LUCIFER’S NEBULA
Book 2 of the Lucifer’s Star Series
By C. T. Phipps and Michael Suttkus
A Mystique Press Production
Mystique Press is an imprint of Crossroad Press
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Smashwords edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press
Digital Edition Copyright © 2018 C. T. Phipps and Michael Suttkus
LICENSE NOTES
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Meet the Authors
C.T. Phipps is a lifelong student of horror, science fiction, and fantasy. An avid tabletop gamer, he discovered this passion led him to write and turned him into a lifelong geek. He is a regular blogger and also a reviewer for The United Federation of Charles.
Bibliography
Agent G: Infiltrator (Agent G #1)
Agent G: Saboteur (Agent G #2)
Agent G: Assassin (Agent G #3) – Coming Spring of 2018
I was a Teenage Weredeer (The Bright Falls Mysteries #1)
An American Weredeer in Michigan (The Bright Falls Mysteries #2)
Cthulhu Armageddon (Cthulhu Armageddon Series #1)
The Tower of Zhaal (Cthulhu Armageddon Series #2)
Running Free (Cyberpunk Wars #1) – Coming Spring of 2018
Lucifer’s Star (Lucifer’s Star #1)
Lucifer’s Nebula (Lucifer’s Star #2)
The Rules of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #1)
The Games of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #2)
The Secrets of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #3)
The Science of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #4)
The Tournament of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #5) – Coming Summer of 2018
The Universe of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #6) – Coming Winter of 2018
Esoterrorism (Red Room Vol. 1)
Eldritch Ops. (Red Room Vol. 2) – Coming Summer of 2018
Straight Outta Fangton (Straight Outta Fangton #1)
The Divine Source (Steampunk Fantastica #1) – Coming Summer of 2018
Wraith Knight (Wraith Knight #1)
Wraith Lord (Wraith Knight #2) – Coming Spring of 2018
Michael Suttkus, II, lives in Leesburg, Florida, with three cats, one of which actually likes him, and his family, with whom he fares better. When not working at a game store, he's playing games, reading science books, or otherwise being incredibly nerdy. Also writing! Because he has to feed cats whether they like him or not.
Bibliography
Running Free (Cyberpunk Wars #1) – Coming Spring of 2018
I was a Teenage Weredeer (The Bright Falls Mysteries #1)
An American Weredeer in Michigan (The Bright Falls Mysteries #2)
Lucifer’s Star (Lucifer’s Star #1)
Lucifer’s Nebula (Lucifer’s Star #2)
The Divine Source (Steampunk Fantastica #1) – Coming Summer of 2018
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LUCIFER’S NEBULA
Table of Contents
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 One
“I hate pirates,” I said, more to myself than the other members of the starfighter squadron that was the Melampus’s primary defense. I was flying in the middle of the ass end of space, surrounded by enemies, and quite possibly going to die with everyone underneath my command. Must be Tuesday.
The interior of the V-shaped Crosshair-91 fighter smelled of stale air, sweat, and oil. Sound didn’t travel through space, so every pilot had to become hyperaware of the noises projected through the ship’s cyber-interface. Mine was a custom job, since cybernetics were still taboo among the majority of humanity’s scattered descendants. My implants meant I could react faster and with more strategy than most pilots—which was good because we were outnumbered three to one. They were all less-advanced Crosshair-75s, inferior to our 91s, but still fully capable of blowing us out of the star lanes.
The Melampus was slowly turning around the fake navigation buoy that had pulled us out of jumpspace. The aging cargo hauler was a half-kilometer cylindrical vessel that could haul a hundred thousand tons of cargo but wasn’t exactly built for combat. It had far more tricks than a standard vessel of its class, but that didn’t mean much given we were under attack by ex-military hardware.
The Ravager, as the ship’s transponder registered it as, was a Commonwealth-constructed gunship that was the shape of a box with three long tendrils sticking out from its mouth. It also had a “rack” on its sides that held room for twelve starfighters, nine of which had been dispatched against us and made me think the pirates hadn’t been entirely successful in their murderous careers. The vessel’s statistics, coldly projected into my mind, showed it was badly maintained with a power production two-thirds of normal but there was little the Melampus could do against something designed to serve as escort to them.
