Five Empires: An Epic Space Opera Read online

  “And then what?” Jake asked. “You’ll be hopelessly outnumbered.”

  It wasn’t in Jake’s nature to be negative, but he was furious to be in this position. He would’ve been far better off working on his own. He might have been well on his way with Fusar by now.

  “A Cavan warship supports all the usual systems,” Michael said. “Life support needs oxygen. The ventilation shafts are partitioned by security gates. No go. The propulsion core is fed by secure power conduits. Again, no go. The heavy weapons systems are lined with cooling tubes so they don’t overheat in battle. Those tubes are partitioned by security gates, except when they are filled with water. As in … now.”

  Jake couldn’t prevent a wide smile. “Pity we don’t have anyone who can breathe underwater.”

  “Pity,” Michael agreed.

  “Michael will breach the heavy weapons systems and deactivate them,” Verity said. “Leaving the shuttle free to blast out and initiate a drift sequence.”

  “And what might that be?” Jake asked pointedly, feeling out of the loop. Plenty of planning had gone into Fusar’s escape. It seemed the number of true believers had skyrocketed since Jake first left for Tranda.

  Verity threw a nervous glance at Fusar. “With Fusar’s permission, we’d like to put in somewhere behind the Jaj bubble.”

  The Jaj bubble was a zone of core systems that prohibited drift drops. A system of disruption buoys prevented the formation of drift space, meaning an enemy fleet couldn’t simply drop in behind the Jaj front line. Disruption buoys had protected the Jaj for thousands of years.

  Fusar squirmed uncomfortably. “I’ll be guided by you,” she said to Jake.

  “I see no problem with that - in theory,” Jake said at length.

  “We’re inside,” called Jean from the cockpit.

  Michael dropped to his knees and lifted a floor panel from its groove. Before he could disappear into the bowels of the shuttle, Jake laid a hand on his shoulder.

  “You gonna be able to make it back?” he asked.

  Michael frowned. “I’ll be OK. Milkmen have a few tricks.”

  Jake forced a smile, but he found himself mourning the Aegisi boy he used to know.

  “I’m sorry, Michael,” he said. “About your sister.”

  “On the contrary, brother,” Michael said, melting into the gloom of the hold. “You were the first to stand up while everyone else was ducking for cover. See you on the flip side.”

  Jake fitted the floor panel back into place, wondering if he’d see Michael again. The chances weren’t great. One man embedded in the walls of a hostile warship? Ridiculous. But then he remembered the way the Brawler had assumed control of the Tranquility, the Aegisi Navy’s finest vessel. The simians were in for a torrid few hours.

  Jake made his way into the cockpit. Jean landed the shuttle on a gleaming chrome floor.

  Soldiers in violet battle armor fanned out across the space, surrounding the shuttle. Jake, Mandie, Fusar and Verity hung back from the window, though the precaution was probably futile. The simians would be scanning the vessel for heat signatures. He wondered if Michael’s unique physiology would register on their systems.

  “He’s through,” Jean murmured, eyes locked on her various displays. “Now we wait.”

 

  “That’s a negative, Node Three, this vessel is rigged to explode,” Jean said. “I advise the deployment of an automated demolitions team.”

  That drew an extended pause. The soldiers outside adjusted their movement, spreading laterally.

  came the reply.

  “Acknowledged,” Jean said. She spun in her chair, allowing a smile to brighten her severe features.

  A light popped from a mezzanine rail across from the shuttle.

  “Get down!” Jake shouted. A high-powered sniper bullet punctured the inch-thick pane and struck Jean in the back of the skull. She slumped forward into Jake’s arms, gurgling like a newborn.

  “Back!” Jake shouted, dragging Jean into the galley. He could see a deep, perfectly circular hole where the bullet had bored through her brain. Small chunks of brain matter had collected around the rim.

