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

Elias came to a stop in a cloud of dust.

  “I take it there’s a good reason why we’re all standing in the open,” the armor soldier said.

  “Hold on.” Hale looked at a map on his forearm screen, then pointed to a ridgeline a few miles away. “There’s an emergency access point to an auxiliary tunnel at the base of the mountains. Looks like it was supposed to run to a bunker that never got built, but it’s on the defense grid. Should take us straight to the firebase.”

  The sound of muted thunderclaps came over the mountains. Heavy weapons fire.

  “Let’s get moving before it’s too late,” Elias said. His treads pivoted him in place, then he and Caas rumbled away.

  “First Sergeant,” Hale said, “get the rest of the company out here. We’ll go by foot.” Hale touched his cloak-activation controls, then put his hand down as windblown sand hissed across the ground. “Sand will screw up the cloaks, won’t it?”

  “Karigole tech ain’t perfect,” Cortaro shrugged. “Don’t tell Steuben I said that. He’s sensitive.”

  “Nickel,” Hale said, pointing to the bunker, “you’re big but you can squeeze through that opening. Go back and don’t stop until you’ve made it to Phoenix. Understand?”

  Nickel shook his head emphatically.

  “Dark in there,” he said. “No leave sir.”

  “Soldier, you don’t have armor or a weapon and I can’t—”

  “No leave sir!”

  “He’s just like a puppy, isn’t he, Captain?” Yarrow asked. “A giant, Cro-Magnon puppy that could crush my skull with two fingers.”

  Hale’s gaze wandered to the dead doughboy lying amongst the slain Ruhaald. He sighed and said, “I thought everything would be easier once I pinned on captain. Come on, Nickel. You have to keep up.”

  ****

  Hale stepped on a half-buried boulder and then up to the edge of the ridgeline. Windblown sand scoured across his cloak, and error messages popped on his visor. Hale looked up and saw nothing but a tan pallor across the sky. The smell of smoke came with the breeze, artifacts from the battle that wrecked Phoenix.

  He cut the cloak and climbed the last few feet to the top of the ridge. Steuben, already poised against the summit with a set of optics in hand, appeared as his cloak faded away.

  “Jacobs is in the tunnel. Path’s clear as far as she can tell. She hasn’t made it to the firebase yet,” Hale said.

  “It may not matter.” Steuben passed the optics to Hale. The Marine peeked over the edge, and dread gripped his heart.

  Firebase X-Ray’s mountain façade was pitted with broken impact craters. Two of the rail gun emplacements smoldered, the heavy guns blasted into pieces and strewn around the mountain. The landing pad cut into the center had collapsed.

  Between the firebase and Hale’s ridge, an energy field several stories high and miles long blocked the line of sight from the human fortifications and a sprawling base full of Ruhaald soldiers and equipment.

  “That’s…not what we were expecting,” Hale said.

  “You engage in understatement to cover for a poor tactical situation,” Steuben said. “I’ve observed this leadership trait in other officers.”

  “Combat leaders can’t show fear, or doubt. Troops get a whiff that things are wrong and all of a sudden it’s sauve qui peut and the battle’s lost. Christ, how many are down there?”

  “I counted roughly three thousand nine hundred individuals, fourteen artillery pieces, three equally sized large pieces of equipment receiving attention from what appear to be technicians and dozens of temporary structures. They’re armed with—”

  “More than we can handle.” Hale frowned. “Looks like they’re preparing for another assault on the base.”

  “Our mission is reconnaissance, intelligence gathering,” Steuben said. “We are not a relief force.”

  “But what if we…” Hale looked at his forearm computer, then back to the valley full of enemy soldiers.

  “You have been visited by a deity? The one known as the ‘good-idea fairy’?”

  “You could say that. She comes to captains more than lieutenants.” Hale pointed to a pair of tents next to an artillery piece, an energy cannon hooked to several battery stacks the size of cargo containers. “There’s another access hatch down there. Doesn’t look like the Ruhaald know it’s under their noses, or whatever they have.”

  “You propose a raid?” Steuben asked. “Even with the element of surprise, we’ll be at a distinct tactical disadvantage.”

