Crimson Worlds Successors: The Complete Trilogy

by Jay Allan

  He glared at his adversary but said nothing. The prisoner did not speak to his captors. He would not give them the satisfaction. They could beat grunts and howls of pain from him, but he would not answer their questions, nor converse with them in any way.

  “Still silent after all these years?” Every word from the Tyrant’s mouth was a mockery. Years before, the prisoner would have lunged at his nemesis, willing to risk death for a chance to kill the man he blamed for his misfortune. But his body had been so battered over the years, it no longer had the strength to fight. Indeed, his legs had been broken and haphazardly mended so many times, he could barely stand. So silence was his last line of resistance, and he’d sworn to himself he would maintain it, no matter what. He knew it was all that held him together, that if he relented it would destroy him.

  “I just wanted to pay you a visit, to let you know that after all the years of housing and feeding you, the time has come for you to serve a purpose.” The Tyrant leaned down, staring into the prisoner’s eyes but still maintained his distance. This had been a dangerous man, and even now he still remembered the fiery madness the captive had shown when they’d first brought him here.

  “Don’t worry, though. It will not be too strenuous on you. Indeed, you will not even know it is happening.” The Tyrant smiled mockingly. “But don’t worry…you will be a great help to my plans.”

  He turned and walked back the way he had come, pausing at the door and looking back. “I almost forgot the best news.” His eyes glared at the prisoner, revealing a hatred his voice did not convey. “Once this matter is over, you will no longer be useful. We can finally put you out of your misery.” He looked around. “Though I don’t know how we’ll get this cell cleaned after so many years of your rotting carcass befouling it.”

  The Tyrant laughed, a brutal, mocking sound, as he walked out slowly, and the heavy door slammed behind him, leaving the prisoner again in his endless solitude. A few seconds later, the cover slammed over the skylight, and the captive was again plunged into total darkness.

  But for all his suffering, for the torture and the endless, agonizing passage of so many years of brutal captivity, the prisoner was not broken yet. He’d ceased to struggle, curbed the urges to fight back, to lash out at his tormentors, accepting that physical resistance was something his broken body could no longer sustain. But deep inside, in the place in his mind that made him who he was, the flame of defiance still burned. It was less fiery, perhaps—colder than it had been. But it was still there. And it was fed by memories—recollections of another life, one taken from him. One he silently swore he would one day reclaim.

  He stared at the closed door, still seeing the Tyrant’s hated face, and in that place where the part of him that was still himself dwelled, he clung to a tenuous existence…and a single thought burned.

  One day I will kill you. And I will laugh as I spit on your corpse.

  Turn the page to continue the adventure in The Prisoner of Eldaron

  The Prisoner of Eldaron

  (Successors II)

  Black Eagles’ Force Structure

  HQ Staff (approx. 100 personnel)

  Special Action Teams (approx. 200 personnel)

  Black Regiment (approx. strength 1,800 combat, 400 close support)

  White Regiment (approx. strength 1,400 combat, 350 close support)

  Blue Regiment (approx. strength 1,400 combat, 350 close support)

  Red Regiment (approx. strength 1,400 combat, 350 close support)

  Medical Services (approx. 600 personnel)

  Logistics Division – “L2” – (approx. 2,200 personnel)

  Garrison Battalion (approx. strength 800)

  “Nest” Operations (approx. strength 1,600)

  Training Depot (approx. 400 training staff and 1,000-1,500 trainees)

  Fleet Command (approx. 3,200 ship crew and 600 maintenance)

  Fighter Command (approx. 320 crew and 600 maintenance personnel)

  “Unassigned” (approximately 40 intelligence agents and independent operatives)

  Eagle Fleet

  Eagle One

  Eagle Two

  Eagle Three

  Eagle Four

  Eagle Five

  Eagle Six

  Eagle Seven

  Eagle Eight

  Eagle Nine

  Eagle Ten

  Chapter 1

  Freighter Carlyle

  Epsilon-14 System

  100,000 kilometers from Atlantia Warp Gate

  Earthdate: June, 2319 AD (34 Years After the Fall)

  “All systems fully operational, Skipper.” Cal Durham looked across Carlyle’s tiny bridge toward the freighter’s captain. “We can execute the burn whenever you are ready.”

