Insurrection
Valyien, Book 5
James David Victor
Fairfield Publishing
Copyright © 2018 Fairfield Publishing
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Except for review quotes, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the written consent of the author.
This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is purely coincidental.
Contents
Prologue: Calculated & Predicted
1. How to Start a War
2. Dur
3. Like Father, Like Son
4. Interlude: The Burning of Haversham
5. The Arena
6. Cycles and Seasons
7. Ko Herg
8. The Greater Enemy
9. Go. Come Back
10. Uprising
11. New War Old War
Thank You
Free Story
Bonus Content: Story Preview
Preview: Recruit
Prologue: Calculated & Predicted
In the Imperial colony-world of Haversham, a boy with brown hair is running fast over the brow of a hill toward home. It is getting late, and the pink sky of his world is starting to burn a deep purple and red—not that the boy is worried. Haversham is set against the backdrop of the Eolaris Nebula, so the skies are always interesting hues.
Little did he know that this evening’s sky really was a sign of tragedy and disaster. But how could he? For now, he is just a young boy from some minor Imperial Coalition merchant family, dressed in his white and silver encounter suit that he has managed to cover in the rich, fertile mud of the planet.
“Keep up, Brig!” bleeps and whirrs the small creature that he is following giddily. The buzzdrone is little bigger than his hand, and, unlike the other larger and more sophisticated drones, he has outboard rotors that allow it to dance and sweep through the air as fast as a dragonfly. “You’re going to be late!” Buzzby, the drone, states as its protocols insists that it has to. Buzzby was programmed with a range of friendly procedures and mannerisms, but it was no machine intelligence. It had no awareness like the other, far greater beings in its species—Ponos, Sirius-23, Alpha…
But for now, Brig and Buzzby are just two more creatures charging from the manicured parklands back to the settlement that is huddled below on the mouth of a great bay. Haversham is a calm world, a placid world for well-to-do guilds and traders. Nothing awful happens here.
Until now.
Clunk. There is a faint warning sound from Buzzby, and Brig looks up to see that his indicator light is flashing orange.
“You’re running low. I should have charged you before we left this morning,” he said, reaching up to allow the dragonfly-drone to swoop toward his hand. Before it could finish however, the drone’s light flashed once, and it fell out of the sky, stone-cold and lifeless.
Brig is shocked a little, and fear ripples through the young boy’s mind—an apprehension of darker things that are about to come perhaps, not that his young mind could grasp such foreboding. Stupid thing, the young child nudges his robotic companion with his sneaker and Buzzby just rolls a little way on the gravel. Knowing that he will get into awful trouble if he leaves it up here, Brig picks up the drone and holds it in his hand, before again starting to jog over the rise of the hill toward home. He should be able to stick Buzzby into the charging port at their villa before his mother even notices, he thinks.
That is, if Haversham had any power at all.
“What the…?” Brig’s sneakers slow on the gravel and dirt paths that lead almost straight to the door of his house. The sky is turning a deep purple, and he can see the settlement spread out before him—a connected series of villas and graceful walkways spreading between them like roots, and the whole colony curving around the mouth of the bay like a scene from a storybook.
Only, there are no lights on in any of the buildings of Haversham. In fact, Brig can’t see any of the glow-lamps lit, even though they are supposed to have come on by now. Usually, Haversham would be a brightly-lit scene of warm and soft lights from the many houses, plazas, and parks. It would look pretty. It should look safe.
Now, however, as Brig’s eyes move over the dark shapes of the houses, streets, and the odd warehouse or processing plant, he realizes that their metals looked jagged and sharp. The buildings take on a different character in the dark.
“What happened?” Brig asks in confusion, dropping Buzzby to the ground. He is not alone in asking this question.
All across the Near Worlds, there were reports of lateness, stoppages, and outrage. Transport ships that should be carrying the latest goods, foods, services, and visitors to this tranquil belt of the Imperial Coalition had failed to arrive—and in fact, few warp jumps had been recorded in the past forty-eight hours. What was going on, the noble families and ambassadors demanded, and Something must be done!
Of course, this was just the sort of thing that the Imperial nobles who inhabited Haversham and the other planets of the Near Worlds would say. Urgent messages were sent to the house lords, and then relayed to the nearest Armcore general. Unfortunately, these messages too—having to rely on data-space to travel, and that meant sub-quantum transceivers and responders—were also subject to the strange loss of power. In short, the message was late in the sending and in the arrival, and one by one, areas, regions, districts, and sometimes whole colonies started to suffer power outages.
This was not the sort of thing that happened to the Near Worlds, that bastion of the middling echelons of the noble houses, and this was not the sort of thing that they paid taxes for. The infrastructure of their cities and habitats were built for a continuous transmission of power to keep them going, and these breaks, drop-outs, and reduced outputs played havoc with their starports, their medical facilities, their personal computers, and so much more.
Alpha had found the weakness of the human race, and the hybrid machine intelligence was exploiting it. The Imperial Coalition was reliant on machines now more than ever.
