Reason For Vengeance (Dark Vengeance Book 1)

by Adrian D. Roberts

  Pulling herself out of bed, she stripped off the clothes she wore since her escape and dumped them in a pile on the floor. Stepping into the small hygiene cubical, she switched the water to a scolding hot setting and stood there as it streamed over her. The hot water tasted of salt as it ran over her face, the remains of the old tears flowing away with the new. It was a slow process as she washed her hair and scrubbed her body. Her movements were mechanical and stilted, her thoughts were far from what she was doing.

  Finally clean, she shut off the water and switched the dryers on. Warm energy engulfed her and dried the moisture from her body, while a stream of hot air took care of her hair. Dirt-free she stepped out and could immediately smell the clothes piled onto the floor. She scooped them up and stuffed them straight into the small hatch of the auto cleaner. In half an hour, they would be washed and dried. She replaced them with a dark sleeveless top and trousers from her Chest.

  She felt no better, just cleaner, and headed up to the cockpit, collapsing into the pilots chair. A dispenser dropped several ration bars that were designed as the pilot’s emergency rations. Each one contained massive amounts of vitamins, minerals, protein, calories and anything else the human body needed to keep going. They tasted bland and boring, but Valerie really didn’t care. It was all she had lived on during the flight, whenever she actually remembered to eat.

  Munching purposefully she looked at the screen showing the flowing silver of hyperspace and the curve of the hull of the freighter, Histria Azure. The Spectre had many excellent attributes, interstellar travel not being one of them, it was far too small to include a hyperspace engine and the massive reactor it would need to power it. The Spectre was incredibly fast in a Solar System’s gravity well, allowing Valerie to catch up to the massive hauliers heading out of the system. She attached the Spectre to the first one she could find, completely without their knowledge and sat back as it took her out into hyperspace, not caring where she would end up.

  Now eighteen days later, the Histria continued on, unaware of the tick on its side hitching a lift. For those days, Valerie had been in a stupor, unable to function. All the rage and drive that got her off Olympus and caused her to wreak such damage, drained from her shortly after entering hyperspace. Those days were a blur and she knew she had barely been functioning. She felt better now. The tears hadn’t stopped, they still continued in their constant slow progression down her face. Her gut felt like a ball of ice, with heartfelt loss constantly ripping at her. The difference today was that she could think beyond all that, to see outside of herself for the first time.

  A three hundred and sixty degree holographic display encircled the pilot’s and co-pilot’s chairs in the cockpit. With a variety of different views, from simple optics for atmospheric flight to tactical displays for the vaster volumes of space. In hyperspace a ship could not see any further than its flight field so tactical displays were useless. The Spectre automatically switched to visual upon entering hyperspace. While it wasn’t capable of independent flight, it was designed for just this kind of piggybacking. The visual came up to give the crew less of a feel of claustrophobia, from being in such an enclosed environment for long periods of time.

  She looked on the display to see what woke her. A graphic showed the status of the hyperspace flight field surrounding the freighter. It indicated the field was shrinking. It began half an hour ago and the computer sounded a warning beep to notify her. Valerie was grateful for the interruption to her nightmare. It was good to see her family and believe them to be alive again, even for the most fleeting of moments. Only it made the loss and pain, when she realised the truth, raw and fresh and she did not want to do that again.

  A flight field reduced as a ship approached its destination. A Vrachtschip built, Spediteur class freighter, like the Histria Azure, had a hyperspace cruising speed of Velositas three. It would take an hour to reduce the field, ready for return to normal space. Valerie thought about that for a moment. At that speed, in eighteen days, they would have travelled twenty-five light years, which made their destination in all likelihood to be Blaze. She grimaced to herself at that.

  Blaze was a very unusual system. It was one of a handful of systems humans had discovered containing a world friendly to them. The Blaze system was made up of a single star burning hotter than Sol, with two planets inside the Goldilocks zone. The area of a solar system that was neither too hot nor too cold, to sustain human life. Blaze A was of a similar size to Earth and slightly further out. Its hotter star made much of the equatorial zone uninhabitable by humans, without purpose built protective environments. Blaze A evolved its own carbon based life forms and oxygen producing fauna. Many earth species were capable of surviving, though they could not thrive on the planet’s surface.

  Colonisation of Blaze A took place before the founding of the Pantheon. Although terraforming was available at the time it had been too expensive for most colonists. When a viable planet became available, they went there in their hundreds of thousands. Many struggled to survive when they arrived, mostly congregating north or south of this world’s tropic, where the majority of its plant and animal life lived.

  For hundreds of years, Blaze sat outside the expanding sphere of human influence and the trade spreading outwards from Sol. With limited gene pool and little contact with other nations, Blaze had been stuck in a kind of stasis, where technology did not advance. There were periods in its history when they went backwards and struggled to re-discover a lot of knowledge. It was not until the vast corporations, such as Ambrosia, founded the colonies that would become the Pantheon, Blaze was able to move forward.

