The Titan Gambit - prologue

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In March of 2026, the people of Earth learned that they are not alone

Two centuries of expansion into the solar system followed, but all that was threatened when Mars fought for independence from Earth in the early 23rd century

After the Solar Civil War, a new balance of power emerged in the system - Earth and Mars ruled as a joint superpower, guiding the development of the rest of Solar Space, with the countless worlds of the solar frontier bent on their whims of political intrigue

Now, a further two centuries have passed, and the specter of war looms large once again, threatening to tear down all that humanity has worked to build…

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PROLOGUE

Outpost Omega 191 - Phoebe, Saturn sector

August 2485 - Eight years after the War

The backbone of night stretches overhead, with infinite stars in every direction as far as the eye can see and the majesty of the Milky Way yawning high over a dense canopy of almost primordial jungle. In a small clearing atop the edge of a cliff, a small, spartan military outpost is tucked into the ancient sulfuric rock. A lone man in a set of military coveralls watched the night sky from under the dome of the miniature biosphere tucked into the corner of his barely there outpost, holding a cup of tea in his hands. He looks tired.

A voice interrupted his reverie: “Commander Melrose, sir?”

The lone man brooding on the outpost’s bio-terrace, Commander Stan Melrose, turns to see a young Lieutenant fast-walking toward him across the flagstones of the tiny courtyard.

“Sir, the sensory suite report you requested? It's ready.” He holds out a sheaf of plasticine papers.

The Commander smiles faintly and takes what is offered to him. He then sets his coffee on the balcony overlooking the tiny swatch of forest and begins to skim halfheartedly through the sheaf of technical documents. “Thank you Lieutenant,” he said. “This could have waited until tomorrow, you know.”

The lieutenant frowned. “Sir?”

“Never mind, Lieutenant,” said the Commander, grinning. “Thank you, you’re a credit to the Corps.” He waved a hand to shoo his subordinate away. “Let me have some peace for a few more minutes, if you would.”

After hesitating for only a moment, the lieutenant nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Then he turned to walk away. Looking back over his shoulder, he caught the Commander looking pensively up at the sky once more. “Sir? Is everything all right?”

The commander blinked, surprised once again. “Hmm? Oh, yes, of course.”

The Lieutenant, now stopped in his tracks, turns to look up at the sky, as well. “Are you... Are you wondering where they are out there, too?”

Commander Melrose sighed. “Actually, just the opposite. I was wondering where Earth is out there. We're far enough away from home that it’s pretty hard to make out amid all the background noise.”

The Lieutenant looked back at his commanding officer. “You miss the Earth, sir?”

Melrose sighed. “Yes. I often wonder if I'll ever make my way back there, on nights like this. What about you? Do you ever get to longing for the Blue Marble?”

The young officer gave him a sheepish smile. “Well, sir, I grew up in the Shantou Orbital Cluster. My family had, uh, other things on our plate than making our way to Terra for pilgrimage.”

Melrose nods, still deep in thought. “I see.” He turned to face the younger man fully. “Then I hope you get the chance to visit the homeworld again, someday.”

A small and slightly uncomfortable pause settled between them. Then the lieutenant nodded and prepared to turn away again. “Good night, Commander.” Before he left, he snapped off a crisp salute, which Melrose returned. Then the Lieutenant disappeared back into the interior of the listening post.

When he was gone, the Commander looked down at the sheaf of papers in his hand. Sighing, he sat down on a deck chair and began to sort through them. After a few futile moments, he tried taking a long drag from his coffee to wake himself up. He gagged–it had long since gone cold.

Melrose set the cup back on the balcony wall. He looked at the papers in his hand, then out at the primeval jungle smuggled away from Earth into this tiny bastion of civilization. Then he stood and turned to walk back down into the outpost himself. Behind him, the starlit sky shone ever on, glittering like a moonlit sea. As if beckoning the people of Earth on to further shores.

Suddenly a space between the stars that was stationary only a moment before started to move right to left across the sky. It grows slowly larger, and begins to descend towards the outpost.

Inside the base, the Commander lopes drowsily down the halls in the strangely angelic gait of microgravity, holding the papers in one hand and returning the salutes of passing spacers with the other. His mag-boots made a dull, monotonous clank-clank-clank sound as he loped toward his quarters.

Finally he arrived at the door, marked "COMMANDER'S QUARTERS" on a small placard beside the frame. He pressed his thumb against the scanning pad below it, and the door slid open with a hiss.

He stepped inside and dropped the sheaf of papers on the fold-down desk before starting to work at his suit's front zipper. The small, spartan space seems almost cozy in a spartan kind of way. He flips off the lights and prepares to climb into his bunk for a few hours' rest.

