Iron & Blood: Book Two of The Expansion Wars Trilogy

by Joshua Dalzelle

  “My … my side, sir.” Barton squinted and fought against the mind-fogging effects of the drugs he’d popped. He was now ashamed of his own weakness, sacrificing his edge in order to minimize his physical discomfort, and he didn’t want the old man to see him like that.

  “Looks nasty,” Rucker said, probing gently around the scorched area of his uniform top before turning his head and bellowing, “Corpsman!”

  “Sir!” a Fleet corpsman in Marine fatigues ran up, sliding his kit off his back as he saw Barton.

  “Sergeant Barton was hit with one of those damned plasma rifles, or whatever the hell they shoot.” Rucker stood up. “Patch him up enough so that he’s stable to move. Word’s come down that if Beck can secure his airfield and advance enough to relieve us we’re going to try and fuel a few shuttles up and push for orbit. Captain Wolfe has agreed to try and make it back around to extract us.”

  “Yes, sir!” the corpsman and Barton said simultaneously. The corpsman then looked at Barton almost apologetically as he pulled a canister out of his kit fitted with what looked like a stainless steel straw.

  “This is really, really going to hurt, Sergeant,” he said before plunging the straw right into the wound and pressing the top of the canister. There was a gurgling hiss of something filling the wound cavity and then a white-hot, searing pain lanced up Barton’s side. He swung and tried to punch the corpsman in the face but the Fleet puke just batted aside the fist with a negligent swat.

  “That’s the normal reaction,” The corpsman nodded. “This is going to take a few minutes to set, but it’ll keep your blood and guts in place while you’re moved. Once it quits hurting, you can go ahead and move around.”

  “Thanks, Doc,” Barton said, lying back and breathing shallowly even as the pain began to fade.

  “Wow … this is bad.” Pike leaned back in his seat, reading the synopsis his ship’s advance computer had pulled out of the ether and compiled for him and his passenger.

  The Broadhead II had popped into real-space just inside the heliopause and had been sitting silent, listening, for nearly thirty-two hours. They’d immediately detected the presence of a Link broadcast and Pike had wasted no time ordering his computer to break into the Aludra Star’s Link archive and pull out the events that had happened since the assault carrier transitioned in, or at least the highlights.

  Even without it being spelled out he and Amiri were able to tell that Ed Rawls’s cowardice had almost cost the mission. If Celesta Wright hadn’t arrived unannounced and pushed him in the right direction he might still be up near the system perimeter. Pike felt a pang of guilt at his uncharitable thoughts as he read further and saw that the 508th had lost two ships and the Relentless had actually executed a rather brilliant bit of strategy against an unconventional enemy and prevented their own demise.

  The computer was savvy enough that it had provided a separate synopsis for Amiri Essa that focused on all the communications from the Marines on the ground as well as the eventual deployment of the drop shuttles to relieve the beleaguered force. The two men read in silence for the better part of an hour before Pike felt he knew enough to come up with some sort of plan of action.

  “The com platform is gone,” Essa said. “I don’t know why we thought that would’ve survived the assault.”

  “The ships here should still have been able to get word back to New Sierra,” Pike shook his head, picking up on what his associate was saying. “This is an established system; normal com drones wouldn’t have even passed through the platform on the way out. Hell, the Icarus is carrying point-to-point drones.”

  “But in this system com drones and starships use the same jump point on the way back to the DeLonges and Columbiana Systems,” Essa argued. “The Darshik picket ships might have intercepted any Wolfe or Rawls launched.”

  “Maybe.” Pike was clearly skeptical something as small as a com drone moving at transition velocity would have been picked off by the Darshik cruisers they’d seen. “So now the question is what do we do? Technically I’ve completed my mission and the smart thing to do would be to haul ass back for New Sierra and try to get Admiral Pitt to commit more forces since it seems thanks to Wolfe and Wright this system might actually be tenuously back in Terran hands, but they can’t hold it alone.”

