Juggernaut: The Ixan Prophecies Trilogy Book 2
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Contents
Copyright
Traitor
Chapter 1: Full Compliance
Chapter 2: Supernova
Chapter 3: War Council
Chapter 4: Wisdom
Chapter 5: Specimens
Chapter 6: Phoenix
Chapter 7: Cowards
Chapter 8: Derelict Ships
Chapter 9: Everyone Has a Hobby
Chapter 10: Caesar
Chapter 11: Tort
Chapter 12: Command and Control
Chapter 13: Forgotten Instincts
Chapter 14: Suffer His Wrath
Chapter 15: The Shape the End Takes
Chapter 16: A Little Experiment
Chapter 17: Intercept Course
Chapter 18: A Prisoner Again
Chapter 19: No Less Remarkable
Chapter 20: Drunk
Chapter 21: Soon
Chapter 22: Rounds Away
Chapter 23: Fabrication
Chapter 24: Setback
Chapter 25: Lash Out Across the Galaxy
Chapter 26: Also a Cretin
Chapter 27: Drama Queen
Chapter 28: In Good Conscience
Chapter 29: UHS Firedrake
Chapter 30: Battle Group
Chapter 31: Heavy Beam
Chapter 32: Ek and the Warlord
Chapter 33: A Second Hull
Chapter 34: The Spirit of the UHF
Chapter 35: Hurricane
Chapter 36: Win or Die
Chapter 37: Unravel
Chapter 38: Wait and See
Chapter 39: One Inch Closer
Chapter 40: Scrap Metal
Chapter 41: Vengeance
Chapter 42: A Seed of Hope
Chapter 43: Chief Ralston
Chapter 44: Revolution Gauge
Chapter 45: Juktas
Chapter 46: Regroup
Chapter 47: Compelled to Obey
Chapter 48: Demerits
Chapter 49: Hades
Chapter 50: Within the Hour
Chapter 51: No Better than the Gok
Chapter 52: Fin Candor
Chapter 53: Automaton
Chapter 54: In the Way that She Cried
Chapter 55: Calamity
Chapter 56: It Is Time
Chapter 57: Ignition
Chapter 58: A Fin at War
Chapter 59: The Cruiser and the Frigate
Chapter 60: Oorah
Chapter 61: Fall Back
Chapter 62: Honor
Chapter 63: Ready to Rock
Chapter 64: Eviscerate
Chapter 65: Raid
Chapter 66: Sitting Duck
Chapter 67: You Knew I Was Coming for You
Chapter 68: Battle Scars
Chapter 69: The Ultimate Whetstone
Chapter 70: People Can't Eat Money
Chapter 71: Goliath
Chapter 72: Technically an Admiral
Chapter 73: Unfit
Chapter 74: High-Value Target
Chapter 75: No Going Back
Chapter 76: Old Steel
Chapter 77: Suicide Run
Chapter 78: Wartime Powers
Chapter 79: Life on the Line
Chapter 80: Immediate Self-Interest
Chapter 81: Service Pistol
Chapter 82: Dark Tech
Epilogue: The Advance
Thank You!
Dedication
Acknowledgments
JUGGERNAUT
© Scott Bartlett 2017
Cover art by Tom Edwards (tomedwardsdesign.com)
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
This novel is a work of fiction. All of the characters, places, and events are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, locales, businesses, or events is entirely coincidental.
Traitor
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and read Traitor for free, the prequel to The Ixan Prophecies Trilogy.
Only mailing list subscribers get to read Traitor. The story takes place during the First Galactic War. It reveals how Fesky saved Captain Keyes’s life, and why Warren Husher came to be branded a traitor.
You’ll also be the first to know when Reckoning comes out - that’s the third and final book in the trilogy.
Chapter 1
Full Compliance
“We can’t let that support ship rejoin its capital ship. If we do, the system’s lost.”
