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

by Terry Mixon

  “Do you think he’ll believe you?” Jared asked as they walked out into the corridor. “Fielding would have had only the most loyal guards on this trip with him.”

  “We haven’t checked, but I’ll wager these men also have bombs in their heads,” she said. “Ones he no doubt told them he’d disabled. I’ll wager I can make them understand that five people can keep a secret only if four of them are dead.”

  Kelsey nodded slowly. “It’s probably true, too. He’s the kind of man that wouldn’t hesitate to kill his subordinates to keep something valuable for himself alone.”

  “And if I promise the man to wipe his code clean just like Austin’s and then drop him in a different system with some valuables from that gaudy cutter of Fielding’s, you can bet he’ll take the money and run.

  “He’ll have seen exactly what Fielding was doing. With a little bit of time, I’m sure that I can get it out of him. I’d be astonished if there isn’t more than one secret lockbox on the cutter, too. It’s entirely possible Fielding brought something physical back to the cutter before he tracked you down.”

  “I do want to know what he was doing,” Jared said. “Do we feed them the same line about modifying the programing of the bomb to keep them all quiet?”

  “Of course,” she said. “I can handle that, though. You have to see that Kelsey and Kelsey speak to one another. You’ll need to explain the situation and then leave them alone to talk.”

  Jared nodded. “We can do that. The next system along our path isn’t occupied, so we can let Fielding sleep while we get all of our ducks in a row.”

  Kelsey frowned at him. “What are ducks and why would you want them in a row?”

  He grinned. “You’re just going to love your doppelgänger.”

  Olivia pushed them both away. “Go take care of this while I finish this up.”

  24

  Angela paced Persephone’s small bridge until the picket ship finally signaled that they were bringing Princess Kelsey and Commander Sommerville back. No need for an exchange this time; they’d bring them back to her ship directly.

  They had Kelsey’s code phrase that everything was above board, so she only worried a little as the cutter docked. Once the passengers were off, the cutter undocked and headed back to the picket ship.

  She’d considered going down to meet the princess but had decided that it made far more sense for her to be on the bridge looking for trouble. Thankfully, none occurred.

  A few minutes later, Kelsey and Sommerville stepped onto the bridge, taking up most of the remaining space. Persephone was powerful, but she wasn’t big. Quite the opposite. Angela didn’t mind.

  “How did it go?” she asked. “Leaving aside the obvious indication things didn’t go too badly, as they let you go.”

  “Pretty good,” Kelsey said. “We’ll be passed along to another ship and taken to meet someone to discuss passage and help finding a route to Terra. I expect that won’t precisely be an easy negotiation, but it’s not our worst-case scenario.”

  Angela raised an eyebrow at Sommerville. “You’ve seen some of what we have to offer, Commander. Care to offer a guess at how this will come out?”

  He shrugged slightly. “I’m not privy to the map of flip point connections, so I really don’t know. I’ve never heard of anyone visiting Terra—and that’s the kind of thing that would get around—so I wouldn’t be too optimistic.”

  “If you can get us close, say to a system that isn’t occupied near Terra, we might be able to surprise you,” Kelsey said. “That’s part of what I’m willing to negotiate with for an alliance.”

  “I do hope you can figure something out,” he admitted. “I’m interested in seeing what you have in your pockets. Though after meeting aliens and seeing a teleportation ring, I’m not sure how you can top what I already know about.”

  “It’s something more practical that we know about that will be far more useful than the mostly theoretical stuff you’ve seen,” Kelsey said. “Either of which would change things, but they’re so critical that they’d have to stay limited to the knowledge of the most trusted few. Did you know that your brother was stationed here when we came for the meeting?”

  He nodded. “He was on the rotation. The tripwire posts are boring duty since no one else knew about the far flip points—good name for them, by the way. No one really expected anyone to come calling until you came along.”

  “Now that we’re going to be moving deeper into resistance territory, can I get a clue how far we’re going and what the process is going to be?” Angela asked.

  He nodded. “Until an agreement of some kind is made, you’ll proceed in this one ship. It’s very stealthy, but now that we know it’s here, it’s not a direct threat to what we have in the systems beyond this. The rest of the ships will remain in the Razor system until we agree you can send for them.”

  “You knew about the humans there, obviously. I’m guessing you’ve never contacted them. Why not?”

  “Too close to Archibald,” he admitted. “If the Empire ever found the far flip point, they’d have found us. As it is, they’d find an undisturbed human world colonized by survivors that barely remember anything other than their world. They’d examine it and give us time to move away.”

  “Do you have any idea where the people on Razor came from?” Kelsey asked. “I’m guessing Archibald simply because of how close it is, but were they Fleet?”

  “Archibald is the fabled home world they speak of, but I’m sure they weren’t ever Fleet. I’d guess a large freighter stuffed with people fleeing the AI forces back in the day. There’s no ship anywhere in the system, so it might have suffered irreparable damage, and they dropped it into the star after they salvaged what they could. Honestly, I’m not sure even they’d know at this point.”

  “They have a religion,” Kelsey said. “The story might be part of their secret lore.”

