by James Evans
Gunfire erupted from the bridge and Warden rushed up to the side of the doorway, risking a glance inside. Some of the crew were firing at the ogres, trying to find weak spots, while others poured pistol rounds through the shattered doorway. There were a couple of dozen Deathless Ruperts in there but no clones of other types, which was an interesting socio-political observation he squirrelled away for later review.
The viewscreen grabbed Warden’s attention and he frowned as Omsk floated across the screen, damage from weapon strikes clearly visible. Vice Admiral Staines hadn’t planned to destroy the enemy ship. Had the boarding actions failed, perhaps?
Then a burst of fire streaked across the viewscreen towards Omsk and he realised what was happening. The Deathless had lost Omsk to Lieutenant Hayes and her boarding team. The captain of Moscow had realised that and was trying to destroy the ship before it could be captured.
Destroy it and the Marines on board.
Warden began firing immediately, shooting the Ruperts as quickly as he could aim and pull the trigger. He killed as fast as he could, but the ship’s weapons continued to fire. Omsk, no more than a few kilometres away, was looking worse and worse.
Then his rifle found the Deathless captain and he went down, crumpling to the floor, riddled with bullet holes. Warden breathed a sigh of relief, lowering his rifle. Ten and the ogres had finished the rest of the crew; the bridge was secure.
He looked up at the viewscreen. Omsk should survive, but he needed to get in touch with Hayes as soon as possible and find out what their situation was. That would probably require the comms system on the boarding pod. Would it be quicker to run back and get in touch from there or for Goodwin to hack the bridge command interface?
He was still pondering the best course of action when a Rupert stood, pulling itself upright on the command console. The captain of the ship, less injured than Warden had believed. The Deathless officer turned to face him and saluted with a smile. Warden shouted a warning as he raised his weapon, but it came far too late.
The officer slammed his hand down on the console, and a barrage of missiles sprang forth, racing across through the cold vacuum of space even as Warden pulled the trigger. The captain’s body shuddered and collapsed back to the deck but the missiles sped on.
Warden turned back to the viewscreen just as the missiles struck Omsk. All the Marines turned, watching as the warheads exploded and the great ship cracked into half a dozen sections.
The pieces drifted, tumbling slowly through space as their orbits decayed, gravity dragging them inevitably towards a hard landing on New Bristol.
Omsk was gone.
And of Bratsk there was no sign except debris. Warden didn’t know what had happened to the third Deathless ship, but he knew that eighty-three women and men, Marines and militia, had been killed in this action.
He watched in silence until the first chunks of debris began to burn up in the atmosphere of New Bristol.
Epilogue
“A rough day,” said Vice Admiral Staines wearily, “but a successful one.”
He looked around the conference room of HMS Iron Duke. Lieutenant Commander Cohen and Lieutenant Warden sat across the table while Governor Denmead and Captain Atticus joined via video from the command centre in Fort Widley.
“Omsk and Bratsk were lost in the action,” continued Staines, summarising the day’s events, “as were all of B Troop, Iron Duke’s boarding party and a significant proportion of A Troop. Moscow is serviceable and will be recrewed as soon as new personnel arrive through the wormhole. She’ll need a new name; I suggest HMS Ascendant.”
There were murmurs of polite approval from around the room.
“The Militia are being redeployed in civilian clones at the moment,” said Governor Denmead, “and the Marines will deploy immediately after.”
Staines nodded his thanks.
“And so it falls to us, Governor, to decide what action we must now take to safeguard New Bristol. Lieutenant Commander Cohen has been reviewing the files recovered from Ascendant using the translation software provided by Captain Atticus’s tech-specialists. Mr Cohen?”
“Thank you, sir,” said Cohen, flicking at his data slate. “You should all be seeing images showing the route taken by the Deathless fleet on their way to New Bristol. As you can see, it’s an almost straight line from a large star, marked in blue, and a planet they seem to have called ‘New Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky’, or NewPet for short.”
Governor Denmead shifted uneasily in her seat.
“Are you saying that’s the homeworld of the Deathless?” she asked. “It looks disturbingly close.”
“I don’t think so, Governor,” said Cohen, shaking his head. “It seems to be a staging world, a stopping point on the way to somewhere else. I think it’s where the fleet originated, or at least Ascendant, but it’s difficult to be sure from the files we’ve reviewed so far.”
“A staging world sounds ominous,” said Atticus. “Why would they come to New Bristol if they already had NewPet?”
“There’s no way to know for sure, sir, at least, not from the data we have so far,” said Cohen, “but Lieutenant Warden and I have been discussing the Deathless economy and population problem.” He paused to look at Warden.
“The briefing documents from the Admiralty suggested that the original crew of the Ark ship Koschei had a keen interest in functional immortality and, after what you were saying about the Deathless economy, I wondered what might happen if they had pursued that goal with vigour.”
“I’m not sure I follow, Lieutenant,” said Staines.
