by Richard Fox
“Then they figured out something from us survived from the encounter on Anthalas, or Takeni when we met up with that red armored bastard,” Ibarra said. “If that thing got the ball rolling out of Barnard’s Star that much sooner…”
+The Xaros will arrive in nine years, not fourteen. This puts our force projections significantly lower. Our chance of surviving the next wave is now exceedingly low, in the single digits.+
“Damn.” Ibarra took his attention away from the probe and found Admirals Garrett and Makarov standing in front of him, neither waiting patiently.
“What is it?” Makarov asked.
“We need to break out our contingency plans,” Ibarra said. “I hate to tell you this, Makarov, but the name of your flagship, the Midway, just became very relevant.”
****
The Iron Hearts’ armor stood in their lidless coffins. Cables ran from ports arrayed over the suits into a diagnostic station on wheels. The third suit’s chest piece was open, exposing the armored womb within. Kallen’s face floated behind the view pane, her eyes closed. A pair of armor techs in gray coveralls crowded around the diagnostic station. An empty wheelchair waited at the end of a walkway.
Bodel, wearing nothing but a dark skinsuit, rubbed a towel through his thin hair. He glanced over the techs’ shoulders, then moved one aside.
“She has to come out—now,” Bodel said. He punched commands into the station and fluid drained slowly out of Kallen’s womb.
“She’s fine. Let her sleep and keep her synch rate high,” Elias said, his voice booming through his suit’s speakers.
“Do you see her blood oxygenation rate, Elias?” Bodel pointed an accusing finger at his fellow Iron Heart. “She’s already in second-stage whither. A few more hours like this and she’ll go into shock.”
“Then give her an adrenaline spike.” Elias’ armor shifted in its coffin. “She’s had her armor on for longer than this.”
“This isn’t a contest, Elias!” Bodel shouted. His head snapped toward the two techs, who took the hint and hustled out of the cemetery.
“Why are you coddling her? She knows her plugs better than anyone in the fleet or on Earth,” Elias said.
Kallen’s womb lowered from the housing inside the armor. Bodel unsnapped the latches on a seam running over the long axis and grabbed a handle on the front.
“She doesn’t want me to tell you. Said you have enough to worry about with your condition—”
“Hans…” Elias’ fingers snapped against his palm as they formed into fists.
“She’s dying. Batten’s Disease…we all knew it was a risk when we got our plugs. She had a seizure just before we left Earth. Doctor Eeks says she’s beyond the point for treatment. We would have picked it up earlier but she’s quadriplegic. Early symptoms never manifested. Her nervous system is degrading.” Bodel reached a hand up and touched the glass over Kallen’s face. “The longer she wears her armor…the faster she’ll fall apart.”
“You asked her to quit?”
“I begged. But she won’t. She’s like you. The armor is all she has.” Bodel bent his forehead to the glass.
“Then why are you still putting her in the armor?”
“Because if I keep her alive in that chair then I will lose her! And then I’ll lose you too, won’t I? You two are all I have left,” Bodel said.
“She can’t do this. We can’t let her,” Elias said.
“Ihr Herz ist Eisen, aber ihr Fleisch ist schwach, Elias.” Bodel slipped into his native language. Elias learned enough German from his childhood in a Bonn refugee camp to know what he said: “Her heart is iron, but her flesh is weak.”
Bodel glared at Elias, then opened Kallen’s womb with a grunt and caught her stick-thin body as it fell into his arms. He lowered her into her wheelchair and covered her shoulders with a blanket.
Kallen’s eyes opened and struggled to focus on Bodel. He patted her face with a towel and wrapped it around her hair. A smile spread across her face, all dimples and pale freckles.
“Hans…why am I out?” she asked.
“Got to get you cleaned up,” Bodel said. “Get some real food in you.”
“But my synch…”
“Your synch will be fine,” Elias said. “Come back when you’re ready.”
Bodel stepped into a baggy set of coveralls and turned Kallen’s chair toward the doors. He looked over his shoulder at Elias. The armor nodded slowly.
