Command Decisions (Book 3 of The Empire of Bones Saga) (26 page)

Chapter Twenty-Six

Kelsey was down in the science labs when
Courageous
and her escorts flipped into the Harrison’s World system. They stopped inside the flip point, ready to flee if needed, but nothing responded to their presence. Didn’t any of their enemies guard their flip points?

Carl Owlet and Doctor Leonard were disassembling the weapons platform. In fact, they had it in pieces scattered across several tables. It didn’t look nearly as threatening this way.

“Have you found anything interesting?” she asked.

The older man smiled. “This machine is quite advanced and was not designed or assembled by an AI.”

“I can see how you’d be able to tell about the design, but how do you know it was put together by humans?”

“Look here.” He pointed to one of the sections. “Someone used tape to hold the cables out of the way. While a machine might do the same, it wouldn’t leave a human thumbprint. Also, there are small touches like this done all throughout the construction. Trust me, skilled human beings assembled this.

She nodded. “I’ll grant that’s interesting, but I’m hoping for a flaw in the construction that we can exploit. If these things ever come for us, I want to be able to stop them short of the ship.”

Owlet shook his head. “I’m sure they have some mechanism to prevent friendly fire, but I haven’t found it yet. Or, I suspect it’s buried in the control computer itself.”

“The way it works on a ship level,” Leonard said, “is that each ship transmits a signal that allies know means it is not to be fired upon. Identify Friend or Foe, or IFF for short. These things don’t transmit as a matter of course. They may have something in their memories that recognizes a friendly machine when they see one. They probably have some signal they look for in humans, too.”

Kelsey shook her head. “I wouldn’t count on that if I were you. These AIs love rewriting code.”

Owlet smiled. “Not in this case. The control code is on a non-writable chip. It’s been in place just as long as the rest of the equipment. I think the code is original. I’ll have it extracted in a few minutes. Then we’ll know for sure.”

Leonard took her elbow. “Look at this.” He gestured toward a small block of circuits and other machinery.

She picked it up when he nodded. It was about the size of her fist and heavier than it looked. She ran it through her implant database. Nothing popped.

“I give. What is it?”

“That is the machine’s grav drive and power supply.”

She gave him an incredulous look and examined it more closely. “That’s ridiculous. This is too small for both. Though I suppose the one in my armor is about the same size.”

“The one in your armor doesn’t have its own power supply. It draws on the armor. This is a self-encased unit with what I’m calling a micro-fusion power source. It can move one of these war machines quite speedily and won’t require recharging for decades. At a guess, the machine only activates it when it needs it. It’s almost fully powered, yet it was obviously constructed some time ago.”

“Can you make an educated guess on how long ago it was built?”

“Ten years, three months, fourteen days, six hours, forty-seven minutes, and…six seconds.” He glanced at the monitor as he said the last.

“That’s curiously precise. And suspiciously recent.” She raised an eyebrow.

“It has a timer that was activated when it was powered on.”

She considered the device in her hands. “It was only built a decade ago. The odds are good that the people who designed it are still around. Why aren’t they in control of it?”

The scientist shrugged. “Perhaps they are. Those people on the planet must work with the AIs in some way.”

Kelsey set the grav drive back on the table. “Still, why didn’t the Rebel Empire have these things? Why these unmanned ships? The ship that escorted the freighter wasn’t equipped like this.”

She waved her own questions away. “Never mind. Maybe we’ll find out when our probes get to Harrison’s World. Anything else?”

“Just this.” Owlet picked up a bundle of clear plastic. “This is an emergency life support bubble. It will keep a person alive for a short while in vacuum conditions. The machine had several of them in a compartment the manipulators could access.”

Kelsey picked one up. It had Fleet markings on it. “Someone stocked it, then. This is how these machines capture people in space. They blast their way into a ship, stun the people, and cart them back to a holding cell on the destroyer. Or, I suppose, they could just hold the ship until that capture vessel came along.”