And Alpha was fast becoming a machine-god.
“Check on my three o’clock?” A brief burst of static as the naval officer in Armcore Fighter 49 slid out of the darkness, many lightyears away.
“I got your three o’clock, Cap’n,” the first naval officer was answered by one of his crewmates, also sliding through in his own sleek, X-shaped one-person Armcore fighter on the captain’s wing. This new arrival was followed by more, another two on down the line, and another three on left.
The seven one-person ships powered their boosters at the lowest impulse setting they had as they followed their captain’s lead, heading straight for the twin star system of Helion.
“Separate on my signal. Lock and load, and fire at will on my command,” the captain—a youngish man chosen for this mission because his harsh, volatile manner—gave his curt orders to the crew.
“Go,” he added, urging his fighter to start gliding downward as the others separated to fan out into an ever-expanding circle around him. They were going to use the wide-attack pattern, as suggested by his performance computers. His attack group would be spread out, so the enemy wouldn’t be able to shoot them all down at once. At least, that was the plan.
Up ahead of the attack-group’s captain, he could see the twin stars of the system hanging in their eternal embrace. The binary system of Helion was rare, and it was one of the most important generators of power for the Imperial Coalition, in the form of the Helion Generator: an always moving helix of triangular carriages that hurtled orbit after orbit around one star, before crossing to hurtle around the other. Each carriage was a giant battery, of sorts—the face of their shells coated with reactive filaments, transmitting their captured radiat
ion to the molten metals inside and creating a ceaseless chain-reaction. Just the careful orbits and the dedicated staff who lived inside every heavily-shielded twenty-fifth carriage kept the Helion Generator from going full super-nova, every minute of the day.
But now, somehow, the energy had stopped flowing from the Helion Generator to the Near Worlds. The docking ships that should load up on the irradiated materials to deliver them to factories and processing plants through the Imperial Coalition had stopped, and all messages with the Helion Generator had been lost.
“Captain? Eyes on the target,” one of the forward fighters reported, and they shared their telemetry data with the captain’s flight computer. There was the Helion Generator signal. It still showed as a helix, but there was something clearly wrong—it was moving far too fast.
“Can anyone hail them?” the leader spat, hitting his comms repeatedly to try and get a message out of the spinning helix ahead of them. Now that they were swooping closer, he could even see the generator with his physical eyes. It looked like a flash of silver, like a line of comets flashing past at insane velocity.
“No one could survive that,” the captain murmured. The G-force alone would probably be enough to make your internal organs quickly become your external ones.
“Arm weapons,” the captain ordered, lifting the lock on his attacking trigger-stick. Although they were the smallest of the manned vehicles that Armcore had—each only contained one crewmember, after all—they could still punch far above their weight. Each fighter was armed with meson torpedoes as well as laser blasters, and their maneuverability and speed were the best of their class.
But even so, they were still outmatched as something slid out from behind the far corona of one of the suns, as Alpha revealed itself—
“Shall we continue?” asked the square-jawed older man to the younger, sitting above him in what could only be described as a throne.
The square-jawed man was none other than Captain Farlow, or the returned Captain Farlow, who survived the capture of Alpha to be dispatched here, to the very heart of the Armcore behemoth, Armcore Prime and its holy of holies—the audience chamber of Senior Dane Tomas, Chairman and CEO of the company.
“I, uh, why not!?” the rotund figure of the senior spat down at the strange captain below him, his eyes flickering up to the holographic display scenes that had been showing the footage of the Helion-Alpha encounter. Dane Tomas, despite being the hereditary owner and commander-in-chief of the most powerful military infrastructure in the entire Imperial Coalition, was also a coward, and he couldn’t take his eyes from the strange vessel that was paused as it emerged from the corona of one of Helion’s binary stars.
The hybrid intelligence known as Alpha had made for itself a ship like no other that Senior Tomas had ever seen before, or was likely to ever see again in this life.
“I see no need,” Captain Farlow stated casually. “It is clear what the outcome was, and you have your reports of the wreckage to verify my information.”
He’s changed, Dane thought—no point in saying that out loud now, was there? The captain below him wasn’t the same man that he had sent from here just a few short orbits ago, on a suicide mission to try and kill Alpha. Captain Farlow held himself differently, he no longer appeared brash, or argumentative, rude or stubborn, just…uncaring.
He had been brought here by one of Dane Tomas’s trusted ‘black ops’ advisors, Specialist Merik, who Dane had told to wait outside the door to his personal audience chamber—partly because Dane Tomas didn’t trust the specialist to not stick a knife in him at the earliest opportunity, but also so that he could come running to dispatch the strange Farlow should he do anything too odd. But Farlow had barely flinched at seeing the man responsible for demoting him from full general down to captain-with-license, and who had clearly dispatched him to die.
Tomas had wondered if he could detect any amount of hatred or rancor coming from the man, but no, there was nothing.
