Soulless Victories (Corporate Wars Book 2) Read online

  SOULLESS VICTORIES

  S. WALKER

  * * *

  Copyright © 2021 by S. Walker

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover Design by James, GoOnWrite.com

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitting in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Acknowledgments

  Promised I would, so here it is.

  Second book in the series and still going strong. To the people who hung around, guessed twists, pointed out typo problems and got excited about details with me: Thank you. I don’t deserve readers as nice as this.

  Mclewis_13, Listrynne, Azgrimm, ReconScout117, TACNUK3Z, JnkAngel, 0570 (the “Numbers Guy”), Godmodedio, Wutanginthacut, Lorventus, Jnkangel, Rasip, Insane42, Runaway90909, OtterBeElsewhere, Gruecifer, AtheistBibleScholar, LilyCamille and MigratoryOilRig (which is a great name).

  Anyone I've forgotten, please accept my apology. You know where to go yell at me.

  For anyone who wants to yell at me: Susceptive on Reddit.

  Chapter 1

  It Followed Me Home

  The last ships off the habitation station were infested.

  Aldi watched from a thousand miles away as the back end of the refugee flotilla come apart, massive cargo-turned-passenger ships shedding debris and desperate lifeboats in every direction. Thousands of shiny objects scattered like metallic seeds, flying in a wide fan forward and back, each one carrying lethal consequences for anything it touched.

  Volunteers piloting cargo assist units swooped in, targeting and recovering anyone they could. But the assist units were small, only meant for nudging wayward containers one way or another in zero gravity: It took multiple in tandem to redirect even a single a lifeboat... and there were hundreds of them to chase. Not to mention impossible amounts of skinsuited figures, people abandoning certain death aboard ship to flail wildly in vacuum for a few more minutes of life.

  Despite the enormity of the task pilots refused to give up, darting across an expanding cloud to push survivors and lifeboats toward the still-intact ships. It was a monumentally selfless task, made even worse by having to avoid swarms of active drones crawling eagerly over every piece of debris for more materials to convert. Operators swung deliberately wide arcs around anything suspicious, dodging growing clouds of white particles and eyeballing everything for unexpected movement. Every lifesaving approach was a nightmarish guessing game, played with instantly fatal consequences for failing to spot danger in time to veer away.

  Aldi tapped the display, zooming in on a tiny one-man unit angling towards a comparatively huge lifeboat, clamps and manipulators ready to nudge the drifting vessel towards safety. Lights and strobes on the outside showed it still had power, possibly enough to keep a dozen scared survivors alive... assuming the cheap Corporate-authorized life support hadn't already failed. Even then personal skinsuits might keep the worst at bay, assuming someone got to them in time.

  Evidently the hauler operator thought the same thing, circling the lifeboat once to check the exterior for hostile drones before sidling up with manipulators extended. It would only take a minute to grasp and accelerate the hull in a slightly new direction, putting it on a course that ended in safety aboard one of the escaping ships. A success story, pulled from an entire day of tragic losses.

  But grasping clamps met an unexpected puff of white particles, followed by a swarm of palm-sized machines pouring through an unseen hole in the hull. The spindly transport assist went down in seconds, drone cables flashing in surgical strikes as triangular hulls adhered to it in a frenzy of disassembling. The operator probably didn't have time to scream before becoming just another small part in a growing tangle of replicating units.

  Aldi shivered and looked away, feeling phantom itches under his skinsuit. Like little spiders crawling around under the material. Not a pleasant bit of imagination.

  Zooming out again, he eyeballed the growing distance between the expanding cloud of tragedy around the habitation station and where he waited with the evacuation fleet. The display helpfully outlined miles of thankfully empty space between them, backdropping everything with glowing red markers indicating Corporate warships in distress and system traffic booking it for every exit point out of Jersteretting.

  Which was another problem: Ships were leaving.

  Aldi hunted through communication options, brown eyes heavy with concern until he found the ship's interior radio link. "Tinker?"

