The Alliance Trilogy Read online

  Table of Contents

  Book One: Alliance Stars

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Book Two: Alliance Armada

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Book Three: Alliance Insurgent

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The Red Sword - Chapter One

  The Red Sword - Chapter Two

  The Alliance Trilogy

  by Michael Wallace

  Copyright ©2018 Michael Wallace

  Balsalom Publishing

  cover art by Jeff Brown

  Click here to sign up for Michael Wallace’s new release list and receive a free copy of his fantasy novel, The Dark Citadel. This list is used only to announce new releases and not for any other purpose.

  The Alliance Trilogy

  Book #1 – Alliance Stars

  Book #2 – Alliance Armada

  Book #3 – Alliance Insurgent

  Note: If you would like to follow the other adventures of HMS Blackbeard and her crew, the other books are available in the Blackbeard Superbox and the Void Queen Trilogy, also as box sets and available on Kindle Unlimited.

  Book One: Alliance Stars

  Chapter One

  The derelict was a human ship. There had been some question of that earlier, when HMS Blackbeard first spotted it drifting through the void, eleven million miles from the nearest jump point. Engines gone, armor riddled from kinetic fire. Deep space had its derelicts, its ghost ships. Some had been drifting for tens of thousands, even millions of years.

  Blackbeard had traveled far beyond the inner frontier, into nearly uncharted space, and the ghost ship matched no known class. It could have been anything or anyone.

  But it wasn’t alien, and it wasn’t ancient. Blackbeard harpooned the ship and sent in the boarding rockets. Marines cut through the plating. Captain Jess Tolvern followed the marines in, turned on her helmet light, and knew these things at a single glance.

  Staring her in the face was a clearly labeled fire suppression system—upside down from her perspective—and she could even read the letters, having been raised in a religious family and knowing a bit of Old Church English from all those years of Sunday school. This was a related language. The corridor curved to the right, and floating there was the shriveled, freeze-dried body of some poor fool who’d clipped himself to the wall, only to see his atmosphere vented. He wore a uniform and a sidearm.

  She toggled her com. “Human, all right.”

  The admiral’s voice came back. “Gravity?”

  “Negative.”

  Not only was artificial gravity nonexistent, but from the fire suppression sign and the way the corpse was floating, the boarding crew was upside down relative to the passageway, which left Tolvern’s head spinning, trying to make sense of it. She made a gesture to the others, and they flipped themselves over with power assist from their mech suit boots.

  “Talk to me, Tolvern,” Drake said.

  She checked the display on the inside of her faceplate. “No energy readings of any kind, sir. She’s cold.”

  “Something’s emitting residual down there. Find it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Their language was formal, but she knew him well enough to hear the tension in his voice, the personal connection. She’d got back in the habit of speaking to him as an officer these past six months, at least on duty, and the words “sir” and “captain” came naturally. Their relationship was no secret to the rest of the crew, but they only dropped the formality during those rare moments when they were both off shift at the same time. The stakes were too high out here across the inner frontier.

  There were fourteen of them in the boarding crew: Tolvern, the science and chief tech officers, ten royal marines, and Lieutenant Capp, the acting second mate. The marines carried rifles and moved ahead in the corridor, boot and elbow thrusters giving tiny bursts to maneuver them. They secured each passageway, moving expertly with their mech suits while the four officers came along at a somewhat clumsier pace.

  More bodies greeted them, most clipped, but some free-floating. The floaters had died violently, heads caved in and limbs bent at wrong angles. Antigrav must have failed during the attack, and they’d smashed into the walls before they could clip.

  Lieutenant Capp stopped and illuminated one of the bodies with her helmet light. “King’s balls,” she swore. “Take a look at this, Cap’n.”

  One man had got himself in a pressure suit before he clipped himself to the wall, but there was a busted seal on his right boot, which had blown open and exposed the foot. Tolvern imagined the poor fool clinging to the wall as grav went down and the ship spun about under fire. Buffered by the atmosphere venting. Foot freeze-drying as the void hit. And then what? Slowly freezing to death as the chill worked up his leg, or did the suit keep him warm and he died of thirst instead?

  Horrible way to go.

  But Capp was a former marine herself, and not so squeamish as all of that. It took Tolvern a moment to realize that the other woman’s light was aimed at something else. It illuminated words carved into the plastic paneling within the man’s reach. The fingers of his right hand still gripped a utility knife.