Fesky spun her Condor along its short axis and blasted apart yet another Slag that thought it could sneak up on her. That was the name they’d settled on for Gok fighters—Slags. “I can see that, Spank,” she squawked. “Do you intend to continue interrupting my concentration with the bleeding obvious?”
The Ixa’s gambit for taking this star system had involved hiding their support ship behind a nondescript asteroid, guarded by three squadrons of Slags. Luckily, Husher’s message to a friendly element on a human colony otherwise covered with radicals had given them access to several well-placed orbital sensor arrays, and they’d been able to spot the hiding ships.
“Can you calculate how long the support ship will take to join up with the destroyer next to that gas giant?” he said. “I’m kind of busy here.” Three Slags had broken from the swarm protecting the fleeing support ship to try separating Husher from his squadron.
They must have identified him as its leader, Fesky reflected. The Gok are getting better at this. “I’m kind of busy, too,” Fesky grumbled as she watched another pair of Slags line up to make a run at her. Nevertheless, she set her computer to calculating the timeframe Husher wanted as she swung her guns around to face the nearest Gok. Within seconds, she had an answer: “Twenty minutes. Less, if the two Roostships tying up the destroyer fall.”
“We need to act now, Madcap.”
“Easier said than done. The Gok aren’t afraid to kamikaze us the moment we get close to that support ship.”
“Then we need to get rid of our own fear.”
“Okay,” Fesky said, trying to keep sarcasm out of her voice. She just loved it when humans got cryptic. “What do you have in mind?”
“Let my Haymakers form a protective cone around your Divebombers. As the Slags try to kamikaze us, my pilots will peel away from formation, one-by-one, to take them on in dogfights to the death. If the Haymakers win those, they’ll live to fight the next one, but if the Gok manage to crash into them, at least we’ll be taking down one of theirs, too.”
Fesky wished the UHF would upgrade its terminology. “Dogfight” wasn’t right, since it referred to planet-based fighter combat, in which there was a down. There is no down in space. She brushed the thought away. “So we’ll be your payload. My Divebombers.”
“Exactly.”
“Could work, Spank. I’ll pass on the plan to my fliers.”
It took their pilots under a minute to regroup as Husher had described. “I want everyone accelerating at six Gs toward that ship,” he said over a wide channel. “Use your Ocharium boosts to reach that rate as fast as our birds can handle. Now!”
Together, both squadrons screamed toward the enemy, and Fesky started performing the exercises every fighter pilot was taught to combat that much pressure on the body. Two squadrons of Slags sprang forward. Not enough. Though she wouldn’t stroke Husher’s ego by saying so, his plan was decent. The Gok wouldn’t expect them to act as suicidally as their own pilots did.
Unfortunately, at the moment, this was also sort of boring for Fesky. If she fired at the Gok,
she’d risk hitting one of the Haymakers protecting her fighters. So she watched the tactical display instead.
Husher was the first to break formation, to take on two Slags. He feinted a chicken-run at the first, twitching his attitude upward at the last second and rotating around his short axis to blow up the dimwitted Gok from behind.
Undeterred, the second enemy fighter charged at Husher, which was exactly the wrong thing to do. The human made short work of the poor dope and moved on to engage another.
Other Haymakers fared less well. Fesky’s battle calm was shaken as three Condors fell to Gok firepower in quick succession.
Under normal circumstances, the kamikaze technique would be next to useless in the vastness of space. But Gok did seem to excel at limiting the room their enemies had to meaningfully operate in.
The Condor formation had nearly reached the support ship when the last Haymaker left to engage another pair of Slags. The final Gok squadron defending the Ixan support ship sped forward, then.
Too late, dimwits. “Ignore the enemy fighters,” she told her squadron. “Execute an alpha strike on the support ship and prepare to turn around for another pass.” She’d plotted the course she wanted them to follow while waiting for her turn to fight, and now she sent it over to their computers.
Another pass proved unnecessary. The support ship exploded under their coordinated salvo of Sidewinders.
