Bernhard let Tshien keep attacking, doing his best to act like he had so little control over the mech that all he could do was back up and try not to get hit. With each attack and step back, the two mechs got closer to the hangar door and the gaping void waiting beyond. Once Bernhard thought they were close enough, he finally started to attack again, this time moving so that, instead of having him back to the door, the two of them fought parallel to it. As Tshien made another rush at him, Bernhard did the same, the two of them coming together in the middle with their blades crossed and ringing throughout the hangar. The two mechs strained against each other, both of them trying to gain just enough leverage to topple over the other.
“I know what you are trying to do, Bernhard,” the Nerve said. “You think you can find a way to shove me out into space. That does not look like that is working very well for you.”
And Bernhard had to admit that it wasn’t. The Nerve’s control over its mech was simply more fine-tuned than Bernhard. His mech’s feet scraped across the floor, inching closer and closer to the edge. Unless he did something drastic, the Nerve was about to send Bernhard’s mech out the door instead.
Bernhard had a flash of an idea. His mech was about to float away into the cold emptiness of space, but that didn’t mean he had to still be in it when it did.
“Heart, if you can hear me, turn off my communication with Tshien’s suit.”
“It is now turned off.”
“I’m going to need another mech very quickly here. Can you teleport another one into the hangar? Away from where anyone is fighting?”
He didn’t have the time to wait for the Heart’s answer. Tshien’s mech made one last violent shove, and Bernhard let it happen. Instead of simply accepting his fate, however, Bernhard locked one of the mech’s arms around Tshien’s blade and pulled hard right as Tshien pushed. Before he could think about how idiotic this was, Bernhard opened up his cockpit and ejected out, flying over the Nerve and its commandeered mech. He looked back over his shoulder just long enough to see the two mechs, both of them entangled together, fall out the door and then drift into space. Inside the cockpit, Bernhard could see the Nerve flailing about, desperately trying to figure out some way to get the mech back inside, but soon afterward, the body of Tshien spasmed and ceased moving. Bernhard’s earlier concern about Zersky had been unwarranted, he realized. Outside of the jamming signal preventing all human communications inside the Visitor, the Nerve was apparently subject to the same haze that had blocked the Cortex.
Bernhard hit the ground right as a new mech materialized nearby. If the Nerve could no longer speak to the worms inhabiting Tshien’s body, yet the Visitor was outside the haze directly around Earth, then that could only mean that Zersky had pulled through on his part of the mission. All Bernhard needed to do now was get back in his mech and help mop up the remaining Cortex.
Not that the battle looked like it was going in their favor once he was strapped back in a mech and heading back to join the others. The Cortex were still coming at them like little more than zombie drones, but enough had pulled their weapons to cause some damage. One of the fighters – Houston’s, from the looks of it – was wobbling badly and belching dark smoke from a ruined engine. Johnson’s crab tank was immobilized, as it was so deep in dead Cortex bodies that they covered the first joint on its robotic legs.
“Heart!” Bernhard called out as he joined in firing on the advancing aliens. “Are you able to tell us how many Cortex soldiers awoke?”
“One thousand and seventy-five.”
“And how many are still coming down the hall towards us?”
“Seventy-three.”
“Wait, really?” He suddenly realized that the waves coming at them were indeed thinning out, and he could actually count down the number of remaining Cortex soldiers as they came through the door only to be mowed down by laser weapons. They were almost there. Against impossible odds, it would seem that they’d actually succeeded.
“Correction,” the Heart said. “An additional three hundred soldiers have just woken up.”
“How is that possible?” Bernhard asked, but he knew the answer as the entire ship around them started to violently rumble and shake. The floor shook so hard that Bernhard’s mech lost its balance, and one of the fighters hit a vibrating wall, causing it to careen out of control.
That would be the Visitor grounding on the moon, Bernhard realized. And in the process, the delicate balance that was the distance between the Visitor and the Ambassador had been disrupted. It seemed they had no choice but to fight one final battle for the fate of all of humanity.
Chapter Nineteen
“Bernhard, there is one additional complication you might wish to know about.”
Bernhard could hear the Heart’s voice, but he couldn’t see anything at the moment. This time, his mech had fallen face-first into a smoking pile of Cortex bodies, and all he could see was their charred, alien features grinning at him with dead rictuses. He’d had his bell rung again in the fall, so it took him a few seconds to recognize the novelty of the Heart offering up unsolicited information.
“What is it?” Bernhard asked. He fiddled with the controls of his mech, found that most of them still appeared to be functional, and then began the laborious process of putting the mech back in an upright position. “And why are you even trying to tell me?”
“I have come to a decision. I do not want so many human lives destroyed. I would also rather you not kill any more of the Cortex, but I understand there is a matter of scale to consider.”
“So what’s the complication?”
“The Visitor is back within the range of the Ambassador’s comm devices, as the Ambassador has grounded only a short distance away from the hangar entrance. But before it set down on your moon, one last change of directive was sent from the hive mind to the woken Cortex soldiers.”
