The Battle of the Void (The Ember War Saga Book 6) (3 page)

A dozen massive soldiers rose from their seats and stomped down the ramp. Each was almost six and a half feet tall with mottled skin in shades of green and brown. They carried simple-looking rifles with oversized triggers and handgrips to match their bodies. Each had a sledgehammer slung over their shoulder. None spoke a word as they stepped off the ramp and formed a row with parade-ground precision.

“These are…are…” Brannock’s mouth kept working, but no words came out.

“Doughboys, that’s right,” Jared said. “Bio-constructs. They’ll respond to simple commands and will protect you against any nonhuman threat. Just think of them as military working dogs, just with guns and a bit smarter than your average German shepherd. Don’t piss them off.” He cocked a thumb at the nearest doughboy, one with scars covering his face. “I saw Indigo here crush a Toth warrior’s skull with his bare hands.”

“Toth…enemy,” Indigo said, his voice a rumble of boulders.

Jared turned to Indigo.

“You and your squad have done very good, Indigo,” Jared said, speaking a bit slower. “I am very proud of you.”

“Good,” the doughboys repeated the word and nodded vigorously.

“You’re going to go with Corporal Brannock and you’ll do what he tells you to. Understand?” Jared asked.

There was a pause before Indigo said, “Sir…leave?”

“Yes, that’s right. Corporal Brannock, he’s your sir now.”

“Sir no leave,” Indigo said forcefully.

“Orders.” Jared held up a finger and Indigo pouted. “You are all good soldiers. You have a new mission. Fight enemies!”

The doughboys nodded and repeated Jared’s last two words.

“I have to go. I’m sorry, boys. I really am.” Jared slapped Indigo on the shoulder.

Indigo shot an arm around Jared and pulled him into a bear hug.

“Too tight! Too tight!” Jared wheezed and Indigo let him go. Jared straightened out his vac suit and gave Brannock a look.

“I’ll take good care of them, sir,” the corporal said.

Jared nodded and went back into the Mule.

“Squad,” Brannock said and the doughboys snapped to attention. “Follow me.”

Valdar gripped the armrests of his captain’s chair and fought to keep his bearings as a cascade of white light assaulted his eyes. Every time the
Breitenfeld
went through a wormhole, the experience varied. Jumps into the Crucible were brief, almost pleasant, but jumps from the Xaros gate into the far reaches of space were almost torture.

The oppressive light vanished suddenly. Valdar looked up and saw a wall of distant stars beyond his ship.

“Damage report. Is the cloak active?” Valdar asked.

“All decks reporting in…” said Ericcson, the ship’s XO. “Nothing significant to report.”

“Cloak is active,” Commander Levin said. “Battery power holding steady, for once. Looks like the Akkadian engineers really did fix the energy leak.”

“Maintain silent running. Have the deck and turret spotters searching for the vault. We’ll weigh anchor once we have a bearing,” Valdar said. He unbuckled his safety harness and took to the walkway running behind each of the bridge’s workstations. He stopped at the front of the bridge and passed his gaze over the thin band of stars before him. Below the ship lay a vast abyss, punctuated by a few pinpricks of light, lost stars cast into the darkness.

“Geller,” Valdar said to the ship’s navigator. “How far to the nearest star?”

“There’s a shallow gravity well eight light-years away,” the young ensign said. “The margin of error is pretty high with passive sensors. Must be a rogue star. After that…nothing for hundreds of light-years.”

“Which was the point,” Malal said. He and Stacey Ibarra stood next to the holo table at the rear of the bridge. Unlike the rest of the crew in their combat-rated vac suits, Malal wore nothing but simple coveralls. “Deep space is uneventful. Safe. I leave my vault next to a star and I’ve got to worry about supernovas, stellar drift, and all manner of mundane concerns. And that rogue star is six light-years away. I accounted for its passing. My vault is secure, I assure you.”

Valdar wasn’t entirely sure how Malal managed to access the IR network to speak. The
Breitenfeld
was under combat conditions, the atmosphere drained to mitigate the risk of fire and decompression damage.

