The Battle of the Void (The Ember War Saga Book 6) Read online

  “All of it,” Standish whispered.

  ****

  Kallen’s gauntlets trembled, digging into the bed of silver grass beneath her. The HUD integrated into the visor over her eyes flashed warning after warning as the synch rate between her and her armor dropped into the red zone that barely kept the armor functional.

  “Desi, can you hear me?” Bodel asked her on a private channel.

  “Mm-hmm,” she managed as phantom pain stitched up her armor’s back. If she had any sensation below the neck, she knew the pain would have been unbearable. She’d been diagnosed with Batten’s Disease weeks ago, an illness that would rob what little faculties she had left…and kill her within the year. Her control over the armor had been slipping the past few days; whatever the Jinn hit them with had sent everything into a tailspin.

  “Key my serum…I can’t do it on my own,” she said. A patch of warmth spread from the plugs in the base of her skull and the tremors stopped.

  “Dr. Eeks said the serum would lose potency with every use. We need to get you out of here,” Bodel said.

  “I will leave with everyone else.” She got to her feet and watched as her synch rate with the armor rose to marginal effectiveness. With a high synch rate, she could move with an air of grace and take on both Elias and Bodel in armor-to-armor unarmed combat and stand a good chance of winning. Now, she could shuffle forward with the finesse of an early-model Ibarra construction robot.

  Yarrow, Hale and Elias spoke to each other a few yards away.

  “Does he know? About the Batten’s?” Kallen asked.

  “The corpsman? No. Nothing he can do. Not his business,” Bodel said.

  “What about Elias?”

  Bodel didn’t answer.

  “Damn it, Hans, you promised me.”

  “He was about to figure it out on his own. You’ve been degrading for too long for him not to notice.”

  “Why…why hasn’t he said anything?”

  “He’s waiting for you to tell him. Assuming we get out of here, don’t wait anymore. Some things need to be said.” Bodel broke off the private channel.

  Elias’ legs locked straight. Armor plates retracted and treads extended from their housings with a whirr of servos. His upper body slid down to the knees and the tracks hit the ground.

  “Crunchies want a ride?” Elias said. “You two good?”

  “No problem,” Kallen said. It took three attempts before her armor transformed.

  ****

  Hale ducked beneath a branch as Bodel rumbled beneath a vine tree. Keeping one hand, foot and a knee mag-locked to the armor and trying to keep his rifle ready for any sudden contact and ducking branches (which Hale suspected the soldier was deliberately aiming for) was an exercise in coordination and concentration.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Stacey said from the other side of Bodel.

  “Bad habit,” Hale said.

  “What? No, listen. Those Jinn weapons blew the tree to smithereens. Why didn’t they do the same to the armor?” she asked.

  “I’m not complaneing,” Bodel said.

  “Why’d they give up after they hit Malal?” she asked.

  “Ibarra,” Hale said, swaying back to dodge another dangling vine, “you’re worried about a very distant target. I’m trying to figure out how we get into the next part of this vault without Malal. Then, I’m trying to figure out how we get off this rock without Malal to open up the outside. How long until we know if he’ll be all right or we need to find out if any of these trees are edible?”

  “We’ve got a structure at our twelve o’clock,” Bodel said. The image of a wide and squat brown building popped up on Hale’s visor.

  “All stop. We’ll go in on foot from here,” Hale said. He jumped off Bodel’s track before it came to a complete stop and rushed over to a glow tree. He zoomed in on the structure with the optics on his rifle. The building was two-stories high and looked like it had been cut from a single giant rock. There were no seams or doorways anywhere he could see.

  “This is the place,” Hale said. “Gunney, take your fire team and scout around the other side. Let me know if there’s a way in.”

  Cortaro, Bailey and Standish took off at a jog.

  Egan skipped to the side like he’d been hit with an electric shock.

  “Gah! Damn thing moved.” The commo Marine slapped a hand against the pouch containing Malal.

