by G. P. Eliot
Dalida
(Emancipation Book 1.0)
G. P. Eliot
Edited by
Gail Nkopuruk
Contents
A Thank You Gift
Dream Squad
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
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Epilogue
Extended Epilogue
Lordstar
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Author’s Note
About the Author
A Thank You Gift
Thanks a lot for purchasing my book. It really means a lot to me, because this is the best way to show me that you like me!
As a Thank You gift I have written another awesome space opera for you called Lordstar. It’s only available to people who have downloaded one of my books and you can get your free copy by tapping this link here.
Once more, thanks a lot for your support, mate!
Respectfully,
G.P. Eliot
About the Book
The encrypted message that has arrived at the Union's center either holds the key to the survival of the human species...or its doom.
Realizing that suffering from extreme boredom was not so bad afterall, Captain Hank Snider and his badass crew need to act fast. After stealing the super-advanced ship called Dalida from the Union’s headquarters, they run to discover the meaning behind the mystery message.
Unaware that the worst is yet to come, they also discover the true reason of existence of the highly classified military project “Dalida”...
With the Union’s greatest weapon out for blood, they are running out of time...and luck. And when Lory, Hank’s female version, gets captured, time runs even shorter.
If the message falls in the wrong hands, it will mean humanity's last extinction level event...
Dream Squad
Hank Snider: Former soldier of the Union’s Special Forces, very angry cab driver, Captain of any spaceship available, and the second most-wanted man in the Milky Way.
Professor Alan Serrano: Former researcher of the Search for Alien Life (SAL) project, alleged psychopath and the…most-wanted man in the Milky Way.
Ida: Hank’s private sexy A.I., left from the time he used to be a soldier. He keeps referring to her as “Ida-baby”. The reason why all of his girlfriends thought he was a cheater.
Lory Cox: Deadly (and gorgeous) member of the Shimmering Path, gun-for-hire and…occasional escort.
Jake Steed: Agent for the Confederates, rich enough to attend the most important dinners where he picks up valuable information.
Drake Madigan: The muscular one, can’t say no to a good steak or even a bad one.
Malcolm Cortez: Graduate of Spacecraft Mechanical Engineering, part-time butler to pay the rent. Usually is hired as a “general assistant” because of…his cooking skills.
1
“We are screwed...” the tall man said with a look of horror on his face.
It was no wonder that Hank Snider, ex-Union Special Forces and Captain of the stolen Lordstar was taken aback by what was happening to him–or about to happen.
The errant Captain was standing in the middle of a supposedly-secret Confederate base–the sworn enemy of the Union–with the entire planet now surrounded by Union forces.
“You led them right to us!” said the very angry, and rather glitchy, form on the view screen of the Confederate Briefing Room. This was CO Admiral Mahari–a mature woman in the classic gun-metal grey suit of the Confederate military alliance, and whose greying ponytail still held threads of the cornflower yellow that it must have once been.
In front of the viewscreen sat Jake Steed–General Steed, Hank thought ruefully–a Confederate Agent who had snuck onto the Lordstar and a man whom Hank would have shot dead, were it not for the fact that they appeared to be on the same side.
Besides Captain Snider stood Lory Cox, a Union dissident who looked about as appalled as Hank did at what they were facing. And on the other side of her was the Professor. The guy who had started this whole mess.
“Admiral Mahari, I must point you to the fact that this base is a well-known secret amongst all Confederates and Dissidents–it was only a matter of time before the Union forces–” Steed was saying in his solid, calm manner.
Nothing fazed that guy, Hank thought.
“Well, we sure as Butang crap could have done with more time before the Union found us!” the woman said.
She wasn’t even on the base, Hank realized. Although this looked to be a well-established military base with defensive gun emplacements around the metal buildings and domes, and an electrified perimeter fence that kept out the planet’s indigenous Giant Sloth-like creatures, the Butang–it seemed that it wasn’t the only one that the Confederates had.
Which was kind of a blessing, at least, Hank thought, for the Confederates that were left. The Confederates were a loose powerhouse of non-aligned worlds who had, so far, managed to escape the worst degradations of the more powerful Union Empire. Hank had always been led to believe that most of their worlds were little more than balls of muck barely out of the equivalent of the twentieth century, compared to that of the much more powerful Union.
