Machine Gods (Star Crusades Nexus, Book 2) (4 page)

She then turned and
walked back to her room. The Sergeant watched her go with a
deflated look on her face. Gun grinned at her discomfort before his
face tightened up. For a second, Sergeant Belgard feared he might
attack her. Instead, he spoke in a low, gravelly voice.

“
Teresa Morato is a
hero of the Marine Corps. We’ve spent the last three days getting
back from an operation against T’Kari Raiders. You should show
respect.”

He then also turned
to disappear off into one of the three rooms, presumably to get
changed into something more suitable. The Sergeant wished, for the
first time since she was transferred from Terra Nova, that she were
somewhere else.

* * *

The
crippled Alliance light cruiser ANS Imperator
drifted slowly through the debris field. Her engines had been out
of commission for more than a full day while fires continued to
burn in her forward sections. Coolant sprayed from the ruptures
along her port flank and into space, along with quantities of
escaping fluid and gas from the other impacts. This damage had
combined over the hours to produce enough lateral thrust to start
moving the ship in a lazy circle towards the rest of the debris in
the asteroid field. A hint of noise caught Spartan’s attention, and
he turned his head to see his old friend, Khan grinning at
him.

“
What?” he asked,
always suspicious of that expression.

Khan chuckled to
himself at the view from the assault shuttle. Unlike the other
humans on board, Khan was one of the Jötnar; a people prized for
their great strength, power, and ability to inflict damage. His
people had been artificially created and indoctrinated by the enemy
back in the Great Uprising over two decades ago and had almost
turned the tide of the War. He was twice the size of any man in the
shuttle with his massive three-meter tall frame, thick muscles, and
armored suit that gave him the look of some ogre or monster of
old.

“Well?” continued Spartan, “What’s so damned
funny?”

Khan nodded to the
crippled ship that drifted slowly and silently through space.
Contrary to what most people expected, there was no sound in space
and even the blasts that had occurred when they’d originally
damaged the ship had not even registered inside their
shuttle.

“Only you would destroy your ship to catch your
enemy.”

Spartan looked
as
his friend smirked. Two of the other
APS operatives sitting nearby were forced to hide their faces from
their commander. Spartan wasn’t just in charge of the team, he was
their boss, and also one of the most highly respected former
marines in the Alliance military. His exploits and his somewhat
direct approach toward people had become almost legendary. The
operatives had been stuck inside their shutdown and deactivated
shuttle for seven hours now and anything, no matter how banal, was
more interesting than watching and waiting.

“
Hey, that was the
plan, remember? For this kind of prey we need the right kind of
bait.”

Khan raised an
eyebrow at the explanation. Spartan exhaled in an annoyed
fashion.

“
Look, I’ve been
working on this one with Alliance Intelligence and the T’Kari for
seven months now. We have to catch them before they move on to the
next system.”

Khan simply raised
his
eyebrow again and settled back down
to watch the ship.

“
Catching T’Kari
Raiders, is that all we’re needed for now?”

Spartan tried to
relax
, but it was difficult. In the last
two years a lot had changed, both for him and his wife Teresa, as
well as their company. APS Corporation had been their baby,
something they’d invested themselves in fully, both in terms of
time and money. Yet since the Alliance had made contact with the
T’Kari in the New Charon Star System, things had turned for the
worse for people like Spartan. The exploitation of New Charon had
begun in earnest with new colonies appearing, like the old gold
rush towns on Earth, in a matter of months. At the same time, the
amount of competition from new, aggressive corporations had grown
massively, as had the number of lavish contracts. It didn’t take
long for somebody to make a mistake though, and the entire industry
had imploded. While the Alliance funding had almost completely
dried up, more and more money was being fed directly to the Navy,
and Spartan had been forced to seek contracts with whoever could
afford APS’ fees. He tried to shake the thoughts of his crippled
company behind him and instead looked back at the ship.

ANS Imperator was
anything but
an Alliance warship. She was
a hulk, salvaged from the fighting decades earlier when the
Uprising had begun back at the Titan Naval Station. Imperator had
been one of the first casualties and had been used ever since as a
storage hulk for ammunition, and unstable or dangerous supplies.
Burn marks on her outer hull were not from any kind of recent
incident. As far as Spartan was aware, every piece of damage on the
ship had occurred many years before he’d even laid his eyes on her
rotting hulk. He looked back at the small group of specialists
inside the shuttle. The cramped interior was barely big enough to
contain the eight of them and their equipment and weapons. Just
weeks from his fiftieth birthday, he was already starting to feel
aches in his joints. Luckily, he was stronger, healthier, and
fitter than most men in their twenties. Advances in biotech, food,
and bioengineering meant a man could serve as a marine grunt for
decades longer than had been possible in the past. Lovett noticed
the look on Spartan’s face and knew his friend was hurting. He
tried to lighten the mood.

“
Hey, it could be a
lot worse. At least the
T’Kari know the
value of military assets, even if our own citizens don’t. If this
mission works, we might get security contracts for the T’Kari
fleet.”

Spartan nodded but
said nothing. Lovett was correct, of course. The T’Kari, though
very much like humans, had a number of differences that still
astounded him. Their complete lack or even belief in physical
violence had left them vulnerable, and he was not surprised the
enemy that had so very nearly destroyed humanity had so
successfully torn T’Kari society apart. Luckily, the violence
exhibited by Spartan and his corporation, directly in front of
them, had proven his worth and gained them a prized contract to
provide specialist security work for the alien race. Though the
Alliance patrolled the system, they refused to operate under any
kind of T’Kari command. APS Corporation was different, and it was
for that reason alone that Spartan suspected his company even still
existed. The other six operatives were all men and women he trusted
implicitly, though James Lovett was the only one of them, other
than Khan, that he’d served with back in the Marine
Corps.

