Paying the Price (Book 5 of The Empire of Bones Saga) (8 page)

“Uh huh. Well, that does make me feel better. Where do I fall on that ranking?”

He made a show of thinking about it. “Not black belt. Sorry. It’s not second nature to you, yet. And you haven’t caught a fly with your chopsticks.”

“You
did
see that movie!”

“Which movie, ma’am?”

Kelsey blinked a moment. She’d said that out loud. “Sorry. I was talking to my resident ghost and got carried away.”

Lieutenant Thompson and the rest of the bridge crew knew about her guest. Jared had decided that they had to. If something went wrong, they might need that knowledge.

It had taken some doing to convince them she wasn’t crazy. Sometimes, she still wasn’t sure.

The officer’s eyes moved to her right. Ned must’ve made himself visible to everyone. Through the ship, he could do that. Maybe that was how he had friends.

“Sorry,” Ned said. “I was teasing her.”

“And you still didn’t answer my question.”

He smiled. “You’re a brown belt for sure. Keep working and you’ll make black by the time we get to Avalon.”

“I hope so. I’d like to have that part of my training squared away. I’m getting tired of Talbot throwing me around the mat when we fight. Well, when my augmentation is turned off, anyway.”

She checked her chrono. “We’ve got almost a full day and it looks like we won’t be stumbling across very many surprises in the next twenty-three hours. Jack, I’ll be in the gym if you need me.”

Chapter Six

Carl Owlet exited the pinnace and floated over to the strange station with light pushes from his grav unit. Because of the extreme radiation, he wasn’t wearing a normal vacuum suit. Not even the marine versions would last more than a few moments here.

Instead, they’d raided the engineering section for suits designed to operate near an exposed fusion plant. That wasn’t the same level of radiation, but tests had shown they’d allow the team to survive in this environment.

The heavy suit restricted his movements, but protected him from the intense radiation flowing from the black hole.

Which wasn’t that far away, really. He had a fabulous view of the accretion disk through the center of the alien ring. It was stunning. He made certain to get some good shots of it with his external vid recorders. They were more powerful and had much higher resolution than his implants.

He wasn’t the first to make the trip. The marines were waiting for him on the surface of the construct. Still, it felt as though he was first on the scene.

“Stop lollygagging and get your skinny butt down here, Carl,” Talbot said.

“On my way, Major. Your exaltedness. Sir.”

“Someone is looking for a round on the mat, I see.”

Carl smiled. His big friend was so easy to predict. His promotion still had him in an odd mental space. Still, he’d best not tease Talbot too much. He didn’t want another marine ready to tie him into knots.

Up close, the station really did look different. The hull material was nothing like what they’d used in the Old Empire. Not only was it completely black, it absorbed every form of radiation they could detect. Discovering what it was would be high on his list of tasks.

He stopped lightly beside Talbot and the rest of the marines floating near the hull of the station. Its bulk obscured the accretion disk and they were in shadow, so they all had their suit lights on. The skin of the station absorbed a lot of that, too.

“Did you find an entrance?” Carl asked.

“Not yet. Since no one reacted to our arrival, I have teams making the rounds in both directions. While we wait, I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“Shoot.”

Carl changed his orientation so he was looking closely at the skin of the station. Rather than a smooth surface, small bumps covered it like a texture. Yeah, definitely not of Imperial manufacture.

Talbot sent him a private message to switch to channel six. Carl opened it, but also continued monitoring the general channel.

“What the hell were you thinking?”

He rolled his eyes. “Is this about the hammer again? Make one damned mistake and you never live it down.”

“Don’t curse.”

“Hello? Pot, this is kettle, over.”

“Yeah, well I’m a grizzled adult and you’re ruining my preconceptions. No, this is about Angela Ellis. You’re getting on the bad side of the wrong person and you need to take a step back before she hurts you.”

Carl shook his head, even though the marine couldn’t see him. He unhooked a small scanner from his belt and began taking readings from the surface of the station.

