by Richard Fox
“Do you hate him for that?”
“How can I? We won the war. The Xaros killed off every sentient species in three-fourths of the galaxy before they got to Earth. I’d rather be alive and have a few moral questions than dead with a pristine conscience. But the Cairo…” A shiver went down his back as he remembered the bodies floating deep beneath the sea. “I can hate him. We can find him and Stacey Ibarra and drag them back to Earth for a trial.”
A door at the end of the cemetery opened and Gideon walked in. The lieutenant put an earpiece on and joined Roland and Cha’ril on the lance network.
“Iron Dragoons, wake up,” Gideon said.
“Huh? Pork chop sandwiches,” Aignar spat as his armor roused him from slumber.
“Always ready, sir,” Roland said.
“Admiral Lettow wants all armor at the next operations briefing. One hour. Decant and meet me there. Uniform is shipboard utilities,” Gideon said.
“Can’t we just remote in like we did on the Scipio?” Aignar asked. “We’ll lose synch and—”
“Did I stutter?” Gideon asked.
“No, sir,” Aignar said.
“Should I go to the admiral and tell him this briefing isn’t convenient for us?” Gideon asked.
“No, sir. Sorry, sir,” Aignar said.
“This isn’t the Scipio. Big-ship drivers like Admiral Lettow do things their own way and we are guests here. Fifty-eight minutes. Deck three. Do not be late.” Gideon pointed a finger at Aignar’s armor and stormed out.
“Damn it. I texted Henrique. All the techs are in the middle of a damage-control drill,” Aignar said. “Can you two help put Humpty Dumpty back together again?”
“We’ve got you.” Roland activated the dismount protocols for his armor. Expelling the hyper-oxygenated amniosis fluid from his lungs was never pleasant but had become easier with time.
“You don’t have to ask,” Cha’ril added.
****
The Ardennes’ briefing room was a small auditorium with dozens of rows rising slightly from a stage with the ship’s colors and the Terran Union flag next to a single lectern. The auditorium could have seated well over a hundred but was packed to standing room only.
Roland pushed through a throng of sailors, all with different ship patches from the Ardennes, attempting to reach the rows where Gideon’s last message told them to meet him. He reached a pair of Rangers in matte-black combat armor blocking the lower rows; each had a gold cord on their shoulders, marking them as the admiral’s personal security detachment. The aisle behind the captain was full of more Rangers, their uniforms in stark contrast to the light gray of naval personnel.
“Pardon me,” Roland said to a Ranger with captain’s bars.
The captain glanced at the warrant officer pip on Roland’s uniform and pointed back the way Roland came.
“Primary staff and 14th Fleet captains only, chief,” he said. “Beat it.”
“Why are you still standing here?” Cha’ril pushed through the press of bodies and looked at Roland. “We have four minutes to be seated.”
Roland turned around to face her. “I think the lieutenant might have—”
“Chief, my apologies,” said the Ranger captain as he tapped Roland on the shoulder. The Ranger tapped the base of his own skull, where Roland had his plugs. “I didn’t recognize you as armor. The admiral has you in the front row.”
“Make a hole,” the other Ranger said. “Armor coming through.”
To Roland’s surprise, the Rangers blocking the aisle snapped to the side.
The captain beat his fist against his heart and lowered his head slightly. Roland nodded quickly and hurried down the stairs. The cordon of Rangers, all with the air of hardened killers and service stripes on their forearms, gave him and the rest of his lance plenty of room as they passed. Most repeated the captain’s salute.
Roland spied a row of men and women with plugs. Gideon turned around and waved them toward three empty seats, glancing at the clock on his forearm screen as Roland took the seat next to him.
“Two minutes to spare,” Gideon said. “Did you get lost?”
“That is correct, sir. This ship is a lot bigger than the Scipio,” Roland said. Gideon grunted, then turned his head to speak to the lance leader for the Uhlans.
Aignar slipped into the seat next to Roland. He looked down at his metal hands, touching the thumbs to the other fingertips one at a time.
