Ruins of the Galaxy Box Set: Books 1-6

by Chaney, J. N.

  “The senator,” Nolan offered.

  “That’s what I’m thinking.” Magnus looked over the container at the ramp. “Splick, these bogies aren’t coming in. They’re just as happy to keep us—” He felt his stomach lurch and a brief wave of vertigo. “We just jumped into subspace,” he said to Nolan.

  “I felt it too, sir.”

  “Dammit.” Magnus didn’t like this. The more known variables, the better, and one more just got knocked off his list. Now they didn’t know who had them, why they had them, or where they were headed. However, Magnus was not completely in the dark. As he began to shape the mental battlefield to his will, intel started to reveal itself, even if it was incomplete.

  Whoever had captured them was more brazen and calculated than he’d given them credit for. Magnus realized that every act had been highly intentional—swift arrival, no communication, no boarding. And that worried him. Someone was following strict orders. Their situation was growing more desperate by the minute, and a single plan—a desperate plan—started to take shape in Magnus’s head.

  “Have everyone assemble here in the cargo bay,” he ordered. “New strategy.”

  * * *

  The senator and Valerie stood beside a small container with Piper sitting on top of it. Their flight crew stood next to them. Nolan and his flight crew took up the middle, flanked by Dutch, Haney, and Gilder to form the rest of a half circle.

  “I’m not sure how much time we have,” Magnus said from the center, “so I’m going to make this quick. The most important thing is that none of us lose our cool. We stay calm, and we all have a better shot of making it out of this without getting our”—he hesitated, looking at the kid—“without a scratch. Copy?”

  Various affirmations went up from among the group. Magnus smiled at Piper. “That means you and Mr. Cuddles there—”

  “Talisman,” Piper corrected, squeezing the stuffed animal tighter.

  Kind of a creepy name for a kid to use. “You and Talisman gotta do your best to help everyone stay calm too. You got it?”

  “We got it,” Piper replied.

  “Now, we could be in subspace for hours or even days,” he continued, looking around at everyone. “It means once you get to where I tell you, you stay there. You stay hydrated, but you don’t move. I don’t care if you have to piss your pants—no one moves. Copy?”

  The group in front of him nodded and gave their verbal assent.

  “Good. Now the hard part. Without eyes and ears on the enemy ship’s bridge, we won’t know our destination port. There are elements of risk with every plan, and this is probably our biggest. Chances are, however, that we’ll be within emergency-pod distance of a Republic relay or habitat planet.”

  “Emergency-pod distance?” the senator asked. “Wait, do you mean to tell me that your plan is—”

  “To jettison every last one of us in the Bull Wraith’s escape capsules, yes.”

  The senator was clearly not excited about the plan. “Excuse me, Lieutenant,” he said, taking a step forward. “I don’t mean to discount your military experience here, but there has to be another way besides inadvertently flinging us into deep space or an uninhabitable planet. Plus, who’s to say that the enemy doesn’t circle back and pick us up?”

  “Senator, they’d more likely use us for target practice than pick us up.”

  The senator blanched. “Lieutenant, I’m not sure I’m following any of your logic here.”

  “Okay, first of all, they’re not going to shoot us down.”

  “But you just said—”

  “Under normal circumstances, yes, I said target practice. But whoever they want, their orders have been to take us alive.”

  “How can you be so sure?” the senator asked.

  “Because otherwise, they would have boarded us already. Someone wants at least one of us alive, and my credits are on you, Senator. But that’s beside the point. They won’t risk firing on any of the escape capsules for that very reason.”

  “So we’re back to them picking us up.”

  “Which they might do, but not all of us. They won’t have time.”

  “I don’t follow,” the senator said.

  “Assuming that this Bull Wraith was once a Republic heavy-armored transport, which it has to be since no other space dock in the galaxy that we know of is capable of making them, one of the very last things to get recoded are emergency pods.”

  “Their homing beacons are on proprietary Republic channels,” Dutch offered.

