Galactar (Savage Stars Book 3)

by Anthony James

  Galactar

  Savage Stars Book 3

  Anthony James

  Contents

  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

  Other Science Fiction Books by Anthony James

  © 2020 Anthony James

  All rights reserved

  The right of Anthony James to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed upon the subsequent purchaser

  Illustration © Tom Edwards

  TomEdwardsDesign.com

  Chapter One

  High above the muddy reds and sandy yellows of the gas giant Lapus-1, the Topaz space station followed its orbital track. At eight thousand metres in length, the station was a collection of differently shaped alloy modules, joined seemingly without an overall plan. Every few years, a new module would be transported from a shipyard on Earth or Lustre and attached wherever it would fit, ensuring that with the passing of time, the Topaz station became ever more haphazard in appearance.

  Captain Carl Recker was one of the twelve thousand personnel currently onboard the station. He’d been assigned quarters that were hardly any larger than the interior of a gravity car, with space for a bed and a communicator. From the sleeping area, a narrow doorway gave access to a cubicle fitted with an all-in-one shower and toilet, a facility which Recker had never experienced before, had never even thought existed, and which he hoped never to encounter again.

  And Recker was lucky his rank gained him this amount of space – most personnel had to make do with a sleeping pod and shared facilities.

  He sat on the edge of his bed, with his short-cropped hair brushing against the ceiling and stared at the communicator’s single screen.

  Position in FTL vid-comm queue: 32.

  His place in the queue hadn’t changed in the last ten minutes and he was beginning to wonder if another technical problem had materialised somewhere in the comm system. The text on the screen updated.

  Position in FTL vid-comm queue: 35.

  Recker closed his eyes briefly. Higher-priority requests could push personal calls down the list indefinitely.

  Position in FTL vid-comm queue: 47.

  He was due back on duty soon and it didn’t seem like he was going to get his channel to Earth in time. Feeling like a shit for missing his promised call, Recker typed out a message.

  Mam, Dad, FTL comms choked with high priority traffic. Sorry. Not much I’m allowed to tell you. Everyone’s trying so hard to make things right. Try not to worry. I’ll give the comms another go once my shift is over. Love, Carl.

  He put the message into the queue. Tiny data packets like this were usually sent in a few seconds and he waited for the confirmation to appear on the screen.

  Message sent.

  With nothing keeping him, Recker left his quarters and entered a long, narrow, low-ceilinged passage which led towards the command and control areas. It was cold, though the insulating properties of his spacesuit allowed him to ignore the near-freezing temperatures.

  The corridor was – surprisingly – deserted. He set off towards the operation area of the station, his boots producing a rattle from the grating underfoot. Beneath the grating, pipes and cables ran, as a reminder of how long it had been since this accommodation module was signed off for use. Anything built within the last fifty years would have such visible aberrations hidden from sight.

  Recker passed numerous doors leading to rooms as tiny as his own, and, every fifty meters, an airlift led to the levels above and below. This accommodation module was almost full and Recker had learned that the military planned to attach additional modules just as soon as they could be constructed. The space station already seemed full to bursting and Recker couldn’t imagine what it would be like with another ten thousand personnel added to the pile. He hoped to be a long way away when they arrived.

  The corridor ended at a wall. To the left was an airlift, currently three levels below this one. A screen on the facing wall showed a feed of darkness and stars from one of the Topaz station’s external sensor arrays. Whoever designed this module evidently thought they were doing the occupants a favour by adding these windows. In Recker’s experience, most people avoided them, like the view outside drove home how close they were to the void.

  Recker paused and swept his fingertip along a touch-sensitive area at the bottom of the display and the feed jumped between the hundreds of arrays. One view of Lapus-1 held his attention for a few seconds. On the planet’s surface, two huge storms which appeared like deep red swirls of incomprehensible violence were gradually drifting together and Recker was interested to witness the outcome.

  Unfortunately, the collision wasn’t likely to happen for a few days, so he spent a moment studying a different feed, this one of his current destination. Then, he turned away and called the airlift.

  With a swish, the lift arrived. The car had room for one person in comfort, though Recker had once seen as many as six fit inside. This one was empty and he entered, then selected a level three below.

  A few seconds later, he exited the lift into another corridor like the one above. Again, the passage was empty and Recker assumed this was because the next shift change wasn’t due for an hour.

  A door to his right provided an exit into the command and control areas. Recker pressed his hand onto the access panel and the door opened. Immediately, he heard voices and footsteps, while the brighter light made him squint.

