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  STAR BREAKER

  STAR BREAKER, BOOK 7

  JAMES DAVID VICTOR

  Copyright © 2022 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 Christian Bentulan

  CONTENTS

  Internal Event Log 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Internal Event Log 2

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Internal Event Log 3

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Internal Event Log 4

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Internal Event Log 5

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Thank You

  INTERNAL EVENT LOG 1

  Encrypted Protocol: Unique. Alpha-Black

  ASSESSMENT:

  Failure. The Thaal Empire did not succeed in taking Camp Vigilant and consequentially, Mars.

  Earth Alliance Marine Corps still remains compromised with 70% of Gold-level senior commanders dead from the Camp Vigilant assault.

  DIAGNOSIS:

  A number of high-variable actors have entered the equation, namely, CAPTAIN HOLLY CROPPER (Forward Recon, EA Marines) SERGEANT BASTION LI (Forward Recon, EA Marines), SERGEANT MARSHAL SMITH (Forward Recon, EA Marines), DR. RACHEL CROW (Advisor, Acting Silver-level Intel clearance, EA Marines).

  PROGNOSIS:

  Despite high-variable actors managing to skew predictions by between 5-35%, the calculation remains the same.

  The Thaal Empire will take over the Sol system in 1-6 Earth-regular months.

  ACTION:

  1. Initiate Plan B.

  2. Neutralize high-variable actors.

  1

  Olympus Mons, Eastern Face, Mars

  The dawn brought with it a fire of ruddy oranges and pinks bursting over the eastern horizon with all the terrible glory of heaven or a bomb blast.

  Damn. The woman with the short bob of dyed red hair, sharp features reflected back at her in her visor helmet, looked up at the natural display. Like the hard russet-and-brown rocks at her feet, her outer form was tough too: a heavy tactical encounter suit made of smooth steels and matte alloys. Sculpted plates contained her, protected her against the alien environment. Hidden servo mechanisms and pistons assisted her every movement. She was rock. She was iron.

  She was Captain Holly Cropper of the Forward Reconnaissance Squad of the Earth Alliance Marines.

  “I guess there are times when this dirtball can be kinda beautiful,” Holly murmured to herself. Of course, the vision would be a whole lot more beautiful if it wasn’t for the charred, broken, and still-smoking ruins of Camp Vigilant that lay to the young officer’s side—and the scatter of blackened and slagged craters that extended around it for almost a mile on all sides.

  The battle for the camp had been fierce and hopeless. The eight-foot-tall, purple-skinned Thaal warriors had taken the Martian military headquarters in less time than it took to order a self-service coffee, or so it had seemed. They had held the home of Marine Command for just short of a day and a half. Despite everything that the humans had thrown against it, the Thaal had remained impregnable with their advanced beam weapons.

  That had been almost a week ago. Today, they were still dragging bodies out of the rubble.

  “Hmph.” There was a grunt from behind her as a shadow loomed large across the Martian slope. Holly turned to see a man in the same type of tactical encounter suit as herself—but much larger because of the man’s prodigious size.

  Bastion Li, she mentally greeted him. Sergeant. Ally. The toughest Earth Alliance Marine she had ever met. Friend.

  “Acting Command is saying they’ll have the dome repressurized by the time we get down.” She saw Bastion’s suit flicker to one side as he turned to nod towards where the large, interlocking geodesic domes were covered by a mixture of hardened plate-plastic polymers and the taut stretch of some opaque synthetic material. Emergency Pressure Fabric. Holly even knew the name of that gray-white stuff, as she’d seen it used more than a hundred times back home, out there beyond the Martian skies and even beyond distant Jupiter—on the Inner Asteroid Belt.

  “It’ll hold for a week at most,” she made a grumbled bet, before groaning as she eased herself to her feet. Despite the laser treatment and the regrowth stimulant that had been applied, her body still felt like it had fallen under a cargo ship after the events down there.

  Down there, Holly thought, her eyes seeming to stare through the shattered geodesic dome and the stretches of pressurized canvas already half-inflating.

  And down again, through the streets of Vigilant, Holly’s eyes remembered the service tunnels where the Thaal had made their entry point—through the Hyperspace Gate constructed by persons unknown and right under Marine HQ’s noses.

  Holly remembered the haze of strange purple-and-crimson light that she had stepped through.

  She remembered feeling the oddness of the alien habitat on the other side. A strangeness that, even through her suit, her body had known. A metal plain—was it a Thaal homeworld? A base? A city?—she didn’t know, but it was a silver plain that stretched to what looked like cliffs. Only the cliffs had been a city with strangely arched towers and walls topped with tines. From it had been marching thousands, tens of thousands of Thaal warriors under a sky that wasn’t lit by stars but by two golden orbs too large and too metallic to be suns.

