Rebel World (The Eternal Frontier Book 4)

by Anthony J Melchiorri

  “Turn off your lights,” one of them said, turning to Tag and the others.

  Tag switched off his helmet-mounted light. The others did, too, and they were bathed in darkness, as if a black hole had swallowed every last photon around them. An Imoogi tapped Tag’s shoulder and pulled him through the huge leaves of seaweed.

  Then he saw it. A distinctly human facility jutted from the ocean floor. It had a spherical bay that seemed suited for corvette-class ships or smaller. The rest of it consisted of a huge, utilitarian cubic structure. A multitude of portholes dotted its sides, spilling yellow light that illuminated bits of silt and debris floating in the water.

  “Looks like someone’s home,” Bull said with a growl.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  The Imoogi led the way into the Lorris facility. They swam low, their bellies brushing the seafloor, careful to follow the trenches full of seaweed. Their bodies rippled like they were made of water themselves, fluid and swift. Tag did his best to shadow them, trying to keep low while minimizing the debris and sand he kicked up behind him. But there was little he could do to prevent the outflow of bubbles from his propulsion jets.

  An Imoogi glanced back at him. Its finlike ears waggled, a gesture Tag figured for disapproval. The marines weren’t much better. They tailed him in fits and spurts, fighting against the currents trying to simultaneously slam them against the ocean floor and carry them deeper, out into a void that was darker than space.

  Tag watched the facility’s lights draw closer. Maybe Hannah was down here in that cavernous place.

  A tingling sensation ran down his spine. He wondered how she, a talented scientist, had been wrapped up in manufacturing a wide-scale drug epidemic and maintaining a facility like this without substantial help.

  Glancing behind, Tag saw the marines’ faces illuminated in the sallow light. Their features looked ghastly, with dark shadows pulling on their eyes, every crease and scar accentuated by the contrast. No doubt they were running on fumes. But their eyes were as hard as the alloy hull of the Argo.

  One Imoogi darted ahead. Tag tried to watch it, but it was like trying to follow a torpedo. It was then he realized just how slowly the Imoogi had been swimming for the humans’ benefit.

  The Imoogi swam under the ship bay and disappeared. A moment later, the others turned back to Tag and his crew, beckoning them with whips of their serpentine tails. Tag kicked up the power on his propulsion jets and spiraled after them. It appeared they had abandoned stealth in favor of speed.

  They swooped under the ship bay into a moon pool. The Imoogi slipped above the water’s surface first. One stuck its face and a few arms back in, signaling to the humans that the coast was clear.

  Tag pulled himself up. Water sluiced off his suit. He gazed around the vast chamber bathed in the unforgiving glow of red battle lights. A jungle of electrical wires and crates lined the perimeter of the moon pool. And there, menacing under the dull light, waited another of Starinski Labs’ prototype crafts. White letters emblazoned on the side of this one read Forge of Blood. A smaller shuttle was docked nearby, and in the open cargo hold Tag spied an air car.

  Hannah’s air car.

  “Eyes on the craft,” Bull said.

  Sumo and Lonestar pointed their rifles at the open cargo door. Bull guarded the open corridor leading out of the bay with Gorenado. An Imoogi slithered toward Tag.

  “We have done our service,” the Imoogi said. “Now we must leave. If we are caught in a conflict with humans, it will trigger the nullification of our treaty.”

  “I understand,” Tag said. “Thank you for getting us this far.”

  “May you have the luck of calm waters,” the Imoogi said before slipping back into the moon pool. The others followed, leaving Tag, Coren, and the marines alone.

  Coren sighed. “Do we examine the ship or explore the facility first, Captain?”

  Both were tempting options. If they searched the building, they might find valuable data about the source of the laced beedle-gee and information about the mysterious backers who had built this place. And if they were lucky, they might even scrounge up evidence about the collaborators’ recruitment efforts on Orthod. But the shuttle offered a clear link between Starinski Labs and the destruction of the Dawn of Glory, with the prospect of more information in the ship’s logs to show how the company, the collaborators, and the Collectors were connected.

