The Void War (Empire Rising Book 1) (13 page)

During his exile, James had also been happy to note that Andrea’s business had been slowly growing. His Dukedom was still her largest client but she had been steadily building up a long list of medium size clients. This also benefited James as he had provided Andrea with a large part of her startup capital. He was a silent partner in her business.

Before closing the report, he wrote a quick message to her. He wanted to let her know that she was to reinvest his reward for the discovery of the Void back into the companies that would be awarded the development rights. That was as far as he could go without coming close to a charge of insider trading. Technically, he was not telling her to invest any of their personal wealth. The RSN reward scheme allowed recipients to reinvest a percentage of their reward back into the system they discovered at attractive rates. Often this opportunity wasn’t taken up but James knew valstronium had been discovered there. He had a feeling the Void was going to become very profitable. He hoped Andrea would be able to read between the lines and direct more of his wealth towards the Void as opportunities arose.

The COM unit on his desk began to flash, telling him that a low priority message was awaiting his attention from the bridge. Activating the COM unit he contacted the officer on watch, thankful for the distraction. “Lieutenant Fisher, there is a message for me?”

“Yes sir, an intelligence officer showed up at the docking hatch with
Vulcan
. He said he had a message for your eyes only. He passed on a datapad; it’s waiting for you at your command chair. Apparently the datapad has to link into the chair for it to activate,” Fisher explained.

“Thank you Lieutenant, I’ll be up presently.”

As curiosity got the better of him he abandoned the report he was reading and headed for the bridge.

Despite the tensions between the spacefaring powers because of the colonial race, the First Interstellar Expansion Era was one of relative peace. Devoid of the interspecies commotion, dread and often panic that would over shadow the end of the First Interstellar Expansion Era, the public of the Human Sphere loved a scandal. In Britain the politicians and nobility were almost always at the center of this attention.

-Excerpt from Empire Rising, 3002 AD

13
th
January 2465. HMS
Drake
, docked at
Vulcan
shipyard.

James had debated putting on the dress uniform he had worn in New York, in the end he had settled for his standard Commander’s tunic. The intelligence officers probably wouldn’t want him drawing too much attention to himself. The datapad had summoned him to a secret meeting aboard the starbase
Gemini
.
Gemini
was a semi-independent starbase, used by shipping lines to load and unload shipments of cargo and passengers. As it was in geosynchronous orbit over Europe, it mainly served the European powers. Britain had a substantial stake in the starbase and operated some of its private levels. Even so, it was strange that he had to leave
Vulcan
to have a meeting with RSNI.

The message he had received last night said a shuttle would be waiting for him in shuttle bay seven
on board
Vulcan
. It also stipulated that he was to leave
Drake
at exactly 0700 hours and head straight for the shuttle bay.

As James walked through the docking hatch, he though it strange that the RSNI security detail was nowhere to be seen. Officially in place to protect
Drake
from infiltrators who may try to steal her information about the Void, they also ensured that no one from
Drake
could leak the same information. Shrugging, he walked the fifteen minutes to shuttle bay seven.

Inside the shuttle bay there was only one shuttle. A single pilot sat in the cockpit, wearing a tight fitting non-descript uniform. Her size and demeanor lead James to think she was some kind of security officer. On their flight over to
Gemini
he couldn’t get any information out of her confirming his suspicions.

As they docked, again in a deserted docking bay, and another similarly dressed officer escorted him into an adjacent meeting room. There he was told to wait and someone would be in to see him shortly. At this point James was beginning to get nervous. He had never heard of the RSNI acting this way. If Admiral Russell or one of his subordinates wanted to see him they could have just met in
Vulcan
or ordered him to the Ripley buildings; the ground offices of the Admiralty in London.

The whine of the door opening alerted James that someone had finally come to see him and he quickly turned to see who it was. All his apprehension fled. In less than a second he was on his feet and rushing towards the figure that had just entered the room. Reaching out his arms he caught her as she threw herself upon him.

