The Terminal War: A Space Opera Novel (A Carson Mach Adventure)

by A. C. Hadfield

  “Thank you for accepting my meeting request, gentlemen,” Morgan said. “Please, be seated.”

  The officers collectively murmured a response.

  Morgan sat opposite Brindley. The four commanders between them, on either side of the table, were the space marshal’s form of window dressing. He liked to have the final say on everything but primed them with questions to play devil’s advocate against any of Morgan’s plans. It wasn’t as tedious as it sounded. Brindley was excellent at his job, and everything deserved scrutiny when it came to issues relating to CW security.

  “We still haven’t located the mole,” Brindley said. “Any luck your end?”

  “Nothing yet. I’ve got Babcock working on it.”

  A smile stretched across Brindley’s face. “Kingsley Babcock? How is the tetchy old bugger?”

  “He’s just fired on the Axis grand fleet. I’ll send him your regards.”

  “Babs? Are you serious?”

  “I wish I was joking. Mach is completing a ground mission. Babcock’s standing in.”

  Brindley’s smile dropped, and he rolled his eyes. “What have you got Bleach doing this time? Please don’t tell me he started all of this?”

  “No, he didn’t, but he’s currently on Terminus.”

  “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

  Morgan remembered Brindley had been Babcock’s junior officer in engineering over thirty years ago. They worked well together and had a healthy mutual respect. Mach constantly annoyed Brindley when he visited Babcock in the lab by playing with their test equipment and calling them geeks.

  “Down to business,” Brindley said and flipped open a desk-pad. “I need more information before we commit eighty percent of the Commonwealth’s resources to an unchartered area of space.”

  “Babcock’s report matches a witness account from Orbital Hibock. Over a hundred Axis ships are heading to attack Terminus. We need to stop them for the sake of the treaty, and our futures.”

  “Terminus?” a middle-aged commander to Brindley’s right asked. “We don’t have any records of the planet. The coordinates are outside our frontier.”

  “He’s right,” Brindley predictably added. “It’s not in the agreement we signed with the vestans. What’s so special about this place?”

  “It’s the planet for their dead and most don’t know the location,” Morgan said and leaned forward to emphasize his point. “Their greatest technological minds are based there. If the Axis capture them and desecrate the land, we kiss goodbye to our new allies and the edge they bring.”

  Brindley slowly nodded. “I see the need for us to defend the area, but we’re talking about facing down a grand fleet. Are the thousands of lives we’d lose worth it?”

  Morgan counted to five in his head to compose himself. He knew the marshal had probably already calculated the risk. “We’re talking millions of lives if we don’t. The Axis will retreat if they see an equal force. You know we can beat them in battle. If they attack, we’ve got a chance of securing peace for another decade by knocking out their fleet.”

  “An armchair admiral would agree,” Brindley replied, “but we’ve still got our mole to consider. An assembling force in space is open to ambush.”

  The four officers nodded in agreement. Morgan maintained a calm exterior, but inside he was irritated about the armchair admiral comment. Brindley knew as well as he did that they had to scramble.

  “Nero fiddled while Rome burned,” Morgan said and relaxed back in his chair.

  Brindley frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s an ancient saying from Earth. While the great city of Rome burned to the ground, its emperor Nero played a violin, revealing his lack of concern for his people and empire.”

  “Are you saying we aren’t concerned?” a commander to Brindley’s left asked.

  “No. I’m aware of the threat our mole poses, but that doesn’t mean we neglect our priorities. Can I tell the vestans we’re on our way to Terminus?”

  Brindley looked around his commanders. “The Fleet always acts in the Commonwealth’s best interest. I know you’d carry out the same due diligence in my shoes. Hell, I’ve even seen you do it.”

  “You’re not wrong,” Morgan said, taking a more conciliatory tone. “But we both know there aren’t many options on the table. Two things can happen. Our show of force will be enough to avert a conflict, and we continue to build our strength.”

