War from a Distant Sun (Savage Stars Book 1) Read online

  War From a Distant Sun

  Savage Stars Book 1

  Anthony James

  Contents

  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

  End

  © 2020 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

  Chapter One

  It seemed like a chance encounter, out in the middle of nowhere.

  The moment the Finality’s sensor officer reported the appearance of ternium particles two hundred thousand kilometres above planet Sarus-Q, Captain Carl Recker knew he was in trouble.

  “Full alert,” he ordered, slamming the control bars to the end of their runners.

  The spaceship’s immense propulsion grumbled with the strain of acceleration and Recker banked the Finality hard towards the only source of cover available - the planet a few thousand kilometres ahead.

  “What’ve we got?” he snarled, already sure he wasn’t going to like the answer. His gaze swept over the screens, status displays, touchpads and switches on the wraparound command console in front of him. Numbers and text rolled upwards in an endless stream and his brain absorbed it all like second nature.

  “Something bigger than we are,” said Lieutenant Adam Burner. “Waiting on the sensor data analysis.”

  “Maybe we got lucky and it’s an ore carrier,” said Commander Daisy Aston from her station adjacent to Recker.

  “Zero chance of that,” grunted Lieutenant Ken Eastwood, not looking up from the engine panel. The bridge lighting was muted, and his face was illuminated in green from the console displays.

  Recker knew it too and he gritted his teeth.

  “Magnitude of the cloud suggests we’ve got an enemy destroyer inbound, sir,” said Burner.

  “Should’ve kept my mouth shut about that ore carrier,” said Aston dryly.

  “Dammit,” said Recker. “It’ll take fifteen minutes to load up our ternium drive, so we’ll have to play the hand we’ve been dealt.”

  He kept one eye on the forward sensor feed. Sarus-Q was close to its sun and comparatively small, with a surface of molten iron and erupting gases. It was just the sort of place that might contain worthwhile quantities of ternium ore and numerous other metals the Human Planetary Alliance needed for its weapons factories. Not that it was a good time to call in a low-orbit dredger.

  “We’re not going to make it around the Sarus-Q curvature before that vessel enters local space,” said Recker.

  “Why do we always get the shit?” asked Burner.

  “A question for later,” snapped Recker. “Did you send the FTL comm?”

  “Yes, sir. Six hours and it’ll bounce off the closest relay. Another ten after that and it’ll reach someone capable of making a decision. In two days, we might have backup.”

  The intel team on deep space monitoring station Quad1 had picked up something out here. Low probability of hostiles, Recker remembered from the mission briefing. Worth checking out, Admiral Telar had said in the short meeting before departure. Not enough of a lead to send anything other than a single riot class.

  The particle cloud reached its peak diameter and began to fade. At the same time, the inbound spaceship emerged from lightspeed, drifting slowly like always happened at the end of a jump.

  “We’ve got a Daklan destroyer at 195 thousand klicks,” confirmed Burner. “Looks new.”

  Recker swore under his breath and felt the sweat beading on his forehead. The moment you gave an old ship like the Finality anything like full power, the life support ran out of juice for the basics like crew comfort and hot air pumped in through the aft bulkhead vents, making the tiny bridge feel like a metal-lined sauna.

  He breathed in the familiar scent of overstressed tech. “Put it up on the screen.”

  “Sensors locked. On the forward, sir.”

  The bridge forward bulkhead was a single curved screen, which could simultaneously display any combination of feeds from the warship’s external or internal sensors. The central section updated to show a faintly shimmering outline of the Daklan spaceship.

  Recker had seen plenty of ravager class destroyers and this one was noticeably different, with an aggressively tapered nose and a lower profile. The spaceship didn’t exactly gleam in the normal sense of the word – hull alloys weren’t reflective – but it seemed fresh and unmarked. The feed wasn’t sharp enough for Recker to distinguish the destroyer’s external armaments, but he could imagine them well enough: missile launchers and plenty of countermeasures.

  “Nine hundred metres end to end and a billion-ton displacement,” said Burner. “And as far as the Daklan fleet goes, it’s a baby.”

  The Finality was totally outclassed - the riot class spaceships were the smallest lightspeed capable vessels in the navy. A bunch of them could handle a Daklan destroyer. Alone, they stood no chance. Or so it said in the rulebook.

  If there was one thing Recker had learned in his eighteen years’ service, it was that surprise could change anything.

  He scanned the available data and took a gamble. “Commander Aston – target and fire the rear missile clusters.”

  “That’s going to tell them exactly where we are, sir.”

  “Launch the missiles. We’ll be around the planet’s cusp before they obtain a lock.”

  “Yes, sir. Firing rear clusters one and two.”

