The Vassal World (The First Exoplanet Book 2)

by T. J. Sedgwick

  “Takai, give the asteroid the once-over will ya please, mate?” asked Chip, a little too colloquially for Takai’s translators to process.

  “I am sorry, can you repeat that please, Sergeant Hart?”

  “Sorry, Takai. Can you please survey over the asteroid?” repeated Chip, as slowly and clearly as he could.

  “Certainly. I will survey with the long-range optics now,” Takai replied.

  Chip could clearly see the first and second thruster emplacements. The potato-shaped asteroid had no discernible rotation. Its major axis was closely aligned with its direction of travel. The first thruster installation was two-third towards the rear and just above its lower horizon. The second sat at the mirror image position near the upper horizon. The third stood hidden behind the far side of the grey space rock.

  After quite a few minutes of close inspection Chip declared, “I can’t see any sign of surface activity. No visible enemy or surface disturbances – could be hiding in the thruster housing though.”

  “We need to be ready for anything. Most of all though, we need to avoid the enemy at all costs. We need to make the changes undetected,” reminded Motor of the final plan.

  Initially, command had planned a full-scale assault on the destroyer with a view to commandeering the asteroid. But there was a fatal flaw in this plan: no matter how tied up the Korgax were on Earth or Gaia, they’d only need one new destroyer to retake the asteroid. Whatever, overt action the allies took, they were destined to fail since they had no capital ships. Only two scenarios would guarantee the safe diversion of 375 Nemesis: a decisive victory for the Korgax, or a decisive victory for the human-Outcast alliance. If the Korgax invasion of Earth went well, they would divert the asteroid themselves. If the human-Outcast assault on Gaia brought down the Korgax, then the victors would be free to re-program the thrusters. If neither of these scenarios played out, the Korgax may decide they want the asteroid to hit Earth. They might even disable or destroy the thrusters to maintain the collision course – this made the need to covert action and a last-minute firing of the thrusters crucial. If the enemy didn’t know the thrusters had been hacked, they would have no need to destroy or disable them. Besides, with no capital ships, it was the only way. So, they had to go in and covertly hack the thruster controls directly from the asteroid surface. The escort had remote access using powerful encryption that could theoretically be hacked too. But the Outcasts had not managed to crack those Korgax ciphers, such was their strength. So there they were, now forty-five kilometres away, gliding towards the asteroid’s surface.

  ***

  They closed in the previous forty-kilometre largely without conversation. Uneventful is good, was the mantra that kept running through Chip’s mind. The downside was that he’d spent too much of the last two hours thinking of home and thinking of what the stakes were for him and his family. If this didn’t work there’d be no heroes homecoming and no future. In fact, the bitter truth was, that if they didn’t pull this off, he’d never hold his wife and two little boys again. He’d never see them grow up, graduate, get married and have kids of their own. He’d never grow old alongside Zara, to enjoy the golden retirement they’d long visualised. None of this would happen because his family on Earth would die with the impact. He might survive if he could make it to a human outpost somewhere – perhaps on Mars or an asteroid colony. But with the Earth and his family gone and the Korgax victorious, what would there be to live for? he thought morbidly. Perhaps he’d struggle on for the sake of revenge, living his final bitter days in hatred of the alien foe.

  ***

  January 11, 2064: Earth

  The invasion fleet had been expected days ago. Some of the more optimistic humans had started to half-believe their own wishful thinking. Perhaps it was all just a bad dream and they’d wake up before they’d ever had the misfortune to find Avendano-185f – now known as Gaia. But arrive the Korgax fleet did – and in strength of numbers that punctuated the night skies all over Earth, filling the hearts of those below with fear.

  It was a freezing, cloudless night of zero degrees in the back garden of Sergeant Matt Hart. His modest home, situated in Hereford, England, now only housed Zara and their two boys – Callum and Quin. Daddy had been gone for two weeks now, but was the closest he’d been since he left – about to land on the killer asteroid hurtling towards them.

  “Is Dad up there, Mum?” asked the blonde-haired Callum to his mum as he looked to the night sky. The hundreds of fast-moving specks in the sky hadn’t been there when they’d returned from soccer practice earlier. Now the mobile new band of Korgax stars encircled the Earth like a second ribbon of Milky Way.

  “Maybe, darling. Wherever he is I’m sure he’s socking it to the aliens and making sure we’re all safe down here on Earth,” she guessed, being as truthful as she could with her limited knowledge.

  “But when will he be home, Mum?” asked Quin.

  “Soon Quinny, soon.”

  She wondered whether that Friday would be her sons’ last day at school before the World was thrown into chaos. Nobody knew what to believe any more as there was so much speculation, so many diverging views on how things would pan out. On the one hand, the Government had an agenda to keep the country calm and orderly. On the other hand, the media still kept on sensationalising things and sowing the seeds of fear. The tensions caused by all the immigrants from the Tropics had been bad enough. It wouldn’t be long before emergency powers were declared and she’d have to retreat down to the bunker again. They’d stocked it as best they could, and Chip had given her some limited practice on the SA80 and 9mm handgun before he’d left. Now all they could do was wait…and stay informed.

