Anvil Dark (Backyard Starship Book 3) Read online

  Copyrighted Material

  Anvil Dark Copyright © 2021 by Variant Publications

  Book design and layout copyright © 2021 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.

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

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  Book Description

  Van left his old life behind, but some things remain the same.

  Even in space, crime still exists.

  After taking a Peacemaker job to find missing fuel, Perry finds something far more sinister than simple theft—a voice, crying out in a forge of heat and flame, and the discovery reveals a series of acts so vicious that nothing short of revenge will suffice.

  Following leads across the stars, Van, Perry, and Torina discover the wealthy elite are doing more than just taking fuel.

  They’re stealing lives.

  But it takes money to make justice, and Van has to work. Torina’s land must be restored, and the Dragonet needs new armor, and Van’s sword isn’t going to sharpen itself.

  So Van throws himself into the life of a Peacemaker, where he discovers that doing his job—and doing it well—makes him a target.

  He’s got the will. He’s got the sword. And he’s got help. Now all he needs is a little fuel.

  And maybe a gun or two.

  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

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Epilogue

  Glossary

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  About the Authors

  1

  I gripped the antenna mount, then pulled myself up and over the edge of the weld between two of the Fafnir’s applique armor plates. The tether unspooled neatly behind me, but I barely noticed it anymore. Unlike my very first spacewalk, which had been terrifying and wondrous, this one—my fifteenth—was just work.

  “Okay, I have definitely joined an elite club among humans today,” I said.

  “And what club would that be, mighty space warrior?” Perry, his voice humming through my helmet’s headset, replied.

  “The one consisting of people that find spacewalks tedious. Even kind of a pain in the ass.” I pulled myself up toward the antenna array itself, just a couple of meters above me.

  “Van, have you ever heard of James Voss and Susan Helms?”

  I frowned, trying to place the names. I couldn’t.

  “Don’t think so. Why?”

  “Because they are two NASA astronauts who, while on mission STS-102 aboard the space shuttle Discovery, did an eight hour, fifty-six minute spacewalk to make some changes to the International Space Station. You’ve been outside just over eleven minutes.”

  “It’s been a long eleven minutes, though.”

  I stopped myself in front of the upper scanner array and inspected the transceiver. Sure enough, stars gleamed through a ragged hole about the size of my hand, fingers outstretched, that had been punched through it.

  “That would explain why the data from it is so fuzzy,” Netty said.

  “Wonder what caused it? Some battle damage we missed, maybe?” Torina put in, obviously watching the imagery from my helmet cam.

  “Hard to miss something like this,” I said, pulling myself around the transceiver to look at the hole from the other side.

  “Probably a micrometeorite.” The speaker was the newest member of our happy little gang, Icrul, or Icky for short. She was a Wu’tzur, a four-armed alien, and one hell of an engineer. Having her on board had already saved us thousands of bonds in labor and parts and headed off at least two major system failures.

  I put my gloved hand through the hole. “Nothing very micro about this.”

  “It doesn’t take much of a rock to blast a hole like that, believe me. Depending on how fast it’s traveling, maybe the size of a—”

  The next word was something in native Wu’tzur that tripped up the translator. Before I could ask for clarification, Perry was on it.

  “The edible seed of a plant native to the Wu’tzur home world, similar to Earthly peas, grown as a staple crop.”

  “And the bird comes to the rescue,” I muttered

  “As usual.”

  I smiled, then thought about the patching kit slung on my harness. It consisted of heavy-gauge metal foil that could be bonded over the hole with vacuum-adhesive. It wasn’t a permanent fix, but it would bring the scanners up from their roughly seventy-five percent accuracy to… something better than that, at least until we could make a permanent fix. The trouble was that whoever made the patch kit hadn’t contemplated a hole this big. I was going to have to try to rig two patches to cover it and was discussing the details with Icrul when Netty cut in.

  “Van, we’ve got a problem.”

  I froze. “The words problem and spacewalk don’t play nice together, Netty.”

  “No, they don’t, and neither do spacewalk and incoming missile.”

  I thought I’d already tensed up, but Netty’s chilling reply tightened up a few more muscles, including a couple I hadn’t even known about until now. I immediately looked around, as though that was going to make any difference. Something the size of a missile wouldn’t be visible to unaided sight until—well, until it detonated, probably. And then it would be all too visible.

