Fire on the Frontline

by Trevor Wyatt

  “You seem too happy for a man that just murdered an entire colony’s population, I gotta say,” Flynn said. Just like Jeryl predicted, Flynn didn’t have to know the details to figure out that Jeryl had pulled some kind of shady strategy to get out of an unwinnable situation. And, as far as The Seeker’s captain was concerned, there were no unwinnable situations—only situations you’d have to be more patient about. In the end, there was always a way out.

  “What can I say, Admiral? I’m a happy man by nature.”

  “No, you’re full of shit by nature, Jeryl,” Flynn laughed once more, this time even more heartily than before. “And you’re fine just like that. As far as I’m concerned, the Armada needs more men like you. And I’m not talking about having men like you serving as Captains, I’m talking about—”

  “No, whatever it is, you can shelve it,” Jeryl cut Flynn short, waving him down. “I’m not looking to become Vice-Admiral again. Been there, done that.”

  “Maybe not Vice-Admiral…but what about a position in Intelligence? God knows these soulless bastards need some fucking ethic in there.”

  “They wouldn’t find it even if it bit them in the face. These guys play by no rules—legal, moral, or ethical. They play their own game, and they make up the rules. They respect nothing, and I don’t want to be a part of it.”

  “You shouldn’t speak of them like that, you know? They have ears everywhere,” Flynn said, the expression on his face telling Jeryl that the old Admiral didn’t give a fuck if Intelligence officers were listening in to their conversation right now.

  “I’ll try. I don’t want to be murdered in the middle of the night by some murderous operative.”

  “They have a few of those, that much is true,” Flynn shrugged. “But it might be one of those murderous operatives that’ll solve this teleporter riddle.”

  “How so?”

  “Intelligence has been trying to develop teleporter tech with no success. They’re exploring…other alternatives.”

  “Don’t tell me they’re planning on stealing it from the Tyreesians. No one would be crazy enough to attempt something like that.”

  “You’re damn right,” Flynn laughed. “No One would do it.”

  “Are you talking about—”

  “Alright, alright. I’ve said enough,” Flynn cut Jeryl short, but that just served as confirmation. When Flynn said ‘no one’, what he really meant was ‘No One’—the Intelligence operative everyone simply dismissed as a legend. Beautiful, stronger than a small squad, and more capable than a whole battalion put together…and she only operated in the shadows.

  Or so it was said. Jeryl didn’t even know if No One was in fact a she.

  “Seriously now, Jeryl,” Flynn started again. “Reconsider. Your talents are being wasted as Captain of The Seeker. I know you love that ship as much as you love your wife, but I see bright things in your future.”

  “Admiral, thank you for all the trust but…I don’t want bright things in my future,” Jeryl said, standing up from his chair and offering Flynn his hand. “The only things I want in my future are my ship, my wife…and my son.”

  Flynn’s eyes widened in surprise, and Jeryl almost felt bad about the way he had said it. Flynn had never married, and he didn’t have any children to call his own.

  “Congratulations then, Captain,” Flynn finally said, shaking Jeryl’s hand. “I wish you all the best. Truly.”

  “Thank you, Admiral.”

  With that, Jeryl started walking out of Flynn’s office. He stopped dead on his tracks as Flynn called after him.

  “Jeryl.”

  “Admiral?”

  “If you care about your wife and your son…I’d think about choosing another career.”

  “Sir?”

  “I know men like you. I was just like you. And as long as you have a uniform…there’ll always be another war to wage.”

  Jeryl simply stood on the doorway for a long moment, Flynn’s words echoing inside his head, and then he just nodded.

  “Thank you, sir,” he said, and then finally left for good.

  There’ll always be another war to wage, Flynn’s words continued to echo inside his head, and Jeryl knew it was the truth.

  The worst part was he knew he’d never be able to give up his uniform. Sighing, he allowed one last thought to cross his mind.

  If war comes…so be it.

  I’ll be ready.

  The Mariner

  See where it all started. Read The Mariner, A Pax Aeterna Prequel, for free, exclusively at this link: https://claims.instafreebie.com/free/yaoQE

  First Contact

  A Pax Aeterna Novel

  Call of Command Book 1

  By Trevor Wyatt

  Copyright 2017 by Pax Aeterna Press

  All rights reserved

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons is entirely coincidental. This work intended for adults only.

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  Book I

  Jeryl

  The vastness of space was always disquieting. It was beautiful, but in the back of Jeryl’s mind they were simply hurtling through empty space in a microcarbon tetrapolymer tube. One small deviation from some pretty tight specs and their ass was grass—lungs bursting as they depressurize.

  No matter the stellar phenomena that they charted, no matter the beauty that they saw—in the end, space was unforgiving, cold, and empty. It didn’t care who was good or evil. It didn’t care about political factions. Or whether the Captain of the TUS Seeker hooked up with his first officer on shore leave.

  Space killed with impunity.

