by Richard Fox
Bale tossed the girl toward her. The child landed badly, shrieking in pain as she rolled to a stop, clutching an arm to her side.
Trinia crawled forward and pulled the girl against her, her size making the child appear like a baby cradled in her arms.
“You will complete my garden,” Bale said. “Fully grown human minds and bodies. Any delays or sabotage and I will feast on that one before your very eyes. Then I will give you a new whelp to care for. Another mewling calf to pay the price for your failures.”
The girl buried her face in Trinia’s bosom, sobbing.
“You’ll have it,” Trinia said. “When can I begin the work?”
“Pity,” Bale said, tapping his claws against the deck. “I’m a bit peckish. I’ll see you taken to the lab. Updates every orbit of this station. Tarry, and that one will pay the price.”
Bale’s legs raised the tank up and he left the room.
Brushing hair from the girl’s face, Trinia asked, “Your name?”
“Maggie,” the child said as her face scrunched up and another cry roiled to the surface.
“I won’t let anything bad happen to you anymore, little one. I promise.”
“I’m scared.”
“I know. I know.” Trinia looked over at the tank containing the mutated procedural. “This is what I do best. You have nothing to worry about. Trust me.”
Chapter 27
The doors to Stacey’s laboratory slid open as she approached. The room was circular, ringed by stacks atop of stacks of computer banks that stretched so high the upper reaches were lost in haze.
She walked into a semicircle of holo screens in the center of the room and a small dais raised her a few feet into the air.
Marc Ibarra hesitated in the doorway, his gaze on the bottom of the dais where Stacey’s flesh-and-blood body lay beneath, still in stasis, held moments away from death. A pair of humorless bodyguards flanked him.
Stacey raised her hands and the holo panels came to life with golden lattices that twisted around each other and made new connections between the nodes: Qa’Resh writing. Power thrummed through the computer banks around them.
She removed a jewel from Trinia’s necklace and dropped it onto a panel. An anti-grav field caught it and suspended it in the air. The Qa’Resh writing in the holo panels changed, and alien writing washed over the screens.
“Stacey,” Marc said evenly. “We need to talk. Alone.”
She waggled two fingers in the air and the bodyguards left, the doors sliding shut with a pneumatic hiss.
“Why?” Marc moved toward the dais, his fists at his chest. “She was your friend. She saved Earth with the procedurals and now—”
“The galaxy is a selfish place, Grandfather.” Stacey reached into a holo screen and flipped over a knot of script. It turned into a Qa’Resh lattice for a second before reverting. “Trinia had information I needed. If it came from her directly or from her notes…the notes are better. She might lie to me if she disagreed with our plan. Her written work…no such concerns.”
“The Toth have her!” Marc started up the few stairs to the dais and bounced off a force field.
“And that means one of two things,” Stacey said. “Bale has already ended her or they’ll put her to work. We can do nothing in the case of the former. The latter offers some hope for her. The overlord is no fool. He knows what she’s worth.”
“If she makes procedurals for him,” Marc said as he began pacing around the dais, hands clasped behind his back, “then he will have an unlimited supply of human beings. Cattle. Slave soldiers. It’s a betrayal to our Nation—”
“My Nation.” Stacey glared at him through the holo screens. “You’re a bystander, Grandfather. You gave up your mantle when you tried to betray us to Earth.”
“It’s a betrayal to everything the Nation stands for if we let the Toth and Kesaht torture Trinia into cooperating with them,” Marc said. “And there’s no guarantee everything you need is in those notes. That is the sum total of millennia of work with Qa’Resh technology. You think the crib sheets are exactly what we need?”
“They’ll be enough,” she replied.
“You don’t know that! You want to find the Ark and realize then that she has some missing piece?”
“I have work to do and you’re becoming a distraction,” Stacey said. “What do you want?”
“Save her! I saw the reports from our assets on Earth. We know where the Kesaht are hiding. She has to be held there. Join with the Union and—”
“Never!” Stacey slammed her hands onto the holo projectors and leaned over the side to lock eyes with Marc. “The Union can bleed themselves white against the Kesaht. I. Don’t. Care. I will not send my children to fight beside them, not when Garret and the Union will murder them for simply existing.”
Marc raised his palms to her. “We have a common enemy. The Kesaht want us just as dead. With our combined fleets, we could end that war and bring the rest of the galaxy to the table.”
“You are a fool.” She leaned back and swiped a new screen into view. “Once we have the Ark, there will be no one to stand in our way. The last intact and fully functioning Qa’Resh ship in the galaxy. A technological quantum leap. You remember what we saw at the dimension gate, where Malal met justice.”
“I’d rather not. His screams were…” Marc turned his gaze away. “This Ark belonged to Malal, didn’t it? You want to taint ourselves with that evil?”
“Tools are not evil,” Stacey said. “Nor am I.”
“We need Trinia,” Marc said. “What if you’re wrong about the Ark? The longer we wait, the more likely it is that Bale will have what he needs from her and then kill her for sport.”
“There is one other group of people with similar experience with Qa’Resh technology,” she said. “I’ve my agents working to procure such an expert now. Much easier than fighting through every Kesaht in their home system.”
