The Siege of Earth (The Ember War Saga Book 7), Page 2

Elias felt his face pull into a smile. That had been a good day.

  “Iron Hearts,” Carius’ flint-gray eyes looked over the three soldiers, “glad to have you back in the fold. You’ve all served with honor, distinction…and some controversy.”

  “That paper pusher upset my humors,” Kallen said. “I didn’t hurt him.”

  “Don’t be cute with me, Desi. I’m talking about what happened on the Breitenfeld.” Carius waved his cane at her like an admonishing finger. “I got Captain Valdar’s complete report and his recommendation that I take away your spurs. Oddly enough, while I was rereading it, all references to something called ‘Malal’ erased themselves. I think Ibarra’s little pet doesn’t want word about this ‘Malal’ getting around.

  “But, with no statement to instigate any kind of punishment, there’s nothing I can do to you. I would have told him to shove his recommendation up his ass anyway. I don’t care how famous he is—no one tells me how to lead my troops.” Carius turned and stabbed a button with the tip of his cane. Mars appeared on the big screen.

  “Destroying that monster was the right thing to do. We don’t regret it,” Elias said, “and if Valdar wants my armor, he can come and take it.”

  Carius chuckled, dry as dead leaves.

  “I always liked you three. Even before you became the reason we have so many new bean heads,” Carius said. “What did they tell you about Mars?”

  “‘Be on the shuttle at 0900 and get the hell off my ship,’” Bodel said.

  “Welcome to Fortress Mars.” Carius stabbed another button and dots appeared across the Martian surface, all spaced almost equally from each other. One of the dots rose from the surface and spread across the screen: a cross section of a massive gun barrel buried deep in the soil. A series of concentric rings extended from the end of the barrel to the surface.

  “Macro cannons,” Carius said. “Ibarra took the rail gun and decided to push it to the very limits of physical science. Each of these cannons can fire a round big enough to crack a Xaros leviathan or rip through a few square miles of drones. The impeller rings can bend the munitions a few degrees…gives each cannon more sky to shoot. Mars is geologically dead, which is the only way any of this would work. We try it on Earth and one little quake would wreck the calibrations.”

  “How do we get the Xaros to stand still long enough for us to hit them?” Kallen asked.

  “You notice that massive fleet over the North Pole on your way in? Admiral Garret’s going to grab the Xaros by the nose and let the cannons pound them to dust,” Carius said. “We’ve got macro cannons all over the planet and can put effective fires on the entire sky from about a thousand kilometers on up. Phobos and Deimos have a cannon each, but we shoot it and those moons will go flying off into space, or into the planet.”

  “And if they try to bypass? Or attack Mars?” Bodel asked.

  “They try to skirt around and the cannons will beat them to death the entire trip to Earth. They try to outrun the big guns and they’ll just die tired. They come to Mars and Garret will pound them to dust from orbit. This is Fortress Mars, not a vacation spot. No civilians or collateral damage to worry about. Every structure is deep enough to survive a bombardment—so I’m told.” Carius gave a dismissive shrug.

  “Now…to the armors’ part of the fight.” Carius hit another key and Mars rotated to show an area full of shallow canyons. A macro cannon emplacement named Nerio blinked several times. “We’re providing near security for each of the cannons. Anything gets through the fleet, the air defense artillery, and the Eagle fighter squadrons assigned to each cannon and it will be dealt with by us armor and the cavalry squadrons you walked past on the way in here.”

  “We are the last, last, last…last line of defense,” Bodel smirked.

  Carius stabbed the tip of his cane into the platform and the Iron Hearts stiffened.

  “This is where we decide the battle, Hans,” Carius said. “The cannons will keep the Xaros away from Earth. Mars is a bone-dry shit pot so I don’t mind tossing kinetic strike munitions at her. We try to have this same fight on Earth and we’ll kick up so much crap it’ll make the nuclear winter of ’32 look like a day on Waikiki. Not a single civilian on this planet, Earth has children. The future.”

  “I understand my failing and will not repeat it,” Bodel said, repeating the only acceptable response to a correction from armor training at Fort Knox.

