Ghost Squadron Read online

  Ghost Squadron

  Kevin McLaughlin

  Role of the Hero Publishing Company

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Author’s Notes

  Introduction

  Other Books by Kevin McLaughlin

  About the Author

  Exclusive for fans of the Accord series!

  Find out how the story started… When Captain Nicholas Stein set out to stop one enemy ship, and set in motion events which shaped the course of human history for decades to come.

  http://kevinomclaughlin.com/accordoffire/

  One

  Sam thought calling this place the 'Oort Cloud' was a misnomer. It wasn’t a cloud at all. There was stuff out there, for sure. Bits of rock and ice. But they were scattered about, so distant from each other that the whole region felt as empty as any other part of space. From her point of view, it was less a cloud and more a zone.

  Whatever they wanted to call it, patrolling the place was damned dull. They were supposed to be out looking for trouble. If the alien ship which escaped the scuffle at Neptune was still somewhere in the solar system, the most likely place for it to be hiding out was in the Oort Cloud. Far enough from Earth that it would be nearly impossible to spot, but close enough that it could have made the trip without resorting to a jump with its Alcubierre drive.

  That, they would have spotted. The energy surge when a ship went into a jump was nowhere near as dramatic as the one expelled when it arrived at its destination, but it was still easy enough to spot from a far distance. They hadn’t seen a jump signature. So unless the aliens had been extremely sneaky about their departure, they were still in the neighborhood

  “Harald, you seeing anything at all out there?” Sam asked over her radio. There was a brief lag before she got a response. Her squadron-mates were all flying at a distance of several light-seconds from each other, spread out to cover more ground. It was still woefully insufficient. A ship trying to hide out there was a needle in a haystack, and they were combing through the stack one straw at a time.

  “Still nothing, just like last time you asked,” he replied.

  He’d been growing testier by the week. Ever since the battle over Neptune, he’d become more distant and reclusive. Instead of hanging out with the other pilots during downtime, he’d resided in his fighter. Sam stopped by a few times when he started the practice. He was only grudgingly talkative and mostly stared out into the stars. She wondered what he thought about while he sat there all alone. God knew they all had enough demons chasing them at this point.

  Sam was evading hers by staying busy. There was a new crop of pilots to train up. Few of their original fighter wing had survived. But the core concept - using digitally uploaded minds as pilots of fighters, because they could survive accelerations and vector changes that would kill an ordinary human - was deemed a rousing success, anyway. Another recruiting drive brought in a host of fresh meat, and it was her job to turn them into a cohesive fighting force.

  Easier said than done. Even after a few weeks in space, the pilots were still green as hell. They were all recruits from Valhalla Online, a digital afterlife where you got to play a fantasy game for all eternity. On the plus side, that meant all her new recruits were used to the idea of fighting. But they were also used to respawning after they ‘died’ in the game. A death in Valhalla Online might hurt, but it wasn’t the end of the road.

  A condition the United Nations placed on allowing them to run around loose in the outside world was that each digital mind was encoded with a high-grade DRM. Copying them was supposed to be impossible. Sam knew nothing was truly unhackable, but it made it impractical at best to make copies of a freed digital mind. No copies meant that if the fighter your program was uploaded to blew to bits, you were gone. End of story, end of life.

  Teaching these new recruits to take death seriously had been a struggle, especially since dying in a simulation was just like what they were used to in Valhalla. They ‘died’ and came right back again to run another sim. It would be very different when they got out in real combat though. The enemy’s guns would cause real damage to their fighters. When they blew up - and Sam knew some of them would die - they’d be gone forever. Wiped from existence. It was a tough concept for them to adjust to.

  Sam spotted a flash of light in the distance, out ahead of them. She lit it up with active scanners immediately. The fighter’s instruments fed data back to her about the energy discharge. It was an Alcubierre drive exit explosion, all right. When a ship came out of a jump, it brought with it a swath of highly charged particles that released all their pent-up energy in an instant. The resulting light show was impressive. At close range, it could blow apart a spaceship. Sam knew, since she’d seen it happen.

  But this wasn’t enemy action. The friend-or-foe systems on board her craft identified the ship at once. It was the Intrepid, the one human vessel capable of making jumps. Well, it was more or less capable. The first time they tried, it had blown out the jump drive. They’d since made adjustments to get the system more or less working, but it was still new tech. Flying around in the Intrepid when it made a jump was a little like riding a C-130 full of nitroglycerin. It would probably make a safe landing. But if it didn’t, the explosion would be spectacular.

  A signal came in from the Intrepid a few seconds later. “Ghost Squadron, any contacts?”