  “Come on boys, it’s cold out here. Let’s go in and get a nice cup of cocoa, shall we?”

  “Yay...!” they shouted, running back into the lounge through the double French doors.

  After making the three winter warmers and settling the kids upstairs, Zara switched on the TV news.

  “You’re watching BCC News – stay with us for the latest on the breaking news. If you’ve just joined us what you can see on your screens right now is the view from the Teide Observatory on the Spanish island of Tenerife. That live feed showing the literally hundreds and hundreds of Korgax ships that have arrived in the last hour, presumably from Gaia. The expert we just talked to – former-Space Force Colonel, Kenyon Smith – was adamant that this is indeed the Korgax ground invasion fleet. Civil Defence has advised people to proceed to their nearest designated emergency shelter, or if they cannot get there to stay put and shelter in line with their guidance for fortifying the home. We understand that martial law is about to be declared and that no sanctioned, non-essential movement after nightfall will be allowed. So far there have been no reports of violence or looting, but the Police and Army are, tonight, out in force all over the country…”

  ***

  January 11, 2064: Mount Hazard, Large Continent, Planet Gaia

  The appropriately codenamed, Mount Hazard, was the only peak on this part of the Large Continent. For hundreds of miles around nothing was more prominent and no other land-form was anything like it. The extinct volcano was due to a volcanic hotspot that the crust had stalled on top of many millions of years ago. A hotspot that was no longer so hot. The line of predecessor peaks had long since been eroded away – mainly by wind, only a little by water. This was the deep interior of the continent larger than Eurasia and virtually a desert. Water-bearing clouds had dropped most of their rain as they floated over the preceding 2,300km of land to the west. Only the lower slopes of Mount Hazard looked green in this part of Gaia, as the last molecules of sky juice were forced upwards into colder air, rising over the mountain. The peak overlooked the historically important trader-routes that ran east-to-west across this great plain. As a strategic position and as an oasis, Mount Hazard made its living. For hundreds of years – long before the invention of motorised transport on Gaia – traders plied the route. Precious metals, ivory and
slave from the east; wood, dried seafood and taki-weed from the west. Millions of tonnes of goods and hundreds of thousands of Alphas had traversed this point, stopping to rest in the rocky, red desert. Clans had fought over Mount Hazard for generations, and now perhaps the most malignant clan of them all, held it. With advances in transportation, it no longer served as a stopping off point for weary traders, nor an exchange point for their goods. Now the town existed to service the regime stronghold bearing down on it, government funding keeping it relevant.

  The old fortifications, carved all the way up the mountainside, started just above the town. They culminated well above the tree line in a place called The Bastion. Intelligence reports told them that the network of tunnels linking the old town to The Bastion were still active. Navy SEAL, Jake Sorensen sure hoped so, as he crouched in the doorway of the disused warehouse adjacent to the forest at the base of Mount Hazard. Next to him crouched Outcast Special Forces soldier, Guardian Lakai. Both wore battlesuits and both were hidden from the passing transportation pods by their invisibility function. All the Alpha passengers in the pods would see if they looked very carefully was a wispy heat haze floating in the derelict warehouse’s doorway. The reptilian bipeds – the Alphas – were the species that had given rise to the enemy regime. The Korgax now dominated the Avendano system and would soon dominate Earth, as their fearsome invasion force readied for invasion. Above Zeta-One patrol – as Sorensen’s squad of four was designated – was the nerve centre of the enemy war machine. In the historical seat of their War Council, the leaders of the Korgax plotted humanity’s downfall. Their immediate job was to get in position, close to the enemy War Council in the stronghold far up the mountain. Even with twenty Special Ops teams they might not take down the whole Korgax leadership, that intelligence told them had assembled there today. Security around the enemy leaders even made Powell’s Secret Service setup look flimsy. Something far more potent was required to cut the heads off this hydra.

  “Have you found a way in yet, guys?” asked Sorensen to his British Special Space Service squad mates. Captain Jen Martin and Sergeant Jonah Fitzroy wore identical battlesuits to Sorensen as they explored around the warehouse perimeter looking for the easiest – and stealthiest – way in. All of the windows and doors were boarded up with sheet metal and they didn’t want to use their shoulder-pod laser to cut through. There could be all manner of sensors and observers in the small, but bustling government-sustained town.

  “Round by the back wall, Sergeant Sorensen. Our contact did his work well,” she said, eyeing the sheet of grey metal she’d easily lifted away from the doorway it had covered. The local Alpha sympathiser had done a good job of stripping the threads of the dozen screws that held the sheet in place. It looked secure to the patrolling enemy security guards they’d seen, but it lifted away with little resistance.

  They took less than thirty seconds to enter the warehouse, establish it was empty and replace the sheet metal. The place was at least two hundred years old and was used by traders to store goods waiting for sale or barter. Now it was literally one big empty space, apart from the pile of junk in the corner, on the opposite side of the back wall. Old shelving, unknown equipment and some lumps of rumble sat in the three-metre high mound.

  “The entrance is below this lot,” said Jen, unenthusiastically.

  “It would have to be, wouldn’t it,” moaned Jonah.

