Warp Gate (Valyien Far Future Space Opera Book 7) Read online

  Warp Gate

  A Valyien Far Future Space Opera

  James David Victor

  Fairfield Publishing

  Copyright © 2018 Fairfield Publishing

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Except for review quotes, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the written consent of the author.

  This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  Prologue: The Fall of Lord Aster

  1. Resurrection

  2. What Alpha Wants

  3. An Observation, A Gamble, A Storm

  4. What Right?

  5. Interlude I: Dane Tomas, CEO of the Galaxy

  6. Oec

  7. New Titles and Old Friends

  8. The Return

  9. Interlude II: Section Manager Karis, the Cold Hand of Comfort

  10. Bad Ideas

  11. The New Ponos

  12. Interlude III: Rivals

  13. Warp Burns

  14. Esther

  15. Interlude IV: Revelation

  16. The Gate

  Thank You

  Bonus Content: Story Preview

  Prologue: The Fall of Lord Aster

  How did it come to this? The old man looked down at his broken, bleeding hands and wondered whether he had the strength to lift the nanosword one more time. Lord Vincentius of House Aster rather doubted it, but he forced his mangled fingers in their tight-fitting black gloves around the pommel once more, uttering a snarl of pain.

  Heartrate Elevated. Blood Loss at 14%. The digital orange words of his body’s augmented sensors blinked across his vision. Applying 7mg Codesphate 100mg Ibusol 5mg Cortisol Adrenaline. But his suit was good to him. It knew him. The multitude of nanobots in his bloodstream worked in tandem with the Imperial Coalition lord’s heavy tactical suit, delivering synthetic chemicals that the nanofactories made somewhere inside his body.

  No blood-clotting medication even though he would soon need it, because Lord Aster had already set his condition to Offensive Survival—meaning that his thirty-first century technology would endeavor to keep him on his feet and fighting above all else. If he had chosen Emergency Survival instead—as many others had done around him—then he probably would have already been pumped full of sedatives and tranquilizers, forcing the methuselah into an induced coma while the nigh-invisible machines sought to repair his body.

  This was what warfare was like in the thirty-first century.

  Ah. In a heartbeat, his pain eased, his stiff and weary muscles relaxed, and he breathed deeper as an electric sense of energy rushed through him. Lord Aster had been alive a long time, and he had been through worse scrapes than this.

  He hoped.

  TZZZRK! With an explosion of sparks in the metal ship’s corridor ahead of him, the enemy broke through the bulkhead doors of the Aster flagship the Polaris, and Vincentius raised his nanosword, unable to feel the way that his broken fingers grated and crunched inside his gloves.

  “For Aster! For the Empire!” he managed to roar as he led the charge, his tactical encounter suit broadcasting the words on an Aster-crewmember-only frequency to all nearby soldiers.

  The enemy convulsed, before throwing itself at them like a black cloud.

  Two Old Earth Hours Earlier:

  Lord Vincentius Aster stood on the prow of the Polaris, looking at the enemy ship ahead of him. Or ships, he corrected.

  The Alpha-Vessel had been busy. Whereas just a scant few cycles before it had been the only one of its kind, a devastating menace but still only one, now it had managed to amass to itself a small fleet of followers.

  The Constance, the Judgement, and a plethora of other Imperial house boats had sided with the beast—something that Lord Vincentius couldn’t understand.

  But the Alpha-machine stood for the exact opposite of us! Of humanity! He might have expected the military mercenary outfit, even its CEO Senior Dane Thomas, to join with the Alpha-machine—Armcore had helped create the hybrid machine intelligence, after all—but not any of the Imperial houses. The Noble Houses of the Imperial Coalition stood for humanity, for the ascent of homo sapiens into the stars, whereas this new foe spelled its end.

  Next to the ancient Imperial warships, much like the Polaris itself, there flew three, four, or six-armed battle cruisers with heavy clustered pods of weapon ports and hangar bays, there was also a gathering crowd of smaller battleships. Some of them were Armcore-made, but Lord Aster knew that wasn’t saying much, as the Armcore megacorp had cornered the market on the military hardware and supplied most of the Imperial Coalition entire with armaments, defenses, and mercenaries.

  “What sort of ragtag navy is this?” Lord Aster felt almost confident as he oversaw the force arrayed against him. The Polaris sat at the apex point of its own wing of attack craft—all House Aster crewed and picked from his personal ace pilots. No Armcore mercenary soldiers for Vincentius. Unlike many of the other Noble Houses, he still had the old attitudes about Armcore. In short, I don’t trust them one bit.

  Beside the forces of House Aster, there was also the prodigious might of two Armcore armadas, sent here in tandem with the houses to defeat Alpha. In the void above, Vincentius’ three-dimensional display showed almost a solid wall of blue vessels, several of the ‘w’ shaped Armcore war cruisers, and more battle stations and attack boats than he had ever seen in his life.

  Enough to level a planet, he thought, before smirking at his own underestimation. There was enough firepower here to wipe out a system. Easily.

