Paying the Price (Book 5 of The Empire of Bones Saga)

by Terry Mixon

  “True, but then you wouldn’t know what to do if you ever had to do it yourself under pressure. For example, what if Captain Baxter had blown his attempt when Athena was running from the Pale Ones?”

  She’d been unconscious for that, but she’d heard the story. Once Jared had rescued her from the Pale Ones, they’d chased the ship back to the Pentagar flip point. Athena had lost power and bridge control seconds before flip and the engineer had calculated the settings in his head.

  If he’d screwed it up, they’d all be slaves to the Pale Ones right now. She made a mental note to see that he received the Imperial Cross for that. Her father wouldn’t argue. That was over and above whatever Fleet Command and the Imperial Senate decided to do.

  The highest award for valor in the Terran Empire came with a few perks that only the emperor could bestow. A small plot of land somewhere and a knighthood. Sir Dennis. Wouldn’t that tie his trickster tongue?

  It also bumped someone up the chain when it came to salutes from his fellows. All Fleet personnel owed a holder of the Imperial Cross a salute, regardless of their respective ranks. Admirals saluted sailors if they held the Imperial Cross.

  Since the Fall, they hadn’t had an opportunity for anyone to earn that high award. Peacetime wasn’t the kind of forge that created moments that earned one.

  This mission was going to change that. She wouldn’t be surprised to see a number of people receive the Empire’s highest honor. It saddened her that all too many of them died doing so.

  “Well, yes,” she said after a moment. “That would’ve been awkward. As an engineer, I’m not sure how he knew what to do.”

  “It’s part of their training, just because it might prove necessary. Score one for the training weenies. I never thought I’d say this, but I may have to buy some of them drinks when we get home.”

  “Your secret is safe with me. I’m transferring the helm back to you, Lieutenant Thompson.”

  “Aye, ma’am. I have the controls.”

  Once he’d accepted the helm, she brought up a display of the Nova system. They were going about a third of the way around. They’d be looking for planetary bodies and flip points. If they hadn’t found any in twelve hours, they’d circle around and come back via a different route.

  Part of her was disappointed that she wouldn’t be exploring the strange station, but the rest of her was thrilled to avoid being at the sharp end for once.

  That’s violating the Marine Raider code.

  “Use your outdoor voice,” she subvocalized.

  He laughed. This time it came across as an actual sound. Of course, it only came through her auditory implants, but this was better than the disembodied voice in her head.

  It had taken her quite a bit of practice to learn to speak without others either hearing her or seeing what she was up to. Or being so incomprehensible that Ned couldn’t understand her.

  They’d come to this compromise because she needed the privacy of her mind left intact. The shade of Marine Raider Major Ned Quincy, the previous commander of Persephone, was a resident in her implants.

  It was ludicrous on the face of it. Her implant processors were far inferior to the most basic of Old Empire computers. At least the ones that were of any size. Yet, somehow the memory recordings that he’d left had come into a life of their own. He was an AI. A real one, similar to Marcus, but different enough to be unique.

  That had sent Doctor Leonard and Carl Owlet into a tizzy. That was the only word for it. Yet, so far, they’d been unable to recreate that lightning in a bottle. They were still hopeful, though. It had worked once, so they could do it again. All they needed to do was figure out the critical elements they were missing.

  Even Marcus was at a loss to explain it. All he could do was confirm that Ned Quincy was undoubtedly sentient.

  She hadn’t needed anyone to tell her that. The man’s odd sense of humor didn’t allow for any other possibility. He was a real person, even if he wasn’t the man who’d created the recordings before the Fall.

  And living with him in her head had proven…challenging. She wanted her privacy, too. So, they’d made a compact. She was the arbiter of when he could use her senses. As he was resident in her implants, she had to trust that he would respect her wishes.

  Otherwise, she’d go crazy.

  So, he was on his word that he didn’t monitor her when she told him to get lost for a while. Like when she and Talbot retired for the evening. Or when she had to use the restroom.

  Since he lived in her implants, he could interface with the ship and do any number of things. Watch entertainment vids, read, and visit with friends. Of which he had some. How that worked, she wasn’t precisely sure.

  He even claimed he was able to sleep. That involved putting part of one of her implant processors into a low powered state that he claimed allowed him to dream.

  Ned also wasn’t normally supposed to monitor her thoughts. She’d given him permission while she was flying the ship today. That way, if she was about to screw up, he could warn her. A second safety net.

  That meant under normal circumstances, he only heard what she said to him and she only heard his “voice” in her real ears. That made things bearable.

  “Now that we’re in the Nova system, no more monitoring my surface thoughts. Was my transition for crap?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. It could’ve been a little steadier, but you made it. Just keep working the sims and you’ll get better. Practice makes perfect.”

  She didn’t need a lot of sleep, so she spent a fair amount of time in various sims. Some for the piloting, others for combat. She’d also visited a number of Old Empire worlds via recordings.

  Ned’s input on combat was immeasurably helpful. He’d made complete copies of all his training in his implants. They’d been among the files she’d taken over when they recovered his body.

