Enemy at the Gates (Spinward Book 2), page 1
Spinward
Volume 2
Enemy at the Gates
by Rupert Segar
Text copyright © Rupert Segar 2014
Cover photograph copyright © Pete Lawrence 2013
To my wife, Jane for her love and support.
To my mother-in-law, Susan, for her editing skills.
Contents
Cast of Characters
Prologue: Origins
Chapter 1: The Door to Death
Chapter 2: Gateway Guardians
Chapter 3: Death and Degradation
Chapter 4: The End of the Phoney War
Chapter 5: The Creators
Chapter 6: Worm Within
Chapter 7: Paths Diverge
Chapter 8: Alien Engagement
Chapter 9: The Empire Prepares
Chapter 10: Separation
Chapter 11: The Missing Sergeant
Chapter 12: Breaking with Tradition
Chapter 13: Hunting Aliens
Chapter 14: Arcadia
Chapter 15: Alien Xenophobia
Chapter 16: A Tangled Web.
Chapter 17: The Great Library
Chapter 18: Devastation Revisited
Chapter 19: The Stolen Key
Chapter 20: The Ghost in the Library
Chapter 21: The Chimera Cruise.
Chapter 22: In the Woods
Chapter 23: The Sergeant Returns
Chapter 24: Tour of Duty.
Chapter 25: The Tide Turns.
Chapter 26: Meeting the Aliens
Chapter 26: Spreading the Web
Chapter 27: Ambush
Chapter 28: Meeting the Real Aliens
Chapter 29: On the Run
Chapter 30: The Imperial Fleet at Chimera
Chapter 31: Alien Doorway
Chapter 32: In the Dungeon
Chapter 33: Hunting on Sybil Prime
Chapter 34: Alien Destiny
Chapter 35: Wounded Prey
Chapter 36: The End of All
Chapter 37: Traitors Together
Chapter 38: Redemption
Chapter 39: Escape from Dreadnought
40: Conjunction
Chapter 41: The Brood King
Chapter 42: The Land War
Chapter 43: The Long Good Sleep
Chapter 44: The Space War
Chapter 45: Arrival at Chimera Six
Chapter 46: Under Siege
Chapter 47: Paradise Falls
Cast of Characters
The Ship and crew
The Ship – an alien entity created by the Creators
Mr Angry – one of the seven pods that constitute the Ship
Arthur King – the Ship’s moral compass and former Imperial pilot
Yelena Kolowski – former Imperial Chief Engineer
Becky Bhuna – former recorder and reporter from Columbus, gateway world to the Alliance
Lea Whey – former librarian from the Quintox Library on Willow
Creators on Last Haven - also called Devastation
Zeeann – Oracle, religious leader of the Creators on Last Haven
Asclepius – Zeeann’s father and scientist
The Kargol Empire
The Kargol Emperor aka the Kings of Kings, King of Ten Thousand Worlds, etc.
Colonel Garth, the Emperor’s Protector
Gorky Parks, Colonel Garth’s henchman
Tim Bartz, brother of Tom Bartz, killed in action against the Ship
Sub-Lieutenant Carole Porter, science officer on board Imperial Valliant
Ivan Korinski, captain of the Black Ops platoon on Chimera Three
Nigel Evans, sergeant to Captain Korinski
Guardians
Suxie Wong, veteran ex-explorer
Thistle and Nigeal, Suxie’s adopted niece and nephew, joint captains of Explorer Spirit
Dylan Moran, AKA ‘Dylan the Devoted,’ cosmologist and one of the original voyageurs
Anton Blanc, master voyageur
‘Sy,’ Sying Chang, captain of the guardian ship Valliant
Peter Berlinski, lieutenant on Valliant
Bazza Foster, defence commander and former chief explorer
Prologue: Origins
When a tiny alien ship was found drifting in an asteroid field, Colonel Garth, the Emperor’s Protector, thought he had gained a super weapon. The Kargol Empire was the largest domain in the galaxy and aggressively expansionist. The alien ship was prized for its surprising ability to emerge from hyper flight next door to a planet. No Human spaceship could do that. The accepted scientific knowledge said switching from the Upper Realm, where faster-than-light travel was possible, to normal space could only happen if the gravity gradient was flat: millions of kilometres away from any planetary masses. For Colonel Garth, the little vessel presented the opportunity of mounting a deadly, sneak attack on any of the Empire’s enemies.
