by Richard Fox
“We can worry about what the aliens had for their last meal later,” Yoon said. “Worry about getting in, recovering what we can, and getting out before we take too many rads. Deal?”
“Breach complete,” Vitali said. A video feed of a glowing round cut along the hull came up on Yoon’s hull. “No atmo bleed. Here we go.” A hook-tipped probe shot across the feed and gripped the far edge of the breach. The hull pulled up like the lid of an emergency ration tin and went tumbling away.
“Pretty thin,” Costas said. “Guess their shield tech’s better than ours.”
“Moving.” Yoon stepped off the edge of the shuttle ramp and keyed her titan’s shoulder thrusters, pushing her towards the opening in the hull. Her HUD pulsed red as she passed through the ambient radiation. She spun around and got a glimpse of the Svarra ship, the crystal protrusions of the hull in stark contrast to the void beyond, whiffs of blown ice from pulverized comets running off the edges like snow off a mountain peak.
She fell into the alien ship and flung her titan’s arms to the sides. They telescoped out and grabbed the bulkheads. She jittered to a stop, then spun on around on her shoulder axis and brought her suit’s feet perpendicular to a grated deck. Her titan scanned the passageway across the electromagnetic spectrum and formed a composite image approximating a well-lit view of the interior, even though the ship was in total darkness.
The bulkheads had a slight bow to them, made up of irregular-sized slats that ran the entire distance of the passageway. Circular light panels on the ceiling were long dead; more than one was cracked. She made out a few doorways, marked by slats that stretched from floor to ceiling.
She ignored the loops of alien writing on the slats and started walking, the thump of each footfall echoing through her suit. The deck rumbled as the other titans landed inside the ship.
“Got a Hawking radiation source a few hundred yards ahead,” she said. “Keep regular intervals and line of sight.”
“I’ve got the tail,” Costas said.
Yoon sent a radar pulse down the passageway and picked up a wide room just ahead. Her HUD formed a dashed line around an object several feet tall just inside the room, the return too weak to get its exact shape.
“Got an artifact.” Yoon twisted a wrist from side to side and a pneumatic spike snapped out of the titan’s arm housing.
“You nervous, XO?” Vitali asked. “Thought this place was deader than disco.”
“You ever regret an abundance of caution?”
“I do when it keeps me in a hot zone.”
Yoon slowed as she stepped into a wide circular room with a domed ceiling. Off to one side, a single figure almost seven feet tall stood transfixed on the deck. The alien vac suit was deep grey, tiny speckles of light lit up within the material as it swayed ever so slightly from side to side. The helmet was solid metal, the faceplate a wide slat with several embedded optic lenses. Tiny clamps attached the boots to the deck.
The suit read as dead; no heat or electromagnetic activity.
“I hate void corpses,” Benson said. “Rads and vacuum keep the bodies from decaying. Once did a salvage on a freighter out beyond Eris. Dead were there for a hundred years…should’ve been dust, but they were all still in their work stations when we found them. Bunch of dried out husks.”
Yoon reached out and gently touched the dead alien’s arm, which bore a screen with wires that ran into a box incorporated into the suit’s chest. The sleeve ripped open like it was made of tissue paper and dust wafted out of the hole.
“Rad and bio contamination,” Vitali said. “This gets better and better.”
“Stow it,” Benson said. “Suits are getting a full scrub no matter what we do. Hawking source is about two decks above us. We want to cut through this ceiling?”
Yoon reached up and her suit’s finger tips rapped against the dome.
“Reads solid,” she said. “Armor cladding around the main gun. Check the doorways for another way out of here. We go deeper and we should find the magazine.”
Yoon stomped over to a section of the wall with slats running at a cross current from the rest of the bulkhead and straightened the fingers of her suit hand. The tips bent into wedges and she rammed them into either side of the door frame. The bulkhead crumbled like rotten wood beneath an ax head. The suit’s wedges sank deeper, then hooked around the door. She stepped back and ripped the door away with a pull from her titan’s shoulder actuators.
