by Richard Fox
“The weapons? How long until you can make them?” Ibarra asked.
Torni scooped omnium up from the cube with both hands and spread her arms wide. The omnium stretched from her fingertips and spun slowly, forming the shape of a blade.
“A few minutes,” she said, “but it will be long, and heavy. I don’t know who can wield this with any amount of skill or effectiveness.”
“Make me one and get back to fabricating the second device. I’ll replicate more blades through the omnium reactor. As for who’s going to kill the General, I have the right people in mind,” Ibarra said
CHAPTER 17
Elias stabbed his fingers into a crack on a drone’s surface and ripped it in half. He sprayed fire from his rotary cannon at a dozen drones attempting to combine into a walker. The drones burst apart as black smoke from their decaying mass joined the red wind sweeping through the battle.
“Elias, this is Carius. What’s your status?” came over the radio.
“Busy.” Elias smashed a heel against a drone attempting to fly past him and crushed it against a boulder.
“I’m sending an extraction for you and your armor. It’ll get to the Breitenfeld, and she’ll take you back to Earth,” Carius said.
“Plenty of fight here. Don’t think Valdar wants me on his ship.” Elias fired at moving shadows through the sand storm.
“Not a request, son. Now clear an LZ. Got a big horse coming for you in one minute.”
Elias backed up until he made contact with Bodel. Caas and Ar’ri found their way over and the four formed a circle, weapons facing outward. The Xaros they’d been fighting were nothing but burning fragments.
“What’s going on?” Caas asked.
“Extraction incoming,” Elias said. “Breit’s taking us to Earth. Didn’t get anything more than that.”
Running lights on a Destrier transport filled the sky overhead, diffusing through the fine sand blowing around them into a wide glow.
“Any word from White platoon?” Bodel asked.
“Nothing.” Elias looked up and saw the Destrier’s rear ramp lowering.
****
Valdar squeezed his eyes shut as the blinding light of wormhole transit assaulted his senses. His head felt like a vice was tightening against his temples and the scars of old war wounds burned like hot wires.
He hated his ship’s jump engines. Hated them with the passion of a burning sun but he could never share this with his crew. He’d earned his sea legs in the blue water navy; he’d never had the desire to become a spacer until the navy forced him into it.
The pain faded away as the blinding light lessened.
Valdar shook his head to regain focus and looked out the front screens on his bridge. The Breitenfeld was in orbit over Mars, and tiny flashes of distant explosions sparkled through the atmosphere. Gossamer-thin clouds stretched out around the ship.
“We’re in the upper edge of the atmosphere,” Ensign Geller said. “Not as bad as Takeni but I’ll get us clear.”
Columns of black smoke rose from mountain ranges like they were smoldering volcanoes.
“Comms,” Valdar said, pulling up a data slate from his armrest, “get me contact with Admiral—”
The bridge trembled as a shadow swept over them. A carrier larger than the Breitenfeld flew past the prow, smoke and fire burning from dozens of tears in the hull. The dying ship rolled to its side and corkscrewed into a final descent.
“Valdar!” Admiral Garret’s face appeared on the data slate. The man looked ten years older than the last time they’d seen each other face-to-face. Sweat ran down his face and blood stained the left side of his head. Garret wore an emergency void helmet, not the armored combat helmet he should have donned before a battle.
“Breitenfeld here as ordered. Where do you want my guns?”
“Earth. You’re to rendezvous with our remaining Manticore frigates over Mount Olympus, take on whatever armor can reach you and jump back to Earth as soon as your engines have the charge.”
Valdar glanced at Levin, his chief engineer.
“Twenty-two minutes to open a wormhole to the Crucible. Longer if we’ve got to take more ships with us,” Levin said.
“I monitored.” Garret’s face jerked from side to side, the reflection of a chaotic holo screen against his faceplate. “Looks like you’ll have fifteen—fourteen now—frigates with you. We’ll hold the Xaros off until you’re away. I’m taking the rest of your task force away from you to hold the line here.”
Valdar felt his ship shift as Geller set the Breitenfeld toward Olympus.