It’s almost as if Alpha has wiped the personality that inhabited that body, and now all I am looking at is a reprogrammed human computer. Dane shuddered.
“Well, I want to see what happens!” Dane said petulantly. He wasn’t used to being regarded in such a brazen, unfearful way. It made him nervous. Irritably, he waved toward the holographic controls to continue their bloody retelling of events some several hundred lightyears away.
“Fighter 1, 2, 3—go!” the soon-to-be short-lived captain of the attack group shouted into the comms, and he could see the flare of orange from their booster rockets through the cockpit’s windows ahead of him, and then subsequently the green, digital lights in the holographic display as they arced toward the large red triangular vector trying to get a lock onto the enemy.
The Alpha ship looked a little like a cuttlefish, but one without tentacles, and that had been crossed with a jagged sword. The ‘forward’ of the boat—if the thing even had forward and back—and what occupied two-thirds of its body was the long, protruding ‘snout’ of metals, thick with bulbous geodesic units. Their metals shone in the glow of the near sun. The Alpha-vessel was so new that it hadn’t yet had a chance to become pitted and dented by the travails of space.
The nose ended in a downward-pointing horn of cerulean steels, protecting a cluster of what looked like antennae, aerials, or gun emplacements. Just in front of the whorl of rounded shell-like structure at the rear extended four fin-like sail-fans in an ‘X’ around its body. They shone and glittered with solar-catching materials but didn’t seem to move as they flanked over the largest part of the body, the rounded shell of the rear that looked as though it had been made from an algorithm. Surely no human mind could have created such a ship. For one thing, it was too large—larger even than the Armcore war cruisers that were the largest military vessels in Imperial space, and perhaps almost as large as one of the cruiser-tankers that slowly plied the space-lanes, delivering goods and raw materials to the far ends of the galaxy.
What chance did seven one-man attack fighters have against such a behemoth?
The captain waited for the first flight to halve the distance between him and the newcomer, before ordering the next group. “Flight 2, go!” The other three suddenly turned and darted in their flights like hunting hawks, angling on their separate trajectories across the void to engage with the vessel.
The captain moved his ship steadily forward, knowing that he had to direct the combat if he could. He had to relay whatever weaknesses and capabilities they uncovered. He had to warn his crew of dangers they might not be able to see, but still, it stuck in his craw to be left behind like this.
The first flight flashed over the fast-moving silver ribbon that the Helion Generator had become, separating and turning as they did so, breaking apart to confuse their enemy.
Flash. Flash. Flash.
It was like shooting fish in a barrel. Three lights blinked along the sides of the Alpha-vessel’s long snout-like hull, and the captain suddenly blinked as, one after another, all three fighters erupted into crimson petals of fire and light. This close to the suns, the energy of their explosions only intensified, spreading to burn up the volatile gases of the corona like a spreading wildfire.
“What…” the captain muttered. How did the vessel calculate the trajectories of his friends so quickly? They had been moving as fast as the agile attack-fighters could go, rolling and banking as they did so—no human eye could follow that, and no computer should be able to predict just where the human pilots would turn to at the last moment…
But Alpha was no normal computer, and he was certainly no human mind. Alpha was the mutant child of Armcore itself, and the infrastructure of its intelligence was steeped in the accumulated military, strategic, and tactical combat that Armcore excelled at. The other half of its code-DNA, however, was far stranger—an amalgam of ancient Valyien technology, some sort of recovered alien computer, or memory server, or relic that the long-lost Valyien had left behind, which had become the cradle into which Alpha
was poured.
Alpha was about as far from a human as it was possible to get.
“Evasive action. Extremely hostile!” the captain barked at the next flight of three attackers, although he was sure that they would also have seen just what had become of their colleagues. In response, he saw his three friends break apart early, and swing wildly in their flight trajectories as they tried to confuse Alpha’s targeting computers.
Whoosh. One darted into the inner corona of the closest sun, skimming along the volatile gases before rolling out again. They’re getting closer! the captain thought, and still the Alpha-vessel hadn’t fired on them.
Whoosh. The next flashed over the silver comet that the Helion Generator had become. Flash. A stupid move, as Alpha once again caught it and opened it up with whatever sort of needlepoint laser weapon it was using—again, nothing that the captain recognized.
Whoosh. The last of the three fighters used the death of his comrade to swerve and duck behind the exploding wheel of fire and swoop down as if running away.
“Torpedoes released!” the captain heard the sun-traveling fighter say, just before he met his fate. A small plume of light flared from under the nose of the Alpha-vessel as it disgorged its own incendiary devices, a small blip of heat and light toward the sun.
“Get out of there!” the captain shouted, feeling sweat run down his face inside his suit.
“It’s okay, Captain! It missed! That missile is nowhere near me!” the pilot replied.
But Alpha didn’t have to fire its incendiary device at the fighter, and no, it hadn’t missed. The captain watched as whatever device exploded, setting off a coronal burn through the outer atmospheres of one of the Helion suns like a solar flare.
Insurrection Page 1