Empire of Bones (30 page)

Not that she had any idea how to do that. She’d work with Jared. They had to be a team if they were going to get home. The future would take care of itself.

Kelsey found the call button and pressed it. She had a lot of work to do.

The adventure continues in Book Two of The Empire of Bones Saga, coming September 2014.

Veil of Shadows

Kelsey Bandar, second in line to the Imperial Throne of the Terran Empire, fell over with a crash loud enough to turn every head in the cavernous Pentagaran physical therapy center. She lay there on her back, staring stupidly at the metal support bar in her hand. She’d ripped it completely out of the floor. And
bent
it.

“Really?” The blonde noblewoman snorted bitterly and dropped the mangled bar. It landed with a substantial clang.

“That may be a first for me,” Doctor Lily Stone, Chief Medical Officer of the Imperial Terran Fleet destroyer
Athena
, said dryly. “Normally, the patient gives out before the equipment. You’ll forgive me if I don’t offer you a hand up.”

“I suppose I can’t blame you for wanting to keep your arms attached to your body,” Kelsey said as she stretched out on her back. The cool floor felt good. “How the hell do the Pale Ones learn to walk without someone helping them?”

Those forcibly enhanced savages certainly had no problems walking. Or fighting. Kelsey was glad her friends had rescued her before the monsters turned her into one of them, but something wasn’t right with the old Empire equipment the bastards had put inside her. She’d been recovering for almost a week and she still couldn’t do simple things without destroying everything around her.

With a few exceptions, the hospital staff gave her a wide berth. Poor physical control and super strength didn’t mix. The damage she’d done to the bar proved their caution wise.

Lily was one of the few people that would come close enough to touch. The dark-haired woman looked down at her patient with an expression of sympathy. “They learn to walk the hard way, I’d imagine. Move before the others do horrible things to you.”

“That would be a powerful motivator,” Kelsey admitted. “While I’m glad that isn’t one of my many problems, I’m beginning to suspect that last machine you saved me from did something to help them adjust faster. In addition to enslaving everyone it operated on, of course.”

The doctor glanced at the two Imperial marines standing nearby. “Gentlemen, if you’d be so kind as to get the Princess back into her grav chair.”

Kelsey held her arms out and stiffened her muscles. The two men lifted her slight form into the waiting grav chair with no trouble whatsoever.

Grav chairs normally had a small control for the patient to direct their own movement, but Lily had removed it after a hand spasm had sent Kelsey into a wall. Technically, Kelsey had removed it herself. Much like she’d uprooted the support bar. Lily promised they’d reinstall the controls once Kelsey’s fine motor skills improved. If they
ever
improved.

Lily used a remote to send Kelsey floating out of the physical therapy center and into the halls of Capitol Hospital. The Pentagaran doctors in their bright white smocks, and the nursing staff in a much wider spectrum of colors, nodded and smiled politely as they passed. On the other side of the hall.

“I know it seems like this is taking forever,” Lily said, “but you’re improving at an incredible rate. You couldn’t even stand two days ago. Today, you’re walking.”

“For certain values of walking, I suppose,” Kelsey grumbled.

“You only fell because you yanked too hard on the support bar. Once you can stay upright, you’ll be walking without any problems.”

“You say that like it’s so simple,” Kelsey said dejectedly. “I ripped a metal bar right out of the floor. I laugh at the idea of ever handling eggs again.” Her gaze slid over the marines accompanying them. “Or any other…delicate objects.”

“And yet you will,” Lily said firmly. “It’s all a matter of relearning control and practice. You can be sure the old Empire marines had no problems with their fine motor skills. We’ll get you back in shape. Just look at how quickly your vision recovered.”

That was true. Kelsey’s vision had stabilized in less than a day. And, honestly, she was improving. She could stand on her own. Mostly. It was movement that caused the artificial muscles in her limbs to jerk and use more force than any five men could bring to bear.

