Earth's Fury (Obsidiar Fleet Book 4) Read online

  Earth’s Fury

  Obsidiar Fleet Book 4

  Anthony James

  Contents

  World’s End

  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

  Benediction

  © 2018 Anthony James

  All rights reserved

  The right of Anthony James to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed upon the subsequent purchaser

  Illustration © Tom Edwards

  TomEdwardsDesign.com

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  World’s End

  Judged purely on that most superficial of attributes, beauty, planet Atlantis had been the jewel in the Confederation’s crown since the first moment one of humanity’s scout craft emerged into high orbit and sent news of the discovery to its home world. Amongst the enormity of the universe, habitable worlds were few and far between, a rarity even when spaceships were capable of crossing colossal distances at high multiples of lightspeed.

  Viewed against the backdrop of space, its sun a distant circle of vibrant yellow, Atlantis was close to romantic perfection. The planet’s deep seas, lush forests and temperate climate had once attracted artists and poets from across the Confederation, along with millions of tourists, who flocked here to escape the dreariness of New Earth, Pioneer, or any of the other highly-industrialised economic powerhouses in human-held territory.

  The good times for Atlantis were a thing of the past. Following the arrival of the Vraxar, the Confederation Council had authorised a full evacuation. Billions of the planet’s inhabitants were loaded onto vast interstellar craft and taken away to the comparative safety of deep space or one of the other worlds in the Confederation. Of course, not everyone was willing to leave. A few million were content to ignore the warnings, or were simply too frightened of the unknown to be cajoled into accepting the promise of a new life elsewhere.

  It wasn’t exactly lawless, since the Space Corps was obliged to leave enough personnel to impose a minimum level of order, but as far as the Confederation was concerned, the people of Atlantis had been provided with ample opportunities to make the right choice and leave.

  As well as reduced levels of personnel, the Space Corps no longer provided significant air support. At one time, there would have been anything from a handful, to many dozens of heavily-armed spaceships either in orbit or undergoing routine maintenance on the surface facilities. Now all that remained was half a dozen old freighters, suitable for carrying off anyone who changed their minds about staying, and a single Crimson class destroyer.

  Even at peak numbers, the fleet once stationed here wouldn’t have been nearly enough to divert the incoming disaster.

  At an altitude of eighty thousand kilometres directly above the day side of the planet, a cloud of fission energy appeared - energy which heralded the imminent arrival of a spaceship. Far below, the skeleton staff left to run the Tansul military base comms hub registered the arrival. They didn’t need to check the Space Corps flight database – they knew nothing was due for weeks. An automated warning was sent across the planetary network to the other populated bases, and a further alert was sent to New Earth via a deep space monitoring station.

  With an emotion closer to resignation than fear, the men and women on these bases left their posts as part of a well-rehearsed routine and made their way towards a series of newly-constructed bunkers which were several thousand metres below the surface and accessed via battery-operated airlifts.

  One woman, a comms lieutenant called Katia Springer, didn’t join the others. She wasn’t content to leave the Tansul mainframe to do all of the work and she stayed, watching and relaying the information onwards to New Earth.

  The spaceship which burst out of lightspeed was like nothing which had come here before. The vessel was an elongated ovoid, covered in turrets, domes, antennae and countless other structures. It was Ix-Gorghal – one of the Vraxar capital ships. At six hundred kilometres in length and three hundred at the greatest part of its Y-axis, there was nothing to compare to it in the Space Corps.

  Ix-Gorghal came to a standstill and for a time measured in minutes, it remained in place, its propulsion systems inactive while Atlantis rotated serenely beneath. A scattering of still-operational ground batteries launched a few dozen high-impact missiles, the warheads detonating fruitlessly against the immense spaceship’s energy shield.

  Lieutenant Springer watched it on a feed from the Tansul comms hub sensor array. The nose of the enemy ship was aimed directly at the planet, affording her an excellent view of a circular hole in the black-metal armour which covered Ix-Gorghal. This hole had a diameter of two thousand metres, with four pyramid structures arranged near the edges. The comms hub’s sophisticated sensor array was able to register the sickly green light somewhere deep inside the Vraxar spaceship.

  This green light grew slowly in intensity, until it was difficult to look at directly. Then, it fired.

  Atlantis was destroyed, shattered into a hundred trillion pieces by the Vraxar weapon. Fragments of the planet were hurled outwards in defiance of gravity. The world which had been threatened with destruction so many times before was finally reduced to rubble and scattered, sent tumbling for an eternity towards the edges of space.

