Damage Control (Valiant Knox)

In space, you can’t hide from temptation…

Nicknamed Hardass by the new recruits, Leigh Alphin is captain of the Fighter Force of the battleship
Valiant Knox
. He’s honorable, straightforward, and hard as nails – except for the soft spot he has for a young woman he rescued off a transport under attack. Now that she’s one of his new recruits, it’s imperative he stop thinking about her in
that
way.

Especially now that the Knox has been secretly infiltrated by the enemy.

Mia Wolf’s new commanding officer is icy, no-BS, and completely gorgeous. His glances send heat searing through her. Neither of them can afford to make this mistake, yet desire takes hold, consuming them. For the first time, Leigh’s iron sense of honor falters as his heart fights for love…and against an enemy trying to destroy everything they hold dear.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2015 by Jess Anastasi. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.

Entangled Publishing, LLC

2614 South Timberline Road

Suite 109

Fort Collins, CO 80525

Visit our website at
www.entangledpublishing.com
.

Select Otherworld is an imprint of Entangled Publishing, LLC.

Edited by Robin Haseltine

Cover design by Louisa Maggio

Cover art from iStock

ISBN 978-1-63375-440-9

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition October 2015

For Mario

All the Small Things

Chapter One

Valiant Knox

In Orbit around Ilari, Brannon System

T
he blaring drone of the battle alarm echoed through the gym, drowning out the raucous conversation of soldiers blowing off steam while they worked out.

Leigh returned the bench press to its frame and sat up, whipping his towel from where he’d draped it over his knee, and then swiping the cloth over the sweat running down his face. He wasn’t on duty until oh nine hundred, when a transport of new recruits were due to arrive. But as the CAFF—Captain of the Fighter Force—a call to arms put him on edge like binging on half a dozen double-shot coffees.

He’d worked hard to train his fighter pilots to be the most elite squadron out of all the UEF battleships. He liked to say it was for their benefit, that they’d be more likely to survive out there in the black when they engaged the enemy. But it was just as important for him to know he’d done everything to ensure his pilots made it safely back on deck every day.

“
Attention, all available fighter pilots, report to launch deck immediately. Condition code bravo-one, I repeat, condition code bravo-one
,” the ship-wide PA system chimed.

Oh, shit
. Leigh shot to his feet and sprinted to the locker room, into the chaos of every single other fighter pilot in the gym grabbing their crap and hauling ass to the launch deck. Bravo-one was a critical code, second only to alpha-one, when the ship itself was under attack.

He ran a fresh towel over himself and threw off the sweat-drenched tank top. Grabbing up his flight jacket and shirt, he followed the wave of personnel headed for the alpha level launch deck.

As he stepped out of the transit, his XO, Lieutenant Teresa Brenner, was waiting for him, his helmet and flight gloves in hand.

“What have we got, Bren?” He tugged on the gloves and took his helmet from her as they jogged toward the shiny row of V-29 fighter jets.

“The CSS are closing in on the troop transport crossing from the
Farr Zero
. The shuttle isn’t going to get here before the enemy intercept. We’ve got maybe two minutes before our new recruits get blown out of the galaxy.”

“Frigging underhanded bastards.” He split off from Bren, who went to her own jet, while he scaled the side of his in a few short steps. In a matter of moments, he’d sealed the cockpit and skimmed toward the launch bay, where fighter ships were already streaming out into space like a swarm leaving the nest.

The CSS—Christ’s Sunday Soldiers religious fanatics who’d taken over the Brannon system—had split off from the United Earth Coalition, intent on turning the entire galaxy back into the dark ages of fearing God and shunning all “manifestations of evil,” which they took to be any type of technology.

Funnily enough, that didn’t stop the a-holes from matching them ship for ship and weapon for weapon in the war that had started nearly twenty years ago.

The runway in front of him cleared and he hit the juice, shooting his V-29 multi-atmospheric fighter jet into the black void beyond the battleship. His electromagnetic radar screen flickered to life, marking the positions of all the ships in the game. He set a course for the slow-moving transport, the other jets falling into formation behind him like they’d practiced a million times.

Goddamn
. No way they’d make the transport before the CSS did. It’d be close, but the enemy was going to arrive a split second before them. Enough time to blow the transport out of the sky.

He switched his comms to encompass all the fighter jets on his tail. “Get ready to go in hot, people. The enemy will be engaged by the time we meet them.”

