by Richard Fox
Brannock and Derringer crouched next to her. There were five human ships still fighting in the void above, rail cannons and point defense turrets blazing. The Midway’s bridge was dark, drones scuttling around and through holes torn in the superstructure where the admiral should have been leading the battle.
The hull around them was pitted and torn. Fragments of aegis shielding skittered past their knees as the ship rolled over.
One of the last ships exploded—its battery stacks gone critical—in a flash of yellow light. Drones crossed in front of distant stars, moving like shadows across the void. Brannock felt exposed, helpless before the awesome might of the Xaros ripping apart his fleet.
“How long we gonna be out here flapping in the breeze?” Derringer asked.
“One more…” Stephens tapped on her forearm screen. “Got lock on connection gamma. Now I need to—”
“If you can work faster without talking, I’m all for it,” Brannock said.
A peal of armor pressed up from the breach. Indigo tried to squirm through the wider hole, with little success.
“Corporal…” Derringer whispered, “think one’s coming at us from the bridge.”
Stephens started to get up. Brannock held her steady. A drone climbed down from the bridge to one of the hull defense bunkers.
“Stay on it,” Brannock said.
A stalk shot up from the approaching drone and bent toward the humans.
“It sees us.” Derringer slowly pointed his rifle toward the drone.
“You don’t know that.” Brannock felt a cold splash of fear against his chest. “Just stay calm and—”
The tip of the stalk lit up with red light.
Derringer put himself between Stephens and the drone and raised his weapon. His rifle fired just as a beam struck his chest. His shot ripped a gash across the drone’s surface. Brannock hit it again. The drone slammed against the hull and broke apart.
“Derringer?” Brannock grabbed the Marine’s slack shoulder, his grip collapsing the empty armor, red mist clouding Derringer’s visor.
Brannock grabbed Stephens by the back of her armor and dragged her toward the bunker.
“What are you doing? What happened?” she asked.
“Keep working!” Three more drones came off the bridge and flew toward them. He set her against the side of the bunker and took out his only quadrium bullet. He slipped the round into his rifle’s breach and clicked a button to overcharge his capacitors. The rifle hummed in his hands.
“Here we go.” He stepped around the bunker and stared down the charging drones. A red beam shot past his knees. Brannock aimed for the drone in the center of the pack and fired. The drones flew apart, but not before the quadrium shell exploded into an electrical storm that arced between two of the drones. The affected drones slammed into the Midway and skipped across the hull.
Brannock ejected his spent battery and slapped his belt to get a fresh charge, but the pouch was empty. His hand went to another pouch—empty.
“No no, no…” He reached behind his back and found a fresh battery pouch on his belt. He struggled to get the battery loose.
The single drone that evaded the quadrium round landed atop the bunker, stalks raised like a spider about to strike. The stalks scythed toward Brannock and Stephens, the stalk tip missing his face by mere inches.
The drone slipped over the side of the bunker.
Indigo gripped the drone by its stalks and slammed it against the hull. He roared and bashed it against the bunker, cracking the shell.
“Hammer! Use your damn hammer!” Brannock yelled as he finally slapped a fresh battery into his rifle.
Indigo drew the hammer off his shoulder and slammed it against the drone. The spike split the shell and cracked the drone in half. Indigo smashed the disintegrating drone again and again.
“I’ve got it!” Stephens called out. “Final countdown activated!”
Indigo tossed aside the last of the drone.
“Good job, Indigo!” Brannock stood over Stephens, searching for the other two drones.
“Indigo, good.” The doughboy slammed a fist against his chest. The soldier’s head snapped to the side. He squared his feet and raised the hammer over his head.
All Brannock saw was a blur as a drone slammed into Indigo and carried him away. Brannock heard the doughboy grunt and shout for a few seconds before his IR cut out.
Searing pain erupted in Brannock’s arm. He twisted aside as the beam burning into his arm ripped into the bunker.
