Alpha strike, p.1
Alpha Strike, page 1
Copyrighted Material
Alpha Strike Copyright © 2022 by Variant Publications
Book design and layout copyright © 2022 by JN Chaney
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing.
1st Edition
CONTENTS
Don’t Miss Out
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
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
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1
Commodore Jack Romanoff had barely stepped out of the bridge of the battleship Delta Orionis with his executive officer, Captain India MacKinnon, when Ensign Amanda Harris, his most experienced tactical officer, trotted up behind them and cleared her throat.
“Excuse me, sir, but could we talk about the battle for a second? I noticed something strange about how the depot missiles behaved and wanted to run it by you.”
They’d just finished fighting a massive swarm of Locust motherships and drones at the quantum gate leading into the depot system, though they hadn’t managed to destroy them all. More than a hundred drones had broken away and charged the old Confederation Navy depot in the system.
Even if the battleship’s drives hadn’t been damaged, he wouldn’t have been able to catch up with the damned things. They were faster than him on his best day. Of course, considering that Hunter—the unofficial name for the battleship—was a hollowed-out nickel-iron asteroid more than a kilometer long and shaped like a potato, that only made sense.
The depot had managed to defend itself with missiles and lasers, though they’d sustained some damage in the process. The good news was that none of the motherships had escaped, so the Locusts wouldn’t know where the now destroyed gate in the New Copenhagen system had led.
“What have you got?” he asked, stopping outside the bridge hatch.
“It was their performance, sir. The missiles should have used nuclear warheads, but they didn’t. Those were kinetic kills. The explosions were the drone’s fusion plants failing.”
“Why would they do that?” India asked with a frown. “Shouldn’t there be nuclear warheads stored here with the missiles?”
“I can’t explain the reasoning or circumstances, ma’am. I just wanted you to be aware that something was off.”
“That’s good information, Amanda,” Jack said. “Keep going over the sensor data from the battle and the depot itself. I hope we don’t have to fight these people, but if we do, I want to have an idea of what their capabilities are.”
“Will do, sir.”
He let the young woman return to the bridge before starting down the corridor. A pair of Marines fell in behind them.
“Why do you think they did that?” India asked.
“They might not have had the skills to refurbish the nuclear weapons,” he guessed. “That’s an esoteric field, and everybody is leery about messing around with radioactive material. Connor has a thing about weapons, too, and by the time he was finished cleaning out the pirates, there might not have been anyone left with the skills to work on them. Hell, the pirates might not have had anyone capable of refurbishing nukes.”
Jack pulled his comm unit off his belt and called Christine Hooghuis. Officially, she was the videographer assigned to the ship by the Sons and the Daughters of the Locust War, and she’d be upset if they didn’t bring her along for this meeting.
Christine fancied herself a war reporter, and she had the spine for it. He wasn’t going to deny her the opportunity to be there. And, of course, he wasn’t going to give her an excuse to tear a strip off him if he left her behind.
“What’s going on, Jack?” she asked as soon as he’d identified himself. “Did we win?”
“This is one of those ‘yes, but’ situations. The drones and motherships are destroyed, so that’s a win. Unfortunately, I have to negotiate with the people squatting in the depot, and I know their leader.”
“That’s a good thing, right?”
“Not this time. He’s a smuggler named Mark Connor, and we have a history. The kind of history where people point guns at one another. I’m on my way to see about forging an alliance, and I figured you’d want to be there.”
“Hell yes, I want to be there! Where are you going? Small craft bay two? I’ll be there with my stuff in five minutes. Don’t you dare leave without me.”
She disconnected without waiting for him to respond, so it was a good thing he was headed for small craft bay two. He also called Sara Nastasi and Mac Turner to tell them his plans.
India shot him a smile. “She’s eager. Depending on what we find there, having her along might be a positive thing. Just judging by the way this Connor dresses, he craves attention. That might give you an edge in negotiating.”
Jack pursed his lips and considered that. “You might be right. Also, the fact that she’ll be recording everything will have an effect. He might give up more than he might otherwise be inclined to, knowing that everything we say will be out in public at some point. If, of course, we win the war.”
“How do you think he caught Tina Chen?” she asked as she dodged around two crewmen carrying a heavy-looking crate down the corridor toward engineering.
