“A spread of small signals around a really big one, sir. With the amount of pyro in this area, my guess is it’s a mining ship with an armed escort.”
More new tech, then, because ISPA had long since tried and failed to mine the rich lodes of pyrofluvium from the canyon—from which it got its name, Pyro Canyon—owing to the incredibly unstable terrain. Violent outgassing had destroyed many a “state of the art” mineral extractor on the ground here, and mining from the air was, well, not possible.
Until now, that is.
“You read that, Cardie?”
“Loud and clear. They’re about to reap more than they bargained for.”
He grinned, then sucked in a quick hot breath. “Okay, Fifth, climb to two thousand, then hit the main ship, whatever it is, with a double-decker crossfire descent. In tight with your wingman. Be sure to give yourself enough room to pull away. After the first run, break formation and mop up the fighter escorts. Stand by for the rest.”
Brink’s signal display screen showed all remaining Alpha fighters flashing green, which meant they all understood and were following his lead.
“Roger that, Brink.” Good. Her Beta pilots were ready too.
“Okay, Fifth, up we go.”
The heat didn’t seem so intense from two thousand feet up, more like a cinder pathway smoldering for some daredevil idiot to walk barefoot across it. The heat haze, though, shimmered the way beyond for as far as he could see. “Anything more, Endicott?”
“Negative, sir. The readings haven’t moved.”
“Roger that. Alphas, dive on my mark.” From the coordinates on his navi-computer, they’d passed his hidden haven a few miles back. A few miles—way too close for comfort.
A fat blue edifice shaped like a beehive shimmered into view ahead, below. The top was around two thousand feet high. An ungodly screeching noise intensified the closer they got.
“Okay, ready, set, dive.”
Enormous tentacular pipes appeared to guzzle molten liquid from the canyon floor, feeding the beehive ship. Bold, as the ship hovered a few hundred feet in the air, seemingly using the heat and electromagnetic properties of pyro itself to create a kind of grav-lev cushion. Tremendous forces, delicately balanced and harnessed in the most hostile place imaginable. Far beyond ISPA’s scientific know-how. The Finaglers clearly prized pyrofluvium as highly as ISPA did, and they’d come to strip the canyon bare. To fuel their invasion.
Brink dove straight for the pipe couplings and opened fire. Detached one, almost two. Molten red liquid sprayed the beehive exterior, the shocking splashes almost drowning him in midflight. Jesus. He veered to port and yanked the joystick back, barely climbing over a jutting rock in time to—
Enemy fire rained down on him from God-knew-where, blitzing his bird. He scanned the sky feverishly. One of his wing stabilizers ripped off. Electric shocks thumped his hand on the joystick again and again, leaving a painful throb in his fingertips. His instrumentation was fried. No way to tell who was where or what the hell was happening around him.
“Alphas, come in. Alph—”
He banked to his three o’clock and dodged between two hurtling Finagler fighters. Their slender, swan-necked shapes didn’t appear threatening. But they were rapid, clapping through the sound barrier on almost every pass. Added to which their shells changed texture and color a little to blend into the background. Avian cutis nova. Difficult for them to change quickly enough to keep up with the ship’s agility, though. A flaw? At such high speeds, the camouflage capability was always slightly lagging, meaning the ship stuck out like a sore thumb more often than it was hidden.
He cottoned on to a pair of fliers, opened up on them from behind. Their shells were tough and shaped convexly to deflect fire, but the exhaust ports weren’t. Concentrated fire downed both ships. Glib annihilation. When he about-turned, the entire canyon was a chaos of tit-for-tat chases and twisting, ziplike tracer fire. The beehive mining vessel toppled off its bed of air and crushed several fighters, before throwing up a cauldron cloud full of bubbling liquid and gas.
Gritting his teeth, he winged a loose Finagler as it cut across him. Its neck broke at Mach 1, nose-first into the floor. That one’s for Barani.
