SHADOW OF WAR

  DESCENDANTS OF WAR: BOOK FOUR

  G J OGDEN

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  An explosive morning

  Chapter 2

  Shepard’s war

  Chapter 3

  Enough is enough

  Chapter 4

  Grime pays

  Chapter 5

  A fatal mistake

  Chapter 6

  Starting a war

  Chapter 7

  Qator Iustus

  Chapter 8

  Escalating tensions

  Chapter 9

  A game of chicken

  Chapter 10

  A familiar scar

  Chapter 11

  Kaeso Silus

  Chapter 12

  Maddy and me

  Chapter 13

  A good deal

  Chapter 14

  A bad deal

  Chapter 15

  A pirate’s life

  Chapter 16

  Emergency medical treatment

  Chapter 17

  Deep in Deep Six

  Chapter 18

  Failed experiments

  Chapter 19

  A very old enemy

  Chapter 20

  The Oubliette

  Chapter 21

  Heading into trouble

  Chapter 22

  Unwise challenges

  Chapter 23

  Cody’s shuttle

  Chapter 24

  The Enclave

  Chapter 25

  Cisos Severra

  Chapter 26

  Never trust a Skemm

  Chapter 27

  We’ve got this

  Chapter 28

  Fletcher’s whiskey

  Continue the journey

  More by G J Ogden

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2022 G J Ogden

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Ogden Media Ltd

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by Laercio Messias

  Editing by S L Ogden

  www.ogdenmedia.net

  CHAPTER 1

  AN EXPLOSIVE MORNING

  Major Katee Kane slid her breakfast tray onto the table and sat down in the seat opposite Commander Dalton Reeves. Both actions were completed with the inelegance of a half-cut Bukkan pirate at a wedding disco, causing the table to shake and coffee to slosh out of Reeves’ cup, and flow dangerously close to the table edge.

  “Don’t worry, I wasn’t going to drink that anyway,” complained Reeves, hastily mopping up the spilled coffee with a napkin.

  “That was lucky then,” replied Kane, smiling at Reeves while noisily emptying the contents of her tray onto the table.

  As a master of sarcasm, Reeves knew that his snippy comment would not have been lost on his XO; Kane had just chosen to ignore it. He picked up what remained of his coffee and studied his XO’s breakfast choices. There was a plate of pancakes drowned in syrup, a small bowl of oatmeal, topped with what looked like half a pound of sugar, a classic Bukkan chocolate patisserie and a cup of black coffee with three packets of sugar resting on the side of the saucer.

  “You could probably fuel a shuttle from here to Bastion with all the calories you’re about to eat,” said Reeves, raising an eyebrow at Kane.

  “Sorry, dad, I’ll be sure to brush my teeth afterward,” Kane hit back, shooting Reeves a withering look while shoveling a huge piece of pancake into her mouth. “Anyway, I need the energy because I did a ten-mile run this morning,” she added, mumbling with her mouth full.

  “When the hell did you find the time to run ten miles?” Reeves said, regarding his XO suspiciously. “You were dead to the world less than an hour ago,” he added, remembering that he’d had to physically hammer on the door of her quarters to wake her up.

  “It only took me a little over half an hour,” Kane replied, nonchalantly tucking into the buttery Bukkan pastry.

  “Come on Katee, you’re trying to tell me you ran ten miles in a little more than thirty minutes, then just showered and sauntered over here for breakfast?” Reeves replied, making no effort to hide his incredulity from his XO. “I’m not even sure it’s humanly possible to run that fast for that distance.”

  “It was actually an inter-species galactic record,” Kane shrugged, as if the superhuman feat was merely all in a day’s work. “The fastest anyone has run before was forty-one minutes and twelve seconds, and that was a De’Vaught monk called Yolenchu the Hearty, thirty-nine standard years ago.” Kane then shrugged again. “Though, to be fair, Yolenchu didn’t have the benefit of my bionic blood.”

  Reeves clicked his fingers and smiled. It was easy to forgot about Kane’s unique respirocytes. Outwardly there was no way to know that her blood had been entirely replaced by a synthetic fluid packed with the sophisticated nanoscopic machines.

  “So you just sprinted the whole distance?” Reeves asked, suddenly more interested now that he knew Kane wasn’t just feeding him some horseshit story to wind him up.

  “I didn’t even get out of breath,” Kane said, finishing the patisserie and dusting the crumbs off her hands. “It freaked me out at first, but now I’m just used to it.”

  Suddenly, Odin leapt out from underneath the table and snaffled up the crumbs that Kane had just deposited onto the floor. Kane jolted away from the Quarr dog that Reeves had rescued from the Slum, banging into the table for a second time and spilling half of her coffee into her oatmeal.

  “Serves you right!” said Reeves, grinning at the oatmeal-coffee soup. His cup was still safely in his hands.

  “What the hell is that thing doing here?” Kane snapped, pouring the coffee out of the oatmeal bowl and back into her mug, leaving clumps of oats swirling around in the dark liquid.

