Hell's Reach (Galactic Liberation Series Book 6)

by B. V. Larson

  Books by David VanDyke:

  Stellar Conquest Series:

  First Conquest

  Desolator: Conquest

  Tactics of Conquest

  Conquest of Earth

  Conquest and Empire

  Books by B. V. Larson:

  The Undying Mercenaries Series:

  Steel World

  Dust World

  Tech World

  Machine World

  Death World

  Home World

  Rogue World

  Blood World

  Dark World

  Storm World

  Armor World

  Clone World

  HELL’S REACH

  (Galactic Liberation Series #6)

  by

  David VanDyke

  and

  B. V. Larson

  Galactic Liberation Series:

  Starship Liberator

  Battleship Indomitable

  Flagship Victory

  Hive War

  Straker’s Breakers

  Hell’s Reach

  Copyright © 2019 by Iron Tower Press, Inc.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the author.

  The Breakers settled on Utopia—an artificial planet wrapping around a tiny star. Right from the start, we breathed a great sigh of relief. Utopia was far enough from the nearest star system to be undetectable by conventional means. The engineering of the world itself was amazing, even though we had little idea who had built it in the first place, as it had long ago been abandoned—or the sentient inhabitants had been exterminated.

  At some point in the past a shell of planetary matter had been stretched and transformed into a Dyson-cylinder, an enclosed metal ring encircling the star. Landing on the inner surface, we found life was quite pleasant. There were low mountain ranges and shallow seas. With as much wilderness as ten normal planets, Utopia gave us freedom to grow. Most importantly, the world provided a secure base from which to operate.

  Over the next year we not only set up trade with the Fugjios Conglomerate at Crossroads, we expanded direct commerce with the aquatic Salamanders, and especially with the peaceful, plant-loving Humbar. This got our economy moving and provided increasing prosperity to our people.

  But we had to have some way of making hard cash in order to maintain our starships. To that end, we remained a mercenary outfit, and as long as any contract was profitable and morally acceptable, we took it. We destroyed crimorg and pirate bases, securing and cleaning up several star systems. We freed captives when we could, and word of our activities began to spread. We made a few friends—and plenty of enemies.

  - A History of Galactic Liberation, by Derek Barnes Straker, 2860 A.D.

  Chapter 1

  Straker’s Breakers’ militarized transport SBS Hercules, approaching the Humbar system.

  Having left Utopia days ago, Carla Engels was beginning to get bored with her latest mission. She took her swiveling chair on the small bridge of the Hercules after setting her bottle of caff into its arm.

  All the screens and boards were in the green, showing the ship’s imminent arrival at the Humbar system was destined to be uneventful. Once she reached Humbar, she’d offload her cargo of plants and agricultural products in exchange for a variety of useful goods and products manufactured by the bovines. Then, she’d travel back to the Breakers’ secret homeworld, the Dyson-cylinder they called Utopia.

  Such was the life of a Breaker trading ship—dull, routine, and comfortable. Well, at least it got her out into space, where she’d lived most of her adult life. Dirtside was fine, but like a sailor denied the sea, space called to her if she was away too long. It was better to be captain of an active transport than the admiral of a fleet stuck in orbit.

  Jon Sylvester, Hercules’ portly helmsman, was also clearly bored. “Transit in five, four, three, two, one,” he droned.

  It could be worse, Carla reflected.

  Thirty heartbeats later, something went wrong.

  Alarm klaxons shrieked. Babble broke out among the crew.

  “Collision—collision—” the ship’s SAI said in its artificial voice.

  “Shields up!” Engels ordered. “Evasive—”

  The sensors officer raised her voice as the deck vibrated. “Ma’am, I have four bogeys at close range. We’re taking fire—multiple shieldbusters. The main generator is down.”

  Engels gripped the arms of her chair. “Sylvester, get us the hell out of here!”

  “Sidespace engines recharging, ma’am,” Sylvester replied, and he no longer sounded bored. “It’ll be nine minutes before we can jump.”

  “Emergency override—shorten that countdown! Sensors, who are they?”

  “Three Arattak frigates. It’s the damned spiders. The other ship... I don’t know what it is.”

  “They’re firing their shieldbusters again,” Bortmann, the weapons officer said. “Our point defenses are having no effect.”

  The bridge shook. “Reinforcement drained. Hull armor degraded. Reserve power is already running low. We’re sitting ducks.”

  “Hellfire,” Captain Engels swore. She turned in a full three-sixty circuit, taking in her suddenly inadequate bridge. “Sylvester, how long can you keep them off us?”

  “Ninety seconds, maybe. They have us boxed, and this tub is packed full of cargo. We can’t dump it fast enough—we’re not built to cut and run. They can—” The ship shook again. “There go the fusion engines. Just impellers now. That other ship—”

  “We’re being grappled, ma’am,” Bortmann said. “Korven-style magnetics.”

  Engels grimaced. “Launch the data module.”

  “Launching.”

  Engels flipped up the cover of her chair’s arm, revealing an old-fashioned keypad with hard buttons. She input a code, feeling the keys click one by one, until a telltale light turned from green to red. “Nav data wiped. Computer core dumped.” At least Utopia’s location wouldn’t be revealed by an infoscan.

