Machine Gods (Star Crusades Nexus, Book 2) (22 page)

Teresa looked at her, registering the honesty in the
woman’s eyes.

“
I was an exotic
dancer with debts and problems when I joined the Corps. In less
than a year, I was in combat on the Titan Naval Station. You learn
fast in the Corps, and people with your skills and leaderships
abilities are few and far between. This Battalion is just as new as
you, Corporal. You will all grow up together.”

She waited for a
moment and watched the Corporal as the news sank in. It took just a
few seconds before the woman was nodding and seemed to accept the
gesture for what it was. Sensing the change, Teresa decided to move
to the details.

“
Okay, you will
operate under the command of Lieutenant...”

She paused as she checked her documentation. The
administrative clerk leaned over and whispered.

“
Lieutenant Glouise
River, Sir.”

Teresa looked at the
officer with irritation. She didn’t like being spoken to in such an
off-hand and casual manner, e
specially
when in front of new marines she needed to command.

“
Yes, Lieutenant
River. Do you think you can manage that? It will mean teaching your
skills to the three squads of marines. You will maintain the
discipline of the unit, help with their training, and advice the
Lieutenant.”

Corporal
Arina positively glowed at the news.

“
Sir, it would be my
hono
r. Why me though, Sir?”

Teresa nodded politely.

“
Good. Well, you’ve
demonstrated command skills, initiative, and aggression. I need all
of these things but especially for 1st Platoon. We might be the
newest battalion in the Corps, but I intend on making this the envy
of every battalion we have. 1st Platoon will be the best trained in
this unit, and I want you to make it happen. Choose your corporals
wisely and get them drilled.”

Arina
sensed it was time to leave and saluted smartly
before leaving the room. As she marched out, the Lieutenant from
logistics made a motion to speak. Teresa ignored him and instead
turned to Sergeant Hacket, a man with whom she seemed to have
developed something of a rapport.

“Your thoughts?” she asked him.

Hacket
snorted
as he considered his words. He
was an old pro, unlike most of the marines of the ship and had
reservations about all the new marines in the Battalion. He looked
to Teresa.

“
She’s
got spunk, I’ll tell you that. She’s tough, and
can lead. But there’s something else.”

Teresa looked into
his eyes, but it was like looking at the head of a shark. His dark,
merciless eyes betrayed nothing.

“
She wants
it, and badly. If you’re after an assault unit,
I reckon she’s the best we have.”

It was a simple
confirmation of what she was already thinking. Teresa didn’t expect
the unit to somehow transform overnight from four hundred raw
marines to an elite unit, but she did expect them to work hard at
it, so when the time came, they would come through alive and
victorious.

“
Good. Now let’s
sort out tomorrow’s schedule. I want to work on their hand-to-hand
combat skills, and I think I know just the person for
that.”

Sergeant Hacket
looked at her with amusement. He knew she was talking about
Commander Gun, the giant in the Battalion, and the one warrior he
knew even he couldn’t bring to the ground; at least, not without
trickery or fancy weapons.

“
Major,”
h
e said slowly, “I like the way you
think.”

Teresa smiled, and
for a brief moment forgot about her worries with her family and the
mission to Helios. Right now it was just her and her marines, and
for the first time in a long time, she felt at home.

The death of Admiral Jarvis took place prior to the
founding of the Alliance. Yet the cult of her leadership and
sacrifice became entrenched in the Alliance Navy. The founding of
the Admiral Jarvis Naval Station at Terra Nova was part of the
growing tradition. Even those who had never seen the commander of
the Confederate Navy knew her by the graduates of her Academy, and
the continuing reminders of her final battle in the names of
colleges, ships, and memorials.

The Fall of Admiral Jarvis

The approach to the
large space station took almost two days, much longer than Spartan
could ever have expected.
When they had
arrived, the station looked just a few hours away. In reality, the
moon-sized structure was much further away. To make matters worse,
they were forced to approach on minimum power, coasting to the
target rather than accelerating and alerting those already present.
They had drifted to the station, along with the multitude of debris
that moved throughout this part of the system. Over that time, the
mixed assortment of T’Kari and humans had thoroughly mapped the
structure, as well as the positions of the machines that had been
detected on the surface. After navigating through the ruined dock
of the station, the T’Kari Raider had taken up a position only a
short distance from one of the long abandoned industrial loading
platforms.

Spartan and Khan
stood on the landing ramp of their shuttle and looked
back to the shape of the T’Kari ship waiting
over them like a sentinel.

“
Spartan, we’re good
here. I’ll have the shuttle brought aboard and prepped in
case you need a hot extraction,” Lovett said
over the intercom.

Spartan waved in a
kind of mock salute to the ship and looked out into
the ruins of the station. Tuke, the leader of
the T’Kari Raiders stood alongside them and gazed upon the ruins of
his people’s old colony with a completely expressionless
face.

“
Are you sure they
built this?” asked Khan
. There was wonder
in his voice.

It was rare for Khan
to feel anything like this for such a place, but even he couldn’t
deny the grandeur and sheer scale of it. The basic shape was like a
gigantic ring, hundreds of kilometers in diameter. From the outside
when viewed from their ship, it had shimmered with a silvery color.
Now that they stood upon its solid foundations, they could see the
inside was actually dark gray and gloomy. Where fields, plants, and
gardens had once stood, there were now featureless spaces of
masonry, metal, and rubble. Very few of the buildings remained
undamaged, and broken armored suits and equipment from a war fought
long ago still remained; as if every warrior had been sucked away
from the station, leaving nothing but their equipment
behind.