“Aye aye, sir, but if the Breitenfeld can make a difference to this fight why are—”
“Earth is on the brink, Isaac,” Garret said. “Luna has fallen. Xaros are pressing on the Crucible and if we lose that station, they’ll bring in reinforcements and it’ll all be over but the screaming.”
A flash of yellow light hit the right side of Garret’s face.
“Believe it or not, we’re holding our own up here,” the admiral said. “Get your ass to Earth and win that fight. I’m counting on you for another miracle, Valdar. You haven’t disappointed me yet. Garret out.”
“The rest of our flotilla is moving to join with Mars fleet,” Ericcson said. “The Chimera and Argus are waiting for us at the rendezvous point the admiral sent us…rest of the frigates are no more than fifteen minutes away. Also tracking several transports coming up from Mars.”
“Tell the flight deck to prep for pass-through traffic.” Valdar swiped across his data slate and looked over the battle. More than half the Mars fleet was lost, locked in a knife fight with Xaros constructs. Valdar had a hard time believing the admiral’s assessment of the battle.
Valdar swiped to the next data feed from Earth. The information wasn’t real-time, and whatever battle he planned to fight wouldn’t be there when he arrived.
Valdar looked over the Xaros forces assaulting the Crucible…and picked up a stylus.
CHAPTER 18
The Destrier flew through the Breitenfeld’s aft hangar entrance and set down once it had enough real estate to land on. The rest of the flight deck was full of armor soldiers. Eagles packed the sides of the flight line. Nearly a hundred suits filled the deck, grouped in packs of three to twelve. Most bore scars across their armor; others were missing arms, legs, and even a few lacked their helms.
The Destrier opened its forward ramp and Elias took a step down then froze in place. He hadn’t seen so many armor since the Second Battle of Brisbane where the combined armor of the entire Atlantic Union destroyed the Chinese People’s Army III Corps and saved the city from falling to the invaders.
Every last suit of armor was looking right at Elias.
Elias thumped his fist against his chest in salute. The armor returned the salute with a ripple of metal-on-metal bangs.
“Elias, ’bout time you got here.” Carius walked up the ramp in his deep gray armor with black bands around the shoulder plates. He lifted a thick chain bound to the General’s damaged faceplate and placed it over Elias’ helm. A cam bot flew up the ramp and panned over Elias.
“You’ve got an admirer, my boy. Not the kind that sends fan letters. This…General is on Mars and he’s been head-hunting armor,” Carius said. “Took out an entire squadron at Gradivus cannon.” The colonel’s helm shook from side to side. “We’re pretty sure he’s looking for you.”
“Then why am I not on Mars looking for him?” Elias asked.
“We’ve learned a little about the Xaros leadership from that Torni friend of yours. Seems the alien bigwigs aren’t above pride and vengeance. We’re going to use that to our advantage—get the General to come chase you to Earth, take some of the pressure off Mars,” Carius said.
“Send us back. I ripped his face off once. I can do it again,” Elias said.
“You’ll get your chance. Right now we need to set the trap and you’re the bait. Hope you don’t mind,” Carius said. “Now smile to the camera. We’re about t
o broadcast this across the solar system.”
Elias looked straight into the cam bot. He held up the General’s mask and leaned toward the camera.
“I want the rest of you.”
****
Ibarra paced back and forth across the Crucible’s command center. He’d returned to this old habit once the Xaros entered the outer solar system. His holographic feet couldn’t wear a rut in the deck, and they never grew sore or tired. There were a few advantages to having his consciousness live on inside the Alliance probe, but he had no fist to smash against anything when the desire arose.
“Jimmy, what’s our status?” he asked the probe in the center of the domed room.
The probe’s answer was a flat holo screen showing the Crucible, surrounded by nearly a hundred ships of the line. Point defense cannons sparred with swarms of drones trying to slip through the defenders.
A few drones had made it through, only to be destroyed by the doughboy and Marine defenders manning small bunkers atop the many control nodes and inside the long hallways running through the conjoined thorns making up the Crucible.
