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

  “There’s that word again.”

  Jared’s lips tugged down into a frown. He gave his brother a look that Hale hadn’t seen since Jared told him that their grandfather passed away.

  “These people aren’t real,” Jared said. “Not like you and I. They’re grown in a tube and given some kind of procedurally generated consciousness. Thing is, none of them know it. They all think they’re perfectly normal. They have memories from before the Xaros invasion and everything.”

  “False minds in weed bodies,” Hale said, remembering what a Toth overlord had demanded from him when he was their prisoner. Hale didn’t have an answer for the Toth, and he’d watched as it murdered two human beings right in front of him because of that.

  “Kind of,” Jared said. “People in Phoenix went nuts over this. There’s a true-born movement causing all sorts of havoc in the city, demanding to know who’s real and who’s…not. The doughboys are just icing on the cake. Every last doughboy’s getting transferred to Hawaii, and I’m going with them.”

  “Why two sirs?” Indigo pointed a finger at the Hale brothers.

  “Not that smart, like I said.” Jared glanced at his forearm screen. “I’ve got to get him to a doc and my commander wants an update. You staying here long?”

  “I’m on the first thing smoking back to orbit,” Hale said. He realized that this chance encounter with his brother wasn’t going to last much longer.

  “Well,” Jared said, “glad you made it back in one piece. You keep it up, OK?”

  “Stay safe.” Hale embraced his brother and remembered what home felt like.

  CHAPTER 3

  Doctor Accorso walked through the Breitenfeld’s sick bay. He shrugged off his lab coat and tossed it onto a hook outside his tiny office then stopped to survey his domain. As the ship’s chief medical officer, the sick bay was his to command and his to control. The slight smell of sterilization wash and ozone from UV lamps was his personal favorite; it meant the room was clean.

  There were no patients. The last of those badly injured fighting the Toth and the Xaros banshees were on Earth, recovering in the new military hospital. Peace and quiet. Accorso knew to appreciate moments like this; someday it would fill with cries from the wounded and reek of spilled blood.

  He opened the door to his office and found someone in his chair. The woman wore the usual void skinsuit and coveralls, but her loose black hair and calm demeanor wasn’t that of a sailor.

  “Come in, Dr. Accorso,” she said. Her face was almost ageless, wavering somewhere in her thirties with flawless skin too perfect to be anything but the result of plastic surgery. She half smiled at him, and Accorso felt fear creep into his chest.

  “Maybe not.” He backed away and felt something hard against the small of his back.

  “Don’t make this difficult,” a voice rasped into his ear.

  The woman wiggled fingers at an empty chair and a firm hand guided the doctor to the seat. Knight, the ship’s counterintelligence officer, stood in the doorway; he spun a blade in his hand before sliding it into a sheath on his belt.

  “What is this?” Accorso asked. “What are you doing in my seat?”

  “I’ll be out of here soon as we’ve everything settled. I’m Shannon. You know the good Mr. Knight,” she said. “We need to discuss your findings, the paper about your crewmen with telomere abnormalities.”

  Accorso swallowed hard. On Anthalas, an alien entity possessed a young Marine medic named Yarrow. Accorso had done extensive tests on the Marine and discovered that the telomeres in his cells were as long as a newborn baby’s. Somehow, Yarrow’s body was much younger than the age in his medical records but the abnormality wasn’t caused by the encounter with the alien. It was present from the moment Yarrow set foot on the Breitenfeld.

  After sharing the news with Captain Valdar, he’d secretly examined blood samples from the rest of the crew and discovered dozens more like Yarrow. Accorso had neatly documented and packaged his findings for release to the truncated medical community in the fleet and in Phoenix, but the communication’s blackout kept him from sending it.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Accorso said.

  Knight rested the knife edge of his hand against the base of Accorso’s neck.

  “Now, now, doctor,” Shannon said. “Medicine is your strong suit. Spotting liars is mine. We have your paper from the ship’s archives—the rough drafts saved on your workstation and the print copies you hid in your golf bag. We need to know if there are more.”

