Forged to Hunt Read online

  A thick cloud hung over the asteroid, trapped by its meager gravity field. The dust would hang around the asteroid for days, possibly months, shrouding the massive rock in a thick cloud, obscuring and concealing any hidden Chitins for a long time to come. Jack couldn’t wait here for the dust to settle. He would have to move on and return to this location later.

  “Torent, report,” Jack said.

  Torent let out a whoop of victory and then replied more formally.

  “Enemy down. My boat triangulated with your surveillance data and detected six Chitin soldiers. My hail cannon sensors confirm six kills, sir.”

  “Sam Torent. Return to your position on the search line immediately and await my instructions. Copy?”

  “Copy that, sir. You can thank me later for saving your hide if you like.”

  “Sam…” Jack could barely contain his anger. “My team was in no need of rescue. Your orders were to hold position. You have disobeyed a direct order. I will be placing you on report. Is that clear, Sam?”

  “Report? For killing Chits? For saving your sorry little team of mediocre Marines? Nice one, Jack. Thanks.”

  “This had better be a private channel, Sam,” Jack said, “or I’ll be submitting you for court martial. This is insubordination.”

  “Yes, it’s private,” Torent said with a much-deflated tone and a greater degree of respect. “Sorry, Jack.”

  “Return to your position on the belt. Forge out.”

  Drake and Attah were standing just inside the tac boat when Jack came to the door.

  “Was that sixth squad?” Attah asked. “You were their squad leader, weren’t you, sir?”

  “Good thing they turned up when they did, isn’t it, Commander?” Drake said.

  Jack walked up the ramp. He tapped the controls and let the door close behind him. It was not good at all, he thought. A small group of Chitins was just the kind of challenge this team needed. Six Chits was no great threat. Jack had stood his ground against greater odds than that. But this group of Marines needed motivation, they needed action. Frankly, they needed a threat to bring out their courage. The hidden Chits on this asteroid had been just the opportunity he’d been hoping for.

  “Well done out there, team,” Jack said. The tac boat pressurized, and he pulled off his helmet. The team could use some encouragement and some praise. They had not taken down the Chits themselves, but they hadn’t messed up either. It was a start.

  4

  Drifting through the belt was an easy task for the small team of Marines who had drifted through their entire service in the Fleet Marines. For Jack, it was becoming one of the hardest deployments of his service. He was constantly on the lookout, knowing that at any minute an enemy could appear.

  Dread and boredom were constantly competing for prime position in his thoughts. He had been close to defeat so many times; he knew it could come in an instant.

  The tedium was shattered with the sound of a contact alarm from the flight console. Jack fed the data to the holostage. The distant image was still poorly resolved, but Jack recognized that configuration. He sent a halt command to the task force and opened a channel to Fleet Command and Control on Eros.

  “Fleet Command and Control. This is Commander Jack Forge, Belt Task Force One. I have encountered a Chitin warship. A Leviathan-class vessel. Sending coordinates to you now. Please advise.”

  Jack stared at the view screen. In the dark distance lay a Leviathan, the most deadly and powerful of all the Chitin craft. Even with a hundred tac boats, Jack knew he could not hope to put a scratch on the huge Chitin warship.

  “Commander Forge. This is Fleet Command and Control. Close with the target and ascertain its operational status. Fleet out.”

  Jack hesitated. If he moved too close to the Leviathan, he would be destroyed in an instant. If he left the boat and went alone, traversing the space in his meat suit, he would not have the sensor detail to determine the Leviathan’s status. The Fleet needed to know if this was a vanguard of a new wave of Chitin attacks or if it was another abandoned craft.

  Jack knew the Fleet would sacrifice a tac boat to discover the level of threat from this Leviathan. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But Jack didn’t have to put himself in danger; perhaps he did have a solution.

  “Fleet, this is Forge. Sending surveillance drone swarm to the Leviathan now.”

  “Negative,” came the swift response from the Fleet Command and Control. “Fleet requires a full data sweep from tac boat sensor array. Proceed immediately, Commander.”

