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

  “Steuben had a shiner. Didn’t want to talk about it,” she said. Her head perked up. “Orozco said they’d got in a fight with a doughboy some of those true-born twats had captured. Some big misunderstanding.”

  “Wait, the doughboys will just attack any alien they see?” Egan asked. “What about the Dotok? Steuben was walking around doughboys in Phoenix before we got assigned to that Osprey.”

  “Not a problem we need to solve right now.” Standish removed a small armor plate from his shoulder and tossed it through the bars. It hit the energy field and quivered against the invisible wall as tiny filaments of electricity crackled. The plate spat back toward Standish. He caught the now-blackened lump of armor and frowned.

  “We’re in this cell because of that ‘problem,’ Standish,” Egan said.

  “You’ve an idea to get us out?” Bailey leaned against the wall and rubbed her temples.

  “I’ve been in brigs, confinement, juvenile detention centers on three continents and Tijuana’s seedier jail cells,” Standish said. He paced from one side of the cell to the other, looking over everything.

  “And in my expert opinion…we ain’t going nowhere.” Standish put his hands on his hips. “Bars are reinforced with graphene. Couldn’t break them even if our armor was powered up. The energy going through the force field is tuned higher than penal-code standard. Dissuasion barriers are meant to sting, not fricassee. I don’t know what was in this cell before us, but Ibarra must have been scared of it.”

  Standish clicked his tongue and looked up. His gaze stopped on a small light diode on the ceiling.

  “You both saw those dead doughboys and heard the gauss fire, right?” Egan asked. “There’s got to be an organized resistance to the Ruhaald. We’ll wait for our chance to get free and find—Standish, what are you looking at?”

  “That one light. It’s fluttering,” Standish pointed over his head, “but the rest aren’t.”

  “So?” Bailey tucked herself into a corner and laid her head against the wall. “We’re in the brig and I don’t even know what damn day it is anymore. Get some sleep.”

  Egan went to Standish’s side and peered up at the light, its luminosity flickering.

  “R-R-A-B-I-A…Ibarra?” Egan asked. “It’s in Morse, repeats and is backwards. Odd.”

  “Hold on, where is Ibarra? Last I remember he was inside the probe they’ve got running this place,” Standish said.

  “You tell us.” Bailey sat up. “You were the one carrying one of those probes in your head on Nibiru.”

  “We don’t speak of that. Ever.” Standish pointed a finger at the sniper.

  “It’s changing.” Egan squinted. “‘Time. Short. Help.’ Those words over and over again.”

  “We’re open to suggestions,” Standish said with a shrug.

  “‘Wait,’” Egan said. The light held steady. “I guess that’s it.”

  “Right, I’m going back to sleep. You boys tell me when the voices start talking again,” Bailey said.

  “You’ve met Ibarra before, right, Standish?” Egan asked. “You trust him?”

  “I’m acquainted with what might be his ghost. It’s not like I ran in his social circles back before the war. I stole money from the Triads and he was the richest man in human history. Not a lot of overlap,” Standish said. “If he’s planning something, I think we’ve got a chance. Or we’ll be killed trying to escape and end up on a Ruhaald smorgasbord. I give us fifty-fifty.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Hale walked through a corridor, the metal grate of the walkway vibrating slightly with each step. The nerve center for all of Phoenix’s defenses buzzed like an angry hive through the metal slats. The smell of unwashed bodies and stale coffee rose from the dozens of officers and enlisted soldiers clustered into little pockets of activity. The walls of the command center were bare stone, carved out of Camelback Mountain on the city’s east side.

  A giant map on one wall with the fixed defenses around the city—rail gun batteries and landing pads hidden within mountainsides—was awash in colored icons. Few of the big guns were still fully operational. A wide swath of red icons filled the northeast portion of the map, the same area where his Marines had been taken captive.

  Hale stopped at a metal door and knocked. It slid aside, revealing a plain metal desk and a tired-looking General Robbins sitting behind it. Another Marine stood by the desk, the back of his head scaly and gray.