CHAPTER 8
Hale, sitting in the top gunner pod on the Mule, watched as the roof of the flight deck slipped away. The distant red curtain of the nebula wavered as its light passed through the Breitenfeld’s cloak field.
“Cloak activation in 3…2…1,” Egan said through the Mule’s IR.
There was a high-pitched whine and the Mule that Hale could see from his exposed vantage point in the turret vanished. He could still see the seat and the ship’s cargo bay beneath his gimbal mounting, but other than that it was like he was floating alone in space.
“Spotters on the Breit confirm we’re off sensors and the visible wavelength. Engaging engines,” Lafayette said. Hale felt the ship lurch through his seat and the tug of constant acceleration against his body. He swung the seat to face his body against the g-forces and saw the bright-blue half disk of Nibiru.
“The view from out here is something else, ain’t it, sir?” Standish asked from the other turret.
“It’s impressive,” Hale said. He felt like he was soaring through the void. Someday we might visit planets like this for the sake of exploration, to push the boundaries of human knowledge and our reach across creation, but not today. Not this time, he thought.
“Sir,” Cortaro connected through a private channel.
“Go.”
“Our Marines are good. Yarrow asked for a copy of the video, so he’s not too salty about the prank. Egan told everybody he’s a proccie.”
“He is? Guess that explains why he’s got pilot wings. I wouldn’t have guessed that since his service jacket lists his birthday decades ago and not…weeks,” Hale said.
“Fits with Admiral Garrett’s address after the Toth incursion,” Cortaro said. “The big boss said proccies won’t be treated any different from true born in the eyes of the military. They’ll get to keep whatever training certificates and rank they had when they came out of the tubes. What a deal, right? I had to bust my hump in the Corps for almost twenty years to get these stripes. Now there’s shake-and-bake gunney and master sergeants running around all over the place.”
“If they were that good, they’d be on this mission. Wouldn’t they?” Hale asked.
“Suppose so…I see the need for them. Just don’t like how it’s playing out.”
“When we were on Anthalas…hold up.” Hale caught a flash of light from the planet’s orbit. He zoomed the gauss cannon’s optics on the flash and saw the two Naga-class dreadnoughts, both circling a mass of starships. “When we were on Anthalas, I saw the Crucible gate open, drones pouring out of it like water over Niagara Falls. There are a hell of a lot of drones coming for Earth, and even if we bucked Standish up to first sergeant to ride herd on a company full of proccies, there’d never be enough true born to lead the number of proccies we need to defend the planet.”
“The day Standish gets a second rocker is the day we’ve lost the war. So what’s going to happen to us, sir? About half a million true born survived the Xaros invasion. We’ll be nothing but a drop in the bucket in a couple more years if Ibarra keeps his production rates up. You saw what was under Mauna Loa after the battle,” Cortaro said.
Toth warriors had dropped into the ocean just off the island’s coast and tried to fight their way into the proccie factory dug into the mountain. Hale and his Marines had fought off the assault and caught a glimpse of what the Toth were after. Thousands and thousands of tubes stacked atop each other, each gestating another human being every nine days.
What alarmed Hale more than the tanks were the automated mining robots he
saw in and around the mountain, expanding the production facility more and more each day.
“That’s not for us to worry about,” Hale said. “Keep everyone focused on killing just one Toth. We’ll have time for an existential crisis…probably never.”
“We’re approaching the anchorage. Stand by for evasive maneuvers,” Lafayette said.
Hale clicked his tongue twice to signal that he was cutting the private line to Cortaro and switched over to his Marines’ frequency.
“No way,” he heard Orozco say.
“I’m telling you, I was there,” Rohen said. “I was there on Ceres when Garrett’s escape pod landed after the America went up. I pulled him out of the wreck and slapped sealant on his helmet where he’d had a class-two air leak. That’s how I got his commander’s coin.”
“You saved the admiral’s life and all you got was a lousy coin?” Standish asked. “You should have got a promotion, a nice cushy job on his staff making coffee and keeping the lady-pogues entertained.”
