The Tenth Awakens (Maraukian War Book 1)

  The Tenth Awakens

  Michael Chatfield

  Maraukian War

  Book 1

  Prologue

  Central Planning Complex for Cleansing Reversal

  Shnarek Homeworld, Shnarek Home System

  113 BC

  General Banlesh looked at Major Sharventi with the same dull look all of the Shnarek had after the Void Guards’ “cleansing.”

  “I have found a suitable race. They call themselves humans,” Sharventi said.

  Banlesh looked over the information. “Interesting.”

  “They’re territorial and aggressive when provoked. We will supplant some of them onto other planets to replenish their people, and gain diversity to get them to augment. We challenge them with the organic soldiers, to create a system powerful enough to support our needs. From that, we will be able to move to phase two, reveal a signal and guide them where we want them.” Sharventi sat back in his seat. His gelatinous being relaxing as he formed to the bowl-like seat and his tentacles rested on the armrests.

  “The resources are within parameters. Your initiative is approved.” Banlesh’s voice was the same mix of bland and uninterested as Sharventi. “With this, we might be able to finally reverse the cleansing the Void Guards did to remove our emotions.”

  Chapter 1

  Supply Shuttle 241

  Tricticus, Emarl system

  6/3350

  “Gods curse it! Captain, I’m reading an extra person.” Cargo Master Choi flicked her holographic screen and pulled up a sensor reading of a man sitting in a side bay filled with medical supplies.

  “Who?” Captain Ferek demanded. He didn’t have time for this kind of crap.

  “No idea. Seems they don’t have an ID chip. Their NIAI—it’s almost as if they don’t have one. Looks like a bum, though.” Choi flicked to visual sensors, mentally kicking herself as she wondered how someone had made it onto her ship.

  “Shit. All right, notify ground crew to arrest him when we are in the hangar if he’s still alive.” Ferek flicked over controls as the craft continued its dive toward the planet below. “Entering atmosphere.”

  The craft shook and rattled from the friction of entering atmosphere. People were thrown about as the seats and their safety buckles tried to contain them.

  “Ursho, paste those damned Maraukians. I’ve just received weapons hot,” Ferek barked as information was projected into his optical nerves by the nanites that made up his Neural Interfacing Artificial Intelligence.

  “Got it. Firing as required,” Ferek’s co-pilot said as they flew the fully loaded supply shuttle, banking and twirling in movements no craft that size should be able to as they used a combination of gravity, anti-grav, and thrusters in an attempt to get closer to the ground.

  Maraukians fired at them. The gray-furred apes had cannons mounted to their backs that filled the air with plasma, rail gun rounds, and rockets.

  Those who were standing up added in their fire. With tens of thousands firing at them, they were unable to miss all of the hits. The armor of the shuttle sounded like rain on a tin roof as rounds marked its surface.

  ***

  The bum in question tried to shake the feeling that the cheap, really-cheap,liquor left behind in the morning as he looked around at his surroundings.

  He’d found it in some locker a while ago, using it in order to dull the memories and get some sleep.

  Bright light shone in from a view screen, acting as a porthole. A string of profanities erupted at the damned sun. He grunted as multiple gravities hit his body. The ship he was in banked violently. The sun was replaced with the fiery glow of re-entry into atmosphere and the portholes filtered down to a more bearable brightness. Mark blinked, trying to clear the light burned into his retinas. The glow of re-entry fell away, and the shuttle’s movements increased. Mark grunted but focused his eyes on the view screen. A yellow planet was below; streaks of brilliant blue cut up the massive continents, pooling into lakes and small seas.

  The ship buckled with the familiar feeling of anti-spacecraft projectiles being way too close for comfort. A tinging noise rang off the hull of the ship. Decoys spat out of the sides of the ship, which were chased down with blue-green balls of fire. The ship cleared the atmosphere, jinking and weaving.

