Virago One: A Hard Science Fiction Technothriller (Ace of Space Book 2)

by John Triptych

  Books by John Triptych

  Wrath of the Old Gods series (in chronological order)

  The Glooming

  Pagan Apocalypse

  Canticum Tenebris

  The Fomorians

  A World Darkly

  Eye of Balor

  Mortuorum Luctum

  Expatriate Underworld series

  The Opener

  The Loader

  Dying World series

  Lands of Dust

  City of Delusions

  The Maker of Entropy

  Ace of Space series

  The Piranha Solution

  Virago One

  Thrillers

  The Girl in the Darkness

  Hunt You Down

  Virago One

  Ace of Space Book 2

  By John Triptych

  Copyright© 2017 by John Triptych

  All rights reserved.

  J Triptych Publishing

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and events either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, and/or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover by Deranged Doctor Design (http://www.derangeddoctordesign.com/)

  Interior formatting by Polgarus Studios

  For ES,

  the times we could have had.

  Author’s note:

  Dear reader, I would like to thank you for purchasing this book. As a self-published author, I incur all the costs of producing this novel so your feedback means a lot to me. If you wouldn’t mind, could you please take a few minutes and post a review of this online and let others know what you think of it?

  As I’m sure you’re aware, the more reviews I get, the better my future sales would be and therefore my financial incentive to produce more books for your enjoyment increases. I am very happy to read any comments and questions and I am willing to respond to you personally as quickly as I can. My email is jtriptych@gmail.com if you wish to contact me directly. Again, thank you and I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it!

  Please join my exclusive mailing list! You will get the latest news on my upcoming works and special discounts. Subscription is FREE and you get lots of FREE books! Just copy and paste this link to your browser: http://eepurl.com/bK-xGn

  I would like to acknowledge the following:

  A huge thanks to Michel Lamontagne, for designing the spacecraft in question from the ground up (even including 3D modeling!), and for invaluable assistance with teaching me how a fusion drive might conceivably work. This would have been a very different book if it weren’t for his selfless contributions.

  Phillip Gaynor and Steven Pietrobon, for a big help when it came to math (which isn’t my strong suit), beta reading, and a whole lot of other things. Thanks for helping me keep the science as accurate as possible.

  Web blogs also played an important role when it came to researching the topic of a realistic, near-future space war, and there were three in particular that I am very grateful to: Atomic Rockets, Tough SF, and Children of a Dead Earth.

  Table of Contents

  Books by John Triptych

  Author’s note:

  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

  Thanks for reading!

  Also by J Triptych Publishing

  When one's mind dwells on the objects of Senses, fondness for them grows on him, from fondness comes desire, from desire anger.

  Anger leads to bewilderment, bewilderment to loss of memory of true Self, and by that intelligence is destroyed, and with the destruction of intelligence he perishes.

  -The Bhagavad Gita

  Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

  Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

  Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

  And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

  Do not go gentle into that good night.

  -Dylan Thomas

  Chapter 1

  His last day of summer consisted of clear blue skies, along with the occasional gust of salty air that sent cooling waves to his tanned chest. The waters off the Gulf of Mexico had the color of rippling turquoise, almost melding into the cerulean firmament up above him. In a few more days, he would be back at work, and he was doing everything he could to enjoy himself. The cost of renting the motor yacht was expensive, but he figured that he deserved some first-class leisure time, especially with the kind of dangerous occupation he had.

  Jared Levy grunted as he leaned to his side, took a can of beer from the cooler and popped it open. His sunburned feet were propped up by the footrest of the fishing seat that had been bolted on the stern deck of the powerboat. The faded Hawaiian shirt he wore was unbuttoned, his bare chest busy absorbing the heat of the mid-afternoon sun above him. A pair of saltwater fishing rods lay attached to the side of the deck, their lines trawling behind the boat’s wake as it cruised along a leisurely six knots, the baits at the end of the hooks occasionally breaking the water’s surface.

  Sipping his light lager, Jared leaned back on the padded chair and gave a contended sigh. He had been chosen to command the world’s most powerful warship on its maiden voyage. Jared knew he was going to make history, and his name would be remembered for all time. All the tests he had to endure, all the networking, all the handshakes and meetings, had culminated to this once in a lifetime opportunity, and he was going to make the most out of it. The Air Force was an old boy’s club, and one had to know the right people in order to get ahead. In the end, he did what had to be done: Jared made alliances with the people who could advance him while destroying his closest rivals.

