WRAITH

  CONVERGENCE WAR

  BOOK 1

  M.R. FORBES

  Published by Quirky Algorithms

  Seattle, Washington

  This novel is a work of fiction and a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2024 by Quirky Algorithms

  All rights reserved.

  Cover illustration by Tom Edwards

  Edited by Merrylee Lanehart

  CHAPTER 1

  Commander Dana Strickland sat ramrod straight in the captain's chair of the Federation of United Planets expeditionary starship Galileo, her sharp brown eyes fixed unwaveringly on the viewscreen. Tension coiled in her athletic frame, her short auburn hair tucked neatly beneath her commander's cap. Around her, the bridge crew hunched over their consoles waiting for orders, the air thick with barely restrained anxiety.

  “Approaching Wolf 1061, Commander," Lieutenant Zhen reported, his voice tight. Sweat beaded his brow as he guided the ship toward their destination. "ETA to visual contact, eight minutes, thirty-seven seconds."

  Dana nodded curtly, her jaw clenched. "Steady as she goes, Lieutenant. Ensign Kabelo, what's the status of that distress beacon?”

  “The signal is coming through stronger now, Commander.” Hunched over his comms station, Kabelo’s dark face was bathed in the sickly glow of his displays. “The interference is clearing up.”

  “Put it over the barrel,” Dana ordered.

  A three-dimensional rendering of space as the ship’s sensors detected it hung above a cylindrical projector between the captain’s chair and the viewscreen. The planet Wolf 1061 occupied a large portion of the projection. Following her order, a blue mark appeared on the far side of the planet, waves radiating out in a show of signal strength.

  “Target is over the barrel,” Kabelo announced.

  Dana stared at the colored circle, considering the situation. They’d picked up the beacon nearly a week ago during a routine mission to collect samples from an asteroid streaking through the Wolf system. Ostensibly, once they compared the samples with others collected from disparate parts of the galaxy, it would prove to be another piece in the puzzle of the universe's origins. A quick transmission back to Obelisk Station had returned orders to investigate.

  The situation was unusual, but nothing so strange as to cause the dread coiling in her gut. That had come from the nature of the beacon. It bore a passing resemblance to the Federation of Unified Planets standard distress signal but with enough variation that something about it had triggered her internal alarm. Kabelo chalked the variation up to the weak signal and potential data corruption. After all, a ship wouldn’t activate its distress beacon if it wasn’t in distress. As a third-generation naval officer, she believed she could trust instincts honed by her upbringing, education, and experience.

  In this case, her instincts were practically begging her to be wary.

  "Ensign Ruiz," she said, forcing her voice to remain calm and steady, "I want eyes on that ship as soon as we're within range."

  "Aye, Commander," Ruiz replied, her voice wavering slightly. Lines of data raced across her screen as she worked to comply.

  The minutes crawled by with excruciating slowness, each second feeling like an eternity. Dana forced herself to maintain an outward veneer of composure, even as tension ratcheted up her spine. On the viewscreen, the pale blue orb of Wolf 1061 swelled, an oceanic jewel against the star-spangled backdrop of space. And there, glinting in the light of the system's orange dwarf star, was their objective.

  "Visual acquired, Commander. Putting it up now," Ruiz reported, zooming the image in.

  The viewscreen filled with the shattered remains of what had once been a spacecraft. Jagged rents gaped in her hull, exposing decks and corridors to hard vacuum. Twisted metal and debris drifted lazily around the wreck like some macabre halo. No lights burned from inside her ruined hull. She was little more than a tomb.

  Dana leaned forward, dread crystalizing into icy certainty in her veins. Like the beacon itself, there was something familiar but off about the destroyed ship's profile. The sharp angles, the predatory lines, the size and shape of the guns mounted to the hull were…

  “Commander,” Kabelo said slowly, dawning horror in his voice. "That silhouette…it looks like an old Valkyrie-class. But that's..."

