The Battle for the Ringed Planet

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By Richard Edmond Johnson

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Copyright © 2012 by the author.

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the author.

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Cover design by Athanasios …
www.mad-gods.com/CoverHIRE

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Other works by Richard Edmond Johnson ([email protected])

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The Heidelberg Hotel
(YA suspense, drama)

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006KY9LTQ

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The Secret in Saartown
(YA suspense, drama, mystery)

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0075XBGOE

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Coming soon,
The Knights of Oakshadow Book 1: The Battle for Sarvonne
(medieval historical fantasy, first of a trilogy)

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Chapter 1:      Planet Fall

Chapter 2:      Survivor

Chapter 3:      Fireball

Chapter 4:      Callisto

Chapter 5:      Grondalle

Chapter 6:      Nightmares

Chapter 7:      The Old Man

Chapter 8:      Starhawks

Chapter 9:      Fire Fight

Chapter 10:    God of War

Chapter 11:    Dragon Marine

Chapter 12:    Tortured Soul

Chapter 13:    The Outlawed Lands

Chapter 14:    The Lost Ones

Chapter 15:    Under the Rings

Chapter 16:    Transporters

Chapter 17:    Impala

Chapter 18:    Warlords

Chapter 19:    Base Camp

Chapter 20:    Engineers

Chapter 21:    Dust Offs

Chapter 22:    Mission

Chapter 23:    Hunter One

Chapter 24:    Casualties of War

Chapter 25:    To Kill a Cyborg

Chapter 26:    The 4th Fleet

Chapter 27:    Inside a Gas Giant

Chapter 28:    Skimming Shields

Chapter 29:    Immortal Death

Chapter 30:    Siiri’s Fury

Chapter 31:    The Secret about Torian

Glossary of People and Places

Chapter 1: Planet Fall

A young man with sunken chestnut eyes and longer than military regulation thick chocolate brown hair stared unseeingly at his reflection in the dimly lit washroom mirror. He had a long angular face with a strong jaw line and if it weren’t for the worn tired look, he would be considered strikingly handsome.

It was one in the morning fleet time, but dawn planet side and he had only a few minutes before pre-flight. Glad to be alone in the cramped metallic washroom he splashed his face with water. When he looked up in the mirror again there was a man in a navy blue flight suit with pale blue skin and wavy blonde hair standing behind.

“You know you’re going to get me in trouble, I barely passed my psych eval before transfer.” he spoke to the man who appeared.

“I don’t know how you even made it. You’re clearly suffering from PTSD.”

“Fleet doesn’t care. Hawkeyes have the highest casualty rate, present company included.”

“You only have a couple of weeks left, Torian.” the blue man gently put his hand on the other’s shoulder.

“Yeah, well, I’ll probably be seeing you today, Tristan. Have you ever heard about this place?”

“Selunia? Only that something bad happened.”

“It’s a tomb. There was a city, but no one survived. Other ships went down to find out why, and none came back. So we’re next.”

“Who is your pilot?”

“I wish it were you.”

“Of course, I was the best. What a team we were; highest stats in the 3
^rd
fleet.”

“But you’re dead; can’t help me now. This new guy is green, but thinks he knows everything.”

“Just like I did.”

“But you did know everything!”

“Aw, cheer up. Remember that weekend you spent at my place in Berkeley, your first time on earth, those girls!”

Torian’s lips curled, “That was wild, right after that depressing holo from Leigh.”

“Made you forget! Oh, and the surfing!”

“You were always crazy, Tristan …” then Torian looked sad, “I gotta go now, I’ll see you later.”

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The R-26 Hawkeye was a sleek spacecraft with a tubular fuselage and wing-like struts in the rear housing surveillance pods and defensive weapons. Designed for long ranged deep space reconnaissance and larger than a regular fighter, it had a crew of two, a pilot and a technician. In the cockpit, enclosed in a transparent steel canopy, two dark helmeted heads checked instruments while they descended into the greenish blue atmosphere of the large ringed planet.

Torian McCallum checked the visuals inside his helmet visor heads up display (HUD) racing along either side with graphs projecting trajectories and numbers, and then emitted an audible yawn.

“Is my flying boring you, McCallum?” grunted the pilot in the front seat ahead.

The tall flight specialist readied a typically sarcastic reply to the green pilot, but thought better of it. He decided to hold his tongue and try keeping a little sanity on their sudden mission. Instead, he analyzed the eight different colored moons hovering beyond the atmosphere. In addition to the moons, there was a thick ring of colorful ice crystals, vastly different from most other planets he had visited.

“What are the atmospheric readings?” Miky Chang, the short hyperactive pilot bellowed through the intercom.

Having just reported them, Torian sighed, “Oh let me see … same as a minute ago.” Slow swirling marshmallow clouds blanketed their view of the continents below. Torian knew from his briefings that deep blue oceans and lush green landforms proved that the early terra-formers with their gargantuan atmospheric possessors had done their job well two centuries ago. The planet Selunia had had the potential to become one of the greatest early colonies, but sadly, something went terribly wrong, and everyone in the only settlement of Kaarina perished.

