by Richard Fox
“Kosciusko!” Admiral Makarov flashed onto his screen.
“Busy!” He fell onto a dagger ship’s tail and wasted several shots failing to shoot it down.
“The flagship’s powered up its jump drives,” Makarov said. “It’s breaking clear of the escort. Have the bombers target it now!”
“Not possible!” A Condor blew apart under a barrage of energy blasts in front of Kosciusko.
“This is the Breitenfeld.” Captain Valdar appeared on the screen. “We can make the shot.”
“How? You’re showing your guns and maneuver engines are offline,” Makarov asked.
“Lafayette stitched together a few power systems when we were over Takeni. Should get a salvo off with my ventral turrets without blowing my ship up in the process,” Valdar said. “Probably.”
Olux’s flagship slid out of the sphere of escorts and away from the battle. A small pool of light came into being on the flagship’s path, an opening jump gate.
Bursts of light erupted from the Breitenfeld batteries. Point-defense turrets on the flagship came to life, their fire crisscrossing into an apex that sank toward the flagship. A cannon shell died, but the defensive fire kept blasting away until the guns couldn’t track any closer to the flagship without hitting it.
The flagship’s guns went silent. The ship canted to the side and rolled slightly, a plume of fire blazing from a massive hole in its side.
Kosciusko turned his fighter toward the stricken ship and fired his afterburners. This wasn’t over yet.
“Jaws, what’re you doing? We got it!” Packer said.
A section of the flagship blew out, and another armored bridge shaped like a flattened gem emerged. It floated in space then sped toward the still-open wormhole. Overlord protection chambers were incredibly durable; only a direct hit from the Breitenfeld’s main guns could have killed Olux while he was inside it. Kosciusko pushed his engines past their red lines, his fighter blaring warnings at him.
“Admiral Makarov,” Kosciusko said, “tell my brothers…no, they’ll understand. Ghul’Thul’Ghul.”
Kosciusko’s Eagle bucked beneath him as he closed on Olux. He felt at peace when his Eagle slammed into the command bridge. The impact cracked the outer shell of the bridge and sent it spinning end over end. It angled away from the open portal, trailing air and crystal fragments. Electricity arced over the surface. More and more crooked fingers of light gripped the gem as a glow burned from within.
The overlord’s command bridge exploded, annihilating Olux so completely that not even ashes remained.
CHAPTER 19
A Mule landed on the Breitenfeld’s command deck. Teams of medics rushed to the lowering ramp and got on board before the ramp edge had touched the deck.
Valdar watched from the sidelines as the medics carried a sailor away on a stretcher. They’d been on recovery duty for hours, tracking down emergency beacons from sailors trapped within dead spaceships or from escape pods. A few were rescued from the void between ships, but not many.
The Toth fleet had descended into chaos with the death of the last overlord. The Toth warriors in charge of the ships had refused to surrender. Every last one of their ships and fighters was chased down and destroyed by the Eighth Fleet.
As the rescue mission after the battle wound down, the fleet would begin recovery.
A line of body bags stretched out alongside the flight line, all picked up by a search and rescue team he’d sent to the Ticonderoga. His tiny morgue had filled up hours ago. The crew was making room in the cargo bay for these bodies, and the many more to come.
Admiral Makarov walked up to Valdar. Her face was gaunt, lined from the constant stress of command during the battle and the chaos that followed.
“You knew,” she said. “You knew what I was when we first met, didn’t you?”
“That you are procedural? Yes,” he said.
“Did it bother you? Following orders from someone like me?”
“It did. It was hard to accept you as an admiral, not…”
“Some tube-grown thing? I understand your hesitation. So why? Why did you go along with my plan? You could have refused, taken your ship full of true born and sided with the Toth,” she said.
Valdar felt a sting of fear. Did she know what he’d done with Fournier?
“Your plan was…brilliant,” Valdar said. “I couldn’t have come up with anything better. And I never had to question your loyalty. You cared about Phoenix. Your sailors. I don’t think you would have done anything different if you were true born.”
