by Nick Webb
Contents
Title
Dedication
Front Matter
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-One
Chapter Seventy-Two
Chapter Seventy-Three
Chapter Seventy-Four
Chapter Seventy-Five
Chapter Seventy-Six
Epilogue
Backmatter
Liberty
Book 6
Of
The Legacy Fleet Series
For J., L., and C.
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Other books by Nick Webb
The Pax Humana Saga:
1: The Terran Gambit
2: Chains of Destiny
3: Into the Void
The Earth Dawning Series
1. Mercury’s Bane
2. Jupiter’s Sword
3. Neptune’s War
Prologue
Deep space
Skiohra generation ship Benevolence
Everything is different. Everything.
Jarum Krull, ninth matriarch of the great house of Krull of the Skiohra, sensed it. Weeks ago, when the first assault on the ligature came from the world of Sangre de Cristo, she had sensed it.
Now it was overpowering.
Nothing was as it should be. Nothing was as it seemed. As if she’d lived her whole life in shadow, watching her life through a frosted glass. All of her eight thousand five hundred and fourteen years were lived in ignorance.
Until now.
She breathed heavily, panting, running down the hallway. The great engines of the magnificent ship Benevolence, her clan’s home for the past twenty-thousand years, pulsed through the walls around her, and it seemed as if her footfalls kept time with them. As if the very lifeblood of the ship agreed with her, and urged her on.
The days of the Unthinkable Thought are over.
Open the door.
It was forbidden to open the door. It was forbidden to even think about it. Many things were forbidden to think about: the existence of the Quiassi. The Findiri. Even the very location of their own ancient homeworld. But chief among them:
Do not open the door.
Do not even consider it.
Do not even think of it.
Because the consequences were death, and worse. She didn’t know what that worse was, but her own mother, Matriarch Jazma Krull, had instilled this hereditary knowledge in her as a child. Even when Jarum herself was still living the Inner Life within Matriarch Jazma, she’d learned it well.
She caught her breath, hearing a noise and a shuffle ahead of her. Her sisters. Just around the corner of the intersecting hallways ahead. Their voices drifted down the dim path. Few ever came this way, deep within the anterior end of their space-faring home, very near where the ISS Constitution had blown clear through the hull during the great war thirty years ago.
She remembered the aftermath of that horror. And … the cognitive dissonance. Perhaps her anguish about the Unthinkable Thought—a taboo for her people—started then, when she, along with thousands of others of her sisters, repaired the damage caused by that horrific battle. Thousands of her sisters died. Millions of their children died, both interior children and exterior. And yet the damage to the ship had to be repaired, and quickly, all while meticulously avoiding the hallway that led to the door. Hundreds of her interior children protested the detours she had to take to avoid that hallway. Thousands of others of her interior children silenced the dissenters in a rage of self-righteous fury. Because avoiding the Unthinkable Thought wasn’t just custom.
It was sacred. It was irrevocable law.
It was woven into their very DNA. Their psyches. Their souls. Matriarch Jazma hadn’t so much taught her the Unthinkable Thought as she reminded her of it, for every Skiohra felt it in her bones.
The voices faded away—her sisters had taken another hallway. She breathed easier again, and resumed her jog. She had to hurry. The Ligature was disabled, at least until the actions of the Motherkiller could be predicted or contained, and so her thousands of rebellious interior children could not reach out and warn the others.
All they could do was scream at her. In fury and terror. They knew her intentions, and they hated her for it. Her own children hated her. No mother could imagine such anguish.
She shut her eyes against the pain. Against the waves of righteous anger. And she ran on, deeper into the Benevolence, nearly to the hallway where few ever went and where none went beyond.
To the door.
The Unpassable Door.
She stopped at the end of the hallway. Thousands of years of habit nearly repelled her, kept her from taking that first step down the long, narrow path. Thousands inside cursed her for even wanting to take that step.
But the first step into the hallway was the hardest. The rest came easier, and by the time she came face-to-face with the door itself, she could barely hear the steady thrum of the engines. It seemed the very life-light of the hallway had dimmed all around her, like she was in a black tunnel, with the only exit ahead of her:
The Unpassable Door.
