Race to Terra (Book 10 of The Empire of Bones Saga)

by Terry Mixon

  If it failed, this was possibly the worst time and place. The carrier would be trapped in a hostile system filled with enemies already looking for a fight.

  Jack Thompson turned his head toward her. “Audacious acknowledges.”

  Angela felt herself tense and only relaxed when the massive carrier appeared. She was quickly followed by the Q-ship and the freighter that they’d stolen from Dresden. All reported themselves in good shape via tight-beam coms.

  This was it. All of the New Terran Empire forces were in the Archibald system now. Part of her wondered if they’d ever get back to Pandora. Angela hoped so. She liked the people there, and it wasn’t every day that one got to explore an actual alien society.

  “Set course for the far flip point, Jack. Take us as far around the enemy vessels as we can get and still make decent time. I’d like to have double the clearance that we suspect the enemy has to detect a slow-moving carrier like Audacious.”

  Thompson nodded. “Yes, ma’am. That’s going to put our travel time at roughly eight hours to get to the far flip point.”

  “Better to go slow than to not get there at all.”

  She turned her attention to the tactical console, where her new executive officer, Senior Lieutenant Arianna Knox, was huddled with the tactical officer, Lieutenant Jevon McLeod.

  “What are you two picking up from deeper inside the system?”

  Her redheaded executive officer turned toward her. “There’s a lot of enemy traffic in there, ma’am. Most of the communications we’re detecting are encrypted, so I don’t think we’re seeing anything from the Rebel Empire side of things.

  “We’re a bit distant to detect things at Archibald itself via passive scanners, but it looks as if the civilian orbital is still intact. There are a lot of small craft moving between it and the surface of the planet.”

  “I suppose that makes sense,” Angela said. “They want to get as many civilians and Fleet people down to the surface as possible to keep them from causing them trouble in space. Hell, they’re probably sending their own troops down to secure as much of the planet as they can.”

  McLeod’s eyebrows rose. “Can they really have brought enough people to subjugate a major world like Archibald? There are billions of people down there.”

  “The AIs managed to do it with Harrison’s World,” Angela said grimly. “It really depends on how much force you’re willing to use. Shoot enough people, and the rest will start paying attention.

  “We also can’t forget how deeply the Clans hate the Rebel Empire. As far as they’re concerned, the Clans are the real Terran Empire, and these people are just pawns for the computers. Pawns that mercilessly exterminated most of the human race. At least that’s what Jacob Howell says, and I believe him.”

  Howell was a human from Pandora, the son of the leader of Clan Dauntless. All humans on the planet were descendants of the people who’d survived the crash of the ex-Clan battlecruiser Dauntless onto the surface of Pandora.

  His father had been a junior officer on the battlecruiser at the time of the crash. All the senior officers had perished because they’d refused to abandon ship and rode it down to the surface.

  Those who’d survived had gone through a culling. The most violent and xenophobic survivors had fought to the death against the Pandorans. Only those who’d surrendered had lived.

  That was Darwinism in action, as far as Angela was concerned.

  At their very best, the clans were antisocial. At worst, they wanted to subjugate or exterminate anyone other than their own people. They weren’t big on talking or negotiating.

  The best outcome would be for them to make their way across the Archibald system and out again without anyone becoming aware that they’d been there at all. That was going to take a lot of slow maneuvering to steer clear of any detection at all. A nerve-racking endeavor at the best of times.

  “Keep monitoring everything you can,” she said. “Jack, make sure we don’t come anywhere near those guys. We’d win the fight but lose the war.”

  “Copy that,” he said. “Unless someone gets a wild hare up his… well, you know, we’ll probably be fine.”

  Angela chuckled, settled back into her seat, and tried to keep from fidgeting. Commanding a ship was very different from commanding a platoon of marines. This was going to take a lot of getting used to.

  Kelsey headed for Athena’s bridge with Mertz and Olivia. She kept her face devoid of expression, but inside, she was seething.

  Oh, she knew that she shouldn’t be so upset at what she’d heard from the other version of herself over the FTL com, but she couldn’t help it. How could the woman have accomplished all of that?

  It wasn’t that Kelsey felt it made her look bad, though it certainly did. What really galled her was how capable the other woman was when she felt as if she could barely tie her own shoes on the best of days.

  Olivia pulled her back when Mertz got into the lift. “We’ll be along momentarily, Jared. Stall him. After how he made us jump around, I don’t feel bad about making him wait for a little while.”

  Mertz didn’t argue, simply nodding. “Will do. Are you going to be long?”

  “Probably not. Say five minutes.”

  “See you there.”

  Olivia waited until the lift doors had closed and then gestured for Kelsey to walk with her up the corridor.

  “What’s wrong?” Kelsey asked.

  “It’s not that anything is wrong, Kelsey, but I can see how upset you are, and I wanted to let you vent. Keeping it inside isn’t going to make you feel any better. In fact, it might be actively bad for our relationship, and I don’t want to see that. Neither, I suspect, do you.”

  Well, that was annoying. “Am I that obvious?”

