Victory on Terra (Book 12 of The Empire of Bones Saga)
Victory on Terra
Terry Mixon
Contents
Victory on 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
Also by Terry Mixon
About Terry
Victory on Terra
Book Twelve of The Empire of Bones Saga
by
Terry Mixon
Kelsey Bandar and Jared Mertz must retrieve the electronic override buried under the ruins of the old Imperial Palace to win the war against the AIs. Oh, and get off the planet in spite of the murderous warships orbiting the destroyed world.
How hard could that be?
Imprisoned in a dead megacity and surrounded by howling savages thirsty for their blood, they must triumph or die. And if they die, humanity dies with them.
Victory on Terra
Copyright © 2020 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: 5/12/2020
Print ISBN: 978-1947376342
Large Print ISBN: 978-1947376359
Cover art - image copyrights as follows:
BigStockPhoto|Richter1910
DepositPhotos|Ragnarocks
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
Victory on 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
A special thanks to Jon Paul Olivier for his timely assistance with this book. It is deeply appreciated.
I also 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
Dave Dolan
David Goldstein
Christian A. Michelsen
Dale Thompson
Clark Williams
Finally, I want to thank my readers for putting up with me. You guys are great.
1
Kelsey Bandar sat in the gritty, ancient tunnel, perched on a plascrete ledge just at the edge of the torch light deep beneath the horde city they’d just escaped from. The crash from the adrenalin high made her feel ready to collapse.
Dust still filled the air, and her eyes stung from the grit. The air was stale yet somehow managed to smell like something mechanical was burning off in the distance. It made her taste burnt toast.
That same dust had gotten under the primitive armor she wore and into her clothes. She itched all over. Parts of her felt like they were being rubbed by fine-grained sandpaper. It was like all the worst parts of making love on the beach without any of the awesome aspects.
Tired and sore, she scrubbed her face with both hands, trying to bring herself fully back to wakefulness. That probably ground more dirt into her pores and made her look like she’d been buried alive. Which, on reflection, wasn’t that far from the truth.
Her hair had to be a nightmare. God, she needed a bath. No, two.
She ached from the efforts of the last few minutes. She hadn’t broken anything—which was a good thing, since her medical nanites and the rest of her Marine Raider augmentation were still offline due to the EMP blast almost a week ago—but it felt as if several people had enthusiastically beaten her for hours.
After their flight from the vault where the horde had kept their scavenged Imperial technology, she’d used a plasma rifle built for marine powered armor to blow a massive hole through the stone walls that they’d used to plug an old tunnel leading to the ruined megacity they’d built their capital next to.
She’d fired a lot of plasma weapons over the last few years, so even without her enhanced strength, her graphene-coated bones and reinforced joints had taken the beating while she’d placed her shots just where they’d needed to go. It was her flesh that had paid the price in bruises and strained muscles.
Her ears, no longer protected by her augmentation, rang from firing the huge weapon. It was an annoying “squeee” that never seemed to go away and sometimes made it hard to understand what the others were saying. She hoped it wasn’t permanent. That would totally suck.
Even if it was something that she had to live with, it had been worth it.
Two shots had utterly vaporized the barrier that the horde had put up to keep the inhabitants of the ruined megacity from sneaking under their walls. That had left her with a single shot left to fire into the vault’s ceiling.
It had quite literally brought the roof down, fully sealing the area behind them. There could
be no retreat now. The only path out of this mess was forward.
And going forward meant that they had to make their way underneath the ruined megacity once called Frankfort. She had no idea what they were going to find there, but based on the evident fear that the horde had about entering the old structures, it wasn’t abandoned. There had to be people living there, and they would likely take her party’s intrusion poorly.
Jared had brought down all of the people on board his destroyer before the AI had destroyed her. That had been more than two hundred people. When she added in the scientists and marines that she’d brought from Persephone, that number had grown to almost three hundred.
The electromagnetic pulse weapon that the horde had deployed had taken them all down when it had crashed their implants. The bastards had then slaughtered just about everyone. They were down to fourteen people.
Her mind still couldn’t grasp the scale of their loss. It wounded her deeply that she’d failed so many people. It didn’t matter that they’d had no idea the horde had that kind of weapon before they’d used it. All of those people were still dead.
The sorrow she felt was mixed with hot rage at the people who’d casually butchered so many innocent people. She hoped she’d killed a lot of their warriors in the fight they’d just finished, but it wasn’t enough.
It would never be enough. Given a chance to exterminate them, she’d do so in an instant and deal with the trauma that caused her later. It wouldn’t be the first time, though she’d hoped to never be in that mental place ever again.
Clarice Beauchamp, the warrior in charge of the first group of locals that they’d met, had lost all thirty of her warriors. Together, the survivors had made their way to the horde city, because retreat was impossible. The fires that they’d started during the fighting had cut them off, and they absolutely had to have some of the tools they’d lost to retrieve the override from the Imperial Palace.
Kelsey opened one of the survival rations that she’d recovered from the storage room where the horde had been sorting their captured gear. With what they’d found there, they probably had enough food for a week.
Whether that would be enough to escape the ruined megacity remained to be seen.
She ate slowly, looking around the hollow-eyed group. Each of them had been devastated in their own way, and this was the first chance they’d had to take a breath since the final fight had begun.
Hell, this was the first real break they’d had since they’d landed on this damned planet.
Talbot was off scouting with Clarice Beauchamp. That left Senior Lieutenant Chloe Laird and Commander Kaitlinn Cannon managing security over the makeshift camp in the tunnel.
