Edge of War
(The Eternal Frontier, Book 2)
Anthony J Melchiorri
April, 2017
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Books by Anthony J Melchiorri
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
CHAPTER FIFTY
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Also by Anthony J Melchiorri
About the Author
Books by Anthony J Melchiorri
The Tide Series
The Tide (Book 1)
Breakwater (Book 2)
Salvage (Book 3)
Deadrise (Book 4)
Iron Wind (Book 5)
The Eternal Frontier
Eternal Frontier (Book 1)
Edge of War (Book 2)
Shattered Dawn (Coming 2017)
Black Market DNA
Enhancement (Book 1)
Malignant (Book 2)
Variant (Book 3)
Fatal Injection
Other Books
The God Organ
The Human Forged
Darkness Evolved
Eternal Frontier (The Eternal Frontier, Book 2)
Copyright © 2017 by Anthony J. Melchiorri. All rights reserved.
First Edition: April 2017
http://AnthonyJMelchiorri.com
Cover Design: Illustration © Tom Edwards, TomEdwardsDesign.com
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.
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CHAPTER ONE
Gray scars along the right side of the alien’s face stretched as it snarled at Commander Tag Brewer, former chief medical officer and now captain of the SRES Argo. The alien’s single working golden eye narrowed as if it was scrutinizing him, already predicting his every move. Tag knew the Mechanic was intelligent. He had spent plenty of time on the Argo getting to know the strange alien who looked something like a human and snake chimera. Slitted nostrils broke up the angular, elongated head of the Mechanic. His serpentine limbs, extending from his thin torso to his six-fingered hands, could bend in ways that made Tag’s stomach turn.
“Coren,” Tag started, dropping into a fighting stance. He bent his knees, prepared to pounce, his hands held in front of him, ready to grapple the skinny alien. “I never thought it’d come to this.”
Coren scoffed. “What? You thought you could just let me onto your ship, drag me across the galaxy to help your people, and then not let me show you what a true Mechanic is made of?”
The duo circled like two male lions. Tag had clashed with Mechanics before, and the memories surfaced in his thoughts. Those Mechanics, enslaved by self-assembling nanite antennas residing in their brains, had been acting at the behest of some mysterious entity he still knew nothing about. After surviving the attack on the Argo, he had taken on three of those Drone-Mechs alone. They had been wearing power armor, and he had fought with only the tools and weapons he could scrounge up while sneaking around the ship. And even then, he had reigned victorious.
I can certainly handle Coren, he thought.
His eyes traced the Mechanic’s lean body. Coren had been the chief engineer of his ship, not a battle-hardened warrior. He might be flexible, but his muscles were hardly thicker than a power cable, and he was skinny enough that Tag thought if the Mechanic sneezed too hard, he would break his own ribs. Tag grinned. While he hadn’t spent as much time in the Argo’s gym as the marines who had once called this ship home did, he lifted weights enough to feel confident he could throw Coren over his shoulder like he was nothing more than a heap of leftover IV bags.
“Are you going to admire me all day, or do you plan on striking, human?” Coren said with a sneer.
Tag lunged. This would be over in a few seconds, max, with Coren lying on his back, giving Tag the victory he deserved. His fingers found Coren’s thin wrists and wrapped around the fur-covered limbs. He forced one of the Mechanic’s hands behind his back then swept one of his legs behind Coren’s ankle, knocking the Mechanic off his feet.
Boom. Done, Tag thought.
This was the same basic move that Tag had learned from his hand-to-hand combat training in boot camp. The same training every human citizen of the SRE underwent during their compulsory military service. And as Coren flew feet over head, Tag commended himself for remembering that training after all these years. He threw all his weight into carrying Coren backward, leaving nothing behind. No retreat, no defense necessary. This was too damn easy.
But right as Coren’s shoulders touched the floor, the Mechanic’s arms curled backward, pulling Tag forward. Coren twisted to the side. With his fingers still secured around the Mechanic’s ropey limbs, Tag’s elbows were bent to their limits, and he yelped in pain. Coren turned to land on two feet and let Tag’s own momentum carry him to the ground. Pain scattered through Tag’s skull when his head hit the deck, his vision crackling as if he was traveling through hyperspace. Instead of going anywhere, Tag groaned and lay on his bruised spine.
“Damn you, you bloody Mechanic,” Tag managed.
Coren laughed, standing over him. “Is this cockiness a trait all you humans share? Or is it unique to you and Sofia?”
From the corner of the training room, Sofia laughed. She placed a hand over her chest as she strode toward the sparring mat. “Coren, you know damn well I can take you down. That’s not cockiness; that’s just honesty.”
