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    Zero 3.0: Mech. Chronicles, #3
    Zero 3.0: Mech. Chronicles, #3
    Zero 3.0: Mech. Chronicles, #3
    Ebook220 pages2 hours

    Zero 3.0: Mech. Chronicles, #3

    By Adam Moon

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    About this ebook

    With the mechs guarding planet Beetar for a century, they failed to notice new enemies coming for them. One is an advanced alien species from another galaxy and the other is a former ally they thought was long dead.The aliens enigmatically vanish, promising to return to vanquish the mechs once they've properly prepared for battle, but the reprieve is momentary when the newest threat emerges.The man who created them has come back to finish them off once and for all with a small army of his own creation. Can Zero and a handful of rusty old mechs defeat a foe who has been preparing for their demise for a century?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAdam Moon
    Release dateFeb 20, 2015
    ISBN9781501420313
    Zero 3.0: Mech. Chronicles, #3
    Author

    Adam Moon

    Adam Moon was born in California, grew up in Scotland, and currently lives in Wisconsin with his wife and two young sons. His oldest son wants to grow up to be the first American President who is a space-ninja sniper-robot from the future. His youngest son likes to punch things and say bad words. His long suffering wife just wants some peace and quiet for a change. Adam writes science fiction and horror. You can visit his website at: www.moonwrites.com

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      Book preview

      Zero 3.0 - Adam Moon

      Zero 3.0

      (Mech Chronicles, Book #3 – In Peril)

      Adam Moon

      Zero 3.0 copyright © Adam Moon 2014

      All rights reserved

      ––––––––

      If you haven’t read the first two books,

      you can find them here:

      Table of contents:

      Chapter 1 – 126 Years ago, Planet Earth

      Chapter 2 – Present Day: The Destroyer

      Chapter 3 – Warship Orbiting Beetar

      Chapter 4 - Hybrids

      Chapter 5 - Habitable World

      Chapter 6 – Stranded

      Chapter 7 – Mechs to the Rescue

      Chapter 8 - Dosian Armor

      Chapter 9 - Earth

      Chapter 10 - Cogmore

      Chapter 11 - Convergence

      Chapter 12 - Hunting Hybrids

      Chapter 13 - The Reds

      Chapter 14 - Jump

      Chapter 15 - Neo Earth

      Chapter 16 - Earth Attacks

      Chapter 17 - Upstarts

      126 years ago, Planet Earth

      Henshaw had been back home for two years. His sickness had subsided as his senses came back to him. Space had dealt his body a blow it was only just recovering from. Had he known what his fellow Earthlings had in mind for him, he might’ve tried harder to stay with the Destroyer space ship. But that ship had sailed.

      As soon as he was well enough to think and move, the U.S. government compelled him to start reverse engineering some of the tech he’d come into contact with. He had spent years collaborating with the Beetars so he could try and replicate some of that alien technology and he had a false leg built from a piece of Dosian mechanical armor that he could study and copy. But he was in desperate need of a mech. Mechs were about as high tech as anything he’d seen. There were dozens of mechs out in the galaxy, and most of them weren’t currently in use. If he could get his hands on one of those he would have a better starting point. His last demand of the Destroyer was to bring him back a disabled mech to work on.

      Stacey Sullivan, the defacto Captain of the Destroyer, argued against it and refused to be his errand girl.

      Of course, if he could get his hands on that Destroyer, he would be able to study the most advanced technology the galaxy had to offer. It had a propulsion system aided by jump capabilities that defied logic. If he could figure that out, he’d be regarded as a hero among men. The government agreed with him and had tried numerous times to get Stacey to hand over the ship, but she had refused each time. When they threatened to stop sending supplies to her she threatened that she would feed her men elsewhere and humanity would never again see the Destroyer in Earth orbit. She would leave and never come back.

      She wasn’t bluffing so the government relented, if only to buy enough time to figure out how to wrestle the ship away from her. But she was a wily one, so they had their work cut out for them. As a peace offering of sorts, she returned with the disused mech Doctor Henshaw had requested.

      That mech was the key to unlocking technologies the Earth had never seen before and could barely comprehend. The administration provided him with everything he needed to accomplish his goals, except when he requested live human subjects to experiment on, but he found a way around that and got what he needed anyway.

      The government was kind enough to protect him from the wrath of mankind. When word got around that he had once collaborated with the alien Beetars and the people became outraged to the point of violence, the government kept him safe and secure.

      He tinkered away on his inventions but all the while he stoked his own outrage. He had been mistreated by so many. The Beetars had subjected him to their rule, forcing him to kill his fellow man to supply them with the human consciousnesses they needed to pilot their mechs. He freed the last few batches of humans and mechs to help him overthrow their Beetar overlords, and yet, when the time came, they rebelled against him. And now that he was helping humanity back on Earth, they decided he was a pariah, worthy of nothing but their utmost contempt. It was unfair.

