Enemy in the Dark by Jay Allan Read Free Book Online Page A

pause, without mercy. Rykara was a planet scourged by the hell of war.
    Arias Callisto stared at the nightmare laid out before him. He had not expected the enemy to put up such a fight. Rykara had been a divided planet, ruled by a squabbling class of hereditary lords eternally at war with one another. By the standards of a Prime world like Celtiboria, it was a backwater, its strength and technology no match for the invaders.
    Callisto had expected to topple Rykara’s petty fiefdoms and secure the planet in a few weeks. It had been four months now, and despite being reinforced twice, he was still battling his stubborn foes. The light casualties he’d expected had grown into catastrophic losses, and many of his lead units were down to 50 percent strength. His soldiers were the hardest veterans in the Far Stars, forged in the furnace of Celtiboria’s wars—in the endless, brutal battles it had taken to unite that great world. Now they were dying in the thousands, at the hands of an enemy they had expected to sweep away.
    Callisto was shocked by the status of the stalemated campaign—and ashamed. One of Augustin Lucerne’s top commanders, Callisto was a man who had fought for almost thirty years at the great marshal’s side, and his history was one of victory, his sword among the most reliable serving Lucerne.
    Until he arrived on Rykara.
    The lords he’d expected to find fractured and struggling against one another were instead united into a single power bloc, prepared for war and focused as one against the invaders. Their old and unreliable weapons had been replaced with modern arms, equipment, and technology far beyond anything Rykaran industry could produce. Indeed, much of the enemy ordnance was more advanced than the equipment used by the Celtiborians. Clearly, someone had aided the natives and prepared them to face the expeditionary force. He’d wondered at first if it could be the empire, but then he put the thought out of his mind. There had been nothing but ineffectual governors on Galvanus Prime since his grandfather had been a boy. And this was serious intervention, not the passing efforts of some imperial peacock sent to the edge of civilization for not bowinglow enough in the emperor’s presence. Still, he couldn’t think of anyone else it could be . . .
    His soldiers fought on, ignoring their losses and the superior weapons of their enemies. They were Augustin Lucerne’s warriors, the proudest army in the Far Stars. Not many could claim to be their equals. But on Rykara they were outnumbered and dependent on a tenuous supply line stretching back to Celtiboria. When the expected quick victory failed to materialize, the impact of their weak logistics moved from problematic to critical. The longer the battle went on, the worse the situation would become. Celtiborian resources were already stretched thin, supporting wars of liberation—or conquest, depending on point of view—on almost a dozen worlds. Callisto knew time wasn’t his ally, and so he did the only thing he could: he pushed his forces even harder.
    The people of Rykara might not have liked their lords, but the Celtiborians were still the invaders, and the people were too downtrodden and uneducated to understand that Callisto’s soldiers had come not to enslave them but to free them from oppression. And while the Celtiborians had no desire to kill any of the Rykaran peasants, without the ability to convince them they were liberators, they were forced to shoot them down in the thousands.
    Captain Darius ran up the small hill toward Callisto. “Sir, Brigadier Orestes reports his forces have taken Lusania and now occupy the city and its environs. The surviving enemy forces are retreating toward the Olsyrus Mountains in considerable disorder.” The aide’s enthusiasm was tempered, understated. Both of them knew just how many casualties Orestes’s troops had sustained in their