Armageddon (41 page)

Omnius shook his human head. The brain inside of it was all he had left. He’d been cut off from his own thoughts, from
himself
. The only way to transmit data now was via light-speed comms, which were too slow to be effective for commanding drones, not to mention that none of his drones had conventional comm systems. The Icosahedron did, but access to those systems was cut off by quantum-linkages along the way.

Omnius sat frozen in his throne, his jaw hanging open, his eyes wide and glowing with augmented reality contacts that no longer worked, because the Omninet was down along with everything else.

He screamed aloud. The enemy had blinded and paralyzed him with one decisive blow, but even that wouldn’t be enough to defeat him. His drones might not be organized anymore, but even with just the ones on the surface, they outnumbered the enemy a million to one. They could all fire randomly and still defeat the enemy. Sooner or later they would find the source of the jamming field and destroy it. Everything was under control…

The deck shook, and the distant rumble of an explosion reached Omnius’s ears. He froze, listening to the dying echos of that explosion. There were no systems in his command center to simulate sound, so that sound had to have been carried through the superstructure of the Icosahedron itself.

Then another tremor rocked the deck, followed by another, and then a dozen more. What was going on? The enemy was far out of beam range, and missiles couldn’t be reaching them already. Not to mention the Icosahedron was too large and too well-shielded to suffer damage from any conventional attack.

The deck shuddered once more, and another rumble reached Omnius’s human ears, more distantly this time. Then he realized what it was.

Thousands of Facets had been coming together along the edges of the Icosahedron. They’d been in the middle of their docking patterns when the enemy activated their jamming field. Now, without him to pilot the Facets and make last-minute corrections to their flight paths, the Facets were all colliding with the Icosahedron rather than docking to it.

The deck shook with the most violent tremor yet, and Omnius almost fell out of his throne. He listened to the thunderous roar of the explosion and he screamed again.

He would make the rebels pay!

Chapter 37

D
estra received the order to launch and she fired up the drop ship’s engines with shaking hands.
Pull it together, Des.
Even after years of training, she still wasn’t the cocksure pilot her ex-husband Ethan had been. She didn’t have the affinity for it, and she was surprised that the Union had given her a drop ship to pilot.

At least it wasn’t a Nova,
she thought. Drop ships couldn’t maneuver much, so all she really had to do was point the ship’s blocky nose at the green diamond that marked the landing site and
drop
down on it. Flight assist and autopilot were there to guide her down; gunners would keep enemies at bay; her copilot would manage shields, gravidar, and energy distribution. All she had to think about was take-off and landing.

Destra took comfort in that as she guided them down from the
Liberator’s
ventral hangar bay.

“How are things looking out there, Cappy?” Destra asked, glancing at her copilot. Out the side window she saw Drop Ship One flying beside them. Without a frame of reference she might have thought it was tiny but for the small, glowing blue speck near the bottom of the blocky gray transport. That speck was the cockpit.

“Clear skies,” Cappy replied. His call sign was a standing joke between the two of them. Cappy was short for captain, because he was always saying that if she ever learned how to fly, they’d put her in a Nova, and make him the captain of their beloved
Freefall
.

Destra smiled at the memory of their time training together on Origin, but this wasn’t training; this was real, and her daughter, Atta, was heading down aboard Drop Ship One. Anything could happen to her, and there wasn’t a thing she could do about it.

The comms crackled. “Tighten up that heading, Drop Two! You’re drifting!” The comm was from Drop Ship One.

Destra snapped out of it and brought the
Freefall
back into line with the glowing green diamond on the surface of Avilon.

“Fallin’ asleep at the wheel again?” Cappy asked.

“You just worry about watching your own screens,” Destra snapped. “Are you sure we’re clear?”

“I’ve got some drone fighters launching from the surface, but nothing close to us yet.”

Destra nodded, gazing down on the shadow-speckled surface of Avilon. The planet’s night side glowed bright with a patchwork of city lights. Something about that seemed wrong to her. “Hey, weren’t we supposed to land on the day side?”

“Good point. Let me check our coordinates on the grid… hold up… what the frek?”

Destra glanced away from her controls for just a second, afraid to let Cappy distract her too much. “What is it?”

“I’ve got some major interference on the grid. There’s a solid wall of it stretching clear from one end of the planet to the other, about thirty thousand klicks behind us.”

Destra shook her head. “Can’t be. Run a diagnostic. Make sure your sensors are working.”

Before Cappy could acknowledge that order, the comms crackled again.

“This is Admiral Therius. Omnius was expecting us, but don’t let that frighten you. We are successfully jamming him, and he is powerless to stop us. Today will be the day that we set humanity free! Your orders stand, and so must you! Stand firm, stand together, and
fight!
”

Destra turned to her copilot, wide-eyed with fear. Omnius had known they were coming. “I have a really bad feeling about this,” she said.

Their drop ship hit Avilon’s atmosphere and it rattled and shook with turbulence. Then the Union fleet commenced bombardment in earnest, and a flurry of long-ranged red and blue dymium beams dazzled their eyes. Further away, Sythian and Gor cruisers opened up with shimmering curtains of lavender-colored pulse lasers.

Fires began blooming in the sea lights below, and Destra watched it all with growing dread. The battle had begun.

She flexed her hands on the flight yoke.
You can do this…

* * *

Clouds raced past Ethan’s canopy in hazy black streaks. The sky gaped open as the clouds parted to reveal the uppermost city of Avilon. Buildings soared from the glowing blue sea of the Celestial Wall all the way up until their glittering spires disappeared into the clouds.

