Homeguard Read online

  The suit processed hundreds of confirmations and, indeed, the tracking system noted that the suit approach vectors had changed. The surviving Wraiths on the plains began to swing wide to the east. While not out of range of the Behemoth’s railguns, it did force the tank crews to adjust from their prepared firing positions to try to hit the Wraiths moving sideways. The losses began to slow as the Wraiths increased their speed.

  “Get to Roystav Launch Station if you can,” Gabriel informed them. “There’s cover there in the hills outside it. Come from the east, though. If you approach from the west, the Goliaths are hull-down and ready. Comm, solo link, Warcat. This is Gabriel, over.”

  “What’s up, Omelet?”

  “How’s our little surprise coming?”

  “It’s coming,” Esau replied after a moment. As planned, Esau had secured the dam and everything around it, in case the usual tactics of urban warfare were applied by the marines. “These fuckers were planning on blowing the dam and blaming it on us later.”

  “You got their ranking officer with them?” Gabriel asked, anger boiling deep within. A Darkling was supposed to be calm and composed, but the rage he felt was something more along the lines of what the average Wraith would feel in the heat of battle.

  “Roger,” Esau said. “A major and his staff.”

  “Execute all the officers. Take the enlisted as prisoners. See whether they had orders from on high, or whether they were being exceptionally motivated, before you kill the major. Let me know when you’re ready.”

  “Roger that. Warcat Actual, out.”

  Gabriel switched frequencies and looked for Bravo Red. He found the squad on his HUD after a moment and grimaced. The tiny unit hadn’t made it to the rally point; they’d gotten bogged down near the northern side of the downtown area, where the roads were wide enough for Goliaths to prowl. Hundreds of marines were holding them off, using a local, fancy high-rise hotel to pepper the approaching Wraiths with deadly fire. The Imperfects, unwilling to shoot the hotel and risk civilian casualties, were instead focusing on taking out the Goliaths with HEAVY rounds, to little avail. The tanks’ armor shrugged off most of the rounds fired by the Wraiths.

  “General broadcast, all Wraiths. Adjust fire, adjust fire,” Gabriel ordered as he popped down from his observation point, the Chameleon system on his suit shutting down and exposing him to the naked eye for the first time since the shooting started. “Goliaths are weak on their underside and the flat sides of their turrets. Slaving your targeting systems with Darkling Leviathan for informational assistance only. Hit them from the sides, not the frontal armor. Confirm, over.”

  Dozens of Wraiths confirmed, and the fire began to taper off as Wraiths bounded to new positions. The spotters in the high rise must have missed the movement, because the Goliaths, either unaware or overly confident, continued their push to drive the Wraiths from the streets. Gabriel nodded in satisfaction as the Wraiths infiltrated the buildings on either side of the major streets in preparation.

  Using the Darksuit to define their targeting parameters, the Wraiths began firing more systematically as four of the terrifying tanks entered the narrow confines of the city. Unable to maneuver, the tanks were sitting ducks for the Wraiths, who flitted between buildings via narrow alleyways to drop the lumbering armor. Gabriel could almost feel their giddiness at destroying the tanks. Hoping they’d use common sense in their further engagements, he shifted his focus back toward Esau and his private little war.

  Before they’d dropped, Esau and Gabriel had decided communications between the marines and anyone in space couldn’t happen if they wanted to win this fight. Gabriel had wanted to take down the communications tower set up near the dam, but Esau had had a different idea.

  “It’s called misinformation, Omelet,” Esau had told him while they were still on the Eye. Seeing Gabriel’s confusion, Esau had patiently continued, “Humanity does it all the time. They think they have secure comms, so a lot of radio traffic is passed along. They react to the comms, whether it be good or bad. We hijack their comms relay without them realizing it, we can feed them false information. This helps us win with minimal casualties.”

  Gabriel had initially been reluctant, but agreed. In hindsight, Esau’s plan was a masterstroke in psychological warfare.

