Table of Contents
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
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my friends and fellow science-fiction authors Vaughn Heppner and B.V. Larson, for their tireless encouragement, for persevering and showing me the way.
Thanks to my readers – my lovely wife Beth, my friend and fellow authors Ryan King and Nick Stevenson, and the members of our Friday Night Writes group – Caroline Johnson, Carol Scheina, R. Brian Roser, and Duane Lee, talented authors all - for their excellent critiques; their feedback has made me a better writer and this book a better novel.
Cover by Humblenations.com
* * *
By David VanDyke:
Plague Wars series:
The Eden Plague
The Demon Plagues
The Reaper Plague
The Orion Plague
Comes The Destroyer (Summer 2013)
Reaper's Run (Summer 2013)
Stellar Conquest series:
First Conquest (within the anthology Planetary Assault)
Desolator
(More to come)
Look for them at your favorite book provider or visit www.davidvandykeauthor.com
Desolator
Stellar Conquest, Book Two
by
David VanDyke
For Stellar Conquest Book One, Click Here: Planetary Assault (First Conquest)
© Copyright 2013 by the author. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means whatsoever (electronic, mechanical or otherwise) without prior written permission and consent from the author. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, businesses and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Prologue
“Where there are three people, there are politics.”
– Attributed to Niccolo Machiavelli.
Flight Lieutenant Vincent “Vango” Markis eased his StormCrow Weaver out of the launch tube and into open space. New Jove, the fifth planet in the Gliese 370 system, hung enormous above him, blue and green striations reflecting from the gas giant’s ragged rings and its nearby ice moon Reta. Rolling the StormCrow fighter once around her long axis, he kicked her tail sideways and started his run out into the black.
In the back seat his Weapons Systems Officer, or wizzo, William “Wild Bill” Hickman, said, “Last patrol for you, eh, V? Twelve hours and you’ll be on that transport back home to mama.”
“Yeah, thanks, Bill. Hard enough to concentrate on work without you making it worse.” Vango ran his eyes over his displays, both the physical, and the virtual overlay that used to be called “enhanced reality.” Everything appeared in the green.
“Sorry.” Wild Bill didn’t sound contrite. “You ready to open the package?”
“Sure, hit me.” Vango’s hands and feet rested on his manual controls, stick and throttles and rudder pedals familiar to pilots throughout history. Some fighter jocks relied only on their links, but his grandfather David Markis, who had taught him to fly on an old Cessna 180 at the age of eight back in South Africa, had branded the concept of redundancy onto his brain.
Wild Bill sent the command through his link that loaded the latest updates into the enhanced reality overlay. Optical vision faded, for a time replaced by the brain-fed virtual world. Together he and Vango swooped into artificial space, examining everything the thin fleet of fighters and recon drones dispersed throughout the Gliese 370 star system had reported in the last twelve hours.
“Whole lotta nothin’,” Vango said disgustedly.
“Nothing sounds fine to me,” Wild Bill replied philosophically.
“That’s because you’ve never been in combat. Nothing more fun than to blast the living snot out of some blobbos that are trying to blast you back.”
Wild Bill snorted. “Flyboys.”
“Yeah…all boys now,” Vango mused. “Too bad all our women are back on Afrana or Enoi pumping out babies, so we’re back to a bachelor military. Like the old days.”
“Old days you never saw.”
“Yeah but my dad and grampa told me a lot of stories. So,” he changed the subject, “how’s your girl? What’s her name, Yuki?”
Wild Bill replied flatly, “Ah, we broke it off. The first kid changed her. She loves being a mom but she doesn’t want to be a wife. Said she can get any man she wants now, with all the breeding they are pushing. Guess she doesn’t want me.”
“Aw, man, that’s hard. Sorry, I didn’t know.” They cruised in awkward silence for some tens of minutes. Over their shoulders, at more than ten AU, the system’s orange dwarf sun shone just another star in the background.
“Ready to deploy the feathers?” Wild Bill finally asked as they approached their patrol area well outward of New Jove.
“Not yet. Let’s do something different on our last patrol.”
“As long as we don’t become the lost patrol…you’re the pilot, I’m just along for the ride.”
Vango thought to himself that he might prefer his old wizzo Helen’s combativeness to Wild Bill’s laissez-faire attitude. “Okay. There’s a high-albedo comet about two million klicks out that got missed on the initial railgun strike and has migrated out here. I don’t think anyone’s ever taken a good look at it. No drone on it. Who knows, might be an old Meme installation still there.”
“Whatever you say, boss.”
“Do you ever get excited about anything, Bill? Or is that handle a complete contradiction?”
“With the right stimulus I might. Your wife got any single friends?”
“I’ll ask her the day after I see her. Burn in fifteen. Let’s see how much ol’ Weaver can handle.” Vango set up the trajectory then on the mark lit their fusion engine, accelerating at over one hundred Gs. Balanced gravplates inside the cockpit kept the forces inside manageable, but even so they both felt the brutal acceleration bleed through the link. Eden Plague healing virus, bloodborne nanites and cyberware kept both men functional, but not comfortable.
