The Siege of Earth (The Ember War Saga Book 7)

by Richard Fox

  “So…no?”

  “We’ll be fine,” Standish said. “Probably. Probably fine. The captain and the lieutenants had a good idea pow-wow.” The Marine detached the optics from the top of his rifle and reached them just around the corner.

  Video feed of the road running perpendicular to the tunnel and the river of spoil flashed across Standish’s visor and went to every Marine behind him. A little more than a dozen wraiths pulled quadrium from the flowing rocks while many more worked on the opposite side of the river.

  “Got some hostiles,” Standish said, “less than before. Nice when a plan comes together. No sign of a sled. Wait…there’s one.” Standish zoomed in on an empty hover sled driven by a single wraith slowing on the opposite side of the gigantic mineshaft. “Wrong side, though. Go or hold, sir?”

  “Hold,” Hale said. “Give it a few minutes. See if another comes our way.”

  “Roger.” Standish swept the optic back and forth over the target area.

  “So, you were really on Takeni?” Weiss asked. “You ran through that burning forest?”

  “Yes. That sucked, by the way.”

  “You were the one that pulled Torni out of that river when she jumped in to save that little Dotty girl?”

  “What? No, never happened. You can ask Torni about that yourself,” Standish said.

  “Sergeant Torni’s dead. How am I going to do that?” Weiss asked.

  Standish tapped the side of his helmet. “Damn IR’s funny in these tunnels.” The optic froze. “Here we go. Captain Hale, got one empty sled arriving.”

  “Collapse the stack, ready on my mark,” Hale said.

  Standish crouched slightly and Weiss stepped closer and stuck his rifle over Standish’s shoulder.

  “Hey, Weiss.” Standish craned his head up to look at the other Marine, his face pale and moist with sweat. “Gott mit uns.”

  “Gott mit uns.” Weiss nodded emphatically.

  “Attack!” Hale shouted.

  Standish rushed forward in a crouch. He cleared the exit and twisted to the left.

  The sled idled a few feet over the road. A neat line of wraiths holding omnium cubes waited to hand over their cargo to a lone wraith standing on the flat bed.

  “Don’t shoot the sled!” Standish drilled a plasma bolt into the forehead of a wraith holding a cube. He sidestepped and leaped onto the bed where the lone wraith on the sled with him hurled an omnium cube right at Standish’s face.

  Standish ducked and rolled forward. Following his momentum, he got to his feet, swung his rifle over his shoulder and drove the butt of the weapon toward the Wraith’s face.

  The wraith caught the rifle butt with one hand, freezing Standish’s strike in place. The wraith’s dead eyes clicked from the rifle to Standish.

  “Well, shit.” Standish let go of his weapon and ducked forward, ramming an elbow into the wraith’s stomach. There was a grunt and the wraith’s hips shot backwards. Standish swung an uppercut into its chin. Blood and teeth sprayed out of the wraith’s ruined mouth. Standish grabbed it by the shoulders and hip-tossed it through the air and into the spoil stream.

  Boulders smashed into the wraith, crushing it into armor fragments and bloody paste as the stream carried the body to the distant exit.

  A ruby beam snapped passed his elbow. Standish fell flat and rolled over the side of the sled. He fell next to Hale, who had his plasma rifle over the driver’s controls, firing on wraiths on the other side of the stream. A dying drone disintegrated at the end of the road. Dead wraiths who’d been shot down before they could be directed away from their mining tasks lay like discarded puppets in the dirt.

  The Marines fired on the wraiths on the other side of the river, but few of their plasma bolts and few attacks from the wraiths made it across the spoil.

  “Get this thing moving, Standish!” Hale ordered.

  “Right, let me just—” He stood up and barely missed another beam of energy sent over the top of his head. “Jiminy Christmas! I don’t think they want us to leave, sir.”

  “Bailey! Take your shot,” Hale said.

  The sniper raised her rail rifle and fired. The supersonic round sent a clap of thunder against Standish’s helmet, hard enough that his ears popped. The bullet hit the opposite side of the tunnel, just below the road’s edge. Dirt, rock and wraiths went flying, all sucked into the spoil and crushed into tiny bits.

