Atlantia Series 3: Aggressor

© 2014 Dean Crawford

Published: 20th September 2014

ASIN:B00NQBN1BK

Publisher: Fictum Ltd

The right of Dean Crawford to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

www.deancrawfordbooks.com

Also by Dean Crawford:

The Atlantia Series

Survivor

Retaliator

Aggressor

The Ethan Warner Series

Covenant, Immortal, Apocalypse

The Chimera Secret, The Eternity Project

Independent novels

Eden, Holo Sapiens

Revolution, Soul Seekers

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• Title Page
  
• I
  
• II
  
• III
  
• IV
  
• V
  
• VI
  
• VII
  
• VIII
  
• IX
  
• X
  
• XI
  
• XII
  
• XIII
  
• XIV
  
• XV
  
• XVI
  
• XVII
  
• XVIII
  
• XIX
  
• XX
  
• XXI
  
• XXII
  
• XXIII
  
• XXIV
  
• XXV
  
• XXVI
  
• XXVII
  
• XXVIII
  
• XXIX
  
• XXX
  
• XXXI
  
• XXXII
  
• XXXIII
  
• XXXIV
  
• XXXV
  
• XXXVI
  
• XXXVII
  
• XXXVIII
  
• XXXIX
  
• XL
  
• XLI
  
• XLII
  
• XLIII
  
• XLIV
  
• XLV
  
• XLVI
  
• XLVII
  
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
  
• REVIEWS
  

We should have known better.

We know that there are few survivors, few of our kind still clinging to life.

They say that when the end came some embraced it willingly, shrugged off their lives like old skins and allowed the Legion to infiltrate their minds and their bodies and become one with the machine. Most, however, did not. Most fought, and died, trying only to remain who they were.

The Legion, the instrument of the Word, our governing law, took life across all of the colonies. Worlds fell; Ethera, Caneeron, Titas; the mining settlements and the outlying systems and the uncharted clouds of asteroids and meteors beyond consumed by the monstrous and insatiable thirst for knowledge and power that is the currency of the Word. The greatest creation and achievement of our human race turned vengeful deity, the destroyer of worlds.

We now know that there are several forces at work within the Legion, an immeasurable swarm of mechanical devices ranging in size from as big as insects to as small as biological cells. There are the Infectors, the smallest and most dangerous, for it is their mission to infiltrate the optical nerves, the brain stem and the spinal cord of human beings, turning them into mere instruments dancing to the macabre hymn of the Word’s destructive passion. Then there are the Swarms, the clouds of tiny but voracious feeders who break down all and any materials into the raw ingredients for more of their kind: metals, plastics, even human tissue, consumed en masse and regurgitated into further countless devices, all of which evolve with startling rapidity as though time were running for them at breakneck speed. Finally, there are the Hunters: bigger than the rest and with only a single purpose – to find and to kill intelligent biological life wherever it is found in the cosmos.

We are the last of our kind, and despite the horrors that we witnessed when we fled the only star system we could call home, we now know that we must return. There is nowhere else to run to, nowhere else to hide, for if we do not make our stand now then we condemn our children or their children after them to face what we could not. We must fight back and step by step, system by system, we must take from the Word that which was ours and liberate ourselves from the living hell that we have created and endured.

The Atlantia, a former fleet frigate turned prison ship, is the last home we have. Our crew is comprised of terrified civilians, dangerous former convicts and a small but fiercely patriotic force of soldiers and fighter pilots for whom there is no further purpose to life other than to fight for every last inch of space between here and home.

Our lives may become the last that will ever be lived, and thus we tell our story in the hope that one day others will read of it and remember our names.

Captain Idris Sansin

Atlantia

‘They’re coming back again!’

Ishira Morle glanced down at a small monitor embedded in the control panel before her and her skin crawled as she saw something moving against a sprawling backdrop of countless stars, a massive shadowy bulk that loomed ever larger to fill the screen. The cockpit of the freighter was a galaxy of glowing coloured lights and deep shadows that mirrored the endless expanses of space outside.

‘Can we outrun them?’

Ishira shook her head as she looked down at her young daughter perched upon the seat next to her, and tried to keep the grinding fear she felt out of her voice as she replied.

‘No, we can’t honey. We’re already at full power.’

The sound of distant alarms echoed into the cockpit from the depths of the ship behind them, wailing through lonely corridors and distant holds devoid of stores. Vapour hissed from damaged pipework where the environmental systems were losing control of the vessel’s internal atmosphere, lights from the corridor beyond the cockpit enshrouded in a misty gloom.

The barrage had come from nowhere, an overwhelming salvo of plasma blasts crashing into the ship as it fled through the lonely blackness of deep space.

‘What’s going to happen to us?’

Ishira gripped the controls tightly in her slim hands, her deeply tanned skin stretched taut across her bones. She was starving, as was her daughter Erin, and the entire ship’s compliment were also suffering from malnutrition and dehydration. Disease was beginning to rear its ugly head throughout the ship, a severe shortage of medical supplies compounding the spread of infections.

