The Terra Gambit (Empire of Bones Saga Book 8)

by Terry Mixon

  Jared had been considering that problem. If the Rebel Empire invaded the other New Terran Empire, there would be nothing there that could stop them and Pentagar would fall first.

  He could pass along the technology to build flip point jammers—even without the people at the Grant Research Station—but it would take a long while before the others could use it. That was cutting edge stuff.

  The scientists at his Grant Research Facility were a few months away from having the ability to mass produce flip point jammers—if creating three or four every month counted as mass production. Still, they’d have a few they could pass on to their friends in the other universe while their Grant people got busy playing catch up.

  “Well, I should let you go,” he said. “I’ll be there to greet you all when you come aboard.”

  “Excellent. Plan for dinner and some alone time tonight. Talk to you soon.”

  Jared leaned back in his chair after the call ended. This side show was over. It was about time. He needed to get back to the real mission or they’d never get to Terra at all.

  19

  Sean tried not to scowl at Fleet Captain Brian Drake as they stepped into Invincible’s marine country after stripping off their hard suits. The other man had no control over this awkward situation. It wasn’t his fault he’d lived in the other universe and that his Olivia hadn’t.

  Now the two of them were talking like long-lost lovers. Which, of course, they were. Ones that had been engaged before their respective untimely deaths.

  Since the other man wasn’t shooting looks at him, Sean was willing to bet Olivia hadn’t told Drake about him yet. That didn’t necessarily mean anything, but he was concerned.

  “Is something wrong, Commodore?” Scott Roche asked quietly.

  “Just a personal matter,” he said. “Nothing to worry about.”

  The other man’s eyes narrowed. “You and Coordinator West?”

  He allowed himself a snort. “I forgot how perceptive you were, Scott. Yes. And, of course, her dead fiancé. Who is now in our universe and alive again.”

  Scott winced. “Ouch. I can see where that might make for a few awkward moments. You need to get that settled before those old feelings get a chance to rekindle.”

  “I don’t think she’d appreciate me puffing out my chest and strutting around. Or peeing on her leg.”

  “Probably not,” the other man conceded. “But you’d better put him on notice. Or would you prefer someone else pass him the word? That might lower the tensions once it comes out.”

  He considered that possibility. “Are you volunteering?”

  “I suppose I am. I’ve known you a long time and I owe you. Well, some version of you. We’re friends and that’s what friends do.”

  “I’ll have to pass, but thanks. This is the kind of thing that I need to do in person.

  “So, what do you think of Invincible?” he asked, changing the subject firmly.

  “I had no idea anything this powerful was even possible. Did the Old Empire make anything bigger?”

  “No. This was the most powerful mobile unit in sheer firepower, though I’d argue the carriers are more dominant once you add their fighters in. Boxer Station is a lot more dangerous in a stand up fight, but it can’t move. We’d never have beaten it if we hadn’t ambushed the AI from point blank range.”

  Scott pursed his lips. “Really? I didn’t think it was that tough.”

  “They’d probably moved the AI. A regular computer doesn’t compare. Not even close. You’ll find out soon enough.”

  The hatch to the main corridor slid open and Admiral Mertz stepped inside. Sean sensed Scott tensing beside him.

  “Relax,” he almost whispered. “This is not the same man from your universe.”

  His friend gave him a somewhat incredulous look. “Are you honestly telling me you don’t believe this guy is a power hungry usurper? Well, potential usurper over here, I suppose.”

  “Without even a trace of doubt,” Sean said firmly. “I was wrong about him in this universe and so was Captain Breckenridge. This man had every opportunity to take the Imperial Throne and didn’t. Our Princess Kelsey trusts him for good reason.”

  Scott sent him a sidelong glance of uncertainty. “If you say so. I guess it’s your universe.”

  “He might really be the Bastard in yours,” he said with a slight smile. “Circumstances are different. You’ll have to figure that out on your own.”

  Mertz cleared his throat. “If I could have your attention? My name is Jared Mertz and I want to ask you all to give me a little benefit of the doubt as we get to know one another. I understand that I don’t have the best reputation in your universe. Give me a chance to prove I am not that man.”

  “Well, Princess Elise married him,” Scott said softly. “She always seemed like a sharp operator to me. If everyone here tells me things are different, I’ll give him a chance.”

  The Fleet officer from another universe stepped forward. “Commander Scott Roche, Admiral. Might my senior officers meet with you for a few minutes so we can settle what we’re going to be doing?”

  “Absolutely, Commander,” Mertz said with a nod. “We’ll use the marine conference room right here. Commodore Meyer, if you’d get everyone else settled, we’ll be pulling out for Boxer Station as soon as the pinnaces get back with the second load.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  The admiral escorted Scott, Princess Kelsey, Captain Drake, Lieutenant Commander Paula Danvers, and the other Doctor Guzman into the briefing room. Elise and Olivia joined them. He’d be willing to wager he could guess at the seating diagram.

  He sighed to himself and tagged Marcus to ask about the arrangements.