  That progression had been slow, the corporations keeping Blaze at arm’s length and contact at a minimum. Protective of their prerogatives and privileges, they built their advanced colonies with a far reaching plan that did not include Blaze. A little over five hundred years ago, Blaze had been entered into the Pantheon and not by choice. An aggressive campaign by a few of the Pantheons Privileged First Families, using the corporations who were the successors of the founders, bankrupted the Blaze government. Those same Families stepped in and ‘saved’ Blaze, running it as their personal cash generator ever since. The same template was currently being used on Gomez.

  Blaze became the bleeding sore of the Pantheon. Bribery and corruption were a way of life in the Pantheon and Blaze took it much further. Every kind of product or service was available, no matter its legality in the Pantheon or even on Blaze itself, and the Families took a cut of it all.

  Blaze B, the second planet in the Goldilocks zone, had been largely ignored. It did not have a bio-system of any kind, though it was fully susceptible to modern terraforming techniques. The original Blaze government did not have access to those technologies, and the ruling Families were uninterested in doing anything that may interfere with their cash flow. Merely a hundred and seventy years ago they finally contracted out the work. The process was still years from completion, only the terraformers and their families lived there in enclosed environments or on the orbital laboratories and staging areas.

  It would be easier to lose herself in a society used to transients passing through and hiding their identities. At the moment she really did not have any idea of what she was going to do next. The other good thing was that she knew exactly where she could hide the Spectre. She couldn’t land it at a normal space port, even on Blaze it would raise red flags that would bring every Legion Navy ship in the system down on her head.

  Ten years ago, Shadow Company were tasked with dealing with a particularly aggressive band of nomads who roamed the Ginormican mountains, named as they contained over a dozen peaks higher than Earths Everest. Descending from the original colonists, the Nomads had carved out a life for themselves transporting goods from the North, over the Ginormicas and across the deserts to the South. Stopping to trade at the small isolated, underground communities eking a life out there. The Nomads were the life blood of Blaze before the intervention of the Families.


  Not wanting such a lucrative revenue stream to be outside their control, a bloody war was fought between them and the Nomads. Unsurprisingly, given the technology and resources the Families could put behind it, the Nomads lost. They did not give up and now the clans hid away in the Ginormicas, occasionally coming out to raid for supplies.

  The Butler clan had gone further out and done more damage than any other for generations. The Blaze Police, a bloated and corrupt institution, more interested in lining their own pockets than risking their necks, were outclassed. If they could catch the clan in the open, their technological advantage would have allowed them to deal with the Butlers. The Nomads did not let that happen, every time the Blaze PD came out in force, the clan retreated back into the Ginormicas. There they were been able to hide, avoid and even ambush the Police.

  The Families appealed to the Legion for help. Not wanting a messy large scale confrontation the media would eat up, they asked for the scalpel over the hammer. Shadow Company had been picked to be that blade, with limited air support. It took Valerie and the Company three weeks to track and corner the clan. The fight had been brutal, bloody and close in the narrow canyons. When the company left the mountains, little of a clan able to date its descendants all the way back to the fourth colony ship to land on Blaze survived.

  There were parts of that mountain range that had never seen a single human being and others the Company were the first humans to set foot in. It was there she could hide the Spectre. It would be incredibly hard to get down to civilisation on foot for her and impossible for anyone else. Of course they could use an aircar, there was just no reason for anyone to do so. The Spectre had almost a zero energy signature when all the systems were running, when it was shut down in standby mode, it would be impossible to find, even if the entire mountain range were subject to a full orbital scan.

  It was very possible they were not going to Blaze. The freighter could be stopping due to another reason. Valerie thought this to be highly unlikely, hyperspace travel was not accurate enough to make deep space rendezvous possible and there were no other systems 25 light years from Olympus. Some were closer and many further. It was possible the Histria Azure was not running at its cruising speed and they were about to arrive at Themyscira, if slightly slower, or Midgard, if slightly faster.

  Time was money for any commercial freighter however and conversely it would increase maintenance costs significantly, if they overburdened the engines. If you knew the rated cruising speed of a civilian vessel, you would have a very good idea how long it would take to reach its destination. Military or courier vessels were a completely different matter, having much more powerful engines and reactors and often without a specific time frame, they were more flexible.

  While Valerie sat there contemplating her destination, the Spectre’s computer continued to monitor the flight field and now showed it was seconds from point of collapse. She braced herself and felt her body being pulled in all directions momentarily, as the Histria Azure and its hitchhiker reverted back to normal space. It was still unknown why organic life felt that change from normal to hyperspace and vice versa. All humans felt it and animals were caused obvious distress by the transference. Even plants were affected by it. Tests had been done, multiple jumps back and forth with plants on board ship. They were all damaged by it as though they had not had water or sunlight. After continued exposure they even died.

  This had been confirmed with animals as well and although there had never been a recorded case of a death for humans, the scientists carrying out the tests reported worsening health. No one could pinpoint the problem. Physically the subjects were in perfect health. The one consistency they could find is that, body mass made a difference. The higher the mass of the subject, the less they were affected.

