Hidden Enemies (Book 9 of The Empire of Bones Saga) Read online

  She prayed he was wrong or they were going to be here a very long time.

  “The conduit itself might be used to transport any number of things,” she told the young man somewhat repressively. “The circuits might yield rare elements and the alloys might prove useful. Don’t think that getting them back into service is the only use for something like that.”

  Carl grunted a little, but nodded. “I see what you mean but I stand by my original impression.”

  Zia gestured for Efrain to lead them on. As interesting as this was, it wasn’t getting the survey of the wreck done any faster.

  The stealthed drones she’d deployed to watch the crash site had already revealed that the engineering section was somewhat intact. As the flip drive was a large piece of equipment, that might mean it was still in there. Getting something like that out without having access to the massive hatch on the ship’s underside would be almost impossible.

  No one down here could tell her for sure if they’d taken it apart. They’d never bothered keeping records of what had been removed and repurposed over the last six decades.

  The three of them walked between a series of buildings and came out in the vast area at the center of the artificial town. The wooden sheds and buildings had been built around the crash site and conformed to how the debris had ended up, so its layout was somewhat arbitrary.

  Zia had seen battlecruisers before, obviously. That said, she’d never seen one sitting on the ground. That made a huge difference in scale. Comparing a ship with another ship, station, or distant planet didn’t make it seem monstrously huge.

  Dauntless was monstrously huge.

  Even with a broken back and terrible tears in her hull, the wreck was still mostly intact. It towered above their heads, rising into the sky like some kind of alien skyscraper. A skyscraper covered with scaffolding so that the Pandorans could remove and access various things.

  In addition to going up a tremendous distance, it was also quite long and wide. Zia and her companions had stepped out of the surrounding buildings near the engineering section. It seemed as if the ship stretched as far as she could see going forward, though she knew that wasn’t true.

  If she was going to compare it to something of a similar size, the wrecked ship covered three or four blocks going forward. Maybe five. It was two blocks wide.

  “That really puts things in scale, doesn’t it?” she asked in a hushed voice.

  Carl took two steps forward and craned his neck to look upward. “I didn’t realize these things were so tall. Intellectually, I know exactly how many decks they have and roughly how much space a deck takes up but that’s not the same thing as seeing in front of me like a building.”

  Zia turned to their guide. “Can we go inside? What are the protocols? I assume someone owns this and we need to get permission to come in to look at things.”

  The Pandoran nodded. “The wreck is owned by the Kingdom of Raden. Clan Dauntless was paid both in money and land, among other things. Technically, my Lord Derek has sufficient authority to grant you access to Dauntless.

  “That said, he does not have the authority to give you anything inside the wreckage. There is a company formed by the government that you would have to negotiate with to exchange anything from inside the wreckage for something they value.”

  She nodded. “So we’re window shopping. How do we get in? This is the section of the ship that we’re interested in.”

  The Pandoran man pointed at a wooden arch next to the ship. “Entrances like that have been set up at ground-level. While the metals are tough, those splits are large enough to allow equipment in and out. Go wherever you like and I shall explain our presence if anyone asks.”

  The wooden archway wasn’t just to keep the weather out, Zia saw. Several metal beams were set up behind the wood to make certain the torn hull of the ship didn’t shift.

  “Just how stable is the interior?” she asked. She didn’t aim the question directly at Carl, but she was interested in what both the Pandoran man and her young friend had to say.

  Their guide spoke first. “With the understanding that this is a wreck, it’s stable. There’s no large-scale movement these days. That stopped in the first couple of decades.

  “That doesn’t mean things are completely safe. Things occasionally fall down and new weaknesses in walls, ceilings, and floors are occasionally detected. When we become aware of such things, we reinforce them or restrict the area to prevent injury.

  “I can’t be more specific without knowing precisely where you’re going to visit. If it’s somewhere outside the zones we’ve cordoned off, I’ll need to get one of the overseers to accompany us.”

  Carl gave the man a long look but finally nodded. “I can’t exactly argue with their experiences over the last half-century. If it were me however, I’d be very careful. Ships like this were designed to be very tough, but when parts fail, they can fail catastrophically.

  “Even though it might have been safe for the last sixty years, it wouldn’t be fun to be in a location that has metal fatigue that suddenly decided to give way.”

  “We just want to go to the main engineering compartment right now,” Zia said. “If something there convinces us we need to see another section of the ship, we’ll let you know.”

  The journey through the wrecked battlecruiser was surreal. It reminded her very much of her time spent aboard Courageous. Except the air hung around them, still and dead. The smell of rust and mechanical decay was strong.

  The interior lighting was a lot dimmer than Zia would’ve preferred, but at least it was powered by electricity. While the illumination was low by human standards, it was probably more than sufficient for Pandorans with their much better night vision.

  She could only imagine how torches would behave inside such a confined environment. The smell would be awful and the fumes from the burning matter would probably sting the eyes.

  Zia gestured toward the haphazard lighting. “What’s powering your lighting?”

  “Residual energy from one of this vessel’s power plants,” the man said.

