The Last Aeon

by Richard Fox

“There is no mercy in this war,” Gideon said. “No quarter asked. None given.”

  “Why are they even fighting us?” Santos asked, dropping the body to the ground.

  “The Ibarras want us to believe the Toth are controlling them,” Gideon said. “Truth. Lie. Doesn’t matter. That they are the Union’s enemy is reason enough for me to kill them. We are Armor. We are fury.”

  “We will not fail,” Santos said, looking to the distance as the rain lessened ever so slightly. “We should keep moving. Get to the target while the weather’s still masking our movements.”

  Gideon’s anchor spike tapped a quick rhythm against the rock. A reply vibrated against their feet a few seconds later.

  “I’ll take point,” Gideon said. “Aignar will link up.”

  Santos fell behind his captain. He gave the dead Rakka a quick look before it was lost in the storm.

  Chapter 17

  The Iron Dragoons entered a forest of trees with smooth bark, trunks thick as a ground car, their tops lost to a low fog and the night sky. Wet creaks and groans reverberated through the air and Santos looked up and switched his optics. The heat image of the forest canopy made him stop in shock.

  Branches were growing out of the trees, like tentacles reaching out of an animal.

  “That’s…something,” Santos said.

  “Focus, kid,” Aignar said.

  Santos switched back to his night-vision filters and closed formation with his lance, keeping a few meters between each suit as they worked through the forest.

  “Storm like that,” Aignar said, “doesn’t pay to have branches that can catch the wind.”

  A lizard the length of a human arm scurried up a trunk. It stopped and canted its head from side to side, regarding the Armor.

  “You’d think all this metal would convince animals we’re not food,” Aignar said. “But let me tell you about these whales on Nimbus IV.”

  Gideon’s helm snapped toward Aignar.

  “Some other time. I’ll tell you some other time.”

  A shroud of fog descended through the forest as the sound of trees branching out continued, squealing like a wet log in a firepit.

  Gideon sent a map image to the lance. The three were on a mesa, a few hundred yards from the edge. A firing point with ID4—Santos’s designation as the fourth-ranked Iron Dragoon—blinked at the top of the cliff.

  “We’ll have a clear shot on the supply depot from there,” Gideon sent. “Priority targets are logistics transports, then container yards, then warfighting equipment. Santos, you understand why?”

  “Desired effect is to draw the Risen out of his position on the front lines. If the Kesaht supply system can’t get bullets and fuel to him, he has to go back to rearm,” Santos said. “And any tanks or armored personnel carriers there are either in the depot for maintenance—and out of the fight—or fresh to the battlefield and will need all the supplies we’re about to blow to hell.”

  “Sound analysis,” Gideon said.

  Santos felt a weight fall off his shoulders.

  “Synchronize fire once you’re anchored,” Gideon said. “Break for your positions and avoid enemy contact.”

  “Moving,” Santos said and took off at a run, following his HUD’s path to the edge of the mesa. Gideon and Aignar split off in separate directions.

  The pounding of his feet through the woods was oddly comforting. To run and not tire once struck him as a miracle of the technology. To fight without fatigue, without the limitations of his muscles and endurance, gave him a confidence that he’d never experienced before. In Armor, the only thing holding his performance back from the limit of the suit was the soldier’s mind.

  A rumble came through his audio receptors—pounding footfalls at odds with his cadence. Neither Gideon nor Aignar were close enough to make IR contact in the fog. Santos slid to a stop next to a wide tree trunk and braced a shoulder against it. The rumbling grew louder and a herd of equine creatures with deep-purple skin bolted out of the forest and stormed past him.

  The creatures’ heads came up to the middle of his chest, enormous in size compared to an Earth horse. One of them reared away from Santos and crashed to the ground, tripping up two more of its kind.

  The one on the ground let out a bleat and scrambled to its hooves. It bounded away.

  “There a fire?” Santos wondered out loud. He stepped away from the tree and continued, his feet sinking slightly in the soil churned from the herd’s passing.

  He moved forward carefully. He had the least distance to cover to his firing point and could afford to be cautious.

  A wet slap carried through the fog, followed by a clank of metal.

