Empire's Ashes (Blood on the Stars Book 15) Read online

  “Yes, I wish we could have begun sooner, but Calpharon is a heavily industrialized world, and it took considerable effort to get the factories and such back at full operation. Now, the humans will truly learn their place. They will worship us, and to serve. And when the Rim is completely subdued, they will labor to support the true war effort, doing their part, and setting aside the folly that so often consumes them when they are bereft of our guidance. They will produce and build strength, and they will know there is a greater power above them.”

  “Indeed, Keremax. Indeed.”

  Tesserax nodded and smiled as he looked out again over the former Hegemony capital. The Colony, the name Ellerax had given to the sections of the Rim and the Near Rim the Highborn controlled, was already vast. Over one hundred billion Hegemony citizens were now under Highborn rule, and if only a minority of that total had yet been properly conditioned as yet, that process was well underway. The Church enforcers were out among the people, and those who proved overly resistant were expedited on the schedule of Collar implantation…or simply terminated. Tesserax hadn’t expected the process to be complete overnight, but he had no doubt those living on the Colony’s current worlds, and those yet to be conquered and added to the mix, would one day be docile and obedient, hardworking and respectful of the Highborn who ruled over them. That would be a joyous day.

  The project that had begun almost four centuries before would finally reach its successful conclusion…and the Highborn, and their rightful flock of humans, could focus their full attention and resources on the true fight, on winning the war that had plagued the Highborn almost since they had fled the empire so long ago.

  It is nearly time. They will come soon. They will answer our beckon call, and they will advance to their destruction.

  And when they come, it will be time to unleash the forces we have massed on the stubborn and disobedient humans. Time to put them in their rightful place, for now, and for all time to come.

  If a few billion more had to die to achieve that state of divine righteousness, that was of little consequence with creatures that bred as quickly as humans. It was a small price to pay for a great step forward for Highborn rule over the cosmos.

  Chapter Nine

  Forward Base Striker

  Vasa Denaris System

  Year 327 AC (After the Cataclysm)

  Yes…that’s the same reference. Another mention, from a completely different source. That’s confirmation…at least enough to justify following up…

  Andi Lafarge was bent over her desk, ignoring the throbbing pain in her hunched back as she scanned what seemed like endless files. Most of what she had were snippets, bits and pieces of previously meaningless information drawn from various imperial artifacts, now made suddenly relevant by context that hadn’t existed before.

  Badlands prospectors were a rugged and a focused group. They had combed ancient and ruined imperial worlds seeking items they could sell, valuable ancient electronics and the like, all the while dodging the dangers of hostile planets, partially operable security systems, Sector Nine kill teams, and Confederation naval patrols. Such men and women had little use or patience for less useful items, things without easily definable worth, and they had often cast such finds aside, or sold them for pittances. Andi had thought to herself a number of times, just how arbitrary her own retention of the folio that started her research had been. She’d kept, it certainly, not thrown it away or sold it for drinking and carousing money as so many others would have. But she’d tossed it in a storage facility and almost forgotten about it for more than a decade.

  She cringed at just how much priceless history had been tossed out the airlock by grim-faced Badlands rogues, uninterested in damaged old data chips and history and philosophy texts. She wondered how much information about the Highborn had been cast aside, whether even, if the key to defeating humanity’s enemy had been found, and then simply thrown out by some ship captain heading to a black market rendezvous with a box of old computer parts and no concern for the historical record.

  Still, despite those realities, Andi had managed to collect a fair amount of such things that had survived. She’d done it through a variety of means. Offering large sums to old prospectors for any trinkets of the sort they might have saved, calling in every scholar of imperial history, even sending Marines to virtually ransack museums on a dozen worlds, armed with Senatorial orders to confiscate any imperial informational artifacts the institutions possessed.

  She’d set up an impressive operation on Striker, over two hundred people, historians, data experts, engineers…a far cry from the days when she and Sy Merrick sat alone, painstakingly pawing through the battered but mostly-salvageable chips. Her team had been working together now for three years, coaxing information from damaged data units and translating various dialects of old imperial searching for any mention of the events of the final years of the empire…and especially of the Highborn, who seemed to have gone by several different names in those days.

  Now, she’d found a second mention of a still-unnamed project, one that had been developed to combat the deadly threat…and appeared to have succeeded in driving the Highborn from the empire. The references were tangential, noting only that the Highborn had indeed been expelled. But both spoke of a planet, a place well coreward of the present day Hegemony, that had been connected to the project.

  A world that had also served as the empire’s first capital…if such things could be believed.

  This new source included additional navigational information. Andi didn’t know all the nav points the data referenced, and it was far from something as simple as a map leading directly there. But she had spent most of her adult life sniffing out imperial worlds, and she believed she could find this one.

  Assuming we can slip by the Highborn without getting fried…

  She pushed that thought away. The less she considered the enemy the better, especially since it had become increasingly clear her road led through the Highborn-occupied zones of the Hegemony and beyond. She would have enough of a challenge forcing herself to leave Tyler and Cassie, she didn’t need to stoke her fear of the enemy as well.

