Last Stand (Stag Privateers Book 1)

  Last Stand

  Book One of the

  Stag Privateers series.

  by

  Nathan Jones

  Copyright © 2019 Nathan Jones

  All rights reserved.

  This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the author

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  The events depicted in this novel are fictional. The characters in this story are also fictional, and any resemblance to anyone living or dead is entirely unintentional.

  Illustration © Tom Edwards

  TomEdwardsDesign.com

  by Nathan Jones

  POST-APOCALYPTIC

  BEST LAID PLANS

  Fuel

  Shortage

  Invasion

  Reclamation

  Determination

  NUCLEAR WINTER

  First Winter

  First Spring

  Chain Breakers

  Going Home

  Fallen City

  MOUNTAIN MAN

  Badlands

  Homeland

  Mountain War (upcoming)

  SCIENCE FICTION

  STELLAR MERGER

  Boralene

  Ensom (upcoming)

  STAG PRIVATEERS

  Last Stand

  Caretakers (upcoming)

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Epilogue

  Author's Note

  Links to books by Nathan Jones

  Chapter One

  Target

  The privateer starship Last Stand hovered behind a moderately sized cluster of debris, far out on an obscure approach to the Breson 2 spaceport.

  It had the flat, triangular shape and stubby wings of a light cargo freighter, and a particularly ugly one at that: its outer hull plates were mismatched and poorly patched, as if they'd been cobbled together from scrap by drunken space nomads. Someone had lazily slapped a coat of dark paint over all of it, thin and scraped in spots and thick and runny in others.

  It had numerous dents, ranging from micrometeoroid scuffs all the way to a serious crumpling along the port wing as if it had endured a major collision. In a few spots, the dark paint didn't completely hide the blackened scorch marks across the hull plates that had either been caused by engine burns, which was unlikely, intense solar energy, which was slightly less unlikely, or laser fire.

  An unusually high amount of laser scoring for a simple freighter, as if it had been through dozens of battles.

  That was the first hint that, when it came to the Last Stand, appearances were deceiving. Another would've been a scan of its current power output, which was roughly double what it should've been. Or of its top end, military-grade, multilayered shielding system, which few but the most paranoid freighter captains would pay to install. Or the weapons ports hidden among the mismatched hull plates, some concealed entirely behind retractable plating.

  Far, far more weapons than any cargo hauler should ever need, even in the lawless fringes of the Deconstructionist Movement's territory where Breson 2 was located. In fact, the Last Stand was even better armed than most light combat cruisers.

  Which, coincidentally, was what it had started out as before extensive renovations. As Captain Aiden Thorne had explained it to his crew when he ordered the renovations, it was easier for a predator to move among the prey when it looked like prey itself.

  And today, they had prey.

  “Target just completed a rift jump at the anticipated location,” his science officer, Barix Ishiv, said abruptly. A slight smile of satisfaction curved the edges of the slight, patrician man's lips.

  Right on schedule. Aiden felt a moment of satisfaction that the information they'd stolen from the ship's logs of their last target was still accurate. “Their course?”

  “Also as anticipated.” The Ishivi's voice was cold and emotionless, showing none of the excitement the news should've prompted. He probably thought all this was beneath him, the purebred sewage clog. That, or since they'd done this sort of thing so many times already he thought it was routine.

  More fool him; Aiden had fought in at least twice as many battles as anyone on his crew, enough to learn the hard lesson that the more proficient you became at waging war, the more wary you needed to become of overconfidence.

  It only took one lucky shot from an incompetent enemy to ruin your day. Aiden had lost far too many friends to those sorts of astronomical odds to ever let down his guard, no matter how easy the fight seemed.

  Besides, with how their luck was going lately he could feel that one in a million shot looming over his head like a noose.

  Either way, he felt enough excitement for the both of them. This was what he lived for: the moments before battle, the anticipation of crushing a deserving enemy. After almost a decade of running and hiding from bitter defeat, watching the universe around him crumple into a black hole of chaos and lawlessness as humanity happily flew towards the event horizon, sometimes he thought the fight was the only thing he still lived for.

  “Still on target to come within range of our present?” he asked, flexing his fingers to limber them up in preparation for the piloting he was about to do.

  Barix gave him a slightly contemptuous look. “What part of “also as anticipated” was confusing to you? They'll be passing within ten kilometers of the package, just as planned.”

  Well. Given how their luck had been running lately, that was practically a miracle.

  The “package” was a utility bot powered off and concealed among some debris. Most utility bots were fairly harmless, but this one had been fitted with an atomic weapon in a radiation shielded casing so the target's sensors wouldn't pick it up.

  A space mine, essentially.

