The Shattered Empire (The Shadow Space Chronicles Book 2) (8 page)

Garret just raised an eyebrow.

“Your brother stepped up, after your father resigned.  They had a falling out, as well, and your brother backed Joe Monaghan.  Jessica is actually an appointee, she works with your brother in organizing our military policy and recruiting allies.  The Restorationist Party took over and it was their efforts over the past few years that allowed us to save up enough to hire the War Dogs.”

“And what about Admiral Mannetti?  Why is she involved?” Garret asked, with narrow eyes.  While he had his own suspicions over the accuracy of Daniel's information, that was more due to how byzantine his father's planning process could be, rather than any distrust of the man.

Daniel looked away, “Are you asking as a mercenary... or as a citizen of Halcyon?”

Garret sighed, “Right now, a little bit of both.”  He met the older man's eyes, “You, at least, have to see that she's not exactly good ally material.”

“She isn't,” Daniel said.  “But the word is that we've got something that she wants... something she
can't
take, not without our help.”

“What could be that valuable?”  Garret demanded.  “The only thing here that valuable was the alien stuff Nova Corp was investigating... and they only ever found the one damaged facility.”  He shook his head, “And, I'm sorry, but some archaic tech that
might
be repaired isn't enough for her.”  He looked between Abigail and Daniel for clues.  Daniel remained stony faced, but Abigail chewed on her lip and looked like she wanted to talk.  “...
unless
someone found something else.”

“I don't know,” Daniel said, finally, “we've only heard rumors.  But Brokenjaw Mountain's been shut down for the past two years.  People were very quiet about it, especially while Nova Corp was around.  Then, as soon as your folks cleared them out of the sky, there's been a lot of traffic up that way.  A brand new road.  Construction and excavation equipment.  Admiral Mannetti's brought in people, engineers, scientists... they go down that road and none of them come back out.”

Garret shook his head, “This is dangerous.”  He thought about the situation for a moment.  The old dig site was only thirty miles away from Brokenjaw Mountain, but had been badly damaged by some kind of impact.  Brokenjaw Mountain was named for it's distinctive caldera.  The massive volcanic plateau around it was a wildlife preserve and refuge and was some of the most rugged terrain on the planet.

Daniel snorted, “Being under that nut job back on Santa Cruz is dangerous.  Being subject to Nova Corp and their goons is dangerous.  Having a fighting chance?  That's just risky.”

“You don't understand,” Garret said sharply.  “Admiral Mannetti is easily as calculating and nasty as either of them... and she exists outside the law.  She's a pirate, one of the worst, from what I've heard.  She's going to try to take whatever it is you people have here and then she's going to loot this place to the ground and maybe just sell the survivors into slavery rather than nuking the place from orbit.”  He tried to put every ounce of his sincerity into his voice, yet as he stared at the old man, Garret saw iron resolve on his face.

“We'll deal with her, then, like we've dealt with Amalgamated Worlds, Presidente Salazar, and Nova Corp, ” Daniel said.  “But we will have our freedom... or die trying.”

***

Chapter II

Anvil System

Colonial Republic

July 25, 2403

Lauren Kelly followed Mason through the crowded streets.  She wondered, absently, if they were still wanted from their last visit here or if that had blown over.  Granted, she would bet that Admiral Collae had probably pulled some strings to clear things up.

They were in Port Jita, now, anyway.  If she remembered right, each of the towns on Anvil were independent, one reason the planet had such a pirate presence.  Four different colonies had been founded here and the three that remained retained rivalry over the system.

Mason stopped outside a large, grim-looking concrete structure.  The humidity of Anvil had left stains down the walls and the narrow windows were covered in a green slime that Lauren guessed either survived off the condensation or by eating the plastic coverings. 
Possibly both,
Lauren thought,
it is Anvil, after all. 
The place looked like a prison and not one of the cushy Nova Roma ones, it looked like one of the Colonial Republic hellholes where the only way out was feet first.

Two men in ill-fitting civilian suits stood outside the broad steel door.  Lauren's eyes narrowed at the poorly disguised surgery scars on their faces.  From the placement, she would guess some kind of communications implants.  One of the men nodded at something that no one else could hear and stepped to the side.  “Tommy King, Admiral Collae extends his greetings.”

Mason just stood there and shook his head.  “He wants to meet with me in there?”

“What's wrong?” Lauren asked softly.  She didn't like the ambiance, she'd admit, but she didn't expect Collae to meet them in a nice hotel much less a military conference room.  The rogue Colonial Republic Admiral was on the run from his own people, with a bounty on his head in a number of systems.  It might have surprised her that he was here at Anvil, except the system was notorious for lax and corrupt security forces.  Granted, if the rumors she'd heard were true, he was hailed as a hero in just as many systems.  So who knew?

