Blood of Heroes (The Ember War Saga Book 3) (20 page)

“This is a bad idea,” Holt said. “I can’t even see where we’re supposed to land.”

“You want to wait here until you think of something better? Aim for a spot just behind the line of fire,” Orozco attached his Gustav to his armor and backed away from the edge. He deactivated the safety overrides on his grav-linings and took a deep breath.

“
Gott mit uns!”
Orozco ran and leaped into the air. He swung his feet forward and hoped that God heard his prayer. The gravity/anti-gravity linings in his boots were meant for zero and micro-g environments, their fixed battery life was greatly curtailed anywhere with Earth-normal gravity or stronger. Overriding the safeties was a sure way to burn out the linings and get in a whole mess of trouble with the chain of command for destroying military equipment.

Orozco fired the anti-grav linings just enough to direct his slowed fall towards a mass of silver flashes in the haze. Controlled descents to asteroids and void ships was something he’d trained for as part of being a strike Marine, doing the same in Takeni’s gravity was much faster than he’d anticipated.

A hunk of brick flew past his head, the banshees making a difficult task nigh impossible with their added interference.

Orozco used the linings again, arcing him higher in the air. The vibrations in his boots stopped suddenly, and the Marine found himself in free fall.

He managed a scream that was half-warning, half-fear, and squeezed his feet and knees together. He fell through the haze and slammed feet first into the cobblestones. The rest of his body hit with all the grace of a thrown sack of potatoes. He rolled several times before bumping into the sidewalls.

Orozco’s ears rang and his lower back was killing him. He pulled himself to his feet, coughing. A pair of Dotok soldiers stared at him, jaws slack.

“What?” Orozco asked them.

A streak of light above the haze pointed to Holt’s descent. Dark lumps of rock pelted Holt, then the light from his anti-grav linings warbled as a hit threw him off balance. Orozco watched as Holt came in to view and dipped lower. He wouldn’t make it. Orozco ran for the other side of the walkway. He unslung his Gustav and thrust the barrel out to Holt.

Holt’s fingertips clawed at the barrel. One hand managed a grip, then the other. Then Holt’s anti-grav linings died. Orozco found himself with the full armored weight of a Marine attached to the end of his Gustav. Holt slammed against the side of the wall and Orozco bent over the side wall, his suit struggling to hold on to Holt and keep himself from going over the edge, a long fall into burning mud and plenty of banshees waited for him if his strength failed.

Orozco pulled his arms back and tried to stand. He was one of the few Marines that could lift his Gustav without the aid of his suit, he would be damned if he’d let Holt’s weight beat him. He grunted and felt Holt inch up the side. Hands grabbed him by the belt and around the shoulders, pulling him backwards.

Orozco got a step back, then dragged Holt over the side. The two Marines fell to the ground. Orozco looked up and saw a pair of Dotok soldiers, the ones who’d helped him, giving him a thumb’s up.

“Magic fingers…” Orozco muttered. He lifted his Gustav in front of his face. The end of the barrel was mangled by Holt’s desperate grip. Orozco got up and gave the prone Holt a gentle kick to the stomach.

“Look what you did to my weapon!” Orozco attached it to his back and un-holstered his gauss pistol. He shook his head in disgust.

“I regret nothing,” Holt said.

“Get up,” Orozco pointed his pistol at a mud covered banshee that found its way to the top of the wall. He drilled a bullet into its eye slit and it went slack. The dead banshee hung from where its talons had gripped into the wall. Orozco pried the hand loose and sent the banshee back into the murk below.

“This fight ain’t over yet.”

The ground shook, and a suit of armor stomped through the haze towards the front lines.

****

Cortaro reached his stick into the mockup of the city and knocked over another grounded starship. The last transmission from the ship was a panicked alert about banshees climbing up the ship’s cradle. That was five minutes ago, no response since. The inner lines still held, but the banshee advance through the city was going much faster than he and Steuben had anticipated.

Pa’lon sat against a wall, his arms folded into his robes.

Cortaro opened a channel to the
Canticle’s
engineering deck. “MacDougall, what’s the status on the anti-grav plates.”

“Everything’s wired together with tape and spit. We’re running the final tests now,”
MacDougall said.

“How long?”

