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

  She’d tried to put her foot down and discovered there were some things she couldn’t order him to do. She shuddered to think about how he’d have been without teams of people working behind the scenes to take tasks off his plate.

  Maybe once they started back toward Avalon he’d get some rest.

  “I don’t think exploring is quite the right word,” Jared said. “We’re only sending a probe. Another probe, actually. This makes what? Eight?”

  “Nine,” Doctor Leonard said. “Perhaps we’ll get this one back. If not, we’ll have to ponder over what we missed on the long trip home.”

  “And we’re leaving on time,” Jared said sternly. “You have sixteen hours. Any more than that and you’re out of luck.”

  “I’m quite certain we won’t need that long,” Doctor Leonard said. “This will either work or it won’t. I took the liberty of sending the probe out earlier today. A second probe will monitor this side for us. We can signal it whenever you’re ready.”

  Kelsey linked her implants to Invincible’s scanners. The weak flip point was only fifteen light minutes away. She saw the system layout in her mind and noted the delayed readings from the probes.

  She had been working hard over the last few months and had mastered the basic operation of her Raider implants. She could now process data as quickly as it came in. Using the processors in her head to spin off tasks was becoming second nature. She’d even gotten used to the ghostly voice of Ned Quincy in her mind.

  Mostly.

  Thankfully, he didn’t seem inclined to speak much unless she spoke to him first. Once she had time, she was going to have to figure out how to move him somewhere else, if they could figure out how. Perhaps he could be of use on Persephone, like Marcus was on Invincible. He wasn’t nearly as complex, but he seemed to be a sentient AI.

  “Send the go signal, Marcus,” Jared said.

  Kelsey felt the transmission leave the ship.

  “Command sent, Admiral,” the AI said. “It’s programmed to make the trip and immediately return. We’ll know in half an hour if it was successful.”

  She leaned up against Jared’s console. “While that happens, I have a few things to run by you.”

  They talked about last-minute loading details until her implant timer indicated the probe would have made the transit and the data was about to arrive at their location. She could see Doctor Leonard was busy reading the full data stream from the probe staying in the Harrison’s World system, but it made no sense to her. It was focused on the flip point and too technical.

  The first probe vanished…and reappeared a few seconds later. It immediately indicated it was in distress. The battle screen had failed and many of the systems were offline.

  “What the hell happened to it?” she asked. “Was it fired on?”

  “I’m getting the scanner recording now,” Marcus said. “I’m forwarding it to you.”

  The view from the probe was of deep space. It saw the weak flip point in its scanners. When the signal came across to flip, it did so.

  And intense radiation bombarded it from every angle on the other side. The battle screen held up almost as long as it took the flip drive to cycle and take the probe back to their side.

  The view of the system beyond the flip point was indistinct. It was as though space was foggy.

  “What the hell was that?” Jared asked.

  “I believe I understand,” Doctor Leonard said as he stepped up beside Jared’s console. “The other system’s sun has gone nova. The destination side is far too close to either a neutron star or perhaps even a black hole for the probes to survive more than a few moments.”

  Kelsey shook her head. “Well, that certainly explains why none of them came back. And it means we’re not going over there, either.”

  “Actually, that’s not a given,” Marcus said. “I’ve analyzed the strength of the radiation and a ship’s battle screens are capable of protecting it. Only the probe’s lack of power caused its premature failure.”

  “Admiral, might I mention that this is an unprecedented opportunity to study such a phenomenon?” Doctor Leonard asked. “We have no records of anything like this in the Old Empire databases and we might not be back this way again anytime soon. Might we use one of your ships for a few hours? Other than the natural dangers, the system probably doesn’t pose any additional risk.”

  Her brother looked between the scientist and Kelsey. “Okay, but only if you make the trip on Persephone. Her scanners are more than capable of getting you the data you need. You only have half a day. We’re leaving on schedule. I’m serious.”

  Kelsey was more than a bit surprised Jared was allowing her to go. He must be even more exhausted than he looked. Still, it sounded interesting.

  “We can do that,” she said. “Doctor, what are the chances you can detect other flip points in that system?”

  “Slim, but not impossible,” he ventured. “Weak flip points are out of the question. We’ll be able to find the one linking to Harrison’s World again because we know precisely where it is, but the chaotic environment there will overshadow any others.

  “We can use the ship’s scanners to locate gravimetric anomalies like planets and regular flip points, though. If they aren’t too far away from us, that is.”

  She grinned. “Well then, what are we waiting for? We have a supernova to explore!”

  Chapter Two

  “Is that thing safe?”

  Carl Owlet looked over at Fleet Captain Aaron Black. “It should be. Why?”

  “It could go right through you—and the wall behind you—if it malfunctions. You don’t have Princess Kelsey’s strength. Hell, I’m not even sure that would be enough if it went rogue.”

  The graduate student gave the Fleet officer a suitably unimpressed expression. “Don’t be ridiculous, Captain. Everything will be perfectly fine.”

  “Famous last words,” the other man said. “I’ll just move over here and watch from behind this handy blast shield.”

