Indomitable, p.1
Indomitable, page 1
Copyright © 2020 Tim Rangnow
All rights reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
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.
ISBN-13: 978-1-952412-01-1
Cover design: Christopher Doll
Published By: Vagabond Publishing
Printed in the United States of America
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
Acknowledgements
About The Author
Guild Series
One
Natalia Avila flopped down on her bunk and groaned with exhaustion. She’d spent the last ten hours crawling through tight service tunnels, patching in new cables and conduits as the ship’s systems were overhauled. The Waterloo was the oldest Coalition frigate still in service, and the powers that be on the planet below had finally decided to throw a few credits into bringing her up to snuff with the rest of the small fleet. Engineering and Technical teams had been combing the ship for weeks, and she fully expected to keep working long shifts for a few more months before all the replacement systems were fully online and the old stuff had been pulled out.
Debating whether to grab a shower before dropping into well-deserved sleep, Nat felt the hard plastic case of a tablet poking her in the back. Sore muscles protested as she reached underneath to pull the device out, and she tapped the screen to wake the display. Might as well check my messages while I decide, she thought as she flipped through icons and touched the one for her personal email. Amidst all of the usual advertisements and notifications of posts on her social media accounts, there were two messages received a few hours earlier and marked as urgent. One was from her parents on Earth, living in the mountains outside Mexico City. The other was from her sister who lived and worked in Aldrin dome on Luna.
Brow furrowed, she tried to remember the last time her family had sent anything that was marked for urgent delivery. Pressing the first message, she was surprised to see wild panic and fear in her mother’s eyes. “Mija,” the woman began, “please tell me it isn’t true. Let us know that you’re okay. Just call us!”
Nat stared at the screen for a minute, trying to figure out what her mother could be worried about. She opened the simple text from her sister to see if it explained things. Nat, I know a lot of people are dismissing this, but I know Erik. He’s not the kind of man who’d try to incite panic without reason. We need to take his warning seriously. Talk to your superiors, if you can, and make sure they don’t mark it down as a message from another crazy kook.
No more enlightened by the second message, she switched over to the news feeds. The screen was filled with red-bordered articles marked URGENT. She tapped to open the first one. Reading through the hastily written article, she learned about the message sent by a Guild freighter captain named Erik Frost and his warnings of some kind of Syndicate super ship. There was a link to his video message, and she pressed the button to play it. The man who appeared on the screen had brownish blonde hair that was cut short but sticking up in all directions. His vivid blue eyes were turned on the camera with a beseeching gaze, as his lips moved to speak the words that had sparked disdain with a scattering of panic.
“I am Erik Frost, captain of the Guild freighter Vagabond. My crew and I accepted a job several months ago to deliver cargo to a so-called black site.” An image of a cargo container replaced his face on the screen, and Nat examined it as he continued to speak. She had seen a lot of shipments pass through the freighter, especially in recent months with the overhaul. Something about the look of this one gave her chills. It made her think of the crates of updated railgun systems that had arrived the week before.
The picture on the screen switched to a view of the Syndicate warship that the captain claimed had imprisoned them. It was hard to grasp how big or small the ship was with nothing in the picture to provide a frame of reference, but it certainly looked nothing like the frigates she was familiar with. There were a few lights across the black hull, but those could either be small running lights or an illuminated large docking bay. She returned her attention to the captain’s words and her mouth dropped open.
“The Syndicate will use the heavy cruiser to destroy the Mars scientific outposts, and then the Coalition dome on Luna. Coalition cities on Earth will be targeted until that government folds.”
Closing the newsfeed, she hurriedly opened a video call with her sister. “Come on, come on,” she muttered as she waited for the call to be answered. It was only a few hours after midnight, but she couldn’t imagine her sister being asleep after something like that message.
The call was finally answered. The woman in the video feed looked harried and completely drained. Dexterity Avila’s eyes were drooping and washed out, and her skin looked almost gray. In the background, Nat could see men and women rushing around the offices of the Transport Guild headquarters and hear multiple conversations being carried out in urgent tones.
“Nat, you got my message?”
“I just saw it, Dex. What in the hell is going on? Are you sure this is something we can take seriously?”
The camera shifted to show the view behind her sister, where an imposing man in an expensively cut suit was standing outside the door of an office barking orders at the people around him. “The Guild president believes it,” Dex told her as the view shifted back to her tired face. “It’ll be months before that Syndicate warship gets here from the belt, but he’s already recalling all Guild freighters and telling us to make arrangements to get off Luna in case Aldrin really is a target.”
Nat gasped and shook her head. Vaguely, she heard the door of the cabin hiss as someone entered. “Are you going to go home to mom and dad? When will you leave?”
