The Last Champion: Book 4 of The Last War Series

by Nick Webb

  “He’s a big boy,” she said. “He can handle it.”

  “He’s a big boy?” echoed Roadie, teasing. “Well, you’d know, wouldn’t you?”

  Him bringing up that years ago she and Roadie had shared a drunken, sloppy fuck after too much tequila would normally drive her to retaliate, but instead she just focused on the task at hand. Retrieving Frost and Roadie and bringing them back safely to the Stennis. “Okay,” she said.

  A moment’s quiet between the two. “Hey, it was just a joke.”

  “I know.”

  “Then why are you making this all weird?”

  She turned the ship to avoid some high altitude cloud, continuing to dive down toward the signal. “I’m not. You’re the one making it weird. It was years ago.”

  “I know. That’s what makes it funny.”

  Guano dove below the cloud cover, revealing the surface of Vellini. It was horizon to horizon junk, dotted with green/brown pools that looked gross even at high altitude. A cluttered city was on the horizon, but even from this distance it looked … dirty. The whole planet was covered in stuff. Coolant tanks, trash, even a massive, rusted starship hull. A billion people lived on this planet, but how they actually lived here, on a giant pile of junk, was a mystery.

  She thumbed her radio key. “This is Tornado 1-2, we’re atmospheric and searching for ejected pilots. Stand by for updates.”

  “This is crazy,” muttered Flatline. “We’ll never get them back even if we could find them.”

  Tuning him out, Guano dove down until she was barely a few hundred meters off the ground, leveled out, then flew toward the beacon. After a moment, she saw the green smoke that the ejection seats automatically gave out in atmospheres. It was coming from a series of truck wrecks, half-rusted out and buried in garbage.

  She extended the landing struts, then set the ship down.

  “Okay,” she said, popping open the cockpit canopy, immediately glad she couldn’t smell anything with her suit on. “There are plenty of scavengers who live in this place, so if you see anyone who isn’t Frost or Roadie … shoot to kill.”

  “Yeah, because I usually just shoot to miss.” Flatline climbed out the cockpit behind her. “Dumbass.”

  Guano swung herself out of the cockpit, landing with a wet splat on the ground. Gravity was minimal on this place, which was good. “There’s the ejection seat,” she said. “Roadie won’t be far.”

  The two of them set out, passing the ejection seat and walking away from their ship, through the endless piles of junk.

  “Watch that green shit,” said Flatline, pointing to one of the green/brown lakes she’d seen from above. “It’s some bioengineered fungus they use to break down the junk. If it gets inside your suit, not only will it kill you, it will hurt the whole time you’re dying.”

  “Awesome,” she said, touching her radio. There was a faint buzzing noise in her ears, and she wasn’t sure whether it was coming from her radio or from inside her head. “Hey Roadie, you out there?”

  No answer. However, from the green smoke of the ejection seat, a space-suited figure emerged. Through the glass she could see Roadie’s face. He waved to her, then tapped the side of his head. Radio failure. Typical problem with ejection.

  Guano smiled, raised her pistol and shot him twice.

  Roadie slumped toward her, face a shocked mask, then fell face-forward into the garbage.

  “Holy shit!” Flatline shrieked beside her. “P-Patricia, what the fuck—holy shit—what the—”

  She turned and shot him too, putting two rounds into his gut.

  Silence.

  Guano stood there, staring down the sights of her weapon as smoke trailed out from the barrel. And then, as though coming out of a strange trance, she realized the enormity of what she’d just done.

  No. No!

  The pistol fell out of her grip, falling into the garbage. Flatline wasn’t moving. Just laying there, crumpled in a heap on his side.

  She slumped in the garbage, hands seeking the bullet wounds on Flatline’s space suit. “Deshawn,” she said, her breath coming in tearful, ragged gasps. “I’m—oh my god, I didn’t mean to. It just—I didn’t—”

  The buzzing returned. Forcing her back into the battle fugue. Forcing her mind out. Forcing her to do things.