“It has been too long,” James heard her whisper as she buried her face in his shoulders.

After almost two minutes James gently prized her off his shoulder. Holding her face, he looked down into her eyes and smiled the widest smile of his life. Slowly he leaned in and gently kissed her lips. As he began to pull back she reached over his shoulder and placed her hand on the back of his head. Forcefully, she pulled his lips back towards hers.  At the same time she moved her own lips up to kiss him with a vigor that startled him.

She placed her other hand on James’ chest and began to guide him backwards, never breaking their kiss. Before James knew it, he had fallen back into a seat and she was above him straddling his legs. After another few moments of passionate kissing this time she broke the embrace. Looking down at James she mimicked his smile from before and then moved in to kiss him even more passionately.

Forty five minutes later James sat with Princess Christine Anne Elizabeth Windsor, second in line to the British throne, on his lap. He was slightly embarrassed that they had let their passions get the better of them. They were in a public meeting place after all. But even so he had no regrets, it had been two years since he had last held the love of his life.

“There were times when I lost all hope of seeing you again. Two years in a survey ship out beyond Cambridge felt like an eternity away. How did you manage to pull this off?”

Before answering Christine gave him another hug. “I had begun to despair too. I thought my father would keep you out there until your ship broke apart from rust.”

Smiling devilishly she continued, “The head of my security thinks I am meeting a daughter of an American senator who wanted my advice. I told him she was in some personal trouble that was of a delicate nature. I managed to get him to order his subordinates to allow me to arrange a meeting without them knowing expressly who it was with. As long as you were unarmed they were to let you in.”

At the last sentence her cheeks had reddened slightly. “I’m afraid they insisted on having a live video stream of the room to make sure I remained safe.”

“What?” James asked with incredulity as he looked around the room. “You mean someone has been watching us the whole time?”

This time her cheeks really reddened. “I didn’t think we would get so carried away but moment got the better of me!” She said as her devilish grin returned.

“But if someone was watching your father will eventually find out. There is no way you can stop all of your security detail from talking.” James warned.

“Don’t you see though? Everything has changed.” Christine countered. “We don’t need to fear my father anymore. Yes, everyone knows your name,” she delicately said trying to avoid saying James’ father’s name. “Yet now they know it for a different reason. Your face is on all the news outlets as the one who discovered the Void. You are already making a new name for yourself. You could take your reward from making the discoveries, reinvigorate the businesses your father ran into the ground and re-establish the Dukedom of Somerville as a major economic force. My father would have to take you seriously then.”

Stroking her hair, James ran his hand down to her neck. Hanging there she had a heart shaped locket. James opened it to reveal a small picture of a red rose.

“You still have it?” He asked her.

“Of course my love. No one will ever take it from me.”

“Good,” he replied with a smile as he leaned in to gently kiss her again. “I’m afraid I have already met your father since my return. He and the Prime Minister came to my uncle’s office to hear my report. It certainly didn’t seem like he has changed his mind. In fact, he went out of his way to let me know nothing has changed.”

Christine bowed her head to stare at the ground for a moment. As James watched, a small tear left her eye and ran down her cheek to touch her mouth. Wiping her cheek she gritted her teeth and looked back at James.

“My father is a stubborn man but that just means we have to be stubborn too. One way or another he is going to have to realize that what we have isn’t going to pass in a month, a year, or even a decade. He can send you to the outer reaches of space again if he wants but I promise you, I’m not going to give up on us.”

James couldn’t stop himself from kissing her again. He didn’t care who was watching, this might be his last chance to see her in person before her father tried to part them again.

When their lips parted, Christine tried a different approach. “Maybe you could retire from the navy. You could invest in the Void; become the champion of our colonial efforts there. That would get you world recognition and praise. If you made a success of one of the colonies you would get a lot of political power as well. That way our marriage would be advantageous to my father. I know what he is thinking. He wants me to marry for politics, not for love.” As she spoke Christine clenched her fists, betraying the suppressed anger that had been building up over the years. There had been countless arguments between her father and her about her future, even before she had met James.