“Thirty minutes to make sure it’ll work, longer if something’s off.”

Cortaro looked up at Steuben, who was leaning over the mockup. His clawed hands gripping the sides.

“We don’t have
twenty
minutes,” Steuben said.

“MacDougall, can we launch now?”

“I can’t guarantee she’ll hold together. But yeah, we can. It’s a chance between amazing success and total failure. Fifty-fifty if you ask me.”

Cortaro rapped his knuckles against the mock up to get Pa’lon’s attention.

“If you’re going to leave, Ancient. Now’s the time,” Cortaro said.

“I’ll go to my gate and return to Bastion,” Pa’lon said. “I’ll relay the situation to Ambassador Ibarra.
Gott mit uns
, my friends.” He struggled to his feet and left the command center.

“MacDougall, get ready, we’re almost done with this planet,” Cortaro said. Cortaro looked at the mock up, banshees were reported on two roadways leading to a nexus that was a straight shot to the
Canticle.
 

“We can’t pull them all back,” Steuben said. “We can get the two nearest defense lines in the ship, the rest will have to hold in place.”

“You mean die in place,” Cortaro said.

“We lose a part, or we lose the whole,” Steuben said. He looked up at Cortaro, and the Marines knew there was no room for negotiation.

Cortaro opened a city wide channel, and wished Hale was there instead of him to make this decision. “All units, defense lines alpha and beta are ordered back to the
Canticle
. We are wheels up in ten minutes. I repeat, ten minutes. Get back to the ship.” He repeated the order, leaving almost a thousand good Marines and Dotok to buy time with their lives.

“Belay that order,”
came over the channel.
“This is Chief Cruz of the Smoking Snakes. Souza and I will hold the junction. Order everyone back. Everyone.”

“They could do it,” Steuben said. He moved two miniature suits of armor to the junction on the mock up.

“All units,” Cortaro said, “stampede. I repeat, stampede.”

****

Orozco had an arm wrapped under Holt’s back, helping the other Marine balance as he tried to limp back to the ship. Blood stained Holt’s right leg from the thigh down, victim of a banshee’s talon. Their defensive position had been almost overrun, only one of the Smoking Snakes managed to keep the banshees off their heels.

Orozco looked up and saw three golden star clusters falling from the sky, military pyrotechnics used to send signals when communications were out or degraded. Three golden stars meant one thing, retreat with all possible speed to the
Canticle of Reason.

“That’s the ‘run away’, isn’t it?” Holt asked through grit teeth.

He pried a gauss rifle from the hands of a fallen Dotok and looked back over his shoulder. Amber rays of Xaros disintegration beams lit up the haze where they’d left the armor.

“It is,” Orozco said.

“We won’t make it,” Holt said, “not with me slowing you down. Get out of here.”

“Fuck you, Holt. I’m not that pissed about what you did to my Gustav. Limp faster,” Orozco said.

A mechanical whine came from the haze. A Smoking Snake, his legs in their tracked travel form, raced toward them. The armor swept them up, holding both Marines beneath one giant arm like they were a football.

“Goddamn slow-ass Marines,” Cruz said over his speakers. “Always need the Army to bail them out of trouble.” Cruz rolled over barricades and weaved around fleeing Dotok soldiers. Cruz got them to one of the
Canticle’s
open bays, Dotok raced into the ship.

Cruz set the Marines down. His massive hand gripped Orozco by the shoulder.

“You tell the Iron Hearts,” Cruz said, “you tell them this is what we wanted.”

“What’re you talking about?” Orozco asked. Cruz spun around and rolled back to the front lines. “Where are you going?” he yelled after him.

“Oro…it’s bleeding again,” Holt said, his held up blood covered hands and faltered.

Orozco caught him before he could fall.

****

Cruz rolled up to Souza at the nexus. A severed banshee claw stuck from his back, fluid from his punctured tank leaking out like blood. Shrieks filled the distance.

“How bad are you?” Cruz asked. He rose onto his feet.

“Bad,” Souza said. Cruz stepped in front of him and saw Souza’s chest piece dented and scratched. “But I can hold on for a bit longer,” his words were laced with pain.

“I think Silva would be proud,” Cruz said.

“He would. He was a good soldier, I’m glad to die on the same rock as him.”

