Last of the Immortals (The Jessica Keller Chronicles Book 3) (17 page)

She had eyes in some places, but no hands.

And now it was biting them all in the ass.

Alexandria Station
was turning into a ghost town: just the university police, a few engineers, the saboteur, and her.

Oh, and an Imperial battle fleet coming to kill her.

Chapter XXVII

Date of the Republic June 7, 394 Ladaux

Because it was a public forum by one of the most distinguished committees in the Senate, something that happened so rarely, seats were hard to come by. Because he was the presiding officer of the Senate, Tadej pulled rank and shamelessly stole two chairs from friendly journalists in the balcony, with a promise of favors to be had later. That the lovely woman on his arm just happened to be the President of the Republic, albeit in mufti today, just added to the feeling of cloak and dagger.

Below him, the Committee was in high dudgeon.

Opening statements were usually dry, boring affairs, frequently rambling and verging on incoherence, as politicians used them to score points in the official journals of the Senate when nobody could argue with them later. Arcane and obtuse. Today was different, perhaps, only in the scale and scope of the proposed bloodletting, from the itinerary of speakers.

It was a Who’s Who of the Noble Lords who happened to be in the vicinity of
Ladaux
or, as Nils liked to class them,
fools on the beach
. Well–connected, but people Nils did not want commanding warships and fleets if he could avoid it.

Today, they looked to be set to pay the First Lord back personally. Certainly, knives in the darkness.

Working up the chain of self–imposed importance, the chairman of the committee, Senator Tennerick, had gone last. He was finally done, one hoped.

Now the fun would begin.

“The committee will call its first witness,” Tennerick began, bellowing into the microphone before him unnecessarily. “First Fleet Lord Bogdan Loncar.”

Loncar.

He had certainly dressed for the affair, wearing his best dress uniform, the one with all the medals and ribbons that made him look so pretty. Nils had explained to Tadej once, over brandy, that proper officers wore no more than a half–dozen of their most treasured ribbons and tags, in spite of being entitled to perhaps scores.

Loncar looked like a preening peacock. Then he opened his mouth and sounded like one as well.

“Members of the Senate,” Loncar’s whiny voice began. “I come before you today with great misgivings about the state of our beloved fleet. A state that can be laid at the feet of one man, someone who brought us here, to the very precipice of ruin, with this arrogance and blindness…”

“My dear,” Tadej leaned over and whispered to the woman seated next to him. “I have already heard enough. I warned them not to try me over this.”

He rose, offering her a hand, not that she needed it. Calina Szabolski might be the President of the Republic, but she had been a professional cyclist when she was young, and she retained the erect carriage and muscles of her youth. The shoulder–length silver–gray hair and piercing green eyes just accentuated everything about her.

She smiled a secret smile as she rose and took his elbow.

Tadej studied the tableau below him.

The movement of standing had somehow gotten Tennerick’s attention. They locked eyes across the grand auditorium.

Tennerick smiled at him like a wolf spying a chicken.

We shall just see, shall we
?

Silence passed as he and Calina exited the chamber and were surrounded by a bevy of security personnel, both his and hers.

“Tad,” she finally whispered after they turned a few corners and went down a back flight of stairs. “You aren’t going to do anything stupid, are you?”

“Why, Calina?” he said with mock surprise. “You know me.”

“Yes,” she agreed grimly, but with a soft smile. “I’ve known you for twenty years. You have that look about you.”

“Indeed,” he whispered back. “Might I suggest that you remain close to your office and staff this afternoon? It’s been brewing for some time with that man. Perhaps we should just lance that boil and be done with it.”

She glared at him sidelong, but remained silent as they approached his outer office.

“Madame President, I must depart here. Thank you for a lovely morning. Perhaps we will be able to do a proper lunch sometime very soon.”

Calina curtsied with a quiet giggle. “Premier Horvat. I await the news of the day with bated breath. Try not to ruin the carpets with your blood–letting?”

