Attack of Shadows (Galaxy's Edge Book 4) Read online

  Captain Thales made his way back through the sub-lunar halls cut into the stone, passing corpsmen carrying wounded. As soon as he’d made his way through a force field, he was able to shuck his helmet and get in contact with fire control.

  “Still no word on the admiral?”

  “No, sir,” replied the junior officer. “Command base house was wiped out by one of the bombs. Right now you’re in command, but the lieutenant colonel in charge of the legionnaire battalion is ready to take over until a more senior navy officer can come up from Tarrago Prime.”

  Thales let that hang for a moment as he mopped sweat from his brow. He knew Navy-Legion interaction often got sticky and tricky… but right now they were in a fight. And the Legion was the absolute best at fighting. As an artillery officer, it was his job to support the Legion.

  He nodded to himself as one of the nearby corpsmen covered a dead gunner with the man’s jacket. The body bags hadn’t arrived yet.

  “Tell him he’s in charge,” Thales said. “And also tell him we’ve most likely got two spies running around the base. You’ve got the gun batteries. I’m going to try and track these jokers down before they do any more damage. Until then, I want you to seal fire control up. Protocol eight. No one gets in or out. If they have a target, Lieutenant… it’ll be you guys. I’m heading to Internal Security.”

  “Roger that, sir.”

  House of Reason, Security Council Chambers

  Utopion

  “Has there been any success in reaching the Seventh Fleet?” Orrin Kaar asked the gathered Security Council members.

  An opulent lunch of chilled luteclaw and beezel eggs occupied the center of the meeting table. Kaar watched as some of the more corpulent delegates piled their plates high with the succulent fare.

  “None,” answered Vice Chair A’lill’n as she spooned a socially acceptable amount—much too little—onto a gleaming white plate. “Based on what we received from the Navy, it is likely that the Seventh Fleet is somewhere in the Tarrago system.”

  “And therefore unreachable by comm.” Kaar let out a sigh, though in truth he felt this to be good news. With the early complications, the Seventh Fleet showing up now would be less than ideal. Better to buy time to secure the moon and Tarrago Prime and then lure the fleet to its destruction. That would provide a clear path to Utopion itself, and a new beginning for the Republic. One where men who were not afraid to lead could prosper. Men like Orrin Kaar.

  Kaar looked around the table. Every delegate member save himself was stuffing his or her face with food that most of the galaxy couldn’t afford if they saved for a month. They were entirely content to sit back and let Kaar—and, it must be admitted, A’lill’n—make determinations for the entire council. When the New Republic rose from the ashes of the old, they would have just that—Kaar would lead them all.

  And the galaxy would flourish.

  “It would seem,” Kaar said to the room, “that all we can do at this point is wait for news from Tarrago. The Seventh Fleet is all we can spare at the moment, with Admiral Devers’s Third Fleet already in action. Unless we wish to leave the edge and mid-core unprotected?”

  Those delegates who were listening shook their heads.

  “Legion Commander Keller, has your kill team been recalled?”

  Keller’s image flickered through the comm. “The order has been given to their team commander.”

  Kaar frowned. “That sounds to me a very noncommittal response, Commander.”

  “There is a chain of command, Delegate Kaar. The order will be relayed to the kill team, but as you know, there is difficulty communicating with the Tarrago system. It may be too late.”

  The eyes of the other council members looked to Kaar for a response, but it was A’lill’n who gave the answer. “You have done your part, Legion Commander Keller. However, if the kill team completes this unsanctioned mission and destroys a major Republic asset… someone will have to pay the price.”

  Keller’s expression hardened. “Understood,” he said, though his tone indicated he did anything but.

  231st Gun Battery Assigned Orbital Defense Command

  Fortress Omicron

  0300 Local System Time

  Internal Security was three levels down and on the opposite side of the gun bore around which the fortress was built. Thales made it there even though a large section of the bore in the area had taken extreme damage from the one bomb that had managed to hit its target.

  To Thales, it was a wonder the gun would even fire out of this bore with all the damage. But according to the LT in fire control, it would. Damage control teams were already hard at work swapping out massive systems boards that interfaced with the solid-state guidance magnets built into the sides of the tunnel.

  At one section, the bore lay open to the vacuum beyond a temporary force field the damage control team had set up. Thales donned his wonky artillery helmet and made sure he had a good seal before passing through the barrier. The team acknowledged him, and he set their comm channel after identifying it on their shoulder markings.

  “I’m just gonna visually inspect the bore while I’m down here. Don’t mind me.”

  They didn’t and returned to their work.

  He stuck first his head, and then his body, out into the gaping cavern that was the orbital gun bore in this quadrant of the dead moon.

  It was like looking into a bottomless pit.

  The distance to the opposite side of the bore was over two hundred yards, and all around the perimeter, massive maglev blocks waited to accelerate and guide the rounds to their targets. Thales leaned out further, fighting a brief wash of vertigo as he looked down. It was dark, even though the tunnel was lit the whole way down to the moon’s core.

  The bomb had likely been set to explode at a certain altitude setting, and that was the only thing that had saved this bore from going offline. Instead of hitting anything, it had merely dropped down the center of the massive tube and exploded in midair.

