The Terminal War: A Carson Mach Space Opera

by A. C. Hadfield

  Mach didn’t need to have brought him along. His archeological skills were clearly of no use here.

  Feeling bad for thinking like this, Mach helped Beringer to his feet and steadied him by gripping his shoulders. “Are you all right?” Mach asked.

  Beringer wouldn’t look up, presumably shamed for his sobbing.

  “Couldn’t be fucking better,” Beringer said, shrugging Mach off and bending down to pick up his laser. He then wandered a few meters further down the dirt- and ice-encrusted tunnel.

  Mach was about to tell him not to go too far, but it was clear the older man needed some space. Mach would keep him in sight, but would let him have a moment to himself.

  “Kortas,” Mach said, speaking into his manacle, “you there? We get your message loud and clear. But if you keep incapacitating us, we won’t be able to complete your task.” It was an effort for Mach to remain civil and in control, but it was clear Kortas had all the power in this situation, and it made no sense to antagonize the Guardian any further. It was quite obvious to Mach now that the Guardians were panicking about this whole situation, which made them unpredictable.

  “I needed to show you the severity of the situation,” Kortas said, his voice even, almost distant now as though his thoughts were somewhere else—perhaps communing with the Saviors. “And the consequences of failure to do as we ask. We have requested your help and have made an exception to have you here. But you also need to respect our customs. Work with us, Carson Mach, and you’ll get out of this alive.”

  The alternative was obvious. “Fine,” he said. “Then let us do our jobs. You want this thing found and destroyed; we can do that, but not if you’re going to shut us down every time we say or think something you don’t like.”

  There was a minute’s silence before Kortas replied. “It is agreed,” he said. “Do what is necessary, but remember, we’ll see what you see. Don’t deceive us, and we won’t be forced to—”

  “Yeah, we get it,” Mach said. “We’re going to continue and find this source of heat, as that’s all we have to go on right now.”

  “We think that is a wise course of action,” Kortas said. The light then blinked off, and the manacle eased further so that it fit loosely over the wrist of his suit.

  “Ready?” Mach said to Adira.

  She had retrieved her laser pistol and stood, waiting for orders. “Always. Let’s do this.”

  “Beringer?” Mach said through the comm system. “You okay? You can return to the Guardians if you don’t wish to continue. Adira and I can take it from—”

  “Holy crap,” Beringer said, disappearing round a bend in the tunnel. Mach grabbed his laser from the floor and chased after the older man. Adira was by his side, matching him step for step.

  They came to the edge of the tunnel. Beringer spun round and shouted for them to stop. Mach and Adira did so just in time. A few inches from their feet a dead drop fell away into icy darkness.

  The three of them held onto each other and stared over the boundary.

  Above them, a cap of domed ice gave the huge cavernous space the feel of a contained city, the kind they built on Summanus. Bio-domes mostly. This one, however, was the largest Mach had ever seen.

  The dome itself must have been at least a hundred meters high. The weak sun shone through the blue crystalline material, bathing the space below in a light blue haze, making it seem as though they were underwater. But it wasn’t the domed ice cap that caught everyone’s attention; it was what lay beneath it, far below their current position.

  “It’s an entire city,” Beringer said breathlessly. “So ancient. Look at it! The coldness must have preserved it. It’s… unbelievable.”

  “Are you seeing all this, Kortas?” Mach said, slowly sweeping the manacle across his body so as to take in the full scope of the city that stretched out for kilometers in all directions.

  The vestan Guardian didn’t say anything. Mach knew that he was looking, though. How could he not? The city below them looked as if it one day it had just fallen asleep beneath the ice and remained that way for… how long, Mach didn’t know, but it must have been a millennia or more given the thickness of ice above them.

  “That’s incredible,” Adira said.

  It appeared they were on a rocky abutment protruding from a straight rocky cliff face. “They must have dug the city into this bowl. Can you imagine the effort and technology required for that?” she added.

