Battle ARC: ARC Angel Series Book 2 Read online

  Battle ARC

  ARC Angel Book II

  by

  Toby Neighbors

  Battle ARC, ARC Angel book 2

  © 2018, Toby Neighbors

  Published by Mythic Adventure Publishing, LLC

  Idaho, USA

  All Rights Reserved No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any print or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  

  Dedication

  Toby Neighbors Online

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  Books By Toby Neighbors

  Jack & Roxie

  Avondale

  Draggah

  Balestone

  Arcanius

  Avondale V

  Wizard Rising

  Magic Awakening

  Hidden Fire

  Fierce Loyalty

  Crying Havoc

  Evil Tide

  Wizard Falling

  Chaos Descending

  Into Chaos

  Chaos Reigning

  Chaos Raging

  Controlling Chaos

  Killing Chaos

  Lorik

  Lorik the Defender

  Lorik the Protector

  The Vault Of Mysteries

  Lords Of Ascension

  The Elusive Executioner

  Regulators Revealed

  Third Prince

  Royal Destiny

  The Other Side

  The New World

  Zompocalypse Omnibus

  We Are The Wolf

  Welcome To The Wolfpack

  Embracing Oblivion

  Joined In Battle

  The Abyss Of Savagery

  My Lady Sorceress

  The Man With No Hands

  ARC Angel

  Charter

  Dedication

  To the only person who has remained by my side in every battle,

  who has defended me in every circumstance,

  whose love, loyalty, and belief in my ability to do great things

  sustains me daily,

  Sunshine Dreamer Neighbors

  Toby Neighbors Online

  www.TobyNeighbors.com

  www.Facebook.com/TobyNeighborsAuthor

  Instagram @TobyTheWriter

  On Twitter @TobyNeighbors

  Prologue

  Colonial Space Fleet

  Department of the Marine Corps

  Forward Operating Base

  Port Gantry, Hoover District, Neo Terra

  MEMORANDUM FOR FLEET COMMAND STAFF

  SUBJECT: Swarm Casualties/Xynobiological Research

  Concerning the alien species generally referred to as the Swarm, new information on the creatures slain in combat in the mountains south of the FOB has come to light.

  Following the battle in the mountains, many of the alien fallen were left behind and have been collected for further research.

  Two dozen specimens were collected, sealed in bio-containment pods, and set for transport back to the Sol System on board the C.S.F. Minerva.

  Xyno-biological research was begun on Neo Terra, led by Marine Corps personnel, and including colony scientists. Finds thus far are as follows. The Swarm is an omnivore species that consumes all botanical, animal, water, and minerals they come in contact with.

  A. Specimens recovered are being classified as drones with thick cranial shields and burrowing snouts.

  B. The drones are essentially clones. DNA tests show identical results for all specimens collected.

  C. Each drone has two stomachs, one for digesting botanical and animal life. The second seems to be reserved for mineral breakdown and storage. Additional testing is needed to confirm.

  D. Drone excrement samples show the production of a fine powder with differing properties. It is believed that said drones produce usable material, although to what purpose we have not discovered.

  It is the consensus here on Neo Terra, that the Swarm is a Queen led, self-replicating species. Tests are currently being done to discover how the creatures communicate. It is our hope to have usable intelligence to further the war effort shortly.

  Imagery from satellites in orbit around Neo Terra have confirmed alien activity, although we have not been able to track the Swarm. It is further believed that the survivors of the ARC platoon battle in the mountain pass have moved underground to rebuild their numbers. If we are correct, we may expect additional attacks soon and request an increase of troops to reinforce ground operations on Neo Terra.

  1

  Fleet Operations Command Station

  Mars Orbit, Sol System

  The room fell silent as soon as she walked in. The three highest ranking officers in the Colonial Space Fleet stared at Second Lieutenant Angela Murphy as if she were personally responsible for the loss of lives on Neo Terra and not for stopping the rampaging Swarm.

  “Welcome back, Lieutenant,” Colonel Jakobson said, stepping out of the shadows like a ghost. “We’re glad to have you at Fleet Command.”

  “It’s an honor to be here, sir,” Angel said, as she came smartly to attention and saluted.

  “As you were, Lieutenant,” Fleet Admiral Basil Jennings said. “Congratulations on a successful mission.”

  “I wouldn’t call it a success,” Marshal General Allison Sinclare said. The head of the CSF Air Force was a severe woman. Her face was pinched together in what looked to Angel like a perpetual frown. “How many Marines were lost, Commandant, hundreds? And the Swarm wasn’t destroyed, just routed from the battlefield. There are already reports that the aliens are reinforcing, if that’s the right word for what they do.”

  “It was a successful test of the ARC hardware,” Jennings said. “And the lieutenant did an admirable job showing what the ARC suit is capable of.”

