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

  “We considered that,” Fournier said. “Ibarra controls every lab in Phoenix and his technician robots have been altering blood tests. The two scientists I used to do our own tests died in rather convenient accidents, but there’s another way to find the proccies, one Ibarra can’t dispute or interfere with.”

  “The colony manifest,” Valdar said, “a list of every man, woman and child that was part of the fleet going to Saturn.”

  “That’s right. It was on a True View data rod, and all of those are time-stamped and unalterable,” Fournier said. “Everyone on that manifest is true born; the rest must be proccies. We give the Toth everyone not on that list. Problem is, we can’t find the list. That’s one of the reasons I need you.”

  “I have some ideas where we can find one,” Valdar said, coming up with a mental list of officers he knew were loyal and discreet. “What else do you need?”

  “The negotiations…can you influence them?” Fournier asked.

  “Everything from Earth goes through me to the officer who’ll be face-to-face with the Toth,” Valdar said.

  “Get us a treaty that rids us of the proccies,” Fournier said. “Do that, and I’ll make sure Phoenix welcomes you back as a returning hero.”

  “If I go against Admiral Garret…that’s treason,” Valdar said.

  “Who’re you fighting for? Ibarra and his alien masters, or the human race?”

  Valdar glanced at the framed photograph of his dead family and closed his eyes.

  “I…I am with you.”

  “Good. Contact me once you’ve found a manifest. Make sure your officer gets us the right treaty.” Fournier’s hologram faded away. Valdar slid the communicator into his desk.

  As Valdar straightened his uniform in front of a mirror, he finally saw a man with a true purpose staring back at him.

  CHAPTER 4

  Ibarra cycled through the camera feeds monitoring the tank farms until he found Thorsson meandering between the rows of cylinders. The blond-haired man stopped at a tank and cupped his eyes to get a better look at the voluptuous—and naked—woman floating in the amniotic fluid. Electrodes stuck to her bald head fed her nearly grown mind with memories as her closed eyes quivered in synaptic REM.

  Ibarra fired up a holo-projector in the ceiling and popped up behind Thorsson.

  “Busy?” Ibarra asked.

  Thorsson jumped away from the tank, dropping a data slate to the floor with a clatter.

  “Must you do that?” Thorsson asked, his face red.

  “Spare me the indignity,” Ibarra said as his hologram tossed a hand in the air. He leaned toward the tank that Thorsson had taken an interest in, Ibarra’s head half-disappearing into the tank. He straightened up and asked, “This is one of the mark III’s?”

  “That’s correct. All military personnel with cross-referenced memories of fleet training,” Thorsson said. “No need to do a shakedown tour with the other units. We’re growing starship crews, not individuals.”

  “And the rejection rate?” Ibarra asked.

  “Higher. Almost six percent have to be recycled due to suicide ideations and depression that come up during the procedural creation. We identified a code segment that can cut that in half, but it would impact their empathy coefficient and that—”

  “Unacceptable,” Ibarra said. “I want human beings, not unfeeling brutes.”

  “Of course, sir.” Thorsson picked up his data slate. “The new data-processing facility is almost online. We can fire up the east fields in another…thirty hours. That will bring our individual unit count to eighty thousand. The numbers on the Lehi remain static. We’ll be well ahead of schedule, even with the demands of doughboy quotas.”

  “Where are we with the specialists? The ones designed to lead those brutes?”

  Thorsson shrugged his shoulders. “The test subjects are under constant surveillance. We can design procedural memory scenarios once we have that data.”

  “Which means we need to get them into combat,” Ibarra said, tugging at his lip.

  “We have data from the Gallipoli experiment, but there were some…issues.” Thorsson rubbed his right shoulder.

  +They’re here+ came to Ibarra from the probe at the heart of the Crucible.

  “Shift your production queues to the lance ships. I want them crewed as each one comes off the lines. Understood?”

  “I thought the larger capital ships were—”

  Ibarra cut his projection and shifted to the Crucible. His holo materialized in the control room where Kosciusko and Admiral Garret were waiting for him in person. Admiral Makarov’s holo floated next to the central dais and a map of the solar system.

