Attack of Shadows (Galaxy's Edge Book 4)

by Nick Cole

  “Speak,” Sullus demanded.

  “Tell me, Lord Sullus: Have you ever heard of the Deluvia?”

  Black Fleet

  Main Hangar of the Imperator

  0933 Local System Time

  Shuttle One settled down to the gleaming deck of the massive main hangar bay. On the outer edges of the vast open space, other shuttles were offloading wounded and recovered pilots from the battle. But in its center, a battalion of crack shock troopers stood at attention, assembled by company to greet the arrival.

  As Admiral Rommal watched the shuttle settle onto the deck, listening to the repulsors throb and shut down, he considered that even if he were about to meet some nasty fate at the hands of their enigmatic leader… Crodus was right. They had accomplished something. They had won something. Tarrago was theirs. It was no longer part of a decrepit Republic that cared little about its warriors, or their spouses who died in their arms, lying in some third-rate hospital among a thousand other people dying by the moment.

  He remembered her.

  Remembered how proud she’d been of him as he climbed through the ranks of the Republic Navy. And he also remembered how helpless he’d felt when she died. How powerless to prevent the death of even one person. Denied the medical treatment that could have saved her life. Denied because his connections in the House of Reason were all but non-existent.

  Denied the life they might have had.

  But in this moment, as the shuttle’s boarding ramp lowered to meet the gleaming deck of the hangar, he remembered that she had always been proud of him. That he had always given a good account of himself. That she had taken pride in his uniform and appearance. As if it were hers. A thing she possessed.

  She had taken pride in him. Pride in her man.

  He’d seen what Crodus’s face had implied back on the bridge. There were many ways to survive. Reports coming in had indicated that Goth Sullus might have been terribly wounded in taking Fortress Omicron. And here was a battalion of troopers who would obey their admiral if for no other reason than that they’d been turned into killing machines.

  If there was ever a chance at survival… then maybe this was it.

  But they had done something here.

  They had won something new.

  What? he wondered. What had they really accomplished?

  The beginnings of something bigger. Something bigger than the pettiness of the Republic. A Galactic Republic that was nothing more than a club for elites, so they could live off the backs of the ninety-nine percent of the galaxy. Theirs never died of diseases that could be treated. They never got passed over. They never went without.

  Or felt small and powerless.

  And she had always been so proud of him.

  Goth Sullus appeared, coming down the ramp. Leaning on the arm of a shock trooper.

  This was survival.

  And the beginning of something better, perhaps. Something bigger than a Republic. Something grander. Something imperial by orders of magnitude. Something better than a House of Reason that was little more than an anonymous mafia run by endlessly do-gooding scolds. Something run by a great man. A benevolent dictator with the power to set things right. To make the hard choices than needed making.

  And in the end… an empire for them all. Maybe it was just that.

  Admiral Rommal sucked in a lungful of air to give the command that would change everything. The command that would either mean their survival… or his death.

  Every admiral must be a gambler. A gambler that he will win the day. A gambler who pays with others’ lives. And occasionally… even with his own.

  They had created something bigger than themselves here today. Tarrago was the beginning of what was to come. And hopefully… it would be better than the Republic had ever dreamed it might be.

  Let the dice fly, he thought.

  Rommal spoke. “All hail… the emperor.”

  And then he fell to one knee and lowered his head in obeisance to the future leader of the galaxy.

  More Galaxy's Edge

  Available October 2017…

  Galaxy’s Edge Book Five: Sword of the Legion

  Read the first three chapters now…

  01

  The planet Rawl Kima.

  Captain Chhun lay on his side, using the roof’s almost-meter wall to shield him from the barrage of blaster fire raking up from the street below. “Booker!” he shouted to the Repub-Navy attaché, “Find out what the hell is holding up the Illustrious.”

  Positioned in an attack orbit, visible overhead, the Illustrious was the sub-destroyer class capital ship that had jumped the Victory kill team into Rawl Kima. Another of the endless missions to capture Mid-Core Rebellion VIPs… and another success. The target, a rotund dwahser, sat in the middle of the roof. A plus-sized isolation hood large enough to contain her trunk firmly over her head, her portly gray arms ener-chained behind her back.

