Atlantia Series 3: Aggressor Read online

  AGGRESSOR

  © 2014 Dean Crawford

  Published: 20th September 2014

  ASIN:B00NQBN1BK

  Publisher: Fictum Ltd

  The right of Dean Crawford to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  www.deancrawfordbooks.com

  Also by Dean Crawford:

  The Atlantia Series

  Survivor

  Retaliator

  Aggressor

  The Ethan Warner Series

  Covenant, Immortal, Apocalypse

  The Chimera Secret, The Eternity Project

  Independent novels

  Eden, Holo Sapiens

  Revolution, Soul Seekers

  Want to receive notification of new releases? Just sign up to Dean Crawford's newsletter via: http://eepurl.com/KoP8T

  Contents

  Title Page

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  XXXI

  XXXII

  XXXIII

  XXXIV

  XXXV

  XXXVI

  XXXVII

  XXXVIII

  XXXIX

  XL

  XLI

  XLII

  XLIII

  XLIV

  XLV

  XLVI

  XLVII

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  REVIEWS

  We should have known better.

  We know that there are few survivors, few of our kind still clinging to life.

  They say that when the end came some embraced it willingly, shrugged off their lives like old skins and allowed the Legion to infiltrate their minds and their bodies and become one with the machine. Most, however, did not. Most fought, and died, trying only to remain who they were.

  The Legion, the instrument of the Word, our governing law, took life across all of the colonies. Worlds fell; Ethera, Caneeron, Titas; the mining settlements and the outlying systems and the uncharted clouds of asteroids and meteors beyond consumed by the monstrous and insatiable thirst for knowledge and power that is the currency of the Word. The greatest creation and achievement of our human race turned vengeful deity, the destroyer of worlds.

  We now know that there are several forces at work within the Legion, an immeasurable swarm of mechanical devices ranging in size from as big as insects to as small as biological cells. There are the Infectors, the smallest and most dangerous, for it is their mission to infiltrate the optical nerves, the brain stem and the spinal cord of human beings, turning them into mere instruments dancing to the macabre hymn of the Word’s destructive passion. Then there are the Swarms, the clouds of tiny but voracious feeders who break down all and any materials into the raw ingredients for more of their kind: metals, plastics, even human tissue, consumed en masse and regurgitated into further countless devices, all of which evolve with startling rapidity as though time were running for them at breakneck speed. Finally, there are the Hunters: bigger than the rest and with only a single purpose – to find and to kill intelligent biological life wherever it is found in the cosmos.

  We are the last of our kind, and despite the horrors that we witnessed when we fled the only star system we could call home, we now know that we must return. There is nowhere else to run to, nowhere else to hide, for if we do not make our stand now then we condemn our children or their children after them to face what we could not. We must fight back and step by step, system by system, we must take from the Word that which was ours and liberate ourselves from the living hell that we have created and endured.

  The Atlantia, a former fleet frigate turned prison ship, is the last home we have. Our crew is comprised of terrified civilians, dangerous former convicts and a small but fiercely patriotic force of soldiers and fighter pilots for whom there is no further purpose to life other than to fight for every last inch of space between here and home.

  Our lives may become the last that will ever be lived, and thus we tell our story in the hope that one day others will read of it and remember our names.

  Captain Idris Sansin

  Atlantia

  I

  ‘They’re coming back again!’

  Ishira Morle glanced down at a small monitor embedded in the control panel before her and her skin crawled as she saw something moving against a sprawling backdrop of countless stars, a massive shadowy bulk that loomed ever larger to fill the screen. The cockpit of the freighter was a galaxy of glowing coloured lights and deep shadows that mirrored the endless expanses of space outside.

  ‘Can we outrun them?’

  Ishira shook her head as she looked down at her young daughter perched upon the seat next to her, and tried to keep the grinding fear she felt out of her voice as she replied.

  ‘No, we can’t honey. We’re already at full power.’

  The sound of distant alarms echoed into the cockpit from the depths of the ship behind them, wailing through lonely corridors and distant holds devoid of stores. Vapour hissed from damaged pipework where the environmental systems were losing control of the vessel’s internal atmosphere, lights from the corridor beyond the cockpit enshrouded in a misty gloom.

  The barrage had come from nowhere, an overwhelming salvo of plasma blasts crashing into the ship as it fled through the lonely blackness of deep space.

  ‘What’s going to happen to us?’

  Ishira gripped the controls tightly in her slim hands, her deeply tanned skin stretched taut across her bones. She was starving, as was her daughter Erin, and the entire ship’s compliment were also suffering from malnutrition and dehydration. Disease was beginning to rear its ugly head throughout the ship, a severe shortage of medical supplies compounding the spread of infections.

  The deep, inky blackness of space ahead through the viewing panel of the merchant vessel Valiant was pierced by the flare of a star unlike any other that Ishira had ever seen. The ship’s computer identified the star as a yellow-spectral type of unremarkable mass, but it was the star’s metallic content that interested Ishira. The build-up of heavy metals inside the star and of elements like helium and oxygen told her that it was nearing the end of its life, a fact vividly illustrated by the violent halo of ejecta radiating from the star in kaleidoscopic halos of bright blue, green, orange and yellow.

