Message for the Dead (Galaxy's Edge Book 8)

by Jason Anspach

  Sturm said nothing for a long moment. But inside he was asking… What are you capable of? Exactly?

  ***

  502nd Legion, Bravo Company, Third Platoon

  Lower Decks, Command Section, Aboard Imperial Flagship Imperator

  The ship rumbled from a distant explosion. The smell of smoke, always a disconcerting thing on any starship, was heavy in the air now, but the ship’s ventilation and purification system was doing a remarkable job of moving it toward venting hull sections. From space, the battleship must have looked like a smoking wreck.

  As Third Platoon made its way up through the ruined decks, Harmoor was getting sitreps from command, indicating that most the of the Legion was now aboard and ready to take the bridge. At one point the platoon linked up with some lost scouts from a leej company that had been decimated by crossfire in a section a few blast doors forward of their position. After exchanging intel, the scouts continued on trying to link up with survivors from their unit. But L-comm was struggling and even going offline at points. Which was odd. Nothing like that had ever happened in anyone’s experience. Of all the Legion equipment that could too often not be relied upon in battle, L-comm had proven itself more reliable than most.

  The decks looked had been ruined by blaster fire and shrapnel-laden explosions. High-tech ship equipment was gutted and blow apart. Power cores were popped and snapped from gaping wounds. Chemical fires burned out of control in some passages. And below their boots, far below, the lower decks groaned as though their structural integrity was a thing not long for the galaxy. They passed uncounted dead legionnaires and shock troopers, and each time the medic, Corporal Fausto, went down on a knee to run a vital scan.

  They found no survivors.

  It was Payback who heard it first. Of course.

  A low whine, like a hydraulic lift.

  L-comm was completely gone by now, and the interference, or whatever it was that was taking down the communication system, had forced Third to switch to hand signals and external audio. Payback held up one fist, and the platoon, stacked in twos along the ruined, blackened corridor they were moving down, halted as one.

  The first Titan came out of the wall directly beside them.

  Turtle, who was carrying the N-42, was pulled off his feet and hurled into the opposite wall like he was nothing more than a poor child’s rag doll.

  Nearby legionnaires froze, even though they’d traveled the galaxy killing all kinds of things. What they were seeing now was probably flat-out the weirdest. The nine-foot-tall war bot emerged from the battle-damaged blackened wall it had been mirroring with some kind of active camo system. It switched to a gleaming robotic silver as it raised its massive tri-barreled N-50 and start firing into the legionnaires at point blank.

  None of them stood a chance.

  One N-50 high-velocity, high-energy gain blast is enough to make a fist-sized entry hole and a head-sized exit hole in any living being it hits. Not even leej armor, and especially the new stuff, held up against that.

  Before anyone even knew what was going on, five legionnaires had been eviscerated by a blur of fire. And the metallic beast didn’t slow. It pivoted mechanically and rapidly, unloading on everything forward of its position.

  Sergeant Hardcore barely had time to throw himself around a corner in the passage and hug wall as men to his right and left dropped from the powerful impacts of the rotating tri-barrel.

  The few legionnaires to the rear unloaded full auto at the war bot’s back. But it merely swiveled its Greek-hoplite bucket, three red eye-sensors glaring, and laced its attackers with targeting lasers. Then, as it marched up the corridor killing legionnaires with ease, it swung its heavy rifle backward without bothering to look and ventilated the legionnaires still firing ineffectively at its back.

  Hardcore called for an anti-tank weapon. One of the few leejes still on his feet dropped his rifle and pulled the AT launcher. At that same moment, the Titan re-prioritized its threat analysis, moving that legionnaire to the front of the queue.

  A hurricane of blaster bolts smashed into the young leej’s armor, and Hardcore could do no more than pull the dead man back behind cover and grab his AT weapon.

  He armed. Didn’t bother to sightline fire. Instead he just triggered it on the fly. The micro-rocket lanced out, sidewindering… and smashed into the ceiling as though its tracking had been hijacked.

