Zero Star

by Chad Huskins

  “What the fuck is all this?” asked Brosier, prodding one with the tip of his Fell’s barrel. “What the hell could do this, doyen?”

  “I don’t know. Don’t touch them. Don’t touch anything.”

  “Copy that, doyen.”

  They found more of these strange tableaus as they went on. Heaps of bodies, some of them frozen in mid retreat. It looked as though the mechanicae had been running, then their own spines had shot out of their taint, dug into the cobblestone street, and held them there. Their flesh was decaying, and their skulls were grinning at Lyokh and his people as they walked past. Trapped in suspended animation like this, fleeing some horror that had grown out of them, they looked to be part of some blasphemous artist’s meditation on the futility of trying to outrun one’s inner demons.

  The rain came down harder, filling the cracks and natural channels of the cobblestone road, forming rivers that carried bits of flesh and blood away. Once, Lyokh lifted his helmet to sniff the air. It was redolent with the odor of death, but also of foreign chemicals, sweat, and burning hair.

  Beside him, Abethik made a noise that was between worry and nausea. “What did this?” he whispered to himself, though his voice was broadcast for all to hear.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Lyokh repeated.

  Someone laughed over the channel. It was Meiks.

  “This reminds me of Halloween in New Orleans,” he said. “You ever been to New Orleans, doyen?”

  “Negative. Never even been to the Cradle.”

  “Me neither. Everything I know I saw on vids. I had a cousin stationed there once. Said it was nice. Still some greenery in the islands, he said. And the atoll-cities are supposed to have underwater casinos.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  “We should go someday, after we get out of this mess.”

  “Let’s do that.”

  That’s where the small talk ended. Except for tactical updates and an occasional tuneless whistling from Meiks, they continued their long, slow patrol in silence.

  Another explosion went off in the distance. There was the pop of gunfire at their rear as the remnants of Fierce Wing battled a squad of mechanicae scouts, who quickly backed off.

  Finally, Ravager One came to a halt, and the warhulks took up defensive positions on each side of it. With hand signals and waypoints, Lyokh directed his people where he wanted them. The assault force remained with him at the front. Lyokh crouched behind the tank and peeked around the side, zoomed in with his visor. Ahead of them, the enemy had really dug in.

  Two collapsed buildings on each side of the street formed natural barriers. They were ramps of rubble going right and left, with a thin valley right between. Up those ramps, the enemy had stacked anything they could find—civilian hovercrafts, corpses, compristeel tables and girders, giant cinderblocks—to form a huge wall that denied admittance. There were a few mechanicae in plain sight, their guns peeking out from behind cover. Infrared picked up exactly thirty-seven more hiding in windows up the street.

  A shot rang out.

  Make that thirty-six. Takirovanen had just tagged one of them, and Lyokh saw that one’s head snap back and disappear from his window. The remaining thirty-six all ducked beneath the windows.

  “Where the hell is he shooting from?” Meiks’s voice said into his ear.

  Lyokh ignored it. “All wing leaders, if you have any last-minute corrections to make to your units, now’s the time. Med bots towards the center, Ravagers shore up our flanks. Ares Actual, I need some of those ammo hoppers from the last supply drop up here for my hulks, ASAP.”

  “Copy, doyen,” said Captain Josep.

  Within seconds, a group of guys came running past Lyokh, their STACsuit’s power dialed up to max so they could haul all the hoppers. They moved with the smoothness that came from thousands of repetitions of this, retracting all the old magazines from the warhulks’ arms and tossing them to the side before slamming the hoppers into place. The warhulks cycled up their reloaders, drinking in the new rounds, then dumped the empty hoppers for the two Ares guys to take back.

  Lyokh took a moment to assess the skies. No more Ascendancy drop pods. He had not seen any in almost two days. That was good. It meant Lord Ishimoto and the others were holding their ground in geosynchronous orbit above Vastill. The last word he had received, before a burst of transmission-jamming white noise had cut them off again from the War Council, was that the Brotherhood had managed to get one ship into orbit above Widden—that at least replaced the Xiyi Lang, and formed a good wall between them and any more enemy vessels.