“What? Who?” Marc cocked his head up at her. “No…Stacey, they’re peaceful. Let them—”
The holo panels changed to a galactic map. Tens of thousands of points came up, distributed around the core, but a small swath of the galactic southeast had only a few dots. Marc knew what he was looking at—Crucible gates. The Xaros seeded them over habitable worlds or systems with ancient ruins. The area with fewer gates was old Alliance territory and belonged to species that had built gates in the last few decades after the Ember War.
A golden circle appeared in the outer edge of the Perseus Arm. No Crucible gates were within a hundred light-years.
“The Ark is there?” Marc asked. “But that’s in the Null Zone. The Qa’Resh never contacted any species there.”
“Every probe they sent vanished,” Stacey said. “The Alliance was so focused on the Xaros, it wasn’t worth the time or energy to look harder into the region. But that is where we’ll find the Ark.”
“And what else will we find there?” he asked. “We might be better off leaving well enough alone before traipsing into someplace that does not want to be bothered.”
“If we fight this war without the Ark, billions will die,” she said. “If we take this risk, lives will be saved—human lives, at least. Are you afraid of the unknown?”
“Earth’s war is our war,” Marc said. “You’re ignoring the battle right outside our door for-for what? A Hail Mary? A superweapon that might not even exist and one there’s no guarantee you can even wield. Trinia needs us. The innocent people on Earth and the colonies need us. Don’t talk about a mantle of leadership and just turn your back on them when we’re needed the most.”
“I need the Ark.” Stacey looked down at the dais. Down to her body in stasis beneath. “It will all come together, Grandfather. You’ll see. Now…I must prepare my army. If there is something in the Null Zone, we’ll be ready to fight for the Ark.”
“Stacey, my darling, I’m begging you to—”
She snapped her fingers and the bodyguards returned.
“Gentlem
en, return him to his cell and see he’s given regular updates on the war effort,” she said. “I may have need of him once the Breitenfeld is ours. Or not. Goodbye, Mr. Ibarra.”
Marc shrugged off the grasp of a guard and walked out of the laboratory, his head stooped in defeat.
Stacey raised her hands like a conductor and began weaving through data.
Chapter 28
Keeper stood in the bottom of the Crucible’s bowl-shaped command center. Her eyes were closed, but her surface swirled with fractals as tendrils of light danced from her fingertips to the Crucible’s basalt-colored floor.
President Garret and General Laran waited nearby. The head of the Terran Union leaned against an unmanned control panel and checked his watch. Laran had her arms crossed over her stomach, her eyes never wavering from Keeper.
“She said she had it,” Garret mumbled. “There are a million fires I have to put out right now. Evaccing colonies. Mercury omnium factory production schedules. A photo op to the macro-cannon emplacement near Vesta that made the mass driver kill. A dozen different military funerals I should be at, but—”
“Sir,” Laran interrupted as she reached behind her head and touched her plugs, “we’re better off being here soon as she succeeds, than being millions of miles away when a decision needs to be made.”
“You like waiting?” Garret touched his jacket and felt the bottle of pills in a breast pocket.
“You’d think a flag officer and the commander-in-chief would be immune to hurry up and wait…but here we are,” she said.
The light faded away from Keeper’s fingers, and the Xaros drone in the shape of a woman turned around.
“I found the Kesaht,” she said. A ripple went over her shell, erasing the fractal patterns and changing her appearance to a well-built woman with a lined face. She raised a hand and a map of the galaxy appeared between them. A spiderweb of Crucible networks overlaid the map, and Keeper touched a star far from any gate in space, a star never occupied by the Xaros during their long march through the Milky Way.
“Sigma Tau 9-9,” Torni said. “Catalogued as a potential habitable system. On the priority list for second-phase settlement. The plan was to open a one-way wormhole to the system, build a Crucible with robots, and bring in colonists. The Hale Treaty put a stop to that plan. It was easier to settle worlds with their preexisting gates and increase standoff distance from mass driver attack.”
“How do you know the Kesaht are there?” Laran asked.
“Data echoes from the Risen’s passing,” Keeper said. “They set up a number of hops to different Crucibles throughout the galaxy. There must have been some fidelity loss, as data kept leaking through the system to here. But this is where it stopped.”
“Within range of the old jump drives before the Qa’Resh disabled them all,” Laran said. “Your theory that the Toth jumped to an inhabited system after their home world was…dealt with…checks out.”
“Can we slag the planet?” Garret asked. “Drop a few dozen mass drivers of our own on it?”
“New Bastion will lose their minds if we do that,” Laran said. “Support for the Vishrakath alliance evaporated after Novis.”
“But no one else has come to our side,” Garret said. “They can’t help any less than they are now.”
“Three gates are within offset jump distance.” Keeper waggled her fingers and three points appeared on the map near the Kesaht system. “All settled by the Utishan. They’re neutral in this war…and have colonies and Crucibles along our galactic south, the only place we’re not fighting pitched battles.”
“If we show up to borrow their gates for a little artillery practice, we’ve got another war on our hands,” Garret snarled. “So much for that idea.”
