Test of Mettle (A Captain's Crucible Book 2) Read online

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  TEST OF METTLE

  A CAPTAIN'S CRUCIBLE

  BOOK TWO

  Isaac Hooke

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, organizations, places, events and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © Isaac Hooke 2016

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced in any format, by any means, electronic or otherwise, without prior consent from the copyright owner and publisher of this book.

  www.IsaacHooke.com

  Cover design by Isaac Hooke

  Cover image by Shookooboo

  table of contents

  prologue

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  thirteen

  fourteen

  fifteen

  sixteen

  seventeen

  eighteen

  nineteen

  twenty

  twenty-one

  twenty-two

  twenty-three

  twenty-four

  twenty-five

  twenty-six

  twenty-seven

  twenty-eight

  twenty-nine

  thirty

  thirty-one

  thirty-two

  thirty-three

  thirty-four

  thirty-five

  thirty-six

  thirty-seven

  thirty-eight

  thirty-nine

  forty

  epilogue

  postscript

  about the author

  acknowledgments

  prologue

  Rade followed the Praetor and three Centurions deeper into the alien ship. Behind him, three more Centurions brought up the rear. The entire party was armed with M1170 laser pulse guns specially modified to penetrate the alien body shields. A trio of unarmed, fist-sized HS4 scouts hovered beside the group. The boarding party had originally started out with eight HS4s, but five had been shot down.

  His team had successfully liberated the crew of the Selene, whom the aliens had taken prisoner. Unfortunately there hadn’t been enough room aboard the shuttles for everyone to return, so he had elected to stay behind with the combat robots. His daughter had been part of the rescued crew, and she was safely headed back to the Callaway at that moment. Rade could relax. Somewhat.

  He had a vague notion of capturing the alien ship; he wanted nothing more than to parade the damn thing back to the fleet with its crew acting as his subservient prisoners. Somehow he doubted that was going to happen. It was a nice dream, though. The more likely scenario would see the mission end with him detonating the powerful explosives attached to the Centurions, thereby preventing their tech from falling into enemy hands. His pressurized jumpsuit was similarly rigged.

  The party moved on foot through the passages they had breached previously. So far there was no resistance—they had already cleared out all tangos in the previous run. Their helmet lamps eerily cut through the crimson gloom cast by the glowing filaments embedded in the bulkheads. Artificial gravity resided at a workable one point one Gs.

  Up ahead, one of the HS4s hovered beside an intact hatch the party had passed by in the earlier run.

  “Cut through,” Rade said. He and the others took up defensive positions.

  The lead combat robot switched to the plasma rifle Rade had given it for that purpose and fired at the door. Yellow gas gushed into the compartment from the molten hole the weapon carved into the metal. In moments the atmosphere beyond had vented completely; the robot fired twice more, enlarging the white hot hole, then replaced the weapon with its laser rifle.

  The HS4 went inside to scout. Rade piped the video feed to his aReal.

  “It’s an empty compartment, Chief,” the Praetor sent over the comm. “Maybe a lift of some kind.”

  “Does it have any obvious means of operation?” Rade asked.

  “No,” the combat robot answered.

  “Let’s move on then,” Rade said. “We don’t have time to figure out how their lifts work. When we’ve cleared the entire level, we’ll come back, blow a hole in the overdeck, and start climbing.”

  Jetpacks would have helped with that, but with the extra spacesuits and the portable airlock they had been forced to carry along for the refugees, the jump devices hadn’t been a possibility.

  The boarding party reached another intact hatch, and the lead robot similarly breached it. When the atmosphere finished venting, one of the HS4s went inside.

  The video feed from the scout clicked out.

  “We’re taking fire!” the Praetor said over the comm.

  Rade had already set the Centurions to “search and destroy” mode: on cue, the two lead robots peered past the edge of the opening and fired.

  “Going in!” one of them said. The first Centurion went high, the second low. In moments two more combat robots piled inside.

  Rade stayed behind, waiting for the Centurions to do their jobs. He observed the operation from their video feeds.

  “Clear!” the lead Centurion announced.

  Rade entered the breached hatch. The passage was about the same width as the previous, able to fit two of the robots abreast. Localized black fog covered the deck in places, the constituent mist still seething: dead aliens. One of the Centurions lay in a broken pile on the floor.

  The remaining HS4s quickly moved ahead to map the area. Rade advanced, following the lead Centurions.

  “Don’t touch them,” Rade warned the robots. He had seen the aliens use that fog as a weapon, short-circuiting the electronics of Centurions, and he worried it could still play havoc in death.

  He carefully stepped over the dark, moving mists himself as he advanced.

