Worlds at War (A Captain's Crucible Book 5) Read online

  “Get down here, T2!” Rade said.

  He aimed at one of the super-suits, which was bounding extremely fast up the slope toward the retreating members of T2.

  Now we see if our chief scientist’s modifications work, Rade thought.

  He squeezed the trigger.

  The super-suit collapsed.

  “T2, when you get to the bottom, assume cover,” Rade said. “We’re going to continue the retreat in traveling overwatch.”

  The torso of Unit E disintegrated on the way down; when Units D and F made it to the bottom, Rade assigned C to T2 then departed with T1 while the second fire team covered them.

  As he ran, Rade set his rifle to autonomous mode and held it behind him to shoot down tangos on its own. Helium and the robots in T1 did likewise.

  After about a hundred meters Rade and the others dove behind a bulge in the rock face to provide proper covering fire for the remaining three robots. “T2, advance!” He was panting loudly from the effort of running in the heavy artificial gravity.

  The three robots got up, but the moment they left cover they were disintegrated.

  Damn it.

  “Run,” one of the remaining two Centurions said. “I’ll cover you.”

  “Thank you,” Rade said. “Good luck!”

  The members of T1 resumed the retreat, keeping their rifles pointed behind them in autonomous mode so that they could continue firing at the enemy while on the run.

  They reached the city proper and swerved into a side alleyway between two triangular buildings. Rade kept an eye on the distant overhead during the detour, worried about an attack from above.

  With a minute and a half to spare before warhead detonation, the three of them arrived at the hatch to the hangar bay.

  Rade wasn’t quite sure how to use the spherical device he had taken from Vance. He lifted it slightly from its position on his harness and directed it toward the door.

  The hatch opened.

  Rade glanced at Helium, then rushed inside. The super-suits remained unoccupied behind their glass pods on the far bulkhead. The shuttle still stood untouched on the deck in the center of the bay. Up until that moment, Rade hadn’t actually been sure it would still be there, as his Implant hadn’t been able to connect to the Dragonfly with that alien hatch closed. He guessed Vance had stowed another of those sphere devices somewhere aboard to protect it.

  “Open her up!” Rade ordered the Dragonfly. He was still gasping for breath from the exertion.

  The down ramp lowered and the haggard trio rushed inside.

  “Take us into the exit tunnel!” Rade told the autonomous pilot.

  “Aye aye, Chief,” the Dragonfly’s AI replied.

  The ramp sealed and the deck hummed as the engines powered on. From his seat, Rade was able to see the cockpit glass, and he watched as the shuttle steered into the exit tunnel.

  Up ahead, the sealed hatch blocked the way.

  “What would you like me to do about the door, Chief?” the AI asked.

  He was about to say, “blow it away,” but the hatch spiraled open automatically to allow egress as the shuttle grew closer.

  “Never mind,” the AI said.

  Rade felt the artificial gravity lift, and a moment later the craft broke free of the Elder vessel.

  “Take us home,” Rade ordered. He had gotten his breathing somewhat under control by then, though he still respired in soft gasps.

  The Dragonfly set a course for the Callaway.

  Rade accessed the shuttle’s external rear camera, expecting super-suits to emerge and pursue at any second. He glanced at the countdown. It had just reached zero.

  If there were any pursuers that had been about to exit, that detonating nuke would have thrown them into disarray. Rade could see no evidence of the explosion on the outside of the ship, but he had no doubt that the internal damage must have been devastating, at least to that portion of the massive vessel. That, combined with the planet killer damage, couldn’t have made for a very good day among the alien crew.

  Rade remained on edge as the shuttle continued to gain distance, and it was only when the Dragonfly was two hundred kilometers away that he allowed himself to relax somewhat.

  He had a terrible stomach ache, and he felt lightheaded. Both could be attributed to adrenaline hangover, that and the weightlessness of space. He also had a throbbing headache.

  But he relished all of those sensations, because he was alive. He reflected, as he often did after combat wound down, on how close to death he had come in the past few minutes.

  “We gotta stop going on life-and-death missions like these,” Helium said.

