Angels of the Inferno Read online

  Angels of the Inferno

  Voyages of the Solar Wind: Book 2

  By

  Michael Erickston

  Copyright © 2019 by Michael Erickston. All Rights Reserved

  Foreword:

  Welcome back to the Solar Wind universe, where Dex Relway and his wife, Rilar roam the space ways as Free Traders. They skirt around the edges of the law, bending but never quite breaking it in their ongoing quest for adventure and riches.

  So, without further ado, please enjoy the ride!

  Prelude: A Brief Account of a Long War

  The Hegemony is a monotheistic but multiracial empire that inhabits most of the “eastern” half of the Milky Way. The rulers are humanoid in shape, but the weird thing is that nobody knows for sure how they really look. They’re never seen without head-to-toe armor on, concealing their features. Even on their homeworld of Nirvanas, nobody has ever seen them in the flesh. From the very limited intel we’ve gathered on them, they recognize each other by voice or the markings on their armor, which are different for every individual Hegemonite.

  Only the ruling race wears the armor, though. All of the other races in the Hegemony answer to the ruling class, a trio of ultra-rich Oligarchs, also known as the Triumvirate. The Overlords of the Hegemony rule with an iron fist, clad in a velvet glove. Loyalty and piety are rewarded extravagantly, while any dissent or questioning of the Oligarchs is quickly and ruthlessly stomped out of existence. From the intel our “anthropological experts” gathered during the war, there has never been an open rebellion against the Oligarchs.

  In the year 2645, two United Systems Confederacy ships made First Contact with the Hegemony near the core-ward world of Thenallis V. When the CFC cruiser CSS Ardent opened communications, the Hegemony ships opened fire. Things started escalating with the Ardent’s destruction, and the CSS Roman barely surviving the attack to report back to CFC.

  But before all-out war began, the Confederacy sent a delegation to “make proper First Contact, and to open diplomatic relations over the grave misunderstanding.” That delegation was sent back to Alpha Centauri IV in their own ship, booby-trapped to explode fifteen minutes after being boarded by the CFC Search and Rescue team.

  The Search & Rescue team found one delegate still alive. They barely got her out of there before the ship detonated. The Hegemony didn’t want us all dead. They wanted us afraid. Judging by the statements the diplomat gave during her debriefing, the Hegemony didn’t want to destroy us. They wanted us as slaves. They believe that it’s their Manifest Destiny to conquer and rule the entire galaxy, enslaving every race they come across. In other words, they’re a bunch of self-righteous dingletards.

  That’s when it became diamond clearcut that the Oligarchs were only interested in our enslavement and absorption into the Hegemony. Unfortunately, our idiotic and bureaucratic Parliament hemmed and hawed for what seemed like an eternity, before shit finally hit the fan. When the Heggies invaded Suneris Prime in late December of 2672, that turned out to be the final straw.

  In early January of 2673, the Confederacy, finally, formally declared war, almost thirty years after the Hegemony declared it on us. After nearly three decades of light border skirmishes and the invasion of the Suneris system, the war heated up really fuckin’ fast!

  With the Confed declaration of war, the Hegemony proceeded to rip us a new one. Most of our core-ward worlds fell within the first month. The Hegemony ships had us outmatched in space, and their soldiers had us outnumbered and outgunned on the ground. Millions died, and hundreds of millions more were enslaved in that first official year at war, as planet after planet fell to the invaders.

  If not for the sheer size of the Confederacy, taking up almost three quarters of the western half of the Milky Way, the Heggies would have conquered us within the first fifty years. However, the Hegemony had to build more ships and draft more soldiers to press the attack and occupy all of our systems. Their goal was our subjugation, after all. That gave us some much-needed, if all too brief periods of breathing room.

  Our own shipyards tried hard to replenish our lost ships. A Confederacy-wide Draft gave us more bodies to throw against the seemingly unstoppable Hegemony juggernaut. Military contractors made bankloads of credits building ships, tanks, armor, and weapons to fight the war in space and planetside. Our military grew exponentially, but barely kept up with the Hegemony’s onslaught.

