Escape Read online

  Escape

  The Lazarus Alliance: Book One

  Blaze Ward

  Knotted Road Press

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Captain

  Chapter 2

  Captain

  Chapter 3

  Lazarus

  Chapter 4

  Addison

  Chapter 5

  Lazarus

  Chapter 6

  Addison

  Chapter 7

  Lazarus

  Chapter 8

  Addison

  Chapter 9

  Lazarus

  Chapter 10

  Lazarus

  Chapter 11

  Addison

  Chapter 12

  Lazarus

  Chapter 13

  Addison

  Chapter 14

  Lazarus

  Chapter 15

  Lazarus

  Chapter 16

  Addison

  Chapter 17

  Lazarus

  Chapter 18

  Addison

  Chapter 19

  Lazarus

  Chapter 20

  Addison

  Chapter 21

  Lazarus

  Chapter 22

  Aileen

  Chapter 23

  Addison

  Chapter 24

  Lazarus

  Chapter 25

  Lazarus

  Chapter 26

  Addison

  Chapter 27

  Lazarus

  Chapter 28

  Aileen

  Chapter 29

  Lazarus

  Chapter 30

  Addison

  Chapter 31

  Lazarus

  Chapter 32

  Addison

  Chapter 33

  Lazarus

  Chapter 34

  Addison

  Chapter 35

  Lazarus

  Chapter 36

  Aileen

  Chapter 37

  Addison

  Chapter 38

  Lazarus

  Read More

  About the Author

  Also by Blaze Ward

  About Knotted Road Press

  Chapter One

  Captain

  It was an old human adage, dating back well before men ever took to the skies, let alone the stars: A captain goes down with his ship. Especially an experimental warship design like Ajax, pushing the envelope of science every direction, almost into the realm of magic.

  Alone, this one Starcruiser should have been able to take on an entire Patrol of Westphalian Phalanx vessels: four Phalanxes and an Archer, with an expectation that he could crush them. Unfortunately, they’d blundered into a full GunWall while during this shakedown cruise: sixteen Phalanxes, four Archers, and a CommandWall.

  And still given better than they got, but it hadn’t been enough.

  He would have coughed as he looked around the smoke-filled bridge and considered his impending death, but the vacuum suit he wore kept everything clean and crisp, in spite of the death and mayhem that had occurred around him. The last of his surviving crew were finally blasting their way clear in the escape pods. He had remained behind to contemplate his failure. Standing orders called for him to arm the scuttling charges right now and blow himself and his final command to kingdom come. However, he knew doubt.

  Perhaps even fear.

  That a Westphalian scientist would somehow be able to piece together enough of the wreckage to understand what he and his team had managed here. That they might manage to build their own version of Kirov’s Lance, a weapon as much superior to the standard Star Lance as that beam was to the much smaller Star Spear. Worse, Westphalia would use such a weapon, perhaps such a ship to conquer the rest of the sector, when the Rio Alliance was just trying to halt the Westphalian invasions.

  He took a look around. The damage hadn’t befallen them fast enough that any of the corpses of his crew remained here on the bridge with him, but he knew that their ghosts would haunt him angrily for denying them a proper burial at sea in a place where their kin could perhaps come visit one day.

  But his duty came first.

  “This is your final warning, Ajax,” the Westphalian CommandWall vessel, the ship in charge over there, transmitted triumphantly.

  He hadn’t surrendered, even when it was inevitable. Just ordered his crew to abandon ship and prayed that the Alliance would be able to trade them home eventually.

  Without him, most of the rest couldn’t tell Westphalia anything they hadn’t been able to read off their own scanners already. An experimental warship, compact and deadly enough that Westphalian officers would warn each other about what had happened today.

  They could be taught fear as well. Doubt. He just had to make sure the lesson would stick.

  He unbuckled from his command seat and staggered across the bridge to where a starpilot had died not five minutes ago, when a shot finally speared the bridge hard enough to kill Ajax as well.

  There was still blood on the chair and station as he sat, the remains of his pilot that would stick to the outside of his suit, but that was the cost of surviving this day. Of exacting some level of revenge on the very gods of fortune that had dropped the two forces into each other’s laps.

  He programmed the star drives to a spot where the scans had shown brightness. A star-birthing nebula so dense with gases and new fusion lights that they would never find his corpse or his ship, to discover what had happened today. Here There Be Dragons kind of place.

  All the power that had been running the Kirov got channeled into the star drives instead, leaving the shields as strong as they had been for most of the battle.

  He stared once more at the shattered, staggering remains of a Westphalian GunWall, and smiled.

  He didn’t believe it for a moment, but he still snarled the thought at them, as if his terrible rage alone would be enough to touch his enemies from beyond whatever grave he was about to consign himself and his ship to.