  Jared had a dream to fly out into space ever since he was a kid; his first memories were as a young toddler sitting on the hood of the family car, watching the rocket launches from Cape Canaveral on their way to Mars. He deliberately took the hard courses in college, majoring in engineering and physics. His family didn’t have much money, so Jared worked part time in order to learn aircraft piloting at a nearby flight school.

  The moment he graduated, Jared joined the Air Force, telling the recruiter his ultimate goal was to become part of the service’s elite Space Command Corps. He breezed through officer candidate school, earning top marks in every subject. Jared got his first taste of the new frontier when he was selected for astronaut training and easily got his first promotion not long afterwards. Within a year, he experienced training with a reserve crew for one of the prestigious Orion battlecruisers the Air Force was planning to deploy. First conceived and tested over a hundred years ago, an Orion consisted of a spaceship powered by atomic explosions. The idea that a h
uman crew would somehow survive being pushed forward as a nuke exploded underneath them seemed too fantastic to be believed, but continued testing showed it actually worked. Existing space treaties forbade the use of nuclear weapons in both Earth and space, but the military continued to build these gargantuan warships in secret, to be deployed only in an event of a full scale war. The military’s Orion fleet remained on standby, the few times they were deployed these ships would only use their chemical maneuvering thrusters, for the other nations of the world would have easily detected a nuclear detonation in space.

  Gulping down the last of the ice cold beer, Jared crushed the aluminum container and tossed it to the trashcan beside the chair before taking another can from the cooler. Looking up, he could see that the lines on the rods hadn’t moved for the past two hours. It looked like the fish weren’t biting this afternoon. No matter, he thought. Soon enough, all those Orions will become obsolete the moment I sit down on that command chair.

  A feminine voice came from behind. “You want a ham and cheese sandwich, Jared?”

  Jared twisted his head. Behind him stood his wife of twelve years, Sophia, carrying a small tray with some food on it. She wore shorts with a loose fitting blouse. A daughter of an Air Force general, Sophia stood by his side through thick and thin, even when she found out he had a mistress. She was raised as a traditional Catholic, and didn’t believe in divorce. They had no children. Sophia wasn’t sure why she never conceived, but she suspected it might have something to do with her husband’s constant trips out into space.

  Jared held his hand out. “Sure,” he said. “Thanks.”

  She moved forward so he could take the meal. “We’ve been out here for hours, still no fish?”

  Jared took a bite out of the sandwich and shrugged. “It happens, I guess.”

  Sophia adjusted her smartglasses to increase its tint. She had been staying mostly inside the cabin, and the sun was blindingly hot out on the deck. “I’ve read on the internet that you won’t find any blue marlin or tuna left, they’ve been fished to extinction already.”

  Jared snorted. “That’s bull. There’s still a few wild ones around. You’ll get lucky if you catch one since they’re pretty rare nowadays out here. I heard quite a lot of people are offering prizes if you bring one in. There’s some red snappers and amberjacks swimming around, so I can still catch something before the day is up.”

  “Okay. How much longer are we going to stay out here?”

  “The charter runs until six,” Jared said. “You want to go back already?”

  “Well sure, I could join up with Brenda. She and Jeff are back in the hotel. Maybe I could do some last minute shopping.”

  Jared shook his head. “No way. I’ve already paid for this trip and it’s non-refundable. This is my one day I can truly relax. I’ll be gone for at least six months, maybe more after this. You’ll have plenty of time to shop then.”

  Sophia let out a sigh. Brenda and Jeff were their close-knit friends, and were playing golf back at the resort. “Okay, fine. I just wish we hadn’t splurged on this trip. It really ate into our savings, you know.”

  Wiping the crumbs off his chest, he took her by the hand. “Relax, honey. Once I come back from my tour, you won’t ever have to worry about money ever again. We’ll be famous!”

  She gave him a quizzical look. “What do you mean? You never tell me about your missions anyway. You keep saying it’s classified.”

  He winked at her, even though his smartglasses had full tint on so she probably didn’t notice. “Just trust me, okay. I’m about to embark on a record breaking mission, and it’s going to change our lives forever. Your husband is going to be a celebrity after this!”

  Sophia giggled a little. “You never tell me anything, but…” She craned her neck up at the sky.

  “But what?”

  She pointed up, into the wild blue. “Look up there. It’s some sort of drone, I think.”

  He turned around and stared up at the sky. Sure enough, there was a moving object one hundred meters above the boat. Using the telescoping sight application on his smartglasses, Jared magnified the image for a closer look.