  The two of them were down in one of the rooms used to test weapons inside the Grant Research Facility. It had plenty of protection for observers and the labs around it. If it could handle plasma weapons, it should be safe enough.

  Probably.

  Carl took a deep breath and tried to put the worries Black had raised out of his mind. Yes, he only had normal human strength. Well, maybe a little less. He was only seventeen and a bit on the scrawny side.

  His latest creation sat on the table in front of him, looking like the prop from an old play. He’d taken some artistic license with it, admittedly. That old pre-Empire vid Kelsey had insisted he watch had influenced both his stylistic choices and some of the programming he’d designed for it.

  As a weapon, it looked…short. But, that was kind of the point. Thor’s hammer was a unique sort of thing.

  After she’d raved about the rather primitive special effects and acting in the vid, he’d sat bolt upright that night with the idea fully formed in his head. It was straightforward engineering using the newly discovered grav technology from the mobile weapon systems the AI had been using.

  Since they had both power generation and grav capability all wrapped in one package, the real challenge had been making a shell that could protect the controls and designing the programming to make it work.

  That had taken four months of cutting his sleep cycle short. An hour or two stolen between working like a dog to get the new ships up and running. He couldn’t complain, though. Everyone had put in the same amount of hard work and it was about to pay off in a big way.

  Captain Black had come into this project late. While Carl could design the parts, he wanted someone with more experience in building a robust weapon to do the final construction.

  The staff here had really come through. He’d never have thought of some of the things they included as a matter of course. And some of the design changes they suggested were brilliant. They had access to the highest technology of the Old Empire and they’d
been working with it their entire lives. He had a lot of work to do just to get into their league.

  They’d created a custom shell for the hammer that was both a stunning replica of the weapon in the vid and virtually indestructible.

  The Old Empire had been working with some very cutting edge hull metals using partially collapsed matter. While nowhere in the same neighborhood as something like neutronium, it still weighed a wickedly large amount. Without the built in grav generator, he’d never be able to pick it up.

  And with the grav generator working to keep it somewhere, not even a Marine Raider could move it if the wielder didn’t want them to. That also fit with the myth behind the vid.

  That left the control functions. A normal set of Fleet implants could only work within fifteen meters. That’s why the Old Empire used headsets to amplify them.

  That was a surmountable problem. One that he was able to rectify by learning how the headsets worked and building an additional transmitter that they could add to an existing set of implants. Since it was going to go inside a person, he’d spent a lot of time working the bugs out. It had to be perfect.

  Then Captain Black’s people had gone over every aspect of it and suggested a number of modifications. That only proved to him that he still needed a lot of polish, even though they were uniformly complimentary of his work, calling it ground breaking.

  Once he was done with this project, he’d submit the long-range communicator to Admiral Mertz. He’d already worked up a modification to add it to the basic implant set for future recipients. Those would give someone the range of a headset. They could even give it to people that already had implants with an outpatient procedure.

  Still, that wasn’t enough range to control the hammer, so he’d created one with even more range for Princess Kelsey. Rather than present her with an untested device, he’d had Doctor Stone implant it inside himself. It was too large for the cranium, so it went in his torso behind his lungs.

  He figured it wouldn’t interfere with anything there and Doctor Stone agreed.

  The matching equipment in the hammer linked and communicated with the wielder via a channel so heavily encrypted that he doubted even he could hack it without his personal knowledge of the algorithms. Good luck to the outsider that wanted to tap in.

  Avoiding jamming was ridiculously simple, in theory. The actual hardware and new scientific theory was a lot more complicated. The execution was fiendishly difficult and he’d had to create an entirely new branch of science to make it work. Well, expand one that existed into something that was actually useful, rather. That had taken the last two months to get working.

  Everyone knew about Einstein’s pre-Imperial work. Pre-spaceflight, really. Specifically, spooky action at a distance. Quantum entanglement of photons so that changes in spin replicated on the linked pair without regard to distance or time.

  A curious scientific oddity. Nothing had ever been created that could successfully harness the effect in a meaningful way. He’d torn up the databases at the research facility and a few separate projects had smashed together in another dream. The work on that had been so intense that he’d yelled at Doctor Leonard for interrupting him.

  He’d been mortified later, but the older scientist just beamed at him. He acted as though Carl had passed some kind of test. Older people were weird.

  The quantum validation unit worked in tandem with the long-range communicator. It used an expected sequence of photon spin changes to validate the commands. Someone might tap into the encrypted communications frequency, he supposed, but they wouldn’t even be able to know there was a second signal required to validate orders.

  It also kept the two units linked. The hammer and wielder would always know where the other was, within the range of the quantum unit. Whatever that ended up being.

  Now that he’d brought it all together in this device, it was time to see if it actually worked. He’d test the range later.

  Quantum theory said it was unlimited, but nature didn’t behave that way. Even flip points had limits. There would be a maximum useful range. He just hoped it was enough to prove workable with Mjölnir.

  He linked his implants to the hammer and hefted it. With the grav assist, it seemed light enough. It would collapse the table if he turned that off.

