Last of the Immortals (The Jessica Keller Chronicles Book 3) (21 page)

“Status?” she called as she raced to the seat at the big conference table with the holographic projector that she called home. Enej sat to one side, the only person at the table with her, while three other crew members worked at stations around the outside wall of the room, facing away from her. They were always so quiet that she often forgot they were there, but any need she expressed turned into action immediately.

She had an amazing crew. She needed to appreciate them out loud more.

“Single vessel, Commander,” the flag centurion replied, cycling through screens and messages. “Semi–local wildcat miner or something. Dropped down from Jumpspace at the very edge of the gravity well going full tilt and immediately broadcast a mayday signal about an Imperial fleet coming. Tamara pushed the big red button. Here we are.”

“Anybody behind him? And does everyone have their emergency survival suits ready?” Jessica asked as she buckled herself in.

If it was
Götterdämmerung
, she needed to be prepared. The flag bridge was designed to be the single most survivable spot on
Auberon
. She was still expecting to get intimate with an Imperial battleship. There might be nothing that survived. The Red Admiral was certainly planning to treat them like a winter turkey, carved into small pieces.

If she let him.

“Negative on company,” Enej replied. “Affirmative on preparations. Chief engineer has been on everyone’s butts to have everything checked out, updated, and either repaired or tossed.”

“Very nicely done, everyone,” she called out to the whole room. Smiles over shoulders greeted her.

She pushed the comm button and prepared for war.

“Bridge, this is Keller,” Jessica said with a nod to herself. “Are you ready to hand off?”

“Affirmative, sir,” Tamara replied instantly. “You have the flag. One vessel, closing quickly. No immediate threat.”

“Prepare to send him a message,” Jessica continued. “I’ll live with the lag time right now.”

Centurion Giroux came onto the line. “Go ahead, Commander.”

“This is Command Centurion Keller. The
Ballard
system is under martial law awaiting the Imperial fleet. Reply to this message with your sensor logs and any pertinent personal observations. Then get clear from the area as soon as possible. Stop. Giroux, send that on a tight–beam loop until he acknowledges. Then feed his information to everyone that needs it.”

“Roger that.”

Jessica considered the scenario while she waited for the message to cross the distance and return. Right now, the two communicants were almost fifteen light seconds apart.

“Flight deck,” she keyed another channel. “Stand everybody down for now, but keep them on Alert–8 status. Wachturm is close, but I don’t think he’s here yet. Naps are fine, but no showers.”

Alert–8. Eight minutes from signal to having the entire wing in the sky, instead of just two fighters.

As always, Iskra replied with a single text message across the bottom of the screen rather than an audio message. There was probably nothing Jessica could do to break her of that, short of taking all keyboards away from her. Even then, she would probably dictate a message and then instruct the system to send it as text.

Iskra epitomized hard–headed, like so much of the rest of the crew.

Stand down acknowledged
.

That was it. All that needed to be said. It was enough.

Jessica’s screen suddenly lit up with information. Schematics of a nearby star system, orbital paths of several starships, Order of Battle for an Imperial battle squadron. Details.

She felt an eyebrow go up involuntarily. The person who organized this information had to have been a fleet officer at some point. It was stripped down, organized, tagged, and even properly indexed. That miner had even made a very good stab at identifying the classes of the enemy vessels, and not just their size rating. Plugged into
Auberon
’s databanks, she suddenly knew what she was facing.

It wasn’t pretty.

A team of three escort frigates, instead of the usual four. The same light cruiser
SturmTeufel
that had been with him at
Qui–Ping
. A Capital–class battlecruiser, possibly
Petrograd
or
London
. Certainly a sister of
Muscva
, who had died at
Qui–Ping
.

And the great white whale.

Imperial Fighting Vessel
Amsel
. The Blackbird. Pride of the Imperial Fleet.

Imperial Admiral of the Red Emmerich Wachturm. The master.

Up until this moment, Jessica had always secretly hoped that they had been wrong. That this was just a wild goose chase to the boonies. A training exercise put together as a practical joke by that man, to get even with her for the
Long Raid
.

A distraction.

But no, there he was.

Incoming.

The red devil of her nightmares, come for her soul.

If he could take it.

Deep inside, Jessica felt
Kali–ma
stir.

For a moment, the Goddess of War looked out through her eyes. Jessica felt happy warmth flood through her. It was like that moment when she faced down Ian Zhao for the throne of
Corynthe
. She’d felt something like Arnulf’s ghost smile down at her then.

The Final Battle was almost upon them.

Jessica scrolled the information down until she saw the signature at the bottom.
Wm. “Wild Bill” Williams, RAN ’58
. A man old enough to be her father, literally. But an officer and a gentleman too, once upon a time.

“Giroux,” she said finally. The pause had been minute outside her head, but eternal within. “Flag’s compliments to Centurion Williams and a personal thank you from me. Hopefully I can buy him a drink when this is all over. Send.”

She closed the channel and sat down to digging into the information she had. Not much had changed from yesterday, but now she knew he was close and what he was bringing. It was still a battleship against her and Moirrey, but she had surety now.

The Red Admiral was coming.

Do your worst.

Chapter XXXIV

Date of the Republic June 16, 394 Alexandria Station, Ballard

One of the downsides to having an AI around, Sykes decided, especially one you didn’t trust, was the need to keep extensive records, printed as hardcopy and stored in various locations around the station. They were bulky, heavy, and hard to wade through. They were also immune to the beast sneaking in and editing schematics in such a way that could hide something important from her masters.

This particular volume was roughly fifty years old and weighed more than six kilograms, with colorful fold–out diagrams and copious indexing, printed in a tiny font that required him to pull out special reading glasses, helpfully attached, to study.