  The admiral and his staff were safely hidden away beneath a kilometer of planetary crust back on Eros. Jack knew they were all at risk from the Chitins no matter where in the system they were, but Jack’s proximity to danger was much more immediate. Jack activated his tac boat’s drive systems.

  “Copy that, Fleet. Advancing on target now.”

  “We’re not going in, are we?” Garcia asked, standing behind Jack’s seat.

  “Yes, we are, Garcia. Suit up, just in case it gets rough.”

  “Suit up?” Drake said. “What are the chances of surviving against that thing even if I do suit up?”

  “You’re the commander,” Attah said. “You could send one of the other boats in, sir.”

  Jack turned around and found all three Marines crowded around him. They looked as terrified as Jack felt, but they were letting it show.

  “I will not send someone else to do my job. We found the kravin Chit. We’re going to check it out. Now suit up and strap in.”

  The Marines drifted away to the back of the ship and took their seats. Jack returned to the flight console and watched the data carefully. He felt a growing sense of dread. He moved his tac boat closer to the massive warship.

  The sensors recorded no activity. There were no energy readings, no propulsion, no weapons charge on the massive plasma arc generator that fired the great seething loops of plasma, each one hundreds of meters long that curled and unfurled across space and smashed ships apart. The Chitins were most deadly when they attacked in great numbers, but the plasma arc was an extremely powerful weapon. A single Leviathan and its plasma arc weapon was more than capable of smashing the fleet’s heaviest warships apart. Jack was relieved to see it was currently dormant.

  Then Jack spotted a breach in the side of the Leviathan, a small breach by comparison to the Leviathan’s massive size. A stream of fluid was drifting out.

  Jack opened a channel to the Fleet.

  “This is Forge. The Leviathan is inactive. It looks dead in space. There is a breach and the craft appears to be bleeding some kind of fluid out onto space.”

  “Fire on the Leviathan, Commander,” the order came back.

  “Don’t do that,” Attah said. “You’ll wake it for sure. It’ll smash us.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Jack said, “but we will fire on it nevertheless. Stand by to fire on the Leviathan.”

  Jack opened the channel to Fleet Command and Control.

  “Confirm that order please, Fleet,” he said. He selected the target for the hail cannon and took aim.

  “Fire on the Leviathan, Commander.”

  “Acknowledged, Fleet. Firing now.”

  The stream of hail poured from the cannon and streaked across the black gulf toward the Leviathan. Jack watched as the stream of hail raced forward.

  The hail slammed into the Leviathan and blasted a chunk out of the outer hull.

  Jack sat forward, intrigued by the result of his cannon’s fire. The Leviathan could take a salvo from a destroyer’s high-density shot cannon or high-energy laser and barely show a scratch. The hail cannon shot should have vaporized on contact, but instead, it blew a hole big enough to park the tac boat in.

  “You smashed it,” Drake said, his voice filled with relief and excitement. Jack had never heard him so animated before.

  Opening a channel to Fleet, Jack watched the fluid spill out from the new breach made by the cannon.

  “No resp
onse to our fire,” Jack said. “The Leviathan is not responding. The hail cannon blasted a hole in the hull. It looks like the Leviathan’s hull is vulnerable to our fire when the ship is unpowered.”

  “Break off, Commander,” the response came. “Resume search and destroy operations. Fleet out.”

  The tac boat’s holostage showed Jack three new ships racing into the sector. Three frigates. They slowed as they neared the Leviathan, the frigates dwarfed by the massive Chitin craft. The frigates each fired harpoon tethers at the Leviathan and began to tow it away from its place in the asteroid belt toward the inner system.

  “What are they doing? We should destroy it,” Garcia said.

  “They want to study it,” Jack said. “Maybe we can find their weakness.”

  “But they’re all gone,” Attah said. “They couldn’t break into the inner system so they retreated. We’ve won.”

  Jack turned and looked at his small team. “Do you really think we’ll never see them again? Do you think they would give up that soon? They have constantly tried to destroy us, and have won at every turn. We win one big victory and you think they won’t respond to that? This war isn’t over yet,” Jack said heavily.