  “Only to someone that knows you very well,” Olivia said with a smile, putting her hand on Kelsey’s shoulder. “And while I realize that you hardly know me, I’ve known a version of you for almost a year. I pride myself on being very observant, and I couldn’t help seeing how my version of Kelsey made you feel.”

  Kelsey sighed and hunched forward a little. “I was already having this mental conversation with myself. I’ve never met another version of me. Hell, until just a little while back, I never would’ve dreamed anything like this was possible.

  “It’s a lot to assimilate, even discounting the fact that I think I hate myself. No offense to your Kelsey, but she had everything handed to her. She got every bit of good luck that I didn’t, and it pisses me off.”

  She held up a hand when Olivia looked as if she was going to respond.

  “Hear me out. I understand that’s not what happened, at least from your point of view. You’ve heard my story, so you can imagine that I don’t see it quite the same way.

  “Again, that’s not her fault. It’s not my fault, either. It’s just the way the universe is. Or perhaps I should say the universes, plural. I just have to accept the way the dice rolled and take my beating.”

  Olivia smiled a bit sadly. “I don’t know how they play dice in your universe, but here we don’t have beatings for the loser. And I think you’re doing yourself a disservice by thinking of yourself as the loser. You’re not in competition with our Kelsey.

  “Her success in this universe didn’t come without cost. Perhaps it wasn’t as high a price as you’ve paid, but it didn’t come for free. She’s bled for everything she’s achieved. So have you. You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “Then why didn’t Mertz mention me?” Kelsey demanded. “Even as we speak, your version of me doesn’t know that I’m here. He left out the story where I came looking for help. Why?”

  Olivia pulled her into a compartment just off the corridor. It wasn’t very large and seemed to be a break room of some kind. Being on board a ship that was supposed to be computer operated, it was completely empty.

  “I suspect that he just didn’t want to open that can of worms right then. He knew we had very little time before we had to cut off communications. Th
at’s not the kind of conversational bomb one just drops and then goes quiet.

  “Jared hasn’t told me anything, but I already know what he intends. It’s what I’d do. He’s going to work on completing this repair mission so that we can get back on the way to Terra.

  “Once we’re away from the System Lord, he’s going to sit you down at the FTL com and get our Kelsey on the other end. Then the two of you are going to talk until you don’t have anything left to say to one another.

  “I have every confidence that our Kelsey is going to get her ships to Terra. Once she does, the two of you are going to have a chance to meet in person. Then you’ll see exactly how our Kelsey feels about you. I can guarantee that both she and Jared will move planets to help your people.”

  Kelsey rubbed her face, tired and angry, mostly with herself. And embarrassed. Was this really how petty she’d become? Had the events of the last few years really turned her into this person?

  “I wish I could believe that,” she finally said. “No matter how lucky you are in this universe, the deck is still stacked against you. I can’t see how you’re going to get past this artificial intelligence, get onto Terra, get what we need, and then get away again. Not when a crazy computer expects us to exterminate humanity there.

  “Personally, I think it’ll take a miracle to make that happen. That doesn’t even count what you do next. You’ll have to go after the master AI, and it’s going to be a lot better protected than the one on Terra.

  “The only thing that’s saved you so far is that the System Lords didn’t even know you existed. Now that they do, at least in a general sort of way, they’re going to take every step they can to protect themselves. How are you even going to get close to the master AI?”

  Olivia shook her head. “You’re asking the wrong question. What you should be thinking about is how we can leverage the hostilities between the Clans and the Rebel Empire to our benefit.

  “Right now, the AIs are figuring out that they have a very serious problem with the Clans. Once they fully grasp the gravity of the situation, they’ll almost certainly assume that the people who stole the Dresden orbital and have blockaded the Erorsi system are the same people that are currently attacking them. Occam’s razor: the answer with the fewest assumptions is usually the right one. Only this time, it isn’t.

  “It takes a lot of imagination to figure out that you have two very different enemies operating independently of one another at the same time. They’ll end up treating us as one group. Since the Clans are a very overt sort of threat, the AIs won’t expect us to be sneaking around right through their very guts.”

  The sheer audacity of the plan she’d just heard made Kelsey gasp. “In other words, you just plan to keep doing what you’ve been doing? Meandering along from crisis to crisis, looking for random opportunity and hoping that someone bigger than yourself doesn’t squash you like a bug? That’s not a plan. That’s a fantasy.

  “One that’s going to fall apart the moment the AIs discover who you really are. Good luck doesn’t last forever, as well I know. Something is going to go wrong that reveals who we really are.”

  She gestured in the vague direction of the bridge. “Let’s take Fielding as an example. He’s living with us. If he figures out that we’re playing him, he might be able to set off the plasma charges in our hold and kill us in an instant.”

  Olivia shook her head. “If I let what might go wrong stop me from doing what needed to be done, I’d still be back on Harrison’s World, hoping that the AI didn’t drop a kinetic weapon on me. You can’t live your life in fear of what might happen.

  “Sometimes bold action is the only answer. Perhaps that’s a lesson you could learn from our Kelsey. Lord knows the woman doesn’t know how to think before she leaps. If she sees something that needs doing, she does it and damn the consequences. That drives Jared absolutely nuts, but I’ll tell you one thing: it gets results.

