The Siege of Sirius: A Splintered Galaxy Space Fantasy Novel

by Eddie R. Hicks

  “You’ll need to work with the crew as well.”

  “I know more about this system than anyone else,” Nereid sat down inside of the shower stall, the spraying water rained down her back and face as she cocked her head backward. The frosted glass cover gave Foster the chance to lower her hand and see normally again, especially at the extent of the water damage done.

  I guess Rivera’s team will be up here sooner rather than later . . . Foster mused.

  “Perhaps I could assist Dr. Pierce with his studies?”

  “I’ll speak with him when I get the chance.”

  ESRS CARL SAGAN, Bridge

  SA-139 orbit, Sirius A system

  June 21, 2050, 13:15 SST (Sol Standard Time)

  “Ah, Becca, you’re just in time,” Williams said to Foster as she entered.

  “What’s up?”

  He waved for her to join him amongst several holographic projections and a 3D map of the Sirius system. “Our teams on the Poniga home world managed to make a deal in obtaining food supplies. Survey teams on the larger moon around the gas giant want a lift back to the colony. Archaeologist are eager to study the tomb of Tiamat and a team of xenobiologists want to study the aquatic life on Meroien.”

  “Jobs that require peaceful exploration and scientific study,” Foster snickered. “That’s weird.”

  “It’s almost as if that was our job.”

  “Really? I thought it was killing Babylonian gods ‘n’ shit.” Foster faced Chang. “Set a course to the moon of the gas giant.”

  Chang punched a series of commands on his helm controls. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “The sooner they file their reports the sooner we can get a mine built.” She looked at the restored bridge and the crew carrying out their duties, now free of the thought of all the doom and chaos they’d had to endure since their arrival. “I’ll be in my office. Dom, you have the bridge.”

  ESRS CARL SAGAN, Captain’s office

  En route to SA-239, Sirius A system

  June 21, 2050, 13:58 SST (Sol Standard Time)

  Foster reached down and cracked out the third haggard box lying on the floor of her office. From her point of view, she had handled these boxes a little over a month ago, in reality, they had been sitting around in her quarters for the last seventeen years. Not all her belongings survived the attack; several items and clothes had to be discarded due to the damage. The decor of her office during their voyage to the moon slowly transformed from a boring room with a desk, to one filled with pictures hanging on the wall from Earth, a globe on her desk, and new models of UNE ships in a display cabinet.

  She stood with her back toward the window and gazed at the newly decorated office, and the one, final unopened box below her feet, her most prized possession still inside, hopefully still intact.

  She reached down to prize the box open when EVE’s voice interrupted her via the intercom. “Captain. Tolukei wishes to know if you have any messages to have telepathically sent back to Earth.”

  Foster made a face, having remembered that with the damage done to the Lyonria hub came the stop of the psionic energy powering Tiamat’s tomb and its drone network. The psionic interference that prevented Tolukei from using his telepathy across space was no more. Contact had been made with the UNE, and with that came news of so many advancements and developments they had missed out on during their time in cryostasis.

  The crew and colonists took the time to compose messages to friends and family back on Earth, while Tolukei played the role of interstellar postman and psionically transmitted them to a psionic that proceeded to pass the messages on.

  “Just one message,” Foster said as she reached back into the final unopened box, wrapping her hands around a tattered solid object. Out from the box came her father’s telescope. Outside of the expected dust and age of the telescope, it was in the exact condition she had left it in when she had packed it away. “Tell mama . . . tell her we made it,” she said, looking down at the telescope.

  Foster smiled warmly at the telescope and perched it on a small table next to her office window. She peered through its eyepiece while her hands adjusted its angle and zoom, a ten-minute stargazing session ensued as she tried to find a particular star no human had seen from their current location.

  That star was Sol.

  She found it, and zoomed in at its yellow glowing greatness, wondering what people around the third planet were doing, much like she wondered what was going on in the Sirius system when she and her father gazed at it through the very same telescope in her position.

  “Papa, I hope you’re proud of me.”

