by Bob Mauldin
LEGACY
Stellar Heritage
Book One
BOB MAULDIN
Copyright © 2019 Bob Mauldin
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by
Blade of Truth Publishing Company
Cover art: Covers by Christian
This is a work of fiction. All characters, places, and events portrayed in these stories are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Contact the publisher via email at: [email protected]
ISBN-13: 978-1-64248-007-8
ASIN:
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Forward
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Epilogue
Note from the Author
About the Author
To my awesome beta readers: Dylan, Darlene, & Jennifer. Thank you for your hard work.
To Joshua for walking into my life and changing it completely and for helping fulfill my dream of being an author.
To my Honey, without you this work would never have been started—or finished.
FOREWORD
I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of Roswell. More to the point, I’ve always been fascinated by what would have happened if, instead of the government, it was civilians who got hold of something… alien… and fantastic.
The year nineteen-forty-seven brought with it hope for a newer, happier world after the end of the greatest war the planet had ever seen. It brought as well, the beginnings of the Cold War, the Iron Curtain, and, in the United States, a rumor, still unverified, of an alleged space ship crash in the desert outside Roswell, New Mexico.
The year two thousand and one should have begun a bright new millennium, but over three thousand souls were lost in one senseless act of violence on September eleventh and the whole world writhed for years… and more people died.
The year two thousand and ten should have been well into the first part of a bright new millennium. Instead, it brought more of the same old: food shortages, race riots, sarin gas attacks and suicide bombings, killing innocents on both sides, all designed to get the world’s attention so some group could espouse some great cause, political or otherwise.
With all of this came more of the same old: anger, hatred and fear; frustration over inabilities to effect any changes in the systems causing all this misery around the world, giving way to resignation concerning one’s fate. At least one of these conditions applied to the vast majority of the human race, it is sad to say, except for a few favored nations where the standard of living was such that the citizenry, for the most part, knew about the conditions in other parts of their world, but felt more than a little divorced from them.
Many of those favored nations would fall by the wayside, devolving in time to the very status they looked down on in those so-called third world countries.
The bright new, long-awaited millennium finally dawned, bringing with it something… alien… something fantastic.
PROLOGUE
Trajo kep Kuria launched the shuttle and moved away from the great factory-ship for the last time. The virus had finally gotten to him, even with all the precautions. He should have known. The Spirits of Space would never let him get away with over nine hundred murders even if it was for love and even if it was unknowingly.
He remembered the necklace and its silvery setting, entwined with the sigil of Rami’s minor house at the bottom. She had placed it around his neck herself in the little chapel overlooking the port city of Quillas, on their wedding the night before the Dalgor Kreth left on its mission. The gava stone center was almost two inches across, and showed the esteem she, and her house, were held in by clan sel Garian.
Once, he had been proud of the associations that one piece of jewelry entitled him to. Now he saw it as evidence against those who would use him so callously and kill so many. Before leaving the bridge for the last time, he recorded a final message detailing his treachery and naming all those responsible for leading him to his part and placed the damning testimony under a security lock with the Captain’s personal code. He had left the Chalweh, the only personal item he allowed to remain aboard, hidden and revealed its location in his confession, all to show the Matriarch how deeply she had been infiltrated by Isolationists.
All he had to do was input the codes into the computer and at the specified time, Rami had told him. The program would activate several strategically located bombs that would make the ship have to return, setting back the Expansionist agenda by several years at least.
What Rami hadn’t told him, and maybe hadn’t known herself, was that the explosives were attached to vials of frenda vesh, the death plague. None could survive in the confining space of even so large a place as the huge factory-ship. A small village unto itself, and built in space, the Dalgor Kreth was incapable of landing on a planet. She and her crew mined the asteroid belts that made their existence possible and shuttled the finished equipment and parts to a colony planet’s surface. And he was a crew member as well. It had never been intended for him to survive, he now knew, the ship never to arrive at her destination.
As per policy, a shuttle is launched each time a ship leaves otherspace to check for damage and he had the privilege on this particular occasion of being the lowly soul assigned the boring task of inspecting the unending field of metal that comprised the hull of a factory ship.
Since, from time to time, ships entered normal space in the direct path of a meteor swarm or, even less likely, in the middle of the swarm itself, it was standard practice to make such inspections. Finally, the program he had input activated itself. This time, when the Dalgor Kreth had dropped out of otherspace, the bombs had gone off. It was the thing that saved his life. Even if it was only for a few more months. He had been launched at the same time as the small explosive units ruptured vials of the virus throughout the ship. Before he could finish his chore, the radio informed him of what was transpiring aboard. During one of his final lucid phases, the Captain transferred control of the ship and Trajo felt his wristband tingle for several seconds.