  Having the files didn’t directly translate to her being able to use the skills. It did make her processors’ use of combat mode significantly more effective.

  That wasn’t good enough for her, though. Kelsey coveted his skills. She wanted to be the badass that he’d been.

  Direct access to his memories of using the techniques gave her a leg up, though. The style of fighting favored by the Raiders was a distilled compilation of many different Old Empire martial arts. Almost all of which had been lost during the Fall.

  With him in her head, she was the last remaining practitioner of this dead art. One day she’d have to teach others and she wanted to be able to do that. She felt like that kid in one of the old vids with the quirky master. Wax on. Wax off.

  “That reminds me,” she said. “I have a question for you.”

  “Since I’m not reading your mind, you’ll have to clue me in.”

  “Sorry. I was thinking about an old martial arts vid. Pre-spaceflight. What degree master were you?”

  He projected a mental image of himself standing beside her. It was spooky really. He could overwrite her optical input and add himself to the scene around her. It was just like what he did for her auditory implants. No one else could see him, unless he chose to go wide, so he was like a ghost.

  “We didn’t use the black belt rankings a lot of the civilian martial arts favored,” he said. “Those got all funny once you made black belt. We made an intentional break with that tradition. We use the colored belts for lower levels and a black belt to indicate mastery. The only level we have above that is sensei. One capable of teaching.”

  “And I’d imagined you were some super badass. What a letdown.” She smiled to take any sting out of her joke.

  “Well, if it’s any consolation, I was the Raider’s unarmed combat champion six years in a row. And the woman that broke my streak? She cheated.”

  “Uh huh. Well, that does make me feel better. Where do I fall on that ranking?”

  He made a show of thinking about it. “Not black belt. Sorry. It’s not second nature to you, yet. And you haven’t caught a fly with your ch
opsticks.”

  “You did see that movie!”

  “Which movie, ma’am?”

  Kelsey blinked a moment. She’d said that out loud. “Sorry. I was talking to my resident ghost and got carried away.”

  Lieutenant Thompson and the rest of the bridge crew knew about her guest. Jared had decided that they had to. If something went wrong, they might need that knowledge.

  It had taken some doing to convince them she wasn’t crazy. Sometimes, she still wasn’t sure.

  The officer’s eyes moved to her right. Ned must’ve made himself visible to everyone. Through the ship, he could do that. Maybe that was how he had friends.

  “Sorry,” Ned said. “I was teasing her.”

  “And you still didn’t answer my question.”

  He smiled. “You’re a brown belt for sure. Keep working and you’ll make black by the time we get to Avalon.”

  “I hope so. I’d like to have that part of my training squared away. I’m getting tired of Talbot throwing me around the mat when we fight. Well, when my augmentation is turned off, anyway.”

  She checked her chrono. “We’ve got almost a full day and it looks like we won’t be stumbling across very many surprises in the next twenty-three hours. Jack, I’ll be in the gym if you need me.”

  Chapter Six

  Carl Owlet exited the pinnace and floated over to the strange station with light pushes from his grav unit. Because of the extreme radiation, he wasn’t wearing a normal vacuum suit. Not even the marine versions would last more than a few moments here.

  Instead, they’d raided the engineering section for suits designed to operate near an exposed fusion plant. That wasn’t the same level of radiation, but tests had shown they’d allow the team to survive in this environment.

  The heavy suit restricted his movements, but protected him from the intense radiation flowing from the black hole.

  Which wasn’t that far away, really. He had a fabulous view of the accretion disk through the center of the alien ring. It was stunning. He made certain to get some good shots of it with his external vid recorders. They were more powerful and had much higher resolution than his implants.

  He wasn’t the first to make the trip. The marines were waiting for him on the surface of the construct. Still, it felt as though he was first on the scene.

  “Stop lollygagging and get your skinny butt down here, Carl,” Talbot said.

  “On my way, Major. Your exaltedness. Sir.”

  “Someone is looking for a round on the mat, I see.”

  Carl smiled. His big friend was so easy to predict. His promotion still had him in an odd mental space. Still, he’d best not tease Talbot too much. He didn’t want another marine ready to tie him into knots.

  Up close, the station really did look different. The hull material was nothing like what they’d used in the Old Empire. Not only was it completely black, it absorbed every form of radiation they could detect. Discovering what it was would be high on his list of tasks.

  He stopped lightly beside Talbot and the rest of the marines floating near the hull of the station. Its bulk obscured the accretion disk and they were in shadow, so they all had their suit lights on. The skin of the station absorbed a lot of that, too.

  “Did you find an entrance?” Carl asked.

  “Not yet. Since no one reacted to our arrival, I have teams making the rounds in both directions. While we wait, I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  “Shoot.”

  Carl changed his orientation so he was looking closely at the skin of the station. Rather than a smooth surface, small bumps covered it like a texture. Yeah, definitely not of Imperial manufacture.

  Talbot sent him a private message to switch to channel six. Carl opened it, but also continued monitoring the general channel.

  “What the hell were you thinking?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Is this about the hammer again? Make one damned mistake and you never live it down.”

  “Don’t curse.”

  “Hello? Pot, this is kettle, over.”