  Although Aiden didn't like to compliment Barix and feed the man's already insufferable ego, he had to give credit where credit was due. The tactic was almost never used, because of the difficulty in effectively setting mines in the vastness of space that had any hope of hitting a passing ship. But the Ishivi had managed to calculate their target's route so accurately, they were going to catch it with the single mine they'd prepared.

  He briefly considered upping the man's share for this haul, then snorted. Yeah, he'd do that about the same time the void sprouted life and became a vibrant garden.

  Shifting his head slightly to activate his headset's mic, shipwide broadcast, he spoke in a calm, clear voice. “Combat stations.”

  Red lights began flashing around the bridge, and throughout the rest of the Last Stand. Around him his bridge crew bent over their stations, eyes intent on their displays. Barix, of course, on sensors and hacking countermeasures, as well as waiting ready to handle interior countermeasures in case they were boarded.

  Ali, Aiden's prototype adult companion, at the moment on communications parsing system chatter, as well as doubling up on the Ishivi's tasks. At least until she was needed for more vital work.

  His gunner, ready with the weapons to surgically disable the target so they could capture it intact.

  And in the engine room, at least he assumed, Barix's twin sister Belix ready to keep the ship moving, while in the shield room Fix stood ready to repel boarders and make emergency repairs.

  They were all ready. They'd done this sort of thing countless times over the years. And, while he didn't want to tempt fate, this run was shaping up to be pretty smooth. Aiden followed the course of the target, timing everything with the sure familiarity of decades of piloting, and at the right moment eased his ship out from behind the cluster of debris and accelerated towards the other ship.

  At the comms station, Ali spoke up. “At our current speed, we'll reach weapons range with the target at almost exactly the moment they pass by the package. Excellent timing, as usual, my love.”

  “Brown noser,” Barix muttered, eyes still on his display.

  Ali smiled at him sweetly. “You pride yourself on your superior intelligence and rationality, Barix Ishiv. Does it display either to good effect, when you criticize an AI for doing what I was programmed to do?”

  The Ishivi scowled, and Aiden smirked at the slight man's obvious discomfiture; this was exactly why he loved his companion. He was glad he'd stolen her off a Deek cruiser a year ago.

  Well, actually he was glad because of the fact that Ali was the ideal crew member. Not to mention for the other, far more enjoyable services she provided. But listening to her spear Barix with incisive insults was a definite plus as well.

  “Have they spotted us yet?” he asked, accelerating fast enough that the inertial dampeners couldn't fully compensate, and he felt himself pressed back in the pilot's seat.

  “Nope, and even if they do it's too late,” Barix replied, seeming eager to duck out of his verbal sparring with Ali.

  At the weapons station, the
gunner spoke up, voice clipped with military precision. “Target is almost within weapons range. Permission to open fire.”

  Aiden bit back a surge of annoyance. Did he have to ask every time? Well to be fair, he probably did. It still irritated the blazes out of him. “Granted.”

  “Target is within range of the package,” Barix added, mockingly mimicking the gunner's disciplined tone. “Detonating.”

  The bridge had no windows, their view of space around them provided by the large three-dimensional main display hovering in the center of the room, directly in front of the pilot's chair. Even so, Aiden still squinted slightly as a visual representation of the nuke's blast made a growing sphere across the intervening kilometers towards the target.

  With almost perfect precision, the gunner opened fire the moment the atomic in the utility bot detonated. High energy laser bursts burned through the distance between the ships, timed to hit just after the enormous explosion of fusion energy overwhelmed the target's shields and they collapsed.

  The timing wasn't just fancy shooting, although the gunner was as stolidly proficient as always. And it was vital he was, since he needed his attack to hit during the window when the shields were down, at least if they wanted this to go smoothly.

  The newer shielding systems could withstand just about anything, even something like an atomic. Their weakness lay in the fact that it didn't take much to overload them, and when that happened a single shield required several seconds to half a minute to clear the buffers and come back online.

  That's why these days most ships were equipped with multiple layers of shielding, so when any one was overloaded the next could take up the slack until the first recharged. With the multilayered shields, the window of vulnerability dropped down to as little as a few seconds with the top end six-layer systems, like the Last Stand was equipped with, since it prioritized bringing up a single layer of the shield for emergency defense while the others came back up in sequence.

  Capital ships could have as many as twenty layers, as well as enhanced buffers and other measures to ensure their shields were a nightmare to knock out. But a cargo hauler like their target probably wouldn't have more than two or three, although even that could be a pain to get past if they put up a fight.

  That's where the atomic came in; the sustained energy from the blast would burn through each layer of shielding in turn, and might even damage the hull or fry some systems that weren't properly protected in EM shielded casings.

  Theoretically, with their target's inferior shields and the massive overload inflicted by the atomic, there was plenty of time to get in the required hits before even a single layer came back up. But it was better to pretend as if they only had a few precious seconds of vulnerability that had to be exploited, just in case it happened to be true.

