Erebus (20 page)

“What the fu-” I started to say. Too late to stop them. They stood up, but within a second, they were down again, blue lightning crackling over their armor.

I watched on the HUD as a small circle appeared around a copse of trees on the map, twenty meters ahead of us.

“He’s in that area. I triangulated off those two,” Cheng said.

“Bastard,” I muttered under my breath, staring daggers at him. But the move had given us Frain’s position, and the men were still breathing.

“All units. On my mark, raise saturation fire into that zone. Visual will be hard but not impossible. Look for a shimmer. Ready?” Cheng called out.

A reluctant chorus of ascent came from the other JAS officers; it hadn’t been lost on them how disposable they were to Cheng. I knew some of the JAS officers were Linked. I didn’t know what the effect of seeing and feeling their fellow Consensus members go down was, but considering my own brief glimpse into the Link, it probably wasn’t good.

“Mark!”

All of us rose as one, the booms, crackles, and zips of our dozen weapons discharging into the tight zone Cheng had identified. Around me, I could see the JAS officers dropping one after another, electricity arcing over them.

Someone scored a lucky hit. Behind a white marble statue mingled among the trees, a figure appeared, blue electricity crackling over it. The camouflage shorted out, but he was still standing. Round after round slammed into the armor-clad figure, staggering him, his armor rippling and sparking away. With what must have been superhuman effort, he took aim on a JAS agent and fired, knocking him down, but the JAS agent had dropped Frain to a knee under the return barrage. Finally Frain slumped to the ground, still arcing blue.

Cautiously, Cheng, the three remaining JAS officers, and I edged toward the figure, weapons trained on him.

“This is just JAS armor. How the hell did it withstand all of that?” one of the officers panted.

“It didn’t; this was all him. His combat enhancements must have withstood the shots,” Cheng said as he knelt down next to Frain. He unclipped and cast aside the helmet, revealing Frain’s sweat-streaked face.

“Warning: de-spin protocols activated,” an androgynous voice called over the link. I looked around; the others had gotten the same message. A loud klaxon, sounding like an old air-raid siren, began whooping, and I felt a rumbling from the floor.

“Cerise, what the hell is going on?” I called.

“My God, the emergency de-spin has been activated on Concorde,” her panicked voice answered. “We’ll lose gravity.”

The rumbling became more intense. I’d never been in an earthquake before, but from Henning’s sensory download of his last moments on Io, I knew this was what it felt like. The whole torus was grinding to a halt. The only thing keeping us glued to the floor was the centrifugal force created by the spinning of the habitat ring—and that was coming to a stop.

“Prepare for zero gravity. Three minutes,” the AI voice called.

“
Erebus’s
antimatter reactor is spiking,” Cerise said, her voice sounding even more panicked. “I think she is preparing to launch.”

Cheng and I looked at each other, then down at Frain just as his eyes opened. He sprang up. He grabbed Cheng by his neck and flung him like a rag doll into the statue. Cheng smashed it off its plinth.

I was so close that the only thing I could do was sweep my carbine around like a club. Frain caught it deftly in his hand. He looked at me and, in that fraction of a second, gave the slightest twitch of his lips into the hint of a grin. Twisting the gun, he snapped it out of my hand and grabbed me by the neck with his other hand. Lifting me off the floor, he flung me into the two closest JAS agents, sending us all to the floor in a tangle of arms and legs.

I heard the sound of a shot being fired and looked up through my smashed visor in a daze to see that the last standing officer had managed to fire at Frain. He shuddered but didn’t go down. He threw my gun straight at her, knocking her off her feet.

Suddenly, Cheng swooped in, the two combat-enhanced men exchanging punches and kicks nearly too fast to follow. Cheng’s moves were a graceful ballet of attacks; Frain’s were skilled and crisp with a titanic power behind his strikes.

For the briefest of moments, it looked like Cheng was getting the better of Frain, countering a kick and a punch, turning and executing a neat throw, rolling Frain over his back…only for Frain to land on his feet and pull the same move, slamming Cheng to the floor. Frain smoothly planted one knee on Cheng’s arm and cranked up on it in an effort to break it.

