Revelation Run Read online

  REVELATION RUN

  ©2019 RICK PARTLOW

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the authors.

  Print and eBook formatting, and cover design by Steve Beaulieu. Artwork provided by Filip Dudek.

  Published by Aethon Books LLC. 2019

  All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  Contents

  Prologue

  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

  FROM THE PUBLISHER

  Prologue

  Captain Ruth Laurent had never imagined she’d meet Lord Aaron Starkad, Overseer of the Supremacy. She certainly hadn’t expected him to be this big of an asshole.

  “Let me make sure I understand your story, Captain,” Starkad said, legs crossed, fingers clasped over his knee.

  The hereditary leader of the Starkad Supremacy, the largest and most powerful of the Five Dominions, was a head taller than her, even seated, and extremely handsome, though the effect was somewhat ameliorated by the sense he knew exactly how good he looked and reveled in it. A curl of blond hair hung down strategically over his piercing blue eyes, and the corner of his mouth was twisted in what seemed to her to be a perpetual sneer. He gave the air of someone who considered the unadorned, sterile-white interrogation chamber beneath him, as if he were wasting his valuable time being there.

  “Your former commanding officer, my former Intelligence chief, Colonel Aleksandr Kuryakin, commandeered one of the newest and most expensive heavy cruisers in my fleet, the Valkyrian, for a mission he authorized without my knowledge or consent, to chase down a Goddamned mercenary company?”

  “My Lord,” she said carefully, very cognizant of the man’s reputation, “he was convinced this ‘Wholesale Slaughter’ mercenary unit was merely a front for an intelligence operation by the Guardianship of Sparta. He saw footage of the unit’s commander, a Captain Jonathan Slaughter, and insisted the man was actually Logan Conner, the eldest son of the Guardian himself, Jaimie Brannigan.”

  “Why the hell,” Starkad demanded, gesturing expressively, “would the heir to the Guardian of Sparta not use his father’s last name? And why haven’t I heard anything about him before if he’s this important intelligence operative?”

  She was about to answer when Saul Grieg stepped in. She’d already learned not to interrupt Colonel Grieg. He was short and stocky, the corners of his flattop as squared off as the epaulets on the shoulders of his grey dress uniform or the cut of his jaw.

  “Lord Starkad,” the Intelligence officer explained with a tone that might have sounded sharp and impatient coming from someone else, but was just the way Grieg spoke, “Logan Conner took his mother’s last name to honor her after she was killed in what the Spartans call ‘the Treason,’ that rebellion twenty years ago or so under Duncan Lambert.” He shrugged casually. “We had a hand in it as well, if I recall, but nothing they could prove. As for why you haven’t heard of him, that’s because he isn’t some sort of intelligence agent, he’s a junior platoon leader in an armored battalion.”

  “He was a junior platoon leader,” Laurent corrected him, letting impatience and annoyance get the better of her innate caution. “But as of the launch of Colonel Kuryakin’s mission, he hadn’t been seen in his unit for months. The Colonel believed it was him and he authorized the mission in the hopes of capturing him alive and using him for his strategic value against Sparta.”

  Starkad barked a cynical laugh.

  “You mean the crusty old bastard wanted to use him to buy himself a seat onto my Privy Council,” he corrected her. “Old Alek always had his eye on politics. So, he leads my best and brightest off on this wild goose chase and what? You say he just stumbled onto an old Imperial treasure trove?”

  “The Spartan operatives were searching for it, following a transmission we didn’t pick up until we were closer. The Colonel figured out Logan and the others had masqueraded as mercenaries in order to pass through Starkad space without alerting us to their presence. My Lord, it was Terminus Cut, the legendary Imperial research station. We were there, we saw the riches it contains…”

  “You were there,” Grieg cut her off, “with a top-of-the-line heavy cruiser and a company of mecha, and yet Kuryakin let himself get suckered in and defeated in detail. The man wasn’t a combat soldier. He should have realized his own limitations.” The stocky Marine-turned-Intelligence officer paced around the room behind her, making her shoulders itch with the need to turn around and look at him. “If he had, he could have waited until the Valkyrian had destroyed their transport before he launched his attack, then taken his time and starved the enemy out.”

  “Tell me again, Captain,” Starkad urged, the hint of a smile on his smug, too-handsome face, “just how you managed to escape.”

  He leaned forward, as if he thought it was a marvelous adventure story he could share over drinks with his toadies. She forced herself not to sigh in exasperation, staring down at the glove on her right hand. The centimeter gap between the glove and the end of her uniform sleeve revealed the livid, red burn scars there and she fought the urge to pull the sleeve down to hide it.

  I can’t hide my face, she thought, bitterness still roiling inside her gut.

