The Last Hero: Book 2 of The Last War Series

by Peter Bostrom

  “We’re fighting in void,” said Roadie. “If you get hit—you’re dead. Your suit will decompress and I won’t be able to get your stupid ass back to the airlock in anywhere near enough time. Assuming they don’t just shoot me too.”

  Yup. That was definitely a risk. “Roadie, we don’t have time to debate this. We'll fight this in the true American fashion: by throwing US taxpayer's money at the problem. They'll take one for the team, as always. I am going to break cover and run in five, four—”

  “No, Guano, no!”

  “Three, two, one—” She leapt up, pistol in both hands. The two intruders were behind cover. Guano tried to break into a sprint, but ended up moving with a swift awkward waddle. Space suits were restrictive, in both movement and field of view. All she could see was a steel framed window that bounced and jostled as she ran, waving her pistol around like a lunatic.

  The intruders appeared. She fired wildly, not even close to hitting them. Roadie hit one—or maybe she did, it was hard to tell—the intruder’s spacesuit erupting in a spray of white gas and red blood, then slumping on the metal deck.

  She expected to be shot at any moment, but then she realized the remaining intruder wasn’t even looking at her. He was looking past her, to Roadie. His rifle flashed.

  “Get down!” she shouted, stopping and lining up her pistol. One shot, two shot, three—and the third round went straight through the guy’s helmet, blasting him back down to the deck.

  Silence.

  “Hey Roadie,” asked Guano, somewhat fearfully. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” he said, breathing labored. “I got shot.”

  Shit. “You okay?”

  “I said, I got shot! No, I’m not okay! Shit!”

  “How bad?” she asked.

  There was a brief pause. “Not bad,” said Roadie. “I think it clipped my thigh. I’m leaking atmosphere but not too bad. I think my, um, blood clotted when it hit vacuum and basically sealed the hole. It hurts like hell though.”

  “Okay,” said Guano, taking a deep breath. “You just hold tight now, okay? Come over to the shuttle, and I’ll fire it up. We’ll block the entrance into the ship, stop any more reinforcements from coming in.”

  She saw him limping across the deck; he was wrong about the clotted blood sealing the hole—white gasses were escaping from a hole in his leg. Guano waddled her way over to the shuttle, her boots clanking on the metal as she climbed up the ramp.

  Based on the debris strewn around the passenger compartment—and the conspicuous blood trail leading down the loading ramp—the shuttle had seen better days. Fortunately, the presence of standby power indicated that it would still fly. She stepped into the cockpit.

  “Damn,” she whispered, eyes falling upon the dead pilot, impaled on the nosecone of a Warbird. “I found Stealth. He didn’t make it.”

  “Shit,” said Roadie. “Wait, they just left him in there?”

  Guano bit the inside of her cheek. “Not like they had much choice,” she said. “He’s kind of … stuck.”

  “Well, un-stick him. I’m almost aboard. And hurry the hell up—I see another boarding craft coming in.”

  Another ship with more intruders. She had to hurry. Guano couldn’t possibly push a Warbird by hand, nor could she move the shuttle, but she could try and cut off the nosecone holding Stealth into his chair. Shuttles had shears to cut people out of their restraints in the event of a crash. She rummaged around in the container behind the copilot’s seat, digging out the heavy metal shears.

  “Sorry, Stealth,” she said, ramming the tip of the shears onto the metal nosecone. She started to cut around, until finally the tip fell off. She pulled him forward, until the sharp tip was out of the chair, then gently pushed his body into the copilot’s seat.

  Corrick gingerly sat down in the bloodstained pilot’s seat, her back sinking into the hole in the rear of the seat. She tried not to think about the mangled seat and powered up the shuttle. Apart from a decompression alarm—duh—everything else came up okay.

  Roadie moved into the cockpit with her. “What was the Admiral thinking, going down to that shithole with Lynch and Modi?” he asked, shaking his head inside his suit. “Same as with the embassy siege. That’s why we have marines—the CO shouldn’t be down there.”