  Carl stopped in his tracks and slowly turned toward the Pandoran. “Are you telling me that one of the fusion plants is still operational? We didn’t detect anything like that from orbit, but I’ll confess that I wasn’t looking for that kind of activity.”

  The Pandoran shrugged. “You’ll have to ask one of the overseers. All I can tell you is that these lights were rigged up during the time following the crash.”

  “That’s not good,” Carl said. “While it’s certainly possible that some surviving engineering personnel verified the safety of that unit after the crash, it’s been sixty years. I think we might need to look at that before we examine the flip drive.”

  Zia had personally seen what happened to ships when a fusion plant failed. She had no intention of being anywhere near a damaged unit that had been operational for decades.

  “Let’s go,” she said, increasing her pace.

  2

  Lieutenant Colonel Russel Talbot watched the prisoners through the vid feed in his implant. To be certain they didn’t concoct some kind of common story to tell him, he’d ordered all the prisoners be housed separately. Audacious was a large ship with plenty of space for thirteen prisoners.

  Of course, they’d said almost the same thing about Commander Veronica Giguere and her crew.

  Commander Raul Castille, the Dresden orbital’s security officer, had orchestrated the murder of most of his comrades, escaped the ship with Commander Giguere and her crew, and no one on Talbot’s side had been the wiser until they were long gone.

  Their plan had been something worthy of Kelsey, though his wife was loath to admit it. She thought she had a monopoly on making crazy plans work.

  Admittedly, they’d upped the stakes for the princess when they’d kidnapped her mother at the same time. And, as mothers-in-law went, the woman was a real piece of work.

  The situation had reminded him of a joke he’d heard
in one of the old vids his wife favored. A man watching his mother-in-law drive off a cliff in his new ground vehicle—an expensive one—might be a bit torn about how to feel. He’d thought it was hilarious until recently.

  After Castille had used the stolen orbital as a weapon to provoke the Clans, Princess Kelsey had tried unsuccessfully to talk the strangers down. She’d had no choice other than to fight when they’d opened fire, though. She’d destroyed both Clan ships.

  Talbot wished Castille had survived the fight so he could punch the man in the face. He’d really screwed things up.

  Now they had Commander Giguere under secure watch in the medical center, her crew locked down under heavy guard in their original quarters, the few prisoners they’d kept from the Dresden orbital in the brig, and the new prisoners isolated so that they couldn’t concoct some common story before Talbot started asking questions.

  A dozen of the newcomers were human enough, though none of them had been in uniform when his people had picked them up. They were undoubtedly Clan officers of one kind or another. Considering that the New Terran Empire knew nothing about the Clans or their worlds, he was going to approach them with kid gloves.

  Basically, all they knew thus far was that a task force had escaped the Fall of the Old Terran Empire, settled these worlds, and now called themselves the Clans. The leaders of those clans—based around the original vessels—worked together to make broader policy.

  From what the Pandorans had indicated of their interaction with the survivors from Clan Dauntless, these were the kind of people that shot first and didn’t really bother asking questions when they were done. The aliens thought humans in general were violent, though they admitted that after the most virulent of the crash survivors had fought to the death, the remaining humans seemed peaceful enough. Natural selection at work.

  Kelsey’s contact with Jacob Howell, the son of the current head of Clan Dauntless, had indicated that no one above the rank of lieutenant had survived the initial crash. The man had suspected higher ranking officers would’ve been even more resistant to integration into Pandoran society than those that had had to be put down.

  It seemed that the people of the Clans were, well, clannish.

  That was certainly going to make dealing with the people Castille had provoked difficult. Particularly since the man had blown up one of their battle stations and forced Kelsey to destroy two of their warships. They’d be out for blood and no amount of talking was going to help.

  He pulled his mind back to the task in front of him. Yes, questioning the dozen Clan prisoners was going to be interesting. But it was the thirteenth prisoner that had his attention now.

  Unlike the others, this one was very different than anyone Talbot had ever seen before. The man was isolated in a small stateroom under the guard of three marines in unpowered armor. They were armed with stunners and had strict instructions not to harm the man even if he attacked them.

  He was human, or so appearances would lead one to believe, but he sported tattoos on his cheeks and forehead, and was dressed in flowing robes of pale green. The tattoos were stylized but definitely portrayed some type of predator bird.

  “So how do you want to play this?” Major Angela Ellis asked him.

  She was the executive officer of Kelsey’s ship, the Marine Raider strike ship Persephone. She’d come over to give him a hand with the prisoners and consult with Commodore Anderson before the flag officer had headed down to the surface earlier.

  Oh, and see her husband of course.

  Talbot still couldn’t quite see what the powerfully-built woman saw in Carl Owlet. Not that the marine had anything against his young friend, but the boy—and boy was the appropriate word—was very much a nerd. One not even old enough to drink.

  Angela, on the other hand, was just over two meters tall and was built to scale. Tough, strong, and combative, the marine officer didn’t seem the type to be deeply in love with a scientist. No matter how much raw destruction said scientist had managed to wreak over the years Talbot had known him.

