In an effort to be a better commander, Ethan tried to get to know his squad. Rictan Two was Magnum, Three was Hop, Four was Rockhead, Five was Streak, Six was... Blades, and Seven was Carnage. Ethan had the feeling there was a story behind each of those call signs, but he hadn't had the time to ask.
Training consisted of back-to-back simulations on ground, in air, and in space. For the most part, Ethan managed to keep up, but the Rictans were much better mech pilots, and at least as good as he was in the cockpit of a Nova.
Now, an hour after eating a bland breakfast of locally-grown grain that had been mashed into a lumpy porridge, they were all getting ready for a live exercise with real Novas. Their job was to escort the 1st Battalion—Atta's battalion—down from the Liberator, providing cover against a superior number of enemy fighters. In this case the enemy fighters were Gor-piloted Shells, but the real ones would be Avilon's faster, more-maneuverable drones. The exercise was meant to mimic what they would have to do upon arriving in orbit above Avilon.
Ethan sat in his cockpit strapped in and waiting for clearance to launch. Holo displays glowed blue and status lights shone bright all around him. Beyond his canopy lay the main entrance of the hangar, shielded with the fuzzy blue haze of static shields. The mission parameters called for a relatively slower launch via the main entrance rather than the ship's Nova launch tubes. They couldn't afford to rocket out ahead of the drop ships they were escorting.
"Rictans, status report!" Ethan called out over the comms.
Multiple affirmative clicks came back.
"All ready and waiting, SC," Magnum replied, addressing him by the abbreviation of his rank.
Ethan set his comms to the command channel. "Mission control, Rictans are green for launch."
"Acknowledged, Rictan One, please standby... you are cleared for launch. Proceed to nav point Alpha and follow the sequence down."
"Roger that, Control." Switching back to the squadron's channel, Ethan said, "Rictans, we are go for launch."
"Roger that, SC," Magnum replied.
Click. Click-click.
Ethan dialed up his Nova's grav lifts and hovered off the deck. His fired up the main thrusters with a sudden roar, and he and Magnum jetted out side by side, passing through the Liberator's static shields with a sizzle of dissipating energy.
Once through the semi-transparent barrier, space turned from blue to black, and Origin snapped into focus as a mottled green and white ball. Ethan watched on the grid as the rest of the Rictans slipped out behind him in wing pairs. Rictan Seven was the odd one out, so he formed a trio with Five and Six.
Ethan bracketed the nearest drop ship and flew up alongside it. It looked like an overturned garbage dumpster, heavily armed and armored, but no good at maneuvering in atmosphere or generating its own lift—hence the name drop ship.
"I've got incoming enemy contacts at zero by five by twenty, coming up fast from the planet," Magnum reported.
Ethan eyed the group of red enemy contacts on his gravidar display. He counted over six squadrons of Shells in that group—three times as many as they had Novas guarding the First Battalion.
Ethan switched to Hailfire missiles and bracketed the nearest enemy fighter under his crosshairs. All of the ships were set to fire simulated munitions and harmless, low-grade training lasers, but that did nothing to still Ethan's pounding heart. The last time he'd been in a Nova cockpit shooting at Shell fighters, the stakes had been real, and all of the munitions had been live. It was hard to tell his brain otherwise now. In the back of his mind he had this terrible feeling that those Shells would switch to live fire when everyone least expected it.
"SC, we're ETA five minutes to firing range," Magnum said.
"Arm Hailfires and mark your targets, Rictans; we don't want any overkill."
A handful of affirmative clicks came back over the comms. Five minutes ran down in what felt like seconds. Ethan's targeting reticle blazed a solid red and he pulled the trigger, letting fly the first simulated Hailfire. Moving on to the next nearest target, he did the same, being careful to avoid the targets already marked by his squad mates. Hailfires jetted out in streams and began splitting apart as they neared their targets.
