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

Dotok women hurried their children into idling Mules, their engines kicking up a dirty haze on the mesa. Wind whipped through the air. Loose bits of cloth on the Dotok snapped like pennants.

Torni and Minder watched the evacuation play out. Torni remembered the tug of wind at her hair, the pungent smell of body odor and fear from the Dotok. She couldn’t feel those sensations viewing the simulation, but her mind tried to fill in the blanks of what she
should
have felt.

“Why are we here?” she asked Minder. “I’ve been through this before. I know how it ends.” She turned to the other side of the mesa just as Yarrow dragged the badly wounded Hale and Bailey into view.

“An amendment for my report to the Masters. Your actions here are difficult for the Xaros to comprehend. I hope to explane it better,” Minder said.

The dirty and armor-clad Torni that had less than a half hour to live lifted a Dotok boy into the air and placed him in the waiting arms of his mother.

“Ask,” Torni said.

“You are warrior caste. Your government spent significant amounts of time and resources training you in combat and communications. Replacing you, particularly after the reduction in Earth’s population, would be difficult,” Minder said.

“There wasn’t a deep bench of other Marines to take my place after your drones killed everyone, you mean.”

Torni watched as she dragged Hale into a Mule.

“Why did you sacrifice yourself for children?” Minder waved his hand through the air and stopped the simulation. He walked up a ramp and leaned over to examine a Dotok baby, swaddled against its mother’s breast. “Look at it. It is useless in its current state. Completely dependent on others for survival. An obvious liability.”

“The child is defenseless. I joined the Marines to defend the weak, those in need,” Torni said. “You see a liability. I see the future. That child may grow up to be a great leader. A scientist who discovers a breakthrough that changes the lives of everyone.”

“You gave up your spot and handed over your air tanks. Perhaps a half-dozen Dotok were saved. Tell me, would you have stayed behind for one child?” Minder walked over to a group of Dotok men herding wives and children up a different Mule.

“Yes,” Torni said.

“What about this one?” Minder pointed to Nil’jo, the elderly First and leader of the refugees. Torni hesitated.

“Interesting.” Minder walked around Nil’jo, looking him up and down. “This one had obvious value. A leader. Presumably educated. Capable. You jump at the chance to die for a mewling lump of flesh that might not even survive to adulthood, but have to consider whether or not to die for this one.”

“You sound like the Dotok. Their society classified each person by their worth, not their potential,” Torni said.

“And when confronted with choosing to adhere to their culture or give in to these…nurturing instincts, the Dotok followed your lead.” Minder rubbed his chin. “This behavior is counterintuitive to survival of the species. Curious.”

“How is it with the Xaros?” Torni asked.

“Our castes are absolute. The Masters lead. I obey. We left the lower tiers to annihilation after the event. There was no discussion or debate.” Minder went to Torni’s frozen form. “I do not know how I can even communicate this concept of yours to the Masters.”

“Women and children first,” Torni said.

“I might as well try to tell them that humans believe the color blue tastes like the number nine.”

“That makes no sense.”

“Exactly. Tell me, how many Marines would your officer have traded for a single baby?”

Torni looked into a Mule. Lieutenant Hale lay on a bench in a puddle of his own blood, his skin pale. Yarrow pressed a heat suture against a long gash on Hale’s arm with one hand and attached a bag of IV fluid to Hale’s armor with the other.

“That’s…”

“Would he have landed all of these Mules, packed with civilians, next to a lone child and put everyone at risk to rescue it?”

“No, not if the Mules were at capacity.”

“He could abandon his own spot.” Minder shook his head. “You hesitate. The answer is unsure. At some point in the human decision-making cycle, there is a limit to what you will sacrifice. This lieutenant would not sacrifice a hundred human warriors for one life, would he? No. But he would fight to the last man to save a city, correct?”

“Correct. We manned the walls of New Abhaile against the banshees and your drones.”

Minder snapped his fingers and the simulation ended. Takeni, the Dotok, and her frozen self all fell apart like they were made of grains of sand—sand that splashed against the ground and faded away, leaving Torni and Minder on a white plane with no shadows or end in sight.

“My task is impossible,” Minder said. “If there was a single value to place on a life, some quantifiable variable, I might explane this to the Masters.”

