Warlord's Invasion (Starfight Book 1) (9 page)

Hal-Dorat grinned, a small grin typical of someone with tact and wisdom. “It was an easy task, your eminence. The technology of the aliens was trivial. I estimate the conquest of their empire will not be as hard compared to other empires. Certainly not as difficult as the Diars. However, theirs is a larger area. This will give them more time to adapt, and perhaps find new technologies and tactics. But from surface observations, theirs is not an unreasonable species. It will not be difficult to convert them into the empire. Of course, there will always be the overly zealous among them. We will probably suffer casualties from acts of sabotage and dissent.”

Gor-Eben nodded. “Such optimistic conclusions delights me, Hal-Dorat. I hope the reality is true as you say. Naturally, every conquest requires risks, but they will be overcome. You will be rewarded for your services, again. Once you have put the final orders in, I will assign a planetary governor in your place. You will then have another star system to conquer. Go.”

The Cat bowed, his black fur glistening. “In honor of the Great Prince.” The hologram faded away.

In honor of the Great Prince, Gor-Eben thought shrewdly.

Outside Bajor City, Southern Continent, Meerlat

Unknown Alien Ship…

Sargent Will Kubersly walked through a large cavernous ship. He didn’t know where
they
would eventually take him, but currently he was in what appeared to be the hangar bay of one of their black troop transports. The transport itself was two hundred meters wide.

So much black, Kubersly observed. This race was obsessed with black, as if it were a divine
color. From what he’d seen, every member of their species had shades of black fur from gray to solid oily black.

Kubersly saw a couple of feline technicians working on one of their tanks. The smell of an unknown gas made him choke. The technicians barely noticed him, as if they had seen it all before.

Kubersly fell forward when one of the armored Cats shoved him from behind. The metal ground of the hangar bay felt cold in his alien sandals.

He continued walking. Stripped of his exoskeleton hours ago, he had nothing but trousers and a combat shirt. During his trip here through one of their black transports, he had seen other humans being herded in lines. Whatever the aliens wanted, they wanted to do it quick.

It took minutes to traverse the hangar bay. When he reached the other end, he was led through a door and into an elevator.

Surrounded by Cats in black armor, Kubersly felt small. When the elevator stopped climbing, it opened to another hangar bay. This time, the ceiling was open to the sky. He saw a dozen shuttlecraft occupying the pads. They led him into one of the shuttle’s doors. A passenger compartment filled with seats.

Three humans sat inside, all of whom were barefoot. Kubersly recognized marines anywhere. These war torn marines had been stripped of their armor just like him.

The Cats forced him to sit beside his fellow humans. The door closed.

Within minutes, the shuttle began to move. Artificial gravity kicked in, and Kubersly felt the stomach churning grouch that came with it. For the longest minute, all was quiet inside the shuttle. The alien guards silently watched in their black armor.

A woman gazed at the group. “Does anyone know where they’re taking us?”

A man spoke, “We’re not dead. That’s a good sign. I really doubt these Cats would waste all these resources to kill us in space.”

“Names?” the woman asked.

“Second Lieutenant Victorio Bertini.”

“Private Arthur Lynch.”

“Sargent Will Kubersly.”

“I’m First Sargent Cornelia Windsor,” the woman stated. “It seems we’re all similar in that we’re all military survivors of the invasion.”

“That have seen combat,” Kubersly remarked. His gaze tried to search for a window but he realized it was futile. There were no windows in military transports, and certainly the Cats followed convention. Whatever antigrav technology the aliens had, he felt not a bump. He didn’t know if the transport had landed or was accelerating out of the system.

“So why us?” Cornelia asked. “Why not civilians?”

“And why only us, instead of all the other captured military personnel?” Arthur asked.

Kubersly shrugged. “Perhaps we’re guinea pigs for an alien experiment. Perhaps they need fit men.”

“Then why not also chose from the civilian pool?” Cornelia wondered. “And if being in the military is must, why just us four? There are plenty of other fit military men and women.”

Silence.

“Maybe it’s something good,” Victorio stated. “A reward.”

“For what?” Cornelia spoke again.