  The ship shuddered once more, and then grew still. Engels cleared her throat as she activated the public address function. “Now hear this. We’re about to be boarded by superior forces. Do not resist. Stand down. We’ll be captured. Remember your prisoner-of-war training. Our goal right now is to survive with honor. Keep faith with your fellow Breakers. The data module is away. General Straker will come for us. Don’t despair.”

  Engels continued to speak calmly to her crew until heavily armed Arattak—man-sized spiders with pink fur—skittered onto the bridge and immobilized the officers with sticky webs.

  The spider in charge celebrated its victory by decapitating Bortmann and drinking from his inverted head.

  Sylvester vomited on the deck.

  “Hang in there, Jon,” Engels said, barely able to hold her own rising gorge and wondering if she should’ve fought them... but that would’ve gotten half the crew killed instead of only one.

  The sound of Bortmann’s blood being drained would echo in her nightmares.

  * * *

  Paradiso town, Utopia

  Derek Straker rolled out of bed before his mind was truly awake, grabbing at the comlink that was insistently beeping on his rough-hewn wooden bedside table. He shoved the annoying thing into his ear. “Straker here.”

  “Sorry to wake you, sir,” the voice of the duty officer said.
“A black box drone has arrived from SBS Hercules—they were attacked in the Humbar system.”

  Shit. Carla…? “How long ago?”

  “Drone travel time from Humbar to Utopia is short—twelve to twenty-four hours, depending on sidespace conditions.”

  “I’ll be right there. Straker out.” He hurriedly pulled on his working fatigues and noticed the time on the chrono—0312 hours. “Never fails,” he muttered to no one. “Always in the middle of a good night’s sleep. Stephanie!”

  The android nanny opened the bedroom door. “Yes, Derek?”

  “I have to go to work. Don’t wake the kids. Maintain their schedule for now. You’ll get further instructions later.”

  “Yes, Derek.” She withdrew.

  Trying not to think about Carla, Straker slipped quietly through the spacious center of their casa grande, into the small garden and then out the rear gate. The new-built mansion was situated at the edge of the hillside town of Paradiso, overlooking the Breakers’ base and settlement below—a compromise with the Italian-descended population, who’d wanted to install their salvator and his family in a palace in the central piazza.

  Above him and to the east, the reflection from the inner surface of the Dyson-cylinder’s landscape was a pastoral scene spread below—fields of food crops and medicinal drug plants, pastures with sheep and cattle, barns and sheds scattered among them. The industrious people of Paradiso had worked enthusiastically to fulfill the promise of their town’s name—and after a year of peace, it was starting to pay off.

  Straker fired up his aircar and swooped down the slope, turning the fifteen-minute walk to the base into a ninety-second hop. He landed on the flat rooftop pad of the ops center. Around him the Breakers organization was stirring, lights appearing in barracks windows and on vehicles as the alert propagated throughout First Brigade. This was the Breakers’ active-service unit. The reservists of Second and Third Brigades had the luxury of a few more hours sleep.

  For now.

  Why the hell hadn’t he fought harder when Carla had wanted to command a milk-run to Humbar?

  His mind answered the question easily. He’d given in precisely because it was a milk run. There’d never been any problems at Humbar, and they had no reason to think there would be today. More importantly, Carla had been getting crabby with dirtside fever. She belonged in space, not on a permanently sunny garden of Eden.

  He wasn’t through with guilt, however. He asked himself why he hadn’t told her to take out a cruiser to escort the Hercules as an exercise?

  Money, that’s why. It was always money—fuel, ammo, maintenance—and the Breakers were barely making ends meet right now. Saving money on any mission meant long-term survival, Colonel Keller and the Ruxin CEO Adriana kept telling him that.

  But now, that economizing meant they’d lost Breakers—and now they’d have to spend more money to get them back.

  Money and blood.

  Colonel Winter, commander of the Breakers’ mechsuit battalion, met him at the door and escorted him to the briefing table. There the AI Indy’s android avatar stood, cursor in hand. Colonel Keller, the stiff, matronly logistics officer, rushed up with stacks of smartcopy to take her seat with an air of harassment. The rest of the heavy wooden table was rounded out with staff officers and noncoms from each functional area—supply, comms, maintenance and more.

  “Let’s hear it, Indy,” Straker said.

  “Thank you, sir.” A hologram appeared above the table, and nearby wall-screens changed to illustrate Indy’s words. “Normally, Commander Sinden would be briefing you, but given the time constraints, she felt it would serve the Breakers better if she remained with her intelligence team and let me do the dog-and-pony.”

  Straker let that pass with a nod. Clearly, Indy could prepare a briefing and preliminary analysis more quickly than even a team of brainiacs could—and fortunately, most brainiacs like Sinden were blind to the jealousy another officer might feel about letting someone else brief the boss in a crisis. They’d rather stay plugged in and crunch numbers.

