by Richard Fox
“The maneuver has merits,” Steuben snapped.
“It was a good idea, Yarrow. Keep them coming,” Hale said. The Marine beamed at the compliment. Hale scratched his face, suddenly unsure of just how much paperwork he’d have to fill out for the loss of equipment and destruction of civilian property, not that the owners were around to claim compensation.
“Had I not redirected other drones to intercept you, I’m sure you would have made it to the extraction point without issue,” Steuben said.
The Marines groaned and shook their heads.
“You cheated,” Standish said. “We would have been just fine but you went and cheated.”
“I do not know this word, ‘chet-ed,’” Steuben said.
“It means you didn’t follow the rules that were laid out,” Hale said.
“Rules? In war?” Steuben flicked a claw beneath his chin and clicked needle-sharp teeth. “What rules do the Xaros follow? What do rules serve in any fight for survival? The purpose of this exercise was to put your squad under stress so you learn something.” The alien pointed a finger at Hale. “Did it succeed?”
“Yes,” Hale said.
“If you had completed the exercise with ease, you would have gained nothing and I would have failed in my mission to prepare you hairless apes for what is to come,” Steuben said. “Rules, chet-ed, foolish notions of a species that thinks it is fighting for anything but its very existence.”
“Thank you, Steuben. We are better for this lesson,” Hale said.
Steuben clicked his teeth together and looked at the smoking building.
“The next squad will be here in two hours. I must adjust the exercise,” the alien said.
“Mr. Steuben Karigole, sir,” Bailey said from behind him. Steuben turned his head around a hundred and eighty degrees to look at the sheepish Marine, Cortaro a step behind her, his arms crossed. “I want to apologize for my behavior. I am a shame to myself, my team and my Corps. I acted innap—”
“Accepted,” Steuben said. “Now leave, all of you. I have work to do.”
Hale called up their true extraction point, a battery recharge station five miles to the east, and sent the way point to the squad.
“Double interval, march pace. Yarrow, take point,” Cortaro said. The Marines put their helmets back on and peeled away from Steuben, weapons pointed to the flanks of their formation as they walked into the desert.
Hale walked next to Cortaro and opened a private channel to his head enlisted Marine.
“What was that all about?” Hale asked.
“She’s a hothead, sir. Doesn’t care to have her talent called into question. She isn’t real happy about ‘taking orders from an alien’ either,” Cortaro said.
“The Karigole aren’t the Xaros,” Hale said.
“She’s not the only one that thinks that way. Plenty of people out there who’d like to throw the Crucible into the sun and Ibarra with it,” Cortaro said. Marc Ibarra, the genius industrialist who’d engineered a plot to keep a sliver of humanity alive and defeat the Xaros that conquered the solar system, had died during the invasion, but his consciousness lived on inside some sort of alien probe. Hale had led the team that rescued the probe from where it hid from the Xaros occupation, and even he wasn’t sure if he fully understood what Ibarra had become.
“She need to see a chaplain?” Hale asked.
“She’ll sit down with one when we get back to Phoenix. Plus, she’s got a ‘group of mates’ from her home country she meets up with most nights,” Cortaro said.
“Aren’t they the Australians that get drunk and break things a couple times a week?”
“We all grieve differently, sir. You still want her with us on this mission? We could find another sniper before we leave,” Cortaro said.
“We’re not going to give up on her. There’s not a Marine, soldier or sailor in this fleet that didn’t lose someone to the Xaros. She can do the job, baggage or not. What about the others?”
Orozco lifted up the edge of his visor and spat a wad of tobacco juice into the dust.
“Big guy’s deadly with the Gustav, doesn’t say much, stays out of trouble and is on time for everything. Give me a dozen more just like him and I could have reconquered Taiwan,” Cortaro said. “Yarrow follows you around like a damn puppy dog and he’s so new he squeaks, does a good job too.”
“Torni and Standish holding up?”
