Eternal Enemy Page 9

Hazan snorted in disgust, and his emotion was so apparent that he even let drop the laser rifle he had been holding at Anders’s chest. The New Eden refugees had been easy to catch up with, as several hundred people could only travel as fast as the slowest—the elderly, the infirm, and the children.

  Thank the stars that the Throne Marines aren’t still after them, Anders thought with a sigh, before flicking a glance at the other group of human scouts who had converged on the interlopers with Hazan, who still did have their laser rifles trained on them.

  “They’ve got one of our own,” Anders said grimly. “You have to appreciate that fact. I have to get him back.”

  Anders saw nervousness flicker through the eyes of the assembled scouts and would-be soldiers. Some of them understood that sort of loyalty.

  “The Marines got your psychic, you mean?” Hazan turned back with a snarl. It was apparent from the scorn in his voice that Hazan didn’t understand that sort of loyalty.

  “Sounds to me like they took him back to where he belongs, with the rest of those freaks and mutants!” Hazan scoffed.

  “Idiot!” hissed an enraged Patch, already pushing past Anders as more of the laser rifles swept up to meet the Void engineer, who was reaching to grab their leader.

  “Patch!” Anders grabbed the Voider’s shoulder just before he could reach Hazan, but the two were locked in a fierce stare that promised violence at any moment.

  “Tell your boy to step back, Commander,” Hazan snarled, earning another growl from Patch in front of him.

  “We came here to help you, you moron!” Patch whispered back furiously. “We’re your only hope of ever breaking out from under the yoke of the Eternal Empress! You want to live underground forever? Running from one hideout to the next? You want your children to grow up like that!?”

  You want to keep your children alive? Anders silently added, thinking of the cosmic evil that was coming for them all. Anders knew that he should tell Patch to calm down again, but he quite agreed with him.

  “We’ve done alright so far!” Hazan snapped, just as another shape pushed through the circle of guards. It was a slightly smaller figure, but she was no less mighty in her fury for it. The two children she clutched to her sides were even smaller.

  “Actually, Hazan, I do want a future for my children! And so would their father, if he was still alive!” Arya said with cold steel in her voice.

  Hazan’s eyes flickered down to Apple and Sven at Arya’s side. Their faces were grimy with soot and the ashes of their home, and their eyes were wide. “Take them away, Arya. This is no place for children.”

  “No?” Arya said defiantly. “You remember their father, Ricardo? You know that he was a brave scout—the bravest! He would be telling you that these children have a right—that we all have a right–to a say in our future. That all that matters is that we survive. Us humans. Together.”

  Hazan’s eyes flickered with some troublesome emotion, and Anders could tell that there was a story here, one about the death of Arya’s partner and those children’s father. Another brave man lost to the uncaring dominance of the Eternal Empress, perhaps…

  “Exactly, Arya.” Hazan held on stubbornly. “Ricardo wanted us to survive. And I’m trying to do that. We get to Granite. We start over. We got some supplies…”

  “And then what, Hazan!?” Arya burst out. “You look at these two children and you tell them what their future is going to be? Is it going to be better? Is it going to get worse for them? Does this golden empress and all her soldiers show any sign of leaving the planet like you said they would? They’ve been here for years, Hazan! They have families out there in Port Helena. They’re not the ones going anywhere! We are!”

  Hazan opened his mouth to say something else that was equally accusatory, but the ex-detective saw his eyes fall on Apple and Sven, and he stammered for a moment.

  “And what if what these people say is true, Hazan?” Arya continued on a quieter, but still desperate, note. “We know that they’ve been doing all sorts of strange things up there at the temple. They’ve got people that can move stuff with their minds. That can kill with their minds. That can do anything…”

  “At least let us try to stop it,” Anders said softly. “Let us try to get our friend back.”

  Hazan glowered, looking from Arya to Anders, Patch, and Dalia. “And I guess you want one of the carts to do it?”

  “We need to get there as soon as possible,” Anders said.

