Stand or Fall (The Omega War Book 4)

by Kevin Ikenberry

  “I believe in the concept of hope, Nyalla. I hope there is peace. I do not want war to rage throughout the galaxy again. I hope Humans are more like the Peacemaker and not like the mercenaries she put down. If they are, perhaps more of our kind would believe in them, too.”

  Chee expected laughter, instead Nyalla nodded her head. “Belief is a difficult concept—as is hope—but I find myself agreeing with you, Chee. I am not sure Humans are the enemy Drehnayl and Chinayl think them to be. This war is about something else, I believe. Killing Humans and earning credits for our work is easy, but it is not honorable. If we are to fight them, then we should fight them, and Drehnayl will be forced to do so soon. When she does, I believe she will hesitate, which will allow the Humans a chance to win. Should they do so, it will offer hope to the Humans that they can fight us. War will most certainly come if that happens.”

  Chee looked down at her timer. “Two minutes to go. What do we do in the meantime?”

  “I believe this meeting didn’t occur by chance. Nor do I believe Chinayl came here to simply congratulate her clutch-sister on a job well done. I believe Chinayl is planning for the worst. I believe Chinayl expects Drehnayl to fail. Why else would she arrange for a force of Flatar and Tortantulas to accompany us? Chinayl doesn’t believe our ground forces can win, even with the two additional transports of troops she’s given us, and I don’t think so, either. The Human CASPers and tanks are formidable foes, especially when they work together.”

  “What do you think Chinayl will do?”

  “Not will do, Chee. What is she doing now?” Nyalla asked. “I assume Chinayl knows exactly what targets we will hit. When Chinayl senses danger, or imminent failure, she’ll appear on the battlefield. Chinayl wants the glory, Chee. She is Peepo’s representative, but once a MinSha becomes a general, they begin to think about their legacy to the brood. They dream higher and bigger with little thought of the consequences. Chinayl wants to impress Peepo with her prowess. Setting up Drehnayl, who wants political power without action, to fail is the easiest way. We have to be ready.”

  Chee froze. “What do you mean?”

  “Chinayl wants this war to happen, Chee. She’ll do anything for it. She’ll push beyond exploiting Human fear. She believes she can punish humanity for their exploration of the galaxy. She believes only she can stop them and doing so will give her the clout to challenge Peepo and the Mercenary Guild council. When Drehnayl fails, she’ll come charging in to finish off the Humans and press forward for all-out war without stopping to consider the consequences. We may have to stop her as well.”

  Such talk was mutiny, and, as the executive officer, Chee could have immediately arrested and charged the younger officer. Nyalla would have been dead by the end of their orbit once Drehnayl knew. Such a move could have gained Drehnayl’s trust…but Nyalla’s words rang true. Drehnayl was far from a competent field commander, and Chinayl was a bloodthirsty warrior. There would be a failure and a re-engagement with a far more violent force. Once committed, Chinayl would destroy Earth and any other planet that stood in the way of what she wanted. Chee felt an ache in her head that hadn’t been there before. Aware of her pulse thumping in her extremities, she looked at the younger officer.

  “You’re right, Nyalla.”

  The operations officer visibility relaxed and keyed her console. “All hands, secure from drill. I say again, secure from drill. Re-stow all gear. Bridge out.”

  Chee waggled her antennae. “What do we do next?”

  “Observe. I’m guessing Chinayl put something on a ship in the fleet to track us. Something that would communicate with the gate systems on its own. It won’t be on the command ship, either. It will be on one of the support vessels. From there, she’ll know when we attack and when we fail.”

  Since their conversation, Chee hadn’t looked at the records for fear of being discovered. With Nyalla now resting and Drehnayl preoccupied, she opened the records and scanned them, looking for anything out of the ordinary. On the cruiser Tral-Ya, Chee found an extra crate of ammunition unmatched to any of the weapons systems on that ship. Any good logistical officer would assume the transaction was a mistake and place the crate in a corner of the hold to barter later. Opening it wouldn’t work because the supposed ammunition within would lose its value. Chee chittered to herself in admiration. Chinayl and her staff were professionals, but they erred when they didn’t expect there to be similar professionals on her staff.

