“A political officer made the mistakes—one with little tactical training. Mine will realize the gravity of the situation and not interfere.”
Voronin stared. “You have control over your political officer?” He glanced around the room as if he was afraid of being overheard. “That’s not possible.”
“It is when you catch the aforementioned political officer engaging in individualist behavior.” Yuen licked his lips. “He won’t trouble us. Now, the next wave of ships will be here in two weeks.”
“How many?”
“Three hundred. Not enough for a straight-up slugfest with the Coalition Defense Force, but the CDF has to spread out, covering dozens of planets. We, on the other hand, will consolidate our strength and attack at their weakest points, landing our troops and taking over their outermost worlds.”
“That’s what Seville wanted to do,” Voronin replied. “But they wouldn’t let him.”
“His loss, our good fortune. I’ve never much trusted the French element of the League, anyway.” The animosity between the French, the Russians, and the Chinese was legendary, as they represented three distinct wings of ideology. As a student of The Art of War, Yuen was always playing the long game. He thought not in days, weeks, or months but years and decades. The Terran Coalition might have superior technology and an element of esprit de corps, but the League would eventually win out. In the end, capitalist democracies defeated themselves. That they’d had to flee Earth in the first place was proof positive. “Work with me. Together, we will crush the enemy.”
“For the glory of the League,” Voronin replied. He slapped his hand to his chest.
Yuen mimicked the gesture. “For the glory of the League.”
THE END
Battlegroup Z: Book 2 – Hostile Spike: Fresh off their last minute victory, Justin Spencer and the Zvika Greengold are forced into battle against overwhelming force - can they hold the line once more? Find out in book 2!
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Battlegroup Z - Book Two - Hostile Spike: Sneak Peak
“This is Beta Three declaring an emergency. Master alarm is lit, reactor fai—”
Justin winced. He glanced at the squadron-readiness view on his HUD and saw a bright-red dot next to Lieutenant Felder’s name. No transponder came from his suit, and the system rated the Sabre as a total loss. Another dead pilot.
Around Justin, the battle raged. Feldstein was engaged in a tail chase with a League fighter, while he’d sent Mateus and Adeoye to screen the bombers from another enemy force. All in all, it was barely controlled chaos.
Red plasma balls streaked by Justin’s cockpit canopy, and he tracked down their source quickly. A single League craft had settled into his six o’clock while he was distracted by the at-large combat picture. Justin yanked his flight stick back, pulling what would’ve amounted to fourteen Gs if his Sabre’s inertial damping systems weren’t functioning at peak capacity. In a matter of seconds, he’d looped around and passed the enemy fighter. Whoever was flying the League craft wasn’t an exceptionally well-trained pilot, because they failed to alter course, and Justin finished the tight loop and ended up on the Leaguer’s tail.
“Alpha One, fox two,” he called while simultaneously launching two heat-seeking missiles.
Both warheads raced away from Justin’s Sabre and accelerated to full attack speed. The League fighter did little to evade, and both hit home, blowing the enemy craft apart in a cloud of super-fine dust.
“Alpha One, splash one.” The “hard kill” call was something Justin had become used to making. His mind flashed back to sixty days ago when he’d never engaged a hostile target, much less snuffed out another human being’s life.
But he had no time to ponder such things, as the next wave of League fighters launched out of Master Four’s launch bay. How many of these damn things do they have, anyway? It seemed to him as if they were facing a never-ending wave of enemies. While the Leaguers lacked quality, they made up for it in sheer quantity.
Justin was close enough to the heavy cruiser that its point-defense systems took long-range potshots at him. He made several juking turns as he checked Feldstein’s status. She was still tangled up in a furball, and the rest of Alpha was providing close support to the Boar element, which in turn was attacking Master Five, the last destroyer that had jumped in.
Blue neutron beams slashed through the blackness of the void, crisscrossing with red beams and superheated plasma balls. Both the Zvika Greengold and the Marcus Luttrell were closely engaging the League destroyer that had successfully jumped into the middle of the freighter convoy. While both ships gamely engaged the enemy, the Leaguers weaved through and around civilian vessels, peppering them with weapons fire.
As much as Justin wanted to peel away and join the fight against the capital ship, his task was to keep knocking down the incoming fighters. Maybe one of these days, I’ll transfer to a bomber squadron. It’d be interesting to be the one delivering heavy ordnance. The missile lock-on buzzed, making Justin focus on the LIDAR display in his HUD. Three enemy warheads were heading straight for him. He briefly pondered the wildly differing skill levels of the pilots they faced. Whoever the latest group was seemed to know their business.
Justin triggered his chaff dispenser and sent a wave of sensor-obscuring decoys into the void while choosing an enemy fighter to engage. Because of the extreme quantity differential, he avoided a head-on engagement and instead loosed a Vulture at the craft outside the League formation.
