Zenith (ESS Space Marines Book 1) Read online

  Zenith

  ESS Space Marines, Book 1

  James David Victor

  Fairfield Publishing

  Contents

  Copyright

  Message to Readers

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Epilogue

  Thank You

  Free Story

  Preview: Discovery

  Copyright © 2017 Fairfield Publishing

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Except for review quotes, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the written consent of the author.

  This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Thank you so much for buying my book. I am excited to share my stories with you and hope that you are just as thrilled to read them.

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  Chapter 1

  Red alert lights flashed, filling the shuttle bay with a harsh, almost violent glow. Was it a sign of things to come?

  She hoped not.

  Sergeant Andrea “Andy” Dolan didn’t know what was ahead of them, but she knew her team could face it. They always had, no matter the challenge.

  Hanging on at the rear of the shuttle craft, half in and half out, she waited for the final clearance from the bridge. Her four marines sat inside, strapped in and ready to go, while the pilot prepped for take-off. One word and the shuttle would head out.

  Andy rolled her shoulders impatiently. The Star Chaser was slowly approaching Starbase Zenith, running every scan their ESS starship was capable of to try and figure out what they were heading into. The distress call they received was automated; there was no way to know when it had been activated.

  Who knew what they would find when they boarded?

  If they ever boarded, that was. Five shuttles were sitting in the bay just waiting on word from up top, each bearing a squad of the 33rd ESS Marine Detachment stationed on the Star Chaser. She was sure that every marine and every squad leader was just as impatient as she. They were geared up and revved up, ready to tackle whatever was there, but right now, they were just waiting.

  Hurry up and wait. That was the life of a space marine.

  “Sergeant, are they just going to keep us on this baby boat forever?” A voice called from the front of the shuttle. “I mean, I know they don’t trust us to keep the rec room intact half the time, but I think this is extreme even for them.”

  Lance Corporal Dan Thomas was a stereotypical ESS Marine. Large, heavily muscled, and seemingly always ready for battle. He had less patience than Andy.

  “You think we’re being made to wait too long if you have time to breathe without things happening,” Andy replied easily.

  “What?” he returned without missing a beat, or waiting for a breath. “I just like to keep busy. You know what they say about idle hands...”

  Andy looked back into the shuttle, raising an eyebrow. “I don’t need to know what you do with your idle hands.”

  Everyone laughed, just as she had intended.

  Andy just shook her head and looked back through the rear hatch. Not that there was much to look at in the shuttle bay, unless she wanted to glance at the shuttle opposite hers and nod at the leader of beta squad, who was doing the same thing. It kept her squad from seeing that she was just as impatient as them.

  The shuttle’s comm system chirped twice, then the voice of the captain filled the small space. “Captain Wallace to all Marine squads,” he said. “We have confirmed that the station’s life support and artificial gravity systems are functioning. You are safe to board the station without the suits.”

  Well, that was a good thing. Andy listened to alpha and beta squads confirm before she added her voice to the sequence.

  She stepped back from the hatch and the door hissed as it closed. It latched with a click as she moved to the front and took her seat next to the pilot, fastening her restraints.

  “Well, we’re on the move now, Thomas. You happy?” Andy called behind her, exchanging a smirk with her pilot. Dan’s chatter usually kept the group both grounded and amused, so she encouraged him. Despite her teasing, he knew when to lock it down.

  She looked through the view screen at the other side of the bay.

  The shuttle bay doors opened and revealed space beyond. Two shuttles lifted up and hovered above the ground for a moment before flying forward, out of the ship. Her shuttle followed moments later. Andy took a deep breath and felt her adrenaline surge as she shifted her thoughts from the waiting and onto the mission ahead.

  As they exited the back of the ship, they couldn’t see the station yet. She wondered what kind of state it was going to be in. What were they going to find there? The Star Chaser had done its best, but the results that weren’t ambiguous were instead disheartening. Was everyone dead? And if so, for how long? What could kill a fully staffed station without anyone else knowing about it until now?

  The shuttles spun around the Star Chaser and the station came into view. There was no obvious sign of damage from the outside, but it was also...dark. That was the first word that came to Andy’s mind as she examined every part that she could see. There were no blinking lights on the exterior; no lights showing through the viewports from inside.

  “What the hell happened?” she asked quietly, mostly to herself.

  “I haven’t the foggiest idea,” the pilot replied anyway. “Get ready to find out, though, because we’re about to dock.”

  There was a sinking feeling in Andy’s stomach at the idea of connecting their ship to the eerily dark space station and going on board, but she knew it was their job. They were here to find out what happened and see if there was anyone who needed their help. Something told her that there wasn’t, but they had to go on board to find out for sure.

