Fortress Earth (Extinction Wars Book 4) Read online

  SF Books by Vaughn Heppner:

  DOOM STAR SERIES

  Star Soldier

  Bio Weapon

  Battle Pod

  Cyborg Assault

  Planet Wrecker

  Star Fortress

  Task Force 7 (Novella)

  EXTINCTION WARS SERIES

  Assault Troopers

  Planet Strike

  Star Viking

  Fortress Earth

  OTHER SF NOVELS

  Artifact

  Accelerated

  I, Weapon

  Visit www.Vaughnheppner.com for more information.

  Fortress Earth

  (Extinction Wars 4)

  by

  Vaughn Heppner

  Copyright © 2016 by the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the author.

  -1-

  The spaceport’s siren blared as I raced past the regular people. Some of my speed was due to steroid-68. The rest came because of the embedded neuro-fibers in my muscles.

  “Look,” a woman whispered. “That’s Commander Creed. This must be a real emergency.”

  It was real, all right, and baffling. How could anyone have launched a space attack against the Solar System without the Starkiens in Alpha Centauri first informing us? The other jump gates leading to Earth were guarded by human-crewed vessels, so the attack couldn’t have originated there. The others would have sent a warning before this. To my mind, the answer was obvious. The bloody baboons were backstabbing us after all we’d done for them. It made me furious.

  Because I was on Mars with its weak gravity, I made incredible bounds. The hard part was controlling my leaps so I didn’t crash into the ceiling or against an unsuspecting bystander.

  Soon, thankfully, I slid to a boarding gate. Two assault troopers with rifles stood guard. The senior man nodded to me. I raced past him into a twisting passageway, soon running up a ramp onto a booster shuttle.

  For those who are wondering, we no longer called ourselves Star Vikings. I liked the term. We pretty much all did. But it no longer fit. We’d graduated from hit-and-grab raiders into a real force. Earth Force, to be exact. In the three years since I’d killed the Purple Tamika Emperor in hand-to-hand combat, a lot had changed.

  “I’m strapped in!” I shouted.

  “We’re waiting for a few more officers to arrive, sir,” the attendant told me.

  “Negative! Sound the alarm. I want upstairs now, as in we should already be in orbit.”

  “Yes, sir,” the attendant said. She stumbled for the pilot’s compartment to give him the news.

  Seconds later, a klaxon blared.

  Maybe it would have been wiser to let the other personnel board first. But maybe this was my last chance to get onto a starship as Mars Fleet accelerated to meet the invader. I didn’t know, and there was no way I was going to miss being part of the welcoming committee.

  The engines ignited, creating a roaring fireball underneath us. The heavy booster shook violently. I loved it. We began to lift as the roar increased. The G-forces shoved me deep into the cushioned seat as we headed for space.

  Someone had invaded the Solar System. Even now, I wasn’t sure how close they were to Earth. I knew they were among the Inner Planets, though. That was the crazy part. There weren’t any jump gates among the Inner Planets. So, it didn’t make sense that an attack force had made it this far without anyone having spotted them long ago. Did the invader possess a fantastic cloaking device?

  I should point out a few critical factors as to why I was so anxious. Aliens had visited Earth over a decade ago. They’d called themselves Lokhars, although we hadn’t known their names or even what they looked like at the time. They’d shown up in a Rhode Island-sized spacecraft, launching thermonuclear missiles at the majority of our cities. London, Moscow, Beijing and Washington DC had all burned up with a thousand others. A few hours later, drones had appeared, spraying a bio-terminator, one intended to kill all life. That had come to be known as The Day. The tiger-like Lokhars—of an upright, humanoid variety—had been ninety-nine percent successful against human life. They’d left one percent, however, the tough, mean, angry humans with the constitution of cockroaches. The one percent had been hidden in submarines, in Antarctica, the Artic and other out of the way places. We’d collectively climbed back up from the brink of extinction…

  Long story short, Earth thrived once more, reseeded from the children of stolen Earth people throughout the centuries by Jelk slavers. The Jelk had been the source of most of the UFO sightings in the past. Countless Lokhar automated factories now gave us the industry we needed for the terraforming and other processes.

  Since then, I’d made sure our planet had become Fortress Earth. I never wanted to go through another extinction-level assault on humanity again. Maybe that’s why I was a little crazy about the invasion right now.

  Winning last time had been hard. The last sons of bitches of the human race had sold their bodies to the Jelk Corporation, becoming assault troopers for alien masters in an alien war. We’d bought the human race time to lick its wounds. Later, I led a slave revolt, captured a Jelk battlejumper and began the road that led to our freedom and a place in the Jade League.

  If that doesn’t make sense yet, it will. If you know all about that, hang on for a few seconds longer.

  We should have had more starships around Earth. Over three-quarters of our growing fleet had left for the Grand Armada, the one that was going to head off to do some damage against the worst menace left. I’m talking about Abaddon and his Kargs. I was supposed to be with the Grand Armada. Frankly, it was a fluke I was home.

