Pax Imperia (The Redemption Trilogy) (37 page)

“I’ve got you now, you bastards,” he crowed in delight. With that sentence the light finally vanished, burying the forest in darkness. It was only then that it occurred to him he had no idea how to get back to the path that led him here.

“Oh bugger,” he muttered, realising that he was now well and truly lost.

*****

“So what made you decide to join the Imperial Navy?” Anna inquired, after dinner had been cleared away and both she and Jon were nursing cups of coffee. Much to the dismay of Jon, who had been idly wondering where Anna might have hidden the Scotch.

“My sister. It was she who encouraged me to join the navy. Me? I wanted to work in the spaceport with my father,” Jon replied.

“Your father was also a pilot?”

“No,” Jon laughed. “My father was a shuttle mechanic. I had plans to follow in his footsteps.”

“Seriously?” she laughed. “I just cannot see you as a mechanic.”

“It’s the best job in the universe,” he insisted, with a straight face. “Anyway, what about you. Why did you decide to join the navy?”

“I never had any interest in joining the fleet. It was never my dream, but another’s. I was madly in love with him at the time and would have agreed to follow him anywhere. It was his idea that we enrol together and, naïvely, I quickly agreed.”

“What happened to him?”

“Oh, he soon grew bored of me and found another. She was an Admiral’s daughter, so obviously he traded up. For the longest time I was angry, furious, the woman scorned. Everything was about revenge for that humiliation. I decided that I wanted to be better than him, more superior, to prove to him how wrong he was to leave me, and so I did my utmost to excel at everything. But over the years I found that it was unrewarding. He was never going to change, and I came to realise that the rank, the privilege, it meant nothing to me. Instead I just became more and more isolated, ever more alone.”

“What happened to him?” Jon asked, curiously.

“Oh, he married her, they now have a beautiful daughter. Sometimes I look at his picture, wondering how things might have turned out differently had we stayed together. What life would be like if we had had a daughter, but it's a moot point now anyway, as he died a while back,” she concluded sadly.

Jon raised his glass in a toast, “To the ones that we have loved—and lost.”

Anna raised her glass in reply, but her expression remained troubled.

*****

In a fit of anger Jason threw the datapad across the length of his small quarters, only taking little satisfaction at the
crunch
as it bounced off the door and came to rest on the floor. He wondered if it was worth the effort to walk the length of the room and jump up and down on it, before reluctantly deciding against that course of action. He would probably have to spend the rest of the day filling in dozens of requisition forms to obtain a replacement.

Soon after the Commander had first tasked him with tracking the source of the transmission to Captain James Harrison on the
Indomitable
, he had set to work with gusto. For the people who had sent the transmission had made a fatal mistake by broadcasting it live. Had they just recorded it and then sent it, the message would have been untraceable. Broken up into tens of millions of packets, routed a million and one different ways, only to be reassembled upon arrival at their destination. A live transmission was different, for the duration of the communication a channel had existed, a pathway through the digital ether that had linked those who had sent it and Captain Harrison. Jason had quickly gotten to work, following that digital breadcrumb trail, when he uncovered the first problem. Whoever had initiated the communication had not been stupid and had routed the message through many, many different relays.

Each relay could make a peer-to-peer connection with any other, and with a little less than a thousand Tachyon relays making up the system, the number of possible combinations increased exponentially with each relay that the communication was routed through. Assuming that the message was routed through a couple of hundred different relays, it was almost impossible to track the source. He had manually tracked the message back through the first couple of relays, but that had taken weeks of his time, and he had finally given up in disgust.

Instead he wrote a worm to do the trace for him.

This small piece of software would upload itself into the relay, search through the message log, find which relay broadcast the message and then transfer itself to the source relay to repeat the process. The worm worked exactly as designed and in the span of six months had traced the message back through—two relays.

It was this that had caused the datapad to be flung the length of the room in a fit of pique. For assuming a couple of hundred relays, it would take a decade or more to find the source of the transmission.