  Nope. Holly shook herself. She didn’t want to think about her brief trip to Thaal-land, wherever in the universe that could be. The idea that it was still out there, that it was still waiting for them somewhere just beyond the thin structure of the Hyperspace Gate was like being in the same room as a bomb whose fuse had already been lit.

  Holly and Bastion had deactivated the Gate. In fact, they had let off a tactical nuke on the Thaal side of it. But was it enough?

  When are the Thaal going to find a way to reopen the Gate from their side? When are more Thaal going to arrive? More than we can deal with?

  No, the captain told herself a little more firmly, dragging her thoughts from what she had seen and what was possible and instead jamming them into the clusterdump that was the here and now.

  “Who’s in charge again now?” she sighed, rolling her shoulders and sliding the sensing unit back into the utility hoop on her pouch. Ever since the Gate went dark—since Holly and Bastion turned it off, more accurately—those who weren’t directly involved in the search and rescue effort were sent out here. They were looking for any piece of Thaal tech that might have escaped or been scattered in the chaos. There wasn’t much.

  “What?” Bastion grunted, already starting to take the large, ponderous and lunging steps that Mars’ lighter gravity demanded towards the Vigilant dome. Beyond him, Holly could see the synth material slowly filling up as it pressurized.

  “Acting Command? Who is it today?” She groaned and wished that she didn’t have to ask the question—but she did. With the attack on Camp Vigilant, the Thaal had successfully taken out seven of the nine top generals and admirals that the marines had. Two left. One General Addison, a blonde-haired woman usually stationed on Earth with the reputation of a rabid pit bull who hated the Outer Group of worlds (Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus, and of course the Breakers of the Asteroid Belt), and a General Hoshi, a military commander who had served back in the early Smuggler Wars but hadn’t seen active combat since two decades ago.

  On top of that, there were still a handful of commanders left: their own Commander Silas from the Outer Group and Commander Badiou from Inner. But Captain Holly hadn’t heard anything from either of them in the chaos of the last week.

  Wonderful, Holly thought. Who was left to take up Sol system defense? Who could? Did Sol even HAVE a reasonable military defense anymore?

  “Addison, I think,” Bastion said over his shoulder, his voice clear over their shortwave suit-to-suit telemetry. “She came up on last night’s transport.”

  Hmm. Holly internally shrugged, trying not to pass judgment on the woman she hadn’t met yet, despite what she’d heard about her. Maybe she would be better than the last lot of generals . . . But then again, both Addison and Hoshi were Earth-based.

  The entire Marine Corps, and even the entirety of Sol politics, was basically divided into two camps: the far richer and more powerful Inner Group of worlds (Mercury, Venus, Mars, and of course, Earth) with their megacorp connections and Earth Senate, and then the Outer Group—everyone from Jupiter outwards, including the splinter Breaker Group who lived on the deep space mining stations. It was only in recent history that the ancient rift between Inner and Outer was finally being healed.

  And I’m living proof of that, Holly thought. Or I was, anyway, she groaned. She was the first of the Breaker Group—the asteroid miners—to make it into the Marine Academy and to pass, even succeeding to eventually become captain of her very
own (very small) squad.

  Most of the Outer Worlds barely trusted the Earth Alliance Marines at the best of times. They said they were just Earth’s police, doing the corporations’ bidding so that the Outer Worlds couldn’t reap the benefits of their rich minerals and ores.

  And there’s some truth to that, Holly admitted with a jag of shame.

  “Addison was on the broadcast this morning, saying something about every tragedy as an opportunity and all that,” Bastion grunted. His tone made it obvious what he, a generation caravan kid born to the outer depths of the Solar System, thought about that.

  “Dear stars,” Holly groaned. Earthers. Where did they come up with this motivational crap?

  Alert!

  There was a small blip on Holly’s digital heads-up display inside her helmet visor. A tiny, fast-moving vector arching out over the gullies and foothills of the Olympus Mons mountain that Camp Vigilant saddled.

  “What’s that?” Holly murmured as the vector moved faster and with unerring accuracy towards their search site.

  Alert! Unidentified Object Incoming . . .

  Too small to be personal transport. A messenger drone?

  Alert! Impact T-minus 5 seconds . . .

  “Impact?!” Holly managed to cough, just in time to see it arching towards them out of the Martian sky. Whatever it was, it was moving too fast. Too fast to slow down.

  “Down!” she yelled, jumping forwards to slap Bastion’s back with her metal arm, shoving him—

  As the small device hit the Martian hillside behind them and exploded.

  2

  “Fracking Hell!” Holly hissed. She was thrown forward by the percussive blast from behind her, Bastion tumbling too. Everything around them burst with white and red and then the brown of Martian rocks.

  “Ach!” she grunted as her suit slammed into the stone. Holly heard a loud crack as one of her outer tactical plates crumpled. She was thrown forward again in the weak Martian gravity, spinning out of control, and barely remembering to tuck her head and arms in the second before she hit the slope again.

