The Ibarra Sanction (Terran Armor Corps Book 2)

by Richard Fox

  “Gideon? Cha’ril?” Roland asked over the broad spectrum.

  He switched his sensors to IR, searching for the heat plume from their Mule’s afterburners, but the remains of the Kesaht ship clouded his sensors.

  “No,” Aignar said. “No, no, no…”

  “Dragoons, this is Gideon.”

  Roland thumped a fist against his chest to thank the Saint.

  “Took a hit on our way out,” Gideon said. “Crew is unharmed, but our Mule is disabled. Send a search-and-rescue bird at your earliest convenience. By that I mean before we burn up in the atmosphere or we find another piece of space junk with our name on it.”

  “On it, sir,” Roland said, “and sir, you’re right not to trust the Kesaht to let us get away.”

  “If an enemy wants honor or mercy, they need to show some first. Get the kids back to their parents. Well done, Dragoons.”

  ****

  Captain Sobieski knelt on the cracked pavement of a supply yard, his rail cannons smoking hot. He watched as the last of the Kesaht battleship’s burning wreckage faded away, then he raised his anchor back into his leg and stood up.

  He turned to the armor still kneeling in the remains of the alien artillery the Iron Dragoons had destroyed. Smoke and smoldering metal formed a hellscape around the armor, and damaged residential towers creating a battered skyline beyond the yard.

  “Steel on steel.” Sobieski struck a fist against his chest. “Good shooting.”

  The armor returned the salute and replaced their rail cannons on their backs.

  “Orders, sir?” asked Lieutenant de Saxe of the Chasseurs.

  “Get to the spaceport. The admiral will need us soon,” Sobieski said.

  Chapter 15

  The 14th was in the middle of a slug fest. The outer edge of Lettow’s frigates had meshed with the Kesaht’s screen and were trading cannon and rail blows at what amounted to knife fighting range for void war ships.

  The aliens’ crescent-shaped fighters died in droves to the fighters off the Gettysburg and Falklands and his ships’ point defense turrets, but there were so many of them. Gor’thig’s fighters had managed to inflict some damage, and their mere presence was a distraction, like trying to fight with gnats in your eyes and ears.

  “Hormond, where’s my hook?” Lettow asked the Falkland’s commander.

  “Got twelve bombers coming up on the flagship.” Hormond appeared in the holo screen. “Can put fifteen torps in space. Spent most of our ordnance on those damn claw ships. Give them three minutes and keep the enemy looking straight ahead.”

  In the holo field, a small group of bombers and a few fighter escorts closed on the rear of the Kesaht battleship. The engines created a sensor baffle that should mask the bombers’ approach until they launched their torpedoes.

  A pipe in the bulkhead on the back of the bridge burst, punching a dent toward the holo tank. Steam shot through a crack in the blister.

  The communications lieutenant screamed and gripped her helmet. She tried to twist it off, but a sailor pinned her arms to her sides in a hug before she could spill her air into the near vacuum on the bridge.

  She shook her head from side to side.

  “There was a transmission off Oricon!” she shouted. “Cut through everything!”

  Lettow reached into the holo tank and pulled the moon to the fore. The battleship that was in distant orbit was in ruin, the hull perforated by multiple rail cannon strikes.

  “Sir, the flagship.” Strickland moved the holo image back to the battle. The last remaining Kesaht battleship accelerated forward, the engines burning bright.

  “Raven three!” Hormond said, announcing that the bombers had loosed their torpedoes.

  The massive Kesaht ship burned forward, on a course straight to the Crucible gate. A course that took them perilously close to the Ardennes.

  “None of the other ships are trying to break through…” Lettow said.

  Behind the battleship, cruisers swerved into the torpedoes’ line of fire, taking the hits meant for the flagship.

  “Guns, ready a full volley when the ship passes,” Lettow said. “Helm, adjust course to give us a clear shot.”

  The Kesaht ship barreled forward, its shields flaring as rail cannon shots hammered away at the prow.

  “Come on, you bastard.” Lettow gripped the holo tank and said a quick prayer to Saint Kallen.