But it was clear that the Confederates had been busy while the Union wasn’t watching. They had been building up their armaments, ships, troops, bases.
“Not that any of it is going to make a blind bit of difference now,” Hank muttered to himself.
“I’m sorry, soldier?” said CO Admiral Mahari, glaring out from the screen as her face once again glitched with static.
“I’m not your soldier, lady,” Hank growled.
“People, please…” Jake Steed held up his hands in mock surrender. “Now is not the time for blame. Now is the time for solutions to this problem,” the man’s eyes flickered to the overhead sensor screens on the wall, “to that.”
On the screens above them were two images–one a close-up tactical map of the Confederate base, and the other a near-orbit map showing the green orb of the planet that they were on. Around that orb were the fifty or so green blips of the Confederate ships–and around that were the angry red vectors of the Union ships. At least twice the number of the Confederate defenders.
“They’ve dropped out of warp, but they are still a few thousand klicks from our forward satellites,” Steed looked at the tactical map. “We have a little time to ready the base…”
Ready the base for what–total annihilation? Hank thought as he watched Steed’s hands flicker over his controls and for the sound of ever more urgent klaxons and alarms to begin outside. On the near-base tactical map, i
nsignia and lights started appearing at the gun emplacements as the ever-ready crews started to fire up their tracking systems…
“General Steed, you know the importance of the REAL mission…” CO Admiral Mahari said sternly.
“I do,” Steed nodded.
“Mind telling the rest of us?” Hank interjected. Of course, he knew about the message that Professor Serrano had decoded when he worked in the Union scientific facilities. But the years that Hank had spent rising through the Union ranks and eventually donning the super-black special-ops soldier suit had taught him one thing: It was always wise to find out what your superiors thought the mission was. Even if they had given you clear instructions–there were many times when he would have been kicking down the door to some dissident cell to receive last minute urgent instructions from Senior-Officer-this or General-that which would completely change the mission parameters.
And besides which, this is MY life and MY crew we’re talking about here… Hank’s eyes slid to the nervous-looking Professor Serrano, whose eyes were locked onto the screen just the same as everyone else.
“It’s all about the Message of course.” CO Admiral Mahari said. “It holds the key to Confederate freedom. It contains data-sets on advanced weaponry, agricultural machines, improved warp-drives, subspace relay systems–we cannot let the Union hold onto that information any longer!”
“Professor,” Hank nodded at Serrano, who looked as startled as a rabbit to be directly asked for his analysis.
“Ah, well, the Union has always claimed that the Message is evidence of an alien race….” Serrano began, his long-fingered hands fluttering. He wasn’t a man built for combat, Hank thought. He was used to giving lectures and seminars, not battle briefings.
“Just the facts please, Professor–we know that was all a load of Union hogwash…”
“But was it though…?” Serrano said, his eyes lighting up as his enthusiasm warmed. “The Message we received was certainly filled with all sorts of wonders, but it would be unwise for our analysis to rule out what happened to Earth, all those centuries ago…”
Everyone was aware of what had happened to Earth of course, Hank knew. A space virus had decimated the population, forcing the creation of the generation ships that the survivors had seeded the stars with. Thus was born the tyrannical Union Empire and the Confederate alliance and a whole scattering of weirder, wilder human outposts. Some people still believed that the space virus was the creation of some malevolent alien species, seeking to eliminate the galactic competition.
Did that mean that the Professor was one of those quacks? Hank thought. Good grief. As if he didn’t have enough problems than to have to start worrying about the mental health of his crew as well.
“Please, Professor. Just the facts,” Hank repeated. “Is the Message everything that Admiral Mahari believes it to be?”
Hank saw Serrano open his mouth to pontificate once again, but from the thunderous look on both Hank’s and the glitched CO Admiral Mahari’s face he opted for silence and nodded instead.
“Okay,” Hank turned. “Well, I have some real bad news for you lady,” he addressed the leading military commander of the Confederacy. “The data that we managed to decode out of the Union servers is empty. It doesn’t have the Message in it.”
