Alien Assault (Blue Star Marines Book 2) Read online

  Alien Assault

  Blue Star Marines, Book 2

  James David Victor

  Copyright © 2020 James David Victor

  All Rights Reserved

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

  This is a work of fiction. All people, places, names, and events are products of the author’s imagination and / or used fictitiously. Any similarities to actual people, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Cover Design by Laércio Messias

  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

  Thank You

  1

  The flight deck of the Faction raider, the Odium Fist, was dimly lit, with only a flickering holo-image lighting the faces of the bridge crew around the deck. Running at stealth approach, the ship and crew were silent, watching the target up ahead. Will Boyd sat in the pilot’s seat, focused entirely on his flight controls.

  The Union heavy freighter lay just on the edge of the Fist’s sensor range, which had been boosted by a small surveillance drone travelling ahead at a distance of three hundred thousand kilometers. Boyd held a steady speed, keeping the drone at the exact same distance without wavering by more than a meter.

  On a state-of-the-art Union cruiser or frigate, it would have been an impressive display of piloting skill. Here on the Fist, a battered old raider, it was nothing short of incredible, impossible for any pilot other than Boyd.

  Captain Poledri slipped down from his command chair, his feet touching the deck silently. He moved slowly across the flight deck—as if he thought he could give away the position of his ship with a loud or sudden movement—and came up behind Boyd

  Poledri placed a hand on the back of Boyd’s seat.

  “Great flying, Boyd,” Poledri said quietly.

  Boyd simply nodded. He focused entirely on the range to the drone.

  The holo-stage flickered again. Every time the holo-stage flickered, the image of the Union heavy lost a little more clarity, and now, flickering wildly, the image returned as an indistinct smear across the display. Boyd felt his heart jump. The drone was small and built for a hunt, but if the heavy was alert and actively searching for raiders then the small composite device would show up if it drifted too close to the target.

  Boyd was flying the Fist and the drone simultaneously, keeping both just within range of each other.

  “Steady, Boyd,” Poledri said, stepping around the pilot’s chair and walking over to the holo-stage. He stood with his hands behind his back, looking up at the image of the Union ship.

  The image flickered again, losing all color, before finally settling and resolving back into clarity.

  “Where’s Thresh?” Poledri said. “Can’t she fix this kravin’ holo-stage?”

  “She’s at the reactor shunt,” Noland said from his position at the surveillance and communication console to the port side of the flight deck.

  “I know where she is. It was a rhetorical question.” Poledri tapped the controls on the holo-stage and attempted to clear up the image on the aging unit.

  “You know what rhetorical means, don’t you?” Boyd said, looking over at Noland with a grin.

  Noland mouthed an obscenity at Boyd before speaking. “Do you want me to answer that?”

  Boyd turned back to his flight deck, and the pair laughed at their joke.

  “Quiet,” Poledri said, hissing in frustration.

  Boyd looked back to his controls. The drone was drifting, a localized gravity anomaly pulling it off course. Boyd corrected the Fist’s course and made a minute adjustment to speed with a brief blast from a starboard thruster.

  The flickering image of the distant freighter was surrounded with holo-text showing the Union ship’s speed and heading as well as its various physical dimensions. Boyd watched the numbers on speed and distance closely.

  Then they changed. The distance was reduced radically in an instant. Boyd hit the anchor field generator and stopped the Fist dead in its tracks. The hull stability field on the Fist was out of alignment by a fraction and the inertia regulator was out of calibration. Boyd felt the result as a sickness in his gut and a dizzy feeling in his sinuses.

  “The heavy is coming about,” Noland called from the surveillance console.

  “She’s running a crazy pivot,” Boyd said as he reversed the drive field and pushed the Fist back, maintaining the distance between the Fist and the Union ship. “Pull in the drone. If the freighter crew is as jumpy as they look, they will be scanning for a tail drone.”

  “No,” Poledri said. He turned his back to the holo-stage. “Full speed ahead, Mr. Boyd. We will attack.”

  “Yes, sir,” Boyd said and immediately pushed the Odium Fist up to speed. Boyd had been in Poledri’s crew long enough to know to respond quickly to the captain’s orders.

  The sudden acceleration was jarring as the minor fluctuations in the stability field again caused waves of sickness. Only Boyd was seemingly affected. He was still relatively new to the ship and was not used to its moods, but he could still fly it better than anyone else aboard.

  “She will detect us in a few seconds for sure, Captain,” Jemmy Noland said, looking at the captain.

  Poledri was bouncing across the flight deck to his command chair.

  “They will be so anxious about getting their crazy pivot maneuver correct, and fearful that they might find a pirate on their tail, they will hit full-blown panic stations when they do see us. We will have surprise on our side.” Poledri opened a ship-wide channel. “This is Poledri. Troopers, suit up and prepare for boarding.”

  Enke Thresh came on to the flight deck, her maintenance overalls covered in tiny, dark plasma burns. She smelled like an overpowered core conduit. For just a moment, Boyd was distracted by her entrance. She had a way of doing that.