“Torni spends a lot of time at church. I see her at every morning Mass I manage to make it to. Standish … he’s just Standish,” Cortaro said.
“You good?”
“I’ve got this. My Marines. We’ve all got shit to work through,” Cortaro said. The Gunnery sergeant lost his wife and four children to the Xaros, more than anyone else Hale knew. Every time Hale had tried to offer a sympathetic shoulder, Cortaro had thrown up his defenses and changed the subject as quickly as he could. Hale didn’t think this time would be any different.
Hale closed the private channel and went back to the squad frequency.
“I’m telling you,” Standish said as Hale joined in mid conversation, “they killed all the crows too.”
“You’re so full of it your eyes are brown,” Torni said. “Crows didn’t have cities, language, or an Internet full of cat videos. Why would the Xaros wipe them out?”
“Because crows can use tools,” Standish said. “When I was a kid back on the farm, I saw one jimmy open a lock with a piece of metal. Zoologists have known about that since the turn of the century. Heck, crows even have—had regional dialects. The Xaros had to know they were kind of intelligent. That’s why they killed them all.”
“What makes you think the Xaros did that, corporal?” Yarrow asked.
“You seen any crows since we’ve been out here? Has anyone seen one since the fleet did its little time jump—skip, whatever we’re calling it—to sidestep the invasion?” Standish asked. “I asked some of the guys that went to scout out the other surviving cities and none of them saw crows. The Xaros wipe out anything that uses tools. That’s my hypothesis.”
“I don’t know how crows would be any threat to whatever those things were doing on Ceres or what they had planned for Earth,” Yarrow said.
“Look, kiddo, just admit I’m right about the crows—or we make a bet. You see a crow in the next month and I give you a month’s pay. No crows and you give me a month’s pay,” Standish said.
“We’re about to leave the solar system for God knows how long and you want him to take that bet?” Torni asked.
“Thank. You. Ms. Torni.” Standish kicked a pebble at her.
“Are we getting paid again?” Yarrow asked. With all the world’s banks and electronic records wiped out by the Xaros, reestablishing a working economy had taken a backseat to rebuilding the only remaining city of Phoenix and repairing the fleet after the Battle of the Crucible. With every human either in the military or part of the Ibarra Corporation that provided for all its employees’ needs through robot labor or 3D printing factories, there hadn’t been much of a need for currency and trade.
The Marines looked over their shoulders at Hale, expecting an answer from the captain.
“Let’s worry about getting back from Anthalas before we worry about bank accounts,” Hale said.
CHAPTER 2
Euskal Tower, once the headquarters of the Ibarra Corporation, was the de facto center of human government. It was the largest remaining building on the planet, and its utility infrastructure had remained intact through the Xaros occupation. A thin layer of quadrium metal ran beneath the city, which, for reasons no one had ever explained to Hale, had made it the last place the Xaros targeted for removal. In the sixty years he’d colluded with an alien probe, Marc Ibarra had planned ahead.
Hale avoided the tower whenever possible. He’d lost two Marines to the Xaros there, and while the battle damage had been repaired, feelings of loss and guilt still nagged at him every time he walked down the hallways lined with plush carpets and restored art. The ro
bot workers had returned everything to its original state, which was at odds with the military nature of its new occupants.
Hale and Cortaro walked past a coffee pot set up outside the conference room and pushed through the heavy doors. The stadium seating of the conference room was almost full of sailors and Marines. Conversations rumbled through the air as Hale caught sight of Captain Valdar, master and commander of the Breitenfeld, surrounded by the chief officers of the strike carrier.
“I’ll leave the brass to you, sir. I’m going to find our Marines and make sure Standish and Bailey don’t try to heckle whoever’s going to speak to us,” Cortaro said. Hale left him with a nod and went down the stairs to where the senior officers were gathered near the front rows.
