Flight of the Reaper: A Military Scifi Epic (The Last Reaper Book 5) Read online

  J. N. Chaney

  Copyrighted Material

  Flight of the Reaper Copyright © 2019 by Variant Publications

  Book design and layout copyright © 2019 by JN Chaney

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from JN Chaney.

  www.jnchaney.com

  http://www.scottmoonwriter.com

  1st Edition

  CONTENTS

  Don’t Miss Out

  List of Acronyms

  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

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

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  LIST OF ACRONYMS

  AI—Artificial intelligence

  AWOL—Absent without leave

  BMSP—Bluesphere Maximum Security Prison—Ultramax IX

  CD—Climbdown Day

  CIM—Computerized Inmate Monitor

  CV—Curriculum Vitae

  DM—Dreadmax Marines (inmates on Dreadmax, often falsely imprisoned, who have prior military experience and protect people from gangs and cannibals)

  Feg—Fredrick Eugene Grady

  HDK—Highly Destructive Kinetic (weapon / rifle)

  HDK 4—Shortened (11 inch barrel--from the trigger assembly) HDK commonly used by spec ops and law enforcement

  HDK 4 Dominator—Full length (16 inch barrel--from the trigger assembly) HDK with double high capacity magazines and a grenade launcher under the barrel)

  HUD—Heads up display

  LAI—Limited artificial intelligence

  LED—Light Emitting Diode

  LZ—Landing zone

  MRE—Meals Ready to Eat

  NG—Nightfall Gangsters

  QRF—Quick reaction force

  RC—Reaper Corps

  RSG—Red Skull Gangsters

  SD Regulator—Slip drive regulator

  UFS—Union Fleet Ship

  UPG—Union Prison Guard

  X-37—Halek Cain's Reaper AI (limited)

  YT—Galdiz 49 rifle, sniper model. (YT is a randomly generated model number)

  1

  “Talk to me, X,” I said, worried about my digital sidekick.

  No response. I was getting used to the silent treatment. One of these times, X would go dark and never come out of hiding.

  As for the ship, it wouldn’t speak to me. X-37 spent most of his time quietly opening back doors to the controls and the other half avoiding the Nightmare’s artificial intelligence. There was something wrong with my LAI; he shouldn’t stand a chance against that level of programing, but here we were.

  There were only three people running the ship. One Reaper, one runaway from a secret and illegal experiment, and one pilot who had worked for Vice Admiral Nebs before realizing we had a special connection.

  Path, Locke, and most of Locke’s people were on prisoner duty, which took far more work than it was worth. I fantasized about putting the rest of the Union crew in life pods and leaving them—not a kind fate in a slip tunnel.

  Amii Novasdaughter helped by running several of the bridge functions normally handled by the AI—navigation, engineering, and maintenance routines to name a few.

  I stopped next to her. “Bet you never imagined the life of a rebel would be so glamorous.”

  “I had imagined there would be more battles and less banging my head against the keyboard,” she grumbled, still distracted by whatever fire she was working on putting out. “You promised me a trustworthy ship engineer.”

  “You’ll like Tom, but I need him to captain the Jellybird until I find somebody else. You’ll need to sleep, eventually.”

  “I don’t know what version of the Union you worked for, but I’m a pilot. I’m used to losing sleep.” Her annoyance was obvious.

  Now would have been a good time for X to chime in with a clue as to what I’d said wrong. We’d been doing fine until I told her she needed sleep. Maybe she didn’t like taking orders from me, no matter how subtle. Or perhaps she struggled with insomnia to rival my own.

  I thought of all the things I’d done that kept me awake at night, and remembered the horrifying dream of how I dropped Novasdaughter’s mother from a bridge and lost my arm. “Sleep’s overrated.”

  She shifted uncomfortably, avoiding my gaze. “I bet you have a lot of regrets when you close your eyes at night.”

  Her tone irritated me. “Let’s not go there. Finish whatever you’re working on and hit the rack. Sleep while you can with that squeaky-clean Union conscience.”

  Her face hardened. “Have you ever been in a micro-fighter barely bigger than the flight suit you’re wearing and had to wait thirty-seven hours for pick up in deep space, hoping you weren’t being left behind?”

  “No,” I admitted. There wasn’t much else to say. She’d been through a lot. I’d failed to save her mother. She wouldn’t be wrong to blame me, but I guessed that her life was a lot more complex than an obsession about the man who made her an orphan.

  The moment stretched out. She waited for me to say more, but I didn’t. People exhausted me, and X wasn’t available to distract me from how hard it was to care about people and keep them alive.

