The Siege of Earth (The Ember War Saga Book 7) (12 page)

The rollers inside the crane came loose and the hook plummeted toward the gun below.

“Um…Elias?” Bodel said.

The hook stopped over the broken coil, swaying from side to side.

“I knew it wasn’t long enough to go all the way down,” Bodel said.

Elias lessened his hold and slid down the cables. He stopped on top of the hook and reached down to the damaged coil.

“The system’s meant to be interchangeable. Find the four clamps and get that thing out of there,”
Mable said.
“Also, don’t touch anything else. Because electrocution.”

Elias unsnapped the clamps, breaking through warped metal and blackened carbon. He grasped the coil by the carry handle and lifted it up. The coil came loose with a tug and he pulled it clear as he stood.

“Now you have to climb all the way back up with that broken part.”
Mable let out a long sigh.

Elias swung the coil back, then forth, moving his perch on the hook farther and farther each time. His swing brought him close to the control room, and he hurled the coil away.

“What the hell are you—”
Mable ducked away as the coil flew across the cavern and smashed into the wall just beneath the control room floor.
“Or that. Fine. That was just fine.”

Elias leaned away from the direction of his swing and killed the momentum.

“I’m looking in the cradle,” Elias said. “Not sure if what I see is good or bad.”

“Are the Faston tabs and field coils still viable?”

Elias looked up at Mable.

“Do you see glowing blue things on the long end of the cradle?”

“Yes.”

“Are they covered in shit or are they clean?”

“Clean.”

“Good to go. Get the replacement in there so I can save the admiral’s ass.”

Elias looked up at his fellow Iron Heart. “Drop it.”

“Drop it?”

“Drop it. I’ll catch it.” Elias held his hand up.

Bodel lay down on the cross bar with the coil extended to Elias, scooted forward a few inches and let it go.

Elias ignored Mable’s panicked screams and watched the coil fall toward him. Mars’ gravity brought it to him at a rate less than half of what it would have been on Earth. The metal frame creaked as the coil fell. The damaged joints on the other end buckled and dropped Elias and his hook several feet before it came to a stop.

Elias reached to the handle and found he was swinging. He shifted his weight to the side and tried to get beneath the coil. He stretched up…and missed by a fraction of an inch. He whirled around and almost lunged off the hook. He got a grip and lifted it straight up. The bottom handle whipped down and dipped into the empty space where the last coil had been. The cables twisted around, then unwound.

Elias held the coil up like a kettlebell as the momentum to his swing faded away.

“I’ll admit it,”
Mable said.
“I peed a little.”

“Maybe we’re too heavy,” Bodel said.

“Now you say that.” Elias bent at the knees and set one end of the coil in the cradle. The rest of the machinery snugly fell into place and Elias clamped it tight. An electric hum and snaps sounded from under Elias.

“Now what?” Elias asked.

“Now get your asses away from the barrel. My firing window closes in two hundred seconds and I’m sending this round before it closes,”
Mable said.

Elias grabbed a cable and shimmied up one side to the crane.

“Pull the hook up behind you. There are rubber stops but I wouldn’t trust them to keep an arc off you,”
Mable said.

Bodel fished up the other cable with his pike and pulled the line to him.

“You could have given us some warning,” Bodel said.

“I don’t fire and the Twentieth Fleet dies to a Xaros leviathan, then Mars falls and all of us die. Or I fire and risk killing you two. There is no decision,”
Mable said.

“I can’t fault that logic,” Elias said.

He got to the top of the cross bar and helped reel in the hook.

“Ten seconds!”

Bodel did a double take at the control room. “What happened to—”

“Target moved. Hold on tight!”

The coils beneath the Iron Hearts lit up. Electricity arced between the cross beam and the armor. Elias felt his teeth humming and squeezed his arms and legs around the metal.

There was a crack of thunder as the cannon fired and the cross beam wobbled beneath them. The hum faded away…but the cross beam started leaning toward the base of the cannon.

“Elias, think we’re in trouble,” Bodel said.

“Jump for it.” Elias stood up on the beam and tried to balance as it tipped over with a groan. Elias risked a glimpse at Bodel and saw him with a footing just as unsteady as his. The beam crashed down on the next lower beam.

Elias leaped away and activated his maneuver thrusters. He looked down and saw row after row of induction coils pass beneath him as he lost altitude. He crossed over dirt, dipped his shoulder forward and rolled over the sand and gravel. He skidded to a halt inches from the wall.

Bodel bumped off the wall and fell on his ass.