I shook off my daze and jumped up. I felt light on my feet. Either I was high on adrenaline or the deceleration protocol was starting to take effect. I launched at Frain, encircling his neck with my arm and punched down repeatedly on the back of his exposed head, aiming for the nerve cluster behind his ear. I might as well have been slamming my fist into a wall for all the effect it had. I did the only thing I could think of and hooked my gauntleted fingers into Frain’s eye socket. Instead of the soft and squidgy ball I expected, it was like a marble in there. Cheng stood up, his left hand hanging limply at his side. Frain twisted and spun me around. I felt like I was riding a bucking bronco.

Frain snapped his leg out in a side kick. It struck Cheng in the chin, lifting him at least his own body height off the floor. Cheng’s now limp body drifted to the ground surreally in the decreasing gravity.

Reaching over his shoulder, Frain grasped my hand and dragged me over his head. Again, I found myself flying, this time almost sedately, to the path, raising a cloud of gravel as I struck and skidded along the ground. I coughed and sputtered against the fog of stones immersing me.

Standing amid our downed, broken, and frozen bodies, Frain looked around. He’d won, and we all knew it.

“Warning: deceleration will be complete in sixty seconds. Secure for zero gravity,” the AI’s voice called.

I shakily stood myself up. Frain’s intense gaze fell on me. “Don’t,” he said simply.

Reaching to my thigh holster, I fumbled for my sidearm. So quickly I could barely follow, he swept closer and gripped my hand in a viselike grip. He pulled the sidearm out of my fingers and threw it away. In the low gravity, it arched out of sight.

“I said don’t. I have no interest in killing anyone I don’t have to,” Frain said before letting that slight twitch of a grin reach his face again. “And you—I don’t have to.”

“Thirty seconds,” the AI called.

“Where the fuck do you think you’re going to go?” I rasped, my throat raw from breathing in gravel. “You can’t even get to the spoke elevator. There will be a hundred officers there. You can’t beat them all.” I felt so light on my feet now that one jump could have sent me soaring like a bird.

Frain let the hint of a grin bloom across his face as he turned toward the elevator spoke building and, after two or three bounding steps, launched himself in the air.

“Zero gravity. Warning. Zero gravity.”

I watched Frain fly toward the spoke. He would impact just under the transparent roof canopy. I felt myself lift off the ground. I fumbled for anything I could hold on to.

“Frain’s heading to the spoke elevator shaft,” I shouted.

“We’ve got bigger problems,” Cerise replied. “
Erebus
has performed an emergency decouple on her moorings. She just has the airlock gangway left.”

Another voice cut across us—Frain’s. “I would suggest you open the docking bay door. I have control of
Erebus
now. Please don’t make me activate her A-drive in the hangar. I doubt it would be healthy for Concorde.”

Flopping uselessly in the zero-gravity environment, I managed to turn and see Frain’s receding body.

“What the hell do you mean you have control of
Erebus
?” I said.

“Just clear the hangar and open the bay doors. I’ve gained full remote control of the drive system now and can activate it at any time.”

That’s why the bastard had been so calm in the interrogation room. He hadn’t been doing nothing; he’d been working on his bloody escape plan!

“Do not open that bay door,” I shouted.

“We have to,” Cerise replied, her voice sharp with panic.

“He’s bluffing!” My mind was whirling through our brief conversation and the fact that Frain had only knocked out the JAS officers, that he hadn’t killed me. “You’re no murderer, Frain. You won’t do it.”

“Wrong, Trent. I said I don’t kill anyone
I don’t have to
.”

I made my HUD zoom in on Frain as he struck the spoke. I could see him ripping open a service hatch and disappearing inside.

“Open the bay door. All officers and task force components, stand down. Allow Frain through,” Cerise said.

I managed to catch myself on the branch of a nearby tree and hugged myself to it. All around me, I could see debris rising from the surface of Concorde. From one lake, a huge bubble of water drifted upward.

A few minutes later, I heard Cerise’s subdued voice.

“
Erebus
is departing. Frain’s aboard.”

“Fuck!” I exclaimed. I looked up through the canopy and could see the long spine of
Erebus
nosing out of the docking bay.

“It gets worse,” she said. “Drayton is gone, too.”

“What do you mean gone?” I demanded in disbelief. Couldn’t it get any worse?