“I could speak to them,” Torni said.

“No!” Minder snapped at her. “You will never pollute their existence with your presence—” Minder clamped his mouth shut.

“‘Pollution’? Then why are you wasting so much time trying to understand us?”

“I am sorry, Torni. I still harbor old prejudices. We suppressed the evolution of other intelligent species in our home galaxy. The Masters believed any interaction with the impure would distract from our great purpose,” Minder said.

“What about the red one? The General. We’ve met.” Torni crossed her arms.

“He is a manifestation of the drones’ programming, not a Master. I have work to do, excuse me.” Minder flicked his fingers and put Torni’s consciousness in stasis, his laboratory replacing the blank simulation in a smear of light.

Photonic copies of Torni’s mind floated atop pedestals, radiating away from his workstation in concentric circles. Lying to Torni about the General and the Xaros was necessary; previous iterations of her mind refused to cooperate once she deduced the truth—that the Xaros would annihilate all intelligent life in the galaxy without remorse or hesitation.

Dangling the hope that she could sway the Xaros Masters away from total
xenocide
proved to be effective in eliciting her cooperation.

Hope. The concept was alien to Minder. That the humans were so dependent on it made his work even more difficult. Minder stepped back from his workstation as the urge to add to his already lengthy report faded away.

Keeper had no interest in learning more about the humans. Minder would be erased as soon as Torni outlived her usefulness. The General had already launched an assault on Earth; humanity’s extinction was all but assured. Completing the report was his duty, his purpose…and it would be the last thing he ever did.

Malal stepped up to a three-story-high door embedded in a wall so tall the top was lost in the haze. He pressed fingertips to the door and ripples spread from his touch.

“Why are the doors so…big?” Bailey asked.

“You think my true form is like yours?” Malal asked.

“What do you really look like? The big-ass orb we found on Anthalas?”

Malal’s head twisted completely around to stare at Bailey. “You truly wish to know?”

Bailey shook her head and stepped back.

The doors slid open to reveal a short tunnel with pitch-black sides leading to a circular room, the walls covered with glass cylinders full of gray fog. Some glinted with specks of light; others had raging storms of multicolored lightning. A raised circular platform took up the center of the room.

“Here we are.” Malal strode into the room.

Hale followed, his weapon ready against his shoulder. He cut around the corner into the lab, sweeping his muzzle around…and behind the door. The entrance was nothing more than a paper-thin slice of reality. He circled the door, and it vanished completely. He ducked his head round the side and found he could look into the doorway back to the orchard they’d come from.

“Iron Hearts,” Hale said, “keep an eye out on your side of the doorway. We get separated, you head back to the shuttle.”

“And who’s going to fly it?” Elias asked.

“Or open up the bay doors?” Bodel asked.

“We all go home or nobody’s going home, crunchy,” Kallen said.

“Fine. Keep an eye out for anything that moves,” Hale said.

The rest of the Marines had entered the room and taken cover behind the platform. Stacey walked a step behind Malal as he walked around the room, scanning the cylinders.

Almost every inch of the laboratory walls was covered by the cylinders, but there was a blank patch the size of a normal doorway on the opposite side of the platform. Hale jogged around the cylinder. On the blank patch was a frozen shadow of an alien with a segmented body like an ant, its spindly limbs held up over its head like it was trying to defend itself.

“My first experiment,” Malal said. “Complete failure, the essence was lost. Shame really, I rather enjoyed its company.”

“What did you do to it?” Hale felt anger stir in his heart, a flicker of hatred that spread until his hands gripped his rifle so tightly that it trembled in his grasp.

Malal wagged a finger at him.

“We’re not here for a history lesson,” Stacey said. “Where is the codex?”

“Yes, the codex…” Malal turned to the empty platform. “I will need control of my faculties.”

“No. Not the deal.” Stacey touched her forearm computer and the governor’s metal hoops glowed bright enough that Hale could see them in Malal’s chest.

“The interface doesn’t use something so pedestrian as fingers and buttons. Loosen your hold. The Qa’Resh gave you the option,” Malal said.

Stacey bit her lip.

“Hale, if he tries anything, shoot the governor. Something tells me he doesn’t want to be a sludge of subatomic particles,” she said.

