Rise of Nimrod Fleet (The Contingency War Book 3) Read online

  RISE OF NIMROD FLEET

  PART THREE OF THE CONTINGENCY WAR SERIES

  G J OGDEN

  Copyright © 2019 G J Ogden

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Ogden Media Ltd

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by germancreative

  Editing by S L Ogden

  www.ogdenmedia.net

  The Contingency War Series

  No-one comes in peace. Every being in the galaxy wants something, and is willing to take it by force…

  Read the other books in the series:

  - The Contingency

  - The Waystation Gambit

  - Rise of Nimrod Fleet

  - Earth’s Last War

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Sarah for her work assessing and editing this novel, and to those who subscribed to my newsletters and provided such valuable feedback.

  And thanks, as always, to anyone who is reading this. It means a lot. If you enjoyed it, please help by leaving a review on Amazon and Goodreads to let other potential readers know what you think!

  If you’d like updates on future novels by G J Ogden, please consider subscribing to the mailing list. Your details will be used to notify subscribers about upcoming books from this author, in addition to a hand-selected mix of book offers and giveaways from similar SFF authors.

  http://subscribe.ogdenmedia.net

  ONE

  Two heavily-armed Hedalt warships surged out from the asteroid field and powered towards the Contingency One. They had lain in wait like ambush predators, using the dense sea of rocks as camouflage. Alarms blared out on the bridge, alerting the crew to the danger, and each of them ran to their stations with only seconds to act before the warships were within weapons range.

  “Casey, get us the hell out of here!” cried Commander Sarah Sonner, perched on the edge of her seat, but the gifted simulant pilot was already well ahead of her. Casey maneuvered the nimble Corvette away from the approaching ships and shunted all the power she could scrounge into the engines. But the larger vessels had a head-start and more powerful drive systems, and she quickly realized she couldn’t outpace them.

  “I turned tail and ran like a frightened rabbit the moment they appeared, Commander S,” replied Casey, sounding singularly unconcerned, as if they were merely escaping from an angry farmer who’d seen them trample his crops. “But they’ll still catch us, before we can jump.”

  Sonner pounded her fist on the arm of the chair and turned to Taylor Ray, who was at the mission ops console. “What are those things? Find me a weakness, anything we can use.”

  Taylor didn’t look up from the console, but summarized what he knew in shotgun bursts, “They’re reading as Corvus-class cruisers. Fifty per cent larger than us and heavily armed; forward plasma cannons, surface turrets, ablative armor… They’re damn tanks!” Then he looked over at Sonner and his silver simulant eyes conveyed his feelings as keenly as any human eyes could, “With Casey at the helm, we could maybe disable one, but two...”

  Taylor’s voice tailed off, but Sonner didn’t need him to finish; she knew how the sentence ended. She swung the command chair in the direction of the tactical console, where her younger brother, James Sonner, was stationed. James had assumed she’d turn to him next, and the wait had been agonizing, like staring up at the blade of a guillotine and wondering when it might fall.

  “Lieutenant Sonner, I’m afraid this falls on you,” Commander Sonner began, ensuring her tone was formal rather than familiar. She glanced down at the console in the arm of her chair and read the countdown timer on the jump computer. Even with the dirtiest set of jump calculations she’d ever seen, it would still be another two minutes before they could safely escape, and the Hedalt warships would be on them in seconds. “Casey can’t fly circles around those things forever, so we’re going to need you to inflict as much damage as you can.”

  “Aye, Commander,” James replied, trying to sound confident, but he was painfully aware in that moment of how fragile his voice was.

  “We don’t need to vaporize them, but if you pop a bully hard enough on the nose it might stop a while to think. Understand?” Sonner continued, “Just buy us enough time to jump the hell out of here!”

  “I’ll do my best, Commander,” said James meekly, before spinning his seat around to face the main viewport and accessing the forward cannons.

  It wasn’t a response that inspired a huge amount of confidence in his sister, and when she glanced across to Taylor, she imagined that his fretful expression probably mirrored her own.

  Casey’s cry of, “Hang on!” brought Sonner’s attention back into sharp focus, as the Corvette suddenly lurched to port, smearing the star field on the viewport into a blur of glowing streaks of light. “They’re right on top of us!” Casey added, hands and feet working frantically to keep the agile Corvette out of reach of the pursuer’s weapons. Shards of plasma flashed past, lighting up the bridge. “You know, it might be helpful if we shot back!”

  “Lieutenant...” said Sonner, staring at the back of her brother’s head and urging him to act.

  James was frantically trying to lock on to the lead ship with the turrets, but Casey’s chaotically brilliant flying was making it nearly impossible. “Casey, can you stop wiggling for a second so I can get a shot off!”

  “If I stop wiggling, they start destroying us,” replied Casey, eyes firmly fixed inside her pilot’s viewport, “but I’ll do what I can.”

  Casey brought the ship around and swung behind the trailing ship, slowing just enough to give the rookie Junior Lieutenant an opportunity to lock on. The chainsaw buzz of the port-side turret rattled through the deck and explosive rounds sailed past the wing of the Hedalt cruiser.