  Smythe, the tech officer, floated over with controlled bursts from his boots, and he leaned in t
o record it with a helmet cam. “Looks like more Old English. What’s it say?”

  Smythe’s voice was tinny in Tolvern’s ear. They were still on general com, and there was a slight delay in responses as everything routed through Blackbeard.

  “Shoulda gone to church, ya heathen,” Capp said.

  Tolvern translated into the modern dialect. “It says, ‘we have been judged.’”

  Saying the words aloud gave her a chill. Judged by whom? For what crime?

  They continued down the corridor of the ghost ship. The marines passed around the bend and stopped at an opening in the wall. Lieutenant Capp floated up and came to a halt.

  “We got a lift shaft, Cap’n.”

  “That should take us to the bridge,” Tolvern said.

  She positioned three marines in the corridor, ordered them to hold position, and sent the rest up the shaft. Didn’t expect trouble, in spite of whatever heat source they’d detected from Blackbeard, but they’d faced tricks and traps before, and some involved supposedly abandoned ships. For the same reason, Blackbeard, tethered several miles away from the derelict, had her guns, missiles, and torpedoes at the ready. The Albion battle cruiser would take no chances this far from home.

  The lift itself was below them in the shaft, which left the way clear to the bridge. Or so Tolvern thought. But when they came out the other side, she found herself not in a command center, but a barracks or human storage compartment of some kind. Dozens of slim, coffin-like pods lined the walls, each one large enough to hold a single body, and connected with a familiar array of hoses and valves.

  All of it was recognizable human tech. The same sort of stasis system used by any human civilization who wanted to transport troops or colonists without giving them life support around the clock. Slip them in chambers, put them down, and freeze them in stasis gel. Thaw as needed.

  Tolvern was disappointed. Nearly six months had passed since they crossed the inner frontier and began to grope their way toward Old Earth. Charts were decades, even centuries out of date, nearly rubbish. Half the jump points were gone, which forced them into detours that took weeks of long, slow crawls across dead systems.

  No merchant frigates, no warships out here. No humans, Hroom, or Apex. They’d come across a single habitable planet, a little hot, but with plenty of water, land, and native vegetation, but if there had ever been settlers there, they’d left no trace.

  This room looked just as dead. Some of the pods had bodies; the people in them would have simply died as their stasis gel stopped circulating. Would have never known their ship was attacked.

  Tolvern switched to a local channel and spoke directly to Brockett and Smythe, who had their hand computers out and were checking out a fried computer bank. “Stay here and check out the tech. I’ll leave a couple of marines and take the rest to find the bridge.”

  “Hold on, Captain,” Smythe said. “We found the heat.”

  “In here?”

  “Looks like there’s an auxiliary system circulating the gel through the cells.”

  The tech officer sounded pleased, almost eager. And the way Brockett was fiddling with computer systems on the wall, it seemed the science officer was pretty keen, as well.

  Capp cut in. “Them blokes are still alive?”

  “I’ll find out in a minute.” A hint of doubt had entered Smythe’s voice. He scanned his computer along the outside of one of the cells, then cursed. “Power, but no circulation.”

  “The gel is degraded,” Brockett announced. He removed a tool from his belt and began pulling bolts from a wall panel. “It’s a known flaw in our stasis chambers, too. Same tech we were using five hundred years ago, more or less.”

  And suddenly Tolvern understood. They’d taken a good hard look at the ghost ship before boarding. Everything was cold on the engines, and there was little in the way of residuals in the power plant. But there had been heat somewhere.

  “Someone gonna explain?” Capp said.

  “This ship has been wrecked for thirty or forty years, minimum,” Tolvern said. “The insulated core takes that long to cool to background temp, so we know it has been at least that long. It’s got a battery or fuel cell running auxiliary, keeping some of this stuff going—impressive, really—but it wasn’t enough to keep these guys alive.”

  “You can only hold someone in stasis for so long,” Smythe said.

  “I was marine, yeah?” Capp said, sounded peeved. “We was always being frozen and thawed. I know you got to wake ’em up every once in a while.”

  “Not just wake them,” Smythe said. “Flush the chamber, refill, and refreeze.”

  But it wasn’t a uniform failure, they soon discovered. The gel had stopped circulating in about eighty of the ninety cells in the room, but the final ten had some movement, and they’d failed from the bottom up. That meant losing the legs first, followed by the torso, on up to the head. Ten people in this room still had living brains, and five were only gone to the abdomen.

  Of these five, two had lost most of their legs and their fingers where their arms hung down by their sides, but were fully intact above that point. In other words, maimed, but alive.