Half an hour later they turned over and decelerated just as vigorously, in the end to approach the iceball slowly, carefully. Drifting by at easy scanning speeds, Vango brought the Crow around to the other side of the five-kilometer sphere. “Big bastard,” he muttered. “Hardly see anything this large anymore. Meme must have put something on it.”
“Yeah, right there.” Wild Bill put an icon over the anomaly he’d spotted, then made it flash. “Just an old Sentry base. No heat sig, it must be dead.”
Delicately Vango eased the fighter in closer, tapping the thrusters to keep Weaver lined up properly. “Looks like a center hit with a maser. Patrolling Crow most likely, early on before we got real organized. They killed it and just left it here, didn’t file a report.”
“Well, somebody’ll eventually want to use the comet. Lots of good stuff in there. Fifteen or twenty cubic kilometers of water for starters. Prep a marker package and an eyeball.”
Plunging into the icy surface, the little drone immediately extruded clamps and crampons, digging itself into the frozen water slush. As soon as it registered solid, Bill commanded the sensors to extend. Soon the thing resembled a metal plant with a two-meter stalk, complete with comm-dish flower.
“Excellent.” Vango goosed the fighter slightly to get it moving away from the planetoid filling half their view. “Wait a minute.” Strengthening the virtual overlay, he pointed with a mental cursor. “What’s that?” He swung the fighter back and forth on its thrusters, suddenly alert.
“Hmm. Not sure. Asteroid fragment?” Three years ago the battle for this system had turned hundreds of thousands of asteroids into hundreds of millions of pieces, characterized by their rough-edged appearance. “Quit squirreling around and let me deploy the high-res scope.” From under one of the fighter’s four wings a hatch opened, and out slid a telescope. Focusing on the anomaly brought it into sharp relief.
Vango mumbled, “Uh…what the hell?”
“Can you stop fidgeting and hold Weaver really steady? There…laser doppler ping…max magnification on the optics.” Bill took a deep breath. “Oh. My.”
“That’s no fragment. That’s artificial. That’s a ship, and not one of ours. What’s the range?” Vango asked.
“Unknown. The pulse hasn’t returned.”
“Hasn’t returned? That thing can’t be that far away.”
“I ain’t arguing, boss. Just saying, it hasn’t returned. Every two more seconds means 300,000 klicks farther away…and it’s been twenty seconds.”
“What do you think that means?” A plaintive note had crept into Vango’s voice.
“I guess it means it’s big and distant. At ten million klicks, simple geometric comparison says it’s…bigger than Conquest. By a lot.”
“And we just fired a ranging pulse at it.” Suddenly a feeling of deep unease came over the pilot. “Time to go.”
Wild Bill barely pulled the delicate telescope inside the fighter before Vango swapped them end for end, pointing Weaver’s nose back toward New Jove and the carrier Temasek. “Tell that eyeball to lock onto that thing and transmit video on command. I’m dropping a feather,” he went on, releasing one of the Crow’s tiny scanning drones. “Set it to stay near the comet in beamcast relay mode.”
“Yeah…okay. Done. But I think we’d better go. Now.”
“Setting up the burn already…why?”
“Because the doppler says it’s coming this way.”
Chapter One
Trissk clung by his claws to the icy stanchion high above the meeting of Ryss Elders. Below him dim pools of light outlined the leaders of the Five Clans as they hissed and spat at each other in debate, breath fogging in the chill air. It means nothing, he thought, always nothing. They talk and they talk but they do nothing.
Trissk was determined that would change.
Every few shiptime days or weeks Desolator visited and scouted a new star system, which meant that each time Trissk listened to the same debate from his perch, and learned much. On the mere edge of adulthood, yet he had something of an elder’s knowledge of politics. Other than his workshop, eavesdropping constituted his primary pastime.
What else was there to do? Endless fur-fights as dejected warriors sought to retain their skills and teach them to their kits without proper equipment? Perusing once again the meager store of knowledge salvaged from personal computers, augmented by the slow and miserly drip of information from the ship’s AI? He was hungry not only to do, as all Ryss warriors were, but to know.
“This time is different!” he heard Elder Chirom, perhaps the least conservative among them, argue. “Our taps show we are outside of a non-Meme system for the first time since the Fall. Even better, there are two other races here, and they are cooperating with each other. Shall we Ryss wander the starways endlessly, watching the universe age while we grow slowly old? We must demand Desolator make contact. Perhaps it will finally let us go. Perhaps we shall have a home.”
“Why should aliens welcome us?” growled the aged Kirst’aa, Eldest Mother, ears back and nostrils flaring. The slit pupils of her rheumy eyes had widened in the dimness, giving her a spectral look. She will join the Ancestors soon…but not soon enough, Trissk thought uncharitably, swallowing his frustration.