The enemy opened fire with bright purple pulse lasers, shooting down dozens of those warheads before they could get close enough to do any damage. A handful got through, and Ethan watched space light up with simulated explosions. Enemy contacts began winking off the grid one after another.
If the engagement had been a real one, those Shells would have been firing back with their own missiles, but they were trying to simulate drones, which would be unable to use their quantum-launched missiles thanks to the Eclipser.
"That evened the odds! Enemy's down by fifteen," Rictan Three reported.
"Don't get cocky," Ethan replied.
Then they reached laser range with the enemy, and the black of space became dazzling as a sun. Enemy fire was so thick that Ethan could barely see the planet through the intermittent flashes of light. The comms came alive with screaming as Rictans tried to warn each other all at once. Five and Four winked off the grid, and Magnum cursed as viciously as if they'd actually died.
The drop ships opened fire then, spitting out golden streams from their ripper cannons. Incoming Shell Fighters were forced to divide their attention, and Ethan flew in a zigzag to jog the enemy's aim. The drop ships took out a few squadrons of Shells, then they flew by one another at speed, and the enemy was forced to come about to chase them down into the atmosphere. Given how much inertia those Shells had to overcome, they likely wouldn't catch up again until the drop ships had already landed, meaning the first part of the mission was already a success.
"Nice work, Rictans," Ethan said. "Time for phase two."
"Sooner I get out of this cockpit, the happier I'll be," Rictan Seven said.
"Cut the chatter, Carnage," Ethan said.
The atmosphere rushed up fast, and soon clouds began streaking by in puffs of white. Ethan's Nova shook and his shields glowed bright blue with the heat of atmospheric entry. Their drop coordinates appeared in the distance as a hollow green diamond. Ethan pulled up a few degrees, aiming more squarely for it. A pair of drop ships raced down to starboard, fading in and out of view as clouds intermittently blocked them from sight. Then they all blew the bottom out of the sky, leaving swirling holes in the clouds. The ground sprawled beneath them—a carpet of green jungles and craggy mountains.
The drop ships began leveling out and slowing down, applying reverse thrust from maneuvering jets, and using their air brakes for increased wind resistance—not that they needed much help there.
"Coming up on the drop site," Ethan announced. "Prepare to switch to grav lifts and hover down."
Click. Click. Click-click.
The green diamond that marked the drop site lay close on the horizon, all but disappearing against the darker green mass of jungle blurring by below them. The jungle looked endless, dark, impenetrable... As they dropped altitude to skim the treetops, Ethan noticed just how tall some of those trees were. One of them was pushing a hundred meters, but it had no branches, no leaves—just an obsidian black trunk. Wondering what it was, Ethan set optical zoom to 10 times—
And saw that it wasn't a tree. It was some type of obelisk. Were those the ruins Therius had referred to?
Ethan marked it on the grid and called it in, "Mission control, this is Rictan One, I'm seeing something down here on the surface, near drop site alpha. Transmitting visual now..."
"Rictan One, this is Control. Those ruins are all over the planet. It's nothing to worry about. They've been investigated a thousand times already."
"What are they?"
"Stay focused on the mission, Commander."
"Roger that. Rictan One out."
Moments later they raced out over a grassy clearing where the green diamond of drop site alpha was located. Ethan killed thrust and glided the rest of the way in. The deafening roar of the Nova's engines disappea
red and now the only sound was the wind buffeting against his wings and fuselage. When he drew near, Ethan powered up the grav lifts and applied full reverse thrust and braking. Forward velocity ran quickly backward to zero and then Ethan deployed landing struts and eased back on the grav lifts until his Nova settled gently into a field of shoulder-length grass.
He and the rest of the Rictans hurried out of their cockpits and found their Zephyrs aboard Drop Ship One. From there they ran down the boarding ramp to help the First Battalion secure imaginary objectives in the jungles.
Ethan was surprised and picked off by a squad of Gors in just the first few minutes. As he lay there, staring up at the blue sky and pretending to be dead, his thoughts turned to the obelisk he'd seen—one of many, apparently.
