The Gravity Warriors of Venus: Book Two of The Kelvin Voyages

by Kyle Larson

  Now, they stood facing another conflict. Only this time, all of the Nine Kingdoms watched what they would do, and they may be forced to help the Earth Navy if they couldn’t defeat the Wanderers.

  “I don’t think anything could be worse than what Karna did. We won’t be burying a son when this is over,” Etho said. They didn’t even consider the possibility that Teve could be harmed defending Venus from the Wanderers.

  “All the elders are here. It is time,” Tendai said. She took Etho’s hand and they walked back into the Archive.

  When they stepped inside they had walked onto the front stage of a massive audience chamber. The hundreds of Gravity Warrior elders filled every seat that made up the aisles and balconies of the chamber. Everyone was silent and waited for Tendai to speak.

  “Be gone with all fear. Be gone with all things wrong. This is our path. We remain strong. The gravity finds us,” Tendai said. It was the mantra of her master, and the entire chamber repeated her in unison. It was what every Gravity Warrior said first thing in the morning and before they fell asleep each night. “My friends, we are here today because war comes knocking at our door. The people of Venus spoke with their votes when this began months ago in the Antioch Belt. The Wanderers are of no concern to us and we will let the other kingdoms deal with them. Unfortunately, we no longer have a choice, and Venus calls on us to protect it.”

  After the report of what happened in the Antioch Belt, Tendai and Etho proposed the people of Venus vote to determine whether they would actively engage the Wanderers. The vote was overwhelmingly ‘no’, so the matter was settled, until Aren Sellwood took away that choice. To say the Venusian minds had changed would be an understatement. They were all ready to stand with their Gravity Warriors in defense of their home.

  “We have trained and devoted our lives to the safety of these people. The Wanderers do not know who they face. They are an army of criminals and cowards, with no honor. They fly under a false cause of justice, but they are would-be conquerors. Well, we will show them what Gravity Warriors do to conquerors.” Tendai unsheathed and raised her staff.

  The chamber erupted in applause. Tendai couldn’t help but smile. She knew as she looked out at her friends, many of whom had once been her students, they too thought of Karna. It had been hard for everyone, which is why she wanted to make sure they were ready to fight against the Wanderers. Right now, they let the Wanderers hover around their gravity field like angry wasps trying to penetrate a brick building. When the Uranian Corsairs arrived, Tendai wanted the Gravity Warriors to be prepared to help. If the Wanderers were still there when the Uranians arrived, the Gravity Warriors would launch their first attack in hundreds of years.

  “Please return to your Archives and prepare your students to defend Venus. Be prepared to use stone armor with all its components — and be prepared to enter the vacuum. All of the other students are standing guard in every city on Venus. Once the Uranian Corsairs get here, we fly to battle. You will know when it is time. Go and be with your people now.”

  The elders all rose from their seats, and like a flock of birds clearing out of a tree, they launched themselves through the several exits in the Archive. Outside the Archive, it looked to the people of Jupur like the Gravity Warriors were missiles. They were very fast and all flew off in opposite directions. In a few moments, only Tendai and Etho remained in the giant chamber.

  “My queen,” a voice came through Tendai’s phone.

  “What is it?”

  “King Erelm of Earth has requested a projection call.”

  Etho’s face dropped and he shook his head. Tendai was a little surprised that the king had reached out to her. She’d hoped he would one day, but right now was not the best time. She was not happy that Earth Navy was on their way to Venus and didn’t really know what to say to Erelm other than what she’d said to Queen Eleyn.

  “I take it you have no interest,” Tendai said to Etho.

  “I have nothing to say to that man. The Erelm I knew wouldn’t turn his back on his people the way he has. He wouldn’t send his son out to defend his planet,” Etho said.

  “I’ll come to find you when I’m done. One of us has to talk to him.”

  “Very well.” Etho took flight and exited the chamber.

  “Use the projector here. I’m ready for him,” Tendai said into her phone.

