Berserker (Messenger Book 2) Read online

  The Rusalkas dropped back to take the brunt of the onslaught. The monsters loped through the brush like predatory cats, leaving trails in the tall grass as the only indication of their positions. Cena tracked one and managed to drop it after three bursts from her exosuit's rifle. Then a flicker of movement in the corner of her viewscreen prompted her to turn left, where she saw another monster leaping upon one of the infantrymen. He managed to partially dodge out of the way, dropping to the ground and causing the monster to deflect off his shoulder, whereupon it fell onto its side.

  As the monster resumed its feet and prepared to pounce, Cena swung her exosuit's heavy whip, knocking it down again with the first strike and crushing its head with the second. The soldier flashed her a thumbs-up and sprinted after his comrades. A moment later, another volley of rockets from the Skyfish dropped across the line of advancing enemies with a deafening staccato of explosions, putting up a wall of smoke and flames and further adding to the raging brush fire.

  “This is Inquisitor Actual,” Amos transmitted. “Code Herald. I repeat, Code Herald. Let's just hope they can see it through all this smoke.”

  Code Herald was the signal that the commander believed they had lured out the enemy's main force and it was time to deploy the beacons for Hydra's orbital bombardment. Omega was the first to dive over the enemy forces. He shot down a pair of anti-air missiles with his rotary gun, then dropped a canister that began spewing red smoke into the air. Vic came next, deploying his own canister and once again tapping into Astral's predictions to avoid a barrage of anti-air fire. Valentin followed, deploying the Blossom's DOTS over the enemy forces to keep them occupied while he dropped his smoke canister.

  Amos was the last to go. He dropped his smoke canister unopposed, but as he pulled up to break away, a laser pierced the sky and lanced through the right wing of his exosuit. He immediately went into a spin, trying in vain to regain control as his crippled suit spewed smoke.

  “This is Inquisitor Actual,” his frantic voice crackled. “I'm hit, I'm hit! I'm going dow—”

  The transmission cut off as his Sylphid crashed on the side of a ridge. Pieces of debris flew everywhere as the wrecked suit somersaulted across the rock face, then the core exploded in a giant column of flame, turning the wreckage into a tumbling fireball.

  “Oh my god,” Vic choked. “Inquisitor Actual is down. Repeat, Inquisitor Actual is down.”

  “Is there any chance he got out?” Tinubu came back.

  “Negative,” Vic said. “There's no way anyone could have lived through that.”

  “Understood,” Tinubu said, his voice an emotionless mask. “I'm assuming command.”

  In the face of massive enemy waves, the coalition force continued its fighting withdrawal, expecting any second for death to rain from the heavens and smite their enemies. But casualties continued to mount, and several Slayers were shot out of the sky as the Xenolists mustered more anti-air weapons. Three more Slayers exhausted their bombs and guns and withdrew from the airspace. Vic's Sylphid also ran low on ammunition, and he returned to the Skyfish to rearm. Still, there was no sign of bombardment from the Hydra.

  “What the hell is Spacy doing?” Cena shouted, her own ammo running low as she contributed to a defensive fusillade to repel yet another wave of suicidal cultists. “Having a damn cigarette break?”

  “Something must have gone wrong,” Tinubu answered. “We have to retreat. We'll fall back to the Skyfish and bug out of this death trap.”

  “I knew we couldn't trust those Union wipes,” Cena snarled.

  But even hope of escape faded as another wave of Xenolists materialized from a hidden entrance near the coast and overwhelmed the drone platoon that had been left behind to cover the coalition's escape route. Instead of an open path to the Skyfish, the coalition found themselves facing a field of smoking rubble populated by a wall of enemies. They were surrounded and cut off.

  Tinubu sent a frantic transmission. “Python One to all remaining aircraft. Those bastards have cut off our escape route. Divert to 11 Romero Golf Kilo 527 003 and hit them with everything you've got!”

  Omega answered, “Python One, if we divert, the rear guard will be left vulnerable and may be overrun. Please confirm that last order, over.”

