by Richard Fox
The Ibarra Sanction
Terran Armor Corps Book 2
by
Richard Fox
Copyright © by Richard Fox
All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission.
ASIN:
Table of contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
FROM THE AUTHOR
Iron Hearts
The Ember War
Chapter 1
Gideon lay half-buried in the blasted remains of a trench, falling dirt smacking into the ground around him as he struggled out of his early grave. The taste of soil and blood filled his mouth. The smell of Hawaii’s volcanic soil and the bark of weapons’ fire, battling fighters overhead, and shouting soldiers all melded into a din that shook his soul at a primal level.
He managed to grip a broken hunk of masonry that once served as a trench wall and pulled himself out of the landslide of his collapsed trench.
“Nico?” Gideon looked down one side of the defenses. The remains of his squad were somewhere in the mélange of black soil and concrete blown apart by a Toth bombing run.
“Nico!” Gideon reached for a chunk of masonry just as a blue-white energy bolt streaked in and exploded against the exposed back wall of the trench just in front of him. The blast kicked him back, peppering his face with embers of burning concrete.
Toth battle ululations echoed over the sound of gun fire as the next wave of attackers emerged from the sandy Hawaiian beach.
He rolled to a stop against a dead soldier sat against the firing stoops, her chin against her chest, an open pressure bandage in one hand, an arm pressed against an eviscerated midsection. Gideon grabbed her gauss rifle and struggled to his feet. The blast had thrown him into a still-standing section of the fortifications. In one direction, the sharp angle of the trenches, behind him was ruin.
The hiss-snap of Toth language sent a blossom of fear through his chest. Claws of a Toth warrior’s forward legs gripped the top of the trench just over Gideon’s head. The warrior was massive, eight feet tall and covered in crystalline armor. Reeking of the sea, the alien looked down at Gideon and bared shark-teeth from its reptilian snout.
Gideon swung his rifle up and pulled the trigger…and got nothing but a dry click.
“Meat,” the Toth hissed and jumped at Gideon, foot claws open wide to seize him and rip him to pieces.
Gideon stood frozen, his mind in shock at the first encounter with the alien species. He jerked backwards, the rush of air from the Toth’s swipe caressed his face. He came to a sudden stop against the power-armored body of a Strike Marine. The Marine twisted to one side, putting himself between Gideon and the Toth. Gideon saw legs and feet of several other Marines as he was shoved unceremoniously to the ground.
Gauss fire snapped through the trench and struck the Toth warrior, shattering its armor and splattering yellow blood against the trench wall.
“Die, you lizard-looking son of a bitch!” Standish shouted. The Marine didn’t have a helmet on, a detail that stuck out at Gideon as he tried to get back to his feet.
The Toth keened and collapsed to the ground, its tail twitching.
“You alright?” asked the Marine that had pulled Gideon out of danger. Gideon glanced at the name and rank stenciled on the man’s armor. Lieutenant Hale.
Gideon pointed back towards the dead Toth with his found weapon and tried to speak.
“Nico…I-I can’t find Nico,” Gideon stammered.
“I got him, sir,” came from behind Hale. The lieutenant handed Gideon off to a Corpsman, who guided him down to a firing stoop. “Look at me.” Yarrow held up the palm of his medical gauntlet and light flashed from a ring on the Marine’s palm.
“Go find Nico. He’s…” Gideon shook his head, clearing away some of the cobwebs, and looked down at the rifle in his hands. The round counter integrated into the back sights blinked on and off. He touched the magazine and found it loose, on the verge of falling out. Slapping the base of the magazine hard, he felt the rifle cycle a round into the chamber.
The fear and confusion melted away and a burning knot of anger ignited inside him as he shrugged off the Corpsman’s touch.
“You might be in shock,” the Corpsman said. “Need to get you back to a field hospital and—”
“Nico is gone.” Gideon wiped blood off his face. “He left us. All of us.”
The thunderclap of a larger gauss weapon sounded a steady double beat in the air. A giant of gleaming metal advanced up to the trench, twin barrels of the cannons mounted to one arm burning red with heat.
The armor’s helm snapped down and stared at Gideon as Toth energy fire snapped overhead.
“Are you going to fight or are you going to hide?” Elias asked. The armor stepped over the trench and advanced toward the oncoming enemy.
Gideon grabbed the parapet and hauled himself over the top. Toth warriors lumbered through the broken battlefield, emerging from the ocean waves and seeking cover in the remnants of the forward trenches.
Elias charged forward, flanked by the other two Iron Hearts of his lance; Bodel and another, the one who would become Saint Kallen.
Gideon let off a battle cry and sprinted forward, outpacing the Strike Marines in their power armor for the first few dozen yards through bomb craters and ripped razor wire.
Ahead, a Toth warrior reared up in a blast crater and leveled its energy rifle at Elias.
Gideon fired from the hip, striking the alien in the side. The Toth let off a trill of pain and turned its weapon on Gideon, whose next shot cracked the alien’s rifle. It exploded in a flash of blue light a heartbeat later.