And then she was gone in a cloud of professional security folks and jasmine perfume.

Tadej watched her depart for a second with a smile, before his face transformed into something utterly terrible. He took a second to return to a neutral smile before entering his office. His staff had done nothing to fear him.

Stacia looked up from her paperwork as he entered. After a moment, her eyes widened and her rich, dark skin paled.

Perceptive. Bright woman. She has a future around here.

“Stacia,” he said simply. “Please notify everyone to be in my office immediately, prepared to go to a war footing.”

“On it,” she said, reaching for the comm. Calm, cool, professional, prepared.

Yes, she would do nicely
.

Ξ

The Premier of the Senate was a job with perks. One of them was a large staff. Fortunately, he had an even larger office, so they weren’t all cheek in jowl as they faced him.

He turned to the woman who was currently serving as his chief of staff, the regular denizen of that office off skiing somewhere cold and lovely. There was no dead weight on his staff. Another perk.

“Please send out a notice to all the Senator’s offices that there will be an extra–ordinary session of Question and Answer today, starting in two hours. Make sure you have someone personally deliver a written invitation and notification to the leader of the Loyal Opposition. Stacia would be a good person to handle that task.”

He could almost feel her blush from where she was half–hidden in a corner. But her instincts on this had gotten him here ahead of everyone else. She deserved a reward.

“Done,” the woman replied. “Next?”

“Vacations are not going to be cancelled, at least not by me, but things are going to get interesting around here tomorrow, so you might all begin to rethink your fall plans.”

A few faces got closed and canny. Old hands who understood tides. Most of the staff would catch on soon enough.

Again, he had a head start.

Tadej intended to play that edge mercilessly.

Chapter XXVIII

Date of the Republic June 14, 394 Jumpspace, Edge of the Ballard system

“Stand by to crash launch,” Jessica said to her flag centurion.

He nodded at her and continued to monitor all of the comm channels.

Auberon
shivered like a wet dog, for just a moment.

Some people claimed that they couldn’t feel the transition into and out of Jumpspace. For Jessica, it was always like diving into a pool of warm water. Not painful. Not shocking. Just a transition from being dry to being wet, at least in her head.

This time, the whole squadron had dropped in together, after a very brief layover a few light–years away.

Plotting that jump had been an exercise in caution. Jessica could just imagine what it would have been like if she and the Red Admiral had managed to pick the same place to rendezvous.

There were really only ten or twelve systems, if you wanted a star handy to navigate by. She could imagine having a dozen ships all arrive, strung out like pearls on a necklace, fighting as soon as they emerged. It would have been mayhem.

She might have gotten lucky and had her whole team organized as Imperial vessels arrived one at a time to be gobbled up, but the gods of luck had not been smiling on
Aquitaine
.

Or maybe they were. Nobody had been there. Hopefully, she had gotten here first as well.

“Flag bridge, Sensors,” Centurion Giroux called from the main bridge. “I have a signal from
CR–264
and Kigali. No Imperials have arrived yet. And he notes a need for priority communication when we get close enough.”

“Understood,” she replied. “As soon as everyone is ready, we’ll hop down to the edge of the gravity well and rendezvous with him. We’ll outrun any signal we send now.”

Jessica pulled up a display of the system, updating in real time as
Auberon
’s sensors took a deep drink from the river of data flowing around them.
Ballard
sitting quietly at the center.
Alexandria Station
overhead. Very little orbital traffic to be seen.

It looked calm, peaceful, serene. Especially considering the hell that was going to erupt at any moment.

Ξ

Jessica sat at the head of the flag bridge table and digested everything Tomas Kigali had covered in his briefing. The faces of her command staff and various senior officers, present either physically or as electronic ghosts from their own bridges, evinced more shock, but there were knowing nods around the table as well. This wasn’t their first rodeo, or even their first encounter with the Red Admiral. Most of the people here had met him.

