by Ivan Kal
“So. Who’s next?”
***
“I can’t believe that just happened.” Meifeng said, as she and Clara walked to their joint quarters. The rest of the fights went about the same as the first one did. A challenger would step in, Adrian would dance around them until they fully committed to an attack and would then take them down with a single lightning fast strike. The only one that came close to even being called a fight was Isurani who managed to make Adrian actually use his hand to block an attack, but the end result was the same, with Isurani on the floor.
“Did you see how he was moving?” Meifeng started again when Clara didn’t comment to her previous remark. “He was like a ghost, there one moment and then gone the next.”
“Yeah…” Clara said finally, the whole experience had shaken her. She had always respected her Clan Leader, she knew that he was indisputably the best fleet commander that the Empire had. And she always believed that he was a competent fighter, a master for sure, but she believed that he wasn’t really on the same level as the Sentinels and others who had made combat their priority. What she saw today told her that Adrian was much more proficient in the combat arts than he let on. Far beyond what the markings on his hands indicated. “Did you manage to see how he took down Mario? All I saw was a blur.” Clara asked.
“No, but I looked at the recording on my imp, wait a sec you need to see this.” Meifeng said as her eyes lost focus for a moment. Clara then got a request on her own imp that appeared over her vision in her HUD. She accepted and was taken to the net, then a vid screen opened and a recording of the final few seconds of Adrian’s first match started playing. Clara watched as Mario’s fist drew closer to Adrian in slow motion, and then just at the moment that she knew it was too late for anyone to respond Adrian moved. In a burst of speed he moved his leg to the side and turned his body sideways so fast that even in slow motion it looked like he was moving almost as fast as normal. His elbow came up and Adrian used his body’s rotation to deliver a devastating strike to Mario’s temple, dropping him.
“How can he be that fast?” Clara asked.
“I don’t know, and I for one don’t care. At least now those idiots will shut up.” Meifeng said.
Clara didn’t add anything, and they walked the rest of the way in silence. It looked like there was more to their leader than was apparent.
Chapter Six
July; Year 30 – Unexplored space
The ship was falling apart under the onslaught of hundreds of greenish-white bundles of energy. They were eating at her ship, swallowing her ship’s hull. All around, her people were dying, their bodies disintegrating before her eyes. She screamed at them, to not give up, to keep fighting, but there was no one there. She was alone, sitting in her command chair. The holo in the room’s center showed that her fleet was gone, destroyed, only her and the enemy ship were left.
The enemy’s ship was smaller than hers, and yet it had destroyed her fleet, and was about to do the same to her ship. She watched as it charged its weapons knowing what was coming next, it felt as if she had seen this moment a thousand times before. The enemy ship fired its bolts of energy. A few seconds later the enemy fire reached her ship, and she knew that she was doomed. Alarms sounded, and the entire ship was shaking until it finally couldn’t take any more. Fire broke through the hatch leading into the control room, it spread towards her, threatening to swallow her whole. She closed her eyes and released a terrifying scream.
Johanna sat up in her bed still screaming, her hands in front of her face to ward off the heat of the flames. Then suddenly she felt light shine through her closed eyelids, her eyes opened almost unwillingly, and she saw that she wasn’t in her old ship’s command center, but in her bed, on board her new flagship. As she started to calm down, she realized that she could hear someone calling her name.
“… alright Fleet Commander?” A voice that seemed to come from everywhere said.
Johanna calmed and slumped back onto the sheets that were drenched in her sweat.
“Yes Turiel, I’m fine. It was just another nightmare.” Johanna said.
“They have been occurring more often in the last few months, Fleet Commander.” Turiel, her ship’s Ai said.
“They come and go.” Johanna said, she had trouble with nightmares ever since her return from Earth, thirty years ago.
“Maybe you should talk with-”
“No.” Johanna interrupted the Ai. “I’m fine, it will pass. It always does.”
“As you say Fleet Commander.”
With a groan Johanna got up from the bed, her sleeping attire, a simple old fashioned shirt was completely wet with her sweat, as was the bed and the covers. She sighed and gathered the linens up in a bundle and put them across the room in the washing bin where the cleaning crew would take them to be washed. With a thought she activated her HUD and glanced at the clock in the corner of her vision, noticing that it was close to the time when she usually got up for her shift. Then she went into her bathroom to take a long shower.
Alone with the sound of running water over her body, she reflected back on the nightmare. It was the same one she always had, a nightmare about the Ra’a’zani ship. She knew intellectually that losing most of her fleet wasn’t her fault, that they simply didn’t know the capabilities of the Ra’a’zani, but even now after all this time it weighed her down. It wasn’t only about her fleet, it was the fact that the actions of her fleet indirectly caused the destruction of Earth, and death of billions of people.
She couldn’t have known that Ra’a’zani possessed a weapon capable of rendering an entire planet uninhabitable, nor that they would be prepared to use it, but in the end it happened on her watch. When she returned to Sanctuary, the fact that the Emperor and her peers didn’t hold her accountable only served to make her feel worse. But eventually she came to terms with what had happened, even though there were still some marks left over.
