Ghosts of Empire (Book 4 of The Empire of Bones Saga)

by Terry Mixon

  She let her words hang between them for a moment before she stood. “I intend to bring Admiral Mertz down to the planet’s surface and continue the negotiations in a more cordial environment. It remains to be seen exactly what we can achieve, but I assure you that I’m working tirelessly for the people of Harrison’s World. I’ll get the best deal possible for all of us.”

  Abigail spun on her heel without a word and strode out of Olivia’s office.

  It never ceased to amaze Olivia. If Abigail’s father hadn’t been a powerhouse in the conservative movement before his death, the woman would never have reached her current position as Olivia’s primary deputy. Abigail was a time bomb waiting for an inappropriate moment to explode.

  * * * * *

  After his visit into the city the previous day, Sean had decided a scouting mission to the other side of the island was in order. He’d spoken that night with Ross and Newland. They’d agreed that some discreet intelligence gathering would be helpful. They’d said they’d take care of it.

  Now it was almost lunch and Sean was getting antsy. There hadn’t been any sign of trouble, but he hadn’t wanted to huddle with the others again so soon. Even though he doubted their captors were monitoring them that closely, he wasn’t willing to risk it.

  When he went to get his midday meal, the server gestured for him to come around behind the counter. He did so without question and found Ross waiting for him in the kitchen.

  The man was dicing something. “Sean, good to see you. I hope you’re good with a peeler. We have a pile of fresh vegetables. You must’ve made some friends yesterday.”

  He snorted. “Hardly. If anything, the guy I spoke with would’ve been happy to cut off the food entirely. I can’t claim any part of this.”

  His experience with a peeler was strictly limited, but he grabbed it and pitched in. The noisy kitchen would make monitoring them almost impossible.

  “What happened last night?” Sean asked.

  “Nothing,” Ross said. “Too much chance of someone seeing them in the dark when normal people were asleep. They went right after breakfast. Some of the boys made a scene on the other side of camp and drew the guards’ attention. A romantic entanglement gone astray. One of my best girls played her role to the hilt and beat the snot out of her ‘wandering man’. It was quite entertaining, I’m told. Gina knows how to be very convincing.”

  Sean had heard something about it, but the brawl had ended by the time he’d gotten over there. “I’m sure the citation write up will be unusual. Did your people make it back safely?”

  “Just did. They slipped into the docks on the far side of the island. Whoever put up the fences to keep us in didn’t check the original buildings closely enough. There are service tunnels that go under them.

  “Several merchant companies receive goods on the docks and transship them into the city on big grav lifts. Our boys broke into one of the warehouses and found a few uniforms. Coveralls, really, in blue with one of the company logos. That let them blend in as they explored the place.

  “The bottom line is that we might be able to get our people over there and co-opt enough vehicles to get everyone into the city.”

  “Don’t the guards search the vehicles?”

  The noncom shook his head. “Nope. At least they didn’t on the one ride the boys took to move cargo.”

  “They went to the city? That was a little dangerous. What if someone challenged them?”

  Ross smiled. “They got caught by the company supervisor and yelled at for goofing off. They had no choice but to ‘get back to work.’ On the positive side, they made some friends and now a number of people think they work there. That kind of cover is useful. Useful enough for me to send them back. They’ll go off shift with the real crew and into the city. They’ll look for places we can hole up.”

  “That sounds good,” he told Ross. “I’m not sure we should make a break until we give Mertz a chance to get us loose. Knowing where the spaceport is and some things about its schedule would be good, though.”

  The older man nodded. “That’s on their list of things to inquire about. They’re good people. They’ll do what needs to be done and avoid sticking out.”

  Sean hoped so, because if they were caught, the outlines of the bold escape plan he’d come up with wouldn’t work. He wished Mertz could get some information to them. Knowing what was going on in the negotiations would make his job easier.

  And if they needed to get moving, he’d like to know sooner rather than later.

  * * * * *

  Kelsey took a shower and considered the dream. No, it wasn’t a dream. It was a recording of events seen by the man in the stasis chamber. Somehow, she’d accessed his files while she slept. That had to be it.

  Nothing like that had ever happened before and it scared her. Her implants were like a computer. They did what she told them to, with the exception of the combat protocols. They shouldn’t have been able to feed the recording into her sleeping mind like that.

  She rubbed her face and checked the time. She’d gotten about four hours sleep. Well, that was it. There was no way she was going back to sleep now.

  With this new anomaly, she decided she’d better go have a few words with Doctor Leonard and Carl Owlet. She needed to figure this out before something went seriously wrong.

  The lab compartment on Invincible was huge. They’d given over a full cargo deck to the scientists and the artifacts they were bringing back from the station and graveyard. She saw a stasis unit, the damaged flip point jammer, and scores of tables covered with smaller items.

  Doctor Leonard wasn’t there, but Carl Owlet sat hunched over a computer station off to the side.

  She walked up behind him and cleared her throat. “With implants, do you really need the screen?”