“For fighting well. Maybe their culture values those who are good at combat.”

“But how do they measure that?” Cornelia asked.

“I don’t know.”

Kubersly spent the next thirty minutes listening to everyone’s combat stories including which units they were assigned, where they fought, and most of all—how they survived. By the time it was over, everyone was reasonably certain that they’d been handpicked because of their experience as soldiers. Everyone’s story in the fourteen hours of ground combat were so extraordinary that it was obvious they had been chosen for because they had fought better than ninety-nine percent of the other marines. What the aliens intended to do with such a handpicked lot remained a mystery. Ideas ranging from brain scans, combat medals, sacrificial goats, interrogation schemes to medical probes circulated.

Finally, he heard a
clunk
. The shuttle’s antigrav turned off and instead of feeling 1.1 G’s similar to the gravity on Meerlat, he felt about 1.3 G’s. They were on board another spaceship. They couldn’t be on another planet. No planets in the system had 1.3 G’s. They could be in orbit of another planet, however, like one of the system’s gas giants.

The door opened. The alien guards signaled them to stand up.

They were led out of the shuttle into a much more massive hangar. This one was a
mile
across. What ship were they in? What types of armaments did this ship have? What type of technology built it? The distant bluish walls glowed. Large vessels the size of Federation frigates docked inside the hangar. Thousands of alien personnel worked inside it, going about their business.

The four waited in an odd group, shuddering because of the cold and surrounded by alien guards until a smaller transport pulled up.

They were forced to climb into it. The guards followed.

The grav bus flew through a kilometer until it reached a landing pad high up in the hangar. When Kubersly exited the bus, he tried not to look down. They were more than eight hundred meters from ground level.

He and his compatriots exited the hangar through a door into the rest of the ship.
They walked through kilometers of metal corridors. Each wall comprised of bluish metal with ambient light that glowed directly from the wall itself.

Numerous Cats with black fur barely noticed them as they passed through the tunnels. The Cats seemed to ignore them completely. Each wore uniforms like a conventional navy.

Kubersly saw a variety of uniforms, but mostly yellow. Yellow must designate standard shipboard personnel. Occasionally, he saw blue. He had no idea what rank or branch or order or specialty that signified. One time, he saw light red. The light red one paid a bit more attention to them as they passed.

Finally, they stopped outside a large gray metal door. The alien guards spoke in a guttural language to a device on the walls. Finally, the hatch opened.

When the marines stepped inside, the first thing Kubersly recognized were all the control interfaces and the Cats who worked on them. This looked like the inside of a control room. Holodisplays in front of every worker, hundreds of workers. This was a command center.

The next thing he realized was that there much fewer Cats in yellow uniforms. There were more oranges and light reds.
Officers?

The guards walked them to the center of this chamber. One of the Cats turned to face them. This Cat wore dark red, and had golden shoulder pads, obviously some sort of rank signifying insignia.

The armored guards bowed, as did several of the nearby light reds. Kubersly looked at his marines. He wondered if he should follow suit. It was obvious the aliens did not want to harm them. That this was some type of honor.

The one in dark red raised a black paw, at which point the guards stood upright.

A Cat with a light red uniform brought four long boxes. The boxes were thin as if each contained a stick. The dark red spoke to the guards who pointed at each of the four marines.

The marines were nudged into a horizontal line facing the dark red.

The dark red opened a box.

The insides if the boxes—to Kubersly’s amazement—were cushioned.

The dark red reached in and took out a long black blade made of a strange shimmering substance. It shined like obsidian. He held the sword and walked to Sargent Windsor, presenting it to her. She paused for a moment. She bowed before taking the sword with two hands.

An elaborate ritualistic gift, then.

The same thing happened to Lieutenant Bertini and Private Lynch.

Kubersly was last. When the dark red gave Kubersly his sword, he bowed as well.

The dark red stared at him with its green eyes.

Kubersly didn’t know what to make of its expression.

The blade felt warm in his hands like it radiated energy. The surface texture felt rough but refined. For a slight moment, Kubersly had a fleeting thought. He thought about using the blade to kill. Obviously, the Cat before him was one of high rank and importance. The dark red’s loss would profoundly affect the enemy.