  “Here’s the vid and details.” The screens populated with metrics and telemetry, the myriad data constantly stored and updated in every ship’s black-box drone, while the hologram displayed the bridge of the Hercules, the armed transport on a trading run to the Humbar—peaceful, friendly, bovine aliens who were rapidly becoming the Breakers’ most reliable commercial partners.

  “Transit in five, four, three, two, one,” the Hercules’ helmsman on the holovid said.

  Alarm klaxons shrieked suddenly. Bridge officers flooded the system with reports and orders while the SAI droned its verbal warnings in the background.

  “Shields up!” Engels ordered. “Evasive—”

  “Ma’am, I have four bogeys at close range.” The image shook. “We’re taking fire—multiple shieldbusters. The main generator is down.”

  Straker leaned forward, and his heart beat faster as his hands gripped the arms of his chair. He wanted to leap into the fight.

  “Sylvester, get us the hell out of here!”

  “Sidespace engines recharging, ma’am. It’ll be nine minutes until we can jump.”

  “Emergency override—shorten that countdown! Sensors, who are they?”

  “Three Arattak frigates. It’s the damned spiders. The other ship... I don’t know what it is.”

  The holo froze there, and Straker forced himself to lean back in his seat.

  Indy gestured at two screens. “On the left you see the three Arattak ships—typical conical shape, pointed toward the target, which is the Hercules. Beams around the circular edge, shieldbuster weapon in the middle—the stinger. The fourth ship is detailed on Screen Two.”

  Straker stood and stepped close to the screen, eyes narrowing. “Reminds me of something.” Sections of the hull flashed with highlights, Indy’s doing. “Those structures... magnetic grapples. Like the Korveni had. Except we destroyed the Korveni.”

  “You destroyed one set of Korven,” a voice from across the room said. “Those are from another set.”

  Straker turned to see Chiara Jilani, currently the mayor of Paradiso—but more importantly, a longtime guerilla fighter. Her life’s mission had been to stand against the Korveni pirates who’d enslaved the people of Utopia for many years. “And we’re just finding out about this now?”

  “I reported it all to Commander Sinden long ago, bossman,” Jilani replied as she strode up to the table. “The Korveni the Breakers destroyed last year were mostly of the Korven race—their cosa nostra, their mafia, if you will. That, on the other hand, looks like a real Korven military ship.”

  Indy spoke. “The Korven home systems are far away, across the Middle Reach, and there was no reason to think they were any threat to us. Our information sources on Crossroads indicated the Korven species, while highly militaristic, didn’t take any particular offense to our destruction of the Korveni crimorg.”

  “We’re not certain if this is a genuine Korven military ship,” Winter said. “It might be a rogue—or a Korven vessel the Arattak captured and manned for their own purposes. We do know the Arattak are incessantly aggressive. The real question is, how the hell did they catch the Hercules transiting in? Didn’t Admiral Engels vary her arrival point? Because that’s our SOP.”

  “The data indicates,” Indy said with certainty, “that the Hercules arrived at a randomly selected point over one light-hour from any previously used point. The odds against the Arattak intercepting the ship by mere chance approach infinity.”

  Straker rubbed the stubble of his jaw. “Then they have some kind of tech—a detector, a predictor. That could change warfare and sidespace travel as we know it, if ships can wait in ambush—and the arriving ships can’t see what’s waiting. Indy, tell Murdock to start looking into this. Wake his ass up if you have to. I’ll see him at noon in his lab for an initial report.”

  “Waking him up now, sir.”

  The android pointed the cursor to roll the holovid. They watched gri
mly as Hercules was beaten down and boarded. All too soon, the displays froze.

  Indy made a gesture of finality. “That’s all we have.”

  “Lucky the data module got away at all,” Straker muttered.

  “The Arattak probably aren’t used to transports having them,” Colonel Keller said. “Most cargo ships run on thin margins and aren’t going to pay for a sidespace-capable drone they may never use.”

  “Money, money, money,” Straker said bitterly.

  Jilani took an empty seat at the table. “Money makes the Reach go ’round. Get used to it.”

  “It’s rather like ammo,” Straker agreed. “It never matters until you run short. So, what do we do next? We can’t let this go without an immediate response.”

  The officers glanced at one another. Jilani was the most tactless of the lot—or the least worried about what the boss thought—so she answered first. “We can’t immediately go after Hercules. We have to assume the enemy might have tracked our drone.”

  “Worst-case thinking, eh?” Straker asked.

  “Yes. If they can track that drone through sidespace—they could find us here.”

  “More likely they can only see that something’s coming, but not who or how many,” Indy said. “Four warships to pirate one transport... that seems like overkill. The Korven ship could have done it alone—plus one Arattak, maybe. I’m worried they have further plans for us.”

  Straker thought about that. Could this be more than a raid? More than a quick slap delivered out of anger? Could the Arattak be planning much more damage for the Breakers?

  “We should send a strong force at them,” he said. “We’ll hit them hard. Then they’ll leave us alone. And besides, we have to rescue our people.”

  Keller spread her arms and fingers wide. “It’s possible that they’re all dead. We don’t know how this ended—and if the Arattak can backtrack us, they might be heading here to Utopia even now. We only have six capital ships, sir. We can’t send any away on rescue missions.”