The probe didn’t answer with words. All but a sliver of its computing power worked to stymie the Xaros trying to regain control of their nearly complete jump gate. The hacking attempts started once the leading Xaros forces reached a few light-minutes from Earth. The Xaros managed to throw off the Crucible from sending more graviton bombs, but the probe could control the quantum field within the great crown of thorns to keep the door open for the Breitenfeld…or reinforcements from the Alliance.
Where are they, Stacey?
Ibarra zoomed out from the Crucible. An enormous mass of Xaros drones lay between Ceres and Earth. Constructs the size of strike cruisers and great murmurations of drones stood guard between the fleet protecting the Crucible and humanity’s home. Another, smaller force of Xaros waited in the void beyond Ceres’ orbit…waiting for the defenders to make a mistake.
If the fleet guarding the Crucible made for Earth, it would be mauled by the cruiser-sized constructs and the waiting Xaros would swoop in and take the Crucible. If the Xaros assaulted the Crucible, the defenses in the void around the jump gate and built into Earth’s second moon would defeat the attackers.
The standoff had held for hours, and Ibarra wasn’t sure how much longer the human defenders could maintain their patience.
“Crucible, this is Captain Gor’al on the Vorpal.” The Dotok’s face came up on the holoscreen. “Earth command reports that we just lost the orbital over Guam. Ground stations across the Pacific Rim are sending me…I don’t know what this is.”
A camera feed from Okinawa came up. A great dark swell of drones poured through the atmosphere, skirting the fire from the remaining orbital batteries in low orbit.
“Not again…” Ibarra shook his head.
“What ‘not again,’ Ibarra?” Gor’al asked.
“They’re forming an extinction arch,” Ibarra said. “The Alliance has seen it on many worlds, and I saw it up close and personal when Earth fell. Watch.”
The drones pressed together, melding into a slight curve that grew to over a hundred miles in length within minutes. The arch in the storm clouds rolled over Okinawa. Sharp points grew out of the bottom like a predator’s teeth. Red energy grew from each tip. The camera feed cut out in a wave of light and static.
“The Xaros will move the arch over populated areas. They’ll carve mountains apart to get at us,” Ibarra said. He switched to feeds from the surviving platforms and watched as the arch drifted north. “It moves slowly, but we’ll lose all of Japan in hours.”
Drones broke away from the Xaros blocking fleet and flew toward the extinction arch.
“The orbitals might put a dent in that thing,” Gor’al said as his eyes widened with a realization. “Earth’s mobile defense is gone…if we don’t break station from the Crucible, it’ll hit the Himalayas, the Ural line, the Alps. Everything. Everyone on Earth will die if we don’t stop it.”
“Hold your station, Captain. We get taunted off the Crucible and everyone will die when the Xaros come pouring through from a wormhole that’s got billions more drones just waiting to join the fight,” Ibarra said. He ran through a least-time projection on the annihilation arch’s path across Earth’s fortresses…eighty-two hours. Much less if the Xaros made another massive breach in the orbital defenses and created another such construct.
“Your people are dying, Ibarra! We’re sitting on our nests watching it happen.” Gor’al’s face pressed closer to his camera. “There are hundreds of thousands of drones loose on Earth’s surface in addition to this arch of theirs. You didn’t go through all the trouble to rebuild humanity and rescue the Dotok to bring them here and just let it get washed away now.”
Ibarra resisted the urge to lash out. Earth was teetering under the current assault, and the next wave of drones—a wave nearly twice the size of the force laying siege to Earth—was due to reach the planet in mere hours. He could handle that problem, but only if Lafayette and his team completed their project…and if Gor’al didn’t throw away the strategic situation Ibarra needed to make his plan work.
I made everything work when I could lie and obfuscate. Telling the truth is an enormous pain in the ass, he thought.
“Help is on the way, Captain. Either the Alliance will send reinforcements or—” The Crucible shifted around as the probe readied a wormhole.
“There, see? Just had to be patient.” Ibarra closed the channel and swiped his hand over the screen to see a white field blossoming within the Crucible.