The problem was that everything was too slow. Each relay transferred tens of billions of packets per second; the individual message logs were petabytes in size. Worse was that the worm could only utilise a fraction of one percent of the relays processing power. The rest was needed to route tens of millions of data-streams simultaneously.

If he could only have exclusive access to the network for a couple of hours. His worm could utilise the full processing power of each of the relays, and what was currently taking months would only take minutes. However it was not possible to have exclusive access to the network. Each planet in the Confederation had overall maintenance responsibility for their own Tachyon relay, only taking down individual relays as and when necessary for emergency maintenance. To take the entire system down simultaneously? Nobody had such authority. Only the Emperor could ever—

Jason banged his head against the desk. He was such an idiot. Rubbing his sore head he put an urgent call through to Commander Radec.

*****

The incessant bleeping roused Albert from his slumber. With his head pounding, disorientated, for a moment he wondered where he was.

“Lights,” he croaked. “Less light, less light,” he cried out painfully, trying to shield his eyes. With the lights now dimmer, his gaze came to rest on the empty bottle of whiskey on his desk.

Then it struck him. Eden Prime. Marcus. Sofia.

The door chimed again but this time he just ignored it. Deciding that he needed some anaesthetic for the hangover before he could deal with any more customers, he was halfway through opening a new bottle when the door suddenly slid open.

Albert could only gape, as he was the only one with the code for that door. Furthermore he had spent several painstaking hours scrubbing all other codes. The drink dulled his reactions as he scrabbled madly in his drawer for the pistol that he always kept close at hand. At the same time, he was trying to make out the intruder, but could only see a faint outline, hidden by the shadows of the room. His sight was not helped one little bit by the dim lighting he had insisted upon earlier.

“There is no need for that,” a familiar voice rang out from the direction of the door.

“Jon? Is that you? But what are you doing here? I thought that you were now—”

“Emperor?” Jon interrupted him. “Marcus’s successor? Right on both accounts, but I’ve taken the day off.”

Albert blinked bleary eyed at him, unsure what to say, finally just settling on a surly, “What do you want?”

“First I want to know if you had any involvement in the attack on Eden Prime?”

“What? No! Of course not. Marcus and Sofia were important to me also, but for vastly different reasons.”

Jon looked at Albert, as if gauging his response, before finally nodding, accepting his explanation. “In which case you had better put on some coffee, because I need you sober for what I want next.”

Albert laughed, but there was no humour in it, just hurt. “I thought that you were all-knowing?”

“Indeed I am,” Jon grinned. “But have you ever thought how an Emperor comes to be omnipotent? Somebody needs to tell the poor guy what he needs to know. Congratulations, you’ve just been handed the job.”

*****

A couple of hours later, now stone-cold sober, but wishing he wasn’t, Albert looked at Jon as if the man had completely lost his mind. “No, I refuse. I won’t do it.”

“I could insist you know?” Jon warned mildly. “One word from me and I could have you thrown in jail, never to see the light of day until you give me what I want.”

“But you won’t.”

“No, I won’t,” Jon sighed. “I owe you that much. So if I cannot threaten you, then I will simply have to buy what I want.”

“You might be rich now Jon, but not all the Aurelius family wealth combined would be enough to pay for that information. I cannot spend the money dead, and neither can you,” Albert reminded him.

“That is the price that I will have to pay, but right now we are talking about you, not me. Anyway I did not plan to offer you money. Instead I will offer you something far more valuable. I offer you a family.”

“I don’t understand,” said Albert confused.

“I know that your wife died many decades ago. I also know that you have a daughter.”

“Had a daughter,” Albert corrected him, reaching for the bottle of whiskey on his desk. This was not a conversation he wanted to have sober. “She also died many years ago.”

“I also know that,” Jon nodded. “She died when Sofia was still a little girl. Sofia often spoke to me of her, for she missed her deeply, as did Marcus. Many a long night we would sit together and he would speak to me of his long dead wife. Sofia’s mother.”