  Jake was vaguely aware of Mandie securing the outer doors. A bass hum resonated throughout the hull. Jake knew that noise - the ship had been clamped and wouldn’t be going anywhere.

  Jean’s eyes were fading fast, though she seemed determined to spend her last seconds focusing on the scruffy duellist.

  “What were we thinking?” she coughed.

  “Foolish,” Jake agreed. “But we’ll get you out of here.”

  “No,” she said. “You … and me.”

  Jake had a mental image of another world. It was supposed to be a fresh start. Two duellists, tired of working for arrogant and manipulative cybomancers. One was Jake, seeking a deeper connection than he’d gotten from the gallery of glamorous women he’d collected over his nomadic early years. The other was “Sweet” Jean Russell, battle-hardened duellist to some of the best cybomancers going around. Scarred, taciturn, no-bullshit.

  Their first night together had been a drunken mess. It wasn’t until the following morning that they discovered a mutual disillusionment with their way of life. With the near-sighted idealism of youth they spent their meager savings on a barren Faegen farm.

  For six months they believed that tomorrow would be better. Jake was just starting to realize his mistake when Verity arrived. Leaving her had been hard, but it was Jean’s muted disappointment that haunted him. She knew it would happen. She saw it coming like a slow-motion collision, yet never said anything.

  And now, after spending years on separate paths, it was Jean who was leaving Jake. He couldn’t pretend his time with her was anything other than a flight of fancy, a young man’s diversion. But there was real, almost tangible affection in those diminishing eyes. A well of emotion he found he could match. He touched her cheek. Her scar tissue was hard.

  “No regrets,” he said, meaning it.

  Jean looked as though she wanted to laugh, but her last breath caught in her throat. He mouth was stuck open, eyes locked on Jake. He closed them gently. A sob tore him from his grief. Verity was hunched in the corner, staring wide-eyed at Jean as if she were a vengeful apparition.

  “Ship’s secure but it won’t be long before they breach,” Mandie said.

  Fusar looked at Verity. “Is she injured?”

  “Negative,” Jake said. “She’s in shock. You deal with her and I’ll see about these fucking simians. Mandie, get in the cockpit.”

  Jake tried to keep his mind clear as he opened what he thought was a weapons locker. He was wrong. By the time he located a weapons rack the ship AI was reporting an aft shield breach. Strangely thankful that there was no time to think, Jake took two rifles, brandishing one in each hand. His pistols were dependable enough but he figured a little shock and awe was in order.

  “Deactivate shields on my command,” he yelled to Mandie.

  Jake positioned himself before the aft gangway, listening for simian activity on the other side.

  The clank of metal on metal. The pulse of an energy field. They were using a sapper, which used void technology to drain power. Jake couldn’t let that happen.

  “Three,” he called, listening carefully.

  reported the AI.

  “Two.”

 

  Jake remembered reading that drift technology usually required at least half a vessel’s power reserves to enable effective transition.

  “One.”

  50

  A background hum died as the shields were killed. There was a loud bang outside and at least one enemy soldier swore. Sapping technology needed a target or it would collapse on itself. The sudden drop in available energy had hopefully caused problems.

  “Open gangway!” Jake said, tensing for battle
.

  As the ramp lowered Jake dropped to his belly and waited for his first target. The first Cavan soldier appeared, closer than Jake expected. He pumped a round into his furry head, watching it explode with grim satisfaction. The enemy soldiers were wearing oxygenators but nothing in the way of cranial armor. Jake popped a second soldier as the enemy platoon scattered to find cover.

  There was no time for a pitched battle. Jake rolled down the ramp, firing indiscriminately into a retreating forest of lilac body armor. Ferantum plates were ruptured and cracked as three more soldiers fell. The four remaining grunts crouched behind a mobile plashield. Jake leaped to his feet and ran straight for the structure, knowing there was every chance he was toast.

  A sniper bullet ricocheted off the chrome at his feet. The next shot would spread his brain.