“Well, sir, we can infer from their presence and their equipment that the Deathless have a large, technically advanced civilisation with manufacturing capabilities somewhat in excess of our own. If the Deathless are functionally immortal in reality as well as in name, then without strict limits on childbirth, they would have experienced rapid population growth.”
“And…?” prompted Atticus, unsure where Warden was going with this.
“And so it may simply be that they’ve run out of space and they’re looking for new worlds to colonise,” said Warden, “but there’s no way of knowing without taking a look at NewPet.”
“You want to visit the enemy’s staging world?” said Atticus, one eyebrow raised. "What’s your reasoning, Lieutenant?”
“It seems the logical next step, sir. We have Ascendant, we’ll soon have a crew, and we have captured plenty of Deathless clones as well as a large number of cloning bays, so we can easily increase the number of Marines available to defend New Bristol,” Warden explained.
“The mission plan that Lieutenant Warden and I are proposing is that we take Ascendant into enemy territory, specifically NewPet. The primary objective would be reconnaissance, the secondary objective would be to disrupt their supply lines,” said Cohen.
“We would need a significant Marine presence to repel boarders and carry out ground reconnaissance as well as assault targets of opportunity,” Warden added.
Staines drummed his fingers and frowned, clearly unhappy that such a proposal had been aired in open council, rather than first being run past him or even Captain Atticus.
“We need to know what motivates the enemy, sir,” said Cohen, neatly deflecting attention away from Warden. “If there are as many of them as our population growth projections suggest, this won’t be their only fleet, and New Bristol won’t be the only colony under threat. This could be a multi-world invasion scenario.”
That made everyone sit up, and now Staines frowned even more deeply at both Cohen and Warden.
“I’m not keen to split my command, Vice Admiral, but I must agree with Warden and Cohen,” said Atticus. “We need to know, one way or the other, what’s going on. I support their plan in principle and, with your permission, and after we hash out some details, of course, I will put forward the mission to General Bonneville for his approval.”
Staines nodded. General Bonneville outranked him and Atticus had just forced
his hand by, as was proper, requesting his approval of the mission. The Marine officer would be submitting a report to headquarters and, if Staines was opposed, the general could still approach the admiralty with it.
Staines narrowed his eyes, wondering if the captain, whom he was meeting for the first time, wasn’t a far shrewder political operator than his rank and bluff honesty suggested.
“I certainly agree that reconnaissance is going to be vital,” said Staines cautiously, “and I too am not keen to split my command. Nor am I entirely sure we should reduce the fighting capacity of our fleet around New Bristol at this stage. Governor Denmead is responsible for the colony and its citizens so I would like to hear her thoughts before we proceed. Governor, do you support this proposal, given the danger that New Bristol might still face?”
Denmead had been looking down at her data slate, apparently distracted. Now she focussed her attention on the vice admiral, pausing to phrase her next sentence carefully.
“As I told my councillors, every battle is merely a prelude to negotiation. We must know to whom we are talking, and we must discover what they want. The Deathless launched an unprovoked attack on a peaceful colony. It’s time to find out why.”
Author Notes - Guerrilla
We published Guerrilla in May 2018, two months after the release of Commando. It came in at a little over fifty per cent longer than the first book, which we had deliberately written as a novella. At the time, it seemed to us that we had accomplished what we set out to do, and although Guerrilla had run a little longer than intended, it hung together well.
But there were a few ideas we’d brainstormed for Guerrilla that never reached the final manuscript. The primary story arc of the Royal Marine Space Commandos follows, naturally, the Marines rather than the civilians around them. We have timelines and all sorts of notes so that, we, the authors know what the the civilians are up to in the background, even though you, the reader, don’t.
For Guerrilla, we had secondary story arcs that would have woven through the novel while the Marines carry out their ultimate mission to attack the fortress base that the Deathless have deployed on New Bristol. While the Marines go and play with massive mining trucks, which, by the way, are pretty much a real thing (though ours is slightly bigger) and Ten sings light opera classics, Captain Atticus and Governor Denmead are hard at work. They have civilians to protect at Fort Widley, the Deathless are attacking Ashton and the civilian militia are fighting a guerrilla war against them.
But we hadn’t written the arcs that followed the drone program run by the Priscilla, or the valiant efforts of the militia, like Captain Idol and Sergeant Adams.
Then came July, and James visited Cardiff for another ‘writing retreat’ as we call them. Seriously, we actually plot and write things, we don’t spend the whole weekend eating takeaway food and drinking. The day before James was due to arrive, Jon got a message from Podium Publishing, who wanted to talk about audiobooks. We had a conference call that Friday evening, and by the following week, we were signed up.
That left us with a decision to make. Once the audio is recorded, the text of your book pretty much needs to remain unchanged. You can still fix typos or maybe tweak punctuation, but you can’t add new scenes without causing all sorts of problems. So we took recommendations from other authors in our genre and found an editor who could help us improve the manuscripts. She’s done sterling work and, as I write these words, we’re working on her edits of the third book, Ascendant.