  “They should’ve set for contact detonation,” Thales muttered to himself. That would’ve taken all four gun bores out at once. They would’ve wiped out fire control in one stroke.

  Except maybe that hadn’t been their plan. Maybe they’d only wanted to disable the one gun that could hit their fleet. Take fire control by force, or stealth, and then take possession of the other three gun bores, ready to hit anything else within those arcs.

  Something else bothered him, and normally he was the type to stay and tease it out until he had it. He was a problem solver that way—or, as the most likely now dead base commanding officer had thought of him… a thinker. Like that was somehow a bad thing as far as the higher-ups of galactic culture were concerned. But right now he needed to get to Internal Security and find out where the two assassins had gone off to, so he pulled himself away from the almost mesmerizing view of the bottomless gun bore and said goodbye to the damage control team.

  At Internal Security he found no one alive.

  They were all dead.

  And that same HK malware had scrambled all the screens and terminals.

  Thales drew his blaster and advanced into the dark security center. One officer was reclining in his chair, swiveled away from his station, blaster on his hip. His head had been blown off. One shot.

  They got him first, thought Thales.

  To his right a tech with headphones on, probably the comm operator for this section, had gotten it in the back. Whether he’d known it was coming or not was unclear. The third man in the station had at least drawn a blaster. It lay a few feet from his body, unfired.

  When Thales had cleared the area, he knew two things.

  One, he was dealing with someone, or someones, who were very good at killing. The headshot on the section chief was pro. And two, they’d come here after Deep Sensors to knock this node out before they went on to their next target.

  The next target most likely had to be fire control.

  Except fire control was locked down. Prot
ocol eight. Virtually inaccessible by physical means.

  And it was way down there, at the intersection of all four gun bores, in the middle of the massive hollow core of the dead moon. A bunker with only one route in or out. That route had a series of eight high-security blast doors that could not be opened from the outside. Anyone even trying would be subdued by gas, or war bots, or ventilated by two automated high-powered tri-barrel N-50s that sensed on thermal and motion. Any unauthorized personnel at the last barrier were targeted and terminated, no questions asked.

  And that was only the last line of defense. The four lifts leading down-bore from each fortress all opened onto a security station guarded by a platoon of crack Legionnaires. Only if you got past them did you move on to face the gas, blast doors, war bots, more blast doors, and the murder guns.

  And everyone in fire control knew you were coming the whole time. And they were authorized to—and this is where it got crazy, but since Thales was an artillery officer and this whole moon was basically one giant gun system, he knew—the fire control officers were authorized to detonate the entire moon in order to prevent the gun from falling into enemy hands.

  Yes.

  The entire moon.

  But of course that would never happen. Because no one would ever invade the Republic, much less the sector capital at Tarrago. And there was no way to get through security into main fire control.

  Except…

  Five minutes later Thales was back at the spot where the damage control team was just finishing their work.

  “Question, Sergeant…” interrupted Thales.

  The damage control team sergeant groaned as she stood up from her work. She wiped her hands on her uniform and waited. She seemed in no mood for officers.

  “When you guys got down here…”

  “Guys?”

  She’d report him for that. Great. Whatever.

  “All right,” he sighed. “Sorry. Long day. I apologize. Deeply,” he added sarcastically. “Okay. When your team arrived. That maglev was still in its mounting bracket chain?”

  She seemed to forget his offense, or rather didn’t take it too seriously. She was just busting his chops. She could’ve cared less.

  “No, sir. It had fallen inward. This whole area was exposed vacuum. The explosion must have forced it off the mounting chain embedded into the walls.”

  Thales thought about that for a second. “But that’s not supposed to happen. Right?”

  “No, sir. Not at all. But it has. Rarely. When they did the initial readiness inspection on the bore after the attack, they spotted this one. So we got detailed to come in and fix it.” She waited. Obviously she wanted to get back to finishing the job he’d just interrupted.

  He looked around the small space they’d been working in. The maglev panel had just fallen inward. It hadn’t been blown inward. It hadn’t bounced off the opposite wall of what amounted to a small niche built along the side of the bore.

  He bent down and inspected the panel. After a few seconds he found what he was looking for.

  “How do you…” He was gonna say “guys” but caught himself. “Get this off? When you do maintenance?”

  She pointed to a pneumatic suction device attached to a small portable lift nearby.

  “So you wouldn’t make these marks.” He pointed toward the top of the panel, where the panel and the floor formed a seam. There, the maglev panel, a very substantial piece of equipment, had been damaged.

  At that point the sergeant got interested. She ran her gloved hand across the damage.

  “From the blast?” she asked.

  Thales shook his head.

  “It’s on the inside. Like someone used a device to pop the panel out of its mount and let it fall inward.”

  “Why?”

  Thales stood, walked over to the opening, and looked down into the gaping maw.

  “Because they wanted to drop onto fire control.”

  “That’s a long fall,” she replied incredulously.

  And then he was running for the lifts.

  Halfway there, running along a curving corridor, he felt the ground began to shake. Dust came down everywhere. There was a loud rumble.

