Ghosts of Empire (Book 4 of The Empire of Bones Saga) (36 page)

The coordinator’s tech woman ran behind the desk. “The computer is wiped, but the basic system controls are still intact. I think I can—”

A loud alarm began wailing outside the door. The tech looked smug. “Fire alarm. It won’t get them far, but it’s better than nothing.”

Coordinator West rubbed her wrists and stood as soon as she was free. “Abigail used the secret escape route in this office. I know where it lets out. I need some people to get me there fast in whatever grav vehicle we can find. We might be able to get the code from her.”

Sean pulled out his Fleet com. “I need a pinnace on the roof right now with two squads of marines. Eliminate the defensive positions and pick up Coordinator West. Take her wherever she wants to go. And fall back ASAP. There’s an armed nuke in the building on a short timer. Ten minutes.”

They reversed course and made their way back toward the rotunda. Muted explosions outside told him the marines were carrying out his orders.

The tech came up beside him. “I think I know where the bomb is. If we can get to it, I might be able to disarm it.”

“What are you?” he asked. “Some kind of vid hero? How can you do all this stuff?”

“Years of hacking everything that can be hacked. And some things that supposedly can’t. No matter how well shielded this thing is, there’ll be radiation. If they wanted to keep that under wraps, the only place that makes sense is the vault.”

“Vault? Like in a bank vault?”

She nodded. “Pretty much. It’s under the rotunda.”

Olivia smiled grimly. “That would be just like her.” She ducked into an office and wrote something on an important looking piece of paper. “Here’s the door code.”

Sean grabbed the marine armorer. “We might be able to get to the nuke. Can they be disarmed?”

The marine nodded. “If it’s not too complex or booby-trapped. It’s possible.”

“Come with me. Everyone else, go with the coordinator.”

* * * * *

The pinnaces dropped out of the clouds right on top of the station. Kelsey could clearly see it on the visual scanners as they fell toward it. She waited for it to open fire, or for one of the battlecruisers to blast them, but nothing happened.

Right before they hit the station, the pilots savagely decelerated and clamped onto the hull. The ramp went down and a marine tossed out a magnetic breaching charge. Once the ramp was back up, they remotely detonated it.

The shock wave shook the pinnace badly, but didn’t dislodge them. The marines lowered the ramp again and poured out of the pinnace. They made it into the station without any problems and bypassed the closest emergency containment doors.

She expected an alarm to be sounding, but it was quiet inside. There was computer access, but it rejected her attempts to interface.

“Talbot, take your men and block access to battlecruisers one and two,” she ordered. “Lieutenant Evans, you have three and four. I’ll find the station command center.”

“On it,” Talbot said. “Keep your head down, Princess. We have unfinished business.”

She grinned and led her team deeper into the station. There were no markings to indicate where anything was. She’d just have to assume that the control center was somewhere in the central shaft.

They took to the stairs to make sure no one ambushed them in the lifts. Somewhere in the distance, she heard the sound of flechette rifles firing.

“This is team three,” a voice said. “We’re encountering hostile fire from the docking port to battlecruiser three. Men without combat armor. We’re going in.”

A few moments later, teams four and one called in. They’d gained access to battlecruisers one and four without resistance. Those ships seemed to be in standby mode. Main power was offline.

Talbot called in last. “We’re getting fire from battlecruiser two. Nothing serious. We’re going in.”

“This is team three. We’re in. The battlecruiser also seems to be in standby mode. Main power offline. We’re starting our sweep.”

“Talbot here. Battlecruiser two is online. Main power active. We’re heading for engineering.”

Kelsey keyed her com. “Teams one, three, and four, if you do not encounter resistance, detach your reserves to assist team two. Lock down your engineering spaces to keep the main systems offline.”

A stream of acknowledgements flowed back to her. If only one of the battlecruisers was active, they might be able to win this even if it got away.

“
Persephone
, this is Bandar. Three of the battlecruisers seem to be offline. We’re securing them. Be ready if the last one gets away.”