  Just as the enemy got a solid sight on the duellist, the ceiling floodlights died, plunging the hangar into darkness. Marveling at Michael’s sense of timing, Jake continued on his trajectory. The troops behind the plashield were dazzled by the light spilling from the shuttle’s gangway. Jake pumped angry red bolts into the fidgety soldiers he found there. Two of them fell.

  Jake had no time to ice the last two, noticing a dozen rectangles of cool blue light across the hangar floor. A second detachment, this time with optics and full battle armor. Time to run.

  And yet the gangway seemed miles away. The duellist almost tripped over a bulbous sapping rod, left behind by the frustrated enemy. The flare of a heated plasma tube dazzled him once, twice. Someone was firing from the ramp.

  “Get the fuck in!” Mandie yelled.

  Jake stumbled up the ramp, amazed he’d made it back alive. He tumbled head first into the galley table, taking a moment to compose himself.

  “What the fuck were you thinking?” Mandie demanded as the ramp closed behind her. The ship rocked from a number of heavy plasma blasts. Jake strapped himself into the pilot’s chair and powered the shields.

  “Buckle down,” he barked to the remaining crew. Fusar, Mandie and Verity obeyed without question. Jake engaged a dangerous launch sequence that bypassed the usual protocols regarding landing gears and containment fields. The craft groaned against the clamps enfolding the landing struts.

  “Fuck!” Jake groaned. He’d forgotten about that.

  “Danner!” he shouted into the general com. “Find mech support to the executive hangar!”

  came Michael’s steady voice from somewhere deep within the warship. A loud fizz enveloped the rear shield, almost bringing it down.

  suggested the AI.

  said Michael over the com as the shuttle was flung into the air.

  “My hero,” shouted Jake triumphantly, struggling to control the spinning shuttle. The port wing dragged against a polished chrome wall before Jake leveled the craft out and hammered it through the force field.

  A matrix of precision lasers began wearing the shield down. Jake unleashed a string of curses. At least they now had confirmation the heavy plasma cannons were offline.

  “Initiate drift,” Jake said sharply, looking at Mandie in the nav chair.

  “But the proximity -”

  “Do it!”

  Mandie engaged the sequence that would drain all non-essential power and feed it into the propulsion core.

  The nebulous planes of deep space shifted slightly, suggesting they were well on their way. Entering drift space so close to a warship was foolhardy in the extreme. Then again, the enemy’s precision lasers were seconds away from eviscerating the shuttle piece by piece.

  “No one vomit on me,” Jake found himself saying as shadows clawed furiously at the edge of his vision.

  The last thing his mind registered was Fusar’s alien howl. Belated battle cry? Anguished howl? Or the laughter of the damned …

  Tackling drift space without the right drugs was the stuff of nightmares. Dragging an entire warship along for the ride was suicidal. As well as plain sadistic. One of the corners of the drift they opened must have tugged on the Cavan warship and pulled it through with them. Under normal circumstances a standard drift run was relatively smooth. The technology had become so refined that displacement could usually be measured in nanometers.

  The presence of a spinning warship in the shuttle’s cone of drift space caused serious problems, not least of which was the constant threat of collision.

  Jake was vaguely aware of the less-than-optimal conditions as he retched continuously over the dashboard. Mandie and Verity had passed out, which was probably for the best. Fusar was semi-conscious, her dark eyes lolling up and down in alarming fashion.

  Jake also noted the naked bullet hole in the view pane, for the moment sealed by the thinnest of force fields. He considered retrieving some putty from the maintenance stores but he wasn’t really up for walking. All he could do was look in queasy misery as the doomed Cavan warship rolled back and forth, held in thrall by the smaller vessel’s drift. He could only guess at the level of carnage on the ship - it was lurching far too viciously for the occupants to escape injury and death. He hoped Michael was safely ensconced in a snug pipe deep in the bowels of the thing.