  “That’s right. And since every last one has to be recoded manually, they’re way down on the commander’s to-do list. As long as we all depart from the ship in different directions—”

  “The cavalry is bound to show up before most of us are recovered,” Nolan concluded.

  Magnus nodded. “And if we’re near a habitat planet, even better. They won’t risk an atmosphere reentry recovery. Far too dangerous.”

  “There’s only one problem, Lieutenant,” the senator said. “I’m not leaving my family.”

  Magnus had been afraid of that. Marines took orders and knew what it meant to sacrifice for the greater good. It was part of their warrior ethos. But the family man, senator or not, was hard to reason with when it came to something he wasn’t willing to lose.

  That’s why you’ve never kept anything that close, isn’t it, Magnus?

  “Senator Stone, I understand that you—”

  “You understand nothing, Lieutenant, if you think for one second that I’m putting my wife and my daughter in two separate pods and placing ourselves at the mercy of the void.”

  “Sir, I—”

  “Darin, my love,” Valerie said, approaching him from the side.

  “No!” the senator exclaimed, pulling away from her hands. “No, Valerie. This is not the best way. I can reason with whoever is helming this ship.”

  “You don’t know that,” Magnus replied.

  “I’m a member of the Galactic Senate, Lieutenant. And these people will listen to reason when the weight of the entire Republic is leveraged against them.”

  “Sir—”

  “Stop trying to reason with me, Lieutenant. There are other alternatives besides this foolhardy errand of yours. We reason with them, find a compromise, and no one gets hurt.”

  “Or everyone dies,” Magnus replied, “because you severely underestimated an enemy who is able to track down a disabled starship, get to it as fast as the nearest Repub rescue team, and then brazenly abduct the entire ship and its crew without so much as cracking a comm or breaching the ship. Whoever these people are, Mr. Senator, they are not going to reason with anyone, because they are playing by their own rules. They’re not afraid of you or me and certainly not afraid of the Republic.”

  He took a step toward the senator. He did not want to embarrass the man in front of his family or his staff, but he also didn’t want anyone to die needlessly, not on his watch. Magnus lowered his voice. “So trust me when I say, Senator, I’ve thought this through, and this is the best chance of survival that you and your family will ever have in a moment like this.”

  Senator Stone eyed Magnus hard. Magnus had the distinct impression that he was toe to toe with a man who’d stood up to the most pompous, sniveling bureaucrats in the galaxy and won. Stone was not a pushover. But neither was Magnus. Had the roles been reversed and they’d been in some political mess on Capriana Prime, Magnus felt he would back off and let the senator get them out of harm’s way. He only hoped the senator was thinking the same thing, because the alternative was knocking the man out cold and jettisoning him into the void against his will and without the ability to input course corrections. But Magnus would do it, if he had to, for the sake of everyone else’s lives.

  “Very well, Lieutenant.”

  Magnus felt his muscles relax and resisted the urge to take a deep breath. “Thank you, Senator. I will do my very best to ensure that you and your family are as close together as possible.”

  “I believ
e you,” he replied.

  Magnus looked at the others, knelt, and placed a holo-pad on the floor. “All right, team, here’s the plan.”

  * * *

  “That’s the last of them,” Gilder said as he dangled upside down in the vertical shaft. He handed the drill and bolts up to Dutch, who set them aside.

  “You good, Gilder?” Magnus asked down the tube.

  “Roger that,” the engineer said.

  “Okay, easy does it,” Magnus said as Haney and Nolan eased Gilder’s legs lower. They continued to lower the engineer down the tube until his boots were almost below the decking.

  “That’s good,” Gilder whispered. He let go of the hatch, which sat on the Bull Wraith’s cargo bay floor, slowly slid it to the side, and motioned to be hauled up. Once he was next to them again, Gilder pushed himself onto all fours, face red as a cherry and sweating profusely. He wiped his brow. “I almost passed out.”

  “So did we,” Haney said, stretching his arms. “If you make it through this, I’m suggesting a diet.”

