by Dan Schiro
Orion winced. “That bad?”
“Sort of.” She gestured at the bright projections. “I’ve placed the source deep in a ravine, but that’s not the bad part, or parts, I should say. It’s on this landmass, right in the middle, see?” She grimaced. “You’ve got flash climate anomalies here, probably some kind of rogue weather weapon. You’ve got a glacier bomb eating up this angle of approach, and you can’t fly through that kind of blizzard. Then here, pretty straight forward, a bomb blast that’s been burning for longer than anyone here’s been alive.” She glanced back with a grin. “Including Aurelia, surprisingly.”
“That is entirely unnecessary,” Aurelia said from the upper tier of the bridge.
“Well,” Orion said, “that might make approach tricky.”
“Oh, you haven’t seen the cherry yet.” Reddpenning manipulated her controls to eliminate all of the floating graphics but for the rendering of a mechanical insect. “This,” she said as she enlarged the figure to the size of a small dog, “is a kind of self-replicating warbot.”
“Hmm,” Orion said, his eyes inspecting every detail of the sharp-edged robot. “Those have been illegal for a long time.”
Costigan grunted, folding his arms across his chest. “I think we might be looking at the reason why.”
Reddpenning sat back and pulled her long dark braid over her shoulder. “If I’m reading the data from our sensor net correctly — and I am, I upgraded the thing myself — there’s a hoard of these buggers a few million strong massed on one edge of the canyon rim.”
“Massed doing what?” Orion asked, shaking his head. “Is this Typhus’ standing army?”
“I don’t think so.” Reddpenning twisted her dark plait for a moment. “The kinetic activity of the bots suggests… I don’t know, all-out warfare.”
“I have heard of this,” Kangor said, raising his voice from the back of the bridge. “The vycart military abandoned their use long ago because they were unreliable.” He shrugged. “In the absence of an enemy, they would turn on allies, strip landscapes bare, even consume one another, endlessly destroying and rebuilding.”
“A mechanical blood orgy,” Aurelia added with an amused twist of her mouth. “Churning through sex and death forever.”
Orion nodded grimly and turned back to peer over Reddpenning’s shoulder. “Any chance we can just bomb the site from orbit?”
“Oh, hon,” Reddpenning said with a tsk. “I would have led with that.”
“As usual,” Costigan put in with a snort, “she’s right. There’s an old network of target-blockers still active that would make it hard to hit the broadside of a barn.”
Orion could almost hear Kangor’s bushy orange eyebrows furrowing before the big man spoke up. “The Grand Warlord hides on a farm?”
“Yes, that does seem odd,” Dalaxa added.
“A human figure of speech, guys,” Orion said without a glance back.
Dalaxa chuckled weakly. “I forget that your race was strictly agrarian just 10 minutes ago.”
“Anyway,” Orion said with a roll of his eyes, “we have to get down there. Start loading up the Briarhearts in squad saucers, and I’ll—”
“Whoa, whoa,” said Costigan, swiveling his chair to stare up at Orion. “Slow down there, OG.” He scratched at the back of his dark, buzz-cut scalp and seemed to weigh his words carefully. “We appreciate the contract, we do, and it will set us up for expansion again this year. But you can’t ask me to send my people into that maelstrom.” He shot a rueful look at the main viewscreen. “I mean, what is this job, OG? If it’s all the threat you say it is, where’s the Union? Where are the Legionnaires? Where’s the SpaceCorps armada with 10,000 warmechs ready to planet-dive?”
“Cos, trust me, I wish that was possible. But…”Orion sighed. They were all good questions. “We’ve got to do this alone.” He pointed at Dalaxa. “When she was abducted, somebody in Parliament scrubbed her name from the Union black books. That means someone sold her, and her weapons, to this madman.”
“What the hell?” Dalaxa let go of the interface terminal and straightened up. “No one ever told me that!”
“Later,” Orion said with an apologetic glance. “Cos, you know Zovaco Ralli, and you know he’s working just as hard as we are to unlock things on his end. Until we get his go-ahead, there’s a chance the Union might send that armada to scrub us from the books too.”
“Plus, who wants to wait for bunch of bureaucrats?” Aurelia added dryly. “They’ll take a month to vote to send a probe out here.”