  “Faster!” I shouted, managing to raise an arm and slamming a fist against an armrest. I don’t know how many G’s we were pulling, but I almost tore a muscle with that little stunt.

  The booster roared into Mars orbit, gaining velocity as it headed for space.

  The intercom came on. “Commander Creed,” the pilot said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I have bad news, sir.”

  “Don’t prep me for it, just spit it out.”

  “Mars Fleet is already accelerating for the enemy, sir. The fleet’s velocity is already too much for us to reach them. It looks like we’re going to have to go back down.”

  -2-

  “I’m coming forward,” I said.

  “Sir, our acceleration is too great. You need to remain in your seat.”

  “Cut the acceleration until I’m up there.”

  The pilot might have argued with me, but he seemed to think twice about it. A moment later, the harsh acceleration quit.

  I unbuckled and launched into the weightlessness. A few tugs on the nearby seats sent me sailing toward the hatch. It opened, and I floated through. The pilot was a lean fellow in a spotless uniform. The stars glittered through the window in front of him.

  “Do you see those, sir,” he asked, pointing out the window.

  I squinted, seeing a dozen extra-bright stars. “What about them?”

  “Those are the exhausts of Mars Fleet. We won’t see them much longer.”

  “Patch me through to them.”

  He didn’t argue. Two minutes later, using a small monitor, I spoke to my old friend Rollo.

  Officially, he was First Admiral Rollo Anderson of Earth Force. He was my longest-running friend. We had
each worked for Black Sand once, a mercenary outfit providing security all over the world. Rollo had been tall and bony back then, and had worked out like a fiend. He’d wanted bulk but had been cut instead like nobody’s business. The alien steroid-68 had done a number on him. Rollo was still tall, but there was nothing bony about him anymore.

  He wore his own, specially tailored uniform, a tight-fitting jacket that did nothing to hide the fact that he was a bulked-up steroid monster with a neck and sloping shoulders better suited to a gorilla than a man. He looked more like a bone-breaker for the Mob than Earth’s highest-ranking fighting admiral.

  One of the sad things was that Rollo had forgotten to smile somewhere along the way. He’d been engaged to a hottie before the aliens had ever shown up on Earth. She’d died on the day of First Contact. Rollo still had her photo. It was clipped inside a book he kept, one with as accurate a score as he could figure concerning the number of aliens he’d personally killed.

  There was nothing cold about Rollo’s desire to enact vengeance against aliens, any aliens of any size and stripe. It was a fiery desire, barely balanced by a fierce loyalty to the sons of Earth. He’d been the first on many occasions to climb to his feet and charge back into laser fire or plasma blasts, to come racing back with an injured assault trooper on his shoulders.

  In war, there was no one better to have by your side than First Admiral Rollo Anderson.

  He now scowled on my tiny screen, his buzz-cut giving him an old-time U.S. Marine look.

  “I’m coming out to you, old son,” I said. “That means one of your ships needs to hang back and wait for my booster.”

  He stared at me for three silent seconds. “Fine,” he said.

  “What?” I asked. “No argument?”

  He shook his head.

  “What’s the situation?” I asked.

  “If you want to join the party, you’ll have to max out your acceleration immediately.”

  “I have an orbital lifter. These things only have so much kick.”

  Rollo stared at me. He didn’t like excuses on the parade ground. During a system-wide emergency—

  “Ella has given me the computations,” he said in a clipped voice. “She wants you to max out immediately. Time is critical, Commander.”

  “Ella’s with you?”

  He barely nodded.

  That was good news. Ella had been a Russian scientist in Antarctica on The Day.

  “What aren’t you telling me?” I asked.

  It seemed he fought with himself for a moment, as if he wanted to start smashing things.

  “We hardly know anything yet,” he said in a hoarse voice. “They’re hidden behind a vast sand shield that is moving with hard velocity toward Earth.”

  That sounded weird. “Give me a visual,” I said.

  Rollo rerouted what Earth Fleet was sending him.

  I squinted, lowering my head to get a closer look. A vast field of sand headed away from Venus toward Earth. The sand spread out over a tremendous area, greater than the old United States of America. My chest grew cold. A monstrous invasion fleet could be hiding behind that.

  This was a clever idea. But how had a vast shield of sand gotten there? Our system’s jump gates were among the outer planets. How could an enemy have maneuvered the sand wall in secret so they came as if from Venus?

  That didn’t make sense.

  A terrible thought struck. What if the invasion force hadn’t used a jump gate? What if they’d found a new way to travel between star systems?

  “Get ready to send a message to Alpha Centauri,” I said.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Creed. You want Baba Gobo to bring the Starkien Fleet into the Solar System.”

  “The invaders could badly outnumber us,” I said. “That means we need reinforcements. The Starkien Fleet is closer than anyone else, a mere jump gate away. There’s no time to lose in sending the message.”

  Rollo hesitated. Maybe he suspected the Starkiens had a hand in the attack. The more likely possibility was that he was considering the political-religious ramifications of such an order.

