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  A large chunk of metal smashed against Ethan’s arm.

  The rest of the crippled station’s fragments were going to hit him in a matter of seconds. He covered his visor with his gloves and screamed as he, and the remnants of the station, headed into the oblivion created by the Atlantis ship.

  And all the while, Ethan thought, It’s not a myth! We’re doomed.

  Chapter Two

  Admiral Morgan gazed out of his window at the new CW—Commonwealth—recruits being marched around the parade square in their crisp dark blue uniforms.

  Running the command center and training wing meant he had the responsibility of ensuring Fides Prime produced humans, fidesians and the cross-breeds, fidians, that would continue to maintain order in the Salus Sphere—even during this prolonged twenty-year period of peace with the Axis Combine.

  Morgan hated the increasingly ceremonial nature of his role. Captains were still patrolling space while he inspected gleaming buildings and accepted salutes from rookies.

  The setting sun over the distant mountains told him it was time to go home, his shift was over for the day. He swept up his cap from the desk and turned to leave.

  Three rapid knocks sounded on his sturdy wooden door. A breathless soldier burst in before Morgan could answer.

  “What now?” Morgan said, irritated about the lack of courtesy.

  “You need to come to operations right away, Admiral,” the soldier said. He swallowed hard. Panic was written all over face. “It’s Orbital Forty…”

  Morgan frowned. “What about it?”

  “It’s gone.”

  “What do you mean, gone?”

  The soldier gestured to the corridor. “This way, Admiral. You’ll want to see this for yourself.”

  The CW Fleet hadn’t lost an orbital station in the thirty years since he joined. Eight were destroyed during the Century War with the Horan Empire, but that was different. Morgan knew the horans wouldn’t dare attack now. Despite the fact that they formed the Axis Combine with the vestans and lacterns and were building their capabilities, an all-out war risked too much for either side.

  Morgan’s boots squeaked along the black rubber floor as he followed the soldier down the white-walled corridors. Pictures hung at regular intervals of former officers who served with distinction during the war.

  They entered a glass elevator and the soldier depressed the button for the eighth floor—the location of the operations hall, where they tracked CW ships and communicated with every planet and station. Ops was the nerve center of the Salus Sphere, coordinating every mission.

  The brown-haired fidian soldier fidgeted with his cuff and avoided eye contact. Concern built inside Morgan. This felt like more than a pirate raid on an outer rim planet.

  “Well, Private, are you going to tell me any more?” Morgan said as they rode in the elevator.

  “It was attacked and I was sent straight to your office after we lost contact. We redirected a scout ship to the area and it only found a few pieces of debris.”

  “That’s impossible. Stations don’t just vanish.”

  The elevator doors smoothly slid open. Morgan strode out and headed to the main area. Rows of Ops staff sat behind desks. He could hear them communicating to stations, ships, and planets about the status of Orbital Forty, telling them to activate black alert procedures. That meant prepare for an imminent attack.

  It had been five years since CW activated a general black alert, when the horans feigned a probing assault on a mineral planet rich with uranium. Morgan guessed it was a bluff to test and monitor their reaction. The horans’ current empire had more than enough deposits to stop them taking such a risk. He was still on the command call, a communication sent to the heads of all operations when an event occurred. That provided a small crumb of comfort that he could at least keep his finger on the pulse of events around the Sphere.

  Large high-definition screens were spread around the walls of the operations hall. The one directly in the center showed the seventy-five orbital stations spread around the frontier of the Salus Sphere circling moons and planets.

  Morgan searched for Orbital Forty on the map amongst the light green globes that denoted them on the black screen. Like the soldier said, it was missing next to the faded outline of Retsina.

  Five officers stood around a central desk, all dressed in the operations uniform of light blue shirts with a name-tag on the chest, rank insignia on both arms, and dark blue cargo pants. They turned to face him as he approached.

