Alliance (Jack Forge, Lost Marine Book 5) Read online

  He prepared the drive assembly to give off a minor, low-level drive flare, just like the one the last decoy had emitted. He sent the instructions to the drive and the flare went off, pushing the tac boat a few degrees to port—away from the brown dwarf’s gravity well.

  The Skalidion continued straight ahead, diving into the gravity well of the brown dwarf after the tail of the decoy slug.

  “Not falling for the same trick as before?” Jack said with a smile.

  This time, the decoy slug was not moving away. He was.

  The Skalidion fighter moved in closer to the decoy, and Jack made ready to activate the slug. A tac boat would have to pull up from the brown dwarf’s gravity well or be destroyed. The decoy slug was now going to make like a tac boat.

  Jack activated the slug and made ready to bring his tac boat about.

  The slug’s drive kicked into life and turned to make a desperate escape from the brown dwarf’s gravity well. The moment the decoy’s drive activated, the Skalidion fired a burst of green fire across the decoy slug’s forward section.

  The decoy was incinerated as the Skalidion green fire burned the material at a molecular level.

  Jack watched the Skalidion pull up from the gravity well, racing away to its starboard side and presenting its drive section to Jack’s fully-charged laser assembly.

  Jack locked on target and fired. The Skalidion, realizing it had been deceived, took evasive action.

  The laser assembly lit up and the energy beam connected with the Skalidion drive section. The fighter tumbled off course. Jack fired again, striking it in the midsection. The fighter detonated with a green fire eruption that burst from the fighter. The remaining parts of the fighter, nothing bigger than a decoy slug, slowed under the tug of the brown dwarf’s gravity and began to fall to the dull star.

  Jack watched the Skalidion fighter break up and burn as the pieces fell. He breathed for what felt like the first time in minutes. He had survived.

  Jack checked the data he had gathered, looking at the thin strip of unoccupied space. He could scout further ahead, but he had been gone for over two days. He had gathered lots of useful data, and a possible way out of the region.

  “Okay, let’s get this back to the fleet,” Jack said.

  He input a heading into the navigational systems, reached out to activate the drive, and stopped himself just as he was about to hit the panel.

  “Procedures, Jack,” he muttered to himself. He was tired and taking shortcuts, but it was even more important to do things correctly now that he was so fatigued. He reset the sensor back to cruising range to give himself the best view of the surrounding space.

  And then he saw the Skalidions. A dozen fighters racing toward the brown dwarf, heading for the position of the destruction of the decoy slug and their fighter.

  Jack held off hitting the drive. He checked his heading. He was adrift and heading out of the system, but he was caught in the gravity well of the brown dwarf and beginning to fall back into it.

  The Skalidions were holding position, the fighters gathered around another ship that Jack did not recognize. It was about the same size as the fighters but less sleek, more bulbous, with several antenna-like structures.

  “A surveillance ship,” Jack breathed. “They’re searching.”

  He checked the heading of his tac boat. He was falling—but not rapidly—in an elliptical orbit that would bring him close to the brown dwarf. In a few moments, he would be on the far side of the dull dwarf star from the Skalidions and out of their sensor view.

  Jack looked at the configuration of the binary system. As he fell toward the brown dwarf, he could kick his drive into life and head for one of the small terrestrial planets orbiting the red dwarf, the larger of the two stars.

  As he slipped beyond the horizon, he saw the Skalidions fall out of view. Jack kicked up the drive and with a single burst, he made for the nearest terrestrial planet. Falling in toward it, he gave himself a kick with the thrusters and entered a low, geostationary orbit, hanging over the surface of the dark planet like a piece of debris.

  Jack may have found a way out, or he may have found a dead end. He had encountered a few Skalidion, but were there more?

  He sat back in his seat. “I guess we just wait and watch,” he said. His eyes drooped closed. “And no sleeping,” he said loudly, waking himself. He grabbed the hydration pack and doused his tired face then checked his suit’s medical report, discovering he could now administer another stim shot.