  “What? Give me back my work or I’ll have Valdar—” He tried to stand up but Knight slammed him back into the chair. The counterintelligence officer looked to be in his mid-fifties, but his grip sent pain shooting down Accorso’s arm.

  “Doctor, exactly who do you think we work for?” Shannon asked.

  Accorso considered the knife on Knight’s belt and just how far away the nearest crewman would be during the ship’s rest cycle. He found cooperation the easiest road to survival.

  “Ibarra,” the doctor said.

  “You may know a little of what Ibarra’s done for the sake of humanity,” Shannon said. “I’ll let your mind wander in your free time to all the things he’s truly capable of. Back on point. Are there any other copies?”

  “A data rod in the base of my chair and another in the lining of my surgical kit,” Accorso said, his shoulders slumping in defeat as Knight loosened his grip.

  Shannon wiggled her fingers and the two rods appeared in her hand with a flourish.

  “Good, you know when to be honest,” she said. “Mr. Knight, would you please?”

  Accorso heard a hiss and felt a sting against his collarbone. Knight held a small pneumatic applicator in his hand; the device was disguised as a stylus.

  “What’d you do to me?” Accorso asked. He touched his collarbone, but felt nothing amiss.

  “An insurance policy,” Shannon said. “You now have a tiny explosive device sitting on your subclavian artery. It will pop if it’s disturbed, exposed to air, or if I push a button. You’re a trauma surgeon. I think you know how many seconds it’ll take you to die once that artery gets turned to hamburger.” She raised an eyebrow, and Accorso nodded.

  “Terms are simple. Never recreate that research. Never tell anyone about that research. And deny that research ever happened if someone questions you about it. If you ever even hint that someone’s telomeres are off for any reason, you’ll be dead before you hit the ground. We clear?” Shannon asked.

  Accorso opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out.

  “I’m serious.” Shannon held up her hand, thumb and middle finger pressed together. “One wrong move and…”

  A snap in Accorso’s ear scared an unmanly shriek from him. Knight snapped his fingers again with an evil chuckle.

  “I…got it,” Accorso said. “Can I ask why?”

  “You can ask, but we won’t answer. Maybe we’ll remove the explosive in the future. Maybe we won’t. It’ll last inside a human body for decades.” Shannon stood up, stretched her arms over her head, stepped around the desk and gave Accorso a pat on the head as she left the room.

  Knight pointed to his eyes, then at the doctor and then shut the office door.

  ****

  Shannon bundled her hair into a void-ship standard bun as she and Knight walked down a passageway.

  “Just like old times,” she said.

  “How’re things on Earth? Does the boss need me?” Knight asked.

  “Difficult, the Toth are a disruption we hadn’t planned for, but the boss…he never saw a crisis he couldn’t twist to his favor.”

  “The Toth aren’t some Chinese bureaucrat or Russian general we can bribe or scare into submission,” Knight said.

  “We’ve been with Ibarra for fifty years. Trust him.” Shannon stopped at an intersection and waited for a sleepy-looking Marine to pass between them and turn down a hallway before speaking again. “He’s the same man, even if he is a hologram now.”

/>   “He kept that probe and the Xaros invasion from us the entire time we did his dirty work. You ever wonder what he’s still hiding?”

  “Ignorance was always bliss, Eric,” she said. “I’ve work to do dirtside, not in this box. Which way to the shuttle bay?”

  ****

  Hale stood on the Mule’s ramp as it descended. He ducked down and jumped from the opening as soon as his frame could fit through it. Chief MacDougall shouted at Hale from the other side of the Breitenfeld’s flight deck, words so laden with Scottish brogue that Hale wasn’t sure if he was being insulted or complimented for his little maneuver.

  “Sir,” Standish, waiting just beyond the yellow and black warning at the edge of the flight deck, called to Hale. The lance corporal gave Hale a salute as his lieutenant jogged toward him. “Sir, Bailey and I were in Hawaii, doing total legitimate Marine Corps things that you shouldn’t ask about, and we…” Standish leaned toward Hale and spoke in a loud whisper, “we saw some really weird stuff going on there.”

  “I’m sensing a trend,” Hale said. “What did you see?”