  It's all about walls, Lyokh thought.

  The rain intensified, if that was possible. The whole world became a roar of falling water. Everyone sat tight, scanning the area. Artemis had perched Thrallyin on a rooftop a block behind, and sheets of water were running off the wyrm’s head and wings. The other wyrms were nowhere to be seen.

  Lyokh hustled from cover to cover, checking in on his guys. He made sure to hold only his sword, never his rifle. They needed to see him with his sword in hand. If their doyen was confident with just his sword, they ought to be confident that things were under control. He had just checked in with Chan and the wounded when he heard Minix say, “Eh, doyen? You might want to come up here.”

  “What’ve you got, Minix?” he said, already heading back to the front line.

  “I’m not exactly sure, but it looks like they’re sending out a welcoming party to greet us.”

  “Say again?”

  “A mechanicae is stepping out from the rubble, walking right towards us. He appears unarmed.”

  MISS PERSEPHONE MOVED towards the wounded Ascendancy ship. The Brotherhood ship Bushido’s Culmination was fast and nimble, and its crew was surprisingly sharp at coordinating with Captain Trepp’s crew. They had fired missiles and turrets, creating an overlapping crossfire scenario that put the enemy in a bind. They targeted its engines. The Ascendancy ship was dead in the water now, and Miss Persephone was barreling towards it. Now the captain of Bushido’s Culmination was shouting at Trepp over an open channel, begging her to back off, not to do what she was about to do. He might as well be telling a sun to stop with all the flares.

  When they slammed into the Ascendancy ship’s upper tower, all of Miss Persephone shook. Trepp was chuckling to herself. Her XO and her crew were looking at her like she had gone mad. Probably she had. Fuck it. It’s worth it to see their faces.

  The viewport showed the enemy tower coming apart as it connected with Persephone’s extended ablative shields. Bushido’s Culmination fired on the Ascendancy ship. The enemy’s reactor must have had some leak, because there was a flare of white and blue light, an explosion that rippled through the fuselage. Bodies were sucked out into the void, and they too were dashed against Persephone’s hull.

  Someone in CIC was laughing. It was only after everyone turned and looked at her that Trepp realized it was her.

  “Ma’am?” said her XO. “There’s another escaping. Their A-drive still looks functional. Getting a strong MeV reading. They’re getting ready to hit FTL.”

  Trepp looked at her tac display, and said, “It’s too far to bother with a chase. If the Brotherhood wants it, let them have it. Otherwise, let the bastards escape and tell the others about Miss Persephone and her mad crew. And ask the steward to bring me up something. I always get hungry after an engagement.”

  CAPTAIN DONOVAN WATCHED on his tac display as the battlegrounds evolve. He saw Trepp and her contingent of Brotherhood ships were doing much better defending Dutimeyer’s moons, and Asteroid Cryzek was anybody’s game at this moment, which was an improvement over when it had been outnumbered and outclassed. Honagher’s installations were all lost, nuked by a desperate group of Ascendancy ships as they saw the way the tide was turning elsewhere in Phanes.

  “They just…nuked it all,” said Vosen, looking over the tac display.

  Donovan nodded. “I expect it was to make sure we pay attention to what the four ships are
doing over Widden’s north and south poles,” he said, rotating the Widden-Suns map with a wave. He zoomed in on the points where the castleships were still poised over the poles. “They’ll shift tactics soon. Blowing up the Honagher installations is meant to show us they’re serious about sabotaging the whole damn system. But if we bleed off a couple ships to go and run interference in the poles, the barrier we’ve created over Vastill becomes weaker.”

  A lot of progress would be lost if that happened. Xiyi Lang had been scuttled in the effort to safely deploy the drop ships and spread its seeds of tactical satellites. Lord Ishimoto, Shatterstar, Ramlock and Sikorskiy had all fought tooth and nail to maintain this ground and establish their own sensor net. And now the Brotherhood ship Tao of Piety had arrived to support them, bringing zero firepower but with a great sensor shroud and a dozen hunter-killer sats. Donovan refused to allow all that work to go to waste.

