Edge of War (The Eternal Frontier Book 2)

by Anthony J Melchiorri

  Tag swiveled, firing at a Drone-Mech as its feet hit the floor. Another three charged him, firing all the while, and Lonestar barreled at the aliens.

  “Captain, look out!” Lonestar fired her rifle, plugging rounds into their bodies, but one still carried forward. Black fluid leaked from the holes in the Drone-Mech’s armor as Lonestar threw herself at it before it could reach Tag, and the duo collided with a sickening crack of alloy against alloy.

  Bull and Sumo fired wildly at other Drone-Mechs that had made it to the floor. Several of the Mechanic engineers were cut down in hand-to-hand combat; others didn’t even have a chance to turn from their terminals. Tag looked to Bracken to see how she was organizing her last-minute resistance. She too was grappling with a Drone-Mech, tumbling in a sea of bodies and twitching limbs.

  Coren and Alpha were still at their stations, working fervently, as Sofia leveled a blast that knocked a nearby Drone-Mech off its feet. Tag ran to them, signaling for the marines to follow, knowing that the duo might be their last chance at survival. Another Mechanic engineer went down in a torrent of gunfire, and Tag watched a Mechanic soldier fall to four Drone-Mechs. Bracken was pushing off the body of the Drone-Mech she had finally prevailed against when another two jumped atop her.

  Tag fired at the Drone-Mechs still descending from the ceiling, but he realized he was no longer aiming at single targets. Now he was simply firing into a mob of armored soldiers. Rounds pinged near him, scorching past his suit continuously, and he ducked lower, crouching near Coren’s terminal.

  “How much longer?” Tag yelled above the din.

  “We are almost finished,” Coren said. “Just need thirty seconds to execute.”

  Something bubbled in Tag. Something like hope. Just have to survive for thirty more seconds, he thought.

  A new sound pierced the unholy chorus of gunfire and agonized yells, and Tag twisted to see the main doors fall under the all-too-familiar glow of intense green lasers. Drone-Mechs in exo-suits cut through the melting alloy, and their weapons wrought new havoc on the hapless free Mechanics. Bull dropped his rifle, and Sumo, Lonestar, and Gorenado followed suit, arming their rocket launchers instead. They fired a salvo at the exo-suit soldiers, rockets leaving a wake of gray smoke until they collided with the mechanized soldiers in a brash display of deafening fireworks. The first line fell quickly but was replaced by more of the looming giant armored suits, and the Drone-Mechs continued their drive forward.

  “Coren, how are we?” Tag asked.

  Coren leaned away from his terminal. “We’re there. We’re ready!”

  His finger plunged toward the command to initiate the generator, but before he pressed it, a salvo of blue pulse rounds lanced into him. His built-in energy shield wavered and crackled then disappeared entirely. Energy rounds ate into his shoulder and arm, knocking him away from the terminal, and he tumbled backward onto the floor. Alpha began lunging toward his terminal but had to dodge as an exo-suit’s green laser caught the ground at her feet and swung upward, slicing through her terminal.

  Without thinking, Tag ran at Coren’s terminal. He ignored everything around him, and his vision tunneled as he leapt over Drone-Mech corpses. His eyes focused only on the terminal’s screen, on the command that would end this all, that would deactivate the Drone-Mechs’ nanites and shut them down. Stop this massacre.

  “Tag!” Someone cried from behind him. Sofia.

  She glanced at him, then back at one of the exos, firing crazily as she did. The exo brought its laser to bear on the terminal Tag was heading for.

  “No!” Tag yelled. His lungs burned and his muscles strained as he raced to the terminal, using every last energy reserve in his body. He lunged, his hand outstretched, desperate to end all of this. To stop it with that single command. Activate the generator. Save his crew. Save the Mechanics.

  His fingers came down hard on the terminal as the screech of the laser exploded in his ear drums. He looked down to see the laser sheering through his chest, tearing through his armor, his bones, his flesh.

  There was no time to feel pain.

  Only darkness.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  A hollow, persistent beat.

  Thump-thump.

  Then the whoosh of air. Like recyclers or filters working to keep a ship alive in the cold, unforgiving vastness of outer space.