“Alpha One, watch your location. You’re too close to Master Four,” Whatley said.
“Roger, Major,” Justin replied tightly. A glance at the master overlay in his HUD showed the danger. This is going to be close. With his right hand steady on the flight stick, Justin angled his craft around, deftly avoiding the cruiser’s point-defense kill zone and sliding into the enemy fighter’s six o’clock position. He loosed a flurry of neutron cannon bolts into its aft shields, severely weakening them and scoring several hits on its hull.
The League craft weren’t content to sit still and let Justin finish them off one by one. The formation shifted as a unit, protecting the damaged fighter as much as possible. They turned back to his Sabre and executed a high-speed firing pass that left Justin’s forward shields greatly diminished and approaching failure.
I need to change this up. Justin reached deep into his bag of tricks and decided to try a trick he’d seen Major Whatley perform. He decoupled the thrusters from the inertial damping system and waited for the right moment, allowing all three fighters chasing him to settle into a stable pursuit course. With a grin, Justin pivoted his Sabre around and fired a long stream of blue neutron energy. His first target was caught entirely unaware and exploded after a multitude of shots hit its hull.
The other two enemy fighters attempted to veer off. Justin sent two Eagle heat-seeking missiles after the closest craft and turned his attention to the third with another fusillade of neutron-cannon bolts. The Leaguer’s shields quickly failed, and four hits to its hull later, it blew apart in a brief orange explosion. Feeling good about his use of a precision tactic he’d only seen employed once before, Justin resynched his thrusters and enabled the inertial damping system.
But Justin forgot the other threat: the Rand-class heavy cruiser off the starboard side of his Sabre. In combat, a person tended to narrow their focus onto a specific danger or set of hazards closest to them—and that tendency typically led to disaster. As powerful point-defense fire erupted around his craft, Justin immediately focused on the threat the cruiser posed. The shield arc facing the enemy collapsed with one hit. He tightened his grip on the flight stick and wrenched it to one side, going into a series of maneuvers known as guns-D. They were a last-ditch effort to avoid overwhelming fire with wild and random course changes.
“Spencer, I told you to watch out. Break to a minimum distance of two kilometers from that cruiser now,” Whatley barked.
“I’m trying, Major,” Justin
replied through gritted teeth. Even with the outstanding protection of his Sabre’s inertial damping systems, by whipping through the twists and turns, he was generating significant g-forces and stress on his body.
“Try harder.”
Justin grumbled, “If it’s so damn easy, why aren’t you out here doing it?”
He started to breathe a sigh of relief as he cleared one kilometer from the enemy vessel. But that relief turned to fear as his fighter rocked to one side. Another hit. While the plasma ball caught him on a different shield arc, it did far more damage than the last one. Red lights lit up across his HUD, indicating internal system damage. The flight stick suddenly became untethered from the movement of his craft. He wrenched it to one side, but the Sabre rocketed onward in a straight line. “This is Alpha One declaring an emergency. I have total loss of flight-surface control.”
“Detach maneuvering thruster control and fly manually,” Whatley said.
The master alarm blared, making Justin’s ears ring. He pulled up the HUD interface and attempted to follow the wing commander’s instructions, to no avail. Red lights spread across every system in his craft. I’ve got to eject before the reactor goes critical. As the thought raced through his mind, point-defense fire filled the void around him. “Negative, Major. My master alarm is lit, and reactor temp is rising. Initiating ejection sequence.”
Justin double-checked his suit pressure, confirmed it was one hundred percent, and pulled the bright-yellow Eject lever under the seat. It triggered a series of explosive bolts that blew the canopy off, and a rocket motor ignited, sending him flying out of the doomed Sabre. His emergency beacon kicked in automatically, and he hoped against hope that the onboard fuel wouldn’t give out before he was out of the blast radius of his former ride.
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Battlegroup Z: Book 2 – Hostile Spike: Fresh off their last minute victory, Justin Spencer and the Zvika Greengold are forced into battle against overwhelming force - can they hold the line once more?
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Also Available from Daniel Gibbs
Battlegroup Z
Book 1 - Weapons Free
Book 2 - Hostile Spike
Book 3 - Sol Strike
Book 4 - Bandits Engaged
Book 5 - Iron Hand
Echoes of War
Book 1 - Fight the Good Fight
Book 2 - Strong and Courageous
Book 3 - So Fight I
Book 4 - Gates of Hell
Book 5 - Keep the Faith
Book 6 - Run the Gauntlet
Book 7 - Finish the Fight
Breach of Faith
(With Gary T. Stevens)
Book 1 - Breach of Peace
Book 2 - Breach of Faith
Book 3 - Breach of Duty
Book 4 - Breach of Trust
Deception Fleet
(With Steve Rzasa)
Book 1 - Victory’s Wake
Book 2 - Cold Conflict
Book 3 - Hazards Near
Acknowledgments and Afterword
Before I share my acknowledgments, I want to include as a bit of an Authors Afterword some notes on the namesakes of the CSV Zvika Greengold and the Red Tails squadron. Those of you who’ve read a Daniel Gibbs novel or two know I like to weave in references to people from history. Some are self-explanatory, such as Marcus Luttrell or Yitzhak Rabin.
