Skirmishes (18 page)

“We have none,” Perkins said.

He frowned. “Someone reported casualties. Was that Lynda?”

“She said there were casualties, but none of them were ours,” Kravchenko said. “Apparently there were a lot deaths on the station. Their security’s armor couldn’t handle our weaponry.”

“So, we had no casualties?” Coop had been braced for loss. The fact that they had none made him giddy.

“Um,” Anita said. “Not among the Fleet personnel.”

His stomach turned. “But Boss’s people?”

“No one that we brought,” Anita said.

She raised her head. She was chewing on her lower lip.

“Boss is going to the infirmary, though,” Anita said. “I think you might want to join her.”

“She was injured?” he asked.

“No,” Anita said. “But the rescue—let’s just say that it was only partially successful.”

“Oh.” He ran a hand through his hair. Squishy. He hadn’t really thought about what condition she would be in when she got here. At least they had gotten her off the station.

He looked at the sensors. They had gone dark again. The
Ivoire
was leaving foldspace. He waited until the familiar star map of the Nine Planets region of space appeared before he stood.

“Tell Boss I’m on my way,” he said.

“She didn’t ask for you, Coop,” Yash said gently. “I just figure you should go.”

He let out a small breath. “That bad?” he asked.

Yash nodded.

He closed his eyes. Always, the unexpected result. And Boss would tough her way through it. He understood that well.

He opened his eyes, nodded at Yash, and then left the bridge.

As he did so, he ran a hand against his forehead. At least Boss was back. At least his people had suffered no casualties.

But they had provoked the Empire.

And he had a hunch they had done so for all the wrong reasons.

TWENTY-SEVEN

GROUP COMMANDER Elissa Trekov stood in the Command Center, watching the information pour at her. Someone had managed to destroy all of the Empire’s major research stations. This last station, the most important and the one they thought impregnable, had gone within the last six hours.

Around her, civilian employees with high security clearances sorted through the technical information pouring in from the surviving ships. So far, no one knew how many people had died on that station. What they did know was that some group had gone after the stealth-tech research in particular, although all of the general research had disappeared as well.

Soldiers in uniforms that no one recognized guarded the research station’s doors as the evacuation notice blared, and prevented anyone from leaving with information, no matter how they carried it.

From the reports Elissa was getting, most of the scientists refused to leave without their research and did not manage to board ships before the station got destroyed.

The messages that had come through, some of which contained classified research information, were often heartbreaking, as the scientists realized they would not survive.

Those messages did not come through the communications systems of the station. Those systems had been among the first things destroyed.

From what Elissa could tell, the invaders—whoever they were—took over operations first, shut down command, disabled the shields, shut down the weaponry, and destroyed all of the communications systems except the internal station warning system.

The attack took less than thirty minutes, including an incursion to rescue a prisoner. The rescue had to be the main point of the attack, because those two ships could have come in and destroyed the station, then disappeared again without an evac and without running the risk of letting information out.

Elissa adjusted the sleeves of her uniform. It scratched against her wrists. The skin was still thin there, even though the repair on her hands had gone well.

Some of the other reconstruction done after she nearly died near the Room of Lost Souls hadn’t gone as well. Her face looked mottled when she got angry, because the blood vessels under the skin didn’t work evenly. She could have a dozen more procedures to fix the remaining issues—all cosmetic—and her friends had advised her to do so.

Her appearance had changed greatly since that encounter, and sometimes took people aback. She didn’t look freakish. Her skin was obviously newer in some places, and her hair had gone completely white. She remained thin. The effect of all of that, plus the fact that she rarely smiled any longer, made her seem older than she was.

Her friends also told her she no longer had any softness about her. She might look like a hardass, but that didn’t even begin to cover the way that she felt. She brooked no disagreement, and she expected everyone to do their jobs with no complaint.

She expected the most from herself. She was not going to lose a crew to her own mistakes ever again.

She did not consider what had just happened one of her mistakes. This was a sneak attack, designed, apparently, by the people who had attacked the other research stations.

A successful sneak attack, yes, but not one she could have foreseen.

After the destruction of the other science bases, her staff had reviewed all new hires and found no one with the embarrassing gaps that had existed inside the resumes of those who had attacked the bases.

Most of those attackers had gotten away except for Rosealma Quintana, captured as she headed toward the rebels in the Nine Planets Alliance. Quintana was an interesting case, since she had once been a major researcher for the Empire, but had quit over a variety of issues. Even though some intelligence had shown her to be a terrorist, her research and discovery capability were so famous within the Empire itself that they trumped every political action she had taken.

And before she had destroyed one of the research stations, she had put herself back in the Empire’s good graces by delivery a Dignity Vessel to the Empire. If anything, so many had argued, she was an undercover double-agent working for the Empire.

And those people had been wrong.

Evidence coming out of this latest explosion showed that Quintana had been a prisoner delivered to the research station just a few days before for interrogation by scientists who knew her talents.

Elissa moved from desk to desk, gathering information. She had a staff to report to her, but she also knew that they would filter what they had learned.

And something about this attack disturbed her greatly—more than the loss of lives, more than the loss of the station itself. The methodology bothered her, and she couldn’t quite put her finger on why.

The rescue of Quintana wasn’t it entirely. Sacrificing so much to save one person made no military sense, unless she possessed incredible secrets. However, Quintana had been in custody for days, so theoretically those secrets should have come out.

Although they might have been lost with the vessel that transported her.

A full-sized warship, outfitted with the latest technology, including sensors so sensitive they should have known about the threat long before it ever appeared.