  “Maybe just wait a little longer,” he said. “Don’t know how long I’m going to be here.”

  With the tac boat’s passive sensors on full alert, Jack watched the movement of the Skalidions as they came out from behind the brown dwarf, lingering, searching.

  He zoomed in on the small group. Maybe this was a scouting party, just like him. Maybe it was the vanguard of a swarm invasion of this system. Either way, Jack had to find out, to give the fleet the best information he could gather, then maybe find a way to escape the Skalidion threat and find some quiet space to call home.

  3

  Sitting in the center of the nest asteroid, Phisrid surveyed her territory through the dark eyes of her thousands of observers, the small Skalidion drones bristling with antennae, all relaying information back to their queen.

  Phisrid was aware of everything her millions of individual drones could sense—fighters, observers, and builders all fed information back to the nest, to their queen. She listened and watched and considered it all. Her late sister would never concern herself with this minutia, but Phisrid wanted to know everything that happened across her nation. Everything meant something. Every detail was important.

  A fighter was lost on the edge of her territory, near the border with the Devex. Phisrid examined the information. A single fighter was insignificant amongst the hundreds of thousands preparing for war on that part of her border, but its destruction at this time, far from the battlefront, was significant. Something was attacking her forces, and they had won a minor victory. That could lead to far worse.

  Determined to discover the cause of her fighter’s destruction, she dispatched a hundred fighters from her swarm to that region, a small dwarf binary system between her and the Devex.

  The observers along the border with Devex space were quiet. There had been no sightings of Devex ships for days. Phisrid guessed the Devex forces had fallen back, concentrating their power deep inside their territory. Any other Skalidion Swarm Queen would have swarmed into the deserted territory in an instant and snatched any star systems in their path. But Phisrid had been fighting the Devex long enough to know that they would not have fallen back without a plan.

  The Devex were aggressive and attacked the Skalidions on sight. Phisrid had overwhelmed them with sheer numbers, and just when she thought the Devex could offer no more resistance, they had fought back hard with a revitalized force.

  They had gained numbers from somewhere. The builders who had devoured the new Devex forces had relayed to Phisrid that the new Devex were different. They were smaller. They were strange. They were sweeter. Phisrid tasted them through the signals sent back to the nest asteroid by the builders. She had never tasted anything so good.

  The desire to conquer new territory was innate to all Skalidion, and that was why their empire spanned a thousand systems and was growing by the day, but Phisrid’s desire to defeat more of these smaller Devex warriors was due entirely to the taste. She wanted more.

  The builders on the outer edge of her nest asteroid completed laying down fresh matter, building her nest. The matter had been consumed after a battle, when the builders devoured all broken ships before returning to the nest and regurgitating the matter to create fresh nest pods. These pods would contain the larvae for fresh drones.

  And with her nest now at such huge proportions, Phisrid knew it was time to spawn daughters.

  The new sub-queen larvae sat around her. Nurse drones waited outside the central chamber for Phisrid to in
vite them in, to allow them to carry the sub-queen larvae away to the fresh pods on the outer edge of the nest. A pair of sub-queens would be placed in each pod and from each would hatch a single sub-queen. One would be devoured by the other and only the most powerful and voracious would ultimately hatch.

  But Phisrid was on the verge of a major battle for Devex space and she needed fighters more than she needed daughters. She began to spawn fresh fighter larvae and summoned the nurse drone.

  The drones collected the sub-queen larvae, but Phisrid halted them with a wave of pheromones. The nurses stood dead still, sub-queen larvae in their mandibles.

  The sub-queens had come too early, and Phisrid needed all matter for her army. She summoned the builders from the outer edge of the nest and brought them to the central chamber. They came scuttling in. The smallest of all the castes had the biggest job after conquest. They built the nest, they built the nursery pods, and they converted all matter into usable materials.

