by Richard Fox
“It’s designed to take more punishment than that.” Lo’thar backed away.
“Team, ready anti-tank gren—” Hoffman’s order was cut off as a flash of light erupted from the cannon.
Hoffman expected a concussion and recoil, even though he should have known better. With no atmosphere to carry a shock wave, they were relatively safe, even this close to the weapon fire. Several other anti-asteroid cannons launched electromagnetically propelled shells at the same time as the first.
Booker spoke in a low voice Hoffman could not ignore. “Looks like the Kid’ran’s Gift isn’t the only ship with a banshee problem.”
Hoffman watched as shells from other Dotari ships converged on the Barca. A half-dozen shells designed to pulverize enormous space rocks struck the corvette within a heartbeat. The ship shattered in a brief fireball. Hull fragments and the ship’s broken interior scattered across the stars.
Hoffman, King, and the others stared at the expanding wreckage. He thought of all the lives lost…then saw glints of metal hurtling right for them. One piece grew larger at an alarming pace, ready to splatter the Marines against the Kid’ran’s Gif’s hull.
Opal shoved past Hoffman to grab Max and haul him backward as debris from the impact pelted the entire team. Adams was knocked off her feet. Lo’thar staggered sideways with both arms over his head.
King hustled to restore order. “Get down! Spread out!”
Booker shoved Hoffman toward the counter-asteroid turret, tripped him, and covered his body with hers. A second later, Opal piled on.
“Turret not enough cover!” Opal boomed. “Keep Sir safe!”
Time distorted. Hoffman’s heart pounded spots into his vision as he tried to see around his medic and the doughboy’s thick arms. Glimpses of his team and streaking fragments of the Barca overwhelmed his visor filters.
“No! Too heavy, Opie,” Booker grunted.
Opal responded by pulling her arms under him so that no part of her or Hoffman protruded from his bulk. “Keep friends safe.”
Bits and pieces struck the hull with incredible force, kicking up sparks against a ship made to withstand impacts from space debris during a thousand-year voyage.
Hoffman pushed Booker toward the turret. Her mag locks unsnapped from the hull and she went void-borne. The medic did a forward roll and used the momentum to carry her into the turret’s shadow before reengaging her boots and landing on the hull again.
As the lieutenant turned to search for the rest of his Marines, a hunk of the corvette’s bulkhead slapped against the hull and skipped toward him like a stone across a lake. There was a flash of a gauss rifle and the bulkhead broke in half, sending a section as big as Hoffman sailing a few feet over his head. Out of instinct, he ducked and saw a mass of pipes skidding across the hull. The debris hit him in the shins and broke his hold on the Dotari ship. His world went upside down, then snapped to a halt.
“Dutchman, bad!” Opal had Hoffman by the ankle and tossed him toward the turret. Hoffman spun like a discus, slow enough to gauge when he’d pass uncomfortably close to the turret. He’d find out if the doughboy had sent him on a crash course in a few seconds.
He overloaded his mag linings and his boots locked onto the side of the turret. He slid across the hull for a few feet, his arms out to his sides to steady himself. He looked to one side and saw his Strike Marines gawking at him.
Garrison clapped slowly and Hoffman stepped off the turret and onto the hull.
“Rally on me,” Hoffman said. “Set up security. We don’t know for sure if the banshees can operate out here or not. Better to be safe than sorry.” He needed time to think through his latest screw-up and fix it. How? He had no idea. His decisions led them to this unwinnable situation. He looked up to the void where the Barca had been just moments ago. The odds of his team surviving had just dropped.
An alert icon flashed on his visor. Looking at his left thigh, he saw a tiny geyser of air leaking out of a breach in his armor. He pulled a tube off his belt and set the tip against the puncture. No matter what this fight threw at him, he was still a lieutenant of Marines.
“Gunney, get me a status report,” he said evenly.
King barked orders while Hoffman sealed the hole. He spread a bit of contact tape over the armor caulk and the alert on his visor went amber. The integrity of his armor was secure…for now.