  “I don’t spend much time worrying about what happens in officer country, but have you ever heard of Admiral Makarov?”

  Hale shook his head.

  “Maybe Eighth Fleet?”

  Another shake.

  “Sir, did we come back to the right planet? Maybe something went bonkers in that alien jump-engine thingy. Since I’ve got on this ship, I’ve seen giant killer robots, fricking six-armed lizards that want to eat my face, a giant…globe…thing that possessed new guy. You tell me that we accidentally jumped into an alternate timeline or something and I’m open to the possibility.”

  Cortaro limped over to the two Marines.

  “Problem?” the gunnery sergeant asked.

  “Standish thinks we’re in an alternate timeline,” Hale said.

  “That’s not the dumbest idea he’s ever had…this week.” Cortaro lifted his cybernetic foot off the ground and rotated his new ankle. “Doc said take it easy for a few days. I think I might have rolled the ankle.”

  A bosun’s whistle blew “Attention” over the loudspeakers.

  “Now hear this. Now hear this,” Commander Ericsson’s voice bellowed through the flight deck. “Breitenfeld will raise anchor from Titan Station in two hours. I repeat: Breitenfeld will disembark in one hour. All sections make ready. Lieutenant Hale to the bridge, ASAP.”

  “But we just got back,” Standish whined.

  Hale turned to Cortaro, dozens of instructions on the tip of his tongue.

  “I’ve got it, sir,” Cortaro said. “Go see what they need.”

  ****

  Hale knocked three times on the door to Valdar’s ready room.

  “Enter.”

  Hale slid the door aside and stepped inside. The captain sat at his desk, cluttered with piles of data slates and printouts in ringed binders. Valdar looked years older than the day he took command of the Breitenfeld a mere six months ago.

  “Sit down, son,” Valdar said.

  Hale picked up an enclosed food tray, which felt cold and heavy, from a chair. The captain was skipping meals again.

  “Uncle Isaac, I was just in Phoenix and witnessed…the city’s not the same as when we left it,” Hale said.

  “It’s the proccies,” Valdar said. “A procedurally generated human consciousness implanted into a flash-grown body. That’s what the Toth wanted from us, and that’s why they’re here.”

  “The Toth…are here?”

  Valdar brought Hale up to speed on everything he’d learned from Admiral Garret and the intelligence gathered about the Toth’s arrival.

  “Garret and Ibarra agreed to a summit with the Toth,” Valdar said. “We’re weighing anchor as soon as we’re resupplied. Ibarra has an old research facility on Europa. He mothballed it years ago and it escaped the Xaros’ notice. Robots are getting it back up and running. That’s where we’ll meet the Toth.”

  “Meet with them? Sir, I watched them murder two sailors right in front of me. Why aren’t we forming up with the rest of the fleet to blow them out of space?”

  Valdar pushed his chair away from his desk and leaned back. His moustache, now shot through with gray hairs, twitched.

  “Ken, because of your unique situation, and the Toth’s ability to absorb memories, you’re going to be kept on a very short leash. A lot of things will be need-to-know for you, just like they are for me, in case there’s a breakdown in negotiations,” Valdar said.

  “I don’t follow,” Hale said.

  “You’re the ambassador. You broke out of the Toth’s ship, gave them a bloody nose on Anthalas too. That gives you a lot of…wasta, mianzi, credibility, however you want to look at it…in Toth culture. It makes you, and only you, the best choice to handle these talks.”

  “Uncle Isaac. I’m a Strike Marine. I shoot people and break things. I don’t…negotiate.” Hale felt a tightness in his chest at the idea of being close to a Toth overlord and not being able to blast it into pieces.

  “Your grandfather—who I met, great man—he ever tell you about his work with the Awakening movement in Iraq, way back in ’07? He was a Marine in Ramadi and got the locals to stop being shitheads and turn on Al Qaeda. Worked great until we let it all slip away, but that’s a different discussion. You can do this, Ken.

  “Ms. Lowenn stayed on board. She’s become something of an expert on the Toth since we encountered them. She’ll prep you with more cultural knowledge—teach you which of their buttons to push and which ones not to touch,” Valdar said.