  The team was quiet.

  “We have a job to do.” Jack reached out to the flight console and reset the boat’s flight path. “Resuming search operations.”

  5

  Jack sat at the flight console and watched the holoimage of the search line. The tac boats were spread across the belt and appeared as tiny points of light. The entire belt would be swept clear of Chits once the search pattern was complete. It was slow going, but it would be worth it to know that the asteroid belt was clear. It was another matter whether the Chitins would return and attempt to retake the belt, but that was a problem for another time. Jack’s orders were to sweep the belt. That was what he was going to do.

  Reports came in from boats all along the line. One asteroid after another was swept and marked as clear. Most of the asteroids were small, no bigger than a tac boat themselves. Several hundred were about the same size as a destroyer-class vessel and were mostly lumpy aggregations of rock and ice. Several asteroids in the belt were huge moon-sized rocks. They carved a path through the belt, collecting smaller asteroids as they went and adding to their own great size.

  The moon-sized asteroids were classified as belt planetesimals with a catalogue number relating to the order in which they had been mapped and classified. BP-8 was just ahead of Jack. It came out of the black of space, a dull gray rock, cratered and scarred by thousands of collisions with smaller asteroids.

  Jack knew that these moon-sized asteroids would be perfect sites for the planetary defense cannons, and he wondered if the belt sweep operation was the first stage in creating a defensive ring of the these cannons. If there were enough sites for the huge Leviathan-busting cannons to be built, the inner system could be protected from Chitin attacks. But Jack knew that not only did the huge cannon require a large asteroid as a site, but all the cannons would need to be mutually supporting. Their fields of fire would need to overlap or the Chitins would simply pick them off one by one, or slip between them unscathed. A defensive ring of planetary defense cannons would surely hold back any Chitin counter-attack.

  As BP-8 came within a few hundred meters of his tac boat, Jack messaged Task Force One and ordered a halt.

  The sensor sweep of BP-8 returned a bright reflector. Something was on the surface. Jack moved his boat in for a closer look.

  “Helmets on,” Jack called out to his team. “I don’t know what we’ve got here, but it’s something.”

  Jack launched a small number of surveillance drones. They raced away toward BP-8 and spread out. Soon, they returned a detailed image of the surface of the planetesimal. The bright reflector was revealed to be a small spacecraft. Jack noticed first and foremost that it was not a Chitin craft. Then he realized it was not a Fleet vessel either. It was an independent craft. It looked like a small trading vessel.

  These types of craft were once a common sight in the asteroid belt, moving cargo and people around the various settlements and industrial sites dotted across the belt, but they had disappeared soon after the start of the war. The independents were defiant at first. It was their nature to be defiant, they were entrepreneurial and saw risk as opportunity, but as the Chitins pushed deeper into the inner system, the indies were forced out, their ships captured or destroyed. Eventually, the indies had abandoned the belt to the Fleet and the Chitins, and conflict.

  “They must have been down there for some time,” Attah said, looking over Jack’s shoulder at the holoimage of the craft on the surface of BP-8. “I can’t imagine there’s anyone alive down there. Are we suiting up, sir?”

  “Yes,” Jack said. “We’ll go down and check it out.”

  Sitting back in his chair, Jack felt a sense of satisfaction that Attah was beginning to take interest in the work. Time away from his acquaintances in the battalion with Jack keeping a tight grip on his med package use was beginning to bring Attah out of the stim-induced indolence. There was a good Marine in there somewhere. Jack needed to help that Marine out from under the months of recreational med use.

  Jack marked the location of the downed independent ship and informed the Fleet that a human craft had been detected on the surface of BP-8.

  Jack turned in his chair. Attah was looking at the holoimage. He was transfixed by it, and then noticing Jack’s attention on him, he stood up sharply.

  “Suiting up, sir,” Attah said, remembering what he was supposed to be doing.

  “You volunteered for the Marines, didn’t you?” Jack said, looking up at Attah.

