Mother Ship, page 1
MOTHER SHIP
STAR BREAKER
BOOK EIGHT
JAMES DAVID VICTOR
Copyright © 2023 James David Victor
All Rights Reserved
Except for review quotes, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the written consent of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. All people, places, names, and events are products of the author’s imagination and / or used fictitiously. Any similarities to actual people, places, or events is purely coincidental.
Cover Design by Christian Bentulan
CONTENTS
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
Thank You
1
Mars
A burning sky. Gold-and-red fires flaring, turning a brilliant white, laced with sudden shudders of blue as Captain Holly Cropper’s world turned inside out . . .
“Holly—Holly!” A voice shook her awake as the captain of the Forward Recon Eight Strike Group of the Earth Alliance Marines gasped and sat up—and instantly regretted doing so. Her side exploded into a pure white flare of pain.
So much pain.
“Ach!” The young woman with the dyed bob of hair clutched at her side as the room around her swam and hazed in and out of focus. Everything was white. Pristine. A sharp and acrid smell hung in the air. Shapes around her moving quickly to her side.
“Holly? Holly—this is Rachel. You need to calm down,” one of the indistinct shadows was saying. Hands, heavy and firm and strong, started to press on her shoulders.
Rachel? Do I know that name? the young Breaker captain thought. It was a small, faraway thought compared to the pain that was lancing its way through her body.
A brilliant light shone above her. It was vast, filling her vision, too bright to look at even. Her Forward Recon suit had done its best to haze out the light, turning the image into almost a negative of itself. Just like the alien star surrounded by its metal cage.
“Holly, you have to—”
Again, the hands were on her shoulders, trying to force her back down.
Alien hands, she thought.
Was she still in Thaal territory? On board the Thaal ship, still trapped as they were thrown into the vast structure that surrounded the alien star?
“NO!” Holly lashed out with her good arm, the one that she hadn’t been given at birth but had acquired thanks to the Thaal that she was convinced she was fighting now.
“Urgh!” She earned a crack and a groan of pain.
“Her cybernetic arm!” The captain heard someone cursing, and she felt herself grin savagely. She wouldn’t go down that easy. If they wanted to kill her, then they would have to—
“Tranquilizers! Quickly!” someone was shouting as Holly batted around with her good metal arm. She hoped that she could drive the aliens away. Then she would get off this bed or platform or whatever they had her tied down on . . .
“Holly!”
“Here it is . . .”
And then at least two pairs of hands seized her once more. One grabbed onto her cybernetic arm as the other seized her shoulders, and she felt an ice-cold pinprick on the side of her neck.
“Ugh . . . No! No!” the captain started to cry out, but her strength was already fading along with the pain. Her head was clearing. At the same time, the brightness in the room lowered and diminished, becoming not the searing brilliance of a burning star but the bright, antiseptic strip lights of medical equipment.
“Holly, Holly—it’s me, Rachel. You’re in a medical camp. You’re safe. We made it home. We did it . . .” the shadow over her said. Holly’s vision started to waver and double once again. Confused as her mind was, Holly had to admit the shape before her looked vaguely humanoid—not as broad nor as bald as one of the Thaal.
Rachel. The doctor. Comprehension started to dawn in Holly’s mind.
“Crow?” Holly whispered . . . just as her eyes slid closed, and she sank into the blissful dark of night.
“. . . but do you think she will be alright? Will she recover?”
That voice was speaking once again. Holly had begun to resurface from the darks of a drugged sleep.
“Of course, her body can recover. Theoretically, that is,” the voice answered—another voice that Holly knew, but she was struggling to place it. It was still dark, and she surmised that perhaps she had a blindfold on. Until she tried to move her eyelids and open her mouth to speak. It felt like she was surrounded by a thick blanket of cloying, heavy wool.
Am I still drugged? What? Why!?
“She was shot through the kidney, which would usually be a game-over medical situation. It’s amazing that she survived at all,” the first voice was saying. Holly had a sudden image of someone who was nearly bald save for a scattering of silver-white hair, with an ascetic, dried-out face like a prune.
I know that voice, she thought. Her thoughts felt as slow and addled as her body was.
“But you can do something about it, can’t you? The Inner Command has the best medical access! Earth has the best . . .”
That was Dr. Rachel Crow, Holly remembered. The same voice that had been trying to reassure her before. The unlikely polymath genius had been the first to understand the significance of the alien relics hidden in their solar system. She knew they were Thaal beacons. They activated homing devices to the warlike, galactic superpower, the Thaal Empire, telling them when a civilization was ready and ripe for harvesting.
She is smart. If I’m in trouble, then she can certainly be the one to get me out of it, Holly knew. Once again, she tried to move her body, but as before, she couldn’t. Whatever drugs, tranquilizers, or paralyzers that the Earth Alliance Marine Corps had given her, they were definitely working.
