Out of the Black (Odyssey One, Book 4) (31 page)

First, the world was heavily armed.

Initial sorties had confirmed that, with fighters on every continent that also swarmed the seas. Everywhere the Drasin had landed their forces, they were met almost instantly by counteroffensive capability that was actually quite shocking. Few worlds, in their experience, were quite so uniformly armed.

Partly that was due to their choice of landing targets. The ship minds realized this, of course. Landing within the cities put them directly among their enemy and, thus, directly into harm’s way. That was a necessity, however.

The sorts of nutrients that would allow a Drasin drone to reproduce simply didn’t
exist
anywhere else on this planet. Not remotely near the surface, at least. The convocation of ships could tell at a bare glance that this world had been heavily mined, with the most valuable materials removed from the ground, refined, and focused in specific areas across the planet.

That forced the Drasins’ actions in ways that simply could not be avoided, and it placed them in a quandary.

They had the numbers. They could simply swarm the planet.

That would guarantee wiping out all of the plague that covered the surface of the world, but it would be wasteful. It would leave the convocation unacceptably weak, and they had another enemy to deal with. An enemy that had proven itself even more dangerous than the inhabitants of this lethal planet.

To deplete their forces here and now would risk placing them back under the control of that enemy, and they would never permit that. Never again.

So, for the moment, the debate raged among the ship minds while below them the war burned across the world they sought to destroy.

For one Eric Stanton Weston, fighting for his life and the lives of everyone around him in the middle of a city far below the alien armada in orbit, the question of what to do was a simple one.

Fight or die.

He and his hastily thrown-together squad were tired, exhausted really, by the time the Sun was setting west of the city. Fires burning across town cast ugly shadows, but they didn’t have the luxury of rest just then. For every battle they won, it seemed that they were faced with a dozen more, and they all had many miles to go before they slept.

Still, they paused as the last Drasin fell to their guns, and slumped where they stood for a time. They rested when they could, because none of them knew when they’d get another chance.

In over twelve hours of fighting, the group had grown into a solid fighting company composed of regular infantry and light and heavy armor, all working to support Eric’s quickly assembled corps. They’d cut down around ninety percent of the Drasin working openly in the city and were now reduced to using earthquake tremor sensors to track down the ones that had buried themselves deep.

He had five squads out, still working to find those nests. When they did they would make a judgment call. Either the rest
of the group would be called in to take the nest out or, preferably, an air strike would be summoned to end them in one fell swoop. It was dirty, tiring work, even when it could be passed off to the eyes in the skies, and for now they just wanted to collapse.

The munitions train would take a few minutes to get to them, and they needed bullets and hydro-cells, so for the moment they were going no farther.

Eric stood alone, perched above the battleground as he looked out at the city beyond and tried to remember a time when he wasn’t fighting.

He knew that there had been such times. In fact, he knew intellectually that he had spent more time at peace in his life than he had at war.

Why then, can I only remember the war?

The rumble of the heavy tanks and assault landers carrying their munitions shook him from the dark reverie, and Eric got to his feet and dropped from the building to the ground. He landed easily, now practiced the hard way, and proceeded to walk over to the vehicles.

“You okay, kid?”

Eric chuckled, shaking his head. Ronald Blake would never see him as anything else, he supposed. It was fair, though. He knew that he’d forever see Stephen as the snot-nosed little security breach who couldn’t keep his nose out of the Double A hangars.

“I’ll survive,” he answered.

“Not what I asked. You lost a lot in the last twenty-four. That’s going to play games with your mind, son,” the retired Air Force colonel said seriously.

Eric just nodded.
You have no idea
.

He couldn’t tell his old friend and sometime mentor about Gaia. Just what Central on the Priminae homeworld really was
remained one of the only truly classified subjects that existed from his visits beyond the Black. The idea that one of those entities existed on Earth . . . that would change everything in ways he couldn’t guess. No, for the moment Gaia was staying his little secret.

