by Rick Partlow
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Follow Rick Partlow
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Rescue Mission
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Book 2 Excerpt
Follow Rick Partlow
Acknowledgments
About the Author
1st to Fight
By Rick Partlow
Book 1 of Earth at War, a military science fiction series.
Copyrighted Material
© Rick Partlow 2020
All right reserved.
Cover art by Tom Edwards (tomedwardsdesign.com)
Typography by Steve Beaulieu (facebook.com/BeaulisticBookServices)
Editing by Ellen Campbell (nosafewordsllc.com)
Published by Pramantha Publishing
This novel is a work of fiction. All of the characters and events are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead or events is entirely coincidental.
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Chapter One
I keep trying to remember what I was thinking, strapped into a disintegrating totem pole thirty stories tall, about to ride it through the atmosphere and into orbit. The fact Daniel Gatlin had invited me, a science fiction author, onto the first privately-funded flight around the moon… Well, that was supposed to be the craziest part of that day.
But what was I thinking in that moment, right before the course of human history changed forever? I know I didn’t expect any part of what actually happened. The confirmation, finally, that we weren’t alone. The realization that the stars were far from peaceful. That the Tevynians wanted to conquer them all, and that it would fall to us to stop them.
Oh. I remember what I was thinking, now. As three times my normal body weight pressed me into the padded acceleration couch and a deafening roar penetrated the plastic and metal of my helmet, all I could think was that this was a huge mistake.
I almost gave into my Baptist upbringing and whispered a prayer as Cape Canaveral fell away beneath us, but I stood fast in the Jeffersonian Deism I’d adopted around the time of my divorce and took the beating of all those merciless gravities of thrust without so much as a whisper at my father’s God.
A laugh pealed loud and merry above the roar of the rocket engines. I couldn’t tell who over the helmet radio, but I suspected it was Gatlin. Oh well, who could blame him? This was his ticket; the rest of us were just along for the ride. Daniel Gatlin had lapped his competitors in the privatized space industry by sinking into his Gatlin Aerospace venture every penny generated from a life spent taking one business after another from start-up to IPO. I admired the hell out of his determination, but mostly I was just grateful he was taking me along on his trip around the Moon.
Like I said, I hadn’t been the first choice. Gatlin had gone live two years ago with the announcement that he’d be personally commanding the Selenium’s first Lunar orbit mission and that he’d be taking along a poet to describe the “beauty of deep space travel.” The only problem was, he hadn’t been able to find a sufficiently famous poet who could pass the physical who wanted to get anywhere near his home-brew space program and when he’d switched from that idea to bringing along a science fiction writer, he’d run into a similar problem with the bigger names. Not that they didn’t want to go, but they’d gone to seed. Maybe if he’d put his feelers out ten years ago, he could have had Card or Weir or someone really big, but people get old, and everyone Gatlin had read had fallen into old age and bad health.
Which left me, Andy Clanton, former Marine, still in my early forties, still fairly healthy, and writer of the best-selling science fiction trilogy that had been turned into a hit streaming series on PrimeFlix. Gatlin had never heard of me and he’d made it clear he had no interest in reading my books or watching the show, but he needed someone. At that point, he needed someone soon, while he still had time to get them through the training.
I was single, my son and ex-wife had very little interest in seeing me ever again, and my agent assured me this would guarantee a decade of New York Times best sellers, so I said, what the hell? What kid growing up didn’t want to be an astronaut?
I began to change my mind when I first experienced freefall. I’d parachuted before, but there was a qualitative difference when the fall never ended, and being strapped into the confines of the crew capsule with four other people didn’t help at all. They were faceless automatons inside their blue and grey pressure suits, their helmets hiding their visages from my position all the way aft in the capsule. I wasn’t the lead dog and the view never changed; I couldn’t even see the tiny portholes from where I was sitting, strapped in with my knees pulled back just to the point of discomfort.
All I could hear over the headphones was Julie trading cryptic technical messages with ground control. I rightly should have referred to her as Captain Nieves, since she was both the pilot and a Naval Reserve officer, and I was a Marine Reserve officer of considerably lower rank; but she insisted everyone call her Julie. Whatever I called her, I didn’t want to interrupt what was probably very important pilot stuff so I stayed quiet until finally, Gatlin turned around in his seat, grinning behind the faceplate of his helmet. He was an odd-looking man, with eyes too close together and a nose that came to a point like a cartoon character’s, but he was the closest thing real life had given us to Tony Stark, so I resolved to be respectful.
“We’ll dock in about four more hours,” he told me. Well, he could have been talking to the mission’s medical officer, Dr. Patel, who was seated in front of me, but I was bored enough to assume it was me. “Can you believe it used to take two days for ships to dock with the ISS?”
