Is it over? Have we lost? Did we lose this war? Good God, my sons.
General Amit pushed through the crowd. She yelled orders to colonels and majors as she moved through. Finally she stopped next to Kane. “I need that close air support. The Coalition troops are counterattacking around Claymore, Rapier, and Longsword.”
“You can’t have it,” Kane stated.
“Damn you, Kane, you told me to fight and take that planet. Those bastards are punching harder than ever right now. I need that air support!”
“We cannot spare it.”
Alarms blared out. “Missiles inbound! Prepare for impact!”
General Amit jammed a finger at Kane’s face. “I need them! I’m losing territory at an unacceptable rate. By God, I’ve never lost a war, Kane!”
“Pull back to your prepared positions. You’ll have no air cover until this fleet engagement is complete.”
General Amit frowned. “My troops have fought for every meter, and now we have to give it up.”
“If you don’t, we’ll give up a hell of a lot more than a few meters.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The room seemed to grow dark as Gavin stared at the floor. He struggled once to roll onto his side but had no strength. Now he simply waited to die. He knew it wouldn’t take long; he’d watched men die often enough.
Some men died in agony, screaming and fighting the whole time. Others died without a word, or maybe with a smile on their lips and an apology for the trouble. He did neither. If he could have struggled, he would. There was no smile in his mind.
He rolled over the events. What had happened? If Rob was a Qin officer, then it was an elaborate ruse to get them to unlock the orbitals. No, he thought, there’s more here.
Erik McCloud’s last entry came to his mind. Rob had tried to kill him. A warlord, his grandfather had said. A revolutionary. A coup.
Was that what this was? A coup? If he wanted to overthrow the Qin, the time was ripe, but then why shoot me?
Someone entered the room.
Gavin tried to turn his head. He was cold now, even with his armor and jacket on. At first he thought it was Cross, but then the person quietly slipped past.
“You bastard,” a woman’s voice said. “What have you done?”
Gavin whispered, “Help me.” The sound was so slight he barely heard it himself.
The footsteps came closer and halted. Gavin listened, yearned to be helped. This was it—either he got help or he’d die. The pool of blood had already spread to his cheek. Death was coming.
He felt hands on his shoulders. Ever so slowly, she turned him over. Pain exploded in his chest and a rough gurgling sound came as he breathed. The floor had acted as a seal for his lungs, and now every breath was agonizing.
The woman had close-cut brown hair and a button nose. Her eyes were a dark blue. They were not kind eyes. He knew what they were: a soldier’s eyes. On one shoulder was a silver pin. Her uniform was similar to those of the other Coalition officers that Gavin had seen. Clean. Crisp.
Gavin struggled to whisper again, “Help me.” The blood gurgled as he spoke.
She looked up and then ran behind the door. Heavy footsteps marched down the hallway past the room. Only when it was quiet did she come back.
Gavin’s eyes flickered. He couldn’t hold on much longer. She moved into his view again and leaned down to rifle through his pockets.
She was close and paid him no mind.
Then he knew. A summer memory by the sea. “Claire.”
Her eyes narrowed just a bit, and she swore. There was a look of conflict on her face, as if torn, and then suddenly she reached down, grabbed onto his body armor and dragged him out of the room.
Claire stopped for a moment, adjusted her grip, and kept pulling. A few doors down, she dragged him through another door. His feet caught on a gasket seal, and she pulled hard enough to yank him clear.
She dropped him in the middle of the room and paused for a moment. She stared at a bed with a corpse on it.
Gavin raised up an arm. He couldn’t breathe. The pressure in his chest was terrible. All he could manage was a gurgle. His body started to thrash, muscles spasmed.
Claire raced to the far wall and tore open cabinet after cabinet. “Hold on!” Then, finally, she knelt down with a case. She peeled off his bloodstained body armor and ripped open his shirt. Foamy blood gurgled out from the wound.
“This will hurt.”
Gavin didn’t much care.
