by Richard Fox
“Data’s coming in garbled,” a captain said from the admiral’s right. “Keeper warned this might happen—quantum fluctuations in the wormholes playing hell with our systems.”
The Ardennes appeared in the center of the tank, then the massive Crucible gate they’d arrived through. Icons for the 14th Fleet’s ships came up, some bouncing from spot to spot as corrupted telemetry data came in.
“We are out of formation.” Lettow spread out his hands on the tank edge and prayed that the Ibarras weren’t waiting just beyond effective sensor range to spring an ambush and crush his scattered ships one by one.
“We’ve eyes on Oricon,” the ops captain said. The moon appeared in the tank, orbiting the tan gas giant, Oricon Prime. “Telescopes pulling images now…Auburn City’s on the other side of the moon, but we’ve got eyes on one settlement.”
“Show me,” Lettow said.
Grainy images came through of a town nestled in a mountain valley where hyperloop tubes converged into a dome at the town center. Smoke rose from several buildings. Lettow zoomed in along the edge of the settlement and saw hasty barricades ringing the town. He zoomed in on two shadows, both of which looked human.
“Have we been able to raise them?” Lettow asked.
“All we’re getting from the moon is static,” his XO said from his left. “There’s some sort of ionization in the atmosphere blocking our hails. Not something that’s ever happened to Oricon, according to the colony logs.”
“Stranger and stranger…” Lettow clasped his hands behind his back. “Launch recon probes. Any sign of—”
Threat icons appeared next to another of Oricon Prime’s moons, Satsunan, far from the colony world.
“Got an EM hit off a Gibraltar-class battlecruiser,” his Operations captain said. “Fleet sensor’s going to work now. Looks like the Matterhorn, one of the 13th.”
Lettow reached out and touched the moon to bring it to the center of the tank, crowding out the rest of the system.
The white-and-red-colored hull of a battlecruiser orbited Satsunan. More ships materialized as the sensors collected more and more data. The battlecruiser’s hull was blackened in parts, bleeding atmosphere from rents in her armor. Her rail cannon batteries fired and Lettow glanced to one side to check the range between his fleet and the Matterhorn. More and more Ibarran ships came around the moon.
“What’re they shooting at?” the admiral asked. “No main gun’s going to have a chance of scoring a hit on us from that distance.”
“Think I’ve got it,” the XO said. He traced a line along the rail cannon munition’s path and frowned when a brief fireball erupted in the middle of empty space. “That’s funny.”
“‘Funny,’” Lettow deadpanned.
“I mean sensor suites are being re-tasked and…” The tank changed view. In the void between moons, a fleet made up of dozens of angular ships appeared. The onyx and dusky red hulls melded against the backdrop of space, occasionally occulting the stars beyond. Smaller ships resembled a grasping hand with six fingers, all somewhat irregular and none identical to the others. Larger vessels bore outcroppings, like burnt willow branches.
“Almost nothing from the fleet on a full-spectrum sweep,” the XO said. “We can barely read them on radar.” Blue-white bolts of energy snapped from the ships and sped toward the Ibarrans.
“Who are they?” Lettow asked. “They’re not Vishrakath.”
“Ships match nothing in the target database,” the ops captain said.
“Ibarra fleet changing course,” the XO said. A dashed line traced away from the rebel ships and wrapped around the gas giant.
“Same with the unidentified ships,” the ops captain said. “They’re maneuvering out of weapons range.”
“Now they know we’re here.” Lettow drummed his fingers against the holo tank. “Seems to me that neither of them knows what side we’re on. If either one thought we were with them, they’d press the attack. They broke off the fight because we might help the other side and they need to run. Hail them, standard first-contact protocol for both fleets. Let’s see how they answer.”
“Aye aye,” the XO said.
Lettow traced a circle on a screen and a contact node came up. He jammed a fingertip onto Captain Sobieski’s name.
****
Roland felt the power leads from his suit connect to an external battery and a new display came up on his HUD. Technicians scrambled up and down his supine armor fit into a torpedo housing, like he was Gulliver in the land of Lilliput.