  “Impossible,” Dana breathed when Kabelo trailed off. Her fingers tightened on the armrests, tendons standing out starkly beneath her fair skin. He was right. The derelict was the spitting image of a Valkyrie-class corvette, the same kind once fielded by the long-defunct Proxima Free Navy. But the PFN had been dismantled and absorbed into the FUP Navy after the shattering defeat of the Coalition of Independent Planets over thirty years ago. So what the hell was one of their old ships doing out here, light-years from anywhere, never mind shot to pieces by some unknown assailant?

  "It can't be a Valkyrie," Lieutenant Commander Singh said, shaking his turbaned head in disbelief. "The PFN hasn't existed for decades. And even if some mothballed relic survived, who would crew it? And what would it be doing all the way out here in the Wolf system?"

  "Unknown," Dana replied, her voice diamond-hard. "But we're sure as hell going to find out. Ensign Ruiz, prep a probe for launch. Let's see what we can see. I don’t expect any survivors, but perhaps her data recorder is still intact. I’d love to know what happened here.”

  “Aye, Commander,” Ruiz replied. A few seconds later, she added, “Probe prepped and in the tube, Commander.” Her voice remained steady now that she had something concrete to focus on.

  “Send it out.”

  On the viewscreen, a small, dart-like shape detached from Galileo's hull and streaked toward the shattered Valkyrie, thrusters flaring blue-white. Dana waited impatiently while it matched orbit and rotation with the derelict before nosing carefully into one of the more significant hull breaches.

  “Put the feed up on secondary,” Dana ordered.

  “Aye, Captain,” Ruiz replied.

  The feed from the probe's cameras resolved on a secondary screen to the left of the main viewscreen. Immediately, a collective gasp rippled across the bridge. Dana’s eyes narrowed, heart picking up its pace.

  The corridors of the Valkyrie were a scene out of a nightmare. Debris choked the passageways, shot through with hard shafts of light from the scores of more minor breaches riddling the hull. Loose wiring sparked and spat. Ruptured conduits still spilled out tiny globules of fluid.

  They weren’t the only things drifting silently in the zero gravity.

  Larger globs of blood floated ahead of the probe, no longer spilling from the bodies that lined the passageway. There were at least a dozen of them, clad in the distinctive charcoal uniforms of the FUP Navy. They hung in attitudes of silent agony, limbs contorted, faces frozen in pain and fear.

  “Oh, my…” someone murmured, their voice thick with horror.

  Nausea churned in Dana's stomach, but she ruthlessly suppressed it.

  "This makes no sense," Singh said, his dusky face pale. "There hasn't been an armed conflict, not even a skirmish, reported in FUP space since the end of the war. And the damage to that ship looks recent. Days old at most."

  "I know," Dana replied grimly, a muscle jumping in her tightly clenched jaw. Her agile mind raced, trying to process the disturbing scene. A ghost ship from the bloody past, crewed by Federation personnel and recently shot to pieces by parties unknown in an uninhabited system. It was like something out of a movie. “Keep the probe moving to the bridge. I want those logs now more than ever.”

  “Aye, Commander,” Ruiz replied, passing the command to the probe.

  It continued through the ship’s passageways, carefully avoiding contact with as much floating debris as possible. As the body count grew, Dana wondered about the crew's composition. She knew from her father that a standard Valkyrie class typically carried about one hundred spacers, give or take. Already, they had crossed paths with almost that many corpses and that didn’t account for the areas they had yet to explore or any bodies that might have been jettisoned during the attack. It wasn’t an impossible situation, but it added to the strangeness of the overall encounter.

  The probe finally reached the bridge, passing through doors left open when the power failed. The bridge was in tatters, having taken a direct hit from a projectile during the fight. A blast hole was pushed in through the viewscreen, the duty stations were ripped to shreds, and exposed wires were hanging everywhere. The crew, secured during emergency action, remained strapped to their seats in various states of damage, most of it immediately fatal.

  Dana swallowed another bout of nausea at the sight. "Get me a close-up on the commander’s uniform,” she ordered, her voice unwavering.

  The probe's camera zoomed in on the corpse secured to the command chair. The emblem on the sleeve was unmistakable—a soaring eagle surmounted by a trio of stars, the rank and branch tabs identical to Dana’s own. Commander, FUP Navy. The camera angled from the sleeve to the chest. A woman. It continued upward to the face, a mess of blood and bone that had caught too much of the projectile’s detonation. Only a hint of dark hair remained, clinging to a slick of freeze-dried blood.

