After Moses: Wormwood

by Michael F Kane

  DAMON STEIN GROUND his fist into the console of their stolen ship. Four men. He had just four men left after the disastrous incident at the Medvedev manor. The priest was more dragon than lamb, and their little chase had gone from a game to a fight for survival.

  Which meant that all options were on the table.

  He turned to his pilot. “Set a course for Jupiter. We’re going to pay Antioch a visit.”

  He didn’t wait for confirmation but rose and walked through the door to the passenger cabin of their shuttle. They would need supplies and more personnel, but those could be found in the Jupiter neighborhood. Right now, their best chance at survival was getting away from Mars and its orbit as quickly as possible.

  “Hey, boss. You’re gonna wanna hear this.” Stein stopped in front of the man, a former colleague in intelligence that went by Cooper. He didn’t say anything but only inclined his head to show he was listening.

  “I’ve been listening in on HiTO comm chatter,” Cooper continued. “In case they were mobilizing anything in orbit to intercept us. But I think they’re going to be otherwise occupied.” He grinned like a kid and Stein wished desperately that he would just get on with it. The smile faded and the man coughed. “They’ve lost contact with the Phobos Platform.”

  Stein’s eyes went wide, and he ran back to the cockpit. “Belay that last order!” he said to the pilot. “We’re going to Phobos instead.”

  “Are you mad? That thing will blow us out of the sky!”

  “It’ll do nothing of the sort. Logan’s there. Right now. He must have found his own way aboard because I never turned over the backdoor passcodes to bypass the satellites and main weapon. They’ll never see us coming. He thinks he can discard me and go on with the operation I planned for him. We’re going to show him just who he betrayed.”

  The pilot shuffled nervously but reached over to the navigation display to pull up the needed flight path. Mars wheeled outside the window as they came around on the new heading and started the burn. Stein gripped the back of the chair and then turned. It was a pity he only had the barebones of his team left. They would have to strike like a meteor. Instantaneous, unexpected, and utterly deadly.

  Sometimes the universe handed you a gift that was too good to turn down, even if it was probably going to get you killed.

  DAVEY CLEARED THE DISPLAY on the thumper turret. “And then to mark a new target, you’ll do this.”

  “That’s not too hard,” Grace said.

  He nodded. “It is pretty easy. Once you get the hang of it, that is. And remember the biggest thing is to—”

  “We know,” Abigail said. “Don’t shoot too fast, or you drain the capacitors.”

  He reset the system and leaned back. “I was actually going to tell you not to try and line up a shot with just visuals. Trust your instruments and get into a rhythm.”

  The Imperious Doubt was much more heavily armed than the Sparrow. It sported not only an aft thumper but starboard and port turrets as well as one under the nose. Their overlapping fields of fire meant that the ship had three-hundred-sixty-degree coverage. Davey was a veteran tail gunner, so it was decided that Abigail and Grace should take the wings. They were inexperienced, and Abigail had to rip out the chair, but they would have to make do.

  Crash course concluded, they went back to the bridge.

  Matthew looked up at their arrival. “Are you ready?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Abigail said. “We have less than an hour now. I’m guessing no one on Phobos was willing to talk.”

  “They didn’t even acknowledge our presence,” Thompson said. “Even after I identified myself. We’re broadcasting a warning and the terms of their surrender on repeat.”

  “So we’re going to attack Phobos,” Grace said slowly. “With Yvonne on Elizabeth still there?”

  Davey watched the muscles tighten in Matthew’s throat.

  “We are,” he said slowly. “Hopefully the situation will change, but until we threaten them...” He looked away. “We have to proceed.”

  “I’ve received my final orders from the administration,” Thompson said.

  “And those are?” Davey asked.

  “Lantern Fleet is to stand down immediately.” He smiled. “I say to hell with that. As a cabinet-level official of the government of the sovereign colony of Arizona, I’m authorizing a nuclear strike on Phobos.”

  “Do you have that authority?” Abigail asked.