“Earth is out of the question the way it is at the moment . . .”
What is wrong with Earth!? Holly thought in a moment of panic. She was Breaker born, meaning that she belonged to the Outer population of Earth descendants who lived on the asteroids and deep space stations as miners and industrial workers. Usually, there was no love lost between the Breakers and the Inner System worlds of Venus, Earth, and Mars.
But Holly, like every Breaker, still felt the refugee pull towards her species’ home world. Or was it regret that they would never get the chance to live there and experience it?
What had happened to Earth?
“No. Earth is completely out of the question. The nearest facility is Aries Station.”
Holly realized that she must be on Mars. But why not use any of the medical facilities there? The Red Planet was home to most of the Earth Alliance Marine Corps training camps—or had been, before the Thaal had tried to invade the planet of war.
“There is another way. A far better facility than anything we humans have,” Holly heard Rachel say. She heard a scoff of outrage, disgust, or shock—she couldn’t be sure. Maybe it was all four rolled into one. Then Dr. Crow continued speaking in the stunned silence.
“You know precisely what I am talking about. The stalled Thaal starcraft hanging right now above our heads. It’s dead. Its connection to the Thaal has been cut, and your marines have cleared it of any remaining fighters, haven’t you?”
“I, uhr, yes, I mean . . .” the second voice said, sounding stern and austere.
Commander Silas! Holly suddenly remembered. Once the strategic and tactical head of the Outer Command of the Alliance Marines, he had been Holly’s original commander. But since the Thaal attack on Mars, which had decimated the command structure, hadn’t he been elevated somehow? But Holly’s fuddled brain couldn’t keep up with the politics. She wondered if he had been promoted to Inner Group Commander or maybe even higher—the Marine War Council of Generals?
“I saw their technology aboard the starcrafts, and I am the one with the best knowledge of it. They have medical bays. Methods for enhanced regrowth, cellular regeneration,” the doctor said.
“Cellular what? No, never mind. I haven’t got time for the explanation. The idea is clearly out of the question. We have enough on our plate right now with the state of Earth and the Breaker Declaration.”
What declaration?! Holly’s mind burned with frustration as she tried to cry out, to moan, move a hand—do anything! She had to let them know that she was in here and that she needed to know what was going on. The Breakers were her people! After her family of marines, the Breakers were who she called family . . .
What had they done? Or what had been done to them?
“Commander, please. I understand your hesitancy, but this is precisely my point. We have four alien starcraft plus boatloads of Thaal relics, fallen war machines, and who knows what else littering our solar system,” Dr. Crow said.
“You know as well as I do the danger that creates. And I dare say there are many who are taking advantage of that alien technology even as we speak. I know that I would be. That is why we have to move now, right away. We need to understand and protect that technology, hold it in the right hands, for the good of all.”
Hol ly’s mind was starting to fuzz over again as the next wave of medicines transfused into her body. A sense of blissful peace flowed through her mind, and she could feel sleep creeping up to take her.
No! No—not yet! The Forward Recon captain tried to fight it, but she wasn’t strong enough. She was starting to be sucked back down to that welcoming blackness.
But she heard the parting words of Commander Silas and the doctor just before she fell into the blissful ignorance of sleep.
“I see. You think we can use Captain Cropper to test the Thaal technology—at the same time as we claim it for the Marine Corps?”
A pause.
“Commander, I am suggesting that we use it to save her life.”
2
Twenty-four hours ago, Hephaestus Station (Outer System)
Encrypted transmission: // :
Subrelay interlink connection—HORNET microservers . . .
Connecting . . .
Connecting . . .
Connecting . . .
“Check the hold! He’s down here somewhere!”
The heavy voice abruptly broke through Sergeant Marshal Smith’s concentration. He was trying to get the blinking lights on the small communication unit to light up in the right order.
They stubbornly weren’t.
“Stars dammit!” he hissed, looking behind him. There were lights shining down the cramped corridors to the third or fifth or whatever number of this rat warren hold it was, deep in the belly of the Breaker station, Hephaestus.
All around the marine from Forward Recon Eight were the mysterious workings of the deep space station, along with a colony’s worth of cargo and crates. Now, Sergeant Smith, Earth born and then lately of the marine recon vessel, the Hornet, was fairly good at technical engineering. It was his specialty, in fact.
But I still have no idea what half of this stuff is supposed to do, he thought. He looked at the giant, ancient, and rust-covered ceramic tubes, each one thrumming and groaning, some with display lights that dully flickered green or an alarming red. Next to this, he saw steel processing units, rubber compression bellows, and yes, many, many, and even more pipes and wires disorganized enough to drive a marine engineer like Smith insane.