She dropped the bundle on the table and checked her chrono. “I need to go meet Talbot. Thanks for showing me what you’ve found. Keep working on that code. We need to be able to stop these war machines before they get used on us.”

“Of course.” The two scientists turned back to their work as Kelsey headed for marine country.

She walked in on a council of war. Lieutenant Reese, Talbot, and other marine officers and senior NCOs sat around the table in the common room going over folders. Based on the number of people she didn’t recognize, the marines from
New York
and
Ginnie Dare
were here, too.

Kelsey grabbed a chair and wedged herself in beside Talbot. “What did I miss?” she whispered.

“Not much. The LT just started.” He slid her an extra folder and she started skimming it as the officer spoke.

Reese gave her a nod, but didn’t stop the briefing. “Now that we’ve covered what we know about this system, let’s discuss our operations. First will be the primary mission of rescuing the prisoners. Though we know next to nothing about the internal layout, we’ll need to penetrate the station, locate the prisoners, and extract them while under fire. Probably heavy fire. I’d like to hear some options on how we manage that.”

That gave Kelsey an idea. She opened a channel to
Courageous
’ computer system and accessed the diplomatic database she’d copied on Erorsi. A query brought up the data she’d requested in her mind.

“I have something that might prove useful, Lieutenant Reese.”

He gestured for her to go on.

“I picked up some Old Empire classified data on Erorsi. It has something about Boxer Station.”

She accessed the holo emitters over the conference table and projected an exterior view of the station. The projection startled most of the men and women around the table. It only belatedly occurred to Kelsey that they’d probably never seen anything like it.

“Sorry. This is Boxer Station.” She started the display rotating so that everyone could see all sides of the facility. “Suffice it to say that it dwarfs the orbital we destroyed in Erorsi orbit.”

Reese studied the station with more than a hint of worry in his eyes. “That makes searching it for our people a lot more challenging. They could be anywhere and we’d be stumbling around looking for them. We don’t even know how the thing is laid out inside.” He narrowed his gaze. “Or do we?”

She instructed the display to focus in on one of the docking levels. The detailed schematics unfolded in front of them. “I have the complete deck plans, including the layout of the brig area. Not that it could hold all our people. With the wounded from the battle,
Spear
had over three thousand people crammed into her hull. If even a fraction of them survived, they could be anywhere on that station.”

The marine officer nodded. “And that’s if the plans haven’t changed. We have no idea how much damage that station took during the rebellion or what modifications the rebels made when they repaired it. Still, this is a better starting point than a blank screen. Thank you, Highness.”

He looked around the seated marines. “I want an operational plan to present to the captain as soon as possible. Team leaders are to examine this data in detail and we’ll reconvene in two hours.”

The marine officer turned his attention to Kelsey. “The captain also wants someone to go over the intelligence gathered from Harrison’s World, Highness. I’d like you to handle that. It’ll be four or five hours before the probes are in range to detect ships in orbit.”

“Are we anticipating a need to go there in person?”

He shook his head. “Not at this time, but we can’t waste the opportunity to study a major rebel world.”

“We’ll see what we can figure out.” She rose to her feet and followed Talbot deeper into marine country. The two of them found a small conference room and sat at the table. She looked up at the ceiling. It had a holo projector, too.

“
Courageous
, what can you tell me about the communications from Harrison’s World?”

“There are several anomalies worth noting. First, there are no other sources of communication in this system. Data from before the rebellion indicates that there were numerous mining stations and daughter colonies. None of them has transmitted since we arrived. Second, the communication from Harrison’s World is heavily encrypted. This unit has not detected any signals from Boxer Station or ships elsewhere in the system.”

She looked at Talbot. “That seems unusual. This is a secure system. They don’t even have ships on guard at the flip points. Why lock communications down so tight?”

“Because you don’t want someone overhearing you. The real questions are who and why. How long until we get better probe data?”

“Approximately four hours,” the ship’s AI responded.