“
Spartan, I’ve got a
question,” sai
d Isamu Takeda from
Kerberos, the newest member of his team. His tightly sculpted face
and jet-black hair made him stand out from the rest of those still
working for APS Corporation. Spartan nodded.

“
Who the hell are
these guys? I heard that when you, Khan, Gun
, and the others first met the T’Kari on Hades, the enemy
attacked you. Didn’t they also have T’Kari warriors fighting with
them?”

Spartan
nodded
again, looking to Lovett who was
doing his best to try not to laugh. The politics of the New Charon
Star System were complicated, and most of the operatives now
working at APS had been employed for their technical or military
skills. Only the more senior members had much of an idea what was
actually happening in the System.

“
Isamu, what
happened out here seems pretty clear to me. Hundreds of years
ago
, the enemy that we’ve been fighting
started a civil war with the citizens of the T’Kari. It went on a
lot longer than our Uprising, and this is the result. Their worlds
are devastated, and their population reduced to almost nothing.
Ayndir, their leader, explained to me that whenever the T’Kari
reached a stage where they might recover, the machines would
return.”

Isamu looked a
little confused at the response
, and
Spartan was already wishing he had some of his old crew back. With
the shortage in resources, he’d been forced to recruit whoever he
could find.

“Like Pontus and Typhon then, back home?”

Spartan breathed out with some satisfaction.

“
Yes,
t
he enemy, whoever they are, seem adept
at several things. They are masters of biomechanical engineering,
space travel, Rift construction and most of all, at sending or
indoctrinating agents to start wars in their name. Based on the
advanced technology of the T’Kari, I would suggest they hit races
once they reach a certain level. We’ve only just spread out from
our own worlds, and that might be just the signal they needed to
start their operations in Alpha Centauri.”

Lovett listened with
interest as Spartan tried to explain what was happening as best he
could. He often had difficulty trying to get his head around what
had happened, and meeting the T’Kari had made it even more
complicated to him. He leaned forward and interrupted the
conversation.

“
What I want to know
is
, who the hell this enemy is? Where are
they, and how are they getting technology and these agents through
to people like us and the T’Kari?”

“
Yeah,”
Khan added.

He had been keeping
quiet while the others talked. His race of synthetic creatures had
the unfortunate background of having been bred and trained to fight
against humanity in the Uprising. Though their programming had been
removed, there were still many that distrusted, or even hated those
that were left, still referring to them as Biomechs.

“
I’ll tell you
something else. When we find where they live, you won’t be able to
hold the Jötnar back. We have a score to settle.”

Spartan placed a
hand on his friend
’s shoulder. He knew it
wasn’t just the fact that Khan and his people had been built and
abused by the enemy that had used the mythology and iconography of
the beast Echidna. It was the losses and the continuous
discrimination and abuse his people suffered every day. No matter
how many battles they fought in, or how many died on behalf of the
Alliance, there were still thousands, perhaps millions of citizens
that considered them as no more than barbarous dogs that needed to
be put down.

“Khan, we all have scores to settle with them.”

A light blinked
inside the craft
, and it instantly drew
his attention.

They are here!

Spartan directed his
gaze back to the crippled ship and quickly identified a
dark shape moving slowly toward the hulk. It was
shaped much like the other T’Kari ships they had come across over
the last month, but this one was equipped with large metal ribs
along its flanks. Spartan pulled his electronic secpad from the
pouch on his armor and brought up the known schematic for T’Kari
Raider ships.

“
Okay, it’s the one.
Wait for my signal, and then we go in. Ready?”

Each of those
waiting patiently in the shuttle nodded in agreement. Even though
they’d been waiting for hours, now that the mission was about to go
ahead, they moved as though rushed. Khan watched the ship and
nodded to Spartan while pointing to its flank.

“Look, they are sending in a salvage team.”

Spartan watched as
the ribs opened up, and like fleas on a dog, the suited T’Kari
exited the ship and used their EVA thrusters to move around the
damaged vessel. Spartan checked his L52 Mark II Assault Carbine one
last time. It wasn’t necessary; it was more a ritual, and one he
always carried out at the start of a dangerous operation like this
one.

“You think their commander is on the ship?” asked
Khan with some suspicion.

Spartan shrugged.

“
You saw the
reports. The small groups of enslaved T’Kari have been hunting down
their brothers for generations. This ship has raided throughout New
Charon with impunity for seven months now. If the commander isn’t
here, then where will he be?”

Khan looked as
though he agreed, but he declined to comment. Spartan released his
grav-lock, moving closer to his old friend as he made his way to
the airlock seal.

“
Anyway, we get paid
by the T’Kari whether he’s there or not. Now we find if the price
they paid for the information was worth it.”

“
They’re
inside,”
Lovett added in his calm
voice.

Spartan took a deep breath and prepared himself for
what was to come.

“
Good. All units
converge on the target.”

He pulled the triple
levers that released both stages of the airlock. There was no mass
ejection of air as the craft had already vented its surplus
atmosphere in the last hour. As the hatches
opened
, the eight elite operatives of the
APS Corporation left the shuttle. They each latched themselves onto
a ZeroDrone and then moved away with slow, gently acceleration. The
extra-vehicular movement drones were a recent development of the
gear used by shipyard workers to move equipment and tooling about
in zero-g environments. Spartan and Khan took the first and were
pulled through space and toward the waiting ship. As they moved,
Spartan watched another three teams, each using the same gear and
equipment as they moved from their own hiding places in the debris
field.