The Terran Gambit (Episode #1: The Pax Humana Saga) (8 page)

“Take us back,” she said in an almost robotic voice. “Time to face the music.”

A cold knot formed in his stomach, which only grew over the flight back to the Florida panhandle.

Dad gives up. Not me. Not me, dammit.

He glanced up through the top viewport in the cabin. Po caught his eye. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t run. Don’t even think about it. They’ll catch you, and when they do, they’ll torture you, then execute you. And me. Just … don’t,” she repeated.

“Why not?”

She set her jaw, and locked her cold, steely eyes on his. “Because. When I held the charred bodies of my children in my arms as they took their last gasp, I swore, I swore, I swore,” she said with rising intensity, “that I’d make the Empire pay. That I’d make them suffer. That I’d bring the battle back to Corsica itself and obliterate the Empire. And me hanging by a noose now means fewer dead Corsicans later.”

He looked back to the controls. The smoking crater that marked Dallas’s passing started to sink below the horizon behind them, and Jake furiously pounded once on the dashboard console, cracking the casing.

I always win.

“But not today,” he breathed.

3

Three years later

“
A
DMIRAL
T
RAJAN?”
T
HE GRAYING
, rail-thin officer poked his head through the ready room door. He hated disturbing the man, especially before breakfast, and made a mental note to have his XO do the honors next time. “Admiral?” he repeated.

“Do come in, Captain,” a voice from the chair in the center of the room said.

Captain Titus of the Corsican battleship
NPQR Caligula
stepped through the door and started to walk towards the chair when the voice interrupted him.

“Close it, please, Captain,” the sonorous, husky voice said. Titus pulled the handle and shut the door, standing at attention. He’d learned months ago not to speak out of turn with the new Admiral—new, not as an Admiral, but new aboard the
Caligula
. The Imperial Fleet Command had transferred Admiral Trajan to the
Caligula
’s battlegroup recently, and so far Trajan had not revealed his true purpose onboard, which ostensibly remained highly classified.

Captain Titus looked around his old ready room. Unfortunately, Admiral Trajan had converted it into makeshift quarters. A mat lay spread against the wall behind the desk, without so much as a pillow or blanket to suggest that it was, in fact, the man’s bed. Very few personal belongings cluttered the space, except for the wall, which now displayed a variety of musical instruments. A violin, a trumpet, several exotic looking wind instruments that Titus could not immediately identify, and one pair of horns that looked deceptively like blowpipes hung crossing one another like an old-style skull and crossbones.

“Do you like heavy metal, Captain?” the Admiral asked, without turning his chair around to face him, which was fine with Titus—he loathed looking at the Admiral’s face, as did most of the crew.

“Sir? Like tungsten?”

“No, Captain. Like the music.”

Captain Titus shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir. I’m afraid I’ve never heard it.” Up until that point he hadn’t been aware of a barely audible screeching noise that permeated the room. At first it seemed to him just background noise of the ship, or the work of some mechanic one deck below or above.

Admiral Titus motioned with his finger, which the computer assistant understood as an increase in volume. Captain Titus clamped his hands over his ears as a cacophony of pounding sounds blasted his head. Hardly music, the clashes and screeches made his head pound, and he winced. Half a minute went by and Titus considered bolting from the room, wondering how long he might have to spend in the brig for the deed. Thankfully, a raised finger from Trajan decreased the volume to a tolerable level.

“Isn’t it magnificent, Titus?”

The Captain hesitated. He wasn’t sure what Trajan was expecting him to say—in the Corsican Empire fleet, one gave the answer his superior expected, or there were consequences.

“It is … certainly interesting, Admiral.”

“Please, Captain. Your true feelings. I assure you I will not be offended.”

He hesitated again, unsure of whether to take the Admiral at face value. But the Admiral’s sigh interrupted his ambivalence. “I’ll speak your thoughts for you, Captain. How could this be music, you’re thinking. What riffraff would even think to listen to this garbage for leisure? For fun? It’s like listening to two cargo freighters attempting to make love to each other.”

Captain Titus couldn’t help but smile at the disturbing imagery.

