Kingdom Come (Backyard Starship Book 7) Read online

  Copyrighted Material

  Kingdom Come Copyright © 2022 by Variant Publications

  Book design and layout copyright © 2022 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.

  1st Edition

  CONTENTS

  Don’t Miss Out

  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

  Glossary

  Join the Conversation

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  About the Authors

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  1

  I sat back from the terminal, raising my hands in triumph as I surveyed the data scrolling before me.

  “Yes. Perimeter is down. Deactivated.” I turned to Perry. “How long?”

  “One hour, thirty seven minutes.”

  “And fourteen seconds, in case you care,” Netty added.

  I kept my arms raised and flexed my fingers, turning it into a stretch. “Time flies when you’re having fun.”

  Perry bobbed his head. “Right? I’ve been beside myself with excitement for the past ninety minutes, wondering what part of the screen you’d tap next. Upper right, I’d think, but no, you’d go for the lower right, and I’d be all like, wow, I did not see that coming.”

  “Gripping stuff,” Netty added.

  “You didn’t have to sit here and watch me, you know,” I said.

  “Van, you told me to sit here and watch you so I could give you an after-hack assessment.”

  “Oh. Uh, then exceptional work carrying out my orders, faithful—”

  “If you say feathered friend, there will be repercussions, Peacemaker Tudor,” Perry warned.

  I pointed at him and clicked my tongue. “Copy that, tough guy.”

  Torina unlimbered her long legs, dark hair pulled back in a style I called space necessity. With her gray eyes twinkling, she exited the Fafnir’s cockpit and made her way back into the crew hab, then the galley where I’d been doing my little hacking exercise. She picked up a cup to pour herself some coffee. “So, success? Did we break into the bad guys’ system and steal all their secrets?”

  “Nope. Van turned off a security light. And it only took him nearly two hours. He made faces the entire time. It was quite the drama.”

  “Uh, excuse me, security perimeter, thank you very much.” I stood, stretching my back this time, then took the cup out of Torina’s hand when she’d finished pouring it. “And I’d love some coffee, thanks.”

  She glared and grabbed another cup. “I still don’t get the point of this, Van. You’ve got Perry and Netty, who can both do this hacking stuff. It would have taken them, what, a few minutes—”

  “One minute, twenty-six seconds, but who’s counting,” Perry clarified.

  “—to turn off that security light?”

  “Security perimeter, and that’s not the point. I may not always have them available. And besides, I’m a hacker, so I should know how to hack things.” I took a sip of coffee, then grimaced and offered it back to Torina. “Ugh. Too much sugar.”

  The look on her face made me pull my hand back before I lost it. “But that’s okay, I’ll drink it anyway. It’s just that—I guess it’s just that back on Earth, I was pretty damned good at what I did. But everything I learned about busting into computer systems, or keeping other people from busting into them, all went out the airlock the moment I stepped aboard the Fafnir. None of the system architecture was the same, every program is basically its own operating system, and it’s—” I shrugged. “I just want to get some of that old magic back.”

  “Van, you don’t have to impress us. You never did.”

  I started to offer her a grateful smile but stopped. “Wait—I never had to impress you with my abilities, or I never did impress you with them?”

  She smiled and sipped coffee, just as Netty cut in.

  “Van, we’re getting a distress call from the freighter Plodding Fool. She’s a class 5, privately registered here in the Eridani system. She’s calling for assistance, saying she’s being attacked.”

  I put the coffee down and headed for the cockpit. “Where is she?”

  “She’s in the vicinity of Tarsura, a moon of the outermost gas giant. Think Venus, if it orbited Jupiter. Her captain says they’re trying to use Tarsura for cover.”

  I looked at the tactical overlay as I settled into the pilot’s seat. Torina took her place beside me and started pre-firing diagnostics on the weapons. We hadn’t been in a fight in nearly a year, since the protracted and bloody Battle of 109, so aside from occasional test shots, our guns had stayed silent that whole time.

  Zenophir’s walrus-like whiskers twitched as she observed Netty beginning pre-flight checks. Zeno’s thick body was clad in coveralls that spotted the tears and stains of a working engineer, but her eyes were keen as she issued two crackling commands for Netty’s course selection—and with that, we were underway.“Kinda figured you’d want to go and help these folks out,” she said, and I gave her a thumbs-up. We’d been together long enough that at some point, we’d crossed that ineffable boundary between crew and team. I trusted Zeno and the others to make the right decisions, and I hadn’t been disappointed yet.

  “How long to intercept, Netty?” I asked.

  “Best case, three hours, ten minutes, and change,” she said as the Fafnir’s drive rumbled to life.

