The Last Aeon

by Richard Fox

  “Charadon will rip your heart out and your Risen implants will send your mind back to me to explain your failure in person,” Bale said.

  “But that will mean the death of my body,” the Ixio said. “The memory of the act is…”

  The Toth warrior at the door hissed and snapped at Tomenakai.

  “Then succeed,” Bale said. “Go. What are you waiting for? Go! Bring me the Aeon!”

  Chapter 7

  President Garret tossed his suit jacket onto a leather couch in his office and slid his feet out of his shoes. He put one hand on a wooden desk, a faithful re-creation of the Resolute Desk from the long-gone White House Oval Office, and sat down in a beat-up chair that creaked under his weight.

  His hands trembled, a palsy that lessened as he concentrated on holding them still. His body seemed to bleed energy into the desk and he felt like crawling to the couch to sleep. He hit a button on the inside of the desk and a small drawer popped open. A half-dozen pill bottles and foil blister packs rattled within.

  His fingertips wavered over a green bottle, then he snatched up a small black vial in the back. Popping the lid, he shook out a glossy black pill with a red stripe around the middle.

  “Hello, my pretty,” he said, and the words came out as an exhausted rasp. His eyelids drooped and he shook out a second pill, then tossed them back and washed them down with a swig of whiskey from a flask on his desk.

  That he enjoyed the occasional nip was no secret to his staff. The amphetamine use had kept up since the Ember War and been kept secret from all but his trusted Secret Service agents for years.

  He leaned back in his chair, a holdover from his time as an admiral that had travelled with him from one ship command to another. He’d nearly lost it for good when the Constantine went down during the Battle for Ceres.

  The pills took hold quickly, and he felt his energy surge. The shaking got worse, but now he could focus.

  The door to his office burst open and a pair of agents rushed inside. Garret slammed his secret drawer shut and bolted to his feet.

  “Mr. President, we need to get you to safety,” an agent said. “Our out-system pickets detected a mass driver on course for Earth.”

  “How many and how close?” Garret slapped away the other agent’s hands when he tried to lead him away by the elbow.

  “Protocol requires—”

  “How many and how close?” Garret half shouted, composing himself before the question could become an outburst.

  “One. Just past Neptune orbit,” the agent said.

  “I’ll monitor from the war room.” Garret went to pick up his coat, but his hand shook so badly he dropped it to the floor.

  An agent slipped it over his shoulder while the other pressed a hypo spray to the side of the president’s neck.

  Garret felt like lead had flooded his bloodstream, but the palsy subsided. His men knew the drill by now.

  He managed a quick but dignified pace to the war room. If the president were to be seen running or carried off by his protection detail, it would send ripples of panic through Camelback Mountain where the Terran Union’s military was headquartered.

  The war room had a large holo tank in the center and nearly two dozen officers manning workstations along the periphery.

  A Ranger colonel saluted as Garret came up to the tank.

  “Jackson, what have we got?” Garret asked.

  “Single mass driver came out of an offset wormhole thirty-two AU from Earth.” Jackson touched a panel and the trace came up in the holo tank. “Warhead masses five tons, but it’s moving at—”

  “How much damage if it gets through?” Garret asked.

  “A thousand megatons equivalent,” Jackson said. “Projected to hit Phoenix in fifty hours. The casualty projections are—”

  Garret raised a hand and shook his head.

  “Mr. President,” said a Navy commander from behind him, “if it gets through, we’ll lose the city. An evacuation ordered now will empty the city within two days.”

  “Listen to me. All of you.” Garret leaned on the side of the holo tank to keep his hands from shaking. “We have spent the last two decades turning the solar system into the most heavily defended place in the galaxy. Bring up the macro cannons.”

  The holo changed to a top-down view of the solar system. The massive cannons, which used magnetic accelerators to propel warheads at near single percentages of the speed of light, appeared across the solar system—from the dark, scarred far side of the moon, Ceres, to hundreds on Mars and many times more across every geologically inactive body large enough to house the rings and the battery capacitors. Two space stations over Earth’s poles came online, each with dozens of cannons.