  Chinayl wanted war, but when her mystery crate found its way into hyperspace, Chinayl would be powerless to make an all-out war happen. For the moment, Chee believed she and Nyalla had the upper hand. All they had to do was eliminate the crate, and whatever Chinayl had planted inside, before leaving Danube. If the general was unable to follow their movements or force Drehnayl’s hand, they might have a chance of preventing war.

  * * * * *

  Chapter Fourteen

  Above Luna

  With the darkened surface of Luna below her and the full disc of Earth above her, Tameera and her four operators fell silently through space toward their landing zone on the outskirts of Tycho City. Her wrist slate identified the dark, empty space below her as the Ocean of Storms. The only things of interest there were the landing sites of Human Apollo Missions 12 and 14. That Humans leveraged sub-standard technology and spirit to get to their moon more than 150 years before said something about Human ingenuity, but so far, they’d been a bane on the rest of the galaxy’s existence. Tameera pushed the thoughts away. High-altitude jumps allowed too much time for idle thoughts and dreams, and they disrupted the necessary focus of the mission at hand.

  They’d jumped from the Veetanho ship three hours earlier. Well within Luna’s gravity well, there was nothing to do for the better part of the three and a half hours before they’d deploy their landing jets and initiate a walk-off landing along the transportation spur protruding toward the lunar northwest of Tycho Crater. The outlying warehouses and domiciles sat far enough away from the main starport approach corridors that no one would notice them. As long as their descent packs functioned properly, there would be no issues with landing and link-up. The landing point appeared on Tameera’s heads-up display, and she grinned behind her faceplate.

  Most of the Human mercenary companies had private storage facilities on Luna, and they were heavily protected from infiltration, even from space. Other companies, especially those involved with interspecies commercial ventures, possessed intricate defensive systems. With Peepo’s forces hovering over Earth some 370,000 kilometers away, every defensive security system on Luna was active, save for a handful, including her target. With the abrupt liquidation of Intergalactic Haulers, a five-kilometer square storage facility sat mostly empty on the lunar surface. A collection of empty storage containers dotted the landing zone, but they would not prevent an infiltration. In fact, the ones nearest the main transportation corridors into Tycho would serve as a perfect link-up point.

  Silently, Tameera sent data packets to her team members falling through the void above and behind her. All of them acknowledged the new plan and adjusted their descents perfectly. Spread out over a hundred kilometers and falling on different vectors, the team would appear as a shower of space debris if Human sensors registered them. The vast darkness of the Ocean of Storms receded behind her as the bright lights of Tycho City dominated the horizon. With more than sixty thousand Humans, Tycho was the largest colony on Luna and home to the various diplomatic missions from the other species in the galaxy. Most found Earth oppressively warm and moist, or they complained about the nauseating odors of Humans. Luna was the perfect place for diplomacy and chaos.

  Tycho City was a large domed structure inside the crater. The inner city lay partially beneath the lunar surface to a depth of five hundred meters. The pressurized dome held a steady, comfortable atmosphere for inhabitants without being conducive to fire or explosions. Most of the diplomatic missions and consulates located themselves in the inner city for their protection. The
Peacemakers built a separate consulate away from the inner city and close to an auxiliary starport and their own storage facilities. Such separation also gave the Peacemakers the ability to post their own sentinels and engage defensive security systems like those of mercenary companies. Despite their best efforts at intelligence gathering for the past two weeks, they’d been unable to determine what systems or engagement criteria the Peacemakers would employ against a threat. They would certainly respond, as was part of their creed, but the breadth of any defense was a complete unknown.

  No matter. Our mission is simple enough.

