The Crucible (The Ember War Saga Book 8) Read online

  “Ninety minutes until the deadline. The captain needs to know about this.”

  ****

  Cortaro, Steuben and Hale huddled around Elias in the entrance bay. The three looked to Hale as he swiped map panes across his gauntlet.

  “OK,” Hale looked up “here’s my plan. Elias, you can break through a few feet of loose rock, right?”

  Elias chuckled.

  “Elias breaks through the cave-in and the armor clears our path to bunker Alpha Seven. We load the wounded onto the Hussars and we haul ass to the next supply tunnel running under old 87 to Phoenix.”

  “We’re not going to get back in the next hour, sir,” Cortaro said. “Won’t be hard for the squids to figure out where we’ve gone.”

  “That’s why you’re going to rig the…nineteen kilos of denethrite explosives in the supply sheds to blow this place once we’re clear,” Hale said.

  “That’s not enough for the entire firebase, but I’ll do what I can,” Cortaro said.

  “And if the route is blocked from the bunker? We will be trapped in a very narrow barrel, like fish,” Steuben said.

  “It’s a risk we have to take. Going overland is not an option,” Hale looked up to the battlements. Wind whistled through the firing slits, sending tufts of sand into the chamber.

  “Storm’s coming,” Cortaro said. “Could be good for us. Doubt those squids know how to function when they can’t see more than a few feet in front of them.”

  “Weather is just as cruel to both sides. Lot to do. Not a lot of time. Move out and draw fire,” Hale said.

  CHAPTER 10

  Stacey hated the conduit room. The pale-white squares with thick black lines of separation played tricks on her eyes, seeming to merge and wander apart of their own volition whenever she made the mistake of looking at them for too long. Whether it was some optical illusion or a side effect of the process that sent her back to Earth, she wasn’t sure.

  Traveling via conduit was…disconcerting. She’d spend some amount of time, ranging from minutes to hours, floating in a white void, trapped with nothing but her thoughts to keep her company. Eventually, the dark lines of the conduit room would appear along with her ability to move. There’d been trips where she could have sworn she saw the lines, only to have them fade away. Some nights she woke in a cold sweat, the memory of the squares racing through her mind.

  She thought the others meant to send her back to Earth, but they’d sealed the door behind her after throwing her in with all the grace and care of a bar bouncer ejecting a rowdy drunk. She was up to her fortieth hour in confinement, assuming the mental coping tricks she’d learned from e-mails traded with Elias were working. He hadn’t responded to any of her messages since she helped Malal recover a codex of the entity’s research. She couldn’t really blame Elias for cutting her off, not when he’d seen firsthand the trail of dead laid by Malal’s actions.

  The armor soldier fought sensory deprivation by visualizing old anime movies in his mind. Stacey preferred memorized talks from Technology, Education, Design symposiums. She’d dreamed of giving a speech to the groups when she was a little girl, but the Xaros put an end to that wish.

  The room had to have some sort of temporal distortion field to it; in the last twenty hours of mind games, she’d yet to feel hungry, thirsty or tired. It was possible she’d messed up her count, jumbled the playlist in her mind. The room was playing tricks on her—had to be.

  Stacey recalled a TED talk where she’d sat in the front row: her grandfather discussing his grand vision for Saturn colonies. The sound of applause in the darkness…the click of Ibarra’s cane as he came from behind the curtain…

  The door opened with a hiss. Stacey’s head snapped up and she saw Wexil walk into the room, two other ambassadors behind him.

  The Vishrakath looked at her and motioned for her to get up, like he was summoning a domesticated animal.

  Stacey returned a hand gesture that might not have translated well.

  “Why am I not surprised that you’re behind all of this?” she asked.

  “Earth survives.” Wexil’s patrician nose rose slightly with the words. “The Xaros were defeated, thanks to the Ruhaald and Naroosha fleets I allowed to join the battle. Don’t think that your begging at Congress meant anything of substance.”

