Ruined Terra (Book 11 of The Empire of Bones Saga) Read online

  Ruined Terra

  Terry Mixon

  Contents

  Ruined Terra

  Also by Terry Mixon

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Epilogue

  Also by Terry Mixon

  About Terry

  Ruined Terra

  Book Eleven of The Empire of Bones Saga

  by

  Terry Mixon

  Marooned on ruined Terra, Kelsey Bandar and Jared Mertz must march to the Imperial Palace to recover the key to defeating the savage AIs that have enslaved humanity.

  If, of course, the fierce and primitive Terrans don’t kill them first.

  Trapped without their advanced technology, they must overcome foes determined to take everything they have left, including their very lives. If they don’t find allies fast, humanity is doomed.

  Ruined to Terra

  Copyright © 2019 by Terry Mixon

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including information storage and/or retrieval systems, or dissemination of any electronic version, without the prior written consent of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review, and except where permitted by law.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Yowling Cat Press ®

  Digital edition date: 12/28/2019

  Print ISBN: 978-1947376298

  Large Print ISBN: 978-1947376335

  Cover art - image copyrights as follows:

  DepositPhotos/Taden1 (Denis Tabler)

  Luca Oleastri

  Donna Mixon

  Cover design and composition by Donna Mixon

  Print edition design and layout by Terry Mixon

  Also by Terry Mixon

  You can always find the most up to date listing of Terry’s titles on his Amazon Author Page.

  The Empire of Bones Saga

  Empire of Bones

  Veil of Shadows

  Command Decisions

  Ghosts of Empire

  Paying the Price

  Reconnaissance in Force

  Behind Enemy Lines

  The Terra Gambit

  Hidden Enemies

  Race to Terra

  Ruined Terra

  The Empire of Bones Saga Volume 1

  The Empire of Bones Saga Volume 2

  The Humanity Unlimited Saga

  Liberty Station

  Freedom Express

  Tree of Liberty

  Blood of Patriots

  The Fractured Republic Saga

  Storm Divers

  The Scorched Earth Saga

  Scorched Earth

  The Vigilante Series with Glynn Stewart

  Heart of Vengeance

  Oath of Vengeance

  Bound By Law

  Bound By Honor

  Bound By Blood

  Want to get updates from Terry about new books and other general nonsense going on in his life? He promises there will be cats. Go to TerryMixon.com/Mailing-List and sign up.

  Dedication

  This book would not be possible without the love and support of my beautiful wife. Donna, I love you more than life itself.

  Acknowledgments

  I want to thank the folks that support me on Patreon. You got to read this book as I was writing it and that kept me working. You have my deepest thanks.

  In particular, I want to thank those patrons that supported me at the $10 level and above:

  Bryan Barnes

  Christian A. Michelsen

  Dale Thompson

  Finally, I want to thank my readers for putting up with me. You guys are great.

  1

  Princess Kelsey Bandar stared at the bright stars spread across the dark sky over her head like diamond dust on velvet. The brilliant Milky Way showed far more points of light than she’d ever seen from Avalon, with the exception of her stays at the Imperial Retreat. Even in the less populated areas of her birth world, light pollution from the many cities made it impossible to see the dimmest of the stellar masses.

  Not so on Terra.

  With the total destruction of civilization here, there was no artificial light to dim the stars. The single large moon wasn’t in the sky at the moment, and there was nothing between her and the majesty of the universe. It was beautiful, sad, and horrifying all at the same time.

  She stood on what looked like a plain of tall, wild grass, though it was hard to make out clearly now that night had fallen, even with her enhanced vision. The chill wind was steady from the northwest and carried the earthy scent of vegetation. Maybe there was a forest off in that direction.

  That battled with the scent of scorched electronics and leaking fuel from the crashed pinnaces nearby. Talk about a sour note. Everyone had walked away from that disaster, but it had really left them in a bad spot.

  She had left them in a bad spot. If only she’d gotten around to focusing more of her flight training on emergency landings, she could’ve gotten the disabled pinnace down in one piece. Or at least avoided crashing it into the other pinnace, wrecking them both.

  Just one more thing that she couldn’t fix after the fact.

  “It’s beautiful isn’t it?” Elise Orson asked as she came out of the tent they were using as an ad hoc command center, at least until they figured out what they were going to do next.