From behind, a single Condor bird zapped overhead, tailed by a dozen enemy fighters. He took off after them and kept his eye on the fleeing bird. Its rolls, pitches, steep banking maneuvers, often all at once, upside down and downside up, were almost impossible to hit unless the pursuers got lucky. He began to suck air rather than breathe. His stomach enacted each move he saw vicariously.
It could only be Jane.
Smart girl. She’s taking the fight away from danger, taking as many of them with her as she can.
He danced his fingers pressurelessly on the joystick before knuckling down for the dogfight of his life. Two Finaglers noticed him and peeled off from their pursuit to engage him. Head-on. Not cool. He veered left and suddenly curled back across them, raking them both in a single sweep. There’s more where that came from. Using his momentum, he swung left again and accelerated across the rank of predators from behind, showering their exhaust vents with round after blazing round. He couldn’t tell how many he hit, how many he downed. Before he could intuit his next move, they broke formation and sped back toward the main battle.
Yellow bastards.
Jane pulled up alongside him, blew him a kiss. He reciprocated. Her cockpit window was badly scarred, like his, but she was still in one piece. If his comms were in working order he’d have asked her to marry him for the gazillionth time. The oldest running joke between them—they had to say it at the most inopportune moments imaginable. Hell, she’d probably asked him more than he’d asked her. Somewhere in there they’d meant it, too, but that was how things had always been in the Fifth. Not quite real and yet…too real.
She motioned for him to follow her lead. Just the two of them, just like old times, into the suck. Amazing how many fighters were still left on both sides, snaking up the canyon walls or belting around the beehive wreckage on one another’s tails.
Who was winning? Who knew? The strategic battle was over, though, with the Finaglers’ sneaky mining expedition up in smoke, the news undoubtedly forcing the top brass on either side to strike a line through Pyro Canyon on their lists of places to colonize. It was simply too volatile an opportunity, and would therefore be a stalemate. Yes, while both forces would have to watch it closely from now on to ensure the other didn’t make a play for the pyro, neither one could afford to risk losing such expensive equipment as the monstrous beehive.
He heaved a stuttery sigh of relief. Fifth Condor had put the game, or at least this part of it, back in stalemate. While that remained, their secret would go undiscovered. And if he and Jane made it back, when they made it back, they would use all their shit-hot influence to ensure it stayed hidden.
Jane’s long-range comms beacon flickered madly in all directions on the roof of her cockpit. He puckered his lips and blew a kiss. She had to be sending an audiovisual report broadcast at high power to the corners of the galaxy. To ISPA stations everywhere. Footage of this engagement would be used to inspire—
Brink jerked upright in his seat as he spotted a convoy of Finaglers separating from the battle. They were heading low into the fumes, away along the canyon…toward the place they must not reach.
Jane saw them too. She gave him a quick worried look, then barrel-assed around the beehive carcass and unleashed everything in her arsenal at the convoy. Bullets, tracers, her last remaining missile. Breathless, Brink released his last missile as well. The explosions lit the outgassing in a fierce flash fire, from floor to sky. But the fumes were so thick and hellish it was impossible to see more than thirty feet ahead, even with nose and wing lights blazing.
Ugh. Horizontal hail slammed into him from the front. It pinned him back in his seat, the pain, th
e steel-ringing pain. It trapped the air in a quick-shut vault in his left lung. A bullet had gone right through his stomach, a little to the right. Depressurization pulled violently, trying its best to work him out of his harness, but he was strapped in tight. The bullet hole was marked by a burrowing cold burn, now blood. Dark red blood, almost black, streamed profusely. Faster than his mind could suck it up. Since when was it that color? Liver blood?
For some reason he thought of swimming. The fourth channel. Currents too strong.
Jane opened fire at a line of four onrushing enemy fighters, exploded one. Two. Her left wing, then her right, crumpled inward and broke off. She spun and spun and spun down, away from him into the columning fumes, until he saw a small pinkish flash. Then nothing.
Gone?
