The Last Aeon

by Richard Fox

  “So this Dragonfly’s going to drop us behind their lines?” Santos asked.

  “In a big ball of flame and bloody chunks, maybe,” Aignar said. “Kesaht air defense is too strong.”

  “High Command has most of our air assets on Yate’s Star evaccing the civilians,” Gideon said. “But removing eighteen million colonists isn’t something that can be done quick and easy. We’re not getting any more air assets for another three weeks at least.”

  “What’s our mission, sir?” Santos asked as a waypoint appeared on the slope of a mountain in the No Man’s Land between the Union and Kesaht lines.

  “We stop these Kesaht from making it to safety, then fall back with friendly forces to the nearest shelter,” Gideon said. “From there, we push out soon as the weather allows, see if we can’t catch them in the open again. Force the Kesaht to spread themselves thin, find an opening to exploit to get into their logistics area.”

  “Sir, we are Armor,” Santos said. “This plan strikes me as…cautious.”

  “It is,” Gideon said, his frustration evident. “High Command wants the stalemate to continue. The longer we hold the Kesaht here, the more time we have to evacuate civilians. If the enemy lose their hold here, they’ll push on another front. They’re like bulldogs—soon as they bite, they don’t want to let go.”

  “We’re not fighting to win, Captain,” Aignar said.

  “There’s a wider scope neither of you are thinking about,” Gideon said. “Umbra is an outpost system. We’re only here because of the system’s Crucible. If the Kesaht get control of it, they’ll use it to open a wormhole over Yates, New Denver, or Proxima, and shoot a mass driver through. Yates doesn’t have the system defenses to survive that kind of attack. The other systems have a decent detection and destruction network, but it only takes one hit to ruin a planet.”

  A screen opened up on Santos’s HUD. The edge was red and white chevrons with TOP SECRET in the middle of the video. A ruined cityscape appeared. Ash fell like snow through a dark-gray sky.

  “Novis,” Gideon said. “Hit by a mass driver storm of almost twenty asteroids. Death toll is over nine hundred thousand.”

  “But Novis is to the galactic east,” Santos said. “The Kesaht aren’t attacking anywhere near there.”

  “It wasn’t the Kesaht,” Gideon said as the video winked out and a map of the galaxy came up, with a blue dot marking the Novis system. Ruby rings of nearby Crucibles appeared next. “Vishrakath and Naroosha ships seized the gates in nearby systems. They launched a coordinated mass driver strike before the colony knew what hit them.”

  “War’s taken a turn for the worse,” Aignar said. “The Kesaht want to kill us all, but they seem intent on doing it up close and personal, preserving the planet in the process. The Vishrakath just want to exterminate us all. If one asteroid the size of Manhattan hits a planet at the right velocity, you’re looking at an extinction-level event across the whole place.”

  “We can’t…” Santos felt blood rush to his face as anger blossomed in his heart. “When do we strike back?”

  “The Union doesn’t have enough ships to evac the outlying colonies and launch an offensive against the Vishrakath coalition,” Gideon said. “Too many fires…not enough buckets.”

  “You’d think President Garret would abandon the Hale Treaty and reopen the procedural crèches. Get our manpower back up to the level where we—” Santos stopped as Gideon’s helm snapped toward him.

  “Did Knox and Mars spend a lot of time teaching you strategic-level thinking?” Aignar asked.

  “No, sir,” Santos said, silently thanking Aignar for the chance to step back from angering the commander. “Armor exists to win the tactical fight, to enable operational victories, thus allowing commanders flexibility on the grand scale.”

  “Concentrate on this fight,” Gideon said. “We’ll deal with the Vish in due time…stand by. General Kendall just opened a conference call.” He left the lance network.

  “Did I screw up?” Santos asked Aignar.

  “We’re in interesting times,” Aignar said. “If someone thinks you’re questioning the wisdom of part of the Hale Treaty, you’re suspect against all of it.”

  “You mean the Omega Provision and the Ibarrans’ illegal procedurals,” Santos said.

