New author and a new series. Reads like it’s going to be pretty good once it got started!
We’re on a small scout ship called the Finality. It’s definitely small since it has a command crew of four and they are on the bridge at their stations. Back in the rear is a squad of soldiers and I think their space is pretty darned cramped by the description of this ship. I’m hoping they don’t have to go out on a lot of long term missions. Their current mission has them scouting a region of space that doesn’t seem to contain much of anything. They don’t like running into anything in the middle of nowhere, but that’s just what’s happening now. An enemy destroyer is just about to drop out of FTL.
The Human Planetary Alliance (HPA) has been engaging the Daklan for a long time. Why isn’t known. All they do know is that the Daklan are advancing faster than humanity and if something does change quickly, the HPA is going to lose this war badly. No one knows who or what the Daklan are. It’s best not to hang around when they show up and now the HPA Finality has a destroyer about to drop right in on them. Captain Carl Recker knew he, his crew and ship were about to be in deep, serious trouble. The small planetoid they were currently orbiting offered no cover and anywhere they did run would be spotted on the destroyers sensors as soon as it came in to real space. Yet, their choices were immediately limited by an FTL Priority 1 message from Admiral Telar.
The message was strange in that Captain Recker wasn’t used to getting mission orders in the middle of his current mission. They usually were told where to go and what to scan and then return with their intel. This time, they were being told to drop everything and head for the fifth planet, Etrol, in this system. There was something there that had somehow shown up on long-range scanner back a HPA HQ. So, as Captain Recker had to go somewhere and fast, he headed towards Etrol hoping the destroyer didn’t catch them leaving the orbit of Sarus-!.
They almost made it free and clear, but no, that destroyer saw them and launched missiles, two of which detonated close enough to the Finality that it broke something. They got a whole of some kind in their rear and it’s leaking particles. Couldn’t be a better way of showing a destroyer where you are and which way you’re going. Still, the Finality was headed away from the destroyer and for Etrol. They managed to get to Etrol via FTL, but that didn’t help their engines much.
Still, they made it to Etrol alive and now they had to find what was so interesting to Admiral Telar. They probably wished they hadn’t. They did find a whole bunch of Daklan and a couple of ships bigger than the destroyer. Now they really had to hid and stay hidden until they could fix somethings and then sneak out when maybe the Daklan though they had been destroyed. And eventually, the Finality did sneak away from Etrol, but they had to push both engines into overdrive to get them into FTL and hopefully arrive somewhere near an HPA base.
That was managed, barely, but at the cost of the Fanilty. The crew couldn’t shut off the engines so they had to be picked up by the base rescue while the Finality was either doomed to blowup on it’s own or be blownup by the HPA engineers. Either way, Captain Recker and his crew were going somewhere else and for another mission.
Admiral Telar had another planet that he wanted reconned. So, Captain Recker and crew set out on another scouting mission with a new ship. Was this going to be the same kind of mission with Daklan enemies chasing them all the time. Or was there actually something else out there that both the HPA and Daklan needed to see. Was there a third entity in this part of space. If so, this would be the first encounter of it’s kind. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be Captain Recker’s last!