by Richard Fox
“Those are not our ships,” Lettow said. “They belong to a rogue faction controlled by Marc and Stacey Ibarra.” The admiral waited as the auditorium—with the exception of the armor, all the armor—murmured in disbelief.
Lettow raised a hand, a hand missing three fingers, and silence returned.
“The Ceres Crucible recorded another wormhole activation thirty-nine minutes later and has been unable to access the Oricon gate since then. The Keeper says there’s a quantum interference pattern disrupting her attempts to open a new gate, but she’ll have the code cracked before we arrive in a few more hours.
“Our mission is to safeguard the Oricon colonists and…” Lettow bit his bottom lip. “…then bring the rogue ships back under Terran Union control. No matter the cost. If this can be done without bloodshed, so much the better. If not…”
“What do the Ibarras want there?” asked one of the fleet captains.
“Intelligence hasn’t given me a good answer to that,” Lettow said. “Oricon is a silver-tier colony still under construction. One main settlement with a few engineer outposts. No more than a hundred thousand souls. That Oricon is a moon orbiting a gas giant is the only thing of note.”
The admiral tapped the lectern and the holo changed to an organization chart of the 13th Fleet with a few ships grayed out. Roland recognized one name, the Leyte Gulf.
“The Ibarran fleet strength is known,” Lettow said, “and we will arrive with enough firepower to overmatch them. If they want to fight, they’ll lose quickly. I’m counting on their ship captains preferring honorable surrender than a pathetic blaze of glory. Let me address the elephant in the room—why the Ibarras went rogue.”
The holo changed to a large civilian ship in orbit over Luna. The ship exploded, and Roland frowned, trying to remember when such a tragedy happened.
“That’s the Hiawatha, a civilian transport with more than three thousand men and women aboard,” Lettow said. “She was lost soon after the incident with the Ruhaald and Naroosha was resolved. I have to call it an ‘incident’ because saying we blew those treacherous Naroosha shits out of the sky and forced the squids to surrender,” he nodded to the armor soldiers in the front row, “is not said in polite company as the Ruhaald are friendly with us these days.
“The initial investigation into the loss of the Hiawatha yielded nothing actionable, and the matter was shelved. Navy CSI took a second look at the loss and found that Marc Ibarra was responsible for the explosion, and a sealed indictment was prepared to charge him with several thousand counts of murder and other crimes.” Lettow shook his head. “He must have gotten wind of what was happening, as he and Stacey Ibarra managed to co-opt the 13th Fleet before it was set to be decommissioned and flee with it through the Crucible.”
Roland leaned toward Gideon and whispered, “Sir, what about the Hale—”
Gideon silenced him with a glance.
“Further,” Lettow’s face darkened, “High Command is certain the Ibarras were responsible for the destruction of the Cairo and the disappearance of the 92nd Reconnaissance Squadron in the Vespus system. No matter the Ibarras’ history, no matter what they’ve done for Earth, this will not stand. It ends in Oricon.
“I hereby issue Fleet Directive number two-delta. All Ibarra-flagged vessels and associated personnel that do not respond to any and all orders to surrender are to be treated as hostile. Any aggressive acts on their part are to be answered with force until such time as they are destroyed or surrender. Any questions?”
“Sir,” a female commander stood up a few rows behind Roland, “the 13th had barely a skeleton crew when it…went off the books. How combat-effective are their ships with that level of manpower?”
Smart question, Roland thought. She’s beating around the bush to get the answer to a bigger issue.
Lettow tapped a small stack of data slates together on his lectern.
“I asked the Intelligence Ministry the same question,” he said. “They don’t have a definite answer. Assume their ships are fully mission-capable until we learn otherwise.”
Roland frowned. The spies must not know if the Ibarras had a procedural-generation facility. He was a frontline fighter, trained to break the enemy’s will and body, not to divine their intentions, but that knowledge gap struck him as a significant weakness in Lettow’s plan.