  That was Admiral Thomas Stein, the captain of the ship. Technically, Stein was in command of the entire human space navy, but he’d taken direct control during the battle for Neptune and never relinquished it after. Sam wondered how long a member of the top brass would be allowed to remain in the field like that. It wasn’t for her to question his decision, but it seemed unwise to have him on the front lines.

  “Negative,” Sam replied. “This sector is clean.”

  “Understood,” Thomas replied. “Return to base to refuel and rest.”

  “We’re still good for another sector if you want,” Sam said. Her tanks still had plenty of reaction mass left to convert into energy for her drive. They’d been coasting at high velocity for the last couple of days, not using much power.

  “Negative. Your people need downtime to stay sharp. Bring them in. Rest, let the techs look over your ships, and then we’ll hit the next sector.”

  “Understood, sir. Passing the word along,” Sam replied.

  The downtime would be good. It was hard on the mind, being out in the black for too long. Even though the pilots could all connect to each other and talk whenever they wanted, the brief lags in conversation caused by distance shut down discussion. That left all her pilots with a lot of time to sit alone in their fighters and think. Sam wasn’t sure how the rest of them were re
acting to that, but it had worn on her enough that she welcomed a respite.

  Two

  The virtual space on board the Intrepid still wasn’t quite up to the standards of the one they’d had on the Hermes. Their original ship had been carefully set up to accommodate a crew of digitized beings. All the life support and crew areas were ripped out, much of that space filled back in with computer hardware to support the Ghosts.

  But the Hermes was gone, blasted to bits in the last, desperate fight over Neptune. The Intrepid was a more massive ship with enormous built-in computing power, but it wasn’t designed for housing the Ghost Squadron. They’d made what adjustments they could as quickly as possible, so it was working. It just didn’t quite feel like home yet.

  Something about the simulated environment was off again today. The only way Sam could describe it was that it felt fuzzy around the edges, like some of the sensory stimuli her mind was being given was incomplete. It wasn’t enough to make her genuinely uncomfortable, but it was an ever-present nagging at the edge of her thoughts. She’d have to talk with Gurgle later. He was proving to be a fantastic hand with the computer systems. Maybe he could help redesign the specs so they’d feel more real for all of them.

  Sam walked through the rec area. A few other fighter pilots had beat her there, and more would be flowing in shortly. After so long alone in the void, they all craved the presence of other people. Even simulated, the contact was essential. She understood now how bad solitary confinement could get for prisoners. They were never entirely alone out there in space, but they might as well be. Messages took long seconds to send, and more time for responses to come back. Even though they each knew the others were out in space with them, the inability to see anyone wore on the mind after a while. Admiral Stein had made the right call, bringing them in. If they wore down too much, people would start making mistakes they couldn’t afford.

  “Captain! Come join us if you’d like!”

  Sam glanced over and smiled. Three of the pilots from her wing were already seated at a table, drinking imaginary mead. Of all the drinks to program into the computer, of course mead was the first they’d choose. All of the pilots in her squadron were from Valhalla Online, a simulated Norse afterlife. Even new recruits like the three inviting her over had all spent a year or more living the role of a dead Norse man or woman. Mead played prominently in the Valhallan culture. It was sweeter than beer - and frankly, Sam found herself craving a good virtual IPA - but the taste had grown on her, too.

  “Sure, Nick,” Sam said, walking over. Nick Holmes was one of their newest recruits. He’d opted to go by his old world name, the one he’d used before Valhalla. For day to day use, anyway. Most people picked a suitably Norse name for themselves when they were uploaded to Valhalla. Some folks had grown so used to that new name that it was all they wanted to be called. Others were new enough to Valhalla that they wanted to use their old, real-world names again now that they were back in the outside world.

  Harald was one of the former. Sam didn’t even know what he’d been called before he was uploaded. He’d never told her. She knew damned little of his background, other than the fact that he’d once been a Marine and was 'given an offer he couldn’t refuse' to join the Valhalla Online alpha tests.

  Sam glanced around the room as she sat down. He was nowhere in sight. She wasn’t really expecting to see him. Harald had begun spending most of his downtime inside his fighter. The computers aboard the fighters were where their minds were stored, anyway. The little Wasp ships were their bodies, in effect. They could project their awareness into this virtual shared space, but it wasn’t where their data was stored. She’d stopped by several times to see Harald just sitting alone, staring out into the void of space. The idea made Sam shiver. He was too much apart. It wasn’t good for anyone, and she worried about her old friend.

  “How did the flight go?” Sam asked as she took a seat next to the recruits. She called for a mug of mead, which appeared on the table in front of her. Imaginary mead still tasted something like the real thing, or so she’d been told. Having the flavor without the calories was a plus side to this life.

