Preserving Perfection: Self-obsessing with body augmentation has left the entire planet of Ramos without children. But to acquire children means interstellar war! (Veiled Destiny Book 2)

by Jason Bourn

  Rheana’s image was on the display in Dorial’s meeting room, “Dorial, do you remember how small and frightened Violet was when we talked to her before? She was five back then, so she is ten years old now. She has probably hit her growth spurt, I would imagine.”

  Dorial said, “I’m more interested in how she and the rest of the children have taken to the body augmentation. If they reject that, then we are lost. From what I hear, the results are looking favorable. Ah, here she is.”

  Violet’s image appeared on the screen, showing a young lady, no longer a little girl. Dorial said, “Welcome Violet, Rheana and I are very happy to see you. How are you?”

  She responded, “I would like to get back to my game. I was playing ‘Warrior Universe’ and was on the twenty-seventh level where the Zorlons were attacking Ramos. We were just activating our defenses when my persa indicated that I needed to get to this meeting.”

  Dorial asked, “So how do you like the enhancements that have been added to your body, like your neural processors?”

  Not really wanting to talk, Violet muttered, “They’re all right, I guess.”

  Shifting tactics, Dorial said, “OK, then you don’t mind if we remove all the body enhancements then?”

  This got Violet's attention. “No,” she shouted quickly, “you couldn't! You wouldn’t!”

  Rheana smiled and said soothingly, “No, we won’t take away your enhancements. We just wanted to find out how you felt about them.”

  Visibly relieved, Violet suddenly became much more talkative. “Actually, the enhancements are great. There is no way any of us could live without them. They give us so much more, uh,” she paused and thought about it, “well, they give us so much more everything. I don’t know how any of us could play video games or sports or anything without them. We’d be so slow and awkward. Though some of the older boys, they are the eleven-year-old boys, they act all bossy – just because they have enhancements that improve their strength. They think they are better than us and they try to boss us around. Those of us that have the most advanced neural network enhancements are much smarter and quicker-thinking than them, though. We can always figure out how to outsmart them.”

  Dorial and Rheana looked at each other with smiles on both their faces, satisfied.

  Dorial asked, “Is there anything else you’d like?”

  Violet thought about it. “Well, I could get even higher scores on the ‘Warrior Universe’ game if I had faster finger speed. Are there any enhancements that I can get for this?”

  Dorial looked at Rheana, who nodded. Dorial said, “Yes, I think we should be able to make that happen.”

  Violet smiled brightly, then her image disappeared.

  Rheana said to Dorial, “I would say the results are exactly in the range we wanted.”

  Dorial nodded, “Yes, she, like all the others, are a bit egocentric – maybe a bit too much like we are.” Dorial smiled and said, “I think this is going to work out exactly like we wanted.”

  – – –

  It had been more than five years since the children had been abducted and Garth was feeling good about everything. It was true that the effort to rescue the children was moving forward at an encouraging pace. The ships were being built and staffed – as Nadia had often pointed out, with almost all Torval 2 support. The focus on this activity had left him, and the other Kingdoms, with plenty of opportunities to increase the size and strength of their holdings. Garth had increased the number of planets in his empire by fifty percent since the children had been abducted, all at the expense of the Periphery. While this had caused friction between his Kingdom and the Periphery, they were not nearly strong enough to put up much of a fight and, actually, had no desire to do so anyway.

  Torval 2 would normally have been the Periphery’s advocate, but their focus had been in the fleet building. Knowing this, Garth, and all the other Kingdoms, had steadily “acquired” more and more once-independent planets.

  Nadia had insisted that a meeting be convened to discuss this issue, so here they were. Garth purposefully delayed his entry into the meeting by more than ten minutes, just to show he had the upper hand in these discussions.

  When he finally initiated the meeting display, the images of the normal cast of characters were already there awaiting him. Smiling to himself, he said “Welcome everyone. It is so nice to see you.”

  Saul started in immediately, “You promised to slow down your takeovers of our Periphery planets. In the last meeting you specifically said you had ‘almost achieved your long-term goals of expansion’. But you took over another three worlds last year and already three more worlds this year and it is not even halfway through the year.”

  Garth interrupted him, “Relax Saul. We needed these additional worlds since they contained ore deposits that we could not obtain anywhere else and they are critical to both our Kingdom’s needs and for the battle fleet’s needs. You wouldn’t want to do anything to jeopardize the battle fleet would you?”

  Saul spluttered, “Those were independent worlds that you acquired. They were providing those ore deposits directly to Torval 2 just fine without you.”

  Garth smiled, “Yes, but we are a much larger Kingdom and have many more resources that we can provide to extract the ore. In fact, the production rate has almost doubled on just about every one of these worlds.”

  Saul was starting to turn red with rage, “You come in, take over the planet, then tear up the planet with those huge machines, leaving it an environmental mess. Then on top of that you impose your crushingly high taxes and you expect us to just stand by and do nothing? Nadia, can’t Torval 2 do anything to stop this?”