“The Russians cut it to six hours in 2013,” I said, then tried to shrug. It didn’t work that well inside a pressure suit, strapped tightly into a seat barely large enough to fit me. “I’m grateful it doesn’t take as long anymore, believe me. This is the experience of a lifetime and all that, but it’s sort of like falling out of an airplane squeezed into a Smart Car with four of your closest friends. Wearing diapers.”
My voice sounded weird trapped inside the helmet, muffled and distant. It was ironic; we were in the vastness of outer space, but everything was small and cramped and incredibly claustrophobic.
“You
do know your space history, Mr. Clanton,” Gatlin allowed, almost grudgingly. “From the descriptions I read of your television show, I would have thought your interests would be less…technical.”
I didn’t mean to laugh quite so sharply or bitterly at the remark, but the sound came out of its own accord, built up over years of acrimony and infighting.
“Sir, believe me, no one is more disappointed in the technical errors on the show than I am, but once you sign the contracts, the studio pretty much has you by the balls.”
“Let’s watch our language back there,” Julie said archly and I felt a sudden rush of heat to my ears. I’d forgotten this would be streaming live to the whole world.
“Sorry,” I said quickly.
“Oh, Jeez, Andy, I’m just yankin’ your chain.” She laughed, a loud and raucous sound for so small a woman.
“I’m a preacher’s kid,” I said defensively. “Old habits die hard.”
“What would your pop say if he could see you now?”
Good question. Dad died three years ago, before I’d hit it big…well, as big as an indie writer is likely to hit it. He always thought I was wasting my time “writing that nonsense,” and I should get a real job with a future. He’d always been disappointed I didn’t follow in his footsteps and go to the seminary. She didn’t need to hear that, though, and neither did the rest of the world. This was a high-tech book promotion, after all.
“He’d probably say I should stop running my mouth and enjoy the ride.”
***
We were in the construction shack when we heard the news. Everyone on Earth probably remembers where they were when they heard it, but we were the only ones off Earth at the time, so none of us could ever forget. The shack wasn’t anything to write home about, just a discarded fuel tank from an earlier NASA Orion shot Gatlin had bought on the cheap and converted to a cut-rate orbital station. It had served as quarters for the crews working on the Selenium these last eighteen months. There wasn’t much left of it now but an empty, insulated shell and a pair of airlocks.
And space. Plenty of space. Julie and Dr. Patel started doing zero-g acrobatics almost immediately but I’d just been happy to have walls more than a few centimeters away from me. I let myself spin around in the empty open space at the center of the shack but didn’t try anything tricky. This was being streamed as well; I could see the different views from the various cameras in one of the huge flat screen monitors affixed to the…wall? Bulkhead? Did they call it a bulkhead on a space station?
“Don’t look stupid,” my agent had said. Easier said than done.
Gatlin wasn’t bothering with the first-timer playground shit; he’d been here before. He was anchored via a tether to the communications console beneath the monitors, and at first, I thought he was checking the external cameras to get a view of the Selenium. I’d seen it already on our approach. For people who grew up on science fiction movies, it wasn’t much, just a crew capsule a bit larger than the one we’d flown up on, mated to a booster rocket that was most of its mass. Still, it was the most impressive thing humans had put into space since Apollo, so who was I to complain? We’d be transferring to the ship in a few hours for the three-day round trip and I hoped there was a more dignified setup for using the bathroom than a damn diaper.
“Julie!” he snapped, not looking up from the video screen. “Get over here, now!”
That was uncharacteristic. Gatlin was consistently upbeat and polite, except for the occasional tweet when he was feeling political. He was a man who didn’t have to be reminded the cameras were on him. I pushed away from the bulkhead and floated over just behind Julie, trying to ignore the flip-flop, “oh Jesus, I’m falling!” feeling in my gut.
“What is it, Mr. G?” Julie asked, grabbing the industrialist’s shoulder to steady herself.
He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. We could all see it on the screen, hear it over the speakers. It was a news report, from his network of choice but I doubt it would have made much difference for this report: it was straight from the White House, from the President himself. Gatlin wasn’t even scowling, even though he and President Crenshaw had never gotten along that well.
“I liked him better before he got the bionic eye,” Julie murmured. “He looks less piratical now.”
Gatlin shushed her urgently.
“…need to reiterate,” Crenshaw was saying, making a quelling motion, “there have been no threats, no signs of hostile intent, no communication at all. The…” He seemed to be struggling to find a word. “…the object simply appeared in cislunar space, that is, in an orbit around the Earth’s Moon. There were telescopes pointed that direction and none of their observations spotted its approach. We have ascertained from telescopic views that it is not of natural origin.”