  “A good old smash-and-grab. We’ve got more than surprise. We have Iron Hearts and Hussars. Now help me find their headquarters tent.”

  ****

  The Marines came to a stop in front of a vault door flanked by a single inactive control panel.

  Standish glanced at his forearm screen.

  “Eight minutes of air left.” He tapped the control panel, but it stayed dark. “That’s not helping.”

  “Move.” Egan ran a wire from his gauntlet and plugged it into the panel. The panel powered up, then went completely blue. “Command prompts are scrambled, but the power shunts are still accessible. Maybe if I…”

  The panel sparked and Egan jumped back.

  “Seven minutes,” Standish said.

  “Can you get it open?” Bailey asked.

  “Do you have a pneumatic vice some—” The vault door swung open. “I mean, obviously I can get it open,” Egan said.

  An unlit airlock lay beyond the armored door. The Marines stepped inside and the door closed behind them.

  A red light twirled over their heads and air pumped into the tiny space through nozzles built into the wall. Standish waited until the sensors in his suit flashed green, then opened the visor on his helmet and took a deep breath.

  “Ah, sweet, sweet, fart-smelling air.” Standish wrinkled his nose as he took another breath.

  “Standish, sometimes I swear you’d complain if your ice cream was too cold,” Egan said as he removed his helmet.

  A shadow passed over the small view port on the inner door. The door swung open violently and a giant arm shot through the opening. A hand the size of a frying pan clamped on to Standish’s neck and yanked him off his feet.

  Standish beat against the vice grip around his throat and found breathing impossible. The Ka-Bar knife in his gauntlet sheath snapped out. He slashed the blade against the arm and heard a grunt of pain before he found himself flying through the air.

  He smashed into a bulkhead and fell to the floor, his armor absorbing the worst of the impact. Standish looked up and into the barrel of a very large gun.

  “Stop! Stop!” A Marine in power armor pushed the weapon aside and put himself between Standish and his assailant.

  “Marines, good! Remember?” The Marine put his hand on Standish’s shoulder and looked him in the eye. “Where the hell did you come from?”

  Standish pulled in a ragged breath and grabbed his neck as he began coughing. He fell onto his rear and slapped the Marine’s hand away.

  The passageway was full of brutish doughboys, their weapons and armor soot-stained and beat-up. Their Cro-Magnon features glowered at Standish. One doughboy lifted his arm and sniffed at the bleeding cut across the forearm. The soldier opened his mouth and licked a black tongue over the wound.

  “Standish, you OK?” Egan asked as he stepped out of the airlock.

  “I really don’t like these guys,” Standish croaked.

  “Lieutenant Douglas, Crucible garrison command,” the man said, shaking hands with Egan. “Who are…wait—are you Sergeant Bailey?”

  “That’s me,” she said.

  “I’ve seen The Last Stand on Takeni at least fifty times. That part with you and that village gets me every time. Does this mean the Breitenfeld’s here? Are we finally getting some help?” Douglas asked.

  “Sir, can we talk and walk?” Egan asked. “We need to find the omnium reactor.”

  Douglas pointed down the passageway and led Egan and Bailey away.

&n
bsp; The doughboy with the bleeding arm reached down and lifted Standish onto his feet like he was a child.

  “Sorry. Thought enemy,” the doughboy said with a gravelly voice.

  Standish brushed his armor off and motioned to the cut. “Same here. Thought you were trying to murder me.”

  The rest of the doughboys stood impassively, heavy brows twitching.

  “You have a name, big guy?”

  “Onyx Twelve-Twelve.”

  “That’s not a name I’ve heard before, but OK.” Standish walked after Egan and the lieutenant, and the doughboys followed in lockstep.

  “You know what’s happening out there?” Standish asked.

  “Enemies.” Onyx hefted his oversized rifle.

  “More than that, maybe?”

  “Many enemies.” Onyx nodded fervently.

  Standish shrugged and caught up to the other Marines as Egan finished detailing their escape from the Ruhaald and their arrival at the dome.

  “So the squids, these Ruhaald are all pissed off because you killed one of their leaders?” Douglas asked.

