Blackhawk: Far Stars Legends I Read online

  Blackhawk

  Far Stars Legends I

  Jay Allan

  Copyright 2016 Jay Allan Books

  All Rights Reserved

  Contents

  The Far Stars Series

  Also By Jay Allan

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  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Shadow of Empire (Far Stars Book 1)

  The Far Stars Series

  Book I: Shadow of Empire

  Book II: Enemy in the Dark

  Book III: Funeral Games

  The Far Stars is a sweeping space opera series, set in the fringe of the galaxy where a hundred worlds struggle to resist domination by the empire that rules the rest of mankind. It follows the rogue mercenary Blackhawk and the crew of his ship, Wolf’s Claw, as they are caught up in the sweeping events that will determine the future of the Far Stars.

  The Far Stars series continues the adventures of Arkarin Blackhawk, and is set roughly twenty years after Blackhawk.

  Read chapter one of Shadow of Empire at the end of this ebook

  Buy Shadow of Empire

  Also By Jay Allan

  Marines (Crimson Worlds I)

  The Cost of Victory (Crimson Worlds II)

  A Little Rebellion (Crimson Worlds III)

  The First Imperium (Crimson Worlds IV)

  The Line Must Hold (Crimson Worlds V)

  To Hell’s Heart (Crimson Worlds VI)

  The Shadow Legions (Crimson Worlds VII)

  Even Legends Die (Crimson Worlds VIII)

  The Fall (Crimson Worlds IX)

  Tombstone (A Crimson Worlds Prequel)

  Bitter Glory (A Crimson Worlds Prequel)

  The Gates of Hell (A Crimson Worlds Prequel)

  MERCS (Successors I)

  The Prisoner of Eldaron (Successors II)

  Into the Darkness (Refugees I)

  Shadows of the Gods (Refugees II)

  Revenge of the Ancients (Refugees III)

  Gehenna Dawn (Portal Worlds I)

  The Ten Thousand (Portal Wars II)

  Homefront (Portal Wars III)

  The Dragon’s Banner (Pendragon Chronicles I)

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  at www.crimsonworlds.com

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  Acknowledgments

  Blackhawk is a prequel to my existing Far Stars series, which was published by Harper Voyager. I’d like to thank my entire team at Voyager for their part in helping to bring this universe to life. The Far Stars wouldn’t be what it is without the contribution of their time, effort, and talent.

  A special thanks to my editor, David Pomerico, whose patience and advice was invaluable in working through the manuscripts for Shadow of Empire, Enemy in the Dark, and Funeral Games.

  I’d also like to shout out a heartfelt thanks to Rebecca Lucash, Shawn Nicholls, Angela Craft, Dana Trombley, Lauren Jackson, Caroline Perny, Pamela Jaffee, and Richard Aquan…the whole Voyager team. You guys are the best, and I’m looking forward to working with you all on the upcoming Flames of Rebellion series, and hopefully a return one day to the Far Stars…

  Jay Allan

  Prologue

  The galaxy. Unimaginably vast.

  Mankind inhabits a huge swath of this massive conglomeration of stars, an entire spiral arm explored and colonized eons ago. Humanity’s origins are forgotten, its birthplace long a lost legend, buried in the endless depths of the past. Little is known of mankind’s expansion into the stars, of how so many worlds were settled and tamed. There are vague histories, as much legendary as factual, of civilizations that rose and fell, leaders who achieved great glory and were remembered…and then mostly forgotten. Great fleets that clashed, deciding the fates of billions. Armies that marched across worlds, cities destroyed and then rebuilt. Humanity pushing out ever farther from its home world, settling a thousand worlds before falling into a dark age.

  But now, mankind’s lost glories are forgotten, the independence and spirit of its early adventurers gone, replaced by terror, by slavery. For the empire that now reigns over those worlds of humanity knows only one way to rule. Fear.

  On a thousand worlds, people live in terror, crushed by their masters at the slightest signs of disobedience. For a millennium the emperors have ruled humanity with an iron fist, and everywhere men and women look up to the sky, they live under imperial control. Everywhere save the Far Stars.

  A remote sector, a star cluster separated from the rest of human space by the great emptiness of the Void, the Far Stars are a difficult and dangerous journey from imperial space. It is to the mysterious natural phenomenon of the Void that the people of the Far Stars owe their freedom from imperial rule.

  Into this untamed frontier a man fled. He had been a warrior, a soldier of great ability, the product of a select breeding program…but that time had passed, and it was a broken man who fled to the frontier of humanity’s dominion, haunted by a dark and terrible past.

  He left his old name behind, took a new one, one utterly anonymous, but not for long. For where he goes, violence and death follows…and soon his new name will spread throughout the Far Stars, a cry of hope to some, a bitter curse to others.

  Blackhawk.