  Her slate vibrated on her wrist as she reached the primary landing decision point. With her other paw, Tameera tapped on the face and sent the confirmation command to her team. The landing zone was in sight, empty and seemingly undefended. Tameera activated her low-gravity insertion exoskeleton and felt a hum through her pressure suit. The lightweight exoskeleton deployed its small engines off two pods at her feet. A series of reaction control jets on points along the suit’s arms and legs came to life and moved her into a feet-down, eyes backward position for landing. Proximity radars came to life at three hundred meters above the surface. With a barely perceptible push, she felt the engines on her feet ignite and accelerate quickly. Within a few seconds, her forward velocity slowed to nearly zero. The altitude ticked down.

  200 meters.

  150 meters.

  100 meters.

  At forty meters, her boots accelerated to 104% power and slowed her vertical descent to less than 2 meters per second. At ten meters above the surface, her forward and vertical velocities near zero, Tameera nulled out the reaction control system. At four meters, she disengaged the system entirely and dropped to the surface. Legs bent to absorb the shock, the lower part of the exoskeleton touched the regolith first. With a slap on her chest, the exoskeleton’s harness dropped away. She jumped forward enough to clear the skeleton’s fall and sank to her boot tops in the fine gray dust.

  Tameera tapped her slate to engage the mission timer. Turning to the fallen exoskeleton, she removed her rifle from its supply harness and her small operations pack. As she looked up, two more of her team executed similarly flawless landings. They silently gathered their weapons and gear. Kneeling on the surface, Tameera watched her final two operators descend to the landing zone. Within four minutes, all were down safe, weapons in hand, ready to move.

  Already ahead of schedule. Tameera initiated their direct communications suite. “Good job, team. Phase two. Security forward.”

  The first two Veetanho on the ground moved to the lunar west, toward the transportation spurs. With local observed time at 0230 hours, there was very light traffic in the outer subdivided areas. The team found a maintenance tube for the electromagnetic rail corridor positioned against a dim bulkhead and slid inside one by one. The tube ran directly to the inner city and had a central height of more than two meters. Still in their pressure suits, they bounded down the tube toward Tycho City. Four kilometers passed quickly, and they slowed to a stop at their rally point. The tube’s path lay just two hundred meters from the Peacemaker Consulate’s outer wall.

  Tameera found the closest access point, and they slid up the tube junction silently. With a few taps on her slate, she located the access point they’d chosen, a maintenance port on the compound’s northwest corner. Moving through the dim spaces between linked buildings and structures, they reached the port without effort. Tameera withdrew a connection cord from her operations pack and connected one end to her slate and the other to the maintenance port’s external control panel.

  Now to see if what we paid handsomely for works.

  Nothing happened. Tameera felt a nauseating panic rising in her stomach. Her eyes flitted over the connections and the cord, making sure nothing was amiss. The panel would alert a false entry after thirty seconds and—

  The external panel lights turned green. Tameera swallowed a sigh and opened the port. She and her team were inside the Peacemaker Consulate in seconds. They cycled through the internal airlock and shed their pressure suits. Near the maintenance section was a low-energy incinerator where they disposed of their suits. Once they completed their mission, she and her team would walk out of a supply corridor on the far side of the compound. She looked at her team. They worked in pairs and each pair had a particular mission. She would move alone to the Peacemaker guild master’s chambers.

  “Any questions?” she asked. They were her best operators, and they had no questions. “Avoid everything possible. Kill with stealth, if you must. Destroy their communications suite and their armory. Let it all burn. Meet at the extraction point according to plan. Anyone who is not there will be left behind.”

  All four nodded. There was nothing more to say. She nodded in return, and the two teams collected their suits and moved down an access way toward the incinerator. After tossing their suits inside, they went their separate ways. Tameera tapped her slate to get the interior map of the consulate. After it appeared, she pulled up an image of her sister, Qamm, who died on Araf in the mission that made Jessica Francis the first Human Peacemaker. Qamm had died at the hands of the Altar Queen, Klatk, but the circumstances didn’t matter to Tameera. Her death was on Jessica Francis and the Peacemaker Guild, who sent the Human woman to end a conflict before it could begin.

