Silent Order: Eclipse Hand

By Jonathan Moeller

The galaxy is at war, and an unexpected scientific discovery can change the fate of empires.

When Jack March stumbles across a space battle, he rescues a naive young scientist. But her accidental breakthrough has uncovered a dangerous secret, a secret the Final Consciousness will destroy worlds and kill trillions to protect.

Starting with Jack March...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jonathan Moeller
• Release date: Oct 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370196890

Jonathan Moeller

Standing over six feet tall, Jonathan Moeller has the piercing blue eyes of a Conan of Cimmeria, the bronze-colored hair of a Visigothic warrior-king, and the stern visage of a captain of men, none of which are useful in his career as a computer repairman, alas.He has written the "Demonsouled" trilogy of sword-and-sorcery novels, and continues to write the "Ghosts" sequence about assassin and spy Caina Amalas, the "$0.99 Beginner's Guide" series of computer books, and numerous other works.Visit his website at:http://www.jonathanmoeller.comVisit his technology blog at:http://www.jonathanmoeller.com/screed

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SILENT ORDER: ECLIPSE HAND

Jonathan Moeller

***

Description

The galaxy is at war, and an unexpected scientific discovery can change the fate of empires.

When Jack March stumbles across a space battle, he rescues a naive young scientist. But her accidental breakthrough has uncovered a dangerous secret, a secret the Final Consciousness will destroy worlds and kill trillions to protect.

Starting with Jack March...

***

Silent Order: Eclipse Hand

Copyright 2017 by Jonathan Moeller.

Smashwords Edition.

Cover image copyright © Illustration 82691116 © Luca Oleastri - Dreamstime.com.

Ebook edition published October 2017.

All Rights Reserved.

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the author or publisher, except where permitted by law.

***

Chapter 1: Distress

Captain Jack March had a cargo hold full of algae.

His real cargo was much more dangerous.

Granted, his real cargo didn’t smell this bad.

His ship, the Tiger, was a heavily modified Mercator Foundry Yards Class 9 light freighter, which was a polite way of describing a blockade runner favored by smugglers, pirates, and privateers. Right now, the Tiger’s cargo hold was filled with sealed fifty-gallon drums of algae protein harvested from the moons of the Rustaril system’s gas giant. To keep the protein from rotting in transit, the drums had been sealed.

Unfortunately, quality control in Rustari industry was poor at best, and so far March had found and sealed six leaking drums. Worse, the plastic gum used to seal the drums was inorganic and impervious to the algae, which meant the algae at the harvesting facilities got stuck in the gum, died, and started decomposing.

The algae smelled even worse dead than alive.

The Tiger’s life support systems were laboring to filter out the stink, and March suspected he would have to replace all the air filters once he arrived at Constantinople Station. Still, at least he would get a good price for hauling all that damned algae protein across thousands of light years. Serving as an Alpha Operative of the Silent Order, the secret service of the Kingdom of Calaskar, was not a lucrative business.

Even better, if the Tiger happened to be boarded by pirates or inspected by overzealous customs officials, they would focus upon the main cargo and its unpleasant aroma. If they investigated the ship’s strong room, perhaps the smell would convince them not to give it a more than a cursory glance.

Maybe they would not find the hidden compartment.

Perhaps they would not find the relic in the compartment, a device constructed by a malevolent alien race that had already been ancient when humanity had first left primeval Earth a hundred thousand years ago.

March had no idea what the device he had taken from Rustaril did, save that a Machinist operative had used it to forcibly convert innocent victims into hidden drones for the cybernetic Final Consciousness. He didn’t know what the damned thing did or how it worked, and the sooner he reached Constantinople Station and handed the device over to the Silent Order, the better. Three times before March had encountered the relics of the Great Elder Ones, and three times before the damned things had gotten a lot of people killed.

Though to be fair, it had been the Machinists that had killed the people. The Final Consciousness wanted the relics of the Great Elder Ones, and they were willing to kill people to get them. March suspected that the Final Consciousness would wipe out entire civilizations to reclaim the thing secured in the Tiger’s strong room.

But, at least for the moment, the relic was secured. The Tiger was in hyperspace, thousands of light years from any danger. The only dangers that March faced at the moment were technical malfunctions and the constant damned smell from the protein drums. He dealt with the risk of malfunction by scrupulously focusing on ship maintenance while the Tiger crossed its hyperspace tunnel.

He dealt with the stink or at least attempted to deal with it by checking all the damned drums and placing an extra layer of seal on the lids.

Vigil, called March, wiping sweat from his forehead.

Captain March? came the computer’s voice over the cargo bay speakers. The ship’s pseudointelligence had a female voice with the cool accent of a Calaskaran noblewoman.

Run an air check in the cargo bay again, said March. Check to see if the percentage of organic contaminants has gone down.