  “Uh, Captain,” Coren said. He seemed to be staring straight ahead through his orange visor, seeing something none of the others could. “My sensors are detecting trace amounts of gamma radiation.”

  “You think that’s residual radiation from the fission weapons smuggled through here?” Tag asked.

  “I doubt it,” Coren said. “The rad reading I’m getting suggests an active radioactive source within this compound.”

  “A leaking fusion reactor, maybe?”

  “Maybe,” Coren said.

  There was another possibility—one neither had dared to say aloud. There might be a live nuclear weapon nearby. They needed to get what they came for and then leave as quickly as possible. Nearby, next to a bench full of scrap material and engineering tools, a terminal stuck out from the wall.

  “Coren, see what you can get out of that terminal and transmit all the data to the Argo. If you don’t find anything useful, we’ll search the ship,” Tag said. “Alpha, keep the data link open and make sure you record video of all this.”

  “Consider it done,” Coren replied. He loped over to the bench and used the data probes on his suit to connect with the computer. “Installing data-sapping software now.”

  “Yes, Captain,” Alpha said over the comms. Tag wished she were there to interface directly with the Lorris terminals, but it was safer to leave Alpha and Sofia in reserve aboard the Argo.

  For a few more minutes, the only sounds they heard were the groans traveling through the thick, plated walls of the ship bay as the water shifted around it.

  “This is interesting,” Coren said, his six-fingered hands tapping away at the terminal. “I believe I’ve decrypted an inventory program on here. If I’m reading this correctly, there are fission weapons still here. The report refers to this facility as Site A. All the weapons except one are stored here. The program references a Site B, which appears to be designated as a test facility.”

  “Would the fission weapons be the source of the radiation you detected?” Tag asked.

  “Maybe,” Coren said. “But at least one of the stored weapons would have to be primed.”

  “Damn,” Tag said. His nerves started to spark with electricity. “What about the Site B weapon?”

  “That one is primed,” Coren said.

  “Gods. Where is this Site B?” Tag looked around the ship bay as if an answer would appear.

  “Three thousand klicks from here, on a land mass that... this is odd,” Coren said. “It’s a testing site for fission weapons.”

  “Strange. At least it doesn’t seem like that weapon is an immediate threat,” Tag said. “Find anything on the Collectors or Starinski?”

  “Starinski is mentioned in several documents, but there’s a great deal more that I need to decrypt.”

  Tag looked back at the open passageway. At any moment, Hannah might show up—with or without heavily armed guards. “We don’t have time to do that here. As soon as you finish installing the sapping software, we’re going to search the stealth ship.”

  “Installation complete,” said Coren.

  “Good,” Tag said. “Let’s move.”

  Sumo and Lonestar cleared the way toward the ship. Finally, they would see the inside of a Starinski stealth craft. But before they reached the Forge, the clatter of footsteps echoed down the hall. Urgent voices bounced off the walls, and Tag dove behind a nearby crate. Sumo and Lonestar found firing positions, and Coren hid under a bank of holoscreens.

  Out of the passage came a group of men and women, all brandishing weapons. They looked like SRE marines with their black pow
er armor and standard-issue pulse rifles, but they had no insignia to mark their allegiance. A dozen technicians followed, pushing huge cylindrical objects on carts.

  Tag’s stomach dropped. Those were stasis chambers—and they were occupied. Tag had a sinking feeling that these were the missing marines. Then he spotted the Principality’s doctors, Beth and Samuel Foster, floating in a pair of chambers with their eyes half-closed, straddling the line between sleep and consciousness.

  Whoever had been engineering the stimmadd here had been using its addictive properties to bend Imoogi to their will. Tag pictured the desperate Imoogi with their red lips and teeth, stained by the beedle-gee. It took no leap of imagination to guess what their reward had been for bringing humans here.

  Another figure emerged from the passageway, and although the red lights overhead masked her features, he had no problem recognizing her. He had wanted to believe that maybe, just maybe, Hannah was innocent. But she strode to the head of the group with the same confident gait as when she had first approached him at the colony’s makeshift bar. There was no hesitation in her step. No regret on her face. Then, as if to confirm his suspicions, she pointed to the Forge.