  “I’m not quite sure,” Talbot said, putting his previous thoughts aside. “He’s not going to know about the New Terran Empire of course. He’ll suspect that we’re from the Rebel Empire. I might not disabuse him of that notion either.

  “We’re eventually going to have to face up to explaining who we really are and why it wasn’t us that attacked the Clans, but that can wait. Stuck here the way we are, we’ve got plenty of time to figure out precisely who we’re dealing with.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Aren’t you a little concerned they’re going to be coming through the flip point after us?”

  He shook his head. “No. While they know the multiflip point exists, they’ve never been successful in utilizing it in the past. There’s no reason to believe they’re suddenly going to develop the technology necessary to get one of their ships through to this side.”

  Score one for Carl.

  “Only his modifications to Audacious’s flip drive made it possible for her to make the jump,” he said. “The same goes for the freighter we brought with us. While big, the freighter managed to come through with its flip drive intact. The carrier burned hers out.

  “Persephone seems to be the largest ship capable of going through from the Icebox side unmodified. And it’s the smallest flip capable ship I’ve ever seen. No, I’m not worried.”

  Angela didn’t seem convinced. “It’s not as if the Icebox system has any other location we could’ve gone. The multiflip point is the only place we could’ve come through. They’ll be asking themselves how we managed to get back and they’ll start working on it.”

  “I’m not sure that’s true, at least not right away. They’re going to tear that system apart looking for where some Rebel Empire warships might be hiding. In fact, that’s exactly what our FTL drones are showing them doing.

  “While they’ve stationed a pair of warships at the multiflip point, I don’t think they really believe anybody went back through it. They’re more worried other ships are going to come through from the Rebel Empire.”

  “They’ve got people at the planet itself and we can be sure they’re going to talk to the people marooned there,” Angela objected. “That includes the roughly ten thousand people we captured with the Dresden orbital.”

  Talbot smiled. “Who are just as in the dark about who we are as everyone else on the surface of the planet. The only people in the Rebel Empire who know about the New Terran Empire are either dead, safely in the New Terran Empire, or on board this ship.

  “While finding so many new people is going to be a shock to their systems, it’s not really going to tell the Clans anything about us. I’m more than happy to let them jump to the conclusion it was the Rebel Empire behind the attack on them. After all, that’s exactly what happened.

  “The only indication they’re going to find of the phrase ‘New Terran Empire’ is going to be that one transmission that Castile made before he blew up their station. For once, mistaken identity is going to work in our favor, I think.”

  “I never took you for an optimist.” The inflection she put on the last word made it sound like a curse. “I’m going to put some money down that it doesn’t work out the way you expect.”

  “Hardly anything ever does,” he grumbled.

  “Are we ready?” she asked.

  “Not yet. I want one more opinion before we confront our unexpected guest.”

  Commander Veronica Giguere, late of the Rebel Empire Fleet—very late, as it turned out—sat in a small room just off the medical center. It offered a bit of privacy, but she knew that was an illusion. The New Terran Empire had her under very close surveillance.

  Which in and of itself was hilarious. The fight with Raul Castille in the engineering compartment aboard the transport ship had ended with an explosion strong enough to render her incapable of more than resting.

  The doctor had set her broken legs and made her broken ribs safe, but that didn’t mean she could
walk. No, she wasn’t going anywhere for a while. Regeneration was good for a lot of things. Knitting broken bones? Not so much. It took time and multiple sessions for that.

  The hatch chimed and she used her implants to see who was calling. Commander Zac Zoboroski—Audacious’ chief medical officer—stood outside with a floating contraption. It looked like a chair.

  Oh, and the four marines making sure she didn’t crawl away when no one was looking were out there, too. That seemed like overkill to her, but she’d already snuck out of their custody once. Talbot had muttered something about barns and horses, but the comment made no sense to her.

  She opened the door with her implants and watched the Fleet medical officer come in with the floating chair.

  “Doctor,” she said, inclining her head. “What’s that?”

  “A grav chair,” he said in his pleasant voice. “Believe it or not, this is the same one Princess Kelsey used after she got her Marine Raider enhancements. The doctor on Persephone had it in storage and I realized it would be perfect for you.”

  Veronica studied the chair closely. It was crude, but seemed functional enough. Definitely not up to Imperial standards.

  “You made that?”

  “The Pentagarans did. They were also cut off from the Empire during the Fall. Their grav tech was better than ours back then. I really need to have someone put together a better model, but we haven’t exactly needed one until now.”

  “And why do I need this? Am I supposed to go somewhere?”

  “Lieutenant Colonel Talbot requested your presence. It seems he wants your opinion on something. If, of course, you have time.”

  She chuckled a trifle bitterly. “My schedule happens to be wide open. Though I will admit that I’m not sure why he wants my opinion. I’m not exactly the most popular person on this ship right now.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short,” the man said, moving the chair around beside her bed. “Kelsey’s mother is still aboard. Besides, getting out and about will be good for you. There’s nothing forcing you to go, but I’d recommend it. Boredom slows recovery time.”