“Never worry my love.” James soothed her. “We’ll figure something out. If I can continue to progress up the chain of command, your father will have to take me seriously.”

“I know,” she said. “But we have already been waiting for years. How much longer are we going to have to wait? I want to start our life together now, not in ten years.”

Silence descended on the room as they both held each other, thinking of the future. After more than ten minutes of just enjoying being so close, Christine spoke up. “Let’s talk about something different. Tell me about the last two years. Are you enjoying commanding a spaceship?”

James didn’t reply immediately as he reflected on the last two years. His feelings about the RSN were constantly changing, initially, when his father had sent him to the RSN academy, he had looked on the whole experience as a joke. He had grown up as the second son of one of the wealthiest nobles in all of Britain. He had always dreamed of having a bigger role to play in the world than serving as a Lieutenant out in the far reaches of space. Slowly over the four years of training he had come to see that there was a much stronger sense of family in the RSN than he had ever experienced at home. He was actually able to earn the respect of his tutors and, in time, develop real friendships with them and his classmates. Indeed, it was through his tutors that he also began to see the significance of the RSN and the pride that ran through it. In reality, the navy was the only thing standing between a continued British presence in space with all the wealth and freedom that came with it and another space power coming in and taking everything Britain had spent the last four hundred years building.

Then, as he had spent his first two years after graduating aboard HMS
Percy
as an ensign he had his first taste of real responsibility. Growing up, his entire life had been one big party where he was always at the center. In hindsight James knew he had been a spoilt brat. What the academy had not been able to drive out of him, the Captain of HMS
Percy
had finished; he had ruthlessly forced his new ensigns to grow up and live up to the responsibilities they had been entrusted with. For the first time in his life, James had found himself actually feeling like he was doing something worthwhile.

After attaining his promotion to Sub Lieutenant James’ responsibilities had continued to grow. It was only then he had seriously begun to consider the possibility of continuing a long-term career in the navy. That had only been cemented when he met Christine. He had fallen in love overnight and James knew that if he were to have a serious chance of marrying her he would need to be seen as a respectable consort to a princess, even if she was only second in line to the throne. His party boy past would not have been acceptable and so throwing himself into the navy gave him his best chance of getting what he wanted.

When the news of his father’s misdeeds had broken, the navy had also offered him a refuge. Aboard the battlecruiser HMS
Lion,
where he had reached the lofty rank of Third Lieutenant his family problems hadn’t changed anything. His colleagues and subordinates already knew and respected him as an officer. His father’s fraud and subsequent suicide had meant he had not been able to set foot anywhere on Earth without being surrounded by journalists. Only in the navy had he found peace and normality when the rest of Britain was calling for answers and even that justice be dished out to the rest of the Somerville family.

Then Christine’s father had found out about their relationship. Even if the navy had still respected James, the nobility had done everything they could to distance themselves from his father. James and his older brother Richard had become toxic overnight. No one wanted to be seen with them, for it immediately brought up all the images of corruption and greed the nobility went to great lengths to disassociate from their public images. Christine’s father had been no exception, for within days of finding out about their relationship he had pulled enough strings to get James promoted to Commander, given
Drake
and sent off on a two year cruise out far beyond civilization and the public eye. That had soured his view of the navy. Suddenly those who he had respected and admired had become the ones who had allowed themselves to be manipulated and used to punish an up and coming officer, simply because of who his father was. In those first dark months James had begun to think that everything he had believed about the navy had just been a façade. Behind the sense of duty and the camaraderie, it appeared that the Admiralty was just as corrupt and self-serving as the nobility. In those months, he had become disillusioned with everything; even the prospect of a future with Christine had seemed distant.