Starck's Lament✔️
- Reads 266
- Votes 107
- Parts 17
Complete Thu, Jun 30, 20224h 15m
The twelfth novel in The Shadow Wars.
Eric Starck is a man adrift. After fighting in the Systems Wars that ravaged the galaxy, he's spent the past three years drifting from one job to the next, never quite feeling comfortable. The latest in a long line of jobs is at least seeming like it might be a career he can attach to. Search & Rescue. His job is to fly through the deeper regions of space and offer assistance to any and all who need it.
Everything is about to get thrown out the airlock, however, as he and his crew pick up a seemingly simple distress call from an isolated, asteroid-based service and repair station. The deep space equivalent of a lone truck stop. As they arrive, they find the facility in terrible shape, the inhabitants brutalized, and quickly become trapped in a truly isolated situation with a group of vicious, blood-thirsty alien creatures that seem to want nothing more than to brutally murder them all...
All Rights Reserved
#279
isolation
Join the largest storytelling communityGet personalized story recommendations, save your favourites to your library, and comment and vote to grow your community.
You may also like
Alone?✔️
A companion short story set after Starck's Lament. Jennifer North, after surviving the horror of the zombies and the remnants of Rogue Ops, has signed up with Anomalous Operations. She's been asking to go on a mission, eager to move on and get to work taking on the unnamed horrors that haunt the dark corners of the galaxy. Unfortunately, her first mission hasn't gone so well. Called out to an asteroid-based mining facility to investigate a strange discovery made by the miners, something has gone wrong. She awakens to find the facility vacant, her spine and head hurting, with no idea of what happened. She must unwrap the mystery of what went wrong, all while being hunted by a mysterious entity...Complete
Necropolis 4 - Terminal✔️
The eleventh novel in The Shadow Wars. Two people have just awoken aboard a deep space research vessel. The Cimmerian. Mark Collins and Jennifer North, a technician and security guard respectively, have absolutely no idea why they were apparently captured and stuffed into stasis tubes. But as they begin searching the vessel, which has suffered some kind of catastrophe, they discover that they aren't alone. Something has gone terribly wrong. However, it isn't the damaged state of the vessel or the dwindling reserves of oxygen and power. It's the fact that the dead are coming back to life...Complete
Dead Ice✔️
A companion novella to The Shadow Wars. In the farthest reaches of space lies an isolated mining planet called Dis: on the way to nowhere and in the middle of nowhere, it is of little importance to anyone but those occupying it. In the polar regions of the planet a handful of research and support sites reside, carving out a miserable existence among the frozen wastelands, eternally shrieking winds, and subzero temperatures. Here sits Frost Station. A cobbled-together research outpost that is home to a mere handful of personnel. Two months into a six month haul, these people are all out here for a reason. Some have been exiled, others have imposed their own. For John Marshall, the job is a break from a world he no longer feels capable of coping with. Counting on the bland monotony of boredom and routine to keep his lack of faith in himself at bay, he's happy to deal with the everyday problems of maintaining a distant outpost. But all this comes to a disastrous halt when a ship crashes just outside the base, right about the same time their communications mysteriously fail. As they pull bodies from the wreckage and try to solve the enigma of what happened, it becomes clear that something has gone horribly wrong when the only survivor from the wreck dies, then comes back to life...Complete
Absolute Zero✔️
The fourth novel in The Shadow Wars. Trent Stone and Drake Winters are best friends, brothers-in-arms, and career mercenaries. After a particularly dangerous job, they head to an isolated space station for a bit of rest and relaxation. But their vacation gets cut short as a mysterious man in a business suit and a hulking woman in body armor show up, offering them the job of a lifetime. The pay is incredible. They'll have access to whatever they want: guns, gear, armor. The only catch is that their job will take them, and a team of highly trained mercenaries, to the edge of known space, to a frozen world housing a mysterious research outpost. What will they do when they get there? The man hiring them refuses to say. But something is waiting for them, out there in the darkness, something of ancient, immense power...Complete
Syberian Sunrise✔️
The sixth novel in The Shadow Wars. Enzo Rains could be a poster boy for the average twenty-fourth century mercenary. (If they made such a thing.) He's paranoid, entirely self-reliant, and does everything in his power to earn his next paycheck. His morals are slim at best and he's survived things that he shouldn't have. So imagine his surprise, (or lack thereof given his grim views on things like security and trust), when Enzo wakes up naked on a pile of corpses deep in the bowels of an unknown, highly technological research complex where an experiment has gone horribly wrong. Forced to rely on a meager inventory of supplies he can scrounge up from whatever dead bodies he encounters and a handful of survivors scattered throughout the facility, Enzo must fight his way through this godforsaken nightmare of a situation. Unfortunately, the damaged facility, the twisted mutations that stalk the corridors, and what's left of the security forces that once ran the place aren't going to make it easy...Complete
Into the Void✔️
