Shattered Pantheons: A Military Sci-Fi Thriller (Spiral War - Liberators Book 6) Read online

  SHATTERED PANETHEONS

  LIBERATORS: BOOK 6

  SJ SCHAUER

  SHATTERED PANETHEONS

  Text Copyright © 2022 by S.J. Schauer

  All rights reserved. This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. No part of this eBook may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles, reviews, or promotions.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  www.spiralwar.com

  Published by Noble Storm Books

  Cover & Formatting by AKD Designs

  Initial release August 17, 2022

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Key Terms

  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

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  GLOSSARY

  Dramatis Personae

  Spiral War Historic Timeline

  About the Author

  Key Terms

  Time and Measure Conversion Factors

  Time:

  1 pulse = 100 centipulse/cents = 0.48 minutes

  1 hectapulse/hect = 100 pulses = 0.8 hours

  1 cycle = 30 hects = 1 cycle

  1 decacycle/decle = 10 cycles

  1 tridecacycle/tridec = 30 cycles

  1 annura = 390 cycles = 1 year, 25 cycles

  Distances:

  1 metra = 100 centimetra = 1 foot = 0.3048 meters

  1 kilometra/kimet = 1000 metra = 0.19 miles = 0.30 kilometers

  PROLOGUE

  UCSB Date: 972.012

  GF Forward Operations Station, Tamkin’s Star System

  In high orbit around the third potentially habitable world in the Tamkin’s Star System, Chris Anit stared down at the pristine surface, her hearts swelling with a sense of hope that this centuries-long war might one cycle come to a peaceful end. The sight was beautiful yet tragic. Vast oceans covered over half of the barren world as it lay ready to accept life once the proper seeds were laid.

  The Confederacy, her Confederacy, had kept it that way, leaving the third mother below all but untouched. Three annura earlier, the Galactic Federation attacked, determined to take the system as a potent symbol of their supremacy. It twisted Chris’ stomach to think that beyond that, they were readying to inseminate the world below to suit them.

  The world, and the system it belonged to, had proven a curiosity for centuries, one that should have stayed neutral ground. It could have been the symbol that the Galactic Federation and Universal Confederacy of Sentient Beings could coexist peacefully. Along with this world, two more orbited in the star’s habitable band; together, the galaxy knew them as The Three Mothers. This one that had yet to birth life, she could relate to it. The Confederacy has long ago settled the First Mother, for she supported Dextro-Amino Acid life. The Second Mother they studied from afar instead was abundant with Levo-Amino Acid life.

  The Confederacy had only allowed scientific teams down to The Third Mother to try and determine why life never blossomed there. Or, if it had, what had happened to it. She shivered at the thought that the world may have once teemed with life, only to have it all wiped out past the bacterial level, and worse, that her enemy was about to rape it. The Confederacy had to rescue The Three Mothers, no matter the cost. The mystery had to be solved before the Geffers contaminated them with their evil.

  Chris’ micomm beeped in her head, pulling her from the viewport. It was a message from her partner, Fendris.

  A feeling she hadn’t felt in ages and would never become accustomed to washed over her. Fear. But there it was, as clear as the air around her. It felt wrong, contrary to the whole of her being. Yet it encompassed her now as clearly as the air around her as she ran to the rally point. It clutched at her heart as she backed away from the viewport and turned to run off. Heart?

  She clutched at her chest and remembered the surgeries she’d had to allow her to pass as Terran. Chris and Fendris had had their secondary heart and lungs removed and stored in stasis back in Confederacy space. Then there were the implants, their micomms, to allow them to communicate with one another, and the esophageal protein filters. Those had proven the most useful, processing the Terran food before it could hit their stomachs to filter out and encapsulate the poisonous, to their Anulian physiologies, Levo-Amino acids.

  Beyond the physical preparations, the pair had trained for close to an annura to make sure that they could pass as any other pair of Terrans. Yet, after six tridecs behind enemy lines, it looked to have all gone down the recycler. She couldn’t explain why. Maybe Fendris had let something slip and revealed them. Fendris?

  She searched the area for Fendris when she arrived at their rally point. He wasn’t there, and he had called for the evacuation. This wasn’t like him. Fendris was the epitome of a Chamalad Male, fierce in battle and the most tender of mates. Her mother and queen would be ecstatic with joy if she knew that she’d taken him as a lover. Queen? No mother is still third in line. She brushed the mistake off, pulled out the thick Geffer handcom from her leg pocket; keyed it on. “Frank,” she called, using his code name for the mission. “Where are you?”

  “I’m here, Trish,” Fendris called back as he rounded the corner, using as nonchalant a voice as he could muster.

  She waited, hands on her hips, for some kind of explanation. “What is going on?” she hissed.

  He took her arm and spun her around to walk down a nearby passageway. “Just act natural,” he whispered into her ear.

  The sensation would have electrified her had his initial message not been so urgent. “Tell me what is going on.”

