Mozari Arrival Read online

  Hammond’s Hardcases

  Mozari Arrival

  Trojan Colony

  Gateway War

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  RELAY PUBLISHING EDITION, MAY 2019

  Copyright © 2019 Relay Publishing Ltd.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United Kingdom by Relay Publishing. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Jack Colrain is a pen name created by Relay Publishing for co-authored Military Science Fiction projects. Relay Publishing works with incredible teams of writers and editors to collaboratively create the very best stories for our readers.

  www.relaypub.com

  Blurb

  They brought death and destruction to Earth. Now it’s time to return the favor.

  The massive Mozari spaceship struck without warning. In an instant major cities were leveled. Millions were wiped from the face of the Earth. The horrifying message to those remaining—your training starts now.

  Pods scattered across the globe are filled with strange, alien wares and scientists of all backgrounds must come together to harness the advanced technology in a race to discover its secrets before the one-year deadline.

  And before their experiments with the exo suits kill another soldier.

  Few possess the rare antibodies needed to control the Mozari armor. But Daniel West soon discovers he’s one of the civilians selected to be fitted and trained to use the suit. Instead of following in his family’s footsteps, he joins the military and is assigned to a team on a mission to the Mozari ship. But when tragedy strikes his team, he must take command of a mission into enemy territory that promises nothing less than certain death.

  What they discover on the ship changes everything.

  Contents

  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

  Epilogue

  End of Mozari Arrival

  About Jack Colrain

  Sneak Peek: Trojan Colony

  Also by Jack Colrain

  One

  Greenwich, CT

  Distant voices echoed from a long way away, from somewhere in the depths of darkness. But light followed, along with the scents of stale sweat and staler beer.

  Rough gray breeze-blocks, cut by a scar of golden March sunlight from on high, greeted Daniel West as he opened his eyes. Blood thumping dully behind his ears, he rolled with a groan into a sitting position on the edge of the metal cot. His shoes sat on the cement floor next to him. He coughed, wincing at the taste in his mouth, and stretched. His shoulders popped, stiff and painful. He wondered if his tongue was as furry as it felt.

  “You awake, Wild?” a voice called from outside the cell door, “or coughing in your sleep? We might need your room for some real criminals later.”

  The door opened, revealing a uniformed policeman of similar build to Daniel, fit, but with paler skin and a small trimmed beard. A reassuring tall and solid presence that had stood by Daniel on quite a few high school sports fields.

  Daniel smiled. “Cody Walker, as I live and breathe; we must stop meeting like this.”

  “That’s probably not a bad idea. Do you have any concept of how much paperwork you could cause me? And you know how much I hate paperwork.”

  Daniel pulled his shoes back on, and then stepped out of the cell. “If you didn’t like paperwork, you wouldn’t have become a cop, surely?”

  “If I did like paperwork, I’d have gone to Yale and been your roomie in law school. Come on, let’s get you back home.”

  “Sounds good.”

  Cody led him out of the drunk tank, towards a flight of stairs leading up. Daniel could hear voices from above—both the variable tones of actual conversations, and the slightly too-loud voices that either suggested an elementary school teacher talking to a class or a TV host.

  It turned out to be the latter: some of those voices were coming from a TV on the ground floor. He recognized the breakfast news anchors and one of the roaming overseas correspondents, who he couldn’t put a name to. He only caught half the actual words, but they seemed to be discussing something about an upcoming Presidential briefing on something overseas. Passing a restroom door, Daniel halted. “Hold up, Cody. Mind if I stop off and clean up?”

  “Why should I mind? I should have thought of insisting upon it.” Magnanimously, he held the door open. The voices muted as Daniel pushed through into the restroom and went to a sink. He splashed some water on his face and cleaned his teeth as best he could with a wet finger in hopes of spitting out some of the stale paste that coated his tongue.

  The face looking back from the mirror was unshaven, good-looking, he thought, with a Mediterranean tone dusted in patchy stubble. The lines under the green eyes were deeper than a regularly sober man’s would have been at his age, and he was surprised that the brown hair could look so messy when it was so short. The man in the mirror also looked a lot more athletic and fit than Daniel felt, and a lot less slumping and aching. At least the guy seemed to have good dress sense.

  The Greenwich Police Department’s ground floor was much like any business office, with two walls that held large Armorglass windows looking out onto the concrete-slabbed plaza that was Bruce Place, in the downtown area of the city. A firearms locker was against a third wall, a private interrogation room and more serious cells through a door in the other. A few waist-high cubicle dividers separated out four desks, and few of the faces there were strangers.

