The Battle for the Solar System (Complete Trilogy)

by Sweeney, Stephen

  But it was too late; he had gone. The Enemy had caught her. She couldn’t run any further.

  *

  Though deep in hibernation, Natalia still shivered from the nightmares. They were all too real, influenced by what she had seen and experienced. Had she been able, she might’ve woken up screaming. But the hibernator kept her under, locked inside her own head, with nothing but her own memories for company.

  Thankfully, the terrible dreams didn’t plague her forever. And soon the darkness departed, allowing her to return to a peaceful, undisturbed sleep; the nightmare having lifted like a veil, taking with it the shattered cities, the scattered corpses and Pandoran soldiers, as if they were moving on to trouble another.

  XIX

  — A Grand Opportunity —

  An excerpt from A GIFT FROM THE GODS by Kelly Taylor

  Friday, June 13th 2617

  With the exception of the invasion of Mythos and the infamous fallout of the Black Widow operation, the one incident of the Pandoran War that sticks most firmly in my mind is Operation Menelaus and the time shortly thereafter. That time became a period of many firsts – it was the first time that any of us had ever seen the ATAFs in a real life combat situation. That début would resonate with people for weeks to come, as many throughout the Confederacy came to question both the heroic pilots at the stick and the nature of the fighter craft themselves. It was also the first time that we had come into contact with the Pandoran forces; “the Enemy” as they were better known to those who were, at the time, privy to such information. We lost a great number of service personnel that day and I was fortunate only to suffer a concussion when one of the Pandoran pilots who hadn’t managed to jump away chose to kamikaze into me, rather than accept capture.

  As might be expected, I don’t recall a lot of the event. There is a great gap in my memory which I am told will never return. My own recollections of my participation in the operation start with being led by security chief Omar Wyatt to Griffin’s rear cargo hold, preparing to board my fighter, and then being back in the hold again, post-battle. Had I not been shown footage of the battle and had it confirmed to me by Estelle, Dodds and Enrique, I might well have believed that I hadn’t done anything.

  I also have few memories of the celebration that took place at Spirit Orbital, upon our eventual return back there. At some point in the evening my concussion fully manifested, and it was left to Estelle to whisk me from the bar where she had been basking in attention and glory, to take me to the station’s medical bay. It was a few days before I was able to think laterally again, and my journals went untouched.

  Following the operation, we all expected to be escorted from the cargo bay and debriefed by Parks, before making the return trip to Spirit. As it happened, Parks had other ideas. He wished for us to remain within the cargo bay until we returned to Spirit, so that he could sneak us off the ship and – as with the ATAFs – keep us detached from the rest of the navy for as long as possible. Of course, things didn’t work out the way he had planned, and Griffin suffered a mis-jump, missing our intended destination of Spirit and becoming stranded in the one part of the galaxy none of us would’ve wanted. It must have come as a shock to Parks when he first found out, but also presented him with a grand opportunity to right a wrong.

  In the hours that followed, I was to experience my first face-to-face confrontation with one of the soon-to-be ubiquitous Pandoran soldiers, whilst we searched Arlos starport. I’m still not entirely sure of everything I saw when we were going about the errand Parks appointed to us, but there are some memories that I really do wish had been a consequence of my accident, a fabrication of my own errant imagination. After what we saw, I could hardly blame the few surviving citizens of the fallen Mitikas Empire for running, even if it did mean attempting, in little more than modified Darts, to fight four CSN starfighters.

  We were summoned to Parks’ private office soon enough, to discuss the task he had in mind for us. But for the meantime, we remained in the hold, locked there alongside the ATAFs, as the Red Devils had been. Five pilots and five deadly starfighters; all components in the Confederation’s solution to the threat of an all-out, unwinnable war with the Pandoran army. A solution that had to happen, no matter what the cost.

  *

  In one of Griffin’s conference rooms, Parks sat down with a number of his senior staff. The wound on his head had been bandaged and he’d given himself a general clean up, while Liu was finding out where the carrier had emerged. Following their arrival into the unknown, Parks had requested they gather as much information as possible pertaining to the unexpected events. He had then called a meeting of the various heads of section.

  He looked around the table. Like him, many of those present also wore reminders of the earlier conflict, everything ranging from cuts and bruises, to arms in slings. Still, everyone had arrived as requested. Time was of the essence; they needed to get things started.

  “Mr Liu,” he said, “could you please start by giving us an overview of our current situation.”

  “Yes, Captain,” Liu said. He picked up a small handheld device and tapped away at the screen, prompting a large holographic projection of the known galaxy to spring up in the centre of the table. It was cluttered with somewhat excessive amounts of detail, highlighting commercial trade routes, jumpgates and commonly used jump exit and entry points, as well as marking entire regions of space that were a part of the Confederacy, and those that were declared Independent. At one end of the map, Temper was highlighted; at the other, Aster. Liu continued to tap away at the device he held, dimming star systems and removing much of the display data that was of no relevance. Eventually, only the Aster and Temper systems were left as the main focal points of the projection. Liu made some final adjustments, centring in on Griffin’s position on the map, within the Aster system. He then began to recount.

