Blood of Heroes (The Ember War Saga Book 3) (6 page)

“Correct. Confirmed by the behavior files Bastion’s AI encrypted into her data transfer,” the probe said. “Let her find bliss in her ignorance. At least until the conflict with the Toth is resolved.”

“She won’t take it well.”

“She is of your bloodline, which remains significant in human relationships. There is no replacement for her. Formulate a course of action to keep her viable once she learns the truth of her situation.”

“Jimmy, you sure do know how to sweet talk a guy. Speaking of ‘courses of action,’ we need to tell Admiral Garret about the Toth...and the production ramp-up. I wonder how our two remaining Karigole advisors, Rochambeau and Kosciusko, will react when we tell them their mortal enemies are coming for a visit.”

Ibarra’s hologram flickered, then vanished.

The Mule rumbled as turbulence slammed Hale against his restraints. He looked up from his forearm display to check on his Marines. Torni had a hand raised over her head and pressed against an ammo canister that seemed intent on breaking loose from its assigned place. Orozco had his arm wrapped around his Gustav gauss cannon. Steuben was as stoic as ever.

Hale could have fit another squad of Marines in the Mule, but as the commander of this drop, he planned to keep him and his team in reserve. Flying above a likely battlefield was dangerous, but he couldn’t find a better place for situational awareness and command and control than the bay of this Mule.

His hand tapped a small speaker box fixed to the outside of his throat armor.

“Everyone have your translators installed?” Hale asked. Bastion devised hardware for the humans and Dotok to speak to each other, based on the system Stacey Ibarra said was used on the space station. She’d given Hale specific instructions
not
to open the devices or the ear buds that came with them, something about ‘harmonic resonator crystals’ failing.

“How’re they supposed to work?” Orozco asked.

“Speak English normally. The translators will nullify what you say and broadcast the Dotok equivalent for the words. It works in the reverse to your earbud.

“Bailey, Standish, see anything from your turrets?” he asked over the Mule’s IR network.

“Jack and shit, sir. And by that, I mean clouds,”
Standish said.

“Same,”
Bailey said.

Hale rotated the display on his forearm, and icons for the four Mules and six Eagle escorts swept over the topographic peaks of a mountain range. They’d be over the settlement in a few more minutes.

“Pilot, any contact with the settlement?” Hale asked.

“Negative. Xaros are in town, have to keep radio silence. One transmission and every drone down there will make a beeline for us.
Breitenfeld
hasn’t got anything to relay to us from the IR line we’ve got with the ship,” the pilot said.

“We don’t know if there are drones down there,” Hale said.

“You’re the mission commander. You can risk it if you want but I think Gall would snip your balls off for that,” the pilot said.

The corner of Hale’s mouth pulled into a grimace. The planning session with his ex-girlfriend had been rather one-sided. She, as she told him in no uncertain terms, was the ranking pilot in the air and she’d get him and his ground pounders where they needed to be, and out of there, without his bright ideas.

He hadn’t found any fault with the air assault and evacuation plan she’d devised, and there wasn’t any reason to change things on the fly. He scrolled through a channel list to find the private channel to her Eagle, and hesitated. Durand’s default response to losing a pilot was anger, unfocused and unrelenting anger.

He shrugged his shoulders and opened the channel.

“Marie?”

“What?” she snapped. “Don’t call me that when we’re on the clock.”

“You alright? I heard about Kyle and Hornsby. I’m sorry.” Hale mentally kicked himself for starting this conversation, which felt exponentially worse with each word. He squeezed his eyes shut and readied for a tongue-lashing.

“They didn’t…this isn’t necessary. You know that, right? Skipper’s got some sort of hero complex going on. We could all be home right now on an R&R chit to that resort Ibarra rebuilt in Hawaii,” Durand said.

Hale checked to make sure he was talking to the right person.

“Captain does what he wants. It’s his ship,” Hale said.

“So you agree with him?”

“I didn’t say that.” The Mule rattled through another bout of turbulence. Hale heard the whine and
thunk
of both turrets rotating, and he looked at the armored hatches closing off Bailey and Standish from the rest of the ship. Arrows painted on each showed both turrets pointing toward the port side of the Mule.

