Marco looked out the viewport and could see the Terra ahead, along with several smaller—yet still large enough to dwarf the Urchin—human warships. They were all firing their cannons at the enemy as Firebirds circled them. A squad of Firebirds was flying alongside the Urchin now, and one of the fighter jets came to hover in front of the viewport, so close that Marco could see the pilot inside.
His heart skipped a beat.
He frowned.
For a second, he made eye contact with the Firebird's pilot.
"Kemi?" he whispered.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
"Marco?"
They were both wearing helmets. She was inside a Firebird. He was inside the Urchin, wearing an exoframe. But she made eye contact with him, even through viewport and visor. She knew it was him.
Marco.
His eyes widened as he stared at her from across the distance. His jaw unhinged.
Kemi's Firebird squadron had received orders to defend the Urchin, to accompany her to whatever meager protection the warships offered in their wake. She had never imagined she'd be protecting Marco.
Flying by the ship's bridge, she hit her controls, doing a scan of local exoframe routers. She saw his name pop up in the nearby network: Corporal Marco Emery. She hit his name, and she spoke into her mic.
"Marco?"
He waved at her from the bridge, and his voice emerged from her headphones. "Kemi! What the hell are you doing here? How did they let you fly a Firebird?"
"Because they're crazy!" Kemi replied. "Marco, your ship sustained a lot of damage. It's breached in several places. We'll keep flying around you, but keep those cannons firing. The scum—whoa!"
She hung up on him. A group of scum pods were racing toward her.
Kemi sneered and fired her Firebird's machine gun.
The bullets sprayed out, popping the scum pods as if they were rotten pumpkins. The centipedes spilled out, and Kemi fired her plasma cannon, melting the creatures.
She glanced back at the Urchin. The bulky, dented ship—by God, it was ugly, more of a floating bucket of rust than an actual starship—had made it into the shelter between the larger warships. Her orders had been clear: Defend the Urchin at all cost. Its warriors had to reach Abaddon.
And Marco among them.
Kemi was relieved that he was still alive, but terror filled her too. The top brass wanted Marco on the planet for something. He was wearing an exoframe, an expensive piece of machinery, worth as much as an entire Firebird. They didn't give exoframes to anyone, just the elite commando soldiers, which Marco—bless his heart—certainly wasn't.
They're sending him into danger, she thought. This had something to do with Corpus. It had to. The army knew he had experience fighting in scum hives, killing their queens and kings. Kemi shivered. They want him to enter the hive of Abaddon.
And Kemi knew: this was a death sentence.
But she had no time to consider it further. The battle raged full force. Admiral Bryan's voice emerged from her speakers.
"All Alliance ships! Form a spearhead behind the Terra. We're charging toward the planet. Engage all enemies in your way, but do not be drawn aside for skirmishes. Your only target is reaching Abaddon. Fly forth, free civilizations of the Milky Way! To Abaddon and to victory!"
The HDFS Terra—the greatest warship humanity had ever built—blasted its thruster engines, roaring out fire, and charged through the scum. Its cannons fired. Its prow ripped through pods. Thousands of warships flew behind it, forming a massive triangle in space, firing all their weapons. Thousands of smaller vessels followed, both human and alien, firing all their guns. They stormed toward the planet ahead, moving at thousands of kilometers per hour.
"Firebirds, surround the spearhead," came the order.
"Avalerion Squadron, follow," rose the voice of Kemi's new squad commander, replacing Major Verish.
Kemi glanced back at the Urchin—this dented box Marco flew in, its hull stained with ash and scum blood. For now, she had to part from him.
Goodbye, Marco, she thought. Stay alive, damn you. Stay alive down there.
She pulled her joystick, rising higher with her squadron until they flew above the vast surface of the HDFS Terra.
Abaddon was closer now, a desert planet coated with mountains, craters, and canyons, a world many times the size of Earth. The scum had evolved in this planet's caves and burrows, had spawned from this rock to spread across the galaxy, a disease passing from world to world. Only one man—Evan Bryan, who now commanded the starship that flew beneath Kemi—had ever reached this planet, had ever hit the scum on their own soil. Bryan had piloted only a single, small jet that day fifty years ago, an early Firebird model that was downright primitive compared to what Kemi now flew.
