Negation Force (Obsidiar Fleet Book 1) Read online

  Negation Force

  Obsidiar Fleet Book 1

  Anthony James

  Contents

  Rebellion

  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

  Decisions

  © 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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  Rebellion

  The Juniper was a massive, infinitely-complex cylinder of alloy, which remained in stationary orbit a few thousand kilometres above the surface of the cold moon Nesta-T3 and far from any of the twenty-six populated worlds which made up the human Confederation.

  While not quite ancient, the orbital had operated as an off-world command and control facility for more than four decades. Such was its strategic importance it had seen three extensive overhauls, during which additional housing, weapons and research modules had been added. The vessel had grown to a length of twenty-one kilometres, with a diameter of two thousand metres. It had reached what the Space Corps’ high command referred to as critical mass, where it was too costly and too vital to be decommissioned.

  The interior was mostly cold, spartan and impersonal. Metal-walled corridors lit in cool blue-white went from laboratories to analysis rooms, or from intel departments to logistics areas. Silent shuttle lifts carried personnel between the many hundreds of floors. Strangers, dressed in uniforms of drab cloths, would speak to each other only to pay lip service to the dictates of civility. The Juniper was not an unfriendly place, it was simply home to many people who lived and breathed their work in the Corps.

  Captain Charlie Blake walked along one of the corridors, doing his best to weave through the press of humanity. There was a problem somewhere – a big one – and even a fool could pick up the undertones of panic. Everyone was going somewhere. A brisk walking pace was evidently not enough for some of the space station’s occupants and a few of them ran, shoving their way through the crowds.

  Blake was heading towards the office of a man known for his lack of patience towards incompetents and career ladder-climbers. Lieutenant Caz Pointer strode at Blake’s side, uninvited and unwanted. Pointer was short, slim and exceptionally pretty, with long blonde hair and wide, blue eyes that spoke of sweet innocence. It hadn’t taken Blake long to learn she was ambitious and sharp as a razor.

  “What’s going on, sir?” she asked. There was a hint of demand in her tone which Blake found grating.

  There was a lot of noise and a distant siren whined in an adjacent area of the orbital. Blake had to raise his voice to make himself heard. “I’m damned if I have any idea, Lieutenant.”

  “A friend told me they’ve called up every senior officer, whether on leave or not.”

  “You heard that?” he asked.

  “It’s true. The shit must have really hit the fan somewhere. I can’t believe nobody’s told you what it is, sir.”

  Pointer was always trying to stir up crap. That was her game – play people off against each other. Blake didn’t know if it was something she did for fun, or if she thought it would benefit her career. If it was the latter, it wasn’t working out too well for her.

  “I’m sure I’m about to hear in precise detail what’s going on,” he said, increasing his pace so that Pointer struggled to keep by his side in the throng.

  “I’d love to hear, sir,” she said, trying out the charm.

  “No doubt you will, Lieutenant. In due course.”

  “I can’t wait!”

  Blake gritted his teeth and kept on walking. He wasn’t long past his thirtieth birthday – a good-looking guy and a rising star in the Space Corps. It made him the perfect target for someone like Caz Pointer to latch onto. The flirting might have been an interesting diversion, even knowing what she was like beneath the undeniably attractive surface. However, there was something distinctly off-putting about the ambition in her face which she was too poor an actor to hide.

  He stopped at a door – it was a metal slab in the wall of a main corridor somewhere on the 78th level. There were no markings on the door. If you didn’t have specific business here, there was no need for you to take an interest in what lay beyond, though the Juniper’s security system wouldn’t let unexpected visitors through anyway. Blake took a deep breath and stepped forwards. The door opened for him at once, making the familiar whooshing sound as it slid to one side.

  “I’ll stay out here, sir,” said Pointer.

  Blake stepped across the threshold, fervently hoping she’d be called elsewhere while he was within. He found himself in a short passage leading to another door. When the outer door closed, the inner door moved aside, allowing Blake into the office beyond.

  This office was a large, square room, panelled in wood and with a holographic window on the back wall which showed an image of a warm day on a hillside somewhere a trillion miles away. There were carpets and plants as reminders of home. One wall was covered in banks of screens and there was a compact console on the floor in front of it. A man sat behind a desk. Like seemingly every other Admiral in the Space Corps, he was grey-haired and with a fixed scowl.

  “Captain Blake, take a seat,” said Admiral Carl Murray.