  The party reached a side passage. According to the map the HS4s had transmitted to his aReal, the passage rounded a bend and shortly ended at a sealed hatch. Meanwhile, just ahead was another secured hatch. Rade elected to open the closer hatch first, as the side passage provided convenient cover.

  While two robots moved to breach the forward hatch, he and the rest of the party sheltered in the side passage.

  He noticed that one of the dark mists resided on the deck nearby. He had seen it fall while remotely watching the Centurions clear the area. It seemed closer to the bend in that side passage than he remembered.

  Maybe he was wrong. Maybe it hadn’t moved. But he had a sneaking suspicion the occupant had dropped to the deck during the initial attack and was merely playing dead.

  Rade pointed his rifle squarely at the mist.

  But before he squeezed the trigge
r the darkness abruptly vanished.

  Incredibly, a man Rade didn’t recognize huddled there on the deck. The individual wasn’t wearing a spacesuit, yet he was alive somehow, despite the lack of atmosphere, and he raised his arms in surrender.

  The man’s lips moved soundlessly. The words Rade thought he formed caused the hair to stand up at the back of his neck.

  Before Rade could do anything more, he felt the deck shudder.

  “Taking incoming fire!” the Praetor said over the comm.

  The remaining HS4 indicators on his aReal clicked out. No more scouts.

  Rade glanced over his shoulder and saw that the robots behind him were shooting past the edge of the side passage, toward the newly breached forward hatch, no doubt.

  Rade turned back toward the man. He was gone.

  “Hey!” Rade raced down the passage, leaving behind the robots. As he rounded the bend he was forced back by the venting of yellow atmosphere up ahead. He saw that the sealed hatch had opened there. A score of dark masses resided on the other side.

  Rade quickly retreated. “Got incoming on this side!”

  Two of the robots took up defensive positions at the bend, while the other two remained near the edge of the side passage. Another pair of Centurions remained out of view, and according to the aReal they’d dropped down beside the forward hatch they’d breached.

  The party defended both flanks and kept the enemy at bay for roughly twenty minutes. For every alien they shot down, another appeared. So many enemies had fallen that the attackers began using the dark masses of their dead companions for cover.

  Rade decided at that point he definitely wasn’t going to be taking over the ship. He also decided he didn’t want to die there.

  “We’ve overstayed our welcome, people,” Rade said. “Units C and E, cover us! The rest, with me!”

  The indicated Centurions dutifully remained behind, one near the forward breach, the other the flank, and the rest retreated.

  The fleeing party members were momentarily exposed in that main passage, and they were relying on the robot near the forward breach to cover them. The Centurion closest to Rade fell behind him. He was glad it was a robot: if a brother had fallen, he would have had to go back for him.

  Rade leaped through the previous breach and into the passageway beyond, leaving the line of fire. He and the three remaining robots raced through the passages and compartments, making their way toward the original gash in the hull they had carved, and when they reached it, they took running leaps from the alien ship and out into the zero gravity of space.

  Rade activated the remote detonators of the combat robots he’d left behind. He glanced at the feed from the rear-facing camera on his aReal, but of course he didn’t see any outward change to the receding alien ship. The robots were embedded too deep for that. Even so, the already weak tracking signals for the specified Centurions winked out, so he had to assume their bodies had been successfully disposed of, and some minor damage to the alien ship had been inflicted in the process.

  So it was done. He had made it out alive. For the moment.

  He wasn’t worried about the aliens turning around to get him. They were in full flight mode. And he doubted they’d try to fire on such a minuscule target like himself. Even so, his problems weren’t quite over.

  He gazed at the stars in front of him and took a few deep breaths to calm himself.

  Floating in the void like that, separated from a ship without a jetpack, would have terrified most people. But Rade was trained for such situations, and in fact he had experienced something similar on more than a few occasions.

  “I’m going to vent my oxygen,” Rade announced to the robots floating in the void with him. “And use it as thrust. We’re going to link up and join our power sources to my PASS mechanism. Hopefully, it will be enough to boost the distress signal.”

  And that was precisely what he did. When he had completed the task, Rade finally had some time to reflect on what had happened.

  “Did any of you see a man in the passage back there?” Rade asked. “During the fighting?”

  The robots responded with a chorus of negatives. He reviewed his aReal video logs. Conveniently, the feed cut out moments before he encountered the individual in question.

  Had he imagined the whole incident? But if so, why had that second hatch opened after the man vanished? Mere coincidence?

  As he floated there in the starry blackness of space, waiting for a rescue that might never come, Rade doubted he would ever learn the truth. The incident would find a place in that uncertain vault of memories labeled Life’s Mysteries, something he would think about from time to time yet could never truly explain.