  “Steuben?” Hale asked as he stepped into the room.

  The Karigole warrior turned around. The upper left side of his face was a scuffed metal plate ringed with scar tissue, a glowing red oval where his eye should have been. The alien raised his right hand and squeezed the cybernetic fingers into a fist. Steuben had nearly been killed fighting the Xaros general. The last time Hale saw his alien mentor was when he’d delivered him to a medical station.

  “Lafayette programmed the auto-surgeons to treat Karigole physiology,” Steuben said. “My new parts are from his workshop.”

  “You were on death’s door when I handed you over to the medics.” Hale looked Steuben over and found little changed in the warrior’s bearing.

  “We recover quickly,” Steuben looked down at his metal hand as the fingers twitched, “but we do not regenerate.”

  The general cleared his throat.

  “Sir.” Hale snapped to attention and rendered a salute.

  The general returned the courtesy and looked up at Hale. The older man had bags beneath his eyes and a pallor to his skin that looked anything but healthy.

  “Captain, well done dispatching that…entity. That kind of bravery speaks well of your ship and the Strike Marine Corps.” Robbins took a small jar of pills out of his desk and popped a pair into his mouth.

  “Thank you, sir, but the armor made all the difference,” Hale said.

  “We’ll figure out which backs get the most pats later. One of your Marines witnessed the incident with the Ruhaald. You have anything to add to his initial report?”

  “The doughboys attacked the Ruhaald without provocation,” Hale said. “The Ruhaald left their dead behind and captured three of my Marines. Wasn’t much more to learn from the scene.”

  “Your Marine have any idea why the Ruhaald would attack doughboys after that incident?”

  “Sir?”

  Robbins reached over the desk and tapped a data slate near Hale’s edge. A topographic map of the area northwest of Phoenix came up. Blue icons representing bunkers popped up across the map. Several grayed out, forming an arrow shape pointing toward a firebase inside a line of mountain peaks near the Tonto Basin.

  “Our guests took the high ground over every single mountain fortress around the planet without firing a shot. Well, almost,” Robbins said. “There was plenty of battlefield friction going on right as the Xaros pulled back and formed that construct. One minute, the Ruhaald were on our side, fighting the Xaros. Then that construct, and every other drone in the solar system, went up in smoke. Soon as that happened the Ruhaald gave every air and void craft fifteen minutes to land or be shot down. Couple ground-based rail batteries took potshots that didn’t get through their shields and were promptly destroyed. Then they threatened to nuke the next city that fired on them.”

  “And it’s been quiet since then?” Hale asked.

  “Everywhere but the defenses around Firebase X-Ray,” Robbins said, “which isn’t far from where your Marines were captured. This is the last message we got through the fiber lines.”

  A small screen came up on the data slate. A Marine in full armor, his face obscured by light across his visor, adjusted the camera.

  “This is First Lieutenant Bolin.” Hale’s ears perked up at the sound of the man’s voice, which sounded oddly familiar. “My outer defensive lines have been breached by Ruhaald troops. My soldiers report that the Ruhaald are targeting and killing doughboys, but they’ll take humans captive. My information’s fragmentary, at best. The inner strongpoints are holding but our ammo reserves will on
ly last another—” The camera feed shook violently and Bolin ducked as sand and small rocks rained down on him. He looked up at the ceiling, then ran from the control room. The feed corrupted and blacked out moments later.

  “Why are the Ruhaald attacking that area and nowhere else?” Hale asked.

  “I was hoping you knew,” Robbins shrugged. A chime sounded on his desk. “Let me take this.” He swung his seat around and began a low conversation with whomever had called through his earbud.

  Steuben whacked Hale’s shoulder with his metal knuckles. The Karigole held his forearm screen up for Hale to see. The personnel file for one First Lieutenant Mark Bolin was on the screen. Hale’s face went white as he looked at the man’s photo. Bolin looked almost exactly like his brother Jared, who’d left Earth years ago on a colony mission. The man in the picture looked harried, worn from years of stress, but Hale was positive that man was his twin brother.

