Ghost Fleet Read online

  Ghost Fleet

  Starwing Elite Book 3

  by Isaac Stone & Timothy Mayer

  Copyright 2018 by Isaac Stone

  1

  After the mess was over on Delios Prime, we were sent back to the outer boarders of the territory controlled by the United Democracies Federation. It wasn’t a long trip as Captain took the ship through the Insubstantia and back to the region where we were posted by the UDF. All those campaigns had taken their toll on the crew of the Hard Rain. We were understaffed and woefully short of enough people to run the starship. Worse, now were down to fifty percent deployment status. With only two Fast Attack Ships and crews, the Hard Rain would be struggling to fulfill its mission. Worse, we didn’t have enough men on board to keep the sleeping schedule in rotation. Threesomes sound great until it becomes an exhausting routine, but the schedule is what keeps our society knit together, keeps us making children, and maintains the pack bond.

  Captain announced during the first morning assembly that we’d have to make some accommodations in the evening shift arrangements.

  “For the time being,” she spoke from behind her portable podium, “We must remain on this elevated schedule.”

  “However,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to get the idea that this arrangement is permanent. Just as soon as we can graduate a few of the trainees into full time staff, there will be more men available. We’ve only two men who are coming up on packmate status. I’ll have to see what I can do and contact some of the other packs in our Order.”

  A hand shot up next to me. “How long do you think it will take for us to get back to where we were?” Its voice asked. It was Imani. I could tell she wasn’t happy about the new arrangement.

  “Too long,” Captain returned. “There are problems popping up everywhere. At least that is what the Starwing Marshal tells me. But there are always problems. I don’t recall one day that there wasn’t a problem. The difference is in scale. There is some serious crap in progress and we’re supposed to help them clean it up.”

  A collective groan rose up from the pack.

  “Just keep in mind,” Captain snapped back at us, “the only reason we’re here is that we provide a function the UDF Navy can’t do on its own. I’m sure the admirals would have all of the Order ships taken out of operation if they could do it.”

  Over the next few weeks, all of us men learned to do our duty. It wasn’t easy. I longed for the simple companionship of only one woman every night.

  One morning I rose to hear Captain’s morning address and looked around at the other men. They seemed a bit tired, but we all managed to hold up. I’d once heard of a society where it was common for rich men to have fifty our more wives to themselves. How the hell was such a thing possible?

  I stood with Vienna that day. Brynne was on either side of me. As per custom, you had your morning mess call with the person you’d been with the night before. Before our current situation, that involved one woman and took place in her quarters. Most of the men shifted from one woman’s room to the next, it worked out better that way. We had our own space in the men’s bunk area, but didn’t use it a lot. Now, I’d find myself assigned to two women every night on the roster. This meant that all of us had to decide whose room would be used in advance.

  I’d hoped early on that I’d only have to satisfy one of my wives each night, but nothing doing. Captain informed us the men would need to increase their performance level too. It went into effect right away. We needed every fertile woman carrying a child as soon as possible. It galvanized us, even as it sent tremors of anxious excitement through the pack. By accelerating the breeding program, Captain was preparing Hard Rain for a major human resources trade off. Pregnant women would have the sex of their baby identified, and could be traded off to other ships for new male and female crew. Men with particularly high breeding scores, like Marcus, could possibly find themselves swapped to high fatality Orders like the Horde or Tomahawk so that they could breed with multitudes of available females. It was a vast breeding scheme the Orders had in place, and far be it for a lowly starfighter jock like me to guess at their long game.

  Captain spoke about a few random topics and concluded her announcements.

  “That will be all for now,” Captain spoke. She turned to me. “Corwin, I need to see you in my quarters before you go on duty.” Captain left the podium and two women went up to haul it away.

  “I didn't see Captain’s name on your list for this evening,” Vienna noted as she kissed me goodbye. “Not like her to start early anyway.” Up until the men were decimated on the Hard Rain, Captain hadn’t placed herself in the rotation much. She was the oldest member of the crew and didn’t mind sleeping alone. In addition, she could no longer have children, though in these rough months of combat and loss, she'd been on the schedule just as much as anyone else.

  “Must be important,” Brynne spoke as she hugged me. “I checked the roster; we’ll be together in a few days. You can tell Indigo and I how it went.” She turned and left with Imani, as both were on the same work detail that morning.

  Captain was still in her uniform when I arrived at her quarters that morning.

  “Something come up again?” I asked her as I entered her room. She glared at me.

  “Captain,” I added. She wasn’t big on formalities, but could stand on them when the mood suited her.

  She was seated behind her desk stared at a screen that floated in the air. I couldn’t see what was on it. Captain motioned to the chair next to her. I moved over and sat down. The moment my butt hit the chair, she turned off the screen. It disappeared.

  “Remember those unidentified ships the navy picked up last month?” Captain asked me.

  I nodded. The navy told us as we left the last engagement about them. They weren’t the usual raiders or smugglers the Order system was created to prevent. These were of a new design that no one had ever seen before. It was all we were told and then the UDF Navy no longer would talk about them. I assumed it was a mistake and they didn’t want to admit it. Or that it was just a clutch of pirate ships and UDF blasted them to atoms.

