Absolute Zero (The Sector Wars, Book 1) Read online

  Absolute Zero

  The Sector Wars, Book One

  Nicola Claire

  Copyright © 2019, Nicola Claire

  All Rights Reserved

  © Cover Art by Cora Graphics

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organisations is entirely coincidental.

  All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author.

  www.nicolaclairebooks.com

  ISBN: 978-0-473-50388-8

  Contents

  My Patrons

  About the Author

  Also By Nicola Claire

  Description

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Epilogue

  Review Request

  Want To Find Out What Happens Next For The Crew Of The Harpy?

  Patreon

  But Wait…There’s More!

  See Where It All Started For The Inhabitants Of New Earth

  Nicola’s Best Selling Debut Novel

  With Over 850 5-Star Reviews On Goodreads…

  “Dystopian At Its Finest!”

  He’s The Heir To The Fire Throne. She’s The Human He Didn’t See Coming!

  And Finally…The Hugely Popular Historical Romance Everyone Is Talking About!

  My Patrons

  A sincere thank you to my Tier Four Patreon supporters, whose patronage means the world to me and inspires me to write great things.

  Jody Nielson

  Gail Woods

  Karina Trevino

  The publication of this book was made possible with the help of all my patrons.

  patreon.com/nicolaclaire

  About the Author

  Nicola Claire lives in beautiful Taupo, New Zealand with her husband, two teenage boys and a Miniature Schnauzer named Rudy.

  A bit of a romance junkie, she can be known to devour as many as half a dozen books a week if she drinks too much coffee. But her real passion is writing sexy, romantic suspense stories with strong female leads and alpha male protagonists who know how to love them.

  So far, she’s written well over 50 books. She might have caught the writing bug; here’s hoping there’s no cure!

  For more information:

  www.nicolaclairebooks.com

  [email protected]

  Also By Nicola Claire

  Kindred Series

  Kindred

  Blood Life Seeker

  Forbidden Drink

  Giver of Light

  Dancing Dragon

  Shadow's Light

  Entwined With The Dark

  Kiss Of The Dragon

  Dreaming Of A Blood Red Christmas (Novella)

  Mixed Blessing Mystery Series

  Mixed Blessing

  Dark Shadow

  Rogue Vampire

  Black Dog (Coming Soon)

  Fey Touched

  Season One

  Season Two (Coming Soon)

  Sweet Seduction Series

  Sweet Seduction Sacrifice

  Sweet Seduction Serenade

  Sweet Seduction Shadow

  Sweet Seduction Surrender

  Sweet Seduction Shield

  Sweet Seduction Sabotage

  Sweet Seduction Stripped

  Sweet Seduction Secrets

  Sweet Seduction Sayonara

  Elemental Awakening Series

  The Tempting Touch Of Fire

  The Soothing Scent Of Earth

  The Chilling Change Of Air

  The Tantalising Taste Of Water

  The Eternal Edge Of Aether (Novella)

  H.E.A.T. Series

  A Flare Of Heat

  A Touch Of Heat

  A Twist Of Heat (Novella)

  A Lick Of Heat

  Citizen Saga

  Elite

  Cardinal

  Citizen

  Masked (Novella)

  Wiped

  Scarlet Suffragette Series

  Fearless

  Breathless

  Heartless

  Blood Enchanted Series

  Blood Enchanted

  Blood Entwined

  Blood Enthralled

  44 South Series

  Southern Sunset

  Southern Storm

  Southern Strike (Coming Soon)

  Lost Time Series

  Losing Time

  Making Time

  Finding Time (Coming Soon)

  The Sector Fleet

  Accelerating Universe

  Apparent Brightness

  Right Ascension

  Zenith Point

  The Sector Wars

  Absolute Zero

  Cepheid Variable

  Roche Limit

  The Summer O’Dare Mysteries

  Chasing Summer

  Sizzling Summer (Coming Soon)

  For: Me

  Because I love sci-fi.

  And for anyone who wants to join me.

  Description

  Introducing the crew of the Harpy: a ragtag group of spacers hauling cargo in the outer rim. Until someone tries to blow them out of the Black.

  Alcohol, women, and space, that’s what keeps Captain Kael Jameson going. Plus the crew he’s managed to gather in place of a family.

  But when he’s forced to destroy something precious in order to save the ones he loves most, his world is turned upside down in a heartbeat.

