The Last Champion: Book 4 of The Last War Series

by Nick Webb

  The attendant looked at the order with a skeptical eye. “You okay, ma’am?” he asked, regarding her clothes and her weapon. “You look a little … ill.”

  “I’m fine.” Guano took a breath to steady herself. “One ticket please, one way.”

  He assessed her with a sceptical eye. “You know that not all of the galaxy is as tolerant as we are here. You won’t be able to be dressed like that where you’re going…” his eyes fell to her rifle. “Or go carrying around that piece with you, all open like.”

  Chrysalis was known for its extreme lawlessness and liberty. A little too much of both for her tastes. “I know. I’ll surrender it to customs when I get there. I just want to go home.”

  “Very well.” The man swiped her credit stick. “Thank you for flying InterStat. Next.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Moon Debris

  100m from the downed Avenir spacecraft

  Pinegar System

  Mattis clipped on his helmet and double-checked the seal. The loading ramp on the shuttle opened, and before them stretched a massive field of broken debris. Grey fragments of starship hull, wires, and the metal girders that composed a ship’s skeleton lay splashed out on the rock’s surface like the bones of some dead beast. Below the metal debris lay a field of broken stones, sharp and jagged, like the infinite teeth of a monster waiting to chew them up as soon as they stepped off.

  “Damn,” said Lynch beside him, blowing a low whistle. “And I thought the surface of that Dark Side place was messed up. You seeing this, Captain Spears?”

  The Dark Side, a rogue world with a private gambling establishment, had been destroyed by the future-humans. Lynch had been one of the first ones on the surface. For him to make that comparison was sobering.

  “I am receiving your helmet cams,” said Spears, bringing Mattis back to the moment.

  He glanced at Lynch out of the side of his helmet. “You going to be okay here?”

  “Sure,” said Lynch, stepping down the ramp. “Second time’s a charm. There’s much less gravity this time, so be careful.”

  Mattis followed him, then stepped in front and took the lead. A full squad of Marines followed behind. As their boots hit the ground and touched the metal, it crumbled instantly, and turned to powder that floated up into the void before, slowly, sinking back down. The sharp rocks beneath them similarly disintegrated.

  Weird.

  Modi lingered behind, waving some kind of scanning device around. “Radiation levels are extremely high in this location,” he said, as though discussing incoming rain. “Our suits will protect us for twenty-six minutes, but I would imagine that, after that point, the damage will be done.”

  Twenty-six minutes. It sounded like a lot of time but Mattis knew it wasn’t. Not really. Everything could change in that time. “Okay,” he said, “let’s make sure we get in, find what we need, and get out. Modi, is the radiation coming from that ship?” If so, the closer they got, the worse their suits would be affected.

  “No,” said Modi, an element of wonder in his voice as he jogged to catch up.. “It seems as though the radiation is naturally occurring in this area. It is coming from the stones beneath our feet. Some process as yet understood. I would enjoy, greatly, if we could stay and study it—”

  “That’s not up to me,” said Mattis, well aware that Captain Spears would be listening in on their communications. “Besides. This place is dangerous enough as it is, and we’re not on a scientific mission. We’ll make full notes in our logs and pass them along to Fleet Command. If they send someone out here, good. If not … well. I’m sure this place will be around long enough for you to come back some day.”

  “Some day,” agreed Modi, a distinct edge of regret in his tone. “When all the fighting is done and the last peace is achieved… when heroes and champions are no longer needed.”

  “Feeling poetic, Modi?” asked Lynch. Mattis couldn’t see his face. “That’s unlike you.”

  “Something about this place brings out the wordsmith in me. The starkness of a ruined world, jagged and toothy, contrasting with the ruined ship.” Modi’s voice turned somber. “I projected the course of this moon fragment over the next ten thousand years; it will drift through space uninterrupted until it finally falls into this system’s star. If nothing is done … well, we’re the only ones to know about this ship. Left to its own devices, it will drift, never corroding, never weakening, until fire consumes it. Until then, the only damage to it will be our footprints; the only things to come of it what we take with us.”