Her superiors wanted her to stay in command of the Second Fleet, but she refused. At the time she didn’t feel comfortable commanding a war fleet. It wasn’t until five years ago that she stepped back on the ship. Now Johanna was in command of the Empire’s First Exploration Fleet. And she loved the job, she still commanded warships, the Empire had learned its lesson, the galaxy was a dangerous place and the exploration fleet needed protection. But their purpose was mostly exploration.
The First Exploration Fleet consisted of all old class warships that the Empire’s war fleets no longer used, four old class dreadnoughts, seven light cruisers, five heavy cruisers, and four battleships along with ten exploration frigates, two repair ships, five supply ships, two mining ships, and three factory ships. The fleet was fully self-sufficient, capable of operating independently for long periods of time, years. They produced their own food, processed materials they mined, and filtered water they gathered from asteroids, comets, or planets.
The frigates were new ships built ten years ago, they were small about a hundred and twenty meters long. Their purpose was to go on solo missions and look for systems of interest for the fleet, usually that included scouting the unmapped trans-lanes. There had been many cases where a frigate would go through the unmapped trans-lane to a system that had no outgoing trans-lanes, in those cases they would need to come back to the fleet using hyperspace. Which depending on the length of the lane they went through could mean months or even more than a year of travel time in order for them to rejoin the fleet.
The two mining ships were also of a new generation, with their own cargo shuttles and crew proficient at mining in space. Their usual targets were asteroids or small moons, but every now and then they would find a rich planet. When that happened, they would send miners down on the planet to collect samples. The mining ships purpose was to replenish the supplies of the fleet, but also to look out for rich systems and rare ores. All finds were cataloged and results sent back to the Empire. The Empire then sends people and builds facilities for a large scale mining operations.
The Empire was in a constant state of expansion and needed every bit of resources in order to feed its growth. The Empire claimed almost all systems that had a large amount of ore, which had increased its territory tremendously. There were sixteen colonized systems in the Empire, systems where people of the Empire lived, and those sixteen systems were all contained within a sphere of some 60 light years. The Empire had presence in a lot more systems beside those sixteen, they had mining operations in suitable systems within 100 light years, and monitoring stations in others close to the Sowir border as well as in the systems marked for future colonization.
In truth the Empire’s territory was an oblate spheroid some 100 light years wide and about and 80 high in reference to the galactic center. The Empire’s territory was below the galactic plane - the Empire used the galactic center as one of the points of reference for its maps, but the galaxy wasn’t a slim disk, it had depth, so they also used the galactic plane. A referential tool that split the galaxy in half.
The three factory ships kept the fleet supplied with anything it needed, the large nine hundred meters long ships, each held large fabricating factories capable of producing everything the fleet needs, but also fabricating satellites, com drones, monitoring stations and even facilities for starting colonies. They were the reason why the fleet didn’t need to return to the Empire often. The supply ships carried all of their food processing and water refinement factories. The ships had few agroponics bays, but most of their food came from processing bio matter in the bio-fabricators.
As for the warships, they were ships that had been built before the Empire was founded or just after. They were good ships, powerful, but the Empire’s technology had leaped forward in the last few decades, enhanced with the new technologies they discovered, acquired from the Nel, or those that Johanna brought back from Earth. The newer ships were bigger and far more powerful, the dreadnought Mk 2 class warships were the foundation of the Empire’s fleets, mush as the older class was.
Johanna’s fleet of forty two ships was tasked with exploring the territory around the trans-route from Sanctuary to Earth, as the Empire’s main expansion was in that direction. The plan was for them to eventually bring their home system under the Empire’s control. Even with Earth ravaged and uninhabitable it was still humanity’s home. For now they had only a few small unmanned scanning stations that monitored the system looking for any signs of the Ra’a’zani return. The Empire was fueled by its rage towards the alien race, by the need to avenge the billions they enslaved and then slaughtered. Eventually they will encounter them again, and the Empire will enact its justice. Every resource that the Empire gained, every technological advancement was for that purpose.
But spreading their territory to Earth wasn’t going to be easy. First there was more than 600 light years between Sanctuary and Earth, and while they had already spread their influence they still had a lot more to go. There were obstacles other than the distance in their path. The direct path to Earth was right through two systems that were inhabited by fledgling civilizations. One was a civilization still on the level of primitive tribal communities, but the other one was a civilization that was much more advanced. When Johanna first encountered them they had already reached space, and had sent a mission to the planet closest to their home world. The mission was endangered, the ship they sent was damaged and Johanna had helped. In doing so she had revealed the existence of alien life to the ship’s single passenger and revealed her fleet to Trivaxians.
She felt responsible for changing everything about their understanding of the universe, so she left them with a parting gift. A package filled with information. She didn’t outright give them knowledge of new technologies, she made sure that they wouldn’t be given everything on a silver platter, what she did was give them means to learn human language and the information about many different kinds of technologies. She gave them concepts and ideas, letting them discover how they were supposed to work on their own.
