Titan (Old Ironsides Book 2) by Dean Crawford Read Free Book Online Page B

the bunk and sat for a moment gazing down a slope to the shore of a limpid lake that perfectly reflected the dawn sky.
    Marshall reached up and felt for the Lucidity Lens , then switched it off. The image of the dawn sky and vast panorama of forests faded slowly away and the interior of his quarters aboard the largest warship in the fleet swam into view. Marshall wasn’t much one for fantasies, but the lens did bring him some measure of comfort when away from home for so long, which he often was. He reflected briefly that he had probably spent at least half of his life on tours of duty, far from Earth and his family. Plenty of criminals had served less time aboard the orbital prisons that drifted in the frigid vacuum of space around Jupiter and Saturn.
    Marshall stood up, the hard–light bunk switching off automatically as he dressed and grabbed a small breakfast of crushed cereal before he washed and prepared himself for another day. At least the current rota had him on “days”, in as much as time counted this far out in the solar system.
    Marshall glanced at himself in a mirror on the wall, which was in fact a sheet of electro–film that flipped his image the right way around so he could see himself as others did. He looked older, the lines in his face more deeply ingrained, the gray hair a little thinner than on his last tour. He reminded himself, as his wife often did, that he had weathered well for a man of one hundred twenty six. She had also reminded him that most commanders of his age would have considered retirement before now, a thought that filled him with a greater horror than confronting an entire fleet of Ayleean warships in nothing but a…
    ‘Good morning!’
    Marshall almost jumped out of his skin as he whirled and saw the glowing holographic form of the ship’s doctor, Schmidt, shimmering before him.
    ‘It’s against protocol to invade the sanctity of the captain’s quarters,’ Marshall growled.
    ‘Unless circumstances dictate that a given situation qualifies as an emergency,’ Schmidt corrected him with an ingratiating smile of neon blue–white teeth.
    ‘What emergency?’ Marshall asked, all his anger instantly forgotten.
    ‘Follow me,’ Schmidt said with a cheerful nod to the door, and then vanished in the blink of an eye.
    Marshall strode through the door of his quarters and out into a corridor where Schmidt was awaiting him. The doctor’s ephemeral nature was one of the many advancements of mankind that Marshall felt uncomfortable with, many people no longer entirely human and, in the case of Schmidt and his kind, both alive and dead at the same time: a Holo sapiens .
    ‘Long range sensors have detected a high–priority transmission coming from the Ayleean system,’ Schmidt explained as he walked alongside Marshall. ‘The transmission is garbled and broken, but it doesn’t look good.’
    ‘For us or for them?’
    ‘Both,’ Schmidt replied, all pretense of humor gone. ‘Our communications team are trying to decode the message and extract some kind of meaning to it.’
    ‘What’s the emergency in all of this?’ Marshall asked.
    ‘It was a distress signal.’
    Marshall stopped dead in his tracks in the ship’s corridor and stared at Schmidt. ‘The Ayleeans sent us a distress signal?’
    The last encounter that mankind had had with the Ayleeans had been a protracted battle that had nearly cost the lives of everybody aboard Titan and the orbital city of New Washington, when the Ayleeans had attempted to breach the solar system and attack Earth.
    Marshall had fought the Ayleeans in two wars, from both of which the CSS had emerged victorious. The species were in fact human, but only partially so. Three hundred years before the Earth had succumbed to a plague known as The Falling that had taken the lives of some five billion souls and rendered society utterly broken. The land had been given over to both nature and to gangs of brigands and thugs who had roamed the wilderness and