“Sir, you okay in there?” Henrique tapped a wrench against Roland’s breastplate.
“I am armor,” Roland said, “inside a torpedo. Soon to be inside a torpedo tube. It will get more interesting after that.”
“Fique tranquilo, sir,” the Brazilian said, “but better you than me, right?”
“And I thought dropping through a hellhole on the Scipio was a novel way to make planetfall,” Aignar said over the lance frequency. He was two torpedoes away, his tech team working just as frantically as Roland’s to get him installed.
“I can understand the genesis of the concept,” Cha’ril said from her tube. “One can assume armor won’t get claustrophobic and can withstand the acceleration.”
“Do you think it was someone in the Armor Corps that woke up one morning and said, ‘Why don’t we just shoot our armor at things,’ or was it some navy engineer that got a visit from the good-idea fairy and wanted to impress her boss with a crazy idea that would work on paper?” Aignar asked.
“I think Gideon tested the prototypes,” Cha’ril said. “Maybe that’s why we got tasked with this mission. Once he’s off the line with Sobieski, you can ask him.”
Roland looked at the lance leader’s icon in his HUD. It was ringed with a pulsating blue line indicating a private conversation.
“So it’s definitely the Ibarra fleet,” Roland said, “and some unknown species. Nice and complicated, just like I like my wars.”
“You think the Ibarras—the actual Ibarras—are in system?” Aignar asked.
“Tough one. When was the last time anyone even saw them? They dropped off the face of the Earth after the Ember War ended,” Roland said.
“My father saw Stacey Ibarra on Dotari,” Cha’ril said. She transmitted a slideshow to Roland and Aignar of an elderly Dotari lying in an upright glass coffin. Dotari in white togas took up the right half of the images; humans and several other species were on the left.
“Ambassador Pa’lon’s funeral,” she said. “Quite the event. Surviving members of the old embassies on Bastion came to pay their respects. Having so many species together undoubtedly led to the decision to jointly develop New Bastion and—”
“Did he see her or not?” Aignar asked.
The images skipped forward and stopped on a human woman in a black dress, her hands covered by gloves, her face obscured with a heavy veil.
“That’s her,” Cha’ril said. “She didn’t speak at the funeral, which I’m told is a human custom. Given her relationship with Pa’lon and her history with the Dotari, it was something of a surprise that she remained silent through the ceremony. My father mentioned that she must have been miserable in that gown, as it was unseasonably chilly that day.”
“I just pinged the ship’s data banks,” Aignar said. “Not a single article or interview with her since the end of the war. I thought High Command might have scrubbed her from the records, given the mess, but do any of you remember her in the news?”
“Nope,” Roland said. “She was on the vids all the time during the war…I had a bit of a crush on her back then.”
“Me too. I always liked the demure types,” Aignar said. “Then I married and divorced a redneck type. Serves me right.”
“I never developed a prepubescent affinity for her,” Cha’ril said. “But what of Marc Ibarra? All recordings of him after the Earth was liberated from the Xaros are of a hologram.”
“Rumor mill says he died during the first invasion,
” Roland said, “then that Qa’Resh probe he’d been working with stored his soul—or something like that—inside itself and kept him ‘alive.’ That’s why we always saw him as a hologram.”
“But he was on the Breitenfeld for the final assault on the Xaros Dyson sphere,” Aignar said. “Him in person. Plenty of crew saw him there.”
“Humans have the technology to transfer their minds from computers to new bodies?” Cha’ril asked.
“Maybe the Qa’Resh could do it,” Aignar said. “You’d think if that sort of quasi-immortality was available, people would be lining up for the chance. That must be what happened—the probe put Marc Ibarra into a proccie body—and then the most infamous man in human history decided to fade into obscurity.”
“Do you two hold any animosity toward him? Before the Cairo?” Cha’ril asked.
“He was in a tough spot,” Roland said. “What he did with the fleet that survived the first wave of Xaros…I don’t know if there was a perfect solution. Imagine you’re one of five children in a burning house. A fireman breaks down the door and has just enough time to save one kid. If you’re that kid, do you hate the fireman for not saving the others?”
