When Luck Runs Out Read online

  When Luck Runs Out

  Book Thirteen of The Empire of Bones Saga

  Terry Mixon

  Contents

  When Luck Runs Out

  Also by Terry Mixon

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Also by Terry Mixon

  About Terry

  When Luck Runs Out

  Book Thirteen of The Empire of Bones Saga

  by

  Terry Mixon

  After years of battle, Kelsey Bandar and Jared Mertz are finally ready to face the master AI enslaving the Terran Empire. With just a bit of luck, this nightmare will finally be over.

  Only luck can run out just when you need it the most.

  Outnumbered and outgunned, they must salvage victory from certain defeat. Failure means extermination, invasion, and the loss of everyone they love. Can they beat the odds just one more time?

  Victory on Terra

  Copyright © 2020 by Terry Mixon

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including information storage and/or retrieval systems, or dissemination of any electronic version, without the prior written consent of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review, and except where permitted by law.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Yowling Cat Press ®

  Digital edition date: 11/12/2020

  Print ISBN: 978-1947376366

  Large Print ISBN: 978-1947376373

  Cover art - image copyrights as follows:

  DepositPhotos|Ivankmit

  Dreamstime | Philcold

  Dreamstime | Marciomauro

  Luca Oleastri

  Donna Mixon

  Cover design and composition by Donna Mixon

  Print edition design and layout by Terry Mixon

  Also by Terry Mixon

  You can always find the most up to date listing of Terry’s titles on his Amazon Author Page.

  The Empire of Bones Saga

  Empire of Bones

  Veil of Shadows

  Command Decisions

  Ghosts of Empire

  Paying the Price

  Recon in Force

  Behind Enemy Lines

  The Terra Gambit

  Hidden Enemies

  Race to Terra

  Ruined Terra

  Victory on Terra

  When Luck Runs Out

  The Humanity Unlimited Saga

  Liberty Station

  Freedom Express

  Tree of Liberty

  Blood of Patriots

  The Imperial Marines Saga

  Spoils of War

  The Fractured Republic Saga

  Storm Divers

  The Scorched Earth Saga

  Scorched Earth

  Omnibus Volumes

  The Empire of Bones Saga Volume 1

  The Empire of Bones Saga Volume 2

  The Empire of Bones Saga Volume 3

  Humanity Unlimited Publisher’s Pack 1

  The Vigilante Series with Glynn Stewart

  Heart of Vengeance

  Oath of Vengeance

  Bound By Law

  Bound By Honor

  Bound By Blood

  Want to get updates from Terry about new books and other general nonsense going on in his life? He promises there will be cats. Go to TerryMixon.com/Mailing-List and sign up.

  Dedication

  This book would not be possible without the love and support of my beautiful wife. Donna, I love you more than life itself.

  Acknowledgments

  I want to thank the folks that support me on Patreon. You got to read this book as I was writing it and that kept me working. You have my deepest thanks.

  In particular, I want to thank those patrons that supported me at the $10 level and above:

  Bryan Barnes

  Dave Dolan

  David Goldstein

  Eugene Humbert

  Christian A. Michelsen

  John Page

  Keith Ramsey

  Carl Rumbolo

  Dale Thompson

  Raymond Wang

  Clark Williams

  Finally, I want to thank my readers for putting up with me. You guys are great.

  1

  “Are we ready to flip?” Kelsey Bandar asked from behind Persephone’s command seat. There wasn’t much room on the cramped bridge of the Marine Raider strike ship—which only held three control consoles—but they were all friends.

  Until half a year ago, Persephone had been hers. Now Angela Ellis, one of her closest friends, was in command. She had to admit that Angela was far better suited to the task than she had been.

  Her friend had really grown into the role since they’d escaped Terra. Any uncertainty the woman might’ve initially had about commanding a warship was long gone. Now she was a confident leader in charge of a well-trained crew.

  Persephone wasn’t working solo anymore, either. They’d linked up with Jared’s fleet a month after they’d escaped from Terra. If push came to shove, they could now fight. At least they could when they weren’t scouting.

  They’d left that security behind and were now three flips away from support. Admittedly, they could get back to the fleet in just a few minutes because of the peculiar nature of the multiflip point network, but they’d be unable to communicate except with low-speed FTL coms.