Lily took Kelsey to a room she’d never visited before. It smelled as though someone had been doing construction. That made her wonder again why her eyes had given her trouble, but her senses of hearing and smell hadn’t.

The old Empire surgical machine had put three cranial implants in her head, all connected by thin wires that ran throughout her brain like a roadmap. Her eyes had artificial lenses, and her nose and ears had some kind of modifications. Yet, her senses of hearing and smell seemed normal. What made them different? Just one more question she might never know the answer to.

Kelsey looked around the new room curiously. Someone had laid the room out much like the medical center on
Athena
. There were also several people from the Fleet destroyer present, both medical staff and scientific. At their sides were what she assumed to be their Pentagaran counterparts.

A week in the company of their new allies had been educational. They still had so much to learn from one another. One thing was clear, however. Many of them—most really—seemed like wonderful, caring people that were intensely grateful that
Athena
had stopped the Pale Ones invasion of their solar system.

The price tag had been hideous. Dozens of Fleet personnel and marines killed, hundreds wounded, and
Athena
crippled. Kelsey still couldn’t imagine how they were going to get home, even with the help of their new friends.

From her hospital bed, Kelsey had finalized the official alliance between the Terran Empire and the Kingdom of Pentagar. They’d share every bit of technical data they recovered from the wreck of the old Empire battlecruiser
Courageous
in exchange for the Kingdom’s support in getting home. She knew there were several scientific centers springing up to facilitate the research.

And, of course, their alliance had a military aspect. No one knew how many systems the Pale Ones occupied. The pre-Fall Terran Empire had been vast before the genocidal civil war had almost exterminated humanity.

Jared Mertz, their mission commander and her half-brother, had brought their science ship, the converted freighter
Best Deal,
through the flip point to take a herd of Pentagaran scientists back to study the derelict. The old Empire Fleet vessel was a treasure trove of technology far beyond any of them.

After drifting disabled in space for half a millennium, the ship was slowly coming back to life. Kelsey had heard they’d repaired one of her fusion plants and that the ship was operating under her own power again. Dennis Baxter,
Athena’s
Chief Engineer, had been chortling about it the last time he’d come to visit.

She was glad he had something pleasant to focus on. There were pitifully few of those moments these days.

Kelsey took a deep breath and pushed her dark thoughts away. She’d already flogged herself over the damage she’d caused. Now she had to move on and make up for it.

And to do that she needed to be able to walk. Back to her current problems.

She smiled at the people she knew and nodded to those she didn’t. “It looks like you have a new medical center, Lily.”

“Almost.” The dark-haired doctor stopped the grav chair beside a piece of equipment that Kelsey knew all too well. The old Empire medical device that had mapped her body before the implant procedure. Beside it was the tank that had cut her open and installed everything.

Actually, procedure was too antiseptic a term. It had cut her open while she lay there screaming. She’d passed out before it put all her new hardware inside her, but she still woke from horrible nightmares every night. She suspected the memories would haunt her dreams for the rest of her life.

She mentally shook herself. The third piece of equipment they’d recovered was missing. The one she presumed was to have reprogramed her implants so that they controlled her, rather than the other way around.

Doctor Jerry Leonard and his graduate student, Carl Owlet, stood beside the old Empire equipment. The elderly scientist was the expedition’s cybernetics expert. The younger man was a programming genius. At the tender age of sixteen, he was also the youngest member of the Imperial exploratory expedition.

Leonard smiled benevolently down at her, unaware of her emotional turmoil. “It’s good to see you up and about, Princess. So to speak. Allow me to say that you’re looking much better than when I saw you last.”

She certainly hoped so. She’d seen the images from before they’d put her into the regenerator. The Pale Ones had gone most of the way toward turning her into one of them, complete with hideous scarring across most of her body. Thankfully, that was one thing modern medicine could fix.

Kelsey forced herself to smile. “Thank you. You obviously have some plans for me. Might I ask what we’re doing today?”

Lily put her hand on Kelsey’s arm. “We won’t be doing anything invasive.”

