The Siege of Earth (The Ember War Saga Book 7) (5 page)

“How’s your village? Your people adjusting to Earth?”

“There have been some…difficulties. Lafayette is still banished. Getting them to relocate to the Kilimanjaro bunkers was a chore. The geth’aar are all pregnant, and geth’aar tend to be especially cranky when they’re carrying strong babies.”

“And how’s that been?”

“I am glad there’s a new battle to take me away from them.”

Hale’s screen beeped. He glanced at it and sighed.

“There are a million things requiring my attention before we weigh anchor. I never thought I’d miss being a lieutenant. Which reminds me. I need your help, Steuben. I want you to be the company executive officer for this mission. The new teams know you. I know you. It’s a good fit,” Hale said.

“And what would my role be?”

“You’ll be second-in-command. I go down and you take over the mission.”

Steuben tapped his clawed fingertips against the armor on his legs.

“I am several hundred years older than you are. I fought campaigns before your nation even existed and I am to be your subordinate?” Steuben asked.

“It would look that way on paper, easier for the rest of the company to understand your role. In reality I don’t think I could ever order you around,” Hale said.

“You saved my people from the Toth. That is a debt I can never repay. I will be your executive officer.”

“Great. Another part of the job is doing everything the company commander doesn’t have time to do…or want to do. So I need you on the flight deck inspecting the drop pods while I go figure out why our supply of antiarmor grenades went to the wrong ship and get them back where they belong.” Hale gave Steuben a pat on the shoulder and stood up.

“When will the responsibility for the tasks you find undesirable ever end?” Steuben asked.

“Never. Get to it, XO.”

****

Egan walked through a passageway, whistling a slow tune as he glanced over his shoulder. A lone sailor shared the space with him. Egan slowed next to a bolted door and waited for the sailor to step around the corner.

The commo tech took out a black key card given to him by Standish and swiped it across the bolted door’s access panel. The bolts snapped open and the door swung loose on its hinges.

“Damn, didn’t think that would work,” Egan said. He touched a microphone on his throat and said, “Get over here.”

Egan glanced into the open door. Humming stacks of electrical equipment filled the space, leaving barely enough room for two men to stand in. Yarrow raced around the corner and stepped into the confined space with Egan.

Egan flipped a panel open, revealing a keypad and screen. He slid Standish’s black card through the reader and a cursor popped onto the screen.

Yarrow, pale and sweaty, reached for the pad. His fingers hovered over the buttons.

“Here,” Egan said, sliding the card into Yarrow’s pocket. “You get caught with that and I know nothing. Standish also says he knows nothing. You want some help, buddy?”

“No, I’ve got this.” Yarrow’s fingers trembled.

Egan looked at the phone number on Yarrow’s forearm screen and entered the number for him.

“Thanks.” Yarrow wiped his face and ran fingers over his shaved head. The word
DIALING
appeared on the screen. Yarrow glanced at Egan. “You mind?”

“Right. I’ll be on lookout. You hear three knocks on the bulkhead that means trouble’s coming.” Egan let himself out and closed the door.

The screen wavered, then showed Lilith squinting into the camera. Her hair was a mess, but her face held the same natural beauty he remembered.

“You better have a very good reason for calling me right now,” she said.

“Lilith, can you see me?” Yarrow asked.

She leaned closer to the camera, then her eyes opened wide. “Jason? Is that really you? I heard the
Breitenfeld
was back but they said your ship is on a blackout. Are you…here? In Phoenix?”

“No, still in orbit, but not for long. We’re going—that’s not why I called.”

Lilith rubbed a hand across her face and looked at him through her fingers. “And why did you call?”

“We have a baby? I didn’t find out until yesterday. I mean…how…”

“You don’t know how?”

“I know how!” Yarrow winced as his words echoed through the tiny chamber. Two knocks sounded against the walls. “What happened? Where is she?”

“I found out I was pregnant a few weeks after you left. It turns out that I have a number of antibodies from Nibiru that negated the birth control shot I got. I am a computer scientist, not a biologist.” Lilith looked away from the camera and said something in Akkadian.

“Lil, are you two safe? Your email said something about a bunker in Phoenix—”

“Daddy?” a child said.

Lilith angled her camera down and a little girl with blond hair and a round face rubbed her eyes.

Yarrow’s mouth dropped open.

“That’s Daddy?” the girl asked.

“Yes, Mary, he’s back from his long trip,” Lilith said.

“She…she’s…”

“She looks just like you, don’t you think?” Lilith asked.

“Yeah…” Yarrow touched the screen.