The gathered media erupted at that until the Press Secretary quieted them.
“I am not going to speculate as to who built it or their possible intent,” the President declared. “Not now nor in any follow-up questions. We have made attempts at communication and there’s been no discernable reply. What we need to do now is to confer with the other nations of the world as to how we wish to proceed, how we wish to greet what may be the first visitors from another star.” He gave the camera the earnest stare that got him elected. “This is perhaps the greatest opportunity humanity has ever been presented with. We are not going to act unilaterally. Thank you very much, and God bless America.” A dramatic pause. “God bless us all.”
“What. The. Fuck.” The words slipped out before I could stop them, but no one complained, not even the publicity-conscious Gatlin.
“They showed it after the press conference,” was all he said, fast-forwarding through the recording to a shot taken by one of the space telescopes and cleaned up with software enhancement. “This all happened shortly after we took off,” he added.
The…thing, the object, was vaguely wedge-shaped and more than anything else it reminded me of the bad guy’s star destroyers in the Star Wars movies, but not quite so bumpy and there was no water-navy-style bridge sticking out of the upper hull. It was smooth and shiny, reflective to the point of being blinding. There was no perspective to give it scale, but a graphic appeared to give us an idea of its size. The graphic was of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, and this object dwarfed it, at least three times as long and maybe half as wide as its length at the base of the thing. At the base of the starship. The alien starship.
“Mother of God,” Patel whispered from behind me. A Christian Indian, I presumed.
“Shame we didn’t bring a physicist along,” Julie said, still casually snarky despite everything. I wanted to be, wanted to be cool and funny and blasé, as if I’d expected this to happen, but this was…
“This changes everything,” I said, a hack writer lacking the talent to think of anything more momentous. Suddenly our little trip around the Moon seemed pitiful.
“Do you think he meant it?” Julie wondered. I mirrored Gatlin’s questioning look in response, and she clarified. “The President. Do you think we’re really going to confer with all the other nations and decide what to do?”
As if in reply, two things happened almost simultaneously: the monitor showing the livestream from the station cameras went black and the Skype alert started to ring. Daniel Gatlin ran a hand through his salt-and-pepper beard and shared a rueful smile with us before he hit the touchscreen control to answer the call.
“I think we’re about to find out.”
The face on the screen was familiar. I’d seen it in press conferences and news reports as well as in countless memes on social media, but I wasn’t laughing now.
“Mr. Gatlin.” General Arlan Lee Smith, head of the US Space Force nodded politely. His south Texas accent and affable attitude had been fodder for comedians for the past two years, but everything I heard from my buddies still in the military was that he was competent and not at all a man to be taken lightly. “Congratulations on your successful launch. I trust you’ve heard the new
s, even up there?”
“What do you want from me, Arlan?” Gatlin demanded, not even bothering with curiosity or annoyance, just moving straight to anger. “Or should I ask, what does Crenshaw want from me?”
“An Orion capsule is launching from Vandenberg as we speak,” Smith told him, seemingly unaffected by the multibillionaire’s attitude. “It’s going to dock with your construction shack, so you need to cut loose your re-entry module and make a space for them.”
“Why the hell would I want to do that, Arlan? Won’t I need the re-entry capsule to, you know, re-enter?”
“You’ll be taking the Orion back down, Mr. Gatlin,” Smith explained patiently, “while our crew takes possession of the Selenium and uses it to rendezvous with the alien spacecraft.” He shrugged. “We’ll re-launch the Orion if needed to retrieve our people.”
“Do you have any concept of how much it cost to build the Selenium, General?” I thought I could actually see bits of Gatlin’s teeth grinding off, so tightly were they clenched. “My money, my stockholders, my investors, their money?”
“Don’t be naïve, Daniel,” Smith snapped, finally losing patience with Gatlin’s tantrum. “You’ll be compensated, and not just monetarily.” His smile was shrewd and not at all friendly, stretching his jowly face like the parting jaws of a snake. “Think of the technology sharing implications of this. Someone is going to be at the forefront of reverse engineering. Would you rather it be you, or your competitors?”
“So,” I jumped in, just too much of a busybody to keep my damned mouth shut, “all that talk about international cooperation was so much bullshit?”
“On the contrary, Captain Clanton,” Smith corrected me, probably trying to intimidate me with the idea he knew exactly who I was. And it worked. “We meant it… right up until the moment our intelligence sources told us the Russians were prepping a Soyuz for launch to do pretty much the same thing. Although I don’t think they’ll be as openminded about remuneration for your ship, Daniel.”
“Since I doubt I have any real choice in the matter,” Gatlin spat the words out, “what do you suggest I do about the Russians when they arrive?”