Captain Valdar greeted him with a quick wave, then turned his attention back to Commander Janessa Ericsson, the ship’s executive officer, and the data slate she carried. Valdar, Hale’s godfather, was gaunt, his face stretched tight against his skull, his uniform looking like it belonged to a bigger man. A cluster of new officers, replacements for those lost in the Battle of the Crucible, stood near the ship’s captain and XO, answering any questions snapped at them.
On the outer edge of the group, Lieutenant Marie Durand glanced at her watch every few seconds. Her flight suit stuck out like a sore thumb amongst the Marines in their fatigues and the sailors in their black pants, ties and collared shirts.
“Marie,” he said to Durand.
“Lieutenant Hale,” she said, stressing his rank.
“Pardon me, lieutenant. How are the new fighters?”
She gave him a quick sidelong glance and pulled a data slate from her pocket. She flicked through messages then put it back in her pocket. She looked at him again, seemingly annoyed that he was still there.
“The new rail cannon capacitors are guaranteed not to overload my ship and turn it into a slow-moving target. I will note that none of those engineers who’re incorporating the improved technology will be on this mission or will ever fly the mark two Eagles into combat,” she said stiffly. “Now, is there anything of military necessity that I can help you with?”
“Marie, come on, we can talk about this—”
“Here? Now?” She put her hands on her hips. He and Durand had been an item before the Xaros invasion. A few days after the Battle of the Crucible, when things aboard the damaged Breitenfeld had calmed down, she told Hale in no uncertain terms that their relationship was at an end and they’d conduct their business as professional officers and little else. She and the rest of her squadron left for the aerospace base outside Phoenix for retraining and reassignment, and she hadn’t answered a single message he’d sent her in the months that followed.
“No, never mind,” Hale said.
The auditorium’s lights dimmed and brightened several times, alerting everyone that the briefing was about to begin. Hale took a seat far from Durand and pulled out his data slate to take notes.
A senior chief petty officer marched onto the stage and stopped at the position of attention.
“Room! Attention!” the sailor shouted.
The room went silent and the assembled servicemen and women rose to their feet and stood at the position of attention.
Admiral John Garret strode onto the stage and walked over to a podium.
“Take your seats,” he said, the microphone in the podium projecting his words across the auditorium. There was a brief rustle as his order was followed, then a rapt silence endured.
“Let's skip the crap and get to business you all know where you’re going.” Garret clicked a control and a hologram of a world covered in jungle, worn mountains and small, shallow seas formed on the stage next to the admiral. “Anthalas. Habitable world with a breathable atmosphere two thousand light-years away from Earth. Currently under Xaros occupation. You’ve busted your asses to get the Breitenfeld back up to snuff and get her ready for this mission. Now I’m going to tell you why you’re going there.”
He clicked the control and the hologram blinked into a scroll of light, perpendicular to the stage. The image was basic, simple, like the message imbedded in the old Voyager space probes that were supposed to signal to any alien that came across them how to find Earth and gave fundamental information about humanity—a monumentally foolish act in retrospect. Although the Xaros drones had followed Earth’s first radio broadcasts back to the planet, they didn’t come across the first objects humans sent beyond the solar system. Another aggressive and advanced species could have come across the Voyager probes, if they Xaros had left any in their wake.
A pixilated humanoid figure with a black stripe across its waist stood at the top of the scroll. Below that was the same figure lying on its side. The next image was of a different figure, this one missing the dark stripe and raising its arms over its head next to the prone figure. The final image showed the two figures standing side by side, both of them with arms raised. Below them was a grid with a mélange of tiny black and white squares.
A woman in her late twenties wearing an Ibarra Corporation jumpsuit walked onto the stage. She took the control from Garret with a trembling hand and stood behind the podium. Her hands grasped the wooden edges like it was a life raft and she bent close to the microphone.
“Hello, I’m Helena Lowenn,” she said, her voice throaty as she spoke too closely to the microphone. “I’m a doctoral candidate—well, I was—in anthropology and sociology at the university of … doesn’t matter. What you’re looking at is an image broadcast from Anthalas across the electromagnetic spectrum several thousand years ago. We believe that whoever was sending this out from the planet was promising a cure for death, or some sort of transfiguration into eternal life. That’s what you see.” She pointed the control at the image and a red dot wavered over the top image. “Someone alive, then dead, then resurrected by another person.
