by Richard Fox
Orozco looked up at Cortaro. “Time?”
“Haven’t made it yet.” The Gunnery sergeant tapped his foot on a chalk line.
Orozco reached out and slapped the line.
“Four minutes and fifty-two seconds. With penalty.” Cortaro entered the time onto his forearm computer.
“This isn’t fair, Gunney.” Orozco stood up. “I can’t even see my feet when the cloak is on.”
“Well boo-goddamn-hoo,” Cortaro said. “I’ll be sure to tell the Toth that this whole thing is just too darn hard and to look the other way when you pull your bull-in-a-china-shop routine right in front of them.”
“I can’t wait to see him do this when he’s got his Gustav.” The distorted words came from somewhere behind Cortaro. “You think he moves like a big dumb animal now? Just you wait.”
“Who said that?” Orozco lurched behind Cortaro, swiping at the air.
“All right.” Cortaro put his helmet on and activated his cloak. The air seemed to flex and bend around him as the cloak settled. “Everyone through the obstacle. We navigate this obstacle as a unit in less than five minutes—and without strangling Standish—I’ll leave two hours open for free time tonight. Move out.”
****
Bailey stared through the thick scope attached to her sniper rifle. The target, a pair of simulated watermelons, sat hundreds of yards away in the holographic rifle range. She exhaled slowly, feeling the thumps of her heartbeat against her cheek and the tiny patch of exposed skin she had pressed against the trigger.
A ribbon attached to a pole behind the melons fluttered in a breeze.
“Adjust east six meters. Offset shot be another quarter second,” Rohen said. He was behind his own rail rifle, a few feet from Bailey.
“I’ll be a drongo if the wind correction is six meters,” the Australian Marine said.
“Have I been wrong the last five shots?”
“No, and you’re not checking your firing tables either. Which leads me to believe you’re cheating.” Bailey snapped her gum.
“Calculating the wind speed at this distance is—”
Bailey fired, the report little more than a loud snap in the training environment compared to the thunderclap generated by the rail rifle accelerating a tungsten-clad cobalt slug to several times the speed of sound. Rohen fired precisely a quarter second later.
One of the watermelons blew apart. A white dot appeared a foot away from the missed target, showing where the wayward shot had passed by.
“Fuck me,” Bailey said. “I hate missing.”
“I told you. Six meters.” Rohen pushed himself onto his knees. “We keep screwing this up and we’re not going to over penetrate the shielding Mentiq’s got.”
“If he even has the personal shields.” Bailey pressed the butt of her rifle against her shoulder, adjusted the recommended six meters with a click on her scope, and fired again. Her target splattered into chunks. “Just because the big brains claim they found a ‘for sale’ listing in the Naga’s computers doesn’t mean Mentiq’s actually got it. He’s probably just another brain in a jar like the rest of them. One clean hit is all we need—a clean hit I can provide without your assistance, thank you very much.”
“Those big brains say a double hit from our rail rifles, at the right interval and at a slower muzzle velocity, will overload the shields and kill him. Her. It. Whatever. That’s why I’m even on this mission,” Rohen said.
“This is a bloody waste of time.” Bailey set her rifle on SAFE and sat back on her haunches. “We don’t know any of the atmospheric conditions on Nibiru, don’t know the rotation of the planet, don’t know any of the variables we need to make our ballistics calculations. Do Admiral Garrett and Captain Valdar think we just point and shoot? Let’s see them try to thread a needle at eight hundred meters.”
“We can figure all those out once we make landfall.” Rohen tapped at his forearm computer and the target within the holo range changed to an overlord tank almost a kilometer away. “Same equations, just different inputs.”
“You are entirely too optimistic for me to really like you,” Bailey said.
Rohen scratched his face, his hand trembling enough that Bailey noticed.
“You OK?” she asked.
Rohen stared at his hand and the palsy faded away.
“Just adrenaline,” Rohen said quietly. The pupils within his pale-blue eyes pulsated for a moment, then he smiled at Bailey.
Bailey felt uneasy. This wasn’t the first time she’d noticed something a bit off about her fellow sniper.