Check now running, said Vigil. Processing will take approximately three minutes to complete.

All right, said March, pacing down the aisle between the pallets loaded with drums of algae protein. The stuff was used for a hundred different applications in food science. Every vat-grown steak or slice of bacon that March had ever eaten had likely started as a drum of this stuff. The algae protein was valuable.

It just didn’t smell very good.

He stopped before the door to the ship’s strong room. On habit, he checked the lock. He was alone on the ship, and if attackers managed to claim the Tiger, they would have the tools to break through the strong room door. Nevertheless, he checked the lock.

It remained secure.

Check complete, said Vigil. Organic contaminants have gone down by 0.3%. The level will continue to drop as the filtration system operates. Rustari algae protein is non-toxic to human physiology.

Yeah, said March. He headed for the ladder to the ship’s dorsal corridor. Still doesn’t smell great.

I am unable to comment, said Vigil.

ETA to the terminus point of the hyperspace tunnel? said March.

There was a brief pause as the computer did the calculation. We shall arrive at system NB11HV2 in three hours, forty-two minutes, and nineteen seconds.

March nodded and climbed the ladder, his left shoulder aching. Not that he had strained it or injured it. His left shoulder always hurt, the mixture of flesh and bone and cybernetic implant registering as a dull ache to his mind. His left arm, fashioned of the dull gray alloy the Machinists favored for their cybernetics, didn’t feel like anything at all. Sensations registered through it – the cold rung of the ladder, the amount of strain as he pulled himself up – but it was distant, academic. He didn’t feel things through that arm the way he felt things through his arm of flesh.

Just as well, given how often he had punched through doors with his left arm.

I’ll be in the gym, said March. Notify me there if there are any anomalies in the hyperdrive or the dark energy resonator coils.

Acknowledged, said Vigil. Have a good exercise session, Captain March.

Thanks, said March, and he stepped into the gym.

He had converted one of the Tiger’s cabins and half the galley into a gym equipped with free weights, a treadmill, and a few other exercise devices. March had spent years as first an Iron Hand of the Final Consciousness and then an Alpha Operative of the Silent Order, and he felt restless and ill at ease if he did not maintain an exercise routine. His left arm was inhumanly strong, but given how often he found himself in violent situations, the stronger and fitter he was, the better. Even without that, interstellar travel was hard on the body, and the stronger he was, the healthier he would be.

March stripped to a pair of exercise shorts and started. First came a run, a brisk eight kilometers, and then he switched to weight exercises, starting with pushups, and then deadlifts, military presses, and overhead lifts, three sets of each. His left arm could lift many times the weight of his right, and he took care to calibrate his left arm to match the strength of his right arm, so he did not overbalance with the weights. It was an odd problem, but he had been used to it for years.

Vigil, March said, once he had finished. Gravity to one hundred and fifty percent.

Vigil complied, increasing the strength of the gravity in the gym. March grunted and grasped the squat rack until his balance adjusted.

Once it did, he repeated his entire workout.

Vigil, said March again once he had finished, breathing hard, sweat pouring down his face and chest. Normal gravity.

Vigil set the gym’s gravity level back to normal, and March sighed in relief. After exercising in the enhanced gravity, normal gravity felt almost luxurious. He leaned on the squat rack as he caught his breath, and his eyes drifted to the mirror in the wall. He looked lean and hard, his face stark with its blue eyes, his close-cropped hair now sweaty blond spikes. But he saw the hideous scar tissue of his shoulder, the massive Y-shaped scar on his chest and stomach that looked like an autopsy incision done with a chainsaw. The surgeons of Calaskar had removed him from the Final Consciousness, but they hadn’t been able to remove all the cybernetic implants, and the scars would always be with him.

March didn’t like looking at his reflection. If not for the need to check the form of his exercises, he would not have put a mirror in the gym. But he preferred the discomfort of looking at his reflection to accidentally injuring himself with improper lifting form.

Despite that, March was in good humor as he walked to his cabin and used the sanitizer booth to clean up. Exercise usually put him in a good mood or at least dulled the edges of a bad one. His last mission from Censor had been a success, and stealing away the alien artifact from the Machinists was a major victory. After he had cleaned up and shaved, March donned his usual shipboard jumpsuit and headed to the Tiger’s flight cabin at the end of the dorsal corridor.

The flight cabin was a narrow room with a station for the pilot, another for the co-pilot, a third for a navigator, and a fourth for a tactical officer or an engineer, depending on the crew. Technically, a Mercator Foundry Yards Class 9 light freighter was supposed to have a crew of six, but March had been operating and flying the Tiger alone for years, which meant he spent more money on maintenance than he would have otherwise.

