The Ibarra Sanction (Terran Armor Corps Book 2), Page 2

  Gideon growled through the comm channel.

  “We will discuss this later,” Cha’ril said curtly.

  Roland landed on the shelf jutting from the canyon side. His footfalls kicked up a spray of bioluminescent life that sparkled in the dark water. He heard the thump of Cha’ril and Aignar landing on the hull of the Cairo. The ship loomed over him, an artifact of humanity that did not belong on this world.

  “Tell me what you see,” Gideon said.

  “Scorch marks across the hull.” Roland zoomed in on the hull with his optics, recording images and keeping pictures up for comparison. “Worse on the dorsal. She hit atmo without her shields, then lost altitude control.”

  He examined the rent where the engines had torn away from the hull.

  “The break is twisted, sheared away. Must have happened when she hit the water or scraped along the canyon wall,” Roland said. He ran his optics up and down the hull, then did a double take over an open tear the length of his armor’s leg.

  “Can’t be…Cha’ril, you reading any radiation from the hull? Any isotopes from a plasma-graphenium interaction?” Roland asked.

  “Negative,” she said. “We’re almost to the life-pod banks.”

  “Sir…” Roland was about to send the screen capture of the tear through the Cairo’s hull when Gideon sent him three images of similar damage, all ringed by silver metal that had cooled along the edges like scar tissue.

  “Rail cannons,” Gideon said. “She was ambushed.”

  “By who?” Roland asked. “Vishrakath use plasma weapons, same as the Naroosha. No one uses rail cannons as extensively as…we do. This can’t be right.”

  “You think your eyes are lying to you?” Gideon pointed to the central passageway in the Cairo, her deck plating dangling from the exposed hull like flesh from a severed limb. “Let’s get in there and find the computer core.”

  “Yes, sir.” Roland followed his lance commander to the base of the ship and began climbing up the bulkhead frames.

  “At the life pods,” Aignar said. A grainy image of an open panel and an empty space in the ship’s hull came up on Roland’s HUD. “Empty. Every last pod on the dorsal port evac point is gone.”

  “Same with the starboard pods,” Cha’ril said. “Given the burn marks within the pod bay, I’m positive the ship was evacuated before she entered the atmosphere.”

  “Pods are all loaded with mayday boxes,” Roland said as he pulled himself up another deck. “Should’ve picked them up if they crashed into the ocean…unless they’d all been destroyed before they hit atmo.”

  Gideon vaulted up into the central passageway and turned his floodlight on as Roland came up behind him. Broken pieces of bulkheads floated in the water, and Roland made out half-open doors and more detritus ahead of them.

  “Meet us at server room three,” Gideon said, “should. “Should be on this deck.”

  The foghorn of whale song carried through the ship like a tremor. The Cairo canted to one side and Roland grabbed on to the bulkhead out of instinct.

  “Why do they think we’re food?” Roland asked.

  “We did see them tearing apart those jellyfish that were lit up like Christmas trees.” Gideon said, snapping off his lamp. “Come, we should be close.”

  They made their way deeper into the ship, their way lit by their infrared cameras, when a shadow reached out at them from the dark.

  Gideon grabbed it and gently swung the loose mass toward Roland. It was a Terran sailor—what was left of him at least. The skin beneath the cracked faceplate was gray and loose, eyes missing.

  “Check for tags,” Gideon said.

  Roland pinched the body’s shoulder, the flesh crumpling beneath his armored fingers. His armor’s right forefinger snapped open at the knuckle and he scanned the corpse. A small pill-sized object pulsed on his HUD in the center of the sailor’s suit.

  “Got it. Spacer Apprentice Hellerman, Joseph H. Identity logged.” Roland tapped the knuckles of his fist against his helm where its mouth would be, then against his chest twice. He pressed the body to the deck and against the bulkhead. “Sir…he’s in his shipboard utilities, not his void combat suit. It takes seventy-five seconds for a graduate from basic training to switch uniforms. He at least had his emergency helm on…doubt he knew much more than the ship was under attack before he died.”

  “Fits that they were ambushed,” Gideon said.