  “Then let’s take a lot,” said Mattis, nodding resolutely. “I plan on living a good long time, but ten thousand years is stretching it.”

  They walked in silence toward the ruined ship, the only light provided by the shuttle behind them and the lamps on their suits. As they touched the ship debris and stone alike, both instantly and silently crumbled. The only noise they could hear was the hissing of the suit’s CO2 scrubbers.

  Finally, the hull of the alien ship loomed up before them. There didn’t seem to be an obvious way inside, but they had brought enough high explosives and cutting fluid to render that a concern trivial .

  “You know,” said Lynch, casually reaching out and brushing his hand against the brittle black metal, “this is probably the closest any human has ever come to one of these things.”

  “Not strictly true,” said Modi. “During the Battle of Friendship Station, several of the Midway’s strike crafts crashed into the surface of one of their ships.”

  Lynch’s voice soured. “You know, I preferred you as a poet.”

  “We’re wasting air,” reminded Mattis. “Lynch. Get us inside the hull.”

  He watched as Lynch took out the cutting fluid, but then—as though struck with a strange impulse—reached out and knocked on the hull with his gauntlet. The metal crumbled as he touched it. “Look,” he said, peeling back thick slices of it with his hands. “It’s brittle, just like the rest of it.”

  “Weakened by the radiation,” said Modi, moving beside him and assisting Lynch, the two of them peeling back the hull like the rind of an orange. “This must be how they construct their armour. Layer upon layer… the damage has weakened the fasteners, along with the metal itself. Made so brittle that the extreme temperature swings from exposure to this system’s sun has—”

  A thought occurred to him. Something that made his eyes widen. “You know,” said Mattis, interrupting Modi and talking as much to himself as he was to the others, “if we could find a way to generate this radiation…”

  Modi shrugged. “It’s only neutron radiation, Admiral. Nothing exotic—”

  “We could weaponise it,” said Spears, energetically. “Mattis, that’s perfect. I love it.”

  “Maybe we should come back,” suggested Modi, peeling back another layer.

  He was beginning to think they should. “That, again, is up to Captain Spears,” said Mattis, although he hoped, somehow, that suggesting it might influence her in the affirmative. “Perhaps when our mission is complete?”

  “Perhaps,” said Spears with a hint of promise.

  Modi and Lynch peeled back another layer of the hull, and the outermost layer of the ship’s insides was exposed. A layer of piping and tubing, along with what seemed like three dimensional circuit-boards. “We’re past the outer layers,” said Mattis, peering at the exposed circuitry—or what he presumed to be circuitry. “It looks like the ship has some kind of distributed processing network on the inside of its hull… as though they completely lined the inside of the outer hull with computing equipment.”

  “Why would they do that?” asked Lynch, presumably to Modi.

  “It might be for redundancy purposes,” said Modi, thoughtfully. “Our ships keep our computer cores lodged deep within for protection, but there is a lot of hardware here. What I can see here alone is more than the Midway ever had in her whole server banks. It’s possible, almost likely, that they are doing it as a redundancy measure; a penetratin
g hit may take out some systems, but there are still many more remaining that can take up the slack. And in the event that a vast amount of computing power is needed, well, then it is available.”

  Vast amount of computing power… “Modi, you were using all those piles of laptops to track where this ship went, yes?”

  “No,” said Modi. “Those machines were merely providing the front-end required to run it. The actual work was being done on a server-farm in Canberra, Australia. The effort required was … substantial.”

  Mattis nodded thoughtfully. “Is it possible that the enemy is doing the same thing?” he asked. “Using huge amounts of computing power to track our ships? Predict our movements?”

  “It’s possible, but any supposition toward the exact purpose of such hardware is merely speculation.”

  Speculation was all they had, but they also had a profound lack of time. “Cut through this barrier,” said Mattis. “But take a sample of their computers. In fact, take a sample of everything. Whatever we can carry or drag back to the shuttle.”

  “Aye sir.” Modi sprayed one of the removed sheets of metal with a red X, then did the same to a chunk of computing hardware, marking it for the Marines to carry back. Then, he and Lynch broke through the layer of computing hardware with remarkable ease, pushing it aside as though it were paper.