  Mach could; he’d been on a terraforming squad just after the war. Great machines capable of excavating huge swathes of planet surface could dig out a bowl like this in a matter of weeks, shedding the material across conveyor belts that ran for ten klicks or more to various locations. The machines were actually ships that were rented out to various planet inhabitants to reshape the landscape. Though since then, the Commonwealth had banned them; they were too dangerous for some of the most volatile planets’ ecologies and climates.

  They could be used as great ground weapons in the wrong hands, diverting rivers and tributaries away from cities, building great fortifications to protect from invading forces. As far as Mach knew now, the company who used to build them had been absorbed into the CW as engineers and contractors for smaller scale work.

  Considering the age of this particular city, it boggled the mind how they would have the technology to burrow into the planet’s core like this. They were standing at least sixty or more meters higher than the tallest building.

  When he scanned the scene with his prosthetic eye, Mach detected the heat signature that they’d first noticed back in the tunnels. This time it was more pronounced, specific. The signature read fifty degrees Kelvin higher than the surrounding area.

  “Kortas?” Mach asked again. “You know anything about this place? Anything we should know before we continue?”

  “Nothing at this time,” the vestan said. “Please, be careful here; it’s very old. Sweep the area. We’ll be recording and analyzing as you go and will return with any information that you might need in due time.”

  “The city, Kortas… did you know this was here?”

  “No. We did not. Please proceed.”

  Mach and Adira shared a smirk. It was clear to them that these so-called Saviors hadn’t told the Guardians everything about their home world after all. Mach was tempted to say something to that effect to Kortas but refrained from antagonizing the vestan unnecessarily.

  “What do you think, Beringer?” Mach said. “How old do you think this place is?”

  Beringer kneeled down and peered out at the dense urban scene before him. After a few moments to consider, he said, “Given the architectural design, and based on the vestan artifacts we have at the museum, I’d say this predates anything we have by some considerable span. At its youngest, I’d estimate this city to be at least ten thousand years old. But that’s a conservative estimate at best. Most of these buildings are completely new to me in design and function. I’ll need to get closer to be more accurate.”

  “Ten thousand, eh?” Adira said. “It don’t look too shabby from here given its age.”

  Mach scanned the city closer now, trying to see what Beringer was seeing, using a critical eye to commit the details to memory. They might not get another chance to view it from this vantage point, and once down there in among the narrow alleys and passages, Mach would want some frame of reference to use for navigation.

  The first thing that caught his eye was the large tower toward the northernmost edge, some few hundred meters away. A spiraled minaret, its surface gold and reflective, capped the peak of the tower. Narrow black windows like archer slots from ancient Earth days dotted the circumference of the minaret and also tracked a vertical line down the tower until it reached the gabled roof.

  Buildings all around obscured the rest of the details; thin lines cut between them representing alleys and roads, a veritable maze.

  On the east side of the bowl, a series of six flat-roofed buildings stood in a regimented line, their sandstone-colo
red fronts peering back toward the rest of the city. A series of arched porches and wide, rectangular windows gave the buildings an anthropomorphic quality, half a dozen frowning scholars judging the rest of the city’s more flamboyant architecture.

  “There’s a bridge down there,” Beringer said, pointing over to the west. “And what looks like a canal, frozen naturally.”

  “Quite romantic if it wasn’t so damned cold,” Adira said. She wiped the frost from her helmet. A plume of heated air billowed out of her mask as her suit jettisoned the excess oxygen.

  The bridge led to the center of the town. Mach tracked his eye across, committing more of the layout to memory. He could see that beyond the terraced buildings, which he assumed were dwellings, there was a series of gardens or communal squares. He scanned across, tracking the temperatures with a narrow-beam setting on his prosthetic eye. “The heat’s coming from beyond those squares,” Mach said. “We should make a beeline for it unless anything else grabs our attention for some other reason.”

  “Sounds like a plan to me,” Adira said. “No point in us standing up here forever. I don’t know about you two, but I’m not getting good vibes from this place at all. And I’ve been in many cities of the dead before—“

  “You have?” Beringer said.

