by Jeff Sims
Contents
Main Characters
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Best Wishes
I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it. Thanks to everyone that helped me with this book.
© 2015 by Jeff Sims
All rights reserved. No part may be copied or reproduced in any manner or by any means without prior written permission by the author.
Published by Book Baby
ISBN: 978-1-6822281-3-5
The Spindle Station is a work of fiction. All names, places, characters, and events are products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. For more information, visit www.allianceconflict.com
Cover art by Tim Phillips
For more information, contact: [email protected]
Chart of known hyperspace lanes
The chart shows the hyperspace connections and relative distances. It does not necessarily show the physical location of the system in space. The shaded ovals contain a planet with intelligent life. Many more systems have been charted, but only the ones relevant to the story are shown.
Time Chart for hyperspace lanes
From To Hours
Advranki 1 Advranki 2 5
Advranki 1 Advranki 3 6
Advranki 1 Altian 6
Advranki 2 Advranki 3 3
Altian Solaria 6
Conron Advranki 1 8
Conron Opron 8
Conron Solaria 8
Conron Uselon 6
Hepitila Dunron 5
Netron Hepitila 6
Netron Hiricula 6
Netron Neto 8
Opron Influenla 7
Opron Netron 6
Opron Trilon 2
Uselon Waylon 6
Waylon Earth 11
Main Characters
Advranki
Carank – Brilliant scientist
Frank – Alliance Senate member
Figur – Alliance Senate member
Dolen – Admiral of the Advranki home fleet. Stationed on Guardian.
Lexxi – Weapons officer on Sunflower.
Putat – Communications officer on Sunflower
Solear – Captain of the Sunflower
Altian
Clowy – 1st Officer of the Sunflower
Lorano – Brilliant scientist
Korno – Alliance Senate member
Human
First Squadron - Russ Brand (Rush), Edward Williams (Ace)
Alpha Squadron – Chris Armstrong (Kip), Ralph Dellman (Rubie), Gus Swanson
Jim Donovan (Pinball) – Pilot – leader of the group of humans
Colin O’Neal – Chief engineer
Amy Weisman – President of Victory Games
Hiriculan
Blifgot’ne (Bline) – Ambassador to the Alliance
Fruid’la – Admiral in Hiriculan fleet. Stationed on command carrier Retribution
Loid’pe– Sewage engineer, formerly navigations officer Loid’la
Punsno’we – (Ponwe) – Project leader for new office building
Solarian
Victor Bullpeep (Tyrano on Earth) – Captain of the mini-freighter Vista.
Crista Bullpeep – Victor’s wife and bodyguard
Ella Birdsong - Pilot of the Sunflower
Jack Dogbarks – Captain of the mini-freighter Jackal.
Amanda Catmeows – Alliance Senate member
Prologue
“Captain Hone, we are now entering the Influenla system,” said Nikol.
Hone said, “Start both active and passive scanners. We need to know what the Hiriculans are doing way out here.”
Nikol started the scan. After a moment she said, “Scan shows that the Hiriculans put a brand new space station near the edge of this system. It is roughly 12 minutes from here at .05 light.”
Hone replied, “Niko, set course for the space station .03 light. Let’s just go say hello, shall we.”
Nikol, the pilot of the Advranki cruiser Justice, adjusted course and speed. The Justice was approaching the station when they were hailed by the Hiriculan cruiser Intolerant.
The Hiriculan spoke in his native language. Hone said, “Computer, translate message.”
…Reverse course immediately. This is a civilian station. According to the treaty Alliance warships are not allowed here…
Hone was not deterred. He said, “Nikol, plot a course around the cruiser. This is a neutral system. Let’s see if they try to stop us.”
Nikol made the course change. They proceeded on the new course for a moment when Nikol announced, “The Hiriculan cruiser is firing missiles.”
The missile travel time was currently 4 minutes. Hone said, “Fire 10 shield buster missiles, then 10 defensive missiles. Continue on our present course.”
Four minutes later Nikol announced, “Our defensive missiles only stopped 8 of the in-coming missiles.”
Captain Hone sent a ship wide communication, “All hands brace for impact.”
Two shield buster missiles impacted the Justice. The impact almost caused Captain Hone to fall out of his seat. He said, “Nikol, what is the status of our offensive missiles?”
Nikol replied, “The Hiriculan cruiser has stopped all 10 of our offensive missiles. Also, we are being hailed again.”
…Retreat immediately or the next volley will damage your ship.”
Captain Hone realized that he couldn’t win this battle. The Hiriculan cruiser apparently had a significant advantage in missile technology.
Hone said, “Nikol set course for the Influenla – Opron hyperspace lane.”
Chapter 1
Lorano’s communicator buzzed yet again. This was the 3rd time in the last hour he had received a hail from the hangar bay. Lorano sighed in despair and answered it.