  “The big brains on Garret’s staff looked at putting us on the fleet, ship internal security or auxiliary rail cannon support.” Carius spat on the ground. “We are the force of decision. Not some ‘auxiliary’ bullshit. The ships are crammed full of doughboys armed with pneumatic hammers and pissed-off dispositions. They’ve got that covered. That Mars is mostly empty is a plus, and a minus. We can’t concentrate our forces in one point, have to spread out so the cannons are always a threat. Lots of space to cover. Lots of avenues of attack from orbit to the cannons.

  “But Mars,” Carius said, raising a finger, “we are armor. No fear of the atmosphere. We are mobile. We are deadly. You three are assigned to Nerio cannon with a troop of bean heads. Keep the Xaros away from the cannon and see that the big guns never tire.”

  “A troop?” Elias asked. “Where did you find twelve new recruits and the time to get them through selection? Proccies can’t take the plugs.”

  Carius smirked.

  “Your troop isn’t human.”

  ****

  The Nerio cemetery held space for twelve suits of armor. The hydraulic lifts, tool benches and repair frames were the same as the Breitenfeld, but the walls were bare rock instead of the dull gray bulkheads that Elias was used to staring at.

  Elias stood in the repair frame, a metal cage used by technicians to lift armor plates, weapons and heavy battery packs onto his armor.

  A tech in a lifter suit carried a pike taller than a man between hydraulic pincers from its transport case to the cage. She set it into a foot-wide cradle attached to a corner bar and the cradle tightened around the pike. The cradle raised the bar with a hiss of compressing air and stopped next to Elias’ right arm where his chief armorer waited for it on a scaffold.

  “Brand new,” Chief Aguilar said, “made from composite steel fashioned over a graphene lattice. Aegis shell might take a hit or two from the Xaros.”

  The Iron Hearts had inherited Aguilar and his Brazilian crew after the death of the Smoking Snakes. The Iron Hearts lost most of their own techs when the Breitenfeld took damage over Takeni. Their lone original technician, Sanders, had managed to pick up enough Portuguese to integrate—mostly cuss words and proper names for tools.

  “New aegis armor,” Aguilar said, “new high-energy capacitors and batteries, new pintle cannons. You’re going to smell like factory grease when the Xaros show up.”

  “I need to hit the range. My synch rating is bottoming out,” Elias said.

  “Always happens with new gear.” Aguilar shoved his hands into an oversized pair of gloves, reached into thin air and closed his hands around an unseen rod. Haptic feedback sensors in the gloves stopped his grip and the hydraulics in the cell synched with his gloves. Aguilar lifted his hands and the cradle with the pike mimicked his action.

  Aguilar set the pike into Elias’ forearm housing. He took his hands out of the gloves and picked up a data slate.

  “How’s the fit?” he asked.

  “Lighter than the last one. Hard to trust it’s an improvement,” Elias said.

  “You’ll manage,” Aguilar said. “I’ve got something else for you.” He took a data drive the size of his thumb out of a pocket. “I got the director’s cut of that movie.”

  “Movie?”

  “The Last Stand on Takeni. You haven’t seen it?”

  Elias turned his helm to Aguilar.

  “They made some puff piece about the Dotok rescue. You and the rest are in it. Even my Cobras Fumantes. That fight with the walker wasn’t anything like how it really went down but the rest is sort of accurate.” Agui
lar tapped the drive against the slate and the movie uploaded to Elias’ system.

  “You want me to tell the range your re-fit is going to take longer?” Aguilar asked.

  Elias stepped out of the cage and stalked toward the door.

  “Sweat saves blood. I’m going to the range now.”

  CHAPTER 4

  A hologram of Pluto and Abaddon floated over the tank in the Breitenfeld’s command center. The ship’s senior officers watched as drones billowed out of Abaddon and abandoned the vessel used to bring them from one star to another.

  “There’s something not right,” said Ensign Geller, the ship’s navigator. “Abaddon is almost as big as Luna, heck of a lot bigger than Pluto. Its gravity should have slapped Pluto’s moons out of orbit. Heck, Pluto and Abaddon should be forming into a new planetary system right now.”

  “Then what does that tell us, Ensign?” Executive Officer Ericcson asked.

  “It’s doesn’t have any significant gravity…because it’s hollow?” The ensign tapped a finger against his chin.

