The Last Strike: Book 5 of The Last War Series

by Peter Bostrom

  Slowly the light faded, and Mattis dared to open his eyes.

  The Caernarvon and the William Harrison had appeared in an empty part of space, surrounded by a blanket of stars.

  And debris. The broken, shattered hulls of starships lay all around them, hundreds of them or more, their hulls broken and cracked, empty and cold; dead and lifeless.

  “What the…”

  “No idea,” said Yim, staring at the screen with him. “Looks like a fleet’s graveyard. Maybe there’s something out there we can salvage. Boost up the Caernarvon and the William Harrison, maybe? At the very least, see what’s out there and why these ships are abandoned.”

  Mattis frowned at the thermal camera. There was a lot of heat around—a lot more than he would have expected for abandoned hulks. And how did they get so close together? “I don’t think,” he said, carefully, “that they were abandoned. Look at the heat signatures, still hot. I think this was the assault fleet that was supposed to come through. We just… blew it up.”

  “Whoa.” Yim’s voice was quiet. “Well, I hope so. That’s a good start for revenge.”

  Something didn’t sit right. That wasn’t what they were here to do. “Vengeance might be righteous, but it’s a spiral of suffering,” said Mattis, staring out at the broken fleet of ships. “It eats you up from the inside, replacing rational thought with emotions. With anger. Anger is a motivator, but its aim is imprecise; it leads you eagerly down paths you should not tread. It trades power for accuracy. And what we need right now is precision.”

  Blair sobbed quietly in the corner. “But what about my kids?” she asked, her voice cracking. Mattis didn’t have an answer for her. Nobody did.

  “We need to think about this,” said Yim, quietly. “Take action. Bold but precise. Cold as ice. Absolutely reptilian.”

  “Reptilian,” Mattis echoed, nodding thoughtfully. “That’s perfect. Exactly what I want.”

  Yim leaned over his console. “I’ll show this to the rest of the crew, and hopefully they’ll turn their opinions around. I think being flung into a future timeline might help convince them that, you know, maybe we all need to work together.”

  “I hope so,” said Mattis, staring out at the debris field, all those ruined ships. He could see the USS William Harrison floating in space beside them, ready to get the job done. To make the bastards pay. To take the war to Spectre.

  They had so much to do, and so little time to do it. “Bring up the data we took from Reardon’s salvaged computer,” he said. “I want to know what we can get off it. Captain Spears died for this information. The least we can do is put it to use.”

  “Aye, Captain,” said Yim. He paused. “Aye, Admiral.” And he launched himself into his work.

  Mattis stared at the main view screen at the ruined debris, and he began to draw up a plan of action. They would need to discover where and when they were. They would have to salvage the local debris, see what could be found. They would have to see what was really on that salvaged computer, and put it to whatever use they could.

  They would have to get the crew on their side, and they would have to deal with the grief that would haunt them all.

  But if all went well, then this time—this time they could seize the initiative. With a bit of luck, it might well finally be time to take the fight to Spectre on his home territory. Assuming Spectre even came from the future. It was troubling how little he still knew about the man. But now, at least, he was on the offensive.

  And it felt good.

  It was time to get to work.

  Epilogue

  Lone Star Bar

  Los Alamos v2.0

  Tiberius System

  Elroy Mattis watched the news, his face glued to the TV screen in mute horror. Everyone at the bar, every drunk, every vacationer, everyone who had eyes and ears was watching. Everyone except baby Jack.

  “We don’t even know what happened,” said the newscaster, obviously fumbling with a tablet and looking away for a moment. “Uhh, Johnny, can you check the feed again—thanks.” Then back to the camera. “Obviously, this is an unprecedented and disturbing development. The, uh… folks, I don’t know what to tell you. The teleprompter is normally—well it’s normally updated from the ground, but as you can clearly see… there is no ground anymore.”

  Rocks. Molten magma. Ruined ships. Boiled gasses. The broken remains of Earth, slowly spreading out and expanding, all focused around a flat, two dimensional portal in space. Flickering, the portal winked like an eye, and then disappeared.

