by Richard Fox
“What is it, ensign?” Valdar asked.
“Sir, I—sorry, there must be an error in my scope. The Earth is…wrong, somehow,” she said.
“Show me. Everyone,” Valdar punched a key on the briefing table.
A hologram of Earth appeared in front of Valdar; the half of the planet their scopes could see was half-lit by the sun. He stared at the sunlit side, unable to find what had startled his astrogator.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“The dark side, sir” she said.
Valdar looked closer; there was nothing but an abyss of darkness beyond the thin line of twilight. Valdar shook his head in confusion, then his jaw went slack.
It was dark, black as death on the Earth’s night surface. There were no outlines of mega-cities hugging the coasts or the meridians of hyper-loop trains that connected the globe.
The bridge was eerily silent as the Earth rotated into the night, the darkness uniform as the abyss.
“Comms, what’re we reading from Earth?” Valdar asked, his voice low.
Valdar heard the clack of fingers against a keyboard and the buzz of error messages.
“Nothing, sir. No location beacons, no Internet, not even radio…nothing from the rest of the solar system. All I’m getting is tight beam IR from the rest of the fleet,” the Comms officer said.
“Faben, use the scopes to look at…Copenhagen. See what’s there. Whatever hit us might have been an EMP,” Valdar said. Stacey took to her assignment with a nod; the telescopes on the Breitenfeld were strong enough to make out license plate numbers on Earth at this distance. An electromagnetic pulse could wipe out unshielded power systems. The effect was used extensively during the Second Pacific War and both the Chinese and Atlantic Union kept the weapons in their arsenals. Valdar believed it was a distinct possibility that the colony mission to Saturn had triggered World War IV.
“Comms, do a wideband broadcast. Ask if anyone can hear us,” Valdar said.
The Comms pod buzzed with an error message.
“I’m locked out, sir. All I have is IR tight beam, and I can only access the fleet—not the relays on Luna or Berlin.”
“Um, sir?” Stacey said. “You’ll want to see this.” Her hands were shaking as they hovered over her keyboard.
“Show me. Show everyone.”
Video of the ship’s telescope feed of Copenhagen came up on the bridge’s forward holo. Valdar recognized the Kastellet, the historic five-pointed fort surrounded by a moat, next to the city’s bay. The wooded park in the center of the fort was as Valdar remembered it. The last time he’d been to the Kastellet, the skyline of one of Europe’s great economic hubs was as memorable as the views across the Baltic Sea. But on the projection, all the buildings, skyscrapers and the harbor around the Kastellet were gone.
Grass and new-growth forest filled the area where civilization should have been.
“Zoom out. Find something. Stockholm, Berlin,” Valdar said, his mouth dry.
The telescope feed flashed from city to city. There was nothing but meadows where there had once been buildings. She cycled the feed through Paris, Rome, Vienna—all the same.
“There! I saw something,” someone said.
Stacey focused the scope on a four-lane highway, which cut off in the middle of a grass field, as if whoever built it had hit an invisible wall. She ran the scope along the highway where tufts of grass peeked through cracks in the road and overgrown weeds along the shoulder looked as if no one had touched the road in years. A still-intact road branched to the north.
“Which way?” she asked.
“To the north is Melk, Austria, my hometown. Please,” the lieutenant in the gunnery pod said.
The feed moved north and the gunnery lieutenant let out a prayer as buildings came into view. Part of the town was gone, erased just like every other place they’d seen. The façade from an apartment complex was missing, the interior exposed like a half-complete autopsy.
“Zoom in on that building,” Valdar said.
The feed morphed. The exposed building looked as if it had been sliced by a laser scalpel; pipes and fiber-optic cables hung from the split walls like collapsed arteries. The exposed room had a kitchen table—a third of it missing—lying across the floor, broken plates sprinkled around it.
A shadow flit across the feed.
“What was that? Find it,” Valdar said.
The feed remained steady despite Stacey’s stabs against the keyboard and mumbled curses. Her Ubi emitted a series of double beeps warning of an incoming message. She slapped at it to turn it off but it kept beeping.