She snapped open the box and laid a plastic sheet onto the bullet wound. Almost instantly it suctioned down onto the wound.
Pain flared through his chest.
Claire worked in silence. First, she set a box onto the wound; a tiny cable snaked next to the box. Next, she laid out three patches onto his chest. Then, one by one, she peeled off the backing and smoothed them down. A machine beeped at her side. It spoke in a machine tone: “Give plasma.”
“Fuck!” Claire yelled. She dug through the case, ripped out some tubing and jammed a line into Gavin’s arm. She leaped up and ripped open another cabinet and pulled out a bag of plasma. Her fingers fumbled to attach the lines.
Gavin felt the cold plasma flow into his arm, and he flirted with the darkness. Consciousness came and went.
In a moment, he felt himself drift up. The machine sounded an alert, and Claire slammed down electrodes onto his chest. Then, in an instant, he was back. Electricity pulsed into his chest and gently coaxed his heart back into action.
The machine bored a tiny extractor into the wound. On a small screen, it showed the insides of his lungs and chest as it stitched, taped, cauterized, and repaired. Finally, it pulled itself out with a pop and retracted inside of the box.
The machine spoke again. “Apply patch X7 to patient’s neck and then patch A2 to sedate the patient.”
“Sorry, no sedation. I’m gonna need your help.”
Claire slapped a patch onto Gavin’s neck.
It felt like a million needles bored into his jugular. In an instant his senses were perfectly alert. A lens focused in his mind, and he sat up. He knew how combat stimulants felt. This was something on an entirely new level.
Claire finally sat back. She let out a sigh. “So you’re my brother.”
“Yes,” Gavin croaked. He coughed and spat blood onto the floor. It took him a moment to sit up. Then, the big question. “Why did you save me?”
Claire narrowed her eyes. She paused and gave a quick look at the bed. “I’m going to need some help.”
Gavin caught a look of…he wasn’t sure. It wasn’t sympathy but something else.
“Robert was the best of us once. He, not I, was going to rule this world. Then he came back from a mission changed. After that…” She stopped and stood. Her eyes went over to the corpse on the bed. “He was different.”
Gavin stood slowly and found that the pain in his chest was almost gone. He tapped at the plastic adhered to his chest; it was stuck down tight, like duct tape. His fingers fumbled to bring the bloodstained jacket back over it. Every time he looked at it, he felt odd.
“What’s he doing?” Gavin said. He followed her to the bed.
Lying silently was the corpse of an old man. Sea-blue eyes stared straight up. White foam clung to the corners of his mouth.
Claire leaned over and closed his eyes, and then she straightened his hair. When she turned back to Gavin, a tear crawled down her face. “Rob is creating a power vacuum. He has but one desire: to rule both mankind and Qin.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know, but we have to stop him.”
Gavin felt the anger rise inside of him. Brother or not, he decided to see Rob dead. He didn’t particularly care what his brother intended to do, or why. All he knew was he had to stop him. “Let’s do this.”
####
Rob turned and sat at a console on the second level. He looked up at Jack and waved the pistol in front of him. “Stick to task. Two minutes.”
Jack didn’t bother responding. The code flared past the screen before him, and he tried to catch the high points. He ran a loop. It failed. In a moment he keyed to it and repaired the call. He was losing his focus and not thinking like a Qin data system.
It all went in groups. He couldn’t send the requests singly; they had to move in the proper order, in the most efficient way possible.
“One minute,” Rob called. “Drop the missile batteries. Then engage all of the orbitals on the Qin heavy cruisers.”
Jack typed faster. He needed more time. “What about the missiles in transit? Do they continue? I can’t reroute. They don’t have enough fuel.”
“Detonate them,” Rob called. He leaned over his own console and tapped faster.
Finally, Jack made enough progress. It was crude, ugly, a total hack. But it bought him some time. He engaged the data set and watched it compile the order. “On your call!”
“Do it,” Rob said angrily. He put on a headset and started yelling orders.
The starscape above shifted. Sixteen missile icons suddenly disappeared. Within a few seconds, the lines of force on the display began to move. The fleets were reacting.
