by M. R. Forbes
"Something's not right here," Fish said, looking down at the corpses.
"Dead," Socks said. "All of them."
Mitchell approached the pile. There were at least forty bodies, all of them wearing Gold Dragon uniforms. Like the two in the lift, they didn't have any obvious external injuries.
That didn't make them any less dead.
"How?" Boomer asked.
"The Tetron, if I had to guess," Mitchell replied, though what he really wanted to know was why? These men and women were elite soldiers. The best kind of slaves. Why didn't the Tetron want them?
A soft clang echoed across the chamber.
"I don't think we're alone down here, Colonel," Cormac said.
"It could just be the structure settling," Fish said. "The bombardment would have upset the sediment."
Mitchell tapped his helmet to radio Long. They couldn't have the salvage team coming down here until they were sure it was safe. Not that the soldiers couldn't handle themselves, but they would be coming in unarmed.
He cursed when a red "signal lost" message appeared in the corner of his visor. They were too deep underground for the old-fashioned tech the Knife was using.
"Socks, head back up to the surface. Tell the salvage team to wait. We need to search the complex first."
"Are you sure, Colonel?" Teal asked. "It's going to take hours."
Hours they didn't want to waste. They didn't have a choice. "I'm not risking their lives. Socks, go."
"Yes, sir," she said, heading for the lift.
"Do we have a schematic of the base?" Fish asked.
"Yeah right," Misfire said. "The Federation posted it online."
"Shut up."
"Stay sharp," Mitchell said, quieting the banter. He was grateful they had brought mapping equipment, even if it was bulky. "Send out the drones."
Sleepy dropped the case he was carrying, unlatched it, and swung it open. He hit a button, and four small discs rose up into the air. They began moving quickly around the room, lasers running along the space and transmitting the map back to Sleepy. He closed the case and attached it to his exo, running a plug from it up into his helmet so he could see the map.
"Ready, Colonel," he said.
The drones vanished from the room at the same time Socks reappeared.
"Message delivered, sir. Salvage team is standing by."
"Thank you."
A second clang sounded from a distant location in the structure.
"What do you have, Sleepy?" Mitchell asked.
"The usual, save for the bodies. They're everywhere."
"The Gold Dragons aren't a large unit."
"I don't know, Colonel. I've counted fifty already. Same deal. No wounds, no sign of trauma."
"Airborne poison?" Cormac said.
"No. The Tetron have access to the neural implant. All they need to do is flip a switch."
Cormac's hand went to the side of his helmet. "What a way to go," he said.
"Come on," Mitchell said, following behind the drones.
They crossed the staging area, entering a series of corridors. The drones could map anything they could get access to, but they couldn't open doors. Mitchell and his squad took care of that, pairing up and moving into each room as they came across it. It was a typical military installation, with meeting rooms, situation rooms, comm stations, a gym, a galley, and more. There was nothing out of the ordinary to be found unless they counted the bodies that littered the floors.
"It's frigging creepy in here," Misfire said, turning her head to shine her headlamp on another body.
"We're getting close to the generators," Sleepy said. "I bet they aren't even damaged. Failsafes probably kicked in, and nobody was alive down here to clear them out."
"Great. I'll be glad to get out of the dark."
"Come on Misfire, you should like the dark," Fish said.
"Oh? And why is that?"
"How else would you ever get any with a face like yours?"
"You're one to talk. Your head is so big Germaine gets it confused with Asimov."
"Heh. Funny. You know what they say about people with big heads."
"Small brains?"
"It is dark in here. I can show you."
Mitchell raised his hand to silence them. He appreciated the release the back and forth provided, but he noticed that Sleepy had stopped moving. "Something wrong, soldier?"
He shook his head. "I don't think so. One of the drones just went offline. Battery's probably drained."
"Are you sure it's the battery?"
He nodded. "Yeah, the other units didn't register anything." He started walking again.
"So what do you think?" Fish asked as they started moving again.
"Maybe the next time you get me in an enemy base with no power and filled with corpses without wounds," Misfire said.
