Armor World Read online

  “Is that those T-bombs?”

  “No… they haven’t launched yet. They’re having trouble getting a fix on the enemy.”

  “How the hell…?” I asked. “That ship is as big as the Moon. How can they fail to lock-on?”

  “I don’t know. The enemy have several advance defenses. We’re working on the problem now.”

  “Where are the T-bombs?”

  Floramel lifted a single, long finger. “On the floor above this one—are you sure you’re cleared to know these things?”

  “They let me in the place, didn’t they?”

  She didn’t argue the point, so I stared up into the darkness overhead. It was alarming to think that a warehouse full of fusion bombs was sitting directly overhead.

  My mind and my eyes fell back to her screens. “But… something made it through and hit the invader. I saw it.”

  She shook her head. “That was our particle beams. They actually hit a few seconds ago. We’re far enough away for a delay in what we’re seeing.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know about that—but did our beams do any damage?”

  She shook her head again. “We’re not measuring any significant hull damage, just a little discoloration—the ship has shrugged off our guns.”

  That was a shocker. This hurtling beach ball wasn’t just a dumb rock, that was for sure. Somehow, it was evading and deflecting everything we had to throw at it.

  “Is it dodging around in space somehow the way your ship did, back at Rogue World?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I’m still suspecting a field of particulate matter—tiny motes of dust or metal that interfere with our sensors and our strikes.”

  “Well, just launch the damned T-bombs blind then,” I said. “Lay down a pattern right in front of this big prick—something they can’t help but run into.”

  Floramel gave me one more glance. “Are you listening in on command chat?”

  “I don’t have the authorization.”

  “Well, you should feel vindicated. The brass has decided to do exactly that.”

  A moment later the T-bombs flew, and everything changed.

  -6-

  At first, there was a wild series of ripping flashes. I saw a dozen strikes, then a hundred—a thousand? I couldn’t tell, but it looked like we’d lit up a sun out there. Automatically, I threw my hands up to cover my eyes. The screens were so good and so accurate, they blasted a pulsing blue-white light that dazzled us all. Stark shadows grew behind us, drawing silhouettes of the milling, wincing crowd of operators and officers.

  “Gee-zus!” I shouted. “What in hell’s name was that? Did it blow up?”

  “They got through!” I heard someone shout.

  My shock faded. Grinning, I whooped, and all the nerds around me gave me an odd glance—but I didn’t care.

  “Hot damn!” I said. “Did we tear up that wrecking ball or what, Floramel? I can’t even see the thing anymore.”

  Patiently, she regarded her screens and instruments. Numbers played there rather than pretty pictures and interpretive graphics.

  “We definitely hit it. They must not have been expecting a shower of T-bombs. We gave no hint up until this moment that we have that kind of technology.”

  “That’s great, girl. But is it destroyed?”

  “No… There’s a field of vapor around the object, but our magnetometers, our gravimetric sensors… the object must be relatively intact. No significant reduction of mass. No signs of a catastrophic break up, either.”

  “Are you sure? What kind of a rock takes dozens of point-blank fusion bomb hits in stride?”

  She turned slowly in her chair toward me, but she didn’t look at me. She was staring at the deck, frowning hard.

  “You’ve got a point,” she said. “Normal matter would have been vaporized or at least seriously ruptured. It’s clear this invasive object is not only massive but unnaturally rugged as well.”

  “Like what? What could take that kind of a whuppin’?”

  Floramel shrugged. Over her shoulder, I saw the big screens clearing. The flashes, the clouds of displaced radioactive gasses, had subsided.

  And I’ll be damned if that big-ass cue ball wasn’t still there, and still barreling down on us.

  “Shit…” I said. “At least it’s all black and scarred up now. Hey. Maybe the ship is intact, but the people inside are dead from shock. What do you think about that?”

  Floramel turned back to her console slowly, thoughtfully. I could tell she was surprised and unhappy. She’d thought the T-bombs would do the trick. We all had.

  “The object is slowing,” she said. “It’s reducing speed dramatically.”

  “Well, that’s good. At least they don’t intend to smash into us, cracking our planet apart like an egg.”

  “No… That doesn’t appear to be their plan. Unfortunately, the fact they’re still able to maneuver means we haven’t killed the crew with the shock of our attack, or the radiation. In fact, we haven’t disabled it at all. They seem to be gliding in with a controlled, smooth deceleration.”

  Graves showed up then.

  “Your T-bombs didn’t work,” he said.

  “Evidently not, Primus,” Floramel said.

  “What other kind of fancy stuff have your nerds got in store for this kind of emergency?” he asked.

  Floramel licked her lips. She didn’t meet his eyes, or mine.

  “The fleet failed. Special weapons failed. I’m not sure that even our monitor ship, the one that held off Battle Fleet 921 single-handedly for over an hour, could stop this enemy, Primus.”

  He nodded. “That’s great. All right, we’re stepping things up a notch, then. McGill, come with me. Maybe you’ll be useful today after all.”

  While Graves and Floramel talked, I’d been examining the data on other people’s screens. News vids were pouring in from the city outside.