He wondered who had built it, and why. He also wondered why no one else seemed to be as curious as he was about Origin.
Ethan supposed that most of them had already spent years training here, so they wouldn't find Origin's mysteries as mysterious as he did. But he couldn't help feeling like humanity's past might reveal something critical about its future. There probably wasn't enough time left to figure it out, but he had to try. Just the fact that Origin was so familiar, as if he'd been here before, was enough reason to investigate. Those obelisks couldn't just be meaningless ruins. If they were all over the planet, and they were still standing here after millions of years, then they'd been built to last, and that meant they had to have served an important purpose. The question was—
What?
Chapter 32
Ethan only ate half his dinner, a vat-grown protein slurry the servers called soup. He passed his bowl down to Carnage, who lapped it up with a grin, and then he left the table and went looking for Atta. He found her at a table full of Gors, all of them busy slurping up the last drops of their own slurry. The Gors watched him with slitted reptilian eyes as he approached. Ethan smiled, but his smile faded when the Gors started hissing at him like a pit full of snakes. He decided it was safer not to look at them.
"You seem to be enjoying the food," he said, his eyes on Atta.
"You get used to it," she replied.
More hissing. Ethan glanced sideways to find the nearest Gor glaring at him and slowly rising to confront him. Ethan looked away quickly.
"You're dishonoring them by averting your eyes," she explained.
"They don't seem to be happy with me whether I look at them or not," Ethan replied as the Gor beside him left the table.
"They consider me one of their matriarchs. They're just being protective."
"I see..." Ethan looked away from the Gors again, and the hissing grew louder. "Maybe we should go talk somewhere else before they eat me," he suggested.
Atta rose from the table, her eyes dancing with amusement. "Follow me."
Ethan followed her through the mess hall and out onto an adjoining balcony. The doors automatically opened and shut for them, sealing out the raucous noise of thousands of soldiers busy slurping soup.
Ethan sighed, his ears thankful for the relative silence of the wind. The air was cool and fresh, rich with the smell of green growing things from the surrounding jungle.
"How do you feed them all?" he asked, glancing back over his shoulder to the table full of hulking gray-skinned monsters where Atta had been sitting a moment ago.
"The Gors?" Atta asked. "Most of them have to eat aboard the Sythians' command ships. Omnius created their fleet to be self-sufficient and to grow all of their own food aboard the behemoths."
"Interesting... so all of you have been here training for eight years?"
"Give or take," Atta replied.
Ethan nodded to the horizon where he could just barely see the skinny black stalk of an obelisk limned and gilded with light by the setting sun. "And in all that time, you've never figured out what those ruins are for?"
Atta's brow furrowed. "What ruins?"
"The obelisks."
"Oh, those."
Ethan frowned. "You don't sound very curious."
"They're not very interesting."
"Are you sure about that? They've survived here for millions of years. Don't you think that means they're important?"
Atta shrugged. "Maybe they were to the people who built them."
"And what about those people? What did they look like? Who were they? Therius says they're our ancestors, so there must be some sign of them here that links them to us."
"There is."
Ethan waited for Atta to elaborate, watching the sun set over the tangled tree tops. "Such as..." he prompted.
"The obelisks are tombstones."
"Tombstones?"
"Under each and every one of them are a whole lot of bones. Humanoid, but not exactly human. Based on the few expert opinions we have around here, the bones are closely related to human ones, meaning that we could have evolved from them."
Ethan shook his head. "So they're all dead?"
"I haven't seen any walking around, if that's what you're asking. The ruins of their civilization are all over the Getties, but the jungle has swallowed most of the ones we might have found here. Noctune is the easiest place to see ruins, because they're all pretty well preserved below the ice."
"How do you know that?" Ethan asked.
"Because before I came to Origin I was stranded on Noctune."
"All alone?"
"No, with my mother, the surviving Gors, and the Rictans."
"So that's why you have such a bond with all of them," Ethan said.
