Counter Strike: The Empire Responds – Military Sci Fi and Space Opera Thriller (Galactic Rebels Book 2) by J.T. Skye

Author:J.T. Skye [Skye, J.T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: anonymous
Published: 2022-02-18T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter nineteen

In the weeks that followed, the newscasts became more confusing. News services countered each other and openly attacked each other at news events. Hoganthan’s on the streets were generally, usually, for the Empire as described within the proposed protocols of the new galactic Alliance.

Houses viciously attacked anyone that supported changing the Empire treaties or supporting the Alliance protocols. Hoganthans are a fierce warrior race, steeped in ancestral heritage of heroism and action. They are not usually passive in response to attacks by others.

Neighborhood skirmishes had deteriorated into all out battles and civil unrest.

Bel, Hutheen and I gathered at the entrance to the small shuttle. We were going over to a very large orbiting Trader's transfer station to pick up a very expensive order of tech that included the partially trained AI core. The station was set in a geosynchronous orbit over Hoganth’s largest ocean and two hundred kilometers from the Western continental coastline.

Three of Petraal’s engineers had been attacked while picking up cases of previously ordered ship tech. They were still recovering from their injuries and I didn’t want to have them go through that again. We knew that roving bands of smugglers and thieves were raiding ported ships and crews. The docks had turned into a melee of crews fighting mercenaries, pirates and vagabonds trying to steal any credits they could.

Food was becoming more scarce, so was also becoming more expensive. Hoganthans on the surface were trying to hide out and so were also buying up and storing foodstuffs making foodbase less available to the station-keeping stations above.

Everyone was looking out for their own interests and trying to steal what they could.

I wanted to make sure our ten million credit investment in the AI didn’t get taken.

So, we went to pick it up, and we dressed the part, looking like a rag-tag group of three lethal mercenaries.

That wasn’t hard to do, we were tired, haggard and had the heavily battle scarred armor to prove it. Hutheen’s was the only armor not heavily scarred and we helped her gently paint it with blacks, grays and browns to mimic damage.

I carefully backed the small shuttle out, rotated it and moved outward toward the distant station.

I watched as we went by the two drones that held the fission weapons… okay, I even held my breath as we flew by.

I contacted the station parking control and was assigned an obscure parking hatch. The crates we were bringing in weren’t that big. The largest one was a meter long, half wide and half tall. There were seven cases in all and some smaller than that. It wasn’t that they were big, or heavy, it was that they were enormously expensive. We’d worked for weeks with the technology company to carefully craft the AI training design algorithm and its seed personality to properly fit our ship, our crew and our mission. We’d paid extra for the secrecy of that. Petraal trusted them and by default, so did we.

What was interesting to me was that the tech company wasn’t on Hoganth.

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