Albion Lost (The Exiled Fleet Book 1) Read online

  Albion Lost

  The Exiled Fleet Book 1

  by

  Richard Fox

  For Dan,

  ever a good man

  Also by Richard Fox

  The Ember War Saga

  The Ember War

  The Ruins of Anthalas

  Blood of Heroes

  Earth Defiant

  The Gardens of Nibiru

  The Battle of the Void

  The Siege of Earth

  The Crucible

  The Xaros Reckoning

  Copyright © by Richard Fox

  All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission.

  ASIN:

  Table of contents

  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

  Chapter 24

  From the Author

  The Ember War

  Chapter 1

  A tremor passed through the deck plates and into Captain Jimenez’s chair as his ship came out of slip space. The air vents feeding the bridge blew a gust of hot air over Jimenez and his crew, all of whom opened their shirts and began cursing the chief engineer who’d promised the air conditioners were fixed.

  Glancing at a screen attached to his chair, Jimenez saw green and amber conditions across the board. None of the systems on the Cabo had failed during the translation from faster-than-light travel, which was a significant improvement from the last engineer’s performance.

  Maybe he wouldn’t space the engineer just yet.

  As the ice world of Sevastopol shined like a full moon through the bridge’s windows, his metal left hand twitched at the memory of working the mines as a child. Jimenez brought his oversized, spiked cybernetic hand to his collar and popped the top button with a flick of thorn-tipped nails. That he’d lost the original to frostbite on that godforsaken planet was a secret. He preferred his crew—and anyone else who ever heard of Iron Hand Jimenez—to come up with their own story as to how it happened; the imagination did wonders to build fear.

  As a pirate, Jimenez preferred to work smarter and not harder; it was much better for the bottom line and life expectancy. Hailing a targeted ship and looking the part of a pirate willing to carry out a promise space every last man, woman, and child on a civilian transport if his commands weren’t followed made his job easier.

  “Get Medived on the line,” Jimenez said. “That old bastard owes me money. I’ll have his hide and his mine if he doesn’t explain all the slip traffic coming through here over the last few days.”

  “Sure thing, boss,” said the sailor at a workstation to his right. Tarka sniffed hard and leaned closer to the fuzzy holo screens in front of her. “Would if I could, but Medived’s spot isn’t broadcasting on the net.”

  “Then raise Orlaf.” Jimenez shifted in his seat as sweat ran down his back.

  “Nobody’s online,” she said. “No ore tenders, no nothing.” The rest of the bridge crew craned their necks toward Tarka’s screens.

  Jimenez curled his metal fingers into a fist and let it fall onto his chair with a clang, snapping the crew back to their duties. He unbuckled from his chair and leaned next to Tarka.

  “Bull,” Jimenez said quietly. “The slip lines have been humming for days with ships coming in and out of Sevastopol space. No one’s got the balls to lay a finger on Orlaf’s claim; he’s with the Wyverns. Last time I saw movement like this was when some Cathay admiral decided he wanted his own empire in wild space. This place should be full of refugee ships carrying all their worldly possessions and marketable bodies.”

  “Radar’s clean except for some debris in a decaying orbit over that snowball and comm channels are dead, sir.” Tarka tapped a control panel, brought up a feed from the forward cannons, and zoomed onto the planet’s surface. Jimenez reached over her shoulder and tapped in coordinates.

  The camera shifted and settled on an open wound on the planet’s surface. The strip mine was almost a mile wide, surrounded by refineries and ramshackle buildings. Blown snow filled the streets and covered the roofs. Jimenez shifted the view to Olaf’s headquarters, which lay in a smoldering heap. The metal spires that once lorded over the city were blasted apart.

  “Conn…pull a route from the grav buoy back to Sicani. Get us the hell out of here,” Jimenez said as he went back to his seat, walking too fast for anyone to think nothing was amiss.

  “Got a radar hit,” Tarka said, “but this can’t be right. Must be some kind of jamming. Nothing’s this big.” A track appeared on her holo screens coming around the planet’s dark side. Three more came after that, then a flood of unidentified ships, each larger than any warship in wild space.

  “Conn?” Jimenez strapped himself in and slapped his metal palm against the armrest.

  “Something’s coming through slip space right on top of us,” the conn officer said. “I can’t form a sheath to—”

  The star field above the Cabo vanished, replaced by the circular underside of a massive spacecraft.

  Jimenez stared at the behemoth, his jaw slack. His crew panicked, screaming orders at each other as their captain remained frozen in shock.

  Six energy beams burst from the massive ship and ripped the Cabo apart within seconds.

  Chapter 2

  Salis closed her only piece of luggage and waited for a hiss of air as the case sealed itself shut. The case held little more than a few sets of clothes and essential toiletries, the sum total of everything she owned. She was used to getting by with little to nothing, but after three months traveling through slip space, she could understand why her fellow travelers carried significantly more worldly goods with them.

