The Book of Ominiue: Starborn

by D. M. Barnham

  D.M.Barnham

  The Book of Ominiue

  Part 1

  STARBORN

  digital edition

  ©2016 D.M.Barnham

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher/Author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission please request from the author.

  ISBN: 978-0-9945879-2-3

  Edited by Serendipity Literary Editing

  All artwork and cover design by D.M.Barnham

  There are two people I would like to dedicate this story to:

  The first and most important is my father, who always encouraged me to do my best and happily endured my strange obsessions throughout life.

  The second is my old creative writing teacher, Mr Lakey, who was the first person to truly believe in me and encouraged me to chase my dreams no matter how silly they seemed. He inspired me to write; not just to improve my spelling but also for the sheer enjoyment of it.

  Special Thanks

  This is a shout-out to my readers and editors. Without you my story would be a poor shadow of what it is today. I have you to thank for correcting spelling and grammar, flow, consistency and input suggestions. You also spurred me on when I was down and were behind me every step of the way. Thank you so much: Elinor, Roald and Melissa.

  STARBORN

  “Do not fear me, oh Blade of Ominiue, for I am Undin; the darkness. I come to bear you and await the light who will take you back.”

  – The First Shadow Warrior

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 01: Starborn

  Chapter 02: Warhorse

  Chapter 03: History

  Chapter 04: Old Road

  Chapter 05: Kérith-Árim

  Chapter 06: Karmoníth

  Chapter 07: Consensus

  Chapter 08: Player

  Chapter 09: Naming

  Chapter 10: Grand Counsil

  Chapter 11: Cohra-Rhí

  Chapter 12: Tournament

  Chapter 13: Mist

  Chapter 14: Freedom

  Appendix I

  Appendix II

  Appendix III

  Maps (External Link)

  Prolouge

  “Of all of Cea’mahender’s creations, Ominiue is the greatest. He is known by many names. Ossh’laue to the Ilnanato Afradians, Heinshinharah to the western peoples, Ominiue to the eastern. Fear to the desert man of the north and Harparnah to the southern raiders.”

  – The Scrolls of the White Wizard (Lethagon: Book of Ominiue)

  After Gate Day:

  The Captain stood upon the bridge of his new warship with what looked like quiet confidence, glaring coldly at the flowing white tunnel before him. It was beautiful to behold and it was his at last. Despite their success, he could not help but feel some apprehension; the capture of the Gateway was far too simple and part of him felt uneasy venturing into the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, but the new engineers insisted it was safe. It was not the wormhole that made him worry, what concerned him was the lack of resistance from the Astronauts, their surrender was most likely because they never expected this kind of intervention, but still it made him uncomfortable. Three other warships travelled the white abyss with them, though only moments apart when entering they could be light-years from each other, such was the unusual and unpredictable nature of the bridges. Only the complex quantum navigation systems could keep them on track as the path twisted and wound its way through the universe, bending space to its will.

  The tunnel looked like velvet to him, glistening and flowing like a river as it passed. Grey streaks mingled in the fabric of the walls as it rushed past them. Physicists speculated that they were the shadows of stars as seen from within the tunnel, but no one knew for certain. Nobody really knew much about the Rosen Bridges, mathematics predicted and guided spaceships through them, no two paths were ever the same. At each end of the wormhole was a manmade gateway. Each gateway simultaneously generated a link, joining together to connect two seemingly separate places in the galaxy. Days can be spent travelling within the Rosen Bridge, but only moments pass in the real world, it was one the great wonders of the universe, and one of the great mysteries for the theory that governed it failed to predict this anomaly. Many physicists over the centuries had tried in vain to understand and create a true law within the unified theory; so far none have succeeded meaning that everything is calculated using laws that exist solely in the realm of mathematics, with little real world comprehension and many believe it will always be so.

  As the Captain gazed ahead a slight smile crept across his face. Success was at the end of the tunnel. Hundreds of ships had been sent through the dozens of gates that connected the Western Front Federation, through which they would simultaneously capture each gateway and force the space-dwellers into submission; their days of independence were over, they would be accountable like any other planet-bound nation. The Federations and Empires would no longer be subject to them. They would no longer have to negotiate and move within Astronaut law. A new era was dawning.

  A sudden jolt snapped him out of his thoughts and flung him backwards; he threw his arms out grasping the side of his seat to steady himself, as the rest of the crew also grasped onto whatever object was nearest to them. The great ship moaned under the impact, sending her protests throughout the interior.

  ‘What was that?’ demanded the Captain in a harsh voice that overpowered the proximity sensor alert. The ship’s computer automatically corrected its course, the stern passing within metres of the wormhole’s edge, causing the Captain’s heart to skip a beat as he watched the strange fabric rushing by his ship a lot closer than he liked.

  ‘Something has collided with us, sir!’ the tactical officer replied.

  ‘That’s obvious,’ snapped the Captain sarcastically.

