The Exodus Gambit (House Adamant Book 1), page 1
THE EXODUS GAMBIT
HOUSE ADAMANT
BOOK 1
GLYNN STEWART
CONTENTS
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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
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
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Also by Glynn Stewart
Copyright © 2024 by Glynn Stewart
Illustration by Elias Stern
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to any persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Published by Faolan’s Pen Publishing. Faolan's Pen Publishing logo is a registered trademark of Faolan's Pen Publishing Inc.
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ONE
“You know, I’m pretty sure being a bodyguard is easier when the principal doesn’t strap herself to half a megaton of nukes.”
Major Vigo Jarret swallowed a chuckle at his subordinate’s comment. He didn’t entirely disagree with Lieutenant Jelica Laurenz, but he couldn’t let his people see that. His detachment of the Adamant Guard was aboard a Royal Kingdom of Adamant Navy frigate on sufferance at best.
“Archangel has a job to do,” he murmured into the encrypted network his people shared, even aboard the frigate Goldenrod. “We are here to protect her while she does it. If she can’t do her job, we are failing at our duty.”
The Major eyed the shuttle in front of him with scant favor. Goldenrod normally carried twelve modular combat shuttles, but the Guard had crammed four more in. Sadly, he knew that the RKAN—pronounced “Ar-Can”—crew had left them the worst corner.
Vigo was a big enough man that just cramming himself into an MCS’s pilot seat was a struggle. A familiar one, as the gold ace wings on his dark gray uniform declared, but a struggle nonetheless—and the cramped space was going to hurt.
“Bravo Flight! On me!” his principal’s voice barked through the shuttle bay. Archangel was the Guard’s code name for Goldenrod’s Bravo Flight commander, Lieutenant Commander Lorraine Adamant.
Aboard Goldenrod, Lorraine Adamant would only go by rank and her base names. It created an illusion of separation between Lieutenant Commander Adamant and Her Royal Highness, Lorraine Alexis Elouise Nala Adamant, Fourth Pentarch of the Kingdom of Adamant.
It was only an illusion, one made harder by Vigo’s own presence—with sixty-one other Adamant Guards—aboard the frigate.
Watching the pilots and copilots of Bravo Flight gather around the elegant young woman he was sworn to protect reminded Vigo of the task at hand and he gave his shuttle another grim look. Getting into the small craft was going to be a pain, so he turned back to his pilots.
The biggest visible difference between the eight Adamant Guards assigned to Charlie Flight and the twelve RKAN officers of the Pentarch’s Bravo Flight was age. Only veterans who’d served a ten-year service term—requiring a reenlistment after five years—were considered for the Guard.
“Guards,” Vigo addressed his people. “Let’s keep the snarking about the job under control, please. The Pentarch is a Navy officer, and we do not get in the way of her job. Understood?”
His people were too experienced to snap to attention at being gently rebuked, but he could see the urge in the stiffening shoulders. They knew better—but they were also, to a one, older than their principal.
As he surveyed his people to be sure the message had landed, he heard Lorraine start briefing her shuttle crews. They weren’t actually close enough for her speech to be clearly audible, with half a dozen shuttles and most of the workbay between her and her bodyguards’ flight squadron, but Vigo’s neural link was synchronized with hers. Everything she heard, he heard. Balancing the inputs wasn’t easy, but he’d learned it.
“Briefing time,” he told his people after he was sure he had their attention. “You know most of the drill. Alpha and Bravo flights are rigged up in bomber mode. This is an endurance maneuver, not just a live-fire exercise, so the plan is to be out in space for six hours.
“First five hours will be practice shots with training warheads. Eight of the bombs on each shuttle are training rounds.” He smiled with wry humor. “So, for those worrying about Archangel strapping herself to half a megaton of nuclear weapons, I can reassure you that she is only strapping herself to a hundred kilotons!”
Given that a bomb was a ballistic weapon until its last twenty seconds of life, the training weapons gave up the warheads and even that twenty-second terminal drive for a bunch of electronics that allowed them to mimic an entire ten-shot salvo.
Bombers generally dropped their entire load at an appropriate distance and velocity, then ran for home. But for a training exercise, they wanted to repeat that process multiple times.
“The last hour of the exercise is a live-fire maneuver, of course,” he continued. “Captain Stephson has designated an ice asteroid that she doesn’t like. The bomber strike is going to make it go away.”
Lieutenant Colonel Sigrid Stephson was Goldenrod’s Captain, a broad-shouldered blonde Valkyrie of a woman as tall and large as Vigo himself. He figured she had an ancestral hatred of ice, hence the selection of target.
The irony was that if Goldenrod’s shuttles hit the asteroid with every bomb, they were doing it wrong. An asteroid wasn’t evading—an actual target would be.
