The Galactic Chronicles: Shadows of the Void Books 8 - 10

by J. J. Green

“Krat. Where’s that holo? Never mind. There’s no time. Pulse response, on the double. Evasive maneuv— Krat. Where’s that pilot?”

  He leaned over the back of another officer to focus on the interface she was looking at. An impact on the ship threw Jas to the floor, along with everyone else still standing.

  “Damage to decks one and two, sir. Hull breech.”

  The dark-haired officer didn’t reply. He glanced at the door, which had buckled where the defense units had forced it open. They needed a pilot. Without the ability to fly, they were sitting ducks.

  “Pulses incoming,” exclaimed a voice.

  “LK29, what’s the ETA on that pilot?” she said into her comm, but at the same time the female pilot Jas had spoken to earlier ran through the door. Without missing a beat she jumped into the vacant pilot seat. She paused, her hands above the screens on the console. “Hmmm...never flown a destroyer before.” She scanned the screens intently. “Let’s try...” She swiped a screen and pressed another. “Okay, got it. I see unwelcome visitors. Oh no you don’t.” She pressed decisively and Jas was crushed to the floor as the ship swept upward incredibly fast.

  “More pulses on their way.”

  “Pilot, emergency jump,” said the dark-haired officer from his new position on the floor.

  “As quick as I can, sir,” the pilot replied.

  A deep vibration rose through Jas as the engines began to build power. She started to get up, but another hit buffeted the ship, and she was flung to one side.

  “Hull breech deck five.” The air was growing hazy with smoke from the damaged areas of the ship. Jas blinked and coughed as the acrid air stung her eyes and throat.

  “We scored a hit, sir,” said the weapons officer, “but they’re still coming.”

  “Fire with everything we’ve got,” said the dark-haired officer. “Fire at will.”

  The vibrations grew stronger. Jas had given up trying to stand, deciding that she was safest staying where she was.

  “Hold on, everyone,” shouted the pilot. The ship rolled and pitched. Jas grabbed the leg of a console. Suddenly the artificial gravity went haywire, and she was hanging suspended in midair, holding on with one arm. The side of the bridge was fifteen meters or so below her. Torben’s remains and bodies of dead Shadows and officers had slid and rolled to the bottom. Some of the living were among them, struggling to get away from the corpses.

  The pilot and other officers who remained in their seats were hanging precariously to one side. The pilot was trying to fasten her safety harness one-handed. Someone fell and landed heavily on a dead Shadow.

  Jas reached up with her left hand to grab the console leg and hold on more securely. Her right hand was already slipping. She missed, grunted, and reached again. But the ship was vibrating so strongly, her fingertips couldn’t get a grip. Her shoulder felt like it was being pulled from its socket. For the third time, she swung her left arm up and attempted to grasp the leg. For the third time, she didn’t make it.

  Her other hand slowly opened as she lost her grip. She was holding on with only her fingers, then they too began to slip. Jas looked down, wondering if she could survive the fall if she landed well. The last of her strength left her fingers, and she dropped like a stone.

  When she was halfway down, they jumped.

  She never hit the bottom. As they came out of the jump, Jas found herself floating in the center of the bridge. The pilot had shut down the artificial gravity as they’d jumped. The other officers were also suspended in midair or in seats, hastily fastening their safety harnesses.

  “Position report, pilot,” said the dark-haired officer. He was floating, trying to hook a foot under a chair arm.

  “Just a minute, sir.” The woman scanned her interface.

  “You mean you don’t know where we’ve jumped to?”

  “No navigator to figure it out, sir. Had to take a chance.”

  “Krat, Pilot Kennewell, we could’ve ended up in the middle of a star,” exclaimed the dark-haired officer.

  “Well, the chances of that are—”

  “Do not answer me back, madam,” the officer barked. “You took an unacceptable risk with the lives of my crew. I shall consider your behavior for a formal reprimand.”

  The already-quiet bridge grew quieter still as even the wounded officers’ groans momentarily quietened.

