Veil of Shadows (Book 2 of The Empire of Bones Saga) (17 page)

Reese began cursing. He sounded a lot like Jared did when she upset him. She seemed to have that effect on men. Perhaps it was a character flaw.

“I’ve got something over here,” Lieutenant Phelps said. “It looks like a computer of some kind.”

The marine officer glared at Kelsey. “This isn’t over yet. You stand right here beside me and you don’t fart unless I tell you to. Am I clear?”

“Perfectly clear, Lieutenant.”

Talbot held up four fingers and tapped the side of his head as his lieutenant stormed off. Kelsey switched to channel four.

“I can see why you did what you did, but you’ve pushed him too far.”

“There were going to kill all of you. My armor might’ve survived the opening salvo, but yours wouldn’t survive one hit.”

The older man sighed. “I’m going to have to volunteer for these implants just to keep up with you. I’m too old for this crap.”

Kelsey caught up to Reese. The computer they’d found seemed a bit substantial for just controlling an asteroid. It actually filled an entirely separate room behind the area where the fight had taken place.

Phelps shone a light over the compartment. “This has been here a while. The consoles have dust on them. A lot of dust. I don’t know what this thing is, but it’s not here just to control those thruster units.”

Reese turned to her. “If you try to interface with that thing, is it going to attack you?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so. They need me in a special machine with physical contact to override the programming inside my implants. It may not do what I tell it to, but I should be safe enough.”

“Do it. See if that’s the computer controlling the thrusters.”

Kelsey initiated contact with the computer and immediately discovered that it was almost completely inactive. Only three processors were running with limited resources. Many thousands of other processors were offline. A quick check confirmed that virtually all the data storage was empty.

“I think that it’s controlling the grav drives, but it’s almost completely turned off. Only one small part of it is functional.”

“Can you alter its course?” Phelps asked.

She asked the computer its course and a schematic popped up in her mind’s eye. “I think so. Ensign Cruz, it has a mountain range on the planet targeted. What do I do?”

The woman looked into the room uncertainly. “Without seeing the controls, I don’t know if I can tell you exactly what to do. Can you enable the console over here?”

Kelsey sent a command through the system to display the asteroid’s course and the console beside the pilot came to life. She stepped over to watch what the Ensign did.

The console showed the planet and the asteroid. A solid green line connected them. Cruz tapped the controls and the course moved until it just missed the planet. The green line changed to yellow a short distance away from the planet. When the Ensign moved it further away from the planet, it went to red. She edged it back to yellow.

“We caught it just in time. Much longer and I don’t think we could have generated a miss. We’ve saved the planet.”

“Good,” Reese said. “Talbot, take the Princess back to the pinnace with your team. Tell the pilot to take her back to
Courageous
right now. I’m not taking any more chances with her.”

Chapter Seventeen

Jared couldn’t blame Kelsey for the events on the asteroid, but he wasn’t going to take any chances with her going forward. If he’d been thinking clearly the first time, she would’ve been in a follow-up group. Though that likely meant the marines wouldn’t have been able to clear the asteroid. As it was, she’d undoubtedly saved many lives. When her father found out the events she’d been through, Jared would be lucky to command a sailboat.

The asteroid was going to pass uncomfortably close to the planet, but with something that massive, it wasn’t possible to change course on a dime. Still, a miss was a miss. They’d foiled the Pale Ones again.

Courageous
detected no operational ships near the shipyards, making the facilities look abandoned. If that were true, then salvaging the yards would be very useful. Not only for the data on the ship construction used by the Pale Ones, but perhaps in putting them to use by the Pentagarans.

Would the Pale Ones have booby-trapped them? It hardly seemed likely that they would attempt to destroy the planet and leave the shipyards ripe for the plucking. That meant more boarding parties. More fighting. They’d been lucky so far this time, but that could change in a moment.

He considered the complexity of the situation. The probes near the planet could be re-tasked to do active scans on the shipyards. Jared knew those shipyards had weapons, so he had every expectation that the shipyards would promptly destroy the probes. But perhaps before they died, they could give them some useful information.