  “Following the previous operation, we prepared to make the jump back to Spirit.” A dotted line made its way across the galactic map from Aster, towards Temper. “As we witnessed, the jump point became unstable and we were unable to prevent our descent into the wormhole. The jump we experienced – if one could call it that – threw Griffin’s navicoms out of sync and it took them quite some time before they were able to establish a link with the nearest navigation buoy.”

  “So, we’re at least still in a populated system?” Samson Tunstall, one of the ship’s physicians, asked.

  “We are, yes,” Liu said.

  “That’s good,” Tunstall said, sounding quite relieved. “At least we’re not in the middle of nowhere.”

  There was a noticeable pause from Liu before he continued. “If we assume the data the buoy transmitted to us is accurate, then it appears we arrived not back at Temper, but …”

  He tapped at the device he held, causing the galactic map to suddenly zoom out a considerable amount, the dotted line once more tracing its way from Aster. This time, however, it moved not towards Temper, but to a star system in completely the opposite direction.

  “… here,” Liu concluded.

  There were gasps from all around the table, as the assembled staff gaped at the region and star system that the line had traced to. The system was named Phylent.

  “Phylent?” Parks started.

  “Yes, sir,” Liu said.

  “We’re in Imperial space?”

  “I’m afraid so, sir.”

  Parks’ gaze shot immediately to the many windows of the conference room and to the space beyond, which, thankfully, remained calm and uneventful. Even so, there were mutterings and mumblings from the others at the table, as they stared in disbelief at the map. Parks’ mind raced. At this very moment in time, he and his ship were in the one place that they really did not want to be. He looked around those seated at the table, knowing that none could confess to fully appreciating the danger more than he. The failed operation to retake Dragon had merely hinted at what the Confederacy and her allies were truly up against, and had it not been for the ATAF
s, no one would have returned home after the battle.

  They had to get away from here as soon as possible!

  After a moment, Parks regained his composure. At this time, more than ever, he needed to appear cool, calm and collected. He couldn’t afford to look shaken in front of his crew, nor instil fear and concern amongst them. They were counting on him to get them home. He called for silence. “How is that possible, Mr Liu?” he said.

  “I think that perhaps Mr Marsh could explain in more detail?” Liu said.

  Heads turned to a rather thickset man seated next to Liu, who straightened up. As Griffin’s chief engineer, Matthew Marsh was in a far better position to answer Parks’ question.

  “Well,” Marsh began, “it seems that there was a malfunction in the jump engines, most likely caused by the damage we sustained during the battle.”

  “Why wasn’t it detected earlier?” Parks said.

  “Due to the nature of the issue, it wasn’t something that we could have pinpointed until we attempted to use them.”

  Parks scowled as Marsh gave a small shrug. It sounded as though the man was offering up a very weak excuse for such a serious issue. Likely that, with the news that Griffin hadn’t become lost in a far-off corner of the galaxy, with no means of returning home, he was now downplaying the severity of the issue.

  Marsh added, “Our pre-jump safety checks and individual unit tests reported no faults, and everything seemed to be working as expected.”

  “But it didn’t work, did it, Mr Marsh?” Parks said irritably.

  Marsh seemed taken back by Parks’ anger. “No, sir. But at least no one was seriously injured.”

  “That’s beside the point!” Parks said. “That failure could’ve destroyed the ship and killed everyone onboard. When we get back to Spirit, I want a full review of all safety checks.” This he directed at everyone within the room, though Marsh fidgeted as Parks’ eyes fell upon him.

  Alright, cool down, Elliott, Parks thought to himself, taking a few moments to study the galactic map and calm himself. Getting stressed at the crew wouldn’t help matters, either. He then pointed from Aster to the Phylent system. “How is it that we managed to get from here to here so easily?”

  “Well, that’s actually quite interesting—” Marsh started.

  Parks presented him with a look that suggested that it most likely wasn’t.

  Marsh back-pedalled. “Er … I think that the malfunction in the jump engines must’ve thrown some of the astral calculations out. Remembering that the technology works by establishing a trans-dimensional conduit between two points and then opening a Lorentzian wormhole, permitting matter to move between the locations within a Kepler Suspension Field—”

  Parks turned his hand around a few times, giving a hint to the man to speed things up.

  “Er … owing to some currently unknown other factors, we have successfully compensated for the miscalculations and travelled through a non-standard dimension. The jump computers then selected a cached version of one of Spirit’s navigation buoys as their destination and dropped us in a random part of the system, which might’ve been the relative location we’d have emerged, had we arrived back at Spirit.”

  “That actually fits in with what I was thinking,” Liu said. “Phylent and Spirit are more or less equidistant from Aster, give or take a few dozen light years. The error correction threshold is quite high for long distances, so that might be how we ultimately zeroed in on the system. Basically, we just went the wrong way, albeit exceptionally fast.”

  Parks considered the explanation for a moment. “Fine,” he said. “I think I understand.”

