The Gardens of Nibiru (The Ember War Saga Book 5) (3 page)

Euskal Tower, headquarters of the Ibarra Corporation, stood in stark contrast to the wine-colored storm clouds building on the horizon. Smaller high-rise office buildings and apartment complexes radiated out from the tower. Sections of the buildings on the outer edges of the silent commercial empire were exposed to the elements, like a giant scalpel had sliced hunks of the building away.

Feet scuffed against asphalt. The road now beneath her feet began abruptly—scrub desert one inch, a wealthy suburb the next. Abandoned cars stretched along the road leading to Ibarra’s city, many with clean-cut, fist-sized holes in the roofs and windows.

“T…T, what the hell happened?” Franklin asked through the IR. “Where is everyone?”

“Damned if I know, but that’s why we’re down here,” she said.

“Movement,” Walsh said.

She ducked behind a car and raised her gauss rifle over the bumper, scanning her assigned sector. A brief video clip came up on her visor, a dark shape with bent spikes flit between the distant buildings.

“That’s all I got,” Walsh said.

“Keep moving. Stay alert,” Hale said.

The world snapped away and she stood in the
Breitenfeld’s
hangar deck, staring out into the gray oblivion surrounding the ship. She had her hand on a gurney where Yarrow lay on the hard plastic slab, his arms and legs strapped down with wide belts. She ran her armored hands through her short blond hair and rolled her shoulders. 

“Our chaperone is supposed to meet us here,” Hale said. The lieutenant looked tired, stressed from more than could ever be expected from one man.

“How’s Gunney?” she asked.

“Stable. Doc’s got him a transfusion and the good stuff to keep the pain down.” Hale touched the railing on the gurney and looked over Yarrow. “Whoever’s going to meet us, sure hope they can do more for Yarrow than we can.”

Something flickered against the gray expanse.

“I think I see—”

Everything went to perfect darkness. No sound. No sensation.

The deck returned. Yarrow stood next to the gurney, leaning on it to stay upright.

“I said get a medical team out here, now!” Hale yelled at a security team of masters at arms rushing toward them.

“Sarge?” Yarrow grabbed her shoulder and took a trembling step away from the gurney. “Sergeant Torni, do you think the LT will let me stay with the team after this?” A black line appeared over his mouth and all sound stopped.

The hum of air vents and Hale talking into the ship’s IR returned.

“We all have bad days, Yarrow. It’s up to you to bounce back,” she said.

The world blurred and Yarrow was back on the gurney.

“Our chaperone is supposed to meet us here,” Hale said. The lieutenant looked tired, stressed by more than could ever be expected from one man.

“How’s Gunney?” she asked.

****

The General punched a basalt-colored control panel, knocking a corner off. The hunk bounced across the sandy floor and came to a stop. It melted away and the damaged section regrew to its original form moments later.

A field of connected dots in a thick white haze floated over a plinth in front of the General. He reached into the field and watched as the memory fragments repeated, always skipping the exact same thing perfectly with each attempt.

Light flared from the eye slits on his face plate.

I know you’re here.

Darkness grew around the General and the source of his frustrations. Constellations of stars grew into being, as if the General was standing in deep space.

+You are a brute, meant for destruction, not discovery or inquiry. This is not your task,+ Keeper said.

You bade me return when I have answers to the human anomaly. This…base creature has what I require. But there have been alterations to synaptic pathways. An intelligence far greater than the humans hid something from me and I cannot rip it out of the scan.

+An intelligence greater than your own?+

Do not mock me, Keeper. You didn’t leave the Apex just to take joy in my frustration. What is your purpose?

+I’ve followed your progress, or lack thereof. The humans had help—long-term help—to survive the scouring of their home world. They utilize dangerous technology to oppose us. The longer they’re allowed to survive, the greater the chance they’ll trigger a cataclysm. I cannot wait while you flail about, trying to address the issue.+

If they repeat our mistake, then we will move on. The universe is vast.

