The False Admiral (11 page)

“Admiral, I'm reading movement below.”

“It's time to give the scanner a rest. Bad readings have wasted too much of our time already. Let's get out of here.” I started the climb back up. The suit's cling charge didn't have much grip on the black rock, but there was no shortage of handholds. I was out of shape, but not so far gone that this feeble gravity could keep me down. The trick was not letting our wires get snagged. Easy on the way down, devilishly challenging on the way up.

At least the EVs were suited to this; the nanofabric was strong enough not to tear, and because the suits conformed perfectly to our bodies, there was nothing to snag on sharp outcroppings.

My soft lifestyle of late hadn't done me any favors. We'd barely started, and I was already out of breath.

There was another tremor, and this time there was nothing subtle about it. The rock shuddered. One of my handholds came loose, and I barely kept hold. Deilani held grimly on, and Nils swore loudly. There was a crunch as something behind us gave, maybe the ledge we'd been standing on just a minute ago.

The shaking stopped. My helmet clearly picked up the crashing of everything knocked loose by the tremor.

My skin had gotten hot, and I'd begun to sweat. I kept my jaw tight, watching little shards of the mineral tumble down the slope, into the dark.

“Stay calm,” I said, trying to follow my own advice. “Just keep moving.”

Coming down here hadn't been very bright. Nothing we were
learning was making our predicament seem any less perilous. I had to do better.

It took several minutes to reach the surface. The others clambered out after me, and wasted no time putting a few meters between themselves and the pit.

So the spire had been sitting on this deep cavity. Interesting.

I took a few deep breaths, checked my oxygen levels, and began to climb out of the crater. I'd had enough of it out here. I wanted to get back to the ship, but we wouldn't be going inside just yet.

“Let's get back,” I told the trainees. “We need to visually confirm that the array is still intact. If it is, that might give us a play.”

“With the colonists?” Deilani asked, staggering after me.

“Nils is right. They're our best chance.”

“What happened to waiting for rescue?” Nils was out of breath.

“The situation's changed. Even if the Empire can track us here, which is by no means certain, it could take longer than I thought for them to get to us. Our chances are better with the colony.”

“Our chances of being executed,” Deilani said.

IT was easy to slide down the side of a ship. A lot of things were easy when gravity was on your side. The same could be said of time.

The climb back up the side of the freighter was arduous, but none of the trainees complained.

The length of the ship took even longer to traverse on the outside. Luckily, the damage from the fallen spire wasn't as bad as I'd feared. The material was dense and heavy, but its fragility prevented it from causing any serious harm to the armored freighter. Apart from the giant tear down the side of the hull, there was no other obvious damage. The com array was still intact. From the top of the ship I could see in the distance the hazy outlines of spires that were even more gargantuan than the one Tremma had knocked down. There were dozens of them. Without the mist it might have
looked like a forest where every tree was as tall and elegant as the Protectorate Tower on Old Earth. The view made me think of cathedrals and basilicas, Old Earth temples to ancient belief systems.

It was an awesome sight beneath the ocean of stars and dim suns, even veiled by the mist. But this planet would never be more than a curiosity, unless this strangely dense mineral turned out to be good for something. It was too inhospitable.

Now that Evagard had annexed the Demenis system, that might give it some value in a trade, or transportation context—but I didn't see it working out. I'd only been here a couple hours and I already wanted off. I had a feeling most people would feel the same way.

Nils was still examining the array. Salmagard was nearby, admiring the view as well. Deilani paced restlessly, checking her O
2
counter.

“Are you low?”

“No,” she snapped. She was.

“Ensign?”

“I think we can do it, Admiral. We can get a ping off easily—that's no problem. I'm not sure we can get a real signal going, though,” Nils said.

“Why not?”

“The power supply. There's plenty of stuff we can try to use, but something strong and
stable
enough to carry—that I don't know about.”

“If we can locate the colonists, we can try to contact them directly. There has to be something we can broadcast with on this thing—we just have to find it. Can we go inside now?”

“Yes, sir. I know what I need to look for.”

It took a full ten minutes to get back to the other end of the freighter, climb down the side, and make our way in through the tear. I would never take airlocks and lifts for granted again.

Nils set off to find what he needed to jury-rig the array, and I told Deilani to help him. Salmagard went back to stockpiling supplies, and I went back to thinking about details.

Like Nils said, sending a ping was easy. But if it found something, we'd only know if we had a way to pick it up when it bounced back, and something that could display that result. The com relay itself was part of the ship's systems, so it couldn't be trusted.

