War Fleet: Resistance Read online

  War Fleet: Resistance

  Book 1

  Joshua James

  Daniel Young

  Contents

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  Prologue

  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

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Epilogue

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  —Joshua James & Daniel Young

  Prologue

  “So are you going to get fat in retirement?”

  Captain Frank Olsen considered his brother’s plump face. “You’re one to talk, Sean.”

  “Hey, I’m dead,” his brother said. “I’m stuck like this.”

  Olsen leaned back and took another bite of his breakfast, then glanced out his ready room window at the stars beyond. He could make out many of the big, lumbering asteroids that were ubiquitous to the region. It was the reason his ship was here, after all. He downed the last of his coffee and refilled his cup.

  “We’ll see,” he said at last. “But I don’t know that a cushy retirement is in the cards.”

  “Well, that’s what you get when you piss off people,” Sean said. The hologram glitched. It was the second time it had done that this morning.

  “You need a diagnostic.”

  “And you need to stop playing cards by yourself in your office,” Sean said.

  “You’re here, aren’t you?”

  “Barely.”

  The hologram of his brother, which only generated from the waist up across his table, drew a couple of cards and slid a credit forward to up the ante. Olsen glanced at the cards in his hand. They were a mishmash of numbers and symbols that he couldn’t hope to fashion into a winning move.

  He upped his ante. Like the cards in his hand, and his brother, the chips were holographic. To anyone looking on, it would appear that he was pantomiming a card game with an invisible opponent.

  “How long have we been doing this, Frank? Six months now?” Sean ran a hand through his thinning hair as he looked at his cards. “I think I can tell when something is bothering you.”

  After his brother had been killed and he’d lost his own command, Olsen had started talking with the hologram, against the advice of a fleet psychiatrist. He’d promised to stop after six months.

  That had been five years ago. The program wasn’t designed to note the passage of time. “I’m not bothered.”

  “Sure you are.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Fine, I’m bothered. Happy?” The program had its shortcomings, but it had nailed his brother’s smug self-assuredness. It had made Sean a fine captain, and much more like their father than Frank, but it wore thin. “I’m not going to get a second chance.”

  “You’re captain of a ship again,” Sean said.

  “A mining ship.”

  “A military ship. And considering most people don’t get a first chance, you’re doing okay.”

  “You know what I mean,” Olsen said, hating how he sounded. Only his brother got this glimpse of him. “I thought out here, away from everything, I’d get a chance to...” He paused. Saying it aloud sounded ridiculous, he realized. “To clear my name.”

  Sean laughed. “Out here? The ass end of nowhere? This is where names go to die.”

  He was right, of course. There was no redemption here, just a slow shuffling off to a dead end. Maybe that wasn’t so bad in the end. There were worse fates. “Thanks, Sean. Helpful as always.”

  “That’s what I’m here for.”

  “Why do I keep you around again?”

  “It must be my winning—”

  The lights in the small office flashed red once and the intercom crackled to life. “Captain, fast-approaching contacts!”

  Olsen jumped to his feet, sending his holographic cards and chips flying. In two steps, he’d crossed the small office and reached the door that opened directly into the CIC.

  “Ha!” his brother called after him.

  Olsen glanced back just as the hologram was shimmering out of existence. Sean was holding up his discarded cards.

  “You really are the king of losing hands.”

  1

  “Where are they?” Olsen said as he burst onto the bridge of the URSA Tapper. He brushed the remnants of his interrupted breakfast from his mustache. The half-empty coffee mug in his right hand threatened to slosh everywhere, but he’d be damned if he left it behind. A man had to draw the line somewhere.

  “Coming out of the belt on the inner-system side,” Lieutenant Resham Santiago, the Tapper’s navigator, replied. Her voice was calm and unhurried. “Four ships. No signatures.”

  “Visual,” Olsen said.

  The small bridge’s viewscreen filled with an out-of-focus image of four shoddy-looking medium-sized ships: a mess of greebles and devices built for functionality over aesthetics. They weren’t too dissimilar-looking from the Tapper.

  “The overdue welcoming party,” Olsen said under his breath.

  The Tapper and her miners had been out here for months without attracting the attention of the locals. And if they had, the idea of tangling with the Tapper had thwarted them. What had changed? “Rico, hail them.”

  Given the ships’ lack of military insignias, Olsen couldn’t tell if they were human, Foorint, or Arstan — not that it mattered in this scenario.

  “No response, sir,” Lieutenant Rico Cadinouche, the Tapper’s pilot, replied.