  “Kelsey, it’s time to stop hiding in the dark and twitching every time you hear a noise. Stop wondering how you’re going to screw things up and start doing everything that you can to make this work.”

  Hard words, Kelsey supposed, but there might be some wisdom to them.

  She nodded, still pissed off, but not at her doppelgänger. Now she was annoyed with Olivia. She really needed to talk with Elise, Scott, and Sean to start sorting this out.

  But now was not the time. They needed to head to the bridge and find out what other impossible tasks Fielding had in mind for them.

  Hopefully it wouldn’t be something so impossible that the AI just killed them outright.

  11

  Talbot walked into Carl’s lab and was once again blown away by how many people were doing so many different things in the large compartment. The young scientist was lucky that Audacious had plenty of space for him to spread out in.

  The sprawling area was filled with tables and large pieces of equipment scattered along the deck. The faint stench of charred electronics came from what was left of the Singularity computer they’d stolen from the Rebel Empire, even though the equipment had probably been damaged years ago.

  Carl raised his hand when he saw Talbot and gestured him over. “Excellent timing. I was just about to call you. We’ve found something.”

  Talbot raised an eyebrow as he stepped up beside his friend. “Really? Something about the FTL com?”

  Carl shook his head. “No. Admiral Mertz shut down his end of the communications link because they’re about to go into a system containing one of the AIs, and he doesn’t want to chance being detected. We’re not going to get much of an opportunity to experiment with things there until they’re done and on the way to Terra.

  “Meanwhile, I’ve been looking at the Singularity computer we liberated from Archibald. I haven’t got everything sorted out, mind you, but I got a little bit more information than we had when we started this. Something intriguing.”

  Talbot followed Carl over to the scattered wreckage of the large computer. The acrid odor of burned electronics was much stronger here.

  They’d found the remains of the computer in the medical research facility they had to burglarize to get a regenerative cure for Commodore Murdoch, the Rebel Empire flag officer they’d captured and Dresden.

  The woman had insider information that they’d simply had to have, so Kelsey had ordered that they do what they could to get her cured from the injuries she’d suffered at the hands of Raul Castille, the murderous security officer under the commodore’s command. The bastard that had caused them so much trouble.

  Thankfully, they’d been able to get away with the cutting-edge regenerative technology, and it had been able to repair the woman’s severed spine. Castille had snapped her neck and left her for dead, but now she was learning to walk again. It truly was miraculous.

  The breakthrough in regenerative technology was going to revolutionize the care of those stubborn injuries that even Imperial technology just couldn’t handle.

  Better yet, he suspected it had implications that were going to carry over into other areas. Such as making it easier to implant Marine Raider technology inside someone.

  Someone like him.

  He’d finally adjusted to the changes that the procedures had introduced into his legs and would soon be going through the work on his torso. He’d had a long argument with Kelsey and the medical staff about what parts of the torso could be done in one session.

  Back in the days of the Old Empire, Marine Raiders went through a number of different stages. Recruits usually came from the Imperial Marines, so they already had cranial implants, but their nanites needed to be upgraded to the class that Marine Raiders used. Call that the first step in the process.

  Next, they had their pharmacology units, ocular enhancements, auditory enhancements, and olfactory enhancements installed. That could cause some significant issues with their senses, so they needed time to grow used to the changes.

  For step three, the Old Empire had implanted artificial
muscles into the legs and coated the bones there in graphene. Step four meant doing that for the torso and leaving the arms untouched. Step five was doing the dominant arm, and step six was the nondominant arm.

  In between each of those six steps was a week of recovery so that the new Marine Raider could become fully comfortable with the great power that was now his or hers to command.

  Kelsey had gone through the entire process in one go at the hands of a mad computer. She’d refused to even consider something like that for anyone else, but she’d agreed that the process could be streamlined.

  The process as it now sat had four steps. Steps one and two of the Old Empire process were combined. Then the legs were done. The third step was doing the torso and nondominant arm. The final step was doing the dominant arm.

  The period between the procedures had also been shortened so that the overall process took about two weeks, including recovery time. Talbot was convinced that could be reduced to a single week, and he thought the new regeneration equipment would help.

  Doctor Zac Zoboroski, Audacious’s chief medical officer, wasn’t so convinced, but once they’d left the Archibald system, he’d agreed to give it a try.

  If they didn’t at least do it once, they’d never know if it was going to be something they could utilize going forward. They needed real data to make smart decisions.

  “What have you found?” Talbot asked. “Frankly, there’s not a lot of this thing left, and I never expected you to be able to pull anything out of it. I’m ready to be shocked.”

  Carl grinned. “And shocked you will be. My suspicions were confirmed. What you see scattered on the deck before you are the remains of an artificial intelligence developed by the Singularity.

  “I’ve been through the computers that the researchers were using and have confirmed that they already knew that, but my inspection of the component parts made that independently clear. It looks as if this piece of equipment was destroyed within the last few years, but that’s not exactly true. Appearances, both visual and olfactory, can be deceiving.