by Randal Sloan
Defenders of the Rim: Borjon
Book 3 of the Far Future SciFi Thriller Series
Randal Sloan
Defenders of the Rim: Borjon - A Far Future SciFi Thriller
This book is a work of fiction. All characters and events appearing in this work are fictional and any resemblance to real persons or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 Randal Sloan
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
ISBN: 978-1-947509-24-5
January 2019
Author’s Page
Sign up here:
http://www.randalsloan.com/farfuture/
Acknowledgments
Thanks to all my readers who are the reason I keep writing the stories I love to tell.
Special thanks to Dean Borden for her most excellent proofreading and Catherine Borden Sloan for copy editing. Your corrections and suggestions were greatly appreciated.
Extra special thanks to my beta readers Gerrit Jan van Brenk, Mem Creagh Webb, II, and Tania Ciza. Your feedback was extremely beneficial.
Cover design by Robin Ludwig Design Inc.
www.gobookcoverdesign.com
Contents
1. Survival
2. Plans
3. A Visit Home
4. The Journey Begins
5. Forerunner
6. Borjon
7. Master Hadassah
8. Plans and Preparation
9. Off We Go Again, Or Do We?
10. Crossing the Void
11. Aerstone
12. Into the Black Hole
13. Infiltration
14. Ai
15. Unexpected Visitor
16. Do the Impossible
17. Sentinel
18. Safe, But At What Cost
Excerpts
Chapter 1
Survival
Master Hadassah, High Master of the Borjon Order of the Most Vigilant, knew the moment in time he anticipated with feelings of both fear and excitement was drawing nigh. A pivotal moment in the future of the galaxy, the One, as he called the Golden-Haired human Jarra, faced certain death for herself and her team unless she could reach beyond her understanding to see the way out.
The Master knew enough to understand the level of danger they faced, and he knew that everything was dependent on what happened at that moment. If she could find her way, the galaxy would have a chance for a bright future. If she failed, the future appeared quite bleak.
As head of the Order, it was his responsibility to study the Prophecies and use his second sight to make sure they did everything possible to support them. The Prophecies were made up of quatrains of text. Each quatrain represented a significant event or period of time of importance and each was dependent on the ones before it.
Despite the fact the Prophecies had never been wrong, their interpretation during the time a particular quatrain was in effect was another matter. Just like the second sight — it was a double-edged sword. What one saw was never clear until after the fact. One had to be very careful not to interfere to the point his interference caused the very result he wanted to prevent.
As a part of this quatrain, if the One did not find the pathway to safety, all would be lost. He knew that much and he gave her what little he could to help, sending a carefully worded message to her through her nest father. He hoped it would be enough. Now all he could do was wait. That was why he was alone in the garden arbor that was the center of the Order’s complex on the home nest for the Borjon and hence he was deep in meditation when he felt the change in the energies of the galaxy, something he could sense with his second sight.
She’s done it! That change meant she had understood his message and had seen the way out for their ship. Across the galaxy in the galactic arm populated by the humans, a new hyper-storm of tremendous magnitude was even now expanding out from its point of origin, all precipitated by their ship.
Not only that, but their ship was currently traveling in a crudely generated version of “fast” hyperspace, a hugely important discovery. The Master did not envy them their ride.
You should be careful what you ask for! Galen Sabatino, System Specialist and Navigator for the Imperial ship Katarina of the Galactic Empire, had just come to that realization. He was currently hanging on for dear life in the most crazed flight in hyperspace he’d ever experienced, if where they were could be called hyperspace. He wasn’t sure what it was.
Galen had once boasted he could navigate their ship anywhere in hyperspace and now he was paying the dues for that boast. He was having to make nearly instantaneous decisions and had no choice but to follow his instincts. So far, he seemed to be making the right decisions, but he knew it would only take one wrong move. Their shields were barely managing to handle things as they were and if they hit something major at this speed, it would be all over with.
Hyperspace was a strange phenomenon. Sometimes it behaved like a flowing river, made up of waves, swirls, and eddies. The navigator had to watch for the hyperspace walls on the sides of that flow and areas within the flow that were high energy clumps, the “rocks” if one extended the river analogy. Quick decisions were required if the navigator didn’t have a map showing him the path to travel. A good navigator had to follow his intuition at times, which was why AI’s didn’t do very well outside the heavily mapped main space lanes — they had no intuition. Usually, though, it wasn’t this intense. Okay, it has never been this intense before!
The hyperspace level they were in had never been seen by an Imperial ship before, that much he knew. Of course, he didn’t even know what level of hyperspace they were traveling in. Something a lot higher than zeta, which he’d seen several times before. That had been challenging enough. At that time, that level was above where any human ship other than theirs had traveled before. Now they far exceeded that. It didn’t matter — all he could do was hang on. Still, it was better than the alternative.
