The Terminal War: A Carson Mach Space Opera

by A. C. Hadfield

“On your word, Tulula,” Babcock said.

  The vestan engineer moved to Lassea’s side. “Guys, you’ve got two seconds to deploy our weapons. Ready?”

  Sanchez nodded. Nigel responded in vestan.

  “Engage,” Tulula said.

  Lassea ramped the L-drive to full power. Sanchez and Nigel fired.

  Babcock swallowed hard and peered up at the viewscreen. Four lasers stabbed from the underside of the Intrepid. The port-side fighter drone exploded into pieces.

  A bolt of concentrated energy zipped across space and headed for the Axis fleet.

  Multiple weapon systems locked onto the Intrepid.

  Distant lights flashed from the formation as cannons and lasers fired.

  The ship thrust to the left and bucked as a laser struck it. An alarm blasted from the bridge’s speaker, and a damage report streamed across the status screen. A moment later the distant stars turned to thin white lines.

  Babcock took a deep breath and slumped back in his seat. Their next stop was Terminus, and he didn’t want to be around when the Axis showed up.

  Chapter 16

  Mach shook his head, clearing the fogginess. A pain in his lower back stabbed at him, reminding him of what had just happened. He must have been knocked unconscious for a moment; his memories didn’t quite match up. A void lay between frames of a film, a key piece taken out that broke the narrative.

  “What the fuck happened?” he said, croaking the words out. No response, from anyone. With slothful limbs, Mach eased himself up from his prone position, shifting the fragments of ice and metal infrastructure out of the way. He spun round, trying to remember where he was, then soon remembered when he saw the pile of debris in the middle of the room and the roof that splintered inwards as though it had taken a direct hit from a fusion rocket.

  Through this gap, the increasingly bright blue light from the dome shone through, a piercing beam. At the end of the beam, the dome of ice above now featured a fragmented façade, the intricate network of cracks scoring across the surface of the ice like some giant doodle from a bored God.

  The dome continued to fragment, the cracks spreading out, forking across from one side to the other, bellowing out its thunderous verse. Great chunks of ice splintered off and crashed down into the city below, natural bombs striking at the heart of history, demolishing all that had come before and had endured for millennia.

  “Mach!” Adira screamed over the scratchy comms. Her panicked words dragged him out of his initial paralysis, his Century War shellshock hangover. He clambered forward to the pile of ice and debris, dragging lumps of rock and metal and other primordial building materials until, eventually, he found Adira buried up to her waist, a polymer joist of considerable mass pinning her in place.

  “I see you,” he said. “Just hang in there, I’ll get you…” somehow.

  “I’m not going anywhere, you take your time,” she said, the panic in her voice hiding beneath her scathing sarcasm. Not a good sign. He’d rather she be yelling at him and cursing at him in a dozen alien languages.

  “Vitals,” Mach said as he searched around the piles of debris for something to use as a lever. “Give me the specs. Right now!”

  “Heart rate through the roof,” Adira said. “Blood pressure dropping faster than a lactern whore’s panties, core temperature as cold as a wendigo’s snatch. What else do you want to know? My inside leg measurement? Just hurry the fuck up, Mach, and get me out of here before I beat the living hell out of you. Twice.”

  Mach smiled, this is what he wanted. Angry Adira was Surviving Adira. He stumbled over a pile of rock and destroyed furniture and found a long section of roof beam that had collapsed beneath the great weight and velocity of the ice fragment. It must have been at least three meters long, and Mach had to use all his augmented strength to lift it and heave it over to Adira’s position.

  “No time for remodeling,” Adira said, catching his eye. “Just get me out of here before I lose the use of my legs.”

  “I’m right on track, darling,” Mach said, getting a scowl for his over-familiar term, even if he did mean it sincerely. He didn’t want to show her that he was afraid of losing her, so he’d get her back up with double-bluffed sentimentality. “Why don’t you use your arms and help me to help you,” Mach said, indicating the end of the beam, which he was trying to wedge beneath the joist that had her pinned.