“That was a surprise we could have done without, Lo’thar,” Hoffman said.
“We didn’t…we removed our point defense cannons centuries ago,” the Dotari said. “I forgot. I can’t believe I forgot.”
“Anything else you need to remember?” Anger seeped through Hoffman’s words. “We have to assume anything on the ship that can be taken over by a Xaros drone has been taken over.”
“Shit,” Garrison said as he scanned the hull with his rifle. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“You have something to report, Marine? If not—stow it,” King said. “Watch your zone. If the banshees climb out here, it should be easy enough to knock them off the hull. Doubt they have grav liners in their feet.”
Garrison cursed. “What are we gonna do, Gunney? That was our ticket back to the Breitenfeld. Now we’re stuck on the outside of a ship full of monsters, and no way to signal the Breit or—”
King grabbed Garrison and lifted him off the hull. “I will throw you toward the Breitenfeld and you can bitch all you like while you’re floating a message to them.”
Garrison’s rant ended and King lowered him to the hull, releasing him as the grav liners in his boots grabbed hold.
Hoffman faced Max. “Can you contact the Breitenfeld?”
“Not with this jamming. Could do it with infrared if I had a line of sight and a transmitter strong enough to keep a signal together. My transmitter is at our breach point.” Max pointed toward the partially open bay doors. “And we can’t see the Breit from this side of the ship.”
“Use your imagination. Think of another way,” Hoffman said.
Max shook his head. “There is no other way.”
“Then we need to get back to your transmitter.” Hoffman felt a surge of confidence he didn’t trust. Instructors at Officer’s Candidate School talked about showing confidence even if you didn’t feel it. “Fake it until you make it” had been one instructor’s advice. Hoffman didn’t know who he was fooling, only that he was a hot mess inside.
Lo’thar fidgeted within his suit. “Through the banshees and sludge tunnels?”
Hoffman shook his head, then checked on the status of each team member with the command and control authority of his armor’s computer. Duke’s air was significantly lower than the other team members’.
Hoffman froze in place, thinking through the implications.
King noticed. A moment later, he turned Duke around and physically checked his gear. An ugly gash cut across the air tanks on one side of the sniper’s armor. Another inch to the left and it would have opened him up like a gutted fish.
Duke’s eyes widened as he saw the damage, then he removed his rifle from his back and inspected it.
“Gunney, if we cross-level air tanks, how long can we last out here?” Hoffman asked.
“We sit still and conserve oxygen, three hours. Moving around and fighting, maybe fifty minutes.”
Hoffman cursed in his head, then punched Lo’thar on the shoulder to get the Dotari pilot’s full attention. “Get us back to our first entry point.”
“That’s…”
Hoffman glared at him.
Lo’thar pointed over the ship’s hull. “Follow me. We have…quite a hike.”
“We go EVA to our initial breach point. Get our IR transmitter and signal the Breitenfeld. Air’s going to be tight. No more talking.” Hoffman followed Lo’thar, looking up one last time at where the Barca used to be.
Chapter 10
Admiral Valdar stood at the holo tank, drumming his fingers against a railing. Waiting. Still waiting. “I’ve got lots of practice at this,” he said to no one i
n particular. “Thought it would be easier when it wasn’t Hale and that bag of ruffians he led around the galaxy. Doing things I told them to do, for the most part.”
“I was thinking the same thing, sir,” Egan said without looking up from his workstation. “As one of those ruffians, I hoped this one would be a cakewalk. Will the admiral consider sending me on an away mission so I don’t have to endure this miserable wait time?”
“Not a chance, XO.”
“Colonel Hale always pulled through, even if he did come back battered and bloodied and dragging strange alien artifacts,” Egan said.
“You sum that up nicely, XO.”
A soft alert dinged twice from the tank. Valdar looked up. An icon for the Barca maneuvered around the Dotari flagship and a garbled transmission opened.
Valdar looked toward Egan.
“They’re sending on radio, not IR. Odd,” Egan said.
The transmission sputtered out.
