by Richard Fox
“Big birds thank whoever’s keeping the drones off ’em,” Firecracker said. “Looks like they broke the shell. Stand by for rail cannon.”
Standish’s hydraulics lost power. He cursed and grabbed a small handle on the turret ring and spun it madly to twist the turret toward the front of the Osprey at an agonizingly slow speed.
A glowing crack ran along the Xaros cruiser’s flank, and the main cannon flickered.
The Osprey’s twin rail cannons thundered, rattling Standish against his restraints. One round hit the mountainside, throwing up a shower of dirt and shattered rock. The other hit the construct on the prow, breaking the forward third clean away. The construct angled down and crashed into the mountains, gouging up an avalanche as it slid down.
A drone veered out of its dogfight with an Eagle and angled for the Osprey. Standish spun the handle the other way.
“Got a bandit coming in on our two o’clock,” he said, “would appreciate some hydraulic power.”
The Osprey twisted onto its side and swung away from the scrum. Standish lost sight of the attacking drone.
“Bailey! You see it down there? Should be your—” The Osprey leveled out and Standish saw the drone pursuing them from behind. He spun the wheels faster. “Six. Six o’clock!”
Power returned and Standish swung the guns around. The drone fired before he could line up his shot and a scarlet beam struck the top of the Osprey, cutting a rudder away and tracing a laser straight to Standish’s turret.
The Osprey banked to the side as the lost rudder threw off the plane’s aerodynamics. The beam meant for Standish zigged around his turret and wrecked the antennae array.
Standish fired wildly, joined by Orozco’s turret. The drone went down in the crossfire.
A Xaros beam struck the aegis plating next to Standish. Black smoke stained the side of the turret. A small fire burned through a hole in the armor and the turret dome. Standish slapped at the flames.
More drones were coming for them.
The Osprey shot forward, wobbling as the afterburners cast blunt torches of fire behind them.
“We’re pulling back to the defense lines along the Salt River,” Egan said. “Another wave’s coming in.”
Standish turned his guns on the swarm. The Xaros pulled back, oblivious to the losses inflicted by him and the rest of the defenders’ air fleet, and coalesced into a sphere a hundred yards wide. The sphere blasted apart, revealing a jagged sphere of light at its center.
Standish zoomed in and saw the General, surrounded by interlocking rings of circling drones. The General raised a hand, then pointed to Phoenix. The drones instantly swarmed past the General, obscuring him from sight.
“OK, looks like the Xaros brought their big bad to play. Anyone have a silver bullet, wooden stake…bucket of water? Also, we’ve got incoming.” Standish fired his cannons, determined to shoot off every bullet before the drones reached them.
A drone reared up over the tail and spat past Standish’s turret before he could swing it around to engage. The drone ripped a disintegration beam across the cockpit and the Osprey flew into a barrel roll.
The world around Standish went end over end, the centripetal force too strong for Standish to reach the ejection handle beneath his seat.
“Gooey! Firecracker? The ground is coming…doesn’t…look…friendly,” Standish managed to say.
The Osprey fell into a flat spin, whipping Standish back and forth against his restraints until it nosed down. Standish got a good look at a doughboy bunker just before the Osprey pulled out of the dive…and flew straight toward a mountainside.
Standish brought his hands over his face. There was a rip of metal and the ship’s tail swung around. The Osprey belly flopped against a slope and careened down the mountainside. Standish jostled against his restraints as the slide got rougher over every rock. He spotted a boulder the size of a car directly ahead of him.
“Ah…crap…” The Osprey hit the boulder and went tail over nose. The ground came straight at Standish as his turret ball slammed to Earth.
There was a bang…then silence.
Standish opened his eyes and found crushed weeds and pulverized rocks against his turret ball. The impact had bent the barrels of his gauss cannons into scrap metal. His turret had sunk into the recession beneath the seat, crushing the hydraulics. Blood rushed to Standish’s head—he was upside down.