  Jas felt for the pilot. As far as she could tell, the woman had saved all their lives. She wondered if the dark-haired officer was just feeling the stress and responsibility of his new command or if he was always a misborn.

  After a pause, the pilot said, “Yes, sir.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  It turned out that they were only a few light years from the scene of the battle. The engines hadn’t generated sufficient power in the short time available to take them very far, but they had escaped the notice of the Shadows, for the time being.

  The dark-haired officer asked for ship-wide status reports, and the ship’s crew listed the dead and injured along with the material damage to the ship. As that went on, someone must have been fixing the artificial gravity because, not long after the last of the reports came in, and when it was established that all the surviving crew had gotten themselves to a safe place, the gravity reactivated.

  Jas had propelled herself into an unoccupied seat on the bridge. She welcomed the return of the sensation of heaviness. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept properly. She felt beyond exhausted and would have given a lot to close her eyes there and then and rest just for a little while. But there was still plenty of work to be done.

  The dark-haired officer was in one-to-one comm with Unity Command, and the uninjured officers began the clean-up. Jas ordered the units to help with taking the wounded officers to the medical bay, but another officer intervened and said that a better use of the androids would be helping the repair crews to seal the hull breaches. She changed her order and sent them to the relevant decks before lending a hand to carry out the wounded officers herself.

  The medical bay was already full of injured crew members, and the medics were busily triaging every man, woman, and alien who went in. Jas left them to it and returned to the bridge to help with the more gruesome task of removing the corpses.

  By the time she returned, however, the dead bodies were already gone and some kind of order had been established. The dark-haired officer was still bent intently over the comm panel, speaking quietly into his mic. The quadruped had finally stopped trembling.

  Technicians were running diagnostics on controls, though more than half of the stations were empty. Everyone seemed busy except Pilot Kennewell. She was resting her chin on her hand and staring glumly into an interface.

  “I thought you did a great job,” Jas said, taking an adjacent seat.

  The pilot sat up and glanced at the dark-haired officer. “Better watch your words around Pacheco,” she said quietly. “Or he’ll consider you for a formal reprimand too.” She rolled her eyes. “Hey, wasn’t it you who was looking for someone earlier?”

  “Yeah. He’s a pilot. Carl Lingiari. Have you heard of him? He joined the battle late.”

  “No. I’m sorry. He must be on another ship.”

  “I thought so.” Jas was disappointed to find him not aboard, but also relieved to confirm that Carl couldn’t have been one of the pilots who’d been killed rescuing her and the units.

  “You’re new, aren’t you?” asked Kennewell.

  “Yeah, I only arrived from the Camaradon a little while ago. Just before the final attack.”

  “Oh, you’re the...” Kennewell’s eyes widened.

  “Yep. I was the one aboard the transport two pilots died saving.” She looked down.

  “Hey,” said Kennewell, “don’t feel bad about it. We all knew the risks when we signed up, and the pilots who brought you to safety volunteered for the job. No one ordered them to do it, and if they hadn’t, I wouldn’t be sitting here now.”

  In response to Jas’ puzz
led frown, she went on, “Your units killed the Shadow pilots who were in the process of picking off the rest of us. If those pilots who died hadn’t saved your units, they wouldn’t turned up to save us, I wouldn’t have been around to fly us out of trouble.”

  “What about Operation Penumbra?” Jas asked. “Wasn’t that a response plan?”

  “It was, but we only had a few hours to work on it. Commander Torben had begun screening everyone to find out if we had any Shadows aboard, but it had to be done secretly so as not to let the Shadows know that we suspected they were among us. We were also in the middle of a battle. Everyone who passed the screening was armed and warned of the danger. Operation Penumbra was the code sign to let us know that the Shadow rebellion had begun and we were to watch for attacks, defend ourselves, and stun and confine anyone we suspected of being a Shadow. But it was too little, too late.”

  Pacheco straightened up and took off his earpiece and mic. “Okay, listen up,” he said, his tone sharp. The man looked weary, and he had to be in a lot of pain from the burn he’d sustained while he’d been hiding with Jas.