  She studied me, eyes narrowed and her thoughts impossible to guess. “How are Locke and his people managing with the prisoners?”

  There hadn’t been time to put the chief squad leader of General Karn and his people back on Wallach, which was good. I needed them to control the much larger crew of the Nightmare. By the time we had cleared it, I realized we had our hands full.

  “With his soldiers and Path’s help, he’s been able to keep the peace and maybe even win a few converts, but we’ll see. If you’re asking when you will get a bridge crew, don’t hold your breath,” I said. “We’ll need to run a skeleton crew for a while longer.”

  “That implies we’re running a skeleton crew, which we’re not. We’re stealing this ship and just barely getting away with it.” Elise slanted a hard look my way.

  “Yep,” I said. “What’s your point?”

/>   “There are two other carriers out there and they have picked up Nebs by now. He’s coming for us.”

  I shrugged. “That will save me the trouble of looking for him.”

  The girl shook her head. “I always knew Reapers had to be crazy.”

  “It’s a sliding scale,” I started pacing again, a tension headache blooming in my skull. My cybernetic arm twitched, reminding me how screwed I was.

  Ten, twenty, and then thirty seconds passed without a jolt of electricity. Henshaw and Tom had fixed the problem before we encountered the people of Wallach, and I wanted it to stay fixed.

  I really missed X-37. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another. The glamorous life of a renegade Reaper sucked space rocks most of the time.

  “You’re making me nervous,” Elise said, checking the communications panel a third time.

  “You’re making me nervous,” I countered.

  She snorted. “Yeah, right. I’m just a girl. Striking terror into the heart of an intergalactic badass—because Reapers are skittish like that.”

  “You’ve checked that sensor reading a hundred times over the last six hours. Leave it alone. Go to the gym and run or something,” I said. “Take a nap. Play some holo games like a normal teenager. There won’t be much time for it after we leave the slip tunnel.”

  The captain’s chair was too large, even for me. Automatic safety protocols formed it to my body whenever I sat down, but it still felt huge--so I normally chose to stand near it instead.

  There were three personal holo displays and a small work screen on the left arm rest. On the right was another keyboard with tactical hotkeys, a joystick, and a secure communication network only accessible to the captain, or so X-37 had advised me back when we talked regularly. Nebs had also elevated the platform somehow. I didn’t think that was the standard Union design.

  Who would have guessed the crazy asshole had an ego to rival the Union itself?

  Novasdaughter stopped typing for a split second, glancing toward us with just her eyes, then went back to work, her back stiffening at our unprofessionalism.

  “You two are like opposite sides of the same credit chip.” Tom chuckled from the bridge of the Jellybird. If he wasn’t busy captaining the smaller ship, he would be my weapons officer, handyman, whiskey drinking and cigar smoking companion, and our resident expert on trashy fiction novels.

  But I digress. Nothing had been right since we captured the Nightmare and entered slip space to find and rescue the Bold Freedom.

  A small concourse ran around the back of the room. There was a workstation for a weapons officer and a weapons officer’s assistant. The navigation station was the same with its own row of view screens and tactical holographic projectors. I was hoping Locke might spare some people for the bridge crew, but I also knew better than to grow too attached to the idea.

  Glancing at the concourse and the door in its center, I understood why the narrow catwalk made me nervous. On this type of ship--that had been where I stood during a Union operation. When I had become bored, I’d planned ways to kill everybody just to stay sharp.

  I wasn’t a leader. At best, I was an instrument of death. At worst, I was a psychopath on a degrading mental, physical, and moral glide path. People were counting on me. They thought I knew what I was doing. They trusted me.

  “What the hell am I doing, X?”

  “I cannot talk right now, Reaper Cain,” X-37 said, sounding like he was on the other side of the galaxy, just the ghost of a voice I might have imagined. “Please don’t ask stupid questions. Only stupid answers will follow such inquiries.”

  “X! I thought the Nightmare’s AI kicked your ass. It’s so good to have you back.”

  A long pause followed, leaving me gripping the rail of the concourse, staring at all the empty workstations. There was a place for a communications officer, a science officer, a master at arms, and several spare workstations that were smaller but could be re-tasked to almost anything in a pinch. None of these were as important as my LAI.

  The Nightmare was a compressed version of a fully functioning Union carrier. Everything was on a smaller scale, but still enormous compared to what I’d grown accustomed to since escaping Dreadmax with Elise and her father. Some differences between a full carrier and a stealth carrier were hard to see. Others were subtle, like the fact that the ship AI would be dangerous to a limited artificial intelligence.