Her people were scanning energy variations inside the region around the station. So far, they were finding nothing.

And that was it.

Her breath caught. She’d experienced this before.

She leaned toward one of the major technicians, a man named Northcutt.

“Confirm this for me,” Elissa said. “We had an information shield around the entire region. An old, but highly advanced shield, composed of monitoring stations and ships.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Northcutt said. “We’re constantly upgrading our technology there. If someone develops a new shield technology, we’ve compensated for it within hours of our discovery of it.”

She nodded, not caring about that last as much as someone else would have expected.

“And there’s no record of these ships arriving through that information shield? No record of their appearance at all?”

“No, ma’am. Not until we got word from the station before communications got shut down.”

Her breath eased out. Only once before had the Empire experienced a ship arriving inside an information shield without leaving a trace. Just once.

And she had nearly died when it happened.

She had never seen the ship, and if her colleagues had had an image of that ship, it had gotten destroyed along with her entire command on that day at the Room of Lost Souls.

But she had seen the transport vessel. She had no visual record of the transport, just her memory of it.

“Do we have images of the transports that landed on the station?” she asked Northcutt.

“Yes, ma’am,” Northcutt said. “And some not-real-clear imagery of the ships, taken by our evacuees as they left. The ships disappeared the moment they fired on the station, so those images aren’t as good.”

She’d seen the first few images. They’d been so poor that it looked like the two ships were part of the debris field.

“I want to see the transports,” she said.

Those images were clear. They’d been sent from the research station the moment it believed it was under threat. Apparently the station hadn’t noticed the two larger ships, or those ships had been cloaked at the moment the transports were launched.

The station did perceive the threat, however, and begged for help.

Which she sent.

Only for the help to arrive in time to pick up survivors and begin mapping the debris field, searching for information and research and problems that might have developed because of the destroyed station.

“We have dozens of images of the transports,” Northcutt said. “What angle do you want to view from?”

“I want to see what you have,” she said. “And I want to see those things in motion as well. And if we have imagery of those soldiers, let me see that.”

Northcutt created a large holographic screen in the center of the room. Three-dimensional images of the soldiers rose first, making Elissa’s breath catch so hard that her chest actually hurt.

She saw those uniforms in her nightmares.

She could feel the color leaching from her face.

Then the transports appeared. Front, back, sides, heading toward the station, and docking. The movement smooth, the transports not cloaked like the one she had seen—as it left, of course.

This time, these soldiers didn’t care if they were seen. She wasn’t sure why, exactly.

“Son of a bitch,” she said.

“What is it, ma’am?”

She couldn’t blurt it out, not here. Not everyone had the right kind of clearance, even though this was a top-secret facility. Only a handful of people knew how the Room of Lost Souls got destroyed. And even fewer knew that a ship came in and obliterated an entire squadron with one shot.

This was a second attack by the exact same people. People whose technology was much greater than anything the Empire had, greater than anything on the Nine Planets, or at least that’s what the Empire’s intelligence told them.

Had the Nine Planets allied with an even greater power somewhere?

The ships might tell her. Two ships. Only two, and they had caused all this damage.

“Do we have better imagery of those ships?” she asked.

“Now we do,” Northcutt said. “The images were pretty shadowy at first, but we’ve put them together and—”

“Just show me,” Elissa said.

A three-dimensional ship floated above the workstation. A three-dimensional
familiar
ship.

“Holy shit,” she said. “That’s a Dignity Vessel.”

“No,” Northcutt said. “It can’t be. It—”

“It is,” said another researcher, a woman whose name Elissa had forgotten. “I’ve been comparing ship images to this one, to see if we knew who these attackers are. And Commander Trekov is right: that’s a Dignity Vessel.”

“We were attacked by two Dignity Vessels?” someone else muttered in disbelief. There was a low murmur throughout the room.

But Elissa felt no disbelief. She had known for a long time that factions now hiding in the Nine Planets Alliance had been taking the wrecks of Dignity Vessels and moving them elsewhere.

She had thought—because the intelligence community had thought—it was for the polymers the ships were designed out of and also for a way to reverse-engineer stealth tech. After all, Rosealma had given that Dignity Vessel to the Empire because—she said at the time—the vessel had active stealth tech, and she didn’t want it in the hands of her former colleagues.

And then, years later, she destroyed stealth-tech research facilities.

Some scientists believed the ghostly death chamber on the Room of Lost Souls was nothing more than another malfunctioning stealth-tech field.

The soldiers that had attacked her four years ago had removed something from the Room, something they had then blown up, and it had destroyed six hundred lives.

One shot.

“Son of a bitch,” she said again.

This wasn’t a new, unknown threat. This was a known threat. The group that had fled to the Nine Planets and set up a research base was farther ahead in stealth-tech research than the Empire had believed.

That group had figured out how to make stealth tech functional, which was how these two Dignity Vessels slipped in and out of information shields.

And the group had also figured out how to turn stealth tech into a weapon.

How could they have gotten so far ahead?

And how could the Empire stop them?

THE STANDOFF

NOW

TWENTY-EIGHT

“CAPTAIN,” PERKINS SAID, “we’re getting a lot of chatter on back channels.”

“Back channels?” he asked.

She nodded, studying the console in front of her. “The Empire ships had been using a dedicated channel to discuss matters, although never once did they truly discuss orders or anything. Now, there’s chatter on a variety of channels, ones normally used by some of the planets on the outer rims. Only the voices, according to our systems, are some of the same voices we’d been recording from this array of ships.”