“I’m not the only one grumbling about this, and the couple Dotok I met haven’t exactly made me feel overly welcome and appreciated,” Durand said.

Hale felt his combat instincts rise to the fore as neither turret changed directions. What were they looking at?

Torni banged an armored fist against her bench and tapped at her helmet.

An amber light lit up on his gauntlet. Standish was trying to open a channel to him.

“You call me and then you hit me with the silent treatment? I swear, Ken, this is exactly what we used to fight about.”

“Marie, I think we’ve got—”

The turrets roared in unison. Hale killed the channel to Durand.

“—gets off the horn with his girlfriend that we’ve got drones,” Standish yelled.

“Got the one on our six,” Bailey said.

“What about the one that went around us?” Standish asked as his turret spun around and around, hunting a target.

“How many drones did you see?” Hale asked.

“Hi, sir, welcome back to the battle.” Standish’s twin gauss cannons fired a burst. “Two for sure…I think I saw another five or six between the clouds. One’s right on top of us, somewhere.”

“Gall,” Hale said over the open command channel, “my gunners think they saw up to five more drones. Can we handle this or do we need to abort?”

Both turrets opened up, drowning out Durand’s response. For just a second, Hale wished this battle was happening in orbit where there wasn’t an atmosphere to host the din of battle.

Something slammed into the Mule’s cockpit and the ship dove. Hale’s restraints kept him in his seat as the Mule tumbled end over end, tossing Hale around like he was on a rollercoaster. A flash of ruby light burst from the cockpit and flooded the cargo bay.

The tumbling continued.

“Sir, drone got the pilots,” Standish said. “I’m open to suggestions!”

“Bail out!” Hale slapped the emergency release on his harness and used the magnetic linings in his boots to lock himself to the deck plating. Even with the world spinning around him, he could still make it to the exit ramp—which was shut. Hale took uneasy steps along the deck, walking like he was drunk.

As the stricken Mule nosed down, Hale felt gravity try to pull him back to the cockpit, but he bent forward and used the electro-magnets in his glove to gain a handhold against the deck.

The ship shook as Standish’s turret ejected. Jaundiced yellow light flooded into the cargo bay as Torni got the rear hatch open. Hale looked up and saw a sky full of smoke.

“Hey! I’ve got a malfunction!” Bailey’s cry was full of panic. Her armored fists pounded against the view block on the turret hatch.

Yarrow, Steuben, Orozco and Torni had climbed to the edge of the ramp. All four looked back to Hale.

“I’ve got her!” Hale shouted. He used his mag locks to climb “up” the deck, like he was climbing the sheer face of a mountain cliff. Hale reached Bailey’s turret, flipped open a yellow and black panel, and wrapped his hand around a red handle within. He locked eyes with Bailey through the view port and nodded to her. She braced herself against the turret seat. Hale yanked the handle.

Explosive bolts severed the turret from the ship and sent it hurtling away.

Hale unfastened his mag locks and used his augmented strength to launch himself up and out of the drop ship. He pulled his ripcord and went through the bone-jarring shake of his parachute catching air.

The Mule slammed into the ground beneath him, erupting into a fireball. Hale grabbed a riser and pulled hard, angling him away from the Mule’s wreckage. The air around him was thick with smoke and the smell of burning grease.

Hale pressed his feet and knees together and hit the ground. What was a textbook parachute landing fall went awry as the parachute kept traveling across the ground, taking Hale with it. Hale fell against fire-blackened soil and scraped along the surface. He unsnapped one riser, which put all the pull on the remaining length of carbon-fiber cord. His attached shoulder plowed into the ground, burying him up to his chest before he came to a halt.

Hale wiped soot off his visor and got to his feet, extricating himself from the parachute and unsnapping his rifle from his back. He’d landed in the settlement Galogesvi, or what had been Galogesvi. The adobe homes and wooden buildings that made up Galogesvi were burnt out or still on fire. Dead civilians lay scattered through the streets. Men, women and children…all victims of the terrible violence that had come to this place.

He was too late.