  “A diet? If I make it through this, I’m eating everything I want!”

  “Have that discussion later.” Magnus looked at Dutch. “You ready?”

  She double-checked her MX13, modified with a suppressor and an extended energy mag, then nodded. “Locked and loaded, LT.” No one had called him that since… since Flow. Magnus felt his heart sink just a little.

  You gonna get her killed too, Magnus?

  “No, I’m not,” Magnus said.

  “Come again, LT?” Dutch asked.

  “Nothing. It’s go time.” He put on his helmet and started the countdown. “Sixty seconds. Go, go, go.”

  Dutch slid down the ladder and landed on the cargo-bay floor without so much as a click. Rawlson followed her, and the two of them disappeared.

  Magnus pulled up Dutch’s badge cam in his HUD and watched as the two Marines leapfrogged beneath the ship’s belly. Then they made a short dash to a control panel against the bay’s nearest wall.

  “They made it,” Magnus said through his external speaker. The room was full of the remaining crew and the senator and his family, all of whom breathed a sigh of relief for this first step of the plan.

  After several glances out the bridge windows, Magnus realized that the Bull Wraith’s crew had made a critical mistake. In their effort to remain anonymous, they’d exchanged physical patrols for systems monitoring. While their suppression dampers kept a captured ship from powering up and attempting to escape, it did nothing to keep the crew from slipping away unnoticed—at least, to a point. Magnus hoped to exploit that opportunity as far as he could.

  Dutch and Rawlson were typing furiously on the access panel when Magnus heard panels unlock and slide apart in the cargo-bay floor beneath the ship.

  “That’s it,” Gilder said, going back down the tube, this time right side up. He crouched under the ship and then gave Magnus a thumbs-up.

  “Grates open,” Magnus said. “Everyone down, one at a time.” They each lined up and prepared to climb down the ladder. Magnus helped Nolan down first, followed by the comm officer, then Haney. Next, he called the senator and Valerie, followed by Piper. Then came the senator’s crew. Magnus double-checked to see Dutch and Rawlson return below the ship—his cue to climb down. Magnus had no sooner grabbed the first ladder rung when he felt a sudden wave of vertigo touch him.

  “Nolan, confirm you felt that,” Magnus said over comms.

  “Affirmative. We’ve jumped out of subspace.”

  Splick, Magnus thought. “Accelerating the time line, people. Let’s move it.”

  Once underneath the bird, Magnus saw Gilder helping each person slip between the cargo-bay drainage grates that Dutch and Rawlson had opened. So far, so good. Keep it nice and smooth.

  Dutch had disappeared into the drain shaft when Magnus heard someone order them to stop. He looked across the immense cargo bay and saw a Marine—no, just a trooper—in black Mark VI armor. The only noticeable insignia were three white stripes on his shoulder plate. Republic armor… on a Republic ship. The trooper brought an MX21 to bear on Magnus… with a Republic blaster!

  “Honeymoon’s over!” Magnus yelled at Gilder and Rawlson and flicked off his safety. “Get in!”

  The very first blaster bolt caught Rawlson in the throat, gouging a hole straight through the man’s neck. His body fell into Gilder and knocked the bigger man sideways.

  Magnus selected high-frequency modulation on his MAR30. He aimed—aided by his helmet’s AI—squeezed, and sent a deafening staccato burst of blue light across the cargo bay. His weapon recoiled against his shoulder as wisps of stray static dissipated. The bolts riddled the assaulting trooper with a tight grouping to the chest. The enemy trooper didn’t have time to register that the ultra-intensity bolts hadn’t even slowed as they passed through his armor and emerged from the back of his chest. He simply slumped to his knees and toppled over—a corpse—before his helmet smacked the floor.

  “Get in the hole!” Magnus yelled at Gilder as the engineer crawled out from under Rawlson’s body. An emergency klaxon filled the air. “Come on, Marine! Move that fat ass!”