A drone landed just before Brannock and Stephens. He tried to bring his weapon to bear, but his arm refused to respond. The drone slashed a beam across the bunker. Brannock heard a brief scream from Stephens then he found himself spinning through the void.
His right arm flopped in front of his face, hanging by a thread from his nearly ripped vac suit. His legs itched with pain then went numb. He refused to look down, knowing what he’d see, and what he wouldn’t.
“Anyone?” he broadcast. “I’m Dutchman. Dutch…off the Midway.” His head felt heavy.
Abaddon spun slowly across his vision. The propulsion rings collapsed, giant cracks forming from one spoke to the other. Gleaming crystal shards broke out of the brass-colored rings and trailed away from Abaddon.
Brannock watched in awe as the crystals burned away. His mind went to a childhood memory of a camping trip, sitting around a fire with his father, watching embers rise into the night sky and die away.
Blood loss sent Brannock unconscious. Death came moments later.
CHAPTER 22
Minder felt his connections to the Xaros network sever with one swift stroke. The Breitenfeld had wrecked the Crucible’s ability to generate wormholes, not the network hub embedded within the structure. There had never been an anomalous drone during the long course of the Xaros invasion, and if there was one thing that caught the Master’s attention, it was data that did not conform to expectations.
He got to his feet, remembering how Torni fought to die the same way.
A smoking mass of abyssal darkness seeped through the wall opposite him. Keeper had sent a null-beast, a legend from their home galaxy used as a tool in the Master’s assassination games. Minder took Keeper’s choice in murder weapons as a compliment.
“We cannot continue like this, Keeper,” he said. “We destroyed our home through hubris. Doing the same to this galaxy only compounds the crime.”
The null-beast coiled into a twisted lance and swung a tip to Minder.
Minder kept his eyes open as the lance shot into his chest. He felt his photonic core disintegrate slowly, like ice spreading through his chest. His body froze in a rictus of pain then crumbled into dust. The null-beast stretched across the laboratory, annihilating everything it came into contact with.
With Minder and all evidence of his existence gone, the null-beast turned upon itself. Black smoke poured from its shrinking body. The last of the creature burned to a tiny mote of light then departed reality with a faint pop.
****
The General watched as the propulsion rings crumbled away, their remnants flowing behind his arsenal like a comet’s tail.
Never before! Never before had one of the polluting species of this galaxy ever dealt him such a blow as this.
He willed the drones still inside the planetoid to replicate. This was but a setback. He would bring the arsenal to Earth, the materiel loss of the rings and what he’d expended to defeat the human fleet was insignificant next to the ultimate strength his arsenal possessed.
Gravity enveloped him and pulled him toward the arsenal. He struggled briefly against the sudden spike in gravitons. Another of the human’s mines…farther away and on the path to Earth.
The human support ships had raced away during the battle. He ordered a segment of his available drones to give chase. They set out, moving unacceptably slow. The graviton mine disrupted the drones as they tried to form their own Alcubierre fields. The drones would pursue, but not catch up for
months.
No…
The General spread his drones across the surface and ordered them to propel the arsenal forward. The planetoid lurched forward. He felt the loss of thousands and thousands of drones as they struggled to overcome the interference from the graviton mine.
Another human mine exploded farther ahead and the General realized what the humans had done.
The support ships were minelayers. They would bleed his arsenal white before it reached Earth and there was no way he could catch the ships or stop them from seeding space with their mines.
Light erupted from the General like a supernova as he raged. He flew to a wrecked ship and ripped it apart. He hurled the prow into another dead ship, knocking them both on an infinite journey through space.
He went to the human capital ship, the carrier, and peeled an aegis plate off the hull. He crushed the plate into a sphere and reached behind his head, ready to smash it into the bridge…then stopped. He burned a path through the ship and stopped in the engine room.