  Blake had met Admiral Murray a couple of times before, though not enough that he could claim to know him well. It didn’t take a genius to see Murray was pissed at something. Not just pissed, but absolutely, completely and utterly royally pissed.

  “Sir,” said Blake, pulling out a chair and keeping his expression neutral.

  Murray growled, the noise an indication of his frustration and anger. His deep-set eyes glowered across the table and the furrows on his forehead looked like lines drawn in marker pen. He slapped both palms down hard onto the top of his desk.

  “We’re screwed,” he said. “It’s damn well happened! What those idiots said would never happen has come and kicked us where it hurts the most!”

  Blake wasn’t lacking in confidence, but he wasn’t sure if he was expected to say anything. Experience told him that when he was facing a superior officer in a situation where he didn’t have any idea what the hell was going on, it was best to keep his mouth shut. It was the right choice.

  �
��There’s been a rebellion, Captain. A damned rebellion within the Confederation! Every single metric, every single poll tells us humanity has never been happier, but there’s always someone who wants a little bit more.”

  Blake was aware of the rumours, but to be confronted by the truth came as a shock.

  “Roban?”

  “Roban and Liventor. The two newest planets in the Confederation and the pair of them have gone ahead and set up what they call the Frontier League.”

  “Which we haven’t accepted, I assume?”

  “That’s for the Confederation Council to decide. I very much doubt they’ll accept the secession, but it’s a bad situation. A very bad situation.”

  “What do you want from me, sir?”

  Admiral Murray calmed himself with an obvious effort. “You come highly recommended, Captain. You’re not the most senior captain we have here on the Juniper, but the reports I’ve received are glowing. You’ve been selected to lead an important mission.”

  Blake nodded at the words, sat back and prepared to listen.

  Chapter One

  High above the Confederation world Atlantis, there was a sudden build-up of energy – a huge cloud of it was forced into local space by the imminent arrival of something forging a way through high lightspeed.

  On the planet’s surface, a monitoring station situated on the Tillos military base detected the fission cloud through its network of satellites. In a split second, the installation’s cluster of processing cores checked the flight plans for every single warship in the Space Corps and determined there was nothing expected. Obeying its programming, the mainframe sent off a series of Priority 1 warnings to numerous personnel, including the base commander and the Juniper orbital.

  It was early evening and the base was on wind-down. Nevertheless, the warnings reached their intended recipients, spurring several dozen people into activity. The base commander opened a channel to the monitoring station to ask what the hell was going on.

  Before the alarm could produce a meaningful response, a number of spaceships exited lightspeed, emerging thirty thousand kilometres above the planet’s surface. To a seasoned observer of known warship types, these vessels would have appeared unusual – dark-metal, tapering cylinders with a series of forward-pointing arrays. The alien craft shimmered in an unexpected way, winking in and out of sight like a faulty viewscreen and making their exact locations hard to pin down.

  The largest spaceship was something different again. Even when compared to the battleships in the Space Corps’ fleet, this one was massive. At eighteen thousand metres from nose to tail, it dwarfed everything humanity had put into the skies, bar the Juniper orbital.

  It wasn’t only the size of the spaceship which made it unusual. This vessel was clad in metal so dark it was almost black. Across its surface, sparks of white and blue crackled irregularly as though the energy generated within the ship was far more than it was able to contain, leaving it to discharge the excess through its outer armour.

  There were Space Corps warships stationed in orbit above Atlantis. Once the threat was identified, they moved to intercept.

  Meanwhile, on the surface of Atlantis, the lights went out.

  Captain Hanzo Smith was sitting in his seat on the bridge of the Resolve class light cruiser ES Termination, dealing with the mundane task of checking his personal messages. With a press of one finger, he deleted the most recent arrivals in his mailbox and watched impassively as five more appeared.

  News of Roban and Liventor’s declarations of independence was an open secret now and it was quite obvious many people amongst both the Confederation Council and the Space Corps had been caught off-guard by the suddenness. So far this evening, Smith had come across at least a dozen different opinions on how best to deal with it and these were only the ones he’d heard about. He’d even received a message from an old acquaintance, now based on Liventor, asking if he wanted to bring the ES Termination out to join the rebellion.

  “How long are they going to keep us here at Atlantis, sir?” asked Comms Lieutenant Fi Rydale. She made a play of indicating over one shoulder with her thumb. “The rebel scum are that way.”

  “Lieutenant,” he warned her firmly. “This is not a situation that requires humour. These are our people we’re talking about.”

