So It Begins (Defending The Future)

by James Chambers

  “There are too many,” he said, dryly to General Lord Hendred Hexikles.

  General Lord Hendred Hexikles knew better than Duke Handor how many Jokapkul closed on Handor’s Bay—enough of his scouts had evaded capture to report the torrential numbers of Jokapcul flooding toward The Easterlies main seaport. He merely grunted.

  “L-Lord,” stammered Lord Mayor Hohten Hombor, the civil administrator of Handor’s Bay, “th-there are enough sh-ships in port to eva-evacuate the most important p-people. And m-many of the rest of the c-citizens,” he hastily added, when General Lord Hexikles glowered at him.

  Duke Harrand Handor ignored the mayor, he looked at Baron Hirham Hibfroth.

  Master of Lands, Baron Hirham Hibfroth said, solemnly, “The grains, vegetables, and fruits have all been harvested and brought into the city, even those not yet ripened. Many are siloed on the ships in port.” He flashed his eyes at the mayor. “The herds are within. The Jokapcul will find naught to feed their hordes.”

  Lord Mayor Hohten Hombor paled. If the ships were serving as silos, how could they evacuate people? How could he escape?

  That night, the cook fires of the Jokapcul army seemed to sprinkle the land as densely as stars did the sky. Fires were occasionally occluded as more columns tramped or rode into the camp. The noises of the soldiers and their animals washed over the city like the sound of the sea that lapped against its eastern side.

  The ground mist burned off slowly in the morning. As the mist thinned, it revealed rank upon rank of Jokapcul soldiers facing the city, until they appeared as fields of spring wheat nearing harvest.

  Duke Harrand Handor and his chief councilors again stood watching atop the tallest tower. The silence that surrounded the city was unnerving; not even birds cried where that army stood.

  Behind the middle of the semicircle of soldiers stood a stark pavilion, its only decoration overlapping canvas roofs that mimicked a fir tree in form. A speck rose from low on the pavilion and spiraled upward. When it gained altitude higher than the height of the keep tower, it ceased spiraling and arrowed at the quintet. In moments they could discern its shape. The thing was vaguely like a gnarly human in form and flapped leathery, bat-like wings. The creature’s eyes glowed red.

  “It’s an imbaluris.” Scholar Hubart Hu’sk’s voice cracked, and he had to repeat himself.

  Duke Handor looked a question at him.

  “A demon used as a messenger,” came the explanation.

  The hideous demon, the size of a large owl and armed with talons bigger than an eagle’s, landed heavily on a crenellation and barely kept from falling off before it steadied into a squatting perch.

  “Oo zurr’ndr!” the imbaluris screeched.

  Duke Handor choked off a swallow before it made his throat bob. “Never!” he snarled at the demon.

  “Oo zurr’ndr!” the imbaluris repeated. It swept an arm back at the Jokapcul army. “Zjogabkul doo ztrong. Oo zurr’ndr or oo dzie!”

  Unsure of his voice in the face of the demon, Duke Handor shook his head.

  “Komm bak, one arr. Oo zurr’ndr then. Or oo dzie!” The demon stuttered its feet around until it faced away from the Duke and his advisors, then launched itself into the air. It didn’t spiral upward this time, simply flapped its way straight back to the pavilion. A chill wind eddied around the tower top.

  General Lord Hendred Hexikles looked at the duke for instructions.

  Duke Handor swallowed and found his voice. “The Jokapcul call coward all who surrender. They kill cowards. We do not surrender.”

  Lord Mayor Hohten Hombor looked fearfully at the duke. “The ships . . .” he croaked.

  The others ignored him.

  “How long can we hold?” Baron Hibfroth asked.

  General Hexikles scanned the surrounding legions. He shrugged. “Weeks. Perhaps a few months. No more.”

  “Perhaps until reinforcements arrive?” Baron Hibfroth asked. “There are reports an army approaches to do battle with the Jokapcul.”

  General Hexikles slowly turned his gaze toward Baron Hibfroth.