“Jesus, little brutal with the metaphor, kid,” Aignar said.
“Marc Ibarra let 99.9-something percent of the human species die,” Roland said. “No warning. No chance to flee. He had his fleet sidestep the invasion, then return just in time—when the Xaros were weak and the Crucible was nearly complete. All part of his plan. Then—”
“Then we won the war and survived extinction,” Cha’ril said.
“It’s hard to judge,” Roland said. “In the grand scheme of things, I’m sure the consensus will go back and forth between hating him and praising him. It’s not up to us to judge him, just to bring him to justice for the Hiawatha, the Cairo, and all the other lives lost that he’s responsible for since the end of the war.”
“Dragoons.” Gideon returned to the lance channel. “We have our target. Small town at a hyperloop nexus called Tonopah. No contact with the residents, but the ship can see them moving around the town’s defenses.”
“Why not the main settlement, Auburn?” Roland asked.
“We can’t see it. Moon’s facing the wrong way,” Gideon said. “The admiral doesn’t want to risk sending anyone over there blind. That all the recon probes vanished soon as they crossed over the horizon leads me to agree with him. The fleet needs answers, and we can get them from Tonopah. We’ll be within Terrestrial Insertion Torpedo range in ten minutes.”
“That acronym—”
“Is not final,” Gideon cut Aignar off. “I told the engineers the name lacks…nuance. What is important is at what altitude you eject. Too soon and you’ll burn up on reentry. Too late and you’re a smear against a mountain and the designers assume there’s a design flaw. So listen carefully.”
Chapter 7
The amniosis fluid surrounding Roland sloshed against his body. The inner wall of the womb pressed in tighter, almost squeezing him.
He remained focused on the course projection on his HUD and watched the distance counter tick closer and closer to zero.
“—nd by,” Gideon said. The channel opened up and broadcast a squeal.
Their landing torpedoes just entered Oricon’s upper atmosphere and the heat bloom would render any and all IR communication impossible.
BRAKING. BRAKING. Flashed across his HUD.
A shudder passed through his womb as rocket nozzles rose along the length of the torpedo and fired. The sudden deceleration bumped the top of his head against his womb hard enough to send a bolt of pain down his back. The inner wall of his womb gripped tighter, almost swaddling him.
Found a design flaw, he thought. Maybe I’ll write a strongly worded letter to the engineers…assuming I manage to land with more grace than a raw egg thrown at a wall.
The rumble of deceleration ended and data returned to his HUD. The torpedo’s path arced just over a snowcapped mountain ridge, one approaching far faster than Roland felt comfortable with. The lower ring of his projected path clipped the jagged peaks.
He dialed up the emergency release and stopped. If he ejected now, he would hit the snow-covered slope and likely trigger an avalanche. If he waited, he ran the risk of plowing into the mountain at full—and fatal—speed.
Please don’t be designed by the lowest bidder. Please don’t be—
The torpedo cleared the mountain top with a few feet to spare, kicking up a vortex of snow and rock as he passed.
Very angry letter. So angry.
His HUD pulsed yellow and forward panels on the torpedo lifted up. The metal sides peeled away and fluttered through the air like petals caught in a gale and Roland could finally see with his armor’s own sensors. He pressed his arms out and threw off the last of the vehicle’s frame.
A quick scan highlighted a small arc of the hyperloop between ridgelines. No power sources. No composite metals. No transmissions.
The landscape’s trees looked like black moss as he fell to the surface. He cycled power into his jetpack and waited to pass into the landing buffer, which his HUD displayed as a red augmented-reality box fifty meters off the ground.
Roland waited until he’d nearly passed through the bottom of the box before activating his jetpack. The jerk from the rocket’s firing was almost a playground tag compared to the insertion torpedo’s braking maneuver. He ejected the jetpack a few yards over the ground and slid to a stop through a dry stream bed.
His shoulder-mounted rotary gun sprang up and began spinning. He raised his arm with the twin gauss cannons and scanned around further…nothing.