  The muckety-mucks at CFC finally figured out the problem in space. The Hegemony’s fighters had our fighters outclassed in space and atmospheric combat. Since the Hegemony exclusively uses energy-based weapons, mostly plasma-laser cannon, they tore our ships’ shields apart, and the armor underneath melted quickly under their weapons’ power. The Hegemony prefers larger ships, the bigger the better. We had pretty much the same philosophy. The fighters played an important role, of course, but we got constantly curbstomped by the superior Heggie numbers.

  On the ground, some Confed Army Generals figured out how to capture enemy weapons and tech, sending their finds back to Confed R&D. That helped our ground forces a lot. Unfortunately, they never captured a suit of armor, though. They had a self-destruct system into their armor, in case they were captured or killed. If in danger of capture, they would voluntarily self-destruct. If they were killed, the self-destruct went off automatically. It wasn’t even that destructive to anything around it. It was more of a self-immolation system, which burned them to dust in their armor and melted said armor around them.

  Then CFC, which had previously never considered frigates as combat ships against the Hegemony’s huge carriers, battlewagons and dreadnoughts, now saw them as a possible solution to the Hegemony fighter swarms. Almost seventy years into the war, we finally had a real breakthrough. Project: Galahad changed everything.

  Galahad class frigates are small, maneuverable, heavily armed for their size, and hard as the Hells to master. Unfortunately, by the time the Galahads were deemed ready for service, we had a severe shortage of pilots. That was mostly due to our fighter divisions’ losses.

  The training regimen for frigate pilots is the toughest training in the Confederacy for a reason. Only nuclear-mechanical and electrical-electronics engineering specialties got accepted into Frigate Flight & Gunnery Training, or FFGT, as those are the two most needed secondary specialties on a frigate.

  We learned the whole ship, stem to stern, as the ancient Earth sailors put it. Our training lasted a full year, with a lot of washouts along the way. Those of us who graduated were badass, though. We were the best of the best. The Elite.

  The first Galahad squadrons flew out of the Sol system, specifically the terraformed moons of Jupiter and their sentinel base, WesternStar station. Our training bases were on and around those moons. There was a reason for that. Ancient Earth stood as a constant reminder of how Humanity had almost made ourselves extinct. Completely uninhabitable without extensive Revitalization Terraforming, it would stay as Humanity had left it. The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries had done the most damage, leading to the Great Exodus of the late twenty-first century. It would stand for eternity, as a warning against the practices that had doomed our ancestral homeworld.

  Our Galahad squadrons’ first action against the Hegemony happened at the First Battle of Gurhin, where our forces fought bravely and well to defend the Gurinkans’ homeworld. We would have won, if the Hegemony hadn’t thrown three full fleets at us. We lost the battle, retreating with just over half of our Galahads surviving, but we’d destroyed over half of the enemy’s numbers. It proved to be the pivotal turning point in the war.

  The secret is in the weaponry used by the Hegemony, or more precisely, the Galahads’ countermeasures to said weaponry. You see, shields don’t do much against energy-based weapons. Charged hull armor, on the other hand, dissipates the Heggie plasma laser bolts like a boss. The small nano-repair modules help even more. The Galahad class frigates have some token rudimentary shields, even less than our fighters. But that big reactor powered the charged hull plates and nano-repair modules, giving us a huge edge on defense. Only concentrated fire from multiple Hegemony ships could break a Galahad’s tank.

  Those reactors suck on larger ships, though. They have serious problems keeping a cruiser’s or battlewagon’s hull protected, while still powering other systems. So, the Galahads became our secret weapon against the Hegemony’s superior numbers.

  By the time the Dynasty series of Galahads, which included the Lu Bu, Zhao Yun, Xiahou Dun, Liu Bei, etc., entered service, the Confederacy had made great strides in the war. We still had a long hard road to drive, but we’d actually started winning!

  Long story short, we won battle after battle. We retook Gurhin in less than a week. Then we retook every other planet that the Hegemony had conquered, over the next thirty years. Our frigates acted as scouts and harassers, hitting small patrols and harassing larger battle groups. Then the CSS Lu Bu (our ship) found the remnants of the Hegemony fleet staging at Harad’s Reach. With our counter-blitz, we’d destroyed most of their invasion fleet in key battles throughout the Confederacy. The survivors of those battles had gathered at the asteroid belt in the Harad system, only fifteen minutes from Alpha Centauri IV through the slipstream.