  “Damn it!” cried James, and then the ship was pounded twice, as if they had run into a couple of small asteroids. The bridge of the Contingency One was flooded with smoke as consoles exploded and circuits crackled and sparked. Sonner was hit by flying debris, which sliced a deep gash into her temple, and was then thrown to the deck, as a power conduit next to her chair overloaded. The blast split the deck in two like a fault line from a massive earthquake.

  Taylor darted over to check on Sonner as Casey veered them away from the trailing Corvus-class cruiser, narrowly avoiding another volley from its plasma cannons. He felt for a pulse, found one, and then sank into the command chair. The seat was covered in fragments of debris and metal, but to Taylor’s simulant skin, it was no less comfortable than a feather bed. He checked the console in the arm of the chair; the engines were undamaged, but the jump clock still had a minute to run before they could escape from the two stronger vessels.

  “Casey, try to keep the lead ship between us and that trailing cruiser; we don’t need two of those things firing at us,” Taylor called out.

  “Aye aye, Captain Taylor Ray,” sang Casey, changing course again as another shard of plasma flashed past the ship’s nose.

  Taylor looked over at James, who appeared to be staring at his console screen, as if in some kind of hypnotic trance. “Lieutenant,” Taylor called over, but there was no response. “James!”
he tried again, raising his voice to a shout, and this time James did look round. “Casey is going to bring us underneath the belly of the lead cruiser,” he continued, locking his silver orbs onto the young lieutenant’s tremulous eyes. “When she does, I need you to hit its engines. Set the turrets to manual control and use your instincts. This is our last shot to slow that thing down, got it?” James nodded with staccato jerks of his head and then turned back to face the console, but Taylor called his name again and he glanced back anxiously. “Take a breath, Lieutenant, you can do this. You have to do this, or we’re finished...”

  James turned again and started working his console as another series of quakes and shimmies shook the ship. Taylor looked down at his console and saw they’d been raked across the back by the lead ship’s more agile turrets; clearly they’d grown frustrated of Casey evading their big guns and had decided to inflict death by a thousand cuts instead. He glanced over to the genius pilot, whose silver simulant eyes were fixed on his own, waiting for Taylor to give the command. “Okay Casey, do your thing...”

  Casey smiled back at him and responded with her customary acknowledgment, before peering back into the pilot’s viewport and grasping the manual controls. Immediately, the Contingency One spun over and soared beneath the lead Hedalt cruiser, in a maneuver that should have ended with them colliding with the enemy ship head on, but as usual, Casey’s skill defied logic.

  “Any time now!” Taylor called out, as he watched the inexperienced Lieutenant frantically try to target the enemy cruiser, before the pressure got to him and he panic fired. In his mind, Taylor held his breath, though in reality he had no lungs with which to hold air in, and watched as the rounds danced towards the engines of the Hedalt cruiser. A handful of the projectiles landed on target, but it was not enough to penetrate the tougher ship’s thick ablative armor.

  James bowed his head and looked back at Taylor. “I’m sorry, Captain,” he said before they emerged from beneath the belly of the lead cruiser directly into the line of fire of its aft turrets. The Corvus cruiser opened fire and the bridge consoles exploded. Taylor and Casey were both flung to the deck, where they lay, motionless; silver eyes staring blankly upwards.

  James slumped down over his station as more explosions rocked the bridge, and bowed his head. “I’m sorry, Captain,” he repeated, softly so that only he could hear, despite being the only one left alive on the bridge.

  A second later the computer began to calmly cycle on repeat the announcement, ‘Warning, damage critical... Warning, damage critical…’ until its synthetic voice tailed off, like an ancient tape cassette playing too slowly. The main lights switched on in the simulator room and the pumps kicked in, whirring tirelessly to empty the replica bridge of smoke and dust. Consoles stopped crackling and the fissure in the simulator’s deck plating closed up, as if it had never been there.

  Commander Sonner got up first and dusted herself off, shortly followed by Taylor, but Casey remained on the deck. She had placed her hands under her head and was smiling serenely, as if relaxing in a hammock on an exclusive Hawaii beach resort.

  “Come on, Casey, you can sleep when you’re dead,” said Taylor.

  “I’ve been dead for over three hundred years, Cap,” said Casey, opening one eye at him, “and so have you, in case you’ve forgotten.” Taylor continued to stare at her expectantly. “Okay, fine, have it your way!” she conceded, springing to her feet. “I thought my death performance was the most spectacular, though.”

  “It’s not a competition, Casey,” said Sonner, gruffly, as she wiped the fake blood off her head, but then smiled and added, “but if it was then my dying act was clearly the best. Did you see how I threw myself out of the chair?”

  “I thought it was a bit overdone...” said Taylor, trying to play it with a straight face, but failing.

  “Am I the only one who doesn’t find this funny?” asked James, who had raised his chin off his chest to watch the others banter together. His comment seemed to flip a switch inside his older sister, like pressing a button that flash-froze her mood.