  Standish jumped back onto the sled and found the controls: several round dials with lit rings. The last sled they found was push operated, but this…

  “Ugh, Egan?” Standish asked for the team’s pilot.

  “Busy! Very busy!” The snap of plasma bolts and clipped commands from Cortaro stepped on Egan’s reply.

  Standish looked over his shoulder and saw a drone rise up from the edge of the road, stalks lit and ready to attack. Orozco’s heavy cannon beat it into the spoil. The rush of material propelled the drone forward. A stalk shot out and nearly took Standish’s head off before boulders clapped against the drone and spat the crystalline pyrite inside the shell out into the stream.

  “OK.” Standish looked at the controls. “I’ve hotwired everything from a 1997 Pontiac to the new hotness Teslas. I can figure this out.” He touched a fingertip to one of the dials and ran it clockwise around the lit ring.

  The sled lurched to the side, straight toward the spoil. Small rocks pelted the side of Standish’s helmet as he spun his finger the other way. The craft banked the opposite direction, heading straight for Hale.

  Hale dove to the ground as the sled almost scalped him. The sled smashed into the tunnel wall hard enough to pitch Standish off his feet and into the rock.

  “Standish!” Hale shouted.

  “Yes! Sorry, sir. She’s a bit sensitive.” Standish gingerly touched another dial, and the entire sled fell to the ground. He moved his fingertip the opposite direction and it rose higher. “Think I’ve got it now.” He touched another ring and the sled lurched forward.

  “Yup! All aboard the Standish Express!”

  Hale waved an arm over his head. “Shift fire!”

  Half the Marines swung their rifles at the drill and aimed for the outermost ring. Their plasma bolts smeared across the metal with no effect.

  “Bailey, plan B!” Hale called out.

  Bailey dropped a spent battery from her belt and attached the power cable running from her rifle to a new battery. She took a tungsten dart from an ammo pouch and slipped it into the acceleration cradle at the base of the rail gun vanes. She aimed at the drill, then raised the weapon to the rocky ceiling just above the spoil stream.

  Marines covered their audio receptors and ducked away.

  Bailey shot the roof, knocking loose fragments of Pluto’s crust the size of houses. The giant rocks floated in the spoil stream, then moved slowly downstream.

  “Load up!” Hale shouted.

  The Marines broke away from the firefight with the wraiths on the other side of the spoil, the firing lines for both sides blocked by the new debris. He loaded up the sled, rifles oriented to the front and to the spoil.

  Hale was the last one on, needing help from Steuben to climb aboard.

  “Go, take us slow,” Hale said.

  Standish touched a dial and the sled jerked forward. Bailey slung her plasma carbine off her back and laid flat on the bed. Each time the moving sled passed beneath a floating orb, she destroyed it with a well-timed shot.

  Wraiths ran up the opposite road, shooting red beams of death after the Marines.

  “Not that slow,” Hale said.

  Standish increased the speed, and Bailey missed a shot.

  “Hey! This is hard enough without you driving like a sloppy drunk!” she protested.

  “I’m getting mixed messages here,” Standish said.

  Cortaro stood up and hit the globe Bailey missed. With each globe they destroyed, the spoil stream shifted to the opposite side, toward the functioning globes still generating a gravity field. The once-smooth highway of th
e spoil stream degraded into a traffic jam of boulders and rocks compacting against each other.

  The spoil stream ground to a halt and spilled over the opposite side, crushing the wraiths to bits. The entire cavern filled with rock as the drill kept eating away and filling the space with more rubble. A wall of spoil advanced a few more yards, then stopped.

  Standish risked a couple quick glances over his shoulder.

  “Well, I’ll be damned. That was a great idea, sir!” Standish said. “You got the drill to bury itself.”

  “Think it’ll stop?” Hale asked Cortaro. “Or will it cut through the entire planet and spawn more drones?”

  “I don’t think the Xaros can handle the pressure at the core of a planet, sir,” Cortaro said.

  “Let’s hope not.”