  The minutes or hours slithered by and still the warm bosom of sleep eluded the duellist. He pondered trying to reach Michael over the general com but his wrist pad was smeared with vomit and he couldn’t remember his access code. Thoughts came and went like wraiths. One moment he was thinking about Fusar and the Jaj Patriarchy, the next he was running for his life across a windswept plain with Sweet Jean’s eyeless corpse pursuing him.

  Which would’ve been fine if such nightmares were interspersed with actual sleep, but Jake was stuck with a horrible awareness of the present. Crippled by nausea, he endured the waking nightmare for hours before finally succumbing to exhaustion.

  51

  The duellist woke in a far corner of the galley, his right cheek submerged in a pool of rancid bile. The Cavan shuttle had fallen from drift space, that much was clear from the ambient light spilling from the cockpit. He rose to his feet and held the edge of the table tightly, knowing from bitter experience that the first few steps were always the worst.

  “Jake …”

  It was Fusar. Jake found her in between two stasis chairs. How she’d unshackled herself was one of the mysterious of drift space. Jake helped her to her feet and settled her into the nav chair. Mandie and Verity were still out cold but breathing regularly.

  The scene outside the cockpit was one of utter destruction. A corner of the Cavan warship, at least fifteen decks teeming with elite professionals, had been torn asunder by forces no physicist was ever going to understand. A trail of debris spiraled out of sight. Jake didn’t want to look too closely but he was sure that trail was rotten with corpses.

  A red planet was evident far below the shuttle. The nav system was unable to identify the object, offering only that they were deep within unpatrolled Jaj space. That is, the rim of stars beyond the ‘bubble’ of stringent Jaj control.

  “Jaj space,” Fusar mused, looking weak and haggard. Jake nodded with great effort, realizing the concept meant very little to her.

  The pair lost themselves in the intricate air cells of the red planet, preferring not to think about the listless, crippled Cavan warship off the port bow.

  Jake knew he should be mounting some kind of rescue mission. Would enemy survivors be grateful or hostile? Was rescue a realistic option considering half his own crew had yet to emerge from drift sleep?

  In the end, a regional authority took the agonizing decision out of his hands.

 

  “Copy,” Jake wheezed into the com.

  continued the guttural voice.

  Jake sighed, sensing that the machinations of galactic politics were yet again conspiring against him.

  “We are
not Cavan,” he said tiredly. “I am a Nostromic duellist returning a Jajan refugee to your core systems.”

 

  Jake looked at Fusar. She leaned forward and spoke into the vomit-soaked com.

  “My name is Fusar,” she said. “My clan name is unknown to me as I was sold into slavery when I was five. When I was eight I came under the care of the Nostromic monks of Fidelis Prime. What followed was twelve years of systematic abuse, the details of which I will be happy to provide, but only once and in the presence of a high-ranking Jajan official.”

  Jake looked at the alien with affection. Fusar might have been planning those words for some time, but to deliver them with such poise and class in these circumstances was beyond admirable, and spoke to a highly intelligent, adaptable individual. Jake expected the provincial officer to at least consult with his superiors, but the gruff voice returned much too soon to be delivering good news.

 

  Jake’s shoulders sagged. This was a critical moment and all he wanted to do was curl up into a ball. Something about the name ‘Bullhead’ seemed familiar. It was a reference that conjured images of melee battle on the sand. Crowds of baying spectators. A maze that spread to the horizon. Plenty of images with nothing logical to connect them.

  Desperate for more information, he checked his wrist pad - no access to Nex. His system had been shut down. He exchanged a worried glance with Fusar. They were flying blind in a completely alien tract of space.

  urged their tormentor.

  “We copy,” Jake said quickly. “I don’t have access to your maps.”

  A couple of plasma bolts arced across the starboard bow. They had company - two snub-nosed, scarlet fighter units. A burly Jaj pilot glowered at Jake from his cockpit.