“Anything else? If not, religious observances are scheduled for 2030 hours. Captain Sobieski,” Lettow looked down to the Uhlan lance’s commander, “those that keep to the Saint meet in cargo bay twelve. Can any of you attend?”
Sobieski beat a fist to his chest.
“Resiste et mords,” Lettow walked off the stage and the audience rose to their feet.
Conversations broke out around Roland. He overheard ship captains rattling off pre-battle instructions, a few officers expressing disbelief at the Ibarras’ turn for the worse, staffers from the squadrons within the fleet trying to get the others’ attention. He hadn’t been in the Armor Corps for long, but long enough to know that most of a staff’s work got done in the minutes after a meeting, never during a meeting.
Gideon glanced down at his watch, then brought his soldiers over with a small gesture with one hand.
“Suit up,” he said. “We’re first on deck for VR range, then live-fire qualifications.”
“Sir, if we’re green across the board,” Roland said, “can we attend the service?”
“Mission prep is the top priority. If that’s in order, then you can go.” Gideon looked over Roland’s shoulder.
Roland turned around and came face-to-face with Captain Sobieski, a slight man a bit shorter than Roland and with thinning hair.
“You’re both supplicants,” he said, glancing at the bare spots on their chest where a Templar Cross would be. “First battle service? Of course. You attend in armor. Arrive as soon as you can.”
Gideon tapped Roland on the arm.
“Daylight’s burning, move out,” the lieutenant said.
Chapter 5
Admiral Lettow paced back and forth in front of his personal shuttle in the smallest bay on the Ardennes. That he’d been ordered to show up here—alone, no less—by President Garret was an order he had no qualms with. That he’d been here for almost ten minutes irked him to no end.
He looked out the open bay doors. As nice as the view of Luna and Earth was, his time and attention were the most valuable commodities he had, and right now he was wasting them.
“If this was some sort of joke, I will keelhaul every last…”
The force field separating the bay from the void shimmered, and spindly, gunmetal-gray spider legs the size of tree branches crept around the edge of the doors. An object shaped like a stretched egg with several stalks stuck to it crawled into the bay, its body easily twice the size of Lettow. Fractals swirled over its surface.
Lettow knew what is was. He’d seen them in his nightmares since the Battle of Ceres.
A Xaros drone.
He backed away, reaching for a weapon on his hip that wasn’t there.
The drone landed on the deck and the legs drew into the shell. It morphed into a humanoid shape, then coalesced into a tall, athletic woman with blond hair and a well-lined face.
“I won’t bite,” she said.
Lettow spun around and reached for the door controls, but a firm hand grabbed him by the wrist. He looked into Torni’s face, then back to the open bay doors.
“Most call me Keeper,” she said. “I used to be Torni.”
As Lettow pulled his hand back, Torni held on for a just a moment so he could gauge her strength, then she let him go.
“By the Saint…what are you?” Lettow asked.
“Highly classified. What I’m about to share with you is even more hush-hush, which is why I had to deliver this in person,” she said.
“Torni…”
“You’ve seen that damn movie about the Dotari, just like everyone else.” She rolled her eyes. “I’ll tell you that having your death rei
magined on film is nothing to be proud of.”
“I am…confused.”
“What’s not in that flick is what really happened. A Xaros Master made a copy of my…” she tapped her head then her heart, “to tear apart at his leisure. Then he murdered me. What he copied managed to escape with a bit of help and now I’m like this. The general public would not take it well that a Xaros drone controls the Crucible over Ceres and the Union’s interstellar travel. Understand?”
“Understood.”
“There’s more to Oricon than just the Ibarras, and I am here to give you your orders—your unofficial but direct orders. This comes straight from the president,” she added, raising an eyebrow at him.
Lettow nodded.
“The Qa’Resh…the public knows them as the species that founded the Alliance that saved us from the Xaros. The truth is a bit more complicated. The true Qa’Resh civilization vanished from the galaxy millions of years ago, but they left caretakers behind to guide any space-faring civilizations that would come after them.”