Almost there. Jack kept laying in more commands. He knew he needed to do two things. One, find a way to keep Rob from taking total control. Two, keep himself from getting shot. But the program wasn’t ready. A few more minutes…
“Hey!” Rob shouted.
Jack froze. His fingers hung just over the keys.
“Fire the orbital defenses now! All focus on the Qin heavy cruisers!” Rob stood and pulled the mic away from his mouth. He looked mad as hell.
“Almost ready!” Jack only stalled for a second. Then, in one keystroke, he sent out the order.
The battlescape shifted and zoomed in, and seventy-four icons came to life all below the portion of the planet where the battle was taking place.
On the screen, it showed charging icons. The Qin display layered in and stated in plain terms that the systems were charging and would be ready to fire in under a minute. Jack couldn’t read a damn bit of it, but he knew a status bar when he saw it.
“They’re charging!” Jack yelled. Then he resumed his program. Rob seemed preoccupied on the headset, and Jack didn’t give two shits what it was about. He needed more time.
The lines of code grew into blocks and loops. Each ran through a combination sequence so that the proper protocol reached the master computers. Orbital equations dropped through and meshed perfectly into trajectory models.
Jack watched the status bar reach full and held his breath.
Then the orbital batteries opened fire.
####
Jakob pulled the throttle and hammered it. The Fury lurched to one side and half flew, half skidded. The slight atmosphere gave him some grip, but it wasn’t much.
He’d missed one missile and was just about to hit the ass of another when it suddenly burst into a ball of flame.
“Woah! I didn’t fire! Blue Six?”
Blue Six responded a half second later. “Negative, engaged.”
Then he checked his scope and saw that all of the missiles had detonated.
“All ships, all ships, prepare to engage at close range. All Furys, sweep fighters. Clear the TU zone. Flak drops in thirty seconds.”
Jakob swung the nose down and watched as bits of spark and oxidation burned off. He’d remembered that old trick from one of his flight instructors way back when. You used the atmosphere to quickly slow the Fury. Then he set course to intercept Blue Six and set out into the fleet.
Blue Six called, “Your nose is lit up like a Christmas tree. Where’d you learn to fly? The circus?”
Jakob grinned and engaged the thermal dumps. Now all of the heat was shunted back to the engine cowling. Dumb mistake.
“Stick on my tail,” Blue Six called. “Keep ’em off. You’re too slow to take them on.”
“Hey, I can—“
“No. You’re too slow. We go in once the flak stops.”
Jakob rode on the edge of the atmosphere with a frown on his face. He didn’t like being called slow, but he knew it was true. Fighter pilots were peak predators for a few years, and then they turned into old, fat bomber pilots.
They met up, set course, and pointed back toward the fleet. Blue Six laid out the plot and set it into the nav system. Until now, they’d been in the high atmosphere. Now they headed back up toward the fleet, where pinpricks of light announced the clouds of flak.
“We’re gonna hit the edge a second before the flak stops,” Blue Six said. “Lock it, engage in three, two—“
“Isn’t that a bad idea?” Jakob said.
“Yup. Hit it!”
Jakob punched the booster and felt the acceleration wash over him. He slid tighter into his cockpit and watched the display fly by. Where other fighters were halting and holding, waiting for the flak to stop, they burned right in.
His Fury danced and bucked as it broke through the outer edge of flak. Each shell exploded in a cloud of gas and shrapnel: the gas to expand the shock wave and the shrapnel to seal the deal.
It sounded like ball bearings raining down on his hull.
Then it stopped.
The Qin interceptors were lit up and almost naked right up next to the cruisers.
Blue Six swung right in onto a Qin interceptor and fired a short burst. The rounds hammered into the Qin ship. It wasn’t enough to kill it, just drive it off.
Jakob tried to keep pace. The motions and movements bordered on erratic. They dove under wreckage, beside cruisers and frigates, right along the hull of a carrier, all the while dancing with the Qin fighters.