+No. I maintain the Apex, not you. The others will not survive if we’re forced to continue our pilgrimage.+

The General remained silent. It glanced at the scan field then back to the Keeper’s infinite depth around it.

The Engineer said the technology was perfect. Stasis without risk.

+His efforts proved wanting. The others will arrive with the Apex. We must begin the final part of our journey soon afterwards or we will succumb to the inevitable. Surrender the scan to me. Focus on your mission to cleanse our new home.+

You will share what you learn?

+Naturally.+

Take it. Then you can report back to me once your duty is fulfilled. I rather like the way this has changed our relationship.

+Your failure to erase the humans put the plan in jeopardy. The others will know of this.+

The star field faded away. The scan field collapsed into a point of compressed data and vanished in a flash.

The General waved his hand through the air and a gash opened in the ceiling. In the space beyond the Crucible where it chose to work, a giant red dwarf star burned in the distance. A small planetoid held steady above the Crucible, and an incomplete net of drones stretched across much of the rock’s surface. More and more drones connected to the net; the sheath would be complete in a few more days, then his advance on Earth would begin.

Cortaro waited at the end of an obstacle course, a timer running down on his forearm computer. The course was a series of irregularly stacked cargo boxes resting on top of small disc-shaped lift bots. The bots, technology used from the old automated warehouses that popped up across the planet in the earlier part of the century, shifted the boxes around, constantly changing the layout. Metal bars ran between some of the boxes, rising and falling as the attached box pairs danced around each other.

A crash came from deep within the obstacle course. A tall box fell over and almost caused a domino effect but the programs within the lifter bots swung away from the falling object.

“Ten-second penalty!” Cortaro shouted.

He heard a grunt and a swirl of light jumped onto a moving pillar. The swirl, a distortion akin to looking through thick water vapor, leapt to another box. It jumped toward a metal bar. There was a metallic thump as something heavy shook the bar. The sound of thumping boots closed on Cortaro.

He heard a muffled curse, and the swirl crashed to the ground right in front of him.

The cloak field withdrew from around the armored Marine at Cortaro’s feet, retreating into a small curved box like smoke being sucked back into a fire.

Orozco looked up at Cortaro. “Time?”

“Haven’t made it yet.” The Gunnery sergeant tapped his foot on a chalk line.

Orozco reached out and slapped the line.

“Four minutes and fifty-two seconds. With penalty.” Cortaro entered the time onto his forearm computer.

“This isn’t fair, Gunney.” Orozco stood up. “I can’t even see my feet when the cloak is on.”

“Well boo-goddamn-hoo,” Cortaro said. “I’ll be sure to tell the Toth that this whole thing is just too darn hard and to look the other way when you pull your bull-in-a-china-shop routine right in front of them.”

“I can’t wait to see him do this when he’s got his Gustav.” The distorted words came from somewhere behind Cortaro. “You think he moves like a big dumb animal now? Just you wait.”

“Who said that?” Orozco lurched behind Cortaro, swiping at the air.

“All right.” Cortaro put his helmet on and activated his cloak. The air seemed to flex and bend around him as the cloak settled. “Everyone through the obstacle. We navigate this obstacle as a unit in less than five minutes—and without strangling Standish—I’ll leave two hours open for free time tonight. Move out.”

****

Bailey stared through the thick scope attached to her sniper rifle. The target, a pair of simulated watermelons, sat hundreds of yards away in the holographic rifle range. She exhaled slowly, feeling the thumps of her heartbeat against her cheek and the tiny patch of exposed skin she had pressed against the trigger.

A ribbon attached to a pole behind the melons fluttered in a breeze.

“Adjust east six meters. Offset shot be another quarter second,” Rohen said. He was behind his own rail rifle, a few feet from Bailey.

“I’ll be a drongo if the wind correction is six meters,” the Australian Marine said.

“Have I been wrong the last five shots?”

“No, and you’re not checking your firing tables either. Which leads me to believe you’re cheating.” Bailey snapped her gum.

