“You have such potential, Max,” Aegis said. “Such promise. That is what makes you so disappointing.”
“Shut up.”
“Telling me to be silent will not—”
“I said shut up. I’ll do it.”
The countdown to launch reached ten seconds. Major Brianne Lindeman began speaking in his ear. “Sir, all birds are ready to fly at your command. We—”
Her voice cut off as Aegis initiated the connection, and Max became Brianne Lindeman—as well as Jordan O’Hare, Juan Vicario, Tom Richards, and all the others.
As one, they launched. He launched.
66
2 days to extinction
Almost immediately, the mother ship began hammering the Absolver with its upper gravity cannon.
The first shot hit, blowing off an entire section of the saucer’s rim. Max watched the explosion from sixteen different perspectives as it flared and then sputtered out in the breathless void.
Aegis took evasive action, and the second shot missed. With that, she withdrew, to harass the mother ship from afar.
Swarms of interceptors burst from the great vessel, spreading out in an attempt to envelop Max’s squadron. He knew the best approach would be to try to punch through them, in a unified fist—except that doing so would make him vulnerable to getting decimated by one of the mother ship’s gravity cannons.
Instead, he spread his Larks wide, each performing its own intricate dance. He followed sixteen different paths at once, every ship firing three thousand rounds per minute from all four Gatling guns.
Periodically, the Absolver’s laser blazed through the middle of the engagement, boring holes through the mother ship’s hull. The great vessel turned its belly away from its tormentor and returned fire with one of its gravity cannon. Each shot took out dozens of interceptors at once.
From the iterations, Max already knew where each cannon shot would land, and he avoided those areas. Simultaneously, he wove sixteen fighters through the bright lattice created by the interceptors’ lasers. None of the enemy lasers landed—at least, not long enough to do meaningful damage to a Lark hull.
Of course, the iterations weren’t perfect. Not this time. They were fighting an intelligence even greater than Aegis, and though the conditions of battle forced certain actions—if the Absolver fired here, then the mother ship moved to evade here, and returned fire there—there was a broad range those actions could fall within. Max had to account for that entire range. Twice, he evaded the cannon’s fire only because the wave of exploding interceptors in its wake provided warning. Those were narrow misses.
His mind felt fragmented, but at the same time he’d never felt more whole. He was a collective, one which embodied sixteen lives’ worth of triumphs and failures, loves won and lost, friendships forged and enemies made.
It was like drinking the most bittersweet drink ever made, from a fire hose. But he couldn’t let it distract him.
With sixteen Lark X-1s, he wove a complex tapestry through the enemy swarm. When reality showed signs of diverging from his optimal iteration, he ran news ones that covered just a few seconds ahead. From his perspective, the engagement proceeded in stutters and starts. One wrong move would trigger a cascade of exploding Larks, and he would try another tack—another iteration. Then another. And another.
Each time he finally executed an optimized, seconds-long plan, interceptors burned. They crashed into each other, foiled by his squadron’s complex dance. That dance followed a pattern only long enough to set the enemy’s expectations, and then to exploit those expectations. He cut through their fleet like a hot knife through butter.
Then, he lost Second Lieutenant Tom Richards, and everything changed.
He didn’t just lose him. He died as him. A roller coaster of a life was cut short—one filled with duty, loyalty, and hardship. The lieutenant had once struggled with addiction and isolation, until he’d joined the Air Force and turned his life around. He’d vanquished a demon that destroyed many who fell in its sway. Only to die, here, because Max had failed.
The shock to Max’s system made him sit rigid in his Lark’s cockpit, with his hands still on the throttle and sidestick. For just a moment, he withdrew from the battle at large.
And then he lost Captain O’Hare.
He gasped, the emotional blow just as devastating as Richards’ loss. But he knew that if he didn’t pull himself together, right away, he would lose them all. He threw himself back into the iterations to find a way out of the tangle of interceptors they’d gotten themselves into.
