Chapter One Preview

Stations.

Clusters of research and development stations. That was what Captain Rowan Bartlett should have been looking at. Instead, the Imperious’s panoramic floor-to-ceiling window offered an unobstructed view of Europa’s swirling, terraformed atmosphere.

Bartlett ran a hand over his short, receding hair.

His chief mate stepped up next to him and wondered aloud, “If the stations were destroyed, where’s the debris field?”

Bartlett quietly considered. Stealth tech? Certainly not far-fetched for the Europans. But if so, why no communication? Silence could presage rebellion, but surely the Europans understood that war against the Collective was not a viable strategy, even for a civilization as advanced as theirs.

“Comms?” Bartlett called over his shoulder.

“Still nothing, sir,” the communications officer answered.

Europa had ceased all communications with the Collective approximately sixteen hours ago. Bartlett’s frigate, the Imperious, had been the closest company ship to Jupiter and its inhabited moons. They had tried to establish contact en route, yet not only had those attempts failed to yield results, but there had also been no challenge issued by the outer sentry rings when they arrived in Europan-occupied space.

Mainly because, as with the R&D stations, the sentry rings were simply not there.

An update had been sent to MARSA to be further relayed to Earth and the Collective headquarters. That news would not be well received.

The chief mate moved nearer the windows, as if a change in vantage point could produce for the naked eye what their scanners could not.

Bartlett turned back toward the operations deck, a raised, semicircular space around the captain’s chair. His op crew sat at stations lining the walls to both sides of the bridge entry. As in all Collective designs, the modular hologram stations adhered strictly to the law of “form follows function” with one exception: scale, the executive-level belief being that size conveyed power.

Bartlett ordered, “Bring us into low orbit and give me a full spectrum sweep of the—”

"Sir, tracking an incoming object." This from the second mate. "Closing at eighty kilometers per second. Spherical in shape, approximately ninety-one centimeters in diameter." 

 “Shields up and go to code yellow,” Bartlett replied.

“Shields up, sir,” the third mate responded.

“Code yellow, aye.” The chief mate jogged back to his station.

The second mate cut in, “Object’s come to a full stop, one kilometer to port. Bearing 302.298.”

“Give me something useful,” Bartlett commanded.

“Scanning,” the second mate answered. “Metallic. Tristeel. Low heat signature. Zero exhaust—”

“Can it put holes in us?” Bartlett asked. He was a military man, keen on threat assessment. He had a healthy fear of what Europan tech could do. Yet he was also a company man, and as such, his fear of next-gen weaponry paled in comparison to his fear of failure.

“No apparent weapons capabilities, sir. Looks like some kind of drone.”

A drone? Just observing?

The third mate spoke quickly: “Secondary object inbound . . . just appeared . . .  maybe from behind Europa?”

Bartlett rushed onto the op deck and over to the third mate’s station, eyeing the sensor display where a pulsing red dot quickly closed distance.

“It’s a ship,” the young man continued. “Sigma class. Fusion drive. Shields active.”

With a few quick taps over the third mate’s shoulder, Bartlett raised a holographic tactical overview that hovered at a diagonal just in front of the captain’s chair. He put one hand on the chair’s back, observing the top-down view of his own ship and the small drone dot out to the port side. He placed his fingers at the bottom right corner of the display and pinched. The tactical field of view widened to include the incoming ship.

The chief mate had joined him. “Vessel identifier?”

“Negative,” the third mate answered. “I’m reading multiple vessel types.”

Ridgerunners. Pirates. They prowled the outer reaches of the solar system, preying on cargo ships that ventured to the Jovian planets or the farposts or the asteroid belts, all collectively known as the Ridge. And thus, Ridgerunners.

But how were they using shield technology? Shield tech was still relatively new, developed by the Europans less than half a span ago . . . Were the pirates responsible for the Europans’ disappearance? Had they stolen the shield tech and figured out how to use it? Or was this ship Europan, masquerading as pirate?

Bartlett punched a button on the arm of his chair, starting a transmission. “Incoming vessel, this is Captain Bartlett of the Collective ship Imperious. State your business or be fired upon.”

Bartlett’s message was greeted by silence. On the hologram, the incoming ship’s dot stopped.

The third mate spoke, “They’re readying weapons, starboard side.”

“Code red. Ready all missiles, starboard side.”

The weapons officer confirmed Bartlett’s order as the chief mate rushed to his station and initiated the code red.

“Ship is coming about, but . . . port-side facing.” The third mate sounded confused. And with good reason. Why in all the known worlds would a hostile ship ready weapons on one side and turn to face their enemy with the opposite side?

“Lock missiles, confirm,” Bartlett ordered.

The weapons officer confirmed.

Bartlett pressed a button on the chair to open all channels. “Unidentified vessel, respond immediately or be destroyed. This is your final warning.”

After a few seconds of silence, Bartlett commanded: “Shields down.”

“Shields down,” the third mate confirmed.

“Fire.”

Eight Cyclone-class missiles blasted from the Imperious’s starboard ports. Bartlett watched the salvo’s progress on his display while the entirety of the op crew did the same at their respective stations.