So far, it had taken him a good forty minutes to isolate the command communications units for Hephaestus. Then he had to locate the subrelay systems, actual hardwired information transfer points that, with the right know-how and equipment, you could use to directly bypass the encryption and data-control measures that every station and vessel had.
And thus, presumably, allowing me to send messages back to the Inner Command . . . Marshal thought. He held his actual adjustment pin. Yes, an actual physical metal adjuster. He could have groaned as he tried to tease the tiny micropins on the unit that he had cobbled together. Just a little more . . . The fourth of the five connection lights on his makeshift comms device flickered a wary green before falling back to a warning orange.
Dammit! he hissed low between clenched teeth. What was with these Breakers and actual physical tech? Why couldn’t they use digital infrastructure like everyone else these days?
It made the job harder, but the sergeant had to admit it was more exciting in some ways. He would have to physically connect and alter the relays if he wanted this to work, a test of his skills and expertise.
“Hey! Over there! I see something!” The searching lights behind him suddenly flared, illuminating his shoulder, and Marshal flinched.
No! I need more time! He twisted the adjuster wildly, far harder than he meant to.
All five indicator lights flared green, a solid, strong connection. He had done it!
“There he is! The runaway! STOP!”
The sound of harsh, shouting voices and running feet erupted behind him. Coming for him.
“No—no—no!” Marshal didn’t know if he would get another chance at this. He hit the connect button, and the earphone in his ear, connected to the device in his hand by an actual physical cable, suddenly blurted:
Encrypted transmission: // :
Subrelay interlink connection—HORNET microservers . . .
Connecting . . .
Link connected!
“Marine private frequency alpha black seven oh five!” Marshal almost shouted over the tiny receiver, picking the private frequency that they had been given at the start of their mission. Every marine mission had a new frequency identifier allocated as a way to secure all mission communications. That way, the call handlers could easily work with each active mission.
Message connected!
“There he is! Stop him!” The thundering steps were right on top of him.
“Marine alpha black seven oh five! This is Sergeant Marshal Smith of the—” the young man managed to get out—before he was grabbed and thrown to one side, the jury-rigged communicator dashing across the floor.
“Ugh!” Marshal gasped as he hit one of the ceramic tubes. He remembered to fold himself into a roll as he went down on the hard, iron grillwork floor, turning himself over.
“Get him!”
Marshal kicked out, his boot smacking into the ankle of one of his Breaker attackers with a satisfying crunch and a squeal of pain. He heard the man go down.
The sergeant lunged out, his hands making for the heavy pistol the man had dropped.
Thump!
And he was hit in the back by a falling knee, something very cold and metallic pressed to his cheek. The muzzle of another gun, and the Breaker man kneeling on him prepared to fire.
“Don’t move, Earthie,” the man hissed, and Marshal, who liked keeping his brains inside of his cranium, dutifully obliged.
“It was worth a try,” he managed to sneer through his lips crushed against the floor. The third of the Breaker attackers crushed his makeshift comms device under his heavy metal boot with a shower of sparks and destroyed hopes.
Sergeant Marshal Smith was hauled to his feet, helped with a few judicious jabs to his stomach and back, and dragged through the cramped and narrow access corridors of the Breaker access station. The young man was in a daze for half of the journey but after spitting out the blood in his mouth from where he had bitten his lip, he was able to focus. He identified the lower engineering halls, the service ports, and the entrances to the large asteroid factories. Their arched doors blazed with orange light and heat as the Hephaestus worked night and day to process the captured asteroids and space rocks, extracting precious minerals and metals.
The Hephaestus was one of the largest of the Breaker stations, and he knew that it was their de facto capital—even if the Breakers would never admit to having a capital or a leader.
The breakers have worker syndicates and conglomerates. Marshal tried to remember his classes in geopolitics that he had taken long ago and far away on Earth.
All of the colonies of Earth still obeyed Earth. It was the central tenet that held the entire alliance of Inner and Outer worlds in place. But the diaspora of humanity across the Sol star system had been problematic for the last hundred years. The Breaker stations had become home to renegade classes of space pirates, smugglers, and Alliance rebels as the Breakers chafed under their harsh living and working conditions. There had even been an uprising twenty years ago, which the Earth Alliance Marines, almost entirely staffed by Inner service personnel, had viciously put down.
But these stations were still packed with people, Marshal saw. Tough looking, dirt-smeared, and ragged people who still toiled and worked in their factories and raced around their warren-like station with fierce pride.
Even though the Thaal almost wiped them off the face of the universe, Marshal thought.
“How do you even pay these people?” he managed to grumble as he was dragged, protesting, up yet another flight of steel stairs . . . and another . . . and another.