  In a few seconds, King Erelm appeared before her. He was seated, slightly slumped over, on his throne. Tendai almost didn’t recognize him. Tendai remembered Erelm as someone youthful, strong, and alive. His whole life was ahead of him when she knew him, and he was one of the bravest Earthers she’d ever met. The old man in front of her was as unrecognizable. It troubled Tendai deeply to see her old friend in such a state. A long youth was something she didn’t take for granted, but still, Erelm looked much older to her than he should have.

  “Erelm,” she said. “I wish I could say it is good to see you, but if the man I knew saw what I see, he would be very disappointed. You are not well, old friend, and I wished you’d accepted the transmissions I’d sent years ago.”

  King Erelm didn’t respond right away, and he kept his expression stiff, but Tendai could see his eyes flare up. The king wasn’t used to being spoken to like that, and he hadn’t prepared himself for the openness of the queen. Tendai was not one to keep observations to herself, especially when she thought her friends needed to hear them.

  “Queen Tendai, thank you for accepting my communication,” Erelm said, his voice flat and formal.

  “Oh no…no, you’re not ignoring that. Right now, I’m no queen and you’re no king, we are two old friends that are about to have a very difficult conversation. They’ll be no hiding behind crowns and decorum.”

  “Tendai,” Erelm’s voice grew concerned. “I should have contacted you. I should have let you talk to me. Maybe one day you’ll understand, but right now this concerns your planet’s safety.”

  “What am I to understand? Losing a child?” Tendai said, with the painful memory of Karna fresh on her mind.

  Erelm didn’t know how to respond to her challenge, so he got to the point to what he had to say. Tendai was a reminder of how selfishly Erelm had dealt with his grief. She had lost so much and carried on. Erelm wished he had a little bit of Tendai’s strength.

  “The Monarch was able to decrypt the Wanderers network. We have all their information. It was just transmitted to myself, Queen Eleyn, and the Royal Council. The Royal Council has no plans to share it with the other Nine Kingdoms until it’s been analyzed, but I thought you could use it. It is the least I can do since you are keeping Kelvin safe.”

  Tendai tried to hide her interest in what Erelm meant to share. It was a big gesture for him, but she needed more from her old friend.

  “You’re right, Erelm. It is the least you can do,” Tendai said, watching his face drop as soon as she finished her sentence. “Transmit it through this connection and I’ll make sure the right people here see it. Venus is grateful for your gesture, lord.”

  Erelm shook his head dismissively. Regret and sorrow weighed heavy on his mind, and he was sick of people reminding him of it.

  “I wasn’t comparing Aren to Karna, Tendai. That’s not fair. We grieve in our own way,” Erelm said.

  “And we move on in our own way too, especially when we have children who still need us. Your son reminds me of you. I hope someday he gets to meet the man I knew, all those years ago.”

  “I do too.”

  The Colonel tried repeatedly to establish a visual connection with Holloway, who he thought was a lieutenant on one of his ships.

  “I’m not talking to anyone unless I can see them,” the Colonel repeated.

  “Sir, there’s no time. The disturbance from the gravity field has affected our transmissions. Sir, it’s one of your commanders. Commander Sellwood, sir, she’s turned against you.”

  “What did you say?” The Colonel said, his voice sounded confused. “Are you trying to warn me?”

/>   “Yes, sir. She and Commander Ristep are trying to take over the shipyards of the Antioch Belt.”

  “Is that so? Well, I had better stop them. What do you propose, lieutenant? Do you propose I break off my attack and head back into the Antioch Belt? That way I can let Earth’s flagship rejoin the rest of its fleet and come to attack your ships in orbit of Venus. Does that plan sound okay with you?”

  Holloway and Ali detected the sarcasm in his voice. The Colonel didn’t trust her.

