Edge of War (The Eternal Frontier Book 2)

by Anthony J Melchiorri

  “Captain!” A voice cut through his confusion, piercing his still-pained eardrums. “Your vital signs...they faded for a moment. I thought we had lost you.”

  Alpha. She knelt next to Tag, scanning the horizon with her rifle. She fired at something, though Tag couldn’t tell what it was.

  “Marines!” Bull yelled. Black burn marks marred his armor, but he stood on a metal plate from the APC’s wreckage. Coils of dark smoke twirled around him as he reached out to Lonestar. With his help, she hoisted herself from under a carapace-like shell of APC armor. Together, they pushed another sheet of alloy off of Sumo and Gorenado.

  “Sofia! Coren!” Tag said, hobbling forward with one arm draped over Alpha’s shoulder. He found Coren hunched over the body of another Mechanic.

  Coren turned at Tag’s approach. “Sharick’s gone.”

  “He was a damn good soldier,” Bull said. “Didn’t deserve this.”

  Tag wanted to say a prayer for the brave Mechanic, but there were too many others to mourn and not a second to waste. An incoming barrage of pulsefire lit up the ground near them, and they threw themselves behind the wreckage. Tag army-crawled forward, dragging himself past a piece of the bench from the APC’s troop hold. Beneath it he saw Sofia. The others were moving around him, ducking and weaving behind what shelter they could find, rousing the other surviving Mechanics.

  He grabbed her shoulder. “Sofia!”

  Through her visor, he saw her eyelids tremor before opening.

  “Something going on, Captain?” she asked, her voice groggy.

  “We’ve got to move.”

  She reached out a hand, and he took it.

  Before he started to drag her out and exacerbate any injuries, he asked, “Can you feel your limbs? Anything hurt?”

  “Does it matter?” she shot back.

  “Fair enough. Ready?”

  Pulse rounds pinged against chunks of slagged APC.

  “Ready or not,” she said, “get me the hell out of here.”

  Tag yanked on her arms, and her nose scrunched up, her mouth opening as if she was ready to scream. But just as quickly, she clenched her lips closed. Once she was free of the bench, Tag could see one of her ankles was twisted beyond the normal limits of human anatomy.

  “Your earlier question?” she said, her voice almost a whimper and sounding agonized. “About feeling my limbs? I can feel them.”

  “Alpha!” Tag said. He was already monitoring the auto-painkiller routines on Sofia’s suit through his wrist terminal and upped her conservative dose slightly. “Help her out.”

  “Yes, Captain!” Alpha scooped an arm under Sofia’s shoulder.

  Without Alpha’s help, Tag limped forward on his own. The pain was slowly dissipating from his own injuries, whether it was the painkillers kicking in or the adrenaline fueling him to focus on the task at hand. Several Mechanic air cars slid to a stop in front of the Institute, and Mechanics stormed out, firing a fusillade into the main door until it caved inward. The first Mechanic soldiers plunged into the darkness of the science building. This was it. They were in. Dozens of Mechanics rushed through the entrance, relaying updates over the public comms.

  “No contacts.”

  “Clear!”

  But Tag gulped. With the explosions glaring brightly enough above the atmosphere to be seen on the planet’s surface and the stealth ships and Melarrey still engaged in a vicious battle overhead, Tag knew it wouldn’t be this easy. Couldn’t be. Tag led his own diminutive forces up the stairs into the building, his boots clattering against the polished stone, when a resounding chorus of gun blasts barked from the depths of the building. Mechanic screams and yells echoed through the corridors and over the comms.

  No, this wasn’t going to be easy at all.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  Tag pressed himself flat against the Institute’s wall, his eyes adjusting to the darkened corridors. Obsidian walls and floor surrounded them, making the place look similar to the Mechanic ships, only instead of the tight hallways Tag was used to navigating, rounded walkways snaked under high ceilings and between ornate sculptures of molecular models and other abstract shapes. Between the artwork installations and multiple doorways, Tag saw Mechanic and Drone-Mech bodies alike. Terminals had been ripped from the walls, lying on the floor with their wires trailing behind them as if they were eyeballs torn from the sockets of a metallic being. The Drone-Mechs didn’t seem to have underestimated the importance of this place as Tag and Bracken had hoped. Instead, the Drone-Mechs appeared to be in the middle of scavenging all the research and supplies within the facility.