“I haven’t done anything to that woman. She’s frothing all on her own. I’ll get the kinks worked out of the hammer a lot faster without her breathing down my neck.”

Talbot floated next to him. “You have no idea. She’s a good person, but she has issues when it comes to losing people. We all do, really, but hers are more like an obsession. She’s convinced you’re out to kill Kelsey with your supposed incompetence.”

The marine held up a hand. “I’ve told her you’re the brightest guy on the block, but she got a bad first impression. You need to stop banging heads with her and try a different approach. You’re not going to bulldoze your way through her objections.”

The scanner readings were very odd. Part of the beams never came back. The hull must be absorbing them, too. What he was getting told him two mutually exclusive things.

First, the hull was made of collapsed matter. Not the partial stuff that he’d used on the hammer, but something a lot closer to neutronium. So much so that the beams weren’t penetrating the surface at all.

If that were true, that explained the lack of a battle screen. No radiation would make it through that. Just cutting it would take a hell of a lot of focused energy. If they could do it at all.

Invincible
’s beams would be ineffective. It would require more power in a tighter focus. Well, maybe they would work with time, but the designers had never envisioned long duration shots. And their tightest focus would be useless. It required something much finer, yet more powerful.

Assuming the readings were correct, the mass of the station should be incredible. Here he was floating beside it, but it should have enough pull on its own to anchor him. Not like a planet, perhaps, but maybe a large asteroid. A handful of true neutronium would weigh millions of tons. He’d need to do some calculations before he knew what to expect.

Yet there was nothing. No indication at all that the surface was pulling any of them in. And that was damned odd. It really couldn’t be both ways. He was missing something.

“I wish I had a clue how to hit the reset button,” Carl told the marine. “Major Ellis is all over my ass. And talk about hostile. She threatened to break me into little pieces with Kelsey standing right there.”

“I hope you take what she says seriously,” Talbot said. “She’s pretty pissed about the whole thing.”

“I don’t understand why. There was no way Kelsey was ever getting that version of the hammer. I have a lot more testing to do on it. Hell, I wasn’t even going to tell her about it until the testing was complete.
She
told Kelsey. And now I have to convince the she-bear that it’s safe.”

He looked over at Talbot as he said that last. The marine was smiling. Bastard.

“Look, kid, I get it. I really do. I tried to tell her what a stand-up guy you are and it bounced. She’s got it in her head that you’re a dangerous fellow. It’s up to you to convince her she’s wrong. I can’t help you with that. No one can.”

“I’m doomed.”

Talbot laughed and moved off to confer with the other marines keeping watch. So much for a helping hand.

Carl sighed and glared at his scanner. It wasn’t even giving him a good idea what the texture was for. If they didn’t get inside the thing, they might never find out. At least not before they left to go home.

He hated the idea of someone else making the big discoveries after he came up empty. Maybe he could get a more detailed reading on the skin if he boosted the scanner power and narrowed the focus. A sweeping scan that went up and down the potential frequencies would also increase his odds of getting something meaningful back.

It only took a few moments to change the settings. He held the scanner against the surface of the station and started probing it.

The hull underneath him sank with astonishing speed, yanking him inside the station. He didn’t even have time to yell before the darkness engulfed him.

* * * * *

Angela finished going over the data Owlet had given her about Project Mjölnir. It was insulting. He’d tailored his summary as though she was four. And slow.

His opinion of marines in general, and her in specific, had to be pretty dismal.

Perhaps he didn’t know that officers in the emperor’s service had to have university degrees. Admittedly, hers was in military studies, but she had the ability to grasp other advanced subjects.

She set the summary aside and opened his write-up about the quantum validation theory.

That might have been a mistake.

It quickly arrowed off into science that she didn’t have the background to understand. Not without a lot of study. Time she was unwilling to waste on this one project.

Maybe the computer could help her grasp it. “
Persephone
, if I send you a file on a scientific subject, can you help me understand it?”

