♦ ♦ ♦
“Captain! The wasps are fleeing!” cried Daisy.
Jacob saw that incredible news in his situational holo. The giant wasp ship and its three allies were swinging up and away from the planetary ecliptic, clearly heading for the magnetosphere boundary. The wasp exit speed was now one percent of lightspeed and rapidly increasing. What was even more positive was the movement of the solo wasp ship that had launched nuke warheads at Valhalla. It was diving down, below the ecliptic, similarly aiming for the boundary.
“Tactical, what of the warheads launched by the wasp ship?” he called to Rosemary. “Are any entering the atmosphere?”
“A few are,” she said. “Captain Jefferson’s sharpshooters killed 31 with her proton laser. The proton lasers on the Star Navy base took out 14 more. Five are now entering the atmosphere. Two are going down faster, while three seem to be globular in shape. They are trailing behind the group of two.”
Anger and frustration filled him. “What will they hit? Any sign they are guided?”
“No, they are not showing guidance ability,” Rosemary replied, her voice catching. “They appear to be in freefall reentry mode. The two falling faster will hit the dense forest on the northern continent. The three falling slower will hit close to Stockholm.” She looked back to him, her green eyes looking wet. “Does anyone on Valhalla have a fighter jet? A ground laser? Smart missiles?”
He didn’t know. But someone else did know. “Andrew, link me up with O’Sullivan at the base. Quickly!”
“Sending a neutrino signal,” the man replied swiftly.
“Fleet captain!” called Joy Jefferson from her image icon at the top of the wallscreen. “We’re diving down after those warheads! We’ll do our best to kill them!”
“Acknowledged!” he said quickly. “Do your best.” Jacob wished he and the other ships were closer but they were on an outward track toward the local moon. The planet lay behind them.
“Captain?” called O’Sullivan. “Our moving neutrino tracker shows the wasp ships are going away. What’s happening?”
He told the man about the five incoming warheads.
“Damn! I thought our proton lasers killed the last stragglers,” he said. He lifted his helmeted head and fixed on Jacob. “We have no ground weaponry of any sort. No smart missiles. No lasers. Earth Command thought outfitting this base with six proton lasers would suffice for incoming asteroids, comets or a pirate raider.”
“We got one!” cried Jefferson. “One of the heavies is dead.”
O’Sullivan heard that. Jacob looked to Rosemary. “Tactical, what about the one heavy and the three lighter ones. Have they impacted?”
She shook her head, then spoke over her helmet comlink. “Not yet. The heavy will hit in four seconds. The three lighter ones in 30. The lighter ones will strike the western outskirts of Stockholm. Homes and businesses are there, from what I can see in our scope.”
He looked up at the wallscreen. The ship’s electro-optical scope was tightly focused on the part of Valhalla that was the warhead target. Green forest filled the top half of the image, with a grassy plain on the lower left and the silver sparkle of buildings and housing and factories over by the eastern seacoast.
A yellow flame blossomed among the trees.
“Anyone in the strike zone?”
“No, captain,” Oliver said. “Warhead yield is atomic, about 50 kilotons. Thank God it was not a thermonuke!”
Jacob knew that. Still, the fallout rain from a 50 kiloton atomic blast would spread over dozens of miles of forest. But it would not reach any of the villages that lay west and south of Stockholm.
Three yellow lights that resembled lightning bolts now spread over the western edge of Stockholm. Black clouds formed.
“Those were plasma lightning globes!” Oliver yelled.
Jacob gave brief thanks to the Goddess that they had not been atomics. If they had, half of Stockholm would have been vaporized. As it was, a few city blocks were likely molten soil, with everyone in those blocks gone up into vapor. Hopefully most city residents were hiding in bunkers or out in the countryside, thanks to his earlier warning.
O’Sullivan looked down at a display in the com room, then up. His face was stricken. “Word from Stockholm landing pad. Their western Salonika neighborhood was hit. Three city blocks gone, in a spread out footprint. Storms are forming above the city. Their responders are heading out to help survivors.”
Jacob slumped in his seat. Seventy-one ghosts from the Marianas now joined the ghosts from the Britain and the several hundred people who had died in the lightning plasma strikes. Telling himself that most of Valhalla was untouched and that most colonists were alive and healthy did nothing for him.