  The star was dying and would soon swallow all of its orbiting planets in a fiery oblivion from which there would be no escape. Ishira stared into the star’s distant fiery depths, the brilliant flare dimmed by photoreceptive sheilding in the viewing panel, and she knew that her destination lay ahead.

  ‘I know what I’m not going to let happen to us,’ she replied. ‘We’re not going to be captured.’

  Erin was nine years old, her long straight brown hair parted in the centre and framing an angelic face and big, wide brown eyes that reflected the twinkling lights of the cockpit. Erin, like her mother, had witnessed the apocalypse that had swamped their homeworld of Ethera more than two years ago, had seen countless millions of human beings consumed by the horror of the invasion. She knew well what was behind them, and tha
t their only future lay somewhere ahead.

  Valiant had dropped out of super-luminal velocity into the Chiron system, the farthest point they had been able to reach before the ship’s internal reserves of hydrogen had been exhausted. The system was virtually uncharted, located as it was on the very outermost boundary of the explored cosmos. Unexplored moons, exotic nebula and high volumes of stellar-radiation and cosmic rays made a beautiful vista a deadly trap for the unwary. Or the desperate.

  The sound of running boots echoed down the corridor behind the cockpit and an elderly man burst through the swirling clouds of vapour, his chest heaving and his left arm glistening with moisture and mechanical fluids, the metallic glint of his bionic prosthetic visible beneath the cuffs of his jacket. Stefan Morle, Ishira’s father and the ship’s engineer, leaned one hand against the frame of the cockpit door and wiped sweat from his brow.

  ‘What’s the story?’ Ishira demanded of him.

  ‘The engine bays are fine,’ Stefan replied, ‘but we’ve lost power conduits and cooling from a third of the ship after that last hit. Another couple of blows and that’ll be it.’

  Ishira looked down once more at the dark shape in the rear-view monitor pursuing them across the void, and then at a schematic of the attacking vessel. A Veng’en cruiser, a big one too, heavily armed and likely manned by countless warriors hell-bent on spilling the blood of humans. She glanced at her instruments, gauging velocities and trajectories, and then looked over her shoulder at her father.

  ‘Divert all remaining power to the engines. Give her everything we’ve got. All that’s keeping us alive now is our speed.’

  Stefan nodded as he looked at Erin. ‘How are you holding up?’

  Erin smiled, a brave face thinly veiling her fear. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘We can’t run forever,’ Stefan cautioned his daughter. ‘You know that, right?’

  Ishira nodded and gave a barely-perceptible nod of her head toward the fearsome star laying directly in their course.

  ‘We won’t have to run forever.’

  Stefan glanced at the star, and Ishira saw his expression crease a little as he concealed his own fear and pain deep inside.

  ‘Can we reach it before..?’

  ‘We can reach it,’ Ishira insisted. ‘Maximum orbital velocity and the star’s gravity will do the rest. We won’t even know what’s happened until…’

  ‘No other options?’ Stefan persisted.

  ‘Surrender, and…’

  Ishira broke off and Stefan nodded. ‘I’ll switch the power across.’

  Stefan turned and hurried away from the cockpit. Erin looked at her mother.

  ‘What are we going to do?’

  Ishira smiled at her daughter and gently cupped her jaw in her hand. ‘We’re going somewhere even the Veng’en will not be able to find us.’

  Erin smiled again but somehow Ishira knew that her daughter was not entirely fooled, that even a nine-year old girl could see that their situation was hopeless.

  Valiant was a merchant ship that had been in the family for two decades, running the mineral line between distant asteroid clouds, Caneeron, and Ethera, bringing home valuable minerals to industries in the core systems for trade and construction. Barely two hundred fifty cubits long, Valiant and her compliment of twelve miners and crew had been on the outer limits of the Tyberium Fields when the apocalypse had struck and the Legion had overwhelmed mankind.

  The distress signals had arrived first, all of them several hours old by the time they had travelled across the Ethera system and reached Valiant. Hundreds of them, thousands, the clamouring of millions of voices crying out in pain and fear and filling the communication channels until, one after the other, they had fallen silent until nothing had remained but the hiss of static.

  Ishira had immediately set a course for the inner system despite the protestations of her crew. Ishira’s mother was on Ethera, as was her brother. It soon became clear that they could not have survived the calamity.

  Nobody aboard was under any doubt that something horrendous had occurred on Ethera, but Ishira knew that Valiant was only equipped and supplied for a three-month mining cruise: if the devastation back home was as bad as the distress signals indicated, they would need supplies before they could flee the system permanently. Thus, she pushed on in both the vain hope that she could restock their holds and the even slimmer chance that the rest of their family had somehow made it out alive.

