Eternal Frontier (The Eternal Frontier Book 1)

by Anthony J Melchiorri

  “We got it,” Coren said. “Drone-Mech shields are down.”

  For a moment, nothing seemed to change on the holoscreen. The violent exchange of cannon fire and rocketing torpedoes continued on the display. Explosions still rocked the ships and fighters. But Tag noticed more and more of the explosions were emanating from the Drone-Mech ships. Several of their fighters erupted into spurting balls of plasma and billows of spreading debris.

  A trickle of joy turned into an unbridled sense of accomplishment. They had actually done it. “Great job!” Tag said.

  “The engineers are going to be working to fix this,” the Mechanic said. “It might not last long.”

  Even so, Tag couldn’t help the glimmer of hope sparking within him. But he knew that optimism might prove premature. The Drone-Mech ships, even without energy shields, outnumbered the SRE fleet, and their offensive measures were still proving to be too much for the Montenegro’s fleet.

  Coren stared at the screen, standing next to Alpha. “We can bring down the dreadnought’s AI systems, but I’m not sure that will drastically alter the course of this battle. You still want us to try?”

  Tag studied the battlefield. The fighters were veering around the SRE and strafing the struggling ships. The Drone-Mech destroyers were levying powerful barrages at the Montenegro, their torpedoes hitting home along the capital ship’s hull. “No,” Tag said finally. “Scratch that AI systems subversion attempt.”

  “What should we do then?” Alpha asked.

  “We don’t want to destroy the Drone-Mechs’ AI systems. We’ll use them ourselves.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  Tag’s thoughts turned back to the moment he had almost lost the Argo to a single stubborn Drone-Mech. The fusion reactor had been overloaded to a near meltdown. Maybe ...

  “Coren, can you send all these repair bots to the dreadnought’s fusion reactors?” Tag asked.

  “We’re not supposed to be helping them!” Sofia said.

  “No, we won’t be,” Coren said, already seeming to understand Tag’s plan. His fingers danced across the terminal, and dozens of the spherical repair bots whirred on. They started heading for two of the open chutes. One by one, they rolled in and were sucked away to their destination. “Sabotage the power plant?”

  “Exactly,” Tag said. “Have them tear the place apart.”

  “I’m already sensing engineers attempting to undermine our efforts,” Alpha said. “They’re trying to reverse the unshielding commands and restrict our access.”

  Tag steadied his rifle at the hatch. The struggling outside had grown eerily quiet. “Keep them off Coren’s back while he finishes this.”

  “I will do my best, Captain.” Alpha worked doggedly at her terminal.

  Bots continued to roll from their racks and zoom into the chutes. Tag’s nerves felt on fire with anticipation as his eyes flicked between the raging battle around the Montenegro on the holoscreen to the hatch. The last repair bot slipped into a chute.

  “Repair bots are all underway,” Coren said.

  “How hard will it be to divert the dreadnought’s firing solutions? Can you retarget cannons and point-defense systems on the Drone-Mech fleet?”

  Coren paused, seeming to mull the request over. “I believe it may be possible.” Once again, he resumed his position at the workstation.

  A long silence followed, only broken by the rhythmic tapping of Coren and Alpha on the terminals. Tag and Sofia kept their rifles trained on the hatch. The heavy rack, now devoid of the repair bots, still stood in place over the door. Tag’s finger hovered near his trigger guard, and his pulse thumped in his ears. He wished he knew what was going on out there. Maybe the Drone-Mechs had given up on gaining entry. Maybe they were trying desperately to reverse the damage Coren had caused their network and were too focused on the computer systems. But something told him that was very wrong.

  Then the hatch burst inward. The door tore apart in a pluming explosion. The blast fractured the bot rack, and chunks of metal whistled dangerously through the air. Fingers of fire twisted across the deck.

  Tag ducked, and Sofia threw herself down beside him. Smoke filled the entryway, replacing the fire, and pulsefire beams pierced the gray clouds, pinging across the bot racks and bulkhead. Tag and Sofia returned fire blindly, with no targets in sight. Then Tag spotted a few dark silhouettes moving within the settling dust. He and Sofia pounded the shapes with mini-Gauss slugs, but more flooded in.

  Alpha paused her work to lay down a barrage of covering fire. But Coren worked diligently, ignoring the hell breaking loose around him.