  Not wanting to interrupt, he merely listened as Esau and the senior Wraiths not assigned to squads began to manipulate the comms of the occupying marines, with varying degrees of success. The standard military comms of Dominion infantry were stupidly easy to hack, Gabriel saw.

  “Panther One-Niner, Battleaxe Two-Seven, I have two squads of Wraiths moving down Cayoga Avenue trying to flank the Goliath parked at the intersection of Cayoga and Ninth, over.”

  “The fuck? There aren’t any tanks on Cayoga! Confirm your last, Two-Seven.”

  “Panther One-Niner, would you mind telling that to the Goliath parked there looking lost?”

  “Wait one, Battleaxe Two-Seven, relaying to confirm.”

  “Too late, Echo One-Niner. Goliath is immobile, Wraiths now moving down Ninth toward Appleseed.”

  “Shit! There are three platoons of marines down there and not in cover! Get on the horn with them, Battleaxe Two-Seven, and warn them. Battleaxe Two-Seven? Hello, do you read? Battleaxe Two-Seven!?”

  Gabriel grinned inside his breathing mask. It was glorious to behold. It also gave the Wraiths valuable information, as the soldiers struggled to keep up with what was real and what was not. However, not all was going according to plan in the southeast. He flipped through the various Wraith squads until he found the two he was looking for. He was surprised to find his old pal Scott “Dry Burn” Dribin leading it.

  “Dry Burn? Gabriel,” he called out over the comms.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Confirm last orders, over.”

  “Push into the city and absorb the losses,” Dry Burn replied. His firm tone changed to a more pensive one. “Kinda stupid, if you ask me, charging a couple of Goliaths in prepared positions head-on.”

  “No such orders were issued, Dry Burn,” Gabriel growled. “Swing east and avoid the tanks. Confirm receipt, over.”

  No reply came. Gabriel scowled and looked at the HUD. The two Wraith squads were continuing their push into the teeth of the Goliaths, who were having little problem defending against the attacking suits. They were getting chewed up. Gabriel repeated his order, and still, no reply. He scowled and switched comm channels over to Esau.

  “Warcat, Omelet. Flip to alternate two,” Gabriel instructed. A second later he received a double click on the comms, confirming Esau had followed his order. “Esau, we’ve got a problem. I’ve got more than a few non-compliant Wraith squads.”

  “Really?” Esau asked, surprised. “Who?”

  “Dry Burn’s squad, and Charlie Green.”

  “That doesn’t sound like either of them,” Esau commented in a low tone. “Let me try.”

  Gabriel patiently waited for a few moments before Esau came back. His friend didn’t sound pleased.

  “They repeated orders I didn’t give,” Esau reported. “Odd. Are they rogue?”

  “Or worse…are our comms getting spoofed somehow?”

  “Wraith comms are more secure than anything else out there,” Esau reminded him needlessly. “The comms in our suits can’t be spoofed.”

  “You’ve got squads running around randomly and not following the plan,” Gabriel stated. “I’d normally chalk it up to natural bloodlust, but one of the squads is led by Dry Burn. He seemed pretty solid when I met him on Solomon.”

  “Yeah, he doesn’t do ‘crazed warrior’ well,” Esau agreed. “He’s the guy who’d walk to the battle, not charge in screaming like some crazed highlander from Kurong. Can our comms be spoofed?”

  “I don’t know,” Gabriel admitted after a moment. “I’ll do some digging into my Leviathan and see if I can find any instances of it occurring.”

  “Too late to stop the attack,” Esau mused over the comm. “I
’m going to move two platoons over to the north and breach the city via the river. I’ll just warn them about being washed downstream.”

  “I don’t think the river flows that quickly, but it’s something to check out,” Gabriel said as he began to dig through his Leviathan cortex. He couldn’t find any instances of Wraith Corps comms being spoofed during combat, but that didn’t mean anything. Lots of data was hidden behind firewalls, which would take time to push through. Just because a Darkling was supposed to have access to anything combat-related didn’t mean that was actually the case. Too often, Gabriel found himself breaking down secure servers within the cortex itself to get to the information he needed.