“Look at them,” Makarov said, staring at the body bags. “Can you tell which are proccie, and which are true born?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Neither can I. I couldn’t tell them apart before the battle. I can’t do it now. Maybe the rest of the fleet and any of Fournier’s surviving believers will see it that way too. Circumstances of birth may be different, but we’re all equal in death.”
Makarov wiped a hand across her face and walked away.
Valdar’s gaze ran over the many dead, and found that he agreed with her.
****
Durand's Eagle hovered over the beach near the wrecked ace. Her ship’s thermal cameras showed the broken Toth fighter in a cooling patch of burnt-out grass, a blob of heat still in the cockpit. She eased her fighter forward until it was over a small clearing a hundred yards from the water. She landed slowly and opened the canopy.
The engines whined on idle as she swung her legs over the cockpit and landed with a gauss carbine in her hands. She powered the weapon and switched off the safety. Her feet crunched against blackened, long-bladed grass, wisps of flame and smoke dancing around her as she walked to the Toth fighter.
The smell of ashes mixed with salt air from the ocean.
The fighter lay nose-first in a driven pile of white sand and dark volcanic soil. Shards of the shattered canopy glinted in the sunlight.
Durand raised her carbine to her shoulder and stepped around the nose. Dried yellow blood stained the hull where it had run from the cockpit. The ace was there, crumpled against the controls, upper and middle arms broken and contorted, its snout tucked into an armpit.
Durand aimed the carbine at the ace and kicked the fighter.
The ace shivered, then turned its face to Durand. One eye was mangled, puffed and caked with dried blood. The other looked over Durand, struggling to focus.
It hissed at her, blood frothing over its lips.
“You know why I’m here?” Durand asked.
The ace let out a wet cough. A hind leg clawed at the side of the cockpit. A panel flopped open, revealing a pistol made of twisted metal cords.
“Fine by me,” Durand shot the ace in its ruined face. The back of its skull splattered through the cockpit and it went slack. Durand shot it in the torso twice. Blood bubbled and spat from a perforated lung.
She spat in the dirt and turned back to her waiting Eagle.
There was no feeling of closure or satisfaction. Her heart beat cold.
****
Valdar’s fingers typed against the holographic keyboard projected by his data slate. His complete report of his involvement with Fournier was almost complete. He’d spent the last many hours detailing every conversation, every fabrication, and laying out his confession to Admiral Garret. He’d felt a weight lift from his shoulders, like his soul was rising from a nadir of guilt and regret.
There was a knock at the door.
Valdar scowled at the door. He’d given specific instructions not to be disturbed.
A knock again.
“Later!” he snapped.
The door locks snapped open and it slid aside. Knight stepped into the captain’s ready room and gave his commanding officer a respectful nod before closing the door behind him.
“Knight? You want to explain what the hell you’re doing in here?” Valdar asked.
Knight reached into a back pocket and took out a small black ball. He tossed it in front of hi
m and it hovered in midair. White light emitted from a ring around the center of the ball and a hologram of Marc Ibarra formed around the ball.
“Hello, Captain,” Ibarra said. “We need to talk.”
“What is this? Knight why do you have—”
“Oh, Eric here?” Ibarra pointed a thumb over his shoulder at the intelligence officer. “He works for me. Has for decades. I put him on this ship to keep an eye on Stacey. Who better than the counterintelligence officer to have on the payroll? Right? A whole ‘who watches the watchmen’ sort of conundrum for you.”
Valdar looked at the screen with his confession, then at Ibarra.
“Now you’re starting to get it,” Ibarra said. “I know everything, Captain. Every little talk you had with Fournier. Every directive from Garret that you muddled before giving it to Hale. I know Fournier swore up and down that your conversations with him were secure. I let the old governments think they could talk without me knowing, gave them the illusion of control, but so long as I have one end of a secure quantum communication channel bugged, they really aren’t so secure.”