  “What are you doing to my reactor?!” she shouted as she stepped up to the engineering console. “Throwing up the anchor field and then jumping to full drive. Is this your idea of good piloting, Boyd? Do you want to tear her apart?” Thresh looked down at Boyd.

  Boyd grinned and pointed over his shoulder at Poledri. “Just following orders.”

  “Get the weapons ready, Thresh,” Poledri said, his voice brimming with excitement. “We are going to take that ship.” He pointed at the flickering holo-stage.

  Thresh transferred to the weapons console next to her engineering station. Her hands moved across the panel in one smooth move.

  “Spitz guns to full power. Hail cannons standing by.”

  “She’s spotted us,” Boyd said as he noticed the Union heavy turn sharply to port, her drive field clearly at full power as the slightest hint of a drive flare came curving out of the assembly. Then the Union freighter was flung across space at maximum drive.

  “After her,” Poledri said. “Thresh, make sure the drive assembly has all the power it needs. I’m not letting this prize escape.”

  Boyd maintained his alertness, ready to match any evasion maneuver from the heavy, but the Union ship was not trying anything fancy. Her captain surely knew that only pure speed could save his ship from the Faction raider on his tail. Boyd knew it would only save them for a short time.

  The Odium Fist was old, but she w
as fast, and her drive systems were in excellent shape. The Union freighter was built for haulage and distance. Built to travel from one side of the Scorpio System to the other, fully laden with material, and then back again for another load. The crew could run a three-watch rotation for weeks if necessary, but the freighter could run for years on end if nothing interrupted its operation.

  Now the Odium Fist had interrupted, and she posed a deadly threat to the freighter.

  The Odium Fist was one of the first Faction ships designed for this kind of raiding operation. Rather than being a modified version of a Union ship, she was configured explicitly for this type of work—sneaking up on Union heavies or chasing them over distance, then making them a little bit lighter by taking their most valuable cargo.

  The Fist was lightly armored, its defensive capabilities based on a combination of hull stability fields, deflector shielding, and an aggressive fighting capability.

  Like all Faction raiders, it was heavily armed with flank hail cannons and a dozen spitz guns. The rapid-fire spitz guns were essentially an upscaled version of the Union Fleet Marine pulse rifle. They were overpowered and based on a stolen Union design. The hail cannon was outlawed tech, and possession meant death by hanging for any and all ship’s crew carrying them. But as the penalty for any Faction crew was death anyways, there was little to deter Faction ships from carrying the cannons. Old as they were, dating back to the fleet that first settled the system, the hail cannons were powerful and able to punch holes in a Union cruiser at close range.

  “We’ll be alongside her in a few minutes,” Boyd said. “But she’s a powerful ship. I don’t think the grapple field will hold her if she decides to suddenly dump a load of speed. We’ll go flying right by her if she decided to stop.”

  “You better hope the grapple field does hold, Boyd,” Poledri said. “You’ll be going over with the boarding party.”

  Boyd looked back at Poledri. “Yes, Captain. But who will fly the Fist?”

  “I know how to handle my ship,” Poledri said. “Just get us alongside her and deploy the grapple field. If she tries to get away, I’ll keep her from running too far. And I’ll remember to come back and pick you up if you get lost in space…maybe.”

  Noland laughed loudly. “Hope you don’t puke in your helmet, Boyd. I hear traversing through a grapple field can get a bit bumpy.”

  “I would have let you take my shuttle,” Poledri said as he tapped away at his armrest holo-display, “but you blew up my beautiful little bus, didn’t you.”

  Noland laughed again, shaking his head in amusement.

  “And you can stop laughing like a Union banker, Noland,” Poledri said. “You’ll be going along with him. Make sure the troopers don’t blow holes in all my plunder.”

  Then it was Boyd’s turn to laugh.

  “When did you last make a traverse?” Boyd moved the Fist alongside the Union ship. The holo-stage flickered, and the flight deck lights dimmed as Thresh threw power from the core into the grapple field.

  The freighter pushed its drive and then threw up an anchor field to stop itself dead. The power fluctuations across the Fist dimmed lights until almost pure dark, and a power conduit blew out in the recreation suite, but a Faction raider was built with grapple fields as a priority. What would be the point of catching up with a freighter if it couldn’t be held?

  Poledri stepped down from his command chair.

  “Move, Mr. Boyd. I’ve got her from here.” Poledri was moving to sit in the pilot’s seat, his hands on the flight console, before Boyd had cleared out. “And throw more power into the grapple, Thresh!”

  Thresh was darting from the weapons console to the engineering station, her hair falling loose from where it had been tied up and secured with a length of stiff conduit wire. She looked completely in control of everything except her hair.

  Boyd was pushed out of his seat by Poledri, breaking into a run and beating Noland off the deck.

  Boyd ran mostly because he wanted to be sure to give the impression he was at least half as excited about this act of space piracy as the captain was. It wouldn’t look good to appear at all reluctant, but Boyd was reluctant. This was a Union ship he was about to board, a ship crewed with a handful of hard-working Union civilians. Boyd knew they weren’t paid enough to deal with pirates.