Habit made her raise her talons to her helmet, ready to activate the transponder and tell her squadron to save their celebrating till they returned to their carrier.
But no cheering came, of course, and she lowered her talons again. A nice change.
Neon-green letters flashed across her heads-up display: “MISSION SUCCESS!”
Fesky lifted off her helmet and placed it on the side of the simulator, which resembled the bottom half of a Talon fighter. Beside her, Husher did the same.
“Solid run,” he said.
“Sure. But it’ll have no actual application unless you’re willing to spend your pilots’ lives like that in real life.”
“To save an entire system from the Ixa? Yeah, I would be willing.”
“Hmm.”
“Anyway, you’re the CAG. You’d be the one giving me authorization to do it. So I guess the real question is, would you have the balls?”
Fesky stood, stretching her wings, which felt amazing after spending an hour cooped up in the simulator. “Considering not even Winger males have balls…I guess you’ll have to wait for the next engagement to find out.”
Husher chuckled. “I’m glad we were finally able to program Condor specs into these things,” he said, slapping his simulator as he climbed out. “I was tired of flying your species’ shitty Talons. How close to accurate do you think we got with the Slags?”
“They seemed close enough.”
“Yeah.” Checking his com, Husher said, “Uh oh. The war council’s in fifteen minutes. We’ll be late if we don’t get moving.”
“I’m not going.”
“Seriously?”
“I hate those drawn-out circle jerks. We’re going to war, and I have a lot of Gok and Ixa to kill. There’s no need to complicate things any more than that.”
“There may be a bit more to it, Fesky.”
“Whatever. I’m going flying.” She stalked toward the simulator room’s exit. They both knew why she wasn’t attending the war council, so she resented Husher pressuring her about it.
Of course, he lacked the exact details, but he knew how strained her relationship was with her species. Her fellow Wingers remembered the reasons behind her exile well, and they remembered her shooting down their pilots as the Providence’s CAG even better.
Still, at the room’s exit, she turned to face the human. Despite how annoying he was, she had to admit she’d come to respect the cocky young officer. Maybe even like him. Not that I’ll ever tell him that.
“Don’t let the Directorate push you around, Husher. Flockhead Bytan has their ear, and she doesn’t consider you on equal footing with our Interplanetary Defense Force. She sees the Providence as a single rogue ship whose rebellion against the UHF could very well prove short-lived. So she expects full compliance from Captain Keyes.”
Husher chuckled. “Watching her try to get that should make for a good laugh.”
Chapter 2
Supernova
The day the world ended started like any other.
Yan Arnarsson stumbled into the lab to continue his grad work, clutching a coffee with one hand and a badly aching head with the other. The previous night, he’d heavily sampled the Christmas brandy his folks had given him, and now he paid the price.
Settling down to compile the data collected by the Pasnoori space telescope overnight, Yan groaned. This promised to take hours. Pasnoori was nearing its apoapsis—the farthest it got from the sun in its solar orbit—meaning they’d entered the optimal window for stellar observation.
In turn, that meant an increased workload for Yan, hangover or no hangover.
Forty minutes into his work, his hands stopped moving on the console. He checked over the data he’d just processed. Then he rechecked it.
When Professor Leifsdóttir arrived, Yan was looking at the image that corresponded with the anomalous data. He’d downloaded it a half hour before, and he’d done nothing except stare at it since.
“What’s that?” she said.
“It…it has to be a glitch. Maybe something wrong with Pasnoori’s software.”
“What would it be if it weren’t a glitch?”
“It would be Epsilon Leonis going supernova. Which would be…”
“Impossible. It’s not due to go supernova for millions of years.” The professor sat at the console next to Yan’s and filled its screen with code. “I’m not seeing any bugs,” she muttered to herself, as she often did. “Well, Pasnoori isn’t the only orbital telescope in the Campion System.” Leifsdóttir glanced at him. “Check this against Cos-V. I’ll compare with data from ROSAT 8.”
