Behind Enemy Lines_Book 7 of The Empire of Bones Saga by Terry Mixon

Author:Terry Mixon [Mixon, Terry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yowling Cat Press
Published: 2017-04-21T04:00:00+00:00

Once her uniform dried, Veronica began examining the tablets they’d been charging inside the abandoned facility. Most of the contents seemed innocuous. Their owners had used them for everyday tasks, and there were no files worthy of further study.

That was until she found a journal. That proved both fascinating and horrifying.

The fascination stemmed from the fact that the man who wrote it—Commander Frank Beaumont—had obviously been keeping a record of his daily activities and thoughts for years. The entries spanned five decades.

The earliest entries gave her a flavor of what it was like growing up on an agricultural world far from the center of the Empire. It documented how his family raised food for more populous systems.

Frank’s father hadn’t been pleased when he’d joined Fleet. That didn’t seem to bother Frank all that much. The two of them seemed to have issues.

Veronica only skimmed the entries, but it quickly became clear that this man hadn’t lived under anything like the old dictatorship as she knew it.

Then came the revolution. That’s where things became horrifying.

Once fighting broke out, he documented everything. She no longer nursed any doubts that Captain Levy had told her the unvarnished truth. The AIs had lied. The horrors she read made her physically ill.

She forced herself to continue reading until his ship—the battlecruiser Infamous—escaped an ambush while escorting a number of civilian ships filled with refugees near Dresden.

He documented how the AI-controlled ships had mercilessly vaporized the defenseless civilian vessels where they could. That alone told her the truth. It was monstrous.

The commodore commanding the protective task force had rallied and counterattacked. She’d defeated the attackers, but reinforcements attacked the pickets she’d left at Dresden. That forced her into hiding.

Their task force didn’t have supplies to stay in the outer system forever, but it was too dangerous to travel farther. They repaired what they could and waited.

His account didn’t specify how he’d gotten to this system. Perhaps he didn’t know.

She set the tablet down on the dirty console and rubbed her eyes. She could continue reading, but his story had already answered the most important questions she’d had. She knew who’d built the base and why they’d concealed it so well.

How could this be happening? How could everything she knew be a lie?

And what the hell could she do about it?

Castille wouldn’t accept this. She knew it. He’d either declare it to be some kind of trick or find a reason to disregard the story. What he’d probably done to Commodore Murdock made it clear the lengths he was willing to go for the Empire.

Thankfully, she didn’t have to make a decision about how to proceed right now. He was still busy questioning the female prisoner. Whatever they were discussing must’ve been fascinating. He’d been in the cutter for hours.

The two marines and the cutter pilot had woken shortly after the woman. Her people had them in an old conference room. She’d resisted the urge to question them. Maybe that had been the wrong call.

She went in search of cleaning supplies.

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