  ****

  Hale’s good arm grabbed the edge of the pit and he hauled himself onto Pluto’s surface. Gravity lessened instantly as he moved beyond the effects of the last glowing orb. A brown haze of dust filled the sky directly over the pit, giving way to blue as the distant sun scattered through tholin particles in the upper atmosphere.

  He searched the sky and found no sign of the Grinder…or the Breitenfeld.

  “Egan, get comms going. Find our ship,” Hale said.

  “I don’t think I can get anything through all the particulates in the atmosphere,” Egan said. “We could go radio,” he said, pointing to Abaddon cresting over the horizon, “but that’ll bring every Xaros drone still out there right on our heads.”

  “Try,” Hale said.

  “Sir,” Jacobs came over to Hale, “where did the task force go? The Grinder would have burned up if it was destroyed. It’s gone…shouldn’t the ships be out here trying to find us, at least send something down the tunnels to look?”

  “Valdar wouldn’t leave us behind.” Hale felt a chill spread from his gut to the rest of his body. Where was the Breitenfeld?

  Hale looked at his air and battery gauges; both were amber and dangerously close to low.

  “Steuben, where is your drop pod?” Hale asked.

  “Clear over those mountains.” The Karigole pointed to distant icy peaks. “It took significant damage when we landed.”

  Hale scratched that course of action off a shrinking mental list of ways his Marines could survive.

  “Sir,” Cortaro got close to Hale, “Drebin in Slate has life support for the next fifty minutes. His O2 scrubber got banged up and is malfunctioning. Rest of us have between one and four hours.”

  Fifty minutes before his Marines started to die.

  “What do we do, sir?” Mathias asked.

  “Get Drebin back in the pit where there’s still atmo. Have him breathe that instead of his suit reserves until we’re ready to move,” Hale said. “Worse comes to worse, we’ll send a radio beam to Earth, see if they can—”

  “Sir, got something.” Egan waved to Hale from a satellite dish stuck in the dirt. “Distress beacon on the search-and-rescue freq.”

  “SAR freqs are radio spectrum. Are you sure?” Hale asked.

  Egan’s face fell. “Yes, sir, I’m sure. Coming from an escape pod, telemetry says it’s off the Scipio.”

  “Got it.” Niles held his rifle steady and pointed to the sky. “Sending.”

  A pic of a corvette came on Hale’s visor. A tear in the hull ran across the rail gun; one vane was bent and misshapen. The ship lolled on its side, trailing debris.

  “That looks like the Scipio,” Hale said. “I wonder why we’re getting a life pod hit off it and not the ship’s distress signal.”

  “Hold on.” Egan touched the side of his helmet. “Getting another transmission off the beacon…dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot—SOS. There’s someone up there, sir.”

  “Doubt they can come pick us up,” Cortaro said.

  “You ever serve on a corvette?” Hale asked Cortaro. “How bad does the Scipio look?”

  “Did a few Luna jumps off one. Didn’t get a real good look around, but you look at her on the infrared spectrum and her battery stacks are still hot. Ship could still have power,” Cortaro said.

  “And atmo in her tanks,” Hale said. He looked at Abaddon. “If there were Xaros inside that thing, they would have come out to finish off whoever’s sending out the distress call. Egan.”

  “Sir?” Egan looked up from his gauntlet.

  “Xaros drones can break out of gravity wells much stronger than Pluto’s. You think that sled can get us up to the Scipio?”

  “Only one way to find out,” Egan said.

  CHAPTER 15

  Of all the things Stacey regretted about her life before the Xaros invasion, not learning to be a better public speaker was at the top of the list. She wished her grandfather, Marc Ibarra, the world’s richest man and the one who’d engineered Stacey’s birth to serve as humanity’s ambassador to the races united against the Xaros, had encouraged her to practice giving speeches—or done anything to teach her to deal with the crippling onset of anxiety that came before every one of these meetings.

  The bastard knew I would end up here. Why didn’t he send me to Model United Nations or Toastmasters instead of astronomy camp? she thought.

  She paced back and forth on the small pod used by Bastion’s ambassadors for their full meetings. It took five steps to get from one side of the dome-shaped craft to the other and Stacey pinged from side to side so fast the turns were making her slightly dizzy.

