The Last Dawn: Book 3 of The Last War Series

by Peter Bostrom

  Then, nearly six hours after their last contact, before they could move the ammunition, and just as Mattis was starting to think they could actually get this all done in time, a simple text message came through from Chrysalis station.

  The future-human fleet had arrived.

  Chapter Sixty

  Earth

  United States

  Baltimore

  Public Spaceport

  Dock 57A

  Smith took one last look around the Aerostar and smiled. “Hey, thanks, guys.”

  Sammy smiled back, and Reardon nodded. “Always a pleasure,” the older brother replied. “You’re a problem, Smith, but not too much of a problem, you know?”

  “I don’t, bro,” Sammy shifted in his wheelchair, feigning mild puzzlement.

  Smith chuckled. “Look after each other, okay? And … just don’t touch that box for now. I’ll contact you in a few days and tell you what to do with it.”

  “Sure, mum,” Reardon laughed. In a flash, a thought bloomed across the smuggler’s face. Rare sight. “You too, okay? Don’t do anything … too stupid.”

  “Of course. Drop by some time. I’ll take you to the awesome kebab place around the corner. You’ll love it.”

  Sammy’s expression brightened. “Wait, free food?”

  Smith shook his head. “I guess so, Sammy.”

  “I do like food,” the younger brother said. “We’re taking him up on that.”

  Reardon shrugged, expression shuttering a little. “Next time we’re all in the same system, maybe. Get me a nice jumper, Smith. You don’t want to be caught without.”

  The spy let his laughter continue as he backed down the ramp. “All right, I’ll buy a suitably awful pattern on the way home.”

  “Two patterns! You’ll buy two suitably awful patterns on the way home!” Reardon called out after him.

  “I’m not wearing the same thing as Harry!” Sammy added.

  Smith waved lazily over his shoulder as he walked toward the dock’s exit.

  He set his eye to lookout function, and sorted files as he made his way back towards the underground carpark where he’d been storing his vehicle. All of his evidence was saved on his tablet, and his handheld, but he could work on the copy in his cybernetics and download the changes when he got to his car. After that, it was a quick transmission to the folks in Langley, and all his work would be backed up in HQ. There was a lot to sort, honestly. Most of the work had already been done in Z-space, but there were a few things that could be better-organized.

  As he was walking down to the first level of the carpark, his eye beeped. Suspicious activity. Wasn’t that strange to get a false alarm for that, but still. Keep looking, he instructed it as he began moving his latest changes onto his absolute last-resort backup device, a data storage chip implanted deep in the bone of his ankle.

  The first level didn’t have many people in it, but then, it wasn’t time for most workers to knock off yet.

  Apart from the cars, the second level was deserted.

  Uh-oh.

  Smith made a show of looking around in confusion and winked, activating a distress signal from his phone. He started dialing Reardon, turning to go back up the ramp. And almost ran into a black-clad man looming right behind him.

  He really needed to get those tracking algorithms looked at.

  He smiled tightly, looking for all the world like a stressed businessman, and tried to step past. “Sorry, sorry.…”

  The man in black blocked him.

  Ah well. They were doing this, then.

  Smith feinted right and side-stepped, trying to get a little higher up the slope. His opponent matched him step for step, drawing a shock-stick as he moved in closer.

  Great. Smith retreated, staying on the balls of his feet.

  A split second before the attacker fired his eyes narrowed, and Smith dove down the ramp, tumbling out of the way of the prongs. The thing probably had a second shot, but he’d have to be in range first.

  Something scraped on the concrete behind him. More attackers. Shit. He used his momentum to keep rolling, bursting out of a circle of black-clad legs just before they could close in.

  All in black? Seriously? What did they think they were, ninjas? That, or whoever hadn’t liked his digging was really hell-bent on a color scheme. He skidded behind a car, narrowly avoiding a fist to the face. They regrouped quickly, rounding the car to cut him off.

