Warrior Chronicles 6: Warrior's Glass

by Shawn Jones

  Warrior’s Glass

  Book Six of the Warrior Chronicles

  by

  Shawn Jones

  When you get what you want in your struggle for pelf,

  And the world makes you King for a day,

  Then go to the mirror and look at yourself,

  And see what that guy has to say.

  For it isn't your Father, or Mother, or Wife,

  Whose judgement upon you must pass.

  The feller whose verdict counts most in your life

  Is the guy staring back from the glass.

  He's the feller to please, never mind all the rest,

  For he's with you clear up to the end,

  And you've passed your most dangerous, difficult test

  If the guy in the glass is your friend.

  You may be like Jack Horner and "chisel" a plum,

  And think you're a wonderful guy,

  But the man in the glass says you're only a bum

  If you can't look him straight in the eye.

  You can fool the whole world down the pathway of years,

  And get pats on the back as you pass,

  But your final reward will be heartaches and tears

  If you've cheated the guy in the glass.

  Dale Wimbrow

  Contents

  Title Page

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  One

  Less than one astronomical unit, Earth’s distance from its small sun, and moving away from them, an unnamed and unidentified ship came into the sensor range of the Ares Federation Ship, Remington. The humanoid avatar, George Addison, detected the unknown vessel moments after the unarmed Remington emerged from a wormhole. Turning to his father, George relayed the new development in his modulated, yet almost-human voice.

  General Cort Addison, military dictator of a fledgling empire that already spanned two universes, let go of his thoughts about a small grave on a distant planet in a universe that had preyed on his own, and looked at the avatar. “Notify Bergh Station and Earth. Tell them we are on our way to Solitude.”

  Technically, the paradise planet Solitude was his wife Kim’s personal property. Bergh Station was the planet’s main settlement, as well as headquarters of the Ares Federation of Planets. Solitude was also the home of the avatar’s core. The GEOtheRmal Gnostic Entity—George—was a massive supercomputer powered by geothermal energy, and had spent nearly all of its one hundred million years of existence alone, beneath the planet’s surface. While on a camping trip years before, Cort had found hints of the civilization that had built the being, which became known as George. Scientists later discovered the supercomputer, made contact with it, and George became an invaluable part of Cort’s Ares Federation as well as his adopted son.

  George touched his control screen several times. He looked back at Cort and said, “I cannot contact Ares space. Our chronometers are out of sync.”

  Do I have to do everything? Jesus H. Christ. Cort took a deep breath and replied, “Probably the time dilation from the wormhole. Align them, and send them a warning as soon as you can.”

  “Father, there has been an anomaly. As we jumped, I detected a tachyon burst. It matches the signature of a Nill transition.”

  Beside Cort, Kim Addison said, “That’s impossible. The transition core was destroyed.”

  “There is something wrong.”

  “What is it?” Cort asked. He looked at the screens in front of George, and the loss of his unborn child was pushed still further back in his mind.

  “The stars are out of alignment. I don’t understand. This is wrong.”

  Kim looked at Cort. They knew George well enough to recognize confusion in his synthetic voice.

  “What’s wrong, George?”

  “We have arrived at the wrong time, Father.”

  “What do you mean? When did we arrive?” Kim tapped on her flexpad.

  “George, align the chronometers. Display the exact date using the Earth calendar.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  Cort stared at the chronometer on the control panel in front of him while the display showed earlier and earlier dates. Every change filled Cort with more dread. This can’t be happening. Stop, dammit. Godsdammit, stop!

  The date moved progressively backward, as if in slow motion. Cort’s thoughts spun with it, around all the death he had wrought, and specifically the two deaths that put him in that particular moment in time. When the display finally stopped changing, his breath caught in his chest, and cold fear crept along his spine. His head swam and all he could say was, “My hell won’t ever end.”

  He had come full circle. The chronometers showed both the time on Earth at that moment and the time they had expected it to be when they emerged from the wormhole. The difference between the two was almost three hundred and fifty years. His first wife, Angela, and his first child, little Diane, were still alive. No drunken wreck had happened. He hadn’t smelled the betrayal of alcohol and sex on his wife’s dead body. He hadn’t gently lifted Diane’s broken form from the wreckage yet.

  The Cort Addison he once was, before the jump in time, before the Cull, before the founding of his military empire, and before the deaths of billions, if not trillions, at his own hands, was still alive. Cort stood stoically and thought about the man light years away on a pale blue dot called Earth. Could I look him in the eye?

  Kim looked down at the date and took his hand. Cort read her as she did mental math. When her mind settled on a number, he squeezed her hand and Kim knew the math was right. “You are down there, aren’t you? I can’t even begin to imagine what that must feel like, to know that while you stand here beside me, you are also alive on Earth right now. That’s… how did you say it? Mind blowing.”