A hand touched him. Daisy.
“Jacob, you did your best. We all did our best. As did Captain Jefferson. She risked her ship by diving into the atmosphere at high velocity.” Daisy’s face held deep caring. “She’s out safe. The frigates are safe. Our other ships are intact. We fought them off, Jacob. We beat the wasps!”
Had they? What would the four surviving wasp ships do? Would they head home and bring back dozens more ships to attack Valhalla? Or would they avoid any human ship? And what of the single wasp ship that was headed outward. Would it depart too? Or would they have to go hunting for it in the system’s Kuiper Belt of comets?
He didn’t know. So he fell back on routine he’d learned at the academy.
“All ships, change status to Alert Combat Ready. Make repairs to your ships. Stay alert for a return by the wasp ships.” He ignored the blinking red lights and sirens. A useful thought hit him. “Daisy, uh, damn. Can you take your LCA down to Stockholm and help them evac the wounded to their hospital? Or up here to our Med Hall on the Lepanto?”
“I can,” she said, her expression moving from sorrow to determination. “When do I go?”
“Now.”
“Fleet captain,” called Swanson from the Chesapeake. “I will send our LCA down to help. With your approval.”
“Same for me,” growled Wilcox from the Hampton Roads. “We’re not that far away. Can we send our LCA down to help?”
“Yes and yes,” Jacob replied. “Captains, thank you for helping me find a way to help the people we are pledged to protect.”
Both captains gave a nod and turned to their XOs to get things going.
Below him, Richard looked up. His gray eyes fixed on Jacob. “Welcome to the side of combat that none of us like to see. Or feel. It won’t go away. But . . . you saved a lot of lives. And most of the battle group is intact. To me, that counts for a victory.”
Jacob hoped that was true. He didn’t know if it was, this being his first experience with real combat. He just knew that he had gained more ghosts to populate his dreams and nightmares.
“You also have me,” Daisy said, standing up.
Had he spoken that aloud?
The faces of his Bridge crew told him he had.
“Thank you, XO. And thank you, everyone on the Bridge, for fighting our first interstellar battle. Let us hope it will be our last such encounter.”
People nodded. A few smiled. Richard shook his head and sat down. Alicia gave him a thumbs-up and an encouraging smile. Daisy gripped his hand, or rather the glove of his vacsuit. She gave him a smile.
“The future will be better,” she said.
He hoped so. Jacob hoped to the ends of the universe that bloody combat and dead ships and particles of flesh that had once been people would not populate his future. But this was what he had signed up for, when he joined the Star Navy. He had to prepare for more such bloodiness in any future he might have. At least that future would include Daisy.
“It surely will be better,” he said, showing her the smile he always gave his mother.
Together they held hands on the Bridge of the Battlestar Lepanto, together in thoughts, together in sadness, united in love and determination.
THE END
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
&
nbsp; T. Jackson King (Tom) is a professional archaeologist, journalist and retired Hippie. He learned early on to question authority and find answers for himself, thanks to reading lots of science fiction. He also worked at a radiocarbon dating laboratory at UC Riverside and UCLA. Tom attended college in Paris and Tokyo. He is a graduate of UCLA (M.A. 1976, archaeology) and the University of Tennessee (B.Sc. 1971, journalism). He has worked as an archaeologist in the American Southwest and has traveled widely in Europe, Russia, Japan, Canada, Mexico and the USA. Other jobs have included short order cook, hotel clerk, legal assistant, telephone order taker, investigative reporter and newspaper editor. He also survived the warped speech-talk of local politicians and escaped with his hide intact. Tom writes hard science fiction, anthropological scifi, dark fantasy/horror and contemporary fantasy/magic realism. Tom’s novels are DEFEAT THE ALIENS (2016), FIGHT THE ALIENS (2016), FIRST CONTACT (2015), ESCAPE FROM ALIENS (2015), ALIENS VS. HUMANS (2015), FREEDOM VS. ALIENS (2015), HUMANS VS. ALIENS (2015), GENECODE ILLEGAL (2014), EARTH VS. ALIENS (2014), ALIEN ASSASSIN (2014), THE MEMORY SINGER (2014), ANARCHATE VIGILANTE (2014), GALACTIC VIGILANTE (2013), NEBULA VIGILANTE (2013), SPEAKER TO ALIENS (2013), GALACTIC AVATAR (2013), STELLAR ASSASSIN (2013), STAR VIGILANTE (2012), THE GAEAN ENCHANTMENT (2012), LITTLE BROTHER’S WORLD (2010), ANCESTOR’S WORLD (1996, with A.C. Crispin), and RETREAD SHOP (1988, 2012). His short stories appeared in JUDGMENT DAY AND OTHER DREAMS (2009). His poetry appeared in MOTHER EARTH’S STRETCH MARKS (2009). Tom lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA with his wife Sue. More information on Tom’s writings can be found at www.tjacksonking.com/.
