Blackest Ocean (Backyard Starship Book 8) Read online

  Copyrighted Material

  Blackest Ocean 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

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  Join the Conversation

  Connect with J.N. Chaney

  Connect with Terry Maggert

  About the Authors

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  1

  I studied the alignment sensor intently, watching as the two circles gradually converged.

  “Okay, Torina, a little more. And a little more. Little bit more—”

  “Van. Please. I can see the alignment, dear.”

  “Forgive me for being obtuse, but what I’m hearing is that mansplaining is… unwelcome? Perry, are you shocked by this?”

  “Stunned, boss. As the kids said in 2015, I can’t even.” Perry waved a wing over his chest, as if wounded. Unlike me, Perry wore no suit, because unlike me, Perry was not made of meat.

  “I think they may have started saying that in 2013 or so,” Torina mused, her voice taut with effort. I stayed silent, letting the moment of humor fade. We were, despite our chatter, working.

  And working in space is never simple.

  I looked up. I was perched on the Iowa’s hull, adjacent to the empty well of a weapons hardpoint on her starboard topside. Above me—although, really only above relative to the Iowa—hung the Fafnir’s workboat with a missile launcher slung beneath it.

  Torina was nudging it the last few meters into place, using deft puffs of thrusters to slowly ease the base of the launcher into the well. It was a delicate operation, depicted on the alignment sensor’s display as a pair of circles, one slightly larger than the other. As long as Torina kept the entirety of the smaller circle enclosed in the larger, the mount would mate properly.

  And she didn’t need me mansplaining to do it. In fact, I really had no reason to be out here at all. Torina, Zeno, and Icky were more than capable. I just felt like coming out for a spacewalk because the grandeur of it all hadn’t gotten old, and my life—and job—were an endless source of fascination and wonder to me.

  “Close now,” Torina muttered.

  “Dead on, Torina. You’ve got the perfect rate of convergence,” I told her.

  Another meter to go. I pushed myself back, making sure I was well out of the way. A faint glimmer in the distance highlighted Orcus, the dwarf planet near which we’d parked the Iowa. The hard spark of distant Sol, a bright point like a far-off welder’s torch, gleamed off a bit of ice on the dwarf planet. It, and the scattering of stars, provided the only relief from the otherwise unrelenting blackness all around us.

  Sol. I smiled. I’d taken to thinking of Earth’s star as Sol, no longer “the sun.” That’s because there were lots of suns, at least as far as known space was concerned. Tau Ceti was the sun in the Tau Ceti system. If you stood on Torina’s homeworld, Helso, then Van Maanen’s Star was the sun. It struck me that automatically thinking of Earth’s sun as Sol, instead of the sun, meant I’d crossed a subtle but important boundary. I was no longer strictly a citizen of Earth. I had dual citizenship now—Earth and “out there.”

  Or out here, at least at the moment. The missile launcher slowly crept the last half meter and finally seated in the hardpoint with a thump I felt through my hands where they gripped a stanchion on the Iowa’s hull. Icky immediately flipped a recessed lever in an open panel nearby and slid the locking clamps into place.

  “Okay, Torina, you can cut ’er loose,” Icky said. Zeno had already plugged a data slate into an access port inside the same panel and was now frowning at its display.

  “Netty, I’m showing everything green. Do you concur?” she asked.

  Netty, the AI that oversaw both the Fafnir and the Iowa, immediately replied over our shared comm channel. “I’d like to traverse the launcher to make sure the T&E motors are properly engaged. Is everyone clear?”

  Icky and Zeno pulled back. “Go ahead.”

  The launcher began to turn, slowly. At the same time, it elevated and depressed as Netty tested the T&E—traverse and elevating—system. She did one full traversal in about thirty seconds, then reversed it and did another, faster. The launcher smoothly obeyed all of her commands with no lag whatsoever.

  Zeno was still studying the data slate. We left the nitty-gritty of our weapons’ operations to her since it was her field of expertise.

  “Okay, no power surges hinting at any binding in traverse or elevation. I think we’re good.”

  “Excellent. One down, one to go,” I said. I glanced behind me and down, relative to the Iowa, to where the second missile launcher hung motionless about a hundred meters from the ship. I could see the stern of the Fafnir, docked on the Iowa’s flank, between my feet. The two weapons we’d removed from the mounts sat in their own spots, waiting to be stashed in the Iowa’s open hold.