  He shrugged. “I do now.”

  “Then let’s proceed,” Matthew said. “Opening a channel to the fleet.”

  He stood and clasped his hands behind his back. The other ships wouldn’t be able to see him, but Davey wondered if it gave him confidence. “This is Matthew Cole, acting captain of the Imperious Doubt. We are ready to commence the operation. Here’s the situation. A formation of defensive satellites protects the moon, armed with either 40mm cannons or torpedo tubes. These defenses are automated. If we move smart and fast, we should be able to avoid most of their fire. Gebre’elwa has suggested that Shotel squadron be broken into four flight groups of three interceptors each, assigned to the Imperious Doubt, the Red Dragon, the Qolxad, and the Azure Dream. Interceptors will take shots at targets that present themselves, but their primary mission is to protect the larger ships from torpedoes, either by presenting a harder to hit target or destroying them before they can land a hit. The Queen of Sheba will remain just outside the range of the satellites, giving a safe retreat point and picking off torpedoes that chase the retreat.”

  “Our goal is to clear a path through the satellites to Phobos. Once there is a corridor to the moon, the Doubt will launch three eight-hundred kiloton nuclear torpedoes at Phobos.”

  “What are we hoping to accomplish there, Cole?” Ewan asked over the comm. “We can’t strike the weapon-facing side of the moon without getting blown out of orbit. Are we just attacking the surface of the moon? I know Phobos isn’t very big, but neither is an eight-hundred kiloton warhead.”

  “It’s true. We have a fraction of the firepower detonated during the Ceres Incident. However, the geology of Phobos works to our advantage. It isn’t composed of solid rock and is, in fact, formally categorized as a rubble pile. It’s a collection of smaller asteroids, drawn together by gravity, that eventually formed a thin crust barely a hundred meters thick.”

  “Dios ten piedad,” Captain Dominguez muttered. “You’re going to break up the whole moon.”

  “If Logan doesn’t surrender, that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

  How could they even be thinking about doing this with the Sparrow still on Phobos? With Elizabeth and Yvonne? Davey thought he knew Matthew better than most people. Maybe not as well as Elizabeth or Abigail did, but he’d made it a point to watch the man. Matthew would do anything to protect the people he cared about. It was something Davey idolized and tried to emulate. But this was almost the opposite of that. This would break him. Maybe it already was.

  They could only pray that somehow, Logan would hear reason and surrender before they had to do something terrible.

  “Watch over each other,” Matthew said. “Stay safe. It’ll be an endurance race to cut through the satellites, and if you get yourself killed, we lose firepower.” He paused as if waiting for further questions. When the line remained silent, he offered a simple prayer, one Davey had heard him give many times before. “May the God of all mercies grant us protection in this our hour of need.” He cleared his throat. “We launch the assault in one minute.”

  Davey tore his eyes away from him and left the cockpit with Abigail and Grace.

  “We’ve got this,” Grace said. “It’ll be okay. Always has been.”

  He made his way to the aft turret and slumped into the seat. “But it might not always,” he muttered to himself as he checked over his systems.

  Matthew’s voice came over the intercom. “Lantern Fleet. You have your orders. Commence the attack on Phobos. If they won’t surrender, we’ll blast it to pieces.”


  “YOU OKAY, WHITAKER?”

  He opened his eyes and looked at Elizabeth Cole. To his surprise, he read genuine concern in her features and not the begrudging pity he’d received from other members of the Sparrow crew. The Cole family really was something peculiar, especially because they had every reason to hate him.

  Which gave him all the more motive to find a way out of this. Because the truth was, he liked them both. It was one of those irrational animal parts of his brain that wouldn’t quite go away, and deep down he knew that he probably shouldn’t wish it away. That was how dangerous creatures like Stein were born.

  He twisted at his cuffs, testing them. His injured shoulder screamed in pain, but his prosthetic arm was another story. It was much stronger than a human arm, though he doubted it came anywhere near the crushing strength of the Shield Maiden. Using something for leverage, he might be able to snap the links connecting his wrists, but that wasn’t an opportunity he was liable to get any time soon.