  Cheap speakers blasted the tiny navigation room with a tsunami of terrified screams and urgent yelling. He flinched back to arms-length from the auditory assault, elbows flexed and head turned away.

  Her voice cut through the wave of noise by sheer willpower, tense and worried. "What? It's a little busy down here!"

  Aldi fumbled the volume downwards. "I think ships are leaving the system!" More yelling, now overscored with repeated metallic crashes and what sounded like overstressed power tools. "What are you doing?"

  "What's it sound like? Throwing a surprise birthday party in the cargo hold?" He scowled but Tinker was already steamrolling the conversation, talking to someone on her side and him at the same time. "No, you— hold that! There! Now get the grinder on it, cut the hydraulic lines. Aldi, did you say someone's leaving? Who?"

  He checked again, seeing the front half of the flotilla streaming for the system exit points. "Everyone farthest away, I think. They're not staying or going back again. They're just... running."

  "Good on them." Something slammed hard enough Aldi swore he could feel it through a quarter mile of deck plating between him and the cargo bay. "That's got it, hatch is open! You and you: Get everyone off that lifeboat, go go go! Where's that jackass with the medical bag? Tell him to get working on this group!"

  He waited for a moment before trying again. "The ships might be infested, or something like that. Carrying more drones. Shouldn't we stop them? Prevent a spread or," he ran both hands through greasy black hair. "I don't know, contain this?"

  "Okay, sure. Go for it and let me know." Then, loud enough to rattle the speakers: "Move to the other lifeboat! Bring the tools! Yes, that means you!"

  Aldi looked at the system display, watching as the last clear spot on the habitation station dissolved under a churning tide of triangular drones and writhing cables. Zoomed out like this it looked almost beautiful: Like a pair of thick plates sinking into a sparkling cloud, each partical alive and working to pull it apart. The reality was far more horrifying, if he'd correctly understood the panicked briefing before they shot him out of an airlock: According to the Corpo mouthpieces the drones were dismantling the whole thing, using the materials to make exponentially more of themselves.

  Which was a blow he wasn't sure how to handle: His entire life had been aboard the Price Fixing, passing various aptitude tests and randomly taking employment on everything from waste systems to short range pilot gigs. Some people took being stuck in one place as confining; they fought to be out, go somewhere else, took on debt and ruinous contracts just to be elsewhere. Chase dreams they couldn't even articulate properly.

  Not him. Aldi Netrische had deliberately low standards and lived in the kind of eternal "happy is what you make of it" lifestyle. He'd expected nothing (and got it) but in return walked around with everything he needed to get by. Insomuch as he thought of the future
he'd sort of expected to be on the habitation station forever. The thing was huge, after all: Each residential platter was thirty miles in diameter and a quarter mile tall. Stacked one on top of the other it was more surface area than he could ever physically visit even if he tried. Who needed more than that?

  But then the first relocations happened, pulling everyone away from the edges. Away from the docks, away from the transports. Only to do it all over again a week later, cramming millions of indebted workers out of their rented units and into hallways and communal spaces. The rumors started then: Something was on the station. An invasion force, perhaps a hostile Corporate takeover.

  By the time workers were press ganged into Security teams and dispatched to fight at the station edges rumors were practically facts: The Price Fixing was being overrun. But by who? Nobody knew. When the truth finally leaked out— drones? self replicating drones??— Upper Management was already harvesting anyone with pilot credentials for mandatory briefings.

  Aldi got snatched up in the first drive, shoved into an airlock with a dozen other non-volunteers and blasted into space. The "plan" was for each of them to scramble over the hull, racing inward to the very center of the Price Fixing habitation ahead of a rising drone wave. Barely half made it through that wild scramble, only to be met at gunpoint and ordered to jump upwards off the infested station, aiming a mile or more through vacuum towards the cargo ships orbiting in standby. All in the hopes at least one pilot would stick that impossible landing and feel obligated enough to bring back a ship.