  Hale ran a hand over his short hair. “This is a lot to take in.”

  “There’s more,” Valdar said and Hale rolled his eyes. “My crew has been infiltrated. Ibarra snuck proccies onto this ship. They’ve been with us since we left for Anthalas. I’m telling you this because they’re a bargaining chip in these negotiations.”

  “How so?” Hale sat back, mentally and physically recoiling from the implications of what Valdar just said.

  “Handing the proccies over to the Toth is a valid course of action if it’ll save Earth from another war. The fleet is in shambles. We have one—one—city. A single point of failure for the future of humanity. Giving up those things might just make us stronger when the Xaros arrive, and there’s no way to reason with the drones.” Valdar nodded as he spoke, evidently convinced of what he was saying.

  “Besides,” Valdar said, “it’s not like these proccies are real people. It’ll be like trading cattle.”

  “Hold on,” Hale said. “This is coming straight from Ibarra and Admiral Garret? They understand what the Toth will do with the proccies? The Toth aren’t going to put them in a zoo. They’re going to…” Hale remembered the Toth overlord pressing feeder tentacles into a Mule pilot’s skull—and her screams as she died.

  “Don’t fall into the trap of thinking the proccies are like us, Ken. They’re not. They’re Ibarra’s Trojan horse to take over the human race. Ibarra can’t be trusted. He already doomed everyone we love—my boys, my wife.” Valdar choked up. His jaw clenched and anger filled his face. “Ibarra let them all die for his plot. We can’t let him win. These proccies are almost perfect. You’ve even had one right under your nose for months.”

  “What? Who?”

  Valdar opened his desk and took out a folded piece of paper. He slid it across the table to Hale.

  ****

  Bodel pushed Kallen over the low ramp leading into the cemetery. Three suits of armor stood in their coffins, ten-foot-tall machines with a singular purpose: death. Bodel glanced up at his armor, so new it still smelled of the factory where it was made. Elias and Kallen had to rip him out of his last suit on Takeni to save his life after his armor was badly damaged in battle. He hadn’t hooked up to a suit since.

  Lafayette greeted them with a nod. The Karigole stood next to a large open case.

  “You have it?” Bodel slurred. The right side of his face was slack, a consequence of the many strokes he
’d suffered from being forcibly removed from his armor. Neural spikes from battle damage were normally fatal; most considered Bodel lucky that he wasn’t catatonic or crippled even more.

  “If I had asked you to meet me here,” Lafayette glanced around the cemetery, “without the nerve-jack, I do believe Elias would have ripped my limbs off.”

  “Only one,” Elias said through his armor’s speakers, “I kind of like you.”

  “Hurry.” Bodel kicked a foot against the brakes on Kallen’s wheelchair and snatched up a cane hanging from the back of her chair. He stabbed the deck with the cane as he lumbered toward Lafayette, dragging a lame leg behind him.

  “How did you compensate for the degradation along his spinal cord?” Kallen asked.

  “I used a stem-shunt.” Lafayette tapped at the base of his skull, his metal fingers clinking against the metal of his cybernetic skull. The Karigole was heavily cyberized; only his face still had the appearance of flesh, and even that was a vat-grown replacement. The rest of his body was constructed of polymers and composite materials, replacements for a body horribly maimed by a Xaros disintegration beam. Kallen didn’t know how much of the original Lafayette was left beneath the bionic components, and he’d never offered the information.

  “Karigole nervous systems aren’t the same as human,” Kallen said.

  “Yes, I am well aware. Ibarra’s probe caught a few errors in my original prototype, but this model should function as designed.” Lafayette reached into the case and pulled out a flexible metallic pad that looked like a spine protector she’d seen motorcyclists use.

  “I wear it all the time?” Bodel asked.

  “No, it will stay in your tank as part of your interface,” Lafayette said. “But I need to attach it to your plugs this one time.”

  “Will it help with…” Bodel touched the slack half of his face.

  “No, I’m afraid not, but the advances your doctors are making in neural-regeneration are—”