  “Looks like we didn’t come a moment too soon,” Coren said. “Let’s hope they haven’t torn up the grav-wave generator yet.”

  “Can you put it back together if they have?” Tag asked as they jogged rank and file down the corridor.

  “Sure,” Coren said.

  “Good.”

  “I wasn’t finished.”

  Tag glanced at Coren.

  “It would take the better part of a year to reconstruct and recalibrate it if they have altered it at all.”

  “Then we better hurry!” Lonestar said, bounding forward.

  The distant report of Drone-Mechs and Mechanics battling in the corridors guided them as they followed the maps projected by their wrist terminals. Tag’s heart leapt each time he heard another rumbling explosion, and he prayed it wasn’t the generator going up in flames. As they rounded another bend, huge banks of white lights swung above them. A flash of cobalt hit one of the obsidian walls, sending down a shower of dust and debris. He pressed his rifle against his shoulder and sighted up the Drone-Mech that had fired on them. A barricade at the end of the corridor blocked what was, according to his map, the grav-wave generator. Drone-Mechs were bunkered behind various shining pieces of laboratory equipment and huge chunks of stone that looked vaguely like lab benches to Tag. A couple of entrenched free Mechanics were firing at the barricade.

  “We’re taking heavy fire,” Forcant’s voice boomed over the comms. “Half of our fleet is out of commission. Our dreadnought only has one functioning fusion reactor. The other cores have been dumped. We’re running at fifteen percent efficiency.”

  Tag spotted Bracken behind one of the pillars. Her power armor appeared as sleek as every other Mechanic’s except for the scarlet stripes accentuating her joints and signifying her rank. Tag had only ever seen her at the conference table, never suited up for battle. She towered over the other Mechanics, cutting an impressive and formidable silhouette as she fired a blast of pulse rounds into one of the Drone-Mechs.

  “We’re almost into the generator,” she said. “We’ve got forces defending the facility.

  “Pardon our intrusion,” Jaroon said, patching into their comm lines, “but we spotted additional forces following you into the facility.”

  “Great,” Sumo said. “In front of us, behind us.”

  “More for me to kill,” Bull growled. “Lonestar, take that column. Sumo, Gorenado, cover us.”

  Bull and Lonestar darted to new positions, flanking one group of Drone-Mechs and pinning them between the two marines. Inch by inch, the Mechanics and Tag’s crew pushed toward the massive door at the passage’s end, leveling Drone-Mechs with gunfire as they popped out from behind stanchions and doorways. A half dozen Mechanics perished in the fight to move forward, but they didn’t let a single loss slow them.

  Soon enough they were at the door, and Bracken dispatched five of them to force their way through the bulky door with their plasma cutters. Boot steps from the Drone-Mechs approaching behind them clacked down the corridors, echoing loudly, and Bracken sent a squad of Mechanics to intercept the new attackers.

  “It’s suicide,” Sofia said as she watched the six soldiers sprint back along the route they had come, leaping over corpses of free Mechanics and Drone-Mechs alike.

  “They know it,” Bull said. “But they won’t let it stop them. Never knew xenos to be worth a damn like your people, C
oren.”

  Coren grunted a response, his fingers nervously tapping on his rifle. A quarter-meter-thick plate of door fell away with a heavy clang, and Bracken ushered in the first few Mechanics. Bull charged in next with Lonestar and Sumo flitting in behind him. Tag followed with Coren, and Alpha helped Sofia in next. Several Drone-Mechs posted around the inner facility fell under a wave of quick gunfire, and Tag felt victory close at their fingertips. They might actually have a chance. They might actually do this. He lunged toward the center of the room, expecting to see a massive machine or something towering above them. Instead he saw a deep well a few meters in diameter. Within the well floated the glowing purple cylinder he had seen in the schematics provided by Bracken, seemingly unprotected other than by a crackling green energy shield that sparked around it.