  Jackson Marne nodded. “Enter the course into the navcom, Cal. Acceleration at 3g.” Three gravities of thrust was a lot for a freighter, and he knew he’d get some grumbling from the crew. But Marne was a navy vet, and he didn’t have a sympathetic ear for pointless whining. Before the Fall he’d served in Augustus Garret’s fleet, where he’d become accustomed to stretches of five or six gravities sitting at his workstation—and thirty or more crammed into the acceleration tanks. And no one bitched to Augustus Garret about his orders, however uncomfortable they were.

  These powder puffs have never been in a tank. They have no idea what real spacers deal with.

  Marne had been hauling cargo since the days just after the Fall, almost from the moment he’d mustered out of the fleet. He’d been born on Earth, and with the home world in ruins after the final war between the Superpowers, he’d chosen Atlantia as a place to settle, a decision made on data no more comprehensive than a few photos of the planet’s magnificent rocky coasts. Atlantia had lived up to its reputation as an achingly beautiful world and a fine place to live, but Marne was a spacer at heart, and perfect weather and beautiful coastlines were pleasures relegated to brief periods between voyages. He’d gone to the naval academy at eighteen, and the merchant services almost immediately after he mustered out, which meant he had spent most of his adult life within the confines of a ship in space.

  He’d been an executive officer on his first freighter, but for the last twenty-five years he’d served as a captain. The job had become routine to him, even with the increased threat of piracy in recent years. But the veteran skipper was nervous about this run. Maybe it’s the secrecy, he thought, trying to brush aside the tense feeling in his gut. The public manifest stated that Carlyle was carrying pharmaceuticals, some medicinal, some recreational—and all derived from the sea life teeming in Atlantia’s bountiful oceans. For decades, indeed, ever since the planet had been colonized, its only exports of significant value had been an assortment of products derived from the oceans that covered 90% of its surface.

  But that’s not what we’re really carrying. Our actual cargo is far more valuable, almost beyond price.

  Carlyle didn’t have a load of drugs or a stasis-preserved hold full of delicacies from the sea, not on this run. Her bays instead carried very special ores, raw material rich in stable trans-uranium elements, the first shipment since production on Glaciem had been restored, after a still-unexplained attack on that world that had left dozens of mine workers dead.

  Cavenaugh Freight was the oldest and largest shipping firm on Atlantia, the only one even marginally comparable to the great transport combines that had developed on the wealthier worlds since the Fall. Marne hadn’t been at all surprised when the government entrusted the very special cargo to Cavenaugh, but he’d been more than a little startled when Elsworth Cavenaugh told him he and Carlyle had been selected for the run. Marne was a senior captain, and he’d been reasonably close to old man Cavenaugh back when the company had been smaller and its operations more informal. But the firm was much larger now than it had been years before, and the former CEO was well over one hundred years old and long retired. Elsworth IV was now in charge, and Marne had never had a close relationship with the old man’s arrogant offspring. He wa
s among the most experienced of Cavenaugh’s captains, but he’d never played the social and political games it took to obtain high profile voyages.

  Whatever the reasoning that had put him in command, Marne knew the significance of the run. Atlantia, though one of the older colonies, had never been a particularly wealthy world. Its pharmaceutical products enjoyed heavy demand, but they were expensive to manufacture, and that kept profit margins fairly low. And the planet needed many imports—electronics, software, vehicles. Its general lack of industrialization created a trade deficit that had plagued its economy since the Fall. The final war between the Superpowers had freed all the worlds of Occupied Space, but Atlantia, for all its natural beauty, had been more prosperous under Alliance control than as a truly independent planet.

  But now that will all change. All because of Glaciem.