  The fleeing battleship came parallel with the Ardennes and her rail cannons fired. Lettow felt the ship shudder with each shot. Shells hit the shields covering the front half of the ship, the after effects fading out just ahead of the Kesaht’s engines. A shell smashed into the flank and a gout of fire exploded from the ship. Two more rounds hit home, and a still burning engine broke off the ship. When the Ardennes struck again, every hit bounced off shields.

  “They’re rotating their shields,” Lettow said. “Keep up the fire…” He touched a cruiser on the opposite side of the Kesaht ship. “Hamburg, you should have a clear shot from your angle. Hit them!”

  The cruiser’s turrets slewed toward its new target. The rail cannons flashed and scored direct hits on the battleship’s hangars. The ship trailed fire from its belly…but it didn’t stop moving.

  “Their fighters.” Strickland pulled up a gun camera feed where a turret blasted apart the crescent fighters. The enemy fighters had shut down, traveling on their last vector.

  The battlecruisers that had been hidden around the Crucible changed course, maneuvering behind the Kesaht flag ship.

  “Hamburg, disengage,” Lettow sent. Fire from the alien ships he’d been fighting had slackened. Their ships meandered away from each other. The 14th did not relent, destroying the ships one by one.

  “Pursue?” Strickland asked.

  “No.” Lettow shook his head. “We break formation to chase them down and we’ll be vulnerable to what we’re already fighting. They want to run…let them.”

  It took another hour to mop up the last of the Kesaht ships. On long range scanners, Lettow watched the battleship flee through the Crucible gate along with the last of the alien fleet. He breathed a sigh of relief when the wormhole collapsed and the Crucible remained in one piece.

  “What happened?” Strickland asked. “That ship around Oricon wasn’t going to make a difference to the fight. If they got those ambush ships into the fight…I doubt we’d be talking right now.”

  “Armor,” Lettow said. “Armor happened. They did something to send the Kesaht running with their tail between their legs.”

  He touched a screen and a smattering of life pods appeared in the holo field.

  “We can piece together what happened later. Get search and rescue in the void, we need to save our people,” he looked over his surviving ships, all of which sported damage, “and lick our wounds.”

  Chapter 16

  At the spaceport, Roland pressed Tomenakai’s fingers against the last stasis box. The lid hissed open and the light around Ben faded away. The little boy pulled his fists away from his eyes and blinked at his brother and his parents, the Dinkins.

  “Mommy! Daddy!” Ben fell into his parents’ arms and the four hugged each other.

  Tim Dinkins looked up at Roland and mouthed a thank-you. Roland nodded and turned to a group of anxious-looking scientists. One held up an empty specimen jar. Roland dropped the severed hand inside and the scientists practically giggled as they looked it over.

  “Anything else you can tell about the specimen?” asked a woman in a lab coat.

  “It didn’t die when I cut its head off,” Roland said.

  She looked up from her data slate. “I’m sorry, did you say ‘cut off’?”

  “Yes. With my sword,” Roland said.

  The woman swallowed hard and backed up a step.

  “It stopped talking after I crushed its skull.” Roland lifted his foot and extended his anchor tip out of his heel. “There might be some of it on there.”

  She covered her mouth and ran off.

 
“What?” Roland kept his foot up as another scientist scraped gray matter off his spike.

  “You get her number?” Aignar asked as he walked over.

  “You find out what our next mission is?”

  “Squat and hold until transport arrives. The captain’s working the mission details now,” Aignar said.

  “I’m low on ammo and I need to recharge or hot swap my batteries.” Roland put his foot down as the scientist left with the sample.

  “Cap said we’ll get that on the transport. We move soon as they hit dirt,” Aignar said. “I didn’t get all the details, but I heard ‘Ibarra’ a couple times.”

  Roland looked over at Sobieski, standing in the middle of an ad-hoc communications node bristling with directional antennae.

  “The captain’s Templar,” Roland said. “Should we tell him about the sword? This Morrigan person?”