  ‘And impossible!’ The navigator added as she watched helplessly as the ship guided itself back into the centre of the tunnel.

  ‘Well, something like a damn rock just ploughed into our rear end!’ the tactical officer retorted.

  ‘Damage?’

  ‘Slight hull breaches. Automatic isolation protocols have been activated.’

  ‘Loss of any crew?’

  ‘None reported as yet, sir,’ an officer replied just as a signal from the region engineer rang through to the bridge.

  ‘Could it have been one of the other ships, passing us by?’ the Captain enquired, revealing his inexperience of their surrounding environment.

  ‘None, sir,’ a science liaison replied. ‘There is no conceivable way anyone could catch up to us inside the Bridge, the course is set, velocity is almost meaningless here.’

  ‘Well something must’ve happened!’

  As the Captain flung his arms in the air in exasperation a second object collided into the side of the warship with far greater force that the first, the reverberations shuddering through the craft, sending it into a half spin that pushed it once more towards the fabric of the tunnel wall. The ship applied its stabilisers, correcting its position again. Warning lights flickered across the command screen, an engineering schematic of the ship appeared before the crew, with section after section turning red, signalling hull breaches and internal explosions breaking out along the impact area.

  ‘We’re under attack,’ the weapons operation officer called out. ‘The gate capture was too simple; those damn Astronauts must’ve cracked the connection. They’re sending something through the bar
rier.’

  ‘Impossible!’ the science officer dismissed the claims for the second time as he strapped himself into his seat. ‘Technically we aren’t even in the same universe. We are hopping through space; there is no ship for them to aim at.’

  ‘What do the sensors tell us?’

  ‘Traditional sensors don’t work in the Rosen Bridge; the scanner range is reduced to a few metres at best. All we’ve got is what we see with our own eyes.’

  ‘Put spotters on any windows. Get some damn communication happening. Arm the fighters and tell everyone to suit up.’

  ‘But Sir,’ the weapons officer stared, aghast at the Captain, ‘the fighters don’t have the quantum computing required to navigate the tunnel, they would be lost almost instantly out there.’

  ‘Let the warship highjack their systems.’

  ‘There isn’t enough processing power, it would crash their systems, the fighter jacking-system was only designed for precision attac—’ A third collision came through, followed quickly by another on the other side of the ship, which caused it to tip and revolve. The Captain lost his footing from the last shunt and took hold of a rail on the command system to stop himself from falling. He glanced at the bright white wall moving once again into their view.

  ‘Ship, correct your path! Now!’ He growled with growing dread; watching anxiously as the craft slowly banked back to the correct course, all the while the wall approached dangerously close. Luck was on their side as they were in an unusually large section of the Einstein Bridge, but at this rate they would be pushed out into god knows where.

  ‘Get those gorram fighters out there and tell them to keep close to the damn ship!’ snapped the Captain. ‘We either fight this damn thing or we all die!’

  ‘Priority Report, Emergency message to the Bridge’ came an engineer’s alarmed voice blaring through the emergency intercom. ‘An unidentified object has attached itself to the hull and is breaking through the armour.’ The Captain’s face contorted in confusion as he buckled himself into a chair, listening as the panic stricken voice continued, ‘There’s something — massive clinging to the port side!’ The bridge crew fell into a paralysed silence as the engineer continued with his strange report, the terror in his voice rising as his description continued.

  A second report came through, cutting off the now hysterical engineer. The unit link began to flicker as other messages from around the ship overloaded the triage system, one after the other with the ship’s computer automatically prioritising them by area damage. A second spotter’s voice quivered as he spoke, ‘Unidentified creatures have passed through the Rosen Bridge walls. They look like —’

  ‘—Somebody turn that damn intercom off!’ the Captain finally barked. ‘Has everyone on this ship lost their bloody minds? Where are the fighters?’

  ‘In the process of being deployed, Captain,’ the tactical officer replied.

  ‘What the gorram are—’ the Captain tried to snap just as the warship was rocked by another collision, it was far more violent than the previous and was rapidly followed by several other impacts. The Captain was shunted in his seat, but unharmed. He was about to shout the order for deployment when his eyes were drawn to something large and black outside the bridge’s main window; moving rapidly towards them, time appeared to contract as he watched the object stretch out; its great mass engulfing their entire view just moments before it collided violently into the forward window. The following seconds past in confusion. The bridge’s crew were stunned into silence as the object fastened itself over their window, blocking the brilliant luminosity of the tunnel so that only the emergence lights filled the room. As the drawn out seconds passed, the only sound that seemed to penetrate through to the shocked crew was the unsettling groan of the hull attempting to relax back into place after the impact. Just as the Captain’s heart began to return to a normal rhythm, a crushing noise pierced the air. The Captain gazed up in horror as the great shadow fastened to the ship began to crush the plating underneath it. The fifteen-centimetre-thick window broke out into a thousand splinters, the crumbling structure filled the Captain with a defeated fear. The creature finally managed to penetrate the surrounding carbon-titanium alloy armour, a horrid screeching sound resonated through the room while the air was forcibly sucked out of the ship and into the wormhole. The new warship’s internal systems flickered with a final struggle before succumbing to failure and plunging them into the wall of the tunnel and then into nothingness.