“The grid at the bottom is a code, which, when deciphered, is an energy reading,” she said. She clicked the control and the hologram shifted to a cube of energy, spinning slowly on an axis. Murmurs ran through the audience.
“Many of you have seen this here on Earth,” she said. “We’re calling it Omnium. As the Xaros erased our cities, they converted all of that matter into Omnium. Our estimate is that a little over ninety-eight percent of every man-made thing on Earth was converted into Omnium, and much of that was used to make the Crucible. There’s still a significant amount here on Earth, Mars, the moon. Somehow, the Xaros can change matter into Omnium, then change energy into any other kind of matter.”
She handed the control back to Garret and tried to scurry off the stage. Garret snagged her by the arm and kept her next to the podium.
“We think whoever was on Anthalas knew the secret to Omnium and was trying to get someone’s attention with it. Dangling eternal life and the means of unlimited energy were pretty decent incentives for a visit to the planet. I’ll turn the next portion of this briefing over to a subject-matter expert,” Garret said.
He stepped aside and a silver needle of light grew out of thin air. The audience shifted nervously in their seats as the light grew stronger. Shouts of alarm shot from the men and women seated behind Hale, but he wasn’t stirred. Hale knew exactly who, or what, was about to speak to them.
A cloud of light broiled out of the needle, then solidified into a silver and blue approximation of a slight man in his early forties. Ripples ran up and down the man’s surface as he looked across the audience.
“Hello everyone,” the shimmering man said, “I’m Marc Ibarra and I’m sure this is just a little bit odd for most of you.” Ibarra looked right at Hale and winked. “The Alliance, the same people that sent a probe to Earth to try to save you all, sent another probe to Anthalas. It was going over there to try to get them to shut the hell up and figure out if they really knew how to use Omnium, which is a trick only the Xaros seem to know. On the way to the system, the probe encountered a message.”
The hologram switched to a two-dimensional screen. An alien w
ith tiny, calcified horns jutting from beneath deep-blue skin, it’s lower jaw thick and with a pronounced underbite, wearing simple spun robes spoke to an unseen camera. Its words were guttural, a series of modulating barks that grated against Hale’s ears. What bothered Hale the most about the alien was its eyes, glowing with a golden light.
“Spirits of the galaxy,” a monotone translation came over the alien’s words, “Anthalas offers you eternal life and freedom from want. Come and be exalted in the light.” The image froze.
“That,” Ibarra said, “and only that, was repeated for several years. That species, which called itself the Shanishol, isn’t native to Anthalas. They’re from a system a couple light-years over. What’s unusual about their presence on Anthalas is that they were barely at 1950s–era technology when they figured out how to pick up the original broadcast from Anthalas—that scroll of images you saw a few minutes ago. Somehow, this species jumped from barely knowing how to use nuclear power to claiming godlike powers in just a few decades.”
The hologram flickered back to the planet.
“Unfortunately,” Ibarra said, “we weren’t the only ones interested in the planet. All transmissions ceased as soon as the Xaros got close enough to be noticed. They beat our probe to the punch by a couple decades. The probe got close enough to get this ….” The image changed to show incomplete rings around Anthalas’s equator, same as the rings around Ceres that had moved the dwarf planet from its home in the asteroid belt into orbit around Earth.
Red spots appeared on the planet’s surface, each above cities laid out in a neat grid pattern.
“The Xaros didn’t remove the Shanishol cities,” Ibarra said. “The only time we see this behavior is when the Xaros come across a civilization that’s already dead. So all the Shanishol must have hit whatever exaltation failsafe they had and left a bunch of ghost towns for the Xaros. We’re confident there’s technology we can use on that planet, and that’s why we’re sending the Breitenfeld there.”
