Blood of Heroes (The Ember War Saga Book 3) (2 page)

Shells tore off the drone’s stalks and smashed into the back of its body, sending it tumbling through space like a flipped coin. Durand lined up a burst and blew it to pieces.

“Splash one!” she announced.

“Is it me, or are they faster than usual?” Kyle, a new transfer to her squadron, asked.

“Got one on me!” came over the IR, the voice reedy with fear.

Durand’s comms flooded with terse warnings and announcements. She craned her neck around, looking for her next target or a fighter in distress. Ruby beams snapped through space and a fireball erupted.

Durand cursed and accelerated toward the explosion.

“Kyle gone, no ejection seat,” Hornsby said. Durand saw his fighter closing on the drone that had killed Kyle. Durand arced her fighter toward the drone, waiting for the range to engage.

The drone’s stalks shifted to its rear as it jinked around Hornsby’s shots. The stalks converged to two points, both gleaming with energy.

“Hornsby, break off!”

“I’ve got him.” His voice shook in tune with his firing cannon.

“I said—”

The pursued drone fired twin energy beams. Hornsby banked his fighter and dodged the first beam, but the second cut straight through his cockpit.

Hatred flared through Durand as she fired her cannon. Rounds fanned through space and knocked a chunk out of the drone. She sped straight for her target and put a burst dead center, blowing it into neat halves that burnt away within seconds.

“Nag, Glue, status,” Durand said to her remaining pilots. She risked a glance at her display panel and saw a red X crossed through a pilot in Ma’s flight. Cittern, he’d been with Durand since the first day she’d set foot aboard the
Breitenfeld
.

“I’m fine,” Glue said. “Filly took a shot through her canopy. Her commo’s down but she isn’t hurt.”

“Gall, this is Glue. Last of the drones are destroyed. We need search and rescue for Hornsby?”

Durand brought her fighter parallel to Hornsby’s Eagle as it tumbled through space. There was a gash through his cockpit, and all that remained of Hornsby was an empty flight suit, rent from shoulder to waist and dark within. Xaros disintegration beams annihilated flesh, leaving nothing but a red mist when they connected with anything alive. 

“Negative, Glue. Mark his ship for recovery once this fight is over,” Durand said.

“Gall, this is
Breitenfeld
actual.” Valdar’s priority transmission cut off Ma’s response.

“This is Gall. Six Xaros drones destroyed,” she said.

“Gall, we’re in contact with the Dotok ship. You need to target the escape pods from the compromised Dotok ships,” Valdar said.

“You want me to
what
?” Escape pods and life boats were sacrosanct, never to be fired upon. Even in the darkest days of the Second Pacific War and the decades of skirmishes that followed, neither the Chinese nor the Atlantic Union had ever knowingly attacked a life pod adrift in the void or sea.

“You heard me. There are three inbound to the
Breitenfeld
. Those are your priority targets. Valdar out.”

Durand shook her head and caught sight of three escape pods burning through the atmosphere toward her ship. She glanced up at the friendly Dotok ship, still in a life-and-death struggle with attacking drones.

“Glue, you get that?” Durand asked.

“I monitored.”

“Get your flight to the Dotok ship and lend them a hand. When that ship is in the clear, take out any escape pods within range. Glue, signal to Filly to follow you. We need to get her back to the
Breit
anyway. Let’s go.”

As Durand dove toward the
Breitenfeld
, she glanced over her shoulder and saw Glue and Nag following. She turned back to her ship and did a double take. On her starboard side the sky was alight with escape pods burning through the atmosphere like flaming comets. There must have been hundreds already within the planet’s atmosphere, converging on a deep, jagged canyon that cut across the surface like Valles Marineris on Mars.

“There’s so many,” Ma said. “There’s no way we can reach them by the time they’ve made landfall.”