  “Commander Holloway, you may be very good at cryptography, but you are no match for the Wanderers,” the Colonel said. A cackle followed the sentence, sending chills up Holloway’s spine. “In fact, you’ve given my technicians exactly what we needed. All we had to do was watch you try to break our codes to learn yours. Then let you download a phony trove of files thinking that you’d got access to our database. You unlocked every gate for us, we’re inside your computers, and now the Wanderers will take over the Monarch.”

  Suddenly, the Monarch came to a halt. Around the bridge, all of the screens of each workstation went black and the lights of the bridge flickered on and off until the main lights went dark. In a few seconds, dim emergency lights came on. The crew all stopped what they were doing and exchanged fearful looks.

  “Holloway?” Captain Ali said.

  All of Holloway’s computations went through her head. She hadn’t realized it at the time, but it made sense to her once the Colonel explained what the Wanderers had been doing. As she’d spent the past hours trying to break into their computers, the computers of the Monarch had become more vulnerable because their higher systems were used for her computations. The computers were programmed to scan for viruses, so the virus must have been activated by the link she had established with the Wanderers and the transmissions she’d been trying to decrypt for months. This was a set up. Somehow, they must have been able to communicate with it and once the link was established, taken over. That would mean the Wanderers were much stronger than she expected and if their hackers could do that to her without noticing, there was no telling what they could do to other parts of the Nine Kingdoms that were not prepared for them.

  “I don’t know how they did it, but they used the link I established to get into our systems. It looks like they’ve got into our power systems,” Holloway said. She immediately retrieved her computer from a drawer in the workstation and powered it up. Once it came online, she could see that no network on the Monarch was active. The entire ship had been taken offline, except for life support and the internal comm system. Everything else, most importantly communications and weapons, were offline.

  “What can you do?” Captain Ali said. She heard murmurs from the crew on the bridge about their uncertainty of what to do next. Their training had paid off in terms of keeping panic at bay, but Captain Ali knew there would be little time for the crew before that set in. The delicate balance of fatigue and alert they needed would also catch up with them, and the host of factors that helped them face off against the Wanderers were going to be greatly diminished.

  There was only one option for Holloway. She would have to reboot the computer core, which she was unsure if the Wanderers had gotten to. It was possible, though not likely, the Wanderers had been able to access the core. It was unlikely because it was only accessible from two computers on the ship, one of which was a terminal at the core itself and the other was a sealed workstation in the Royal Cabin, hidden for emergencies. Since she was the chief computer technician aboard the Monarch, only she was allowed access to the higher systems of the Monarch. Because the core held so many different access points to the Earth Navy database, she kept a restricted access to it to prevent exactly what had just happened to the rest of the computer systems. Whether or not the Wanderers got into the core, Holloway would have to go directly to it and manually plug in with her laptop.

  “If I reboot the core it would override any control they have of the other systems. That’s the only thing I can think of,” Holloway said. “The quickest way to do that is go directly to the core. It’s powered independently from the rest of the ship, so it should still be online.”

  Getting to the computer core would be difficult, though. If all the systems were down, the internal moths that got the crew around the massive Monarch would not be functional. The computer core was deep in the bowels of the Monarch and it would be no easy task for any officer to crawl through the network of corridors and tunnels that lead to it.

  “What do you need from me?” Captain Ali said. There was no use in discussing the carelessness that may have allowed the Wanderers to penetrate their systems. She was just as responsible as Holloway, and they’d both have time to learn from their mistakes once this was over. All they could do now was try to get ahead of whatever the Colonel had planned for them.

  “Time,” Holloway said. Getting to the core would be hard enough, but an entire systems reboot would not be quick. It could take hours, and if the Wanderers suspected it was a possibility, the computer core could potentially be the first place they headed once they were onboard.

  That was the reality that set in. The Wanderers would be boarding and taking control of the ship at any moment. Holloway had to assume the worst: The Wanderers had complete control of all the higher systems onboard. The rest of the crew quickly came to the realization they would be face-to-face with the Wanderers very soon.

  “Go,” Captain Ali said. “We’ll do what we can to distract them. Remember our training.”