  “Just do it, dammit,” Tinubu exclaimed. “If we can't break through to the Skyfish, we're all dead anyway!”

  “Understood. Diverting to those coordinates.”

  Tinubu cut the transmission and muttered, “You can afford to be calm, you Spacy bastard. If we get wiped out, you can just fly home.” And, he thought with a thrill of fear, that prospect was starting to look increasingly likely.

  *

  Janice stood on a platform halfway up the main spire of the Halispont atmospheric processor, staring out over the surrounding lakes and forests. Smoke trails billowed from the trees and dispersed as they reached for the sky, while the black Asuras of Pierson and Wizard flew overhead together with a squadron of Revenant drones. In the distance, the giant Yotun sat in a clearing, surrounded by the wrecked fruits of its heavy cannon fire.

  The battalion guarding Halispont had fallen. The Xenolists had sustained heavy casualties in the assault, especially among the prepositioned guerrilla forces, whom they had used as cannon fodder in human wave assaults. But the atmospheric processor was now theirs.

  Already they had begun to load the Messenger spores into the processor's silos. While the rest of the forces stood guard outside, Janice and her Nullities would proceed into the depths to provide the last line of defense for the processor's core.

  Suddenly, a stab of pain lanced through her forehead. She reached up and felt the bulge in the middle of her brow, then she staggered and screamed in agony as the pain reached a crescendo. She heard a ripping sound, and a river of blood flowed down her face and dripped onto the metal plating at her feet. The pain subsided quickly, followed by a fresh surge of power to replenish what she had spent in the battle.

  There's my third eye, she realized.

  She spared one final glance for the war torn vista, relishing the knowledge that blessed silence would soon descend upon this beautiful land forever. Then she turned away and entered the processor. She passed through many layers of labyrinthine corridors and giant machines, descending all the way to the processor core. Here in the depths, a series of catwalks crisscrossed over vast silos, where the Messenger spores would soon be loaded.

  As Janice stared out over the cavernous chamber, all but the barest traces of conscious thought left her, replaced by an oblivious serenity. The air around her crackled, and she levitated several meters off the catwalk. Her staff slipped from her hand and entered a slow revolution around her as she turned slowly upside down, closed her eyes, and curled into the fetal position, hanging in the center of a crimson orb of energy. Her third eye came open and rolled lazily from side to side, glowing with emerald light. The alien energy reached its invisible hands throughout the entire processing chamber, filling the air with a dark pall.

  The guardian was in place. All that remained was to wait for the end of all things.

  Twenty-ninth Escalation

  I reach out to take its hand

  Wyburn sat on the Hydra's bridge, staring at the border where Chalice's ocher horizon met the black canvas of space in the main viewscreen. He glanced down at the smaller hologram of Chalice floating over his instrument panel, watching his vessel draw closer to the target zone. According to the timer underneath the map, they were right on schedule. The cultist bastards would never know what hit them.

  His serene confidence was interrupted by a rumble from deep within the ship. He lurched in his seat, the course projection on the map curved off target, and the image in the viewscreen went into a slow spin.

  “We're drifting off course,” Ensign Ferrari exclaimed.

  “Helm, get us back on course,” Wyburn barked.

  “I'm trying,” the helmsman answered. “The port and starboard thruster banks are down.”

&nb
sp; “Can you use the verniers?” Wyburn asked.

  “We're losing altitude,” the helmsman responded. “I've got to goose the main rockets to get us back up to speed. I can try to correct our course with the verniers,” he input some calculations, “but it's going to be tight whether I can get us over the target on this pass without the main vectoring rockets.”

  “Damn.” The Virtuous Circle was currently on a high orbital patrol. It would take her even longer to reach the target point than it would take the Hydra to circle around Chalice again. They couldn't count on her to carry out the bombardment for them.

  Of all the miserable luck, to experience a catastrophic engine failure now. And Wyburn had just performed an engineering inspection in preparation for this operation. As of yesterday, there had been no problems. He connected his console to the engine diagnostic system, but it came back with an error message.

