Fury of the Bold
Bold Trilogy #2
Jamie McFarlane
Fickle Dragon Publishing, LLC
Copyright © 2018 by Fickle Dragon Publishing, LLC
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Contents
Preface
Prologue
1. Cowboy Up
2. Command Presence
3. Hunkering Down
4. Family Affair
5. Go Fish
6. Two Birds
7. Staying Present
8. Go Team
9. A Spelunking We Will Go
10. House United
11. And Then There Were Two
12. House of the Bold
13. Exposed
14. Playing with the Big Girls
15. Siege
16. Stalemate
17. Honor in Sacrifice
18. Turning the Tide
Glossary of Names
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Also by Jamie McFarlane
Preface
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Prologue
Fury of the Bold is the second book in Privateer Tales Bold Trilogy and has been written in a manner to be read independent of the other books. That said, one of the difficulties of writing a long running series is getting people back up to speed with characters they may have forgotten. I have two resources available for this. The first is a glossary at the end of this book. In this glossary, I have descriptions of the major characters. The second is on my website at fickledragon.com/privateer-tales-characters. And, don't worry, neither resource is required. I'll introduce each character as you run into them, just like you'd expect.
Happy Reading!
Jamie
Chapter 1
Cowboy Up
Bright sunlight warmed my back as I stood on a hillock overlooking a lush green field. At the edge of the field, nestled against a thick forest of broad-trunked trees, stood a primitive village of animal-skin tents. Movement caught my eye and I crouched, not wanting to be discovered.
A flap of hide was thrown back as a figure exited one of the tents. I squinted, not recognizing the species. The male with his smooth hairless chest and thick brown hair along his arms and back wore nothing but tanned leather leggings and shoes. He had an impressive and powerful build. As if sensing my presence, the figure looked in my direction. I didn't move, fearing discovery. To my relief, he turned back toward the tent and spoke calmly in a language I couldn't understand, his voice carrying further than I'd have expected.
Two smaller figures exited the tent, their profiles obviously female. One was roughly the male's height, although less broad through the chest, the other a juvenile. For a moment, the three spoke. The wind was favorable, allowing me to catch snippets of their strange speech.
A loud noise from the sky startled me and as I watched, a burning object fell to the earth. On the tail of that shuttle-sized hunk of rock, hundreds, if not thousands more plummeted toward the village. Fearing for my safety, I turned to run, but my feet were frozen in place. I raised my arms protectively as the first object struck. Surprisingly, I felt nothing as the blast wave crested over my position.
A scream from the village caught my attention and I turned back. The juvenile female pointed to the sky and suddenly the village boiled to life as the tents disgorged their inhabitants. The male grabbed a long, wooden bow from where it rested against his tent. The juvenile, no doubt his daughter, wrapped her arms around his waist and cried. I didn't need a translator to understand her fear.
A great cracking sound pulled my attention back to the field where the first of many objects had landed. Through the dirt and smoke that hung in the air, fifteen Kroerak warriors pushed up between the smoldering rocks, emerging like chicks from an egg. They stood up straight on hind legs and sniffed the air. The first to emerge froze and turned toward me.
I awoke with a start.
Rolling over, my hip fell into the hole in the mattress caused by a Kroerak lance – for the millionth time it seemed. The steady drumbeat of heavy rain on the skin of Gaylon Brighton's hull froze me in place as I avoided waking fully. I'd successfully sealed the captain's quarters of the ruined ship from rain infiltration, but I could hear water running nearby, in places it had no business being. It was only a matter of time before the ship’s salvageable systems would become unusable and I suddenly found I was unable to rest.
"Stay in bed," Tabby murmured sleepily, dragging a hand across my stomach and pulling close to me. Even with the grav-suit and suit-liner's capacities for self-cleaning, I felt grubby, having missed anything resembling a shower for the better part of two ten-days.
Only a few hours ago the elders of Piscivoru had arrived in the ruins of the ancient city of Dskirnss on their home planet of Picis. We'd been met with a mixture of emotions. As a group, they experienced a sense of awe at the scale of the once-great civilization of their ancestors. For some, that awe was soon replaced by an overwhelming feeling of loss. That sense of loss was further compounded by their one remaining technologically-savvy Piscivoru. Engirisk, who'd used an engineering pad as a sort of virtual window, showed those assembled an overlay of the city in all its previous glory.
Perhaps the Piscivoru who took the cultural disintegration the hardest was Tskir, the exile we'd rescued from the planet Jarwain. While she was thrilled to be reunited with the remnant of her species, she had lived her whole life with the technology of their ancestors and had little in common with the primitive people.
Unexpectedly, the elders had insisted on a feast to celebrate a victory over the Kroerak. Even if this freedom were to be short-lived, it was something to be rejoiced over. There had never been a time when these Piscivoru had been allowed to walk unmolested on 'the above' as they called it. As it turned out, the feast was mostly ceremonial for Sendrei, Tabby, and me. We'd run out of fresh food on Gaylon Brighton and the small lizards considered Kroerak shell a delicacy.