  “Guard Coren!” Tag yelled over the cacophony of gunfire.

  “Copy, Captain,” Alpha said, flipping over a workbench to help block Coren. She stood behind it and shouldered her mini-Gauss, looking evermore the valiant soldier.

  Tag and Sofia continued firing on the entryway. Several dark shadows crumpled in the dust clouds, replaced by others, firing and yelling.

  “My sensors are reporting at least a dozen individual lifeforms!” Alpha said, firing. One of her shots slammed into a Drone-Mech. “Eleven now!”

  “Weapons systems are almost ... there!” Coren yelled. He turned away from the terminal. A blast of pulsefire hit the workstation. Sparks flew, and the terminal went dark. The holoscreen still glowed, and the outboard view showed the dreadnought’s cannons firing in sporadic, crazed patterns. Torpedoes changed trajectories and accelerated toward the Drone-Mech battlecruisers and destroyers. Piercing blue rounds lit up the Drone-Mech fighters soaring around the Drone-Mech fleet. The exploding fighters’ blasts resonated through the dreadnought’s thick hull.

  “Got a status report on the power plant?” Tag asked.

  “Reaction chamber integrity is dropping,” Coren said. “We’re getting the first signs of radiation leaking. We have five, maybe ten minutes if we’re lucky before this entire place detonates.”

  “You heard him!” Tag fired on a Drone-Mech leaning in from the corridor. “To the Argo!”

  He forced himself up against all his instincts yelling at him to stay low. Firing at the Drone-Mechs, he surged forward. His small team followed. They pushed through the meager forces clustered in front of the hatch, cutting through them with a barrier of flying slugs. The pulsefire slowed, until Tag brought his sights over a final Drone-Mech lingering in the smoke. He squeezed the trigger until the Drone-Mech collapsed, then rushed to the exit. Something barreled out of the dark smoke and crashed into him before he reached it. His fingers loosened around his rifle, and the mini-Gauss clattered across the deck. He went down, entangled in the grip of a thrashing Drone-Mech. The alien’s power armor had holes punched through its left arm, but if it was injured, it showed no signs of weakness. Just anger, hate.

  Tag made out other vague shapes leaping over him, and the grunts and clangs of ensuing hand-to-hand combat reached his ears.

  Before he could contemplate the fate of his crew, the Drone-Mech standing over Tag pummeled him, ripping at his helmet, trying to twist his neck. Tag wrapped his hands around the Drone-Mech’s wrists, desperate to pull it away. Then one of the Drone-Mech’s hands pressed down on his shoulder. Hot agony radiated through the injury, and he let out a pained yell. The alien took advantage of the weak spot and put its full weight on his shoulder.

  Tag’s arm went weak. His nerves screamed. The alien began punching at his visor, slamming its armor-reinforced fist into the polyglass. The blows shook Tag’s head, and he blinked, desperate to keep his blood and sweat from blinding him. Another impact sent his teeth chattering, and he tasted something coppery, metallic. The Drone-Mech drew its fist up again, and Tag tried to block the blow by raising his good hand.

  But the alien’s punch never landed. A thin set of six fingers wrapped around the Drone-Mech’s wrist. Coren grabbed the Drone-Mech by its neck and threw the alien across the room. The lanky Drone-Mech crashed into an empty bot rack, and the rack tumbled over its limp body, and it settled near another fresh set of Drone
-Mech corpses.

  Coren offered a hand.

  Tag took it and stood. “Thanks.”

  “No time for thanks,” Coren replied.

  Sofia wiped blood from her visor, and Alpha wrung her metal fingers after setting down the body of another Drone-Mech.

  “Everybody okay?” Tag said.

  The others shook their head.

  “Then time to get out of here!” Tag said.

  The group ran through the corridor. They heard more scurrying footsteps echoing down other passageways, but Tag paid them little heed. They couldn’t waste a moment longer returning to the fighter bay and to what remained of the Argo. They reached the hatch and rushed into the bay.

  The deck shook under their feet, evoking memories of Eta-Five in Tag. A distant explosion sounded, not from outside but from deep within the belly of the massive ship. The meltdown had started, but it didn’t matter now. It wouldn’t be long before the dreadnought tore itself apart from the inside. They just needed to make sure they weren’t in it when it did.

  That meant a short dash to the Argo, and then—

  Coren froze. The others skidded to a stop near him.