  It was a half ass, desperate plan to save the top echelon of Management while leaving nearly everyone else to die. In other words a perfectly Corporate proposal.

  And it might have worked... except for Tinker.

  Tinker Envelde had opinions about Corporate. Upper Management in particular. Because of her at least one of them was currently spinning through open space, gun and tether waving uselessly while running out of skinsuit life support.

  Which was fine, Aldi figured. Kind of a karma thing. He had deliberately low standards... but some things were just unreasonable.

  But that led directly to him stumbling into Tinker's plan, which very much did not involve saving the Management types aboard station. The exact opposite, in fact: She'd been one of the doomed jumpers, kicking off alongside Aldi towards the distant darkness... only she'd actually made it, catching the ship and yanking him away from embracing the stars with a single angry tug on his tether.

  But instead of evacuating the rich she'd taken their stolen ship away from the Admin section, docking it dangerously close to the drone wave to pick up a huge group of indebted pilots. Only to drop them off again at every hauler ship waiting in orbit, primed with the same message over and over: "Go back. Fill up on workers— no Management, fuck 'em— and leave. Go anywhere. Don't get a drone on board, they'll destroy the ship."

  Only one person dared the or what question. Which was when Aldi got an interesting lesson in how size doesn't matter when one person has zero-gravity combat training and the other doesn't. Five and a half feet of pissed off freckles and waving brown hair bounced the pilot between bulkheads like a toy until he begged to leave. After that nobody else had an objection and the evacuation started flawlessly.

  Also along the way she'd kissed him. That was something. Maybe even a "something", but he didn't like to put expectations on the future that way.

  But still... it was a new experience. He'd been involved in and actually started the whole process. Did that make him responsible? For everyone? That was a new feeling and he didn't like it much.

  Aldi reached for the console, aborted, then tried again. "How do I make them come back? What do I say?"

  "You don't. Just let it go. Alright, dammit— look, I get it." He was mildly surprised at how empathetic Tinker sounded. It was an unexpected softness, especially considering he'd personally watched her tiny fists repeatedly slam a large pilot around a few hours earlier. "You're a big picture kind of guy. Like everyone pulling together, holding hands, getting along and stuff. Now you feel responsible and that's sweet. Really. But we already warned 'em and gave everyone a chance when we hijacked the first ship. That's good enough."

  Memories of jumping off the hull of the station, aiming himself into vacuum at the distant, cold outline of an empty cargo ship popped into mind. He shivered, feeling the ghostly yank of a lifesaving tether all over again. "I've been meaning to thank you for that."

  "Oh, you'll thank me. Later. But we got every single one of those ships started, and all of 'em took a hold full of workers before running." Loud hissing and a bass rattle briefly drowned her out, followed by more yelling and directions. "-consider that debt paid. But right now gimme a status check: How are those Corpo warships doing?"

  "The warsh-? oh, hold on." Aldi frowned and checked, swiping the console display past the doomed habitation station and disintegrating transports. It was almost impossible to believe but he'd literally forgotten about the warships, caught up in the moment of watching life or death evacuation struggles.

  In moments he had local sensors closed, activating longer range suites and looking towards where he'd last seen the pair of behemoths. Finding them again shouldn't be hard: The damn things were world-enders. Massive on scales it was hard to properly imagine even in nightmares.

  Even a single warship arriving in system was terrifying— it usually meant Fiscal Enforcement was showing up for a "compliance check"... or to simply write off the entire startup. Permanently. Those ships were the final law of Corporate, an entire system's worth of resources condensed into a single, impossible to beat force. Like death with a hull wrapped around it.

  So finding two at once on their console screens after hijacking the cargo ship was almost paralyzing. Finding out they were losing to third vessel with a completely unknown classification actually made Aldi wonder if this entire situation was some sort of vivid hallucination brought on by a failed Environmental system. It could definitely happen— he was certified in repairing atmosphere recyclers and mold on filters was pretty common after sloppy maintenance. It was possible he could be just lying on the floor somewhere, dreaming machines were eating the station while ships showed up to ram actual Fiscal Enforcement dreadnaughts around the system like bathtub toys.