  Nadia sighed. This had been going on for years, starting long before the “No Win War”. She had been pushing for a centralized government with battleships to ensure that the rights of all people were respected, but with the advent of the war, all thoughts of that had been put on hold. “Saul, you know that our primary focus has been building the battle ships to get back all our children. There is no way that we can do that and defend every single Periphery planet. I think you are going to have to provide your own defense.”

  Saul countered, “But Garth’s forces are so much stronger than any of our worlds. We’re made up of hundreds of small, backwoods worlds, most with a single outpost. There is no way we can stand up to the forces of any of the Kingdoms.”

  Nadia shook her head and said, “Once we get the children back, we can address your issues. Until then, we will have to make do.”

  Garth smiled to himself. He felt he had played his cards right, and this meeting showed that he was right. He would continue to help with the war effort, but he felt certain now that no one was going to stop him from continuing to build up his Kingdom.

  – – –

  Edgar had been waiting patiently for this presentation. Dr. Ester Stills cleared her throat, then started “I wanted to thank the entire council for their support in this activity. Without their dedication, this cloaking effort would not be where it is today. After all the engineering and design activities over the last five years, we are ready to see the results of the cloaking for the first solar system element. Granted that this is just for a moon, it is important in that it is the Earth’s moon. This is the first large stellar object that has been totally surrounded with the final-production hardware. Specifically, the solar-powered damper sensors and emitters have been placed all around the moon and we are ready to initiate the system. Are you ready?”

  She waited a dramatic few moments, then nodded. “Here we go.” With that, power was applied and millions of cameras around, and outside of, Earth recorded a sight never before seen. The moon simply vanished from view. It was amazing. Not only was there no moon visible from Earth, or from any of the thousands of satellites or space craft, but the stars behind the moon could be seen for the first time. It was incredible, a roaring success.

  Edgar was ecstatic. Dr. Stills looked on, in awe. She momentarily forgot that she was speaking
to the entire council. But no one noticed. They were all in awe as well. For the first time in recorded history, it appeared as if the Earth had no moon.

  Finally, Dr. Stills remembered where she was. “Sorry about that, as you can imagine even though we were anticipating this, the reality is absolutely incredible. And this is just the start. Within the next ten years, all of the major stellar bodies, including our sun, will have been fully cloaked. At that point, for all intents and purposes, our solar system will be invisible to all wavelengths of energy. About the only signature that will be given off is the gravitational effects, which could easily be passed off as a small black hole. Speaking of which,” Dr. Stills had obviously planned this segue wording intentionally, “here is Dr. Jarod Yep to discuss the Transient Black Hole status.”

  Dr. Yep stood, approached the podium and smiled. “As you know, we have been working on developing technology that will make a black hole. This technology, using lasers, has been around for many years. The real challenge is to make a black hole with sufficient mass to actually have some effect on the solar system. And the effect must be temporary, or bad things will happen.” His smile became broader.

  “Being swallowed up by a black hole is probably not on anyone’s ‘To Do’ list, so we’ll try to avoid it. The only way to both give the black hole mass and to make it temporary is to use dark matter. As you may know, dark matter makes up almost thirty percent of the universe, far more than what we know as ordinary matter, and we have been studying it intensely for years. We determined that it is made up of large particles that can’t be detected by normal means. We were able to create a temporary worm hole, for only a fraction of a second to move a large amount of these large particles to a spot close enough to the solar system to give it a nudge, but far enough away that the black hole wouldn’t swallow up the entire solar system. We then create another temporary worm hole to move these large particles back again. By doing this over and over again, we have successfully moved the solar system slightly more than one inch over the last month.”

  Smiling again, Dr. Yep continued. “Now, one inch may not seem like much, but we are just getting started. That one inch per month will double roughly every month. So that will be two inches per month in a month and so on. What that means is that in less than five years the entire solar system will have moved the width of the solar system itself. And it will continue to accelerate as long as we continue this process of generating black holes.

  “As you probably already know, our solar system is already moving at a high rate of speed around our Milky Way galaxy. What we have done is to speed up that motion. Where it used to take about 230 million years to go completely around, now we will do that a bit faster.

  “The bottom line is that no one will be anywhere close if they come looking for the solar system or Earth.

  “Well that is all for now. We’ll try not to mess up the whole black hole thing,” he laughed at his own “holy” joke. No one else did, but he didn’t mind.

  Edgar groaned. He never did care for Dr. Yep’s sense of humor, but Edgar did appreciate his talents. As a result of those talents, he was quite sure, that when anyone came looking for Earth, whether from Ramos or Torval 2, Earth would not be able to be found.

  CHAPTER 16 – SOPHIE’S CHOICE

  Sophia Helmsly was not one normally prone to panic. Being one of the few female leaders of a Periphery world, she had become known as a tough but fair negotiator in her dealings with many traders. She had named this world “Sophie’s Choice”, and through her command, it had become very a profitable mining colony.