  “I received a stitch that our extraction is being moved up. Something big is going down, and we need to get out of here.”

  “Has our cover been blown?” she asked. The voids in her chest seemed even more empty, and she steered Fendris towards the docking bay. Speaking in the open was a risk she’d learned early in their assignment was worth taking. While their micomms allowed them to communicate via an artificial telepathic link, it raised suspicions when the pair would walk in silence. As a result, they only used the link when separated and spoke in quiet, intimate tones when together, all the better to pass them off as the lovers they were.

  “Not that I can tell, but the message was dated ha
lf a decle ago. It instructed us to be out no later than last cycle. Whatever’s about to happen…”

  Klaxons blared to life all around, and Chris felt her remaining heart jump. Her head went light. With just her primary heart, she had to work hard to keep herself calm. Excitement and fear responses would usually press the secondary heart and lungs into greater service, flooding the brain with additional oxygen. Her brain wanted that oxygen now and had felt starved of it. “Attention, all hands, Battle Stations! A Confederacy Strike Force has entered the system.”

  “We need to get to the escape ship before the task force reaches the station,” Chris snapped and jumped into a run, dragging Fendris behind her. She hadn’t even reached the first cross-passage before she ground to a halt. “Wait! Do they know about the new task force due to arrive?”

  Fendris shrugged a curiously innocent gesture from a man she had seen kill without a second thought. “I doubt it. I only read their transmission because I was about to send off my report, and that was part of it.”

  “How big is our group?”

  “The message didn’t say. But, if it’s based on our previous report, too small.”

  She couldn’t believe it. Prior to this cycle, the in-system defensive force would have been considered token at best; a single escort carrier with a quartet of cruisers and frigates supplemented by a squadron of corvettes. If the Confederacy sent in an equal or even double-sized strike force, they would be overwhelmed by the massive battle group coming to reinforce the system. A trio of Barker-centered carrier groups with eco-forming ships would arrive within the successive two cycles to hold the system and oversee the ecological rape of the planet below.

  “We have to get out of here and warn them.”

  They took off down the passageway but barely made it thirty metra before the whole station rocked. Chris grabbed for the nearest bulkhead as the emergency lights sprang to life. Her pulse pounded in her ears. “Alert, breach! The hull has been breached in Section Three. Prepare for emergency seal.”

  Fendris’ face drained of what little color it still had. “They hit the hangar.”

  “Why?” she implored. The plan had always been to escape on the Galactic Federation shuttle that had brought them here. They had hidden a Confed IFF package within the tertiary avionics spares bay for when they made their escape. However, that plan had relied on them knowing about the attack ahead of time. Now the shuttle was gone, and instead of waiting out the initial battle in relative peace, they had to fall back on contingencies. Contingencies got people killed in her experience.

  “Why?” he asked back at her. “Because they probably thought we were clear already. By how this place shook,” he began before a more violent explosion rocked the station. “Frag me! Slipstream Torpedo Bombardment.”

  She all but shook with fear at the sound of that. “They’ll knock us out of orbit.”

  “If they don’t blow this whole place to bits.”

  “Hey, you two!” a Terran called in his khaki naval officer’s uniform. “What are you doing here? Get to your battle stations.”

  Fendris shot the officer a look of utter contempt and frustration. He had to come up with a legitimate explanation. “Our posting was on the hangar, sir!”

  Frustration and anger twisted his face. “Then come with me,” he spat.

  The pair exchanged a quick look and followed the officer as he hurried along the corridor towards what Chris assumed would be the main control center. The whole of the station was in a panic and rocked twice more before they reached the officer’s destination: The Damage Control Center. “You, over there,” he called to Fendris and pointed towards the Life Support Control Panel. “You, there,” he continued and pointed Chris toward the Reserve Communications Array Panel beside it.

  Fendris’ face lit up as they approached. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  She nodded. It was suicide for sure, but it was their best chance to ensure that the strike group knew what to expect in the coming cycles. “Yes. I’ll jam all outbound comm channels and broadcast what’s coming in the clear on the one I keep open. Hopefully, that will give them time to get reinforcements.”

  Fendris cocked his head and nodded. “Hadn’t thought about that. I was just planning to vent the station.”

  She took pause at that. The sound of such a cold-blooded death didn’t sit right with her. It was dishonorable and made her stomach want to climb into the gaps left by her secondary lungs. Still, the two deep-cover intel agents couldn’t afford to waste any advantage they could garner. Even if it were a dishonorable death for the warrior pair, it could potentially save the lives of thousands of Confederates. It might just be worth it. As if to emphasize the point, her stomach cramped hard enough that she wanted to double over. She grabbed at it with one hand and steadied herself with the other.

  “Are you alright?” Fendris asked.