  It was clearcut that they were massing for a final push at the Confed Capital. They hoped to break us by destroying the Confederate Seat of Government and take out CFC’s main base. We had other ideas.

  We called in the cavalry, hid and harassed the Hegemony outliers, and waited for back
up. Then when the rest of our fleet arrived, we proceeded to eat the Hegemony’s lunch! Fifty-six full squadrons of Galahads showed up, along with cruisers and battleships to help with the curbstomping.

  The Hegemony had never surrendered before. They would fight to the last, or they’d retreat. Harad’s Reach forced them to actually surrender.

  This time, when we opened diplomatic channels to the Hegemony homeworld, they accepted our demands for unconditional surrender and cessation of all hostilities. We’d won the fuckin’ war!

  We still never knew what they looked like under that Lords damned armor, though. That was one of many secrets we never learned about them. But hey, we were too busy celebrating to give a shit.

  Then the Confederate President did some really densenut stupid shit. Instead of occupying their space to ensure their compliance with the Centauri-Nirvanas Accords, he pulled our expeditionary forces back to our space to help rebuild. We could’ve done both, but the dumbass dingletard wouldn’t hear of it. The Hegemony was broken, in his opinion, so he didn’t see the point of making sure they stayed on the straight and narrow. It would come back to bite us in the ass, of course. Shit like that always does.

  Chapter 1: Capital Punishment

  We dropped out of the slipstream over Alpha Centauri IV, and the first thing we noticed was all of the Godsdamned traffic! It was like an ancient Earth freeway at rush hour!

  “Oh Lords, Dex! We’re never going to get clearance with this backup!” Rilar said from beside me in her gunnery seat.

  “Oh, ye of little faith, my sweet kitten,” I replied with a grin. “Watch and learn, my darlin’!”

  “Yeah, right!” Rick laughed from the seat behind mine. “Dude, you are not going to get landing clearance in this mess for at least a couple of hours! Maybe Jeka and I should go back to our quarters to fuck some more.”

  “Ooooh, now that sounds like fun!” Jeka chimed in.

  “Hush, Dracula. Not helping!” I snorted. Yeah, that was Jeka’s call sign in Flight Training, since she’s a Selarian, AKA an extremely hot and extremely Goth vampire chick.

  “Well, if they’re going to go fuck, maybe we should too, sek’natha,” Rilar piped up, running her hand up the inside of my thigh. In spite of myself, my cock started to get hard.

  “Ok, shush it, everybody! I’m gonna call Control and see if we can get a fuckin’ landing spot in this mess!” I said. Some fuckin’ people are the shittiest backseat drivers in the known universe!

  “Ok, sorry, Dex,” Rilar purred, even as she licked my ear.

  “Later, baby. I’m going to tear you up later, but for now…” I grabbed the com and switched it to the AC IV Control frequency. “Alpha Centauri Control, this is the SS Solar Wind, requesting landing clearance, over.”

  “Solar Wind, this is Control, please assume a holding pattern. We’ve logged you in, and our ETA for your turn is two hours,” came back the reply.

  “Ha! Told you!” Rick laughed again.

  “Keep talkin’, dingletard, and I’ll toss you out the airlock and let you walk down to the surface!” I snorted a laugh right back.

  “Loves ya too, Dex!” Rick shot back, and I rolled my eyes as I laughed along with him.

  “Ok, so we got two hours. What should we do?” I asked to the cockpit at large.

  “Well, we could choose sides and smell armpits,” Rick suggested. “Dex is on my team!”

  “Do you want me to bleed you dry, Hubby?” Jeka asked in a menacing voice. I gulped. She hadn’t even threatened me, but since she’s a Selarian vampire, and I have an unreasonable fear of Selarians… Ok, ok! You get the idea.

  “No thanks, sweetums. I’ll shut up now,” Rick said, and I grinned even wider. I turned around and held up my hand, and Jeka gave me a high five and a fangy grin.