  All around the room were a host of terminals, each buzzing and blinking in indecipherable script. Tag used his wrist terminal to turn on the Mechanic-language translation software given to him by Bracken’s team. The language around him shifted into Sol Standard, but it was no more decipherable. Instead of unrecognizable characters in an alien language, the translations were just as meaningless; all he saw were words and numbers in Sol Standard far beyond his level of scientific expertise.

  “Thank the gods Bracken’s got the real scientists,” Sofia said as she gazed around the massive chamber.

  “You and Captain Brewer are real scientists, are you not?” Alpha asked.

  “We are, but not this kind,” Tag said, waving to the equations and information on the holodisplays across the room. He wondered if even the best-trained SRE physicists could unravel the information seeping from these terminals.

  Bracken sent her soldiers to secure various doorways in the room. Her engineers settled into terminals, already installing their software that would override the Drone-Mechs’ signals. Coren and Alpha, too, found stations to assist.

  “Bull,” Tag said, “I want you all on that door at all times. Don’t let a single Drone-Mech in.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Bull said then turned to Sumo, Lonestar, and the still-limping Gorenado. He gave directions over their private channel, and the trio set up a defensive barrier of overturned lab tables near the main door.

  Sofia stood next to Tag as they watched the Mechanics bend over terminals, furiously inputting commands or settling into defensive positions. “Glad my xeno-anthropology background is coming in useful now.”

  “Maybe you can write a book about the Drone-Mechs’ culture,” Tag said, glancing nervously between the various doors leading into the chamber. Muffled gunfire and rattling explosions shook through them.

  “Already wrote it,” Sofia said. “Shoot. Kill. Destroy.”

  “That’s the title?”

  “No, that’s the whole book.”

  Tag heard the telltale screech of distant pulsefire and aimed his mini-Gauss at one of the trembling doors. “Let’s try not to be a chapter in that one, okay?”

  “Whatever you say, Skipper.”

  Coren leaned back from his terminal. “Bracken, it appears the systems aren’t quite what we predicted.”

  Bracken hurried to his side. “How so?”

  Another Mechanic engineer spoke up. “They were modifying the generator to extend its range, presumably to improve their control over the Drone-Mechs.”

  “Will that be a problem for you?” Bracken asked.

  “No,” Coren said. By the way he said it, Tag could practically see his smirk behind the orange visor. “It should make our program more effective.”

  “Only there is a downside,” the other Mechanic engineer said. “We will have to rewrite certain software components.”

  “How long will that take?” Bracken asked.

  “No more than an extra fifteen minutes,” Coren said. “The changes should be relatively simple.”

  Tag hated that Coren had said “should be.” Uncertainties and probabilities weren’t helpful right now.

  Bracken seemed to share a similar sentiment. “Our fleet is dying up there, and even those damn strange Melarrey are having a difficult time keeping the Drone-Mechs off of us. We’ll be lucky if we have five extra minutes.”

  Coren nodded but offered nothing other than to keep working.

  For several long moments the clatter of typing Mechanics filled the air. The sounds of the gun battles outside had grown quiet. Bracken attempted to hail the detachment she had sent to stave off the Drone-Mech counterattack, but no one responded to her inquiries. She paced near Coren and the other engineers. Tag stood vigil near her, vowing never to leave Coren or Alpha’s side. He willed his breathing to slow, willed his mind to remain sharp, to focus on where the enemy might dare breach the grav-wave generator’s chamber. Tension rose between the Mechanics, humans, and Alpha as thick as the humid air in Tag’s hometown of Old Houston.

  A rumbling began shaking the walls, and Bracken’s soldiers bristled with their weapons. Bull stared pointedly at the main door, where the quaking seemed to be concentrated. Metallic groaning echoed all around them, amplified by the chamber’s acoustics, and Tag felt his pulse increasing with every tremor.

  “How long do we have until the code is implemented?” Bracken shouted over the din.

