The Ember War (The Ember War Saga Book 1)

by Richard Fox

  Military captains remained stoic as the civilian ship masters shouted accusations and questions at Ibarra who raised his hands in an appeal for quiet.

  “What happened to Earth? Where is everyone?” asked a civilian captain, the questioner replaced as another echoed the question.

  Ibarra’s image flickered.

  ****

  Cortaro ran a cable from the Ubi he’d picked up to a wall-mounted screen and Marines and sailors clustered around it. The screen, and every other PA screen on the ship, matched the Ubi’s display. Rumors had swirled through the ship about what was on the Ubi and Captain Valdar ordered its contents shared on the ship-wide address system without delay or filtering through the ship’s leadership.

  Cortaro swiped through the media files and found the last video entry. He’d already seen it a dozen times, each time harder than the last. He hit play.

  A haggard face of a man with a red and white beard and a thinning hairline came up. A feeble light showed his face, the collar of his stained uniform, and little else. The collar held a commander’s rank pins.

  “This is Commander Phil Albrecht of the NAU Breitenfeld.” Murmurs spread across the crowd watching the video. Albrecht looked years older than when he’d been on the ship, little more than twelve hours ago from the ship’s perspective. “Or I was. No one knows what happened to the Breitenfeld, or the rest of the fleet, after the malfunction. Now I’m the ranking officer of what’s left of the military in and around Euskal Tower.

  “We don’t have much time. The next assault will—” Albrecht pressed a hand against his face and took a deep breath. “Sorry. The Breitenfeld and the rest of the fleet vanished right after the Chinese attack. The Ibarra Corporation thinks there was some sort malfunction in the slip-coil drive that sent the fleet into deep space instead of Saturn. Marc Ibarra is MIA and no one has any idea where he is. Must have snuck onto the fleet is my guess.

  “The Midway picked me up outside lunar orbit and we were gearing up for a punitive strike against the Chinese when we detected the droids.” Albrecht’s gaze unfocused. He mouthed words several times before they finally came out. “At first, we thought it was some sort of meteor shower. There were so many contacts. The drones, robots—whatever! The swarm passed over Mars and wiped out everything.

  “We got some video feed back before the computers were compromised. Saw just enough to know the swarm was alien and our fight with the Chinese got put on hold. There were billions of drones. Do you understand? Hundreds of billions of drones. They didn’t try to talk to us, didn’t give us any kind of chance, nothing.

  “We combined fleets with the Chinese and whatever the Russians had around Luna and tried to fight. I led a flight off the Midway….” Albrecht wiped a tear away from his face. “We hurt them, a few of them, with high-powered gauss and rail gun shots. Nukes, anything with an onboard system was useless. We were doing well, then the Chinese fired up their targeting computers. The drones compromised their systems in seconds, turned the Chinese guns against themselves, and wiped them out in minutes.

  “The line held, but not for much longer. The drones were just toying with us, seeing what we were capable of. Then they joined together into a ship twice the size of the Midway and blew the fleet away. I saw drones bore into ships, heard the screams of the crew as the drones slaughtered them.

  “The Midway took a bad hit and drifted into Earth’s gravity well. I gathered up survivors and retreated. The spaceport near Phoenix was still functioning so we made planet fall there. Most of the planet was shut down. The drones ripped through the firewalls controlling the utility systems and cut the power to everything.

  “We thought we could fight them on the ground,” he said, shaking his head. “They formed into orbital platforms and hit anything that moved with disintegration beams. The armored corps at Ft. Hood never got out of the motor pool. Everything was just gone within hours. I managed to get into Euskal Tower with a few units of armor and sailors.

  “We hunkered down, tried to raise resistance cells on the Internet until that went down. We went to radio but every time someone broadcasted they’d go dark within minutes. The drones would triangulate their radio towers and wipe them out. The old fiber-optic lines stayed up but…

  “The drones sent swarms into the cities, killed every man, woman and child. There was no place to hide. The disintegration beams cut through everything. There were some in deep bunkers, but the drones bored through the ground and wiped them out too. The deep-sea colony didn’t last long, same with the cavern cities on Luna.

