The Siege of LX-925

by J.J. Mainor

  Chapter 29

  Remy was shoved into a new set of quarters, with the door sealed behind him. The crew was too busy to clean out his old room, so they simply dumped him into another. They had repairs to carry out on two ships. When that was done, they had to finish decommissioning the mining complex so the world could be handed over to the Independent Union.

  Remy studied the room to learn what amenities he had access to and what he was cut off from. The interior controls for the door were destroyed so he couldn’t get out, obviously. The scrambler on his table also had the data port removed to prevent him from obtaining and uploading any unauthorized programs.

  Inspecting the menu choices that were loaded, he found they left him with a rather depressing selection. As if a sign of the torture he would surely enjoy, his food selection was limited to such boring and tasteless offerings as oatmeal, chicken broth, and veggie patties. To drink, all they programmed for him was water. Scrambling up a glass, he found they went the extra step and programmed it to materialize in a paper cup so as not to give him a potential weapon.

  He didn’t care about that video from the UN. He didn’t care about Freedom’s gloating. Remy expected he would find a way off this ship. Somehow, sometime, he was going to get back to Earth and expose the violations within this space program. Given his situation, he realized he would have to tread extremely carefully. If the Colonel meant to scramble him from existence, he would have done so already.

  That wasn’t to say he wouldn’t in the future. There was a plan for him going forward and if he wanted any hope of getting home, this game would have to be played. Remy would have to bite his lip when around Freedom to make sure that confrontation on the bridge would be his last outburst. Going forward, his plans, schemes and machinations all had to be handled delicately.

  Looking around the drab room, he noticed a flaw in one of the metal panels attached to the wall. It was round, maybe a couple centimeters in diameter. It reminded him of the stick he used to hide the interdimensional controller. Remy thought about it for a moment, trying to think about the trip to these quarters, peeling away the layers of fear and dread occupying his thoughts as he was led through the corridors. Retracing those steps in his mind, he realized they had passed his old door and locked him in the neighboring room.

  This was the wall he hid that controller behind. Merging the stick and the panel together in this reality must have altered that part of the wall. Remy pushed on the circular flaw, driving his thumb through the metal. Then, wrapping his finger around the edge of the hole, he pulled at the panel with all his strength until the entire sheet separated from the bulkheads behind it and gave him a clear path to his hidden treasure.

  Finally, he had a mode of escape. But it wouldn’t do him any good within the vacuum that lie on the other side of the dimensional plane. He looked at the panel to the adjacent room – his old room – wondering if it would give way just as easily. Testing his suspicions, Remy shoved the panel off the bulkheads and onto the floor.

  More good fortune awaited him on the other side! The modified scrambler remained on his old table. He cradled the unit in his hands, thinking about everything he needed to scramble up before it was discovered, and before he was discovered.

  First up was to repair the new hole in the wall so no one would see it next time he received a visitor. Remy directed the scrambler at a healthy panel so that he could add a template to the database before dematerializing the old panels and rematerializing new ones in their spots on the bulkheads.

  The next order of business was creating a new protective suit so that he might travel in the other dimension unhindered. Then, suited up and crossed over, he needed a way to hide everything. The button he might be able to conceal, but there was no way he could keep the armor or the souped up scrambler without them eventually being discovered.

  His inspiration came from his survival training. The first thing to look for in any situation is not food or water as one might think, but shelter. You could survive maybe a month without food, a few days without water. But if you didn’t have proper shelter, you wouldn’t last the night. He had to build himself a room in this dimension just like Sadile had in his medical bay.

  With the patterns for the wall panels in the scrambler, it took him about an hour to grab materials from the storage pods, take them to the other side, and construct a tiny room to contain air and maintain pressure. Not only did he then have a place to hide his contraband, but he had a place to compile his intelligence and plan his escape free from discovery. Key to the case he needed to build for the UN was that case of data chips he had hidden in the medical bay.

  On his first trip to the surface of LX-925, the miners gave him everything they had in their data stores. Fortune may have secured the original files when he seized control of the Forward, but those secrets were still in his grasp.