  AFTERWORD

  Hello everyone, I hoped you enjoyed the story and a different take on the Splintered Galaxy saga. For those that might not be aware, The Siege of Sirius was originally planned to be the fifth book in the Splintered Galaxy series as a follow-up to the EDF-2 subplot featured in Equilibrium of Terror: Part 2. However, I spent so much time developing the characters for Siege of Sirius that I felt the story should revolve more around them, plus sticking to the original plot would have made the story twice as long. So, this became a spin-off with plans to continue their adventures in a new series scheduled to be released next year.

  That’s right, this isn’t the end of the adventures of Captain Foster and her crew. They’ll be spearheading a brand-new series as they venture deeper into the unexplored regions of space, and who knows? Maybe they’ll run into a few familiar faces from Splintered Galaxy along the way.

  UPRISING OF THE EXILED PREVIEW

  Want to know what was going on at and around Earth while the crew of the Carl Sagan was traveling to Sirius? Let Uprising of the Exiled be your guide. Check out a sample of the first chapter below.

  VANCOUVER, EARTH, SOL SYSTEM

  “Don’t kill anyone this time,” Tetsuya grumbled.

  Thick gray clouds released a downpour of rain that had been drenching the region for the last three days. Classic Vancouver, Rina “Destiny” West thought while she looked out the passenger-side window of the car she was riding in. The sights of the outside world appeared as a blurred splash of colors thanks to the rainwater.

  Vancouver was one of the few cites in the world that didn’t bear many scars from the war with the Hashmedai. This was a surprise to many, as New Westminster and Surrey had seen Hashmedai ground forces take control of those areas two decades ago. New Westminster took it the worst, as the Royal Canadian Air Force had launched a series of air strikes in that area to thin out the Hashmedai. This also proved to be the final acts of the Canadian air force, as Hashmedai interceptors had obliterated all their fighters across the country in a counterattack.

  East Hastings was another sign that Vancouver hadn’t changed much, Destiny was quick to notice. Tetsuya Ishihara, who handled the wheel of their car, drove it along the badly maintained streets. Prewar, East Hastings had been one of the poorest and most run-down areas in the city and quite possibly all of Canada. Today? Not much had changed. Run-down buildings, sketchy people, trash, and questionable deals struck in back alleys. The only major difference between this place now and this place then was that Hashmedai roamed these areas as well. Deserters from the war, they knew they had lost and that they couldn’t return home. They made their homes here on Earth wherever they felt welcome, which didn’t include many places. Most of the human race still bore a grudge.

  Their car came to a stop alongside a curb. Destiny’s fingers interacted with the screen of her holo phone. A window materialized in front of her, displaying the contact info of the person she was trying to call. A man named Arn. After several seconds of listening to a ring-back tone, Arn finally answered. The holographic window transformed into Arn’s image, a bald man with a long unkempt beard, wearing a hoodie and shades.

  “I’m here. Where the fuck you at?” Destiny said.

  “Already? Damn, girl, you’re quick!” Arn’s hologram said. “It’s some old-world abandoned Chinese supermarket. You can’t miss it.”

 
Destiny recalled driving past it not long ago; she’d have to backtrack. I should have called earlier, she thought. “I’ll be there in a minute,” she said and hung up. The holographic window with Arn’s contact info reappeared, displaying a notification at the bottom that the call had ended, and then it vanished. “Wait here,” she said to Tetsuya. “I’ll deal with this fucker as quickly as I can.”

  “Discreetly,” Tetsuya said. “It’s still daytime. Can’t afford to have someone ID you.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Seriously, Hannah’s predictions haven’t been accurate lately,” he said, looking at Destiny’s scarred left hand. “And you know that.” She rolled her eyes and proceeded to open the door but stopped. Tetsuya’s hand gripped her shoulder; he had something to add. “I’m serious, no bodies. These are humans not affiliated with the United Nations of Earth we’re dealing with.”

  “Whatever,” she said with a sigh.

  “Give me your piece.”