  “Can Vishrakath actually reach up and pat themselves on the back? I don’t know what you really look like. Maybe you’re just a giant sphincter full of teeth.” Stacey kept a veil of contempt over her words, hiding the thrill she felt that Earth may have truly defeated the invasion force.

  “The Xaros were defeated, then the Naroosha and Ruhaald seized control of the Crucible and the skies over your world. They will rain down enough nuclear bombs to render Earth’s surface uninhabitable to a microbe for the next million years…if I so choose.” Wexil clasped his hands behind his back and strode toward her.

  “Why? Why would you do this? We are allies! Earth’s fleets would have gone to the Ruhaald’s aid—to anyone’s aid—and fought the Xaros. How could the Qa’Resh and the Alliance have authorized this?”

  “Listen to me, child, the Alliance is dead. After the Qa’Resh allowed your little expedition to save the worthless Dotok, and after the Qa’Resh aided you against the Toth…it was obvious to myself and many other ambassadors that our union was a fraud. We joined this Alliance to stand together against the Xaros, not play favorites and risk everything for the sake of those who will be little more than footnotes in the annals of history.”

  “Bull. You’ve been angling to control Bastion since before Pa’lon ever arrived. Humanity had to trade all but a few hundred thousand souls to get that Crucible. You think we’d pay that price and just let species far from the fight decide our fate? I hope you burn in hell.”

  “We decided to send the probe that worked with your namesake to create a fleet strong enough to beat the Xaros before they completed the Crucible. The only reason your race survives is because those ‘far from the fight’ decided your loss would benefit that whole. Instead of thanks you give us insubordination and work behind our backs with the Qa’Resh. But such concerns are past us.”

  Stacey got to her feet, her legs and back surprisingly pain-free, given how long she’d sat in the corner.

  “Hardly. You need the Crucible to fight the Xaros, to attack their home world, their Apex. You saw the report from the Marine taken prisoner by the enemy. The Crucible is a fragile thing. All it takes is one solid hit from the hundreds of macro cannons around the solar system to blow it into toothpicks. Don’t think we’ll let you take over our…world…why are you smiling?”

  Wexil chuckled. “You thought you could keep Malal on Earth, force our hand into sending you aid. We lose the Crucible, we lose Malal, we’re back at square one against the Xaros. Yes, you had leverage over us. Had. That all changed once the Naroosha ship returned from Earth.”

  “You have Malal? Here?”

  “We do. It is a most intriguing creature. I don’t know why the Qa’Resh kept it—and the bargain you negotiated—hidden from the rest of us. I had to smuggle in Toth malicious code over the course of centuries to adjust my personal AI in order to dig out those details from the Bastion mainframe.”

  “Listen to me. You don’t know what the thing is. What it’s capable of. Anthalas. The Jinn. You need to hand it over to the Qa’Resh before it gets loose and—”

  “The Qa’Resh are locked away in their crystal city. They are of no significance. The secret to constructing jump gates is being distributed to all races loyal to me, all courtesy of Malal. I know what it wants, and only the Vishrakath can give it to him. There is only one piece missing from defeating the Xaros: procedurally generated humans. That is where you come in.”

  Stacey’s jaw clenched.

  “The Ruhaald and Naroosha forces were enough to seize the orbitals, but the procedural-generation facilities are buried beneath your mountain cities. The cost of extracting the technology and raw materials would be excessive.
You will go back to Earth, under guard, and convince your people to hand over what we need without delay. Do this, and we will return your home world to you and then our association will be at an end,” Wexil said.

  “You’re going to make yourself an army to fight the Xaros, aren’t you? But they won’t be proccies with free will—they’ll be brainwashed slaves. You’ll feed them into the grinder to spare the lives of your precious Vishrakath.”

  “Many more races than just mine will benefit from the procedurals. Do I sense reticence? This was the plan from the beginning, the plan you and your grandfather agreed to, with a slight modification to stop your kind from saying ‘no.’”

  Stacey’s hands balled into fists.

  “You’ve thrown everything Bastion and the Qa’Resh worked for right out the window so you could be the one that pulls the strings?”