  But if we don’t send anyone to the poles, they maintain dominance there, and they could dismantle the ice and water operations of Widden, he thought, but didn’t say. He didn’t need to say it. His XO knew it. Everyone in CIC knew it.

  It was a tough call. The mission was to defend all of Phanes’s economy, establish a perimeter around the planet, and get the High Priestess and her command coterie off-world. The first two they were doing well enough, but if he wanted to keep control of Widden he would need to bleed off key resources, which could threaten the support over Vastill, and thus lose them the High Priestess.

  If she isn’t dead already.

  Indeed, satellite imagery showed a horror show down in those streets, particularly around the Dexannonhold. And no transmissions had been heard from High Priestess Zane. Transmissions were still being jammed, sure, but QEC or tightbeams ought to get through, especially this close to the planet.

  Thankfully, he was saved from having to make a decision when the word came up from the War Council. The message flashed on his main station board. It was direct from General Quoden, who spoke on the group’s behalf. “War Council has said we stay,” Donovan told his XO. “We’re not leaving our people in Vastill without support.” Even as he said the words they were a relief. A small relief, but relief just the same.

  Just then, a pair of Ascendancy fast-attack corvettes came out of nowhere, appearing on scopes coming in from Rah’zen. On the tac display, there was a green line that indicated the range at which Pacifier was most effective—one of the newcomers was foolish enough to cross that line, and was summarily vaporized a second after Donovan gave the order. The other ship was hit by two successive torpedoes launched by the Brotherhood ship Ark of the Redeemed, which was hanging out on Rah’zen’s far side. That Ascendancy corvette burst on its side, leaving a trail of vented gases and bits of jetsam.

  Donovan tapped a button on his armrest. “Comms One, conn. Send a tightbeam over to Tao of Piety. I want to know how soon their sister ships will arrive. Tell them that whatever we can do to facilitate an expeditious arrival, we will.”

  Four more fast-attack corvettes came at them. Again, seemingly materializing out of nowhere. They stayed well above Lord Ishimoto, to steer clear of the Pacifier on her belly. Donovan screamed for weapons auto-targetting, and plotted solutions. Lord Ishimoto rattled as her turrets fired in rapid staccato. On the tac display, the area between all their ships became a confusion of drive trails, targeting vectors, and detonations.

  Minutes later, the response came. “Conn, Comms One. Piety is saying they’ve got ships at the outskirts of the system, but that their weapons and shields are insufficient to make it past a barricade of Ascendancy castleships around the Oort cloud. Piety sent the coords to seven of their ships, all hanging out at the edge of the system with nowhere to go.”

  Donovan looked at the ships of Task Force Three, hanging at the edge of the solar system. “Send a tightbeam to Vaultimyr, give her the coords, and see if she can spare a ship to help the Brotherhood’s vessels.” Everything he was doing was being listened to by the War Council, who were in the War Room sending out tactical commands of their own to other ships in the fleet. Donovan waited to see if they would contravene his order, but none did.

  “Aye, sir,” said Comms One.

  Vosen said, “That could weaken our own defenses at the Oort cloud.”

  Donovan nodded. “But we need to infect the Phanes System like a plague. Whoever gets to its core and sets up a better shop, the infection will spread out to all worlds. If we can get the Brotherhood ships in here to support us, we’ll abandon the Oort cloud entirely and have Task Force Three fall back to support Dutimeyer, Cryzek, everything else.”

  “Conn, sensor room.”

  “Go ahead, sensors.”

  “Sir, we’ve got something going on down on the surface. Sat images show virtually all fighting has ceased.”

  Before he could say anything, Donovan heard an alert chime on his station. When he hit the acknowledgement, he saw the cause. Tao of Piety was deploying three small drop ships. Troop carriers.

  “Sir,” came Comms One, “Piety is tightbeaming us. They say they’re sending down their Elite Penitent Brothers. They’re going to help our boys on the ground.”