“These are the dulcet warblings of a late twenty-first century band called The Sweet Nothings. Quite popular in their day, back on Old Earth. Perhaps even our own ancestors thrashed their heads along to the music as they operated the machines that churned out the myriad of plastic commercial trappings that made life worthwhile back then.” He laughed. “Well, maybe not my ancestors. Mine were too busy infiltrating the Italian government at the time. Yours too, perhaps.”

The Admiral’s back was still turned to Captain Titus, but now he swiveled the chair to face him. Over time, Titus had learned not to wince. His former XO had not learned that lesson, and the Admiral’s response was … uncharitable.

His eye. His right eye. It was missing. Just gone. And worse, the Admiral made no attempt to cover it up, giving no thought to the comfort of those around him. Ah, except that was the brilliant strategy of Trajan’s that Titus had finally understood. It wasn’t that the Admiral had no concern for the comfort of those around him, it was that he was entirely concerned with the emotional state of those around him. The more discomfort he could incite in whoever he was issuing commands to or negotiating with, the better. He was a master of controlling the situation around himself, and Titus guessed the gaping hole in his head, mottled with veins and scar tissue, was exposed to the world precisely as just another tool to assist him in his control of others.

“Captain,” the Admiral began, locking his remaining black eye on the man. Titus shifted uncomfortably on his feet. “Do you realize you can tell everything there is to know about a people by its music? Their aspirations. Their fears. Their thought processes and outlook on life. How they process information. How they value beauty and handle suffering and pain. Even how they formulate strategy, and dare I think it, battle plans. Not details, of course, but broad narrative arcs.”

It was posed as a question, but Titus had interacted with Trajan long enough to know not to answer. The answer would be given to him at the appropriate time.

“Did you know that a culture’s music is the window to its very soul? Tell me, Captain, what does this music tell you about the soul of those who enjoy it?”

“Chaotic? Unbalanced?”

The Admiral frowned. “Are you certain?”

Titus swallowed. “No, sir.”

Admiral Trajan pulled a comb out of his pocket and ran it through his thick, black hair, which still showed the gleam of some type of oil-based product. “Unbalanced? No. Captain, you might not be aware, but this is the music of the rebellion. Every rebel fighter listens to it. Every space jock has it ringing through his fighter’s cabin as he flies. Even Admiral Pritchard himself, before he disappeared, was known to have a fondness for it, and his men adored him.”

Pritchard. The empire’s scouts had searched the settled part of the galaxy for two years and still hadn’t found the bastard. Where you hide a battleship the size of the
Fury
was beyond Captain Titus. He nodded in response to the Admiral’s monologue.

The Admiral continued, the age lines on his face stretching as he smiled. “And what it tells me about the rebellion is that it is not dead. They will rise again, and will choose their moment soon, if I have a correct read on them.” He dropped his chin and glanced at Titus. “Which, I assure you, I do.”

Titus protested. “The Earth rebellion? Rise again? But they are finished. They have no political organization, and their military ranks have been absorbed into the Imperial Fleet. What about the Truth and Reconciliation process?”

“The Senate may have forced us into reconciliation with the rebels after the Dallas incident, but that doesn’t mean the rebels just went away. No, Captain. They are not finished. They are simmering below the surface. They know a watched pot never boils, and so they are lying low. Waiting until we are looking elsewhere. But they will choose their moment, and we will be ready.”

Titus nodded. “Yes, sir. And so that is the nature of your mission? To wait for them to make their move, and then to crush them?” The Admiral had been on board three months, sending out a constant stream of communications through gravitic pods, and directing the
Caligula
’s course from the privacy of the Captain’s ready room, which he had transformed into his command center in addition to his quarters.

The chair swiveled back around to face the viewscreen, and Titus breathed a silent sigh of relief that he didn’t have to stare at the gaping hole in his face anymore. “You’re half right, Captain. We will not wait for them to make their move. We will, in fact, encourage them to take it. We will set it on a gold platter and decorate it and entice them to bite. And when they do, yes—we will crush them.” He keyed the display on the wall in front of him and it snapped to life. “Why I called you here,” he said, tapping the screen, indicating a stellar map of the galaxy within fifty light years of Earth.