  “Sorry for the wait,” Ibarra said. “Busy, busy, busy.”

  “We’re here to finalize the defense of Earth,” Makarov said. “What is so important that it kept you away?”

  “An error in the repair yard on Titan Station,” Ibarra said. “My robots almost installed the Tour’s rail cannons without the backup pneumatic runners. Always have analogue backups to every digital process. World War III taught us that.”

  “Can the Toth hack our computer systems?” Admiral Garret asked.

  The probe slid up from the dais, a needle of light surrounded by bluish motes of light. Makarov backed away, her hand automatically reaching for a pistol that should have been at her hip.

  “If the Toth possess that capability, I’ve not detected their presence on any of our networks,” the probe said. “Did I startle you, Admiral Makarov?”

  “No,” she snapped. “Remind me to get an in-person tour of the Crucible once this issue is resolved.”

  “Moving on,” Ibarra said with a shake of his head, “can you access the Toth networks, Jimmy?”

  “Negative, the Toth seem to be operating under analogue conditions, and there’s nothing on the electromagnetic spectrum to suggest they’re using any sort of communication but point-to-point IR,” the probe said.

  “They’re coming at us like we were Xaros,” Kosciusko said.

  “So? All we know is that the Toth aren’t fool enough to win the battle for us with their own stupidity,” Garret said. “What’re our chances now that Admiral Makarov’s Eighth Fleet is coming online?”

  “It has been a century since the Alliance severed ties with the Toth,” the probe said. “They have either created their own jump drives or found a way to repair the Qa’Resh drives they possessed before we lost contact with them. Their military capabilities have improved, based on the brief engagement between the Breitenfeld and a Toth cruiser over Anthalas. In a fleet-to-fleet engagement, the Toth sustain unacceptable casualties in seventy percent of the scenarios.”

  “And what about us?” Garret asked.

  “Titan Station sustains heavy damage and Phoenix is decimated. The Toth make no distinction between military and civilian targets,” the probe said.

  “Win the battle, lose the war,” Ibarra said. “We have to conserve what we can for the Xaros.”

  “Better to deal with the wolf on your doorstep before the wolf on the other side of the hill,” Makarov said. “My fleet will be fully operational in two days. Any chance we can get more Q-rounds? Would those make a difference?”

  “I have robots constructing quadrium harvesters beneath Europa’s ice right now,” Ibarra said. “But they won’t make a difference here. We’re installing the omnium reactor on this station as we speak, but it won’t be online in time to produce much.”

  “Then we will have to kill the Toth ship to ship,” Kosciusko said, punching a fist against the dais.

  “Simple, inelegant, expensive…and true,” Ibarra said.

  “Show me a least-time plot for the Toth fleet to Earth,” Garret said. A red line traced from the enemy fleet over Neptune to Earth. “Give me an overlay of the lancer squadrons and the graviton emplacements.” Blue fleet ship icons popped up through the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars, along with solid blue dots that formed an evenly spaced ring through the belt.

>   “The graviton mines were meant to slow down the Xaros, but they should foul the Toth Alcubierre drives just the same,” Garret said. “If we redeploy the lancers to this point,” he pointed to where the red line intersected with the asteroid belt, “we could knock out enough of their ships to make an attack on Earth a suicide run.”

  “We agreed to keep our ships within Mars’ orbit,” Ibarra said. “If they detect the lancers trying to sneak around the asteroid belt, we’ll have a shooting war on our hands. I say we keep the lancers where they are—snug against big chunks of rock where the Toth can’t see them—until we really need them.”

  “Ibarra speaks sense,” Kosciusko said. “We array our forces defensively, put the Midway and the rest of Eighth Fleet over Phoenix to protect the civilians. Wait for the time to strike.”

  “We’ll be ready,” Makarov said. “Kosciusko, you’ll join me on the Midway? Along with the expeditionary squadron the Dotok offered?”

  “Correct, I will join you soon,” Kosciusko said.

  “Then let’s get to it,” Garret said.

