The Ember War (The Ember War Saga Book 1)

by Richard Fox

  The Xaros orbital fired. The lance of energy pierced the America’s hull and burst out the other side of the carrier. Admiral Garrett’s flagship listed on its side and went dark.

  Valdar’s jaw clenched. Thousands of sailors were aboard the stricken ship and there was little to nothing he could do to help them.

  “Guns, fire on my mark….Fire!”

  Breitenfeld’s damaged rail gun battery crackled with electricity and two rail gun slugs shot away, a trail of burning space dust in their wake.

  The orbital swatted aside one of the rounds. The other impacted and spun the orbital slowly like a wind chime in a slight breeze. The orbital flipped over and brought its cannon to bear on the Breitenfeld.

  “Guns?”

  “We’ve nothing, sir.”

  “Conn, evasive maneuvers,” Valdar said. His ship skewed away from the orbital slightly—his spaceship did not turn on a dime.

  The cannon flared, red forks of lightning snapping from the power source.

  “All hands, brace for impact!”

  The orbital jerked as a rail gun shot lucked past the defenses, deflecting its cannon shot ever so slightly.

  The orbital’s beam sliced through space and ripped across the Breitenfeld’s outer hull. The hit gouged the armor and continued on into space. Damage alerts flooded the bridge, a chorus of panicked voices and klaxons swirling around Valdar as his ship rolled over.

  “Engineering! Get attitude control back before we slam into Ceres,” Valdar said. He tried to pull up a damage report on his screens, but his screen was locked in solid blue.

  “Decks nine to forty are open to vacuum. Main engines offline,” Ericson said.

  Valdar’s screens came back to life. The damage was bad, but not fatal to the ship or what remained of the crew.

  His tactical plot was gone but Valdar could see the orbital dead ahead of them. A dozen Union ships closed in on the orbital, pounding it with rail gun shots and their anti-fighter gauss cannons.

  The orbital’s point defense lasers raged against the incoming fire, annihilating thousands of rounds before they could make a dent in the thing, a feat impossible for any human mind or computer ever developed by man or woman. A rail shot hit the flank of the enemy station and the point defense ceased.

  The Gettysburg fired a full broadside into Delta and it broke apart like a shattered plate. The pieces burned away and the bridge erupted in cheers.

  Valdar sat against his chair and let out a slow breath.

  Victory wasn’t theirs yet. Not until Crucible was under their control.

  ****

  “Go right. We’re almost there,” Ibarra said.

  Franklin quickened his pace, leaving Stacey a few steps behind. He ran past the corner and raised his rifle as a shout barely escaped his lips.

  A stalk shot out and struck him in the chest, flicking him away like an errant insect. Franklin smashed into the bulkhead and careened to the ground with a sickening crunch.

  Stacey’s feet skidded to a halt. The drone crept toward Franklin like a spider, stalks digging into the sand with each step.

  A red ember grew from the stalk tip reaching toward Franklin.

  Stacey pulled her pistol from her holster and fired off two rounds. Both bounced off the drone.

  The drone swung around toward her. The ember on the stalk died away and it moved toward her with a sense of purpose.

  “Run,” Ibarra said.

  Stacey did as advised. The thump of stalks against the floor bore down on her faster than her worst nightmare.

  A stalk swept against her ankles and she fell to the floor face-first. She tried to crawl forward but a stalk speared into the ground just ahead of her shoulder. The stalk whipped her onto her back and pressed against chest. The stalk was ice cold, leaching heat from her entire body as the central mass of the drone loomed over her.

  A stalk tip hovered over her face. It snapped apart into eight digits and grabbed her right forearm. She struggled against the hold but she was a mouse against a python.

  The drone brought her hand closer to the body, Ibarra’s light reflecting off the geodesic patterns swirling over its surface.

  “Hey! Leave her alone,” Franklin shouted, his voice burbling through a punctured lung.

  The drone flipped a stalk toward Franklin and a red light grew from the tip.

  Stacey heard the crack of a gauss rifle and an electrical storm broke over the drone.