  “We have a firing solution?” Garret asked.

  “Working up now,” Jackson said. “We could make a low-confidence shot now.”

  “No. One shot, one kill.” Garret swiped a finger down a control screen and the Keeper appeared in the tank.

  “Sir?” Keeper’s gaze wasn’t on Garret as her hands flitted over control screens the president couldn’t see.

  “Where’d the mass driver come from, Keeper?” Garret asked. “And how’d it get so close before we detected it? You said the Crucible would disrupt any unauthorized wormholes out to Sedna.”

  “They slipped it in when I sent a troop transport through to Proxima,” she said. “I’m honestly impressed they could do the math on the disruption wave. They detected when I paused the wave for the jump and opened the wormhole during the dip in quantum interference.”

  “How much of a problem is this?” Garret asked. “If we can’t use the Crucible, the war gets real tough, real fast.”

  “Speed of light is our constant friend,” Keeper said. “They can’t slip a shot in like that unless I’ve got the Crucible open and they can’t get any closer than Neptune.”

  “Fire solution loaded.” Colonel Jackson leaned over and whispered the news. “Triangulation from three different macros ready on your word.”

  “Take it out,” Garret said loudly and forcefully.

  The holo tank switched to the entire system and three green dashed tracks appeared, all converging ahead of the incoming munition. A timer appeared next to the projected point of impact.

  “Back to my first question,” Garret said. “Where’d it come from?”

  “The Crucible on the Novis colony,” Keeper said. Her eyes didn’t blink as screens reflected off her skin. “I’m getting…emergency transmissions from Novis. The Vishrakath have taken the system. The colony’s been hit, badly.”

  “Alert the 17th Fleet. They’ll retake the system,” Garret said quietly.

  A small grainy image appeared next to Keeper’s screen: a picture taken from the inner ring of a Crucible, surrounded by hundreds of the converted asteroids the Vishrakath used as spaceships.

  “That’s a live feed. The 17th won’t be enough,” Keeper said. “But…my crews in the Novis Crucible armed the Monkey Wrench before they were killed. We won’t have much time before the Vish find the transmitter or the Wrenches. Permission to burn the bridge?”

  “Granted.”

  “Fire mission sent to Mars.” A half smile played across her lips. The red planet came up, along with the smaller Crucible orbiting the planet. A trio of macro cannons lit up on Mars, their mag launchers charging.

  Every Crucible in human-controlled space was seeded with Monkey Wrenches—small, hard-to-detect denethrite charges designed to explode once a time-delayed fuse was activated. The explosions would render the gates too damaged to disrupt wormhole formation across their systems. At least until the Xaros devices self-repaired.

  A wormhole formed inside the Mars Crucible, and another appeared just ahead of the Novis gate, slightly off-kilter. Three macro cannons on Mars shot hypervelocity rounds up from the planet and through the wormhole.

  The camera feed from the Novis gate shook violently, and long, basalt-colored spikes went spinning through the void as the macro-cannon
shells from Mars smashed it to pieces. The feed cut off.

  “Gate kill.” Keeper shook her head. “They’ll repair it, but not for weeks.”

  “Their fleet’s stuck there for now,” Garret said. “This’ll make them think twice before they move on another of our colonies.”

  “They’re not stupid,” she said. “They’ll work out a countermeasure soon enough.”

  “How many people on Novis?” Garret asked, wiping sweat from his brow.

  “Wait…” Keeper raised a chin to the screen and Garret looked to the converging tracks. He swallowed hard. A miss would mean a scramble across the solar system, and every macro cannon that had the time and distance to engage the incoming mass driver would come into the fight. With all the defenses Earth could muster, Garret could rationalize that he and Phoenix were safe. But the loss in confidence from a miss…

  The timer ran to zero and a red triangle blinked over the convergence. Garret waited, not daring to breathe.

  “It’s a hit!” Jackson shouted and the room broke into cheers.

  “Good work, Keeper,” Garret said.

  “We’ve only been rehearsing mass-driver interception every work shift across the system for fifteen years,” she said. “They need to fire almost two hundred at once before I get concerned.”

