The Prisoner of Eldaron: Crimson Worlds Successors II Read online

  The Prisoner of Eldaron

  Successors Book II

  Jay Allan

  Copyright 2015 Jay Allan Books Inc.

  All Rights Reserved

  Contents

  Black Eagles’ Force Structure

  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

  Epilogue

  A New Series from Jay Allan

  Also By Jay Allan

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  A New Series from Jay Allan

  Shadow of Empire

  Book One of the Far Stars Series

  Published by HarperCollins Voyager

  Coming November 3, 2015

  Available Now for Preorder at All Retailers

  (All Preorders will receive a special bonus set of stories)

  The first installment in the Far Star series, a swashbuckling space saga that introduces the daring pirate Blackhawk and the loyal crew of the Wolf’s Claw, from the author of the bestselling Crimson Worlds epic.

  Smuggler and mercenary Arkarin Blackhawk and the crew of the ship Wolf’s Claw are freelance adventurers who live on the fringe of human society in the Far Stars, a remote cluster of inhabited worlds on the edge of known space…and the only place humanity lives outside the reach of the brutal empire that rules the rest of mankind. A veteran fighter as deadly with a blade as he is with a gun, Blackhawk is a man haunted by a dark past. Even his cynicism cannot banish the guilt and pain that threaten his very sanity.

  Sent to rescue the kidnapped daughter of his longtime friend Marshal Augustin Lucerne, Blackhawk and his crew find themselves drawn into one deadly fight after another. When the Wolf’s Claw is damaged, they are forced to land on a remote planet ravaged by civil war. Pulled unwillingly into the conflict, they uncover disturbing information about secret imperial involvement that could upset Lucerne’s plans for the Far Stars.

  For the Marshal is determined to forge a Far Stars Confederation powerful enough to eliminate all imperial influence and threats in the sector. He needs a skilled warrior like Blackhawk on his side, but the mercenary, plagued by dark memories from the past, refuses to join the cause. All too soon, though, he and his crew will have to take a stand.

  Far Stars Two: Enemy in the Dark

  Release Date December 1, 2015

  Far Stars Three: Funeral Games

  Release Date: January 19, 2016

  Also By Jay Allan

  The Crimson Worlds

  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)

  Crimson Worlds Successors

  MERCS (Successors Book I)

  Crimson Worlds Refugees

  Into the Darkness (Refugees Book I)

  Shadows of the Gods (Refugees Book II)

  (September 2015)

  Portal Wars

  Gehenna Dawn (Portal Worlds I)

  The Ten Thousand (Portal Wars II)

  Homefront (Portal Wars III)

  (Coming Soon)

  Pendragon Chronicles

  The Dragon's Banner (Pendragon Chronicles I)

  The Sword of the King (Pendragon Chronicles II)

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  at www.crimsonworlds.com

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  Black Eagles’ Force Structure

  HQ Staff (approx. 100 personnel)

  Special Action Teams (approx. 200 personnel)

  Black Regiment (approx. strength 1,800 combat, 400 close support)

  White Regiment (approx. strength 1,400 combat, 350 close support)

  Blue Regiment (approx. strength 1,400 combat, 350 close support)

  Red Regiment (approx. strength 1,400 combat, 350 close support)

  Medical Services (approx. 600 personnel)

  Logistics Division – “L2” – (approx. 2,200 personnel)

  Garrison Battalion (approx. strength 800)

  “Nest” Operations (approx. strength 1,600)

  Training Depot (approx. 400 training staff and 1,000-1,500 trainees)

  Fleet Command (approx. 3,200 ship crew and 600 maintenance)

  Fighter Command (approx. 320 crew and 600 maintenance personnel)

  “Unassigned” (approximately 40 intelligence agents and independent operatives)

  Eagle Fleet

  Eagle One

  Eagle Two

  Eagle Three

  Eagle Four

  Eagle Five

  Eagle Six

  Eagle Seven

  Eagle Eight

  Eagle Nine

  Eagle Ten

  Chapter 1

  Freighter Carlyle

  Epsilon-14 System

  100,000 kilometers from Atlantia Warp Gate

  Earthdate: June, 2319 AD (34 Years After the Fall)

  “All systems fully operational, Skipper.” Cal Durham looked across Carlyle’s tiny bridge toward the freighter’s captain. “We can execute the burn whenever you are ready.”