  “Things aren’t looking too good right now. We lost three ships to the Shadows during that attack from within, which makes seven altogether when we count the ships destroyed during the battle.” He sighed and passed a hand across his face. “Unity Command will send lists of the crews lost as soon as they have them. The Shadow attack turned things around somewhat. The battle’s over, but no one’s won. As soon as we receive coordinates, we will regroup with the remaining vessels.”

  He stopped and seemed to have nothing else to say.

  After a moment’s silence someone said, “And then what, sir?”

  Annoyance flickered across Pacheco’s face. “What do you think, man? That fight was just a skirmish. Now we begin the war.”

  How long Jas had known that it would come to this, she couldn’t remember, but Pacheco’s words were no surprise to her. The Shadows were an infestation that, each time you thought you had vanquished them, they would reappear in another place, more numerous and deadlier. Their great strength was their replication of their victims. They could hide in plain sight as the colleagues, friends, family, and lovers of every sentient being they replaced, biding their time until the moment was ripe to rise up and take over.

  Jas didn’t know how they could stop them, or if they could ever be stopped. The war had only just started and it could be years before it was finally over. She was separated from Carl and from her friends, and she was caught up in the conflict with no end in sight.

  All she could do was continue to fight their deadly enemy and hope that, one day, she might be reunited with the people she loved.

  Shadow War

  Chapter One

  The destroyer Thylacine materialized from a starjump, and Commander Jas Harrington immediately leaned forward in her seat. A hologram blinked into life in front of her—a golden globe slowly spinning in mid-air, filling one-fifth of the Thylacine’s bridge. A dry, cloudless planet.

  The planet’s name was unpronounceable in English, but that didn’t matter. It was one of several worlds that was home to a rich source of mythrin, the raw ingredient of the stupor-inducing, extraordinarily expensive, highly illegal drug, mythranil. As such, the world was extremely likely to have been infiltrated by the hostile aliens known as Shadows.

  Infiltrated, and secured.

  The Shadows aimed to cut off the Unity Alliance’s supply of mythranil so the UA’s Shadow scanners wouldn’t work and their ability to tell friend from foe would be lost.

  “Force field maximum power,” said First Officer Trimborn. “Scanning for enemy ships.”

  Jas nodded. Everyone aboard knew the drill. If the battle scenario played out as it usually did, they had about five seconds.

  Four. Three. Two—

  “Pulses incoming,” exclaimed Trimborn.

  The Shadow ship protecting the planet had spotted them and fired.

  “Got the origin coordinates,” said another officer. “Returning fire.”

  Vibrations shook Jas’ seat and the arm rests beneath her hands. The enemy’s pulses had hit the ship, but the Thylacine’s force field was strong. They had plenty of power, enough for a long, pitched battle. The trick to winning was to destroy the opposition before the power ran out.

  “Picking up the Shadow ship,” said Trimborn, looking from his screen to the holo. A starship appeared over the edge of the golden globe. Long, slim, and sprouting four curved extensions, the ship was a make that Jas didn’t recognize. Like most Shadow ships, it had probably been built by the native population on the planet below and stolen by the aliens after their invasion.

  The Thylacine’s pulses were already streaming toward it.

  “Fire again,” Jas said. “Full attack.”

  “Yes, Commander.”

  “Halve our distance from that ship, Pilot,” said Jas.

  Pilot Kennewell replied, “Engaging Raptors, ma’am.”

  Acceleration from the propulsion engines pushed Jas back in her seat as the Thylacine sped toward its attacker, following the barrage of pulses it had launched. A similar assault from the Shadow ship clashed into the Thylacine’s pulses. The bolts of raw energy collided, exploded, and dispersed in the high thermosphere above the planet. The Thylacine continued full speed ahead, cutting through the cloud of energized particles, leaving behind a charged wake. Jas hoped the battle was visible to the population below, giving the invasion survivors the news that the Unity Alliance had come to their rescue.

  “A second ship’s jumped in,” exclaimed Trimborn.