  “Good luck getting it, then. The religious types there have some peculiar ideas and practices. They’re not exactly friendly when someone encroaches on what they consider their turf.”

  “Tell me about it,” the princess muttered.

  Angela gave the other woman a look. “You’ve met them? I think I missed that story.”

  “Talbot led a party down, and there was a ruckus in the town that revolved around them,” Kelsey said quickly. “Nowhere near the landing party.”

  The princess’s response was a tad too quick for Angela’s taste. It sounded like the other woman was hiding something. Still, now was not the time to dig deeper.

  “Anyway,” Angela said, shooting the princess a raised eyebrow, “my question still stands. Any clue on how many more transits we’ll make to get there? One? Many?”

  “A few,” Sommerville allowed. “My brother sent a probe over to the next system to let the picket there know to expect us, so we’ll head over shortly, I’m sure. That ship will escort us to where you need to go.”

  Jack Thompson turned in his seat and cleared his throat. “Major, could I have a word?”

  She nodded and rose to her feet. “Of course. If you’ll excuse me for a moment, Highness, Commander.”

  Angela leaned over her helmsman’s shoulder to look at his console. Nothing looked out of place. “What’s up?”

  “Princess Kelsey has a call on the special com,” he said very softly.

  The implication was instantly clear to her. Admiral Mertz was calling on the FTL com.

  “Understood,” she replied quietly. “Carry on.”

  Angela stood back up and turned toward the princess and resistance officer. “I’m about to take a break to get something to eat. Would you care to join me?”

  As she spoke, she sent a com signal to Kelsey through her implants. Admiral Mertz is on the FTL com for you.

  The princess nodded. “Food sounds good, but I need to go take care of a few things. Commander Sommerville, why don’t you and Angela get to know one another a little better while I do so?”

  He smiled. �
�I’d be delighted. Major?”

  “Jack, you have the bridge. If we get the call to go forward, please proceed and only tag me if something seems off.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Let’s go, Commander. The galley isn’t much to look at, but the food is good.”

  With that, she led Commander Sommerville away from the bridge and Princess Kelsey so that the woman could find out what was going on with Admiral Mertz. Hopefully nothing galaxy shattering. They were finally getting some things to go their way.

  Kelsey stood behind Mertz as they waited for her doppelgänger—Kelsey One—to come to the FTL com and start what would be a shocking and unsettling conversation. Hell, it was going to be the same for her, and she knew what was coming.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Mertz said.

  “I’m not sure how you can be so certain. This isn’t going to be an easy conversation.”

  “I wager it’ll be easier than you expect,” he said with a crisp note of certainty in his voice. “She’s not going to expect you, but she’s at least been exposed to the idea for a while. Don’t forget that she was there when we brought out the bodies of people from other universes. People that we knew. Multiple versions of those people.”

  “That is so creepy,” she said with a shudder that wasn’t even partly for show. “How can you say that so casually? Your friends died.”

  “It’s an odd place to find myself,” he admitted. “They’re dead but still alive. It’s actually a bit more difficult to accept Commander Roche. I didn’t know him for long, but he’s dead here, killed at Harrison’s World.”

  “And Olivia’s whole world,” Kelsey added. “That’s hard. Yet her ex-lover is still alive there. She’s had it worse than either of us. How does she stand the knowledge?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not sure. I know it’s a burden for her. Having Sean and all her friends alive here helps, I’d imagine.”

  The FTL com picked that moment to come to life. Mertz turned his attention to it as a generic voice spoke, interpreting the Morse code that was used into actual speech. In Kelsey’s mind, she changed it to her own voice.

  “Kelsey here. Jared, is that you?”

  “It’s me,” he said. “Sorry for the delay in resuming full communication, but we had some issues on this end that had to be sorted out. How did your meeting with the resistance go?”

  “Pretty good. I had to reveal some of our secrets, but I didn’t mention the FTL coms or multi-flip points. Showing Commander Sommerville the Pandorans, the small transport rings, and my hammer turned the trick as far as he was concerned.

  “And speaking of revelations, Carl has cracked the operating system on the Singularity computer and has managed to start accessing the data it contains in a more straightforward process. He now has indexes of files and locations on the storage medium to change the task from almost impossible to just difficult. Like the computer we found on Courageous, it has a lot of data to be examined.”

  “Can you tell me how long ago the computer was destroyed?” Mertz asked. “I remember Carl guessed it was a number of years ago, but a century is different than a decade when it comes to useful information versus history.”

  “He’s still struggling with the units of time they use, but he said it was almost certainly shut down abruptly around twenty years ago, give or take five.”

  “That’s pretty recent,” Kelsey said. “It might have information that’s actually useful against them now.”

  “I agree,” her double said, not realizing a different person had spoken. “I’ve got the researchers from Dresden working on getting a feel for what kind of information is available. I should know something by the time we get to Terra.”

  “Is that a certainty at this point?” Mertz asked. “You said the meeting went well, but we have no idea if they’ll help you get there, or if there’s even a way to get there.”

  “I have a good feel for Commander Sommerville. He’s going to work hard on convincing them. He’s already gotten to the point of asking for a diplomatic representative. You’ll never believe who he thinks would be a good match: my mother.”

