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

by Richard Fox

  “Prepare to launch.”

  As the launch bay doors opened, the dull gray of Earth’s moon passed beneath the Vorpal as she came around the satellite. A crewman stood at the edge of the flight deck and raised two flags over his head.

  Titan Station came into view, flack batteries firing into the void. Tendrils of flame reached out of hull breaches, feeding on the atmosphere bleeding from the hull. Flashes of exploding fighters and gauss weapons stretched a rough line from the Titan to Ceres as Earth’s new moon swept into view.

  “Getting some video in…that’s their Midway,” one of his pilots said. “What’s happening to it?”

  Bar’en turned on a screen on the side of his cockpit. Nearly half the carrier’s hull was stripped away and more peeled from the faux-armor and formed into drones. Bar’en checked his load out: he had two anti-ship rockets slung beneath his fighter.

  “It’s a Xaros construct. Engage it as such. Odd numbers to kill strikes, evens fly cover. Switch for second pass. Don’t let there be a third,” Bar’en said.

  The crewman at the front of the flight line lowered a flag, signaling that their launch was imminent.

  “The humans saved us from Takeni. Shared their home with us. Now we earn our place.” Bar’en cycled power to his engines.

  The crewman dropped the second flag then fell face-first to the deck.

  Bar’en brought his fighter a few feet into the air and shot out the hangar, directly over the prone crewman. There was talk about ending the tradition of assigning the youngest sailor to flag duty, talk Bar’en wouldn’t stomach. Some things were just meant to be.

  He pushed his engines to their limits, eyes darting from his control panel to the approaching Crucible. The new capacitors and battery stacks held up as the fighter rumbled beneath him. Acceleration pressed him against his seat and a chill swept over his face as blood squeezed out of the fleshy parts of his nose and cheeks.

  His blunted beak clicked as he saw the first drone flitting through the Crucible’s giant thorns.

  “Claws out, take what you can on the pass. Stay on me,” Bar’en said. He cut his afterburners and veered toward a handful of drones cutting into one of the many control nodes spread through the thorns. He let off a burst, shattering a drone. His pilots wiped out the rest a moment later, leaving a scar of gauss bullets across the dome.

  “The imperfection was mine,” one of the newer pilots said.

  “You think the ghost haunting the place will care that you scratched the paint?” another asked.

  Bar’en banked over a thorn and flew into the inner section of the Crucible. The Xaros peeled away from the Midway’s fore sections, exposing bare frames and open decks to the void. Bodies of sailors escaped from the ship. Bar’en brushed his knuckles against the prayer beads attached to his chest, an old superstition to ward off the attention of the dead.

  “Odds, ready rockets, target the aft armor plates.” Bar’en pressed his thumb against the missile release. A pair of drones streaked past him and he weaved up and down, dodging laser fire.

  “Loose!” He clicked the release twice and his fighter surged forward, free of the rocket’s mass. He pulled his Eagle into a climb, heading straight for the thorns.

  “Three solid hits…no chain kill, localized damage, but they’ve stopped separating,” one of the even-numbered pilots said.

  “Follow me. Evens, prep your strike.” Bar’en looped around the outer edge of the Crucible and rolled his fighter over. Half his pilots jumped out ahead of him, eager to make their attack. One of the thorns cracked apart as they flew over the inner edge, round craters blown out of the surface that might have come from Dotok rockets.

  “This is Marc Ibarra aboard the Crucible to whoever just blew up my jump gate. Stop it.”

  “The beggar does not bite the coin tossed into his bowl,” Bar’en said.

  “Keep shooting the drones. Just be more careful about it!” Ibarra yelled so loud Bar’en’s ears rang.

  Rockets leapt from the leading fighters. Xaros fighters managed to take down a pair before the rest slammed home. Compounded drones burned away as if an inferno sprang from the rocket strikes.

  “Well done,” Bar’en said. “Now we finish off the rest…and try not to shoot the Crucible.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Steuben leaned against a metal weapons rack and pushed. The wheels weaved through the sandy floor and veered to the side. Steuben let off a stream of Karigole curses that had no real translation into English and pushed again.

