The Ruins of Anthalas (The Ember War Saga Book 2) Page 7

  “You mean the Xaros will wipe us out, or them out, before we can help each other,” she said.

  “Yes, we can still participate in debate, but we can’t vote.”

  “Why?”

  “It stops any ambassador from convincing others to waste resources. You vote on what you can affect, and that’s all.” Pa’lon twisted a dial and the approach to the comet grew faster.

  “Realpolitik over interstellar distances,” Stacey said.

  “That doesn’t mean you can’t make an impassioned plea for or against a vote. I did it for your species, managed to sway a few votes toward sending the probe that your grandfather met,” Pa’lon said.

  “Humans thought we were alone in the galaxy for so long, that we were responsible for our destiny. Yet a committee and popular vote is what sealed our fate.”

  “We provided a little help. You did the rest. There are those who view the Xaros as the galaxy rebalancing itself, removing sentients who meddle with the laws of physics and destroy worlds as it suits them. But I don’t care for those people,” Pa’lon said.

  “Then what do you believe the Xaros are?”

  “If you can fight against something, it isn’t fate. The Xaros aren’t the same as what happened to the species we’re about to see.” The shattered comet grew closer and Stacey finally got a sense of scale. It wasn’t a comet—it was a shattered planet.

  Multihued gas mingled with evaporating ice, creating a corona around the continent-sized chunks of rock.

  “What is this?” she asked.

  “An ancient recording from one of the first probes the Qa’Resh sent out. A billion or so years before this, a passing singularity upended the system’s planetary orbits. This planet, about the size of your Pluto, wandered too close to a gas giant and was broken apart by gravity sheer and set on an elliptical orbit around the primary. Then … something wondrous happened.”

  They zoomed close to the surface of one of the larger rocks. A thick smog of gasses diffused the distant primary star into a smear across the sky.

  “Life.” Pa’lon pointed into the distance where three balls hopped toward them on spindly legs. “Fascinating, aren’t they?”

  The creatures were deep red and covered in short curly hair, each almost the size of a basketball. They hopped past the two observers, twirling and clicking at each other.

  “What are they called?” Stacey asked.

  “The Qa’Resh don’t bother with names. These have a quantum state designation and nothing else.”

  “Are they talking to each other?”

  “Oh yes, they were quite intelligent. Watch.” Pa’lon tapped his control panel and their view shifted to the inside of a deep crater. Nests dug every few feet contained piles of eggs, hexagon patterns over the chrome shells. At the edge of the crater, the round creatures formed a tight chain, their bodies touching the creature on either side, all of them swaying from side to side.

  “What is—”

  “Shh!”

  A sonorous trill began, joined by multi octave notes that stretched together like a symphony.

  “They’re singing?”

  “That’s right. They’re welcoming their young.”

  Eggs cracked open and miniature, naked creatures crept out. Their tiny legs shook off fluid, then each wondered toward the edge of the crater seemingly at random.

  “The hatchlings can tell which is their parent by how they sing.” The alien smiled, the gesture similar to humans except that Pa’lon exposed long eyeteeth as his lips pulled apart.

  “Human birth is more … scream-y and painful. So I've heard.” Stacey said.

  “As is Dotok.” The image blurred and they were in a field of small asteroids, hordes of the creatures leaping from one asteroid to the other in a cacophony of chirps and squawks. “They had songs for phases of their home’s transit around the sun. Molting, breeding, such things. They had no concept of war or even conflict.”

  “Are they here? On Bastion?”

  “No,” Pa’lon frowned. “They’ve been extinct for millennia.”

  “What happened? The Xaros?”

  “No, celestial mechanics. The elliptical orbit was unstable. The same gas giant that gave birth to the world as you see it nudged it off course to send this entire ecosystem and this species into the sun. The probe that recorded this could do nothing to save them, and it didn’t interact. But … they knew. As the planet broke apart even further and burned away, they all joined together and sang again, a song that the probe had never recorded before.”

