The Last Hero: Book 2 of The Last War Series

by Peter Bostrom

  Mattis digested that. “Do they have visitors? What do they think of outsiders?”

  “There are regular shuttles coming in from all over the galaxy. Money is money, and trade is great, but if you sail in there in a gunship and they don’t like you? Crunch.”

  Crunch was bad. “How do we get past it?”

  “Well,” said Bagram, considering, “they use an optical recognition system to ID incoming craft. It’s primitive, but the system gets almost nothing that isn’t an automated mining drone so it works well enough. The whole system is basically a bunch of high-res thermal cameras slaved together to make a 3D model of the ship, which is compared to 3D models of the authorized ships. If you’re authorized, no worries. If you’re not, squish.”

  Crunch or squish, neither were good options. “Well,” said Mattis, “the Midway is pretty distinctive. No way we could disguise it as an uncrewed drone, or civilian shuttle.”

  “No way you should do that,” said Bagram. “The minefield is only in the belt. If you complete your translation a little way out from Kepler-1011b’s orbit, you could probably get a signal to them. They might alter the minefield to let you in. Or …”

  “Or?”

  “Or, you know, not. The only way you’d know is if you ventured inside.”

  Well. What a pain. “Okay,” he said. “There is one more thing.”

  “Okay?”

  This part might be difficult to explain. “As much as I’d like to consider us square, there is the unfortunate matter of you and your men boarding and attacking our ship. You seriously damaged this ship and you caused a major international incident. Plus you threatened to fire on an inhabited world, putting millions of lives at risk.”

  “We were just bluffing—”

  Mattis held up his hand. “You made the threat. Bluff or no. That’s one for your lawyers to explain, and they will. I’m afraid I will have to turn you over to the authorities on New London, and I can’t say you won’t be spending a very long time in prison indeed. This isn’t something you can simply get away with. But I will make sure to note your cooperation in my log, and I will try to see your inevitable sentences minimized, or at least, your conditions improved. No promises, but I’ll see what I can do.”

  Bagram nodded. “Prison beats unemployment.”

  “Let me discuss this with my XO,” he said, “and we’ll work on a plan. For now, though, thank you.”

  He stepped away, beckoning Lynch up to him. When they were comfortably out of earshot, he clicked his tongue. “You heard that?”

  Lynch nodded. “Never been in a minefield,” he said, whimsically. “It could be fun.”

  Mattis grimaced. “Yeah, well, getting stretched into paste in under a second isn’t exactly how I anticipated going out. Think Modi can help us with this one?”

  Lynch whistled. “Probably not. Gravity mines were old tech—you’d know more about them than he would, I’d wager.”

  “I know enough to stay the hell away. Gravity mines are big and extraordinarily dense. They’re easy to detect at long distances, which makes them pretty useless to use offensively. They’re only really good for area denial such as this.”

  “We could shoot at them, then, from a distance? If they’re easy to detect, we should be able to pick them off one by one.”

  That wouldn’t work. “We want this Armitage’s cooperation,” said Mattis. “If the first thing we do is start shooting at their only defense, I doubt that would endear us to him.”

  “We don’t know it’s their only defense,” Lynch cautioned.

  That was true. “Guess we’ll have to rely on their generosity and whatever insane solution Modi can come up with.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” said Lynch. “I’ll get the ship ready to commence Z-space translation.”

  “Very good. And ask Modi what we can do about the hole in the casemate; if it does come to a shooting match, I don’t want a missile to come in through there and blast us all to dust.”

  “Will do.”

  Mattis left him to his duty and touched his earpiece. “Admiral Yim,” he said, smiling widely. A pronounced feeling came from within, as though he had passed some kind of milestone, and for the very first time, talking with Yim didn’t seem forced or unnatural, and he wasn’t holding back a seething anger. “We’re going for a jump. Care to join us?”