  Too slow. He slammed the head of the first pursuer into a window as they came round the corner and bolted as they slumped, stunned. That was the problem with ambushes in covered carparks like this. Heaps of places to hide, but then, heaps of cover if you didn’t take out your target fast. And if said target could activate a sensor that saw into the infra-red, well…

  Someone behind the next car. Alright. Instead of dealing with them directly, he leaped, narrowly avoiding a hand grabbing for his ankle. The pursuer behind him reached again and the hidden one reared up, but he was already over the windshield, on the roof, leaping between cars.

  This would have been a really bad idea, he reflected, if I hadn’t spent a large part of my life training for basically this exact scenario.

  He cleared the aggressors quickly and slid back down, racing to another row of cars. God, ninjas swarming a spy in an underground carpark, it was something straight out of some gritty comic-book adaptation. Pity I’m not that kind of hero, he thought, flicking his handgun’s safety off.

  Crack! Some idiot dumb enough to show his face went down.

  Crack! One of his ninja-friends followed.

  They started hanging back. A heat-signature started tracking around the aisles of cars, obviously looking to get in a flank.

  Nice try, buddy. Smith slipped around a few cars, staying low. The guy kept looping around. He leveled his gun. You’re going to have to give me a clear shot eventually. They were level with him now. Come on, come on…

  An arm appeared over a bonnet and lobbed something at him. Thin and cylindrical.

  Grenade. Shit shit shit—

  He snapped off a shot at the arm, at the body that must have been behind it, and moved for cover but it was too late. The device flashed three times, pulsing with purple light.

  His stomach lurched in a profound way he hadn’t ever expected, as though being tossed around on a rollercoaster. His prosthetic eye stopped working, as did various other implants.

  Some kind of tech wizardry had taken them out. He fired in a moment of shock, emptying the last of his magazine.

  Smith shook his head, suddenly half-blind, and tried to plan. Making a target of himself was bad, getting trapped would be worse. The gun was next to useless, now that his depth perception was significantly affected.

  He put his blind side to the car and stayed very still, drawing his own shockstick. With any luck, he might pick up anyone’s approach from a blind spot with good old-fashioned hearing.

  Indeed, he heard a scraping sound from the blind spot, on the side where most of the enemies were. He whirled and met the probably-not-actually-a-ninja’s charge with 50,000 volts to the chest. That stopped her. He gave her a solid kick as she went down and then moved back a step, because there was another one just begging for a shock to the face and—

  Something very solid and very fast connected with the back of his head.

  He staggered. His remaining vision spun.

  There was a sickening thud as the second blow landed.

  And agent John Smith dropped like a sack of potatoes.

  The black-clad figure who had launched the implant-disabling device hunkered down beside the fallen spy, looking for a pulse.

  They nodded and pulled out a communicator. “Alright boss, target subdued. Still breathing. Let’s get him back to base.”

  And that was all he remembered.

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Earth

  United States

  Baltimore

  Public Spaceport

  Dock 57A

  “
This is it,” said Reardon, flicking on the blowtorch and adjusting the flame until it was a hot blue. “You ready for this, Sammy?”

  “Yeah,” said Sammy, leaning forward in his wheelchair excitedly. “Come on. Open the box. I wanna see what we got.”

  “Even though Jonny-boy told us not to?”

  “Because he told us no to.”

  He smiled. Fair enough. With careful deliberation, Reardon put the blowtorch to the box’s lock, heating it until it glowed a faint, angry rose color. Then, holding the torch with one hand and a pair of hydraulic bolt cutters in the other, he snipped the bar and the hot metal fell to the deck.

  “There we go,” said Reardon, grinning over his shoulder. “Just had to ask nicely.”

  “Do you think it’s gold?” asked Sammy, curiously. “Data drives? Maybe even something more valuable.”

  Reardon turned off the torch and set it down, rubbing his hands together gleefully as he reached up for the lid. “Hey presto,” he said, lifting off the lid triumphantly. A rush of cold air washed out, chilling his hands. “It’s a—”

  A dead body.

