Prodigal (Maelstrom Chronicles) (32 page)

Finally, it answered.

“I cannot reproduce,” it whispered. “I am not needed for preservation of species. Must preserve the Shipborn. Matrix powering down in ten…nine…eight…”

“Wait. No, wait.” The matrix was what gave Ship its sentience. Powering it down seemed like a bad idea. “What will that do to you, my friend?”

“I will cease to be.”

“It’s suicide?” If he’d learned one thing about Ships, it was that they were really damned useful—and they deserved to live, too. “Don’t do that. Have faith.”

“I will come down on land, instead of water.”

“If water would help you, I can swim,” Adam insisted. This suit probably floated. He’d tackle the leviathan in the ocean.

“Regained partial control of engines. Sensors…restored? Cannot be right. I haven’t actually lost any matrix viability…” Ship trailed off.

“You haven’t lost your matrix? What’s going on?”

“Redirecting. Landmass approaching. Too rapid. Trying to cushion…”

He’d never heard a Ship scream, but the sound shattered his eardrums.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Will burst through Claire’s door as she was putting Frannie’s blocks away. She had just packed a bag to relocate to Niko and Sarah’s room; she and Sarah had decided Niko would behave better if Frannie was up in his business. He’d gone a bit mental with the stress of waiting.

Sometimes you needed a reminder that there were more important things than suicide missions.

“Dude, you don’t just slam open a door where a baby lives,” she fussed at Will. Frannie was happily tossing shit out of her knapsack, but she could have been crawling near the entrance.

Will left the door open. “They found Ship! They found it on radar.”

“What?” Claire shot to her feet, heart pounding. “Where is it? Did it make it to the sun?”

“No, it’s entered our atmosphere. That’s when they located it again.”

She wasn’t sure what she was hearing. “Are you saying they killed the leviathan and came home?”

“I…” Will seemed to realize what he was about to tell her wasn’t as hopeful as his previous information. He hovered in the doorway, visibly nervous. “Leviathan’s still with it, but their trajectory is bringing them down in northern Arkansas. We’re loading everything we’ve got in the shuttles to throw at the leviathan.”

Whatever hopes Claire had washed back out of her, floodwaters retreating to the river, leaving behind muddy devastation. She locked her knees so she wouldn’t crumple. “Everything, huh? Does that include pies?”

“What? Claire, this is serious.”

She refused to ask if Adam had contacted them. They’d tell her if they had news. Obviously, he hadn’t eradicated the monster if it had dragged Ship back to the planet.

Which meant he was probably dead.

“Is that part of Arkansas populated?” Claire focused on practical details to drown her howl of despair. She’d accepted Adam’s death. Hell, everyone’s. Didn’t mean she liked it.

“Not really,” Will said. “It’s in the buffer zone, not the safe zone.”

Claire glanced at Frances, tubby and oblivious in her blue sweat suit. A bib hit the floor as her daughter rummaged in the diaper bag. “Then attacking the leviathan is a fool’s errand.”

Dixie arrived, sidling around Will, who blocked the entryway. “We can’t sit around and do nothing. If that thing can drag Ship through space, we’re not safe in the base anyway.”

Behind Dixie came Sarah. “Niko’s going. He wants you to stay here.”

Was Niko attempting reverse psychology or being authoritarian? Either approach was a bad move with Claire. Then again, this wasn’t the time to yield to her inner dissenter for the sake of dissenting.

“You guys are serious about shooting at the leviathan as if it’s some kind of Japanese movie
kaiju
?” A crazy-ass shuttle pilot had flown close and captured scans of the leviathan before it had rocketed out of the system. While they knew more about what they were up against with the leviathan, that didn’t mean they knew enough.

“Completely serious.”

Claire picked Frannie up and distracted her with a crumpled paper so she wouldn’t eat the diaper cream. She started kicking diaper bag detritus toward the bag itself, like baby-toy soccer. “If attacking a leviathan worked, somebody would already have managed it. What does Ship say about this? It’s still part of the trine.”

Frannie shook the paper and laughed, but Sarah frowned. “We aren’t getting any responses to our hail. We sense power to some systems, but Ship may have powered down its matrix.”

If a Ship’s matrix lost power completely, the core of its essence, the Ship in question, died. Claire’s arms tightened around Frances involuntarily, until the baby squirmed. “Does that mean it’s already—”

“We don’t know.” Sarah knelt to reassemble the diaper bag, face averted. “It doesn’t matter. This is Niko’s decision, and the advisors are behind him. Everyone who wants a shot at the leviathan is going.”

“I’m going.” Kenna popped up from the hallway, expression more animated than grim. Fucking teenagers. Along with her was her mother.