He looked up from his console. “Zia. I want you to take two of the three probes that we sent to the planet, move them in as close as practical to the shipyards, and do an active scan. I want to know everything you can tell me about them and I want to see what their response is to the activity.”

“Aye, sir.” She manipulated her controls and they waited as the speed of light signals traveled to the probes. Time dragged until the responses came.

“Both probes have been destroyed, Captain, but I got detailed readings on both shipyards. It looks like we significantly damaged the one we fired on last month. Many areas of the habitat portion are open to space. I would judge it unlikely that it has any live Pale Ones aboard. Also, I only detected no operational weapons on that structure.”

Jared had already been going over the data and concurred with everything that she’d said. They could take out the operational shipyard, but they’d virtually destroy it in the process. The damaged shipyard seemed unarmed. As long as it didn’t self-destruct, of course.

“Pasco, keep the planet between us and the shipyards as much as you can. Bring us close to the damaged shipyard. Use it to shield us from the operational shipyard.”

They came in hard and fast. His worry that the shipyard would self-destruct once they moved in proved unfounded. It simply sat there.

The boarding proved to be somewhat anticlimactic, as well. Most of the systems appear to be off-line and bloated corpses filled the corridors. The EMP effects of the fusion weapon must’ve completely crippled the shipyard. The scientists would have a field day tearing it apart looking for clues about the Pale Ones.

Once assured of their relative safety, Jared put
Courageous
into orbit around the planet just behind the shipyard, carefully keeping an eye on the operational shipyard through several drones used to relay signals.

He’d worried the operational shipyard would fire at them around the curve of the planet, but it didn’t. Perhaps the primitive missiles they had weren’t capable of targeting when the launching vessel couldn’t see the target.

In any case,
Courageous
seemed to be safe for the moment. That might not last, so he ordered Zia to scan the surface. Almost immediately, she detected the remains of old Empire civilization. Bombed out cities and ancient ruins.

He still had no idea why the rebels would devastate Erorsi and leave Pentagar completely alone. It made no sense. The asteroid had targeted at a mountain range. There didn’t seem to be anything special about that area, so he had no idea why they picked it. Perhaps it was just a convenient target for the massive weapon.

Relatively certain that they were safe for the moment, Jared canceled battle stations and just kept the ship at a heightened state of alert. When commander Graves arrived from operations, he turned the watch over to him. “Call me immediately if the tactical situation changes. I’m going to debrief the marines.”

His XO gave him a knowing look. “You mean you’re going to debrief Princess Kelsey. Go easy on her. I understand that the combat was pretty extreme. Even worse than the Parliament building.”

Jared slowly nodded. “I’m going to have to rein her in somehow, but I’m not going to make a huge production of it. This is partly my fault. I shouldn’t have sent her along with the marines. Not until that base had been cleared.”

He entered the lift and instructed it to take him to marine country. By the time he arrived, he’d decided on a basic strategy.

Activity filled marine country. Some of the marines were cleaning equipment while others were preparing for combat operations. A distracted-looking Lieutenant Reese broke off his conversation with some Pentagaran marines and came over to him. “Captain. If you’ll step in my office, I’ll give you a brief report on the operations to date.”

Jared hadn’t been to Lieutenant Reese’s new office before. It was as large as Jared’s old office had been on
Athena
. Several citation plaques hung on the wall behind the desk and a shelf held some sports trophies. Baseball, it looked like. Jared had never been a follower of the sport, but it was very popular throughout the Empire.

He gestured for the marine to take a seat behind the desk while he sat at one of the visitor’s chairs.

The marine officer remained standing at attention. “I take full responsibility for the danger I put Princess Kelsey into. It was reckless and unacceptable. I have no excuse for my lapse.”

Jared laughed before he could stop himself. “That is a complete load of horse shit and we both know it. Princess Kelsey does things that no sane human being would even think about doing. I’m certain that you took what would normally be adequate protective measures. And sit down. You’re wearing me out standing there.”

When the marine sat, Jared continued. “What happened on that asteroid?”