But what did that teach the aliens about humans?

Kubersly shook off the idea. He gazed at the other marines. They, too, must have come to the same conclusion. Then he realized the implications of his decision, and to a certain extent, the reason for the gift. The blade was an act of truce and camaraderie between one accomplished warrior and another. A symbol. Kubersly would shatter this symbol by using it as a weapon upon the one who gave it to him.
He bowed, again.

The dark red uttered a short brutish speech and their ceremony came to an end.

Later, in the shuttlecraft down to the planet, Kubersly, upon further scanning the blade, saw something on the handle. There were vertical lines, like markings. He counted them. There were twenty-six markings on the handle...

Twenty-six...why?

Then he realized. Twenty-six for each of the alien troops he killed.

CHAPTER FOUR

Fifteen days later

December 29
th
3986 AD

Betelgeuse System, above Betelgeuse V …Nickname: Serenal

Courier Ship

Passenger Compartment…

I
t had taken two weeks on the fastest hyperlight courier ship to traverse the distance between the frontier world called Meerlat and the sector’s capital, Betelgeuse. For Vier Kleingelt, the
journey of 1600 light years had been entirely uneventful and dreadfully boring compared to the twelve hours of vibrant albeit horrible activity she had ever witnessed as the commander of Meerlat. After her escape, she hadn’t heard about Meerlat since Colonel Streit’s surrender. None of the FTL capable recon probes sent to scout its status had managed to escape the system without being blasted out of neighboring hyperspace. It seemed the aliens also had a method of detecting ships moving in hyperlight as well as an even more sophisticated—and successful—method of preventing even the fastest human vessels from escaping once that system was established.

What she did know was that the alien fleets were still on the move. A gradual pace compared to the speed in which she went, but it was apparent they were conquering neighboring systems closest to Meerlat in systematic order, driving deeper into human territory.

The good thing was that the most populated and most heavily fortified human star system in the sector knew everything she knew, although it would take more weeks before the crown world, Trantor, heard about the invasion. Her ship was the fastest courier ship in human history, but it was still nothing compared to the fastest human drone ship. Message-carrying machine-controlled drones could achieve a speed of .003 light years per second, or just under 100,000 times the speed of light, whereas the fastest manned ship could only achieve 38,000 times the speed of light.

As Vier’s shuttle descended through the upper atmospheric layers of Betelgeuse V, otherwise called Serenal, she gazed out the window and noticed the green vegetation spread across the vast continent below. As she could recall, Betelgeuse V was colonized eight hundred years ago by nascent explorers from that ancient cradle called Earth. Being only 1.2 times as large as humanity’s homeworld, it was easily terraformed by adding Earth’s native plant and animal species. The fact that it orbited a star 120,000 times as bright as Sol meant little concern because the orbit of Betelgeuse V was over 400 times as far as Earth was to Earth’s sun.

Gazing out the transparent aluminum window, she saw the vast cities spread all across the continent below. Their gleaming metallic luminosity reminded Vier a little bit of Trantor, humanity’s Crown World.

Suddenly, Vier put her palm on her chin and sighed.

Oh, how much she missed Trantor.

Trantor. A gigantic planet-wide megalopolis city and civilization as far as the eye could see, even from orbit. She missed Trantor’s red glow during night and the low hum of its atmospheric recyclers working to clean the constant air pollution; the busy sounds of rushing aircars and the churning of blue-white antimatter generators. She often liked peeking out of a gravcar during the morning commute, to see a metal world made by humanity from the ground up. Most of all, she missed Trantor’s center of government, the administrative region called Tranpolis, where she could actually have a say and influence the politics of an entire star nation.

Vier sighed, again.
That
mistake had cost her dearly. When she’d been demoted to Meerlat, her first reaction was that her new frontier command was barren. Barren of life, of activity, of effort and immersion. The people there seemed friendly enough, but they lacked a certain urgency that endowed the people in the core worlds. Sure, freedom was everywhere. The rules were lax and the human desire to explore and colonize was easily satisfied, but it still lacked the importance that came from being in the heart of humanity. Vier realized that if she had been born another person, perhaps carefree like her sister, she may have very well been content with
Meerlat, but that was not who she was. She wanted to be in there, in the thick of the action, or as her savant mentor called
aggressive control of one’s destiny
.