  “He’s here eating breakfast; what do you think he’s doing?” Reeves answered, throwing Odin a crust of bread from his plate.

  “I’m sure that allowing an animal into the mess hall is against regulations,” Kane said, scowling at the dog, then at Reeves.

  “It’s a good job that I write the regulations then, isn’t it?” replied Reeves, haughtily.

  Kane continued to scowl at Reeves, then began tackling the oatmeal, seemingly unperturbed by the fact it was now mixed with coffee. Reeves shook his head at his XO and surveyed the mess hall while he waited for her to finish eating. It had been a quiet few days, he reflected, but from the tense postures and subdued atmosphere in the room, it was clear that the escalation of the Sa’Nerran situation was getting to the crew, as well as to the population as a whole. He’d already lost more than eighty percent of his Quarr personnel, most of whom had gone AWOL after the defeat of the Quarr Empire by the Sa’Nerra. Reeves assumed that the majority had likely joined the mysterious rebel resistance group that was fighting the Sa’Nerra on their own terms. He could understand their choices, despite the inconvenience it had caused him. Fortunately, the Quarr had never constituted a high percentage of Concord’s staff, and the shortfall had largely been covered by an influx of humans arriving on the station, many of whom had been courtesy of Commodore Alexa Jana. And, to Reeves’ great relief, considering her exceptional competence and skillset, Sergeant Axia Calera had remained. Even so, it was clear that the defeat of her world was weighing heavily on the mind of the proud and extremely private security chief.

  “May I join you?”

  The voice roused Reeves from his thoughts, and he looked over his shoulder to see Lieutenant Harpax Curio standing behind him, breakfast tray in hand. The Eyrhu officer had a keen and expectant look on his face.

  “Sure, take a seat Lieutenant,” said Reeves, gesturing to an empty place at the table. “I was just waiting for Major Kane to finish putting away enough food to feed a squadron of fighter pilots.”

  Kane again scowled at Reeves, but continued to polish off the rest of her oatmeal, before resuming work on the now slightly diminished stack of pancakes. Suddenly, Odin scrambled under the table and barked at Curio as he went to sit down, causing the Lieutenant to jolt back in surprise and spill a glass of fruit juice onto this tray. The officer cursed in his native language and began grabbing napkins from the center of the table to mop up the spillage.

  “It seems that no-one can hold their drink this morning,” quipped Kane, smirking at Curio as he juggled mopping up the juice with avoiding having his heels nipped by Odin.

  “Odin, that’s enough,” said Reeves in a firm but kind tone. “Lieutenant Curio is a friend.”

  The dog immediately stopped antagonizing the Eyrhu officer and sat down obediently by the side of Reeves’ chair. However, his sharp eyes and slightly bared teeth remained squarely aimed at Harpax Curio.

  “Sorry about that, Lieutenant, Odin is still quite protective of me,” Reeves said, while stroking Odin’s ears.

r />   “Quite alright, sir,” Curio replied, sounding flustered despite clear efforts to appear otherwise. “I never quite seem to click with animals, I don’t know why.” The Eyrhu officer squeezed the juice out of the napkins and back into the glass.

  “What is that stuff, anyway?” asked Kane, eyeing the glass of purple juice with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion.

  “It is Maluva juice, Major,” Curio replied, finishing cleaning the tray then placing it neatly in the center of the table. “It is a fruit nectar mixed with the extracts of seven functional mushrooms from my world, which have proven to have numerous health benefits, including significant cognitive-boosting properties.”

  “What the hell are ‘functional mushrooms’ supposed to be?” Reeves frowned at his operations officer.

  Lieutenant Curio appeared pleased to be asked the question and was about to respond when Kane shrugged and picked up the glass.

  “Major, I am more than happy to get you a fresh glass if you wish to sample…” Curio began, while reaching out to take the glass of mopped-up Maluva juice out of Kane’s hand. However, Kane had already pressed the glass to her lips and drained half of the contents. Reeves and Curio both scowled at Kane in disgust as the station’s XO set the glass down on the table. She then appeared to ruminate over the taste, like a whiskey connoisseur sampling a new batch of bourbon.

  “Tastes a bit woody, if you ask me,” Kane said, smacking her lips together.

  “I expect that would be because of the paper napkins Curio used to mop it up with,” Reeves suggested.

  Despite being disturbed by his XO’s willingness to imbibe the wrung-out alien fruit and mushroom juice drink, he was also impressed that Kane could still surprise and disgust him in new ways, even after all their years together.

  “Is there any news from Ambassador One?” asked Lieutenant Curio, while using a two-pronged fork to pick up what looked like a chunk of pickled fish from the breakfast plate in front of him.

  “No, she’s still on Bastion with Commodore Jana, trying to make the case for the navy to step up to the Sa’Nerra,” Reeves replied. “We’re in contact intermittently, but the Sa’Nerra are intercepting long-range comms to the station, so she’s not able to tell me anything useful.”

  “What news is there of the growing rebellion against the Sa’Nerra?” Curio continued. He skewered another piece of oily fish from his breakfast plate and began chewing it in an orderly manner while waiting for a response to his question.

