The Siege of Earth (The Ember War Saga Book 7) (27 page)

“I believe you suffered some hearing damage.” Steuben waved Yarrow over.

“Are you saying something?” Hale looked back to the crumbling walker. Two armor soldiers jumped over the construct, firing wildly behind them. A tear of light so bad it stung Hale’s eyes came around a mountain spur.

Blinding light filled the gun port. Hale felt a tug on his shoulder and his feet lifted away from the floor.

He was falling. His eyes were flash blind, his ears still ringing, but his arms and legs swinging about without purchase convinced him he was falling. His body slammed against something and a vice grip closed around him.

“Steuben? Cortaro?” He fell against the ground and shook his head to clear it.

Hale’s eyes recovered enough to see a pair of giants standing over him. He fought to stand on wobbly legs. They were inside the mountain’s main entrance, a mess of broken stone blocked the way to Phoenix. The rest of the hangar was empty but for broken machinery.

Steuben helped steady Hale.

“What happened?” Hale asked.

“The Xaros leader was about to fire on us,” Steuben said. “I took immediate action to save our lives.”

“Did you…did you
jump
off the mountain?”

“I did. The chance that I could cushion our fall with my grav-liners or that Elias would catch us seemed better than trying to stop a disintegration ray with my face,” Steuben said. “I did not anticipate there being so many rocks coming down at the same time as us.”

“Thank me later.” Elias’ hand retracted into the forearm housing and a crystalline blade with gold filigree came out. An aegis shield unfolded from his other arm. “Hope you two are up for a fight. This is as far as we go.”

“I’ll lower the blast door,” Bodel said.

“Fight what?” Hale asked. An electric hum filled the hangar. The hair on the back of Hale’s neck stood up as talons made of coherent light stabbed through the rocks blocking the exit.

The General tore his way into the hangar. The ground blistered and ignited into small fires beneath his feet. The Xaros Master pointed to the faceplate hanging from Elias’ chest.

+YOU+

Hale screamed in pain and fell as the word pounded through his head.

****

The General’s word hit Elias like a spike through his mind. He backpedaled a step, fighting to focus. The Xaros Master was a wash of blazing light and heat through his optics.

Elias bashed the fist of his shield arm against his chest.

“Come on then.” Elias held his blade in a high guard and charged. He slashed at the General and hit nothing but superheated air as the General jinxed aside in a flash of light. Elias ducked behind his shield and caught an energy blast against the aegis armor that knocked him off his feet.

Bodel leveled his cannon at the General and let loose on full automatic fire. Rounds exploded harmlessly a yard away from the General. The recoil pulled Bodel’s shots up and to the side…and to the chain holding up the aegis blast door. Gauss rounds shattered the chain, sending the blast door down with a crash.

Bodel let out a war cry and charged, unsheathing his blade in a vicious slash to the General’s neck.

The General caught Bodel’s sword arm and slammed a punch against Bodel’s shield. The Iron Heart flew back, bouncing off the floor like a stone across water. Bodel’s arm, torn clean out of the socket, remained in the General’s grip. The arm melted like wax against an inferno. The sword clattered to the ground.

An ammo case behind the General burst open. Ar’ri rushed out and lunged at the General with his sword. The tip cut across the General’s hip, opening a gash across the chain-mail layer. Blue light burst from the wound.

The General slid aside and raised an arm overhead, the fingers turning to a scythe of hard light. He slashed at Ar’ri, who got his shield up and blocked the blow before it could slice him in half. The scythe bit into the edge of the shield…and stuck.

The General whipped around, slinging Ar’ri against the blast doors with a crash.

Caas burst out from a maintenance hatch and stabbed the General in the back of an arm. She twisted the blade and the General’s arm fell limp against his side. The Xaros spun around and sent a blazing fist at her head.

Caas swayed back. The General extended a hooked finger and ripped out the optics on her helm as his hand passed. Caas’ hands went to her helm and she stumbled back.

There was a roar and Elias punched the pointed corner of his shield into the General’s face, denting the faceplate. He arched his sword up and caught the General across the chest, cutting through a plate of red armor. Blue light shone out of the wound.

Elias brought his sword down for a return stroke. The General brought his arm up and the blade bounced off a force field coming off the General’s armor. The Xaros’ injured arm reknit and a blast of light slammed into Elias’ hip, knocking him into the air.

Elias fell onto his back and skidded across the floor with a screech of metal. He brought his shield up and blocked the General’s foot as it rammed down against his chest. The shield glowed red hot as intense heat coursed through the aegis, melting it from the inside out.

“Elias, hold on!” Hale yelled. The Marine had got to his feet, blood running from his ears and nose. He ripped an antiarmor grenade from his belt, twisted it twice and hurled it at the General.

