WITH A MONTH TO GO, IT'S TIME FOR A PEEK

CHAPTER 1

Location: Terraneau

The spy ship sneaked out of the anomaly the way mice sneak out of their holes—quickly, carefully, silently. Anomaly are like electrical tears in the fabric of space. They occur when ships travel using broadcast technology. In this case, the Unified Authority spy ship had a built-in broadcast engine the enabled it to make the hundred-thousand-light year jump from Earth to Terraneau instantaneously. She arrived in Scutum-Crux space approximately fourteen million miles from Terraneau, far enough out of casual surveillance range that we would not have noticed the disturbance had we not been waiting for it. With her stealth generator, the spy ship was invisible to our equipment. Only the anomaly showed on the readouts.

The spy ship was small and unarmed, the naval equivalent of a humming bird. She had the ability to slip in behind enemy lines and listen to our communications, track our movements, and watch our production without threat of detection.

But this ship had been detected. We saw where she broadcasted into our space and we knew her final destination. It didn’t matter that we lost track of the ship as she travelled fourteen million miles from the anomaly to the satellite because we knew precisely where she would end her journey.

She was the mouse in the night, we were the cat. When she materialized beside the satellite, we would pounce. Even if we never saw the ship, our equipment would detect a momentary energy fluctuation when she lowered her shields to retrieve the satellite. She would be vulnerable when she lowered her shields.

I had no sympathy for the crew of the spy ship, they had come to the Scutum-Crux Arm to watch people die. Instead of offering assistance, the bastards placed a satellite so that scientists could study the death of an entire planet.

The satellite was smaller than a golf ball and armed with a camera so powerful that could pick out a single grain of sand in an open desert. The satellite’s unblinking eye undoubtedly recorded us as we pulled our shuttle out of the tunnel and launched into space. It must have spotted us setting our trap as well; but the crew of the spy ship would have no access to that data until they retrieved the satellite.

“Anything?” I asked Cutter. Under normal circumstances, I would have used ship-to-ship communications; but the spy ship might have overheard us. Instead, we used the short-range interLink, a network designed for battlefield communications.

Cutter spoke to a tech officer, then said, “Nothing yet, sir.”

We kept our communications short in case the Unifieds tried to listen in.

Freeman and I watched the scene on a small video screen as we waited inside the kettle of a transport. The screen showed a panoramic view of open space. Terraneau spun in a corner of the screen, its oceans still blue but hidden behind a global cloud of smoke and ash. The alien attack had erased the green from the continents. Gone, too, were the ice caps that once marked the poles at the top and bottom of the planet. Soot from the attack had turned the atmosphere a rusty gray.

“You’re still on our side, right?” I asked.

Ray Freeman, one of the deadliest man who ever lived, said nothing as he watched the screen. The man was huge, seven feet tall. He was wide and thick and covered with muscle. He was also the last of his kind. In a galaxy that had outlawed ethnicities a century ago, Ray Freeman was proudly African-American. A lot of men saw him as someone to fear. I admired him.

Freeman was a human sphinx. He answered questions only when felt like answering. Generally he ignored them. He was a mercenary, but money did not determine his loyalty.

“Why help us?” I asked. “Why not the Unifieds?”

“I’m not taking sides,” said Freeman.

“The hell you’re not,” I said. “We’re about to attack a Unified Authority boat. If you don’t care who wins, you don’t belong on this ride.”

I trusted Freeman, though he had been vague about his loyalties. In my experience, Freeman was not the type who starts the mission as your friend and then shoots you in the back. He made his alliances public and sniped his targets from a mile away. In my experience, Freeman’s loyalty was never in question.

“I don’t care about sides, just saving lives,” Freeman said. “That’s it. It’s not about loyalty. The only planet the Unifieds care about is Earth, you’re out to save what’s left of the galaxy.”

‘What was left of the galaxy…’ Before the first alien invasion, the Unified Authority had one hundred eighty colonized planets scattered around the Milky Way. The aliens “sleeved” one hundred seventy-eight of them. The Enlisted Man’s Empire, a nation composed of the cloned military that the Unified Authority had ejected, re-established contact with twenty-three of those planets before the aliens began incinerating rescued planets.

Freeman’s entire family had been on the first planet the Avatari, the aliens, had incinerated. Having lost everyone he may ever have loved, the galaxy’s best professional killer became a self-appointed savior.

When dealing with people like Ray Freeman, as if there were anyone else like Freeman, there is no room for ambiguity. I decided to reconfirm his motivation. “As long as we’re saving more lives than the Unifieds, you’re on our side?”