  “It’s too little, too late,” Sinclare said, holding up a memo. “The ARC program was somewhat successful in the field, but from the reports we have, Lieutenant Murphy’s platoon was not able to utilize the technology.”

  “That’s a vast overstatement,” Corps Commandant Henrik Fuller declared.

  “The only eyewitness from the battle is in the room. We should hear her out,” Colonel Jakobson said calmly.

  Angel would have been more than happy to disappear into the shadows much like the head of intelligence seemed to do whenever he wasn’t directly addressing the Command Staff. She felt completely out of her depth surrounded by career officers with decades of experience. Angel had only been in the CSF for a couple of months. She had successfully led one missio
n, and had only been forced into action at the last minute by a strange twist of fate. She was proud of what her tiny platoon had accomplished in the mountains on Neo Terra, but she held no illusions of grandeur. She had been smart enough to utilize favorable terrain and attack in a fashion the Swarm had never seen before. The next time she might not be as lucky.

  “He’s right,” Fleet Admiral Jennings said. “Lieutenant, what is your assessment of the enemy?”

  “The Swarm,” Angel said, feeling like she had been asked to give a presentation that she hadn’t prepared for, “is intelligent. They reacted to our attacks, adapting their tactics to stop us once it was obvious we were making an impact on their numbers. I’d say we got lucky. The right terrain, the advantage of surprise, and the remarkable tactical abilities of the ARC suit won the day. But we can’t expect that the Swarm won’t be more prepared for us once we fight them again.”

  “I couldn’t have said it better myself,” Sinclare stated almost triumphantly.

  “You don’t think the ARC suits give us the advantage?” Fuller asked.

  “Yes, they do, but the problem isn’t the suits. It’s our lack of numbers,” Angel said. “There are only five of us now. And we never know where the swarm will attack.”

  Jakobson stepped into the light. “I believe the commanders are interested in your opinion of what you can do in the ARC suit, not the over all need.”

  “Oh,” Angel said. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to overstep.”

  “Not at all, Lieutenant,” Fuller said with a smile, but Sinclare’s frown made Angel feel like a child being scolded.

  “Tell us what you thought of the suit’s capabilities,” Jennings ordered.

  “The ARC suit is amazing,” Angel said. “Not only is it able to move in a remarkable fashion, it allows a person to fight without growing tired for a much longer period of time.”

  “Are we really spending a fortune to keep grunts on their feet longer?” Sinclare asked with dripping sarcasm. “I can do that with a few pills from the med bay.”

  “Let her talk, Marshal,” Fuller demanded. “That’s what she came all this way for.”

  “Can the suits disrupt the Swarm?” Jakobson prompted.

  “Yes,” Angel said. “It was successful disrupting the coordinated movements of the Swarm, which further allowed us to inflict greater damage to the hive. We had some explosive ordinance, but the real damage was done by the six of us.”

  “You and the Special Forces fire team led by Staff Sergeant Cashman?” Fuller asked.

  “That’s correct. We must have killed close to five-hundred of their number.”

  “That’s not what I read in the after operation reports,” Sinclare said.

  “There were less than a hundred dead in the pass after the Swarm fled,” Fleet Admiral Jennings said. “I know this may be a daunting report, lieutenant, but try to give us the facts.”

  “I am sir,” Angel said, feeling a bead of sweat trickle down her back. “We killed more than what was found on the battlefield. Most of the dead were consumed by the aliens.”

  “Consumed?” Jakobson asked, as if he didn’t already know what Angel was talking about.

  “Yes sir. The aliens eat their dead.”

  2

  CSF Emergency Alert Station,

  Close Orbit, Neo Terra, Tau Ceti System

  “Tell me you have something?” Lieutenant Commander Paula Mercer demanded. “This cat-and-mouse game is getting old.”

  “Sorry commander, it was just flora,” said the Petty Officer seated at console where he stared at his monitor. “Must have been waving in the wind.”

  “Where the hell could they be?” Mercer asked hypothetically. “They have to pop up sooner or later.”

  She returned to the report she was typing up. Normally, she dictated reports, letting the computer’s voice recognition software turn her words into neatly formatted memos, but occasionally she liked to practice her typing skills. It was an almost forgotten art form, but Paula Mercer liked to stay connected to the past. She was a career officer, and had spent the better part of her adult life in space, surrounded by the latest technology. Typing a report by hand, sewing ribbons onto her own uniform, and even writing old-fashion letters to her family made her feel a little more human after months inside a space station or on board a CSF vessel.

