War on a Thousand Fronts Read online

  There was the briefest of pauses before Priscilla replied.

  Tangel cried out.

  Tangel glanced at Joe as they ran back to their pinnace. “Well, so much for a leisurely stroll on your day off. That’s what you get for hopping a ship out here.”

  “Are you kidding?” Joe asked. “Do you recall how long it’s been since you and I saw action together?”

  “Too long,” Tangel replied. “Let’s rectify that.”

  LANDING

  STELLAR DATE: 09.06.8949 (Adjusted Years)

  LOCATION: Planet HH1

  REGION: Hidey Hole System, Large Magellanic Cloud

  “There it is,” Sera said, gesturing at the spire of rocks jutting out of the crater’s center. “We should be able to get an IR reading off that spire, but it’s completely invisible.”

  “Certainly unusual,” Jason said from the pilot’s seat.

  Sera watched Jason’s fingers dance over the console as he pulled the pinnace into a long canyon that led into the crater.

  “You know,” she said as they slid into the narrow rent in the planet’s surface, “we have stealth systems. You don’t need to—Wall!”

  “Relax.” Jason’s voice was calm, his face filled with a rapturous expression as he flew the pinnace through the narrow canyon, effortlessly managing the twists, turns, and occasional updrafts surging through the planet’s thin atmosphere. “This is my thing.”

  “You’re ‘thing’ is smearing us across a kilometer of rock?” Sera asked, her hands gripping the sides of her seat, even though the internal a-grav systems dampened the ship’s movement.

  Jason tossed a grin over his shoulder. “Just like in Vagabond’s Canyon back on Proxima. I used to fly that in my T-38 at twice this speed. Even threaded the stone needle with it.”

  “Back in your misspent youth?” Sera asked through gritted teeth, glancing back at Major Valerie to see the woman’s usual stoic expression firmly in place, though on a face several shades paler than normal.

  “Something like that,” Jason said with a chuckle as he activated the grav emitters and began to slow the pinnace. “Regarding stealth, yes, they can’t see our ship, but these pinnaces either fly fast, or they fly bright with a-grav to stay aloft. A-grav breaks stealth, and fast means we’d create visible air currents. Canyon’s our best bet.”

  “So what sort of spaceship was a T-38?” Sera asked, trying not to pay attention to how close Jason got to the canyon walls. She would have to pass a vid of this to Cheeky at some point.

  Jason laughed. “Not a spaceship. It’s an old Earth air-breather. A T-38 Talon. I had a lot of reproduction aircraft strewn about the stars around Sol. A bird in every port—something to do on the layovers.”

  “Seems like a lot of ‘something to do’ for simple stop-overs,” Sera replied, her jaw clenched, glad to see they only had thirty kilometers to go.

  Jason’s tone continued to be easy and nonchalant. In fact, he seemed more relaxed than she’d ever seen him. “On the pre-FTL trade routes, you could sometimes wait years for all the cargo to get assembled for the next trip. Always bugged me. People knew we were coming for decades, but they still never had their ducks in a row when we got there.”

  “So this…stunt flying…is your thing?” Sera asked as she watched Jason, starting to feel as though she was seeing him for the first time.

  “Well,” he shrugged while banking the craft around a tower of rock rising from the center of the canyon. “We all have to grow up eventually…take on our share of responsibility. Eventually you gotta trade in the T-38 for a GSS Intrepid.” He glanced at Sera. “You know that as well as anyone.”

  “Stars, do I ever.”

  “Maybe when this is all over, I can just fly again for a while. You know…I have this bird back on Carthage, a Yak. I think you’d love a ride in it.”

  She didn’t have a chance to reply before the pinnace shot out of the canyon and into the crater, rapidly closing on the rock spire in the center.

  Jen highlighted a level patch of ground.

  “And that,” Sera placed a marker on a smooth section of the spire’s slope, “is likely a door.”

  “No EM at all,” Valerie said, speaking aloud for the first time since they’d left the Helios. “Though that doesn’t mean we couldn’t be looking at automated defenses.”

  “Not my first time on a job like this,” Sera shot Valerie a meaningful look. “I was a Hand agent, after all.”