  “I don’t want another chamber damaged,” she said to one of the barrel-chested grunts. “Secure these ones well. It’s hard enough getting specimens without you all ruining them.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the grunt replied as he helped load one of the stasis chambers onto the ship. Hannah watched from the edge of the cargo hold.

  “Boss says you gotta clean this mess up,” a man said from the open hatch of the Forge.

  Hannah rolled her eyes. “I told him I would.”

  “He wants to know how.”

  “In fifteen minutes, this place will no longer exist,” Hannah said. “Is that good enough?”

  “No,” the man said. His face contorted as if he had tasted something rotten. “He wants the colonists gone. The marines, too.”

  “He wants us to scare them off the planet?”

  “No, he wants them dead.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  “Dead?” Hannah asked, spreading her hands wide. “That’s not what we agreed to, Porter.”

  Tag’s stomach roiled as if he’d eaten something rotten. Hannah was working for the enemy. And to make matters worse, the mention of Porter’s name burned through Tag like a blast of pulsefire through the Argo after the energy shields had fallen.

  A huge man with roping muscles and head shaved clean looked at his wrist terminal. Private Manuel Porter. One of Cho’s missing marines. The marine grimaced as he spoke, as if it pained him to say the words he said next. “Boss says you do it or he’ll blow the whole planet. This wouldn’t be the first.”

  Tag’s pulse accelerated. Images of fission bombs exploding over the Principality flashed through his mind.

  Hannah looked at the ground for a moment. “Shit.”

  Porter gave a forced smile. “You got to think of the good of humanity. Isn’t that what you told me? Gotta make some sacrifices to secure our future.”

  “Sure,” Hannah said, “but I didn’t think... screw it. Fine. He wants them gone, I’ll get them gone. No bombs, though. That’d be too damn obvious if the SRE starts getting curious.”

  “You got a better plan?”

  “I’ve got something. Get the ship ready for launch.”

  “You got it,” Porter said. He disappeared into the ship. Hannah returned to the corridor alone.

  Tag looked at Coren, then Sumo and Lonestar. If they moved out of their hiding spots, they would be in full view of anyone who happened to look out of the Forge’s cargo hold. Maybe they could take the ship by force. He had faith in his marines—all four of them. He didn’t relish going head-to-head with an enemy that outnumbered them five-to-one. At the same time, he couldn’t abandon the people that had been abducted. Nor could he let the stealth ship slip away with information that might help the SRE stop the collaborators.

  They needed help.

  “Gods be damned,” Tag muttered to himself. Bull looked over at him, and Tag waved him off, gesturing for him to hold tight. “Alpha, Sofia, we’re going to need more marines. Go to Cho now and show him the video of what we found here. Tell him if he wants his missing marines, he needs to help us. Warn him there might be some kind of attack on Orthod, too. Oh, and he needs to make sure the intraplanetary system is ready for the Forge or whatever else they throw at the colony.”

  Tag might not have a chance to search the Forge of Blood now, but there was still another way of getting the data he wanted. Keeping one eye on the ship, he inched around the edge of the bay until he made it to the corridor.

  “Bull, on me,” Tag whispered over the comms. “The rest of you, stay put. Priority number one is making sure we don’t get caught. Do not let these people see you. I don’t want a shootout until we’ve got reinforcements.”

  Tag clung to the shadows as he and Bull padded down the corridor. Other, smaller corridors branched off throughout the facility. Uncertainty tugged at him as he moved. Maybe he should have waited for the marines with the rest of his crew. But he might not get another chance to confront Hannah. She could hold key information to this operation.

  But no matter how he legitimized it, he knew the real reason he wanted to face her. He wanted to hear it from her directly—why she had chosen to betray humanity. Why she was working with the collaborators.

  The sound of her voice trickled through the hall. Up ahead, a triangle of yellow light leaked through a cracked door. Through the crack, Tag saw a bank of holoscreens. A dark shape was silhouetted against them.