But for a short period, agendas were set aside and we simply existed together, Piscivoru and human, quietly celebrating one of the few successful campaigns ever recorded against the Kroerak. The victory, while significant, was also fragile. The Iskstar-charged weapon sat atop a ruined ship, which in turn sat atop a pile of rubble. At that moment, if the Kroerak returned with any sizeable force, they would easily destroy us.
It was these thoughts that pulled me from the warm, albeit pocked mattress.
"Coffee?" Sendrei Buhari asked.
I'd wandered back to the galley, dodging the rain streaming through Gaylon Brighton's many holes.
I perked up. I'd thought the ship's coffee station had been among the many casualties. Gratefully, I accepted a dented cup, the cup's micro grav-generator beneath still working. Pouring some of the dark liquid into my mouth, I wasn't even disappointed by its grainy texture.
"What's in this?" The coffee also tasted slightly burned. Don’t get me wrong; my taste buds recognized it and rejoiced – having been without the necessities too many times to count.
"Sorry," Sendrei Buhari answered. "We call this cowboy coffee. Brewer is broken. I had to improvise." He nodded to a blackened spot on the floor where a cooking pot sat. When I'd first seen the area, I'd mistaken the carbon as damage from our la
test fight. The smell of wood smoke and the brown liquid Sendrei was pointing to inside the pot made me think otherwise.
"We're cowboys?"
"We sure are where coffee is concerned," he answered, tipping back his own cup. "I created an electrical arc to ignite flammable debris which boiled the water. I’m not sure where I went wrong; I added grounds and boiled until the granules floated to the top. I poured more water in, which the AI indicated would cause the grounds to drop. That didn’t happen. I suppose we could find some filtration fabric to remove the grounds, but then we wouldn't be camping."
Sendrei had a quiet sense of humor that belied his warrior physique.
"Well, if drinking coffee in a ruined ship is camping, I'm all in." I pulled a meal bar from a pouch lying next to the cabinets and peeled it open.
"What's on deck for today?" he asked. He’d already thought through the top priorities, but would give me the courtesy of speaking first.
"I was thinking. We lost five Piscivoru in the fight with that Kasumi. That means there are ten Iskstar crystals available from their staves," I said, pulling the crystal I'd retrieved from the pouch on my waist. Once again, I felt a connection to the crystal as I turned it over in my hand. "I know the staff crystals aren't the same shape, but I was wondering if we could make them work."
"Work with what?" Sendrei asked. "We only have one blaster turret and your crystal does the job pretty well."
Movement at the corner of my eye caught my attention. Jonathan, or at least the holo projection of their common physical form, approached from beneath the ship.
"Where have you been, Jonathan?" I asked, momentarily ignoring Sendrei's question.
"We have discovered reference to a planetary defensive weapon," he answered.
"That's perfect," I said. "Where is it and what will it take to get it fired up?"
"We have perhaps oversimplified," Jonathan answered. "We have only just learned of its existence. The status and even the location of the weapon is yet unknown."
"You didn't answer where you've been," Sendrei said. "As far as I can tell, you were gone all night."
"That is true," Jonathan said. "We returned to the underground city of the Piscivoru. In that our corporeal form is close in diameter to that of our guests and our speed over ground can be quite fast, we took it upon ourselves to establish communications between the two locations by placing repeaters within the tunnel."
"A planet-wide defensive array sounds like a great long-term answer," I said, "but if the Kroerak return before it’s working, they could wipe us out. We need something now. We don't even have our Popeyes. A band of twenty warriors would likely take us out."
"Your concern is legitimate," Jonathan said. "According to Noelisk, five Kroerak were discovered within the city throughout the evening and were dispatched. There could be good news on the Mechanized Infantry suits, however. We have calculated that if the suits were sufficiently dismantled, they could be carried by Piscivoru through the lower tunnels."
"No way," I said. "We barely scraped through some of those passageways. The back plate would never make it."
"It is remarkable how you are capable of intuitive calculations of this nature," Jonathan answered. "And you are correct, the back plate and ammunition pack storage both have dimensions incompatible with the passage in its current form. There are, however, only eight locations that would require widening. To be specific, a total of twenty-seven cubic meters of material would need to be removed."
"If only we had someone who was familiar with mining equipment." Tabby's voice wafted down the hallway just before she appeared. Her tousled, long amber hair and puffy eyes were a good telltale that she'd just awakened.
"Coffee?" I asked, handing her my cup. "Sendrei says we're cowboys now."
"Cowgirl," she said foggily, as she accepted the cup and looked into it suspiciously.
"What would you require to remove that much material?" Jonathan asked, projecting the side-view of a tunnel onto the galley's bulkhead. The pinch-points were well identified, and I recognized a few of them from the scrapes the mech suits had left behind.