  “Which is in line with the assessment from Ibarra and his probe.” Captain Valdar reached into the tank and zoomed in to the surface of Pluto. “This thing had propulsion rings, same as Ceres and other planets occupied by the Xaros. Admiral Makarov and her fleet managed to destroy them, which is why the drone mass heading for Earth is so small.”

  “Small?” Commander Utrecht’s eyebrows popped up. “There must be tens of millions of drones coming for us.”

  “If the Xaros had converted the entire mass of that planetoid to drones, we would face drones in the hundreds of millions,” Valdar said. “Eighth Fleet managed to drop graviton mines on Abaddon’s path, forcing them to burn mass that could have been transmuted into drones. The minelayers sent back telemetry data for six months before the last of the crew…ceased broadcasting.

  “While we were sitting in the void waiting for our jump engines to come back online, Earth prepared for this invasion. We should have had a few more years to prep. Ibarra’s plan was for the Xaros we defeated at the Crucible to broadcast that only a few of our ships survived the battle, and they’d return with a force large enough to crush the survivors. The Xaros don’t know about the proccies, didn’t know about the armada we’d build in the time it took them to travel here from Barnard’s Star.”

  “But they’re here early, aren’t they?” Lieutenant Hale asked.

  “There’s the rub,” Valdar said. “We don’t know if it was when the Xaros saw our ship at Anthalas, Takeni, or when they took Torni prisoner, but they figured out we were still around and decided to step off from their jump gate on Barnard’s Star before the message from the drones we destroyed made it back to them. No more connecting the dots. This is where we are and, we’re moving on. Explaining time dilation gives me nose bleeds.”

  “I can do it, sir.” Geller held up his index fingers. “You see, when the Xaros sent a message from Earth, it had to travel—”

  Valdar slapped a palm against the side of the tank and Geller shut up.

  “Even with the losses inflicted by Eighth Fleet and the burn rate across the void, the Xaros are here in overwhelming force,” Valdar said. “Admiral Garret has the majority of our fleet in orbit around Mars. He thinks he can stop them there, save Earth and the civilians from collateral damage.”

  “So when do we leave for Mars?” Durand asked. “No ship has more experience fighting the Xaros than us.”

  “We don’t,” Valdar said, pointing to Pluto, “watch.” He touched the holo and it swung around, revealing the dark side of Pluto and Charon. Red lines washed over Pluto as the image switched to infrared. A perfectly circular hole lay at the base of Pluto’s ice mountains. Drones and tinkling specs shuttled from the hole to an artificial satellite high above Pluto’s surface. The satellite looked like a frayed ring.

  “They’re building a new Crucible,” Ericcson said.

  “That’s right,” Valdar said. “They’re mining through Pluto’s crust for materials. There are several shafts around this main dig site, and it is days away from completion. It’s not as big as the Crucible over Ceres, but if the Xaros can open a gate to one of their garrison worlds…billions more drones could come through and then we don’t stand a chance.”

  “What are we waiting for?” Hale asked. “There’s a fleet over the North Pole. Send it through our Crucible and blow the hell out of what they’re building.”

  “We do that and Earth is vulnerable,” Valdar said. “What we send through won’t make it back to Earth before the Xaros. The drones can outrun us from Mars to Earth, too. Garret is confident he can stop them on Mars, but he’s not the ‘all eggs in one basket’ kind of strategic thinker. Enough drones get to Earth to overwhelm the orbitals and there’s no fleet to stop them? They will slaughter every last man, woman, and child on Earth. They complete the new Crucible? Millions more drones come through and the fight is unwinnable. Same outcome.”

  “We have a lot of ways to lose this fight,” Utrecht said.

  “The plan is for the Breitenfeld and a small task force to jump through our Crucible and destroy what the Xaros are building, then return to Earth using our jump engines. We fail and the reserve fleet does the job, leaving Earth vulnerable,” Valdar said.

  “It’s not enough to wreck their construction site,” Hale said. “They’ve got to have something massive digging that hole and converting omnium. We don’t take that out and they’ll just build another Crucible.”

  “Correct. We’re taking on more strike Marines to augment you and your team,” Valdar said. “Which reminds me…XO?”

  “Attention to orders!” Ericcson shouted, snapping everyone but Valdar to attention.