  Those words tickled something inside of Rade, because he began to laugh. And it was no ordinary laugh, either, but rather a loud, uproarious guffaw.

  Helium gave him a curious look, but then he too burst out in crazy laughter, unable to control himself.

  “Humans are an odd bunch,” the surviving Centurion, Unit B, observed.

  “We are indeed,” Rade said between tears of joy. “Odder than you’ll ever know.”

  ZHIDAO HAD FLED the body of the Artificial before the Twisted One drew it in. Then Zhidao had raced, unnoticed in the darkness of the cave, along the floor after the fleeing landing party. While the humans and robots had been forced to retreat in a circuitous manner from the opening, Zhidao had taken a more direct route, flowing toward the bottom of the gorge and then to the city proper. The Phant had reached the hangar bay two full minutes ahead of the party, and easily seeped through the hatch into the bay beyond.

  Once there, Zhidao had clung to the hull unnoticed underneath the Dragonfly. When Rade Galaal and the others had finally taken the shuttle away from the domain of the Twisted Ones, they did not know that they harbored a secret passenger just below.

  Zhidao would have smiled if it had lips.

  And so I have won, in the end. The artifact of the Twisted Ones is mine. The time of my brethren has nearly come.

  Zhidao would have to get a new Artificial body when back aboard the Callaway of course. Zhidao had already instructed Maxwell to prepare for that particular occurrence.

  Yes, Zhidao would have smiled from ear to ear.

  twenty-three

  Jonathan sat in his office, reviewing the repair reports for the ships under his command. His mind wandered, and he thought back to what had happened over the past few hours.

  The first order of business after routing the mothership was to clean up the twenty scavengers in high orbit. The fleet utilized a series of hit-and-runs: concentrating their Viper fire during the different flybys, and using nukes to eliminate any incoming disintegration and fragmentation bombs. The Raakarr employed their particle beams to sweep up any bombs that got through. The strategy was great on digital paper, but it didn’t work quite so well in reality. The fleet was forced to give up its attack plan after destroying only ten of the scavengers, because more simply arose from the surface to replace them, and the allies were losing too many ships in return.

  Jonathan had ordered the fleet to abandon Earth. None of the scavengers followed them.

  With the damage the planet killers had caused to the Elder ship, the interference the Möbius strip vessel produced ended, and communications with Earth and the other planets were restored. Jonathan briefed NAVCENT on the situation, informing the senior command of everything that had happened from Raakarr-2 all the way back to the return trip to Earth. NAVCENT in turn explained that no reinforcements were coming as far as they knew, considering that the system was still cut off from the InterGalNet. Jonathan and his fleet were all that was standing between the Elder and Earth.

  When Jonathan asked about the radiation contamination caused by the exploded planet killers, NAVCENT responded that it was tolerable, and that cleanup efforts were ongoing in the affected hemisphere. When he inquired about the scavenger vessels that had descended onto the planet, NAVCENT confirmed that they were indeed gathering raw materials: the senior command promised that po
tential strategies were being developed to deal with them. In the meantime, NAVCENT tasked Jonathan with taking the fleet to Jupiter and eliminating the threat posed by the Elder once and for all, by whatever means necessary. They told him that Admiral Zang had agreed to obey Jonathan’s orders, and that the captain was effectively in command of the entire combined fleet.

  Jonathan thanked the senior command and ended communications. He had the battle group set a course for Jupiter.

  Piloted by Chief Galaal, the rogue Dragonfly had returned unmolested to the fleet shortly thereafter. Apparently the MOTHs had successfully placed the nuke and detonated the warhead before leaving the Elder vessel. It hadn’t appeared to cause any obvious damage. Apparently the SCS operative Vance succumbed during the mission, which was probably for the best.

  During the debriefing, Chief Galaal had revealed his encounter with what he believed to be an Elder itself. He also produced some sort of alien artifact that he had taken from the Elder ship at the behest of Vance. Unfortunately, no one knew what that artifact did. As the fleet departed Earth, Jonathan asked the different governments if their intelligence agencies knew anything about the stolen object or Vance. No one claimed to know a thing. Jonathan sent the man’s photo and profile down for the different agencies to research, and they promised to get back to him if they found anything. In the meantime, Jonathan had placed the artifact in the hands of Harv. So far, the lieutenant wasn’t able to make heads or tails of it.