  “Yes, sir. Just over a year ago, sir.”

  “About the same time as me,” Jack said.

  “What made you volunteer, sir?” Attah asked, relaxing slightly.

  Jack smiled. “I didn’t volunteer. I was studying engineering at university on Eros. I missed a few classes and then dropped a grade. That meant mandatory service. I was pressed into service.”

  Jon Attah looked visibly shocked. “I didn’t know that, sir.”

  “I’ll go back to my studies one day,” Jack said, grabbing his helmet. “Why did you volunteer?”

  “My brother was a professional Marine, sir. He joined when I was just a kid.” Attah paused. He hesitated. And then, finally, Attah stood up straight and spoke with a tone of pride tinged with loss. “He was on the Gemini, sir.”

  Jack had heard of the Gemini. It had been in the news feeds in the days before he had been pressed into service. The destroyer had been sent to deflect an asteroid on a collision course with Eros when a Chitin Leviathan had attacked without warning. It had been blanket coverage, but Jack had been too preoccupied with his brother’s funeral to care about a distant war and unknown Marines.

  Jack looked up at Attah. “I’m sure he was a great Marine,” Jack said.

  “He was a bully,” Attah said. “Always beating on me. My whole life, I thought I hated him, but when the Gemini went down, I knew I wanted to fight the Chits and make them pay for taking my brother from me. Does that sound stupid, sir?”

  “No, Jon,” Jack said, “sounds pretty noble to me. Now suit up. I’m putting us down.”

  Jack pulled on his helmet and moved the boat in close to the craft on the surface.

  The surface of BP-8 was very different than the smaller asteroid. Like most larger asteroids and all other Belt planetesimals, BP-8 was covered in a fine powder, the fallout from a thousand collisions with smaller asteroids. Jack ordered his Marines to move lightly and not disturb the dust too much. As he neared the indie craft, Jack had his team spread out.

  “Attah, go left. Drake, you go right. Garcia, you are with me.”

  Jack headed straight for the craft and the small hatchway half-buried in the dusty soil of BP-8. The hatch appeared to be sealed. These indie craft were capable of extremely long interplanetary trips and a small crew could be sustained for weeks, even months.
But this region of space had been swarming with Chitin craft only a short while ago. It was unlikely that they would have missed this one. Jack guessed the craft was abandoned, or that the occupants were dead.

  Approaching the hatch with caution, he accessed the craft’s central computer with his meat suit’s remote connection. The ship still had power. Jack checked the computer for details on the passengers and crew.

  Jack was stunned to discover that a four-person crew was alive inside. He sent a message to the craft’s communicator circuits.

  “This is Commander Forge of the Fleet Marines. I need to clear this asteroid. Do you require assistance?”

  The hatch opened. It slid upwards, a dull light spilling out and the pale dust falling away from the hatch cover as it moved. With the hatch fully open, Jack saw four figures standing inside. They wore the bright red civilian space survival suits. Their leader stepped forward, hand extended.

  “Thank you, Commander,” he said. “We’ve been—”

  Then the communicator cut out. Jack tried to reconnect, but he was prevented by a communication block.

  The leader of the group tapped the side of his helmet. His gestures told Jack that he couldn’t hear. Jack copied the action and shrugged. He opened a channel to his team.

  “Let’s get them back to the tac boat,” Jack began.

  “Cancel that order. This is Agent Visser of Fleet Intelligence. Commander Forge, return to your tac boat and continue with your search. Leave these people for recovery by Fleet Intelligence. That is an order.”

  Jack looked up as the engine flare of a corvette decelerating overhead caught his eye. The ship came vertically down to the surface of BP-8. At twenty meters, a hatch on the underside of the corvette slid open and eight Fleet Intelligence enforcers dropped to the surface. They were wearing the black meat suit worn by the Fleet Intelligence enforcers. The enforcers surrounded the indie crew. Jack looked up at the corvette as the crew of the indie craft and their captors were carried upwards by an elevator beam. The beam drew a swirling column of pale dust up with it.