Alpha Fleet (Rebel Fleet Series Book 3) Read online

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  Swarm

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  ALPHA FLEET

  (Rebel Fleet Series #3)

  by

  B. V. Larson

  Illustration © Tom Edwards

  TomEdwardsDesign.com

  Copyright © 2017 by Iron Tower Press, Inc.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the author.

  Rebel Fleet Series:

  Rebel Fleet

  Orion Fleet

  Alpha Fleet

  =1=

  After all the excitement of battle and adventure among the stars, coming home to Earth was… well… kind of boring. At first, the crew of my ship Hammerhead didn’t see it that way. They were glad to relax and answer countless questions in countless debriefings. As the crew of Earth’s only space-going warship, we were pretty important to the brass on our homeworld.

  It didn’t take long for the novelty to wear off, however, and Dalton was the first man to ask me about it.

  “When are we going out there again, Captain? I can’t bear to be stuck on this dull ball of dirt much longer. I’m going to go bonkers soon.”

  “They haven’t issued me any orders yet. In fact... we might not be crewmen anymore.”

  “What’s this?” he demanded with outrage. “Which cock-up got us blacklisted? I have to admit, it could have been anything—there were plenty.”

  “No, no, we didn’t screw the galactic space-pooch. But Hammerhead’s crew is considered a planetary treasure now. A resource of experience that is unique on Earth. In short, they want to turn us into instructors.”

  Dalton squinted at me for a moment, and I got the feeling he was trying to discern whether I was joking or not. When he made his decision, he gave me a dirty laugh.

  “Me? An instructor? I’ll give them both barrels, as you Yanks like to say.”

  He left then, chuckling evilly and shaking his head in amusement. I wasn’t quite sure what he had in mind, but knowing Dalton, I was certain no one else was going to enjoy it.

  The number of staffers at Space Command had grown over the last year. The old NORAD tunnels were too small to contain our swelling ranks. Most of the personnel were now housed outside the mountain in a freshly constructed series of imposing, government-looking buildings. They were growing like weeds all over the slopes of Cheyenne Mountain, with new roads being carved into the rocky slopes.

  There was something like a moat in front of the citadel-like base, with a lone road crossing it. The entire thing resembled a fortress. Guard towers, still freshly painted a tan color, were being assembled and placed all along the moat.

  I was standing on the top floor in the new executive building, and let me tell you, it was pretty nice. Big-budget features were in evidence everywhere. There were marble columns, statues, visiting politicians taking near-constant tours, and God-knew-what else in this formerly lonesome region of the Rocky Mountains.

  Without question, Space Command was where the action was these days. It was early spring, and as I stared through massive windows at the snow-topped peaks surrounding the base, I knew I should be feeling elated. But somehow, my eyes kept drifting up from the moat, the construction traffic and the marching lines of troops.

  Above it all was the sky. Beyond the streaky clouds the atmosphere thinned and turned a sheer blue, a color that was deceptive. Space was really black and white for the most part. It was a glittering river of white of stars on a background made up of endless night.

  “Leo?” a feminine voiced asked me. “Am I disturbing you?”

  It was Gwen, and I turned to flash her a smile. She’d clearly been talking to me, and I hadn’t been listening.

  “No,” I said, “of course not. I’m just reminiscing about the stars. Do you ever miss them?”

  “What? Fighting and dying in that frozen void?”

  “Yeah.”

  She was quiet for a second, then she sighed. “Yes, sometimes. Down here, everything seems so small. I remember when the Imperials first retreated. Commander Shaw and the rest of them were all depressed.”

  “Right. No more glory points for anyone after the war ended. Everyone going home, and the few professionals left in the Rebel Fleet were all stuck in dead-end jobs.”

  Gwen stepped to my side and gazed upward, standing with her hands clasped behind her back.

  “It’s been nearly a year,” she said. “People are beginning to think the Imperials won’t be back for another millennium. Did you hear they want to disband our whole crew and turn us into instructors?”

  “I did hear that,” I said. “That’s what the meeting here in this conference room is about.”

  She looked around, startled. “That’s why you’re here early, isn’t it? You’re never early.”

  “This is a big one.”

  “What are you going to ask for?”

  I glanced at her. “You mean in terms of rank?”

  She nodded.

  I turned back to the window and shrugged. “I don’t care. If they think it’s the best way I can serve the build-up effort, I guess I’ll go along.”

  “Going along to get along? That’s not like you.”

  Heaving a sigh, I gave her another shrug. If the truth were to be told, I was a little torn up about it. Earth had built more than twenty phase-ships like Hammerhead over the last year—but I’d been passed over for an appointment to command any of them.