“Lorano, we need your help on the assembly line. The electronic boards are not passing the final test,” said Jim Donovan.
Lorano heard another voice in the background say, “I think it is the pressure transducer. The pressure tube isn’t aligning properly between the housing and the board.” He heard a third voice say, “No, it is definitely the solenoid connection. I think we should be soldering the joint instead of relying on a press fit.”
Lorano started to answer and realized that the humans had already broken the connection. He would have preferred to stay in the control room and try to fix the issue via the com panel, but he realized that he would have to personally go down there.
Carank said, “Well, the humans are starting to re-design the gravity missiles. That doesn’t sound good.”
Lorano placed his palm on the weapons cabinet and said a password to unlock it. He took a beam weapon from the cabinet and handed it to Carank. He took a second and tucked it under his shirt. Carank saved his latest project on his work station, grabbed the weapon and stood up. Lorano said, “Let’s go.”
They walked carefully around the large piles of equipment that were waiting to be installed and exited the control room. This equipment would be used to track the missiles once they were fired into hyperspace. The priori
ty at the moment though was properly assembling the missiles that would be used to chart hyperspace.
Lorano contacted the Sunflower and said, “We are going to the landing bay and interacting with the humans. Please have Lexxi monitor us.”
Lexxi responded directly by screaming “Aaaahhh!” She continued, “Do you think I have nothing to do but sit around and monitor you? Just squirt mustard on your head and go in there.”
Lexxi put her giant headphones over her ears and broke the connection without waiting for a response. Realistically though, she really didn’t have anything better to do.
Lorano laughed at her thinly veiled joke and said to the closed communicator, “You are welcome to join us and bring the condiments.”
The Sunflower was on a little-known mission. It wasn’t exactly a secret mission, but very few beings knew where the ship was or what it was doing. The ship had been assigned to assist scientists Lorano and Carank in their search for Old Solaria.
The Sunflower had been stripped of all crew members save Captain Solear, his first officer Clowy, weapons officer Lexxi, and 20 human fighter pilots. The remaining crew members and recently promoted Captain Arean had transferred to a new cruiser called the Dandelion. Ella Birdsong, the pilot, had remained on the supply depot in Conron.
This was technically against an Alliance regulation requiring a minimum of 30 beings to be on board before starting a mission. However, Captain Solear had secret orders that allowed him to temporarily break the regulation.
The planet Solaria was not the home world of the Solarians. They had been forced to abandon their home world approximately 4 millennia ago when it was struck by a severe band of cosmic radiation. The system’s general location had been recorded by the evacuees, but the exact location and name of the planet was lost. The Solarian council had ceremoniously named their home world Old Solaria.
When the Solarians joined the Alliance, they requested that the Alliance Navy try to find their original home world. The Alliance Navy had been searching for the planet on and off for the last two decades. To date though, the search had been fruitless.
However, the outlook had recently changed when Lorano invented a new way to chart hyperspace lanes and search for cosmic bodies. The new method was far, far cheaper and quicker the previous method.
The previous method made use of hyper charting missiles. These were enormous missiles about the size of a fighter that were capable of jumping into hyperspace by themselves. The method was to launch a missile, have it jump to hyperspace and travel to a specific location, chart that location, then open a tiny hyperspace window and send the information back. These missiles were hugely expensive to produce and could only be used one time. Thousands or even tens of thousands of missiles were required to chart a hyperspace lane.
Lorano had created a new type missile that could continuously send back gravity readings as it traveled through hyperspace. From this, they could then create a map of the gravity fluctuations throughout the missile’s flight path. The gravity information wasn’t nearly as good as a detailed scan, but a ship could follow a missile’s path with a high degree of confidence that it wouldn’t smash into anything.
Using Lorano’s method, the same area could be effectively charted using only hundreds of missiles instead of thousands. Plus, each missile was significantly cheaper since it didn’t need a hyperspace generator or advanced communications gear.
Lorano’s idea for locating Old Solaria was to inundate a particular location with gravity reading missiles. The result should be a chart showing areas with high gravity and their relative width and breadth. Once identified, they could follow-up with hyper charting missiles or actual visits to these locations for exact scans.
During his brief stay at the Conron Depot, Lorano reviewed all of the legends and stories about Old Solaria and made note of any that gave a spatial location. The task hadn’t been as arduous as it sounded. There were only a handful of stories that gave a general location of the planet and only one (the monument on Solaria) that gave actual coordinates.
Carank had also been busy. He reviewed all of the previous Alliance Navy searches. He created a multi-layered chart that showed the known astronomical objects such as stars, planets, and meteoroids against the gravity profile of the regions in question. He was searching for any area that had a high gravity spike without a corresponding identified object.
