by Richard Fox
“There’s a lot of that going around,” Ely muttered.
Hoffman shushed him then said to Masha, “We’ve got time for that?”
“Plenty. Remember, you’re not there to sightsee. You’ve got the final approach.” Masha cut the transmission and the life pod swayed to one side. Through a small window at the prow, Ceres and the fuzzy ring swung into view and stayed there.
“What now?” Ely asked.
“There’s a ship.” Hoffman swallowed hard. “One big enough and intact enough for us to hide in until Masha gets her act together. Soon as she does, we’ll take the pod out and moray onto the hull of that troop transport. Make the jump to a system where the Crusade’s still fighting and we’ve got a shot at linking up with friendly forces.”
“This troop ship won’t have a sensor that can pick us up? You said—”
“Geist ships. That transport will be some old merchantman converted over to a people mover or a Dotari scow they’ve got in service. We’ll be fine. Just don’t go banging on the hull. The Geist won’t bring the ship in to where there’s fighting, so we can unlock and set course for friendly space as soon as we’re there. So long as we don’t get too close to the Geist or any ships fighting for them…we’ll be OK.”
“Wow…you guys have this worked out.”
“Not that we had a whole lot else to do but soul-killing office work until you showed up. And despite all our planning, you can tell how well this is going. I knew I should’ve prayed harder last Sunday. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get some sleep.” Hoffman snuggled against his acceleration seat and closed his eyes.
“Wait, what if the Geist find us while we’re on the way?” Ely looked out a porthole.
“We’re in a potato. Your call,” Hoffman said. “Eat. Sleep. Use the head. Who knows when we’ll get the chance again.”
“What ship are we going to?” Ely asked.
Hoffman sighed.
“The Geist attack was in full force when the Ark and the Crusade fleet led by Makarov the Younger jumped in. Our Navy was in a knife fight with the enemy when the Lady ordered the evacuation. She could get some of Earth’s defenders to safety, but not everyone. If every ship turned and ran, it would’ve been a massacre. So what was left of one fleet volunteered to die in place so the rest might live. After it was all over…the Geist created the junk ring around Ceres, so every time we looked up at the moon, we’d see our defeat writ large. And there’s one particular carrier up there.”
“Which? The new Europa? The Charlemagne?”
“No, Ely. Admiral Valdar was never the type to let someone else die for him. We’re going to the wreck of the Breitenfeld.”
Chapter 15
An exile, who went by just John in his group, was thrown to his knees beneath the lights of a Commissariat shuttle. The glare blinded him as the troopers left him alone, the damp from the cold grass seeping through his clothes. He spat out blood and felt loose teeth. The bruises down his back and around his neck and shoulders had hurt since the troopers captured him deep in the woods.
Fists. Batons. Boots. They’d been liberal with the blunt-force trauma.
John tested the cuffs binding his hands behind his back and got a nasty shock for his efforts.
A pair of steel-shod boots stepped into the light and John tensed up. A Commissar, his hands in black gloves, got him up on his knees. John kept his gaze down, refusing to give the Commissar a look.
“How long have you survived out here?” Nakir gripped John by the chin and forced his face up. The chrome mask was in shadow, but John could see fear in his reflection. The Commissar hooked a thumb into the exile’s lips to expose teeth and gums. “You seem fresh.”
John shook himself out of Nakir’s hold. “Kill me and get it over with.” John’s shoulders sank. “I refused to be a good little slave once. Nothing’s changed.”
“Look how alive you are. Still full of the same foolish conviction you had when we brought you back home. All this time out here living like a savage has only tempered your soul, made you stronger.” Nakir slapped a hand on John’s harness and a jolt went through the exile’s entire body. “You would be a fine addition to the tithe…I’d rather not lose that gift.”
Nakir wrenched his hand off and involuntary tears rolled down John’s face. The Commissar took a clear plastic box from a pocket on his overcoat and held it up for the light to catch. A metal slug twitched, striations in its surface flexing as it felt at the box’s corners. John leaned away, but Nakir grabbed him by the neck and brought the box up to his eyes. The slug rattled against the walls, fighting to get out.