  “You heard it?”

  “No, I don’t have the heart to listen to it just yet.”

  “Don’t tell me this is the first time you’ve been here. Why are you doing this to yourself?”

  “It helps me focus on the ultimate threat—extinction. My people were fortunate. A probe found us before we could develop radios and announce ourselves to the Xaros. We wasted a century arguing whether or not the probe was some sort of cosmic charlatan, then we listened to a species a few stars over as the Xaros came to their system and annihilated them.

  “By that time, the Xaros were too close for us to build and crew a credible navy—we breed far too slowly. So we created ark fleets and ran. The first fleet was grand, dozens and dozens of ships carrying the best minds and warriors from our entire population, sent out to a world like our home. Those who weren’t chosen stayed until smaller colony fleets were built and sent off to less desirable worlds. My parents were of the less desirables, and I was born in transit to Takeni.

  “Takeni was the first world we settled, but the grand fleet and others haven’t reached their destinations yet. Bastion needed an ambassador from us, so … here I am. But, extinction. If we’d stayed behind, my people would have been wiped out. So we cast chance to the stars and run from system to system while the Xaros catch up, and they will eventually. There’s only so much room left in the galaxy. While I may be from an insignificant world of few people and resources, it is a candle against the night that I must maintain, or all will be darkness.”

  Stacey reached up to touch a baby as it crawled over its parent, her hand passing through it. The baby poked at its parent’s skin then scrambled aside as the parent scratched at the irritation. The baby repeated the game several times until the parent flipped over and tickled the baby until it squealed.

  “Bad enough when species go extinct through no fault of their own. You ever wonder why the Xaros are doing this to us?” she asked.

  “If we knew the why, would it do us any good?”

  “Maybe we could get them to stop.”

  “They’ve overrun ninety percent of the galaxy. Never a single communication or demand. We’ve never even been able to examine one as they disintegrate on death or capture. For all the species who’ve encountered them, we can only guess what they truly want.” Pa’lon ended the hologram and his Spartan quarters filled the room around them.

  “Come,” he said. “Let’s go to the Assembly and see if we can keep another light burning.”

  ****

  Hale had to walk almost doubled over as he made his way through the air vent. A fine layer of dust that seemed impervious to the ship’s air scrubbers was caked along the walls. He made a mental note to add “cleaning the vent” to a list of approved extra-duty punishments for any of his Marines that warranted a meaningless punishment to eat up their spare time, yet one miserable enough to deter future events of whatever minor infraction led to the punishment.

  But, if he wanted the air vents clean, it would mean he’d been in the air vents, and that begged questions he didn’t want to answer.

  The air vent rumbled as a fighter roared into space from the flight deck beneath the vent. At least he was going the right direction. There were enough jokes about lost lieutenants that he didn’t need to add to the legend by accidentally falling into a maintenance bay or requiring a search party to cut him out of the air ducts.

  Hale turned a corner and found the spot he was looki
ng for—an air grate overlooking the flight deck. He also found Steuben, his legs curled beneath him, sitting by the grate. The Karigole brought the tip of a plastic wand to his mouth and exhaled blue smoke that faded into nothingness.

  “Lieutenant,” Steuben said.

  “How … what are you doing here?” Hale looked over his shoulder to make sure no one else was there with them.

  “I wished to speak with you, but Gunney Cortaro feigned ignorance as to your location. I followed your scent and found where it was strongest. By the way, you took a wrong turn three corridors back,” Steuben said.

  “I have a scent?” Hale sat beside Steuben and stretched out his back.

  “Chlorine. You spend a great deal of time swimming and reek of it.” Steuben took another drag from the wand. Smoke wafted through a secondary set of nostrils aside the alien’s nose. “The smoke detector in this section is inoperative. Most convenient.”

  “What’ve you got there?”

  “Tamkoolak in concentrated form. I’m down to my last juice cube, inevitable and unfortunate. I’d offer you some but it would cause a seizure and loss of bladder control.”