March dropped into the pilot’s acceleration chair and powered up the console. Screens lit up, holographic displays showing navigational information and system status. The Tiger still had thirty-two minutes before it arrived at system NB11HV2, an uninhabited star system claimed by no major or minor interstellar powers. March spent the time going through the usual checklist, making sure the Tiger’s ion thrusters, fusion drive, kinetic shields, and radiation shields were ready for action. March also ensured the ship’s weapon systems were ready to receive power – the four plasma cannons, the central railgun, the dorsal and ventral laser turrets, and the flak launchers. NB11HV2 might have been unclaimed, but anyone could be waiting there. Pirate gangs, renegade mercenaries, Kezredite slavers, alien raiders, and other such groups often operated out of empty star systems. For that matter, the Machinists would know that March had the artifact on the Tiger, and they might have sent a force to intercept him before he returned to Constantinople Station. The odds of finding a single ship in the vastness of the galaxy were immense, but it had happened before, and it had happened often enough that March wanted to be ready for it.

He watched the countdown as the terminus point of the hyperspace tunnel approached. Hyperspace travel had many dangers, the dark-energy based creatures that swarmed hyperspace among them. If not for the dark energy resonator, they would possess and mutate any humans on board. A more prosaic danger was a navigational error. March could, in theory, have hyperjumped straight from Rustaril to the Constantinople system, but a single calculation error, multiplied across thousands of light years, and he would miss his target and end up in interstellar space. Better instead to go from system to system, like a man crossing a creek on stepping stones, to use the old analogy.

The final minute of the countdown began. March gripped the power levers for the hyperdrive and waited, and as the countdown hit zero, he yanked the levers. The hyperdrive shut down, the resonator a half-second later, and the Tiger entered normal space at the outer edge of NB11HV2, nearly a billion kilometers from the hot blue sun of the system.

And at once every sensor on the Tiger started blaring with warning.

Proximity alert! said Vigil. Dark energy sensors and radar registering multiple contacts! Weapons discharge detected! Multiple inbound craft detected!

March cursed and started hitting controls, throwing power to the shields and the weapons. The weapons started charging up, the shields building strength. The lights in the flight cabin flickered from the strain on the ship’s power grid. It was a bad idea to power up weapons and shields until the hyperdrive had completely discharged residual dark energy from the jump, but March didn’t have any other choice. If he had jumped into a battle, he dared not proceed without defenses and weapons.

Get a tactical analysis going, said March, taking his eyes from the power and weapons displays to the sensor readouts.

The Tiger was a billion kilometers from the sun of NB11HV2, so far that the star was little more than a bright coin on the visual displays. The dark energy sensors registered multiple active hyperdrives within a quarter of a million kilometers, and the shorter-range radar and ladar results came back a few seconds later.

There was a space battle underway, and March had jumped right into the middle of it.

Tactical analysis complete, announced Vigil, and one of the displays lit up with ship and vector information.

Five ships were engaged. The first was a small shuttle, little more than a metal box with a hyperdrive and the systems necessary for spaceflight bolted onto it. The shuttle’s shields had almost collapsed, and it was jerking and dancing in an erratic evasive pattern that had the distinctive look of an autopilot.

The other four ships were heavy starfighters, armored and fast, though not terribly maneuverable. They looked sleek and deadly, their pilot compartments encased in heavy armor, and the starfighters were armed with plasma cannon and missiles. March recognized them as Raptor-class heavy starfighters, produced by Hiroth Foundries. Hiroth Foundries sold its wares to anyone who could pay for them, and a lot of minor governments bought Raptor fighters instead of expensive capital warships. The Raptor was also a favorite of pirate gangs, mercenary companies, and slave traders.

Any registration data on the Raptors? said March.

Unknown, said Vigil. No transponder data available.

Right. The Raptors had disabled or stripped out their identity transponders. That meant they were either pirates, mercenaries doing a dirty job quietly, or a black ops team from a government.

The shuttle is broadcasting transponder information, said Vigil, anticipating March’s next question. It is registered to the Sonari City branch of the University of Oradrea.

March blinked. Oradrea? What was an Oradrean shuttle doing here?

At the moment, it looked like the shuttle was fleeing for its life.

The four Raptors were pursuing it, firing in short bursts intended to gradually bleed off the shuttle’s radiation shields. The Raptors wanted to disable the shuttle rather than destroy it. March checked the scanners, but he didn’t see any capital warships or troop transports nearby. Only one of the Raptors would be able to dock with the disabled shuttle at a time, but the Raptors had a crew of only four men. That meant the Raptors did not expect to find much resistance on the shuttle once it was disabled.

From this distance, March could not get a reliable life reading on the shuttle, but he didn’t think it had more than two or three humans on it.

"Two of the Raptors are targeting the Tiger," reported Vigil