The Last Dawn: Book 3 of The Last War Series Read online

  Contents

  Title

  Dedication

  Front Matter

  Prologue

  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

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Epilogue

  Backmatter

  The Last Dawn

  Book 3

  Of

  The Last War Series

  For my three favorite admirals: Kirk, Adama, and Ackbar

  To be notified of future books in The Last War series, sign up here: smarturl.it/peterbostrom

  Peter Bostrom is the pen name of Nick Webb co-writing with other authors. The Last Dawn is by Nick Webb and David Adams.

  Copyright 2017 by Hyperspace Media

  Other books by Peter Bostrom:

  The Last War Series:

  Book 1: The Last War

  Book 2: The Last Hero

  Other books by Nick Webb:

  Constitution, Book 1 of the Legacy Fleet Series

  Mercury’s Bane, Book 1 of the Earth Dawning Series

  The Terran Gambit, Book 1 of the Pax Humana Saga

  Other Books by David Adams:

  Lacuna, Book 1 of the Lacuna Series

  The Polema Campaign, Book 1 of The Symphony of War

  Prologue

  Tonatiuh System

  Planet Zenith

  City of New Bristol

  Admiral Jack Mattis Air And Space Port

  Landing Pad 9

  “Aww now, come on ladies, you wouldn’t wanna kill a handsome guy like me … would you?”

  Harry Reardon, smuggler extraordinaire, smiled his award-winning smile as he stared down the barrel of a pair of high powered pistols, hands at the level of his eyes. His ship, the Aerostar, hummed behind him on the landing pad, a drone refueling its O2 and nitrogen tanks. Nearby, his assailant’s ship was similarly being restocked. A logo that looked remarkably like an octopus was half-peeled back from the hatch window. Weird. Just like the Weird Sisters.

  “Cute,” said Jasmine—or was this one Carolynn? He could never keep track. “You see, we were thinking we would take the cargo and the money.” She pulled back the hammer. “It just seems simpler that way. Doesn’t it?”

  “Simpler,” echoed Reardon, eyes flicking to the green crate on the mechanical pallet jack he’d transported from Chrysalis to Zenith, all the while taking great care to avoid the law. His supplier was quite insistent on that point. “Do you even know what’s in that thing?”

  “I know it’s worth about two million dollars to our buyer,” said Jasmine … or Carolynn … or Whichever, her finger tapping on the trigger. “That’s enough for me.”

  Reardon blew out a low whistle, reaching over and pushing his aviator glasses up his nose. “And you’re only paying me twenty-five. Jeez. I was getting robbed before you fine ladies pulled out your pieces. Weird Sisters indeed.”

  One of them sneered at him. “Poor, poor Harry Reardon, joke of the galaxy. With your I’m compensating for something black leather jacket, cringe-worthy haircut, your ridiculous pink ship, and your crippled brother … everyone laughs at you behind your back”

  “Hold on. That’s just not fair,” he said, frowning in annoyance, tilting his head forward so he could look at her over the rim of his shades. “My ship’s not pink.” His beloved Aerostar was a very manly salmon colored. Or, as the salesman had referred to it, blood in the water.

  “Whatever,” said one of the contacts. She gestured with her spare hand. “Hand over the money, and the cargo, and maybe we’ll let you go.”

  There was no way they were going to let him go. It would be bad for business; easier to just shoot him and and say he was the one who double-crossed them, killed in the subsequent shootout. How could he say otherwise if he was dead?

  “Sure,” he lied, keeping his hands up. “Pallet jack key first. It’s in my breast pocket. Lemme just get it.”

  “Okay,” said Whichever. “But if you make any sudden moves…”

  He grinned widely. “You think I’ve never been robbed before? I know the deal, sweetheart.”

  Her expression instantly soured. “Don’t call me sweetheart.”

  “Sorry, honey.”

  “Or that.”

  “Sorry, darl’n.”

  She snarled and jabbed her gun toward him. “You just really wanna die, don’t you, you piece of—”

  Just close enough. Reardon snatched the pistol out of her hand, spun it around, and squeezed the trigger.

  Click.

  The gun had a biolock on it. The woman in front of him—he arbitrarily designated her Babe Number One—slowly drew another pistol. A bigger one, with an extended barrel. And loaded.

  “Awkward,” he said, and then flung the weapon at her. She ducked, spoiling the shot.

  Crack. A bullet whizzed past his head, close enough to almost clip his ear. Babe Number Two fired again, the bullet screaming as it ricocheted off the ground, flying away farther on into the spaceport docking bay.