  THE MAN, IF he could be called that, walked to the dead center of the street, between the two large mounds of rubble his fellow mechanicae had fortified. He was tall, black-skinned, with a bald head ringed with several small protrusions, like steel pegs that had been forced into his skull—a crown of electronic thorns. His eyes were completely gone, replaced by something akin to oculators, and his jaw was hung permanently open by wires and braces of steel, creating the impression of an eternal scream, like the man was enduring sustained torture. His arms were a deal longer than his legs, and hung below his knees. His body was coated in black plate, with three large black stripes painted cleanly across the middle, with the emblem of a cog on one shoulder pad: the emblem of the Ascendancy.

  Lyokh watched from behind cover, puzzling over the strange loner who had dared to take to the street, moving without cover, without haste, and without any noticeable weapons besides the huge gauntlets on each of his wrists, which Lyokh knew was the home of the deadly pistons the mechanicae had used to great efficacy in CQB.

  The man just stood there, rain cascading over his head and armor, looking across the street at the assembled fighting forces of the Republic, and waited.

  “Doyen,” said a cold voice in his ear. “Want me to take the shot?”

  “Negative, ’Vanen. Let’s see how this plays out. But standby, we can’t be sure what this means.”

  “Copy that, doyen. Standing by.”

  Minix, leader of the warhulks, said, “I don’t like the look of this, sir. Feels funny, sending just one guy out.”

  Meiks spoke from somewhere unseen. “Maybe they’ve seen the error of their ways, and they come bearing gifts,” he said dryly. “If you enter peace talks with him, doyen, make sure you remind him of our long sacred tradition of offering virgins in a new truce.”

  Lyokh waited for the reply coming from Heeten, something to the effect of how that would mean they would have to reciprocate by offering Meiks to them. It was only a split-second lapse in memory, just a moment when he forgot Heeten was dead. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and knocked twice on his helmet to wake himself up, then looked back at the man standing defiantly in the street.

  A couple of his people in Gold Wing were chatting.

  “Think he’s a champion?” asked O’Tulley.

  “A what?” said Beirs.

  “A champion. Like in the old days, you know. Our best warrior against your best warrior.”

  “It’s a trick,” Winters said. “They’re up to something, messing with our heads. This guy’s a sacrificial lamb, focusing our attention while they make some other play.”

  Lyokh said, “Abethik? Any word from the War Council?”

  A scratchy transmission came through. “Partially…getting some fresh jamming going on. I…the…probably not going to get much support fr
om the Brotherhoo…anytime soon. It’s possible…might be on our own for a while.”

  What else is new?

  It had been this way for the last three days. On again, off again communication with Lord Ishimoto. Sometimes Lyokh was able to get an update from the War Council before making a move, at least a data dump that would give him an idea of what resources they had in orbit. Mostly, though, he had been alone in his command.

  He looked at the men all around him, their armor coated in blood, their faces haggard. The go-pills kept them awake, took the place of sleep, but nothing beat real sleep. He glanced back at the wounded and the dying. Forty-one of them, maybe ten would get some nanite injections that could help repair wounds, but they were still hurting.

  Lyokh closed his eyes.

  Heeten.

  He listened to the pitter-patter of rain on his helmet. Heard the distant rumble of thunder, like a monster in retreat. Looked at two soldiers nearby, half their armor burned off, their flesh red, giving themselves stem cell boosters from auto-injectors. Another man was missing a hand, with a med bot kneeling beside him, applying a self-adjusting tourniquet.

  Lyokh nodded to himself. He didn’t want anyone else to die out here. He knew keeping them all alive was an impossibility, but if there was even a chance…

  “He might be asking for a parley,” said Lyokh.

  “Yeah, well, fat chance of that,” Meiks said. “I say we let Takirovanen do his thing, and let the son of a bitch parley with God.”

  Lyokh sighed heavily, and nodded to himself. He had decided.

  “Meiks, if anything happens to me, you’re in charge of Gold Wing.”