  As he set out across the void between the two secret rooms to retrieve his next prize, it occurred to Remy that the miners had been saving their life patterns daily as a precaution to accidental death or injury. It occurred to him that maybe they had not been erased from existence as the Republic had planned. It would also explain why they weren’t too focused on the end-game until he showed up with Anders and his escape plan. Those data chips were the escape plan.

  His heart sank as he approached Sadile’s secret room and noticed the Doctor’s corpse was missing. He and Anders always knew the man would be resurrected, but they didn’t expect this body would be found. Remy’s eyes darted to where he had attached the case to the outer wall, and thankfully found it still hanging where he had stuck it. As he grabbed the case and turned back toward his room, his eyes scanned the medical bay and adjacent corridors trying to discern the solidity or transparency of everyone nearby hoping no one was in this dimension to see him.

  Racing back to his room, he was distracted by the sight of two people in one of the other quarters. There was a man and a woman, and his heart sank upon realizing Roxanne had been returned to Pittman. More to his horror, Pittman had the poor woman against the wall. Both were naked, and he had his pelvis rubbed against hers. For the first time, he was presented with the consequences he had brought upon those who had trusted in him and his mission to do the right thing.

  Remy rushed into his old quarters and returned to his own plane to use the computer. If Roxanne was returned to slavery for her part, he burned to find out what Anders suffered, if anything. A part of him still didn’t trust the Lieutenant, but a notation on his record quickly eliminated those doubts.

  Anders’ file had been recently updated to record a Section 13, a reprimand only one step away from a court-martial. Though it meant the Lieutenant was spared the worst of Freedom’s wrath, the Section 13 also meant he would be denied any future promotions. It also likely signified a return to the Marines if and when they returned to Earth. His career was on life support, even if his life had been spared.

  Remy had become intensely curious about the information on the data chips. He flipped the clasps on the case and lifted the case open to find a single data chip inside. There were supposed to be close to a dozen! Like the body, someone had indeed found his case and this single chip was left as a message. He knew it.

  Without haste, he inserted the chip into the computer and brought up the file directory. There were no messages for him. There was no data from the mining operation. The chip contained nothing but a list of recipes meant for the scrambler. Okroshka, beef stroganoff, blini, shashlik, pelmeni: everything on this chip was a Confederation dish.

  It may not have been Lieutenant Anders, but someone had been playing a game with him this entire trip. Remy grabbed the computer and the chip and took them to his new secret hiding place to tuck them away with the scrambler and his new suit. He returned to his quarters in his proper dimension and affixed the controller to the underside of the sink in the bathroom. Then, collapsing on his bed, Remy took in the enormity o
f his situation.

  Without that data, he had nothing on the Republic’s space program. The proof of their crimes was gone, and he would have to start from the beginning to build his case. Going forward, he would have to employ all his diplomatic skills to keep on Freedom’s good side and keep himself from disappearing once and for all into one last scramble.

  Author’s Notes

  Inspiration for the Freedom Reigns series came from two places.

  The first was Star Trek. My preteen and early teen years were spent watching the Next Generation as it aired. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in wondering why their transporter/replicator technology didn’t have broader applications. For example, there was an episode where Worf broke his back and Dr. Crusher worries herself over the idea of performing an experimental procedure. But the thing is, why aren’t they already using the replicators to create replacement body parts? When Picard needed a heart transplant in his academy days, why wasn’t his transporter pattern saved so they could replicate a new heart based on his own tissue? Why couldn’t Crusher just bring up Worf’s old transporter pattern and replicate him a new spine without so much worry?

  About the time I started focusing on a new story, I got to thinking about everything they could do with just the transporter/replicator, not just the beneficial stuff, but the horrible stuff as well. People could be duplicated so easily, Riker’s double might have been the norm instead of a fluke. Tasha Yar died, why didn’t they just pull up her last transporter pattern and create a new Yar? Sure she would lack the few memories between that save and her death, but it would be better than being dead.

  Heck, why do they even “build” ships? They should have had a massive replicator creating ships from raw materials in mere seconds.

  But the entire Trek universe was similarly limited. It was almost as if Roddenberry had too much on his plate to really think beyond the initial ideas.

