The Siege of Earth (The Ember War Saga Book 7) (8 page)

“Crimson has release!”

“Gold has release!”

“Slate…damage…dead stick. I repeat dead—”
The lieutenant’s words ended in a wash of static.

“Damn it. Egan, do you have vis on Slate’s pod?”

A scarlet beam stabbed through the hull and gouged a line through the deck just inches from Hale’s feet. The drop pod’s electricity cut out, plunging the team into near darkness. Light from Egan’s cockpit wobbled across the pod as it lost control.

“I’ve lost engines,” Egan said. “I blow the ejection seats or we’re all dead.”

“Do it!” Hale shouted.

“Brace!” Egan opened a yellow and black panel and grabbed the neon-green handle within.

Hale pressed his head against the back of his seat and grabbed his chest restraints. There was a flash as explosive charges blew his seat out of the drop pod. Hale tumbled over and over, catching alternating glimpses of the icy plains of Pluto and the
Breitenfeld
and her task force locked in a knife fight with Xaros ships.

He grabbed release pins on each of his shoulder restraints and pulled. One came free, but the other slipped out of his grasp. The left half of his body sprang away from the seat, jamming his right arm against the harness. Centrifugal force pulled his free arm away. He strained to reach the other pin, but even his pseudo-muscles in his power armor couldn’t overcome the force of his mad spin through Pluto’s thin atmosphere.

Hale jerked his right shoulder and found some wiggle room. He jerked again and came free of the chair. He kept rolling end over end, the thin layer of nitrogen and methane over the dwarf planet’s surface doing nothing to buffer his fall. He keyed the thrusters in his boots every time he saw Pluto’s surface and twisted his body to plunge headfirst once his tumble eased.

Hale looked around. Gauss point defense batteries across the
Breitenfeld
and her task force ripped through the void. Rounds flashed as they hit drones or raked across the sides of Xaros construct ships.

Burning streaks descended across Pluto’s brief horizon. Hale didn’t know if they were disintegrating drones or dying fighter craft. He looked to the surface and saw a puff of ice and snow as something impacted against a glacier.

“Here goes,” he swung his feet to the surface and fired the thrusters attached to his boots. He felt his stomach sink and blood rush from his head as g-forces played across his body. As he tried to gauge his descent with how hard he was about to hit Pluto, he wished he’d had a few more days to rehearse this emergency landing.

Hale hit like a falling dart. Ice shattered and a fine layer of dust and snow covered his visor. Hale felt pressure against his entire body, but no pain. He raised an arm, shifting daggers of broken ice the size of his hands across his helmet. He wiped his visor clear and saw the still-raging void battle high above.

He pushed himself onto his knees and felt for the plasma rifle on his back. He breathed a sigh of relief when his hand closed around the handle. He looked around. Low mounds of rolling ice stretched across much of the horizon, but the Norgay Montes were to his north.

Another Marine landed ahead of him. Hale pressed off the ice, taking long, loping strides through the gravity barely a twentieth of Earth’s. He kept an eye to the sky, aware that his gray armor made him an easy target against the pale white ice.

He leapt over a lump of ice the size of a bus and found Egan struggling out of his impact crater.

“Everyone got clear of the pod,” Egan said. “This was
not
how we were supposed to get down here.”

“What about the other teams? Did they make it down in one piece?”

“No idea. I was too busy trying to fly a falling stone, then trying to do the descent math in my head before my ejection seat could kill me.” Egan drew his rifle. “Blast must have fried the seat’s thrusters. Damn lowest bidder.”

“Sir!” Standish and Yarrow waved to them from the edge of the depression. “We’ve got a beacon from the landing zone. At least one team is where they’re supposed to be.”

“Thank God for small favors,” Hale said. “Any sign of Cortaro or Bailey?”

Yarrow touched the side of his helmet and nodded.

“I’ve got line of sight and IR to them both. Cortaro is not happy with us standing out in the open,” Yarrow said.

