The Battle of the Void (The Ember War Saga Book 6)

by Richard Fox

  “But you were poking around in Malal’s data,” Kallen said. “Some of the archives were tampered with. You never found anything that could fight the Xaros?”

  “The demon’s work is soiled. Corrupted by genocide. We never pried into his archives,” Father said.

  The armor traded looks.

  “Someone’s lying to us,” Elias said.

  “We thought the demon went beyond the veil with the others. Now he is back. Why?”

  “I told you. Information to fight the Xaros,” Elias said. “They are coming for our world. We need what he has hidden here.”

  “How is the technology to devour the innocent useful to you? The demon is accessing that data right this moment. That is why we sent the wyrm to stop you,” Father said.

  “Ibarra’s behind this,” Bodel said. “Those two sacrificed everyone back on Earth to get their grip on that Crucible. Makes you wonder what’s at the end of this plot.”

  “What do we do?” Kallen asked.

  “Get back to Malal. Stop this madness,” Elias said.

  A tink-tink-tink noise rippled through the auditorium as the Jinn robots came to life. Glass limbs waved in the air and electric lines flared to life through their semiopaque bodies.

  “We are not of one mind,” Father said. “We thought you were robot slaves to the flesh warriors,” Father said. “But you are all the same. You fight. You are fury. Your nature is not of compassion, but to destroy. Do you share the demon’s purpose?”

  Elias’ armored hands squeezed into fists. Servos tightened as his armor reacted to the surge of anger and adrenaline coursing through Elias’ body. Elias did not need his weapons to be deadly.

  “We fight,” Elias said. “That’s true. Monsters killed my family, and I was too young and too weak to help them. I earned my armor to fight for those in need. I fought to turn back the Chinese advance on Brisbane—not to conquer, but to protect the innocent. I fought the Xaros on Earth to take back our planet. I fought the Xaros on Takeni to rescue the last of the Dotok. I killed Toth in three solar systems to protect my brothers and sisters and those who are barely human. Do you really think I would let Malal commit genocide if I could stop it?”

  The chittering returned from the audience.

  “Hey, boys?” Kallen looked up. “I think we got a problem.”

  “What do you mean? Elias was great,” Bodel said.

  Elias looked up. A black stain spread across the distant end of the curved world. Cracks spread away from the stain, toppling buildings and wrecking forests.

  “Father…what is that?” Elias asked. Black mites swarmed through the stain.

  “The Xaros,” Father said. The Jinn robots fell silent. They toppled against each other, then to the ground, like they’d all suddenly fallen asleep. “We must hide. If the drones know we are here, they will destroy us.”

  Father struck out, the gray smoke stroking Elias’ forearm. Elias jerked his arm away and swung at Father, his fist passing through Father, earning nothing but little curls of smoke for his effort.

  A diamond full of orange light fell from Father’s incorporeal form and bounced against the stage. The light faded away.

  “That…is a lot of Xaros,” Kallen said, her helm still cocked to the sky. The swarm of Xaros elongated into a thin spiral and swept down toward the bridge. A handful split off and descended toward an area away from the Iron Hearts. No more drones came through the distant hull breach.

  “They’re following the bridge,” Bodel said, “which is going to be very bad for the crunchies if we’re not there.”

  “The Jinn took our ammo. We aren’t going to be much use at range unless the Xaros are vulnerable to our biting wit,” Kallen said.

  A panel on the side of the stage popped open. The armor’s magazines, full of gauss rounds, and their few quadrium munitions spilled out in front of them.

  “We aren’t going to be much use without another battalion of armor and Osprey gunships in support,” Kallen said.

  Nothing happened.

  “Really?” Elias slammed a magazine into his cannons and cycled rounds into the chambers.

  “Worth a shot,” Kallen said.

  “Going to be tough getting up there,” Bodel said.

  “We’ll figure something…” Elias stopped, his gaze on his forearm where Father touched him. He held his arm up for the others. There was a very detailed map with a glowing orange line leading from the auditorium to a dimension door. The path veered off the direct route into a warren of buildings.