  Her visibly upset blue eyes gazed at him almost as if they were burning a hole into his mind. The five-second stare down resulted in Destiny reluctantly handing her ePistol over to him from her leather jacket. “Happy?”

  “And your old-world one.”

  Old-world was a term commonly used to describe anything that existed before the Hashmedai invasion. In this case, her concealed Sig Sauer P238, a pocket-sized pistol that fit perfectly in the side pocket of her blue jeans. Like her ePistol, it found itself into Tetsuya’s possession. “Now are you happy?”

  “I’ll be happy when I get the fuck out of this piss hole.”

  The car door finally opened, exposing a section of the interior to never-ending rain showers outside. Before stepping off, Destiny opened the back door and removed a large black art tube. Tetsuya took notice and asked, “What the fuck is that for?”

  “Just part of my cover for the people around.” She smiled and winked at him. “I’m an artist if anyone asks.” He has a lot to learn about me.

  Destiny began her walk away from the car, down the drenched and grimy sidewalk in East Hastings. She paid little attention to what the rain was doing to her ginger hair, dyed of course to mask her age of forty-one. Between that and her vigorous daily workout routine, few people truly knew her real age. Throw in the art tube, and she looked like college student. And to think—she hadn’t even kept up with all the new fancy antiaging biotechnology that had been invented.

  She continued her walk, paying little attention to the homeless humans and Hashmedai. She saw a group of prostitutes speaking to someone in a car that had pulled over. They were both Hashmedai. Threesome with two Hashmedai women. What a brave soul. She grinned and walked past, briefly thinking about a time she was a working girl. Though she was much better than these girls, as she was an escort, she never walked the streets. She was above that, a high-class and very expensive escort, working out of Los Vegas, before it was glassed. She sighed and thought to herself, Those were the good old days. She missed those times, especially Jazz, her favorite client.

  Destiny arrived at the location, a boarded-up store. The door was ajar, and she could hear voices coming from within. This must be it. She entered and quickly performed a threat assessment of the location. Overturned shelves, four shady-looking men wearing sweatpants and shirts, probably bodyguards and probably packing heat. They all had something large in their pockets, ePistols like the one she handed over earlier, no doubt. Arn emerged from the shadows with open arms, his guard was lowered, a perfect opportunely for Destiny do something she’d been dreaming about for the last few months.

  She ignored the four men, and her feet took her toward Arn at rapid speed. Her fist slammed against his jaw, launching his body to the floor. Fucking asshole. She heard the hissing sounds of four ePistols powering up. They made the same noise Radiance magnetic weapons made when activating. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference, as the tech behind eWeapons was based on Radiance magnetic weapons-Railguns, aided by a computer built into the weapon.

  Destiny could see blood slowly trickling out from Arn’s mouth as he spat out a tooth and slowly rose to his feet. “What the fuck was that for?” he asked.

  “Bio-fucking-metric weapons. I requested not to be given those.”

  He finally got to his feet and said, “So my stock got a few of the defects, my bad.”

  Biometric weapons would activate only if the fingerprints matched with the assigned prints programmed into the weapon. It was possible to hack and remove the biometric programming, but even the most skilled hackers had issues with it. The United Nations of Earth (UNE) did not want their weapons in the hands of terrorists and criminals and went out of their way to make it an irritating process.

  “Your stock had me sitting in a hospital bed for a month. Your stock had me bury eight of my good friends,” she said, jabbing her index finger toward his angry face.

  “Well fuck, I’m sorry.” More blood slowly dripped from his mouth. She had gotten him good. “I’ll hook you up with some better guns.”

  Her hand reached back toward her art tube as her head slowly tilted to the side to see if any of his bodyguards had stepped closer. No sign of them, though she knew damn well four guns were being aimed at the back of her head. “I have a new dealer; I’m fucking done with you.”

  “So you just came here to fucking deck me?”

  “I want a refund.”

  “Seriously?” Arn said with a surprised voice. “No refunds.”