Moments before, they had been facing certain death with a huge incoming barrage of missiles that had been launched by the ships of the rebels they were fighting. It had all been a delaying action to allow the lighter units of their two combined Imperial squadrons to escape certain destruction at the hands of the rebels. Katarina had been the only ship in the fleet fast enough to get there in time and they had been attempting to hold the line long enough for the squadron’s heavy ships, the cruisers and super-dreadnoughts, to reach them. Unfortunately, they’d run out of time.
They’d destroyed many, many times their weight in enemy ships, using every trick their devious minds had been able to come up with, but it still hadn’t been enough. They had even used a crude beam consisting of a flood of zeta level hyperspace radiation. It had only worked because the ship they’d been aiming at had simply been too big to miss, but it had done the job.
Galen breathed a sigh of relief as the hyper flows smoothed out for a moment. That meant he finally was able to cast a quick glance over at the commander of their little ship, Lieutenant Jarra Carsean. Jarra was actually the Crown Princess Jarraosa Christinee Von Hasson, but she’d never rested on her laurels. He had never known a leader like her before, and he knew their ship’s small crew would follow her anywhere. They already had done so; hence their current situation. Jarra seemed completely calm, so Galen tried to relax just a little himself.
Still having to react to the hyper flows, Galen was at least able to wonder at their current situation. He might not know what level of hyperspace they were traveling in, but at least they were alive. It had all been because of Jarra that they were here instead of having been blown apart to begin with.
When those missiles came bearing down on them, somehow she’d known to tell them to fire their beam into that hole they�
��d torn into zeta level hyperspace. That was the spot where their desperately improvised weapon of zeta radiation had been set up. Early on in their experiments with their ship’s beam weapon, they’d determined the energy of the beam was almost compatible with the raw energy of hyperspace. In fact, they used that compatibility to power the beam well beyond their abilities using the current reactor systems of the Empire, even exceeding what their alien enemies, the Aerstone, had achieved.
Galen couldn’t know what had happened since they were still in the middle of it, but when they fired their beam into that break in the hyper-wall, it did two things. First, it finished opening a connection to the higher levels of hyperspace, up to the theta level and beyond. That connection tapped into a huge hyper-storm that had been left there a millennium ago, a storm produced accidentally by another group of aliens known as the Octarians. The leftovers from that storm had formed the Badlands, an area of space in the Galactic Empire that was up unto the moment had been filled with nearly unnavigable space, rogue moons and planets, and unimaginable energy storms. Thanks to the new hyper-storm, the Badlands were changed once again.
Secondly, it opened a portal into that theta level hyperspace, pulling their ship inside. Her shields flared brightly, but already raised to the max, Katarina’s shields were the most advanced in the Empire, and they held. Instead, they were pulled along by the theta level stream, their ship blasted by energy levels even higher than the theta level.
Compared to certain death, it was a vast improvement, but as the other team members watched wide-eyed, Galen struggled to keep their tiny ship within the near center of that flow, avoiding the walls on either side that shot up to energy levels never imagined, much less seen before by humans. Just one touch and their ship would have been torn apart into its component atoms and scattered across those light years of hyperspace.
All of that had led them to their current situation, barely hanging on and no idea where they were going. Glancing ahead, Galen suddenly felt a tiny gleam of hope sprout within himself. Was that an opening, a possible exit?
Jarra could hardly believe they were alive. Determined to protect a number of their Imperial Squadron’s escort ships, one of which held her new friend Lieutenant Amy Swanson, Jarra had rushed her ship into position to block the Rebel ships pursuing them. Vastly outnumbered, Katarina nevertheless engaged the enemy ships, including one ship so big they called it a monitor, and at first they’d held their own, using every possible resource at their disposal.
They’d needed everything they could dredge up from the brilliant minds that made up her team, going so far as to use hyperspace itself as a weapon, tapping into the wall of zeta level hyperspace just outside their ship to use it as a crude beam aimed at the monitor ship. Only on a ship that size would that have worked at all, but it had done its job, destroying that monster.
Using the small arsenal of missiles they carried and their ship’s own beam weapon, the only one of its kind in the Empire, they’d managed to damage and destroy a handful of the remaining cruiser ships in the rebel squadron. But they had been so vastly outnumbered! Eventually, the rebel ships had gained the advantage.
All of the surviving cruisers had fired their missiles in a near simultaneous launch, all of them aimed at the desperate Katarina. Her team had done an astounding job with their defenses up to that point, but they’d had nothing left to deal with the horror descending on them. They’d all known there was no way their shields would be able to hold.
