It Ain’t Over…
Robert M. Kerns
Knightsfall Press
Copyright © 2019 by Robert M. Kerns
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means--electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise--without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright owner.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any place or person (whether carbon-based lifeform or otherwise) is unintended and purely coincidental.
Published by Knightsfall Press
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https://www.knightsfallpress.com
About This Book
Buy a planet and disappear...
That's all Cole wanted.
He spent thirteen years hiding on the fringes of society, piloting freighters for criminals and building a stash to do just that.
But life happens when you're busy making plans.
When Cole chooses to save an ejected castaway and stumbles into a crew of his own, he starts down a path that will force him to choose.
Will Cole protect those who have become his people? Or will he slip away quietly in the night?
Read Now to find out!
Chapter One
ACS Adran Jordeen
Pyllesc System
25 June 2999, 10:17 GST
(Galactic Standard Time)
Commander Auvran Volskyn scanned the bridge of his newest command, a destroyer fresh out of the Aurelius shipyard. Named for a military hero some two hundred years in the Aurelian Commonwealth’s past, the Adran Jordeen was the second Dawn-class destroyer in service, after the class prototype. Commander Volskyn desired that the ship would bring honor to her namesake. The first officer’s arrival at his right shoulder drew Volskyn’s attention.
“Yes, XO?”
The first officer leaned close and spoke in low tones. “We have the princess all trussed and awaiting her sacrifice. Marines I trust are watching her.”
Sudden movement at the Sensors station drew Volskyn’s eyes, just as the lieutenant there spun to face the command island.
“Skipper, we’ve detected a freighter matching the configuration and engine signature of a known smuggler, sir! It’s about twenty light-minutes distant on a bearing of zero-three-six by zero-two-two degrees and appears to be on course for the Andersoll jump point. It’s skirting the asteroid field right now.”
“Fantastic, Sensors,” Volskyn said. “Helm, alter course to intercept and increase speed to full. Bring the ship to Alert Status Amber.”
As klaxons sounded all over the ship, Volskyn turned back to the first officer, whispering, “The appearance of that freighter is fortuitous. Is the cut-out in place for the comms system?”
The first officer nodded, also replying in hushed tones, “Yes, sir. I saw to it myself.”
Volskyn nodded and resumed his normal posture. “Comms, signal the freighter: heave to and prepare to be boarded.”
The communications officer keyed the system to record his message and pressed transmit, watching the computer display show the message was sent. Thanks to the newly created cut-out, there was a physical gap of three feet between the data line and the antenna cluster. Since the damage control lines were still transmitting the heartbeat signal, which the engineering systems monitored, the antenna cluster didn’t read as inoperable. In short, the message never reached the antenna cluster, and the communications officer had no way to know.
Three minutes passed, during which the destroyer moved within extended missile range of the freighter, and the communications officer reported, “No response, sir!”
“Signal one more time, Comms. Helm, close up to powered missile range, and match speed with the freighter.”
The communications officer keyed the command to re-transmit his message.
“Powered missile range, Skipper!” the helmsman announced. “Matching speed with the freighter.”
“Still no response, Skipper,” the communications officer said.
Volskyn made eye contact with the first officer and gave a single nod, before directing his attention to the weapons officer and saying, “Sound Battle Stations, and WEPS, lock target on the freighter.”
Freighter Howling Monkey
Pyllesc System
25 June 2999, 10:35 GST
Cole stepped out of the freighter’s head, still zipping up, when a shrill tone erupted from the cockpit. It was the one tone he hoped he’d never hear: hostile weapons lock.
“Aw, hell,” Cole muttered, running the short distance to the cockpit and scanned the readouts as he landed in the pilot’s seat. “Seriously? A Dawn-class destroyer? Where the hell did a Dawn-class destroyer come from?”
Cole grabbed the throttle with his right hand and slammed it forward against its stop, rotating the handle ninety degrees to his right. ‘Turning the handle’ was a signal to the engineering computer to deactivate the safety interlocks on the engine subsystem and dump half the ship’s power into the engines. The cockpit lights dimmed to half their full brightness, and Cole felt himself get pushed back into the pilot’s seat as the inertial dampeners no longer had sufficient power to counteract the full thrust of the engines.
Cole’s fingers flew over the console as he instructed the engineering computer to re-route all non-essential power to the shields and called up his stored helm routines. A missile warning wailed as Cole picked Evasive Maneuvers Plan 59927, activating it and selecting the nearby asteroid mining camp as a destination while flipping the switch to activate the automated anti-missile systems. The freighter’s anti-missile systems were the modern equivalent of the ancient ‘chaff and flares,’ and when Cole felt the freighter begin his Evasive Maneuvers algorithm, he jumped up from the pilot’s seat.
Cole ran back through the ship, heading for the starboard suit lockers. This model of freighter had two docking airlocks roughly amidships, and each airlock came with an anteroom intended for the storage and maintenance of both emergency soft-suits and the tricked-out hard-suits required for any hullwalking, or extravehicular activity (or EVA) as it was called in olden times.
