The Hope Island Chronicles Boxed Set

by PJ Strebor

  He took three deep breaths, exhaling slowly. Nathan brought up each holo menu in turn, examining the readouts to confirm the positive preflight status of his boat.

  “Commander – Telford.”

  “Commander.”

  “Sir, I have completed preflight. All indicators are in the green.”

  “Very well,” Worsfold said. “Proceed.”

  “Aye, Sir.” He examined the hangar area. No other boat had cleared their pier.

  “Flight control, Epsilon One.”

  “Epsilon One, Flight control.”

  “Request permission for immediate departure from hangar area and clearance to launch area.”

  “Epsilon One, Flight control.” The same bored voice. “Permission granted to depart hangar area.”

  Nathan acknowledged. “Commander—”

  “Proceed.”

  “Roger. Proceeding.”

  Nathan did a fast rotation of the chair to confirm no personnel were in the hangar and the pier had separated completely from his fighter. By touch alone he guided his fingers to the maneuvering controls. The boat slid smoothly from the pier at a sedate pace, clearing the hangar doors.

  Without a single jerky movement, he taxied the fighter across into the boat bay. His TF-51 Specter fighter stopped on the center line.

  “Flight control, Epsilon One. Request permission to depart the boat.”

  “Epsilon One, Flight control. Permission granted. Good luck.”

  “Roger, and thank you. Commander, I have received permission to depart the boat.”

  “Go.”

  He took his fighter into open space and awaited orders.

  “Very well,” Worsfold said, “make a powered descent to ten thousand, where you will be on a heading of one-eight-zero true.”

  Nathan pointed the nose toward the planet at an oblique angle and pushed the throttles forward to the red mark. Forty-five seconds later, he leveled out smoothly at ten thousand meters.

  “Proceed to coordinates Alpha Gamma two-four-eight, and arrive there in precisely thirty-eight seconds. Go!”

  Nathan had spent hours examining the contoured three-dimensional schematics of the flight training area, and so had a better-than-fair idea where to go. From the painful throbbing between his shoulder blades, he also suspected what would come next.

  “Proceed to coordinates two-seven-niner, drop onto the deck, reduce speed to two hundred kph and take us through the KC. And Mister Telford…”

  “Keep my nose up?”

  “Go!”

  The Kondrachev Chicane had a long-standing reputation as the trickiest and most potentially dangerous flight training scenario any pilot would face in their career. The valley of death, as a past student — probably a fan of Tennyson — had dubbed it, had claimed lives over the years, together with a healthy respect from those who accepted its challenge.

  Nathan prided himself on not scaring easily, but this would be his third time through the dangerous maze in as many days. His unaccustomed apprehension returned. The first time he had flown along its menacing path, his nerves had jangled for an hour after he landed. The second time felt little better. The KC had been designed for experienced pilots undergoing advanced training at fighter tactics school. Not a grommit.

  The Kondrachev Chicane was more of a narrow, meandering ravine than what could be rightly called a valley. A long, winding snake of black death, waiting to tear a boat to pieces with the jagged black fangs protruding from its sheer cliffs. A pilot had to be very much on the ball in order to traverse its twenty-kilometer length without becoming part of the scenery.

  Nathan arrived at the coordinates, skimming twenty meters off the deck, pulled the speed back to 200 kph and pointed his fighter at the gaping black entrance. He took several deep breaths, exhaling slowly, as the rotting teeth of the maw grew in his front holo panels. It’s just another challenge. Just another challenge. Even at the standard speed of 200 kph, the opening hurtled toward him at an unnerving speed. In the blink of an eye, the boat was swallowed by the dark ravine. The raging walls streaked by like a furious black gale. His pilgrimage through the chicane would take around six minutes of mind-jarring concentration.

  After two minutes his nerves stretched as taut as a bow string. His concentration remained absolute, but he still noticed the trickle of sweat running down his back.

  “Mister Telford, increase speed to three hundred kph,” Worsfold said.

  “Aye, Sir,” he acknowledged, fighting to maintain focus. Three hundred clicks? Too fast. It’s too bloody fast. He nudged the throttle forward and hung on.

