Chapter 1

Something inside Brodie Erikson was restless. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but it felt as if an earthquake was raging in his stomach or some mighty storm was brewing on the horizon. Whatever it might be, it seemed certain to bring dramatic change to his life. Brodie sensed it coming steadily toward him. At first, he’d thought it was related to his pending return home, but now it seemed more substantial than that. He needed to prepare himself, but he didn’t know what to prepare for.

Brodie had been away at Hel Academy, training to be a hersir for the past eight years. At the age of twenty, he would be the youngest to hold the title of Clan Erikson Hersir in the past millennium. In comparison, all his classmates had been fifteen to thirty years older, and more than one had tried to kill him as the only boy among men and women.

Brodie realized some people back on Norse wouldn’t be happy to have someone so young become hersir, commander of all the clan’s troops. So he’d arrived a day early on the last shuttle into the starport in the hope that he would avoid conflict. And, if he were officially installed as hersir, it might help calm the waters.

He’d boarded a small shuttle three days before with the six graduates of this year’s class. Starting as a child in a class of adults, Brodie had worked his butt off to keep up and even advance. The class had started out with eight students. Two of them had tried to end his life, and Brodie had been forced to defend himself with extreme prejudice. Two successive failures had put a stop to the attempts.

That didn’t mean the other five didn’t actively conspire to hold Brodie back. To their dismay, he slowly worked his way up the class ranking until he reached the top of the class come graduation.

It was customary for the academy valedictorian to get the pick of the available postings, and Brodie had been offered two that interested him. The first was to command the King’s Guard on Mulheim. That coveted position would have given him the King’s ear, and he could have turned that into just about anything, including eventually commanding the King’s army.

The other interesting position was second in command of the battleship Thor, one of the crown jewels of the Norsemen’s space force. It had been named after the god of thunder because the massive ship was equipped with a planet-busting weapon.

Brodie had decided against both positions because either of them would make him the envy of — and, in turn, the enemy of — too many others. Instead, he’d decided to pursue the original path he’d set out on: to become hersir of his clan’s forces and eventually the jarl—chieftain—of the clan when his father stepped down.

The shuttle had taken the graduates to a space station, where Brodie had booked passage on a passenger liner to Mulheim. There, he’d found this cargo hauler headed for Norse with available passenger berths.

When he boarded, he was assaulted by the overwhelming smell of lubricants and the whiff of a recent electrical fire. But it didn’t really bother him—he’d been up seventy-two hours straight, so he strapped in and promptly fell asleep.

He jerked awake to the rumble of thrusters reversing, making a throaty, crackling sound as the hauler vibrated, lurched to a stop, and floated down to the tarmac. The viewport slowly cleared of all the dust and steam that had been created by the engines and landing thrusters. Once the tarmac cooled, a chime sounded to let him and his fellow passengers know they could depart safely.

Brodie had traveled with a couple of haggard-looking lumberjacks on leave. The two of them looked hungover and ignored him as they stepped out onto the tarmac. The loggers had a transport waiting for them, as did the flight crew.

Brodie should’ve made arrangements because the place was deserted at that time of night. To make matters worse, it began to rain. Within a few minutes, he was soaked through as he trudged toward town with his travel bag on his back. He’d made it to the gate when he saw a transport speeding down the road toward him at an alarming rate. When it got close, it slowed, then stopped.

“Get in!”

Brodie smiled because that had to be Val. The back door opened, and he threw in his travel bag and slid into the back seat. Up front, Erik smiled at him.

“You grew up,” Erik said.

His two friends hadn’t seen him since they went their separate ways eight years before. Hel Academy had kept Brodie so busy that he’d only managed to sneak out a few messages while training.

“It looks like you both did as well,” Brodie said. “How did you guys know I was here?”

Erik looked like a typical young Norseman with long blond hair falling down his back, a trimmed beard, muscular arms and shoulders, and blue eyes. His arms and shoulders had developed from many hours of wielding an ax.

Even in the modern age of energy and projectile weapons, the Norsemen were known for close-in fighting with handheld bladed weapons. On a ship, it made sense not to use energy or projectile weapons because you might fry something critical or punch a hole through the hull.

Val was the warrior among them. As big as Erik, she had blond hair in two braids that hung down over her chest. She specialized in the shield and spear.

Brodie was the biggest of the three, standing 193 centimeters (six-four), though not as muscular as his friends because he relied on his speed, quickness, and endurance. His weapon of choice was the seax, an oversized Viking knife. While he could use any weapon to great effect, he was a master with his knife.

Val pointed at Erik, who gave him a sly smile.

“I have my ways,” Erik said mysteriously as Val drove into the starport, not toward town.

“Where are we going?”

“We have a surprise for you,” Val said.

In the back of the starport was a storage area for starships, many of them abandoned for salvage. Val pulled up to what looked like an old explorer scout ship that had seen better days.

“What’s this?” Brodie asked.

“We knew you’d need a ship when you came back, so when we returned, Erik emptied your credits, and we bought this. She’s almost ready,” Val said proudly.

Brodie had a momentary twinge when he heard they’d raided his credits, but they’d always been closer than brothers and sister, so he let it go. Val hit a remote, which opened a door and lowered a ramp. The three jumped out of the transport and ran inside to escape the rain.

Explorer scouts’ primary missions were twofold: to gather intel on their enemies and explore unknown star systems. They carried little or no weaponry but were quick, stealthy, and designed to support a crew of nearly a hundred for long hauls.

As he stepped inside the ship, Brodie noted that the interior looked as rough as the exterior, with peeling paint and dingy grime everywhere. He hoped Erik had bought it at a bargain-basement price because, so far, he wasn’t impressed.

They went to the bridge, where Brodie saw the ship’s name on a plaque by the door: Loki’s Mischief. Under that, it said, ‘Captain Erikson.’ A spaceship was like a complex organism, with the nerve center being the bridge. Loki’s Mischief’s bridge was in the center of the ship, behind hardened armor and shielding. This made sense because the ship itself was originally designed to be lightly armored throughout, and the command centers of the early designs of the class had been easily destroyed.

He could instantly tell that Erik and Val had been working on this area because it was clean, and he spotted many upgrades. This gave him hope for the rest of the ship.

Behind the command chair was a meeting table where the crew could access all the ship’s systems while planning missions, looking at three-dimensional star maps, or firing weapons.

Brodie noted that there were only four stations in front of his command chair. There had been eight or ten on the old scout ships, depending on the model.

“Why so few?” Brodie asked.

“Remember the ship designs you sent me?” Erik asked.

Brodie nodded. It was probably considered a serious security breach, but he’d sent his friend copies of a few of the more exotic alien ship designs he’d studied at Hel Academy. They hadn’t explicitly been told the drawings were classified, so Brodie had scanned them and sent them to Erik, who loved stuff like that.

“The Vuln drone ship gave us ideas on how you could pilot this ship with little or no crew. We quickly realized that if we put in standard workstations, they could be switched to handle anything from weapons to navigation by making a selection,” Erik explained.

The Vuln were a long-lived race with a low birthrate, which meant they didn’t have a lot of bodies to run their ships. Life was precious to them, so all the Vuln starfighters were drones.

“Adding a primary AI and multiple sub-AIs made it simple to automate almost everything. In a pinch, the ship could get you to the nearest starport, even if the entire crew was incapacitated,” Val said.