“Worry about what we can see, touch and kill, Glue,” Durand said. The three pods streaking toward the
Breitenfeld
descended in a line, one already dangerously close to the ship. Glowing tracer rounds from the
Breitenfeld
’s point defense batteries rose toward the nearest pod.

Durand gunned her engines and accelerated toward the trailing pod.

“
Breitenfeld
, cease fire on point defense. Those bullets become real indiscriminate once they leave the barrel,” Durand said. She trained her Gatling cannon on the pod, a bare gunmetal teardrop shape, its heat shield already glowing from friction with the thin atmosphere. She had the shot—it was a sitting duck compared to the Xaros drones—but she hesitated.

“Please let this be the right thing to do.
Gott mit uns.
” She pulled the trigger and the escape pod tumbled like a bird killed mid-flight. Durand shot past the target, a tear in her eye. She found the next pod … and saw the
Breitenfeld’s
massive rail cannons slew up.

“Brace!” Durand’s warning went out a split second before the strike carrier’s main batteries blasted shells past her. Even in the wisp-thin atmosphere, the crack of the shells shattering the sound barrier and the turbulence from the shells’ passage assaulted Durand like she was in the heart of a thunderstorm.

She shook her head to try and clear a tinnitus whine from her ears and pulled her fighter out of a spin.

“A little warning next time,
Breitenfeld
?” Durand sent over the open channel. She saw the closest escape pod, its retro-thrusters flaring like miniature suns as it neared the ship. “One of the pods is … landing?
Breit,
a pod is landing on the upper hull between the rail batteries. I don’t think we can reach it in time.”

“I can get it,” Choi Ma, call sign Nag, said. “You get the other one.” Glue’s Eagle broke off and made a beeline for the
Breitenfeld.

“Got it,” Durand rolled her fighter until she found the other pod. She banked away and set an intercept course. She twisted around and saw Glue taking careful shots at her target. Her cannon shells peppered the pod while the missed shots continued on and struck against the
Breitenfeld’s
hull.

“Try not shooting our own ship, Glue. That sound reasonable?” Durand asked.

Glue answered in Chinese, her tone full of frustration as she overtook the pod and roared past the ship’s bridge. The damaged pod wobbled as the retro-thrusters cut out and it fell into gravity’s clutch. The pod slammed into the ship and embedded within the hull.

Durand winced and turned her attention back to the last pod. She powered up the rail gun that ran the length of her fighter and angled her shot to avoid the
Breitenfeld.
The rail gun robbed her of momentum and as it fired, it thrust her against her restraints. The rail shot blew the pod out of the sky. She skirted the edge of the burning debris field and brought her fighter back toward the ship.

“Breitenfeld
, you going to tell me why it’s so important to destroy these life pods?” Durand asked.

A shadow crossed over her cockpit. She looked up and saw a dark shape falling toward her. It slammed against her fighter and then tumbled toward the planet like a sailor with a ball and chain sinking into the ocean.

Claws raked against her canopy, leaving deep cuts as they tore across. A face straight from her nightmares leered at her. Abyss-black armor plates protruded from pasty white flesh, and bright yellow eyes trembled with rage as the thing opened its mouth. Fangs and black tongue gave way to a banshee’s scream.

It jammed its claws into her canopy and pulled a clenched fist over its head. Sunlight glinted off smooth armor plates as its scream continued.

Durand slammed her fighter into a barrel roll. The creature held on for two complete rolls before it lost its grip and centrifugal force flung it away. The planet and space spun around as she fought out of her spin. She managed to right her ship and pulled up toward the void.

Her breath came in short, terrified gasps as her heart pounded in her ears.

“
Breit—Breitenfeld
, I don’t know what that was. But I think they’re on our ship.”

Lieutenant Ken Hale charged down the passageway. As a Marine, he was normally pretty easy to distinguish amongst the ship’s complement. His armored bulk and the gauss rifle in his hands set him apart from the ship’s naval ratings in their void suits as he ran past them. That he was running
toward
whatever the sailors were running
from
marked him out as part of the ship’s defense force. He ran just ahead of the rest of the Marines, marking him out as their leader.