The fourteenth novel in The Shadow Wars. Colonies are being attacked along the Far Reach. Hundreds of people have been murdered. Very little information has been gathered on those responsible, but what is known so far is chilling. They are monstrous men and women who have been heavily modified by technology, gruesomely grafted directly into their flesh. They know no fear, no mercy, no pity. They cannot be threatened, bribed, or reasoned with. Anomalous Operations has been trying to deal with them for weeks now, attempting to discover where it is they are hiding, who they are, and how to stop them. Finally, a break in the case comes. The secret location of their headquarters is discovered. Allan Gray and Callie Ward, along with a squad of veteran soldiers, are dispatched beyond the Far Reach to put these techno-terrorists down for good. But something is waiting for them in the darkness, something of immense power and cold, calculating evil...Complete
Necropolis 3 - Annihilation✔️
The third novel in The Shadow Wars. First, he awoke on a rainy little wasteland of a planet called Dis. His memories were gone and there were zombies everywhere... Then, he was kidnapped and experimented on by Dark Ops, the shady government branch sent to take advantage of the virus loosed on Dis that turned everyone it touched into ever-evolving undead horrors... Now, on a desolate lunar mining colony, racing against a timeline unlike any other, Greg Bishop and a handful of survivors must do whatever it takes to escape the system before the local star explodes. Undead horrors, cybernetic nightmares, and an army of soulless men in black armor are all out for his blood...Complete
Rogue Ops Rising✔️
The ninth novel in The Shadow Wars. Part of the mystery surrounding Rogue Operations, the name given to a top-secret faction of the Galactic Alliance gone renegade, has been peeled away. Thanks to the efforts of an unlikely band of mercenaries and soldiers, a crucial piece of the puzzle has been revealed: Rogue Ops is scouring the galaxy for a collection of ancient, alien artifacts. But for what purpose? What do they do? Where do they come from? What ultimate goal is Rogue Ops working towards? That question is about to be answered. A new pair of artifacts has just been discovered. Fundamentally different from the original collection of ancient devices, these artifacts act as data caches and hold the secret to unlocking the mystery of Rogue Ops and their machinations. Trent Stone and Drake Winters, career mercenaries and brothers-in-arms, are tasked with hunting down one of these artifacts. As soon as they show up to collect it, however, they are forced to engage in a desperate chase that will take them across the galaxy... Greg Bishop, Security-Investigations soldier turned Spec Ops warrior, and Enzo Rains, ex-Spec Ops badass turned mercenary and then back again, are, despite their differences, forced to work together and recover the other artifact. Unfortunately, they quickly become stranded on an island-based research colony after something goes wrong. If they want to complete their mission, they must fight their way through a terrifying new enemy...Complete
Countdown✔️
The tenth novel in The Shadow Wars. The end has come. With one of their own dead and another turned traitor, who took one of the all-important artifacts over to Rogue Ops, the lingering remnants of Dark Operations must prepare themselves for the final confrontation. The secret of the artifacts has been revealed, the true, insane nature of Rogue Operations' plans has finally been brought to light. If they are allowed to succeed, it will mean galactic apocalypse, the total annihilation of all mankind. Drake Winters, Greg Bishop, and Allan Gray, along with a handful of other expert killers and seasoned veterans, must now embark on a race against time across the breadth of the galaxy, facing down unspeakable horrors from beyond the stars and ancient alien facilities that have not seen the light of day in thousands of years. The end is here. The countdown has begun. Do they have what it takes to save us all?Complete
Snowblind✔️
The seventh novel in The Shadow Wars. In an isolated region of space, four survivors of brutal conflicts meet and are once again forced to fight for their lives... On the pleasure planet known as Mezzanine, a pair of mercenaries on the run from the law find themselves engaged in a shootout with men in dark armor... The lone survivor of an entire planet is recovered from a ship adrift in space... What do these events have in common? Each of these people has fought and survived against incredible odds. Each of them has faced down the shadowy government branch known only as Dark Operations and lived to tell about it. Now, the truth finally comes out: Dark Ops is no longer operating within the confines of the law. They've gone rogue, and the government is desperate to put them down. They want to hire these survivors for that very purpose. United against a common threat, this unlikely band of warriors is tasked with a new objective: recover a scientist willing to turn over Dark Ops' secrets. Unfortunately, it won't be easy. The planet he's on is owned by the enemy, and they're going to do everything in their power to keep him...Complete
A companion short story set after Starck's Lament. Jennifer North, after surviving the horror of the zombies and the remnants of Rogue Ops, has signed up with Anomalous Operations. She's been asking to go on a mission, eager to move on and get to work taking on the unnamed horrors that haunt the dark corners of the galaxy. Unfortunately, her first mission hasn't gone so well. Called out to an asteroid-based mining facility to investigate a strange discovery made by the miners, something has gone wrong. She awakens to find the facility vacant, her spine and head hurting, with no idea of what happened. She must unwrap the mystery of what went wrong, all while being hunted by a mysterious entity...
More detailsContent Guidelines