Just then an ALARM klaxon starts blaring over the base P.A. system. Melrose's brows pull into a sharp frown as the bright orange emergency lights flash to life on the wall next to his door.

“What the-?” he began to say, caught completely off his guard.

Suddenly the voice of his first officer came over the PA. “Commander Melrose?”

The Commander was already pulling his zipper back up by this point. His voice is tense: “Yes, Captain. What the hell is going on? Why are my alarms sounding off?”

Captain Murasaki’s next words hit him like a rain of sharp stones. “We're under attack, sir!”

Melrose paused as the horrific implications of this news sank in. His face grew pale as the full weight of them landed in the pit of his stomach. “How in the-? What happened?”

“It's the zharans, sir, they're here. We don't know how, but somehow they must have slipped past our sensor screens. They're bombing us from orbit, and they’ll be landing troops at any moment.”

Swearing loudly, Melrose practically jumped across the room and hit the open button next to his door. He didn’t even stop long enough to grab his green duty-wear flak jacket before he left.

Commander Melrose dashed past confused and riled up spacers from his staff who were also ambling this way and that. Fully suited-up Security Force spacers raced toward the exits, weapons in hand, and technicians in neon flight suits shielded their heads as the piping was rattled loose by external explosions.

The Commander paused after a particularly strong detonation rocked the base, causing several pipes in the ceiling to jump loose and fall to the floor, nearly crushing him.

“These sons of bitches,” he said through gritted teeth. “They're bombing my base!”

He kept careering along, heading at his full if awkward speed past a sign marked "COMMAND & CONTROL", with an arrow pointing ahead along his current trajectory. The alarm klaxon continued to blare, and the lights flickered with each cacophonous explosion up on the surface of the supposedly hidden base. The blasts got louder with each repetition. They were growing closer to the mark.

At last he emerged into the C&C, and found himself in the midst of an unfolding crisis. Several members of the command staff had been injured by damage from the bombing, and the rest were in a frenzy of activity as they attempted to keep tabs on the battle now unfolding above the tiny outpost.

Captain Murasaki called the Commander without looking up at him. She had a bleeding gash over her left eye. “Sir, you'd better get in here and take charge. The sons of bitches are really working us over.”

Melrose crossed the room with some difficulty and stood over her command station. On her screen, a half-dozen enemy missiles prepared to descend on the little outpost.

The base shook with another series of explosions as they made their landing. “Goddamn it all,” he bit out. “Who gave these wind-up pieces of dog shit permission to bomb my outpost?”

Murasaki smirked humorlessly. “I don't think they're asking anybody’s blessing, Commander.”

Melrose grunted as his eyebrows pulled into a frown. “They sure as hell didn't ask permission to show up and kick our collective asses in the last war, either. Why weren’t we at least warned, though?”

“I have no idea, sir, and that's my informed opinion. They weren't there one second, and the next…” Murasaki pulled up another holographic image. It showed a long, insectoid Alliance cruiser in orbit of the moon. “That’s what’s sending us presents.” She turned to face the Commander, scowling gravely. “I don't think they're in the mood for negotiations this time around, either.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Melrose muttered, gritting his teeth. There was only one way this could end.

The holo-image now showed several dozen enemy infantry leapfrogging across the barren surface of Phoebe in tactical formation, headed toward the outpost from three directions. They moved across the ghostly red-tinged terrain with a surprisingly clinical efficiency. The SecFor spacers engaged them at the outer perimeter of the outpost, but it was nowhere near to an even fight. More a one-sided slaughter.

The Commander leaned in closer to Murasaki. “Do we have enough time to evacuate nonessential personnel to the fallback position? They should be able to get that far, at least.”

Murasaki inhaled sharply. “Maybe, but it's dodgy. We'd have to send them the long way around through the southeastern tunnels. That's not a sure thing, Commander.”

Melrose grimaced, but knew he had no choice. “Give the order, Captain.”

She looked up at him, meeting his firm gaze for just a moment before nodding and hitting a button on her station. “All station personnel,” she said into the microphone. “This is Captain Murasaki. Nonessential staff are hereby instructed to fall back to secondary pickup at RV point bravo. Take only what you can carry and go. This is an order directly from Commander Melrose. Repeat, take only what you can carry and leave now.”

She let up on the call button and looked back up at the Commander with a strange expression on her face. “What about the command staff and security forces, sir?”

The Commander shook his head gravely. “We're staying behind. Someone has to try and get the word out to AEROCOM. Someone has to tell them what’s happening here, before it’s too late.”

