Rebel hell hells jesters.., p.1
Rebel Hell (Hell's Jesters, #3), page 1
Rebel Hell
Hell's Jesters, Volume 3
K.J. Coble
Published by Haymore House Publishing, 2020.
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
REBEL HELL
First edition. August 11, 2020.
Copyright © 2020 K.J. Coble.
ISBN: 978-1393572343
Written by K.J. Coble.
Also by K.J. Coble
Hell's Jesters
Hell's Jesters
Cry Havoc
Rebel Hell
Back Into The Fire
Hell or Highwater
Last Call (Coming Soon)
Heroes of the Valley
Defenders of the Valley
Blood in the Valley
Stand in the Valley
Warlock of the Valley
Scourge of the Valley
Curse of the Valley (Coming Soon)
The Quintorius Chronicles
Lord of Exiles
Legion of Exiles
Republic of Exiles
The Vothan Guard
The Tome of Flesh
Crypt of the Violator
The Witch of Vendar
The Witch of Vendar
Hell at the Gates
Twilight in the City of God
Standalone
Magic Fire - Metal Storm
The Shadows of Maunathyrr
Ashes of Freedom
Beyond the Bulwarks
Watch for more at K.J. Coble’s site.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Also By K.J. Coble
Dedication
Part 1 – Miscalculations
Part 2 – Holocaust
Part 3 – Return to Hell
Part 4 – Through the Wilderness
Part 5 – Reckoning
Part 6 – Aftermath
Part 7 – Epilogue
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Further Reading: Back Into The Fire
Also By K.J. Coble
About the Author
For Christine, who is never out of the fight.
Part 1 – Miscalculations
ONE OF THE UNEXPECTED effects of Bradley Boxer’s new, perfected body was that he felt fear again.
In his original, age-ravaged form the main thing had been the itching, the burning of millions of nanobots scrubbing his cells at a molecular level, holding the tide of years at bay. It wasn’t supposed to have been that way, but the Project Fountain people had miscalculated. After a dozen failed interventions, their desperate, final solution had been to harvest his mind from one body and drop it into this one, regrown whole in a vat.
And it had worked.
He was a man again—staring down the yawning chasm of fear.
“How did this happen?” he asked.
The men and women around the conference table glanced at one another. The enormity of what they’d discovered drained color from perfect skin, haughtiness from arrogant eyes. Fear and calculation remained, though, as each weighed the others and all their gazes went to one woman at the far side of the table.
“We think it was when we acquired United Industries,” she replied.
“I don’t understand,” Boxer said, “when we took over UI they were one of top-producing transuranic production firms in the galaxy. They’d held the Fleet supply contracts for twelve years. That was the whole reason for undermining them and then buying them out, Kylie!”
Kylie Jeeter winced as his voice pitched towards anger. Like most of the executives around the table, her money paid to preserve the appearance of a stern forty-something in Nova Terran finery. But terror—and the harsh lighting of the conference room—let real age slip through her façade, fine wrinkles webbing the corner of eyes, a gauntness to her chin, and perhaps the faintest flick of gray at the roots of her stylishly blue hair.
“I-I know,” she sputtered to restart. “We have forensic accounting scouring the holofiles. Nothing came up during the merger. We checked. I was part of the team.”
“I know you were, Kylie.”
The accusation in his words snapped across the table with enough force to visibly shrink her in her seat. “It wasn’t just us,” she rushed to add. “The Fleet Appropriations Committee of the Assembly reviewed everything, because of all the controversy. They found nothing.”
Boxer didn’t quite roll his eyes. “That’s because we paid them not to look too closely.” He sagged back in his seat, a headache settling between his temples. “You were supposed to be certain of this!”
“We were, Brad,” she insisted with a bit of force, some spasm of self-preservation. She looked around the room, at peers already attempting to distance themselves from her. “We all were! Everyone around this table had a hand in this!”
That triggered a babble of protest and feigned outrage around the table. But Boxer held up a hand to silence them. He waited until they’d done so before leaning forward, elbows on the table, and scanned each face. His gaze settled finally on quivering Kylie.
“So, what you’re telling us is that Syntar Fleet Corporation, the largest producer of transuranics in the galaxy, will have exhausted that very product in less than two years?”
She swallowed once. “Eighteen months, likely.”
“Oh, now you’re precise?” Bret Hansen of Supply Chains quipped.
Boxer shot him a venomous look and the man quailed back into his plush seat.
“We might be able to stretch it out another six months,” Kylie said, “if we slow down production.”
“You can’t be serious,” Boxer snorted. “The Alliance is at war. The demand for starship fuel has tripled!”
“We have other acquisitions pending,” the lithe, jet-haired woman to Boxer’s right said to him. Vikki Hellas was one of his most trusted subordinates—and his chief corporate enforcer. “Are there possibilities there?”
“Maybe there’s some short-term infusion.” Hansen sat back up. He affected antiquarian glasses—rumor had it to make him look smarter than he knew he really was. “But most of those firms are minor players and we’ve seen their books.” He shot Kylie a meaningful look. “All suggest upcoming shortages.”
