A Found Beginning (Osprey Chronicles Book 5) Read online

  A FOUND BEGINNING

  OSPREY CHRONICLES™ BOOK FIVE

  RAMY VANCE

  MICHAEL ANDERLE

  THE A FOUND BEGINNING TEAM

  Thanks to our Beta Readers

  Kelly O’Donnell, Larry Omans

  Thanks to the JIT Readers

  Dorothy Lloyd

  Zacc Pelter

  Diane L. Smith

  Deb Mader

  Dave Hicks

  Jeff Goode

  Debi Sateren

  If we’ve missed anyone, please let us know!

  Editor

  The Skyhunter Editing Team

  This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.

  Copyright © 2022 by LMBPN Publishing

  Cover Art by Jake @ J Caleb Design

  http://jcalebdesign.com / [email protected]

  Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing

  A Michael Anderle Production

  LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  LMBPN Publishing

  PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy

  Las Vegas, NV 89109

  Version 1.00, January 2022

  ISBN (ebook) 978-1-68500-614-3

  ISBN (paperback) 978-1-68500-615-0

  DEDICATION

  To my Bunny Banshee – may nothing ever silence that incredible voice of yours…

  —Ramy Vance

  To Family, Friends and

  Those Who Love

  to Read.

  May We All Enjoy Grace

  to Live the Life We Are

  Called.

  — Michael

  CONTENTS

  Previously in the Osprey Chronicles...

  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

  Mantle and Keys

  Author Notes Ramy Vance

  Author Notes Michael Anderle

  Books by Ramy Vance

  Books By Michael Anderle

  Connect with The Authors

  PREVIOUSLY IN THE OSPREY CHRONICLES...

  It's all hands on deck as the K'tax swarm Locaur in response to an ancient signal beacon. If the K'tax prevail, Locauri and humans alike will become fodder and breeding grounds for the next generations of K'tax.

  Sarah and the Osprey's crew stand ready to defend the planet they call home against overwhelming odds. The Overseers are helping, but not without dissent in their ranks. Nor will they commit their full force...they must protect multiple spatial locations. Overseer Kwin has a solution to the human resources problem, but no one knows if it will be enough and in time.

  Then the fleet arrives through the wormhole at Dr. Grayson's order—but will the Tribes bent on conquering band together with the Osprey and her allies long enough to defeat the K'tax? Or will it be every side for themselves, and the victor takes the spoils?

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Come here, Boo. Look at this.”

  The bathroom door hung open, and mist from the sonic shower filled the tiny apartment for the first time in months. A little girl streaked out of the bathroom, drowning in the oversized, stretched-out shirt that served as her pajamas.

  Sim threw herself onto the convertible couch-bed, diving into Sarah’s open arms. Her flesh was warm, her mop of tightly curled hair damp and heavy with the scent of coconut. Sarah and Cole had repeatedly told her not to use the real oil without asking first. This last bottle had cost more than Cole made in a week, and if they believed the rumors, there was no more real oil available anywhere. Not at any price. They were supposed to save it for special occasions.

  Sarah said nothing because this was a special occasion. The ink wasn’t yet dry on her contract, and she felt her ship-out date looming over her head like the blade of a guillotine. Four weeks. Four weeks until she got on a Tribe shuttle and went off to officer cadet training.

  They’d told her that her first six months at the academy would be brutal. No family visits. Less than an hour of comms time per week. The academy had to be relentless, the recruiting officer had told her. The first generation of Tribe officers would need to be some of the toughest, smartest, best-trained humans alive.

  In exchange for her signature, Sarah’s sign-on bonus had included, among other things, six extra hours of sonic shower use.

  She and Sim had run the water until it was cold, and their fingers had turned to prunes.

  So yes, this was a special occasion. She wouldn’t begrudge the girl a few drops of oil, even if it annoyed Cole.

  “Look.” Sarah waved at the recording device on the low table beside the couch. “Look what Aunt Petie found for us!”

  It was an ancient holo-projector, chipped and rusted at the corners. Sarah hadn’t asked Petra where she got the antique. There were some things she was better off not knowing. Especially not now that her soul belonged to the Tribe.

  Sim pressed her cheek to Sarah’s shoulder, studying the little device with bright, honey-colored eyes. She reached out with fingers still plump with baby fat. “Go?” she asked.

  Sarah wrapped her arms around the child and nodded. Sim pressed the power button. At first, nothing happened, and Sarah was afraid the old projector had given up the ghost. Then a cone of light shot from the device and filled the single-room apartment with a wavering blueish glow.