  “There is a resemblance?” Steuben asked quietly. “Distinguishing humans by your faces is difficult for me now.” He tapped the metal plate embedded into his skull.

  “It’s there,” Hale whispered. “But he’s been gone for—”

  “Forty-five soldiers and nearly a thousand doughboy augmentees,” Robbins said, snapping Hale and Steuben out of their conference. “That’s what’s assigned to Firebase X-Ray. Ruhaald destroyed every IR re-transmission site between Phoenix and X-Ray and they’re jamming every commo freq into and out of the area. Whatever they’re doing, they don’t want us to know about it. I hoped there was more to learn from the site of the incident. You’re both dismissed.”

  “What about the firebase, sir? We can’t just leave them out there.”

  “Captain Hale, my mission is to defend Phoenix and the civilians behind our walls. We took one hell of a beating from the Xaros, and right now I have a chance to re-arm and repair and to do so without being shot at by the Ruhaald cruiser floating over our heads,” the general said. “We can’t poke the bear just yet. Not until we figure a way around their shields.”

  “There is a tunnel linking Phoenix to one of the outlying bunkers,” Steuben said. “There are several cloaking devices in Lafayette’s lab. We could reach X-Ray without detection.”

  The general sat back in his chair and folded his hands across his chest.

  “Reconnaissance,” he said, raising a finger. “Gather information and report back. We’re in intermittent contact with the Breitenfeld and the surviving ships orbiting the moon. Captain Valdar doesn’t know much more than we do. Anything you can find to help us understand—and fight—these new enemies will be vital.”

  “We’re on it,” Hale said. “My Marines have snuck through worse places than Arizona countryside.”

  “What is it Valdar’s crew is always saying to people?” One of the general’s eyebrows shot up.

  “Gott mit uns, sir.”

  ****

  Beyond the edge of the Milky Way, a multifaceted orb hurtled through the void. The great crystalline faces of the exterior shell stretched for billions of miles, connected together in an object with a circumference wider than the orbit of Saturn. This, the Apex, carried every surviving member of the true Xaros race, but not their drone servants, within.

  Deep within the crystalline mountain ranges of the interior walls, a single intelligence waited. The Keeper’s consciousness tapped into the vast network of jump gates seeded through the galaxy that would soon be the Xaros’ new home. It reached out to the conduit that should have been on Earth, the home of an annoying resilient parasite race…and felt nothing.

  The arsenal world that the General sent from a nearby star was gone. The secondary conduit that Keeper had used to converse with his peer was also absent. Keeper knew the size of the General’s force, his worth as a tactician and the known disposition of the surprisingly well-equipped human resistance. Keeper’s records of previous conquests lent to near-perfect models when estimating the force required to erase another irrelevant species. In all scenarios, the General should have finished off the humans some time ago.

  To willingly sever his connection from the network, the General risked the ultimate fear of any Xaros: true death. The humans had destroyed the General’s photonic husk before; to leave himself open to that same risk was unfathomable.

  And yet…

  If the General had succeeded, he would have sent word of his victory. Keeper had told his peer many times that failure to eradicate the humans would not be tolerated by the other Xaros masters. The General’s silence could only mean failure.

  The General had strode across the stars, the drone vanguard an overwhelming force against every intelligent race ever encountered. Never before had a Xaros perished at the hands of another species, even during their billion-year supremacy in their lost home galaxy.

  And yet…

  Keeper did not deny the only logical conclusion as to the General’s absence. If the humans and their allies had found a way to kill a Xaros, then the rest of the species under his care was at risk. It had known of the General’s failings and allowed the other Xaros to operate freely. The others had some trust in the General’s abilities, but they made sure Keeper knew their safe arrival in the new galaxy—a galaxy cleansed of all other intelligent life—was Keeper’s responsibility.

  Keeper’s prominent position in the new galactic order was in jeopardy, but the situation could be salvaged.

