by Richard Fox
The Last Aeon
Terran Armor Corps Book 5
by
Richard Fox
Copyright © by Richard Fox
All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission.
ASIN:
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
FROM THE AUTHOR
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Read ALBION LOST, another Richard Fox universe!
Prologue
An alabaster tree levitated over a box filled with pitch-black soil. The bottom of the trunk was a jagged edge, as though it had been ripped from its roots and plunked onto the pedestal. Long branches arced over the atrium, glowing with light that diffused through the chamber.
Stacey Ibarra walked around the tree, staring up at the gossamer-thin leaves that glinted with light blue as they flexed in an unfelt breeze. She touched her chin and stepped from side to side, changing her angle on the strange tree. Her fingers rubbed together and she reached for a leaf.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Pa’lon said as he walked up behind her.
Stacey snatched her hand back and smiled at the Dotari ambassador.
“Just trying to see if it’s real or not,” she said. “What do the Qa’Resh call these? And how can it survive if it isn’t even planted?” Stacey brushed a strand of hair behind an ear and bent over to look into the gap between the tree and the soil.
“The Qa’Resh don’t give names to things,” Pa’lon said. He looked like a man in his early fifties with salt-and-pepper black hair and a respectable beard, but Stacey knew he was an alien. Every species represented on Bastion had a single ambassador, but the space station kept up a hologram around each individual, matching them to the race of whoever looked upon them. Stacey had wondered what she looked like as a Dotari to Pa’lon, but neither he nor the station’s control AI would answer.
“They aren’t much for interior design either.” She pointed down a hallway with a slightly arched ceiling lit from strips running a few feet above eye level. An oblong window offered a view to a gas-giant planet.
“Over five hundred ambassadors are here,” Pa’lon said. “You think they could agree on how to dress the windows?”
“I never thought of that.” Stacey frowned.
“You’re new here,” he said, motioning her forward. “Come. I’m to escort you to the Silent Quarter.”
“She’s ready?” Stacey’s brow perked up. “Grandfather’s been asking about Trinia since I first came here. Said he hasn’t spoken with her in—”
Pa’lon looked up at the ceiling and shook his head while tapping an ear.
“What’s wrong?” Stacey asked.
“Station intervention,” said a monotone voice coming from the ceiling. “Uncleared discussion area.”
“I’m not privy to the details,” Pa’lon said. “The AI does that from time to time. Come with me.”
He turned and walked down the hallway, hands clasped behind his back.
Stacey hurried and fell in next to him. She watched Pa’lon closely, searching for any break or error in the hologram, but if there was any way to glimpse the Dotari underneath the holo, she couldn’t find it.
The temptation to reach out and feel the loose tendrils on his head was real, but one of the first lessons she learned about Bastion was most explicit. No touching.
“Why’s it called the Silent Quarter?” she asked.
Pa’lon glanced at her and stopped in front of an elevator. He waved a palm across a panel and a green light blinked.
“It is fitting,” he said. “Bastion has been the home of the Alliance for several thousand years. During that time some member races have…fallen away. Others were overtaken by the Xaros. Most ambassadors choose to return to their home world when that happen. Some stay on as mentors and tech experts, but they have no voting rights.”
“Wait, Trinia is—”
The elevator doors opened and Stacey took a step back. The elevator walls were clear, and a hull door opening into vacuum brought back her naval training. A hand slapped against her hip, searching for a phantom helmet and air supply. The smear of the Milky Way led into the gas giant, the binary stars of the system’s primaries blazing above the galaxy’s backbone.
“Get used to this.” Pa’lon stepped into the elevator and Stacey took a tentative step onto a wide disk.
“Old habits,” she said, looking back and around the hull of the massive space station.
Steel-blue metal stretched out for miles and two pillars tipped with minarets marked the edge. She’d tried to work out the station’s size several times, but each time she tried to estimate the circumference her math was wildly different—almost like the station changed itself to keep her from learning too much. And she was certain the size and color of the system’s primaries had changed since her arrival less than a week ago.
She reached out and touched an invisible wall, and the elevator moved along the hull without any sense of inertia. She widened her stance and crouched slightly.
Pa’lon laughed. “The exterior lines are always a treat,” he said.
“Not if I throw up on you.” Stacey brushed her hands over her jumpsuit. Fashion had no meaning when everyone else saw you as a hologram of their own species. She’d opted to dress casual. “I was never one for wild rides like this. You’ve been to the Silent Quarter before?”
“My mentor spent some time there,” Pa’lon said.
“Perhaps you can introduce me? I’m sure he has some funny stories about you that will make me feel less awkward everywhere I go,” she said.
“He’s…no longer here.”