  Jeryl sat in CNC on the Terran Union Starship called The Seeker. He used to hate that name when he first took command. But now, he loved it. Two years of commanding an Armada frigate patrolling the border with the Outer Colonies would do that to anyone. He knew each of his crew personally. Hell, he had hand-selected almost all of them at some point or another as people left and needed replacing.

  “We’re approaching the last known coordinates of TUS Mariner, Captain,” the navigator, Henry Docherty, called out from his station.

  “Cut FTL drive and return to normal space,” Jeryl ordered, leaning back on his chair. He could feel the hum of the ship change as the FTL drives disengaged. The ship materialized into normal space, out from the folded space it was travelling in.

  “Visual,” Jeryl ordered. The view screen lit up in front of him. It dominated the far wall of CNC and gave him the visual sensors to see what was happening outside of The Seeker. Double-plated transparent microcarbon glass panels line the sides of CNC, but Jeryl had no idea what the designers of the frigate assumed they would do—they were as big as portholes on an ancient seafaring craft. He couldn’t hop on tip-toed and look out to get a view of the outside, and more importantly, he couldn’t make command decisions.

  But Jeryl guessed it was done to bolster morale, to prevent people from becoming claustrophobic. To not have them dwell on the fact that they were in a box travelling several times the speed of light through the cold unknown.

  “Mr. Lannigan,” he said to his Science Officer. “Coordinate with Ms. Gavin and scan the area for The Mariner.”

  The science officer nodded and made room at his station as Ashley Gavin—the shapely First Officer of The Seeker—walked over to join him. Not for the first time had Jeryl sighed at the sight of his First Officer.

  He had done everything that a Captain could do in this situation. He had delegated tasks to his crew and now all he could do was sit back and wait for the next piece of information on this godforsaken mission.

  He knew he didn’t sound too happy, but that was only because he wasn’t.

  They were out here in the far fringes of the Terran Union. The close
st station—Edoris Station—was 20 light years away. That was roughly 20 days that they’d been travelling. No colonies. Just empty space and giant balls of gas and dust.

  “If it’s something involving the Outer Colonies trying to come through our back door,” Admiral Flynn had said to him, “there’s no other person I want investigating it than you.”

  The Admiral had been insistent that The Seeker had to go see this out. The only problem Jeryl had with the Admiral’s insistence was that the Outer Colonies were all the way on the other side of the Terran Union. Even if they had ships as powerful as the Union’s, he doubted they could get all the way around it without attracting some sort of attention.

  Besides, the distance to traverse through empty space would be prohibitive. Which meant, the more that Jeryl thought about it, that whatever caused The Mariner to stop responding to the Edoris Station wasn’t related at all to the Outer Colonies.

  And Jeryl would know; he had had experience on the border. Most of his time in the Armada had been rotating on and off ships that patrol the border. There were brush fires, isolated incursions; more to harry and provoke The Union than anything else.

  There hadn’t been a war from as long as he could remember. Hell, since as long as anyone could remember. From what he knew, the last sustained conflict was during The Schism, about fifty years ago, back in 2147. The only reason everyone knew about it was because it was taught through History classes; no one who lived through The Schism was serving in The Armada now.

  So all they had to go by was what they learned in school—how Earth had sent out her children into the stars. And how those children had grown older and began to help their ailing parents from the ravages of its nuclear war. How rebuilding Earth was deemed to be impossible—after the nuclear wars that rocked the planet, scientists of the mid-21st Century said it would take at least a thousand years of rebuilding for the planet to go back to pre-World War III conditions.

  But they hadn’t factored in space travel, or colonies. They hadn’t factored in humanity’s drive to survive when backed against the wall. From the ashes of post-atomic horror, Earth came together and did away with the old institutions, and implemented a unified voice. Earth looked to its children to go into the stars and send back the resources to rebuild.

  And rebuild they did—to the exclusion of all else. Large percentages of colony budgets were earmarked for rebuilding efforts for Earth, and for the first generation or two, it was done with pride. People were contributing toward the rebirth of the cradle of humanity.

  But fast-forward to another generation, and one would see the grudging acceptance of the sacrifices that had to be made so that a world, one that very few had ever seen, could prosper. Hostility festered in future generations, hostility aimed at sacrificing all their hard work for a world hundreds of light years away.

  And the farthest of Earth’s children—those in the outermost colonies—said one day that they’ve had enough. They threw off the yoke, as they believed it to be. And once again, humanity went to war.

  But that was fifty years ago. The Terran Armada then was nothing compared to what it was today. Rebuilding was the focus. There was very little need for defensive or offensive technology. Humanity hadn’t encountered any alien lift and it still hadn’t. The few frigates and cruisers that were in service were used to ensure hostilities didn’t get too bad. And in addition, to ensure that the proper material flowed back to the Homeworld.

  Eventually, with the Colonies being granted their independence—all 57 of them—tensions cooled and the long vigil across a border began. That was the last conflict anyone had ever fought.

  All the research and all the exploration hadn’t uncovered any trace of alien life. They found moss growing on a rock on New Chrysalis; some vegetation here and there—a sign that the universe wasn’t asleep while the humans destroyed themselves, but still no sentient life. For as much as they all believed, humanity was alone in the universe, left to explore on its own; left to fight amongst each other as they colonized the stars.