Their research hadn’t yielded any new information or insight, but Lorano had identified four potential areas that he thought were promising. According to the star chart, the obvious place to search for Old Solaria was Trilon.
The old historical records suggested that there may have been a hyperspace jump path between the two systems. Although there is mention of a path, it doesn’t list actual jump coordinates or actually mention Trilon by name. This was strange because Trilon had been discovered before Old Solaria had been evacuated.
The Navy had conducted multiple searches from Trilon and could find no evidence of a previous path to Old Solaria; nor were they able to chart a new one. Every conceivable direction from Trilon was blocked by gravity disturbances and/or cosmic radiation.
The Navy next tried to find a way around the radiation field by starting in Uselon, Waylon, and Dunron. If they couldn’t find the planet by going right to left, perhaps they could stumble upon it by going left to right. They made several, unsuccessful searches from each location.
Since the Fleet had left a hyperspace charting platform in the Waylon system, Lorano agreed with Carank’s earlier assessment that Waylon was the most logical place to begin the new search. Lorano and Carank had boarded the Sunflower in Conron and had made a relatively short series of jumps from Conron to Uselon, and then on to Waylon.
The Waylon system consisted of an average star with five planets. The system was unusual in that all five planets were clustered very close together and were very high in raw materials such as iron ore and polonium. It appeared that at one time the five planets were probably one giant asteroid that was struck by a meteoroid and splintered.
They had arrived in the system approximately two days ago and docked with the hyperspace charting platform. The Sunflower made a complete scan of the system while it was traveling to the platform. The system was unoccupied. They also queried the traffic control buoy; it showed that no traffic had been here since the Navy stopped looking for Old Solaria almost a year ago.
Well, official traffic anyway. Lorano and team had flown the mini-freighter Vista around the outskirts of the Waylon system roughly four months earlier when they were forced to find an alternative hyperspace path from Earth to Conron because the existing hyperspace corridor was ‘accidentally’ damaged and was no longer viable.
The fancily named hyperspace charting platform was in reality simply a drilling platform and its corresponding control sphere and living quarters. The drilling platform wasn’t being used; the team was located in the control sphere. The conversion from mining control sphere to hyperspace charting platform had been straightforward – the Navy had simply dragged the structures to the Waylon system and changed their name.
Lorano and Carank reached the hangar and saw the Sunflower. The Sunflower was docked to an exterior bay right beside the main hangar. It was connected to the station via an airlock. Carank waved at Lexxi as they passed. She couldn’t literally see him, but there was a camera in the corridor and he knew that Lexxi was monitoring it despite what she had said.
The last two days had been productive. They had landed on the station and found an unmarked corvette stored in the main hangar with a completely clean transponder. They moved the corvette to an exterior docking bay and cleaned the main hangar.
The humans then unloaded the cruiser and transferred everything to its correct position – the assembly line in the main hangar and the monitoring equipment in the bridge. Lorano and Carank focused on setting up the assembly line. It was the priority because they needed roughly 1,000 gravity missiles to conduct an adequate search of a
particular area.
Lorano took a deep breath and prepared himself for his upcoming encounter. He noted that Carank was doing the same. They had no inherent force field protection here should the humans turn violent. They could have removed the sleeping gas canisters from the Sunflower, but the hangar bay was too big. The gas would dissipate before it would cause the humans to fall asleep.
Lorano fingered his beam weapon. He had been in the bay several times before, but with only 1 or 2 humans. This time all 20 were there. Individual humans hadn’t bothered him, but he felt the weapon was a necessary precaution this time. Basically he thought it was better to have a beam weapon and not need it then need one and not have it.
They walked in. One of the humans saw him and they immediately came running toward them. The humans lined up in their eerie twin lines. Lorano forced himself not to turn and run. Instead he held his breath and waited. Captain Solear had informed him the correct greeting was ‘dismissed’ or ‘return to your duties’.
Lorano said, “Dismissed.”
Eighteen of the 20 pilots returned to whatever they had been doing. Jim Donovan and Russ Brand approached them. Lorano noted that it was normally these two humans that discussed technical issues with him. He wasn’t sure why those it was always those two, but then he hadn’t really given it any thought.
Jim said, “The machine is rejecting too many parts. The circuit board won’t fit into the housing.”
Lorano responded, “I imagine it is simply user error. Is everyone following the work instructions I created?”
Jim didn’t answer, so Lorano reviewed the assembly process. The prototypes that he had built by hand to check the design had fit perfectly. However, now that it was being assembled on a relatively high speed machine, the circuit board was slightly rubbing against the housing and causing the issue at final test.
Now that Lorano had diagnosed that the problem was that the components weren’t fitting together properly, he quickly changed the design. He angled his body so that no one could see the monitor. He quickly made a small adjustment to the length of the circuit board. Then he announced, “Everything looks good, let me try.”