  He scrambled down the dark passage away from killing machine. Ten feet later he found the second of the three-Titan team that had ambushed the entire platoon.

  Hardcore was the last to die, unaware that the first and third Titan had finished cleaning up the rest of the platoon that now lay dead on the lower bridge decks of Imperator.

  ***

  Praetorian Strike Team

  Cybar Mother Ship

  The Praetorians were down to a little over ten percent of their original number. They were now five, including their captain, and along with their emperor they raced through the strange ship, passing chambers and holds that looked like the insides of some robotic alien life form that defied comprehension.

  The numbers of Titans that came at the remaining Praetorians and their warrior-emperor at the next choke point reached the outer edges of extreme.

  Sullus pulled one Titan off its feet, drawing the flailing machine toward himself as other Titans fired directly at him. Some blasts seemed to veer off of their own accord, while others struck near and close. One hit the ancient Mark I armor and rebounded away on a high-pitched note. But the strike caused Sullus to lose focus and drop his latest machine-victim to the gleaming steel deck. He hunched over from the blow that had struck his armor dead on.

  Sturm yelled, “Cover me!” and rushed to Sullus’s side to drag him away from the firefight. Two shock troopers deployed high-yield stun grenades—special-issue Praetorian equipment—and bought enough time for the strike team to put some distance between themselves and the pursuing horde.

  “Hurry, sire,” urged Sturm as he led Sullus away down a strange octagonal passage that seemed to be constructed of a million different fractal surfaces constantly shifting and engaging with one another in new formations. THe trailing Praetorians fired back at the slow but determined advance of the looming Titans.

  “We’re close,” muttered the emperor, who began to walk on his own after a few more steps. “I sense its presence. It’s both curious… and afraid. Which is a new thing for it. It’s ordering everything to stop us now. We are the priority. Things are about to get… very difficult.”

  “Then how are we supposed to get through this? And what is this thing?” Sturm yelled raggedly as he burned through a full charge back to put down a closing Titan.

  “We’ll lure them into a trap. We’re close to one of the hangars that face the fleet. How is your comm to the fleet?”

  “Negative since we boarded, sir,” said Sturm hopelessly. “We’re cut off and unsupported.”

  The Titans fired and advanced.

  The Praetorians, to their credit, had by now identified “kill spots” on the great war bots, and were able to put down more than their fair share of the mechanical monsters. These weak points included the hip and joint assemblies, along with what passed for a throat. Hip shots shut down their ability to move; throat shots terminated runtime. But even with this newly acquired knowledge, there were far too many of them.

  “Just… keep them busy for a moment,” huffed a near-breathless Sullus. His voice was like a ragged machine wheezing through the armor’s audio filters.

  Then he knelt down on one knee and bowed his head to his gauntlet. As though he were thinking deeply.

  ***

  Auxiliary Bridge

  Imperial Flagship Imperator

  Twenty minutes earlier Admiral Rommal had been this close to scuttling the ship and ordering the surviving crew to the escape pods. It had been so desperate and so close Rommal had already asked Revenge to stand by to transfer his flag.

  But then some new invasion force h
ad stopped the legionnaires dead in their tracks. And while this new combatant wasn’t discriminating between shock troopers and legionnaires, it was keeping the ship from being completely taken by the Legion.

  Imperator had managed to re-establish control of her ion guns by using a combined shock trooper and algorithm systems hack. Targeting wasn’t good, but at this range it didn’t matter. Even with poor aim Imperator had already taken out three Legion destroyers.

  Admiral…

  Rommal heard the ghostly voice of the emperor inside his head. And almost immediately his present surroundings—the cramped auxiliary bridge deep within the heavy blast door–protected internal sections of the Imperator’s command stack—faded away.

  Rommal was inside a shadow space that felt both empty and vast. Except the darkness was like a living thing. Clutching at him. Wanting to take him within its folds for a thousand years. It felt cold. Like death must feel. That was the thought his stark raving mind had as it tried to piece together just exactly how he’d been killed. How he was here. How he was no longer in the battle.