  “You go over Gideon’s head and he’s liable to crush yours with good reason,” Aignar said. “If the Corps had suspicions about the Templar, even aspirants like us, they’ll only get worse after this. You give even an impression we’re loyal to anything but the chain of command and you’ll look guilty.”

  “If Gideon goes straight to General Laran with this—”

  “He’d jump both Sobieski and Colonel Martel. Gideon’s a hard-ass. He may not like the Templar, but he’s as straight as they come.”

  Roland touched the hilt on his leg.

  “Politics. Hated it in school. Didn’t think I’d ever deal with it in the Armor Corps.”

  “It’s more for the big brass. Line grunts like us get to focus on killing bad people and breaking their nice things. But…look at that.” Aignar said, pointing to the edge of the flight line, where the rescued children were looked over by doctors and run through decontamination spray boxes. “Families. Families made whole because you refused to fail them. Imagine the hell those parents would have gone through if those alien shitheads got away with those kids. War is shit. Death. Destruction.” He cocked his head toward the chaos of the wrecked supply yard. “We’re lucky to get through it with scars and nightmares. But you, kiddo, you were a goddamn hero today. When those bad days come, and they’ll come, don’t ever forget this moment—the smiles on those kids’ faces.”

  “You were there too,” Roland said.

  “The Saint was with us. Maybe we can go to her shrine when we get back to Mars.”

  Roland thought back to the small cave where Kallen was interred within her armor and he tasted her “tears” again.

  “We should…I would like to see her again.”

  Over the spaceport, four corvettes descended from orbit.

  “Dragoons,” Gideon came over the IR.

  “Always ready, sir,” Roland said.

  “The Scipio picked us up in orbit. Report to her soon as she lands. We are needed.”

  Chapter 17

  The maintenance rig around Roland’s armor almost felt like home. A team from the Scipio’s crew worked to ream and recharge his armor, operating with none of the finesse of the Iron Dragoons’ dedicated team of Brazilian armor tenders. Master Chief Henrique had cross-trained this group of navy ratings. Roland could almost hear the chief’s colorful Portuguese euphemisms as the sailors struggled to load a fresh case of gauss shells into Roland’s ammo stores.

  The rest of his lance stood in their bays, recharging off the ship’s batteries. Gideon was off their network, online with Captain Sobieski and the other commanders.

  “But what did that big ugly mean about ‘humanity’s sins,’?” Aignar asked. “This is our first contact with them. It’s not going great, but it sounds like he’s talking about something else.”

  “The Ibarras have interacted with them in the past,” Cha’ril said. “Perhaps they committed some diplomatic slight or killed a Kesaht leader. Such things have happened before.”

  “The Ixio had human bodies in its lab. The Ibarras knew how to fight them,” Roland said. “I’d think the Ibarras wrote a check that Earth gets to cash, but he accused us all of xenocide. I don’t know when, where, or why the Ibarras would exterminate an alien species. Seems a bit far-fetched.”

  “Humanity destroyed the Xaros,” Cha’ril said. “Annihilated their Dyson sphere and sent their drones into the nearest star.”

  “That was the old Alliance,” Aignar said. “Us, the Dotari, Ruhaald, Qa’Resh—before they up and vanished—don’t know why these Kesaht would single us out. I don’t see any of the Xaros in these Kesaht. The Xaros wiped out every intelligent species they encountered. That Ixio was talking about some grand union through brain implants. Doesn’t fit.”

  “So the xenocide he’s talking about probably isn’t the Xaros…then who?” Roland asked.

  Aignar turned his helm to Gideon.

  “The lieutenant got hurt pretty bad by the Toth,” Aignar said. “Still totes around some of their claws. But he never mentions them. No one ever talks about the Toth anymore. They showed up around Earth, demanded proccie tech and that we hand over a significant portion of our population. Sure, 8th Fleet—may the Saint preserve them—kicked their ass and sent them packing, but High Command’s doesn’t even list them as a threat species. We don’t even train to fight Toth targets.”