  “Some rescue this is,” she bemoaned, heaving the tip of the beam into place.

  Mach clambered forward of the pile of debris and placed a large rock under the beam about halfway. “Okay,” he said. “I’m going to lever this sonofabitch off you. When the pressure is eased enough, I want you to skid your ass back out of the way. If I drop it, I don’t want to take your legs with it; I can’t carry you and chase after Beringer.”

  “Where is the idiot, anyway?” Adira said, gritting her teeth as some pain wrenched at her.

  Mach didn’t answer; he didn’t know, and right now, his priority was Adira—it always had been, and would likely remain the case until he was finally a part of the universe’s great field of indifferent particles.

  He heaved once on the end of the lever, pushing down with perhaps half his strength, eager not to be too hasty and break something—or someone. The joist groaned against the resistance, the low bass note complementing the high-pitched scream that came to Mach via his external microphones—a scream that belonged to Beringer. A scream that if Mach were not already in a hyper state of attention trying to get Adira free, would have chilled his blood to a frozen state right there in his veins.

  “That was him,” Adira said, helpfully.

  “I know,” Mach grunted. “As soon as you feel anything move, try to get free.”

  “Get on with it, superman.”

  This time she rewarded him with a smile that, had his veins froze, would have melted them again. She knew it too, knew it would help motivate him. Her beauty was only second to her cunning and complete knowledge of Mach’s psyche. If anyone else had this kind of insight into him, he would have likely made sure they weren’t in a position to take advantage of it, but Adira was different… so very different.

  He heaved harder this time, willing every sinew of his musculature to work harder than it had ever worked, to do this one thing for him if they wouldn’t do anything like this again. Just this once, he said, bargaining with his body. You owe me, old buddy. I saved you so many times on pox-ridden planets that the CWDF felt they needed to defend. And what had that achieved? A short peaceful period to allow the Axis Combine to rebuild their fleets…

  “Argh!” Mach grunted as his body gave him what he wanted.

  Everything he had, every particle, quark, atom, and molecule coalesced into one thing: a lever-pushing device of immense motivation and force. Things within his body snapped, giving up the ghost, as they used to say, giving their lives to him in this one monumental effort.

  Sweat dripped down his face, over his lips, tasting peppery on his tongue. The beam-lever bowed dramatically over the fulcrum rock, the joist continuing to moan its elemental bass line, soundtracking his efforts.

  The joist shifted. Dust and rocks fell away, now freed from the tyranny of the joist’s weight. Mach tried to call out to Adira, to move, to shift, do anything to get out of there, but the tendons and muscles in his neck were too taut to allow his vocal chords to work.

  His vision grew dark and eventually, with one final effort, he let out an animalistic yowl, pushing the lever down a few more centimeters until something gave, snapped.

  The joist!

  It had broken against the lever; the part that lay over Adira tumbled down the small pyramid of rocks and ice to crash against the floor. A small avalanche of sand-colored stone chased after it as though they already missed its dominance.

  Adira, however, gave out a cry of freedom, using her arms to push herself up and out of the debris until she lay flat on her back on the top of a chunk of ice. Her chest heaved in sync with his own that flared wi
th pain as each breath made his muscles work again despite their burning protest.

  Mach fell backward, letting the lever go. It bounced up and then down, the center pivoting on the fulcrum, until it, too, made that journey down to the floor, where it lay next to the joist, as Mach lay next to Adira, both exhausted, but still alive.

  Without turning to face her, due to the impossibly heavy amounts of lactic acid now drowning his muscles, he said, “Are you okay? Anything broken beyond repair?”

  A pause, pregnant with emotion he knew Adira wouldn’t display. The silence was enough for him, though; a few seconds that he could fill with his version of what Adira might be feeling. It included gratitude, and something else that he already doubted before it fully formed in his mind.

  “I’ve sprained my ankle; I think,” she said, with no emotion in her voice: just the facts, like a good journalist covering the skirmishes in the trenches. “It will be fine to walk on with the swelling. I’m dehydrated and suffering from low levels of shock. Nothing to worry about. No bones broken. You?”

