Empire of Bones (8 page)

“Our father,” she corrected him. “I know that hasn’t exactly been a pleasant truth for either of us, but it’s a fact we need to accept.”

He sighed. “It seems like we could manage to forget that for the time being.” He closed his eyes and sighed even deeper. “Fine. Our father.”

She explained her late night discussion with the Emperor. “Then he woke me early the next morning and hustled me onto a shuttle. I didn’t know where I was going or why until Carlo explained it to me.”

Against his will, he found himself nodding. “You do know how to take the fun out of a good mad, don’t you?”

“I’m sure I’ll do something to legitimately piss you off soon enough.”

He chuckled. “I am sorry that our circumstances have put us at odds. I’ve often considered what my life would be like if I hadn’t joined Fleet. If I’d stayed at home and done anything else, everyone’s lives would be so much simpler.” He gave her a serious look. “I truly regret what this has done to your family.”

She sighed. “Me, too. Yet there isn’t one thing we can do to change the past. All we can do is make a better tomorrow.”

“That sounds like a slogan. Here we are. Stay beside me and don’t touch anything without asking.”

He touched his thumb to the pad beside the double doors and stepped inside when they slid open. The area just inside engineering opened up quite a bit. The ceiling was three stories tall and the room spread the full width of the ship. Massive machines with attached consoles filled most of it and a subtle humming seemed to make his teeth vibrate a little. There was also a subtle hint of electricity in the air.

“Dennis.”

Lieutenant Commander Dennis Baxter turned and gave him a high sign. He said something to the people clustered around him and strode over. “Captain. What can I do for you?”

“This is Deputy Ambassador Kelsey Bandar. Kelsey, this is
Athena’s
Chief Engineer, Lieutenant Commander Dennis Baxter. Dennis, I’d appreciate it if you gave her the grand tour.

Baxter’s eyes widened. “I’d heard you were aboard, Princess. Welcome.”

She took his hand and shook it. “Thank you. Please, call me Kelsey. Or Ambassador. I’m not acting in an Imperial capacity and we’re all going to be together for some time. Treat me just like you would anyone else.”

“As you wish. Call me Dennis. Come on over and I’ll give you the highlights.”

He led the two of them to the center of the huge compartment. “Toward the aft are the ship’s grav and flip drives. The fusion power plants are under our feet. These consoles here, here, and here monitor everything to be sure we’re in good shape. Andrew, give the lady your seat.”

One of the men rose and stepped to the side of his console. Baxter gestured for Kelsey to sit.

She sat gingerly, making a show of keeping her hands as far away from the console as she could while looking at the bewildering layout of graphic displays. A large screen directly in front of the seat showed some kind of complex flowchart.

Jared only had a general idea of what he was looking at. Fleet kept its officers focused on their primary fields of study. He’d come up the tactical track, so weapons systems were more his speed. He’d heard of some officers that jumped tracks, but they were the exception rather than the rule. Besides, engineering officers didn’t have the combat skills the command track required.

Baxter leaned over Kelsey’s shoulder. “Let’s take a look at the inside of the port fusion plant. Press that big green button right there.” He pointed to one right in front of her.

She pressed it and every light on the console flashed red just as Baxter said, “Not that one!”

Kelsey threw herself out of the chair, terror etched across her face. Until Baxter’s chuckles gave him away. Her eyes narrowed and she hit the Chief Engineer in the arm as hard as she could. “How could you! That’s mean!”

Then she whirled on Jared. “Did you know what he was doing?” she demanded.

He held up his hands in a gesture of innocence. “I had no idea what that button did. I did fail to mention that Dennis is something of a practical joker, though. And you did tell him to treat you just like everyone else.”

The Princess crossed her arms over her chest and glared at them both for a moment before she smiled a little. “Okay. That was pretty good.”

“I couldn’t help myself,” Baxter said. “All you did was lock the console. In any case, we were running a diagnostic routine so it’s offline. There was never any danger.”

“You’re still going to pay for that. Now, let’s get a real tour.”

