Earth Defiant (The Ember War Saga Book 4) Read online

  Fournier went up a flight of stairs two at a time and shoved a set of double doors open. Applause rose as he entered a ballroom. Dozens of men and women cheered as he raised a fist in victory.

  “True born!” Fournier waited for the noise to die down. “What a day. We have the manifest, and we alone will share this truth to our last city. The proccies are among us. They think like us, look like us…but they are products of an alien plot. A plot so intricate that they managed to infiltrate our organization.”

  Murmurs spread through the crowd.

  “Shannon!” Fournier called out to his assistant. A side door banged open, and his lieutenant shoved a man in front of her, his hands bound behind his back and his mouth gagged.

  Shannon kicked the prisoner and sent him to his knees next to Fournier. Those assembled spoke in hushed whispers as one of the true born’s founders tried to plead through his gag, an old red cloth napkin crammed between his jaws.

  Fournier ripped the gag away.

  “What’s your name?” Fournier asked.

  “Sir, it’s me, Njoroge,” he said. “There must be some mistake, I can’t be a—”

  “What ship were you on when Ibarra stole everything from us?”

  “The…the Johnson Atoll,” Njoroge said. “Cabin thirty-seven.”

  Fournier whipped out his data slate, looked at it, and shook his head.

  “You’re not on the manifest,” Fournier said. He handed it to Shannon, who nodded in agreement.

  “No!” Njoroge cried. He tried to get to his feet but Fournier kicked him in the chest, sending him to the ground. Fournier held out a hand to Shannon, who pressed a crude pistol into his palm.

  Fournier put two rounds in Njoroge’s chest. The proccie struggled to sit up as blood seeped through his shirt. Fournier shot him in the forehead.

  “Everyone else…” Fournier said, “everyone else here is true born. There is a city full of people—real people—full of doubt over the truth of what they are because of Ibarra. We have the manifest, and we’ll use it to tear through Ibarra’s web of lies, but first…we need the upper hand. Now we need to prepare for the endgame.”

  ****

  Shannon rolled Njoroge’s corpse into a section of carpet cut up from the floor. She didn’t have to dispose of the body properly, just keep it hidden for a few more days until Fournier’s plan played out. The building was large, with plenty of places to stash a body until the smell became too noticeable.

  She ducked her head into the hallway, running her eyes up the blood trail leading from the little office where she’d wrapped up the body back to the ballroom. She and the dead man were alone, and she knew Njoroge wouldn’t divulge any new secrets.

  Shannon stuck the butt of her pistol against a molar and pushed. There was a painful click as it dislocated. She swallowed blood and counted to ten, waiting for the beacon in her tooth to connect to her employer and open a secure IR line.

  “C’mon, c’mon c’mon.” She tapped her fingers against her thigh, waiting for the connection. Shannon tapped her forearm screen and swiped through manifest lists.

  “Shannon?” Ibarra asked. The tooth sent vibrations into her inner ear, keeping his words for her and her alone. “What have you got?”

  “Boss,” she said quietly, “they’ve got the manifest. Already executed a proccie too.”

  “Your cover must have held if we’re talking,” Ibarra said.

  Shannon’s eyes skimmed over the passenger list of the Doughty and found Shannon Delacroix’s name. That woman was dead. She’d thrown herself out of an airlock soon after the Battle for the Crucible, evidently distraught about the loss of her family on Earth, but her demise was kept hush-hush, and Shannon stepped into the woman’s life…after Ibarra adjusted some records.

  “Fournier has total confidence in all his people now,” she said. Shannon tabbed over to the manifest for the Endeavor and started reading the names. “They know about the Lehi. He’s prepping an assault on it now.”

  “Lawrence did well,” Ibarra said.

  “He doesn’t know what’s going on,” Shannon hissed. “They tortured him for hours before he broke.”

  “Lawrence is a fine administrator, but a horrible actor,” Ibarra said. “He’s done exactly what I needed him to. Can you get him out alive?”

  Shannon’s brow furrowed as she read over the manifest. She scrolled back up and read it again, slowly and carefully.

  “Shannon?”

