The Last Champion: Book 4 of The Last War Series

by Nick Webb

  “That’s sad,” said Lily. “People… they are mean.”

  Chuck opened his eyes. “What?” he asked, perplexed. “What did you say?”

  “Say?”

  “No, don’t just copy me. You said it was sad. Did you understand what I was talking about?”

  “Talking about,” said Lily.

  He sighed and slumped forward, half bending over. “What’s up with you?” he asked, shaking his head.

  The ship’s computer beeped. It would soon dock at Christchurch Corporate Business Park station. “Okay,” said Chuck, pushing himself up to his feet. “Try and pretend there isn’t more to you, but I know. I know you were listening.”

  “I’m listening,” said Lily.

  Frowning skeptically, Chuck watched her for a second, then turned and went to wake up the others.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Hidden Compartment

  Jovian Anchor station

  Planetoid Slingshot

  Vellini System

  Tiberius Sector

  “Jeremy?” asked Mattis, staring wide eyed at the man and lowering his rifle. “Is that really you?”

  “Is it really you?” asked Commander Pitt in response, glaring at him suspiciously. He leaned forward slightly, almost to the point of unbalancing, his face near the bars. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m saving you.” Mattis looked around for some way to open the doors. “Key. Where’s the key?”

  Wordlessly, Commander Pitt pointed through the bars, through the doorway, to the barracks where scorched, shredded bodies lay splashed out on the ground, wisps of smoke still filling the room from the grenade blast.

  Begrudgingly, Mattis went back into the barracks and began sifting through the bloody hunks of meat that were once the Forgotten who’d tried to kill him. The acrid stench of the gunfire mixed with the coppery smell of blood seeped in through the crack in his helmet, and soon his hands were coated in gory mess.

  His fingers found something attached to the blasted remains of one of the bodies. At first he thought it was a spare magazine, but it was too thin. A key card. He pulled it out, wiped it off, then returned triumphantly to the prison cell.

  “This it?” he said, holding the yellow thing up.

  “Yes.”

  Mattis swiped it over the sensor and the bars, with the faint groan of stressed metal, slid into the floor.

  It suddenly occurred to him that he was now only a step away from grabbing distance of a total stranger which could probably snap his neck before he could shoot. He stared at Pitt. Pitt stared at him.

  “So,” said Mattis, figuring that if the guy was going to kill him he would have done it by now. “Where to now?”

  “Out,” said Pitt, eyes falling to the door. “What happened out there?”

  “Had to turn their internal organs into external organs.” Mattis checked his rifle. “I didn’t want to. But they didn’t exactly give me much choice.”

  Another period of silence, broken only by distant reverberations of gunfire through the decks of the station.

  The… man. Mattis struggled to think of it as Jeremy Pitt. It looked so alike; the last time Mattis had seen him he looked exactly as he did now. And if what the man’s father said was true…

  But what if it wasn’t?

  “Jeremy,” said Mattis, unable to keep an edge of caution out of his voice. “How are you alive? What do you remember?”

  Pitt’s eyes seemed to flare with an inner light. “I don’t know,” he said. “I remember… going aboard the Paul Revere. I remember Ensign Sexton. I remember Ensign Ward. Lieutenant Haney. I remember their skill, their bravery. I remember Lieutenant Burnett, standing in the CIC, her hands folded behind her back like she was going to ride that ship all the way to Captain.” His voice softened, some of the gravel draining out of it. “I honestly thought she would.” Then it returned to normal. “We hit something. Rammed it. A ship. Big one. No—a rock. A big rock. We were trying to…” he smiled faintly. “Modi was trying to give me a physics lecture and I wasn’t having a bit of it. Then—then we pushed the engines, we slowed the rock, we sent it back. We pushed it back to the ship that fired it. And then…” his voice trailed off.

  “Then,” said Mattis, “the port engine exploded. We detected a fire onboard. A surge in power. We requested the Jianghu assist, but they went radio silent after acknowledging the request. They just sat there watching. Escape pods went out, some of them, and then the ship blew into pieces.”

