The Battle of the Void (The Ember War Saga Book 6) (5 page)

“What about the codex? Is it still here?”

“There are voids.” The tree dimmed. Leaves fell from branches and shriveled before they hit the ground. “Voids in the pollution where my more sensitive projects were kept. My wards and ciphers hold true.”

The trunk cracked in half, one side falling to the ground, crumbling into dust.

“If you two are done wasting time…” Hale motioned into the bands of trees with the muzzle of his rifle.

“Movement,” Bodel said, “on foot, two o’clock from our direction of travel. I can’t make out the distance in this fog…but it’s coming in fast.”

“Shield the principal. Take cover behind the trees,” Hale said.

Elias and Kallen stepped over to Malal, protecting him with their armored bulk.

A clipped staccato noise came from the distance, dozens of high, oscillating yelps.

“That sound like barking to anyone else?” Egan asked.

Stacey took her gauss carbine off her back and got closer to Malal behind the armors’ legs. The entity was her responsibility, and she wasn’t entirely sure how vulnerable he was while he had the Qa’Resh governor inside him. She keyed off the safety and felt it hum in her hands.

Kallen glanced down at her. “You shoot me and I will be upset,” she said.

“What? Why do you think I’d do that?”

Elias turned his helm to her, and then looked back into the fog.

“Oh, right, I did shoot him in the face…that one time,” she said as the panicked memory of Elias ripping open her stricken elevator and bouncing a bullet off the soldier’s helm came back to her. “You’re still mad about that?”

“Incoming!” The snap of gauss rifles erupted around her.

The ground shook as the double clap of Elias’s twin cannons spat bullets that blew a tree into splinters.

Stacey struggled to even see what the Marines were shooting at. She glanced at Malal, a serene expression on his face.

A streak of orange and white shot into the air over the forest. It reached an apex then dove onto Kallen. A clang of metal on metal broke in the air and the armor stumbled backwards. Stacey watched in shock as Kallen tipped over and came down on her like a felled tree.

Malal yanked Stacey out of the way. She bounced off Elias’ leg and nearly dropped her carbine.

A leonine form with gleaming tusks savaged Kallen’s armor, teeth and claws drawing sparks as they ripped across her helm and shoulders.

Stacey swung her carbine up and fired from the hip. Bullets hit the ground next to Kallen then stitched a line up her flank and into the attacker. The beast yelped in pain as it curled up, its fanged snout biting at a smoking crater on its rear haunches.

Kallen’s massive hand grabbed the beast and swung it into a tree, shattering it like a dropped wine glass. Smoke poured out of the half still in the armor’s grasp, the stench of ozone invading Stacey’s helmet.

She gagged and doubled over. Malal touched a button on the side of her helmet, and a blast of fresh air blew across her face as her armor sealed itself off from her surroundings. She went to her knees, fighting her body’s desire to vomit.

“You OK?” Yarrow patted her on the shoulder.

“Hate…that smell…” she said. Kallen’s shadow loomed over her. The armor had the rear half of the beast held by a whip-thin tail. Two divots of cobalt blue marred Kallen’s side armor.

“No hard feelings,” Kallen said, dropping the remains at Stacey’s feet. Clear liquid seeped out of a mess of shorn wires and sparking power lines.

A high-pitched screech filled the air, a sound she remembered from her childhood when a dog had been hit by a car, breaking the poor animal’s spine and legs.

“Come,” Malal said.

Stacey followed him to the source of the noise. Hale and Cortaro stood near a tree, hunks of bark blown free by the Marines’ gauss weapons. Their weapons trained on one of the injured beasts.

It looked like a saber-toothed tiger made out of white and orange glass. Streams of light raced over its surface, swirling around the ends of its missing front legs. It tried to crawl through hunks of broken glass, the remains of the rest of the beasts that attacked.

“What the hell is it?” Cortaro asked. “Is it…alive?”

“I can tell you,” Malal said. “May I?” he asked Hale.

“Be my guest,” Hale said.

Malal grabbed the beast at the base of its skull. Screams of fear filled the air as he lifted it into the air. His other hand wrapped around the neck. Stacey’s stomach went into knots as the thing seemed to beg for mercy as it shivered in Malal’s grip.

Malal tore the head free from the rest of the body, and silence returned to the grove. Malal dug a finger into the exposed skull and removed a glowing cube. He wrapped his hand around the cube, fingers morphing into a solid mass.

“This is unexpected,” he said.

“Care to share the details?” Hale asked.

Malal tossed the cube over his shoulder.