  Which was what the new vessel was doing: Literally ramming both dreadnaughts, over and over.

  For her part Tinker took a single long, slow blink at the display and got right on with stealing the ship. But Aldi was mesmerized, capturing images and zooming in for a better look. The Enforcement ships were monsters, but at least they were familiar: Seedpod shaped, with a thicker stern and an irregularly tapered front broken up by multiple boxy landing zones and sensor bays. Hundreds of Cormorent torpedo launchers created dark lines running the length of each vessel, ready to spit out singularity-powered death at a thousand launches per minute. Buried inside those city-sized hulls were multiple redundant power plants, running Krepsfield singularity engines strong enough to pull the whole thing into an artificial event horizon at a moment's notice.

  Full motion videos of warships scouring whole systems clean in a blizzard of Cormorent hits were technically illegal to share. No one was supposed to know when a planet or startup managed to stray close to ruining the bottom line like that. But in practice Fiscal Enforcement usually turned a blind eye on image distribution, tacitly encouraging the fear and worry it caused the populace to know any sort of uprising would end in bloody ruin. A worried system was a compliant system, after all.

  Before today, Aldi thought nothing had the firepower to stand up to a dreadnought.

  He was still correct, actually: The challenger didn't use firepower at all. It just rammed the warships. Repeatedly.

  Their attacker was roughly the same size as an Enforcement vessel, but potato shaped with tapered ends almost entirely obscured in some sort of thick metallic cloud. It attacked by turning nose forward and accelerating until collision, crushing whatever section of the wa
rship impacted and leaving behind a thick smear of metallic debris. After enough collisions the concealing mist wore away enough to get a good look at the hull, revealing a bizarre series of raised, interlocked hexagons covering everything from end to end. No hatches, no ports or sensor bays: Just hexagons, each side a quarter mile long and spewing heavy particles everywhere.

  Weirdly terrifying, brutally simplistic. If he hadn't been distracted by Tinker, outright ship theft and a bizarre evacuation Aldi might have stared at the three way fight forever.

  Which might have been a good idea, because it seemed to be over. "Um." He double checked. "This might be bad."

  "Alright, ground rule: No cliffhangers. None of the drama stuff, just say it. Are they coming this way or not? How much time do we have to run?"

  "No, they're not. Coming, that is. I think they're gone." He swiped through screen after screen, looking around the system map through the cargo hauler's limited sensor suite. "There's just a big ball of clouds left near the exit point. Nothing else."

  There was a pause while Tinker thought. She left the connection open, treating him to a long series of yells, power tools and at least one crying child. When she finally spoke it was with the concern of someone seeing a strange lump on a medical scan. "How big is the cloud? Large enough to be all three ships?"

  He used two fingers to pull up a measurement grid, overlaying the metallic smear. "I only have one angle, but sure. Easily big enough. Do you think they all destroyed each other?" Which would be great as far as he was concerned. The best possible outcome.

  She crushed his hopes. "Not a chance. Check me on this, but I'm thinking those triangle drones on the station and that big bastard are related, somehow. That scan for you?"

  He shrugged, then remembered it was audio only. "It would be a pretty wild coincidence, otherwise."

  "That's what I'm worried about. Hey, you! What's your name?" Aldi almost reflexively answered, saved from embarrassment at the last moment when she kept right on going. "Wow, Francis? Seriously? Your parents must have hated you, but whatever: You're in charge now, get everyone sectioned off into sleeping areas. Break open the cargo pallets, I don't care." Someone shouted, loud enough the confusion and disbelief clearly came through Tinker's audio. She shouted right back, twice as angry. "Then delegate, genius! Grab four friends and have THEM grab four friends. Get it handled, then let me know when you're done and I'll give you something else to do. Unbelievable. Aldi?"