The Gardens of Nibiru (The Ember War Saga Book 5) (5 page)

Ibarra had told Valdar that the mission to Nibiru wasn’t a suicide mission, not for him and his ship. The mission came with a fail-safe, one Valdar had to deliver to the planet’s surface. If Hale learned of it…

“It’s war. We take risks,” Hale said.

“Then we’ll continue as planned. Get to the surface, kill Mentiq if you can and get out of there. I’ll handle the high ground.” Valdar’s words were resigned. Hale and his brother Jared were the last tangible connection the captain had to his life before the Xaros invasion. Throwing Hale into the fire again felt like the moment he realized his wife and children were dead and gone.

****

The armoire was alive with the snap and hum of power armor as the Marines donned their combat gear.

Standish swung his arms across his chest and pulled his shoulders back, feeling the pseudo-muscle layer beneath the plates adjusting to give him a full range of motion. He squatted low, feeling the suit contract against his thighs and knees. He jumped up and activated the magnetic linings in his boots, which brought him back to the deck like he was connected by an elastic band.

“Pretty sure it works, huh?” Egan asked. “I saw a guy try to cheat his checklist like that and almost cracked his skull against the ceiling when the linings failed.” The communications specialist pressed an armored pouch against his belt; a hum and a click followed as magnetic plating and turnscrews fixed the IR relay kit to his armor.

Standish took a bandolier from an ammo canister and draped high-explosive grenade shells over his chest.

“Well, sergeant,” he said to Egan, “when you’ve got the latest and greatest equipment coming out of Ibarra’s foundries, there’s reason for confidence. The new mag linings made it through QC twelve hours before we jumped out.”

“I thought all the new gear went to the Ranger Regiment and the expeditionary core they’re standing up on Mars,” Egan said.

“It is,” Standish said curtly.

“Then why do we have the new linings…and gauss capacitors for our rifles that are fifty percent more efficient than what we had last week?” Egan asked.

“Gunney?” Standish turned away from Egan and waved at the team’s senior NCO. “We’re going atmo. Should I bring a couple extra thermobaric grenades? You know, for giggles.” Standish tapped the grenade launcher attached to the bottom of his gauss rifle.

Cortaro, who had a checklist in hand as he inspected Rohen’s armor, didn’t bother to look away before answering. “Add another bandolier to your carry sack.”

Standish grabbed the bulging pack attached to the small of his back and looked inside.

“But Sarge, I do that and I’ve got to dump my pogey bait to make room,” Standish said.

“My heart bleeds,” Cortaro said.

“Man…” Standish grabbed a handful of candy bars from his pack and put them in the half-empty ammo can. He ripped the corner off a confection made of chocolate, nougat and nuts and took a bite.

“Not going to let those damn squids eat my stash,” he mumbled. Standish tilted the ammo can to Egan.

“Thanks.” Egan took one out and started eating.

Standish motioned to the pilot’s wings stenciled on Egan’s chest armor. “How’d you get wings as an enlisted Marine? I thought you had to go through OCS before pilot training.”

“Easy, I’m a proccie,” Egan said.

Yarrow, Orozco and Bailey all stopped what they were doing and turned their attention to Egan.

“I came out of the tube knowing how to fly Mules and Destriers. Bet I could handle an Eagle if I had to. I can read and understand Toth too. The planners beneath Camelback Mountain looked at what your team was missing and had me made to order,” Egan said. “I heard the instructors talking about me after I passed my flight quals on Hawaii. They came clean about my background once I asked. Sure made knowing Toth make a lot more sense.”

“You seem awful…” Standish glanced from side to side, “awful OK with being a proccie. Wait, can I say that? Or is ‘proccie’ a that’s-our-word sort of thing?”

“I don’t care,” Egan said. “Sure is a lot easier than calling someone a ‘procedurally generated human being’ every single time. I thought Western civilization got over that politically correct crap decades ago.”

Standish and the other true-born Marines looked at Yarrow.

“Hell, it don’t make no difference to me,” Yarrow said. “Proccie’s fine.”

“Wait a minute,” Orozco took an oversized magazine for his Gustav and tapped it against his bare head. “Why didn’t they just make a whole new team of Marines perfect for this mission? Each of them the reincarnation of Chesty Puller, General Mattis and Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, seems better than sending the lot of us to Nibiru.”

“Training,” Cortaro said. He tapped his fingers against Bailey’s shoulder and the Marine stood up straight, her arms to the side as Cortaro inspected her armor. “We, with the exception of Rohen and Egan, have been together for a long time. We’re a team and any team will be better than a group of individuals lumped together, no matter how good those individuals are.” He spun a finger around and Bailey turned her back to him. “Ibarra’s tubes can pump out proccies that know each other and remember training for years on end, but that takes a long time. Admiral Makarov and her Eighth Fleet are like that. Now Ibarra’s churning out proccies one at a time, sending them to new units where they’ll learn to be a team the old-fashioned way: training.”