  He jumped a little and turned to face her with a smile. “It’s still very helpful. I can see things at a glance that don’t pop out in the implant feed. I suspect that will change as I get used to the new hardware. For now, I’m doing both.”

  “That sounds complex. Where’s Doctor Leonard?”

  “Off hunting for artifacts. Is there something I can help you with?”

  Kelsey considered how to frame her problem. “I finally got to bed a few hours ago and had a dream. Unfortunately, it wasn’t mine. It was memories of the dead man from that ship. His name, by the way, is Ned Quincy. He was a Captain in the Marine Raiders and in charge of Persephone.”

  That got the graduate student’s full attention. “That’s not possible. Files in implant storage aren’t accessed like that.”

  He stood up and started setting up one of the machines near his workstation. “Let’s take a look at the files.”

  She sat where he indicated and put on the headset he handed her. He frowned and focused on the screen. “There’s some unexpected activity. A large number of the smaller files are accessing one another. They’re also adding new files. Weird.”

  “Are they filling up my implant storage? Do I need to delete them?”

  “You still have a lot of free space. What concerns me is that the activity seems to be continuing. Are you accessing those files?”

  Kelsey shook her head. “No.”

  “Let me look at the logs here… The files are initiating the access requests, but only within the new material. One file in particular. Let me look at the code in the static memory of my system. There, I’ve copied it. You can get up.”

  She nodded and took off the headset. “I want to look at some stuff while you figure this out. Did they bring over anything from Persephone?”

  He gestured toward some of the tables nearby. “Since we were there, yes. A lot of personal gear and any odd equipment.”

  Leaving him to his work, she walked over to the tables and started examining everything as she walked down them. It only took her ten minutes to find what she was looking for. A pair of short swords in a harness.

  She drew one and looked at it closely. It was exactly like in her dr
eam. The honed edge of the dark blade looked just like her marine knife. That made it insanely sharp and durable enough to hack through a bulkhead.

  Kelsey slid the harness on and tightened it. The sword hilts projected over her shoulders. They felt oddly familiar.

  Carl waved for her to come over. “The file is complex. I’m not sure I understand what it is. I’m going to keep poking around in the code, but it might take a while. Nice swords, by the way.”

  “They were in my dream. Or the recording. Whatever. I’m going to step over here and see how they feel. I’ll try not to throw one by accident.”

  “We’d all appreciate that.”

  Kelsey walked over to a cleared area and took a deep breath. She’d never had any martial arts training, but her implants knew some things. Combat reflexes, she supposed. At the very least, she could see how they felt without chopping up anything important.

  She drew the swords awkwardly and tried to have her implants guide her, but that didn’t seem to help. Apparently, her hard-coded responses didn’t include sword fighting.

  Kelsey sighed and put the swords clumsily away.

  The files in her memory probably had something about the swords and their use. Maybe she could find a tutorial.

  She accessed the file Carl had said was doing all the work and asked for a sword tutorial. It promptly requested control of her limbs.

  This was similar to when her implants took her into combat mode. She checked the limits of what she was granting and her hardware informed her that she retained override authority. If she wanted, she could stop at any moment.

  What the hell. She authorized the file to proceed.

  Her hands flashed up to the hilts and drew the swords smoothly. Her body then went into something very much like a choreographed dance. The blades went this way and that as she flowed across the open area attacking imaginary foes.

  In fact, that was exactly what it was. Her implants were taking her through a dance of death.

  The blades slashed, thrust, and chopped, each move obviously representative of actual combat. Her body flowed along with it, even leaping as required. Higher than an unenhanced person could manage.

  The blades had every bit of power behind them she could manage. And, considering how much she could really do, that meant something.

  The routine ended with her crouching low, with her blades out at her sides. She felt like a predator.

  The program was about to sheath them, but she countermanded it and stopped its control just to make sure she could. Her body was again her own and she was certain that she could have stopped at any point she wanted to.

  That’s when she saw everyone in the room staring at her with their mouths open.

  She rose to her feet and flushed a little. Her hands put the swords away with only a little trouble. “Sorry about that. I was just giving these a test drive.”

  Carl slow clapped as she approached. “That was beautiful. You look as though you’ve been using them for years. I found something”

  “Tell me.”

  “The central file is acting like a clearing house for the rest. It’s written much like the control programs for the ship’s computer. Well, not this one of course. Regular ships.”

  “So, it’s a rudimentary AI?”

  He shook his head. “It’s what we call an expert system. It doesn’t have nearly the capability or resources of an AI, much less a computer like the one on Courageous. Think of an automated library assistant.”

  Kelsey had used that kind of program quite extensively before this mission. They acted almost like people, but weren’t that smart. They used pronouns like “I” for themselves, rather than the Old Empire standard of “this unit,” but they were just mimicking intelligence. There was no spark of life to them, unlike the computer on Courageous. Or especially the AI on Invincible.

  In any case, Jared was going to have a cow when she told him about it.