“Smooth.” Elias reached to him.

“Piss off.” Bodel took Elias’ hand and stood up.

“Good news, you didn’t break anything else with your little stunt,”
Mable said.
“There’s an access door to your right. Someone from Green platoon says they need your help.”

“I really do not like her,” Bodel said.

Elias knocked the back of his knuckles against Bodel’s chest.

“We need to keep moving,” Elias said.

A cube of omnium took up the center of the round workshop. Empty workbenches, with backless chairs tucked beneath, stretched around the outer wall, broken up by a single doorway.

Torni held a hand over the cube and drew omnium into the air.

Lafayette, standing on the opposite side of the cube, held up a wide data pad with a diagram for a piece of machinery that looked like a cross between an old vinyl record player and a ramjet engine.

“Part number one, attempt fifteen,” Lafayette said into a beeping recorder on his arm.

Torni glanced at the diagram then focused on the omnium swirling just beyond her fingertips. The ghostly substance twisted against itself, colors rippling up and down as it morphed into a shape to match Lafayette’s diagram.

Torni smiled and guided the part to a workbench where Malal sat with his feet dangling over the edge, hands laid loose at his side. His chin was down, eyes closed.

“Well?” Torni asked.

Malal opened an eye, then leaned forward and sniffed at the part.

“Your mid-coupling is three degrees off axis. Do it again,” Malal said.

Torni squeezed her hand into a first and crushed the part. It melted into omnium and she tossed it back into the cube.

“This is bullshit,” she said. “The tolerances on this thing are impossible. I’m better off making more q-shells or aegis plates.”

Malal returned to his meditation without comment.

“No one has ever constructed a device like this, Ms. Torni,” Lafayette said. “The underlying design is borne out by observation, but the physics governing its function are someone theoretical.”

“What?”

“It will work. We just have to make it perfectly,” Lafayette said.

“Explain again why this is worth the time and effort.” Torni pressed two fingers against her temple. Her fingertips sank into her head. She winced and pulled her hand back. Her shell returned to normal with a quick shake.

“The details…do you still feel the connection to the Xaros General?” Lafayette asked.

“He’s out there.”

“Is he aware of you?”

Torni cocked her head to the side. “I don’t…I don’t know.”

“If he is, and I tell you our purpose, it could compromise the device’s effect,” Lafayette said. “This
is
important. Admiral Garret is leading the fleets over Mars to slow the Xaros advance because Ibarra and I convinced him that this will work. Thousands and thousands of your fellows are fighting to give you the time to make this work, Torni.”

Torni’s face screwed into a frown. She held fingers up next to Malal’s ear and snapped them several times.

“Malal. Malal, what am I doing wrong?” she asked.

“I find your attempts to gain my attention vexing,” Malal said.

“Answer me and I’ll leave you alone.”

Malal’s eyes half opened. “Your mind is fractured and of your own volition. Humans evolved to be humans, in human bodies. It is why your damnable armor soldiers fight in humanoid suits and not in something more elegant or effective. You fight against your natural form and that distraction follows through your efforts.”

“
This
is my natural form.” Torni touched her chest.

“Once.” Malal closed his eyes.

Torni looked at Lafayette.

“Stand back.” Torni looked down at her hands. Smoke rose from her fingertips, then they stretched into stalks. Torni’s body flashed to shifting patterns and morphed into an oblong drone’s body with several stalks breaking loose from the surface.

Lafayette backed into a bench and dropped his data slate.

“What?” Torni’s voice came from the drone.

“My autonomous nervous system is creating an involuntary reaction,” Lafayette said.

“You’re afraid.” Torni’s stalks went to the omnium cube and drew the substance into the air again.

“It was a mistake to keep that atavistic feature, I believe.” Lafayette picked up his data slate and held it up for Torni.

“Malal, is there anything else I should do?” Torni asked.

“There is a magnetic field coming from a surveillance device in the ceiling. It will slow our progress if it remains functional,” Malal said.

Torni moved a stalk across her shell and stabbed the ceiling where she felt the field.

In another part of the Crucible, Marc Ibarra broke into a string of profanity.

****

Torni’s stalks played over the surface of an orange crystal glowing from within. More stalks touched the crystal, then moved with blurred speed as they carved golden lines of circuitry. Torni held up the crystal, examining the scrimshaw.

“Acceptable,” Malal said. “Place it in the device.”

The work of many days had resulted in a device almost the size of a coffin. Torni set the crystal into a waiting cradle. Clamps snapped down and the device drew the final component inside its housing.