Today we'll hit them with the firepower of an entire fleet, she thought.
But the scum fleet was determined to defend their home. More and more pods came rising from the planet, streaming toward the Allies. Thousands of scum ships, ranging from vessels the size of Firebirds to wobbling blobs the size of jet carriers, hit the Alliance from all sides, spewing fire and sizzling globs. Every moment, another Alliance ship shattered. Alien vessels collapsed, some spilling out water, others exploding into crystal shards. Firebirds fell, one by one, a rain of fire. A jet carrier burned, listed, and slammed into a warship.
But the fleet charged onward. Plasma blasts, shells, lasers, bullets—they tore a path through the scum, and the ships—thousands of ships—barreled on through the swarm toward the rocky planet.
Kemi's jet rose and fell, zipped left and right, and she felt caught on a storming sea. There was no sound in space. She couldn't hear the starships shrieking, couldn't hear the dying screaming, couldn't hear the explosions or the raging flames. All was a silent painting of fire, of falling starships like burning autumn leaves, like rising sparks from flame. All was a great show of light and fury and death and molten metal and honor. She flew onward. She flew like her brother had flown on his doomed mission. She flew for humanity. For Marco. For freedom. But she also flew for the fear inside her, those nightmares of the mines, of the evil she had seen.
And she felt them. The scolopendra titania. She could not hear in space, but she could sense their thoughts, their thrumming hive, the network of the centipedes, all connected like the roots of many trees forming a single organism. They had connected her to this network in the hives of Corpus, and she still could tap into it, see the branches of consciousness forming across the battle, invisible lines running from pod to pod, back to the planet below. To him. To the emperor. She could foresee all their movements. They flew toward her, and she dodged, knowing in advance their direction. They fired at her ship, and she skirted the attacks, fired back at them, shattered them, for she knew where they would aim before they shot. A Firebird dived at her side, slamming into the Terra. Another Firebird exploded. One by one, her squadron's jets perished, but Kemi flew onward.
You cannot kill me, she thought. I'm one of you. I know you. I'm you, and I'm vengeance. You made me into this weapon.
The other Firebirds rallied around her, squadron after squadron, falling in the flames, more replacing them. Warship after warship collapsed, but others flew forth. And before them—the scum perished.
Hundreds of pods. Thousands. Tens of thousands. They burned. Space blazed with countless flaring scum ships like a galaxy of crumbling stars.
"To Abaddon!" rose a cry through her speakers—the voice of Admiral Bryan, leading the fleet.
"To Abaddon!" Kemi cried.
"To Abaddon!" rose the voices of her squad pilots.
And through the flame and poison of the scum swarm, through the death of millions, through shattering metal and sacrifice, they charged toward the planet.
Thousands of Alliance ships fell. Millions of soldiers perished. A great death, a great sacrifice, a genocide here in space, the single largest battle in human history. They flew through it. They charged onward. Kilometer by kilometer, death by death
. They made their way through.
They reached the orbit of the scum's world.
They had left home with a hundred thousand ships, with ten million troops. They arrived at Abaddon with perhaps a few thousand vessels, with perhaps a million lives.
But they reached the planet.
And through the speakers, emerging into every cockpit and bridge across the fleet, rose the voice of Admiral Bryan.
"Bomb them. Destroy them."
And with a thousand thin strands, the missiles flew forth.
Fire and dust and heat flowed across Kemi's cockpit, and she fired all the last missiles in her arsenal, and she saw nothing but white light.
* * * * *
"Bomb them," said the voice in the speakers, the voice of Admiral Bryan, the man who had punished the scum fifty years ago. "Destroy them."
Marco and Lailani stood in one of the Urchin's gun turrets. Outside the viewport, covering their field of vision, spread the rocky surface of Abaddon.
Marco and Lailani looked at each other. They understood.