  “Okay, start broadcasting that we’ll be there shortly across the comm channels. And leave it at that, shortly. Maybe we can spook whoever’s attacking them.”

  I turned to Perry. “I didn’t know there were active pirates here. I thought the Eridani Federation put a lot of effort into keeping their space safe.”

  Perry shrugged. “Nobody’s perfect, Van. Besides, if everyone thinks that, they kinda let their guard down, right?”

  “I suppose—”

  “What the hell’s all this about, anyway?” a new voice cut in.

  I turned to the grumpy voice. Icky, who’d obviously just woken up, clambered into the cockpit and settled into her place behind Torina.

  “Pirates attacking a freighter. We’re going to intercept,” Zeno said.

  Icky brightened. “A fight?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe.”

  Icky cracked all four sets of knuckles. “Hope so. All this flying around transferring prisoners and lugging old rocks and sticks back to wherever they came from is bor-ing.”

  “Those old rocks and sticks are the cultural heritage of a dozen different worlds, Icky. They belong where they came from, not being knickknacks in that Traversia Corporation boardroom where we found them.”

  “Whatever. It’d just be a lot more interesting if it involved busting some heads.”

  “It’d just be a lot more interesting if it involved busting some heads. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Icky’s philosophy of life,” Perry said.

  “Keep it up, bird, and I’ll show you some of my philosophy in action.”

  I squinted at the overlay. “She’s in the atmosphere?”

  “They did say they were going to use the moon for cover,” Torina said.

  “Well yeah, but diving down there? Doesn’t look friendly at all.”

  “It depends how you define friendly. If you find six hundred kilometer per hour winds and frequent, high intensity lightning discharges friendly, then Tarsura would be downright charming,” Netty offered.

  “I’m a fan of the semi-organic flying boogers, myself. Quite the array of, ah, fluids hurtling around in the upper atmo,” Torina said.

  “Flying boogers? That are, presumably, frozen?” I asked in disgust.

  “Sort of. I’d hate to be the one to clean our windshield if we took a dive in there. Lots of long-chain organics that we might find offensive to our sense of smell,” Torina added.

  “I’m offended by boogers in general as I have none,” Perry announced.

  “Elitist of you. What’s that?” I asked as we eased down to the greasy upper winds.

&n
bsp; We arrived to find the aftermath of a battle. The Plodding Fool had managed to land some solid hits on her attacker, a class 4 up-gunned workboat—or, actually, a former class 4 up-gunned workboat, now a drifting wreck about a million klicks above the roiling storm clouds. It had launched an escape pod that was broadcasting its own locator beacon, but we decided that whoever it was could sit tight while we tried to rescue their supposed victim.

  “Netty, are we getting any comms at all from the Plodding Fool?”

  “No voice or video for over an hour now, just her transponder broadcasting an automated distress call. And even it’s sporadic. There’s a lot of electrostatic potential in those clouds, which is probably screwing up comms.”

  “So there might not be anyone actually alive down there,” Torina said.

  “There’s a chance.” I pondered the situation for a moment, then shrugged.

  “I’d rather not come all this way just to let someone die a couple of hundred klicks below us. Netty, based on what I’m seeing on my panel, the conditions down there are within the Fafnir’s performance envelope, right?’

  “Just. Drop even another twenty klicks or so deeper into the atmosphere, that becomes a no. And the aforementioned semi-organics are heavy. They’ll cause serious drag as well.”

  “Yeah, well, we still have to try,” I said, tapping at the flight controls and committing the Fafnir to the safest and quickest atmospheric insertion Netty could calculate that would take us down to the Plodding Fool.

  The cloud tops loomed closer as we fell from orbit. The Fafnir shuddered briefly as she passed through the first tenuous wisps of gas, then settled into a steady bass rumble once we hit the atmosphere proper. The ship plowed through the thickening vapors, incandescent streamers of plasma spilling off her nose and flickering across the canopy and along the hull, with the odd ripe splat as the Fafnir was decorated with some local flavor.

  Dropping further, we passed between two towering banks of cloud lit by restless flashes of lightning, the coruscating whites and blues fading to more menacing tones lower down. The first winds shook us, pushing the Fafnir one way, then the other.

  “Not much worse than Earth atmo,” I said.

  “Wait for it, Van. The good part’s just ahead,” Netty said.

  “The good par—?”

  I was cut off mid-word by a sudden rightward slam as wind gusted against the Fafnir’s broadside flank. The inertial dampers handled it easily, but it was still disconcerting to see the view ahead suddenly snap sideways. And then up, and then steeply down. Up again, and to the left, and then hard back to the right.