“Where you from? You sound American,” she said.
“Little town—it was a little town—called Monterey. California, not Mexico,” Rohen said. “Had this great aquarium. Best seafood on the West Coast.” The right side of his face pulled into a grimace. He turned his head away from Bailey.
“Most I ever saw of America was Las Vegas. I don’t remember much of that. How long you been in?”
“I’m not a proccie,” Rohen snapped. “That’s what you’re getting at, aren’t you? It’s like that all over the fleet. New guy shows up and the interrogation begins. You wouldn’t ask if I was from Eighth Fleet. Everyone knows what they are.”
“It’s no big deal for me,” Bailey shrugged. “Yarrow’s a proccie. Hell, he had some alien thing in his head for a while. Don’t see me making a fuss about it. He’s a good kid, knows his stuff. What, you don’t like proccies?”
“No one gets to choose the circumstances of their birth. Proccie…true born…can’t be all that different from each other. Besides, if I had any real heartburn over Ibarra’s children, I’d have been on the Lehi with Fournier and the rest of his bigots.” Rohen pushed himself up to his feet. “Where’s the pisser?” he asked.
Bailey pointed to a recessed doorway at the other end of the rifle range.
Rohen made his way to the latrine, his shoulders tight, his pace fast. The door slid aside as he approached.
Once the door shut behind him, Rohen collapsed against the bulkhead. His hands and arms jerked against his body as his muscles spasmed out of control. He managed to press a hand to his chest and slide a clip of thumb-sized auto-injectors from inside his shirt. Rohen pinched an injector between two fingers and tried to press it to his neck. His hand refused the command, jabbing into thin air.
“Damn it,” he said through grit teeth. He pinned his hand to the wall and forced his neck against the needle point. His nerves burned as the serum coursed through his system. His muscles relaxed and came back to his full control.
It would get worse. Ibarra had told him as much when he woke from the procedural tube buried deep within Mauna Loa on Hawaii. The tremors would strengthen into seizures if he didn’t take his serum regularly, but even that was losing its effectiveness as time went on. Rohen gave the clip of injectors a pat and slid it back into his uniform.
He looked himself over in the mirror, not finding any nervous twitches that might hint at a deeper problem to his fellow Marines. All he had to do was maintain the façade of a perfectly normal true-born human. Once he made it to Nibiru, he’d be one step closer to fulfilling the mission Ibarra gave him.
Rohen splashed water on his face and went back to Bailey.
****
Four Eagle fighters waited on the flight deck, each connected to the ship’s power lines and locked into catapults that would launch them out of the ship within two minutes of an alert. The pilots sat on an ammunition lorry, eating lunch from pressboard trays and watching a rare spectacle play out across the otherwise empty flight deck.
The clash of composite steel on steel rang through the flight deck as two Iron Hearts sparred each other, the third armored soldier watched from the sidelines.
Durand wolfed down a bite of some bland substance billed as stroganoff and dabbed her lips. She winced as one of the Iron Hearts slammed an elbow against the other’s chest and knocked it to the deck. A giant boot slammed down next to the prone soldier’s helm and Durand felt the
vibrations through her seat.
“Who just won?” asked Glue, Durand’s second-in-command.
“Hard to tell with the new suits. I think that’s Elias,” Durand said. After the battle against the Toth, Ibarra rolled out new and improved suits for the few remaining armor soldiers in Earth’s military. The Iron Hearts now stood fifteen feet tall, their armor smoother and modeled to resemble the human form more than the blocky armor they’d worn before.
She glanced at her two Dotok pilots, Manfred and Lothar. They sat shoulder to shoulder, stubby beaks agape as they watched the Iron Hearts fight each other.
“What’s the matter, Manfred? Never seen anything like that before?” she asked.
“We don’t have this,” Manfred said. “The Dotok never had anything like this. I heard stories about them from the other survivors, how they held off the Banshees so the Canticle could escape Takeni…Is it true they’re like the Toth? Nothing but a nervous system plugged into their armor?”