“Do I even want to ask?”
“I cannot judge whether or not you want to, but I do suggest you should.”
“Don’t be so literal. What did the hive mind tell the Cortex to do?”
“The Cortex soldiers are now aware that the Ambassador is the only thing keeping them from receiving further instructions from the hive mind. They have been instructed to destroy it so that the remaining tens of thousands of Cortex soldiers may wake from stasis.”
“Well, unless they can breathe completely without atmosphere, I guess it’s a good thing that there’s a bit of distance between the Visitor and the Ambassador.”
As the mech was once again in its proper position, Bernhard turned it around to properly see the damage the Visitor’s crash had done to the hangar.
The hangar was once more full of alien fighter craft. This time, there were no boxes storing them. All of the fighters were now out in the open and waiting for their alien pilots.
“Heart, what the hell did you do?” Bernhard asked.
“I was ordered by the Cortex to put all fighter craft back in their place. I am sorry. It is against my programming to disobey certain orders, no matter what the cost.”
“Then how much time do we have until the next batch of the Cortex make it to the hangar and start trying their attack against the Ambassador?”
“This group was let out from a farther stasis room, so they will not arrive for roughly five minutes.”
“Please tell me that someone else has been listening in on this?” Bernhard asked.
“I heard it,” Johnson said.
“So did I,” Dufresne said. Bernhard saw that her fighter had been the one knocked about by the crash. It was now broken and lying against a far wall. As he watched, the woman climbed out of her busted craft and ran with a distinct limp to another fighter. She was bleeding from multiple wounds, and yet she didn’t let that stop her. Maybe Bernhard was going to need to reassess his attitudes regarding her.
The sight of Dufresne’s crashed fighter gave him an idea. “Everyone, before the next wave gets here, destroy as many of the fighters as you can.”
“On it,” Johnson said. The crash had shaken her crab tank out of the worst of the pile of bodies, allowing her to extricate it the rest of the way out now. Before Bernhard could even give her any advice on how she might destroy them, Johnson’s tank walked right over the first fighter craft in line, spearing it with the tank’s legs and manipulator arms. Obviously, she didn’t need his help.
Floating overhead, Teng’s ship appeared to be completely undamaged, and upon seeing what Johnson was doing, he immediately followed suit, concentrating first on the fighters closest to the hall door. Houston’s craft hovered for a moment, looking for all the world like it was about to fall out of the air all by itself, before it flew over to a far side of the hangar to land. Houston got out and ran for a new fighter just as Dufresne took off in her new one and followed the example of her teammates.
“Heart, make sure Houston is filled in on everything before his ship takes off again,” Bernhard said. He started to blast the fighters one by one, although they proved a bit more resilient to the mech’s weapons than they did the others. “Also, keep giving me a countdown until the Cortex gets here.”
“The first Cortex soldiers will be in the hangar in the next thirty seconds.”
“Wait, what? You just said –”
“This group is no longer marching at the same pace as the others. Not only are they attempting to do their job faster, but…”
Bernhard nodded. “But they’re not going to just blunder blindly into our weapons like last time.” He ceased his attempts at destroying the fighters and again turned back to the hall door. “Heart, can you give me a running tally of how many Cortex soldiers are left?”
“I would rather not. I do not like continually announcing deaths.”
“It would make it much easier to prevent a whole lot more deaths later, Heart.”
The Heart paused, but not before making a noise that sounded suspiciously like a sigh. “Three hundred. And the first will be coming in momentarily.”
Bernhard was firing the mech’s energy cannon before the first Cortex soldiers had even made it into his line of sight. Surprisingly, though, the Heart didn’t announce the number going down at all. These soldiers appeared to be armed differently than the previous ones, including energy shields that they were able to erect in front of themselves before they returned fire. Bernhard had to maneuver his mech out of the way as twenty blasts of laser fire converged on his previous position.
“Johnson, I think I’m going to need help on this one!” Bernhard called out. Before she could turn her crab tank around and go for the new arrivals, however, several shots hit the tank’s legs and incapacitated it.
“Johnson, are you okay?” Bernhard asked.
“Just peachy,” she said. “I still have weapon systems on this thing, but none of them are terribly long range. If I want to continue contributing anything important to this fight, I’m going to need to switch to one of the fighters. Cover me!”
Bernhard called out for her to stay put, but she was already coming out of the hatch in the top of the tank. Bernhard did his best to lay down cover fire, and he even heard the Heart drop the total number of Cortex soldiers by seven, but all his concentration remained on Johnson as she dodged laser blasts and made a beeline for the nearest fighter she hadn’t wrecked. Just like Dufresne, she showed a level of courage and determination in her run that Bernhard would not have expected. He would make proper soldiers out of them yet.
The three fighters that were already in the air turned their attention away from destroying ships and back at holding back the Complex, but Bernhard could see that a small number of troops had already gotten past the door and were huddling in the hangar, waiting for the best opportunity grab a fighter for themselves and head out on their mission.
