The invaders thought they had crushed humanity. They messed with the wrong species.
An Impulse Power Story
Francine Beaumont is tired. Tired of waiting for an armada of Imber ships to finish off what’s left of humanity. Tired of fear and privation. Tired of living like a rat, feeding off what scraps the cat lets her have.
When the chance comes to hit the Imbers where it really hurts—right at their fuel supply—she takes it. One stealth cruiser. One pilot. A cargo hold filled with explosives. A suicide mission for sure, but better that than doing nothing.
As the ship’s cook, John O’Shaughnessy knows everything that goes on aboard the warship. And something is definitely up with his Frankie. If she thinks he’s going to let her carry out this crazy plan of hers alone, that stubborn woman has another think coming.
Frankie thinks she’s gotten away clean…until her instincts tell her she’s not alone on her mission. Still, it’s a shock to find her peace-loving John standing there with eyes that spell murder. Now is a hell of a time to discover they’re more than friends. But there’s no turning back…
Warning: Space invaders were seriously harmed in the making of this story.
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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
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Metal Reign
Copyright © 2010 by Nathalie Gray
ISBN: 978-1-60504-905-2
Edited by Sasha Knight
Cover by Kanaxa
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First Samhain Publishing, Ltd. electronic publication: February 2010
www.samhainpublishing.com
Metal Reign
Nathalie Gray
Chapter One
Frankie threw her hands up. “Because it’s home, dammit!”
“A toxic planet with a potholed moon.” John rolled his eyes. “Some home. And we’re not even sure anyone survived the initial attack. What if we can’t even live down there anymore? What if everything is dead?”
“Earth is tougher than you think.” The old debate. She was tired of it, tired of waiting, of running out of everything, of being afraid all the time. But then again, humanity was about to do something about it. Stand up and take their planet back. In a matter of hours—
“Your turn.” John tapped the deck of cards on the plastic trunk by her bunk.
She played her card in their weekly game of poker. But her heart wasn’t in it. A headache squeezed the back of her eyeballs. Damn, another low.
John’s eyebrow arched the way it always did when pain slipped past her guard. He never missed much.
“Want one?”
“Sure.” That man was one in a million.
The toffee John offered melted on her tongue as soon as she popped it into her mouth. Caramel flavor spread from the velvety candy as sugar entered her bloodstream. The latest glycemic low left, her hands stopped shaking and her mood lifted. Somewhat. Frankie closed her eyes and sighed. Buttery paradise in her mouth.
“Good, huh?”
In all the years she’d known him, John’s voice had always soothed her nerves. It did again that evening, a mere twelve hours before the great charge. D-Day, as in the old days. But right now, they were playing cards. She focused on that.
She smiled with her eyes still closed, knowing John would wear that corner grin she liked to tease him about, the one that invariably got him in trouble with the ladies. Or more aptly, with their territorial boyfriends. Frankie opened her eyes and caught him not grinning as usual, but wearing a pained expression that flitted to mocking in the blink of an eye. There, then gone. Like those schools of silver fish she had watched in old-fashioned movies.
She let it go. John O’Shaughnessy, her ship’s cook and long-time friend, was eccentric if nothing else. “Better than good.” She winked.
“Is the low over?” The lone lamp in her cabin cast coppery rays in John’s light brown hair, which he wore a bit past the collar. Eyes bluer than an iceberg stared, as if he could see right through to her core. “You still look pale. Want another shot of sugary sin?”
“I think I’m good now.” She extended her steady hands to prove it.
“A surgeon’s hands.” John pocketed the rest of the toffees. Little drops of amber clad in gem-colored wrappers. “You should have the doc take a look at you. I can’t always come bravely running to save you, armed with candy and benevolence. You could lapse into a diabetic coma, and then who would complain about my menu?”
“The rest of the crew?”
“Ouch.” John put a long hand to his chest. “How you wound me, my fair lady.”
“I’m no lady and you know it.”
Without taking his gaze off her, John delicately lowered his cards. A full house.
Frankie slapped her hand on her thigh. “Goddammit.”
“Tut-tut-tut. He had nothing to do with this.” Eyes sparkling, he scooped up and pocketed the evening’s win—old tokens from a long-destroyed bridge on Earth—and leaned back against the bulkhead. Muscles twitched along his rower’s shoulders. All angular, lean lines. “So… That plan of yours…”
And there it was. She knew it had been coming. All evening she’d waited for John to broach the subject of her plan. In his characteristic way, he’d taken his time. A true poker player. No wonder he beat her nine times out of ten. But then again, she didn’t play to win against John, she just played to spend time with him. Once in a while even Commander Beaumont needed to let her guard down and be herself.
“About damn time you said what was on your mind.”
John shrugged. “My nan always said there’s never a good time to make a bad decision.”
“Going after the Imbers is a bad decision?”
“Not if you have tens of thousands of professional troops and an armada of warships. You have neither. Those are biomecha death on wings. How do you kill the machine part of them when you don’t have armor-piercing ammo? And how do you get to the soft, chewy inside when you can’t get past their mechanized defenses?”