Lailani lifted the white shell, the one painted with a red-and-blue molecule. She loaded it into the cannon. Here wasn't just a typical bomb filled with regular explosives. This was an erisitrol tetranitrate bomb, the most powerful explosive known to humanity, nicknamed the Eris bomb. It wasn't a nuclear weapon, but it came damn close.
Marco grabbed the cannon's cord. He looked at Lailani.
"Together," he said.
She grabbed the cord with him. They yanked it back together.
The cannon fired. The Eris warhead flew.
Thousands of bombs flew with it from across the fleet.
For a moment, silence. A pause in the battle.
Then white light flowed across space, and the world of Abaddon trembled.
"Fire again," came the command.
They fired again.
The bombing of Abaddon continued for hours. Marco and Lailani kept loading shell after shell, blasting the planet's surface, tearing down mountains. Mushroom clouds rose one by one, forming collapsing forests. As the warships fired, the Firebirds kept flying around them, picking out the last scum pods still attacking the fleet. More human ships fell. Barely any alien allies remained. And still the Alliance bombed.
As Marco kept firing, as the blasts kept raising mushroom clouds on the planet, a sickness began to grow in his stomach.
"We're exterminating an entire species," he said, and the words tasted foul. "I'm not sure I like this."
"They're bugs, Marco." Lailani loaded another Eris shell into the cannon.
"And they're intelligent," Marco said. "As intelligent as humans. We defeated their fleet. Should we really carry out genocide against them?"
"Marco." Lailani's eyes flashed, and she shoved the shell into the gun, then gripped his arms. "Listen to me, Marco. I felt them. I know them. I'm one of them in many ways. Their emperor spoke to me. A million of their voices screamed inside me. They are pure evil. Every last one of them—cruelty distilled. They are demons. All they care about is killing."
"Killing," Marco said and nodded. He exhaled shakily. "Maybe we've all become like them."
Lailani's eyes were hard. "Don't go soft on me, Marco. I don't need this. Not now, not as we're about to win this war." She sighed. "Besides, our bombing isn't exterminating them. We're killing only a handful of them." She looked down at the planet being bombarded by the fleet, and she winced. "I can feel them crying out, trying to reach past the chip in my mind, to control me, to plug me into their hive. They're hiding underground. A few of them died near the surface, but only a few. They're in their hives, protected from our bombs. Waiting for us. And he's among them, Marco." Her voice dropped to a strained whisper, and her face paled. "The emperor. He knows me. He knows my name."
Marco tightened his lips and fired another shell. "Then we'll kill him. You're right, Lailani. There's no use showing mercy now. I don't have to like what I'm doing. And I don't. But you're right. This must be done, and we must kill him. For Earth. For the future of our species."
"And for our adorable mixed-race babies," Lailani said, finally giving him a smile. "And for all the puppies we're going to adopt."
The shelling continued hour by hour. As the scum's fleet shrank, the human fleet surrounded the planet, blasting it from all sides. Finally Marco and Lailani had to sleep, letting a second fireteam operate their cannon. Seven hours later, they woke up to see the fleet still bombing the planet. They resumed their work at the cannon. A cargo ship flew up toward the Urchin, and a team rolled in crates full of more shells. The bombing continued, pounding crater after crater into the planet below.
For hours, the fleet bombed.
They slept again.
They woke to a third day of shelling Abaddon.
"Bloody hell," Addy said that third day, sitting in the mess hall with half the platoon. The other half was still at the cannons. "I never imagined the HDF even had so many bombs."
Marco sat at the table with her, Lailani, and twenty other warriors. Chicken wings steamed on plates, and empty bones rattled in bowls. Marco glanced out the viewport toward the planet below. Thousands of shells were flying from the fleet down toward the planet, streaking like comets and exploding below.
"We're using every last bomb we've got, it seems," Marco said. "Years and years, decades' worth of bombs, trillions of dollars' worth of bombs, stocked up for this war. Admiral Bryan means business."
"Admiral Bryan is a badass." Addy nodded.