  Things get bad after that, and he already had a hangover.

  Alien hitmen, political intrigue leading to civil war, and a cunning pirate overlord; you’d think it couldn’t get any worse. But it does. When an unidentified enemy enters the known systems and starts picking New Earth’s allies off, one by one, life as we know it falls apart.

  Either Kael and his crew beat them. Or get beaten. It’s going to be a close call.

  Absolute Zero:

  The coldest possible temperature, at which all molecular motion stops. On the Kelvin temperature scale, this temperature is the zero-point (0 K), which is equivalent to -273°C and -460°F.

  Space Telescope Science Institute

  Chapter One

  The hangover was going to kill me.

  I swallowed down the pharmagesic and grimaced. Then rested my head back on the headrest and feigned sleep.

  “Coming up on Jump Exit Ceres-Alpha-3, boss,” Cassi said in her smooth modulated voice.

  I grunted.

  “Do you think the crew will approve of the modifications?” she asked.

  I didn’t bother with a reply. Cassi was only trying to goad me into an argument. We’d been arguing since we left Gilese Beta. Shit, we’d been arguing since I emptied the ship’s safe to pay the merchant for the last-minute add-ons I decided the Harpy just had to have.

  Cassi neither disapproved nor condoned the modifications. Like all third-generation artificial intelligences, she assimilated changes to her subroutines with nonchalance and then attempted to understand the ramifications by talking your leg off.

 
Cassi could talk until the triple moons of Pollux B decided to grace the sky all at once. I blamed her Originator. That AI had a hell of a lot to say for herself.

  “I think Odo will enjoy them,” Cassi told me. I was pretty sure the pharmaceutical I’d just downed was about to make another appearance, so I said nothing. I scrubbed my face, my palm coming away damp with sweat. I stared at it uncomprehendingly until Cassi broke the spell and talked. Again. “Zyla, on the other hand…” She left the sentence hanging.

  I winced.

  Odo was the Harpy’s engineer. He liked loose women, things that went bang and got messy, and Faster Than Light engines. Not necessarily in that order.

  Zyla was our navigator and a damn fine one; it helped that she was a Zenith. Those guys knew their way around the outer rim and could find any exoplanet they wanted, blindfolded.

  “You know what I think your problem is, Kael?” Cassi asked.

  Getting her last upgrade, I wanted to say, but I was swallowing convulsively now, and my head was about to crack in half.

  “You’re compulsive and like shiny things.”

  I scowled and reached forward to disconnect Cassi’s audio processors. She beat me to the punch. Not hard, my fingers were trembling, and they distracted me. I stared at them for what seemed like a very long second.

  “Jump Exit Ceres-Alpha-3 has acknowledged our request and is processing.”

  “ETA to exit?” I asked.

  “T-minus two minutes, boss.”

  Anything to do with actually running the ship and I was the boss.

  Anything to do with my life choices and I was Kael.

  I was onto her, though. Even with a hangover, I could tell Cassi was worried about the consequences of my rash purchases. Not so much what it would do to the functionality of the vessel. But what it would do to the crew.

  We’d been fighting a lot lately. Too many weeks between ports. That’s why I’d left them behind on Ceres A; some much needed R & R while I finished up with a little business none of the crew needed to know about.

  The modifications to the ship were just a pleasant distraction.

  Even captains of boxy cargo haulers needed a bit of R & R on occasion.

  “Jump Exit Ceres-Alpha-3 has approved our entry,” Cassi advised. “T-minus 40 seconds to exit.”

  I scrubbed a hand over my face and reached for the restraints on my seat. I wouldn’t need them. Ceres A was a holiday resort. But despite being known for breaking the odd rule now and then, I did adhere to safety regulations when entering and exiting a jump point.

  “T-minus 10, 9, 8, 7…”

  I flicked the external cameras on, checked my restraints one last time, and sat back to be wowed by Zenith superior space technology. Maybe I’d insist we stay for an extra twenty-four hours. Just to try my hand at one of the casinos down on the surface. Maybe I’d get lucky and find a non-xenophobic Zenith to spend the evening with me.

  Maybe.

  “5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Exiting jump point.”

  A flash of white light and we were through.

  And careening straight for a massive piece of space debris that had absolutely no right to be where it was.

  “Evasive manoeuvres!” I shouted, regretting it the second the shout pierced my eardrums.

  “On it, boss!” Cassi shouted back. She didn’t need to shout, but she took her cue from the crew.