Coren
held out a hand, and Tag took it, hoisting himself back to his feet.
“When we first started training together on Eta-Five, you fell just as easily as him,” Coren said.
“Sure, but that was a one-time thing. Fool me once, shame on you,” Sofia said. “Fool me twice...”
“Yes, yes, I know how these human sayings go,” Coren said.
“Damn right you do,” Sofia said. “Never pulled that move on me again, did you?”
Coren let out a low huff.
Tag rubbed the back of his head. “For a scrawny creature, you pack quite the punch.”
Again, Coren emitted a derisive laugh. “It’s not the power behind my punch. It’s the power behind yours. From what Sofia tells me, our standard hand-to-hand combat is similar in concept to your human jiu-jitsu. It relies on leveraging the opponent’s strength and momentum against them.”
“Makes sense,” Tag said. He thought to test the limits of Coren’s humor and clapped the Mechanic’s shoulder. “It’s the only way weaklings like you stand a chance without power armor.”
Coren didn’t laugh. His lips remained straight. “There’s more truth to that than you may realize. We are far too logical and intelligent a race to neglect our weaknesses. Something you humans could stand to learn for yourselves.”
Tag grinned when Coren’s thin lips curled slightly.
“Would anyone be willing to spar with me? I would gratefully accept the opportunity,” a voice called from another corner. Alpha, the sentient half-machine, half-biological being of Tag’s creation, cocked her silver head slightly, and her servos whirred as she stepped forward.
“No!” the others said in unison. Alpha’s screen-like eyes glimmered dully as if she were disappointed. Out of everyone on the four-person crew, Alpha by far possessed the most intrinsic strength. Her mechanical limbs would make short work of any flesh-and-bone beings, and she had even torn the alloy shell off of an exo-suit Drone-Mech pilot when they had saved the SRES capital ship, the Montenegro, from a massive assault. Tag had downloaded the entirety of the Argo’s encyclopedic databases into Alpha, including more fighting styles and techniques than all the fully biological beings on the crew could ever hope to learn in their lifetimes combined.
“How about we take a break from physical training and get some work done instead?” Tag asked. “I’m not interested in breaking any more bones today.”
“Captain, between your medical skills and the regen chambers, it would be no problem for us to treat any broken bones,” Alpha said.
“Count yourself lucky you don’t have pain receptors,” Tag said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be saying that.”
“I will, as you say, take your word for it, Captain,” said Alpha in a robotic tone that sounded vaguely glum.
Tag wiped off the sweat beading on his forehead with his sleeve. “You do that. In the meantime, we’ve only got a couple days until we hit normal space outside Eta-Five. Back to the bridge.”
The mention of Eta-Five cut any air of good humor that had been shared within the group. Tag could almost feel the apprehension radiating off his crew as they made their way up the ladders to the bridge. The last time they had been on Eta-Five, they had been chased off it by a barrage of torpedoes, warheads, and pulse weapons. And now, with nowhere else to turn, they were headed straight back.
CHAPTER TWO
On the Argo’s bridge, a holoscreen cast its wan blue glow over the crew members seated around the chart table. The resulting light and shadows playing over their faces accentuated the grim expressions they wore. None looked forward to what they might encounter, and Tag did his best to appear more confident than he felt, hoping to inspire a bit of the same in Sofia, Alpha, and Coren. He gestured to the image of a planet rotating on the holoscreen. Spinning in the air with its wispy atmosphere forming soft, snowy tendrils around it, its serenely white appearance belied the true nature of the planet. Beneath that beautiful exterior was an unforgiving landscape riddled with more ways to kill a person than cannons on an SRE Behemoth-class capital ship.
“Alpha,” Tag began, “I want you to chart a flight path that keeps us in the cover of one of Eta-Five’s moons as long as possible.” He circled a spot on Eta-Five, and the area expanded. “Here’s where we’ll land. We’ve got to touch down near the wreck of the MES Stalwart.” Despite their best efforts, Coren and his crew just didn’t have the parts to fix the Stalwart. They had barely gotten away from an encounter with the Drone-Mechs in the first place, and even then, they had been lucky to survive the crash on Eta-Five. Now, years later and unable to leave, the planet that had been their refuge had turned into their prison. Coren and his crew of uninfected Mechanics wanted nothing more than to shatter the chains of the nanite menace enslaving the rest of their people, but they stood no chance of doing that if they remained stuck on Eta-Five. “We should have enough scraps from the battle between the Drone-Mechs and the Montenegro to make the ship spaceworthy again.”