“I owe the designer a drink,” Standish said. The lights in his turret ball faded away, leaving him with a sliver of sunlight from a crack in the fuselage.
“Hey,” Standish said, knocking against his turret, “anyone hear me?”
“Standish?” Bailey asked. “I’m trapped in my turret.”
“Me too. Better stuck here waiting than going home in a bucket, I guess.”
“I love engineers. Bless their nearsighted, basement virgin, problem-solving little hearts,” she said.
There was a squeal of metal, the clang of something hitting the outside of the ship.
“Ah, think we’re good and fucked now,” Bailey said.
Standish reached for the holster strapped to his chest and drew his gauss pistol. He gave it a derisive look. It wouldn’t make much difference against a drone.
“Bailey?” No answer. Standish swallowed hard and felt his heart race as the sound of tortured metal got closer.
“This is not how I wanted to die,” he said quietly.
His turret shook slightly, then pulled deeper into the Osprey. The ball went rolling across the desert, oscillating Standish’s view between blinding sunlight and dirt until he came to a sudden stop. Tall figures with wide shoulders and hefty rifles surrounded him.
A Cro-Magnon face with mottled skin stared at Standish through the glass. A hand the size of an oven mitt knocked on the turret.
“OK?” a gravelly voice asked.
“Where the hell did we land?” Standish kept a tight grip on his pistol.
“Move.” Orozco, a crowbar in hand, stepped around the giant soldier. He jammed one end against the seam on the turret ball, popped a panel free and helped Standish out.
“Oro…” Standish cast a sideways glance at the soldier watching the two Marines. “You make new friends, or something?”
“These are doughboys. Where have you been?” Orozco pointed the bent end of the crow bar at the wrecked Osprey. “They got us out.”
Egan sat against the twisted metal, sharing puffs from a vape stick with Bailey.
Standish took off his helmet and turned his face to the sky.
“Ah, sunlight, dry heat.” He waved a hand over his face. “Bugs. Good to be home.”
The Osprey’s two flight techs crawled out of a rip in the back of the ship. One tossed away his helmet and vomited.
“Firecracker?” Standish asked Egan.
Egan shook his head and held up an arm. A burnt line ran down his forearm. “Drone got her. Made flying a lot harder.”
Standish looked to the mountain they’d rode down. The flash of gauss cannons and Xaros beams traced lines of conflict over Phoenix.
“Everybody,” Standish said, clapping his hands, “up. We need to get back in the fight.” He turned around and found himself face-to-chest with a doughboy. He craned his neck up.
“You. Big man. English?”
The doughboy grunted.
“We need a tunnel back to the city. Any help?”
The doughboy cocked its head to a round bunker jutting out of the desert floor.
“That’ll do.” Standish turned back to the survivors. Egan was on his feet, limping badly to the bunker. Standish went to him and put Egan’s arm over his shoulder. “Thought it was just your arm.”
“Everything hurts,” Egan spat.
“Maybe next time we let Orozco fly. What do you think?”
“Hell no.”
“If he had some more—”
“No.”
The sound of explosions from the heart of Phoenix echoed through the mountains.
CHAPTER 26
Torni lifted the last open hatch on the Karigole pod off the ground and slowly brought it upwards.
Lafayette, crammed into the pod with a jump drive and several dozen ribbon-chutes, nodded to her as it closed.
“Reminds me of my first encounter with humans,” Lafayette said.
“Just without Standish screaming,” Torni chuckled.
The hatch shut with a hiss as the pod sealed itself off from the outside world.
“Torni, I need you to get a lifter team and move the pod to the airlock doors,” Ibarra said through an IR bud tucked behind Torni’s ear.
Torni reached under the pod, widened her stance and lifted it up with little effort from her omnium body. She carried it toward the end of the air lock as the doors peeled opened.
“Or that. That works too,” Ibarra said.
Orbital stations around Ceres and the Crucible fired bursts of anti-air fire every few seconds. Torni saw explosions in the atmosphere against Earth’s horizon, long trails of dying ships streaking through the clouds as they succumbed to gravity.
