Shield of Humanity (The Last Hunter Book 7), page 1
Copyrighted Material
Shield of Humanity Copyright © 2023 by Variant Publications
Book design and layout copyright © 2023 by JN Chaney
This novel 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, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing.
1st Edition
CONTENTS
Don’t Miss Out
Previously on The Last Hunter
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
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PREVIOUSLY ON THE LAST HUNTER
Having liberated Argent, the capital world of the Confederation in the cluster, Jack Romanoff and his crew had to repair the ship and gather what help they could for the next phase of the fight. He also had to deal with politicians that he had to pay attention to.
While settling in on the planet, a familiar enemy with a new face came calling: the conspiracy that tried to kill Sara Nastasi was back. This time, they had their sights on him and the entire Confederation.
He and his people turned the tables on them but were unable to pursue the leadership of the Poseidon Group as it fled the system, starting a clock to a coup that could destroy everything they were fighting for. The next step was to find the conspirators’ hidden shipyards before it was too late.
1
Admiral Jack Romanoff walked into the main briefing room aboard Hunter and smiled at his officers as they rose. “Sorry I’m late. I got hung up on a call with President Ibarra. I hope you didn’t get started without me.”
“Actually, we did,” Commander Kelly Danek said with a cheeky grin. “Of course, we were mainly gossiping about your love life, so we can skip ahead if you’d like.”
He gave the chief engineer a quelling look as he sat down before smiling again. She was an iconoclast, and he was more than willing to allow her leeway as long as she kept his engines running. Still, his love life was a bit over the line.
Okay, a lot, even though they would gossip no matter what he did.
“I don’t exactly call light dating a love life,” he said somewhat repressively. “And since Sara is on Argent and we’re all the way out here beyond the jump limit, I don’t think there’s much to talk about, do you?”
“We weren’t talking about your love life, sir,” Lieutenant Derek Calvo, his helmsman, said. “We were discussing the energy shield we’re trying to develop.”
“Now you’re being a spoilsport,” Danek said with a scowl. “We could have kept him going for at least a few minutes.”
“You might be mostly immune to him being annoyed with you, but the rest of us aren’t,” Lieutenant Amanda Harris, his tactical officer, said.
“It’s a good thing he likes you,” Lieutenant Colonel Mac Turner, the marine commander, said with a smirk. “Teasing a man about his love life isn’t playing fair. And you young people shouldn’t be indulging in that since everyone else may be talking about yours.”
“I just said we weren’t talking about his love life,” Derek groaned, redness beginning to show on his cheeks. “And what do they say?”
“Never mind that,” Amanda said firmly. “Why don’t we move on to talking about what we’re really here to discuss? Teasing the admiral is all good and fine, but like Colonel Turner says, we’ve got better things to do.”
Jack noted with some amusement that she wasn’t blushing. Still, they were right. There was a lot to discuss, and they might as well get about their business.
“What’s the condition of the independent quantum drive?” he asked his chief engineer.
“Better than you’d think,” the tall, brown-haired woman said. “All the repair parts are in, and we’ve got it back together. We’re still running the self-checks, but everything is green so far. We should be ready for a test jump in an hour or two.”
It had only been a few days since the drive had been disabled in combat, so that was fast. The good news made him smile. He didn’t like being stuck without the ability to move rapidly around the combat area, and the independent quantum drive was the fastest means of doing so. The hyperdrive they’d confiscated from the Tardan colony vessel could also move them, but it was much slower.
“That’s a lot quicker than I’d expected. How did you manage it?”
“We had most of the parts already at hand, so getting everything into place was simple enough. The problem we ran into this time was that we burned out a couple of things that weren’t normally at risk of being damaged when we used the hyperdrive and independent quantum drive together to skip the ship ahead and create that energy shield.”
She frowned. “We’re trying to figure out exactly how that works. The two drives are working together in ways we don’t understand, and even though we figured out how to use everything safely—for the most part—it’s still a lot more dangerous working with this unknown technology than I like.”
“That might be true,” Derek said, “but it saved our bacon. The Novarites would’ve destroyed us if we hadn’t had that ability. I’ve been going over the data we collected during those skips, and we’ll want to be a bit more careful about how deep into the gravity well we go with it.”
“Why so?” Jack asked.