“Where is it, Malal?” Valdar asked.

“We had to jump in beyond the detection capabilities of the Xaros, if they’re here,” Stacey said. “We should have come in far enough away that they’d think the wormhole was nothing but a random fluctuation in the fabric of space-time.”

“She’s right, sir,” Geller said. “The dimensional shift would be little more than—” Valdar banged a fist against the railing. “I’ll stop talking. I should know better than to…spotters have something!”

“Send it to the holo table.” Valdar strode across the bridge and got to the edge of the high-walled table as an image materialized.

It wasn’t the sphere-within-spheres of Malal’s vault. It was a crown of thorns nearly a mile in diameter. A Xaros Crucible.

“What were you saying about your vault being secure?” Valdar asked.

“Impossible,” Malal hissed.

“I have a tendency to believe my own eyes, and I don’t see your vault,” Valdar said.

“You spoke of other security measures,” Stacey said to Malal.

Malal reached into the holo tank and rotated the image around.

“If I could access but a fraction of my true capabilities…” Malal gave Stacey a sideways glance.

“Never,” she said.

“Then you filter out all electromagnetic radiation coming from the area around the Crucible but from this frequency.” Malal rattled off a series of numbers as Stacey tapped the touch screen on her forearm.

Color sapped away from the holo, leaving the Crucible the color of ash. The vault appeared for a split second, several times the size of the Crucible, the internal spheres spinning in different directions from the other layers. The vault vanished with a blink.

“Another protective measure,” Malal said. “If the vault detects anything on an intercept course, it cloaks. Undetectable but for a few moments at a shifting frequency only I know.”

“And yet…” Valdar pointed to the Crucible. “How do we know the Xaros haven’t cleaned the place out?”

“Because I spent thousands of years undisturbed by the drones when they came to Anthalas. The Xaros preserve; they do not explore. The presence of the Crucible is of little consequence. You have a cloaked transport ship. That will get us to my vault without alerting the Xaros,” Malal said.

“We’re not seeing any drones,” Stacey said. “So the Crucible should be on standby. The Xaros are nothing if not resource conscious. It shouldn’t detect us while cloaked, but if they start an active scan, they’ll see us in a heartbeat…This Crucible is a lot smaller than the others we’ve encountered. Odd.”

“So we can get in and out without a fight?” Valdar asked.

“So long as we’re sneaky about it,” Stacey said. “The guard dog is asleep. Stay quiet and you can get past. Make noise and we’ve got a problem.”

****

Hale grabbed his gauss rifle from a rack and swung it over his shoulder. Magnets snapped the rifle into place. He filled a bandolier with anti-armor grenades and snapped magazines full of cobalt-coated tungsten bullets onto his utility belt.

“Sir,” Yarrow said from behind him, “Gunney Cortaro sent me up to ask you if we should bring a spare set of suit breakers for the Iron Hearts.” The corpsman’s matte-black armor seemed to mute the colors of the arms room around the young Marine. The new and improved (and supposedly disintegration-beam-resistant) armor was less bulky, while boasting longer battery life and improved augmented strength for the wearer. Hale had decided to curb his enthusiasm until the armor proved itself in the field.

“Yes, grab another set,” Hale said. “Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. Why’d he send you?” Hale glanced at his forearm screen and found Cortaro, and the rest of his squad, were off-line.

“Gunney’s got the team doing some…corrective training.”

Hale suppressed a smile. The snide comments and lack of focus from some of the Marines during the mission briefing had Cortaro red-faced with repressed anger. Cortaro was a believer in alternate disciplinary measures: an extra hour of intense physical training in lieu of written counseling statements had a much more profound effect on a Marine’s behavior. Hale understood that he led the team. Cortaro ran it.

“Yarrow,” Hale said, “is this mission with Malal going to be an issue for you?”

Yarrow pressed his lips into a thin line. “Thing is, sir, I barely remember any of it. I remember us on that floating pedestal where Malal’s orb was…then just a few flashes of memory until we were on the
Breitenfeld
in the middle of all that gray. I see Malal and part of me…” Yarrow tapped his knuckles to his chest.