  “The guild ships are advancing.”

  His eyes snapped up to the display. Cole wouldn’t throw his life away on a vain attempt. He had a plan. The question was, what was it, and did it give them any openings to do something, anything, to stop the Phobos Platform from firing.

  “The lead ship appears to be broadcasting on an open channel.”

  “I’m not interested in what Matthew Cole has to say,” Logan said. “Empty threats and bloviations are not my concern right now.”

  Whitaker coughed politely. “He’s in my ship. He has the firepower.”

  Logan stared at him for a long moment before turning back to the tactical displays. “The platform will automatically fire on any ship that approaches the iris. If they even break the horizon of the moon, they die.”

  “Uh huh,” he said, in a slow drawl. “Well, in my defense, I did try and warn you, and I suspect that Cole did as well. Don’t blame me when we’re all sucking vacuum.” Logan didn’t respond, but his body language said everything. Whitaker’s improvised plan was working. He struggled to his feet.

  “Sit down,” Elizabeth hissed. Yvonne eyed him in curiosity but didn’t say anything.

  Logan turned at the sound. “I should kill you for the nuisance you’ve been.”

  He deliberately gave him his cockiest grin. “But?”

  “But you may have uses, assets I could absorb, so you get to stick around this miserable universe a little longer.” He turned to the only other Abrogationist not at work in the control room. “Get him out of my sight. I don’t care what you do with him, so long as he’s gone.”

  Perfect.

  He was pushed out the main door and nearly stumbled down the steps. “That was hardly necessary,” he grumbled as he regained his feet. His heart was starting to hammer in anticipation of what he was about to do. Hopefully the adrenaline would keep him from passing out. “You can just point and I’ll walk. I’ve been beaten enough times in the last week that you don’t need to make further effort on that front.” The short muscular man, whose name Whitaker had overheard as Benson, sighed and pointed at a door. “See. That wasn’t hard.”

  It was an empty conference room, or maybe a briefing room, given the military dressings. Benson flicked on the lights. “Just don’t do anything stupid.”

  Whitaker snapped his head back toward the door. “What was that?”

  The man took the bait and turned to look. “What?”

  Whitaker almost screamed when he used his prosthetic arm to wrench his other shoulder out of its socket for the third time. With the extra range of motion afforded to him, he pulled his arms over his head and tackled Benson before he could react. With his hands now in front of him, Whitaker was able to use the strength afforded by his prosthetic to good effect, wrenching the gun away from his enemy and then getting a hand on his neck.

  “Sorry, Benson. you chose the wrong side.”

  He crushed the man’s throat without a second thought.

  Through clenched teeth, he got to his feet and closed the door. He would need a second prosthetic limb after this, and the doctor in the control room was going to be rightly cross with him. After breathing slowly and deeply for a couple of minutes, hoping at least some of the lancing pain in his shoulder would subside, he finally cursed under his breath and crawled to one of the chairs at the table.

  He took his wounded arm and braced it along the metal armrest. He wrapped the short chain linking his cuffs under the bar, and then twisted and pulled up with his mechanical arm. The link popped, while the cuff bit deep into his flesh, drawing blood. What was more damage at this point? Especially considering he was free for the first time in days. He slid over to a nearby computer and booted it up, ignoring the arm hanging limp at his side. To his surprise, the computer wasn’t locked. Either security around here was nonexistent, or else there was a full back door override in effect. That would explain how Logan seemed to have taken complete control of the Phobos Platform mere minutes after arriving. He could use this to his advantage.

  The current system he was on didn’t have control over anything important, but he was able to find camera feeds. Flicking through the facility, he took count of how many men Logan still had. Two in the hangar. Six in the control room. Two patrolling the main corridor. Three outside the dorms. He frowned. What were they up to?