  “Peachy,” Mach said. “Just peachy.”

  During this conversation, he realized that Beringer’s screams had stopped. He couldn’t sit up yet, his back and shoulders were locked, demanding their time to recover for they had made the bargain and had given Mach everything. Now he needed to play the game, give the time, but time wasn’t something he had in abundance. He willed himself to sit up, groaning with the effort.

  His HUD had stopped working. Beringer’s position was no longer available to him.

  “Kortas,” Mach said, talking into his manacle, “you read me? You seeing any of this?”

  The static buzzed, crackled, then the unmistakable voice of Kortas broke through.

  “Carson Mach, we see… we’re seeing…” He broke off; the sound of panicked other voices echoed in the background. A guttural scream, an explosion, the sound of stone falling and collapsing.

  “What the hell’s happening there?” Mach asked, his body now cooperating with him, a fresh dose of adrenaline helping to combat the sloth-like indignant attitude of his tired muscles.

  “We’re under attack,” Kortas said. “They’re swarming the Garden of Remembrance… this is… impossible, it can’t be… shouldn’t be.”

  “Okay,” Mach said. “Just breathe, concentrate, and tell me what’s happening. Does it relate to what’s going on here? The ice cap is fracturing.”

  “They’ve reversed the polarity,” Kortas said with an increased incredulous tone. “The fissure under the Garden is melting. You have to get back here, Carson Mach, as a matter of urgency. We need your help.”

  “The polarity of what?” he demanded. As he talked, Adira had taken his laser pistol and clambered up the rock, presumably in search of Beringer. Above them, chunks of ice kept falling from the compromised ceiling.

  “The generator rods,” Kortas said breathlessly. It sounded like he was running. “They keep the fissure that the Garden is built upon frozen while keeping the atmosphere above it warm so that we can keep the Saviors safe.”

  “So you’re saying the fissure is melting, and the atmosphere is freezing now?”

  “Only in the confines of the Garden, yes. The proto-vestans are more cunning than any of us could have imagined.”

  So there it was, finally, an admission of what they were facing. Mach was about to launch into a castigation of how the Guardians had sent them on a fool’s mission with a lack of information, but time wasn’t available for that now. “Just tell me what you know, as quick as you can, about the situation, about these proto-vestans.”

  Adira interrupted the conversation by telling him she had found Beringer.

  While Kortas continued to run and pant, Mach dragged his tired body up to the top of the pile of rocks and joined Adira. She pointed over a half-crumbled wall to an exposed lab of some kind.

  “That’s him,” Adira said.

  Beringer, stripped of his helmet, was strapped to a chair, his legs and arms encased in electrical wires. From a dozen points over his body, translucent tubes looped from him to a vat half-obscured by shadow. The vat was a tall cylinder that held reddish-brown mulch.

  “Kortas!” Mach yelled, holding up the manacle. “What the hell is this?”

  More panicked shouting came from the manacle’s comm-link. Kortas was shouting orders to evacuate and get to the ‘temple.’ “There’s no time,” the vestan said. “You have to get to the temple, get the Saviors off the planet’s surface. It’s too late for us now. We underestimated them… their capabilities, their numbers. We see now why the Saviors buried them so long ago. We should have known not to leave them there, in the ice. We should have destroyed them.”

  “Destroyed what?” Mach said. “You’re not making any sense.”

  “The proto-vestans, Carson Mach, one of the Saviors’ grand experiments. A huge failure, and our forebears. The pits… the icy burial grounds, they’re rupturing, melting… they’re coming, Carson Mach, coming for all of us, for their makers, the Saviors, you have to get to the temple before all is lost.”

  The feed cut. The manacle clunked and fell to the ground—as did Adira’s and, beyond them, Beringer’s. They were free… in a sense.

