Ghosts of Lyarra by Damian Shishkin

inbound Imperial cruiser in a few weeks and we need her for the next stage of the plan.” The armored stranger continued.
    “ And must I wait for the ship to arrive to know what I shall be a party to ? The AI begged.
    “We are going to change the future Caretaker!” he answered; Caretaker could almost see him smiling underneath the helmet. “You are going to help us kill the Empress!”

Four Inner System Solar
Power Relay Station;
Project Olympus
    It had been almost five months since the attack on the temple on Ryas, and the whole Empire seemed to be on edge as the culprit still was at large. Tension was felt all the way out to the reaches of Earth, as the farthest outward member of the Imperial Council. Even out in a place that officially didn’t exist, the crew and workers of the project that would drastically alter the landscape of power in the rim sector. Though there were five more projects like it currently being run in secret from Imperial eyes, Zeus was the largest by far and the most pivotal in the grand scheme of things. It was also the farthest away from completion; scheduled to be done nearly two years from now and more than a year and a half longer than any of the others.
    All this, made the effort of keeping all under his command focused that much more critical, because General Patterson knew that the last thing the Earth could tolerate was a failure on this scale. It was the hardest posting he had ever accepted, and in the grand scheme of things probably the most important. Patterson had been through the ringer since the Husk attack and this was the last posting he ever thought he would ever get. He had been heralded the hero of the Husk war, but as the smoke cleared the new Earth Alliance had honorably discharged him from service; offering a retirement package in lieu of being publically outed in the hunt for answers as the Council tore the military apart looking for heads to roll for the creation of Aen. He wasn’t thrown to the wolves; his public image was too valuable and morale on the planet was too low for that to happen. In the end, he had been swept beneath the rug and forgotten about as the late Jenson Taylor was crucified for his actions in project Starchild.
    Patterson felt like he dodged the bullet, for the truth about the project would never see the light of day; that and he avoided the axe being swung by the daughter of the man they killed to make Aen. Council Sara Foster knew everything, and even from his lavish home in central Mexico Patterson could feel the searing hatred from her on the other side of the world. So when she called and demanded his presence, he had thought his time was finally up. The last thing he had expected was this, but he understood what she was after; this was a secret more monumental than Aen, and in his world, being able to keep a secret made one a valuable commodity.
    He looked over the morning financial reports; the project was over budget but most of these black ops things usually were. To anyone looking at the planetary books, they would see a bustling tourism industry, a slew of profitable mines, and a few mines actually losing money. But the ones losing money were actually producing the most product of them all, and the funds from those sales were being funneled to Olympus and its projects along with untold tons of titanium ore being mined from asteroids in the solar system. In fact, every ounce of iron ore, titanium, and platinum had been taken from all the meteors in the Kuiper belt between Mars and Jupiter, but the rest of the world was told it was to clear inbound shipping lanes and secure docking facilities. More funds were going to the defense sector than to the repairs of the planet; a fact that if revealed would be more than frowned upon by the people of Earth as well as the rest of the Council. Enough funds had been spent on Olympus thus far to rebuild the damage caused by the Husk tenfold, and the project was just past the half-way point to