  Stacey had an epiphany. The protective force fields were still down.

  She swung a punch that hit Wexil’s jaw with a crack. The ambassador stumbled back, sputtering and waving his hands in shock.

  Stacey had never done well during her combatives courses at Officer’s Candidate School, but she’d passed the training. She kicked Wexil in the knee and sent him to the floor with a yelp, then she slammed an elbow against the side of his head with a satisfying thump. She raised a foot to crush his fingers when one of the other two ambassadors that had arrived with Wexil grabbed her from behind and pinned her arms to her sides.

  The attacker kicked her feet out from under her and twisted her around. She landed facedown on the deck, the weight of the other pinning her to the ground.

  Stacey tried to wriggle free, butting her head backwards, trying to connect to anything. The grip stayed strong, and Stacey stopped struggling. She’d save her energy for her next chance to lash out.

  Wexil sat up and ran a hand down the side of his face…which had a crack running from the temple to his jawline. The Vishrakath touched the wound gingerly, then scowled at Stacey.

  “If you will not convince your people to cooperate,” Wexil said as he got up and put a heel to her throat, “then I will have the Toth do the job for me. They have their foibles, but they will honor a contract.”

  Wexil turned and left the conduit chamber.

  The ambassador pinning her to the ground left her on the floor. She waited until the others left before pounding one of the hated white tiles in frustration.

  ****

  The center of the great Congress on Bastion was a giant stone dais with a diameter slightly wider than a football field. Hexagon-shaped pillars a few feet across made up the entire dais, forming ridges around the circumference from the flat top down to the deep darkness below.

  Ambassadors had theorized as to the dais’ origins for several centuries. Was it a relic from the Qa’Resh home world? An interesting geological construct from a lost planet? Created solely by the crystalline entities with some unknown association to their opaque ways of thinking? There were many questions, but never any answers from the Qa’Resh.

  Before the mutiny, only the Qa’Resh ever appeared on the dais. Now, a single occupant stood there still as a statue, his head against his chest, within a shielded hemisphere at the center.

  Malal.

  An ambassador pod hovered over the lip of the dais and floated toward Malal. It stopped a few yards away and a few inches over the bare stone. The dark glass dome over the pod lifted up.

  Wexil stood up and smoothed over his black tunic before taking a gentle step onto the tightly packed stone rods. There was not a single grain of sand beneath his foot. For all the centuries he’d attended Congress, none had ever set foot onto the dais. This was the place for the Qa’Resh, not the others.

  He looked up, admiring the beautiful light coming down from an unseen source. Such marvelous engineering, too bad the Qa’Resh would never share the secret to the construction.

  Wexil hefted a box from the pod and carried it with both hands to Malal’s prison. He set it down, then took a small device from a pocket. With a click, the shielding around the ancient entity faded away.

  The Vishrakath ambassador waited a moment for a reaction. When there was none, he cleared his throat. Still nothing.

  “Malal?”

  Malal’s head snapped up and his featureless face twisted toward Wexil.

  “Release me,” Malal said, the words generated by vibrations in his omnium shell.

  “In good time,” Wexil said. “There is much to be done.”

  “My bargain is with the Qa’Resh, not you.”

  “The Qa’Resh are not to be trusted. They spent thousands of years trying to organize an opposition to the Xaros, and instead of abiding by the will of the very body they created, they chose to protect a new member. A race that should never have been contacted, let alone inducted to the organization. A race that acted beyond our council, broke our decrees.”

  “The humans,” Malal said.

  “The human issue broke this grand alliance apart. For those truly willing to work toward the greater good and defeat the Xaros, there is a future. A future that you and I will create.” Wexil raised his arms to the grand silence around them.

  “I have a price.”

  “It will be paid in full—by the humans, no less—either on Earth or with what we prepare for you.” Wexil bent over and opened the box. Dozens of data crystals glittered in the light.

  “That is not all I require.” Malal opened his arms and lifted a foot off the ground. His chest rippled aside, revealing a spherical device made up of thin strips of metal, a dark light held within.