  It was an unmanned aerial drone alright. Quad ducted fans allowed it to hover in place, and the white and blue paint made it hard to see across the sun drenched sky. It looked to be the size of a small chair, which meant that it had enlarged batteries for long range capacity. His smartglass readings indicated that it was shadowing them at a discrete distance, its mounted cameras looking directly back at him.

  Jared frowned. Was it one of his Air Force buddies playing a trick on him? He knew quite a few in the USAF senior officer corps were jealous of his new assignment, but he figured the top brass’s decision to name him as spacecraft commander was fair and square. He had been keeping his eye on the fishing rods for the past few hours and was totally oblivious to what was going on above until his wife had pointed it out to him. Now his mind was filled with all sorts of suspicions. If it wasn’t one his friends, could it be perhaps the media trying to get a scoop? Did they get a whiff of his assignment and what it entailed? The internet had been rife with rumors for months, with multiple conspiracy sites proclaiming the US military had achieved some sort of technological breakthrough. But how did they know he was an integral part of it? Was there a leak somewhere down the chain of command?

  He shook his head. No, it can’t be. The clearances involved were at the highest level that most of the other branches in the military weren’t even aware of it, much less the politicians. Even among the president’s chief of staff, only his most senior advisers had been told when it came to the details of the project. This had to be something else. He had been briefed about conspiracy theorists who published the names of military personnel on their dark linked sites, and his name had come up in a database along with a few others. The FBI was investigating, but everybody thought the potential threats against them were minimal. Most of his colleagues shrugged it off as a joke, but now he wasn’t so sure.

  Sophia had placed the tray on the side of the deck. “Is it a Coast Guard drone?”

  “No,” he said. “They would usually have red or orange stripes to indicate that it’s one of theirs.”

  “Then who could it be?”

  “I dunno, you think maybe Jeff hired a drone to spy on us?”

  Sophia giggled. “Don’t be silly. Jeff wouldn’t do that.”

  Jared sighed. “You’re right. I’m just trying to guess who would be following us around.”

  “Maybe it’s from the boat charter company? Looking out for us to make sure that we’re not going to steal their boat? Or something like that?”

  Jared chuckled as he drained off the last of the beer in the can. Was he being too paranoid? Best to find out who it was. “Maybe you’re right. Why don’t you give them a call and ask anyways.”

  “Okay,” Sophia said. She placed the receiver plug that was attached to the frame of her smartglasses into her left ear and used the phone menu system on her device to dial the number of the boat rental firm. For a few minutes, she kept trying to adjust the settings but nothing happened.

  Jared turned and looked at her. “Well? What did they say?”

  Sophia was confused. “I don’t know. I can’t seem to get through. My communications application keeps saying, ‘dial failed.’ I tried about three times now and still nothing.”

  Jared gave her an incredulous look as he put his own earpiece on before using his smartglass, but for some reason his inputs failed too. “What the heck is going on here? I can’t call out either.” He tapped the frame to give him an expanded menu as he used his eyes to sort through the possible commands using the screen projection in the lenses of his smartglasses. “What? It says here that I’m offline. Did you pay the com-link bill this month, honey?”

  “Of course I did! It gets automatically deducted from our savings account, you know that.”

  Jared sighed. “Alright, I’ll use the public telecom links instead. T
his will probably be an expensive call since we’re past the national cell zones.”

  Sophia placed her hands on her hips. “Well?”

  “Christ,” Jared said. “All I’m getting is static. I should have a dial tone. These devices should be able to pick up any signal.”

  “Maybe we’re too far out?”

  “No,” Jared said. “The entire planet is crisscrossed with not just cell zones, but all the internet relay satellites overhead means there are no dead zones anywhere in the world. It’s almost as if—”

  “As if what?”

  Jared grimaced as he stood up and walked over to the helm located in the cabin behind him. Right beside the manual controls was the boat’s communications system. He activated it and started going through the list of quick reference channels for emergencies. As he went through each one, all he could hear was the sound of static from the audio speakers. He slammed his palms down on the counter and cursed.

  Sophia had a worried look in her eyes as she followed him into the cabin. “What’s wrong?”

  He turned around and stared at her. “We’re being jammed. That’s why we can’t call anybody.”

  Sophia couldn’t believe it. “What?”

  He activated the controls, altering the autopilot to return the boat back to the marina. When the readouts gave him a negative response, Jared cursed a second time as he inputted the map coordinates and punched in the heading. The boat began to pick up speed as it turned starboard, making a slight bump as it bounced off a low wave before heading in a northerly direction.