  Crammed inside the small box was the withered, almost rotten creature, its flesh a sickly green color, limbs warped and gnarled like the branches of a wasted tree. It didn’t smell—either it had been preserved in some fashion, or the body had deteriorated to the point it no longer reeked.

  “Well?” asked Sammy, grinning from ear to ear. “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” said Reardon, grimly, as he slowly, almost reverently, put the lid back on the box.

  Sammy wheeled closer. “Come on,” he said, a slight whine to his voice. “I wanna see it. What is it?”

  “It’s nothing,” said Reardon, his voice hardening slightly. “Believe me, you don’t need to see this. It’s not valuable. It’s just—”

  “It’s a body, isn’t it?” asked Sammy.

  Reardon didn’t like lying to his brother. He often had, to protect him, but he never liked it. “Y … uh, no.” And he was never any good at it either.

  “I want to see it,” said Sammy, his hands resting on the wheels of his chair. “I’m not a kid any more, Reardon. I might not have made the call to shoot those people back on Zenith … but I was the one who turned on the guns. I aimed. I pulled the trigger. It might as well have been me who made the decision. I was in this job from the start, I want to be there for the end.” He paused, eyes flicking to Reardon. “I want to see it.”

  “Not like this,” said Reardon, hands balling by his sides. “Not like this. Sammy, come on.”

  “I’m not a kid,” said Sammy, gently, but with an underlying firmness that could not be denied.

  Dammit. He was right. He could trust his little brother to fly him through a deadly firefight, talk Smith through a dangerous infiltration of a senator’s high-security vacation estate. He could trust him to shoot thugs off his back. But he wanted to protect him from seeing a dead body?

  Time to let go, Reardon. He’s all grown up.

  So, carefully, he lifted the lid and set it aside.

  Sammy stared impassively down at the body, eyes occasionally drifting over its form. Reardon hated seeing it … hated doing this to his brother. Why did he want to see so badly?

  “Hey bro,” said Sammy, nodding down to the body. “Check it out.”

  He didn’t want to look. “What?”

  Sammy nodded again, insistently. “Look. I think it’s still breathing.”

  Nah. That guy was green and dead. There was no way. Reardon kept his eyes averted for a moment but, quickly, curiosity took hold. He looked.

  “Holy shit,” he said, as he watched the body’s chest gently rise and fall. It seemed impossible to him, completely impossible, but there it was … gentle, slow breathing, as though artificially induced.

  “It’s … it’s alive.”

  Reardon babbled something in a frightened stammer, half falling back. But rather than attack them, the creature just lay there, its chest rising and falling. Below the body was another box, and from the label on the top, it was very clear what it was.

  High explosives.

  “Okay,” said Sammy, “what are we going to do with this thing?”

  He had absolutely no idea. Slavery—buying and selling people—wasn’t exactly what he was in the game for. “I’m not sure,” he said, hesitating.

  “I got an idea,” said Sammy, considering. “Why don’t we just take it to the last person Spectre would expect us to deliver it to?”

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chrysalis, Low Orbit

  USS Midway

  Bridge

  Right on the edge of the minefield, ten future-human ships—Lynch had helpfully re-designated them Skunks Alpha through Juliet—transitioned out of Z-space at the same time.

  “Sound general quarters throughout the ship,” he said, as the ship’s lighting switched from the standard to the ominous red of battle.

  Lynch assessed the radar output screen with a critical eye. “Looks like that bizarre shockwave took care of most of the damaged ones,” he said, nodding with grim satisfaction. “And it might have roasted a few others, too, before they got away.”

  “I’d like to think they’re coming into this battle as soft as we are,” said Mattis, although he knew it was, in many ways, a forlorn hope. Still, nothing wrong with hoping for the best and preparing for the worst.

  Without seeming to waste any time at all, the hostile ships began steaming straight towards Chrysalis, the forming up into an aggressive attack formation, their weapons glowing with eager energy.