  The Solar System held the Forerunner artifact Holgotha. Once, the Starkiens had led a nomadic existence because every race believed they lacked honor. I’d helped them regain their honor, but the Starkiens were treaty-bound to stay out of any star system holding a Forerunner object. If they broke their treaty agreement, every Jade League race was supposed to help hunt down the oath-breaking Starkiens.

  “The Starkiens won’t come,” Rollo said.

  “Baba Gobo owes us everything. He’ll come. Besides, he’ll realize I’ll help him smooth this over later.”

  Rollo shrugged, turning, giving someone my order.

  By the time he looked at me again, I’d strapped myself into the navigator’s chair. The navigator headed for the main compartment to sit.

  “Ready?” I asked the nattily dressed pilot.

  He glanced at his board, finally seeing the blinking green light that indicated everyone else aboard the booster was ready for acceleration.

  “Give it all you have,” I told him.

  The engines soon ignited, and we headed for the extra-bright dots in the star field.

  As per my command, Rollo had ordered a starship to wait for us. I had time to kill before I reached the vessel. So, I might as well explain the religious-political situation that humanity found itself in. The whole thing was weird and rather interesting.

  Where to start, though…

  Before the Lokhars—the humanoid tigers—hit Earth, there was a grand two-way struggle going on in our neck of the Orion Arm Spiral. On one side was the Jelk Corporation. Nasty red-skinned Rumpelstiltskin devils ran the giant company. The small red bodies were just a fleshy disguise, though. If you shot a Jelk enough times, his body vanished and his true self appeared. That self was an energy creature that could float through walls and fly through space.

  The Jelk Corporation was hardheaded and tough-minded. They had two-legged lizards called Saurians to do their dirty work. That work included flying their spaceships and providing soldiers for the company armies. Saurians landed on Earth one day after The Day. Jelk battlejumpers had chased off the Rhode Island-sized dreadnaught that had attacked Earth. None of us knew that at the time. We figured the Saurians had done the mass killing. Thus, being in a murderous rage, I’d killed Saurians in order to get aboard a landing craft. I’d had some big plans that day.

  But that’s not what I’m trying to explain. On the other side of the grand Orion Arm conflict were all the other aliens. The most important were the Lokhars, who worshiped the Creator. That’s key to understanding the political scheme. The Lokhars had created the Holy Jade League. They fought a losing religious war against the Jelk Corporation. The Jade League protected and worshiped at ancient Forerunner artifacts. The best way to think of those in Jade League religious terms were as holy Catholic relics.

  As I’ve said, Earth now had a Forerunner artifact of its own. It was an ancient machine the size of an asteroid. It could talk, think and do freaking wild things. One of those things was to transfer or teleport to just about anywhere in the blink of an eye. That was ancient Forerunner technology for you.

  The Forerunners, by the way, were the First Ones, really intelligent beings who had made the jump gates and other cool crap. They were so bright and inventive that they were all gone. The going consensus was that they were extinct.

  The Solar System and Earth in particular was a backyard dirt-pile in the scheme of Orion Arm religious politics. The Jelk had planned to come to Earth to recruit hundreds of millions of slave soldiers for their company armies. The tigers figured no way could they let us ferocious humans loose on the star lanes, so they’d tried to exterminate us before we became a problem. Maybe I should be more exact. The Purple Tamika Emperor had reasoned it out like that, giving the kill order to his subjects. That’s one of the reasons I killed the bastard three years ago, plain old human revenge.

  A good tig
er by the name of Doctor Sant, belonging to Orange Tamika, now ruled the Lokhars. The tigers had become humanity’s friends in the bargain.

  I’m sure that’s all as clear as mud, as the old expression goes. Well, it gets more interesting. A third party joined the fray. They’re the Kargs, ruled by a demonic being named Abaddon.

  It’s a mess of an explanation. Let’s just leave it at this. I helped stop the original Karg invasion, one that came from a different space-time continuum. You heard me right. They were from a different reality. They would have come in their trillions in a billion spaceships. We assault troopers took their portal planet away, stranding them in their dying space-time continuum. However, and this is a big one, believe me, Abaddon made it out with enough Kargs and giant moth-ships to begin attacking the Jelk Corporation core worlds.

  That meant the Kargs and Jelk had been battling it out one thousand light years from Earth. That gave me the needed time to get rid of the Purple Emperor and help put the Orange in his place. It gave humanity time to fix the Earth, repopulate it and build a tough little fleet of our own.

  Now, when I say Earth Force was little, that’s in comparison to everyone else. We made up for it by being the toughest mo-fos on the block. That only makes sense, right? The nice humans had all died on The Day. The only ones left were the crazy kind, the ones regular people had avoided when everything had been normal.

  Anyway, after a lot of complications, things had worked out for humanity. We joined the Jade League, and I managed to help the baboon-like Starkiens get their honor back. The other races no longer sneered at them as space vagabonds and nomadic trash. The Starkiens also sealed Earth’s most easily used jump gate.

  As the booster continued for the waiting ship, I used the monitor. I studied the wall of space-sand. It moved away from Venus toward Earth. How long would it take Mars Fleet to reach the wall of sand? Could it do so before the sand and whatever was behind it reached Earth?