Invasion (Contact Book 1) Read online

  Invasion

  Contact | Book 1

  David Ryker

  Ryker’s Rogues

  Contents

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  1. Pale

  2. Loreto

  3. Pale

  4. Loreto

  5. Hess

  6. Loreto

  7. Hess

  8. Loreto

  9. Hess

  10. Loreto

  11. Cavs

  12. Clough

  13. Loreto

  14. Hess

  15. Loreto

  16. Clough

  17. Hess

  18. Loreto

  19. Hess

  20. Cavs

  21. Loreto

  22. Hess

  23. Loreto

  24. Cavs

  25. Hess

  26. Loreto

  27. Hess

  28. Loreto

  29. Hess

  30. Loreto

  31. Loreto

  32. Cavs

  33. Loreto

  34. Hess

  35. Loreto

  36. Hess

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  Author’s Note

  Become a reviewer!

  I’m looking to build up a review team - a crack team of ninjas who can read and review a book within a week or so. In return, you’ll get a free copy of every book I publish - which is a lot (see below!) Reviews make a huge difference to the success of an independently published book, and I have twenty or thirty spots available. It’s first come first served…

  To join, visit www.DavidRyker.com/Reviews and fill out the form - I just need a couple of bits of information like your email address so I can send you your free books!

  Currently available for review:

  Invasion - Contact One

  Downfall - Contact Two

  Breakout - Fugitive Marines One

  Wanted - Fugitive Marines Two

  Coming Late September:

  Untitled - Iron Legion One

  Untitled - Fugitive Marines Two

  1

  Pale

  Space was dark and full of nothing.

  Eddie Pale caught himself staring at the stars. Distant lights dimly burning themselves to death. White pinpricks barely brighter than the glowing consoles inside the cockpit. A pointillist chaos against the black velvet everything.

  He had been born on an arid desert planet beneath a gray-painted sky. Waving away the terraforming fumes, he had coughed and spluttered and recited the oath until it was etched onto his heart. All his life, Eddie had hoped to see the universe from above. But there was no time to dwell on the past or the disappointment of the cosmos. It was just another desert, Eddie knew, but that didn’t matter. He was being tested.

  The fighter leaned to the side, and a booster flared. Taking a firm grip of the control, his knuckles whitened. Tucked up inside the cockpit, secured and surrounded by blurry screens and switches, the rattle reminded him to take it easy.

  “Come on.” He slapped the console.

  The spacecraft tugged and shuddered against his tight fingers. Loosening his wrist, allowing some play, he let the Wisp know who was in control.

  Relax, you’ve done this a hundred times.

  A thumbnail sun coughed cold light across his face. He sucked in a lungful of recycled air and bit down to stop his teeth chattering. The worn-out oxygen felt dry on the skin and made his throat ache. His tongue moved instinctively through the Fleet’s oath.

  I will be the guiding light which shields humanity from the darkness.

  A simple mantra which meant everything. All his life, he had held the oath close and never said it out loud. One day, he dreamed, he’d sit in the admiral’s office and recite the words and join the First Fleet for real.

  Get through the great nothing. Show them what you’ve got.

  “Pale.”

  A crackle from the comms surprised him.

  “Pale, don’t waste time. You’re on the clock.”

  That voice. Confident and direct. Used to giving orders. A tone and texture like dirt and stones forced through a garbage disposal. Loreto. Admiral Richard Loreto. Red Hand himself. He wasn’t supposed to be watching. Eddie jumped to life and his nerves knotted. Strapped in onboard one of the Fleet’s oldest Wisps, he tried to look lively. They measured every movement back at base and judged every detail.

  Hesitantly, Eddie reached for the comms and found it on the second try. The Admiral of the First Fleet did not watch over the final tests of lowly pilots.

  “Yes, Admiral.”

  “Sir, Pale. Pilots call me sir.” A grunt. Could have been static. “Unless they stick the landing.”

  Feeling the shudder of the boosters, Eddie focused. Pass this test and he’d be a pilot. A guiding light, for real. Not just any pilot; he would pass out under Red Hand Loreto. Everyone knew the haggard legend whipped his recruits harder than anyone else. He’d never talked to the admiral until today.

  Loreto’s distant face watched impassively over training sessions and hangar quarrels. His shadow dominated the wall of the bridge as he waged war. He pushed his pilots hard and not everyone made the cut. The failures were full of regrets, spreading legends about his monstrous personality. Those that passed loved him and told the same horrific tales. Like every wannabe pilot, Eddie had spent years trying to please Loreto.

  “Take her round the perimeter twice, open the boosters and let her fly. Pass through the asteroid cluster. I’m timing you myself.” Loreto crackled. “Then bring her into the Vela. Land her. Make your parents proud, Pale.”

  His stomach sunk. Eddie’s parents were dead. No reason for Loreto to know that. Or maybe—a thought slithered into his mind—he’s testing me.

  “Yessir.” Eddie tried to keep his voice even. The pilot’s voice, they all had it: confident, calm, composed, cocky.

  “Get to it, Pale.”