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Hangar Bay

  USS Midway

  High Orbit Above New London

  Omid Sector

  Time passed. Hours. Corrick and Roadie sat, breathing recycled air with nothing else to do but watch their O2 gauges drop. She’d stuck a sealant square over the hole in Roadie’s suit, and so far, it had held.

  Running out of oxygen wasn’t the problem, of course. It never was. The true issue was getting rid of the CO2 they were exhaling. Their suits had a device to break the carbon atom off and turn it back into oxygen, but it couldn’t do so faster than they were producing the toxic gas. And there were always losses. Tiny wisps of gas that escaped the nominally sealed suits.

  Suits which weren’t designed for long-term habitation. But with the shuttle stuck in the airlock—ahead inaccessible, behind only vacuum—there wasn’t anything they could do until the Midway got around to rescuing them.

  “You doing okay, there, Roadie?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Just like I was the last time you asked. And the time before that, and the time before that—”

  “Just making conversation,” she said. “You got shot. It seems relevant.”

  Roadie groaned slightly. “Well, ask me something else. Anything else. Just not about the leg. It hurts like hell.”

  No doubt about it. Guano tried to lighten the mood. “Aww, come on. You got a bit of a boo-boo. You’ll be fine. Betcha twenty bucks we get rescued before your tank hits a quarter empty.”

  “Twenty bucks, eh?” Roadie glanced at the meter on his suit—it showed just below half—and then managed a grin. “Hey, if you hate money so much, I’ll take some of it off ’ya. Just … talk about something else.”

  “Deal.” She considered. “Okay, well … tell me about your family, then. You haven’t really talked about them much.”

  He snorted. “Sometimes I wish my mother had used a gun to kill herself instead of a bottle.”

  Guano blinked. “That’s … wow. Yeah, pretty personal. Thought we’d start with stuff like where they live, hobbies, that sorta thing.”

  “Well, drinking was her hobby. It’s true,” said Roadie. “I don’t exactly keep it a secret. I just don’t talk about it unless people ask. You asked. So I’m telling.” He looked at her oddly. “You don’t like to talk about your family either.”

  “True enough,” said Guano. “Because, well, human beings don't see things as they are; they see them as we are. The more I talk about them the more I’m, really, talking about myself.” She paused to consider. “Wow. That was pretty damn deep of me, if I say so myself.”

  Roadie snorted. “Wonder what that says about me.”

  “Dunno.”

  Another period of silence. Then her radio crackled. “Hey, Guano?” It was Flatline. “You receiving me?”

  Finally, someone else to talk to. Guano thumbed the comm on her hand. “You betcha,” she said. “Good to hear your voice, you dipshit. Took your time already.”

  “Hey, screw you,” said Flatline. “Damage control teams have all kinds of more important things to do than save a bunch of pilots.” She could practically hear him smirking down the line. “You know what they say about pilots. They’re just mouth-breathers who couldn’t hack it as gunners. You guys are mostly expendable, priority level of: eh, if we can get around to it.”

  She muted the microphone, stifling a playful laugh, until her voice came back to normal. “Well, you damn idiot, we could kind of use your help right about now. Roadie got shot, and he seems okay, but if he dies in here I’m pretty sure the smell could travel through vacuum, so …”

  Roadie punched her in t
he shoulder. In return, Guano playfully clapped on on the thigh, summoning a yelp of pain.

  “He okay?” asked Flatline. Obviously one of them had left their mic open.

  “Yeah, he’s just complain’ because he owes me twenty big ones.”

  “You can’t take money from a sick man,” protested Roadie, faking a little cough.

  “What are you, Canadian?” Guano waggled her fingers. “Pay up, chief.”

  “I said not to call me that.” Reluctantly, Roadie pushed a crumpled note toward her.

  She caught it, pocketed it, and opened the frequency again. “Okay, Flatline. What do you need us to do?”

  “Well,” he said, “we can see you’re wedged in there pretty tight. Damage control teams won’t be able to cut you out of the wreckage, so we need you to reverse the ship out. I’ll guide you on this side, and Frost will guide you on the other side. If something goes wrong, Frost will EVA and come get you. Make sure your helmets are on tight.”