Titus looked at the readout and cocked his head. “Epsilon Eridani? But there are no major habitable planets there, just a—”

“A mining settlement, yes, and a valuable member state of the Empire, however small its size. We need to go there. Have navigation plot a course.”

“But sir,” Titus squirmed a bit. “Why do we need to go to a mining settlement? And especially one inhabited by the lowest forms of life in this sector of the galaxy? Smugglers, bounty hunters, pirates, slavers, you name it, Epsilon Eridani has it.”

Admiral Trajan replied without looking up, for which Captain Titus was grateful. “You will know the reason eventually. Get us there within the day.” His tone indicated that the conversation had finished. Titus drew himself up to his full height and saluted before turning on his heel. “Oh, and Captain?”

Titus paused at the door and turned to face the thin, black-haired man in the chair, who swiveled once more towards him, aiming the ghastly, empty eye-hole his direction again. “Convert one of the fighter bays into storage space. We are about to receive a large quantity of goods, and we will need a place to put them.”

“But what about the fighters? If the bay is full of goods, we will lose fighter launch capability.”

“Yes, I know that. Move them off to the side. Send them to the other bay. I don’t care. We will have to do without them for up to a week. Dismissed.”

Titus had a dozen more questions for the Admiral—why in the hell they were relinquishing fighter support for a week chief among them, and what exactly was so important that it required one of the most advanced battleships in the Corsican Imperial Fleet to play the role of a common freighter—but he saluted again and closed the door firmly behind him, listening as the screeching music shifted to something even more ghastly than before, at a much higher volume.

This was going to be an interesting year, to say the least.

* * *

“Shotgun, don’t do it.”

Lieutenant Commander Jacob Mercer lifted the visor of his helmet and glanced back at Po. “And why not?”

“Because, if you die, then I’ll have to scrape the goo off the canyon floor, and Admiral Bates will demote me back to lieutenant.” She threaded the strap from her motorcycle helmet’s c-ring and pulled it off her head, shaking her long, black hair in the breeze flowing up from the canyon’s edge. Jake noted with approval that at least she let the bun out when not on duty—a marked improvement he had suggested months before.

“Yeah. Listen to momma grizzly,” said their companion, Ben Jemez, perched atop a third high-cc motorcycle. “Besides, I’m sure it’s against a dozen fleet regulations. You know the imperials—they’ve got rules against blowing your nose with toilet paper rather than tissues.”

Jake wrenched his own helmet off and glared back at his friend. “Yeah? Which one?” He and Ben had been friends for nearly three years now, and Jake had gotten quite good at calling the other man’s bluffs—especially when he was quoting regulations.

“Uh, you know. In the back. Section four oh one paragraph c or something.” He waved his hand vaguely. “The section that says no risking your life to prove yourself to people you’ve already proven yourself to.”

“Listen to the boy, Jake. He is wise beyond his years,” said Po. Lieutenant Commander Ben Jemez was only seven years younger than Po, and only four younger than Jake, but Po had adopted him after her fashion, doting on him as he had no living parents of his own—one unfortunate drawback to being from Dallas.

“Yeah. Listen to the boy,” Ben repeated, grinning.

“It’s only a risk if you think there’s a chance of failure,” Jake retorted, but then turned to look at the canyon. It was small, as canyons went in the deserts of the Inland Empire of Southern California—more of a deep, dry riverbed than a canyon. And yet, a good three hundred feet of dusty, desert air hung between the two walls, and the canyon floor seemed like a distant pile of sand, a hundred feet down.

As they’d raced down the highway, one particular slope next to the canyon had beckoned to him. He’d stopped, examined it, and his onboard computer informed him that the slope was precisely twenty-four point two degrees, and that if he gunned it up to one hundred and fifteen miles per hour, he’d barely make it. Not accounting for wind resistance, of course.

“If you don’t think there’s a chance of failure, then you’re even more deluded than I thought,” quipped Po.