“
This was the site
of the last battle for dominion of this place,” Tuke
explained.

The shuttle ramp
slid back into the small
T’Kari craft,
and just as quickly as they had arrived, it lifted itself up and
moved back along a pre-determined path to their ship. It had been
Spartan’s plan to keep the shuttle on the ship, but as Khan watched
it go, he started to feel trapped on the uninhabited station.
Spartan remained silent, but Khan then looked to him. He had a
question forming on his brow.

“Who won?” asked Khan.

Spartan
watched him, noticing how Khan always became
more animated at the description of the greatest battles and
struggles. In many ways, the warrior was more like a child, though
over the last two decades he’d changed substantially. Even so, the
rage was always just below the surface, and it was important to
remember he was barely older than his nineteen year old
son.

Just
like Gun
,
Spartan laughed inwardly, thinking of his old friend back
home.

Tuke lowered his head in shame.

“
Nobody won here. We
fought until just a few hundred remained on each side. The climate,
air, and power systems were shattered, and the Biomechanical
creatures used on both sides had killed almost all the civilians.
We agreed to a truce and turned our backs on this
place.”

“
And you never came
back? Not once, in two hundred years?”

Tuke nodded.

“
When we left, the
others collapsed the Rift. Another way in would have to be found.
Over time, the details for many of these tunnels in space were
lost. Some by accident, other deliberately to keep our people
safe.”

Khan pointed to the
part of the station almost seven kilometers away. A shattered spire
pushed up from the surface, and a large vessel waited nearby. It
was different to any of the ships they’d come across so far,
roughly the size of an Alliance frigate. It was stationed almost
half a kilometer from the station, yet from this distance looked
massive.

“What about them?”

Spartan looked in his direction.

“Yes, I think we managed to make it here undetected.
Now we just need to get close enough to see who they are and what
they are up to.”

Tuke beckoned to the right.

“
There is an
underground transportation system two hundred meters away. It is
just below the surface and will keep us out of their sight. Not
that they will be looking for us.”

Khan grinned.

“Yeah, why would they?”

The three walked
through the ruins of the station, each glancing at the myriad of
bodies and equipment littering the ground. Spartan couldn’t
remember the last time he’d seen such devastation. The lack of a
viable atmosphere had kept the place in a state of almost perfect
preservation, all of this time. They wore their fully sealed armor
and carried firearms at the ready. A wide ramp led to the
underground section and blackness. Even so, there were a number of
dim lamps, perhaps enough to light a quarter of the underground
structure.

“Where is the power coming from?” asked Spartan.

Tuke looked to the
stars and moved down into the blackness of
under ground.

“The suns. This entire facility uses massive amounts
of solar energy. The storage capacitors will keep functioning even
after a thousand years. I’m surprised more of them are not
working.”

The three continued
forward
through the rubble, continually
checking for signs of trouble. Rather than announce their arrival,
they made use of their suits’ inbuilt night vision modes. They
moved further inside the structure, picking their way past the
damaged vehicles and broken weapons. It took nearly four hours for
them to cover the distance until they finally reached the point
where Tuke stopped. He waited and looked about as though expecting
trouble before looking to Spartan.

“
Directly above us
is the old control tower. It was used for coordinating the landing
of supply ships and aircraft. The scavengers are three hundred
meters from the tower.”

Spartan nodded and
moved to the dark entrance to his right. The door had been torn up
by a violent action at some point in the past and lay in pieces on
the floor. As he moved inside, he tried to avoid looking at the
dozen corpses of T’Kari civilians. Their skeletal remains served as
an important reminder as to both the hostile environment on the
defunct station, as well as the violence that had occurred there.
That was when Spartan appeared to have an epiphany.

“Tuke, there’s no atmosphere and minimal power, yet
we have gravity?”

“
Yeah,
” muttered Khan, as though
he’d been thinking the same all along.

Tuke tilted
his
head slightly and to the
ground.

“
At the heart of the
station is a microgravity generator. It is self-sufficient and
provides a gravitational core at the center.”

Spartan looked
confused and thought of asking for clarification before remembering
that the last time he asked a technical question, he just ended up
feeling stupid.

No,
he thought,
if you don’t know already, why
bother asking now?

They
move
d through the opening and past what
looked like some kind of mechanical walker. It reminded Spartan of
the Vanguard armored suits he’d helped develop in the War. The big
difference, however, was that these looked like machines rather
than equipment that was worn. Tuke saw him looking and nodded
gently.

“Yes, these are some of the machines we used to use
in times of war. They were quick to construct and very effective.
Until the other side started to build them.”

Yeah, I wonder where the idea for those machines
came from.

Spartan
cou
ld see parallels with their own
uprising two decades ago on the derelict station. They had almost
lost to the Biomechs and the Zealots, both of whom fought for what
became known as the Echidna Union; an entity that Spartan was
starting to believe was nothing more than a construct of this Great
Enemy that despoiled worlds and created wars. As quickly as they
had moved onto the slope, they were out in the open. The bright
light from the triple stars was very different to the stars of
Alpha Centauri, and Spartan’s mind started to wonder what other
parallels there were with this world and his own. They moved past
shattered masonry, and a question formed on his lips. That was when
he spotted the machine.