“Let’s get moving.” Hale bounded up the hill.

The Marines formed into a wedge formation and ran toward the beacon, picking up Cortaro and Bailey on the way.

“Just so everyone knows,” Standish said, “there’s a master release button in the center of the Y-harness.”

“Why are you telling us this now, Standish?” Egan asked.

“Oh, no reason.”

Hale didn’t have to look at Standish to know he was winking at him.

****

Hale crested a hill made of ice and stone and saw a round mineshaft big enough to swallow a Destrier transport in the side of a cliff.

He keyed his IR. “This is Roughneck 6. Anyone copy?”

“6, Crimson leader, I’ve got you. We’re just inside the opening. Plenty of room for you,” Lieutenant Jacobs said. “Mind the drop pod. We’ve got it under camo twenty-five meters from the entrance.”

“Roger, inbound.” Hale made for the opening, his team behind him. He got to the shaft and jumped over the outer edge. The shaft wall looked like the surface of the ocean—perfectly still waves a few inches high descending into a deep abyss.

Five Marines from Crimson huddled against the edge of the shaft, their attention on the horizon. A black body bag lay off to the side.

“Xaros hit Fredericks,” Jacobs said. “His armor stopped most of the beam, but it cracked his suit. He suffocated before we even hit the surface.” Her gaze stuck on the dead Marine.

“What’s the status on your equipment? Any other casualties?” Hale asked.

Jacobs didn’t answer.

Hale grabbed her by the shoulder and turned her to face him.

“Look at me and focus,” he said. “Fredericks is gone. You can’t do anything about that now. Mission. Lead your Marines that are still alive.”

“Right, sir, sorry. Pod came down intact. We got all the special equipment out. No one else is hurt,” she said.

“What about the other pods? Gold is supposed to meet us here. You hear from Mathias or Bronx from landing zone bravo?”

“I saw…I saw one drop pod explode. I don’t know which,” she said.

Ice gripped Hale’s heart at the news. An entire team of trained and ready strike Marines—his Marines—gone in an instant, gone before they could even get into the fight. And there was a fair chance Steuben was on that doomed pod. No matter the gamut of emotions running through Hale’s mind, he was the company commander. They still had a mission to accomplish.

Hale looked at Cortaro. “Get an IR relay set up. We’re heading down as soon as it’s set up.”

A flash of light broke across the sky. One of the frigates slumped out of the formation around the
Breitenfeld
, its engines sputtering. It nosed down and corkscrewed toward the planet’s surface. The ship crashed into a distant mountain face, the sound of a muted explosion echoing through the wisp-thin atmosphere.

“They’re breaking through! Look!” Jacobs pointed to the
Breitenfeld
as the ship unloaded a broadside on a Xaros cruiser and blew it into burning fragments. The strike carrier and her escorts sprang through the gap in the Xaros lines.

The
Breitenfeld
’s guns slewed around and fired. Quadrium shells burst to life, tendrils of electricity leapfrogging through the Xaros ships. The stricken enemy vessels went off-line.

Hale thought Captain Valdar would have kept his guns on the Xaros as they slowly succumbed to Pluto’s gravity. Instead, the
Breitenfeld
and her surviving escorts sped away on burning engines. They vanished over the horizon within seconds.

“Where are they going?” Jacobs asked.

“I don’t know, but Valdar must have a plan,” Hale said. He looked at Egan and said, “Can we still contact them?”

“Not unless they left buoys, sir.” Egan took a sheet of optic camouflage from the case and unfurled it over a small satellite dish propped up on the lip of the tunnel. He poked the antenna through a small hole. “But when they’re back in line of sight, we’ll have comms.”

“Maybe he’s scrubbed the mission,” Jacobs said. “Should we wait here?”

“The
Breitenfeld
doesn’t give up, lieutenant. This fight is far from over. Get your Marines up and ready.” Hale turned and looked down the mineshaft that extended deep into the abyss. “We’re going in.”

