The Chemical Mage: Supernatural Hard Science Fiction (The Tegression Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  THE CHEMICAL MAGE

  THE TEGRESSION TRILOGY

  BOOK 1

  ––––––––

  FELIX R. SAVAGE

  ––––––––

  Copyright © 2017 by Felix R. Savage

  The right to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by Felix R. Savage. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author.

  First published in the United States of America in 2017 by Knights Hill Publishing.

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  CHAPTER 1

  THE UNSINKABLE, AN FTL-CAPABLE supercarrier, floated in orbit around the largest moon of Majriti, a gas giant in the Upsilon Andromedae system. Puffs of plasma wisped from the knobbly auxiliaries halfway along its 3-kilometer length. Station-keeping. Nothing threatened the old, weary capital ship up here. The enemies of the Unsinkable—the enemies of humanity—were down there, on the night-shrouded moon.

  Beep. Beep. Beeeeep.

  The duty officer on the Unsinkable’s flight deck took the call.

  “Sorry, Sarge, we cannot launch a routine medevac after dark. Call back at first light.”

  The only pilot in the ready room was Colm Mackenzie. Having opened one eye without being fully aware of it, he went back to sleep. Curled on a storage chest, he dreamed of home. He was six years old, playing with his toy airplanes behind the settee. His father drowsed beside the electric fire, still wearing his tailcoat and frog-patterned ascot, mechanically stroking the cat. Empties cluttered the hearth. Colm’s baby sister Bridget slept in her bouncy chair. Their father’s wet snores turned into a series of harsh tones.

  Beep. Beep. Beeeeep.

  Oh God, Colm thought muzzily. Please let me have one shift without anything happening. I’m so tired.

  “Sorry, Sarge. We cannot fly a priority medevac at this time.”

  You heard the man, Colm thought in relief. Call back at first light. He made his favorite airplane fly into orbit to dock with an orbital transfer vehicle. One day he would run away to space ...

  But why was he so cold? The fire was on and everything.

  There was a funny smell, like sewer gas.

  He peeked out from behind the settee.

  Blue-white sparks crawled over the fur of the cat on his father’s lap. Sprite didn’t seem to notice. Nor did Dad. He snored on as the strange sparks darted up his wrists, and the room got colder and colder.

  Colm’s knuckles whitened on his toy airplane.

  There was something in the corner, behind the baby chair.

  Beep. Beep. Beeeeep.

  “Sarge, we cannot—oh. Yes, Captain, but our air support resources are severely depleted ... orders are not to risk our remaining ships on night missions ... yes, I do understand that I am speaking with Captain Best ...”

  Oh, not that Best guy. What does he think we are, his limo service? Give us peace, you entitled arsehat.

  Half awake, half asleep, Colm crouched in his hiding-place behind the settee, wondering if he was about to die. The thing in the corner was a hunched mass of shadow. It rippled, blurring the wallpaper. Then it stretched a foot into the firelight. A huge foot, bigger than Dad’s, in a leather boot caked with mud.

  The electric fire went out.

  And yet Colm could still see the shadow, blacker than the darkness.

  It lurched forward.

  Slit eyes glittered blue.

  It stretched out a finger as pale as bone—an old finger, with too many knuckles—and poked the cheek of the sleeping baby.

  Colm screamed and hurled himself out from behind the settee.

  China shattered in the kitchen. Mam rushed in, yelling: what is it, what’s wrong, you scared me half to death.

  The shadow vanished.

  Sprite jumped off Dad’s lap.

  Bridget started howling.

  Dad stumbled upright. The sparks were gone from his hands and wrists. The smell of beer came off him in waves. “That’ll do! God’s sake, Daisy, you gaun off yer head?”

  Mam banged the overhead light on. “Put the bloody fire on! I don’t care how much it costs.”

  Colm heaved Bridget out of her chair. There was a grimy smudge on her cheek where the thing had touched her. He spat on his fingers and wiped it away. Mam talked over Bridget’s screams, about Great-Grandpa Mackenzie and the spoons and money.