“What about Amalgamated Galactic Holdings?” Vikki asked. “They were a huge player until we snagged the Fleet contracts.”
“They have notably divested themselves of a number of their larger production centers,” Kylie said. She shrugged. “Perhaps they’d gotten wind of this.”
“I’d like to go back to how we didn’t get wind of—”
“Enough,” Boxer growled to head off Hansen’s rant. He glanced at Vikki. “So UI’s five-year projections were a lie—a complete lie. Does the Assembly, the High Council suspect anything?”
Vikki shook her head. “My contacts say the government is completely distracted with the war and their own in-fighting. The Fleet Appropriations Committee isn’t even scheduled to meet again for four months.”
“And the Navy?”
“Similarly distracted by the upcoming offensives,” she replied. “The war is going better for us, but progress is slow. The Admiralty is feeling the pressure.”
“So we have time to sort this out,” Boxer said.
“Time to sort this out?” a new voice wondered from the far side of the table. The speaker was the only executive at the table who allowed his age to show, silvery gray hair and brows furrowed. Tad Olivian had been with Brad since the beginning of his rise, an old, old friend who traded on that to occasional speak truth to his power.
“Brad,” he said gravely and looked around him, “everyone, we’re talking about facing a catastrophic shortage of the fuel that allows hyperspace transit.” He looked back at Boxer, eyes shivering a moment.
“We’re talking about the collapse of the galactic order.”
A chill went through the room, all the arrogance, all the self-importance of Syntar’s leadership shrunken to a hard moment of reality.
“The Alliance is,” Vikki said into the quiet. She turned to Boxer. “But there are other sources.”
Boxer smiled grimly. “The Union.”
“The war,” she said with an eager nod.
A quick flick at the controls on the table before her brought a globular hologram shimmering to life overhead, a monstrous star map of the galaxy. Calling it that was a fallacy, of course. In reality, the star systems known to humanity sprawled across a single arm of the Milky Way. What lie beyond those was anyone’s guess. Further exploration had become the province of the desperate or deranged; the smattering of worlds beyond the Rim. As internal tensions and decadence had settled into the Alliance, curiosity for the greater unknown had withered.
The map showed the greatest of these tensions in contrasting colors above them. Nearly two thirds of the systems remained the cool gray of Alliance-loyal. But the remaining third fluttered into a baleful orange scheme; the worlds of the breakaway Union of Free Stars. Predominantly planets of the Outregion, with smaller populations and looser laws, their untapped natural resources had left them prime for exploitation, particularly where the transuranic ore was found.
And few firms excelled at exploitation more than Syntar.
But the impudent locals had balked at their—admittedly—heavy hand, refused to see the long term, where integration into the gal actic balance of trade would ultimately make them equals to the older, more established planets of the Alliance. Instead, they heard the oily promises of radicals and opportunists who agitated for resistance. That radicalism had led to a break finally, an obscene rebellion against the galactic order—as Tad put it—that had made them.
“It’s possible,” Vikki said, “that UI didn’t so much lie as inflate the anticipated gains from the Outregion market into their domestic yields.” She touched another control and a dusting of the Union orange worlds blinked. “These worlds, in particular, had been in the process of constructing transuranic mines for United when we bought them out—Gallaton, for example.”
A mutter of disgust went through the meeting as Vikki’s control highlighted the world in question. Gallaton felt like where it’d all begun, and where it’d all begun to fall apart. The Hell Jesters’ first large-scale strikes had fallen there, supporting planet-wide riots when Syntar took over UI’s operations. Things had followed what became a predictable pattern after that: civil uprisings, Syntar assets increasingly under attack, and finally rebellion in favor of the Union.
“UI had counted Gallaton’s yields on their financials,” Vikki went on, “but the rest of these worlds, not so much. They made it look like their already extant operations would produce what, instead, would still be coming from future markets.”
“Bait and switch,” Boxer rumbled.
“Exactly.”
“And that’s all well and good that you’ve solved the mystery, Vikki,” Hansen snapped, “except that those worlds have almost all fallen in with the Union. Those markets are closed to us till the war’s won.”
“Which will not finish before our domestics shortages become obvious,” Tad said ominously.
“So it does us little damned good!”
“Calm the hell down, Bret,” Boxer growled.
“Calm down? How do you plan to break this lovely news to the Board, Brad? ‘We were planning on paying out dividends, but we’re bankrupt and all going to prison, instead’?”
“Getting hysterical is helping no one,” Tad shot back.
“And we’re not going to tell the Board,” Boxer added.
Silence went through the conference room as abruptly as a gunshot. All turned towards him with varying degrees of shock and fright.
“We’re not,” he repeated, “no one in this room. Am I quite clear on that?”
Adam’s apples bobbed around the table. Kylie Jeeter looked like she was going to be physically ill and sweat sprouted across Hansen’s ample forehead.
