One decisive victory a m.., p.1
One Decisive Victory: A Military Sci-Fi Series (Grimm's War Book 3), page 1
ONE DECISIVE VICTORY
©2022 JEFFERY H. HASKELL
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CONTENTS
Also in Series
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
Chapter 40
Blooded: A Grimm’s War Story
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Thank you for reading One Decisive Victory
About the Author
ALSO IN SERIES
AGAINST ALL ODDS
WITH GRIMM RESOLVE
ONE DECISIVE VICTORY
CHAPTER ONE
IRON EMPIRE SPACE - 4MAY2935
Princess Elsa Faust, daughter of the sitting Emperor of the Iron Throne, and second in line for the Empire, balled her fists in impotent rage. Six-hundred souls of the light cruiser Speerspitze we’re dead. Murdered by a weapon that shouldn’t exist. One moment Speerspitze prepared to board a pirate ship, the next second she exploded like she had run full throttle into an asteroid.
A shudder ran through the passenger ship as the pirates docked their smaller vessel to the emergency airlock on the starboard hull.
Elsa backed away from the port side window and put a hand out to the bulkhead to steady herself. The weapon used was unimaginable. No one had such technology. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
Klaxons wailed as the outer airlock was forced. Her feet were frozen to the deck, and her mind desperately raced through what was about to happen. None of it was good for her.
“I have to move,” she said, trying to kick-start herself into action.
They were coming, and she needed to escape. Among the Stars’ registry showed her as a Terran Republic luxury liner with seven thousand passengers. In reality, she was a Schnell-class liner and had a minimal crew with only one passenger—a princess who also worked for her father’s security services. The ship was on a mission to investigate the disappearance of foreign flagged vessels in Iron Empire space.
The head of her security detail, Scharführer Jorgan Wagner, pointed toward the lifeboats.
“Princess, this way.” The urgency in his voice startled her brain, and she hustled past him. “Any word from our escort?” he asked.
She shook her head, finding it hard to move the muscles in her neck. “They’re gone, Jor. Destroyed.”
She sensed him stiffen. His demeanor changed from the friendly man who had protected her since she was a child, to a hard, no-nonsense killer.
“It’s no wonder no one has come back to report on what’s happening out here,” she said as they stormed down the hatchway.
“What do you mean?” Jor asked.
“They destroyed Speerspitze with a single shot. Just one. If Father knew about this technology, our fleet would flood the area.”
The lift dinged, and the doors slid open as they approached. Jor remained two steps behind her. She turned and realized that he’d drawn his menacing 10mm P3 sidearm.
“If it comes to that”—she glanced down at his pistol—“we’re in trouble.”
“Princess, you and I both know it will come to that. My duty is to get you off this ship.” He pressed the lowest button in the lift. The doors slid shut with a whoosh, and her stomach flopped as they descended to the lower decks.
The worst-case scenario her team had anticipated involved three or more pirates emboldened by the disintegrating Terran Republic and carefully targeting foreign-flagged ships in the hopes of avoiding Imperial attention.
The pirates had wrongly assumed her father wouldn’t care about foreign-flagged vessels. However, the public image of her father’s empire wasn’t remotely accurate. He was truly, genuinely committed to what was best for his people, and pirates of any sort were a parasite regardless of who they targeted.
Part of that commitment was making sure his children were capable of ruling when he was gone. Which was why she found herself on an empty liner under boarding action by pirates. Pirates who somehow had a weapon on their ship that shouldn’t exist.
The lift opened on a checkered red and yellow sign with an arrow pointing toward the lifeboats. “Jor,” she said before leaving the lift, “give me your backup.”
He didn’t hesitate, spinning his main gun around until the butt faced her. “Take this one, Your Highness.” With his other hand, he produced a more compact version of the same pistol.
She grabbed the weapon, and it beeped, acknowledging her authority to use it. She felt her pulse jump as they drew closer to their only escape. Her shock ebbed, replaced by fury.
Whatever happened next, she had to warn her father of what was happening out here. It wouldn’t change anything for those who had died, but it would let them rest easier—and keep more from joining them.