She pushed the broken door to one side. In the next room, several pods lined the walls, lockers interspaced between each one.
“Looks like I found berthing,” she said.
“This ain’t the way.” Costas sent a vid capture to the rest of the team: a passageway ripped open by the crystalline hull of the alien ship. A hunk of the blue-white glass blocked the hallway, like a barbed arrowhead left in a wound.
“Got a possibility,” Benson said, “ramp leading to upper decks.”
“Lower over here,” Vitali said.
“Movement?” Benson backed away from his doorway, one palm up and facing the opening. “Got it on radar.”
“Can’t be,” Yoon said. “Everything in here’s been dead for—”
A blur shot out of the doorway and hit Benson in the chest. His titan rocked backwards, then broke free from the deck.
Yoon’s radio erupted with shouts and panic from her team. She reached out to grab Benson’s foot, and missed as he bounced off the ceiling.
“Get it off! Get it off!” Benson screamed.
He bounced off the deck and twisted around, then Yoon saw what had attacked him. A crystal insect with six limbs clung to Benson’s torso. Its head was a Drerix helmet welded to the same crystalline material of the Svarran ships. The sharp points of the limbs gripped his titan’s surface, slowly sinking through the metal.
“Hold him down!” Yoon shouted.
Vitali slapped his hands against Benson’s shoulders and pinned him to the deck.
Yoon raised her fists over her head as the alien’s helm spun around. The lenses flashed as she swung her titan’s heavy hands down at the creature.
The alien slipped to one side, but Yoon managed to crush a single one of its limbs as her strike hit Benson’s chest.
“Breach! Bre—” Benson cut off as air spat out the punctures in his suit. Red light flashed through the alien’s limbs.
Yoon struck again, but the alien slipped away from Benson and scuttled back down the passageway it had come from.
“Benson? Benson?” Yoon stepped over his suit and put herself between him and the open doorway.
“He’s flatlined,” Vitali said. “Suit’s lost all atmo. He never had a chance.”
“What the hell was that thing?” Costas asked as he came shoulder to shoulder with Yoon, the plasma torches lit on both his titan’s hands.
“Christ, it was fast,” Vitali said
“I don’t know. Maybe a survivor of the other fleet,” she said.
“It had a Drerix head,” Costas said. “Why the hell would it have that?”
“Benson’s blood’s leaking out…” Vitali stepped away from the dead titan.
“Shut up, both of you!” Yoon snapped. “We can’t do anything for Benson. His suit’s offline, can’t send it back on remote.”
“We ain’t armed for combat,” Vitali said. “We’re in titans, not the marauders the FCF Marines have.”
“I hurt it.” Yoon kicked at the broken appendage as it floated in front of her. “Can’t be that tough.”
“You want to keep going?” Vitali asked. “Are you nuts?”
“We abort and the Allihies will have to recover the whole ship and take enough rads in the process to kill the whole crew,” she said. “The magazine should be up that corridor.”
“The corridor where that thing went,” Costas said.
“I’m going.” Yoon extended an arm into the corridor and flashed her plasma torch to warn off the alien. “You coming or not?”
“I’ve taken
a whole rad already,” Vitali said. “I can feel the headache coming. Can we just hurry this up already?”
“Costas, watch our rear,” Yoon said as she started up the ramp.
“What was that? Maybe the crystal ones can go in stasis?” Costas asked.
Yoon marched up the ramp, watching for doorways or any opening in the ceiling the alien could use to launch an ambush.
“Would’ve seen some—any—activity in the Svarra fleet soon as we showed up,” she said. “Active scans aren’t subtle. Can’t be anything organic. Nothing’s going to survive these rads for this long.”
“Giant sentient star is trying to wipe out Earth,” Costas said. “Can’t say anything too far beyond the pale of believability anymore.”
“Ramp tapers off eleven yards ahead,” Yoon said.