  “Alright, folks, get ready for the freak show,” she called back, not letting any of her doubts enter her voice as she became the sergeant her team needed.

  Every shuttle spaced out, spinning slowly and backing up to an individual port. Zenith was something of a hub, so there were plenty of places for ship-to-station shuttles to park and let people disembark. Each pilot knew what they were doing and the process went smoothly.

  “The ship’s automated systems aren’t engaging, so we’re going to have to complete the lock cycle ourselves,” the pilot said. Andy balked at the extra time it would take. She knew the craft would remain stationary while they were docking, though, so she unfastened her safety restraints.

  As soon as they heard the click of hers releasing, the others unfastened themselves and got to their feet. She squeezed past her squad to get to the rear hatch and ordered an equipment check. Everything checked out once and then it checked out again as they waited tensely for the pilot to give them the green light.

  Eventually, he called out to them. “Cycle is complete. Lock initiated. Another moment more and you’ll all get just what you’ve been wishing for.”

  Andy wasn’t so sure about that, but she nodded, not looking away from the shuttle hatch.

  She rolled her shoulder once and then turned on the light on the top of her pulse rifle. Four other lights popped on just before the hatch system hissed and the door opened. Beyond the dark metal frame was...more darkness. A
ndy led the way off the shuttle, keeping her rifle up.

  She advanced slowly, swinging her light from side to side to check for danger. There was nothing. Inside the darkness, there was only silence. They moved further down the docking ramp until they neared the end when Andy’s light lifted and hit the wall of the station corridor just in front of them.

  All five paused.

  “Well, that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence,” Dan quipped in a low, uneasy voice.

  Illuminated in the giant circle of Andy’s rifle light was a dark, bloody handprint.

  Chapter 2

  No one moved for several heartbeats. Andy took a deep breath and shoved down her apprehension. There was no time for that now. She moved forward and led her team into the corridor, lights swinging one way and then the other.

  “I’m not feeling anything,” Roxanna reported, her voice low.

  “Well, you’re just not trying hard enough, clearly,” Dan retorted, although his voice didn’t quite have its usual sarcastic edge.

  Corporal Roxanna made an annoyed sound low in her throat. It wasn’t the Selerid’s real name, but her real name wasn’t pronounceable by the human tongue. Roxanna was close, though, so she adopted the name. Her empathic abilities were useful when exploring… until they found nothing. That just made the situation creepier.

  “Let us know the moment that changes, Roxanna,” Andy said, ignoring Dan.

  “Yes, Sergeant,” Roxanna replied immediately. Andy thought she could hear a tremor in the woman’s voice.

  There was no indication that one direction would be better than another, so Andy chose at random and led them to the right. They entered a long hallway with no doors. Viewports looked out into the emptiness of space. Andy wondered how the life support and gravity were working but the lights weren’t, but that was someone else’s problem.

  They continued in silence until they reached another intersection. All Andy could hear was the low, steady breathing of her squad. She looked both directions. Everything was still dark…and silent.

  Andy jerked her head to the left, indicating that they would continue in that direction. It would lead them deeper into the station, which was more likely to lead them to some sort of clue; some sort of anything.

  This corridor, unlike the last, had doors.

  Andy paused at the first door they came to. The others covered her while she tried opening the door using the panel. As expected, the door didn’t open. She stepped back and nodded Dan forward. He slung his rifle over his shoulder and pulled a micro press out of his vest pocket and pressed it to the seam of the door.

  He moved back and took up his rifle, returning to his place with the rest of the group as the micro press slowly pushed the door open then dropped to the floor with a thud that echoed down the empty corridor.

  The squad cautiously stepped into what appeared to be a large storage room. Shelves lined the walls on either side. The wall opposite the door was now empty, the shelving unit that used to be there had been ripped from the wall. The items that had been stored there were all over the floor, some in neat piles and others scattered haphazardly.

  Andy noted a big dent in the shelf. Given the material, it would have taken a a lot of force to do that. She didn’t know what would have caused it but was sure she didn’t want to come across whatever it was unaware.

  Lance Corporal Anallin, the other non-human member of her squad, a Hanaran and thus by-species without gender, was standing on the other side of the shelf. Its pale blue, iris-less eyes were making that clicking sound they made when focusing intensely or disconcerted. “There are scorch marks on the floor. I think a laser pistol or pulse rifle was fired. I would need to scan to be sure.” Click. Click. Click. Definitely agitated. “And there are scratch marks on the lower portion of the wall. They are short. Deep there and lighter there, like something was dragged from this room.”

  Click. Click.

  “I guess they...” Dan began, then hesitated. There was a long moment before he forced a breathless laugh. “Well. I guess they didn’t find the storage room accommodations to be to their liking, eh? Spacious and all, but not very good ambience.” The sound of his swallowing was almost audible in the silence. “Or, well, maybe they just didn’t pay the bill.”