“Calculating the wind speed at this distance is—”

Bailey fired, the report little more than a loud snap in the training environment compared to the thunderclap generated by the rail rifle accelerating a tungsten-clad cobalt slug to several times the speed of sound. Rohen fired precisely a quarter second later.

One of the watermelons blew apart. A white dot appeared a foot away from the missed target, showing where the wayward shot had passed by.

“Fuck me,” Bailey said. “I hate missing.”

“I told you. Six meters.” Rohen pushed himself onto his knees. “We keep screwing this up and we’re not going to over penetrate the shielding Mentiq’s got.”

“If he even has the personal shields.” Bailey pressed the butt of her rifle against her shoulder, adjusted the recommended six meters with a click on her scope, and fired again. Her target splattered into chunks. “Just because the big brains claim they found a ‘for sale’ listing in the
Naga
’s computers doesn’t mean Mentiq’s actually got it. He’s probably just another brain in a jar like the rest of them. One clean hit is all we need—a clean hit I can provide without your assistance, thank you very much.”

“Those big brains say a double hit from our rail rifles, at the right interval and at a slower muzzle velocity, will overload the shields and kill him. Her. It. Whatever. That’s why I’m even on this mission,” Rohen said.

“This is a bloody waste of time.” Bailey set her rifle on
SAFE
and sat back on her haunches. “We don’t know any of the atmospheric conditions on Nibiru, don’t know the rotation of the planet, don’t know any of the variables we need to make our ballistics calculations. Do Admiral Garrett and Captain Valdar think we just point and shoot? Let’s see them try to thread a needle at eight hundred meters.”

“We can figure all those out once we make landfall.” Rohen tapped at his forearm computer and the target within the holo range changed to an overlord tank almost a kilometer away. “Same equations, just different inputs.”

“You are entirely too optimistic for me to really like you,” Bailey said.

Rohen scratched his face, his hand trembling enough that Bailey noticed.

“You OK?” she asked.

Rohen stared at his hand and the palsy faded away.

“Just adrenaline,” Rohen said quietly. The pupils within his pale-blue eyes pulsated for a moment, then he smiled at Bailey.

Bailey felt uneasy. This wasn’t the first time she’d noticed something a bit off about her fellow sniper.

“Where you from? You sound American,” she said.

“Little town—it was a little town—called Monterey. California, not Mexico,” Rohen said. “Had this great aquarium. Best seafood on the West Coast.” The right side of his face pulled into a grimace. He turned his head away from Bailey.

“Most I ever saw of America was Las Vegas. I don’t remember much of that. How long you been in?”

“I’m not a proccie,” Rohen snapped. “That’s what you’re getting at, aren’t you? It’s like that all over the fleet. New guy shows up and the interrogation begins. You wouldn’t ask if I was from Eighth Fleet. Everyone knows what they are.”

“It’s no big deal for me,” Bailey shrugged. “Yarrow’s a proccie. Hell, he had some alien thing in his head for a while. Don’t see me making a fuss about it. He’s a good kid, knows his stuff. What, you don’t like proccies?”

“No one gets to choose the circumstances of their birth. Proccie…true born…can’t be all that different from each other. Besides, if I had any real heartburn over Ibarra’s children, I’d have been on the
Lehi
with Fournier and the rest of his bigots.” Rohen pushed himself up to his feet. “Where’s the pisser?” he asked.

Bailey pointed to a recessed doorway at the other end of the rifle range. 

Rohen made his way to the latrine, his shoulders tight, his pace fast. The door slid aside as he approached.

Once the door shut behind him, Rohen collapsed against the bulkhead. His hands and arms jerked against his body as his muscles spasmed out of control. He managed to press a hand to his chest and slide a clip of thumb-sized auto-injectors from inside his shirt. Rohen pinched an injector between two fingers and tried to press it to his neck. His hand refused the command, jabbing into thin air.