  Santos unlocked his MEWS hilt from his thigh and keyed the blade into a short-bladed gladius configuration. Dew coalesced along the metal.

  In a small depression between trees, the edges rimmed with thick roots, a Kesaht armor crouched over a dead equine lying in blood-soaked mud. The Kesaht’s armor was filthy and bore crude runes dabbed in blood and ash on the shoulders and back. It ripped a handful of flesh away and stuffed it into its mouth. Needle-sharp teeth chewed, but the flesh just squeezed through the fleshless jaw and dribbled down the back of the mouth.

  The Kesaht was feeding, but nothing went into the metal body.

  Santos stopped at the edge of the depression, feeling a mixture of shock and disgust at what he saw. He flipped the gladius into a reverse grip and jumped toward the Kesaht, blade stabbing downward.

  The alien swiped a claw through the air and deflected the strike, the edge drawing sparks as it nicked the Kesaht’s forearm. The enemy’s blood-soaked mouth opened and a roar burbled out of a speaker within.

  Santos bashed the hilt against the Kesaht’s head, turning the roar into a stream of static. The enemy grabbed him by his forearm, pushing the blade up and away, then raised a knee up to its chest and kicked Santos in the thigh, knocking the leg back and unbalancing him. It wrapped a hand around his sword grip and tried to pry it out of his hand.

  Santos let it go and the gladius bounced off the equine’s body and into the mud. The Kesaht shoved the Armor back and picked up the weapon.

  Electricity crackled out of the hilt and up the Kesaht’s arm. The alien’s grip tightened as the discharge overloaded the Rakka’s brain inside the suit.

  Santos stomped a boot onto the Kesaht’s foot and threw an uppercut into its midsection. The blow jerked it up, and its pinned foot kept it from going flying and transferred the force of the blow into its body.

  The Kesaht tore free at the waist and flopped into the dirt. Santos lifted a heel and crushed its sternum with a crack of metal. Sparks spat out of the throat speaker like a last dying breath.

  He grabbed the edge of the hilt and the electric storm shut off.

  “That’s mine,” he said, slapping the flat of the blade against a knee to knock blood and bits of mud away.

  The rumble of an oncoming stampede sounded through the fog. He looked toward the rim and dropped into a defensive stance as two more Kesaht armor came charging at him. One leaped forward, claws out and reaching for him.

  Santos drove a knee up and into the Kesaht’s chin, breaking teeth into a shower of glinting metal. The Kesaht’s momentum carried it forward and it managed to get its arms around Santos. The two fell to the ground with a thump.

  Santos passed the gladius to his other hand and pressed his fist against the side of the Kesaht’s neck as its legs tried to wrap around him and lock him in place. The fist retracted and a punch spike shot into the alien’s neck, cracking joints and servos.

  The other Kesaht stood over them and raised its hands, then swung the clawed tips of its fingers at Santos’s helm.

  The Armor wrenched the punch spike inside the neck housing and ripped off the Kesaht’s helm. The other enemy’s strike shredded the helm into a thousand pieces. Santos squeezed the hilt on his gladius hard and the blade morphed into a thin cone with a sharp point. He drove the point into the other Kesaht’s knee ser
vo, jamming it into place.

  Santos then shoved the headless enemy off him and rolled to one knee.

  The Kesaht beat at the weapon lodged in its knee, snarling as it sent a jolt through its hands every time it touched it.

  Santos yanked out the gladius and stabbed it into the Kesaht’s chest, driving the spike up to the hilt. The Kesaht froze as though it had been shut off, and Santos drove a shoulder into it, using the blow to free his weapon.

  The headless Kesaht kicked and beat in the mud. Santos stood over it, pinned a flopping arm to the ground, and rammed the spike into the brain case. He slid it out and looked back at the half-eaten creature, then to the Kesaht at his feet.

  “What was done to you?” he asked. “Do the ones that locked your mind in there even know what you’re going through? They even care?”

  With a flick of his wrist, he drew the spike back into the hilt and locked it onto his thigh just as an alert flashed on his HUD. The fire mission was less than five minutes away.