  Dana glanced away from the macabre display. She’d seen enough. “Have the probe attempt to retrieve the data recorder, and then call it back.”

  “Aye, Commander,” Ruiz replied.

  The probe swun
g away from the Valkyrie commander, circling to the rear of the command station and pausing ahead of a sealed panel. A spindly arm extended from the probe, reaching out to remove the bolts securing the panel in place. The ship’s data recorder would be in a blast-proof box behind the panel. The recorder remained safe in its cocoon while the bridge had been torn apart.

  Dana watched with bated breath as the probe worked on recovering the recorder. It was hard not to remain on edge when all she knew about the craft was that another ship had torn it apart. A second Valkyrie couldn’t have done this kind of damage. If anything, this was the work of…

  Proximity alarms started blaring, warning of another ship nearby that didn’t have an active transponder. Eyes shifting to the sensor grid over the barrel, she was shocked to see a red mark behind them, approaching quickly. Where the hell had it come from?

  Heart slamming against her ribs, she spun to face an equally surprised and frightened Kabelo. "Report, Ensign!" she barked, a razor's edge in her voice.

  Kabelo’s hands shook as he tried to find a match for the ship’s signature, his eyes wide and panicked. "New contact, Commander! Komodo class, she just rounded the planet behind us, moving fast."

  The bottom dropped out of Dana's stomach. Light-years from the nearest friendly outpost, a Komodo class warship appearing out of nowhere meant nothing good. And how could it have come from behind? They were just there, and sensors hadn’t revealed a thing. Unless…

  Had it finished off the Valkyrie just before they arrived and circled the other side of Wolf 1061 to avoid detection? She couldn’t help admiring the ship’s captain for their strategy if so.

  She also didn’t want to die.

  "Get it on the tertiary, now! And hail them!"

  Dana felt the blood drain from her face as the vessel's sleek, wedge-shaped hull resolved on the display to the right of the main viewscreen. It was definitely a Komodo.

  Like the shattered Valkyrie, the incoming ship was built in a bygone era. It was still in service but limited to patrol duty around occupied planets. Unlike the Valkyrie, this ship was no battered wreck. Her dark hull was pristine, the brutal lines of her structure speaking to a vessel of war at the peak of her power. And lining that hull were enough missile ports and railgun turrets to reduce Galileo to a cloud of expanding dust.

  "They're locking on!" Ruiz cried, raw panic cracking her voice. "Missiles in the tubes! Targeting systems have us painted!"

  "Raise shields and charge the jump drive, now!" Dana roared, adrenaline spiking through her veins. "Helm, initiate emergency evasive pattern! Comms, open a channel and transmit on all frequencies!"

  The crew leaped into action, Galileo banking and jinking wildly as Zhen sent her through a nausea-inducing series of maneuvers, desperately trying to break the missile lock. But the Komodo clung to them, her fire solution remaining locked on Galileo's frantically weaving form.

  "Channel open, Commander," Kabelo reported, his words clipped and tight.

  Dana sucked in a shuddering breath, forcing herself to speak clearly and authoritatively, even as cold sweat trickled down her spine:

  “Attention unidentified vessel, this is Commander Dana Strickland of the Federation research ship Galileo. We are an unarmed scientific survey vessel on a peaceful mission of exploration responding to a distress beacon. We are a neutral third party, and intend only to render aid to the afflicted. We mean you no harm. Please break off your targeting lock and allow us to retreat.”

  A beat of heart-stopping silence. On the screen, the Komodo swelled, seeming to fill the heavens, her viciously pointed prow aimed unerringly at Galileo's heart. Dana's nails dug into her palms as she fought to steady her voice.

  "Repeat, this is the research vessel Galileo. We are not a threat to you. Galileo is not an armed ship! Please, power down your weapons and open a dialogue or allow us to surrender the field!”

  The comm-link hissed and spat, the electrostatic crackle of an open channel the only reply. The Komodo advanced, drawing so close to Galileo that Dana expected the two ships’ shields to kiss at any moment.