Murasaki’s eyes widened for just a moment before resolve set in. She nodded, frowning, and turned her attention back to her station. She and the Commander watched the holographic images playing across the air over her duty station. The interplay of the enemy cluster-missiles pounding the outpost one final time before the infantry moved in for the kill was almost mesmerizing, in a frightening kind of way.

Eventually he grew tired of the distraction and turned back to the Captain’s screen. No changes there made him frown. “I'd really love to know why exactly we haven't contacted AEROCOM yet, and quickly.”

She typed furiously, to no avail. “Dammit!” She turned to face Melrose: “They're jamming us, sir. I don't know how the hell they're managing it, but our signals aren't getting out.”

Melrose felt his blood run cold for the second time in less than an hour. “What? How the hell can that be? They’d have to target the whole moon to pull off that kind of—”

Just then Lieutenant Yevgeny burst into the room. He grasped at an injury in his right arm with his bloodied left hand. Blood poured down his sleeve and from deep cuts above his brow. “Commander! They're inside the base. The enemy is already inside, sir! What should we do now?”

“Get back out there to the SFs, Lieutenant. Tell them to buy as much time as they can!”

“Yes sir!” Yevgeny stammered as he started back out of the room, almost tripping over wreckage in his path. Then he turned and hurried off down the hall, gliding awkwardly in the low gravity. Under almost any other circumstances his gait would have been comical. No, though, there was no humor in it at all.

Melrose watched him go before leaning over Captain Murasaki's duty station again. Before he could give another order, the power to the command hub flickered off and back on again. “Dammit,” Murasaki muttered as she fidgeted with her equipment, still fighting to establish a connection with the rest of the galaxy. “It’s no good, sir. I can’t get a signal lock, there’s too much interference from whatever the Alliance have got aimed at us. I could try sending a direct beam ping to the nearest Stream node, but—”

“Do it, Captain.” Melrose stared down at her as she looked up incredulously. “That might be the only chance we’ve got. Will there be any chance of it being intercepted by our side?”

She grimaced. “Hard telling. It could be lost in all the background noise. The Stream’s a busy system, sir. There’s just so much information flowing at any one time, and we’re so far outside the main networks.”

Melrose swore under his breath. “It’s still the only hope we have of getting a warning out.”

She nodded grimly and began to type furiously once more. After several agonizing seconds, her face split into a darkly satisfied grin. “There, it’s done. All we can do now is pray.”

Melrose put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “Then we’d better get to it, Lieutenant.”

The power flickered again several times in a couple of seconds, before shutting down completely. Murasaki tried to flip on the emergency power but nothing happened. “Goddamn it!” she shouted.

“Can we get the power back on in here before they overrun us?” Melrose asked quietly.

Murasaki likewise spoke in a hushed voice in the sudden quiet and darkness. “I don't know, sir, but we'll certainly try.” She typed in a furious string of commands onto her terminal. It booted back up with emergency power a moment later, and the red-tinted emergency lights flick on overhead a moment after that. Murasaki's fingers practically flew across the keyboard. “Shit,” she muttered. “Sir, the power capacitors have been forced offline, either through tampering or by direct fire. Either way, there's no way we can—"

She stopped short as Lieutenant Yevgeny stumbled back into the doorway of the command hub, lit only by the emergency lights in the hall behind him and a few inside the hub. He stood silhouetted in the doorway a moment, like a gothic painting of some fevered nightmare. “Commander?” he managed. He stumbled through the doorway, clutching his stomach. “They... They're inside the wire...”

He collapsed face first onto the floor, a painfully slow-motion arc in Phoebe’s gravity. When he landed, four smoking holes were revealed to have been blasted into his back. Each of them smoldered like simmering coals in the dim light of the overhead emergency lamps, with smoke curling up like winter steam.

Commander Melrose rushed forward to roll the Lieutenant over and check his vitals. He was stopped in his tracks by a shout from the doorway. “Stop there!" the voice said in accented English.

Melrose looked up to see two enemy soldiers standing framed in the doorway. One of them aimed a sleekly organic-looking rifle at his face. Both of them were suited up in vaguely insectoid, all-black combat suits complete with fully face-obscuring helmets. Their getup only accentuated their non-human nature.

The nearest one barked out further orders: “Get back. Move back.”

Commander Melrose slowly stepped back as ordered. He was careful to keep his own body between the zharans and his staff. “Nobody say anything. We're prisoners now, that means we have rights.”