  “Wasn’t us,” Standish said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder, “it was those boneheads.”

  “Something tells me the Ruhaald and Naroosha stabbing us in the back and taking a spot over our cities wasn’t a flash reaction to fratricide,” Douglas said. “I’m glad to give you three rifles and put you on the line, but we’re hanging on by a thread in here. So there’s no more help coming with you?”

  “We’re it, for now,” Egan said.

  “I’ll barricade the bunker tunnels.” The lieutenant pressed a knuckle against the bridge of his nose. “Can’t believe I forgot that. Wouldn’t have known you were here, but the airlock tamper alarms went off.”

  “You slept lately?” Egan asked.

  “Heh heh, sleep.” The passageway ended in stairs that led into the ceiling. A set of heavy doors slid open as they neared and bright light flooded around the Marines. Standish put a hand over his eyes as he took the steps. He blinked hard and came to a stop.

  The hollow interior of the dome stretched around them, a two-story barricade of aegis armor plates with integrated towers full of doughboys. The bio-constructs hauled heavy boxes of ammunition from a cube-shaped building in the center. Smaller Marines in power armor mixed with the doughboys along the wall, directing repairs and standing shoulder to shoulder on the firing steps.

  “We had to abandon the outer wall after the last push,” Douglas said. “Squids tried to swarm us through gate Charlie. Some of them got to the top of the wall before we pushed them back. Lost three Marines to their damn armor. They ain’t as bad as the Toth, but they ain’t pushovers in a fight either.”

  “The reactor’s undamaged?” Egan asked.

  Douglas snapped off terse commands and the doughboys turned away. The lieutenant motioned to the cube.

  “The only reason we’re alive is because they must want that thing intact,” he said. “I saw them using heavier weapons during the mad scramble to get in here when the attack started. Squids aren’t even using explosives. I thought about scuttling the reactor. Our back’s to the wall here, but we can still fight.”

  “Do you know what we had to go through to get that damn thing?” Standish asked.

  “Who’re you?” The lieutenant gave him a once-over.

  Standish groaned and tossed his hands up in despair.

  Douglas grabbed a handle on a sliding door and opened it with a heave. Inside, the reactor stretched across the length of the cube. Pallets full of glowing omnium cubes filled a corner. A robot arm grasped a cube and slid it into an open slot on the far end of the reactor. On the other side, a thick plate of aegis armor slid out of a sparking field and onto a conveyor belt.

  The lieutenant pointed to a computer terminal hewn from stone. Strips of paper attached to the many buttons and dials fluttered in a slight breeze. Waist-high piles of green notebooks formed a berm around the side and back of the computer.

  “That looks familiar,” Standish said. “We got that off Anthalas.”

  “Sure hope you guys know how to use it,” Douglas said. “I futzed around with it and got it to keep making the last item in the production queue, aegis plating. You put something in that scanner box in the middle of the device and it’ll make that. We use it for ammo, parts.”

  Egan walked up to the computer and frowned. He bent over and looked closely at the alien script on the buttons and dials, then compared it to the very different alien markings on the labels.

  “This must be Shanishol,” Egan said as he touched a button, then lifted the attached ribbon, “and this is…”

  “Karigole, I guess,” Douglas said. “Lafayette was the only one that worked in here.”

  “I need to tell this alien artifact to make me a KR-12 IR receiver-transmitter,” Egan said, “and the control panel is in two languages I have no idea how to read.”

  A small lamp attached to the control panel flickered. Egan’s gaze snapped toward the light, and he nodded.

  “Ibarra says the production code is in one of these notebooks.” Egan flipped through a book, glancing back at the light as the flickering intensified. “Lafayette scanned thousands of items. We just need to find it…and figure out how to use the interface.”

  “What? Ibarra’s in the lamp?” Douglas asked.

  “He’s in the Crucible’s power systems. He also said he’s been trying to communicate with you for hours.” Egan set the notebook aside and picked up another one.

  “Huh, I just thought the light was on the fritz.” The lieutenant frowned as the flickering continued. “What’s he saying now?”