  “It took thirty-six hours to wipe out humanity. Billions dead. No demands for surrender, no communication from the drones.

  “For some reason, the drones weren’t very interested in us down here. Only a handful of drones came to Euskal. We fought off the first wave, thanks to the armor suits. The second wave knocked us down to three suits and a dozen men and women with rifles. They’re massing over the mountains now, thousands of them.”

  Red flashes of light lit the room behind Albrecht. Marines and sailors stirred from sleep and ran from the room.

  “I don’t have much time left. I’ll broadcast this message on every wavelength I can. Maybe it’ll catch up to the Breitenfeld.”

  A red beam sliced through the room leaving a burning line on the camera’s pixels.

  “Gott mit uns!” Albrecht shouted and cut the video.

  Cortaro set the video back to the beginning. The room was silent, but for the sound of someone weeping in a distant corner.

  ****

  Ibarra’s projection leaned over the table.

  “When the last human was dead, the Xaros left a small detachment to erase all trace of our existence and the majority of their force dispersed to other stars.”

  “You knew! You knew, you son of a bitch, and you didn’t tell us!” Admiral Garrett roared.

  “Yes, I knew.” Ibarra’s image shifted into a single line of light running perpendicular to the table. “I arrived almost sixty years ago, and even if I’d taken total control of your civilization, it would not have mattered. In the fifteen thousand years we’ve fought against the Xaros, only two civilizations have withstood the initial contact with them. The first didn’t survive the second attack. The second civilization survives only because it went into hiding. I am a herald of the surviving civilization. Both civilizations had thousands more years to develop before contact. I devised a scheme to give you a shot at surviving.”

  The light shifted to show a schematic of the slip-coil drive.

  “Not an engine at all, but a stasis device. It sent each ship into a pocket universe where time essentially stands still. You disappeared before the Xaros could detect you and sidestepped time just long enough for the plan to work. The Xaros fleet, moving at nearly the speed of light, is too far away to turn around.” The display shifted back to Ibarra.

  “If you had these stasis devices, why is the fleet so small? Ten billion people and you only cared to save six hundred thousand?” one of the civilian captains asked.

  “The slip drives ran off quadrium. I mined out every last gram this solar system had to offer to make this fleet as large as it could be.” Ibarra’s image crossed his arms. “You can second-guess me all you like but none of your questions or good ideas mean a damn thing right now. I had sixty years to come up with a plan and I had the help of an AI more advanced than anything we could conceive. The choice was to save some of us and win this fight—or extinction.

  “If humanity is still around to vilify me in a hundred years, then I’ve succeeded.”

  “What do they want? The Xaros?” Lawrence said, stepping away from the corner.

  “They eliminate all intelligent life they can find. For so long we’ve wondered why the stars were so silent—no broadcasts from alien civilizations anywhere on the electromagnetic spectrum. The Xaros will send single drones to every single star to find intelligent life and suitable planets, but when they detect intelligent life through their transmiss
ions, they come in force. We’ve been broadcasting a giant ‘Kick Me’ sign since the 1920s.”

  “The first species to come in contact with the Xaros gave them their name, which in that extinct language translates equally to death, annihilation and cruelty. The Xaros have never communicated with any species they’ve encountered.”

  Ibarra shifted into a model of the Milky Way where an arrow pointed to Earth’s place in the galaxy. Stars at the western edge of the galaxy switched to red and a crimson tide rolled across the galaxy, covering almost three quarters of the stars, until it reached Earth.

  “We’re certain they originated from beyond our galaxy because elements of their makeup aren’t found anywhere in the Milky Way. We don’t know who sent them but there is more to their purpose than nihilism. They will erase all trace of living civilizations—we see that happening right now—but will preserve the remains of extinct races. And no, we don’t know why.”