The General didn’t bother to react, confident in his kinetic shield until the grenade exploded and shot a lance of molted copper through his chest. The General floated back, one hand covering the wound.

He looked at Hale and his eyes flashed beneath the facemask.

“Ghul’Thul’Ghul!” Steuben ran at the General and buried his heirloom blade into the General’s thigh. The intense heat from the General’s being poured into the weapon and exploded in Steuben’s face.

The General built up a ball of energy in his hand and punched toward Hale.

Caas rammed her shield into the General’s fist. She looked at the General through the view port on her armor, hate in her eyes as she took the brunt of the General’s blast against her shield.

Caas angled the shield to the side and slipped into the General’s guard. She slammed her helm against the General’s face and stabbed up. Her blade pierced just beneath the General’s breastplate and came out just beneath his shoulder.

The General bashed her aside and rose into the air, one hand covering the wound. He backed into the aegis blast doors and tried to meld through…and bounced off. The General whirled around and pounded at the door, ripping at the aegis plate with long claws as he tried to find an escape.

Elias picked up Bodel’s blade and hurled it at the General.

The blade burst through the General’s breastplate. He arched back and a wail filled the air. The General fell slowly to the ground.

Elias reached up and took the General by the neck. The Iron Heart’s fingers burst into flames and fused together as he slammed the Master to the ground. Elias rammed his blade into the General’s chest, pinning him to the ground.

“Let your end be in pain,” Elias growled. “Let your end be in failure. This is for her. For us all!” Elias slammed his open hand down on the General’s head and ripped it off. Elias held the severed head up and looked into the General’s eyes as the light faded away.

Blue ooze poured out of the open neck and vanished in a cloud of steam. The General’s armor went limp and collapsed against itself.

Elias tossed the General’s empty mask and mail helmet away and fell onto his knees.

“Iron Hearts…who needs help…” Elias fell to his elbows.

Bodel, half-buried beneath a wrecked lifter, held up his remaining thumb.

“Ar’ri is unconscious,” Caas said from her brother’s side, “but he’s stable.” She shifted her body around to look at Steuben, who lay motionless on the ground.

“Steuben?” Hale got to the Karigole’s side and rolled him to his back. Steuben’s right hand was a mangled mass of blackened flesh, and a sliver of his blade was embedded in his face from the top of his right eye socket down across his jaw.

Steuben looked at Hale and gave the Marine a pat on the side of his head.

“Good fight,” Steuben said.

Valdar got out of his command chair and walked slowly across the bridge. There, in the skies high above Sri Lanka and barely visible from his ship’s position high over the Pacific, a Xaros construct unlike any other he’d ever seen grew larger as more and more drones melded together.

The drones formed into a stretched pyramid, the tip pointing at the Earth.

“Ibarra, what is that?”

“Not…not something we’ve seen before,” Ibarra said from a small screen on Valdar’s faceplate. “The probe’s picking up an impossible amount of energy in that thing. If the math is right…this new construct could cut through the Earth’s crust and into the center of the planet. It’ll heat up the planet’s core. Drive the continental plates apart, volcanic eruptions everywhere. Worldwide devastation. This is impossible. The Xaros don’t destroy worlds—ever!”

“I’ll trust my lying eyes.” Valdar snapped his head toward Geller. “Set a collision course. Full burn.”

Geller nodded quickly.

“Valdar, the
Vorpal
will join you,” Captain Go’ral said. “We will not let our final colony die before us.
Gott mit uns.
”

“Thank you, Go’ral. Ibarra, can the Naroosha and Ruhaald get their ships to Earth in time to help?”

“The Xaros will fire in…minutes, ten at the least. It’ll take an hour for anything with firepower to get from the Crucible to you,” Ibarra said.

“Minutes?” Valdar watched as the pyramid’s surface glowed red. “We’re not going to make it,”

****

On the dark side of the moon, drones zipped across the surface as they raced to join the construct forming over India. Light from their stalks danced over the glass ocean scarring the Tsiolkovskiy crater and miles beyond its rim.

In the small circle where Torni had devastated the Xaros swarm, the ground shifted.

An arm burst through the blackened ground. Long, skeletal fingers clawed the vacuum then slammed into the ground. Torni pulled herself out of the hasty grave the explosion made for her. Her body was a mess of heat-warped shell and gaps across her surface, resembling some horrific creature made from sea coral more than a human being.

+Join. Combine!+ The call was overwhelming, stronger than any urge she’d ever felt. The drone gestalt pulled her away from the moon and on the same path as the drones flying overhead.