The 4
^th
fleet was in close proximity to the system and sent a cruiser to evaluate the strategic importance of the dead colony, hence their little excursion in the R-26 Hawkeye. Of course, there was always the nagging morbid curiosity to know how the two hundred thousand colonists, men, women, and children, had died. Other manned investigations had failed to come up with an answer, mostly because they all had died immediately after entering the city. Some speculated it was a plaque, or poisoned atmosphere from hidden gases released under the mantle. Naturally, military planners reasoned that a state of the art R-26 Hawkeye with a trained crew protected by military combat suits would be safe. Military Intelligence or not, there was no way Torian was getting out of the scout vessel once they landed.  

The experienced crewmember swore that Chang was the worst pilot in the fleet. His descent was so painfully slow and drifting noticeably off course that Torian struggled against the urge to take over. Instead, he amused himself with scanning all the landforms surrounding the derelict city. The planners had selected the site well near a wide fertile river valley. Tracing the river away from the empty city, suddenly he furrowed his brows as he came across the valley. The visual was strange, and since he came from a rural farming colony, he had the insight to see something others had missed.

“Lieutenant?”

“What? Can’t you see I am concentrating?” nervousness showed.

Sailing through a sea of white, the pilot was flying by instruments through the cloudbank, and judging by his lack of enthusiasm, not doing well.

“Just follow the yellow line in your HUD.” Torian muttered under his breath inaudible to the man steering the craft. Fortunately, they broke through the clouds and could see green below with a collection of grey concrete buildings nestled on a curve in the river.

Glancing down on his right, Torian remarked, “Space Port on our 3 o’clock …”

“I can see.”

“How many planet falls have you done?” his last pilot, Tristan, had completed dozens.

“Shut up or I’ll kick the crap out of you when we land!” and he could, having practiced a number of martial arts in the gym. Of course, Torian knew he could not even try to hit him back because Chang was an officer, so he sighed watching the vessel slip off course towards the middle of Kaarina instead of the spaceport.

This was Torian’s twenty-fifth official recon mission, more than most, with almost three years in the service as a Long Range Recon Space (LRRS) Specialist First Class. Chang was only his second pilot and this was supposed to be their second mission together, the first scrubbed. His other missions had been with the likeable experienced pilot, Tristan Alpha, who taught Torian how to fly during their boring weeklong deep space recons. However, Tristan was dead, and now he was stuck with Chang.

To make matters worse, without warning, all the vessel’s systems shut down. Alarmed, Torian tried restarting his cockpit controls while Chang swore.

“What did you do?” Torian demanded. Chang was only weeks out of flight training and had no deep space recons.

“I didn’t do anything!” all the lights on their consoles went out as well as the HUD in each of their visors. The cockpit was dark and adding to their dilemma the sickening sinking feeling trapped in an aircraft during freefall.

The vibrating hum of air pressure on the hull was unnerving and Torian shouted, “Eject!”

“It won’t!”

“Eject! Eject! Eject!” The R-26 Hawkeye began to spin uncontrollably. Torian guessed they were about five thousand meters from painful impact.

“It’s not responding …,” Chang yelled close to panic.

His mother taught him never to curse, but now was not the time as he uttered a few choice words. “I’m overriding …” but try as he might Torian could not engage the ejection system. Glancing out the transparent steel cockpit, he grimaced. They would send him home in pieces. No, scratch that, they would never recover his body from this cursed planet.

Torian groaned, “I was less than two weeks short …” he closed his eyes waiting for the end.

Suddenly, just as mysteriously as the power had shut down, it came back on. All the system panels began flashing and their HUD’s ran columns and columns of useless numbers.

“Now eject! We’re less than 3000 meters and still spinning!”

“No, I got it!” Chang shouted back as the familiar resonating buzz of the ion engines kicked in and the space craft stabilized.

However, Torian was not sure the pilot had the controls watching concrete and glass buildings rush up towards them, “I don’t think …”

“Relax! We have plenty of altitude …” just then the nose dropped. The Specialist First Class watched in horror while the pilot fought with the controls as the R-26 Hawkeye dived towards a tall shiny steel building. To his credit, Chang avoided the building and headed straight for a section of low-rise apartments. Working with surprising precision the pilot maneuvered the craft over long abandoned rooftops to a small open court connecting several complexes. He flared up the thrusters and the R-26 Hawkeye hovered for a few seconds lowering the landing gear before the power began to flux and it dropped like a rock, stopping short of smashing to pieces on the ground. The sleek vessel hit hard with a sickening crunch. Small wisps of smoke and dust rose past the cockpit while Torian leaned back and let out a shaky sigh of relief.

“Told you to relax.” Chang undid his harness and pressed the button to slide their seats to the left, opening a small space for walking through to the back. The smaller man hopped out of the pilot’s chair and squeezed by Torian to the rear and lower part of the craft.  Meanwhile the military specialist tested his control screens.

“We lost power on descent! Can we lift off again?”

“Sure. Come on, we have to check outside.”

Exhaling in frustration Torian checked their power levels and systems, “Our thrusters are off-line!”

“We’ll fix them after.”

“What if we lose power when we lift off?”

“You worry too much, scan the area!”

Grumbling Torian tried to read the fuzzy screens and then switched to holo, but they displayed just as much static. He was still able to isolate objects and check their descriptions.

“Lots of rats.” he never could figure out why they allowed rats to breed on colony worlds, “Deer and packs of wolves and wild dogs.” Some of the dogs were quite large, human sized, and the wolves were so numerous that he did not bother to check every one listed on the scan.