The forward projector and every screen on the bridge cut to black as Stacey’s Ubi went silent. A half second later, a tired old man appeared on the screen, his eyes full of sorrow and his shoulders slouched.
Marc Ibarra.
“This message is for my fleet. What I have to say is hard to accept, but you must listen.” Ibarra looked up at the camera. “As of now, you are all that is left. Every human being on Earth, the moon, Mars, everywhere…is dead.”
Valdar squeezed his hands into fists. No, this can’t be right. Not my family, he thought.
“Soon after you left, a swarm—an alien armada, arrived. It scoured the solar system clean of any and all human life, any sign that we ever existed. There was no way to stop it. What I did to you was our only hope of survival.
“The slip-coil drives are stasis generators. They brought each ship out of the time-space continuum for thirty years. If they functioned properly, the swarm never detected your presence at anchorage, scoured the solar system, and moved on to the next star system. If they did detect you, then they are waiting and all hope is lost.”
Valdar looked at the gunnery officer, who shook his head. Nothing on the scope.
“The swarm will leave a residual force to erase everything we’ve built. They are few in number but you must not underestimate them. Even with the full might of the fleet, I’m not sure you can beat what remains.
“To survive, you must remain radio silent for as long as possible, tight beam communications only. They aren’t looking for you but they’ll attack the moment they detect you. Then, you must get my granddaughter to my headquarters in Phoenix immediately. She is the key to the next battle. She must survive.
“Stacey,” the bridge crew snapped around to look at her as Ibarra continued speaking, “all the answers I can give you and the fleet are waiting.”
Ibarra took a deep breath and wiped a tear from his eye. “Go. Go now. For what little it’s worth, I’m sorry. There was no other way.”
The screens blinked back to normal.
Stacey sat back against her pod chair, her face a mess of confusion and fear.
“Sir, priority message from Admiral Garrett,” said the Comms officer. Valdar tapped the pad on the back of his left hand to take the call. Valdar’s visor opened a video window only he could see. Garrett looked older than the last time they’d spoken.
“Admiral,” Valdar said, “we just received a message from Marc Ibarra—”
“We got it too. Every single screen in the fleet had it. Everything Ibarra said checks out. Astrogation looked at the orbital position of the planets and they’re right where they should be if the year is 2089, but Ceres, the dwarf planet in the asteroid belt, is somehow missing,” Garrett said.
“It pisses me off to take orders from Ibarra, but this is—I don’t know what this is. Not yet. You get Ibarra’s grandkid to Phoenix with your Marine complement and get out of there without a peep. The Breitenfeld and the rest of the fleet will stay put. The heat flare from our engines is pretty damn noticeable.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to figure out what to do with half a million civilians who’re trying to lose their minds. Godspeed,” Garrett said and cut the call.
“Lieutenant Faben,” Valdar said. Stacey looked up from her Ubi, her face pale. “Do you have any orbital assault training?” She shook her head.
“Urban warfare?”
A shake.
“Do you know how to use a gauss rifle?” Another shake.
“Report to Major Acera on the flight deck. Get moving. See what they can teach you on the way down,” he said. He keyed a ship-wide announcement from his wrist pad.
“Breitenfeld, this is Valdar. I don’t know any more, or any less, than you do. We have a mission, orbital insertion on Phoenix and an immediate extraction of whatever Ibarra wants us to find there. Focus on that. That mission is all we are and all we have. We will piece the whole story together later.
“Make ready for orbital assault. Valdar, out.”
CHAPTER 4
Lieutenant Hale rechecked the power charge on his gauss rifle for the umpteenth time and glanced at Ensign “Faben,” who was strapped in next to him. The name plate his visor put out over her was tied to the bio-tags she wore around her neck, not the truth.
“Ten minutes out,” Major Acera announced to the Marine company over the IR net. Hale and his team shared a drop ship with their sister strike squad; the rest of Acera’s Marines and a platoon of mechanized armor were split between five other drop ships.
“Faben, is there anything else you can tell us?” Acera asked.