  Now the mission was in jeopardy. Illustrious needed to hurry up and send down fighter support. An evac-shuttle to extract the team and target at the very least. The one that should have been waiting for them in the first place. The closer one got to the core, the more the Republic military seemed incapable of basic military procedures.

  Swarms of MCR scanning the biological spectrum were surrounding the heretofore local MCR militia headquarters. Chhun and his kill team had the high ground, controlling the roof of the tallest building in the modest urban sprawl that populated whatever town this was.

  Kahl, Chhun thought it was called. It didn’t matter. They needed to get out there or get some help killing bad guys. There were a lot of bad guys.

  Booker, the Navy liaison, looked at Chhun from deep beneath his helmet, his eyes draped in shadows. If the thing were pulled down over his head any tighter, you’d think he was a war tortoise. “Holding up what, Captain?” asked Booker. “The evac or the bombing run?”

  A spray of blaster fire chewed into the building’s façade, with errant shots streaking up so close that Chhun could hear the sizzle through his bucket. “Both or either, Booker. I don’t care! Just get some—“

  A fragger arced overhead thrown from the street below. Whoever tossed it had quite an arm. Or trunk.

  The Dark Ops legionnaires watched the grenade fall as their buckets mapped its trajectory and probable landing spot, accounting for any bouncing rebounds on the surface of rooftop. The bucket HUDs also identified the amount of time left on the fuse through some kind of Republic coder magic. A newer feature the kill team was happy to have.

  “I’m on it,” Masters called, running toward the fragger as it landed and setting up a mobile containment bubble—called a bubbler—around it. A thick blue energy shield capable of withstanding physical trauma at the same level as two feet of impervisteel formed a dome around the fragger with seconds to spare.

  Chhun watched the grenade as his HUD ticked down the final second. The primary and secondary explosions gave a muffled bamf beneath the containment bubble. “Nice work, Masters.”

  “Thanks, Cap.” Masters powered down the bubbler, allowing a thick cloud of smoke to rise heavenward. The roof was scorched, with layers of now harmless shrapnel evenly piled within the bubbler’s containment. Similar scorch marks and shrapnel piles dotted the area. “These mids are gonna get one up here before I can reach it, though. Can’t keep this up forever.” Masters shrugged his shoulders. “At least they’re too dumb to throw ‘em all at once.”

  More likely, the ill equipped rebels—they’d never recovered from the loss of Scarpia—didn’t want to part with their fraggers unless they were sure it might save their lives.

  “We need to re-take the initiative,” Chhun said in agreement. “Pin them down. Fish!”

  A leej in the black armor of Dark Ops hustled to Chhun’s position from his station on the opposite side of the roof. A poorly aimed rocket streaked over their heads, landing a kilometer off with a faint crump.

  “Sir?” Sergeant Andrevel Fisher crashed into the roof-wall next
to Captain Chhun, his rapid-fire SAB at the ready.

  “I need you and Averill to keep those mids pinned down and quiet for a while. I’m gonna try and convince our target to call off her dogs, for whatever that’s worth.”

  “We should just throw her over the edge and get out by foot,” offered Fish.

  “Today, Fish,” Chhun said, his voice betraying a smile.

  “On it,” Fisher answered. He waited for Sergeant Averill—Sticks--to join him on the side of the roof where the blaster fire was thickest, counted to three over L-comm, and sprang up, unleashing fury through the barrel of his SAB while Averill picked off targets with his N-4.

  With the rest of the squad keeping the MCR honest from the four sides of the building, Chhun approached the dwahser, who sat oblivious to the firefight thanks to her isolation hood.

  Chhun reached out to remove the hood when Sticks shouted an urgent heads up. “Three Mids made it inside the front doors.”

  A rumbling boom erupted from two floors beneath that shook the foundations of the building.