      Everyone he helped turned on him.

      With that knowledge, he changed objectives. Rather than create tech for the government, he decided the tech belonged to him, including the human subjects he had enhanced with advanced technology.

      From that moment onwards, he decided he would only work for himself.

      But that changed when his handlers gave him a proposition he couldn’t refuse. They had become increasingly frustrated by their failed attempts to commandeer the Destroyer ship. They wanted that jump tech in the worst way, but Captain Sullivan was now on to them and her trips to Earth had become so sparse they didn’t think she was ever going to return. That was unacceptable, so they tasked Henshaw with retrieving her jump drive at all costs.

      Luckily for them, he had just the plan.

      That was 126 years ago.

      Present Day: The Destroyer

      Captain Scott O’Brien sat in his Captain’s chair heavily. His knees throbbed. Last week was his eighty second birthday. Without cryo-freeze, he would probably only see a few more years before the sands ran out for him, and he had no intention of ever being cryo-frozen again. It hurt like hell.

      He’d worked his way up from lowly janitorial type duties to engineering and then to console operations in the hub. He’d seen every square inch of the ship over the course of his career. He knew it back to front and was possibly the only human alive who understood any of its technology. He was a perfect candidate when the previous Captain passed away. But rule came with a price that he’d grown weary of paying.

      They’d been scouting for new, life harboring worlds, for decades now and all they’d come across were dirtballs, dead and lifeless, or ice sphere’s, that might have harbored life underneath, but not any kind he was interested in meeting.

      His problem was this; he’d taken the Captain’s chair from two people who’d discovered dozens of planets with life, much of it intelligent. So compared to his predecessors, he looked like a buffoon in the eyes of his men. It hardly mattered to them that the two previous Captain’s had been given coordinates to those planets, and hadn’t actually discovered them for themselves, but it mattered to him. If he were a petty man, he’d tell his crew that all the previous Captain’s had accomplished was already mapped out for them by those who’d blazed those trails before them. He was in uncharted territory now. But as each year passed, and each new planet turned out to be a piece of shit unfit for life, his men grew restless, and they blamed him.

      He hated to think poorly of the previous two Captain’s because they were both brilliant. The last Captain only warmed the chair for a month before he died, but he had been with the ship his entire life, working under the Captain that preceded him. Her name was Stacey Sullivan. Captain Sully, as the crew affectionately called her, had lived a unique life. She was the first human to Captain the Destroyer class starship, commandeered from the alien race that had built it. The alien race was called the Beetars. They were impressive but they were power hungry oppressors who had to be stopped.

      Stacey Sullivan, a handful of humans, some giant robots called mechs, and the Cogmore’s banded together and put the Beetars down, taking their Destroyer and their Warship in the process. The Cogmore’s were a strange alien race. They were small, with tentacles for legs and they had just a single eye. But they were ruthless warriors.

      Had Stacey Sullivan failed, he’d be dead along with the rest of the human race. The Beetars had already decimated the Earth as a warning. Had they stood uncontested, they would’ve wiped them out entirely.

      He’d seen the Beetar Warship, his Destroyer’s sister ship, only once before. The mechs were using it in the orbit of planet Beetar to quarantine them. The Beetars had lost the war and as such, they were forever forbidden from space travel, to ensure lasting peace throughout the galaxy.

      If O’Brien had his way, he’d never have to lay eyes on that Warship again. The mechs threatened him and his ship the last time he went there to bring them news of home. The mechs were once humans. But all that was left of them was a mind trapped in a metal body, and their minds were over a hundred years old. O’Brien had wrongly assumed they’d care about how the Earth was faring. When they got too aggressive, he bid them goodbye and left. That was fifty seven years ago.

      No one knew much about the mechs or the Beetars. Their battle happened so long ago and they had both been trapped. The Beetars were trapped on their planet because of the orbiting mechs and the mechs were trapped because they were enforcing the quarantine.

      Captain O’Brien’s was disappointed he’d never once discovered a habitable world but he’d accomplished the single most important thing he ever wanted to achieve and that was staying the hell away from those bloodthirsty mechs.

      When his comm. officer turned and said in a hushed whisper, One of the mechs on the Warship is hailing us, he almost had a heart attack.

      He whispered back, Ignore it. Whatever they want is going to have to wait until I croak. The next Captain can take care of it.

      Yes, sir. But they’re not going to like it.

      How the hell would you know? You’ve never even seen one. I have and I refuse to deal with them again.

      I’ve heard all of the stories. They’re the ultimate war machines and they defeated the apex species of our galaxy.