  “Check on him,” Stacy said.

  Egan unzipped the pouch slowly. Dark swirls moved across the surface.

  Malal’s face formed and said, “Let me out.”

  “Jesus H. Christ!” Egan tore the pouch off and threw it against a glow tree.

  A blobby arm slurped out of the pouch and the rest of Malal pulled free. Malal morphed back into his human shape, no worse for wear. He turned his head to Egan.

  “You will never speak of this,” Malal said.

  “Fine by me.” Egan went to his empty pouch and hesitated before picking it up.

  “What happened? Are you…whole?” Stacey asked.

  “The interaction between the energy field of the governor and the Jinn weapon proved…unpleasant,” Malal said. “Had the weapon been a bit stronger, I would have been destroyed. To have my existence ended so close to my goal, and by the combined efforts of humans and Jinn. A tragedy.”

  “Nothing on the other side, sir,” Cortaro said.

  “I take it you have a way inside,” Hale said to Malal.

  “Yes. Give me a moment. Some things are still in flux.” Malal’s chin sunk to his chest.

  “Form a perimeter,” Hale said to the Marines. “Soon as he’s done putting his face on, we’ll move out.”

  “Hey, Ibarra.” Standish waved to Stacey. She jumped off Bodel and went to him. Standish opened a pouch and removed one of the bullet-shaped heads from a Jinn soldier and handed it to her. “I figure you’re the only one smart enough to figure anything out from this. Well, except for Malal, but he freaks me out.”

  “Thanks.” Stacey rolled the object in her hands, her reflection wavering like she was looking into a pond disturbed by a strong breeze. It was half the diameter of her head, a tangle of ripped glass wires at the base.

  “You know, there’s no artificial life on Bastion,” she said. “The Qa’Resh probes might make that definition, but they’re so constrained by programming most shut down when forced to choose anything.”

  “Why’s that?” Standish asked.

  “The Xaros. Any computer system they can access they destroy. Bastion never bothered to recruit or even contact species that were AI and computer dependent. They’d never stand a chance once a single Xaros drone showed up in system and ripped every network to pieces,” she said.

  “Guess we were lucky we had the Second Pacific War, forced our military to learn to function without computers,” Standish said.

  “You think that was an accident?” Stacey asked.

  Malal’s face snapped up.

  “I am ready,” he said.

  ****

  The largest cavern Hale had ever seen was the Tycho Dome on Luna. Jared’s senior thesis on asteroid mining had caught the attention of an Ibarra Corporation headhunter, who arranged for Jared and Hale to visit the incomplete dome. Jared’s trip included corporate briefings on the wonders of working for the wealthiest company in human history and a conditional offer of employment. Hale got space sick during the shuttle from the spaceport in Belize to Tycho and spent most of the trip clutching a bag ready for the contents of his stomach.

  Luna’s light gravity hadn’t agreed with him then, and it hadn’t gotten any better with time.

  The Tycho Dome was three miles high at the apex, and with enough surface area to house almost a million people once complete. Hale didn’t think one could suffer from agoraphobia beneath the Moon’s surface, but he’d come close to a panic attack while his brother chatted up the project’s engineering staff.

  Tycho Dome was a child’s sand castle compared to where Malal led th
em.

  A great cylinder spun around a freeway-wide bridge. Lakes, green forests and concentric circles of structures filled the inner surface. All of it stretched so far behind them that the end was lost in a haze. Ahead, a solid pillar of light pulsated.

  Hale used his forearm screen to send a dose of anti-motion-sickness drugs into his system. That the folded landscape rotated around the bridge did nothing to settle his stomach.

  Malal opened his arms wide.

  “Behold! My great work, my soul forge,” he said.

  “Malal, is there anyone in those cities?” Hale asked.

  “No one. Holding areas for the kindling, if you will. Come, you won’t be the first to see this, but you will be the first to speak of it afterwards.” Malal moved toward the pillar at a brisk pace.

  “How does it work?” Hale asked.