The jump engines remained intact. Keeper might withhold the technology from him, but here was a crude approximation of the forbidden technology. The General rolled the ball of compressed aegis shielding between his fingers, deep in thought.
A faulty jump engine had doomed his home galaxy, erasing it from existence and sending the Xaros on the long journey to this, their new home. The General had asked for the jump technology to investigate the humans’ meddling on Earth, but Keeper refused.
The Masters decreed that the jump engines would never be used again; violating that would mean sanction—a sanction the General wasn’t sure he would survive.
Only if they find out...
The General summoned drones to the Midway. Keeper kept a smothering presence around everything the General did since waking after the human incursion on Anthalas. Yet…the General didn’t feel Keeper now. Something else had the other Master’s attention.
The General cut his connection to the Apex. He came up with a plan, one he had to execute quickly. Keeper would never know, and victory required no explanation.
CHAPTER 23
Standing watch aboard Titan Station was a balance between controlled chaos and mind-numbing boredom. The fleet’s rapid expansion meant more and more void traffic in and around Earth, activity that waned and ebbed with the workday in Phoenix. With Phoenix local time still in the wee hours of the morning, space traffic was minimal. Those manning the control center took the time to prep for the approaching morning rush.
Colonel Mitchell took a last sip of coffee, sniffing the deep aroma of pure Kona beans brewed to perfection. Before the Xaros invasion, Kona coffee was highly prized by connoisseurs the world over. Which led to sky-high prices beyond what Mitchell could afford, or more than his wife would let him spend on something she’d considered frivolous.
He looked at the grounds stuck to the bottom of his mug, remembering the first morning of his honeymoon with his now dead wife. They’d ordered room service from their hotel on the Las Vegas strip and shared a pot of Kona.
Mitchell could afford his old vice with the Ibarra Corporation’s presence on Hawaii and new robotic farms across the islands, making Kona plentiful. He lost his wife in the invasion, but the smell of Kona always brought back fond memories of her.
“Berthing requests for next week.” His assistant passed him a tablet full of spreadsheets.
Mitchell frowned at the list, catching a half-dozen conflicts in seconds.
“When will the Luna yards be up and running? Or Mars? Or what they’re building out in the Lagrange Point? What’re they calling it?” Mitchell took a stylus from his breast pocket and highlighted requests for later attention.
“Just the star fort, for now,” the assistant said. “I think Ibarra has a contest going for a name.”
“Anything but the Alamo,” Mitchell muttered.
A siren blared from the ceiling as red lights flashed across the bridge.
“The Crucible has a gate request,” a crewman said.
“The Breitenfeld?” Mitchell asked.
“Can’t be, the mass displacement coming through the wormhole is too large for the Breitenfeld.” His assistant looked over the crewman’s shoulder and read off the screens.
Mitchell flipped the safety catch off the system-wide kill switch and pressed his other hand against a biometric reader. The kill switch went green. He could shut down every computer in the solar system with the press of that button.
“The Breit bringing home another stray?” Mitchell asked. “They came in over mass with that Dotok ship.”
“Just one ship…other end of the wormhole reads as coming from just outside Barnard’s Star. It has to be the Midway, but it isn’t broadcasting any of her codes,” his assistant said.
Mitchell opened a channel straight to Ibarra.
“Crucible, this is Titan watch. Can you shut down the wormhole? This doesn’t feel right,” Mitchell said.
“Can’t. Point of origin is too close for Jimmy to counteract,” Ibarra said.
“Then I’m declaring a code black. God help us.” Mitchell took in a deep breath then shouted, “Prep for analogue!”
He looked at the button beneath his fingertips then pressed it.
A coded transmission emanated from Titan Station. Every single computer, robot and automated system it touched went into immediate shutdown as their CPUs shut down and power lines detached from batteries. Earth shut down within minutes; the transmission reached through the rest of the solar system at the speed of light.
The command center’s crew swapped out their now useless touch screens for control panels boasting keys and dials.