As Major Brianne Lindeman, he loosed a pair of Sidewinders at two interceptors that confronted her.
As Captain Juan Vicario, he swept his Gatlings across a dense cluster of enemies, forcing them back.
As himself, he fired his gravity cannon, taking out seven interceptors that had lined themselves up, if only for a split second. Long enough to end them.
As every pilot in his squadron, he executed the best flying any of them were capable of. No, better. He was the sum of their parts. He was the best fighter pilot who had ever lived.
They neared the mother ship, and its point defense turrets blazed. Each Lark X-1 executed flawless guns-D maneuvers, informed by Aegis’ intimate knowledge of each weapon’s subroutines.
We’ve done it. We’ve broken through.
But it was no time to celebrate. They had to hit the first engine, hard. He didn’t have to give the order to perform an alpha strike. He was the alpha strike.
Fourteen Sidewinders flew, speeding ahead to converge on the engine, which each Lark’s display outlined in red. As the missiles neared, they added gravity cannon fire to the volley.
The engine exploded in a spectacular shower of flame and shrapnel.
A thrill shot through him—shot through the body of every pilot in the squadron. They’d done it. He’d done it.
He felt more powerful than he’d ever felt before. More accomplished. More righteous.
He could take on the entire universe like this. The entire invasion fleet.
Send them all. I’ll kill every one of them.
On his way to the second engine, he lost another Lark. Thirteen left.
Then, the alpha strike on the second engine failed to destroy it. Most of his gravity cannons missed their mark, instead leaving craters in the hull around the engine.
The squadron’s momentum carried it past, and the interceptors zipped after, hard on their heels.
In space, there was no banking. No using your momentum to swoop around for another pass. He now had to brake hard and thrust in the opposite direction, through the oncoming swarm of enemies.
Another Lark burst apart under enemy fire as the squadron arrested its own momentum under the power of element 115, then accelerated back toward the target.
Then, a group of interceptors converged on Max’s fighter.
He had no choice. If his Lark was destroyed, they would all be destroyed.
So he sent Vicario’s fighter to intercept the group.
It exploded, and the sacrifice bought them the breathing room to slip past and hit the engine again.
This time, they succeeded. Flame and shrapnel exploded from the mother ship’s underbelly.
Eleven Lark X-1s danced through the enemy fleet, flying back toward the Absolver, which Aegis had maneuvered closer.
The transport shuttle was flung from one of the saucer’s bays, and the Larks closed around it, escorting it toward the mother ship’s hull.
Eleven fighters became ten. Then eight. Max felt every death like a sledgehammer blow to his heart.
He lost another.
Finally, they entered the mother ship through one of its interceptor launch tubes.
They were in.
67
2 days to extinction
Max popped open his Lark’s hatch, stumbled out into some sort of hangar bay, and tore off his helmet with barely a thought for whether the landing bay was pressurized, with breathable air.
>
He bent over to vomit onto the deck, his stomach’s contents splashing across the blue-gray deck. Only then did he attempt to suck in a lungful of air.
Fresh oxygen rushed into his lungs. The landing bay’s air was breathable. Thank God.
The other six surviving pilots seemed in worse shape than him. Two of them didn’t get out of their fighters at all. Of the other four, Lieutenant Yates fainted as soon as he stepped out of his Lark, and Max winced as his head hit the hangar deck, hard.
Two other pilots were also throwing up. Only one had the strength, or the will, to make her way to Max after dragging herself from her fighter.
Major Brianne Lindeman delivered a full-arm slap that made him stagger sideways, ears ringing. Nearly, he stumbled to his knees—it seemed the gravity aboard the mother ship was slightly below what he was used to.
He wiped his mouth with a sleeve, then clapped a hand to his cheek, which stung. Lindeman just stood there and glared, as if waiting for him to say something.
He felt nothing like the grand hero who saves the world. Instead, he felt wretched. Pathetic.