“This is true,” Kangor said with a solemn nod.
“All the squad saucers have to do is follow me,” Orion said, jaw jutting at the ravaged planet on the viewscreen. “I’ll thread that needle, you know I will. And if we can stop Typhus the Mad Thinker here, now, we could save billions of lives.”
Costigan grimaced and turned a pained gaze to his business partner and wife. After a moment of wordless communication, he looked back at Orion with a nod. The thickset man leaned over a microphone mounted on his control dash and touched a button. “Briarhearts,” he said in a commanding deep voice. “Teams Gold, Blue and Red, prepare to deploy. I repeat, teams…”
Minutes later Orion sat in the captain’s chair of his Prodigal Star, keying up launch with Bully at his side, while Kangor took the operations station and Aurelia and Dalaxa belted into their crash couches. “Preparing to open the hangar bay,” said Reddpenning’s voice from Orion’s control dash.
“Red team good to go,” Adler said over the audio link from her squadron saucer.
“Blue team good to go,” said Seals, captaining another of the 12-man transports.
“Gold team good to go,” Zagzebski added from his own saucer.
“AlphaOmega good to go,” Orion said as he tapped in a few last commands.
The metal jaws of the hangar bay opened beneath them. Orion’s mirror-bright, asymmetrical ship tumbled out of the White Heath followed by three gunmetal-gray saucers branded with the Briarhearts’ thorn-wrapped heart logo. They tumbled slowly toward the war-torn orb until their dropships achieved some small measure of separation from the White Heath.
“Everyone keep a visual lock on me,” Orion said to the other pilots as he tuned his shift-skin to a bright cherry red. “I’ll find a way through the storm, I always do.” After he heard the others chuckle and assent, Orion fired his ship’s powerful ion engine at full-bore.
The four ships plunged toward the planet, and fear gripped Orion’s stomach like a fist. He was nowhere near the pilot Katherine Vanlith had been, and this approach was vastly more difficult than their escape from Wormrock Penitentiary. Still, Orion did have the training Crag Dur Rokis Crag had imparted to him, so perhaps he could improvise. He began by splitting his mind into two pieces. In one corner he entered the White Room, seeing only angles and force vectors while slowing the world around him. Another segment of his consciousness entered Blooming Flower to lay bare the secret algorithms of the chaos rushing up at him on the viewscreen. They were on the cusp of the smoky upper atmosphere when a great ribbon of blue light cut in front of his ship, missing them by a frighteningly narrow margin. Alerts rang and flashed on the control dash in front of him, and the ops station projected a holographic threat analysis.
Seals cried out first. “The hell was—”
“Still firing—” came Zagzebski’s deep voice.
“Weave, weave,” Orion said as he wrenched the navigation wheel in front of him. “Kangor, what do we got?”
The big vycart swore under his breath as his huge hands tapped clumsily at the ops station console. “Orbital particle gun. Its solar sails are only at 19 percent, but—”
“Shit, shit,” yelled Adler over the connection, her end crackling. “It clipped me, we’re losing power!”
“Pull up, Adler,” yelled Orion as Bully whined in the secure hutch at hi
s side. “Get out of orbit and signal White Heath for pick up!”
“Sorry!” shouted Adler through the distortion on her end.
“We still on?” asked Seals.
“Stay with me,” Orion grunted as he barrel-rolled away from the ancient particle beam’s killing gaze. “If we get close to the ground, it won’t be able to target us.”
“We’re behind you, OG,” said Zagzebski, strain in his voice as if he lifted some heavy weight.
“By the stars,” Dalaxa murmured, clutching her stomach on the crash couch. “I don’t feel so well…”
Orion led them through the planet’s patchy shell of clouds, the sediment-thick atmosphere roaring around their ship, and plunged within a few thousand feet of a cracked black landmass. Slender gray tornados swirled all around them, churning up out of nothing, combining, splitting and dwindling like no natural pattern he had ever seen. The two pieces of his mind fell into rhythm as he flattened out their descent, and soon he saw the alleyway between the violent weapons of weather. He accelerated into the gap, and to their credit, Seals and Zagzebski followed him through with their squadron saucers flying on edge.
