ALSO BY MARKO KLOOS
FRONTLINES
Terms of Enlistment
Lines of Departure
Angles of Attack
Chains of Command
Fields of Fire
Points of Impact
Measures of Absolution (A Frontlines Kindle novella)
“Lucky Thirteen” (A Frontlines Kindle short story)
THE PALLADIUM WARS
Aftershocks
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2020 by Marko Kloos
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542090056 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1542090059 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781542090070 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 1542090075 (paperback)
Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant
First edition
For Lyra, the artist. I love you as much as you don’t love hugs.
CONTENTS
START READING
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
When it is peace, then we may view again
With new-won eyes each other’s truer form
And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm
We’ll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain,
When it is peace. But until peace, the storm,
The darkness and the thunder and the rain.
—Charles Hamilton Sorley
CHAPTER 1
ADEN
Zephyr streaked through the void faster than Aden had ever traveled before. Faster than most people have ever traveled before, he corrected himself as he watched the holographic plot on the top bulkhead. They were hurtling down the dotted trajectory of the current shortest-time traffic lane from Rhodia to Pallas, the small mountain planet that made the most distant orbit around the system’s sun. The acceleration readout next to Zephyr’s icon showed the improbable number of fifteen g. Most civilian ships maxed out at seven or eight, and even warships rarely managed more than ten. At some point, gravmag generators demanded an infinite amount of energy, and then the laws of physics kicked in and imposed a hard speed limit.
“T-minus eight for turnaround burn,” Maya, the pilot, announced from her workstation up on the command deck. She was fully in her element, both hands on the flight controls, comfortably reclining in her gravity couch. Aden had been on Zephyr for three months, and this was the first time they were pushing the engine hard enough against the gravmag generator’s limit to feel the weight of uncompensated acceleration.
Zephyr was roughly the same size as Cloud Dancer, the ill-fated ship that had carried Aden off Rhodia three months ago, but that was where the similarities ended. Cloud Dancer had been old and worn, with the marks of many years of interplanetary travel. Zephyr looked far more polished. Everything on board worked the way it had been designed, and nothing was worn out or broken. It was easily the most modern ship Aden had ever seen, although his sample size was admittedly small and consisted mostly of well-used Gretian Navy ships. His berthing compartment was just as small as the one on Cloud Dancer, but it was much more comfortable, with well-thought-out storage cubbies and a retractable toilet-and-sink combo. It was claustrophobic compared to the officer-sized residence unit in the Rhodian prison arcology, but Aden had gotten used to the smaller space. In a way, it was cozier than his old residence unit, which had always felt empty and impersonal because he never had enough belongings to fill it up and make it his own.
“What’s the status of our slow friends?” Captain Decker asked.
Next to Aden, Henry Siboniso, the ship’s first officer, used the controls suspended in front of his gravity couch to increase the scale of the holographic plot projection until it showed most of the space between Zephyr and Pallas. He highlighted a ship icon labeled OMV LADY MINA and clicked his tongue.
“They’re not even at turnaround yet,” Henry said. “Going down the track at a steady ten point two. Unless they find an extra notch or two on their throttle, we’ll beat them by almost an hour.”
Decker chuckled softly. “Well, the bet was their idea. Not that we stand to win much after we fill up again at Pallas.”
“We could back off a g or two,” Maya suggested. “Save some reactor fuel. We’ll still beat them. It’s first past the inner marker, not first one to dock.”
“Crew poll,” Decker said. “It’s everyone’s money, after all. Sound off. Who wants to save a few thousand on the fuel bill? We’ll stand to make profit on the bet if we don’t blow the whole wager out of the drive cone.”
“Not me. I’ll kick in a few hundred if I have to,” Maya said without taking her eyes off the control screen in front of her. She looked like she was having way too good of a time to even consider her own proposal.
“If you’re going to show off, might as well show off big,” Henry said.
“I don’t care for this extended high-g shit, but I can suffer it for a little while longer, I guess,” Tristan Dorn said from his gravity couch behind Aden. He was the ship’s medic and the oldest member of the crew, a tall and lanky Oceanian in his fifties with a craggy face and short white hair. Aden found it liberating that almost everyone on Zephyr was his own age or older, and far more experienced. Only Maya, the pilot, and Tess, the engineer, were not in their forties yet. It was the first time since his early days in the Blackguards that he was the most junior and least experienced member of a team, but there was a certain freedom in taking orders instead