  “Christ…that,” Aignar said. “That order’s officially on hold. The admiralty almost went into open revolt after a summary execution on the Ardennes. Garret painted himself into a corner when he agreed to that part of the treaty. Of course, he didn’t think we’d ever have illegal proccies in custody either. Damn the Ibarras. Damn all those that sided with those traitors.”

  The Dragonfly banked to one side and rose in the air, matching the slope of a mountainside passing beneath their feet. The release point icon on the HUD maps vanished.

  “Change of plans?” Santos asked.

  “Welcome to the battlefield,” Aignar said as he cycled gauss shells into the double-barreled cannon mounted on his forearm, “where the enemy gets a vote and operation orders get tossed in the garbage soon as things kick off.”

  “But this means we’ll be in the fight soon, doesn’t it?” Santos asked.

  “You learn quick, kid. I’ll give you that,” Aignar said.

  Gideon joined the network again.

  “Pathfinder observation post spotted a Kesaht armor column heading north through the valley. We’re moving to intercept,” the captain said.

  Santos loaded his gauss cannons and an icy chill blossomed in his heart. He told himself it was just adrenaline, priming him for combat, not fear. Never fear.

  A blinking diamond appeared ahead of the Dragonfly on the map, less than a minute away and just over a mountain ridge.

  “Iron Dragoons,” Gideon said. “I am Armor.”

  “I am fury,” Aignar said, bashing a fist against his chest and causing the Dragonfly to wobble slightly.

  “I will not fail,” Santos said as he reached over his shoulder and gripped the handle on his Mauser heavy rifle.

  The transport crested over a snow-covered ridge and the retro thruster flared, arresting its forward momentum. The clamps around the Armors’ waists released and the lance dropped onto a pristine white slope.

  Santos’s feet sank into almost three feet of snow before crunching against rock. He loped forward, bounding down the mountainside, kicking up clouds of powder with each step.

  Below, a wide, iced-over river snaked through the valley. Target icons sprouted up through the valley, the forward edge almost around a bend. Kesaht tanks were in the lead—massive, iron-clad war machines on treads with double-barreled turrets.

  “Target lead elements,” Gideon said. “Bottle them up in the valley. No mercy. No survivors.”

  Santos released the mag locks on his Mauser and flipped it over his shoulder and into his other hand. He marked a tank just behind the leading Kesaht vehicle and zoomed in. A Sanheel officer—a large, centaur-like creature with gold cords entwined in its long braids—was half out of a cupola, shouting at Rakka foot soldiers milling around the tank.

  Santos lined up a shot, using his suit’s targeting systems to compensate for the uneven bounds down the mountain. Sailing over a drop-off, he landed in a snowdrift that exploded in a cloud of white.

  When he heard the crack of Aignar’s and Gideon’s Mausers, he cursed himself for not firing. His momentum carried him out of the snow and dislodged a shelf of iced-over snow, sending a segment of the slope the size of a baseball diamond’s infield loose.

  His vision cleared and he targeted another tank. He fired, the force of the Mauser’s heavy shell blowing out a cloud of snow that melted and refroze into ice crystals an instant later. The Armor on the side of the tank flashed as the shell hit and the tank rolled to a sudden stop.

  “Berserkers,” Gideon said.

  At the base of the mountain, a half-dozen deep-gray figures charged up the slope. The Kesaht had their own armor.

  “Re-targeting,” Santos said as a
tank shell slammed into the mountain a few dozen yards behind him, pelting him with rock fragments.

  “No!” Gideon said. “The lead tanks!”

  “Rog—” Another shell exploded just ahead of Santos, slamming him to one side. He ducked into a roll, snow mashing into his every joint and his optics, but a quick blast of infrared and a jarring vibration from his helm’s servos cleared his vision.

  The valley was alive with Kesaht. Moving toward one side of the valley to face the Iron Dragoons were dozens of Rakka. The brutish foot soldiers carried long rifles and bore pelts over their shoulders along with fetishes of bones and souvenirs taken from fallen Rangers on their body armor. Sanheel officers towered over their Rakka soldiers, whipping them toward the fight and shouting in their crude language. Tanks slewed their cannons toward their flank.

  The half-dozen alien armor continued their charge up the slope, bounding forward on all four limbs like a wolf closing on prey.