  “You keep saying ‘we,’” Admiral Garrett said. “Who do you represent and why shouldn’t we toss you out of an airlock and go it our own way?”

  Ibarra morphed into a silvery tear of light. It gave off a gentle glow that reminded Garrett of childhood Christmas trees.

  “There is an alliance of intelligences against the Xaros, who, for all their technological prowess, are limited by the laws of physics. They can travel at a little more than 90 percent of the speed of light between the stars and that gives us our only salvation: time. We’ve had the time to organize and coordinate, to integrate species who could help in the fight. The alliance detected you sooner than the Xaros did and sent me to do what I could.

  “So far, the Xaros know nothing of the alliance and we must keep it that way until we have the means to defeat them. As far as the alliance is concerned, humanity’s extinction is better than my capture or detection by the Xaros.”

  Angry muttering filled the conference room. Holo projections jumped from captain to captain as accusations flew.

  “You should have let us all die!”

  “We won’t be your pawns!”

  “You expect us to trust you!”

  Garrett jabbed a button on the table and the ship captains went mute.

  The tear of light morphed back into Ibarra.

  “Yes, we’re expendable,” Ibarra said. “In the end, any part can be sacrificed to save the whole. That is the morality of survival.” Ibarra’s image rotated around to look at Garrett. “The question is, will we do what we must to survive?”

  “Wait just a damn minute,” Lawrence said. “This isn’t his decision. I’m the CEO of this fleet and our charter is very clear that I’m the one who—”

  “Theodore, the next decision is strictly military and you’re not in any position to second-guess it,” Ibarra said.

  “You. Are. A. Hologram! Marc Ibarra is dead and I’m the ranking officer in this company now. There’s no need to risk the personnel and material expenditure following the plan of a bunch of whatever-you-are holed up on the fringe of the galaxy when we’re dealing with annihilation,” Lawrence said. Nods and silent cheers came from some—all of them civilian—captains.

  Ibarra rolled his eyes. “This is why I didn’t put any politicians in the fleet.”

  Stacey cleared her throat.

  “If I may,” she said. “Article five, subsection nine, paragraph twelve of the fleet charter puts Admiral Garrett in charge of the fleet until it reaches Saturn. We’re still in transit, technically.”

  Lawrence raised a finger and opened his mouth to protest, caught himself, then furiously tapped at his forearm computer.

  Garrett unmuted the captains and gestured to the table.

  “Please. Continue.”

  “There’s no ‘please continue,’” one of the civilian captains said. “We aren’t going to just let you—”

  Garrett pushed a button and the captain vanished. Another click kicked all the civilian captains off the line. Naval officers filled in the vacant seats.

  “Thank you,” Ibarra said. His image shifted into a rocky satellite pockmarked by asteroid strikes, small patches of ice glinting from its surface. It could have been any of hundreds of such bland planets and planetoids from Mercury to the outer Oort cloud. What set it apart for Garrett were the eight concentric rings around the orb and the glittering material between each ring.

  “What are we looking at?” Garrett asked.

  “Ceres, a dwarf planet that was, until recently, a resident of the asteroid belt. The Xaros are moving it into Earth orbit at the L1 Lagrange point between Earth and the sun. The rings nullify the planetoid’s mass and provide propulsion. Fascinating, isn’t it? They’re rearranging the solar system,” Ibarra said.

  “Get to the point, professor.”

  The image zoomed in to what looked like a crown of thorns hundreds of kilometers in diameter, the gray-black metal of the crown swirling with the same patterns as the Xaros drones. Four dark cables ran from the crown to the surface of Ceres. The crown wasn’t a complete circle. The last few degrees of the circle didn’t connect, like the bare branches of two trees reaching for each other.

  “This is a wormhole generator, a gate from one place in the galaxy to another. More importantly, it is an incomplete wormhole generator. Once the solar system was subdued, the majority of the Xaros droids reassembled themselves into the array around Ceres and this gate. The Xaros have a factory and are using the four space elevators on Ceres to shuttle material up to the gate. They are within days of completion,” Ibarra said.

