Armageddon (36 page)

A
tta gazed down on the glossy black, egg-shaped capsule. It was big enough to fit a full-grown Gor, armor and all. Beside her stood Torv, and beside him, was General Raka of the Second Battalion.

“This is going with the Second Battalion to the surface?” Atta asked Raka.

The Gor nodded once and spoke quickly in a sibilant stream of hisses. Atta’s translator supplied the gist of what he said a moment later.

“Yess,” Raka replied. “We do not know what it isss, but Admiral Therius says it is important that we find a safe place for it and defend it.”

Atta didn’t need the translator, since she was receptive to Gor telepathy, but she had to wear one to get used to it. At Avilon the Eclipser would block the Gors’ telepathy along with all other forms of quantum communications.

“We also have one of these,” Atta said.

“What iss it?” Torv asked.

“I’m afraid to say until I know more. I need to talk to the other battalions first. How soon can the other generals meet with me?”

Torv closed his eyes. After a few moments of silence, he replied telepathically.
“I speak with them. They meet with you now.”

Atta nodded. “Good. Let’s go.”

* * *

Rictan Squadron grudgingly accepted Ethan’s leadership after hearing how he’d thrown himself on a grenade to save Magnum, but that didn’t mean he’d earned his place among them yet. He’d quickly realized that Magnum’s shoes weren’t the ones he had to fill. The Rictans made frequent references to someone they called
The Sergeant,
or
Mr. C.

Ethan had been tempted to ask about that, but the Rictans only had six members rather than the usual eight for ground squads. That meant they’d lost two men along the way, their sergeant obviously being one of them.

In an effort to be a better commander, Ethan tried to get to know his squad. Rictan Two was
Magnum
, Three was
Hop,
Four was
Rockhead
, Five was
Streak,
Six was…
Blades,
and Seven was
Carnage
. Ethan had the feeling there was a story behind each of those call signs, but he hadn’t had the time to ask.

Training consisted of back-to-back simulations on ground, in air, and in space. For the most part, Ethan managed to keep up, but the Rictans were much better mech pilots, and at least as good as he was in the cockpit of a Nova.

Now, an hour after eating a bland breakfast of locally-grown grain that had been mashed into a lumpy porridge, they were all getting ready for a live exercise with real Novas. Their job was to escort the 1st Battalion—Atta’s battalion—down from the
Liberator,
providing cover against a superior number of enemy fighters. In this case the enemy fighters were Gor-piloted Shells, but the real ones would be Avilon’s faster, more-maneuverable drones. The exercise was meant to mimic what they would have to do upon arriving in orbit above Avilon.

Ethan sat in his cockpit strapped in and waiting for clearance to launch. Holo displays glowed blue and status lights shone bright all around him. Beyond his canopy lay the main entrance of the hangar, shielded with the fuzzy blue haze of static shields. The mission parameters called for a relatively slower launch via the main entrance rather than the ship’s Nova launch tubes. They couldn’t afford to rocket out ahead of the drop ships they were escorting.

“Rictans, status report!” Ethan called out over the comms.

Multiple affirmative
clicks
came back.

“All ready and waiting, SC,” Magnum replied, addressing him by the abbreviation of his rank.

Ethan set his comms to the command channel. “Mission control, Rictans are green for launch.”

“Acknowledged, Rictan One, please standby… you are cleared for launch. Proceed to nav point Alpha and follow the sequence down.”

“Roger that, Control.” Switching back to the squadron’s channel, Ethan said, “Rictans, we are go for launch.”

“Roger that, SC,” Magnum replied.

Click. Click-click.

Ethan dialed up his Nova’s grav lifts and hovered off the deck. His fired up the main thrusters with a sudden
roar,
and he and Magnum jetted out side by side, passing through the
Liberator’s
static shields with a
sizzle
of dissipating energy.

Once through the semi-transparent barrier, space turned from blue to black, and Origin snapped into focus as a mottled green and white ball. Ethan watched on the grid as the rest of the Rictans slipped out behind him in wing pairs. Rictan Seven was the odd one out, so he formed a trio with Five and Six.

Ethan bracketed the nearest drop ship and flew up alongside it. It looked like an overturned garbage dumpster, heavily armed and armored, but no good at maneuvering in atmosphere or generating its own lift—hence the name
drop
ship.

“I’ve got incoming enemy contacts at zero by five by twenty, coming up fast from the planet,” Magnum reported.

Ethan eyed the group of red enemy contacts on his gravidar display. He counted over six squadrons of Shells in that group—three times as many as they had Novas guarding the First Battalion.

Ethan switched to Hailfire missiles and bracketed the nearest enemy fighter under his crosshairs. All of the ships were set to fire simulated munitions and harmless, low-grade training lasers, but that did nothing to still Ethan’s pounding heart. The last time he’d been in a Nova cockpit shooting at Shell fighters, the stakes had been real, and all of the munitions had been live. It was hard to tell his brain otherwise now. In the back of his mind he had this terrible feeling that those Shells would switch to live fire when everyone least expected it.

“SC, we’re ETA five minutes to firing range,” Magnum said.

“Arm Hailfires and mark your targets, Rictans; we don’t want any overkill.”

A handful of affirmative
clicks
came back over the comms. Five minutes ran down in what felt like seconds. Ethan’s targeting reticle blazed a solid red and he pulled the trigger, letting fly the first simulated Hailfire. Moving on to the next nearest target, he did the same, being careful to avoid the targets already marked by his squad mates. Hailfires jetted out in streams and began splitting apart as they neared their targets.

The enemy opened fire with bright purple pulse lasers, shooting down dozens of those warheads before they could get close enough to do any damage. A handful got through, and Ethan watched space light up with simulated explosions. Enemy contacts began winking off the grid one after another.