  Malal looked at Hale like a dog that had just messed the rug.

  “I don’t think your language has enough small words for me to explane it properly.”

  “Try me,” Hale said.

  Malal remained quiet for a minute then held up the palm of his hand. A box morphed out of his palm.

  “What is in the box?” Malal asked.

  “How am I supposed to know?”

  “You aren’t. You are to guess. Please, do so.”

  “I don’t…a model of the Breitenfeld, how’s that?” Hale asked.

  The sides of the box sank back into Malal’s palm, revealing a sparrow that flapped its wings and jerked its head from side to side.

  “Incorrect, but inconsequential.” Malal closed his fingers around the bird and dropped his hand to the side. “You are capable of creativity; you can imagine multiple possibilities. Tell me, where did that answer come from?”

  “Just a guess,” Hale said.

  “And that guess is what makes you so wondrous. Animals do not imagine. Computers do not create. They follow a pattern set by those capable of independent thought. I will share something your physicists suspected but would never be able to prove. No matter what you guessed was in the box, you were right.”

  “You changed what was inside?”

  “No. But in making a decision, making your guess, you created a reality where there was a model in the box,” Malal said. “The universe reacts to your will. That is the ultimate power of sentience, and that power is quantifiable. Measurable. Useable.”

  “You lost me,” Hale said.

  “You held on longer than I thought possible.” Malal turned his attention back to the great pillar.

  “Where’s the ‘so what,’ Malal? What does all this have to do with those empty cities? What you did to the Shanishol on Anthalas?”

  “Hale,” Stacey tried to step between the two, “none of this is relevant to the task at hand.”

  “The power exists in sufficiently developed minds, but it is faint,” Malal said. “When harvested in sufficient amounts, it can be bent to a purpose.” He waved a hand up and down his omnium body. “To stave off the decay of time. Or, if at the right place at the right time, to open a doorway to another universe where the laws of physics are more…accommodating.”

  “And how many souls did you feed into this forge?” Hale asked.

  “Lieutenant! Stop this line of questioning right now,” Stacey said.

  “What’s done is done, bright one,” Malal said, “and I have no time for regrets.” He turned his face to Hale. “All of them. We harvested every advanced intelligent species in the galaxy. Every planet we nurtured to maturity fed the forge engines. We left a few primitive species behind, those not worth the effort to collect. Ironically enough, there was no suitably advanced civilization to counter the Xaros when they arrived.”

  Hale stopped. His stomach felt like a rock as the implications of what Malal just told him raced through his mind. He knew Malal was a monster, but the sheer scope of his crimes was almost impossible for him to comprehend…and this monster was their ally.

  Stacey took a few halting steps after Malal, then came back to Hale.

  “Hale, look, I know this is a lot to take in, but the Qa’Resh—”

  Hale grabbed her by the shoulder, glared at her and opened a private channel.

  “We are not doing this, Stacey. We can’t help that thing anymore. Not when the price of its cooperation is going to be paid in blood. Our blood!”

  Stacey slapped his grip away. “Not your decision. Not mine either. In case you haven’t noticed, we are up shit creek without a paddle in this vault, and in this war, without Malal. Play along until we’re back on the ship. Can you do that, at least?”

  Even when angry, Hale could see the reason behind her request.

  “We’re not done. Not by a long shot,” he said.

  Stacey opened her mouth to speak, then turned away.

  “Problem, sir?” Cortaro asked as he came up from behind.

  “Let’s keep moving.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Miles beneath Abaddon’s surface, a control room came to life, a circular room with a flattened dome ceiling, identical to Crucible’s command center. Workstations lit up with data on the human fleet, holo recordings of the Gallipoli’s final moments, replays of Xaros disintegration beams ripping across the aegis armor with less effect than expected against the humans’ ships.

  The presence of humans in deep space was an anomaly, one that must be reported.

  A plinth in the center of the room glowed as pale light shone through the base, up through floating red plates of armor. The control room connected to the greater Xaros network and transmitted every scrap of data collected on the human fleet.