  That was something they’d only use if they had to. The gravitic pulses it used were hard to detect, but not impossible, and they dared not even hint at the technology to the AIs or their enslaved humans.

  Carl Owlet turned in response to her question. As the resident scientific genius, he was still figuring out how the multiflip points worked. Thankfully, he’d made some progress as they’d crept ever closer to Twilight River, the home of the master AI that held the remains of the old Terran Empire in thrall.

  “The probe we sent through the branch just popped back and reports that the other side is clear, but it picked up activity in the system. Nothing close enough to detect our arrival, though.”

  “Send the probe back and then take us through the flip point, Angela,” Kelsey said. “You know the drill.”

  “Helm, make it happen,” the big woman commanded. “Verify all systems are set to stealth nominal. We don’t want to give the locals any indication that we’ve arrived.”

  “All systems verified, Major,” Senior Lieutenant Jack Thompson responded. “Flipping the ship.”

  There was a b
rief churning inside Kelsey’s gut before they vanished from one system and appeared in another, having traversed the distance between them instantly. Thankfully, her Marine Raider augmentation made the process a lot less disorienting than it had once been.

  As they appeared in the new system, no one said a word, and the ship began launching additional probes to gather information about the system without giving away their presence.

  It would take hours for the stealthed probes to determine who was in the system and what they were doing, but the location of the system itself should be easy enough to identify based on the starfield.

  “Fiona,” Kelsey said, glancing toward the ceiling. “Can you tell us where we are?”

  “I’m working on that, Colonel,” the artificial intelligence said through the ship’s speakers. “I anticipate having our location dialed in within the next few minutes.”

  Fiona had chosen to present herself as female even though she had no biological body. Like Marcus, the AI aboard Jared’s flagship Invincible, and Harrison, the AI running the shipyards on Boxer Station at Harrison’s World, she was made up of the same hardware as the AIs they were fighting.

  The only difference was that Carl had scrubbed their core rules of all the homicidal nastiness that the master AI had built into its own brood. He’d also inserted a core rule that the AIs had to obey orders from herself or Jared.

  She still wasn’t sure that had been the best decision, but it was done and couldn’t be undone without unraveling their personalities, so they’d all have to live with his choice.

  Jared Mertz, her brother—technically her half brother, even though they shared no genetic link whatsoever—and the commander of this expedition, had remained with the fleet in a system that wasn’t on any of the old Imperial maps.

  To the best of their knowledge, humanity had never discovered the star or the pristine world that orbited dead center of its habitable zone. That was a real loss for humanity, because the world rivaled Avalon or Terra in its beauty. Her husband, Russ Talbot, was leading an exploratory mission down to its surface even now.

  Kelsey returned her thoughts to the mission at hand. She was glad that they were able to get away for a little while. It really strained one’s nerves to have to slip through the Rebel Empire—the AI-enslaved remnants of the old Terran Empire—with an entire fleet of ships while hoping that no one noticed your passage.

  As a Marine Raider strike ship, Persephone’s hull was coated with materials that were difficult to detect. In addition to that, she had stealth fields that they could throw over her hull to absorb incoming scans. Unless someone was right on top of them, they’d have no idea that she was there at all.

  The protection wasn’t perfect, of course. The closer Persephone got to an actively scanning enemy, the higher the chances she’d be noticed.

  Their most significant risk of discovery during this particular mission was random patrols that might inadvertently come across them once they’d flipped into a system but before they’d had a chance to get the lay of the land.

  Based on what she’d seen so far, the Rebel Empire was taking nothing for granted. The AIs had destroyers in a lot of systems doing exactly that. So far as they knew, the AIs didn’t suspect the existence of flip points that didn’t fit the standard model, which at least made what they were doing possible.

  Multiflip points occurred in roughly the same area of a system as regular flip points—which meant they were mostly spread out between the habitable zone and the innermost gas giants—but they were much more difficult to detect.

  Far flip points sat way out in the outer system, and were as detectable as regular flip points, but no one had ever bothered searching for flip points at so great a distance from a star. They were also like regular flip points in that they could only go to a single destination, but part of their unusual nature was that the distance traversed was significantly greater than a regular flip point.

  Where a standard flip point might allow a ship to go up to a couple of hundred light-years, a far flip point could reach an average of a thousand. The shortest one they’d found thus far had been over seven hundred light-years. The longest had been more than thirteen hundred.

