The Battle for the Ringed Planet
Page 1
--
By Richard Edmond Johnson
--
Copyright © 2012 by the author.
--
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the author.
--
Cover design by Athanasios … www.mad-gods.com/CoverHIRE
--
Other works by Richard Edmond Johnson (writer7475@gmail.com)
--
The Heidelberg Hotel (YA suspense, drama)
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006KY9LTQ
--
The Secret in Saartown (YA suspense, drama, mystery)
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0075XBGOE
--
Coming soon, The Knights of Oakshadow Book 1: The Battle for Sarvonne (medieval historical fantasy, first of a trilogy)
--
Chapter 1: Planet Fall
Chapter 2: Survivor
Chapter 3: Fireball
Chapter 4: Callisto
Chapter 5: Grondalle
Chapter 6: Nightmares
Chapter 7: The Old Man
Chapter 8: Starhawks
Chapter 9: Fire Fight
Chapter 10: God of War
Chapter 11: Dragon Marine
Chapter 12: Tortured Soul
Chapter 13: The Outlawed Lands
Chapter 14: The Lost Ones
Chapter 15: Under the Rings
Chapter 16: Transporters
Chapter 17: Impala
Chapter 18: Warlords
Chapter 19: Base Camp
Chapter 20: Engineers
Chapter 21: Dust Offs
Chapter 22: Mission
Chapter 23: Hunter One
Chapter 24: Casualties of War
Chapter 25: To Kill a Cyborg
Chapter 26: The 4th Fleet
Chapter 27: Inside a Gas Giant
Chapter 28: Skimming Shields
Chapter 29: Immortal Death
Chapter 30: Siiri’s Fury
Chapter 31: The Secret about Torian
Glossary of People and Places
Chapter 1: Planet Fall
A young man with sunken chestnut eyes and longer than military regulation thick chocolate brown hair stared unseeingly at his reflection in the dimly lit washroom mirror. He had a long angular face with a strong jaw line and if it weren’t for the worn tired look, he would be considered strikingly handsome.
It was one in the morning fleet time, but dawn planet side and he had only a few minutes before pre-flight. Glad to be alone in the cramped metallic washroom he splashed his face with water. When he looked up in the mirror again there was a man in a navy blue flight suit with pale blue skin and wavy blonde hair standing behind.
“You know you’re going to get me in trouble, I barely passed my psych eval before transfer.” he spoke to the man who appeared.
“I don’t know how you even made it. You’re clearly suffering from PTSD.”
“Fleet doesn’t care. Hawkeyes have the highest casualty rate, present company included.”
“You only have a couple of weeks left, Torian.” the blue man gently put his hand on the other’s shoulder.
“Yeah, well, I’ll probably be seeing you today, Tristan. Have you ever heard about this place?”
“Selunia? Only that something bad happened.”
“It’s a tomb. There was a city, but no one survived. Other ships went down to find out why, and none came back. So we’re next.”
“Who is your pilot?”
“I wish it were you.”
“Of course, I was the best. What a team we were; highest stats in the 3rd fleet.”
“But you’re dead; can’t help me now. This new guy is green, but thinks he knows everything.”
“Just like I did.”
“But you did know everything!”
“Aw, cheer up. Remember that weekend you spent at my place in Berkeley, your first time on earth, those girls!”
Torian’s lips curled, “That was wild, right after that depressing holo from Leigh.”
“Made you forget! Oh, and the surfing!”
“You were always crazy, Tristan …” then Torian looked sad, “I gotta go now, I’ll see you later.”
--
The R-26 Hawkeye was a sleek spacecraft with a tubular fuselage and wing-like struts in the rear housing surveillance pods and defensive weapons. Designed for long ranged deep space reconnaissance and larger than a regular fighter, it had a crew of two, a pilot and a technician. In the cockpit, enclosed in a transparent steel canopy, two dark helmeted heads checked instruments while they descended into the greenish blue atmosphere of the large ringed planet.
Torian McCallum checked the visuals inside his helmet visor heads up display (HUD) racing along either side with graphs projecting trajectories and numbers, and then emitted an audible yawn.
“Is my flying boring you, McCallum?” grunted the pilot in the front seat ahead.
The tall flight specialist readied a typically sarcastic reply to the green pilot, but thought better of it. He decided to hold his tongue and try keeping a little sanity on their sudden mission. Instead, he analyzed the eight different colored moons hovering beyond the atmosphere. In addition to the moons, there was a thick ring of colorful ice crystals, vastly different from most other planets he had visited.
“What are the atmospheric readings?” Miky Chang, the short hyperactive pilot bellowed through the intercom.
Having just reported them, Torian sighed, “Oh let me see … same as a minute ago.” Slow swirling marshmallow clouds blanketed their view of the continents below. Torian knew from his briefings that deep blue oceans and lush green landforms proved that the early terra-formers with their gargantuan atmospheric possessors had done their job well two centuries ago. The planet Selunia had had the potential to become one of the greatest early colonies, but sadly, something went terribly wrong, and everyone in the only settlement of Kaarina perished.