“No, they can come out,” Durand said. “You might catch Kallen or Bodel in the mess hall, but they spend all the time they can in their suits.”
“What about the third?” Lothar asked.
“He got hurt during the fight for the Crucible. Rumor is he’s fused to the tank inside the suit,” Durand said.
“He’s trapped in there? Why hasn’t someone tried to get him out?” Manfred asked.
Kallen stepped off the sidelines and faced off against Elias. Her hands withdrew into the forearm housings, replaced by a long spike in one arm, a burning torch in the other. Elias slammed his fists against his chest and held his arms out wide. Kallen crouched, then sprang off the deck and tackled Elias.
The two hit the deck so hard Durand almost dropped her tray.
“You want to go ask him?” Durand ran her fingers against her shoulder pouch and found a beat-up pack of tobacco cigarettes. She looked up at the ventilation shaft where she knew she could smoke in peace, but that wasn’t going to happen while she was on ready alert.
Manfred and Lothar spoke to each other in Dotok, then they looked at Durand and shook their heads.
“What are they doing?” Glue asked. “Why bother training in hand-to-hand combat?”
“You remember when Elias returned from that unfinished Crucible over Takeni? He had that red mask with him,” Durand said.
“I thought that was just a rumor,” Glue said.
“Interesting how something that’s supposed to be classified information becomes rumor, isn’t it?” Durand asked.
“So it’s true? The Iron Hearts and that metal Karigole fought some sort of Xaros leadership?” Glue asked.
“I’m not saying that.” Durand gave a very Gallic shrug.
“Is this an example of doublespeak or a double entendre?” Lothar asked. “We’ve had some difficulty with English nuance.”
“Shut up and watch the giant robots fight, boys. You ever see them on the battlefield, that means you’re in the middle of one hell of a fight.”
****
A sea-green world with thick bands of white clouds filled the bridge’s holo table. Valdar, a cup of steaming coffee in hand, and the rest of the Breitenfeld’s senior officers watched as the planet rotated before them.
“Now that we’ve cleared the system’s primary,” Ensign Geller said, “we’ve got our first good look at Nibiru. The place is almost ninety-eight percent ocean. No polar ice caps. Given the high levels of oxygen in the atmosphere, I’m certain we’re looking at a planet much like Earth that’s been flooded in the recent past, probably from volcanic activity in the polar regions.” Geller moved his finger over a touch screen and a yellow dot appeared at the top of the planet. “As you can see—”
Valdar set his coffee cup against the table’s railing with a loud snap.
“Skipping ahead…” Geller tapped his screen. The holo zoomed in on a small land mass, ribbons of deep green islands spreading out from a massive, gray dome-shaped object. “This is the only inhabited area we’ve detected with our passive sensors.”
“What is that dome? The picture looks distorted,” Lieutenant Hale asked.
“It’s a shield,” said Commander Utrecht, the ship’s gunnery officer. “Same energy signature as we saw on the Naga. If it’s as strong as what we’ve encountered before, there’s no way our rail guns can get through.”
“So much for an orbital bombardment,” Ericson said.
“I could drop nukes into the ocean,” Utrecht said. “If we space out the bursts just right, it would generate a tsunami. Wash the Toth away.”
“Nukes aren’t going to work,” Geller said. “There’s a neutron inhibitor field coming from the dome. We can’t get a fission or fusion device to function anywhere in the atmosphere.”
“Paranoia is a hallmark of the Toth leadership,” Steuben said. “They believe their fellows are constantly planning to usurp them, which they are.”
Geller zoomed the holo in to the tip of an island close to the dome, bringing into focus blocky structures separated by a grid of dirt roads.
“Even if we could use nukes, there are civilian factors to consider. There are at least five settlements on different islands surrounding the dome,” Geller said, “all within a few dozen miles of the shields.”
“Is that a Toth city?” Ericson asked.
“No.” Lafayette reached into the holo and zoomed in further with a gesture. “Toth architecture is more organic. Their layouts center on the residence of whatever overlord or corporation rules the local area. The Toth, and Mentiq, are beneath the shield dome. I’m certain of it.”