  The comms died, leaving Eddie alone again save for the electronic hum. These ancient Wisp ships had room enough for one person, nestled in among frayed wires and patinaed screens.

  Make your parents proud, Pale. The words demanded Eddie’s attention.

  He accelerated the fighter. Tight eye on the yaw. His instructor’s words echoed but Loreto dominated his thoughts. Everyone knew about the admiral’s thoroughness and his meticulous, tactical mind. It couldn’t have been an accident.

  The spiteful woman at the colony orphanage had named him Pale after the edge of known space. The Pale. That’s where your parents are, she’d smirked, watching you. The size of the lie had staggered the child; she knew how to hurt him.

  “H-hitting the vector now, control.”

  I stuttered, Eddie realized. Loreto must have heard it. Now, the admiral knew about his nerves. The surge pressed through the ship, the half-gravity pushing the pilot back into his seat. The thin, rickety memories of his parents pulled at his thoughts. They were victims, passively choked to death, shipped from planet to planet without any say in where they went next. Lungfuls of fumes, backs cracking under the pressure, broken hearts and broken minds, they’d left a kid behind to fend for himself. They weren’t from Earth and they hadn’t mattered.

  Out by the perimeter, it was all so quiet, just another desert. In the distance, he could see the stars. No ghosts, he assured himself, just blotches of color, twists of solar systems in every direction. For a kid who’d dreamed of reaching out and touching the universe, this cold and inhospitable void was a disappointment. Humans had only themselves for company. A curse.

  Out here, near the frontier, there were no colonies. The Pale itself was an idea, really. There was no physical line, no marker shouting: ‘THIS IS THE END.’ The Pale was simply where humans stopped. The high tide mark.
/>   Still, they had to patrol the Pale. What was the point of an abandoned frontier? Might as well admit defeat. Eddie shook his head. First the parents remark, now this. Stay focused.

  The engines coughed as he took a feel of the fighter. Reaching out with a hand, he altered switches and swiped at screens. This was simple stuff. All his life had been about this moment.

  I will be the guiding light.

  Comforting words, but the aging machinery was the real challenge. It felt strange to hurtle through space, strapped into a fighter built by the lowest bidder and well-past its best. He’d seen rust on the vent shafts. The control stick’s rubber had worn almost entirely away, leaving a sticky residue on the skin.

  Don’t complain. Be thankful. Almost there.

  The whole fighter creased and flexed, the roaring engines not used to high speeds. There hadn’t been a war for years. Decades. That didn’t make pilot training any easier. Not in Red Hand’s fleet.

  Eddie was at the top of the ellipsis, the farthest point from the Vela. He could picture Loreto watching. The jowls and square-set shoulders, the pepper-black hair with hints of gray at the temples, intense eyes glowering at the screen. The admiral looked older than he was. But he had enough cynicism for five lifetimes.

  The closest thing I’ve ever had to a father and he’s hardly spoken a word to me.

  That morning’s abandoned breakfast rations haunted his empty stomach. Nerves tingling, Eddie would have killed for some dead weight. Anything to hold him down and stop him from floating away.

  Why the hell is Loreto watching me? Eddie felt anxious. He could see the Vela now, the lead ship of the First Fleet, as aged and rugged as its commander. A long, thin ship. Kraken class. Three thousand men and women aboard. Officers and cooks. Cleaners and captains. A little colony, scrutinizing his every move. They’re all watching.

  It had been home for two years, taking the Wisp a little farther every day. He waited for the moment when Captain Hertz would waddle over, slap him on the shoulder and say, in his mollycoddling voice, “I think you’re ready, Pale.”

  Eddie didn’t feel ready. Forever, he’d dreamed of being a Fleet pilot. Those at the edge of the known universe who protected humanity from the unknown. The pilots peered through the Pale without fear, without dread. He wanted desperately to look into the depths of space and see that there was nothing there. Not an enemy, not his parents, just cool, comforting nothingness.

  For hundreds of years, the Fleet had trained for a fight which had never come. Even as their funding and numbers dwindled, there was no better place for a colony brat to make his name. Want to get off a backwater planet? Sign up! Protect humanity. It was all a lie, one which hid all the tediousness of the unending desert of space.

  Eddie settled into a rhythm as his thoughts wandered. His nerves began to fade. He was in danger of enjoying himself.

  “Off vector, Pale. Adjust five to starboard.”

  Eddie turned nervously to a readout. The admiral was right. The finest of margins. How the hell had he been able to notice? From the Vela, it must have seemed no more than a hair’s breadth.

  He steadied his hand and changed the course as Loreto suggested. Pilot school meant following orders. Learning which buttons to press. Learning which routes to fly. Learning how to convince Kelch and the hangar goons to move your ship up the waiting list for new parts. Maybe he’d make captain one day. No higher than that though; Eddie had the colony stench all over him. No glad-handing parents to help him up the ladder.

  Clanking, the control stick fidgeting, the worn rubber chafing against his thumb, the entire fighter shuddered. Eddie could imagine flakes of rust peeling away and burning up in the boosters. The screens flickered, the comms buzzed, the gravity wavered. The whole ship jumped.