  “Admiral Morgan,” a young officer said, “at 18:30 Salus Time, we received communications from Orbital Forty about a sudden burst of energy. We have a video feed of the events shortly afterward. A ship exited a wormhole and fired what we think are large ion cannons.”

  “A ship out of a wormhole? Are you sure?” Morgan asked.

  “I’ve made you a copy, sir,” the captain replied and handed him a memory chip.

  “Your soldier told me a scout ship only found a few pieces of debris. What other measures have you taken?”

  “We’ve sent orders to the nearest destroyer. It’s a light-year away and heading straight for Retsina in a hunting pattern.”

  Morgan glanced down at the desk at the orange blur in the middle of the flat screen. “Is that the feed?”

  The captain tapped the pressure keyboard and a light green timer ran in the top corner of the screen, displaying Retsina time. “This is the feed from Orbital Forty’s observation deck. I’ve sped it up to give you a better impression.”

  An orange swirl transformed into a tunnel and a bright light flashed at the end of it. A ship cruised through the wormhole. The description matched the myth. An imposing dull gray giant, although it had been reported to have a graphite sheen, cannons on the top and sides, four times bigger than the common CW standard. They only had ion cannons that size for ground defense.

  It fired at the station and uneven lines of static interference cut across the feed. Blue bolts of concentrated energy shot from both sides of the ship and pounded the station. The wormhole extended toward it and the feed stopped.

  Morgan took a deep breath. It looked like the myth that had become a joke amongst the ranks. During the Century War, a ship would appear from nowhere and attack both the horans and CW. It had no pattern, never communicated and had devastating weaponry.

  Eventually the story changed to blaming every disaster and crash, every missing person or just about anything that couldn’t be explained on the supposedly mythical Atlantis ship.

  “Do you have a fix on the ship?”

  “No, sir,” a tall thin female fidesian lieutenant said. “Do you think the wormhole swallowed the station?”

  Morgan replayed the images in his mind. He’d even stopped believing the Atlantis ship existed. Nobody had that kind of tech in the known universe. The rumors were that this ghost ship of destruction had trawled space for centuries, appearing in solar systems that were light-years apart in a matter of minutes, arbitrarily targeting anything it could find.

  The myth was the reason that people didn’t believe it existed. If CW and Axis technology wasn’t even close to accomplishing wormhole travel, how could a centuries-old ship?

  “It’s possible in theory,” Morgan said. “I need to report this to the Space Marshal. Stay on black alert, and if you find its location, I want every available ship in the area to bring hell down upon it.”

  Members of the ops team had stopped working and peered at Morgan. This was the first time as admiral he’d been tested. Twenty years of peace, punctuated with minor skirmishes against inferior forces, had left everybody in a comfort zone.

  The Atlantis ship had destroyed it with a single cruel blow.

  ***

  Morgan climbed into a two-seater transport pod outside the command center building and sat on the purple leather chair. The clear plastic door slid shut with an electric whine. He needed to come up with a realistic plan before speaking to Marshal Kenwright.

  The gruff o
ld man was a fighter pilot during the Century War and the soldiers loved him. The senior officers under his command had a less favorable view because he didn’t suffer fools and wasn’t scared to speak his mind when he suspected they were taking the easy option.

  Morgan leaned toward the voice-recognition system’s speaker in front of him. “Area five. The marshal’s residence.”

  It set off along the magnetic track and whirred past the air base. Three black arrow-shaped drones took to the air, joining others outside the atmosphere as part of the black alert proactive defense shield. At the side of the airstrip, a crew of the fidesian artillery peered out of the windows of a hundred-meter-tall orbital cannon. The setting sun radiated off its white barrel and support rods.

  Without a firm location or a trackable path for the Atlantis ship, Kenwright wouldn’t commit a destroyer group to a search mission. It would leave sections of the Salus Sphere wide open. The old dog was cautious about this for a reason. The horan always looked for signs of weakness. If the Atlantis ship continued attacking CW stations, it would expose parts of the frontier and would require a destroyer presence to plug the gap.