  The passage outside went left and right. Personnel, all wearing spacesuits and most of them carrying tablet computers or bundles of paper, hurried in both directions, talking rapidly into handheld communicators or taking jerky swigs from disposable cups filled with over-strong coffee.

  A double-width door opposite opened, revealing a room filled with banks of screen-laden hardware, attended by a team of agitated-looking technicians. The door slid shut again, just as Recker entered the flow of human traffic in the corridor.

  He strode amongst the people, unwilling to match their pace. This module of the Topaz station was as old as the joined accommodation block, but it had been extensively modernised. Cables, pipes and maintenance panels were hidden behind panels and the floor was solid, rather than fitted with loose grating.

  This area of the space station was reminiscent of underground facilities back on Earth, Lustre and other planets in the HPA. Recker sensed the differences. The faraway, muted rumble of propulsion and the slightest of vibrations, only felt in the quietest of moments, never let him forget where he was.

  At another lift, Recker descended two more levels. Hi
s impatience was already building even though he wasn’t late. The journey from his quarters to the docking station took twenty minutes on average and while he was aware many civilians had far longer commutes, he didn’t enjoy this dead time – time which was neither his own, nor in any way productive.

  From the lift, Recker proceeded into the next module, which was separated by a permanently open blast door. Signs he no longer noticed hung from above, offering directions to newcomers. This next module was home to the primary statistical analysis teams, as well as a few of the senior officers most involved with these teams. Right now, just about everyone in stats was tasked with the impossible job of predicting the future based on numbers derived from present data. Recker knew they were amongst the finest minds in the Human Planetary Alliance, yet they’d failed to predict the Daklan attack on Lustre and now they were having to completely re-think their models. What warning they’d given about the possible destruction of planet Fortune, he had no idea.

  On balance, Recker was far happier to be on the frontline than having that kind of weight pressing down on him.

  Topaz station had three separate docking areas, the largest of which could accommodate a riot class warship - not that facilities existed to perform anything other than the most routine of maintenance. Recker was heading to the tertiary docking area, which was a dedicated module that served no purpose other than as a launching place for sixteen identical shuttles.

  Having traversed the square entrance tunnel leading to the module, Recker entered a rectangular space about three hundred metres by two hundred, with a twenty-metre ceiling. Eight access tunnels on each of the longest walls provided means to enter the shuttles, with status lights and information screens to advise which shuttles were available.

  Recker spotted the closest green light, third on the left and he strode towards it. This hub room was busy with personnel, and the maintenance teams had taken one shuttle out of its access tunnel in order to work on it. Cut-down versions of shipyard tools, including a compact crane and a gravity loader were near the shuttle and a brace of ceiling-mounted robotic laser welders directed shielded beams into the transport’s upper plating.

  Whispers on the grapevine hinted that an officer had got drunk on illicitly obtained alcohol and decided to take a sightseeing tour on that shuttle. How this officer – rumoured to be a male comms lieutenant - had managed to circumvent security protocols was a matter of some conjecture. Of even more conjecture was how he’d managed to crash the transport into the heavy lifter Maximus which was parked outside the space station.

  The unknown man’s career was certainly in tatters and fortunately for Recker, that comms officer’s name was not Adam Burner.

  At the end of the third tunnel, another, shorter tunnel connected to the shuttle’s side airlock. A pair of stony-faced soldiers stood guard, carrying their gauss rifles in a way which suggested they believed everyone was harbouring guilty intentions of one kind or another.

  Recker greeted them cordially, waited for the shorter of the two men to scan his biometrics, and then entered the airlock. Less than a minute later, he was at the controls. Thirty seconds after that, clearance came through for his departure.

  The docking clamps thudded as they disengaged and Recker piloted the shuttle along the red-lit launch channel, keeping his eye on the forward sensor feed. A door ahead opened, permitting him access to the second half of the launch tunnel. Finally, the outer door opened and he flew the shuttle outside.

  As soon as he banked towards the position of the Maximus, Recker was presented by the wondrous sight of the Lapus-1 gas giant, near enough that the transport’s limited sensor capabilities were able to provide an image of breath-taking clarity. Viewing the planet from the window inside the space station was one thing, from out here it seemed far more real. A few billion kilometres further away, the Gygor star was a bright dot, its warmth and heat hardly more than a whispered promise out here by the sixth planet in the solar system.

  Eight weeks of seeing the same thing twice daily hadn’t spoiled the sense of awe and Recker struggled to tear his eyes away. He located the Maximus heavy lifter on the shuttle’s ten-inch tactical screen. The lifter was three hundred kilometres away, at the same altitude as Topaz station and following a similar orbital track.