  “Apparently the first three disappeared after we were-re-tasked,” she told me. “Those ghost ships, as they’re calling them, are back, and have already hit three sparsely populated settlements. No survivors.” She let the final words sink in for effect.

  “How come we haven’t heard?” I asked her.

  “The navy wants to keep it quiet,” she explained. “These were outer colonies, far from where we patrol. But those ships are headed in our direction.”

  “Do they know where they come from?”

  “Best bet is the Spear Cluster, but no one really knows.”

  The Spear Cluster was a deep space wasteland that was located below the lower portion of the UDF’s territory. It was created millions of years ago by two suns that collided after they’d been pulled together by some unknown force. It was a strange and scary part of known space.

  “What worries me is that this is the place Queen Dredge howls about when she is having one of her fits. This was days before I received the assessment on the probable origin point of those ghost ships.”

  Queen Dredge and her crew were a group of pirate women who surrendered to us rather than face the wrath of the UDF Navy. She’d terrorized known space for a short time by raiding settlements and cartel compounds alike. Her particular targets were the drug cartels, which some people thought put her on the UDF side. In fact, Dredge was on her own side, and to this day has yet to fully divulge their true motives. Captain had her and the pirate women locked up in our starship, in a makeshift brig build out of converted quarters now standing vacant due to our heavy loses, until she could figure out what to do with her. By
the laws of space warfare, the pirates were Captain’s prisoners since they’d surrendered to her crew. They, and the pirate ship Thunder Horse, belonged to us for the time being.

  “I know you interrogated Queen Dredge,” I told her. “But did you get any useful information out of her?”

  “Not yet," Captain shrugged. “She won’t even tell us who did the upgrade work on her ship. Let the Udies figure that one out; I’ve sent them a transcript of her ramblings. By all rights, I should’ve sent her, and that psychotic crew of hers, out into the great void the day she surrendered. I’m sure it would’ve been a merciful death compared to what some her victims experienced. No lack of willing executioners for them. I had several planetary governors contact me and offer to do the deed.”

  “So why is she still alive?” I wanted to know.

  “I can't bring myself to do it,” Captain confessed. And this from the woman who led the attack on swarms of mercenaries.

  She noted the look of surprise on my face.

  “Dredge picked her crew from broken people,” Captain explained. “All of those women were from mental asylums or found wandering in the streets. Moreover, all of them destroyed on the inside from the way they were treated. Not even one of them was that way for genetic reasons. She found women who were sick and diseased in their minds. Dredge gave them a way to externalize their inner pain. Dredge is the worst one of all. You’ve seen enough inside her mine to know it. I am surprised we've gotten anything out of them honestly, they're all former Black Mirror users, and the detox from that has added a whole new layer to their madness.”

  It was true; I had the gift and could see the inner workings of select people. Dredge was an open book to me. As was Precious, a packmate we’d acquired by way of the Roka assassins. Precious had learned to control the rage in her mind to kill, but Dredge still longed for the tortured screams of her perceived enemies. I didn’t think it was possible for those pirates to even function around normal people.

  “So, what are you going to do with them, Captain?” I questioned. “You can’t have a band of psychotics loose on this ship. They might even figure a way out of the holding cells given time. At least we could help Precious.”

  “Precious has a bounty on her from three different systems,” Captain countered. “This ship is the only safe place for her.”

  I looked at her in confusion. “I thought you said she was safe to travel down the surfaces so long as no one knew who she was?” I asked her. “When did you find this new information?”

  “The Grand Marshal,” she explained. “He contacted me a few nights ago. Seems there’ve been questions asked about our new packmate and how it was we pledged her in when she hadn’t been with the ship but a few weeks.” It normally took years for someone to make it that far.

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him Precious was a special case and it wouldn’t happen again, at least not in the next hundred years. It seemed to satisfy him. For now.”

  “However,” she continued. "That’s not the worst of it. We’re supposed to pull out of our current trajectory and head into the region near the Spear Cluster where the ghost ships appeared. The navy wants them stopped before word gets out and terrifies the rest of the governments. Something this big could unravel the entire alliance. So, off we go into the thick of it.”

  I waited a bit until I asked her the question that was on my mind. “So why are you telling me all this, Captain?” I asked. “Isn’t this something everyone needs to know about?”

  “They will," she responded. “But I wanted to see you because I’ve moved myself around on the roster. This new mission from the UDF puts another perspective on things. I’ve updated it and you’ll be here tonight.” She ran one finger down my face and smiled.

  “Alone?" I asked. I was a bit tired of the chore of satisfying two women every evening. Perhaps tonight would be a vacation.

  “No. Precious will be here too. She’s having some jealousy issues with the two-on-one situation. She’s not the only woman with this problem. I must put a stop to it with her right away, as she’s the most vulnerable. I’ll see if what I have in mind works with her. If it does, I’ll implement it with the others.”