Jared followed them as Baxter led her deeper into the bowels of engineering. She was a lot different than he’d imagined. Their interaction had always been uncomfortable and stiff. To see her with a sense of humor and such a natural ability to bond with total strangers had him reevaluating everything he thought he knew. Perhaps she was more suited to the role of diplomat than he’d realized.

Baxter took her deeper into engineering. “These are the flip drives. More precisely, the Osborne-Levinson Bridge initiators. No one calls them that. When we dump the capacitors into them, they trigger the gravitational fault in the flip point in such a way that it reverses polarity and takes us to the other side. It’s all over before we can even measure the event.”

She looked at the massive machine and shook her head. “Just the concept of going light years in the blink of an eye boggles my mind. How do you get your head around something like that?”

He shrugged. “I’m an engineer. I can understand the practical results without knowing all the theory behind it. That’s for the scientists over on
Best Deal
. When they start droning on, I flip myself to the other side of the room.”

Kelsey laughed. “Have you talked with them about it? I think that would be a fascinating conversation.”

“I have. They wanted to change the parameters of what our probes look for so they had to explain it to me. I immediately went for alcohol once they were gone.”

She laughed again. “I’m looking forward to meeting them.”

Jared inserted himself there. “We’ll have a few combined meetings to plan out things once we reach the kickoff system. I know they love to find someone willing to listen to them explain things, so you’ll have plenty to hear.”

He turned to Baxter. “What kind of changes did they make to the scanning parameters?”

“They wanted me to increase the sensitivity threshold. There are apparently some competing theories about how weak a flip point can be and they wanted to be sure that they didn’t miss something. I warned them they’d probably get false positives, but they thought that would be acceptable. In any case, I can always change the settings back.”

The next stop on the tour was at the grav drives. Baxter rested his hand against one. “These are just like the gravs on every car you’ve ridden in, just a lot more powerful. Since we use more power and make them very large, they provide much more thrust. Enough to make the trip between flip points in a matter of days.”

“I’ve heard that and we’re making good time, but what about that acceleration? Shouldn’t it mash us into jelly?”

“Absolutely not. I’d look terrible in a sandwich. Grav drives work by altering the gravitational gradient of the space-time around a ship. Think of it like falling. You don’t feel acceleration as you fall. A failed drive would leave you going exactly the same speed you were already going.”

The communicator on Jared’s belt beeped. It reminded him that he should issue the diplomatic team some of their own. That would’ve made tracking Kelsey down significantly simpler. He brought it to his lips. “Mertz.”

“Lieutenant Anderson, Captain. We need you up on the bridge right away.”

He felt his gut tighten. “Is something wrong?”

“
Best Deal
just signaled their test probes located a flip point.”

He whistled. “That’s pretty good range to find it from this far away.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I should’ve been clearer. They found a previously undetected flip point between here and the target point.”

He shared a look of surprise with Kelsey and Baxter. “I’ll be right there.”

Kelsey followed Jared to the bridge. He was so intent that he seemed to have forgotten she was with him. She wasn’t about to remind him. She wanted to know what was going on.

He strode out of the lift and directly to the console in the center of the oval-shaped compartment. The curved front wall held the largest vid screen she’d ever seen. Two large consoles sat in front of them. Two unoccupied consoles behind him faced the rear wall, while a third sat on the far side of the room.

Commander Graves surrendered his seat to Jared. “Doctor Cartwright seems pretty sure that the flip point he detected is real.”

“Put the system up on the screen.”

The view of the star field vanished, replaced by a graphic of the system. Kelsey found it easy to read. The star and planets were obvious. The small blue circles represented the ships. That meant the green circle behind them and the one in front of them had to be the flip points.

An amber circle appeared between the ships and the most distant flip point. To her eye, the new flip point looked like it was about a quarter of the way toward the flip point they’d been heading toward.

Graves pointed at the screen. “The area in question is almost directly ahead of us and about eighteen hours away at our current speed.”