“You first, XO,” Vitali said.
Yoon slowed as she came to the top of the ramp. She held up a hand, and the cameras built into the fist filmed a long room filled with more alien vac suits clustered around a massive doorway. Several of the suits still had blocky rifles held in their grasp. Radiation warnings sprang up across her HUD.
“Should be the magazine,” she said.
“Looks like a security team,” Costas said. “Like they were fighting off boarders when they got fried.”
“You two seeing the rad spike?” Vitali asked. “I’m gonna hit my second rad if we’re here more than a few minutes. You ever had your marrow replaced? Hurts like a son of a bitch.”
“Vault door’s on hinges,” Yoon said. “Should be a simple breach. Cover me.”
Yoon strode into the room outside of the magazine, her gaze darting around, watching for the alien. She swept an arm through a pair of aliens, scattering them into dust and gossamer strands of vac suit that came apart like a spider web. Her suit took more and more radiation as she continued through the throng of ancient dead.
She reached up and swatted at a taller alien when she touched something solid. The crystalline alien scrambled over her hand and jumped toward her torso. Yoon twisted on her hip actuators and punched the thing before it could make contact with its remaining limb tips. The blow sent it flying through dusty bodies and into the far bulkhead.
“Watch it!” Yoon kept her arms pointed at the alien as it scrambled up a wall and turned its mismatched head at her. The creature scuttled from top of the wall to the bottom, lenses flashing. She bumped into the vault door as Vitali and Costas stopped near her.
“What’s it doing?” Costas asked.
“Don’t know, don’t care,” Yoon said. “Act threatening. Keep it away while I work.”
“If we had atmo I could broadcast some harsh language,” Vitali said. “Otherwise I have to hope it runs under my feet to get stomped.”
The alien brought two mandibles off the wall and tapped them against each other several times.
“Charades?” Costas asked.
Yoon twisted her torso around and grabbed a circle made up of slats overlapping the edge of the vault door and the frame. She sent a radar pulse through it and the return came back as a locking mechanism.
“Costas, what’s your read on the hinges? This is a titanium/graphene blend with some exotics I’ve never seen before,” she said as she retracted her titan’s fingers and brought a saw blade out from the housing. The blade spun up and began cutting into the lock.
“Same…lot thicker than what you’ve got,” Costas said.
“That thing don’t look happy,” Vitali said. “Lot more tapping and flashing.”
“So long as it isn’t trying to murder us,” she said.
“Shit. Shit!” Vitali backpedaled as the alien jumped off the wall and charged at him. His plasma torches flared, slagging the deck just beneath the alien as it leaped up. It landed on top of his head and stabbed into his dome.
Costas slapped an awkward hand at Vitali and knocked the alien away.
“You OK?” Costas asked.
“Ringing like a bell in here,” Vitali said.
Yoon’s saw broke through the lock and she grabbed the door with her other hand. It opened a foot and a half, then ground to a halt. Radiation warnings flashed across her HUD.
“What’re you waiting for? Get in there!” Vitali shouted.
“Door’s jammed,” she said. She craned her neck to one side and her view swung around until she saw the alien on the other side of the room, huddled against an open panel on the ceiling, limbs buried in a mass of cables in the bulkhead.
“Thing’s not going to help us, is it?” Costas asked.
“May not matter.” Yoon turned her attention back to the opening and looked inside. Racks of singularity warheads the size of footballs were within. A massive robotic arm hung from a broken housing on the ceiling, a cracked warhead in its grasp.
She tugged on the door again, but it wouldn’t budge. There was no way her titan could fit through the opening or reach its limbs all the way inside to the warheads. The radiation counter on her HUD ticked higher and higher.
“I’ve got an idea,” she said. “A bad one, but it’ll work.”
She stepped in front of the narrow opening and twisted her titan around to bring the hatch on the back of her suit flush with the magazine.
“XO…don’t,” Costas said.