Valdar glanced around his room, then glared at Knight, who shrugged.
“That’s right. I’ve had your office wired since before you ever set foot on this ship,” Ibarra said. “But I’m not here to gloat. I’m here to thank you.”
“What?”
“Yes, to thank you for being so honest and…honorable.” Ibarra said the last word like it left a bad taste in his mouth. “I knew I could count on you to do the right thing—as far as you’re concerned—and go along with Fournier. Feed me his entire plan so that I could twist it to my own ends. You see, Captain, I’ve been at this game longer than you’ve been alive. Just because someone’s working against me doesn’t mean I couldn’t find some use for them. And you served a great purpose. Not sure how we’d ever have taken out the Naga without sneaking a bomb on board.”
“You used me,” Valdar said.
“Well, all I had to do was listen and pull a couple strings here and there,” Ibarra said.
“Don’t think you have any sort of power over me,” Valdar said. “I’m sending my confession to Garret in the next few minutes.”
“Why would you do that?” Ibarra cocked his head to the side. “Your secret’s safe with us.”
“It’s the right thing to do,” Valdar said slowly.
“Nonsense!” Ibarra rolled his eyes. “You did us a great service. Helped win the battle, all that. If you hit send, Garret will take this ship away and he’ll build a jail just for you…or a gallows. Why don’t we skip all that mess and make a deal?”
Valdar rubbed his thumb against his forefinger. He was tempted to reach out and send the file with a click of a button. Confessing would mean humiliation, the loss of his ship and what little he had left after the Xaros invasion. Ibarra put his hands on his hips and smiled like a huckster.
“I’m listening,” Valdar said.
“Don’t say a word to Garret,” Ibarra raised a finger next to his face, “or anyone else for that matter, ever. It’ll stay our little secret. You’re far too useful to me on this ship than you’ll be if Garret gets wind of what you did.”
“‘Useful to you’? I tried to help Fournier because I thought he was doing the right thing for humanity, not what you wanted to do. You think I’m going to be your pet?” Valdar asked.
Ibarra’s face fell. “I respect you, Valdar. I really do. You remind me so much of myself when I was a young man, before I came to accept what must be done to save humanity. I think you could be the one to lead us all into a new Golden Age, if we can survive that long.
“The Toth attack taught me that our place in the galaxy is insecure, even with the Xaros sure to return. We have an opportunity, one I want you to be part of. We have access to a new planet, one far beyond the galactic rim. I’m going to send a small contingent of true-born humans to the planet in the next few weeks, then gravity tides will cut us off from the world for fifteen years. I want you to lead the second fleet, but we have to survive that long, and there are very few people that I trust anymore.”
“Why would you trust me?”
“You are, at your core, a good man,” Ibarra said. “I can depend on that, and the colony to Terra Nova could be our last chance to survive. We should survive the next Xaros attack with full, unfettered proccie production, but they’re coming at us expecting to fight whatever survived the Battle of the Crucible. The third wave will be exponentially larger, trillions of drones to smother us into oblivion. Not even the tacticians on Bastion have ever figured out a way to survive the full force of the Xaros.
“We can’t have another internal division like Fournier. That’s why I need you working on my side from now on. In return I’ll send you off to lead a colony of true-born humans—without meddling from me or Bastion.”
Valdar considered the offer, then deleted the file he’d prepared for Garret.
“There, you see,” Ibarra looked over his shoulder to Knight, “he can be reasoned with.”
“What do you need from me?” Valdar asked.
“In the future, I don’t know yet,” Ibarra shrugged. “But when I need you to jump, you better ask ‘how high?’ As for right now, I require penance, proof you really are on the right team. You’re going on an assassination mission. You will kill Dr. Mentiq and end the Toth threat to Earth.”
CHAPTER 20
Admirals Garret and Makarov watched as Stacey swiped through screens full of arcane coding language that neither of them could fathom. Ibarra’s hologram sat on the empty plinth in the center of the Crucible’s control room.