Bartlett’s mouth dropped as the larger dot of the unidentified vessel disappeared, to be replaced by a smaller dot . . . before the missiles reached their target.

Bewildered, the second mate said, “The drone, sir, it moved. Relocated.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Missiles aborted,” the weapons officer reported. “They’re showing no target within acquisition—”

“Vessel to port, one kilometer! Missile lock. Incoming!” the third mate shouted.

At the same time the second mate blurted: “Two more vessels coming from behind Europa—”

“Shields up! Shields—”

“Too late!”

The floor shuddered beneath him. Bartlett grasped the seat back for support and yelled, “Damage?”

“Busters, port side,” the second mate replied.

“Busters” blasted apart a ship’s outer shell and bulkheads to make way for “seekers”—pirate specialties—that would pinpoint and eradicate a vessel’s shield processor.

“Breach in sector three. Shields nonfunctional,” the chief mate reported. “Mobilizing repair crews.”

The shields. Just as Bartlett had feared.

On Bartlett’s display, a second missile salvo arced from the enemy vessel and raced to the frigate’s aft. After another jarring impact that rattled Bartlett down to his bones, the navigation officer reported that their gravity thrusters had been obliterated.

The thrusters, Bartlett thought, but not the drive. The ship still maintained one G internally.

Bartlett worked through his options: no gravity thrusters meant no propulsion. Orientation thrusters, meant mainly for docking maneuvers, were not gravity driven but provided only minimal acceleration. Certainly not enough to make a getaway or quickly reorient. They could blindly loose all missiles on the port side, but with as close as the ship was now, those missiles would never get far enough from the Imperious to arm.

Most Ridgerunners preferred to disable and board their targets. They would salvage anything and everything and either sell the pilfered materials or use them to bolster their own vessels.

Bartlett knew that pirates did not take prisoners. Unless . . .

Unless it was who he thought it was: the Pack. His second mate had reported multiple vessels. The Pack was known to use one vessel as a decoy and attack with their remaining fleet.

Bartlett shouted to the chief mate: “Battle stations! Scramble ARTs to all access points. Prepare to repel hostiles.”

“Aye,” the officer replied, busily punching buttons and relaying orders into his comm.

Just then, a shadow blocked the observation window’s ambient light. Bartlett turned to see a massive beta-class vessel crossing their bow.

“Fire all forward batteries!” the captain blurted, but even as the command was issued, he watched guns on the enemy ship send streams of plasma rounds to various points out of view.

“Forward batteries neutralized,” the second mate confirmed quietly.

Bartlett’s heart sank as the massive ship proceeded to the Imperious’s starboard side, guns still blazing. He rushed to the op deck, hovering over the chief mate’s shoulder, eyeing a bank of holographic screens. Throughout the ship, alarms sounded, emergency lights strobed, and noncombat personnel rushed to their respective stations and readied for the worst.

“Open comm to ARTs,” the chief mate advised.

On one of the screens, Bartlett could see an Armed Response Team gathered around the airlock, railguns held ready. He couldn’t help but be nervous about the guns being used on his ship. Though the railgun “smart slugs” were designed to detect the structural makeup of Imperious’s bulkheads and fragment before impact, things didn’t always work perfectly. A hull breach and loss of pressurization was a very real threat in the face of any boarding attack. In that event, a lightly armored pressure suit would be the only thing keeping the team members alive. Hopefully.

The ship rocked slightly. The team waited.

Further down the hallway, a circular section of bulkhead flew inward, colliding with the opposite wall and falling to the grated floor.

“What just happened there?” the chief mate asked. “Is that—”

A pirate in “jury rig” poked his head in and lobbed a small, spherical arc grenade up the passageway toward the ART. Before the grenade even had time to go off, a second pirate, also in a cobbled-together pressure suit, stepped into the corridor and raised a weapon with a fat disk at the end of a long barrel.

“ART 1, you have a breach aft,” Bartlett yelled. “Repeat, breach aft! Engage! Engage!” He pounded the back of the chief mate’s seat, helpless to intervene and, once again, confused. For an invading craft to seal and breach apart from an airlock wasn’t unheard of, but he had believed it beyond the pirates’ capability.

Just as ART 1 repositioned to acquire the enemy, the pirate activated his weapon. A flat, bluish plane of transparent energy spread out from the disk and partitioned the hall. ART 1 unleashed railgun fire, but the slugs didn’t penetrate the shield. The pirate fired; the disk, along with its shield wall, shot down the passageway, its edges reconfiguring to the contours of the corridor as it caught and carried the arc grenade with it, then swept into the ART, stacking them up, sweeping them to the end of the hallway, where the mass of bodies prevented it from pushing any farther.

A second later the arc grenade detonated, but the barrier held fast. Body parts, pieces of armor, and blood all bombarded the shield wall.

Bartlett’s mouth dropped open. The entire first response team was just . . . gone.