  “That would be the smart thing to do,” Essa said noncommittally, not looking over at Pike.

  “Fine, you stubborn pain in the ass,” Pike snarled. “We’ll head down and put eyes on the planet while we’re here.”

  “I didn’t say anything!” Essa protested as the throb of the Broadhead’s RDS coming up gave them both a moment of vertigo.

  “I can feel the waves of condemnation radiating off you at the thought we’d just do a sneak and peek,” Pike said. “That’s why I can’t stomach operators. No sense of perspective. You’re all blunt instruments that get sent into situations that require a surgeon.”

  “Present company excluded, of course?” Essa frowned.

  “I said it how I meant it,” Pike said. Essa gave him a rude hand gesture from his homeland as Pike programmed an aggressive descent into the system. “I guess we’ll see who has the better tech; whoever built that one-off ship for the Darshik or Tsuyo’s ship designers.”

  “These images show that the machine is still dormant,” Lieutenant Maan said, indicating the images she’d put up on the main display. The CIC officer had picked out a few images in different parts of the spectrum to highlight the points of her quick brief as the Star moved up into high orbit over Juwel.

  “We can clearly see the inlets and the exhaust vents for the processor and there isn’t any moving air around these areas. Thermal graphs show the exterior of the machine is only slightly warmer than the surrounding water it sits in; no hot spots or increase in temperature that would indicate a power source or that it’s even preparing to start up.”

  “What about this line here?” Commander Simmons indicated a black line that stretched from the machine that was sitting fifteen kilometers offshore and ran up onto land near a flat spot of desert beach. “What’s that?”

  “Inconclusive,” Maan said.

  “It’s a power cable,” Lieutenant Commander Sharpe said confidently. The chief engineer had come up for the technical brief at the behest of the captain. “That machine isn’t so big that they’d have a reactor buried down in it somewhere, at least not one of sufficient size to power something like an atmospheric processor. We’ve assumed the thing was in the water to hide it, but that never really made any sense. It’s most likely immersed to provide cooling and then the power source will be located ashore where it’s easier to manage and defend.”

  “So what would you use to power something that big?” Jackson asked. “There’s nothing in the local area they could easily commandeer even if the power was compatible.”

  “Easy.” Sharpe shrugged, appearing bizarrely disinterested. “I’d land a starship right on that flat spot the cable comes up to and run it off the powerplant.”

  “What?!” Simmons scoffed, rolling his eyes.

  “That’s actually not that outlandish,” Jackson held up a hand. “We can land our ships in the event of an emergency and the Darshik seem to be at least on par with our Gen III starships … but we can’t get them back into orbit. Once they’re on the ground that’s it. We can control the decent but they’ll never fly again afterwards.”

  “So?” Sharpe asked. “You’re invading a planet with the intent of transforming the atmosphere to the point that you can live on the surface and all indigenous life dies off. A single cruiser to act as the powerplant and a base of operations for the terraforming effort seems reasonable.”

  “Word has come in from the surface, Captain!” the relief com officer called across the bridge. “The shuttles are almost fueled and the wounded have all been loaded up. It will be four shuttles in total coming back up. Colonel Rucker and twelve hundred or so of his Marines are staying behind to augment Colonel Beck’s force.”

&n
bsp; Jackson thought about ordering Rucker back up so that he could go back and brief CENTCOM in person but relented. He’d earned the right to see the mission through to the end and he assumed he’d send some officer up that would be prepared to pass on the same information.

  “Very well,” he said. “Inform the Icarus that we won’t be here much longer.”

  “So what do we do about this … thing?” Simmons asked, gesturing to the display. “I still completely agree with the captain that destroying it from orbit is too risky given our lack of knowledge about what’s in it. Since they haven’t been able to power it up yet do we just leave it for the ground forces to handle?”