“Guaranteed,” Coren said hungrily. “One way or another, I’m getting my people off that planet.”
“What? You guys don’t like the snow?” Sofia asked.
“I have had enough of it for a lifetime.”
Alpha’s silver fingers splayed across the chart table as she peered at Eta-Five. “Captain, I am worried we aren’t considering our main mission. Admiral Doran charged us with uncovering what Captain Weber was supposed to be doing out here.”
“I haven’t neglected that, Alpha,” Tag said. “But I’m at a loss. None of my searches through the ship’s logs showed anything out of the ordinary.”
“Likewise,” Sofia said. “If Admiral Doran was right and he was on some covert mission, I’m not a damn bit closer to figuring out what it was. All we’ve got is that it could have something to do with the nanites, Eta-Five, and that old generation ship that disappeared out here.”
“The UNS Hope?” Coren asked.
“Yep,” Sofia said. “Something fishy is definitely going on, but I’m stumped.”
“I haven’t found any trace in our computer systems that might point to a covert operation. I have also been unable to determine the nature of cargo and torpedoes that the Drone-Mechs stole from the Argo,” Alpha added.
“Yeah, thanks for rubbing it in,” Sofia said ruefully.
If Alpha had had eyebrows, Tag guessed that she would have raised one then. “I don’t understand that expression.”
“Point is,” Tag said, “we’ve got nothing. But my gut tells me that following the nanite trail is our best lead. And to do that, we could use some help. Getting the Stalwart up and running again is going to be crucial. It’s better that we don’t do this alone. Whatever is out there is worse than we ever imagined.” Tag grimaced. The nanite technology had infected almost an entire alien species with self-assembling antennae that were being used by someone to control their minds with grav-waves. “This is beyond anything either humans or Mechanics could’ve come up with on our own.”
“I’m sure we would’ve come up with it on our own at some point,” Coren objected, appearing indignant.
“Regardless, we need all the help we can get,” Tag said. “And, if you agree, I think the first step toward figuring out who is behind the nanites is finding any surviving Mechanics that might be out there. I’m not just talking about the ones on Eta-Five, either.”
Coren’s chest seemed to swell at that. He didn’t quite smile, but he gave a single enthusiastic nod. “I am obviously biased, but I fully support that course of action. I’ll do whatever is in my power to ensure we find any surviving Mechanic strongholds and, machines be willing, track down whoever inflicted the nanites on my people.”
“I’m assuming we’ll have the full support of the free Mechanics in this mission too, right?” Tag asked.
Coren sat silent for a moment as if mulling the question over. “You can be assured my people will seek retribution for what has been done. They will want to see this through, and if that means supporting the Argo’s mission, t
hen I’ll ensure we do just that.”
“Good to know,” Tag said. Internally, he processed the full meaning of Coren’s statement. The nanites shared striking similarities to a human technology that had long ago been developed and then banned before the SRE ran Sol System Prime. The officials Tag had discussed this with claimed the SRE had always supported the ban on biowarfare and mind-control weaponry. But there was a nagging worry in the back of Tag’s mind that someone in the SRE might have continued the development of these nanites. And for all he knew, a human in the SRE might have been responsible for deploying them.
Tag was nothing more than a commander in the SRE Navy, and prior to that the chief medical officer of the Argo. Covert operations and weaponry technologies were not his specialty, nor was he privy to whatever classified weapons systems research and development the SRE had going on. And while Coren had learned to trust Tag, the Mechanic still openly voiced his skepticism of the SRE government. Tag feared what kind of retribution the Mechanics might seek if the nanites were indeed an SRE plot. But, he reasoned, postulating and worrying about possible conspiracies wouldn’t help them find the actual culprits.
“Coren, would you mind running a final diagnostics array?” Tag asked. “I want to ensure the bots have finished all essential repairs.”
“Yes, Captain,” Coren said with a slight nod. He bent over one of the terminals.
“You got plans for me, too, Skipper?” Sofia asked.
“I do,” Tag replied.
“Better not involve cleaning the heads.”
“I believe that’s what we have the maintenance bots for, is that not correct?” Alpha asked.
“It’s a joke, Alpha,” Sofia said. “Humor, remember?”
Alpha tilted her metallic head, growing still for a minute. “I remember humor. I still do not understand it.”
“Probably because it’s a shitty joke,” Tag said.
Alpha’s screen eyes seemed to narrow. “Is that a pun, Captain?”
“Yeah,” Sofia said, smirking. “A crappy one, too.”
“I’m sensing there are layers to this conversation that I may be missing. I’ll record our conversation to analyze later.”
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