“There are currently two hundred and twenty-one Cortex soldiers remaining,” the Heart said. Another group of them split off from the others and tried to take a different path to the fighters. Bernhard took most of them out, but multiple other groups started taking the same tactic. Too many were getting through the door and into the hangar now. While the number continued to drop, Bernhard realized the various Cortex groups were preventing too many targets. They needed to fall back and regroup at the hangar door, where they could hopefully create another choke point for any Cortex fighters trying to leave the Visitor, but with everyone else now in fighters rather than ground vehicles, he had no way of conveying his commands. He would simply have to go that direction himself and hope that the others followed suit.
“One hundred and sixty-three Cortex soldiers remaining.”
Bernhard backed all the way up to the hangar door, but didn’t yet step out. The way the Visitor had landed, there would be something of a drop from the door to the surface of the moon. Once he left, the mech would not easily be able to get back in, nor would he be able to communicate with the Heart anymore. Teng’s fighter wheeled about in the air and flew to take a position over Bernhard, while one of the others joined him. The remaining two – Dufresne and Houston, he believed – continued to fly around taking potshots at the Cortex. Soldiers had stopped filing through the hall door by now, and a number of them had made it to ships. One of the fighters started to rise in the air, but one of the scientists shot it before it got a few feet off the ground. It crashed into several other fighters, taking a few Cortex soldiers with it.
“One hundred and nine Cortex soldiers remaining.”
Several more of the fighters lifted off. All of them at once concentrated their fire on one of the scientists’ ships, causing the thing to go out of control. Bernhard had no idea whether it was Houston or Dufresne, but whoever was piloting it aimed the falling and flaming ship at the largest concentration of soldiers still on the ground. Both the fighter and soldiers exploded in a small fireball.
Despite himself, Bernhard really hoped that hadn’t been Johnson.
“Fifty-nine Cortex soldiers remaining.”
The Cortex soldiers that were now in the fighters were starting to come this way. As any that got past would have free reign to go after the Ambassador, Bernhard decided it was finally time for the last fall back. He took a few last shots from his current position, then turned the mech and jumped out of the Visitor to the moon’s surface below. His fall was slow, given the barely existent gravity here, and it gave him time to twist the mech around and aim at the door. Three ships backed out after him slowly, firing back in the whole time. The instant a fighter tried to come through that was facing the other way, however, Bernhard unloaded on it. Once he hit the ground, it took him a moment to adjust before he once again started running in the direction of the shuttle.
The Ambassador looked like it had suffered a rough landing, but as Bernhard got closer, he could just barely see the hint of a figure through the tinted front windows. Bernhard took a position in front of the shuttle and again turned around. This would have to be the point of the last stand. The old rust-bucket of a space shuttle wasn’t designed for combat, and it had already taken far more of a beating than it had ever been designed for. All it would take was a single Cortex fighter getting past him to get a good shot off and destroy their last chance at protecting the Earth.
The firefight at the door flared up as the three remaining ships on his side continued to back away and spread out, giving them a better position to snipe anything that tried to make it through. A single rogue shot from one of the Cortex hit one of the ships, but unlike the previous one, this one managed to crash a little more gently on the moon’s surface.
And through it all, a single ship made it out the door and headed directly for Bernhard and the Ambassador.
It could have gone high, taking up a position that Bernhard would not have easily been able to defend against from the ground, but instead it went low, skimming the gray surface of the moon and kicking up a trail of dust behind it that hung in the air for a preternatural amount of time. It fired directly at Bernhard, and despite his best efforts to dodge, one of the shots hi
t the mech in the laser cannon.
The cannon went dead. Now the only thing standing between this single Cortex ship and the end of the human race was a mech armed only with a blade on one arm.
Bernhard breathed deeply, then jammed forward on the controls. The mech leaped in the air just as the Cortex ship tried to pull up and go over him.
Instead, the ship ran right into the blade.
The impact was enough to knock Bernhard’s head against the inside of the cockpit, and his world went black. The last thing he saw was the Cortex fighter spinning uncontrollably off into space, completely missing the Ambassador.
Chapter Twenty
Bernhard woke up in the familiar confines of the Ambassador with Johnson staring down at him, her face full of concern.
“Oh thank God, it’s about time,” she said. Bernhard tried to sit up from where he had been lying down, but the effort made his aching head pulse with renewed pain.
“How long was I out?” Bernhard muttered.
“You’ve been here with me in the Ambassador for about half an hour,” Johnson said. “But you were out cold inside the mech for longer than that. We were starting to get worried that you’d had too little oxygen in there and suffered some kind of brain damage.”
“Who’s we?” Bernhard asked. In response, Zersky came into view.
“Welcome back, Captain,” he said.
“We’re not dead,” Bernhard said. Johnson smiled.
“No, we’re not.”
“And Earth?”
“Also not dead,” Zersky said. “I’ve been in contact with command on and off for the last twenty minutes. They know everything that happened, or at least an abbreviated version of it.”
“I don’t suppose it’s too much to hope that all of this is still a secret?” Bernhard asked.
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