  Apart from himself, he saw only the officers, the civilian clerk, and a janitor. Officer Gabriel, whom Daniel knew was still nursing a busted knee, was at the switchboard, but his attention—like that of Officers Santos and Ryan, and the burly Detective Hansen—was on the big flat-screen mounted in the corner. Daniel wondered for a moment what was so interesting, but doubted it was going to be as important as getting this over and done with. It looked to be a stock market tracker on the screen. More immediately, he knew Cody would have his personal effects safe, and the paperwork for the Public Intoxication ticket filled out, same as every other time he hadn’t been able to walk home in a straight line.

  “You see this?” Cody asked, picking up the citation from his desk.

  “It looks like paper,” Daniel admitted.

  “You’re half right. It’s paper-work. You know what I’m thinking?”

  Daniel shrugged. “That you hate it.”

  “That’s more just a basic fact, Wild. Right now, I’m thinking that next time this happens, I may just drop you off in an empty freight car heading up to Canada. When the Mounties up in fair Canuckistan find you sleeping off your trip with no passport, then you’ll get to do a lot of paperwork. And
the Mounties get some, too...” Cody trailed off, looking over Daniel’s shoulder. Daniel turned to see what he was looking at.

  The TV was covering the US News Network’s Breakfast Briefing, but instead of courthouses or celebrities, the screen was showing something Daniel couldn’t quite make sense of. On the left was a night starscape with something darkening a patch of it, blocking some stars. The familiar blue press briefing room at the White House was on the other side of the screen, with an empty podium and reporters failing to duck far enough out of the shot as they swapped seats. A rolling update slid across the bottom of the screen, but he couldn’t get a clear view of what it said.

  Cody stood up and stepped a little closer to the TV.

  “Hold up and listen, Dan.” Daniel hesitated; Cody had called him by his actual name, which meant he wasn’t bantering.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the Press Secretary began from behind the podium, wasting no time after walking out. “At twenty-one thirty, local time, astronomers and radar specialists from NORAD and several other organizations and countries confirmed the existence—the arrival—of an unknown Near-Earth Object in low orbit over the southern Pacific Ocean. It is much larger than most NEO asteroids, but its orbit is stable, and does not appear to pose any imminent threat to Earth. Further statements will be issued as we learn more.”

  Immediately, the TV speaker was filled with a clamor of questions about the object’s effects on the tide, what it might be made of, where it had come from, and why it hadn’t been detected earlier. One braver journalist stepped toward the podium more directly, risking being ejected for a such a breach of protocol. “Is this a man-made, or, I should say, artificial object?”

  The Press Secretary caught herself before completing a shrug and smiled blandly and professionally. “As yet, Ms. Lance, we have no comment to make on the object’s origin.”

  “Then, is it natural?”

  “As I said, we have no comment as of yet.”

  “Can we take that to mean that you—the government—don’t know either?”

  The Press Secretary’s smile became slightly more frozen. “Studies are continuing, Ms. Lance, but that’s all we can say for now.” She shuffled some papers and nodded. “That’s it for now. We’ll hold another briefing when more information comes in.” She retired behind the curtain as another wave of camera flashes went off. The USNN studio filled the screen again, and a visibly surprised host turned to an elderly guest next to him. “If I can just ask Professor Gray of Princeton’s Astrophysics—”

  Hansen grunted and muted the show. Daniel blinked and looked at Cody. “What was that all about?” he asked at last. “Did someone slip me a roofie last night, and I’m tripping?”

  “If someone did, it was probably a little green man, and he got the rest of us, too.” Cody grinned. “Wouldn’t it be cool if that’s who was coming? If it’s an alien mothership or something, the world changes right now.”

  “Even if it’s natural, it’d be a second moon now...”

  “May as well finish up with this citation so you can get on home.”

  Not wanting to pull his eyes away from the silent TV screen, Daniel asked, “The usual fine?”

  “The usual. No free road trip to Canada. This time.” Cody nodded to the paper and slid it across the desk with a ballpoint pen. While Cody got Daniel’s wallet out of his desk drawer, Daniel signed the form, but then felt his eyes pulled back to the TV screen. A live feed of the object was on now, showing its darkness against the sky. There was a hint of pre-dawn lightness in the sky, which the rolling caption identified as being filmed by an Australian TV station.

  The object was a rough, dark smudge maybe the size of a full moon, but more oval than any natural object in the sky. Another image of it flicked onto the screen, this one captioned as being shot from a US Naval ship. Then there was a shot taken from a passenger jet five miles up in the atmosphere. With this one, whoever had been filming on a phone or a tablet had zoomed in on the object as best they could, and now Daniel could see, despite the blur and motion-shake, that its surface was as rough as it was gray.