  He dove behind a slightly-too-small crate. Another round screamed past. “Sammy!” said Reardon into his earpiece. His brother was always so slow when it mattered most. “Now would be a good time!”

  The ship—still powered on due to the resupply—hummed with energy. A heavy, twin-barreled machine gun on a ball-turret thrust out of the underside of the ship, spinning angrily as it turned to face the two assailants.

 
; “Wait,” said one, dropping her gun. “Wait, wait!”

  Nah. “Do it, kid,” he said. “It’s either them or us.”

  With a loud rip-saw of a few hundred rounds being sent downrange, Jasmine and Carolynn got turned to chunky salsa.

  His ears rang and the air smelled of cordite. “Waste of ammunition,” said Reardon, groaning as he grabbed the heavy box’s handle and began dragging it toward the ship. Bullets cost so damn much. He stepped over a body part. “Jesus, did you have to get their bits everywhere?”

  “That was your fault,” said Sammy. “You’re the one who insisted on installing the 75-caliber guns. Those things are designed to shoot, like, tanks. Not people.”

  That was the great thing about guns that worked on tanks. They worked equally well on people. “Why didn’t you shoot ’em earlier?” he asked. “They had guns on me for, like, a minute.”

  “I was taking a dump.”

  “Ah,” said Reardon, “so kind of you to pinch it off just for me. Anyway, if they were stupid enough to try and mug me in full view of my ship—didn’t pay off for the dumb-fuck sisters, that’s for sure—that means that whatever we were delivering was super valuable. Possibly even super duper. I’m sure someone else will be interested in our cargo. Whatever it is.”

  “Yeah,” said Sammy in his ear, his brother’s voice high pitched and nervous. “But we should get off-world. Fast. Firing heavy weapons like this is going to attract a lot of attention. The cops are probably already on their way.”

  “Probably,” agreed Reardon, dragging the heavy box on the pallet jack up to the loading ramp, straining his arms as he pulled it aboard. He’d totally lied to Babe Number One about the pallet jack—it wasn’t motorized and therefore didn’t need a key. Why didn’t they have a robot for this….

  Well, because robots cost money, and I ain’t got none of that.

  Although that wasn’t strictly true. He’d gotten paid for the job and got to keep the merchandise to boot. And now he knew how much it was worth. Time to go get paid … assuming he could find a buyer.

  And what the hell could be in that box that was so damn heavy? Oh well—he’d never know. The supplier was insistent that if he opened it, he not only wouldn’t get paid, but he’d also be hunted down and turned into even chunkier salsa than the dumb-fuck sisters painted all over the deck outside.

  Reardon slammed his fist on the button to raise the ramp. “Sammy, the cargo’s aboard. Get us off-world.”

  “You got it,” said Sammy.

  Reardon took out his earpiece and made his way up to the flight deck. Why did they call it a flight deck? Probably because cockpit sounded funny. He sauntered up to the ladder and put his hand on the first rung.

  The whole ship shook as a massive shockwave passed over it.

  “Sammy?” he asked, then realized he’d taken off his earpiece. Damn it. He climbed up the rungs of the ladder, pushing open the hatchway. Sammy’s wheelchair was parked where the co-pilot’s seat normally was, its occupant staring out the cockpit. “Hey Sammy, what the hell is going—”

  Out the front of the cockpit canopy, the city of New Bristol was on fire.

  “What did you do?” asked Sammy, glancing over his shoulder, his face pale.

  “Me?” Reardon stared at the cityscape as one of the tall buildings—some finance headquarters or something—toppled over, crushing several smaller buildings and sending up a huge cloud of concrete dust that enveloped the streets in brown, billowing clouds.

  “Yes, you!”

  Reardon felt his face go as white as Sammy’s, and slid into the pilot’s seat. “We have to get out of here,” he said, powering on the engines.

  Another building toppled over, as though shaken apart at the foundations. “What the hell is that?” asked Sammy. He pointed up into the sky. “What’s happening?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Reardon, as the engine power built to a high-pitched hum. “This is the perfect distraction for us to get out of here.”

  The Aerostar rose up through the air. Another shockwave raced toward them, engulfing them in a cloud of dust. The ship tumbled, then rightened itself, slowly sinking back down toward the surface of Zenith. Reardon increased the thrust; the ship continued to drop, wobbling in the turbulent air.

  “Why aren’t we gaining altitude?” he asked, opening the throttle to maximum. The ground slowly drifted up toward them as the Aerostar’s engines, at maximum burn, fought to push them away.

  “We are,” said Sammy, pointing at the altimeter with a shaking finger. It showed them at two thousand feet above the ground which was almost within stones-throwing distance. “We’re going up all right … but … the ground is coming up with us.”