  “Good morning!” said Frost, Roadie’s gunner, her chipper voice beaming across the line. “I’ll be your server today! Can I start you off with drinks?”

  “Oh boy,” said Roadie. “Saved by the gunners.”

  Guano fiddled with the switches in the cockpit, adjusting settings and diverting what little power the shuttle had left to the engines. “Get ready for full reverse,” she said. “Hold tight, this might get a bit rough.”

  She pulled back on the throttle. The shrieking of scraping metal echoed all around her. The shuttle vibrated with the effort, engines straining. She diverted more power to the ship’s propulsion systems. More power. More power…

  Then, like a cork from a bottle, the shuttle tore loose. It flew across the hangar bay backwards, careening across the vacuum, smashing into the far wall. The hull of the shuttle cracked like an egg, and the ship broke apart into a several pieces, the cockpit detaching and rolling across the landing strip, finally coming to rest face-down on the deck.

  Guano’s head spun. Roadie had fallen on top of her. They struggled in their heavy space suits, finally disentangling from each other.

  Frost’s spacesuited face appeared at the torn-off lip of the cockpit. “Are you guys okay?” she asked, her earlier bright tone replaced but concern.

  “I’m fine,” said Roadie.

  “I think I broke another ship,” said Guano, staring blankly at the debris scattered over the landing strip.

  Chapter Fifty

  The streets of Glasgow

  Earth

  Reflex kicked in, and Bratta scurried out of the corner—And into the path of his would-be assailant. Something got tangled in the leg department, and they both went flying. Bratta heard a nasty crack as his elbow hit the asphalt, pain flaring in his head, hip, and ulnar nerve—common name “funny bone” despite the fact that it was neither a bone nor particularly humorous. He heard another crack and winced.

  Wait. That crack hadn’t been from him. He looked up and saw leather jacket man braced against the corner. There was blood on the wall, at head height. He was in the middle of categorizing just how nasty a situation that could be when Jeannie appeared and shot the man in the back. He staggered backwards and fell on Bratta’s prone form with the grace of a poorly-tossed caber.

  Bratta yowled and wriggled out from the weight. His ankle hurt something awful, but that was nothing to what must have been happening in the big man’s head.

  Jeannie looked down and him, eyebrow hitting her hairline. “Well done, Steve.”

  “I am,” he said, wringing a scraped hand, “the hero. That we both deserved, and needed. I need a theme song.”

  “You did hit your head hard,” she snorted, rifling through the downed man’s pockets.

  “I did,” he agreed from the road. He knew better than to try and sit up until the world had stopped visibly spinning. “What are you doing?”

  “Research,” she replied.

  “When I do research, it usually doesn’t look like that,” he mused. “I don’t use guns, for one.”

  “Stun-stick, Steve. It’s a stun-stick.”

  “Oh, that’s nice. Much less chance of death. I don’t want to be an accessory to murder.”

  “For once, you’re making sense. You should get knocked over the head more often. I could help with that, actually.” She gave up on the jacket and turned to shirt pockets. “Ah, jackpot!”

  “Um, OK?”

  Jeannie held up a card. Bratta adjusted his glasses and peered.

  “His name is … Callum McIntosh?”

  She sighed. “Look. The company. Do you recognize it?”

  He squinted as he tried to read in the dim light. “Uh …” It was called Pegasus Security. Didn’t mean much to him.

  She shook her head. “Damn. Well, I suppose we’re waiting until he wakes up, then.”

  A thought occurred. “Ah, hang on. Can I see it again?”

  Jeannie handed him the card. “That’s the security company they hire. I presume.”

  With the card in both hands, Bratta was able to actually get a good look at it. And then he saw it.

  Even with his head pounding and his elbow probably scabbing onto his jacket, he knew that Jeannie had been having far too much fun being mysterious and all-knowing. It was his turn—he was, after all, the scientist here. And he knew something Jeanie didn’t.