“You wouldn’t think such a small intelligence could enjoy its work, but the Geist are exquisite craftsmen. Do you know what happens when we Turn a mind?”
“I fight it and it’ll kill me. Then you’ll have nothing!” John spat on Nakir. Nakir bent his pinky and thumb into a C shape and poked the digits on either side of the exile’s heart. Blue electricity arced through John and he fell with a shriek.
John fought to breathe, but his lungs wouldn’t comply. A deep pain radiated out of his chest and down his left arm. Nakir punched him in the sternum and John’s heart restarted.
“Do you know how many times a heart can be jolted before it explodes? I might let you find out, or…” He shook the box again. “There is no defense. That was a lie we planted within the Crusade to trick Ibarrans into believing they could die by defiance. We’ve gained many thousands more troops from that little trick. No, captive soul, I Turn you with this and your mind will be mine. You will be stunted, capable of little more than basic survival, and you will be utterly obedient. The spark you carry in your harness will waste away to nothing until you die from apathy. That is your fate…unless you answer a simple question. Have you seen this boy?”
Nakir held a palm down before John, then flipped his hand over, and Ely Hale’s face formed out of blue light emitted from the Commissar’s fingers.
John’s face twitched and his voice caught in his throat.
“You have. I don’t need to Turn you to know that. Where? When? Who was he with? Tell me what I want to know and I’ll let you go,”
John’s eyes widened.
“Truly. Right back into the forest you’ll go. Grow stronger. The Geist appreciate a wild soul. So will it be freedom or will you be Turned?”
“I-I saw him.” John nodded. “’Round dawn. Down by the…the stream where we catch trout. Maybe a few miles west of where you caught me. He had a Strike Marine with him.”
“They were on foot? No one else?” Nakir asked.
“No one. Didn’t say anything about where they were going. They just-just gave us some food and kept going. All the food they had.” John’s eyes were locked on the box.
“All their food…” Nakir slipped the box back into his coat. “There. That wasn’t so bad now, was it?” He held up a finger and tapped it forward. The restraints on John’s wrist snapped off and the metal wire slithered up Nakir’s leg and coiled around his arm.
John crawled away, afraid to look away from the Commissar.
“Go.” Nakir shooed him away. “We’ll come for you when we choose to.”
The exile ran into the darkness.
“Was that wise?” a shock trooper asked Nakir as he walked up the shuttle’s ramp. The trooper had his helmet off, his lumpy, ugly face looking more potato than human. “You should have Turned him and be done with it.”
“Humanity owes the Geist every soul. I will not waste the coin to pay our way to salvation. Nakir waved a hand over a sensor on the hull and a holo map sprang out. “How goes the sweep?”
“We have every drone that’s still functional in North America combing the forest. Even if they have active camo, we’re running a sensor sweep that’s deep enough to pick up their residual thermal trace from footprints. Nothing but harnessed and chipped exiles and feral cattle. That Standish had a real beef ranch out here.”
“Then it stands to reason that our quarry
aren’t here. They were on foot, no support, seen perhaps fifteen hours ago.” He pulled up an overlay of drone data from where they’d found the downed shuttle and their location. The search covered most of British Columbia, an area far larger than two could have covered on foot. “Anything more from the investigation at the harvester camp?”
“Three dead. One with a gauss wound. We finally got the nets back up after the outage and there’s this.” The trooper touched two fingers to a screen on the back of his hand, then flicked at the holo. A shipping manifest opened up.
“‘Unspecified heavy equipment.’” Nakir tilted his head slightly and more data scrolled across his mask. “Curious how something like that would be delivered to such a remote location.”
“Could be snowmobiles?” The trooper shrugged. “The harvesters still hunt during the winter. Almost too easy running the exiles down.”
“No sign of this equipment at the camp? No thermal spikes of a shuttle taking off? Or engines on any of the roads?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“When you eliminate all other possibilities, what remains must be true, no matter how unlikely or infuriating.” Nakir went down the ramp and walked away from the shuttle until he could gaze up at the stars. “If you could get off Earth, where would you go? Where would you hide? Someplace where God would be with you.”