“Oh…I’m an idiot, aren’t I? A real diplomat would know better than to say something like that. Why I’m on Bastion instead of someone trained to keep their foot out of their mouth is still a mystery to me. I know, Grandfather—babbling. Now I’m babbling.”
A door opened against the hull and Stacey jumped back. A narrow hallway led to a small opening and another door.
“This takes some getting used to,” Pa’lon said as he held up a hand for Stacey to exit first.
She rushed out, relieved when her feet touched the solid, comforting floor. At the end of the hallway was a small vestibule and a bench.
Pa’lon hesitated in the elevator.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I…I thought I could wait for you, but I don’t want to go in there,” he said. “Memories and implications.” He looked up and continued to speak, but Stacey couldn’t hear what he was saying. The elevator doors slid shut.
“OK then,” Stacey said. “Now what?” She waved a palm over a sensor and nothing happened.
A moment later, the doors opened and a caretaker droid stood before her. Its limbs were pipes as thick as a finger and its face a shovel with a screen mimicking human features.
“Chuck? Haven’t seen you since I first arrived,” she said.
“Designations are irrelevant,” the droid said. “Follow me and do not speak to the other residents.”
The shovel face twisted around and the droid led her through a circular room with rows of crystalline trees radiating out from a Qa’Resh probe in the center. The probe was a sliver of glass, emanating gentle light.
Ambassadors sat on benches around the room, some conversing with each other, more than one sitting quietly and staring into the probe. Stacey passed by a disheveled woman who was wiping tears from her eyes. Stacey smiled and gave her a small wave, but the woman didn’t acknowledge her.
“Why is there a probe here?” she asked the droid.
“For the dissociated to return home.”
“But…aren’t they all—”
“It will be their final translation from Bastion. Your appointment.” The droid stopped at a set of very tall double doors and one half slid back into the wall. The room beyond was completely dark.
“Did they not pay the power bill?” Stacey asked, looking over the threshold. Not even the ambient light from the chamber cast into the other room.
“Privacy screens are in effect. You are scheduled to return to Earth in the next four hours. Hurry,” the droid said.
“Busy busy,” she said as she touched a foot onto the dark floor and stepped inside. The room snapped into existence, a laboratory filled with holo stations of spinning DNA strands and men and women standing with their limbs locked in a Vitruvian pose. The stations were all much too large, and the edge of a table she could see was just below her head level.
“What do I—” She turned around, but the door was gone. “No way this can go wrong.”
Stacey went into the room and saw that screens on the lab stations displayed swirling circles of alien text. On the table was a book the size of her torso, with another of the moving circles on the spine. Stacy licked her lips at the thought of touching something so tactile. An actual alien artifact, one without the connection to the genocidal Xaros, was a dream come true for her. The Qa’Resh and other ambassadors hadn’t offered her anything like this.
Heavy footsteps vibrated through the floor and she whirled around.
A giant approached: a Nordic-looking woman, ten feet tall, her hair done in intricate braids around the crown of her head. She wore a copper-colored robe that swished around her legs.
Stacey retreated a step and whacked the back of her head against the table edge.
“I’m going to save the human race,” the alien said. “And to do that we must destroy everything you believe about your future.”
Chapter 1
Stacey watched frost creep out across an armrest of a captain’s chair from beneath the touch of her silver fingers. Lifting her arm, she looked across the Warsaw’s bridge. The layout was much as she remembered from her time aboard the Breitenfeld. Her Naval career had been brief as fate had another calling for her.
Navarre, shrouded by clouds the color of old steal, turned in the distance through the forwards windows. Echoes of battle commands, whispers of fear between crew stations all harkened back to a very different time in her past.
She looked over a blown-out door, scraped the edge of her foot against a bloodstain and went to the astrogation station. The spot was as she remembered, though the controls had been modified in the nearly twenty years since her brief service on the ship.
She touched the headrest and leaned forward, catching her reflection on a screen. The young woman she’d once been was gone, replaced with a motionless mask on a metal body, a silver mannequin given locomotion with an echo of her true features.
Stacey ripped away the headrest and tossed it aside.
“Admiral Makarov?” she asked.
To the rear of the captain’s chair, a woman in her mid-twenties with abyss black hair and alabaster skin stepped forward.
“My Lady?” the admiral asked.
“How long until your ship is ready to fight again?”
“Nineteen hours. The damage we took evacuating Pasaia is nearly repaired. The crew replacements are going through their final drills now,” she said.
“Every life lost is a tragedy,” Stacey said. “This ship reminds me of another, the Breitenfeld, the ship of miracles, where Earth launched the first missions of the Ember War and brought the final battle to the Xaros Masters. She’ll be ours soon. As she should be. The Terran Union abandoned the mantle of leadership when they signed the Hale Treaty and turned away from protecting our future.”