“Copy,” Jared said. “We’re not seeing any action from the station above us, so I’m going to leave it be. If the battlecruiser breaks away, we’ll take it out. We’d have already opened fire on it, but the station raised battle screens as soon as you breached it. It’s brought targeting scanners online, too. That means it’ll lay into us as soon as we act. Do what you can to stop it from detaching.”

“We’ll do our best. Bandar out.”

That was about the time that the stairwell door below them opened and men poured in. They immediately opened fire on her.

* * * * *

Olivia raced to the roof of the council building and met the marine pinnace as it came roaring in for a landing. The far side of the roof was on fire. It looked as though something had exploded. She ran up the ramp as soon as it came down with the rest of the infiltration team at her heels.

“I need to talk to the pilot,” she told the man with the headset. “To show him where to go.”

“This way, ma’am.”

He led her through a door at the front of the pinnace and to a small compartment where the two pilots sat.

One of them, a woman, looked over her shoulder. “Sit down at the flight engineer’s console and tell me which way to go.”

There was only one seat open, so Olivia sat and looked at the map the woman had put on display for her. “Go south. You’re looking for a warehouse near the edge of the city. I’ll find it before we get there. Make it fast. We don’t have much time.”

“Roger that.”

The woman turned and touched the controls. The pinnace lifted smoothly into the air and blasted forward, crushing Olivia into her seat with acceleration. Now she knew how thrilled and terrified her driver must’ve felt when he got to go fast.

She tore her attention away from the pinnace and studied the map. Whoever had designed and installed the escape route used one of the city’s old grav train links. The line now terminated at a warehouse.

“I have it.”

“Excellent. Touch it on the screen.”

Olivia touched the warehouse on the map.

The pilot was silent a moment. “I have it. There look to be two normal ways in. A cargo loading area and a personnel door.”

“There’s a disabled lift in the office area on the south side,” Olivia said. “Only, it’s not disabled. It leads down to a train station. My implants can open it and control the lift.”

The pilot spoke softly, probably to the marines. Then she nodded. “Let me land the pinnace so you can approach from the street.”

She brought the pinnace down and the marine that had brought Olivia up to the flight deck escorted her back out.

The heavily armed marines surrounded her as she made her way into the building. The lift opened to her implant command. Half a dozen marines went in with her and pushed her behind them. That seemed fair. They had all that armor.

She sent the lift down to the station below. The doors opened just in time for the train carrying Abigail to pull to a stop.

The doors on the vehicle slid open and Abigail ran out, only to freeze when she saw all the weapons pointed at her.

“I’ll wager this comes as a shock,” Olivia said. “Don’t you villains ever learn?”

“But…How could you…I left you…”

Olivia held out her hand to the nearest marine. “May I borrow your pistol?”

The man handed her a flechette pistol that she could barely get her fingers around. It felt as though it weighed a ton.

“I don’t have time to blather. Give me the code to disarm the nuclear device.”

“Go screw yourself.”

Olivia shot her in the leg. The pistol kicked harder than she’d expected. A big splotch of blood appeared on the other woman’s leg and she fell down screaming.

“Is that enough or shall I shoot you in the other leg?”

Abigail snarled at her. “You can go to hell. I’ve already killed millions and you’ll just shoot me anyway.”

Olivia thought about that for a moment and nodded. “I think you’re right.” She raised the pistol and pointed it at the other woman’s head. “I should shoot you dead, but then I’d have to live with that memory in my head. I’ll just have to settle for something else.”

She smashed the barrel of the weapon across Abigail’s face, breaking her nose. Far less satisfying, but not as cold as an on the spot execution.

“We need to go, ma’am,” the marine said, gently taking his pistol back from her. “The LT says we only have five minutes to get clear of the area. If Commander Meyer can’t stop the bomb, we don’t want to be here when it goes off.”