“Now hear this,” boomed through the ship and into the commo room. “Now here this. Make ready for jump. All hands secure stations and prep for combat conditions.”

“Ah, not now,” Yarrow said.

“You have to go?” Lilith ducked down next to Mary, who was staring intently at her father.

“Yes, they’re going to suck all the air out of the ship and—” Three knocks came from the door. “I’ll come to Phoenix as soon as I can. You two, stay safe there, promise me.”

“Where are you going, Daddy?”

“I have to go stop the monsters, OK?” The screen filled with static. “I love you two!” Yarrow didn’t hear their reply as the video feed washed out.

Egan cracked the door. “Let’s go. If we don’t get to the armory in three minutes, Top will eat us alive.”

Yarrow wiped the back of his hand across his eyes.

“You see them?” Egan asked.

“Yeah. Thanks, brother.”

Fleet Admiral Garret tossed a baseball over his head and caught it with a snap of flesh on leather. He set the ball on his nineteenth-century oak desk and spun it. The blur of stitching against the off-white leather captivated him for a moment as it meandered toward the edge. His hand trembled as he reached to catch it. The ball hit his fingers and fell to the deck with a thump.

“Damn it,” Garret said. He glanced at a drawer where he kept a flask of vodka, tempted to take one last swig before the grand dance began.

No. No more of that,
he thought.

He popped open a pill bottle and took out two tablets almost as big as his pinky nail. He dry swallowed them both and winced as a bitter aftertaste washed up his throat. Human warriors had relied on stimulants for thousands of years. Roman gladiators took small doses of strychnine, the soldiers of the Second World War relied on amphetamine “energy pills,” American servicemen and women of this century made do with caffeine and cigarettes until the Ibarra Corporation patented the Sustain pills Garret had just taken.

Each Sustain would keep him alert, free from hunger and thirst, and away from the latrine for twenty-four hours, although prolonged use was forbidden and illegal. As the supreme commander of all Earth forces, he could care less about doctor’s orders while humanity’s fate rested in his hands.

I slept yesterday…didn’t I?

As Garret stood and slid his hands into armored void gloves, he glanced at a clock mounted next to the door and counted down from five.

There was a knock on the door as his count ended.

“Enter.”

The door slid aside, revealing the head of Garret’s Ranger bodyguard detail, Marcella. Lights reflected off the Ranger’s obsidian-black armor, the power armor adding to Marcella’s already impressive bulk to the point where he could barely fit through the doorway. The major had been confused for a doughboy on more than one occasion, which Marcella didn’t seem to mind.

“Sir,” the word came from Marcella’s throat speakers with a click, “data packet from Earth just came in. Marked for you.”

“It’s time. Let’s get this done.” Garret scooped his helmet off his desk. He stopped next to a tattered flag cased next to the doorway, void-black cloth with an embroidered dragon twisted into the shape of an 8. Admiral Makarov’s flag was one of the few artifacts recovered from the
Midway
. Garret thought of her and her fleet’s total sacrifice to delay the Xaros.

He kissed his fingertips and touched the glass as he left his ready room.

Just a few steps across the passageway, the
Charlemagne’s
bridge snapped to attention as he entered. He gave a brief grunt and the bridge returned to their duties. Garret went straight to a wide holo table surrounded by his senior staff. Holograms of the other admirals in his fleet and one general snapped into being around the table.

Mars snapped into the air over the table. Pulsating red dots on the surface marked the macro cannon emplacements, and nearly two dozen fleets orbited the dusty world.

“All fleets report ready condition bravo, sir,” said Admiral Dorral, his chief of staff. “On board security augmentees deliveries will be complete to all ships in nineteen hours.”

Garret had redirected the system’s procedural development farm’s computer power to creating doughboys several days ago. It took nine days for a proccie farm to produce another soldier, sailor or technician for the fight against the Xaros; a still gestating human was worth precisely zero in the forthcoming battle. The latest generation of doughboys took twenty minutes to produce a new soldier, and the single-minded biological constructs were ideal for shipboard defense.

“What about the data packet from Ibarra?” Garret asked.

Dorral tapped a keyboard and Mars sank toward the table and melded into a holo of the entire solar system. Garret’s eyes flit over the ready status of macro cannons on Ganymede and Calisto, transfer fleets bringing new cruisers from the Mercury yards to Earth, orbital emplacements around Titan and rail gun emplacements dotting Iapetus.

Earth and Luna were a riot of data, too much for Garret to take in at a glance.

A red ring circled Pluto and a much larger planetoid, a new arrival to the solar system…Abaddon.