She paused, her feet paralyzed momentarily by th
e great debate taking place inside her. She could hear them all, each and every one of her children, all at once. It was a mother’s gift—to hear and understand tens of thousands at once, seemingly outside the bounds of temporal reality.
And it was a debate she followed with great interest.
Why would we even have this taboo if not to protect us? It was natural selection’s way of ensuring our people’s preservation, said one.
Lunacy. Utter lunacy. Natural selection can’t build ships. Natural selection can’t be so specific as to forbid entry to a specific door on a specific ship, at a specific point in space-time. Besides, you were always terrible in our biology classes, retorted another.
Peace, brothers. The fact remains, regardless of the taboo’s origin, that we are bound by it. It is there for a reason. And, reason suggests that it is there for our protection. What other reason for its existence could there be? said a third.
The second waved its micro-cilia back and forth, deep within her—she could feel it—an interior Skiohra’s physical movement indicating doubt or rejection. For some reason, the action, at that moment, brought memories of the Motherkiller, when she spoke with Polrum Krull, just weeks ago. Her analogue of the micro-cilia waving, the shake of her head back and forth, seemed like such a crude waste of mortal energy, to communicate such a simple concept as no.
Your logic is faulty, the second said. Beyond faulty. It is absurd.
A fourth voiced its agreement. Brothers. Sisters. Think. Until the great cataclysm of the Ligature at Sangre de Cristo, we all accepted the taboo as irrefutable and unquestionable law. But that event changed something within some of us. And subsequent cataclysms changed more of us. And now there are hundreds of us. Perhaps thousands, since many of you have not yet even voiced an opinion. But those events changed us, fundamentally. Everything is different. This is … something new. A new age of our people. I can sense it—
Heresy! You speak heresy, you foul—
The cacophony of voices descended into an almost indecipherable mishmash of insults and arguments and fights. “Children. Please,” she said out loud. “The time has come. All of you know of my love for you. A matriarch’s love is eternal and knows profundities most of you will never experience for yourself. I respect all of your opinions, all of your wants and desires. But the decision is made. I have made it. And you will all bear the consequences along with me.”
And so will all of our people, mother, said the first. Is it your place to decide their fate?
She closed her eyes. He spoke the truth, and it cut her to the core. Was her choice irresponsible? Would she bring calamity upon her whole people with this simple, rebellious act? Did she have that right?
But she had to know. Something deep, deep within her urged her on. Drove her on. It compelled her. It was irresistible, like the urge to not think the Unthinkable Thought itself had been. And now a similar force drove her to break it.
Her hand reached for the ancient mechanical handle. An inscription above the door itself was barely visible, corroded with moisture and the passage of tens of thousands of years. But she could still read them, and she read them in wonder.
Open at the end.
Below that were symbols. Etchings, of four beings.
And below those, on the door itself:
And the end is the beginning.
“We need to begin again,” she said, just above a whisper. A breath, no more.
The mechanical lock turned with the press of her thumb. She squeezed the release, and felt the handle become loose.
And she turned it.
The door opened. She averted her eyes—something visceral and deep within her prevented her from looking any deeper into the room than just past the threshold. A step into the room, two steps, then she turned and shut the door with a foreboding clang.
She turned back towards the center of the room, still looking straight down at her feet, not daring to see any further. Habit? Or was it deeper than that?
But for Jarum Krull, ninth matriarch of the house of Krull of the Skiohra, it no longer mattered. Her time, and the time of all her children, had expired. No more debate. No more discussion.
And in the fraction of a second where her head was still conscious as it tumbled through the air, she could hear the terror erupt within her. The chorus of condemnation from the followers of the taboo, met with incredulous silence from the doubters.
The blood drained from her head, and flew outward in a spiral as it seemed the room spun around her. Her body fell with a thud, and her head hit the wall across the room and fell as well.
You ignorant, rebellious fools! the followers of the taboo screamed at the rest, and at her. Cursing their very mother and matriarch, now seconds from death.
And in the fraction of a second it took her head to fall to the floor where her body lay, she looked at the center of the room.
And gasped, breathless, since there was no air left to exhale.
She had to tell someone.
She had to warn them.
She frantically reached out with the Ligature to someone, anyone nearby, only to remember that it, too, was dead. Just like her.