  “Word is that there’s a base in the unknown regions, beyond the Quarr border and far away from Shadow Space, but it’s all hearsay at the moment,” Kane answered, reporting the rumors that had been relayed via Calera’s security network.

  “If you hear anything more concrete, be sure to let us know, Lieutenant,” Reeves cut in. “We know that some Quarr military vessels escaped capture, and another rumor suggests that there were Skemm defectors too. If they all end up as part of this rebel force, this base could become a key player down the line. Hell knows we need allies.”

  Lieutenant Curio nodded. “I will ‘keep my ear to ground’, sir, as I believe the human saying goes.” The Eyrhu lieutenant then leaned in closer, as if he were about to reveal a particularly juicy item of salacious gossip. “On the subject of the Sa’Nerra, do you have further need of my special services?” Curio asked, flashing his eyes and using a hushed tone of voice that made his question sound shifty and borderline inappropriate. “You know… for the secret mission,” Curio added, flashing his eyes some more.

  “Do you mean the secret mission that we don’t talk about in public in the mess hall, because it’s a secret?” Kane replied, delivering the line with well-practiced sarcasm.

  Curio froze and his bottom lip began to tremble, which was the Eyrhu equivalent of flushing hot with embarrassment.

  “Erm, yes?” Curio squeaked, clearly unsure of how to answer. Major Kane simply folded her arms across her chest and raised her eyebrows at the brilliant but socially-awkward operations officer. “I mean… no?” Curio offered instead. The officer looked like a rabbit in the headlights.

  “When we have further need of your skills, you can be certain that we’ll call on you, Lieutenant,” Reeves cut in, sparing Curio from any further lip-trembling embarrassment.

  The truth was that Reeves wouldn’t have need of Curio’s services until he and Kane had completed their next clandestine mission. The on-going repairs to the Invictus had so far prevented them departing for Far Deep Nine, but the latest update from Three suggested the ship would be ready to go in around forty-eight standard hours. In many ways, Reeves was glad of the delay, because the task seemed impossible, even in comparison to their narrow escape from the Progenitor world.

  Thanks to Curio’s earlier experiments on a captured Sa’Nerra warrior, Ambassador One had made a critical discovery. The Progenitors had engineered the technology necessary to exist safely inside Shadow Space into the genetic code of all the species they’d created. It had later been disabled once the different races were unleashed upon the galaxy and allowed to develop and evolve, according to the Progenitor’s blueprints. Unlocking this latent ability would allow Reeves and Kane to enter the Progenitors’ Shadow Realm without any adverse effects, just as the Sa’Nerra were able to do. However, in order to achieve that, the android needed a functioning human neural interface. This was the same technology employed by humans over a millennia ago, before its use was banned during the human-Sa’Nerra war.

  Unfortunately, recovering a neural device required Reeves and Kane to visit Far Deep Nine, a perilous haven for pirates, smugglers and delinquents from all across the six realms. In many ways, it was not unlike Concord Station. The crucial difference was, where The Abyss had rules and Enforcers to keep the peace, Far Deep Nine did not. It was a place that Reeves had never visited and had never wanted to. Yet according to the Ambassador, the former mining colony was once used as an experimental laboratory by the inventor of the neural control weapon that had been used to devastating effect by the Sa’Nerra a thousand years ago. As such, it was their best and only hope of finding a human in hibernation stasis who still had the ancient and vital technology embedded into their brain.

  Suddenly, the coffee in Reeves’ cup began to ripple and he could feel tremors reverberating through the metal deck plates of the mess hall. Looking around, he saw the sizable frame of Chief Vito Raspe thundering in his direction. The engineer was carrying a breakfast tray and was wearing an enormous, fully laden tool-belt over the top of his Concord Station uniform. Reeves noticed that the Bukkan’s flies were undone and had to fight the urge to suppress a chuckle.

  “Mornin’, guv,” bellowed Raspe, slapping Reeves on the shoulder then dropping into the seat next to him while acknowledging Kane and Curio with friendly nods. Reeves watched the seat sink several centimeters lower as the engineer’s considerable mass bowed the legs, but remarkably the chair did not buckle under the pressure. “Quiet in ‘ere today, innit?” the engineer went on, smiling cheerfully.

  Curio opened his mouth to respond, but Raspe has already begun annihilating the first of six bacon and fried egg rolls, and no longer appeared interested in the answer to his question. Moments later, Odin appeared at the side of Raspe’s chair, looking at the Bukkan engineer with a hopeful eye.

  “Hello, boy!” Raspe boomed, reaching down and ruffling the fur on Odin’s head. “This one’s for you, pal,” he added, grabbing one of the rolls, tearing it in half and tossing it on the deck in front of Odin.

  “I don’t believe that bacon and egg rolls are an appropriate foodstuff for Quarr canines,” said Lieutenant Curio, who was regarding the dog with only slightly less revulsion than Major Kane was.

  “Sure they are!” said Raspe, licking his fingers then starting on a second roll. “Odin’s a growin’ chap, ain’t that right Odin?”