Predator (Old Ironsides Book 3) Read online

  ‘We should prepare as best we can,’ she said.

  ‘Prepare?’ an elderly senator echoed. ‘You mean for an invasion?’

  Arianna nodded. ‘Yes, an invasion. Whether it be by dissident Ayleeans or something else, we cannot stand by and wait. We must act now.’

  Governor Sergei Vitily of New Moscow stood up.

  ‘The people,’ he said. ‘The last time this happened we were able to disguise it as Ayleean aggression. That might no longer be an excuse they’ll easily accept, given how CSS has trumpeted about our new accord with the Ayleean Council.’

  Arianna didn’t miss the veiled jibe at her policies.

  ‘There will be panic,’ said another. ‘We can’t hide this from the population.’

  ‘Then we must be careful,’ Arianna insisted, her stern tones silencing the senators. ‘We can remain hopeful that this is a mistake, an error, a temporary failure of communication software, but it would be folly to do nothing. We must be strong and united for the people who rely upon us, and we must be prepared for whatever is waiting for us out there. Keep this news to yourselves, and especially avoid any unnecessary contact with the media.’

  Arianna turned and stepped down off the podium as the senators began to disperse, pursued by the uncomfortable feeling that there was something out there that had been heading their way for millennia and that she was powerless to do anything about it.

  ***

  VI

  San Diego

  California

  ‘Give it some, man!’

  The Vampire’s EM Drive howled as the induction system drew in vast volumes of air and blasted it from the exhaust, the craft surging forward as though fired from a cannon. Above the howling engine the three teenagers in Chance Macy’s ride screamed in delight as they rocketed across the open desert at two hundred twenty knots.

  Chance leaned back in his seat, cruising on autopilot above the narrow metallic twin strips of the I94 north west of the city. The sun was setting out across the nearby Pacific beyond the hills, the sky a spectacular panorama of high cirrus clouds glowing against the deep blue of the heavens. He could see cruisers lifting off from the space port in the city and rising up into the evening sky, ion engines flaring white, and high above them the brilliant star–like orb of New Los Angeles dominated the sky to the north. As he watched, he saw two shooting stars arc across the sky and vanish as they burned up in the atmosphere.

  ‘We can break three hundred!’ his passenger, Freck Seavers, yelled in delight.

  The Vampire was heavily modified, a gift from Chance’s father on his graduation from college. Not that Chance gave a hell or hoot for working, despite his degree. His father owned the Macy Shipping Company out of New York City and was worth more than some small cities. Chance knew that he was first in line of his three siblings to inherit the company, so until that day came his main plan in life was to get drunk, get high and get laid, although not necessarily in that order.

  The two girls in the back seats of the Vampire’s sleek fuselage, Candice and Evelyn, giggled and sipped alcohol from the bottle as Chance kicked the accelerator and the vehicle surged faster across the plain, turning to follow a right hand bend that would bring them down through the valleys to Lower Otay Lake on the city’s south side. He glanced at the airspeed indicator and saw two hundred seventy four knots.

  ‘Give it some more, man!’ Freck yelled as he swigged beer from a chilled flask in one hand.

  Chance eyed the bend and knew that he couldn’t take it at more than two fifty, which itself was a hundred over the limit. The I94’s boundary lines demarcated the “safe zone” where the Vampire could travel without moving out over the rocky, uneven terrain either side of the interstate. The black market location shield he’d fitted to the Vampire to prevent the authorities from tracking his speed was one law he could break, but Newton’s Laws of Motion were pretty much out of his hands. Chance eased back off the throttle and Freck sneered at him.

  ‘Man, you go not guts!’

  ‘I do have a brain though,’ Chance replied casually as the Vampire slowed through two hundred and some of the wind screaming past the open T Top faded away. ‘I’d like to keep it in my head and not splashed across the desert.’

  Freck shook his head as the Vampire plunged into shadowy valleys, his curly red hair and gaunt features twisted with disgust as he looked at the girls in the back seat.