“The wormhole is collapsing,” his assistant said.
Mitchell slid a helmet over his head and connected to the life-support systems in his chair.
“Battle stations! Get the guns manned and get us to zero atmo ASAP,” Mitchell said. Once he was sure his orders were running through the station, he looked to the Crucible.
The Midway hung in the center of the Crucible, her hull burnt black, flight deck bays shut.
“Hail them,” Mitchell said.
“Nothing,” his comms officer said.
“Launch our alert fighters. Tell Hawaii, Luna, Okinawa, everybody to scramble whatever they’ve got,” Mitchell said.
“Sir, it’s the Midway,” his assistant said. “It looks badly damaged. What about search and rescue?”
“Then let’s hope I’m just being overly paranoid. Do it. Now.”
“She’s breaking up!” a crewman shouted.
Holes opened across the Midway’s hull. Mitchell switched a screen to one of the station’s telescope cameras and got a closer look at the ship. Her hull pulled apart into black lumps, which spun into oblong shapes…and grew stalks.
Blood drained from Mitchell’s face.
“Oh no.”
****
Ibarra watched a holo of the Midway, trying to estimate just how many drones were packed into the Eighth Fleet’s flagship.
“The drones…they replaced Midway’s aegis armor with drones,” Ibarra said. “The omnium derivative we used for the armor is close enough to the drones’ makeup that we didn’t even notice when they were coming through.”
+Can we deconstruct the Xaros trick after we’ve defeated them?+ the probe asked.
“I will now remind you that we have no weapons on the Crucible.” Ibarra called up a holo showing local space. “I’m so stupid. We should have prepared for this.”
+The Xaros are not known to use jump engines. There was no precedent for this.+
“Somehow that doesn’t make me feel any better!” Ibarra zoomed the holo out and felt a glimmer of hope when he found a warship on the far side of the moon. “Jimmy, drones are coming for this command center, aren’t they?”
+Correct. Two hundred ninety-five are en route with roughly half of newly formed—+
“Turn on the doughboy tanks in nodes two and three. Full production,” I
barra said.
+This will terminate all procedural humans still in the tubes. Are you sure?+
“Those drones get in here and they’re dead anyway. Do it.”
The doors to the command center opened. Steuben, half-dressed in combat armor, stormed into the room with his blade in hand, Lafayette following close behind.
“Ah, now we’ve got good news and bad news,” Ibarra said. “The bad news is that we’re about to be neck-deep in drones.”
“What is your good news?” Steuben asked.
“You two are here.”
****
Flight Leader Bar’en jumped off a catwalk and grabbed onto a pole the auto-lifters used to move cargo through the main flight bay on the Vorpal. He slid halfway down and leaped off. He swung his feet in a lazy somersault and kicked out, furthering his arc. The lower gravity on the flight deck made it easier to get the fighters in the air faster, and made acrobatic routines look easier than usual.
Bar’en slammed his helmet on and landed just shy of his fighter. He jumped into the cockpit, hands racing through pre-flight checks before he sank into the seat.
“Captain Go’ral, I could use an update,” Bar’en said.
“A Xaros ship came through the Crucible. We are maneuvering around Luna at best speed, but you and your squadron can reach them first. Our hosts ask that we engage the enemy at the Crucible first, then ‘shoot anything else that’s Xaros’ after that,” the ship’s master said through his helmet comms.
“And why did our esteemed hosts let a Xaros ship through the Crucible?” Bar’en asked as his canopy closed around him. Eight more fighters with the rest of the alert pilots readied for battle.
“I don’t see how that’s relevant. Also, may I remind you of the three previous reprimands you received for excessive criticism of their military capabilities and competence?”
“I only get those when the humans accidentally hear what I have to say.” Bar’en charged up his weapon systems. As much as he derided Earth’s pilots, their gauss weapons were a step above Dotok, and they weren’t averse to sharing the technology.