Jack shrugged. “They must’ve noticed something about the cutter that didn’t match what they expected to see. I may ask about it, but I’d be shocked if they tell us.”
“If you don’t, I will. I want to know what we screwed up so we don’t repeat it if we have to do this again.”
“Be my guest. In the end, it doesn’t matter. Things were bound to get complicated no matter how this played out. It’s up to us to pick up the pieces and see how we can work together with Connor and his people.”
India stepped into an open lift and pressed the button for the appropriate deck. “On the plus side, we’ll be able to let the civilians off here. It’ll be great not to have them underfoot when we fight.”
When they’d entered the Perseus cluster, he’d watched in horror as Vice Admiral Suzanne LaChasse sent the self-destruct signal that destroyed the gate leading out of the cluster, trapping hundreds of civilian ships still trying to flee the Locusts.
It also left a dozen Confederation Navy cruisers to be destroyed protecting the civilians. Their sacrifice holding the Locusts back had given Hunter time to shepherd the civilians to safety.
That hadn’t been without consequences, but they’d repaired most of the damage. Enough, at least, to get them here and to bring along a strange Locust wreck that the drones had savaged. It had been filled with pods carrying aliens in suspended animation, though most of them were dead. That was a secret he wasn’t going to share with the smuggler.
He’d taken the people from the civilian ships and selected cargoes that might be useful, but getting all those people out from underfoot would indeed be good. He wasn’t sure the civilians would thank him for putting them on a station under the control of a smuggler, but needs must when the devil drives.
They arrived at small craft bay two at about the same time Christine did. The young woman raced in out of breath, undoubtedly having run the entire way.
“We’re still waiting on Derek, so you didn’t have to rush,” Jack said with a smile. “He’s a million and a half kilometers away. There’s plenty of time.”
“I wish you’d have told me that before I ran all this way,” she said as she bent over and tried to catch her breath. “Still, a little exercise never hurt anybody.”
He just shook his head. She wasn’t out of shape in the least.
It took her a minute to catch her breath, but once she had, she stood up straight and reengaged him. “I haven’t had a chance to go over the video I recorded on the bridge, so tell me everything that happened.”
Jack looked around and spotted one of her drones hovering nearby. They were her stock-in-trade, and they were damned unobtrusive. He hadn’t seen one on the bridge, but that didn’t mean there hadn’t been one. Hell, she might have wired up a permanent video camera. He wouldn’t put anything past her when it came to getting the videos she wanted.
He’d given her carte blanche for recording anywhere except private quarters or other locations where the crew had an expectation of privacy. She was recording everything she could get her hands on with the expectation she’d be able to edit it into a blockbuster documentary about the invasion.
He’d never thought himself likely to end up as a subject of interest to trillions of people, but he couldn’t let himself focus on that. It was beyond his control, so he chose to ignore it. He had a war to win, which was more than enough to hold his full attention.
While he was thinking about that, Commodore Sara Nastasi walked in, limping. She was the senior officer of the Judge Advocate General’s office on Faust, but she’d been trapped aboard Hunter when they jumped into the cluster.
Her prisoner had gotten his hands on a gun and tried to assassinate her, shooting her in the leg. She survived. He didn’t.
“I hear we’re going on a trip,” she said. “I hope there won’t be much walking.”
“There might be,” he said, “but I’d wager we can get you a hand getting to where we need to go. I was just about to fill Christine in on what happened during the last battle.”
Jack ran through the events of the fight for them, and Christine asked some questions. That filled up some of the time as they waited for Derek to return from the depot. Jack was grateful for the distraction because he’d have been pacing and worrying otherwise.
When the large hatch at the end of the small craft bay slid open and a beat-up cutter floated in to set down on the deck nearby, Jack was ready to go. The cutter was as old as Hunter—over two centuries—and it showed in its faded paint and the dents and dings it had accumulated.
Once the craft had settled, he headed for it but spotted movement out of the corner of his eye. The recommissioned and promoted Lieutenant Colonel Mac Turner—a retired Marine Force Recon officer and now Marine commander aboard Hunter—stood there in combat armor, armed to the teeth.
Since he hadn’t seen Turner before the cutter had arrived, Jack assumed he’d been hovering just out of sight. Probably so Jack wouldn’t decline his offer of protection, though he didn’t need it. If Connor intended to betray them, he’d have the ability to do so.
