by Daniel Gibbs
Victory’s Wake
Deception Fleet Book One
Daniel Gibbs
Steve Rzasa
Contents
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Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
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Acknowledgments
Victory’s Wake by Daniel Gibbs
Copyright © 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
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].
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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
Prologue
Transport Tamara Jean
In Orbit of Karavas
Second Moon of Aphendrika—Terran Coalition
27 June 2464
Andreas Stefanidis knew leaving his ancestral planet would be difficult. Nine generations of his family had worked the fickle soil of Azar III until it was a treasure trove of grains, the breadbasket of its sector.
But after two centuries of watching their world’s abundance siphoned off for the League of Sol to consume, leaving the Stefanidises and thousands of others starving, he knew he had two choices, death or new life.
The League had lost the war with the Terran Coalition—badly. The grumbling of the local security officers revealed as much to Andreas. No amount of propaganda—and there were heaps of it—could hide the fact. That didn’t stop Azar’s commissar from rooting out disloyal citizens, with a fervor unmatched since the darkest days of the conflict. It was no time to harbor individualist sentiments. How could the League hold together after such a defeat if the people were not of one mind, one goal?
The commissars deployed fear and guilt to keep League citizens in line.
Andreas, though, couldn’t feed his wife and five children with propaganda, and the League tired of the growing unrest. He hadn’t sabotaged harvesting bots, but he hadn’t turned in the saboteurs either. All the while, border worlds that had changed hands during the war with the Terrans had gotten the chance to choose their fates through popular referendums. For the rest of the complainers, the people clamoring for a better life, the League was suddenly content to cram them aboard cargo transports and ship them out.
When one of those transports arrived at Azar III, Andreas had already sold everything of value his family couldn’t carry. He knew his neighbor would take good care of the plots of Andreas’s land he’d absorbed into his own for the good of the League. Whether or not he kept doing so after Andreas and his family left wasn’t his concern.
Andreas had saved enough to bribe their way aboard the transport and secreted more to start that new life. They’d departed ninety days ago.
At first, the crowded holds were an exciting maze for the children, a warren of sixteen corridors connecting four cavernous bays. As more people boarded, many of them unattached men of varying ages, families banded together in Hold Two. They used luggage for barricades. Parents kept watch over all the young, making sure none strayed beyond the entrances and exits. Singles and couples could stay in Hold Two, so long as they agreed to steer clear of the families and form groups of their own. Even aboard the ship, with a minimal and uncaring crew, the collectivist element of League society survived.
Weeks in, no amount of belongings could block all the crying of infants or shouting of adults. It didn’t matter much to Andreas, even though his family was one of those who erected the makeshift walls. He absorbed the noise into the background as he dreamt of what awaited—the Terran Coalition, the victors, people who prized freedom so much they’d stood firm, massively outnumbered and outgunned, against superior League forces. A motley collection of aliens and independent neutrals had flocked to their banner, allies against annexation into the League’s benevolent socialism.
Andreas had seen that so-called benevolence firsthand. It had worked his family to the bone while the commissar and his underlings had paraded around in clean, pressed uniforms aboard gleaming hovercraft. Not anymore.
He took in his corner of Hold Two, where the Stefanidises had set up a cramped but comfortable ten-by-ten-meter encampment. Soon, he would find new farmland, something he could buy that would be his, no one else’s—land he could cultivate and from which he could sell the produce to new neighbors without the government taking what wasn’t theirs and impoverishing his community, land where he and his family could live unmonitored, untracked, free.
“Baba.” Little Yira, his youngest at seven years, hopped onto his lap. “When will we be home?”
Andreas smiled and brushed her hair. “Soon. We must be patient. We must follow many steps, but we are not far. We have made the last wormhole jump.”
From across the encampment, his wife, Najwa, frowned. She knew as well as he did that their waiting had taken up half those ninety days, a month in orbit with a thousand other League re
fugees aboard the transport seeking refuge on Aphendrika. “Go and play, Yira.”