“Switch to active sensors. Show me what’s going on,” Valdar said. Data feeds appeared inside the tank and he zoomed in on the Barca’s location.
The corvette was nothing more than hunks of debris spreading away from the massive Dotari flagship, some of it recognizable as parts of the corvette.
“I’m not reading any distress signals from life pods,” Egan said.
A cluster of small Dotari ships at the edge of the lost fleet suddenly changed course.
“Those ships aren’t coming for us, are they?” Valdar said.
“Confirming,” Egan said. “Begging the admiral’s pardon, but those ships are on an intercept course for the Breitenfeld.”
Valdar looked around the bridge, gauging the reactions of his crew. The air suddenly felt thick. “Gor’al, contact the ships and learn their intentions.”
The Dotari officer began speaking into open channels, repeating greetings and challenges several times, but there was no response. He looked over the data. “The maneuvers are too precise. The ships are still slaves to the flagship. But there’s no one at the helm.”
“I don’t understand why they would fire on us,” Valdar said, pointing to the debris field from the corvette on one of the screens.
Egan pulled up the corvette’s last transmission.
“XO, you have that look on your face,” Valdar said. “Tell me you’re onto something.”
“I was a commo bunny in the Strike Marines not that long ago. I can piece together some of the telemetry data from the transmissions.” He pointed at a code fragment. “That can’t be right. They’re broadcasting under condition Zeta—imminent threat from known hostile. Zeta…that’s—”
“The Xaros,” Valdar said, slamming his palm down on a broad button at his workstation. “Battle stations.”
As klaxons blared throughout the ship, his heart pounded and his blood raced hot in his veins. He took a deep, calming breath and donned his helmet. He activated his void suit’s life support systems as the ambient air on the bridge was sucked into storage tanks. Fighting in a medium that enabled fires and blast wave propagation was a poor tactical choice.
Gor’al’s quills straightened like the hair on a scared cat’s back. “Not again,” the Dotari said. “How is this even possible? I thought all the Xaros were destroyed.”
“We killed the Masters,” Valdar said. “We hacked the drone’s source code and sent self-destruct orders…but the commands were broadcast from the Crucible gates at the speed of light. There are still some dead zones across the galaxy where drones might still be active…looks like we’re in one.”
“We need to tell Earth there’s still a drone out here,” Egan said. “Get them to rebroadcast the kill command in the event that—”
“Secondary concern,” the admiral said. “This ship beat the Xaros to save the Dotari once. Failure is not an option.” On Takeni, he had a ship full of fighters and an armor company. Now he had a crew full of engineers and sailors ready for anything but a fight.
“Sir,” Egan said, “for what it’s worth, I’m glad we’re doing this on the Breitenfeld. But I’m also not going to pretend an ice-cold spear of dread didn’t just stab through my guts.”
“Understood, XO. Understood. Get the Grinder techs up here. We need to dump that cargo if we want to maneuver.”
Chapter 11
Years ago in the Virginia forests, Hoffman had marched through the night after being told the maneuver was just a short exercise before evening chow. The event had been far enough into the training cycle of Strike Marine selection that he and his fellow Marines understood the drill. No one dared ask when it would end. They knew it would end, eventually, when they were thoroughly miserable or when they quit.
No tricks existed to make forced marches shorter or less miserable. They were simply a thing to be endured. The trip across the Kid’ran’s Gift was little different. Hoffman preoccupied himself with thinking up another plan in case their initial entrance was compromised…and hadn’t come up with a viable Plan B.
Every fifty steps across the hull, Hoffman checked the O2 levels of Duke’s armor. Minutes felt like days. Their destination might have been a thousand miles away for all the progress they seemed to make. He felt each breath and wondered if Duke was holding his, maybe exercising his sniper breath control to produce a trance-like state of minimal exertion.
He noticed divots in the metal of the hull. The ship had been in the void a long time. Pitted and worn from space, how long had it stayed on course before a lost drone happened upon it carrying the Xaros programing necessary to turn it into a weapon—using whatever resources were available in the endless void?