  Daniel stood to get a clearer view of the TV over the shoulders of other people watching it. As he watched the silent image, the picture began to change. Something around the bottom edge of the shapeless object began to lighten, then glow. “What the...” As if reacting to his thought, three dull flickers shot out and away from the patch of darkness, and vanished. “Hey, what—”

  Hansen shot in with the remote, bringing on a voice saying “…objects are traveling at hypersonic velocity...” Cody stopped form-filling.

  “Dan, this might be—”

  “NORAD,” the TV voice went on, “has begun tracking three unknown ballistic objects. Analysis of their descent trajectory predicts landfall on the Eastern coast of Australia within minutes. Now, we’ll go live to our Australia correspondent, Kath Garner.”

  Garner was way out of her depth, if Daniel was any judge. She was on the roof of what Daniel assumed was a USNN building, looking to the east with a shaky smile. The camera kept following her gaze, but the evening sky was normal and clear. “We haven’t heard any more about what’s going on than you have,” she was saying, “but as you can tell from the sirens in the streets below, people are... worried. Local authorities are advising all residents and visitors to take tsunami precautions, to go to the strongest structures. We’ll stay out here as long as we—”

  She broke off with a look of wide-eyed horror, and the camera whipped round dizzyingly.

  The sky brightened, as if the sun were flying past in a blinding, blazing light with a slight green tinge, leaving purple streaks on the screen. Buildings in view flared with the amount of light reflecting off them. The TV speakers blared out yells, curses, car horns, and the sound of breaking glass. A thunderclap followed, snapping the screen to static.

  The TV went black for a startling instant before cutting back to the news studio. Daniel felt as if the wind had been knocked from him, even though he wasn’t sure why he felt that. The hosts looked as if they felt the same way, their jaws slack and their eyes darting around for direction from their producers. Daniel remembered feeling winded and seeing casters like this on TV on 9/11, and he felt something sink inside himself now. He suddenly understood something very bad had happened, and his stomach lurched at the thought.

  After a stunned moment, the host spoke uncertainly. “We seem to have lost signal with our affiliate... We’ll try to regain contact as soon as we can, and...” He looked down at the notes on his tablet, visibly disturbed. “We can go to Terry Danvers in Canberra—that’s around two hundred miles from Sydney—who I believe can give us some kind of update on the situation. Terry?”

  “Can you hear me OK?” an American male voice asked.

  “Sure, Terry. You’re coming through loud and clear.”

  “Things are a little... a little crazy here. Much of the Australian internet is down; phone connections to Sydney are down. We have a feed from a traffic chopper over North Canberra, and… oh.” The last sound was small and lost, the sound of a man seeing a knife-hilt sticking out of his own body.

  The chopper’s picture feed was jittery, but showed the neat layout of Canberra’s streets backed in the distance by a low range of khaki hills. Beyond them was a dark and roiling gray and brown ceiling of dust, with thick pillars of clouds holding up the sky. It took a moment for the scale to make sense, but then Daniel saw the true pattern: the thick mushroom cloud, almost blending with two others flanking it.

  Daniel felt behind him for the chair and sat heavily, falling into it. How high must that mushroom cloud be to be seen from two hundred miles away, he wondered, and how big a nuclear blast did it take to make a cloud that high? Cody’s look of cautious wonder had drained from his face. A phone rang, which everyone in the room ignored, and then another, and then all of them were going off. Cody took a deep breath and stood up. “Let’s get you home, West.” He put a hand on Daniel’s elbow, steadyin
g both Daniel and himself as he stood. “While we can. You got transport?”

  “You know I drink and walk; I didn’t bring my SUV.”

  Cody nodded, and handed Daniel his phone and wallet. “Since we had it anyway, I put your cell on charge. You’d best call your dad.”

  Daniel nodded, wishing it would shake this strange world away. “You guys are probably about to get pretty busy.”

  “I think the world’s about to get pretty busy,” Cody said.

  The Pentagon, VA.

  The mushroom cloud over Sydney loomed far larger on projection screens in the Joint Chiefs’ secure Combat Information Center, or C-In-C for short, nestled in the most shock-proof and bomb-proof sub-level of the Pentagon. It was a larger version of the chambers aboard aircraft carriers and other warships, from which battles were controlled and commanded. The Secretary of Defense, Gardner Davies—himself a former four-star general before he’d embarked on a political career—had hustled his way over immediately while the Secret Service moved the President and the rest of his Cabinet away from DC. Sydney might have been at the opposite end of the world, but it had been an object lesson in how cities were vulnerable, whether for deliberate attack or for natural disaster.