  “Boring. Is it always that bad? I brought books along to read, but we had way too much time on our hands out there,” Nick said. “Nothing to do but stare out at unmoving stars. For days.”

  Sam chuckled. “Boring is good. When it’s not boring, it tends to be way more exciting than anybody really wants.”

  “Why? Excitement is good!” the recruit next to Nick said. Sam glanced down at the uniform his avatar wore, to check his name. LeBruin, it said. She didn’t recall his first time.

  “Mostly because excitement in a fighter involves people blowing up around you,” Sam said. “It’s not all fun and games.”

  “Yeah, but we blew up a lot more of them than they blew up of our ships,” LeBruin said.

  Sam blinked, considering her response before replying. How to explain combat to someone who’d never seen anything but simulated battle? These guys were fresh from Valhalla. Every death there was glorious because you’d be right back fighting again the next day. Out here that attitude was going to get people killed, permanently. She needed to continue working to quash it.

  “We did beat them soundly,” Sam said. The recruits smiled and raised their mugs like they were about to toast her words. But she had more to say. “That won’t bring back any of my friends who died in the process. They’re gone. Forever. Remember that, when you’re out there. They died to defend our world. Some of us will die if we have to fight the aliens again.”

  They looked suitably chastised. Sam wondered if she was going to get any more invitations to join them at their table. She had a feeling she might not, and that was fine. She was the squadron commander, second only to the Intrepid’s non-digital CAG for all their flight groups. That the ship had a regular person as CAG didn’t bother her. Half the fighter compliment was regular people, half digital ones. Overall command went to Keladry Stein, the admiral’s wife. If it had been nepotism, Sam might have raised a fuss about it. But Kel was one of the most gifted pilots she’d ever seen.

  A ping on the communication system tore her attention away from the conversation at the table. She had an incoming message. Sam checked the sender identity and stiffened with surprise. It was Samantha - the other Sam, the physical one whose uploaded mind had become the person Sam now was. She’d sent a letter. Sam wondered what was up - they didn’t communicate with one another all that often. It felt strange and uncomfortable, like talking to yourself, only not. She excused herself from the table and stepped aside to check the note in privacy.

  Three

  Once she was safely away from the others, Sam opened the message. It was a video recording, which in some ways made the sense of strangeness she felt even more intense. It was like watching herself say words she’d never spoken. She shook her head, trying without much effect to clear the feeling. The hell with it. She might as well hear what her ‘sister’ had to say. She pressed play.

  “Sam, I hope this recording finds you well. I know you folks have been super busy out there. But with you out of Valhalla at last, I thought you might appreciate some updates from the home front,” Samantha said on the recording. “The news about Neptune leaked at last. It’s a mess. Just the idea of aliens trying to invade has people upset. Protests broke out all over the world. Celebrations at the fleet’s success broke out, too. Right now some folks are thrilled we won, and others are being pissy about not being told right away that it was happening.”

  That made a certain degree of sense. Governments had been keeping their people in the dark about important things for ages. It was probably something thought up by the very first government, whenever that had been. But people didn’t usually like it much when they discovered that sort of secrecy. The United Nations had kept some dangerous secrets just a decade before. The new regime was operating under a policy of openness and full disclosure. Sam wondered how much they’d damaged public opinion by kee
ping the invasion secret as long as they had.

  “Anyway, the UN decided if the alien cat was out of the bag, they might as well spill the rest. They released a statement about the Ghosts - that’s what they’re calling you, did you know? The Ghost Squadron,” Samantha’s voice said.

  The squadron had named itself, right before that final fight. Very few of the original Ghosts were still around. Most died in that final battle. But the name had stuck, and Sam was glad. It fit, after all. They were the ghosts of dead people, come back to defend humanity in their moment of greatest need. Her mouth quirked a small smile. It was like something out of legend, which felt fitting.

  “People still aren’t sure how to handle that news. Just like the invasion news, some folks are upset. Others are just happy we found a way to win. Your people might be hailed as heroes or…not so popular. Or maybe both at the same time. I’m not sure how it’s going to come out just yet, but I’m keeping my ear to the ground as much as I can,” Samantha said. “I’ll fill you in as I learn more. Oh - one more thing.”

  “I haven’t told mom and dad about you, yet,” Samantha said. “They’re well. Seattle isn’t one of the protest hotbeds. People there are more in a partying mood, from what I hear. So no worries about their security. I talked to them yesterday, and they’re both pretty healthy and happy. I still think we ought to break the news to them, sometime soon. About you, I mean. I can do it solo, or you can come with me if you wanted.”