  “Nice of them,” Bodel said, “but why the detour?”

  The rapport of distant gauss fire echoed through the auditorium.

  “Let’s go.” Elias charged toward the sound of battle.

  CHAPTER 13

  Minder gathered up the shattered bits of the tanks that once held Torni’s consciousness into a force field and sent it off to a reclamation chute.

  An alert tugged at his mind. Minder tapped into the data feed from a long dormant artifact site. Malal’s vault sprang into view. Energy readings had spiked within the structure, the first recorded activity from this—or any—site from this particular precursor intelligence.

  Minder shifted into his human form. The architecture for this location corresponded with the subterranean structures on Anthalas and many other worlds. His mind did not allow for coincidence.

  Torni appeared next to him.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “This will happen very quickly. If I’m right, then this is good-bye.” Minder tapped into the automatic subroutines running through the Crucible orbiting the vault. Seconds to go.

  “What are you—”

  “Tell them to destroy the Crucible. Your armor hurt the General before. Use this to destroy him.” Minder tapped Torni on the chest and a jolt of energy spiked into her brain.

  “The Crucible will release a lepton pulse and…there.” Minder pointed to the display as a strike carrier materialized.

  “That’s my ship! That’s the Breitenfeld!” Torni’s face lit up.

  “The Crucible will open a wormhole to a reserve force of drones in the next few minutes. Get through and tell your ship to hit the Crucible here.” The joins between the connected spikes blinked red on the display.

  “What? How the hell am I supposed to—”

  Minder grabbed her by the shoulders.

  “Thank you, Torni.” Minder shoved her away. She vanished before she could even get in a word of protest.

  Minder swept a hand across the room, the vessels holding copies of Torni’s mind shattering with its passing. He accessed his report and scrambled the data into a cloud of subatomic particles that even Xaros technology could never recover.

  With his final work destroyed, Minder sat on one of the now empty pedestals and waited for his reckoning.

  Will I be remembered as a base traitor or the first step away from our dark path? He thought. Futile. None will know of this. Keeper will erase me from history to stop the spread of corruption. The Xaros do not tolerate impure thoughts.

  He watched the holo as Xaros drones poured out of the Crucible orbiting the vault.

  ****

  Torni felt herself tumbling end over end. She bounced against dark metal shapes that stampeded past her like a startled herd of cows. She waved her arms, trying to grab onto anything to stop the chaos around her. A bent metal bar swung in front of her face and she tried to bat it aside with her other arm. Another metal bar crossed with the first.

  The stampede subsided and Torni saw the void around her, wide swaths of stars from distant galactic arms alternating as her wild motion continued. The metal bars bounced against each other, in tune with the movement of her arms.

  She looked down. Her body was oblong, swirling with checkerboard patterns. She kicked a leg out, and a stalk grew to mimic the movement. Flashes of light and the eruption of lightning from a quadrium round demanded her attention. Her spin stopped as she willed herself to concentrate on the epicent
er of the quadrium explosion.

  Hundreds of disabled Xaros drones floated in space, bouncing off each other. Arcs of electricity jumped from the giant thorns of the Crucible, the wormhole within fluctuating like the ocean during a storm.

  Torni looked down and realized the truth. She was a Xaros drone.

  Ohhh…kay, she thought. Damn you, Minder. A little warning and some instruction would have been useful.

  The Breitenfeld’s rail guns flashed and dozens of drones broke apart and disintegrated under the bombardment. The ship’s turrets sent up blazing-fast torrents of gauss fire, destroying more drones.

  The drones came back online as if suddenly awakening from a deep sleep and scattered apart. Torni’s mind filled with static. The pyrite crystals within her shell flared with heat as the mass of drones came back to life. The static grew worse, then subsided as the drones split into two groups: most shot off to Malal’s vault; the rest went for the Breitenfeld.

  That static. I’m connected to the drones somehow, she thought. Doesn’t matter. I need to do something useful right now.

