Prologue

"Shit, goddamn it, mother fucker." and a good dozen other curses in three different languages came spitting from behind Michael's clenched teeth as he fought to gain some semblance of control over his rapidly descending craft.

It was not supposed to have been this hard on this run. He was supposed to be out and back in just four days. Of course he hadn't anticipated running into a battle. Now his main engines were gone, the sensors were offline, and worst of all the inertial dampeners were barely functional. He had to slow the ship down or the impact would surely kill him.

"Easier said than done." he thought as he watched the planets surface getting closer all too quickly.

The ships systems were blaring alarms and warnings at him when he noticed that the atmospheric foils had finally deployed. He didn't know if they were in time as he watched the altimeter plummet past 1000 meters. He pulled up hard and prayed that the wings didn't tear off. The ship slowed rapidly, but he could tell that he was still going to hit very hard. He closed his eyes and braced for the impact. He briefly felt the horrendous jolt before he was knocked unconscious.

Michael Christopher had joined the space forces when he was just out of high school. He initially served on a destroyer for 2 years before he applied for a transfer to the courier service. He had shown a high aptitude in both piloting and navigation and was accepted into that elite group. Courier ships were small and very fast and their pilots got to see a lot more of the galaxy than the average fleet crews. Their job was relaying messages and small cargoes between fleets and distant planets. It was a dangerous job sometimes, and the fact that the little ships carried little in the way of weapons only made the abilities of the pilot that much more important. Courier service pilots were therefore considered some of the best in the vast Terran Protectorate and being accepted to serve in that service was considered a high honor. Michael was trained on one of the larger courier ships with a 3 man crew for 2 years before being given his own one man packet ship. It was usually a lot more boring than exciting as he spent up to 3 weeks at a time between fleets or planets by himself. Overall however he liked his job. The only thing he had to worry about was the off chance of bumping into a pirate ship or a hostile alien species.

The first was rare, although it had happened to him twice in the 2 years he had had his ship. Both times he easily out piloted and outran the brigands. The second he had never had happen. Humans had only encountered two other sentient space faring life forms in the three centuries since they had discovered Faster Than Light or FTL travel. The Oorli were vaguely reptilian and hard to understand. There had been some minor clashes with them early on but for the past 200 years they and humanity had gotten along reasonably well. This was mostly because their atmosphere and temperature requirements meant that the planets the Oorli settled were not suitable for human colonization and vice versa. So there was no real competition between the two races for living space. Therefore they got along, or at least were not antagonistic towards each other.

The Dizyntk on the other hand were suited to very similar environments as humans. Not much was known about the Dizyntk. They were mammalian and almost feline in appearance. Little was known about their social habits. They had only been encountered sixty years ago and relations were quickly strained over claims of ownership of two star systems. This led to a war between the Protectorate and the Dizyntk Imperium. It lasted twelve years before peace negotiations finally brought an end to it. For the past forty years there had been nothing but the occasional small skirmish.

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