Planetary Parlay

by Cameron Cooper

  Special Offer – Free Science Fiction

  Space cities have been locked in war for centuries over the resources of an asteroid belt.

  Humans pilot swarms of pod fighters to protect their city’s mining operations from other cities, risking everything and suffering multiple deaths and regenerations. Then Landry goes through a regeneration which introduces an error that will destroy the delicate balance of the war.

  Resilience is a space opera short story by award-winning SF author Cameron Cooper.

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  Epic science fiction at its finest. Realistic far future worlds. Incredible characters and scenarios. – Amazon reader.

  This short story has not been commercially released for sale. It is only available as a gift to readers who subscribe to Cam’s email list.

  Click here to get your copy:

  https://cameroncooperauthor.com/resilience-free/

  Table of Contents

  Special Offer – Free Science Fiction

  About Planetary Parlay

  Praise for Cameron’s previous Hammer series:

  Title Page

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  About the Author

  Other books by Cameron Cooper

  Copyright Information

  About Planetary Parlay

  Into the Heartland of the Enemy

  Danny and her allies risk travelling to the home world of the slavers, in an attempt to divert a war that experts all say is inevitable.

  Terran Parlay is the third book in the Iron Hammer space opera science fiction series by award-winning SF author Cameron Cooper. The Iron Hammer series is a spin off from the acclaimed Imperial Hammer series, and features many of the characters and situations from that series.

  The Iron Hammer series:

  1.0: Galactic Thunder

  2.0: Stellar Storm

  3.0: Planetary Parlay

  4.0: Waxing War

  5.0: Ruled Out

  6.0: Stranger Stars

  7.0: Federal Force

  8.0: Redline Rebels

  Space Opera Science Fiction Novel

  Praise for Cameron’s previous

  Hammer series:

  I love sci-fi and this story makes me love it even more.

  I am in awe of the writing ability and imagination of Cameron Cooper.

  Before reading any of this author's work, I would have stated I did not really like science fiction. THAT has changed.

  It's full of action from beginning to end.

  Brilliant and intricate.

  Many memorable characters – but my favorite is Varg.

  Twists and turns so you’re never really sure what is going on behind the scenes.

  I am so enthralled with the series that I am impatient for the release of the next book.

  Cameron somehow describes scenes in ways that make me feel like I am actually present

  This story truly does justice to the legacies of the greats, like Orson Scott Card and Frank Herbert.

  Edge of your seat action will keep you captivated until the final page!!

  —1—

  The ten-minute warning pulled me out of a sleep I wasn’t aware I’d fallen into. Or it might have been Dalton’s chest lurching out from beneath me as he shook himself awake. I heard a pad hit the floor as I propped myself up and tried to get my eyes to focus.

  “Ten minutes before emergence,” the concierge panel repeated. “Ten minutes, everyone.” It wasn’t Lyssa’s voice. Lately, she had adopted an indeterminate gender voice for ship systems.

  I hauled myself to the side of the bed with a groan. I was still dressed. So was Dalton. We’d propped ourselves up against the head of the bed to read, both convinced we’d never sleep.

  Dalton rolled his eyes at me. “Don’t pretend you’re not excited.” He adjusted his clothes and ran his fingers through his hair.

  “You couldn’t at least comb it?” I said.

  “There’s time to get all formal,” Dalton said. “When we step off the Lythion onto Terra itself, I promise I’ll be cleaned up and slicked down.”

  He had a point. I turned away from the concierge panel, where I’d called up a mirror, twisted up my hair into a knot on the back of my head, and secured it. Good enough for now. I wanted to get to the bridge.

  “In a hurry, are we?” Dalton called after me as I strode to the door, which slid aside for me.

  I threw him a dirty look. “You said not to pretend I’m not excited. I wanna see it.”

  I let the door close behind me and headed toward the ramp up onto the bridge of the Lythion. I wasn’t the first heading in that direction, either.

  We had a full ship—twenty people, not counting me or Lyssa. Lyssa didn’t need accommodations, and Dalton and I were sharing the same tiny room. So were Van Veen and Marlow and the other couples among us, but we were still squeezed for space. We were all bunched up in smaller than usual staterooms and I don’t think any of us bothered with tailoring them to an environment that suited us, despite the thirteen days the jump to Terra had lasted.

  The common-area-surrounded-by-rooms plan that we had used for the raid upon Hegara had been modified. Six others were crossing the common area, which was still set up for tables and chairs, including Sauli and Marlow.

  And Keskemeti.

  I gritted my teeth when I saw his mousy features. I had been gritting my teeth for two weeks, every time I saw him on my ship.

  But Terra beckoned. I turned and tramped up the ramp into the familiar bridge area and could feel something relax in my middle as I glanced at the banks of servers, the inertia shells and the dashboards in front of most of them. The dark metallic floor and the low ceiling.

  It was ugly, but it was home.

  Lyssa’s avatar stood by the captain’s shell as usual, staring ahead at nothing. The blinds were down over the observation windows, so we didn’t have to look at the nausea inducing purple and blue flashing of the interior of the wormhole.

