The Gardens of Nibiru (The Ember War Saga Book 5) Read Online Free PDF Page A

from Eighth Fleet. Everyone knows what they are.”
    “It’s no big deal for me,” Bailey shrugged. “Yarrow’s a proccie. Hell, he had some alien thing in his head for a while. Don’t see me making a fuss about it. He’s a good kid, knows his stuff. What, you don’t like proccies?”
    “No one gets to choose the circumstances of their birth. Proccie…true born…can’t be all that different from each other. Besides, if I had any real heartburn over Ibarra’s children, I’d have been on the Lehi with Fournier and the rest of his bigots.” Rohen pushed himself up to his feet. “Where’s the pisser?” he asked.
    Bailey pointed to a recessed doorway at the other end of the rifle range. 
    Rohen made his way to the latrine, his shoulders tight, his pace fast. The door slid aside as he approached.
    Once the door shut behind him, Rohen collapsed against the bulkhead. His hands and arms jerked against his body as his muscles spasmed out of control. He managed to press a hand to his chest and slide a clip of thumb-sized auto-injectors from inside his shirt. Rohen pinched an injector between two fingers and tried to press it to his neck. His hand refused the command, jabbing into thin air.
    “Damn it,” he said through grit teeth. He pinned his hand to the wall and forced his neck against the needle point. His nerves burned as the serum coursed through his system. His muscles relaxed and came back to his full control.
    It would get worse. Ibarra had told him as much when he woke from the procedural tube buried deep within Mauna Loa on Hawaii. The tremors would strengthen into seizures if he didn’t take his serum regularly, but even that was losing its effectiveness as time went on. Rohen gave the clip of injectors a pat and slid it back into his uniform.
    He looked himself over in the mirror, not finding any nervous twitches that might hint at a deeper problem to his fellow Marines. All he had to do was maintain the façade of a perfectly normal true-born human. Once he made it to Nibiru, he’d be one step closer to fulfilling the mission Ibarra gave him.
    Rohen splashed water on his face and went back to Bailey.
     
    ****
     
    Four Eagle fighters waited on the flight deck, each connected to the ship’s power lines and locked into catapults that would launch them out of the ship within two minutes of an alert. The pilots sat on an ammunition lorry, eating lunch from pressboard trays and watching a rare spectacle play out across the otherwise empty flight deck.
    The clash of composite steel on steel rang through the flight deck as two Iron Hearts sparred each other, the third armored soldier watched from the sidelines.
    Durand wolfed down a bite of some bland substance billed as stroganoff and dabbed her lips. She winced as one of the Iron Hearts slammed an elbow against the other’s chest and knocked it to the deck. A giant boot slammed down next to the prone soldier’s helm and Durand felt the vibrations through her seat.
    “Who just won?” asked Glue, Durand’s second-in-command.
    “Hard to tell with the new suits. I think that’s Elias,” Durand said. After the battle against the Toth, Ibarra rolled out new and improved suits for the few remaining armor soldiers in Earth’s military. The Iron Hearts now stood fifteen feet tall, their armor smoother and modeled to resemble the human form more than the blocky armor they’d worn before.
    She glanced at her two Dotok pilots, Manfred and Lothar. They sat shoulder to shoulder, stubby beaks agape as they watched the Iron Hearts fight each other.
    “What’s the matter, Manfred? Never seen anything like that before?” she asked.
    “We don’t have this,” Manfred said. “The Dotok never had anything like this. I heard stories about them from the other survivors, how they held off the Banshees so the Canticle could escape Takeni…Is it true they’re like the Toth? Nothing but a nervous system plugged into their armor?”
    “No, they can come out,”