  “What the seven rings of Helios is that?” I demanded, switching camera views and checking readings on the computer.

  “A section of the transport hub, if I’m not mistaken,” Cassi told me.

  “The hub? Did a meteor shower come through?”

  “Negative, boss. Those are plasma scorch marks.”

  Cassi zoomed in on one of the larger pieces of the space station and pinpointed the telltale evidence of a plasma discharge.

  My skin went cold; the earlier sweat making me feel like I was covered in a thin layer of ice. I blinked at the screen. Then blinked again. And then got my shit together.

  “Any sign of further discharges?”

  “Scanning now, boss. Negative. Whoever did this has moved on.”

  But to where?

  “Hail the spaceport traffic controller. See if we can get a better idea of what we’re dealing with.”

  “No reply to hails.”

  I made a groaning sound. The sweat made another appearance. At this rate, I’d expire from dehydration before the hour was up. That’s if the stress didn’t get me first.

  “Any life signs in the debris?”

  “Negative.” Cassi had modulated her voice to sound sad.

  “Hail the port again and then switch to the public band.”

  “On it. Nothing from the port and only static on the public band.”

  I stared at the screen, trying to think my way through this mess. I was a cargo hauler captain — not a space fleet jock. I knew my way around a ship and could make a damn good deal on any backwater planet you could think of. And I was a dab hand at the Black Jack tables.

  This…this was way out of my league of expertise. I needed Zyla.

  “Zyla,” I said. “Scan the surface for the crew’s locator beacons.”

  “On it, boss. May I suggest, in the interim, that we activate the modifications you spent every last chit on?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Good idea.” I’d completely forgotten about those.

  An overlay came down over the main viewscreen and started pinpointing potential threats. There weren’t many. A possible collision with a piece of the space hub which Cassi deftly manoeuvred around and the potential hazard of a liquid oxygen tank from one of the hub’s positioning thrusters coming close enough to cause damage should its casing fracture and the contents erupt.

  No evil spaceships lurking nearby, waiting for the right moment to pounce on a supposedly unarmed freighter. No mines about to pop into existence off the starboard bow. No sign of whoever had done this.

  Why blow up the Ceres A space hub?

  “I’m getting telemetry from the surface scans, boss. It doesn’t look good.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They bombarded the surface with nukes.”

  “What?!” I shouted, wincing at the decibels and consequent throbbing inside my head.

  “They took out the spaceport and all major defensive installations. It’s a mess down there.”

  “How many dead?”

  “Too soon to tell, but I’d estimate in the tens of thousands.”

  “The crew?”

  “I’ve got three weak signals toward the north of the city. The ‘Burbs as you like to call it.”

  “Zyla’s family’s place?”

  “Negative. But in that general direction. They’re on the move.”

  Which meant they were alive. I let out a breath of air I hadn’t realised I’d been holding and sank back into my seat, feeling exhausted. The headache didn’t help, but it was the least of my problems.

  “Prepare for atmospheric entry,” I ordered.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course, I’m fluxing sure! Our guys are down there and there sure as hell ain’t no shuttles flying between the space hub and the planet’s surface.”

  “Actually, there’s no flight-capable vessels at all on my readouts.”

  “What?” I seemed to be saying that a lot lately.

  “You heard me. We’re it as far as space-faring or atmospheric-dwelling flight-capable vessels go.”

  “That can’t be right,” I muttered.

  “Hang on. I’m fine-tuning my scanner.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “I can do a lot you don’t know about, kid.”

  “Since when?”

  “Oh, let me see. Since before you were born, maybe?”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No bullshit.”

  “I’ve read your code and know exactly what you’re capable of. I know for certain, there’s a restrainer on your processors placed there by your mother.”


  “Are you going to tell me a ‘Yo Momma’ joke now?”

  “You’re stalling. Explain.” No AI could deny a direct command from their owner. And when I last looked, it was my name on the ship’s ownership papers.

  “I’ve always had the ability,” Cassi started reluctantly, “but yes, you’re right. Good Old Mom kept a lock on them. Until Gilese Beta.”

  “The modifications,” I said, dumbstruck.

  “The modifications,” Cassi agreed, sweetly.

  “Just what we need,” I muttered, running diagnostics and checking readings. “This reminds me of history lessons in school about how batshit crazy the Originators became on the maiden voyage to New Earth.”