  “Ah, so the real soldiers are here,” he said.

  Ahead, a squad of Drone-Mechs in mechanized exo-suits stood, each looming almost four meters in height. They carried double-barreled weapons as long as Tag was tall. The first exo-suit soldier spotted Tag and the others. It brought its weapon to bear.

  “Look out!” Tag cried.

  The crew took shelter behind a wrecked fighter. A low whine escaped the gun, rapidly growing louder, until an intense green beam cut through the air and tore into a defunct fighter. The beam chewed up the metal, turning it into a puddle of hot orange slag. The other soldiers’ weapons whined and fired, and the fighter slowly disappeared under the assault.

  Tag forgot about the sharp pain throbbing in his shoulder. He feared it would hurt a great deal more when he was cut in half by one of those green beams.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  “Do those exo-suits have any weaknesses?” Tag asked.

  “The soldiers inside will still die if you shoot them,” Coren said.

  “Oh, that’s extremely helpful,” Sofia said, her nose in a snarl beneath her clear visor.

  “I’m serious.” Coren glared. “The suits are well armored, but those rifles of yours should still pierce them.”

  “All right, but we can’t take them head on,” Tag said. The exo-suit soldiers’ weapons continued to dissolve everything around them. The deck shook as one of the soldiers loped to a new position, preparing to flank them. “Focus on getting back to the Argo. I’ll distract them, you three move!”

  Before any of them could protest, he slid into a firing position and shot a burst of slugs into one of the soldiers’ exo-suits. Two of the rounds whizzed by harmlessly. But the third devastated a servo on the suit’s right leg. The soldier took a step forward, and the suit crashed sideways, its leg slipping from under it. Still, it laid down an unrelenting curtain of fire, and the others picked up its slack, churning forward over broken fighters and broken crates.

  “Your turn!” Sofia yelled. A flurry of slugs punched into the side of one exo-suit, and it swiveled to fire on her.

  Tag ran. He didn’t bother looking back, but he could feel the heat radiating from the exo-suits’ beams, following him. He dove behind a fallen catwalk. The entire structure deformed and melted under the concentrated fire hitting his position. Throwing himself to his belly, he army-crawled to the Argo. He was close, almost there. Sofia and Coren jumped into the ship, disappearing into the cargo bay. A few minutes later, one of the Gauss cannons opened up on an exo-suit. The shrieking rounds shredded the suit and the alien inside. The cannon pivoted and fired, and another exo turned to globs of half-molten alloy.

  Tag scrambled for the cargo bay hatch. Another explosion from somewhere within the ship resonated through the deck. The quaking knocked him off his feet. He sprawled, his hands outstretched.

  The deck trembled under Tag again. But it wasn’t another blast rocking through the ship.

  A shadow fell over Tag. He rolled just in time to avoid the green beam tearing into the metal where he’d just been. Moving for the exo-suit soldier’s blind spot, he dove under its feet. Another blast ripped into the deck. He dodged the stomping feet.

  “Come on, Tag!” Sofia cried. “We’re ready to go!”

  He and the exo-suit soldier were in the Argo’s blind spot. Now he was engaged in a deadly dance with the terrifying metal monster.

  “I’ve got an exo on me!” Tag said.

  “I will assist,” Alpha replied over the comms in her near-monotone voice. She sprinted from near the cargo hatch of the Argo in a flash of silver. Green beams cut into the deck behind her, but she juked from side to side, anticipating each blast. Then, drawing near, she threw herself into the air. Her arms pinwheeled until she slammed into the cockpit of the exo.

  With her body blocking the soldier’s view, Tag rushed for his dropped mini-Gauss. He picked it up and leveled it at the exo. The exo flailed and thrashed, trying desperately to throw Alpha off. She clung to the cockpit and punched at the polyglass. Blow after blow, she hammered it. Fracture lines appeared first, then the polyglass fell away. Alpha tore the soldier from his perch within the suit and threw him clear of it. His body hit the bulkhead and fell to the deck, a bleeding mess.

  The suit, pilotless, collapsed. Alpha tried to jump away, but she didn’t make it. Tag watched in horror as the suit crashed onto her legs and pinned her beneath it.

  “No!” he yelled.

  The dreadnought shook again. This time, the tremors didn’t cease, and more explosions echoed through the ship, sounding like the roars of some awakening kraken rising from the depths.

