Glory - Humanity's Retribution Part 1: A Military Sci-Fi Adventure, page 1
GLORY: HUMANITY’S RETRIBUTION PART 1
GLORY SERIES
BOOK 4
IRA HEINICHEN
CRAIG MARTELLE
CONTENTS
Connect with the Authors
Acknowledgments
The Perseid Barrens
Chapter 1
Jade
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Theta 4372
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Aeternus Tertius
Chapter 16
Aetern
Chapter 17
Aeternus Tertius
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Tertius B
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Aetern
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Aeternus Tertius
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Tertius B
Chapter 33
Aeternus Tertius
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Aetern
Chapter 38
Tertius B
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Aetern
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Aeternus Tertius
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Tertius B
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Aeternus Tertius
Chapter 49
Tertius B
Chapter 50
Aeternus Tertius
Chapter 51
Aeternus Secundus
Chapter 52
Aeternus Tertius
Chapter 53
Tertius B
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Aeternus Secundus
Chapter 57
Coming Soon!
More From The Authors
Authors’ Notes
Also by Craig Martelle
CONNECT WITH THE AUTHORS
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Ira Heinichen Social
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Glory: Humanity’s Retribution - Part One (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.
No part of this book may be reproduced without express written permission of the copyright holders.
Copyright © 2024 Ira Heinichen and Craig Martelle
Published by Craig Martelle, Inc
PO Box 10235, Fairbanks, AK 99710
First US edition, October 2024
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to our Beta Readers
Micky Cocker (in memoriam), James Caplan, Kelly O’Donnell, and John Ashmore
Cover designed by Chris Kallias
Editing by Mia with LKJ Books (lkjbooks.com)
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THE PERSEID BARRENS
Unclaimed Space
CHAPTER ONE
The Paragon ship was dead.
The sight of it shook loose memories in Lieutenant Henry Warren.
He’d spent a summer on the coast of the Pacific Northwest as a kid. Cold, gray sands, fog that rolled in and out like clockwork, constant salty wind, and the greenest trees you’d ever seen—trees that were always green, no matter the time of year. And one day, suddenly, without explanation, a beached whale was lying bloated and askew, right in the middle of young Warren’s morning adventure. Dead before it came ashore was what his mom had said. Died out at sea, then bloated up with gasses and floated ashore. It certainly smelled like it was dead, like fish but with a rancid edge that made his eyes water; the entire beach smelled like it for hundreds of yards in every direction. He’d noticed the smell long before he’d known what the dark lump on the sand was. The seagulls circled it, cawing like mad things, fighting with each other in a frenzy each time they landed on the carcass, then took flight again with strips of rotten flesh hanging from their yellow beaks.
‘Don’t get close to it,’ Mom had warned him later that morning. ‘Dead whale like that can explode from all the gasses in its guts. And don’t touch it. The bacteria in there could kill you.’ In fact, she’d forbade him from going back to see it altogether. Two days later, it was gone from the beach, removed by the local authorities, but Warren had already seen enough. That very first morning, before his mom’s warnings, he’d touched the rotting skin, dark and slick. He’d looked the beast in its lolled, lifeless eye, and he’d stood in front of its half-open mouth, filled with white, comb-like strands and buzzing with a horde of flies. The smell was the worst there. Overpowering. As was the darkness beyond those alien-like teeth. It brought Warren’s arm up to cover his mouth and nose, and then he ran home. He’d spend the rest of the summer wondering if Mom was right, and he was going to keel over and die. He didn’t.
The Paragon ship ahead was like a beached whale. Her belly had ruptured, and she listed lifelessly to her side. Just like the whale, gulls circled her in the form of shuttles and drones, eager for their piece, and this time, Warren was one of them. He was a gull eyeing this miracle of a prize, and what a prize she was. Stars above, what a prize.
He gripped a hand-strap of the breaching shuttle and eyed the mid-ship rupture with its telltale greenish glow. “Keep us dead center with the nose of the ship,” he instructed the pilot just in front of him. The radiation coming off the vessel was intense, her own cosmic version of a salty, decaying stench. Approaching the ship’s nose would put the most shielding between them and the harmful particles. Warren couldn’t help but think of the whale’s lifeless mouth, open and crawling with death. But he wasn’t running home this time. He was going inside.