  Thump-thump.

  There was a dull ache. A memory unable to be placed, tickling at the edge of the mind but refusing to reveal itself, coy and tantalizing.

  Thump-thump.

  Flashes of light exploded in a symphonic burst of colors. First red and black then giving way to softer, calmer blues and greens. Then silver, like fluid metal flowing all around.

  Thump-thump.

  Tag took his first unaided breath, his consciousness flooding into him, bouncing beneath his skull, and he gasped, his hands jolting to his chest. He felt fluid draining from all sides, puddling at his feet, then being siphoned off. He was stuck inside something. Imprisoned. His breathing grew more rapid, accelerating in concert with his pulse. He pressed a palm on the polyglass, yearning to be free, to be outside this chamber. Whatever it was.

  Something looked back at him. Huge brown eyes, soft and warm, shone from a face chiseled and scarred by war, dark skin traced by light lines telling tales of glancing pulsefire and piercing shrapnel.

  “He’s waking up!” the person boomed.

  Then it all rushed back to Tag. He was in a regen chamber, and outside was Gorenado. Last time he had seen the man, the marine had still been recovering from his own debilitating injuries, limping around the battlefield on Meck’ara. As the chamber door hissed open and the man cradled Tag in his arms, Tag realized Gorenado had had plenty of time to recover, which begged the question.

  “How long...how long...” Tag struggled to get the words from his lips. His mouth felt sticky, and he could taste the stench of the worst morning breath he had ever had lingering on his tongue.

  “Been a few weeks, Captain,” Gorenado said, gingerly laying Tag on one of the med bay patient crash couches. He turned to someone Tag couldn’t yet see. “If you can handle him, I’ll go let the others know. Want to tell them in person.” Gorenado’s heavy footsteps faded into the corridor.

  A silver face loomed over him. “All biometric activity reports normal healing processes, Captain, in line with computational projections.”

  Tag tried to take a relieved, deep breath, but he felt a sharp sting in his chest as if an exo-suit were wrapping its metal claws around him and squeezing. He winced.

  “That will cause some pain for a while,” Alpha said. “It’s advisable to take shallower breaths.”

  “No...kidding,” Tag managed. The events that had landed him here started to materialize. The grav-wave generator. The Drone-Mechs. The exo-suits, and the laser that had torn into him. Judging by his mere existence, he guessed they had somehow won, but he was almost afraid to ask the question, fearing he had only survived by a miracle.

  However, Alpha didn’t leave him in suspense. “You managed to initiate the implementation, Captain. The Drone-Mechs were shut down. Unfortunately, that meant that some of them perished as the genetic alterations made by the nanites initiated cellular suicide. But a surprisingly sizable portion did survive and are being treated to help recover full neurological functioning. It’s unclear if that will be possible. Many of the Drone-Mechs are simply husks of beings, functioning as though they do not have a brain at all. Most of the Drone-Mech ships were reinstated into the free Mechanic navy, and the Melarrey have established a working relationship with the Mechanics as they rebuild Meck’ara. Bracken survived, as did—”

  “Coren?” Tag asked, his voice coming out raspy.

  “Yes,” Alpha said. “He suffered several pulse rounds, but nothing near as traumatic as the laser you took. The injury was rather gruesome.” She repositioned a holoscreen and clicked a command on the terminal. Tag cringed at the image of his charred torso. It appeared even
worse than Gorenado’s wounds, and Tag was surprised he had survived at all. “You were lucky that Lonestar dragged your body away from the exo-suits’ laser before it could do much more damage, or you would have surely died. She took quite a bit of pulsefire but came out of the battle looking much better than you.”

  Alpha’s delivery left much to be desired in the way of bedside manner, but Tag appreciated the content of the message. He also made a mental note to thank Lonestar when he saw her. A twinge of relief passed through him in knowing his decision to let her in on this last mission had been a good one. She truly was a dedicated marine who had been wrapped up in a conspiracy beyond her control. Her fidelity to the mission and the SRE had been proven by her valor.

  “Lonestar isn’t back in the brig...is she?” Tag asked.