The 4th fleet was in close proximity to the system and sent a cruiser to evaluate the strategic importance of the dead colony, hence their little excursion in the R-26 Hawkeye. Of course, there was always the nagging morbid curiosity to know how the two hundred thousand colonists, men, women, and children, had died. Other manned investigations had failed to come up with an answer, mostly because they all had died immediately after entering the city. Some speculated it was a plaque, or poisoned atmosphere from hidden gases released under the mantle. Naturally, military planners reasoned that a state of the art R-26 Hawkeye with a trained crew protected by military combat suits would be safe. Military Intelligence or not, there was no way Torian was getting out of the scout vessel once they landed.
The experienced crewmember swore that Chang was the worst pilot in the fleet. His descent was so painfully slow and drifting noticeably off course that Torian struggled against the urge to take over. Instead, he amused himself with scanning all the landforms surrounding the derelict city. The planners had selected the site well near a wide fertile river valley. Tracing the river away from the empty city, suddenly he furrowed his brows as he came across the valley. The visual was strange, and since he came from a rural farming colony, he had the insight to see something others had missed.
“Lieutenant?”
“What? Can’t you see I am concentrating?” nervousness showed.
Sailing through a sea of white, the pilot was flying
by instruments through the cloudbank, and judging by his lack of enthusiasm, not doing well.
“Just follow the yellow line in your HUD.” Torian muttered under his breath inaudible to the man steering the craft. Fortunately, they broke through the clouds and could see green below with a collection of grey concrete buildings nestled on a curve in the river.
Glancing down on his right, Torian remarked, “Space Port on our 3 o’clock …”
“I can see.”
“How many planet falls have you done?” his last pilot, Tristan, had completed dozens.
“Shut up or I’ll kick the crap out of you when we land!” and he could, having practiced a number of martial arts in the gym. Of course, Torian knew he could not even try to hit him back because Chang was an officer, so he sighed watching the vessel slip off course towards the middle of Kaarina instead of the spaceport.
This was Torian’s twenty-fifth official recon mission, more than most, with almost three years in the service as a Long Range Recon Space (LRRS) Specialist First Class. Chang was only his second pilot and this was supposed to be their second mission together, the first scrubbed. His other missions had been with the likeable experienced pilot, Tristan Alpha, who taught Torian how to fly during their boring weeklong deep space recons. However, Tristan was dead, and now he was stuck with Chang.
To make matters worse, without warning, all the vessel’s systems shut down. Alarmed, Torian tried restarting his cockpit controls while Chang swore.
“What did you do?” Torian demanded. Chang was only weeks out of flight training and had no deep space recons.
“I didn’t do anything!” all the lights on their consoles went out as well as the HUD in each of their visors. The cockpit was dark and adding to their dilemma the sickening sinking feeling trapped in an aircraft during freefall.
The vibrating hum of air pressure on the hull was unnerving and Torian shouted, “Eject!”
“It won’t!”
“Eject! Eject! Eject!” The R-26 Hawkeye began to spin uncontrollably. Torian guessed they were about five thousand meters from painful impact.
“It’s not responding …,” Chang yelled close to panic.
His mother taught him never to curse, but now was not the time as he uttered a few choice words. “I’m overriding …” but try as he might Torian could not engage the ejection system. Glancing out the transparent steel cockpit, he grimaced. They would send him home in pieces. No, scratch that, they would never recover his body from this cursed planet.
Torian groaned, “I was less than two weeks short …” he closed his eyes waiting for the end.
Suddenly, just as mysteriously as the power had shut down, it came back on. All the system panels began flashing and their HUD’s ran columns and columns of useless numbers.
“Now eject! We’re less than 3000 meters and still spinning!”
“No, I got it!” Chang shouted back as the familiar resonating buzz of the ion engines kicked in and the space craft stabilized.
However, Torian was not sure the pilot had the controls watching concrete and glass buildings rush up towards them, “I don’t think …”
“Relax! We have plenty of altitude …” just then the nose dropped. The Specialist First Class watched in horror while the pilot fought with the controls as the R-26 Hawkeye dived towards a tall shiny steel building. To his credit, Chang avoided the building and headed straight for a section of low-rise apartments. Working with surprising precision the pilot maneuvered the craft over long abandoned rooftops to a small open court connecting several complexes. He flared up the thrusters and the R-26 Hawkeye hovered for a few seconds lowering the landing gear before the power began to flux and it dropped like a rock, stopping short of smashing to pieces on the ground. The sleek vessel hit hard with a sickening crunch. Small wisps of smoke and dust rose past the cockpit while Torian leaned back and let out a shaky sigh of relief.
“Told you to relax.” Chang undid his harness and pressed the button to slide their seats to the left, opening a small space for walking through to the back. The smaller man hopped out of the pilot’s chair and squeezed by Torian to the rear and lower part of the craft. Meanwhile the military specialist tested his control screens.
“We lost power on descent! Can we lift off again?”
“Sure. Come on, we have to check outside.”
Exhaling in frustration Torian checked their power levels and systems, “Our thrusters are off-line!”