  “Steuben.” Lafayette ran up the corridor and tossed an aegis reinforced armored jacket to Steuben. The cyborg Karigole had two gauss rifles attached to his back. “I’ll get this.”

  Lafayette gripped the side of the rack and pushed it ahead, barely breaking his stride as Steuben donned the armor.

  “Show off,” Steuben muttered.

  “The door, if you please.”

  Steuben ran ahead, snatching a rifle off Lafayette’s back as he passed, and tapped a code into the keypad bolted onto the basalt-colored doorway. The doorway opened from a center seam, tiny bits collapsing to the side like a crumbling sand castle.

  Inside, dozens of large cylinders held doughboys. Mechanical arms tipped with tiny needles, attached to tubes leading to swirling vats of liquid, worked over each soldier, building them in a flurry of additive materials.

  A shiver went down Steuben’s back. The Karigole believed that life was too sacred to mimic and seeing the doughboys under construction filled him with revulsion. Despite his personal feelings, he’d take any help he could get against the Xaros cutting their way into the Crucible.

  Lafayette rolled the weapons rack into the middle of the room and locked the wheels. His eyes narrowed in concentration.

  “What?” Steuben asked.

  “Ibarra?” Lafayette cocked his head to the ceiling. “These doughboys are programmed to see Steuben and I as friends, correct?”

  “Yes, of course…” Ibarra’s voice echoed around them. “Probably. Let me double-check.”

  The glass shell of a cylinder rotated aside and the newborn doughboy within opened his eyes.

  “Ibarra?” Steuben clicked off the safety of his gauss rifle with a claw-tipped finger. The doughboys were programmed to defend humans at all costs. Steuben’s first encounter with a doughboy, whom he was trying to rescue from kidnappers, ended in violence for no other reason than Steuben was nonhuman. Having to fight a room full of doughboys was not going to help defend the Crucible.

  “You’re good. New subroutines added last week to all units,” Ibarra said. “Now, if you’re done being all paranoid, there are hull breaches in corridors three and twelve. I’ll point the way.”

  A doughboy stepped out of the construction cylinder wearing nothing but a pair of shorts, his skin glistening from the last brush of the needles.

  Steuben tossed him a rifle. The doughboy pulled back the charging handle, saw the gauss dart in the chamber, closed the bolt and hefted the weapon against his shoulder.

  “Purpose?” he asked.

  “The Xaros are here,” Steuben said. “Follow me and fight.”

  “Fight.” The doughboy nodded his head.

  ****

  Steuben ran down a corridor, his rifle swinging from side to side in tune with his stride. Doughboys struggled to keep up, their heavy footfalls echoing off the walls.

  The end of the corridor broke away from the junction and lifted up. It passed through the thick hull and opened to the void. Steuben saw drones and Dotok fighters battling over the connected thorns. The opening passed over another hull section.

  “Why can’t I feel it moving?” Steuben asked. He couldn’t wait to get off this alien place; he never understood why Lafayette liked it so much.

  The corridor opened up to a stadium-sized control node. Crates of shining omnium were stacked high on one side of a tall building, plates of aegis armor awaiting delivery on the other. Xaros clung to the side of the building, cutting into it slowly
but surely.

  “Defend the omnium reactor at all costs,” Steuben said. He aimed down the rifle’s iron sights and blew a drone off the top of the reactor housing. He ran into the reactor chamber and took cover behind slabs of aegis plates.

  Doughboys fired on the drones, advancing slowly into the chamber. Soldiers armed with nothing but pneumatic hammers charged ahead, war cries bellowing from their lips. Steuben loaded a quadrium shell into his rifle.

  Drones lifted off the reactor housing and raked their beams across the firing doughboys. They evaporated into red mist with the briefest touch of the drones’ weapons. The soldiers kept up disciplined fire, destroying several drones before those armed with rifles were reduced to a few.