  “I have heard of this army,” he said. “It has no general. It has no training as an army. It is a ragtag of deserters, escapees, bandits, and refugees. Put no hope in that army, Baron, it cannot help.”

  “I have heard it has bested Jokapcul forces many times,” Hibfroth insisted.

  Hexikles shrugged again. “Isolated units. Foraging parties unprepared for combat. Raiding parties flush with victory and not expecting opposition. It has not faced an army. If it faces this one,” he looked outward again, “it will be crushed.”

  In the distance, they watched as lackeys set up a stage in front of the pavilion and mounted two thrones on it. When the thrones were ready, two men mounted the stage and sat, one a half beat before the other. They were too far away for the duke and his men to make out any details of their appearance or dress. The speck that was the imbaluris lighted between the thrones.

  “Lackland?” Duke Handor asked.

  “Likely,” replied Scholar Hu’sk.

  Lackland, self-named The Dark Prince, renegade fourth son of Good King Honritu of Matilda, was reputed to be the commander-in-chief of the Jokapcul armies that ravened across the continent of Nunimar. General Lord Hexikles doubted that. Whichever of the two thrones Lackland occupied, the man in the other throne had to be the kamazai who was in fact the commander-in-chief. Had Duke Handor known what General Hexikles thought, he would have agreed.

  The imbaluris returned at the appointed time. “Oo zurr’ndr!” it screeched.

  Almost too fast for the eye to follow, Hexikles drew his broad sword and swung it down onto the imbaluris’ leg.

  The demon shrieked and flopped onto its side. It struggled to turn about and flung itself from the tower and flapped away.

  “Kill the messenger?” Duke Handor asked dryly.

  General Hexikles shrugged. “It’ll live.” The razor-sharp blade hadn’t been able to cut through the demon’s hide, but the weight of the blow had broken the bone under the skin.

  The Duke nodded. “They have our reply.”

  Moments after the imbaluris reached the pavilion, a whole flock of the demons took off and scattered to front line units. Men from each front line legion broke ranks and trotted closer to the keep’s outer ramparts. They carried odd looking tubes. They stopped nearly two hundred paces from the outer ramparts and knelt with the tubes balanced on their shoulders, pointed at the stout walls. Pthupping noises came from the tubes, followed by puffs of rock dust and chips from the wall faces as the demon spitters began to slowly pulverize them.

  General Hexikles called down the tower well for a messenger. The messenger raced up the ladder, accepted the general’s orders, and sped down to where the next level of commanders waited for orders. Those commanders then sent orders to their sub-commanders on the ramparts. Longbowmen stood tall and drew arrows to their cheeks. The range was too great for accuracy, but enough arrows were fired that the Jokapcul firing the demon spitters began to fall. They were quickly replaced.

  The battle was begun.

  Special - Editor’s Bonus

  What follows is an extra story found only in the eBook version.

  Editor’s note:

  The novella Confrontation was written (on a manual typewriter I might add) on December 31, 1979, as part of the Alliance Archives universe. It was among the earliest works for writer Charles G. Weekes, and is the only known surviving manuscript of his works to be found. It later became The Glactic Journals. What is reproduced here as a tribute to Charles is an excerpt of his original novella.

  Inspired by the greats of science fiction—and the popular Sci Fi media of the time—Weekes dreamed of being a writer, one who envisioned on the grand scale of Space Opera, where mile-long warships battled using forces only theorized about by university professors; and where the ship‘s captain was always the first man into the fight.

  Alas this was not to be, for in 1992 AD we lost Weekes to the ag
es. In 2006, it was decide to dedicate the anthology Breach the Hull to him, so we started to track down his works for use as an excerpt. Unfortunately, it seems that most of his works were on five-and-a-quarter inch floppy disks, with no paper hardcopies to speak off. As he is no longer with us to say yay or nay to any editorial corrections, this work has only been edited for typos to maintain the integrity of his work, leaving the balance in its raw state.

  Weekes concluded this story with the words, *THE BEGINNING*—I cried at seeing this—I’m so very sorry that there isn’t anything more of his work than this one excerpt. I know in my heart, that if he was still among us, he would have become one of the premiere writers in this genre; but at least these few pages can show us his potential.