  “Why didn’t we see them sooner?”

  “The radiation wave blinded all our equipment,” Santiago said.

  Olsen frowned. “What radiation wave?”

  “The one I messaged you about twenty minutes ago,” said the smooth, emotionless voice of his XO.

  Olsen turned to the ship’s cyborg. Rob’s alabaster face and glowing blue eyes gave little away. His AI interfaced with, but was still independent of, the ship’s computers. Ever since the Grashorn incident, Admiralty had ruled that all executive officers must be machines capable of making decisions in milliseconds.

  “Tell me again,” Olsen said. He’d seen the message from Rob and he’d ignored it. The cyborg’s regular reports tended to be mind-numbingly detailed, with little of actual note. Until now, it seemed.

  “As
you wish, Captain. The current target asteroid has an average N-number of 318, indicating a highly unstable core. The rock is emitting gamma and beta radiation at consistent, near-hazardous levels. Upon approach from the miners, it has pulsed well above hazard levels twice in the last half-hour. However, neither pulse lasted long enough to do damage to our hardened systems.”

  “Let me guess,” Olsen said. “They still want to set charges on it?”

  The mining operation was technically civilian. The Tapper was just there to support them. But in practice, it was Tapper ships and pilots out there ferrying the miners around. The ship itself was considered a mining ship, in spite of her military designation.

  Rob shrugged. “My analysis shows the probability of finding metrinium at thirty-five percent.”

  That gave Olsen pause. He’d not heard a probability that high since they’d arrived in the tight-knit belt of asteroids in the Hardy-Myers sector. He could hardly blame the miners.

  “Captain, the incoming ships are assuming an attack formation,” Santiago said. “We have weapons signatures.”

  “It seems the light show has attracted some unwanted attention,” Olsen said. “What assets do we have out there?”

  “The Extractor, sir. She just started her final approach to the target asteroid.”

  “Who’s on the stick?”

  “Redrock,” Rob said.

  Olsen felt a tightening in the pit of his stomach. Redrock was Lieutenant Edward Nathan’s call sign. He was the best pilot Olsen had ever known. He was also like a son to him.

  Olsen nodded at Santiago, who immediately put him through to the Extractor.

  “Lieutenant, we have hostiles inbound. Get back here at full thrust before they lock a tractor beam on you.”

  “No kidding,” Nathan said curtly. “I was waiting to hear from you. I’m already headed back.”

  “Head back faster,” Olsen said sharply. “Tapper out.”

  He opened a hatch on his armrest and tapped a button within. Klaxons sounded on deck, and the light in the room went from soft white to a harsh, pulsing red. An automated voice called for battle stations.

  Olsen glanced down at his cold coffee. “What the hell,” he muttered to himself as he drained it.

  2

  The Tapper was no pushover. She could handle a few small hostile ships, but this was supposed to be light support duty for a mining operation in the middle of nowhere. The Tapper was skeleton-crewed and lightly armed. Her bark was worse than her bite.

  And for months, that had been more than enough. As he’d predicted when this mission had started, Olsen was bored out of his mind.

  The mining company wasn’t doing much better. Fifty asteroids broken apart, and not one speck of metrinium. They’d come all this way to the far reaches of space to obtain the resource necessary for powering the new fusion-cannons in the modern super-dreadnought battleships, but so far, there hadn’t been a trace of anything.

  But here was something, Olsen thought. Something less than ideal. “Can you max magnify?”

  The view on the screen went grainy, but the incoming ships were close enough that shapes emerged.

  “Cruiser-class vessels,” Rob said.

  “And from the look of it,” Olsen said, “they’re outfitted with 7800-Celsius laser turrets on each flank.”

  “And underbelly ion-cannons,” the cyborg said, noting the protrusions.

  Olsen swore under his breath. “How long until Nathan gets here?”

  “ETA in thirteen seconds,” Rob replied.

  “As soon as he passes the launch doors, fire up the shields. No delays.” In the distance, the ion-cannon on the largest vessel started to glow bright white. Ion-cannons cost an absolute fortune, but the weapon was so powerful its beam could pulverize a moderately-sized unprotected ship in seconds. It contained enough energy to completely short a destroyer’s shield, if it hit at the right angle.

  In other words, the Tapper was in trouble.

  “Five seconds,” Rob said.

  Static pulled at the hairs on Olsen’s beard as the light bloomed ever brighter at the front of the ion-cannon. “Schmidt, heat up the lasers, dammit.”

  “Yessir.” The gravelly voice of the weapons officer, Lieutenant Commander Teller Schmidt, boomed across the CIC.