  “Damn, I miss my armor right now,” Mark hissed as he looked at the grubby sand-colored fatigues he’d stolen. Not the armored helmet, breast plate, and greaves that he was more used to than his own skin. His gear would’ve made this feel like more than a slightly pressured cakewalk. One with bright lights, explosions, and a high risk of death, but those were familiar sights to an Earth Military Force Trooper.

  Images flashed behind the man’s eyes as he cringed; he pushed them back into the recesses of his mind as he looked around to take his mind off it.

  “This is definitely not the Sol system.” He studied the planet. The view did not match with any of Earth and Her Colonies planets he’d memorized.

  Which meant one of two things: One—he was insane. Not that unlikely. Or two—he truly wasn’t in Earth and Her Colonies area anymore. Which meant that they really operated outside of the EHC and that they might really have a space drive that travels faster-than-light.

  Images, unbidden, intruded into his mind. One of a man and a woman kissing as a rocket exploded behind them, his world going dark. An image of those two people on gurneys as Mark could only turn and run away.

  Mark let out ragged breaths and pulled himself back. His eyes burned as his body felt to be in physical pain.

  Think, Mark! Now is not the time! We need to figure out this FUBAR situation and quick! What are we looking at? By the weapons fire, looks like a hot drop into a war zone. Just. Fucking. Wonderful. Okay, we’re in one of those legion shuttles. There aren’t any guards on this thing, but I’d bet hard fucking money they’re going to have people on the ground.

  Mark was hurled against his seat’s straps again, his hangover rearing its ugly head.

  He’d seen the insides of stations and other craft for six months, hopping from ship to ship, getting as far as he could as fast as he could.

  He didn’t know where the hell he was when he woke up, but as he stowed away and ran from ship to ship, he gathered more information.

  He’d woken up in a ship coming back from Earth. It looked like a freighter on the outside, but inside it was a medical ship, putting Earth Military Force Troopers back together. However, the medicos weren’t from Earth and Her Colonies. Instead, they said that they were from the legion.

  Mark, barely healed of his wounds, had gone searching for his brother Tyler and sister-in-law Alexis, threatening a woman who had shot at him before he’d found them. They were dead, laid up on gurneys.

  Blinded by grief and rage, he’d escaped the ship, not knowing where he was going but just wanting to escape it all.

  “Hitting the dirt in ten. It’s going to be a hot one.” A calm, thankfully human, voice echoed through the ship. The jackhammers in his head promptly alerted him of the fact there were a lot more gravities being put on his body, making it feel as if a nuclear war had kicked off inside his skull.

  The heavy weapons on the shuttle opened up, with missiles, rail guns, cannons. Hell, they were probably throwing the fucking kitchen sink at whoever was shooting at them.

  He breathed in as the gravities lessened. He looked at the view screen, now looking at a gray desert with patches of brilliant blue water and sand. The view screen tracked his eyes and looked left to face the direction the ship was going. The gray wasn’t the desert but where hundreds of thousands of fucked-up apes charging a black base that looked like an equally fucked-up w
agon wheel, with bumps and weapons shooting out of it. The apes were being pushed back by artillery and weapon fire from the walls of the dome with catwalks from the main dome to smaller outer domes that created a wall.

  “The fuck,” Mark growled to himself. He was a veteran of multiple battlefields, but he had never seen anything like what was in front of his eyes. It wasn’t a fight; it was a one-sided slaughter. But the victims of this slaughter were actually able to not only force their way across open ground but engage the buildings along the outer ring of defenses in fierce battle.

  “It’s called tactics, or at least move and fucking shoot. Not run at the fucker trying to kill you and give them a nice juicy target. Just how in the goddamn colonies can these apes keep up this kind of fighting? Holy fuck.” Mark held his head, shaking it. This truly was alien to him.

  “Fucking hangover.” He cringed. At least it helped him to look away from the idiocy that was the apes’ tactics, which seemed to be run as fast as possible into the weapons fire, not caring for their losses. It actually looked as though they became more excited as the fucked-up wagon wheel fortifications tried to suppress them with everything they had.