  No!

  Her hands searched in the garbage. Looking for the pistol she’d dropped. She couldn’t let them control her anymore—she couldn’t. Where was the gun, where—

  There it was. The grip poking out of a pile of trash. The buzzing in her ears intensified, maddening. She snatched the weapon up and put it to her temple.

  The buzzing reached a crescendo.

  Slowly, Guano lowered the weapon. She pressed it into Flatline’s hand. With careful deliberation, she walked over to Roadie’s body, picked up his firearm and fired it twice into the air. She dropped it down by his body, too, and then walked back to her ship.

  After a moment’s consideration, she knew she couldn’t go back to the Stennis. Too many questions. She programmed in a course to the USS Warrior, the flagship of their reinforcing fleet, then powered her ship up. She took off, flew out of the atmosphere, and radioed the Warrior for landing clearance.

  And it all felt so natural.

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Sickbay

  USS Warrior

  Vellini, High Orbit

  Vellini System

  Tiberius Sector

  Bratta leaned up against a desk in the infirmary. Mattis had run after Pitt, the Senator and the journalist had left, Chuck Mattis had accompanied one of the future-humans being escorted out by Marines and had left his infant in the care of a nurse who was overseeing the final administration of the retro-virus that would cure him. And when they were all finally gone, Bratta let out a long sigh he didn’t realize he’d been holding.

  Well that… could have been a lot more awkward. But a lot less, too. A solid four out of five. Better than usual.

  Pitt was a clone. Fascinating. The amount of cellular augmentation required to turn a normal human into one of those things was well beyond him. If only he’d spent more time working at Maxgainz before he’d recorded that escaped mutant and escaped himself to broadcast it to the galaxy.

  The more interesting thing was how they infused the clone with all of Pitt’s memories. Did they extract them from his corpse? From a point before his death, then extrapolate? Wondering about the mechanisms of extracting memories from a dead man was a lovely mental exercise that he let his brain run through until it was interrupted by a familiar voice.

  “Ah, Mister Bratta.” Commander Modi smiled politely as he stepped through the doorway to the infirmary. “It is good to see you here.”

  Fortunately, Bratta noticed, many of the sick and injured had now been evacuated and many of the alarms were off. How long had he been standing there, lost in thought? He had to stop doing that. It was one of the reasons why Jeannie left him. “It’s good to see you, too!” Bratta positively beamed. “Whatever can I do for you, Mister Modi?”

  “Well,” said Modi, his normally calm exterior overlaying an obvious undercurrent of excitement. “I heard you were aboard and was hoping you might be able to take a look at something for me.”

  Oh, will you just look at some science stuff? Finally, after months of living in a bar, followed by days of being trapped on that ship with the Reardons? How could he say no? “I’d love to,” said Bratta. “I’m your chap.”

  “Great.” Modi took out a datastick. “Here. It’s an analysis of the data from the wrecked Avenir ship. I’d like you to run the program on this disk and—”

  Bratta practically snatched the thing away, gleefully plugged it in, and then switched programs on his terminal to the program on the device. Finally, a non-genetics problem to work on. From behind, someone bumped into him; a pilot wearing a flight suit.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  Distraction. Bratta paid the woman no further heed. A few taps of the keys executed
the program and examined its output. After a brief moment that he presumed the program spent calibrating itself to his esoteric hardware, it then began to hum away, running through the calculations Modi had pre-stored on it, and prepared to make them human-readable.

  “What seems to be the problem?” asked Bratta as the machine worked, a simple blinking bar on the terminal that read LOADING.

  “Simply put,” said Modi, leaning up against the table, “this is a program which is used to interpolate real space speed and direction from Z-Space trajectory. It has a result stored on it, and I trust that result because the program obviously works; it produces a vector into real space, absolutely. But it took an enormous amount of computing power to produce this result because it had a strange element present in the calculations that introduced constant errors that had be be identified and trimmed. This made it a non-deterministic polynomal, turning a simple P-hard problem into an NP-hard one.”

