Relics of Eternity (Duchy of Terra Book 7)

by Glynn Stewart

“Incoming!” someone snapped, and Pierre narrowed the map to focus on the battle around him.

  He readied his own weapon as red contact icons flashed up on his HUD.

  “Multiple contacts around the main access to Engineering,” a Marine reported. “They have plasma weapons but minimal armor. We are advancing.”

  He could hear the plasma fire as well as see it on his screen as the lead elements of his force charged into the teeth of the defenders’ fire.

  The crackle died down after a few seconds, the red icons fading out on Pierre’s display.

  So did one of the blue icons representing his Marines. A tap on the hologram brought up the biometrics, and Pierre grimaced and mouthed a silent prayer.

  Even Imperial medicine couldn’t do much for what looked like a mostly vaporized head.

  “We’re moving into Engineering,” a new voice reported. “Lance Braden is down, KIA.”

  “Understood,” Comtois replied. “Second squad, move up. Keep them in your sights.”

  “There isn’t enough space, sir,” the point Marine replied grimly. “Not until we’re into the Engineering spaces.”

  Pierre moved forward with the rest of the Marines, his hands tight on his own plasma rifle. The schematics told him that the point Marine was right, but he still had to see it before he let go of at least some of the guilt.

  Even with eight Marines charging down the hallway, they’d had to go in waves. The space the Children had chosen to defend had allowed six of them to focus fire onto a space that only held three Marines abreast.

  Lance Braden’s body had been moved back out of the chokepoint, his armor leaned against a wall in the space the engineers had been firing from.

  More plasma fire crackled in the distance and Pierre grimaced. He didn’t say anything, though—his Marines knew the risks of firing plasma weapons in Engineering. If they were firing weapons, there was a reason.

  “We have contact,” a Marine reported. “Hostile power armor in the Engineering bays.”

  “Second platoon, move in,” Comtois ordered. “Overwhelm them. Shoot straight, Marines.”

  Even with the sensors of multiple Marines in the relatively open space around the power reactors, the tactical map was still unclear on how many hostiles there were and where they were. By the time Pierre entered the space himself, hustling along with Alpha Company’s first platoon, it was clear that the Children were making a serious push to hold his people up there.

  There were at least twenty enemies in power armor in the space, and they had serious gear, the same heavy plasma rifles as his people.

  “Sir, get down,” Comtois snapped at Pierre. “Take cover—behind something they won’t shoot, preferably!”

  Pierre swallowed a chuckle as he ducked behind a heavy-duty power conduit. In this kind of fight, there wasn’t much that would stop any of the weaponry in play. There were, on the other hand, a lot of things in the Engineering space that neither side could afford to shoot.

  He had a three-to-one numerical edge on the defenders, and he knew in his bones that his Marines were better. It was a question of how bad his Marines got hurt—and the answer wasn’t looking pretty.

  Studying his HUD for a moment, he locked a target in and stepped out from behind his cover. His weapon fired a high-intensity beam of plasma that hit a Children defender as the fighter left their own cover, burning clean through his target’s chest plate and sending them reeling backward.

  “Push them, Marines,” he barked. “We need control before someone rigs the whole place to explode.”

  Back in cover, his armor’s computers were analyzing all of the data to make sure no one was doing that…and flashed a bright red warning. One of the armored figures was kneeling behind the main antimatter power core. No one was shooting anywhere near them—antimatter needed and received a lot of respect in this kind of fight—but they were interfaced with the power core’s systems, and that was definitely a bad sign today.

  And even Pierre didn’t want to shoot at them. The fight was swinging toward his people, but his people were busy fighting it. If the Child working at the console was doing what Pierre feared, there was no time.

  “Comtois, cover me,” he ordered.

  He barely registered his subordinate’s spluttered curses before he dove from his cover, hitting the ground running as he charged across the freighter’s Engineering deck. Four of the ship’s eight power cores were there, including the only antimatter plant on the ship.