  The builders moved in, dozens at a time, swarming over each nurse and sub-queen larva it held.

  With a final wave of chemical signal from Phisrid, the conversion began. The builders tore into the larvae in a frenzied feast, but not a gram of matter was wasted. Once all was consumed, the builders scuttled off to the outer edge of the nest and laid down even more pods. These would house the fighters. Hundreds of fresh fighters would be secured in their maturation pods.

  Phisrid sensed a whiff of dissent from a nurse drone. The nurses were all failed sub-queens, their abdomens clipped to refresh the nurse drone ranks. Some nurses had a little too much of the sub-queen about them. They were the only caste to ever show opposition, and swarm queens needed to be alert to it. Too many nest asteroids had become lifeless husks after a nurse caste uprising.

  Phisrid snatched up the nurse and pressed the squirming dissenter to her rasping mouth. She pressed the wriggling nurse in deeper, tearing it apart, crushing it. The queen was not as clean an eater as the builders and the soft internal parts of the nurse exploded over the inner chamber.

  Wiping the mess from her face and antennae with a satisfaction she had not felt since destroying her sister, Phisrid summoned a builder to come and clean up the mess. The rest of the nurse drones began to carry the fresh larvae away, the new wave of soldiers.

  The taste of nurse drone was sweet, but not as sweet as the new small Devex warriors. Although she could only taste them as a secondary sensation received from her builder caste drones as they devoured them, Phisrid could not forget the taste. She had one thought other than expansion of her territory. She would taste one of these Devex for herself. She would train one builder for this very specific task. The next time Phisrid’s Skalidion army moved against the Devex, one would be taken alive and brought back to the nest asteroid, to the central chamber and before the swarm queen herself, and then Phisrid would taste for herself.

  But before she could fulfill that desire, she would have to attack. Her forces were growing and soon, she would press her invasion deep into Devex territory. The Devex would be wiped out, all their systems falling under her control. She was on the verge of creating the largest Skalidion territory ever, a nation so large it would become an entirely new Skalidion Empire, separate from her mother’s empire. Stronger. Smarter.

  Her recently dispatched group of fighters and watchers were arriving at the location where her fighter had so recently been destroyed—the dwarf binary on the edge of her territory. She diverted her attention to this one small region. There was a mystery here. She was intrigued.

  She was also hungry. She reached out and snatched up a nurse drone that was entering the central chamber to transport a soldier lava to its outer pod. Phisrid pressed the nurse to her mouth and sucked the juice, rasped the husk, and savored the flavor. Sour and sharp, a hint of the sweetness that she craved.

  She dropped the shattered fragments of nurse drone and watched through the dark eyes of her observers at the dwarf binary system.

  4

  Jack watched the Skalidions zip back and forth across the dwarf system while holding his position in orbit. Below lay the dead surface of barren rock. Above lay the cold dark of space with the Skalidions moving about in random, jerking flights.

  Then Jack detected a new wave of Skalidions. He looked at the holostage and the indistinct signal. At this range, it appeared to be a large blob, an indistinct mass. But as the mass drew closer, Jack could make out the individual signals from a hundred Skalidion drones. Most were the sleek fighter configuration but a number were the bulbous shapes that Jack suspected were the Skalidion sensor drones. Although they shared the same basic body plan, there were distortions here and there. They had more antennae and larger dark areas that appeared to be eyes. The front section was squat and sat at the front and center of the huge, round central section. The drive covered the entire rear side of the drone but was flattened. The look was of a large rounded blob with streaks of green and red.

  The fighters continued their seemingly random search, but the sensor drones began a systematic sweep of the system.

  Jack sat forward, sensing the danger.

  “Looking for me?” he muttered. “Looking for the one who killed your fighter?”

  Jack was amused to have become the target of a manhunt, a dragnet to find the one who had beaten the fighter, but he was also aware of the danger of staying too long.