  “I dunno,” said Guano, trying to keep her mind off Stealth’s blood congealing on the back of her suit, and the dead body just a meter away. “Captaining a warship by day, shooting people by night. Pew pew. I think it’s pretty awesome.”

  “Well that’s how I know it’s a terrible idea.”

  She laughed, appreciating the distraction, and lifted the shuttle up. “We’ll have to jam the shuttle’s nose in the doorway out of the hangar bay to the ship to block it fully,” she said. “We’ll raise up the loading ramp and seal it.”

  “Do it,” said Roadie.

  Sparks began flying off the hull of the shuttle—even without sound, she could tell they were being fired at. Guano spun the ship around, aimed the nose toward the airlock that led into the rest of the ship, and jammed the throttle open. The shuttle lurched forward, crunched against the airlock and lodged itself in, crumpling the nose even further. A press of a button sealed the rear loading ramp. Done.

  The shuttle was a cork blocking entrance into the rest of the ship. More gunshots bounced off the rear of the shuttle but, as she predicted, the hull was simply too thick.

  Only then did she realize they were stuck in the shuttle with a dozen angry invaders on the other side of the hull.

  “Okay,” she said, turning to Roadie, “what now?”

  “Wait, you didn’t have an exit strategy?”

  “I was coming up with this shit on the fly!” Guano groaned.

  “Clearly.”

  She looked around the cockpit, eyes darting back and forth to any piece of equipment, emergency controls, big red magic buttons—anything that would help them get out. “Just got to think …”

  “Hey Guano?” asked Roadie, glancing at his oxygen meter. “How much air do you have?”

  “Hopefully enough to last before they get us out,” she said, grimly. Then a dark thought occurred. “They … do know we’re in here, right?”

  Chapter Forty-One

  The streets of Glasgow

  Earth

  Bratta gripped the sides of his seat, which logically—especially in the rush hour congestion—did nothing, but at least made him feel better. Jeannie scoffed, but she didn’t spare him any further attention.

  “Relax, Steve, this isn’t going to be easy for them.”

  “What? How so?”

  “Visibility is low. The roads are difficult to drive, and there are plenty of cars around us that look like ours. They lost us for a while back there. If we’d been near a turnoff, we might have made clean away already.”

  He hoped she had a point.

  “Shouldn’t you, you know, be going a little faster? If we’re trying to get away and all?”

  Jeannie snorted. “I arrest speeders for a living. Only thing we’re going to do by speeding is get pulled over, or, in these conditions, cause an accident. No,” she paused to jerk the gearstick—which seemed to be an actual gearstick, not the usual automatic affair. How old was this car? The engine sputtered and stalled, to an outpouring of disapproval from the other drivers. “The trick is to drive like a complete fool. It’s hard to chase an idiot when you have to anticipate their every move and they’re causing traffic jams.” She pretended to fumble with the keys, then she turned to him, smiling like the Cheshire cat, as the car fired back to life. “Want to swap seats? We’ll have time.”

  Bratta peered through the window, and saw the next set of traffic lights a long way ahead. She had a point.

  Behind him, he could see the car with the mismatched lights, just sitting there. Patient. Silent. Waiting for the kill, or whatever they were planning. And the only thing between him and his fate was joking about it. He shuffled more deeply into his jacket.

  �
��At least you have a new car,” he said, because talking was better than thinking. “Your old monstrosity would have been visible for miles.”

  When they’d been married, Jeannie had owned an ostentatious and overly-treasured truck to facilitate her dreaded camping and hiking trips. The vehicle had been his chariot to many midge-filled, muddy memories.

  “New car?” She hopped across two lanes. Their tail dropped back a few cars, unable to cut into their lane. Bratta held down a giggle. Perhaps they’d win this, after all. “The Wee Beastie’s over in Edinburgh, where she lives. I came over on the train—this is my parents’ ride.”

  “Your—your parents’ car?” And he’d thought the day couldn’t get any worse.

  “I get to read on the train, and Mum and Dad don’t mind me borrowing this thing while I’m here.”