  She clamped her eyes shut and ground her teeth together until they felt like they might crack before nodding. “I’ll be fine,” she groaned. She’d never experienced pain like this before, not even from the worst stomach virus. However, the pair had been briefed that such a violent reaction could occur if they accidentally ingested levonic proteins. “Something I ate must have slipped through. Going to die soon anyway,” she explained and began to tap her way through multiple menus and programs. Her stomach knotted itself up again as she drafted her message detailing the size of the soon to arrive GF Task Force. In a few pulses, she was ready and turned to Fendris. With a touch of a key, she would begin to transmit her message and burn out every other communications array on the station.

  Fendris nodded to her, his resolve set, and his face hardened. He was ready to die and take as many of the enemy with him as possible. A quick glance at his console informed her of what he had intended. These Operations Stations mainly were composed of quick-fab sections. Each had its own independent docking latches that joined them together, an airlock that led out into space, and small emergency atmosphere bottles. A skilled weaver could bypass every safety interlock, blow out the seal rings that connected the sections, and command the emergency bottles to vent. After that, the station personnel would have less than a pulse to seal off individual compartments to preserve whatever air remained. On top of everything else, he was such a computer genius. It saddened her to know they wouldn’t share a long life together.

  She nodded to Fendris and mouthed her love for him. They both hit the activation keys on their panels. Fresh alerts sprang to life, and her ears popped from the sudden pressure drop.

  “What’s going…” the officer’s call was cut off abruptly in a burst of bubbling blood; Fendris’ knife buried in his throat.

  The rest of the crew looked about in a panic, diving for the emergency oxygen hoods at their stations. Chris pulled her two concealed daggers and dove for the nearby security guards as they rushed towards Fendris. She did her best to appear panicked should their attention wander her way. The first seemed to disregard her, his focus firmly on Fendris. She lashed forward, dug her knife into his left lung, and twisted. Blood exploded up her arm as his partner ground to a halt. He twisted to face her, and she buried her second knife in his eye socket. He screamed, a hoarse breathless thing in the thinning air, and staggered back before she felt a hand jerk her away.

  She spun about, knife in hand, and found Fendris before her. He held two emergency oxygen hoods in his hands. Blood covered one of them, and he shoved the clean one into her hands. She accepted it wordlessly and slipped it on. He did the same, pointed towards a set of emergency beacons.

  She turned to look; a sign read ESCAPE PODS. In all the excitement, she had forgotten that this part of the station carried the emergency escape units. Her skin prickled in the thinning atmosphere as they started into a run, each step launching her a couple metra into the air. It took her a moment to realize why.

  Unlike Confed ships and stations, the Geffers used graviton spinners. The units were known to not produce an even gravity f
ield and required power to operate. Consequently, in combat conditions, they were often run at low power. That was not the case here. With the power leads between sections severed, the limited available power was shunted away from niceties like gravity.

  Her zero-gravity training kicked in. Swimming through the thinning air wasn’t an option, so she pushed off the ceiling as she neared it, intending to bounce back and forth in an evasive pattern. As she came back in to land on the deck, a sharp, burning pain ripped through her left shoulder. She spun about; spotted the armed security in their wake. She reached down instinctively for her Pp-48. Her hand slipped down her bare leg instead of connecting with anything. She cursed that Geffers didn’t carry sidearms as part of their duty uniform.

  She prepared to leap at them. It was a desperate gamble to survive, but she had little choice. Before she could, a knife sailed past towards the lead guard. Blood erupted from the man’s face, and he flailed backward in the failing gravity. Out of control the way he was, he crashed into the others behind him.

  She wouldn’t waste the opportunity and twisting about, pressed on. Plaser blasts sizzled past and burned away what little air remained around her. She felt the sweat on her body begin to sublimate away, and the familiar feeling of a vacuum pulled at her skin. She cursed the uniform’s fabric as it stiffened around her swelling skin. Every movement hurt, the grey jumpsuit scratching her as if made of sandpaper. Yet she and Fendris pressed on.

  As they neared the bank of escape pods, fonts of blood erupted from Fendris. Her heart skipped at the sight of it. Without skin or atmosphere to hold his vital fluids back, the blood gushed into the vacuum. She dove for him, and another mass driver round shattered the hard visor of her emergency vacuum hood. The air exploded from her lungs, forcing her back. New pain exploded up her leg. She twisted around to find troops in vac suits bounding towards them.

  This is it. Chris prepared herself for the end, her limited air rushing past as she remembered a Chamalad prayer for a quick death. Another stabbing pain ripped across her abdomen. That’s it, I’m done. A gut wound in a vacuum was an assured death sentence. Before she could even take a final, defiant stance, she felt someone grab her and shove her into a cramped space. She flailed to stop them, to strike out at her unseen attacker, and found Fendris’ all but lifeless face staring back at her. The color had completely drained from his skin, leaving him a ghostly pale. What little blood he had left, he’d spent shoving her into what she now realized was an escape pod. It was a foolish move, but he couldn’t have known that she was mere moments from death. With the last of his strength, he slammed the door shut, and his head disappeared in a burst of dark crimson.