  Down here, we were locked inside a fortress. There was no place safer on Earth, unless you counted a few mile-deep mining holes that no one knew about.

  People had been permanently blinded by the flashes. Others had been sunburned—right through the clouded sky.

  Sirens rolled out over the streets, and armored troops jogged to defensive positions. I hadn’t seen this kind of alert at Central since the Squids had hit us—maybe not even then.

  “Uh…” I said, “can you give me two minutes, Primus Graves, sir?”

  He slid his eyes to Floramel, then back to me. He sighed. “All right. Come to the upper deck conference room in five minutes, or I’ll send a squad to arrest you.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  My hand reached out, and I touched Floramel’s shoulder again. She stiffened slightly.

  “James, this isn’t—”

  “I’m worried, Floramel. I need your help.”

  She frowned at me, and I was sad to see a hint of suspicion in her eyes.

  “Della and Etta, my little girl, they’re out there in those streets.”

  Her expression changed, and she swept a glance over the continuously playing news vids on screens all around us. There were scenes of panic, traffic snarls, even fires in the old wooden buildings on the east side of town.

  “Oh… your daughter is out there?”

  “Yeah. She wants to be a lab-monkey, like you. She’s already been accepted by Central U.”

  “Really? She’s not neuro-typical then?”

  “No, not at all. She’s half Dust-Worlder, remember? The granddaughter of the Investigator.”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” she said, as if a great mystery had been solved.

  I didn’t take any offense at this. I’d never been much good at school, and I didn’t care who knew about it.

  “My mama always said I was one-part genius and three-parts retard,” I said. “Maybe Etta inherited the right part.”

  “I understand your concern, James,” Floramel said, “but I don’t know what I can do for them. If Della insists she has important legion business at
Varus headquarters, she might be able to get inside the upper floors here at Central, but your daughter… she’s not even an intern yet.”

  “Can’t you just print her out a pass, or something?”

  “I don’t have that authority… and security is going to be unusually tight.”

  Thinking about the hogs that examined Turov and I in the elevator, I had to admit she was right. My heart sank. My little girl had come to Central just in time to fall into a magnitude 9 shit-storm.

  “All right,” I said. “I try something else.”

  “But Graves said five minutes…” Floramel said, but she was talking to my back.

  “He’ll get over it,” I said over my shoulder. “He always does.”

  Striding with ground-eating steps, I moved at a pace that only a man of my height can do without jogging. Turov came into view a few moments later, and I caught her frown of disapproval.

  “Where the hell have you been? Flirting again?”

  “We’re in trouble, Galina.”

  “No shit, McGill. That ship is not only slowing down, she’s coming here. Right here.”

  “What?” I asked, catching her arm and turning her around to face me.

  Startled, she looked up into my intense face. Something there told her I wasn’t fooling around, so she didn’t get angry. Maybe she was too surprised for that.

  “They think the ship detected the source of our T-bombs,” she said. “They traced our attack to this building. They didn’t like that attack. Right after the bombs detonated, that big ship changed course. Instead of aiming at the Indian Ocean, it’s now targeting Central.”

  I loosened my iron fingers from around her elbow and studied the screens.

  “Della and Etta… they’re out there in those streets.”

  “Ah…” Galina said, rubbing at her arm slightly. Her anger and confusion drained away. “Your daughter came back to you from Dust World?”

  “She sure did… but right now I kind of wished she’d stayed out there.”

  -7-

  “James?” Galina said to me. “James!”

  “Huh?”

  I’d been staring at the screens. Panic was spreading across the city, and the displays were full of chaos. The big ship was decelerating, and it would make planetfall in about ten hours. The word was spreading and people were freaking out.

  “I can try to help,” Galina said.

  That got my attention. I looked up and spoke to her at last. “I can’t even get through to them on my tapper. I’m blocked.”

  “I know, it’s a security thing, but I can get past the firewall with a text. I’ll see what I can do for them.”

  My eyes searched hers, and I smiled in relief.

  “Thanks, Galina, I owe you one.”

  She waved for me to leave. “Go to your meeting with Graves now. He’s got something, um, special for you to do.”

  I felt an urge to kiss her, but I knew that wasn’t going to fly in public. I could see in her eyes that she felt the urge too. That had to be enough. Turning away, I hurried toward the upper galleries.

  They were really apartments, or offices, or something like that—parts of the basement floors that hadn’t been demolished completely to make the big chamber in the middle that was serving as Earth’s War Room today.

  There were ramps made of slabs of puff-crete. It was the only path upward from the main floor. In the hall, it was half-dark—lit up like a movie theater by random flashes of light from one screen or another. The strobing effect made it hard to see where I was going. I almost fell off one of the ramps when I reached the third floor and took one step too far. They hadn’t even bothered to make any handrails or patch all the cracks in the walkways.

  The final ramp just ended, some ten meters above the main floor.

  “Shit,” I muttered, looking down. That would have been a nasty fall—maybe ending in a revival.

  Reaching out a boot, I managed to feel my way onto the broken slabs of puff-crete that connected the ramps to the corridors. Once inside the corridors, it was relatively safe and easy going. After another fifty steps I found a door my tapper was indicating to me with a big green arrow.