  With the publication of the work, his name is no longer lost to the ages, as he now stands with us as part of the Defending the Future trilogy, and as an author in the annuls of military science fiction.

  Mike McPhail

  Editor and Friend

  CONFRONTATION

  The Galactic Journals Universe

  Charles G. Weekes

  For Nessus

  Prologue

  The fires of Hell were still burning on planet Argo after the infamous pirate raid ninety-odd hours earlier. Atomic flames, burning with intense radiation in pools of molten rock which had once been food production factories or thriving cities; Fire of Prometheus that would blaze with pure white heat for millennia to come.

  No rain fell to soothe the scarred, horribly brutalized world. Most of the atmosphere had been sundered from Argo in the initial seconds of the merciless antimatter bombardment. Only tenuous, dissipating gases flowed and ebbed over the dead husk, hugging lava like soil in the losing battle to stay and die with is mate from the Dawn of Creation. Soon, the few remaining molecules that had been a life-sustaining envelope would join their brethren the Thule of deep space.

  On a few parts of Argo were the remains of fighter craft; of Pirate and Patrol manufacture. The rudely glowing spaceship skeletons poked out of the hardening stone like some modern-day dinosaur fossil. Their crews were vaporized, leaving only shadow impressions on the film of the shattered cockpits.

  Drifting above the altar to the god of War, were too warships. One, the invader’s dreadnought, was a mass of twisted metal surrounded by bloated bodies. The other, United Celestial Navy’s Galacticruiser Arcturia C2100D, the victor of combat, fared only slightly better.

  Her two-point-eight kilometer long hull was seared and pitted. Even hours after the last proton missile had been fired, small metal fires still glowed as the foam nytronium hull struggled, from manta ray-shaped prow to delta-wing propulsion complex, to discharge the concentrated heat of battle into the embracing depths of infinity.

  Amidships, in the pylon connecting the Command Module and Engineering with the Hanger Pod, a ceremony was taking place.

  A tradition dating across time; a rite which transcended most interplanetary culture.

  Burial of the dead.

  In the portside missile room, the last operational conventional weapon station on Arcturia, survivors from battle—exclusively from the Galacticruiser—gathered if physically possible, or watched on jury-rigged monitors in the overcrowded Sickbay as acting commander, Major Donavan Vega delivered last rites over the few remaining bodies that could be assembled to bury in space.

  The Altairian Security Chief’s face was expressionless. As a partial empath, Vega had already suffered most of the agony when death visited Arcturia. After ninety hours of trying to save a ship thought as good as dead, and more importantly to fight back and win, he was just too emotionally exhausted to feel anything—or to really care. His duotone brown hair, usually kept trim and neat according to Celestial Navy regulations, was tussled; matted with his own sweat and blood. His uniform was in worse condition; the light grey and red tunic tattered and soiled.

  The thought of removing the grip of battle, the stench of death and destruction from his pores had entered Vega’s mind on more than one occasion. Unfortunately, with all emergency power for bare minimum life support and ship functions, such amenities as a freshly pressed uniform, or even a sonic shower had to be dropped by the wayside.

  A technician tapped Vega on the arm, indicating that missile launch systems were ready.

  “Now into the depths of space,” Vega said in low halting tones, “With all honor and dignity bestowed to starwarriors, I commend these souls to the necropolis of space. May they find eternal peace and rest with their Creator. Amen.”

  Vega turned slowly, his hybrid Altairian/Terran mind blocking out waves of debilitating pain. He nodded once at a technician, who jacked six levers over, completing the electrical circuit between solar batteries and firing mechanisms.

  Six caskets shot into the void. Six ruined corpses out of one hundred and thirty casualties. The rest were either too badly destroyed from battle or subsequent medical cannibalization for spare parts. Some would never be found.

  Vega leaned on a console in the darkened missile room as crewmembers filed out, locked in their own thoughts. One man, in a soiled orange pressure suit, lingered behind talking into his commdisk in hushed whispers. He finished his discussion, a dark expression crossing his swarthy face. He swaggered over to Vega, assuming a reclining position against another console, careful not to apply pressure to his horribly roasted left arm.