“I can get a fleet through to the Kesaht system,” Keeper said. “There’s a cipher embedded in the Risen signature that overrides the lockout. Same one I’ve felt moving through the network when other Risen have been killed.”
“Then why not open the gate and send a mass driver through?” Garret asked. “A warhead with a thousand nukes to glass their whole planet?”
Keeper gestured to the map and the Kesaht’s star came up. Tiny smudges of planets appeared.
“We only have artifact light for Sigma Tau 9-9,” she said. “Hundreds of years old by the time it was catalogued. Where anything is in the system now is a guess. They may have settled an asteroid belt, moved to a gas giant’s moon. We don’t know their defenses. We send a mass driver through, we don’t even know what to aim for.”
“It must be done,” General Laran said, “must be done by the Terran Union in person. Nukes are unreliable. The Crucibles can flood any system with a dampening field to stop any fusion or fission warhead from activating.”
“Frag the gate?” Garret asked.
“It will repair itself,” Keeper said. “That might buy us a few months.”
“We have one shot at a surprise attack,” Laran said. “Bring them to their knees quickly now and it will cost us less in ships and blood. If we go back after they have months to fortify…”
Garret sighed and leaned toward the blurry image of the Kesaht system.
“How many ships can you send through?” he asked.
“If I can keep the wormhole open…there’s no limit,” Keeper said. “But if they sabotage the gate themselves, break the link soon as we come through, it gets tougher. I can guarantee several hundred of our capital ships can get through in the initial push. Any more than that and they’ll detect the disturbance coming to them.”
“That should do it,” Garret said. “We’re not there for a pinpoint strike. We’re there to crush the Kesaht once and for all. Wreck their shipyards. Knock them down to the Stone Age. Seize the Crucible and bring the threat of nuclear destruction. Cut their deployed fleets off and let them die on the vine. We’ll end them in one swift stroke.”
“That many ships is our entire reserve,” Laran said. “If anything goes wrong, other fronts will become untenable.”
“You mean we’ll lose,” Garret huffed. “We’re not winning this war, General. You know it and I know it. This is our chance to regain the momentum.”
“I’ll need my Armor Corps,” Laran said. “And 14th Fleet soon as they’ve finished maneuvers over Venus.”
“You’ll have them, and the 9th and 12th,” Garret said. “We’ll feign an offensive to the Syracuse sector. Keep the Kesaht from realizing what we’re up to.”
“There are risks,” Keeper said. “If the fleets go through and the Kesaht damage their wormhole…no reinforcements unless the Utishan let us through. You could be cut off, General. No way to get word in or out.”
“Acceptable.” The general tugged the front of her tunic to straighten it out. “There will be no substitute for victory.”
“I must ask,” Keeper said. “What if we invite the Ibarrans to—”
“No,” Garret shook his head. “They’re not to be trusted. Not now. Not ever.”
A ripple went down Keeper’s shell.
“You’ve a problem with that?” Laran asked.
“No, ma’am.” Keeper shook her head. “We can beat the Kesaht on our own.”
“Recall the Breitenfeld from Syracuse,” Garret said. “We’ll have Admiral Valdar command the fleets. Good for morale.” The president plucked a data slate from his jacket and there was a rattle of pills.
He put the slate to his ear and walked out of the control room.
“I’ll need at least thirty-six hours,” Laran said. “Recall all forward deployed Armor. My Corps will find the Toth overlord and bring his broken shell back to Mars as a trophy. This will be our victory. Not the Templars’. Not for Kallen.”
“Then I wish you God’s speed and good hunting,” Keeper said. “Don’t deny the Saint. Never hurts to have too much help in your corner.”
Laran snorted derisively and left.
Keeper double-checked that her appearance was “normal” and sent a signal to recall the Crucible’s brid
ge crew. She looked up through the viewport in the ceiling to Earth and crossed herself.
“Sancti spiritus adsit nobis gratia. Kallen, ferrum corde…”
THE END
The Story continues in FERRUM CORDE, coming summer 2018!
FROM THE AUTHOR
Hello Dear and Gentle Reader,
Thank you for reading The Last Aeon. I hope you enjoyed your time with Roland and the Armor, much more on the way!
Please leave a review on Amazon and let me know how I’m doing as a storyteller.
I’ve been a fan of science fiction since I saw Star Wars in the theater when I was a wee lad. My love for all things spaceship and giant robot has only grown over time, I’m fortunate that I can add a few new stories to the genre.
Drop me a line at [email protected].
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Also By Richard Fox:
The Ember War Saga:
1. The Ember War
2. The Ruins of Anthalas
3. Blood of Heroes
4. Earth Defiant
5. The Gardens of Nibiru
6. The Battle of the Void
7. The Siege of Earth
8. The Crucible
9. The Xaros Reckoning
Terran Armor Corps:
1. Iron Dragoons
2. The Ibarra Sanction
3. The True Measure
4. A House Divided
5. The Last Aeon
6. Ferrum Corde (Coming Summer 2018)
The Exiled Fleet Series:
1. Albion Lost
2. The Long March
3. Their Finest Hour (Coming 2018)
Read THE EMBER WAR for Free