  Cort stood silently for almost a minute, head tilted back and eyes closed to keep tears from rolling down his cheeks. He whispered, “Not just me, Kim. Diane and Angela aren’t dead yet.”

  Finally, he opened his eyes and stared at some demon only he could see. The jump from the Gryll universe had gone horribly wrong. Everything had also gone wrong on the other side of the wormhole. From the moment his task force arrived to rescue the humans who had been abducted over thousands of years to the attempted jump back to Ares space, and time, the curse that seemed to plague Cort haunted his every moment.

  Originally designed to be a planet killer, the Remington was, in essence, a two-kilometer-long, double-barreled shotgun. It looked like one, too. The long, rectangular barrel housing led to a gunstock-like superstructure that housed the ship’s bridge, normal living quarters and habitat areas, as well as the munitions magazines and shuttle bays. The Coach Gun-class ship used two huge, side-by-side Gauss cannons to fire high-density tungsten slugs that weighed as much as small moons. With enough power to energize the slugs to a plasma state and fire them at fractions of the speed of light, the twin guns could reduce an Earth-sized planet to space debris with just a few dozen shots. But those two barrels were currently filled with the thousands of human and alien refugees who had been rescued from the diabolic, human hungry planet on the other side of the wormhole.

  Cort had put an end to the abductions, and he had discovered the horrific reason for them—human babies were being farmed for a gland in their brains that was used as a hallucinogen for telepathic aliens. The remains of the babies we
re then fed to their unwitting parents, as well as other aliens.

  As if walking through a meat processing plant designed for human babies wasn’t torture enough, Cort had been incapacitated by a telepathically-induced stroke. As a result of his mentally uninhibited state, one of his female officers, a protege named Quinn Faulks, took advantage, and raped him daily for weeks. Cort didn’t find out that woman was pregnant with his child until after he himself had executed her.

  The man most people considered to be a living embodiment of war, because of his proficiency at waging it, faced still more challenges. As his biosynthetic blood repaired the damage created by the stroke, it forged new pathways in his brain that gave him the ability to read the thoughts of anyone around him. Sometimes, everyone around him. Like a schizophrenic, the many voices in his head wreaked havoc on his focus and threatened his sanity.

  He realized he had spoken aloud the final twist of his apparent curse. Out there, on Earth, almost across the galactic arm from the Remington, his lost family was still alive, even as his new wife, his soulmate, and mother of his son Dalek, stood beside him on the bridge of the ship, staring at the anguish evident on his face.

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “If we are in the right universe,” Cort pointed to the chronometer, “and if that thing is correct, Diane and Angela will be alive for a little over a month. They die in… thirty-seven days. That’s how long I have to save my daughter.”

  “Oh gods,” Kim whispered. “Oh my gods.” Am I going to have to share him with Angela too?

  “I’m sorry,” Cort said as he turned to leave the bridge. He was sorry, but he’d also heard her thoughts. “You don’t have to share me, though. I’m going to try to save Diane, not Angela. I love you. Not her. I don’t even know if I can do anything. But I have to try.”

  Before she could respond, he opened the door and stepped out. He stopped, looked back, and asked, “George, what happened? How did this happen again?”

  George’s avatar turned in his seat and said, “I don’t know, Father. But I registered a Nill tachyon burst as we traversed the wormhole.”

  “You said that before. What does it mean?”

  “Ship logs on the Mare’s Leg indicate there was a similar burst when you traversed to the Gryll universe.”

  That troubled Cort. He’d long since stopped believing in coincidence, and this one not only ripped at his heart, but also at the universe around them. “Figure it out. In the meantime, we’ve got to stop that ship.”

  “Why?” Kim was confused about why the alien ship had become the topic again. “They aren’t a threat to us.”

  Cort spoke as he thought it through. “That ship may not be a threat to us, but they are a threat to Earth.” This Earth. Not the future Earth. “What are the odds that they just happened to be at our emergent point, in both time and space?”

  George said, “Given the current variables…”

  Cort shook his head. George was smart, but he still hadn’t grasped the finer points of human interaction. “It was rhetorical, son. Either they came through ahead of us, or they were waiting for us.”

  Kim said, “They might not be violent.” Let them have her.

  Cort looked her in the eyes, and as her thoughts hit him, he focused on her nose, trying to block them out. He failed, and irritation was unmistakable in his voice. “Really, Kim? What about my daughter? She’s ten right now. Let’s assume I don’t know they are an enemy. But what if they are? What if they do attack Earth? What about Diane? Do they get her too? Why wouldn’t you think they are violent, given what happened on Mars, the crystal planets, during the other wars, and in the Gryll universe? Are you okay with letting them have my daughter?”