“
Cobras Fumantes,”
Cruz said, speaking the Brazilian words for their name.

The Smoking Snakes heard the chittering of banshee’s coming for them. They raised their arm cannons and opened fire as the first enemy came through the haze. A sane foe might have pulled back from the withering fire, but the banshees pressed forward, losing hundreds as the gauss cannons blew them into bloody ribbons. Banshees threw their dead over the walls to clear the way for those behind them.

Cruz ran out of ammo first. Twin slithering bands of smoke rose from the red hot barrels.

Souza held them back for another thirty seconds before he ran dry.

The soldiers roared, the battle cry from their speakers drowning out the banshee’s shrieks, and charged.

Cruz smashed his fists into the banshees, bashing their bodies into pulp with each swing. Three banshees wrapped their talons around his right arm, dragging it down. He stabbed fingers into one, and flinging over the side of the wall. He slammed his right arm to the ground and stomped the life out of the pair of foes.

Souza went down under a press of bodies. Cruz fought toward his comrade knocking banshees aside. A weight hit his back and drove him to his knees. Pain stabbed through his legs as talons ripped the treads out of his armor.

A rumble shook the air, and the
Canticle of Reason
rose from its centuries old cradle. Cruz saw it float into the clouds, and knew he’d won this battle.

He made it to Souza and beat aside a banshee peeling aside the fallen soldier’s chest plate. Banshee’s piled on top of Cruz. His helm was ripped away the feeds to his tank went dark. He swung his arms blindly, feeling every impact against his armor until a talon pierced his tank and he fell onto Souza.

Ready alert for pilots was an exercise in constant tension. The fighters maintained a full combat load and stayed on a battery feed, ready to launch in thirty seconds, which meant the pilot stayed in the cockpit the entire time, bored but hypervigilant for the go signal. The Eagles farther back in the queue had to launch within two to five minutes of the ready-alert craft, which gave the pilots time to afford such luxuries as bathroom breaks and eating at the base of their fighters.

Durand walked the line of fighters, a mix of human Eagles and Dotok fighters, chatting with pilots and answering last-minute questions about their mission. She did it to calm her nerves as well as theirs.

“Gall,” Bar’en asked, “this mission is … unorthodox. Do human military planners look at a situation, ask what is the worst plausible idea, then try to make that happen?”

“That’s just how Captain Valdar works,” Durand said. “I once rode into battle strapped to a luxury liner that was going to be used as a battering ram. Watched a trillion dollars in hardware squished against a Xaros weapons platform to buy our fleet just a little more time. This isn’t so bad.”

Bar’en rapped his fingertips against his helmet and shook his head.

“All hear this! All hear this!” the ship’s intercom sounded. Pilots snapped on helmets and climbed into their fighters. They knew what was coming.

“Battle stations! All hands to battle stations and prepare for acceleration.”

Durand donned her helmet and felt it pull airtight against her flight suit. She shimmied up the ladder to her Eagle and jumped into the seat. Hers was the first Eagle to launch, as was her right and responsibility as the squadron commander.

A single Mule sat on the flight deck. The passengers were already in place, but there was no crew. Nothing but the android Karigole and the two armor soldiers inside could survive the maneuver planned for its future.

“All right, 103rd,” Durand said to her squadron, “we clear a path and then we get them home. Good hunting.”

A rumble grew through the ship, and Durand felt g-forces grow to match the ship’s acceleration. 

“Lafayette, you all OK over there?” Durand sent to the Mule.

“Everything is within specified parameters,” the Karigole answered. “Are you aware of a new variable?”

“No…just checking,” she said.

“I suspect you are attempting conversation to compensate for anxiety,” Lafayette said.

“You should’ve been a shrink, not an engineer,” she said.

“I don’t understand your worry. I’m the one riding a bomb at twenty times the force of gravity into the heart of an incomplete Crucible potentially full of Xaros. You just have to shoot things,” Lafayette said.

“Are you attempting conversation to compensate for anxiety?” Durand asked.

“Perhaps.”

The gravity pressing Durand against her cockpit increased, and she lost all interest in talking.

****

Lafayette, at the controls of the Mule, watched as a timer ran down to zero.

“Prepare for launch,” he said.