  Kelsey turned to her friend and forced a smile onto her face. “It is. Even in the depths of misery and destruction, there’s still some beauty left around us, and that gives me hope. How’s Jared?”

  “Lily says that he has a concussion, but she’ll have him up by morning, just like your pilot. Those were the only injuries we had in this entire affair, and I find that absolutely amazing.”

  Kelsey turned again toward where she’d crashed and stared at the wreckage sourly. With her enhanced eyesight, she had no difficulty seeing that they were screwed. The pinnace that she’d brought down had punched a hole through the hull of the other craft and warped its frame. Neither of the small craft would ever fly again.

  “They say that any landing you can walk away from is a good one, but I think I’m going to disagree,” she said with a grumble. “We have to get to the Imperial Palace to recover the override, and that means we’re going to have to travel at least a thousand kilometers on foot. Probably more. Potentially a lot more. All of that with our supplies on our back.”

  “Well, I always did enjoy a good hi
ke,” Elise said with a sigh of resignation. “Can’t the powered armor the marines brought help carry what we need?”

  “No,” Kelsey said with a resigned shake of her head. “Their power supplies won’t get us more than a few days into the journey. The best we can manage is to get some of what we have to a less exposed position and stash it there for emergencies. Not that I’m sure how it will benefit us once we’ve left the area. Talbot is working out the details with Major Scala.

  “Once we really get going, we’ll only have the supplies we can carry with us. A good chunk of that’s going to be weaponry and other military hardware. Add to that food, water, and other consumables, and we’ll be packed down pretty heavy. We’ll have to gather all that and get to marching as soon as we can tomorrow, since this site is in danger of being spotted from orbit.

  “The pinnaces have stealth materials woven into their hulls, but we can’t take a chance that the AIs will spot them and destroy our extra gear or ourselves. If we can find a place somewhere close that will work as a supply cache, we’ll stash everything there and begin the long march.”

  Kelsey let the silence drag on for a few seconds and then turned to face her friend directly. “Tell me about my doppelgänger. She and I haven’t spoken more than a couple of words, and it’s hard for me to even believe she’s real. A version of me from another universe? I’m having trouble getting my head around that. What’s she like?”

  “It’s odd,” Elise confessed. “Sometimes, she’s so very much like you, and then she’s… not. She’s been through so much. I grew up in terror of becoming a Pale One, and she had to live through it, even if only for a short time. That gives me the cold shivers, and my heart goes out to her.”

  The Pale Ones were the savage descendants of human survivors on the planet Erorsi. A mad computer there had been utilizing Old Empire equipment to forcibly implant them with Marine Raider hardware and then reprogramming their cranial implants so that it could control their actions, even over their resistance.

  They’d became vicious killing machines that had attacked Pentagar on primitive ships built by the computer for five centuries. Many Pentagarans in danger of capture would kill themselves to avoid that fate, and Kelsey completely understood their motivations.

  If she’d really understood what the computer would do to her, what she’d have become for the rest of her life if Jared and the rest hadn’t saved her, she might have taken her own life in the heat of the moment once she’d fallen into their grasp.

  The Pale Ones had captured her and her marine escort because she’d been an idiot. She’d let a petty, nose-in-the-air, noble girl tantrum put her into harm’s way, and she’d paid the price for that. To her everlasting shame, so had her marines.

  That had been the moment that she’d finally grown up. That had been the point in her life where everything had changed. Never again would she allow herself to fail her people, or herself. She’d die first.

  How much worse had it been for her other self? Talbot and Jared had saved her, but that hadn’t happened in the other universe. There, that version of her had become a Pale One, lost control over her own body, and been forced to do brutal, terrible things. Things that horrified Kelsey to even think about.

  “One thing we did settle,” Kelsey said once she’d set her horror aside, “was that having us be Kelsey One and Kelsey Two like you guys came up with was ridiculous. This universe is my home, so I’m Kelsey. She’s decided to use one of our cousin’s names and will now be Julia. We both always loved that name.

  “If the situation is ever reversed, I’ll use that name in her universe. Not that I expect my father to ever allow me over there, mind you. At the very least, it’ll make talking about each of us a little less complicated.

  “Now, to change the subject, what do you know about the Terrans? Sean said that your people observed some of them through the drone feeds. Can you tell if there are any around us now? Do they know we’re here?”