The nearest zharan stepped closer to him, lowering its rifle. Quiet chuckling emanated from his helmet speakers as his head cocked like some curious puppy. “Is that right?” he said. Then he put two fingers to the temple of his helmet and said something in his own language into his radio, before turning to address the Commander in English once more. “You may be prisoners, but it's up to the Colonel to decide what ‘rights’ you have. This way.” He pointed toward the door before raising his rifle again. “Move, now.”

The command staff exchanged glances. At length the Commander nodded and the group began filing out into the hallway. Outside the control hub, the captured command staff saw dead SFs and living zharan troopers everywhere. The lead zharan prodded Melrose in the back with his weapon. “I said, move.” The group then heads off in the direction of the courtyard, flanked on all sides by zharan soldiers.

Out on the balcony overlooking the simulated rainforest, they found even more zharans milling about. Outside the dome, a good number more zharans were busily assembling a scaffolding around the sensory dishes. Melrose turned to face the lead zharan. “What the hell do they think they’re doing to my outpost?”

A new voice rose from halfway across the courtyard in reply. “I'm afraid it isn't your outpost anymore, Commander.” Melrose turned to see another enemy soldier walking toward him. This one wore a black combat undersuit with a tattered brown leather duster over that. He stopped a few paces away.

Colonel Damon Jerek was of average height and build, with plain brown hair, and might have blended with the humans if not surrounded by zharans that clearly looked upon him as a superior officer. His most striking feature, however, were his mismatched eyes: While the left was yellow-golden, the standard color of all zharan eyes, the right—crossed above and below by a nasty vertical scar—was vividly electric blue.

The zharan officer’s voice was almost charismatic when he spoke again. “Commander Stanley Melrose. Seventeen years in the Interplanetary Defense Corps. Served with distinction in the 4th Combined Fleet during the Frontier Wars. On his third tour of duty as commander of an Omega-series deep space listening station, I believe.” His lips pulled back into a smile very reminiscent of a shark as he visually assessed the Commander. Then he extended his hand. “An honor to meet you, sir.”

Melrose gritted his teeth but said nothing. He did not shake the zharan’s proffered hand. After staring back in the Commander’s eyes for a moment, as if deciphering the inner workings of his captive’s mind, the Colonel turned to his subordinate and spoke to him in English. “Captain, it would really make my day to hear that the staff of this facility has been rounded up in their entirety. Is that the case?”

The zharan captain looked at the human prisoners gathered nearby as if concerned they would overhear, but answered his commanding officer after a short pause. “Negative, Colonel. Aside from trying to pin down that transmission we intercepted, we're still searching for some of the staff. About twenty of them, if the data we received for this operation can be relied upon in terms of staff complement.”

Jerek grinned his vicious grin. “Oh, I would vouch for our intelligence with my life, Captain.” Then he turned to face Commander Melrose again. “So I suppose that means it's down to you to vouch for those under your command. Tell me, Commander... Did some of your staff flee their posts? Possibly under your orders, as that rather annoying transmission we intercepted seems to have suggested?”

Melrose said nothing for a moment. Little did he know his silence did him no favors. Jerek smiled his predatory smile again, for he had already gotten what he wanted. “That's what I thought.”

Then the zharan colonel sighed and turned to his Captain once more. “Begin scanning the surroundings, Captain, and leave no stone unturned. I want them all accounted for.”

The Captain saluted smartly, that strange left-handed salute the zharans favored. He then turned to give orders inaudibly over through his helmet radio, pointing at his own masked subordinates for emphasis.

Jerek turned back to face Melrose. “It would be top-notch of you to make this easier for us, Commander. We're quite busy you see. Lots to do yet. You understand, I'm sure.”

Without a word of caution, the Colonel drew a sleek and sinister-looking sidearm pistol from a holster under his overcoat and aimed it at Captain Murasaki's head. She flinched but held her ground.

“I'll give you to the count of, oh, let's say four, before I start picking off the members of your staff who are in fact present. So if you would, Commander, please tell me where you sent your missing personnel?”

Melrose shot a sidelong glance at Murasaki. She was starting to shiver, slightly at first and more noticeably as Jerek began counting up. His aim never wavered. “One...”

The Commander began to speak, holding up both hands in supplication as he did so. “I don't know where they are, I swear to you. They could be anywhere by now, you have to believe me.”

Jerek slowly shook his head as he continued counting, his cold mismatched eyes still boring into Murasaki's as he aimed between them. A faint and sinister smirk was still painted on his face. “Two...”

Now Melrose was all but pleading with his captor. “Please, be reasonable. You must understand that the safety of my staff is my utmost priority. I can't in good conscience endanger some to save those who are here. You know that Colonel. You're giving me an impossible decision here!”