“That works for me.” Hale thumbed the safety off his rifle and pointed it at Malal’s chest.

One of the hoops in the governor faded away, and Malal rose off the ground.

“Whoa! What is this?” Yarrow scrambled away from Malal as he floated toward the platform.

“Easy. All part of the plan. Kind of,” Hale said. “Shoot him if he acts out of line.”

“Sure,” Standish muttered, “I’ll know just when the floating star god is about to turn from benevolent companion to face-eating demon. Did that in basic training.”

When Malal’s toe tips touched the pedestal, it came to life with a white glow. Three of the cylinders floated from the walls and formed an orbit around Malal.

“This is what you seek,” Malal said. “Peerless knowledge of omnium manipulation. Discrete dimension communications…and…no.”

“What? What’s wrong?” Stacey asked.

“Corruption.” Malal closed a hand into a fist and one of the cylinders shattered. The light inside the broken cylinder held its form for a moment and then dissipated into nothing. Hale heard the sound of a distant scream.

The two remaining cylinders floated down to hover in front of Stacey.

“The echoes. They tried to access my work and ruined it,” Malal said.

“Do we have what we need?” Stacey removed a small pyramid-shaped object from a belt pouch and tapped one of the corners. It leapt from her fingers and spun like an out-of-control gyroscope.

“The schematics are parsed through several different vessels. We must have the complete record to open it…a security measure that is proving irksome,” Malal said. “This data would have survived until the energy death of the universe. Leave it to lesser beings to ruin perfection.”

The spinning pyramid spun around the two cylinders in a figure-eight motion, rays of light dancing between the objects.

“He serious about all this?” Hale asked Stacey over a private channel. “What if he’s just playing us?”

“The best encryption methods we had before the war involved steganography based on cosmic background radiation with quantum keys,” she said, “which are about as complex to Malal as pig Latin is to us.”

“Which…means?”

“He could be playing us. I have no way of knowing. This recorder the Qa’Resh gave me will take in all the data. They’re the only ones that can put it together,” she said. The pyramid slowed to a stop, then floated to Stacey. She snatched it out of the air and returned it to a pouch.

“Malal,” Hale put his fingertip on the trigger, “you went through an awful lot of trouble to protect all this knowledge. Without redundancy, you’re risking everything on a single point of failure and something tells me you wouldn’t make that mistake. Where are the backups?”

“Perceptive.” Malal stepped down from the pedestal, moving through thin air like he was taking a set of stairs. “This is one of the ancillary laboratories. The forge will have the original documents.”

“How do you know the Jinn didn’t get into there too?” Hale asked.

“Because the vault is still here. If anyone but me had broken into the sanctum, a singularity would have opened up and annihilated everything,” Malal said.

“Hold on. There’s a black hole in the middle of this place just waiting to go off?” Stacey asked.

“Correct. I will guide us,” Malal said. “Bring your abominations into this room. I must reopen the door.”

Hale sent a quick message to the Iron Hearts. The cylinders around the lab clinked against each other like wind chimes as the armors’ heavy footsteps reverberated through the room.

“Malal,” Stacey said, “is there anything else in here we could use in the fight against the Xaros? I don’t want to waste this opportunity.”

“You’ll get what you bargained for, bright one. The rest of the records here all pertain to the grand question.” Malal looked around the room. “The totality of my existence went to the answer, and here we are surrounded by a fraction of that work. Experiments that failed, experiments that brought me one small step closer to a solution. Once I’d solved the equation, I should have destroyed all of this. But…vanity.”

“What was the question?” Elias asked.

“Must we die? Must our consciousness embrace oblivion when reality can no longer support even the concept of thought?” Malal’s face pulled into a sneer. “That was our destiny,
is
your destiny. The cold abyss at the end of the universe, when all matter and energy decay into nothing.
I
found a way out.
I
opened the door to immortality…and my peers left me behind.”

“Your people never had faith in God? Never thought you could achieve eternal life through belief in a higher power?” Elias asked.

“Spare me,” Malal said. “We were that ‘higher power’ for countless civilizations until I found a more noble pursuit for our efforts. Humans are lucky they were nothing better than primates when our gaze passed over Earth. I will not waste any more time. Stand aside.”