Marco began to wonder, however. He stared down at the explosions rocking the planet. Admiral Evan Bryan, back when he had been only a young pilot, had nuked this very world, slaying many scum. On Earth, he had been hailed as a hero. He had, after all, deterred the scum from continuing their genocidal attacks against Earth, ushering in the horrible—yet preferable by far—War of Attrition. A hero? Yes, Marco had often thought so. Like most boys, he had hung a poster of the smiling Captain Evan Bryan on his bedroom wall. Yet watching the bombardment continue, he wondered whether Bryan was less a hero, more of an exterminator—a man consumed with rage, with lust for vengeance, with a burning desire to extinguish a species. Marco didn't wish to exterminate the entire alien race of the scum, even after all they had done, only to stop them from attacking Earth. Was Bryan interested in victory . . . or in genocide?
"I wonder how badly Earth is suffering," Lailani said. "We haven't heard news in days."
Addy cringed. "Maybe that's bad. Maybe they don't want to tell us because Earth's getting the shit kicked out of it."
"Last we heard," Lailani said, "three entire Earth cities had been wiped out. And that was days ago. The scum might be hitting Earth as hard as we're hitting Abaddon." She shoved her tray away. "War is so fucking stupid."
"War stinks," Addy said.
"Just like your feet," Marco said.
"Only because my feet kick your ass," Addy said, to which Marco had no comeback.
"Soldiers!" The voice boomed through the mess, and they all turned to see Gunnery Sergeant Bo Jones standing at the doorway. The towering bald man was dressed in his battle fatigues, sleeves rolled up to reveal coiling tattoos. "Get into your exoframes and head to the shuttle hangar."
Addy leaped up from her chair. "We're blasting down now, Commander?"
"Soon enough," said Jones. "Exoframes, and move it! You'll finish your meals in the scum emperor's dining hall."
"Mmm, all the slugs we can eat!" Addy said, racing toward the door. The other soldiers followed.
As Marco stepped into his exoframe, his heart pounded, and he couldn't keep his fingers from shaking.
This is it, he thought. The invasion. It's here.
He thought back to his old dream, to standing on a desolate planet, the scum scuttling toward him. If Lailani was right, even after three days of bombardments, the scum were still alive, waiting safely in their underground hives.
After three days of shelling, the guns of humanity fell silent.
No m
ore hellfire rained down upon Abaddon.
A distant observer would be forgiven for believing that peace had come. Down on the planet, the dust settled upon a pocked surface.
No more scum pods flew. The creatures all lurked below, waiting. Marco didn't need Lailani to tell him that this time. He could feel them himself, millions of them, creeping in their burrows. Here would not be a hive like on Corpus, only a few kilometers long. Here waited hives the size of a planet.
The platoon gathered in the hangar, all in their exoframes. Three shuttles awaited them, bulky landing craft, big armored boxes with propellers and turbines.
"Ma'am?" Addy raised her hand. "You know, the thought struck me. When we get hives of ants back home, we just pump them full of poison. Remind me why we have to land on the planet? Can't we just gas the fuckers from up here? Anthrax, mustard gas, Marco's old underwear?"
"Try your socks," Marco said. "Deadlier than Agent Orange."
Lieutenant Ben-Ari stared at them. "We've tried that before. On many hives. The scum are the toughest bastards in the cosmos. They can breathe anthrax like it's potpourri. Even if we could develop a bug or molecule that's poisonous to them, they can hold their breath for years, and their armor can withstand anything we splash onto it. And if they do sense danger, they just dig deeper. Only one thing works with the scum." She patted her rifle. "Shooting them."
Addy sighed. "And I reckon an army of ten million Osiris warriors is too expensive?"
Ben-Ari smiled wryly. "Much too expensive. Osiris costs more than the starship she's flying." The lieutenant turned toward Lailani. "Now, de la Rosa, this is a large planet—many times the size of Earth. Are you sure we're flying over the right place?"
In her exoframe, Lailani was no longer small and weak; she was a machine of metal and fury. Yet behind her visor, her face was pale, and dark bags hung under her eyes. She looked out the viewport, and the desert surface of Abaddon reflected on her visor, all craters and canyons and dry death.
Earth Rising (Earthrise Book 3) Page 17