Stacey didn’t respond. Hale nudged her with his elbow. Her head popped up from the Ubi screen she was reading.
“What? Right, sorry. I’ve got a note from Grandpa on my Ubi. It says I’m supposed to go to his private elevator in the Euskal Tower and take it into the basement. He said the sensors are gene-coded to me only. If the power’s out, there’s a battery-stack access point next to the door,” she said.
“Like he planned this whole thing,” Vincenti said. Franklin, seated next to him, struck Vincenti with his elbow.
“I see the schematic for the battery stack, sir. We can run it off our spares,” Hale said.
“We’ll set down five kilometers south of the target building. Maintain radio silence unless detected, IR only,” Acera said.
Stacey, clad in her shipboard skin suit and work overalls, looked like a child next to Hale in his assault armor, the graphene composite plates could take a direct gauss shot but made him feel like he was wearing a barrel around his chest. The extra battery and ammo packs mag-locked to his lower back and thighs crowded Stacey against the bulkhead but she hadn’t complained.
He glanced at the anti-armor grenades mag-locked to his upper chest. The grenades would fire off a depleted uranium slug or a molten lance against an armored target by way of a shaped-charge explosion within the grenade. If he used the EFP setting, the grenade would blast well short of the target to fire off the explosively formed slug. Hale never cared to learn the physics behind the device; he just needed to know how it worked. The anti-armor grenade’s blast was little threat to Hale in his armor, but Stacey wasn’t so well protected.
It took eight hours to properly fit someone into void rated combat armor—time the mission couldn’t give her.
Stacey had a small-caliber gauss pistol on her chest harness, which was adequate against unarmored targets and little else.
“Did Ibarra say anything about what’s down there? Aliens, right, but what kind?” Standish asked.
“He didn’t say,” she said with a shrug.
“Why the hell not? If it’s twenty feet tall and has tentacles for a face, we’d fight that differently than we would… brain thing riding around a mech suit, right?” Standish said.
“Ibarra Corp developed our gauss rifles and just about every other piece of gear we have. If he did plan this, then maybe we can hurt whatever’s waiting for us,” Franklin said, patting the rotary cannon at his side. “And we have the Iron Soldiers with us.”
The mechanized armor platoon that fell under Acera’s command was part of the Union Army; referring to them as Marines was a mistake and an invitation to a fistfight.
“Plenty of Ibarra tech on Earth when we left. Didn’t seem to do them any good,” Standish muttered. No one argued with him.
“Sir,” Cortaro spoke to Hale over a private channel, “my family lives near the drop site. Scope shows my house still there. You think…we can maybe…?”
“Not just yet,” Hale said. “My parents aren’t that far away either. I want to go as much as you do, but it’ll have to wait until this is over.”
Cortaro nodded. “Hoo-ah, sir. You’re right. I shouldn’t even have asked. Don’t tell no one, OK?”
“I bet they’re OK. Just get through this fight,” Hale said. Cortaro had a wife and five children in the Phoenix suburbs. All his Marines had family on Earth; all were just as worried as Cortaro. Even if Ibarra was wrong and there were survivors from the alien invasion, thirty years had passed. What was left of the world they knew?
“Stand by for atmosphere,” chimed the drop ship’s computer.
Wisps of fire streaked past the windows as the drop ship dove to the Earth. The first bit of turbulence felt like the ship dropped a meter. Marines cursed and braced themselves against their seats.
“Put your head against the seat and get ready for G’s” Hale said to Stacey. The ship shook like a rat in a terrier’s jaw. Combat drops were designed for speed, not comfort.
“‘Get ready for G’s,’ he says. ‘Go on the orbital assault. It’ll be fun,’ they said,” Stacey murmured.
“We can all hear you,” Hale said. The drop ship sheared from side to side and Hale’s head bounced against the restraints.
A red light flashed in the ceiling.
“Breaking maneuvers in three…two…,” the computer said with an inappropriate level of calm.