  “No,” Alpha said. “In your place, Sofia assumed command and said you would probably wish her to have open range over the Argo.” As if she was uncertain whether Sofia had made the right choice, she added, “My objections were noted based on SRE law in such circumstances, but Sofia insisted your views on the matter would be different.”

  “Good,” Tag said. He stretched his fingers and toes and felt a warmth in his muscles. Normally a stint in the regen chamber would necessitate a stay in bed for complete recovery, but he felt like he could get up and walk out of here. “So...Lonestar saved me from the laser, but she certainly doesn’t know medical science. I’m presuming you took the lead there?”

  Alpha nodded. “I did, Captain. I altered the regen chamber’s healing algorithms as well, making adjustments to some of the preprogrammed simulacrum stem cells. I hope that you find the changes satisfactory, as I believe they are an improvement over the normal healing paradigm.”

  “I can tell,” Tag said. He forced himself up straighter in the crash couch. His bones creaked, and he still had to refrain from taking too deep a breath, but he managed to swing a leg over the side with surprising ease. “How’s it feel?”

  “Pardon me?” Alpha said.

  “To make an improvement like that. To be able to do something that helps others live.”

  “It currently resides as the most favorable feeling in my life, though my life is rather short compared to yours,” Alpha said.

  Tag smiled at that, brushing his hand through his still-wet hair. “Good. And throughout my somewhat longer life, it’s still remained the best feeling I’ve had. Helping others even when the odds seem long and lost. Doesn’t get better than seeing someone you saved recover from the brink of death.”

  “Yes,” Alpha said, her eyes tracing the deck. “It is a much greater feeling than causing destruction. I am almost ashamed of what I told you before. What I said when I didn’t realize the fragility of life.” Her beady eyes narrowed. “But after seeing what the Mechanics have gone through firsthand, I can say that saving life will always be preferable to me over taking it.”

  “As it should be,” Tag said. “Thanks to your efforts and the rest of the crew, we just saved more lives than we can count.”

  “Actually, I think I can offer a prediction with an exceedingly low margin of error on the exact count of the lives we saved.”

  “Just a saying, Alpha,” Tag said as she looked at him with a robotic but certainly bemused expression. “Can I go for a stroll?”

  “You must take things slowly, but I believe with my aid, you can.”

  “Then let’s do that,” Tag said. “I want to see the crew.”

  “They are assembled on the bridge, taking a brief break from their efforts to rebuild the Institute. Bracken believes we can use the Institute as a center of defense against the grav signals from the Drone-masters in case there are still surviving Drone-Mechs elsewhere. In addition, they’ve begun full-scale production of the nanite vaccine we discovered.”

  “Excellent,” Tag said. “And besides taking care of me, what have you been up to?”

  “Between coordinating the onboard repair bots, I’ve been scouring the records and analyzing everything on the shipboard computers to analyze any code or encrypted messages Captain Weber may have left.” She let out a mechanical sigh. “I still have no leads on where Captain Weber intended to take the Argo, nor what he intended to do with the ordnance the Drone-Mechs stole in their initial attack on the ship.”

  “Damn,” Tag said. “What about the Melarrey? What’s their game?”

  “They, too, are after the Drone-masters. The Drone-Mechs destroyed most of their home world, and the ones we’ve met are some of the last members of their species. They had been scouring the wreckage of the Mechanics’ civilization for clues as to what the Drone-masters were after when we encountered one of their scouting ships. Jaroon was on that ship. He apologized for frightening us but said they refused to answer any incoming hails for fear their computer systems would be hijacked by the Drone-Mechs.”

  “Makes sense,” Tag said, recalling the Drone-Mech computer takeover of the Argo. “But why did he decide to help us?”

  “Jaroon scanned our computers, which is what caused those strange disturbances, to determine whether we were friend or foe, since they’d never encountered a human.”

  “And what about trying to suck Coren up?”

  “That was an attempt to assess whether Coren was a Drone-Mech or not. They planned to perform a scan not unlike the one you developed to detect nanites.”

  “Got it,” Tag said.