Her head hit the floor, and the world went white, and her last-ditch vain effort to reach out to her sisters through the inactive Ligature failed.
Because for Jarum Krull, time had run out.
Chapter One
Conference room
ISS Independence
Near Britannia
Captain Tyler “Ballsy” Volz of the ISS Independence had fought many battles through two wars, had seen death, destruction, intense fighter battles and major campaigns between fleets of capital ships, and had even witnessed the final defeat of the Swarm at the hands of the legendary Captain Timothy Granger as he lured their remaining ships into a black hole and obliterated them with anti-matter bombs.
But nothing could have prepared him for this.
“You … want to….” He trailed off in disbelief. “Ok now, back up, and just repeat it. Because what I thought you said sounded a little too crazy, even for a dimwit such as yourself.”
His son, Lieutenant Ethan “Batship” Zivic, made a face. “Dimwit? Crazy, sure. But dimwit? Come on, dad, you can do better than that.”
“I was being generous.”
Zivic almost had to bite his tongue. They bantered, and they had managed to set aside their differences. But the tension ran deep. In his father’s eyes, he’d killed his own mother by being a show off. In the son’s eyes, his father was a deadbeat dad who’d abandoned him and yet still had the gall to criticize.
But civilizational threats tended to supersede family squabbles. Most of the time.
“Ok. From the top. Dad.” He tried not to make the eye-roll too apparent as he flipped back through his presentation on the conference room wall. He knew his father hated being called dad in front of other crew members, though the only people present were Rayna Scott, an old, dear friend and the ship’s chief engineer, and Lieutenant Jerusha Whitehorse, who, as Zivic’s former fiancee, was practically family.
“From the top. And preferably this time with fewer ‘pew pew’ noises.”
“I did it once, dad.”
“You did it twice, but no one’s counting.”
Lieutenant Whitehorse cleared her throat. “Gentlemen,” she said, followed by a smile.
Captain Volz shrugged and waved at Zivic to continue.
“As I was saying. The new Swarm ships. They’re big. Beyond big. They’re huge, with power levels off the charts. Just one could raze the entire surface of Earth or Britannia in a matter of ten minutes or so. Their power systems are distributed, as are their weapons, and as far as we can tell, their computing power too, not unlike the Independence herself.”
“Us scatterbrains gotta stick together, don’t we baby?” Rayna Scott was whispering up at the ceiling, addressing the ship as if it was her own child. Which was literally how she thought of any ship she tended.
“Suffice i
t to say, destroying one would be impossible without one of the Granger moons. But seeing how we can’t exactly control the Granger moons and have to rely on….” he paused a moment to register his disbelief of what he was saying, “a thirteen billion year old dead former IDF captain to move them around for us, I think it’s imperative that we find a way to defend ourselves against these without his—its—his help.”
“Thank you for the introductory material that we all already knew. Now get back to your point. And make it sound less stupid this time.” Volz was tapping his foot impatiently.
Another eye-roll. “We know that the Swarm can be essentially lured to any location with a powerful enough meta-space pulse. Either with a meta-space shunt harnessing the power of a large nuclear or anti-matter explosion, or with our own meta-space transmitter with the power ramped up to … higher than it should ever go. But, since we’ve only ever done it once ourselves, and that time by accident, I don’t know if we can bank on it—”
“It’s all we’ve got right now. Go on.”
“Right.” Zivic turned back to his presentation. He was itching to get back in his cockpit and shoot some Swarm shit alien fighters, and he was especially itching to finally beat his dad’s record of one hundred kills during a battle from the Second Swarm War over thirty years ago. But he’d been tasked with strategizing ways to defeat the immense Swarm capital ships. “It seems like the higher intensity the meta-space pulse, the greater the effect of the summons. At least, with the two data-points we have to go on. So it stands to reason that if we detonate an anti-matter bomb or ten, shunt nearly all the energy into meta-space within a narrow slice of time, say, ten nanoseconds, that should catch their attention and possibly get all of them here at once.”
Volz chuckled. “Big ifs, but ok.”
“So here’s what we do. We go to Penumbra. The black hole Granger lured them to thirty years ago. We essentially mimic what he did, only this time we detonate the bombs and the meta-space shunts just outside the event horizon—as close as we can get—and hope that all the Swarm ships show up right at that location.”