  The pod slowed and stopped outside the stone gates of the marshal’s residence. Two soldiers guarded each side and held their X50 carbines across their chests. Only vestan heavy armor could stop a caseless round fired from an X50. With the motion finding and enhanced vision scope, it was the best on the market in terms of energy efficiency but lacked the stopping power of the energy weapons.

  Morgan stepped out and straightened his dark blue jacket. The door slid closed behind him and it hummed back toward the central pick-up point.

  “Good evening, Admiral,” the left soldier said and waved him through.

  Morgan returned the nod and thought they were getting younger with every year that passed. Or perhaps that was just him getting older. He walked up the road toward the large three-story lilac dome. The former marshal used to be a fidesian and had the place remodeled to look like the best houses on the planet. Kenwright didn’t bother changing it back to the typical square colonial style. He loved the fidesian culture and art.

  It showed in the way Kenwright arranged the residence gardens with native plants and statues of fidesian gods. Most humans liked to have their own little slice of Earth. Even though almost everyone had moved to the Salus Sphere over two hundred years ago after resources dried up and the ozone layer disappeared.

  Eight, ninth, and tenth generation humans lived in the Sphere along with a few sevens like Kenwright. Some humans crossbred with genetically modified fidesians to create fidians, but most still had reminders of the old world like grassed lawns, wooden benches and genetically engineered flowers made from DNA blueprints.

  Morgan saw it as misplaced nostalgia for a place they would probably never visit. If any did, they’d be bitterly disappointed to find a crumbling empty world, used as an outpost for pirates. The Salus Sphere provided everything they needed to sustain the species and a whole lot more.

  A junior officer met him at the pair of open front doors. He saluted. “This way, Admiral. The marshal’s expecting a strategy to find and destroy the ship.”

  “What does he know about it?” Morgan said, surprised that Kenwright already had the details.

  “He read the black alert order about the wormhole attack.”

  Morgan turned the chip in his hand and thought about the ideal person to send out in search of the Atlantis ship. Most of the well-drilled crew of the fleet were excellent in formation attack, but that wouldn’t do it. A set-piece battle would prove costly against the kind of weaponry used to take out an orbital station with a few shots. He needed something completely different to avoid exposing the Sphere to a horan invasion.

  Kenwright sat behind his white marble desk and gazed at a pair of monitors. Morgan’s footsteps echoed around the empty cream walls as he walked across the polished stone floor toward the desk.

  “I see the Atlantis ship’s back,” Kenwright said, keeping his focus on the screen. “I take it we haven’t managed to locate it?”

  An orange glow reflected across Kenwright’s face. Morgan guessed he’d ordered a copy of the Orbital Forty’s feed to watch in advance before their meeting. It didn’t surprise him that the old marshal would be all over this like a rash.

  “No, sir,” Morgan said. “It’s just like the historical reports from decades ago. A scout ship reported most of the station missing.”

  “And now we’ve finally seen the big ugly brute. I don’t recognize the design.”

  “Somebody once told me it was built by an ancient alien race who no longer exist. All part of the myth, I suppose. I’d like to put myself forward to take a capital ship out and hunt it down.”

  Kenwright slowly nodded and smoothed his gray mustache. “We lost two hundred good people today. I want you to put your best crew on it. You’re an admiral. I don’t expect my top team to put themselves forward.”

  “With respect, sir,” Morgan said but didn’t mean, “we need an experienced crew to capture something like this.”

  Kenwright rolled his eyes and sighed. “You’ve got your own responsibilities and I can’t allow it. Do you have anyone else in mind?”

  The response didn’t surprise Morgan. He expected it, but it was worth a shot. It was always worth having a plan B when dealing with the old goat.

  “I’ve already been thinking about that, sir,” Morgan said. He paused briefly, wondering if his suggestion would appeal to Kenwright’s maverick nature, or if he’d receive a dressing down. “We need to keep our frontier defended, but we have our own special predator. I’d like to ask your permission to contract Carson Mach.”