  “…and they found the A-P mines,” Masters quipped over the L-comm. He replenished a charge pack and leaned over the edge, firing on the rebels below.

  “Right where I left ‘em,” answered Bear, a two-meter leej who looked like he could do more damage with his hands than his N-6.

  Chhun grabbed the top of the target’s isolation hood and pulled it off like the lid to a covered dish dinner. The sudden transition from absolute stillness, devoid of all light or sound, to the bright sunshine and brilliant noises of combat caused the dwahser’s eyes to grow wide in panic. The MCR cell leader spouted a nasal alarm through her trunk and then began to frantically slap at Chhun’s chest and bucket.

  “Hey—stop!—knock it off!” Chhun grabbed the nose-like appendage and removed the Kublaren tomahawk Masters had bought for him years before. “I’ll cut that thing clean off, if you don’t stay still.”

  Pacified, the dwahser seemed to grow accustom to her situation. She fixed a hateful gaze at the legionnaire. “Urah trah.”

  “Where’s the stupid translator bot?” Chhun called out. His bucket translated the dwahser’s insults just fine, but the external translation interface was painfully slow. A bot was still the better option.

  A cylindrical robot hovered from a hiding spot somewhere on the roof. “I am here, Captain Chhun,” the bot said, flashing blue lights accenting each syllable.

  For his part, Chhun was thankful his team had been given a bot with repulsor functionality. The beings of the galaxy may be more comfortable with bipedal machines, but taking stairs was a hell of a lot simpler with this model. “What’d the target just say?”

  “Death to tyrants,” the bot answered.

  Good, it was translating the same as Chhun’s bucket. The kill team ran into a situation a few months back where a translator bot wasn’t calibrated for the proper regional dialect. Chhun spent ten minutes coming on to a zhee cell leader. Worse yet, the zhee seemed to be into it, looked like its little donk heart was broken when the bot’s software updated.

  Heart-breakers and life-takers.

  Chhun gritted his teeth. He had hoped for a more compliant captive, but this sort of determination wasn’t uncommon from the MCR. At least, not from the alien ranks. The humans tended to roll over the moment Republic pressure was applied.

  “Today might be your lucky day,” Chhun mumbled to himself. He spoke next to the translator bot. “Tell her the blaster fire coming our way is just as likely to get her killed, and she needs to order—“

  “’Nother fragger coming in!” shouted Fish from his position.

  “I can’t get to this one!” called out Masters.

  The fragger bounded on the rooftop as legionnaires dove down low in an attempt to avoid as much shrapnel as possible.

  Boom!

  A shower of debris tinked against Chhun’s armor. The shrapnel blast of the fragger had missed him, and the model of grenade only exploded once, unlike the Legion’s standard ordnance. But one explosion could wreak havoc, even when protected by armor.

  “Everyone all right?” Chhun asked his team, allowing his voice to transmit over L-comm and externals.

  One by one, the kill team called out affirmatives and went back to their firing stations. Masters was the last to reply. “I mean, nobody important got dusted,” he said.

  Uh-oh, thought Chhun, scanning the rooftop for the naval liaison even as he spoke. “Is Booker—?”

  “He’s fine,” Masters said. “The target took the brunt of things.” He kicked the corpse of the severely perforated and bleeding dwahser, causing the dead MCR leader to roll onto her back. Booker was still lying prone, covering his head with his hands.

  Chhun whistled at the luck. The rebel’s girth absorbed almost the entirety of the blast, and probably saved the naval liaison’s life.

  “Hey!” Chhun shouts at the liaison, snapping him from the concussive daze caused by the fragger. “Really could use some support from your friends up in the Illustrious, right about now!”

  Booker keys open his comm, covering one ear to better hear above the din of blaster fire. “Agro-seven to Virtue-one, come in.”

  Chhun’s Dark Ops enhanced L-comm ported the comm transmission into his bucket’s receivers.

  “We hear you, Agro-seven.”