  “River flows at two hundred cubic feet per second,” Esau reported over the comms. “Is that fast?”

  “I don’t know,” Gabriel admitted. “How deep is the river?”

  “Gah, this is stupid shit we should have taken care of on the ship,” Esau groused.

  “Knowing is half the battle,” Gabriel informed his friend.

  “I like that. Where’d you hear that from?”

  “No idea,” Gabriel admitted. “Sometimes I swear this suit is possessed and has a mind of its own.”

  “Huh…” Esau muttered a few moments later. “Six meters deep at the center. That’s pretty damn deep.”

  “Yeah, the river flow could take Wraiths downstream a bit,” Gabriel replied in a distracted tone as he continued to dig into the research.

  “Okay, going to have them advance carefully from the north,” Esau decided. “While it would be different fishing a Wraith out of the sea instead of being the fish for once, I don’t think we’re going to have enough time to do that.”

  “‘Join the Corps, see the universe, get fished out of oceans,’” Gabriel muttered. He quit his search after a sigh. “I can’t find anything about Wraith comms being spoofed. Doesn’t mean it’s never happened though.”

  “If we can do it to others, it can probably be done to us,” Esau reminded him. “Remember what Griffon told us back at MITC?”

  “If you can see the enemy, he can see you. If you hear him, he hears you. Silent, then strike from afar.”

  “Yeah,” Esau stated. “That grumpy old bastard knew what he was talking about.”

  Gabriel gave it some thought. While it made sense in an abstract sort of way, he still couldn’t think of any way the secure comms of the Wraith Corps could be spoofed or outright hacked. “I don’t get it. Unless they got their hands on a dead Wraith…no, because the Leviathan would degrade before it could be extracted from the head. That’s what the former Wraith guy told me on Maelstrom at least.”

  “Uh, Gabe?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can you spoof our suits?”

  “Well, sure, I guess,” Gabriel allowed. “The Darksuit can completely…oh. Oh, shit.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I know how they’re doing it,” Gabriel muttered.

  “Well?” Esau asked. “You going to share, or make me hold my breath in anticipation?”

  “They’ve got a Darksuit.”

  “What? No.”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean…?”

  “There’s a Darkling fighting for the other side.”

  A pregnant pause settled between the two men. Esau broke the quiet in a manner most befitting an Imperfect of the Dominion by repeating Gabriel’s earlier sentiment.

  “Aw, shit.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  “This is going to be a bloodbath,” the commander of the Third Regiment muttered. Gabriel silently agreed.

  * * * * *

  Chapter Two

  Christine

  DVC Belle of the Ball emerged from the jump gate with little fanfare. Miniscule particles of oxygen and carbon lit the hull ever so briefly as they were burned off by the energy of the gate, creating a brief light show to accompany the ship as it made its entry into the system. It was a fluke, really, since most of the non-reactive metals that made up the ship typically didn’t allow oxygen or carbon molecules to stick to the surface. However, there were always a few that seemed to tag along, thus creating a brilliant, if short, viewing experience, should there be a ship close enough to see it.

  Given that ships were usually over four thousand kilometers away from each other during gate transit, there was usually no one there to appreciate the oxygen’s strange reaction to the friction field of a jump gate.

  The nose of the ship reoriented itself and fired the main booster for twelve seconds, giving the craft enough acceleration to arrive at its destination in three hours. Belle wasn’t equipped with military-grade hardware; it was a passenger liner, not built for speed, but comfort. One passenger, in particular, wasn’t pleased.

  “I wish this hunk of junk moved faster,” Christine Dai, former Dominion Investigative Bureau agent and current wanted Project Jericho member, muttered as her hand unconsciously went to her belly. She knew she was really starting to show, and it would only get worse, given her short torso and long legs. At full term, her pregnancy would look like she’d stuck an oblong melon under her shirt. She pushed a loose strand of brown hair away from her face. “I’d kill for something fried and chocolaty right now.”

  “I get what you mean,” Wil Westin commented as he stood up in the small cabin and began to pace. He quickly ran out of room. “I’ve ridden in slow, and this…ship is glacial.”