  ‘Looks like Chance’s weener just shrunk a little!’

  The girls giggled, but Chance didn’t bite on Freck’s insult. The kid was ugly to say the least, even though his deceased folks had owned a property estate and could have afforded the cosmetic re–alignment that would have fixed his twisted smile, spotty complexion and heavy eyebrows. They hadn’t, something to do with “being comfortable with one’s self” or some such, and though they had died in an accident and Freck had inherited their fortune, his parents’ wills had created a major drag by insisting that Freck refrain from cosmetic enhancement on threat of forfeiting his inheritance.

  Chance himself had no need of any enhancements, his footballer’s physique and square jawed smile the very reason he didn’t bridle whenever Freck tried to provoke him. Freck would be getting out of the vehicle soon, and neither Candice or Evelyn would be wanting to go with him. As ever, Chance would choose which of the girls would go with him tonight.

  Or, maybe they both would.

  The thought caused a smile to cross Chance’s face and then he heard the screaming.

  ‘Look out!’

  Chance saw two pin prick lights appear as if from nowhere before them and he stamped down on the airbrakes as he hauled back on the throttle. The Vampire howled as it slowed, reverse thrusters slamming all of them against their restraints. The two lights vanished as quickly as they had appeared and the vehicle shuddered to a halt in the half darkness, its headlights glowing like beacons and the desert sky silent above them and filled with countless stars.

  ‘Jeez, what the hell was that?!’ Freck snapped.

  Chance sighed and shook his head, his heart still racing. The Vampire’s hard light shields would easily have deflected whatever animal had run out in front of the vehicle, but it was still a natural human instinct to slow dramatically when an obstacle appeared in front of such a fast moving craft. Chance recalled the last time he’d hit a wild horse while driving out here, the grim remains of the animal plastered across the shields as he’d driven his then girlfriend home, weeping all the way.

  ‘Must’ve been a deer or something,’ he said finally as he reached down to engage the EM Drive again, the Vampire moving off once more. ‘The eyes were pretty high up.’

  Freck looked about them and then glanced at the girls in the back seats

  ‘Hey, why don’t we get out here and have some fun?’

  Chance looked at Freck and then at the girls. There was a furtive expression on his friend’s features, and Freck’s eyes flicked to Candice’s long, tanned legs.

  ‘Y’know,’ Freck added as he looked Evelyn up and down, ‘fun?’

  Chance saw the girls’ smiles vanish and Candice recoiled in her seat.

  ‘Eww, no way!’

  Evelyn burst out laughing and shook her head, her long brown hair spilling like shimmering smoke around her bare shoulders. ‘Like, not in a million years, Freak!’

  Freck withered in his seat as his skin flushed hot, and then he scowled as outrage burned him inside.

  ‘Stop the car.’

  Chance blinked. ‘Do what now?’

  ‘Stop the damned car!’

  Chance slammed on the airbrakes once more and the Vampire slid to a halt amid the soaring desert valleys. Freck hit the door release and climbed out.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Chance asked, suddenly concerned.

  ‘Home,’ Freck snapped.

  Evelyn pouted. ‘Oh come on, I was only kidding.’

  ‘You can’t walk home,’ Chance pointed out. ‘It’s gotta be twenty miles from here to the city limit.�
��

  Freck shoved his hands in his pockets and stormed off. ‘Better to walk twenty miles alone than spend another second with those two.’

  Chance watched as Freck staggered off, the girls leaning on the back of his seat. Any concerns he might have had vanished as he felt Evelyn’s hand on his chest.

  ‘Isn’t it time we got going?’ she purred.

  Chance sighed. ‘We can’t leave him out here.’

  ‘It’s not our choice, it’s his,’ Evelyn whispered, ‘and my folks will be back by eleven so if we don’t head home soon…’

  Evelyn let the statement hang in the air for a moment. Chance took one last look at Freck, his shoulders set in defiance as he kept walking, his head down and his gaze resolutely averted.