  Had legionnaires, or perhaps those massive gleaming war bots, stormed the bridge and shot the high-value target admiral first? Was that how I died? the admiral asked himself.

  Had the Imperator had gone up like a supernova in an instant? Sudden reactor cascade? Damage to the hyperdrive shifting the ship into a million pieces? One of the main SSM magazines going nuclear, igniting hundreds of thousands of tons of fissionable torpedoes?

  Self-destruct? No, only he could order that.

  Maybe he had.

  Admiral… repeated the voice of the emperor. Aim your ion guns at the point on the mother ship you now see inside your mind. Then fire.

  The voice felt like an icy hand grabbing at his stomach, or his kidneys… or even his heart. It was the most real thing he’d ever heard inside his mind.

  Fire now, Admiral.

  As he heard the emperor’s voice, his desire to obey that command was based in the most primal of his personal fears. Unreasonable childhood fears of darkness and disappearance for all time.

  Rommal saw an image of the alien ship that had entered the battle late.

  He saw the spot he was to fire upon.

  And then he was back on the bridge.

  Damage control sirens wailed. The sound of blaster fire was near and close at hand. Only a few shock troopers guarded the final blast doors.

  “Admiral,” said one of his officers. “The Legion will take the ship in the next few minutes.”

  Fire now, Admiral.

  His mind ached like it had been pulled from a frozen lake after ten thousand years.

  “Is something wrong, Admiral?” asked the CIC officer from nearby in the emergency-lit darkness.

  “No… nothing,” began a hesitant Rommal.

  “We must evacuate, Admiral.”

  When Rommal said nothing, the officer stepped away.

  Rommal remembered the voice. He remembered what it had told him to do.

  “Fire control,” he croaked. “Engage with helm and maneuver the ship into position to fire on the alien ship.”

  There was a pause in the silence. The bridge crew was busy fighting the line of Legion destroyers close at hand. Turning away now, maneuvering the turrets that had been brought to bear, would create a massive advantage for the enemy. The destroyers would be able to fire into the unprotected engines.

  And that would be the death of the ship.

  “Do it now!” Rommal shouted.

  The crew rushed to obey.

  The OIC in charge of helm called out the steering change. Engineering reports came in acknowledging the request to divert power. In an instant battery commanders were filling the comm with bewildered chatter that sounded like a thousand electronic insect drones angrily reacting to something they could not believe.

  “Arm main ion guns for a shot,” barked Rommal with utter conviction.

  The gunnery officer was on the comm with the battery crew that had replaced the dead crew.

  “Guns ready to fire,” announced the gunnery officer. “Standing by for target.”

  Rommal stumbled forward to a tactical display of the alien ship. He found the spot he’d seen in that dark cold place of death that had wanted him for a thousand years.

  Of starvation.

  Of cold.

  Of not death.

  Hell.

  “Here!” he said, stabbing at the screen indicating the targeting point on the Cybar mother ship.

  The gunnery officer transferred a targeting grid and flipped it to the targeting control officer on site inside the battery.

  “Firing now,” came the electronic voice. It sounded muted. Matter-of-fact.

  The heavily damaged Imperator shook as both ion shots left the guns.

  ***

  Praetorian Strike Team

  Cybar Mother Ship

  The emperor raised his head. “They’re firing on us, Captain. Shots will be here in thirty seconds. Tell your men to pull back and stand close to me.”

  The Titans were everywhere. Coming out of the walls, swarming the passages, dragging one of the shock troopers into the gleaming metallic death press surging toward the surviving Praetorians.

  As Sturm pulled his men back, the emperor used an old trick. A Rechs trick. Not the Crux. Truth be told, he was almost out. He was exhausted. Drained. Weak. He’d been using the torch to cut his way through the machine monsters more than he’d been smashing, ripping, and tearing them apart with his mind.