“I’m not leaving until there’s no choice,” her sister told her resolutely. “There’s too much to be done here. We need to make sure our crews are safe, reach out to our contacts in the mining colonies and on Deimos, and check in with our government liaisons. The Guild rep in the Syndicate capital is already trying to get a meeting with someone on the Executive Committee to get their response.”
“If this is really happening, Dex, make sure you’re off Luna before that ship arrives. Mom could never get over losing you.”
“Nat, you’re the one we’re all worried about.”
“Huh? Why worry about me? I’m not in a spot that your Captain Frost said was in danger.”
Smiling wryly, Dex touched the screen. “You’re on a Coalition frigate, manita. Who do you think they’re going to send out to try and stop a warship when they realize it’s on the way?”
“Oh.” Nat was struck speechless. After three years in the Navy, serving on a ship that had never gone farther from Earth than short patrols to Mars, she’d come to think of it as little more than a typical workplace. Sure, the ship had railguns and torpedoes, but since they’d never been used aside from training exercises there were few on board who thought there could ever be real danger to the frigate. The stalemate between the Coalition and the Syndicate had dragged on for so long that their guards had been lowered and inertia had set in.
“I’ll be fine,” she finally said. “I need to call mom before she worries herself sick. Don’t work yourself to death, Dex, and check in with me if you hear anything more.”
“Same, Nat. I love you.” The video screen went black as the call was ended. Nat closed her eyes and took a deep calming breath.
“That’s a messed up situation, isn’t it?” a voice asked.
She turned to see her bunkmate leaning against the bulkhead by the door. Janet Li worked a communications station on the bridge, and the two women shared the same shift. It made them perfectly fitted to share a cabin, since there was no threat of one waking the other while getting ready to go on shift or coming back.
“I can’t believe no one in Engineering was talking about it. If I hadn’t decided to check my messages before conking out, I still wouldn’t know anything about it.”
“You should have seen how it stirred up the command staff when that message came through in the middle of my shift. The lieutenant on duty called up the XO, who called in Captain Andrews. Before you know it there were half a dozen officers clustered around a video screen in the conference room. I heard the Fleet Admiral had every ship’s command staff involved, along with the administrators of Aldrin and Deimos.”
Nat sat up, flipping her legs around to hang down from the side of her bunk. “They’re taking it seriously then?”
Janet shrugged, walking over to her locker to change out of her uniform. “No one’s really sure. The meeting was still going on when my shift ended, but then it’d only started half an hour before.” Flipping her long black hair over a shoulder, she turned to look at Nat. “That was your sister, right? The one who works for the Guild.”
“Yeah, Dexterity. She knows that Erik Frost guy, and says he’s trustworthy. Sounds like their leadership is definitely taking it seriously.”
“Like she said, it’ll be months before any ship can reach Earth from the belt. We’ll know for sure what’s going on long before that happens.” Janet shrugged and disappeared into the small washroom with her bag of toiletries.
Nat spent several minutes with her thoughts racing. She finally shook them off as much as she could and called her mother to give a quick reassurance. After promising to visit the next time she got leave and could return planet side, she ended the call. She slipped out of the jumpsuit she wore as part of the engineering crew, and crawled into the zippered gel-filled sleeping bag that kept them safe in the event of any erratic maneuvers the ship had to perform. Relaxing into the warmth of the snug bed, she cycled through news reports for most of an hour until she was so tired she couldn’t keep her eyes open any longer. Slipping the tablet into a pouch on the wall of the bunk, she shifted around to get comfortable and was asleep in moments.
Stopping in at the galley before starting her afternoon shift, Nat wasn’t surprised to find everyone in the room was chatting about the message from the Vagabond. She could hear one ensign loudly proclaiming that the freighter captains were known to be scoundrels who would do anything for a credit, and he couldn’t believe that anyone would take such a message seriously. Not far away, a handful of crew from various sections of the ship were huddled together, discussing the projected path of the warship and where their families should be sent to be safe from any attacks.
After dropping her empty tray into a recycling slot, she walked through the ship to reach Engineering on the lowest decks. People she passed in the corridor had worried expressions, and more than one looked as if they’d had no sleep at all since the previous day. There had been no ship-wide announcements yet, which worried her more than anything. If the Fleet Admiral and his staff had decided there was no reason to believe the warnings, then the captain would have announced it within hours of the message coming through. To wait this long told her they were either still in discussion with all the fleet officers or had decided to accept the warning as fact and were preparing to act on the information.
Walking into Engineering, she was waved over by one of the men who crawled through service corridors with her. “Did you hear?” he asked.
“Yeah, I saw the message last night after shift.”
“Not that,” he scoffed. “One of my friends on the team installing the last of the new railguns said two Syndicate frigates headed out in the direction of the belt this morning. He said their engines were burning hot and hard from what he could see.”