Unfortunately, for the Emperor’s Protector, the Ship had a mind of its own. In fact it had seven. The alien vessel was run by a collective mentality made up of seven egg shaped pods. The entity which called itself the ‘Ship’ was convinced it was on a mission to save the galaxy, if only it could remember how and why.
The vessel had lost its memory when it had been infected with a Human made virus. The Great Plague had crippled artificial intelligence computers right across the galaxy. Without machines that could balance the flux fields needed for hyper flight all interstellar travel ceased. The Millennium of Isolation, which saw civilisations collapse and billions die, only ended when a cure for the Plague was found. The Second Great Expansion saw Humanity re-united by the Cult of Explorers. A vast fleet of missionary ships spread the cure for the Plague and news about the wider galaxy from world to world.
The alien Ship chose test pilot, Art King, to be its moral compass. The decision was made in its sensorium, an interactive virtual world where machine and Human commune together. On the Ship’s successful return, Colonel Garth ordered everyone to be killed to keep the project completely secret. Art King and Chief Engineer Yelena Kolowski were the only survivors. When they escaped on board the Ship, they were pursued by the ruthless forces of the Empire.
On the run, looking for its alien makers, the Ship found two more crew mates. The glamorous Becky Bhuna was a reporter on the Alliance world of Columbus. She had been framed as a spy by a Kargol agent who tried to impound the Ship. The historian Lea Whey was a leading academic on the library world of Willow. He was exiled by the autocratic ruling committee of chief librarians for being too popular. Lea’s work on ‘Forbidden Worlds’ pointed towards a distant region of the galaxy as the likely location of the Ship’s makers. They all set off for the Chimera sector unaware that the Emperor’s Royal Fleet was heading there too. On the way, Art was kidnapped by Kargol agents and delivered to the Emperor’s flag ship.
Landing on Chimera Six, the Ship, Yelena, Lea and Becky discovered a network of alien gateways. The grey portals, some in orbit above planets, others on the surface, allowed almost instantaneous travel between worlds. The network of gateways, which criss-crossed the galaxy, had been explored for nearly a thousand years by generations of voyageurs, the descendants of French Canadians shipwrecked by the Great Plague.
The arrival of the Imperial Fleet saw the Battle of Chimera One. Using a gateway controller given to an explorer and the voyageurs’ map, the tiny alien Ship defeated the entire armada. Yelena, aided by the pod, Mr Angry, rescued Art from the clutches of Colonel Garth on board the flag ship. Then a cluster of engrams encoded in Art’s comms link saved them all by taking over the Royal Fleet’s computers and shutting down a self-destruct order from the Emperor.
As this second volume of Spinward begins, explorers and voyageurs have joined together to form the guardians of the gateways; the Ship continues to try to find the mysterious aliens who created it; the Kargol Emperor dreams of revenge; and, all the time, a galaxy wide catastrophe is approaching fast.
Chapter 1: The Door to Death
The heat was stifling on Danube 4, a desert world almost devoid of life. High on an equatorial plateau, the temperature was closer to the boiling point of water than the melting point of ice. In the windless silence, an alien portal hung motionless, one metre above the ground
A young couple, bound together wrist to wrist by a golden chord, leapt out of the floating grey oval and dropped to the ground. They both stumbled and fell forward, their hands outstretched in front of them. The man toppled sideways and lay on the ground struggling, one arm twisted oddly over his head. The young woman, her fair hair glittering in the fierce sun, found her hands and feet were stuck. Sticky tendrils were rising and wrapping themselves around her wrist and forearms. The fronds’ muscular contractions pulled at the woman’s arms. The more she pulled, the harder they pulled back. She was on her knees and elbows and the tendrils were reaching up toward her face.