  He recalled the way the man’s lips had soundlessly moved, and he felt his skin tingle. He could have sworn the man had formed two impossible words:

  Rade Galaal.

  one

  Unable to sleep, Captain Jonathan Dallas opened his eyes to discover that the darkness in his quarters had come alive.

  He had first seen that darkness months ago, when he had been a prisoner on his own ship. One of the aliens had crashed its fighter into the Callaway and boarded. He had escaped the brig but the darkness had chased him to an airlock and forced him to take an unwanted spacewalk.

  The darkness had finally returned for him. And there was no escaping it, not in the tight confines of his quarters.

  The black mass swirled hypnotically around the tiny flashing light. That fog almost seemed to call to him. He thought he glimpsed something solid within. It reminded him of a reptilian claw.

  He scrunched his fingers tightly into the bed sheets and awaited his doom. He was trapped. There was no way he could escape the compartment, not without touching the thing.

  His crew had captured one of the aliens after the initial engagement, but the thing had died not long thereafter. Had it somehow returned to life and come for him?

  The expected death never came.

  He blinked several times. The darkness was not alive after all.

  The tiny light, however, continued flashing. He realized it was sourced from the aReal spectacles he had placed on the nightstand. The light indicated an incoming call request. Because the aReal emitted no alert sounds, the call wasn’t important enough to warrant waking him. However, since he wasn’t asleep anyway...

  “Lights,” he grunted.

  The overhead LEDs began to slowly brighten. The gradual brightening was supposed to ease the transition from dark to light, giving the eyes time to adjust.

  He reached for the aReal, slid the long arms over his ear lobes and rested the padded area over the bridge of his nose. The system scanned his retina and logged him in.

  The steel bulkhead to his right was replaced by the colorful twilight of dawn on a white sand beach. By default, the sun was programmed to match the illumination levels of the surrounding room, and that molten orb rose in sync with the brightening light, painting hues of red and orange across the sky. The bed underneath him had become a hammock tied between two palm trees. Waves lapped against the shore nearby. Seagulls screeched overhead.

  Floating directly in front of him was an incoming call request from Lieutenant Connie Myers, the chief scientist. The indicator, which contained Connie’s portrait, followed the movements of his head so that it remained slightly offset from the center of his perception, where it would stay until dismissed or answered.

  He chose the latter action. “What is it, Lieutenant?”

  “I’m sorry, Captain, did I wake you?” Connie asked.

  “No,” Jonathan said. He reached under his aReal and rubbed one eye.

  “You told me to notify you the moment there was a change in the specimen,” Connie said. “Well, there’s been a change.”

  JONATHAN HURRIED TOWARD cargo bay seven.

  That was where they kept the captured alien. Confined to a glass container, the area immediately surrounding its body was shrouded in perpetual darkness, similar to the black mass Jona
than had imagined in his quarters. When the Callaway’s telepath, Barrick, had emerged from his trancelike attempt to communicate with the alien, that darkness had descended to the bottom of the container. The alien never moved from that spot again and was presumed dead.

  The scientists had been unable to pierce the darkness with any scanning technology. The chief scientist, Connie Myers, had devised a way for their pulse guns to penetrate, however, but that was it. She still had no idea what it was made of, nor what the alien underneath actually looked like. Connie had been analyzing the darkness-generating device Wolf had purloined from the alien prison ship, but so far her best guess was it created some sort of energy field around the user. Relativistic effects were definitely involved, given that time appeared to move at a much slower rate from the frame of reference of one standing within the darkness.

  The few crew members in the passages at that hour saluted as Jonathan passed. Despite his weariness, he returned the gestures wholeheartedly. These brave men and women had proven themselves in the crucible of battle. They had earned every salute.

  He entered cargo bay seven and was met by Connie. She wore her dark hair in a bun. Like Jonathan, she used the spectacles version of the aReal, giving her the look of an academy professor. She was dressed in the standard blue utilities.

  “I apologize again if I woke you,” she said. “But I figured if you were asleep you wouldn’t have answered.”

  “No apologizes necessary,” Jonathan said. “I was wide awake. So what kind of change are we talking?”

  “Have a look.”

  He marched straight to the glass holding tank. The darkness surrounding the alien was no longer there: in its place resided a mummified body. The thing was vaguely insectile, similar to a mantis with those large, spiky forelegs. Horned plates lined its segmented abdomen. Two jointed legs were folded underneath the body. The round head contained bifurcated mandibles on either side of a tube-like proboscis. Three round protrusions on the crown could only be eyes. They were shielded by horny plates that extended from the sides of the head.