  Steuben’s rifle beeped with a full charge. He swung it over the top of the armor pile and fired on a pack of drones. Drones rained down from the sky as the q-shell knocked them off-line. They fell, right to the eager group of hammer-wielding soldiers that the drones had ignored.

  Primitive soldiers armed with melee weapons were of little threat to the drones while they were airborne. Once forced to the ground, the matter was different.

  Doughboys tore into the drones, ripping them apart with an atavistic fury that Steuben had no choice but to admire. The Karigole picked up a weapon coated in the dusty remains of a soldier and tossed it to a doughboy holding a broken hammer.

  “Get rifles! Watch the skies!” Steuben pointed to a breach in the dome and shot at a drone squeezing through. The soldiers took up arms left by the fallen. Those without rifles manhandled plates of aegis armor into crude bunkers.

  Steuben tapped a mic on his throat. “Ibarra, omnium reactor is secure, for now. You either send me more ammo and soldiers or cut off the Xaros reinforcements to keep it that way.”

  “Lafayette just saved my bacon in the command center. More doughboys are coming off the line. I’ll see what I can do for you,” Ibarra said.

  Steuben took careful aim at a drone zooming across the sky and blew it in half. A heavy hand slapped him on the back, fouling his aim on the next target.

  “Good shot, ugly!” a doughboy shouted.

  “Who’re you calling ugly?” Steuben shook his head and aimed again.

  CHAPTER 25

  Rangers in gleaming black armor burst onto the Midway’s bridge. Snub-nosed gauss carbines swept across the silent bridge with precision. They looked through every tear the Xaros drones used to gain access to the ship’s command center and made a hasty exam of every sailor they came across.

  “Clear,” the team leader said.

  Admiral Garret entered the bridge a few seconds later. Drops of black blood floated in the void, staining his vac suit with each impact. A custom gauss pistol hung above the wrecked holo table. The admiral grabbed it gently, turning it over in his hands.

  “Have you found her?” he asked a Ranger.

  The soldier pointed to a vac suit caught under a command chair. Garret cradled the empty suit in both hands and wiped red dust off the nameplate just above an ugly burnt hole. Makarov.

  “Rest of the teams report no survivors, sir,” the Ranger said. “Lafayette says the jump engines are a total loss.”

  “That’s…to be expected.” Garret let the empty suit go and walked to the forward section of the bridge. The armor around the bridge was gone. He looked up and saw Earth, Luna and Ceres. The sun glinted off debris stretching from each celestial body.

  The shipyards on the moon were wrecked. Titan Station badly damaged. Both were victims of a few drones that combined and burned themselves to oblivion with one massive blast from an energy cannon.

  Eighth Fleet was gone, and with it some of his best ships and crews. Garret hit his knuckles against a dead control panel. Assuming Makarov’s fleet even had a chance to send back word of what they encountered, it would be years before the message even reached Earth.

  Even with the Crucible still largely intact and the omnium reactor safe, every last human being would know exactly what this day meant. Defeat. He’d struggled to keep the military’s and civilians’ hopes up through the despair of losing their families and homes…now this.

  “Sir, found something.” A Ranger held up a clear, void-safe case. Inside was a notebook with a tea-stained cover and Makarov’s name on it. Handwritten notes, printouts and pics jutted out from between the pages.

  Garret took the case and gave it a pat. This was something, at least. Maybe he could forge a narrative out of the admiral’s log, paint a picture of heroism and some kind of a victory from her loss and give hope to humanity.

  “Good work, son. Have the recovery teams sweep the ship for remains,” Garret said. “Escort me back to my shuttle…the planet needs to know what happened.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Torni walked through the ranks of frozen crewmembers. She’d come here several times during the years it took to reach the rogue star passing by Malal’s vault. They were little more than statues, more perfect than the wax figures she remembered from a museum she visited in Stockholm as a little girl.

  She stopped next to her old squad. Cortaro had a vice grip on Standish’s arm, Gunney’s face frozen in anger, Standish’s in amusement. She touched Standish’s face, with a hand that looked perfectly normal, and gave him a quick pat.

  “Let’s hope things go well for you,” she said.