  “Yeah, don’t ask.” Adira checked her suit and said, “We’ve got enough monofilament to get us down to the surface. I’ll go first. You two cover me.”

  Mach raised an eyebrow. “Really now? Chain of command mean anything to you, my love?” He flashed her a smile to take the edge off his objection. Adira needed handling with kid gloves if he were to keep her from doing anything rash, especially when her patience was running out, which he knew from experience would soon be the situation.

  “Fine, Captain Mach, what would you rather do?” Adira said, hands on hips.

  “Beringer goes first—both of us can actually shoot a rifle,” Mach said. He was already moving behind the older man, pulling the graphene-tipped grapple hook from the integrated winch and backpack.

  “Hey,” Beringer said, looking over his shoulder. “Is this such a good idea?”

  Mach ran out some slack and buried the hook into a crack in the rock. He pulled on it, testing the weight. The motored tips of the hook dug further into the rock, making for a solid anchor point.

  “It’s a great idea,” Mach said. “Unless you want to stay up here on your own—with that… thing running around. At least this way, we’ll have you covered all the way down to the city surface.”

  Despite his face becoming pale, Beringer swallowed once and nodded. “Fine,” he said, his voice cracking as he stepped toward the edge of the outcrop. He stood there for a brief moment; his body arched like a reed in the wind over the edge.

  Adira sighed with impatience and moved toward him, no doubt to push him off. But to both Mach and Adira’s surprise, Beringer jumped of his own volition into the blue abyss between their position and the city below.

  Chapter 11

  A feeling of pride swelled inside Babcock. Squid Three, his creation, and companion, navigated one of the Intrepid’s swallow-shaped fighter drones through the open docking bay and landed next to the other two stationary craft.

  Chrome securing clamps rose out of the floor and snapped around its three legs. An oval escape pod, attached by a length of graphene cable, floated above it.

  The graphite-colored docking-bay door rumbled closed, blocking out the distant view of the orbital’s mangled remains. Babcock gazed through the viewing window and waited for the bay to pressurize. They had managed to find a single vestan alive during their search. The other pods were mostly uninhabited or damaged by debris collisions.

  Tulula stood by his side. She had come along to translate if the male vestan didn’t speak Salus Common.

  “I still can’t believe my people sided with the lacterns and horans,” she said.

  Babcock put his hand on her bony black shoulder. “Better the devil you know. You wouldn’t believe it, but Earth was a microcosm of the galaxy. Humans fought over land and resources and had their territorial pacts. Discrimination against many things, including appearance, used to be rife until everybody realized we had bigger things to consider, like finding a new home.”

  “Seriously? But your home world is so small, and you all look exactly the same.”

  “Indeed. The less we knew, the more open-minded we claimed to be. It’s comforting to believe you’re the center of the universe.”

  Tulula let out a gargled laugh. “Is that what your ancestors thought?”

  “To some extent. Many assumed we were alone until Professor Katona invented the photon drive, and we explored beyond our solar system.”

  “You’ll have to tell me more of human history one day.”

  “Beringer’s your man. He lives and breathes it.”

  The escape pod gently floated down and bumped against the ground. A slim, gray-faced vestan, dressed in a dark brown uniform, pressed his hands against its transparent lid and glanced around the bay.

  A green light pinged on the entry pad, and the viewing deck’s door hissed open. Babcock headed inside, eager to find out exactly what had happened during the attack.

  The fighter’s cockpit cover raised a few inches and slid back. Squid Three ascended, raised a silver tentacle, and chirped.

  “Good job,” Babcock replied. “Continue your analysis on the Axis encryption keys. Let me know if you have a breakthrough.”

  Squid Three’s red eye flashed twice, confirming the command, and it drifted away.

  Babcock smiled to himself. The development of this version had started working a lot faster than the previous two. Not that he planned to share the droid’s inner workings. Both the Axis and CWDF had a habit of weaponizing any new advancement in AI.