  The frigid world on the outskirts of Atlantia’s solar system had barely been explored for most of the 130 years since the first colonization party transited in to the Epsilon Indi system. Indeed, men had lived on Atlantia for half a century before they’d even bothered to name it. It was far from the warp gates and so distant from the primary there was little reason to even think about it…just another lifeless rock of little value. That was until one of the rare scientific expeditions to the frigid planet discovered something extraordinary. Glaciem was one of the eleven places in Occupied Space where STUs had been found to exist in naturally-occurring deposits.

  Stable trans-uranic elements were super-heavy metals, materials ensconced on the period table north of uranium, far north in the case of the very special isotopes in Carlyle’s hold. Many such elements had been synthesized in laboratories over the years, but most were extremely radioactive, with half-lives too short to allow the creation of meaningful quantities. However, the ore Marne’s ship was carrying was rich with a very special element, number 164 on the periodic table, dead center in a still poorly understood phenomenon known as the second island of stability.

  For reasons human science had not yet fully explained, there were two small segments of elements on the periodic table that produced isotopes far more stable than those around them. The first island existed in the low-120s, and the elements in that range had half-lives of days and weeks, while those just before and after decayed in microseconds. But it was the second island that produced truly useful elements, with half-lives in the millions of years. These materials were still radioactive, though far less so than those outside the island. There was a plethora of uses for such heavy metals, but the most important was in spaceship drives, where even minute quantities could easily be converted to less-stable super-heavy elements and achieve critical mass almost instantaneously, with the release of enormous energies.

  The elements in the second island had been known for over a century, but they had been produced only in the lab by particle accelerators. The process was almost incalculably expensive, at least when producing quantities useful for anything but research. It had been widely believed that no such element would be found in a naturally-occurring state, but that assertion had been proven profoundly wrong when a party of explorers discovered the first veins of the material on a frozen moon in the Beta Cariolis system.

  No one had developed a credible hypothesis to explain why the material was found on a few rare—and in nine cases out of eleven—frigid worlds, but that didn’t stop the gold rush mentality every time a new source was found. And now Atlantia had its own priceless resource, one that promised to expand and invigorate the planet’s economy for generations to come.

  That’s the future down in my hold, the promise of prosperity for millions of Atlantians.

  If it gets through.

  Carlyle was a strong ship, one of the best-armed in the Cavenaugh fleet. She was a match for most pirates, one of the reasons Marne had only been attacked once in the almost sixty trips he’d made as her captain. And the true nature of her cargo was a closely-guarded secret. When Carlyle returned, Marne knew he and his people would be fifteen minute celebrities, the guardians of the first delivery from the mines of Glaciem. Their single cargo run would double the value of Atlantia’s exports by itself, and the potential wealth from fully exploiting that frozen planet’s treasure was almost incalculable. Atlantians had long enjoyed their planet’s magnificent climate and almost unimaginable natural beauty, but soon they would feel the effects of an influx of real wealth, something none of them could have imagined just a few years before.

  But fame, however fleeting, still lay ahead. For now, only a handful of people outside of the crew had any idea what the ship was carrying. Carlyle’s launch had been unexciting in appearance, just another run of routine pharmaceuticals to the eyes of anyone interested enough to pay attention.

  Still, Marne had a bad feeling. Carlyle was bound for Arcadia, a four jump run from Atlantia, and one that didn’t involve passing through any high risk areas. But he couldn’t shake the discomfort that had plagued him since his ship’s launch. His cargo was classified, but he didn’t think much of peoples’ ability to keep secrets. All it would take was one bout of bragging by the pompous Elsworth IV or a politician’s loose lips in bed with his mistress, and the word would be out. And every pirate in Occupied Space would salivate at the chance to bag a cargo of STUs.

  “How’s the scope?” Marne had been asking the question every half hour since he’d been on the bridge. It was a waste of time, he knew. The AI would warn them immediately of any contact. But it made him feel better to check. Epsilon-14 was a useless system, its three planets so utterly without value no one had ever maintained so much as an outpost there. It’s only use was as part of the quickest trade route between Atlantia and Arcadia…and Marne knew for a fact there were no Arcadian vessels scheduled for a run to Atlantia right now.