  The new vessels were sleeker, faster and more deadly than my ship had been—but there were certain elements aboard the original ship that our techs had yet to duplicate. There were characteristics of the ship’s hull and equipment that were still beyond human engineering.

  That was because parts of Hammerhead had been cannibalized from the alien-built heavy fighter I’d brought home to Earth. There were some things Dr. Abrams and his team had yet to figure out.

  The thought made me smile. The technical challenge was probably driving Abrams mad.

  “You two need some time alone?” a booming voice asked from behind us.

  We turned to see General Vega. He was the base commander, and we’d never gotten along very well.

  He was laughing at his own joke, messing around with a laptop as he set up a station at the front of the room. Gwen and I had been a romantic couple once—but that was all in the past. Some people, like Vega, still liked to bring it up whenever they found us together even today.

  “We’re just the early birds, sir,” Gwen said. Her tone wasn’t as light as her words. I could tell she was pissed off about Vega’s innuendos, but she was trying to hide it. “I’ll go check on the staffers,” she said. “They should have been here by now.”

  She hustled away, and Vega’s eyes lingered on her as she passed by.
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  When his eyes swiveled back to me, he shook his head. “I don’t see why you pissed that away for some furry thing with a tail.”

  That comment made me suck in a breath. I wanted to let go with some shouting, but I held back.

  “We all have our private lives, sir,” I said.

  He shook his head, tapping at his computer. “Don’t know what’s wrong with a human woman,” he muttered. “But that’s not what we’re talking about today, is it?”

  “No sir.”

  “I hear your bucking for a promotion.”

  I blinked in confusion. “Not that I’m aware of, General.”

  He chuckled again and shook his head. He tapped at a screen to open a file. A memo was displayed in the midst of the conference table. From any angle, it appeared to face the viewer. It was a nice trick they’d gleaned off the alien perception gear we’d captured over the years.

  “Right here,” he said. “On August 2nd and again in November—and lastly in March. You’ve put off entreaties to join the ranks of our instructional staff here at the Mountain.”

  “Uh... that’s true, sir. But nowhere did I mention a promotion.”

  “Only a fool would put it in print, and whatever people say Blake, you’re no fool. Why would a man resist a transfer into an easy life on the most important military base on Earth? No one would, of course. Only a man who’s holding out for a better offer would even pretend. So, what’s your next move?”

  Startled, I shrugged. “I was hoping for a command position, General. On one of the ships we’ve been commissioning every three weeks.”

  “Right…” he said, nodding and tapping at his computer. “I knew you’d try that play. What’s next? Threatening to resign if we don’t give you your due...? That’s the endpoint of this negotiation, isn’t it? Maybe we should jump ahead to that moment right now.”

  I was finally beginning to frown. Vega was the kind of man who grew more irritating the longer you talked to him—about anything.

  “Nowhere in those documents did I threaten to resign,” I pointed out.

  “No—and again, you’re playing this masterfully, boy. You know how important you are to Earth’s defense efforts. If it was anyone else other than the great Leo Blake, we’d have simply ordered you to a new post. If they’d wanted to bail out, we’d have let them. But you and your people are special. You know we need you, and you’re squeezing. I can hardly blame you for that—even if it’s somewhat unethical.”

  My frown grew. Before I could reply, however, I heard the swelling sound of voices in the hallway outside. I paused, eyeing the entrance. I expected a gaggle of staffers to join us, but they kept on walking. They sounded excited.

  “Um...” I said, gesturing toward the hallway. “What’s going on, General? Isn’t this supposed to be a larger meeting? Why are we the only two people in here?”

  “It’s all nonsense,” Vega said, waving away my words as if they stank. “After the last war, everyone is jumping at shadows.”

  “What kind of shadows?”

  “Some nerd spotted a few shimmers out in far orbit, a few million kilometers out. Some say it’s a breach opening, but I say that’s nonsense. We know now that events like this appear naturally once in a while.”

  “I see...”

  “Back to the matter at hand,” he continued. “Will you or won’t you accept a position under my command as a full-fledged instructor?”

  “I didn’t return to Earth’s service in order to teach.”

  “Come on, man,” he said earnestly, leaning forward. “We need you. We need your experience. I can’t have just one experienced crew the next time war heats up. I want a hundred teams who’ve been trained by that one experienced crew.”

  “Yeah...” I said, turning back toward the window again. “I get that. Normally, I’d try to weasel out of your trap. But you’re right. I can better serve Earth by training new crewmen. Just tell me this, General. If I take the job, will you put me back into command service someday later on?”

  “Of course!” he purred happily. “That’s always been assumed! No one is putting a tiger like you out to pasture, Blake. You have too many fine qualities as a line officer.”

  “That’s what I thought,” I said, knowing he was lying. As an accomplished bender of facts myself, it wasn’t hard to detect false statements coming from another.