“Boring. Why sit down under some mountain waiting for Armageddon when I could be out here making a difference?” Rohen asked. “Now I get to travel to strange new worlds, seek out alien leaders and shoot them with my rail rifle. Just like the recruiter promised. Sort of. OK, not at all.”
“Careful what you wish for,” Yarrow said.
The ships at the anchorage grew larger, almost to the point where Hale could make out individual ships.
“Cut the chatter,” he said. “Standish, don’t maneuver your turret. The techies say we’re effectively invisible beyond ten meters, but let’s not risk anything.”
“Roger, sir,” Standish said.
“Lafayette, do we absolutely have to fly through the anchorage? We’ve got time to go around,” Hale said.
“Time, yes. But not battery life. I attempt to go around and we’ll be visible before we hit the surface. Besides, do you think I lack the skill to pilot this brick with wings? Are you trying to insult me?” Lafayette’s tone was prickly.
“No, Lafayette. I just want to mitigate any risk that—”
“Questioning a Karigole’s competence is unacceptable. I will demand satisfaction once we make landfall. What do you choose as your weapon, gauss pistols or energy blades?”
“No, Lafayette. There’s some horrible misunderstanding here. Steuben? A little help?”
“Ha. Ha. Ha. Earth humor,” Steuben said.
“Are you two messing with me?” Hale asked.
“Did we do it incorrectly?” Lafayette asked.
“Yes. No. Will you just fly this crate so this mission doesn’t end with us as a smear on the side of a Toth cruiser?”
“As you wish.” Lafayette cut the speed on the Mule and angled it beneath the nearer dreadnought.
The Mule passed beneath the immense craft. Hale looked up and watched as the irregular crystalline cannon emplacements and the bloody coral of the hull passed above him. The cannons glowed with eldritch light, each angled into the scrum of ships anchored above Nibiru. He’d set foot on the Naga and gotten a bloody tour of the ship’s interior, not an experience he ever wanted to repeat.
The Mule passed out of the dreadnought’s shadow. The anchorage was mostly Toth ships, cruisers and destroyer-sized vessels with distended hulls designed to haul cargo, not the sleeker warships that had come to Earth.
The ship with the rotating segments that they’d examined from the Breitenfeld’s bridge came into view. It was nearly four miles long, the massive segments built like rounded skyscrapers around the central axis. Hale made out a few antennae across the prow shaped like a shovel blade, but no weapons. How any race could build such an immense ship without mastering artificial gravity or bothering to put any obvious weaponry on the hull and survive an encounter with the Toth was a mystery to him.
“Sir, can you see what’s at our four o’clock, negative declination,” Standish said.
Hale leaned and looked over the edge of his turret and through the cloaked Mule. He caught a glimpse of a spaceship the shape of a flattened saucer through the gaps between the Toth ships. The saucer-ship was made up of cubes and covered in what looked like thin green moss.
“Weird, right?” Standish asked. “Why would anyone come out here to visit with the lizards? Not like they’re the real friendly type.”
“Steuben?” Hale asked.
“I don’t know,” the Karigole said. “The Toth claimed the Alliance’s probe made first contact with them. There were no records of them interacting with neighboring species before or since. Given the evidence of a human settlement on the planet and what we can see with our own eyes, the Alliance’s information is incomplete.”
“He’s so helpful. Glad we brought him along,” Standish said.
Hale shook his head in annoyance. He leaned over to the other side of his turret to get another look at the strange vessel.
A blur of white shot past his face so close he raised his arms to protect himself. A pair of blazing engines streaked past the Mule as the speeding ship crossed in front of the Mule’s path.
The Mule shimmied from side to side, pressing Hale against his restraints. His eyes widened in shock as the cloak around the ship began to fail, revealing patches of the hull as the field opened and shut like a winking eye.
“We’re losing the cloak!” Hale shouted.
The ship settled and the cloak restored itself.
“Egan, Lafayette, we good?” Hale asked.
“Like driving down a highway after it rains,” Egan said. “Cloak is back up but we lost some of our power reserves getting it under control.”