“Zach, can you reach your knife,” she said arching her head backwards as tendrils began clinging to her neck.
“Non, can ‘ardly move at all,” came a slightly muffled reply. “Merde, the more I move, the more I’m stuck.”
Tendrils weaved their way through the woman’s hair and began pulling her head down to the ground. She managed to turn her face slightly sideways and saw a pair of military boots step towards her. Fronds waved around the boots, touching them then shrinking away.
“Help us,” said the woman
“The secret ‘bout the Jupiter fly trap,” said
Gorky Parks, a dog faced man, walked around the trapped couple. His footsteps left patches of flattened tendrils oozing a viscous liquid.
“The controller won’t work for you,” spat the dark haired man through the fronds wrapping themselves around his face.
“I know,” said Parks, kneeling down beside Zach and prising the controller from his hand. The clinging fronds shied away from the man’s touch. “That’s why I caught you alive.”
Parks pulled a laser scalpel from his breast pocket. “Now, this is gonna hurt a bit,” he said, as he amputated Zack’s right thumb.
Chapter 2: Gateway Guardians
Guardian Valiant, with a skeleton crew of three on board, hung in space above an altogether unremarkable, uninhabited world on the border between the Alliance and the Empire. Valiant was near the end of a three month tour of duty standing sentry alongside the altogether remarkable portal, orbiting about 35-thousand kilometres above the planet’s equator.
A vast network of the gateways spanned the galaxy. The doorways allowed almost instantaneous travel between solar systems. Most of the gateways were on the surface of planets, usually desert worlds. About one planet in three had a portal in geosynchronous orbit above the planet. The entire network had been built by an elusive race called the Creators. It was believed they had made the portals to travel into the future.
Guardian Valiant, an old explorer ship which had been converted and upgraded, was prepared for trouble. In the nose cone, forward of the control room, sat one of the most complex devices ever built in Human history. Packed into the first six meters of the vessel’s pointed prow was a combination of sensors, particle projectors, field generators and a compact, egg shaped AI computer. The automaton, called the Sentinel, was capable of flying the vessel by itself. In extreme circumstances, the machine intelligence could take over, make its own decisions and act upon them. For the Sentinel, such a set of extreme circumstances was fast approaching.
In the control room, Captain Sying Chang was finishing a long and tedious nightshift. Sy was expecting to be relieved by another vessel in the next week or so. Then she and her crew could get back to the job of contacting isolated worlds. The job of spreading the Good News was much as it had been for centuries, only now, by using the doorways; they could reach planets in the most distant parts of the galaxy. An explorer’s work was never done.
Sy had only been a fully qualified devotee of the Cult of Explorers for eight months when she defected. She had been contacted by the crew of one of the new guardian ships. Her conversion to the new cause took nearly a week.
The guardian vessel led the explorer ship through a series of portals, ending their journey at the far flung planet of Dakota. She and the rest of her crew were taken to a small settlement, high in the mountains to the north of Sioux City. Sy remembered the midday sun glinting off the spires and domes of the distant city. The sight had helped calm her mind in those troubling days. The arguments and discussions were civilised. No question would go unanswered. Sy was amazed to hear of the Empire’s defeat at the Battle of Chimera One. She had heard rumours, of course. Despite news blackouts, no secrets could ever be kept from the Cult of the Explorers. However, the truth seemed devastating: one tiny ship had left the Imperial Fleet in disarray. She also conceded that her home world, Willow, was in effect ruled by a puppet regime, controlled by the Empire. Nevertheless, her belief in the aims of the Cult of Explorers was strong.
Sy listened to an ancient old lady called Suxie but remained unconvinced. She met with several voyageurs. The weather beaten men with their incredible inner strength and charismatic charm were attractive but ultimately unpersuasive.