Huddled in a small circle around a couple of the torches that they’d propped up for light and heat were the remaining people in their group: Jared Mertz, Carl Owlet, Elise Orison, Olivia West, Commodore Sean Meyer, Austin Darrah, Ralph Holstead, Doctor Lily Stone, and herself.
And, of course, her doppelgänger, Julia, a version of herself from another reality. That was still a little hard to accept, but the woman was growing on her.
They were all ragged and worn because of everything they’d been through over the last few days. Not only the fighting, but the mad searching through the debris that the horde had scavenged while looking for any tools that could help them turn their implants back on.
Doctor Stone had found her spare medical kit, so she could get to the implants now. Then the struggle would be for Carl to convert a piece of equipment that he’d found to generate the exact frequency and charge needed to initiate a reboot of their implants.
Honestly, that was one of the first things they needed to do. Without her Marine Raider augmentation, she wasn’t able to protect them. A lot of people had died because of her arrogance in thinking that their technology would keep them safe, but without her augmentation, they were working at an extreme disadvantage.
They needed to get their implants back online as quickly as possible, without rushing things to the point that they killed someone. And that process needed to start now.
She rose to her feet, futilely tried to dust her hands off for the umpteenth time, and walked over to Lily. “You said that you’d recovered enough of your medical kit to perform the surgery. Is that something we could do here?”
Lily shuddered. “I can theoretically sterilize the surgical zone, but this is an incredibly dirty area. The chances of something getting into someone’s head—even with all of the precautions I can take—is greater than zero. If that happens and we can’t get their implants back online so that their medical nanites restart, they could get an infection of the brain, and that would be fatal.
“Even if I perform the surgery successfully, the real work is going to be for Carl. If his modifications to the equipment generating the charge are flawed, it could fry the wiring in the brain and kill someone outright.
“All told, I suspect that working with this jury-rigged technology is going to put the first person at significant risk. Perhaps as much as a thirty percent chance of death or cerebral injury. And that’s on top of the infection risk if the reboot fails.”
“That’s too high,” Jared said, his voice echoing off the plascrete walls around them. “What can we do to bring it down?”
The doctor shook her head. “Absolutely nothing. I doubt that we’re going to find a functional surgical center anytime soon, and at least Carl knows the equipment that he’s modifying.
“If we find other equipment that could be used, it’s going to be in questionable condition, and that would make the risk go up. As high as the chances of a negative outcome are, they’re still probably the best we’re going to get. The positive in this is that once we can assess the process, the risk goes way down for subsequent patients.”
Before her brother could respond, Kelsey squatted down in front of the doctor. “I’m willing to risk those odds. If we don’t get my augmentation back online, the chances that someone is going to kill us all will rise exponentially.
“You can bet that there are dangerous people in this city. People that had to have heard those explosions. Our time is running out.”
Jared looked skeptical. “We’re deep underground. They might’ve heard something, and they might even know that it came from the direction of the horde city, but they’re not going to be able to know precisely which tunnel it took place in.
“Hell, the tunnel leading to the horde vault has been sealed off for a long time. This isn’t going to be the first place they think of, if they even think that the explosion affects them at all. They may just end up believing that the horde did it to themselves.”
“We can’t take that chance,” Kelsey said with a shake of her head. “We have to assume that the residents of Frankfort are going to come looking for intruders and that they’re going to find us shortly.
“The question is, are they going to find us in a condition to resist or take us prisoner like the horde did? With their reputation, are we willing to chance that they won’t torture and execute us like those bastards up there intended to do?”
Those were the million-credit questions.
Jared shook his head slightly. “Even with your augmentation, that’s still not a guaranteed defense against attack. Yes, you’ve got all those unarmed-combat skills, but how far is that going to get us?
“We have no advanced weaponry. What if they do? This deep underneath the city, if they still have some kind of power generation, they may have functional Imperial weapons.
“The horde has to have something like that, or they couldn’t have made the EMP weapon. If the people here bring something like that to bear, swords and bows are going to be useless.”
They stared at one another for a few moments before she nodded. “There’s something to what you’re saying, but I think you’re missing the bigger point. Our best bet is to negotiate passage if we run into the inhabitants. I believe that we have a better chance of doing that if we can prove our story of coming from t
he sky above, and my augmentation gives us a better chance of making that happen.
“I understand there’s a risk, but it’s one that I’m willing to take. When you get right down to it, this is relatively mild when compared to some of the chances I’ve taken over the years.”
“One of these days, the odds are going to catch up with you,” her brother said with a sigh. “I’d rather not have that happen today, Kelsey.”
She smiled slightly. “Me either, but beggars can’t be choosers. A thirty percent chance of death right now is better odds than a hundred percent if we’re caught with our pants down around our ankles again. We’ve got to take the chance. I know it, and so do you.”
“Talbot’s not going to be happy about this.”
“No, I’d imagine not.”
Jared grimaced. “Do it.”
Carl Owlet watched nervously as Doctor Stone made her first incision into Kelsey’s skull. The small woman was unconscious due to the somatic stimulator attached to her forehead, which kept her in a state of sleep much more profound than any kind of anesthesia would have done.
He wasn’t a big fan of the blood the incision caused, which Olivia West was wiping away with a sterile wipe, but this was far from the first surgery he’d witnessed. He’d worked with the doctor when they’d installed the new communications module in the princess’s torso.