Legions of Orion (Star Crusades Nexus, Book 1) (21 page)

Spartan looked about
the room until spotting his two cases that had been brought along.
One was very small, no bigger than one man could carry in a single
hand. The second was much larger. He stepped closer and examined it
carefully. Jack watched him as he walked around the large shape,
easily as big as a bathtub.

“What is it?” he asked.

Spartan
ign
ored his question and continued
checking it. He finally stopped in front of the long edge and
entered a code, followed by a thumb scan. The top hissed open
gently, and Spartan leaned over to look inside. Jack walked over
and gazed inside its darkened interior. It was heavily padded and
included small boxes and a battered looking but well maintained
coil weapon; standard Alliance Marine issue from what he could
tell. There were a few changed to the sights, but underneath it was
standard gear. What really caught his eye was the armoured personal
protection suit. It was the body armour worn by all marine units
and provided a sealed system with protection against most small
arms.

“
You brought your
old M
arine armour with you?” asked Jack
in surprise.

“
No, this is
second-hand ASOG gear that I bought at auction. It’s had a tough
life, but all works perfectly well.”

He pointed to the end of the room where
another crate stood up against the wall.

“What’s that?” asked Jack.

Spartan grinned at him in a way only an
old warrior could.

“That’s your armour.”

The Zealots took their initial
teachings from the
Church of Echidna, but
where did the technological and military support come from? Most
assumed that the destruction of the Rift at Hyperion also marked
their destruction, but the reality was far more complex.
Information retrieved from the ruins pointed to the Stars and to
Orion. While the small number of Zealots continued to preach
against the citizens of the Alliance, it became clear that without
their support infrastructure, they were too weak and separated to
continue more than a token resistance.

Origins of the Zealots

Agent Stefan Hammacher paced in front of
his prisoner and then slammed his fists down onto the table. The
man wore nothing but his issued overalls and dripped with sweat. It
was a small room, with no windows and a single secured door at one
side. Just two chairs and a table were all that broke the monotony
of the space.

“Your brothers are dead,
and
your only friend in the world is your lady
companion from the Beagle.”

He noticed a faint glimmer of
recognition on his face. It had taken some serious investigative
work on behalf of the Intelligence community
,
but they had finally linked the attempted thefts
on Epsilon Eridani
,
and now
Prometh
e
us, to the attempted sabotage on
ANS Beagle. By all accounts the group was small, no more than a
dozen people, possibly less. They weren’t even related to the
Zealots or any other religious faction. No, these people were all
linked by just one thing, a connection to Hyperion seventeen years
earlier.

Stefan knelt down to the side of the
man so that his face was the same level.

“
She’s already
offered to give up the rest of your cell. All she wants is
confirmation that we have stopped exploratory work in Orion, which
we have.”

The man lifted his eyes slightly,
instantly betraying doubt or interest in what Stefan was telling
him.

“
The coordinates
used were a complete waste of time, so our efforts are being
redoubled elsewhere. So the question is, why are you attacking the
Alliance?”

The man looked up to
him.
“It doesn’t matter. You’ll reach
her, and then we’ll pay, all of us.”

Stefan stood back up
and sighed. It was the same answer, over and over.

“Who exactly do you think we’ll
reach?”

The man looked
directly into his eyes, and Stefan knew immediately that it was
fear he was staring directly into. He’d seen this look before, but
only in the most dire of situations; when a parent knew their child
was about to die, the moments before a car crash or the reliving of
something as awful as a violent rape. It was the instinctive
reaction of sheer terror and remembered past ordeals that he’d seen
a few times before.

“
Echidna!” he
hissed.
“She is real, and she is coming.
It doesn’t matter where you point spacebridges. Eventually, you
will make it easy for her. She wants to come back, and you are all
making it happen.”

Stefan stood up and
walked to the door. It was his fifth visit to the man, and so far
he’d established no more than the Alliance interrogators had. As he
approached the door, it hissed open to a dark corridor. A guard in
black clothing and armed with a cut down coil carbine watched him
leave. A few metres along the corridor were a number of blackened
glass doors. He entered the first and moved into a larger room that
contained a number of video displays and two senior
agents.

“Anything?” asked the first.

Stefan shook his
head.
“No change.”

He
w
alked up to the first screen and moved
his hand in front of it to select Director Johnson. It connected
but placed him in a holding queue. As he waited, he looked over to
the two men.

“
How about you?
A
nything yet on the Euryale
Cell?”

The first man looked
back at his screen, but the second, a tall bald man with rounded
glasses, nodded.

“
Not much, but it is
something to go on. They were tracked entering a datacentre in one
of the research labs. Our agents stopped them but let them escape,
so we could continue tracking them. Guess what we
found?”

Stefan lifted an eyebrow
inquisitively.

“
This,”
s
aid the agent, and he tapped a button to
bring up a video feed. It showed the group of men moving to a
parked groundcar. They opened the back and climbed inside. The
camera zoomed in and managed to get a detailed view of the interior
before it closed shut.

“
What am I looking
at?” he asked, unimpressed.

“
The box
on the bed of the car, Sir. We ran it through
the system, and it matches the gear found two decades ago. Best we
can tell it’s one of those artificial intelligence
hubs.”

Stefan looked surprised.

“
You mean the
half-electronic, half-
biological control
units that we recovered in the Uprising? I thought they were all
captured or destroyed?”

