Nebulous loyalties rim j.., p.1
Nebulous Loyalties (Rim Jumper Book 4), page 1
NEBULOUS LOYALTIES
THE FOURTH RIM JUMPER NOVEL
Copyright © 2022 Tim Rangnow
All rights reserved.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-952412-22-6
Published By: Vagabond Publishing
Printed in the United States of America
NEBULOUS LOYALTIES
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
JOIN THE MAILING LIST
Other Books
About The Author
Chapter One
Kole swiped a hand across the metallic display, smiling as the words began to flow across it almost immediately. They were in a language that hadn’t been spoken in the galaxy for thousands of years, but he was able to pick out a few that he could decipher.
“That does it,” he said, straightening and looking at the woman sharing the circular platform with him. They were elevated here in the center of the control room, giving the commander of the ship a view of the other stations being slowly assembled where there had been only empty space before.
“You’re getting good at that,” Jaeger said, walking over to look at the newly activated display. “This one couldn’t have been more than ten seconds.”
Kole shrugged. “Practice,” he said simply. In the day and a half since they had triumphed over the Gorgon, a cruiser from the Gar Hegemony fleet, he had done little else but decipher as much as he could about the Ancient technology. Several other people were learning how to bring display screens to life with their thoughts, but he was the only one who could manage it in less than several minutes. Many who tried had been unable to do so at all. That led to most groups pulling him in to help with their projects as soon as he completed another.
Speaking of which, he could see a couple of people from Engineering hovering in the background. He frowned at them, secretly pleased at the way they flinched in reaction to the expression. “Jaeger, we need to talk.”
“Hmm?” she said, distracted by the words scrolling across the newly active display. The Ancient technology was built around some form of metal that Kole had never seen before. It could turn into a liquid and flow across the screen as needed, returning to an incredibly hard surface a moment later.
“Jaeger,” he said, more forcefully.
“What?” The young woman turned to look at him inquisitively. It was at times like this that he remembered just how young she was. She couldn’t be much more than twenty-five years old, and yet she had assembled a collection of people and turned them into an organization dedicated to taking some measure of revenge from the Hegemony that had taken from them. In Jaeger’s case, she had lost her mother and brother when the unauthorized colony world they were living on was discovered and attacked from orbit. Her father had survived, but spent almost two decades on a prison planet, until she’d convinced Kole to break him out.
“It’s time for me to leave.”
She opened her mouth, but no words came out. Finally, she nodded. “You’ve done more than we had any right to expect from you. It would be wrong of me to demand more.”
“It’s just for a while,” he told her. “I need to find Neela. Once I do, I’ll bring her back to Titan and we’ll keep working on deciphering the ship’s systems. After what I did, I’ll probably be running from the Hegemony for the rest of my life, unless this rebellion succeeds.”
A couple of months earlier, a Hegemony intelligence officer had tracked him down while he was returning a bounty to the Roberts system. Major Sylvia Herrera had asked him to take a job, one that would have him infiltrate a pirate group that had been preying on Hegemony shipping for several years. The pirates had even managed to defeat a sector governor’s fleet with their cobbled-together attack ships.
As part of their deal, Herrera had agreed to help the woman and child he and Neela were escorting back to Roberts IV. The woman, Liana, had fled the abusive father of her child, and Neela had talked him into helping her instead of turning her in for the five thousand credit bounty. Once Liana was free and had legal custody of her young son, Neela would ride with her on the cruiser to another system where mother and child could start a new life in safety. After that, he knew Neela would have parted ways with the woman and Gorgon, to travel to their agreed-upon fallback location in case they ever got separated.
During the course of his work with the pirate group, rumored to be led by someone named Mudamir, he had discovered that the young woman tasked as his babysitter during a few test jobs was actually the leader of the group. She told him her story of loss and explained her drive for revenge, and he discovered that everyone who had joined the group had good reason to hate the Hegemony. He had been conflicted about whether to follow through with reporting the location of their base to Herrera.
Then, Jaeger had taken him to the world they called home, a planet called Caldor II deep in the Rim and far from the trade lanes. It was the planet Jaeger’s parents had tried to colonize illegally, and she had returned there once she escaped the institutional orphanage she had been consigned to after the loss of her family. As she explored the barren planet, she discovered a massive object buried under the sands.
The colossal ship had been left behind by the Ancients, a race that had spread across the galaxy at a time when humans still thought stars were nothing but pinpricks in the curtain of night. By the time the first human left Earth, the alien race had disappeared from the galaxy. All that was left were ruins scattered across some of the worlds that humanity explored and colonized. And at least one vessel that was still mostly intact.