  “All it takes is one to slip through,” Garret said. He pulled the colony data for Novis up and the blood drained from his face. “I’ll convene Congress in a few hours. Total war against the Vishrakath and their allies.”

  “I’ll hold the fort up here,” Keeper said.

  The President of the Terran Union reached into his jacket and felt the pills hidden in a pocket. He’d stop by the restroom for a pick-me-up before addressing Congress.

  Chapter 8

  “Kid. Wake up.”

  Santos’s limbs jerked inside his Armor’s womb, feet and hands bumping against the inner shell as thick amniosis sloshed over him. He felt a slight tingle as the umbilical joining him with his Armor fed data into his brain.

  Through the Armor’s helm optics, he saw the Armor was still in the cemetery coffin. Chief Henrique and his technicians worked on the ground level, carting munitions around to the rear of the coffin where servo arms would load gauss shells into his internal magazines.

  “Online,” he said.

  “Your sync rating’s nominal,” Aignar said through the lance’s IR. Santos looked to the suit to his right. Aignar’s Armor bore a fresh Iron Dragoon patch and bare swaths of graphenium on the torso and legs, a rush repair job that made the Armor look as if it bore battle scars.

  “Cadre said it takes a few rounds of combat to fully meld with a suit,” Santos said. “I should be in the green in no time.”

  “‘Green,’” Aignar chuckled. “Mars shouldn’t send bean heads like you straight to a fight like this. Cycling you through a lance that just came off the line is how it’s been since the end of the Ember War.”

  “Reports from the outpost systems haven’t been…positive.”

  “Umbra is an outpost world. You’ll get to see how ‘positive’ things are pretty quick. We’ve got deployment orders. You checked out on the MEWS? Stupid acronym. First the tactical insertion torpedoes. Now ‘Melee Enhancement Weapon System.’ They should run the names by a twelve-year-old instead of some engineer weenie.”

  Santos pulled up a menu and a wire diagram of a hilt turned over and over in his vision. A blade extended and locked into place, then morphed into an axe head, then a gladius, then a pickax.

  “Drilled extensively with them,” the recruit said. “Lost our Sundays off to close-quarters battle training. I never understood the reasoning. We’re Armor. We carry double gauss cannons, rotary guns, the Mauser heavy rifle, and the rail system for killing starships in orbit. At what point did we decide to forgo all that ranged firepower so we could run over and hit an enemy on the head with a sword?”

  “We must be deadly and capable at any distance,” Aignar said. “The Corps neglected the up-close and personal fight for too long. The Ibarrans didn’t. Now the Kesaht have their own Armor on the field and they have a ‘close with and destroy the enemy’ mantra that they don’t deviate from.”

  “The Templar did focus on sword work. I thought that was just a nod to the Armor armed with Excalibur blades that fought the Xaros Masters at the end of the Ember War,” Santos said.

  “The Templar are gone from the Corps. Some of us learned hard lessons about melee combat. Captain Gideon will get you on the mats soon enough. Amazing what a few real bruises will do to aid muscle memory.”

  “You heard the rumor that the Ruhaald invented the tech to morph the MEWS from one weapon to another?”

  “I heard. Ruhaald spent a lot of time working on anti-armor tech after the war. Word is the Iron Hearts scared the piss out of one of their brood mothers and the squids picked up a deep-seated fear of us. Can’t imagine why. At least the Ruhaald are on our side in this fight,” Aignar said.

  “We’ve got the Dotari,” Santos said. “And…the Karigole?”

  “All two dozen of their warriors,” Aignar said. “The Vishrakath bring a few more races into their alliance every month. Good thing every adult human in the galaxy served in the military one way or another. If the Union hadn’t mobilized so quickly, the war’d be over.”

  “We’re losing?”

  “You’re not winning if you’re on the defense,” Aignar said. “And here we are on Umbra. Our world. This ain’t Cygnus, where we kicked the Vish off planet.”

  “The Ibarrans aren’t much help,” Santos said as he switched his view to a long, thick-barreled rifle mag-locked to his back beside the rail gun vanes recessed into his Armor. “It was nice of them to leave a few Mauser rifles for us to copy.”