  Santos cursed and took off at a run, pushing his Armor as fast as it would go, heedless of the noise he was making.

  The forest thinned and he came out into a small clearing that ended with a steep drop into a gray abyss of fog. He slid to a stop with a shower of small rocks.

  As Santos changed his optics to infrared, the valley beneath the fog came into view and he saw a sprawling spaceport ten kilometers away. He recognized the design of quick-built Terran Union warehouse domes and prefabricated buildings. Circling the spaceport was a sprawl of geodesic huts, cut through with wide avenues leading into the port. A massive Kesaht lander—a squat, ugly ship with a hull that looked like it was made of segments of tree bark nailed to the ship’s frame—took up most of the main pad.

  A low defensive wall formed the inner perimeter and Santos spotted weapon nodes every few hundred yards. The Union kept rail guns inside; what the Kesaht had replaced the weapons with was not a question he wanted an answer to just yet.

  “New guy,” Aignar’s voice came through the IR, weak and static-laden. “Drop your damn anchor. Manual aim.”

  “Manual? At this distance?” Santos lifted a foot and a drill bit extended out of his heel. He rammed it into the ground and it bore into the rock beneath the topsoil. He opened the rail vane housing on his back and extended the twin matte-black lengths over his shoulder and aimed it at the spaceport in the distance.

  Energy flooded the magnetic capacitors and he unsnapped a shell the length of his Armor’s hand off his waist. He tapped the shell against his helm twice and snapped it into the rail gun’s breech.

  “You didn’t see the sensor globes they’ve got on the walls?” Aignar asked. “You use a targeting laser, they’ll backtrack it instantly. You want to eat counterfire?”

  “I just got here,” Santos said, watching as the charge level on the rail gun ticked higher. “Ran into some trouble.”

  “Santos, your target is the ship,” Gideon said.

  “Confirmed,” he said. Bringing the crosshairs onto the alien lander, which was nearly the size of a Union cruiser, he realized the captain had given him the largest, easiest-to-hit target.

  “Base activity picking up,” Aignar said. “Got Sanheel running around their motor pool.”

  “They know we’re out here,” Gideon said.

  “I took them down without firing a shot,” Santos said. “But…no excuse, sir. They must have sent back a warning.”

  “Thirty seconds from now, they’ll know exactly where we are,” Aignar said.

  Santos cut the input from his audio receptors and braced himself against the inside of his pod. Rail cannon shots had the advantage of firing a hypervelocity slug that traveled with enough velocity to make orbit meant that correcting for wind and other gunnery factors to a short range target was an afterthought. The blast wave from such a shot, on the other hand, was of significant concern.

  Rail guns were meant to be fired in a vacuum. Employing them in an atmosphere would be deadly to any unarmored living thing nearby.

  “On my mark,” Gideon said.

  Santos stared at the enemy ship. His heart skipped a beat when hull segments snapped open and point defense turrets came out.

  “Sir, they’ve got—”

  “Fire!” Gideon ordered.

  Santos delayed just long enough to feel the slap of twin blasts of overpressure against his Armor. He dragged his crosshairs onto the lander and fired. Lightning arced down his vanes and the shell launched, leaving a trail of ignited oxygen in its wake.

  The lander buckled like it had been stuck by an invisible axe. The forward section broke away and crashed to the ground and fire exploded out of the point defense turrets.

  “Ha! Direct hit!” Santos shouted.

  There was a rumble beneath his feet. He looked down and a crack opened in the ground from his anchor and spread to the cliff’s edge.

  “Crap.” He began unscrewing his anchor from the bedrock, but he was still locked to the ground as the ground beneath his feet collapsed into a small depression. He heard the rumble of boulders breaking loose and falling into the valley.

  The ground between him and the cliff edge sloped down and slid away.

  “Crap. Crap!” His anchor came loose and he backpedaled, his heels digging into the soil as it loosened into a stream of dirt pouring over the cliff. Santos launched himself backwards and rolled over. He crawled through the collapsing ground, trying to reach the nearest tree, but it felt like he was swimming against a river.