“What? Is that true…?” Steed paled behind the desk. Finally, there appeared to be something that shocked him. Hank would have laughed where it not for that total annihilation thing…
“It is,” Hank explained what Serrano had told him just moments before they had entered the briefing room. “It was a dupe. The Union was playing us this whole time.”
“Probably so that they could find the Confederate base,” Lory Cox muttered beside him.
“And now, seeing as we’re all going to die terrible fiery and hopefully quick deaths, I am going to make sure that I don’t notice it…” Hank reached for his left thigh holster–the one that mirrored the one on his right, but instead of the heavy Union pistol, it held his trusty bottle of 25 year, oak-cask aged Cubanian whiskey.
“Captain,” Lory said a little disapprovingly, but Hank had heard opinions like that a thousand times before. ‘How could you? Don’t get drunk! Not at a time like this’ Hank almost laughed. To be honest, Hank Snider wasn’t sure if there was a better time to get plastered…
“General, you know that we’ve committed too many forces already to this. Your mission remains the same: Get That Message, and I don’t care how you do it.” Mahari said.
“But that means going back to the Message Center,” Serrano said out loud. “It’s a top-secret Union research facility, in highly-regulated space.” He should know after all, Hank thought, as both he and Lory had worked there–although Lory had only been pretending to work as she was actually an undercover agent.
“The Shimmering Path,” Lory said suddenly, which Hank knew was the underground dissident group that she belonged to, working to try and subvert and overthrow the corrupt Union.
“Can they get here in…?” Steed looked at the overhead tactical map, “Oh, I’d say about half an hour or so?” Even Steed didn’t look convinced.
“And do our Shimmering Path comrades even have access to battleships!?” If Steed, who was the nice one, Hank thought, remained unconvinced, then CO Admiral Mahari looked positively hostile to the idea.
“You’d be surprised,” Lory growled at them both.
“Explain,” Mahari barked at her, earning a sharp look and a tightening of Lory’s jaw.
“We don’t have much, but we’re infiltrated throughout the Union. I bet that there are even Path agents on that Union fleet out there. If you let me send a message to them, they might be able to help us.” Lory said.
“Do it,” Steed said, rising from his chair and letting Lory take it to access the Confederate bases’ satellite network.
“Just get that Message, General Steed.” There was a sigh of disgust from the CO Admiral Mahari, and then a dull click as the screen went black.
“Wow,” Hank said, his voice echoing into the flask as he sipped. “She’s a real hard-ass, right?”
Outside those metal walls of the Confederate base, the grey-suited Confederate soldiers raced back and forth to their positions as red lights flared and pulsed.
It was dusk, and the already deeply-crimson sun of the planet, it was almost an L-class red-brown star in fact, was starting to set, turning the skies above to a deep inferno-red.
It was perhaps a fitting sight for the battle to come.
Confederate soldiers ran to the metal towers and jumped into the harnesses for the orbital guns, as the tower grooves opened up and there were extended launch tubes. On battle screens and HUDs all over the base, Confederate soldiers saw tiny flashing crosshairs start to scan and sweep the darkening night, as–even though they couldn’t see them–were out there somewhere approaching the Confederate fleet. The guns would be the last line of defense for the Confederate base.
Higher still, squadron COs in their Confederate attack craft tried to not display any hint of nervousness to their pilots. The fifty defense craft were jockeying into squadron position–each battle group comprising of ten ships; three wings of three and one CO vessel. They would attack in waves if they could, but the Union forces were two to one in their favor at least.
And further out even than the orbiting defense craft came the satellites–most were civilian, but a scattering were orbital defense satellites, and, as their automated sensors pinged off the falling wave of Union craft, they waited for them to come into range…
3…2…1!
The weapons’ ports on the defense satellites opened with bursts of gas, and from them exploded small missiles, rising on the plumes of their own rockets, like a cloud of gnats against a herd of charging elephants…
The battle had begun.
2
Lory’s fingers moved ferociously fast over the Confederate’s computer display, as the alarms continued to blare above her.
‘AT
TENTION ALL PERSONNEL: Action Stations. REPEAT: Action Stations. Those not on front-line deployment to prepare with evacuation plan. ATTENTION ALL PERSONNEL…’