  Jonathan dismissed the repair reports and studied the tactical display. Six red dots proceeded toward the gas giant a day ahead of the fleet. These dots represented the Elder mothership and the five scavenger ships escorting her. The remaining scavengers that had departed Earth had long since docked with the Möbius strip vessel, and scans indicated the craft had been fully incorporated into the damaged hull. Some sort of repairs were definitely taking place.

  A notification appeared on Jonathan’s aReal. The second watch comm officer was calling from the bridge.

  “What is it?” Jonathan asked when the officer connected.

  “The SCS got a facial hit on the photo of Vance you sent,” the officer said. “Apparently, it belonged to a model of Artificial.”

  “An Artificial?” Jonathan asked. That matched with what Rade had revealed about Vance.

  “That’s right. The X51-A model. An outdated variant first put into production over seventy years ago. The entries for that model were mysteriously wiped from the SCS cloud storage, and the analyst only found it because of an overlooked article on the X51-A that was cited in the InterGalNet history archive.”

  “Interesting,” Jonathan said. Someone certainly wanted to ensure that no one ever found out the real identity of the Artificial. “Thank you for the news, Lieutenant. Though it doesn’t really tell us any more about what this Vance character hoped to achieve, nor who the Artificial was actually working for.”

  “No,” the comm officer agreed. “But the SCS promises to keep us in the loop if anything further is discovered.”

  Jonathan doubted the SCS would find anything else. It was obvious Vance didn’t work for them, but for some other clandestine government agency that was even blacker. Jonathan doubted he would ever know the truth. “Is there anything else, Lieutenant?”

  “Yes, in fact,” the comm officer said. “Barrick wants to talk to you about the prisoner we captured.”

  Lieutenant Commander Wolf had successfully captured one of the humanoids with his modified Avenger. The transfer shuttle had continually stunned the humanoid with psi-blasts all the way back to the ship, and after landing aboard and pressurizing the hangar, a specialized crew of MA robots had cut the humanoid out of the super-suit. Another MA injected a sedative—Connie had previously prepared the full genome map of the humanoids, and had determined they were ninety-nine percent human, with DNA basically equivalent to that of Neanderthals. Unsurprisingly, normal sedatives worked, and the being was knocked unconscious.

  They had carried the captive to Connie’s makeshift lab in cargo bay seven, where a psi-shielded work area had been arranged in the form of a large tent. The humanoid was clamped in to a bed inside the tent and allowed to awaken. So far it hadn’t attempted communication, but that could be because all the technicians in the lab wore psi-shielded spacesuits. Connie wanted to enter the tent unshielded, but so far Jonathan had refused her, not wanting to lose any members of his crew. He was well aware the effects a powerful telepath could have on the human mind.

  “Tap him in,” Jonathan told the comm officer.

  As he waited for the telepath to connect, he thought of what else had transpired in the wake of the fighter battle led by Lieutenant Commander Wolf out there. The mission had been somewhat of an experiment, but because of the success the Avengers had had against the super-suits, Jonathan had given the order for the fleet to modify the Cobras aboard Avengers fleet-wide, under the direction of Lieutenant Connie Myers. The hope was that by the time those super-suits engaged again, the enemy would face an entire fleet of modified Avengers ready to take them down.

  “Hello Captain,” Barrick transmitted voice-only from the Raptor.

  “What can I do for you?” Jonathan asked.

  “I hear you’ve captured a certain telepathic prisoner?” Barrick replied.

  “We have,” Jonathan said. “I suppose you have some advice for interrogating him.”

  “My psychic tolerance is high,” Barrick said. “And I’d certainly volunteer to interrogate him, except—”

  “Except we’ll never allow you aboard,” Jonathan finished for him.

  “That is correct,” Barrick conceded. “There is one other person with a high psychic tolerance on your ship, however.”

