Revolution: The Ship Series // Book Two
Read Revolution: The Ship Series // Book Two Online
Authors: Jerry Aubin
Praise for
Revolution
Aubin has done it again!
Revolution: The
Ship Series Book Two
is a darker and deeper sequel to
Landfall
filled with heart, humor, and page-turning adventure. Aubin takes us into the
hidden workings of The Ship and the restless strata of civilians ripe for
rebellion.
Revolution
continues the thrilling ride of
The Ship
series with new threats, new allies, and surprises around every corner.
- Owen Egerton, author of
Everyone
Says That at the End of the World
If you
purchased this book without a cover it would be pretty surprising. You’re
missing a cool cover! Go out and buy a copy that actually has a cover.
This is a work
of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the
author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events
or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright ©
2015 Jerry Aubin
Illustrations
copyright © 2015 Jerry Aubin
All rights
reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
For any
information, please contact
[email protected]
.
The main text of
this book was set in Georgia.
The chapter
title text was set in Avenir.
Lekanyane
Publishing
Austin //
Amsterdam // Cape Town // Sydney // Christchurch
ISBN 978-0-9970708-3-5
(pbk)
ISBN 978-0-9970708-2-8
(ebk)
For K, P, W, and Q.
What the hell were
you thinking, Zax?
Just protecting the Ship one pipe full of
sewage at a time.
They get all the benefit and we bear all the
cost.
Pretty effective, if I do say so myself.
We know they are out there somewhere.
With all due respect, sir, we shouldn’t split up.
You can thank Captain Clueless over there.
We can pretend all of that silliness never happened.
We can’t let you have all the fun today.
He will be awake in thirty mins.
Permission to speak freely, sir?
I know exactly what I'm doing.
You need to look at the big picture.
I need you out of that suit, Corporal.
The fate of the Ship is in your hands right now.
Will you actually shoot this time?
There’s nothing you can do, Zax!
She's in for the surprise of her life.
I'm making good on that promise.
What the hell were you thinking,
Zax?
An
explosion flared on his viewscreen when Zax shattered the enemy spacecraft with
a burst of blue ion pulses. Three more dull-gray alien orbs, each bristling
with plasma cannons, maneuvered behind him and prepared to fire. He attempted
to escape by accelerating his fighter straight into the heart of the expanding
blast. Flying through the remnants of your opposition wasn’t a recommended
evasive maneuver given the likelihood of damaging your own craft, but it was
the best of the bad options Zax had left for himself.
The fighter screens tinged orange from the burning
wreckage of the enemy, and a sharp
crack
signaled that Zax’s fighter had
collided with something sizeable enough to ruin his day. Damage alarms wailed
and flashed as the fighter refused to respond to his commands.
“What the hell were you thinking, Zax? You were
supposed to back off and wait until Red 23 could provide cover, but instead you
dove in and engaged this group all on your own. If you managed to hit that
debris from a slightly different angle, we’d be part of that explosion right
now!”
Kalare was not always a fan of his piloting choices, but
she seemed especially pissed today. Zax often wondered whether she regretted
her choice to fly with him as his Weapons System Operator. He was grateful to
share the fighter with his only friend, but he sometimes fantasized about
having a WSO who just shut up and let him fly however he saw fit.
“Point taken, Kalare. How bad’s the damage?”
“There’s a load of problems, but the biggest is
secondary weapons control got totally fried. Give me another couple secs, and I
will get primary weps back online and flight control stable—for now.”
A different alert squawked and pulled his attention back
to the threat board. Red 23 finally caught up with them but immediately came
under heavy fire from the same aliens Zax managed to dodge. His disabled
craft’s uncontrolled inertia carried him away from the battle, so Zax was
unable to do anything but watch in grim silence as the enemy overwhelmed his
wingman with a rain of fiery plasma. An alien shot found its target, and Zax
averted his attention from the viewscreen so he wouldn’t witness the smooth
silver needle of Red 23’s fighter rupture into a million fragments.
A piercing tone cycled on and off and provided Zax with
a moment of relief. The noise signaled that the pilot and WSO of Red 23 had not
died when their fighter was destroyed. The armored Core which protected the
biological matrix containing their minds had instead been ejected successfully.
The Ship would deploy a Search and Rescue craft to collect the Core and their
consciousnesses would be returned to their waiting bodies onboard the Ship. Zax
called the Commander, Air Group using her call sign.
“Cobra—Red 23 is gone, but I’ve got pings showing
their Core ejected successfully. We going to get any more help out here?
They’re relatively slow and reasonably stupid, but these aliens outnumber us by
at least a hundred to one and we’re getting chewed up pretty bad.”
“You’re damn right about how we need more help, Z. Your
wingman’s Core is floating uselessly and your fighter is practically toast as
well—all because you couldn’t manage to follow my orders and stay with him.
Head back to the Ship immediately before you take any more damage and I need
two SAR birds out here to collect two Cores.”
Zax held his frustration in check and replied,
“Aye-aye,
CAG.”
He considered complaining to Kalare about the commander’s directive
but abstained knowing she’d likely use it as yet another opportunity to
admonish him about his questionable piloting choices. Kalare restored flight
control a short time later, and Zax turned his craft back towards the Ship.