“Aignar, you were a Ranger. What was that salute?” Roland asked.
“I keep forgetting you’ve never been around anything but armor and the Skippy,” Aignar said. “Those Rangers keep to Saint Kallen.”
Roland glanced at the Uhlans. Each, as full members of the order, bore the Templar cross as a patch on their uniforms.
“But we’re just armor, not Templar,” Roland said.
“Doesn’t matter to them.” Aignar’s eyes darted toward Gideon. “I’ll explain later.”
Curtains across the back of the stage opened, revealing a carved emblem of the Ardennes: a boar’s head with a single text-bearing ribbon beneath it.
“What does ‘Resiste et Mords’ mean?” Cha’ril asked.
“‘Resist and bite,’” Roland said.
“Your mouths are like a Dotari baby’s—useless in a fight. I don’t think I will ever understand you humans,” she said.
The room fell silent as Command Master Chief Petty Officer walked onto the stage and stomped his foot into the position of attention.
“Admiral Lettow!” he shouted.
Roland went to attention, eyes locked forward, as the admiral marched onto the stage. Lettow had salt-and-pepper hair and a neatly trimmed beard. He would have had vid-star good looks, were it not for a nose that looked like it had been broken many times and a patch of scar tissue over his left ear.
“Be seated,” Lettow said as he stepped behind the lectern. The lights dimmed and a holo field formed next to him, taking up the rest of the stage. The whole of the 14th Fleet, nearly eighty vessels in formation around the Ardennes, appeared in the holo. The image zoomed out, showing their course from Mars to the Crucible gate near Ceres, now Earth’s second moon after the Xaros relocated the dwarf planet during their occupation of the solar system.
“The 14th is on course for a wormhole jump to the Oricon system,” Lettow said. “Eight hours ago, the Crucible detected unauthorized activity at the Oricon gate. The colony managed to get this image through before all contact was lost.”
The image changed to a Crucible gate, the massive basalt-colored segments joined together like a crown of thorns, a fleet of Terran vessels emerging from the active wormhole.
“Those are not our ships,” Lettow said. “They belong to a rogue faction controlled by Marc and Stacey Ibarra.” The admiral waited as the auditorium—with the exception of the armor, all the armor—murmured in disbelief.
Lettow raised a hand, a hand missing three fingers, and silence returned.
“The Ceres Crucible recorded another wormhole activation thirty-nine minutes later and has been unable to access the Oricon gate since then. The Keeper says there’s a quantum interference pattern disrupting her attempts to open a new gate, but she’ll have the code cracked before we arrive in a few more hours.
“Our mission is to safeguard the Oricon colonists and…” Lettow bit his bottom lip. “…then bring the rogue ships back under Terran Union control. No matter the cost. If this can be done without bloodshed, so much the better. If not…”
“What do the Ibarras want there?” asked one of the fleet captains.
“Intelligence hasn’t given me a good answer to that,” Lettow said. “Oricon is a silver-tier colony still under construction. One main settlement with a few engineer outposts. No more than a hundred thousand souls. That Oricon is a moon orbiting a gas giant is the only thing of note.”
The admiral tapped the lectern and the holo changed to an organization chart of the 13th Fleet with a few ships grayed out. Roland recognized one n
ame, the Leyte Gulf.
“The Ibarran fleet strength is known,” Lettow said, “and we will arrive with enough firepower to overmatch them. If they want to fight, they’ll lose quickly. I’m counting on their ship captains preferring honorable surrender than a pathetic blaze of glory. Let me address the elephant in the room—why the Ibarras went rogue.”
The holo changed to a large civilian ship in orbit over Luna. The ship exploded, and Roland frowned, trying to remember when such a tragedy happened.
“That’s the Hiawatha, a civilian transport with more than three thousand men and women aboard,” Lettow said. “She was lost soon after the incident with the Ruhaald and Naroosha was resolved. I have to call it an ‘incident’ because saying we blew those treacherous Naroosha shits out of the sky and forced the squids to surrender,” he nodded to the armor soldiers in the front row, “is not said in polite company as the Ruhaald are friendly with us these days.