He nodded.

“Good enough for me,” I said, though inwardly I still had doubts. The clones of the Enlisted Man’s Empire had been bred to save the lives of natural-borns, and the Unified Authority had thanked us it with one betrayal after another. I felt a need to save the natural-born residents of our planets, but I could not come up with any logical reason to do it.

Satisfied that I could trust Freeman for now, I turned my attention to the mission at hand. “Cutter, are the traps in position?” I asked over the commandLink.

Asking that question was my form of fidgeting. Captain Don Cutter was a good officer, not the kind of man who leaves things undone. Still, we were dealing with an invisible foe and we would only get one shot at the bastards. It was one of those pivotal moments on which the future hangs. If we failed to bag that spy ship, the war would end before it began.

“Yes, sir,” said Cutter. He spoke in a whisper.

Five transports floated within a few a hundred yards of the satellite. They were not debris from the graveyard of ships, Cutter had placed those birds himself. One of the transports carried a team of engineers. Freeman and I sat in the kettle of the second. The others sat facing away from the satellite, their rear hatches open, their kettles carefully packed with explosives. When the spy ship lowered her shields, we would use these transports like old fashioned cannons.

The bombs were not especially powerful. We need to cripple the spy ship, not decapitate her. I didn’t care if the crew lived or died, I didn’t owe the bastards. The ship’s computers, on the other hand, they mattered.

Five million people had just died on Terraneau and millions more had their necks on the chopping block on other planets. The key to saving those was on those computers. We could not win the war with the aliens; but armed with the right information, we might survive it.

“How long has it been since you detected the anomaly?” I asked Cutter.

“Fifty-two minutes, sir,” he said.

Fifty-two minutes, I thought. Fifty-two minutes to travel fourteen million miles, either the bastards are taking their time or they figured us out. In conventional travel, U.A. cruisers topped out at speed of thirty-eight million miles per hour. Travelling the fourteen million miles from the anomaly should have taken less than half an hour.

“Maybe they know we’re here.” I said the words out loud but meant them for myself.

“Not likely,” said Cutter.

Listening over the interLink, Freeman heard every word we said but did not comment. He lived in a world of absolutes. Either the spy ship was coming or she was not. He saw no value in second guessing the situation.

I looked back at the video screen and saw nothing but empty space. The satellite was so small that it did not even appear on my screen. A little bubble of light represented the area around it.

“Mars, are your men ready?” I asked on a different frequency. Mars, Lieutenant Scott Mars, ran my corps of Navy engineers. I would have preferred using a demolitions team on this mission, but Mars’s men were handy with explosives.

“Yes, sir. You stop the ship, sir, and we’ll kick her doors in,” he said.

“Minimal damage,” I reminded him for what might have been the hundredth time.

“You said you wanted a hole,” he reminded me.

“Right,” I said.

“If you know a way to put a hole in a ship without doing damage…”

“I take your point.”

“We’ll keep the damage to a minimum, sir,” said Mars.

Cutter interrupted us. “It’s a go!”

Nothing had changed on my screen. The ash-choked atmosphere of of Terraneau still showed in one corner of the screen. Our transports still hid at the edge of the debris.

I did not see the spy ship. Of course I didn’t see her, not yet at least. But the spy ship must have been in place beside the satellite and her crew must have lowered her shields or Cutter would not have sent that message. His sensors detected energy fluctuations.

Cutter detonated the bombs in the three open transports, firing a barrage of bearings and shrapnel at the invisible target. In the silence of space, the detonation made no noise; but the explosions flashed and vanished on my video screen.

Had it been a civilian ship caught in that storm, the debris would have broken it to pieces. The spy ship took the beating, and survived. Her stealth generators failed and she came into view. Air and flames leaked from small holes in her hull and a large outer panel had been ripped from her bow, all cosmetic damage that would prove fatal for her crew.

The ship was shaped like the head of a gigantic spear, fifty feet wide at her stern and two hundred feet long. Tiny electrical eruptions burst across her cylindrical hull. This bird would need repairs before she flew again. No problem. Mars's engineers could repair her.

Our ambush nearly sheered off one of her three aft engines. It hung limp at an odd angle like an arm in a cast. Liquid fuel escaped from the back of the engine, flying into space in bubbles. If the pilot of the spy ship tried to light the other engines, he’d ignite a fire that would consume the entire ship; but judging by the damage to the bridge, I did not worry about survivors among the flight crew. The bridge had gone dark and the spy ship wasn’t going anywhere.