In two centuries of on-and-off war, to Warren’s knowledge—which was to say, any records that had been declassified, because he’d looked through everything available—the Terran Defense Force had only ever seized and boarded a Paragon ship twice. Paragon vessels, like the bodies of their crew, were very good at self-destructing before anything like that could happen, which made such opportunities exceedingly rare. And of those two instances where the circumstances had aligned to allow both seizure and boarding, in both cases, the damage to the vessel had been extensive enough to render them virtually useless for intelligence gathering. Their files were thin and remarkably unhelpful. Warren found it likely that the thinness of those files was the only reason he or anyone else was aware of the event in the first place. Perhaps there had been other encounters where more had been learned, perhaps very important things, but those files were never declassified and had been hidden away where Warren would never be allowed to find them. He suspected that’s what was going to happen with this mission report, because there were definitely secrets over there. The ship was mostly intact, and its sudden, one-in-a-million core containment failure had both cut power to all the systems that should have scuttled the ship and killed its entire crew compliment—likely in mere minutes, the radiation readings were so intense. It also meant, crucially, the ship had never called for help. She hadn’t the time to report what happened before she’d died, and that fact made her the biggest prize Warren and his fellow gulls had ever chanced upon.
The Paragon didn’t know she was there.
Not yet. They would soon. Certainly, they were already looking for her…but they didn’t know the Fleet had found her first. That Warren had found her first. That, in minutes, they’d be inside her intact bulkheads, searching for something—anything—they could get their hands on that could, perhaps, turn the tide of this latest, deadliest war. This wouldn’t actually be Warren’s first time boarding a Paragon ship, but it would be the first time doing so freely, with the ability to go wherever he pleased and the time to pry out her secrets.
“Eyes up,” Warren called to the team behind him. His team. Invariably, Warren preferred to work alone. He was so good at his job, the brass tended to allow him that. But not this time. The ship, just ahead of them, was so close now that it filled the shuttle’s cockpit win
Clunk.
The shuttle made magnetic contact with the nose of the massive Paragon cruiser. The pilot had done well to fly them straight down the line to the forward-most point of the vessel, putting as much metal and mass between them and the bleeding power core as possible. A whining hiss followed a second later as the shuttle’s breaching systems began to bore through the cruiser’s dense hull. Warren patted the pilot on the shoulder in thanks for a job well-done, reiterated over his suit’s external speakers that he should not move from this point until Warren and his team returned, and then lumbered his way down to the others. They were gathered at the front of the shuttle, behind the forward airlock where the breaching system was cutting them a hole. One of his fellow team members tossed him his rifle, which he caught and ran through a quick functions check. He’d done so a dozen times already, but he’d do so obsessively a dozen more times before this was all over. It was his way.
Clunk.
A second thud came a minute or so later. Paragon external hulls were thick, it would seem, at least at the bow. The whining hiss stopped. A light ahead of them, centered over the internal airlock door, stayed stubbornly red. They were not yet allowed by the safety systems to enter. Experience told Warren this was because of the heat the breaching torches created, and the airlock was bleeding it off. They’d be able to enter soon enough. Behind him, Warren could feel his team shuffle, restless, anxious to get inside. He felt the same. He gripped his rifle and compulsively ran his fingers again over its controls, taking comfort in their feel even through the airtight mesh of his suit’s gloves.
The light turned green, and the airlock door rumbled aside. The team packed in, Warren at the front. They barely fit. Warren looked at the radiation readings. Still okay. Good. With a light, hum-like vibration from the deck, Warren felt the airlock suck the atmosphere from the cramped chamber. An external pressure reading in the corner of his faceplate display rapidly dropped to zero, and then the outer airlock door rumbled open.
It was dark on the other side. The edges of the hole the shuttle had bored through the Paragon hull still glowed from the plasma torch, but that was the only source of light or activity. Warren stepped gingerly through the opening and found himself standing in an empty sensor control room. Apparently, the Paragon bastards put them at the front of their ships just like the Fleet did. He grinned wryly at the small revelation, the first of many he was looking forward to. He glanced at his HUD. Radiation had doubled with just the opening of the airlock and the removal of this one piece of hull. It was still in an acceptable range for their mission, but Warren knew it would only get worse the farther inside they moved.