We'd have to use Tremma's personal reader. My first order of business was to retrieve it from his cabin and take it to our headquarters at Medical. Because we'd been outside, Deilani had released more decontamination nanomachines. They did their jobs well, but they also made my throat scratchy.

It still felt good to have my helmet deactivated.

The air in the freighter still tasted fresh by spacecraft standards. It had been through recyclers a thousand times, but it beat the alternative. Having literally scaled the side, walked across the top and along the length of this freighter, I knew how big it was, and vaguely how much breathable air was in it. That was encouraging, but even if things went well, there was a good chance we'd need all we could get.

Nils was going to have to be the one to use Tremma's reader to interpret the results of our ping. I set out to find him, though trekking through the freighter alone was starting to get to me.

The dim, empty corridors were no longer sinister. Now they were downright malevolent. My desire to get off this ship was growing by the minute. Without Nils to navigate, I had to slow down and be sure I was going the right way.

It wasn't as if I didn't know how to find my way around, but larger commercial vessels with power tended to give you plenty of help. Tremma's freighter gave me nothing but identical passage after identical passage. Captain Tremma's untimely death was at the front of my mind.

The back of my neck tingled, and I was getting sore from looking over my shoulder.

We still didn't have an explanation for what had happened in that airlock. A simple accident wasn't enough. Sabotage to the tech suits? I was having trouble picturing it. And why? There was simply no plausible explanation.

I found Nils with the com array and handed off the console to him. My limited technical skills would have to be put to work finding ways to extend the lives of our EV suits.

Using a ping to determine the Ganraen colony's location was simple. They might detect the ping and get interested, but we couldn't count on that. We'd have to do something less ambiguous, like sending an SOS. Building a beacon from scratch would be a big job, but Nils thought he was up to it. He needed this, something to occupy his mind so he wouldn't have to spend too much time alone with his nerves.

Salmagard was in Medical, struggling under the weight of a twenty-gallon cylinder of distilled water. She had it balanced across her shoulders, but was bent with the weight. I helped her set it down.

“Is this what good genes do? They make you think you're an ant?”

“A what?”

“Uh—an ant. An Old Earth organism able to lift more than its own weight. A lot of people regard them as our evolutionary superiors.”

“Oh, yes.” She
was
Earth-born, after all.

“Carrying water, probably not what your family had in mind for you. Your bloodline's pretty high tier, right?”

She shook her head. “No, sir.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

“No, Admiral.”

“But you look just like the Duchess. Don't tell me I'm imagining it.”

Salmagard's resemblance to the paintings and images of the Grand Duchess was so profound that I'd just assumed she was carrying her genes, and so had Deilani and Nils. I knew there were supposed to be a couple extremely privileged bloodlines whose purpose was to make sure that the Duchess' DNA stayed alive.

She reddened slightly. “The resemblance is deliberate.”

It took me a moment to catch her meaning. “You modified your appearance?”

“
I
didn't. It's part of an initiative to integrate my caste with the Service.”

“But the gentry's been in the Service for ages. Aristocrats make up half the officer corps.”

“To integrate us outside that role,” Salmagard said.

“Ah. Well, that's been a long time coming, but to design the way the candidates look?” It was typically Evagardian; they were making a big show about setting the precedent of enlisted aristocrats. Harmless for the most part, and pleasingly progressive—but not terribly convenient for the people like Salmagard who ended up as showpieces styled after historical figures.

She looked uncomfortable. “
I
was not consulted.” She touched her face—which I now realized was not hers at all. It didn't just look
like the face of the great woman, it
was
the face of the Grand Duchess. “We all have the faces of Heroes of the Unification.” She was referring to the power struggle on Old Earth during the twenty-first century. Its outcome—influenced by the young woman whose face Private Salmagard now wore—had decided mankind's path for the centuries that followed.

Evagard never stopped honoring its heroes. Hell, the new flagship was called the
Julian
. Half the planets and systems in the Empire were named after these people.

“The modification is purely aesthetic. We're otherwise ourselves,” she added.

“What tier are you?”

“Ninth.”

“And from Old Earth.” So she was at the lower end of the gentry spectrum; the highest I'd ever seen had been a fifth tier—and I'd barely gotten a glimpse of her. Her family had to be wealthy.

“We just call it Earth,” Salmagard said mildly.

I snorted. “You would.”

Ninth. That was still light-years above the vast majority of imperials.

“So whose genes have you got? Not the Duchess'?”

“The Guardian's.” Salmagard said it with a note of pride.

“I didn't know she had a line.”