  “Yeah, well I’m a grizzled adult and you’re ruining my preconceptions. No, this is about Angela Ellis. You’re getting on the bad side of the wrong person and you need to take a step back before she hurts you.”

  Carl shook his head, even though the marine couldn’t see him. He unhooked a small scanner from his belt and began taking readings from the surface of the station.

  “I haven’t done anything to that woman. She’s frothing all on her own. I’ll get the kinks worked out of the hammer a lot faster without her breathing down my neck.”

  Talbot floated next to him. “You have no idea. She’s a good person, but she has issues when it comes to losing people. We all do, really, but hers are more like an obsession. She’s convinced you’re out to kill Kelsey with your supposed incompetence.”

  The marine held up a hand. “I’ve told her you’re the brightest guy on the block, but she got a bad first impression. You need to stop banging heads with her and try a different approach. You’re not going to bulldoze your way through her objections.”

  The scanner readings were very odd. Part of the beams never came back. The hull must be absorbing them, too. What he was getting told him two mutually exclusive things.

  First, the hull was made of collapsed matter. Not the partial stuff that he’d used on the hammer, but something a lot closer to neutronium. So much so that the beams weren’t penetrating the surface at all.

  If that were true, that explained the lack of a battle screen. No radiation would make it through that. Just cutting it would take a hell of a lot of focused energy. If they could do it at all.

  Invincible’s beams would be ineffective. It would require more power in a tighter focus. Well, maybe they would work with time, but the designers had never envisioned long duration shots. And their tightest focus would be useless. It required something much finer, yet more powerful.

  Assuming the readings were correct, the mass of the station should be incredible. Here he was floating beside it, but it should have enough pull on its own to anchor him. Not like a planet, perhaps, but maybe a large asteroid. A handful of true neutronium would weigh millions of tons. He’d need to do some calculations before he knew what to expect.

  Yet there was nothing. No indication at all that the surface was pulling any of them in. And that was damned odd. It really couldn’t be both ways. He was missing something.

  “I wish I had a clue how to hit the reset button,” Carl told the marine. “Major Ellis is all over my ass. And talk about hostile. She threatened to break me into little pieces with Kelsey standing right there.”

  “I hope you take what she says seriously,” Talbot said. “She’s pretty pissed about the whole thing.”

  “I don’t understand why. There was no way Kelsey was ever getting that version of the hammer. I have a lot more testing to do on it. Hell, I wasn’t even going to tell her about it until the testing was complete. She told Kelsey. And now I have to convince the she-bear that it’s safe.”

  He looked over at Talbot as he said that last. The marine was smiling. Bastard.

  “Look, kid, I get it. I really do. I tried to tell her what a stand-up guy you are and it bounced. She’s got it in her head that you’re a dangerous fellow. It’s up to you to convince her she’s wrong. I can’t help you with that. No one can.”

  “I’m doomed.”

  Talbot laughed and moved off to confer with the other marines keeping watch. So much for a helping hand.

  Carl sighed and glared at his scanner. It wasn’t even giving him a good idea what the texture was for. If they didn’t get inside the thing, they might never find out. At least not before they left to go home.

  He hated the idea of someone else making the big discoveries after he came up empty. Maybe he could get a more detailed reading on the skin if he boosted the scanner power and narrowed the focus. A sweeping scan that went up and down the potential frequencies would also increase his odds o
f getting something meaningful back.

  It only took a few moments to change the settings. He held the scanner against the surface of the station and started probing it.

  The hull underneath him sank with astonishing speed, yanking him inside the station. He didn’t even have time to yell before the darkness engulfed him.

  * * * * *

  Angela finished going over the data Owlet had given her about Project Mjölnir. It was insulting. He’d tailored his summary as though she was four. And slow.

  His opinion of marines in general, and her in specific, had to be pretty dismal.

  Perhaps he didn’t know that officers in the emperor’s service had to have university degrees. Admittedly, hers was in military studies, but she had the ability to grasp other advanced subjects.

  She set the summary aside and opened his write-up about the quantum validation theory.

  That might have been a mistake.

  It quickly arrowed off into science that she didn’t have the background to understand. Not without a lot of study. Time she was unwilling to waste on this one project.

  Maybe the computer could help her grasp it. “Persephone, if I send you a file on a scientific subject, can you help me understand it?”

  “This unit may be able to assist, Major Ellis. It depends on the nature of the theory and how specific your question is.”

  She sent the files. “This is classified under my seal. Only Princess Kelsey, Carl Owlet, Doctor Leonard, Admiral Mertz, and I are cleared to know the contents.”

  “Understood. Which theory are you looking for clarification on? There are a number of fields that are mentioned.”

  “Quantum communication. How does that work?”

  “It doesn’t, at least as far as this unit’s databases are concerned. This unit has located several mentions of failed experiments in that line, but none that were able to meaningfully use the quantum entanglement of photons.”

  “Then focus on the files I sent. How does it propose the communication to work?”

  She leaned back in the chair behind her desk to await what was no doubt going to be a boring lecture in science. She really didn’t need an office, but the privacy would be useful if it put her to sleep.