  She had a point, at least about the reading thing, although if she’d just slow down a tad that would make him feel a lot better … but, at least a car like this was heavy, so if they had an accident, they’d be a fair bit safer. Still, that didn’t really make the situation any better. “Your parents are scary when they’re angry, Jeannie.”

  “It runs in the family—damn, they’ve caught up again.”

  Bratta turned just in time to see the mismatched headlights slot in behind them. He whimpered a little.

  Jeannie hummed a little. “You make a good point.”

  He looked at her. “How? I wasn’t talking, how can I have made a point?”

  The traffic lights were coming up. Jeannie indicated, but didn’t turn the wheel. “Your misery speaks for itself. This is turning out to be a pain.”

  “Do you … do you have a better solution?”

  “Sure. We turn the tables on them. They might know why they want to tail us; we definitely don’t.”

  “What? But the point is we don’t want to talk to them because they probably want to attack us. Or worse!”

  Jeannie shook her head. “No, we don’t want them to talk to us. But if we’re asking the questions …”

  Bratta stared out at the low clouds. “How? Jeannie, I’m not exactly scary, you know? And I don’t think they’re going to play by the rules.”

  “Just trust me, Steve,” Jeannie said, putting on a sudden burst of speed to catch the orange light. “We’ll be fine.”

  Their tail lost them at the lights, stuck behind a red. A minute later, they caught up again, just as they were exiting onto a smaller road. They dropped back a few cars during a lane merge. They advanced on them even as the streets started getting smaller and less predictable. Whoever was behind that wheel, Bratta thought, they either had extremely good eyes, or an excellent memory.

  Jeannie went the wrong way down a one-way street, and their pursuers missed the turn.

  “Perfect.”

  “Really? How?” Bratta asked, glancing at the end of the lane, where a perpendicular street led from the main street to their hiding place. “You’ve trapped us!”

  “No,” Jeannie replied. “I’ve trapped them.” She turned the car into a narrow side-alley. It was a dead end, wide enough to turn around in, but nothing more. “This is a residential area—see those garages? They’ll think we’re running, or that we have a safe house. Now, get out and hide.”

  It was now freezing outside, and while his jacket could stave off the light rain well enough, his trousers could not. Jeannie pointed behind him, to a corner angled back from the alley’s entrance. “Over there. No need to do anything fancy, just stay still and don’t make any noise.”

  He nodded and made his way over to the damp corner, and tried to not let his teeth chatter too loudly.

  Rain beaded on top of his head and ran down his forehead, falling over his eyes.

  Droplets landed on his glasses; now he couldn’t see.

  On the other side of the alley, Jeannie kept one hand tucked into her jacket, unmoving.

  They waited.

  Tires crunched on gravel, getting closer. A single headlight painted the garage behind them. Bratta shivered, and not just from the weather.

  The tires stopped. Then the sound of the engine died.

  A door slammed, accompanied by a male voice saying something in thick Glaswegian. From the tone, Bratta assumed he was swearing, which hardly did much to assuage his fears. Come on, he told himself, a month ago you were facing down aliens. You can deal with one Glaswegian.

  Actually, that category included Jeannie, so no. No, he could not.

  Footsteps sounded, growing nearer and nearer. A burly man in a black leather jacket appeared in his peripheral vision, and Bratta stopped breathing. There was a blur of movement from Jeannie’s side of the alley, and then—

  “Put your hands up, sir!”

  Holy coprolite his ex-wife was scary.

  Their tail must have thought so too, because his eyes—even from here—widened. He looked over and saw Bratta.

  No, no, no. This was a non-ideal situation.

  The man glanced at Jeannie, met her steely eyes, and charged. At Bratta.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Orbital Defense Platform J4

  High Orbit Above New London

  Omid Sector

  US Army Captain Jessica Mao adjusted the connections on her prosthetic hand, the fleshy fingers on her right fiddling with the metallic ones on her left.

  The sensation of touch came back as the dodgy prosthetic jerked back to life, her steel fingers flexing experimentally. Hopefully it would hold for the rest of the mission.

