Open Arms (On Silver Wings Book 7)
Page 1
Open Arms
Book VII in the On Silver Wings series.
Cold War III
Evan Currie
ALSO BY EVAN CURRIE
Atlantis Rising Series
Knighthood
The Demon City (Late 2017)
Odyssey One Series
Into the Black
The Heart of Matter
Homeworld
Out of the Black
Odysseus One : Warrior King
Odysseus Awakening(Dec 2017)
Odysseus Ascendant (Spring 2018)
Odyssey One: Star Rogue Series
King of Thieves
Heirs of Empire
Heirs of Empire
An Empire Asunder
Warrior’s Wings Series
On Silver Wings
Valkyrie Rising
Valkyrie Burning
The Valhalla Call
By Other Means
De Oppresso Liber
Open Arms
Other Works
SEAL Team 13
Steam Legion
Thermals
Copyright Info
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2016 Evan Currie
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Foreword
I have no idea if this turned out the way I wanted it to or not, so I’ll let you be the judge. I do know that it was supposed to be a one-off novel to wrap the Cold War arc and it turned into the start of a 3 book arc of it’s own… so if you like Sorilla, she’s not out of the war yet. Big things coming in this series, just in the next two books alone. Stay tuned…
You can keep up to date on the latest releases at my website, facebook account, or other social media accounts (check the contact me link after the story) or sign up to my newsletter at
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Cheers everyone, and enjoy the book
About the Author : Evan Currie is a Canadian author of science fiction and fantasy novels whose work has been translated into multiple languages and sold around the world. Best known for his military science fiction series’ Odyssey One and On Silver Wings, Evan has also dabbled in far flung Space Fantasy like Heirs of Empire and steampunk-ish alt-history among other worlds.
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Prologue
Alliance Border World
Sentinel Kriss walked the wall, eyes sweeping the landscape beyond the fortified sector. He and his team had been dropped on-world a few day/night cycles past. He wasn’t really sure how long one of those lasted here, didn’t much care either. Nothing had happened since he and his team had arrived—literally nothing.
Sentinels weren’t supposed to be dropped onto a quiet world.
The Alliance bulletin on this world indicated that an action was supposed to have happened. Some sort of assault, according to the best intelligence. His team had landed on a piece of dirt farmland, with no sign of bad weather coming, let alone any hint of an attack.
Lucians weren’t farmers.
Oh, there were Lucians who farmed, but that was a pitiful existence. Kriss knew of none who took pride in it, not that they should, and none who wanted to farm. Just being on a farm world with nothing to fight made him itch.
“Sentinel Kriss.”
Kriss half turned, nodding to the Parithalian who was approaching.
The tall, somewhat spindly, and blue-skinned Pari’s were the elite ship handlers of the Alliance. Every race had their merchants, their battle groups, and their private navies…but the Parithalians were the acknowledged masters of maneuver. Only the Ross were even close to them, and it wasn’t the Ross’s natural skill that put them on that level, but rather their unnatural link to space-time.
It was damn hard to outmaneuver someone who could literally control the shape of the field you were playing on, yet the Pari were known to do it.
Kriss had a lot of respect for that level of natural skill.
“Master of Shuttles.” He nodded to the young Parithalian. “Anything new off the Link?”
The Intelligence Link was part of the wormhole communications network, the fastest communications available in the Alliance. If the Intelligence Services knew anything, an update should have come through.
Since nothing had, that meant no change in intelligence, so the attack alert was still in effect.
Which meant he and this team were stuck standing here in the middle of the most disgustingly peaceful planet he’d ever had the everlasting misfortune of standing on.
“At least the weather is pleasant,” the master of shuttles told him.
Kriss snorted. “I would prefer an ice storm and class-eight winds to this…boredom.”
The Pari looked at him askance for a second before apparently deciding that there wasn’t much point in pursuing the conversation. He just nodded awkwardly and retreated back the direction he’d come, leaving Kriss to turn his attention back over the wall to the eternal stretch of farmland beyond the secure walls.
He struck the rim of the armored wall in frustration, staring at all that quiet.
The only reason the system even had a fortified base was because it was Alliance requisite procedure to install one before a new colony was authorized. This world was—well, had been—primordial. No life to speak of beyond the early multi-cellular level, which made it perfect as an agri-planet. Drop probes, automated planting drones, harvesters…the whole process took centuries to complete, but within a relatively short time, the world was producing, and by the time the system was fully implemented, one world would feed a thousand.
It was a good way of doing things.
Normally the system operated entirely in the background, completely beneath notice, and certainly without the attention of a brigade of Lucians lead by a platoon of Sentinels. That was how it was supposed to work.