The pilots all confirmed they were weapons-ready. Leigh shifted in his seat, forcing his shoulders down and taking a deep breath, centering himself for the battle to come. It would be chaos; it always was. Weapon’s fire and other jets moving so fast, the mind barely had time to register one before moving on to the next. But, before the storm, he always took a moment of calm to blank his thoughts of everything except his focus on the mission objective: protect the transport and get it onto the
Valiant Knox
in one piece.

A yellow-white flash flared in the distance. The enemy had opened fire on the unarmed transport.

He came up on the scene in another moment, sending a stream of weapon’s fire across the top of the shuttle, toward the half a dozen ragtag CSS ships closing in. A trail of smoky debris streaked out from the left side of the shuttle, which appeared to have trouble maintaining a level trajectory.

Hopefully the transport had only taken superficial damage. The CSS had bombed the main UEF outpost on Ilari a few weeks back. They needed every single one of the recruits on board that shuttle to fill out the decimated ranks.

He swore under his breath and looped in to engage one of the enemy ships, forcing them to break off.

“Bren, take the lead. Harper, Seb, and Lawler, with me. I want an all-points protective formation around that transport.”

Leigh cut his ship out of the fight and took a long sweep around the enemy ships. Bren took his place at the head of the main squadron, covering him and the three guys who’d fallen in behind him.

He came in over top of the transport, slowing his speed to a near crawl to match pace. Harper and Lawler settled in on either side of the ship, while Seb got underneath.

“
Farr Zero
transporter, this is Captain Leigh Alphin escorting you in to landing. Your ship appears to be damaged; do you have a report?”

Radio silence and static met his hail.
Hell
. The damage must have taken out the comm system. Either that or the pilots were compromised. He repeated the call, but got nothing. Cursing under his breath, he shut down the comm and turned his concentration to keeping an eye out for any enemy ships.

Fortunately, Bren and the main squadron had cut the CSS off from pursuit.

With the shuttle puttering along, the trip back to the
Knox
crawled by while he worked up a double sweat under his helmet. A few stray streaks of weapon’s fire came too close for comfort, but they got the transport into the landing bay without any more damage.

He put his ship down, hardly waiting for the engines to go offline before he pushed his way out of the hatch and slid down the side of the jet. He yanked his helmet off and dropped it to the deck, then jerked off his gloves and pulled the tabs open at the neck of his flight jacket for some cool air. Sweat dampened his shirt, making it stick to his chest. Lawler and Seb hurried over to join him, expressions similarly grim.

The shuttle was still maneuvering into place as he and the guys crossed the bay. A couple of deck maintenance personnel had the fire-dousing hoses out, spraying down the left side of the transport with gray foam.

He snagged the attention of some nearby soldiers as he headed for the damaged ship. “Report to the medico responders and prepare for wounded.”

Lawler and Seb hung back while Leigh climbed the short wing to where the maintenance chief had started working to get the hatch open. When the section gave way and lifted, a cloud of thick smoke puffed out.

Not a good sign
.

He went to take a step, pulling his shirt up over his mouth and nose, but someone grabbed his arm. He glanced back to see Lawler holding onto him, a grim expression on his face.

“You can’t go in yet, not until they get the fire under control.”

“I’m not going to stand here and watch these people burn.” He shook off Lawler’s grip as a couple of passengers stumbled out of the hatchway, coughing and gasping. Lawler caught one who almost fell off the edge of the wing, then slung the guy’s arm over his shoulder and helped him down to the deck.

A shout came from the opposite side of the ship. The chief maintenance officer held his comm up to his ear. After a second, he lowered the device again, his face set in tense lines.

“Evac the deck. The fire’s taking hold and the transport’s engine hasn’t fully shut down. The pilots aren’t responding. The flight control team is going to seal the deck and vent the atmosphere to prevent an explosion.”

A shock of disbelief tightened Leigh’s shoulders and upper arms. “And what does the flight control team think is going to happen to all the passengers inside the shuttle when the entire launch bay vents?”

The chief maintenance officer glanced away from the transport, as if he didn’t want to know. With steadily thickening black smoke in the air, people were scrambling to evac.

Were they really going to write off a whole shuttle-load worth of their own people?

“If this transport blows, Captain Alphin, it’ll take the entire upper port side of the
Knox
with it. We’d be crippled and lose a lot more than a hundred or so personnel. Yang cleared the call.”

The officer shook his head, expression grim as he hurried to the edge of the wing and jumped down.

“Wait!” When the other man paused and looked back up at him, Leigh crouched down on the edge of the wing. “If someone shuts down the engine, will that save the need to vent?”