Fires burned against small pockets of the lunar surface. Distant stars wavered around Earth, not from the shifting air currents like she’d see from Earth’s surface, but from the passage of drones. Great spikes from the Crucible’s structure formed a giant crown of thorns, each shifting against each other.
“I need you to give the pod a good push to the center of the Crucible. Lafayette, you’ll get your wormhole in a jiffy. Bring back the Scipio as soon as you can,” Ibarra said. “We have a couple hours to make this work. Don’t dawdle.”
“I am an engineer. I do not ‘dawdle,’” Lafayette said.
Torni carried the pod over the threshold and let it float just beyond the doorway. She morphed a hand to grip the deck and stretched her other arm out like a tentacle to grasp the pod. She pushed the pod into the Crucible’s empty center and pulled herself back into the air lock.
There was a flash of white as the Crucible sent the pod to rendezvous with the Scipio.
“Now, the next part.” Ibarra cleared his throat. “I need you to take the other jump engine to the Tsiolkovskiy crater on the dark side of the moon.”
“I’m sorry, take the what where?”
“Transform into a drone, pick up the other jump engine and fly it to the moon,” Ibarra said slowly.
“You do know that every gun in this solar system is itching to blow drones to pieces, which would include me,” Torni said.
“You’ll be safe from the local defense platforms, Scout’s honor. Luna is lost. There’s no one, drone or human, to shoot at you. Things will happen in a hurry once Lafayette returns and it’ll take you at least twenty minutes to get the device into place. Chop chop.”
“Don’t you ‘chop chop’ me.” Torni picked the jump drive up off the deck and morphed into her drone form, holding the device between her stalks. “I don’t even know where the soil cove—thing—place is.”
“I’ll guide you. Aim for the upper half of the dark side and don’t spare the gas.”
****
Torni flew over the mountains ringing the Tsiolkovskiy crater, her stalks gripped to the jump engine behind her like a squid’s tentacles against a caught fish. She zipped toward the center of the miles-wide plain, kicking up a storm of loose dust in her wake.
+I’m here.+ She slowed to a stop, scanning for any movement across the crater.
“Wonderful, my dear, well done. Excelsior. Now the hard part,” Ibarra said. “I need you to stay and aim.”
+Aim?+
“When Lafayette is in position, he’ll open a wormhole that links to the Crucible, which will then funnel to your device.”
+And what position is that?+
“The sun’s corona. Lafayette will open his portal in the path of a solar flare and send that raw power through your device. You will direct the flare against the Xaros swarm coming for Earth. You should see them by now. Look for the occluded stars.”
Torni shifted to her human form, stepping into the pristine lunar soil. She looked around and found a massive dark patch against the starry sky that shifted and roiled like a living thing.
+Wait. Wait…now hold on just a second.+
“You will be protected by the Tikari shielding for a few seconds. That should be enough to wipe out the maniple. It has to be there and it has to be now. The moon will take the brunt of the heat and radiation. An up-close and personal look at a solar flare would destroy the Earth. Now, are you ready?”
+What about Lafayette?+
“He won’t survive. This was his plan. He volunteered to take the Scipio in. He’s the only one that can keep the wormhole open so close to the sun. If we had more time, we could have come up with something else, but here we are.”
Torni clutched the jump engine tight and looked to the millions and millions of drones on their way to Earth.
“The shielding should keep you safe from—”
+Don’t worry about me. I don’t care what the Xaros did to me. I am still a Marine and if I have to die here, now, to give Earth a chance, I will. You should never have kept the details from me, Ibarra. They wouldn’t have mattered.+
“Sometimes I forget that not everyone is a dishonorable cheat like me. Put the end with the crystal against your chest and lead the Xaros maniple by about two fingers’ width. Sweep the blast across the swarm if you can. The activation will be sudden and unpleasant.”