  Valiant reached as far as Caneeron before it became clear that they could go no further, the communication channels filled with the digital hymn of the Word’s complete control over humanity’s technology base. On the way in they had passed a handful of refugee vessels packed with terrified passengers, the last survivors of mankind fleeing their only home.

  Ishira had guided Valiant into the docks at Caneeron and together the crew had loaded everything and anything they could aboard her before blasting out of the system with a handful of Colonial cruisers in hot pursuit, their crews entirely consumed or controlled by the Legion. It had taken all of Ishira’s skill as a helmsman and all of her wily father’s experience as a commander to outwit the Legion and escape into deep space. But with only a small mass-drive to propel Valiant toward other star systems, and with only enough supplies aboard to last perhaps a year, it had become a long and lonely journey through a hostile cosmos.

  ‘They’re closing on us!’

  Erin’s panicked voice snapped Ishira out of her reverie and she scanned her instruments once more as she keyed the ship’s intercom system.

  ‘Transfer the power now!’ she called.

  A series of gauges on the cockpit panel before her shifted colour as her father drained power from the shields and other systems, then redirected the supply toward the engines. One thing that Valiant had as an advantage over the lumbering Veng’en cruiser was speed: designed to run the trade routes for maximum profit against minimum time, Valiant’s sub-luminal acceleration far outstripped that of the big cruisers.

  Her father’s voice replied over the intercom.

  ‘That’s it, you’ve got everything, now get us out of here!’

  Ishira saw the engine displays register an excess of power and she threw the sub-luminal throttles fully forward. Valiant surged as she accelerated and Ishira felt herself pushed back into her seat as the freighter soared away from the big cruiser.

  She scanned her instruments and constantly updated her position in her mind, a natural ability to calculate angles and velocities inherited it seemed from her brother, Carnoy, a recruit in the Colonial Fleet’s flight training program who was likely now dead along with several billion other human beings.

  ‘They’re falling back,’ Erin shouted with delight as she pointed at the rear-view display.

  Not for long, Ishira knew. Although slower to accelerate due to their massive size, once fully underway the cruiser would soon begin to overhaul Valiant. And that was exactly what Ishira was counting on as a new plan formed in her mind.

  Ishira keyed the intercom again, this time broadcasting to the entire ship.

  ‘All personnel, strap in immediately. Prepare for tactical manoeuvring.’

  Stefan reappeared in the cockpit doorway and stared at his daughter. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘How many planets does this system have, pa?’ she asked as she scrolled through the ship’s data logs.

  ‘Chiron? I don’t know, it’s unpopulated because of the dying star. Maybe three or four, several moons I think but it’s not a good idea to…’

  ‘Four,’ Ishira said as she found the correct entry, ‘two of them with breathable atmospheres. One is too close to the parent star, but the other…’

  Stefan moved to stand alongside her seat and he frowed heavily.

  ‘You don’t know what’s out there, Ishira,’ he said. ‘It won’t likely be any safer on one of those planets than it would be to turn back and welcome the Veng’en aboard.’

  ‘You got any better ideas?!’ Ishira s
hot back. ‘It’s either try to survive or fly this ship straight into the heart of that damned star and…’

  Ishira cut herself off as she saw Erin staring at her wide eyed.

  ‘Rock, hard place,’ Stefan said. ‘How are you going to lose the Veng’en cruiser?’

  ‘I’m not,’ Ishira replied. ‘I’m going to force them into an overshoot, and then duck back toward the nearest habitable moon and hunker down. The Veng’en cruiser’s mass is sufficient enough that it will take them too long to reverse their course and keep track of us.’

  Stefan bit his lip as he strapped himself into a seat. ‘They’ll flip her and fire their engines at maximum thrust to do that,’ he said. ‘It’s a military vessel. They’ll be back onto us too quickly.’

  ‘Not if we’re close enough to that star,’ Ishira said.

  Stefan and Erin fell silent.

  Ishira knew that the gravitational pull of the star, combined with the Veng’en cruiser’s mass, would produce enough force to prevent it from slowing easily, whereas Valiant’s nimble hull and powerful engines would quickly propel her on a new course and buy them the time they needed to hide.

  ‘Here we go,’ Ishira whispered as the first glowing tendrils and veils of ejected stellar material flashed past Valiant. ‘Brace for turbulen…’

  The first wave of stellar radiation and billowing solar wind pummelled into Valiant like the blow of a giant hammer and shuddered through her. Giant hull braces groaned and the keel strained as she was flexed by the violent forces acting upon her.

  ‘Point oh-two-four luminal velocity,’ Ishira said, trying to keep her voice calm and avoid upsetting Erin.

  ‘Too fast,’ Stefan said, ‘we won’t be able to pull out!’

  Ishira did not reply as she gripped the controls more tightly.

  Valiant shuddered again as she was pummelled by wave after wave of stellar gases, many of them heated to thousands of degrees as the star cast of its atmosphere in a vast nebula, the solar core growing before them. The star’s surface was a blinding mass of boiling solar storms, massive plumes of hydrogen gas soaring billions of cubits above the solar plane and spiralling out into deep space.