Aurora Rising: The Complete Collection (184 page)

Simply conversing with Will served as a welcome respite from the hours of tension permeating the room.

About what you’d suppose from a room full of people with itchy trigger fingers and nothing to shoot. They continue to anticipate the end of days any second now, but it appears we’re…well, it appears we’re winning.

I don’t have your catbird seat, but that’s the rumor here, too. Alex?

Alive and kicking ass across the United Fleet, near as I can tell.

Naturally. So, what’s the status on the rest of the targets?

Richard grimaced despite his best effort not to.

We couldn’t catch up to one of the military targets in time. We tracked him on his ship only to have to chase him down on the ground—and damned if he didn’t take out the Prevo on Romane before being subdued.

Jesus. Proves they were right about the threat, though, if at a heavy cost.

You’re telling me. Montegreu reported she had fulfilled her obligations in full twenty minutes ago. I shudder to think what it entailed.

It had to be done, Richard. For the safety—for the survival—of us all.

I know. Doesn’t mean I have to like it.

I doubt it helps, but Delavasi doesn’t like it either.

Maybe, but he just drowns his guilty conscience in alcohol.

And hookers.

Richard laughed loudly enough to earn a glance from Miriam. He pointed at his ear, which seemed to satisfy her.

Hookers, really?

You have no idea.

Nor do I want to. Moving on from that disturbing image…so everything’s taken care of on your end?

As of…now, yes it is.

Thank you, Will. The next hour or two may get a bit dicey, but thanks to your help it’ll be worth it.

I love you.

And I you. When this is over you’ll come home, right?

I intend to beat you there.

Richard ended the conversation with a relieved smile. He’d kept the secret as asked; only he, Will and Graham had all the information. Montegreu had her list, and Alliance and Federation agents in the field and select military officers had their targets, but nothing more.

He wondered how long he was going to get to wait for whatever was to come. Then he noticed the transformation in Miriam’s demeanor from normal epic-battle tension to
serious
epic-battle tension.

Not long, it turned out.

56

EARTH

EASC
H
EADQUARTERS

K
ENNEDY PULLED HER COAT TIGHTER
before beginning the trek across the courtyard to the Logistics building.

She’d given up her childish beachside sulking hours ago, enjoyed a lovely dinner at a lovely restaurant—still alone—and performed an admirable and extended imitation of window-shopping in the market district. But when the stores had closed for the night and the hour had grown late, she had finally relented and returned to the Island.

The news feeds being broadcast in every store, on every street corner and in her eVi were confused, vague and often contradictory. The most she’d been able to determine was the United Fleet hadn’t yet been annihilated. This left her maintaining a level of ignorance which simply would not do.

She doubted they were any more likely to allow her in the War Room now than they had been earlier, but even the lobby should have better information than the media, right? And if she were to happen
by
the War Room—

—the sky overhead illuminated in a dazzling flash. The thunderous roar of multiple blasts followed to assault her eardrums. Everyone in the courtyard halted to gape upward.

Six laser beams streamed from the heavens to slam into two hulking shadows perhaps four kilometers above. The beams’ vivid citron hue could only mean they originated from the orbital arrays, the fact the array nodes pointed outward notwithstanding. As the light of the lasers spread in the night sky, the shadows revealed themselves to be Metigen superdreadnoughts. One hovered directly above the EASC Complex, the other to the southeast over the Sea-Vac Metro.

She had but the briefest second to recognize them for what they were. Earth’s orbital defense arrays were the most powerful weapons in existence—at least built by humans anyway. Each node was the size of city block and housed a laser over five times more powerful than the weapons on an Alliance dreadnought. Two hundred individual nodes orbited Earth on ten arrays. All of this meant the force of three lasers tearing into each superdreadnought destroyed the gigantic ships in under four seconds.

Kennedy threw her head back and cackled in delight as the sky lit up like a fireworks circus. The first celebration of victory had arrived in grand style courtesy of the aliens themselves.

Then the wreckage began to rain down, and she decided she did not want to be trapped under another tonne of debris just yet, or ever again. She sprinted for the door and made it inside the instant before a thirty-meter-long shard of superdreadnought debris gouged itself into the center of the courtyard.

It should make a perfectly acceptable monument in remembrance of the Metigen War.

The orbital array weapons did not strike London or Vancouver or New York or Sydney or the other four cities seemingly in their lines of fire. Instead they struck the thirty-two Metigen superdreadnoughts hovering stealthed high above those cities.

The initial blow of the lasers disrupted the vessels’ cloaking to reveal the full size of the attacking force. The superdreadnought weapons swung up in search of the source of the attacks, but multiple nodes firing from widely disparate locations denied them an easy target.

The powerful weapons tore through the mighty ships. They disintegrated in exceptional synchronicity, cracking open in crimson flames almost in time with one another. In the next second they burst apart in massive, blinding-white explosions.