  “Or?” Brindley said.

  “Or we create history by making our next war last a day, rather than a century.”

  The commander to Brindley’s right leaned toward him and whispered. Morgan found it rude for a moment until he remembered doing the same thing in front of former President Steros. Forty years of CWDF service was hard to shake. He had to accept he moved in different circles nowadays.

  “Have the vestans confirmed their numbers?” the whisperer asked.

  “Forty-five frigates,” Morgan replied. “They’re in the process of deploying.”

  “And the Axis strength is confirmed at a hundred?”

  “That’s the latest report I’ve had from the staging area.”

  “Any sign of lactern cruisers?” a female officer to Morgan’s immediate left said.

  Those ships, with their cloaking tech, caused the most fear amongst the allied fleet. They were always more comfortable fighting what they could track.

  Morgan shook his head. “Not that I know about, but obviously that can change.”

  Brindley peered at the screen to his left and focused back on Morgan. “Four capital ships, sixteen destroyers, and forty fighter drones will be there in twenty hours. That’s all we can afford without leaving the Sphere open to attack.”

  Morgan did a quick calculation in his head. Unless the Axis jumped in the next hour, the CW ships would arrive before them to join the vestans. A joint force of over a hundred should be enough to scare the grand fleet away.

  “Thank you for your understanding, Marshal,” Morgan said.

  “Let’s hope we get there in time,” Brindley replied. He folded down a screen on the table. “Time to go to work, gentlemen. I want a holo-meeting with all Fleet commanders in twenty minutes to discuss strategy.”

  The four officers stood, braced for a moment, and left the marshal’s office. Very obedient, Morgan thought. He knew he made the right appointment when promoting Brindley. With him as president, the days of high-ranking bullshit artists were over.

  Brindley unbuttoned the collar of his dark blue jacket and moved to his desk at the end of the room. He opened a drawer, produced a bottle of Orbit Hooch, the spirit used during the Century War to toast victory, and poured two glasses of the amber liquid.

  Morgan joined him, sat on the edge, and took a glass. “Armchair admiral? If I didn’t know you any better, I’d say you’ve gotten too big for your boots.”

  “You know the drill. The men and women need to know I’m fighting in their corner and not folding to every request from the top.”

  “That’s exactly why I chose you. I didn’t want a patsy. I’m sure word will get around about your barb, and you’ll be a hero for an hour.”

  Brindley sighed and peered into his glass. “We might lose a lot in the coming days.”

  “I know how you’re feeling,” Morgan said. “Trust me, you’re doing the right thing.”

  “It doesn’t make it any easier.”

  “An ancient war leader once said, ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’ If we are heading to war, humans, vestans, and fidians will say the same thing about our fleet. It’s a horrible price to pay, but our story will echo through the centuries.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  Morgan clinked his glass against Brindley’s. “Let’s toast to a safe return.”

  Both men swallowed their drinks and slammed their glasses on the table.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The tubes came out easily, the proto-vestan havi
ng used a quick release system to attach them to Beringer’s suit.

  The needles came out with a sucking sound. Beringer’s suit pressed tight against the wounds, a membranous layer inflating with the suit’s compressed air. Adira had fetched his helmet and connected it, having removed the smaller breathing apparatus that were fitted to the archeologist’s face.

  “Can you hear me?” Mach said, kneeling in front of him.

  Beringer blinked his eyes rapidly as though he were transmitting a message in binary format, but he was just getting used to the light as he came around from his enforced subconscious.

  “I… what happened?” he said, wincing as he leaned forward.

  The suit’s constricting fit meant that for the time being his movements would be stiff. At least until his blood had clotted, which, given the vestans’ suit tech, wouldn’t be long. The membrane was fitted with a coagulant coating.

  “You were dragged off by a monster and used as lunch for his friends,” Adira said. She jerked a thumb to the cylinder that held the small amount of blood the alien had extracted from Beringer.