A blast shaking the ship and almost throwing Cole off his feet led him to think the anti-missile systems weren’t everything the freighter’s owner had led him to believe, but with any luck, that wouldn’t matter too much longer. Just as the access hatch to his destination came into view, the low-frequency hum generated by the artificial gravity system cut out…along with the artificial gravity. Cole was mid-step when it happened, and the motion of stepping with his right leg sent him drifting toward the corridor’s ceiling.
“Oh, shit…oh, shit!” Cole said as he pressed his hands and feet against the smooth corridor bulkheads, trying to arrest his ascent. He was not successful.
What his hands and feet failed to do, though, Cole’s shoulders and upper back achieved very well as they collided with corridor’s ceiling. His head, lower back, legs, and feet struck the ceiling less than a second later. Cole shook his head to clear it and positioned himself to push off, hoping to coast down the corridor to the suit locker. Just as Cole was drawing his knees to push off, the high-pitched whine of the artificial gravity powering up echoed through the corridor.
“Aw, damn,” Cole said with a sigh, just as the whine was replaced with the low-frequency hum, and he fell to the deck. His forearms, elbows, and knees took the worst of the beating, and Cole gave himself two seconds to regain his breath before gingerly pushing himself to his feet.
Cole almost hobbled the three meters to the suit locker and went straight to the spare parts cabinet. He kicked the locking panel, slamming the sole of his right boot against it, and the lid sprang
open. That was a design flaw with those types of floor lockers; one good kick to the code panel would spring the lock without reporting the cabinet had been accessed.
Cole switched his attention to a nearby repeater screen and its associated control console, keying in the commands necessary to bring up the cockpit’s readouts for shield, engines, and reactor integrity. A quick scan showed him the shields at 63%, with the computer auto-balancing the shield sectors; the main engines slowly burning through their thruster nozzles; and the reactor running at 125% and not-so-slowly approaching critical levels.
“It would’ve been nice not to have to do this with a destroyer lighting up the ship,” Cole said with a sigh, “but I suppose it will add a bit of realism if Qeecir ever locates the freighter’s black box.”
Turning back to the spare parts locker, Cole withdrew his custom-designed hard-suit, grunting at the effort. Having sunk half his life savings into the suit (at least the savings other people knew about), Cole smiled at the all black, state-of-the-art, stealth material making up the suit’s outer covering. Beyond that, the suit had thermal shielding to hide the occupant’s body heat, and a master control would allow him to turn off all systems that would emit any kind of radiation into space at will—especially the recovery beacon—while leaving the suit otherwise functional. It held four hours of air in its internal reservoir while supporting a ‘backpack’ containing another six. The suit also had a built-in maneuvering system, designed to achieve maximum effect with as little fuel consumption as possible.
Cole keyed the repeater screen to add a readout displaying the time to the helm’s destination in suit-hours, then crossed the small space to the inner airlock door and began the manual bypass sequence that would activate the explosive bolts in the airlock’s bulkhead. The explosive bolts were a safety feature intended for times of emergency egress. Cole worked through the entire sequence until he reached the final step, which was pulling a lever that would complete the explosive ejection of the starboard airlock, and stopped. Then, he turned back to his suit and struggled into the ungainly pride and joy that would hopefully save his ass soon.
The ship was being hammered by that destroyer, with the shields down to 30%, by the time Cole was comfortable with the suit-time to travel to the mining camp. He donned his helmet and locked it into place, activating the suit’s systems and delivering a Heads-Up Display to the interior of the helmet. He lifted his arms and used his right hand to enter a specific code into the control panel on the suit’s forearm control panel. In response, the suit activated it’s communications system just long enough to squirt a low-frequency signal burst across the ship. The signal burst contained only the minimal energy required to penetrate the hull and activate the detonator for a small explosive Cole had placed on the port-side shield relay at his last refueling stop. The explosion bringing down the shields across the whole port side of the ship occurring at almost the same time as a fresh round of missile detonations was a happy accident.
The computer was already struggling to maintain a working shield grid under the destroyer’s assault. When the port-side shield relay that routed power to all the shield emitters on the port side disconnected from the system because of vaporization, the computer redoubled its efforts by re-routing all shield power through the starboard relay. The starboard shield relay in that freighter—well, any civilian craft, really—had never been engineered to support the entire power for the shields, and within moments—not even a full minute—the starboard shield relay melted to slag. The shields over the starboard side of the freighter vanished, and the moment Cole saw the shield readout on the repeater screen flash red, he pulled the lever on the airlock.
Cole felt—more than heard—a dull whump as the hull transmitted the concussion of the airlock’s explosive bolts detonating. He had enough time to release the handle before the explosive decompression propelled him clear of the freighter.
Cole floated amidst the remains of the starboard airlock, watching the Aurelian destroyer pound the freighter into debris. Without shields and under the strain of running at 125% for almost thirty minutes, the reactor soon triggered the engineering systems’ emergency ejection protocol. Cole was still close enough to watch a hull plate detach from the underside of the freighter just moments before a reactor assembly that glowed red launched into space like an outsized torpedo. As the reactor exploded in an orgy of thermonuclear destruction, Cole hoped the cluster of debris around him would hide him from the destroyer’s sensors.