  Cort felt her shame immediately. He also realized that the few other people on the bridge tried not to listen to their conversation. Kim said, “I’m sorry, Baby. It’s… We don’t know anything about them.”

  Cort shook his head. “You may not know better, but I do. The earliest signals that might have left Earth’s solar system are still thousands of light years from us, and these guys are on an intercept course with the planet I come from, in the time I came from. Do you really think that’s a coincidence? Or that they might be benevolent?”

  “We don’t know they aren’t,” Kim said softly.

  Cort felt a sudden realization strike Kim. She understood what he already knew. Quietly, and without looking at him, she said, “If you are alive on Earth, they are probably going after you.”

  “Exactly. You get it now. They were waiting for me. So why not face us when we when emerged from the wormhole?”

  “Father, we weren’t supposed to be in this ship. We evacuated Gryll space in the Remington because the Mare’s Leg was not large enough for our refugee contingent.”

  It was a last minute decision. Liz Thoms was in charge while Cort was AWOL, burying his unborn child. She let the victims of the Gryll decide their own fate. There were so many of them who wanted to come back to Earth’s universe that the Mare’s Leg couldn’t hold them all. That meant the other ship had traversed the wormhole before the Remington.

  “That’s gotta be it. This ship can beat them. The Mare’s Leg couldn’t have. But how did they get to this time?”

  George posited the alien ship didn’t know the Remington was unarmed, and unable to use its massive Gauss cannons. That could mean they had turned and ran from Cort.

  “If you are correct, they must be from the Gryll universe.”

  “They didn’t know the weapons bay and barrels are filled with refugees,” Kim agreed.

  “The people on that ship don’t know that. But since they are afraid of the Remington, they are running from me. Straight toward Earth.”

  George added that, based on current velocity and distance, the ship had come through at the same moment as the Remington, but was undetected because of the tachyon burst that overloaded and interfered with the Ares ship’s sensors.

  “What if they aren’t violent? Maybe they are just afraid of us. We don’t know for certain they are after you.”

  Cort looked at Kim and tried to understand her doubt. But his effort only served to make him more impatient to get his point across. “You don’t know that. I’m War. I do know that, as well as if I was reading their minds, too. Someone can’t stop me in the future, so they are trying to in the past. Just like that so-called science colony all those years ago on Mars, this is bad, and I have to figure out what to do about it.”

  They stared at each other as memories of the science colony resurfaced. When Cort had declared independence from Earth, the alliance of Atlantica had sent an invasion force to Mars. Cort had acted on his instincts then; instincts that saved the fledgling Ares Federation. But now Kim didn’t want him to be right. The implications of that were too much for her to bear. She had always had to share him in one way or the other, and she was loathe to have to do it yet again.

  Cort could feel Kim’s distress and uncertainty as he walked off the bridge, but her thoughts were gone. He touched the comm in his ear and said, “George, I need weapons. Do you have anything you can use to print them?”

  George responded that they could not even store ammunition for the main guns, much less print weapons, without cannibalizing the housing structures of the refugees, or other parts of the ship.

  “Godsdammit!” Cort repeated. “How do I fight a war with thousands of confused people on the ship?”

  “We could ram them, Father. That would cost us our lives, but I believe you to be correct. They must be stopped, or they will alter our history.”

  “I don’t want to do that, but we will if we have to. Keep that in mind, son. If I’m gone and you have to save Earth, you put Kim and Dalek, and as much of yourself as you can on a shuttle, and get yourselves to the nearest Earth-like planet. Then you kill that ship. No matter what the cost.”

  “My avatar’s memory is sufficient to transfer any needed information to the planetary core on Solitude. The gel core her
e with us, is a duplicate of that which was left with Admiral Thoms on the Gryll homeworld.”

  “Okay, but you understand that protecting Kim and Dalek is your primary mission, followed by destroying that ship?”

  George agreed and suggested printing a small shuttle, but reminded Cort it meant there would be less material for weapons. They decided to print ammunition for Cort’s HAWC, and prioritize the shuttle. The next step was to build a company of Marines in case they had to assault the enemy ship.

  “Other than ourselves, Mother and Dalek, there are twenty-three Ares military personnel on board. Seventeen human, and six Jaifan.”

  “Who else do we have?” Cort asked.

  There were fewer than three hundred human and alien refugees who could possibly be used for the assault, but fewer than a hundred of those could be considered combat-capable.

  “Okay, get me the ones you think might be able to help us. Make sure our people know not to mention the timeline to the civilians. We can’t deal with questions and confusion right now. Just get me some fighters. When I figure out what we’re going to do, you will need to have printers ready to go, too. So gather whatever extra material you can for them.”