“What’ve we got, Jimmy?” he asked the probe. “Alliance to turn this fight around or the Breitenfeld to spit in the wind?”
The strike carrier ripped through the wormhole and streaked away like a bat out of hell. Ibarra instinctually ducked behind a workstation and watched as Captain Valdar’s ship raced toward the fleet blocking her path to Earth.
“What in the hell is he doing?” Ibarra turned his face away as the Xaros battleships struck at the Breitenfeld, carving fissures across her hull as she bore down on the aliens. The Breitenfeld’s rail cannon batteries flashed as she zipped past, striking Xaros ships on either side with quadrium munitions.
Lightning chained from one ship to the others, burning hundreds of drones out of existence.
The Breitenfeld continued toward Earth, engines flaring to guide her into high orbit.
Frigates leapt out of the wormhole, each with the same insane velocity as the Breitenfeld. The Toth energy cannons fired and pummeled the disabled Xaros battleships. The Manticore frigates pounded the Xaros, cracking their hulls and blasting them to pieces. A battleship cracked in half, burning from within. The rest of the Xaros fleet was nothing but expanding ash within minutes.
“Valdar?” Ibarra blinked hard, unsure what he’d just seen.
“Ibarra, what the hell is that over Japan?” the Breitenfeld’s captain asked.
“Your next problem. There are two million fighting beneath those mountains. They’ve got less than an hour before the extinction arch that wiped out Okinawa reaches them,” Ibarra said.
“Are you aware of the next wave of Xaros coming toward Luna?” Valdar asked.
“I’ll worry about that. You worry about Japan.” Ibarra glanced at the ceiling. “Wait, do you have Elias with you?”
CHAPTER 19
The sled rose through a reddish-brown haze. Dust and flakes of rock spewed out of the Xaros tunnel and hit Hale’s visor with a tink. He shifted his feet against the soles of his boots, testing that the mag lock to the sled still held.
His Marines knelt against the bed, each maintaining several points of mag-locked contact with the sled.
The Scipio lay ahead, the automated distress call from one of its drop pods pulsing through his comms. The Morse SOS signal came and went every few minutes, never broadcasting too long.
Hale zoomed in on the corvette. She bore scorch marks over her hull and two of her maneuver engines were mangled.
The ship’s shuttle bay door was open, but Hale couldn’t make out anything inside.
“Cutting the anti-grav,” Egan said. “We’ll coast the rest of the way.”
“Not to be needy, but I’ve got eighteen minutes before I suffocate,” Drebin said.
“We’ll be there in five. If I try to rush, we’ll overshoot, then this canoe is way up shit creek and I don’t see any paddles,” Egan said.
“Sir,” Jacobs spoke to Hale, Steuben and Mathias on a private channel, “do you…do any of your Marines know how to work a corvette?”
“We all have basic damage control training. You?” Hale asked.
“Nothing,” Jacobs said.
“Same,” Mathias said.
“Adapt and overcome, Marines. Adapt and overcome,” Hale said. He looked at Steuben, waiting for an answer.
“I am a warrior, not an engineer,” the Karigole said. “If Lafayette were here, I would have no concerns with your plan.”
“Wait, you have concerns?” Hale asked.
“The ship is unpowered and in a degrading orbit. It will crash within a few hours.”
“Why didn’t you mention this observation before we loaded up and broke atmo?” Hale asked.
“You still would have taken this chance. My observation would have made no difference.”
“Steuben. My XO. The next time you see the chance for catastrophic failure, speak up,” Hale said.
“As you wish,” Steuben shrugged.
“Almost there.” Egan touched the controls and the sled jerked beneath Hale. “What do you think, sir? Shuttle bay or the Xaros-made entrance across the rail gun battery?”
“Shuttle bay. Can you get us inside or do we need to float in?”
“I can land it.” Egan maneuvered the sled to outside the shuttle bay.
Inside, a wrecked Mule lay crumpled against the inner bulkhead. The shuttle bay was tiny, with barely enough room for a single Mule, compared to the stem-to-stern flight deck of the Breitenfeld. Blackened streaks scarred the inner walls.