  The Q-round Franklin fired sent thin bolts of lightning through her body. Her muscles convulsed and a scream fought to get past her locked jaw. The reek of ozone filled the air as the drone collapsed to the ground.

  Stacey fought to breathe and pushed the stalk off her chest. She scrambled away from the drone and got to her feet.

  “Franklin?” she asked. Franklin, propped against the bulkhead, his head hanging on his chest and rifle smoking at his side, didn’t answer.

  “Can you do something to the drone?” she asked.

  Ibarra didn’t answer either.

  “Grandpa?” she looked at her palm. His light was gone. She shook her hand. “Grandpa, can you hear me?”

  A stalk twitched. Another scratched at the ground.

  With the bulk of the waking drone between her and Franklin, she turned and ran, hating herself for it.

  ****

  The snap of a single gauss shot echoed around Hale. Even with his helmet off, the acoustics of the Crucible played hell with locating where the shot came from.

  They stood at a confluence of three hallways, each leading a different direction from which they’d come. After the station had rearranged itself to cut them off from Stacey and Franklin, Hale and his team had run through the station, trying to double back on the air lock and reunite.

  With no map and racing through hallways with no discernable features among them, Hale was pretty sure they were lost. The only beacon for finding Stacey and Franklin was the sound of a few cracks from a pistol and the gauss rifle shot.

  He wiped sweat from his brow. The air was just over a hundred degrees and so dry that it leached moisture from him with every breath.

  “I think…right,” Cortaro said.

  “Maybe we should split up,” Standish said.

  The crack-crack of pistol shots flit through the air.

  “Straight,” Hale said. He donned his helmet and ran down the center hallway, holding his rifle at waist level as they ran, the weight pulling his upper body forward and low. His head jutted ahead of the rest of him, leading him face-first into whatever danger the Crucible held. He never wanted to lead Marines into a fight this way, blind and grasping toward the enemy.

  The flash of pistol fire lit up around a corner. Stacey turned the corner, her head down, blind firing her pistol behind her.

  “Drop!” Hale shouted. He braced himself against the black sand and raised his rifle against his shoulder.

  Stacey looked up, her face awash in terror, and fell forward.

  The drone was a second behind her, its stalks pushing against the floor and rounded walls.

  Hale fired and the rifle mule-kicked his shoulder. The round sheared off a stalk and the drone stumbled. Hits from Cortaro and Torni to the drone’s body knocked it back like punches against a heavy bag.

  Time slowed as Hale waited for his rifle to power up the next shot. His weapon trembled as the capacitor charged, an eternity as the drone sprung forward on its stalks.

  Standish hit it dead center. Cracks spider-webbed from the impact but the drone didn’t slow as it lunged for Stacey.

  His capacitor went green and Hale squeezed his trigger.

  The drone burst in half, the two pieces falling to either side of Stacey and burning away. The smell of smoldering coal filled the air.

  Stacey sat up, her chest heaving on the edge of hyperventilation. Torni ran up to her and pulled Stacey’s helmet free. Her face was awash in sweat, her hair matted against her head. She pushed aside Torni’s proffered hand and tried to run back the way s
he’d come.

  “Where’s Franklin?” Hale asked.

  “Back…there…” Stacey said, struggling for breath between words.

  “Is he all right?”

  “No.” Stacey swallowed hard and pointed ahead.

  ****

  Hale knelt next to Franklin’s body, still sitting against the bulkhead. Franklin’s chest plate was cracked and blood dripped from the damage and seeped into the black sand. The drone’s blow had driven broken ribs into his lungs—mortally wounding him. That he managed to fire his sole Q-round and hit the drone was a testament to his will.

  Hale slipped the ID chit from Franklin’s shoulder armor and closed his fist around it, then he pressed a button on the temple of Franklin’s helmet and the visor popped loose. Hale moved the visor aside and touched Franklin’s eyes, half-open and staring into nothing, and closed them with his fingertips.