  But she knew what she had to do. Leaving the two people who mattered most to her, going off on what she knew looked for all the world like a suicide mission, would be the hardest thing she had ever done. It just might be the thing that saved both of them, too. She wanted to hold her child, as though her arms could protect Cassie from the harshness of the universe. But she knew she couldn’t save her child with her arms or hands, or even with every weapons she possessed…any more than her own mother had been able to shield her from the realities of the Gut.

  She couldn’t turn back the invader with her strength…and nor, she was almost certain, could Tyler, with the entire fleet behind him. No, if the Highborn were to be defeated, she and her comrades were going to need something more. She had to go. She had to find the secrets of how the empire had driven the Highborn out…and she had to bring that, whatever it was—weapon, tactic, trick?—back to Striker, so it could be used again. So the Pact could repeat what the empire had apparently achieved more than three centuries before.

  So it could defeat the Highborn.

  * * *

  “All of them. Seventeen. Every one. Every outpost along the frontier destroyed utterly, with no survivors. And, as best we can ascertain, almost simultaneously.” Tyler Barron sat at his desk, speaking to Clint Winters. The two were alone. Barron had almost called Atara into the meeting, but he’d held back. He knew his friend was struggling, and he’d been trying to give her some time to fight off her demons. Besides, Chronos was in the outer system inspecting a portion of the Hegemony fleet, and wouldn’t be back until early the next morning. Vian Tulus was consumed with some Palatian spiritual ceremony, and couldn’t be reached for—Barron looked at his chronometer—eleven hours and seven minutes.

  He’d come to respect the Palatians, and to think of Tulus as his brother, but the warrior race that rule
d the Alliance had its strange aspects, and he still struggled a bit to truly understand them.

  The war council would meet the next day, and he would update Atara then, along with all the others. But he’d needed one person to serve as his sounding board before then, to help him make sense of the mountain of data that had streamed in over the past week.

  “And no sign of invasion yet? Along any of these axes?”

  “No, nothing. Not even in the systems where the outposts were destroyed. It appears that the enemy forces that struck those stations pulled back almost immediately after.”

  “That is strange. Maybe they want us guessing where their attack will come. Destroying all the outposts prevents us from fixing on their intended approach. They could come through anywhere on the line now.”

  “That is true…but I’ve dispatched scouts to all those frontline systems, and they will provide the same warning the outposts would have. So, I’m not sure what they’ve really gained simply destroying the outpost or outposts in the way of their planned invasion route. If they’d hit all the outposts and come on immediately, before we were able to reestablish some kind of monitoring, maybe they could have achieved some surprise. But they sacrificed anything they gained by giving us time to restore some level of reconnaissance along the border.”

  Winters didn’t respond. He just nodded, and he put his hand under his face, adopting a thoughtful pose.

  “There is one additional bit of information we’ve gleaned, Clint, and it’s not good news.” Barron looked right at Winters. “The scanner data suggests that each station was struck by an identical task force, every one of which included six hundred fighters. We’ve confirmed this for ten of the stations, and while we’re still going over the rest of the data, my guess is the results will show the same thing. Assuming the remaining seven are the same, that means over ten thousand fighters were deployed…and we’re fairly certain the attacks were synchronized, or close to it. That means none of these squadrons were in two of the attack forces. I’m jumping the gun a little here, but it seems very likely the Highborn not only possess fighters…they have at least ten thousand of them in active service right now, and every one of their pilots appears to be trained to a skill level far beyond anything we might have expected.”

  Barron hesitated, trying to keep his thoughts focused. The news he’d just given Winters was indeed bad. So bad, he was still struggling to comprehend the implications himself. “We’ve built up to almost ten thousand as well, including the wings based on Striker, but we still have to maintain some kind of bombing potential…and almost none of our pilots have meaningful dogfighting experience. We’re also limited, at least for now by supplies of interceptor equipment and ship to ship missiles, but once we can correct that, how do we divided our forces? We need enough interceptors to deal with the enemy fighters, or our bombers will get blasted to atoms before they get anywhere close to launch range. But we also need our strike wings powerful enough to get past Highborn point defense and missile barrages, and do some damage to those ships before the lines engage.”

  Barron looked intently at his friend. “I’m going to confess right now, Clint…I’ve got no idea, no answers to those questions, and a boatload of others…and I’d be damned grateful if you had some wisdom to offer right now.”

  * * *

  “I know you have to go…but I still can’t reconcile with it. I want to order you to stay, to post Marines at the door, to have Pegasus’s engines sabotaged…even to use Cassie to try to guilt you into staying.” Barron’s tone was taut, his ragged emotions apparent in every struggled word he uttered. “But you know I can’t do any of that to you.”