The bald man nodded.

“
Apparently not,
w
e have their vehicle bugged, and it’s
being tracked. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

A gentle tone from
the display behind him reminded him the link to the Director was
going through. He turned back to see the face of Director Johnson
waiting patiently.

“Sir, the prisoner has confirmed the
attacks are definitely a response to our exploration outside of our
system. He believes by doing this we are inviting Echidna to attack
us.”

There was a short
delay as the signal was routed through the Rift to the Director who
was now back on Terra Nova. Normally, it would have taken months
for such a signal to work, but with the new Interstellar Network,
trade and communications had been made almost
instantaneous.

“
I see. And by
Echidna, we assume he is referring to some kind of Biomech
leadership.”

“
Either that, or he
thinks we have a God on our doorstep that wants
payback.”

Again there was a short delay before
the grimfaced Director spoke again.

“
The question is,
which one is worst? I’ve passed the latest intelligence up through
to the committee.”

* * *

The dark grey hulk of ANS Devastation
dwarfed the group of frigates as she rotated about in space, prior
to reversing her engines. Like many vessels, she made use of her
main engines as the means of both acceleration and deceleration.
Few people outside of the Navy understood how ships covered wide
distances in the time that they did. When not in a rush, a ship set
its course, accelerated to its cruising speed and then coasted to
the target. When near the destination, the engines would be used
again to slow the craft down to avoid it sailing past the end
point. This ship needed to travel much faster than that and had
been accelerating at maximum power for half of the trip. By moving
at 9.8 m/s
²
, the ship would actually create the
equivalent of Earth’s gravity. The internal gravity generators were
forced to counter this movement to avoid subjecting the crew to
multiple forces. Devastation was equipped like all of ships in her
class with substantial numbers of point defence turrets. The ship
was the first of the Crusader Class to be equipped with a number of
new technologies developed on Prometheus. The most significant of
these was the modification of the bow to use new weapons system.
All her railgun batteries had been stripped out and replaced with
experimental direct-energy particle beam technology, adopted from
the enemy ships in the Uprising. The most obvious distinction was
that two large emitters were now visibly protruding from her
bow.

Inside her thickly armoured hull waited
the men and women of the embarked
m
arine
unit
,
as well as Spartan’s APS Team. For
most
,
this was their first actual combat
landing
,
but for Spartan and his people
it was something they’d done dozens, probably scores of times.

“
Jack, you landed
with m
arines before?” asked Khan
loudly.

A number of the
younger m
arines turned to listen in on
the conversation, but Jack seemed unfazed by all the interest. The
young man shook his head and looked down to his carbine to check it
one last time.

Both he and Spartan
wore the advanced PDS suits that his father had brought along. They
were camouflaged in a mottled digital pattern that the APS
Corporation had been working on
, along
with Alliance development teams. Stood next to them were the half a
dozen Jötnar, and each of them using the crude looking and heavy
armour. The look betrayed the complexity of the structure; the
ability to absorb all but the heaviest of weapon impacts. Even the
Jötnar’s helmets were now completely sealed so that the creatures
looked more like robotic ogres then living, breathing
people.

“
Don’t worry, they
aren’t all as useless as you might have heard!” said
Khan
, followed by a great roar of
laughter from the other Jötnar. One marine, a private with a
spotless suit, moved towards them but was called back by his
sergeant.

The landing bay of
ANS Devastation was completely different to any previous Alliance
starship. With the development of rudimentary artificial
gravity
, it was possible to land shuttles
and craft onto the deck without having to transfer people from
rotating section, and thereby clearing up internal space. The aft
of the ship included a single deck with additional storage above
and below for more craft. There were currently four armoured
shuttles waiting to be loaded. Each was designed to carry a full
twelve-man marine squad, and a number of marines were already
filing inside the first. The shape of General Rivers and two Marine
Guards appeared from the main access door and entered the deck. All
those present saluted at his approach but not Spartan and his team.
He stopped in the middle and called out with his booming
voice.

“
There has been a
change of plan. Commodore Lewis confirms he has extracted Colonel
Daniels and his platoon from the surface. The wounded are being
taken care of while he sends down more marines to recce the area.
His men have already found two entrances to a derelict structure of
some type. Check your suits’ internal secpads, and you’ll see it
resembles a spaceport of some kind, but most of it is now
buried.”

The General stopped
and spoke to a nearby deck chief who rushed off and started
barking
orders at a group of Navy
crewmen. It took only a few seconds for them to start dragging
equipment from one of the many stowage areas. Spartan recognised a
helmet being pulled out. He’d last seen it worn by the General in
the middle of hand-to-hand combat.

The old
fool, he’s coming with us!
Either there’s trouble, or he thinks it’s too important to
leave to green recruits, maybe a bit of both?
He wondered.

“
Commodore Lewis
already has two platoons on the surface, checking the remains for
intel or technology. In the last hours, he’s prepared another nine
shuttles of marines, that’s a full combat company of your comrades.
We will be joining them to enter the facility. We have no idea what
we might face down there, so check your gear, weapons and armour
and keep this by the numbers. I don’t want to lose a single marine
on this rock, understood?”

“
Yes
, General!” came back the
chorus of marine voices.

The marines returned
to their preparation while the Deck Chief and his team arrived with
the General’s old equipment. One of his guards helped him into the
main suit
, and he waved over to Spartan
and his team.