A House Divided

by Richard Fox

  Getting out of the Qa’Resh structure with Aignar’s womb had been much easier, as if the structure was helping them get out before it sank into the crushing depths of the gas giant the alien structure had floated through for millennia.

  The thought of entering another maze didn’t fill him with confidence.

  The wall next to him rippled as he approached a corner, and the outline of an armor soldier oscillated past him…but this armor carried a sword.

  Gideon ducked as an Ibarran armor swung around the corner and slashed a blade that would have cut Gideon’s helm clean off had he been a split second slower. Instead, the sword chopped into the building and embedded itself several inches into the wall.

  Gideon fired his gauss cannons and hit the Ibarran in the flank, shooting off sparks as the bullets ricocheted away. The other armor reeled back, but kept his grip on the sword.

  Gideon unfolded the shield built into his left arm and rammed the edge toward the other armor’s elbow. The Ibarran let go of the sword just in time and lifted his arm out of the way. The shield impacted with the building, leaving a cut that bled a chalky substance as Gideon wrenched it away and charged his foe.

  He felt hammer blows beat against his shield as the Ibarran unloaded his gauss cannons at Gideon. He punched his cannon arm around the edge of his shield and fired blind. The bullets shot through an iris in the dome building and vanished without a trace.

  The Ibarran slammed both fists down on Gideon. Gideon got his shield up and stopped the blows, but the Ibarran grabbed the edge of his shield and twisted to one side with enough force to send Gideon flying.

  Gideon released the shield from the anchors on his arm and it went sailing into the distance without the Iron Dragoon, then Gideon swung his arms around and hugged the Ibarran’s arms against his torso. The helm of the Ibarran armor, adorned with a Templar cross, stared into Gideon’s optics.

  Gideon snapped his rotary cannon onto his shoulder and unloaded into the Ibarran’s helm. Bullets ripped it apart in a split second and Gideon shoved his foe back and into a wall. The Ibarran clutched at his ruined helm, a bad reflex Gideon exploited.

  Gideon’s right hand pulled back into his arm housing and a spike took its place, locking with a snap. Gideon punched the spike into the Ibarran’s breastplate and felt it puncture the outer armor plate and sink into the pod beneath. Amniosis fluid gushed out like blood.

  “Where’s Nicodemus?” Gideon asked.

  The Ibarran jostled from side to side for a moment, then went still. The soldier inside was dead. Gideon pulled the spike out and pushed the suit to the ground with disgust.

  As the snap of gauss fire echoed through the air, Gideon looked around for Thomas and Pak, but they were nowhere to be seen. The buildings fouled the echoes, hinting at too many possible directions for the fire.

  He shot up a pigeon drone and connected to his lance, his HUD showing them both two blocks away and engaged in a gunfight. Gideon ran down the street parallel to the central dome and reloaded his gauss cannons.

  Turning a corner, Gideon found an Ibarran armor next to an iris, dragging himself on a mangled leg toward the doorway. With his back to Gideon, the Ibarran had a cannon arm trained in another direction and firing, a sword gripped in the other hand. Gideon hit the Ibarran in the arm and shoulder while focused fire from Pak and Thomas hit the armor in the back. The Ibarran collapsed to the ground.

  Steaming amniosis spilled onto the ground. The Ibarran worked his sword tip into the ground and used it like a crutch to try to work his way to the iris.

  “Pathetic.” Gideon snatched the sword away by the hilt and put a boot to the Ibarran’s head.

  “Where is she? Is Nicodemus with her?” Gideon asked.

  The armor’s legs and shoulders began twitching, like a seizure was imminent.

  “He’s redlining.” Pak put a hand on the back of the Ibarran’s neck and data cables snaked out of his wrist and into ports at the base of the helm.

  “Don’t bother,” Gideon said. “It’s a death sentence either way.”

  “Gideon!” a familiar voice shouted.

  The Dragoon whirled around. There, in the threshold of one of the dome’s many irises, was an Ibarran armor soldier. Gideon recognized the combat posture, the way he held his cannon arm cocked to one side.