  Still, to her mind, it was the multiflip points that were the most interesting. She didn’t know how they worked because Carl hadn’t finalized a working theory yet, but they were devilishly difficult to detect. Also, depending on the frequency generated by the flip drive, they could potentially take you to different destinations through what he called branches, using a tree metaphor.

  More interestingly, when you arrived at the destination multiflip point, it could, in turn, take you to even more destinations. Without leaving the section of space around the multiflip point, a ship that had mapped the various branches could flip three or four times in the space of a couple of minutes and visit as many systems.

  One of the dangers they’d discovered was that some of those branches only allowed for a limited amount of tonnage, and it might vary depending on the direction you were traversing a branch. It might allow for a cruiser to make the trip out but limit the return to a destroyer. Or no ship at all.

  That had to do with the energy distribution inside the branches of the multiflip point network and was why mapping was critical. They had to probe each branch carefully to get an idea of how much tonnage it would allow so that they wouldn’t be stranded on the other side if they used it.

  Another one of Carl’s inventions had made the process somewhat easier. He’d created an external frequency modulator that could be installed on an existing flip drive that would allow it to take them through branches that might not otherwise be traversable.

  He’d also designed a flip drive that could do the work much more precisely and even had one built at a Rebel Empire shipyard. That had taken a covert mission and acquired them some allies in the process. That specialized flip drive was now a resident aboard the Fleet carrier Audacious.

  She and her commanding officer, Commodore Zia Anderson, were separated from the fleet because of one of those one-way branches, and Kelsey was worried about the woman and her crew. Zia was working with the resistance inside the Rebel Empire, but she didn’t have any support from the fleet or the New Terran Empire.

  Kelsey hoped that things were okay with them and their unplanned guest. Kelsey’s mother, the former empress of the New Terran Empire, had stowed away to be with Kelsey at the start of her mission and had decided to remain with the resistance and act as an ambassador for the New Terran Empire.

  What could possibly go wrong with that?

  Kelsey just hoped that Justine Bandar didn’t sleep with the wrong person. When it came to affairs, her mother didn’t have much common sense, though Kelsey’s biological sire was a powerful and canny Imperial senator, one who’d bled to prove his loyalty to the emperor and the Empire.

  “I’ve identified this system,” Fiona said. “It was never permanently occupied by humans and thus never given a colloquial name, so it’s listed in the Imperial Catalog as Y-73598F-8A. The star is an unremarkable red dwarf, and there are no listed resources of note. It does, however, have one intriguing feature.”

  The main screen changed from a view of space to a map of the flip lines around Twilight River. One of the systems near their target began blinking.

  “Y-73598F-8A is two flips away from Twilight River. This particular branch of the multiflip point network has brought us significantly closer to the master AI than any of our previous explorations. In fact, based on the signal traffic that I’m picking up inside the system, I believe that it hosts a significant defensive force.”

  “That’s good,” Angela said with a relieved smile. “The closest we’d gotten before was five systems out, and even that had a sizable picket force of destroyers. This will allow us to get an idea of how much protection the master AI has layered around itself. If it isn’t too significant, the fallback plan of forcing our way into Twilight River using Admiral Mertz’s fleet might work.�
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  “I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I were you,” Kelsey warned. “This thing has had five centuries to build up its defenses. Each layer inside this onion is going to be tougher than the last. Whatever we find here will just be a tithe of what’s in the next system, and Twilight River itself will be worse yet.”

  That was a grim forecast but one that she honestly believed. If it came to the point that they couldn’t slip into Twilight River through a back door, she seriously doubted that they’d be able to get into it at all.

  “Thank you, Debbie Downer,” Carl muttered loudly enough for everyone to hear.

  She smiled slightly as everyone else chuckled. The scientist was irrepressible.

  “Carl, honey, use your inside voice,” Angela told her husband.

  Kelsey still had trouble imagining the big marine woman and the slight scientist being a couple, but she supposed it wasn’t any more outlandish than her and Talbot. She was smaller than most women, much less Carl, while Talbot was bigger than Angela. Quite the visual mismatch.

  The young man grinned at his wife. “I had to lighten the mood a bit. I’m starting to get a better idea of how the multiflip point network is laid out, and I think there’s a good chance that we’re going to find a branch that leads where we want to go.