“The scans show the fire’s blocked access to the cockpit. And while we’re standing here yacking, it’s getting closer to the engine. Not to order you, sir, but we need to haul ass off this deck.”

The rest of the launch bay had cleared.

Leigh yanked at the zipper on his flight jacket, pulling it all the way back up to his chin. The material was flame resistant to a point to give pilots a better survival chance at ejecting if their jets caught fire.

“What are you doing?” the chief maintenance officer demanded.

“I’m going to shut down the transport engine. Give me three minutes. If the shuttle isn’t offline by then, vent the deck.”

“Sir! Captain Alphin! You can’t!” the other man called as Leigh strode toward the hatch where black smoke poured out, backlit by the orange flicker of flames.

At the hatchway, he tabbed a three-minute countdown into his watch and leaned into the doorway, groping for the emergency panel. Once he found it, he wrenched it out. The oxygen masks were missing.

Cursing, he reached into the neckline of his jacket and yanked up his T-shirt, which wasn’t going to help much—he’d be lucky to make it to the cockpit. But he had to try.

The
Knox
had to come first, but he was going to do everything in his power to save as many people as possible.

With one last breath of clean air, he plunged into the darkness, mentally mapping the short route to the cockpit. Interior emergency lights flickered intermittently.

He stumbled over a prone form and nearly went down. Stepping carefully over the still figure, he resisted the urge to check for a pulse. With his three minutes ticking away, he didn’t have time to make sure every person he came across was still alive.

Heat pulsed against him in waves, making him feel like he was cooking inside his flight suit. Sweat ran down his face and neck. He coughed, his lungs protesting the fumes, the burning chemicals stripping his throat raw and stealing all the moisture from his mouth.

The front of the ship glowed and flickered with dancing flares of orange, deepening to red and blue. Entry to the cockpit looked impossible.

Goddamn it
. How the hell was he going to get through that to shut down the engines? He dropped from a crouch all the way to his knees, cutting down an aisle away from the cockpit hatchway. Sweat stung his eyes and he blinked, wiping the back of his hand across his face. He checked his watch. Hell, he’d already used half of his three minutes.

Dizziness started messing with his sense of equilibrium, and he grabbed an armrest to keep himself steady. If he couldn’t get into that cockpit in the next minute, he and the rest of the people on this shuttle would suffocate.

He forced himself to shuffle forward, thoughts becoming murky as though the smoke had gotten inside his brain and started clouding his mind. He grasped onto a single thought.

He had to save these people, had to save himself.

His knee knocked something and he dropped to his hands. It was too big for an oxygen tank. Eyes streaming from the smoke and sting of sweat, he brought the cylinder closer to his face to focus on the writing. He couldn’t make anything out except a symbol. It was a discarded, likely empty, tank of dousing foam for small fires.

When he depressed the lever, a jet of gray foam shot out. A spike of hope cut through the thickening murkiness of his mind, and he glanced up at the cockpit. There’d be nowhere near enough foam to clear the doorway. Instead, he held his breath, turned the nozzle, and sprayed the foam over as much of his body as he could.

Only forty seconds left.

This probably wasn’t going to work. No doubt the only thing he’d achieve would be killing himself ten seconds before this bay got vented.

Nonetheless, he forced himself up, heart pounding a hard, uneven rhythm as he dragged back into the center aisle. Bracing, he took one second to tell himself he was crazy, then launched forward, running for the closed hatchway where flames licked over the surface.

With his flight jacket pulled over his hand, he slapped at the emergency manual override. But the hatch only cracked a bit and stopped. He wedged his arms in and braced against the doorway, yelling out in furious pain as the heat of the metal singed through his jacket.

But he ignored the burn and pushed, widening the gap until he could squeeze through. Inside the cockpit, the smoke wasn’t as thick and the air had a weird tang to it. He lurched over to the control panel, forcing his eyes to focus, and hit the emergency engine shut down. The few remaining lights in the cockpit went dark.

Thank God
.

He slapped a hand over the comm.

“This is Captain Alphin.” His voice came out hoarse, and talking sent him into a short coughing fit. But he swallowed down the spasms in his throat by sheer force of will. “Engines shut down. Get the maintenance crew back on deck and put this fire out.
Now
.”

He didn’t wait for confirmation, since the dizziness yanked even harder at him. Bringing a heavy, aching arm up, he grabbed onto the lever for the cockpit’s emergency hatch, popped it free, and gasped as clean air hit his face. He slumped to the floor, chest heaving as he sucked in oxygen. His stomach churned, the fumes making him feel sick.