The Toth crawled along the rim of the crater, its armor blackened and arms smoking.
Gideon raised his rifle to his shoulder and fired on the alien, the recoil slowing his momentum as he ran. The Toth spasmed as a shot punched through its helmet and exited the other side in a gout of yellow-gray brain matter.
Gideon slowed to a stop next to the Toth’s body and glanced over at the Iron Hearts. Elias crushed the skull of a warrior as Bodel rammed his cannon arm into the chest of another and blew its back out with a single bullet.
Kallen…was looking right at Gideon. She pressed her armor’s knuckles against her helm to mimic kissing them, then tapped the same fist against her heart.
For a moment, Gideon felt peace. Then the Toth warrior at his feet grabbed him by the ankle. The last thing Gideon saw was the Toth’s fire-blackened claws slicing at his face.
****
Gideon snapped awake. The amniosis fluid of his womb sloshed around him, the abyssal darkness of the pod within his armor lit up in a grid.
The Toth-inflicted scars on his face and chest burned, just as they always did after that dream. He felt his heart pounding, his muscles bunched into knots.
Different, he thought. It was different this time. Nico…
“Armor, begin conscious cycle for Lieutenant Gideon,” came through his womb and into his auditory system. “Authorization Tagawa, LC-44.”
“I’m awake,�
� Gideon sent the Scipio’s captain.
“Get your lance prepped,” she said. “I think we’ve found her.”
****
Gale winds edged Roland off his descent path through the cloud layer enveloping Nimbus IV. The deep gray expanse around him darkened to the color of red wine below, and the searing light of the system’s star washed out the world over his head as he fell. He activated a small maneuver thruster and shunted over to one side, just beyond the limit of his plotted course.
Inside his armor’s womb, floating in the amniosis fluid and connected by an umbilical control cord that plugged into his brain through a plug in the base of his skull, he had no sensation of falling as he plunged down at terminal velocity.
A radio channel opened up from his Dotari lance mate, Cha’ril, who was unseen in the abyss of clouds but still close by.
“Roland, we’re almost to the break point and if you—”
Wind slapped against Roland’s armor, gently rocking him within his womb. The push left him slightly off the centerline of his course, but still within his path’s margin of error.
“Something to add, Cha’ril?” Roland asked.
“Got ten-meter swells on the ocean surface,” Aignar said, coming up on the lance’s channel. “Prep your retros for early stop. Get ready for a drop if Mother Nature proves fickle.”
“Confirm break floor adjustment up twenty meters,” Gideon said and new telemetry data flashed across the HUD fed into Roland’s vision.
Roland activated the jetpack bolted to his armor’s back and maneuver thrusters on his legs. He glanced over the power levels, then looked down at the approaching darkness.
“Break in three,” Aignar said, “two…one. Go, go, go!”
Roland swung his legs forward slightly and ignited his rockets. Inertia strong enough to snap the neck of a normal human felt like a slight push against his body inside the armored womb, enough that he felt his feet just touch the inside of his control pod. Heat warnings popped up on his HUD, and he felt like he had his back to a burning fire pit.
He fell through the bottom of the cloud layer and found an endless expanse of roiling ocean, nothing but white-capped waves the size of buildings thrashing against each other. He searched for a flat patch of ocean to land in as his airspeed shrank to zero.
“No good options,” he said. “Geronimo!”
Roland shut off his jetpack and plummeted toward the water. Hydraulic pistons punched the jetpack away and it went tumbling end over end through the driving rain.
Roland pressed his legs together and crossed his arms over his chest just as he came down on the backside of a wave. He wobbled slightly as he sank into Nimbus IV. His armor’s sensors switched spectrums and formed a composite of the undersea world through a mixture of heat and sonar, as it boosted what limited visible light made it through the cloud cover and salt water.
“Sound off,” Gideon said.
“Feet wet, fifty meters to the floor,” Roland said as an eel the length of a city bus swam below him. Bioluminescent dots shimmered along the eel’s flanks. Blood-red coral the size of trees dotted the ocean bottom and schools of fish meandered over lime-green sand.
Roland spread his feet hip-distance apart, hitting the ground with a massive thump. A hammer-headed manta ray scurried away. He sent out a sonar pulse and the location of the rest of his lance mates came up. They’d landed in a neat diamond formation.
“Water pressure’s nominal,” Cha’ril said. “At least we didn’t land in another rip current.”
“The Scipio’s magnetometer picked up a return to the south,” Gideon said. “Move out and stay alert for whales.”
A waypoint near the edge of a canyon appeared on Roland’s HUD. He turned and started walking, his feet drumming up clouds of dust with each step. Worms rose from the sand and clutched at his armor’s shins and knees as he went on.
“I’m surprised Captain Sobieski sent us down for this one,” Aignar said. “Magnetic anomaly looks like it’s in a trench wall, could just be a vein of exposed iron.”
“The size and mass are consistent with the Cairo,” Cha’ril said. “More so than the last five drops.”
“Lots of asteroid activity in this system, lots of big lumps of metal on the ocean floor,” Aignar said. “Is that why the Cairo was even in this system all by herself?”