“Now what?” Torni asked.

“Now we make another one. We’ll need a resupply, of course,” Lafayette said, gesturing to the omnium mass in the center of room. The cube had been reduced to a few inches of material during the fabrication of the device Torni still didn’t understand.

The door to the workshop opened—not by sliding or swinging—they crumbled from a centerline and bled into the frame. Shannon walked in and froze when she saw Torni in her drone form.

“It’s her,” Lafayette said, “and it’s quite alright.”

Shannon’s eye twitched. “The probe needs to speak with Malal.”

Malal slumped forward, his knees buckling almost to the point of collapse when he hit the ground. His body stayed upright and he locked in place, as if a rod of iron had suddenly gone through his spine. He followed Shannon out of the room, his arms tacked to his side.

The doors closed behind him.

“He is most disconcerting,” Lafayette said.

Torni shifted back to her human form and Lafayette sighed in relief.

“I spent years with him waiting for the
Breitenfeld
’s jump engines to recharge,” Torni said. “He treated me like a house plant. Spoke to me only when he had direct repairs, or to give instruction on transmuting another substance. Otherwise, he acted like I wasn’t even there. It was…lonely.”

“How did you cope? Humans seem to be very social creatures. Your sense of self still seems rooted in that despite your condition,” Lafayette said.

“Yes, my ‘condition.’ The ship needed a lot of repair work—that kept me busy. I even spent a month in the void to grab an asteroid and ferry it back for raw materials. Stacey would return from time to time. Kept me supplied with books and vids. Then we finally made it home and I think, ‘I can see my Marines again. Let them see me as they remembered, not as the thing they’re fighting.’”

Lafayette’s arm jerked to the side and buzzed.

“Him again.” Lafayette turned his palm to the center to the room and a hologram formed out of a projector in his wrist.

“Done? Progress? Did I pick the wrong week to quit drinking?” Ibarra asked.

“The device is complete,” Lafayette said. “I estimate we can complete the next unit in seventy-two percent of the time.”

“I’ll send up another cube. Well done, but get the next unit done in half the time.” Ibarra touched two fingers to his temple in a mock salute and faded away.

“Ibarra, wait,” Torni said. Ibarra’s hologram grew stronger.

“These proccies of yours, tell me about them,” she said. Her thumbs rubbed against her forefingers and she chewed on her bottom lip.

“There are over a billion now, almost all in the military,” Ibarra said, his face growing serious. “The answer to your question is ‘no.’ I can’t make you a new body.”

“Why not? Are you just saying that to keep me working away as some sort of…Santa’s elf?”

“The procedurally generated minds grow within the bodies as they gestate. I try to make a full-grown body without the mind and it’s nothing but a vegetable. The brains won’t take a fully formed consciousness at the end of the process,” Ibarra said.

The hologram touched its face.

“You think I like this?” Ibarra asked. “Being a ghost trapped inside a machine. I know what you want, my dear. I want it too.” He looked at Lafayette and his cyborg body. “We must adapt to what we are, not what we want. The omnium will be here shortly.” Ibarra vanished.

Torni’s chin lowered to her chest.

“You fear they won’t accept you as you are now?” Lafayette said.

“They thought I was dead. The Torni they knew
is
dead. I’m just a copy.” She looked at her hands and let them revert to swirling patterns. “My last moments downloaded into a Xaros matrix. If I was flesh and blood…it would be different. Better.”

“Your team helped rescue the last of my people from the Toth. Did you know this? There is a Karigole village in Africa. Men, women, geth’aar, children and adolescents. But I cannot see them, take part in the customs and celebrations of my culture. I am a pariah because of my form.” Lafayette tapped metal fingers against his chest with a
clink.

“It is easy to despair,” he said. “The last hundred Karigole warriors took an oath to avenge our loss against the Toth. It gave us purpose. Reason. Once that oath was fulfilled and our people were free…they rejected me. I still love them, just as I think you still love your Marines. This work will save the Karigole. Save all of humanity. Do not despair.”

Lafayette went to Torni, took her arm, and hugged it against his chest.

“What are you doing?” Torni asked.

“Hugging. A gesture of empathy and kindness, correct?”

“Not like…come here.” Torni took her arm away and gave Lafayette a brief hug around his shoulders.

The doors opened and an omnium cube floated into the room on a robot-driven grav-dolly.

“Time to get back to work. Have a good game.” Lafayette slapped Torni on the rear end.