Albert’s hand shook as he took a firm grip of his glass, struggling to bring it to his lips without spilling any of the contents. “You knew? For how long?” he asked, in a strangled tone of voice.

“That Marcus’s wife, Sofia’s mother, was your daughter? I found out a few years before Harkov betrayed Marcus and the Empire. I always wondered why you had served Marcus, and his father before him, so faithfully, then one day suddenly upped and left. It seemed a strange coincidence that it was exactly around the same time she died. That was why I brought Sofia here as, aside from my family, it was the only other place that I knew she would be safe. That’s why I knew you would help us.”

Albert closed his eyes in the pain at her loss. “Did she know? That I was her grandfather?” he asked desperately.

“I don’t know. It was not my place to tell her.”

“Well it’s too late now. They’re all gone. My wife. My daughter. Marcus and Sofia. All gone…” He trailed off, watching the drink swirl around the glass, before bringing it up to his lips, emptying the glass in a single gulp.

“Maybe not. Sofia has a son. A little boy called Marcus, with blond hair and your blue eyes. You’re a great-grandfather now. So that is what I offer you in payment for this information; to be a part of a family again. I think the boy would like to get to know his irritable, cantankerous great-grandfather, don’t you?”

Albert looked directly into Jon’s eyes; sure that this was some sort of trick to get him to part with the information Jon wanted. Yet, as he stared into the unblinking gaze, Albert could see the truth in it. Jon was telling the truth. He had a great-grandson, and for the first time in many months he found something new inside of himself—hope.

Then Jon’s words sank into his consciousness and he, instead, felt a blazing anger. “You would bargain with me for access to my own great-grandson? My own flesh and blood? After everything that I have already lost?”

“Don’t talk to me about loss,” Jon hissed in a strangled tone of voice. “You have no right to take the moral high ground on this. Not when I have lost everything. Marcus had Sofia. You have a great-grandson. Me? I have nothing but memories of fleeting moments of happiness.”

Albert looked away ashamed, for he had lost a son-in-law and a granddaughter, but Jon had lost his wife and a man he loved as a father—and more. He had read Jon’s personal file countless times and had been horrified at what this man had lost throughout his life, amazed that he could even stand up straight and look him in the eye. “Then I don’t understand, what is it that you are offering?” Albert asked.

“When the boy is older, and you read bedtime stories to him, and he asks you if the monsters in those stories are real, what are you going to say Albert? Are you going to lie to him and say such monsters don’t exist? Or will you tell him the truth? Tell him that such monsters do exist out there, because you and I know both know that they do. We’ve both fought them. So this is what I am offering you. Give me what I need, and I am going to slay every last one of them, so that they will never threaten anybody ever again. And then you can tell the boy the truth. That such monsters don’t exist, not anymore.”

“But Jon, if I give you this and you do what you say, think of the cost. They will never forgive you for this, or forget. They will hunt you down for the rest of your life. They will not rest until you are dead.” Albert pleaded with him.

“And that is the price
I
am willing to pay,” Jon nodded his head in agreement.

*****

With Albert’s promise to get the information that he requested, but knowing it would take some time, Jon reluctantly stepped on-board the
Endless Light
. The thought briefly crossed his mind that he should just depart for some remote uncharted system and escape from the crushing weight of responsibility his position now entailed. The idea reminded him of his suggestion to Sofia, now seemingly a lifetime ago, that the two of them should just elope. He wondered why he hadn’t insisted…

“Commander,” the voice of the
Endless Light
interrupted his reverie. “You have an incoming communication.”

“Only one?” he grumbled. “Who is it?”

“Lieutenant Edgar,” came back the prompt response.

“Well at least it’s not Anna checking up on me,” he muttered aloud. Having told her of this trip, or a rough approximation of it, he’d been slightly vague as to his final destination. “On screen,” he called out, sliding into the pilot’s seat of the ship.

“Jason,” he called out with forced joviality. “How is Senator Calis?”