  The Finality’s rear launchers were 250 metres back from the bridge, with most of the intervening distance being solid ternium. Even so, Recker heard – or sensed - the boom of detonating missile propulsions along with the faintest of vibrations through the alloy of the spaceship’s control bars. The Ilstrom-5 missiles were more engine than anything else. A small payload but designed to reach their target quickly.

  “Time to impact: 30 seconds. Missile clusters reloading,” said Aston, her voice tight.

  “Sixteen direct hits might not be enough,” said Eastwood. He was the oldest of the crew, with grey hair and a gravel voice. “Not that we’re going to land a quarter of that number.”

  Recker could feel the maddening prickle of day-old stubble, but he couldn’t take his hands off the controls. “What’s that destroyer doing, Lieutenant Burner?”

  “Nothing yet, sir. Let’s hope our sensor deflection keeps them guessing.”

  The velocity gauge climbed, and Sarus-Q occup
ied the entire forward feed. Recker did his best not to be distracted by the hostility of the planet and the sense he got that most of its surface was moving slowly, like an ocean of sullen red magma.

  Burner gave the bad news. “They’re coming for us, sir.”

  “Damn, that’s a high output from their engines,” said Eastwood. “Must be packing something bigger and better than what we’re used to.”

  “Just our luck to run into a warship fresh out of the dock.” Recker swore under his breath and watched the sixteen Ilstrom-5s racing across the tactical. “Come on, come on.”

  “We’re not going to make around the curvature before they lock and fire,” said Burner.

  “Rear clusters reloaded, sir.”

  “Fire.”

  A second wave of missiles burst from their launch clusters – another sixteen green dots on the tactical display.

  Light flashed on the bulkhead feed, telling Recker that the enemy ship had launched shock-pulse bombs to knock out the Ilstrom-5s. The single flash was followed by dozens more, laid out in a computer-determined pattern to maximise the chance of destroying the missiles. Amongst the shock-pulse bursts, Recker saw elongated streaks of hardened ternium slugs rip across the darkness of space, as the Daklan aimed their Graler turrets at the Ilstrom-5s.

  One-by-one, the Finality’s missiles were pulverised, and they disappeared from the tactical until only a handful of the first wave remained in flight.

  “Enemy missiles inbound,” said Aston. “Twenty total. ETA, 40 seconds.”

  Recker had misjudged both the skill of the Daklan crew and the effectiveness of their hardware. Now he had to deal with his failing.

  “Launch disruptors.”

  “Disruptors away.”

  A hundred tiny drones spilled from the Finality’s rear deployment tubes and their tiny single-burst engines hurled them towards the Daklan missiles. The drones emitted heat, light and ternium particles. Sometimes it was enough to fool the enemy guidance systems.

  The Finality was travelling fast and – at an altitude of five hundred kilometres - Sarus-Q seemed close enough to touch. Overlays and projections from the spaceship’s mainframe cluttered the tactical and Recker’s mind combined them into a picture of the engagement. In a few seconds, the planet’s curvature would break the enemy weapons lock, leaving only twenty Feilar homing missiles to deal with.

  “The final two Ilstroms stopped transmitting right on top of the enemy vessel,” said Aston. “I can’t confirm impacts.”

  The second wave wasn’t faring any better than the first and half were knocked out by enemy countermeasures before the missile transmissions were blocked by Sarus-Q. They dropped off the tactical along with the enemy destroyer.

  “We’re out of enemy sensor sight,” said Recker. “Shame about those Feilars.”

  The enemy missiles maintained a lock on the Finality and they hurtled across the planet’s surface.

  “Disruptors away,” said Aston. “Five Feilars taken out by our first drone deployment.”

  The Daklan fleet was armed with several types of missiles. The Feilars were the slowest and carried the smallest payload. Even so, Recker didn’t want them testing the Finality’s armour.

  “Railer chain gun hunting for a lock,” said Aston.

  “Spray and pray,” muttered Burner.

  Recker took the Finality lower. Sarus-Q didn’t have much of an atmosphere, but the heat began to accumulate on the spaceship’s nose. The underside feed was like a vision of hell – a grey-black ocean of semiliquid rock with areas of red and orange.

  “Hull temps rising,” said Eastwood.

  “I know it, Lieutenant.”

  “The disruptors took out another four inbound missiles,” said Aston. “Eleven to go.”

  A second later, the Railer got a target lock and a green light appeared on the weapons panel. The chain gun started up with a roar of pure savagery – like the perfection of metallurgy given its own voice.

  Recker had once seen a recording in which the captain of a Teron class cruiser directed his vessel’s Railers at the surface of an uninhabited vacuum world. The four underside weapons had smashed a vast, unbelievable hole in the side of a mountain. It was a brutal example of what could be achieved with a large calibre, an enormous rate of fire and a muzzle velocity of five thousand kilometres per second.