"Ideally, we'd have a mining laser. We would bore holes and pop 'em with a controlled gas expansion. That far underground, we wouldn't dare risk using direct explosives. A cave-in would be … well, I think we all understand that would be bad," I said. "That Class-A replicator we were going to give the Jarwainians is too small to build anything but the bags. We'd need to get the Class-C going. I think we'd have to build a bore instead of a laser; build time on a Class-C for a halfway decent laser is at least twenty hours."
"How long for a bore?" Tabby asked. "Do you even know how to use a bore?"
I chuckled and raised my eyebrows at her. "Of course. Hoffens are, if anything, good at using even the most Luddite technology. Fact is, a quality hammer bore is almost as fast as a laser. It just requires more attention and leaves a mess. Lasers are pretty much point and shoot. Given that Gaylon Brighton isn't going anywhere anytime soon, we can scavenge her for material."
"Popeyes aren't much protection from ships," Tabby said.
"Agreed," Sendrei said. "First order has to be repairing Gaylon Brighton's turrets and power supply."
"Anyone think this ship will sail again?" I asked.
"No way," Tabby answered.
I nodded in agreement with her statement. We'd been lucky to sail her up against a Kroerak frigate. That luck had run out when she'd been impaled by a dozen lances.
"We should move the turret to a position worth defending," I said, "along with the med-tank and replicators. Like Sendrei's cowboys, we need to build a fort and bring everything inside the walls. If we're spread out when the Kroerak come, we'll have trouble putting up a defense."
"Move it where?" Tabby asked.
"To the bunker where the Piscivoru are holed up," I said. "Engirisk was excited to start looking through all the technology that had been left behind. How about this? Jonathan, you and Sendrei get Gaylon Brighton's turrets, Class-C replicator, and med-tank portable. We can use the stevedore bot to move them once you get them freed up. Tabby had the Class-A mostly removed. We'll take it over to the bunker and negotiate with Noelisk and crew. They already have power, and hopefully we can just connect the Class-A."
"We have constructed a power regulator pattern for the purpose of connecting human technology with the Piscivoru," Jonathan said. "This part sits within the completed bin labeled 'A.'"
His statement reminded me that he was not a single entity but a community of 1,438 silicate-based sentients. The fact was, they'd likely already discussed everything and come to the same conclusions hours ago.
"What are we missing, Jonathan?" I asked.
The collective was generally unwilling to change plans we came up with. In some circumstances, like with the communications and arranging to disassemble the Popeyes, they would act independently.
"There is a matter of food for the Piscivoru," they said. "There existed an unusual symbiosis between Kroerak and Piscivoru. While the Kroerak hunted the Piscivoru, the Piscivoru in turn fed on the fallen Kroerak. The Piscivoru have become dependent upon Kroerak as their primary source of protein."
I shuddered, recalling the disgusting crunch of Kroerak shell. "I think Sklisk said there were supplies in the bunker."
"We estimate there is perhaps enough for sixty days with proper rationing," he said. "If the Kroerak do not return with ground forces, and if an effort to replace this food supply is ignored, the Piscivoru will starve."
"Anything else?" I asked.
"We think it likely an advanced guard of Kroerak will arrive as early as ten days from now. Whatever our preparations, we should execute them with due haste."
"Have you been in contact with Thomas Anino?" I asked.
Jonathan held a quantum crystal that allowed direct communication with Thomas Anino, the inventor of TransLoc. While no longer operable, TransLoc technology had originally given humanity access to the stars. Unfortunately, it had als
o given the Kroerak a way to invade Earth.
"Our communication has been limited," Jonathan answered. "We believe, as do you, that quantum communications may not be completely secure. Thomas Anino knows of Loose Nuts' limited success in tracking down that which the Kroerak most fear. The details of the utilization of Iskstar have been withheld, however."
"I appreciate that," I said. "I'm not sure what the Kroerak would do if they thought we were developing technology as powerful as Iskstar. If I were them and I believed that intel, I'd throw everything I had at the problem."
"We also believe this to be true," Jonathan said. "It is prudent to assume the Kroerak are aware of your victory and are indeed amassing attacks on multiple fronts."
"Time to stop talking and get to work in that case," Tabby said, stuffing the rest of a meal bar into her mouth before washing it down with scalding hot coffee.
Sendrei nodded in agreement. He would work on freeing the top turret and a power source while Tabby and I met up with the Piscivoru.
"Did you lose your brush?" I asked as we walked up the incline leading forward.
Tabby's hair was always meticulously kept. As we walked she flipped it back, obviously annoyed. "Did you see it?" she asked, pulling her hair over her shoulder and holding it in place. "It wasn't in our quarters."
"Probably fell out. I patched some pretty big holes in the head. It won't take even three minutes to make one on the Class-A," I said. "We can do that first if you want."
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