  “Thanks, Jeka!” I exclaimed with a laugh. “That’s the way to shut Rick West up!”

  “Anytime, Dex!” she replied, laughing with me. Poor Rick dared not open his mouth for a while.

  I plotted the holding pattern that Control gave me into the autopilot, and sat back with my feet up on the console.

  “Sooo, any ideas on what to do while we wait?” I asked again to the cockpit at large.

  “Beer and burgers?” Rick asked warily. He didn’t want to piss his wife off again.

  “Now that sounds like a plan!” I said, snapping my fingers. “After that flight, we need some nourishment!”

  “That’s because we fucked our brains out during that flight through the slipstream,” Rilar said with a giggle. Rick, and to the extent she can blush, Jeka blushed at that comment, causing me to snicker. I was glad I’d done some tinkering with the EM fields between our quarters and the guest quarters to soundproof both rooms.

  She was right. After last night, it was a wonder that I could even walk! I couldn’t speak for Rick, since the soundproofing of our quarters and the guest quarters prevented us from hearing what they’d been up to. I had to wonder for a moment about their relationship.

  I think their secret has to do with the fact that Rick is into Goth girls, and has been ever since I can remember. I caught him staring at Jeka back in flight training. When they got assigned together, he did a “yes!” under his breath. So yeah, they’re pretty much meant for each other.

  My secret is that ever since Rilar and I took our relationship to the next level, my physical fitness has gone to the next level too. My slight pony keg beer gut is now a hard as rocks six-pack again, thanks to Rilar. My kitten likes riding me hard (pun intended) to get me back into shape and keep me there.

  “Ok, so beer and burgers it is,” I said with a shrug. “Remind me to get some more foodstuffs when we finally get down to AC IV.”

  “Remember to get more foodstuffs!” Rick chimed in.

  “Noted, buttnugget,” I replied, and we went down to the galley to get us some food and our beverage of choice.

  We spent half an hour in that holding pattern, while we ate and drank a few brewskis. Then the call from AC IV interrupted us. The loudspeaker blared in the galley, startling us into action.

  “Attention all ships! Attention all ships! This is Alpha Centauri Fleet Command! Hegemony ships have emerged from the slipstream, and we need assistance!”

  Before the voice even said the second “Attention,” we were halfway to the cockpit. I took one look at the radar display, and my mouth dropped open. It also took my buzz away, leaving me stone cold sober!

  “I’m counting at least eight-hundred enemy ships, Dex,” Jeka said from the auxiliary radar station. Actually, it was the radar station in the cockpit, which they generously called a “bridge” in the Sparrow Class Light Freighter owner’s manual. Then our old military training kicked in, and I got on the com.

  “Free traders, this is Captain Dex Relway of the Solar Wind. If you’re unarmed, bug out ASAP. If you are armed, form up on me.” I didn’t wait for a reply, just switched frequencies to CFC’s FTA channel.

  “CFC, this is Captain Dex Relway of the Solar Wind,” I started, calling Confederate Fleet Command. “We stand ready to assist in any way.”

  Rick gave a thumbs-up from the main com station, also known as the auxiliary missile station, letting me know that at least some of the FTA ships were down for a fight.

  “Captain Relway,” a familiar voice came back, “This is Fleet Admiral Jonn Gavins. You and your ship are hereby given a provisionary commission in the Confederate Navy with a brevet promotion to the rank of Commander. Welcome back. Your orders are to assist in the defense of Alpha Centauri IV. If you have ships rallied, attack the enemy fighters while we finish mobilizing the fleet.”

  Wow! Jonn made Fleet Admiral! No surprise, really. He’s a good guy, and a great strategist and tactician.

  “Roger that, CFC. We’ll do what we can. Solar Wind, out,” I replied and cut the com. Then I looked around at Rilar and our ad-hoc crew. “You guys ready for this? It’s gonna get damn muddy, real quick.”

  “It’s like riding a hover-board,” Rick shrugged. “You never forget how.”

  “What he said,” Jeka smirked, hooking her thumb over her shoulder at her husband.

  “Good. How many are onboard, Rick?” I asked, referring to the other FTA ships.