Lara was another matter entirely; someone who was simply satisfied with marrying a doctor and retreating into the unknown. Vier didn’t even want to think about that.

The light of an entire world didn’t matter if I can’t influence the greater web of worlds.

Looking down, Betelgeuse V reminded Vier of Trantor, but not by much. It did not have the entire planet-covering cityscapes of Trantor, but it had some. Its population was only 18 billion, whereas Trantor’s population was 85 billion. Whereas Trantor controlled the entire 12,000 light years-wide star nation, Betelgeuse V was the military nexus of a star zone 2500 light years across. In the event of alien aggression, its commandant controlled the entire region of warships and could operate independently as a fast response measure since it took far longer for news to travel to Trantor.

So far, nothing had happened. And Vier thought the commandant’s actions were wise. There had been no lightning reprisal since the alien invasion began. That was because Senior Vice Admiral Wolfgang Mittermeyer had chosen instead to retreat all hyperlight capable forces away from the regions being invaded. Some might say that it appeared cowardly, but not Vier. She’d seen the aliens’ capabilities. Human warships stood no chance against
that
technology.

So what options did that leave humanity?

Well, for now, the only option seemed to be full scale retreat until a known method of successful resistance could be found.

The good news was the aliens seemed to be slightly vulnerable to human missiles. Vier knew Human warships had no chance against alien warships, but human space missiles could inflict some damage in sublight combat. As a result, Vier had recommended to Mittermeyer that war production should be focused on creating gravity propelled missiles. She had told Mittermeyer in the video-mail that production of energy weapons should be halted entirely. Phased multi-dimensional nanopulses and its antecedent, gravitron darts, had no effect on the alien’s space-born warships’ shields. Perhaps if the enemy’s shields were taken out by nuclear tipped missiles, energy weapons might have an effect, but she didn’t know having never seen it happen. She did not know how their armor could withstand against that. As for laser weaponry, they were completely innocuous.

This was the state of affairs for sublight battles. Hyperlight conflict was a different untested matter, and Vier surmised that the reason for her summoning had something to do with that. Perhaps in hyperlight battle, humanity would have a more even edge.

In the end, Vier surmised that humanity could always surrender. The aliens did not kill civilians outright, and seemed to have a purpose for leaving civilians alive, but she didn’t know what that purpose was. If only, there was a way to communicate with the aliens. She knew surrender was not an option for Vice Admiral Mittermeyer. Trantor would have the ultimate say in that. She hoped that didn’t happen before all other options were exhausted.

Betelgeuse System

Betelgeuse V, Northern Continent

Sector Military Command Headquarters

Chief Commander’s Office, Suite 1, floor 2408…

“...I have convened this meeting primarily to discuss your new orders personally.” Senior Vice Admiral Mittermeyer expressionless face couldn’t hide his kind eyes and warm cheeks no matter how hard he tried to appear serious.

Vier sat within her senior commander’s office with a skyscraper view of 35
th
century Betel City. Lines of aircars rushed in the distance, their exteriors reflecting the bright red rays from the system’s supergiant. A cloudless sky allowed that same supergiant to bask the city in its auburn glow. The starzone’s military command headquarters was a massive twenty kilometer high skyscraper that knew few equals on the planet. It certainly fit with the human propensity that the buildings with the most authority should also be the largest and tallest. To Vier, she felt rather defenseless. The building did not have shields nor layers of earth to protect it from orbital or long-range kinetic bombardment. But she couldn’t help but admire the human fascination with megastructures.

Mittermeyer continued, “I realize this may be inefficient, but I believe there’s no substitute for communicating in person. Tachyon communication has its drawbacks, of which some can’t be replaced even with holographic technology.” He shifted in his seat and laid his hands flatly on his desk. He wore the same black and blue uniform of a flag officer. “Besides, it gives me the opportunity to see you in person. Are you prepared to receive your new orders, rear admiral?”

