The Siege of Earth (The Ember War Saga Book 7) (9 page)

The passage wound its way through several yards of broken rock before Hale noticed light spilling across tan stone. The Marine ahead of him went onto his hands and knees and crawled forward, and Hale followed suit.

The hallway opened up to a cavern. Glowing orbs floated through the air, casting a uniform light across everything. Quadrium ore glinted across the cavern’s walls and ceiling. A waist-high wall of rock led from the opening to a stairway cut into raw stone that zigzagged down to the base of the cavern.

Crimson’s sniper waved Hale over. The Marine raised the detached optics from his rail rifle over the lip of the wall. Video feed came up on Hale’s visor.

Two figures in dark armor made up of sharp angles lifted glowing cubes of omnium from a pile in the center of the cavern onto a hover sled.

“What do you think, sir?” Jacobs asked.

“That’s omnium…last time we saw this was in Phoenix. Xaros normally have their drones converting mass,” Hale said. There was something familiar about the armored figures, both of whom had their backs to Hale.

A chill went down Hale’s spine.

“Jacobs,” Hale said, grabbing her arm, “ambush. No q-shells. Aim for center mass. Knock ’em down. We’re not going to get much intell if you blow them into mush.”

“Yes, sir.” Jacobs gave a few curt commands. She counted down from five with her fingers then she and her team stood up and aimed their plasma rifles. Two rifles fired almost simultaneously.

“Targets down,” Jacobs said.

“With me.” Hale took to the stairs, his weapon trained on the two bodies lying next to the sled, smoking holes in their backs. Jacobs followed close behind.

She pointed to a semicircle tunnel branching away from the cavern and ordered her Marines down to cover the approach.

Hale got to the first body and gave it a swift kick in the lower back. The strike of armor on armor sounded like clashing metal.  No reaction. Same result with the second body. Hale put his foot against a corpse and pushed it onto its back.

The thing had once been human. A man’s face was visible beneath a see-through crystal half-helm, his mouth and chin slack, eyes staring into oblivion. The irregular armor covered the back of his head and the rest of his body.

“What are they? What happened to them?” Jacobs asked. 

“Banshees, human banshees,” Hale said. “The Xaros found a Dotok colony fleet in the void, turned them into slave soldiers and set them loose on Takeni. I spent a lot of time debriefing that fight with the intell squirrels. They think the Xaros did it because they didn’t have enough drones on hand. They convert mass to drones, hard to find much in interstellar space.”

“But where’d they find them?” Jacobs asked.

“Pluto was unmanned…Eighth Fleet. The Xaros must have taken prisoners, turned them,” Hale said.

“We can still save them. Can’t we?”

Hale shook his head. “Banshees were hardwired to the Xaros network. Dr. Accorso tried to free one, killed it in the process. Treat these as hostile.”

“But, sir…these are human beings. We can’t just…kill them,” Jacobs said.

Hale tapped his screen and opened a private IR channel to Jacobs. She stiffened and raised her chin.

“Listen to me, Lieutenant. I was there on Takeni. Fought the Dotok the Xaros changed into monsters. There was no mercy from the banshees. They killed every man, woman and child they got their claws on. There is no coming back from this. We have hours, a day if we’re lucky, before the Xaros finish their gate and Earth is lost,” Hale said. “The mission is all that matters right now. You get me?”

“Got you, sir. Just…” she hesitated, pointing her muzzle at one of the bodies, “first time I’ve killed a…person.”

“Captain,” Cortaro said aloud, his visor open, “I’ve got an idea.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“That quadrium survey my cousin told me about, the one that mapped out all the deposits in this mountain range, it should still be on file somewhere. Might give us a map of where the Xaros are digging,” Cortaro said.

“But the
Breit
’s still out of contact,” Hale said.

“It’ll take seven minutes to get a message back to Earth,” Egan said from the top of the stairs. He held up the end of a line snaking back to the tunnel. “I’m bouncing off the relay sat way up over Uranus.”

“Who on Earth would even have that data?” Hale asked.

“Marc Ibarra,” Cortaro said. “We’ve got the freq to the Crucible. Let’s ask him.”

A small red needle appeared in the holo tank, another graviton bomb delivered through the Crucible into the invading armada of Xaros drones as they crossed through Saturn’s orbit.

“Augustus cannon firing,” Dorral said from across the table.

Garret acknowledged with a tap of his finger. The hypervelocity round tracked away from Mars and sped toward the approaching foe.

It would be another hour before the telemetry data from the latest graviton mine reached Mars and General Krupp and his team could refine their targeting data. Garret would have delayed Augustus’ launch, but Mars’ rotation would have turned the cannon away if he’d waited another ten minutes.

But as soon as Mars’ rotation took Augustus off the firing line, it brought Nerio to the fore. Mars had enough cannons scattered over the surface to always have six guns that could engage targets in the distant solar system. As the enemy drew closer, the number of effective weapons would fall as the angles of attack shrank.