“Here it is,” Jor said. The lifeboats were on the other side of a four-way intersection. Elsa covered the right as Jor crossed the passageway. He slapped the controls to activate the boat’s internal power supply.
“Freeze,” a man growled.
Elsa reacted on instinct. Spinning, she brought her pistol up and fired. The P3 discharged a pellet at near-supersonic speeds, blasting through the air, striking the man in a fury of burning plasma. His scream died in his throat as his chest vanished in a thousand-degree inferno.
Her mind caught up with the scene. Elsa had spent her life around professional soldiers. These “pirates” weren’t wearing uniforms, but she knew a soldier when she saw one.
Behind her, Jor shouted as more came from the opposite direction. Bolts of plasma burned down the passageway, forcing Elsa away from the lifeboat.
“Elsa,” Jor barked, using the shelter of the lifeboat’s hatchway to return fire. He franticly waved for her to cross the corridor. Three meters separated her from freedom. Green beams of ionized plasma filled the air between them. Maybe she could make it… but odds were she would be cut to ribbons.
She fired again, forcing the reinforcements to fall back for a second. Then she realized the problem—it would take a solid thirty seconds to launch the boat. In that time, the “pirates” could blast through the hatch and kill them both.
She saw only one option. “Jor, go!” she shouted.
He shook his head. In his eyes, though, she could tell he’d reached the same conclusion.
“You need to do your duty, Scharführer. Tell my father,” she said.
Duty warred within him. He had sworn an oath to protect her, but a greater oath to protect the Empire. No single life was above that.
“I will come back for you,” he said, backing into the boat bay. As the hatch closed, he slid his pistol across the deck to her.
Next to the lifeboat entrance, a digital readout showed the number of passengers and the countdown to launch. She used the timer to measure her return fire. Every three seconds, she ducked out from the corner and fired. They were waiting for her each time, but she didn’t come out at the same place, and their initial shots missed.
With five seconds left to go, the bulkhead she hid behind glowed with enough heat to burn her skin without touching.
“Charge,” a man with a gruff voice barked.
Booted feet pounded down the hallway, and the fear and shock she’d felt earlier were washed away by the fire of anger, purified through a singular focus. No matter what, she was going to make them pay for the Speerspitze. At the last possible moment, she dove out from behind the melting bulkhead, firing as she went. A dozen men were at point-blank range, and she rained down hell on them.
The first one’s head vaporized. Another died clutching his burning throat, and a third screamed as the blazing plasma severed him at the waist. Her weapon ran dry, and they were on her.
A heavy boot stomped on one hand. Another kicked her in the stomach. Someone grabbed her hair, yanking her head back. Pain, unlike anything she’d ever felt, blasted through her as they beat her with hands and feet, reducing her to a whimpering, sobbing thing, cradling herself on the deck.
“Put a collar on her, and let’s find the rest of the crew,” a man with a thick bushy beard snarled.
Cold steel wrapped around her neck. Jorgan appeared in her mind, and she wished with all her might that he succeeded and her father would come for her. Then blessed unconsciousness took her.
CHAPTER TWO
ONE MONTH LATER
Nadia huddled under her coat, pulling the blue scarf up over her nose to keep out the cold. Omega-Centauri Four certainly won the prize for coldest winter. Even Zuckabar, with its zero-degree average, didn’t match the thirty below of the frozen border world.
However, Omega-Centauri Four rested in a neutral zone between the two nations. Its unique position between the Terran Republic and the Iron Empire allowed for a certain amount of intelligence gathering on both sides. Many governments held embassies on the planet, and all agreed they would have no military presence outside the embassies. Over time, hundreds of embassies had popped up and Omega-Centauri Four had turned into something of a political neutral zone.
Snow crunched behind her, and Nadia spun, losing her footing on the ice-covered ground, causing her to slide back. She recovered, hand going to her sheathed plasma knife, the only weapon she could easily purchase on the heavily regulated colony.
