Backlash Rising Read online

  Backlash Rising

  The Star Guild Saga™ Book Two

  Brandon Ellis

  This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.

  Copyright © 2020 (as revised) Brandon Ellis

  Cover Art by Jake @ J Caleb Design

  http://jcalebdesign.com / [email protected]

  Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing

  LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  LMBPN Publishing

  PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy

  Las Vegas, NV 89109

  First US edition, May 2020

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-64202-939-0

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-64202-940-6

  Contents

  The Backlash Rising Team

  Prologue

  1. Ali

  2. Koda

  3. Ali

  4. Shae

  5. Diana

  6. Eden

  7. Zim

  8. Shae

  9. Ali

  10. Koda

  11. Ali

  12. Ali

  13. Koda

  14. Koda

  15. Zim

  16. Koda

  17. Shae

  18. Ali

  19. Eden

  20. Ali

  21. Eden

  22. Ali

  23. Koda

  24. Shae

  25. Koda

  26. Diana

  27. Eden

  28. Koda

  29. Shae

  30. Diana

  31. Eden

  32. Ali

  33. Shae

  34. Shae

  35. Enlil

  36. Shae

  37. Eden

  38. Ali

  39. Shae

  40. Shae

  41. Ali

  42. Shae

  43. Ali

  44. Eden

  45. Shae

  46. Eden

  47. Ali

  48. Enlil

  49. Eden

  50. Shae

  51. Eden

  52. Ali

  53. Eden

  54. Ali

  55. Shae

  56. Ali

  57. Enlil

  58. Eden

  59. Shae

  60. Ali

  61. Eden

  62. Shae

  Epilogue

  Author Notes - Brandon Ellis

  Connect with Brandon

  Books by Brandon Ellis

  Other LMBPN Publishing Books

  The Backlash Rising Team

  Thanks to our Beta Team:

  Kelly O’Donnell, John Ashmore, Larry Omans, Rachel Beckford

  Thanks to our JIT Team:

  Peter Manis

  Deb Mader

  Debi Sateren

  Veronica Stephan-Miller

  Kerry Mortimer

  Diane L. Smith

  Paul Westman

  Billie Leigh Kellar

  If I’ve missed anyone, please let me know!

  Editor

  SkyHunter Editing Team

  Prologue

  Shadows stretched across Starship Sirona as the sun descended toward the horizon. On planet Eos, total nightfall never occurred. Strong winds were just as rare.

  Sleuth, Captain Diana’s right-hand man, felt a vibration coming from his HDC. It told him a motion detector had tripped a few kilometers away. He swiped his finger across the holodisplay to bring up the weather.

  He pushed his wide rim glasses up the ridge of his nose and ran his fingers over his balding head. He ran diagnostics and scanned the sensors again. He stiffened, his lips downturned.

  Like he thought, calm weather outside. The wind hadn’t tripped the wire. Unwelcomed guests did, their ship heading toward Sirona.

  “Dammit,” he said under his breath.

  He’d placed detectors in specific locations around the plateau, and he and Diana were the only two who knew of them, for a good reason.

  They were preparing for the Monarch, Enlil. The one who masterminded and organized the attack on Starbase Matrona—where most humans lived and worked. Enlil, the man who used humans as slaves, was headed their way. He had used his own, more advanced fleet, to decimate Star Guild, the human star fleet and military consortium.

  Sleuth stood back from his desk and scanned Tech Quarters, making sure no one had seen his holoscreen.

  He relaxed when no one loomed secretly over his shoulder or sat at a nearby desk, glaring in his direction.

  At the moment, a few techs sat on shift, staring into their holomonitors, diligently trying to figure out what had gone wrong with the ship’s auxiliary engines and the core reactor.

  He could easily see in the eyes of everyone on this ship, they wanted to get this big lug off the ground and into space.

  Hank, the overweight, lazy, annoying, unprofessional holocomp technician, was on shift tonight, but Sleuth didn’t worry about Hank. The guy paid more attention to food than anything else, and he’d never figure out why the engines didn’t fire up and operate.

  Sleuth pushed down a grin, shaking his head as he watched Hank and the other techs study the monitors. No matter how hard they worked, Sleuth wouldn’t allow this ship to fly.

  At least, not yet.

  After landing on Eos, where they now sat at the base of a long plateau, Sleuth had hacked into the ship’s mainframe, masking the auxiliary engines and the core reactor as being damaged. He and Diana blamed the Anunnaki starfighter attacks, their constant missiles and cannon slugs hammering the ship as the culprit. Attacks Diana and Sleuth helped set up with Enlil before the Anunnaki and human war began.