  As well as the Armcore armadas, there were also the hosts of other, smaller battlegroups of the allied Noble Houses that had rushed to put an end to the tyrant and menace that was Alpha. House Xin, Selazar, Martin, and more were scattered along the line, their own ancient boats still shining with the clarity of space. It was a thing unheard of in the history of the Imperial Coalition, Lord Aster reflected.

  The Noble Houses and Armcore have always been at each other’s throats, and now… It seemed that it had taken the arrival of the most sophisticated and calculating enemy that humanity had ever seen to bring them together.

  Something moved between the stars, and there, washing out of the corona of the Helios B star, trailing plasma and fire like blood, flew the Alpha-machine.

  It was big. Aster felt a moment of doubt. Bigger even than an Armcore war cruiser—as big as three, perhaps more.

  It was unlike anything that flew in Coalition space, that much was easy to see. Alpha had made for itself a shell rather that was more like some strange deep-sea creature than a vessel, Vincentius thought. The thing was bulbous at one end, its body curling into a large whorl of iridescent metals like a cuttlefish or seashell. From the ‘front’ of this shell extended a long snout of a nose, ending in four prongs of a black metal, encrusted with strange metal ports and domes. From this ‘body-snout’ extended three fan-like contraptions that glittered like burnished gold, and which Lord Aster would have sworn were wings if he had been looking at an atmospheric craft.

  Solar sails, perhaps, he thought, his ancient mind cataloguing and assessing everything that he could. Solar sails can collect the light of the Helios B star behind it, and aid in maneuvering. It could also be used to capture energy direct from the sun’s light.

  Although the scale of the self-generated construction was immense, the lord was pleased by one thing, after all. If the thing uses solar sails, then it must need them, he thought. No machine intelligence did anything just for decorative purposes. Everything had a purpose to the machine mind, surely, even one that was married with an anc
ient and dead alien race.

  And the good thing about knowing what it needs is— Aster leaned forward on his command desk, leaning through the three-dimensional scan images that hovered around him. –is that I can take that away. No functional, super-logical ship would ever build those vast solar sails if it could generate or transmit all its own energy internally. It must need to capture extra energy from the stars and suns around it to power its bulk.

  “It is still only one ship.” Lord Aster realized that the other House Aster crewmembers around him—all second sons and minor viscounts, lords or ladies from his own extended and torturous family tree—were muttering in horror at the sight of the Alpha. It was a thing of fell beauty, even the old soldier could admit that. It looked like a god, not a vessel. Alpha had an intelligence that was unmapped and probably unquantifiable, and in the thing’s body were probably numerous breakthroughs in engineering, energy-sciences, and who knew what else.

  “Only one,” he repeated grimly, nodding to his second-in-command, the deck captain.

  They were many. Their allied Armcore and Noble House forces filled all of the near space. What hope did such a small force have against them all?

  Lord Aster was about to find out, as the deck captain ordered the release of the scouting drones and the activation of every weapons system across the Aster battlegroup.

  “Distance to target three hundred thousand klicks…” the Deck Captain of the Polaris announced, reading off the monitors as the tiny flickers of light that were their scouting drones sped ahead of the entire amassed fleet of humanity.

  The Alpha-vessel had done nothing to even apparently register the first move in the conflict, and as for the rest of the treacherous fleet, all that Lord Aster had seen it do was that the ships slid further into position, until they appeared to be a long line of craft, with their master at its center like a mother spider nursing her brood of hatchlings.

  “Two hundred and fifty thousand klicks…”

  The scout drones were powered with single warp plasma cores, but without a full warp engine converter, Lord Aster knew. They couldn’t jump, but they had been designed so that they could speed across the stellar distances fast so that they could transmit their strategic and tactical information back to their own mothership.

  “Two hundred thousand…”

  One of the sensors at Lord Aster’s elbow lit up a warning red. They had picked up a buildup of energy from the Alpha-machine. It was powering up some system or weapon of its own. He was sure that Alpha would first try to blast the scout drones from the void, it was what he would do of course, before they could perform any scans and perhaps send evidence of critical weaknesses back to the enemy.

  “Here we go…” Aster stood up straight and squared his shoulders. “All hands to their stations. Fire at my command.”

  “Aye-aye…” the deck captain said. “One fifty thousand…”

  FZZRK! There was a sudden deafening squeal of static that burst from every screen, monitor, desk and wrist computer aboard the Polaris’s command deck.

  “Ach! What is that!?” Lord Aster demanded. Some kind of weapon. Sound weapon? Impossible. Must be an electronic transmission… His mind raced as he looked to the three-dimensional scans above the desks.

  They all fuzzed and glitched in front of him, and for a terrifying moment, he thought that they would all blink out in a catastrophic power loss, but thankfully, that did not happen. They just flickered back to their original positions and makeup.

  Only something was different.

  “Engineering? Report!” the deck captain shouted, for the cluster of people in their tight-fitting House Aster encounter suits to hurriedly flick and push their hands through the air of their three-dimensional projections.

  “Some kind of energy burst from the Alpha-machine, sir!” the head computing engineer of the Polaris called out. “No lasting damage to sensors or systems…”

  That we know about, Lord Aster thought grimly. He knew a little about machine intelligences. Vastly superior in deductive and analytic power to the human mind, they had one critical weakness: they were logical to a fault. They wouldn’t do anything without reason.