They reached the hatch to the generators. Sleepy approached the security panel, pulling it off and reaching in to trigger the backup system. The hatch slid open.
"Where are the drones?" Mitchell asked.
"They went that way," Sleepy said, pointing to the right. "It'll take me fifteen, twenty minutes to reset the system."
"Okay. Fish, Misfire, keep watch on the doors. Teal, Firedog, Boomer, Socks, you're with me. Boomer, take the mapping equipment."
Sleepy unplugged and passed the equipment over before vanishing into the room beyond.
"Expecting trouble, Colonel?" Fish asked.
"Playing it safe," Mitchell replied. "Boomer, lead the way."
Boomer smacked the side of the electronics.
"Boomer?"
"Drones just vanished, Colonel," he said. "Damn batteries."
Mitchell stared at Boomer. One drone losing power he could understand. All of them? He didn't buy it. "I don't like it," he said. "Sweep formation. We'll take it slow."
They didn't question him, moving into position. There hadn't been any more of the banging since they left the staging area, and now Mitchell was wondering if that had been intentional. Had the Tetron set a trap for him? It seemed impossible, but he couldn't ignore it. Not after Liberty.
He also couldn't turn back without collecting the assets. They had come too far, risked too much to leave empty-handed. Whatever was going to happen, they had to face it head-on.
They moved through the corridor until it split. Boomer checked the map the drones had managed to finish, pointing them to the left. "They vanished up that way about four hundred meters."
Mitchell's headlamp reached down the corridor. Four bodies lay against the walls, but it was otherwise empty. He didn't see the drones either. What the frig was going on?
He started down the passage, rifle set against his shoulder. The others spread behind him, keeping a clear line of fire down the hallway while Teal moved backwards, covering their rear.
They reached the end of the corridor, running up against a secured hatch.
The power was still out.
It slid open anyway.
37
"Carver, this is Daedalus. I don't know how much more of this we can take."
Steven sat in the command chair on the bridge of the Carver, his eyes closed and twitching beneath the lids as he watched the battle unfold on his p-rat's grid. His initial attack had caught the Federation by surprise, scoring a hit on the battleship Samurai that had torn into its rear hangar and left the starship unable to launch fighters while the Gallant and the Daedalus had sent their surface nukes on towards the target.
Admiral Hohn had screamed when the nukes had detonated against the green land mass, quickly turning it a sickly brown. They were words that were burned into Steven's brain, and he heard them over and over as he tried to make sense of the mess he had found his fleet in.
"There are nothing but farmers down there," Hohn had cried.
No underground bunkers. No military factories. Sensor reports of the debris field the nukes had kicked up confirmed it.
What the hell had he done?
Why
had Alliance Command ordered him to do it?
The Carver shuddered as another projectile slammed into its flank, piercing the shields and blowing a hole in the battleship.
"Damage report," he said, forcing himself to keep his voice calm, even as he began maneuvering the Carver to broadside the pair of battleships that had taken aim at the Daedalus. The other ship was leaking debris, badly battered and ready to be finished off. It had lasted longer than some of the other ships in the fleet, ships that had crumbled under the weight of the Federation's ferocious initial return volley. Thousands of his men and women had already died. Hundreds more were wounded. He knew there was no winning this fight. If he had just escalated the war against the Federation, he knew there was no way for the Alliance to win either.
Had Command doomed them all?
Captain Rock's voice was firm. "Hangar C is out of commission. Deck G is gaping. Shields have been diverted to critical systems."
Steven opened his eyes, watching the action beyond the viewport. The Carver was in position, and he opened fire on the rear battleship, sending a volley of heavy bolts towards the starship's engines, watching as the shields absorbed the impact, shattering the missiles into smaller bits of debris. A follow-up volley from the battleship caught the head of the Daedalus, and its marker vanished from his p-rat.
"Shit," he said softly, letting an emotion escape. "We need to get the rest of the fleet out of here." He opened a channel to the remaining ships. "Retreat pattern delta."