Jaeger had started the pirate organization as a way to get the resources needed to repair the hull breach, and to buy or steal the reactors and engines that had to be jury-rigged to make it space-worthy again. Named the Titan for obvious reasons, she had shown the gigantic ship to Kole with pride. Including the vast chamber that contained nearly a dozen black spheres where there had once been hundreds. Jaeger’s group had tested them and found that the spheres could either terraform a large swathe of land… or utterly destroy all life in a larger area.
Their plan had been to use the spheres to strike at the Hegemony, destroying governmental centers and military bases. They were even ambitious enough to hope they could drop one of them on Orion V, the capital of the galaxy-spanning Gar Hegemony.
Faced with the possibility of attacks that would kill millions of innocent people, Kole had felt compelled to report the location of the world to Major Herrera. The cruiser she was on, the Gorgon, had immediately started making the necessary FTL jumps to reach Caldor as quickly as possible.
Before the cruiser arrived, he had managed to talk Jaeger out of her plans for such drastic revenge. Plans that many of the two thousand people on Caldor had been mostly uncomfortable with and were happy to abandon. They channeled their focus instead into repairing the Ancient ship so they could leave the planet before the Hegemony arrived.
With Kole’s extremely limited knowledge of the Ancient language, learned during his experience in the ruins on Viridia II, he had been able to assist their efforts. His work began the process of waking the ship from a hibernation that had lasted untold centuries, and the Titan rose from the planet just as the Gorgon arrived in orbit.
During the escape, he stumbled across the command to activate the ship’s weapons systems. The power of the Ancient weapons was overwhelming, and though they took damage of their own, the Gorgon was destroyed when a torpedo strike set off a reactor explosion. Several dozen life pods had remained active after the explosion, and they were left behind for later Hegemony ships to recover.
Out of the ashes of that fight had grown the new organization that called itself the Mudamir Rebellion. Instead of pirates hungry for temporary revenge, these people were now rebels intent on bringing down the Hegemony. Or, at the very least, correcting the many corruptions that had spread within the government.
And Kole had put himself among their number when he departed Caldor aboard Titan. Even if Herrera hadn’t survived the death of the Gorgon, he felt certain her superiors wo
Jaeger reached out to grab his hand, and she squeezed it affectionately. “You’ll always be welcome on Titan, Kole Anwynn. Without you, we’d all be corpses.”
“That’s not true –”
“Yes, it is,” she said before he could finish. “Everyone here knows we never could have finished the work needed to get this ship off the ground in time. If you hadn’t discovered how to use the Ancient systems, we would have been bombarded into scrap on Caldor.”
He glanced around, surprised at some of the nods from men and women still working to set up stations around the central dais. “Well, it’s not like I could have flown away and lived with myself, knowing that so many people would die.”
Jaeger laughed, reaching up to pat his cheek. “That is exactly why you will always be one of us.” She looked over his shoulder, in the direction of the Engineering people he’d seen earlier. “Now, you better get out of here while you still can.”
Kole grunted in agreement, and he turned to walk through the narrow gap in the metallic displays that encircled the dais. He jumped down to the deck and strode toward the exit from the control room.
“Kole,” Jaeger called when he was at the door. He turned back to meet her eyes, which had grown intense. “Don’t take too long. I might have a job for you soon. An important one that I can’t trust with anyone else.”
He looked at her for several seconds, wondering what it could be and why she hadn’t mentioned it sooner. It would wait until he returned, though. Kole raised a hand in farewell, and then turned away to navigate the twisting corridors to the docking bay where his ship was parked.
The Ancient vessel had an organic form, almost as if it had been grown instead of built. The corridors often curved and twisted, instead of following straight lines as they would in a human ship. That organic nature was most evident on the hull, which was smooth and undulating as if long strands of metal had been twisted or braided to form the ship. It was hard not to think of the ship as alive, especially when one watched a hull breach slowly “heal” itself. The Gorgon’s laser cannons had blasted several holes in the ship, and most had disappeared already as the metal flowed back to form an unbroken surface.
A young soldier was standing guard at the door to the docking bay, and he stiffened to attention when he saw Kole approaching. At some point during the brief battle, he had become an unofficial second-in-command to Jaeger, and that feeling had only continued to spread afterward as his contributions became known. Though they still didn’t have a way to steer the ship, they had escaped the Hegemony and had their own vessel to call home. That was enough for most of the two thousand people onboard.