  He sank into the growing avalanche, and just as it occurred to him that his father wouldn’t even have a body to bury, something clamped onto his arm and the roar of dirt subsided.

  He looked up at Aignar, dangling in the air above him. One hand grasped Santos’s forearm; the other held on to Gideon’s foot. The captain had his arms wrapped around a tree trunk, and his fingers dug into the bark.

  Santos looked down to a long drop into a cloud of pulverized rock.

  “You waiting for an engraved invitation?” Aignar asked. “Climb, bean head!”

  Santos reached up and clamped on to Aignar’s upper arm. He used his lance mate as a field-expedient ladder to get up to Gideon and onto the new edge of the cliff.

  Aignar followed him, scrambling over the edge and hugging the ground.

  “Nice terra firma. Sweet terra firma,” he said, patting a patch of grass.

  As a messenger drone shot out of Gideon’s mortar and streaked into the sky, Santos looked back at the spaceport. The lander was engulfed in flames, the inferno spreading to nearby supply yards. Small explosions rippled through the valley.

  “You’re the only one that got a hit.” Aignar bopped Santos on the helm. “Point defense came online just before we fired and took out our shots. Why didn’t you say something?”

  “I did! That’s why I staggered my round.” He tossed his hands up and dirt went flying. “Point defense intercepts the initial volley, but can’t react fast enough to reorient to the next attack from a different vector. Funny, that was my last lesson on Titan before I got yanked out of training.”

  “It was enough,” Gideon said. “I sent a report to General Kendall. With all the confusion from the depot being hit, it should get through. Move out. We need to get to our own resupply.”

  Gideon helped the two to their feet and slapped Santos on the shoulder.

  “Well done, Iron Dragoon,” Gideon said and took off at a run.

  Santos was caught flat-footed by the compliment and fell in behind Aignar.

  In his pod, a smile spread across his face.

  Chapter 18

  Makarov watched as the Toth dreadnought flew over an icy archipelago on Ouranos’s southern pole.

  “Still don’t have a clear shot,” Eneko said.

  In the holo, the Concord of Might bore down on the planet, the ponderous vessel pushing forward with all engines blazing. Dozens of new contacts emerged from the Cyrgal ship and sped ahead as a wire diagram of a Cyrgal gunship appeare
d in the holo tank.

  “No fighters,” Makarov said. “Their smallest ship has to carry a full kindred at once.”

  “Maybe they’ll trade the lack of maneuverability for increased firepower,” Andere said. “I would.”

  “Amazon,” Makarov called her wing commander by her call sign, “ready for IR launch.”

  The helmeted pilot appeared in the holo, her Shrike’s cockpit surrounding her.

  “Roger, Warsaw actual,” Amazon said. “Know we’re running the risk of degraded connection with the atmosphere and distance.”

  “I’m aware,” Makarov said. “Have self-destruct safeguards in effect. We make one screw-up, two giant ships will want our blood.”

  “No pressure,” Amazon said and snapped off her channel.

  “Concord of Might,” Makarov said, touching the Cyrgal ship, “cut your velocity twenty percent. My fleet is about to engage.”

  The cyborg alien appeared in the tank.

  “Our ship must match the invader’s orbital plane to fire on them with no threat to the Aeon,” he said. “Our present vector will allow several minutes of sustained fire. While the dreadnought will be destroyed in close orbit to the planet, we’ve enough time to mitigate damage to Ouranos from debris.”

  “It’s a big ship,” Makarov deadpanned.

  “We have every intention of blowing it into small pieces. Reentry friction will take care of the trash.”

  “I like the way you think,” Makarov said. “Be advised the ship will be shielded and—”

  “Not an issue for the amount of firepower we will bring to bear,” the alien said.

  “Toth shields have an oscillation period that can be exploited. Give my guns enough time to find it and—”

  “The decision has been remanded to a committee.” The Cyrgal cut the transmission.

  “How I wish we were doing this with the Dotari,” Makarov muttered. “They know how to get things done.”

  “Toth fighters are boosting,” Andere said. In the tank, tiny icons sprinted ahead of the Last Light toward the Cyrgal ship. The fighters and gunships were on a collision course.