  Makarov nodded. She looked to her side and waved her fingertips across her throat. Her hologram faded away.

  “She, and her entire fleet, are unaware that they’re proccies,” Ibarra said. “We need to keep them ignorant until this is resolved. Can’t have the Eighth descend into chaos like Phoenix.”

  “The commo blackout between the Eighth and Earth has held,” Garret said with a thankful nod to the probe. “Can you maintain it?”

  “Don’t insult my probe, Admiral,” Ibarra said. “We’ll do our job—you do yours. Use Breitenfeld to keep the Toth talking until Twelfth Fleet is out of their tubes. We’ll have a nice surprise waiting for the Toth.”

  “Fair enough. I’m going to evacuate civilians out of Phoenix. They’ll be pissed, but at least we won’t lose everyone to one Toth attack,” Garret said. “When will Stacey return from Bastion? Any word on what reinforcements she can bring with her?”

  “I do not have an open channel to Bastion,” the probe said. “She ferries any and all communications from the Alliance, and she is not scheduled to return for another thirty hours.”

  “In the meantime, we’ll plan for the worst and hope for the best,” Ibarra said. “I thought we’d have decades before it came time to defend Earth. Yet…here we are. Let’s make it happen.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Stacey Ibarra inhaled quickly, then slowly blew the air from her lungs. She repeated the breathing exercise several times, keeping her eyes closed.

  “No problem, Stacey,” she said to herself. “You’re just addressing almost every sentient species left in the galaxy.” She opened her eyes and saw herself in her bathroom mirror. She patted her cheeks, then grasped the edge of a porcelain sink.

  A wet rumble went through her stomach.

  “No! I’m fine, just fine.” She grimaced and opened an eye. Her skin was pale and moist with sweat. “Come on, girl. You went mano y mano with a Xaros drone and won. Sure, I had a bunch of Marines with me, but who else in the Alliance can say that?” She glanced up, trying to find an answer. “Lafayette. Lafayette fought a drone, but look what happened to him. Me? I’m still in one piece. Take that, all the rest of you judgmental aliens.”

  “Ambassador Ibarra,” came from the ceiling. Stacey let out a startled cry, then recomposed herself.

  “Yes, Chuck?”

  “Congress begins in seventeen minutes,” the station’s AI said. “At your normal pace you will arrive on time, if you leave now. You are scheduled to address the entire body in regards to—”

  “I know damn well what I’m supposed to be doing,” Stacey said. She ran a finger through her straight black hair, knowing full well that her appearance was irrelevant. The station broadcast a hologram around each ambassador. For Stacey, it meant every ambassador appeared human, and she appeared as the species of whatever ambassador looked to her.

  “Let’s do this,” she muttered.

  The corridors of Bastion glowed yellow, alerting each ambassador to the approaching session in the main hall. Stacey did her best to look assertive as she walked past others, her head up and shoulders back. Looking confident didn’t go very far in quelling the riot of butterflies in her stomach though.

  Holo-panels on the walls flashed with arrows, directing her to a human-sized doorway. She stepped into a pod, a circular anti-gravity sled with an opaque dome and a waist-high bank of controls. The dome would remain dark until Congress officially started.

  “Chuck, give me something for my stomach,” Stacey said. She waved a hand over a sensor and the text of her prepared speech appeared on the dome like a teleprompter. A panel opened beneath the control banks and a cup fell from a dispenser. Carbonated water poured into the cup.

  “You arrived ten percent faster than usual,” Chuck said. “Should I adjust your standard-pace model?”

  “No.” She downed the liquid, which tasted sweet with a chalky aftertaste. “Ugh, what is that?”

  “Does your stomach feel better?”

  “It does, actually.”

  “Ibarra personal setting, four hundred thirty-seven,” The AI’s voice changed to Stacey’s “Don’t tell me the details if it’ll make things worse.” The voice switched back to normal. “Do you still want to know?”

  “Skip it.” She scrolled through the agenda for the council meeting and frowned. “Chuck, why is the Vishrakath ambassador requesting equal time to respond to my address?”

  “Unknown.”