  “Yeah well, they shouldn’t steal our planets and our warships then, should they?”

  Rydale had a rebellious streak of her own, though it could manifest itself in numerous, often conflicting ways.

  “Just be quiet for a moment,” said Smith. “I need to think.”

  “You’re the boss, sir.”

  “Something you would do well to remember, Lieutenant.”

  Smith was as worried as most people about the news. The Confederation had been settled for decades – ever since the war with the Ghasts was brought to a close. Now there was this. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that if the talking failed to bring the breakaway planets back into the fold, there was a chance matters could take a nasty turn. Neither Roban nor Liventor had the warships to repel a determined effort to retake the planets by force, but who within the Confederation wanted to deal with the long-term results of keeping a suppressed population in line? It was unthinkable.

  “There’s just us, the ES Stinger and the ES Craster up here,” said Lieutenant Lars Jansson, evidently not comprehending his captain’s desire for quiet. “They won’t send us somewhere else, will they?”

  “I don’t see why not,” said Rydale, pouncing on the opportunity to stick her oar in again. “There’s absolutely no need to keep a permanent patrol around Atlantis. Not these days. Who’s going to attack? Not the Ghasts, that’s for sure. Plus, we’ve got seven more ships on the ground undergoing routine maintenance. I’ll bet they could be up in the air in minutes.”

  “Six of them, for sure,” said Smith, finding himself drawn back into the conversation he’d already tried to put an end to.

  “We’re about a hundred days from Roban, I reckon,” said Jansson. “Whatever’s going to happen, it’ll be done by the time we get there.”

  Jansson’s statement was wrong on so many levels but Smith couldn’t bring himself to open up a new avenue for the discussion to continue, so he pretended he hadn’t heard. Smith closed out of his mailbox, which now contained seventeen unread messages. It seemed best to let things settle down a bit and then read the important ones once there was some sort of consensus.

  The ES Termination was about halfway through its scheduled month-long patrol orbit of Atlantis. When it was over, another vessel would arrive to take its place. It was only within the last year Fleet Admiral Duggan had allowed the numbers of warships in a combat-ready orbit to be reduced from eight to three and that was on the condition of having more of the fleet’s light repairs done on the planet’s shipyards. It was as though the Admiral feared Atlantis was somehow more vulnerable than all the other worlds in the Confederation.

  Personally, Smith thought keeping three or four warships here in total was more than sufficient, especially given the cutbacks within the Space Corps. Atlantis was a beautiful place, for sure, but its economic contribution to the whole was modest. Most people only came here for a holiday on one of its countless beaches, or on the shores of its idyllic lakes.

  “We’re going nowhere,” Smith stated with certainty. “The Fleet Admiral likes to know he’s keeping Atlantis safe.”

  “At least we’ve got nothing to worry about,” said Rydale. “Two more weeks of boredom.”

  “Which you’ll spend planning your holidays,” said Smith, aware his lieutenant was due a month’s worth of accrued leave as soon as the patrol time was done.

  “Already sorted, sir,” she stated, unabashed. “The first week will be in one of the resorts on the planet right below us. I got a last-minute deal.”

  “Sir?”

  It was Larsson, his eyes focused on something on his console. Smith detected a note in the man’s voice – fear and uncertainty in equal
measures.

  “What is it?” asked Smith. It was easy to be lulled into complacency on these long patrol assignments and he struggled to bring his mind to the present.

  “It’s a fission signature, sir - there’s something coming.”

  Smith frowned. “What sort of something? Where?”

  “I-I really don’t know, sir. All I can tell you is that it’s something big and it’s not one of ours.”

  “Where?” Smith asked again, this time with greater urgency.

  “Forty thousand klicks away, coming in at a similar altitude to us.”

  Smith stood, frozen. His jaw worked while his brain tried to figure out which words his mouth should say. A fission signature indicated there was something due to emerge from lightspeed travel in the next few seconds. The larger the signature, the larger the incoming vessel. Whatever was about to arrive, it was huge – far larger than anything Smith had seen before.

  “Not one of ours,” he said, repeating Larsson’s words. The significance of it finally sunk in and he sprang for his seat. “Full alert!” he shouted. “Lieutenant Anand, load the Lambda and Shatterer batteries. Prepare the shock drones and Splinter interceptors. I don’t know what the hell is coming, but I want to be ready for it.”

  “I’m sending a message to the Juniper, sir,” said Rydale. “I’ll coordinate with the Stinger and Craster.”