  Lloyd Mackenzie swayed drunkenly, rubbing his eyes. Everything was back to normal, Colm thought ... and then his father shouted in a near-panicky voice, “Aw, shut it, you bitch,” and threw a sloppy punch into his mother’s face.

  Colm woke up. The flight deck klaxon was blasting. It had really happened—or had it? Anyway, he had run away to space, and now he was 44 light years from home, halfway through his second enlistment, sitting up in 0.5 gees of artificial gravity, in stale darkness, thick with the funk of overheated circuit boards and old sweat.

  The duty officer raised his voice. “Emergency medevac! Man your spacecraft!”

  “On it,” Colm yawned, accepting the inevitable. His ship was the only one that would be available for days.

  His copilot and gunner sprinted out to the hangar to initiate systems checks. Colm shook out his leathers, which he had been sleeping on. He stuck one leg into the EVA-rated flight suit and hopped over to the duty officer while wriggling his other leg in. “How bad is it?”

  While the duty officer briefed him, the globe of Majriti IV, projected on the end wall, spun to display a blood-red electronic pushpin. The medevac request had come from the moon’s smaller archipelago, on the Majriti-facing side. Colm’s heart sank. This was going to be hairy. When you deorbited at night, you plunged through belts of intense radiation accumulated during the day, as the moon's magnetosphere interacted with the more powerful magnetic field of the gas giant it orbited.

  “Two platoons pinned down, taking heavy fire. Sounds like a triple call scenario,” he told his copilot and gunner as he climbed into the cockpit of the gunship. Triple calls happened frequently: an officer in the field would keep upgrading the severity of his medevac request until he got to yes. So they were going to be flying into a hot LZ to evacuate a Marine who mightn’t even be wounded, might just have decided he was fucked if he’d fight another step. Colm sometimes toyed with the idea of pulling a fakie himself. Realistically, though, he’d never get away with it. He was already on disciplinary warning for smuggling cigarettes.

  His weariness faded as he connected with the gunship. His esthesia implant flooded his nervous system with tactile feedback from the ship, expanding his sense of being to encompass the hard vacuum in the hangar—a faint metallic tingle on his skin; the output of the reactor—a meaty pulse of heat in his belly; the water in the reaction mass tanks—a replete feeling, like he’d just had a nice hot cup of tea ... and a hundred other rich sensory inputs. The implant translated every detail of the ship’s status into a sensation his body could immediately understand. Real life paled in comparison. The last lingering echoes of his nightmare vanished under the sensory onslaught.

  The launch platform rotated, pivoting the gunship to face the outer wall of the flight deck. Half a kilometer long, the cavernous hangar held a sparse handful of gunships and larger dropships. All the rest we
re down on the surface of Majriti IV, or had already been lost.

  The deck lighting dipped from blazing white to ominous red. The rampies working on the other ships retreated to the safety zone.

  “Ready,” Colm said. He flexed his toes, ensuring the landing gear of the gunship gripped the platform securely.

  “Warpig Ten, you are cleared for launch.” Warpig One through Warpig Nine were no more. Eleven and Twelve were out there somewhere. Like Colm, they were being slotted in any old place to fill holes in coverage. The Unsinkable’s captain was fondly known as the Rat—he chewed through ships and crews like they were made of cardboard.

  “Roger that, Zero,” Colm said. “Launching on my mark ...” Copilot Bekkelund and gunner Smythe were strapped into their respective couches, faces invisible behind their visors. “Mark.” He pulled the launch trigger.

  Power flooded into the rail launcher under the platform. Like a tiny maglev train, the platform zoomed towards the wall, carrying the gunship with it. Hydraulic doors gaped ahead. At the end of the rail, an elastomer catapult snapped the platform back—this part was fully automated—and hurled the gunship into space.

  The little ship fell away from the Unsinkable like a bottle chucked out the window of a 3-kilometer skyscraper. Colm glanced back with radar-enhanced vision to confirm his separation distance. The Unsinkable might be one of Earth’s largest and most capable capital ships, but like all spacecraft designed never to land, it was an unaerodynamic mess to look at, solar panels and zero-gravity field generators and other bits and bobs sticking out all over its length. The gunship was a thing of beauty in contrast. It at least had wings.