  “How long do we have?” asked Mattis.

  “Not long at all,” said Lynch. “They exited Z-space real close to Chrysalis—way closer than we could ever try. Based on how fast they can move, they’ll be in effective firing range in five minutes. More or less. Enough time to finish what we’re working on, then get everyone back in place and ready to fight.”

  Five minutes. It seemed both far too long to wait, and yet, just barely any time at all. Mattis watched as the enemy fleet drew closer and closer. With the tap of a key, he called up the Hamilton. “How are those repairs coming?” he asked into his radio.

  “Admiral, we’re coming along well,” said Abramova, “but if you could ask the enemy to politely hold off their attack for a moment, we could really use the extra time.”

  Lynch glanced at him. “I don’t think they’re really much for talking.”

  Mattis clicked his tongue thoughtfully. “As much as that is my preference … neither am I. Get ready to engage. Are they close enough for a firing solution yet?”

  “Almost,” said Lynch. “Give the gunners a moment to calculate the initial firing solution. Stand by.”

  Combat in space using projectiles meant that the effective range of their weapons was only what they could see, and what they could hit before their target dodged. Inevitably these kinds of things turned into knife fights.

  “Firing,” said Lynch, and the ship shook slightly as the Midway’s guns spoke.

  A thought flashed through his mind. “Captain Abramova, the mines around Chrysalis … the last time we were here, they were programmed to destroy any ship without a valid transponder ID. Does Commander Riley know if that’s their standard configuration?”

  “That’s my understanding,” said Abramova, and there was a brief pause, presumably as she conferred with Commander Riley. “Yes. That’s correct.”

  Mattis smiled grimly. “What’s the bet these fuckers don’t have clearance?”

  “They aren’t really much for talking,” said Lynch, echoing his earlier words.

  The ship fired again, another wave of shots flying out toward the encroaching future-human ships. “They haven’t fired back yet,” mused Mattis. “Almost like they’re hesitating…”

  “Maybe they don’t want to hit Chrysalis,” said Abramova. From one of his screens on the command console he could see her frigate firing too, white hot streaks of cannon fire leaping into the void.
“Our orbit currently puts us between the asteroid and them. If they miss us, they’ll hit the surface.”

  The memory of Zenith’s scoured surface, fire and smoke and ruin, flashed into his mind. “Since when have they shown a reluctance to endanger civilians?”

  “Unknown,” said Abramova, “but they aren’t shooting.”

  The enemy ships continued to advance, the first wave of fire striking their armored front, sparks and flame flying as they absorbed the impacts. She was right; their weapons lay silent, still, not even tracking them.

  “Whatever the reason,” he said, “let’s use this to our advantage. Adjust our orbits … switch from low to stationary relative to that fleet. Put us between the asteroid and them, permanently. It’ll buy us more time, and if they want to engage us at close range, they’re going to have to contest that minefield.”

  “Aye aye, Admiral,” said Abramova.

  “Executing orbital shift,” said Lynch, fingers working at his console.

  The Midway and the Hamilton began to drift, their engines flaring in the cold dark of space. Slowly they gained distance from Chrysalis, firing their guns as the two ships moved to keep the rough, jagged disk of the asteroid behind them and the enemy ship ahead.

  “Keep firing,” said Mattis. “We’re throwing our shells at their strongest point, but hell. We just reloaded. Might as well spend what we got.”

  So it went. The Midway and the Hamilton fired their weapons until finally the hostile ships drew close enough for some of the spherical mines to light up and begin to move toward them.

  If the future-humans had any fear of the mines, they didn’t show it at all. They steamed on ahead, sailing straight toward the approaching gravity mines. Right as the two signals merged, the attacking fleet fired volleys of their strange red gun toward the mines, striking them straight on. But the Chinese had apparently built the things to last. They absorbed the gunfire handily, the blasts seeming to only make them angry, accelerating on toward their target.