If the engagement had been a real one, those Shells would have been firing back with their own missiles, but they were trying to simulate drones, which would be unable to use their quantum-launched missiles thanks to the Eclipser.

“That evened the odds! Enemy’s down by fifteen,” Rictan Three reported.

“Don’t get cocky,” Ethan replied.

Then they reached laser range with the enemy, and the black of space became dazzling as a sun. Enemy fire was so thick that Ethan could barely see the planet through the intermittent flashes of light. The comms came alive with screaming as Rictans tried to warn each other all at once. Five and Four winked off the grid, and Magnum cursed as viciously as if they’d actually died.

The drop ships opened fire then, spitting out golden streams from their ripper cannons. Incoming Shell Fighters were forced to divide their attention, and Ethan flew in a zigzag to jog the enemy’s aim. The drop ships took out a few squadrons of Shells, then they flew by one another at speed, and the enemy was forced to come about to chase them down into the atmosphere. Given how much inertia those Shells had to overcome, they likely wouldn’t catch up again until the drop ships had already landed, meaning the first part of the mission was already a success.

“Nice work, Rictans,” Ethan said. “Time for phase two.”

“Sooner I get out of this cockpit, the happier I’ll be,” Rictan Seven said.

“Cut the chatter, Carnage,” Ethan said.

The atmosphere rushed up fast, and soon clouds began streaking by in puffs of white. Ethan’s Nova shook and his shields glowed bright blue with the heat of atmospheric entry. Their drop coordinates appeared in the distance as a hollow green diamond. Ethan pulled up a few degrees, aiming more squarely for it. A pair of drop ships raced down to starboard, fading in and out of view as clouds intermittently blocked them from sight. Then they all blew the bottom out of the sky, leaving swirling holes in the clouds. The ground sprawled beneath them—a carpet of green jungles and craggy mountains.

The drop ships began leveling out and slowing down, applying reverse thrust from maneuvering jets, and using their air brakes for increased wind resistance—not that they needed much help there.

“Coming up on the drop site,” Ethan announced. “Prepare to switch to grav lifts and hover down.”

Click. Click. Click-click.

The green diamond that marked the drop site lay close on the horizon, all but disappearing against the darker green mass of jungle blurring by below them. The jungle looked endless, dark, impenetrable… As they dropped altitude to skim the treetops, Ethan noticed just how tall some of those trees were. One of them was pushing a hundred meters, but it had no branches, no leaves—just an obsidian black trunk. Wondering what it was, Ethan set optical zoom to 10 times—

And saw that it wasn’t a tree. It was some type of obelisk. Were those the ruins Therius had referred to?

Ethan marked it on the grid and called it in, “Mission control, this is Rictan One, I’m seeing something down here on the surface, near drop site alpha. Transmitting visual now…”

“Rictan One, this is Control. Those ruins are all over the planet. It’s nothing to worry about. They’ve been investigated a thousand times already.”

“What are they?”

“Stay focused on the mission, Commander.”

“Roger that. Rictan One out.”

Moments later they raced out over a grassy clearing where the green diamond of drop site alpha was located. Ethan killed thrust and glided the rest of the way in. The deafening roar of the Nova’s engines disappeared and now the only sound was the wind buffeting against his wings and fuselage. When he drew near, Ethan powered up the grav lifts and applied full reverse thrust and braking. Forward velocity ran quickly backward to zero and then Ethan deployed landing struts and eased back on the grav lifts until his Nova settled gently into a field of shoulder-length grass.

He and the rest of the Rictans hurried out of their cockpits and found their Zephyrs aboard Drop Ship One. From there they ran down the boarding ramp to help the First Battalion secure imaginary objectives in the jungles.

Ethan was surprised and picked off by a squad of Gors in just the first few minutes. As he lay there, staring up at the blue sky and pretending to be dead, his thoughts turned to the obelisk he’d seen—one of many, apparently.

He wondered who had built it, and why. He also wondered why no one else seemed to be as curious as he was about Origin.

Ethan supposed that most of them had already spent years training here, so they wouldn’t find Origin’s mysteries as mysterious as he did. But he couldn’t help feeling like humanity’s past might reveal something critical about its future. There probably wasn’t enough time left to figure it out, but he had to try. Just the fact that Origin was so
familiar,
as if he’d been here before, was enough reason to investigate. Those obelisks couldn’t just be meaningless ruins. If they were all over the planet, and they were still standing here after
millions
of years, then they’d been built to last, and that meant they had to have served an important purpose. The question was—

What?

Chapter 32

E
than only ate half his dinner, a vat-grown protein slurry the servers called soup. He passed his bowl down to Carnage, who lapped it up with a grin, and then he left the table and went looking for Atta. He found her at a table full of Gors, all of them busy slurping up the last drops of their own slurry. The Gors watched him with slitted reptilian eyes as he approached. Ethan smiled, but his smile faded when the Gors started hissing at him like a pit full of snakes. He decided it was safer not to look at them.

“You seem to be enjoying the food,” he said, his eyes on Atta.

“You get used to it,” she replied.

More hissing. Ethan glanced sideways to find the nearest Gor glaring at him and slowly rising to confront him. Ethan looked away quickly.

“You’re dishonoring them by averting your eyes,” she explained.

“They don’t seem to be happy with me whether I look at them or not,” Ethan replied as the Gor beside him left the table.

“They consider me one of their matriarchs. They’re just being protective.”

“I see…” Ethan looked away from the Gors again, and the hissing grew louder. “Maybe we should go talk somewhere else before they eat me,” he suggested.