“This unit may be able to assist, Major Ellis. It depends on the nature of the theory and how specific your question is.”

She sent the files. “This is classified under my seal. Only Princess Kelsey, Carl Owlet, Doctor Leonard, Admiral Mertz, and I are cleared to know the contents.”

“Understood. Which theory are you looking for clarification on? There are a number of fields that are mentioned.”

“Quantum communication. How does that work?”

“It doesn’t, at least as far as this unit’s databases are concerned. This unit has located several mentions of failed experiments in that line, but none that were able to meaningfully use the quantum entanglement of photons.”

“Then focus on the files I sent. How does it propose the communication to work?”

She leaned back in the chair behind her desk to await what was no doubt going to be a boring lecture in science. She really didn’t need an office, but the privacy would be useful if it put her to sleep.

“The devices use entangled photons and pre-defined arrangements of spin as authentication mechanisms. These units do not directly communicate, strictly speaking. The standard communications units use the spin of the photons to verify a command is authentic.

“Though not directly designed for communication, it may be possible to use them for such. The photon sets are sizable and would allow for significant data throughput. The quantum devices are only capable of communicating with one another in linked pairs. A working range of ten kilometers is given, but this unit finds that claim doubtful.”

Angela sat up, interested. “Doubtful in what way? Are you saying that it doesn’t work?”

“Test results indicate that it did in fact work in a lab setting, but this unit is finding a discrepancy in the range Carl Owlet has verified and what the original scientific theory seems to indicate.

“Carl Owlet has set a working range of ten kilometers. That is unrealistic and does not fit the scope of how entangled particles operate.”

“Okay, what would be a more likely range? Five kilometers? Less?”

“This unit apologizes. Perhaps it did not adequately explain the original theory. Even prior to spaceflight on Terra, the effect of entangled photons were observable at hundreds of kilometers of separation.”

She blinked. “Are you saying someone could control this hammer over a distance of hundreds of kilometers?”

“Negative.”

Angela sighed in relief. “Thank goodness. That would be hard to get my head around. What do you hypothesize the maximum range to be?”

“This unit believes the upper range to be unlimited.”

She must’ve misheard what it said. “Could you expand on that?”

“Theoretically, entangled photons are not bound by distance at all. It should not matter if they are in the same compartment, in different stellar systems, or across the observable universe. The artificial range assigned to the communicator by Carl Owlet does not seem supported in theory.”

She stood slowly. “Are you telling me that he could control that hammer over interstellar distances? That’s ridiculous. If so, why would he only say it worked out to ten kilometers?”

“As designed, control of the hammer requires both the standard communications unit and the quantum validation device. So, the normal communicator limits the range.

“That said, this unit believes that Carl Owlet doubted the scope of his breakthrough. It believes that he incorrectly applied an artificial limitation. Only an actual test of the communications potential can prove or disprove that assertion, however.”

Angela tried to get her head around what the computer was saying. Unlimited communication range? Absurd.

“We’ll leave that aside for the moment. Tell me about the rest of the hammer.”

Hopefully, she wouldn’t find any other glitches in his presentation. This wasn’t looking good at all.

* * * * *

Jared felt like he was floating beside Talbot. He was using the vid feed from one of the other marines to have a conversation with him from his flag bridge, but it was just as though he was there.

“How the hell could he just disappear?”

“Damned if I know, sir. I turned my back for a minute and he was gone. I thought he’d floated around the curve of the station, but he didn’t turn up when we spread out.
Invincible
scanned the entire area looking for him. Nothing. He has to be inside that thing.”

“I thought you didn’t find any airlocks.”

The former non-com growled. “We didn’t. There isn’t a single entrance to this thing. Not one seam we can find. Nothing.”

“Then we’ll need to open the thing up. Try a plasma rifle.”

“No dice. As far as I can tell, it had no effect whatsoever. It didn’t even discolor the skin. We need bigger guns.”