“Damn it,” he said through grit teeth. He pinned his hand to the wall and forced his neck against the needle point. His nerves burned as the serum coursed through his system. His muscles relaxed and came back to his full control.

It would get worse. Ibarra had told him as much when he woke from the procedural tube buried deep within Mauna Loa on Hawaii. The tremors would strengthen into seizures if he didn’t take his serum regularly, but even that was losing its effectiveness as time went on. Rohen gave the clip of injectors a pat and slid it back into his uniform.

He looked himself over in the mirror, not finding any nervous twitches that might hint at a deeper problem to his fellow Marines. All he had to do was maintain the façade of a perfectly normal true-born human. Once he made it to Nibiru, he’d be one step closer to fulfilling the mission Ibarra gave him.

Rohen splashed water on his face and went back to Bailey.

****

Four Eagle fighters waited on the flight deck, each connected to the ship’s power lines and locked into catapults that would launch them out of the ship within two minutes of an alert. The pilots sat on an ammunition lorry, eating lunch from pressboard trays and watching a rare spectacle play out across the otherwise empty flight deck.

The clash of composite steel on steel rang through the flight deck as two Iron Hearts sparred each other, the third armored soldier watched from the sidelines.

Durand wolfed down a bite of some bland substance billed as stroganoff and dabbed her lips. She winced as one of the Iron Hearts slammed an elbow against the other’s chest and knocked it to the deck. A giant boot slammed down next to the prone soldier’s helm and Durand felt the vibrations through her seat.

“Who just won?” asked Glue, Durand’s second-in-command.

“Hard to tell with the new suits. I think that’s Elias,” Durand said. After the battle against the Toth, Ibarra rolled out new and improved suits for the few remaining armor soldiers in Earth’s military. The Iron Hearts now stood fifteen feet tall, their armor smoother and modeled to resemble the human form more than the blocky armor they’d worn before.

She glanced at her two Dotok pilots, Manfred and Lothar. They sat shoulder to shoulder, stubby beaks agape as they watched the Iron Hearts fight each other.

“What’s the matter, Manfred? Never seen anything like that before?” she asked.

“We don’t have this,” Manfred said. “The Dotok never had anything like this. I heard stories about them from the other survivors, how they held off the Banshees so the
Canticle
could escape Takeni…Is it true they’re like the Toth? Nothing but a nervous system plugged into their armor?”

“No, they can come out,” Durand said. “You might catch Kallen or Bodel in the mess hall, but they spend all the time they can in their suits.”

“What about the third?” Lothar asked.

“He got hurt during the fight for the Crucible. Rumor is he’s fused to the tank inside the suit,” Durand said.

“He’s trapped in there? Why hasn’t someone tried to get him out?” Manfred asked.

Kallen stepped off the sidelines and faced off against Elias. Her hands withdrew into the forearm housings, replaced by a long spike in one arm, a burning torch in the other. Elias slammed his fists against his chest and held his arms out wide. Kallen crouched, then sprang off the deck and tackled Elias.

The two hit the deck so hard Durand almost dropped her tray.

“You want to go ask him?” Durand ran her fingers against her shoulder pouch and found a beat-up pack of tobacco cigarettes. She looked up at the ventilation shaft where she knew she could smoke in peace, but that wasn’t going to happen while she was on ready alert.

Manfred and Lothar spoke to each other in Dotok, then they looked at Durand and shook their heads.

“What are they doing?” Glue asked. “Why bother training in hand-to-hand combat?”

“You remember when Elias returned from that unfinished Crucible over Takeni? He had that red mask with him,” Durand said.

“I thought that was just a rumor,” Glue said.

“Interesting how something that’s supposed to be classified information becomes rumor, isn’t it?” Durand asked.

“So it’s true? The Iron Hearts and that metal Karigole fought some sort of Xaros leadership?” Glue asked.

“I’m not saying that.” Durand gave a very Gallic shrug.

“Is this an example of doublespeak or a double entendre?” Lothar asked. “We’ve had some difficulty with English nuance.”