  Briefly, anyway.

  “Netty, who the hell is shooting at us? How did anyone even get close enough to shoot us without—”

  “Van, two things. One, there are two ships, both of which looked like normal outbound traffic from Spindrift until they started shooting at one another. We just happen to be downrange of their fight. And two, that’s not really the problem.”

  “Then what the hell is?”

  “
Uh, the fact that you’re outside? That we can’t maneuver at more than a walking pace without you being ripped off the outside of the ship?”

  “But if we’re not the target—”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Perry said. “If that missile decides it can’t track its target, it’s going to detonate anyway, so it doesn’t become a navigation hazard. And, on its current trajectory, it’s likely to do that close enough to the Fafnir to be a serious problem. For all of us, not just you.”

  I was already pulling myself back toward the airlock. “I’m coming back inside—”

  “Van, you won’t make it,” Netty said flatly.

  “Why? How long have I got?”

  “Two minutes. Maybe.”

  “Well, shit.”

  “Indeed. I don’t think it’s going to detonate close enough to do serious damage to the Fafnir, but you won’t have armor between it and you when it does.”

  “Your b-suit is good at protecting you from radiation, Van—but not that good,” Perry said.

  Torina cut in. “Van, I’m going to try and shoot the damned thing down before it gets too close. Make sure you’re clear of the laser mounts.”

  While she was speaking, the turret sporting the upper laser emitters slewed around and elevated. I instinctively followed the sight line but still didn’t see anything, of course. Too far, and space was big.

  “Van, your best bet is to try to keep the bulk of the Fafnir between you and the blast, if and when this thing detonates,” Icky said. “That should block most of the radiation and any chance of you getting hit by fragments.”

  “Okay. Which side of the ship should I head for?”

  “We’re… not sure, yet.”

  “Damn it! I thought space was supposed to be too big for this sort of shit to happen!”

  “It is, Van, right up until it isn’t,” Perry replied.

  I let my eyes wander in hope of finding a solution, discarding ideas as quickly as they came to me. Nothing worked. I also checked the laser mount to make sure I didn’t inadvertently get in the way of its beam and get bits of me puffed to vapor. My gaze skimmed across the stern of the Fafnir, just beyond the laser, kept going, then snapped back.

  “Netty, is there any chance of that missile detonating directly astern of us?”

  “It’s not likely, no. Why?”

  “Because I have an idea. Oh, and an order.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Do not, under any circumstances, fire up the main drive!”

  “Okay, I’m in,” I said. The reply that came back crackled with static.

  “Roger—stand by—thrusters—maneuver to keep—”

  I think it was Netty, but it might have been Torina. Or Icky. It didn’t matter, though. I got the gist of it. They were going to use the thrusters to rotate the Fafnir, keeping her nose pointed toward the missile. I, in the meantime, was going to huddle in place.

  Where I was, was jammed inside one of the Fafnir’s three drive bells, the flaring constructs poking from her stern that spewed incandescent plasma while her main drive was operating. Made of a dense, heat-resistant alloy, they were specifically designed to shield the ship from the furious thermal and radiation effects of her own exhaust. Ironically, short of the shielding encasing the reactor itself, they were probably the most durable and radiation-resistant part of the Fafnir.

  They were also my only real hope for survival. Torina had tried, and failed, to shoot down the missile at range, and now it was less than thirty seconds from detonating. Either she or our point-defense system might yet manage to blast the damned thing apart before it blew, but it was doubtful. The inbound missile was military-grade, incorporating enough stealth tech to make it an even smaller, more elusive target than it already was.

  Not that it was even remotely comfortable. The drive bells were only a meter and a half or so in diameter at their open end, and narrowed down to the actual exhaust port, which was only about as big as my fist. Moreover, a magnetic collimator, a device intended to keep the plasma exhaust focused into a stream as it exited the port, protruded about halfway into the bell. It left me crunched up in a space about the size of the trunk of a typical sedan—not to mention squashed against a device that, when operating, pushed about thirty thousand degrees Kelvin. A grim part of me wondered just what would happen if someone fired up the drive right now. An even grimmer part realized that I’d never know the answer to that question.