      If you wanted to know about them, you should have talked to Captain Sully. She saw their good side and their bad side. In fact, even though she’s been dead for sixty years, a copy of her consciousness is running one of those mechs.

      Who’s Captain Sully?

      Oh, for Gods sake. She’s the reason this ship is called the S.S. Sully. The S.S. stood for scout starship. Shut up and deny the hail.

      His comm. officer nodded and reluctantly dismissed the hail. O’Brien could see in his face that he was disappointed. No one alive had laid eyes on the mechs; no one but the withering old man giving the order to ignore them. But he knew it was the right thing to do. Anything coming from the mechs was suspect in his book.

      He didn’t give them a second thought.

      Twenty minutes into his nap his navigation officer nudged him. He sat up straighter in his chair with a start. What’s so important?

      We’re at the next planet.

      So what? What’s the verdict? Is it another fireball or is it too big to harbor life?"

      Neither. Preliminary data suggests it has the right atmosphere for carbon based life as we know it. In fact, it’s about as close to Earth’s atmosphere as we’ve ever seen.

      O’Brien was now sitting up, staring at the monitor. It showed a blue orb. The figures running along the bottom were translated from Beetar to English but that didn’t mean he understood what any of them meant.

      The nav. officer pointed to the bottom of the monitor and explained the numbers. It’s in the goldilocks zone so the weather is temperate. It has a single moon so it’s stable on its axis. Everything we’ve detected so far makes this a true contender for a life harboring planet. Should we go in for a better look?

      Of course, he said, fully aware that the universe wasn’t about to throw him a bone so close to the end of his life. He’d been a failure for ninety nine percent of his life so why would things change now? Despite his misgivings, his heart rate quickened and his forehead misted with sweat. This could be the big one. This could be the very first planet ever discovered by a human being that had the ability to sustain intelligent life. But the stakes were so high now and he just knew there would be some kind of ludicrous curve ball chucked his way to spoil everything. Maybe there was no surface water, or maybe an asteroid had struck millions of years ago, wiping out what life had once been there.

      His comm. officer whispered, The Warship is still hailing us. They’re desperate about something. I opened the link for just a second to find out their coordinates but I killed it before they had a chance to speak.

      Where are they?

      They’re still beside planet Beetar.

      Leave them there to rot and don’t open another link. Now they know where we are too. You’d better hope they don’t come looking for us.

      Yes, sir. Sorry, sir."

      Don’t say another word about mechs or the Warship to me again.

      Yes, sir.

      O’Brien put all thoughts of the mechs from his thoughts. This was too big to let silly distractions upset him.

      He bit his lower lip as they moved in for a look at the blue planet. What they saw brought gasps from everyone in the hub.

      Warship Orbiting Planet Beetar

      Zero tried to hail the Destroyer again. Surely it was still operational. A lot of time had elapsed since the last time he’d seen it but these ships were built to last thousands of years. He needed their help in the worst way.

      The Beetars had warned him long ago that a warrior alien race from another galaxy with jump technology might come to kill them all. He’d ignored their warning as nonsense because there was no evidence that such an alien race even existed, but now, over a hundred years later, he was staring at just such an alien race’s ship. And that big blocky ship was more than they could handle, alone. He had been appointed the leader of the Warship, so he was at his command station. Eve was the only one of them with enough knowledge of the Beetar Warship they were on to operate the controls. She was the brains and the blood of the ship, but at the moment she was indisposed in the turret bubble, firing at the alien ship ineffectively. Ace was with Volts, out in the void of space, trying in vain to pry their way inside the alien ship. Jackson was launching the nukes at the huge ship to no effect.

      The alien ship had initiated an electronic handshake with their ship to exchange languages so they could communicate, but that was only so they could tell them they were about to be slaughtered. Zero was trying to hail them back, but they ignored him.

      They were losing the battle and the alien ship had yet to fire a single shot.

      He tried to hail the Destroyer again, but it ignored him.

      And then one of the guns running along one of the sides of the cube-shaped alien ship jumped to life and fired on them. The light was blinding and the impact rocked the entire Warship.

      Zero didn’t know what to do. The attack was so vicious that he had no answer for it.

      Sirens blared, meaning the hull had been breached somewhere from the shot. He ordered Eve to target that gun with concentrated turret fire and for Jackson to keep his finger on the launch button for the nukes.

      He zoomed in to the last position he knew Ace and Volts had been. On the monitor he saw both of them, prying on the outer shell of the alien ship with all of their might, but they weren’t making any progress. If they could just get inside, they could lay waste to the aliens within but it didn’t look like that was going to happen any time soon. When Volts hovered a foot from the ship and pulled out the sword he’d confiscated from a long dead Beetar Commander and started to hack at the ship, Zero knew they were getting desperate.

      Zero was out of options. He yelled for Eve. "Fly this

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