Chapter 16
The life pod floated into the Breitenfeld’s main hangar. The hull was cold and dark, the twisted remains of Eagle fighters and Condor bombers mashed to the walls. Bits of metal and broken tools floated about as the pod came down and docking clamps snapped to the deck.
The hatch opened and Hoffman, in his full power armor, scanned the hangar with his gauss rifle. He stepped out and continued forward in the zero gravity, then thrust his boots toward the deck. Magnetic pads activated to pull him down.
“Clear,” he said through the IR.
Ely emerged, wearing a too-large vac suit bunched up on his limbs and tied down. His feet slid across the deck until he locked down with the same kind of magnetic pads that Hoffman had.
“This suit stinks so bad,” Ely said. “Did the last guy to wear it never shower? Maybe he died in it.”
“Yeah, maybe he did.” Hoffman snapped on a flashlight and shined it deeper into the hangar. “Just be glad there was a spare suit on board.”
Ely looked up at long tears in the hull. Blackened and slagged patches from plasma weapon strikes were everywhere. A fighter pilot’s helmet drifted past him, the skull and crossbones unit symbol for Fighter Squadron 103 on one side. He grabbed it and turned it over.
“This was Mom’s old unit. How could this have happened to the Breitenfeld?”
“Destiny? This ship was in the middle of almost every single major engagement during the Ember War. Ibarrans captured her during the next big one. My Strike Marines and I got her back, then Valdar decided he’d never retire again or give her up to someone else. He made a lot of enemies fighting for a stronger Navy after the Kesaht War ended. That she’d hold the line before the Geist…destiny. At the end, she ran out of miracles.”
“But structural integrity seems decent.” Ely stomped a foot. “Most of the ship looked intact on the way in, but the turrets are gone.”
“The Geist took the rail guns. Made them into a monument out near Houston where they train conscripts.” Hoffman walked toward the rear of the hangar, shining the light back and forth until he ran it over a cut in the deck the length of a hand.
“You know where we are?” Hoffman went to one knee and reached for the cut, but pulled his hand back before he could touch it. “Do you know what this is?”
“This was the Final Prayer.” Ely stopped a foot behind him. “Where the Armor that died on the Apex were blessed. Colonel Carius was here and he…he asked Saint Kallen for victory. And the Iron Hearts were here too. Hussars. Templar.”
“Elias did this.” Hoffman touched the edge of the cut gently. “Made it with the blade that killed the Xaros king. This is holy ground.”
“If you say so.” Ely looked over Hoffman’s shoulder, then bunched his hands to his sides and slightly hunched his back. “I feel…something. Like there’s someone else here. I don’t like this place. Can we leave, please?”
“Ghosts.” Hoffman stood and walked to a dent in the hull. “This is where a good man died. He couldn’t let go of his hate and it almost cost us everything. I almost made the same mistake. Thankfully, Lady Ibarra is more merciful than she should be. Come on.”
“Where are we going?” Ely touched the back of his helmet and winced. “Ugh…I might need another dose of that inhibitor compound soon.”
“Hard to do when you’re in a vac suit. We need to get to the cemetery.” Hoffman stopped at the doors of a lift that were ajar and pried them open with strength augmentations in his power armor. The shaft was an abyss both up and down. “You ever slick ride?”
“I grew up on starships. Of course I did. Pathfinders loved doing it and my dad had a habit of deleting a captain’s mast disciplinary report with slick rides. Unless something got damaged.”
Ely swung into the shaft and locked the sides of his boots to a magnetic strip on one side, then the back of one fist over his head.
“Ready to fly?”
“Not exactly.” Hoffman kicked one boot against the strip on the other side and it locked on. His other careened off with a squeal of sparks and he fell back onto the deck, one foot still held fast.
“You’ve got to manually reconfigure the polarity.” Ely rolled his eyes. “Now you have to wait for it to cycle back.”