Rocket assist motors on the Mule blossomed, hurling it into space. Acceleration almost twenty times the force of gravity shook the ship like it was a failing fault line. The tolerances of human air and spacecraft had outstripped their bodies’ capabilities over a century ago. The weakest part of any flight system forever remained the squishy human bodies that couldn’t handle extreme maneuvers and that demanded air, stable temperatures and sleep.

A human sitting in the copilot’s seat would have died minutes ago. Lafayette had been forced to rebuild himself after being struck by a Xaros disintegration beam many years ago. He’d eliminated every limitation he could. The flesh was weak, as he’d learned the hard way.

“Elias, Kallen, doing well?” he asked.

“Shut up and drive,” Elias grunted.

Lafayette’s fake lips pulled into a smile. Maybe he was a bit tougher than the armor in one regard.

The rocket assist boosters burnt out and Lafayette jettisoned them. The acceleration and its corresponding g-forces faded away, but the speed remained.

The proto-Crucible was dead ahead with four enormous generation ships arrayed around its outer edge. His cyborg eyes focused in on the Crucible’s hull as drones emerged from around the surface and sped toward him. More came from around the generation ships, but the dark lines of the Xaros corrupting their hulls remained.

“
Breitenfeld
, total drones in the upper nineties. More than we’d anticipated,” Lafayette said.

“Then you’d better make it quick in there,”
Valdar said.

“Roger,
Breitenfeld
, breaking maneuver on your signal.” Lafayette turned on the rear-facing cameras and put his hand on the maneuver thrusters.

“Firing the last of our Q-shells,”
Valdar said.

Lafayette waited until four silver streaks overtook his Mule and watched as they blossomed into electrical storms in the midst of the oncoming drones, knocking them offline. He hit the maneuver thrusters and the ship flipped over, its tail now pointed at the Crucible. Lafayette made slight adjustments until the Mule was on course for the control module, a rounded dome against the exposed rock of the asteroid the Crucible was cannibalizing, and readied the drop ship’s thrusters.

Disabled drones tumbled through space. Utterly helpless, and harmless, for several more minutes. The small Q-shells fired by Marine gauss rifles or the Eagle’s rail guns might knock a drone out for several seconds. The power within the much larger Q-shells of the
Breitenfeld
’s main guns was enough to destroy some drones and knock most offline for up to ten minutes, in theory. Ten minutes was almost enough time for him to complete his mission.

Lafayette fired the Mule’s thrusters, which robbed the ship of its forward momentum, slowing it down. He kept his ship on course to the control module as his relative speed fell to almost nothing. He was rather perplexed that his human allies couldn’t do the equations to calculate his exact landing velocity and location. It was only rocket science.

He nudged the Mule parallel to the control node, cut the speed, and fired the docking harpoons. Spikes dug into the surface of the control node, and graphene ropes pulled taut, setting the Mule against the surface with a jarring crunch.

“Almost perfect,” Lafayette said. He unstrapped himself from the seat and floated into the cargo bay, the ramp lowering to reveal the smooth domed roof of the control node.

The straps securing Elias and Kallen to the Mule popped off. Lafayette grabbed a bulkhead and pushed them both out of the Mule with his legs. The armor unfolded to their humanoid configuration. Elias pushed jet packs to them and opened an ammunition case bolted to the floor.

He took out a beat-up pouch containing his tools, and a satchel holding several pounds of quadrium and the bomb components.

“This the right spot?” Elias asked. The two soldiers stood on the surface of the control node, left hands replaced by cutting lasers.

“I was off by almost ten feet, but if you make us an entrance there, it will get us to the bridge,” Lafayette said. “The Xaros are consistent in their construction projects.”

The soldiers set their lasers against the dome and sliced through the basalt material. They had a hatch cut out in seconds. Elias tossed the hull piece behind him and pulled himself inside.

“There’s gravity and atmo,” he reported.

The edges of the hatch glittered with light as it began repairing itself.

“Hurry up,” Kallen said.

Lafayette pushed off from the Mule and floated to Kallen. She caught him and pushed the cyborg into the opening.

She grabbed the edge of the hatch and followed. Gravity pulled her down. Her feet had almost hit the ground when she came to an abrupt halt. Her hand was stuck inside the edge of the hatch. It had regrown around her fingers, incorporating her into the hull. Kallen tugged at her hand, but it remained fast.