  “I was badly injured in the explosion of one of their drop-ships,” she reported dispassionately, shutting out the emotional pain the way she’d learned to shut out the lingering pain from the burns. “I was blown clear and buried beneath some wreckage. None of the enemy noticed me, and I was able to sneak inside the Terminus facility and steal food and medical supplies.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut tightly for a moment, remembering nights spent gritting her teeth against the pain to keep from crying out, huddled behind supply crates, so damned close to surrendering just to get proper medical treatment.

  “When they began loading supplies onto their drop-ship to leave the system, I hid in one of the crates and then managed to find an unoccupied storage bin on their starship. When they made their stop on Guajarat to ship their personnel back to Sparta, I snuck on board their drop ship using a stolen uniform and made my way from the spaceport to a Starkad intelligence agent I knew was running our operations in the capital.”

  She hissed out a breath through clenched jaws. Her description had been dry, matter-of-fact, leaving out the desperate fear, the sheer panic, the hunger and thirst gnawing at her in the times when she couldn’t sneak out to forage. Leaving out the constant, sleepless agony…

  “Well, that’s an impressive story, Captain Laurent,” Aaron Starkad allowed, leaning back, hands behind his neck as he regarded her through hooded eyes. “If it’s true, if you�
��re not simply a Spartan plant, a double-agent.” He glanced over at Grieg, who was standing at parade rest near the center of the small room, a statue dedicated to the spirit of martial readiness. “You’re my new Chief of Intelligence, Colonel Grieg. What say you?”

  Grieg’s eyes were the neutral, flat black of a military service pistol and his stare felt much like a loaded gun being pointed her way.

  “Her story checks out,” the man made his judgement with the finality of a gavel banging on a courtroom desk. “There’s always the possibility she’s crazy, but she’s not lying.”

  “In that case,” Starkad said, pushing himself up to his feet, palms flat on the flimsy, plastic table, “we shouldn’t waste any more time. It’s been, what?” He glanced at Laurent. “Months already? We can’t let Sparta have access to that sort of weapons technology. Grieg, you’re going to lead the mission personally and I don’t want any fuck-ups this time.” He cocked an eyebrow at the Intelligence chief. “Do you have any idea how much a heavy cruiser costs? You better not lose me another of them.” He began to turn back to the door, but paused and waved at Laurent. “Oh, and just in case, you’re taking her with you. If she’s telling the truth, give her a promotion and a medal. If she was lying, you can shove her out an airlock.”

  Starkad’s nose wrinkled as his eyes went to Laurent’s face. “And if you have the time, see if there’s anything the medical team can do to make her look less hideous.”

  Is it treason, Laurent wondered, to fantasize about punching your king in the face?

  1

  Terrin Brannigan tapped the console impatiently, as if the motion would make the upload go faster. The status bar was virtually crawling from one side of the display to the other and he wondered if there was anything else he could be doing.

  Record the last of the stardrive field propagation data? Did that.

  Re-check the calculations for antimatter output from the design specs for the solar-powered orbital factory? Did that.

  Finish the report on conversion procedures to refit antimatter-powered devices to fusion plant throughput? Did that.

  No, this was it. All he had left to finish today was uploading the last of the Terminus Cut facility database to data crystals and getting it on the next cargo run to Sparta. He would like to have been able to bring the computer language crew back here to do the work of decoding the more deeply encrypted sections, but the more people who came to Terminus, the greater the danger of being discovered.

  “A watched pot never boils.”

  Terrin didn’t jump at the interruption of his thoughts, but only because he’d come to expect it. The voice was perky and upbeat and annoying as all hell. He closed his eyes for a moment, gathered his patience and turned to face Petty Officer Third Class Francesca Hayden, apparently the most cheerful and effervescent computer technician in the whole Spartan Navy. Even when she was standing still, she gave the impression of constantly bouncing on the balls of her feet.

  “Pardon?” he said, the actual content of her words lost in his irritation.

  “It’s just a saying my great grandmother used to tell me,” she clarified, still grinning brightly, her teeth almost painfully white in the glare of the temporary lighting they’d set up in the auxiliary control center down on the third level of the Terminus facility. There’d been too much damage to the primary control center from the fight with Starkad, and this one had come with actual, physical input terminals instead of haptic holograms. “If you watch a pot of water on the stove, it seems like it takes forever to boil, you know.”

  “I don’t believe I’ve ever had the occasion to boil water on a stove,” he admitted. He winced, realizing it made him sound like a privileged douchebag, and he amended the statement. “I mean, in college, I made my own meals sometimes, and in the lab at the university, but those were all just ready-made heat-n-eat bowls.” He shrugged, trailing off.