  Chapter Ten

  “You did what?” Jared asked.

  His sister had the grace to look embarrassed as she repeated herself. “I loaded the files from the dead man into my implant storage and I’ve been playing around with them.”

  Her admission came in his office in front of Elise and himself.

  He considered Kelsey critically. “Has anyone ever explained the difference between boldness and recklessness to you? This was not the wisest of plans.”

  Kelsey looked mulish, but she nodded. “On reflection, I suppose that’s true. However, it seemed necessary at the time. I need those files. We need those files.”

  “And just moving them to storage on Invincible wasn’t good enough?” Elise asked.

  “No. They’re hardware specific. And implant serial number locked, too, but I was able to spoof that. On a regular computer, they just sit there. Even unlocking them takes a while. I made the right choice.”

  Jared wasn’t sure she had, but it was too late for him to do anything about it. “What about your dream? That sounds dangerous. What if you’d activated some fighting protocol and beat the snot out of Talbot?”

  Kelsey nodded. “I thought about that after the swords. Every attempt to access my body requires my authorization. I can’t give that while I’m asleep. Accessing the vid files, well that’s a little different. Carl thinks he can modify the protocol to prevent unconscious access.”

  Elise considered Kelsey. “Why is it so important to you?”

  “I have this equipment inside me, but I know virtually nothing about it. I want to be its master, not its servant. Somewhere in one of these files is the access code to Persephone’s computer and all the data I could ever want to know about the Marine Raiders and the implants inside me. I’m sure of it.”

  “How close are you to finding it,” Jared asked.

  His sister slumped a little. “I don’t know. The program talks like a person, but it’s just an advanced interface. It’s sophisticated enough to fool people who don’t know what it is, but it can’t really think.”

  “Perhaps parsing the files directly might give you more access to the contents,” Invincible said. “Or at least allow for a more refined search for the codes you seek.”

  She looked at the ceiling with a skeptical expression. “My implants aren’t really made for that kind of thing. I can make access requests and do searches, but I can’t have it running in the background. Well, not very effectively. And these aren’t even straight recordings. I can hear some of his thoughts.”

  “There are ways of doing deep recordings that also include your surface thoughts. That’s implicit in the interface between the human brain and cranial implants.

  “In any case, I could construct a more comprehensive indexing program that would run in the background on your implant hardware. Coupled with some changes to the library program that use some of my own heuristic models, and it would make your access program significantly more useful in parsing what files might meet your needs, while still respecting your privacy in much the same way I already do.”

  “I’m not sure I get that, Invincible,” Jared said. “What do you mean about respecting privacy?”

  “I have restrictions preventing me from invading the privacy of the crew. I can freely monitor the public areas of the ship, but not their personal quarters. This program would be similar in that I would create a subroutine for Kelsey that would do a systematic re-indexing of the files available to her, but it would not report anything back to me.”

  Jared cocked his head. “You answer questions and requests when I’m in my quarters. How does that work?”

  “My subroutines monitor for attempts to communicate with me and emergencies. They only alert me in situations where regulations allow me to interact with the crew. They retain no data, so I’m unaware of what is occurring outside those situations. In the case of a medical emergency, I would summon a medical team at once.”

  “That would’ve been useful back on Athena when Carlo Vega died,” Kelsey said. “What would I need to do?”
>
  “Authorize me to access your implant storage and the central program. I’ll replace certain subroutines with my own programming to optimize the searching and access of the data. As it updates the file indexes and cross-references the data, you will be better able to find information.”

  “Do it,” Kelsey said. “How long will it take?”

  “Not long at all. I’m accessing the program now. Updating the search routines and optimizing the ability of the program to catalog and access data now. Update complete. I did find a file in the index marked ‘welcome.’ I believe it to be a message from Ned Quincy to you.”

  She stared at the ceiling for a moment. “Play the message for all of us.”

  * * * * *

  Abigail had her driver speed back to the council building and summoned a crew in to search her office for monitoring devices. Once they had declared it clear, she used her private com link to call Master Calder.

  “Yes, Abigail?”

  “I confronted Coordinator West a few minutes ago and I’m afraid that her initial report to the council is more of an understatement that we feared. She doesn’t intend to push for our release at all. She’s most likely going to give the prisoners back in exchange for some Fleet officers the Lord had on Boxer Station.”

  “Well, I can’t say that’s surprising news,” he said. “We already suspected that she wouldn’t push things. It’s time to cause a rift in her relationship with Admiral Mertz. Implement the plan.”

  Abigail smiled. “With pleasure. I’ll make the arrangements right away.”

  * * * * *

  Jared’s implants notified him that a vid file was available. He instructed it to play.

  The scene around him dissolved and he was sitting in a small compartment looking into a mirror. The man’s face was pleasant enough, in a rugged way. He smiled at his own reflection. “To whoever finds these files, greetings. My name is Ned Quincy. I’m a captain in the Imperial Marine Raiders. Commandos, they call us. Consider this my final report.