  Sleuth’s hack not only tricked the holocomp system, but it had also duped the techs and engineers, and the nearly ten thousand-strong crew.

  Sleuth understood his genius with holocomps and holonets, but even he impressed himself with how well he’d dug into the system and veiled his handiwork.

  He punched in a command on his HDC, looping still shots on all vidscreens connected to Sirona's outside holocams.

  He let out a breath, again looking around to see if anyone had been spying on him.

  All clear.

  The still cams hid any outside events Sleuth and Diana didn’t want anyone besides themselves to see, like Enlil’s ship coming into view any minute now.

  He ran his finger over an icon and tapped, his finger going through the hologram and pulling up the security systems on the ship. “Disable,” he whispered. He pressed more buttons, overriding security backup systems. He glanced over his shoulder, clearing his throat. “Gentlemen?”

  Hank leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms, his swivel chair dipping back, his hair unkempt, and his beard messy. Bruised shadows surrounded his eyes from his nose’s run-in with Chief Petty Officer Alison Johnson’s fist not too long ago. He cleared his throat. “Yeah, Sleuth?”

  Sleuth calmly nudged his large framed glasses up the ridge of his nose. “It's quiet out there. No Anunnaki detected, so I'm going on a break. Give me thirty minutes.”

  Hank scrunched up his nose. “I get my thirty minutes next.”

  “You've already had a half a dozen breaks, Hank. No more.”

  Hank wiped his nose and shook his head. “Meh, you’re no help
.” He went back to work, dismissing Sleuth with a wave of his hand.

  Sleuth walked out of Tech Quarters and headed toward Captain’s Quarters, hoping Diana would be there, ready and waiting.

  She had slept very little lately. Instead, she paced hallways, going over whatever game plan she and Sleuth came up with on a day-to-day basis. All plans focused on how they could survive this mess, even though Enlil had told them they would.

  Sleuth quickened his pace down a corridor, biting his fingernails as he glared at the gray ceiling and then at the black hand railing that lined the wall.

  Their survival depended on Enlil, and he always gave ample warning before arrival.

  Today, he hadn’t. Which meant Enlil was pissed, and when he was pissed, people died.

  Captain Diana Johnson walked into her quarters. The door automatically shut behind her with a whoosh.

  Much like in the corridors, she paced. This time inside a pitch-black room, the outside ebb armor drawn closed over the windows like the rest of the ship to protect the inhabitants inside. It was all a ruse. The truth was they didn’t need protection. Just as Sleuth understood, she knew all too well Enlil wouldn’t end her crew, her ship, or her life.

  The contract she’d read and signed highlighted that verbiage. She did what Enlil and the contract instructed, even when she continued to sign new contracts full of new orders. She had accomplished all his wishes except his most recent—ending Ali’s life—her fake daughter. She couldn’t pull the trigger. When she had the chance and finally mustered the courage, she failed. Her daughter and her friend, Daf, had then escaped the confines of the ship.

  A tracking device inserted in her daughter years ago had deactivated shortly after she reached Mount Gabriel. Neither Sleuth nor Enlil’s people could figure out why.

  Which was why Diana paced the hallways for hours, and she continued to pace now, pulling her graying hair, and trying to stop the hundreds of thoughts racing through her mind. Ali had slipped through the cracks, and Enlil wouldn’t be happy.

  Diana yawned, staring into the darkness that saturated her quarters. She didn’t want to turn on the lights and see her traitorous eyes in the mirror. She knew her quarters like the back of her hand, and in the pitch dark, walked to her desk. There she sat, a memory of Ali slowly surfacing like a bubble rising and bursting from a thick, hot tar pit.

  It had been the first time they met, the day after the Anunnaki wiped Ali’s mind and loaded her with new, false memories, just three days after they kidnapped her from Earth.

  They sat inside Diana’s home on Starbase Matrona, Sphere One, Officer’s District.

  Ali hunkered uncomfortably on a chair at Diana’s dining room table and rubbed her eyes. “Mom, I have a headache, and I’ve been vomiting all morning.” She lifted her head, squinting. “Why am I at your house? Did I get drunk last night and stumble here? I did, didn’t I.”

  Diana never had a child. She didn’t know what to say or do, so she rushed to Ali’s side and rubbed her back. She wondered if that’s what a loving, attentive mother did. A nearly absent mother raised Diana, so she figured doing the opposite of her own mom sufficed.

  She didn’t want to piss off Enlil either, who threw his little experiment—Ali—into her lap. He told Diana to lead the young woman to military life to see what might happen.

  “She’s of mixed blood,” he said. “I found her and want to test her. I like games, and this might be a good one for us to experiment with.”