  “The company,” he said. “Pegasus Security? I read about them in—well, it doesn’t matter. But they’re all veterans. And there’s only one place where these people are hired in force, apart from Zenith, and that’s their home office, a little teeny place on the edge of nowhere. A place called Chrysalis.

  “The asteroid?” she asked, her eyes bugging out a little. “You’re shitting me.”

  “You’re shitting yourself,” said Bratta, angrily, then his eyes widened too. “That … came out wrong.” He cleared his throat. “But, yes. Chrysalis. Apparently it’s a bit infamous because of the mines. You see, the mines protecting the area use a unique gravimetric signature that—”

  Jeannie held up her hand. “I know all about Chrysalis,” she said, her tone a mixture of anger and … something else he couldn’t quite pick up on. “We’ll catch a shuttle in under some fake names. Ironically, even if we’re caught, nobody will care; what happens on Chrysalis stays on Chrysalis or so they say. What a dump.”

  “Well,” said Bratta, “if you’re still keen on saving the human race, we’re going to that dump, so … best smile, Jeannie.”

  She glared at him and he wasn’t sure, exactly, what he’d done wrong.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Shuttle Zulu-4

  High Orbit Above New London

  Omid Sector

  Mao had lost battles before. The last time she’d woken up in a field hospital on some desolate world, minus a perfectly good arm. This time she’d surrendered on a platform that seemed to be deliberately shut down.

  The decision to do so was easy. No sense fighting a whole ship on her own with nothing but Jacobs for backup. When the Chinese marines had boarded, she hadn’t resisted, even when they’d clipped on the binders a little too tight.

  It only hurt one arm anyway.

  The marines shoved her in a seat next to Bagram. The two of them exchanged a slightly defeated glance, but she saw something in his eyes that gave her a little hope. The edge of a smile.

  She expected to be returned to the Chinese ship for a friendly chat with Admiral Yim in person, followed by a long stay in a Chinese prison, but instead, the shuttle took her to the Midway.

  One part elation, one part confusion, one part suspicion. Why would the Chinese willingly give up their prisoner like that?

  Mao kept quiet. The shuttle docked with the Midway. The shuttlebay was trashed; it had seen some kind of internal battle, almost certainly thanks to her people.

  Nice work, ladies and gentlemen. Too bad you couldn’t finish the job.

  The shuttle loaded up her fellow Forgotten, space-suit clad warriors with their hands in b
inders. The sight took a little bit of the fire out of her belly. They weren’t going to the Midway—they were just taking on more prisoners from her.

  Soon, the shuttle was back in open space. Oddly enough, the guards who remained to watch them were a mix of Chinese and American soldiers, yet the ranks, the service patches of the marines didn’t match up. Some were wearing service ribbons they couldn’t possibly have earned, and some had way too many medals for someone of their rank; others, too few.

  Mao had been serving with the Forgotten for years. She knew an impromptu, thrown-together unit full of misfits trying to be something they weren’t when she saw one.

  The shuttle orbited to the other side of New London. Mao saw glimpses of the west side of the planet through the dropship’s tiny portholes. Were they going to stand trial on her homeworld? That would be bad. Ever since the Chinese fucked everything up, the courts had been notoriously corrupt. Their likelihood of receiving a fair trial was, ironically, higher with the Chinese. She hated the idea but was forced to concede, intellectually, that it was true. Red bastards … as long as someone could bribe them, or slip them some kind of payment … dammit. Not that it was going to be easy anywhere, but this?

  Bias would be impossible to avoid. People tended to take a dim view of those trying to murder them all with nuclear fire from orbit.

  The shuttle turned toward New London but, right as her heart sunk down into her gut, she realized it wasn’t descending through the atmosphere. It was docking with another ship. A light frigate which had no recognizable markings, nor was it a ship in a style which she was familiar. It seemed almost to be a combination of Chinese tech, American tech, and some other influences she had no hope of recognizing.