  However, as she saw the four heavily armed ships approaching Sophie’s Choice, she tried to stop the panic from setting in. She had heard of other worlds being attacked and swallowed up into Garth Nolan’s Kingdom, but she never thought that they would take her world. She had received four messages from them, but she had refused to respond.

  Sophie’s Choice was much closer to Torval 2 than most of the back worlds that Garth had annexed. She had thought that this proximity would prevent this act of terrorism. She saw now that she had miscalculated.

  She quickly sent an urgent message to the Periphery representative, Saul Voluck. “Saul, there is an imminent threat of attack. We need military support, now!”

  A message quickly came back from Saul. “Please make your request to Nadia Davidson from Torval 2. She is the only one in position to help you. We have had five other worlds attacked this year and we have not been able to help any of them.”

  Frustrated, Sophia forwarded her message to Nadia. She did not know Nadia personally, but she had heard that Nadia was both fair and honest. Unfortunately, she had also heard that Nadia was extremely busy, always with much more on her plate than she could handle.

  As she waited for a response, she contemplated her options. Unfortunately, this did not take long because her options were few. She could surrender and take whatever position that Garth’s representative was willing to offer her. Or she could put up a fight with hand weapons and her three small ships that were mostly used to support mining operations. They did have lasers. Sadly, they were no match for the fully armed ships that Garth’s Kingdom boasted. By far the most likely outcome, if it came to a fight, was that her three ships would be destroyed and the position that would be offered to her would be a long prison term at best and a firing squad at worst. The only other option she saw was to get help from off-world. Saul had deferred to Nadia – no real surprise there. And Nadia hadn’t responded. “Great,” she thought, “just great.”

  After a wait of almost an hour, which had allowed Garth’s four ships to get much closer, she finally received a message from Nadia. Reading it quickly, she couldn’t help but fight back tears. It just wasn’t fair.

  The message said “I have told Saul many times that it is up to the Periphery to defend itself. Torval 2 is already stretched thin trying to keep the battle ship fleet and quantum jump drive efforts on track. We are already fifteen years into this effort and we are getting close, but we cannot keep stretching it out further in time. I am terribly sorry not to have better news, but there is just no way we can have ships employed at the ready throughout the Periphery. Even if we did have ships at some locations, I am sure that any attack would be on the worlds far away from these ships. Good luck and be strong, Nadia.”

  Sophia pondered whether all her efforts had been worth it. Yesterday, she would definitely have said “Yes,” but today she was not so sure.

  Finally, she looked at the messages from the approaching ships. All four messages said essentially the same thing. “Your presence is requested on our lead ship to discuss negotiations as to new trade agreements with Captain Richard Studor. Please respond.”

  Sophia responded, though her teeth were clenched tightly shut. “It would be my honor to attend to a meeting on your ship. Let me know the time and I will see if I am available.” She had added the last part to give the charade that she had some degree of control of the situation.

  A message was quickly sent back to her. “We will send a shuttle to get you in four hours’ time.”

  – – –

  The time passed extremely quickly for Sophia. She had to tell every colonist what was happening and what the likely outcome was. She told most of them that their lives and jobs would continue much like before, but she wasn’t as certain as she tried to make her voice sound.

  When the shuttle finally landed, she bravely walked up the ramp and sat down. Nothing was said and the shuttle took off and rendezvoused with the lead ship. As she entered the lead ship, a feeling of loneliness swept over her. She had forsaken everything to make Sophie’s Choice not only a profitable mining endeavor, but also a good place to raise a family – even though she had none herself.

  The man at the conference room table nodded at her and said, “Welcome aboard, Sophia Helmsly. I am Captain Richard Studor. It is nice to meet you in person. We are anxious to start negotiations for your planet to be the sole trader with Garth’s K
ingdom.” He bowed when he said this. Frowning, he waited until Sophia bowed too.

  He continued, “We are prepared to offer you the use of our advanced mining equipment in exchange for an exclusive contract to trade with us. This would be a win-win proposal, I’m sure you can see this.”

  Sophia asked quietly, “Is this an optional offer? Do I have the choice to refuse the offer?”

  Frowning, the captain said slowly, “Yes, of course you have the option to turn this offer down. The only thing we ask is that you let us know who is your second in command in case any accident befell you on your return to your planet.” With that statement, the captain gave a large smile.

  Sophia could read between the lines only far too well. “So, if I ‘voluntarily’ sign this trade agreement with you, what did you want in return?”

  Smiling even more broadly now, knowing that he had won, the captain said, “There will be a small twenty-five percent tax on every transaction, just to show your support for Garth’s generosity. Also, we will provide a resident Kingdom administrator that you will report to. As long as you don’t cross the administrator, I’m sure that we will get along just fine.”

  Trying to hide her grimace and her clenched teeth, Sophia said, “I would be honored to accept such a generous offer.”

  With that a toast of quite good ale was served. As Sophia returned on the shuttle, she thought of all she would lose in this exchange. It wasn’t everything, but it was a lot. She knew that one glass of good ale would not make up for it, but she was afraid that this was all that there would be.