  Coren replied. “We’re almost—”

  The rumbling erupted into sounds of tearing, shrieking alloy. One of the overhead air vents burst outward, sending fragments of slagged metal splashing in red-hot drops across the room. Shrapnel caught one of the Mechanic engineers and tore him from his terminal.

  And then they came in.

  Not from the doors but from above, rappelling from the holes torn into the ceiling, firing as they went, aiming haphazardly at Mechanic and terminal alike. Tag saw one of the Drone-Mechs lining up a shot at the delicate grav-wave generator hovering in its well. Time almost stood still as he tried to sight up the Drone-Mech, tried to get the drop on the enemy before the alien ended all their efforts. Everything they had worked for. All the sacrifices, human and Mechanic alike. All of it threatened to be worthless, subverted by a single rogue, hijacked alien swinging from the goddamned ceiling.

  Tag squeezed the trigger. Even as he did, the Drone-Mech fired first. His shot careened straight at the generator. Straight at their only salvation.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  The single pulse round burned through the air, past the tumbling shards of metal and plumes of dust falling on Tag and Bracken’s crew. Tag cut the Drone-Mech apart in a fusillade of kinetic slugs. But it was too late.

  A blast of violent green shook through the room when the round hit the generator. Tag winced, readying himself for the resulting explosion. As the light settled, no ball of fire tore from the well and enveloped the room. Instead, the generator pulsed green for a few moments before settling again.

  Of course, Tag thought. The damned energy shields had saved it. But like the personal energy shields on the Mechanics’ and now the marines’ armor, and like those of the ships, the shield wouldn’t last forever.

  More pulsefire streaked from the Drone-Mechs, hammering the generator’s shields. The Drone-Mechs and whoever their masters were no longer seemed so interested in protecting and upgrading the generator. Instead, they had quickly realized the immense, immediate threat it now was to the control of the Drone-Mech forces. Streaks of blue hammered the terminals near Tag, and the Drone-Mechs fired a barrage into the generator.

  “Protect it!” Bracken yelled over the comms. Her engineers continued at their stations, ignoring the chaos around them, working at their code until the end.

  “Bull, on me!” Tag commanded. The marines rushed from their now useless defensive barricade to join Tag and Sofia. The crew returned fire on the Drone-Mechs streaming into the generator room, picking them off with kinetic slugs that punched through their alien bodies and right into the room’s walls. For every Drone-Mech they took out, another black cord fell from the ceiling, and a new squad of Drone-Mechs slid in. Bracken issued new orders to her soldiers, reorganizi
ng them as the Drone-Mechs descended. No matter how they changed their tactics or where they focused their firepower, nothing seemed to thwart the Drone-Mechs’ relentless efforts to destroy the generator.

  The shields continued to shimmer and flash with each incoming round. Arcs of plasma-like lightning jolted out from the generator. Tag recognized the signs of imminent shield failure.

  When that shield went down, a stray, grazing pulse round could debilitate the whole generator. The efforts of the engineers still glued to their stations, some enduring pulsefire, some already lying at their terminals dead, would be worth nothing. The generator would never shut the Drone-Mechs down. Tag and his crew would die here beside Bracken and hers. The free Mechanics would fall from the sky, their fleet destroyed, any hope of stopping the Drone-masters lost with it. The SRE, even if they did resume the Argo’s failed mission, might never find the Drone-masters, might never discover how human technology had been perverted into the nanite weapons of mass enslavement. Between Lonestar’s deception and the initial attack on the Argo that had gotten him into this mess, there was no doubt in Tag’s mind someone in the SRE knew exactly who and what the Drone-masters were. That alone sent a dark terror through Tag. Those people—those traitors—had an immense, secret power: the ability to disrupt civilization and peace precariously situated within the SRE. The days of prosperity, of human expansion into the far reaches of the galaxy, of peaceful coexistence with most alien species were being threatened.

  No, Tag realized, they were already gone. They had already passed the brink of war, the edge of interstellar conflict, and were now plummeting straight toward galactic-scale annihilation.

  Drone-Mechs continued pouring into the facility, and the marines and Mechanics struggled to maintain their tenuous hold on the room. There was no way they could let this room fall. No way they could let this generator fail.