“Whoa, sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you,” Chén said, his hands at waist level in a sign of surrender.
Nadia pressed her lips together as the muscles in her body tightened on high alert.
“You were supposed to approach from the west,” she said through clenched teeth. She’d planned every detail of this meeting, and it wasn’t starting off the way she would like.
“Yeah, you said that, but you might have noticed how frigging cold it is out here? I didn’t want to add five minutes to hike around the Flats in order to come from the west. Are we doing this or not?” he asked.
“The Flats” was the local name for the squat, two-story concrete apartments that dominated this part of town. They were short, to avoid damage from the high winds, and sprinkled haphazardly around the hill the embassies dominated.
Chén stamped his feet in the snow, trying to stay warm. His movements were tight, stiff, not from fear, but expectation.
Nadia’s eyes narrowed. She looked past him, seeing nothing, but with the wind and snow, she couldn’t see more than twenty meters. Her intuition warned her that something was wrong.
His jumpiness could be the cold… or something more sinister.
“Do you have it?” she asked.
“You’re not going to like it,” he replied.
Carefully, in full view so the jumpy woman didn’t kill him, he reached inside his coat pocket and pulled out a data stick. “RISS picked this up an hour ago. Why does the Alliance care about pirate activity in Imperial space?”
She shook her head. The drive was marked with the official seal of the Republic Security Services. Chén didn’t move.
Nadia reached for the disk and he jerked his hand up at the last second.
“Not so fast. I want double the money. It’s treason if I’m caught.”
Nadia had dealt with this before. It was a negotiation, like most of the transactions in her line of work. Everyone had a price—this was Chén’s way of letting her know he set a steep price for his conscience. While they had agreed on a price, the true price was never known until the last second. She had come prepared.
The irony of her work wasn’t lost on her. In one respect, she couldn’t imagine betraying the Alliance for any reason, let alone something as trivial as money. On the other hand, she exploited people who would gladly betray their own governments.
She pulled a stack of crips bills from her front pocket.
“Two hundred thousand… Terran trade currency,” she said.
Chén’s eyes followed the cash as she idly moved it back and forth.
“Damn, I should have asked for more—”
Chén stepped back, triggering her reflexes. Nadia’s adrenaline kicked in. Her perception amped up, and she threw herself forward into a roll. Air swished above her as a plasma sword burned through the spot she’d occupied a second before.
She came up, slamming her own plasma knife into, and through, Chén’s stomach. He howled from the pain as the superheated blade sliced his intestines. With her free hand, she palmed the data stick and turned to face her opponent.
A shimmering outline in the snow, barely more than a mirage faced her. He wore a blackout suit, something Nadia herself used on multiple occasions.
Nadia forced the lump down her throat. The kind of tech he wielded was not only illegal, but expensive. She backed away, giving herself some room to move while holding Chén’s moaning body as a shield.
“Who did you sell me out to, Chén?” she asked the dying man.
He opened his mouth to respond when the assailant whipped the sword across and severed the traitors head from his body.
She let her training take over, responding with muscle memory of a thousand hours she’d spent in practice. It didn’t matter who he worked for—if she died at the end of his blade, then her mission would fail.
She pushed Chén’s headless corpse at him to buy herself a second. The body forced him back.
Nadia feinted left, and he followed. When she jerked herself in the opposite direction, the ice-covered ground wouldn’t let him completely recover his footing. He lunged as she ran, the sword burning through her arm.
A dull ache warned her of the damage to her cybernetic arm. Relief ran through her that the blow hadn’t connected with flesh.
Running through snow on ice-covered ground was twice as hard and half as fast. She grunted from the exertion, jerking her limbs back and forth as she fought to keep her feet.
“Mike-Seven-Echo, India-One-Five. I need immediate evac, LZ is hot. I say again, LZ is hot,” she called out over the emergency frequency. Her original plan called for her to insert and extract through civilian channels, but that plan had died with Chén. Military evac risked the Alliance’s standing on the planet, but if the information on the disk was what she thought it was, then the risk was more than worth it.