  Pa’lon shared the pod with her, the Dotok ambassador’s eyes watching her go from side to side. He kept his hands clasped behind his back, rocking back and forth on his heels slightly.

  “Do all humans act this way before public events?” he asked.

  “You want to go back to your own pod? You can.” Stacey shook her hands from side to side then patted her cheeks.

  “You’ve been an ambassador for many years now. Perhaps the topic of discussion is causing this…behavior,” Pa’lon said.

  “Ambassador Ibarra engages in this routine before every Congress, even during sessions where she is not scheduled to speak,” said Chuck, Stacey’s AI assistant, from a speaker on the control panel. “Variations include self-talk, snapping fingers, unexpected flatulence—”

  “Thank you!” Stacey shouted. “Thank you for all that unnecessary information, Chuck. That happens one time—”

  “Eight.”

  “—one time and it gets filed in some gigantic behavioral database.” Her face flushed red and she looked away from Pa’lon.

  “I can make the request to Congress,” Pa’lon said. “My species is in as much danger as yours.”

  “No, this is my job. I will get Bastion to send their fleets to help defend Earth. I failed miserably when the Toth came knocking. I’m not going to screw this up again.” Stacey took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “My bargaining position is significantly better this time around.”

  “I wouldn’t go there, Stacey. There are already too many ambassadors afraid of what humanity could do with what Bastion’s provided: the procedural generation technology for new soldiers, the omnium reactor, the Crucible. We will win more support by being magnanimous, thankful.”

  “Earth has lost billions of lives to Bastion’s plans. Don’t think we’re going to let the Xaros steamroll us just because it’s convenient for some race that’s never seen the business end of a disintegration beam.” Stacey set her face and threw back her shoulders. “Chuck? We ready?”

  “The final ambassador is in place,” Chuck said. “The Vishrakath ambassador, Wexil, has petitioned to address the council before the vote.”

  “Of course he has,” Stacey said.

  Wexil had swayed Bastion away from supporting Earth when the Toth attacked, offering the reptilian aliens the proccie technology and the lion’s share of humanity. Wexil’s plan would have had Earth repopulated with more “compliant” humans from replacement proccie tubes to serve the Alliance. Relations between Stacey and Wexil had reached a nadir soon after she learned of this plan, and
they had not improved.

  The dark covering on the pod’s dome rolled aside. A gigantic stone pillar with a flat top large enough for a football field was in the center of the grand Congress. Hundreds of ambassador pods surrounded the pillar, all floating on an even plane.

  A giant disembodied head appeared over the pillar: one of the Qa’Resh appeared as a middle-aged woman with a long braid of hair. “She” was really one of the giant crystalline entities that made up the Qa’Resh; that Stacey had seen their true form put her in a very exclusive club on Bastion. The Alliance’s hosts and nominal leaders were notoriously shy and paranoid, especially after the Toth killed one of their number in a kidnapping attempt many years before Stacey arrived in the station.

  “Members of the Alliance,” the Qa’Resh said, “the Xaros are at the gates of a member world. Earth, which holds our only Crucible jump gate, is under threat. Ambassador Ibarra and Pa’lon have petitioned for military aid. It is time to decide.”

  A pod rose from the other side of the pillar. Stacey felt anger swell in her chest as Wexil came level to the Qa’Resh’s pillar. Few things helped Stacey focus during public forums, but one was her hatred for that man.

  “To our hosts.” Wexil bowed to the Qa’Resh. He looked like a patrician man in his late forties with slick black hair. Stacey did not know what the Vishrakath really looked like; Wexil hid behind the human projection Bastion kept around him at all times. Every ambassador looked human to Stacey, just as she resembled the races of each ambassador when they saw her—all in the name of cohesion and communication, according to Chuck.

  “Ambassadors.” Wexil’s pod spun around and he held his hand to the side. “Earth and the Dotok are right to ask for our aid. They are under threat and have done much to aid our efforts against the Xaros.” He looked at Stacey and gave her a slight nod. “But expending resources to save that planet is no longer in our best interests.”

  Stacey’s hand snapped out to activate her pod’s speakers. Pa’lon caught her by the wrist and shook his head.