  Elise chuckled. “After that landing, everybody within a hundred kilometers probably knows we’re here.”

  Kelsey felt her face redden. “Yeah, I suppose that’s true. And?”

  Elise shook her head. “Not that we’ve seen. Terra is a mixture of dead megacities and land originally meant for growing food. I gather the Terrans don’t feel comfortable coming out into the wilds with the AIs looking down from above. We’ve got at least a little separation from their obvious dwellings.”

  No one really had any idea how populous Terra was now. Once it had housed many billions of people, but those days had ended when the artificial despot in orbit had started the kinetic bombardment. Only a tiny fraction of the people alive before that event had survived the next year, she was sure.

  That said, the ruined megacities might still house a lot of people, relatively speaking, even without power. How they’d grow food, Kelsey had no idea, but they’d seen some humans on the drone feeds, all scattered around the globe. And the AIs wouldn’t have tried to exterminate a nonexistent population, which was what they’d thought Jared and his people were here to do, if there wasn’t a significant number of people down here.

  She still didn’t understand why the machines wanted to kill the people of Terra. They had them trapped inside the system and had destroyed their civilization at least a century ago, based on the decay of the megacities and the amount of overgrowth that occurred since.

  Humans were good at finding places to live. She’d seen that on Erorsi, and that had been worse than Terra. Whether they were savage or still retained some degree of civilization, Kelsey had no idea. That would come out in time, since she was absolutely certain that they’d meet people along the way to the Imperial Palace.

  She just hoped they could avoid fighting them. There was no need for humans to kill one another when they had the sadistic computer over their heads that deserved their full attention.

  That made her start worrying about how they’d get off Terra again once they’d succeeded. She wasn’t even going to allow for the chance of failure in their mission. It was too important.

  Still, once they had the override they’d come for, they had no way to get back into space. With both pinnaces wrecked, the only other ship they even had in the system was going to be unable to retrieve them.

  Persephone had six fighters that she carried on her hull in makeshift cradles. Those weren’t stealthed, so they’d be spotted if they tried to approach Terra. Even if they could make a few successful runs, they’d only get a couple of people off the planet before they were caught.

  And say by some miracle that they did get everyone off the planet. There was still no way out of the Terra system. The far flip point that she’d used to get here was a restricted one. Persephone had been small enough to make it through, but the trip had been a one-way ride. There were other flip points leading out of the system, but the AI had them under heavy guard.

  No, they were trapped here, unless Angela Ellis found a multi-flip point that the AI was unaware of. While that was still possible, Kelsey wasn’t holding her breath.

  Kelsey rubbed her face tiredly. Those were problems they’d have to deal with after they got their hands on the override. One major crisis at a time, please.

  She was about to say something to that effect when Commodore Sean Meyer stuck his head out of the tent. “We need you inside. There’s a problem.”

  “Of course there is,” Kelsey muttered. “How could there not be?”

  She allowed Elise to precede her inside. The tent held several small tables with portable computers that Jared had brought down from his destroyer before the AI had blown it to bits. They were being monitored by members of his crew.

  “What is it?” she asked, already dreading the answer.

  “I’ll let Carl explain,” the Fleet officer said, deferring to their friend.

  The young scientist looked up from the computer where he sat at with a grimace. “We were monitoring the drone network that the admiral seeded. The one that the AI
thinks distributed the Omega Plague.

  “I was using it to look around our general area when everything went dark. I had to go back through the logs to find out what happened, but it seems the AI sent a destruct code into the network. All the drones are gone. We’re blind.”

  Kelsey sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger. “I thought we had control of the network. How could the AI do that?”

  Her young friend shook his head. “We had a hack into the system. One that the admiral’s people inserted so that they could monitor and screen out information that they didn’t want the AI to see. The AI still had access to the command codes.

  “We probably should’ve planned for this, but no one locked the thing out. That makes sense, I suppose. If they had, the AI would’ve noticed the moment it sent any command and saw that nothing happened. That would have been… bad.

  “As it is, we’ve lost the network monitoring everything going on around Terra, but the AI still doesn’t know we’re here. That’s a win of sorts. Right?”

  “It’s just one more thing,” Kelsey grumbled. “Why can’t we catch a break? There’s so much going on around us, and all of it seems to have a downside. Without the drones, we’re not going to be able to see what’s between us and the Imperial Palace.”