  “It‘s over, D’Aquilla,” Vega said without looking up to visually identify one of the few surviving pilots on Arcturia, Aerospace Squadron: 214th Leader, Captain Bruce D’Aquilla.

  The human smiled in agreement, causing caked blood on his blond moustache and goatee to flake off.

  “You know, Vega, it almost seems futile,” the squat bull of a man said. “It‘s like spitting into the wind with a pound of chew in your cheeks.”

  “Really?” Vega said. He tried a quick scan of his friend’s mind, finding a crude, but effective mental block. As a telepath, Vega could have easily sundered the barrier, but he decided to wait and see what news his friend was hiding.

  “I wonder if the Allied Council will consider this,” his large hand made a sweeping gesture to cover the vessel and decimated Argo far below. “As sufficient reason to pound the crap out of Or‘Delle?”

  “Probably they will. However, I am a warrior, not a politician. I cannot confess to being privy to the thoughts of the statesmen that run our live.” He looked down at his commdisk. “Soon the Republic and two Fleet tugs will be here to take us back to Atmor for refitting. To replace our dead and severely injured.”

  “Uh, Vega, I hate to be the one to tell you—Doc thought it would be best coming from me.”

  “Go on,” Vega said curtly, his face an unreadable mask.

  “Jessica’s dead. Did you hear me Vega?”

  Hear what? Vega thought. That his mate is dead? He did not believe his auditory system. It was impossible to accept the finality of the statement. His human half wanted to scream deadly epitaphs at the immutable Universe, to smash something, to tear the Or’Dellens that had taken his wife away from him into bloody shreds.

  It was Vega’s Altairian half that regained enough control to attempt choked, but calm speech.

  “She was an excellent Science Officer. Major Sommers will be a great loss to the Celestial Navy.”

  “And to you,” D’Aquilla said quietly.

  “And to me.”

  Vega’s commdisk beep twice, shattering the silence like a broken crystal. Even as he removed the device, Vega was psyching himself back into the mold of the efficient Security Chief and acting commander.

  “Security Chief Vega here.”

  “Astrogator DeSalle here, sir. The Republic and the two tugs have just popped out of Nth space. Commander Ramon extends his compliments and wishes to know when we can start transferring casualties and personnel?”

  Vega listened to the voice of the junior astrogator fresh out of the Space Academy on her first deep space assignment. An Admiral’s daughter, a milita
ry brat Vega had expected to fold at the first major crisis. In ninety hellish hours she had proven herself as capable as any cosmonaut onboard, filling the billet of Chief Astrogator due to the man’s death when Arcturia‘s bridge had vaporized in the first nine milliseconds of battle. He made another note to recommend that Christine DeSalle be awarded the post permanently with the appropriate rank once they arrived back at Atmor.

  “Very well, ensign,” Vega said. “Return compliments and inform Commander Ramon that as soon as the Avengers can link our number six and number one airlock, we can commence crew transfer. Inform Doctor Masters to start moving her patients to airlock number one. Pass the word to abandon ship, then pull all the record tapes on this incident. Captain D’Aquilla and I shall meet you at airlock six. Out.”

  “Acknowledged and out.”

  “I can’t believe we’re abandoning the old girl…“

  “Sentimentality, D’Aquilla? I would never have thought you would be sorry to leave the Arcturia, however short the hiatus will be.”

  “It‘s small things, Vega. Memories of good time and good people—and the best quadralude synthesizers in the Celestial Navy.”

  “You would think of that noxious drug at a time like this.”

  “Well excuse me! Can you think of a better time?”

  “In fact I can. Onboard Republic’s shuttle on our way to some modicum of comfort.”

  Vega shoved the Terran clone in front of him, trying to avoid the emotions of leaving a ship that had been home since he had graduated the Weapon’s Academy fifteen years earlier.

  Irrationally, he made a promise to stay with the when repairs began at Atmor and to be with her when she sailed into the blue black void again.