“We’ll fix them after.”
“What if we lose power when we lift off?”
“You worry too much, scan the area!”
Grumbling Torian tried to read the fuzzy screens and then switched to holo, but they displayed just as much static. He was still able to isolate objects and check their descriptions.
“Lots of rats.” he never could figure out why they allowed rats to breed on colony worlds, “Deer and packs of wolves and wild dogs.” Some of the dogs were quite large, human sized, and the wolves were so numerous that he did not bother to check every one listed on the scan.
“And the atmosphere?”
Shaking his head, Torian replied, “Normal readings …”
“Contagions?”
“None detected, but other crews scanned nothing before they died …”
“They didn’t have a Hawkeye, the best survey vessel in the Confederation’s inventory.”
Under his breath Torian groaned, “They must have uploaded blind loyalty in your sleep.” Unstrapping his seat harness, he climbed out and down a small set of steps from the cockpit into the crew quarters, a cramped space with a chair and larger console screens to one side and a bunk on the other. A trap door lay on the floor a couple of feet from the steps up to the cockpit. The R-26 Hawkeye, designed to last weeks in space, had enough food supplies for a couple months. Chang checked his utility belt on his navy blue combat environmental suit complete with a pistol.
“I am not going out there. No one told me I had to go outside. We can scan from in here.”
“You’re going outside, and that’s an order.”
“That’s an unlawful order. You cannot order me to go out into an unknown hazardous area without adequate protection. I read the Fleet Regulations.”
“Is it hazardous? What did your scans say?”
Torian grimaced, Chang had him, the scans reported the atmosphere safe, “There’s something, otherwise all those people wouldn’t have died …”
The shorter man pressed the lock on the side of the crew’s quarters and the trap door opened down revealing a small ladder, “Ok, coward, I’ll go first, and if you don’t follow you’ll be up for refusing a direct order. Hopefully they’ll shoot you when we get back, or worse, extend your tour!”
Glaring at the Lieutenant, Torian checked his utility belt, “Fine!”
“You do realize this mission is recorded on holo?”
“Including your fabulous piloting?”
“Shut up!”
When they were outside, the temperature from Torian’s HUD read 28 degrees Celsius and a slight drizzle produced an annoying film on his visor. Chang walked around the Hawkeye with its landing gear extended, crumpled in the front so that the vessel angled down slightly.
“Wow, is that a kid’s play structure you crushed?” Torian folded his arms.
Chang raised his brows inside his helmet as he studied the wooden and metal mashed up mess under the R-26 Hawkeye. They were in a small courtyard connecting residential apartment units surrounded by several benches on playground sand that overflowed with weeds.
“That’s symbolic.” Torian grinned.
“How?” Chang shot him a frustrated look.
“Well the protestors call us baby killers.”
“We didn’t kill any babies.”
“We bombed New Persia to dust.”
“They deserved it, the home world of the Immortal Fleet.” Annoyed, Chang sighed and marched in front of Torian, “Ok, now remove your helmet.”
“Wha
t?”
“You heard me, take it off.”
“Nothing doing, I’ll die.”
“You don’t know that …”
“Hey, I read the briefings and searched the Holonet on this place …”
“That’s a direct order, take it off!”
Torian narrowed his eyes, “What did that hot blonde intelligence lady tell you?”
“I know a whole lot more than you do.”
“What did she promise you besides her bed?”
“Nothing, I’m a loyal officer …”
“I’ll wager a place in a Starhawk squadron!”
Chang was quiet.
“Yeah, that was it. If you finished this mission, she will put you in a fighter squadron. Well, good luck! You can’t even fly straight, so there’s no way you can do formation …”
“Shut up!” Chang shouted and drew his coal black pistol, “Take off your helmet or I’ll be justified to shoot!”
“Don’t you get it? We die and they can upload the data from our suits! No drone ever could report why humans die here, so they need a live test!”
“They would never sacrifice good troops that way …”
“They do …,” he thought about Tristan.
“Take off your helmet or I’ll fry your insides …”
“Ok, I get it.” Torian seethed. Both off-worlders glared at each other through their helmets. Chang motioned with the pistol one more time and Torian stuck out his hand in a stopping motion.
“All right!” the taller man slowly unsnapped the fasteners and there was a rush of air as he lifted the navy colored space helmet from his head, letting loose his chocolate colored hair, damp with sweat and rapidly matting with the drizzle.
“Breath!” Chang ordered with the pistol still pointing at the crewman. Torian inhaled slowly and then exhaled. He repeated breathing deeply for another moment.
Laughing Chang lowered the pistol, “See, she was right, there is no plague anymore.”
“It stinks here, like death.” the odor was of something rotting and the slight drizzly breeze carried other unpleasant smells. Torian walked around a little sniffing the air some more. Chang holstered his pistol and then began to fiddle with his helmet. A moment later, he held it under his arm and took a deep breath.
“Yes, you’re right, it sure stinks here.” reaching into his utility belt he pulled out a small black rectangular item with a screen and removed his heavy navy gloves. He began fussing with the tiny buttons and examined the screen.