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Rebels

  Ark Worlds Volume 1

  By Richard Alonzo

  Copyright © 2013 Richard Alonzo

  Revised Edition Copyright © 2014 Richard Alonzo

  All Rights Reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organisations, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover Design: SelfPubBookCovers.com/Fantasyart

  “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”

  A popular (yet apt) misquote of Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Chapter 1 Council of War

  Chapter 2 Assault

  Chapter 3 Retribution

  Chapter 4 Evasion

  Chapter 5 Debriefing

  Chapter 6 Safe Haven

  Chapter 7 The Offer

  Chapter 8 Breadcrumbs

  Chapter 9 Upgrades

  Chapter 10 Revelations

  Chapter 11 Virus

  Chapter 12 Memories

  Chapter 13 Reboot

  Chapter 14 Judgment

  Chapter 15 Synchronisation

  Chapter 16 Liberation

  Chapter 17 War Games

  Chapter 18 Chaos Theory

  Chapter 19 Aftermath

  Epilogue

  Exiles Ark Worlds Vol. 2. A Preview

  Prologue

  Chapter 1 Incursion

  About the Author

  Other books by this Author

  Connect with Richard Alonzo

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank my family for their patience and support while writing this novel. My wife Julie, my daughters Toni, Mari, Emma and son Michael for their patience and understanding especially over access to the family computer. I have learnt my lesson and now have a dedicated machine for writing. Especial thanks also goes to my oldest daughter Toni for introducing me to the joys of National Novel Writing Month or nanowrimo for short without which this book would have never seen the light of day. I hope you enjoy it and find the inspiration to realise your own dreams whatever they may be.

  Prologue

  Bryn shivered as he looked out from the cave entrance, set high up in the windswept snow-capped mountains. The lights of the refinery, in the valley below, were barely visible as the howling gale whipped up a frenzied blizzard of newly fallen snow. He wrapped his arms tightly around himself and checked his helmets HUD. Using his neural interface he increased his combat suits thermal output and rebalanced it with its cloaking capabilities, to ensure anyone scanning the mountain range wouldn’t detect any abnormal heat signatures. He cursed under his breath as the power management software kicked in and over-rode the new settings.

  Just then a hooded figure emerged from the quickening gloom, his cloak billowing out behind him as he strode towards Bryn’s hiding place. He gripped Bryn’s shoulder firmly in his right hand, barley slackening his stride, as he passed into the dark cave beyond. As he did do so he opened a direct comm link. “You’ll thank that power management software someday solider it just saved your life.” then he was gone, into the darkness, before Bryn had a chance to respond.

  “But that’s just it I’m not a soldier.” he thought reviewing his suits power levels. “Still he’s right about the software. If it hadn’t kicked in I’d have been running on emergency reserves for the last ninety minutes of my watch.”

  He sighed. It wasn’t like there was an awful lot to watch as the sky darkened and the night closed in around him. It shouldn’t have been like this. This wasn’t the life he’d mapped out for himself when he’d taken the shuttle to Anobar. A newly discovered earth like planet out on the galactic rim. The second coming of mankind they’d called it. A new colony, a new beginning, free from the mistakes of the past. How naïve could they have been?

  The early years had been good. They were too far out, too isolated, to draw much attention from the larger sponsors that dominated so much of the rest of colonised space. But it was only a matter of time before someone staged a hostile takeover. When it had come, it had come suddenly and without warning. A short public service broadcast advising all residents that the Anobar colonies were no longer sponsored by Delware. Who had been subject to a hostile take-over by Malstrom, which now assumed ownership of all its assets. The terms had been simple, all residents had seven days to leave the planet and exit the Anobar system. There was just one catch. Any unauthorised craft attempting to leave the planet’s atmosphere would be shot down and the authorised exit fees required by the spaceport, now under the jurisdiction of heavily armed Malstrom security personnel, were prohibitively expensive.

  The alternative for anyone unwilling or unable to meet the exit fees was a period of indentured servitude to Malstrom to earn your safe passage off planet. Any resistance to optimising planetary productivity would be met with deadly force.

  Most people had lived through it before, some more than once, for many it was the final straw. Too poor to leave, too tired to fight, and unwilling to endure legalised slavery they had simply decided to end it all. He felt tears welling up at the corner of his eyes as he thought of the families he’d known, the people he’d shared his life with, who had simply given up and took their own lives. Others had simply resigned themselves to their fate, asset stripping the planet they'd once called home, to feed the insatiable maw of a faceless corporation. A few had decided to fight. The logic was simple if they could make the planet unproductive and unprofitable enough Malstrom would eventually cut and run, except they hadn’t. Their resistance had been met with overwhelming force, an almost illogical determination to crush the resistance no matter what the cost. In the face of such insurmountable odds the revolt appeared to be over before it had begun, until he'd appeared.

  No one knew where he came from or who he was. All they knew was that one night the hooded stranger had marched straight into the resistance headquarters and told them that what was left of their positions had been compromised by a traitor. He’d even named the traitor, Jasper, a member of their command council’s inner circle. A tense stand-off had followed after he’d disabled the guards Jasper had ordered to subdue him. He’d offered them an escape plan.

  “Let anyone who wants to, leave with him.” Jasper had said dismissively. Claiming the stranger was a spy and anyone who followed him was doomed.

  Bryn was glad he made the right choice that night. The images of fire and destruction raining down on their camp as they’d fled into jungle, drop-ships disgorging heavily armed stormtroopers shooting everything in sight, was etched into his memory. As was the image of Jasper, clad in the jet black armour of Malstrom’s elite forces, publicly executing the survivors in a planet wide public broadcast a few days later.

  Since that night, two years ago, they had inflicted significant losses on Malstrom under the strangers guidance. Targeting key installations, hitting hard and fast before melting away, but it was getting harder all the time. The planet was in total lock down, nothing got in or out unless it was a registered Malstrom vessel. After the first few instances of smuggling at the spaceport it had been purged and was now staffed exclusively by company loyalists. Jasper had personally executed those involved and promised the same fate to anyone who aided them. While offering a large bounty and free passage to a new life elsewhere in the galaxy for information leading to their death or capture.

  They did what they could to help, liberating food and medical supplies for wider distribution, but many were too afraid to take it and fewer still where willing to assist or join them. Jasper’s strategy was brutally simple, e
liminate their support networks by any means necessary, to starve them out and he had what appeared to be the full and unlimited backing of a major galactic enterprise to achieve it. Ranged against him was a ragged guerrilla force of ill-equipped individuals with a mismatched collection of native, captured, scavenged and improvised tech. Yet somehow they survived and occasionally prospered. The stranger always seemed able to come up with a plan that kept them one step ahead.

  Night had fallen and he sat there alone staring into the bleak windswept night with only the snow for company. No, this wasn’t the life he’d planned for himself on Anobar. He'd come here as a geophysicist to help build a new world, but ended up fighting the old one as a reluctant revolutionary. Still at least it was a better life than the one most of the former colonists endured. At least when he did die, he would die a free man, not a slave.