  “The problem is that we don’t know if any of the cruisers left lurking about in this system will do the job or if it takes a specialized ship,” Sharpe said. “Keep in mind that what I said was just an educated guess. There could be a heavy hauler bringing in a powerplant even now from Darshik space or I could be completely off the mark and there’s some sort of compact powerplant built into the thing or we could all be wrong and it’s not an atmospheric processor at all. Honestly, unless they’re playing a fifteen-year plan I don’t see that single machine being able to do the job quickly enough to keep us from moving in everything we’ve got and destroying it.”

  “Speculation for another time and likely different people,” Jackson said. “Let’s get ready to grab our wounded Marines and get the hell out of here.”

  “Heading back to Engineering now, sir,” Sharpe said, walking off the bridge.

  “Icarus is breaking orbit, Captain,” the com officer said. “Captain Wright wants to get out away from the planet where she can better maneuver in case the enemy stealth ship appears.”

  “Understood,” Jackson said, still looking at the images of the alien machine on the screen. Sharpe had brought up a point that had been bothering him since they discovered it sitting in the ocean: as impressive as it was, it wasn’t enough to modify an entire planet within a timeframe that was useful for the Darshik. So what was the point of it?

  The four drop shuttles were able to safely launch from the airfield they’d landed at and made orbit without incident. Jackson opted for a slower, standard approach for rendezvous since there wasn’t anybody actively shooting at them at that particular moment. No point putting everyone at risk doing a full combat extraction when Celesta Wright had effectively cleared the skies. He knew that the Specter was still out there, but its commander had watched the Icarus tear through four Darshik with ease and hadn’t been able to destroy her in their first engagement. Jackson felt confident that the Starwolf-class destroyer’s impressive speed and firepower would keep the Specter at bay long enough for him to collect his wounded and be on their way.

  He assumed that the Marines could probably find treatment somewhere along the string of settlements surrounding Neuberlin, but he understood the tradition of the service and their desire to extract their own people to care for them. He also wanted to take back as much firsthand knowledge of fighting the Darshik on the ground as he could as he doubted this would be the last planet they tried to establish a beachhead on.

  “Lead pilot has made contact; we’re ready to being recovery operations, Captain,” Ensign Dole said, stifling a yawn with his hand.

  “Very well.” Jackson sat down. “Configure the Star to recover spacecraft. Inform Flight OPS they’re green to capture.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Jackson took one last look at the images of the alien machine before they were cleared away and views from the recovery operations were put up in their place. There was something nagging at the back of his mind about why the Darshik would put it there.

  26

  Alarms began chirping softly from the console, forcing Pike to incline his seat back up and see what was happening. It wasn’t an actual alert so he wasn’t worried that they were about to be fired upon or even that the sensors had detected anything in their vicinity.

  “What’ve we got?” he yawned. He frowned as looked at the data his passive sensors were feeding him. “Hey! NOVA! Get your ass up here!”

  “What?” Amiri Essa said irritably. He’d only gone back to the living spaces in the small ship to get some sleep an hour or so before.

  “We’re picking up another reactionless drive that isn’t the Icarus,” Pike said. “It’s not very close, but it’s up ahead and roughly along our current course.”

  “Our elusive Darshik ship that punched holes in your lady’s destroyer?” Essa said, drawing an irritated look from Pike.

  “It keeps popping up intermittently so it’s not under power; probably making fine corrections to stay hidden but it’s definitely drifting back towards Juwel,” he said.

  “I thought RDS ships were virtually undetectable,” Essa said.

  “Who the hell told you that?” Pike laughed. “Starships are made of metal still. Radar will pick them up unless they’re stealthy like our friend here, but even a ship like that will show up using a magnetic anomaly detector depending on how close it is to you and how close you both are to a stellar body like a planet.”

  “So how are you seeing it as none of those conditions are currently true?” Essa said.

  Pike hesitated before going on. “This is highly sensitive,” he said. “The fact you’re even on the flightdeck of this ship during combat operations is probably a pretty serious violation of half a dozen regs, but I operate outside normal channels so I’m taking a chance you’re not going to screw me over and blab everything you see. You really want to know or just take it on faith that it works?”