  Kelsey blinked at the other woman’s words. Her mother? A diplomat? More like a social butterfly that was always on some new man’s arm. Was other her serious?

  Mertz apparently shared Kelsey’s opinion. “I remember that you said she’d stowed away, but really? I realize she was once the empress of the Terran Empire, but do we really want to have her speaking for us? Not that I’d mind if she wasn’t at Terra with us, considering that she hates me.”

  The same had been true in Kelsey’s universe, but there, her mother had had many reasons to despise Jared Mertz. If he was such a paragon of virtue here, why did her mother hate him after all this time?

  Well, she’d have to find out when she either spoke with the woman or with her doppelgänger face to face. That wasn’t the kind of question she was going to ask with him standing right there.

  He looked at Kelsey as if reading her mind. Under other circumstances, that would be funny.

  “She’s had a change of heart in some ways,” the other Kelsey said. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say she’s forgiven you for being born, but she’s had her pampered eyes opened a bit.

  “Honestly, I’m still of two minds and need to talk with her to see how serious she’d be in this role. It might not be a bad thing, really. She wasn’t idle while she was empress. She has the diplomatic chops if she can be convinced to use them.”

  “Well, I guess that’s your call,” Mertz said. “I have another matter to bring up. Another person, really. I couldn’t mention it before because someone was present on my side that didn’t have need to know about her.”

  “Okay,” the other Kelsey said. “Who is it, and how does knowing about her affect me?”

  “Trust me when I say that her presence is going to be a shock to your system,” he said with a lopsided smile. “Kelsey Bandar, allow me to introduce you to Kelsey Bandar.”

  25

  Talbot headed for Carl’s lab as soon as his friend called for him. He’d just gotten word through the FTL com that Kelsey was back aboard Persephone and that she’d secured permission to go meet with someone they could negotiate with for passage to Terra.

  Audacious, the freighter, and the Q-ship would remain in the Razor system until they were called forward. Meanwhile, Zia had dispatched probes to search the system thoroughly. If there were more resistance ships here, she wanted to know about them.

  As a side effect of that search, they’d already located a multi-flip point that the resistance wouldn’t have known about. Goodness only knew where it led to. The branches of the multi-flip points seemed to have more range than a single regular or far flip point, so it likely led to places far beyond Archibald. If that was one of the bargaining chips that Kelsey was going to trade for an alliance and a path to Terra, the resistance was going to be very surprised.

  And he was sure that something like that would trade hands. It would take something big to break the bonds of suspicion that the resistance had to be feeling right now. They had no reason to trust them. Hell, until this encounter, these people had no reason to suspect anything like the New Terran Empire even existed.

  Talbot knew from conversations with Olivia West that the resistance operated in cells that kept communication between themselves to the bare minimum. That still implied—though she’d never said so—that there was someone over them all in a kind of coordinating position. Not overtly directing actions but more as a clearing house of information between the groups.

  One that was very careful never to reveal itself lest the Rebel Empire find them all through it. He wondered if that was the group of people they’d found.

  He was still thinking about that when he entered the lab and walked over to the remains of the Singularity computer. Carl was sitting at a workstation right up against it and seemed to have added a number of cables running into the debris.

  His friend jumped a
little when Talbot put his hand on his shoulder. He turned and scowled up at him. “Do you have to do that?”

  “It’s in my contract,” Talbot replied smugly. “What’s up?”

  “We found the operating system. One of my top computer guys, Eric Hosmer, reverse engineered a variant of it that has all the security protocols disabled. We have full, organized access to the data cores.”

  Talbot blinked. He’d known his friend had been making progress on accessing the data, but he hadn’t known he’d gotten this far.

  “Excellent! Good work to all of you. What can you tell me about it?”

  “Quite a bit, actually. This computer was a master AI on the equivalent of what we’d call a superdreadnought. It tangled with Rebel Empire forces on the border with the Singularity. It was a hell of a fight. The data cores have a record of the battle, which I’ve already sent to Commodore Anderson.

  “It was a very large fleet action. The Singularity side was about the same strength as the entirety of Admiral Mertz’s new command. Lots of ships that seem to be on par with the Old Empire tech, and in some cases, a little better.”

  The scientist gestured for Talbot to take a seat next to him. “The Rebel Empire side was even more powerful. You know how we never see battlecruisers or superdreadnoughts here? Well, I think I found them. They’re in use on the far side of the Rebel Empire, probably under computer control.”

  That wasn’t good news. They’d all hoped the Rebel Empire had destroyed the larger ships. To have them in active service meant that the AIs had a tremendous reserve of power that they could bring to bear on the New Terran Empire. If, of course, they could spare them from the fight they were already engaged in.

  “Have you narrowed down when the fight took place?” Talbot asked. “We know this computer has been in Rebel Empire hands for years.”

  The young scientist nodded. “I finally managed to get a grasp on how the Singularity does their calendar. The fight that killed the ship this computer was on took place a little more than eighteen years ago. So the data in the cores isn’t ultra-new, but it’s far more recent than we had any right to expect.”