“She must have slipped out in the confusion.”

“Well, where the hell is she?”

“Checking,” Cerise paused briefly. “Security playback shows that she got to one of the other spoke elevators. She…she’s onboard
Erebus
.”

I continued watching
Erebus
push out of the bay, its habitat ring sliding into view and, finally, the engines. Slowly at first but picking up speed, the huge ship sailed out into space.

The coms network was chaos at first. I realized the snippets of information I could pick out as people called for rescue or with frantic questions about what was going on were only half the conversation; the rest would be occurring over the Link.

Rapidly, the network calmed down as the Linked wrestled themselves into some kind of order. It must have been traumatic for them as a whole, every individual firing queries and distress into the Consensus, but once the initial panic was over, they acted with decisiveness.

“
Erebus
hit
Han Xin
as soon as she cleared Concorde. Her drive’s been taken out,” Cerise briefed me over link. “
Erebus
herself has gone to A–Drive, heading in-system.”

I was riding down back to our base in one of the search-and-rescue flyers, which had been dispatched to scoop up anyone trapped floating about in the weightless interior of the vast space station. Before they could even think about spinning the torus back up, they had to rescue anyone who had been stranded in midair. Not only people, but livestock and anything valuable had to be grabbed as well. It was a massive operation and wouldn’t be completed anytime soon.

“Hit with what? I didn’t think
Erebus
had any weapons,” I said, more than slightly puzzled.

“She doesn’t. But what she does have is an array of probes and drones that double as decent KIs, not to mention a number of high-powered communications and sensor lasers. That’s what
Erebus
used on
Han Xin’s
A-drive ring. The damage is bad, but no casualties, thankfully.
Han Xin’s
going nowhere fast, though.”

I looked over at Cheng, strapped down next to me. He didn’t look good; he hadn’t regained consciousness. We had locked down his combat armor for use as an impromptu backboard. It was battered and had savage dents in the composite plating. And that’s just what Frain had done with his fists.

“Any indication where
Erebus
is heading?” I asked.

“Best we can tell, into the Earth-moon system. We’ve let them know, but our communication with Earth won’t arrive until half an hour before
Erebus
herself gets there.”

We landed on campus, and I climbed out of the search-and-rescue craft. The SAR craft quickly lifted with the squirt of gas jets, undoubtedly to pick up more stranded people.

I crawled along the hastily assembled guide ropes into the command center while the medical techs saw to Cheng, Vance, and the other injured JAS officers.

“Earth is going to be pretty damn nervous with Frain heading toward them,” I said to Cerise and Frampton, both of whom were strapped into their chairs. Not for the first time, I cursed the light-speed barrier that stopped instantaneous communications.

“No shit,” Vance said. “I’ve sent the Pentagon a message telling them to do what they can. There are a lot of assets around that can take out
Erebus
. But that’s if she stops. If Frain’s just mad…If he barrels into Earth…” she let the sentences go unfinished.

“He isn’t mad,” I said as I strapped myself into one of the seats. “He’s heading back to Earth to do something, but I doubt it’s to wipe it out.”

“Nonetheless,” Vance said, “I doubt anyone’s going to risk it and give him even half a chance.”

I heard another figure enter the room. It was Sihota. “What a mess,” he said grimly. “How long until they get there?”

“Forty minutes,” Vance answered, then added a little sullenly, “And another fifty-two after that before we find out just what the hell happened. I’ve requested a full feed.”

***

We watched the holotank in silence as
Erebus
burst into the Earth-moon system, immediately firing her antimatter torch in a maneuver that would have damn near crushed her crew.

There wasn’t a huge amount of firepower in space, just kinetic strikers for precision-bombing military targets on Earth or to blast away any rogue asteroids that looked like they would get close to anything important. There were some laser installations to take out missiles and a few drop-down fighters and landing craft to deliver soldiers anywhere on the Earth at short notice. The problem was very few of them were anywhere near the Lagrange point where
Erebus
had dropped out of A-drive.

Wildly spiraling as it locked on one target after another,
Erebus’s
communications laser lanced out time and again, taking out the kinetic strikers streaking toward
Erebus,
each striker flaring in a flash of white.