Yira kissed Andreas’s cheek and leapt down, boots padding on the metal deck plates. No sooner had she rounded the bend into the adjoining family’s space than giggles erupted—the O’Brien clan. No telling what sort of game they’d concocted. Last week, they were pirates in neutral space, racing through an asteroid field. Andreas shook his head at their boundless imagination.
“Is there news from the captain?” Najwa plucked dough from a food canister.
Andreas checked his tablet. “None. He is as vexed by the Terrans as we are. I don’t understand. We’ve crossed their border unhindered, entered the system, yet we’re held at arm’s length from the planet. Instead of working a new world, we’re spinning around a dead rock.”
The simple graphic of the transport’s orbit burned bright green. How many times have I stared at the ellipse, watching the white dot follow it ten thousand kilometers from the chunky gray planetoid with the tantalizing blue oceans of Aphendrika fifty times the distance away? Andreas shrank the image, reducing the asteroid and the transport to pinpricks of light with the gleaming planet at the center of the display.
“Any new arrivals?”
He tapped a command. Twenty-nine other dots appeared, tracing yellow lines around the moon. He highlighted one. “A freighter from Bannister, it seems, got here this morning.”
“Thirty ships. Tens of thousands of us.”
“That doesn’t even count the ships lingering on the edges of the solar system or elsewhere along the Terran border. So many people leaving the demilitarized zone…”
Najwa sighed as she shaped biscuits, using the open lid of a circuit junction box as a makeshift baking counter. “Waiting and waiting. For what?”
“Opportunity, freedom, all those things the League denied us.”
“The things we fought against—with the Terrans.” Najwa glanced at him. “You should mind your words.”
“The commissar doesn’t care about us anymore. He’s not looking over our shoulders.” Andreas scowled at the tablet. “We just have to make the Terrans see we’ll work hard to earn our place among them. As long as we can buy a place, start a farm—we’ll build a new community.”
“No one will accept us so quickly, you realize, possibly ever.”
“It doesn’t matter. We need the chance, however long it takes.”
A scream pierced the rumble of the cargo bay. Andreas knew its pitch instantly. He bolted from their corner, heading for a band of refugees clustered near one of the two corridor hatches. Voices rose. Boots scuffled. Andreas couldn’t see what was going on.
The shriek of a plasma rifle cut off the arguing. The crowd peeled away, men and women retreating into their family camps. Connor O’Brien was left in the grip of two burly men in tattered, grease-stained coveralls. Either one could have broken the arm he held, which was a testament to their bulk, given O’Brien was discharged League infantry.
“Let me go! Don’t put a hand on my boy!”
“Shut the hell up.” A third man punched O’Brien in the stomach. He glared down at O’Brien’s gasping form, scars practically writhing on his face under the glare of the bay’s garish lights. His left eye twitched, the red iris at the middle of the silver cybernetic pinpointing on its target. “You knew this was coming. This ride has a price. It just went up. Stay put, and you won’t bleed out in front of the kids.”
Kids? Two more men dragged away a tall preteen boy, who fought against them, and with the trio—
“Yira!”
A sixth man scooped her up, and she screamed again.
“Get away from my daughter!” Andreas charged into their midst. The weapons didn’t matter. All he saw was a brute taking his youngest, like she was a package to be delivered.
Tears streamed down her face as she cried for him, “Baba! Baba!”
He hit the man’s backside, his shoulder plowing dead center into his spine. He spun the man around and caught his nose with a swipe of his fist. Blood spurted onto his knuckles.
A rifle’s stock crashed into the back of his neck, the pain making the cargo bay spin. Andreas reeled, vomit rising in his throat. He hit the deck, vertigo overtaking him.
“Back off!” A pistol’s muzzle pressed to the top of his head. “Anyone else wants to be a hero, they’ll be the first to take a swim out an airlock!”
More shouts burst from the crowd. O’Brien broke free, bellowing, as more refugees joined the fray. He was atop the nearest man in a second and stabbed through the ragged coverall with a combat knife.
Rifles fired again—into the crowd rather than above it. The angry shouts became cries of panic. Flashes of plasma blinded Andreas. He gagged on the sudden stench of blood mingled with sweat.