Commando, it turns out, had some typos, some slightly dodgy phrasing, some very dodgy punctuation (there’s always dodgy punctuation) and a number of areas that could benefit from a general-purpose polish. That was fine, and we cranked through the suggestions and re-published the manuscript.
Guerrilla was much the same, in many ways, but it also had a few issues. By and large, much like Commando, they were minor. But then our editor pointed out that we had not delivered on the drone or militia storylines and asked if that was deliberate.
It wasn’t, and as you may already have guessed, we decided to make Guerrilla the best book it could possibly be by addressing those minor issues. That meant writing a few news scenes, which caused the text to jump from 54,000 words to a little over 71,000. We waited with baited breath, worried that our editor would come back and say the new scenes didn’t work at all or that we’d committed some horrible new errors to paper.
But she loved them.
We’re pleased with them too, and if you’re re-reading Guerrilla after already reading the original text, we hope you enjoy the new scenes.
After that, we tweaked to the prologue to fix one of Jon’s last-minute quibbles, before, finally, he volunteered to draft a nice author note, the fool! Yet another thing to read and edit until it’s all nice and pretty.
After all is said and done, though, Guerrilla is a book much improved. It’s even better value for money than it was before. You’ll get a pay off on the militia and drone pilot story lines. We’ve got new characters that you’ll meet again in other books, and it’s not all about Warden and his team.
So with the edits to both Commando and Guerrilla completed, we’re now off to finish work on revisions to Ascendant, which are mostly about how // REDACTED // deals with // REDACTED // without having to // REDACTED // and how no-one else // REDACTED // which may or may not be a spoiler or a hint at the action to follow in // REDACTED // and // REDACTED // as // REDACTED // finally engages in // REDACTED //.
Thanks for reading,
Jon Evans & James Evans
September 2018
Thank you for Reading
Thank you for reading Volume One of the Royal Marine Space Commandos series, which contains Commando and Guerrilla, Books One and Two.
The series continues with Ascendant, Gunboat and Dreadnought, and we hope you’ll enjoy those as well.
It would help us immensely if you would leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads, or even tell a friend about the books.
Or contact us on Facebook to let us know what you thought of the book. We look forward to hearing from you.
Jon & James Evans
Subscribe and get a Free Book
Want to know about upcoming releases?
Would you like to hear about how we write our books?
Maybe you’d like a free book, Ten Tales: Journey to the West?
You can get all this and more at imaginarybrother.com where you can sign up to the newsletter for our publishing company, Imaginary Brother.
When you join, we’ll send you a free copy of Journey to the West, direct to your inbox*.
There will be more short stories about Ten and his many and varied adventures, including more exclusive ones, just for our newsletter readers as a thank you for their support.
Happy reading,
Jon & James Evans
We hope you’ll stay on our mailing list but if you choose not to, you can follow us on Facebook or visit our website instead.
imaginarybrother.com
* We use Bookfunnel to send out our free books. It’s painless but if you need help, they’ll guide you through so you can get reading.
Also by Jon & James Evans
The Royal Marine Space Commandos
Commando
Guerrilla
Ascendant
Gunboat
Dreadnought (out soon)
Free Stories
Ten Tales: Journey to the West
Imaginary Brother Publishing
Jon & James began writing the RMSC books in 2017 and published the first, Commando in March 2018. Three more books follow later in the year.
We formed Imaginary Brother to handle the Royal Marine Space Commando intellectual property going forward.
If you’d like to keep up with the new releases, we suggest joining the mailing list at imaginarybrother.com/journeytothewest
As a thank you, you’ll get a free copy of Ten Tales: Journey to the West* and access to desktop wallpaper based on the new cover
art for the books by Christian Kallias.
The fifth book, Dreadnought, will be out in early 2019 along with the audiobooks from Podium Publishing.
* We use Bookfunnel to send out our free books. It’s painless but if you need help, they’ll guide you through so you can get reading.
About The Authors James Evans
James has published the first two books of his Vensille Saga and is working on the third, as well as a number of other projects. At the same time, he is working on continuing the RMSC series with his brother Jon.
You can join James’s mailing list to keep track of the upcoming releases, visit his website or follow him on social media.
jamesevansbooks.co.uk
About The Authors Jon Evans
Jon is a new sci-fi author & fantasy author, whose first book, Thieftaker is awaiting its sequel. He lives and writes in Cardiff. He has some other projects waiting in the wings, once the RMSC series takes shape.
You can follow Jon’s Facebook page where you’ll be able to find out more about the RMSC universe. If you’re a fan of Instagram, you can follow him there, and perhaps explain to him what it’s for.
If you join the mailing list on the website, you’ll get updates about how the new books are coming as well as information about new releases and the odd insight into the life of an author. Or insights into the life of an odd author.
jonevansbooks.com