  “The Breitenfeld carried out a punitive mission against Toth leadership soon after the incursion,” Cha’ril said. “They killed the senior Toth overlord and rescued a number of prisoners from the planet…Nibiru, I think it was. The Toth were said to have descended into civil war after that. Then the Qa’Resh destroyed all the jump engines before they vanished. The Toth are very likely stuck in their home systems with no means for faster-than-light travel.”

  “The tech for making Crucible gates was disseminated across the old Alliance…if they had it, we would have encountered them again,” Roland said.

  “The Toth were not part of the Alliance,” Cha’ril said. “Therefore, they did not receive the Crucible technology. The answer is evident. No species would willingly contact a race of slavers and murderers. We are well aware of what the Toth do to prisoners.”

  “There were some crazy stories from the end of the war,” Aignar said. “Especially from the Breitenfeld’s crew. Weird energy beings. Giant machines feeding off suns.”

  “Didn’t the Breitenfeld’s crew get preferential colony assignments after the war? I don’t think any of them are on Earth. Who was there at the end?” Roland asked. “Colonel Hale went on that deep-space colony mission. Admiral Valdar is on some secret assignment…”

  “Miss Bailey was badly injured at the last battle,” Cha’ril said. “She says she doesn’t remember much of what happened.”

  “The Ibarras were there,” Aignar said. “I bet they know everything.”

  “We might have a chance to ask them,” Gideon said. “Our mission plan is coming through. I’ll share it in a moment.”

  “Sir, what happened to the Toth after the Ember War?” Roland asked.

  “This is relevant, how?” Gideon asked.

  “Something the Ixion said to me while he was ranting about ‘false minds and weed bodies’—”

  “Stop,” Gideon said. “Are you sure he said that? Those exact words?”

  “I’m sure,” Roland said. “Do they mean something?”

  “It’s…nothing, just jogged some old memories.” Gideon’s armor brushed fingertips across the helm, tracing his facial scars. “The Toth are a low-threat priority. We train for fights we’re likely to have. Not theoreticals.”

  “But what happened to them?” Aignar asked. “It’s like they vanished.”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care,” Gideon said. “We have enough enemies without picking fights with old ones. You three ready for our real-world mission or do you want to keep playing ‘what if?’”

  The lance remained silent for a moment.

  Gideon activated a holo projector in the ceiling of the Scipio’s bay, the gas giant Oricon Prime and her moons forming over the hellhole. An icon for a small flotil
la of corvettes and destroyers popped up between the colony moon and the pale-brown planet. A dashed line for the flotilla’s course ran over the planet’s north pole.

  “Just what the Ibarras want with this system was a mystery until a few hours ago,” Gideon said. “When the Ibarras first arrived in system, they had this exchange with the governor.”

  Two pictures came up in the holo, one of a recorded video of Governor Paletress, a woman in her late forties with short bobbed hair, the other a still silhouette of a person’s head and shoulders.

  “Where is it?” A wave form matching the words appeared beneath the silhouette. “Your survey records from six days ago show exactly where it is. Stop toying with me.”

  “Admiral…Faben, was it?” Paletress sighed heavily. “As I’ve told you, we don’t process the raw data. We; we simply compile and send it on to Earth for analysis. Three hours before you arrived, High Command restricted the data with a clearance level I’ve never seen, and one neither you nor I have the codes to unlock. Your demands are most irregular and I don’t see how—”

  “You still have the raw data,” Faben said. “Send it to me.”

  “Admiral,” the governor said, putting a hand to her face, “the data is encrypted. There’s no way you can access it without the key cipher. My programmers say that even with a quantum dot—”

  “Send it. To. Me.”

  “I will not.” The governor squared her shoulders. “This system is under the colonial administration. It is not under military jurisdiction, and even if it was under my control to release it to you, I wouldn’t give it to you, even on the off chance you might choke on it.”

  The governor looked offscreen.

  “Another Crucible wormhole.” She narrowed her eyes and one corner of her mouth pulled back in a smile. “Let’s hope it’s the alert fleet I requested from Earth come to teach you some decorum.” The governor’s eyes narrowed, then she went pale. “What are those ships? Who are they? Jackson, run a full scan and—”