After the voices finally ceased, he flushed the tainted air to space and finished the grisly task of removing all organic material to which the virus might attach itself and survive. Sealed inside a construction pod from his inspection ship, rem
oving the last few corpses, he had time to admire the irony of the situation the Spirits of Space placed him in. He finished his morbid tasks and returned to the shuttle. He waited the recommended time and then some, ordered the closing of all ports and restored the ship’s air from uncontaminated spares on board.
In the months that followed, he tried to find home. Someone, possibly the Captain, had erased all astrogational data from the computer, and others had evacuated the dead bodies and all of their possessions up until the last few no longer had the mental capacity to carry on. Those few were the ones he had to remove himself.
He knew as little about his section of space as anyone would who had never traveled the airless pathways between the stars. His star was one of a trinary system, his own sun being the reddest. Ordering the ship’s computer to begin compiling data and rebuilding the astrogational library, he also ordered that any such system was to be investigated.
Now he sat in the command seat of a shuttle, leaving the Dalgor for the last time. Months had passed as the computer searched out system after system with its long range scanners. Each time it would be a false alarm. Until the last stop. Sitting in orbit around the reddest star of the latest trinary system, the ship’s instruments picked up intelligent signals from a hotter, more yellow star than his people would usually colonize.
The irony of that made him laugh. The Spirits had led him to a new race in the stellar neighborhood. The Shiravi knew of only one other, and that one was a belligerent warlike race. From what the computer translated while he was in otherspace, streaking toward the planet its inhabitants called Earth, these beings might hold the key to the defeat of the Korvil. But the information needed to get back to Shiravi. If only he hadn’t contracted the disease himself. Even now he could feel the ice rushing through his veins.
Choosing a landing site wasn’t too difficult. A continent in the northern hemisphere reminded him of home. And, since the atmosphere was breathable, he could at least pretend that he was home. The stars would be different, of course, but he would feel the wind on his face one last time.
The virus running through his body bloomed again. The toxins flowed through his system, greying his vision and numbing his hands. The shuttle nosed deeper into the waiting arms of the gravity well fast enough to over-tax the heat compensators. Terror welled up in him at the thought of not getting one last breath of fresh air. Fear gave birth to hormones that finally gave him back his vision and the use of his hands.
Dripping sweat, he brought the shuttle back under control. He keyed the on-board computer to land the shuttle in the valley he had chosen while still aboard the Dalgor Kreth. Maybe, he thought, dying will give me relief from this burden. Maybe the Spirits will allow me to rest if these beings can advance fast enough to help bring down the Isolationists who willed this turn of events.
Hands trembling over the controls, he carefully settled the shuttle into the secluded valley and shut the engines down for the last time. A spasm wracked him as the plague began its final assault on his body, and he coughed blood onto the deck. He staggered from the control room of the shuttle, through the empty cargo section, to the door, and pressed the controls that would give him his last look at a living world.
And maybe, just maybe, he could use those two aliens he had seen on his scanners in the last few seconds before landing to get back at all those who had used him. If this race had the curiosity and aggressiveness indicated by their space technology, they would be a good choice. If the two he saw on his scanners had either or both of those traits, they would be waiting somewhere nearby. Of course, they wouldn’t understand what he had planned for them, but if those Kath-e-vel spawned Korvil Raiders could copy the ship they stole, then perhaps these could, too. Especially with a full-sized construction ship waiting in orbit. Maybe they could stop the Raiders, and maybe they could eventually deal a death blow to the Isolationist movement that had used and discarded him. He would never know, of course, but he did hope.
“Oh, Rami, did you ever really love me?” he asked himself as he started down the ramp to get the only revenge he had left…
CHAPTER ONE
Katherine Hawke regained consciousness slowly, her eyes fluttering open. For a time, she just lay there, feeling the cold, hard ground beneath her, letting impossible images replay in her mind as her eyes finally focused. The first thing she saw, mere inches from her face, was a small alpine-like plant found in the Montana Rockies every spring. It threw a shadow from the full moon shining down on her. Beyond were sage and mountain grasses struggling to cling to the steep slope.
Beyond that, was… something else. A craft of some kind, shaped vaguely like a space shuttle. This one was still glowing red from its fall to Earth. Katherine felt the heat on her face. It didn’t fall, it landed! And I’ve had enough experience designing loads for shuttles to know that this isn’t one, she mused fuzzily.