  It turned out that Marcus had set aside temporary quarters for the people going to Boxer Station and wrangled a block of cabins for those staying on the superdreadnought for the mission. It would be easier to keep an eye on them if they were clustered all together.

  Unable to get his mind off the odd fix he was in, Sean made his way to the observation lounge. The compartment didn’t really have a window stretching from bulkhead to bulkhead, but the holo emitters certainly made it appear as if it did.

  There wasn’t much to see as the ship powered through the cloud of radioactive particles surrounding the black hole at the center of the Nova system. That was fine by him since it meant he was alone and that gave him privacy to think.

  The best outcome was if Drake stayed on Harrison’s World while Olivia went with the mission as planned. He wasn’t holding his breath on that.

  The worst case scenario was both of them staying. The odds of that were higher than Sean liked. His best option was to encourage them both to come on the mission. Was he likely to get push back from Olivia?

  On reflection, he didn’t think so. She was in a relationship with him and he didn’t see her stepping out, even with a formerly dead lover.

  Yet people were complicated. Did he talk with her about it or trust that she’d do the right thing?

  He slumped into a chair and stared sightlessly toward the screen. No matter what he did, there was a chance this would all blow up in his face. God, he’d rather fight a desperate space battle than contemplate losing her.

  Kelsey stared out at the veritable sea of derelict ships floating around Boxer Station. With her implants, the superdreadnought’s scanners were more than capable of seeing the scope of the scene.

  “There are tens of thousands of ships here,” she murmured. “When I learned about the Old Empire, I had no idea they had so many. Why?”

  “And these are only the ones that weren’t destroyed outright during the Fall,” Mertz agreed. “They had several reasons. The biggest one was that they weren’t the only human civilization out there. True, they were the biggest, but the others were a threat, particularly if they ever banded together. And many of them were not very friendly.

  “Take the Singularity. They left the Old Empire in the early days, going deep into the void to set up a soc
iety more to their taste. The two societies eventually found one another again and they fought a constant low level battle along their entire border for thousands of years. To the point it became like ritual and tradition.”

  “Over what?” she asked, giving Mertz her full attention.

  “Mostly over implants and genetic engineering. The Old Empire went the route of cranial implants, which the Singularity saw as an abomination that endangered Humanity. Rightly, as it turned out.

  “On the other hand, the Singularity chose to edit the human genome to create a class system that the Old Empire saw as monstrous. As you might imagine, each was eager to do the other harm and they raided across their common border for something like twelve centuries.

  “Each side built a massive fleet to make certain they could defend themselves if need be. Or to crush their enemies if the opportunity presented itself.”

  She considered that situation. “I wonder what happened to them after the Fall. The Singularity, I mean. Did the AIs conquer them, too?”

  Mertz shrugged. “No one knows. The Singularity was on the far side of the Rebel Empire. Since the AIs don’t exactly share information, they could have crushed them, too. Or they might have stopped at the border. I suppose we’ll find out one day.”

  She gestured around them, not at the ship, but at the derelicts floating all around Invincible. “How many of these do you think are salvageable? God, I wish there were still some in my universe. They would be an incredible boon.”

  “If even one percent is reparable, I’ll be astonished,” he said sadly. “These are mostly just huge coffins filled with millions of dead Fleet personnel.”

  “What do you do with them?” That was a morbid question, but she wanted to know.

  “We take them to Harrison’s World for burial. The Spire on Avalon isn’t capable of holding the number of people we’re talking about, so Coordinator West build one there in an area that was large enough to hold such a memorial.

  “The process of getting the poor bastards there is slow and time consuming, but it has to be done. We have entire crews of people recovering the bodies, identifying them if they can, and seeing they get to Avalon before the wrecks are sent to the breakers to salvage what they can.”

  “Can you really afford to use resources like that? You need to put every person toward getting ready for the enemy and the fight that has to be coming. Why not just bury the dead in space? Drop them into the sun?”

  He seemed to consider her for a long moment. “It comes down to respect. They died defending the empire, and never knew that to an extent they succeeded. We owe our brothers and sisters in Fleet the rest that our ancestors promised. Sometimes the right thing isn’t easy. You do it anyway.”

  That certainly wasn’t the answer she’d expected to hear from the Bastard. Since they hadn’t found all these ships in her universe, she had no idea what the man there would have thought.

  This wasn’t going to be easy, she decided. Not only was this man challenging her assumptions, the records she’d reviewed certainly supported the general consensus that he could’ve used this ship to put his boot on the throats of everyone in the New Terran Empire. And he’d chosen to do nothing of the sort.

  Instead, he’d fought beside another version of herself to stop a coup and keep her father on the Throne. And alive.

  The recordings she’d seen of Ethan in the Imperial Throne room getting ready to sentence this man to death spoke volumes about both. Her brother here had been mad. She was convinced of it now.

  Oh, the implant recordings that Mertz had put into the record could have been forged, she supposed, but they matched the statements of the Imperial Guard present at the time.

  Added to so many other clues and evidence, she was sure Ethan had been mad here. Paranoia and megalomania, at the very least.