  In part Freedom Reigns (all six books) explores Trek technology, not to the extreme, but to the absurd.

  The second inspiration came from my first science fiction book, USS Krakowski. It honestly surprised me when the book took off from day 1, but when it started selling in the UK, I had one of those Oops moments. The book had aspects to it that are unmistakably ‘Merica or ‘Murica (depending on which spelling you prefer). It was a United States fleet taking it upon themselves to save the rest of the world, the other nations make excuses for not helping, and toward the end I mention the ambassador telling the rest of the world to “go to hell” when the rest of the world wants to share in the spoils.

  I mean I understand the US is the largest audience for ebooks, and as such they should be somewhat US-centric. However you also don’t want to limit your audience, and some of the points in USS Krakowski (though they could be seen as a comment on our overall relations with the rest of the world following our invasion of Iraq) may have been alienating to a foreign audience.

  So I wanted to do a story as un-‘Murica as possible. The US type nation is every bit as dark and sinister as its three counterparts. Ships are plastered with names that evoke patriotism, and their commanders take on those same names as their own (after all, what is more ‘Murica than a commander named Freedom?). The main character works for the UN, representing the global community, and he is French-“Candian.”

  Book 1 by itself, The siege of LX-925, is meant to be the introduction to this outer space realm, both for the audience and for the main character, Remy Duval. The four nations dominating interstellar travel have been keeping the galactic happenings secret from Earth, so in essence, we the audience discover this universe along with Remy. He is dazzled by the advanced technology, and through his rose colored glasses, he sees all the positive applications. Then he is horrified when he realizes what this technology could be used for.

  Even worse for him, being the newcomer, he doesn’t entirely understand how everything works. He doesn’t fully understand what these nations are capable of or how far they’re willing to go without the rest of the world watching over him. He has no problem speaking his mind. He has no problem going from observer to participant. His heart is in the right place, but he never has all the information he needs. Each time he acts he makes things worse.

  There is so much more to this universe than what Remy sees on this single mission, and he unfortunately has to experience all of it before he can accept that he might be wrong. And at the risk of spoiling the series, very few of the conclusions Remy draws by the end of this book are correct. Characters aren’t who they claim to be, even scenarios aren’t what they were presented to be.

  A lot of elements were planted in this book to hint to later revelations or scenarios. Since I don’t think this is much of a spoiler since I promote it in the descriptions of the later books, I will use the alien races as an example. I think it’s toward the end of the book where Colonel Freedom alludes to hostile alien races – we don’t meet aliens in this book, but I let you know they’re coming in later books. Other hints and revelations I’ll save for the books where they’re revealed or utilized.

  But though there is a serialized aspect to this series, I wanted each book to be a complete adventure within that serial. One reader on Amazon took issue with the serialized aspect and with the fact that Remy Duval does not grow as an individual in this book. Both of which are valid points. Despite general warnings in the indie author community not to react to negative reviews, I did post a reply, not to tell the reviewer they were wrong, but to use it as an opportunity to create a discussion about the character. The funny thing was, as much as he hated the character, he understood the character and understood what he was supposed to be in this book.

  Unlike USS Krakowski which took off immediately upon release, response to this book was tepid. Admittedly, I’m no artist and the cover isn’t exactly one of the most exciting. In fact it ended up on the site lousycovers.com or something like that. And I kind of found that amusing. What was more amusing, the creator of the site admits to being a cover artist. I think he uses the site hoping to drum up more business, because he showcases his own work as examples of covers he claims aren’t lousy. Admittedly, they’re not, but thanks to Amazon’s posted sales rankings, you can see for yourselves that his “not lousy” covers sell far fewer books than many of the “lousy” covers he pokes fun at.

  Even on those other sites, it has garnered quite some interest, especially once the price went to free; and it has driven interest in the rest of the series. People like you have read this book and found themselves interested to learn more about this universe and learn what happens to these characters and how their way of thinking evolves over the course of the series.

  If you’ve made it this far, then I truly thank you for sticking with my rambling. On the next page you’ll find a preview of the second book in the series, The Vorman Insurgence.

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  The Vorman Insurgence

  Freedom Reigns Book 2