  I didn’t ask her any more about what she had in mind. Captain was brilliant when it came to be managing the complicated arrangements on the ship. It was why she’d held the command so long. She knew who was best together and for what time. She knew who to keep apart for the bad times. She oversaw at least fifty successful pregnancies since I'd pledged into the pack.

  I met Precious at Captain’s door at the start of evening shift. She wasn’t in the mess hall, for some reason, which bothered me a bit. Just as it was custom to have breakfast with your assignment from the previous evening, it was the same to have dinner with whoever you were assigned for the upcoming evening. I’d waited for her, but she didn’t show. One glance at the room told me all my packmates were busy with plans for the night. A few were coming off a different shift and preparing to put their time in for the late shift. When we weren’t in combat, very few people were needed to maintain the ship during the twelve-hour evening cycle.

  I hadn’t expected Captain to join us. She didn’t come down to the mess hall unless there was something important. When she had herself in rotation on the roster, it was one way you could tell who would be with her that night. You would see a lone man who sat by himself.

  Most of the groups that filtered out this evening were triads, with one or two couples. Before so many of our men were lost, triads weren’t unknown, but very rare. Most of the time they involved a couple reporting to Captain’s quarters for some extra instructions. She prided herself in the knowledge that no one woke up the next morning unsatisfied.

  “I missed you,” Precious said to me as she stood up to kiss me. She was very small, which made her an excellent choice for a serial killer and terrorist. Those were her professions before we’d captured her.

  We entered Captain’s rooms after knocking on the door and receiving permission to enter. Precious had one arm wrapped around me. I could feel her desire radiate. Despite the way things were supposed to be on the ship, she and I shared a special bond. It was from the deep mind probe I’d done on Precious after we took her into the ship. It was hard to believe this sweet little woman had killed eight men and two women. Harder still to realize that she’d enjoyed every moment of what she’d done. However, this was before I was able, with Captain’s help, to travel into her mind and the hell it created.

  “Good evening, Corwin. Good evening, Precious,” Captain spoke to us as she reclined on the bed. She wore a sheer, green gown I'd never seen before. I knew this had to be part of what she planned for the evening.

  “Good evening, Captain,” we both spoke to her in unison. I felt Precious’ arm tighten a bit around my waist. She didn’t like it that I was to be shared with another woman.

  “I want you two to take a shower,” she instructed us. Her eyes looked on mine. “Take your time about it, but don’t get carried away. We need to go over a lot this evening.”

  2

  The Hard Rain was the first Order ship to reach the area near the Spear Cluster. Three others were supposed to join as where the ghost ships first appeared. My crew and I were suited up and waited for any signs we’d have to take our FAS out of the hanger. I looked across at Tank and his crew as they waited in the ready room with us. We had to be ready to go if the siren went off.

  Two days ago, I’d been contacted by the two UDF Naval officers who’d tested me for paranormal abilities in the past. At the time, they were excited that I’d tested so high. No one else ever tested that high for paranormal abilities. I’d always been able to guess or anticipate things. Turns out, I could notice the inner thoughts of many people. What made one person easier to read than another, no one fully understood, but it was a rare gift I possessed.

  “Your abilities may be the only thing that matters this time,” one of the officers told me in the b
rief conversation we had. “We don’t know where those ghost ships come from and we don’t know what kind of weapons they carry.” We'd discussed a few more things of no importance. He couldn’t tell me much more about what I wanted to know about.

  “Precious and I were assigned together the other night,” Tran mentioned to me as we waited for any word from the bridge. We considered it a point of pride that our FAS held the record for quickest launch.

  “How is she doing this week?” I probed a bit. Not mentally, Tran was someone I had a hard time reaching. Besides most of the crew knew about my ability and made it clear they didn’t appreciate their minds tapped without permission. Oddly enough, most people knew when someone was mind probing them, but ignored the sensation.

  “Thanks," he told me. “We were with Alyx in her room and she let us go first. The last time I was with Precious was with Indigo. I thought that little woman was going to cry when I took care of the Indigo first. Last night Precious held my hand while Alyx was on top of me. She’d never done that before.”

  Captain has worked hard with us the night we were all together. When we’d toweled off and joined her in bed, she explained that she wasn’t going to make love with me. That would be Precious’s treat tonight. She could have a man to herself for a change. Precious was a bit suspicious, but soon let herself flow into the moment as we came together. Captain nodded, and I went deep into her mind while we made love.

  The three of us mind-merged again, and Captain was able to reassure Precious that she was loved and wanted by everyone. It was a long process that barely allowed us any sleep, but it seemed to have worked. I had begun to suspect that Captain exerted some degree of psychic influence over the entire crew, and had been doing so for years, and now I knew that to be true.

  After a few hours, Precious was fast asleep in my arms with Captain massaging her back. I was afraid to move since I had no idea if she’d stay that way or not. Precious didn’t have issues transitioning from sleep to wake any longer, but I didn’t want to risk it. Besides, she had the appearance of angel when she slept, despite the scars that still were evident on her body.