  “Customer is always right,” Destiny said as her other hand clasped around Arn’s neck. “I want a refund…Now!” Her last action triggered four sets of steps that she heard behind her. There wasn’t a drop of fear in her, however. None of these thugs had a real combat training unlike the police, Radiance, and UNE forces she’d been fighting for the last few years.

  “Get fucked, you stupid fucking cunt!” In attempt to break free, Arn wrapped his hands around the hands that she was using to choke him. His grip was weak, compared to Destiny’s; her hands didn’t move. She let out a slight grin as he turned his head to the side to address the four men closing in behind her. “Have at her, boys; I ain’t paying you by the hour!”

  Let’s dance. The hand choking Arn pushed him back to the ground, while her other hand quickly pulled her art tube to her front. Her instincts led her to leap and take cover behind the checkout table. Perfect timing, as magnetically accelerated bullets ripped through the air. Destiny’s quickly moving fingers opened up the tube, and out came a katana and an arm-mounted Hashmedaian guardian shield. She arose to her feet, this time with a rectangular-shaped blue energy force field protecting her from the second barrage of bullets.

  Her feet guided her to the four men, who did not attempt to move from their position, while her hands guided her katana to either stab or dismember their bodies. Each hit released jets of blood across the air, raining down on her like the rain outside not long ago. Her left arm, which had the guardian shield device strapped to it, periodically rose to block weapons’ fire from the last remaining bodyguard, whose severed head hit the ground shortly afterward.

  Arn remained on the floor, trembling in fear as Destiny’s blood-soaked body graciously stepped toward him. Her blue jeans were now purple; her leather jacket was dripping red. She hovered over his body and the placed the tip of her blade between his eyes. “Now,” said Destiny, “where’s my fucking money?”

  FLIGHT 4219, PERTH TO VANCOUVER, EARTH, SOL SYSTEM

  White clouds hovered over the eternal blue of the Pacific Ocean. A sight that would be changing soon, as this flight from Perth, Australia, to Vancouver, Canada, was coming to an end. Ken Smith sat back and relaxed in his first-class seat aboard an Earth-to-Earth (ETE) transport. He preferred the first-class seats from the Earth-to-Space (ETS) transports that he frequently flew to Mars, as they were equipped with holo vids. ETE transports didn’t take long to reach their destination with their high speeds, as they traveled exclusively on Earth. ETS transports, however, made trips to locatio
ns throughout the solar system. Even traveling at a fraction of the speed of light, it could take a flight several hours to reach the moons of Uranus.

  An announcement played over the transport’s intercom to all the passengers aboard, stating that they’d be in Vancouver within ten minutes, making this a forty-five-minute trip. He sometimes missed the old-world plane trips, in which a flight from Perth to Vancouver would take nearly a whole day and require at least one stop along the way. The message on the intercom replayed again, this time in Chinese, then a third time in Radiance, which caused him to chuckle.

  There were no Radiance races aboard this transport that he could see, though with Linl it was damn near impossible to tell just by looking. Carbon-copy humans, he liked to call them. Most flights had a few Radiance races aboard. Since the uplifting of humanity, Radiance continued to have a few ships from Alpha Centauri trickle in, dropping off nonmilitary personnel to live on Earth. Most of them were just laborers and construction workers to help rebuild cities razed by the demonic Hashmedai. A few others were scientists and engineers, though many of them stayed on their ships, setting foot on Earth, Mars, or the moons of the gas giants only to work with human scientists and engineers. Recently, merchants and missionaries started to show up and live among humans, proving to be a double-edged sword of sorts.

  The increased presence of civilian Radiance races was no doubt helping humanity’s economy, advancement, and recovery from the war. However, the longer Radiance continued to remain on Earth, the more violence people were forced to witness thanks to the Hashmedai Liberation Front (HLF). After the war, as a way to repent, groups of Hashmedai offered themselves as slave labor to human communities hit hard. After all, they lost the war, and the ships that weren’t nuked, fled or crash-landed, leaving behind thousands of soldiers and ship crew members. As time went on, those communities took in these Hashmedai, allowed them to have a place to live and eat, and eventually settled down and started families.