Seals cried out with glee when they escaped the field of storms. “Yeah!”
“Hell yeah!” Zagzebski screamed.
“No high-fives yet,” Orion hissed at them as a they approached a stark dichotomy of landscape. On the left, a thick veil of snow fell over a glacial slab of ice where a heat-subtraction bomb had hit long ago. On the right, a glittering swarm of tiny warbots swelled in towering waves like an angry ocean of steel that stretched for miles and miles. Pulse bolts and plasma weapons added dazzling flashes of blue and green to the senseless battle, and intermittent explosions lifted tight, smoky mushroom clouds into the air. The glacier sat immovable, and though the warbots’ violent churn brought the edge of the battle close, the chaos never quite spilled onto the forever-frozen slopes. Orion guessed that some kind of environmental sensors warned the warbots away from the subzero temperatures, and he hoped that would give his team the margin they needed.
“Stay with me, and keep it steady,” Orion said to the other pilots as he aimed for the edge of the blizzard.
“Keep it steady,” Dalaxa said with a trembling voice. “Excellent advice, I suppose.”
Orion’s Prodigal Star thrummed and bounced as the thick sheets of snow hit them, and Bully’s whine voiced the anxiety everyone was likely feeling. Orion knew he dared not fly any deeper into the blizzard where the effects of the bomb were stronger. Skimming the edge of the heat-subtraction zone would keep them away from the warbots’ mosh pit without clogging their ships with ice, if they could make it through fast enough. The viewscreen grew dark gray with the mesmerizing static of swirling snow, and Orion could hear Zagzebski cursing through gritted teeth over the howl of the icy wind. The navigation wheel in Orion’s hands shook so hard he thought it might snap off, but then the viewscreen lightened a few degrees as they neared the other side of their shallow dive through the blizzard.
“Hang in, hang in,” Orion muttered.
“Shit, I’m losing altitude,” cried Seals.
“Hang in,” Orion ordered.
“Ion engine’s at 13 percent,” said Seals, voice straining. “I gotta pull out of this storm!”
“Seals, no,” Orion shouted as he flipped up the aft camera window on the viewscreen.
Seals’ squad saucer veered right, cruising out over the thrashing sea of warbots. Within seconds, the mechanical shapes rose hundreds of feet on rockets and wings to swarm his saucer, their sharp pincers gnashing and their cutting lasers glowing red. The warbots quickly enveloped the ship, and for a second Orion could hear Briarhearts screaming over the audio link. Then the link died with a click. The saucer plummeted toward the ground and warbots swarmed over it.
“Seals, Seals, come in,” shouted Zagzebski over the link.
“We lost him,” Orion barked. He flicked away the aft camera window and saw the edge of the snowy veil ahead. “Stay with me, Zagzebski.”
“Five miles to the objective,” Kangor hissed from ops. “Four miles…
“Airbrake as hard as you can on my mark,” Orion shouted into the mic on his control dash. “Three… two… mark!”
The Prodigal Star escaped the realm of the heat-subtraction bomb and Orion hammered the emergency inertial dampener. Below them, an abyss yawned, thousands of feet wide and incalculably deep, its depths swathed in glinting shadows. On the other side of the great ravine, a wall of orange and blue flames rose up hundreds of feet, burning as if the nano-chemical bombs had fallen yesterday and not millennia ago.
Orion clutched the navigation wheel and wrestled his finely tuned ship to a hover halfway across the dark canyon. He almost breathed a sigh of relief until Zagzebski’s squad saucer skidded through the air ahead of them, the craft’s bow and landing thrusters firing like a dozen white-hot torches. For a tense moment, Orion feared Zagzebski would lose control of the flat vessel and tumble end-over-end into eternal flames. Yet the saucer came to a stop with a thin cushion of superheated air to spare. Dalaxa retched up whatever little breakfast she had been able to stomach, Zagzebski cursed profusely over their audio link, and Orion finally breathed out.
“OG,” said Zagzebski, panting, “we have to go back to—”
“Follow me down,” Orion said, cutting him short. “Stay close, but let me go first and scope it out. No chatter the rest of the way, unless absolutely essential.” Orion frowned and killed the connection with a stab of his finger. “Kangor,” he added with a quick glance at his tense friend, “start a full spectrum sensor sweep.”
