by Richard Fox
“What’re you getting at, Ibarra?” Makarov asked.
“We send a single cloaked ship to Nibiru. Kill Mentiq and the senior overlords. That will throw the entire Toth race into chaos,” Ibarra said. “End the threat they pose to us once and for all.”
Garret looked at Makarov, who nodded.
“Which ship?” Garret asked.
****
Stacey repaired the final piece of the probe’s code and stepped back from the workstation.
“You want to check it over?” she asked Ibarra.
“I monitored it while you were working.” His hologram paced back and forth in front of the central plinth.
“Why couldn’t we tell the admirals about the override code the Qa’Resh gave us? Or about Terra Nova?” Stacey asked.
“The Qa’Resh gave us the code because the Alliance threw us under the proverbial bus. It was our way to escape the Toth. We tell them and they’ll distrust the Alliance, and by extension, us. Your other modifications to the probe…excellent. I’ll retain override authority. Bastion won’t be able to lock us out ever again. I can open the portal to Terra Nova without the probe—or anyone else—able to stop me.”
“But…why, Grandpa? Why does it have to be you?”
“So they,” Ibarra pointed to a screen showing the Earth, “appreciate it. My goal, my only goal since the day that damn probe landed on Earth, has been to save humanity. We’re not going to let the probe take that away from us or trust that Bastion has our best interests at heart. If we offer Phoenix a lifeline with Terra Nova, they’ll be beholden to us. Our control will return.”
“I don’t like it,” she said. “They’re our people, not our pawns.”
“Look what happened when we trusted anyone but ourselves,” Ibarra said. “We almost lost everything a second time, and those that would survive would be slaves to the Alliance.”
“Not everyone in the Alliance agreed to that. We have friends, those we can trust like the Dotok,” Stacey said.
“Then you’d better convince the rest of the Alliance to stand with us,” Ibarra said. “Now, let’s reboot the probe and get you back to Bastion.”
CHAPTER 21
Standish opened his foot locker and dug through a jumble of dirty clothes and even dirtier kit.
“Where is it? Where is it…ah-ha!” Standish stood up and brandished a loud yellow and blue Hawaiian shirt. “I knew I still had it.”
“You aren’t actually going to wear that on shore leave, are you?” Orozco asked. The Spaniard wore baggy shorts and an old-fashioned bowling shirt. He opened a pair of gold-rimmed sunglasses and slid them onto his face.
“I have been stuck on this tin can or neck deep in aliens trying to eat me for months, Sarge. Ibarra and his magical mystical construction robots rebuilt the R&R center in two days just so we, the heroes of Eighth Fleet, could get some time off. I am going to party like I just got my discharge papers.” Standish slipped the Hawaiian shirt over his shoulders and tried to smooth out the wrinkles. He looked in a mirror and raised an eyebrow at his reflection. “Irresistible,” he said, emphasizing the second syllable.
“Standish, do I need to check your color vision?” Yarrow asked.
“And speaking of irresistible,” Standish said, wrapping a lanky arm over Yarrow’s shoulders and giving him a squeeze, “we’re going to find you a girl with low standards and questionable decision-making skills. I will not have a virgin in my team. Your death would just be too tragic.”
“Oye.” Bailey stepped from behind a wall locker, wearing a safari jacket and khaki pants. She ran a comb through long dark hair. “The first thing he’s doing is getting shitfaced with the rest of us. He’s never actually drank alcohol. I bet he gets two shots of tequila before he’s trying to hump a bar stool or passed out. Maybe both.”
“Does no one want to go fishing with me?” Orozco asked. “I heard there are marlins off the coast of the Big Island this time of year.”
“Fishing,” Yarrow said meekly, “sounds kind of—”
“New guy thinks he has some say in the matter!” Standish slapped Yarrow on the back. “It’s called negative peer pressure, kid. We do it because we love you.”
Cortaro, standing in the doorway, cleared his throat. He wore his shipboard fatigues, even though he was on the same R&R rotation as the rest of his squad. A grim-faced Lieutenant Hale, also in his fatigues, stood behind Cortaro.
“No,” Standish shook his head in denial. He shook a finger at Cortaro. “No!”
Cortaro stepped aside and Hale walked in. He stopped in front of his Marines and looked each of them in the eye.
“We have an urgent mission. Shore leave has been cancelled,” Hale said.
Standish fell to his knees and looked to the ceiling, “Why? Why, God, are you doing this to me?”
“Standish,” Cortaro growled.
Standish’s shoulders slumped forward and his chin fell to his chest.
“What is it?” Orozco asked. He took the sunglasses from his face and slid them back into a felt-lined case.
“We’re going to find the Toth leader and kill him,” Hale said. “That should get them off our backs long enough for us to deal with the Xaros.”
“The hits just keep on coming,” Standish moaned.
“Get to the armory and suit up,” Cortaro said. “Prep your chutes. We’re doing a high-orbit low-opening jump over the California coast in three hours.”
The team leaders left the barracks.
Bailey tossed her comb in her bunk and sat down next to Standish.
“Bullshit, is what it is,” she said.