  “I…” Pitt obviously struggled. “I remember fire. I remember Burnett. She was dead. Something—some piece of metal, big as a car—it had come from somewhere, speared in from the upper decks, almost cut her in half. Ward… don’t know. Haney, don’t know. I thought I was dead too. I remember lying there, watching the pods escape. Watching them fly away like little angels taking the crew… my crew… away to safety. I wanted to get on board one. I wanted to save myself.” He shook his head, firmly, as though trying to shake loose the memory. “I… I remember the fire spreading. Stealing the air from the room. We had our suits, of course, but there was something … something else. I don’t remember exactly. A presence in the room. Something dark. As though it were stealing the life away from all of us. It touched Burnett. It saw she couldn’t be saved. Then it touched me too. Like a damn ghostly Grim Reaper. Maybe I was dreaming. But it put its finger on me, and then the next thing I remember was waking up on a surgical table in some dark place.”

  “You were saved from a burning ship,” said Mattis, skeptically, “by the Grim Reaper?”

  That brought a scowl to Pitt’s face. “No. I was dying at the time. What I saw was just a shadow. I don’t understand it any more than you do.”

  A burst of distant gunfire echoing through the metal of the space station reminded him that, although this was a very curious thing for Pitt to remember indeed, the questions he had would have to be answered later. “We have to get out of here,” he said. “Follow me. We’ll talk about this when we have time.”

  Wordlessly—his former XO seemed to not want to talk much—Pitt nodded toward the exit. Together, he and Mattis returned down the maintenance corridors, retracing the steps he had taken to get there.

  As they passed by the symbol of the planet biting teeth, Pitt’s eyes seemed drawn to it. “This mark,” he said. “I know it.”

  Curious. “From where?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Even more curious.

  There was no more time for questions. His radio crackled into his ears as they got close. Waiting at the end of the narrow passage was Lance Corporal Cho, a small fire burning behind him.

  “Sir,” said Cho, who, to his credit, didn’t stare at Pitt even a little, “we have to get out of here. The whole place is coming apart. The structural foundations of this place were damaged by…” He flicked his eyes to the side. Sampson stood there awkwardly, her still-smoking rocket launcher slung over her shoulder. “Someone.”

  Mattis touched his radio. “Mattis to HMS Caernarvon. Mission accomplished, we have the package. I say again: Commander Pitt is with me.”

  The radio crackled and in the background of the audio Mattis could hear the dull rumble of weapons impacts and bridge chatter. “This is Caernarvon actual,” said Spears. “Standby.”

  A faint rumble spread throughout the station. Mattis did not want to wait around. “Recall the Rhinos,” he said to Cho. “We are leaving.” He touched his radio again. “Mattis to USS Stennis. Captain Flint, come in.”

  Flint came through clearly, his voice as drawl-y and painfully slow as he remembered. “This is Stennis actual. Go ahead.”

  “Looks like the Caernarvon is a little busy,” said Mattis. He turned and headed toward the breaching pod. “Requesting extraction. Break.” He took his hand off the talk key. “Cho, is the breaching pod okay?”

  “Yes sir,” said Cho, moving up beside him. “Just climb on in and break away from the station. One of the ships can pick us up,
no problem.”

  Sounded like a plan. Mattis pressed the talk key again. “We’ll be heading to the breaching pod and breaking contact. Wouldn’t mind a lift.”

  There was a slight pause. “Technically,” said Flint, “that would be Captain Spears’s call. I’m not going to cross an angry lady Brit.” His voice dripped with what Mattis could only interpret as pleasure at making him wait.

  “It’s your breaching pod,” said Mattis, frustration building despite his efforts to calm it. The guy was being a total dick. Just leaving him here.

  “I am aware. Retrieval, however, was to come when Spears was ready—it was part of the operational plan.”

  This much was true. But it was also a technicality. Dammit, the man was a prick. “Granted,” said Mattis. “However, we cannot get through to Spears at this time.” Right on cue, another ominous rumble—this one more significant and longer lasting than the previous—shook the station. “Things are getting unstable here in a big way. I’d rather not float home, Captain.”