Since the Crucible sent the first graviton bomb through a wormhole, their picture of the Xaros armada had improved with each attack as the probe processed data off each explosion. The initial attacks were like lunging for an enemy in pitch blackness—they had a good idea where to strike, but hit nothing at first. As soon as a mine connected with a substantial number of drones, the defenders gained a handhold on their foe.

The probability of inflicting damage rose with each new attack. The Xaros were fast, nimble, and had begun to spread out as the graviton mines destroyed more and more of them. Mars’ cannons took their toll, but Garret wouldn’t know how much of the Xaros force had been whittled away until they were almost on top of Mars.

The red smear of the approaching Xaros blinked as new data came in. The Xaros mass forked apart like a snake’s tongue. There was a rustle of unease from the officers around Garret.

“Give me course projections.”

Dashed lines ticked away from the two tips and traveled toward the center of the solar system. One track led to Mars, the other to Earth.

“That’s…unusual.” Dorral tugged at her bottom lip. “Xaros attack methodology always uses their numbers to overwhelm a target. They’ve never split up like this before, even in the face of a defense in the depth like we’re putting up.”

“Something made a command decision. It’s here.” Garret tapped his fist against the table’s railing. “The leadership entity
Breitenfeld
encountered on Takeni, the same one that Makarov faced in the void.”

“This changes things,” Dorral said. “Even with the Xaros just within the orbit of Saturn, they’re faster than us. They’ll reach Earth before our fleets here can.”

Garret looked at the fragmentary data in the holo tank and made quick calculations.

“The Xaros are sending enough drones to overwhelm Earth’s defenses…and enough to keep us tied down on Mars. We’re being played.” Garret reached into the holo field and touched his thumb and middle finger together. The holo zoomed out to show the entire solar system.

“Send a priority message to the
Breitenfeld
,” Garret said. “Have her jump to Mars once the Grinder is destroyed. No delay. We’ll use her jump drives to shuttle ships of the line back to Earth. That could make all the difference.”

“Aye, sir.” Dorral turned away and went to a commo station.

Garret opened a frequency and Krupp’s holo appeared next to him.

“Sir?” the general asked.

“We need to end the battle over Mars faster than we’d anticipated. Here’s what I want you to do.”

As Garret laid out his plan, blood drained from Krupp’s face.

****

Red warning lights flashed as the
Charlemagne
withdrew air from the bridge. Garret felt his helmet flex as vacuum tugged at his faceplate.

His fleets formed a slight concave shield between Mars and the approaching Xaros fleet. Tens of millions of drones crept toward the red planet, slowing as they entered the outer fringe of the planet’s gravity well.

Garret waved his hand across the combined fleet. Twenty
Midway-
class supercarriers, hundreds of battle cruisers armed with rail cannon batteries, fifty
Manticore
-class frigates boasting salvaged Toth energy cannons, and over a thousand more ships of the line made up the rest of his grand fleet. Then the fighters, tens of thousands of fighters filled the space between the warships like dust in the air around a stampede.

It was too much for one man to manage, he knew that. Each fleet admiral had autonomy to carry out his orders however he or she saw fit. The memory of designing the temperament and skill of each admiral before they came out of the proccie tubes churned his stomach, but if each could fight as well as Makarov, this day might end in victory.

“Enemy front-line trace will cross engagement line black in…five minutes,” Dorral said.

“How long until Phobos rises?”

“Thirty-five minutes,” Dorral said with a wince.

“We’ll make do.” He dragged the holo around to focus on the Xaros. The miles-thick line of drone icons spread out like blood over an invisible globe, all just beyond the effective engagement of his fleet’s weapons.

They’ve learned,
he thought.
Good thing we still have a few surprises waiting.

The Xaros swarm was a mass of single drones, difficult targets for the rail guns on most of his ships. The enemy meant to flood his ships with a deluge of drones. A single Xaros could cut through a ship’s aegis armor and wreak havoc. He’d seen the damage firsthand when walking through the
Midway
’s dead halls.

Garret opened a channel to General Krupp. “Ground command, I doubt we can stop them all. Prep your local security forces. They’ll come for the cannons.”

“Of course,” Krupp said, “not like there’s anything else down here for them to visit. I’ve got three cannons ready and able to support you. Rest are either out of the engagement envelope or firing on the force heading to Earth.”

Garret closed the channel and brought his trembling fingers to a pulsating red button. He swallowed hard and pressed it to open IR-beam communication to every ship protecting Mars.

“Combined fleet, this is Garret. Mars is our fortress. Our enemy will break against our iron will and die beneath our guns. Let’s give these Xaros bastards a proper welcome. All fleets, begin attack pattern theta. Garret out.”

He felt a slight vibration through the deck as the
Charlemagne’s
few rail guns fired.

The trace of rail gun shells zipped away from the fleet and struck out at the outer edge of the Xaros swarm. Quadrium rounds exploded into jagged bolts of deep blue lightning that coursed through the drones, knocking them off-line and rendering them into little more than a lump of metal traveling on a simple vector. Flechette rounds fired from rail cannons tore through the drones like a close-range blast from a shotgun.