  A smile crept across Kenwright’s face. “Bleach is just the sort of crazy bastard that could pull this off. You have my authority to make the transfer from our central funds.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Morgan said. The use of Mach’s nickname irritated him, but it was well deserved. Whenever a dirty job needed doing, they always used him to clean up the mess. “I’ll start the ball rolling and update you later.”

  Kenwright narrowed his eyes. “Make sure you do. And not a word about this to anyone. If it’s known that I sanctioned a Bleach mission, it won’t be just my head on the block.”

  Morgan nodded, turned, and headed back outside.

  Dusk had firmly set in and he peered up at the tiny white dots of the drones buzzing around in the starry sky.

  Carson Mach had served with him on a destroyer twenty years ago and left the fleet after a string of charges and short spell in military prison. He couldn’t take discipline back then, but always delivered on his contracts after going freelance.

  The only nagging doubt was if Mach had finally let his vices completely consume his life. For the sake of the Salus Sphere, Morgan hoped that wasn’t the case.

  Chapter Three

  Carson Mach chambered a round in his SamCore Stinger, his favorite illegal firearm, and glared at the most hideous horan he’d ever seen at the far end of the bar.

  The horan, an ex-commander of an Axis Combine warship, glared back, the hate distorting his reptilian face. This one had dark crimson scales that looked wet and glossy under the bar’s neon lights.

  Ralex was the big bastard’s name, and he carried a bounty that Mach desperately needed to pay off his bar tab here in The Tachyon, lest he himself received a bounty on his head by the criminal owners, the Laverna.

  The horan wore a thin black robe over his muscular body. He leaned forward on the bar, propping his thick, bony elbows onto the surface. His green and yellow eyes stared right at Mach, not even pretending that he didn’t want to rip Mach into shreds and then feed him to the horan’s pet dogs—although dog was a generous term for the quadruped lizards with razor teeth and claws that slice through titanium.

  It was at this point, as Mach downed another shot of Gasmulch to stop his hands from trembling, that he thought about the terrible situation he was in.

  Ralex was the he
ad of a rogue group of horans who had fled from the Axis Combine after they lost the war with the Commonwealth powers of the humans and the fidesians. This rogue group, unaffiliated with their former commanders, was free to roam the CW worlds as they saw fit, spreading their hate and bile as they went.

  Mach knew that the reptilian swine was planning something, some attack on one of the CW home worlds in the Fidesian system. The Commonwealth had gotten soft in the previous twenty years of peace.

  While they continued to expand the cultures of art and exploration throughout the now peaceful Salus Sphere, the Axis Combine were rebuilding their forces beyond the Non-Combat Zone: the ring around the sphere, where all parties had agreed not to establish any military outposts and to maintain a free-fly zone for all.

  It didn’t take a genius to know that the Axis were preparing for another attack. Letting scum like Ralex travel freely was naïve at best.

  “What are you looking at, filthy human?” the horan said in his dry, raspy voice. It was barely audible over the pulsing electronic music blaring out of The Tachyon’s speaker system.

  Mach squinted his right eye, the black one, and read the temperature of the horan. The beast was ten degrees warmer than his natural body heat. Mach had learned, through his prosthetic eye, that the horan’s lizard-like bodies became much hotter as they prepared for battle. He presumed it was a speeding up for the immune and metabolism systems—the very things that gave them their ability to regrow limbs.

  A tall thin fidesian wearing a leather waistcoat hurried behind the bar, serving people as quickly as she could, perhaps sensing things were about to hit the fan. The fidesian glanced at Mach; her ruby red eyes glinted under the lights, as though they were miniature nebulae as seen through a Hoffberg telescope. Her head, like the rest of her body, was almost bald. She, like all of her race, had a fair, almost transparent thin layer of hair on her skin, which under the right kind of sun had a hint of green to it. It was a look that appealed to Mach greatly.