  More tramping on the ramp up to the bridge. I turned to face Sauli, Marlow and Keskemeti as I moved around my shell. “If you don’t have an official role on the bridge, you need to go away. We can’t afford to trip over tourists up here.”

  Marlow tilted his head at me. “We want to see it, too, Danny.”

  My gut crimped a little. Marlow had been stuck in an impossible position, between me and Jai. He had been incredibly patient with both of us, and there was no frustration in his voice now.

  Even more people were streaming onto the bridge, now, and bunching up behind the front three. Dalton squeezed through and went over to the weapons dashboard.

  “Three minutes,” Lyssa said, not looking behind her.

  I looked at Marlow, but I was really speaking to Keskemeti, damn his weaselly sub-human hide. “Lyssa will put up a big screen in the common area. You can watch from there.”

&n
bsp; “I want to see it with my own eyes, not on a screen,” Sauli said. “I can look at Terra on a screen any time I want.”

  He had a point.

  Vara and Hero pushed between people’s knees. I pointed to the bulkhead where the parawolves could park themselves and not be in the way.

  Sauli gestured to the others. “By the wall. We won’t trip anyone up there. Come on.”

  Vexed, I watched as everyone arranged themselves around the back walls of the bridge and along the sides. They squeezed in one by one. One of the last was Jai Van Veen, who didn’t look at me directly as he moved over to where Marlow was standing at the back. Juliyana beside Lyth. Sauli with Kristiana. The shorter people, including the gorgeous Elizabeth Crnčević, stood in front of them. Gratia Rosalie, who was the tallest of any of us, stood beside Jai, her arms crossed.

  I turned back to my shell, and saw Dalton was staring at me with his direct, motionless gaze which said he was silently warning me. I understood the stare this time. Let them watch.

  I put my back to the inertia couch and took a deep breath.

  “How long, Lyssa?” I asked, as the rest of the occupants on the Lythion, including three more parawolves, all eased onto the bridge, looking for a vantage point.

  “Seventy-eight seconds.”

  The tension on the bridge increased. The murmurs and whispers stopped.

  “Sixty,” Lyssa said.

  I couldn’t hear the parawolves panting, either. Just the odd clicking of the servers as Lyssa worked.

  “Thirty.”

  I sucked in a breath and turned my gaze to the shutters over the windows. “Drop the shutters the moment we emerge, Lyssa.”

  “Of course.” Her tone wasn’t dry. She was too busy to ape human emotions right now.

  “And…now,” she added.

  There was a slight shudder as the crescent arms, which had spent all the time we were in the hole tucked beneath the ship, now swung up over the front. I saw the twin arms swipe across the windows from bottom to top, almost as though they were wiping away the wormhole.

  Starfield took its place.

  And there, hanging before us, almost perfectly framed by the observation window, was Terra. Blue and white, with touches of ochre, and wisps of cloud across the near circular face. We’d arrived on the noon side.

  Off to one side was the much smaller moon.

  I gazed at Terra as it turned, tracing the shapes of the continents and oceans with my gaze. Naming them—which I could do now after three months of orientation study more intense than any I’d ever gone through, including Ranger officer training. Austrealand was enjoying their summer right now and the blue ocean to the west of them was…yes, the Indigeny Sea.

  Silence gripped the bridge as we all stared at Terra. Earth. We were the first Carinads to ever see the world from where all humanity had sprung.

  “I dunno,” Eliot Byrne said, his tone judicious. “I think Hegara is prettier.”

  “No, it isn’t,” I said quickly. Firmly.

  “Nothing is prettier than that,” Marlee Colton added. “Not even…” She trailed off. “Wow,” she finally added.

  Yep. I agreed one hundred percent.

  —2—

  Lyssa was the first one to stir and get back to business. “I’m receiving a digital data stream, Colonel,” she told me.

  “The mathematical text?” I asked.

  She nodded. “The same notations I used to surrender to the mother ship. They’re asking if we can receive low band radio waves.”

  “Not their high frequency military band, then,” Lyth observed.

  “Not even close,” Lyssa told her brother. “About as far away from that as is possible.”

  “They don’t want us to trip over their secure channels,” Dalton said.

  “Go ahead, open the radio receiver,” I told Lyssa. “We’re here to talk, after all.”

  We were drawing closer to Terra with every second. The top and bottom edges were disappearing as the ball grew too large to be seen through the windows all at once.

  I regretted that we couldn’t linger out here and just…watch, for a while.

  “Ship approaching,” Lyssa added. Then, “It’s a mothership.”

  I glanced at Dalton.

  “Weapons poised,” he assured me.

  “We’re not going to shoot them down, right?” Jai asked from the back of the bridge.

  I didn’t look back at him. “I’m just being cautious, Van Veen. It’s too late to cry foul play when we’re sucking vacuum because they’ve put a fireball through our middle.” I had intended to be polite, but my tone came out strained.

  I made myself drop it and focus on more critical matters. “Lyssa?”

  “They’re asking to speak to our…leader. Shall I put it speaker?”