  Booker shouted into the comm. The fragger must have damaged his hearing. “Requesting immediate orbital support and exfiltration. Transmitting current location.”

  “Where’s our ride out of here?” called out Bear, his voice every bit as large as his physical size.

  There’s a pause, as though the comm station officer aboard Illustrious was considering the shouts of a mountain-like man.

  “Request is denied, Agro-seven.”

  Chhun didn’t wait for Booker to plead his case. He broke in over the comm. “This is Captain Cohen Chhun—what the hell are you talking about, ‘request denied?’”

  “Don’t take that tone with me, legionnaire.”

  Unbelievable.

  “Listen, whoever you are,” Chhun began, fuming with anger, “you get support down here right now or the first thing I’ll do when I reach the ship again is hunt you down so we can talk about ‘my tone’ in person. You got that?”

  The voice on the other end sounded much more charitable. No one in their right mind wanted an angry leej gunning for them. Especially not a Dark Ops leej. “Sir, I have orders that outrank yours. We are not to send any craft into the region. No exceptions. Sorry Captain.”

  “Unreal,” Chhun muttered to himself. He opened up his squad comm. “Wrinkle in the op, Victory squad. We’re gonna have to get ourselves out of this. Illustrious says they can’t send down fire support or an exfil shuttle.”

  “Because that would be too easy?” asks Masters. “Because I don’t mind the easy way. Really.”

  “So we kill ‘em all,” Bear said, jamming home a new charge pack into his weapon. “Would have been nice if they let us do that in the first place instead of that smash, grab, and dash crap. Could have set up a nice ambush, have these Mids all dead in the street by now.”

  “Typical Point garbage,” Fish responded, switching out his own charge packs. “Hey, I’m chewing through these. Booker! Bring me that satchel with my extras. And keep your head down.”

  Booker grabbed the pack carrying the extra charge packs for Fish’s SAB and sprinted toward the legionnaire, keeping low, but still clearly above the roof life.

  “Keep your head down!” warned Fish a second time.

  An MCR blaster bolt struck the navy trooper in the temple, killing him instantly.

  Fish hissed in anger and crawled to reach the satchel of ammunition.

  “Move it, Fish!” his firing partner, Sticks, called as he cut down an MCR peeking from around the corner of an alley with a shoulder-launched rocket. “We need that SAB to keep them back!”

  “I know! I know!” Fish scrambled rapidly in monkey crawl. “Any of you guys notice
that the closer to the core we operate, the worse trained our attachments are? I mean, I feel bad for the kid, but…”

  “Stay focused,” Chhun said. “We’ve got enough charges to keep what’s in the streets busy well into the day.”

  So long as reinforcements didn’t come. Chhun resisted the urge to shake his head. His team had been in tighter scrapes than this—the runaway corvette-of-death came to mind—but knowing that didn’t make the situation he was in look any better. This was bad and didn’t promise to grow any better with time. He ran through scenarios, thankful that the MCR didn’t seem have a mortarbot or any repulsor vehicles at their command. At least, not yet. It hadn’t been all that long since his kill team drove into the city in an unmarked repulsor sled to apprehend the dwahser target. Resistance could still be scrambling for a counter offensive.

  The best bet would to be forget the capital support ship and go directly to Dark Ops. No way they’ll let a team hang out to die. They may already be scrambling. L-comm should be able to reach the deep space orbital platform hosting the Dark Ops Command Center for this section.

  “Major Owens,” Chhun called into his command L-comm, trusting the message would get through. “Illustrious doesn’t want us tracking our muddy boots back on her decks. We need some relief up here.”

  “I know,” came the Dark Ops controller’s voice. It sounded crystal clear. Modern technology was a beautiful thing. “I’m watching the whole thing via remote peeper. And trust, me, I chewed enough point ass to make ‘em need a rabies shot. But they aren’t budging. Damn fool Captain agreed to a cease fire designed by the MCR to get you guys isolated and killed, and he ain’t breaking it. Good news is that a contingency plan is already inbound. Can you hold off another fifteen minutes for an updated status report?”