  5 klicks out, he opened the throttle. A mixture of water and xenon plasma gouted out of the aft engine bells. He somersaulted and dived towards Majriti IV.

  Majriti itself, a gas giant ten times as massive as Jupiter, dominated the blackness ahead. Vivid sapphire and turquoise bands striped the giant’s waning crescent.

  Upsilon Andromedae A, a bright G-type star, flared at the top of Majriti’s limb, then slid behind it.

  The gunship fell into night.

  “I see lightning, I see lightning,” chanted Megumi Smythe in a little-girl singsong.

  “This better be a real emergency,” Erik Bekkelund said grimly.

  Majriti IV was an Earth-sized moon. Its atmosphere sprouted a tail of particles ionized by magnetic field interactions. Charge built up during the day. At ‘sunset’—the moment when the shadow of the gas giant crawled over the moon—it reached spitting point. Electrostatic discharges fanned from the poles like sheet lightning. The fireworks obscured the geography of scattered islands below, and the remaining lights of human colonization.

  “Cross your fingers,” Colm said. He dived into the storm. Faint shudders of electric charge washed over his skin.

  99 times out of a hundred, you’d be fine.

  The other time, you’d be Warpig Two, who got struck by a discharge. All systems DOA. Went into a tumble and burned up on re-entry.

  Colm’s luck held. They got through the electric storm A-OK.

  So now they only had to contend with the enemy on the surface of Majriti IV: a couple million hostile Ghosts.

  .

  CHAPTER 2

  THE MEDEVAC REQUEST HAD come from a settlement called Drumlin Farm. Colm called the local artillery command post and asked them to lay off shelling the area until he got in and out. Just a professional courtesy. They said sure, we’re out of ammo, anyway. With Marines, it could be hard to tell when they were joking.

  Anyway, no shells exploded below as Colm dropped the gunship towards Drumlin Farm. No tracer rounds lit the dark terrain.

  Hot LZ? This didn’t even look like room temperature.

  But the field sergeant on the radio sounded panicky, breathing hard, like he was running and talking at the same time. Bekkelund fed Colm the livestream from the guy’s helmet cam. Tight-curved, rough-hewn stone walls. A spiral staircase. The fighting had moved inside.

  Colm simultaneously lowered the gunship onto his coordinates and watched it descend from a short distance. The sergeant had climbed onto some kind of balcony or lookout point. He leaned on a carved stone balustrade, helmet cam rising and falling as his shoulders heaved. The inverted blue candle-flames of the gunship’s plasma exhaust lit up the night.

  Another reason not to go down after dark: you made yourself into a big fat target. VTOL-capable, the gunship had secondary thrusters under its wings, pointing straight down. Colm had diverted the xenon-135 component of the exhaust to storage—that stuff was highly radioactive, not to be spewed all over friendly troops—but the un-spiked water plasma still glowed bright enough to leave after-images on your vision.

  “Bang,” the sergeant said, making gun-hands. The ship-light silvered the backs of his battlesuit’s gauntlets. “Just to set your mind at ease, these Ghosts are Stage Two.”

  “Very reassuring,” Colm said. Stage Two meant mortars. Those shells could actually do some damage to the gunship. He throttled back the combustion chamber’s output, aiming to get down fast—

  “Incoming,” Smythe snapped. She pulsed the shockwave generator, the gunship’s key defense against explosive rounds. A pressure wave rushed outwards, generating a sonic boom. The sergeant on the balcony flung himself flat. Fuses triggered, the incoming shells exploded in mid-air.

  Not far enough away.

  Pain spasmed through Colm’s port wing. He gasped aloud. Half a dozen points of agony pulsed under the skin of his left arm. Shrapnel.

  “Sorry, Collie Mack,” Smythe cried. She had nothing to be sorry for. She had the best reflexes of any gunner he’d ever flown with.