  The Fafnir began to vibrate in staccato bursts. It was, I realized, the mass drivers of the point-defense systems firing.

  “Guys? Any updates?” I asked.

  “—seconds—” was the only reply. The drive bells did a good job of blocking comm signals, too. Again, though, I got the gist of it and hung on as the starfield began to slew sideways. Netty, or whoever was piloting the ship, was rotating her to face—

  A dazzling flash erupted outside the drive bell, a pulse of searing light that came and went. The headset crashed with an ear-splitting blast of static.

  —to face that, the detonation of the missile’s warhead. I instinctively braced myself for the impact of the shock wave.

  Which, of course, never came, there being no atmosphere and all.

  “—Van?” Perry’s question was hesitant, hopeful.

  I tentatively stuck my head out of the drive bell. A fading sphere of glowing gas marked an explosion that looked terrifyingly close to the Fafnir but was probably kilometers away.

  “Van, are you okay?”

  “I’m still here.” I checked my suit’s heads-up. “And I’m much less irradiated than I might have been.”

  “Van, you’re still breaking up,” Perry said. “You said you want us to activate the main drive?”

  I winced, then scowled as I pulled myself out of the drive bell. “No, I said I wanted you to run the AI bird through the trash compactor—a couple of times.”

  Icky laughed, a jumble of notes that were pure joy. “Firing up Bird Smasher 9000 now, boss.”

  “Is that real?” I asked, laughing.

  Icky paused, thinking. “Not yet. But I am an excellent engineer.”

  We cautiously approached the remnants of what had been a particularly vicious battle—with me safely back inside the Fafnir—and scanned the area. One of the ships, a heavily armed cutter used by the Cloaks, the Spindrift security force, had been left a drifting wreck and was unlikely to be holding survivors. The other ship, a class six workboat, had fared better. Its drive was out and most of its other systems were offline, but it was still substantially intact.

  I pointed at its icon on the tactical overlay. “So that’s the bad guy, right? It’s hard to tell without a program.”

  “Depends how you define bad,” Perry replied.

  Torina frowned at the overlay, then shrugged. “Theoretically, the Cloaks are the good guys. But, as you might recall, they’re as corrupt as sin. So this might have been a legitimate law enforcement action, or the Cloaks may have decided to make a little coin on the side.”

  “Well, that Cloak ship isn’t much more than scrap. This workboat might have some salvage value, though,” Icky said from her jumpseat in the back of the cockpit. We’d rigged it up for her, along with a repeater panel giving her access to the Fafnir’s critical engineering functions. It was enough to let her monitor the ship and keep track of what was working properly and what wasn’t. It was a long way from being an actual flight engineer’s station, but that was still a major upgrade away, so it would have to do in the meantime.

  I glanced back at her. “There might be, you know, survivors, too.”

  “Yeah, I suppose,” Icky said, idly scratching with three of her arms. The fourth tugged at her ear as she worked up to saying something.

  Torina lifted a brow. “You sound disappointed.”

  “Well, yeah. Survivors mean no salvage claim.”

  “Wow, that’s cold,” Perry said. “And also not quite true. If that ship was doing anything illegal, then we can impound it and claim s
alvage.”

  Icky brightened at that. “Sweet!”

  I resisted shaking my head. Perry was right. Icky’s attitude was frosty. But I had to remind myself that she’d grown up with essentially no one but her father for company, aboard his big, refurbished battleship, the Nemesis. She was a brilliant engineer, able to read meaning into the tiniest flicker of an instrument reading, or the most minute change in the harmonic vibrations of a fusion drive. But when it came to reading social cues and just general interpersonal relations, her isolated upbringing showed.

  “Netty, is there a usable docking adapter on that workboat?” I asked.

  “Topside, near the bow, there seems to be an intact UDA. We should be able to make a seal there.”

  Torina, always the voice of reason, cleared her throat. “Uh, Netty, what are the chances of that ship just blowing up in our faces?” She glanced at me. “I’d hate for poor Van here to have survived a missile detonation only to end up vaporized anyway.”

  “Poor Van would hate that, too,” I said.

  “Minimal chance of that. That workboat’s drive is basically just a bunch of spare parts now, and its reactor has scrammed and shut down. Of course, there could be scuttling charges.”