  The former applications technician from Megiddo Orbital Station had decided to tag along to assist Christine, should she need it. He wasn’t exactly welcome on Solomon; the Third Regiment Wraith Corps, and their commander, Esau Morales, had suggested to the tech that he’d be better served if Wil left the planet. The technician had immediately agreed and followed Christine onto the next transport due to leave the system.

  At least Aurelia is safe, Christine thought as she closed her eyes. The decision to leave the young girl in the hands of the Wraiths remaining behind on the planet had been a difficult one, but one she’d had to make. Ultimately it had been Aurelia’s bond with the younger Imperfect women who made up a small cadre of Wraiths on the base that had made the decision for her.

  She shook off the memories of the smiling child and focused on the task at hand.

  “What’s my name again?” Christine asked Wil for the umpteenth time. She had ruthlessly drilled the young technician to ensure their cover IDs remained solid while they were on Corus. Wil wasn’t a field agent by any means and had initially flubbed the questions.

  “Jane Cobb,” he replied after a brief hesitation. “From New Israel. Traveling to Corus because it’s the last place your abusive ex-husband would think to look.”

  “And your name?”

  “Amos,” Wil answered, firmly this time. “I work with you.”

  “You’re an Imperfect in my employ,” she corrected him. “You work for me. Remember, this is a Core world. Things are different here than out at Megiddo Orbital Station and Belleza Sutil. The status chain goes: lord, nobles, Perfects, and Imperfects, who are required to declare what they are before they do anything else. Except at Wraith Tech, that is.”

  “What’s ‘Wraith Tech?’”

  “That’s MITC,” she explained. “I heard Commander Morales call it that once.”

  “Amusing.” Wil grunted as they both felt the ship’s main booster cut off. If everything went according to plan, the duo would arrive at Corus’ Orbital Station in a little under three hours. From there, a short transport hop would deliver them to a small city near the training center. They would be on their own for transportation from there, since only prospective Wraiths were landed directly on base.

  “They could have called it something worse,” Christine reminded him as her mind drifted. “Hell, for starters…”

  “Not to change the subject away from murderous psychos who terrify me,” Wil said as he sat down on a chair in the shared cabin, “but I was wondering…did you notice how much Aurelia grew over the last three weeks before we left? Phy
sically, I mean. She’s still fairly immature with her behavior and stuff.”

  Christine had noticed, and it had her worried. Unlike Wil, Christine had a pretty good idea of what the alien Abassi had done to the young girl during their experiments. Gabriel had confirmed something had been done, and her own questioning of the child had led her to believe some experimentation had occurred. Given what the Darkling had found in the research labs on Ptolemy and Ibliss, Christine was inclined to believe that Aurelia had been the Abbasi’s first success.

  “Growth spurt, maybe?” she offered with a tentative shrug. “I know I shot up like a weed when I turned thirteen.”

  “Yeah, but in three weeks?” Wil persisted. He shook his head. “That’s twenty-one days, Christine. Who does that? The little girl just isn’t right.”

  You have no idea, Christine thought. Instead, she walked over to the tiny locker at the foot of her bed and opened the lid. Inside she found her datapad. She waved it to get Wil’s attention before tossing it at him. “So far as I know, we’re the only two Jericho agents remaining.”

  “I’m not Jericho.” Wil looked at her, confused. She smiled winningly at him.

  “You are now.”

  “Son of a…”

  “According to what Chief Gan dumped into the backup on the ’net…” Christine said as she moved gingerly to her bed and sat down. Her back was beginning to ache, which would be a problem, since she didn’t want to complain about it in front of Wil. I could definitely go for a back rub right now, Andrew, she silently complained before continuing, “Malachi, the bastard half-brother of the emperor, was one of the founding members of Jericho, albeit inadvertently. Malachi, Chief Gan, and Dame Hastings set up the organization. The dame squirreled away money and resources all over the place just in case Jericho was ever declared personae non gratae across the Dominion. Malachi took over the Wraith training command, and Gan ran the organization.”