  The Finality only had one Railer and it was smaller than the equivalent on a Teron class. That didn’t mean it was inefficient. The weapon fired an extended burst and one of the Feilars vanished from the tactical. A split second for retargeting and the Railer discharged again.

  “Nine left,” said Aston. “Third wave of disruptors out.”

  “Nose temperature at two thousand degrees Centigrade,” said Eastwood.

  “That gives us another two thousand to play with, Lieutenant.”

  The Finality’s nose burned a fierce orange, but Recker didn’t let up on the controls. He watched the Feilars closing on the tactical. They’d burn up before the spaceship in the atmospheric friction, but Recker didn’t think he was going to have it that easy.

  “Drones took out another three,” said Aston.

  She didn’t need to remind anyone that the disruptors weren’t so effective at short range. That left the Railer to do the cleaning up and the chain gun fired continuously, its motor and barrel temperatures climbing rapidly towards their design maximum.

  With four Feilars still inbound, the Railer’s in-built safety mechanisms shut the weapon down, leaving the bridge in a peculiar silence.

  “Shit,” said Burner.

  The Finality was an agile craft, but evading missiles was an exercise in futility even if you timed it right. At the last moment, Recker threw the spaceship hard to port and he imagined the life support module fighting against the lateral forces. The muscles in his forearms strained and even the walls around him groaned under the stresses.

  For a second, he thought he’d pulled off the improbable and made the Feilars overshoot. A glimpse of silver on the rear sensor feed told him he was wrong. Then, missiles struck the Finality.

  Chapter Two

  Twin detonations sent a wave of vibration through the spaceship. On the bridge, the results of the missile strikes seemed muted, like a gentle collision heard from a place of safety.

  Recker knew the reality. “Damage reports!” he barked. Several amber warnings and a couple of reds appeared on his command console, but he had to fly the damn spaceship and couldn’t spare a moment to check the alerts out in detail.

  “Two successful Feilar strikes on our rear plating,” said Eastwood. “We’ve suffered engine damage and I’m checking the extent. No breach into the interior.”

  That last part at least was a relief. Like all warships, the Finality was mostly propulsion and weapons systems, with a limited central area given over to the crew. If a missile opened a hole into the interior, it usually meant the damage was terminal.

  “An amber appeared on rear Ilstrom cluster #2,” said Aston.

  “Out of action?” asked Recker sharply. He didn’t look up – the Finality wasn’t responding like normal and it was taking all his focus to keep it steady.

  Aston’s expression was one of angry uncertainty. “I don’t know.”

  “The monitoring tools don’t tell you?”

  “There’s a fault on them too, sir.”

  “Do what you can to find out.” Recker raised his voice. “Lieutenant Burner?”

  “All sensor arrays operational, sir. I sent an FTL comm to base informing them of our engagement with a new Daklan warship.”

  “Hull temps at 2500 Centigrade,” said Eastwood. “It might be time to pull up or slow down, sir.”

  Recker didn’t want to do either. The Daklan were persistent and they didn’t like to lose a target. The alien bastard piloting that destroyer would come looking for the Finality – that was not in doubt.

  “I screwed up once and I’m not going to risk another engagement,” he said. “Not yet
anyway.”

  Already Recker’s mind was working out the possibilities. The Finality had taken a couple of missile strikes, but the riot class was tougher than the sum of its parts. That’s why the hull specifications hadn’t been changed for about fifty years. At a few trillion feds each, riots were cheap to build, reliable and with a design that could be easily fitted out with new weaponry. They were a good way to increase fleet numbers and the best place for a newly promoted captain to prove his or her worth.

  Or somewhere for Recker’s enemies to show him that the past wasn’t forgotten.

  He shook away the distraction of memories and concentrated on the here and now. It was likely the Daklan vessel had suffered some damage from the Finality’s missiles, though Recker wasn’t ready to push for a second confrontation. The mission documentation didn’t require him to sacrifice his ship or his crew – he was meant to hunt for signs of the enemy and report in.

  Clearly the intel team on DS-Quad1 hadn’t expected him to run into a Daklan destroyer, else they’d have sent something with more firepower than the Finality. Maybe.

  “I just had Sergeant Vance on the internal comms,” said Burner. “He reports no casualties. I told him to hunker down and keep everything crossed.”

  The Finality wasn’t a dedicated troop carrier, but it had a squad of soldiers stationed onboard in case they were required for any one of a hundred different reasons. Staff Sergeant James Vance and his fourteen soldiers were cooped up in their quarters aft. The internal alarms would make it clear the Finality was engaged, but they wouldn’t know anything more.