“Standish,” Yarrow said, putting a hand on the Marine’s shoulder, “you can get me drunk and maneuver me into sex I won’t remember after we get back from the planet full of face-eating aliens.”
“You promise?” Standish asked.
“Sure, why not.” Yarrow took his fatigues out of his wall locker. “It’s not like we’re ever going on shore leave.”
****
Stacey stood as her pod rose above the assembled ambassadors.
“Thank you for this chance to address our congress,” she said. “Earth defeated the Toth armada. Every ship destroyed. Every overlord slain by our Karigole allies. We recognize the enormous sacrifice of our Dotok allies who lost many fine pilots in the battle, and the Karigole, who are the last two of their kind.
“We do not recognize the contributions of this congress. While many of you lobbied to support Earth in our hour of need…none of you were there. None of you stood beside us against a vile enemy determined to enslave and devour us. You can claim that you were simply following the rules of our alliance, that you fell sway to the words of a demagogue, but Earth will remember who stood with us,” Stacey looked straight at the Vishrakath ambassador, “and who stood against us.
“Humanity will end the Toth threat for good, a task which we will carry out without your help or thanks,” she said.
“No, unacceptable!” Ambassador Wexil’s pod rose to face her. “You can’t take it upon yourself to do something with far-reaching ramifications as attacking the Toth. They will consider it a provocation from the entire Alliance.”
“I’m not asking,” Stacey said. “I’m telling you what Earth will do. There will be no half measures in this operation. Mentiq will be killed. The rest of the overlords will die with him. If some part of the Toth can survive, I hope what remains learns to never anger us again.”
More ambassador pods rose into the air, all demanding to be heard. Stacey looked up at the Qa’Resh face over the massive column in the center of the assembly. The face looked down at her, and she could have sworn it winked.
FROM THE AUTHOR
Thank you for reading Earth Defiant. I hope you enjoyed it enough to leave a review and tell two friends about The Ember War books. I always enjoy hearing from readers and you can drop me a line at [email protected].
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Also By Richard Fox:
The Ember War Saga:
1. The Ember War
2. The Ruins of Anthalas
3. Blood of Heroes
4. Earth Defiant
5. The Gardens of Nibiru (coming April 2016!)
The Queen of Sidonia
Princess Cosima will be queen, if she survives to her eighteenth birthday.
In a galaxy controlled by massive corporations, few worlds are truly free. When explorers find a priceless wormhole near Sidonia, the hostile attention of the Aquitaine Corporation focuses on the small, backwater kingdom.
To protect their world, Sidonia’s royalty rush seventeen year old Princess Cosima into an arranged marriage, one that will guarantee a treaty and shield Sidonia from Aquitaine’s clutches. But Cosima never asked for the honor of becoming the next queen to a man she doesn’t love.
With the fate the planet in the balance, a team of deadly assassins targets Cosima. The best killers money can buy will see the Princess dead before her wedding day. Cosima will need her wits to uncover the identity of the assassins targeting her, and her courage to stay alive in the middle of an interstellar power struggle.
If you like space opera novels with intrigue, a fast-paced plot and a tale of survival against impossible odds, then read The Queen of Sidonia today! Click HERE to learn more.
EMBER WAR SHORT STORIES
IRON HEARTS
Elias, soldier of the Iron Hearts and pilot of a mechanized suit of armor, lies comatose in a hospital. His mind trapped within the prison of his failing body. With no other option but to watch their friend wither away, his fellow Iron Hearts concoct a dangerous plan to save him.
VENT RATS
An alien Toth stowaway runs loose aboard the Breitenfeld. Chief MacDougall joins with Lafayette and Steuben to hunt it down before it wrecks the ship.
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An Excerpt from THE GARDENS OF NIBIRU
Book 5 of the Ember War Saga
Coming April 2016!
The doors to Bastion’s stellar cartography lab opened for Stacey. The immense lab was empty, but for a single unsupported staircase extended to a small platform in the center of the room. A holo projection of the Milky Way filled space around the platform as the shadow of a slight figure moved within.
Stacey walked up the stairs, her eyes glancing over the thousands of star systems marked by icons for known Crucible star gates. Thick tendrils of billion strong Xaros drone fleets advanced into the last unconquered swath of stars in the galaxy, each moving inexorably toward an inhabited system.
A single Crucible marking glowed blue just behind the tip of a tendril: Earth. A dashed line of a projected Xaros invasion reached from Barnard’s Star toward Earth, still more than a decade away. Her home world was behind enemy lines.
“Stacey,” a young woman with coffee-colored skin and curly hair waved to the human ambassador, “thank you for coming so quickly.” Stacey hurried up the stairway to join Darcy. The other ambassador looked human, an illusion projected by Bastion to help the many different species on the station better relate to each other. The Ruhaald alien beneath Darcy’s mask was an amphibious species with segmented flippers and toothy feeder tentacles in place of a mouth. Not for the first time, Stacey wondered what her Bastion-provided Ruhaald form looked like.
“You said it was urgent.” Stacey stopped next to her fellow ambassador on the raised platform and looked across the galaxy. Bastion’s hologram of the hundreds of billions of stars was as near perfect as science could achieve. Qa’Resh probes scattered across the galaxy constantly fed data to the space station. The lab could zoom in to each star and access a lifetime’s worth of data on the stellar system and known planets.