  Tolvern called the ship and explained the situation to Drake. “Smythe says we can dislodge the chambers, haul them back to the ship, flush the gel, and refreeze in one of our own cells. Or even amputate and wake them up. It’ll be a shock waking up after half a century missing your legs. But better than dying, maybe. And we might get some intel.”

  “Sorry, what was that last part?” Drake asked. She repeated, and he said, “How long?”

  “To get them back? I’d say forty minutes, maybe an hour. Depends on—”

  She stopped, put off by something in his tone. There was noise in the background, a lot of chatter. She flipped to the general com, only to find that she was cut off from shipboard communications. So were Capp and the rest.

  Suspicion bloomed. “What’s going on up there?”

  “Stay on task,” he said. “I’m sending the brawler to pick you up. You can haul out the stasis chambers, but you’ll have to hurry.”

  “The brawler? Why? We’ll strap them to the sled and send them back on the line with the rest of us. Along with anything else we find that looks interesting.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m pulling you out manually. Carvalho is already in the launch bay.”

  “Carvalho? Why him?”

  “Because he was on hand, that’s why. You don’t have forty minutes. You have twenty. Can you get the pods and haul them out in that time?”

  “James?” Her tone was serious, and she didn’t care that she’d broken protocol by using his given name while on duty. “Quit messing around and tell me what’s going on.”

  “We’ve got company. Three ships, already at missile range and closing fast. They have not announced their intentions.”

  Tolvern swore. “Anyone we know?”

  His answer made her blood go cold. “Not human. Unknown alien race. Warships.”

  #

  Blackbeard and her crew were veterans of the war. They’d faced down Apex harvesters, massive alien ships that collected victims by the thousands to be ritually slaughtered. Tolvern and her boarding party were not panicking by any stretch.

  But they were in a tight spot, and nerves were frayed. Blackbeard seemed to have detached from the harpoons, which left them stuck on the derelict until Carvalho could bring them home on the brawler.

  James cut me loose. He’s left me here.

  Of course he had. If it came to abandoning his wife and a small away team to save his battle cruiser and the hundreds of crew and marines on board, what choice would he have? Duty first. Always duty.

  Twenty minutes. It wasn’t long. Tolvern told Brockett and Smythe to detach one stasis chamber and leave the other. Whichever one of the two had the least degraded systems—that’s what they’d take. The other poor fool would never wake. But neither would roughly ninety other humans on the ghost ship, those who’d survived the in
itial attack and been drifting endlessly through space ever since. Left to die, unnoticed, unmourned.

  Smythe and Brockett got the stasis chamber detached and floated it between them toward the open lift shaft. Twelve minutes had passed. Tolvern called Drake to update him—and get better information, by God, even if she had to pry it out of him. Manx answered from the bridge and gave her the brush-off.

  “Collect your team, make your way to the penetration site, and await orders.”

  “Manx, dammit. I give you orders, not the other way around.”

  “Not at the moment, you don’t.” His voice was tight and nervous. That in itself was alarming. “Call me only when you are assembled at the penetration site.”

  “Put the admiral on.”

  Instead, Manx cut the line.

  They came up the shaft to where the three marines had remained since she’d left them in place. They’d wedged themselves into niches between storage lockers and popped out as Tolvern’s light swept over them. Their relaxed posture told her everything. They were operating with old information.

  “Capp, explain the situation.”

  Their postures stiffened as the lieutenant filled them in with her rough York Town accent and vocabulary, punctuated by choice curses. The marines did not complain, apart from a few oaths of their own. Inside, what must they be thinking? How many marines had volunteered for this mission? All of them? Anything to get away from the tedium of shifts through stasis, virtual training sessions, and the long, slow haul through space. These lucky few were now stuck here in this dark ship.

  Tolvern consulted her computer when they arrived at the three holes they’d burned through the outer and inner hulls upon their arrival. Sixteen minutes had passed since Drake gave her orders.

  “I’m at the entry site,” she said over the general com. “Unless you say otherwise, I’m going to make a quick run up this corridor while the marines cut a bigger hole to see if there’s anything we can haul out of . . . hello?”

  The line was dead. She tried the local channel. It was down, too, and she couldn’t even communicate with the people floating right next to her. Capp tapped at her helmet and shrugged. Tolvern repeated the gesture and shook her head.

  They were cut off. The unknown ships must be jamming communication as they closed. That answered one question. Hostile intent.