  The target was a set of the Old Empire marine armor on a stand at the other end of the room. It looked as imposing as hell. Part of him expected the hammer to bounce off, leaving him looking like an idiot.

  “I’m ready,” he said after taking a deep breath.

  “The recorders are on,” Black said. “You’re clear to go. I have a med team standing by. Just in case.”

  “Thanks for the confidence booster,” Carl said in the same dry voice he’d been practicing after hearing how good it sounded on Admiral Mertz.

  The hammer had a strap to wrap around the wrist, but this wasn’t the time to use it. He drew the weapon back and awkwardly threw it while designating the armor as the target.

  It left his hand and flew toward the armor at maximum speed.

  In retrospect, that was probably a mistake.

  The hammer brought up its miniature battle screen, broke the sound barrier just in front of Carl, and blasted into the armor with the force of a speeding pinnace. And a good fraction of one’s weight.

  It blew through the chest of the armor as though it were tissue paper. The reinforced plascrete behind the target faired just as poorly. Carl had a clear view of the hammer’s surroundings as it screamed around in a tight turn and howled back toward him, generating two more sonic booms right together as it reversed course.

  The first blast had deafened him, even with the protection of his implants, and blown him into the wall. It thoughtfully slammed the table on top of him. He’d ended up sitting with his back to the wall as the hammer arrowed toward him like a freight train.

  He had just a moment to get his hand up and the hammer abruptly slowed, creating a fourth sonic boom that almost knocked him unconscious. The handle slapped into his hand as gently as one could ask for.

  Carl lay there, stunned, staring at the hammer. And at the devastation it had wreaked on the range and the surrounding labs.

  He couldn’t hear Captain Black shouting for the medical teams, but he saw them rushing in with their trauma gear and expressions that told him he looked pretty bad.

  “I think I might need to tweak a few settings before I present Mjölnir to Princess Kelsey,” he said faintly as they surrounded him.

  * * * * *

  Crown Princess Elise Orison stood beside Admiral Walter Sanders on the bridge of His Majesty’s battlecruiser New Wales. It was identical in every respect to Jared’s old ship, Courageous. And it was all theirs.

  There was still much to do in refitting her, but this was more power than the rest of the Royal Pentagaran navy combined.

  She could see the pride in Walter’s expression. He was very pleased with this as his new flagship. At least until Boxer Station completed basic repairs on the superdreadnought Great Britain.

  “Well, Admiral,” she said. “The time has come for me to say my goodbyes. You’ll be on your way back to Pentagar shortly, so my cutter will take me to Invincible. I’m going to miss having you around.”

  The older man smiled. “Not so much, I’ll wager, Your Highness. You want more time with Admiral Mertz and I’m too much like a chaperone.”

  She grinned. “You’ve found me out. Well, it’s not as though I’ve let that stop me so far. He and I are sharing quarters, you know.”

  “And what a scandal that would be, if word ever leaked back home. The heir to the Pentagaran crown shacking up with some foreigner.”

  She cocked her head. “Shacking up? Have you been watching those old movies Kelsey favors again?”

  “Every chance I get,” he admitted. “Princess Kelsey says the 21st century was some kind of touchstone to the Old Empire. They supposedly enshrined it in a kind of collective consciousness.

  “She
attributed a Captain Jack Harkness in saying that was when everything changes. I suppose it’s a reference to that being the last truly common sense of humanity before they went interstellar and forged their own societies. Perhaps that explains some of her madness for the era, and that of a number of other people.

  “In any case, Jared is a fine man. I’d rather not see either of you hurt.”

  “And why should I hurt him?”

  “You shouldn’t,” the old admiral said gruffly. “But, you need to keep in mind who you are. You’ll inherit the throne one day. He’s a serving officer in a foreign navy. Do you have a future together?”

  She’d been pondering that question for a while. She loved Jared, but her duty was clear. That wasn’t going to be an easy decision to make. Give up her soulmate or her people. A stark choice indeed.

  “We’re both aware of what lies ahead of us,” she said gravely. “I’m hopeful this trip will settle it for us.”

  She checked her internal chronometer. She’d never get used to the capabilities of her new implants. It had been nine months and she still wondered how Kelsey did it.

  “I need to be on my way. I promise I’ll uphold the dignity of the Pentagaran people. Be safe, Admiral.”

  “Screw dignity, Elise. Do what’s right for you and damn anyone who lifts their nose.”

  “Now there’s some advice I can surely follow,” she said with a laugh.

  * * * * *

  Marine Major Angela Ellis stared at the destruction with wide eyes. “One little guy did all this? The kid from the science department? Seriously?”

  “You have no idea, Major,” Fleet Captain Black said. “And you’re selling him short. Way short. My people tell me the work he did on this project is breathtaking.”

  She nodded as she walked over to look through the hole in the plascrete wall. It was three meters across. “So I see. Breathtakingly stupid. And he wants to give this thing to Princess Kelsey? Not happening.”

  The Fleet officer smiled. “Even the commander of her personal protective detail might find that difficult to enforce.”