Sailors pressed against the bulkheads to make way for the Marines. A sailor stumbled around a corner, her left arm missing from the elbow down, blood gushing out with each heartbeat.

Hale raised his rifle and sidestepped the corner. He knelt against the bulkhead and pulled the stumbling sailor to the deck.

“Yarrow, stabilize her,” Hale said.

“On it, sir.” The medic knelt beside the sailor, pulled tubes from a thick gauntlet on his left forearm and jabbed them into ports on the sailor’s neck armor. The sailor mumbled and tried to squirm away from Yarrow, a spray of blood staining Hale’s armor. The medic unceremoniously set a knee against her sternum and held her flat. He whipped a cone-shaped bandage from a pack on the small of his back and pressed it against her bleeding stump. The bandage tightened around the wound, darkening as it filled with blood.

“Hush, sailor. You’re getting the good stuff,” Yarrow said.

Sergeant Torni stabbed a knife hand at a pair of unharmed sailors watching the ordeal. “You and you! Take her to med bay!” she barked.

The sailors nodded emphatically and carried the wounded sailor away.

A banshee’s scream echoed through the passageway.

“I guess we’re going that way, aren’t we?” Standish said. The Marine squeezed his rifle butt against his shoulder and crouched slightly.

“Correct. The better question is why we’re still standing here,” said Steuben, the alien Karigole advisor, from the back of the squad of Marines.

“The XO said something about an update,” Hale said, “but I’m not getting anything from her now.”

A thunderclap rocked the ship and the deck lurched beneath their feet.

“That was the forward rail battery,” Orozco said. The gauss carbine in his enormous hands looked like a toy compared to the heavy cannon he normally carried. Firing projectile weapons was dangerous enough on the ship, and given the weight of firepower his preferred weapon carried, it would have been more dangerous to the crew and ship than any enemy they encountered. “Why didn’t the other battery fire?”

Another high-pitched scream echoed down the passageway.

“You get three guesses, and the first two don’t count,” Bailey said, emphasizing her words with a snap of chewing gum. The squad’s sniper had traded her normal weapon in for a carbine that she held against her chest.

“We’re going to the rail battery one. Follow me,” Hale said. He stood and ran down the passageway.

Natural light streamed through ragged gaps in the hull over their heads. Hale felt the chill of freezing air creep into his suit. He knew he should’ve stopped and set his armor for void combat to compensate for the thin atmosphere, but that would take time that he—and the
Breitenfeld
—didn’t have.

A sailor ran around a corner at a T-junction and tripped himself up as he tried to change directions. He slammed against the bulkhead and looked down the passageway he’d come from.

“No! No!” The sailor raised his hands in front of his face. Something flew through the air and slammed into the sailor, crushing him with the snap of bone and armor.

Hale skidded to a stop and raised his rifle. The dead sailor was entwined with … another sailor, both bloody and broken. The deck vibrated against his feet as heavy footsteps pounded down the passageway.

“Ready a Q-round,” Hale said. The quadrium rounds could disable the Xaros drones for a few precious seconds, enough to get close and finish them off. Hale heard Standish power up his gauss rifle and load one of the precious munitions into his weapon. “Steuben, hammer?”

“I have it.” The Karigole pulled a handle with a thick cylinder attached to the end, a pneumatic bolt that could crack the Xaros drones and destroy them.

“If you have to use a high-powered shot, go single—”

The pace of heavy footsteps increased and what came around the corner wasn’t a Xaros drone. A hunched-over, armored behemoth with gangly arms that ended in sharp claws tinged red with blood swung toward the Marines. Its arms swept wide, gouging the bulkhead. Its face, an armored wedge with two slits for yellow eyes and exposed flesh around its mouth embedded atop a bull neck, leered at the Marines. Its jaw distended and it shrieked loud enough to activate the sound dampers in Hale’s helmet.

