The Phoenix Crisis Read Online Free PDF

few
minutes.    
     

Chapter 3
     
    The computer beeped, interrupting Nimoux’s
meditation. With a patient breath he cleared his head and uncurled
himself from the lotus position. Heavy and perplexed thoughts
weighed on his mind. It was something of a personal weakness that
he felt off-balance and disharmonious with himself when the picture
before him was so very unclear. Ever more he found himself thinking
about Calvin Cross and the message the rogue had sent him, accusing
the Empire of corruption and conspiracy. Nimoux was not in a
position to judge the veracity of the specific accusations, but the
feeling they gave him—the intuition that something odd was going
on—seemed unshakable.
    He moved to his computer terminal and sat
down. He glanced over the results of the latest analysis, the
screen glow brightly in the dim environment. It was the latest in a
series of analyses he’d been doing in his spare time, when not on
watch. And with each new tidbit of information, an increasingly
interesting puzzle was taking shape.
    The data had come from the Desert Eagle’s
sweep of Abia System with her new advanced scanners. Nimoux and his
crew had been given the assignment recently—though it felt like
ages ago—to wipe that area of space clean and destroy any
recognizably large pieces of starship debris. Nimoux and his staff
had followed their orders and now not so much as a floating bolt
remained in Abia to be identified. The information wasn’t gone
though. Even though the ruined hulls of the obliterated starships
were now space dust, his computers had recorded a great deal of the
information. And though, probably, he’d been expected to delete the
information, Nimoux found himself instead combing through it
intensely. Finding golden nugget after golden nugget.
    “ ISS Barracuda…” he
whispered as the computer positively ID’d a fraction of a
battleship’s hull and matched it to the list of ships branded by
Intel Wing as “missing”. So far the remains of three Imperial
destroyers and two Imperial battleships had been identified, and
every one of them occupied a space on the Company’s ever-growing
“missing ships” list. Nimoux suspected that the list of AWOL
vessels, which at a glance was frighteningly long, wasn’t quite so
lengthy after all. It made him start to wonder how many of the
ships had been destroyed, and what was motivating the Company to
cover up the fact of their destruction, rather than pursuing the
truth.
    Among the pieces of debris and refuse that
the Desert Eagle had scanned were several unidentifiable fragments
that belonged to alien vessels. Their schematics, markings, and
other information wasn’t in the Imperial database so confirming the
ID’s wasn’t possible—although files kept in the Intel Wing archives
gave Nimoux some pretty good guesses as to the identities of the
alien ships—and from what he could, tell they were Rotham in
origin. And not just any run-of-the-mill Rotham ships either,
military vessels. Warships.  Not unlike the fleet he’d seen in
Imperial space swooping down on Remus System. 
    As much as Nimoux was afraid to admit it, he
couldn’t escape the conclusion that the Rotham Republic and the
Empire were at war. Ever since the ceasefire signed at the end of
the Great War and the re-creation of the DMZ, the rival powers had
continued to wrestle with each other using discrete means:
espionage, sabotage, financial pressure, and such tactics, but
Nimoux had never expected—and had certainly never heard—that the
political powerhouses had resumed their shooting war. He wondered
if the firefight in Abia had been only one of many such incidents
invisible in the darkness, kept quiet by both the Imperial
government and the Republic.
    What a strange thing to cooperate on…
    The Desert Eagle and the squadron of ships
under Nimoux’s temporary command moved silently through
alteredspace. Technically their standing orders were still to hunt
down the renegade