Finally, Sy met the one they called the “Mr Angry,” the red floating egg shaped machine which was far from angry. She could barely believe the pod was part of an entity which had defeated the Imperial Fleet. Despite its name, Mr Angry was calm and softly spoken. The pod was asking for Sy’s aid. Humanity, scattered around the galaxy in all its different forms, needed saving. The mysterious aliens had left a marvellous network of portal to bring Humanity together, but the gateways needed protecting from armed aggressors like the Empire. The red pod and its brothers had also been gifted to Humanity by the aliens. However, through a cruel trick of fate, the computer plague had left machine not knowing exactly what it should do. The red pod was open and honest about its own vulnerability and asked for her help.
Sy cried as she looked out over the foothills and to the city beyond. In her heart she would always be an explorer. According the new code, she would still spend periods seeking stranded societies, bringing them the Good News or an improved version of it; but, the rest of the time, she would be a guardian.
Suxie Wong brought her some green tea in a small porcelain bowl. The ancient explorer smiled gently and sat beside. The pair stayed in silent contemplation for some time. The tea had gone cold when Sy reached out for Suxie’s hand and said “Yes, I will become a guardian.” Suxie beamed back at her.
A loud buzzer sounded in the control room bringing Sy out of her reverie.
“Sy, we may have a problem,” said the Sentinel over the intercom.
Sy had become comfortable in the company of the artificial intelligence. She imagined the Sentinel as a sort of soldier or protector that lived in the forward compartment next door.
“Satellite Two has stopped transmitting. Reviewing the data stream up to the break, I detected a ship approaching.”
“Merchant or war?” said Sy looking herself at the pinprick on the display in front of her.
“I cannot say directly. Looking at sample bands on the EM spectrum and the flux monitors, I would guess the ship is in stealth mode.”
“I thought you could see through that stuff.”
“It may be a new type of stealth shield.”
“Then it’s a warship,” said Sy hitting the ship wide alarm. “Punch up our defences and …”
The ship veered violently and Sy was crushed against the arm of her chair before the inertial dampener field could compensate. She heard at least two ribs crack. Her arm was badly bruised, if not broken.
“Sentinel, what in Einstein’s name …”
“Sorry, Sy, I had no choice. An Imperial cruiser is emerging.”
“Drain its power!”
“It has a new type of quantum interference generator. I cannot cut through the field. They’ve launched multiple missiles. On collision course.”
Sy looked up at the 3D vidscreen above her consol. She realised with horror that the Sentinel meant they were on a collision course with the warship not the missiles. The vast vessel, still emerging from the hugely dilated portal, loomed even larger on the screen as they accelerated towards it. The missiles bounced harmlessly off the Valliant’s hull.
“Proximity controllers prevent detonation too close to the warship that fired them,” said the Sentinel, sounding smug.
The Valliant was still powering towards the Imperial navy vessel.
“Nooo …” screamed Sy.
In the vid screen, the cruiser appeared to shift sideways but they were still going to hit it. The Valiant scraped along the warship’s side. The force fields protecting each vessel meshed and flared. The screen protecting the Guardian ship proved stronger than that surrounding the much larger Imperial cruiser. The warship’s force field failed. As a result, the small Guardian ship gouged a trench of twisted metal and bent bulkhead spurs a hundred metres in length down the side of the Imperial warship. Valiant shuddered and screeched but the small ship remained intact.
“Deploying controller buoy,” said the Sentinel calmly.
A tiny spinning sphere was ejected from the rear hold of the Valliant. It was surrounded by a flaring field of energy which withstood the ion beams that lashed out from the cruiser.
“Priming the gateway, flux ions, right handed.”
The Imperial cruiser’s bows just cleared the gateway as Valliant entered it. The small Guardian vessel disappeared into the grey portal. The controller buoy became active. First, the tiny spinning sphere emitted a coded pulse of right and left handed flux ions. The dilated portal shrank back to its original size but became a duller grey than before. The gateway had sealed itself. Then, the buoy exploded creating a flux blast that crippled the marooned Imperial cruiser.