  The backup fusion cores located elsewhere could be shut down completely from there, and the antimatter core was the easiest one to induce a catastrophic failure in.

  Antimatter earned every gram of the respect it was given.

  For the first few steps, no one even seemed to notice that someone was mad enough to charge the full length of the open deck. After that, it felt like every one of the Children was targeting Pierre.

  The Marine fired on the run, shooting at the defenders in his field of view. He wasn’t sure he e any of them, but that wasn’t the point. He couldn’t shoot at his target; the engineer had chosen their position far too well.

  Fortunately for Pierre’s longevity, Comtois had a far better field of fire and was just as good as his boss was counting on him being. Shooters that came close tended not to get a second shot, the Company Commander peppering their hiding spots with fire to keep their heads down.

  Pierre hoped that his distraction was buying his people the opportunity to take down more of the Children, but his focus was on the antimatter core. The engineer had to know he was coming—the crescendo of plasma fire around him wasn’t subtle—but they continued to focus on their work.

  A plasma bolt slammed into Pierre’s armor from behind. Integrity warnings flashed up on his HUD, and he hit a command he never thought he’d actually use.

  He tossed his plasma rifle aside as the hydrogen reservoirs in his suit that fed it vented themselves. There were multiple spots he could vent the high-pressure gas, which meant he sent it all out the back of his suit, turning an emergency ammunition dump into an improvised rocket.

  A stray plasma bolt ignited the hydrogen cloud and he suspected he made a hell of a show as he blasted across the last dozen or so meters, his armor’s force blade snapping out as he flew.

  He used his suit’s actual jets to control his course at the last minute, using every scrap of his momentum to swing the meter-long blade into his target and cleave the engineer in two in a single blow.

  Pierre hit the ground exactly like a quarter-ton suit of armor. He managed to roll onto his feet, the contortion leaving him wincing in pain as he came up on one knee and activated his armor’s stun field.

  The weapon wouldn’t do much against anyone in armor, but the pulse of energy screwed with everyone’s targeting systems, allowing him to close the distance with the engineer again, severing the connection between the dead Child and the antimatter core.

  No one was shooting at him now. He was in the same “don’t shoot the fucking antimatter” safe zone the engineer had been relying on, and he linked his own armor into the console. If he was very lucky…

  “Assez!” he snapped aloud.

  The ship was still using the Imperial Navy–issue operating system. Which meant that Pierre could now see that the engineer had mostly succeeded. The antimatter and hydrogen feeds were already turned all the way up.

  The engineer hadn’t managed to turn off the containment fields, but they’d been plugging in the authorization codes to do it. Pierre focused on the engineering console, closing out the battle as he fought with the software to save everyone’s lives.

  He wasn’t an engineer, but the Imperium trained their Marines in how to stop this exact situation. Some parts of the OS were sufficiently generic that his codes worked. Others…weren’t.

  He’d stopped the containment field shutdown, but he didn’t have the control to slow the feeds. The core could only handle a reaction of a certain intensity, and the system was giving him warni
ngs.

  Pierre couldn’t stop it. The core was still going to overload, unless…

  “Stand by for lights out,” he barked on the main command channel, and used the strength of his armor to tear the surface of the console off. He assumed there were easier ways to take it off if you had tools, but he had powered-armor gauntlets.

  The cover was designed to come off, and nestled in the middle of the circuit boards was what looked like a glorified valve control. Grabbing it in the two armored fingers that would fit around it, Pierre pulled the emergency shutdown control out of the console, rotated it ninety degrees, and slammed it back down.

  The feed for every single reactor on the ship stopped in the next second. The lights went out a moment later, the system automatically focusing on using the power reserves to keep up the reactor containment until the reactions ended.

  Emergency lighting began to switch on after a few seconds as Pierre breathed a long sigh of relief.

  “Speaker Qadir,” he said calmly. “Life support should have emergency power, but I’d appreciate it if you can confirm that once you are in control. En avant, Speaker.”