Hell, the man had even sat at this table just months ago, for a briefing during the Promenade, at
Bunala
. He was something of a known quantity to Denis, Robertson, Tomas, Alber’ and the rest.

Jessica glanced over at Arott Whughy.

Most of the team.

Stralsund
was still something of a wild card. At least the man was taking the time to listen and understand before asserting himself and asking questions. In any other situation, he would have been in command. And probably done a credible job.

Probably.

The Red Admiral was her daemon to slay.

“We’ll assume Wachturm will appear at any time,” Jessica said into the silence. “All crews will return to normal rotations, but be prepared to come to battle stations at any moment. If we stay deep enough inside the gravity well, we’ll have at least twenty to thirty minutes warning when he appears.”

“What about Centurion Kermode, Commander?” Kigali asked with a strange lilt to his voice.

Jessica let a single raised eyebrow ask for her.

“I mean,” he continued, “we’ve probably done as much
Mischief
as we can at this point, short of just making more of everything, right?”

“Correct,” Jessica agreed. “No point in taking any systems apart right now when we might need them in ten minutes.”

“Right, but I have a system that needs to be put back together, and I figure she’s exactly the right person for it.”

“What’s broken on
CR–264
?” Oz spoke up from his corner of the conference table. His tone suggested harsh words for that vessel’s chief engineer in the near future.

“Oh, it’s not me,” Kigali quickly countered. “Suvi needs our help. She’s in a bind.”

“The
Sentience
?” Jessica asked. The briefing had covered the damage to the communications systems. Station personnel should be able to handle fixing that.

Why did he need Moirrey?

Kigali’s voice sounded like she was a person to him, rather than a force of nature. But that was how Jessica always thought of her.

“Yeah,” he replied. “We’ve talked a lot, her and me, and she has some peculiar needs. The folks on the station won’t have the array fixed for at least another week, doing it their way. I figure Moirrey can pull some sort of rabbit out of her hat. She’s good at that.”

That got a round of chuckles from the table. Moirrey’s rabbits had kept them all alive. Hopefully, they would continue to do so.

“What have you promised her?” Jessica asked.

“Only that I would ask, boss. The
Declaration of Martial Law
has your name on it, at the end of the day.”

Jessica felt her face grow serious and stern.

“I’ll talk to both of them,” she said, before turning to the newest member of the team.

She studied Whughy for a moment. He was tall and athletic, lean in ways similar to Kigali. Probably smarter. Certainly more serious in his overall approach to life. Well–trained, and well–recommended by the First Lord.

She was afraid he was going to be too hidebound for what was coming. But she needed the big guns right now.

“Is
Stralsund
prepared?” she asked. No more than that.

He nodded to her, almost as serious.

“If I read between the lines in the various briefing materials correctly, Commander,” he responded, “you expect that we’ll be wrestling a bear and trying to kill it with a pocket knife. Or perhaps, peeling an onion with a dull spoon, depending on the sequence of engagements. Lots of tears and blood before the task is done.” He nodded at her again. “
Stralsund
will hold.”

He paused for a moment, turning to look at the rest of the people present before returning to her.

“Can we win?” he asked.

“He’s not doing this just to attack us, Whughy,” Jessica said. “Or even
Ballard
. This isn’t a simple battle for control of a planetary system,
Stralsund
. This is an attack on everything the
Republic of Aquitaine
stands for.”

She paused to take in the others. The rest of her team was calm, but with her one hundred percent. They had been there. Most of them knew the next words that were coming out of her mouth.

“If we fail, we will have died trying.”

Chapter XXIX

Date of the Republic June 7, 394 Ladaux

Q & A was probably the actual beating heart of the Republic, regardless of what some historians and political experts might want to tell you. Tadej relished the time spent fencing verbally with the head of the Loyal Opposition in such a public forum.

It was almost better than sex, some days.

Tadej had diverged from custom today. Normally, he was entitled to enter the auditorium last, making the other Senators stew in their juices awaiting him, at least metaphorically.