We were travelling in a particularly bad place to be ambushed as well since our current, highly illegal, cargo run was taking us through the Border Planets on the edge of Sector 13. It was the penumbra between “civilized” Community space and the petty fiefdoms that made up the territory humanity had colonized throughout the Spiral. As desolate no man’s lands went, this was innumerable light years away from anyone who could
answer a distress call and even further from anyone who would.
“I hate pirates too, Cassius,” Clarice O’Harra said, revealing my coarse language had gone out over the comm.
Clarice was piloting the second of our fighters and doing a damned good job of it despite the fact she was only a year into training. The Melampus first officer had all but demanded to be able to learn after we’d stolen our ship from the Commonwealth and was a fast learner. Unfortunately, as a third of our enemies went up in an explosion of its fusion reactor and orihalcum fuel, this was the definition of a sink-or-swim scenario.
“I don’t suppose you have a plan for this,” David Albernathy said over the comm. He was the former leader of the Melampus’s starfighters but the only one besides me with any actual combat experience but myself. “Because surrender is a perfectly valid response from my perspective. Better than the Melampus jumping without us.”
If I could have reached through the comm unit and strangled the Commonwealther with my bare hands, I would have. That kind of talk would have gotten a man executed in the Crius Starfighter Corps.
“You aren’t in the Crius Starfighter Corps anymore,” the cool soothing voice of Judith, the ship’s A.I. and the digital ghost of my late wife, whispered in my ear. “And thank God for that.”
I pulled back on my starfighter’s speed before spinning around and targeting the pair of pirates behind me. Both of them scrambled to maneuver out of the way, only to be blasted to pieces by my plasma cannons. I could tell the enemy pilots had received military training and should have easily overwhelmed us but, instead, were reacting with a cocky and overconfident flight pattern. I reckoned the crew of the Ravager and its pilots to be deserters from the current interstellar war, Crius or Commonwealthers who’d decided they wanted no part of the next altercation between the major powers of humanity’s scattered tribes.
People like me.
“I have a plan,” I said over the comm. “Sort of. “
“Sort of?” Clarice asked.
“Trust me.”
In truth, the military training of this particular group of outer space refuse worked to my advantage, as I had a good idea how they were going to react. People without military training often reacted in ways that caught seasoned soldiers off guard. The Ravager’s commanding officer was, instead, following textbook Commonwealth privateer tactics. He or she was using their starfighters to destroy the Melampus’s own compliment of fighters while moving their corvette to unleash a barrage of heavy star cannon fire. It would get very close and tear through the old tub like it was plastisteel in a meteor storm. We would have no choice to surrender, then, assuming they would let us live versus disabling life support and leaving the crew to suffocate.
“No,” I muttered. “No one else dies for me.”
Trying to distract as many of the pirate’s Crossfire-75 fighters behind us as possible, two following me in this case, I watched as the Ravager unloaded on the Melampus’s shield enough to tear through a ship of its size three times over. The shield, however, held and disguised missile pods unloaded a barrage of gravity missiles that detonated at point-blank range against the Ravager’s own shields.
The Melampus’s few heavy plasma cannons then opened fire, tearing at the surface of the vessel’s weapons systems. Many of the shots missed, the crew not exactly trained soldiers, but the damage done to the gunship was tremendous. It also distracted my tail long enough that I spun around and unleashed my ship’s micro-torpedoes to blow both out of the sky. Five down. Four for me. One for Clarice. Correction: six down, four for me, two for Clarice.
“I’m hit! They’ve got me!” David Anderson shouted, panicking as he broke away from a standard flight pattern and flew from the formation I’d drilled into us. The three remaining pirates then all descended upon him and unloaded every bit of plasma they could into his side, causing his Crosshair to explode into another brief burst of light.
It was a petty revenge killing as the three remaining starfighters put up their surrender signal seconds later, accompanying the Ravager’s own as its crew evacuated the collapsing ship. The Ravager’s bridge was destroyed so whoever was in charge must have determined it was best to give up, despite the fact they were in the middle of a nearly empty sector and we weren’t a warship. The starfighters, meanwhile, powered down and became nothing more than floating space debris.
“No quarter,” I said, turning around and then firing on the helpless starfighters as Clarice watched me slaughter them.
“Buddha beyond,” Clarice muttered, watching the slaughter. “That’s murder.”
“So was what they planned,” I said, growling and debating whether or not to attack the Ravager.
“Cassius, this isn’t you,” Judith said, her voice like a splash of cold water against my rage. “You are not a monster.”