****

Hale marched through the tunnel, relying on his visor’s IR filters to see anything. The tunnel entrance was a faint dot behind them. The two teams of Marines moved in stacked wedges, Crimson squad in the lead.

There’d been no word from the teams with Steuben from landing zone bravo. Steuben and the Marines with him knew the mission; they’d follow him through the tunnel once they found it. If they were still alive. The longer Hale went without any contact from them, the more certain he became that they were lost.

Should have ordered the drop pod release sooner,
he thought.
No, I should have gone with the low-orbit, low-opening jump instead of the pods
.
Would have been safe in the
Breit
until Durand cleared out the drones. Some company commander I’m turning out to be.

Cortaro raised a fist, bringing the teams to a halt. He knelt down next to a sparkling lump of material jutting from the wavy ground.

“Sir,” Cortaro said, “look at this.”

Hale motioned for Crimson squad to continue on while his team stayed put. Taking long steps in the weak gravity, he got to Cortaro’s side.

“What is it?”

“This…” Cortaro cocked his fist to the side twice and a Ka-Bar blade sprang out of its forearm housing. He poked the tip into the twinkling material and knocked a bit free. He scraped up the material with the edge of his blade and brought it up to his visor. “This is quadrium ore. My cousin Emmanuel worked for Ibarra Mining, was going to get me a job there when I hit my twenty years of service and retired. He told me about a drone survey of Pluto from years and years ago. Said the ice out here has a hell of a lot more quadrium than Earth’s oceans or Europa.”

“If this is so valuable, why didn’t Ibarra mine it out before the Xaros ever arrived?” Hale asked.

“Look around, sir. We’re pretty damn deep. Quadrium wasn’t worth much before the war, and it would cost a fortune to get this far under the surface. Plus, the Chinese had a research station out here. They weren’t real open to non-Chinese mining interests on anything they’d planted their flag on.”

“We brought back that omnium reactor from Anthalas,” Yarrow said. “That made all the q-shells we’d ever need. Why would Ibarra muck around in the ass end of the solar system?”

“Better question is why are the Xaros digging for quadrium, if that’s even why they’re down here,” Hale said.

“Sir…” Jacobs bounded over. “We found something weird a little farther ahead.”

“The perfect tunnel dug through the surface isn’t weird enough?” Standish asked.

Hale pointed a finger at Standish and the Marine stopped talking.

“Show me,” Hale said.

He followed Jacobs down the tunnel another hundred yards until it ended against a marble-smooth wall of rock. Silicate crystals glinted beneath the polished surface. Quadrium ore dust hung around them, swirling in thick eddies as the Marine officers approached the wall.

“Not this,” Jacobs said, pointing to the edge of the tunnel. An arched hole in the tunnel twice the size of a Marine opened to a tunnel with rough rock walls. Jacobs went to the hole and picked up a pebble in each hand. She reached over the threshold to the tunnel and dropped both pebbles. The rock inside the passageway fell significantly faster than the rock released in the tunnel.

A Marine ran around a corner and stopped at the edge of the doorway. His visor was up, face exposed. His mouth moved, but Hale heard nothing.

Jacobs tapped her helmet.

The Marine lowered his visor.

“Sorry, ma’am, forgot you’re in vacuum. Atmo in here is at sea-level pressure, Earth standard gravity mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide in the air. Temp’s good too,” he said.

“Just like the Crucible,” Standish said. “Void one side of a wall, atmo on the other.”

“Got eyes on enemy troops,”
came through the IR from one of the Crimson Marines.

“How many drones?” Hale stepped over the threshold and felt weight return to his body. He stumbled against the rough-hewn wall, scraping his pauldrons against the rock.

“This way, sir,” the Marines said. “We set up an observation post.”

“Not drones, Captain
.
Humanoid. Working on some kind of a truck.”

“Moving.” Hale looked back and saw Egan setting up an IR receiver at the passage entrance. The more times they changed direction in the mines, the harder it would be to keep comms with the
Breitenfeld
.