  Sim gasped as a swath of grasslands sprouted from the misty air. The image quality was awful—grainy and flickering, popping at the edges. The wildflowers that exploded out of the grass looked sickly and colorless.

  Yet they made Sim squeal with delight.

  “Where is it?” she demanded as the footage, shot from a drone or perhaps an airplane, swept above the grasslands. Lone trees sprouted out of the ether. A pair of giraffes grazed among the top branches, their long tongues curling around wicked thorns. Long blue rivers snaked across the landscape, where rows of antelope bowed to take their morning water as a pink and gold sunrise slashed the horizon.

  “Is it Africa?” Sim’s eyes were wide.

  “Uh-huh. It’s the Serengeti, Boo.” I think.


  “Have you been there?” Sim demanded, reaching out to touch the flank of one of the antelope as the camera soared past. “Is that where you’re from?”

  Sarah’s mouth twitched in a sad smile. “No, Boo. This was as far from my home as you could get and still be on the planet. The grasslands and the deserts I grew up in were kind of like this,” she added, rallying at the sight of her daughter’s disappointment.

  Or had been decades, if not centuries, before Sarah was born. Laboratories and ecological dead zones, synth-dogs, and death cults had defined Sarah’s childhood. The biodiversity, the explosion of life filling the hologram around them was almost as much of a myth to Sarah as they were to a daughter born and raised in a tin can in outer space.

  A gray shape loomed in the distance, growing as the camera drew closer but obscured by long grass. Sim squealed with excitement. “It’s Baby!”

  On hearing her name, one of the cushions on the edge of the couch stirred. Baby, the size of an overstuffed pillow, lifted her head, sniffed the air, decided she wasn’t being summoned and went to sleep again.

  Sarah stared at the projection, baffled until she saw the horn form at the center of the holo-beast’s forehead. Then she laughed. “Not quite. Water bears didn’t grow that big back on Earth. It’s a rhinoceros! But it is a baby, look. Here comes its mama.”

  Sim cooed in wonder as a larger gray shape emerged from the sea of grass. Mother and child cuddled on their couch on a space station orbiting a frozen moon of Jupiter, watching an ancient record of a mother and child cuddling in their grassy nest.

  Some stories were universal.

  The minutes slipped by, and when the recording went dark, Sim replayed it. Then she replayed it again and again. After five or six times, the recording went dark, and Sim didn’t stir from Sarah’s arm to press it again. She huddled close to her mother’s chest, her breathing slow and deep.

  Sarah settled back on the wide couch that doubled as the family bed, resting her head on Baby’s warm flank. She stared into the darkness, unable to sleep. With one eye, she watched the dimly glowing clock tick down the minutes. Four weeks. Her life had narrowed to a slice of four short weeks, and Cole was late from the lab. Again.

  “Mama?”

  Sarah roused, her ears perking at the sound. “Yeah?”

  “Is that what it’s gonna be like?” Sim mumbled.

  In the dark and quiet, Sarah didn’t understand right away. “What what’s gonna be like, boo?”

  “Home. When we get there.”

  Sarah felt a pang in her gut. She squeezed the child as tight as she dared. “I hope so,” she whispered.

  Sim mumbled something and turned over, restless. “No.”

  “No?” Sarah’s breath caught.

  Sim shook her head firmly, lips smacking. “Hope in one hand and poop in the other,” she muttered. “See which one fills faster.”

  Sarah stared into the darkness, baffled. Then she realized where Sim must’ve heard the phrase. Lawrence must’ve taken her request to “tone down the expletives around the kid” at face value.

  “You’re right, honey,” she conceded gently, wiping a strand of hair from Sim’s forehead. “Hope is good. Hope is necessary. But hope alone isn’t good enough. We’re gonna have to work for it, too.” She closed her eyes, resting her chin on top of Sim’s head as sleep sent its first feelers burrowing through her blood. “One step at a time.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Slowly, Jaeger realized that someone was laughing over the comm system. It was Toner. There was an edge to his voice—high, sharp, and hungry. “Assistance? From the fleet? You haven’t been reading the company magazine, Kwin. They’re here for a goddamned bug hunt.”

  Jaeger couldn’t breathe. She stood in a sea of holograms on the bridge of the Terrible. Hundreds, thousands of K’tax fighters swarmed through space between Locaur and its moon. Seven asteroids the size of her fist lumbered through the gap on a collision course for the planet. Any one of those modified asteroids hitting the planet head-on could cause an extinction-level event.