And while most of the shuttle crews were inevitably green, the COSH—Commanding Officer, Shuttles—was Commander Olavi Chevrolet. Chevrolet was a solid officer, one Vigo had served alongside before he’d joined the Guard.
“Our job is the usual,” Vigo reminded his people. “Charlie Flight has been rigged as interceptors. We aren’t carrying nukes,” he told them. A rueful chuckle told him he could stop belaboring the point.
“We will hang back from the main exercise zone with our sensors peeled, with a tightbeam link to Goldenrod herself,” he continued. “We are in position for search and rescue if there’s an accident—and my Charlie One and Archie’s Charlie Three will carry S and R modules.”
They gave up a measurable amount of maneuverability to do that, but Vigo agreed with Chevrolet and Stephson. It was more likely they’d have to clean up after an accident than shoot down assassins—and the loss of maneuverability wasn’t that much.
There was a reason Vigo had put the modules on the shuttles assigned to himself and his best pilot. He was confident that he could outfly the handicap.
“Any questions, people?” he asked them.
“Any intel suggesting an unusual threat level?” Lieutenant Major Archie Patriksson asked. The slim redheaded officer was one of Vigo’s three “section leaders” and was nominally in charge of the shuttle section.
Unfortunately for his independent authority, the principal was a shuttle pilot, and that meant that Patriksson’s boss went out with him as often as not.
“All threat environments are currently quiet,” Vigo told them. “Both military and civil intelligence are sounding warning notes about the Richelieu Directorate again, but that’s at least partially habit and the fact that they’ve finally rebuilt the ships they lost the last time they went around with us.
“But we do not accompany the Pentarchs to protect them from the threats we can foresee, people,” he reminded them. “The Guard exists for the threats that cannot be foreseen.
“So, if I see any one of you slacking off out there today, there will be hell to pay. Slack enough, and I’ll send you to Brave’s detail!”
That got him the laughs—and the understanding—he was after.
Brave was the Guard code name for Admiral His Highness Benjamin Adamant, the Fifth Pentarch. The oldest of the Pentarchs—the current King’s older brother, in fact—he was also the commander of the Adamantine Home Fleet and notorious for running his Guard as hard as he ran his crews.
When fate or exhaustion took King Valeriya Adamant from her throne, the Pentarchs would stand as candidates to replace her. If Benjamin Adamant had the poor luck to outlive his sister, he would have the rare distinction of standing for royal election twice.
Vigo had met the old prince—he’d met all of the current Pentarchs as part of his job—but he’d been Lorraine Adamant’s shadow for twenty-two standard years. He had fewer illusions than most and had his own opinions as to which of the five Pentarchs should be the next King.
He figured Lorraine needed another decade to be ready—and he knew she didn’t want the job—but the determination to learn and do her best that he could hear in the briefing she was finishing up would make for a brilliant King.
Vigo Jarret’s job was to make sure she got that decade of seasoning.
Despite strapping herself to nukes on a regular basis.
TWO
The Midas-type modular combat shuttle was the backbone of the Kingdom of Adamant’s military shuttle fleet. Depending on the modules hooked up to “the Cube” containing the engines and pilot compartment, it could do everything from hauling a thousand tons of cargo out of a gravity well to delivering a thirty-man platoon into the same gravity well and providing air support.
Vigo had flown it in every configuration that officially existed and at least three that didn’t officially exist. Interceptor mode, designed to protect the mothership from missiles, shuttles, shuttle bombs, or any other projectile someone threw at the ship that held your bunk, was his favorite.
His neural link hooked up to the Midas’s systems and augmented the direct physical controls. At his hands, the parasite craft could dance in space with a vectored thrust capability no larger ship could match.
Goldenrod was one of the few ships he knew of that could come close. A ten-year-old design now, the Perennial-class frigates had incorporated all of the lessons of the last war into a design that he thought was possibly the most gorgeous ship the RKAN had ever built.
She was two hundred meters from bow to stern, with rakish lines that drew the eye away from the box launchers, active heat-radiation vanes, and heavy laser emplacements. Dorsal and ventral sensor and communications towers gave her an almost sword-like appearance normally.
She was a fine-looking ship, though he knew his opinion was biased. The RKAN’s frigates were built to be pretty—they were the most visible arm of the Kingdom of Adamant, the ships doing trade security and port visits throughout the Bright Dream Cluster.
And since there was no one else there to appreciate the view, Vigo gave the frigate an admiring portion of his attention for a few seconds before turning back to the situation around him.
They were a good three light-hours from home, well away from prying eyes in a zone of the Adamantine System’s outer ice belt only the RKAN ever came to. The inner belt was far more interesting to miners, and the gas giant Orichalcum served as the main focus for gas refining.