  Nicodemus.

  Gideon tapped the flat of his captured blade against his leg as Stacey Ibarra emerged from the iris, light glinting off her silver body.

  Gideon and Nicodemus squared off for a moment. The two warriors needed no words. Gideon ran toward him and Stacey, breaking into a sprint and roaring a challenge.

  “Captain!” Pak called out. “Wait!”

  Stacey put her hand on the doorframe.

  Gideon thrust his gauss arm at her but a hypervelocity shell from Nicodemus blew his weapon apart. Electricity from shattered capacitors arced up his arm, but Gideon kept running. He leapt at his quarry just as they pulled back into the iris and he fell in after them.

  Gideon hit a floor and skid to a stop. Springing to his feet, he slashed his sword around then realized he was in a tunnel. A tunnel that must have been a mile long and ended in a small pinpoint of light. There was no sign of Stacey or Nicodemus.

  The chronometer on his HUD blinked with an error. There was a ninety-second gap in time that his system couldn’t account for.

  “Damn you!” He struck his sword against the wall and a kaleidoscope of light rippled from the impact. The shape of armor and a woman on the wall moved away from the light end to a darkness at the other.

  “Fifty fifty…” Gideon tore away the ammo belt to his lost cannon and took off running.

  ****

  Fifty-nine bodies lay in a makeshift morgue. Body bags lay spaced out neatly through one of the Warsaw’s empty cargo bays, as if the dead were in formation and awaiting orders. Most bore white shrouds emblazoned with Templar crosses.

  Roland knelt next to Tongea, one hand on the armor’s shoulder as he prayed. Tongea looked fierce even in death, the tribal tattoos on his face set firm.

  Roland finished his prayer and touched the bandage over his bullet wound. His lungs ached with each breath, and a dozen small cuts and bruises across his body were a constant source of pain…but the feeling in his heart was the worst.

  He looked across the dead, but in his mind’s eye he saw Aignar. He heard his friend’s last word over and over again.

  A throat cleared behind him.

  Roland looked over his shoulder and did a double take.

  The woman behind him had hair as dark as the abyss, skin almost alabaster and lips a deep red. The admiral pins on her collar didn’t match her age—she couldn’t have been much older than Roland.

  “They all need the final blessings,” Roland said.

  “This can’t wait,” she said.

  “It is my duty to—”

  “My ship has a chaplain that can give last rites. If this wasn’t a life-and-death emergency, I wouldn’t disturb you, Templar.”

  “Life and death…” Roland leaned over and kissed Tongea’s forehead. “Plenty of death today.”

  “Lady Ibarra is in danger. She needs armor and she needs it now,” Makarov said. “Morrigan said you are true to the cause.”

  Roland got to his feet slowly, pain dogging his every motion. “Lady Ibarra…will she honor them? What they sacrificed?”

  “She loves us,” Makarov said. “The Templar stand with her and she stands with the Templar. Must you ask?”

  Roland looked at her, the bruises and cuts on his face evident in the bay’s light. “My faith’s been tested lately,” he said.

  “Lady Ibarra calls,” Makarov said. “I will answer. Will you?”

  Roland shut Tongea’s body bag and draped a shroud over him. “I am armor. I am Templar…” He touched his bandaged arm.

  “You need a suit,” she motioned to him. “Follow me.”

  ****

  Roland leaned against the corner of a lift he shar
ed with Makarov. His legs felt like jelly and the bulkheads were a sturdier alternative to standing.

  “Makarov?” he asked.

  “That’s me. Perhaps you knew my mother. She was—”

  “Commanded the Lost 8th,” Roland said. “Fought off the Toth incursion. Jumped into deep space to slow down the second Xaros invasion. She succeeded, at the cost of everyone in the fleet. My father was on the Midway. Last minute reassignment before the fleet weighed anchor.”

  “My mother’s flagship,” Makarov nodded. “I didn’t know about your father.”

