Call to Arms (Black Fleet Trilogy, Book 2) (36 page)

Owens scrolled through his test results. “There are even markers that confirm he would have come from Earth in the mid twenty-first century, though I can’t tell you any more precisely than that.”

“So, he’s either telling the truth, or someone went through an incredible, and unnecessary amount of trouble to fool us,” Jackson said.

“Unnecessary?” Owens asked.

“Their ships defeated an entire Phage armada in less than two hours,” Jackson explained. “And easily. The
Ares
and
Icarus
would have been no match for them. If they wanted something from us, they could just take it.”

“That’s not my area of expertise.” Owens shrugged. “I’m just here to tell you that as far as my equipment is able to determine, he’s human.”

“Thank you, Doctor.” Jackson nodded and turned to reenter the room.

“Captain,” Blake said as Jackson walked in and took his seat.

“Good news, Colonel,” he said. “As far as my Chief Medical Officer can determine, you’re as human as anybody in this room.”

“That
is
a relief,” Blake said with a wry smile. “Tell me, Captain… How long have you been fighting the species you call the Phage? We intercepted their message to you. Highly unusual in our experience. As far as I know, they’ve never bothered to communicate with a species they’ve marked for destruction before.”

“We’ll get to that in due time,” Jackson said, still highly disturbed by the cryptic Phage message—their first and only contact with the species to date. “I think a far more interesting story would be how a near-mythological figure from the distant past has swooped in with ships of incredible power and pulled our asses out of the fire at the last possible instance.”

“I could say it was a wild coincidence, but that’s not entirely true,” Blake said. “We’d been tracking this group for a while. I’m just sorry we found them too late to help minimize your losses. How much do you know about the Odyssey Project and the
Carl Sagan
?”

“Almost nothing other than it was supposedly our first attempt at FTL exploration.”

“Supposedly?”

“A lot of time has passed, Colonel,” Jackson said. “The
Carl Sagan
was never heard from again, and Tsuyo Corporation has erased knowledge of your crew by omission. Most contemporary historical accounts only tell of their first
successful
attempt to explore and colonize.”

“Tsuyo Corp is still around?” Blake seemed genuinely surprised. “And still manipulating public perceptions, I see. I guess some things really don’t change. But yes, I was part of that first ill-fated mission.”

“So what happened to you and your crew?” Lieutenant Davis asked.

“How much time do you have?” Blake joked.

“It seems we have plenty now that you’ve cleared our skies.” Jackson leaned back and gestured for Blake to begin.

The story the colonel told them over the next two hours was nothing short of extraordinary.

Once the astronauts, as they were still so called, were shuttled up to the
Carl Sagan
, the ship began its ponderous, chemically-fueled flight out of the Solar System. The FTL drive seemed to work as advertised, and they transitioned out of the system, just past the orbit of Venus. That drive, not even first generation but more of a prototype, had flown twice before in unmanned test flights to prove the system’s integrity before trusting it with forty-eight highly trained humans.

The first two weeks of the warp flight were spent monitoring the drive and making sure the ship’s automated functions were performing as they should. This was absolutely critical since, even though they were traveling faster than light, the trip would still be of sufficient length as to require the crew to enter an induced hibernation.

Theoretically, the drive was capable of incredible, almost unimaginable speeds, but the human scientists that had adapted it were no closer to developing the necessary power source than they were twenty years prior. The compact fission reactors aboard the
Carl Sagan
just couldn’t develop the distortion fields needed to push past a warp factor of 1.5 at maximum output.

“But something went wrong.” Blake shuddered. “We were scheduled to arrive in the Proxima Centauri System, scout around, and then fly home loaded down with enough imagery for Tsuyo’s marketing department to use for a decade to justify funding for Phase II of the Odyssey Project. Instead, we ended up adrift in interstellar space. We found out later that something had happened to cause our guidance and flight control computer to reboot. The ship just flew on in a random direction, never alerting us until reactor two finally failed and forced the T-Drive to disengage.”

“So your warp drive failed,” Jackson said. “Then what? You just woke up and found yourselves stranded?”

“Warp drive? That’s actually funny,” Blake deadpanned. “We were absolutely forbidden from using that term. Anyway, Captain, no… We didn’t wake up. The environmental systems had failed long before we dropped back into normal space. We had all been dead for many, many years.”

“Obviously you’ll have to clarify that,” Jackson prompted.

“We had died while in hibernation, the interior of the ship cooling rapidly from multiple hull breaches that we were told occurred from the shear forces caused by variances that developed between our distortion fields,” Blake said. “It shouldn’t have been an issue since we’d planned to drop out of… warp long before then. The stasis beds were well insulated, so some of us were very well preserved as the temperature and pressure dropped slowly rather than explosively. Most of us weren’t so lucky.”

“
Who
told you about the field variances?” Jackson asked, already suspecting where the story was heading.

“Twenty-three of us were so well preserved, and our minds had already been mostly dormant during the induced hibernation, that the Vruahn were able to repair the damage and revive us,” Blake said. “Before that, they’d already been able to decipher our languages from studying the remains of the
Carl Sagan
. It was still a hell of a shock when I opened my eyes and had an alien jabbering at me through a translator.”

“Twenty-three out of forty-eight,” Jackson said. “Tough break, Colonel.”

“Indeed,” Blake said softly. “I have the ashes of those unfortunate twenty-five aboard my ship. When we began the trek back, I had hoped to be able to return their remains to Earth, ideally to whatever family may exist for each of them.”

“About those ships,” Jackson gestured at the display in the conference room that was showing the two phalanx formations. “Vruahn?”