“Why should they not? There is evidence of a battle here. Perhaps the Meme have been beaten in this place.” Chirom crossed his arms, putting his paws inside his warm robe’s sleeves.
“Or perhaps not,” the ancient female snarled reflexively. Trissk expected nothing different; her favorite word was no.
“What can it harm to find out?”
No, you are doing it all wrong, the young watcher thought. She thrives on opposition…you must hold out something she wishes, as well as something she does not, and get her on your side. He longed to leap down and make his own arguments, but they would not listen to him, a maneless male. If he did so they would unite against Chirom, guilty by association.
“Desolator grows ever more unstable. It is better not provoked. We must hope and pray to the Ancestors that it…” The aging speaker, B’nur, trailed off as she often did, losing her train of thought.
After a polite moment for the other Mother, Kirst’aa snapped to Chirom, “Make your proposal.”
See how clever she is. She calls for a vote early, before Chirom has a chance to persuade them further. And she will win.
“I propose we petition Desolator to contact the aliens here, and to allow us to leave the ship and settle in this place if they will have us.” Chirom folded his arms and looked around.
“So proposed. Vote as one, etan, detan, dar.” On the count of three each held out a paw, claws sheathed for no, out for yes. Four to one was the vote against action.
Again they do nothing….therefore it falls to me to do something. Trissk merely had to figure out what that something might be.
***
Commander Rick Johnstone, CyberComm watch officer on duty aboard the EarthFleet dreadnought Conquest, sat bolt upright with his mouth unconsciously hanging open. His dark locks mingled with the two cables connected to his skull plugs, unusual for many linkers that shaved their heads – especially on patrol.
“What is it, Commander?” Captain Chandar Mirza asked mildly, ignoring the man’s unkempt look. He’s the best comms officer I’ve ever seen; I can flex a bit on the grooming. By contrast, his own hair was short and neat, just like the rest of him.
Instead of answering, Rick’s fingers flew across his console. In concert with instructions from his link, the view in the main holotank swooped out, briefly showing the whole of the Gliese 370 system before zooming in toward New Jove. Blue and green icons blinked dully, marking the carrier EFS Temasek and the Hippos’ new pride and joy, the heavy cruiser Krugh, in orbit around the ice moon Reta.
Another icon joined them in the tank, yellow and bright, over a hundred million kilometers out. Numbers scrolled beside it and the view expanded further as Mirza leaned forward, his smooth Persian face even more frozen than usual. “If I interpret this correctly, we have an inbound bogey out beyond New Jove. Can we get some idea of what it is, and how large?”
Commander Tanaka, Sensors officer on duty, replied, “The feed says it is a superdreadnought-class object, but does not appear to be a Meme ship. It’s coming in from the nearest edge of the Empire. From the Bite.” A large man, he appeared a bit puffy and out of shape, but like everyone on the bridge of the system’s premier warship, he was very good at his job.
“Bring up the Meme Empire data and load it into the holotank,” Mirza said.
Soon the device displayed a model of their enemy’s holdings, constructed from data captured from the Meme or supplied by the Hippos. Shaped like a lozenge over a thousand light-years across, the area contained tens of thousands of stars, only a fraction of the
Milky Way Galaxy’s component of hundreds of billions.
The Bite was what Intel called a chunk missing from their captured knowledge. It appeared as a hole in the edge of enemy space covering almost a quarter of the display. Earth’s solar system sat at the tip of the sliver of the Empire that reached around to embrace and surround the Bite. Perhaps this was the reason humanity had not been overwhelmed outright: the blank area seemed to shield it from direct Meme attack.
While Earth’s solar system lay off to the side of the Bite and fifty light-years inside Empire territory, Gliese 370 fell thirty-six light-years out toward the end, hopefully away from the main Meme fleets. Perhaps humanity could find expansion beyond the edge of their enemy’s realm.
No one knew for sure what that blank space represented – dead worlds, enemy worlds, worlds with no Meme? On optical and radio telescopes, stars and the wobble of planets were visible there but little else. Rumors from the Hippos said that the Bite was the battleground between the Meme and an enemy that had almost beaten them: what the Meme called Species 447, or the Ryss.
Interrogation of the three captured Meme had yielded little, not because they were unwilling to tell, but because they simply seemed not to know. The Meme Empire compartmentalized its knowledge ruthlessly, and these had been purpose-bred creatures, fit only to tend the great moon laser they called The Weapon.
“At present speed how long until the contact reaches Reta?” the captain asked.
“Something like twenty hours, Skipper.”
“And how soon can we get there?”
Master Helmsman Okuda spoke up from his cockpit, the medusa of cables plugged in to his shaven ebony skull moving as he turned. “At maximum burn we’ll arrive four hours before it does, assuming no further acceleration. We can get there sooner if we fly past and come back.” If they were to attack, he meant. Nobody wanted to fight at relative rest to the enemy.
Desolator: Book 2 (Stellar Conquest) Page 1