A hologram of Marc Ibarra’s head and shoulders formed in the center of the table.

“Mars command, this is Ibarra. Shame we have to deal with this time lag, but those are the laws of physics. Here are the brass tacks.” The holo zoomed in on Pluto where a thick red line snaked out of Abaddon and traveled toward the sun. “From what our passive collection systems picked up on Pluto before they were destroyed, it looks like we’re facing a mass of over

one hundred million drones.”

Ibarra’s recording paused as those around the operation’s table took in the number. No one showed any sign of panic or surprise—all were too well trained as commanders to ever make such a misstep—but Garret felt their tension even behind his own mask of command.

One hundred million…the worst-case scenario they’d planned on since the defeat of Eighth Fleet was for only half as many drones.

“Not optimal…at all,” Ibarra said. “There is the evacuation protocol that we’ve discussed—”

Garret slashed his fingertips across his throat and Dorral paused Ibarra’s recording.

“We stay and we fight,” Garret said. “There are too many civilians on Earth to evacuate through the Crucible before the Xaros can reach our home. We run and the Xaros will find us. We’ve spent years fortifying Mars and Earth, building a fleet stronger than I’d ever dreamed possible. The enemy is here, at our gates, but we will break them.”

Dorral continued the recording.

“—but I didn’t spend the last sixty-five years getting the planet ready for this moment so that I could just throw my hands up in the air now,” Ibarra said.

“The Bastion probe has data on all known Xaros assaults on inhabited star systems. We know their tactics,” Ibarra said. “The Xaros always attack the highest concentration of military force first, then wipe out outlying settlements at their leisure. Mars, your fleets are obvious, mobile. Earth’s defenses are static and the Home Fleet is hidden. Mars will be our anvil, but the Crucible is the hammer. One of them, anyway.”

Ibarra raised a hand and snapped his holographic fingers without any sound. A schematic of a device made up of several round shields, each the size of a Mule transport, appeared over the tank.

“Graviton bombs. If the Xaros hold to form and make straight for Mars, then there’s only one least-time course they’ll take. The Alliance probe and I will send graviton bombs through the Crucible and into the Xaros maniple. The drones are fast and tough, but we’ve yet to encounter one that can outrun a short-lived singularity. Still, the effective range on these devices is only a few kilometers, and the Xaros have plenty of room to maneuver in the void. Each bomb will transmit telemetry data on the maniple, which will make subsequent strikes more accurate. The probe is one hell of a computer, and we’ll do the best we can to punch them in the face the entire way to Mars.

“Our ambassador on Bastion is working to secure military assistance from our allies, but as we’ve agreed, we won’t bring them into play as a knockout punch until we’ve got the Xaros by the nose. Show our hand too early and they may change tactics, go to ground and start replicating more drones where we can’t touch them. Assaulting a Xaros position will be bloody—we learned that at the Battle of the Crucible—and fighting the Xaros in open space isn’t to our advantage. We’ve got defenses. Let’s use them.

“Which leaves our macro cannon phalanx. Fleet Admiral Garret has release authority on them. I’m waiting for your decision,” Ibarra said.

Dorral stopped the recording.

“Macro batteries in the outer solar system can commence bombardment as soon as they receive our order,” said an admiral at the far end of the table. “But with the time it takes a message to reach the cannons, and how far the Xaros will have moved from their last-known position between then and when the munition hits…”

“They’ll be pounding vacuum,” Garret said. While the macro cannon shells traveled at a decent single percentage of the speed of light, the Xaros would detect the launch and have time to maneuver out of the way. Garret crossed his arms and tapped a finger against his armor.

“General Krupp,” said Garret and the lone holo army officer snapped to attention. “All Mars macro cannons will begin immediate area-of-effect bombardment on the center mass of projected Xaros positions. We’ll receive telemetry data from the graviton mines before Ibarra does—don’t wait for him to paint a better target picture. Phobos and Deimos batteries will load munitions but are not to fire.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll have rounds in the void within ten minutes. The big guns will never tire.” Krupp turned away from the holo table and spoke to someone Garret couldn’t see.

“I want to fight them here, on Mars,” Garret said. “All fleets will join the line beyond Phobos’ orbit as the enemy approaches. We will bring the outer system batteries to bear once we’ve engaged the Xaros.”

“Sir,” Dorral said, clearing her throat, “relying on a macro cannon shell from so far away…if the firing solution is off by anything we run the risk of hitting Mars…and us.”

“‘God fights on the side with the best artillery,’” Garret said. “Let’s have faith that He is with us.”