  Recker oriented the shuttle and took it towards the lifter. At the same time, he obtained a sensor lock and zoomed in to observe the progress the construction teams were making in converting the enormous vessel into a deep space construction and repair facility. The Maximus was greater in overall size and mass than the Topaz station and every time he saw the lifter, Recker was struck anew by the incredible feats of engineering required to put something like this into space.

  Around the vessel, swarms of lifter shuttles carried the components required to fit the Maximus with not only additional missile clusters and Railer countermeasures, but also an additional layer of armour plating. A deep space fit out of this magnitude was something the HPA had never attempted before and Recker hoped the work would be completed without too many problems.

  As he came closer, he saw that the lifter’s underside main bay doors were sealed – as they had been ever since the spaceship arrived here in the Gygor system. The secondary, forward bay doors were open and it was from here the shuttles obtained their cargoes of gun barrels, half-built turrets and magazines required to equip the heavy lifter with the extra armaments everyone hoped it would never need.

  Recker guided the shuttle towards one of the universal shuttle docking ports on the upper midsection of the Maximus. Matching speed and position required a few seconds and then he piloted the shuttle into the docking tunnel. The docking clamps engaged, a light turned green and Recker climbed from his seat and exited the transport.

  Leaving the bay, Recker entered one of the huge main passages which connected the lifter’s forward and aft sections. Walking ten kilometres wasn’t a practical proposition, and the Maximus was equipped with its own internal gravity tram system, which could carry people to any of several dozen places.

  Having chosen the closest shuttle bay to his destination, Recker didn’t need to take the tram. Instead, he entered an airlift, this one already filled with a team of fifteen or twenty maintenance technicians. They laughed and joked, but it was obvious they were only going through the motions.

  Recker got out at the same floor as the technicians and, not for the first time, asked himself if he should push more forcefully to be quartered over here on the lifter. The Maximus had no spare capacity and, though Recker wasn’t too proud to share, some of his work was best done using the dedicated equipment on Topaz. He guessed he didn’t mind too much one way or the other.

  From the lift, Recker followed the technicians along another oversized corridor, which had stacks of square metal crates against each wall. A doorway in the right-hand wall opened into a cavernous warehouse of a size that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the Adamantine base. Inside was enough equipment and components to build almost anything and it was here the technicians went.

  Recker kept going until he reached a flight of steps which led down to a blast door. The door was left permanently open during normal operations and he passed through it into a vast space that filled the upper third of the Maximus and extended for a total of six thousand metres forward to aft.

  As he always did, Recker stopped a few paces inside in order that he could take in the sights. This place was almost beyond comprehension – the kind of unbelievable accomplishment that even to this day, many people in the HPA didn’t understand their military was capable of. Recker came to the Maximus every day and even he struggled to grasp the scale.

  Although this bay might have just about accommodated the hull of a fleet battleship, if perhaps not its mass, at the moment it contained only a single craft. Five hundred metres from where Recker was standing, the alien spaceship Vengeance waited like a betrayed old friend. The bay floor wasn’t nearly strong enough to support 2.7 billion tons, but t
he ceiling-mounted gravity clamps were designed to restrain much greater mass than this. Even so, their straining resonance was enough to set off a dull ache behind Recker’s eyes.

  The Vengeance was partly dismantled – as much as was needed for the technicians to access the weapons and defensive modules inside. Much of its armour had been stripped away, exposing the engine modules underneath, yet without disguising the purposeful lines of the warship. Six cranes, along with an army of metal-cutting robots made Recker think of flies crawling on a corpse.

  The most important components – the mesh deflector, the Fracture device, the Executor bolt generator and the processing core – had been extracted weeks ago, to be studied and reverse-engineered in order that the HPA could create its own copies and turn them against the enemies of humanity. Recker understood this was how it had to be, but that didn’t make it easier to deal with the sense of loss.

  A two-person gravity car – a vehicle which was little more elaborate than a ten-inch-thick slab with bucket seats and a joystick on top - floated nearby. Recker jumped up and drove it towards the Vengeance. Halfway there, he spotted two people he recognized amongst the throng of technicians, and he changed course towards them.

  “Commander Aston, Lieutenant Eastwood,” he greeted them, loudly enough to be heard over the drone of gravity clamps, the scrape of shifting armour plates and the roaring noise of laser cutters.

  Aston turned. She looked fresh-faced like always and her hair was tied in its usual ponytail.