“They are an echo. Android approximations from a dead world,” Malal said. “These things mimic the tusk-cats from the eastern hemisphere, not the planet’s sapient species that called itself the Jinn.”

“What about the Jinn?” Stacey asked. “Are they here too?”

“No,” Malal said. “The Jinn are gone. Extinct by my hand.”

****

Hale and Cortaro walked close to each other, their eyes watching opposite flanks for the small column of Marines and armor as they made their way through the neatly spaced rows of the glowing trees. There hadn’t been another sign of the tusk-cats, or any other wildlife, since the last encounter.

“I cross-leveled ammo,” Cortaro said. “We’re still green on battery life and supplies, but we have a couple more fights like that and we’re in trouble.”

“We didn’t come here for a scrap, but we’re going to win every one we get into,” Hale said. “Malal says we’re not far from the lab with the codex. Let’s hope that’s the last stop we have to make in this damn fun house.”

“Hope isn’t a method, sir.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Hale walked faster and opened a private channel to Stacey. “Ibarra, fall back and talk to me.”

Malal didn’t seem to notice as Stacey fell back to join Hale.

“Help you?” she asked, still on their suit-to-suit channel.

“Why is that thing helping us?”

Stacey looked away. “The Qa’Resh made a bargain with him. I don’t know all the details, but he’ll help us complete the Crucible, give us a shot at winning the war.”

“A ‘bargain’? In return for what? I saw what Malal did to the Shanishol on Anthalas. There were rivers of dead in that city, Stacey. He set himself up as some sort of prophet and lured thousands to their death. What kind of deal did they cut with him?” Hale asked.

“Again, I don’t know all the details.” Her words were clipped, guarded.

“He wanted
us
. When we had him on the
Breitenfeld
, he wanted to know how many humans were left so he could catch up with whoever left him behind…it’s the proccies, isn’t it? Did the Qa’Resh promise him a planet full of them once the war’s over?”

“No!”

“Thought you didn’t know the details,” Hale said.

“The Qa’Resh aren’t like that. They helped us against the Toth, gave us the location of Terra Nova to help us survive when the council voted to abandon Earth to the Toth.” Her face fell as she realized what she’d just said.

“What? The alliance voted to do what, exactly?”

“This is between you and me. Bastion wanted to let the Toth take some of the proccie technology—and every other human being left on Earth—then repopulate our home with a more compliant human population, the kind that doesn’t violate resolutions to save the Dotok…or assassinate enemy leaders,” she said. “The Qa’Resh are hard for me to fully understand, but they’re on the side of the light, like us.”

“Malal doesn’t want a nice summer home on the beach and a pension. What did the Qa’Resh promise to get his help?”

“I don’t know,” she said through grit teeth.

“Your grandfather tricked the whole planet for decades. Engineered a scenario where there was enough of a fleet to retake the Earth after it sidestepped the Xaros invasion. I have a hard time trusting him, and something tells me your apple doesn’t fall too far from his tree,” Hale said. He cut the line to Stacey and moved back to Cortaro.

“I see a wall,” Elias said. “Twenty rows of trees ahead.”

“My lab,” Malal said.

Makarov double-checked the seals on her helmet and lowered her head in prayer.

God, don’t let me screw this up. Amen.

She touched a strike cruiser in the holo before her and opened a channel to the captain.

“
Gallipoli
,” the captain said, a feed of his helmeted face appearing next to his ship.

“Parris, you ready for this?” Makarov said.

“We’ve been ready for the last half hour. I’ve got my squadrons in the void and three Warthogs tethered to my hull. Waiting for the word,” Captain Parris said.

“The word is given, good hunting,” Makarov said.

Parris cut the transmission. The
Gallipoli,
a frigate, and two destroyers accelerated away from the rest of the fleet, their course plot taking them wide around Abaddon’s rings. A diamond popped up on the course plot, the maximum engagement distance for the
Gallipoli
and her escorts’ rail cannons. Their mission was simple: attack the rings so Makarov and the fleet’s scientists and engineers could gather data for the next step. 

The minutes ticked by as the
Gallipoli
closed on the firing point without action from the Xaros. Sweat dribbled down the back of her vac suit and fell onto her visor. It reacted to the moisture, vibrating until the drop dissipated.

“We’ve got movement,” Kidson said. A single point on the drone net lifted off the surface, aimed directly for the
Gallipoli.
The net broke apart, the needlepoint of drones keeping toward the approaching human ships, the rest of the net reknitting itself over the surface.

“Abaddon’s acceleration is slowing, ma’am,” Santiago called out. “Down almost twenty percent to two gravities.”