  ‘Right,’ he said finally, ‘the hell with him.’

  Chance slammed the throttle down, the engine growling and Evelyn squealing with delight as the Vampire lurched forward and thundered past Freck. Chance saw his friend consumed by a cloud of desert dust and then his tiny figure shrank to a speck against the sunlit hills.

  *

  ‘Losers.’

  Freck spat the word along with a mouthful of dust as the Vampire accelerated away into the brilliant sunset pouring like molten metal across the horizon. Freck squinted into the blazing distance and knew that he would never be able to walk the full twenty miles. Not that he had intended to.

  Freck hated Chance, Evelyn and their oh so perfect little crowd of sycophants and fashion victims. They had more money than Freck, better looks, better homes, better educations, better everything. Hell, Freck didn’t even have any parents, his education and life funded by the insurance payouts after they had died when their shuttle flight from New Chicago crashed in the deserts of Utah after a freak collision with another shuttle whose pilot had died of a heart attack at the controls. If that hadn’t occurred, Freck would never have made it into the college, where money spoke louder than qualifications.

  Freck pulled out his black zone communicator, an illegal device that operated on frequencies outside those of lawful communicators. He accessed a single contact and then waited as the connection was made.

  ‘They’re on their way,’ he said without hesitation. ‘They’ll hit city limits off I Ninety Four in five minutes. Come get me when you’re done, and make sure you film it.’

  ‘Where you at?’

  ‘Twenty miles east on the ninety four, make it fast.’

  ‘We’ll be there.’

  Freck shut off the communicator, then tossed it onto the nearby desert dust and with a flourish of hate stamped one heel down upon it. The delicate, glowing screen shattered and the lights blinked out, much as he knew Chance and the girls’ soon would.

  Freck started walking again, feeling suddenly excited. He couldn’t wait to see those girls again. Evelyn would not disrespect him or reject him again, largely because she wouldn’t have a choice. Freck was done with this life; the rejections, the social awkwardness, the cold shoulder he received from most everybody around him. Freak, they called him. Who the hell in this day and age wouldn’t give their children the surgery to rectify a thin jaw, hooked nose and wiry, tight hair? Nobody wanted to look like he did. Freck didn’t want to look like he did.

  Beauty is skin deep, son, his mother had always said. It’s what you’re like on the inside that counts. Freck’s pleas to the effect that on the inside he looked bitter and sad at being denied a simple human right had fallen on deaf ears, but now his parents were gone and since becoming wealthy he had made some new friends who had promised they could get him the surgery he wanted “off the books”. The money he had inherited would fund his bio enhancements whether the lawyers liked it or not, and as it happened the same people who could organize the black market surgery also knew a nefarious community of blowhards who could arrange pretty much anything Freck’s deep pockets could afford.

  Somewhere out on the city limits, four bonehead thugs were waiting. Paid half their fee up front in cash, their instructions were simple: grab the girls, bring them to Freck. He would then have his way with them, before leaving what was left to the thugs. Chance…, Freck had decided to allow him to live and felt great pride in his magnanimous gesture. The girls on the other hand would have to die so that they could not identify him as the…

  Freck whirled and froze as he heard something in the shadows behind him. He listened to the silence of the desert, suddenly aware of how alone he was out here and how far away the comforts of civilization were. He cursed himself silently for not waiting until the Vampire had been a bit closer to home before getting out, as had been his plan all along. Evelyn would surely have insulted him again anyway. This was her fault, and now he was stuck out here alone.

  A lizard slithered down off a rock nearby and Freck sighed in relief. He refrained from walking across to it and stamping on its neck, rising above his anger as he turned and almost walked straight into a man.

  Freck jumped out of his skin as he stared at Chance standing right in front of him. He glanced past his friend into the distance where the Vampire had raced away toward San Diego.

  ‘Chance? How the hell did you…?’