Tad cleared his throat into the sickened quiet. “Ah, how do you plan on handling that, Brad? It may take a year, but these problems will get out.”
“Not if we solve them first.”
“You plan on conjuring a fresh transuranic vein out of thin air?” Hansen sniped.
“No, I plan on taking back what is ours.” He pivoted to Vikki. “I think I know where you were guiding us, earlier, Vik. Why don’t you finish?”
“The Fleet has already overrun a number of Union worlds.” She indicated a few on the star map. “And while no one of these held Syntar operations prior to the conflict, the Navy is poised to reclaim a number of those in the coming weeks. We should be able to restart operations.”
Hansen scanned the planets she’d indicated. “None of those was a major source. And we’d be restarting in the midst of a military occupation—not exactly ideal conditions.”
“More ideal than the alternative,” Boxer said coldly.
“And I get that,” he hurried to reply, “but you’re describing a stopgap, not a solution.”
“Other worlds will fall,” Vikki said. She hesitated before proceeding. “Not all of those will have been markets we’d tapped before.”
“What are you talking about?” Tad asked incredulously.
She glanced slyly at Boxer. “Contacts of ours in the Assembly have let slip certain previously-classified records from the Bureau of Archives. Amongst these was a copy of the old Survey Corps records from the First and Second Diasporas.”
Tad frowned. “Survey Corps records were classified? Why?”
“You’d be surprised.” Vikki manipulated her controls and the star map zoomed in on a single world. “This is Loudon, one of the so-called ‘Core Worlds’ of the Outregion and a major player in the Union’s initial secession.” She touched the controls again and a new set of schematics overlaid the holographic world, indicating forests, seas, agriculture, and— “Transuranic veins,” Vikki said triumphantly. “We rarely see such dense deposits.”
“Look at all of that,” Hansen mused with naked avarice. “Why would they bury such information? They could’ve been a power in the sector!”
“Because they knew what would happen,” Vikki replied. “Loudon was settled by political dissidents, anti-Alliance, anti-urbanization religious nuts. As near as we can tell their founders paid through the nose to have the original Surveys vanish. They even hid it from their own people. Loudon only slowly modernized, and only grudgingly as interstellar trade caught up to them. We have gotten word that they had started mining, quietly, just before the secession.”
“That would definitely put us back on a tenable path,” Tad said. “But how do we get at it? It’s a major Union world.”
“For now,” Boxer put in. “Our informants in the Admiralty have made it clear for some time Loudon is a key target in the Fleet’s upcoming offensive.”
“That’ll be a bloodbath,” Kylie Jeeter gasped. “The Unionists will fight like crazy to defend it.”
“With Fleet Admiral Geiger in command of our forces, I have no doubt,” Boxer replied with a smile. “And considering the Admiral’s friendliness to our firm, I’ve also no doubt we’ll get the access we desire after the planet’s fallen.”
“You’ll squeeze them dry,” Tad said with a kind of horrified wonderment. For all that he sometimes acted as Boxer’s conscience at these meetings he still had his own fortunes to manage.
“It will serve as a new template,” Boxer announced, the fear of before evaporating. “Wherever the Alliance advances, Syntar will follow, and the spoils will be ours.”
He looked around the table, could see the uneasiness, the vague queasiness of men and women who didn’t care for risk. He despised them in those moments, the fools and weaklings. Their fortunes had long insulated them from consequence or the need for action. Boxer suffered from no such failing; had outdistanced all these others to helm the greatest organ of commerce in the galaxy.
He’d not lose his grip now.
“They brought it on themselves,” he said to his subordinates. “No one made them rebel. No one forced them to cast off a hundred and twenty five years of peace and prosperity. This is judgement upon them, for their sins.” Boxer smiled at that last part. He had no religion, save power, but it was a nice touch.
“We will bleed them dry.”
THE TICK OF THE ANTIQUE clock in President Levine’s office became torture as silence stretched in the room.
Grand Admiral Carson Greer, commanding the Fleet of the Union of Free Stars, finally shifted in his chair before Levine’s massive mahogany desk, couldn’t help it. He was a man of action, not the long cerebral moments of his chosen star nation’s executive.
“We’d be abandoning those people,” Ansolm Levine said at last.
“We’re not going to abandon anyone, yet,” Greer replied. “We’ll fight for as long as we can, sir.”
The President offered him a melancholy smile. “Admiral, we wouldn’t be talking about this if you didn’t believe you’d eventually have to retreat.”
“I have to consider every possibility, Mister President. Retreat is one of those. But the Alliance is stretched thin. If we can inflict enough damage, we may be able to force them to recalculate.”
“Geiger is commanding the invasion force,” Levine scoffed, “he’ll never retreat.”
“It’s that recklessness I’m counting on,” Greer replied. “The Alliance already miscalculated by attempting to invest so many of our worlds at once. These slow, grinding sieges require pinching off space lanes and extensive patrols and dozens of ships. There’s been little progress and their people grow impatient. They’d been told it would be over by now.”