  Now the insides of the ship were exposed. They had cut into the side of a long corridor strewn with debris, and right in front of them lay a crumpled form, almost completely unrecognisable, barely more than a lump of dust with a few humanoid features protruding.

  “I’m guessing that’s what’s going to happen to us if we stay here too long?” asked Mattis, grimly.

  Modi said nothing, which was all he needed to say.

  The three of them slipped inside the ship, Marines following. Mattis took the lead, unslinging his rifle and awkwardly shouldering it. They crept through the ship, working deeper into its bowels. They found another body, this one far more complete; merely dessicated, ghoulish and hollow-eyed.

  “The radiation seems to be significantly less the farther we get into the ship,” said Modi, crouching beside the corpse and examining it. “This one died at roughly the same time, but obviously its condition is much better.” As he touched the corpse, it floated off the ground before slowly sinking back down. “Gravity is much less, too.”

  Odd. “Modi, hypothesis?”

  Modi turned toward him. “Hypothesis for abnormal gravity inside an Avenir ship?” He shrugged helplessly. “Weird technology gone amuck? An effect of the radiation? Maybe they just like it that way?”

  All seemed equally likely to him. Mattis pointed down the corridor. “Into the ship,” he said. “Whatever effect seems to be generating this—whatever vulnerability they might have toward this strange place—I want answers.”

  “Sixteen minutes,” said Modi, cautiously. “We should be mindful that the effect might become less prominent the farther we get into the ship. Or stronger. Nobody can say. We are truly groping in the dark here.”

  “We’re blind bulls in a very fragile china shop,” said Lynch.

  Right. Enough metaphors for now. Mattis lead the way deeper into the ship, moving past the occasional corpse or broken pile of debris. The hallway cracked and splintered like snakeskin, buckling on occasion, and they found more complete bodies that had been crushed by some immense force.

  “Poor bastards came in hard,” said Lynch, lightly touching one with his boot. It drifted up into the air, floating, bouncing idly off the ceiling.

  There, on the roof, was a strange symbol. Two teeth biting into a planet. Mattis shone his shoulder lamp at it. “I wonder what this means?”

  Nobody had any kind of answer.

  “Sir?” asked Modi, an unusual energy in his voice. “I’m detecting a power source. Atmosphere.”

  Mattis squinted. “There’s an air bubble on this ship? A section that didn’t decompress?”

  “An unlaunched escape pod,” clarified Modi, moving over to a section of bulkhead that seemed heavier than the others. It had a small, reinforced door no greater than one meter wide next to a large purple button. “Behind here. It’s small… one man, maybe. It’s tiny but I’m sure that’s what it is.”

  With such a tight opening, it was the only thing that would possibly fit. “Okay,” said Mattis, “hand me the cutting fluid.”

  Lynch gave him a thick tube with a plunger on one end. He placed the extruder against the metal hull and squeezed the plunger. Liquid leaked out the tip, smoking as it came into contact with the metal, dissolving it far too easily.

  At the other end of the tiny airlock was the escape pod. No bigger than a coffin, it was barely big enough to hold a person, and was sealed by a thick door with a small glass window.

  A face stared out from it, head tilted at an odd angle. It almost looked like it was squinting curiously at the light from Mattis’s lamp.

  A mutant face.

  Alive.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Aerostar

  Low Earth Orbit

  Sol System

  There was no way they had a mutant aboard.

  “So,” said Reardon, leading Chuck through the ship’s cramped interior. “This is the Aerostar. Just a little note, kid; that’s the name of the model, not this particular ship’s name. Except it’s one of a kind. So it’s just the Aerostar. Not the USS Aerostar. Or HMS Aerostar. Or whatever. Just the Aerostar.”

  Chuck blinked in confusion. Ship naming conventions were strange to him. “Why?”

  “It’s that way because…” Reardon waved a hand dismissively. “Because of how it is.”

  “Ooookay.”

  They passed a series of small rooms. Reardon jerked his thumb at one. “Your place. Try not to make a mess.”

  “Okay.”