  The light grew brighter. A burning sphere of light grew in the armor’s chest. The spheres burst like a supernova, filling the armor with coherent light.

  The General had arrived.

  A swipe of his ethereal fingers brought up a real-time image of Eighth Fleet. The ship that carried his prisoner and had proven difficult to destroy on Anthalas and Takeni, the Breitenfeld, was absent. He studied the ships, noting their markings and significant improvements made to their weapons and armor.

  They are using the omnium reactor they took from Anthalas. The General compared the ships arrayed against him with Torni’s memories. His prisoner was of the human’s warrior caste, but segmented to the human’s ground combat arm. Her memories of the humans’ fleet were fragmented, ancillary.

  The largest human vessel, Midway, corresponded with memories of a wrecked ship broken across a mountain range. Is this the same ship? the General asked himself.

  The General compared Torni’s memories of ships in battle over the Crucible to the humans’ fleet and came to a conclusion he had some confidence in.

  The humans had sent their entire fleet to stop his invasion. The fleet before him was a few ships less than what Torni remembered seeing in dry dock and in space. Human breeding patterns and maturation meant that the crews of these ships were the vast majority of the fighting force that survived the Battle of the Crucible.

  If they risked their entire fleet to slow my advance…they’re relying on the Qa’Resh alliance to protect their home world.

  The theory fit the facts…but something galled at him. The humans had proved too resourceful, too clever, to make such a strategic misstep as sending everything they had to interdict the next invasion.

  The eye slits in his mask burned as frustration mounted.

  I will brush this irritant away and finish off what remains on Earth. The final outcome is the same. The General stretched his perception through the entire planetoid and felt the drone crèches. Proto-drones, little more than omnium sacks clutching the sides of hollowed-out caverns through the rocky interior, reacted to the General’s command to mature into full-sized drones.

  His arsenal was far from the dark matter halo around Barnard’s Star, forcing the drones to transmute far more of the planetoid’s mass to mature so quickly. Drawing on so much of the arsenal’s potential would make for fewer drones once it arrived in the human’
s system.

  There was a single tenet of warfare that the General held to with every operation against the intelligent species polluting this galaxy: overwhelming force. Even with the losses he’d sustain swatting this human fleet aside, he’d invade Earth with a force several orders of magnitude greater than anything the humans could hope to have standing against him. Their extinction was a near mathematical certainty.

  Still…

  The General ordered his drones to redouble their production. He would take no chances.

  He watched the human fleet for hours and then he entered the conduit leading to the rest of the Xaros network and left his arsenal to the droids’ programming. He would return, but first he needed more answers.

  CHAPTER 10

  The admiral turned an ornate handle on her bulbous samovar and piping hot water poured into a china cup, already half-full with deep brown tea. Her hand trembled and the cup rattled against the saucer in sympathy.

  She set the saucer on her desk, spilling some of the tea onto an open notebook.

  “Chyort voz’mi, guvno!” She wiped the spill away and picked up a pen. Every observation from the recent battle went onto the paper—every conjecture, every crazy idea that came to mind. She picked up a printed photo of the damaged construct and scribbled a note on the back.

  “Ma’am?” came from the doorway. Calum leaned into the room. “Five minutes until the captains.”

  “Yes, I will be right…Calum, that ribbon. It fired off the lance that destroyed the Gallipoli. Why haven’t we seen that tactic before?” she asked.

  Calum frowned.

  “Well,” his head rocked from side to side, a sure sign he was thinking hard, “they were under duress. Gallipoli was going to pound them to dust if they didn’t do something fast. The whole thing—the ribbon, the lance, all made out of drones. They lost a lot of combat power when they killed the Gal.”

  “We haven’t seen kamikaze tactics from them,” Makarov said. She chewed on the end of her pen then wrote furiously.

  “Should I have them wait?” Calum cocked his head over his shoulder.