Iron Dragoons (Terran Armor Corps Book 1)
Page 24
Given the rare opportunity to make its own decision, the probe opted to dither. In the week it took to pass into Jupiter’s orbit, the probe took in more data. It scoured the Internet for factors to add to the assessment, but the assessment remained the same: unlikely, but possible. By the time it shot past Mars, the probe still hadn’t made a decision.
As the time to adjust course for Earth or continue into the sun approached, the probe conducted a final scan of cloud storage servers for any new information…and found something interesting.
While the new information made only a negligible impact on the assessment, the probe adjusted course to Earth. It hadn’t traveled all this way for nothing.
In the desert south of Phoenix, Arizona, it landed with no more fanfare than a slight thump and a few startled cows. Then it broke into the local cell network and made a call.
****
Marc Ibarra awoke to his phone ringing at max volume, playing a pop ditty that he hated with vehemence. He rolled off the mattress that lay on the floor and crawled on his hands and knees to where his cell was recharging. His roommate, who paid the majority of their rent and got to sleep on an actual bed, grumbled and let off a slew of slurred insults.
Marc reached his cell and slapped at it until the offending music ended. He blinked sleep from his eyes and tried to focus on the caller’s name on the screen. The only people who’d call at this ungodly hour were his family in Basque country…or maybe Jessica in his applied robotics course wanted a late-night study break.
The name on the screen was “ANSWER ME”.
He closed an eye and reread the name. It was way too early—or too late, depending on one’s point of view—for this nonsense. He turned the ringer off and went back to bed. Sleep was about to claim him when the phone rang again, just as loudly as last time but now with a disco anthem.
“Seriously?” his roommate slurred.
Marc declined the call and powered the phone off. He flopped back on his bed and curled into his blanket. To hell with my first class, he thought. Arizona State University had a lax attendance policy, one which he’d abuse for nights like this.
The cell erupted with big-band music. Marc took his head out from beneath the covers and looked at his phone like it was a thing possessed. The phone vibrated so hard that it practically danced a jig on the floor and the screen flashed “ANSWER ME” over and over again as music blared.
“Dude?” said his roommate, now sitting up in his bed.
Marc swiped the phone off the charging cord and the music stopped. The caller’s name undulated with a rainbow of colors and an arrow appeared on the screen pointing to the button he had to press to answer the call. When did I get this app? he thought.
Marc sighed and left the bedroom, meandering into the hallway bathroom with the grace of a zombie. The battered mattress he slept on played hell with his back and left him stiff every morning. Dropping his boxers, he took a seat on the toilet and answered the call, determined to return this caller’s civility with some interesting background noise.
“What?” he murmured.
“Marc Ibarra. I need to see you.” The voice was mechanical, asexual in its monotone.
“Do you have any frigging idea what time it is? Wait, who the hell is this?”
“You must come to me immediately. We must discuss the mathematical proof you have stored in document title ‘thiscantberight.doc.’”
Marc shot to his feet. The boxers around his ankles tripped him up and he stumbled out of the bathroom and fell against the wall. His elbow punched a hole in the drywall and the cell clattered to the floor.
He scooped the phone back up and struggled to breathe as a sudden asthma attack came over him.
“How…how…?” He couldn’t finish his question until he found his inhaler in the kitchen, mere steps away in the tiny apartment. He took a deep breath from the inhaler and felt the tightness leave his lungs.
That someone knew of his proof was impossible. He’d finished it earlier that night and had encrypted it several times before loading it into a cloud file that shouldn’t have been linked to him in any way.
“How do you know about that?” he asked.
“You must come to me immediately. There is little time. Look at your screen,” the robotic voice said. His screen changed to a map program, displaying a pin in an open field just off the highway connecting Phoenix to the suburb of Maricopa.
“Come. Now.”
Marc grabbed his keys.
****
An hour later, his jeans ripped from scaling a barbed-wire fence, Marc was surrounded by desert scrub. The blue of the morning rose behind him, where his beat-up Honda waited on the side of the highway.
With his cell to his ear, Marc stopped and looked around before deciding how to continue. Spiked ocotillo plants looked a lot like benign mesquite trees in the darkness. A Native American casino in the distance served as his North Star, helping him keep his bearings.
“You’re not out here, are you? I’m being punked, aren’t I?” he asked the mysterious caller.
“You are nine point two six meters to my east south east. Punk: decayed wood, used as tinder. Are you on fire?” the caller said.
Marc rolled his eyes. This wasn’t the first time the caller had used the nonstandard meanings of words during what passed as conversation between the two. Marc had tried to get the caller to explain how he knew about his theorem and why they had to meet in the middle of the desert. The caller had refused to say anything. He would only reiterate that Marc had to come quickly to see him, chiding him every time Marc deviated from the provided driving directions.