  With only a handful of geriatric, secondhand cruisers and experimental Terrible-class ships, Jaeger and Kwin didn’t have a hope of stopping them all.

  At the same time, more ships spilled into the system, appearing at the white mouth of the wormhole that had recently opened in-system. The fleet. That boogeyman from the other side of the universe—it had finally caught up with Jaeger and her crew.

  “I gotta ask, Captain,” Toner added, in a raw voice she hardly recognized. “Is this what you saved my life for? Just to watch it all go up in flames?”

  “Sensors tracking thirty-seven new ships in the system,” reported Udil, Kwin’s second-in-command, from her station at the edge of the circular bridge. “None of them are responding to my hails.”

  “Keep hailing,” Kwin ordered. “Divert all other resources to the asteroids. We must break them apart or throw them off course before they hit Locaur’s upper atmosphere.”

  “We can’t get close to the fucking things,” Portia cried over the comms system. Her ship, one of those geriatric cruisers, soared an arc ahead of the approaching asteroids, strafing lines of laser cannon fire off her port bow. A swarm of sixty or seventy K’tax fighters closed in, forcing the cruiser out of firing range before she could pummel the target.

  “The fighters swarm us if we try,” she shouted. “They’re shooting down all the kamikaze mines before they can get close enough to affect the asteroids.” The asteroid barges lumbered forward, as inexorable as glaciers. Small explosions flowered and faded against the stars as the tick-like K’tax fighters targeted the approaching mines and destroyed them in a barrage of mining laser pulses.

  “How much time do we have until the first asteroid hits a point of no return?” Jaeger demanded. A red halo appeared around Locaur.

  “Forty-six minutes,” Me said in its usual—and in this case utterly inappropriate—cheerful tone.

  “Captain,” Udil said, making both Jaeger and Kwin look around. The metallic Overseer’s claws were a blur as she worked her station. “I’m receiving a message from the Terrible IV. The commander says they’ve finally got their tractor-ray generators online. If she can get within five thousand kilometers of an asteroid, she should be able to generate enough force to push it off course.”

  Jaeger’s gaze snapped back to the battle. Five thousand kilometers. It sounded like a lot—and as far as weapons ranges went, it certainly was—but against the vastness of space, and the sheer number of K’tax fighters, that distance was nothing.

  “Let’s rally the cruisers to provide her cover,” Jaeger said to Kwin. “Get her within tractor range. Tell the other Terrible ships to get their tractor-ray generators online.”

  A clamor of echoing voices, the sounds of a dozen Overseers trying to coordinate a battle, filled the bridge. Jaeger was thankful that the Terrible’s onboard translation system rendered Overseer speech normally instead of the accented version their antenna bands provided.

  “Those generators have never been tested in these ships!” Kwin snapped. “With all of the electrical problems it could easily cause a catastrophic feedback loop—”

  “Kwin,” Jaeger shouted over the babble. “The fleet isn’t going to help us. Do you have a better idea?”

  Kwin’s mandibles snapped shut. Half a heartbeat passed between them. Then, with the strange abruptness of all Overseers, Kwin turned sharply to Udil. “Do it.”

  “God dammit!” Toner’s fist slammed onto the console, cracking the metal casing. He turned his wild blue stare on Occy. “Five minutes.” He glowered. “She kept her promise to stay out of the fight for five fucking minutes.”

  Something flashed in the corner of Occy’s vision, and he turned to see a message blinking on his tablet screen. He was getting a private comms hail from an ID he didn’t recognize—it belonged to neither the Overseers nor any of the human crew. Urgent, the message flashed.

  He frowned, all the sounds of Toner’s rag
ing and the drop crew’s agitation fading to the background as he snatched his tablet and pushed out of the cockpit. The atmospheric transport was on loan from the Overseers, and the narrow hallways left him feeling almost suffocated. He found an empty corner and activated the coms.

  “Who is this?” he demanded. “This is a secure channel. How did you get access?”

  There was a moment of static across the line. Distantly, Occy heard the landing crew shouting battle updates to one another. He was about to shut the line, chalk it up to some glitch in the machine when a soft, contemplative voice made his blood run cold.

  “Deathbringer,” it mused. “You activated the signal? You touched the crystal god? You brought the invasion?”

  Occy’s heart skipped a beat. “Virgil?”

  “Yes.” It pondered. “Yes. I have seen it, too. I have seen more than you, I think. I could touch it again. Turn its mind away from war. With help. I need your help.”