  Chance lunged forward and Freck saw in his eyes a blackness, that of a man with no soul. Chance grasped Freck’s shoulders in his hands, his grip like an iron vice that crushed Freck’s muscles. Freck opened his mouth to scream for help and saw Chance’s face dissolve into a horrific maelstrom as something shot out from it toward him.

  Freck felt white pain sear his body as the horrific protrusion forced its way down his throat and tore through his body in a surge of white pain. His feet lifted up off the ground and then his neck snapped like a dry twig and the brilliant sunlight vanished into darkness.

  ***

  VII

  CSS Victory

  Polaris Station

  Sula stepped off the boarding ramp of a shuttle and onto the deck of the frigate Victory and tried to quell the nervousness tingling in the pit of her stomach. She surveyed the scene around her and realized that this was the world into which her father had walked many years before.

  The frigate was two hundred fifty thousand tons of metal, armor, plasma cannons and flight deck that dwarfed any of the ships that she had seen visit New Washington during her years growing up near North Four. As she stood with the half dozen or so other honorary Ensigns who had been flown out here to experience life aboard a serving frigate, she could see a row of Phantom fighters parked nearby, their canopies open and technicians working on and around them. Her choice of service here was no coincidence, for her father had flown Phantoms with “Fighting Eighty Fourth” to the day that he died.

  ‘This way, please.’

  A duty sergeant who looked like he’d spent centuries aboard the ship gestured for them to follow him and they walked in a narrow rank two wide, staying outside the yellow warning barriers that demarked the active engine run up areas where intakes or exhausts could cause fatal injuries. Although no fighters were flying that day, Victory was still on active duty and could theoretically be called into action at any moment.

  ‘The ship’s due to launch within the hour,’ the duty sergeant explained as he led them off the flight deck. ‘We’ll be underway to Sol System border patrol and two visits to the Rim Colonies under CSS protection. It’s a milk run so there’s little danger of any live engagements, but you never know…’

  The twinkle in the eye of the duty sergeant provoked a ripple of laughter among the Ensigns around Sula as they walked, but she could sense the unease it veiled. Victory had been involved in some of the heaviest fighting of the Ayleean War and still carried some of the scars to this day, her upper hull pockmarked with ageing plasma scoring and dents that had not yet been repaired. Her commander, Captain O’Donnell, reputedly liked them to remain to remind everybody who served aboard Victory what it was they were getting into.

  ‘You’ve each been assigned a serving officer based on your preferences and availability,’ the duty sergeant w
ent on. ‘Your active duty begins now, and your job is to assist your officer while learning the routine of life aboard an active fleet warship. What you learn here will assist you should you decide to commit to a career within the fleet, so pay attention and use the time as best you can. You all did well to beat the competition to be here, so make the most of it.’

  Sula sensed the pride in those around her, but she didn’t buy it. Her father had often spoken of how undermanned the fleet had been during the war, of how few people wanted to fight the Ayleeans after hearing so many horrific stories about them. The feeling back home in New Washington was that they should be left alone, Sol’s borders the only thing that needed protection. Interventionist wars to “prevent” an invasion force that might never come had been unpopular as far back as she could remember, and recruitment into CSS fleet ranks barely sufficient to sustain a war footing. Sula reckoned the fleet was glad to have anybody sign up, and had sensed no great competition for places when she’d applied just two months before for the scholarship.

  ‘Sula?

  She saw the group stop and the duty sergeant pointed at a doorway, above which was emblazoned the logo of the Fighting Eighty Fourth.

  ‘You’re up,’ the sergeant said. ‘You’re assigned to Lieutenant Tyrone Hackett. Report for duty inside, and good luck – they’re a tough bunch to get along with.’

  ‘How so?’ Sula asked.

  ‘They’re pilots,’ he replied with a thin smile, as though it were obvious.

  Before she could reply the sergeant led the little group away to other areas of the ship. Sula sighed, turned to the door and wondered how often her father had walked through the same doorway. There were no hard light doors aboard a frigate, the ship using the old fashioned solid doors both to save on power and to help protect against the spread of fire aboard ship during battle.