  Santos took in the enemy force that seemed focused just on him and wondered if Captain Gideon had turned his first battle into a suicide mission.

  “Get in close,” Gideon said. “Grab them by the belt and fight.”

  “Novas?” Aignar asked as his Mauser boomed.

  “Novas,” Gideon said and a command prompt came up on Santos’s HUD as he spun around a boulder. Tank shells bracketed his position.

  He authorized the prompt and a shell popped out of the mortar tube integrated into the back of his Armor. Blast shields slapped down over his optics a split second before three Nova shells exploded, their light so strong it melted the top foot of snow around the base of the mountain.

  The blast shields snapped up and the Kesaht floundered, pawing at their faces and flash-burnt skin. Tank turrets stopped tracking the Terran Armor, their vision slits blackened, their sensors overwhelmed by the Nova shells.

  The Kesaht armor, who had their backs to the explosions, closed on the Dragoons, two for each of them.

  Santos hopped forward and planted a foot on an ice-encrusted boulder. He fired his Mauser, hitting a tank in the thin rear armor and puncturing the ammo stores. It exploded into a shower of flame and twisted metal, scything through nearby Rakka and Sanheel.

  A Kesaht armor lunged at him, its overlong hands ending in serrated talons that glinted in the twilight. The Kesaht’s helm bore a mouth with jagged teeth that opened and screamed at him.

  Santos leaned forward and jumped off the boulder. Tucking his knees into his chest and spinning over, he kicked his heels out and flew over the alien armor, his feet landing on the second attacker’s shoulders. He knocked the Kesaht to the snowy ground with a crunch of metal and the Kesaht slid down the slope, Santos surfing on top of it.

  Racking another round into his Mauser, Santos twisted his torso around on the Armor’s waist gyros. He shot the Kesaht armor scrambling to catch up from behind, blowing a hole the size of a manhole cover in its torso.

  The Kesaht beneath his feet grabbed him by the elbow and jerked him to one side. Santos fell into the snow, the Kesaht latched on to him, and the two iron giants pounded each other as they tumbled down the mountainside.

  The world spun through Santos’s optics, but he caught a glimpse of a tank square in his bumpy, chaotic path.

  Santos braced the Kesaht armor in his arms and twisted hard, slamming the alien into the tank with a bell clang. His shoulder hit the Kesaht, and its body somewhat softened his impact. The alien armor let out a gurgle that sounded somewhere between pain and anger.

  Santos rammed a fist into the Kesaht’s face, crushing the helm against the side of the tank. The Kesaht’s hand snapped open and four clawed fingertips slammed into Santos’s torso, digging into the Armor’s outer layer.

  Santos punched his gauss cannon arm into the Kesaht’s chest and suddenly remembered where the brain case controlling the suit was located. He fired a double shot and the shells blasted through the Kesaht, blowing a small crater in the ground. The Kesaht’s claws popped out of his armor.

  “Aignar? Gideon?” He looked over his shoulder in time to see a Sanheel drive a bayonet toward his helm. He ducked and swung his cannon arm up, deflecting the stab into the top of his helm. The point hit against the curved top of the Armor and Santos heard a fingernail-on-chalkboard screech as it scraped across.

  Pushing off the ground with one leg, Santos drove his shoulder into the Sanheel. The Sanheel were big, massing nearly half a ton, but the impact bashed the Sanheel back onto its hind legs. The Sanheel glared at Santos, its fleshy face adorned with small gold rings, and spittle flew off its tusks.

  It was the first time he’d ever come so close to another species, and all he saw in the alien’s eyes was murder.

  Santos activated the shield on his left forearm and swung his arm around in a hook as it unfurled. The reinforced metal edge sliced through the Sanheel’s neck and popped its head up into the air.

  “Captain?” Santos asked as he shoved the Sanheel’s body aside.

  A tank explosion flashed yellow light across the battlefield. Rakka milled about in near confusion, half-blind from the Nova shells. Smoke and flame bent off wrecked tanks as wind blew through the valley.

  When a Rakka launched into the air from the other side of a rumbling tank and landed in a snap of bones next to him, Santos was fairly certain one of his lance mates was in that direction.