“The initial investigation into the loss of the Hiawatha yielded nothing actionable, and the matter was shelved. Navy CSI took a second look at the loss and found that Marc Ibarra was responsible for the explosion, and a sealed indictment was prepared to charge him with several thousand counts of murder and other crimes.” Lettow shook his head. “He must have gotten wind of what was happening, as he and Stacey Ibarra managed to co-opt the 13th Fleet before it was set to be decommissioned and flee with it through the Crucible.”
Roland leaned toward Gideon and whispered, “Sir, what about the Hale—”
Gideon silenced him with a glance.
“Further,” Lettow’s face darkened, “High Command is certain the Ibarras were responsible for the destruction of the Cairo and the disappearance of the 92nd Reconnaissance Squadron in the Vespus system. No matter the Ibarras’ history, no matter what they’ve done for Earth, this will not stand. It ends in Oricon.
“I hereby issue Fleet Directive number two-delta. All Ibarra-flagged vessels and associated personnel that do not respond to any and all orders to surrender are to be treated as hostile. Any aggressive acts on their part are to be answered with force until such time as they are destroyed or surrender. Any questions?”
“Sir,” a female commander stood up a few rows behind Roland, “the 13th had barely a skeleton crew when it…went off the books. How combat-effective are their ships with that level of manpower?”
Smart question, Roland thought. She’s beating around the bush to get the answer to a bigger issue.
Lettow tapped a small stack of data slates together on his lectern.
“I asked the Intelligence Ministry the same question,” he said. “They don’t have a definite answer. Assume their ships are fully mission-capable until we learn otherwise.”
Roland frowned. The spies must not know if the Ibarras had a procedural-generation facility. He was a frontline fighter, trained to break the enemy’s will and body, not to divine their intentions, but that knowledge gap struck him as a significant weakness in Lettow’s plan.
“Anything else? If not, religious observances are scheduled for 2030 hours. Captain Sobieski,” Lettow looked down to the Uhlan lance’s commander, “those that keep to the Saint meet in cargo bay twelve. Can any of you attend?”
Sobieski beat a fist to his chest.
“Resiste et mords,” Lettow walked off the stage and the audience rose to their feet.
Conversations broke out around Roland. He overheard ship captains rattling off pre-battle instructions, a few officers expressing disbelief at the Ibarras’ turn for the worse, staffers from the squadrons within the fleet trying to get the others’ attention. He hadn’t been in the Armor Corps for long, but long enough to know that most of a staff’s work got done in the minutes after a meeting, never during a meeting.
Gideon glanced down at his watch, then brought his soldiers over with a small gesture with one hand.
“Suit up,” he said. “We’re first on deck for VR range, then live-fire qualifications.”
“Sir, if we’re green across the board,” Roland said, “can we attend the service?”
“Mission prep is the top priority. If that’s in order, then you can go.” Gideon looked over Roland’s shoulder.
Roland turned around and came face-to-face with Captain Sobieski, a slight man a bit shorter than Roland and with thinning hair.
“You’re both supplicants,” he said, glancing at the bare spots on their chest where a Templar Cross would be. “First battle service? Of course. You attend in armor. Arrive as soon as you can.”
Gideon tapped Roland on the arm.
“Daylight’s burning, move out,” the lieutenant said.
Chapter 5
Admiral Lettow paced back and forth in front of his personal shuttle in the smallest bay on the Ardennes. That he’d been ordered to show up here—alone, no less—by President Garret was an order he had no qualms with. That he’d been here for almost ten minutes irked him to no end.
He looked out the open bay doors. As nice as the view of Luna and Earth was, his time and attention were the most valuable commodities he had, and right now he was wasting them.