  Diana shook her head at the recollection. She rested her elbows on her desk, slumping her chin in her palms. Why did I align with Enlil? She’d pondered this for countless hours on countless occasions, and always came up with the same conclusion. Enlil forced her to comply. He never came out and said what he more or less insinuated, “I’ll spare your life and your crew’s life if you betray your race for me.”

  She ran the mixed-blood thing over in her mind. Why were mixed-bloods so important? She never got the answer from Enlil, though she once asked if there were more on Starbase Matrona or in Star Guild. He just gave a nod.

  At the time she asked, they were in a secret underground room on Starbase Matrona, in a meeting suite to speak about the plan. It was a place only privileged Anunnaki gathered, like Enlil and the Prime Directors, unbeknownst to humans. They had ushered her into the club for her undying loyalty to the Monarch, the only human to ever enter.

  Enlil stared into Diana’s eyes as if telling her never to ask that question again. “Very, very few mixed-bloods,” he said. “And like the contract and the plan, this is between you and me.”

  Diana stood at her desk, thinking of turning on the lights to see her quarters, her potted plants, her beautiful paintings on her walls. She shook her head and sat back down and leaned against her backrest.

  She stared at the blackness, recalling the first time she met Ali.

  Ali stood from the dining table, her legs wobbly. Diana held on to her to help her balance.

  “Thank Guild dad isn’t alive,” said Ali. “He’d probably beat me over the head with a frying pan for drinking so much. You know, mad for being left out.”

  Diana had never married, but apparently Enlil gave Ali memories of a father, Diana’s now fake and dead husband. “He would have been proud of you, dear.” She didn’t know what else to say. Did widowed wives say such things to their children?

  Ali shot her a look. “He hated me with every cell in his body. You know that.” She furrowed her brow. “What are you talking about?”

  Diana remembered backing away, her hands up, apologizing.

  She sighed, coming back to the present, wishing that day never happened, and that Ali, the bullheaded, independent nuisance had never entered her life. “Lights on.”

  The quarters illuminated, and she glanced at the panel beside the door. “Door, lock and unlock on my command only.” A beep confirmed her order.

  She leaned forward and pulled a key from her pocket. A glimmer of light reflected off the key as she slid it into a desk drawer’s keyhole. She turned it and pulled the drawer open.

  Inside rested a single item—a holopad full of Robert Rose's art, put together by the artist himself. It was Diana's most prized possession. Not because of the beauty held within it, but because of what she believed acted as its purpose.

  She supposed Robert knew the reasons he drew and painted these images. She’d crap her pants if she learned anyone else had caught on, too.

  She placed the holopad on her desk and turned it on. A hologram of a book floated above the holodisplay. She flipped the pages by swiping her finger over each holographic page, stopping when she saw a gorgeous blue planet.

  She slid open another desk drawer and grabbed a magnifying glass. She placed it over the upper portion of the planet, and in tiny letters, Robert had etched the word Earth. To the naked eye, the word looked like part of the landscape.

  She’d never visited Earth, but in her conversations with Enlil, that’s where her race originated. It was where Ali had come from—the most recent human taken from that planet.

  Turning the page, she paused. Starbase Matrona. An image of the starbase’s construction came to the forefront with massive assembly ships surrounding it, and a large golden planet in the background, planet Eos. “Building the starbase probably took years,” she said to herself.

  Robert Rose’s paintings took a life of their own and were breathtaking. Hence, why the man became the most famous artist in the history of Matrona. Too bad he hid in secret.

  She turned the pages until she came to a painting rendering a plateau with a vast ridge. An erupting star hovered at the base, looking like a tiny supernova.

  She pressed her thumb against her teeth. How can a star explode on a planet? Is it even a star?

  Experts had interpreted all of Robert’s art, but never decoded the author's mind or his prophetic style. They spoke about his exquisite brush strokes, his perfect symmetry, his ability to capture a feeling. They didn’t see his futurist eye
, or his ability to forecast potential future events. The experts more or less discounted his foretellings.

  None of them saw what she had always seen, a pattern to every piece of Robert's work. He painted the past and painted possibilities of future outcomes, a history book combined with prophecy.

  She flipped the page, then quickly flipped back. She couldn't help it. No matter how many times she told herself that was just a piece of art, she thought the painting with the supernova depicted a future event on planet Eos.

  And the ridge?

  She tapped her teeth again and shook her head. “It has to be the plateau’s ridge I’ve parked Starship Sirona next to.” She bit her lower lip and scratched her chin. She paused, staring at the image. She huffed. “The exploding star has to be Sirona.”

  A Robert Rose prediction.

  But it couldn’t be Sirona. She’d signed a contract with Enlil. Her ship, her people, and most importantly, herself, would be safe.