All of those missiles had been aimed at them, many times the number their tiny little ship could have survived even with her advanced shields. They had nowhere to go, even if they could have outrun them. That was when Jarra had remembered the message she’d been given from the aliens they called the Borjon. Her father was the Ambassador to Borjon and he had delivered the message that came from a group within the Borjon that would best be described as monks. That message from her father had been:
“You must be extremely careful in your upcoming mission. It’s much bigger than you realize. The lives of you and your crew and the fate of the galaxy itself are all going to depend on how you respond. The last words given by the Master monk, translated as best we can: ‘When you’re faced with the gravest danger of all, when there appears to be no way out, look deep inside. You must find the one path that leads to safety, impossible as it may appear to be.’ ”
When those missiles had been coming for them, those words had come back to her and in a moment of insight, Jarra had realized what their one path to safety had to be. Even though her team had thought she was crazy, they’d done what she’d asked. What an amazing group of young people they were.
And here they were, alive for the moment. She knew they were still at risk, but she had no doubt that Galen would be able to handle it. He was a very special young man and his navigational abilities were bested by no one. Of course, they had no idea where they were going and the speed they were traveling would only compound it. Actually, she didn’t even know their speed compared to the real universe — only that it had to be extreme, perhaps light years a second.
She sent an implant message to their System Specialist Gabo Rollins, not wanting to disturb Galen even with background noise. “Are our reactors going to hold? We’re redlining on the shields.”
Gabo’s reply was just as silent, “I think so. They’re holding together this time quite well. As long as we don’t hit anything, that is. If we do, it won’t matter.”
Jarra knew Gabo was referring to their quite recent history with the highly experimental reactor systems they had on board. They had pushed their little ship beyond what had been believed were the limits of Imperial systems, and too many times those reactors had scrammed under those demands. But this time, all their work had paid off, for it looked like maybe they just might hold. Unless, as Gabo said, they hit something.
If anyone could manage this, Galen could. Then Galen made a slight change to their path and suddenly she saw a light area ahead. Was it possible? Before she could finish that thought, Galen pushed their tiny ship through. In a blink of an eye, they were out, back in normal space.
Jarra caught her breath. We made it; we’re alive! Then Jarra looked at her sensor board, a puzzled look on her face. For the first time since they had started this incredible journey, she spoke out loud to her team. “Guys, where in the galaxy are we?”
Light years across the galaxy, Lieutenant Commander Jason Cauldwell stared at the monster storm that now swirled across the area of space where they were in the Badlands. He stared in disbelief and horror at the scene in front of them.
He still couldn’t believe it. He had been on board the Imperial super-dreadnought Relentless at the navigation station when they’d arrived at the scene moments ago, mere seconds too late to save the Katarina. He had watched helplessly as those missiles had converged on their tiny ship, unable to do anything to save his love. The words of promise he’d shared with Jarra right before she’d left on their last mission were burned into his mind.
And now she was gone. No one knew exactly what had happened to trigger the storm he saw in front of them. They couldn’t decide if it had been so many missiles exploding simultaneously in the Badlands or it had been something else entirely, but Jarra and her ship were just simply gone. In bitter retribution, the ships that launched those missiles at them were gone too, destroyed in that huge storm that had enveloped them almost instantly. That didn’t make him feel any better, though, since it wouldn’t bring his love back to him.
Only the stronger shields the Imperial super-dreadnoughts and their companion ships now had in operation had saved them from that same storm. Of course, they owed those shields to the Katarina and her crew, a last gift they had been given by them. Oh, my love, we should have had all those years together.
The ship’s com officer announced a communication addressed to him from Dauntless, the ship with the Crown Prince John Dansi Von Hasson on board. Jason looked up to see the face of his Crown Prince
. That face was showing a level of grief that Jason suspected mirrored his own. Prince John had been very close to his cousin, more like brother and sister than cousin.
“We’re still scanning inside that storm, but we haven’t found anything yet. I know we’re not going to find them, but I can’t give up just yet. It won’t hurt to give it a little longer; the engineers are still working on all the systems we pushed so hard to try to get here in time. If only we’d been a single minute sooner—”
“You know we did all that we could, Your Highness. But I appreciate you staying a little longer. I can’t let myself give up just yet either.” He shook his head. “It just doesn’t feel right. I swear, I thought the universe would feel different without her. It should. It should feel completely empty.”
“It feels pretty empty over here,” John replied. “I’ll let you know if we find anything…”
He closed the connection. Jason felt like his heart was closed down too.
“Where are we?” Jarra repeated for at least the third time. Over the years as a Crown Princess, she had traveled over most of the Galactic Empire. Nothing about where they were now was the least bit familiar to her. Even the fact that the system nearest them appeared to have a habitable planet in it should have meant something, but apparently that planet had never been discovered by the Empire. Katarina’s crew appeared to be the first to have laid eyes on it. That was all very interesting, but no help with their current predicament since it wasn’t on any Imperial chart.