It took 190 secs for Zax to weave his way through the
clusters of enemy spacecraft and reach the leading edge where they had been thinned
out and were no longer a threat. He was still a tremendous distance away from
the Ship, but his augmented viewscreen allowed him to make out the craggy
outlines of its massive rocky base as well as the twinkling lights from the
millions of viewports which adorned the structures along its upper half. The
CAG had ordered him to return, but she hadn’t been explicit about how fast he
needed to get there. Zax reduced his speed to five percent. If he wasn’t
allowed to fight, he might as well hang around and observe what he was missing.
“Kalare—can you please give me an expanded threat
board?
”
“Sure thing, Zax. Are you upset about being pulled
from the battle? I bet you’re upset about being pulled from the battle. If you
were looking at the same damage readouts I’m seeing, you’d totally agree with
the CAG. Besides, now we can watch what all of the other fighters are doing and
learn from them. I always think it can be super useful to watch the more
experienced pilots and WSOs to see how they handle situations in the middle of
an engagement. Like Red 12 there. Did you see how she destroyed those four
alien craft in front of her? After she did it, she inverted herself 180 degrees
and avoided their debris field altogether. She could do that because her
wingman was right there with her and had kept her six clear of any trailing
aliens. I think that was a pretty smooth move. Don’t you agree that was a
smooth move?”
Zax was thrilled that he and Kalare were communicating
at the speed of thought over their fighter’s neural network. It meant any
monologues would flash by in an instant as compared to how long it would take
if she was physically speaking to him. He probably should be more sensitive to
Kalare's feedback since they’d both be dead if their fighter was ever annihilated
to the point its Core was destroyed. The odds of that happening were slim,
though, so her passive-aggressive critique of his piloting rankled. He decided
to let it pass and silence filled the virtual space between them rather than
the sarcastic reply he had on the tip of his virtual tongue.
The threat board would look like a random maelstrom of
activity to most people, but Zax had always possessed a preternatural ability
to tease patterns out of chaos. After a short period of intense focus, he recognized
a new threat emerging. Six of the enemy spacecraft maintained a tight formation
and allowed an unending stream of their fellow pilots to sacrifice themselves
as a moving shield against the Ship’s fighters. The sheer number of identical
fighters made it impossible for the humans in the middle of it all to pay
attention to any one alien craft versus another. Since Zax watched the big
picture from afar, he recognized the subtle shifting of the enemy movements
which protected the six fighters and allowed them to approach the edge of the
battle zone closest to the Ship.
The six alien craft moved together until they appeared
as a single fighter on the threat board and accelerated en masse towards the
Ship. At the same instant, all of the remaining alien craft stopped battling
the human fighters around them, swiveled in the direction of the Ship, and
unleashed a continuous barrage from their plasma cannons. The aliens were far
enough from the Ship that even such concentrated fire wouldn’t do serious
damage to the vessel, but the rain of plasma bolts destroyed all of its
defenders which were in the formation’s path.
“Kalare—did you see what just happened there? We’ve
got to stop that group of fighters speeding towards the Ship!”
Zax vectored his fighter towards the aliens and pushed
its acceleration close to the maximum. The Ship’s fighters were designed for
situations just like this one. A human pilot would never survive the staggering
g-forces generated during such high-speed maneuvers. With their bodies back on
board the Ship, all Zax and Kalare experienced was a sensation of movement
carefully calibrated to provide their minds with a “feel” for what was
physically happening with their fighter.
The human defensive force destroyed aliens at an even
faster pace since they were no longer shooting back, but there were still so
many enemy spacecraft providing cover with their plasma cannons that the
resultant wall of fire was nearly impenetrable. Zax pointed his fighter towards
the shower of plasma bolts without a moment’s hesitation.
It required every bit of Zax’s skill to thread his
fighter through a series of gaps in the aliens’ covering fire, but he
successfully made his way until the six-craft formation was within secs of
weapons range. Five alien fighters had attached themselves to one craft in the
middle to form a single unit. Kalare was preparing a full spread of ion blasts
targeted at the center of the formation when an alien plasma round connected
with their fighter. Zax had almost dodged it like so many before, but he
misjudged its trajectory by the smallest fraction and suffered a glancing blow.
Once again, alarms flashed and wailed within his fighter.
“Zax—we’ve lost primary weapons control! We can’t
shoot at them so there isn’t anything we can do. Get out of here!”
“We’ve got to do something—no one else can stop them
before they get within range of the Ship! We’ve got to ram them!”
The potential consequence of that action hung in the
silence between the two of them for what felt like an eternity although it was
only millisecs. Zax addressed it directly.
“We’ve always been told how well-armored our Cores
are. I guess this is a chance to put it to the test. If ours gets destroyed and
we die, at least the Crew will send our bodies into space together. We’ll float
forever with each other for company.”
Kalare was silent for a long moment before she replied.
“OK. You’re right. Do it.”
Zax triggered his fighter’s emergency acceleration. It
would deplete his fuel within secs, but it was sufficient to reach the alien
formation. The enemy fighters loomed larger and larger as Zax closed the gap
from behind. The formation attempted to evade at the last moment, but he had
anticipated their response and matched their vector change instantaneously.
There was a blinding light from the explosion. The
physical sensations of the violent impact were not transferred to Zax’s mind,
so he experienced the destruction visually as a slow motion rending of the
spacecraft into a constellation of debris. A sensation of weightlessness
signaled that the fighter’s Core had been successfully ejected and was floating
freely in space as the lifeboat for his and Kalare’s minds.
“
We did it!”
Zax exulted in their success for a fraction of a sec.
Then a secondary explosion breached the Core and expelled the fragile
biological matrix which contained his and Kalare’s minds into the unforgiving
vacuum of space.