Intellectually, Frankie knew he was right. But humans couldn’t afford to do nothing, as they had for the past five hundred years since the invasion. In 2149, Imbers had come on their monstrous ships, thousands of them, machines made of living parts. They had landed and taken everything. Ravaged the planet, killed half of its species, mined it to a hairsbreadth of its ecosystem’s life. While the Imbers raped the planet for its precious ores, unyielding and unafraid of its inhabitants, people had fled in what ships could be launched. Cruise liners, freighters, personal crafts. Those who couldn’t flee died on a planet suddenly toxic. Or so everyone had surmised. Now, she wasn’t so sure. Mass exodus of unparalleled proportions had preceded a couple million humans stranded in space, struggling to sustain life onboard ships never designed for prolonged habitation. After decades of disease and despair—a second Dark Ages—people had begun to reorganize, colonize. Start over. But none of the space colonies were Earth. None of them felt like home.
“We can’t afford to sit on our hands. Not anymore. We’re starving, John. Food is run
ning out. We keep losing power. Our hydroponics crops are failing, children are born smaller and weaker with every generation. Our immunization programs aren’t worth shit. We have to take Earth back. It’s not a matter of ego or honor or whatever. It’s survival. We’re not going to last much longer.”
“We could find another hospitable planet instead of obsessing about one we can’t have. There’s a couple—”
A flare of temper forced Frankie to her feet. Her French father’s side was manifesting itself. Again. “John, for fuck’s sake. There are no other planets close enough. Every single mission we’ve sent came back negative. When they came back at all.”
“So you’re just going to attack them? Get out the slingshots, folks, we’re going after Goliath.”
“No, not just attack them. You know that. One stealth cruiser, no heat signature to speak of, we remote-pilot it close enough to put a charge on the orbital pipeline. The Imbers will think it’s just more space debris and won’t see a thing until their fuel dries out. My plan—”
“Your plan is flawed at best,” John cut in.
Frankie took a deep breath. “You’re not doing that devil’s advocate thing again, are you? Because this is not a good time for it. Not tonight.”
“The devil doesn’t need another advocate, but reason does. It’s not reasonable to think we can hurt the Imbers badly enough simply by cutting off their fuel line. That thing is armored and protected. Plus, they’ll spot us a system away. It can’t be done.”
“It can. And it will. One good hit on that orbital pipeline and it’s bye-bye Imbers. You’ve seen the reconnaissance report—”
“A couple of spotty RSIs don’t count as data to me.”
“Those remote sensing images aren’t spotty when you know what you’re looking for. And people died to get that data back home. It’s the Imbers’ one blind spot, and I’ll be damned if I don’t take a shot at it.”
“Okay. What if you miss that shot? Or worse, what if you succeed and it doesn’t change a thing except make them come after us?” John’s blue eyes turned darker. “They haven’t cared one bit what we do so far, don’t make them. And as the lead ship, Commander Beaumont, you’d be the first to get it in the teeth.”
John always used her rank whenever a debate wasn’t going his way. Frankie sighed.
“You’re on that ship too. And I still wonder why you stayed. You’re a civilian, you could’ve just asked to be reassigned to another ship. This mission was volunteers only.” She raked both hands in her hair. “Look, it’s a decent plan. While the alien scumbags are running around wondering what the hell is going on with their fuel, the rest of our ships will come in for the kill. With the numbers we have, it should be enough to destroy the lunar power plant.”
It sounded true enough, and accurate enough. Yet Frankie couldn’t look into John’s eyes without feeling dirty. Most of what she’d said was true. But not all of it.
She checked her watch, cringed. One standard hour until her ship, Magellan, the largest and oldest in the fleet, would rendezvous with the salvager, Ca Ong, which had in its massive belly the cruiser she’d pilot for the mission.
“Why do you keep looking at your watch? Are you nervous?”
Because all they had was right now. Because she wasn’t woman enough to face him and tell him the truth. Because every time she looked into John’s eyes, she wanted to change her mind and find a quiet place somewhere for another game of poker. Just one more.
In the end, she just shrugged. “Aren’t you?”
Some big Commander you are, Beaumont. Can’t even face up to your one friend.
Through narrowed eyes, John stared at her as she resumed pacing her small cabin. Barely three paces one side then back to the other. When she’d returned for a fourth trip, he stood and blocked her way. She was tall and fit yet was still dwarfed by the man’s six-three, athletic frame. In long hands that didn’t shake—his hands never shook, no matter the situation—John framed her face and placed a kiss on her forehead. Heat wafted out of her collar. He’d never done that. To her shock, the heat caused by his unexpected kiss didn’t dissipate.
“God knows you have a lot on your plate, Frankie,” he murmured. “And I understand you can’t brief me on everything all the time as things happen. But when you want to tell me what’s bugging you, you know I’ll be there to listen. Okay?”
