Empire Ebook Full (24 page)

“Yes, great!” I said. “Come to my conference room the minute you get aboard. You aren’t
too badly hurt, are you?”

“My left leg is in a bag of nanites,” she said. “But I need to talk to you.”

We broke off the connection, and I headed into the conference room. On most spaceships,
you didn’t get a lot of privacy. This cruiser was the largest Star Force vessel we’d
built yet, but it still wasn’t any bigger than an old-fashioned submarine back home.
It was about five hundred feet long and displaced something like fifteen thousand
tons. As a result, when you moved around in the ship you had to expect to bump butts
with plenty of other crewmen.

I poured myself a fresh cup of crappy coffee and stripped out of my armor. I figured
I had to smell pretty bad by now. I put on a nanocloth crewman’s suit and wished I
had time for a shower. When she finally arrived, I sipped at my coffee, which was
already becoming lukewarm.

She paused in the doorway and we looked at each other. She was in nanocloth too, but
I liked her uniform more than mine. We’d come up with black outfits, very utilitarian.
They were little more than army fatigues or in some cases coveralls. Her Imperial
clothes had a much more stylish cut to them. There were new insignia on her shoulders,
too.

Her hair was down, and still looked long and dark. It was a little ragged, but I could
tell she’d worked on it on the way over to my ship. She didn’t look like a crash victim,
which surprised me. Her leg, as she’d indicated, was floating in a bag of nanites.
A long red line had split open the skin, revealing the bone in spots. Nanites silvered
that region, working on it.

After a second, I smiled at her, and she returned the smile. She came in then and
sat down across from me. I was less than pleased to see Kwon thumping along in her
wake. Without even asking, he came into the conference room and stood there at the
end of the oblong table. He was so tall he had to lean his head to one side. He was
still wearing armor, and it looked more banged up than Jasmine did.

“Yes, Kwon?” I asked.

“He’s here to make a report as well,” Jasmine said.

I nodded stiffly. “Excellent work out there, First Sergeant,” I said. “By all means,
give me your report.”

Kwon looked at Jasmine for a second, then shuffled his feet twice. “Ah, well sir…I
wanted to join you, if possible.”

I frowned slightly. “Do you have a report to make or not?”

“Sure,” he said. “Ah, the last ship has reported in and we’ve sorted out the dead
from the living. We now have a total of twenty-nine thousand, three hundred and sixty-one
survivors. More are being found every hour.”

My eyebrows shot up at that. “That’s good news,” I said. “What about Star Force people?”

Kwon looked at Jasmine, then back at me. “That’s not so clear, sir.”

I was frowning again. Kwon took this moment of confusion to stump into the room and
begin aiming his big butt at a chair. I put up a hand.

“I need you to go make a count of all the military personnel on those transports.
Maybe they aren’t calling themselves Star Force, but I want to know how many there
are anyway.”

Kwon froze. His rear hovered only a foot above the chair he’d targeted. “Are you sure
you’ll be okay here alone, sir?” he asked.

That was it then. I felt a surge of irritation. My own staff didn’t trust me with
Sarin. Sure, we’d had a few exciting moments together. We’d made out, given one another
a beating and who knew what else. But that was all in the past. I didn’t like Kwon’s
mother-hen attitude.

“Even if she’s one of Crow’s assassins,” I said. “I think I can take her.”

Kwon looked comically alarmed for a moment, then he examined my grin and Jasmine’s
embarrassed smile. He finally figured out I was joking, and began a halting laugh.
“Ah. Ha, ha, ha! Sure-right,” he said. “But that wasn’t—”

“I know what you meant, Kwon. Now, get out of here. That’s an order.”

“Sure, sure,” he said, exiting unhappily. As the nanites closed the portal behind
him, I could still hear him muttering in the hallway.

“He doesn’t trust us,” I said, turning to Jasmine.

She was clearly embarrassed and determined to pretend she didn’t know what I was talking
about. “We have to talk, Colonel.”

I leaned back in my chair and offered her some coffee. “I can’t believe you’re alive
and back aboard my ship.”

“I didn’t think this would happen either,” she said. “I thought I could go back to
Earth and command a fleet. I thought—”

I studied her. “How bad is it? I mean back home, on the ground? How did Crow pull
it off?”

She looked at me sharply. “You mean, you don’t know?”

I shook my head. I explained that we’d been cut off from transmissions from Earth
for months. We’d heard things, but it wasn’t like we had the vid files and news reports.

“That figures,” she said. “Jack always told me he was keeping you advised of his every
move. He told me he sent you files, and read letters where you occasionally objected.
But he said you’d understood his actions and had seen the necessity of it all. I had
figured he was lying of course. I knew you wouldn’t have gone along with the ultimatums,
and the purges. But I thought he really
was
telling you things. I didn’t realize he hadn’t even bothered.”

My frown deepened. Crow was not the most honorable fellow, and I didn’t like the idea
he’d used my name to rubberstamp his ambitions.

“Give me a timeline,” I said. “I’ve been out of touch, fighting on the frontier for
months.”

“Of course. Where do I begin? I suppose I should start with my return to Earth. I
was sent out to Eden last year to talk some sense into you.”

“You failed, but who can blame you for that?” I asked, laughing. She didn’t laugh,
and soon I stopped and cleared my throat. “Go on.”

“Crow has been planning this for a long time, I think. Since the beginning, maybe.
He’s been waiting for his opportunity. I think that opportunity came when you were
gone from Earth for a long, long time. He wanted to kill you, but I think he knew
that if he did, everyone would know it was him, and they would hate him for it. So
he waited until you were stuck out here, and made his move then.”

I nodded and sipped more coffee. It was cold now, so I threw it on the floor. The
nanites sucked it up and spit it out of the ship. In seconds, my boots no longer glistened
with brown droplets.

