Ghosts of Empire (Book 4 of The Empire of Bones Saga) (39 page)
Read Ghosts of Empire (Book 4 of The Empire of Bones Saga) Online
Authors: Terry Mixon
Tags: #Space Opera, #Military Science Fiction, #Adventure
Now they were ready to go home. With the three flip blockers the scientists at the Grant Research facility had built, they could lock down Harrison’s World, Pentagar, and Erorsi from Rebel Empire incursions. Except for when they needed to perform maintenance on them.
Commodore Sean Meyer had two battlecruisers, two heavy cruisers, and six destroyers to guard Harrison’s World. He’d work hand-in-hand with Coordinator Olivia West to ease the planet into the new Terran Empire without letting most of the people know about the change in management.
Someday, the general population would learn the truth. Just not right now.
Pentagar was getting the same number of ships. They’d travel back with Jared and he’d have a handover ceremony when they passed through. They would watch over the base on Erorsi, too, until more ships arrived.
By his best guess, it would take six months to work out the final repairs on all the ships in his fleet. It would take even longer to get them fully manned with trained, enhanced personnel. He shuddered to think about how long it would take to work through the remaining tens of thousands of derelicts.
They’d brought the mines in the asteroid belt back online, reestablished the automated fabrication units, and had a unit to disassemble ships too badly wrecked to fly again. They called it the breaker. It salvaged what parts it could and melted the rest down. The critical and rare elements went into new parts.
The crew also determined if a ship was salvageable before sending it to the construction bays. They pulled the dead from the wrecks and sealed them in body bags. If the medical teams could reactivate the person’s implants, they made note of their names and copied the data stored in implant memory.
The cargo holds on one of the transports held the tens of thousands of bodies they’d recovered so far. And that was only off a couple of dozen ships. Fleet was going to have to come up with a new means of burying their honored dead. The Spire couldn’t hold the many millions of corpses in these ships.
The lift doors slid open and Doctor Leonard walked onto the bridge. Kelsey was with him.
She smiled at Jared. “I hear we’re about to go exploring.”
* * * * *
Kelsey eyed her brother critically from behind her cheerful expression. He looked exhausted. That was understandable. He’d been putting in routine fourteen-hour days for the last four months.
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. 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 consider what we missed on the long trip home.”
“And we’re leaving on time,” Jared said sternly. “We have sixteen hours. Any more than that and you’re out of luck.”
“I’m quite sure that we won’t need that long. Either this will work or it won’t. I took the liberty of sending the probe out earlier today. We can signal it whenever you’re ready.”
She linked her implants to
Invincible
’s scanners. The weak flip point was only fifteen minutes away by light speed. She saw the system layout in her mind and the delayed readings from the probe.
Kelsey had been working hard over the last few months and had mastered the basic operation of her implants. She could now process data almost 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.
“Send the go signal,
Invincible
,” Jared said.
The ship’s sentient AI did so. She felt the transmission leave the ship.
“Commands 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, but it made no sense to her. It was all technical.
The probe vanished…and reappeared a few seconds later. It immediately indicated it was in distress. The battle screen had failed and the hull of the probe looked…melted.
“What the hell happened to it?” she asked. “Was it fired on?”
“I’m getting the scanner feed now,”
Invincible
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 lasted almost as long as it took the flip drive to cycle and take the probe back across.
The view of the system beyond the flip point was indistinct. It was as though space was cloudy.
“What the hell is that?” Jared asked. “What’s happening?”
“I believe I have the answer,” Doctor Leonard said as he stepped up beside Jared’s console. “The other system is the problem. The 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 no probe ever came back. And it means we’re not going over there, either.”
“Actually, that’s not a given,”
Invincible
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 twelve hours. We’re leaving on schedule.”
She was more than a bit surprised Jared was allowing her to ride herd on the scientist. He must be even more exhausted than he looked. Still, it sounded interesting.
“We can do that,” she said. “Doctor, what are the chances that you can detect other flip points in that system?”
“Slim, but not impossible. Weak flip points are out of the question. We’ll be able to find this one 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 are not too far away from us, that is.”
She grinned. “Well then, what are we waiting for? We have a supernova to explore!”
About Terry
Terry Mixon is author of The Empire of Bones Saga and The Humanity Unlimited Saga. He served as a non-commissioned officer in the United States Army 101st Airborne Division. He also worked alongside the flight controllers in the Mission Control Center at the NASA Johnson Space Center for almost two decades, supporting the Space Shuttle program, the International Space Station, and other human spaceflight projects during his tenure there. He lives in Texas with his lovely wife and a pounce of cats.
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