  Pushing my way inside, I discovered the room was full of people I recognized.

  “Sargon? Harris?” I said, putting on a grin.

  They nodded back to me coldly. They didn’t look happy.

  At the front of the place was Graves. He was inspecting equipment of some kind.

  “So good of you to join us, Centurion McGill,” he said. “You’re only seven minutes late.”

  “That hamster’s maze out there almost killed me, Primus!”

  Grave’s made a disgusted face. “Maybe you’ll wish it did before this briefing is over.”

  Sliding into a seat in the back, I listened in. Normally, I was bored and mentally drifting during any briefing—but somehow, this time things felt different. The stakes were higher today. This wasn’t going to end up with Legion Varus going out for a cruise on some inhospitable rock. This was Mother Earth we were preparing to defend.

  Harris raised his hand, and Graves nodded.

  “With all due respect, Primus,” Harris said, “this sounds like a job for hogs. We’re on Earth, after all. It’s not even legal for us to—”

  “Hegemony has suspended their normal rules for the duration of this crisis,” Graves told him. “Specifically, they’ve dropped the prohibition concerning independent legions performing military operations on Earth.”

  “That was quick,” Harris muttered. “I didn’t think the Ruling Council could do anything in less than six months.”

  A few people whistled and shuffled their feet. Legion Varus hadn’t fought on Earth since we’d last been invaded, but it was hard to be surprised. If you scared anybody enough, even a hog, he tended to wake up and take action.

  “If you don’t have any more comments, I’ll get back to the briefing,” Graves said. “We’re in the planning stages, naturally, and we don’t know if our services will even be needed. Maybe these aliens are friendly, and they only want to ask to borrow a cup of sugar.”

  No one laughed, but at least I knew that Graves had made a joke. His jokes were always grim and delivered with a stony expression—people rarely laughed.

  “What’s the plan, Primus?” I asked him.

  My tone was serious. Normally, I would have been calm and collected, if not bored. But today… today I had a kid out there in the city, and it sure as hell looked like someone was coming to kill her.

  Graves looked at me for a moment, and he nodded. “The ship is headed directly for Earth. It’s slowing down, and we don’t know where it’s going to land yet.”

  I raised my hand. Graves sighed and waved for me to speak. In the old days, he would have told me to shut the hell up—but now that I was a centurion, technically only one rank below him, he allowed me to talk a little more.

  “Sir,” I said, “that’s old news. The ship’s course has been plotted. She’s coming right here, to Central.”

  The crowd of Varus officers mumbled again. Harris growled at me. “How the fuck do you know that? You just got here.”

  “That big bastard cue ball of a ship sensed the origins of the T-bombs—at least, that’s what the nerds running the ops stations down there think.”

  Harris frowned at me fiercely. When he got bad news, he tended to get angry—at the messenger. Turning back around, he crossed his arms over his wide chest and glared at Graves sourly.

  In the meantime, Graves had checked his tapper. “I can see here from the live updates you’re right. The ship is homing in on Central. We’ll have to speed this up…”

  Moving to a control screen, he began making gestures and touching big colored blocks of text. The wall behind him transformed into a map of local space. The Earth was down low, in the bottom left corner. In the center of the screen was the Moon, and far, far up in the upper left corner was another object. It was something metallic that followed a trajectory line
all the way to our planet.

  “It will pass Luna in about three hours. As it’s reducing speed, it will hit us tomorrow morning just before dawn.”

  “That’s great. That’s just frigging great,” Harris complained.

  “Legion Varus will play the part of first-responders in this crisis.”

  We looked at each other and grinned at that, but our grins faded as Graves continued. He displayed a layout of the city.

  “It’s possible they will lay waste to this city for daring to effectively attack them. The xeno-people say their behavior patterns indicate arrogance and decisiveness. No matter what their intentions are, there can be no doubt they didn’t like our surprise attack—ineffective as it was.”

  The grins were gone by now, but Graves wasn’t done.

  “If, on the other hand, they don’t dust us off into our component molecules, it’s predicted they will land here and at the very least inspect the origins of our attacks—meaning the vaults below Central.”

  Total silence met his statement. It hadn’t escaped any of us that we were standing directly in the path of this hurricane of shit.

  “Accordingly, Central will prepare to defend itself as best it can. To that end, we’ll not just lock the doors and set up auto-cannons on the roof. We’ll counterattack the moment they arrive.”

  “How the hell are we going to do that?” Harris demanded. “We teleported bombs into that ship, and they didn’t do crap.”

  “No,” Graves said, “we didn’t teleport bombs into the ship. We tried, but failed to penetrate their hull. The bombs therefore came out of… wherever the hell a teleporting object goes through when it’s in transit and struck the hull. That’s partly why they were so ineffective. Most of them struck with kinetic force only and didn’t go off properly.”

  “Still, I don’t see how—”

  Graves lifted his gauntlet. “We’re going to get another chance when they arrive. If they want to land troops here, they’ll have to open some kind of door, something like that. Then we’ll be able to breach that hull and enter the ship.”

  “You mean,” I began thoughtfully, “we’re going to teleport troops into the ship the second they open up?”