  The chief scout and guard of the human colony, who had clearly taken it upon himself to try and protect his people, hung his head “Fine. Jin?” He nodded to one of the armed scouts. “Take them to the depot. Give them what they need.”

  “Thank you,” Arya breathed in relief, before nodding toward Anders. Get it done, the look said, and Anders nodded back.

  I’ll try, he thought…although he had no idea how.

  The carts of the New Edeners, it turned out, looked like heaps of junk to Anders, but they were treasures to Patch McGuire.

  “Electric propulsion?” he asked, marveling at huge coils of batteries that sat, partly-covered, in the back compartment.

  The scout, Jin, had taken them almost all the way back to New Eden before turning down smaller access tunnels that ran under the surface of the earth—some appearing to even have slabbed floors as if they had once been arcades or streets. Finally, however, they passed a broken-open metal railing and walked down a long flight of stairs illuminated by their suit lights. Jin had led them to a place that smelled of asphalt and grease.

  Some kind of engine yard, Anders had realized, seeing multiple arched hangars containing more of these strange, tubular, and metal-wheeled contraptions, slowly rusting into the gravel beneath.

  A few of these ‘carts,’ however, appeared to have been re-fit by the New Edeners. Their short, almost rounded bodies were built-up with extra plates of metals soldered and bolted onto the sides.

  “Yeah, we’ve electrified a section of the tracks. Or Port Helena has,” Jin said with a rakish smile. He had long, black hair held back in a ponytail and the same mixture of service jackets and outrigger gear that was clearly patched and re-worked. Jin nodded to one side of the engine yard, where large metal boxes on the walls had been broken into, and there were multiple cables snaking in and out, rejoining here and there and affixed to the walls by the New Eden engineers.

  “I think I got it. Just simple forward, brakes, thrust…” Patch was already hovering over the driver’s seat in the open-air forward part of the carriage, looking at the various levers and pulls.

  “Sir!” Moriarty said in Anders’s ear, just as there was a flash of color ahead of them.

  “What was that!?” Jin growled, already unslinging his laser rifle to sight down the front of the train.

  “Moriarty, report,” Anders ordered. It had been a blue flash. The same color as field technology.

  “Intermittent energy readings, sir. Sudden buildup and transference of field-generated energy,” Moriarty confirmed, just as there was another flash, and this one was a lot closer…

  Getting closer, Anders realized. “Patch, I think we need to get moving now!” he said as the flashes continued, getting closer and closer.

  “Initiating movement scans,” Moriarty said. Anders’s screen washed with blue before suddenly isolating something, flying up into the air ahead of them.

  And another thing.

  “Trap drones!” Anders called as Patch pulled on the brake release, and their cart started to move—so slowly—forward.

  The constrained air of the tunnel howled as Patch pushed their cart to move faster and faster, right as there was another blue flash springing up in front of them.

  “Down!” Anders shouted, seeing the spray of gravel the instant that the small device jumped up into the air.

  Trap drones were designed as an install-and-forget system, Anders knew. He had installed them many times himself. They were usually placed in the no-go areas between civilian and Marine bases,
more as a deterrent than anything else. The idea was simple. If a civilian got too nosy about the workings of the Throne Marines, a trap drone would activate automatically as it sensed their movements, and then it would explode.

  It was a simple deterrent, but a deadly one.

  There was a flash of crimson, and a wave of heat rolled over the side of the cart, flaring like the burst of thruster rockets over the edges.

  >>Warning! Suit Impact. Thermal Shielding -10%...

  It was only ten percent, Anders thought, crouching in the footwell beside Dalia and Jin as Patch between them similarly huddled at the foot of the chair, pushing on the thrust pedal with both hands.

  Another crimson light flashed as another trap drone went off, flinging its body at the accelerating cart. The forward cone of the cart erupted with the thwacks of impacting metal bodies and more, always more, flames.

  “Stay down!” Anders shouted. Their Outcast suits could stand up to most of the impacts, couldn’t they?