  “Come on, X,” I whispered.

  “I am doing my best, Reaper Cain.”

  “I’m sorry, X. It’s just that I haven’t heard from you in a while. Please tell me you haven’t been quarantined by the Nightmare,” I said.

  A pause long enough that I sensed Elise, Novasdaughter, and Tom watching me followed. She gripped the edge of her workstation and Tom watched from his place on the bridge of the Jellybird via the holo connection.

  “I’m here, Reaper Cain.” X-37’s voice was marginally clearer than a few moments ago—like he was attempting to reassure me.

  “How can you sound tired?” I wondered aloud. “You’re digital.”

  “I do, in fact, have hardware interlaced through your nerves. Wires that are two or three molecules wide in many places, but real nonetheless. What you interpret as my fatigue is my slowed processing speed,” X-37 explained.

  “Are you okay?” I avoided eye contact with Elise. None of us knew what would happen to me if X-37 went off-line and Henshaw’s revelations that Nebs might be able to cause that to happen worried me. Thoughts of my inevitable showdown with the man never left my mind.

  “I am well, Reaper Cain. Evading capture by the Nightmare and keeping open the back doors that allow you to run the ship are the greatest challenges I’ve ever faced,” X-37 admitted. “But I’ll manage.”

  “What can I do to help, X?” I flexed my cybernetic left fist, controlling my breathing, and feeling helpless.

  “Interesting. I believe that is the first time you’ve asked such a question,” X-37 mused. “Unfortunately, there is only one thing that a person of your talents and temperament might do to help the situation.”

  “Spit it out, X.” I already knew where my limited artificial intelligence was going with this.

  “Well, Reaper Cain, since you asked, and I’m certain you care greatly about my welfare, you could capture Vice Admiral Nebs and convince him to order the ship to stop trying to quarantine me,” X-37 said. “Failing to capture him, you should kill him and force everything to reset. And please do that without allowing his ship’s AI and his personal double LAI to seize control of my operating systems during a face-to-face showdown with the man. Thanks in advance, Reaper Cain.”

  “I’ll get right on that.” I paced the concourse and struggled over my next step.

  Elise pushed back from her workstation, exhaling in frustration. “I know we have to be close to leaving this tunnel, but I’m just not familiar with these readings.”

  “Let’s take a break,” I said. “Seriously, we need to get off this bridge.”

  She nearly jumped out of her seat. “Can we go to the armory?”

  “Sure thing, kid,” I said.

  She smiled, confident and mischievous at the same time. “I’ll let that one go because you’re going to give me a bunch of cool weapons and armor.”

  “We’ll see about that.” The armory had been resistant to our efforts to convert its more deadly tools to our use. It would be easier if X-37 wasn’t constantly struggling to avoid quarantine and was able to help me hack into the control mechanisms of the armor and weapons the Archangels and other Union soldiers left behind.

  “Hal, I may be able to help X-37 with some physical measures,” Tom said.

  “What?” I didn’t believe my fix-it guy could outsmart the artificial intelligence of a state-of-the-art Union stealth carrier.

  He frowned, looking at his work screen rather than me. Static disrupted our connection for a split second. “It’s an idea I’ve been working on. I located a design flaw related to an unusual sig
nal relay on the stealth carrier. I’ll let you know if it goes anywhere, but I think we can hold the AI of the Nightmare prisoner.”

  “Unlikely,” X-37 said.

  I tried to hide my relief but didn’t actually care if X realized I was pretty freaking happy to hear him. “You’re back.”

  X-37 didn’t respond, which was unnerving. Our banter followed patterns, and I started craving a cigar whenever we deviated from our routine.

  Tom waited for X to jump back in, but nothing happened. He cleared his throat and continued awkwardly. “I can’t make any promises. Just let me work on this for a while.”

  “Don’t wear yourself out, Tom,” I said, pretending I wasn’t getting seriously worried about my LAI’s erratic behavior. “Elise and I will be in the armory.”

  She bounced onto the balls of her feet with excitement and I reminded myself she was still a young woman, not a hardened spec ops soldier like she pretended to be. Modified Lex tech allowed her to heal faster than anyone I’d ever met, but it didn’t give her extra abilities.

  Every skill she’d mastered from Path or me resulted from her hard work and secret practice sessions she thought I didn’t know about.

  “Are all Union ships this well fortified?” Elise asked. “This bulkhead looks ready to withstand a direct hit from a nuke.”