  On a hunch, he switched to the view inside the dorm entrance. It was barricaded shut and guarded by survivors. He smiled to himself at the potential of reinforcements. The only problem was that he had no way to get there safely.

  “CUT ACROSS THE OUTSIDE of the satellite formation,” Matthew said. “Try not to get too deep or you’ll be cut down.”

  “Following in your wake twenty klicks back,” Ewan said.

  “Gunners, hit anything that’s not ours. Is everyone ready?”

  He heard brief acknowledgments from his own crew.

  “Seven seconds till we cross into their range,” Thompson said. “I’m marking close targets and passing them to the turrets now.” They passed into the overlapping spheres of fire. “I’ve got six satellites firing cannons. One incoming torpedo.”

  “Shotel, see what you can do about that torpedo,” Matthew said and spun the Doubt to face back out of the danger zone and gunned the engines. Their trajectory would take them on a sweeping arc through the outside of the satellites before rocketing them back toward the Queen of Sheba. In the meantime...

  The thumpers opened fire.

  “This would be easier if we were flying straight,” Abigail said.

  “That’s how you get shot down,” Matthew chided.

  “It’s kind of hard to hit a four-meter target that’s fifteen klicks out,” Grace growled.

  “Welcome to my life,” Davey said. “Target down.”

  They hit two more before leaving the danger zone. Matthew adjusted their course to make a pass by the Queen and come back around. “Shotel, how’s that torpedo?”

  “Firing on it now.”

  “Got it!” shouted another member of the flight team. “Coming around to rejoin formation.”

  Matthew glanced over at Thompson. “How did Lantern Fleet do on the first pass?”

  “I’m counting eleven downed satellites.” He grimaced and gestured at the bare scratch they’d made in the cloud of defenses. “We’ve got our work cut out for us.”

  They had thirty-two minutes until Kyoto came over the horizon of Mars. “Lantern Fleet, we’re going to be a little short on time. As soon as you finish a pass, get set up for another. Stay safe, but clear that path. There are a lot of people depending on us today.”

  He ignored the warning in his mind about the people depending on him on Phobos. He could only hope and pray that Logan saw the danger or that they would find some way to escape. The stakes either way were higher than he could bear to think about.

  YVONNE STARED AT THE tactical display as the Guild ships slowly whittled away Phobos’ defenses. It was a strange feeling to be rooting for them, knowing that if they
won, she and Elizabeth would die. Dead at Matthew’s hands. It was the right choice given the stakes, but it was still eerie. Another display in the command center showed a rapidly dwindling clock, counting down to doom for the Kyoto factory.

  Or rather three of its five production lines. Precious machinery that could never be replaced. But there was no telling if Logan would keep to the original threat now that he could fire on any target on Mars. Maybe he’d take out the entire factory. Maybe he’d strike at other public infrastructure.

  No, she was rooting for Matthew. She just hoped he could live with himself afterward.

  “It’s probably foolhardy to say that you don’t have to do this,” Yvonne said aloud. Logan took a few steps closer and raised an eyebrow as if to question her sanity. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Look, there’s no way you get out of this alive without surrendering. If Matthew doesn’t blast us to pieces, the Martian militaries will as soon as they manage to muster their forces.”

  “We’re aware of the cost,” he said simply and turned away.

  Time for a different tactic. “I’m sorry about your fiancé. I lost my husband to organized crime violence too.” Logan froze but didn’t turn back around. “I know what it’s like to feel that hate eat away at your soul.”

  “And yet you’re a doctor,” he said. “An upstanding member of society. While I became a terrorist. I don’t think you understand—”

  “I became a murderer,” Yvonne interrupted. “I pulled the trigger, not knowing the gun wasn’t loaded.” She felt Elizabeth’s eyes on her. “So, yes. I know what it’s like. And I’m sorry. For myself and for you. I’m sorry that no one shared your burden so that you could bear it. I’m sorry that you think all of humanity is responsible for your loss. But you’re not alone. Life is tragic for everyone.”