“Don’t forget to check the rest of the team.” King sent a text to the lieutenant’s visor.
Hoffman ran through each Strike Marine’s armor statistics and noticed that Opal didn’t use much more air than a regular-sized grunt. His heart rate was normal. Respiration only slightly elevated from the exertion of the space walk. Doughboys didn’t feel fear like normal humans, if at all.
Hoffman wondered if the team would ever accept Opal. Booker and some of the others felt sorry for him, but that wasn’t the same. Wasn’t enough. King and Duke didn’t hide their resentment of the doughboy. He realized that was most likely the source of King’s frustration. The gunnery sergeant probably thought the doughboy was a distraction from the mission.
Opal was a monster in any fight; he was designed that way. So long as he had a thinking human to give him instructions, he was a valuable asset. But none of that changed his hidden flaw. The doughboys were biological constructs, all with a shelf life. Most of the doughboys had been “retired” from service after the Ember War, their internal processors shut down, some taking longer than others.
Sadness latched on to Hoffman’s heart. Losing his doughboys to the Xaros had been hard enough. Watching them slowly break down over a series of days had been almost more than he could bear. Sometimes they’d shut off out of the blue, stopping whatever task they were in the middle of doing and resting their chin to their chest, never to reactivate.
Other doughboy platoon leaders likened the loss to a family dog that passed away. Hoffman never could separate his charges like that, never think of them as just tools or animals. His doughboys were his soldiers, and Opal had been by his side for years. He continued to function while all the rest shut down within a few months of each other. According to the biomechanical engineers, there was no way to know when Opal would degrade. It could come anytime, but it would come with some warning—failure to carryout simple commands, confusion, erratic behavior. There was a way to shut Opal down prematurely, a series of verbal commands Marc Ibarra taught him when his first doughboy degraded.
Hoffman shivered at the memory. Being around Ibarra had been…difficult.
Everyone knew Opal could fall apart without warning, despite his stalwart appearance. Sudden death was a battlefield hazard for all Strike Marines, human and doughboy. That Opal had lasted so long with no ill effects proved enough for the brass to keep him
in the field, though over the years, more than one person had expressed concern to Hoffman about Opal’s inherent flaw. Still, even if Opal could comprehend his situation, he would never waver from his duty beside Hoffman.
An alert chimed in Hoffman’s helmet. He checked his team. Duke’s oxygen levels were in the red.
He pulled his auxiliary tank free and his own O2 levels dropped precipitously. He quietly handed it to the sniper, who accepted it with a nod. The grizzled old veteran looked ashamed as he hooked it up.
Another chime sounded in Hoffman’s helmet. “We’re not going to make it to the transmitter,” King sent in a text.
Hoffman typed on his arm screen as he walked slowly and steadily behind Lo’thar. “Suggestions?”
“Pit stop. Recharge tanks.”
Hoffman touched Lo’thar’s shoulder, and the Dotari pilot stopped, his eyes looking worried even through his visor.
“We need to get back inside,” Hoffman tapped out.
“What?” the Dotari said, wasting valuable air. “You’ll note the lack of noorla out here.”
Rolling his eyes, Hoffman grabbed Lo’thar by the gauntlet and held the screen up to the alien’s helmet.
“No choice,” Hoffman typed. “Even if we called for x-fil, the Breit won’t get here in time.”
Lo’thar looked around, then pointed to an oval-shaped opening not far away. “Maneuver thruster port. Oops, talking.” Lo’thar tapped on his gauntlet. “We can get back inside through there.”
Booker’s text came up on Hoffman’s visor. “And if this ship makes a course correction while we’re inside?”
“All our problems will be over,” Lo’thar said. “Stop giving me the stinky eyeballs, Sergeant King. I have plenty of air.
“I see no residual heat from the port in the IR spectrum,” Lo’thar continued. “I doubt it has been used in years. Still, I suggest we hurry.”
“Adams, in you go,” King said.
Hoffman put a hand on her slim shoulder to stop her. “Belay that. I’ll go first.”