“Standish,” Hale said.

Standish fired his Q-round with a flash of silver from his muzzle. The round thumped into the creature’s chest and electricity arced from the impact. The monster took a step back and thrashed its arms against its body. Its claws pried the Q-round from its chest and hurled it against the deck. It looked at Standish and growled.

“At least I managed to piss it off,” Standish said.

The monster charged, looping strides that would reach the Marines in seconds. Hale switched his rifle to
SHOT
and sent a burst of pellets the size of marbles into the monster. The rounds hit and stopped it dead in its tracks. Gauss fire from the rest of his Marines punctured its armor, splattering gray blood against the deck and bulkhead. It fell to its knees and reached for Hale, the arm stretched out, the claws scything toward Hale’s face.

A strong hand grabbed the carry handle on the back of Hale’s armor and jerked him back, the claw tips missing his visor by a hairsbreadth. Hale felt his feet leave the deck as Steuben tossed him back like a rag doll. The Karigole stepped forward and swung his hammer into the monster’s forehead.

The pneumatic bolt cracked the skull and drove a six-inch spike into whatever brain matter lay beneath the obsidian armor. The monster collapsed against the deck, its limbs twitching.

“This works just fine,” Steuben said. He wrenched the spike free and tapped the hammer against his thigh to knock away clinging viscera.

Hale scrambled to his feet and aimed his weapon at the fallen creature.

“What the hell is it? Some new kind of Xaros?” Bailey asked.

“It isn’t disintegrating.” Torni kicked the creature’s arm, her armored boot clanging against the armored limb.

“Howled like a damn banshee,” Orozco said. “Low-power shots didn’t do much to stop it. We go high power and that should take them down faster.”

“We miss with a high-power shot and the round will go through three decks before it stops,” Hale said. “Shoot those banshee things in the face until they stop moving. That work for everyone?”

“Sir, you’re my kind of Marine,” Bailey said.

Another banshee howl set Hale’s nerves on edge. “That’s coming from the rail battery,” Hale said. He opened a channel to the bridge as they ran down the corridor.

“XO, this is Hale. The boarders are not Xaros. I repeat,
not
Xaros. Q-rounds are ineffective but they will go down to massed fire. Pass that on to the other defense teams,” Hale said.

“Hale, we need you in rail battery one ASAP. We need that gun back in the fight and we’ve lost communications with them,”
Ericcson said through his helmet’s IR.

“Almost there. What about video? Can you see what’s in there?” Hale asked. He stopped at a corner and glanced down the passageway leading to the main entrance of the battery. The double doors were shut, warning lights spinning above the frame. Blood stained the manual locking handles on each door.

“Video is down too,”
Ericcson said.

Hale looked at the entrance controls embedded in the bulkhead as smoke wafted up from the panel and the reek of ozone mixed with the iron tang of spilled blood.

“Torni, can you bypass the damage?” Hale asked his head enlisted Marine. Once the squad’s tech expert, she’d stepped up to fill Gunnery Cortaro’s position after he’d lost a leg on Anthalas.

Torni flipped a panel up and shook her head at the mess of burnt-out circuits. “No chance. Someone fragged the whole system, sir. Looks like we either blow down the doors or open it the slow and painful way,” she said, nodding toward the dogs, the circular handle in the middle of each door. She looked up at the thin strip of lighting where the ceiling met the doors; the strip flickered twice every few seconds. “Extra slow, something tripped the emergency locks.”

“Blow the doors in,” Hale said.

“That’ll kill whoever’s still in there,” Orozco said.

“Orozco, Steuben, on the doors. Our suits should be strong enough to overpower the locks. Open them just enough to get us in,” Hale said. He stepped back, took a knee and readied his weapon. The Marine and the Karigole grabbed the dogs and twisted, the pseudo-muscles built into their armor laboring against the emergency brakes.