  The Vishrakath ambassador held significant sway with many of the other ambassadors. The Vishrakath held twelve major systems and colonies on hundreds of planets on the outer rim of the galaxy that they’d settled with sub-light ships over the course of thousands of years. They were one of the founding members of the Alliance. That Ambassador Wexil chose to involve himself in her request didn’t help her stomach. At all.

  The black dome faded away until it was transparent. Hundreds of domes floated around her, each with an ambassador inside. Many were looking right at her.

  Stacey swallowed hard and smoothed out her simple tunic.

  In the center of the Congress hall, a gigantic slab of rock jutted from the floor. Its flat top looked like it had been shorn away by a laser. An enormous face of a woman with a long braid of hair running down her left shoulder came into being, the Qa’Resh.

  Stacey was one of the few ambassadors who’d ever seen the Qa’Resh in their true form: crystalline jellyfish with long tentacles, natives to the upper atmosphere of the gas-giant planet that Bastion orbited. The Qa’Resh always addressed the council masked as whatever species looked upon it.

  “Members of the Alliance,” the Qa’Resh “woman” said, “we are gathered here on a matter of grave importance. The humans, the newest member of our Alliance, are under threat—not from the Xaros, but from those we once called allies, the Toth.”

  Rumbles of disquiet came from the ambassadors.

  “To address this matter is the human ambassador.” The Qa’Resh vanished as Stacey’s pod floated toward the rock mesa without any sensation of movement.

  “Set rotation on my pod to slow,” Stacey said quietly. She waited until the climb over the mesa was complete, then began speaking.

  “Honored intelligences of the Alliance. Three days ago, I returned from Earth with news of the Toth presence in our solar system. The Toth brought sixty-five star destroyers and battle cruisers, not a trade fleet. That they wish to negotiate is a farce. They betrayed the Karigole. They violated the sanctity of Bastion’s predecessor. They cannot be trusted now.

  “Earth’s defenses are meager, but expanding rapidly thanks to the…repopulation techniques perfected by the Qa’Resh and member species, but we cannot guarantee success against the Toth. I do not believe the Toth will be satisfied with seizing the procedural technology for themselves. They may conquer our planet and humanity risks the same fate as the Karigole.

  “The Alliance has more to lose than one memb
er. The only Crucible jump gate in Alliance space orbits Earth. The single greatest strategic asset in our long war against the Xaros is as stake.

  “Earth needs reinforcements. Even a few ships could convince the Toth of our resolve and send them from the system without loss of life. What races will pledge forces? I am scheduled to return to Earth soon, and I will ensure the Crucible is ready to assist your journey.”

  Stacey stepped back from the edge of her pod. A holographic billboard sprang up above her, a white plane ready to record what races would send aid to Earth.

  A single icon from the Dotok appeared, Ambassador Pa’lon pledging the Canticle of Reason. The gesture was more symbolic than anything as the ship was already in orbit around Earth.

  Stacey stared at the billboard for almost a minute…but no other icons appeared.

  “Chuck, is that thing on?”

  The billboard vanished, replaced by the Qa’Resh.

  “Ambassador Wexil of the Vishrakath,” she said.

  A pod with a dark haired “man” with a patrician face floated up level to Stacey. Wexil gave her the briefest of glances before speaking.

  “While the threat to the humans is unfortunate,” he said, “we cannot risk complete annihilation, not while other options remain viable. While the incomplete Crucible is a great asset, it cannot mitigate all risk from using the jump engines.”

  “Would the esteemed ambassador please explain what the hell he’s talking about?” Stacey kept her face stern, but she regretted the un-diplomatic words.

  Please let some of that be lost in translation, she thought.

  “The jump engines on your little ship, the Breitenfeld,” Wexil said, “recorded fluctuations in the fabric of the quantum space with each jump. These fluctuations, while slight, could lead to a subspace rift, a rift that would tear space apart at the quantum level and expand at the speed of light. We lack the technology to repair a catastrophe of that magnitude. Even one rift would eventually annihilate all matter in the galaxy, stopping only at the edge of the dark-matter halo.”