End of Empire
By
UCSBdad
Disclaimer: As usual, I own none of this. Rating: K. Time: Centuries after my stories beginning with The Pilot.
"What's the second thing?" Rick asked.
"King Tal apparently has three allies with him. Some human and some non-human. They've devised a code so they can all talk to each other. Not a very sophisticated code. It wouldn't take Imperial code breakers any time at all to crack it."
"So, no reason to head back to the Empire?"
"No, sir."
"Have we figured out where the message drone was going? That's probably where King Tal's fleet is."
Short Tail brought up a hologram.
"The enemy scout came from this solar system, tagged as System Alpha, based on their FTL wake. And the drone headed to this solar system, tagged as System Bravo."
"Okay, we'll sneak up on System Bravo and see what's there. Then maybe we'll look in on System Alpha."
As usual, they came out of FTL just outside the Oort cloud and used their sub-light engines to move closer. They also used passive sensors so as not to alert King Tal and his merry men.
"I count a hundred and seven warships and thirteen transports, probably carrying troops, but maybe also carrying extra weapons, spare parts, food and whatnot. There is one interesting ship. Here."
Short Tail brought up a holo which showed the vague outline of a ship.
"Okay, what's so special about that one?" Rick asked.
"It's one hundred percent Imperial technology. I'd say it's a Roxalani ship that's defected to the barbarians."
"I hope the whole damned Roxalani fleet hasn't defected." Beau said.
"Unlikely." Rick said. "Roxalani intelligence had a pretty good handle on the people who wanted to join the barbarians in looting the Empire. Since that Roxalani had to run this far to be safe, I'd imagine the fleet as a whole stayed loyal."
"We hope." Short Tail muttered.
"Okay. We'll head back to System Alpha."
They found System Alpha had no habitable worlds. It was probably just a convenient place for Tal and his allies to meet up.
"We found what?" Castle asked.
"Shit." Said Short Tail with a smile. "They apparently discharged their waste tanks here before heading for the Empire. About half the waste is from humans, the rest from non-humans. There's also a lot of junk they tossed out floating around in space."
"They have some truly awful alcoholic beverages." Beau added. "They tossed out a few bottles that were unopened. Either by accident or because they knew how bad it was. I didn't actually drink any, I just analyzed it."
'Okay, we'll head for Timisoara and see what a metal poor planet can produce."
As usual, they left Zephyr behind in the depths of interstellar space where no one was likely to stumble upon it. Rick and Kate, in Johanna, made orbit around Timisoara.
"I don't see any cities." Kate said.
"Hard to build mile high buildings like you'd find on advanced Imperial worlds with just wood, ceramics, and plastic to work with. Even going underground would be difficult if they have earthquakes. We'll try to find some kind of sign of life down there."
And they did.
"We have company. There's a ship down there. Not very big and it doesn't appear to be a warship. We should land there." Kate decided.
They set down within a few hundred yards of the other ship.
Kate gasped.
"Rick! That's the J and J, my parents' ship. We need to go there now."
"Wait one. There's someone coming towards us waving a big red flag."
They both looked at the viewscreen. Coming towards them was a wagon drawn by two beasts that looked like a large, shaggy sheep with the neck of a giraffe. There was a being behind the driver waving a red flag and yelling. The wagon stopped and the person with the flag jumped out.
He appeared to have been descended from something like a lizard. He had green, scaly skin, but also a white beard with no hair on his head. He was dressed in several colorful caftans, each longer than the next.
He strode up to the Johanna and said something in a language they didn't know.
"That's my parents' ship." Kate yelled through the loudspeaker. "Are they here?"
"You speak ch-ch-ch Anglic? From the Empire?" Said the native.
"Yes. But that's my parents' ship. Are they here?"
"No. They are ch-ch-ch gone. Deceased. But you must not ch-ch-ch leave ship. Parents died of disease. They had no ch-ch-ch immunity. We have medicine. We'll bring soon. Half of your hour."
Kate began to cry.
"I've believed they were dead for years, but there was always just a tiny bit of hope they were out here someplace."
Rick put his arms around her and held her close.
"You are ch-ch-ch little Katie?"
"Yes. How do you know my name?"
"Your parents talked of you. Especially your ch-ch-ch mother. The disease they had is common with us but rarely fatal. We gave them medicine and they got ch-ch-ch better for a bit. But too much damage was done to their ch-ch-ch internal organs."
He turned around.
"Here comes Albotonnoure with medicine. I am ch-ch-ch called Vibortumain."
The second local jumped down from his wagon and ran to the hatch. He put the medicine in front.
"Please take pill." Said Vibortumain. "Wait one ch-ch-ch hour before coming out. Do what ch-ch-ch decontamination you can each time you enter or leave ch-ch-ch ship."
Rick put on a spacesuit and opened the hatch and took the pills.
"Do we need these, I wonder. Our shots should protect us against everything."
"We'll take them. I want to get to the ship."
He handed a pill to Kate and took the other himself. They waited for more than one hour and then came out.
"May I visit my parents' ship?"
"Of course. It is ch-ch-ch yours now. We use the computer to ch-ch-ch learn, but we keep the ship ch-ch-ch shipshape."
Kate ran to the ship and went aboard, followed closely by Rick.
"It's exactly as I remember it. Look, there's a vid of the three of us, just where Mom always left it."