  “Standby,” said Flint. He kept walking. The breaching pod appeared. Most of the Rhinos were there when he arrived. All their eyes turned toward him, toward Pitt. Mattis tried to keep his mind on the job. He couldn’t see any children there. That, in some way, vindicated his decision to use the Rhinos. He couldn’t imagine Sampson with kids. “Mattis, we are good to extract you when you’re ready.”

  That was good news. “Confirmed. We’ll eject as soon as we’ve loaded. Mattis out.” He waved toward the pod. “All aboard! Marines, we are leaving!”

  Mattis anticipated that herding the Rhinos aboard would be like gathering up a bunch of cats, pulling all their tails, then throwing food in every corner of the room while detonating fireworks at the centre. Yet, despite their obvious misgivings and more than a little grumbling, most of them began filing back into the breaching pod.

  “They’re out of ammunition,” said Cho, through the radio, using a private frequency. “They’re like big ole’ babies, all tuckered out and wanting their naps.”

  Depressingly accurate. Mattis watched as Kluger trudge through the threshold, the heat shield of his flamethrower snagging, nearly pulling him off his feet. “I just gotta ask; how do you handle it? I mean, I can respect them and their destructive potential, but you seem different. What gives? Why ride with the Rhinos?”

  “They’re fun.” There was a genuineness to Cho’s voice that made Mattis smile. “They really do mean well. They aren’t bad people. They’re just … well. You have to be ten percent smarter than the equipment you use. Fortunately, the stuff we issue to Rhinos is almost childproof. But they get results.”

  Mattis threw a sideways glance to Sampson. She was trying to fold down her rocket launcher but obviously missing a step. Finally, she just bashed the thing against a bulkhead, damaging the launch tube. Seemingly satisfied, she boarded as well, glancing at the dark corners of the ship as though worried there might be monsters there.

  “Mmm hmm,” he said.

  Kluger leaned over to Sampson. “Hey. Is shooting people gay?”

  “What?”

  The guy shuffled uncomfortably. “I mean, you’re putting things into other guys. That kind of does sound gay to me.”

  “Huh, good point,” said Sampson, seeming to consider the thought with some gravity.

  That the two of them were able to operate heavy weapons completely dumbfounded Mattis.

  It took longer to load the pod than he would have liked. Pitt got in last, both eyes staring squarely at Mattis.

  There was a brief period of silence as the pod’s computers worked, then with a hiss and a groan, the pod disengaged. It moved away from the station and out into open space.

  “Okay,” said Mattis to Pitt, as the nebula came into view through one of the pod’s portholes. “Mission complete.” A wide smile came over his face. “It’s good to have you back, Jeremy.”

  “It’s good to be back,” said Pitt.

  Spears’s voice pierced the quiet of the pod. “Mattis. I think we’ve figured out what the hell was going on here.”

  “What do you mean? Like, besides the Forgotten keeping Pitt here as ransom?”

  “Like, why the warbirds defending this godforsaken station were ducks. Drones.”

  “They were drones? Remotely piloted?”

  “Looks like. Turns out they were a distraction. Nothing more. While we were engaged with them and the Forgotten capital ship, a smaller ship escaped unnoticed from the station. We would have missed it had we not reviewed the footage just now.”

  A pit formed in Mattis’s stomach.

  “And? Any idea what was on it?”

  Pitt broke in. “Kids.”

  Mattis’s head snapped towards him. “What did you say?”

  “I heard kids. Crying. When I was in that cell.” Pitt closed his eyes and started shaking his head, as if simultaneously trying to remember and forget a dramatic memory. “Couldn’t see anything going on. But the sound was unmistakable. There were some kids on that station. Young, too.”

  “You hear that, Spears?” said Mattis.

  “Yes. The bastards. Look, Jack, from the footage we can pinpoint the second that the ship entered Z-Space, but it’s going to take a while to triangulate a vector, given what little information we have. So I suggest—”

  “Further into the system,” said Pitt.

  “What?” said Mattis and Spears simultaneously.