  “The control room. Zzzzt—close,” Ibarra said.

  “You OK?” Hale stood up and walked to Stacey. She held her right hand palm up, the light within sputtering.

  “Think he had to do a hard reset, but he’s getting better fast. That Q-round screwed him up pretty bad,” she said. Her head cocked to the side and she said, “Go, go, go—stop that!”

  Her hand jerked away from her and practically dragged her down the hallway, an invisible force pulling her along.

  The hallway, which led to a distant red blur, suddenly bent downwards just ahead of Stacey. The Marines huddled around her, not wanting to be separated again. They stepped over the bend and the hallway spilled into an amphitheater.

  Stairs, too tall for easy steps, led down into the center of the control room. Pale blue light wavered against rings of black stone emanating from a plinth in the middle of the room.

  “I really don’t like this place,” Torni said.

  “Get me to the center-target bull’s-eye…,” Ibarra said, trailing into static.

  They hustled forward through a gap in the rings. Standish ran his hand over a ring and gold speckles shimmered in the wake of his touch.

  “How do they control anything if there are no buttons? And why do drones need stairs?” he asked.

  “Think-think-think this is for drones? Stacey, touch the altar,” Ibarra said, his voice modulating out of tune.

  She stopped a few feet from the center of the room, then took a step back.

  “What will happen?” she asked.

  “I told you. Transmutation—chrysalis—something wonderful.” Ibarra’s voice snapped into normal with the last word.

  She closed her hand and brought it to her chest.

  “Stacey, Marines and sailors are dying to buy you time. Please,” Hale said.

  She looked at Hale and nodded quickly.

  “We’ve lost so much for this. What’s one more sacrifice?” She held her hand over the plinth and Ibarra’s light grew so bright Hale had to look away. When the light subsided, he saw a single sliver of light hovering over the plinth.

  Stacey backed away, rubbing her palm.

  “My, this is more than I expected,” Ibarra said. Lines of energy burst from the plinth and into the control room. Standish danced away from where the lines shot beneath his feet.

  Holograms wavered over the rings and molded into focus. Alien script wrapped rings around holos of the Earth, individual ships of the fleet, and depictions of the solar system.

  “So much more.”

  The sliver of light that was Ibarra deformed and snapped into a crown of thorns model of the Crucible. Red specks of light in the model, some in the spikes connecting the station together but most concentrated in the nodes, moved slowly.

  “Let’s take care of the drones,” Ibarra said. A pulse of light emanated from the plinth, through the floor and into the walls of the Crucible. The red dots on the model ceased moving and blinked out.

  The pulse of light returned and filled the plinth with burning white light, which then faded, leaving the altar as a cylinder of golden light.

  “I can use their energy to open the portal. Are you ready, Stacey?”

  Stacey looked up at the altar as it floated toward the ceiling. Golden light bathed her face and a tear rolled down her cheek.

  “Hurry, before I change my mind,” she said.

  Hale grabbed Stacey by the shoulder.

  “Wait, what is this?” he demanded.

  “Nothing that concerns you. Now be silent. This part is tricky,” Ibarra said.

  The golden light swirled faster and faster, motes of stars pulled into a black hole so fast they nearly burnt away before they could be consumed. The swirl accelerated until there was nothing but a sold plane of gold light, then it dimmed to an unblemished oval of white the size of a door.

  “Go,” Ibarra said. The portal lowered to the ground without a sound.

  Stacey pushed Hale’s hand away.

  “It’s all right. I’ll come back,” she said. She reached out and touched a fingertip to the portal. Her hand held still for a moment, then her fingers slipped into the portal. The white field crackled with blue-white energy where she broke the plane. She pulled her hand back, all fingers still attached.

  “It tingles,” she said.

  She stepped a foot into the portal, looked over her shoulder at Hale, and went through.

  The portal blinked out of existence, leaving Ibarra’s sliver of light in its place.

  “Admiral Garrett? Where are you?” Ibarra said. Hale heard the echo of the words in his helmet IR.