  The craft shifted from side to side to make it harder to track. The sounds of weapons fire making contact filled the craft as a missile exploded in front of his view, taking out the sensors and switching him to a grainier picture. Even with the shitty quality view, he was able to see that they’d leveled out and were barrelling toward the wagon wheel fort at a few Machs—its target; the dome in the center of the base. He gripped his seat as the distance closed in the blink of an eye.

  “Fuuuuuuck!” The wall snapped opened in bare seconds before they would have been turned into a smoking wreck. Something slowed the shuttle, violently swinging him from side to side. He hit the quick release in the center of his chest, swaying a bit as he got to his feet and checking he had everything. He gave the view screen a final glance and saw troops rushing out of the shuttle in full body armor as robots unloaded the cargo.

  His combat pumps and augments forced the nausea away even as his head swam.

  “Not Earth Military Force.” He looked at the powered armor-wearing soldiers. It was thinner and better made than the units he’d used as a trooper in the Harmony War.

  Instead of heavy machine guns, these soldiers were using bullpup rifles, with a large shield on their back with Roman symbols on it. At their hips, they wore a sword that stuck out to the side so as to not hit their armored legs.

  “I think I’ll introduce myself later—don’t want to walk into the middle of a firefight.” He stretched to his full height of six and a half feet, cracking his high gravity-wrecked joints. Scars covered his visible skin and bumps under his ragged shirt told of more violent injuries.

  He stepped out of the compartment. Looking toward the storage area, he started jogging just as a hatch cycled. Four of the powered armor-wearing soldiers came out of the corridor. Shit. Definitely not one of my best mornings.

  “Well, this is a little awkward.” He raised his hands above his head and looked at the faceless helmets of the four armored soldiers. They were only slightly shorter than him.

  Wordlessly, two approached: one ready to subdue him and the other with an arm immobilizer. The other two moved to get better arcs, ready to kill him if he made an aggressive move. He opened his arms to show he had no weapons and gave his best disarming smile.

  “Seems I got lost on the way to the shitter. Mind telling me how to get there?” He tried to placate them as he figured they were three meters away from him.

  They continued their advance, sure of their armor and weapons. He felt distinctly less confident of his chances of survival as adrenaline shot through his body.

  Two meters.

  “I’ll come with you as long as I don’t have to wear that thing. Otherwise I’m going to leave.” This caused the two in front to pause. He’d bet money that they were conversing with their commander. They didn’t say anything to him and continued their advance. Well, I did warn them. He twitched his triceps and released two blades from their holsters under his upper arms.

  He didn’t want to get into another fight but if he wasn’t able to fight back, he didn’t like his chances of surviving. It would be as easy as pulling a trigger to put him down.

  Mark felt his heart beat faster. He hated running and hiding. He was a fighter, but he didn’t know what his cause was and needed more information before he could make any judgments.

  One.

  He moved, ducking forward so those covering from behind couldn’t get a clear line of fire at him as he flicked his hands down, catching the blades in his hands. He grinned as battle hormones from his augments kicked in. Time to dance. His combat pumps shot a cocktail of drugs into his system as his body seemed to come alive with energy.

  ***

  Richmond Lavicus had been a bit bewildered when Optio Jael had picked him and two others for a security detail to detain a stowaway, but he was a legionnaire and so he followed his orders, grabbing an immobilizer as soon as the shuttle in question landed. They’d rushed aboard to where the stowaway was supposed to be.

  Richmond was a little shocked when the stowaway was a six-and-a-half-foot tall man who looked like a fighter.

  Something seemed familiar about him, even with the long brown hair and the full beard.

  He’d asked Jael whether they should just talk to the man before they detained him because he did not want to see what the man did if he didn’t want to go peacefully. Jael had denied it and Richmond followed his orders. When the man had threatened them, Richmond had felt a little apprehensive but safe inside the armor that had kept him alive on three planets.