  “I say again,” said the newsreader, his face grave. “This is not a test. Not a prank. What you are seeing is live footage from the Sol system… these images are coming to you direct from Z-space, and have not been modified in any—” the guy stumbled over his words, a profound crack appearing in his otherwise professional demeanor. “In a-any way.”

  Someone coughed softly in the background. There must have been a hundred people crammed into the Lone Star Bar, filling it to capacity, all of them staring at the tiny screen. He could have heard a pin drop. Someone whispered, “no. No.” The silence was broken by another person vomiting.

  “We have not received anything from those who were on the surface,” said the newscaster. “Not… even beacons.”

  Elroy had expected the newly sworn in President Jameson to give a speech. He had expected… someone to give a speech. It always happened after every major calamity. Pearl Harbor, 9/11, the Sino-American war, the attack on Friendship Station, the Battle of Earth… there were always politicians, there had always been words to comfort, words to inspire, words to reassure.

  All he could see this time, though, was a scared newscaster, a scrolling marquee that had yet to be updated with the true scope of the disaster and therefore showed only inane bullshit, and more planetary debris than he had ever seen or imagined.

  He bounced baby Jack softly. An automatic reflex at this point.

  What did this mean? Was Mattis okay? What about everyone in orbit, or… nearby?

  Things had changed. That much he knew. Things… had changed.

  A hand touched his shoulder. Reflexively, he looked to see who it was. A middle aged man with a grey beard, and a long scar across his face, wearing a sharply tailored suit. He was missing his left ear and his beard was speckled with salt and paper.

  “My name is John Smith, CIA,” he said, eyes flicking to the TV and the stuttering newsreader there, then back to Elroy. “Come with me. Watching the replays won’t help.”

  “I know,” said Elroy. For some reason—some strange reason he could not understand—he got off his stool and followed the guy away from the TV, away from the crowds. “So it’s true? Earth is gone?”

  “It is. And now I need you to help me stop it.”

  Elroy shook his head at the absolute insanity of that statement. He brushed the temporal logic aside and asked, “What does that have to do with me?”

  “Everything,” said Smith. He led Elroy out of the bar and down the street. “I knew your husband. Chuck trusted me. I hope you can grow to trust me too.”

  Elroy didn’t know this man, but if Smith was going to harm him, he could have done so already. “Sure. Okay.”

  Smith held out his hand, as though to shake, and Elroy could see it was a prosthetic. “Shake on it.”

  Elroy awkwardly juggled Jack into his other hand, then stuck out his hand. A brief electric shock passed into him. “Ow!” He scowled. “Hey, what’s the big deal?”

  “It’s important,” said Smith, “to make sure that it was really you I was talking to. Not a clone. Not a nanobot drone of Spectre’s. You.”

  That was some kind of scan? Elroy didn’t understand what was going on. “Why? What do you mean?”

  Smith smiled ever so slightly. “I mean,” he said, “that you and I are going to save Earth… and stop something like this from ever happening again.”

  “But ... but how can someone like me save Earth?” Elroy waved at the holographic viewscreen proje
cting from the building on the corner showing news coverage of the gaping, shimmering hole that used to be Earth. “It's already gone. And I'm just a guy with a dead husband and now, apparently, a dead father-in-law.” He'd seen the Caernarvon disappear into the maelstrom. No one could come back from that. Not even his war-hero father-in-law.

  Smith pulled him along, gently but firmly. “I can't give you all the details out in public like this. But—” he looked both ways down the street, and, apparently satisfied they were sufficiently isolated, leaned in to Elroy's ear. “I know who Spectre is. Finally.”

  Elroy had heard enough horrifying details about Spectre from his father-in-law to know this was big. Huge. No-one knew who this sociopath really was. But he still couldn’t wrap his mind around what the hell it had to do with him, but struggled for a way to say it politely. “What the hell does that have to do with me?”

  Smith’s smile flattened into something more determined. More resolved. For just the briefest of flashes, Elroy thought he saw … triumph. But then it was gone and Smith pushed him into the backseat of a waiting car. “Because you're a Mattis. Come on, let's get moving.”

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