Shadow Space Chronicles 1: The Fallen Race Read online

  The Fallen Race

  by Kal Spriggs

  Published by Sutek Press

  The Fallen Race Copyright 2013 Jacob Spriggs

  Cover Image Copyright 2013 Jacob Spriggs

  Books by Kal Spriggs

  The Renegades Series

  Renegades: Deserter's Redemption

  Renegades: The Gentle One

  Renegades: Declaration

  Renegades: Ghost Story

  Renegades: A Murder of Crowe's

  The Shadow Space Chronicles

  The Fallen Race

  The Shattered Empire (Forthcoming)

  The Eoriel Saga

  Echo of the High Kings (Forthcoming)

  Contents

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Epilogue

  Diagrams

  About the Author

  Other Books by Kal Spriggs

  Kal Spriggs on Facebook

  Kal's Website

  CHAPTER I

  June 1, 2402 Earth Standard Time

  Venture System

  Nova Roma Empire

  The seven remaining ships of Convoy 142 writhed at the heart of a maelstrom.

  Baron Lucius Giovanni clutched at the arms of his command chair as the enemy fire battered the War Shrike yet again. The short, dark haired man peered at his displays with dark, almost black, eyes. His black and silver vac suit bore the eagle symbol of Captain's rank on the collar, and his shoulder bore a patch with the snarling wolf's head of Nova Roma. He acknowledged the fresh round of damage reports. His eyes went to his Executive Officer, “Tony, can you get anything past their cruiser screen?”

  Commander Doko shook his head. The confines of the battleship's bridge seemed even tighter with the acrid stench of ozone and shorted electronics. “No, sir. Their cruiser's firefly systems are too strong.”

  Lucius rolled his tongue around a mouth that felt dusty and tasted like ash. His eyes went to the sensor plot that showed what remained of the ships of the convoy. As he watched, the destroyer Sicarius dropped out of the formation in a broad cloud of debris and with far too few escape pods. “Very well, keep hammering their cruisers.”

  Lucius looked over at his brother in law, “Any new orders from Commodore Torrelli?”

  “No, sir,” Commander Reese Giovanni-Leone said from the communications section. Everyone on the bridge had expected one command from Torrelli ever since the initial ambush. One battleship couldn't take on six dreadnoughts, not with any chance of survival. But if they charged into the enemy formation they would disrupt it. That might save the convoy.

  The hell of it was, Lucius would rather take that chance than watch the convoy slowly vanish under the enemy guns. Soon enough they'd lose enough sensors or weapons and the enemy missiles would get through. They'd already had the bad luck to jump in on the Chxor force in close vicinity to Venture's refueling station. The escorts couldn't survive that firepower much longer and the merchant ships would not survive after that.

  “Don't know why he's waiting,” Lucius muttered. His ship rocked again under multiple impacts. “Not like the bastard can't be happy about the chance to give that order.”

  ***

  Commodore Vito Torrelli grimaced as the Augustus shuddered. The elderly dreadnought had held up far better than the convoy's other escorts. The forty year old dreadnought had far more resilience and armor than the other ships in the convoy. Even so, an early hit had opened the bridge to vacuum and slaughtered most of his navigation section. Other hits had wrought serious damage on the old ship. Commodore Torrelli was well aware that his ship was bound to Nova Roma for extensive refits even before all of that damage. “Order the War Shrike to close in on Regal's aft quarter.” He grimaced as he saw Lucius Giovanni's ship swing into position immediately.

  He could almost see the aloof expression of the other ship's commander. He wants me to send his ship into the throat of the guns... wants to die a hero's death, Torrelli thought... as if that could ever make up for what his father did. “I won't give him that honor,” Torrelli muttered. He noticed a flicker on one of the enemy cruiser's firefly systems. “Guns, focus on cruiser three, hammer me a gap so we can hit these bastards!”

  The enemy dreadnoughts hid behind the massive, pancake-shaped defense screens of the cruisers. Those overlapped screens and the massive jamming of the cruiser's firefly systems counteracted the better targeting systems of the Nova Roma warships.

  As Vito Torrelli watched the displays, he could hear the unvoiced criticisms from his rival. It felt like he could feel Lucius's breath on the back of his neck. “Dammit! Get me a shot!”

  ***

  “That bastard can fight,” Lucius said. The Augustus had received the brunt of the enemy's fire. A comet's trail of debris, air, and water vapor trailed behind the battered dreadnought, but Commodore Torrelli continued to fight.

  “Cruiser three just went down, sir, I've got a shot!” Commander Doko shouted. A moment later both warships poured their fire through the suddenly opened gap and into the dreadnought left exposed. Every remaining gun and missile tube aboard the War Shrike fired into the gap.

  Lucius snarled as explosions rocked the enemy vessel. A massive cloud of debris enveloped the lead Chxor dreadnought. “Looks like we gave them something to remember us by!” The Chxor formation adjusted though, and a moment later the damaged dreadnought disappeared again behind the defense screen of another cruiser.