“He had ships, Kyle. He had them specially built. He can design them now—he’s not
as good as you are, but his designs are more devious and they look sleeker somehow.
Anyway, he had built something new, what we call
death ships
. Little assassination ships that carry only one man, or no men at all. They flew
out in the night and killed every government official in every country of note that
had complained about Crow openly. He did it all in one night too—all across the globe.
You remember when the Nano ships first came to Earth, that night they picked us both
up?”

I nodded. I wanted to ask questions, but I held back. I wanted to ask Sarin who had
been running Star Force without challenging Crow? Who hadn’t seen this coming, and
had let him get away with literal murder unchecked? But I didn’t ask these things,
as I knew it was probably she who had been asleep at the switch. Deciding information
was better than recriminations, I held my peace.

“The ships swept across the globe at midnight in every country, quietly plucking people
from their beds with long arms. But instead of dragging them into their bellies and
testing them, they just closed their black, rippling hands. They crushed ribcages,
mostly. Like angry children throttling helpless dolls. They have a name now for that
terrible night, when thousands died. They call it ‘The Night of the Red Hands’. Apparently,
after having killed so many, witnesses said the three-fingered, metal hands were encrusted
with gore. At the mere sight of them, everyone fled screaming.”

“Didn’t they fight?”

“It was hard. They don’t have nanite tech in the old capitals of the world. They have
missiles, but these ships were no bigger than vans darting down streets, humming and
seeking. They didn’t find everyone on their lists, of course. But those that survived
got the message. They hide now, and fear the day the ships will come back for them.
Crow retrieved them all, and he had the balls to apologize and claim it was all an
unfortunate incident. We haven’t seen them since.”

“Didn’t the entire world declare war?” I asked. I found myself breathing hard. The
injustice of it all was hard to bear.

“War on Andros Island? War on Star Force, who had saved them all from extinction?”
She shook her head and pushed her long hair back away from her face. “A few did. Israel
and Japan—a few others.”

I hesitated. Sometimes, you want to wait one more second before you have to hear horrid
news. “What happened to those nations?” I asked quietly, when I was ready.

“He destroyed them. He didn’t kill everyone—but he mowed their military and their
infrastructure.”

“They were helpless?”

“Not at first. They fired nukes at us, ship-killers. They couldn’t get through our
defenses, of course. We’ve fought alien fleets. A few dozen primitive ICBMs—it was
a joke. But Crow used the incident to make examples of them. He flew out our ships—our
real warships, which he’s been building up for so long. We bombarded them into submission.
It was easy, really. You just sit up there and fire sparks down into the clouds, one
after another. The brainboxes did the targeting. We didn’t exterminate any cities
or anything like that, we just pounded away at their military and infrastructure.
They were helpless to stop a bombardment from space.”

I stared at her. I now had a headache that coffee couldn’t fix. “Are you telling me
my Star Force heroes beat down the legitimate governments of Earth? Willingly?”

She heaved a sigh. “I apologize for all of us. It didn’t seem that way at the time.
You have to understand, the assassin-ships went out on their own, Crow sent them.
We didn’t even really believe that story was real. We didn’t
want
to believe it. We
couldn’t
believe it. At least, not on the scale that was described. From our point of view,
we woke up one morning and missiles were incoming. We scrambled, we defended ourselves,
then went on a reprisal mission. It happened so fast…”

I nodded, trying to visualize it all. Somehow, the reality of events on Earth was
worse than I’d imagined. I’d figured maybe Crow had gotten elected to Emperor by some
party of world government-loving nut-jobs. But he’d done it the old-fashioned way,
by eliminating the toughest competition then terrorizing the rest.

“You mentioned something about an ultimatum.”

“Yes. Crow went live on the worldwide nets. He wore that suit he always wears now
for the first time—I’m sure you’ve seen it, all white with jingling medals. I don’t
even know where he got all that bling.”

I shook my head. I’d never seen any such imagery, but it sounded like Crow trying
to impress people. He’d always been over-the-top when it came to things like that.
He liked his symbols of power to be big and flashy, like that massive desk I’d once
commandeered from him back on Andros Island.

Jasmine paused until I gestured for her to go on.

“Anyway,” she said, “he said that it was time for the world to grow up. He claimed
it had all been a misunderstanding, another fight between Star Force and the provincial
governments—that’s what he calls them. The U. S. Whitehouse and the British Parliament—those
are just provincial, backwater institutions, according to Crow. He explained that
our world needed centralized authority to go along with a centralized military. He
said that the major governments of the world had met with him and decided he was the
one to lead us into this era of worldwide peace and unity.”

“What a surprise he chose himself,” I said. “Did he have any real backers?”

“Yes. Russia and China both came out in favor. Japan did too, after their beating.
The Israeli Knesset remained mulishly silent. Two dozen other minor countries joined
in, mostly small places from Eastern Europe, the Mideast and Africa.”

“What about the U. S.?”

“That part was weird. There was something going on in Washington. None of us, maybe
not even Crow, understood it all. But suddenly, the president was gone. I’m still
not sure if Crow’s assassinbots killed him, or if it was a successful internal coup.
In any case, the Pentagon announced martial law. They dissolved congress—most of the
members were dead anyway. And then they declared themselves to be part of Crow’s Empire.
The Terran Empire. That’s what they call it now.”

I sat in shocked silence for about a minute. I looked down at my hands which were
gloved in metallic nanocloth. I tried to visualize the assassinbots coming in the
night, plucking leaders from their beds. What if the Nano ships had simply squeezed
my body into pulp when they’d gotten hold of me? I would have succumbed, I was quite
sure. Normal humans really couldn’t put up much of a fight against these machines.

I looked up at Jasmine. She stared back at me, sharing my expression of pain and worry.