Revetments carved from mountains surrounding the macro cannons slid aside and rail cannons rose from their hiding places to join the assault on the Xaros.

The spread of the Xaros slowed. A few hundred drones managed to skirt through the assault, fewer than combat models in the past few years predicted. Garret refused to let his hopes rise.

The top of the Xaros-made dome moved toward the line of human ships like the tip of a knife pushing against a cloth. The edge of the alien force retreated toward the base of the spike emerging from the mass.

“The drones are combining.” Dorral zoomed in on the spike. Red lines danced over the spike’s surface as a single massive construct emerged, a dagger pointed at Garret’s fleet and into the heart of Mars. Makarov had described battling a leviathan-class vessel, but this was larger by an order of magnitude.

“Krupp,” Garret said, reaching into the holo and double-tapping the new Xaros creation, “we’re not going to have another chance like this. Fire target Durandal.” A timer appeared next to the leviathan, counting down the seconds until Phobos cleared the far side of Mars.

Red spots of light grew up and down the Xaros’ spike.

“All fleets execute honeycomb maneuver—” Garret called up firing solutions from the macro cannons on Mars, hating himself for every second he wasted, “—Echo. Ninth Fleet, drag your heels a bit until we have launch and stay out of the line of fire.”

The defending fleets moved away from each other slowly, spreading into a lattice to deny the Xaros a concentrated target.

“Give me three point targets on the leviathan,” Garret said to the gunnery officers next to Dorral. “Do we have eyes on any seams in the hull?”

A gunner cocked her head to the side.

“The whole structure is covered in ravines hundreds of meters deep.” A close-up of the spike flashed into the holo. Deep fissures glowed red, like the spike was covered in cracked obsidian and filled with lava.

“Plenty of potential weak points. Sending three now,” she said.

Garret touched the three white target reticules that appeared on the spike.

“All fleets, fire at will. Hold back bomber wings until further notice.” Garret looked to the timer and tapped his fingers against the table railing.

Something’s not right
, he thought.

Beams of ruby-colored energy stabbed away from the spike, ripping through the thin line of ships. Garret lost ten ships in the blink of an eye, all smaller frigates and destroyers that lacked enough aegis armor plating to withstand much more than a blow from a Xaros construct made up of a few dozen drones.

The fleet struck back, launching concentrated rail cannon fire against Garret’s assigned targets. Point defense fire erupted around the point targets like sparks off a live wire.

The timer flashed as Phobos rose from behind Mars. Ready icons popped up next to Deimos, the outer moon looming over the battle.

“Here we go.” Garret’s hands gripped the railing.

Phobos held nine macro cannons quarried through its rocky body and hidden beneath dusty firing ports. All nine revealed themselves at once and brought their capacitors online. The six cannons hidden in Deimos did the same. The moon batteries were designed to fire one at a time in support of the Mars-based weapons, but Garret needed an assassin’s mace for this battle.

Garret said a silent prayer for the crews that volunteered to remain with their guns. They had a chance to survive—a very slim chance.

“Rounds away!” a gunnery officer shouted.

Flight paths stabbed through the holo tracing the incoming macro cannon rounds fired from the two moons and several cannons on Mars. All the projected paths led to the great spike.

The fire mission Garret and Krupp devised brought devastation down on the Xaros construct from multiple directions and with enough firepower to crack Earth’s moon wide open.

Garret didn’t breathe as the giant shells raced toward the spike…and hit home.

A cheer broke through the bridge as the spike burst into jagged fragments the size of the
Charlemagne
. The remains sizzled with internal fire along their broken edges.

Garret stared intently at a fragment tumbling end over end. He felt a brush of fear against his heart as the fragment slowed down…and the smoldering embers within the broken pieces died down.

Dozens of fragments came to a halt, a few hundred kilometers away and almost parallel to his fleet.

“No…” Garret’s throat tightened as he struggled to comprehend the new fight he and his sailors were about to face. “All ships! Engage the fragments immediately. The enemy is still in this fight.”

Several of the larger jagged remnants shattered…releasing tens of thousands of drones that swarmed toward the human fleet. The rest of the pieces shifted into constructs the size of battleships, forming cavernous assault cannons through their middle.

“They weren’t really joined together when we hit them with the macro cannons,” Garret said and punched the railing. “They suckered me in and caught us all flat-footed.”

“Sir! Phobos…it’s broken apart!” Dorral said. Garret’s hands squeezed into fists as the expanding mass of rock and shattered metal that had been the inner moon began their final descent toward Mars. All the crew were dead. Garret knew the risks. It was his decision and they’d died accomplishing little against the Xaros.

But there was nothing he could do for the dead.

The
Charlemagne
rocked beneath him as a Xaros beam cut across the prow.

The holo table was a riot of clashing ships, thousands and thousands of fighters and drones in a dogfight larger than any other in human history.

This is my battle. Time to fight it.