She let them hustle her and their sobbing prisoner back into the lift and prayed the commander was able to stop the looming atrocity.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Jared listened to the chatter between the teams with mixed emotions. They’d completely surprised the enemy, that was for sure. Three of the four battlecruisers were powered down and drawing needed resources from the station.

That was good. That was
great
.

Except for the fact that the last one was on internal power and coming to life. That was bad.
Very
bad.

The bad guys must’ve focused their attention on that one. It made sense. A completely functional warship of that size would have a very good chance of taking out every mobile vessel in this system. It could certainly defend this planet from all attacks while they took their time getting the other three ready to fight, especially with the armed station above it.

Kelsey and the rest had an excellent chance of taking everything else intact. All that left for him to do was figure out how to defeat a ship the size and power of
Courageous
with a damaged Marine Recon vessel. One with only two operational beam weapons and no missiles at all.

“The operational battlecruiser has detached from the station,” Lieutenant Brand said. “It raised battle screens before it exited the stations cover. They appear to be opening the range from the station, but are not accelerating much at all.”

“Can we penetrate their screens with our beams,
Persephone
?”

“Yes, Admiral. However, the amount of damage this vessel can cause is limited and its battle screens are significantly weaker than those of a battlecruiser. One direct salvo will likely destroy this vessel.”

They needed a bigger weapon. Well, it just so happened that they had one. He opened a ship-wide channel. “All hands, this is Admiral Mertz. I want all non-essential personnel to go to the rescue pods and stand by. When I give the order, the rest of you will have thirty seconds to join them. Slave all controls to the bridge. I’ll eject you when the time is right. It’s been an honor.”

That seemed entirely too much like the speech he’d given on
Invincible
earlier.

“Lieutenant Brand, lay in a course to ram the battlecruiser in the engineering section. If we can disable their drives, it won’t be a threat anymore.”

“Aye, sir. I’ll need to move us around to a better approach vector. It will only take a—”

She leaned forward and stared at her console. “Explosion on the battlecruiser. Something big in the engineering section.”

Jared tapped into the scanner feed. It was a damned big explosion. Now there were large secondary blasts ripping the aft section of the ship into chunks. Its grav drives failed and it began falling.

That’s when he saw a pinnace detach from the hull of the doomed battlecruiser. It looked damaged, too.

“We’re receiving a transmission,” Brand said.

The overheads came to life. “
Persephone
, this is Talbot. We’ve disengaged from the battlecruiser, but we took some damage. A hand would be really nice because our drive just failed.”

The pinnace arced downward and disappeared into the clouds below the station. It didn’t have the strong hull a battlecruiser did. The pressure would quickly crush it.

“Take us after it,” Jared ordered. He hoped they could catch it before the pressure did their own compromised hull fatal damage. If that happened, they’d all die.

* * * * *

The bomb was right where the tech suspected. On any other day, he’d stare at all the art and baubles packed into the small room. Today he only had eyes for the oblong weapon set on top of an ancient, hand-carved chest.

Sean stared at the complex bundles of wires and controls on the nuclear weapon with apprehension. Especially when the armorer shook his head.

“No way,” the man said. “I can’t defuse that in five minutes.”

The tech attached her computer to it. “Maybe we can disable the anti-tampering mechanisms. It’s not as if we have much to lose. We can’t get far enough away to survive the blast anyway.”

Feeling like a third wheel, Sean watched the two of them work feverishly. The countdown clock was racing toward zero and still time seemed to flow like molasses.

At fifty-three seconds, the tech shouted in triumph. “I’ve disabled the anti-tampering features!”

“Can you disarm it?”

The marine shook his head. “No, but I’ll keep trying.”

That’s when the solution hit Sean. “Can we accidentally set it off?”

“No.”

“Put the spare breaching charge on it and run like hell.”

The man gaped at him for a second, whipped off his pack, and pulled out the spare charge. He fiddled with the controls and slid it under the bomb. “Out! We need to close the vault to maximize the damage.”

That was probably going to piss off a number of wealthy and powerful people. He could live with that.