  I bent around the back of my shell. “You’re up, Van Veen.”

  His expression was neutral as he moved over to the sound pickup Lyssa was pointing to on the far corner of my dashboard.

  Behind him, I could see Peter Kole grimace. She was the administrator of Triga, and a politician from the bones out. She and Gratia Rosalie, who was the Mayor of Zillah’s World and a chum of Marlow’s, plus Arati Georgeson, the Mayor of Blinni, were all aboard as representatives of the Carinad worlds. Sauli’s wife, Kristiana Saito, was also aboard in her multiple roles as head of the Spacing Guild, and the default leader of Darius City. All of them and a hundred other Carina worlds had spent three months arguing who should get a coveted place aboard the Lythion. These three—Gratia, Peter and Arati—had been drawn out of a hat. Kristiana had squeezed aboard because I’d insisted she come as part of my crew.

  But because no one could agree on who should speak for all the Carina worlds, Jai Van Veen, who represented none of them, had been chosen.

  “Speak into that,” Lyssa told Jai, pointing to the pickup.

  He nodded.

  “Go ahead,” Lyssa added.

  Jai cleared his throat. “This is Colonel Van Veen speaking. We are expected at the Parliamentary Palace, at the invitation of the Terran Assembly. May we proceed?” Then he glanced at Lyssa.

  She spoke a phrase that seemed much longer, using the Terran dialect that Ven had assured us was used upon Earth. It was the one he knew best, as he had been a slave on Earth.

  The radio band crackled noisily, picking up the sound of nearby stars. Then a voice came through, clear and strong. “Proceed, please. Establish orbit at edge of exosphere…do you understand?” The probably-female voice had an accent. I wasn’t used to listening to accents and had to focus to understand what they were saying.

  “At the top of the atmosphere,” Lyth murmured, behind me.

  “No pause for interpretation,” Elizabeth Crnčević pointed out. “They’ve learned Common well enough to be fluent.”

  “We will follow your suggestions,” Jai said. Lyssa repeated it in Terran.

  More crackling. Through the windows, I saw the mothership draw even closer, blocking the view of Terra behind it. The bland nose curve of the ship with its columns of what I assumed were vent holes that always made me think of multiple nostrils seemed to be leaning over us. The sight of it made me want to lean back, away from its approach. My heart picked up speed.

  I heard the clearing of throats and indrawn breaths and knew I wasn’t the only one suddenly feeling claustrophobic.

  Jai Van Veen looked over his shoulder at everyone lining the back of the bridge. “We’re here to negotiate peace. They asked us to come. They know how to reach us in our section of the galaxy, so why a ruse to bring us here? Think people.”

  “Logic does not soothe emotions,” Elizabeth Crnčević said. “The Terrans have only ever been hostile, Colonel. But we will adapt.”

  “Is the mothership blocking us, Lyssa? Or escorting us?” Jai asked,

  “It is maintaining the current distance,” Lyssa said.

  “Proceed to the upper atmosphere as requested,” I told her.

  “Proceeding.”
/>
  I watched the nose of the mothership carefully, to see if it backed off as we moved forward. Lyssa dipped the Lythion downward, heading for the atmosphere. I held my breath as we slid past the mothership.

  Nothing happened except we were greeted with a close-up view of Terra and my breath was stolen all over again.

  I think we all stared, mesmerized, while Lyssa moved the ship into the requested position. From this close, Terra’s curve disappeared. We were looking at the real life version of the flat maps we had studied for weeks. I could see the many archipelagos of Chindasia surrounded by blue sea. Quite a few islands had smoke plumes from active volcanoes.

  “Orbit established, Captain,” Lyssa told me.

  Jai tapped the pickup. “Is this still live?”

  A soft crackling sounded. “Now it is,” Lyssa told him.

  “Terra, we have established orbit. We have shuttles standing by and will proceed to the surface if you will provide coordinates for the best place to land.” Jai paused, then added, “Do you understand?” There was not a single odd note in his voice, but I knew he’d said it because their asking us the same thing had irritated him. He wasn’t exactly rolling over and letting them use him as a rug. I suppose that was something.

  I held in my sigh.

  Soft metallic clinking from somewhere forward of the bridge told me Lyssa had opened the gantry passages to both shuttles and was filling them with air.

  The clear, accented voice answered Jai. “We will bring our shuttle to you. Wait.”

  I straightened from my lean against the shell. “No!”

  “Lyssa, off,” Jai said quickly and turned to me. “They’re being courteous.”

  “By stuffing us into their slave shuttles? We’ll be cut off from the Lythion, if we let them take us to the surface. We’ll be dependent upon them for transport to and from Lyssa. We have to use our own shuttles, Van Veen.”

  His jaw flexed.

  I tried again, this time using reason. “I know they’re being nice right now, but if something does go wrong, we need a way to get back up here that we control. I want something of ours on the ground with us.” I paused. “Basic military sense,” I added softly, trying to remind him that he had once been part of the Imperial Shield, and had automatically thought in terms of security and defense, too—before this whole diplomatic disaster we were on had stolen his ability to think in strategic terms.