PRAISE FOR T. JACKSON KING’S BOOKS
EARTH VS. ALIENS
“This story is the best space opera I've read in many years. The author knows his Mammalian Behavior. If we’re lucky it’ll become a movie soon. Many of the ideas are BRAND NEW and I loved the adaptability of people in the story line. AWESOME!!”—Phil W. King, Amazon
“It’s good space opera. I liked the story and wanted to know what happened next. The characters are interesting and culturally diverse. The underlying theme is that humans are part of nature and nature is red of tooth and claw. Therefore, humans are naturally violent, which fortunately makes them a match for the predators from space.”—Frank C. Hemingway, Amazon
STAR VIGILANTE
“For a fast-paced adventure with cool tech, choose Star Vigilante. This is the story of three outsiders. Can three outsiders bond together to save Eliana's planet from eco-destruction at the hands of a ruthless mining enterprise?” –Bonnie Gordon, Los Alamos Daily Post
STELLAR ASSASSIN
“T. Jackson King’s Stellar Assassin is an ambitious science fiction epic that sings! Filled with totally alien lifeforms, one lonely human, an archaeologist named Al Lancaster must find his way through trade guilds, political maneuvering and indentured servitude, while trying to reconcile his new career as an assassin with his deeply-held belief in the teachings of Buddha. . . This is a huge, colorful, complicated world with complex characters, outstanding dialogue, believable motivations, wonderful high-tech battle sequences and, on occasion, a real heart-stringer . . . This is an almost perfectly edited novel as well, which is a bonus. This is a wonderful novel, written by a wonderful author . . .Bravo! Five Stars!” –Linell Jeppsen, Amazon
LITTLE BROTHER’S WORLD
“If you’re sensing a whiff of Andre Norton or Robert A. Heinlein, you’re not mistaken . . . The influence is certainly there, but Little Brother’s World is no mere imitation of Star Man’s Son or Citizen of the Galaxy. Rather, it takes the sensibility of those sorts of books and makes of it something fresh and new. T. Jackson King is doing his part to further the great conversation of science fiction; it’ll be interesting to see where he goes next.”–Don Sakers, Analog
“When I’m turning a friend on to a good writer I’ve just discovered, I'll often say something like, “Give him ten pages and you’ll never be able to put him down.” Once in a long while, I'll say, “Give him five pages.” It took T. Jackson King exactly one sentence to set his hook so deep in me that I finished LITTLE BROTHER’S WORLD in a single sitting, and I’ll be thinking about that vivid world for a long time to come. The last writer I can recall with the courage to make a protagonist out of someone as profoundly Different as Little Brother was James Tiptree Jr., with her remarkable debut novel UP THE WALLS OF THE WORLD. I think Mr. King has met that challenge even more successfully. His own writing DNA borrows genes from writers as diverse as Tiptree, Heinlein, Norton, Zelazny, Sturgeon, Pohl, and Doctorow, and splices them together very effectively.” –Spider Robinson, Hugo, Nebula and Campbell Award winner
“Little Brother's World is a sci-fi novel where Genetic Engineering exists. . . It contains enough details and enough thrills to make the book buyers/readers grab it and settle in for an afternoon read. The book is well-written and had a well-defined plot . . . I never found a boring part in the story. It was fast-paced and kept me entertained all throughout. The characters are fascinating and likeable too. This book made me realize about a possible outcome, when finally science and technology wins over traditional ones. . . All in all, Little Brother’s World is another sci-fi novel from T. Jackson King that is both exciting, thrilling and fun. Full of suspense, adventure, romance, secrets, conspiracies, this book would take you in a roller-coaster ride.” –Abby Flores, Bookshelf Confessions
THE MEMORY SINGER
“A coming of age story reminiscent of Robert A. Heinlein or Alexei Panshin. Jax [the main character] is a fun character, and her world is compelling. The social patterns of Ship life are fascinating, and the Alish’Tak [the main alien species] are sufficiently alien to make for a fairly complex book. Very enjoyable.”—Don Sakers, Analog Science Fiction