And where had they gotten a repulsor gun? Repulsor gun tech had evolved from shield tech. But it was incipient: again, Europan in origin, contracted by the Collective but, thus far, issued to very few combat personnel and still in the field testing stage.

On the screen, the pirate who had fired remained still as the disk flew back down the corridor, rejoining his weapon’s barrel. Once the disk locked in place, the blood-coated barrier disappeared, sending droplets of blood and bits of metal and flesh to the floor.

Bartlett’s attention shifted to the screen showing ART 2’s position at the starboard airlock, second level.

The chief mate spoke into the comm: “ART 2, be aware the enemy has breached level three port side. ART 1 is . . . lost.”

On the screen, ART 2 responded immediately. Bartlett followed their progress across multiple screens as they made their way toward the forward corridor that would take them across to the breach.

Just then, a camera feed caught Bartlett’s attention. It displayed a second breach, aft of where ART 2 had just been. ART 2 had rounded the first corner, moving to port. The captain watched as a stream of pirates rushed through the second level feed. These attackers used more conventional weaponry, mainly centrifugal sling guns, but they were rushing headlong toward ART 2’s unprotected rear.

Bartlett shouted, “ART 2, you have hostiles incoming on your six! Turn and engage!” He looked to his chief mate. “Shut the blast doors forward, port side, third level, and lock down all forward lifts.”

The chief mate complied.

Bartlett prayed this would prevent the first pirate team, the one with the repulsor gun, from engaging ART 2 so that squad could face the second pirate threat.

His pulse thundered as he stared, unblinking, at the feeds. The second ART waited at the juncture of the starboard passage and forward cross-corridor. One of the men peeked around the corner as a grenade bounced down the hall.

Billowing smoke filled the screen. The voice of the ART leader crackled over the speaker at the chief mate’s station: “I hear bootsteps! Ready! On my mark!”

Bartlett could just make out the team leader kneeling at the juncture, his squad formed around him, aiming down the corridor.

“Fire!” the leader yelled.

The team fired slugs into the smoke. Their salvo met with no response as the railguns reloaded.

“Stomping sounds,” the team leader’s voice reported.

Bartlett leaned in, squinting. A thick, massive shadow emerged from the fog—a Vulcan armored suit. It had a tri-barrel, tri-disk centrifugal sling gun for a right arm . . . aimed directly at the squad.

“Take cover!” the team leader ordered. A barrage of hypersonic rounds ripped apart a soldier who hadn’t moved quick enough, then shredded the bulkhead behind him.

Bartlett’s hopes withered.

“First pirate team has cut their way into the forward stairwell, level three,” the chief mate observed, pointing to another screen.

Bartlett ground his teeth. They were running out of options. If that first team got off of level three . . . ”Shut—shut the blast doors starboard side, level two forward.”

The officer complied, but through the haze in the starboard camera feed, Bartlett watched as the pirate in the Vulcan armor stood at the threshold. The gun arm and a tree-trunk-sized left arm spread out to prevent the blast doors from closing. Pirates swept past, closing in on ART 2.

The level three feed showed pirates flowing into the stairwell from the corridor.

Bartlett’s blood ran cold. That first pirate team was headed down to level two. ART 2 was about to get cut down in the crossfire. And there was nothing he could do but watch.

But even that option was removed when both camera feeds were shot out.

“Send a mayday,” Bartlett called to the communications officer.

A second later, the reply that Bartlett had feared came back: “All outgoing signals jammed, sir.”

“Of course,” the captain responded. “Seal the bridge.”

The chief mate complied. Alarms sounded throughout the operations area, and two-meter-thick tristeel blast doors closed off the bridge’s entry.

Bartlett was heading back to his seat, ready to attempt communication with the pirates once again, when the chief mate announced that a data terminal on level five had been accessed.

“Incoming video, same terminal,” the communications officer notified.

Bartlett was unsure what to expect as he returned to the chief mate’s station and said, “Patch it through.”

Seconds later, a larger screen hovered in front of the others. A female appeared there. She had removed her jury-rigged helmet to reveal rugged but attractive features. Her hair was shaved on one side, braided and beaded on the other. The terminal mic had been activated, and she began speaking. The chief mate switched on the feed’s volume.

“Captain,” she began. “Outgoing signals are jammed. You have no backup. This ship is ours. We’re accessing oxygen conduits to the bridge now.” The woman held up a canister.

There was no need for her to elaborate. The captain immediately recognized the lethal X4 gas.

The pirate lowered the canister, leaned in, and said, “Should I pipe this gas in, or do we discuss the terms of your surrender?”

Micky Neilson is a two-time New York Times bestselling author. His graphic novels Ashbringer and Pearl of Pandaria have both been published in six languages. As one of the first writers at Blizzard Entertainment, he has more than two decades of experience in the cutting edge of the gaming industry. In 2018, Micky completed his first original sci-fi novel, Ridgerunners. Most recently, Micky wrote a behind-the-scenes illustration book, The Art Of Spyro: Reignited Trilogy. Micky lives in beautiful Washington State with his wife and daughter, where he enjoys life's essentials: movies, comic books, chocolate, and sushi.