  A massive beam of light shot out from the front of the nearest incoming ship. “Shields!” Olsen shouted. He worried he’d left it too late, but the beam hit a wall of energy and dissolved into it. A blue band pulsed out of this just in front of the ship.

  The shields started to sputter, but they managed to hold, albeit barely.

  “Redrock,” Olsen said. “Did you make it?”

  No answer.

  “Redrock—”

  “Affirmative, sir,” the shuttle pilot’s voice came back over the radio. “Our backside got a little toasty, but we made it.”

  Olsen turned to his weapons officer. “And the shields, Schmidt?”

  “Twenty-five percent, sir. If another ion-beam hits the hull, we’re shrapnel.”

  Olsen tugged on his uniform’s collar, loosening a bead of sweat that trickled down his chest. “Charge the left coilgun.”

  The Tapper had two large guns designed for searing into a ship’s hull, alongside four side-mounted 5300-Celsius laser turrets. Not the highest-tech equipment, but good enough to pack a punch.

  Olsen glanced at Ensign Boris Chang, the ship’s youngest officer. “Go down below and see if you can squeeze some extra juice into those coilguns,” he said. “Work your magic.”

  3

  “You got it, Cap’n,” Chang said, before he even thought about what he was agreeing to. He ran to the rear door and pushed the release button to open it. The clanking of the magnets on his boots against the deck plating echoed out from the corridor. Only the principal rooms on the Tapper could afford artificial gravity.

  Chang was out of breath when he got to the defense bay. Still, he knew time was thin. Ion cannons were notoriously slow to recharge, but if one ship had them, then they all might. And in the meantime, standard lasers could do plenty of damage with their shields weakened.

  Chang punched open the doors, turned off his mag-boots, and pulled himself inside using the door frame. He had artificial gravity in here, necessary for all the technology to work correctly. He landed lightly on the floor, closed the doors, and got to work.

  Never, in his studies at the Malmö Institute of Space Education, had they given him the work of an electrician. Mostly they’d expected him to do computer-based work — as most engineers did aboard the largest warships in the fleet. Typically, graduates from MISE got assigned to those kinds of ships.

  But Chang knew he had little chance to excel amongst the best in such competitive positions. Instead, when he’d seen a posting for a mining ship in the far reaches of space, he’d applied on the first opportunity. Here, despite being the lowest-ranking and youngest officer on the ship, people saw him as a genius, and he had access to plenty of raw materials, smelted from mined ore in the Tapper’s furnace bay.

  Now, the pressure of saving the whole mining vessel fell on his shoulders. If he got it wrong, his name wouldn’t go down in history, like he’d daydreamed about so many times in Professor Argwal’s advanced propulsion courses. Instead, he’d be just another dead man on a backwater vessel in the middle of nowhere.

  But he shouldn’t be thinking of that now. He had work to do, and he’d already wasted precious time for what? Neuroticism?

  Chang just had to pull out the right energy gates and reroute the systems. He put on some gloves and opened the hatch on the first of the coilguns. This room didn’t actually house the bulk of the gun, which ran across the length of the ship. It just held the electricals that provided the thing with the power it needed.

  He opened the hatch for the second gun, then took hold of a long strip of spare power cabling and reconfigured the interior gates in a way only he knew. As he worked, he glanced up at a comically oversized red switch that c
onnected to a makeshift shield battery he’d devised months ago. He’d fashioned it from spare parts and mounted it on the bulkhead. Not pretty, but it did the job. The captain would thank him for it later.

  After he completed his work, Chang slinked down against the bulkhead and, once again, wiped the sweat from his brow. If he died today, at least he would die knowing he’d done everything he could.

  He wished he was back on the bridge to see what was happening, but he knew better than to move without orders. Instead he hunkered down, comms channel open, and waited.

  4

  The forwardmost incoming ship unleashed a volley of laser fire at the Tapper, the beams cutting through the mining vessel’s shields and searing the hull. Olsen had seen some old science fiction movies where lasers would streak across the screen, like heated bullets traveling really slowly. But that wasn’t how lasers worked — the beams turned on, seared whatever surface they were aimed at or sapped energy from a shield, and then turned off again.

  The ship rocked, and the ceiling glowed red for a moment. Olsen looked up at it. “They’re attacking the bridge, dammit. Rob, damage report?”

  “The shields are down completely and in need of repair, and the warp engine has shorted, but we should be able to return power to it in ten minutes. Otherwise, all systems are functional.”