“They were the first intelligent life?” Lettow asked.
Torni shook her head slowly.
“That’s a sad story for another day,” she said. “But when the Qa’Resh ascended—vanished, sorry—they left some things behind. Our Path Finder teams spent years combing through every world we thought the Qa’Resh might have touched. To the best of our knowledge, they were the most technologically advanced species that ever lived in the Milky Way, superior even to the Xaros.”
“Anything they left behind would be invaluable,” Lettow said.
“‘Invaluable’ is an understatement. A quantum leap in technology, society…it would have more of an impact on human history than the Ember War. We’ve found fragments here and there—most of it indecipherable—but then someone had a breakthrough.” She held up a palm and a hologram of an object that looked like a conch shell made of silver.
“The Qa’Resh left behind a ship,” she said. “We found reference to it from more than one extinct species. A sort of chariot of the gods. We were close to finding it when…the woman who made the breakthrough left Earth.”
“Stacey Ibarra,” Lettow said.
“Correct, and we’ve been two steps behind her on the search for the Qa’Resh ark. That she’s stuck her head up in the Oricon system must mean there’s something important there for her, and she’s obsessed with the ark.”
“The ark is the real reason she left Earth?”
“Her why is hard to pin down—her accident at the end of the war, the end of the proccie program. I think it was a broken heart that pushed her over the edge. But what matters is that she wants the ship. And so does Earth. You are to secure Stacey Ibarra and whatever she’s found on Oricon by any means necessary. Nothing else matters.”
“The colonists—”
“Nothing else matters, Admiral. If the Ibarras get their hands on the ark—or any significant piece of Qa’Resh technology—it is over. The very survival of humanity depends on this.”
“Then send more ships with me,” he said.
“I can barely get your fleet through the Crucible to Oricon. If we could send more, I would. We’re putting a lot of special trust and faith in you, Admiral.” She canted her head to one side. “I must get back to the Crucible.”
She turned and walked back to the open bay doors where stalks grew out of her back and lifted her off the deck.
“Wait—is there anything else I should know?” Lettow asked.
Torni turned back, the surface of her shell fading to gray, and said, “Stacey…she’s not well. If you come across Marc Ibarra, he may be more reasonable. Good luck.” She morphed into her drone form and flew out of the cargo bay.
****
Roland and Aignar, both in armor, ascended through the Ardennes in a maintenance lift. Blast doors unlocked and recessed into the walls as they went along, then banged shut as they cleared each deck. The whir of gears and clang of metal marked each new level, a harsh industrial replacement for the pleasant ding of a civilian elevator.
“You never did this when you were a crunchy?” Roland asked.
“Didn’t find the Saint until after I got hit,” Aignar said. He lifted an armored hand and moved his fingers in a smooth wave.
“How does the armor feel compared to your prosthetics?” Roland asked.
“I am armor. I am…whole. If I could, I’d never leave the womb, but if I didn’t, then the little of what’s left of the broken part of me would wither away. Did I ever tell you that I could sing? I was good. Could do the classics from Sinatra, Broden, Bublé, Draiman. But this…” He beat his fists against his chest twice, the clash of metal on metal ringing through the lift shaft. “This is better.”
Roland’s helm nodded. Deep down, he wasn’t sure if Aignar was telling the truth to himself or to Roland.
They stopped and cargo-bay doors opened to a tall, wide room bereft of any cargo or machinery. To their left, ranks of sailors and Rangers stood in silent prayer. Opposite them were a half-dozen armor all bent to a knee. Red-armored Uhlans, all bearing the Crusader cross outlined in gold, had their helms bent to the hilt of massive swords, tips resting against the deck. Two armor soldiers from the Chasseurs lance formed a line with them, one with the cross and sword, the other with his sword-less arm resting on his bent knee.