“Drones up,” he radioed, which was tinged with static from electromagnetic interference. Three team members stepped forward and opened a crate each from which a swarm of tiny, palm-sized drones rose. They flashed and twinkled as their scopes began to record their surroundings, and then they flickered out of the chamber in a blink, one by one, moving much faster than the human eye could anticipate. They’d map the ship in fifteen, twenty minutes, tops, or at least everything they could gain access to. Warren and his team, trailing behind the ever-growing map, would get inside everything the drones couldn’t. You could sack a ship from stem to stern in under an hour in this manner. Warren had done it personally, though never quite like this.
Growing alongside the map, Warren eyed the radiation readings the drones were reporting in tandem. “Twenty minutes,” he said after a time. “Groups Foxtrot and Kilo, you’ll have twenty minutes down there, tops. Get moving.” They were the team assigned to the rear-most sections, closest to engineering and the breached core. “Don’t take your eyes off those rad levels.”
The two team leaders grunted acknowledgements and took off as fast as their magnetic boots would allow them. There was no power on the derelict ship, thus no gravity. Warren considered advising them to abandon the boots wherever possible and fly, it would be faster than clunking along, but he’d only be repeating himself from the mission briefing. They didn’t need a mother hen, and Warren had no desire to play one. They knew what they were doing. The other groups filed out in predetermined waves, those traveling the farthest into the ship first, and then those in closer and closer areas until it was only Warren left with his second. They weren’t assigned to a specific section of the ship. Rather, they’d swoop in and support whoever needed it or explore some area of interest the others weren’t getting to. Already, eyes on the scan of the ship, Warren had an idea where he wanted to go.
“Stay close,” he rumbled to his assigned second officer. It was a man he’d only met a half-day before, groggy from compression drugs after having been boosted in from two sectors away. He seemed sharp and well-trained enough to know that Warren didn’t want mindless conversation. Just do as you’re told and do it well. Warren gripped his weapon, and they were off. Mid-ship. One of the drones had spotted what looked like officers’ quarters, and they could get there before Bravo Team.
The corridors leading out from the ship’s nose looked very much like the corridors he’d seen on the Scythe, the last and only Paragon ship Warren had ever seen the innards of. He’d spend most of his time wearing a Paragon suit then, a very different experience to this one, wearing his own. And it didn’t stink, especially compared to that memory. No Paragon patrols to dodge here, either, which was also an improvement.
Warren almost yelped when he turned a corner and came face-to-face with someone. Rifle up, finger millimeters from its trigger, and heart pounding, he took a long moment to slow his breath and properly take in the scene. It was a dead body. In fact, not just one. There were several, a multitude in fact, floating ahead of him and filling the long, straight corridor. A glance behind told some of the story why. A bank of escape pods was there, but it was full. The pods had never fired. This gruesome, floating mass of Paragon had tried to abandon ship but never reached them. Another glance, this time at his HUD and the lethal radiation readings there, told the rest of the story.
“No crash metal between us and the core here,” the second radioed, and Warren jumped for a second time. He’d forgotten the other man was there for a moment. The channel hissed angrily with static, struggling to get across just the few feet between the men as the radiation pummeled it.
“Cross-junction in twenty meters,” Warren said, one eye still on the map. He realized he still had his rifle raised, which he lowered. Too wound up, he chided himself. “We’ll be fine.”
They moved, quickly as they could, through the floating mass of bodies. Some were half-immolated, and any they touched, either accidentally or to move aside, reacted by smoking and starting anew to disintegrate. They weren’t here to collect any of the deceased, but anyone who might’ve had designs on snagging one for study was bound to be disappointed. No one had ever seen a Paragon outside their suits, and that wasn’t changing here. Even their exposed edges were just soot. It was cremation or nothing. What a wild way to go. Warren pushed that thought aside and focused on his breathing. Calm. Steady. Bring that heart rate down. Keep moving.
Warren launched into the junction as soon as he saw it, releasing the magnetization on his boots with a practiced kick and gliding into the opening. The radiation levels dipped instantly. On the map, several of their drones had stopped responding, the majority of them further-most into the ship, fried by radiation. The area they were moving toward was incomplete, with several sections of empty map. They’d have to be careful, quick, and watch their own levels. Luckily, a route seemed available to get them there with minimal exposure. Warren flashed it to his second, and then reactivated his boots to launch himself once again, this time down a dark corridor directly ahead. No bodies in this one, thankfully, and the radiation appeared to be tolerable.