  “No, you’re the only one who shouldn’t find this funny, Junior Lieutenant,” she said, sharply. “The rest of us have run this sim a dozen times, and we’ve all seen real action too. If we’d messed up out there like you just did in here, then none of us would be talking to you now.”

  James was torn between straightening to attention, as would be expected when being given a dressing down by a commanding officer, and flipping the bird at his bossy older sister. He chose the former. “I’m sorry, Commander, I will do better next time.”

  Sonner sighed and retracted some of her spines, “No, there won’t be a next time,” she said levelly. “You’ll take the mission ops station and Captain Ray will remain at tactical.”

  “Yes, Commander,” said James, glumly.

  “Believe me, I’d rather we had the Captain’s expertise at mission ops,” Sonner went on, “because he’s a lousy shot too...”

  “Hey, that hurts!” Taylor butted in.

  “But, out there we don’t get a second chance,” Sonner continued, ignoring Taylor’s protestations, “and we don’t have any more time to train on it.”

  “I understand, Commander,” James answered, trying to sound more upbeat, “I won’t let you down.”

  Casey waltzed into the center of the bridge, winking kindly at James as she did so, and then rested an arm on Taylor’s shoulder before meeting Sonner’s curious eyes. “So, what are we up to next, Commander S?”

  Sonner pressed her hands to her hips and considered her response. In many ways, spending more time training was the smart option, and it also gave the new engineering crew that they’d recovered from the asteroid base more time to get the Nimrod Fleet fully prepared. But between their less-than-subtle heist of Casey and the black market transceiver from the Way Station, and their short battle with a Hedalt War Frigate, she knew that the Empire’s eyes would be turned on them. It was impossible to know how much they really knew – perhaps they suspected them to be nothing more than racketeers – but if there was any suggestion that Hedalt Warfare Command knew something of the Contingency then they had to act as quickly as possible to recover the flight crews, before the Hedalt found them first. She made her decision and announced it to the others, “We caused a real stink back at the Way Station, but there’s no suggestion that Warfare Command is on to us,” Sonner began, “So, for now, we use every second we have to prepare. That means we train for a few more days, while we have the chance. But we’ve done enough for today; you’re all dismissed for the evening.”

  “Aye aye, Commander Sarah Sonner,” sang Casey, practically skipping off the bridge of the combat simulator. Lieutenant James Sonner followed, and Taylor gave him a reassuring slap on the back as he passed, being careful to measure the strength of the blow so it didn’t knock him flat or crush any vertebrae. But as Commander Sonner made to leave, Taylor hung back, causing her to pause and look at him quizzically.

  “Thinking of some solo training?” quipped Sonner, but then she remembered her dig at him about being a lousy shot, “I didn’t mean what I said, by the way, you’re solid at tactical; just not as good as you are at mission ops, or command, that’s all.”

  “It’s not that,” said Taylor, trying to pluck up the courage to tell Sonner about his encounter with Provost Adra during his last jaunt through the Fabric. He’d told himself there had never been an opportune moment, but if he was honest with himself, there had been; he just didn’t want to have the awkward conversation. Now he could no longer put it off, because if Sonner was choosing to delay the mission to recover the reserve flight crews, under the false impression that Warfare Command was still in the dark about them, then she needed to know this was no longer the case.

  He fixed his silver simulant eyes on hers and said, “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  TWO

  Provost Adra’s War Frigate ploughed through the asteroid field, bouncing smaller rocks out
of its path as if they were nothing more than balls of cotton candy. In the center of the command platform Adra stood with her eyes closed, listening to the percussive thuds of the plasma turrets mounted all around the hull of the hawk-like ship pummeling the more threatening asteroids into dust. Unlike the incessant drone of the ship’s engines, she found this noise satisfying. It was the sound of power and dominance.

  “We are approaching the target asteroid now, Provost,” said Adjutant Lux from his station between the two pilot simulants at the front of the bridge. “I have displayed it on the viewport.”

  Adra opened her eyes and examined the enormous rock for the first time; though given its size, it would have been more accurate to describe it as a planetoid rather than an asteroid.

  “Our probes have emerged from the cave mouth and confirmed the presence of a concealed base,” Lux continued, before turning from his console to face Adra and await further orders.

  “Can we navigate inside?” asked Adra.

  “No, the cave entrance is too small,” replied Lux smartly. “I am readying your personal shuttle. It is compact enough to navigate through the connecting tunnel and reach the inner docking platform.” Adra nodded and Lux turned back to his console, continuing the preparations to board the asteroid base.

  It had been several days since they had tracked racketeer pirates to the star system, believing them to be pursuing the rogue Hunter Corvette that had swindled them out of valuable contraband back at the Way Station. Besides the giant asteroid field, there was nothing remarkable about the system, but Adra was convinced that the rogue simulant and his female human companion had been here, and so they had remained, scouring the asteroid field for any trace of them.

  The search had been impeded by the damage sustained during the battle with the racketeer reinforcements, but it had also allowed time for the ship to be repaired, and for Adra’s own wounds to heal. But now, they were finally closing in on what appeared to be a hidden human base.