  Why did she always have this effect on him? She was no different than any other tech. Okay, maybe she was cute, if you were into the whole pixie look, with her bobbed brown hair and upturned nose and the impish grin. She certainly did nice things to a set of blue Navy utility fatigues but that could have been the effect of months away from civilians. He glanced around the control room to see if any of the other technicians had noticed his embarrassment, but the only two he could see looked to be absorbed in their work.

  “I love a home-cooked meal,” she went on as if he hadn’t tripped all over his tongue. She leaned on the hard plastic of the control console and eyed the two-dimensional display screen fitted there. “It’s what I’m most looking forward to when I get back to Sparta, visiting my family and sitting down for dinner with my family. Do you and your family ever eat dinner together?”

  “Not generally.” He sniffed. “My father usually works through dinner unless it’s some sort of formal occasion, and until all this…” He waved a hand around them, indicating the base and the whole mission. “…my brother and I could barely sit in the same room together without yelling at each other.”

  “Oh, right,” she said, nodding as if she’d only now remembered, though he must have told her a half a dozen times already. “I keep forgetting you’re Captain Conner’s brother.” She laughed. “Did you guys really have to call him ‘Captain Slaughter’ on the mission?”

  “Yeah, well, he was undercover. The rest of them could be released from service without too much attention, but he’s the Guardian’s son. Someone would have noticed that.”

  Or at least that’s what they kept telling me. I wouldn’t have any idea.

  “Is he coming back to pick you up once the initial study is done?” she wondered. “I really want to see that ship you guys found!”

  “I don’t know. The last I heard, the ship was being put through its paces on some proving ground system way out at the edge of Spartan space.” He shrugged. “But I guess they’d want to send it out to pick up the shipment of Imperial technology. They might be able to smuggle technicians and work crews in and out on commercial ships but we won’t be able to sneak mecha and battlesuits and hovertanks out that way. We’ll need the stardrive for that. Since it’s reactionless, we can sneak past Starkad pickets to the jump-points before they detect us.”

  “Well, technically,” she corrected him with a puckish grin, “it’s not a stardrive without an antimatter power source to take it past the lightspeed threshold. And the Starkad picket ships will still be able to detect it, since it has to vent reactor heat. They just won’t be able to identify it as a spaceship with the fusion flare.” A giggle, surprisingly girly. “And they wouldn’t be able to accelerate fast enough to catch up with it anyway.”

  Terrin scowled at her, annoyed again though not clearly understanding why.

  “If you already know all that, Petty Officer Hayden, why did you bother to ask me?”

  “Just making conversation!” She touched him on the forearm and he stared at her hand with a look of incomprehension. “And I told you, call me Franny.”

  He was still trying to formulate a response when the alarm klaxons sounded. They weren’t quite as jarring as they might have been had they been built into the structure of the room. Instead, they vibrated out of tinny speakers attached to the walls with adhesive and hooked to the makeshift intercom system through repeaters set at intervals in the corridors. They were as frightening for the message they carried, one drilled into him over the last few weeks by one rehearsal after another. A ship had jumped into this system.

  “Attention all personnel, report immediately to the shuttles!” The voice was familiar, serious and brooding. Terrin thought perhaps the Ranger captain was self-consciously trying to live up to the legendary standard his boss, Major Randell had created for officers in the elite Special Operations unit. “Repeat, all personnel report immediately to the shuttles. We have Starkad warships inbound and only thirty-five minutes to take off in time for the escape ship to reach the jump point! This is not a drill!”

  Though would Capt
ain Cordova actually tell them if it were? Terrin swallowed hard and looked at the progress bar of the upload. Seventy percent.

  “Get out,” he ordered, his voice breaking slightly. He cleared his throat and repeated himself as Franny and the other two technicians stared at him. “All of you, go! I’ll be right behind you after this data finishes uploading. We can’t leave this for Starkad to find.”

  And I’ll be damned if we did all this for nothing.

  If there were really Starkad ships inbound, he knew what the procedure was. Cordova had gone over that often enough, too. He’d seen the thermonuclear charges the Rangers had set, knew the procedures for arming them…and knew the process was irreversible once it had been locked in.

  The other two techs hadn’t required any more convincing; they’d vacated their posts and taken off out into the corridor. This was technically the night shift, though it meant little in an underground base, but most of the regular crew would have been in their quarters, sleeping, and wouldn’t be passing this way to get to the surface and the shuttles there, so he wouldn’t have to worry about anyone else. Except Franny, who was still standing there, hands on her hips and a stubborn expression on her face.

  “Franny, I said you need to go.”

  “Just as soon as you do,” she insisted, her voice as firm as her stance. “If this is important enough for you to stay and wait for it, it’s important enough you shouldn’t be doing it alone.”

  “Damn it, Petty Officer, get to the shuttle!” He tried to make the words sound commanding, the way his brother or Lyta Randell did when they dealt with unruly subordinates, but it came out a lot more pleading and petulant than he’d intended.