"Katie, is that you?" Said a woman's voice.
"Mom! Are you here! Where are you?"
"Katie, if you're hearing this, then I'm dead. Your father passed a few days ago and I won't last much longer. I do want you to know how much we both love you and miss you. Please be kind to the Timisoarans. They're a gentle and friendly race. They have little material culture due to their lack of heavy metals, but their schools of philosophy are fascinating. And they did their very best to help us."
"Katie, I hope you're happy and I do hope you've found someone to love and to love you as much as your dad and I love each other. Goodbye, Katie, we'll always love you."
Kate began to cry again. Rick held her for ten minutes, then she stood back.
"Can you fly the Johanna? I want to take the J and J back to the Empire."
"Sure. Is the J and J as fast as your ship?"
"No, but I still want to take it." Kate was looking very stubborn.
When they got back outside, they found forty or fifty Timisoarans waiting for them.
"I wish to take my parents ship back home. I'm willing to pay you for it."
"Unnecessary." Said Vibortumain. "It is already ch-ch-ch yours."
"Then allow me to pay you for helping my parents when they were sick."
"Again, unnecessary." Said Vibortumain. "It would be ch-ch-ch improper to take money for aiding the ch-ch-ch sick. Your parents were buried as they said was their people's ch-ch-ch custom. We can take you there."
"I'd like that very much."
The graves were in a clearing in a small grove of trees. Kate noticed that someone had been putting flowers on the graves.
"It was their custom ch-ch-ch they said. We decorate many things with flowers. It seems ch-ch-ch correct."
They stayed for several weeks, during which Kate and Rick traded all the heavy metals they'd brought for intricately carved figurines and books written on philosophy. Kate also downloaded the information from the J and J's computer that the Timisoarans hadn't copied, put the information on date cubes and gave them a small computer.
After a last visit to the Beckett's graves, they left, each in one ship.
"You grew up on the J and J, didn't you." Rick said over the radio as they got far enough out of the planet's gravity well to go to FTL. "How come you weren't with them? Not that I'm complaining, mind you."
"I was home schooled on the ship. By the time I was eighteen I knew enough to get a first-class spacers' license. But Imperial regs say you have to graduate from an approved school, so I was sent off to the Thunderhouse Academy to waste two years. When I was nineteen, my parents left on their last voyage."
"Coming up on the FTL limit. We'll be back at Zephyr in no time." Rick said.
They reached the Zephyr with no problems, but found they then had a problem.
Beau sat in the wardroom, sipping a Vorlag ale, talking to Rick and Kate.
"We have a problem. The J and J is much slower than either of our ships. If I were to crank the FTL up to full power, I'd get about eighty percent of our full military power speed. That said, I don't know how long the J and J would go at full power. The Timisoarans kept the ship clean, but they had no idea how to do preventative maintenance. The ship needs a lot of work."
"It's my parents' ship and I intend to take it back to the Empire." Kate interrupted angrily. "I can fly it back by myself. If I avoid any kind of inhabited systems, I can sneak into the Empire."
"Until you get to the border where the barbarians will be thick. They'll be in every system, inhabited or not, and they'll have patrols out in interstellar space."
Rick and Kate glared at each other.
"Luckily, you have a brilliant engineering officer." Beau said, not at all modestly.
"And what does this brilliant officer suggest?" Rick demanded.
"We can rig a magnetic sling to hold the J and J tight against the hull of the Zephyr. And with a bit of work on our force field array, we can contain both ships in the force field. It'll cut our top speed by about two per cent, but if we absolutely have to, we can jettison the J and J."
"You're sure this will work?" Rick demanded.
"Who's the brilliant engineering officer around here?"
Rick looked at Kate.
"Do you accept that? If necessary, we'll jettison your parents' ship."
She nodded.
The brilliant engineering officer was right. The magnetic sling was rigged, the force field was reconfigured, and a test flight showed that it worked as expected.
"Beyond Timisoara there's supposed to be a large, mercantile cluster of planets, basically unknown to the Empire. And the Empire, and humans, are basically unknown to them. If that's so, then the barbarians haven't raided them. That's what we were sent out here to find: Just how far in-galaxy the barbarian star nations extend." Rick said.
Working as much by guess work as anything else, they set off to find the cluster. The first planet they came to was mostly, but not entirely, disappointing.
"Those are natural formations." Short Tail said, looking over the shoulders of his sensor team.
"Not very big and deserted, I'd say." Rick replied.
"But it's a start."
They used a ship's boat to land, and a small crew led by Rick and Kate approached the site.
There were six semi-circular structures arranged in a circle.
"They used heat to fuse the dirt together to build with." Rick said. Then he stood next to a doorway. "Based on this, they must be taller and wider than humans. Bigger than Vorlags or Kzinti as well."
"Perhaps not." Beau replied. "They may have needed to move heavy equipment in and out of the structures."
"We'll see what's inside then."
The doors slid open easily, but there was nothing inside.
"We should look for their trash." Beau said.
"Trash?" Rick asked.
"I took an archeology course once. You find all sorts of good stuff in the trash."
"You took an archeology course?" Rick said, disbelievingly.
"There was a lovely young female taking the course. Her name was Lo-Ollo. She had the most fascinating, soft tail. I used to wait outside the class to see her come running…"
"We'll look for the trash." Rick cut him off.
TBC