“If you’re so close, why can’t I see you?” he asked. He took a few steps in what he thought was a northwesterly direction and squished into a cow patty.
“Continue,” the caller said.
Marc shook his foot loose and tried to kick the cow leavings from his sneakers.
“You know what this is? This is exactly what’s all over my shoes, you monotone bastard. Forget it!” Marc shoved his phone into his back pocket and limped back toward his car, his right foot squishing with each step.
The route back to his car was comparatively easy; he just had to walk toward his headlights. That was the plan, anyway, until the lights on his car shut off.
“Marc, this is important.” The muffled words came from his pocketed cell.
“How are you doing this?” Marc shouted into the night.
“Turn around, please.”
Marc did as asked and a silver light like the snap of a reflection from a fish twisting just beneath the water flared on the ground ahead of him. No one was there a moment ago and Marc hadn’t heard any movement.
“I swear if I get my kidneys cut out I will be so pissed about this,” Marc said as he made his way to where he saw the light. He stood for a moment, then flopped his arms against his sides. “I’m here.”
“You’re standing on me.” The voice came from beneath Marc’s feet.
Marc skipped aside like he’d just heard a rattlesnake’s warning.
“Holy—did someone bury you? Why didn’t you tell me to bring a shovel?” Marc went to his knees and poked at the ground, which felt solid. “How deep are you? Do you have enough air?” Marc asked, using both hands to shove earth aside.
“Two inches ahead and three down.”
Marc’s face contorted in confusion as he kept digging. He moved a mound of gray dirt and pebbles aside and a silver light washed over his face.
A silver needle no more than three inches long rested in the dirt. Tiny filaments of lambent energy crept from the needle and undulated through the air like a snake in the ocean. Marc was frozen in place, his jaw slack as the filaments extended away from the needle, shades of white swimming in and around it.
“We don’t have much time.” The words came from the needle in the same mechanical voice as his mysterious caller. A point of light appeared in the air above the needle, sparked, and then lit into a flame no b
igger than he’d seen on a match head. The white flame, which gave off no heat, rose and grew in size. A flame the size of Marc’s head came to a stop a few feet in the air.
Marc, transfixed by the flame until now, got to his feet. The filaments from the needle had extended past him and formed a perimeter ten yards in diameter. Tendrils of energy writhed against each other and against an invisible boundary. His heart pounded in his ears and his innate fight-or-flight instinct made a decision.
“This is a different experience for you. Let me—”
Marc turned and ran away. He got to where the tendrils had stopped and ran into what felt like a wall of water. Air thickened around him as he tried to push through and find purchase on the ground ahead. It felt like he was moving through clay.
“Marc, you’re being ridiculous.” The air hardened and spat him back toward the flame. Marc tripped over his own feet and tumbled to the ground. He snapped back to his feet and looked for a way, anyway, to put some distance between him and the flame.
The flame, white on silver or silver on white—Marc couldn’t tell as it morphed in the air—floated toward him slowly.
Marc made the sign of the cross with two fingers and looked away. He heard a sigh.
“Look at me.” The flame, again.
Marc opened an eye. The flame was a few inches from his hands but he still felt no heat.
“I’m not here to hurt you. I’m here to help you. Understand?” The flame bobbed in the air gently until Marc nodded. “I am an emissary from an alien intelligence sent to save your species from extinction and I need your help to do it.”
Marc pointed a finger at the flame and tried to touch it. His fingertip passed into the flame’s surface without sensation.
“I thought unsolicited physical contact was against your species’ norms,” said the flame, the tendrils rustling with the words.
Marc snapped his hand back.
“Did you say something about…extinction?” The flame bobbed in the air. “How? Why?”
“An armada is coming.” The flame morphed into an oblong shape with a half dozen tendrils sticking from it, like a misshapen spider. “They are the Xaros and they will annihilate your species with ease. Unless you and I work together, your extinction is assured,” the flame said, floating closer to Marc, who stood dumbfounded. The flame came so close that he could see his reflection on it. Deep blue motes of light sprang from the flame and evaporated in the air.
“Why me? What am I supposed to do about an alien armada? I’m a B-minus grad student with a mountain of student loans, not some…some world leader!”
The probe returned to flames and a hologram of a white paper popped into the air next to it. Pages flipped open from the book, the mathematical proof he’d finished the night before.
“We expected that your species would have progressed to the edge of your solar system by now. To see such potential squandered on wars and Internet cat videos was disheartening, but this is well beyond what you should be capable of. The advancements you discovered in material science and energy storage are a springboard to technological advancement that will give you a 27 percent chance of survival, provided everything goes as planned. We can start here.” The proof stopped with the picture of a lattice of carbon atoms. The last page had the words “No way!!!!” scrawled next to the diagram.
“I don’t understand,” Marc said.
“You will, but we need to get started right away.”