A few minutes later, Professor Leifsdóttir’s hands also stopped moving on her console. Wearing a helpless expression, she turned to him. It was the first time Yan had ever seen her act with anything but confidence bordering on arrogance.
“Could this be a new Winger weapon?” he said. “It would be the perfect attack. No colonies orbit Epsilon Leonis, and it’ll take years for the shockwave to reach us, long enough for us to leave the system.” He realized he was babbling, but he couldn’t seem to stop. “A bloodless victory. We’ll have to abandon everything we have here, everything we’ve built. They could do this to every human—”
“The supernova happened before the war began. Its light is only reaching us now. I don’t know what caused it,” Leifsdóttir said. “But we have to alert the governor. Campion must be evacuated, and its darkgate deactivated as soon as possible. Otherwise its destruction will cause a catastrophic explosion in the connecting system.”
“Do you…do you have access to the governor?”
“Of course not. But I’m about to get it. The supernova will be visible to the naked eye in a matter of weeks, even in daylight. The danger is undeniable.”
Chapter 3
War Council
The Atrium looked nothing like human government buildings. It made sense that the Wingers would want their decision makers to meet under the open sky, or at least, as open a sky as you could get while remaining indoors. A transparent dome formed the ceiling, and the seating radiated upward from a small, circular floor, where individuals would take turn speaking.
Husher stumbled a little as he entered, still not quite accustomed to Spire’s low gravity. The Winger Directorate was still filing in, and taking their sweet time about it, too. Maybe they’ve forgotten there’s a war on, Husher thought to himself.
After spotting the officers from the Providence sitting near the central area, he moved toward them, trying to catch Sergeant Caine’s eye as he did. She looked away the moment he succeeded, a chill
washing over her face.
What in Sol is her problem? Ever since they’d last spoken aboard the Winger orbital defense platform, moments before he’d plummeted to the surface with a nuke clipped to his suit, Caine had been giving him the silent treatment.
Blackwing also sat among the Providence officers, though he yet held no rank, and the sun’s rays shone through the dome to play across his dark-gray feathers. The respect Blackwing commanded among Wingers had earned him a seat at the war council, respect that had only grown after his near-miraculous escape from a stealth ship plummeting to the planet. The former pirate had already declared his intention to leave when the Providence did, to continue serving in her Air Group. Apparently almost dying had reawakened his thirst for constantly being in danger. Crazy Winger.
Husher took the seat on Captain Keyes’s left. XO Laudano was on his right.
“Morning, Lieutenant,” the captain said. “Where’s Fesky?”
“She said she can’t stand these ‘drawn-out circle jerks.’ Her words, not mine.”
Keyes chuckled. “Leave it to Fesky to be a step ahead of the rest of us.”
Suppressing the urge to grimace, Husher gave a curt nod. How can Keyes be so cavalier about Fesky’s situation? They both knew how precarious her position had become since their arrival on Spire. In truth, Keyes had seemed unusually relaxed ever since his arrival on the planet’s surface.
Flockhead Bytan stood and marched slowly toward the central speaking area. Except for the Tumbra and the Kaithe, the Wingers stood shorter than other sentient species, though their muscled upper bodies and enormous wingspans made them no less imposing. Paired with Spire’s low gravity, their unique anatomy had allowed evolution to grant them flight.
Unlike other members of her species, who usually had trouble concealing their emotions, Bytan kept hers tightly controlled at all times. That made her even more imposing than other Wingers.
“Wait,” Husher whispered, leaning toward his captain. Don’t tell me Bytan’s a Director. Whatever happened to the separation of state and military?”
“The Wingers do things differently.”
When Bytan reached the small circle in the middle of the Atrium, she spread her wings to their full span. “The Directorate is now in session. Our purpose today is to review the information we have about the conflict currently spreading throughout the galaxy and, if we can, to decide on a course of action. We will begin by listening to the testimony of the first human to arrive on our planet recently. He has been our prisoner for almost a week.”