  “War. My mother died on Luna when the Xaros smashed it.” Roland worked his jaw as he looked to the deck counter.

  “Let’s get something out of the way, shall we? I know who my mother was. I know what I am. She was a procedural, as was almost everyone else in the 8th Fleet. Born from the tanks to fight for Earth. She was ‘alive’ for less than a year.” She touched the side of her head. “But I know her, remember her from a childhood I know didn’t happen, remember learning she died. I still love her and my heart still aches to think of her.”

  “You’re young…for an admiral,” Roland said.

  “Accelerated training regimen in the tubes. Lady Ibarra needed fleet commanders. She didn’t need a proccie with all that experience in a body ten years from retirement.”

  “Huh…I would never have thought of that.” Roland shrugged his right shoulder, wondering if he had any joints that didn’t hurt.

  “The Lady does what must be done. The old rules for procedurals were dropped once the Nation came into being, though…I’m unaware of anyone as…unique as me.”

  “You were cast from a superior mold.” Roland regretted the words as soon as he said them. “No, I mean—”

  “Thank you.” She opened a pocket on her uniform and withdrew a small piece of cloth in a plastic case. Placing it on her palm, she showed it to Roland. It was a bit of an old-style void suit with an admiral’s rank insignia from the Atlantic Union, the military that fought the Ember War before Earth became the Terran Union.

  “This was my mother’s,” Makarov said. “President Garret found her void suit on the Midway’s bridge. The Lady…secured this for me.”

  “Lucky you. I have nothing of my parents.”

  Makarov touched Roland’s chest just above his heart.

  Roland nodded slowly. He understood the admiral’s meaning; he carried his parents with him.

  “Save Lady Ibarra.” Makarov pressed the case into Roland’s hand. “Then bring that back to me.”

  “I can’t—”

  “Going to reject this lady’s favor? I thought you were the Black Knight.”

  Roland smiled, and even that hurt. “Keep this ship in the void and I’ll return to you with…with our Lady.”

  “Warsavo walcz,” Makarov said.

  The lift slowed to a stop and the doors opened to a busy cemetery. Technicians tending to a half-dozen suits of armor stopped working and watched as Roland stepped off the lift. At the far end of the cemetery was a suit of black armor, Templar crosses on the shoulder and breastplate, a sword hilt locked to the leg, the chest and interior womb open and waiting for him.

  Roland strode forth, returning fist-to-chest salutes from the crew. When he stopped at his ready armor, the pain in his body faded away. He looked back to the lift and saw Makarov touch her fingertips to her lips just before the doors shut.

  “About time,” Morrigan said from the suit next to his.

  “Who’s with us?”

  “Martel. The Black Star lance. Saint Kallen. Who else do we need?”

  “Martel can barely walk.” Roland stripped off his prison garb, foregoing modesty but for skintight shorts.

  “He’s under while he syncs with his armor. Meanwhile, you look like you poked a bear in the arse,” Morrigan said.

  “Doesn’t matter. I am armor.”

  “We are the fury.”

  Roland climbed into the womb and the abyss closed around him. Amniosis rushed into the pod and he took it in, the atavistic biological response to drowning trained out of him. He fed the armor’s umbilical into the plugs at the base of his skull and felt his armor form around him.

  Vision fed into his brain and the pain of his flesh faded away as his suit became his body. He turned his helm from side to side, lifted his arms, then clamped his hands into fists so loudly is startled the technicians.

  “How do you feel?” Morrigan asked.

  “Whole.”

  Chapter 25

  Gideon ran into a semicircular room with a dozen different irises, all wavering like disturbed ponds. He rapped the edge of his sword against the ground and followed two sets of footprints to the iris second from the right.

  “Here goes nothing,” Gideon muttered as he rushed through. A small room barely the size of a Mule cargo bay opened around him with another iris door on the other side. Stacey Ibarra was in the middle of the room, speaking with Nicodemus.