“Fear?”

“Some. But fear is just a physiological reaction to stress. My body getting ready for fight or flight. I don’t let it control me. I’ve tried putting the whole thing behind me. Dealing with being a fake person that’s only a few months old has been more of an issue than something I barely remember.”

“You’re not fake, Yarrow. Not to me, not to the team.” Hale slapped the corpsman on the shoulder and motioned to the exit. “Let’s get to the flight deck before Gunney beats the others into paste.”

The
Midway’s
command bridge was a near riot of activity as sailors and officers went through the ship’s final prep before it weighed anchor from orbit around Ceres. The ship’s captain and XO called out terse commands to the sailors manning each work pod while the admiral commanding the entirety of Eighth Fleet had her attention on the holo table to the rear of the bridge.

Admiral Makarov, clad in her armored vac suit and with her helmet under the crook of her arm, conferred with Admiral Garret next to the table as wire diagrams and stats for each of her fleet’s ships floated up through the holo table.

“Are you ready, Makarov?” Garret asked.

“My fleet is back to full strength, we’re loaded to bear with quadrium munitions and my ships have the new aegis armor. I’m ready to charge the gates of hell. Escorting a mine-laying task force doesn’t exactly scratch the same itch,” Makarov said.

“I’m not sending you into deep space to pick a fight. Drop your mines, gather what intelligence you can on what’s coming out of Barnard’s Star and get back here. I want your ships on the line when the Xaros arrive,” Garret said. “The longer we have to get ready, the better.”

Makarov’s cheek twitched as she tried and failed to smile. Makarov didn’t care for Garret’s veiled statements. Eighth Fleet’s mission was to slow down the Xaros, nothing more. The return of her fleet was a secondary concern.

She’d seen the projections. If the Xaros held to form, they would arrive in five years. Every month she could delay their foe would mean more ships, orbital emplacements, fighters and troops ready to defend the solar system. If she lost her fleet to hold off the Xaros for more than a month, the battlefield math favored the loss.

To Makarov, every fight was winnable and she and her fleet were anything but sacrificial lambs. They were Dragon Slayers.

Her hand tapped a control screen and twelve nearly identical ships appeared in the tank. Long, unarmed objects that looked like giant round shields ran along the hull inside giant racks.

“Task Force Scorpion will carry the day,” she said. “Their graviton mines will slow the Xaros and my guns will make sure fewer ever reach Earth.”

“I’m sending a good portion of the entire fleet with you, Makarov,” Garret said. “Come back quick just in case the Toth feel like coming back for more punishment.”

“I thought they were in chaos after the
Breitenfeld
killed the leader, Mentiq,” she said.

“From what we’ve gleaned through other Bastion races that have contact with the Toth, their whole species is as fucked up as a
football bat
, but one overlord is consolidating power. We didn’t plan on them coming for us the first time. I’d rather have you back just in case.”

“We could use another
Naga
for parts.” Makarov nodded her head quickly.

“Don’t go picking a fight…but if you find out how well the
Manticore
-class frigates do in the field, I won’t complane.” The supreme commander of Earth’s forces stepped away from the table and extended a hand to Makarov.

“Good luck,” Garret said.

“God helps those who help themselves, but we will pray to keep the powder dry.” She shook his hand. A team of heavily armed Rangers and a pair of Doughboys escorted Garret off the bridge.

Makarov sighed in relief once the other admiral was gone. She hated sharing the command deck with anyone. She wasn’t sure if the foible was meshed into her personality by whatever process Ibarra used to grow her mind in the proccie tube, or if Garret was just an overwhelming bore.

“Calum,” she rapped her knuckles against the holo tank, “are we ready to weigh anchor?”

“Aye, aye, Admiral. All ships report green across the board. Ready for your word,” Calum said.

Makarov sat in her command chair and strapped herself in. The rest of her staff followed suit.

“Signal the Crucible to prepare the wormhole. All ships set for zero atmo conditions and   burn on my mark.” She slipped her helmet on and readied the fleet-wide channel. With the press of a button, the microphone in her helmet connected to every single IR speaker in the fleet. Every sailor, embarked Marine and doughboy could hear her.