  “Well then,” Vega said with delight in his voice. “The rest of this meeting will focus on how we get the other key members of your team to join us. What do you think would be the best—?”

  He broke off, as an excited group of staffers spilled into the conference room. There were five of them, and Gwen was in the lead.

  “Sirs?” she asked breathlessly. “I tried to contact you both, but you’re syms are blocking me out.”

  “That’s what I always do when I have an important meeting,” General Vega said stiffly. “I hate interruptions while I’m handling people who are physically present. I don’t even see how you young people can get anything done with your syms buzzing in your brains all the time.”

  One key piece of tech Earth had spread around their armed services was the sym. Our “syms” were symbiotic life forms that lived inside our bodies and linked us to technology around us. The original form of the biological implants weren’t entirely innocuous, as they could be influenced by any high-ranking member of the Rebel Kher. My sym was one of those original versions.

  For the benefit of the standard soldier, Dr. Abrams had managed to clone my sym and perform gene-splicing alterations upon it. According to him, his modern Earth-grown syms were immune to outside influences. I wondered if that was really true, as the Rebel Kher had never returned to challenge his assertions.

  “The techs think it’s an arrival event,” Gwen explained. “A breach.”

  “Confirmation?” Vega asked. “Ship sightings?”

  “Not yet, General.”

  “No, I thought not. False alarms every day. Why was I put in command of such an excitable bunch of kids?”

  The staffers took offense to this, and they began to argue with General Vega about the importance of their news, but I ignored them all. I opened up my sym and used it to reach toward the sensor arrays surrounding the base.

  I still had the clearances needed to pass security. My mind reached effortlessly through the radio waves, then deeper to the physical wires, then lastly out to the instruments themselves. Collecting all the latest data of significance, I let my sym absorb the raw stream for perhaps five seconds before urging it to formulate a grand overview. A big-picture took another few seconds to coalesce.

  When it did, I staggered and gasped. Everyone looked at me.

  With a tossing motion of my hand, I cast what I was seeing to the conference table, which dutifully transformed it into a hanging, three-dimensional image in our midst.

  The final image rapidly filled in and sharpened as my sym kept collating details. A spinning rift was growing in far orbit. It had appeared between the Earth and her sole loyal companion, the Moon.

  Everyone stopped chattering. They all stared in fascination. Someone—something—was coming to visit us. No one could deny it when they saw the rift—not even General Vega.

  A starship was about to arrive. Would it be friendly or hostile? There was no way of knowing.

  =2=

  It didn’t take long for the techs to perform the same analysis I’d done, and they quickly came to the same conclusions.

  Alarm spread quickly over the base. Air raid sirens wound up, singing their long, low, mournful note from a dozen towers. The noise reverberated off the granite walls of the mountains surrounding us until it was almost unbearable.

  “You’d better hope these visitors nuke this place, Blake,” Vega told me as he rushed out of the conference room to the control center. “Because that’s the only way you’re getting out of your new duties.”

  Before I could assure him I had no intention of resisting his plans, he was gone. Without an o
fficial role in the operation of the base—I’d been a glorified PR rep for months—I moved back to the windows and stared upward. With the naked eye, I couldn’t make out anything unusual.

  The temptation to use my sym again to monitor the situation proved unbearable. I closed my eyes, cast outward with my mind, and watched events unfold in space beyond the clouds.

  At first, the situation was unclear. I could see the swirling rift, a riot of colors painted with dusted, gauzy lights. It wasn’t until I overlaid our own naval positioning that I got the picture.

  Our tiny ships were moving in. They were all phase-ships, invisible because they weren’t entirely located in our dimension of space. Using their only advantage, stealth, they crept toward the rift from multiple angles.

  My mind raced as I watched. Three of our ships were close enough to reach the region. Earth’s new fleet wasn’t much, not by the standards of the more established Rebel Kher worlds. Some of our older siblings could field hundreds of large vessels. All we had was a score of sneaky ships that employed tech we barely understood.

  The breach widened, and I could see stars through it. I gasped aloud, and I wasn’t the only one. Another voice gasped behind me at the same moment.

  I opened my eyes and turned to find someone behind me. I also saw I’d left the streaming feed open, and it was still being relay to the conference table. The rift was there, spinning in a ghostly fashion above the flat glassy surface.

  “Blake,” Lt. Commander Jones said, “tell me this isn’t really happening.”

  “Sorry,” I said, “but it’s real. That feed is from space—that’s what our sensors are picking up right now.”

  “A rift is opening? How far out?”

  “Maybe three hundred thousand kilometers above us. Just beyond the orbit of the Moon.”

  “Why would they do that? Why would they choose to come out right there?”