  Jackson Marne nodded. “Enter the course into the navcom, Cal. Acceleration at 3g.” Three gravities of thrust was a lot for a freighter, and he knew he’d get some grumbling from the crew. But Marne was a navy vet, and he didn’t have a sympathetic ear for pointless whining. Before the Fall he’d served in Augustus Garret’s fleet, where he’d become accustomed to stretches of five or six gravities sitting at his workstation—and thirty or more crammed into the acceleration tanks. And no one bitched to Augustus Garret about his orders, however uncomfortable they were.

  These powder puffs have never been in a tank. They have no idea what real spacers deal with.

  Marne had been hauling cargo since the days just after the Fall, almost from the moment he’d mustered out of the fleet. He’d been
born on Earth, and with the home world in ruins after the final war between the Superpowers, he’d chosen Atlantia as a place to settle, a decision made on data no more comprehensive than a few photos of the planet’s magnificent rocky coasts. Atlantia had lived up to its reputation as an achingly beautiful world and a fine place to live, but Marne was a spacer at heart, and perfect weather and beautiful coastlines were pleasures relegated to brief periods between voyages. He’d gone to the naval academy at eighteen, and the merchant services almost immediately after he mustered out, which meant he had spent most of his adult life within the confines of a ship in space.

  He’d been an executive officer on his first freighter, but for the last twenty-five years he’d served as a captain. The job had become routine to him, even with the increased threat of piracy in recent years. But the veteran skipper was nervous about this run. Maybe it’s the secrecy, he thought, trying to brush aside the tense feeling in his gut. The public manifest stated that Carlyle was carrying pharmaceuticals, some medicinal, some recreational—and all derived from the sea life teeming in Atlantia’s bountiful oceans. For decades, indeed, ever since the planet had been colonized, its only exports of significant value had been an assortment of products derived from the oceans that covered 90% of its surface.

  But that’s not what we’re really carrying. Our actual cargo is far more valuable, almost beyond price.

  Carlyle didn’t have a load of drugs or a stasis-preserved hold full of delicacies from the sea, not on this run. Her bays instead carried very special ores, raw material rich in stable trans-uranium elements, the first shipment since production on Glaciem had been restored, after a still-unexplained attack on that world that had left dozens of mine workers dead.

  Cavenaugh Freight was the oldest and largest shipping firm on Atlantia, the only one even marginally comparable to the great transport combines that had developed on the wealthier worlds since the Fall. Marne hadn’t been at all surprised when the government entrusted the very special cargo to Cavenaugh, but he’d been more than a little startled when Elsworth Cavenaugh told him he and Carlyle had been selected for the run. Marne was a senior captain, and he’d been reasonably close to old man Cavenaugh back when the company had been smaller and its operations more informal. But the firm was much larger now than it had been years before, and the former CEO was well over one hundred years old and long retired. Elsworth IV was now in charge, and Marne had never had a close relationship with the old man’s arrogant offspring. He was among the most experienced of Cavenaugh’s captains, but he’d never played the social and political games it took to obtain high profile voyages.

  Whatever the reasoning that had put him in command, Marne knew the significance of the run. Atlantia, though one of the older colonies, had never been a particularly wealthy world. Its pharmaceutical products enjoyed heavy demand, but they were expensive to manufacture, and that kept profit margins fairly low. And the planet needed many imports—electronics, software, vehicles. Its general lack of industrialization created a trade deficit that had plagued its economy since the Fall. The final war between the Superpowers had freed all the worlds of Occupied Space, but Atlantia, for all its natural beauty, had been more prosperous under Alliance control than as a truly independent planet.

  But now that will all change. All because of Glaciem.

  The frigid world on the outskirts of Atlantia’s solar system had barely been explored for most of the 130 years since the first colonization party transited in to the Epsilon Indi system. Indeed, men had lived on Atlantia for half a century before they’d even bothered to name it. It was far from the warp gates and so distant from the primary there was little reason to even think about it…just another lifeless rock of little value. That was until one of the rare scientific expeditions to the frigid planet discovered something extraordinary. Glaciem was one of the eleven places in Occupied Space where STUs had been found to exist in naturally-occurring deposits.

  Stable trans-uranic elements were super-heavy metals, materials ensconced on the period table north of uranium, far north in the case of the very special isotopes in Carlyle’s hold. Many such elements had been synthesized in laboratories over the years, but most were extremely radioactive, with half-lives too short to allow the creation of meaningful quantities. However, the ore Marne’s ship was carrying was rich with a very special element, number 164 on the periodic table, dead center in a still poorly understood phenomenon known as the second island of stability.