  Not that the gunner needed a reminder to be efficient and precise, since he was never anything else; his first shot hit the shield emitters, knocking them out. His second hit the weapons, and his third the engines.

  And just that quickly, the battle was over. The gunner turned to Aiden as if looking for praise.

  Aiden looked away, ignoring what could've been a hint of disappointment, possibly even hurt, hidden behind that rigid discipline. He was probably just seeing what he expected to see in a normal young man; the gunner didn't show emotion. It was anyone's guess whether he even felt them.

  Pushing the uncomfortable topic from his mind, Aiden toggled his communicator headset's mic to one of the common broadcasting frequencies. “I like to take ships whole so I can strip valuable parts and cargo from them,” he told the target dryly. “But if I blow you up I can probably still salvage some useful stuff from the debris. This is your one chance to surrender.”

  The target's captain replied, voice strained with fear and the tattered remnants of his defiance. “Who is this? You've just fired on the DMS Fleetfoot, a trading ship operating with the full sanction of the Deconstructionist Movement! You'll be hunted across the stars for this.”

  Tell me something new, Aiden thought wryly. “Is that a refusal to surrender?” he asked, eyes on Barix. The Ishivi was monitoring the target's systems closely, to make sure the enemy crew wasn't making hasty repairs to get them operational again.

  A stream of curses from the other captain assaulted his ears. “We're surrendering!” the Deek eventually snapped. “Powering down our systems now.”

  Aiden waited until Ali and Barix both nodded confirmation to him, then relaxed slightly and leaned back in his chair. He hadn't really expected the enemy to try to go out in a blaze of glory; the strength of a Deek's conviction was directly proportional to the strength of their combat advantage, he'd found.

  Too bad there were always endless morons willing to pick up a weapon for the Movement, giving them that advantage.

  “Fleetfoot, prepare to be boarded,” he said. “Approaching now. Keep your systems unpowered, disarm your crew, and have everyone gather in your galley lying facedown. Any resistance will be met with lethal force.”

  “Understood,” the other captain growled, sounding as if he was speaking through gritted teeth. “Complying.”

  Aiden closed his eyes, letting the inevitable adrenaline of battle, even a feeble one like this, slowly drain out of him. Then he toggled his mic. “Fix, you're with Ali at the forward airlock. Prepare to board the Fleetfoot and subdue its crew.”

  “Understood,” the combat android replied, its tone almost as clipped and emotionless as the gunner's.

  Ali was already away from her station, holding her cauterizer and kinetic force multiplier, or KFM, in either hand. She always kept the weapons close nearby, her human's safety and wellbeing her top priority. Aiden stood and reached for his own cauterizer, the same one he'd been issued over two and a half decades ago when he'd joined the Preservationist Fleet as a pilot cadet.

  “You're in the chair,” he told the gunner as he started after his companion. “Fly us in to dock with the target, and if you see anything suspicious you have my permission to blow the Deeks into the void.”

  “Understood, sir,” the gunner said, smoothly standing and slipping past him to take the pilot's chair.

  Ali was waiting for Aiden at the bridge's forward exit. “You're going to come too, aren't you my love?” she asked in weary resignation.

  He nodded. “Staying well behind you, waiting until you've confirmed it's safe before I go anywhere.”

  For a moment he thought his companion was going to do her best to talk him out of it again. She'd tried numerous very rational and compelling arguments, such as that the enemy could've booby-trapped their ship, or contaminated their air with some sort of nasty chemical or biological agent. He'd eventually told her to stop challenging him on the issue and undermining his authority and after that, she'd grudgingly given up.

  Although he doubted she accepted it.

  As they stepped out into the corridor, Barix called after him from his station. “Might I state for the record, as usual, that I strongly object to you sending out an advanced sex robot prototype that's worth as much as this ship as part of a boarding team?”

  Aiden snorted and kept walking without bothering to reply. As if it was my choice.

  Thanks to her companion programming, Ali's core priorities put the wellbeing of all humans above any other consideration, even her own continued functioning. She insisted on being part of boarding parties, so she could do her best to incapacitate enemy combatants before Fix killed or injured them. She also wanted to take that spot to prevent another member of the Last Stand's crew from being forced to put themselves in danger.

  Stupid HumanAssist Enterprises and their stubbornly idealistic quest to try to patch up the minor nicks and scrapes of human suffering, all the while refusing to do anything about the madmen blowing huge gaping holes in society. Did HAE really think they were going to make a difference that way?

  Aiden had been tempted to try to tinker with Ali's programming but had avoided doing so because, for one thing, it was impossible. Even the Ishiv twins, with their genius level intelligence and carefully honed technical skills, couldn't have had a hope of cracking HAE's coding, even with years to work at it.