  “Cassie is the biggest reason I have to go, Tyler.” Andi was a tough screw, a Badlands rogue at heart, and she rarely held back when unloading on someone, or making her point. But she sounded as fragile as Barron, as close to losing the control she proudly wore almost everywhere she went. “My mother, too. I owe it to her. I want to stay with Cassie, I want to sit and watch her sleep, read with her…just touch her, feel the warmth of her skin. I’m sure my mother wanted the same thing. But she died in the squalor of the Gut, doing what she had to do to protect me. I want all the peaceful parts of motherhood, Tyler, more than I could ever have imagined I would have. But what is more a mother’s need than to protect her child? I’d never even thought about having a child before…” She stepped toward him and placed her hand on his chest. “…or someone like you. You know I love you, more than anything. Both of you. But if we don’t discover a way to defeat the enemy, I’m going to lose you both. We’re all going to die, and I can’t allow that. Not when there’s a chance I can do some good.”

  “Do you really believe you can track down this phantom imperial weapon, whatever they used to expel the Highborn?” Barron sound doubtful. “It doesn’t seem like a lot to go on.”

  Andi sighed softly. “I can’t lie to you, Tyler. I don’t know. The data we have is vague, far from conclusive…but I don’t doubt the empire did find a way to drive them out. The records are much stronger on that, and I think we can call it fact. The Highborn were gone…before the final stages of the Cataclysm. They may be responsible for hastening the final fall, but they were not there when it happened. And that means something forced them to withdraw. Whatever that was, we need to find it, use it. Otherwise, at best we’re looking at war without end, an eternal meatgrinder consuming billions in an effort to hold the line. And at worst, abject slavery under beings that expect us to worship them. You know what that means for us, Tyler. I will kneel down to no conqueror, no more than you. Nor would I see my daughter reduced to such a level. No, Tyler my love, for us, this is truly a fight to the death. And I can do more in space, searching for the secret that might lead to victory, than I can here. More for our cause, for the Confederation. More for you.”

  She sniffled a bit, pushing back on the tears she could feel trying to come out. “More for Cassie.”

  Barron stood silently. Andi could feel the struggle inside him. She’d resented his efforts to hold her back from danger in the past, even as she’d understood them. She’d lived her life for a very long time as the sole arbiter of what she did. Her crew, her friends, even the laws of the Confederation…none of them had ever prevented her from doing what she’d felt she had to do. But she realized she wasn’t alone anymore. She understood how much it hurt Tyler to let her go, and she knew the pain Cassie would feel if she never came back. Staying would be the easy choice. All it would require of her was to pretend everything would be okay.

  Until the day Tyler died in front of her. The moment she fell protecting Cassie, knowing in her final seconds that her daughter would die right after her…or live a life in servile bondage. No, she didn’t have a choice, even though she knew she would thrust a dagger in Tyler’s heart when she left.

  As he had done many times to her, with no more choice or malice than she had now.

  “I will be fine, Tyler.” She felt guilt immediately. She knew it was a lie, or at least a promise she very well might not be able to keep. He knew it as well, she was sure of that. But the mind was a strange thing, and she imagined her words would come back to him, and on some level, he would believe them.

  He would believe them because he wanted to, because he needed to…and that would make his ordeal just a bit easier to endure.

  “I want that ship of yours checked out from bow to stern, and especially that stealth unit. We don’t even know if those will work against Highborn scanners, but I’m damned sure going to be positive its functioning at one hundred percent.”

  She nodded, and she could feel a single tear escape, rolling down her cheek. She could feel the pain in Tyler’s voice, and she knew the depth of his feeling for her. He was trusting her, too, showing his confidence in her abilities.

  And it was nearly killing him to do it.

  “And I want you to take some Marines with you. I don’t suppose you can fit more than half a dozen on Pegasus, but I want you to ha
ve some real muscle when you’re wandering around some imperial ruin.”

  Andi didn’t say anything. She just stood where she was for a few seconds, and then she stepped forward and put her arms around Tyler. She pulled him close to her, and for a fleeting few seconds, she gave in to delusion, and told herself she would never let go.

  Chapter Ten

  Around Forward Base Striker

  Vasa Denaris System

  Year 327 AC (After the Cataclysm)

  “No, no, no…I’ve told you a hundred times. Interceptors are a whole different animal. If you go up against the Highborn squadrons the way you’d run at the point defense of the capital ships, you’ll get blasted to scrap.” Reg Griffin was shouting into her comm, her voice hoarse from hours of haranguing her people. She knew she was being unfair to them. She had hundreds of ships out there, not one of them holding a pilot who’d ever flown an interceptor outside an Academy exercise. Now, they were up against every old line veteran in the fleet, every pilot she’d been able to find with actual dogfighting experience…and that picked force was being led by two legends, names that carried almost the level of magic Jake Stockton’s had held in the wings. Olya Federov and Dirk Timmons. Known in their combat days—and once again—as Lynx and Warrior.

  The two veterans, the last remaining of the five revered pilots who’d led the fight against the Hegemony, commanded about three hundred fighters, in every way, the handpicked elite of the squadrons, men and women who had all survived longer than pilots were supposed to, through multiple wars and endless battles. Reg had thrown over a thousand of her people at them, including many hardened in the fighting at Calpharon. They had better than three to one odds, and every one of them flew a fully-equipped interceptor, with missiles and enhanced battle computers.