“We can use the hyperspace drive about twenty percent deeper into the system than we can use the independent quantum drive, and I suspect there’s a similar limit with the skip drive. When we engage the two drives together, the combined effect moves us forward faster than light speed, but it still seems to use a hyperspace band to get us there. The deeper into the gravity well we are when we activate the drives, the greater the risk we’ll trigger a jump into a higher hyperspace band that might be lethal. During the battle, we inadvertently jumped almost all the way to Argent and stressed the quantum drive. The distance we achieved is almost certainly an indicator that we pushed the line when we triggered the drives as deeply inside the gravity well as we did.”
Jack pursed his lips and crossed his arms as he leaned back in his seat. “I wish we had a way to have our cake and eat it too. We were discussing creating an isolated system with the hyperdrive and independent quantum drive used to create a shield rather than driving us around. Is that still a possibility? If so, could it also be used as the skip drive rather than putting our main drives at risk?”
“Now that we’ve got access to all the old battleships and our complete set of repair parts, it’s not out of the question, but do we really want to use an entire independent quantum drive for something like that?” Danek asked. “I’ve already commandeered what amounts to a complete drive to have on hand as a spare. I’m tired of having our primary drive system damaged in battle, so we’re putting together a backup. It will be in the middle of the ship, so hopefully we won’t be at risk the way we were in the past. I realize utilizing two independent quantum drives is an extravagance, but history has proven that we need the redundancy.”
“Will it work even if the drive isn’t in engineering?” Amanda asked. “I understand it covers the entire ship when we jump, but I thought its position inside the hull was important.”
Danek raised one of her hands and waggled her fingers back and forth. “It’s going to require some adjustment, and we won’t have the same area toward the ship’s stern that we could use to bring other vessels along with us, but I think I can make it work. There’s a lot of complex mathematics that goes into calculating what the jump bubble looks like, and I ran it through the computers to verify it should work.”
“Those are the kinds of words that don’t fill you with confidence,” Mac said with a grin. “I don’t suppose we can do anything to upgrade ‘should work’ to ‘will work,’ can we?”
“Not without testing it to be sure. I’ve sent everything I have down to Professor Prescott so he can verify my math, and we can certainly test things carefully when we’re ready to go, but the proof will be in the pudding. Until we try it, we won’t know for sure.”
Jack found himself nodding. “It’s a calculated risk, but one that I approve of. If the drive in engineering will be fully repaired in the next few hours, how long until the secondary unit is installed?”
“That’s going to take longer,” the engineer said. “We’ve got to hollow out the area where we took the hit in the ship’s side a bit more and get the basic subsystems back online to verify everything has power and that we’re ready to do the install. Since the Novarites were kind enough to clear out that section of the ship, we don’t have to disassemble anything.”
The thought of that made Jack grimace. The Novarites had a massively powerful beam weapon using antiprotons that had almost burned its way to the central corridor through the side of his ship. Considering the weapon had to go through a hundred meters of nickel-iron, that was a true statement about how powerful the thing was. They had two holes punched in the bow of the ship as well. They should’ve been nigh on invulnerable, but they were almost helpless against something like what they’d faced.
“I suppose that’s as good a place to install the new drive as any,” he agreed. “Derek, since you’ve been going over the data, how effective was our makeshift shield against the antiproton beam?”
“We took one hit while the shield was up. It diffused a lot of energy, but that was barely a fraction of what was being pumped into us. I’d say it saved us from maybe ten percent of the damage we would’ve otherwise taken. Not a lot in the greater scheme of things.”
“I suppose it depends on your perspective,” Amanda said. “Ten percent less penetration means lives saved and less damage to deal with. It’s a lot more effective against the phased packet plasma guns. I don’t want to say that we’re immune to damage from the things, but with the packets disrupted, there’s no focused impact point. The plasma sprayed the hull over a wider area, and we can survive that. An antiproton beam would chew us up. The new shield isn’t up to protecting the ship from something that powerful.”
“How did the Novarites protect themselves against weapons like that?” Mac asked. “It seems like that’s the same sort of weapon that took out the engineering section of the ship that was recovered after the first invasion. Are they as much at its mercy as we are?”
“There was no indication during the battle that they used an energy shield,” Amanda said. “If they had one, they didn’t use it. We’ve only barely started digging through the ship to see what we can find, but it’s possible it was destroyed during the battle. Even though the big ship was mostly intact, it was still blown into two pieces. That’s an awful lot of equipment that’s probably lost forever.”