When the chaos subsided and the crowd thinned, O’Brien lay facedown in a crimson pool. His wife screamed over him, shaking his body as if she could rattle him back to health. Two more bodies, men, lay curled up, clutching arms and legs as others tended to their wounds.
“Free lesson for the day.” The red-eyed man gestured with his pistol. “Let’s go, boys. Shoot anyone who follows.”
The gang dragged their captives out—Yira, Aidan O’Brien, and four others, aged eight through eighteen.
Andreas couldn’t stand. The pain in his head made him retch every time he tried to rise. But that didn’t stop him from dragging himself after the gang and clawing his way up the nearest bulkhead. Najwa caught up with him, bawling and swearing in Greek. His vision swam down a dark tunnel. The corridor’s hatch slammed shut, cutting off his last view of a screaming Yira before he passed out.
Vasiliy Kiel thumbed through the report on his tablet as he stirred his tea with his right hand. The cinnamon wafted from his desk, filling the office with a welcome distraction from the acrid ozone of plasma torches and the nose-wrinkling stink of industrial lubricants. “Resistance, Ferenc?”
“Minimal.” The messenger, a young man with a dirty, scarred face, stood at perfect attention. It was a ridiculous pose when compared with his ratty jacket and patched trousers. Even the boots were mismatched. It was the damned cyber eye that didn’t fit with his grubby appearance—a shiny new model. “We took some hits. Jasper’s getting stitched up. Ryu has a concussion.”
Kiel let his stare linger on Ferenc’s attire until the young man fidgeted. Good. Cybernetics or not, most people were rendered uncomfortable by Kiel’s eyes—one palest blue, the other dark brown. They couldn’t handle the contrast. “And the resisters?”
“We shot some,” Ferenc said.
“I suppose it could have been worse.” Kiel sighed. “Thankfully, the captain was an easy bribe. Let me know when the payment comes through for our first captive.”
“The first should be by the end of tomorrow—twenty thousand.”
“Not bad for a fifteen-year-old.” He gestured with the tablet. “Make sure half goes to the particle weapon emplacements and half to our agents in place. No sense shorting them when we’re this close.”
“Yes, sir.”
Kiel waved him off.
The hatch popped open, admitting a cacophony of sounds—torches hissing, workers bellowing, machines rumbling. When it shut, Kiel heard the soft undercurrent, a subtle vibration through the walls.
Refitting was on schedule. Money remained tight, hence the trafficking. Kiel scowled at the figures on his tablet. It was easy enough to insert his operation into what was already an endemic problem along the border, what with the horde of filthy traitors dumped out of the League’s figurative back door. He had no qualms about exploiting anyone who dared turn his back on the League of Sol.
So, his superiors’ requirement that none of the money spent on their operation be traced back to External Security Service—or any part of League officialdom—was a welcome challenge. He got free rein to vent his anger on those scum. The League gave us everything. Made me who I am. And they’d throw it away to gamble on a life of chaos with the individualists? D
isgusting.
The irony of a Terran planet’s elites paying for fleshly entertainments—secret slaves, really—and thus giving him the funds for a weapon meant to strike at the Coalition’s weak underbelly made Kiel smile. If the plan worked. He wouldn’t celebrate yet—not a chance. Only when ships were burning over Aphendrika would he raise his mug in triumph.
He sipped at the tea. Too hot, but it would have to do. He would rather absorb the minor irritation to refocus his mind. He had a deadline, after all. Vasiliy Kiel had ninety days to make sure the Terran Coalition wished they’d never won the war.
1
Oval Office, the White House
Canaan—Terran Coalition
1 July 2464
President Justin Spencer knew that if he wished the war were still on, it must be a bad day indeed. Lord, sometimes it seemed easier then. The last nine months had been among the hardest of his life. Not even the time of nonstop combat on the CSV Zvika Greengold during the beginning of the war, where he flew multiple sorties a day, compared to this. Between the disappearance of the Lion of Judah in October of 2463 and the Jalm’tar crisis, the Terran Coalition had been pushed to the brink. And to think I once thought this job was what God wanted me to do. The newest crisis was an influx of refugees from the League of Sol.
