“Arya!” Anders called the woman who was only a little way away, hugging Apple and Sven tight to her. “What’s in that direction? You got fire. Moving fast,” Anders said, pointing the way.
“Oh, my Earth,” she gasped. Her eyes were wide as she exclaimed, “That’s Central Tunnel 2, one of the main ways in!”
“Sir, you have two more thermal fronts heading forward,” Moriarty’s calm and measured voice said, and the blue of Anders’s sensors washed again, concentrating to his left and, when he turned his head, behind him.
“There and there?” Anders said tersely.
“Central 1 and 3!” Arya gasped.
“Get everyone away!” Anders shouted. This wasn’t an accident, and even though Arya was screaming at people to move, it was only a moment before the darkness of New Eden was washed in a burst of red.
9
Arrivals
Sector 5, Throne-Ilythian Border
This drift of space was not the usual starry blanket of distant and near suns, stable, pulsing, or twinkling. This patch of space was fragmented, as if the blanket had been torn in parts—with large, blank areas that were like spilled ink on the face of the universe.
In other areas, however, the deregulated but heavily guarded Sector Five was speckled with clouds of nebulae—star nurseries where the youngest children of the Milky Way community were born amid washes of crimson and green, blue and purple.
Sector Five, occasionally known as the Bridge, was a large ribbon of complicated space that ran along one edge of the Golden Throne territories. Its internal physics made it a strange and hazardous place for jump travel, and thus it created a natural barrier between the hungry advance of humanity and their neighbors, the elf-like Ilythians.
It was also the scene of the largest conflict yet seen in recent history, still with the discarded parts of ships and transports where the Ilythian destroyers had tried to forge a bridgehead into human space.
They had failed, of course, but the arrival of the saucer ships of the crab-like Secari had at least helped them destroy one and injure another of the gigantic Pillars-of-Empire ships of the Eternal Empress. It was hard to say if this constituted a victory, as the Secari had been beaten back, and the Ilythian forward fleet—their only fleet, it had to be said—was now broken apart.
“We got them on the run now!” crowed one Throne Marine over his suit communicator as he hung from a titanium-filament line from the drone repair ship above, slowly working his way up one section of the broken Pillar. The largest battle-station of the empire stretched out for what looked like leagues both above and below the man, whose name was Frank, and who had been dispatched—along with a thousand or so other secondary-class, newly-graduated Marines—to this repair and salvage work.
“On the run maybe, but you hear about the Red Judges? They’ve gone and sided with them!” shouted one of Frank’s comrades, an older woman named Keelie, a hundred meters above him and already using her cutting laser to open up the section before.
“Now…” she continued. “The map says that Munitions Bay 28 is in here, so we should be able to grab an entire transport worth of stock back.”
“I never trusted the Red Judges anyway,” Frank murmured, thinking of the seven-foot tall humans who came from the harsh, mineral-rich desert and mountain worlds of the Golden Throne. The higher gravity and intense work of such worlds had led them to being generally larger and tougher than any other type of colony human.
“Ha,” Keelie scoffed. “You sound scared, Frank! It’s not the Red Judges I worry about. It’s what’s going to happen now that we’ve lost their factories.”
They were in the middle of discussing the vagaries of this strange war, which had started, ostensibly, as an unprovoked attack by the Ilythians and had quickly escalated into a full-scale civil war against the Reach of the Golden Throne.
“And there’s those crab-men and Mondrauks and Proximians we got to think about, too…” Frank did sound pensive. The Golden Throne always had a lot of enemies, but they had never before teamed up like this.
“What are you talking about!?” Keelie once again laughed. “The empress nuked the Mondrauk home world. Nothing of them left but a couple of bandit-craft. The Ilythians are broken already. The Proximians are just a bunch of wannabe throne citizens with a grudge! They’ve been harping on about freedom, and they wouldn’t be anything without the empress! Anything!” Keelie said over the sounds of her clanking and pushing at the metal.
She didn’t say anything about the crab-like Secari, however, whose numbers were vast—even if they did not have anything like the firepower that the Golden Throne had, Frank noted.
Keelie’s omission wasn’t anything to do with fear, however. It was because of a wash of anxiety that rolled through the battle-site.
“What the…” Even Frank felt his heart start to race, and a sort of animal panic grab at his intestines. Without even hearing a sound or with any warning from any scanner, Frank knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that there was something very big, and very dangerous, behind him.
Frank stayed where he was, looking at the scorched and scratched hull of the Pillar. Sweat beaded down his forehead, and his jaw was so tight that his teeth started to hurt, but there was no way he was going to turn around.
“Fr...Fra...FRANK!” came Keelie’s sudden, piercing wail over the suit communicator, before it abruptly ended with a gurgling whimper.
Warning! Operator Throne Marine K. Y’Marshal’s Bio-signs Compromised.
“K-Keelie?” Frank whispered. But there was silence from above.
And silence on every other channel of his suit-to-suit communicators.
“S...S-Sergeant?” he whispered. Again, there was nothing.