  “Woah!” Eddie dropped both hands to the control stick. “What was that?”

  The cockpit plunged into darkness, weakly lit by the lonely stars. The screens fluttered, their readings wild. Remember the training, remember the training!

  It’s all part of the test. This was how they evaluated people. They give out the worst, least reliable fighters and you’ve got to compete against the failings. Eddie’s mind was full of hollow reassurances.

  “Pale! What the hell?” Loreto’s rugged tones scratched furiously at the static.

  “Under control, sir! Under control,” Eddie lied. “Hit a pocket of… something.”

  “Back to ship, now.” A growled order. Eddie felt his stomach tremor. He was going to fail.

  “With all due respect, sir,” he said, panicking, “I have the situation under control.”

  “Call me Admiral,” Loreto barked, his voice a blunt weapon. “Back to ship. Now!”

  Eddie punched the nearest screen. The glass cracked and he didn’t care. Failure hurt, especially when the fighter had rebelled. It’s not my fault. The Wisp lurched again, shaken by an invisible hand. The cockpit darkened and the comms emitted an ear-splitting scream of static.

  “Vela, come in.” He heard the fear in his voice. “Do you read?”

  Silence. Eddie jerked the controls and felt nothing. The stick floated free, unable to change the fighter’s course. Together, they drifted aimlessly through the void.

  Then, everything turned white.

  The brightness burned through Eddie’s eyelids. The light was too much.

  Crying out in agony, Eddie covered his face. His fighter was without power, its pilot blind. He jerked the control, desperate for some feeling, some sensation.

  The brightness left. Even through his shielding hand, Eddie felt it vanish. Urgently, he searched for the Vela but his eyes were bleary, only seeing dancing, hazy swirls of color. Psychedelic shadows where the universe used to be.

  The fighter jumped again. The feeling came back to the controls. Eddie tugged hard to the left, into the center of the ellipse. Rubbing his eyes, shaking his head, heart racing, vision blurred, he tried to calm himself. The world was wrong.

  This is part of the test. Eddie wanted to believe. The screens hummed again. As Eddie reached out with a finger, searching for the autopilot, his skull knocked against the cockpit. The whole fighter bowled through space.

  There’s nothing out here to hit. Eddie panicked. The dancing shapes and colors began to settle. Alarms and sirens shrieked. His vision came into focus and space wasn’t empty anymore.

  Hundreds of ships surrounded him. Thousands. Eddie’s breath caught in his throat. All he could do was stare. Ships like nothing he’d seen before.

  Something flashed on the edge of his vision. It was flying right toward him. Two fighters, smaller than the rest. Moving too fast. Grabbing the stick, Eddie veered to the right. The ship groaned as the engines gasped. The cockpit was rebooting, the instruments waking up. They weren’t reacting fast enough.

  Explosions buffeted the fighter. Eddie struggled with the stick. Shrapnel hit against the shields, which rippled neon blue. The whole craft lilted to the left, the strange vessels screaming past. Similar battles played out all around. Giant ships cruising through space, firing into one another while dogfights swarmed. The Vela was nowhere.

  Oh God, Eddie realized, the Vela.

  He tried the comms. Blank static. He tried the switches and the screens, searching for any sign of life. They only showed his own fighter, struggling along.

  Don’t panic, don’t panic.

  “C-come in.” Eddie didn’t care about the tremble now. “I’m still out here! There’s…”

  How the hell could he explain this? They had to be able to see it anyway.

  “There’s a battle.” Be calm. Think of the training. Provide useful information. Breathe. “A battle has… appeared. I don’t know where from. I see massive ships. Twenty, at least. They’re firing. And there’s… must be hundreds or thousands. Smaller fighters. They’re so fast. Can anyone hear me? There’s something out here.”

  No answer. The battle closed in around him, filling the velveteen space which had twinkled so dimly. Drifting,
menacing giants waged war, their cannons churning. He marveled at the fire rate and when he traced their aim, he saw the damage, how it ripped the smaller ships apart.

  Through the obliterated wreckage of a ship, Eddie finally glimpsed something in the distance: the Vela, all the way on the other side of the fight, back toward home.

  They need my help. I need their help.

  As ships exploded, as the debris broke apart and drifted through space, it hit against his fighter. Eddie felt the control stick wrestle against his grip. Two more fighters roared past, hardly a wing’s width away.

  If I stay here, I’m dead.

  The fight thundered around him, furious wasps swirling around a dust mite. He hoped they wouldn’t notice him and his clapped-out fighter, trying to get home. Grabbing the stick, flicking switches with a practiced hand, Eddie stared through the gap.

  “Vela, come in.” He exhaled, terrified. “I’m coming home.”

  Lifting his finger from the comms switch, Eddie gaped in awe at the battle filling formerly empty space. Twitching the stick, he aimed his Wisp.

  I am the guiding light.

  2

  Loreto

  “What the hell happened out there?!”

  Richard Loreto raged against his blind instruments, thrown from his pulpit by the force of the blow.

  “Get everything back online,” he ordered. “I want to know everything!”