“How dare you,” Lindeman said when he didn’t speak.
The urge to apologize made him open his mouth, but he closed it again. He’d violated the free will of fifteen people, and in doing so he’d lost nine of them. An apology of any sort would feel cheap. Meaningless.
Plus, if he had it to do again to save humanity, he would.
Lindeman trembled visibly. “We trusted you to lead us. Not…not enslave us.”
He returned her gaze, burning with shame and almost wishing she would strike him again.
“Vicario, Richards…all of them…you robbed them of the chance to sacrifice themselves for their country,” she said. “For humanity. They didn’t make that sacrifice—you did. You turned them into tools.”
“They made the sacrifice by getting into their Larks,” Max said, amazed at his ability to keep his voice steady.
For a moment, he felt sure she would hit him again.
The shuttle’s hatch opened, and Chambers emerged at the head of thirty-three GDA operatives. His expression was already grim, but when he saw Max and Lindeman, it hardened further. He walked briskly over.
“What’s going on?”
“This…monster.” She flicked her hand toward Max, apparently at a loss for words.
Chambers looked at him. “Max?”
He shook his head.
“Listen,” Chambers said. “Whatever happened out there, it worked. We’re in. Right now, I need you to pull it together. Lindeman, I want every one of your pilots to take a weapon and help us push through whatever this ship has in store for us next. We don’t have time to process anything right now, or to grieve. Not if we’re going to see this thing done.”
With obvious reluctance, Lindeman pulled her gaze away from Max. She headed to the shuttle, where Sergeant Zimmerman was handing a weapon to one of the pilots who’d vomited. That done, Zimmerman headed to one of the Larks that was still closed, and opened it. A weak groan came from inside. The sergeant helped the occupant down to the deck.
Remembering himself, Max returned to his own Lark and took out the gray block he’d taken from the Absolver, which Aegis had called the Receptacle. It was their salvation, according to her. But then, she might be biased, considering it basically was her.
As always, he had no choice but to trust her. No matter how much it kept costing him to do that.
Chambers placed a hand on his shoulder. “You good?”
Max couldn’t stop himself from shaking. He felt weak.
“Here.” Chambers fished a wrapped bar from his pocket, tearing the package open and handing it to him. “Keep your blood sugar up.”
Max took a bite, chewed, and swallowed. Almost, he vomited it back up. Only sheer force of will kept it down.
Halfway through the bar, Chambers handed him his Colt semi-automatic. “Come on. We’re out of time. I’m surprised they haven’t hit us yet.”
Nodding, Max shifted the smooth gray block under his left arm and accepted the weapon with his right hand. He forced himself through the motions of checking over the rifle.
Chambers’ squad members were ministering to the pilots as best they could. Near one of the Larks, Sergeant Zimmerman was shaking the still form of Lieutenant Daniels.
Chambers was staring over at them. “Leave him.”
Zimmerman looked up. “Sir?”
“Anyone not fit to stand can’t come with us. I plan to set a grueling pace. Get them in the shuttle and lock them in there. That will have to be enough.”
With evident reluctance, Zimmerman oversaw his men as they helped three incapacitated Lark pilots into the shuttle. It brought their force down to thirty-eight.
Chambers was looking Max over. “I’d love to offer you the chance to stay and rest, but I don’t think you get that luxury. We may need you in there.”
“I get it.”
A clanking came from the shuttle’s hatch, drawing Max and Chambers’ attention. Two of the GDA operatives were dragging a fifteen-foot ladder from the craft.
“Santos. Cox. What the hell are you two doing?”
The two men stopped, looking somewhat sheepish.
“Found this in a compartment under the deck,” one of them said with a faint Hispanic accent. Max assumed he was Santos. “It would make an awful good breach ladder, sir.”