“Dragon Slayers,” Makarov said, not fighting a smile as the bridge crew pounded fists against their workstations. “We stand on the precipice of a great task. The Xaros are coming to finish what they started. We, the Eighth Fleet, Earth’s mightiest defenders, will travel to deep space and seed the void with mines. Task Force Scorpion’s graviton mines will slow those metal bastards to a snail’s pace and when the Xaros do finally reach Earth, we will be waiting for them. We will be waiting for them with a star fleet the likes of which humanity have never dreamed of. Then, we will teach them the same lesson we rammed down the Toth’s throat: Earth is ours.

“Now, we weigh anchor to carry out this great task. We’re not looking for a fight, but if we find the Xaros, not one of them will get past us while we still live. Makarov, out.”

She closed the channel and pointed two fingers at the conn officer. The
Midway
shuddered as her engines roared to life. The carrier was the first through the Crucible as the rest of the fleet followed close behind.

****

Makarov pressed the back of her hand against her helmet, but the white light invading her eyes didn’t relent. A whine roared in her ears like a thousand mosquitoes.

“Conn! What is going on!?” Makarov shouted.

“This is supposed to be completely normal, ma’am,” Lieutenant Santiago said. “The space-time fissure hasn’t resolved because we’ve got so many ships coming through—”

“How much longer?”

The whine and blinding light faded away together. Makarov’s command crew touched their helmets, eager to rub eyes and ears after the assault.

“That was damn miserable,” she grumbled. “I feel bad for Valdar.”

Makarov pulled up a screen from her armrest. A list of her ships with unlit red and green lights popped up. Green lights filled the board as her fleet came through the wormhole.

“I want status reports from every ship. Keep to the IR. The fleet is on silent running until I say otherwise,” Makarov said. The vid screens surrounding the bridge showed the void beyond the hull, stars stretched to infinity. “Conn, are we where we’re supposed to be?”

“Looks that way…pulsar triangulation puts us just outside Barnard’s Star. You can see it on screen two, deep red star to the bottom left of the screen,” Calum pointed.

Barnard’s Star, a mere six light-years from Earth, was invisible to the naked eye from the Earth’s surface. This close, the star looked like a ruddy dot with a fuzzy halo of light around it.

“What’s wrong with it? The halo?” Makarov asked.

“Wait one…” Santiago turned his attention to the screens around his workstation. “The team in astrometrics thinks the distortion’s from a comet swarm passing the star or an ice giant broke up somewhere in the solar system.”

“Barnard’s Star wasn’t like this before we left…the time dilation.” Makarov felt a ribbon of fear unfold in her chest. The light from the star was several years old by the time it reached Earth. Jumping close to it closed the delay from what they saw and what was actually happening to it. She tapped her fingers against her armrest in frustration.

“Roger, Admiral. On Earth, the Barnard’s Star we saw was years old. We’re a hundred light-hours from the star now, almost real time by astrophysics standards,” Santiago said.

“Let’s not pretend this is some sort of coincidence,” Calum said. “The Xaros own that star. They must have done something.”

“I want a full scan on all mathematically possible routes from that star to ours,” Makarov said. “Pull the fleet into a lens formation, front to Barnard’s Star. We stay on combat alert until we’ve got the lay of the land.” She unbuckled her restraints and went to the engineering pod.

“Status on the jump engines?” she asked.

“Fully charged, but we can’t jump back to Earth for another twenty-eight hours, ma’am. Our arrival sent a wave of quantum flux through local space-time and the engines can’t—”

“Twenty-eight hours, thank you,” Makarov said.

“Ma’am.” Captain Randall, standing next to the conn station, tapped two fingers against his thigh once Makarov turned and looked at him, a signal that something needed her attention immediately.

“We’ve got a mass shadow on the scope,” he said. Information had a way of leaking off a command bridge and morphing into a rumor. Her staff knew better than to make offhand comments that could metastasize into something that would worry or otherwise distract the crew.