Three heat blossoms appeared overhead and the rest of his lance came down just ahead of him. Roland took off running, his massive legs pounding against bare rocks and echoing through the valley. There was no mistaking the Iron Dragoons’ arrival; the time for subtlety was past.
Gideon landed at a run, making his entire descent look almost second nature to him.
Aignar would have tripped over a boulder had his armor not shattered it with a kick. Roland ran alongside his lance mate and kept his pace.
“Roland, did you intentionally alter your course to clip the mountain?” Cha’ril asked.
“The guidance computer didn’t compensate for snowpack,” Roland said. “And I almost got a concussion during the braking maneuver. I can tell the designers didn’t participate in hands-on testing. Not sure how Mars can make that happen.”
Gideon had pulled ahead of Roland and Aignar. Cha’ril fell back, forming them into a diamond formation with the lieutenant leading the way.
“Same as having riggers jump the parachutes they packed themselves,” Gideon said. “Older reference, but the idea was put before the design committee.”
“I can imagine the engineers’ response,” Aignar said. “‘But did you die? No? Full production!’”
“Can it.” Gideon said, sending a travel route to the lance, a rally point at the base of a spur on the mountainside opposite Tonopah Valley. “We’ll do a quick recon from there.”
Roland acknowledged the route and kept scanning their right flank. The Oricon trees were tall and spindly, with dark bark and wide, thorny canopies. Running past the surrounding forests and the snow-covered mountainsides was like looking at a bar code from some antique price sticker.
Gideon slowed as he approached a drop-off next to the rally point. He skidded to a halt and aimed his weapons down the slope to an area Roland couldn’t see.
“Contact?” Aignar asked.
“I’m not sure what this is,” the lieutenant said. “Roland, down here with me. Rest of you on security.”
Roland jogged over, his feet crushing the smooth rocks of a dry stream bed into powder. Gideon stood at the edge of a spread of what looked like large red eggshells, all cracked apart and nestled into a bed of lime-green ooze.
“Some sort of local…plant?” Roland asked.
Gideon picked up a piece of the red eggshel
l. Goo ran through his fingers and dripped slowly to the ground. He squeezed, deforming it with a squeal of tortured metal.
“Tensile strength is high. My sensors can’t get a composition read on it, but the sludge is organic,” Gideon said.
Roland spied another piece jutting out of the green substance. A discoloration just beneath the surface caught the setting sun’s light. He activated his olfactory sensors and cringed inside his armor. The scent brought him back to one of his first days working as a busboy, when he’d been ordered to clean up soft-drink syrup that had leaked in a storeroom. The stench of rotting syrup permeated that room and never seemed to go away, no matter how many times he cleaned it.
He picked up the metal…and twisted it around to show Gideon a pair of bullet holes.
“15-millimeter,” Roland said. “My sensors show a tungsten and cobalt residue on the inside of the holes. This was done with gauss weapons.”
“Our cannons are 30-millimeter. Ammo for gauss rifles and carbines is half the size of what we’re looking at,” Gideon said. “Whoever did this wasn’t using Terran standard equipment.”
“It was a massacre.” Roland tossed the metal back into the field. He activated the pilot light for his flamethrower and burned green residue off his armor’s fingers. “These must be soldiers from that unidentified alien fleet.”
“Fair assessment, but don’t cling to it,” Gideon said. “Get eyes on the settlement.”
“Sir.” Roland walked up the spur and ran a sensor arm up from his helm. Smoke rose from a few buildings in Tonopah. The tops of prefab buildings stuck out over the hasty barricades of hyperloop parts and wrecked vehicles. Incomplete rail lines mounted atop columns dotted the surrounding valley, all pointing to a nexus point in the middle of the town.
“Don’t see much activity,” Roland said. “No transmissions eith—”
The slope next to Roland exploded in a rain of loose dirt and rock fragments, and Roland slid back down, his armor covered in dust.
“That was a rail rifle,” Cha’ril said.
“I noticed.” Roland tapped the side of his helm twice to knock dirt from his optics.