  “The governor remains until your end of the bargain is complete. We know what you are capable of. None of us are fools.”

  “You betrayed the humans and the Qa’Resh. I have been around this galaxy since before the Vishrakath first crawled out of your jungles and looked at the skies in fear. The humans are vicious and deadly. The Qa’Resh…cunning and patient. Poor traits for your enemies to have.”

  Wexil shook his head. “The feral humans will be taken care of shortly. They will survive as pliant servants or not at all. The Qa’Resh are irrelevant, exiled within their city. As for their cunning, they thought they could hide the gate you seek.”

  Malal’s form reknit itself. His face became more defined, a mirror of Wexil’s features.

  “You found the place…” Malal said, floating around Wexil. “You know where I can finally have my apotheosis?”

  “We do.” Wexil removed a small tile from his other pocket. The omnium metal glowed faintly as script jumped from the surface, changing, depending on how the light struck it. “A small token from the site. A recreation, naturally, but I’m sure you recognize the craftsmanship. In fact, we found it long before the Qa’Resh ever did. When they failed to mention its discovery to us over a thousand years ago, the Vishrakath knew our hosts were not the benevolent beings they made themselves out to be.”

  “Where is it?” Malal reached out to Wexil. His fingers nearly touched the ambassador’s face, but the governor within Malal’s chest glowed and the entity’s fingertips melted before they could caress Wexil.

  Malal withdrew his hand and the drooping fingers reknit themselves.

  “In time. First, you will share the knowledge you retrieved from the laboratory—construction plans for our own jump gates. Omnium reactors are nearly complete in many systems. Once we have our own gates and massive fleets of human-crewed ships—compliant humans with no thought of surviving the battle—we will end the Xaros threat once and for all. Then, and only then, will we pay your price,” Wexil said.

  “A grand plan. One that will not play out for…centuries?”

  “The Xaros will plod toward inhabited worlds, but they are slow to traverse the void. We may lose some members of my new alliance—the Ruhaald, the Naroosha—but what is the loss of a few more races when the rest of the galaxy will be saved? We will have our counterattack ready long before the Xaros can threaten those who truly matter.”

&nbs
p; “You mean the Vishrakath.”

  Wexil shrugged. “Survival of the fittest.”

  “I make my pacts in blood, but you have none. Here, your soul is cold.” Malal held a hand out to the box full of crystals. One leapt out and landed in his palm. Strands of light crept into the crystal.

  “What do you mean about my blood?” Wexil looked down at his hands, confused.

  “Irrelevant. This requires my concentration.” The definition in Malal’s face faded away.

  Wexil pushed the box closer to Malal then backed away and reactivated the force field. He turned in place, looking over the entirety of the Congress. Ambassador pods stretched into the darkness. It all belonged to him now. Eventually, the entire galaxy would belong to the Vishrakath.

  CHAPTER 11

  Elias waited in front of a pair of metal doors in his travel configuration. His torso shifted from side to side like he was a prize fighter about to make his entrance to the ring.

  “Five minutes until the deadline,” Hale said from beside the doors.

  “Let me go,” Elias said. “The enemy’s leaning forward in the saddle, ready to attack. Better I break through than wait for them to blow the doors. You crunchies won’t do well if that happens.”

  Hale looked down the tunnel, packed with soldiers, Marines and doughboys. The freed prisoners wore what they could scavenge from wall lockers and the dead. None were fully armored for battle but they carried rifles. Hale’s motley crew was filthy, tired and pissed off.

  At least they’re motivated to get the hell out of here, he thought.

  “First Sergeant, explosives set?” Hale asked.

  “Trip wires and timer good to go,” Cortaro said. “I agree with Elias, sir. I don’t want to be here when the squids decide it’s time for us to pay up.”

  “Elias. Go.”

  The Iron Heart rammed his fingers into the seam between the doors and shoved them aside. Rocks the size of Hale’s head tumbled down around Elias. Bright light shined through the gaps from the other side of the cave-in. Hale’s mouth went dry as he realized just how close the Ruhaald had come to reaching the gate.