  “Commander,” Ruiz whispered. “What about the probe?”

  “Not now,” she snapped back, too low for the comms microphones to pick up. She opened her mouth to repeat her plea for mercy when a voice, grating and harsh as an asteroid field, blasted across the bridge speakers, seeming to drop the temperature ten degrees:

  "Research vessel Galileo, this is the Federation of United Planets warship Basilisk. You will cut thrust and shut down your shields immediately. Prepare to be boarded. This is your only warning."

  Dana stared at the looming battlecruiser, her mouth desert-dry, the thunder of her pulse nearly drowning out all other sound. Beside her, Singh made a small, incredulous noise as if he couldn't quite process what he was hearing.

  "Boarded? Commander, this is insane! Why would a fellow Federation warship be threatening us? Demanding to board us? We're on the same side, for God's sake!"

  "Are we, Singh?" Dana replied. Slowly, feeling like a woman in a dream, she swiveled her chair to face her crew, seeing her own terrible, creeping realization dawning like a black sun on every frightened face.

  An impossible ship crewed by Federation personnel attacking a Federation vessel without warning or reason.

  There was only one explanation. An explanation that made her blood run cold.

  Rebellion.

  CHAPTER 2

  The warm, buttery aroma of breakfast filled Soren Strickland’s nostrils as he entered the kitchen. His stomach let out a hungry growl, ruining his plan to sneak up on his wife, wrap his arms around her waist, and kiss her on the cheek.

  Jane turned away from the stove at his belly’s complaint, smiling at her husband of twenty-eight years. “There you are,” she said as he approached, stepping into his arms and joining him in an affectionate hug. “You’re almost late for breakfast.”

  “I’m not as young as I used to be,” he replied. “These old bones don’t want to get out of bed so quickly anymore.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Please. The gray in your hair might say old man, but your body still says otherwise.”

  “Now you’re just flirting with me,” he joked, though he couldn’t really argue with her assessment. At fifty-six, most people would consider him still a handsome man. His light hair was streaked with silver at the temples, but his features remained chiseled and strong. Years of military training and discipline had kept him as fit as a man half his age, his broad shoulders and trim waist a testament to the hours he still put in at the gym.

  “Maybe,” she replied with a laugh before planting a kiss on his lips.

  “Hmm, much better than my sneak attack,” Soren responded. He felt the same way about his still very beautiful wife. Her auburn hair was also lined with gray, and she had put on some weight after having their kids, but she retained everything he had always loved about her.

  “Have a seat while I fetch your chow, Captain,” she said, shooing him to the kitchen table.

  “What’s on the menu today, Cookie?” he replied as she began dishing out the meal from the stove. He pulled out a chair and settled himself at the table.

  “Your favorite—two eggs over-easy on top of corned beef hash, with a side of sausage and two chocolate chip pancakes. Extra syrup, just how you like it."

  Soren chuckled. “What's the occasion, Janie? Is this a setup because I forgot an anniversary or something?"

  Jane laughed and shook her head, setting the plate in front of him before leaning in to kiss his forehead. “No setup. And no occasion. I just love you. Simple as that. I have since I first laid eyes on you back in high school. Never stopped loving you when you went to war. Loved you for the three years you were held prisoner by the Coalition of Independent Planets, And definitely loved you when they finally brought you home. That was probably the happiest day of my life.”

  "You stuck with me through all that because you're crazy," Soren deadpanned, but then he grinned, and his eyes twinkled with affection. He reached up, cupping Jane's face in his calloused hand. "But I'm damn glad you’re crazy. I don’t know what I'd do without you."

  Jane leaned into his touch. “What I am is crazy about you, old man,” she said, her eyes soft with love and understanding. They'd been through so much together, weathered storms that would have broken lesser bonds. But their love had only grown stronger, tempered by time and trial. “And without me,” she argued, “I’m pretty sure you would have been court-martialed, kicked out of the Navy, and died penniless, in a box on the streets. ” She jerked her chin down matter-of-factly to prove her point. “But…” She pulled away, throwing a coquettish smile back at him. “...I could be wrong.”