  They would all pay for Qamm’s death, but none more than the guild master. She steeled herself. The Peacemaker Consulate, even outside of regular business hours, would be difficult to navigate. Success for her team depended on absolute stealth. Getting close to the guild master’s chambers would require every bit of training she’d had and more than her fair share of luck. Yet, the deeper she pushed into the compound, the more brazen she became. Dark, silent hallways gave her freedom of movement. Every security console required a moment or two of focused work. Those were the times when the shadows seemed to flinch, and her fur stood on end at the thought of getting caught.

  The Peacemaker Consulate was built in concentric circles. The inner circles, where the tactical and leadership decisions of the guild originated, rose seven levels. The guild master’s chambers were four levels up, and the most direct route to them, not to mention the riskiest, was to ascend a combination of ventilation ducts along the southern wall. At the maintenance access, her ears perked up when she heard distant whispers in the main passageway. She tapped the entry panel, and the access door slid open. Backing inside, Tameera let the door close silently as she drew a long, curved knife and held it at her side. Inside the access panel, any noise from the passageway faded as the fans and air movers above Tameera covered everything with a nearly steady hum. Her hands worked blindly at her utility harness, then she placed a visor over her eyes. A network of invisible blue lasers appeared in the space above her. As daunting as they appeared, Tameera grinned at the challenge of ascending through them. She sheathed her knife and climbed.

  * * *

  Karma IV

  Central Detention Facility

  Vannix responded to the warden’s summons as quickly as she could and couldn’t help but wonder how badly Jackson had screwed things up. She’d taken a room in the closest hotel and found it mostly empty. From what she could see, mercenary contract season was in a full hiatus. As tempting as it was to investigate the pits and see what kind of action there was, Vannix realized it was in her best interest to steer clear. Doing so, however, left her without much investigative work to do. She checked with the docking facility and the nearest gate for information on the departure and arrival of the Victory Twelve. As a Peacemaker, the traditional bribe structure for such information was beyond her capacity, and she found out nothing else. GalNet was equally useless for her searches, though her Peacemaker status gave her a little more information than most users. Still, there was nothing regarding James “Snowman” Francis or Tara Mason in recent searches or census data. After his mission to Shaw Outpost, Snowman had simply vanished. His company’s assets had all been frozen and appeared headed for mass li
quidation, but there was no movement from the company’s board of directors, and all information regarding its holdings was hidden behind a firewall system even an elSha couldn’t crack.

  Tara Mason had similarly disappeared. The flight logs for the Victory Twelve showed her arriving at Karma twelve days earlier, yet there was no record of the ship transiting the gate, and there was no information on the ship from the Port Authority offices. Short of taking a shuttle and trying to find it in the traffic around Karma, there was no way to tell if the ship was there or if it, like Tara and Snowman, it had disappeared. Unless Jackson found more information, their mission appeared to be heading for a very dead end.

  When the call from Calx’s office came, Vannix had almost talked herself into an early bedtime. She’d changed into her Peacemaker coveralls and sidearm, and had arrived at the main reception point by 2200 hours. The facility was dark except for the perimeter security fields. A MinSha guard she didn’t recognize passed Vannix on her way into the facility. In between the two exterior gates was a small, dark window on the reception point’s outer wall. A stainless tray appeared.

  “Your sidearm, Peacemaker.”

  Vannix unhooked the holster from around her upper right thigh and unfastened the central clip. Placing it all in the bin, she spoke to the window. “Vannix. Badge Number One Five Six Victor Three Alpha One.”

  “Acknowledged, Peacemaker. Warden Calx is expecting you in Building One. Do you know the way?”

  Vannix almost chuckled. Every detention facility in the galaxy had a similar layout. Building One was directly ahead of her and overlooked both wings of the facility and the expansive central yard. She glanced that way and confirmed the layout, but noticed the entire eastern wing was shut down as the doors stood open and the loading docks gates were also ajar.