“Is the net part of the propulsion system?” Calum asked.

Makarov opened a channel. “Scorpion, what’s your read on this?”

Delacroix’s face popped up next to the
Abdiel
. “The data is fascinating…a bit preliminary for a definitive answer.”

“The separated drone mass comes to nearly a hundred thousand individual drones,” Kidson said. He glanced at a flashing screen. “Video from the
Gallipoli.
”

A window opened in the holo. The needle of drones broke into thousands of individual drones, all swarming toward the
Gallipoli
.

Makarov saw the projections for her ships to reach the firing point and the intercept times for the drones. She opened a channel to Parris.

****

Captain Parris reached into his holo table and traced routes with his fingertips. He looked at his XO and shook his head.

“Parris?” Makarov’s full-body holo came up next to him. “We’re looking at the plot and—”

“It’s pointless, ma’am,” he said. “If we turn tail and run, the drones will be all over us before we could expect support from the rest of the fleet. I stay the course and I’ve got a fight on my hands before we hit range on the rings. Damn things are a lot faster than we’d seen before. My guess is they’re combining their Alcubierre fields to get at us that much sooner.”

Makarov’s face betrayed nothing as her holo wavered.

“We’ll take the shot. You have my word, Admiral.”

“Good hunting.” Makarov’s holo vanished.

“Helm,” Parris strapped himself into his command chair, “all ahead full. Guns, I want a full spread of q-shells and flechette rounds on that mass from every ship. Beat them back as long as you can. Save a broadside for the rings as soon as we’re in range.”

“Aye-aye, Skipper,” his tactical officer said from her pod. “The big guns never tire.”

Parris opened a channel to his wing commander. “Raven, you’ve got to pick up the strays that get through the bombardment. Keep them off us as long as you can.”

“Awful lot of drones heading right for us. Sure hope this ain’t a one-way trip,”
Raven said.

“Stop hoping and get ready to start shooting.” Parris pressed a button and prepared to address every ship under his command.

“This is
Gallipoli
actual. We’ve got a fight on our hands. Our mission is to knock a chunk off those rings and get back to the fleet. Make ’em pay,
Gallipoli
out.”

The rail gun batteries fired, the first ventral battery a split second after the other two, rocking the ship from side to side. Flashes from the other ships’ rail batteries burst like lightning deep within a thundercloud.

The first quadrium shells erupted against the line of approaching drones. Pale blue jagged tendrils of electricity arced through the leading drones, burning some out of existence and knocking thousands more off-line. Flechette rounds followed a split second behind the q-shells. They broke into spikes two meters long and ripped through the disabled drones, impaling several drones before being robbed of their killing momentum.

The bombardment hit the attacking drones like a series of shotgun blasts, blowing hunks out of the giant mass.

The needle broke apart, forming into a giant cloud of drones.

“Guns, adjust cannon fire, wide dispersion across the entire front,” Parris said. “Conn, how long until we’re in range of the rings?”

“Five minutes at current velocity and heading, Skipper,” the ensign at the conn said.

“Combination!” Commander Hudson called out. “Xaros are forming into…looks like one hundred drone constructs, disintegration cannons visible.”

Parris called up the spotter’s feed on his screen. The frigate-sized constructs gathered into a dozen tendrils and accelerated toward the
Gallipoli
like grasping fingers, single drones darting ahead of the larger ships.

“Flechettes won’t have much of an effect on these larger ships,” the gunnery officer said.

“Load lance shells. Take out the leading constructs.” Parris glanced at the time plot to the firing point. The Xaros would reach him before that—he was certain of it.

His ship’s rail cannons kept firing, launching another salvo every forty seconds. The capacitors blinked with warning. The rate of fire pushed the ship’s systems to the limits and rested on the knife’s edge of permanently damaging the battery core.

Just the way they’d trained.

“Targets engaged!”
Raven said.
“Got almost fifty drones coming from—”
the transmission filled with static and the sound of a gauss cannon rattling the wing commander’s cockpit
“—way too many. I’m down three Eagles and—”
It cut off in a hiss of static.

The icon for Raven’s Eagle flashed amber. Damaged.

“Constructs entering range, enemy cannons readying to fire,” Hudson said.

“Conn! Evasive maneuvers!”

The ensign flipped a plastic cover off a series of four yellow buttons and pressed one. Thrusters bolted to the dorsal frame, all with their own independent power systems, flared to life and pressed the
Gallipoli
down.

The recoil from the sudden acceleration slammed Parris against his restraints. Scarlet lances of energy snapped over the ship’s bow. The thrusters cut out and Parris settled back into his seat.