  A holo display reset to show the America, venting gasses and listing in space.

  “This is Garrett. I’m in a life pod on my way down to Ceres after I had a carrier shot out from under me. How’s it going in there?” the admiral’s gruff voice responded.

  “Mission accomplished. The Crucible is secure and our ambassador is away. I’m reading a few drones still functioning outside the Crucible. I’ll relay their location to the fighters and this fight will be over,” Ibarra said.

  “Get a fix on lifeboats while you’re at it. I’m going to have plenty of company on this rock and our air will only last so long,” Garrett said.

  “As you wish,” Ibarra said.

  Hale looked at his three Marines, each tired, banged up and overheating.

  “What now? What about us?” Hale asked Ibarra.

  Ibarra’s light flickered.

  “This battle is won, but the war is far from over,” Ibarra said.

  ****

  “I want the oxygen lines cut to deck nineteen cut now and that fire contained. We’ve got casualties crew in the aft compartments and we can’t open the deck to vacuum,” Valdar said to the exhausted crewman on the holoscreen.

  “The passageway is blocked, sir, we can’t get to the environmental controls,” the crewman said, pleading.

  Valdar swiped a schematic of the ship next to the holo and looked it over. Red damage icons cut a path along his ship’s hull like a bleeding wound.

  “One of the drones cut through the decks across from the magazines, climb up through it and then take the service lift next to the armor storage. Can you do that?”

  The crewman nodded and cut the feed.

  “Engineering, damage report.” Valdar swung his chair away from the holo table.

  “We’ve got engines two and four back online. We can keep orbit around Ceres but I don’t think we can get back to Earth anytime soon.”

  “That’s progress,” Valdar said.

  “Sir, we’ve got a priority fleet transmission…from Admiral Garrett,” the communication’s officer said.

  “Put it up,” Valdar leaned against his chair and watched as active fire icons went from red, to amber, to green on his damage control screens. The Breitenfeld had fought through the worst of the damage, but making her whole again would take time.

  Admiral Garrett, in an emergency space suit with the barren Ceres landscape behind him, looked into the camera with stern determination.

  “To the fleet, to all that is left of u
s…we’ve won. The Crucible is ours. The Xaros are destroyed. Our planet is free once more.” Garrett looked up. “I can see our ships, some burning in space. Some still fighting to survive. All with battle scars. We’re hurt, but we’re alive. We are few, and we are all that remains. But we are embers, and we will reignite humanity.

  “My orders are to save every ship we still can, care for the wounded, get the civilians back to Earth immediately. And would someone get down here and pick me up?”

  CHAPTER 11

  Her universe was an abyss of white. She felt her arms and legs moving; whatever ether she was in offered no resistance, nothing to push against. Her armor was gone, replaced by a violet jumpsuit that had no feeling to it. She opened and closed her eyes, but the white light didn’t change. It was all.

  She clicked her teeth together—no sound.

  Ibarra wasn’t in her mind anymore. The only way she knew to count the time was to sing songs in her head over and over again and keep count.

  Hours, probably more, passed.

  How long until I lose my mind? she thought.

  Eventually, a grid pattern formed in the distance. Her attempts to swim toward the black lines were fruitless; they didn’t get any closer or farther away. Was her mind, starved of stimulus, creating something for her to see? Was this the first step toward insanity? She lashed out, clawing at the air, and screamed in silence.

  She swung her arms again and again, then her foot touched something.

  She looked at her feet. Three foot-long squares rimmed in black were just beneath her feet. Her toes scraped at the ground, then her body lowered to the floor. She fell to the ground, hugging the cold floor and breathing in the smell of dusty linoleum.

  “Finally,” she said. She sat up with a snap, shocked at the sound of her own voice.

  The walls and ceiling of the room she occupied were just like the floor, a black grid of lines on a white background. She stood up and walked toward the wall, just a few feet away from her, but the wall stayed the same few feet away without moving.

  She ran forward, but she couldn’t tell if she moved ahead or stayed in the exact same place—the perspective remained the same.