  Chapter 01

  Starborn

  “Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.”

  -Carl Sagan

  A Decade Before Gate Day:

  The retreating glare of the sun sent its dying light through the western mountain range; beams that broke through the gaps of the ranges stretched out to the endless forest before slowly sinking behind the high peaks. The north-eastern plains briefly came to life in a fiery blaze as the blue sky faded into a dusky haze, a show of absolute beauty it seemed to a single impassive observer: Shayne Forrester.

  Standing alone upon the cleared hill all that accompanied this man was a gnarled old tree. He had wandered from camp creating a visual catalogue of the flora in the brief break provided, following the tracks of a large animal now long gone. The clear view had brought him to a stop as he contemplated the world before him. Looking out at the horizon he did not see what his companions saw, for there was something unusual about him. He gazed up at the point of interest that both enthralled and haunted his kind: the moon.

  His people were drawn to the natural satellite. To them it was a curiosity but they also feared it, though none would ever admit it. People were fundamentally programmed for order and stability, a change too great in a world that was so similar could cause physiological trauma. Though many thought it was a wonder and there were those who were inspired by it, ultimately it served to them as a reminder of everything lost. They could try to ignore it and continue on with their lives, but for the rest of their existence it would be a beacon of all that had changed. Its sight would forever remind them and make them restless.

  To Shayne it presented no such horror. Sometimes when he looked up he knew it was not quite right, but in truth all he saw was scientific statistics: a natural satellite surrounded by numbers and facts. To him there was nothing strange. He contemplated how they could be troubled by such an insignificant thing. He expected the colonists to anticipate inconsistencies with a new environment, but the moment they stepped out of the ships and into the bright new world they became overwhelmed. All preparation they made failed them, as though they were better suited to a completely alien world instead of a partially familiar one.

  The continent the Earthmen chose as their settlement was home to giant lizards; creatures thought to be on the scale of the ancient dinosaurs. They dwelled in the deserts, which made up 97 percent of the landmass. They lived their entire lives underneath the heated sands. The behaviour of these dinosaur-like creatures resulted in the planet being named Iraquis. The Pathfinder scoutship Captain, Kendell Craine, said they reminded him of giant worms, and as a consequence named the planet from a world in a classical novel as well as an ancient Middle Eastern country.

  They chose to place their settlement in a vast and unpopulated forest expanse within a lush subcontinent that protected the settlers from the arid desert beyond. This subcontinent was further broken into east and west by a dividing range, with their colony resting at the foot of one of the tallest mountains. The cold high country became known as New Switzerland and the settlement itself was named Thorns Basin, in honour of the planet-side Mission Commander and leading military man, General Thorn Hendingson.

  This isolated oasis was the centre of civilisation on this planet. The natives called the planet Casader and the green region they lived in Dífrun; a name that was eventually adopted by the Earthmen. There were subcontinent paradises on three of the four continents, most of them located near coastal regions w
here weather patterns brought more rain. All of them supported intelligent life, but none were anything like Dífrun, which was by far the most interesting. There were several reasons that motivated the Earthmen to break protocol and settle so close to a developed and organised civilisation: the presence of a unique native people in itself, the diversity of flora and fauna, incredibly rich mineral deposits and one nearby region that revealed very strange scanner-readings. It was just coincidence that the moon sat in a prime location for planet-side observation.

  Casader’s moon was much like Earth’s moon, Luna; it was the same composition and colour and it always had one side facing the planet’s surface. It was a small moon, but its proximity to the planet meant it was a lot larger in the sky with a two-degree angular diameter. These trivial differences held no effect on a colonist’s wellbeing, people quickly adapt to changes like that. What unsettled the new colonists was twofold, the first being that Casader’s moon was gravitationally locked in what appeared to be a Geostationary Orbit. It always stayed in the same position in the sky; standing guard over the colony, just above the eastern plateau. This particular feature caused the Earthmen to give it the name of “Clarkes Moon”. To the natives it was called Yaulma, which translated to “one who watches,” and was worshiped by many of the desert wanderers, north of Dífrun. The second did not occur to most of the settlers until they either read about it or they saw it for themselves: the moon travelled through a complete cycle in a single day. A patient observer could watch the phases change before their very eyes. It was a beautiful sight, every morning was a new moon and every night was a full moon. There was a biannual solar eclipse that could only ever be full in one small region of the world, far in the east. Each year worshipers from the desert would make a pilgrimage to the moon temple that was aligned with the centre of the eclipse, providing the maximum amount of visible eclipse days.