And in the last 30 years they have advanced considerably. They built a colony on the planet closest to their home world and had started to explore their solar system. The Empire had a stealth drone inside their system monitoring their activities, and while the Trivaxians hadn’t cracked FTL travel yet, she was sure that it was only a matter of time. Humanity was lucky in a way, they gained a lot of knowledge from the database of the Union ship that Olympus found at the bottom of the ocean. Trivaxians will need to discover things on their own, with just the knowledge that it was possible.
The problem that the Empire faced now was, what to do with Trivaxians after they cracked hyperspace or trans-travel. There had been a lot of debate, because this case will set precedent for all future encounters between the Empire and fledgling civilizations. It had been decided that the Empire will not force its way into a civilizations home system, it belonged to the intelligent race that was born in it, and Johanna’s fleet had already mapped an alternate trans-route to Earth that added some twenty light years to their trip, but only a week in travel time. But the problem now was how much territory is a race entitled to? Were they entitled to the closest inhabitable system, or systems?
The Empire had far greater economy, industry, and population growth. In all likelihood they will surround the Trivaxian system in less than a decade. And what then? What would they do when Trivaxians emerge from their system, trying to spread and colonize the space around them, only to find out that it was already claimed? The Empire had no definitive answer, there were talks about asking the Trivaxians to join the Empire in some manner, but no one had brought forward a complete proposal. They couldn’t decide when an offer should be made, how much would the Trivaxians be required to change.
For now that problem was put aside. The Trivaxians showed no signs of being close to developing a hyper or trans-drive. And so, the exploration fleet’s job was to map out the systems around the route to Earth, but also to look for other alien races. If they are still bound to their home system, they would be ignored, if they had started to colonize other systems, Johanna would establish diplomatic relations.
Thankfully, they didn’t expect a lot of those kind of encounters, not in this part of the galaxy at least. According to the Union ship data, the area of space that Earth and Sanctuary were in, was sparsely populated. Back in the Union space it was likely that dozens of races would evolve within a 30-50 light year radius. The galaxy was filled with life bearing planets, so the worlds where humans could survive weren’t rare. Out of sixteen colonies of the Empire only four were unsuitable for humans, but they had the technology to build artificial habitats so there wasn’t really a planet that they couldn’t colonize.
Johanna knew that soon the Empire will expand its borders along the trans-route to Earth. For three decades they had built their industry up, set up the clans, and stockpiled resources. According to the plan that the Emperor set up at the founding of the Empire, the time of rapid colonization will begin soon. The Empire’s population had grown sufficiently that from this point onward its growth will increase exponentially. Thanks to the progeny centers in another two decades the Nel and Human population will reach nearly two billion. They will spread themselves thin, but it was necessary, they needed to constantly fuel their expansion. The Empire’s industry and resource gathering had already far surpassed their needs, it was time for the excess to be put to use.
Finishing her shower, Johanna dressed and made her way towards the Command Center.
***
Two days later Johanna sat in the command center of her fleet’s flagship, the dreadnought Monarch. It was the last of the old class dreadnoughts to be built, and it was named after her old ship, the one that she commanded in battle in the Solar system. The ship was scuttled when she returned to the Empire, even though she was still operational. But the damage she sustained guaranteed that she would never again see combat.
“We are detecting a vortex opening at the trans-station Fleet Commander.” Her ships Sensor Handler said.
Johanna nodded, they had been expecting it.
“Contact, a ship has emerged.” Sensor Handler reported, “It’s the Gracious.”
Johanna allowed herself to relax, hoping that her subordinates hadn’t noticed. “Tell the fleet to go to green stations.” Johanna said turning to her Comm Handler. Even though they knew that the Gracious would arrive now, she had ordered yellow stations throughout the fleet. A part of her, a small part that was still in the Solar system didn’t allow her to let her guard down. “And contact Ship Master Resaani, I want him to report to me in person as soon as he is able.” The news that the Ship Master of the Gracious reported back was significant, and she would need to talk to him in person.
“Right away, Fleet Commander.” The Comm Handler said.
With that, Johanna stood up from her command chair and made way to her ready room, which was connected to the Command Center. Inside, she went behind her desk and sat down, with a flick of a hand and a mental command her see-through glass desk came to life. A myriad of holo windows appeared above it and a similar number showed on the desk’s surface. There were countless reports and fleet requests, the fact that she knew that these were only the reports and requests that concerned the whole fleet made Johanna’s head spin. But she resigned herself to another day of reading and answering requests. She synced her imp to her desk computer to speed up her responses and started with the oldest reports and requests, she quickly scanned the topics and started reading. Three hours later she was still looking at the endless wall of reports when a chime announced that she had a visitor. With a mental command she opened the doors.
Resaani, Ship Master of the Gracious walked in. He was pale as all Nel were, and was dressed in the blue skintight suit - the fleet variant of the suit that everyone in the Empire wore now, but his rank was shown on a small vest that he wore over it.