  “Thanks anyway,” Hale said. He took a tube, the size and shape of cigarette, from a pocket on his shoulder and twisted a brass ring to activate it. “You must have quite a habit if that’s your last cube. I figured you’d bring more with you when you arrived.”

  Steuben took another drag.

  Hale puffed his e-cigarette and took in a deep breath of nicotine-doped water vapor. While water vapor wouldn’t set off smoke detectors, some moralist in the fleet decided the devices should detect a number of airborne substances as an additional function. Nicotine was at the top of the list.

  They watched as a pilot climbed up a ladder and crawled into the cockpit of an Eagle Air/Space superiority fighter. Crewmen removed battery charging lines and made last-second maintenance checks, yanking away red streamers labeled REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT from rocket pods and the gauss Gatling cannon slung beneath the fighter’s nose.

  “You come here often,” Steuben said. “There are layers to the chlorine smell.”

  “Before every mission. It helps me clear my head to see that things can happen without me.”

  “Gunney Cortaro is a fine Marine. He seems fully capable in his duties.”

  “He is. Most of the time when I tell him something has to be done it’s already finished. I’m lucky to have him.”

  “Yet you feel every decision is your responsibility?”

  A crewman in a yellow vest stood in front of the Eagle and raised two lit wands. He led the Eagle away, directing him toward the launch ramp. Upgraded battery capacitors had replaced the treadmill system the flight deck used to have; now each plane could use its own internal power to launch from the ship.

  “I am the officer in charge. Success and failure are my responsibility.”

  “We are more egalitarian. When the Karigole go on a mission, each and every one of us knows the desired end state and acts in unison to achieve that goal. We have no need for officers or rank. Your system seems derived from a landowner/serf relationship remaining from your feudal period. Odd that you haven’t evolved since then.”

  Hale chuckled. “You try to get three Marines to agree on pizza toppings, see how that works out for you. So what brings you to my once-secret hiding place?”

  “There is something about this ship and crew that Lafayette and I don’t understand. You are the most levelheaded human we have access to, so we decided to approach you with the question,” Steuben said.

  Hale tensed, his mind racing through what little he could remember from the primer on the Karigole he’d skimmed through.

  “The phrase Gott Mit Uns appears many times, which I understand to mean ‘God is with us.’ I’ve seen it on the ship, stenciled on armor. I see it on at least three fighters on the flight deck. Your planet’s history has several wars of religion, to include a crusade in Europe that displaced the entire Islamic population from the continent. There are twelve different religious groups on the Breitenfeld, most denominations of Christianity with some … pagans?”

  “Yes, they’re a blast on shore leave.”

  “And one adherent to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.”

  Hale shook his head. “Standish.”

  “How is it that so many religions can accept that a singular god is with them? Do you have an overarching deity that you are invoking with Gott mit uns?”

  “No, Steuben. For the most part, humans tolerate the presence of other religions. Things are different when one religion decides that they’re the only way to believe and forces those nonbelievers around them to convert or suffer. There’s a tacit agreement through the ship that the Gott means the god of whoever is saying Gott mit uns and no one tries to make it about only their god.”

  They sat quietly for a few seconds.

  “You humans are very complex.”

  “Thanks, I think. You mind if I ask you a question?”

  “You just did, and without offense.”

  “Then can I ask you another—” Hale shook his head. “I saw you with the Karigole on the flight deck before we left orbit. You all said something together.”

  “Ghul’Thul’Ghul.”

  “Yes, what does that mean?”

  Steuben folded his wand in half and rolled to his feet. He stomped away, bent beneath the top of the air vent.

  “Sorry,” Hale said.

  ****

  Lieutenant Durand looked through her canopy at the stars cape beyond. The Anthalas system was deep within the Milky Way, and the galactic center was three times as wide and twice as luminescent as what could been seen from Earth.