  “Let me guess,” Jonathan said. “Me.”

  There was no way he was going to step into that tent in cargo bay seven unshielded, no matter what Barrick told him.

  “I was thinking of Bridgette...” Barrick said.

  Jonathan was quiet for several moments. “Ah.”

  “Yes,” Barrick said. “When the humanoid tries to form a link with Commander Cray’s wife, she will be able to receive it, while simultaneously fending off any mind attacks. I’m sure she related the story to you about how she had me attempt the psychic termination of her pregnancy, and my resultant failure? Trust me when I tell you: she’s the only one aboard who can safely communicate with that being.”

  “I’ll consider it,” Jonathan said. “Though communication with the captured humanoid is not a high priority right now.”

  “It should be,” Barrick said ominously. “In fact, if you want to win this, communicating with that humanoid could be key.” The telepath tapped out.

  What the hell does he know?

  Jonathan called Robert to his office.

  After the commander had settled himself, Jonathan imparted what the telepath had shared with him.

  “So what do you think?” Jonathan said. “Do you feel comfortable allowing Bridgette unshielded into cargo bay seven?”

  Robert shook his head. “That lying sack of shit. He’s got a thing for harming my wife, I tell you. I won’t allow her to participate. She’s been through enough. Get anyone else to do it, but her. Hell, I’ll do it.”

  “She did endure Barrick’s psi attack when she was aboard the Raakarr vessel,” Jonathan said. “She told us herself during the debriefing.”

  “How do we know Barrick didn’t fake the whole thing?” Robert said.

  Jonathan considered his words carefully. “Barrick tells me he can see the future. In the past, he has hinted at events that have come to pass, so at the moment, I’m inclined to believe him. If he says Bridgette is the best choice to interrogate the humanoid, then she probably is.”

  Robert shook his head. “I won’t allow it.”

  “I’d like to ask Bridgette directly,” Jonathan said. “The fate of the fleet, and the entire human race, could be at stake.”

  Anger flared in Robert’s eyes, but then he sat back a
nd folded his arms. “You’re the captain.”

  “I won’t order her to do it if she doesn’t want to,” Jonathan said. “But she’s a strong woman, Robert. I believe she can do this. Let me talk to her.”

  Robert hesitated. Then: “You should know, there’s a specific reason why I arranged for Eugene to berth with us. And it’s not just because I wanted the child close.”

  “What are you talking about?” Jonathan said.

  “Go visit Bridgette,” Robert said. “And you’ll find out for yourself.”

  twenty-four

  Jonathan made his way toward the commander’s quarters. When he reached the door, he used his aReal to alert the occupants. According to Maxwell, she had no visitors and was alone with her child Eugene.

  The hatch abruptly opened and Bridgette barged out. Before Jonathan knew what was happening, the hatch had slammed shut behind her.

  “Why hello Jonathan!” Bridgette said anxiously. “To what do I owe this pleasant surprise?”

  She only reached up to Jonathan’s chest in height. Her deep blue eyes always seemed at odds with her dark hair, which framed her face in straight tresses that day. She had the cutest button nose, and the most flawless skin of any woman he knew. Then again, he could see the start of crow’s feet stamping the outside of her eyes and smile lines that weren’t there two years ago. She hadn’t lost her pregnancy weight, which was probably a good thing, considering he had always felt she was a little too thin in the past.

  For a moment he found himself reminded of the woman he had abandoned on the mountaintop. It was the porcelain skin that did it, and the nose, and the too-blue eyes.

  His gaze drifted suspiciously to the sealed hatch. “Can we talk inside?”

  “Oh no.” Bridgette smiled nervously. “Out here is just fine. The place is a mess.”

  Jonathan pursed his lips. “Maxwell, open the hatch to Robert and Bridgette Cray’s stateroom.”

  The hatch slid aside.

  “Jonathan, please don’t!” Bridgette grabbed at his arm.

  The pleading in her voice stopped him. He stared into the quarters. “Why does it look like you’ve got some kind of tent filling up most of the space in your berthing area?”