  Tulula headed to the escape pod. Its red circular hatch spun and punched open. She extended an arm inside and helped out its dazed-looking occupant. They held a brief conversation in their native tongue and turned to Babcock.

  “This is Nigel,” Tulula said. “He’s a laser gunner from the orbital battery.”

  The vestan gunner bowed his head.

  “Nigel?” Babcock said. “That’s an odd name for a vestan if you don’t mind me saying.”

  “My name is unpronounceable for humans,” Nigel said. “I chose it before my first trip to Fides Prime. Thank you for rescuing me.”

  “Any decent being would’ve done the same thing,” Babcock said. “Can you tell us what happened?”

  Nigel took a couple of steps forward, moving smoothly across the ground in the vestan perpetual-motion way. His mustard-colored eyes widened, and the central black dots focused on Babcock. “We picked up hundreds of encoded signals on our old Axis links. Our orbital defense network had traced the source before their fleet appeared on our scanners.”

  “How big was the fleet?” Babcock asked.

  “Maybe a hundred ships. I’m not sure. They weren’t heading here. The vanguard broke off the main body and attacked. We didn’t stand a chance.”

  “Did you manage to decrypt any of the signals?” Tulula asked.

  “No. It happened too quickly. We never expected them to attack.”

  Babcock sighed at Nigel’s naivety and innocence. “You’re part of the Commonwealth now. It’s obvious you weren’t the main target. This attack was more of an opportunistic strike.”

  Nigel’s eyes flicked from side to side, making a wet peeling noise. He stumbled to his side and pressed his spidery gray hand against the fighter drone for support.

  “You must be tired and hungry,” Tulula said. “Come with me. I’ll take you to the mess.”

  Tulula supported Nigel and helped him across the docking bay. The attack made a little more sense to Babcock. Orbital Hibock was unlucky, as it happened to be en route to whatever destination the Axis fleet was heading.

  “Captain Babcock,” Lassea said through his smart-screen, “we’ve got an ansible message from Commander Tralis.”


  Babcock raised his screen. “What does our great commander have to say?”

  “He’s ordered us to return immediately.”

  “Plan the L-jump with Steros. I’ll be up shortly.”

  “The Chester's already left. I’ll prepare to jump in two minutes.”

  It came as no surprise that Steros had already departed. Babcock imagined the young captain filling Tralis’ head with stories about his brave actions, taking out two lactern frigates before the truth could be revealed.

  The Intrepid came out of L-jump two klicks away from Tralis’ fleet. Babcock stared at the floating wreckage of a CWDF destroyer. It had four gouges ripped out of its dull metal side, showing all the hallmarks of lactern cruiser torpedo strikes.

  Thankfully, the other two destroyers were still intact and flanked the capital ship. Small craft buzzed around the fleet, no doubt searching for survivors and surveying damage.

  Tralis appeared on the comms screen. “Nice to have you back, Captain Babcock. We need to talk.”

  “What happened?” Babcock asked.

  “Six Axis cruisers. They came out of nowhere. A shuttle’s already on its way to your ship.”

  “Can’t we use holo-comms?”

  Tralis shifted in his chair and narrowed his eyes. Babcock recognized the look. The commander’s order wasn’t up for negotiation.

  “I’ll board as soon as it docks,” Babcock said.

  The screen cut back to the galactic signal tracker.

  “Opening the docking bay,” Lassea said. “It’s only half a klick away.”

  Sanchez shook his head. “I knew we’d end up being messed around. The longer we stay, the more chance we’ll end up bogged down in Commonwealth politics.”

  “Stay positive,” Babcock replied. “At least it keeps us busy while the others carry out their mystery mission. It could be worse.”

  The big hunter puffed his cheeks and turned back to the cannon console. Babcock knew Sanchez had wanted to be part of the action on the ground, but he had to get over his injuries from a previous mission. Mach insisted on it.