  “All base personnel. Report to your battle stations. We are under attack. Enemy ground assault forces are attacking the base. Repeat…”

  ***

  Even with the turbo lifts it took forever. Along the way, Captain Thales had time to communicate with the company commander’s adjutant and inform him that they had a problem down in fire control. He was told in return that the main gun was getting firing orders that made no sense—and it was firing.

  The line suddenly went dead—the adjutant had clicked off. The man had sounded efficient but stressed, and Thales had the impression that the officer didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation and so had chosen to attend to other pressing matters. Then again, the adjutant probably didn’t know about the two crustbuster weapons that could annihilate the moon in less than thirty seconds if fire control felt threatened.

  And he was in the middle of an invasion. So there was that.

  At the bottom of the core, the elevator opened out onto an innocuous platform with gravity decking. Access tunnels from the other bores led to this same platform—it was the only way in or out. Or so he had thought, until today. Down here there was near weightlessness, and if those two assassins had dropped down the tube with a minimum amount of gear, they’d have been able to land right on top of the fire control bunker—a straight shot, with no damage.

  Thales’s mind swam. Ahead of him the bunker waited, suspended in the void of a hollow core. A lone bridge made its way out there, and a fortified security station guarded the entrance to the bridge. The legionnaires knew he was coming.

  “Advance!” called some acid-voiced legionnaire from across the wide distance between the lift and the security station. Powerful floodlights sprang to life, bathing everything, including Thales, in a bone-white cold light.

  Thales raised his hands, suddenly and uncomfortably aware of the blaster on his thigh. He could see these keyed-up leejes taking that as the needed provocation to blow his brains all over the platform.

  And they’d be right to do so, he told himself.

  But he walked forward to the station without getting shot, and the legionnaire sergeant came out.

  “State your business.”

  “We may have infiltrators down here,” Thales said. “I’m with the 231st. Captain Thales. OIC for Navy. As of right now. I’m going in there to take command of fire control. You should have an authorization from Lieutenant…” Thales couldn’t remember the kid’s name.

  The legionnaire sergeant merely stared at him. Any emotions—hatred, warmth, whatever—was hidden behind the iconic helmet they all wore. They call it a “bucket,” some distant part of Thales’s mind remarked.

  “Ain’t no one’s been down here. Ain’t no one gettin’ through, sir. Your ID signature checks out. Head down the bridge and never mind the war bots. Don’t screw around by the emplaced guns or they’ll go live on you. It’s that serious. Fire control will open the door and you can go on in.”

  For a moment, Thales thought about telling the legionnaires to come with him. If there were two assassins in there, or trying to get in, they wouldn’t stand a chance against a platoon of trained killers like the legionnaires.

  But these men would never leave their assigned post. That would be like getting them to say that water wasn’t wet.

  “Last contact with Lieutenant…” He still couldn’t remember the kid’s name. He nodded toward the bunker.

  “Five minutes ago. It’s all quiet down here.” And then the legion sergeant added, “Which kinda sucks.”

  ***

  It wasn’t the two fearsome latest-gen war bots that freaked Thales out. The gigantic killing machines merely watched him pass without comment. It was the guns. The automated tri-barrel N-50s. Not even the thin, transparent, domed bridge—which seemed to impossibly conn
ect with the fire control bunker suspended in the middle of the core—was as scary as the two soulless heavy blaster killing systems.

  Maybe because they were AI-run. Artificial intelligence had always bothered Thales. Like it couldn’t be reasoned with. Like there was no soul to appeal to on the other side of an instantaneous and violent death.

  From the bridge, he could see the nearest gun breech of the four attached to the bunker. It was a massive gleaming impervisteel system that impressed the hell out of the artillery geek side of him. Attached to the breech was a massive cylinder magazine the size of a corvette. Ready to rack and reload the rounds the orbital defense gun fired faster than anyone thought possible.

  This was not some one-shot super-weapon like so many movies liked to show. Some giant beam that destroyed a planet in just a few seconds. This thing could blow up an entire fleet inside a minute, hitting each ship with its own individual round. It didn’t fire as fast as an automatic heavy blaster, but close enough. Except that it fired rounds the size of trees. All of them sleeping inside those enormous cylinder magazines.

  That impressed him.

  The war bots bothered him.

  The N-50s scared him to death outright.

  Why?

  He didn’t know. Maybe it was the legionnaire sergeant’s warning not to mess around with them. And of course the AI thing. Maybe it was the fact that if there was even the slightest mistake they would just activate and hit him with a short burst of thirty blasts.

  They wouldn’t miss with even one shot.

  And there was nowhere to hide, because all he was doing was following a narrow tube that led into the heart of the bunker.

  He’d never been so glad to hear a blast door slide aside with a hissed whoosh. And then he was through. The fire control lieutenant greeted him. The kid looked worried and nervous. And he seemed genuinely glad somebody else was in charge.

  Thales didn’t have to imagine why. This kid had singlehandedly knocked out a Republic destroyer. There would be hell to pay, and someone was going to pay it. That was the way the navy was. Everyone knew that.