Their exercise location was randomly selected—Vigo had triple-checked that himself, trying to calculate a guess of where they would be based on both Home Fleet’s exercise schedule and Goldenrod’s own prior training runs—which meant they should be secure.
Should wasn’t a word professional bodyguards hung the safety of their principals on, and he kept his sensors focused on Lorraine Adamant’s Bravo Lead shuttle.
“Guard Actual, do you need our course?” Commander Chevrolet asked over a private channel. “Or do you want to work it out on your own for training?”
“We’re not training today, COSH,” Vigo pointed out. “Send it over and we’ll shadow you out. We’re rigged for S and R, if the Deck Chief didn’t tell you that.”
The Deck Chief had almost certainly told him that. But just as Vigo was taking a shuttle flight out to play bodyguard around an exercise with no sign of danger, he was also going to confirm that all of the information was in everybody’s hands.
“She did,” Chevrolet confirmed. “I will admit, in private, that having an extra set of birds to fly overwatch does relax some of my hackles. But I will never say that where your people or mine can hear it!”
“We try to be useful as well as intimidating,” Vigo told the other pilot. The course flickered up on his shuttle’s displays. Forty minutes at four gravities to open distance from the frigate. Not a pleasant jaunt by any stretch of the imagination, but the pilots would be able to handle it easily. The angle, though…
“Got the course. We’ll fall into your trails and keep our eyes peeled,” he continued. “Any changes to the intended exercise area? I want to get some drones up to play backstop.”
Redundant, probably. But Vigo’s entire job was to be redundant. If he was actually needed, especially out there, things were already going very wrong.
“I’m sending you an update,” Chevrolet confirmed. “You’re getting it first. I’m relocating the entire maneuver zone and got the Captain to pick us a different asteroid to nuke.”
Vigo took a moment to process that—and to take a second look at the course. That explained the angle being off. They weren’t quite going in the opposite direction from Goldenrod than planned, but they were a good sixty degrees off from the original plan.
That could be a problem.
“Any particular reason, Olavi?” he asked softly, leaning on their old-comrade status and using the other man’s first name. The reality of their ranks was more complicated than it sounded, since an Adamant Guard officer was generally considered to rank three levels up from the equivalent title in the rest of the military.
That meant that Vigo was regarded as Lieutenant Colonel Stephson’s peer, not Commander Chevrolet’s.
“Officially, to test my people’s ability to adapt on the fly,” Chevrolet told him.
“And unofficially?” Vigo prodded. Sudden changes that weren’t cleared with the bodyguards were a problem.
“I can’t put my finger on anything,” the COSH told him. “Or I’d have talked to you about it. But my skin is crawling and the hairs on the back of my neck are standing up. Something isn’t right, Vigo. So, I’m relocating the exercise and watching for Richards.”
“You think the Directorate is going to try a sneak attack?” Richard was the radio code for Richelieu Directorate combatants: warships or shuttles.
“I don’t think anything,” Chevrolet admitted. “I’m just being twitchy, and shifting it up is good practice for my people. And I know you’re paranoid enough to appreciate that the only person who knew where our final zone was until ten seconds ago was me.”
He wasn’t wrong there. If Vigo had trusted the COSH a bit less, it might have been a problem. As it was, though… Well, he’d flown a bomber with Olavi Chevrolet as interceptor escort.
There were few higher levels of trust.
The next two hours passed quietly. Well, quietly for the Guard shuttle flight—Lorraine and Chevrolet put their people through their paces, all the way up to the twelve-gee maximum thrust of a bomber-mode Midas.
Four training shots had been fired from each shuttle, each mimicking a full flight of bombs and allowing the two flight commanders to assess their people’s performance in coordinating the drops.
Officially, Vigo Jarret had zero role in that assessment. Unofficially, he’d flown alongside Olavi Chevrolet when they’d both been wet-behind-the-ears rookie Lieutenants thirty years earlier, and he’d lived in Lorraine Adamant’s back pocket for the last twenty-two years.
Both of them would both listen to and solicit his opinion, so he kept a good chunk of his attention on the exercises and kept a running tally. So far, this time, he wasn’t seeing anything worth passing on to the flight commanders.
The bomber crews could be better, but that was always true. They were good, rising above base competence into a solid level of coordination that would leave any pirate or criminal needing new shorts.
Against an actual warship, they’d have more difficulty, but that, too, was always true. Goldenrod had a lovely array of beam weapons that no pirate would manage to keep operational for long, even if they managed to get them in the first place.
Those beams were intended to take down missiles and other warships, though not all could do both. Shuttles would often find themselves in the worst of all possible worlds if a warship dialed them in.
“Permission to take a nap?” Patriksson asked—and even with his senior pilot, Vigo had to check to be sure that was on a private channel.