  “I’m not on here,” she said. “My alias isn’t on the Endeavor’s manifest. This can’t be right. Unless…”

  “No, listen to me, my darling,” Ibarra said.

  Shannon sank back on her haunches, sitting on Njoroge’s carpet-wrapped body.

  “I had you scrubbed from that manifest the second you set foot on that ship, you understand me?” Ibarra said. “You were going to slip away from the rest of the fleet and come back to me as soon as things settled down. That was always the plan.”

  “I can’t be a proccie. I remember so much…” Shannon said. There was an electric shock from her false tooth. Shannon’s eyes unfocused and her head lolled to the side.

  “Override,” Ibarra said firmly. “New imperative: I was on the Endeavor.”

  “I was on the Endeavor,” Shannon said slowly.

  The tooth shocked her again, and Shannon looked down at the body beneath her, somewhat confused.

  “What were you saying about the Endeavor?” Ibarra asked.

  “Nothing. I was there. My cover is secure…The Lehi. Fournier’s going to make a move, destroy the production lines we’ve got supplying the fleet,” she said.

  “You’re not going to believe this, but we’ve got bigger problems up here,” Ibarra said. “I’m working on a miracle…but even I’ve got limits.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Golden motes of light swirled in the center of the command center. They condensed into an almost incandescent globe, then faded away, leaving a kneeling Stacey in their wake. She pressed her palms against her temples, wincing with pain.

  Admiral Garret, Rochambeau and Ibarra’s hologram waited for Stacey to come to her feet.

  “God, I hate this part,” she said. “Like a damn ice-cream headache.”

  “Stacey,” Ibarra said, “I can’t help but notice that you’ve returned without a couple squadrons of reinforcements.”

  “No, but I’ve returned with plenty of bad news,” she said.

  “They’re not coming,” Rochambeau said.

  Stacey shook her head.

  “Why the hell not?” Garret asked. “I thought we, and the Crucible, were the damn lynchpin to their entire war effort against the Xaros.”

  “We are, sir,” Stacey said, “just not on the terms we thought.”

  The probe rose from the plinth in the center of the command center, a long thin iris of light.

  “I’ve received new instructions from Bastion,” the probe said. “This is most unfortunate.”

  “Bastion, the Congress at least, decided that not preserving the Crucible is more important than us,” Stacey said. “The probe will cooperate with the Toth, send them back to their space without risking a quantum rupture—more on that later—if we surrender. It will give them everything they need to start producing their own proccies. The computer banks, sperm and ovum depositories. The whole thing.”

  “What about us?” Ibarra asked. “What’s to stop the Toth from just…” He looked at Rochambeau.

  “Nothing,” Stacey said with a shake of her head. “But the probe will keep a production line, which can be scaled upwards, on the Crucible. The new humans will be…less willful. Obedient to Bastion’s orders. Earth will be repopulated, just not by anyone who can truly think for themselves.”

  “I believe,” Rochambeau said, “the human word for this situation is ‘bullshit.’”

  “Bastion thinks we’re just going to roll over and play dead for the Toth?” Garret asked. “I have warships ready to hold—to hell with what they expect f
rom us.”

  “Let me stress…if…if the Toth get to the point where the Crucible is in jeopardy, then the probe will run up the white flag,” Stacey said. “If there’s one silver lining to this whole mess, it’s that the Qa’Resh gave us a chance to save our species on our terms. Let me show you.”

  Stacey walked over to a holo board listing each human void ship on one side and the Toth ships on the other, all given designations by their relative size compared to human ships.

  “What happened with the Dotok…” Stacey looked up and down the Toth ships, then frowned. “This can’t be right. The sheer tonnage of this many ships using Bastion jump technology would require dark-matter capacitors larger than any of these ships.”

  “Ms. Ibarra, English please,” Garret said.

  “How many jump gates did they use when they entered our solar system?” Stacey asked the probe.

  “One,” the probe said. “The wormhole measured—”

  “Then where is the ship with the jump engine?” Stacey asked. “The Breitenfeld could barely bring the Canticle of Reason back from Takeni, and the Toth fleet masses nearly four times the Dotok ship.”