  “You don’t want to know.” Egan tossed another book from the pile to Standish and Bailey. “Lafayette wrote down an item description or a stock number in English for what he scanned. Last four digits are two-seven-two-two for the transmitter. Find it.”

  The pound of heavy gauss rifles echoed through the dome.

  “Balls, not again.” Douglas ran for the door.

  “I thought Lafayette was some kind of Karigole mechanical genius.” Standish ran a finger down a list of numbers. “You’d think he’d be more organized than this.”

  The lamp flickered.

  “Ibarra says you’ve never heard of Nikola Tesla…and he’s got an idea that might help us.” Egan put his helmet over the lamp and ran a wire from his gauntlet to a port on the back of his headgear.

  The light flickered rapidly as Egan’s fingers danced over his control panel.

  Marc Ibarra’s head and shoulders appeared on Egan’s visor and looked around.

  “That’s a little better,” Ibarra said through the helmet’s speakers. “You have no idea how cramped it is in here.”

  The clatter of gauss weapon fire grew louder.

  “No time for chitchat.” Ibarra clapped his hands twice. “Flip pages in front of the helmet’s camera. I can read and process the information a hell of a lot faster than any of you, and time is not on our side here.”

  Bailey opened a notebook and turned the pages one by one.

  “Faster, my dear. I’m not a Commodore 64,” Ibarra said.

  “A what?” Bailey bent the pages with her thumb and let them flip open with a rustle.

  “Before your time. Not that one. Next.”

  Standish picked up an armful of notebooks and passed them to Bailey one by one.

  “Mr. Ibarra, we’ve got some bad news about Shannon,” Standish said.

  “I noticed her absence. She will be missed.” Ibarra’s eyes barely twitched as he scanned through another book.

  “Well, we were sad to see her go,” Standish said, “but we were wondering—ow!”

  Bailey stomped on the Marine’s foot and snatched another book out of his hand.

  “We were wondering what happened to you,” Bailey said. “Shannon couldn’t explain your…situation.”

  “My mind’s been inside a secure memory partition within the probe since Bastion tried to screw us ove
r with the Toth. Stacey and I had a few failsafe programs installed for this kind of situation…but the Naroosha are better hackers than I gave them credit for. They don’t have full control over the probe—yet. But they will soon. I can play around with the maintenance systems a bit and assert control over a few key areas in a pinch. If they figure out where I’m hiding, things will go south real quick.”

  “What do you mean by ‘south’?” Standish asked.

  “The Naroosha had complete control for a few hours before I threw my sabots into the works. They sent their one and only jump-capable ship to Bastion. Now they’re trying to jump from Bastion back to their home world through our Crucible,” Ibarra said. “If they do that, we’ll be neck-deep in Naroosha ships and troops. I’ll let you speculate on how that’ll play out.”

  “And you think Captain Valdar can pull our asses out of the fire?” Bailey asked.

  “The Breitenfeld is our wild card, my dear. Ah…there it is. You,” Ibarra said, pointing at Egan, “the tall one, enter this code.”

  Bailey tapped her finger against the helmet over the light, jostling it from side to side. Ibarra’s arms shot out and pressed against the side of the visor.

  “Soon as he makes your little toy,” Bailey leaned in close and pointed a finger at Ibarra, “you’re going tell him how to make me a new Barrett rail rifle to replace Bloke.”

  ****

  Standish craned his neck up, peering across the void. His visor cycled through spectrums, searching for heat blooms of enemy ships and graviton emissions from anchored ships. A sliver of the moon showed on the far side of Earth, scorched soil creeping around the horizon like a scabbed-over wound. He pushed down from the torn roof of the bunker and landed gently.

  “Clear,” Standish said to Egan. “Anyone know what the hell happened to the moon? Looks like somebody took a flamethrower to it.”

  “Better that ball of rock than the Earth,” Egan said. He opened a box and removed an IR transmitter the size of a gauss rifle. “It’ll take a few minutes to get this emplaced. Cover me.” He touched a button on his chest and vanished beneath a Karigole cloak. The transmitter seemed to lift up of its own volition and floated onto the roof, a fiber-optic cable trailing into the open hatch.