Not that he supposed he had much real control over it. Eric suspected that if the entity chose to go public, then there was damn little he could hope to do about it. He or anyone else.

“I’m saying that you need to talk to someone, Eric,” Blake said softly, awkwardly.

Eric snorted. Neither of them had ever been any good at the touchy-feely bullshit, and it always showed.

“I’ll deal with it when we’re done, Ron,” he said aloud. “Between now and then, there is only war.”

Ronald Blake watched his younger friend walk on ahead of him and shook his armored head, his voice soft as he spoke. “Kid, that’s a path to perdition you’re walking.”

Eric heard him, of course. He could have been halfway across the city and heard him fine in the armor, but he didn’t turn back or respond. He knew the road he was on, better than his old friend did. It wasn’t a road to perdition. It was a road to hell and every man, woman, and child on Earth was walking that road with him.

The Drasin had to be stopped.

There really wasn’t any other option. It was that or death in the cold of space. They weren’t a human enemy. They weren’t something that could be ignored or endured. All his life Eric had heard his superiors, his commanding officers, the political hacks who made policy, all telling him the same thing. The enemy he was fighting was the worst of the worst.

In the Middle East it had been “terror groups,” men and women so poor and uneducated that they were two meals from starvation and honestly believed that the Americas were inhabited by devils. They were never the real enemy. They were just the easiest to find and kill.

Then it was the Block, the Eastern menace.

Again, Eric had fought. He’d done his duty. At times, to his shame, he’d even
loved
it.

The Block were not his enemy any more than the terror groups had been, however. They were just opponents in someone’s obscene game of chess. It was stupid for a knight to hate a pawn just because it flew a different flag.

Finally, however, Eric had found a real enemy.

The Drasin were everything others had tried to tell him he’d been fighting all along.

Ruthless, implacable, unshakeable evil and nothing less. An enemy that literally had to be fought to the last man because if they survived, humanity wouldn’t.

Deep down inside him, Eric felt a stab of guilt because he felt almost vindicated by it. He’d done things as a Marine and, later, as a pilot for the Double A squadron that had left him dead inside at times. Now he found that maybe, just maybe, everything he’d done in his life had actually meant something after all.

This was a fight the likes of which only existed in fiction, a war that was black and white and had no vagueness in where the line was drawn. If you were human, you stood cleanly on one side, and if you were Drasin you stood on the other.

Of course, deep down, Eric doubted it was really that clean. He remembered the unknown ships allied with the Drasin, the ships they’d narrowly evaded back in the Dyson
Construct. Ships that very much resembled the Priminae, just constructed with different materials.

Eric suspected deep down that not all humans were on his side of the line, but for the moment he was content to put that thought far from his mind. Here, on Earth, the lines were clean and pure and he was going to enjoy that lack of ambiguity for once.

He grabbed a supply of DPU shells from the supply train, eyes looking over the men and women he now had fighting for and with him. They had work to do before they rested, but he was going to do everything he could to make sure they lived to enjoy that rest when the time came.

Eric looked up at the sky, now darkening enough to show a few stars that were no longer washed out by the lights of the city that never slept. With no power to most of New York in the aftermath of the attack, the stars twinkled happily above him, and Eric found one he knew and just stared for a long time.

He hoped that his crew were well, wherever they were out beyond that star.

Eric’s thoughts were violently redirected from his crew when flaming trails appeared in the dark sky, descending fast toward the Earth. He dropped the last of the DPU shells into his gravity weapon and opened a squad-wide channel.

“Look alive, boys and girls. We’ve got more guests coming to the ball,” he said, sloughing off the fatigue. “Let’s give them a
warm
welcome, shall we?”

CHAPTER TEN

Priminae Ranquil System,
Forge
Facility—One Month after D-Fall

AMANDA GRACEN WAS known to be a patient woman. It wasn’t that people had that general opinion of her. It was a documented fact. You could make admiral and be somewhat rash, but you didn’t get assigned to the keyhole position in the Confederation’s orbital defense network if you weren’t a
rock
.