  Jason pulled the craft’s nose up, letting the pinnace aerobrake as he banked around the spire, only firing the a-grav systems for a moment before he set down a kilometer from their destination.

  “Why over here?” Sera asked.

  He gestured at the fissures covering the floor of the crater. “This is the least convenient approach. Star’s behind us too, meaning that if they are watching, this is the direction they’re watching the least.”

  “Why would they watch any direction less often?” Valerie asked as she pulled off her harness.

  “Maybe they’re not,” Jason allowed. “But there are always compromises when building an installation like this. Just trying to guess at which ones the builders of this place might have made.”

  Valerie inclined her head, pursing her lips for a moment. “Fair enough.”

  Sera followed Valerie and Jason out of the cockpit to the pinnace’s small bay, which was fitted out as an armory. The strike team was already getting geared up. Eight members of Sera’s High Guard, and a spec-ops squad under Colonel Pearson. And Flaherty, of course.

  He gave her a nod, not an iota of worry on his face after Jason’s breakneck approach.

  In addition to the humans, there were four AIs in the group: Jen with Sera, Julia with Valerie—a pair that the High Guard had taken to calling ‘The J-J’s’—and two in Pearson’s team as well. Laney was embedded with the colonel, and another named Fara was in a mobile frame.

  All four had spent the trip sharing their breaching techniques with Chief Yves, a specialist on Pearson’s team.

  “Alright, people,” Pearson said, as Sera stepped into the armor rack and selected a light, ablative armor set. “Not all of us have worked together before, but we know how the job is done. First and foremost, we protect our assets.”

  With that, he nodded first to Sera and then to Jason, all eyes in the room following his.

  “That all I am?” Sera asked with a lopsided grin as she stepped out of the armor rack.

  Valerie winked at her. “Pretty much, yeah.”

  “Secondarily,” Pearson continued a moment later, a small scowl settling on his brow. “We’re here to grab intel. Every bit of data we can get our hands on. We need to know what the Airthans are up to, and what other strongholds they have tucked away in the far reaches of space. We get that, we protect—” he glanced at Sera and Jason, a smile pulling at the corners of his mouth for just a moment, “—the president and the governor, and we get out. General Sheeran has two pinnaces with a platoon each in low orbit, ready to drop down if we need them, so if the shit hits the fan, you call for backup. No martyrs.”

  “Colonel has the right of it,” Valerie added for the High Guard’s benefit. “Protect our charges, get the intel, get out in one piece.”

  A chorus of affirmations echoed in the room, and Jason slapped Sera on the shoulder, turning her so he could inspect her armor.

  His eyes were serious as he checked her over, but there was a lilt in his mental tone.

  Sera retorted as she examined his armor, then spun him to check his back.

  She clapped him on the shoulder to signal that his armor checke
d out, then turned for him to inspect her back.

  Jason’s chuckle rumbled in her mind.

 

 

  Pearson and Valerie walked through the group, both pausing to check over Jason and Sera’s gear before moving on.

  Sera chided the major.

 

  Sera snickered.

  She grabbed a helmet off the rack and slotted it on before selecting a multi-function rifle, two sidearms, and a lightwand from the weapons rack.

  Jason said, handing her a cloak.

  Sera grabbed the cloak and threw it over her shoulders.

 

  She grabbed a bandolier of burn sticks and pulse grenades, slipping them on before pulling the cloak around her shoulders. It Linked up with the armor, a new menu of stealth controls appearing on her HUD.

  All around her, the rest of the strike team donned their cloaks and formed up at the bay’s exit. They waited while the ship extended a shroud that would hide the bay’s exterior doors as they slid open.

  Pearson’s team exited first, spreading out and securing the area.

  Laney had already deployed a swath of microdrones that spread out around the pinnace, checking the nearby terrain for sensors and defenses.

  Almost immediately, they located several sensors, and marked both their positions and ranges on the team’s combat net. Pearson made the call not to disable them—none of the AIs nor Chief Fara were certain they could shut down Airthan scanning tech without setting off an alarm.

  Laney had advised.

  Sera had been in agreement; there was little point in having stealth tech if they didn’t utilize it for as long as it was effective.