He maneuvered down into the ravine slowly, his asymmetrical ship wobbling with the wild drafts swirling through the darkness. Kangor’s clumsy scans told Orion they had nothing to fear in the way of security systems, booby-traps or counter-detection measures, so he flipped on the Prodigal Star’s exterior floodlights. The walls of the canyon glittered on the main viewscreen, the rock and sand melted to faceted glass by an orbital particle beam. Toggling his camera angle, Orion saw a thin line of bubbling molten orange below him where the ancient planetary wound had pierced the crust of War Blight. They descended for hundreds of feet until the sky was a gray band above them, and then Orion’s control dash blinked with a green light.
“Zagzebski,” he said as he opened the audio link again. “You still with me?”
“Yeah,” he said sullenly after a moment. “I’m with ya, OG.”
“I’ve picked up something on the magnetic resonance scan.” Orion activated his directional thrusters and started for a dim outcropping along one wall. “Follow my lead and prepare to land.”
The two ships cruised on humming thrusters until they reached a tremendous hole bored in the glassy wall of the ravine. A large landing platform as sturdy as anything on Konnexus waited grafted to the wall, its clean-swept plasticrete surface devoid of dropships. Orion and Zagzebski brought their vessels in for landing, and though no alarms sounded, both squads scrambled out of their dropships ready for battle. Orion and his team came down the ramp grouped together to protect each other, while Zagzebski’s 12 Briarhearts fanned out with pulse rifles ready to fire. Still neither man nor machine came to life to oppose them.
“Stand by, everyone,” Orion said as he vanished his silver bo staff back into his spellblade gauntlet. “This place looks too quiet,” he said with a glance at his crew.
“Have we come too late?” Dalaxa asked, her pearly skin and pink scalp speckles gleaming in the floodlights of the dropship. “Or were we intentionally misled?”
Orion shrugged. “Only one way to—”
“OG, hold up,” Zagzebski said as he shuffled over, still scanning the entrance into the ravine wall over the barrel of his hefty rifle. “Let me take half my squad, go back for Seals.” The swarthy man towered over Orion, his frame even larger than usual in his maroon-and-gray
assault armor. “I owe him that. We both do.”
“There’s nothing to go back for, Zag.” Orion looked up into Zagzebski’s pleading brown eyes and forced his face to remain placid. He knew the man had lost his best friend, but everything that had been Seals or the other Briarhearts had already been broken down. Those atoms were part of the warbots’ churn now, fodder for their endless cycle of destruction and rebirth. “I’m sorry,” he told Zagzebski. “But we have to go forward. Your head in it?” he added pointedly.
“We go forward.” Zagzebski snorted, his face twisting with anger, and nodded. “Understood, OG.”
Orion rallied the sum of their firepower to him and led the way across the smooth plasticrete landing pad, his huge dog stalking tensely at his side. The Briarhearts deployed datacubes to light their way, and the towering doors of a cargo entrance built into the wall of the ravine gleamed coldly ahead. The thick steel doors stood ajar, one of them off-track and vibrating as a dying servomotor whirred and strained to force it closed. Orion conjured a long straight sword in his hand and slipped through the opening, the others hustling in behind him and spreading out.
They found themselves in a large dropship hangar, the cathedral-like space empty but for a few crates and discarded diagnostic machines. A security door gaped open on the other end of the hangar, and Orion led the team toward it with a chorus of eerily echoing steps. Though Orion was beginning to believe the enemy base was deserted, Bully bristled and growled at his side.
Kangor took the dog’s cue and sniffed the musty air. “We are not alone,” he growled.
Orion saw a flash of pale blue flesh leap from behind a pile of crates, the shape incredibly quick yet somehow still lurching and lumpy. The creature cried out with a guttural voice as it charged through the shadows, and then the screaming began.
Chapter 14
The lurching blue form seized one of the Briarhearts and tore off the man’s arm at the elbow. As the mercenary flailed back screaming, the other Briarhearts swiveled as one and opened fire with their pulse rifles. The dark hangar blazed bright as the bolts streamed past Orion in a quick flurry and stopped. The knot of blue muscles stumbled back into the shadows, moaning and smoking.