  My gaze lingered on them. They were both twin-barreled cannons retrieved from the wreckage of an ancient battle and installed by Icky’s father. They were an esoteric design that promised to fire bolts of high-energy plasma enclosed in magnetic bubbles to long ranges at a good chunk of light speed. The guns used physical principles on the very edge of understanding, which is how the plasma bolt was able to generate its own magnetic containment bubble, and should be devastating weapons.

  To quote Icky, they wrecked major ass.

  To me, they were a weapon with that dirtiest of words. Potential.

  First, we had to make them work. Unfortunately, ancient alien weapons didn’t come with owner’s manuals, and although we tried mightily, we couldn’t get the damned things to do more than squirt clouds of plasma that immediately started dissipating. There was something about their operation we just weren’t getting. Rather than have them clog up two perfectly good hardpoints, though, we’d decided to replace them with the missile launchers, and here we were—

  “Van, I’ve got a pair of intermittent contacts that I think are inbound,” Netty said.

  “You think they’re inbound?”

  “That’s the intermittent part, boss. They seemed to be on a trajectory that’s at least in our general direction, originating from somewhere in the vicinity of Rhea, one of the moons of Saturn. Sorry, I’m getting what I can from their signals.”

  “Good work. Just… curious, that’s all,” I muttered.

  I frowned. It was peculiar enough to encounter any other ships in the Sol system. It did happen, but they were usually some sort of legitimate research expedition, charting and documenting the system or, more disturbingly, doing some sort of cultural anthropology study of Earth. A not-insignificant number of UFO sightings on Earth were actually alien researchers, particularly grad students doing field work for their dissertations. Apparently cattle mutilations had been the idea of an Eridani anthropologist who’d just wanted to study the reaction to it he got.

  Which meant we were kind of like lab rats running around in an Earth-sized maze, a fact that managed to both amuse me and piss me off at the same time.

  The only other sort of contact in the Solar System tended to be criminals up to no good, and that’s where my interest was piqued. I’d put out the word through the Guild to lay off with the cow mutilations and power failures and stuff, but that didn’t stop bad guys from haunting my home star system. Flickering, inconstant contacts heading toward us from Saturn didn’t sound like a research team, so I had Netty prep the Fafnir for an intercept.

  I started toward the airlock. “What’s their ETA, Netty?”

  “Uh—”

  “That intermittent, huh?”

  “Yes. If it’s supposed to be some sort of stealth, it sucks. But it does make get
ting hard data a problem.”

  “Maybe that’s the point.”

  “We’ll go with that. Anyway, using the Fafnir’s weapons ranges as a standard, they’ll be in effective missile range in… about two hours.”

  I stopped just outside the airlock. “Two hours?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Two hours.”

  “Are we having comms trouble?”

  “No, it’s—Netty, two hours from Saturn to here is awfully damned fast, isn’t it?”

  “And yet, there it is.”

  A faint chew of anxiety started in my gut. Two unknown contacts with weak, flickering scanner returns and insane velocity, both heading toward us—

  Every one of my nerves went to high alert, and Torina felt it too as she opened a comm from the workboat.

  “Buckle in?” she asked. Torina’s combat awareness was second to none.

  I felt the workboat thump into place. “Come on inside, dear. Choppy air ahead.”

  “I’ll put my tray table up while I’m at it.”

  “Tudor Airlines thanks you for your cooperation. Now, then. Prepare to receive our guests.”

  I settled into the Fafnir’s pilot’s seat with a comfort that was becoming second nature and let my eyes adjust to the low light of our screens.

  “Perry, my favorite mechanical bird, what’s the latest?” I said.

  Perry turned his amber eyes on me. “I hate that word, you know.”

  “What word?”

  “Mechanical. It makes me sound like I’m all gears and pistons and grease and stuff.”

  “Okay, so what would you prefer?”

  “How about synthetic?” Zeno asked, scanning her panel.

  “Makes me sound fake.”

  “Artificial?” Icky suggested.

  “Too vase-full-of-cheap-plastic-flowers.”

  “Okay, how about—”

  I cut in. “How about we concentrate on the business at hand and discuss respectful nomenclature of our valued crew member after we resolve these two bogies?”

  “See, Zeno? Nomenclature. That’s why I feel valued,” Perry said.

  “No need to crow about it,” Zeno deadpanned.

  Perry’s head whirled, then his beak dropped. “Well played, whiskers.”

  Zeno inclined her head while grinning, or at least as much as she could given her thickness.

  Torina slid past me and settled into her own seat, her hand trailing over my shoulder as she did. It was a small gesture, but the meaning was… significant, and I smiled at her with a warmth that told a story. She cocked her head, grinning. “What’d I miss?”