  The roiling wormhole settled back into a more stable plane. Xaros drones came through in ones and twos.

  The Breit needs to cut off their reinforcements or she’ll be overwhelmed. If I still had my commo suite— The UI from her old power armor appeared across her field of vision. She touched a stalk against another, where her forearm screen would have been, and her shell shivered as it scanned through IR channels. She picked up the Breitenfeld’s transponder and several open commo channels.

  If I think it…I can do it. Torni pinged a commo channel and entered an ID code.

  CHAPTER 14

  White-hot gauss tracers tore across the view screens on the ship’s bridge.

  “Three drones inside our flack bubble!” Ericcson shouted. “They’re going for rail turret one.”

  “I want hull security teams in the void and in their bunkers right now,” Valdar said. “How long until we can get a Marine detachment armed with q-rounds and pneumatic hammers to rail one?”

  “Already in place, no reports of contact,” Ericcson said.

  Shutters across the ship’s hull opened and vac-suited sailors scrambled out into the void. A pair of Xaros drones latched onto the forward rail battery. Ruby lasers stabbed the armor plating briefly, then cut out. The drones hesitated, stalks twitching.

  “The armor plating works!” Ensign Geller shouted. The disintegration beams returned, brighter and thicker than before. Rail turret one flashed red on Valdar’s damage control screen.

  The white flash of gauss rifles erupted across the hull. One of the drones shattered. The other flew off into space like it had been kicked and then disintegrated.

  “Where’s the third?” Valdar asked.

  The fire from the hull teams continued. The silver streak of a quadrium round traced a line from the hull to just above the bridge. Jagged lightning cast shadows across the bridge. A Xaros drone slammed into the hull plating surrounding Valdar and his bridge crew, hitting so hard it shook the captain’s command chair. The view screens showed the drone splayed out across the outside of the bridge. Gauss bullets hit the drone and the armor around the bridge, hammer blows of the impacts sending tremors through the bridge.

  The red lines of burning embers spread across the drone as it fell away.

  “Drone destroyed,” Ericcson said.

  “Tell the hull security teams good job, and to watch their aim the next time they shoot at my bridge,” Valdar said.

  “Sir!” Ensign Erdahl, the ship’s communication’s officer waved to Valdar. “We’re getting a message from Hale’s team. Target coordinates on the Crucible and text saying that will cut off the Xaros reinforcements. Sending it to you now.”

  “Guns.” Valdar looked at Commander Utrecht and nodded.

  “Plotting.” Utrecht and a pair of sailors marked the target coordinates on their tactical boards and readied a firing solution.

  “Is Hale in space? Where is their Mule?” Valdar asked.

  “Drones coming through the Crucible at a rate of fifty per minute!” Ericcson announced.

  “The code Hale used is old…I ran a triangulation on the signal but the signal’s coming from nothing,” Erdahl said. “They must be cloaked.”

  “Captain, rail one is down,” Utrecht said. “We need to bring the ventral battery to bear if we’re going to do this quickly.” The firing solution popped onto Valdar’s visor. The ship was badly out of position to make the shot.

  “Helm, prep an emergency burn on even-numbered thrusters. Guns, slew the batteries to starboard and fire when ready,” Valdar said. “Ericcson, tell the hull teams to hold onto something.”

  “Burn ready,” Geller said. “But if we try to draw power for the guns and the engines at the same time it’ll—”

  “Engage thrusters!” Valdar shouted. The ship’s port engines roared to life and twisted the ship’s prow to the right. The rail guns mounted on the top and bottom of the ship crackled with energy and shot hyper-velocity slugs over the side of the ship.

  The Crucible swung into view. Cracks grew from a join of three different spikes, glowing with blue light. The open wormhole flickered as dark spots of emerging drones appeared on the surface. The Crucible swept across Valdar’s view and vanished.

  “One hit, limited effects,” Utrecht said.

  “Keep the engines burning. Swing us around for another shot,” Valdar said.