Nat raised her eyebrows. “I wonder what they’re doing. It’s supposed to be their ship out there, so why rush off after it?”
Shrugging, the crewman started searching for someone else to share his news with. “That video from the Frost guy said the ship was lightly crewed. Maybe those frigates are carrying more people out to fill the empty spots.” He hurried away from her as a new person entered from the corridor.
She had an uneasy feeling that his quick guess may prove to be more correct than he’d have expected. If she were in command of the Syndicate Navy, the first thing she’d do after the secret was out would be to get the cruiser everything needed to be a larger threat. Her jaw clenched as she thought about how this development put the Waterloo one step closer to being called into service to meet the new threat head on.
Once her shift started, the menial tasks that were on her schedule quickly took over her thoughts. Even when working to connect wiring to a new panel, something she’d done a hundred times before, she needed to put all her attention into the job to ensure it was done correctly. That need to focus only on the job and let any other worries melt away was one of the things that drew her to the Engineering department when she joined the Navy.
During her lunch break, she got comfortable in the tight confines of a service corridor that was only a few feet in height and width, and pulled a meal bar from her pocket. Munching on the grainy bar that had a taste reminiscent of apples and cinnamon, she thought of the Syndicate cruiser for the first time in hours. She grumbled to herself about the job that kept her so out of touch while on duty. The corridors that housed the frigate’s wiring and electronics were heavily shielded to prevent any kind of disruption from errant signals, which also kept any tablet brought into the corridors disconnected from the ship’s network. Nat had stopped toting her old tablet around during shift a few months into her posting on the Waterloo. Fighting a brief temptation to leave the service tunnel and check on any updates, she balled up the wrapper from her meal bar and shoved it into a pocket to dispose of later. She turned back to her work and was soon lost in the minutiae of rewiring panels for several more hours.
Crawling out of the small service tunnel at the end of her shift, Nat took a minute to stretch out her muscles and enjoy the freedom of having enough room to extend her arms and legs. The lieutenant in charge of her shift, Mags Richtaus, sauntered over to check in and verify which tasks had been successfully completed. They spent a few minutes running down the list, and discussing some items that would need to be added or require extra work.
“I know you guys are out of touch in the tunnels,” Mags said at the end. “Captain is making a ship-wide announcement in about ten minutes. He wants to catch everyone between shifts.”
“Thanks, lieutenant. Is it about the Vagabond message?”
“I’d say the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of that. Get cleaned up while you can.”
Nat gratefully headed for her cabin, situated near midship since she and her bunkmate worked at opposite ends of the frigate. She made it through the door before the announcement started, and found Janet laying in the top bunk having just returned from her own shift. “Do you know what the captain’s going to say?” she asked, stripping out of the dusty and greasy jumpsuit.
“Not a clue,” Janet replied, shaking her head as she kept her eyes on her tablet. “I don’t think it’s going to be good, though, based on how much frowning my lieutenant was doing near the end of shift.”
“You heard about the Syndicate frigates heading out toward the belt this morning?”
“This morning? Nat, they’ve been leaving Earth orbit all day. Six at the last count, with the last one departing two hours ago.”
Nat turned sharply. “That’s their whole fleet, isn’t it?”
“Two more left,” Janet corrected. “One is in orbit on the far side of the planet, over the Syndicate capital in Hong Kong. The other was last seen farther in system, doing scientific exploration around Venus.”
“Still, that’s a lot of firepower heading for the outer system, leaving the Syndicate leadership exposed. If our prime minister or the Admiralty ordered it, we could take out their one frigate here and start landing Marines on their cities.”
“Until that giant cruiser arrived with six frigates escorting it. Then we’d lose everything we gained and more.”
“What are we going to do to fight against that ship, anyway?” Nat asked quietly, entering the washroom for a quick shower. The small stall had several dozen nozzles placed to spritz water onto the skin from all angles at once, to allow for minimal water usage. Water sprayed for five seconds, the bather soaped up, water sprayed out again for ten seconds to wash the soap off, and the process was complete. Exiting back into the cabin rubbing a towel over her short black curls, Nat was just in time to hear the tones sounding throughout the ship to alert listeners to a ship-wide announcement.
“Crew of the Waterloo, this is Captain Andrews.” She straightened up unconsciously at the deep tones of the captain’s voice, three years of ingrained discipline taking over. “By now, all of you have seen the video sent out by the freighter captain, and his claims about the cruiser named Indomitable. The command staff and I have been in conference with the Admiralty and our other frigates for the last twenty-four hours. In light of the actions of the Syndicate frigates, and with confirmation received from the sensors of the colony on Interamnia, Fleet Admiral Holgerson has decided to take these warnings seriously.