Kelsey rose to her feet. “We’ve got a little time to burn. I should use it wisely. I’m going to talk to our ranking prisoner again. You should get some sleep.”

The prisoner had been very quiet since he’d gotten access to the ship’s library. Perhaps he would give her some information to go on.

The guards didn’t try to deny her access. They just opened up the hatch at her command.

Lieutenant Commander Richards looked up from his tablet and stood. Since he had implants, he didn’t require a tablet, but she’d seen no harm in granting his request for one.

“No need to stand on my account,” she said as they closed the hatch behind her. “Please, stay comfortable. I’ve just stopped by to make sure they’re allowing you the access I promised to the ship’s library and your people.”

He sat back down. “Yes, thank you. I seem to have all the access you indicated I could have and I’ve seen my people. I appreciate the courtesy. I thought I should stand for royalty, even if we are at war. It’s only polite, considering.”

Someone had told him about her. Oh, well. It was bound to come out eventually. She sat on the edge of the second bunk in the compartment. “I appreciate that, but I don’t stand on ceremony. Have you found your reading interesting?”

He looked at the tablet and sighed. “Confusing, but I’m to the point where I can no longer convince myself that everything I’ve read is faked. It’s too internally consistent, and yet inconsistent.”

Kelsey blinked. “I’m not sure I understand that.”

Richards smiled a little. “History, or anything for that matter, is never completely consistent when you go to different sources. There are always little differences of opinion or even errors. If these purported Old Empire history books and news summaries were fakes, I’d have expected them to be more uniform. Or to have a consistent kind of bias or error.

“To my chagrin, they appear authentic, even though they can’t be true. Whoever lied to you about the Old Empire did an amazing job. It makes me question if parts of the history I know are wrong.”

“You seem to know a lot about history for a computer guy.”

“It’s a hobby. This puts me in a moral quandary. I now believe that you think you’re doing the right thing. You’re wrong, but that’s only because someone misled you. I’m convinced you utterly believe the lies they’ve told you about the rebellion. It’s my duty to see if I can make you see the error of your ways.”

She allowed herself a smile. “Oddly enough, I feel that same duty. Can you explain why all of this supposedly faked data was on an abandoned ship? One built before the rebellion and crewed by people who knew the situation better than either of us? They had the means to commit mass suicide so your ancestors didn’t capture them. And they used it. That’s hard to get around.”

“I believe that the emperor and his corrupt ruling class must’ve been pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes long before the rebellion started. They would’ve had no trouble falsely portraying the rebellion. They controlled every information channel.”

“Or the AIs you serve edited the history you were taught long before you were born. Consider your own reaction when we captured you. The way they programmed your implants to attack at all costs. Doesn’t that speak of some subterfuge on the part of the AIs?”

His eyes narrowed. “I’m not ready to discuss the AIs and how they work inside our society.”

Kelsey smiled. “If you say so. I have some data from the AI that captured Erorsi that indicates what they were like.”

“That thing was mad. A ship’s AI isn’t really intelligent and its conflicting programming instructions eventually turned it into a thing of horror. I’ve heard about some of the atrocities it perpetrated. It exterminated billions of people. Horrible. It should have been stopped.”

“I can’t disagree with any of that. Why didn’t you?”

He took a deep breath. “The damage was done long before I was born. Fleet Command decided at the time it was best to leave well enough alone. The Empire contracted after the rebellion. Once we get back out to this area, we would have dealt with the thing. And the monsters it left behind.”

“Yet you continued to supply it with the very equipment it needed to do its dirty work. The proof is inside me. You took children as payment. And your ship attacked ours without provocation. You killed thousands of Fleet personnel. It’s a little late to be the wronged party.”

“The children are resettled and rehabilitated. It’s the only way we can save any of those poor people. I have no idea what you did to spark the attack, but you must’ve done something. The captain wouldn’t have done so unilaterally.”

There was still a lot of denial going on, she decided. Time to give him more information and let him stew.