“Yes, sir.” Vier nodded. She thought about her friend Anton Shenks—how he wouldn’t be able to follow her wherever she went, how he was always there for her and how the first time—he wouldn’t be.

“Good. There are two parts to your orders. Your first order is to take a fleet comprised of approximately twenty percent of the region’s hyperlight combat force and test the enemy’s
hyperlight combat capability
. Once you have attained insight on their abilities, you are to transfer all information to Lower Vice Admiral Mu Pei, who will then decide whether to counterattack with the remaining eighty percent of our hyperlight combat force. If Mu Pei decides to engage, this is where the second part of your orders are to come into play. Your second orders are to attempt to capture any piece of their technology, particularly their weapons and propulsion technology at the same time Mu Pei engages with his larger combat force. If and when Mu Pei engages, you must use everything in your power to achieve the second latter objective as long as it does not contravene with Mu Pei’s orders. Your fleet will consist of 800 dreadnoughts, carriers, cruisers, and destroyers and 100 marine transports made for hyperlight ship-to-ship assault. Your marine transports will be armed with hyperdrive nullifiers and suspenders.”

Vier blinked in shock. She had never been in command of such a large force before…although, while sitting on the board of advisers to the President, she had
influenced
such a large force before. The 100 marine transport alone was more than she had ever directly commanded. A typical marine transport carried 50 assault flyers, each one manned by twenty marines. About 100,000 marines total.

Mittermeyer opened his palm outward to calm her. “Since we don’t know our enemy’s hyperlight combat capabilities, but since we do know their sublight capabilities, we need to be safe and initially estimate that you will suffer heavy losses unless proved otherwise. We will work our strategy based on that belief. Although the unknowns have demonstrated a very high range of technologies—for instance, their sublight space combat technology is much more advanced than us, but their planetary infantry level technology is on our level—whereas their hyperlight combat abilities are concerned, it is very likely they outmatch us. Still, we need to test this.” Mittermeyer paused. “So once you have accomplished the first objective, and if the information we obtain is positive, Lower Vice Admiral Mu Pei’s fleet will come out of extreme detection range and engage the enemy hyperlight forces in the most tactically advantageous means with our remaining eighty percent. You will become part of his fleet and follow his orders in that scenario. I estimate we will receive reinforcements from the surrounding starzones in the coming weeks, so his numbers may be higher than what we have as of right now. If the information you obtain is not positive and in fact, we are indeed heavily disadvantaged in terms of hyperlight combat capabilities as well as sublight, you will withdraw your remaining units out of hyperlight detection range and follow Mu Pei’s orders, again.” He put his hands together on the ferroglass desk. “As for your second orders, depending on what technologies you obtain, or none at all, we will proceed accordingly. Any questions?”

Vier took a moment to think. “Sir, what if I successfully acquire all their technologies?”

Mittermeyer smiled. “That’s wishful thinking, but I like your optimism. In the best case scenario, we will take that information and send it to every star’s construction facilities, so that we may manufacture new weapons and equipment using that technology. So far, it seems the enemy’s invasion pace isn’t so fast that we won’t have time to create new starships and defenses. In the instance that we don’t even have the tools to create such new starships, we will manufacture them. Trantor has the ultimate say in what types of weapons and equipment we will concentrate on producing, regardless of what new technologies we-you obtain. I have forwarded Trantor a list of recommendations, including yours, as to what types of weapons we focus on creating using technology we have right now, from the information you’ve obtained in the battle of Meerlat.”

“What if I acquire none, sir?”

“If we are significantly outmatched in hyperlight combat and you are unable to acquire any technologies, we will be in a hole. We will be at the mercy of our enemies. If we can combat their ships in hyperlight on a near equal footing but your marine assault fails, we will still have some tactical room to maneuver. We will continue to find other ways to obtain their technology.”

Something odd made Vier curious. “Why a frontal marine assault on their hyperlight war fleet? Surely, they have auxiliary vessels or isolated warships which can be more vulnerable targets to capture technology from? And what about targets within gravity wells?”