****

Malal opened a door into a sparse forest. Trees made up of intertwined vines as thick as Hale’s leg joined the luminescent white trees. Tufts of tall grass formed bushes between the two types of trees, which alternated as the forest stretched into the distance.

The Iron Hearts took the lead out the door, the tops of their helms well short of the treetops.

“This is weird,” Standish said as he and Orozco squared opposite corners around the door. Standish swung around and found the door had disappeared, same as the entrance to the lab. He knelt next to a tree trunk and kept his eyes peeled.

“What part?” Orozco asked. “Us in some crazy
hombre
’s secret stash or that we’re babysitting the guy, helping him look for…I don’t know, Excalibur or something.” Orozco thumbed the control to his Gustav heavy cannon, spinning the three barrels to life.

“I know, right? How am I going to tell this story to all the impressionable and hero-worshipping ladies when we get home? ‘Then he snapped his fingers and a dimensional gate opened up.’ No one wants a one-night stand with a nut job. Well…I’m OK with crazy because I never use my real name and leave before they wake up.” Standish shook his head. “But what I’m talking about is this forest. Why are all the trees evenly spaced? Even those bushes are smack between the trees. There should be bugs, critters all over the place.”

“Maybe you’re missing the forest for the trees.” Orozco shrugged his shoulders, then scratched his back against a trunk. “Those tusk-cats weren’t biological. Maybe the trees aren’t either. Nature doesn’t have a lot of obvious patterns to it. A setup like this can’t be an accident.”

“Maybe there’s a planet where trees grow in an orderly fashion,” Standish said. “Gunney Cortaro would love it there.”

“So…there’s a gardener? Someone that wants the forest just like this?” Orozco asked.

“That’s my guess. You think he-she-it knows we’re here?”

Orozco gave the long barrels on his cannon a pat. “I haven’t been subtle.”

“Move out,” Cortaro said from the middle of the formation as Malal closed the door. “We’re half an hour from the next doorway. Stay alert. Stay alive.”

Standish kept watch behind the formation as it moved into the forest. The eerie symmetry and layout of the place didn’t bother him as much as the total stillness of the trees, like he was walking through a photograph and not a living, breathing place.

****

Hale touched a beaded cord hanging from his armor and shifted a black bead to the bottom. Keeping a pace count was a fundamental skill for Strike Marines; learning to keep track of his position without the aid of GPS was a novelty for someone raised in the always-on, always-connected environment of twenty-first century America like him. The American military hadn’t relied on maps, terrain association and compasses for dismounted movement since the end of the Vietnam War. The skills came back to the fore once the Chinese disabled or destroyed the world’s satellites at the beginning of World War III.

Having to trust Malal with the navigation irked Hale. He was the team leader; he was supposed to know where they were and where they were going. With no distant point of reference, the only thing Hale knew for sure was how far they’d gone since they left the lab: nine hundred yards.

Not for the first time, he wished Steuben was there. The Karigole warrior never tried to interfere with Hale’s authority, but he would give a few private words of advice from time to time.

A whistling sound came through the air.

Hale stopped and raised a fist next to his head, signaling a halt. The tree branches remained as still as ever. No breeze caused the whistling, which grew louder.

“Anyone else hear that?” he asked.

“It’s coming from up high,” Elias said. His helm titled up toward the dark sky.

Thumps sounded in the distance ahead of them, each new sound evenly spaced from the last. Hale couldn’t keep count as the rhythm pounded the ground with the steady ferocity of an old belt-fed machine gun.

“Action front,” Hale said, “hold your fire until we know they’re hostile.”

Elias put his palm against one of the glowing trees and shoved it over. Clear glass roots snapped and shattered as it tore free from the forest floor. Bodel and Kallen did the same and then rolled the trees toward Hale with a kick. The three trunks formed a field expedient, if somewhat sloppy, palisade.

“Take cover,” Elias said.

The Marines crouched against the trunks as their internal light slowly faded away.

The sound of marching feet filled the air.

“Care to shed some light on what’s coming at us?” Hale asked Malal.

Malal, standing tall and not taking advantage of the felled trees to shield him, gave a slight shrug.

“Get down. Now.”

“My form is proof against anything the physical universe could—”

“You’re not invisible and standing out in the open will draw fire on those of us who aren’t ‘proof.’”