  Colm muted the pain and dropped the gunship the rest of the way to the ground. The jacks bit into soft, uneven soil. The jolt rattled their teeth in their heads. Not his cleanest landing ever.

  Residual exhaust heat incinerated vegetation, ringing the gunship in fire.

  The computer fed him a detailed damage report. Shredded thermal tiles, not on the leading edge of the wing, thank God, but he didn’t fancy taking off again with damaged insulation.

  “I’m gonna slap a patch on that.” He sprang off his couch. While Bekkelund engaged in a shouting match with the field sergeant, Colm bounded aft, grabbed tools from lockers in the annular space behind the crew cabin, and unsealed the side airlock with a thought. Pale smoke rolled in. He switched off all the lights, not to make the ship any easier a target than it already was.

  Bekkelund brushed past him and dug in the ammo locker. Came out with a handful of spare mags for the machine pistols they wore as sidearms.

  “Where’re you going, Vike?”

  “Sarge said the casualties, plural, are somewhere around here.”

  The gunship crew were not supposed to leave the bird.

  “Lost him,” Bekkelund explained. “Last thing he said was ‘Ghosts are on the stairs.’”

  “What a clusterfuck,” Colm said. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  Bekkelund replied with a snigger. Colm was well known for bending the rules. In Colm’s own opinion that explained why he was still alive, but he tried not to be a bad example to his crew. Both of them were younger, on their first enlistments. Bekkelund’s pessimism was a defensive pose, his bravery the real thing. Colm watched him jog away across the smouldering field, remembering what it was like to be 25 and feel invincible.

  The damaged wing claimed his attention. He manhandled a collapsible ladder down to the ground, propped it against the trailing edge of the wing, climbed up. Dull pinpricks in his left arm told him exactly where the shrapnel had hit. Esthesia implants had their detractors, chiefly among squeamish types who opposed any kind of body modification, but like most working pilots, Colm took the view that you would have to pry his implant from his cold, dead body. Esthesia saved a ton of time and guesswork. In a war zone, that could make the difference between life and death.

  The implant also gave him eyes in the back of his head. T
he gunship’s external cameras synced with his infocals, smart lenses embedded between his own lenses and irises. He saw Smythe clambering down the airlock steps behind him. She carried a combi—the standard Marine rifle with grenade launcher attachment—on a sling.

  “Not you, too,” Colm said.

  “Vike’s heading for the farm. He’s such a fucking idiot. He might need help getting back.”

  “Right. Thing is, I was briefed that there are still civilians at the farm. So if you get that far ...”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.” You had to admire colonists. They hung on like grim death while the Ghosts fired antique field artillery at them. All too often, they died for their right to call a piece of some alien planet home. “If you find any of them, offer them a ride.” Colm wasn’t here to evacuate civilians, but he was rapidly getting the impression that the next command decision regarding Drumlin Farm would be to order its abandonment. The radio silence from the Marines on the ground was ominous. So was the fact that the Ghosts had not lobbed any more shells at the LZ. It suggested the enemy was busy with other things. Spooked by the damage to his ship, Colm wanted to get back in the air pronto, but at this point the gunship might be the only way out for whoever was still alive here.

  “You’re the best, Collie Mack,” Smythe said. She blew a kiss off her armored gauntlet and ran across the field, straight through a stand of burning crops. The flames licked over her steel greaves and cuisses.

  Colm wasn’t too worried about her. Unlike him and Bekkelund, she had a battlesuit. These were only issued to the Marines, but after a year and a half in-system, there was more spare gear on the Unsinkable than there were live troopers. Nothing wrong with using dead man’s kit if it kept you alive.

  Colm squeezed buckyball paste into the holes, smoothed it out with a spackle knife, finished each patch with four-ply carbon nanotube sticky tape. The smoke had cleared away and he was getting hot in his leathers. He unsealed his visor and inhaled the air of Majriti IV. The lingering acrid smell reminded him of winter muirburns, when farmers would burn back the heather for better grazing.