  Startled, Gilder dove headfirst between the grates and disappeared. Then Magnus lowered himself in and scanned the area. Everyone but Rawlson had made it below the grates and down the chute.

  “Dutch, you copy?”

  “Loud and clear, LT.”

  “Blow it.”

  “With pleasure.”

  Magnus hugged his MAR30 to his chest and jumped down the chute as the control console across from the Sparrow detonated into a fireball.

  26

  Kane had paced in his quarters for nearly an hour. He massaged his head, trying to ease the chronic pain that had been with him since… too long. Since the war. The pressure had become more acute, however, the moment he’d seen her name. He hadn’t seen it spelled out like that in a long, long time. And the letters had more of an effect on him than he cared to admit.

  Is she alive? Or is this someone else using her credentials to their advantage? His thoughts were restless, and he was torn between pursuing the ship signed out in her name and pursuing the ship that was headed toward the object of his desire.

  She was once the object of your desire, said that strange voice inside him. It always spoke so calmly, so assuredly. He hated it.

  “Yes. I admit that. But things have changed,” he replied, knowing that he was only going to goad the interrogator. But maybe this time he would win. “And that was a long time ago.”

  So time is what changed your love? the voice asked.

  Kane bristled. “No, things changed over time.”

  What things?

  Kane massaged his head more. He was already irritated by the pain, the memories, and the deep sense of loss. None of it ever left him alone.

  “We had different desires. We didn’t mean for it to happen. It just… happened.”

  I see, the voice said, but Kane knew it was condescending to him.

  He didn’t need to justify himself here. After all, it was he who’d done all the living—all the dying—not this counterfeit voice in his head.

  But you both had the same desires once, the voice retorted.

  “We did, yes.”

  So time changed those as well?

  “They changed over time too, yes.”

  You’re mincing words, Kane. You’re not answering the question.

  This was infuriating. He’d retreated to his quarters often on every ship he’d ever been assigned to, but even more after he’d become an admiral. Their pet project, he reminded himself. And then he’d gone off the grid. But in all this solitude, he only ever succeeded in getting berated by himself. No, he corrected. By the voice.

  Answer the question.

  Kane knew what it was getting at—what it was trying to extract from him. But he hated to let it be right. He walked over to the sink and mirror on the far wall. He let the water run hot and then splashed several handfuls o
n his face, hoping his skin might feel it. He shut the faucet off and gripped the metal sink with both hands. Water dripped from his face as he glared at himself in the mirror—glared at it.

  You could have left this fool’s errand and gone after that ship yourself, the voice said.

  “I know I could have.”

  Then why didn’t you?

  “That’s what I have a fleet for.”

  But she never wanted your fleet.

  Kane pounded a fist on the sink. “That was her problem. She didn’t want to serve the galaxy either.”

  Serve the galaxy? the voice said in bewilderment, as if it had just heard something for the first time. Kane knew it was mocking him, as it always did when they sparred about this subject. He glared at it in the mirror, seeing its eyes flick back and forth. Yet she went to serve the galaxy with them.

  “She was selfish,” Kane spat. “All she wanted were the old things. She wasn’t open to the possibilities—to what we could have done together.”

  Or what you wanted to do.

  “She had a choice!” Kane noticed spittle running down the mirror. He wondered where it had come from. His hands ached as he squeezed the metal harder. “She had a choice,” he repeated.

  So did you.

  “Is that what this is about?” Kane seethed. “You just want me to admit that I made a choice? That it wasn’t time that did it, or distance?”

  Yes. That’s exactly what I want.

  “Fine!” Kane yelled. “I chose! I chose to pursue the greater good instead of her. Are you happy now?”

  I don’t know, Kane. Are you happy now?

  “Damn you!” His arms tried to wrest the sink from the wall, saliva bubbling from the corners of his mouth and a small trickle of blood coming from his nose. “Damn you to hell!”

  * * *

  “Admiral,” came a voice over the private channel to his quarters.

  “Go ahead, Captain.” Kane wiped his face with a towel. He noticed blood on it.