Stacey had loved the stars and astrophysics since before she could walk. To have such an immense font of knowledge at her fingertips was beyond her wildest childhood dreams.
“It might be,” Darcy sighed, “if the data is right. I don’t know what you did, but while you were on Earth, the Qa’Resh removed the data locks on the graviton surveys.”
“The data we thought might help us find the Xaros colonization fleet,” Stacey said, “if there is one.”
“The initial data was a bit inconsistent.” Darcy’s fingertips danced across a floating control screen. “Then I used your idea for filtering raw graviton data through a brane simulation…”
The holo field shifted to bring the edge of the galaxy in front of the two ambassadors. A Crucible marker floated amongst a halo of stars along the galactic rim.
“So I was right about that?” Stacey reached to the marker and flicked her thumb and forefinger apart to zoom in. A deep-green star with two planets in its habitable Goldilocks Zone materialized, a Crucible orbiting a world with snow-covered mountains and wide swaths of desert.
“Yes,” Darcy said through grit teeth, “you were right and I was…not yet correct.”
“This is Crucible 0-1, isn’t it? The first the Xaros ever built,” Stacey said.
“That’s right. Mok’Tor colony world. The first advanced civilization to encounter the Xaros, and the first to fall to them,” Darcy said. “‘Xaros’ is the Mok’Tor word for ‘death,’ ‘balance’ and the number zero. They were a poetic species.”
“Fascinating, but didn’t you say something about this being urgent?” Stacey asked.
The holo shifted. The edge of the galaxy moved away and a red dot appeared in the deep space just beyond the galactic rim.
“I thought it was an error in the data,” Darcy said quietly, “but it’s there.”
Stacey tried to zoom in and got an error buzz in return.
“All we have is a depression in the fabric of space-time,” Darcy said. “No light, no heat, nothing on the electromagnetic spectrum at all from…it.”
Stacey swiped a finger next to the dot and a screen full of data appeared next to it.
“The mass on this thing…something like this has to be a star, a large red dwarf perhaps. There are smaller catalogued red dwarves beyond the rim. Why can’t we detect this any other way?” Stacey asked.
“It’s consistent with what we’d expect with a Dyson sphere, a habitable megastructure built around a star,” Darcy said. “There’s no record of any species in our galaxy ever building something so momentous, and it’s on course to Crucible 0-1 at almost ninety percent the speed of light.”
“At that speed it won’t arrive for another…ninety-four years. Why haven’t you presented this to the rest of Bastion?” Stacey asked.
“There’s something wrong.” Darcy crossed her arms. “Once I knew what to look for, I went back through Bastion’s survey data, thousands of years’ worth, and retraced the object’s path.”
Darcy flicked a finger next to the red dot and a solid line traced away into intergalactic space. The line turned to dashes at the earliest recorded data point as the object’s projected course stretched though the galaxies of the Virgo supercluster. The path never came close to any galaxy.
“This can’t be right.” Stacey’s brow furrowed as the line continued to the very edge of observable space, billions of light-years away. “Where did it come from? Bastion’s stellar cartography models are near perfect—that object had to start somewhere. Could it have changed course?”
“Redirecting an object with that much mass and momentum would be more difficult than building the Dyson sphere,” Darcy said. “You see why I didn’t present this to the Congress. Someone would tear my theory apart and laugh me off the stage. They’d say the object is just some stellar anomaly…ignore it.”
“An anomaly heading straight for Crucible 0-1? Wait…speaking of anomalies. Chuck?” Stacey said to Bastion’s AI interface.
“Yes,”
the AI’s voice was toneless and curt.
Stacey lifted her hands into the holo and pulled the image down. A great black void in intergalactic space intersected with the anomaly’s projected path. The void had no rogue stars, no clouds of gas extending for light-years, none of the detritus common between the great expanse between galaxies.
“This void,” Stacey said, “I’ve studied it before. There’s nothing we can see or detect now, but the gravity models for this filament running through the local supercluster show something was here, correct?”
“Void designation A-9-2239, held a galaxy with a stellar mass twenty percent larger than the Milky Way. The gravitational effect of that galaxy ceased two hundred five million years ago. This is inferred, not observed,” Chuck said. “Recordings integrated into the Bastion stellar cartography library are no more than five million years old.”
Stacey tugged at her lip. She reached a hand into the holo and twisted an imaginary knob, moving the timeline backwards and forwards. The Xaros object appeared just beyond the void when the galaxy that should have been there vanished.
“That’s where it came from,” Stacey said. “The Xaros are from that void, or what used to be there.”
“Galaxies don’t just blink out of existence, Stacey,” Darcy said.
“Yet the math says that’s exactly what happened in that void. There was a galaxy. Its gravity left a legacy on the stars around it. Then it was gone in the blink of an eye. We need to talk to someone who could have seen what happened,” Stacey said.
“You know someone that old?”
“The entity from Anthalas. It’s sitting in a cell down in the Qa’Resh city. Time to go have a little chat with that thing,” Stacey said.