“This is Hale. Form up on…the only three-story building, the one that’s on fire,” he broadcast through his suit’s IR. He wasn’t surprised when no answer came back. With all the ambient heat and smoke, the infrared communication system was practically useless.

A banshee’s wail broke through the sound of the roaring flames.

With no other options, Hale ran toward the scream. He found Bailey’s turret embedded in a house wall, the parachute crumpled over the roof like a discarded blanket. A pair of banshees clawed at the metal sphere, digging their talons into the gaps between plates.

Hale thumbed his rifle to high power and drilled the nearest banshee through the spine. The gauss bullet penetrated the other side of its body and blew off a chunk of the house. The other banshee turned and managed a scream of rage before Hale blew its head clean off.

The banshees twitched on the ground as he ran to the turret. Bailey opened her turret pod and accepted Hale’s hand as she climbed out.

“To hell with this planet. I already hate it,” she said, slapping a magazine into her carbine and sighing at the Mule’s wreckage. “My sniper rifle was in there.”

“But you weren’t. Let’s find everyone else,” Hale said. Eagle fighters sparred with Xaros drones overhead. Aircraft darted around and through pillars of smoke stretching to the edge of the canyon holding Galogesvi.

“I got a good look at the place on the way down. Whole town is burnt to a crisp,” she said. “Big fire on the outskirts burning through farmland.”

The snap of gauss rifles crackled in the distance.

“Sounds like us,” Bailey said.

“No time to waste.” Hale ran toward the sound of gunfire.

They found the rest of their team on the second floor of a wrecked building, one of the few that had a Dotok language sign across the façade. A dozen dead banshees lay in the street around them.

A lance of blood-red light slammed into the Marines’ position, slicing through the thin walls and nearly hitting Steuben.

Hale swung around a corner and saw a banshee, head and shoulders taller than the rest they’d encountered, its right arm replaced by a cannon that glowed from within. Banshees loped past the weaponized creature, running on all fours like charging gorillas.

Hale aimed for the tall banshee’s head and saw the weapon swing straight toward him. He fell to the ground as he squeezed the trigger, sending the shot into the sky as a beam of red energy sliced through the air right where his head had been. The beam scythed down, severing the wooden frame of the adobe building. The walls creaked, and collapsed.

The Marine rolled out of the way as one side of the building toppled toward him and he snapped off another shot, hoping to foul the banshee’s next blast. He came to a stop with his belly to the ground and managed to half aim his next shot. The round clipped the banshee on the shoulder, knocking it back a step. Gauss rifle fire stitched across its torso and it slammed into the ground like a felled tree. The cannon arm burned from within and disintegrated, leaving the rest of the banshee behind.

“Hey sir, good job not being dead. Real proud,” Standish said, forgoing the IR and just shouting so his lieutenant could hear him.

“Did you find Bailey?” Torni asked.

“Bailey? She’s right—” Hale looked back at the collapsed building and saw the Australian Marine’s foot sticking out of the rubble.

Tossing rubble aside, Hale tried to uncover her head and chest first so she could breathe. He pushed a lump of adobe away and found her limp arm sticking out of a void.

“Bailey!”

Steuben grabbed the edge of the mostly intact wall and heaved it off Bailey. She sat up groggily, the top of her helmet dented in. Hale pulled her clear. Steuben dropped the wall and a waft of pulverized concrete dusted the three of them.

“That got me wobbly. If my head’s going to hurt like I’ve got a hangover, I could have at least been a little shit-faced,” she said.

“Yarrow, check her out,” Hale said over his shoulder to the medic.

“Raider Six, this is Gall,” Durand’s transmission came over radio waves.

“This is Raider.”

“Mission abort, I repeat, mission abort. This valley is crawling with drones and I don’t have the fighters to clear them or get you out of here safely. Everything I’ve got in the air is going back to capital, New Abhaile. The Dotok say they can sortie a couple dozen fighters to help us out. You’ll be on your own for a couple hours,” she said.

“What else is new,” Hale mumbled. He pressed the transmit button on his forearm display. “Roger, Gall. I’ve got six for pick up. Crew of Mule Eight is KIA.”