“Where’d you hear all that, Gunney?” Standish asked.

“You’re not the only one with contacts.” Cortaro pulled a canister off Bailey’s back and shook his head. “This filter’s at thirty percent. Get a new one.” He slapped her on the shoulder and returned the bad filter to her.

“That why we’ve spent every waking moment on the range or doing drills since I came aboard?” Rohen asked. “I thought we were going at it a bit hard, considering your and Hale’s reputation.”

“And what reputation is that?” Orozco asked.

“After everything you did on Earth, the Crucible, Anthalas…I doubt any of you’d ever have to pay for a drink at a bar ever again,” Rohen said.

“Which bars are you talking about?” Bailey asked.

“Don’t mistake an intense desire to not be eaten or killed as something special.” Standish looked at Egan, Torni’s replacement. “Not all of us made it home.”

“Or in one piece,” Cortaro flexed the muscles in his cybernetic foot and calf. The clone replacement for the limb he lost on Anthalas would have to wait until after this mission. “All right, big mouth,” Cortaro said, pointing at Standish, “let’s see if you remembered to double-check your auxiliary air lines for once.”

****

Hale, clad in his armor and with his rifle attached to his back, walked off a lift and onto the
Breitenfeld
’s flight deck. He found most of his Marines and Steuben standing behind the yellow and black chevrons running along the perimeter of the deck, demarking where one could watch flight operations safely.

Only Yarrow was on the flight deck, almost empty of craft but for a few Mules and a pair of ready-alert Eagles toward the stern of the deck. Yarrow held both hands out in front of him, pawing at the air as he meandered around the deck.

“Sir,” Cortaro said as Hale stopped next to him.

“What the heck is he doing?” Hale asked.

Bailey and Standish fought a laugh and stifled all but restrained sniggers.

“He is looking for the cloaked Mule,” Steuben said.

Standish bit the knuckles on his armored gauntlet as a tear fell from the corner of his eye.

“Hey, Gunney,” Yarrow called out. “I don’t think it’s in spot 2-4.”

“I said 3-4!” Cortaro waved Yarrow farther down the flight deck. The medic gave a thumbs-up and moved away, a hand held up in front of his face like he was walking through a dark room.

“So this is…Earth humor?” Steuben asked.

“How long has this been going on?” Hale asked.

“Ten minutes,” Bailey said, her shoulders jerking from stifled laughter.

“It started before I got here,” Cortaro mumbled.

“Preflight checks are complete. Ready to go,”
Egan said, his voice coming through the IR receiver in Hale’s earpiece.
“And what the hell is Yarrow doing? Lafayette’s in the cockpit with me and he thinks it’s some kind of war dance.”

“He’s looking for the Mule,” Hale said. “Flash the running lights.”

Egan burst into laughter and Hale cut the channel.

Spotlights on a Mule almost thirty yards from Yarrow blinked on and off. Yarrow stopped stumbling around, looked at the Mule, then to the Marines, then back to the Mule.

“Aww…fuck you guys!” Yarrow stomped across the deck to the Mule.

Hale bit his lip to stop from smiling as his Marines broke down. Standish fell to the ground, on the verge of hyperventilating as he laughed.

“I don’t understand this,” Steuben said.

“I got it—” Bailey wheezed, “I got it on video.”

“All right, that’s enough.” Hale nudged Standish with his foot. “Time to saddle up.”

Standish got back to his feet. “Sir, I haven’t laughed that hard since I had Yarrow asking the ship’s foundry for a box of grid squares.”

“You know if you get hit he’s the one with all the pain meds,” Hale said.

Standish stopped laughing.

Darkness. Stacey’s world beyond the small sled was nothing but absolute darkness. Her trips back and forth from Bastion to the Crucible orbiting Earth were little different, though spending hours waiting in an infinite white void compared to the abyss she was in now felt like splitting hairs. Both purgatories were long, dull affairs.

Getting an audience with the Qa’Resh hadn’t been easy. The enigmatic hosts of the Alliance preferred to remain at arm’s length from the ambassadors for all but official business. But when she asked to question the entity recovered from Anthalas, she’d been granted permission almost immediately.

Naturally, like all things with the Qa’Resh, the security measures felt like an unnecessary chore. She’d get to the entity, but she’d have to go alone and she wouldn’t know where its holding cell really was. The Qa’Resh lived within the upper atmosphere of a gas giant on a giant floating city…if the entity wasn’t kept there, the planet had plenty of space for a cell.