  “They knew exactly where to hit her,” Cha’ril said as she and Aignar came up behind them. “From what we saw up top, every main power line was severed by rail cannon fire. I doubt the Cairo managed to fire back.”

  “Roland, here.” Gideon pressed his fingertips into the seam of a door and bent the reinforced doors open just enough for Roland to stick his helm inside. Stacks of servers within metal housing were bolted to the bulkhead of the small room. One server sat tilted, its corner denting the unit next to it.

  “Core’s…not looking good. No ambient power. Let me hook up.” Roland brought his right forearm into the room. He unlocked a pair of probes from a small hatch on his armor and extended the probes out to the main computer terminal. The probes wavered up and down like cavorting eels.

  “Problem?” Gideon asked.

  “I’ve trained for moving the probes around in normal atmo and vacuum…not cold saltwater,” Roland said.

  “Move.” Cha’ril said, nudging his foot.

  “I’ve got…I’ve got it.” Roland plugged both probes into the terminal and the system powered up for a split second, then died with a snap. “Slagged.” Roland pulled his probes back into his arm. “Captain must have hit the panic button when the ship was attacked. Even if we pull the units off the wall, intelligence will never recover anything. Even the buffer was nothing but static.”

  “Wait…buffers,” Aignar said. “Cairo’s a Geneva-class ship. Their point defense turrets have the same optics we do.” He tapped his helm. “Six-hour local storage. Won’t do a data transfer until a ship stands down from battle stations, keeps the load off the processors.”

  “Then we find a turret,” Gideon said.

  “Firing position Bravo-two-eight is at the end of this corridor,” Cha’ril said as her three lance mates turned to look at her. “I memorized the ship’s schematics. Didn’t you?”

  The thrum of whale song reverberated through the ship and the deck rocked slightly beneath Roland’s feet.

  “Moving.” Roland strode down the passageway, gripping the deck with the mag plates in the soles of his massive feet. The thump of the Iron Dragoons’ footfalls seemed to antagonize the whales outside the ship, and their song filled with clicks.

  Aignar sent a brief video clip of a shadow moving against the severed opening behind them.

  “At least they’re too big to join us in here,” he said.

  “Isn’t there some ancient human hero you can pray to?” Cha’ril asked. “What was his name? Sea Man? He could talk to fish.”

  Roland slowed to a stop at a round, heavily reinforced door. It was half-open, rolled into the scorched metal bulkhead for the ship’s outer hull. He got his helm and shoulders into the turret. The dark void of the ocean pressed through the transparent turret walls. The two gauss cannons extending from weapon housings through the turret on either side of the gunner’s seat bore green ribbons of Nimbus sea life.

  “You’ve enough space?” Aignar asked.

  “Almost.” Roland tried to inch forward, but his ascension kit on his back kept him from going any farther. “The manual controls still hooked up?”

  There was a squeal of metal and the hatch widened enough for him to enter the cramped confines of the turret.

  A body lay strapped in the gunner’s seat. Another sailor in his shipboard utilities. Roland ran his scanner over the dead man, searching for his identity implant. The man’s chest was a ruined mess. Broken ribs poked through his uniform, and a leg was bent and broken, a crater of black flesh in the thigh.

  “Sir…he’s been shot,” R
oland said. “Close-range gauss fire…got his ID chip.”

  “Ambushed then boarded. Pull the buffer so we can get the hell out of here. Should be under the gunner’s seat,” Gideon said.

  Roland hooked a finger beneath a handle at the base of the seat and tugged. The seat rocked back and forth as the hydraulics beneath the turret failed to activate.

  The rumble of whale song sounded so loudly that he felt his womb quiver in resonance. He looked up and a deep shadow blocked the view from the turret. He activated his floodlight and stared into the massive eye of a Nimbus whale. A yellow iris contracted around a blood-red pupil and the whale reeled back, emanating clicks that sounded like bones breaking in the jaws of a wolf.

  “You think you scared it away or just pissed it off?” Aignar asked.

  The Cairo rocked from side to side as the pod of whales hit it with their tails.

  “You pissed them all off. Bravo,” Aignar said.

  Roland cut off his floodlight, then gently touched the dead sailor’s shoulder.