Kriss grunted in annoyance and turned his back to the fields to look down over the base.
So what were he and his team, to say nothing of the rest, doing here?
Kriss flipped on his comm system. “Sentinals. Report.”
He listened as his team checked in, reporting nothing over and over again. No sign of anything out of the ordinary, no single blasted reason for a Sentinel team to be on-world.
If something didn’t happen soon, he was pulling his team back to the base. There was no sense leaving them scattered all across a damned agri-world if there were no threats to be had.
*****
Irak paused in his patrol, looking over the seemingly never-ending fields with a sneer.
“Everything is so…green,” he said to his partner after a moment.
“Green isn’t evil, Irak,” the other Lucian said with a rasping chuckle. “Great battles have been waged among the green.”
“Not this color green, Histh.”
That, the other Lucian supposed, he would have to give to his patrol partner. Battles of note were more normally conducted among a darker green, with real cover around them. Not these never-ending fields of light, practically pastel, green.
It was disgusting.
The color wasn’t something that should be found in nature; it was just an unending pastel-green sea of leaves and vegetation barely up to the Lucians’ calves. The crop was a prime source of food for the Alliance, but to the Lucians’ sensibilities, standing in the midst of it all was a singularly disturbing experience.
He took a step through the muck, then paused in confusion as an odd sensation filled him.
Before Histh could react, or even think, he had an impression of pitching forward as everything went from that hideous pastel-green to an all-encompassing, eternal black.
Though he could not know it, all around him Lucians pitched forward into the green, landing solidly on the dirt and plants and shivering for a few moments before they stopped moving entirely.
*****
Kriss frowned, glowering at the communicator. Half his team had failed to check in.
“All units, check in. Comply.”
Nothing. No response.
The Lucian Sentinel abruptly crossed the room and checked the secure scanners, looking for any anomaly. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, out of the ordinary that he could see. Every system check, all remote scanners…they all showed clear.
“All Sentinels. Check in. Comply.”
Kriss grabbed up his weapon and strode from the tower. He made it to the door when a screaming sound tore the air around him and a wash of heat and fire engulfed the building behind him, plucking him up and throwing him across the open section of the base and into the fields beyond like a toy in a hurricane.
In the wet muck beyond the base, Kriss painfully shifted over to his back and stared at the utter destruction of the building he had just a moment earlier been inside. He cast around slowly, grasping at the muck as he looked for his weapon, but it was nowhere to be found.
Blackness slowly reached out to swallow him as he doggedly started to crawl back toward the fire, his stubborn instincts such that he made it almost a dozen meters after he’d passed out.
Chapter 1
Hayden subcontinent
The jungle rolled by under them as the drop ship captain leaned back in his jump seat and looked over his shoulder at the full-bird colonel strapped in behind him.
“We just went ‘feet dry,’ Colonel,” he announced. “We’ll be at the LZ in five minutes.”
“Understood,” the man answered back, wiping perspiration from his face.
The humidity was unreal, and it was only going to get worse, he had little doubt. The colonel looked down at his uniform and mourned the crisply pressed pleats that it had begun the day with. The drop ship was matching the local climate where they were heading, part of the acclimatization protocols, which he supposed was for the best overall but he wasn’t the biggest fan of just then.
He leaned forward in the seat, just able to get a glimpse of the rolling hills of the subcontinent over the co-pilot’s shoulder. The Hayden hardwood trees were well-known as high-value luxury imports on Earth, but the population made more money off pharma-crops and research grants from what he understood.
Why anyone in their right mind would come out here if they didn’t have to, I have no clue.
The subcontinent was almost entirely unpopulated, only recently having been opened for land grants by the Hayden Council. No one had been much interested before, but apparently a few people got the ball rolling and that was that. Now he had to fly out to the literal arse end of nowhere.
The pilot of the DL-90 SpaceHawk nodded off in the distance. “There’s the locator beacon. Hold on, I’m going to bring us around and approach from the cleared section.”
The colonel frowned. “Why? The wind shouldn’t be bad enough to affect our approach.”
The pilot laughed. “There’s almost no wind to speak of, sir, but this is Captain Aida’s spread, which brings up two big points. The most important of which is, it’s only polite to let the captain see who’s coming from a decent way off.”
The colonel slumped back, mollified, before another question occurred to him. “What’s the second?”
“Sir?”
“The second, point, what is it?” he asked.
“Oh, that.” The pilot chuckled, tapping his threat board. “We’ve been painted by surface–to-air since we went feet dry, so I really don’t want to be impolite.”
The colonel grimaced, knowing that he probably should be surprised but not quite able to muster it. He’d read the woman’s file, so protocol or not, it didn’t much surprise him that she had managed to rig up surface-to-air defenses to cover her property.