  Many hours later when the majority of the planet’s remains had dispersed, there was something left behind. Ix-Gorghal was in the exact location it had been when the weapon was fired. Its energy shield was so immense, not even the ruins of a planet were sufficient to make the Vraxar ship retreat.

  Eventually it did move. Its fission engines spent a short time accumulating energy and then the huge alien spacecraft vanished into lightspeed, its course unknown to the Confederation. In its wake, it left nearly six million dead and no clue as to why the Vraxar had decided it was time to kill instead of convert.

  Chapter One

  It was three weeks since the loss of Atlantis and there was no sign of the panic dying down. On the New Earth Tucson military base, Fleet Admiral Duggan was finding it hard to remember what it was like to have more than three hours sleep in a single twenty-four-hour period. His medical staff were in regular attendance, monitoring his diet and keeping him topped up with whatever drugs they deemed necessary to keep him alert and capable of making vitally important decisions. If things ever blew over, he knew it would take days for him to recover.

  “It’s not like I’m a young man anymore,” he muttered to himself, l
ong past bitterness at the inexorability of time. Duggan was in his eighties and whilst medical advances meant an average human could expect to live beyond 130 years, he was long past the bloom of youth.

  The most frustrating part was that Duggan knew he was struggling to do anything more than deal with issues and problems as they came to him. He was reduced to a wholly reactionary state and no matter how hard he tried to change the situation - to allow himself to look ahead instead of at the present day - he found himself thwarted at every turn. The now had taken over and he couldn’t find enough time to handle everything. The failure was his and he knew he couldn’t let the situation persist.

  In his office, he mulled over the most pressing issues in the war against the Vraxar. The biggest lead they had from the first encounter with Ix-Gorghal was a recording of a fission cloud from the alien cargo vessel believed to be carrying the wreckage of the ES Determinant. A combined fleet of human and Ghast spaceships had followed the trail, only to find it go cold. There was no sign of the enemy cargo ship and no further clues as to where it had gone.

  After that, Duggan was left to rely on the remaining unencrypted data arrays of the Valpian – an Estral cruiser captured years ago. In the end, it was fruitless. The Valpian had evidently been built prior to the Estral engagement with Ix-Gorghal, so there was nothing the Space Corps could learn about the enemy capabilities.

  He shifted in his chair and sighed. The desk in front of him was covered in an ever-growing pile of what he colloquially referred to as crap, though he didn’t refer to it as such in front of anyone except his wife and one or two trusted friends. In truth, this crap was produced by the finest minds in the entire Confederation – men and women who were able to perform wondrous feats using only the few pounds of grey mush which they kept safely inside their skulls.

  He picked up a folder and spent a few seconds looking over the contents. He guessed this final report on the nature of fission engine efficiency had taken a million or so manhours to compile and he felt a pang of guilt that it was a low priority for his attention.

  With a practised flick of his wrist, Duggan cast the folder onto the far-left corner of his desk, upon which was his unofficial I’ll get around to this later pile of other brown folders. He reached for the next report, only to be interrupted by his personal assistant, Cerys.

  “Councillor Stahl wishes to speak with you, Fleet Admiral. He would also like to know why he’s been denied direct access to your communicator when he’s part of the organisation that pays your damned wages.”

  Cerys was back to speaking in its usual business-like female tones. Only a few months ago, the computer behind it had decided for whatever reason, to talk like a seductress. It had left Duggan somewhat puzzled and he was relieved when it had reverted to normal without any apparent explanation.

  “Those were his words?” Duggan gave a half-smile. Councillor Stahl could be a pain in the backside, but the man had shown himself able to make the tough calls when it was truly necessary.

  “His exact words,” said Cerys.

  “Bring him through.”

  The desktop communicator hummed softly and the display indicated it was connected to a hub on planet Charing in the Origin Sector. Stahl spent much of his time on Old Earth, but, like most of the Council, he often found his presence required on several different planets at the same time.

  “Fleet Admiral.”

  “Councillor Stahl.”

  Neither man was interested in wasting breath on anything beyond the tersest of greetings and Stahl got straight on with it.

  “How are the preparations for Last Stand?”

  “There were unforeseen issues with the construction of Benediction. The last one proved to be the hardest to complete. Nevertheless, it is finished and I signed it off yesterday. It is being moved into position.”

  “I thought we were building from a blueprint. Why were there problems?”

  “We are not talking about the creation of children’s toys, Councillor. Benediction is an advancement of the design and with a greater yield than the others. A far greater yield.”

  The words were an understatement.

