War Fleet: Resistance

War Fleet: Resistance


Book 1


Joshua James Daniel Young


Contents
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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
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Epilogue
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Prologue
“So are you going to get fat in retirement?”
Captain Frank Olsen considered his brother’s plump face. “You’re one to talk, Sean.”
“Hey, I’m dead,” his brother said. “I’m stuck like this.”
Olsen leaned back and took another bite of his breakfast, then glanced out his ready room window at the stars beyond. He could make out many of the big, lumbering asteroids that were ubiquitous to the region. It was the reason his ship was here, after all. He downed the last of his coffee and refilled his cup.
“We’ll see,” he said at last. “But I don’t know that a cushy retirement is in the cards.”
“Well, that’s what you get when you piss off people,” Sean said. The hologram glitched. It was the second time it had done that this morning.
“You need a diagnostic.”
“And you need to stop playing cards by yourself in your office,” Sean said.
“You’re here, aren’t you?”
“Barely.”
The hologram of his brother, which only generated from the waist up across his table, drew a couple of cards and slid a credit forward to up the ante. Olsen glanced at the cards in his hand. They were a mishmash of numbers and symbols that he couldn’t hope to fashion into a winning move.
He upped his ante. Like the cards in his hand, and his brother, the chips were holographic. To anyone looking on, it would appear that he was pantomiming a card game with an invisible opponent.
“How long have we been doing this, Frank? Six months now?” Sean ran a hand through his thinning hair as he looked at his cards. “I think I can tell when something is bothering you.”
After his brother had been killed and he’d lost his own command, Olsen had started talking with the hologram, against the advice of a fleet psychiatrist. He’d promised to stop after six months.
That had been five years ago. The program wasn’t designed to note the passage of time. “I’m not bothered.”
“Sure you are.”
He rolled his eyes. “Fine, I’m bothered. Happy?” The program had its shortcomings, but it had nailed his brother’s smug self-assuredness. It had made Sean a fine captain, and much more like their father than Frank, but it wore thin. “I’m not going to get a second chance.”
“You’re captain of a ship again,” Sean said.
“A mining ship.”
“A military ship. And considering most people don’t get a first chance, you’re doing okay.”
“You know what I mean,” Olsen said, hating how he sounded. Only his brother got this glimpse of him. “I thought out here, away from everything, I’d get a chance to...” He paused. Saying it aloud sounded ridiculous, he realized. “To clear my name.”
Sean laughed. “Out here? The ass end of nowhere? This is where names go to die.”
He was right, of course. There was no redemption here, just a slow shuffling off to a dead end. Maybe that wasn’t so bad in the end. There were worse fates. “Thanks, Sean. Helpful as always.”
“That’s what I’m here for.”
“Why do I keep you around again?”
“It must be my winning—”
The lights in the small office flashed red once and the intercom crackled to life. “Captain, fast-approaching contacts!”
Olsen jumped to his feet, sending his holographic cards and chips flying. In two steps, he’d crossed the small office and reached the door that opened directly into the CIC.
“Ha!” his brother called after him.
Olsen glanced back just as the hologram was shimmering out of existence. Sean was holding up his discarded cards.
“You really are the king of losing hands.”


1
“Where are they?” Olsen said as he burst onto the bridge of the URSA Tapper. He brushed the remnants of his interrupted breakfast from his mustache. The half-empty coffee mug in his right hand threatened to slosh everywhere, but he’d be damned if he left it behind. A man had to draw the line somewhere.
“Coming out of the belt on the inner-system side,” Lieutenant Resham Santiago, the Tapper’s navigator, replied. Her voice was calm and unhurried. “Four ships. No signatures.”
“Visual,” Olsen said.
The small bridge’s viewscreen filled with an out-of-focus image of four shoddy-looking medium-sized ships: a mess of greebles and devices built for functionality over aesthetics. They weren’t too dissimilar-looking from the Tapper.
“The overdue welcoming party,” Olsen said under his breath.
The Tapper and her miners had been out here for months without attracting the attention of the locals. And if they had, the idea of tangling with the Tapper had thwarted them. What had changed? “Rico, hail them.”
Given the ships’ lack of military insignias, Olsen couldn’t tell if they were human, Foorint, or Arstan — not that it mattered in this scenario.
“No response, sir,” Lieutenant Rico Cadinouche, the Tapper’s pilot, replied.
“Why didn’t we see them sooner?”
“The radiation wave blinded all our equipment,” Santiago said.
Olsen frowned. “What radiation wave?”
“The one I messaged you about twenty minutes ago,” said the smooth, emotionless voice of his XO.
Olsen turned to the ship’s cyborg. Rob’s alabaster face and glowing blue eyes gave little away. His AI interfaced with, but was still independent of, the ship’s computers. Ever since the Grashorn incident, Admiralty had ruled that all executive officers must be machines capable of making decisions in milliseconds.
“Tell me again,” Olsen said. He’d seen the message