+Together. Together.+ Torni grabbed a hunk of rock as big as her arm and transmuted it into omnium. The glowing material flowed down her arm, restoring it to her human form like a healing salve. She took in more of the dark rock and made herself whole.

She morphed into her drone form and took to the sky, falling in with a pack of drones.

The demands of the gestalt lessened as she came around the horizon and saw the Earth. Drones fed themselves into a growing mass. Data from the drones assaulted her mind like her head was inside a beehive.

Beneath all the noise, a still small voice remained.

What’s happening…where am I going?
Torni thought.

The drone mass shifted, transforming into a jagged spike pointed at the Earth’s surface. The tip opened like a blooming flower and the spark of a disintegration beam lit up in the center.

We’re going to…burn through.
The image of the beam burning through the Earth’s crust and into the mantle came to her: the Earth’s core superheating and breaking the planet apart.

The fleet…impressions of human and other defenders came to her, all too weak and too spread out to have a hope of stopping the planet killer. She saw the
Breitenfeld,
her hull scarred, weapons broken, yet still attacking the Xaros without mercy as they went to join the construct. The words she’d put against the hull in gold lettering,
Gott Mit Uns
, shown in the sunlight.

Torni flew into the construct, her limbs melding with other drones as they added themselves to the weapon. More drones piled on top of her and she felt the entirety of the Xaros mass through the gestalt.

Deep inside her mind, she felt an itch. The kill command she’d received and carried since Malal’s vault scratched at the back of her consciousness.

Will they know? If only…if only I could have seen Standish one last time.

Torni didn’t fight the kill command, didn’t banish it away to the back of her mind like every other time before. She let it course through her…and into the rest of the drones. The command, designed to prevent the capture of a Xaros drone, was a fundamental piece of the drones’ programming, written by the Xaros Master who designed them. The kill order overrode the General’s last decree and the beam forming at the construct’s tip faded away.

Torni felt a gentle warmth spread through her, then the sensation of pins and needles as her body began to burn away. The gestalt that had been hammering her mind faded away as the drones went off-line, leaving their bodies to disintegrate.

A ring of burning embers erupted from Torni and flashed through the construct. The spike broke apart and fell into the atmosphere. The Xaros became a rain of fire that would have covered all of Sri Lanka had any of their remains made it to the surface.

The last of the Xaros siege dissipated in the monsoon winds.

****

Valdar watched the Xaros pyramid crumble away.

“Why?” he asked, the word hanging heavy over the bridge. “Why would it just…die?”

“No one’s complaining, Captain,” Ericcson said.

“Ibarra?” An error message popped up on Valdar’s visor. He keyed the channel back to the Crucible and tried to hail the command center again. No response. He tried to open a new channel to Gor’al on the
Vorpal,
and got nothing.

“Comms, were the antennae arrays damaged?” Valdar asked.

“Negative, sir…looks like there’s some kind of IR interference going through the atmosphere,” the comms officer said.

A whine filled Valdar’s earbud.

“This is Prefect Ordona of the Naroosha. The Crucible is ours. All Earth ships will take their weapons off-line immediately and set anchor in orbit around your larger moon. Noncompliance will be met with deadly force. Noncompliance will be punished with the nuclear destruction of a human settlement every twenty-two minutes, beginning with…Phoenix.”

Valdar snapped to his feet. He went to Geller’s station and saw the camera feed of the Crucible. The Naroosha and Ruhaald ships surrounded the jump gate. Shuttles from the silver vessels descended on the command center where the probe and Ibarra had taken up residence.

Broken human warships drifted away from the jump gate, bleeding atmosphere from wrecked tanks and trailing bodies. Valdar had left a small contingent behind to guard the Crucible…and they were gone, destroyed by the Ruhaald and Naroosha.

“They stabbed us in the back,” Valdar said.

“The human fleet over the fourth planet will not leave orbit. Noncompliance will be met with deadly force. No human ship will travel between worlds. Noncompliance will be met with deadly force. You have ten minutes to obey.”

Valdar felt the gaze of every man and woman on the bridge fall on him.

“Sir, what do we do?” Ericcson asked.

There were fewer than twenty warships still able to fight, all damaged and crewed by exhausted sailors. Even with the
Vorpal,
Valdar knew he didn’t stand a chance against the newly arrived “allies.”

“Get our fighters back aboard and get us into lunar orbit,” Valdar said evenly.

“We’re giving up?” Utrecht asked.

“No!” Valdar slammed a fist against Geller’s chair. “This isn’t over, you all understand me? I will be damned if we surrender to these bastards, but this isn’t the time to fight. Not yet.”

Valdar turned his eyes to the Crucible.

Ibarra, you crafty bastard, you’d better have something up your sleeve.