  The task of controlling the speeding craft became twice as fast, twice as frantic, twice as dangerous. The knot between his shoulder blades burned with a fury he had rarely experienced. For the next sixty seconds he battled for survival, all the time envisioning a number of grisly accidents that could befall Worsfold.

  “Increase speed to four hundred kph,” Worsfold ordered.

  He acknowledged with a tight, “Aye, Sir,” but his hand hesitated over the throttle control. Nathan’s teeth locked together as he pushed the throttle forward to the next notch.

  The moment the boat jumped forward, something happened. It felt as if a balloon popped inside his head. His whole body felt as though a great flood of icy water had hit him. Shocking as burnt flesh, the sensation washed away all doubt, all fear, all logical consideration. For some reason he could not fathom, Nathan began to chuckle. “Aye, Sir, speed is now four hundred kph.” His chuckling continued to grow as he realized how easy this was. The sweat dried on his skin. The tension lifted from his tortured muscles, replaced by a soothing calmness and sense of peace he had never known. He knew, without any basis in logic and against the absent forces of empirical evidence, that he could do this. Not arrogance gone wild, nor a sudden bout of insanity, it just … was! The chuckling settled into the warm pit in his stomach, the luminous peace spreading throughout his being.

  The connection between mind and body became more tenuous than ever. The boat and he had melded into one. He thought of what he needed to do and the boat pitched and turned to his commands, as if his body was no longer required as the middle man in the transaction. Nathan could sense the hum of the engines through the throttles and could perceive the sharp edge of the screaming wind as it shrieked across the flight controls.

  The Kondrachev Chicane. A problem? Not in a million years. The Valley of Death? Ha! He could fly backwards through this piddling little rat crack. What had he been thinking before? The big bad chicane wasn’t a shark waiting to tear him apart, but a gummy-mouthed minnow. It was nothing. He was nothing. The universe was endlessly wonderful and he was less than a speck within its enormity and more than a deity.

  When the TF-51 burst from the far end of the chicane, the danger vanished. With it, the feeling of utter peace was ripped from him like a torn limb. Nathan groaned as his energy leached from him as if sucked into a brutal vortex. His eyes blurred and his hands began to shake. Try as he might to fight off the utter fatigue, he could not resist it. Against every instinct in his being — with the notable exception of his personal survival — he uttered the words he had vowed never to speak.

  “Commander, please take over.” The weakness in his voice startled Nathan.

  “It’s my boat,” Worsfold acknowledged.

  Nathan released the controls and slumped into his chair. He did not lose consciousness, but drifted in a state of limbo for some minutes.

  “Are you still with us, Nathan?” Worsfold’s voice sounded calmer than it had been in months.

  “Yeah.”

  “Try to relax. We’ll be back on the ship in no time. ”

  “Skipper, what happened to me?”

  “What happened? Oh, Nathan, something wonderful happened.”

  Worsfold’s tone reminded Nathan of an old-time evangelist who had regained his long-lost faith.

  ***

  Commander Worsfo
ld remained silent throughout the endless journey back to Chiron, for which Nathan was grateful. He could not have felt more drained if he had been fed through a meat grinder. Body, mind and soul.

  Back onboard the boat, he recovered some of his energy but still had difficulty extracting himself from his combat chair. Worsfold shooed away the pier commander and helped him unbuckle and get shakily to his feet. His legs turned to rubber and he leaned on the commander till they arrived at the briefing room. A strong cup of coffee and ten minutes of rest aided in his recovery.

  “I guess you’ve been wondering why I’ve been pushing you so hard,” Worsfold said presently.

  Nathan finished his coffee and got unsteadily to his feet to get a refill. “I may have been a little curious.” As always, he tried to keep his emotions in check, but the chicane had clawed at his mind and body unlike anything he had experienced.

  “I saw something in you, Nathan,” Worsfold continued, “and if there was the tiniest possibility of you reaching your full potential, it was my duty to push you over the line to get there.”

  “Even if you got us both killed?” Immediately he regretted his hasty, cruel statement. “I apologize, Skipper. That wasn’t fair.”