  “We’ll go with that,” Andy said without much humor, despite the attempt, as she glanced back at him before moving to the still-upright shelves. She reviewed the materials on them, but nothing seemed out of place there. “I don’t see anything that tells me what happened here. Let’s scan it.”

  Anallin slung down its rifle and pulled a scanner from its thigh holster. A quiet whirring noise filled the silence as the squad continued to search. Even when they had looked at everything that could be looked at with the naked eye, they kept looking because to stop would be to allow too much time for thought.

  “The scorch marks are from a laser pistol,” Anallin finally declared. “I doubt whoever was in here was a soldier. Perhaps personnel from one of the other station departments or a civilian.”

  “Can you run a deep scan on those scratches and see if there is any biological matter left behind? It could help identify who it was,” Andy said.

  “I will see,” Anallin replied, kneeling down to run the scanner over the marks in slow sweeps.

  “This is just weird, Sergeant,” Dan said a few moments later, uncharacteristically sedate.

  “It is, but we didn’t sign up for the ESS Marines to look at normal things now did we?” Andy replied. He didn’t reply right away. “Did we, Thomas?” she repeated, her voice rising slightly although not too much. They couldn’t be sure who or what was nearby and she wasn’t going to draw any more attention to them than they already had.

  “No, Sergeant,” he finally replied, although he didn’t meet her gaze.

  She let it go at that because she knew this was a situation unlike other ones they had been in, particularly as a team. She couldn’t remember anything quite like this before, but space was a big place and who knew what you could find?

  Before she had a chance to consider saying anything else, Anallin chimed in again. “There is a trace of bio-matter. My scanner isn’t equipped to analyze it, but I can collect a sample for the science department to review.”

  “Good,” Andy said with a nod. “Go ahead and do that. We’ll take samples of anything else we find along the way, and then let the science geeks sort it out.”

  A few moments later, Anallin gave a nod to Andy that it was finished. She returned the gesture and moved back to the door into the corridor. “Let’s keep moving.”

  She had no idea what they’d find there, but frankly, she wasn’t going to place any bets that it would be a happy thing.

  Chapter 3

  The sinking feeling that had opened in Andy’s gut was turning into a gaping maw of ‘what in the stars is going on here?’ Their lights swung from one wall to the other, moving in sequence to light up most of the corridor ahead as they left the storage room and moved further down the hall.

  It was another long stretch without any door on either side, but now they were also without any viewports. Even though the vastness of space and spattering of stars didn’t do much to provide light, there was some comfort in being able to see them. A space station could be particularly claustrophobic in the inner sanctum, both without sight of the stars and the lack of movement beneath the deck plates.

  Andy wasn’t going to let it get to her. She was there because they had a job to do, and she was going to make sure they did it.

  They came to another junction and she brought them to a halt. She looked both directions, seeing as far as her light let her. She saw more doors to the left so she ordered them to continue that way.

  At the next door, Andy nodded at Dan to open this door like he had the last.

  While waiting for that, Andy looked at the fifth member of her five-man squad: Private, First Class Jade Martin, the third human on the team. It was a quick look, at first, but then she noticed ho
w Jade kept snapping her head from side to side, and it didn’t look like she was just keeping an eye on their surroundings. Her eyes never focused on either side of the hallway; they looked like they were looking at things that...weren’t there?

  “Martin,” Andy called in a low voice just as the micro jack completed its job and dropped the floor with a thud. Jade’s head snapped in her direction, and Andy could see that her eyes were dilated and she was breathing harder than any exertion on their part could explain. She frowned slightly. “What is it?”

  “Nothing, Sergeant,” Jade said with a short shake of her head.

  Andy wasn’t convinced, but the door was open to another room that needed to be searched. She decided not to push the issue...for the moment.

  The squad turned into the room and searched it the same way they had the last one. The flashlight beams were swinging from side to side when there was a slight hum and the lights blinked twice before finally coming on. The three humans and Roxanna blinked against the sudden light, while Anallin’s eyes just clicked.

  “It looks like alpha squad found engineering,” Andy commented. “Leave your lights on, though, just in case it doesn’t last.” She didn’t trust anything about the station right then and didn’t want to get caught in the dark, even for a minute.

  She expected some sort of comment from Dan about alpha squad, jesting about their ability to find things, but it didn’t come. It was a wide open door and she knew it was the type of thing he’d roll right into, but he didn’t say anything. She glanced at him, better able to see him now in the full lights of the room. He wasn’t looking in her direction, though, and it was pretty obvious that he wasn’t about to say anything. The station was really getting under everyone’s skin in a way Andy hadn’t seen before.