A part of him sank, a part of him, the tightest part, uncoiled and lifted like a spring relieved of a great weight. He saw the Finaglers’ wake trails through the smoke disappear, as if they’d never been there. Instinctively he turned after them, the strength leaving his hold on the joystick. When they came back for seconds, to finish him off, the power in his bird had failed altogether.
This is it, then. We take our secret with us.
He let loose a grim, painful chuckle. Closed his eyes as he dipped under the middle flier and muttered, “Gemini Sparks—only those taller than this Martian can ride.”
Remembering the kids’ favorite leap on the roller coaster, he yanked the eject lever and instantly heard the cockpit roof slam into the underside of an enemy ship. Immense, crippling force. He let go. The image of voluptuous Jane, crouching in her swimsuit, ready to dive into Altimere, was his last.
If only he’d been around to see those changes. If only—
Chapter Thirteen
Gus awoke to the frantic sounds of clattering trolleys and footwear squeaking on a laminated floor. Bright Lincoln light dazzled him as he turned his head, so he kept his eyes shut and facing downward into his folded arms. The right side of his rib cage ached, and a splintering pain shot upward from his sternum when he took a heavy breath. No feeling at all in his left arm and only a faint pins and needles in his right didn’t make a lick of sense. None. For a moment he thought he was back in bed at Med Lake after the FIBER operation and everything that had happened since was all a meandering, mischievous dream—no, a cruel ’mare—and he would have to face the chill of reality in a moment. It might even be worse, if that were possible, if—
L.B.!
He juddered, sprang forward, his thighs ramming against something hard. His right leg pinged. Lincoln light again flooded into his vision, but while he saw that he was indeed in a room at Med Lake—the soothing bare walls, the bioluminescent shivers of light on the ceiling, the EMS bot standing vigil at the door—he was not in a bed. He was sitting in a chair at a bedside.
Her gentle fist squeezing his fingers did more than rouse his left arm, which had fallen asleep, it raked his memory completely.
You have survived.
“Trillion, that you?” She stirred, watching him through a squint, her inflamed, puffy face pink and white and sweetly adolescent.
“Who else would it be?”
She squeezed his hand again and coughed, winced. The painkillers they’d given her after the spinal surgery had started to wear off, but the doctors insisted she couldn’t have any more for several hours. At least the operation had been a complete success. In a matter of weeks she’d be on her feet and treading the same rehabilitation steps he’d trodden four years earlier—well, not exactly the same. But she’d be swimming alongside him, and he couldn’t wait for that. The gravitational whirlpool worked wonders for mind-body health.
“Doc Umbize gave me the news—” L.B.’s gaze rose to the dark clouds wire-wooling the sky to the east, “—about Cardie and Brink. They went down somewhere in Pyro Canyon, didn’t they?”
Gus double-checked to make sure no one else was in the room. “We can’t tell anyone else, but yeah, that’s where they bought it. Took out half the Finagler squadron first, smoked a heavy-duty pyro mining op. That was after they destroyed a base ship on another moon. Our side won the battle with fighters to spare, and we’ve sent reinforcements to blockade that system. A major tactical victory, by all accounts. We’ve managed to press the invaders back to 90z, where it’s a stalemate for the time being. But IPR is saying Cardie and Brink went down somewhere near Perihelion instead—to really get people up off their asses. It’s already had the biggest yield rating since records began. Millions are joining up.”
She looked at him, neither smiling nor frowning. Full of wonder. “I always said it was a grubby business. But Barani was right—manipulation or not, somehow the whole damn thing works.” She paused. “So we did it?”
Gus leaned over and kissed her on the lips. An impulse he’d buried long ago found the alien light of day. The sensation made both sides of him, real and artificial, dissolve into rarity. A kind of spaceless, timeless homecoming for all his senses met prodigiously on one point of contact. Bliss. Her lips were warm, flaky, but she didn’t resist. Quite the opposite.
“We did it,” he whispered after pulling away. To breathe.