  It had been determined that hyperspace travel was perfectly safe, as long the subject was not exposed too many times over a relatively short amount of time. It was calculated to take a minimum of fourteen consecutive jumps, in a twenty-one hour period, to cause any significant damage. The shortest distance between two inhabited systems, was the six light year trip between Galway and Killarney or Killarney and Ballymena, so there was no danger. It had also been proven that inorganics showed absolutely no change down to the molecular level.

  Shaking off the effects the transference brought, Valerie started scanning for media signals. The Spectre would receive a signal from the local traffic beacons, including the system identity and would display it momentarily. That was not what Valerie was looking for.

  It took her moments to pull up a news feed. The gravity shadow of a sun extended out to 1.2 billion kilometres, approximately half way between Jupiter and Saturn in the Sol system. This was deemed as close as hyperspace allowed you to go to a star safely, before it became unstable. Depending on the star and in what state it was in, you could go closer. It had been found though, that it was very difficult if not impossible to model that instability, so all craft exited at that minimum distance. If your destination was something outside of that it was quite easy to leave hyperspace earlier.

  With the signal traveling at light speed, it was approximately an hour old. That was of no issue to Valerie, what she was looking for would be older than that. Courier vessels moving at Velositas thirteen or fourteen could have made the journey in seven days against her eighteen. The story of Furioso would be all over the news by now. She hoped it would have died down, but didn’t think so. Constant updates would have been coming in from Olympus as they discovered more information.

  It was immediately obvious the news feed originated from Blaze, matching the information the Spectre was putting up on her screen. The Ship was also taking in information from its passive sensors, automatically doubling checking what it received from the beacons. The computer used the star alignments, planet arrangements and the position of the systems Sun, to calculate a location.

  A system chart appeared automatically on the screen, confirming the system to be Blaze. It showed Blaze A on the opposite side of its sun to the direction they arrived from. The crew of the Histria Azure would have known this when they calculated their flight plan. They brought the freighter out of hyperspace 1.2 billion kilometres directly above the sun. A turn sharp enough to bring them around behind Blaze A was not possible via hyperspace. The crew planned their arrival to give them the shortest sub-light journey.

  The freighters sub-light engines were already coming online. The ship began to re-orientate itself to take the least time course to Blaze A. A Spediteur class freighter had a cruising sub-light speed of thirty thousand kilometres per second or ten percent of the speed of light. With an acceleration of one percent every fifty minutes it would take over eight hours to reach its cruising speed. Needing the same time to decelerate relative to the planet, taking a total of eighteen and a half hours to reach Blaze A.

  The Spectre, in contrast was much faster, it was actually designed to be one of the fastest ships in space. Able to accelerate at one percent every five minutes, up to a maximum of ninety thousand kilometres per second or thirty percent of the speed of light, the Spectre would reach its maximum speed in one hundred and fifty minutes. Valerie would reach Blaze A in a little over six hours.

  Letting the freighter do the work for the moment, Valerie searched the news feed for information on Furioso. As she feared, it was not difficult and was still headlining the hourly bulletins. The Pantheon’s government were pushing it for all it was worth, by releasing horrific pictures of casualties floating within the station, frozen faces bloated by decompression. There were reports from ships involved in search and rescue and heroic stories of people sacrificing themselves to save comrades.

  All of this Valerie skipped over, she was not even tempted to look at the casualty lists to see if any of the people she knew and worked with for years, were on there. She just could not bring herself to care. She was glad she checked none of Shadow Company’s roster were on board before carrying out her plan, but that was all.

 
A quick search for who was to blame for the attack, brought up a news program recorded on Olympus, before being sent on the news courier to Blaze. Valerie sat back to watch it play. It began with a woman wearing an impeccably tailored suit, sitting in a comfortable chair in a studio with her bare legs crossed. An image of Furioso was displayed behind her, the battered and broken husk of the space station giving true gravitas to what she had to say.

  “I’m Sunta Plato for the TSE News Network here on Olympus.” She began as though no one saw the two minute intro Valerie skipped past. “Here at TSE, we would like to say that our thoughts and sympathies go out to the survivors and those who have lost family members and friends, in the horrific attack at the Furioso station.

  “How William Baccurin’s Free People’s Society.” There was a distinct note of scorn in her voice as she named the FPS. “Can justify such a wilful and cowardly attack on those men and women, who are our staunchest defenders of our freedom…” Valerie fast forwarded what she assumed to be the usual government propaganda spin. She had heard similar reports on incidents she personally was involved in with Shadow Company. They rarely included anything resembling the truth.

  A picture of a man in his early twenties replaced the image of Furioso behind Sunta Plato and Valerie slowed the recording to normal speed. “-we can now categorically say that the attack was carried out by Lance Corporal Ruben Novajkovui, from the 114th Legion Commando Marine Regiment. Legion Intelligence have been able to confirm that the Lance Corporal took a shuttle from the Battleship PLN Horus to Furioso, three hours before the attack. Those sailors and soldiers on board the Horus, must be both glad he did not target their vessel and wondering what they could have done to stop him.