  “What the?” Wyburn opened a line to engineering. “Engine room, what the hell is going on?”

  The face of the engineering officer, Commander Wangai, appeared over Wyburn's console. “Admiral, the vector rocket banks have gone silent.”

  “I know that,” Wyburn snapped. “I can't get a diagnostic feed from up here. What's the problem?”

  “There was some kind of explosion,” Wangai said. “I've initiated damage control and safety protocols. We're looking into it now.”

  “When can you have it fixed?”

  “Well, uh...” Wangai cast a nervous glance to the left and right. “We've got another problem. Mullen has gone missing.”

  “What? What do you mean, he's gone missing?” Wyburn exclaimed. Master Chief Engineer Mullen was the foremost engineering expert on the Hydra, a certifiable genius with starship engines. While there was enough technical expertise on board to keep the engines maintained in the master chief's absence, fixing a major problem would take much longer without his knowledge and supervision.

  “I mean just that, sir,” Wangai said. “He was here just ten minutes ago. Now no one in engineering knows where he is. Nobody saw him leave.”

  “Contact security,” Wyburn ordered. “Tell them to find him and drag his ass back to engineering so he can fix this!”

  “Already done, skipper,” Wangai said. “But it's total chaos in here. We could really use you down here, sir.”

  “What a mess.” Wyburn stood up and headed for the hatch. “You've got the bridge,” he said to Belloc as he passed. “If we manage to get over the target zone, just shoot the hell out of any signal flares you see.”

  “Aye aye,” Belloc replied.

  Wyburn stopped by the nearest equipment locker to retrieve a zero g maneuvering backpack, then he headed for the elevator and rode it up toward engineering. The simulated gravity of the rotating habitation ring grew weaker with the elevator's ascent, eventually culminating in zero g and leaving him hanging in the air.

  Wyburn considered his options. Interplanetary vessels like the Hydra did not rely on a single method of propulsion. For long range travel, they relied primarily on a giant light sail, augmented by beam catapults installed around the Union's major holdings. This allowed them to use external power to accelerate, alleviating the need to carry massive fuel stores. As a backup for situations when the light sail couldn't be used, they also possessed reactionless field propulsion systems which required no propellant, but these could only generate minimal thrust.

  Finally, the vessels were also equipped with traditional rocket propulsion systems. They didn't carry enough propellant to use their rockets for all movement—by the principle of diminishing returns, the extra fuel mass would eventually cross a point where it required more energy expenditure to push it than it provided—but for all its inefficiencies, rocket propulsion was still king for short bursts of massive thrust. Thus the main rockets were used in situations where speed was critical.

  The light sail could be used to maneuver by controlling its angle, but it would take far too long to deploy it to correct their current course, and the lack of support from a beam catapult would make it significantly less efficient. The thrust generated by field propulsion was far too weak for tight maneuvering; at any kind of speed, the turn radius was huge. The vector rockets were their only option. Without those, if they missed the target zone, it would take a full 90 minutes for them to make another pass around the moon and try again.

  Wyburn used his maneuver pack to navigate the engineering section's zero g labyrinth of tubes, circuits, fuel tanks, generators, turbine, and other machinery. Many maintenance drones buzzed past him, along with a handful of human technicians. He found Commander Wangai in the starboard rocket propulsion compartment, supervising a swarm of drones and technicians disassembling the outer shell of the main starboard thruster.

  “You said there was an explosion,” he said. “Is the propellant safe?”

  “Yes, sir,” Wangai replied. “Manual inspection shows that neither the fuel tanks nor the combustion chambers have been breached, but the status readout is still on the fritz.”

  Wyburn applied a light burst of thrust to follow Wangai to a console emitting a holographic projection of the thruster bank. According to the readout, the whole starboard engine was gone. But Wyburn was staring right at it.

  “What is this?” he demanded.

  “As best as we can tell, the explosion cut the connection to the sensors,” Wangai replied. “I've got a crew working on it right now.”

  Suddenly the readout flickered, and several of the diagnostics flickered to life. One of the engineers cried, “Did that do it, Commander?”