  “Urk!” She heard Bastion’s breathy groan of pain over their suit-to-suit comms as he, too, was flung down the slope of the Martian mountain, crashing and bouncing. Both marines finally skidded to a halt in a spray of gravel, sand, and rock. Bastion thudded against an outcrop of black and pitted volcanic rock, while Holly traveled a good sixty-five feet more in a spray of red dirt.

  “Guard up!” Holly managed to snarl as her cyborg arm pushed into the dirt, flipping her over to her side as she coughed and spluttered from the fall.

  Rifle. Get my rifle. Find cover. Isolate the attackers . . . Her thoughts were tight and hurried, clicking into combat mode as she tried to assess what had just happened.

  They had been attacked.

  Someone had fired a rocket at them.

  “Sergeant!” she called, scrabbling to a crouch with her rifle smoothly transitioning into her hands, sighting around them.

  No cover. Take them out before they . . .

  “Good. We’re clear. No attackers, Captain!” Bastion’s words were a grunt of anger and efficiency. She saw that he, too, was crouched beside his outcrop, sighting along the ridge behind them, the slope underneath them.

  But the heads-up displays of their suits were silent. No enemy detected. No targeting systems hot on their position. Nothing but the normal readings of their own elevated heart rates, oxygen intake, and the smaller sounds of the usual host of general system messages. And the orange section illuminating Holly’s shoulder pad where it had been crumpled, but that wasn’t anything to worry about, she knew. These heavy tactical suits could take a whole lot more battering than that.

  But there was no sign of any enemy. None at all. Just the usual signatures of other marines, service personnel, and EA civilians moving about like ants down there around the outskirts of Camp Vigilant.

  Incoming Message!

  “Search Deploy 04—what happened up there? What’s your situation! We got a reading of a blast . . .”

  It was their command station down there in Camp Vigilant with a worried sounding lieutenant or staffer on the other end. The same one that Holly recognized had given them this useless mission of finding Thaal tech.

  “Someone threw a rocket or missile at us, that’s what!” Holly said. She didn’t have to say sir, she was mildly pleased to realize. The guy was a lieutenant. She was a captain.

  “I want a transport up here right away. Get a radar sweep of the area.” She barked an order before checking with Bastion.

  “Still nothing, Captain.” The big man had stood up clear of the rock and turned a quick 360.

  Absolutely nothing, Holly confirmed on her own scanners. The Thaal registered on their scanners now as “enemy combatants” or “alien targets.” So unless they had found a new way to fool their suit scans, which was highly possible, in Holly’s opinion, then there was no explanation.

  “Captain Cropper, please repeat: are you requesting a Code Red?”

  The lieutenant on the other end—probably another Earther who had been sent up here along with the hundreds of others as reinforcements.

  “What do you think? Me and my man got fired at!” Holly snapped. Of that, her instincts were certain. A small projectile about the size of a miniature drone or a regular infantry rocket had struck their location. With that accuracy, it had to have been fired at them. It was an attack by persons unknown.

  “Of course I am requesting a Code Red!” she said, to earn a sharp, “Sir, yes, sir!” The line clicked and buzzed for a moment as the distant Earth lieutenant worked. The result of his actions arrived a moment later as her suit blared with orders:

  ALERT! IMMEDIATE CODE RED.

  All Field Teams to stop and hold in place. Await further orders.

  All Code Red protocols apply.

  / Wideband transmission restricted . . .

  / All operations cancelled . . .

  / All movement and transport cancelled . . .

  / All civilians to return to secure quarters . . .

  / Live fire active . . .

  In answer, there was the distant pealing of alarms from below picked up by Holly’s tactical suit only as whispers in the thin Martian atmosphere. The moving ant figures and vehicles down there halted suddenly or alternatively scattered and zipped to the nearest field bunkers. The captain saw a glint of distant metal as the large storm doors started to roll down over the many Camp Vigilant airlocks.

  “I’m coming to you. Hold position,” Holly hissed tersely, combat crawling the distance to Bastion’s outcrop as he covered her. Still no more rockets or missiles flung through the air at them. She thumped against the rock at his side, checked her rifle magazine, and covered the direction opposite Bastion.

  “Clear,” she whispered, her heart thumping.

  “Clear,” Bastion echoed.

  Both marines waited, sweeping their rifles back and forth across the horizon in that long, timeless moment of adrenaline readiness. Nothing was moving save for momentary gusts of red dust peeling off of the mountain’s back. The moment could have been ten seconds, it could have been twenty minutes, and still no sign of any enemy.

  Alert! Incoming Message. Priority Alpha.

  “Captain Cropper, this is General Addison, Inner Group Command and Acting Commander of Mars . . .”

  Holly blinked. The woman’s voice on the other end of the comms was taut like a wound up guitar string, tight and tinny. She could hear the scowl that made it.