“This is where Tommy King first broke out of Colonial Republic custody,” Mason said, loud enough for the goons to hear.  “It used to be Rota Prison, where the PCRA kept Amalgamated Worlds Prisoners of War... the ones they didn't shoot out of hand.”

One of the goons gave a smile, “Admiral Collae says you passed the first test, Captain King.”

Mason spat to the side.  “I'm not here to play games,” he said.  He looked over at the other one, “I'm not meeting him here.  We're going to go check into a nice place, Admiral Collae's dime.  Your boss can come find us there.”

Lauren opened her mouth to protest, but he caught her arm and turned her around.  “Don't,” Mason said, his voice low.  There was a harshness to his handsome face, something cold and alien to his normal relaxed attitude.

“What?” Lauren asked, “We need to meet with him, we can't afford to let him back-stab the Baron...”

“Trust me,” Mason said, his voice low.  “He needs us more than he lets on.”  He sighed, “And if we went in there, we wouldn't come out.  It was a message, of sorts.”  His eyes went distant, “Almost no one came out of Rota Prison alive.  The handful that did were shattered or mad.”

“What about you?” Lauren asked.

“I didn't come out, I broke out,” Mason said, his jaw clenched in memory.  “And a lot of good men died with me on the way.”  He closed his eyes and Lauren saw him take calming breaths as they walked.  She wondered at that.  The Tommy King of legend was a scourge: a man who had led pirate fleets against dozens of Colonial Republic worlds.  There was little known about his past, some had said he was a renegade Amalgamated Worlds officer, others said he was the bastard son of Thomas Kaid, the former terrorist leader of the old Provisional Colonial Republic Army. 
The ones that didn't say he was a hell-spawned demon,
she thought wryly.  His pirates had looted and destroyed civilian shipping, smashed Republic Liberation Fleet task forces, and even plundered entire cities and colonies.

Yet none of those rumors or myths spoke of the man behind the legend.  She had seen that Mason had a history of regret, but also one of pain and loss.  Whatever the cause, that pain had clearly sent him on a course of revenge.

Mason continued to lead her by the arm until they were several blocks away.  Only then did he release her arm.  He looked at her, suddenly self-conscious, “Sorry about that.”

Lauren shook her head.  She knew that he had the lead on this and he hadn't hurt her, just confused her.  “Not a problem.  What's our next move?”

He sighed.  “Hotel Ramen, it's on the nicer part of town.”  He sighed, “There's someone I need to talk with there, anyway.”  He rubbed the stubble on his chin thoughtfully, “There may come a point where I'll need to send you to talk with some people... not the kind of people that you might like to associate with.”

Lauren raised an eyebrow, “Really?  You think I'll flinch at some unsavory types?”  She'd dealt with the rebels of Faraday, the corrupt security forces of Anvil, and her team had gone aboard the
Peregrine
to secure Admiral Mannetti after her betrayal at the Second Battle of Faraday.  She wasn't afraid to deal with scum.

“Not what you're thinking,” Mason said.  His gaze went distant, “The folks that Tommy King associated with were... well, some of them barely qualified as human.  If I need to assemble some kind of force, I'll be scraping up the dregs of humanity.  People that would torture you to death to pass the time.”

“We need people like that?” Lauren asked.  She was familiar enough with the uncaring, methodical murder committed by the Chxor.  She knew well enough that human monsters were common enough, but she wasn't sure where they would fall in on this.

“We may,” Mason said.  “And some of them are more useful than you might think.  For that matter, some of the places this might go, some of them may be more useful than
I
want to think.”

Lauren gave a nod, “Just tell me what to do, I've got your back.”

The nod he gave her was solid, but she still saw the doubt in the back of his eyes.  Mason was afraid.  Not that she couldn't do the job, but that she would see the darkness in his past and that it would change their relationship. 
Maybe he should worry a bit more about what kind of relationship we have in the first place,
she thought.  She liked and respected Mason McGann, despite his past.  She felt something of a partnership with him as well, to the point that she wanted to see if it could become something more.  But Mason had yet to even suggest anything like that.  For all she knew, he viewed her as a companion and little else.

Mason gave her a crooked smile, “Don't get thoughtful on me now, Lauren.  Let's get going, shall we?”

Lauren gave him a nod and they stepped back into the crowds.

***

Faraday System

United Colonies

July 25, 2403

Baron Lucius Giovanni stretched and yawned as he finished reading through the latest reports.  This one, thankfully, detailed some of the good work being done by the engineers and scientists who had come aboard the Dreyfus Fleet.

Lucius marveled a bit at that, once again.  Humanity had thought the Dreyfus Fleet lost for almost a century's time.  Officially chartered to destroy the renegade psychic Agathan Fleet, the Dreyfus Fleet was built of some of the largest and toughest vessels humanity could build, during the era of Amalgamated Worlds.  Besides those massive warships, it had a host of smaller ships to act as scouts and a screen.  It had also had large number of transports carrying additional personnel, equipment, and supplies for their stated mission.  The Dreyfus Fleet had left Earth and vanished and everyone had presumed it lost, along with everyone on-board.