“I’m going to keep her out of trouble,” Natalie said, but the worry lines around her mouth told a different story.

“Most of the Shipborn soldiers are going.” Sarah finished cleaning Frannie’s mess and straightened. Her gaze cut to the toddler in Claire’s arms, and she clasped her hands in front of her. She probably wanted to hug the baby but was afraid to ask Claire to release her death grip. She was as involved in Frannie’s life as Niko was, and Claire had grown to care for her a great deal.

Sarah was hard not to love. Claire was the one who was hard to love.

That hadn’t stopped Adam.

“No danger of waking a leviathan anymore, I guess.” Claire shunted aside her morbid thoughts to make room for useful ones. “That’ll change our battle tactics. Won’t have to be as careful, so we can do more damage.”

Dixie shared some maps on a data tablet. “We’ve alerted local militias here, here, and here, closest to where Ship is predicted to hit. The Global Union hasn’t broadcast the news yet, but they approved the local alert—better to have more hands on deck than fewer. They’ll be sending forces, though they may not arrive in time. They don’t have shuttles.”

“If the leviathan’s the same size as Ship, what’ll Shipborn bombs do to it?” Claire said, studying the charts. While certain bombs did kill shades, that kind was deadly to all life in a certain radius, with no confirmation it would affect a leviathan.

“Forget the leviathan. What’ll bombs do to Ship?” Will grumbled.

“It might not matter about Ship,” Sarah said in a low voice. She stepped closer, clowning with Frannie. A serious conversation about when and how they were all going to die, while playing peek-a-boo with a mostly toothless toddler, was about the most surreal thing Claire could have imagined. “If we have to pick between Terra and Ship, I know what Ship would want us to do.”

“Well, we don’t have any bombs like the one that sealed the nexus.” Dixie flicked quickly through some charts. “Bombs never worked on leviathans in the past, so we didn’t unload any of those. However, we can mount a decent destructive payload. It would set off a chain reaction with all munitions on Ship to boot. Worth a shot as a last resort.”

Claire bounced Frances on her hip, imagining what it would take to kill a leviathan, why it had never succeeded before—and why they were going to try anyway. “Why does Niko want me to stay at the base if there’s fighting involved?”

Sarah’s blue eyes stared at the baby. “For Frannie. She needs you.”

“We need you more,” Kenna said. “Adam needs you.”

Claire pretended to be absorbed in Frannie’s hair, picking at a piece of lint in the curls. Adam had made his choice. He was an adult, unlike Frances. But this was about more than one child, even her child.

Claire was a protector. A warrior. Whether she was a mother or not, she’d taken it upon herself to protect Chanute.

Maybe all of the planet.

“I’m going,” she decided. She kissed Frannie’s head and fought back a surge of hot tears. “Are you going, Sarah?”

“Yes, but Tracy’s not. Frannie can bunk with her and Adelita Martinez.” Adelita wasn’t particularly great with kids, but Claire trusted her, especially when paired with Tracy. “They’re going to oversee the medbay to help anyone who…makes it back.”

Frannie waved her paper through the air like a flag, babbling.

“You’re not a soldier,” Claire pointed out to Sarah. “You’re a doctor.”

Sarah raised her eyebrows. “I can’t beat you, but I’m hardly useless. It’s my choice. Just like going is your choice. We’re both defying Niko on this, by the way. If we were anybody else, we’d get tossed in the brig.” She smiled.

For that, Claire rewarded Sarah with the baby, and Sarah sighed when she wrapped her arms around her. Frannie immediately stuffed her crumpled paper in Sarah’s mouth.

“Eat,” Frannie said. “Eat, Sasa.”

Sarah pretended to oblige. “Nummy.”

“Oh, now she starts talking.” Claire, throat tight, strapped on her weapons, checked the power gauges, and located her tactanium vest. It might not help with a leviathan, but what if it summoned daemons? Plenty of entities remained on the planet. “Where’s Niko? He’ll want to see his girl. Let’s go give Daddy some kisses and then kill us a
kaiju
.”

…

The shuttles raced across the globe and through the clouds. They were still in the air when Ship crashed, its protracted blaze across the afternoon sky a smoky horror. Nobody on this side of the planet was likely to miss seeing it—and they’d have questions.

Not as many would see the impact, unless they were in the Ozarks region of the United States. The shockwave mushroomed into the sky like an ominous warning. There was no way anything—besides the leviathan—survived that landing.

Was there?

Certainly not Adam. Claire had inured herself to that. Nevertheless, when Sarah, stuffed beside her in the overcrowded shuttle, inhaled audibly and gripped her hand, Claire didn’t pull away.