  “It's working,” Wangai shouted back.

  “That's better.” Wyburn leaned in for a closer look. “Let's see what we've got here.”

  “There's actually not much damage,” Wangai observed. “Most of the system checks out just fine.”

  “The vector actuators are out.” Wyburn waved his finger through the diagram, causing it to ripple. “When those went down, the system must have automatically turned off the engine as a safety precaution. If we tried firing the rockets with a malfunctioning vector control, it could send us veering drastically off course. That could be deadly in low orbit.”

  “But why would the actuators explode without damaging the rest of the engine?” Wangai's eyes narrowed. “And at the exact same time. Then there's the matter of the diagnostic going down. That system has redundancies for its redundancies. It's not likely to fail by chance.”

  Wyburn understood. “Sabotage.”

  “Mullen,” Wangai said. “The timing of his disappearance is a little too convenient to be coincidence.”

  “He's got nowhere to go. Security will find him,” Wyburn said. “More importantly, how soon can you get this fixed?”

  “We can make new actuators in the machine shop,” Wangai said. The machine shop came equipped with an automatic factory with the designs for replacement parts preprogrammed into it, and sufficient raw materials to manufacture several replacements. “But we'll need to practically disassemble the engines to install them. We're talking at least a twelve hour job for each rocket bank.”

  “24 hours?” Wyburn exclaimed. “Is that the best you can do?”

  “'Fraid so, skipper. That's with the whole crew working around the clock.”

  There was no chance of repairing the engines in time for the operation, then. But just as he was about to give up, Wyburn thought of an alternate solution.

  “Well, it seems like you have things under control down here. Carry on, Commander.”

  He fired his left thrusters to spin around and started boosting away. He got only a few meters before a pair of marines appeared around the corner, their movements frantic and their expressions agitated.

  “Admiral, it's a mutiny,” one of the marines exclaimed. “Part of the security detail has joined—”

  Several shots rang out and two bullets struck the marine, who let out a cry and bounced off a bulkhead as his blood flew through the air in weightless globules. The other marine sp
un around and gunned his thrusters in reverse, firing his rifle around the corner as he boosted away.

  “Admiral, you need to get out of here,” he exclaimed. “I'll cover you, sir.”

  Wyburn recovered from his initial surprise quickly. He responded, “I'm counting on you, marine,” and boosted back down the starboard rocket engine compartment. As he passed Commander Wangai, he called, “No heroics, Karega. We'll need your engineers to get this engine repaired. Get your men to safety, ASAP.”

  “Aye aye,” Wangai replied, and turned to begin barking orders to his men.

  More shots rang out as Wyburn fled around the corner. He pulled out his pocket computer and tried to contact the bridge, but there was no response. Cursing, he found a maintenance drone control panel and patched in a video feed from several of the repair bots buzzing around engineering.

  A scene of pandemonium greeted him. Marines were flying about and shooting at each other, their bullets ricocheting off bulkheads and occasionally punching holes in each other's flesh, filling the air with floating blood until the globules spattered against hard surfaces. At a glance, it was impossible to tell who was on whose side.

  “Idiots,” Wyburn hissed. Starting a firefight in engineering was lunacy. One misplaced shot could bring down the entire ship.

  This whole thing was a setup, he realized. They sabotaged the engine, cut the diagnostic feed, and made the chief engineer disappear; all to get him off the bridge, knowing that he would have to go down to engineering himself to ascertain the situation. Now that the trap was sprung, the mutineers were trying to assassinate him. But who was the mastermind?

  He didn't have to wait long to find out. As he considered his options, the intercom clicked on and a familiar voice echoed throughout the ship.

  “Now hear this. This is Major Anming Kuo, the chief of security. Under Article Seven of the naval code, I declare Admiral Wyburn guilty of high treason and relieve him of command. Unfortunately, there are those who are complicit in the admiral's treachery, which has necessitated an armed takeover of this vessel. With the aid of my troops, I have seized control of the bridge and will now abort the mission to provide orbital support to the SLIC forces currently attacking a fellow insurgent base.”