“Fall in to my left and kneel.” Sobieski sent to the two Iron Dragoons over infrared coms, keeping their conversation private from the rest of the bay. “The ceremony will begin soon.”
Roland noted open bay doors behind the armor and across the bay behind the sailors and others. The un-armored only entered through the door opposite the Templar. Roland did as instructed, keeping his left forearm across his knee, right fist to the deck.
“Speak the prayer with the chaplain,” Sobieski said. “They taught you the rest on Mars?”
“Yes, sir,” Aignar said.
“Good…chaplain’s on his way.” Sobieski closed the channel.
Roland angled one of the cameras in his helm up to look at the throng of the faithful. The crowd filled the back half of the bay and had bunched up through the bay doors.
“I didn’t know so many even knew of the Saint,” Roland said to Aignar on a private channel.
“There’s a shrine on every ship now,” Aignar said. “They’re here to ask for protection, for her to witness them in the fight so they may be judged worthy if they die. That armor is here makes a difference. Only armor is ever allowed into her tomb. To them, we are Saint Kallen made manifest, her sword and her shield.”
“How do you know all this?”
“While Tongea was teaching you the way of the sword, I studied the catechism.”
The ship’s chaplain walked out from between the armor, a censer and chain in his hands. He held the gunmetal censer aloft and red incense billowed out.
Roland raised his fist and slammed it against the deck, in time with the rap of sword points and fists from the other armor. He waited for a five count, then hit the deck two more times.
The chaplain let the censer run out through his hands, stopping it a few inches above his foot. He swung it from side to side and walked across the front rank of the faithful, most of them Rangers in full battle armor, their visors painted with skulls.
Roland increased the sensitivity on his armor’s olfactory sensors and smelled the iron tang of Mars carried on the incense.
“May the Saint protect us,” the chaplain said loudly. Roland activated his armor’s speakers.
“Sancti spiritus adsit nobis gratia,” the armor intoned.
“May the Saint witness us.” The chaplain said, continuing his march up the front row.
“Kallen, ferrum corde,” the armor continued the prayer.
“May we find the iron in our hearts to prove worthy of her.”
“Perducat nos ad portam salutis. Amen.”
The forward line of Rangers rose to their feet and crossed the bay. The chaplain turned around and wa
lked to the other end of the bay, the censer still swinging, still sending red smoke into the air.
The Templars began chanting the pre-battle hymn in Latin.
A Ranger walked to Roland, lifted his visor, and beat a fist against his heart, then rapped twice against Roland’s leg. He slammed his visor down and continued through the doors behind the armor. The next Ranger did the same thing, as did the procession of sailors coming from behind them.
“What’re they doing?” Roland asked Aignar over their IR.
“We are armor. We are the Saint. One last prayer from them before battle,” Aignar said.
Roland turned his helm slightly, watching as the crew passed by the armor.
“It’s like…Memorial Square,” Roland said. “You’ve been there? The armor that died at the last battle with the Xaros, all in a circle around the platform. You could walk between the statues up to a platform inside. Look out over their shoulders and…I always felt protected when I was there. We’re recreating that moment, aren’t we?”
“That’s right. I thought you skipped all the catechism lessons?”
Roland took in the faces of those passing by, tapping against his armor. The throng through the back of the bay hadn’t stopped.
“I’m staying here…” Roland said, “until the last moment before the battle if needed.”
“For them,” a voice said.
“What?” Roland asked.
“I didn’t say anything.” Aignar turned his helm to his lance mate.
Roland lifted his fist off the deck and opened his hand, feeling the touch of the men and women as they passed by.
Chapter 6
Lettow blinked away the jump gate’s afterglow and slapped his palm against the buckle on his chest. Straps unlocked and zipped back into his seat as he sprang up and went to his round holo tank the size of a dinner table for twelve.
His staff arrived at their positions within seconds, all of them too slow to beat the admiral to battle stations.
“Ops, what’s our situation?” Lettow asked.