“They don’t have anything like that,” Danek said with a shake of her head. “Lisa and Professor Prescott dug the full technical specifications for one of their big ships out of one of the Novarite computers. There’s nothing about an energy shield in it. I suspect that’s because they didn’t have access to an independent quantum drive like we did. There’s something about using the two styles of drive at the same time that creates that effect. It skips us forward in a quick burst through hyperspace, and then we dump energy when we emerge. That might be because we’re cheating by going somewhere between hyperspace and wherever the independent quantum drive takes us. This is all uncharted territory.”
“It sounds like we’ve got a lot to still go over,” Jack said with a sigh. “Now that Captain MacKinnon—excuse me, Vice Admiral MacKinnon—is on her way back to the Confederation to give them an update, we’ve got to find the Poseidon Group and those hidden shipyards of theirs. That’s a time-critical task because if we don’t stop them here, we won’t be able to. I don’t suppose we’ve made any progress on that.”
Derek shook his head. “We’ve dug up a crew to run another of the exploration ships, but the cluster is huge, particularly when you look at the fact that only a fraction of the stars are occupied. They could be anywhere.”
“That’s all very true, but we’re not going to find them if we don’t start looking. We have five exploration ships available, and we need to get them all crewed and searching. That means we need a good search pattern and a way to verify if any ships have disappeared. We’ll be careful, but the Poseidon Group will have their eyes out for us. If any of our scouts are less than careful, they could be captured or destroyed. If that happens, we need to know sooner rather than later. Amanda, if we managed to find the shipyards and have to confront a bunch of cruisers, what kind of condition will we be in?”
She smiled wolfishly. “We’ve got a lot of missile capability, and even though they’ll have phased plasma packet guns, we can disrupt some of that incoming fire. I don’t care how many cruisers they have. They’re not going to be as dangerous as a massive wave of Locusts trying to swarm us. Unless they have some kind of secret weapon, we’ll manage.”
“I don’t know that I’d discount the idea that they’ve got a secret weapon,” Mac warned. “While it’s possible they could be building a numerically superior force of cruisers to take on the Confederation, attrition isn’t a recipe for victory, at least not without losing a lot of your people. We don’t know what they got off the Novarite ship they captured, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they managed to work out some type of advanced alien weaponry. Could they have built their own antiproton beams?”
“Doubtful,” Danek said. “From what I’ve been able to determine, only the largest of the Novarite’s ships have that type of weaponry to begin with. It takes up a lot of space, and something the size of a cruiser doesn’t cut it. That means the small Novarite vessel they captured wouldn’t have had one, and they never got complete access to the Novarite computer systems. Without having the supporting data, there’s no way to determine how a weapon like that even works. We’d never have figured out they were using a variant of the hyperdrive to directly tap into a higher band of hyperspace filled with antiprotons.”
“It wouldn’t be easy, but it could be made to work,” Amanda insisted. “It’s obvious that whoever the Novarites were fighting had similar weaponry, and based on the size of the beam that must’ve punched through the smaller ship, it was of somewhat lower power. If a big beam had struck that small ship, it would have been obliterated. Whoever the people the Novarites are at war with came up with something smaller, and that might fit into a cruiser.”
Jack tapped one of his fingers against the tabletop. “I’m not willing to bet against them having some advanced weaponry, but we’re not letting it terrify us. If that’s what they’ve got, that’s what we’ll fight. We still don’t know some things and won’t know what we’re missing until we start digging up information. That’s what David and Tina Chen are working with Lisa to solve down on Argent. Until then, we assume it’s a problem we can handle. Derek, I want you to work up a search pattern so that we can most effectively see that every system gets a look to verify that no shipyards are hiding there.”
The young officer nodded. “If an exploration ship jumps in and collects data through passive sensors, they should be able to pick up anything worthwhile if they drop out on different sides of the system. That way, none of the planets obscure the fusion plants of any enemy ships. It’s how we found Port Royale and how we’re going to find the shipyards. Eventually.”
“Do the best you can and update me as soon as we have crews for more of those exploration ships. I don’t want any ship operating solo, so pair them up. When we get the final exploration ship fully manned, she can accompany us, and we can start doing the same thing. Or, we can explore alone and leave her here to carry us news if there’s trouble. That’s actually a better idea, I think.”