  That didn’t mean he was mad in her universe. Not even close. Her brother was as sane as she was. She’d spent countless hours going over everything she could remember about their interactions and how he differed from the man in this universe.

  She’d stake her life on her brother. And that probably meant the Mertz there was just the kind of man she’d always believed, but a worm of doubt still existed deep inside her mind.

  Well, that wasn’t a problem she was going to solve today. She needed to put her distaste aside and give this Jared Mertz a chance, as difficult as that was. She needed his help to get to Terra and to recover the override.

  Potentially, she needed his help repeating the entire mission in her universe. Only he had the DNA to use the key and open the Imperial Vault. What if the override required his DNA, too?

  The Bastard had taken the Imperial Scepter when he’d killed her father. He hadn’t had implants at the time, so he probably hadn’t had a clue what it really represented. Well, unless his sources inside the Imperial Palace were a lot better than they all suspected.

  With the resources aboard Courageous, it was likely he’d found a way to get implants. Could he have worked out the secret? It was always possible the man would try for the override himself with the goal of making the AIs answer to him.

  As horrifying as that idea was, that was also a problem for another day.

  Kelsey forced herself to smile. It felt unnatural in this man’s presence, but the two of them were going to be working closely together for the foreseeable future.

  “When do we leave for Terra?”

  “We’ll head out to make the yearly report for the AI as soon as we get your people settled on Boxer Station and Olivia gets back from our Harrison’s World. The target system isn’t too far away, so we can probably leave from there and make our way toward Terra.”

  “Do you think we can get to Terra? From what you’ve said, the Rebel Empire has the entire system isolated.”

  “We have to,” Mertz said with a shrug. “The Empire is depending on us.”

  Indeed, difficult times truly did show a person’s character.

  20

  Olivia watched Brian as the cutter descended toward the newly constructed spaceport on her home world. The System Lord had vaporized the original spaceport a decade ago when it locked the planet down.

  This time they’d taken the precaution of moving it far away from any city and would not allow it to become heavily populated. If war came once again, millions need not die because of where they lived.

  The people working there dealt with the imposition of a long commute by hypersonic grav rail from the closest population center several hundred kilometers away. Only people on duty or in transit at any time was at risk, and they’d have a lot of warning if the enemy came.

  Of course, any enemy would have to deal with the flip point jammers and the heavy Fleet presence in the system. Sean’s command was growing to be almost as powerful as the one Jared commanded, when one included the repaired ships being worked up and the Fleet personnel here for training. The Rebel Empire would not crack this nut easily.

  “This is unreal,” Brian murmured as they came over the landing pad and settled on the plascrete. “We haven’t dared send out more than a few stealthed drones, but it was more than enough to know our world was dead. Now it lives again.”

  “It made me want to vomit,” she said as she unstrapped. “Knowing that I came up with the plan that killed everyone. Twelve billion people, dead because of me.”

  He stopped and turned toward her. “You and the entire leadership council. None of us knew how powerful the System Lord was. What I’d like to know is why it didn’t kill everyone in this universe.”

  She didn’t answer as they exited the cutter. Honestly, she wasn’t even sure what the answer was.

  “What was Invincible’s status when the System Lord attacked?” she asked as they went down the ramp.

  A sleek black grav car sat waiting for them. Overhead, several others circled. Her guards. She’d ordered them to keep their distance today. Further out, far beyond sight, Fleet fighters kept overwatch. That last was more a training exercis
e than a need.

  “It was almost operational,” he responded as they climbed into the car. “I’d only just arrived back at Grant when all hell broke loose. We never did figure out what set the Lord off, but it started using the orbital bombardment platforms to blow the hell out of everything. The most likely thing was that it had somehow detected Invincible.”

  His eyes grew shadowed. “You were at the government center when it destroyed the capital. I’ve always comforted myself with the idea that you never really knew what was happening before you died. You didn’t have time to be afraid.”

  Olivia closed the door behind her, strapped in, and patted his hand. “I’m sorry you had to live with that.”

  He nodded, but his gaze was penetrating. “I died here. How?”

  “You were trapped with the crew on Invincible when the Lord locked the system down. Something different triggered it here, which might explain the difference in its response.

  “Without the computer, there was no way you could fight, so you and your people waited until supplies ran out and then ended things on the flag bridge. I was only able to bring you home and bury you a few months ago.”

  “It sounds as if you had it harder.”

  She shook her head. “No. You had to live in a hole while the AI murdered our people. Still, we don’t have to make this a comparison of who had it worse.”

  “I suppose not. Did you ever find someone else?”

  His expression told her that he probably hadn’t.

  “Only recently. You were a hard man to get over. You’ve met him. Commodore Meyer.”

  The corners of Drake’s mouth edged up. “Ah. That explains the odd looks of semi-hostility he kept shooting me. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Now I know.”

  “He’s actually a very good man. You’re very much alike, I think. Which, on reflection, might not be the best thing.”

  She faced Brian squarely. “I’m committed to my relationship and my work is here, just as yours is back on your home. As much as this might seem like a second chance for us, I don’t want you to build unreasonable expectations.”