  “The Ibarrans are another issue. Remember what I told you about them and the captain.”

  “Not to speak of them unless I want my face ripped off. I got it.”

  “Do that, shoot straight, and follow your orders, and you’ll be fine with Gideon…speaking of which, he’s calling us to bay 37 for deployment. Ready to march?”

  “Isn’t that our lance motto? Toujours pret? Always ready?”

  “You’re not so bad for a bean head,” Aignar said and the coffin pulled back from Santos’s Armor.

  He took a step and the techs began clapping. He looked down and saw a length of red rope with three knots around his right ankle.

  “What’s this?” he asked, reaching down.

  “Don’t!” Aignar shouted. “Bahia bands for good luck. Our techs are all Brazilians. The knots are some sort of old pagan tradition. Color means what kind of wish was done when they gave it to you. Don’t take the band off yourself. When it gets burned or ripped off—and it will—the wishes will come true. Or that’s what they say. I don’t argue. They keep fixing my gear so I’m inclined not to piss them off.”

  “What does red mean?” Santos looked at Henrique and beat a fist to his breastplate.

  “Strength and passion. Doesn’t hurt to have that in a fight, though I could’ve used a four-leaf clover on more than one day. Let’s move. Gideon’s waiting.”

  ****

  Umbra passed beneath Santos’s feet as the Dragonfly transport skimmed over the planet’s surface. The undulations of the flight didn’t bother him inside his Armor’s shock-resistant pod, though if he’d been out of his Armor, he doubted he’d have kept his lunch down.

  Santos ran landing calculations through his suit’s systems. If the clamp around his waist suddenly released, he needed a plan before he was halfway down to a sudden stop against a mountainside.

  “Santos, this is Gideon,” came through his IR.

  The young Armor looked over at his commander’s suit in the harness next to his. The captain hadn’t spoken to him or Aignar since they loaded onto the Dragonfly inside the mountain base. Gideon had been in constant communication with higher echelons the entire flight, and Santos wasn’t so green that he had to be told not to chime in to that conv
ersation.

  “Sir. Honored to be under your command and an Iron Dragoon. Let me—”

  “I’m sending an operational overlay to you,” Gideon said. “Tell me what you see.”

  A terrain map of Umbra came up in Santos’s HUD. Blue rectangle unit symbols formed a roughly parallel line with red enemy diamonds through the mountains and valleys. A blinking curser marked the Dragonfly, heading for where the lines met between a tall range. Santos zoomed in on the forward edge of the battle lines and worked his jaw from side to side in confusion. A symbol for a Ranger brigade was moving south, opposite a Kesaht division moving north.

  “We’re retreating,” he said. “And so are the Kesaht…that’s happening across the continent.”

  “Why?” Gideon asked.

  “I don’t…forgive me, sir. I don’t know.”

  “The only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing,” Aignar said. “But being clueless on the battlefield is a good way to be wise and dead.”

  “Umbra is a slow-rotation planet,” Gideon said. “A full day lasts 211 hours. Long story short, the heat from the system primaries and the oceans on the other hemisphere make for some powerful Hadley cells. Hurricane-force winds and storms that’ll last the better part of an Earth day are on the way. Maneuverability and survivability in that environment are a challenge. No air support. No evac. Neither the Kesaht nor our ground forces can operate, so the storm surge puts a temporary truce into play.

  “There are bolt holes across the continent—caves and underground shelters for the original colonists—just big enough for a battalion of crunchies to fit into,” Gideon continued. “Issue arises that neither we nor the Kesaht can field a large enough force to overwhelm the other. Put too many troops in the field, they’ll get caught out in the storms.”

  “Stalemate,” Aignar said. “We’re bleeding each other dry without gaining any ground.”

  “Not a lot to eat in this place,” Gideon said. “And like most wars, this will come down to logistics. Intelligence has ‘high confidence’ they’ve identified supply depots behind the Kesaht lines. If we take enough of those out, the enemy forward troops will wither on the vine.”