The Alliance ships began to shift formation as their commanders worked to get them out of the fight. Starfighters disengaged, heading for the closest safe hangar.
Steven closed his eyes again, shifting the path of the Carver once more. As Admiral of the fleet, it was his duty to ensure as many people made it to safety as possible. In a fight like this, that meant a continued attack, diverting the enemy fire towards him while the others made their escape. He found himself calm as he did it, certain of his actions despite the gnawing pain in his gut at the idea of leaving his child without a father. It was the fear of every soldier. At least he would help hundreds of other children keep theirs.
A knock tone sounded in his p-rat.
A knock? Now?
What the hell?
He checked the identity of the sender.
Mitchell?
He couldn't believe it. Mitchell, his brother. Mitchell, the traitor. Was he on board the Samurai, or one of the other Federation ships blowing the fleet apart? If he was, why would he be making himself known now with a personal, high priority knock, right when Steven was about to die?
He spent two seconds trying to ignore it. When his p-rat indicated Mitchell had streamed a message to him, he clenched his teeth. Did he want to hear anything his brother had to say in the final moments of his life?
The Carver shuddered again, taking a glancing blow through the forward shields. Debris spun up and sizzled against them while a starfighter exploded nearby.
"Damn you, Mitch," Steven mouthed, accessing the stream.
Nothing but jumble came out the other end, though it was clearly in Mitchell's voice.
He didn't dismiss it. He couldn't. The memory of it was too strong. The games they had played when they were younger. It had been years, but his mind recalled it immediately. He recognized the pattern. The message was encrypted.
"Sir!"
He looked over to Rock, who had abandoned his seat to approach him in person.
"Huh?"
"The Federation is moving to block our ships. They aren't going to let us leave."
"Son of a-" Steven said, trailing off. The Federation hadn't taken his bait. There would be no retreat, not after what they had done.
He returned his attention to the message. It couldn't be coincidence he had received it here, now. If there was any chance Mitchell was trying to help him...
No. Mitchell was with the Federation. Cornelius had said as much. He had warned Steven that he might try to contact him.
How had the General known?
The whole thing was so strange. So unexpected. Being in the military meant order and discipline. There was none of that out here. There was only death and chaos.
And Command had put them up to it. They had told him the Federation was building weapons here and had ordered him to escalate the war.
He was a soldier. He normally would never have questioned orders. Except things had been off kilter since shortly after the Alliance claimed Mitch was dead and then told Steven he was a traitor instead.
He could ignore a lot of things for the sake of his orders. He couldn't ignore this.
"Open a channel to the Samurai. We're going to submit to a full surrender."
"What?" Rock said. "Our orders were-"
"I know what our orders were, John. Do it. Now!"
"You know what the Federation does to prisoners of war?"
Nothing as barbaric as torture or malnutrition, but hard labor mixed in with three squares a day was likely.
"I need to buy us some time."
"Time for what?"
"I can't explain right now."
Rock looked at him like he had lost his mind. "Okay." He ran back to his station to open the channel.
"This is-"
"Hohn," Steven said. "Cease fire. We surrender." He opened a channel to the remaining ships in the fleet. "Cease fire. Cease fire. Shut down your engines. We surrender."
It was against all accords of common decency to fire on a ship that had claimed surrender. Within seconds, the entire battle had ground to a halt.
Steven was sure the other commanders would be questioning his resolve right about now, furious with him for disobeying to save their, and his own, life. It was a cross he would have to bear.
"This is Admiral Hohn," the Federation Admiral repeated. "We accept your complete surrender. Power down all non-essential systems immediately."
"Understood," Steven replied, passing the order out.
He slumped back in his chair as all eyes on the bridge turned to him.
"You'd better have something useful to say, Mitch."
38
"What the hell is going on, Admiral?" Rock asked.
"It's about Mitchell. I need your help. We don't have much time."