  “Attention, all passengers,” came from a speaker in the ceiling, “please disembark at your nearest gangway. Mandatory customs and immigration screening is required by New Exeter authorities regardless of your final destination. Please have all your documents ready for inspection.”

  Despite three months of recycled air, passable food, and a cabin slightly more robust than the steerage decks, she was hesitant to leave the High Sierra. She ran her fingertips along her forearm, feeling the slight mass of an implant near her elbow and the connecting line of neuro-wire running to another implant within her wrist. That the doctors on Geneva swore her augments were undetectable by anything less than a full bio scan should have put her mind at ease, but they weren’t the ones about to come under scrutiny. Albion, like most civilized star nations, had strict laws against voluntary biological augmentation.

  The neuro-wires tacked on to the rest of her nervous system sent a shiver through her body, and an ache for something missing, a phantom itch for a part of her body she’d never had, scratched at her mind. She’d have her gestalt soon, and then she would finally feel whole.

  Salis tapped out the address of a hotel onto the smart tag attached to her luggage and walked over to a floor-length mirror next to the cabin’s door. With her hair in loose waves, a silk blouse that flowed from her shoulders to below her waist in the latest style from Toulouse, and pants that ended above her ankles, she was every bit the young low-le
vel executive and not at all her true self.

  Why she had to travel under an alias and under cover was never fully explained to her, and she hadn’t pressed for more answers. On Geneva, and especially in the Houses, the apprentice does not question the master.

  Salis picked up a small briefcase next to the door and brushed her fingers against a sensor on the frame. The door slid open to a corridor full of passengers bustling toward a bright opening farther down the passageway.

  Natural sunlight stung her eyes for a moment. Albion’s star was a bit more luminescent than Geneva’s, something Salis knew she’d have to get used to during her long stay. She peered down both sides of the corridor, keeping an eye out for one person in particular, then stepped out of her cabin.

  After three months aboard the High Sierra, everyone but her seemed overly anxious to get the hell off the ship and onto Albion. That the transit had taken a week longer than advertised hadn’t gone over well with the passengers in the more expensive staterooms, but such were the hazards of slip space. The gravity tides between stars could stretch or compress the faster-than-light travel times, and the High Sierra had the misfortune of catching un-fair winds after it weighed anchor from Uttar.

  Uniformed ship’s crew went flush against the bulkheads to make way for the rush of people making for the exit. The crew’s faces looked more relieved that the ship had finally made landfall than most of the paying passengers. Salis traded nods and smiles with the butlers and stewards. One would eventually make it to her room and see that her suitcase got sent to an Exeter city delivery service and then on to her hotel.

  “Fiona!” came from behind her, and Salis bit her bottom lip in frustration. She’d been so close to avoiding him.

  “Wait up…” A heavyset man with a shock of red hair and whose skin was burnt orange from tanning treatments elbowed his way through the crowd.

  “Reginald…I thought you would have disembarked sooner with the rest of first class,” she said.

  “Well, you didn’t answer the message I sent you last night. I have to know if you’re still interested in that cove whale tour. They really are spectacular creatures—you must see them.” He ambled just ahead of her and used his sturdy frame to help ease her passage toward the open doors a few yards ahead. Salis had come to the much older—and by his own boasts, much richer—man’s attention as they neared Albion. While she’d rebuffed his every polite attempt to gain her attention, the man was persistent.

  “I need to adjust to Albion’s day-night cycle, so I turned in early. Very sorry, my dear Reginald.”

  Stepping around the exit and onto the gangway, she moved through the environmental force field separating the ship from Albion’s natural air with a gust of air and found her senses under assault. Hot, heavy air laden with the smell of sea salt clung to her like wet clothing. Her first breath was almost a struggle.

  She came to a sudden stop and took in her assignment, her home for the next twenty years—New Exeter. The city filled the inner edge of an ancient impact crater nearly fifty miles around. The western third of the crater wall was lost to the ocean that spilled into the crater and formed a harbor. A bridge connected one edge of the harbor wall to the other, and sunlight from a pair of setting stars made the glass and composite-metal construction glint like jewels.

  “That’s the Boadica Bridge,” Reginald said. “The sunset views are quite spectacular…”

  “Is the air on the bridge like—” She took a short breath and wiped sweat from her brow. “—this everywhere?”

  “What? Humid? I thought the main city on Durongin was tropical.”

  Salis sucked the damnably thick air through her teeth. She’d spent her entire life on Geneva, a cold, rocky world. Her cover story had a more varied history.

  “There’s humid and then there’s this soup.” Salis hurried down the gangway to a waiting tram. She gripped a sweating metal bar and stayed on her feet as more passengers filed into the wide-bodied vehicle.

  Reginald tapped on a window, then pointed to the first-class tram with tinted windows and a smiling spaceport worker offering water bottles at the entrance. He mimed sending a text message and gave her a wide smile. She nodded quickly and breathed a sigh of relief when he finally turned away.