  So then if it wasn’t the Outer Colonies, and if there was no such thing as non-human life, Jeryl was left to wonder what could be preventing The Mariner from responding to them

  Solving that problem, he thought. That’s the only mystery that makes this mission worth a damn.

  The Mariner was a deep space exploration vessel, with a small crew complement. A part of Jeryl betted that those egghead scientists were just lost in their own little bubble, exploring some stellar phenomena of the month. Not realizing that The Seeker had to be pulled off their course to go rescue some scientists with their heads in the clouds.

  We’ll probably find them and they’ll realize they somehow turned off their communications grid, Jeryl thought. Or maybe they took it offline so that nothing would bother them with their research. I’ve seen it happen before. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  He was thinking about the scientists when Ashley walked toward him.

  Jeryl could tell she was coming up to him even though he was looking down at his pad. He could smell the slight perfume that she indulged in every morning; the smell that he remembered before he went to sleep at night; the smell that he had breathed in when they were on shore leave in New Sydney, when they found themselves accidentally at the same resort. They had drinks and dinner. A bottle of New Sydney wine in his suite. Then, a night of sex.

  And the next morning, they replaced all of that with professionalism to cover up the awkwardness—to make sure they didn’t have to talk about what they had done together the night before.

  Jeryl felt the hair behind his neck rise as Ashley came closer. Something was definitely up.

  She leaned closer and whispered in his ear.

  “Captain,” she said softly so that no one could hear. “There’s something you should probably see. In private.”

  Ashley

  “In private?” Jeryl whispered cocking one eyebrow as he looked at her. Ashley stood straight, and pursed her lips. She felt the palm of her hands grow sleek with sweat.

  A poor choice of words, she thought.

  After the New Sydney incident, she had struggled to push her way past the ensuing awkwardness. She did her best to act as professionally as possible, but sometimes her defenses faltered. She couldn’t help it; every time she closed her eyes, and remembered those warm days back in New Sydney, Captain Jeryl just turned into…Jeryl.

  The Armada frowned upon their officers falling into personal relationships, but everyone knew it was inevitable; no one could confine people in a vessel for too long a time and expect nothing to happen. Anyone could be sane enough to keep things professional while they were in outer space, Ashley had always thought, but the moment they feel gravity’s pull, things change.

  There was the atmosphere to adjust to, and the slight variations in weight. Trading up the Armada uniform for some expensive dress smuggled from the Outer Colonies wasn’t off the table as well, especially for Ashley—at some point, all the formalities drop.

  That was what happened in New Sydney.

  It was just a short break between deployments, but there was enough time for crass jokes, a bottle of wine, and a night between the sheets at The Oath, one of the landmarks of New Sydney. Jutting more than two thousand feet skyward right in the center of the metropolis, the expensive hotel provided the perfect setting for a weekend of drinking and forgotten boundaries.

  The soft sheets of The Oath’s suite were on the far side of the universe, at least as far as she was concerned. She wore her uniform now, the First Officer badge clipped to her chest; she had a job to do.

  “In private,” Ashley repeated with a nod, nervously running her tongue between her dry lips. She balled one hand into a fist, and tried to hold his gaze without allowing the First Officer mask to drop.

  “Okay,” Jeryl breathed out, reading the serious expression on her face. There was no smile on her lips, putting all the awkwardness to bed. Finding The Mariner and reporting the situatio
n back to the Armada should be a simple enough job, but now she was not so sure.

  Ashley had been serving under Jeryl for a few years now, and she had learned to develop that quick intuition the Armada tried to impart on its officers. She had been in more border skirmishes than she could count on her fingers, and lived through so many false alarms that she had already forgotten half of them. But this was different.

  This wasn’t a pirate raid in one of the mining colonies, nor just another one of those border confrontations. As far as Ashley knew, no ship tried to encircle The Seeker and none of the ship alarms had gone off for months now. They were alone in the vastness of space, and still she felt there was something wrong about the whole situation.

  She felt as if she stood on a shore, her feet buried in the sand, watching as the ocean slowly receded, back into its depths—and then the whole ocean would rise up to swallow her. The readings she had just seen…There was no way for her to be sure, but somehow she felt that a tidal wave was looming above them.

  Turning on his heels, Jeryl marched across the CNC. Ashley trailed after him, that tight anxiety taking over her chest. Jeryl stopped for a second, allowing the biometric sensors to recognize him. The door to the Captain’s private office slid to the side and into its metallic partition.

  Spartan and rigorous, Jeryl’s office was a reflection of the discipline that allowed him to climb through the ranks all those years. His desk was tidy and uncluttered, the chair behind it is so carefully placed that the whole office looked more like a set than an actual working space.

  If she didn’t know all about the ungodly amount of hours the Captain spent in here, Ashley would have assumed Jeryl earned his Captain rank by being an effective pencil pusher. The Armada was full of these types nowadays—the memories of war were distant and faded, and there were few men she trusted to lead the way if shit hit the fan.