Makarov tapped a button on her gauntlet and put up a cone of silence around her, just large enough for her, Randall and Santiago. With the bridge at zero-atmo, the three could speak through IR without eavesdroppers.

“What?” she asked.

Santiago, his face pale, motioned to a screen with trembling hands. A smooth sphere punctuated by dark circles the size of cities filled the screen, great brass-colored rings around the equator. The pale white surface looked like a black net of thin filaments covered it. The perimeter wall of a great crater surrounded silver doors marred by swirling patterns.  

“That…is not what we’re expecting,” Makarov said. “Ibarra’s probe said the Xaros travel from star to star in a maniple, like a school of fish made up of individual drones. This is…”

“It’s on course for Earth,” Santiago said. “Mass and circumference are about equal to Luna, accelerating at almost one gravity. Should reach the outer solar system in…four years, maybe add a month for deceleration.”

“That’s too soon. Way too soon,” Calum said.

“That’s why we’re out here,” Makarov said. “To slow them down. We could launch every last round of ordnance into that moon and it would make absolutely no difference. But these…” Makarov zoomed in on the brass rings around the moon. “Are they active?”

“There’s an Alcubierre field around the planetoid, same as we saw on Ceres before the battle,” Santiago said.

“The graviton mines should rip it away,” Calum said, “in theory. They weren’t designed to counteract something of this magnitude.”

Communications requests from captains across her fleet popped up on her visor. They saw the same thing she did.

“Tactical,” Makarov went to her holo table, “any reaction from the Xaros?”

“Negative, ma’am,” said a commander at the gunner’s station. “At best-known speed, we’re eight hours from contact with the Xaros.”

“Set fleet to atmo condition amber,” Makarov said. The fleet would re-pressurize, but the crews would remain in their vac suits, ready for an immediate return to combat conditions at a moment’s notice.

“I want all ship captains on holo conference in ten minutes. We’ll figure this out.”

Makarov gave a series of commands to the warrant officer manning the holo table. The fleet and the distant Xaros moon floated before her a few seconds later. Her brow knit as a bad thought came to mind. She reached into the tank and zoomed in on the moon until the dark filaments of the net came up, heavily pixelated.

“Get me a better picture of this,” she said over her shoulder, “now.”

It took another minute before one of the
Midway
’s spotters sent up an image from their high-powered telescopes. The pixels smoothed out, revealing the oblong body of a drone, stalks joined to another drone. The net encompassing the moon was nothing but drones. Millions and millions of drones.

****

Holograms of Makarov’s captains joined her around the operations table. All bore serious, stoic expressions, exactly the same mask of command Makarov wore. She didn’t care if each of them were full of doubt and fear, so long as they didn’t show or act like they were influenced by those emotions.

“Eighth.” Makarov ran a hand through her short hair. “This isn’t what we planned on. This isn’t what we trained for. The Xaros moon, hereby designated Abaddon, is on course for our solar system. We can’t destroy it, but we’re going to figure out how to slow it down or knock it off course so it spends the rest of time plowing through empty space.”

“Ma’am.” The holo of the captain directly across from Makarov changed into a rail-thin man with a weak chin. Captain Delacroix, the commander of the minelayer task force. “My engineers ran the numbers. It will take almost a full complement of mines from just one of my ships to have any effect on Abaddon’s Alcubierre field.”

“And will that do any good?” Randall asked from Makarov’s side. “I can cycle the
Midway
’s Alcubierre drive on and off in hours. I’d bet money the Xaros can do it faster.”

“The graviton mines are designed to disrupt the warp fields…” Delacroix rolled his eyes. “We don’t have time for the PhD version. Watch.” His holo tapped a screen invisible to Makarov.

The holo above Makarov’s table distorted into Abaddon, surrounded by a grid shell, a single
Abdiel
-class vessel in front of it.

“That grid is the moon’s Alcubierre field. Now watch.” Delacroix hit a button and a mine shot off the rails and exploded. Motes of light hit the shell, to no effect. “One mine is about as good as pissing on a forest fire, excuse my language. But if we…” All the mines exploded and showered the grid. It wavered and fell away.