  Gideon’s momentum carried him forward and into Stacey. He scooped her up and tried to stop, but his feet slid across the floor and took them both through the portal. Through the undulating doorway, he saw Nicodemus’ shadow barreling toward them. He stabbed the sword toward the door as Nicodemus darkened it…and hit nothing as the other armor vanished.

  Stacey tried to wiggle out of Gideon’s grasp. He grabbed her by the arm and hurled her into a curved wall. The wall cracked with the impact, but she popped right back onto her feet.

  Gideon slammed the sword down in front of her, missing the tip of her nose by a fraction of an inch.

  She stopped, then calmly regarded the Terran Union armor soldier and folded her hands across her waist.

  “You must be Gideon,” she said. “Nicodemus isn’t the type to mistake someone.”

  “You…” Gideon wrenched the blade out of the floor. “This is all because of you. Nicodemus and Morrigan followed your worthless name. Became traitor because of you and your grandfather and that lie of a saint.”

  “You are more right than you know,” she said. “I have heard a great deal about you, Gideon. Gideon the scar face. Gideon the failure.”

  “What did you call me?” He pulled the sword behind his back.

  “The Toth crushed you. Left you full of inadequacies you thought you could conquer as armor, but then you couldn’t measure up through training. Nicodemus had to carry you through the qualifications. Morrigan spent days teaching you something so simple as walking in armor.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Scores so poor that no lance commander wanted you, but Nicodemus and Morrigan refused any assignment until all three of you were incorporated into a unit together. Then you were taken off the line when you almost redlined—”

  “Stop it. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Then you finally began to show some progress as armor and what happened? Your lance left you behind. I don’t blame you for feeling like a complete waste of—”

  With lightning speed, Gideon swung his sword at her. The blade—with the force of shoulder, hip, and knee actuators—bounced off her arm.

  Stacey Ibarra looked down at a deep gouge running from her shoulder to her elbow. Raw silver sparkled like the golden roofs of the Qa’Resh city. She squeezed a hand against the cut and her arm reknit itself.

  “You have to try harder than that, scar boy.”

  Gideon roared and slammed a hand around her neck. He hoisted her off the ground and squeezed with all the power his armor could muster.

  “That’s the spirit!” Her mouth didn’t move, but her eyes laughed at him. “You think I need to breathe? Quaint.”

  Gideon felt her neck crush ever so slightly, then she raised an arm and set it atop his. A crystal glowed in her fingers.

  “This is a Qa’Resh data crystal. Want to see how it works?”

  A flood of light struck his helm and Gideon’s HUD went white. His armor’s failsafe kicked in and shunted off all inputs to the womb to prevent h
is neural system from overloading and burning out his brain.

  He was trapped in darkness, aware of nothing but his real body floating in amniosis and his beating heart. He reached up with his real hand, which felt numb, and fumbled with a panel buried beneath the womb’s inner padding.

  How did she know that? No. It doesn’t matter. I am armor. I am fury. I will not fail.

  He flipped a switch and his armor came alive.

  Stacey was gone, but the light she’d hit him with had bleached a swath of his arm white. He picked up the sword and hurried through the lone iris door, his heart as full of determination and hate as ever.

  ****

  Lettow’s holo tank fizzled as he panned over the Qa’Resh city and glanced down at the radiation levels displayed on the tank rim. The Ardennes’ shields degraded under the constant pressure of the distant magnetar and the irradiated nebula, but he still had several more hours before he needed to deal with the issue.

  The thoughts of bone-marrow reconstruction and full blood transfusions for his crew were at the back of his mind, but if they could end the Ibarran threat right here and right now…

  “Graviton detection,” Rhysli said from the other side of the tank. The Ruhaald’s long arms tapped against a holo screen Lettow couldn’t see.

  “Another Union ship,” Jarilla said.

  Lettow zoomed the holo out and found the new detection moving away from the Crucible.

  “No IFF pulse,” Lettow said. Camera feeds swept through the area and a grainy image of a carrier popped up. “It’s human…not Union. The Ibarrans are here. Guns, work up a firing solution.”

  In the holo, the Ibarran ship jumped from side to side slightly.