“She’s listed as being here on a survey mission,” Roland said.
“Then why did she have an entire company of Path Finders on her crew manifest?” Aignar asked. “Nimbus is a protosystem. Won’t be properly habitable for millions of years. Drop a drone to collect data and scoot back into the Crucible gate.”
“That the Xaros built a Crucible in this system should tell you something,” Cha’ril said. “They left jump gates where there were worlds they could settle or where they found remnants of past civilizations.”
Roland’s HUD blinked with a hit on his armor’s magnetometer, he activated a flood lamp on his helm and marched toward the anomaly. A school of fish the size of basketballs fled from his light while ribbon eels squirmed out of the sand and swam toward him.
“Don’t remember anything from the Crucible survey about the Xaros liking water planets,” Aignar said. “This is the closest thing the system has as far as an Earth-like environment.”
“The outer gas giants have extensive moon ecosystems,” the Dotari said.
“Then why—if the Cairo was out here snooping for archaeotech with her Path Finders—why say she’s on a survey mission? Phoenix sending the Scipio with the rest of her corvette squadron isn’t how we’re supposed to do search and rescue.”
Roland stopped next to a coral tree and swept his light up the trunk and to the spiny branches. Tiny polyps on the surface opened and closed, grasping at passing plankton. Red mist flowed from the upper branches, their ends broken along a straight diagonal line.
“Roland, you have something?” Gideon asked.
“Looks like something cut through this coral. Angle doesn’t look natural…continuing to the mag anomaly,” he said. Roland walked on, faster now. After a solid week of scanning and searching the planet and the rest of the system for the missing Cairo, he finally had a possible lead. As much as he wanted this mission to end, finding the ship down here meant there was little hope of finding the ship’s crew alive.
A wire outline appeared on his HUD, covering a patch of ocean floor the size of a hangar door. He walked over, and his foot thumped against something metal. He sank to his knees and brushed a swath of sand up, where it caught the gentle current and flowed away like smoke in the wind.
He felt the metal through his armor’s fingertips; the surface was pockmarked like lava rock. Roland pointed the twin gauss cannons mounted to his forearm and cycled the autoloader. He carried no ammunition and the weapon sent a blast of water across the hunk of metal, billowing sand up and away.
The sweep revealed a section of starship hull plating, the remains of a pair of white numerals on the far edge.
“Got something.” Roland sent images to the rest of his lance. “Hull number…37? That’s the Breitenfeld. This can’t be right.”
“That’s an 87,” Gideon said. “The Cairo’s complete number is 387. Besides, the Breitenfeld’s been on some secret mission for months.”
“Looks like we found her.” Roland lifted up the edge of the hull plate, disturbing a small gaggle of yellow and red fish. Floodlights from the other three suits of armor converged toward him through the gloom of the deep water.
“No. We found a piece, not the ship,” Gideon said as he neared. “This has reentry scorching on it, could’ve been lost in orbit.”
Roland swung his lamp toward the direction of the larger object that brought them down in the first place. The seafloor ended abruptly a few dozen yards away, giving way to endless water and darkening depths. He dropped the hull section and hurried over to Cha’ril and Aignar, where they stood along the trench edge.
Below, a scar had been cut across th
e canyon wall, and resting on a shelf—barely visible to his armor’s sensors—was a Terran destroyer, her engines half-ripped from the rest of the hull, leaving decks exposed to the ocean.
His HUD returned an error as it searched for the bottom depth of the trench.
“If she’d crashed any deeper, we’d have to call in the Ruhaald,” Aignar said.
“The water pressure at the Cairo’s depth is 1100 feet,” Cha’ril said. “Eighty-five percent of our armor’s rated pressure. We’re going down there, correct?” she asked Gideon as he joined them.
“We need to learn more,” Gideon said. “Hull’s mostly intact. We should be able to recover her data banks at least. Cha’ril, Aignar, check the dorsal life pods. Roland and I will get inside. Hit your floats if you go over the edge or the pressure will crush you into paste long before you hit bottom.”
“If there is a bottom,” Aignar said.
A rising sound like a foghorn reverberated through the water.
Roland and the others snapped off their floodlights.
“Great…whales.” Roland ran along the edge of the trench, keeping pace with Gideon. He looked up at the weak light on the ocean surface. The silhouette of massive creatures passed overhead.
“It really is a mistake to call them whales,” Cha’ril said. “Earth whales are mammals. I must say that swimming mammals—which is something of an aberration, according to the most recent galactic survey—are fascinating. But we haven’t seen these Nimbus whales give birth to live young or even—”
“No one asked, Cha’ril,” Aignar said.
Gideon leapt off the edge and sank toward the ledge bearing the final resting place of the Cairo. Roland followed suit, fighting the urge to try to swim. His armor was as buoyant as an anvil and was adept at nothing but sinking in this environment.
“The xenobiological classification is important,” Cha’ril said. “It’s frustrating enough that so many humans think we Dotari are birds just because of our beaks.”
“Don’t Dotari lay eggs when they have babies?” Aignar asked.