  I will return for you.

  And then he slammed a palm down on the controller and leapt into infinity.

  Chapter Two

  Captain

  Ajax had not failed him, even as he had failed her. Somehow, the coordinates he had programmed into the star drives, a random mishmash he had expected to carry him to his death inside a newborn star, had brought him out instead in the middle of a dark, hollow space.

  It was like finding a park amidst the overpacked slums of Greenbriar, back home on Brasilia, the capital world of the Rio Alliance. A little pocket of green and beauty nobody had ever imagined might exist.

  He cracked open the faceplate of his suit to study this wondrous place without the extra glass in the way. Around him, the bridge blowers and fans were sucking up the smoke and death scent that had filled the air of his bridge and replacing it with something that almost smelled like a forest, compared to the battle with Westphalia. That would be the vertical farm hydroponics facility midship, but in imagination, his memory, he wandered those slums of his childhood.

  Everywhere around him, the robots and repair systems would be furiously working. He knew it was wrong to ascribe emotion to them anthropomorphically, but he couldn’t help thinking that perhaps Ajax was as enraged as he was that the gods of fortune had killed both of them on their very first cruise, before they had a chance to show the Rio Alliance and Westphalia what a warship like Ajax was capable of.

  He was supposed to be dead now, they both were, yet even that had been denied them.

  Again, he wondered if a spy had leaked the coordinates of the test mission. That it had been an ambush from the start and not just random, entropic luck. No other explanation made sense as to why an entire GunWall might drop out of jump on top of him and his ship.


  He owed somebody a debt of pain and retribution, but the mailing address was blank, for now. He could live with that. Those same gods had apparently chosen him to live long enough to deliver it personally.

  Internal systems showed the breakdown. Almost all of his brand new vessel was damaged to some extent. Nothing but the star drives and a few sensors were fully functional, even now.

  Still, the ship could repair itself reasonably well, given time. Another secret that must be hidden from the Westphalian scientists, how to impregnate fluids and certain microbes into a carbon-nanotube/steel matrix that would repair itself, given time and raw materials supplied by service robots his engineers had jokingly dubbed gardeners. Spray water and fertilizer, and keep watch to make sure the systems stayed within their programmed bounds.

  He needed to kill it all. Destroy this ship now that he had escaped Westphalia, so that they couldn’t reverse engineer his secrets and eliminate the surprise innovation that might let the Rio Alliance win enough of the war to push the Earthers back into their own sphere. At least until they decided that they didn’t need to conquer the galaxy.

  A captain went down with his ship. The ultimate price to pay for failure.

  His hand hovered over the switch that would arm the scuttling charges and send them both to hell.

  He still knew doubt.

  Had the meeting truly been an accident. Or a spy? He knew that the Alliance would consider him dead with his ship. Lost at sea, as it were. The corpses that remained behind with him would join him on that roster.

  On patrol.

  The ancient saying that indicated a naval vessel that had sailed into the wide oceans of distant Earth never to return.

  He could not make his hand complete the circuit. Could not destroy Ajax, even as she lay fighting for her life around him. In four months, perhaps eight, depending, she might be as good as new if he left the robots and circuits alone. And that spy, whoever he was, might have been rewarded by Westphalia for destroying Project Ajax.

  On the pilot’s board in front of him, a light appeared.

  Coherent radio signals, out here in the middle of a box of stars so close and bright that he still didn’t know how he had managed to not hit anything in his blind flight. Perhaps he was truly a poor man, and had indeed entered the Kingdom of God, for he had apparently passed a camel through the eye of a needle to land in this place.

  None of the signals were pointed at Ajax as near as he could tell. The light-speed burst of his arrival, that flash of azure light against the night sky, would be hours reaching the inner portions of the system he had blundered into.

  But radio suggested intelligence. Civilization. People, at least of some sort, as his target had been farther from the home colonies than any human vessel had ever transited, to the best of his knowledge. Only his own desperation had driven him to such an extreme decision.

  He listened. Voices. Languages he didn’t recognize, but the very act of hearing something on a radio frequency was bizarre enough. Another first contact?

  Humans were not alone in the universe. Their own radio waves had enticed other explorers, until the two sides found each other. But this wasn’t the Interlac of the Rio Alliance he was hearing. Nor the Anglo-Germanic of the Westphalians.

  This was something else. Something that might be friendly, and might not be. He had no way to tell.

  Around him, Ajax went to work with her mindless dedication to service. To the war itself, which would free the Rio Alliance from the Earthers of Westphalia, those men and women who felt that alien species should be subjugated, rather than welcomed.

  And if he was already dead, did he have anything to lose?

  He did not. All options entailed risk, but perhaps, just perhaps, the Kingdom of God had offered him a second chance.