  Chapter One

  West Hill

  “The Badlands”

  Northern Celtiboria

  The bar was dusty, rundown…a filthy shack. It sat on the edge of a town boasting no more than a few dozen buildings, most as ramshackle as the tavern itself. The walls were dark and grime covered, and the floor was built from coarse boards, old and stained with spilled liquor and more than a little blood. It was a place soldiers went, to get drunk, to gamble, and sometimes to get into fights, mostly non-lethal brawls fought with fists and bar stools instead of assault rifles and artillery.

  There were about two dozen people milling around, wearing a variety of mostly worn and filthy uniforms, sitting at the bar or at one of the half dozen broken down tables scattered around the room. Most of them were busy drinking—or playing poker. Gambling was always popular with the soldiers, and many of them rushed to find a game just as soon as their paymasters handed out the nearly worthless scrip for their habitually overdue pay.

  There was a rickety stair in the back corner, leading up to a second floor with a half dozen small rooms, where the saloon
provided the other service soldiers with pay in their pockets tended to seek. A private was stumbling down the stairs, trying unsuccessfully in his drunken state to fasten his pants with one hand as the other gripped the loose and wobbling rail.

  West Hill wasn’t much as towns go, but it was the biggest settlement in the Badlands, and the only significant population center within ten day’s march in any direction. The scrubby desert had little more than sagebrush and a few meager farms clustered around the river, nothing of significant value. Save that it was a crossroads of sorts, laying between the rich ports of the White Rock Coast and the fertile plains and the river cities farther inland. A dozen trade routes passed through its desolate landscape, the motor caravans carrying all manner of goods to waiting markets. And that made it worth fighting over.

  The armies of four Warlords were nearby, men of war who had struggled for this scrap of arid rocky plain, and the power over regional commerce it would provide its owner. The soldiers were mostly huddled in their armed camps now, licking their wounds after more than a year of nearly constant combat. They had fought themselves to exhaustion, and worn, tired, and low on supplies, the respective commanders had agreed to a truce. No one expected it to last very long—ceasefires on Celtiboria seldom did—but for now the guns were silent. At least mostly silent. With almost a hundred thousand grim veterans in the area, there was no such thing as perfect peace, and men were still dying, just at a slower pace.

  “Give me the bottle.” The man tossed a coin down on the bar. It was an imperial copper, worth twenty times its weight in any of the debased and almost valueless Celtiborian currencies…and an almost obscene price to pay for the bottle of throat-scarring rot gut the bartender dropped in front of him. But the man didn’t care. The money was ill-gotten, so it only seemed right to him it should be ill-used as well. Besides, it was worth it to him if the bottle got him drunk. A glass at a time wasn’t accomplishing anything, so he figured it was time to escalate things.

  “Sorry, buddy, but I can only give you the set exchange rate on that.” The bartender stood, staring down at the coin with poorly disguised greed. Imperial currency was accepted everywhere in the Far Stars, with far greater enthusiasm than the various local coins and scrips. But most of the worlds established official exchange rates that owed more to fantasy than reality. And on Celtiboria, fractured and perpetually mired in civil war, each Warlord enforced his own valuation, generally with even greater avarice and wishful thinking than the central banks of the other worlds.

  The man knew the bartender was full of shit. There wasn’t an establishment on Celtiboria that wouldn’t happily give three times the official rate, regardless of local laws and regulations. But he didn’t care. The barkeep had to earn his way, and if cheating his customers was the only way he could do it, so be it. He’d have even found it amusing…if he’d had time for anything beyond misery and the temporary relief offered by extreme drunkenness.

  “S’alright, just keep the change…and keep this swill coming until I’m under this stool instead of sitting on it.” The man wasn’t really drunk, not yet at least. The slurred words were more wishful thinking than real impairment. Getting drunk was a challenge for him, something that took a lot of effort. And one hell of a lot of booze. He grabbed the bottle and filled his glass right to the top. Then he picked it up and drank it down in one slug. It was shit, some kind of bathtub brew that burned like battery acid going down, but right now he’d have guzzled Stegaroid piss if it would dull the pain…erase the memories, even for a few hours. But that was easier said than done.

  He wasn’t a normal man, born with a random assortment of his parent’s traits, with memories of old Aunt Jenny telling him how they had the same eyes. No, his genetics were far more complicated, the product as much of manipulation in a lab as whatever DNA he got from his mother and father, whoever they had been. Many people would have considered his genes a gift. They made him stronger, faster, smarter…more capable than pretty much anyone else he’d ever encountered. But they also made it damned difficult to get drunk, and most of the time that was all he cared about.

  He realized people would consider him ungrateful for the capabilities he so despised, but he didn’t see things that way. He was doing his best to throw away his talents, and he radiated contempt for the things he could achieve if he chose to. Indeed, he was far too aware of just what he could do, the terrible uses to which he’d put his capabilities in the past…and it was that more than anything that made him want to crawl into the bottle. He wanted to be left alone, and usually that’s what he got. Most of all, he hated his hyper-charged digestive and immune systems, and the efficiency with which they purged poisons like alcohol from his system almost as speedily as he could imbibe them.