  A bluish-gray nebula dominated space on the other side of her canopy, nascent stars shining from within the stellar nursery.

  Years ago, she’d bought into the Atlantic Union military recruiter’s promise to see the solar system. This was more than she’d ever bargained for.

  “Gall, there’s a comet dorsal side,” Choi Ma, her wingman, called Durand by her call sign through the IR net.

  Durand flipped her Eagle over, a simple maneuver in the void as small thrusters on her wingtips pulsed. In atmosphere, flipping over ran the risk of rushing blood to her head and disorienting herself to the point where she risked a sudden “air ground interface.”

  The comet burned silently, its tail stretching out for a million miles. Starlight coursed through it like sunlight through a dusty room stirred up after years of isolation.

  “We’re coming up on the dark side of the moon. IR buoy ready,” heavily accented English came over the IR.

  Durand sighed and rolled her fighter over again. The Condor bomber between her and Choi’s fighter wagged its wings. Durand craned her neck at the moon, a heavily cratered rock as unremarkable as Mercury or Luna.

  “All right. Filly, Nag, drop the buoys every five hundred kilometers as we slingshot around the moon. Stay ballistic. Keep course corrections to grav/anti-grav thrusters so we don’t send out a heat plume from the engines for the Xaros to see,” Durand said. The IR buoys would transmit messages from the Breitenfeld to the Marines once they hit the planet. Keeping the moon between the ship and the planet helped with operational security. The infrared lasers that transmitted communications were weak enough not to be detected by the Xaros, but they needed to circumvent the moon.

  “Stop calling us that,” said Mei Ma, the pilot of the bomber. “Just because ‘Ma’ translates as ‘horse’ doesn’t mean we want clever nicknames.”

  “When you defected to the Atlantic Union, you agreed to our militaries’ customs and courtesies. No one gets to pick their call sign. Isn’t that right, Glue?” Durand said, calling out the other Eagle pilot.

  “We did not defect!” Mei shouted and Durand had to suppress a chuckle. Some buttons were just too easy not to push. The Ma cousins were captured after a Chinese attack on the Breitenfeld just before the fleet vanished from space and time. Durand recruited t
hem to fly in the assault on the Crucible, and the three women had integrated into her squadron after the battle.

  A stern admonition in Chinese shot over the IR from Choi.

  “Buoys ready,” Mei said, suddenly calm. “Drop in three … two … one. Mark.”

  A cylinder tumbled away from beneath her bomber and the tiny thrusters along the buoy brought it to a halt. The sides of the buoy opened and formed into a teacup shape, baffles to keep any IR radiation from spilling over when the beams hit the receiver.

  Zhi Ma, sitting in the weapons control seat in the bomber, reoriented the buoy toward their course around the moon. She was the only one who had to concentrate for the rest of this mission as she had to connect each buoy to the other as their three-ship formation swung around the moon.

  Durand flexed muscle groups from her toes to her face one at a time to keep sensation in her body and remain alert. It would take hours to traverse the moon, hours exposed to any Xaros on the side of the moon that the Breitenfeld couldn’t see once it jumped into the system.

  They swung around the light-side edge of the moon, and Durand kept her eyes to the horizon, watching for any threats. Anthalas came into view quickly, deep orange and reddish clouds meandering through its sky, its surface mostly green blotches of jungle between worn mountain ranges. She could have sworn there were some seas on the planet from the mission briefings, but she couldn’t spot any.

  Zhi deployed and oriented the buoys with ease. Test messages sent to and from the Breitenfeld were clear and secure.

  “All right, ladies, two more and we can head back to the Breitenfeld,” Durand said.

  “Um … what is that?” Choi asked.

  Durand’s heart jumped in her throat and a cold wave of adrenaline coursed through her veins. She looked over both shoulders for whatever Choi had seen.

  “Where? Where?” Durand asked as the memory of Xaros disintegration beams slicing past her canopy prodded her to fire up the Q-shell launcher within her fuselage.