  But Rechs’s old armor from inside the Quantum Palace of long ago… the original prototype of the modern legionnaire armor… was a thing of wonders. Wonders that sometimes worked. And sometimes didn’t.

  One of those wonders was a force shield bubble that not even the height of Republic science had ever been able to duplicate.

  Except it didn’t always work like it was supposed to. Or at all. Sometimes.

  Sullus activated the system with his mind. He’d made it work only once during the refit he’d given it after stripping it from Rechs’s dead body.

  The Cybar were everywhere. There was no place where there wasn’t a mass of bots swarming in. Not just Titans now, but machines of all shapes and sizes. The AI was no longer testing, probing. It meant to win. Here. Now.

  The Praetorians were firing on full auto. Weapons blurring out high-powered energy shots in every direction. “Last mag,” one of them called out. Then another repeated the warning.

  The line… thought Sullus. It is this close.

  The entire ship collapsed in on itself. Or rather, the bulkhead horizon that could be seen down Cybar-swollen passages, walls, and tetragonal gleaming blast doors that seemed the things of lost giants, rushed suddenly from far away to near at hand.

  Sullus knew what was happening.

  Both ion rounds, despite the targeting issues the Imperator was having, had found their target in the hangar bay of the ship. A typically weak point in most ships. Even the Cybar, with their super-intelligence, had never managed to solve that ages-old problem.

  In the second before the Cybar would have been pushed into the emperor and his men, melting and twisting from the surface-of-the-sun heat of both shots and the unreal kinetic force… the old Mark I armor’s force bubble bulged out and stopped the monster metal horror show carnage. Just a meter from the gleaming buckets of the shock troopers.

  Then the world turned to white-hot fire.

  Sullus reached out with what was left of his mind and sought the Crux. He forced it to push the suit’s bubble outward. To maintain its power and presence. He felt it wanting to collapse. Wanting to pop out of existence and allow them all to be cooked and mashed down to their molecular minimums.

  He felt the Praetorians lose their minds and surrender to sweet unconsciousness. Their ability to comprehend death, to explain what was happening—the unexplainable—savaged their psyches.

  But Sullus remained conscious. He saw the state of the battle. Saw how close h
e was to losing everything…

  Breathing. Seeing everything with closed eyes as the bubble tried to press itself inward in the face of the sudden power released into the titanic alien ship.

  A ship that had summoned everything to save itself in this wounding moment. Summoned everything to kill the entity known as Goth Sullus. Surrounded him with everything it had.

  And then the ion guns had fired and cooked it all to slag.

  When the bubble failed, they were deep inside the ship. Deep inside a strange and alien place no human mind was ever meant to see.

  Admiral, he called to Rommal. I have one last task for you to perform.

  And then he told the admiral what to do.

  Goth Sullus opened his eyes.

  Green light washed over a chamber through which a strange and slender bridge ran off into unseen distances. Those strange fractal surfaces, shifting and interlocking, making new surfaces, formed every inch of the titanic wall that surrounded the platform where the four survivors had landed.

  The ship had sealed the hull breach from the ion shots as best as it could.

  Sullus felt the rush of escaping oxygen. A green mist was being sucked toward the wound in the mother ship’s side. But that did not bother him. In time that faded, and then ceased. The ship was still trying to save itself.

  Sullus could feel its fear.

  It was afraid of dying. And it was many things. Not the one thing it pretended to be. It was an army. A legion. It was part of many legions. And it was from far away. From farther than he’d gone out beyond the galaxy’s edge. It was as alien as the word was ever meant to be used.

  This was the thing, or at least part of it, that he and Reina… the long-lost Reina… had known was coming for the galaxy.

  These were the things that even the Ancients had been afraid of.

  They hadn’t felt fear in millennia unrecorded.

  Sullus stood.

  The Praetorians around him looked like dead bodies. But he could sense the tenuous thin strand of life within them. To his credit, Captain Sturm tried to rise, but he only made it to his hands and knees.