“Author T. Jackson King brings his polished writing style, his knowledge of science fiction ‘hardware,’ and his believable aliens to his latest novel The Memory Singer. But all this is merely backdrop to the adventures of Jax Cochrane, a smart, rebellious teen who wants more from life than the confines of a generational starship. There are worlds of humans and aliens out there. When headstrong Jax decides that it’s time to discover and explore them, nothing can hold back this defiant teen. You’ll want to accompany this young woman . . in this fine coming-of-age story.”—Jean Kilczer, Amazon
RETREAD SHOP
“Engaging alien characters, a likable protagonist, and a vividly realized world make King’s first sf novel a good purchase for sf collections.”–Library Journal
“A very pleasant tour through the author’s inventive mind, and an above average story as well.”–Science Fiction Chronicle
“Fun, with lots of outrageously weird aliens.”—Locus
“The writing is sharp, the plotting tight, and the twists ingenious. It would be worth reading, if only for the beautiful delineations of alien races working with and against one another against the background of an interstellar marketplace. The story carries you . . . with a verve and vigor that bodes well for future stories by this author. Recommended.”–Science Fiction Review
“For weird aliens, and I do mean weird, choose Retread Shop. The story takes place on a galactic trading base, where hundreds of species try to gain the upper hand for themselves and for their group. Sixteen year-old billy is the sole human on the Retread Shop, stranded when his parents and their shipmates perished. What really makes the ride fun are the aliens Billy teams up with, including two who are plants. It's herbivores vs. carnivores, herd species vs. loners, mammals vs. insects and so on. The wild variety of physical types is only matched by the extensive array of cultures, which makes for a very entertaining read.” –Bonnie Gordon, Los Alamos Daily Post
“Similar in feel to Roger Zelazny's Alien Speedway series is Retread Shop by T. Jackson King. It's an orphan-human-in-alien-society-makes-good story. Well-written and entertaining, it could be read either as a Young Adult or as straight SF with equal enjoyment.” –Chuq Von Rospach, OtherRealms 22
&nbs
p; “If you liked Stephen Goldin’s Jade Darcy books duo, and Julie Czerneda’s Clan trilogy, then you will probably like Retread Shop since it too has multiple aliens, an eatery, and an infinity of odd events that range from riots, to conspiracy, to exploring new worlds and to alien eating habits . . . It’s a fun reader's ride and thoroughly entertaining. And, sigh, I wish that the author would write more books set in this background.” –Lyn McConchie, co-author of the Beastmaster series
HUMANS VS. ALIENS
“Another great book from this author. This series has great characters and story is wall to wall excitement. Look forward to next book.”—William R. Thomas, Amazon
“Humans are once again aggressive and blood thirsty to defend the Earth. Pace is quick and action is plentiful. Some unexpected plot twists, but you always know the home team is the best.”—C. Cook, Amazon
ANCESTOR’S WORLD
“T. Jackson King is a professional archaeologist and he uses that to great advantage in Ancestor’s World. I was just as fascinated by the details of the archaeology procedures as I was by the unfolding of the plot . . . What follows is a tightly plotted, suspenseful novel.”–Absolute Magnitude
“The latest in the StarBridge series from King, a former Rogue Valley resident now living and writing in Arizona, follows the action on planet Na-Dina, where the tombs of 46 dynasties have lain undisturbed for 6,000 years until a human archaeologist and a galactic gumshoe show up. Set your phasers for fun.”–Medford Mail Tribune
ALIEN ASSASSIN
“The Assassin series is required reading in adventure, excitement and daring. The galactic vistas, the advanced alien technologies and the action make all the Assassin books a guarantee of a good read. Please keep them coming!”—C. B. Symons, Amazon
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