“If this was some sort of joke, I will keelhaul every last…”
The force field separating the bay from the void shimmered, and spindly, gunmetal-gray spider legs the size of tree branches crept around the edge of the doors. An object shaped like a stretched egg with several stalks stuck to it crawled into the bay, its body easily twice the size of Lettow. Fractals swirled over its surface.
Lettow knew what is was. He’d seen them in his nightmares since the Battle of Ceres.
A Xaros drone.
He backed away, reaching for a weapon on his hip that wasn’t there.
The drone landed on the deck and the legs drew into the shell. It morphed into a humanoid shape, then coalesced into a tall, athletic woman with blond hair and a well-lined face.
“I won’t bite,” she said.
Lettow spun around and reached for the door controls, but a firm hand grabbed him by the wrist. He looked into Torni’s face, then back to the open bay doors.
“Most call me Keeper,” she said. “I used to be Torni.”
As Lettow pulled his hand back, Torni held on for a just a moment so he could gauge her strength, then she let him go.
“By the Saint…what are you?” Lettow asked.
“Highly classified. What I’m about to share with you is even more hush-hush, which is why I had to deliver this in person,” she said.
“Torni…”
“You’ve seen that damn movie about the Dotari, just like everyone else.” She rolled her eyes. “I’ll tell you that having your death reimagined on film is nothing to be proud of.”
“I am…confused.”
“What’s not in that flick is what really happened. A Xaros Master made a copy of my…” she tapped her head then her heart, “to tear apart at his leisure. Then he murdered me. What he copied managed to escape with a bit of help and now I’m like this. The general public would not take it well that a Xaros drone controls the Crucible over Ceres and the Union’s interstellar travel. Understand?”
“Understood.”
“There’s more to Oricon than just the Ibarras, and I am here to give you your orders—your unofficial but direct orders. This comes straight from the president,” she added, raising an eyebrow at him.
Lettow nodded.
“The Qa’Resh…the public knows them as the species that founded the Alliance that saved us from the Xaros. The truth is a bit more complicated. The true Qa’Resh civilization vanished from the galaxy millions of years ago, but they left caretakers behind to guide any space-faring civilizations that would come after them.”
“They were the first intelligent life?” Lettow asked.
Torni shook her head slowly.
“That’s a sad story for another day,” she said. “But when the Qa’Resh ascended—vanished, sorry—they left some things behind. Our Path Finder teams spent years combing through every world we tho
ught the Qa’Resh might have touched. To the best of our knowledge, they were the most technologically advanced species that ever lived in the Milky Way, superior even to the Xaros.”
“Anything they left behind would be invaluable,” Lettow said.
“‘Invaluable’ is an understatement. A quantum leap in technology, society…it would have more of an impact on human history than the Ember War. We’ve found fragments here and there—most of it indecipherable—but then someone had a breakthrough.” She held up a palm and a hologram of an object that looked like a conch shell made of silver.
“The Qa’Resh left behind a ship,” she said. “We found reference to it from more than one extinct species. A sort of chariot of the gods. We were close to finding it when…the woman who made the breakthrough left Earth.”
“Stacey Ibarra,” Lettow said.
“Correct, and we’ve been two steps behind her on the search for the Qa’Resh ark [check]. That she’s stuck her head up in the Oricon system must mean there’s something important there for her, and she’s obsessed with the ark.”
“The ark is the real reason she left Earth?”
“Her why is hard to pin down—her accident at the end of the war, the end of the proccie program. I think it was a broken heart that pushed her over the edge. But what matters is that she wants the ship. And so does Earth. You are to secure Stacey Ibarra and whatever she’s found on Oricon by any means necessary. Nothing else matters.”
“The colonists—”
“Nothing else matters, Admiral. If the Ibarras get their hands on the ark—or any significant piece of Qa’Resh technology—it is over. The very survival of humanity depends on this.”
“Then send more ships with me,” he said.
“I can barely get your fleet through the Crucible to Oricon. If we could send more, I would. We’re putting a lot of special trust and faith in you, Admiral.” She canted her head to one side. “I must get back to the Crucible.”