  “Sir! Augustus just sent Code Black!” Reese said.

  Lucius felt his stomach drop. The other warship lay only a hundred kilometers distant, close enough for visual. He looked at his sensor repeater just in time to see the dreadnought's port side engines erupt in a chain of explosions. The massive ship began to rotate as its starboard engines threw it into a spin. The stresses over-taxed the ship's frame and the midships section ripped apart in a slow-motion avalanche of sheering steel.

  He watched as four thousand crew died... and he could do nothing.

  Lucius let out a tight breath. Only five ships remained and Convoy 142 had a new commander. His eyes raked across his navigation display. The civilian ships didn't have the acceleration to escape the Chxor. They didn't have the time to calculate a jump through shadow space to take them elsewhere. Even if he threw his ship at the Chxor, the remaining transports couldn't elude the enemy, not without someone to screen them.

  “Message to all ships,” Lucius said, his voice suddenly hoarse. “Prepare and execute blind jump immediately.”

  There was a sudden silence on the bridge.

  “Solarius Endeavor, Unicorn, and Trade Enterprise acknowledge,” Lucius's brother in law said. “Regal reports damage to their jump drive and that they'll have it up as soon as they can.”

  Lucius felt a cold mask settle over his face. The War Shrike couldn't take the full firepower of the Chxor, not for long. “Tell them to expedite and that we'll cover them until they jump.” He watched as the other three civilian ships jumped away into shadow. He wondered if any of them would emerge again. As if on cue, a fresh barrage swept in from the Chxor ships. Alarms wailed and Lucius felt the deck heave as multiple beams tore into his ship. His eyes focused on the inbound missile tracks. Without the Augustus, they'd lost most of their interceptor fire.

  Lieutenant Livian
us's hands flew across his station. He took the sensor data and picked off the missiles one after the other. His precise shots almost stopped them all, but two missiles slipped past his fire. One swept past as the helmsman continued his evasive maneuvers. The proximity fuse detonated only five kilometers in front of the War Shrike. The Chxor used missiles based off of captured human munitions. Fundamentally identical to the pilum ship-killer missiles, they packed a sixty megaton fusion warhead.

  The sudden burst of radiation hammered into the War Shrike's magnetic fields that held the plasma defense screen in place. The massive induction coils exploded like bombs at the massive surge of power. One exploded out into Engine Room Three and killed fifty-eight crew. The other detonated only fifty meters away from the bridge. The four armored bulkheads between there and the bridge absorbed some of the effect. The aft bulkhead of the bridge shattered.

  Shards of steel whipped through crew members and equipment alike. Half the weapons techs died before they knew what hit them. The concussion ripped Lieutenant Livianus out of his shock chair and smashed him against the forward bulkhead hard enough to leave a red smear. One shard flew like a spear and slammed into the back of the communications officer's chair. Lucius's brother-in-law let out a scream of agony as it bit through his left shoulder. Lucius's gaze locked on the shard of metal that pinned Reese to his seat. He felt something twist in his own guts as he heard Reese's scream.

  The explosion itself vaporized fifty meters of armored hull and opened the ship's entire forward section to vacuum. The hard radiation and the wave superheated plasma took the lives of two hundred more of Lucius's crew in an instant.

  The first missile's simple tracking system lost the War Shrike and continued past.

  The Regal had no countermeasure systems to prevent that missile from acquisition. The missile detonated on top of the unarmored transport. It vaporized the aft end of the vessel and sent the ship's fusion plant into overload. Lucius grunted in anguish as the seventy five civilians aboard died almost instantly.

  Lucius shook his head to clear it. His sensors told him that only his ship remained. He cut his seat restraints and staggered through the smoke and noise of the bridge. He shoved a corpse off the top of the navigation station. Lucius flipped up the clear plastic cover, the surface slick with blood.

  His fist hammered down on the jump initiator.

  ***

  June 1, 2402 Earth Standard Time

  Deep Space

  When a ship plotted a jump through shadow space, it took hours for a navigation computer to run the calculations. The complex nature of shadow made up most of this time. Other factors of that time, however, lay in the gravity-induced shear forces and changes in relativistic frame involved in transitioning from one part of the universe to another without passage through the space between.

  On a blind jump, a navigation computer input a null code for the destination. The ship could emerge a thousand kilometers or a hundred light years away, if it emerged at all. And a blind jump didn't take those other factors into effect. A ship might emerge only to be ripped in half by tidal forces. Or it might hurl into some bit of space detritus at a huge difference in relative velocities.

  Fortunately, the War Shrike emerged in empty space. Unfortunately, the tidal forces sent the ship into a sharp axial spin. The ship's inertial compensator adjusted, but for a moment the crew experienced fifteen gravities of acceleration.

  The harsh tang of ozone and the arrhythmic staccato of arcing electricity brought Baron Lucius Giovanni out of a delusional nightmare and into a nightmare of reality.

  Consciousness brought with it a spitting headache and nausea. Lucius retched all over the deck and his vac suit. The shriek of damage alerts and the cries of the wounded began anew. He lost only seconds to his brief lapse of consciousness due to the unguided transition from real space to Shadow and back to the real universe.