  Words still felt clumsy on his tongue, but talking was getting more comfortable as he walked down the ship’s corridors, even though he was leaning heavily on Alpha. Still, the mere fact he was walking after the injuries he had sustained gave him hope. He should have been dead. And if he could recover thanks to a little ingenuity and perseverance from his crew members, he had confidence that both the Mechanics and the Melarrey could, too. It would be difficult, perilous work, but there was a chance to succeed. And no matter how slim it was, he and his crew would work to make it happen. Because when the day came—and he knew it would—that the SRE needed help, he had faith these races wouldn’t soon forget the Argo or its help and that they would be glad to return the favor.

  Maybe it was optimistic. Maybe it was the painkillers or his stay in the regen chamber messing with his mind. At least for today, he wouldn’t let anything but optimism dominate his thoughts.

  With Alpha leading him, they began the climb to the bridge. He tried to come up with what he would say to his crew, how he would inspire them on the next leg of their journey—wherever it would take them—but he realized he was lacking direction. Lacking something to say that would give them a concrete next step, a concrete objective. They could certainly devote their time to rebuilding the Mechanic society and learning what they could from the Melarreys’ efforts, but that wouldn’t necessarily put them any closer to finding the Drone-masters.

  “Damn the gods.” He stopped in the middle of the ladder, perching on a step. He had been blind again, looking for answers in the exact places there would be no answers. It seemed so obvious now, so clear that it had to be true.

  “Captain?” Alpha asked.

  “Take me to the captain’s quarters,” Tag said.

  Alpha gave him a curious glance but relented, changing direction as she helped him hobble toward the captain’s quarters. He entered past the conference room and into the chamber he hadn’t yet moved into. The place still felt haunted by Captain Weber’s spirit, and by all accounts, it might be. He searched the room, looking for something, anything. A clue that they had missed before. He tapped in a command on a nearby terminal and opened a holoscreen view of the captain’s quarters according to architectural schematics.

  “Overlay,” Tag commanded the computer. The holoscreen projected the images of the captain’s quarters all over the physical quarters themselves. Bulkheads, shelves, secured lockers, the bunk. All were illuminated in the glow of the projection.

  “What are you doing, Captain?” Alpha said, still standing in the doorway to the chamber.

  “Remember how t
he computer reported the slight power discrepancy in the cargo bay?”

  “Right,” Alpha said. “Lonestar’s transponder was leeching from our shipboard systems.”

  “All the computers knew was that there was a power leak. They knew nothing about what was causing it.”

  “I understand that, Captain, but I do not understand what you are doing now.”

  “Sometimes the computer doesn’t know everything,” Tag said, already stepping gingerly around the room and searching the holographic overlay. “Sometimes we don’t put things on the computer because they might be discovered, like a secret transponder. Or they might be stolen by our enemies, right?”

  Alpha’s beady eyes seemed to expand as if she understood immediately. “And surely if Captain Weber’s commands were as secretive as we suspect, searching in the computer will yield very few results to guide us.”

  “Exactly,” Tag said. “There’s no way he was just shooting into space without a solid plan, and even the best memory enhancements can’t give you perfect recollection of everything you’d need to travel through hyperspace toward whatever it was Weber was after.”

  “At least that is what you are presuming.”

  “That is what I’m hoping for, yes,” Tag said, “because that would mean...”

  He let the words trail off when he spotted a panel on the bulkhead that appeared slightly different than the holo-overlay suggested. There was an extra indent for a rivet that hadn’t been part of the ship’s original schematics. It appeared innocuous, subtle. And that was exactly what he had been looking for. He punched it with his finger, and the panel opened, revealing a chamber within it. His fingers shook as he reached inside and felt the cover of a physical book. An actual, physical book. He withdrew it, trailing his fingers over the leather cover and smelling the scent of the paper. It reminded him somehow of home, of comfort, though he swore he had never known the scent of a physical paper book before.

  Carefully, he opened the cover, not knowing how gently he had to treat it to prevent the thing from tearing. And there, on the first page, was handwriting that he presumed was Captain Weber’s. He scanned through the lines of text detailing coordinates and locations to unleash certain ordnance. As he read on, his stomach sank. The optimism brooding in him earlier was replaced with a frightening chill that started first in his gut then spread through his limbs and came to rest in his mind. The book didn’t explain much.