Stacey paced two steps along the sled, spun in place, and took two steps to the other end. She hadn’t tried to count the hours since she’d boarded the sled and her entire universe shrank to little more than what she could reach beyond her fingertips.

A bag slung over her shoulder flapped against her hip. Inside was the only physical object ever recovered from the Xaros, aside from the Crucible near Earth. The object gave her chills just thinking about it, even if it was just a re-creation.

According to Pa’lon, the long-serving Dotok ambassador who’d become her mentor, security hadn’t been this strong when he first joined the Alliance. But after the Toth betrayed the Alliance and killed a Qa’Resh during a kidnapping attempt, things had changed radically.

At least I don’t have to use the restroom,
she thought.

“I mean, do they even have bathrooms in this prison? Could you imagine how complicated that would be? Having to accommodate hundreds of other races—I’m talking to myself.” Stacey patted her fingers against her cheeks and stretched her arms out behind her back. She closed her eyes and swung her arms in front of her chest—and hit something hard and rough.

She opened her eyes and saw a dark rock wall in front of her, the surface black and pitted like it was made from solidified lava. She turned around and found she was in a small cavern, her on one end and a giant orb of shifting bronze metal on the other.

Intricate patterns played out across the orb’s surface: shifting fractal swirls dancing between blooms of dark checkerboards. The orb glowed from within, the only source of light in the cave.

Stacey swallowed hard and felt a tinge of fear spread through her chest.

“It can’t perceive you,” a voice said.

Stacey seized up and snapped her head around to look for the source of the words.

A disembodied head of a middle-aged woman with long braided hair hung in the air next to Stacey, looking at the orb. The Qa’Resh never appeared in their true form—crystalline entities the size of a two-story house—but always in the form Stacey saw now. There were at least three distinct humanlike guises, the braided woman being the one Stacey had the most contact with.

“It can’t perceive you, yet,” the Qa’Resh said. “Are you ready?”

“Shouldn’t there be some sort of…barrier? This thing isn’t exactly friendly,” Stacey said. She ran her hands over her simple tunic and pants, smoothing out what few wrinkles had crept into the white fabric.

“You are safe. You have our word.”

“Fair enough. Let’s start.” Stacey walked to the orb, her back straight and shoulders square. Her posture likely meant nothing to the orb, but it made her feel better.

A wave of static spread across the orb to the edge of the cave.

Stacey pressed her lips into a thin line, then glanced from side to side.

“Can it hear me?” She flopped her hands against her side.

“Where are you?” boomed from the orb, the voice low and masculine. 

Stacey took a step back, watching as patterns twisted across the orb like a film of soap over the surface of a bubble.

“Here. Can you see me?” Stacey asked.

“You are not here,” the orb said. “Your soul is cold.”

“I don’t know how to convince you otherwise. Given your situation I assume you have time for a few questions,” Stacey said.

“The burning ones demanded much. I gave. Why should I bother with a fleck of ice like you?”

“I came here to discuss history, not philosophy or metaphysics. The Qa’Resh aren’t the most engaging hosts. I doubt anyone else will be down here for a very, very long time. What will it be?”

Stacey waited a few heartbeats before turning around and starting back to the sled.

“You ask about history?” came from the orb. Stacey stopped but didn’t turn back to face it. “The burning ones asked questions a human mind cannot comprehend, nothing so mundane as the march of time. But we are lost if we do not know the path we’ve walked. Isn’t that right…Stacey?”

“How do you know my name?” She whirled around.

The orb contracted and poured itself into a new shape. Yarrow, made up of the same shifting, patterned bronze metal, stood before her, his skin and armor blending together.

“This host knew of you. His mind was a wide pool with little depth, his knowledge imperfect. I wonder if your mind is as flawed.” The Yarrow-orb reached a hand toward her and stopped at a force field that shimmered from the contact.

Stacey approached the force field.

“Do you have a name?” she asked.

“You may call me…Jehovah.”

“No. You are no god to me or anyone else. Cut the crap.”

“Elohim.”

“Not that either. You’ve mentioned others of your kind before. What did they call you?”

“In my original form…Malal.”

“Can you assume that form? The way you are now is…unacceptable.”

The Yarrow-orb shifted to an asexual humanoid shape, its features as bland as a department-store mannequin.

“It’s been so long,” Malal said. “I don’t think I remember.”

“How far back do you remember?”

Malal canted its head to the side. “I was imprisoned on Anthalas for the last hundred million years. Before that, my time was with my peers, working to solve the great question.”

“And what is that question?”

“Is there an end? Were we, the galaxy’s first and greatest civilization, doomed to extinction as entropy wore all of creation down to nothing? The answer was no. We found a way out, a door to an infinite expanse where we could live on…but the others left me behind. Left me trapped in that insignificant speck of a world where I could watch the heavens dim to nothing.”