Others are not, as I found out during the ARC process.
First, the Red Tails squadron; it’s named in tribute to the 332d Fighter Group. A unit of the famed Tuksegee Airmen, the 332d was the first African-American fighter unit to serve in combat with the US Army Air Force. They derived their nickname from the distinctive red vertical stabilizer fins on their aircraft, and had a near-perfect bomber escort record against the Luftwaffe. There’s some great Wikipedia entries on the subject, as well as a terrific movie entitled “Red Tails” that tells their story.
Second, Zvika Greengold. After WWII military history, modern-day Israeli military history is my next most read subject. During the Yom Kippur War in 1973, then Lieutenant Greengold commanded a small group of two damaged tanks. With them, he faced down multiple Syrian army divisions. Estimates place the number of enemy armor units destroyed by his hand at between twenty and sixty. Even when burned over twenty percent of his body, Lt. Greengold fought on against incredible odds. For his actions, he was awarded the Israeli Medal of Valor. It is the highest award for Valor in the Israeli Defense Force — analogous to the US Medal of Honor.
With that, I’ll begin my acknowledgments.
I’d like to start by again thanking my father for the many hours of amazing sea stories from his thirty years of service to the US Navy. A few worked their way into my stories, and gave me a window into the life of a sailor far from home.
To all those who have helped me over the last three years in making this crazy dream of a sci-fi universe where Christians, Jews, and Muslims work together for the betterment of all – thank you. The list is too numerous to count, but you know who you are.
To my editor, Susie – Thanks for helping me polish this book to the point it's something to be proud of – and for not rolling your eyes too much at my constant questions.
To those who have sent me emails over the last few years saying that the Echoes of War series rekindled your faith – thank you. I can think of no greater honor.
As always, I give thanks to those brave men and women in the US military I have had the pleasure of working beside for the last fifteen years. Thank you for your service.
Finally, I give thanks to God for the words I’ve written and the life granted to write them in.
Until next time, Godspeed.
- Daniel Gibbs
Echoes of War - Book 1 - Fight the Good Fight
Fight the Good Fight by Daniel Gibbs
Copyright © 2018-2021 by Daniel Gibbs
Visit Daniel Gibbs website at
www.danielgibbsauthor.com
Cover by Jeff Brown Graphics—www.jeffbrowngraphics.com
Additional Illustrations by Joel Steudler—www.joelsteudler.com
3D Art by Benoit Leonard
This book is a work of fiction, the characters, incidents and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. For permissions please contact [email protected].
Get Two free & Exclusive Daniel Gibbs Books
FREE BOOK: Read the story of Levi Cohen and his heroic fight at the first battle of Canaan in Echoes of War: Stand Firm.
FREE BOOK: Join Captain James Henry as he tries to survive in the independent worlds after being cashiered out of the Coalition Defense Force. Can a broken man rebuild his life? Find out in A Simple Mission.
Both available FREE, only at
www.danielgibbsauthor.com/standfirm.
Also Available from Daniel Gibbs
Battlegroup Z
Book 1 - Weapons Free
Book 2 - Hostile Spike
Book 3 - Sol Strike
Book 4 - Bandits Engaged
Book 5 - Iron Hand
Echoes of War
Book 1 - Fight the Good Fight
Book 2 - Strong and Courageous
Book 3 - So Fight I
Book 5 - Keep the Faith
Book 6 - Run the Gauntlet
Book 7 - Finish the Fight
Breach of Faith
(With Gary T. Stevens)
Book 1 - Breach of Peace
Book 2 - Breach of Faith
Book 3 - Breach of Duty
Book 4 - Breach of Trust
Deception Fleet
(With Steve Rzasa)
Book 1 - Victory’s Wake
Book 2 - Cold Conflict
Book 3 - Hazards Near
1
CSV Artemis
Patrol Sector 14A – Terran Coalition / League of Sol Active Combat Zone
5 February 2444
Corporal David Cohen glanced at the clock. It’s time for morning prayers. But there’s no way I can make it to the shul and still keep on schedule for our repairs. An Orthodox Jew, he was heartsick when he couldn’t make it to prayers.
Taking a moment before heading to his post, David stood and prayed quietly. “May the Lord bless you and protect you. May the Lord shine His countenance upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord lift up His favor upon you and grant you peace.” The prayer was from the book of Numbers, in the Torah. I hope someday we can have peace. But the ship isn’t going to repair itself.
Coalition Defense Force Boxed Set: First to Fight Page 21