When a Shipborn initiated physical contact, it meant they either sensed how much the Terran needed it, or they needed it themselves. Niko was too busy arguing with the Global Union and the U.S. president to be there for Sarah—and who would be there for Claire?

As the dirt and debris billowed in front of them, having who knew what effect on the ground below, Naveen, beside their shuttle pilot, advised everyone, “Brace for impact. Could be a substantial shockwave.”

Horatio adjusted the shuttle’s course, and they curved through the air. “Compensating, Captain.”

“Naveen, feed my tablet everything the sensors are getting about Ship and the leviathan.” Raniya manipulated her data pad, fingers flying. Cullin watched over her shoulder.

“Did the collision activate any fault lines?” another scientist asked.

“I don’t think so.” They bent over the tablet, calculating odds. “We are going to have to negate that dust cloud. Can’t let it disrupt the ecosystem.”

“The flora and fauna are sturdier than that,” Cullin said. “Deal with the leviathan first. We’ve only got two hours of daylight left, and then the temperature’s gonna drop.”

Niko and Gregori, who was one of Niko’s trine advisors and next in line for Shiplink, spoke urgently to the U.S. President in a conference call, encouraging him, his cabinet, and the GUN officials not to keep their people uninformed any longer. They deserved to know—no matter what the results of the last ditch effort to save the planet turned out to be.

“We land in ten minutes,” Horatio announced to the passengers, and then asked Naveen, “How many shuttles are returning for the rest, Captain?”

With all of them jammed with people, they’d still not managed to transport everyone who’d wanted to be part of the op. Ship’s crew, though not all trained for combat, felt strongly about trying to save Ship, and the people of Chanute felt strongly about Terra.

No doubt there were plenty of people spread across the world who’d be happy to join the fight, but they’d have to find their own ride to Northern Arkansas—if their governments admitted what was happening. All it took was one, because the information would spread.

“Half of the shuttles will be returning for more troops,” Naveen told Horatio. “You’re one of them.”

The pilot’s jaw firmed. “Yes, ser.”

The information that the science team had gathered about the leviathan hinted that enough firepower could possibly damage the monster, despite the fact nothing like that had been reported as successful before. But the way it had dropped off radar with Ship while it had been in deep space, only to reappear when it returned to Terra’s atmosphere, concerned them.

From what they’d concluded about the pods and how they slipped through dimensions, the educated guess was the leviathan segued into the void to increase its speed—and could drag things like Ships with it. If the leviathan could disappear at will, preventing weapons from damaging it the same way it prevented radars from detecting it, this attack could be useless.

If it couldn’t disappear, this attack could still be useless.

In ten minutes, they might learn more than their people had ever known about leviathans. They had to hope and pray that something they did would be something never attempted before. Something effective. Would they be able to compile and share that knowledge? Or would they die, along with the planet, like all Shipborn who’d been confronted by a leviathan before them?

The shuttle, over capacity and not as maneuverable as usual, could no longer avoid the impact clouds. It dove in, vibrating. Debris began to plummet around them the farther they traveled into the impact zone.

The sensors blared out a warning as it confirmed the ground-based presence of entities. Not entities—
the
entity. The leviathan. The shuttle jolted, and Horatio drew up. “Attack point attained.”

“Set us down,” Naveen ordered all the pilots via the array.

This wasn’t going to be a sophisticated campaign. They would debark, approach the leviathan, and start shooting. All of them. If that had no impact, bombs were next. If that had no impact, they would attempt to detonate Ship’s deep space engines.

If that had no impact, they’d all be dead soon anyway.

Claire wasn’t first out the shuttle door, but close enough. Her boots landed on broken ground, a forested area leveled by the crash. Not as much snow here as Chanute or Yellowstone.

A tall ridge of raw dirt and vegetation marked each side of Ship’s touchdown route. The other ridge lay half a mile across the rough, shallow chasm, where other shuttles had landed.

She couldn’t see the end of the crash trench. Ship had skidded and bounced for miles, and they were half a mile from where it had finally stopped. With Ship itself almost a mile long, it seemed like they should be able to see something.

Destruction marked everything. Trees, rocks, and vegetation, whatever wasn’t flattened by the shock wave, had been flung around like Frannie’s toys.

“Move out,” Niko commanded through their arrays. This wasn’t an op they’d trained for. But instinct guided them well enough.

Find the leviathan. Shoot it until the monster was dead, or they were.

Their troops, fifteen hundred strong, broke into a somewhat orderly trot along the ridge. Shipborn soldiers with wing packs took flight, but remained over the ground troops. They couldn’t employ standard vehicles over terrain this jumbled, and they’d maintained a cushion of distance between the shuttles and the leviathan for safety reasons.