Then, suddenly, half a dozen Qin heavy cruisers exploded. Pulse cannon rounds blasted through the centers of the hulls and continued on into deep space. Like a cloud of hail rising from the planet, more of the pulse cannons fired.
“On my ass, quit gawking!” Blue Six called.
Jakob slammed the jets to one side and tried to bank. Without the atmosphere to slow him, he had to waste precious fuel spinning about. He watched as just above a pair of Qin ships strafed along Blue Six’s Vulture. “Fuck it.”
He slammed one engine to max, and then set the back one to max. The sudden shift baked the Fury and set his nose right at the Qin ships. Then he brought the engines back together and slammed the boosters. Alarms sounded, a fire extinguisher went off somewhere in the engine bay, and he sailed right for the Qin ships.
Blue Six wavered down and then up; she tried to swing along and hide in a burnt-out cruiser, but the Qin ship blocked her. Then Jakob’s Fury poured the fire into them. Every single shot went wide.
Jakob halted fire for a second, adjusted his aim for the tilt of the ship, and fired once more. His heavier cannon slammed a round right into the engines of one Qin ship. It fell back suddenly as its boosters died. Then another TU fighter swooped past and finished it off.
The second Qin interceptor banked away and was gone.
“Fuck, you shoot bad,” Blue Six called.
“You’re welcome,” Jakob replied. He turned his nose, pointed it at the Qin fleet, and couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “I think those army boys finally got something right. We’re gonna win this.”
Just in front of them, the line of Qin heavy cruisers was faltering. Dozens of the brawlers burned. Even more were moving to break orbit. But now, without the light cruisers to screen their escape, a flotilla of TU frigates and destroyers moved in to block the easy exit.
“Ain’t over yet, Grandpa,” Blue Six called. “Get ready. Fleet’s going in!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Lopez and Cross waited, the whole time listening to the firefight deep in the complex. Both were silent, quiet, watching, and waiting. They had no comms with the groups inside. All they had to do was wait.
Once the firefight died down, the two stared through the hatch and watched—waiting, expecting. If a counterattack would come, it would come now. On one hand, they assumed that Rob an
d his soldiers had failed, or on the other they hadn’t.
No one came.
Cross stood and stretched. He wandered back over to the edge of the water. He couldn’t stand to be by the corpses any longer. At first, they’d moved them out of the path leading toward the sub.
“I’m dumping them,” Cross called to Lopez.
Lopez grunted back.
Cross pushed the first body into the water. His back throbbed and ached, but the worst of it seemed past. That and the combat booster that Lopez had given him took the edge off.
The energy field crackled and pulsed, and suddenly the body disappeared into the darkness. Bubbles erupted, and then nothing but ripples remained. He stared at the water, unsure if he should do it again.
“Pressure,” Lopez said. “We gotta be what, a few hundred meters deep? They pass through that field and then the pressure, uh, equalizes.”
“Pleasant,” Cross said.
He pushed the rest in. He wasn’t terribly squeamish about any of it. The bodies of the cyborgs he left; they were too damned heavy. Though he did take a minute to study them. They were pretty damned wicked. Cross appreciated the design, though he saw the flaws. Heavy. Tough. But in serious need of proper infantry support.
As the minutes passed, he strained his ears. Somewhere far off, someone was fighting. Still the explosions and gunfire echoed through the halls, but from deep inside. Once, they’d heard a closer shot, but then that too was silent.
He glanced back at the submersible. The pilot had it sealed up tight.
“You got a calbar?” Lopez called.
Cross shook his head. He was hungry too. The calbar was first-strike food, a brick of energy and nutrients. “Negative, Captain.”
Lopez nodded and checked his pockets. He looked up and down the hall and dropped down into the prone position. “Armored suit!”
Cross snapped up his sniper rifle and braced it against the steps a dozen meters away from the hatch. He had a nice, clear view to about a hundred meters down the hall. If he needed to shoot further, all he had to do was scoot a bit more.
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