Then she realized that her head and right arm were hanging over the edge of the steep bluff she and her husband Simon had climbed, lugging a telescope to do some star-gazing. She slowly rolled over so that she was on flat ground. She looked at the moon above, realizing from its position that only moments had passed, and hours of memories poured into her head.
The yearly camping trip was to clear out the cabin-fever as Simon called it. Away from man’s presence. Some places in Montana you could pretend that no one had ever been there before you. That no other people existed. The occasional vapor trail and far-off sound of engines usually came as a bit of a shock somewhere around the third day. Only this time it had rained for the first three days.
This year, she and Simon had brought their friend Gayle Miller along. Gayle had stayed in camp, not caring to hike up a steep, muddy trail in the dark. “I’ll keep the fire going so you can find your way home,” she had said jokingly. Her idea of fun was to read a book by the light of a Coleman lantern and feed an occasional stick of damp wood to the warming blaze.
Katherine sat up carefully, a wave of dizziness stopping her just short of upright. The feeling passed and she took stock of her situation, looking around. First, she was apparently unhurt, except for a small gash on her forehead that had bled more than a little before beginning to clot, courtesy of some small rock kind enough to break her fall. Standing up uncertainly, she looked toward the telescope and Simon. By the light of the fully risen moon, she could see him struggling as she was. Only he didn’t know why. Or maybe I don’t either, she thought acerbically.
A flash of memory surfaced: the sky growing brighter as whatever it was at the bottom of the bluff came down, Simon looking up in astonishment as the sky turned red, then ... nothing. She heard a groan as he struggled to sit up. Whatever had made her pass out had worked on him as well. She walked the few paces to him a bit exhausted, her balance and energy returning more with each step. She knelt down beside him and, pretending to wipe leaves and twigs off, checked him over for any injuries.
Pushing her hands away, he said, “Nothing broken. Just bruised and battered. What the hell was that?” He got slowly to his feet and she wrapped her arm around his waist as much for him as for herself.
They stood several yards back from the edge of the bluff, so Simon hadn’t yet seen what she had. “Well, it kinda looks like a space shuttle,” she said, nestling close to him in the chilly Montana night, her head on his chest. At an even six-foot, Simon’s arm draped around her five foot two shoulders comfortingly.
He rested his chin on top of her head for a moment and then jerked it up. “Looks?” he asked. “Something moving that fast had to have crashed. What makes you think it was a space shuttle?” he asked incredulously.
“Come over here,” she said, pulling with the arm she had around his waist. “You tell me. And I did say ‘kinda.’” Her flashlight found the edge of the bluff.
The moon’s cold white light tended to suck the color out of most things, but the craft at the base of the bluff was still sending heat waves into the air, the field behind
them wavering. Small fires had started near the ship, but quickly extinguished themselves. This particular year, the first three days of the trip had been spent in tents and under tarps. Thanks to a stationary front, the rain had soaked everything not under cover, thankfully preventing another of the numerous fires that plagued many states from spring to fall.
Smoke drifted around the slowly cooling ship, blurring its outlines first here, then there, always tantalizing, not giving a full view of the thing. A shift in the winds blew the smoke clear for a few seconds and the pair stared down at the huge ship. Forty feet high it stood, the bluff being about sixty feet higher than the valley below. Some sixty feet wide and nearly two hundred feet long, it nearly filled this end of the small valley.
“It had to have landed under its own power,” he said, almost to himself. “And we don’t have anything that can do that.”
Katherine looked up at him. With the moon behind him, his face was hard to see, his eyes hidden in shadow. She felt a quiver go through the arm around her shoulder. “Who do you mean by we?” she asked. “Even the Russians and Chinese don’t have the capability to land something like this under power and practically VTOL, too.” Getting no response, pretty much what she expected under the circumstances, she added, “Remember, I have a doctorate in physics and I had to learn the cargo capacity of a shuttle along with lift, drag, mass, momentum and other things, like vehicle configuration, and that is no normal shuttle down there.” Occasionally her time at MIT still came in handy.
Tech Sergeant Hoskins jumped when he heard the first ping in his earphones. He looked at the data stream running down the right side of his display and immediately flipped a switch and pressed three numbers on his keypad. It only took seconds for a captain to arrive. “What do you have, Sergeant?” he asked, clearly irritated at being disturbed. Nothing at the shift briefing had indicated any reason to expect anything out of the ordinary.