A pair of Rictans raced down beside him, their shields glowing almost as bright a blue as their thrusters trails with the heat of atmospheric entry. Ethan’s Nova buffeted wildly, the air snatching at its fuselage, trying to slow him down. His shields roared deafeningly loud in his ears. They were going in
hot,
at full throttle, to prevent Avilon’s defenses from targeting them.

They couldn’t afford to take any risks. The First Battalion was theirs to escort, and it was the one carrying the Eclipser. That device was the only reason they hadn’t fled at the first sign of Facets in orbit over Avilon. Omnius had sprung a trap for them, but he was the one caught in it. The Icosahedron was dead in space, and had yet to even launch its fighters. Avilon’s defenses were offline, suspiciously silent. The garrisons had been all but wiped out in the initial bombardment, and what few fighters had escaped were scattered and disorganized, being picked off as the Union’s entire fleet roared down on top of them.

Ethan began to feel hopeful about the engagement. At this rate, Therius might not even need the nanites, but Ethan and Atta were prepared. They’d strapped enough real explosives to each of those nanite bombs to vaporize them when they went off.

“SC, we’ve got incoming! Ten o’clock low,” Magnum said.

Ethan checked the grid and saw a group of five drone squadrons racing up to port. “I see them,” he said. “Rictans, switch to Hailfires and light ‘em up!”

Ethan thumbed over to missiles and banked left to bring the drone under his targeting reticle. Red brackets highlighted the enemy fighter on his HUD; then he heard the
beep-beep-beeping
of a target lock. The reticle turned green, and he heard a solid tone. Ethan pulled the trigger two times fast, and a pair of Hailfire missiles jetted out on hot orange contrails, one after the other. They split apart almost immediately, giving eight different warheads for the enemy to shoot at. To either side Ethan saw more Hailfires go streaking out and splitting apart.

Then the enemy opened fire with crimson streams of pulse lasers. Missiles exploded in the near distance, lighting the sky on fire, and then the enemy’s lasers came streaking toward
him.
Ethan jerked the stick in a circle and feathered some rudder to make himself harder to hit. Lasers flashed all around him, missing him by narrow margins.

Then a pair of them struck home, provoking a blinding flash and a hissing roar from his shields. Ethan toggled his own pulse lasers and began strafing the enemy formation at exactly the same moment as the rest of the squadron did. Then the surviving Hailfires reached their targets and the horizon blossomed with fiery reds and golds. Over a dozen targets winked off the grid. The explosions reached Ethan’s ears moments later with muffled
booms.

Victory cries echoed over the comms, and they went rocketing through the fading light of the enemy fighters’ explosions.

“Get on their tails!” Ethan ordered, even as he rolled over and looped under through a Split S maneuver to chase the remaining drones away from the drop ships.

Ethan pulled out of his loop at a lower altitude than before. The drop ships were dead ahead, but so were the drones. The drop ships fired on them with a withering barrage of ripper cannons and pulse lasers. Drones exploded left, right, and center, but they kept on target, strafing the drop ships with fire.

Ethan strafed them back, trying to scare them off before he remembered that they were drones. Death didn’t scare them.

The comms crackled. “Get those fighters off us!”

The remainder of the 1st Battalion’s fighter escort broke away and engaged the enemy at close range. At least six drones fell apart in the first few seconds, but there were easily two dozen left, and Ethan could see that one of the drop ship’s shields were failing. Ethan grimaced and poured a steady stream of fire into his target. He scored a lucky hit and it flew apart in a fiery rain of debris.

Then came a much bigger explosion as the drop ship whose shields were failing flew apart with a blinding flash and a roiling ball of fire. The explosion reached his ears as a titanic
boom,
and then a pelting wave of shrapnel went hissing off his shields. Ethan’s heart seized in his chest.

If that ship had been carrying the Eclipser…

* * *

“I can’t shake them!” Destra shrieked.

“Try!” Cappy roared.

The drop ship’s shields roared furiously at them as continuous streams of enemy fire chased them down to Avilon’s surface.

“I’m trying!” she insisted. Perspiration beaded on Destra’s upper lip and brow as she did everything she could to fight her own ship’s sluggish momentum. Eventually, she managed to push the
Freefall
into a lazy barrel roll.

An alarm sounded from the copilot’s station, interrupting Destra’s concentration. “What was that?”

“Aft shields critical, equalizing…”

Destra fishtailed, as if to literally shake the enemies off.

It wasn’t working. Enemy fire went on roaring at them. Desperate, she keyed the comms. “Drop One, we’re in trouble over here!”

“Hang in there!” Then over an open band Destra heard the pilot of Drop One say, “Get those fighters off us!”

“Shields failing!” Cappy warned.

“Equalize!”

“There’s nothing left to equalize!”

The constant roar of lasers hitting their shields suddenly became a high-pitched shriek as enemy fire burned through to the hull. Then a blinding red light suffused the cockpit.

Bang!
The cockpit depressurized and stole Destra’s breath with a sudden gust of escaping air. Their seat restraints held them down and kept them from being sucked out, too. Destra gasped, her lungs heaving in the thin air. Wind whipped in through the cockpit, wailing past her ears. Then came a gut-wrenching lurch, followed by another
bang!
This time it stole more than just her breath.

It stole everything.

Chapter 38