He listened intently as Lieutenant Reese walked through the events of the assault. When the marine finished, Jared stared at the bulkhead for a minute thinking. “The idea of Pale Ones using old Empire weapons is very disturbing to me. That has all kinds of unpleasant implications.”

Reese nodded. “I hadn’t believed that they were capable of using them, but I suppose if they can fly a spaceship, they can shoot a gun. I’d wager that they required some special control in order to do so, or some special instructions. Based on what Kelsey saw, they weren’t very accurate. If we’d already been inside that room, I think we could’ve taken them.”

Jared tried to imagine the fight. “Kelsey taking them out all by herself is a different kind of disturbing. I’ve seen her fight hand-to-hand and it’s amazing and terrifying. I can only imagine what her using old Empire weapons looked like. Just how effective were the weapons they were using?”

“Let’s put it this way, our shaped charges couldn’t breach that armored door. Princess Kelsey’s plasma rifle did this.” He brought up a series of images on the console. “One shot.”

The destruction made Jared’s jaw drop. “That’s…unimaginable.”

“It was like Armageddon,” the marine admitted. “Even all the way back at the lift, it sounded like the world had ended. The grenade she used that decimated the enemy forces was so powerful that it left a crater bigger than one of our mortar shells. Her flechettes went through bodies, equipment, and blew huge divots out of the walls. She had more firepower than the rest of us combined.”

“Tell me you’re upgrading your weapons. And tell me that you’re adapting that armor for your use. We have the most powerful ship I’ve ever seen, but there are some situations where we need men on the ground.”

Reese grimaced. “We’re restoring weapons as quickly as we can. Rather, a couple of the scientists are showing us how to do so. I believe we can have flechette weapons for all marines inside a week. We have a couple of the smaller plasma rifles, too. The larger weapons require powered armor to use. And the armor requires implants, so we’re at a dead end. I’m about ready to volunteer to be implanted myself.”

Jared’s eyes widened. “You’d let that machine cut you open and make all those changes? Changes that you can’t take back?”

The marine shrugged. “It’s the future, Captain. To fight the Pale Ones, we’re going to have to be a lot more effective. Fleet officers, too. This ship is capable of so much with the right interface. How long is it going to be before someone takes that first step voluntarily? I say now, because if we wait, it might be too late.”

First Zia’s comment and now Reese’s. The writing really was on the wall.

“How is Princess Kelsey?” he asked, changing the subject.

“Jittery. I had Doctor Stone check her out, but I already knew what it was. Post-combat shakes. She’s not the first person I’ve seen react that way. Sturdy as steel when the shit hits the fan and then shaking like a leaf once it’s all over. The doctor gave her a sedative and sent her to bed.”

Well, that meant he wouldn’t be speaking to her tonight. That was probably for the best anyway.

Jared rose. “Well, I’ll just have to speak with her tomorrow, then. Work with Lieutenant Anderson and come up with an assault plan for the operational shipyard. We’ve come this far. We might as well clear the system. Plan on the Pale Ones being armed.”

Reese stood and saluted. “Aye, sir. I’ll have something on your desk in a few hours.”

“Don’t rush. Sometime early tomorrow is soon enough. I have an important meeting that will probably take up most of my evening.”

Jared headed for the medical center. Technically, this wasn’t a meeting. It was more of an ambush. He found Doctor Stone in her office and rapped on the open hatch. “I hope you have time, because I need to talk to you.”

She looked up from her console. “I always have time for you, Captain. What can I do for you?”

He closed the hatch behind him. “I’ve decided to undergo a procedure. One that I suspect you will strongly disapprove of.” He dropped into the seat in front of her desk. “I’ve decided that I need a Fleet officer’s implants.”

Doctor Stone scowled. “There is absolutely no reason to go through something like that until we understand things better. It’s your brain, Jared. If something goes wrong, you’ll be a vegetable or dead.”

“
Courageous
was designed to interface with a crew that could command it effectively. Princess Kelsey didn’t have a choice, but if we’re going to fight our way home, we’re going to have to get over our aversion to the idea of implants. As this ship’s Captain, it behooves me to take that first step.”