  Since the Skarak had appeared in the Scorpio System and attacked shipping, the Union Fleet was too preoccupied with patrolling the outer system. Any transport running between the planet Extremis and the belt was too far from support. The fleet carrier, Titan, was stationed at the central Union world of Terra. The fleet’s other two carriers, Goliath and Able, were patrolling the far side of the sphere, outside the system, watching for any Skarak incursion.

  This Union freighter had entered the danger zone. If the Odium Fist hadn’t found her, another raider would have. These were happy hunting grounds for the Faction.

  “He’s only sending me to keep a watch on you, Boyd,” Noland said, panting as he ran.

  “Maybe he thinks you need the exercise.” Boyd turned into the kit locker. His personal locker held his suit, which he maintained himself. He didn’t trust a Faction maintenance drone, and he needed this suit to be in the best condition. His life depended on it, not only because it protected him against deadly environments, but because he was currently using his locker to hide the covert device he was using to maintain communications with Major Featherstone, his Union commanding officer.

  Boyd was no pirate. He was a sergeant in the Blue Star Marines. Acting like a pirate was just part of the undercover mission he had been assigned.

  “Hurry up, Boyd,” Poledri’s voice came over the helmet communicator as he pulled it on. “They shut down their drive after Thresh gave them a salvo of spitz rounds. Faction control reported a Union cruiser in this region of the belt only a few days ago. So let’s move quickly. And, Noland, keep an eye on Boyd.”

  Noland grinned through his scratched, murky faceplate. He nudged Boyd hard in the ribs.

  “See? Captain doesn’t trust you.”

  Boyd ignored Noland’s grinning and exited the kit locker. The main airlock already had four Faction troopers standing by, ready for some piracy, pulse pistols in hand.

  Noland stepped in behind Boyd and hit the inner door panel. It slid shut with the screech of a poorly-maintained mechanism. Boyd knew Thresh would have this ship back to factory specs in a few weeks of drydock time, but Poledri loved the free run of piracy now that the Union was preoccupied with alien invaders. He was hardly giving any of his crew a chance to breathe, let alone conduct some basic maintenance on non-vital systems. Boyd hadn’t even had a chance to contact his boss, Major Featherstone, in several days.

  Noland was just about to activate the airlock pump, to bring the airlock pressure down to vacuum, when Poledri’s voice crackled over the group channel.

  “Wait up. Wait for me. I’m coming.”

  The troopers exchanged looks. They looked at Boyd and Noland.

  Boyd looked at Noland and shrugged.

  “Guess the captain wants to get his pulse pistol out of its holster,” Noland said with a grin.

  “Guess so,” Boyd said.

  The inner door opened and Captain Poledri was standing there. His suit was a new Marine unit, traded with a fellow Faction captain only recently. The pulse pistols, however, were old. Boyd could see they were clean, well maintained, and with fresh power cells, but these pistols had the battered, well-worn look of the pirate’s favorite weapons.

  “Okay,” Poledri said, stepping into the airlock. “Open her up and let’s steal some Union kit.”

  The troopers saluted and greeted the captain. There was nothing a Faction trooper admired more than a captain who went into the fight personally.

  Boyd watched as the timer on the outer door began to count down. The pump screeched and whined until the air pressure fell to virtual zero and the airlock was at vacuum.

  Poledri looked at Boyd, an excited look on his worn
face.

  “Open her up, Mr. Boyd,” Poledri said.

  Boyd stepped up to the outer door panel and hit the flashing red button.

  The door slid open noiselessly to reveal a startling view.

  The side of the Union heavy freighter was just a few hundred meters off, but all around there was nothing but deep, dark space. Boyd stepped out of the airlock and into the void. Whichever way he looked, he had the feeling he was about to fall. But he hung in space, floating alongside the outer hull of the Odium Fist.

  Boyd hit his suit’s thrusters and began his traverse to the other ship. He picked a suitable landing spot on the silvered composite hull, just a few meters away from an airlock. He moved forward, upright, and after completing half the traverse, he turned so he was falling, slowly, feet first towards the hull now below him. Projecting a rear view on his faceplate, Boyd looked at the Fist behind him. The troopers were all streaming across space behind him, Noland amongst them, but standing out from them in his new environment suit was Captain Poledri.

  Boyd touched down on the hull of the Union ship and walked over to the airlock. He hacked the panel and popped the hatch. And then, without waiting for instructions, he dropped into the dark airlock.

  Boyd had boarded the Union ship.

  He was a pirate now.

  2

  The inner hatch opened, sliding back noiselessly on a well-maintained mechanism. The interior showed a clean and well-ordered industrial vessel.

  The crew was nowhere to be seen or heard.

  “Just look at the size of this thing.” Poledri stepped out into the corridor.

  A trooper, a small quick man, darted to cover Poledri from one side of the corridor. Noland took position on the other side. The pair of flank guards aimed their pulse pistols along the corridor, guarding their captain and watching for the Union crew who may at any moment attack.