The Colonel’s head slowly swiveled so that his eyes could bore into Melrose’s face. “Three...”

“Now you see here!” Melrose spat, suddenly indignant. “We are lawful prisoners of war under Article 21-Bravo of the Nüwa Ceasefire Accords. That means we have certain rights and legal protections under both Commercial Assembly and Alliance law. You have obligations to our treatment, Colonel.”

Jerek paused his counting and turned his gaze to the Commander, one eyebrow raised. His pistol remained pointed squarely at Murasaki’s head. “That would be true, if this were a time of war. Or did I miss a section of the Accords on my last read-through?” He smiled his cold, vicious smile. “Because when last I checked, we weren't in a time of war... Were we?”

Melrose’s hopes for salvation deflated in half a second. He looked plaintively at the Colonel, then over at his helpless command staff, then back at Jerek. “I'm sorry, Colonel, I really am... But I cannot in good conscience give up the safety of some of my staff for that of our own. I take full responsibility for that much.”

Jerek blinked, his grin fading. He casually lowered his pistol until his arm was by his side. Then he smiled again, broadly, without a hint of cruelty in the expression. “Well, that much I can respect.”

Then, wordlessly, he raised his gun to aim and shot the Commander squarely in the middle of his forehead before he could even register he was in danger. He only managed to raise his eyebrows in surprise at the sudden motion before the shot from Jerek's pistol dropped him like so much dead weight.

Several members of the command staff gasped aloud, and a few let out cries of horror. Murasaki dropped to her knees next to her dead commander and rolled him over, mouth agape and voiceless. He was stone dead, a cauterized hole burned through the center of his forehead. She leapt back to her feet, rushing at Jerek with balled fists and rage on her face. “You son of a bitch!”

Two of Jerek's troopers caught her by the arms to hold her back. Jerek lowered his pistol, grinning again. His eyes burned with fury, and his voice dripped with disdain. “Such loyalty. How very charming.”

Then he aimed the pistol in the direction of the command staff. All humor had disappeared from Jerek’s voice when he spoke again. “Now, shall we dispense with the parlor games? I am eager to hunt down those of your staff who have fled into the forest, Captain.” He smirks. “Mind you, they are your staff now, seeing as I have just relieved the previous commander of duty.

Murasak glared at him from where the zharan soldiers held her, tears in her eyes. “Go to hell.”

Jerek's mouth curled into another cold little grin. “Don't threaten me with a good time.”

Then he shouted an order in Zharan at the troopers guarding the captured staff. They tightened their circle in response and raised their weapons. Jerek’s voice was now free from humor. “I have no more patience for this, Captain. Tell me where your staff has fled and I may decide to spare those of you we capture alive.”

He raised a hand, preparing to give the order to execute the surviving members of the command staff. Murasaki stared at him, horror-struck. Her eyes, still hot with tears, were now also wide with shock.

At last, she bowed her head in defeat. “They headed north. Our extraction point is ten kilometers north of this base, on a plateau. You can't miss it.” Her voice was hollow like the wind over a moor.

The Colonel slowly lowered his hand slowly. He stooped low enough to cup her chin in his hand, raising her eyes to face his again. That cold, malicious smirk of his had returned as he stared down into her tear-glistened eyes. “Now, was that really so difficult?” He released her with some force and gestured to the two troopers holding her steady. They responded by pushing her back into the crowd of prisoners.

Jerek turned to leave the courtyard. He spoke to his subordinate as he departed. “Begin your sweep, Captain. Everywhere within thirty klicks of this outpost. They can't have gotten far, wherever they really went. In the meantime, I'd like to sit down and have a look at what sort of salacious information these irksome little vermin have been collecting on us here. I’ll need to make a report within a few hours, and the Sovereign will be interested to know what our enemies have been learning here.”

The Captain followed beside him, nodding at the command. He snapped off a barked order in zharan to two of his own subordinates. “What about the prisoners here?” he asked the Colonel.

Jerek stopped in his tracks and turned back to face the humans. “What prisoners?” he asked flatly.

The Captain nodded, and Jerek turned away from his captives, washing his hands of them once and for all. The zharan captain signaled his troopers, who raised their weapons once more as they closed ranks on the humans. Inside the huddled crowd, the reality of their fate was suddenly clear. Some cried out, others wept, some merely closed their eyes to shut out the inevitable. Murasaki merely looked to the heavens, taking in one last look at the starlit sky as oblivion rushed toward her with the sound of sudden gunfire.