“They’re thieves and killers,” I said, moving to attack formation against the Ravager’s escape pods.
“So are we,” Judith replied. “Don’t you want to be something better?”
“I don’t know.” I wasn’t a hero here and despite flying around a former Commonwealth spy ship, I didn’t represent any galactic government. I was here smuggling weapons for a petty warlord, the kind of scum I’d been trained by my superiors to fight, and had no moral high ground to stand on. Killing these people for doing what they had to do to survive would be the ultimate hypocrisy and the only thing I had left was my integrity.
“Cassius,” Judith repeated my name. “You are better than this.”
Was I?
“Accept the surrender of the Ravager,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Deposit a rescue buoy for them to be picked up by the Community Patrol or whomever else they want to contact. Let their bosses sort it out, if they have any.”
“Understood,” I got a response from my second in command and acting captain, William Baldur. “It looks like you survived another one.”
“Yeah, well, you’ll have to wait a little longer to be captain,” I said.
“There’s always next time,” William said. “Want us to salvage anything from the pirates? Those Crosshairs would have made up for a lot of our losses on this little stunt you pulled. Do you know how much those missiles cost?”
“Less than David’s life,” I said, growling.
“Clearly you didn’t know David that well.”
William and I had a good working relationship. I hated him. He hated me. It was good to know where we stood. He was good at his job, though. It had been the job he’d had before I’d stolen the Melampus from its previous captain. Technically, Clarice should have been the one on the ship, but I couldn’t get her to stay away from the frontline. Not since she’d been tortured by the Chel had she been comfortable not being in the thick of things onboard her vessel. Clarice was a woman who wanted to protect others—even if it got her killed.
I envied her that.
“Gods and immortals, it’s like working with children,” Clarice said, joining us over the comm. “We should dispatch some salvage ships and carve as much of the Ravager up as we can before we leave but we can’t stay. We’re running the edge of our deadline as is.”
“I’m still the captain here,” I said, sounding hollow even to myself. Once I’d commanded entire wings of starfighters.
Now I could barely rein in my two primary subordinates. I wondered if my doppelganger, the bioroid duplicate that helped start the Insurgency, ever felt this way.
“No,” Judith said. “All of the Imposter’s followers are fanatically devoted to him.”
Great, I thought.
“Yeah, the Count von Asshole needs to rubber stamp this,” William said.
“Do it,” I said, calmly maneuvering my fighter back toward the Melampus.
“Yes, sir, Mr. Nobleman, sir.”
“Oh and go kark yourself, too,” I said, using a Xerxes swear word in place of its more common counterpart. It annoyed William I spoke his people’s tribal language and that was another reason to do it.
“Only if we get paid,” William said. “Then I’ll happily buy everyone lotion for it.”
I rolled my eyes and did my best not to smile. “Consider it rubber stamped.”
That was when I heard Clarice speak to me on a private channel. “Captain, I’m relieving you of command.”
I blinked. “Making a coup, Clarice? If so, awesome. I hope it involves walking the plank.”
“The what now?” Clarice asked. “No, it’s just until we reach the Ring.”
The Ring was our “port of call” here in the Border Planets. It was an alien construction which dwarfed anything created by humans and was much finer than any product by the Community. The fact many races in the latter feuded over control over it meant it had, accidentally, fallen under control over the human planets who’d just moved a population inside and squatted. Isla, who was more informed in old Earth media than myself, said it resembled several science fiction construct ideas from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I, personally, thought it was a damned weird idea to make a space station in the shape of a ring with no ceiling.
“How disappointing,” I said. “You’d make such a fine captain. Maybe get a little eye-patch and form fitting corset to wear on the outside with a proton cutlass you can wave around.”
“Whatever holovids your drawing your image of them from, I remind you I’m actually from a family of pirates and slavers. I know what they look like and it tends to be just like regular spacers except scruffier.”
“Sorry, I’m just tired of the captain thing. It sounded a lot better on paper when we mutinied.”
“You mutinied, we followed,” Clarice said, reminding me of how I’d stolen the ship from Captain Claire after she revealed herself to be an agent of the Commonwealth secret police known as the Watchers. I’d been willing to work with her at the beginning but eventually decided taking the ship and running was the best course. That wasn’t what she was discussing now, though. “Cassius, you need to report to Dr. Hernandez. You need a psych checkup and a whole lot of drugs right now.”
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