  Bringing his rotary cannon onto his shoulder, Santos fired quick bursts into Rakka as he came around the front of the tank. The primitives were of little threat to him, and the more he cut down, the more the rest of them panicked.

  He cleared the front of the burning wreck and stopped in front of an oncoming tank.

  “Ah, balls,” he said, diving to one side as one of the two turrets fired. He felt the rush of the shell scream by and landed on his flank. As the turret turned toward him, he fed a shell into his Mauser and hit the tank in the treads, blowing through one side and out the other. The tank rumbled forward onto bare road wheels, leaving broken track behind it like shed snakeskin. The tank lurched forward, the leading edge of the armor digging into the ground, crushing one tube like a paper straw against a rock.

  As Santos stood up and looked back to where Aignar and Gideon were still fighting, he heard the whine of hydraulics behind him. Spinning around, he saw the disabled tank’s other tube aiming right at him. There was a blast and Santos went spinning as a shell the size of a football caught him in the side just above the waist.

  The blow spun him like a top, slamming him against the ground and kicking up hunks of ice stained with Rakka blood. Static flooded his HUD and he felt the press of ice against his Armor through the neural link. His side ached—psychosomatic pain to match the damage to his suit.

  When he tried to push himself up, it felt like red-hot razors tore down his spine. He was dangerously close to redlining. Overwhelming his body’s neural systems with scrambled data from his suit would demolish his mind and send him into a coma from which only one Armor soldier had ever recovered.

  His HUD cleared, and he looked up into a sky the color of an old bruise. His shoulder servos sprang back and forth, but his arms didn’t move. Santos concentrated on lifting a hand, but the neural feedback turned into fire in his mind.

  On an intellectual level, he knew he’d trained to recover from a battle-damage disconnect, but here, beneath an alien sky and in the midst of his first life-and-death battle, panic was on the verge of taking over.

  Not now. Not here. I won’t let Father be right about me! he thought.

  A Sanheel bashed the butt of its rifle against his helm, making Santos’s vision wobble. The alien loomed over him and drove a bayonet into the Armor’s chest, the point sinking an inch into the metal before sticking. The Sanheel flashed a smile around its tusks and pulled it from side to side like a lever, digging deeper into the Armor.

  “Time to die, demon!” the Sanheel shouted.

  A pair of metal hands clamped around the alien’s head, which exploded in a splatter of
bone and maroon brain matter.

  Gideon flung the Sanheel aside and stepped over Santos.

  “Stay down,” Gideon said as his gauss cannons barked and he loaded a shell into his Mauser.

  “I can fight.” Santos propped himself up, but Gideon stomped a heel against his chest and pinned him to the ground.

  “Down! You’re no good to anyone if you redline.” Gideon’s Mauser cracked and the recoil swayed him back slightly. “System reboot. Now.”

  “That takes—”

  Gideon lifted his heel a bit and whacked it against Santos’s chest hard enough to rattle him inside his inner pod.

  Feeling his face flush with embarrassment, Santos relinquished his hold on his suit and reset his sync. If the Sanheel didn’t overwhelm and kill Gideon in the next few minutes, he’d return to the battle with reasonable control over his Armor.

  He listened to the fight around him. Shame nagged at him, and he wasn’t sure if it was because he needed to be rescued or because he doubted his lance would save him when he needed them the most.

  Neither answer was acceptable…and both could have been true.

  Chapter 9

  Makarov crossed her arms across her chest as she watched a single dot in the holo plot inch closer and closer to Ouranos. She activated the mag locks in her boots, heard them click and grip the deck plating, a nervous gesture, which wasn’t a successful trait of flag officers and admirals. Every now and then, though, something slipped through the mask of command. Particularly when she was bored.

  “Ma’am,” Andere said, tapping at his workstation along the ring around the holo table, “we’ve got movement from the Cyrgal ship.”

  “How many hulls?” she asked.

  “Just one, Admiral,” the man said, swallowing hard, “but it is something to see.”

  A green diamond flashed over Ouranos’s inner moon. Makarov enlarged the spot with a flick of her fingers.