Hale squeezed his core muscles and thighs. The drop ship pulled from its dive and Hale felt the press of five times his weight against his body. He strained to keep blood in his brain until the maneuver ended, the unnatural press leaving him like the dimming of a blinding light.
“We’ve got a winner,” Walsh said.
Stacey sat slumped against her restraints; the maneuver had caused her to black out.
“Her readings are OK. Wake her up,” Walsh said.
Hale reached over and pressed a button on the top of her helmet. A second later, her body shook as a mild electric shock went down her spine and a whiff of ammonia filled her helmet.
Stacey jerked away and tried to rub her offended sinuses.
“Ugh, this is why I went space navy,” she said.
“Thirty seconds to insertion. Assume drop line positions,” the computer said.
Hale disengaged his restraints and sprang to his feet. He pulled Stacey from her seat and guided her to Torni, who attached a D-clip on a line running from her armor to Stacey’s chest harness.
“What do I do?” Stacey asked.
“Hold on tight,” Torni said as she wrapped an arm around Stacey’s waist and grabbed the line running from the ceiling to a panel beneath her feet.
Hale went to his drop panel and locked his feet into the restraints. Clamps locked around his feet and he removed his rifle from its chest mount. The ship shook as it lost speed. An amber light pulsed on the bulkhead.
“Marines, our mission is stealth and reconnaissance. Don’t fire unless our lives depend on it,” Hale said.
The amber light pulsed faster and turned green. Hale mag-locked his hand to the cable and nodded his head to pray. God, please don’t let me screw this up.
The panel beneath Hale’s feet broke from the drop ship and plummeted, taking Hale with it.
Blast from the drop ship’s engines knocked him from side to side as the cable lowered him to the ground, his augmented grip keeping him from taking the much quicker gravity-assisted way down. He scanned the terrain around the drop point—overgrown weeds and covered play parks for children.
The sky was overcast, a gray sheen so dull he couldn’t find the sun. Five other Marines descended alongside him, more from the other drop ships. A pair of Eagles, wings and rudders extended for atmospheric flight, hovered over the drop ships by turbo fan engines built into the wings.
The panel smacked into the gr
ound and the clamps on his feet disengaged. Hale jumped away and ran for a block building sitting astride an unkempt soccer field. He slid against the wall, kicking up a plume of dust and pebbles. Walsh and Standish stopped on either side of him, rifles scanning for targets.
“This is Red 1, boots dry,” Hale said on the company IR net. On Earth, ambient moisture would absorb the IR transmissions, limiting the effective range to a hundred yards. Major Acera, huddled against a jungle gym set with the first sergeant and a pair of Marines shepherding a mortar tube, gave him a thumbs up.
Torni and Stacey ran over to join Hale, Stacey’s labored breathing drowning out the local IR net. The rest of Hale’s Marines descended from their drop ship.
“I know this place,” Stacey said. “I had my eighth birthday party right over there.” She pointed to a covered pavilion.
Hale was about to give her a quick lesson in radio discipline when he noticed something in the dirt, a glint of metal. Grabbing it with his fingertips, he lifted it slowly as sand grains fell away from a dull steel rod connected to a lump. The whole thing came loose with a jerk and Hale held it in front of him.
The metal rod was attached to a ball joint; another metal rod dangled from the joint.
“Walsh, is this what it looks like?” Hale asked the medic.
Walsh snatched the joint and held it up to his visor.
“It’s a prosthetic leg, newer model too…. Hold on, this kind of prosthetic is supposed to be covered in replacement tissue when installed. Where’s the rest of him?” Walsh asked. He glanced around the corner and froze.
“Sir, this is weird,” Walsh said.
Hale leaned over Walsh to see what held Walsh’s attention. The medic pointed at a hole in the concrete the diameter of a clenched fist. The hole extended through one wall and through another; Hale could see gray sky through the hole.
“Some sort of laser, fired from the sky, maybe,” Hale said.
“Lasers leave scorch marks. That left a perfect cross-section of the wall when it went through it,” Walsh said.
Cortaro and the rest of Hale’s Marines went prone next to the perforated block house, their active camouflage morphing to match the sandy ground.