  “Captain! We just slagged battery piles three and nine!” Levin, the ship’s chief engineer, sent through the IR. “You take another shot and we’ll lose—” Valdar cut the transmission. The flashing icons on his damage control panel told him enough.

  “Guns?”

  “Three seconds…firing!”

  The dorsal rail gun fired…but not the battery on the bottom of the ship.

  “Had a malfunction,” Utrecht said. “Slewing battery to compensate. First shot had no effect, reengaging with ventral cannon—”

  Geller slapped his hands against his pod for attention. “Our stabilizers don’t have the power to compensate! If you fire without the counterbalance of—”

  The Breitenfeld shuddered as the bottom rail battery fired. Warning icons exploded across Valdar’s screen a half second before the ship pitched on its long axis and slammed Valdar against his restraints.

  ****

  Durand’s jaw dropped as the Breitenfeld rolled like a barrel. The strike carrier’s engines cut out, the momentum hurling white-armored sailors from the hull security team into space.

  “I don’t think the ship is supposed to do that,” Manfred said.

  “The wormhole is down! Look!” Glue shouted.

  The Crucible listed in space, the wormhole gone. Cracks spread through the great thorns, lumps of shattered basalt-colored material clouding around the gate like a growing asteroid field.

  Drones broke away from the Breitenfeld, most making straight for the vault. Dozens and dozens coalesced together between the ship and the vault.

  “Merde, they’re combining. Red flight, attack pattern Charlie, now! Take long-range rail shots as soon as you have a clean shot.” Durand swung her Eagle toward the growing mass of drones and hit her afterburners.

  “What about the Dutchmen?” asked a rookie pilot, call sign Fiend.

  “Won’t matter what happens to them if there’s no ship to go back to,” Durand said.

  She cut the thrust on her engines and powered up the rail gun built into her fighter’s frame. She’d been left dead in space by a rail gun malfunction before, and all the assurances from her engineers as to the improvements to the weapon did nothing to cover up that feeling of helplessness she’d had before the guns of a Chinese warship.

  The Xaros construct grew to the size of a destroyer with a gaping hole in its center that would become a cannon of immense power once the drones had finished. A handful of drones latched onto the outer hull and fused with it. More broke away and made for Durand and the three Eagle
s in a loose formation behind her: Manfred, Lothar and Glue.

  “Any of you have a q-shell chambered?” Durand asked.

  “I do,” Nag said, “but I won’t be in range for a few more minutes.”

  “Figures. Blue flight, fire gauss cannons on my mark, aim for center mass,” Durand said. “Filly, where are my two Condor bombers? Your torpedoes would be very useful right now.”

  “I am staring up Nag’s backside. Give me two more minutes than her,” Filly said.

  A red glow formed in the center of the Xaros construct, the cannon aimed at the Breitenfeld.

  “Blue fight.” Durand flipped the safety off her rail gun trigger. The Xaros destroyer was miles away, and she had to make this shot without her computers. “On my mark…fire!”

  She pulled the trigger and her Eagle bucked with the recoil. Her head bounced off the pad behind her helmet.

  “God, I hate that,” she muttered. The Xaros construct was still ahead of her, a red gash across its flank tracing over the top.

  “I scored a hit,” Manfred said. “Some of the loose drones put themselves in the line of fire. My round didn’t hit as hard as it should have. Others deflected.”

  At least five more of the gray-metal drones were on an intercept course. Two broke off and made for the destroyer. The glow inside the cannon was faint, but growing brighter.

  “Manfred, Lothar, can you handle three drones?” she asked.

  “Are you insulting us?” Manfred asked. “Lothar could do it all by himself.”

  “Glue and I will charge through. You two handle the drones and get another shot on the destroyer as soon as your rails recharge,” Durand said.

  “We’ve got nothing but our gauss cannons. We might dent the side if we’re lucky,” Glue said.

  “I know that, you know that, but they don’t know that.” Durand let off a chain of shots from the rotary cannon slung beneath her hull and jinked to the side to dodge a disintegration beam. “Keep them off-balance until the bombers have range. Anything to stop them from firing on the Breit.”