  Since the battle in the McDuall mountains, the Swarm had consistently avoided detection. The observers in the Emergency Alert Station in orbit around Neo Terra occasionally caught sight of a Swarm build-up, but they had not been able to bombard the aliens with any sort of tracking agent. The elusive creatures fled underground and managed to collapse the tunnels they had burrowed into the planet’s crust, leaving no trace of the aliens on the surface. The great mystery was what the aliens were doing underground. Lieutenant Commander Mercer had no evidence to back up her theory, but she often imagined their underground lairs to be similar to bee hives. She had even done some research on bees — learning about the different types of bees within a hive, how they related to their queen, and how they reproduced. Of course bees weren’t the only animals to reproduce in large-scale numbers. Fish often produced hundreds of eggs at once. Many types scatter their eggs for the males to fertilize later, and Paula Mercer wondered if perhaps that same concept might be true for the Swarm.

  Things got a little tricky when it came to terminology. Most of her fellow officers referred to the leader of the Swarm as the queen, implying a gender that Paula Mercer thought was misleading. In her mind, they Swarm was led by a king, who also moved to various underground hives where he fertilized hundreds, perhaps thousands of pre-laid eggs to build the numbers of the ravenous hive. It was all conjecture since no one had been able to explore the underground colonies, if that was what they truly were. Despite the CSF’s incredible resources, they were essentially fighting blind. Every effort to gain intelligence on their enemy had failed. They only had bodies of the Swarm drones to study, which was helpful, but not as informative as they had hoped. Lieutenant Commander Mercer ranked high enough to have access to the reports coming up from the planet where researchers were dissecting the aliens. The problem was, they were all the same. They had dozens of specimens. But they might as well have had just one.

  Paula finished her report and looked up at the big monitor. The Emergency Alert Station was the central hub of all satellite coverage above Neo Terra. Unlike earth, the colony world had nearly eighty-five percent land mass. Most of Neo Terra’s water was underground, and the planet had volatile weather systems, necessitating an extensive satellite system in orbit above the colony world. The information was monitored by various groups on the ground, but the Emergency Alert Station was staffed by the CSF and monitored the feeds from all the surveillance satellites. The command center was a circular room, with rows of enlisted men and women monitoring various satellites. There were huge view screens above the individual stations, and in the center of the room Lieutenant Commander Paula Mercer had a rotating seat with various controls of the large screens.

  She sat back, rubbing her eyes. The appearance of the Swarm had brought an excitement and sense of importance to her work that hadn’t existed during her long tour as station commander. It also increased the stress she felt. Their job was to monitor and report anything that might concern the colonists on the ground — from weather systems, to strange behavior by the native species. But it was the Swarm that had her full attention. She wanted to eradicate the aliens before they rendered Neo Terra worthless and cost humanity thousands of lives.

  “Commander,” said another of the enlisted personnel, this one to her right, “it looks like we might have something.”

  “Show me!” Mercer ordered.

  “It could be a sandstorm,” the man said, sending the satellite imagery up onto the big screen above his station.

  “Or it could be the Swarm kicking up dust,” Mercer replied, staring at the satellite image.

  “Should we alert the ground forces?”


  “No, not yet,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “Get Commander Beauregard on the Ramses. He’ll need to scramble surveillance craft to get us a closer look.”

  “I’m haling the Ramses now, Commander,” the communications officer replied.

  Paula Mercer wasn’t certain, but she thought that perhaps the tide was turning. They had the Swarm running scared. All they needed was a location and the CSF Marine Corps could move in and finish the job.

  3

  Fleet Operations Command Station

  Mars Orbit, Sol System

  “We’ve seen the video footage,” Marshal General Allison Sinclare said. “What little there was. It was beamed to us as soon as the Minerva dropped out of hyperspace. Your tactics were exemplary, and no one is discounting your courage. But let’s be honest. You managed to detour the Swarm, and nothing more.”

  Angel felt her stomach tighten and a familiar sense of unease settled over her. She had been stabbed in the back by fellow gymnasts over the years — gossiped about by girls she thought were her friends. She’d even had coaches run her down in front of competition judges hoping to ingratiate themselves in the confidence of the decision makers at a meet. It was the ugly side of what Angel thought of as a beautiful sport, but none of it prepared her for the cutthroat environment she found herself in as a CSF officer.

  “What is this, a witch hunt?” Commandant Fuller demanded.

  “No one is pointing fingers,” Fleet Admiral Jennings interjected.

  “But we aren’t sweeping the failure of your ground forces under the rug either,” Sinclare went on. “Despite having overwhelming force, the Marines on the ground failed to inflict significant casualties, and then rushed head-long into a trap that cost the lives of hundreds.”

  “Colonel Hale will be recalled,” Fuller said. “He made an unfortunate mistake, but that doesn’t negate the work of his forces on the ground. They successfully turned the alien Swarm away from the space port.”

  “Look, I’m not here to point fingers,” Sinclare said. “But our job is to make decisions and protect the colonies. Can we honestly say that throwing more Marines at the problem fixed anything.”