For what felt like an agonizing eternity, Cole watched the destroyer hold station just off the port quarter of the freighter’s remains, a gargantuan killer dominating his entire field of view. He was not prepared at all to see an airlock open on the destroyer and eject someone in what could only be a soft-suit. The destroyer then turned away from the ruined hulk, its engines ramping up as it left the area at speed.
Chapter Two
Pyllesc System
25 June 2999, 11:04 GST
Cole floated in space, all alone in the night. His momentum carried him closer to the asteroid field that contained his current destination, but he looked out at a distant shape that was barely discernable against the blackness of space. Staring at the drifting soft-suit, Cole had two distinct thoughts warring within him for supremacy. On the one side, he bore no responsibility for whomever floated in that soft-suit; in fact, his rational side could present zero reasons rescuing the poor sod would be a benefit. On the other side, though, the poor sod was a fellow spacer, and no spacer—not even a pirate with the blackest heart—would leave a fellow spacer to asphyxiate in the cold void.
Stifling the urge to growl, Cole keyed in the commands to activate all of the suit’s systems, including its link to his implant. For several hundred years now, most people carried an implant for a multitude of reasons, including paying merchants and interfacing with their banks. Implant, toot, PC…no matter what you called it, the computer embedded just behind a person’s right ear allowed one to interface with many devices in the modern age. Most people called it progress.
The suit’s control systems now interfacing with his implant, Cole selected the distant soft-suit with a wink of his left eye and activated his suit’s maneuvering systems. The dull roar inside the suit of the jets kicking off overwhelmed Cole’s thoughts for just a moment as he felt himself being angled toward the distant soft-suit and pushed to counter the momentum imparted by the explosive decompression of the freighter. Having nothing else to do, Cole watched the HUD readout that showed his suit’s remaining air as he drifted toward the castaway.
The readout listed a value of 9.817 hours of air remaining when Cole started his journey to the soft-suit, and it read 9.383 hours remaining when the suit finished its braking maneuver and eased him into arms’ length. The soft-suit’s occupant had not reacted yet to Cole’s arrival, and the first thing Cole did was pull the two safety clips designed to anchor two suits together, attaching them to the corresponding safety rings on the soft-suit.
Soft-suits were never intended for long-term occupancy, so most soft-suit designers didn’t engineer the air reservoirs to hold over thirty to forty-five minutes of air, and the occupant had already used at least twenty-six minutes during Cole’s transit. Cole pulled the emergency umbilical that would connect the soft-suit to his own for such things as medical information and sharing air and, peeling back the port’s protective covering, locked the umbilical into place. Cole sent the command to activate the umbilical through his implant and watched his air readout drop from 9.317 hours remaining down to 8.817 hours remaining. The occupant must’ve been breathing fumes.
Whoever it was still hadn’t reacted to Cole’s presence or actions, so he keyed the medical subsystem to display the other person’s status. Cole’s suit computer reported a stabilizing heart rate and blood-oxygen levels (more confirmation that the soft-suit was running on fumes) but also a complete lack of consciousness. Cole frowned. The medical sensors in a soft-suit were limited, so he had no wa
y to know if the person was unconscious from hypoxia or some other cause. The medical subsystem reported the person as healthy, though, so that was good news…right?
Cole accessed his suit’s navigation system and selected the nearby asteroid mining camp for a destination and, as the maneuvering jets re-oriented him and his castaway, attached the third safety clip at his waist for increased stability between the suits.
The time read 14:23, with 3.283 hours of air remaining, when Cole reached the outer perimeter of the mining camp. He was just about to key his suit’s comms and announce his presence when he saw a series of explosions ripple across the mining camp at the access shaft into the asteroid. Cole could only watch in impotent silence as a cloud of asteroid debris shredded the airlock nearest the mining shaft like a shotgun blast tearing through paper. A fireball flared from the shredded structure and was snuffed out as the remaining air evacuated to space.
Cole maintained his approach to the mining camp, despite seeing no activity or detecting any comms chatter. As he entered the debris cloud expanding from the remains of the camp, there were enough particulates for his suit’s computer to calculate the most likely cause of the explosion: the ignition of a methane/oxygen pocket within the asteroid.
Arriving at the sole remaining docking arm for the camp, Cole moved to the airlock and keyed the airlock to cycle and open the outer door. Cole maneuvered himself and his castaway into the airlock. Its interior display showed the mining camp’s life support was recovering from the blast, so at least the majority of the camp’s structural integrity was sound. Cole disconnected the safety clips and umbilical from the soft-suit and laid the soft-suited figure down on the airlock’s deck. Then, he activated the magnetic soles in his suit’s boots as he squared his shoulders and steadied his legs. Knowing he was as prepared as he would get, Cole accessed the airlock controls via his implant and activated the commands to cycle and open the inner door.
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