“Boris? Huan?” But none of his other comrades amongst the Marine Salvage Corps answered him, either.
Frank’s internal suit sensors berated him for his cowardice. There was no sign of nearby life—everyone in sensor range was reading ‘compromised’—and there was simply nothing Frank could do. His body would no longer obey him. He quivered and trembled, clutching onto the hull of the craft in front of him and hoping that whatever it was would go away.
If Frank still had the senses left to think, he might have thought that it was some final, vengeful attack by the Ilythians. That perhaps they had come back to the scene of their defeat to do exactly what he and Keelie were doing—salvaging—and instead engaged in punishment of any human they found here.
But it wasn’t the Ilythians.
The fear and terror slowly started to ebb and fade, and still the Throne Marine shook and trembled against the side of the ruined Pillar-of-Empire. Frank didn’t know quite how long it took, but after what seemed like eons, he realized that his eyes were open once more and he was looking at the same square inch of scorched hull that he hadn’t taken his eyes from yet.
Frank did not feel good at all. He felt a deep trepidation and dread, but at least it was his feelings, if he had the ability to register the difference.
When he finally did turn around, he saw the strange, fragmented space of Sector 5 behind him as always.
The Black Sun had, after all, only been passing through on its way to the interior throne territories.
10
Marine vs. Marine
Sector 0, Sol
They were too far away to see the brunt of the flames, but Anders saw the orange plumes that erupted into the air to the right, left, and behind them. It was a blowout of some kind, not the sustained force of an explosion, but immediately afterwards, there came the sudden, telltale thwap of meson bolts.
Marine meson bolts—Anders gritted his teeth—from Marine heavy rifles.
“Dalia, on me!” Anders was already turning to the nearest source of the screams and flares of purple-crimson laser fire.
“Boss!?” Patch’s worried voice over the suit-to-suit communicator.
“Stay with Jake. Find a way out, and take as many as you can with you,” Anders said, half-tur
ning to nod at the younger Voider. Patch was only in his twenties, and like all of his strange cadre of space engineers, Anders would once have called him ‘callow,’ but Patch had been at Anders side in many fights and battles by now.
“I trust you, Patch. You got this,” Anders said honestly. “You already know what we have to do. Protect the people.”
He saw the young man nod back solemnly, and then Anders turned, pushing past the hurrying people with Dalia already in front of him, heading toward the shooting.
“Rear guard action,” Anders said through gritted teeth as they broke through the last of the press of escaping people to see the last of the container-buildings before them, flashes of meson on the other side.
A scream.
“Golds!” He heard someone shouting from down there.
Anders nodded to Dalia to take the other side of the container avenue, heading forward at pace, straight toward the firefight. Anders paused, hitting the wall for a moment to take a breath, and then…
“Sensors,” he asked. His suit flashed with another blue wave, isolating four signatures on the other side.
“Sir, we have an attack unit of four Throne Marines in classic clearing formation, heading toward your current location,” Moriarty informed him, and the screen obligingly showed readouts of their heavily-armored Marine power suits. “Your team is still running the security access hack codes, sir, so they won’t be able to get a sensor read on you.”
“Good,” Anders said, just as there was another scream, and one of the New Edeners, a man in a ridiculously lightly-armored padded suit, was thrown back into Anders’s avenue, his chest smoking from a terrible laser wound.
Breathe. There was nothing Anders could do for the man. Apart from avenge him. Three. Two…
One.
Anders moved from his crouch, raising his heavy rifle to sight the nearest of the Throne Marines—just a few meters away, and already sweeping his own rifle back toward him…
Outcast Suit/Weapons Link…
>>Full Charge...
Anders felt his rifle kick with the fully-amassed charge that he used, powerful enough to deplete the entire field generator battery of the rifle in one shot—and powerful enough to burst the sphere of the Throne Marine’s blue shield and his chest plate. The blast sent the attacker flying back to the wide arched entrance that they had stepped out of, which still had trace patches of the glowing red chemical flash incendiaries they had used.
Anders rolled back to the corner of his container, already moving up the alley as the return volley hit the edge, buckling the metal and exploding with crimson and purple fire.
“Two are following,” Moriarty said as Anders leapt for the end of the container, back into the canteen space, and dodged behind the side of the wall.
Thwap! Thwap! Bolts of fire burst past him, hungry and eager for their quarry.
“In the avenue?” Anders hissed as he moved again, vaulting over one of the tables.
“Affirmative.”
But the two Marines didn’t come charging out as Anders had expected. No. Instead, something else spun through the air into the central space.
“Grenade,” Moriarty said, a moment before there was an almighty flash, and Anders was pushed, skidding back to one of the pillars of the canteen space by the shockwave.
Warning! Suit Impact.
>>Front Plate -15%
“Augh,” Anders grunted, pulling up his rifle just in time.