  “That’s all right. There was a degree of risk involved, but I felt you could do it. The chicane is the great breakthrough, but this is only the beginning, young man, only the beginning.”

  “I felt something in my head,” Nathan said, “like a balloon popping. Everything changed, became effortless. The moment I cleared the chicane, the euphoria vanished. Then someone dropped a house on me. I’ve come down from adrenaline highs before, but nothing like that. I guess you know how that feels.”

  “No, Nathan,” Worsfold said quietly, “I don’t know. When I attended flight school, I had an instructor called Constance Kondrachev. Connie was hands down the finest pilot I have ever met. She thought I had potential, so she pushed me almost to the point of breaking. If you think I’ve been hard on you, believe me, next to Connie I’m a pussycat. As things turned out, I didn’t have what it took, but that’s fine. I learned a lot along the way. Connie had a very special knack for flying, and she always looked out for anyone who might be similarly gifted.”

  “A knack?”

  “It’s been called many things over the years. Sometimes the Rapture or the Madness, or just the gift. I care to think of it by an old flyer’s expression: the right stuff. Whatever you wish to call it, Nathan, it’s difficult to quantify.” He rubbed his chin absently. “Did you ever run the academy marathon?”

  “Four years in a row.”

  “Then you know about the wall.”

  The first hint of understanding began to filter through Nathan’s confusion. The wall stood as an intimidating barrier of greatest stress during the endurance race.

  “So you pushed me hard to get over the wall?”

  Worsfold nodded. “The experience of this day will stay with you for the rest of your life. In time you will feel differently whenever you drop into a combat sphere. It will start slowly at first, like exercising an unused muscle, then build gradually until you will be capable of doing things you couldn’t currently dream of. It’s rare, special and almost unique.”

  In a flash, Nathan recalled his time on Truculent. How something like this knack had come to his rescue at two critical junctions during that stressful assignment.

  “Where does this, ah, knack come from? I mean, why me and not someone else?”

  “That’s something even Connie couldn’t answer. Perhaps it’s a gift from the universe. Perhaps it’s genetics. Perhaps it’s plain good luck. I don’t know, and you shouldn’t care why. Just be grateful you have it. Connie believed the gift chooses the recipient. I wouldn’t know, myself; I’ve never been into that mystical stuff. All I know is you are the only person I have heard about in the last thirty years to have shown this talent. It starts in the young, then, if properly nurtured, matures into something you can control. In time it will manifest itself in times of greatest stress and during the most intense danger. So, Nathan, savor it, treasure it and in time you will learn to properly utilize it.”

  “I will. I promise you.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Date: 12th December, 321 ASC.

  Position: Pruessen Empire. Planet Pruessen. Brandenburg city. Imperial Palace, war-room.

  Status: Weekly strategy briefing.

  Commodore Oscar Draeger took his seat at the briefing table, sitting as he always did at the right hand of Emperor Thaddeus. Viceroy Roth sat to the emperor’s left and leaned in to whisper a last minute nugget of wisdom to the most powerful person in the empire.

  Along the lengthy table, a sea of high-ranking officers and officials waited patiently. Now that Draeger had arrived, fashionably late as usual, the meeting could commence. Draeger knew that no one would voice disapproval of his tardiness, for the man who sat at the right hand of the emperor could do no wrong.

  Commodore Oscar Draeger had no enemies. Even the all-powerful Imperial Reformation Executive and their brutish cohorts in the Human Resource Service were his friends. Oscar Draeger had nothing but friends and allies. For to be other than a friend to Oscar would invite cruel fate to fall upon you with all of the might the empire could marshal. He commanded the Imperial Pruessen Navy’s Intelligence Special Services Division, and that lofty position added to his power base. Known by many and feared by all, he had been at the top of his game for more years than anyone could remember.

  Even as Pruessen imploded, following the disastrous conclusion to the last war, he had established himself within the new regime. Positioned closely to Emperor Thaddeus, he had nurtured the young leader and in so doing became an indispensable and valued asset, while simultaneously creating the beginnings of a growing power base for himself. Yes, life was good for Oscar Draeger, and none of the fools knew of his real intent, his true ambitions or his relentless devotion to a cause they could never conceive of.