  Crossing the kilometer of terrain between the pinnace and the spire was slow, arduous work. The team kept to rocky ground, doing their best not to disturb the sediment on the base of the crater.

  As best as Sera could tell, at one point, the crater had held water—though not much, and not for too long. Perhaps the impact of the meteor that had created this twenty-kilometer divot had been enough to alter the small planet’s climate, causing it to lose its surface water.

  Another piece of evidence that pointed to the magnetic fields as being artificial in origin. If this world had always possessed such strong fields, it would have held onto more atmosphere.

  Ahead, Pearson’s scout team crossed the final fissure. Though they were invisible, their markers on the combat net showed that they’d leapt over the gap, something confirmed by a few small wisps of dust lifting into the air.

  A breeze swept by, removing the traces, but also scattering the microdrones further. Once the wind had passed, Sera saw Valerie release more drones, spreading them around to further mask the team’s progress.

  Sera reached the final fissure and eyed the four-meter gap. It wouldn’t be hard to jump in the low gravity, but the crevasse was almost forty meters deep, and she didn’t want to have to climb back out, should she slip.

  Jason asked on a tightbeam Link. She saw that he was standing a meter to her right, his invisible form outlined on her HUD.

  Sera shot back, then worried that her response was too coarse.

  Jason only laughed. < ‘Old man’, is it? When all this is over, we can go back to my cabin, and I’ll remind you what this old man knows.>

  Sera shook her head, a grin settling on her lips, as she crouched and then sprang forward, leaping across the gash in the crater’s floor.

  Jason said as he leapt across after her.

  * * * * *

  Five minutes later, the team reached the spire, a towering spike of basalt rising over seventy meters from the base of the crater.

  It was worn by wind and the elements, and Sera wasn’t sure if it was caused by a volcanic eruption after the impact, or if the meteor had liquified the surrounding rock enough that it had splashed back up and frozen in place.

  The latter seemed unlikely, but given some of the bizarre geological formations she’d seen on various planets, it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility.

  Valerie asked as they spread out around the rockface.

  Sera looked back at the area that was clearly a landing pad, then followed the most level route between it and the base of the spire. It led to a crease in the rock, and she cautiously stepped toward it, releasing a batch of nanoprobes into the air.

  she announced.

  Jen announced, as Valerie and two of Sera’s guards approached.

  Valerie said, and Sera gritted her teeth, but moved back, watching Pearson’s team move into the fore.

  Flaherty eased toward her position, and Sera realized she’d lost sight of him on the journey to the spire. She wasn’t sure if it was because she wasn’t paying attention, or if he’d turned off his IFF systems that randomly updated the combat net with his position.

  Pearson said to Valerie over the command Link.

  <‘When’?> Jason asked.

  Sera shrugged as she watched Jen’s progress with infiltrating the sensors embedded in the rocks.

  Valerie asked.

 

  Julia informed the team.

  Chief Yves said as he approached a flat stretch of rock at the back of the crease.

  Jen suggested.

  Yves paused.

  Colonel Pearson asked.

 

  Sera directed her AI.

 

  The rest of Pearson’s team continued to scour the area surrounding the spire, noting the placement of other sensors while Jen worked her way into the facility’s network.

  Jason said after a few minutes.

  Sera prompted.

 

  Sera realized that Jason was right. They’d found plenty of di
fferent sensor systems: EM bands, sound waves, even geo vibration pickups.

  But no defense systems. Not a single autoturret, or drone dispersal port.

  Valerie countered.

  Jason allowed.

  Sera asked.

  The governor let out a long sigh.

  She didn’t think that was the case.

  Jason asked.

  Sera didn’t have to give Jason’s question much consideration.

  Pearson replied. he paused for a moment.

  Sera wasn’t going to be left out of the fun that easily. There had to be some perks in being president.

  Pearson directed the comment to Jason.

  Jason only snorted.

 

  Sera replied.

  Jason chuckled.

  Pearson grunted, a moment before Jen sang out in victory.

 

  As Jen spoke, a section of rock slid out and shifted to the side, held aloft by an a-grav field. The group waited as Yves flushed a nanocloud into the darkened interior.