  Screens along upper luggage racks played video footage of a devastated coastal city, forests on fire, filthy refugees—all with dark hair and features unlike the average Albian—fleeing the city on foot.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “Some nearby unaligned world decided to mine out an asteroid in low orbit,” Reginald said. “Guess Albion sent a fleet to help them out. Shame they’ll miss the holiday because somebody got careless a couple stars over.”

  “Such a shame.” Salis looked across the tarmac, noting the obvious security vehicles and armed personnel forming a loose cordon around the High Sierra. The guards carried holstered sidearms, their focus on the disembarking passengers, not the luggage coming off the ship where robots sorted the bags into waiting trucks.

  Wires ran from behind a curved mirror in the back of the tram and into the overhead storage spaces. Salis used the mirror as she adjusted her hair while mapping out the surveillance setup that ran through the tram. She spotted at least five subtle camera lenses and DNA screeners within the air-conditioning vents.

  By now, the Albion security forces would have her fingerprints, gene-code, iris scans, X-rays, and infrared of her entire body. A decent screening system, but one that could still be beaten.

  The tram driver stood up from behind the wheel and rapped his fingers against a metal bar.

  “Hello and welcome to New Exeter spaceport.” He paused to wipe a handkerchief over his face. “Lovely weather we’re having for you all. I know you’ve been on a long void transit, but one last bit of administration and you’ll all be free to enjoy this fair city.”

  He droned on about duty-free shops and customs declarations. Salis noted the weapon concealed within his coat, and how the tone of his voice changed suddenly while talking. She’d bet money he received instructions through a subdermal earpiece as he rushed through the last of his speech.

  A drone the size of a dinner plate floated around the outside of the tram.

  Salis tapped a finger against the balance pole, feigning annoyance. Security was far too high for something as routine as a cruise ship arrival.

  Act natural. Act like you’re supposed to be here, she thought.

  The tram lurched forward and zipped across the landing pad. One security vehicle followed close behind.

  The roar of ascending spacecraft shook the windows as a cargo lighter rumbled overhead. A pair of ground-to-void fighters sat outside an open hangar, missiles on their wings and pilots in the cockpits. Drone carts carrying luggage fuel cells zipped around the spaceport. Given the sheer number of moving pieces, Salis guessed the New Exeter port authorities sprang for a top-of-the-line AI manager.

  The bus stopped outside a round building connected to the main port.

  “Customs and immigration,” the driver said. “Step into any privacy booth you like. Watch your step as you get out.”

  Salis did not enjoy her brief foray back into the city’s raw weather as she went from the tram into the immigration building. Inside, rows of circular booths with semi-opaque walls, each the size of an escape pod, waited for newcomers. Salis felt herself sweating despite the welcome embrace of conditioned air as she walked into the nearest booth and shut the waist-high door behind her. The interior was nothing more than a ring of padded seats and a small desk in the center. The walls switched to a landscape view from the center of the city’s harbor.

  A pleasant-looking woman appeared on the interior wall and bowed slightly to Salis.

  “Hello, you can call me Cynthia. I am a virtual intelligence representing the laws and regulations of New Exeter and Albion. Please have a seat.”

  Salis felt a flicker of hope as she sat down and withdrew her passport slate from her purse. Virtual inte
lligences handled routine matters and had little capacity for anything beyond the norm. If she was under any additional scrutiny, a real person would be speaking with her.

  Swiping a finger over the screen, she opened her passport.

  “Thank you…Ms. Salis. What is the nature of your visit?”

  “I represent Sook Mining Limited. We’re interested in expanding operations to this sector.” Salis added a slight smile as she finished. Rarely did a free-market economy like Albion’s ever say no to a capital injection.

  “You are not listed as having a hotel reservation anywhere in New Exeter City. Would you care for a recommendation?” The faux-woman’s image shimmered briefly, and Salis’ hand curled into a fist as her heartbeat accelerated. The video error undoubtedly meant an operator within the VI system had just taken over.

  “I wanted a room with a view of the migrating whales…the ones with the bioluminescent algae. Given that my arrival date was a bit fuzzy, I thought I’d wait and see if the whales were even around before I spent a fortune for a room looking out at a whole bunch of nothing.”

  “You arrived just in time. A pod of prism whales is on the way to the harbor and should arrive just after sunset. I can send available harbor-watch charters to your data assistant and recommend several hotels.”

  “Please.”

  The VI’s head cocked from side to side. Her mouth became pixelated as she spoke again.

  “Albion is a signatory to the Vitruvian Accords. Any cybernetic augmentations beyond those required for minimal quality-of-life standards are subject to inspection and possible sanction. Do you have anything to declare?”

  The corner of Salis’ mouth twitched before she answered. Her neuro-wires were dormant, practically invisible to all but a full-spectrum scan, and utterly useless as an augmentation so long as she was without her gestalt. Admitting to the neuro-wires would mark her out as something far from a simple corporate scout. But if the security service already knew about her augmentations…