The Battle of the Void (The Ember War Saga Book 6) Read Free Page A

mannequin’s. The man stared straight ahead, uninterested, as the room settled down on Valdar’s order. The longer Yarrow watched, the more certain he became that the man wasn’t even breathing.
    The man’s head snapped to stare straight at Yarrow. One side of the man’s mouth pulled up into a smile, like there was a line connected to the corner of his lips. Yarrow felt a stab of fear in his chest, then calm. He felt something trickle out of his nose and wiped the side of his hand across his face. A small smear of blood stained his fingers.
    A hand touched his shoulder. Yarrow looked over and found Cortaro and Hale behind him.
    “You alright, Yarrow?” Cortaro asked.
    “Sure, Gunney. Just the damn dry air on board,” Yarrow said.
    His lieutenant and head non-commissioned officer traded a glance.
    “Let’s get to it,” Captain Valdar said. “Given the MALCODE order, we’re doing this the old-fashioned way. Slides.”
    A crewman brought out an easel. Large sheathes of attached paper rustled as he set it next to the captain, the words OPERATION INDIANA in simple black and white on the top sheet.
    “You’ve all seen the preparations in orbit with Eighth Fleet. Our mission stands apart from theirs. Slide.” The crewman flipped a sheet of paper over. A map of the galaxy was on the next sheet, a red dot in between two of the arms. “This is where we’re going.” Valdar pulled a pointer open and tapped the red dot. “It is, on a galactic scale, in the middle of nowhere. The target is dozens of light-years from the nearest star, nebula or anything else of interest. The only other place we’d find a more perfect void is intergalactic space. Slide.”
    The paper flipped over, revealing a picture of a giant object in space. The structure brought back Yarrow’s memories of a jade puzzle ball, layers of intricately carved spheres within each other. His grandfather had one, a memento of a trip to Okinawa before the Chinese conquered the island.
    Not a real memory , Yarrow reminded himself. He was a procedurally generated human being, grown in a tube and implanted with a lifetime’s worth of skills and memories. He did his best to discount everything that he remembered prior to joining Hale’s team aboard the Breitenfeld , the first moment he knew that something truly happened and wasn’t a construct from Ibarra’s computers. Yet he couldn’t deny that everything he remembered from before he learned the truth of his existence had no bearing on the kind of person he’d become.
    “This is a laboratory of a long vanished, advanced alien race.” Valdar’s eyes flicked toward the still man sitting beside Stacey. “Lieutenant Hale encountered a remnant of this race on Anthalas. Their technology powers the omnium reactor that will make a difference in our next fight with the Xaros.”
    “We’ve got the reactor, sir,” said Commander Utrecht, the ship’s gunnery officer, from the front row. “What more do we need? Wouldn’t it be more useful with Eighth Fleet than going on another snipe hunt?”
    “What’s he complaneing about? Not like he’s the one that has to go boots on the ground to find this stuff,” Bailey muttered.
    “Captain, may I?” Stacey stood up. Valdar motioned to the podium and stepped aside.
    “After the encounter with Xaros leadership on Takeni,” Stacey nodded to the two Iron Hearts, “and some…additional research, we determined that the Xaros are more than just the drones. There is a leadership caste, one we can either negotiate with to end the war or eliminate.” Murmurs spread through those assembled. “I’m for the latter, if anyone cares. Reaching that leadership is difficult, unless we can complete the Crucible we have orbiting Ceres. Once our gate is fully operational and tied into the Xaros network, we can strike a fatal blow to the Xaros.
    “We lack the technical know-how to complete our Crucible, and that’s where this star vault comes into play. The technology we