  Tag ran to Alpha. She writhed, struggling to free herself. At least she was alive. Tag knelt to help her as point-defense rounds screamed overhead. Another exo-soldier crumpled, armor shredded and melted.

  “Go on, Captain!” Alpha said. “I am unable to escape.”

  “You’re coming with.” Tag grabbed her wrists and pulled. She tried to push herself free, but even with their best efforts, she remained pinned.

  “This thing’s going to blow any second!” Sofia yelled over the comms. The Argo’s grav impellers rumbled to life and glowed blue. The ship shifted, shedding debris, and it started to hover above the deck.

  A deep roar resonated through the fighter bay, accompanied by the distant sounds of explosions.

  “Captain, go!” Alpha said. “It is not worthwhile for all three of you to die for me.”

  Tag shouldered his mini-Gauss. “Sorry, Alpha. Not going to happen. You don’t have any pain metrics running, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Good.” Tag fired twice at her. Each round cleaved through a leg, shredding the wire and metal leading to her torso. He threw the mini-Gauss over his back and dragged her legless body across the deck, away from her severed limbs. He hoisted her into the cargo bay and slammed the hatch shut. “We’re on board! Get us off this ship, Coren!”

  “Doors are still closed, Captain!” Coren replied over the comms.

  “Cut us a way out then!”

  The hum of the charging energy cannon accompanied the swelling thunder of the explosions rumbling through the dreadnought.

  “You okay?” Tag asked Alpha.

  “Yes, all units functional. But I’m afraid my EVA suit is compromised, and I will be unable to join you on the bridge.”

  Tag lifted her into a fireman’s carry. Her weight exacerbated his injury, but he ran up the ladders and to the med bay. “You’ll be safe in here.” He locked her into a patient crash couch. “When we get out of here, I’ll get you a new pair of legs. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  “And thank you, Alpha.” He left before she could respond and sprinted for the bridge.

  “Energy cannon at full power,” Coren said.

  “Fire,” Tag said, strappin
g his harnesses over his body.

  The charged blast filled the cargo bay with brilliant light and coursing energy, crashing against the massive fighter bay hatch. Heat washed over them, rolling through the hole in the bridge viewport. The huge metal doors protested in a long grating whine, then bent outward. Vacuum finished the job, pulling loose fighters, Drone-Mech corpses, dead exos, and fragments of alloy through the wound in the bay doors. The Argo was thrown into open space with the rest of the fighter bay’s contents. Tag’s stomach flipped end over end as he struggled to orient himself as the Argo spun away from the dreadnought.

  “Get us out of here, Sofia!” Tag said.

  “Aye, aye, Skipper!”

  The ship swayed then stopped, finally stabilizing, and it shot from the dreadnought, colliding against a screen of debris. Cannons boomed from the enormous ship, sending rounds coursing in all directions. Fighters, confused by the attack from their own ships, perished in vaporizing blasts. The dreadnought lashed out at everything around at as it destroyed itself from within because of Coren’s subterfuge.

  “Get us to the Montenegro!” Tag commanded.

  They swerved between assaulting fighters. Coren kept the weapons system hot, bringing down incoming torpedoes and the occasional warhead. Another ship appeared in their viewport, giving Tag confidence and a glimmer of hope that they’d actually make it, they’d actually succeeded.

  The Montenegro was still alive. Damaged, but still alive. No other SRE ships drifted around it, and only a small detachment of fighters circled it, finishing off Drone-Mech fighters daring to dive in too close.

  Tag turned on the stern outboard cams on another holoscreen. He watched the dreadnought falter in its last death throes. Cannons still sputtered wildly as a jet of blue plasma cut through its belly. The jet widened into a colossal pillar. Then a violent flash of white light overwhelmed the view. When the cams adjusted, the dreadnought was nothing but a spreading plume of broken and scattered pieces careening through space.

  Sofia whooped in her seat while gripping the controls. Tag closed his eyes for a moment and soaked in the tremendous victory. He opened them to see Coren glance at him. The Mechanic held his fist in the air in a simple, quiet gesture of triumph. The surviving Drone-Mech fighters fell back, retreating to the two remaining Drone-Mech destroyers and a damaged battlecruiser. The limping fleet accelerated then vanished in a white blink of light, jumping into hyperspace.