“You tell the captain he better make it back to Earth.” She cancelled her suit’s safeguards and opened the hatch. She slithered out of her titan and squeezed through the vault door and into the magazine.
A wave of dizziness washed over her as the radiation squeezed through her suit. Her guts knotted up as she stumbled into the magazine and grabbed a warhead with two hands. Heat seared through her gloves as she lugged the warhead back to her suit and hefted it into the open hatch. Her vision darkened around the edges.
“Yoon! Get back in your titan,” Costas said. “That thing looks like it’s going to make another pass at us. We get you back to the Allihies and—”
“No!” Yoon turned around and made for another warhead. “Too much…radiation. I’m a dead woman.” Blood ran out of her nose and spattered against the inside of her helmet.
“We can…we can put your suit on auto. Have it follow us back,” Vitali said. “XO, why? We could’ve figured something out.”
“Had to do something constructive…right now.” She grabbed a second warhead and cradled it against her chest, as her fingers had stopped bending to her command. A near crippling sense of light-headedness came over her as she pushed the second singularity warhead into her suit.
She turned back for a third and fell to her knees. She gagged as blood seeped out of her gums and ran down her throat. She crawled towards another warhead, but each time she moved a limb it felt like she was moving through thickening clay.
“Think…that’s it. Go! Get back to the ship.” Yoon collapsed to the deck. She felt the stomp of titan feet through the floor, heard faint messages through her helmet comms as Costas and Vitali spoke.
Her stomach felt like a white-hot knife was buried inside her. She curled into a ball as a terrible ache emanated out of her bones.
“Should be…should be soon. Tell Captain he’d have done this…for me. For us all,” she slurred as darkness pressed in around her.
***
Captain Nash paced around the bridge, glancing at Yoon’s empty station and the holodisplay where the Allihies’ shields were slowly eroding away.
“Shuttle Beta-Nine’s engines are active,” the ship’s AI said.
“Open a channel,” Nash said. “Yoon, what have you got for me?”
“We’ve got two warheads,” Vitali said. “Locked in her titan, got the radiation contained too. We don’t have her or Benson, Captain. Lost them in that damn ship. But still got what we came for.”
Nash bit his lip and turned his head to one side.
“Two…only two?” he asked.
“Don’t think we’re going to get anymore,” Vitali said. “Some sort of survivor on the ship locked itself in the magazine after we left.
Don’t think we could get back in there if we tried. Shuttle’s on autopilot back to the ship. Tell medbay Costas and I need full rad treatments. I’m over four rads as is….not feeling too great.”
“Get back here and we’ll take care of you,” Nash said. “Helm, ready a course back to Earth. Let’s hope two warheads is enough to end this war.”
Nash’s gaze lingered on the alien ship as his crew began prepping to take the Allihies, and humanity’s best hope for victory against Empyrean, back home.
Richard Fox Biography
Richard Fox is the author of The Ember War Saga, a military science fiction and space opera series, and other novels in the military history, thriller and space opera genres.
He lives in fabulous Las Vegas with his incredible wife and two boys, amazing children bent on anarchy.
He graduated from the United States Military Academy (West Point) much to his surprise and spent ten years on active duty in the United States Army. He deployed on two combat tours to Iraq and received the Combat Action Badge, Bronze Star and Presidential Unit Citation.
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The Path to War
By Josh Hayes
One
Lincoln set the last crate down and cursed as it almost toppled off the stack. He scrambled to regain control.
Captain James Hale lurched forward to help the younger man, but stopped short as his engineer managed to keep the crate from crashing to the deck. “For shit sake, Lincoln, be careful, would ya?”
“What?” Lincoln said, scooting the crate into position. “I got it.”
The chattermonkey on Hale’s shoulder switched positions, from left to right, small furry hand pressed against the back of Hale’s head, steadying himself. “Actually, it almost had you. And…” Ears paused, taking a moment to look down at Hale’s wrist chronometer. “… you own me fifty. Small bills, please.”