The deep, inky blackness of space ahead through the viewing panel of the merchant vessel
Valiant
was pierced by the flare of a star unlike any other that Ishira had ever seen. The ship’s computer identified the star as a yellow-spectral type of unremarkable mass, but it was the star’s metallic content that interested Ishira. The build-up of heavy metals inside the star and of elements like helium and oxygen told her that it was nearing the end of its life, a fact vividly illustrated by the violent halo of ejecta radiating from the star in kaleidoscopic halos of bright blue, green, orange and yellow.

The star was dying and would soon swallow all of its orbiting planets in a fiery oblivion from which there would be no escape. Ishira stared into the star’s distant fiery depths, the brilliant flare dimmed by photoreceptive sheilding in the viewing panel, and she knew that her destination lay ahead.

‘I know what I’m
not
going to let happen to us,’ she replied. ‘We’re not going to be captured.’

Erin was nine years old, her long straight brown hair parted in the centre and framing an angelic face and big, wide brown eyes that reflected the twinkling lights of the cockpit. Erin, like her mother, had witnessed the apocalypse that had swamped their homeworld of Ethera more than two years ago, had seen countless millions of human beings consumed by the horror of the invasion. She knew well what was behind them, and that their only future lay somewhere ahead.

Valiant had dropped out of super-luminal velocity into the Chiron system, the farthest point they had been able to reach before the ship’s internal reserves of hydrogen had been exhausted. The system was virtually uncharted, located as it was on the very outermost boundary of the explored cosmos. Unexplored moons, exotic nebula and high volumes of stellar-radiation and cosmic rays made a beautiful vista a deadly trap for the unwary. Or the desperate.

The sound of running boots echoed down the corridor behind the cockpit and an elderly man burst through the swirling clouds of vapour, his chest heaving and his left arm glistening with moisture and mechanical fluids, the metallic glint of his bionic prosthetic visible beneath the cuffs of his jacket. Stefan Morle, Ishira’s father and the ship’s engineer, leaned one hand against the frame of the cockpit door and wiped sweat from his brow.

‘What’s the story?’ Ishira demanded of him.

‘The engine bays are fine,’ Stefan replied, ‘but we’ve lost power conduits and cooling from a third of the ship after that last hit. Another couple of blows and that’ll be it.’

Ishira looked down once more at the dark shape in the rear-view monitor pursuing them across the void, and then at a schematic of the attacking vessel. A Veng’en cruiser, a big one too, heavily armed and likely manned by countless warriors hell-bent on spilling the blood of humans. She glanced at her instruments, gauging velocities and trajectories, and then looked over her shoulder at her father.

‘Divert all remaining power to the engines. Give her everything we’ve got. All that’s keeping us alive now is our speed.’

Stefan nodded as he looked at Erin. ‘How are you holding up?’

Erin smiled, a brave face thinly veiling her fear. ‘I’m fine.’

‘We can’t run forever,’ Stefan cautioned his daughter. ‘You know that, right?’

Ishira nodded and gave a barely-perceptible nod of her head toward the fearsome star laying directly in their course.

‘We won’t have to run forever.’

Stefan glanced at the star, and Ishira saw his expression crease a little as he concealed his own fear and pain deep inside.

‘Can we reach it before..?’

‘We can reach it,’ Ishira insisted. ‘Maximum orbital velocity and the star’s gravity will do the rest. We won’t even know what’s happened until…’

‘No other options?’ Stefan persisted.

‘Surrender, and…’

Ishira broke off and Stefan nodded. ‘I’ll switch the power across.’

Stefan turned and hurried away from the cockpit. Erin looked at her mother.

‘What are we going to do?’

Ishira smiled at her daughter and gently cupped her jaw in her hand. ‘We’re going somewhere even the Veng’en will not be able to find us.’

Erin smiled again but somehow Ishira knew that her daughter was not entirely fooled, that even a nine-year old girl could see that their situation was hopeless.

Valiant was a merchant ship that had been in the family for two decades, running the mineral line between distant asteroid clouds, Caneeron, and Ethera, bringing home valuable minerals to industries in the core systems for trade and construction. Barely two hundred fifty cubits long, Valiant and her compliment of twelve miners and crew had been on the outer limits of the Tyberium Fields when the apocalypse had struck and the Legion had overwhelmed mankind.

The distress signals had arrived first, all of them several hours old by the time they had travelled across the Ethera system and reached Valiant. Hundreds of them, thousands, the clamouring of millions of voices crying out in pain and fear and filling the communication channels until, one after the other, they had fallen silent until nothing had remained but the hiss of static.

Ishira had immediately set a course for the inner system despite the protestations of her crew. Ishira’s mother was on Ethera, as was her brother. It soon became clear that they could not have survived the calamity.

Nobody aboard was under any doubt that something horrendous had occurred on Ethera, but Ishira knew that Valiant was only equipped and supplied for a three-month mining cruise: if the devastation back home was as bad as the distress signals indicated, they would need supplies before they could flee the system permanently. Thus, she pushed on in both the vain hope that she could restock their holds and the even slimmer chance that the rest of their family had somehow made it out alive.