  But there are so many.

  “How do we know where we’re going!?” Patch cried out.

  “We’re on tracks!” Anders hissed back, guessing what the twin lanes of metal railings on the floor at the bottom of these tunnels were for. They were the points of electrified contact that dragged the heavy metal wheels along, weren’t they?

  “But the tunnels curve, boss!” Patch growled back. “Acceleration. Physics. Laws of Motion!”

  “Ah,” Anders said. The cart gave a jumping wobble on its tracks as if to prove Patch’s point. In answer, the Void engineer quickly popped a head up to see ahead. Anders saw his face blanch just before there was a rolling wave of crimson engulfing Patch’s suit.

  “Patch!” Anders grabbed his shoulder, but he was already falling backward into the metal floor. His visor was smoking and blackened with soot and char.

  “Patch! Can you hear me?” Anders asked, shaking the other man’s shoulders slightly as the cart around them shook from one side to another.

  “Ugh…” The Voider groaned and lifted a thumb before hastily rubbing at the crystal-plate of his visor to reveal a very pink but otherwise healthy face underneath.

  “I’m okay, boss…” Patch said weakly. “More bruised than burned,” he reached up to rub his back where he had been thrown backward.

  Just as the cart shot out around a bend, out of the mined area of the trap drones apparently, and into broad daylight.

  17

  Departures

  Sector 3, Aries

  Group-Captain Rigar of the Red Judges Defense Force—a hastily-convened organization mostly comprised of the mine union workers of the heavy industrial factories on the planet of Aries below—looked at the assembled lights that spread across the heavens of his ochre world and growled.

  It was nighttime for this hemisphere, which was usually the time that Rigar, lately of Fifth Foundry smelting site, liked the most. But he was no longer out there in the hillsides and scree piles that surrounded Fifth Foundry, where he would camp over a synth-ale with a few friends, looking up at the stars of his home, and the satellites that transmitted the daily production quotas back to Imperial 1.

  At least they won’t be getting a jot of our labor, he thought grimly as he looked once again at the moving satellites. Imperial satellites, which were probably as much for spying purposes as they were for trade.

  No, Group-Captain Rigar was nowhere near the mountains of his home. He was instead on Aries 1, the giant spaceport and principle city of the largest of the Red Judge colony worlds. He was in Hephaestus Tower, which up until a few nights ago had been the foothold of imperial bureaucracy on his beloved red world.

  Rigar grinned as he remembered the shocked faces as he and the rest of Fifth Foundry Union had pulled the power to Hephaestus Tower. The Red Judges, with all their technical experience, had proved very good at getting around the throne’s advanced technologies. They had then stormed the doors and walls, easily overpowering the Marines inside with their Red Judge servo-assisted strength suits.

  But now, as he looked up at the lights of the spy satellites and the distant haze of light beyond them, Rigar felt a moment of trepidation.

  You see, the skies over Aries—whichever hemisphere you lived in—did not usually have that hazed ribbon of light across the face of the night. That, Rigar knew from the forward scouts and the information sent by the Proximians and the Secari, was one of the largest massed fleets of the Throne Marines.

  Enough to make a new nebula up there, the man thought glumly. Rumor had it that even more ships were there than the Golden Throne had used to repel the Ilythian and the Mondrauk attacks.

  To crush the Ilythian and Mondrauk fleets, Rigar corrected himself.

  “When are the Secari promising to get here?” he growled over his shoulder as he leaned out over the black-metal balcony of Hephaestus Tower. Behind him, there was a flurry of movement as other Red Judges worked, night and day, to try and coordinate the defense of Aries.

  And not just the defense of our lives, Rigar knew. The Secari and the Proximian fleets were supposed to get there any day now. They had been conducting raids and skirmishes on throne military bases and deep-space depots, but the attacks were too few and disparate.

  Suddenly, the war against the rule of the empress and the Reach of the Throne had centered around them, the Red Judge worlds. Instead of a campaign that could be strategized and planned, the war for independence and its brutal crackdown had suddenly coalesced here.