  “They’re hiding something from us,” Ibarra said. “How?”

  “I’m more concerned that our probe didn’t pick up on this to begin with,” Stacey said. “Did the Toth initiate contact when they arrived?”

  “The Toth designated Kren sent a multifrequency standard greeting three seconds after their fleet translated,” the probe said.

  “Show me.” Stacey turned from the board and a hologram appeared in front of her. Separate lines of transmissions ranging from energy levels just above cosmic background radiation to the upper bands of the near ultraviolet wavelengths.

  “The Toth know what frequencies we use,” Stacey said. “This mess they sent us is hiding something.” She scrolled through bandwidths until she found one that was spikey with energy waves.

  Stacey went pale.

  “Probe, initiate command line red dash alpha,” Stacey said. The probe’s sliver of light wavered. “I want you to create a memory partition for the Ibarra matrix. Now.”

  “Done,” the probe said. Ibarra’s hologram flickered.

  Stacey pressed her palm against a command console. She closed her eyes and the probe faded away.

  “It’s been hacked,” Stacey said. “I sent it into hibernation before it could cause any more damage.”

  “That’s impossible,” Ibarra said. “The probe’s programming language is—”

  “And yet,” Stacey snapped, pointing to the rogue transmission, “here is an override code degrading the probe’s logic functions. The probe should have realized something was off when the Toth arrived.”

  “Why did they send a simple override code? Why not take over the whole system?” Ibarra asked.

  “Your ships are still rigged for analogue, no computers to take over,” Rochambeau said. “If the Toth seized control of the probe, they’d still have to deal with the fleet. They’re buying time to get close to Earth.”

  “Get close? Their fleet is still at anchor over Neptune,” Garret said.

  “Anthalas,” Stacey said. “The Breitenfeld said the Toth ship they encountered was cloaked.”

  Rochambeau and Lafayette spoke to each other in high-pitched whistles and clicks that hurt Stacey’s ears.

  “The Karigole had experimented with larger cloak fields before the Toth betrayal,” Lafayette said. “The technology could, in theory, be scaled upwards. We abandoned the research once field tests failed against the Xaros. A simple lepton pulse would collapse the cloak instantly.”

  “Do we have a lepton emitter…somewhere?” Stacey asked.

  “No, but I can build one in about an hour with the omnium reactor here on the Crucible,” Lafayette said.

  Stacey looked at Lafayette for a second, and the Karigole just smiled at her.

  “Go! Go make a lepton emitter, for Pete’s sake,” Stacy said. Lafayette spun on his heels and ran from the command center.

  “What do you think we’re going to find?” Ibarra asked.

  “I’m not sure, but we’d better warn the Breitenfeld,” Stacey said.

  ****

  Valdar looked at the cooling plate of food on his desk. He picked up a fork and pushed a scoop of fried rice around the plate.

  “What’s wrong? It actually has taste now,” Hale said. The Marine stripped a plastic wrapper off a piece of carrot cake from his own tray and gave it a sniff.

  “Can’t say I have much of an appetite,” Valdar said. He opened a desk drawer and pulled out a bottle of whiskey and two paper cups.

  “Uncle Isaac, where’d you get that?” Hale asked.

  “There seems to be a lot of booze on my ship,” Valdar said. “A couple other captains suggest there’s a black marketer aboard the Breitenfeld. Each time we leave orbit, the amount and availability of quality alcohol dries up for Phoenix and the fleet. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

  “Rumors is all,” Hale said. He made a mental note to have a conversation with Standish once this dinner was over with.

  Valdar poured a double shot in each cup and returned the bottle to his drawer.

  “Cheers.” Valdar held the paper cup up as a toast and tossed back the drink. Hale managed a sip and coughed. “Drink up. It’ll help make this next part go down easier.”

  “We have instructions back from Earth?” Hale forced down the rest of his drink, warmth spreading through his chest.

  “High command wants this resolved immediately,” Valdar said. “Riots in Phoenix, serious discipline issues in the fleet—the proccies are going to tear us all apart before the Toth or the Xaros get the chance. You’re to agree to hand over the proccies—and the tech—at the next session. They were never our choice or our idea. This mess is on Ibarra.”