+You’re a real son of a bitch, you know that, Ibarra?+
“I do, my dear, I do. The shield will function automatically. Brace yourself when you see it charge up.”
****
Lafayette buckled himself into the command chair on the Scipio’s bridge and ran a data line from the back of his head into a port on the chair. The ship’s systems came online and fed directly into his mind. He shifted through the damaged systems and found that the Marines and a few sailors had done a passable job at repairing her.
He activated the jump engine connected to the ship’s fusion core and routed the Tikari shielding along the Scipio’s hull. The Tikari shields were a marvel of engineering from the now extinct species. The technology had spread through the Alliance and was viewed by many as a panacea against the Xaros invaders. Central to the shield’s function was a small oscillation buried within the finer details of string theory, which the Tikari had studied extensively for many hundreds of years. It seemed that the Xaros had a more thorough understanding of the underlying physics to the shields and once the Xaros encountered the Tikari fleet equipped with the technology, the drones had ripped through them with ease and put an end to the Tikari.
The Alliance abandoned further research in the technology. Only the Toth kept the shields in use on their larger ships. Lafayette felt disgust rise in what remained of his throat as he remembered salvaging the Naga to recover their shield emitters. The Toth shields had been the genesis for this plan, after he’d made a number of significant improvements to their design.
“Lafayette, the Marines are clear. You ready?” Ibarra asked.
The Karigole checked the jump engine’s power levels and gripped the handrests tightly.
“Everything is in order. I trust you will send this ship to the right place.”
“I have monitored the sun’s energy output since I first entered the solar system,” the probe said. “It kept my subroutines active and engaged.”
“It stopped him from being bored. I tried to turn him onto soap operas. He wouldn’t have it,” Ibarra said.
“See that my personal effects make it to Steuben. He’ll need them,” Lafayette said. “Be sure he knows I volunteered for this, or he will suspect otherwise of you.”
“Thank you, Lafayette. The human race will not forget this,” Ibarra said.
“I do this for my village, my people, for the allies that saved us from the abyss. Let’s get on with it.”
“Stand by.”
Lafayette activated the Tikari shielding. A ripple of energy
washed across the bridge’s view ports, like the leading edge of a wave slowing against a beach. Lafayette looked to Earth and picked out the African continent where a battle raged over Mount Kilimanjaro. The last of his people were safe behind the walls, for now. As much as he wanted to stand atop the battlements and strike at the foe, what he was about to do could turn the tide.
The ship groaned as something deep in the hull buckled. An electrical panel on the navigator’s seat fritzed out and sent sparks into the air.
“How did they ever learn to master fire?”
A wormhole formed before the Scipio and engulfed the corvette.
Lafayette’s heart pounded against his metal chest as the ship’s sensors went wild. The white abyss faded away and Lafayette looked out across the sun’s photosphere. The surface stretched for far longer than any gas giant he’d ever visited. Giant pillars of fire several times the size of Earth rose off the surface, arced down and formed great archways larger than any structure ever built by mortals. Dark spots tens of thousands of miles across seethed on the sun’s surface.
Lafayette had never felt so small before.
“Shields are working, as I haven’t been burnt to a crisp.” He checked the power levels…and found they were decreasing faster than anticipated.
A flare rose up beneath the Scipio, heading right for the ship.
“At least the probe’s calculations were correct.” Lafayette activated the jump drive and watched as the wormhole struggled to form between the incoming flare and the Scipio, solar winds buffeting the portal like a sail in a storm.
Heat warnings popped up across the ship. Temperatures rose to levels that would have killed a human being within seconds. Lafayette felt the armrests go slack as the metal softened. The shields lost half their remaining charge in less than a minute.
The wormhole stabilized.
An avalanche of superheated plasma hit the wormhole…and did not rip through it. The rest of the flare engulfed space around the Scipio and the tiny wormhole. The ship survived in a small shadow of safety behind the wormhole. The might of Earth’s sun ripped into the portal and out the other end on the dark side of the moon. The plan was working.