Kelsey hadn’t realized she’d tensed up until she looked down and saw that she’d cracked one of the hand rests. She took a deep breath and forced herself to relax.

The damage she’d caused was not lost on the scientists. Leonard stepped back nervously. “Nothing to worry about, I assure you. We’ve been going over the hardware we recovered from the old empire marine and Pale Ones bodies. We wanted to bring you up to speed with our progress and perform a few tests.”

“What kind of tests?” She heard the suspicion in her voice. She wasn’t sure she’d ever trust a medical procedure again. “Where is the third piece of equipment? The one that would’ve overrode my implant’s programming?”

“It’s elsewhere. We’re trying to extract its data and determine how it can overwrite the implant’s control code. We absolutely will not be exposing you to any danger,” he stressed. “Shall we start with our findings?”

At her nod he continued. “On the hardware side, we’ve completed a detailed examination of all your implants. We believe them to be standard old Empire designs without modification. That’s excellent news, as we know many marines lived and worked on
Courageous
with exactly the same enhancements.”

Their successes somehow failed to make her feel any better about her own condition, but they did make her curious. “How many marines did they have aboard
Courageous
?”

The older man’s expression turned somber. “Of the five hundred and eighty-five frozen bodies we recovered, one hundred and seventy-eight had the same extensive implants as you do now. That’s a significantly higher ratio than we have on
Athena
. Our marine compliment is about ten percent of the crew.
Courageous’
marines made up thirty percent of her crew. I suppose that makes sense. They had a lot more space for people on
Courageous
and they were at war.”

The low numbers still surprised Kelsey. “I have trouble believing that they crewed that massive ship with only fifty more crewmen than our destroyer.”

“That is an amazing feat,” he admitted. “The précis of the latest reports from
Courageous
indicate that the ship used significant automation. The systems also seem to be very sturdy. Some of them have come back online without intervention. Commander Baxter suspects there is some ability for the systems to self-repair.”

“You mean the ship might be able to fix itself?” The thought boggled her mind.

“Perhaps to a degree. They’ve restored power to all systems. In fact, power came online even in some systems that no one has worked on yet. I just heard that they’ve found some small remotes repairing power connections and replacing damaged cabling and components.”

That set her back on her heels, metaphorically speaking. The wreck of the old Empire battlecruiser had been tumbling frozen in space for five centuries. Other than one dangerously unstable fusion plant, all its systems had seemed dead.

“Even with all the legends,” Kelsey said at last, “I never expected anything like that. If it could fix itself, why hadn’t it done so before now?”

The scientist shrugged. “I have no idea. Perhaps we’ll discover the answer to that once we can access the ship’s computer. Right now, I’m more interested in you.”

“I can see some similarities between
Courageous
and you,” Lily said. “I put you in the regenerator and removed the worst of the scar tissue. That left a significant amount of micro damage that I figured would take several months to heal fully. Yet, in less than a week, it’s all gone. Did you have any injuries as a child?”

“I broke my arm doing something silly. I also had my appendix removed by microsurgery.”

Lily nodded slowly. “I noted both those items when I gave you your physical just before we arrived in Pentagaran space. In addition, I saw a deep cut that had healed well on your left leg. With the sheathing on your bones, I can’t scan for the break, but I can tell you that the residual scaring from the other injuries is completely gone. You don’t have an appendix, but it might as well have never been there.

“Your body’s ability to repair damage seems to have been significantly augmented. I saw no indication of anything like that with the Pale Ones. I’d like to have a better idea of what’s going on inside you.”

“You and me both.” Kelsey gestured toward the old Empire equipment. “What does that have to do with these damned machines?”

Doctor Leonard cleared his throat. “You told us the first machine was controlled by some type of computer. It’s not responding to us in any way. We’re hoping that you can communicate with it.”

A chill ran down Kelsey’s spine. “We didn’t exactly build up any kind of rapport and I’m not too keen on the idea of getting into either of them again.” As in, she would flat refuse to do so.