  It snapped its point of consciousness to the tip of a massive spike stretching from the inner shell to just shy of a captured star. In the spike tip dwelt another, the Engineer.

  +Awaken.+ Keeper undid the bindings that kept the Engineer asleep during the eons-long journey between galaxies. The Engineer materialized: a giant clockwork wheel, cogs within cogs all working perfectly together in perpetual motion.

  +Too soon…+

  +Indeed, your great work is flawed. I have called you to account.+ Keeper fed his peer status reports from the last few thousand years. The Apex was failing, albeit very slowly. The titanic forces keeping the central star corralled had developed certain idiosyncrasies, which would inevitably lead to failure and the quick and total destruction of the entire structure.

  +I told the others this star was not the ideal candidate. If given enough time, I would have created the perfect solar foundry for our journey, but the annihilation wave was too close,+ the Engineer said.

  +You promised the star would never fail. We could traverse the universe without fear. Now we will arrive at the nearest galaxy from our home with mere millennia to spare.+

  +We’re nearly there. You’re welcome,+ the Engineer said. The master builder sent a pulse through Apex and took less than a second to process the enormous volume of data. +Millennia, yes. I can tell you down to the nanosecond, but that is irrelevant. Our new home should be nearly ready long before then.+

  +We have a complication.+ Keeper fed the Engineer the details of the General’s conflict with the humans and his deafening silence.

  +The General is lost…intriguing.+

  +Was your mind damaged during hibernation? One of our own is gone forever. There is a credible threat to the rest of us. I came to you for a solution, not a philosophical discussion.+

  The Engineer’s form morphed into an hourglass. Diamonds poured through, but the mass of sparkling jewels in the upper and lower halves remained the same size.

  +The natives use wormhole technology, unfettered from the gates. Dangerous,+ the Engineer said. +They run the risk of triggering another annihilation wave. There will be no hope for our kind if that happens.+

  +Give me a solution or I will have no choice but to take the issue to the others. Then they will cast us both into the intergalactic void for failure,+ Keeper said.

  +One of your shades had a prisoner. A Torni.+

  +How do you know this? I destroyed the data.+

  +All information is sacred. I designed the system. I built data shunts to make sure heathens like you didn’t destroy anything…this Minder…good that you killed i
t,+ the Engineer said.

  Space around the two Xaros shifted to the upper atmosphere of a gas giant. A pair of stars hung beyond the hazy sky. The two Xaros loomed like disinterested gods, watching four humans and a Qa’Resh play their part in the recording as the crystalline entity extracted Malal from the human on a gurney.

  +An ascended species, most interesting,+ the Engineer said.

  +Why are we here?+

  +This is the lynchpin to the resistance. This ‘Bastion’ of theirs. I can find where it is. It will just take some time to identify the binary star system with just such a planet. I’m within the data now…our new home is quite fascinating,+ the Engineer said.

  +You’re engaged in a hollow pursuit. The world is likely well beyond our immediate reach. The drones will overrun the rest of the galaxy in the next few thousand years, with or without the General. The damage this Bastion could do between then and now is difficult even for me to predict.+

  +If we hold to our current model, then there is a risk.+

  Keeper felt a chill run through its being. +What are you suggesting?+

  +We must not limit ourselves to a failing paradigm. I can find data you thought hidden, but if I decide to destroy a record, it will be gone forever. We can solve the human problem. How we do so will remain secret from the others.+

  ****

  Standish slid a boot off and set it next to the rest of his armor in a neat pile. The Marine, wearing nothing but a black body glove, massaged his swollen foot.

  “It’s like walking around in snow boots when the power systems are off-line,” he said. “I swear my stress fractures will come back from Strike Marine selection. That’s all I need, tottering around on broken feet.”

  “That’s the worst you got from selection?” Bailey asked. She’d stripped off her armor and now stood at the sink, scrubbing Ruhaald blood from a thigh plate. “I got bit by a damn cottonmouth. Corpsman hit me with antivenom before I passed out. Still made it through swamp phase in one go.”