  “Why not save the modifications for later models?”

  “I didn’t expect delays, else I would have denied the request to make design changes.”

  “New Earth is the last?”

  “Yes, Councillor. The other planets are already part of Last Stand.”

  Stahl sighed, giving an indication of the weight bearing down upon him. “I hope to hell we never need to put it in motion.”

  “On that we agree. Have you reached consensus on the protocols?”

  “No one wishes to take responsibility.”

  “It needs more than one man.”

  “I have put myself forward, so you will not be alone, Fleet Admiral. However, the Council are still arguing over how many more need to be involved. If we decide authorisation requires a majority decision…”

  “Last Stand will never be activated,” finished Duggan.

  “This is where the responsibility of the Council ends and that of the Space Corps begins,” Stahl replied. “To ensure we don’t find ourselves in a situation where we need to sacrifice billions of our own people.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Can we defeat Ix-Gorghal and Ix-Gastiol?”

  Duggan was aware that it was frowned upon in the lower ranks of the Space Corps to sound negative about anything, even when it was glaringly obvious that failure was inevitable. Fortunately, it took little skill to identify the buzzwords used to cover up such nonsense and it was equally lucky that Duggan felt no compulsion to call a turd anything other than what it was.

  “It’ll need a miracle to destroy just one of those two spaceships,” he replied.

  “And presumably a miracle to destroy the second. Does that make it a miracle squared or simply two miracles added together?”

  Stahl was attempting a clumsy joke.

  “Somewhere in between, Councillor.”

  “I’ve been keeping up to date with the progress on Earth’s Fury.”

  “It is going well, though it won’t be ready as soon as I would like.”

  “I trust we aren’t putting all of our eggs in that particular basket?”

  “No, Councillor. The Space Corps has several promising new designs undergoing testing.”

  “Fine, keep me informed.”

  With that, Stahl was gone.

  Duggan stared at his desk for a few seconds. He wasn’t fond of inaction, so he stood and stretched the aches and pains from his muscles.

  “Cerys, I’m going to check on the progress of Earth’s Fury.”

  “Would you like me to send advance warning?”

  “No. And make sure I’m not interrupted unless it’s of absolutely vital importance.”

  “Yes, Fleet Admiral. Will you be gone for long?”

  The computer knew damn well how long he was likely to be gone and was trying to act like it had human uncertainties.

  “Use your best estimate.”

  He left his office. His appearance surprised a few of his staff who worked in the open plan area outside and they prepared themselves to follow. He wasn’t in the mood for their questions and he waved them to their seats.

  “I’ll be back shortly,” he said.

  A few minutes later, he was outside. He took one of the boxy, utilitarian pool cars and gave its onboard computer directions. With barely a murmur, the vehicle pulled out of its parking place and entered the traffic of the base. The cloth interior of the car seats smelled of damp and the navigational screen flickered.

  Outside, there were trees and a few grassy areas, in stark contrast to most other bases in the Space Corps where greenery was unheard of. It was late afternoon and the sky was grey, though for once there was no sign of the drizzle which was a seemingly permanent feature on this part of New Earth. Duggan’s mind was elsewhere and he didn’t notice any of these things, and was only dimly aware of his transit through
the wide streets of the base.

  The car emerged from the shelter of the buildings and continued onto the flat, concreted landing field. Several warships were parked further along the strip – there were four Crimson class destroyers in a neat row, along with one Imposition class cruiser. The sight pulled Duggan from his reverie and his eyes roved over the warships. They were beautiful, terrible constructions built to defend humanity and it saddened him to think how powerless they would be against the might of the Vraxar capital ships.

  This part of the landing field was several kilometres across and it took the car a few minutes to pass the docked spaceships. It entered the shipyard and there was a marked increase in ground traffic. The car weaved its way between three huge gravity cranes and was forced to stop to allow an immense flatbed gravity crawler to go by. The crawler was several hundred metres long and it carried a half-billion-tonne cuboid block of Gallenium. A team of anxious-looking technicians walked alongside, checking their diagnostic equipment for any sign of malfunction in the crawler’s engines.

  The crawler’s destination wasn’t hard to fathom – a new Hadron battleship was ninety-five percent complete in Trench One. The Ulterior-2 was so long they’d needed to do additional work on the docking trench in order to fit the hull inside. The battleship loomed hundreds of metres above the sides, its armour plating dull in the artificial light. Construction robots filled the skies, dancing a computer-controlled dance with two huge lifter shuttles. Everywhere around, thousands of technicians hurried about their business.