  A dark shadow crept out from behind the cylinder and loomed over Beringer. Mach raised the laser pistol, brought the green reticule over the proto-vestan’s dark, almost featureless face. Mach felt the blood in his veins chill at the sight of this thing; this… proto-vestan was the only accurate description. It was glossy black, smooth skinned, but lanky, long, odd-proportioned with the merest slit for a mouth and eyes that shone like black orbs through semitranslucent lids that reminded him of an early reptile.

  Mach pulled the trigger. The pistol fizzed and hummed, a laser bolt blasting out of the barrel. Mach blinked and looked back through the scope to see the shadow slither off beyond the cylinder that obscured his view into the room.

  He’d missed—this time.

  The tubes running from Beringer transformed from clear to red.

  “Fuck, they’re draining him,” Adira said, already clambering down the pile of debris and racing across the ground toward the half-crumbled wall, her right sprained ankle giving her an awkward gait.

  Mach holstered the pistol and made to chase after her, but the movement above him stopped him in his tracks.

  He peered up and saw hundreds of dark shadows shifting across the outside of the ice dome. He followed their trajectory and realized the proto-vestans had escaped their frozen prison and were heading back toward the Garden of Remembrance, the Saviors’ temple.

  The numbers were overwhelming. They’d never be able to fight that many… which left but one option: do as Kortas said. Get the Saviors’ off the planet’s surface. But not before he and Adira saved Beringer—they owed the poor bastard that much at least.

  Chapter 17

  Morgan’s two-seater transport pod powered along the side of Fides Prime’s main spaceport. To his left, crews ran for the twenty open hangars to board the stationary destroyers. He had put the planet on red alert and was heading to the Admiralty to explain the dire situation they faced if they didn’t act decisively.

  Five fighter drones lifted from the concrete and headed in different directions toward the atmosphere. A group of eight members of the Fides Prime defense force, in their pale blue coveralls, marched in the direction of a tall white orbital cannon.

  Meeting with senior officers at short notice was always better face-to-face and the best way of guaranteeing a result. Morgan remembered when he was an admiral. Officers always complained when the president demanded they attend an immediate meeting in the government building. Visiting them in their environment started things off on the right footing. He also enjoyed being back in his old haunt.

  The transport pod pulled to a gentle halt outside the two-story solid granite structure. Images of early Commonwealth ships were carved into the walls. A green and white striped CW banner fluttered at the top of a roof-mo
unted flagpole.

  Morgan hit the exit pad, and the door rose open.

  Two marines, either side of the open glass doors, braced to attention and slapped their palms across their rifles.

  “Carry on,” Morgan said and headed straight inside.

  A young fidian, in dark blue officer’s dress, met him in the lobby. She smiled, flashing her light green teeth. “Welcome, sir. The space marshal and his staff have already assembled in his office. This way, please.”

  Morgan followed her across the cream marble floor. He didn’t need an escort to find his way around the building that doubled as his second home for over a decade, but followed protocol. CWDF rules were never formed on democratic principles, but that was the best way to manage a fighting force.

  Paintings of previous admirals hung on the walls of the corridor leading to the space marshal’s office. Morgan grimaced as he passed his own. The old human painter had given him an expression he only recognized in himself when he was on the toilet. Typically, Mach pointed the same thing out during the only time Morgan had given him a tour of the place.

  The female officer extended her arm, gesturing Morgan through an open door, and he entered the room. The buzz of chatter instantly stopped.

  All five officers stood to attention.

  Space Marshal Brindley, at the head of a rectangular wooden table, gave a nod of acknowledgment. Morgan wondered why he still bothered to dye his hair black. It was fairly obvious from his thin frame and deep wrinkles around his forehead and eyes that he was close to retirement.

  “Thank you for accepting my meeting request, gentlemen,” Morgan said. “Please, be seated.”

  The officers collectively murmured a response.

  Morgan sat opposite Brindley. The four commanders between them, on either side of the table, were the space marshal’s form of window dressing. He liked to have the final say on everything but primed them with questions to play devil’s advocate against any of Morgan’s plans. It wasn’t as tedious as it sounded. Brindley was excellent at his job, and everything deserved scrutiny when it came to issues relating to CW security.