“We’ve got incoming,” Standish said. “Three bogies on our six and coming in fast.” Hale rotated his turret around and saw the Toth dagger-fighters fly over the side of a nearby cruiser and bank straight toward the Mule.
“Not the highway patrol,” Egan said. “Hold on.”
The Mule nosed up and accelerated so fast Hale’s arms shot away from his body. He had to use his armor’s muscle lining to get his hands back to the control sticks. Something broke loose within the cargo compartment and struck the deck with enough force to send a vibration through Hale’s seat.
Hale rotated the turret around and saw twin engines of whatever had nearly hit them a few hundred yards ahead. Darkness clouded the edges of Hale’s vision and the blazing yellow afterburners grayed out. He tightened his core muscles, fighting to keep blood in his head.
“So long as we stay in their wake,” Lafayette said with a calm voice, “the Toth should attribute our brief appearance as a sensor ghost from the craft ahead of us.”
“Slow…down,” Hale managed.
“Hmm? Oh yes, I forgot,” Lafayette said. The Mule decelerated and the enormous g-pressures relented.
The Mule banked to one side, tossing Hale against his straps. The ship swung around a sensor tower on a Toth ship and spat out of the anchorage into the void.
“Did anyone forget to take their motion-sickness pills?” Orozco asked.
“Good news, the Toth fighters seem to have lost interest,” Lafayette said. “Bad news, we’ll need to set down a little earlier than planned. The maneuvers drained a significant percentage of our batteries.”
“How early?” Hale asked.
“We’ll make planet fall…eight kilometers away from our intended landing zone. Prepare for atmosphere entry. Five by five,” Lafayette said.
“Join the Strike Marines, they said. You won’t have to walk anywhere, they said,” Bailey mumbled.
A corona of burning air formed around the shuttle craft farther ahead. Hale tightened his grip on the control sticks and notched his thumbs beneath the safety switches for the gauss cannons. It would be a long way back to the Breitenfeld if anything else went wrong.
****
The Mule came down in a copse of twenty foot tall spires a few in diameter. The spires tapered off into blunt tips, their deep purple surfaces wet with dew. A flock of bat-like creatures with leathery wings burst into the
air and circled over Hale’s turret. The creatures circled high above for a moment, then broke away as one giant unit and flew away from the landing zone.
The ship rocked as it settled against its landing gear.
“We have 199 seconds of active cloak remaining,” Lafayette said.
“Get the netting up! Just like we drilled,” Cortaro said over the IR.
The rear hatch fell open and hit the ground with a whump. Orozco and Rohen ran down the ramp, a heavy metal line strung between weighted plates carried by each Marine. They stopped just beyond the Mule’s tail and dropped the plates. Each Marine grabbed a handle in the middle of the plate and lifted up corners of a gossamer fabric.
“Ready?” Orozco asked Rohen, who nodded. “Heave!” The Marines reached back and threw the weighted corners over the top of the Mule. The fabric came out of the line on the ground, flapping as it unwound.
The leading edge crested over the Mule, then smacked into Hale’s turret. The fabric billowed in the air like a shaken sheet.
“Not the plan!” Hale shouted.
Hale hit the emergency release on his control console and the turret shell retracted into the Mule. Hale grabbed the edge of the fabric and hoisted it over his head. He ran for the nose of the Mule, carrying the fabric like he was trying to get a kite airborne.
He jumped off the Mule and mashed a carpet of knee-high midnight-colored ferns around the stalagmite-like flora. He pulled the sheet taught and pressed the leading edge to the ground.
“Secure the edges.” Cortaro jumped up, grabbed the long edge and punched it to the ground. He jabbed a stake through the sheet and stomped it into the ground. The rest of the Marines worked the edges, covering the invisible Mule in a tight tent.
“Activating,” Lafayette said.
The gossamer fabric shimmered, then vanished completely. There was no sign of the Mule beneath it. Hale picked up a pebble and flicked it at the Mule. It bounced off thin air with a ping.