  “Forgive me.” Roland grabbed the base of the gunner’s chair, ripping it away from the deck. He dug his fingertips into the seam of the hydraulic housing and pulled the machinery that maneuvered the cannons up into the turret. He ripped away pipes and found a bright yellow box.

  The Cairo lurched to one side, then an unceasing grinding sound—the hull scraping against the shelf—filled the ship.

  “We’re loose!” Gideon shouted.

  Roland stuck the yellow box into a housing on his forearm as the grinding stopped and the ship tipped over into the trench. The hull bashed against the canyon wall and slid lower. Roland braced himself against the turret walls as the ship came to a sudden stop.

  “Did the engines get hooked on something?” Cha’ril said.

  Roland looked down and into the crushing depths.

  “We’ll climb back up,” Gideon said. “I can see—”

  The forward hull of the Cairo ripped free with a screech of metal and plunged down.

  Pressure warnings flashed amber on Roland’s HUD. A rock outcropping loomed out of the darkness and struck the side of the ship, knocking it into a slow spin.

  Roland lifted his right leg and jammed the heel against the glass. The anchor spike meant to keep him grounded when he fired his rail cannons broke through the turret shell and sent cracks through the entire surface. The cracks deepened as the outer water pressure grew stronger by the second.

  He swore his womb was tighter as he kicked the glass and shattered it into a million pieces.

  “Got a way out!” Roland knocked away the turret frame and sent the gunner seat and cannons spinning into the abyss. He reached down and grabbed Aignar’s hand as he reached through the half-open door and flung his lance mate up.

  Aignar activated the ascension pack on his armor and hydro-jets unfolded from their housings, shooting him straight up. The back blast hit Roland hard enough that it staggered him against the side of the turret.

  Roland pulled Cha’ril free and sent her after Aignar.

  His HUD flashed red as the water pressure neared his armor’s survival threshold.

  “Get out of here,” Gideon said as he struggled through the meager opening between the hull and the turret.

  “We all go home or nobody goes home, sir,” Roland grabbed his lance commander by the armpits and hurled him toward the surface.

  He tried to touch the ascension kit’s activation switch, but his shoulder actuators ground to a snail’s pace as the pressure squeezed against him like a vise.

  “Sancti spiritus adsit nobis gratia.” His fingers brushed the activation button and the hydro-jets sent him hurtling away from the Cairo.

  The pressure warnings vanished as he ascended. The dull crump of the Cairo succumbing to the depths trailed him like distant thunder.

  “I sent the recall buoy to the Scipio,” Cha’ril said, her voice tinny and weak through the interference of the saltwater. “I’m first to go feet dry. I’ll relay telemetry data for the static line pickup.”

  Whale song pulsed around Roland and his HUD flashed as the creature’s sonar bounced off his armor.

  “Anyone else getting sick of these things?” Roland asked.

  “Keep your speed up,” Gideon said. “You miss your burn height and it’s a long wait for the Scipio to come back.”

  “You screw up one time…” Aignar said.

  Light from the ocean surface grew as Roland ascended, his hydro-jets still churning away. The twinkle of distant bioluminescent creatures appeared in the distance.

  “Roland, check your three o’clock,” Gideon said. “Think I saw—” His transmission washed out in static as a pulse of sonar hit Roland’s armor.

  He twisted around…and saw a whale swimming right for him. A dazzling light rippled down the creature’s skin, meant to confuse prey just before the creature struck. Inky black tentacles tipped with hooked teeth the length of daggers reached for Roland.

  Roland pulsed his hydro-jets and the tentacles swiped just over his head. The whale kept coming, its jaws open like petals of a flower, alabaster teeth glinting in the light. Roland raised a fist behind his head and punched the whale square in the nose.

  There was a crack of bone as the whale compressed against his fist, its forward momentum canceled by the blow. The whale hung in the water, blood seeping from its blowhole, then sank away.

  Roland looked up at the sunlight playing across the surface, Roland tilted his helm back, then locked his legs together and arms against his flanks. He burst out of the water and jettisoned the hydro-jets. His jetpack flared to life, sending him skyward on a gout of flame and steam from boiled ocean water.