Sykes smiled.

You had to read between the lines to see it, but the man in charge of station security at the time this book was written had really disliked the
Sentience
. The first section of the book was entitled
Emergency Operations
and read like a how–to guide to disable the AI in the event that she got out of hand. Or something went wrong with the station.

Or just because it was Tuesday.

Where to cut wires. Where to splice them in. Relays you could close or re–route as needed to hobble or blind her.

Everything a visitor like Sykes needed to kill a goddess.

She was still secure in her inner core. Those parts of the station that had been first lofted into space a thousand–odd years ago were wired into her nervous system, and redundant enough that she could compensate, but anything beyond frame nine could be cut. And had been designed and built in such a way that you didn’t have to stick your arm into the lion’s cage in order to do so.

Sykes looked at the room around him. This certainly didn’t look like the lion’s den, but he supposed the whole station qualified.

He had made himself a little nest near a long–since–unused operations center. There was an emergency decontamination shower, so he had access to a toilet and water, plus enough food to get him through the next few days of hiding from the periodic, amateurish sweeps. There was even an emergency one–man drop–pod in a nearby bulkhead that would blast him to safety in under twenty seconds if he was still here.

He had left all the electronics off, just to be safe.

Certainly, the
Sentience
would be able to locate him if he turned on anything important, but hot–wiring lights and heat to make the room a little more livable wouldn’t get anyone’s attention, unless he did something to draw them here.

This room was a leftover from one of the previous expansions, so it was probably meant to be used as a backup facility, in case something happened to the one of the main ones, up two decks and out a dozen frames from the core, in the newest part of the station.

He was safe here. Now all he had to do was wait for the Admiral to arrive.

Ξ

“So,” Suvi asked her quietly. “Are you in?”

Moirrey paused the schematics on the screen and dropped them to a thirty percent transparency mask so she could look at the
Sentience
’s face on the screen behind it.

It were a daft way to ask the question, but she did suppose that it were appropriate. After all, they were about to commit the same sorts of mischief as had been played on
2218 Svati Prime
, once upon a time.

Right now, though, it were just the two of them.

An’ this woman really did need her help. The others were really just window dressing at this point. Sure, the doc over on the couch were a smart fellow, but he were all book–learning and stuff. Never been elbows deep in a dead machine with a welding laser and a camera while things was on fire around you. And Arlo, standing beside the door, knew all abouts blowing stuff up, but that was basic wiring and boom things. Nothing sophisticated.

This, this were a whole ‘nother matter.

They was likely to be some fine citizens down below right pissed if they ever found out. And probably a bunch o’folks back on
Ladaux
that would be after her head.

Moirrey understood right then what Lady Keller had meant about being able to say she were just following orders. As an excuse, it stunk like a three–days–dead chicken, but the orders had been very specific.

She wondered if Commander Keller would hang for it.

Maybe.

She had certainly known it was a risk. Else why send Moirrey over with a brand new credit card and a blank shopping list, if not to watch her max it out doin’ silly things?

“Centurion?” Suvi continued.

“Aye, ma’am,” Moirrey said. “It’ll work fine. If we had more time, they’s probably some improvements I could make to the design, but it’ll do the trick for now. Long term’s a whole different bucket of fish, but we’ll have time to fix it then, if’n we’s still about to worry.”

“Very good, Centurion Kermode,” the AI said. “Let us begin by…Oh my…”

Moirrey’s head came up as the tone of Suvi’s voice changed in the middle of the sentence. One moment, everything were fine and dandy. Then it changed. Slurred, kinda. Dropped a third. Got emotional and stuff.

“What’s up, Suvi?” she asked carefully.

“Something has just severed most of my internal sensors and controls,” the
Sentience
replied quietly.

“Ma’am?”

“Moirrey, I’ve gone blind.”

PART III: GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG

Chapter XXXV

Imperial Founding: 172/06/16. Ballard system

It was time.

Emmerich kept repeating those words in his head as the squadron made the last short hop inwards for the final battle.

Jessica Keller
.

She had managed to stave off utter defeat at
Third Iger
after he had mousetrapped Loncar. She had made the
Fribourg Empire
dance to her tune along the
Cahllepp
frontier and committed long–term psychological damage at
2218 Svati Prime
. She had escaped him at
Qui–Ping
. She had personally embarrassed him at
Sarmarsh IV
and
Petron
.

Now it would end.

Jessica Keller had nowhere to run.

The battleship
Amsel
dropped out of Jumpspace safely outside of
Ballard
’s gravity well like one of the great whales of the Homeworld breaching. Come to think of it,
Ballard
was known for several species of cetacean that had been introduced, before Armageddon. Perhaps they would appreciate the irony and majesty of the situation, were they able to see the deep skies above them.

The flag bridge around him came alive with voices and real–time sensor information.

Below them,
Ballard
. Nearly a dozen major orbital stations, but only two he was interested in. The local militia would have a squadron of defense fighters to engage, like mosquitos. Not up to war border standards, but a force that would need to be reduced to make sure he could not be overwhelmed.

Pity he couldn’t mask launching a stealth missile at the station, like Jessica Keller frequently did when crash launching her little hawks. Still, they were high on the agenda.

But first…

“Communications officer,” he said. “Order the entire system to surrender immediately or face imminent destruction. At the same time, send the coded pulse to our agent.”

That would take nearly thirty seconds to arrive. At least that long to return.

That left him time to study her as
Alexandria Station
began to edge around the back of
Ballard
from his emergence point.

Auberon
and her squadron were nestled deep in the gravity well, like ticks on the back of a hunting dog. All the usual suspects were there:
Brightoak
,
Rajput
, and
CR–264
.