“How much time do we have?”
“Sixty years.”
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Albion Lost
For centuries, the Daegon waited. They plotted. And now they are ready to strike.
The core worlds of settled space enjoy a tenuous peace, unaware and ill prepared for the threat building beyond the furthest reaches of humanity. The star kingdom of Albion stands as a shining light of justice and mercy in a harsh galaxy, and they will be the first to suffer the Daegon's fury.
Defying his low born status, and despite his self-doubt, Commodore Thomas Gage has risen through the ranks by sheer grit and determination, defending Albion from brutal pirate clans.
And when the onslaught comes, Gage and his fleet may be Albion's last hope for freedom.
A new military science-fiction series for fans of Honor Harrington, Earth Alone and Old Man’s War from the author of the best-selling Ember War Saga.
Chapter 1
A tremor passed through the deck plates and into Captain Jimenez’s chair as the ship came out of slip space. The air vents feeding the bridge blew a gust of hot air over Jimenez and his bridge crew, all of whom opened their shirts and began cursing the chief engineer who’d promised the air conditioners were fixed.
Glancing at a screen attached to his chair, Jimenez saw green and amber conditions across the board. None of the systems on the Cabo had failed during the translation from faster-than-light travel, which was a significant improvement from the last engineer’s performance.
Maybe he wouldn’t space the engineer just yet.
As the ice world of Sevastopol shined like a full moon through the bridge’s windows, his metal left hand twitched at the memory of working the mines as a child. Jimenez brought his oversized, spiked cybernetic hand to his collar and popped the top button with a flick of thorn-tipped nails. That he’d lost the original to frostbite on that godforsaken planet was a secret. He preferred his crew—and anyone else who ever heard of Iron Hand Jimenez—to come up with their own story as to how it happened; the imagination did wonders to build fear.
As a pirate, Jimenez preferred to work smarter and not harder; it was much better for the bottom line and life expectancy. Hailing a targeted ship and looking the part of a pirate willing to carry out a promise space every last man, woman, and child on a civilian transport if his commands weren’t followed made his job easier.
“Get Medived on the line,” Jimenez said. “That old bastard owes me money. I’ll have his hide and his mine if he doesn’t explain all the slip traffic coming through here over the last few days.”
“Sure thing, boss,” said the sailor at a workstation to his right. Tarka sniffed hard and leaned closer to the fuzzy holo screens in front of her. “Would if I could, but Medived’s spot isn’t broadcasting on the net.”
“Then raise Orlaf.” Jimenez shifted in his seat as sweat ran down his back.
“Nobody’s online,” she said. “No ore tenders, no nothing.” The rest of the bridge crew craned their necks toward Tarka’s screens.
Jimenez curled his metal fingers into a fist and let it fall onto his chair with a clang, snapping the crew back to their duties. He unbuckled from his chair and leaned next to Tarka.
“Bull,” Jimenez said quietly. “The slip lines have been humming for days with ships coming in and out of Sevastopol space. No one’s got the balls to lay a finger on Orlaf’s claim; he’s with the Wyverns. Last time I saw movement like this was when some Cathay admiral decided he wanted his own empire in wild space. This place should be full of refugee ships carrying all their worldly possessions and marketable bodies.”
“Radar’s clean except for some debris in a decaying orbit over that snowball and comm channels are dead, sir.” Tarka tapped a control panel, brought up a feed from the forward cannons, and zoomed onto the planet’s surface. Jimenez reached over her shoulder and tapped in coordinates.
The camera shifted and settled on an open wound on the planet’s surface. The strip mine was almost a mile wide, surrounded by refineries and ramshackle buildings. Blown snow filled the streets and covered the roofs. Jimenez shifted the view to Olaf’s headquarters, which lay in a smoldering heap. The metal spires that once lorded over the city were blasted apart.
“Conn…pull a route from the grav buoy back to Sicani. Get us the hell out of here,” Jimenez said as he went back to his seat, walking too fast for anyone to think nothing was amiss.
“Got a radar hit,” Tarka said, “but this can’t be right. Must be
some kind of jamming. Nothing’s this big.” A track appeared on her holo screens coming around the planet’s dark side. Three more came after that, then a flood of unidentified ships, each larger than any warship in wild space.
“Conn?” Jimenez strapped himself in and slapped his metal palm against the armrest.
“Something’s coming through slip space right on top of us,” the conn officer said. “I can’t form a sheath to—”
The star field above the Cabo vanished, replaced by the circular underside of a massive spacecraft.
Jimenez stared at the behemoth, his jaw slack. His crew panicked, screaming orders at each other as their captain remained frozen in shock.
Six energy beams burst from the massive ship and ripped the Cabo apart within seconds.
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Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
FROM THE AUTHOR
Iron Hearts
The Ember War
Albion Lost