  “What the?” Beringer said, shaking his head.

  Mach stood and searched the room, looking for anything useful. The cylinder was as tall as he, and was half full, or half empty, depending on one’s outlook, with the reddish-brown mulch. A tube at the base headed toward a wall shrouded in shadow. Mach stalked closer and discovered that there were half a dozen cryo-chambers, within which were more of the proto-vestans. These ones, however, were frozen in place, unmoving.

  Beringer stood with Adira’s help and looked up, the shadowy movement having caught his attention. Mach couldn’t help but follow his gaze and watch as yet more proto-vestans swarmed across the dome, which cracked still more. Each time the ice split, a booming crack, the sound of primordial thunder, bellowed out to the city bellow.

  “We’ll explain on the way,” Mach said, remembering the urgency in Kortas’ voice. He made sure there were no more proto-vestans waiting to jump out on him from the shadows of the lab and guided Beringer out over the crumbled wall. He got his bearings, using the distant tower as a landmark to retrieve the overlay he had embedded in his memory earlier.

  They eventually cleared the crumbling science buildings and were back out into the city proper. More chunks of ice continued to rain down, ordnance in a one-sided battle.

  “Come on, this way,” Mach said, pointing to a wide road that ran parallel to the frozen canal. “We’ll have to go back into the Guardians’ compound and head to the temple. We need to extricate the Saviors, get them off the planet.”

  “In what?” Adira asked as the group began to jog back through the city, retracing their steps.

  “The shuttle we came in on,” Mach said. “We’ll just have to make room.”

  It took just ten minutes to reach the mausoleum where the attack had first happened on poor Afron. Mach wondered what had happened to him; though given the mulch in the cylinder, he realized that the vestan Guardian was probably in the bellies of his forbears now. And as for the heat signature, he now had that confirmed by Kortas: the generator rods.

  For a creature so primal looking, the proto-vestans were cleverer than they appeared. Probably why the Saviors buried them in great pits of ice. But then why not just destroy them outright if they were that feral and dangerous? He’d have to deal with the question later. For now, they had to get back to the Garden of Remembrance. Although he feared the proto-vestans would already be there, getting into the temple to consume their makers, and with it, taking the sum of the vestans’ knowledge wrapped up in the Saviors’ dead-but-not-dead minds, and thus weakening not just the vestans themselves, but also the CWDF, who had recently brought the vestans into the Commonwealth from the Axis Combine to shift the balance of power.

  The three of them took another fifteen minutes to get back to the courtesy vehicle outside the mausoleum. The weak sun was rising to its zenith point though it didn’t bathe the planet in strong white light; the shadows merely became less dense, more nebulous. And dipping in and out of these shadows was the tall, lithe figures of hundreds of proto-vestans, streaming toward the GoR like a line of ambitious ants.

  Mach hit the autopilot controls of the transporter pod. The engines whined up and sped back to the docking bay from where they had first set out. He had hoped then that they’d be back without too much trouble, having found Afron’s remains, and that he’d be now negotiating with the Guardians for their freedom.

  Mach wasn’t stupid; he knew that they were never due to leave the planet. And that Morgan had sent them here on that very assumption; an old friend sending the other into a situation that the former hoped the latter would leave up to his reputation and defy the odds to return. Slim odds, though, Mach thought, not taking it personally, although knowing that if he survived this and got off the planet, that he’d call in the biggest favor of his life from Morgan. The president owed him that much at least for sending him to his certain death.

  Still, it wasn’t the first time, and he doubted it would be the last. It was just how it was with Morgan and Mach. Two old war vets continuing their scheming in the aftermath, both unable to let go of the past and just be.

  They had to live on that edge, keep pushing, because to give up and live a life of comfort was just another form of death. A slow, insidious death that crept up on you one night when getting out of bed and realizing you haven’t done anything of note for weeks and, worse, you had no desire to.

  No. Mach wouldn’t do that.