She swore, bent at the waist to bring her feet against the roof and pushed against it with all the strength her actuators could muster. Her hand burst free of the hull and she fell against the deck.

“You OK?” Elias asked.

Kallen got to her feet and looked at her hand. Sparks shot through where three fingers had once been.

“Write that down for next time,” she said.

They were in a command center, identical to the Crucible near Earth. Stairs meant for something much taller than the average human ran from a central plinth toward the outside wall. Rings of control stations emanated out from the same plinth.

“Get to it, professor,” Elias said.

“Yes, against the bulkhead will do nicely.” Lafayette ran up the too-tall steps and set the satchel against the wall. It would take him two minutes to reassemble the bomb, another three for it to be fully operational.

“What’s that thing going to do?” Kallen asked.

“This ‘thing’ will form a singularity for several nanoseconds, causing severe damage to this structure and redirecting its momentum back along its intersection path,” Lafayette said.

“You mean it’ll create a black hole and turn this whole thing around?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Then just say that!”

“Hush, child.” Lafayette attached a graviton emitter to a bundle of silvery quadrium shells. “The master must work.”

A low thrum filled the chamber.

“Master better work a hell of a lot faster,” Kallen said. She cycled rounds into her forearm blaster and fired up the cutting laser.

****

Hale’s boots slipped against a wet rock and kicked a stone loose. It bounced down the path and struck an old Dotok woman on the thigh. She looked at Hale and made a hand gesture that he was sure wasn’t meant to be kind.

The original settlers had cut a rudimentary path up the mountain leading to the mesa Hale planned to use as their evacuation point. What the Dotok had intended to be a radio relay site could prove to be the salvation for hundreds. The path ran through a narrow valley between peaks, blocking the view from the rest of the canyon.

They were a mile from the mesa, almost there.

“Sir,”
Bailey said through the IR,
“I’ve got movement.”
The sniper was at the rear of the column where the old path began at the foot of the mountains.

“On my way,” he said to her. “Standish, keep them moving. Yarrow, meet me at the base of the mountain. Act causal.”

Hale made his way through the throng of refugees, his pace purposeful but not an all-out run. The Dotok’s nerves were on the edge of a knife since the storm; any indication of a serious problem might send them into a panic.

A few Dotok men had pulled back from the edge of the group, watching as Bailey looked through the scope of her sniper rifle.

“Torni, get them moving,” Hale said. “Then keep them moving.”

The sergeant barked commands and pointed up the mountain with a knife hand gesture. The Dotok shied away and caught up to the rest of the group.

“What’ve you got?” Hale asked Bailey, her helmet off and attached to her belt. She pressed her eye against the scope of her rail rifle and her face hardened.

“Straggler,” she said. “Woman carrying a baby. Running hard.”

“Must have made it out of the city then got lost from the group before we found them,” Yarrow said.

“That’s not all,” Bailey said. A video feed from her optics popped on Hale’s visor. The woman was there, clutching an infant to her breast, running barefoot across open ground. The feed panned down the canyon and showed a single banshee chasing after the woman.

“She’s not going to make it,” Bailey whispered. “Let me take the shot.”

Hale looked at the canyon around them. The rail rifle was not a subtle weapon. The sound of the recoil would travel for miles up and down the canyon, and there was no way that was the only banshee out there.

“Sir, we shoot and the banshees will be all over us,” Yarrow said. “We’re almost there.”

“Let me take it,” Bailey said. A tear rolled down her cheek. “That’s my little girl, my Abbie, out there. Please let me take it.”

“Do it,” Hale said. It was the wrong tactical solution. He knew in his head he was making a mistake. This was a decision from his heart.

The bullet left the barrel with a sonic boom, kicking up a plume of dust and sending a crack through the canyon. The round vaporized the banshee from the waist up and shattered a boulder behind it.

“Yarrow, with me.” Hale sprinted out of the mountain pass, leaping over rocks and using his augmented armor to propel him to speeds no un-suited human could ever achieve.

The mother froze as she saw the two alien Marines coming for her, weapons in hand. She looked back at the dead banshee, then closed her eyes and squeezed her squalling baby to her chest.  

“Nil’jo and the rest of your village are with us,” Hale said.