  I tapped at the thruster controls, struggling to keep the Fafnir flying down the long, arcing pipe Netty had calculated as our best descent.

  “Van, might I recommend that Perry or I take over? The winds are only going to—”

  The Fafnir abruptly barrel rolled, while slewing hard to one side. Despite my best efforts, she slipped out of the pipe and plunged toward Tarsura’s unseen north pole.

  “—get worse.”

  “No argument here, Netty. You have control,” I said, lifting my fingers from the command screen.

  “I have control.” She immediately began thrusting in quick bursts, edging us back into the pipe. My reaction time was measured in fractions of a second, but hers were in milliseconds. Moreover, I had to see and process the wind and flight data on the master display, where she just thought it all. When it came to delicate piloting, there really was no contest.

  Even so, Netty struggled to keep us flying more or less in the direction we wanted to go. And now some new enemies entered the field. Lightning lashed the clouds around us, gigavolts of electrostatic power discharging in colossal blasts of energy. Peals of thunder slammed against the hull. At the same time, the atmospheric pressure began to quickly build, squeezing the Fafnir like a giant vise. Netty had compared Tarsura to Venus, but compared to this, the latter was downright sedate.

  I glanced at the overlay, where even the Fafnir’s scanners were having trouble burning through the titanic flares of electrical discharge. “Netty, dead-reckon it. How far?”

  “Based on inertial nav, about thirty klicks.”

  I nodded and we flew on. Crackling arcs of lightning now pulsed around the Fafnir like flickering strobe lights, slashing around and across our course, while hurricane winds tossed us like a toy boat on a choppy lake. Icky muttered something, and I glanced at her.

  “Problem?”

  “Not yet, but this combo of pressure and winds are starting to get a little scary. If either goes up much more—”

  “There,” Torina said, pointing ahead.

  The Plodding Fool had emerged from a swirling wall of cloud, a dark shape silhouetted against the inconstant flashes of lightning. Thunder walloped us again and again, pounding on the Fafnir like a drum.

  “Van, we are never going to be able to dock with that ship!” Zeno called over the racket.

  I had to fight just to keep my eyes on the other hull, which slid and jinked like mad across the sky as we pitched and yawed and rolled.

  “No shit. Netty, any comms yet? Maybe we can tell them they don’t need to hide anymore, and to start pouring on the thrust for an escape—”

  Again, I cut off my own words. A big chunk of something detached from the Plodding Fool, whipped away, and vanished into the clouds.

  “Van, she’s breaking up. And we’re not going to be far behind her if we don’t lift out of here,” Netty said.

  As if to underline it, the Fafnir suddenly groaned, a low, plaintive cry of metal being stressed to its limits.

  More pieces came off the Plodding Fool. Each exposed a greater volume of her to the supersonic gusts, which ripped off additional plating—

  Until, just a few seconds later, there wasn’t enough of her left to even contemplate a rescue.

  I knew when we were beat. “Netty, get us the hell out of here!”

  The Fafnir immediately pitched up—then down again. Netty fought for control, but the furious winds had had a taste of spaceship, and they wanted more.

  “Van, I need to light the drive,” Netty said.

  I winced as lightning arced across the Fafnir’s bow, looking close enough to singe my hair. At the same time, thunder clapped so loudly it made my ears ring. Lighting the fusion drive inside an atmosphere was perilous at best, since it was basically a continuous, directional thermonuclear explosion. There was a reason it was profoundly illegal on every inhabited world, one of the few things everyone in known space agreed on and generally respected.

  But if Netty said we needed to do it, I believed her. “Kick it!”

  Netty did, and another blast of thunder, one of our own making and the biggest yet, walloped the Fafnir. I saw a half-dozen systems flick to yellow on the status board. But the Fafnir shot upward, and the winds and lightning quickly died. Less than thirty seconds later, we punched out of the clouds. Glowing jets of vapor trailed us into orbit, the strange phenomena called sprites erupting from the storm tops. And just a minute after that, Netty cut the drive as we settled into the placid calm of stable orbit.

  “Well, that was fun,” Zeno said.

  “For certain, very specific definitions of fun, sure,” Torina replied.

  I stared down at the clouds, wondering how long it would take the debris that had once been the Plodding Fool to reach the unseen surface.

  I sank back in my seat. “Shit.”

  Torina shrugged. “We can’t save everyone, Van.”

  “Doesn’t mean we can’t try, though, and we did,” Zeno added.

  “Yeah.” I turned back to the overlay, where the escape pod from the ship that had attacked the Plodding Fool still beat out a monotonous distress call. “So let’s do the next best thing and nab the bad guys that caused all this shit in the first place. If any of them are alive, I’ve got some creative punishment in mind.”