  Holloway stashed her laptop in the backpack under her workstation and strapped it to her shoulder. She started to make her way across the bridge.

  “No one try to contact me. All of our mobiles and communications are routed through the Monarch’s network. Anything we say can be monitored. If I can do what I’m trying to, you’ll know when it happens. ”

  The rest of the officers didn’t know what to do. Everything they had trained for taught them to respond, but there was nothing to respond to while their ship floated lifelessly in space. All they could do was watch Holloway leave the bridge and head down into the bowels of the Monarch. They all felt anger to be helpless after everything they had done to prepare.

  “We are going to try and make this very easy for you and your crew, Captain Ali,” the Colonel’s voice came over the comm system. Everyone froze, including Holloway, who was almost off of the bridge. “We are going to dock with the Monarch and come aboard. You and your crew will surrender. This is not a negotiation. Make this easy for us, and as I said, we will try to make it easy for you.”

  All eyes looked to Captain Ali.

  “This is Captain Ali of Earth Navy. Stand down your ships and surrender. Earth Navy will grant you and your crew due process. By the interplanetary codes of war in the Nine Kingdoms, we will permit you and your crew to remain onboard your ships while you await trial by an appointed arbitrator. You may take a few minutes to discuss this with your crew.”

  “As the commander of the Wanderers, I formally reject your gracious offer, Captain Ali, and remind you and your crew to prepare for our arrival.”

  The transmission ended.

  “Sergeant Steichen,” Captain Ali said, to the officer currently at the piloting control. “We don’t have a lot of time. Get down to the star diver squads and seal off those hangars. If they can’t be sealed, then launch all the fighters and make a break for the rest of the fleet. They should be here in a few days, but they need to know what’s going on. Do anything you can to get the word out to the fleet that the Monarch has been taken.”

  Captain Ali was nervous the Wanderers would try to use the Monarch as bait to trap the rest of the fleet. What was worse is that they may have access to all of the Earth Navy’s information now that they controlled the computer system. It was an act of desperation to launch the star diver squads. Ali knew full well she’d be putting those pilots at risk from either being captured or shot down.

  Steichen ran off the bridge, while other officers stood up from their w
orkstations, ready to take action.

  “Let’s get to the armory. It’s time to fight.”

  The Colonel sat in his office, away from the rest of the bridge. He looked over the fake data the Wanderers allowed Holloway to access and transmit to Earth. If the Colonel was correct in his calculations, that data would be shared across the Nine Kingdoms.

  The Colonel remembered when he left Venus, not knowing when he would return. He was older than the governments that would attack him. He remembered the brutality Saturn brought down on Venus and how close they’d come to wiping out Venusian culture. The Colonel experienced the horrors of war as a child, memories he never quite got over but had learned to live with. He believed what kings and queens would always eventually do: send their people to war to die for them. The Colonel believed the Nine Kingdoms would eventually be corrupted and then humans would be forever under the domain of their monarchs.

  War would come again to the Nine Kingdoms, but this time the Colonel knew he could control it. The Colonel knew it would be a long process to turn the people of the Nine Kingdoms free, but he did truly believe they would get there. The only thing was, the Colonel was not afraid to use force to unseat the monarchies.

  One planet the Colonel knew only he could take was Venus. He believed Aren was walking into a disaster and it was his way to get rid of her. She still had a lot of clout over many Wanderers, but if she failed to conquer Venus as miserably as he expected her to, he could kick her out. Once the Colonel succeeded where she would fail, on top of her failure in the Antioch Belt against the Monarch and the Lunar Guardians, he would be able to neutralize whatever threat she was to his authority.

  The Colonel planned to send her back to Earth, where she’d no doubt be convicted of crimes. Aren was doomed no matter what she did. There was no way she would succeed against the Gravity Warriors. She didn’t know it, but the battle of Venus was the first step in his bigger plan for his home planet. The power of Venusian gravity was something the Colonel intended to take, but he needed Aren to do the dirty work of bringing down the gravity shield.