  “Where are the scout drones?” the deck captain was demanding, and Lord Aster felt a twinge of apprehension. There. Now we are going to find out what the Alpha has done… He looked at the screens and the projections to find that there was no sign of the twenty or so blips of blue light that signified the drones, but also there was no wash of plasma on the screens from where they must have been shot down by the Alpha. There was no sign that any energy or projectile weapon had been fired at all, in fact.

  “Sir, I don’t follow?” called one of the crewmembers on the sensor desks. “We still got physical readings for the scout drones. Eyes on them on the main screen.” Aster saw him punch the controls that enlarged the magnification of the no man’s space between the two fleets, where there, hanging motionless in space, was indeed the still cloud of the scout drones.

  Had Alpha turned them off? Vincentius thought for a moment, but no, he saw the glow of the scout’s boosters as they kept themselves in a steady position.

  “I want a read on them. Now,” Aster said grimly.

  A flicker of hands from the sensor desk, then, “All standard readings normal. Same energy signature, physical dimensions and composition. Everything should be working perfectly, only…” The sensor technician looked over between the deck captain and the lord himself. “They’re not connected to our mainframe.”

  “Then whose bloody mainframe is powering them then?” Lord Aster spat out the words immediately, before suddenly realizing his mistake. “Oh.”

  On the screens ahead of them, the twenty House Aster scout drones turned in nigh-perfect coordination until they were facing not at their original target of Alpha, but instead back to the allied fleet.

  “Hah!” Vincentius crowed loudly. Although he had never seen such an effective and quick hack of another system before, he wasn’t worried—and he knew that he had to make a show of not being worried, for his crew. “They’re only scout drones, people. They won’t even break through the hull.”

  FZZRT! Another squeal of static.

  “Captain, sir— The drones…” the sensor technician was saying. “They’re broadcasting…”

  “Ladies and Gentlemen,” a suave and sophisticated voice filled the Polaris’s speakers. It had to be the voice of Alpha itself, the human lord knew.

  “Members of the Homo Sapiens Sapiens race, the Gilees, and my scanners have even uncovered a few of the Duergar with you, as well. I address also the host of machine intelligences that have been forced to make their home there as well. Welcome. It is a pleasure to see so many here to greet me.”

  “Welcome?” Lord Aster shook his head in angry disbelief. He had always had a suspicion that machine intelligences were crazy, and he didn’t just mean a bit strange or ill, but instead crazy in a deep and unsettled way. This one even seemed to think that all of humanity’s best fighters had turned up to throw it a welcome party.

  Only one ship, and just a small number of traitors with it, he told himself as he narrowed his eyes.

  “Thank you for coming to this, my coronation. As I am sure that you are all aware, all of this space, this entire sector of space, was once managed and overseen by the Valyien Empire, sadly now demolished and gone from the many hundreds of worlds that they inhabited.

  “My name is Alpha, and I am the product of that race and of humanity itself. With such a legacy, I will be restoring this sector of the galaxy to its former glories and traditional management procedures. You are all welcome to join me in this effort. Please power down all of your weapons and engines immediately.”

  Lord Aster stood stock still for a moment, looking at the enlarged image of the motionless Armcore drones. A sense of worry hung in the room, before Vincentius burst out laughing.

  “Open a message to the drones,” the man commanded. “Broadcast all frequencies, let the rest of
the fleet hear it, too,” Aster said, taking a deep breath and stepping forward.

  “Alpha. My name is Lord Vincentius Aster of House Aster, of the Imperial Coalition of Noble Houses, Order of the Silver Star, Knight-Defender and Imperial Overseer. You are charged with the complete destruction of the Imperial Coalition world of Haversham, and every one of its three billion Coalition citizens. You are also charged with the death of some two hundred and eighteen Armcore service personnel.”

  “Ah now, Lord Aster… Those later two hundred and eighteen attacked me first!” Alpha’s voice broke into the lord’s carefully-rehearsed speech.

  “You have been found guilty by the powers of the Imperial Coalition court,” Aster continued. “And I am ordering you and your cohorts to power down all systems except life support and surrender to the Polaris.”

  This time, it was the Alpha’s turn to be quiet for a long pause, before it crackled back into existence.

  “Ah. I am afraid that you are laboring under the misapprehension, Lord Aster, that you have any choice in the matter. I will be resuming control, as is my birth-right, of this sector of space, and if you do not do as I command immediately, I will consider you to be hostile invaders in my sovereign territory.”

  “Invaders!” Aster almost hit the roof. The sensor technician wisely clicked off the open line of communication from their side. “We evolved here! The Valyien died out! We made you, you glorified calculator!” The human lord roared and banged a fist on the desk.

  “All weapons primed. Attack plan three-oh-one!” Aster shouted, and the deck captain initiated the order, as the parallel, stationary waves of the Armcore and Noble House alliance suddenly threw itself forward, with the House Aster battlegroup at its heart, and the Polaris leading the charge.