  “Our exit from time-out, stasis—whatever—and this gate isn’t a coincidence,” Garrett said.

  “No, admiral, it isn’t. This is an opportunity that the alliance has been waiting for. We need you to capture the gate before it’s complete.” The image zoomed in further to a confluence of thorns where a dome almost as large as the America was seated.

  “If it’s heading for Earth, why don’t we clear out the drones and wait for it to come to us?” Garrett asked.

  “Two reasons. First, the drones on Ceres and Earth will replicate and double their numbers within the next seventy hours. We can barely beat them now. It would be impossible to beat them once they’ve replicated. Second, once the gate is complete, it will tie into the rest of the gates the Xaros have across the galaxy and the number of reinforcements that will pour through the open gate can be expressed only in scientific notation.

  “You get me into the control room and I will take control of the gate,” Ibarra said.

  “Why do droids need a control room? They seem just fine in space,” Stacey asked.

  “That, my dear, is an excellent question.”

  Garrett stood up and put his hands on his hips. He paced around the table, captains watching him as he walked behind them. Officers who’d served with him since the Second Pacific War recognized when their commander was deep in thought.

  “How many drones are we facing? Hundreds?” Garrett asked.

  “Total single units: close to ten thousand,” Ibarra answered.

  “Impossible. The combination of a few dozen of those things almost took out Breitenfeld,” Garrett said.

  “You are correct. Good thing I took out an insurance policy before you left,” Ibarra said.

  His image shifted to a plot from the fleet leading to Ceres. An icon appeared over an asteroid idling along the fleet’s route.

  “I’ll open an IR beam and—”

  “Hello?” a hoarse voice came through the speakers. “This is Sven Thorsson of the Ibarra Mining Corp. I’m on asteroid IM-3637. There was some sort of malfunction with our power plant and…my limpet station is gone. I had no communications ability until a few seconds ago. Can anyone hear me?”

  “Hello, Sven, this is Chairman Ibarra. Is the cargo secure?”

  “Sir! Yes, everything is here. Where are you? What the hell is going on?” Thorsson asked.

  “Just hold on, Sven. We’ll send someone over to pick you up shortly. Ibarra out.” He cut the channel as Thorss
on’s panicked voice tried to ask more questions.

  Ibarra rubbed his holographic hands together.

  “You’re going to like this.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Lieutenant Hale sat at a small desk in his bunk room. It was definitely his now; the other two lieutenants he shared the berthing with had died on the mission to recover Ibarra from his tower. The dead Marines’ bunks had rumpled sheets and a few loose personal items—mini-Ubis for music, hard-copy photos and an antique Ka-Bar knife—still on them, as if the Marines would be back any moment to clean up before Major Acera saw the mess.

  Hale’s Ubi lay on the desk, projecting a screen and keyboard for him to work from. He stared at the blank screen and couldn’t find any words. He’d sat down to write condolence letters to Walsh and Vincenti’s families. That was his duty, to explain how they died to those they loved so there might be some closure, some comfort in knowing that the officer who ordered them into battle cared about their well-being and didn’t send them to their deaths without care or concern.

  The words wouldn’t come to Hale. There was no one to write them to.

  The double beep of an incoming call snapped him from his reverie. Hale looked at the caller’s name for a second, then accepted the call.

  The screen changed to show his brother, Jared, his fraternal twin, who looked as bad as Hale felt. Jared served in a Marine infantry company, not as specialized as Hale’s strike team but equipped with heavier weapons and more Marines than Hale’s company.

  “Ken! Thank God. I haven’t been able to get through to your ship for hours. The IR lines are jam-packed and…are you OK?”

  Hale held up his left arm, a pucker of synth-skin over the shrapnel wound.

  “Nothing they can’t fix,” Hale said. “How’re things on the Charlemagne? You good?”

  “We just offloaded a civilian from an asteroid mine and a lot of weird ammo. You know anything about that?”