Lord knew, most of the people he’d served with would have done the same in a heartbeat if they could without bringing the full force of governmental law enforcement on their heads. Figures that an SF specialist would find a way to make it happen anyway.
******
Sorilla glanced up from the machine she was working on as the drop ship fired rockets and settled into an easy hover over the landing field that had been the first thing she’d cut out when the Council had confirmed the land grant she’d claimed. The bird was one of the new SpaceHawks, she noted, which meant there was a new Sol-Class battle cruiser in orbit, unless she missed her guess.
Explains the traffic spike, Sorilla supposed as she finished tightening the last bolt and kicked the power switch on the MOFA she’d just fixed. The mobile fabrication unit whirred through its boot process, then rose up on its spider-legs and scampered off to join its fellows in the assigned work.
Basically a 3D printer on legs with to the centimeter GPS and dead reckoning software, the swarm of MOFAs had been surplused after the Ares incident had shut down the mines on the Mars-class world during the war. War economy being what it was, the sturdy robots were largely obsolete by the time anyone could figure out a practical use for them. She’d found them sitting in a cargo hull, waiting to be recycled if anyone ever got around to paying to bring them back to Sol Space.
Buying them hadn’t broken her. Most of her pay for fifteen years had been accumulating and earning interest, including combat pay, since there had been literally nothing she could spend it on most of the last decade. It took a fair chunk just the same, however, and she’d traded shamelessly on her on-again, off-again relationship with Alexi and his precious Socrates to get them transshipped to Hayden as well as favors from a dozen other old friends in and out of SOLCOM.
Sorilla was surprised so few people had figured it out, but Hayden was going to be the center of commerce for Sol before much longer, which was why she’d applied for a land grant almost as soon as the war ended. There were worse places to retire, in her opinion, and as long as it remained wild she intended to enjoy it as much as she possibly could. If civilization made it too boring for her, she’d sell out and maybe get herself a ship to find somewhere else to her liking.
It was big galaxy, now. Bigger than most people realized.
Sorilla clapped the worst of the dust and dirt off her hands and made her way casually toward the drop ship as it settled down on the carved stone pad she’d cut out of a block of stone too big to move with anything she had, and watched as the hatches popped and the first figures appeared.
It looked like a security detail, a couple armed soldiers who held themselves like they had just gotten out of boot. The sort assigned to someone senior enough to have a guard, but not important enough to put any real effort into the task.
That told her volumes it and of itself.
Sorilla signed and brushed her shorts and shirt off, sending dust wafting in the slight wind kicked up by the drop ship as she got into range of the ugly military ship. A man in a colonel’s dress kit dropped to the stone and looked around for a moment before focusing on her.
She winced, automatically, at the thought of what the humidity and heat would do to the dress uniform long before the man got back to the ship.
This is a man who is far too concerned with appearances, she noted as she schooled her face to a neutral mask and greeted him. “Colonel. Welcome.”
; The man stared for a moment, a flicker of something in his eyes. She was guessing distaste, but it could have been anything, Sorilla supposed. Finally, he smiled and took a step forward. “Captain Aida, I have a dispatch from Brigadier Mattan for you.”
Sorilla nodded slowly, knowing that wasn’t the whole of it. If it were just a simple dispatch, it would have been transmitted to Hayden Control and relayed on to her when she picked up her mail. She paused in front of him and saluted, barely holding the gesture long enough for him to return it, before accepting the physical transfer of the dispatch he was offering.
“Haven’t seen the brigadier in eight years,” she said as she tapped the memory card to her computer and transferred the data over, scrubbing the card in the process. “What does the old man want?”
The colonel choked, doing a fair job of masking it in the process, but he definitely choked when she called Mattan “the old man.” Not that she’d needed the confirmation, but there was no chance in hell she was dealing with an SF man. Everyone called Mattan “the old man” in the field, including his secretary.
“I’m sure it’s covered in the dispatch, Captain.”
Sorilla sighed, but nodded as she pulled up the files on her implants and flash-read the brief without bothering with any of the details just then. When she was finished she frowned. “I put in for leave, Colonel. I have a lot of leave time saved up, more than enough to hold me over while SOLCOM processes my papers. I would say that this better be a joke, but you don’t look like a stripper to me.”
He wasn’t remotely good enough to hide his choking that time.
“Excuse me, Captain?”
Sorilla snorted at the censure in the man’s voice, noting the barely hidden grins on the two soldiers behind him.
“If the old man was setting me up for a gag,” she said, giving him a once over, “he’d have sent a stripper. Frankly, Colonel, you wouldn’t meet standards. So, why the hell is SOLCOM calling me back up now? We’re not at war anymore.”