  The room around him was dimly lit and he realized the shooting had finally stopped.

  “Engineering is secure, sir,” Comtois’s voice said in his ear. “Did…what I think just happened just happen?”

  “That engineer had the antimatter core set to overload and I’m no hacker,” Pierre said calmly. “Emergency shutdown works, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Yes. Yes, it does,” his subordinate agreed.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Rin hadn’t really asked if he should be going over to the captured Children ship. The cyberwarfare experts—the Imperial Marines’ polite name for hackers—he’d been working with aboard Defiance had loaded up to go with the second wave of Marines, and he’d shrugged and gone along.

  He’d seen bigger ships than the freighter they were pulling up alongside, but he’d done a lot of work and study in A!To, a star system guarded by multiple squadrons of superbattleships. The freighter was the size of a standard battleship, though, which made her the largest ship he’d seen this far out.

  Fortunately, almost none of that size and mass had gone to weapons.

  A Marine Speaker was walking down the rows of seats in the shuttle, checking everyone’s gear. They stopped in front of Rin and looked down at him. The power armor allowed even average-sized humans to loom quite effectively, and the archeologist quailed a bit.

  “Dr. Dunst,” the man greeted him calmly. “I’m not even going to ask if the Captain has approved this. I’m not turning this shuttle around for one civilian.”

  Rin returned the faceless helmet’s regard as levelly as he could.

  “I’m Speaker Lebeau, Bravo-Five-Actual,” the Marine introduced himself. “You realize, Doctor, that we are going aboard a recently secured hostile vessel? That may or may not still have active Children operatives aboard?

  “Most importantly, we are boarding a vessel that currently has its atmosphere set to induce minor hypoxia in anyone without proper breathing equipment,” Lebeau concluded drily. “Spear Vaquero! Get me an unpowered armor set with atmo gear.” He studied Rin very specifically for a few seconds.

  “Size seven; we’ll need to cinch it down, but I am not letting the civvie wander that ship without armor and an O2 mask!”

  Another armored Marine—presumably Spear Vaquero, the platoon’s senior noncom—appeared a few seconds later with a full combat suit, an open-down-the-back neck-to-toe armored garment, and the attached helmet.

  They studied Rin for a few seconds, then retracted their own helmet, revealing an androgynous face with short-cropped black hair.

  “All right,” Vaquero said brightly. “I’ve got this, Speaker. He’ll be armored and masked before he enters the ship.”

  “Make certain of it,” Lebeau ordered, then raised an armored finger at Rin. “I’m assuming you have a reason to be here, Doctor, but you don’t go aboard that ship until Spear Vaquero clears you as armored up—and you don’t do it without a fire team of Marines around you. If any of that is a problem, said fire team of Marines will sit on you to make sure you don’t leave this shuttle.

  “Am I clear, Dr. Dunst?”

  “Entirely, Speaker Lebeau,” Rin confirmed with a grin. He unstrapped himself from the chair and reached for the suit. “These people have been stealing and wrecking Alava artifacts across the region. I want to see what they keep on hand for themselves.

  “I’ll be a good civilian, I promise.”

  Lebeau snorted and continued on, leaving Rin with Vaquero.

  And the armored suit, which did not look like it was going to be comfortable to put on.

  Several excruciatingly uncomfortable minutes followed as the shuttle docked, and most of the Marines trooped off to join their fellows in making sure there were no Children with oxygen masks hiding in corners.

  Finally, they had the armor cinched in around Rin so it was snug against him in the places it was supposed to be, and he had the mask on.

  “Straightforward enough, I suppose,” Vaquero observed.

  Rin stared at them like they’d grown a second head.

  “That was straightforward?” he asked.

  “I graduated the A!Tol’s bodyguard course,” they told him. “I have put everything from doctors to diplomats to children in armor, including members of eleven different species. It’s easier to do it with someone who shares your basic physiology, and it’s much easier to do it with someone who’s smart and cooperative.”