“Pasaia was the last of our colonies in the galaxy with a legacy Crucible,” Marshall Dvaoust said. “What of our other worlds?”
“It was a mistake to settle systems known to New Bastion before our relationship with the rest of the galaxy was set,” Stacey said. “I didn’t think the Terran Union or the aliens would turn on us as hard as they did on Balmaseda…but our colonies in nearby stars are all within the gate network we built for ourselves. Navarre is the only link to them. We lose this system and the rest are at risk, until then they are safe. Continue the fortifications. Besides, if we were to evacuate some of the…special populations, the trauma would be severe.”
“We do not question your vision.” Davoust said. “The war will be won. The Ibarra Nation will survive, even if we must secure that right at the barrel of a gun.”
“We can pay that price in blood, or we can win with one swift stroke,” Stacey said. “And to save our lives we need the last Aeon…and we need the Breitenfeld. I trust Admiral Makarov to retrieve the first asset.”
“You’ll not accompany the mission to Ouranos?” Makarov asked.
“I will be there in spirit,” Stacey replied. “Make ready. And as Admiral Valdar would say…Gott Mit Uns.”
****
Roland intoned the last of a prayer and raised his eyes from the sword planted point-down in the floor. Candlelight flickered off a statue of St. Kallen in her wheelchair. He’d seen her depicted in other ways since he returned to Navarre: an apparition walking the battlefield with a nimbus of light around her head; busts of her with hair in a long braid and draped over a shoulder, leaving her skull plugs exposed. Small shrines of her in her wheelchair seemed to be tucked into every common area and office he’d been to.
He rose to his feet and sheathed his sword, then lit a pair of candles. The silence of the empty chapel was almost reverent, though he was used to attending services with many others at the same time. Today was different.
“Thomas Shaw. Catherine Shaw.”
He turned around and froze. There was another person in the pews, genuflecting on the kneelers. Roland saw the top of a head of pitch-black hair.
Admiral Makarov crossed herself and looked up at Roland. Despite her high rank, she was nearly the same age as Roland. She’d been brought forth from the procedural crèches with the knowledge and experience of a senior commander, but a younger body to keep her on active duty longer.
“Ma’am,” Roland said, nodding to her.
“We’ve the chapel all to ourselves. You can call me Ivana out of earshot of the crew,” she said.
“I’ve never called a flag officer by their first name before,” Roland half-smiled.
“The Lady’s Armor stand apart from my chain of command.” She went to the statue and looked up at the saint. “You always observe the anniversary of the Lost 8th?”
“My mother wasn’t big on church,” Roland said, “but we always went to pay our respects on the day the Midway returned from the void and we knew father was lost. I’ve found more religion since then.”
“It would be easy to turn this into a time for mourning.” She lit a candle. “Admiral Yulia Makarov. The Lost 8th was sent to the void to slow down the Xaros coming from Barnard’s Star. From the logs recovered on the Midway, my mother could have jumped back to Earth once they encountered Abaddon and all the Xaros inside that dwarf planet.”
“Getting spooked and running home wasn’t my father’s style.”
“Nor my mother’s. They fought and managed to slow dow
n the Xaros. Bought Earth several more years to prepare, just enough time that the enemy broke against our defenses. We light a candle for the dead who won a victory, not who died in vain,” Makarov said.
“I wonder…” Roland shifted uncomfortably. He knew the Makarov standing next to him was a procedural, possessing false memories of her deceased “mother,” but Ivana Makarov knew what she was. “I wonder if this is what they would have wanted for us.”
“What parent wants their child to fight a war? ‘I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy,’” she said.
“John Adams.” Roland touched a pocket, then removed a small plastic box with a bit of old-style admiral insignia on it. “You did ask for this back.”
“You did return from battle as you promised.” Makarov brushed her fingers against his as she took her favor from him. “But, you’re assigned to my Warsaw for this next mission.”
She nudged his arm and they walked out of the chapel into a passageway humming with the sound of sailors working around the corner.
“A mission I don’t know much about,” Roland muttered.
“You may not be in my chain of command, but I must respect yours to deliver your orders as they see fit.” Makarov swiped a hand over her screen and dozens of alert messages scrolled past. She sighed.
“I haven’t had the chance to look around Navarre,” Roland said. “Are there restaurants? Or theaters or—”
“Nothing like that,” Makarov said. “All efforts are going toward the war…though I do have my own personal mess and can invite whoever I like to it. After this mission?” She raised an eyebrow.
“I’ll accept your invitation as another lady’s favor,” Roland said.
“Then may the Saint be with you.” Makarov glanced at a blinking alert message. “And with my quartermaster in about three minutes when I figure out why we don’t have any rail cannon shells for the forward battery.”
She looked up and down the passageway, then gave Roland’s hand a quick squeeze before she left.