Jared studied something on his console. “What exactly did Cartwright say?”

“The discussion became unintelligible when he tried to explain in more detail.”

“Zia, get the good doctor on the screen for me.” He looked over and seemed to notice Kelsey for the first time. “Oh. Everyone, this is Deputy Ambassador Bandar. Kelsey, you know Commander Graves.” Graves smiled bowed his head in acknowledgement.

Jared pointed toward the man and woman seated in front of him. “Lieutenant Pasco Ramirez, my helm officer. Lieutenant Zia Anderson, my tactical officer.” Both turned and nodded briefly toward her before returning their attention to their consoles.

“Take a seat at one of the unused consoles, please,” Jared said. “They’re locked, but I’d appreciate it if you kept your hands off the controls anyway.”

As if she’d touch another button after that stunt in engineering. “Yes, Captain. It’s a pleasure to meet you all.” She sat down and clipped the belt around her lap before folding her hands on top of it.

Lieutenant Anderson turned in her seat. “I have Doctor Cartwright, sir.”

“On screen.”

The representation of the system vanished and a grandfatherly looking man with fringes of white hair around his bald skull and the most outrageous mustache Kelsey had ever seen appeared. It came off to the sides of his mouth in little points. He looked quite jovial and very, very excited.

“Captain Mertz! Isn’t it wonderful?”

Jared smiled politely, but he didn’t come out and agree. “We’ll see, Doctor. Why don’t you give me a general overview? Please consider my relative lack of knowledge about flip points in general. How did you find it when the other scouts coming this way didn’t?”

“We have the most sensitive flip scanners since the Fall. Possibly even before. Also, after their initial examination of this system, I doubt anyone has come back to check it again. After all, we had no reason to suspect such a weak flip point existed until recently.”

“Elaborate on that. In simple terms, please.”

Cartwright reached up and absently twisted his mustache. “Very little is known about pre-Fall technology, but early explorers found bits and pieces drifting in space when we finally climbed out of Avalon’s gravity well again. Most of the battle debris was long gone, either burned up in the atmosphere or thrown into various corners of our solar system. One of the things we found was an Osborne-Levinson Bridge scanner from one of the combatants.”

The older man turned as though he expected there to be a white board behind him and looked frustrated that there wasn’t one. He crossed his arms across his chest. “During the intervening years we determined its function and replicated it. Once we got into space, we refined that technology even further.

“A young theoretical cosmologist at our university recently reviewed our prevailing understanding about flip points and developed a competing theory which allowed for the possibility of weaker flip points.”

Jared nodded. “And you updated the probes with that in mind. Got it. Do you think the pre-Fall Empire knew about these weak flip points?”

The scientist shrugged. “We have no way to know for sure. Does it matter if they did?”

“I suppose not. What does this theory say about these weaker flip points? Are they safe to use? Do they go shorter distances?”

“The theory is too untested for those details to be more than educated guesses. We should be able to calculate how strong the flip points are, at least with enough certainty to guess at their safeness. My personal feeling is that they lead to closer systems, but we won’t know until we send a probe through.”

Jared nodded. “Get your people working on refining the data for this particular flip point. We need to have a better understanding before I decide if it’s safe to attempt using it.”

The scientist nodded sharply. “I have people working on that right now, Captain. I should have some observations by the time we get there. At the very least, I should have much more refined scan data. I suggest we meet tomorrow morning to discuss this in person.”

“That sounds like a plan, Doctor. We’ll see you on
Best Deal
at 0900.”

The older man nodded. “We’ll be ready, Captain.”

The transmission ended abruptly. Kelsey redirected her attention to Jared. “Are you planning on using it?”

He turned in his seat. “Perhaps. Its unusual nature means I’ll at least send a probe through to take some readings. If the other side looks interesting and it seems safe, I’ll consider exploring it.”

He rose to his feet. “Charlie, get second shift to take over for the evening. We need to get a good night’s sleep if we expect to have any chance of understanding what the good Doctor tells us.”