  His sister’s husband hadn’t yet bled out from the shard of steel that pinned him into his chair. “Medical team to the bridge,” Lucius croaked into the intercom.

  Injured and dead men lay scattered across the bridge deck. One or two others stumbled to aid the worst wounded. Lucius moved forward to help Reese, but at that moment the bridge medic team moved in and one of them shook his head at him, “We’ll handle this, sir.”

  Lucius nodded and retreated to his command chair. He swept a hand across the front of his vac suit. That only smeared the filth that caked him. He took a few breaths to calm himself and forced himself to focus. First thing to do, he knew, was to run a diagnostic of his ship.

  From his chair he activated his command displays. The three dimensional projections were visible to him, but would appear as only blurs of light to someone else. Life-support, engineering, defense systems and weapons; all the absolutely necessary systems retained most of their functions or would, at least, for the next six hours. He hadn’t known the extent of damage to the ship before he made the jump.

  His lips drew up into a predatory snarl. The War Shrike remained intact; the ambushers hadn’t smashed the his ship entirely. And with time, he would return to gift the Chxor with that knowledge.

  Reports came in from the damage control teams as they tried to get systems up. Petty officers directed repair crews and medical support to where they were needed most. Someone, Lucius thought he heard his XO's voice, dispatched repair teams to the essential areas of the vessel. With the certainty that his ship would not explode or dissolve beneath him, Lucius had a moment to study the space that in all probability would be his final resting place.

  “Navigation, what do we have?” He asked, his throat feeling raw. He looked over at the man at the navigation console. He felt a shock to see a tech at the main console. Ensign Camila and Lieutenant Divore and their petty officers are all down?

  “Not much, Captain.” The navigation tech’s hoarse voice answered. “I'm confirming our location now, but the initial run shows us only five light years away from Venture. The nearest inhabited system is Fey Darran.”

  Lucius grimaced at the short distance they had gained. A blind jump could have taken them a thousand light years as easily as five, but the tiny distance covered made it more likely that any Chxor forces that searched would discover them soon enough. “Fey Darran?” Lucius asked and his eyes narrowed. “That’s a quarantined world, correct?” He forced his gaze away from where the medical team worked frantically. Commander Reese Giovanni-Leone would live or die; Lucius had to save his ship. Alanis would understand. I have to stay focused... he thought. Fey Darran lay out on the very edge of human space, and the world had gone into quarantine before Lucius's birth, if he remembered right. Some kind of plague, one dangerous enough that the survivors maintained quarantine.

  “Yes. It’s only a few hours away in Shadow. The next nearest world belongs to the Republic, Anvil, and that’s five days away in Shadow.”

  Lucius shook his head. He forced his eyes to focus on the symbols. There wasn’t a good choice between the two. Fey Darran would prove no refuge with a plague. At the Anvil system, the Colonial Republic would be as likely to open fire on sight of the War Shrike as welcome them. For that matter, half of Anvil's security forces were little better than pirates. “Anything else that’s closer?”

  “No, sir. I’m reading only a handful of systems nearby, but our logs for this area are old. Mostly uncharted systems. The Imperial Fleet hasn’t had much interest in this region.”

  That was something of an understatement, Lucius knew. Nova Roma's Imperial Fleet had ignored this section of space as a backwater for decades. Lucius sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to think. They needed time and that was something they just didn’t have. He looked at the list of systems, almost all of them listed only an alphanumeric rather than a name. All but one. That caught his eye: Faraday. “Nothing else on this system?” he asked as he highlighted that one.

  “Negative sir. No worlds or stations listed, just a name, and the type of star, G-class.”

&n
bsp; “How far?” Lucius asked. If the star had a name, perhaps he’d find something there worth naming.

  The navigation tech remained silent for a long moment, “Seven hours.”

  Lucius looked at his control screen. He opened a channel to the engine room. A haggard old man met his eyes. “James, how long do we have?”

  Commander James Harbach had been a professor at the Academe of Science on Nova Roma, before being drafted to the Fleet. His lank white hair, well out of regulation cut, hung down in his eyes. Soot and stains covered his engineering vac suit. Deep lines cut his face and made him look even older than his already considerable age. “Well, I might keep the reactors up, for ten more hours or so. After that… I just don’t know. We can make shadow space, for now. But once the containment coils go, and I’m not sure how they’re holding, we won’t go anywhere.” As always there was a whine to his tone that set Lucius's teeth on edge.

  “Ten hours? Make your men ready for shadow space.” Lucius closed off the channel.

  ***

  June 2, 2406

  Faraday System

  Unclaimed Space

  Alarms wailed as the ship exited shadow space. More alarmingly, the floor heaved, and the ship itself groaned. Lucius had not moved from the bridge, “What was that?”

  “Gravitational anomaly, sir, it pulled us off course. It looks like the system is a lot more active than we thought.”

  “How much more active?” Lucius asked as he took his seat.