  “Perry bitching about being called a bunch of greasy flowers,” Icky said. “He’s so weird.”

  Torina stared. “What?”

  “I—what? I didn’t—” Perry started, but again I cut him off.

  “Guys, focus here? Let’s try this again. Perry, status please,” I asked.

  “The two ships haven’t responded to any comm challenges. They have no transponders, or aren’t using them, so we can’t ID them. Their scanner returns are still pretty wonky, so we can tell they’re about class 6 and—well, that’s about it.”

  I nodded. My earlier thoughts about alien researchers doing bizarre things on Earth just to provoke a reaction gave me an idea. “Okay, Netty, let’s disconnect from the Iowa, then set course, uh”—I pointed—“that way.”

  “You want to head to the Large Magellanic Cloud? It’s going to take us about eight hundred thousand years to get there, so you might want to use the lavatory first.”

  “Any random direction at full power will do, Netty—well, as long as it doesn’t crash us into anything, of course. I just want to see what these incoming ships are going to do, come after us, keep on track for the Iowa, some of both, or neither of the above. Let’s force their hand, so to speak.”

  The Fafnir undocked with a clunk, and Netty eased us away from the Iowa with thrusters only. Once we were clear, she lit the fusion drive, and the Fafnir shot forward on a heading of that-a-way.

  “Engine is cooking hot, boss,” Netty said.

  “Keep it at a medium boil. Onward, if you please. And this is a general order, but keep our weapons at more than a boil. I want us—and our sharp ends—ready.”

  “Van, the new missile launchers on the Iowa have passed all their diagnostics. They have a far longer range than the Fafnir’s launchers, they accelerate a lot harder, and those warheads are absolute haymakers,” Netty said.

  I grinned at her enthusiastic report, then drew my focus back to the targets. Both incoming ships were clearly aimed at the Iowa, either because that was their intent or they simply hadn’t detected the Fafnir. “I’m sensing you’d like to test fire them at some live targets, Netty. How bloodthirsty of you.”

  “I’d call it pragmatic. This is an excellent opportunity to test the targeting, firing, and tracking capabilities of the missiles.”

  “By blowing up a couple of unidentified ships.”

  “The only thing we don’t really need to test is the warheads. My suggestion is we fire them unarmed and inform those incoming ships about it. If they’re hostile, I can arm them remotely. If they’re not, they’ll just sail on past and we can recover them at our leisure.”

  I smiled again. “That is pragmatic. Okay, broadcast three warnings at thirty second intervals, then loose a missile from each launcher.” I glanced at Torina. “Maybe that’ll provoke them into talking to us.”

  “Actually, Van, they may not be talking to us because there’s no one to do any talking, aside from an AI,” Perry put in.

  I turned to him. “You think these ships are unmanned?”

  “Possibly. I’ve been analyzing the scanner data, and although these ships are roughly the length of a typical class 6, they seem to be a lot less massive. If we assume conventional power plant and drive specs, then they’d have almost no internal space for a crew. One guy in a cockpit, maybe, like a fighter, but that’s it.”

  “Or their crew is really, really small,” Icky said.

  Perry gave a slow nod. “Yes, that’s a possibility, too, that these ships are crewed by tiny aliens.”

  “Van, no answer from those ships,” Netty said.

  “Weapons hot, Netty. Do your thing.”

  Two icons streaked away from the Iowa, one from each of the new launchers. The missiles were fast—at least fifty percent better acceleration than the Fafnir’s comparatively small ordnance. They immediately pinged their targets and began to track them.

  “So far so good. We’re looking at about eight minutes to detonation if we arm them,” Netty said.

  I watched the icons representing our two bogies on the tactical overlay. For the moment, they just maintained a steady, unchanging course. We were closing with them at a phenomenal rate, though mainly because of their enormous velocity. The Iowa’s missiles had shot past us and closed even faster.

  “So if they don’t answer us sometime… in the next seven minutes, I guess, are we actually going to just blow them up?” Torina asked.

  I looked out the canopy, a useless reflex because I wasn’t likely to see much many millions of kilometers away. I sometimes wondered why the Fafnir even had a canopy, since virtually everything we did relied on the ship's suite of sensors anyway.

  “Probably not. For all we know, maybe they can’t contact us and are coming for help,” I replied.

  “If that’s the case, they’d better start decelerating pretty soon or they’re going to overshoot us,” Netty said.

  I regarded the scans and knew she was right. “Still, I’m not excited about attacking two ships that haven’t actually done anything hostile—”