  Telemetry data from the Scipio and his lance mates flooded his HUD, and he activated his recovery line. A balloon inflated from a housing on his armor’s waist and pulled a reinforced graphenium line skyward as his jetpack slowed his ascent.

  Within seconds, the Scipio emerged from the clouds and roared overhead. Catch arms along the bottom of the corvette’s hull trapped his recovery line and jerked him aside with enough force that it would have killed an unarmored human instantly.

  Roland and the rest of the Iron Dragoons trailed from the ship like pennants as it angled to the void and reeled them into the ship’s open cargo bay.

  “This is Lieutenant Commander Tagawa,” the Scipio’s captain said. “What news?”

  “Cairo found. Total loss,” Gideon said.

  “God damn it,” Tagawa said. “At least we found them.”

  “We are armor,” Gideon said. “We do not fail.”

  Chapter 2

  Roland scrubbed a towel against his head before trading it to a technician for a set of overalls and a pair of boots. He stood on a raised platform connected to the maintenance bay for his armor, its torso open to the Scipio’s bay.

  “Roland,” Gideon called out from the hatch to a turret along the upper levels of the bay. The lieutenant locked eyes with Roland, then ducked into the turret.

  “You think any of the Cairo’s crew made it out?” asked the tech, a Brazilian man in his mid-fifties named Henrique.

  “Looks that way. Where they are now is the hard question.” Roland lifted his right arm up and looked at his forearm, then back to his unresponsive armor. “Damn it. Should’ve got the buffer box before I dismounted.”

  “I’ll get it.” Henrique took a data slate from a hip pocket and began tapping.

  Roland stepped into his coveralls, the feel of the fabric almost odd against his skin. Being plugged into the armor for days and weeks on end conditioned his nervous system to be nothing but the armor, to be one with the war machine’s systems and the fifteen feet of metal. Every time he left the womb, he felt…lesser.

  He stepped into his boots, which he tightened against his legs with leather straps instead of laces. The “tanker boots” were an old tradition, carried down from the American military’s original armor corps created by the legendary George S. Patton in the early twe
ntieth century. Roland shifted his weight against the stiff leather, wishing he’d had some more time to break them in.

  General Laran, head of the Terran Armor Corps, insisted her soldiers wear the tanker boots to “set us apart from the rest of the military,” as if the plugs in the base of their skulls weren’t enough to mark them in a crowd.

  He looked over at Aignar’s armor. Roland’s lance mate sat on a stool while technicians attached cybernetic hands and forearms to where his arms ended just beneath the elbow. A pair of boots with the rest of his legs sat waiting next to him. Aignar had a towel wrapped around the bottom half of his face, masking his missing jaw.

  Aignar was once a Ranger and had been badly injured fighting the Vishrakath on Cygnus II. A rare genetic condition kept him from receiving replacement organs, leaving the Armor Corps as his last avenue for service.

  Roland looked away as Aignar picked up a black box that held the rest of his face. Despite their time serving together, fighting side by side, watching Aignar put himself back together still made Roland uncomfortable.

  “Here you are, sir.” Henrique handed Roland the yellow buffer box he’d recovered from the Cairo. It was moist to the touch and smelled of brine. Roland took it, the sudden weight catching him by surprise and he nearly dropped it.

  “You want one of us crunchies to help you?” the tech said with a wink.

  “Just need my sea legs back.” Roland stuffed the box into a thigh pocket and took the ladder down to the deck. He ran around a cart bearing his armor’s rail gun and gauss ammunition, then hurried up a set of stairs leading to the turret where Gideon waited for him.

  By the time he got to the top, his chest burned and his legs were aching. Moving in armor was effortless and he was trained to operate the armor without the limitations of something so mundane as muscle strength and oxygen.

  He was a bit lightheaded and sweating by the time he reached the turret. Inside, Commander Tagawa squatted next to the gunner’s seat, already raised up and its buffer box sitting in a neat pile of fiber-optic cables. Cha’ril and Gideon stood against the bulkhead. Cha’ril’s head quills were loose, hanging around her head like strands of hair the thickness of a pencil. She held a water bottle to her beak and bit down on the nozzle before taking a long sip.