"Yes." Atta looked away from the setting sun. "Ethan, all of this talk about ancient history is interesting, but we have a more immediate problem."
Ethan cast another glance over his shoulder to make sure no one was about to come out onto the balcony with them. "Did you find the bombs?"
"I did. All of the ground teams have an identical capsule to carry down and defend. The generals all assumed those capsules have something to do with the Eclipser, because they weren't told where the Eclipser is going to be, but I know where it is, because my battalion is the one that's taking it down."
Ethan looked out to the horizon. "Then Therius really is planning to kill everyone."
"We're not going to let that happen. I can't stop those bombs from getting to the surface without finding a way to oust Therius, and there's not enough time to organize a coup before we jump to Avilon, but we might be able to sabotage the bombs and somehow vaporize them before they're detonated.
"Won't that just let the nanites out anyway?"
Atta shook her head. "Nanites are micro-machines that feed on everything and use the materials to multiply. Apply enough heat and they'll melt, just like any other machine."
Ethan blew out a breath and looked out to the horizon. The sun had sunk below the trees, and now all that remained was a faint glow fighting feebly to compete with the stars. The jungle was a carpet of shadows below them. Ethan imagined the lost cities of a highly advanced race lying buried far below those jungles. What had happened to them? An entire galaxy full of people gone.
"Can I see the bones?" Ethan asked.
Atta shrugged. "I'll take you there tomorrow."
Ethan shook his head. "I'd like to go now if you don't mind."
Atta pursed her lips. "There are predators out at night."
"So we suit up and take a few Gors with us. Should make for good training, don't you think?"
"How am I supposed to clear that with the base commander?"
"Night ops. Tell him I need the extra training."
"What if you get eaten Zephyr and all?"
Ethan's brow furrowed. "Just what kind of predators are we talking about?"
"We call them Nightstalkers."
"I didn't see anything while we were training on the ground today."
"That's because they only come out at night. During the day they're hiding in warrens underground. They don't seem to like daylight."
The breeze felt suddenly cold, and Ethan shivered. "Nightstalkers... they sou
nd friendly."
"Even the Gors are afraid of them."
"And you?"
Atta grinned. "I like a challenge. Gets the blood pumpin' as Magnum would say. Speaking of which, we'd better take the Rictans with us. The Gors are great to have in a fight, but they're superstitious as krak. They think the Nightstalkers are the ghosts of their ancestors come to get them and drag them down to the Netherworld."
Ethan snorted. "Hard to picture Gors being scared of anything."
"That's because you haven't seen a Nightstalker yet. Come on, let's go get suited up. We don't want to waste all of our rack time hunting Nightstalkers and digging up ancient fossils."
"Lead the way..." he said.
Chapter 33
Ethan stood with Rictan Squadron and Atta at the edge of the parade grounds, scanning the shadowy jungle with infrared and light amplification overlays. With those overlays activated, the ground and trees turned varying shades of blue, while living creatures popped out as bright smears of red, orange, and yellow. Ethan counted dozens of small blurry heat signatures hiding out in the trees and a handful of even smaller ones scuttling along the ground. Looking down he noticed that he could even see dozens of creeping, crawling insects, highlighted bright blue against the dark blue ground.
"I thought insects are cold-blooded. Why are they showing up on infrared?" Ethan asked, turning to Atta. Their Zephyrs radiated plenty of heat, too, but the overlays highlighted them green to distinguish them from everything else.
"They're showing up because they're moving," Atta explained. "Your infrared overlay is called IAMS for short, which means Infrared and Motion Scanners. Not everything dangerous radiates heat, so IAMS helps us to identify all possible threats in our environment."
Ethan smiled. "So bugs are threats."
"Not usually."
"What about Nightcrawlers? What should I be looking for?"
Magnum answered this time, "Stalkers, not crawlers. They're warm-blooded, and big, about three meters at the shoulder when standin' on their hind legs. You can't miss ‘em."
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