  The hologram echoed his words. Before the first officer had finished speaking, another starship winked into existence. It appeared directly behind the Thylacine, so close that the energy of its starjump hit them full force, rocking the ship.

  “Krat,” muttered Jas, gripping her armrests to steady herself. There was no way the Shadows could have messaged for reinforcements. The Thylacine was dampening their comms. She was confident of that. This was bad luck—a pure coincidence that her destroyer had happened to arrive moments before a second Shadow ship. It was probably there to relieve the first or was intended to double the planet’s defenses.

  This battle wasn’t going to be as straightforward as Jas had hoped. “Fire away at our second target.”

  “Already on it, ma’am,” came the reply. The pulses flew out toward the new aggressor.

  The officer should have awaited her order, but she didn’t object. Her team were battle-seasoned. She trusted them to use their initiative, and they knew it. The new ship would take about a second to activate its force field post-jump. If the Thylacine could score a hit during that time window, it would do significant damage. Waiting for her command would only have wasted precious time.

  “Direct hit,” said the officer.

  The Thylacine continued to zoom closer to the original Shadow ship and away from their surprise attacker. The ship they were leaving behind shuddered as their pulses hit it. Jas craned forward, looking expectantly at the ship. They had to have hit it before its force field was full power, but the holo displayed no debris.

  “We didn’t breech her hull,” exclaimed Trimborn.

  “Maintain fire,” Jas said evenly, settling backward into her seat. “Equal pulses. Both ships.” They were now under attack from two directions.

  She bit the edge of her thumb. Failure to inflict serious damage when a ship’s force field was down was rare. She peered at the new ship. It was another kind that she’d never seen before. In five years of battles, Jas had seen many starships fighting on both sides of the Shadow War. She’d gotten to know most of the models and their specs and capabilities. Only occasionally now did she encounter an unfamiliar ship. Yet here were two that she didn’t know. She wondered if the Shadows had begun to design and manufacture their own ships.

  The second ship began its pursuit. The Thylacine continued on its course, closing the distance with the first ship. They were fast b
ecoming penned in. Jas clenched her jaw. Taking out one average Shadow ship was achievable. The Thylacine had done it often enough. Taking out two—one of which seemed exceptionally well-protected—would be tough.

  “Pulses incoming,” Trimborn said. They were too numerous for the Thylacine’s pulses to intercept.

  The ship vibrated again under the heavy fire.

  “Fighters launched from Shadow Ship Two,” said Trimborn. Sparks spewed from the side of the second ship, the tiny flecks of light representing manned Shadow fighter ships.

  Jas’ stomach twisted at the sight. She raised her comm button to her lips. “Squadron Leader Correia, scramble all fighters.”

  She imagined the Unity Alliance fighter pilots in their single-seater, highly maneuverable ships as they bravely prepared to launch. Starship force fields protected them against high-energy pulses, but close-range, low-energy fighter fire could penetrate the defensive screen. Protracted fighter fire on vulnerable spots could cripple a ship. The Thylacine’s fighter pilots would protect against these attacks and attempt to destroy the enemy’s fighters.

  Despite the danger to her ship from the Shadow fighter attack, Jas hated deploying her pilots. Their chances of survival were terrible. In the average Shadow War battle, fewer than sixty percent of UA pilots would make it back to their ships alive. Jas’ pilot survival stats were somewhat better, mostly because she did whatever she could to avoid risking her pilots’ lives. It was something Admiral Pacheco criticized her for, though she’d never lost a battle yet.

  In the current situation, however, she had no choice.

  “Kennewell,” she said. “As the last fighter leaves, take us hard to port.” The Thylacine’s fighter ships would launch to starboard. She needed to give the pilots room to maneuver, and she wanted to avoid becoming sandwiched between the two Shadow ships.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Kennewell replied, her hands hovering over her controls.

  The ship continued to vibrate as the odd attacking pulse impacted their force field. Their own pulses were also scoring hits, too, gradually wearing down their enemies’ power levels.