  Aries was to be the lightning point. The place where all their freedom was either won or lost. Forever.

  “Boss?” It was Carly, one of Rigar’s trusted seconds. She had worked down in the lower pits of Fifth Foundry with him. She had dug her own way out of the collapse of Pit 17, and a few years later, she had been instrumental in going back down into the upper seam when there had been a dangerous gas leak, risking her own life to rescue the work teams trapped there. Rigar trusted her. He trusted her opinion over almost every other.

  “I just got off the communicator with Big Chief H’jchk,” Carly stumbled over the name but persevered. “He says they’ve got a Pillar-of-Empire at Seca Prime, and that is tying up at least half his forces…”

  “What!?” Rigar growled. He was angry and frustrated, but he knew that perhaps he should have been expecting something like this. Just one of the largest of the battle-platforms of the throne could dominate an entire colony world, and the Secari chief would understandably try to protect his home.

  But we need to fight together! He balled his metal-clad fists over the railing and felt the metal start to squeal as it protested and bent under the immense pressure.

  “And the Proximians?” Rigar said, his tone a little harsh—not that Carly seemed to mind.

  “Brigadier General Fiennes has said that he can spare twenty-five of their New Dawn re-fitted attack vessels…”

  “Great.” Rigar rolled his eyes. He knew what that phrase ‘re-fitted attack vessel’ meant. It meant the mercenary ships and the merchant tugs that the Proximians had been secretly outfitting and armoring for years. They were good against civilian-world and merchant ships, but as a client world, the Proximians were not allowed any official military of their own by order of the Eternal Empress.

  “Because Proxima has been attacked,” Carly continued.

  “How bad?” Rigar half-turned this time.

  “Well…” Carly shook her head behind him. “Fiennes says he doesn’t know. But the chatter on the data-net is that it’s bad. Real bad.”

  “They’ve been attacked before.” Rigar turned back to view the new constellation of throne ships far above. “They’ve suffered the empress’s wrath. They survived,” he said. That had always been one of the things that he admired about the would-be republicans of Proxima. Every couple of generations, they tried again, no matter how many trade embargoes or ports were attacked, or political and guerilla leaders executed by the Throne.

  “Well…” Carly’s tone was, for the first
time ever, hesitant. “One report is saying that half of Proxima is burning, sir.”

  Rigar blinked. He knew that wasn’t a poetic turn of phrase. Carly didn’t go in for poetry. If she said that half of Proxima was aflame, then that probably meant that it was.

  The group-captain of the newly-minted Red Judge Defense Force had turned back to Carly, so he didn’t see the change in the skies behind him. But he saw the change in Carly’s eyes as they flickered past his shoulder. First, she frowned in confusion...but then they widened in fear…

  “What is it!?” Rigar turned back to the bent railing, and as soon as he was facing that direction, he felt the wave of nausea and horror rise up from his guts.

  It was somehow coming from the stars above.

  The haze of light that had stretched across the nighttime skies of Aries like a new galactic nebula had changed. It had become disrupted, with an expanding, shredding hole appearing in its center, revealing nothing but blackness behind it.

  “What’s happening?” he asked, but Carly didn’t have the answer. “Sensors!” he called out, flinging a gloved hand before him to activate his personal data-field and allow the long-range scanners of the Aries port to transmit images of what they picked up.

  Rigar’s stomach was churning, and he felt his heart quicken, but he didn’t know why. He wasn’t a man usually prone to anxiety, but this tremor he was feeling was unavoidable. And it seemed to be getting worse.

  The images in his field showed the sudden, bright vectors of a hundred thousand throne military vessels—many, many fighter craft and their supporting dropships and transporters…

  But they were all peeling away from something, firing field and traditional positioning thrusters as they desperately sought to get out of the way of each other and of whatever was pushing through them…

  Is it the Secari? The Proximians? For the briefest of moments, Rigar had the wild hope that he was looking at some new attack by his allies.