  The captain took a small knife from his belt and flicked it open. He cut into Hale’s lieutenant rank patch and ripped away a corner.

  Ericcson cleared her throat. “The Atlantic Union emergency council, acting upon the recommendation of Fleet Admiral Garret, has placed special trust and confidence in the patriotism and integrity of Lieutenant Kenneth A. Hale.”

  Valdar ripped Hale’s rank off and flung it aside.

  “In view of these special qualities, and his demonstrated potential to serve in the higher grade, Lieutenant Hale is hereby promoted to the rank of captain, Atlantic Union Marine Corps, effective immediately,” Ericcson said.

  Valdar took out a pair of silver bars rank insignia and pressed the metal pins into the uniform where Hale’s old rank used to be. Valdar put his palm against the rank and raised an eyebrow.

  Hale stared back at him, impassive.

  Valdar lifted his hand and slammed it against the rank, driving the pins into Hale’s chest. Hale didn’t even blink.

  “Well done, son.” Valdar shook the new captain’s hand. The rest of the bridge broke into applause. Valdar stepped back so the rest of the crew could file through to congratulate Hale. No one else tried to beat Hale’s rank into his chest.

  A rare smile crossed Valdar’s face. Promoting his godson was one of the few happy moments he’d experienced since the Xaros invasion. Valdar’s wife and their children were dead. His connection with Hale was the only familial tie he had left in the world.

  Despite the honor and attention from the crew, Hale didn’t look happy. He kept his gaze away from the ship’s captain.

  Something’s wrong, Valdar thought.

  ****

  Valdar held the door to his ready room open for Hale as the two entered the captain’s only place of sanctity on the entire ship. Hale noted that the room was clean, the bedsheets tight enough that they looked fused to the mattress and there was no smell of neglected food trays.

  Hale stopped next to a wall where Valdar had a collage of family photos tacked to the bulkhead. One picture had both the Valdar and Hale families taken during a lake trip when Hale was just a boy. Everyone in that photo but Hale, his brother Jared, and Valdar was dead. Jared…he’d probably never see him again.

  “Shame we missed seeing him off,�
� Valdar said. “Jared will do well on Terra Nova. His passion was always for construction, plenty of chance at that on the new colony.”

  “At least he’s safe, sir,” Hale said, adding an honorific he rarely used when in private with Valdar.

  Valdar’s mustache twitched and he flopped down in a cracked leather chair.

  “What’s eating you, son?” Valdar asked.

  Hale touched the captain’s rank on his chest.

  “I don’t deserve this. Captain Acera, God rest his soul, he commanded a team for three full years before pinning on captain. Went to advanced recon school, forward air controller training…couldn’t Ibarra create a more qualified officer in one of his proccie tubes and send him here instead?”

  “You heard Ericcson, ‘demonstrated potential.’ You’ve got that in spades. Hell, you’ve got a slew of Purple Hearts and other awards in the pipeline. Bureaucracy is slow at best—during wartime it’s molasses moving uphill in winter. You weren’t this hesitant when you took over the defenses of an entire Dotok city. What’s really eating you?”

  Hale chewed on his bottom lip. “When I was with Stacey on that vault…she said something to me. Something that didn’t make sense.”

  Valdar leaned forward and rested his arms atop the desk.

  “It was about the Toth, when I was on Europa negotiating with one of their damned overlords.” Hale’s lips pulled into a sneer. “Stacey said we were never going to hand over the proccies. I was just a delaying tactic until she could bring help or Ibarra could get another fleet crewed.”

  Valdar turned his head aside.

  “But…” continued Hale as he walked up to Valdar’s desk, “you told me to sign the treaty that would have done just that—given up every proccie on Earth, handed over all the tech used to make them. All my instructions from Earth came through you, Uncle Isaac. I can’t make this work in my head. Either Stacey was lying to me…or you were.”

  “Ken…I thought they were abominations.”

  “No!” Hale slammed a hand against Valdar’s desk. “The proccies are just as human as you and me. Yarrow dragged my bleeding body off the battlefield and stitched me back together. Rohen led the Toth away from the rest of my team so we could get off of Nibiru. Every last sailor that died in Eighth Fleet to give Earth a fighting chance was a proccie.”