Kole nodded as he passed the guard, then paused inside the bay to smile when he saw Rim Jumper. If there was anything that had ever felt like home to him in the galaxy, it was the ship he had owned for the last two decades.
“You are leaving us?” He turned to see an older man approaching. Yusef al Haimani was rail thin after so many years on a prison planet, but he looked healthier than he had in the days immediately after they managed to smuggle him to freedom.
“It’s time,” Kole said. “I need to reconnect with my partner, and then we’ll return here to continue helping decipher the ship’s controls.”
“I wish you luck,” the older man said, grasping Kole’s hand warmly. “I will pray for your return. Without you, my daughter would have done things that she would regret for the rest of her life. She needs a moderating influence.”
Kole laughed ruefully. “I think that’s the first time anyone has ever called me moderate.”
“It’s all a matter of perspective,” Yusef said with a kind smile.
“Well, I’ll return as soon as I find Neela. As I told Jaeger, I’m sure the Hegemony will be searching for me just as hard as they’re searching for her.”
“I am glad to hear you will come back. We still need to figure these out.” Yusef waved a hand at the rows of strange teardrop-shaped ships arrayed along the walls of the docking bay. Two dozen of them, each only a little smaller than a Hegemony star fighter. A group of mechanics were huddled around one, trying to work out how to control them. So far, there had been very little progress.
“I’ll add it to the list,” Kole said. Along with the thousand and one other things on the Ancient ship that people were clamoring for him to look at in the hope that he’d understand it better than they. No matter how many times he explained that he’d only picked up a few words in the Viridian ruins, the rebels refused to believe he didn’t have a special connection to the ship after the things he’d been able to do.
Leaving Yusef to clear everyone from the bay before his departure, Kole approached Rim Jumper. He keyed in his security code to open the ramp, then walked up it quickly to enter the cargo bay that filled the rear of the ship. From there, he entered the corridor that sloped up into the cockpit, passing the doors into the galley, entertainment room, and two cabins.
“Are the engines ready, ShANN?”
A holographic female face appeared in a corner of the room beside the large viewscreen. ShANN, or the Shipboard Artificial Neural Network, had generic features, designed to please the largest number of people, with pink and green dreadlocks that stood out. Those had been added by Neela soon after she joined him on the ship, her way of getting back the pink dreadlocks she’d had when she lived on Hebat Prime.
“The engines are warmed up and Rim Jumper is ready for departure, Captain Anwynn.” Her tones were flat and emotionless, but welcoming. He’d missed them.
“Perfect. Plot out the best faster-than-light course, and I’ll take us away from Titan.”
Kole fell into the pilot’s chair, taking a moment to stroke the semi-circle of displays before he activated the systems and began feeding power to his engines. Yusef was watching from outside, and the older man pressed the button that opened the docking bay when he saw that Kole was ready. Above him, the metal flowed apart to form an opening more than large enough for his ship. A greenish haze filled that opening, keeping the atmosphere within the ship from venting into space.
Rim Jumper shuddered as she lifted from the undulating surface of the bay, and he passed through the opening. Kole fed power into his starboard thrusters and turned the ship in the direction of his target. He watched as the three-kilometer-long Ancient vessel flew past, marveling that such an old ship was still capable of navigating the stars.
The hull of the vessel was smooth and unbroken, with little evidence remaining of the damage that had been taken during the battle with the Hegemony cruiser. Even the crude repairs that Jaeger’s group had made to patch the large hull breach that existed when they found Titan were only slightly in evidence. The ship had begun to “heal” itself there, as well, absorbing the material and replacing it with the strange metal that could flow like water to fill the gap.
He knew that dozens of small chambers could open across the surface of the ship at the touch of a button in the control room. Perhaps hundreds of them. They were the ship’s strange weapons, capable of shooting out beams of energy that could take various forms. Testing those weapons and learning their capabilities was another task on his exhaustive list of work that needed to be completed, and it was one task he looked forward to once he returned to Titan.
“Our course is prepared,” ShANN said, breaking into his reverie.
Kole glanced at the display, unsurprised that the AI had picked a course he couldn’t improve upon. Without any hesitation, he reached out and pressed the red button that initiated the first of many FTL jumps.
Chapter Two
Kole was exhausted by the time Rim Jumper dropped out of the last faster-than-light tunnel. It had taken twenty-seven jumps to reach this system, and he had been so impatient to arrive that he’d been restless from the start. When he crawled into his bunk for sleep, he would be on his feet again an hour later to pace the deck.