“We pulled the computer core from the Naga and a few other Toth wrecks,” Stacey said. “Their programming language wasn’t too difficult to crack. Lowenn brought back most everything Bastion had about the Toth. The hardest part for us to understand was their base twelve mathematics.”
“You bought us all the way up here for a science lecture?” Garret asked.
“Hang in there, Admiral,” Ibarra said. “It gets interesting.”
“We found the virus the Toth sent that compromised our probe,” Stacey said. “The probe will function as intended as soon as we’re ready to reboot, but, while I was poking around that malcode…” She brought up a screen full of dense programming language and raised a palm just beneath the screen with a huge smile on her face.
“Am I supposed to notice something?” Makarov asked.
Stacey huffed and tapped her fingers against several parts of the code. “It’s base ten! The same kind of math we, and every other ten-fingered species use, but wait, there’s more! You see these command executables? They’re not written in Toth.”
“The Toth had help writing the code?” Garret asked.
“Yes, and here’s where it gets weird,” Stacey said. “The language isn’t used by any species in the Alliance. We were about to give up when I saw these mentioned in Hale’s summary reports.” She took a gold coin out of her pocket and tossed it at Makarov, who plucked it out of the air.
Makarov examined the crude coin with the lion and seated man.
“It’s Akkadian, from ancient Mesopotamia,” Stacey said.
“The code or the coin?” Makarov asked.
“Both, but the language evolved somewhat in line with the pan-morphology theory doctor—”
“Fascinating,” Garret deadpanned. “We care because?”
“Savages.” Stacey shook her head quickly. “No sense of wonder or curiosity.”
“Once we broke the code on the Akkadian language,” Ibarra said, “it opened up the rest of the Toth records. Specifically, the location where Dr. Mentiq hangs his hat.” Ibarra stood up and a planet appeared on the plinth behind him. Deep-blue seas covered most of the surface, and a single, small landmass surrounded a massive volcano.
“The Akkadian language code we recovered says this is a planet named Nibiru. Our tongues can’t form the Toth word for whatever they call it,” Ibarra said. “Dr. Mentiq has it
set up as his own little playground and never leaves. The rest of the Toth come to him for everything.”
“Wait, why are the Toth using one of our extinct languages?” Makarov asked.
Stacey and Ibarra shrugged their shoulders.
“Great, another cosmic mystery,” Admiral Garret said, “keep this Akkadian business under wraps before I have to tamp out another conspiracy theory. All this is relevant, why? We just beat the piss out of the Toth. I doubt they’ll come back for more.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Admiral,” Stacey said. “The Toth that attacked us are a single corporation. There are hundreds more—some stronger, some weaker—but they will want the proccie tech, and they will be back in force.”
“But the Toth are very set in their ways, thanks to the relationship between Mentiq and the overlords,” Ibarra said. “He gave them their tanks, and in exchange he gets first cut of any new asset the Toth want to acquire. Try and shortchange Mentiq and he cuts the power to the tanks. So, once this Toth fleet is overdue to report back to Mentiq, he’ll auction off the rights to Earth again.”
“Chyort voz’mi,” Makarov said as she pressed her fingertips against her temples.
“Why can’t any species in this galaxy take a damn hint,” Garret said.
“There’s an opportunity in every crisis, Admirals,” Ibarra said with a smile. “Every senior executive from the Toth home world will come to Tribute in the next few weeks for the auction. And we could be there.”
“You think we can spare a fleet to attack that planet?” Garret said.
“We won’t need a fleet. Mentiq doesn’t let the leaders come to him in warships—puts him at risk.” Ibarra waved a hand and the planet morphed into a large box shaped like the center of an extended accordion.
“That is the cloaking device from the Naga,” Stacey said. “We found it mostly intact on the wreck. Lafayette examined it with the omnium reactor and was able to make some significant improvement. Turns out it’s based on Karigole tech.”