  “Many hands make light work…come on,” she replied.

  They cleared the junk and found the metal trapdoor. Sorensen used his shoulder-pod laser in cut mode to melt away the lock. With night vision switched on, they climbed down into darkness. Jonah was the last in, and he took a few minutes to pull some of the junk back over the hole.

  Sorensen was first down to the bottom, twenty metres below the warehouse. He looked around him – just bare rock walls from west to south to east, but a tunnel leading north. The air was damp, and an inch of stagnant water lay on the rough-hewn floor. The tunnel was straight, but not horizontal, for it climbed at an increasing gradient until obscured by its own ceiling. Lakai joined him, then Jen, then Jonah. None of them were visible to each other, but the latest miniaturised EQP transceivers were integrated into their battlesuits, allowing undetectable communication between them. Just three other patrols were lucky enough to have the mini-EQP sets they were using – there were only enough to supply the highest priority missions. If there was anywhere that the older generation of short-range microbursts would be detected, it was here amongst the Korgax leadership gathered on Mount Hazard.

  “Sergeant Sorensen, we must follow this tunnel to reach the lava tube we need,” said Lakai, rather obviously given the lack of other routes.

  “Let’s move out,” said Sorensen, hands on his lowered battlerifle – all hidden by invisibility technology.

  The four apparitions advanced slowly along hundreds of metres of the former smugglers’ tunnel. Heavy gravity weighed on their lean, fit bodies. Only Lakai’s armoured exosuit allowed him to make much progress at all. The cartilage-boned amphibian relied on the hard shell of the suit to support him like an insect’s exoskeleton. The naturally formed lava tubes in the mountain came from successive eruptions over millions of years. As lower viscosity flows continued beneath already-hardened rock, they eventually run out of lava to leave conduits underneath much of Mount Hazard.

  “Damn, it’s steep,” puffed the ultra-fit Sorensen. The tunnel had reached a forty-five degree incline and they were finding it slow going and tiring work.

  “And only getting steeper,” replied Jonah from the rear.

  “The 3D map shows it will shallow out in two-hundred metres,” informed Lakai.

  “Yes, according to the map you’re right…” replied Sorensen, having brought up his own copy of it on his HUD.

  They reached the top and the intersection with the oval-shaped lava tube, the width of a wide-body jetliner.

  “That is strange…” remarked Lakai’s synthesized voice translation.

  “What’s strange?” asked Sorensen, a little concerned.

  “What we see does not match the 3D map.”

  “How so?”

  “There is left and right – west and east, but looking up ahead I can see that left is blocked off. Can you see it too?” said Lakai, peering west with his suit’s optic zoomed in.

  “Guys, we’ve got a problem,” confirmed Sorensen. “They’ve concreted up the damn lava tube!”

  “What about the other way?” asked Jen.

  “Can’t see round the bend – but I don’t trust this map any more. We need to risk sending in a Hummingbird,” replied Sorensen, referring to the tiny recon drone. Hummingbirds, while having no cloaking tech, were small, quiet and matte-black. The drone could map the tunnels ahead with its LiDAR scanner, building up a 3D map with the use of lasers.

  “First pass without LiDAR – we need to scope it out visually first before we start up the lights show and tell them we’re coming,” said Jen.

  After a few minutes, they took up defensive positions and Jonah released the Hummingbird into the blackness.

  ***

  January 11, 2064: Asteroid 375 Nemesis, 34 days from Impact with Earth

  “Ten seconds to touchdown,” called Motor over the battlesuit network they’d just switched to. They were one of the other patrols deemed important enough to be equipped with the same EQP sets as Zeta-One on Gaia. Undetectable voice and data comms.

  The dark-side of the asteroid loomed closer at an ever-increasing rate. “Brace for touchdown!” he said, seconds before the Foxbat skidded onto the asteroid at a shallow angle. The cloaked craft deployed two small anchors from her belly on thin nano-fibre cables. The sharp anchor hooks bit past the thin layer of dust and into the bare rock below. The Foxbat bounced once before the cable tensioners did their work and quickly ate up the 5 m/s closing speed. The tensioners reeled the Foxbat backwards against the asteroid surface and finally she was still.

  Chip breathed a sigh of relief.
They were past the destroyer, apparently undetected and down safely. “That went well,” he commented.

  “Not so fast…” replied a worried Motor.

  Chip often thought Motor a bit of a worrier, but never criticised him for it – his cautious nature had saved lives in the past, including Chip’s.

  “What’s wrong, Cap?”

  “Bit of a dust cloud we set off, that’s all.”

  “Must happen all the time though, Cap – all these rocks and stuff on the surface, and only micro-gravity to keep them there. Probably thousands of little rocks floating around near the big rock. Plus, we’re in shade here – no direct sunlight for them to see the dust.”

  “Hmmmmm, maybe,” replied Motor, unconvinced. “Let’s get out and cover any landing tracks we made. The Foxbat will cover the anchors and cables below. Let’s move out guys. Sarai and Takai, anchor yourselves to the ship until we’ve done our work.”

  “Yes, Captain. We will do that,” replied Takai.