  “That’s impossible,” said Reardon, but as he watched, the ground got closer and closer and the altimeter climbed higher and higher. “Nope. Guess it’s really possible. This is happening. Hold on….”

  One of the buildings nearby, the control tower, toppled over. Debris rained all around them, plinking off the hull.

  Sammy flailed around. “Do something, Harry!”

  He wasn’t sure what more he could do. Except….

  No. It was too dangerous.

  But then again, what was the purpose of having an emergency anti-matter engine booster if he never used it when he needed it? The ground was coming up awfully quick, and if he did nothing, they would definitely die.

  With a soft groan Harry reached over to the switches to his left and turned the knob labelled Do Not Ever Turn. The emergency booster-thruster. His own, personal addition. A micro-pellet of anti-matter that, injected into the reaction stream, would essentially quadruple the engine power for several seconds. Or was it a factor of forty? He could never remember.

  The Aerostar shook angrily as the reactor pumped the surge of power into the engines, thrusters moving beyond normal—safe—levels of thrust into the wildly unsafe. The altimeter spun angrily as he continued to climb, and finally, the crust of Zenith beneath began to fall away, breaking up and tumbling in pieces as it did so.

  The thruster burned out, and the ship continued to climb up into the atmosphere. He maneuvered the external cameras to see the planet’s surface. A section of it had broken into a million pieces, little more than a fragmented debris field.

  “What happened?” asked Sammy, aghast.

  For probably the first time in his life, Harry Reardon had no answer.

  The Aerostar broke the upper atmosphere and crossed the threshold into space. He tilted the ship forward, turning the cockpit toward the planet’s surface.

  A massive explosion had blown a whole continent of Zenith to dust and ashes. The exact nature of the blast eluded him—he wasn’t an explosion-analyst or … whatever you called someone who studied explode-y things … but to his untrained eye it looked like the crust of the planet had been lifted up several miles … and then dropped.

  “Wow.” There wasn’t anything else he could say.

  “Yeah,” said Sammy. “Guess we don’t have to worry about not having take-off clearance.”

  The ship drifted again, giving a view of space, a black blanket full of twinkling white stars.

  “What does the radar show?” asked Reardon, unable to hide a little tremor in his voice.

  Sammy glanced at it, his face ghostly. “There’s … there’s a ship,” he said. “A big one.”

  He aligned an external hull camera toward the contact. It was a giant steel wall, a very regular geometric shape—not cubical, but more like a brick floating in space, with a massive protrusion below it like a jousting knight’s lance. It glowed a fierce, angry red, lines of power running along it, similarly lit up.

  It had to be the military. Chinese, American, it didn’t matter. Could even be one of the smaller space powers. Brazilian, or Indian, or Indonesian. Again, didn’t matter. All governments were different faces of one tyrant … and they all offered the same choice. A hand up your arse, or a boot up the same. But he was nobody’s puppet. Neither was Ne
w London, or Chrysalis.

  Or Zenith. What was left of it. Which, at a glance, didn’t seem to be much. He remembered that last year this planet had figured prominently in the news, but he couldn’t remember for the life of him why.

  “ID on the ship?” asked Reardon, touching his Z-drive engine switch. “If we gotta get out of here in a hurry I wanna know who’s chasing us. The Chinese are faster but the Americans have bigger guns, so, you know.” He diverted extra power away from non-essential systems. “If our Z-space translator fails again, like last time, it’ll be good to know exactly how we’re going to die.”

  “No idea,” said Sammy. “It’s not showing up anything the Aerostar can recognize. Just a bunch of jibberish. Like they scrambled it or something, and we don’t have the key.”

  The ship’s radar wailed at them. Reardon stared at his system in bewilderment.

  “They’re launching fighters,” said Sammy. He snapped his fingers in front of Reardon’s face. “Hey! Bro, they’re launching fighters!”

  How long had he been staring at nothing? “Shit,” he said, flicking the Z-space drive to jump mode, and grabbing the custom joystick that he had labeled, Zoom Zoom Zoom! “Sorry. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  The Z-space drive whined in complaint and, for a moment, he really did think it would fail. He whacked the Z-space control panel with a fist. Then the black sea of regular space faded out around them, a cloud of bright hues enveloping their ship as it moved from real space into the strange, multicolored reality of Z-space, navigating away from Zenith as fast as it could.

  “Well,” said Reardon, slumping back in his seat. “I guess we don’t have to worry about retaliation for taking that cargo. Or legal trouble for killing those two babes.”

  “Guess not,” said Sammy, running his hands through his hair. “Jesus … what was that ship? Did it cause the blast down there on Zenith?”