  For reasons human science had not yet fully explained, there were two small segments of elements on the periodic table that produced isotopes far more stable than those around them. The first island existed in the low-120s, and the elements in that range had half-lives of days and weeks, while those just before and after decayed in microseconds. But it was the second island that produced truly useful elements, with half-lives in the millions of years. These materials were still radioactive, though far less so than those outside the island. There was a plethora of uses for such heavy metals, but the most important was in spaceship drives, where even minute quantities could easily be converted to less-stable super-heavy elements and achieve critical mass almost instantaneously, with the release of enormous energies.

  The elements in the second island had been known for over a century, but they had been produced only in the lab by particle accelerators. The process was almost incalculably expensive, at least when producing quantities useful for anything but research. It had been widely believed that no such element would be found in a naturally-occurring state, but that assertion had been proven profoundly wrong when a party of explorers discovered the first veins of the material on a frozen moon in the Beta Cariolis system.

  No one had developed a credible hypothesis to explain why the material was found on a few rare—and in nine cases out of eleven—frigid worlds, but that didn’t stop the gold rush mentality every time a new source was found. And now Atlantia had its own priceless resource, one that promised to expand and invigorate the planet’s economy for generations to come.

  That’s the future down in my hold, the promise of prosperity for millions of Atlantians.

  If it gets through.

  Carlyle was a strong ship, one of the best-armed in the Cavenaugh fleet. She was a match for most pirates, one of the reasons Marne had only been attacked once in the almost sixty trips he’d made as her captain. And the true nature of her cargo was a closely-guarded secret. When Carlyle returned, Marne knew he and his people would be fifteen minute celebrities, the guardians of the first delivery from the mines of Glaciem. Their single cargo run would double the value of Atlantia’s exports by itself, and the potential wealth from fully exploiting that frozen planet’s treasure was almost incalculable. Atlantians had long enjoyed their planet’s magnificent climate and almost unimaginable natural beauty, but soon they would feel the effects of an influx of real wealth, something none of them could have imagined just a few years before.

  But fame, however fleeting, still lay ahead. For now, only a handful of people outside of the crew had any idea what the ship was carrying. Carlyle’s launch had been unexciting in appearance, just another run of routine pharmaceuticals to the eyes of anyone interested enough to pay attention.

  Still, Marne had a bad feeling. Carlyle was bound for Arcadia, a four jump run from Atlantia, and one that didn’t involve passing through any high risk areas. But he couldn’t shake the discomfort that had plagued him since his ship’s launch. His cargo was classified, but he didn’t think much of peoples’ ability to keep secrets. All it would take was one bout of bragging by the pompous Elsworth IV or a politician’s loose lips in bed with his mistress, and the word would be out. And every pirate in Occupied Space would salivate at the chance to bag a cargo of STUs.

  “How’s the scope?” Marne had been asking the question every half hour since he’d been on the bridge. It was a waste of time, he knew. The AI would warn them immediately of any contact. But it made him feel better to check. Epsilon-
14 was a useless system, its three planets so utterly without value no one had ever maintained so much as an outpost there. It’s only use was as part of the quickest trade route between Atlantia and Arcadia…and Marne knew for a fact there were no Arcadian vessels scheduled for a run to Atlantia right now.

  “Clear, Skipper. No contacts.” Durham didn’t sound bored or irritated as Marne knew he’d be if their roles were reversed. Your paranoia has probably rubbed off on him. He’s been glancing down at the scope every few minutes for the past six hours, even when you haven’t asked.

  Cal Durham was a great executive officer, and Marne knew he was lucky to have him. He’d have sworn Durham was ex-navy, but he wasn’t. He was just one of those rare people who seemed born to spend their lives blasting through the depths of space, and he was an odds on favorite to secure a captain’s berth before long. Perhaps he’d even take over Carlyle one day soon.

  Marne himself was close to retirement, perhaps another trip or two, and he’d be done. He’d spent a life in space, and as much as it so often seemed like home, he knew it wasn’t. In recent years his thoughts had focused more on the cost of a career like his. He was ready to hang up his captain’s uniform and try to repair some of the devastation his decades in space had wreaked on his personal life.

  He had an estranged wife, one who’d tried for years to deal with the endless separations until she’d finally decided she just didn’t care anymore. And a son and a daughter he hardly knew, both grown now and harboring their own resentments for childhoods spent mostly without a father. He’d told himself there was still time, but he wasn’t sure he really believed it. They didn’t hate him, he was fairly certain of that. He hadn’t been an abusive monster, and his career had supported them all, including expensive educations for both children. They just didn’t know him, not really. He was like nothing to them, someone who should have been part of their lives, but for the most part, wasn’t. He suspected that might be harder to overcome than if he’d done something truly awful.