“Yes, Captain.” Blake nodded. “The Vruahn and humanity now have a common enemy—the difference being that their society has evolved to be so passive that they were unable to even attempt defending themselves. Long story short, that’s where we came in. Eighteen of us have been clearing out systems for the better part of fifty years now, while the Vruahn continue to build us better and more powerful ships, but we’re still losing ground to them… these
Phage
.”

“Wait… fifty years—?”

Jackson was interrupted by Ensign Hayashi bursting into the conference room, his face flushed red and tears standing in his eyes.

“What is it, Ensign?”

“A com drone has arrived from a Prowler in the Alpha Centauri System, sir!” the young officer choked out.

“And?” Jackson asked impatiently.

“Haven is gone, Captain!” Hayashi said. “The Phage… they showed up and completely destroyed it!”

Epilogue

Two months after the Battle of Nuovo Patria

Jackson’s blurred vision focused again on the business end of his 1911 .45 pistol, the slide still wet with his saliva. Again, he placed the weapon down and grabbed the near-empty bottle on his desk, tilting it up and draining it. He slammed the bottle down and grabbed the pistol again, convinced that this was the only logical conclusion to his life: a coward’s way out for a fool that was responsible for the deaths of billions.

He was dimly aware of his hatch chime chirping away cheerfully as well as the harsh pounding of someone
really
wanting into his office. Ignoring it, he lifted the weapon again and, oddly, felt a pang of sympathy for his poor steward who would have to clean up the mess later.

“Put that fucking pistol down!”

Jackson squinted at the hatchway, now wide open with an irate Admiral Marcum, along with a concerned looking Major Ortiz standing behind him. The mutinous Marine officer must have given Marcum the security override code for the hatch.

The
Ares
had been in high-orbit over the irregularly shaped, rapidly cooling lump of molten rock that had once been Haven for the last two weeks. Jackson had been completely incapacitated for more than half of that time, leaving command of the ship to a distraught Jillian Davis. The hatch closing captured his attention again, and he saw that there were actually two people in his office: Admiral Joseph Marcum and Colonel Robert Blake.

“Admiral, may I help you?” Jackson slurred out. “Forgive me for not standing.”

“Captain Wolfe, you will cease this idiotic behavior immediately,” Marcum said.

“You know, Admiral… it’s not smart to antagonize someone with a weapon.” Jackson hefted the pistol. “Especially someone who doesn’t really like you to begin with.”

Blake and Marcum just looked at each other before the Air Force colonel reached over and, with surprising quickness, plucked the pistol out of his hand, ejecting the magazine and clearing the chamber before setting it back on the desk with the slide locked back.

“Well then…” Jackson stared at the now harmless chunk of steel. “I guess I have no choice but to listen to you, Admiral. If you’re here to arrest me, you should know that I was about to make that a moot point.”

“Are
you about finished, Senior Captain?” Marcum snarled. “You had best unfuck yourself and quick. Your crew can’t see you like this. When’s the last time you’ve been out of this room?”

“You can’t seriously be contemplating leaving me in command of anything.” Jackson swallowed hard as his stomach and the bourbon fought it out.

“Jackson, this isn’t anybody’s fault.” Marcum slid wearily into one of the chairs and gestured for Blake to take the other.

“I was too blind to realize the Phage were playing me.” Jackson leaned back. “I pulled all of our forces to one area and left it clear for them to come up and hit us in the worst possible place. They even said so much to me directly.”

“You made the hard choice to stand fast when nobody else wanted to even admit we were in a war,” Marcum said. “The truth is, Captain, that there would
never
have been a significant force in this system. The politicians would never allow one enclave to have any sort of military presence over Haven. That’s why this has been Black Fleet’s home for all these years, and no other numbered fleets are welcome. They certainly weren’t going to revisit that policy just because a few Frontier worlds were at risk. Haven was always going to fall if the Phage wanted it.”

“That’s rather defeatist of you,” Jackson said.

“My point is that this disaster isn’t just one man’s fault,” Marcum said. “We didn’t take the threat seriously, and now billions are dead for it.”

“So what happens next?”

“We do what humans have always done: we persevere,” Marcum said. “We’ve debriefed your Earther friend here, although he keeps claiming he’s an ‘American.’ He’s got a lot more information on the Phage than we’ve been able to collect in the last four years, including one very significant vulnerability.”

At this Jackson perked up and looked over at the colonel.

“That’s right, Captain,” Blake confirmed. “There is one thing that could bring the Phage down completely, but my team has never had the resources to exploit it by ourselves. So the question is this: do you want us to leave you alone so you can finish what you were about to do here, or do you want to saddle up one last time and go riding for some payback?”

Jackson gave the officer a small, feral smile. “I’m listening.”

Thank you for reading
Call to Arms.

If you enjoyed the book the story will continue with:

Counterstrike

Book Three of the Black Fleet Trilogy.

Coming Fall/Winter of 2015

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From the author…

So there we have it, the dreaded second act and the even more dreaded cliffhanger. I tried to make it as gentle as possible and looking back it’s actually the first time I’ve ever used that particular literary device in a published work.

This trilogy is very much about Jackson Wolfe and his crew, but in this second book I had to give a little more detail into the politics at play in this universe for things to make sense. My goal was to give enough detail to satisfy any questions you may have without grinding the story to a halt. We are on the brink of all out war, after all.

I know I’ve said this before, but thank you again for the overwhelmingly positive response to this series. With this in mind I’ve already started writing “Counterstrike” by the time this book is released so that books two and three come out back to back. For the Omega Force readers I hope to have book eight out towards the end of this year.

Cheers!

Josh