  “Yes,” Hannah was saying. “All the beedle-gee you want if you get rid of the colonists.” Silence for a moment. “However you have to do it.”

  There was a longer pause, and then an exhale. Even though she was nothing but a shadow from Tag’s vantage point, he could see her shoulders sag, her chin tilt to her chest. Her fingers brushed through her hair as she shook her head slowly.

  “Let’s go,” Tag said, pulling out his pulse pistol. He counted down on his fingers.

  Three. Two. One.

  Bull kicked through the door. Tag leveled his pulse pistol at where he expected Hannah to be. Before he could do more than blink in surprise, Bull lit up in a crackling storm of green electricity as the personal energy shield on his suit overcharged. He fell limp, and his head cracked against the floor.

  “Drop the weapon, Tag,” Hannah said.

  Tag let his pulse pistol fall from his fingers. He looked at Bull through the corner of his eye. It was impossible to tell how badly the marine was hurt. He wanted to reach for his wrist terminal; a quick tap would reveal the data streaming from Bull’s suit’s biosensors.

  “He’s still alive,” Hannah said as if she was reading his mind. “At least he should be. I wasn’t expecting the energy shield.”

  “Bull might be alive, but you have blood on your hands, Hannah. The Imoogi, the colonists, the marines. Why are you doing this?”

  She flicked a selector on the side of her weapon. “We have to.”

  “It’s not too late. You’re smarter than this. Better than this. Call off whatever you’re planning.”

  Hannah walked toward him, keeping just enough distance that he couldn’t try to disarm her. “You’re no diplomat. What are you, Mil Intel?”

  Tag laughed. “No, not even close. I’m a goddamn scientist, like you.”

  “I’m so much more than that now.”

  Tag could see a slight tremor as she held the pistol toward him. It was a model he didn’t recognize. He met her eyes and recognized the emotions he saw there. She had likely never aimed a weapon at another human before shooting Bull. Tag recalled the feelings of adrenaline and horror when he’d first killed someone—albeit a Drone-Mech—and the nightmares that had followed.

  “Enviro-Cosmos and Lorris are just shells, aren’t they?” Tag said. “You’re working for Starinski. But do you know who they are working for?”

/>   Hannah’s stoic expression cracked for a moment. Tag pressed on.

  “They call themselves post-humans, but we’ve been calling them the Collectors,” Tag said. His eyes fell on the dragon tattoo pulsing along her wrist. “Do you know what they’ve done to other races? Do you know the type of genocide and enslavement they practice?”

  The cold mask returned as she regarded him. “Some sacrifices must be made to survive. Those who don’t embrace the future are destined to be forgotten.”

  “You lied to me, Hannah. That night... under the stars, everything you told me about humanity embracing the future and making our own fate. Instead, you’re going to let our fate be decided for us.”

  “That’s not true. The SRE is holding humanity back. We have to succeed. We have to survive. And to do that, we have to be uncomfortable. We have to challenge ourselves and push ourselves forward.”

  “Uncomfortable? That’s what you call it?” Tag’s chest heaved, tendrils of fire twisting in his gut. “You saw Coren? The Collectors enslaved his people using nanites. That’s not embracing our future—that’s resurrecting the worst of our history.”

  “No, Tag.” Hannah shook her head. “I’ve met post-humans. They’ve shown me what humanity could be. How we could control our own evolution rather than wait for nature and passing millenniums to do it for us. We can be the masters of our destiny.” She sighed. “Tag, don’t you get it? You met a post-human. Did it show you the Luminals?”

  “Lumi—?” Then Tag understood. “You mean those strange beings that appeared on the UNS Hope. The ones they say massacred most of the crew and then made others go crazy?”

  “Yes,” Hannah said, her eyes gleaming. “You claim to be a scientist, so how do you explain that?”

  Tag’s silence was answer enough.

  “You can’t. We can’t. Even the post-human can’t. But they’re trying. When the Luminals decide they’ve had enough of humanity, the SRE won’t stop them. Only the post-humans will save us.”

  “There has to be a better way. The Collectors are going to use the people you’ve abducted as lab rats. You’re hurting people, not saving them.”