  “Clear, Skipper. No contacts.” Durham didn’t sound bored or irritated as Marne knew he’d be if their roles were reversed. Your paranoia has probably rubbed off on him. He’s been glancing down at the scope every few minutes for the past six hours, even when you haven’t asked.

  Cal Durham was a great executive officer, and Marne knew he was lucky to have him. He’d have sworn Durham was ex-navy, but he wasn’t. He was just one of those rare people who seemed born to spend their lives blasting through the depths of space, and he was an odds on favorite to secure a captain’s berth before long. Perhaps he’d even take over Carlyle one day soon.

  Marne himself was close to retirement, perhaps another trip or two, and he’d be done. He’d spent a life in space, and as much as it so often seemed like home, he knew it wasn’t. In recent years his thoughts had focused more on the cost of a career like his. He was ready to hang up his captain’s uniform and try to repair some of the devastation his decades in space had wreaked on his personal life.

  He had an estranged wife, one who’d tried for years to deal with the endless separations until she’d finally decided she just didn’t care anymore. And a son and a daughter he hardly knew, both grown now and harboring their own resentments for childhoods spent mostly without a father. He’d told himself there was still time, but he wasn’t sure he really believed it. They didn’t hate him, he was fairly certain of that. He hadn’t been an abusive monster, and his career had supported them all, including expensive educations for both children. They just didn’t know him, not really. He was like nothing to them, someone who should have been part of their lives, but for the most part, wasn’t. He suspected that might be harder to overcome than if he’d done something truly awful.

  Forgiveness is one thing, difficult perhaps, but attainable. But how does one overcome irrelevance?

  “Skipper, I’m getting energy readings from the Wolf-441 warp gate.”

  Marne snapped his head toward Durham, feeling his stomach clench as he did. “Full power to scanners, Cal. It’s probably nothing to worry about, but let’s make sure.” Marne didn’t believe that. He didn’t believe it for a second.

  * * * * *

  “Scanning report complete,
Captain. It appears to be an Atlantian freighter—a fairly large one, approximately 150,000 tons displacement.” Lars Treven’s tone was mundane, professional, but it was lacking enthusiasm. Atlantian ships tended to be poor prizes. Other than an occasional shipment of some of the more sought-after of its pharmaceutical exports, the planet’s freighters were barely worth attacking.

  “All hands to battlestations, Mister Treven. We have ourselves a target.” Ivan Yurich held back a smile at Treven’s lackluster tone. He knew his first mate was expecting a mundane cargo from the Atlantian ship, one that would barely cover the expedition’s costs. But Marne knew better.

  He had been Black Viper’s captain for ten years, the first six as an independent pirate, and the last four as a member of the Black Flag Syndicate. He’d enjoyed being answerable to no one, but finally the Black Flag had made him an offer he couldn’t refuse—stunning upgrades for his ship at no cost and an ongoing intel feed leading him to the richest targets in Occupied Space. His recruitment hadn’t been all carrot, though. Significant stick had been in evidence as well, especially when his contact assured him, without any detectable emotion, that he’d walk out of their meeting a member of the syndicate…or with a bounty on his head so large, every pirate and adventurer in Occupied Space would be after him.

  His ship’s name had simply been Viper then, becoming Black Viper when she bowed to the nomenclature of the shadowy organization. His new allies—masters?—had been true to their words, and the value of his ship’s prizes had increased dramatically. The Black Flag organization had provided access to better venues to sell booty as well, and even after kicking 40% of the take upstairs, his profitability was way up, more than double what it had been in his days as an independent.

  The massive increase in prize money had other advantages as well, not the least of which was recruiting quality crew members. He’d managed to ease out some of his less capable people over the last few years, and now he had more veterans of the various navies than ever before. That made his crew old—anyone who had served in a Superpower’s navy was at least in his mid-fifties—but he found it to be a worthwhile trade. Younger crews were harder to control and more likely to do stupid things, while his combat veterans had lived long enough to appreciate a good situation. Black Viper ran much like a naval vessel, and that discipline showed in its extraordinary record of bagging major prizes.