Outcast Suit/Weapons Link…
>>Marine Heavy Rifle 50% Charged…
>>Burst Fire…
Anders fired at the two shapes that bounded out of the space. Three shots, the first missing one, the next finding a leg and bursting over the blue field shell with enough force to bowl the Marine over, and the next hitting their colleague on the shoulder, spinning him around…
And then Anders was pushing himself up and leaping forward again, right as the second Marine spun around.
Anders’s rifle was recharging. He’d fired too much, but his booted feet hit the floor and he used the rifle as a club instead, hitting against the blue shield and the man’s helmet with a grunt of force, enough to push him back down as Anders spun to do the same to the one he’d hit in the leg.
Both Marines were protected by fields, but both of their field-generated shields were also compromised, and Anders knew that his blunt force attacks would cause damage to the suits beneath—if he could keep up the pace.
“Grargh!” The first Marine he had struck was already rolling out of the way of Anders’s rifle-butt sweeps. Anders knew that would give the Marine the space they needed to fire their weapon. Not good.
Instead, Anders jumped toward the one on his left, grabbing the man’s rifle and twisting it as he swiveled on his hip, plucking it out of the man’s hand and reversing the grip so he had a heavy rifle in each hand.
Outcast Suit/Weapons Link…
>>Weapon Unrecognized!
>> Error!
“Frack!” Anders remembered that all ‘official’ Marine weapons were locked to the biometric identifiers of their user.
By now, the second Marine had rolled into a crouch and had his own rifle—which wouldn’t be suffering a User Error!—rising straight at Anders’s chest.
“Projecting shield,” Moriarty said in a nanosecond. The Marine fired, and there was an explosion of blue fractals and light as Anders was lifted off his feet and thrown against the Marine behind him. Anders’s power suit didn’t have any field shields that it could deploy like the better-equipped Throne Marines did, but his data-node, the small crystal-lace nano-computer that Anders and every other throne citizen had at their disposal, could—if they were an ex-military node like Anders’s was.
But still, it wasn’t as strong or as good as having a fully-dedicated suit shield system.
Warning! Suit Impact!
>>Front Plate -60%
Anders saw stars, and then a fragmentary blackness, before he was struggling in a nest of limbs from the Marine behind him. He kicked and rolled away, knowing that the first Marine would be firing on him at any moment…but they didn’t.
Anders saw the look of shocked alarm from the Marine he had just kicked clear of as Anders brought his heavy rifle down on the man’s damaged helmet once again. There was a heavy clunk, and the man fell still.
All of this only took a couple of heartbeats, and Anders realized that he wasn’t actually dead yet.
Why didn’t that other one shoot me again? Anders turned to see that the other Marine who had already shot him once was motionless on the ground, with Dalia standing over him as her rifle slowly lost its glow.
“You took your time,” she said. There was no time for a repost as there were still screams coming from behind them, and the heavy clank of more Throne Marines coming from their recently-cleared Central Tunnel 2.
“Those four were only scouts,” Anders realized.
11
Gotcha
“I said don’t kill them all!” Cread said in exasperation as his heads-up display started to scroll with kill figures.
The commander-general stood at a bend in one of the service tunnels, surrounded by a heavy-suited team of black-and-golds, receiving the frontline reports and checking the digital map he had overlaying one half of his vision. In his hands, he held only one weapon—a long-barreled heavy meson pistol, especially designed with his direct supervision, and capable of emitting only a fraction less of the power of a Marine heavy rifle.
The weapon couldn’t do salvo shot or burst fire, unfortunately, but Cread could oscillate the beams to make it powerful enough to shear through metal and power armor if he wanted.
The pistol was, in fact, one of the few objects that Cread actually treasured and had made sure was salvaged from the wreckage of the Reaver, above and beyond any efforts to reclaim the bodies of the Marines who had served under him there.
“Do you want us to stop termination orders?” Sergeant Keller asked quickly, without a hint of confus
ion or rancor. Cread took this to be a good sign from the woman. It meant that she had been at least trained well enough to not second-guess orders, just obey them.
But still. Even the best trained of Marines were still only Marines—even if they wore sergeant’s stripes.
“Don’t kill the psychic. PK J-14.” Cread threw, with a simple hand gesture, the image and associated biometric data on the youth to Keller’s suit. “And save Corsigon for me.” Another swipe and another packet of identifiable data. “The rest, you can kill.” The commander-general’s tone soured. “But if it turns out your incompetents have killed the very people that I want alive, then…”
“That’s a negative, sir,” Keller said, again in that deadpan way. Her face was visible as a small live video feed in Cread’s HUD, and he could see the flashes of light across her eyes from the battle around her. She kept calm under pressure, he thought. Perhaps he should promote her to Acting Field Commander of Earth when he was in charge here.
“I have data on your two wanted via feeds from the eastern attack trajectory and the forward team,” she said, and there was a dull ping as Cread’s suit accepted and opened the images.
There was Corsigon, visible in deep shadow and fire relief as he was in the process of attacking the Marine whose suit had taken the image. A location marker had him just inside the main tunnel to the east of New Eden, and time-stamped about twenty-five seconds ago.
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