“Why didn’t you say something?” Hoffman pulled his boot off with a grunt and sat on the edge.
“Why didn’t you ask? Sorry…sorry, sir. I just thought you knew how to slide. You never…you never told me what happened to Admiral Valdar. The bridge looked intact and—”
Hoffman shook his head. “He made the call to die in place, Ely. What do you think happened to him?”
“No.” Ely shook his head. “No. Not Valdar. Not him too! How can everyone I ever knew be gone! This isn’t fair!”
“And it won’t ever be fair, kid. Valdar died to—”
“You’re lying.” Ely looked up and the mag locks in his boots activated, shooting him up the shaft and straight to the ship’s bridge.
“Wait! Wait!” Hoffman’s voice faded as the IR lost signal.
Ely counted deck markers as he rose higher and higher in the ship. He slowed down a few levels from the bridge and came to a complete stop at a wrecked blast door. The Terran Union Navy learned that it was always better to fight after the ship’s atmosphere had been removed and the crew was in void suits. The presence of air gave explosions a medium to send blast waves and to fuel fires, neither of which were value-added during a battle. But the tanks that held the ship’s air were heavily shielded within the ship.
Ely crawled through a missing segment of the blast door and brushed dust off a mechanical gauge. It was full.
“Ship was at battle stations…that checks out.” He went to the yellow and black chevrons demarking the edge of the doors to the bridge and opened an emergency access panel. He pulled down the red lever inside and the doors opened a few inches with each heave.
He slid through the gap and turned on a lamp built into his vac suit. A dead holo table was a few feet away, the emitter ring cracked by a hunk of shrapnel. He turned to one side where the gunnery station was supposed to be. A body lay slumped in the seat, a gash down the back of the lightly armored battle uniform.
Ely’s breathing felt too loud in his helmet and he put a hand to the holo table to steady himself. The blast shields over the windows were torn up, and he could see Ceres through some of them. More wrecks from the Terran Union Navy’s last stand were visible through other gaps. He turned his light forward and saw the back of the captain’s chair.
“Please don’t be there…” Ely took a slow step forward, like he was moving through water and not a vacuum. “Please, ple
ase—”
Something touched his shoulder and he recoiled to one side. A body floated next to the holo table, commander’s rank on the shoulders. Its faceplate was shattered and Ely turned the light away before he could see what was inside, but not before he caught a glimpse of the name tape.
Egan.
Ely knelt lower as the corpse slowly drifted over him.
“It’s OK. It’s OK, because there’s nothing you could do for him. Not here for that.” Ely crept toward the captain’s chair. He leaned forward and saw a pair of boots. “Oh no.”
He got up slowly and the light from his vac suit washed over Admiral Valdar. His helmet was tilted forward, emergency straps in place. The rank and name tape matched the man Ely didn’t want to find dead on this bridge.
“Grandpa…” Ely touched his helmet, failing to cover his mouth. “Grandpa, no…we were supposed to see you before we left. Go fishing at your cabin in Virginia. Jerry was so sad when you went on some mission. I tried to be tough, but I took it harder than he did. You had the best books in your library and you had so many sea stories. I thought I’d get to see you again when there was a Crucible on Terra Nova and that I’d get to introduce you to my own family and…you were supposed to be here.”
Ely touched Valdar’s chest…but there wasn’t any resistance. He pushed harder and the vac suit flattened like there was nothing inside.
“Huh?” Ely lifted Valdar’s helmet up, but there was only darkness within.
Empty.
“Kid!” Hoffman crawled onto the bridge, his chest heaving. “Kid, you don’t need unbroken legs for me to complete my mission. I’m just saying.”
“He’s gone! He’s not here!” Ely stabbed a hand at the empty vac suit in Valdar’s chair. “The Geist, they don’t use disintegration beams like the Xaros, right? Right?”
“You need to calm down before you use up all your oxygen.” Hoffman pushed Egan’s body aside and grabbed Ely by the arm. “No, the Geist use plasma or they’ll just tear you to pieces…”