  Tapping the thruster controls, Jack moved along the low orbit and hid his tac boat beyond the horizon, putting him just out of sight of the searching Skalidions, for now at least.

  “So we’ve learned one thing,” Jack said to himself as he made ready to move out of the system, “the Skalidions want to learn about their enemy too.”

  Jack let himself fall closer to the planet below and moved further to the far side, putting the cold, rocky world between him and the hunters in the system. Jack released a decoy slug and let it drop slowly to the surface. It would make its presence known in a short time, but not before Jack was away.

  Watching the available data on the holostage, Jack could see the location of the surveillance Skalidions. They were in formation directly on the far side of the planet. Ahead of Jack was the red dwarf, so he laid in a direct heading.

  Jack’s suit alerted him to the fact that he had been without sleep for far longer than recommended. The suit’s onboard med-pack recommended a stim shot.

  Jack felt alert. The hairs on the back of his neck were standing to attention, and his scalp tingled. He felt excited and afraid. He waited for the right moment.

  “The last thing I need right now is a stim shot,” he said, and then he punched the drive.

  The tac boat leaped to full speed in a fraction of a second. The inertia stability field inside the boat stopped Jack from being hurled across the small interior, but minor fluctuations in the field pressed on him in waves that brought pain and nausea. His suit’s grav field compensated for some of the effect, but the tac boat was definitely in need of service, and the inertia field generator needed recalibration.

  The red dwarf star came close, growing in size, showing on the holostage as a towering red wall and making the tac boat appear as a barely significant speck of matter. Jack slowed the tac boat and entered orbit in the corona.

  At that moment, he activated the decoy slug on the surface of the small rocky planet. A merest flicker of energy output. Jack didn’t want to tempt the Skalidions with too tasty a lure. He guessed they might suspect a trap or diversion. The flicker was insignificant, but for the swarm of Skalidions sweeping the system and actively searching for him, a flicker was all he needed.

  The holostage showed the Skalidions all racing in and scanning the area in detail.

  Now Jack could make his final move. He raced through the corona of the red dwarf. The tac boat’s external sensors let him know that hull composite tolerance was about to be breached. Jack wanted to push it a little bit more, but the boat was in such a poor state, it might fail before design tolerance was reached.


  Jack pushed as hard as he dared and rounded the red dwarf, putting the star between him and the Skalidions.

  Now Jack could move. He pushed the drive up steadily to maximum, diverting power to the hull stability field as the boat creaked under the stress of acceleration. Releasing a surveillance drone in his wake, Jack felt a sudden increase in the fluctuations in the inertia field. They tugged at him here and there, pulling him close to breaking point. Only his tactical suit kept him together.

  Then the tac boat hit max speed and the inertia fluctuations dropped away. Before Jack could relax, he checked the data being sent to him by the surveillance drone. No Skalidions were in pursuit.

  Jack felt a wave of exhaustion wash over him. He sent a signal to the surveillance drone to power down and remain silent so it didn’t give away his escape. Jack slumped into the chair and looked at the flight console. Amber warning lights told him what he already knew: the tac boat needed service. The whole fleet needed service, and so did he, but the first thing he needed was sleep.

  “Not yet,” Jack said. He repeated it to himself only louder. He stood up and walked along the small interior before returning to the flight console. Jack input the coordinates of the fleet into the navigation systems and then let the drive systems make the necessary corrections.

  Jack was heading back to the fleet.

  The nebula came out of the dark and grew as Jack fought off his fatigue. The suit had woken him moments before with an automated, low-level stim shot, just enough to stop him drifting into a deep sleep. A flash of light on the holostage caught Jack’s attention. It hurt his eye like a needle pressed to the back of the socket. He checked the ident codes over the holoimage and saw that a pair of Blades were racing out to intercept him.

  Jack’s flight console communicator burst into life with the voice of the lead Blade.

  “Attention incoming craft. This is combat patrol. Come to a full stop and maintain position. Transmit ident codes now.”