Unbeknownst to almost all of humanity, the Dreyfus Fleet was actually something of an ark, much like the biblical Noah, designed to preserve something before the coming catastrophe.  Admiral Dreyfus, it's commander, had done so off of the warning signs he saw in Amalgamated Worlds, as well as the advise of a psychic precognitive.  In his preparations, Admiral Dreyfus had recruited dozens of scientists and hundreds of engineers, doctors, and other experts and professionals.  His fleet had sailed not just with the sailors and Marines, but also their families.  Two million men and women, with the goal of helping to restart human civilization.  Those transports also contained a host of machinery and equipment, some of it built during their time of waiting and others packed away until now.

In the months since they had begun unloading some of that equipment, they had only now begun to construct some of it.  The largest construct was also the one they had begun work on first and it was quite possibly the most essential one  to their long-term success.

He pulled up the latest progress report and stared at the imagery.  The huge solar arrays were almost absurdly simple.  The vast swaths of panels took up large chunk of space and they were extremely vulnerable, but the huge power yield produced by the tens of thousands of kilometers of solar array could be turned to something more valuable and condensed.  The collider at the core of that construct could produce antimatter, enough to recharge the ships of their fleet and to build munitions for the same.  Power was their one limiter and Lucius remembered his near panic when he'd learned that their power reserves were dangerously low.

The ships of the Dreyfus Fleet had no need to stop and refuel their hydrogen tanks.  They didn't carry bulk fuel.  But they carried dense antimatter matrices, with antiprotons and protons locked away in magnetic binders, so close that a slight shift in the containment field allowed their steady combination to provide energy.  Those energy matrices were almost empty, after eighty years at standby levels, despite the additional antimatter they carried just for that purpose.  Admiral Dreyfus's engineers had estimated that they had another year before their reserves would become too low to allow their ships to function.

At which point,
Lucius thought,
we would own the universe's largest target.

There was a black market trade in antimatter.  Various systems produced limited quantities of it and it was, very infrequently, naturally occurring.  For that matter, the Centauri Confederation used it as the power source for their own vessels.  Lucius knew that the Chxor also had a huge antimatter production facility.  The issue was bulk.  They needed enough to resupply an entire fleet.

Thankfully, they had planned ahead and already had the collider packed away.  Production of the solar arrays had taken more time, but they finally had enough that the first production had begun.  Within a few months, they would have enough to begin resupplying the vessels in the most need.

The downside being that the antimatter production facility was their logistical weak-link.  A significant portion of their vessels and crews had to maintain a perimeter around it.  Lucius had heard the arguments from multiple sides in regards to putting it in another star system.  The issue, then as now, was their limited number of vessels and the importance of Faraday.  Perhaps, as time went on, they would gain other worlds, expand their population, and they could split their essential resources out to a dozen star systems.  Right now, however, they just had the one egg basket.  The collider and its solar array were one of dozens of projects underway... and they all were vulnerable.

So, the antimatter production facility lay at one of Faraday's Lagrange points, a vast, glittering, crystalline construction which slowly grew in Faraday's night sky.

A baby's wail from the next room jerked his head up and Lucius gave a smile as the wail quieted almost immediately.  He stood from his desk and moved into the next room.  “She's awake?”

His daughter Kaylee had needed a wet-nurse after her mother did a disappearing act.  Nix's people had vetted a few dozen before selecting Emilee Stark.  Emilee had lost her husband during the Chxor occupation of Faraday.  She had a brand new baby of her own to feed, needed the work, and she had passed a number of loyalty examinations.  On top of that, she was a calm, friendly woman, “Yes, Baron, hungry too.”  She gave him a slight smile from where she sat.  Lucius's recent fatherhood had forced him to choose a different residence, this one an apartment that had an additional pair of bedrooms.

“Thanks, Emilee,” Lucius said.  His face softened as he stared down at his daughter.  “Let me know when she's done?”

“Of course, Baron, I'm sure she'd love some 'daddy time,'” Emilee said.

Lucius smiled and turned back towards his study.

***

Anvil System

Colonial Republic

July 25, 2403

Lauren answered the room's com-unit just as Mason slipped in from the hallway.  “Yes?”

“There is a Colonial Republic officer here to speak with Mr. McGann, shall I send him up?”  The concierge's voice was nervous.  “He says he is expected.”

“Yes, thank you,” Lauren said.  Mason stripped off the dingy leather jacket and scuffed boots.  He pulled on his black leather boots and a black silk shirt as she watched.  She had to admit, the sight was interesting... particularly with some of his scars.  One in particular looked like someone had tried to write their name in his back, a jagged, crooked scar that trailed off his side.