  Oh, brother. Bratta had conducted no small amount of computer science. NP-hard was a problem that broke computers’ brains; like trying to write down every possible combination of chess pieces.

  A hint of caution crept into Modi’s voice. “Is this where you ask me to repeat what I said in English, probably with an overly thick Texan drawl?”

  Bratta smiled and shook his head. “No, I totally understood. There is no need to simplify.”

  “You are the best,” Modi said with solemn relief.

  The terminal chirped, indicating that it had verified the calculations as presented. There it was; a course through space. As Bratta scrolled through the numbers, his brow creased. Something was off about it. Something was strange—not in the data, but in what it was discarding. The trimmed tree branches. The rogue element that was messing things up.

  “What do you think?” asked Modi, curiously.

  The junk data. He scrolled through it, trying to find some kind of pattern. “I’m not sure,” he said, cautiously. “Where is this data from again?”

  “From when we first discovered the Avenir ship back at Erebus in this solar system. The ship has since exploded, but something about this data has tugged at something in the back of my mind, too. It doesn’t add up. We attached a tracking device to its hull right before it entered Z-Space, which is how we knew to come here to Vellini. But something about the data….”

  Bratta frowned and sifted through. “If you ask me, it looks like there was a second ship in close proximity. That’s the only explanation here. A second ship entered Z-Space with it, at the same time, at almost the exact same position.”

  “Two?” Modi stared. “No, I was present at the battle. Only a single ship escaped.”

  Bratta tapped on a series of keys, copying the junk data into its own dataset, then feeding it into the algorithm

  “That will take months,” said Modi, aghast. “Months on military supercomputers. On this thing it will take—”

  Chirp. His computer spat out the result. Bratta pointed at the screen and what it so clearly, so painfully showed.

  The junk data was another Z-Space vector. That’s what had been confusing the analytics; just as it entered Z-Space, another ship had joined it. Had it been stealthed or photonically cloaked somehow?

  Either way, the Avenir ship that had decimated the American fleet, that had killed thousands, had not been alone.

  Chapter Sixty

  Sickbay

  USS Warrior

  Vellini, High Orbit

  Vellini System

  Tiberius Sector

  Mattis could see that Jeremy was rattled.

  The guy had just learned he was a copy of a man now almost certainly dead. That would be a blow to anyone. Still, Mattis followed at a cautious distance, until finally Pitt stopped walking, glaring over his shoulder in a distinctly ominous way.

  “Ready to talk about it, Commander Pitt?” asked Mattis, cautiously, suddenly reminded of the powerful outburst in the lab. If Pitt decided to fold him into a pretzel, there would be nothing he could do about it.

  “That’s not even really my name, is it?” asked Pitt, in a way which did not invite a genuine answer.

  Dammit. What would Chuck say? Something inspiring, something soothing, something encouraging, something…

  “Your name is whatever you want it to be. Your life is whatever you want it to be.”

  Pitt turned to him, eyes flashing a dark red. “I want to be myself,” he said. “Commander Pitt. United States Navy. But my body? It came out of a laboratory. How do I even know that the thoughts in my head are my own? Not some… dark impulse imparted by whoever did this to me. I owe it to…” his voice trailed off, unable to find a satisfactory answer. “I owe it to…”

  “If your body came out of a vat, and your mind came out of a computer, then what do you owe anyone?”

  Pitt thought for a second, his features softening. “I owe it to myself. To everyone around me. I have to find out the truth. About who I am. Or … what I am.”

  Cautiously, Mattis stepped forward and, reaching up, clapped the tall man on the shoulder. “I think you already have it figured out.”

  Pitt smiled, weakly, but it was there. “Okay. I should—I should go back to the Stennis. Help Captain Flint with whatever he needs.”

  Mattis wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea of a clone of Pitt wandering around, even if it did have the man’s memories and, seemingly, his personality and ambitions. But Chuck was right. If he thought he was Pitt, then he’d act like Pitt.