“Conn?” he asked.

“We can still make the firing point, and I think I lost a filling,” the ensign said.

“Sir, the
Cabo
took several direct hits. I’m not getting anything from her or the crew,” Hudson said.

A coherent beam of energy struck the ship’s starboard side. It cut across the aegis plating like a surgeon’s laser, gyrating the ship beneath Parris. The beam cut out, leaving a smoking furrow in its wake.

“Damage report,” the captain said.

“Minor damage to decks seven through twelve…primary lift to the flight deck off-line,” Hudson said.

A smile came to Parris’s face. The aegis armor worked as advertised. Ships hit by Xaros beams of that magnitude had been gutted like a fish during the Battle for the Crucible.

At least we have a ghost of a chance now,
he thought.

A drone cut across his bridge, an Eagle blazing gauss rounds hot on its tail.

Drones landed on the ship’s hull. Ruby beams stabbed into the aegis plating, slowly cutting through the armor.

“Get the gunships on those boarders, now!” Parris ordered.

“The Xaros constructs are reforming,” Hudson said. “They’re…fusing into a single mass, sir.”

“Tell the
Ancona
to continue their mission. Get fire on those rings. Helm, adjust course for the new construct. Ramming speed,” Parris said.

The bridge went silent. An out-of-control Eagle slammed into the ship and broke into an expanding cloud of debris.

“Ramming speed, aye, Captain,” the ensign said.

The ship veered to the side. Parris got a glimpse of the rest of his task force, their point defense turrets raging against dozens of drones swarming over them. The new construct came into view: the hundred drone ships fit like bricks on a wall as they merged into a vessel several times the size of the
Midway
.

The
Gallipoli’s
rail batteries flashed, scoring solid hits on the merging Xaros. Red light burned against the seams of the construct. Blisters of disintegrating drones broke out across the surface.

“Get video of this back to Makarov,” Parris said. “Hitting them while they’re merging might be a vulnerability.” 

The construct ripped apart like a desiccated ear of corn. The
Gallipoli
hit the fragments as they broke off, shattering them into burning embers.

“Conn, break off ramming speed and return us to our original course,” the captain said.

A fragment twice as long as his ship twisted into a spiral…one end pointing toward the
Gallipoli.
Another hunk smoothed into a long dart and slid into the spiral. The dart shot through and crossed the void to the human ship in the blink of an eye.

It speared through the strike carrier and
shattered her keel
. The ship ripped into two halves that slammed into each other. Wrecked batteries dumped their stored energy and scorched the ship black. The remains of the
Gallipoli
spun through the void.

****

Makarov kept her head up, watching as the
Gallipoli
died. Data from the rest of Parris’s task force kept coming in. They were holding their own against the drones swarming their hulls, but it wouldn’t last much longer.

The icon for the
Cabo
blinked red. The captain reported boarders in his engine room and the ship exploded a few seconds later.

“Admiral, the fragments…” Calum zoomed in on what remained of the giant construct. The jagged remains broke apart and reformed into drones. The new drones made straight for the besieged ships.

Makarov slammed a fist against the side of the holo table. She’d sent them on this mission, and now she was helpless while they were torn apart.

The frigate
Ancona
broke from the pack, engines burning well beyond their safety tolerances.

“What’s she doing?” Kidson asked.

“Taking a shot,” Makarov said. Tiny icons broke from the
Ancona
, lance shells closing on Abaddon’s rings.

“Come on…” She opened and closed her hands into fists as the shells crossed the last few hundred meters…and missed. Xaros destroyer analogues closed on the
Ancona
. Damage icons popped up next to the
Ancona
as disintegration beams hit home.

New rail cannon tracks appeared, and the
Ancona
vanished from the plot, replaced by a yellow and black emblem. The
Ancona
was gone, but she got off one final salvo. The shells streaked toward the rings, and hit.

A cheer went up through the bridge. Makarov stayed silent and zoomed in on the point of impact. The shells knocked a hunk off the rings, exposing glowing pyrite within. The open wound grew bright, then pulsated from abyss black to burning bright.

“Lost the
Reno
…and the
Utica
,” her XO said.

“I want every scrap of data we can get from Abaddon and what happened to that merging construct when the
Gallipoli
hit it. Send everything to Earth as it comes in. Maintain ready alert. Tell the captains I will have them on holo conference in forty-five minutes,” Makarov said.

“Search and rescue, Admiral?” Calum asked.

Drones swarmed around the dead ships.

“No, there’s nothing to recover. I’ll be in my ready room.”