  “Ma’am,” said Petty Officer Third Class Leonard Alexander Jacobs, his chubby face lighting up. “We’re in.”

  It was just her and him. It felt strange to be a Major working with a single Petty Officer, but such was the nature of the impromptu, thrown-together units. She’d asked for four men. They’d given her one. That was fine. They’d accomplished the mission—the Forgotten made do with what they had. And very effectively, too, it seemed. Despite her misgivings.

  Now they owned an orbital armored box that pooped missiles.

  “Good work,” said Mao, putting her hands on her hips and facing the small camera they had set up. “Ready to open the connection.”

  “All good here,” said Jacobs, giving a firm thumbs up. “Should we hail the Americans or the Chinese?”

  That decision was hers—mission planning had specified she was to hail whichever ship responded first—but that discretion meant she was also free to resolve some of her own, personal, grudges. “Hail the Chinese ship.”

  Jacobs worked over his keyboard, fingers tapping on keys. An old-style keyboard being typed on by an old-style man. Apparently this guy, despite his age, wasn’t even a Sino-American war veteran. He was something else—a survivor of the destruction of Capella Station.

  Mao knew it had something to do with the alien attack but beyond that she honestly didn’t really care. She was more concerned with why Jacobs had been picked to work alongside her. It didn’t make any sense—Capella Station was way, way out in the sticks. The guy must have been a fuck-up.

  But the camera’s light came on and Mao had no time to think about all that.

  “This is US Army Major Jessica Mao to Chinese vessel,” she said, her voice steel and anger. “Request permission to speak to CNS Luyang III actual.”

  There was a delay—longer than she was anticipating, presumably to account for translations and relays—and then a firm, crisply accented voice came over the line. “This is Admiral Yim.”

  Mao smirked out of the corner of her mouth. “It’s a pleasure to finally get to speak to you,” she said, drumming her prosthetic fingers on her fleshy arm. “How does it feel to work for the people who destroyed Friendship Station?”

  “Major Mao,” said Yim, a slight tinge of sarcasm painting his voice. “I can assure you that I had no part in destroying the very station as I was standing on it when its reactors went critical. And yes, I was there. Got the scar to prove it.”

  “Got my own scars,” said Mao, pointedly fol
ding her prosthetic arm in front of her, the servos whining slightly as her fingers settled. “I’m not blaming you personally for what happened. I blame your government. You were the ones who worked to destroy it—to blast a symbol of cooperation into atoms. You couldn’t stand it, could you? The Chinese flag flying alongside the American one.”

  Yim’s voice hardened. “Do you have any proof at all of what you’re saying?”

  “Look to the world at your feet,” said Mao. “Look to New London. The galaxy needs to wake up to your evil; this world was once a jewel, a hub of trade and commerce and culture. The people there were rich, prosperous, happy—I know, because I grew up there during the war. And what happened when the war ended? An influx of Chinese. Because we made peace, Chinese immigrants poured into the place like locusts, eating up the jobs, buying up the local industries and employing only their own people, brought in off-world to work for a pittance per hour, strip-mining our wealth and leaving nothing for the people who made it.”

  “I’m sure,” said Admiral Yim, evenly, “the exhaustion of the tungsten mines, leading to an end to the mining boom, and the simultaneous influx of narcotics from New London’s moons had absolutely nothing to do with your world’s misery. While I don’t doubt that unscrupulous Chinese businessmen played a part in what happened, it’s difficult to accept, either personally or as a representative of my government, that this is all our fault.”

  “Typical Chinese,” said Mao, curling back her upper lip. “Always trying to deflect blame. Those kind of games are in your blood.”

  “Funny,” said Yim. “If I’m not mistaken, Mao is a Chinese surname.”

  Oh he didn’t. “I’m a tenth generation American,” spat Mao. “I’m as fucking American as apple pie on a foggy Boston morning.”

  “And the land upon which you were born, the nationality on your birth certificate, this changed your blood content?” Yim chuckled down the line. “Talking to you is like arguing with Swish cheese. Your argument stinks and it’s full of holes.”