“Mmm, you could say that, yeah.”
They watched each other, sparking smiles, dreams, futures in a galaxy removed from darkness. From war. Between the hover rescue team lifting them to safety from the hub tower on Altimere to them being here, miraculously repaired, had been the best and the worst time of his life. The worst because he could have lost L.B. at any time, the best because she’d already saved him. And everything that transpired from now on was theirs, fully earned.
“How did you do it? How did you beat them like that, without any kind of weapon?” He’d imagined a coining ability so powerful that it had no limit—no physical limit. Extra-Physical Travelers weren’t supposed to be able to effect any kid of physical change in their surroundings. It was more like wandering out of body at will. Amazing, yes, but harmless, purely voyeuristic. Until now.
“My parents, remember? Clay and Varinia. I told you about them.”
“You didn’t tell me they could do that, that you could do that.”
She shrugged, flushed red. “Well then, that was my way of telling you. I can go anywhere, see anything, kill anyone, all from the comfort of my armchair. So you see why I voluntarily took the meds. I’m the deadliest gal since Mother Nature, and you want to know the most frightening part? I’m not so sure my body dying would have stopped it. All I knew was I had to protect you from those bastards, and if that meant I had to spend eternity in my coining state afterwards, I’d have done it. I’d do it again.”
“I know.”
She paused. “So now you’ve heard all my secrets, Trillion. How about you let me in on one of yours.”
“Come again?”
She nodded at the bedside table, to the Last Will and Testament digi-coil marked ISPA, For Your Eyes Only. “I’m guessing that isn’t Barani’s.”
His heart sank when he realized he hadn’t given the lad more than a passing thought all day. “No, I’m afraid he’s gone.”
“No chance he—”
“ISPA’s register has him checking in for induction at the Vike two days before…” He swallowed the urge to retch, then braved a massive, shuddery breath. “That’s the last record of him anywhere.”
She looked up to the dark clouds again, moisture filling her eyes as well. “So whose is that?”
“Cardie’s.”
L.B. whipped her gaze at him. “Cardie included you in her will? Why?”
“She wants us to take a trip.”
“To where?”
“To find the last piece of our puzzle.”
She looked at the digi-coil, then at him. “So I should pack the sunblock?”
“And then some.”
“What do we s
ay when they ask us where we’re heading?”
“Whatever we like. The will gives us immunity for a one-time visit.”
“How about a weekend’s R & R…someplace warm.”
“We’ll have to do better than that.”
“I’ve got it.” She thought for a moment, then pouted, closed her eyes and heaved a sigh. A sly smile quirked one corner of her mouth. “How about a honeymoon…on a moon that’s stickier than honey.”
He chuckled through his nose. “After what we’ve been through—”
“It’ll be a quaint send-off,” she finished.
“We’ll go as soon as you’re better. No rush.”
“Not for us. Not anymore. We’re heroes, right, Trillion?”
The frantic squeaking of footwear on the laminated floor outside, and the clattering hospital trolleys reminded him what others were risking right now, all across the galaxy, in this fight against invasion. “We’ve done our part, let’s put it that way. Let’s just say we helped our heroes home.”
Chapter Fourteen
Several weeks later.
Pyro Canyon
Glove in glove, Gus guided L.B. through the endless field of roaring geysers. Alert to every tremor in case a new vent should rip open the canyon floor, he kept her close. They were trespassers here, sent to spy on an ancient galactic secret. The low, shallow archways in the overhanging shelf ahead stood a mere few feet from the ground. The shadowy gap, though perfectly uniform for a hundred yards across, was the only entry point into the hidden sanctum. Outgassing didn’t enter it, perhaps owing to some subtle alien manipulation of the airflow. Or a force field of some kind. As Gus and L.B. approached, a dim glow the color of sun-dried cork throbbed inside the darkness.
He switched on the omni-recording willed to him by Congresswoman Acton.
“To Corporal Gus Trillion, in the event of my death,
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