Read Empire of Man 01 - March Upcountry for Free Online Page A

Highness."
    "Oh, really, Captain? I hadn't noticed." The prince's voice was muffled through the plastron of the helmet. After a moment's fumbling, he released the standard catches and dumped the helmet on his bunk. "By the way," he continued sourly, "there wouldn't happen to be a skin-suit in my size on board, would there?"
    "No, Your Highness, there wouldn't," Pahner answered stoically. "I've already checked. That detail was overlooked. As were others, apparently." He turned to the miserable-looking captain. "If you'd care to continue, Captain Krasnitsky?"
    The captain rubbed his face and sighed.
    "We were sabotaged, Your Highness. Badly."
    "Sabotaged?" the prince repeated incredulously. "By whom?"
    "Now that is the million-credit question, Your Highness," Pahner admitted. "We know the who as in 'who actually did the sabotage.' That was Ensign Amanda Guha, the ship's logistics officer."
    "What?" Roger blinked in confusion. "Why would she do that?"
    Captain Krasnitsky opened his mouth to answer, then looked at Pahner, and the Marine shrugged his shoulders and continued. "We're not positive, of course, but I believe she was a toombie."
    "A toot zombie?" Roger's eyes widened. "Here? Are there any more?" Then he shook his head at the stupidity of his own question. "We wouldn't know, would we?"
    "No, Your Highness, we wouldn't," Pahner replied with considerable restraint. "However, there are some indications that she was the sole toombie. It's vanishingly unlikely that anyone else in the Company is at risk. Everyone who is expected to have contact with you is regularly swept and has up-to-date security protocols. And everyone in the ship's company was swept before the voyage. Including Ensign Guha. But we found a device in her cabin. . . ."
    "Oh, shit," Roger said.
    "I can think of at least twenty ways the device could have made it on board," Pahner continued. "However, that's not the most pressing issue at the moment."
    "Your Highness," Captain Krasnitsky said finally, with a nodded thanks at Pahner, "Captain Pahner is correct. How they got to Guha is less important than what she did to us, I'm afraid. She managed to attach explosive devices to several of the tunnel drive plasma conduits. When they went off, we nearly lost Engineering entirely from an unvented plasma core leak. When the plasma breach was detected, the automated systems were supposed to shut off deuterium flow, but the next bead in the magazine was a worm program that she apparently dumped into the control systems. It cut out the safety interlocks, so the plasma kept venting. . . ."
    The captain stopped and wiped his face, trying to find the right words to report the disaster, but Pahner did it for him.
    "We've lost all but one fusion plant, Your Highness," the stone-faced Marine said. "Tunnel drive is off-line. Phase drive is off-line. The chief engineer got the flow shut down manually, but a plasma blast took her out right after she did it. And she was our only fully qualified engineering repair officer."
    "A physical and cyber attack." The prince sounded stunned. "Against a member of the Imperial Family?"
    "Yes, Your Highness," Pahner said with the bleak smile of the truly pissed professional. "Lovely, don't you think? And it wasn't as if they were going to stop there. We've got worm programs and viruses in every major subsystem: Navigation, Fire Control—"
    "And Environmental," Krasnitsky interrupted with a shake of his head. "Well, had. I'm pretty sure we got them all wiped out, but we've taken some heavy casualties in Engineering, and—"
    "I was 'pretty sure' there wasn't anything like them on board to begin with!" Pahner snapped angrily. "We need to be more than 'pretty sure,' Captain."
    "Agreed, Captain," the captain said shortly. He stood and straightened his back. "Your Highness, with your permission, I need to get back to my ship. I have high hopes that we can make sufficient repairs to get us to a habitable planet. Although," he turned and