The doors cracked open slowly, revealing darkness within the rail gun battery. Twenty sailors manned the cannons, but the space beyond was silent. Hale switched on his infrared filter to look through the six-inch and widening gap and saw a pair of sailors lying on the deck in pools of blood.

“Frag it?” Bailey asked. She slipped a grenade off her armor and hooked a finger around the pin.

“Not yet, there might be—stop!” A blood-caked gloved hand slid into view at the edge of the doors.

“I’ve got him.” Yarrow stepped forward and reached for the hand, just as a clawed hand snapped out of the darkness and clamped onto Yarrow’s shoulder. The banshee snatched Yarrow off his feet and pulled him to the door. Yarrow managed to get his hands up and slammed them against the doorframe, his augmented strength barely able to match the banshee.

The banshee’s face thumped against the opening, teeth snapping at Yarrow.

“Shoot it! Shoot it!” Yarrow screamed.

Hale felt like his feet were stuck in wet concrete as he struggled forward. He brought his rifle up, but Yarrow’s body blocked his shot. Trembling with exertion, Yarrow was losing the battle against the monster’s grip, its claws digging into his armor.

With one hand, Steuben reached out and slapped Yarrow’s right arm from the door. With the other, the Karigole brought his short sword down and hacked into the banshee’s wrist. The blade embedded with a wet
thunk
. The banshee’s howl changed and it let Yarrow go. The banshee jerked its hand back and the blade went with it. The hilt and flat of the weapon slammed into the sides of the open door, jamming the banshee’s hand in the opening. The arm reached toward the Marines and slammed back against the door, like a wolf struggling against a trap.

The third strike broke the blade. Pieces clattered to the deck as the banshee’s footfalls echoed away from the door, its screams fading away.

Yarrow rolled onto his hands and knees and scrambled away from the open door.

“Anyone else not like these things?” Standish asked.

“Where’d it go?” Torni asked.

Orozco stuck his carbine into the opening. “Looks like it went down the ammo elevator…blood trail goes that way at least.” The Spaniard beamed the footage from the camera on his carbine to Hale.

“Get the doors open enough for us to get through,” Hale said. “It went to the armory and we have to go after it.” He flipped open the control panel on his gauntlet and sent commands to seal the armory.

“Can we bring in some backup?” Standish asked. “Maybe Elias and his armored super-friends? Bet they’d
love
something like this.”

“They’re all in their travel coffins. By the time they get here it’ll be too late. What’s in armory bay three, Standish?” Hale asked.

“A bunch of inert kinetic rounds for the rail cannons … and that giant omnium reactor we found on Anthalas.” Standish ran over to the dogs and helped Orozco twist it open. The doors lurched open another few inches and Hale saw the elevator platform to the armory, the plating ripped aside like it was made of tissue paper. He tried to open a channel to the XO, which stayed open for a second before cutting out.

Yarrow grabbed the dog Steuben was on. The medic glanced at the broken blade and then at Steuben, he alien’s mouth twisted in a snarl as he worked.

“Hey, thanks for saving me and not cutting my arm off to do it,” Yarrow said.

Steuben grunted and managed to move the door another half inch.

“You are welcome, young one,” Steuben said. “I believe Gunnery Sergeant Cortaro is still angry over the loss of his leg, or suffering some manner of post-traumatic stress. Corpsman Yarrow, what is a
pendejo
?”

“Ugh,” Yarrow said. “Sorry about your sword.”

“Lafayette will fix it,” Steuben muttered.

“We’re good,” Bailey announced and squeezed through the opening. Orozco shook his head at the slight woman, and the barrel-chested Marine opened the doors wider.

Bailey peeked down the exposed shaft. “Blood trail goes all the way down,” she said to Hale.

Hale joined her at the edge. The twenty-foot descent ended on the armory deck. Gray smears of blood against the exposed machinery of the lift.