  He whistled as he walked. Even God hated a whistler. Chuck’s ears ached. If this was going to be how the trip went…

  A young-looking Indian kid in a wheelchair zoomed out of a door, using his grip on the frame to spin himself around and stop. “Hey, buddy!” he said, grinning like a half-moon. “Oh man, this is Admiral Mattis’s kid, huh?”

  Admiral Mattis’s kid… he was more than that. “Yeah, I’m Chuck Mattis.”

  The kid wheeled up to him, extending a hand. “I’m Sammy Reardon.”

  Chuck took the hand and shook it firmly. “You’re the mutant?” he asked, hesitantly.

  The elder Reardon laughed. “Ha! He wishes,” he said, reaching down and ruffling his brother’s hair.

  “Hey!” Sammy swatted his hand away. “Don’t!”

  Reardon shot little finger guns at Chuck. “Best brother in the galaxy right here.”

  “Okay,” said Chuck, hoping his scepticism wouldn’t come through too badly. And he needed to keep Reardon distracted. “So, uh, is there really a mutant—”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Reardon leaned up against a wall. “You’ll see her soon. Not that she says much, still being in her box and all. But first, let’s see the lead you were talking about. For Smith.”

  Uh oh. “Uhh…” Chuck gently bounced Jack. “I think I smell poop. How about I change him first?”

  Reardon casually reached into his pocket, pulling out aviator shades and putting them on. Chuck was significantly taller, so it seemed an almost laughable attempt to be a tough guy. “How about you gimme that lead, kid?” he said.

  Sammy snorted dismissively. “You’re twenty-two. You’re like… five years younger than him.” He grinned a bit. “Sorry, I looked up your arrest record. It had your date of birth.”

  “Thanks,” said Chuck, grimacing. Permanent records sucked.

  “The location,” said Reardon, an almost genuinely threatening edge to his voice. “Where is Smith? Or the baby gets tossed out the airlock.”

  Chuck’s chest tightened at the idea, but Sammy just laughed some more.

  “My bro’s kidding,” he said, casually reaching over and punching Reardon in the side. “He won’t d
o that.”

  Reardon crouched beside his brother, hissing and speaking in a faint whisper that Chuck was still able to hear. “Hey, what did I tell you about not undermining me when I’m intimidating people?”

  Sammy spoke in a normal voice. “You’re not intimidating anyone, Harry.” He looked up at Chuck. “But if you have info, that’d be real helpful.”

  “No,”he replied in his most imperious Admiral Jack Mattis voice—an attempt to let Reardon know that he wasn’t someone he could intimidate with empty threats. “Not until Bratta has seen my kid. Where is he?”

  Reardon opened his mouth to say something, then shut it and broke into an awkward, goofy smile.

  Sammy thumbed in his brother’s direction. “He doesn’t know.”

  Shit.

  “What? You’re kidding me.” Unbelievable, he thought. “Fine. Set me back down. I’ll go find him on my—”

  “Now hold up, Mr. Mattis,” said Sammy. “It turns out that when I was hacking into Smith’s comm logs, I came across another number. The metadata was encrypted, but that was no match for me, obviously, and it turns out it’s Bratta’s number. That is, I think.”

  Reardon swung around to face his brother. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me that?”

  “You were busy arguing with him over the phone,” he said, pointing to Chuck.

  “Well? And?” Reardon stretched his arms and palms out.

  “It’s active, but I think he hasn’t paid his bill or something because it won’t let me connect. I traced it to New Los Alamos. Quirky little world out in the Tiberius Nebula.”

  Chuck nearly laughed. How convenient. Smith was in that general location. Somewhere. “New Los Alamos is Nerd Heaven. By far the most technical world in the Tiberius sector, originally set up to study the nebula, and now… well, basically anything they can. Makes sense Bratta would be there,” said Chuck. He eyed the two of them. In spite of Reardon’s blustery persona, he could tell it was an act. The brothers were clearly not hardened criminals. At least, not the violent kind. “Ok. I’ll tell you. Smith is also out in the Tiberius Nebula. Not necessarily New Los Alamos, but one of the other dozens of worlds out there.”