Steven had already been forced to raise his p-rat status to the highest level of privacy to stop the constant knocks of the other ship commanders from threatening to overwhelm him. They were confused, and they had every right to be, but for the moment he needed to figure out how he was going to get them out of the mess he had just put them in. Admiral Hohn had already started the process of dispatching crews to commandeer the Alliance vessels.
"Mitchell? How can any of this have anything to do with your dead brother?"
"For one, he isn't dead. Cornelius told me as much in confidence back when we had the first meeting."
"You're kidding?" Rock stared at him. "You aren't kidding."
"No. He sent me a message."
"You surrendered because your not-quite-dead brother knocked you?"
"In part. There's something weird going on here, and I think his message has something to do with it. Not only was it aimed directly at me using one of my secure transmission codes, but he also encrypted the audio itself. I need you and Corporal Kravitz to help me decode it, and we need to do it in the next three minutes."
"You do realize this is insane, right?"
"Yes. I'm passing the open stream on to you and Kravitz. It's probably a simple transposition cipher."
"You know I suck at cryptography."
"Kravitz doesn't." He opened a channel to the engineer.
"Admiral. Why did we surrender?"
"Don't worry about that. I just sent you a stream. I need you to decode the cipher."
"Cipher?"
"Listen to it."
There was a pause while the tech did as he was told. "Okay, I get it. Can you give me a clue?"
"Yes. The key is probably Dawn Cabriella."
&nbs
p; "Dawn what?"
"Cabriella. C-A-B-R-I-E-L-L-A. She was my first crush in school. Mitchell teased me about her for years because she was kind of, well, not pretty. At all."
That drew a laugh from Rock.
"Mitchell? Your dead brother?"
"He isn't dead. The message is from him."
Kravitz whistled. "Dawn Cabriella. Okay, give me two minutes."
"You have one," Steven said. He could see the Samurai hanging to the right of the Carver, transports pouring from the sides.
Ten of them. He had lost half the fleet.
"One minute? Okay, okay. I can do this."
"The Federation is on its way, Steven," Rock whispered. "Even if this turns out to be something, what are you going to do?"
"I don't know yet. We're hanging by a nanotube here."
They sat in silence while the seconds ticked away. Steven watched the transport drawing closer to the Carver. The worst case scenario is that he would be sent to a POW camp, considered a traitor, ostracized by his crew, and the Alliance would never barter to get him back. He supposed he could live with that if he could convince the Federation it was all one big misunderstanding.
As if that were possible after he had killed hundreds of thousands of civilian farmers.
"Kravitz?" Steven said, drawing short on patience.
"I know, I know. I had to pull a few cryptographic packages from the archives. Nobody uses this kind of stuff anymore. Even the kids write algorithms to mess with data security."
Not him and Mitchell. Their parents had always forced their wish for the "good old days" on them both.
"John, head down to the Hangar to receive the landing party," he said.
"They aren't going to be happy you didn't come in person. It's kind of expected etiquette."
"You can bring them to me. It'll have to do."
"Okay. Good luck." Rock fled the bridge in a hurry to meet the transport.
"Kravitz?" Steven said again.
"Almost there. Give me two more - Ah-hah. Got it. I'm sending it back to you."
Steven started playing the stream the moment it registered in his p-rat.
"Steven. I don't know where you've been assigned, what you've heard about me, or if you've had any contact at all with General Cornelius. I hope to God you trust me when I say that if you have, it's all bullshit. We're in deep trouble, and by 'we' I mean all of humankind. There isn't enough time to explain, but you need to warn as many people as you can. Liberty is gone, Steven. They destroyed it, and they're moving for Earth. I'm too far behind to stop them. I need your help. Your neural implant is compromised and can be used to take control of your body. To enslave you. I bounced this transmission from one of their ships. If you've received this message, it means they must be nearby. Offload this stream somewhere and turn off your crew's receivers right frigging now. Tell your commanders to do the same. Steven. I know you. I know you think this is insane. Trust me, it is, and it gets worse. Do it. 47-17-9, 22-19-3,0-11-81,56-12-6,31-"