  “From when I overheard them talking. My captors. They always kept me hooded, but I could hear them sometimes. They’ve got another base in this same system. Further in. Not all the way—not at Vellini itself. But … maybe one of the gas giants. The magnetic fields on those are great places to hide things you don’t want found.”

  “Jack, there are three gas giants in the Vellini system. Could be any one of them. And …” she lowered her voice as if to keep Pitt from hearing, though they both knew he could, “are we … sure … about the source of this information?”

  Mattis eyed Pitt, who nodded with understanding. “Of course we’re not sure, Spears. But it’s all we’ve got.” The expression on Pitt’s face—a mixture of relief and … hope?—told Mattis that Pitt knew he couldn’t be trusted, not under the current circumstances, but that he was relieved his old commanding officer was trusting him and giving him the benefit of the doubt.

  “Very well,” said Spears. “Looks like of the three gas giants, only one actually has a powerful enough magnetic field to actually hide anything. Erebus. Though why anyone would build something there is beyond me. The strength of the planet’s magnetic field does interesting things to the ionized nebula gas. It’s like a maelstrom in there once you get close enough.”

  Pitt shrugged. “It’s where I’d hide something. If I were the Forgotten and hiding a bunch of stolen kids?”

  Mattis glanced again at the other man’s eyes. He seemed so … earnest. That did seem like the old Jeremy Pitt.

  “Ok. Spears? Captain Flint? Let’s get to Erebus. Let’s go bring these kids home, and call it a day.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Guest Quarters 3

  The Aerostar

  Christchurch Corporate Business Park station

  Vellini, High Orbit

  Vellini System

  Tiberius Sector

  Bratta was enjoying far, far too relaxing a sleep when it ended abruptly with a banging on the door.

  “Time to go,” came Chuck’s voice from the other side.

  Already? “Okay, I’m up.” Bratta yawned and stretched himself out, swinging his legs off his cramped bed and checked himself in the tiny mirror. Needed a shave. But that could come later. So could a shower. They had shower facilities on these ships, right?

  Bratta cast a longing eye at his suitcase. Within was his new invention; his dart thrower. Firing little homing drones laced with a knockout poison, it was his current little pet project.

  Except it kept exploding when he fired it. A minor bug. Only happened, like, a quarte
r of the time though.

  No, it wasn’t ready and he couldn’t risk it. Instead, Bratta changed, threw some deodorant on, and then opened his suitcase. Inside was another of his little projects… cameras so tiny they could be worn on clothes and not seen with the naked eye, appearing to be little specks of dirt or grime. He picked a dozen of them out with tweezers, which would activate the adhesive, then stuck them all over his clothes, including one on the tip of his index finger.

  Seeing Modi and his inventions on Chrysalis had been inspiring. Bratta was looking forward to seeing his own creations in action.

  Satisfied, Bratta went down to the cargo bay where everyone was waiting.

  “Hi,” said Chuck, the nice young man whose baby was sick. Not just sick, but something else. Something that worried him. In his few weeks as an employee of Maxgainz, he’d worked on … interesting genetics problems, using samples his managers had provided him.

  The kid’s DNA had sections of striking similarity.

  “Good morning,” said Bratta, pushing the confusing thoughts out of his mind. “Ready to make a completely unsuspicious social call at the corporate offices of Jovian Logistics and Supply? I’m an old hand at this by now.”

  “It’s actually evening planetside,” said Smith.

  Technically correct, the best kind of correct. “Good evening,” said Bratta, apologetically.

  Sammy wheeled down the ramp towards the cargo bay, hands on the wheels to brake himself. “Hey, guys.”

  Everyone said hi.

  “Hey,” said Reardon, his hair a mess as he sauntered down the ramp into the cargo bay. The guy looked like he hadn’t slept much. “So what’s the plan, nerds?”

  Bratta frowned and pushed up his glasses. “Excuse me, I’ll have you know I’m extremely skilled at infiltration,” he said, snorting dismissively. “I’m a lot more than just an engineer, thank you very much.”

  “Oh, good.” Reardon pulled out his aviators and slipped them on his face. “So I guess you’ll be our point man on this operation, right?”