The impulse to tell him everything surged in her. They’d shared so much already. Heartache, frustrations, illnesses and injuries. She could tell him anything, couldn’t she? Almost.
Not this time, Beaumont.
“You’re such a moron,” she let out through a fake grin. Guilt was like a cold knife stabbing her despite the pleasant warmth his hands created.
A dark blond eyebrow arched as he pulled back to look at her. “I’ve been thinking about something…” He scratched the back of his head, sucked his teeth. “Maybe I should just—”
A knock came at the hatch. Both John and she started. It was the first time she’d ever seen him caught off guard. The notion that something could rattle him pained her. He was her rock, her one true friend. If life got to him too, then who else could lend her a shoulder to cry on?
John drew back, an expression of chagrin quickly turning to mockery. He rolled his eyes. “Leila needs to learn how to use the comms.”
“How do you know it’s Seaman Qiu?”
“Only Leila knocks on armored steel.”
Game-face time, Beaumont.
She put the mask back on, changed from Frankie playing a game of poker with her best friend, to Commander Beaumont, ship captain and fleet admiral due to unforeseen circumstances—Admiral Lang’s death had left a gaping hole in the fleet—and a woman about to take what was left of humanity on an all-out charge against the invader. No one but John had ever seen Frankie underneath the stoical mask of leadership. No one but him knew about her drops in blood sugar, her obsessive nail-biting and pacing, or how she would sometimes wake in the middle of a nightmare she couldn’t remember, prey to her own personal demons. Doubts the worst of them. What if she missed something? What if she was wrong about that pipeline? What if something happened to the Ca Ong?
Those what ifs would someday crush her, she was sure.
She felt torn between needing to deal with this latest fire and yearning for a bit more downtime before…
She pulled the lever up and opened the hatch. Seaman Qiu stood not ten centimeters away, brown eyes huge in her pointed face as she saluted. “There’s a problem, Ma’am.”
John slipped his two forefingers inside the arm pocket of his black coveralls and pulled out a toffee. “There. For later.”
When Frankie reached out to take the candy, their fingers brushed. While she turned to address Qiu, she spotted John bringing his hand to his mouth, as if testing the feel of it. That look of pain again flashed in his expressive eyes before the Roman Catholic Irishman who had a direct line to God—John spoke to Him all the time, as he jokingly boasted—winked then walked out.
She could still smell his cologne after he’d left. A strange notion of loss invaded her, made her mad at the intrusion even if she knew intellectually that she could speak with John any time she wished. For the rest of that night anyway. She would go see him later. A lump rose in her throat.
Not now. She couldn’t afford the luxury of self-pity.
“What’s going on, Seaman?” she asked as she rushed down the passageway alongside Qiu. Both sets of boots clanged on the metal grille deck. Those they met snapped to attention along the pitted bulkheads. The Magellan had once been a fine ship. But it was old and tired now. Like the rest of humanity’s infrastructure. They needed that planet back, dammit.
Qiu murmured out the corner of her mouth, “It’s the Ca Ong, Ma’am…”
Glacial fingers of dread gripped her by the nape and wouldn’t let go. The Kraken-class vessel basically carried the entire plan in its hold. If something happened to it, she’d be hard-pressed to find another small, ma
neuverable craft that could approach, undetected, the vulnerable Imber pipeline.
“How bad?”
Seaman Qiu cleared her throat.
Jesus…
She could tell just by the wall of noise from the hatch leading to the bridge that there was big trouble in the air. Comms crackled with a multitude of messages coming in simultaneously from various ships. None of it sounded good. The two crewmembers manning the console frantically relayed the data to the officer of the watch, who, in turn, barked orders to the rest of the crew. Beyond the wide portholes in front and on each side, inscrutable blackness pressed in against the bonded glass except for one spot lit by the Magellan’s giant searchlight. Still a fair distance away but close enough to ID, the Ca Ong’s unmistakable round prow occupied the beam of light.
When the closest deckhand spotted Frankie stepping through the hatch, a relieved smile spread to his lips. She nodded.
“Captain on deck!”
“At ease. Present location?”
“One light-year from Earth, Ma’am.”
While the chaos of the bridge swallowed Seaman Qiu, Frankie made a beeline for the comms console.
“Sitrep.” She needed a situation report, and she needed it now. Things were not looking good.
“Bad, Ma’am. The Ca Ong just sent a distress call. They had engine problems all the way to its present location—”
“Ma’am.”
Frankie turned away from the comms console to catch the Ca Ong’s starboard green light arcing from left to right, which meant either the ship had executed one hell of a tight turn or it’d just done a barrel roll. Neither maneuver made sense in the present situation when all they had to do was position their aft so that the Magellan’s cargo cranes could tug the stealth cruiser into her hold.
From the comms, a cacophony of messages blared out. Only one word, repeated over and over. “Mayday! Mayday!” Then nothing at all. The silence startled her as badly as the crew. Someone gasped.
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