  A group of four soldiers walked through the door, their green and black uniforms identifying them as General Ghana’s men. Bako Ghana was one of the strongest Warlords in the area, and he’d been expected to chase the others out of the Badlands in a single campaign season. But the rival Warlord Lucerne had gotten the better of him, beating his forces in the field three times, and taking West Hill away from him.

  The truce that followed gave the soldiers of all sides access to the town, as long as they didn’t bring anything heavier than sidearms with them. The word was Lucerne didn’t like it, but even in victory, his forces had been worn down, and he needed time to rest and resupply them. Giving his rivals’ soldiers access to the only place in the Badlands they could get their fill of booze and women didn’t seem like too much of a price to pay for the break in the fighting.

  The new arrivals carried themselves not with the demeanor of an army that had been thrice defeated and chased halfway across the Badlands, but rather a swagger that suggested their side had gotten the better of the fighting, that West Hill was their town, and not just someplace they were allowed to come lightly-armed to do their drinking and whoring. The man would have quickly seen through the pretense, realized the soldiers were overcompensating, covering for their bruised morale. That is if he’d noticed them at all. Which he didn’t. Apathy had become his religion, and he was deep in prayer, with no interest in anything save the bottle in front of him.

  “Barkeep, four whiskeys…and be quick about it.” The soldier’s voice was coarse. He and his comrades sat down at the bar, the speaker at the end of the group, right next to the man. The four of them were puffing on foul-smelling cigars, cheap ones, the man realized as the noxious smoke wafted in his direction.

  The soldier next to him reached out and grabbed his drink as the bartender set it down. “Another,” he barked as soon as he’d tossed it back and set the glass down. Then he turned his head and stared at the man.

  “So, what the hell do we have here?” he asked, the disrespect unmistakable in his tone. “Some homeless wanderer in off the scrub?” He paused, his gaze locked on the man. He made a face. “You stink, you know that? You reek like the trail.” He paused, turning back and downing the drink the bartender had just poured for him. “You got any scrip on you? Cause one of them fine women upstairs’ll give you the bath you need for half a ducat. You might even enjoy it.” He laughed at his own insult, followed immediately by his three friends. They all looked over at the man, waiting to see if their target had the guts to stand up to four of the great Ghana’s soldiers.

  But the man didn’t react, didn’t respond at all. He’d seen his share of soldiers, killers with frozen blood who would make these Celtiborian bullies piss themselves with a stare. And from the stench drifting his way, the loudmouth needed to bathe even more than he did.

  “What are you, deaf? I’m talking to you, boy.”

  The man remained silent. He stared straight ahead as he grabbed the bottle and filled his glass again. He wasn’t there to fight…or even to socialize. He was there to drink himself into unconsciousness.

  The soldier’s face turned red, and he looked back at his companions. “This drifter thinks he’s too good to talk to us, boys.” He stared back a
t the man. “He don’t look like much though, does he?”

  The man turned toward the soldier, staring with cold gray eyes. “I’m not looking for trouble, soldier. Now, drink your drink, move the fuck along…and keep your shit to yourself. I’m only gonna say it once.” His voice was icy. He held his gaze for a few seconds, eyes fixed on the soldier and his friends. He was fighting to stay calm, to beat back urges from the past, dark ones…to try to ignore the soldiers, not to take the bait. But the normal involuntary response stirred in his mind, and he analyzed each of them, coldly assessing the threat they represented, and deciding it was minimal. If it came to fighting, he didn’t doubt he would prevail. But wasting four troopers would draw a lot of unwanted attention. So he turned back to his drink and put it to his lips, downing it in one quick gulp before he put the glass on the bar and filled it again.

  The soldier hesitated. There was something in the man’s stare, the frozen sound in his words. Something unsettling, threatening. He hesitated, but then he looked back at his friends, saw the chuckles forming on their lips, waiting for him to back down. Finally, he turned back toward the man.

  “Hey, boys…we got ourselves a real tough guy here.” There was a nervousness in his voice, but he pressed on anyway. “You know what, shithead? You picked the wrong guys to fuck with. You hear me?” His voice was thick with false bravado, but there was an uneasiness there too, even fear. The soldier took his cigar and put it out in the man’s glass, the lit end hissing as it was extinguished by the low proof, watered down whiskey.

  “What about that, tough guy?” The soldier laughed, flashing another glance back to his comrades, clearly expecting his target to back down. But the man just sat still for a few seconds, silent, unmoving. Then his arm whipped up, striking out in a motion so quick it was just a blur. The soldier stood still, looking straight ahead, his eyes transfixed. Then he fell to the ground, his hands grasping desperately at his crushed throat as he gasped for air.