  “Okay.” Mattis knew better than to tie himself up in knots over something he had little control over. They were in a crisis. He would have to act. “Just take it easy, okay? And make sure you go with an escort. Just… for your own protection.”

  “I will.” Pitt gave a crisp salute. “Thanks for the, uh, the pep talk, Admiral.”

  Mattis saluted back. “Any time.”

  Pitt turned and began walking to the hangar bay, disappearing down the corridor, a Marine following close behind. Mattis watched him go with cautious eyes, wondering if he had done the right thing.

  “How’d it go?” asked Chuck, behind him. Mattis knew better than to ask how long he’d been standing there. His son had better manners than to approach a conversation he had no business overhearing.

  How had it gone? It was difficult to say. They were in the middle of a crisis, so this was no time to overanalyze everything, but… eh. There would be time enough in the future to second guess his decisions. “Fine,” said Mattis, shaking his head.

  “Sounds like it wasn’t really fine,” Chuck said, gently. “Sounds like the fights you and mom used to have. Back when we were broke and struggling—before… before mom left.”

  Mattis managed a half smile. “Not going to lie, being a nillionaire living on a junior officer’s salary with a bratty twelve-year-old wasn’t exactly how I anticipated my life to be going at that point.”

  “Nillionaire,” said Chuck, smiling too. “I liked that word. It was… you know, it was a way to think about being flat broke in a way that made it seem much nicer than the reality.” He snorted playfully. “You remember when we used to go out to the range, and you let me collect all your spent brass? You’d just gone through basic, so you were all… police that brass, seaman! Using the drill instructor voice. And then, when I got to shoot, I was all like, you better police your brass!”

  Wistful memories, somewhat disrupted by the reality of their situation. “I remember,” said Mattis, his eyes falling back to the piece strapped to Chuck’s hip. “I see that thing you’re carrying, too. I haven’t forgotten.”

  “I know how to use it,” said Chuck, somewhat defensively. “You taught me.”

  “When you were a kid,” said Mattis. A twinge in his right shoulder made him wince. The painkiller might be wearing off…

  “I’ve been practicing. I actually wanted to take Elroy out to the range soon—he says he hates guns, but I think I can bring him around. Start him out on a nice .22 or air rifle or something, work our
way up to a manly 10mm.”

  It was nice to have a genuine conversation with his son that wasn’t about him getting arrested or some kind of terrible calamity. “I remember the first time you shot a 10mm,” he said, smile growing. “I was like… okay, champ, you gotta hold her tight, because she kicks…”

  “Ha!” Chuck snapped his fingers. “Champ. That’s what you used to call me, champ. Chuck the Champ…”

  The two laughed, a moment of togetherness that lasted far shorter than Mattis would’ve liked. There was still some underlying tension there, but Chuck was making an obvious effort. And Mattis was more than happy to let him.

  “Okay,” he said, “we should get back to the infirmary and pry Modi and Bratta apart before they get married or something.”

  Chuck snorted. “Bratta? I know he has that crazy ex-wife of his, but…”

  Mattis sighed. “Look, when those two get together, it’s like they’re speaking another language. The language of tech and love.”

  “Ask him about the mechanical bull sometime,” said Chuck, a mischievous glint in his eyes. “He loves telling that story. Trust me.”

  The two walked back to the infirmary—it wasn’t that far away—and when they got there, Mattis felt like they had, genuinely, crossed some kind of threshold. Not quite forgiveness, not quite reconciliation, but the start of something.

  “Okay,” said Mattis, stepping through the threshold and giving Modi and Bratta a polite nod. “How did it go with you two?”

  “We found something important, Admiral,” said Modi. The guy’s whole face seemed to be twitching as though he was struggling to maintain his composure. “There was another vessel that left with the Avenir ship back at Erebus. That’s what was causing the computers to struggle putting together a flight vector; interference from the other ship’s presence.”

  Mattis’s stomach clenched again. Another ship. Stealthed or cloaked? Like the Avenir vessels in the original attack on Earth?