“She doesn't, but her DNA has been part of the core since before the Unification. She was bred for the Heir.” So she was outwardly identical to the Grand Duchess, but genetically she was the normal product of her ancestry, which had at one point been touched by the genes of one of the great heroes. And now she was in the Imperial Service, in negotiations.

“There's no telling where you'll end up, is there?” I ran my hand through my hair. “I bet you wish you'd gone a different way. Not that I can talk.”

“No, Admiral. My family is long overdue to be represented in service of the Empress.”

“Is that why your parents wanted this?”

She nodded. “My family was rewarded.”

“Were you tenth tier before your parents accepted this honor on your behalf?”

She nodded. “Yes, Admiral.”

“Then they owe you a lot. But they must still have convinced you to serve somehow. And negotiations, of all things?”

“Because of my genes, it was thought I might be predisposed.”

That made sense. The Guardian had been the greatest warrior in the history of the human species. Or at least, that was how imperial history liked to put it. The legends were probably exaggerated. “Even so, why would you choose this over Earth?”

Salmagard folded her hands behind her back and smiled. It was a small smile. Controlled—she had been brought up and then trained not to express herself, but apparently this so amused her that even she couldn't help but show it.

“What is it?” I asked, seeing the way she was looking at me.

She hesitated, obviously debating internally.

“Forget propriety,” I told her. “I'm curious. Tell me what's on your mind.”

She met my eyes. “You keep doing that,” she said. “It's noticeable.”

I looked down at my hand, realizing what she meant. I was so used to brushing my hair out of my eyes that it had become a reflex. Now that my hair was short, there was no need. But every time I
moved my head a certain way, there was my hand with nothing to do. It was just muscle memory. My head also felt curiously light.

I'd get used to it eventually.

I sighed. “You're right. I need to be careful.” I returned her gaze. “Do you think I should shave?”

“I couldn't possibly comment, sir.” At least there was a hint of a smile there, if only for a moment.

“This is how I looked before,” I said. “More or less. What do you think?”

“It's more to my liking, sir. What do you mean ‘before'?”

“Before all this.” I gestured at myself. “Is it all right for you to have a preference?”

“Do you know anything about being the first daughter of an Earth family?”

Suddenly a tremor rocked the ship. The medbay tilted around us. I wasn't ready for it, but Salmagard caught me before I could fall, and we struck the bulkhead, struggling to stay upright. Salmagard's water jug slammed into the metal with a bang, rebounding across the room.

After the initial jerk, there was a slow lean as the deck shifted arduously underfoot. The jug started to roll back. Equipment was everywhere, and we watched it slide slowly across the deck. I could feel a subtle vibration.

I kept my eyes open. I knew what I'd see if I closed them.

The ship came to a stop with us listing at about a thirty-degree angle. I let out my breath. I was still clinging to Salmagard, and she was looking at me questioningly.

“In case there was another one,” I said defensively, and let her go. If I'd had half her poise, Deilani never would have doubted I
was an officer. Admiral still would've been a tough sell, but it would've been a start.

But poise had never really been my thing. Something to work on if I lived long enough.

Walking, and even just staying on our feet, was difficult. The deck was now a hill. EV boots gave excellent purchase, but it still felt like a hard climb.

None of that was important; I'd heard Deilani's cry over the com when the tremor started.

“Nils?” I asked into the com. He was closer to Deilani than we were; if she was in trouble, he needed to take notice.

“Busy, Admiral.”

It sounded like he had.

I was already in the corridor, running as fast as the dark, slanted floor would allow. The ensign's voice sounded strained. “Hold on,” he ground out. “I've got you.”

“Are you okay?”

“We need you,” he gasped.

I ran faster. The bulkhead that opened to the planet's surface was now angled noticeably downward, making it more difficult to get out. I put more charge into my gloves, making my way up the side of the freighter as fast as I could. Salmagard was right behind me, but I was too focused on speed to worry about her.

I clambered over the top and took off at a sprint made awkward by the magnetism in my boots, and the planet's unfamiliar gravity. It was foolish to run through the mist, but I ignored that; the ensign didn't sound good. I could see distant spires around us, stars above, and the metal underfoot seemed to stretch on forever. I was gasping for breath, and so was Nils.

The array was still there, but now it was leaning dangerously.

“Where are you?” I looked all around, but there was nothing to see but green.

“Over here, down
here
,” Nils hissed. I immediately realized what must have happened. I whirled and slid down the now-sloped deck. There was the ensign, clutching Tremma's reader to his chest with one arm and using the other to hold on to Deilani.