  He’d gotten within a meter of the man when he raised the immobilizer, ready to strap the man’s arms in it. Then the man moved. It was faster than anything he’d ever seen. The man ducked; mono-blades appeared in his hands as he slashed the knee joints of Richmond’s suit with the blade in his left, causing Richmond to drop. The man brought the knife in his right across Quell’s right knee, making him tilt and fall as a ton of armorite and gravity worked to topple him. The bum turned his body and hurled the two blades into the barrels of Jael and Jorsht’s guns. They only reacted when the blades where halfway down their barrels. Their panicked trigger pulls made a telltale fizzt of shorted electromagnets. Richmond had thrown the immobilizer away and reached for his sword.

  The man grabbed the sword from Quell’s back, leaving the M19 as he tackled Jorsht and Jael. Veins popped along his bare skin as he dropped the both of them, sending a ton and a half worth tumbling, shaking the corridor.

  Seeing the man charge forward, Richmond saw his opportunity, and dove for Quell and his M19.

  The other man brought his sword to bear, systematically cutting the servos in the two suits’ elbows and then knees.

  Richmond turned toward the man, leveling his barrel with them.

  The man ducked as Richmond put a round in the ceiling. The mono-molecular sword was thrown out from the man’s hand, stabbing through the rifle as the man grabbed a sword from Jorsht.

  Richmond desperately grabbed at his sword, getting it halfway out of its scabbard.

  “Don’t do that, son,” the man growled, making Richmond freeze as Quell’s mono-blade tapped his helmet. Slowly, Richmond released his sword.

  A grin spread across the man’s face. “Smart move.” He flicked the tip of his blade and sent Richmond’s down the corridor.

  “Who are you?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know.” The man sliced the motors in Richmond’s armor, making them useless. He turned, grabbed the two blades from the M19’s barrels and ran toward the cargo hold.

  Richmond kept racking his brain, wondering why the man looked familiar. The alarm had already been raised; capturing the man was someone else’s job.

  ***

  Mark rushed through the aisles of the cargo hold, avoiding the automated loaders and trying to keep an eye out for the reinfo
rcements that were probably already on their way. He didn’t have time to deal with them as he crossed through a blast door into the main cargo hold.

  “Where in the hell am I going to find armor and a gun in this lot?” he muttered.

  “There’s Jupiter-class armor in section J-02,” the toneless voice of the shuttle’s AI said.

  “Thanks. Uh, where is that?” On Earth, AIs were still theoretical but Mark had got used to using them while on the run. Seemed as if they were everywhere within the world he now found himself. It also seemed that as long as he could convince them he was under threat, they’d let him get away with small infractions.

  “Follow the blue ball.” A bright ball appeared, starting down the aisles.

  “Damn, you’re good.” Mark followed the big blue ball.

  There has to be some kind of pun there.

  “Thank you,” the AI said in its same toneless voice as Mark followed the bouncing blue ball.

  “You have reached your cargo,” the shuttle AI said as the ball disappeared.

  He looked at a row of black containers that stretched back twenty meters and then was stacked to the roof of the shuttle. They looked like large, seamless coffins.

  “How do I open it?”

  “You need a NIAI.”

  Mark grimaced at the shuttle AI’s words. “Where would these NIAIs be, pray tell?”

  “Behind you.”

  “Now we’re talking!” He hit the release on the shipping container behind him. Inside were small black boxes stacked upon one another. Mark pulled one out and opened it to reveal a silver band a few inches thick and bigger than his hand.

  “Attach to your upper arm,” the shuttle AI said after he’d studied it for a few seconds.

  What the hell. He shrugged and slid it up his right arm. It clamped down on his upper arm and started spreading out, stretching and conforming to his arm faster than Mark had time to react. A cold feeling spread from the armband through his body. He clawed at the band in panic as his adrenaline spiked. He hit it against the wall. Other than bruising his arm around it, there was no change in the band.