  If he was mad enough to risk it.

  Chapter Three

  Lazarus

  He had decided to take on a new name, reflecting the raw miracle of his escape. Of his failure to die when all the odds favored it.

  Someone obviously had a greater plan for him, to have shown him the way forward at the very moment when he was prepared to do his duty as his superiors back home had impressed upon him. He would survive, at least as well as he could. As long as he could.

  In his rebirth, he went back to his youth and chose the name Lazarus, for another man who had been dead and then returned to life by a miracle. It was arrogance itself on his part, so he crossed himself and prayed for forgiveness.

  If he could buy himself six months, survive that long alone in an alien star system, Ajax would be as repaired as she could be without a stint in the bio-dock to fix everything else.

  But she would need secrecy. That much was obvious.

  The reaction thrusters were running at around thirty percent efficiency. That was enough for now. He spun the bowsprit around and killed his velocity, relative to the closest star of the nine within a few light-years of him. Lazarus headed inward at a slow pace, listening to the signals and recording them.

  Hopefully, somewhere in their chatter, there would be a key that would allow him to start translating their tones into communication. Moving at this speed would give him time, if he was careful not to be seen from below. Optical telescopes were watching the night sky constantly, and had already noted a few moving stars in the firmament of the heavens below him.

  Planets. Big ones, too. Ice giants, this far out, but that would be the perfect spot to hide Ajax while he figured out what to do with the aliens who did not know he was eavesdropping on them.

  Lazarus slept for a time. Listened to the alien chatter, which sounded like nothing so much as a pair of pilots bored and talking back and forth occasionally as their ships maneuvered closer together. Truck drivers making a delivery somewhere they had been to before.

  He visited the cold storage area and converted it to a morgue for his friends and crew. Ajax had gone to space with only ninety-seven sailors aboard, small for a warship of this power. Casualties had still been atrocious, as he looked down at the twenty-eight dead before him. Hopefully their ghosts would only haunt his dreams and not his days.

  A full day passed as he slept, ate, and worked, listening all the while.

  Finally, the ship entered into orbit of an ice giant so distant that the local sun was barely brighter than two of the closer neighbors. Lazarus shut down as many systems as he could, running silent into night as the ship circled the blue-green marble below in a complicated dance with a whole tribe of little moons.

  Down on the flight deck, he loaded up the one dispatch boat with supplies. Naval architects back home called it a koch, after the ancient Russian boats capable of sailing the pack ice. This one had a short-range jumpdrive, meant to handle personnel runs and mail, rather than the two bigger boxes, known as pinckes, aboard to serve him as cargo shuttles.

  Alone, the space felt enormous, as the koch was designed for a pilot, an admiral, and an aide. Six might fit for short missions, if they were friendly. One almost bounced hollowly around.

  Lazarus added a laser pistol and a bolter rifle to his gear and dug out his armored lifesuit, heavier than the simple suit he had been living in, leaving the faceplate retracted. It would handle any EVA tasks if he needed to, but better to run on the koch’s life support for now.

  Just in case.

  He felt a twinge of pain and separation as he backed the little ship out of the launch pod and aimed his bow straight up, relative to the plane of the system. Once he got enough distance to be comfortable with the local gravity wells, he jumped a quarter light-year, which put him nearly a fifth of the way towards one of the stars that direction.

  A second jump dropped him back into the first system, but at a random enough location with no backwards vector that would point someone to Ajax, hopefully.

  Alone in the darkness he listened. If they were watching the skies around them, the blueshift of his arrival would show up on sensors and in portholes fairly quickly. The koch was unarmed, if
they were pirates, but nothing he had heard so far suggested that.

  Miners, maybe, operating in the asteroid belt he had detected, similar to the one around many systems, where a proto-planet failed to live up to its potential.

  Just because he had no other choice, not really, Lazarus opened the transmitter on the channel the two voices had been using most frequently and spoke.

  “Escape-Pod-Two-Seven-Three-One to local vessels,” he said simply in Interlac, prepared to trigger the jumpdrive to blast him into deep space again if they turned out to be hostile. “Please reply on this frequency.”

  Just under nine seconds later, all chatter ceased as the two voices recognized that a stranger had joined them, and their last words echoed into silence.

  Lazarus had spoken in Interlac. The aliens who welcomed the first human colonists to their worlds had claimed that Interlac was a near-universal tongue for all creatures capable of communicating that way. At the same time, that blob described an area of space only about seven hundred light-years wide and less than two hundred thick. And well away from here.

  Ajax had carried him far beyond even the most ambitious limits of space the Rio Alliance and their friends had explored.

  The koch had enough sensors to track what appeared to be two vessels over there, at least as they separated. He sent a scanner ping downrange and noted the return signal.