  “Very well, gentlemen,” Viceroy Roth began, “we will begin with a report from Admiral Heller regarding the situation to the southwest.”

  Admiral Heller came from the old school. One of the few senior officers to have survived the debacle of the last war, he, unlike many of his contemporaries, had adjusted to the staggering changes marking the transition from the old republic to the new regime.

  “I am pleased to report to your Majesty,” he said, bowing his head slightly toward Thaddeus, “we have taken the Layden system without firing a shot.” A murmuring of approval resounded around the table. “In the final analysis, the government of Layden chose the most pragmatic approach to their untenable situation and signed the surrender document a month ago.” He shrugged. “It’s taken that long for a courier boat to confirm my best suspicions.”

  “Good news indeed, Admiral Heller,” Roth said. Even when complimenting someone, he maintained his predatory air. “That will go a long way to finally securing our southern flank in preparation for Operation Drawbridge.”

  Roth paused long enough to entice the admiral into saying, “Thank you, Viceroy.”

  “And what of the Talgarno system?”

  Oscar knew Roth was aware of the situation, but at this level of government the game had to be played.

  Heller cleared his throat. “Talgarno is proving to be a harder nut to crack, Viceroy.” He cleared his throat again. “We sent envoys into the system two months ago to negotiate their surrender and, ah, the Talgarnos did not respond favorably.”

  The emperor raised an eyebrow.

  Admiral Heller took a long drink of water but still needed to clear his throat. “A month ago the envoy’s ship returned to Layden and egressed near the outer marker. A boarding party from one of our E-boats went aboard after repeated hails went unanswered. They found that the controls had been set on automatic.” Admiral Heller’s face sagged. “They found what remained of the envoys. Four sacks hanging from the overheads, each containing a head.”


  Viceroy Roth reclined in his chair, puffed up his cheeks and exhaled loudly. “Yes, I’d say that constitutes an unfavorable response, all right.”

  “They know they can’t possibly win against our superior forces, but they would rather die than surrender. Their ferocious Talgarno pride blinds them to the only logical choice. They have seen what we’ve done to other systems that have opposed us, and still they resist. Perhaps when we reduce their society to a smoking ruin they will understand the futility of attempting to stand against the empire.”

  “Yes, no doubt,” Roth said. “What are the projections, Admiral Heller?”

  “Projections are difficult to estimate when dealing with such an intractable adversary, Viceroy.” He cleared his throat and gestured to the younger officer to his right. “Admiral Braun is leading the operation and has had first-hand experience against the enemy forces.”

  Braun sat erect, his hands steady, his eyes clear.

  “If we’re lucky,” Braun began, “we might get away with forty percent casualties, Viceroy.”

  “If we’re lucky, Admiral Braun?” Viceroy Roth’s predatory expression intensified.

  “The Talgarnos have, since the end of the war, adopted a fanatically xenophobic posture.”

  Unlike Heller, this young admiral maintained eye contact with the viceroy, even daring a quick glance at the emperor.

  “They have one of the best modern navies in the north, with experienced crews and solid leadership. Their pathological hatred of outsiders equates our entreaties to a form of societal violation. This is no ordinary enemy, Viceroy. In short, Sir, we can beat them, but it will cost us. Considering the extremism of the enemy mindset, I believe a casualty figure of forty percent to be a conservative estimate.”

  “Have you fought them before, Admiral Braun?” the emperor asked.

  “Yes, Majesty.” Braun waited until the emperor motioned him to continue. “I accompanied a destroyer squadron on a recon sortie to within a half light year of the Talgarno outer marker. Within an hour of egression we were attacked by six small, hyper-capable patrol craft. We tore them to pieces but they kept coming at us. One of them broke through our defense envelope and rammed the destroyer Oldenburg. She survived but will be in dry dock for three months.” Braun shook his head, betraying his admiration. “Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen.” He dared to stare directly at the emperor. “That is the type of insane tenacity we will face when we go to Talgarno, Majesty.”