“Then who’s living there?” Valdar asked.
“I don’t know, sir. The architecture on each island we can see is unique, but this one…” Geller swiped his fingers across the touch screen and the holo whirled across Nibiru’s surface and stopped over a village with several dozen buildings.
The imagery was grainy, but Valdar made out a perimeter wall, paved roads, houses several stories in height and a large central square with some sort of statue in the middle. At the corner of the square, two large and one small humanoid figure in white clothing stood out from the earth-toned buildings.
“Is this a human settlement?” Lafayette asked.
“It—yes, that’s my guess,” Geller said.
Whispers broke out from the assembled officers. Valdar rapped his knuckles against the railing to quiet everyone.
“How is this possible? Where did those people come from?” Ericson asked.
“We had some suspicions,” Valdar said. “The ancient-era coins the Toth ambassador gave to Lieutenant Hale on Europa, the base-10 coding found in the Toth’s computers, even in our own history. Ibarra’s probe suspects that the Toth visited the Earth several thousand years ago and encountered the civilization in Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq. Many cultures from that time period had lizard-like god figures as part of their mythology. At the risk of sounding like some crazy-haired weirdo from an old TV show, the Toth could be the inspiration for those legends.”
“So, the Toth took some humans with them when they left Earth way back when?” Hale asked.
Valdar pointed to the settlement in answer.
“There’s more,” Geller said. The display shifted to a square landing zone cut out of a dense forest not far from the village, a worn path connecting the two. A Toth drop ship, similar to the ones that delivered Toth warriors to the Hawaiian shores during the aliens’ assault on Earth but missing any armament, sat on the landing zone.
“So that’s how they get to and from Mentiq’s city,” Valdar said. “Looks like we’re going to have to do this the hard way. Hale, you and your team will make planet fall just outside this village. Figure out if the people in there can help you get into the city, or if they know some way we can get those shields down. I don’t care if you smother Mentiq with a pillow or I pound him into dust from orbit. He is our objective.”
“What if the humans are collaborators?” Hale asked.
“Hard to believe, but if they’re on Mentiq’s side, then they’re hostiles. Treat them accordingly,” Valdar said. “Find a way into that city. You’ll have two days. Lowenn and the probe put an Akkadian language pack together for your communicators. Let’s hope they still speak that language.” Valdar double-tapped a screen and the holo zoomed out to show the entire planet. “What’s in orbit?”
“Nothing to be happy about,” Utrecht said. The image dissolved and rematerialized. Two gigantic Naga-class starships, the color of dried blood with irregularly placed crystalline cannons across their hulls, circled around a cluster of smaller spacecraft.
Hale recognized several Toth cruisers with the spiral shell design he’d seen up close and personal on Anthalas and Earth. A handful of ships were unlike anything he’d ever seen before—a sleek teardrop ship with stretched reflections of neighboring vessels across its hull and a pillar-like ship with segmented portions rotating around its long axis. More Toth and ships of unknown origin were packed close together like a herd of sheep by the circling Naga battleships.
“All the ships out mass the Breitenfeld,” Utrecht said. “The two Naga-class ships will make everything difficult once we lose our cloak. We’ve seen how much firepower those ships can put out.”
“Do they have the same energy shields?” Valdar asked.
“If they do, they’re lowered. We’re not picking up the same energy signatures that we did from the Naga,” Geller said. “And the rest of the ships are running on low power. Life support and little else.”
“Mentiq does not trust his guests,” Steuben said. “They are weak and defenseless before the battleships. A foe without a weapon cannot strike.”
“Any idea why there are so many ships in orbit?” Valdar asked. “I doubt the planet’s land mass has enough dirt for all the crews to stand on.”
“It looks like a convoy,” Ericson said. “Maybe all these ships are on their way somewhere and this is just a waystation.”
“From an operational standpoint, it’s an obstacle. The anchorage is directly above Mentiq’s city,” Utrecht said. “Our single Mule with a cloaking device doesn’t have the range to get around those ships.”