  “A shame we don’t know what the secret speed ingredient is,” Marsh started to babble. “I have to say that I am actually amazed at the distance we managed to cover in such a short space of time. I’m planning on holding on to the data from the jump, so we can analyse it once we return to Spirit. The findings could help to revolutionize space travel and …”

  “Put it in a report,” Parks said, waving away the rest of the comment. Right now, he wasn’t prepared to allow Marsh to indulge his knowledge and enthusiasm for the inner workings of interstellar transportation. “And I think you’ll find that the secret ingredient you’re searching for is just plain dumb luck, Mr Marsh. By all rights this carrier should’ve been ripped apart.”

  “Sorry, sir,” Marsh said.

  “Just out of curiosity,” Liu said, turning to Marsh, “what were those weird red clouds we saw?”

  “From what I’ve been able to work out, it looks as though we were fluxing between dimensions,” Marsh said. “If you slow down some of the cloud footage recorded during the transit, you can see snatches of clear pockets within them, where … well, there is a door to another universe.”

  There was dead silence at the table, though not, Parks suspected, because those gathered around it failed to comprehend the potential implications of what Marsh had said.

  “Could we’ve fallen through one of them?” someone asked.

  “I very much doubt it,” Marsh said. “Jump technology has come on leaps and bounds since it was first discovered. To my knowledge, there has only ever been one occurrence of a vessel experiencing a full cross-dimensional shift. It turned up in a place that could only really be described as liquid space. There was nothing else around them – just liquid for hundreds of miles in all directions. They crossed back about an hour later; with no damage other than their engines being screwed.”

  “Gentlemen, time is wasting,” Parks said, keen to move on. “We have a lot to do and maybe not a lot of time in which to do it.” He also thought it was best that Marsh stopped talking. He looked back to Griffin’s navigator. “Mr Liu, from here, how long would it take for us to return to Spirit?”

  Liu frowned. “Under ideal circumstances? Roughly twelve or thirteen hours.”

  “And with the main propulsion engines in their current state?” Parks once again addressed the chief engineer.

  “I would say we are looking at sixteen to twenty hours, if not a little longer,” Marsh said. “However, the jump drives aren’t in a state where we could safely execute another jump.”

  “And how long before we can?”

  “I’ve not had enough time to estimate the cost of the damage to all the dependent systems yet. But given what I’ve seen so far, I’d reckon around nine hours.”

  Parks nodded, but swore quietly to himself. They were looking at a timeframe of more than a day before they were back at Spirit. The chances of them being discovered before then were high. Don’t panic, Elliott.

  “Okay,” he said to Marsh, “begin the work as soon as this meeting is over. As for the rest of you, I need you all to find members of your respective teams who may be able to lend their skills to repairs and maintenance. I shouldn’t need to reiterate to any of you that in her current state, Griffin is a sitting duck. Most of her major systems are operational, but shielding is minimal and we have little in the way of offensive measures. We are also unable to easily deploy what remains of our starfighter complement. The cargo holds are simply not equipped to launch fighters at the rate we’d need to fend off attackers.”

  He thought of the cargo holds. Whilst those holding the ATAFs contained little more than the five craft themselves, the others were bursting with Griffin’s starfighters. Deploying them in an emergency would be next to impossible.

  “We could save time with pre-emptive deployments, Captain,” the standin OOD offered. “They could scout out staggered distances from the ship and act as an early defence system.”

  “No,” Parks said, “we’re already in danger of being detected by long-range scanners. Deploying fighters would only be throwing wood on the fire. We need to keep our profile as low as possible.”

  Those around the table appeared to all be in agreement with his plan, their eyes drifting from the holographic display, to the quiet space outside. The words ‘Mitikas’, ‘Phylent’ and ‘Griffin’ were far too close together on the g
alactic map for anyone’s liking.

  Parks continued delegating, “I want a seventy-thirty split in repair work made to the jump engines and the flight deck. It is vital that we get out of this system and away from Imperial space as soon as possible. But it is equally important that, in the highly likely event that we are discovered by enemy forces, we are able to defend ourselves.” Though if he was being completely honest with himself, he couldn’t really see it doing much good.

  “Yes, sir,” came the resounding answer from those assembled.

  “Lieutenant Weathers, have you managed to contact either Ifrit or Leviathan?” he asked of a woman sitting further down the table.

  Weathers, now working as communications officer in place of O’Donnell, flipped through some papers as she spoke. “We don’t believe that Ifrit and Leviathan are within range. It doesn’t appear that they followed us into the jump point, and it’s highly unlikely they’re even aware of our current position. It’s unlikely that they were able to follow us either, given the unstable nature of the jump point.”

  It was as Parks had suspected – they were on their own. Dammit. “Very well. Is there anything else?” His query was met by shakes of heads and silence. “Then let’s get cracking, people.”

  As the staff officers left, Parks noticed that Weathers was lingering, appearing to be waiting for everyone else to vacate the room. “Yes, Lieutenant?” he asked, once they were alone.

  “An encrypted communication has come in from CSN HQ, sir.”

  “From headquarters? Are you sure?”

  “Yes, sir. It arrived just before the meeting.” She seemed just as surprised as he was.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant. I’ll take it in my private office.”

  Weathers nodded and departed, leaving Parks to ponder the speed at which the Confederation Stellar Navy had succeeded in pinpointing their location, so soon after their recent accident.