  When his time came, it would be saving his friends, fighting enemies, having an actual effect on an indifferent universe that wasn’t even hostile, just utterly unconcerned with what went on inside it. That was the real reason the proto-vestans were so eager to come out of their slumber and consume their makers: they too knew that it was a slow comfortable death on the other side of the coin.

  They had spotted their chance, used the slight environmental changes—the thawing of just one creature—to leverage the opportunity to live again, to be the thing that the Saviors made them: killers—brutal, efficient killers—consuming all in their path.

  A quiet voice in the back of his mind asked him sardonically who and what that reminded him of. Touché, he said to his subconscious as the vestan vehicle increased its speed, as though it knew the urgency of the situation and left the swarming ants behind.

  The vehicle stopped abruptly in the docking bay, which was entirely dark.

  The gullwing doors slid open, and the lights came on the second he stepped out of the pod, as though the room were alive, waiting for them. “You both okay to move? We’ve got to be quick,” Mach said, speaking to Adira and Beringer, who had also stepped out of the vehicle.

  “I’m okay,” Beringer said. “The stim is numbing everything at the moment. I can’t speak for my mental condition right now; I’ve never been so scared, and I don’t know what the hell I’m saying or doing…” He rambled on until Adira stilled him with a hand on his shoulder.

  “We’re good to go,” she said.

  Mach nodded and checked his laser was ready to fire if needed. They only had the one weapon between them now, but the battery was still almost at ninety percent, giving him enough shots to take down at least a few of the protos if needed.

  “Which way to the temple, then?” Adira said.

  The three of them looked around the utterly sparse dock, its plain white walls giving no hints of direction or perhaps a handy map one would find projected on the sides of the metro pods.

  “No idea,” Mach said. “Let’s figure it out as we go. I know that we came in from that door.” He pointed to the southern wall and approached, rifle raised.

  Outside of the docking bay, the sound of more ice cracking filled the air, along with smaller cracks and thuds, reminding him of grenades in a warzone and making him wonder if the protos hadn’t found a secret cache of weapons. That would not be good at all.

  Mach led the others through the door after c
hecking it was clear and entered the equally plain corridor. He wondered what the Guardians had against aesthetics, or at least some kind of detail to help orientate the GoR’s main structure.

  From the outside, it looked like a set of four pyramids connected with glass tubes. However, there was no way of telling what form it was, for the rooms and corridors all looked alike.

  “I remember these corridors,” Beringer said. “They all look alike, but there are subtle differences to the texture.” He stopped for a moment and turned his light to the wall, showing that one panel a few meters wide displayed a glossy texture while the next panel was matte.

  “How does that help us?” Adira asked, genuinely interested and full of hope.

  “It’s a guide,” Beringer said. “I studied something similar to this before; the passages of vestan destroyers use a scheme like this. The textures provide directional cues of a sort.”

  “Great,” Mach said. “You’re taking point. We need to get to the center, where the temple is. Think you can get us there?”

  Beringer shrugged. “Only one way of trying. Just make sure you’re covering me; I don’t want to be dragged off and used as a food source again. Trust me when I say it was entirely unpleasant and an experience one would not wish to repeat.”

  “Covering, now go,” Mach said. “The quicker, the better.”

  For the next five minutes, they stalked the seemingly endless corridors as Beringer tried to figure out the navigational scheme. Then, with a whoop, the archeologist announced he had it figured out and sprinted off toward the center of the building.

  Following them, from an adjacent room or passageway were the hurried sounds of footsteps and crashing noises and screams. The protos were trying to get to the temple the more direct way, Mach assumed. But if that were the case, he and his team were one step ahead—for now.

  Mach and Adira followed Beringer around a corner, and the three of them came to a sudden stop. Up ahead, less than five meters away, in the narrow passageway crouched three proto-vestans devouring the bodies of two dead Guardians, their robes stained darkly with viscera. The pitch-black protos hunched over their prey, clawed hands digging into dead meat.