  “No, we can’t do that,” Hale said. “The Toth will…they will make human beings by the millions and slaughter them. Slaughter. Them. Where do we get the right to just condemn so many souls to—”

  “They don’t have souls!” Valdar slapped a palm against his desk. “They are mockeries. A false front by Ibarra to mask everything that we’ve lost. Where did Ibarra get the right to doom my family to death? Huh? Now Ibarra wants to replace everyone with something that follows his plan, his vision. We’re not going to have it, Ken. Earth is ours. Our future belongs to us and we can’t let Ibarra take it away again.”

  Hale looked away from his godfather.

  “I saw his body on Earth. Ibarra’s,” Hale said. “He went beneath Euskal Tower, loaded up his mind into that probe and died. He could have been on the fleet, sidestepped the Xaros invasion with the rest of us. He chose to die there. That’s not the action of someone who doesn’t care. Ibarra made the proccies so we’d survive the next fight with the Xaros, and he made them as real to us as he could. I don’t understand why we’re just throwing them all to the wolves.”

  “You don’t have to, Ken,” Valdar said. “Orders are orders. Make this counterproposal to the Toth.” Valdar slid a data slate across his desk.

  Hale read through the text, his face slack as the sheer score of the agreement with the Toth became clear.

  “We’re going to lose more than the proccies with this,” Hale said. “We’re going to abandon everything we believe in ourselves.”

  ****

  The door to an armory locker slid aside. The empty armor attached to a magnetized wall plate formed a human-like shape. Hale, already in his pseudo-muscle layer, grabbed a sabaton from the locker and stepped into it. It tightened around his foot and lower leg, automatically adjusting to his usual fit.

  He put the rest of his armor on in silence, his mind working on autopilot.

  “Hale,” a low voice came from the doorway. The Marine glanced over his shoulder and saw Steuben. Hale slid a mail shirt of linked graphene-ceramic chains over his head.

  “Help you?”

  “The negotiations aren’t going well,” Ste
uben said. The Karigole sat on a bench between the lockers.

  “They’re going well in that an agreement is close,” Hale said. “But that agreement…”

  “I am here to apologize,” Steuben said. “You desired my counsel several times. I was too blinded by hatred to help you.”

  “No harm, no foul, Steuben. The decisions are all made back on Earth, and they’ve got three Karigole there that I’m sure no one’s listening to.” Hale touched his collarbone through the mail shirt, triggering a sensor. The shirt melded against his pseudo muscle layer. He picked up his breastplate and looked over the interior connection sensors.

  “I had a wife,” Steuben said, “beautiful, strong, but from a different clan. We had to give up our family support to marry—little worry for those too young to realize they’re being foolish. Without our family backing, we had to save for many decades before we could petition a geth’aar so we could have a child.”

  Hale had no clue what a geth’aar was, but he wasn’t going to interrupt the first bit of personal history Steuben had ever shared for clarification.

  “My centurion’s mission off world was to be my last. After I returned, we’d have more than enough for the geth’aar and a home. My wife…she had the nest already prepared. No more war for either of us, but the Toth put an end to all that.

  “Do you know where the Toth struck first? They kidnapped the geth’aar from their enclaves. Every last one of them. They ordered our military to surrender, promised to consume a geth’aar each deca-turn and broadcast the feeding. Without the geth’aar, we’d be extinct anyway…so they surrendered immediately.

  “We would have given the Toth anything to get them back…but they took everything. Slaughtered every last Karigole. Even the hatchlings. I saw the fields, Hale. The fields full of our dead.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Hale asked.

  “Don’t trust them. The Toth are prisoners to an insatiable hunger. The more they have, the more they want. They won’t stop with just the proccies,” Steuben said.

  “It’s not up to me.” Hale fixed his breastplate to his chest and grabbed his shoulder plates. “Your military had their orders. I’ve got mine. What am I supposed to do? Shoot the Toth in the face—or whatever—and tell Earth we’re in a war because my personal beliefs got in the way?”