“Why? Leaving someone behind doesn’t seem very…godlike.”

“
I
was the one that found the key.
I
was the one that opened the door for the rest and they shut me out. They didn’t want to pollute their new perfect world with the price
I
paid.” A riot of colors swarmed across Malal’s skin. “But the door remains. I will find my way back and make them pay.”

“This price, did you pay it with the Shanishol we found on Anthalas? Through murder?”

“Immortality requires sacrifice. My people cleansed the entire galaxy of lesser species to fuel our way through the gate.” Malal smiled, the corner of its lips pulling far wider than any human’s could have. “They left me on that rock, waiting for the next batch of intelligent species to arise. It was…tedious.”

Stacey felt her skin grow cold.

“Your species consumes other living things to survive,” Malal said. “So did we. I managed to tempt a few to Anthalas, but none in the numbers I needed to make the journey. The Shanishol were my last best chance before the Xaros arrived…you know how that ended.”

“Speaking of the Xaros.” Stacey reached into a pocket, pulled out a small holo-emitter and set it on the ground. It flared to life and great filaments of galaxies came to life around her. She touched a finger on the anomaly at just beyond the edge of the Milky Way.

“This,” she said, “this object has been on its way to our galaxy for as long as we can tell. At least two million years. It will arrive in the star system where the first-known Xaros contact took place. No one thinks that is a coincidence.”

“Yes, I know of it.” Malal raised a finger and the holo of the local universe shifted, the galaxies realigning as millions of years rewound. The anomaly backtracked to the great void and the holo froze. “Ah, your data is incomplete. Surprising, but not unexpected.”

An elliptical galaxy with a uniform glow of stars filled the void.

“This was quite the event.” Malal’s fingers floated through the air like he was playing an invisible instrument. A single dark spot appeared on the galaxy and spread out as the holo ran on. The abyss engulfed the entire galaxy in a little over two hundred thousand years. The anomaly appeared in intergalactic space just a few hundred years before its home galaxy was annihilated.

“There was some concern that the rupture would reach us before our great task was complete, but the tear couldn’t sustain itself beyond the galaxy’s dark energy halo,” Malal said.

“What happened?”

“Children playing with the fabric of creation. Technology similar to the jump engines you used to bring me here rip open holes in quantum space to create wormholes. There is a chance—”

“The tear will continue. Yes, we’re aware of the danger,” Stacey said. The threat of a quantum tear had been a convenient excuse for Alliance races unwilling to send aid to Earth against the recent Toth incursion. Stacey thought the reasoning to be nothing but cowardice, but now, seeing the effects wipe out an entire galaxy…

“Did you ever have any contact with the Xaros that escaped?” Stacey asked. “Surely you saw them coming.”

“We noticed…but we didn’t care. Their arrival was millions of years away. We planned to be long gone by then. Would you like to see it?” Malal swept his hand across his chest and the galaxies blew away as if swept by a great wind. The red spot that marked the Xaros anomaly grew larger and more distinct.

A world with perfectly flat metal surfaces floated in front of Stacey, a spherical polyhedron with a twenty equally sized facets. Great rings of metal—like she’d seen around Ceres—surrounded the equator. 

“It’s…incredible,” Stacey said as she realized how massive the object truly was. The Xaros rings were wide enough to enclose the solar system out to the orbit of Neptune.

“A fair creation. We weren’t impressed,” Malal said with a shrug.

“What about this?” Stacey reached into her bag and pulled out the General’s faceplate that Elias had torn away during the battle in the incomplete Crucible near Takeni. It was as wide as a dinner plate, but the material had almost no weight in her hands. “Can you tell me something about the being that used it?”

Stacey pressed the corner of the mask into the force field. Static glittered around the disruption as she pushed it through to Malal.

Malal took the mask with its deformed fingers that swept over the armor plate like rivulets of liquid mercury.

“This isn’t the original,” Malal said.

“No, it was recreated by an omnium reactor here on Bastion. How can you tell?”

“The same way you tell the difference between a picture and the true article. This is part of a photon cage. We considered this method to prolong our existence. Photonic bodies are too fragile and will last only a few million years before degrading. My omnium body is much more resilient to entropy.” Malal pressed the mask against his face and bobbed from side to side.

“Did we kill this this thing when we ripped its face off?”

“Doubtful. Beings that wish to survive this long would never let their existence hinge on a single point of failure. Did its energy dissipate in front of whoever claimed this trophy?”

Stacey shook her head. “Elias said it fled from the Crucible.”

“Crucible?”

Stacey explained the jump gates the Xaros left in systems with habitable worlds, and how the Alliance captured an incomplete gate near Earth.