“Breach ladder?” Chambers’ voice dripped with skepticism. Then, his expression softened. “Well, maybe you’re onto something. If you’re prepared to carry it while running, go ahead and take it.” The agent raised his voice. “Let’s go, people. We have a journey ahead of us.”
With that, they started down the first passageway.
They continued to encounter no resistance. Chambers set them to jogging for fifty meters, then walking for fifty, stopping for brief rests every so often. But not nearly often enough.
The other Absolvers will catch up with us eventually. Max wasn’t sure whether that mattered. Even if the other craft had more Skirth fighters aboard, he doubted they’d be able to catch up in time to interfere with the mission Max and the others were on, to replace the mother ship’s core.
An hour in, two GDA operatives took pity on Santos and Cox, taking a turn carrying the ladder. Max would have pitched in himself, except that he held the gray block that contained Aegis’ consciousness, and he had no intention of letting anyone else carry that.
Recently, Max had been surprised a few times at the conditioning his first year at the academy had given him. But life had been far too interesting lately, and he was tired, his breathing coming in gasps.
As they pushed through the mother ship, the vessel took many forms. Cramped corridors that forced them to walk single-file. Metal bridges spanning canyons that fell away into nothing. Great domes filled with vegetation, with a distant, light-speckled overhead that gave a convincing impression of the night sky. The craft’s sheer variety was unexpected, and Max wondered what secrets it might hold.
It was one thing to look at the behemoth while zipping around in a Moscovium-powered space fighter, and quite another to traverse it on foot.
The lack of resistance did nothing to comfort the soldiers. Instead, it made them tense and irritable. Most of their tiny force wore tight scowls, and the smallest sounds would cause them to jump, swinging their weapon toward the source.
But nothing impeded their progress. Not yet. Of course, the long journey was its own line of defense. What better way to soften them than to exhaust them?
Two hours in, they encountered the first defender—an alien belonging to the same centipede-like species they’d encountered on the moon. It slithered toward them the moment it saw them, lighting fast. Machine gun fire tore it to pieces.
“Stop shooting,” Chambers said. When his men’s fingers stayed tight on their triggers, he screamed it. “Stop shooting!”
At last, they did, most of them breathing heavily. The being had been sliced
into three distinct sections by the weapons fire, its brown blood painting the sapphire-tinged deck. An antenna twitched from one of the thing’s ends.
They pressed on, and Max found himself trying to piece together why the Scion wouldn’t take direct control of the centipedes, so that they each fought with perfect efficiency.
There had to be a reason. Maybe the Scion used the neural dust to program the centipedes with a directive to kill anything that wasn’t them, then cut them loose. That way, even if an infiltrator found a way to cut the Scion’s connection with its underlings, the things would still kill any invaders.
Drawing on a reserve of strength he was surprised he still had, Max caught up with Chambers. “We can expect to encounter a lot more of those things, I bet.”
The agent nodded. “I was thinking the same thing.” He glanced down at the gray block, still under Max’s arm. “You want me to take a turn with that thing?”
“No,” Max said, too quickly. “It has to be me.”
Over the next hour, they encountered a few more lone aliens, and then groups of two and three. Their appearance didn’t have nearly the same effect on Chambers’ men as the first centipede had, and they made short work of them, without wasting the kind of ammo they had before.
It was only when they started running into packs of the things that the real problems began.
Mostly, Chambers had them backtrack at the first sight of the larger gangs, to find another way around. The mother ship offered no shortage of alternate routes, it seemed: up or down, straight or curved, abrupt or winding.
But sometimes, engaging was unavoidable. Like when they were passing through a four-way intersection, and centipedes came at them from all sides, including the way they’d come.
Chambers didn’t hold back, then. He quickly organized his force, and had them line up their magazines within easy reach. The centipedes slithered toward them with unsettling speed, and the GDA operatives let loose with their SAWs, cutting the giant insects to pieces. Beside Max, Major Lindeman went through an entire box of ammo, which surprised him until he realized that he had, too.
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