Everyone in the War Room and on holo stood in stunned speechlessness as they watched the destruction of the colossal ships. Images from every affected city on Earth and identical ones from Cavare and two other Senecan cities had replaced the battle maps above the table.

No one as yet bothered to inquire from where the live images originated, when they’d been so conveniently queued up or how they were now being displayed.

Miriam had a good idea who was responsible, though. Her main question, really, was…why the theater?

She opened a channel to Terrestrial Emergency Operations. “Mobilize rescue operations in the impacted cities immediately. The falling debris will cause damage and injuries in the metropolitan areas.”

Then she closed her eyes and breathed out.
Alex, I could hug you. Then kill you.

Suddenly everyone was talking at once, but she concentrated on the important ones. Brennon’s mouth hung open and he appeared to have developed a slight tremor in his hands. “I don’t understand. How did they get past our defenses in the first place? How did thirty-two superdreadnoughts hide in the airspace above these cities?”

Devon responded, sounding unashamedly smug. “Their proficiency with the cloaking technology is far more advanced than ours, and it is a highly sophisticated technology. It was an easy matter for them to slip in one by one under stealth. Did you think just because they hadn’t used the shields yet they didn’t have the capability? They didn’t
want
to be stealthy until now.”

Miriam eyed Devon suspiciously. “How did you know?”

He shrugged as if to imply it had been a trifling matter. “The cloaking projection does give off a faint residual energy signature beyond whatever environment it’s replicating. We set the long-range sensors to watch for it yesterday. Once we picked them up at the Main Asteroid Belt we tracked them to their destinations. Same thing at Seneca.”

“Why didn’t you simply alert us and take them out as soon as they arrived?”

“We didn’t want to tip our hand until we’d finished securing all their agents.”

“Explain.”

Richard cleared his throat. When all eyes turned to him, he began fidgeting with the hem of his jacket. “The Prevos believed—correctly—the aliens had put in place a fallback plan to execute on should they begin losing. It involved, among other things, utilizing agents around the galaxy to sabotage our efforts on numerous levels. Alex and the others provided Naval Intelligence and Federation Intelligence a list of names. We’ve spent the last twenty-four hours arresting or if necessary eliminating those people before they were able to act. The man who destroyed Ms. Requelme’s Artificial was one such agent we were unable to apprehend in time.”

So that was the purpose of the blind authorizations. She stared at Richard in challenge; he gave her a dramatic and presumably apologetic wince in answer.

Brennon continued to look rather perplexed, and she mused whether this latest near-calamity had finally broken his admirable composure. “How is it the Prevos had
names
?”

Richard jerked his head toward Devon. “Mr. Reynolds, perhaps you’d like to explain?”

Devon gave an exaggerated sigh, but he was decidedly relishing the spotlight. “It was all thanks to Annie. Even before Noetica, she noticed Jules was introducing tiny, subtle errors into her algorithms to weaken the accuracy of her analysis of the aliens. After we were linked, she told me—not as if she could have hidden it from me.

“We cross-referenced Jules’ comms records with those of the other known Metigen agents—Aguirre, the assassin—and uncovered matching anomalous signals. Once we’d identified the aliens’ signature we were able to locate additional contacts. We traced the activity of Hervé and these other agents to more agents, and so on. They were in the military, government, business, everywhere—and some of them could have inflicted serious damage. One of them did.”

Quite a piece of detective work. The explanation raised many questions; most of them would wait, but not all. “What about the Kill Switch? Why risk Brigadier Hervé using it?”

“Oh, that? It was never a true threat. We found and disabled it in the first hour.”

“Of course you did.”

It made for a daunting proposition, contemplating the true scope of the Prevos’ power. They’d made an impressive display of it in the last five minutes, and Miriam had to wonder how much further it might extend. But this too was a question for the morrow.

Her gaze returned to Richard. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t Alex tell me?”

He wore a pained expression. “Miriam, you know the aliens are eavesdropping, all the time and everywhere but I suspect nowhere more than in your orbit. We needed to keep it to the smallest possible group—literally three people outside of the Prevos knew the details. The rest were merely following orders. And if you learned Hervé was a Metigen agent, you would have insisted on arresting her. If that had happened, the aliens would have been tipped off before we’d secured the other agents and we would have lost any control of the situation we previously gained.”

She nodded deliberately. She was unable to refute the logic, but her pride still stung something fierce.

Brennon showed signs of recovering from his bewilderment and spoke up again. “What now?”

Gianno and Vranas had been busy handling their own fallout from the destruction of the superdreadnoughts on Seneca, but they too were now listening with interest.

“Now we intensify—”

You have our attention.

SPACE, NORTH-CENTRAL QUADRANT

S
ENECA
S
TELLAR
S
YSTEM