  She’d learned to control her omnium body, adopt a form that resembled herself from before her death, even down to loose hair and the illusion of breathing.

  Torni reached out with her mind and felt a broken lump of metal in a trash bin. The metal rose into the air and floated to her waiting hand. Tendrils of light reached from her fingertips and caressed the garbage until it melded into a sphere of pulsating omnium. The sphere morphed into a silver and gold emblem the size of her palm. An eagle, a globe an anchor. The symbol of the Atlantic Union Marine Corps in precious metals.

  Transmuting matter from one form to another was child’s play for her. Malal had proven to be a capable mentor during their long isolation in deep space.

  Torni slipped the emblem into Standish’s pocket.

  +Malal. I’m ready.+

  +Activating jump engines. One minute to translation.+

  Learning to transmute matter into omnium and back again had taken time, and Malal was anything but a kind and patient teacher. Torni had repaired the ship’s engines long before the Breitenfeld got close enough to the rogue star to recharge the dark-energy stores. She’d spent the rest of the time working on the ship. Being a drone meant no need for sleep or sustenance.

  The only break she’d had from isolation were the infrequent visits from Stacey, always to quiz Malal on data obtained from his vault, never to chitchat.

  As for Malal…

  Torni went to the edge of the open flight deck, stepping around the three Iron Hearts. A deep red star burned in the distance, the rogue star that proved to be the ship’s salvation. The Breitenfeld would have been in deep space for centuries without this celestial rogue’s passing.

  “Farewell,” she said.

  A white disk opened before the ship, growing wider until it enveloped the ship. Torni felt none of the queasiness from her previous wormhole jumps. Granted, she no longer had a digestive system to agitate.

  The white abyss faded away. Earth and Luna. A smile spread across Torni’s face. They were finally home. She focused on the night side of Earth; her “eyes” were as sensitive as any spotter’s telescope on the ship. Japan and Korea were alive with light. She could see the gridlines of urban areas on Okinawa and Taiwan. Mountain ranges along Australia’s east coast were riven with light, same with much of New Zealand.

  “What the hell?”

  “The humans have been busy,” Malal said as he walked up to her. His face was as still as a mannequin’s.

  “The cities…they’re built into mountains,” she said.

  “Easier to defend. I will release the crew. They remember you in your old form. In the brig,” Malal said.

&nbs
p; “They will accept me this way and I am done being a prisoner,” she said.

  “As you like.” Malal lifted a hand and snapped his fingers.

  “—will use the quadrium shells…” Captain Valdar took a half step to the empty ammunition dolly. His face knit in confusion. “Where did it go? Ibarra?” Valdar turned back to the equally confused group of senior officers on the stage with him.

  A murmur rose through the ship’s crew. Many pointed to the open bay doors.

  Valdar saw his home world, and Torni and Malal at the edge of the flight deck. The captain pointed a finger at the two.

  “You cut me off, didn’t you?” Valdar demanded.

  “You wanted to return to Earth. Here you are. I believe your customs demand you express some gratitude.” Malal held up a hand as if he wanted Valdar to kiss it.

  Valdar jumped off the stage and went straight for Malal.

  “This is not the emotional response I anticipated,” Malal said to Torni.

  “This is his ship, Malal. He decides what happens and how it gets done. You stepped on his toes,” Torni said.

  “Another of your euphemisms,” Malal said.

  “My crew deserved to know what you were—” Valdar stopped his advance as Elias cut in front of him.

  Elias reached high over his head and swept an armored fist into Malal’s head. Malal bounced off the deck and careened into an empty lifter suit against the bulkhead. Elias jammed his arm into the wrecked suit and pulled Malal out, the ancient being’s head deformed from the blow.

  Elias slapped his hands against Malal’s chest. The pneumatic servos whined in protest as Elias tried to crush the governor inside Malal.

  “Elias! Stop! You’re going to kill him!” Torni ran across the deck.

  “This thing is a monster!” Elias thundered through his armor’s speakers. “We saw what it did to the Jinn. It will do the exact same to us once it has the chance.” His arms shook with effort.