Best Served Cold

Imagine, if you will:

It all began with a what.

What, as it turned out, was a tiny speck racing through the blackest depths of space, catching the faint and distant light of the Sun as it did so, growing fainter and more distant at each passing second.

The speck was a freight carrier – a loderunner, looking exactly like one of the multitude that traveled between Mars and Earth. This particular one was a brand new ship, which – most unusually – had already been refitted. It had been specially modified – in great haste – to meet the demands and purpose of a new mission, and as a result, most of the ship’s cargo space was now occupied by a passenger compartment and extra fuel cells to allow it to make this extraordinarily long and distant journey to the outer reaches of the solar system. Unmanned probes had gone there before, but probes weren’t ships – they didn’t carry crew… Human beings, in person. Crewed, full–sized Human ships had never ventured this far out before.

As to the why – and there always is a why – it began as a trivial observation. One day a scientist at the UN’s Space Center – a successor to what remained of Earth’s previous multi–national space agencies – had noticed something unusual in a few grainy long–range visuals transmitted by some old American and Japanese space probes out near Pluto. Although at first the images showed only a few shiny specks orbiting the cold little dwarf planet, nobody was confident enough to claim for definite what they were. The Director of the UNSC authorized a larger scale investigation, and more old deep–space probes were traced and rerouted to add their sensors to the pool. The culmination of all these combined long–range scans showed these shiny specks for what they were – ships… and ships not of the Earth. Pluto was the center of a hive of activity – on the surface, they appeared to be building a settlement!

For a large slice of Human history, the question of whether there were aliens in outer space had always been a popular topic of conversation – but even up to that time, aliens were generally regarded to be fictional, curious strangers who sometimes crashed outside small country towns or stopped to molest cattle or abduct a few unlucky people and probe them in interesting ways.

People even speculated that perhaps adorable little green men had been sitting at a restaurant on the Moon, eating Xzdfrisk while watching and laughing at the stupid humans blowing each other up during the recent last global war. But not anymore. That was yesterday. This was today – and things had changed. Not only was there incontrovertible evidence that there was extra–terrestrial life, but that it was setting up camp in their back yard!

It's about revenge.

Getting even. Fighting back. Whatever it’s called, it’s supposed to warrant two graves or at least, that’s how one old saying went usually, in the case of mere mortal Human beings. In the case of the Human race as a whole, it was less about that and more about survival.

Having just survived the Big Nuke twenty years before, a recovering Earth just beginning to reap the rewards of interplanetary colonization was suddenly attacked by an alien race that didn’t communicate, didn’t negotiate and seemed absolutely intent on taking the entire solar system for itself.

The only option the war-weary people of Earth, Mars and Luna had, was to beat their plough-shares back into swords and fight back! In the first six months, the best the fledgling Earth Defense Fleet could manage, was to push the savage Gimp back to the asteroid belt. For four long years since then, it was all they could do to maintain the stalemate, with each side waiting for the other to make a fatal mistake.

Sooner or later the war would end, one way – or the other.

For Alex Nikolls, a pilot fighting in the blackness of space on an almost daily basis, it couldn’t come soon enough!

For Francis Talon Commander In Chief of a strike force intended to bring the aliens to their knees, it was the culmination of a journey of self-glorification and ambition leading all the way back to the L.A. mafia and the killing of Marian Mureau’s parents.

For Marian Mureau, it meant more than just the end of the war – it signified the end of a life-long vendetta!

Book Trailer Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXRjCtWyLMU

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