  “May as well tell me.”

  “This ship has the ability to detect minute fluctuations within the distortion fields of its own gravimetric drive,” Pike said. “It’s basically like an accelerometer but accurate to a degree unheard of in even the most sensitive electronic devices. I don’t know how to explain it much further than that because, frankly, I don’t understand the science behind it. I’m a spy, not an engineer. To keep this on point all I’ll say is that I can easily track anything which moves by distorting space-time like an RDS regardless of how well they want to stay hidden.”

  “I can see why that’s classified,” Essa said.

  “Exactly,” Pike said. “The ESA is only now experimenting with gravimetric propulsion. We’d rather not let on that we have a way to detect them even more accurately than thermal detectors are able to pick up plasma thrust engines.”

  “You’re not going to kill me now that you’ve divulged such a sensitive secret, are you?” Essa seemed more curious than concerned. Both he and the CIS agent operated in a world where people, even allies, were killed for less.

  “Probably not,” Pike said as he continued to work the controls on the large, curved glass console. “But I may report that you were made privy to it and it will limit your assignments to places where you can’t be captured by anyone who would want that knowledge.”

  “I’d rather you just kill me,” Essa said sourly. “So what are we going to do?”

  “We’re going to hope the Darshik don’t have the same capability and try to get up close enough to get some intel on this bastard, and then we’ll let the Icarus know where it’s at,” Pike said. “I assume it can also perform intra-system hops like its ugly cousins so I don’t want to tip our hand too early.”

  “But what if it just decides to hop and we’re still trailing it?” Essa said. “It’ll arrive before our transmission does.”

  “Good point,” Pike conceded. “We’ve already been transmitting limited data on the Link without drawing any interest. Let’s use that and then start to move in.”

  “Sir, we have a new node that’s popped up on the Link,” Accari said. “No ship registry, but it’s giving all the correct codes to access the stream and—ah, these are high level CIS codes. Stand by … I’ll have to have the com section verify these.”

  “Verified,” Ellison called out. “CIS access codes, level five, all properly authenticated.”


  “That narrows it down to either the director himself or a full-blown Agent,” Barrett said. “Coms, call the captain to the bridge if you please. I think we can guess who the new arrival is.”

  It took a full five minutes for Celesta to come onto the bridge. She’d been sound asleep when Ellison had called her, allowing herself a few hours off while the Aludra Star wrapped up recovery operations and prepared to break orbit and head for home. She trusted Barrett even if the ship came under attack, so she left him on the bridge as the Icarus protected Captain Wolfe’s ship while it was so vulnerable.

  “Report!” She failed in her effort to contain her irritation.

  “New node on the Link, ma’am,” Accari spoke up. “Given the codes used to access the telemetry stream we’re assuming it’s Agent Pike or some other high-level CIS operative.”

  “Let’s not assume identity based on non-specific codes,” she warned. “CIS could have had a Prowler out there this entire time that’s just decided to make its presence known. Is it providing information?”

  “Not continuous updates,” Accari shook his head. “Just a single burst with a packet that I’m not authorized to open.”

  “Send it to my terminal,” Celesta said and crossed the bridge to her chair. She quickly logged in, found the encrypted packet, and used her command level authorization to access it. She read through it quickly, her eyes widening just a bit as she did.

  “OPS, put a confirmation of transmission to the unknown node up on the Link,” she said. “That was a CIS asset in the system and they’ve spotted our Specter. The ship is sitting out beyond the orbit of the fifth planet and there’s a risk that it may be prepping to jump in close and take us by surprise.”

  “What do you want to do, ma’am?” Barrett asked.

  “I’d say with the element of surprise gone we sit tight and be ready to fire on anything that approaches us or the Aludra Star,” she said. “Coms! Tell the Relentless to start heading for the jump point and that we’ll escort the assault carrier away from the planet once they’re done.”