  Vaquero grinned and closed their helmet.

  “And now I shall leave you to the tender mercies of Lance Sanderson,” they told him, gesturing to one of the four suits of power armor still in the shuttle. “I have a platoon to help organize. Chop chop, Dr. Dunst. We all have work to do.”

  The Marine NCO was gone before he could think of a response, and he shrugged helplessly as he turned to Sanderson.

  “I need to rendezvous with Speaker Murtas,” he told the Marine. “Is his location flagged?”

  “He’s in the main computer center with a stack of people who can make my armor dance with me in it,” Sanderson replied. “We can get you there.”

  “Let’s get moving, then,” Rin told his escort. “The sooner we’re mixed in with everyone else, the less danger we’re in.”

  “You’re in no danger, Doctor,” Sanderson told him. “I’m authorized to put very large holes in this ship to keep you safe.”

  “Yes, well, I’d rather not put holes in the ship until we’ve determined which parts we might need!”

  Someday, Rin Dunst was going to get used to the fact that the Navy and Marines regarded him as an asset on par with their entire starship. Someday.

  All evidence suggested that day was definitely not today.

  Rin was expecting to find the freighter’s data center a hub of activity, with the computer experts and hackers plugged into consoles and holographic systems all over the place as they tore into the files they’d extracted from the freighter’s computers.

  Instead, he found a half-assembled portable computing setup surrounded by bored-looking techs. The only lights in the room were portable lamps the Defiance contingent had set up themselves, and they shone on dull and unpowered spikes of molecular circuitry and blocks of cheaper computer servers.

  For a moment, he thought it was a power problem—but then he spotted a portable power generator in the corner. Murtas had come prepared for this.

  The Speaker in question was sitting on the power generator as Rin approached him, his masked chin resting on his hands as he studied the computer center.

  “Speaker Murtas?” Rin greeted the man via a private channel. The masks didn’t leave much ability to be heard.

  “Dr. Dunst. If you were hoping to get useful information from my dive into the ship’s computers, you’re going to be sadly disappointed.”

  “What happened?” Rin asked.

  “I’d hoped t
hat when the Marines threw the ship into emergency shutdown, they’d done so before anyone had initiated a purge protocol on the computers,” the gaunt and pale-haired intelligence officer replied. “I suppose the fact that the bastards were already trying to overload the antimatter core should have told us their assessment of how this was going to end.”

  “The data’s gone?”

  “We powered up the molycirc cores, at least; they’ve been wiped,” Murtas confirmed. “There isn’t even an operating system left. It’s possible we can retrieve some data if we restored an OS, but it’s impossible for us to make certain that our installation doesn’t write over the very data we’re trying to save.”

  “Can we extract the cores and analyze them elsewhere?” Rin asked.

  “That depends on whether we want to move the ship or not,” the Navy officer said. “That’s Captain Casimir’s call, not mine. If I pull every box and molycirc spike in this room and haul them back to Kosha, we should be able to retrieve some data. Everything was deleted; it’s a question of how much was properly hashed before the power went down.”

  “Any idea?”

  Murtas coughed.

  “We could be lucky and retrieve as much as fifty percent,” he admitted. “Or…we could find that ninety percent of the contents of the computers are hashed and the ten percent that’s left is just the OS and the code doing the hashing.

  “It’s a complete throw of the dice at this point, and to get it, we’re leaving a freighter that costs as much as a pair of destroyers a lobotomized hulk drifting in the middle of nowhere.”

  “There have to be other ways to move that don’t require its own computers, right?” Rin asked.

  “There probably are,” the Speaker admitted. “And were I a line officer or an Engineering officer, I’d probably already have the solution to my problem.” He gestured around the room. “I’m a tech geek and an intelligence wonk, Dr. Dunst. I can’t fly this ship without all of its original hardware and software.

  “I have a copy of its original software on Defiance, but if I install that, I risk losing everything I’m here to access. So, right now, Doctor, I’m feeling pretty damn useless.”