“Where were you hiding?” Jack asked with a half-smile as Mac approached.
“Up in flight control,” Turner said, gesturing to the lit compartment with wide windows overlooking the small craft bay from just above the main interior hatch.
“You know coming along isn’t going to make any difference, right?”
Mac shrugged. “Difference or not, sometimes you have to project an image. You’re the commanding officer of the most powerful warship in the cluster, and you need to have someone intimidating backing you up just to make a point to this guy.”
There might be something to that, so Jack gave in. “Okay.”
Jack ordered his Marine guards to stay behind and boarded the cutter before making his way to the control area while the rest secured themselves in the passenger compartment. Seated in the pilot’s couch was Lieutenant Derek Calvo. The young man was still dressed in civilian clothes because of the covert mission they’d been on.
He was young for his rank—barely an adult—but he was gifted when it came to flying the battleship. They were lucky to have him and his reenactor friends. If they hadn’t, he and everyone else aboard would be dead.
Jack slid into the copilot’s seat, strapped in, and put a headset on. “Is everything okay over at the depot?”
“They caught us almost immediately,” Derek said with a sigh. “I suspect they were watching the system a lot closer than we’d expected. When I brought my active sensors online, I must’ve caught somebody’s attention, and they tagged us for monitoring. That Connor guy was right there when we landed.”
“It sounds like there was nothing you could have done to change things. Don’t stress about it. We’ll make this work.”
“You sure make some interesting friends, sir. Are we ever going to hear the story about how you and Connor fought off a bunch of pirates?”
“Maybe someday. What’s your opinion of him? It’s been fifteen years since I’ve seen him, and we didn’t have much of a chance to talk back then. You’d know him better than I do.”
Calvo lifted the cutter off the deck and pivoted to head toward the exit. They made their way through the large hatch and into a tunnel leading to the asteroid’s surface. An identical hatch there slid open and allowed them out into space while an energy screen kept the atmosphere inside.
Once they were clear of the ship, his young pilot altered their course, and they headed toward the depot. They were too far away to see it with the naked eye, but the active sensors allowed him to see it clearly.
“He’s a character, sir,” Derek said with a smile. “He acts larger-than-life and dresses the same. We didn’t talk about his past, but he goes out of his way to make himself seem personable.”
Connor had been dressed like a pre-spaceflight pirate when Jack spoke with him. If anything, his costume was even weirder than the old uniforms the naval personnel aboard Hunter wore.
Jack continued asking questions about the conversation Derek and Tina had had with Connor, getting as much information as possible so he could build a mental image of the smuggler that wasn’t shaded by the events fifteen years ago.
When they approached the depot, Jack focused his attention on it. The orbital structure was designed to hold full crews for twelve battleships, the support personnel to work with them—three hundred thousand people—as well as their munitions and spare parts, so it was enormous.
Jack doubted there was anything approaching that number of people aboard, but Connor had been here for years, so there was no telling.
The eleven other battleships in his division were also in orbit around the gas giant. Their condition was unknown, but Jack had seen traffic going between the depot and some of the battleships, so the locals were doing something there. According to Tina, they also had people doing mining and refining in the belt.
He kept looking until the cutter entered the depot, and he found himself in a small craft bay even more expansive than the ones aboard Hunter. It wasn’t packed with small craft, but it was far from empty.
Jack saw Tina and Connor standing beside a parking spot just ahead of them. Derek must’ve seen them as well because he guided the cutter to that location and set it down.
As the young man began shutting the cutter down, Jack made his way back into the passenger compartment. Turner was already opening the hatch and making his way out. It looked as if he wasn’t going to be hiding in the background for this.
Jack followed Mac down with Sara, India, and Christine behind him. Rather than putting things off, he walked up to the oddly dressed smuggler and extended his hand.
“It’s been a while, Connor. It looks like time has been good to you.”
The red-haired man grinned as he shook Jack’s hand. “I can’t complain. And look at you, Navy, commanding one of these battleships. I never thought I’d see the day. You’ve moved up in the world.”
Jack introduced his companions, and Connor played the gallant host. Jack didn’t think the women appreciated having him bow over their hands, but he might’ve been wrong. Connor shook Turner’s hand just as firmly as he’d shaken Jack’s.
