“C’mon, I saw you messing with Stiles’ crate.”
“Not me,” Peter countered.
Henrietta studied the two remaining boys. “No, I guess it wouldn’t be you after all.”
Ali smiled as he watched Stiles twitch. “Jimmy programmed in some loud band music.”
Henrietta smiled. “Oh; serves him right!”
“Arietta,” Peter scolded.
“Mr. Hamadi,” the Overseer called, “let’s get you in before you get into trouble.”
* * *
Ali loved building things, as shown by his cluttered room which was always filled with homemade electronic gadgets. He took his studies seriously, just like his father. By the age of ten, Ali held three patents for mechanical interfaces with artificial intelligence modules. Mo was very proud of his son, and it was apparent Ali would follow in his father’s impressive footsteps. If it were up to Ali, he would not sleep at all because it was such a waste of precious time. Each second asleep was a moment lost where some important discovery was just waiting to be found. He often woke up in the middle of the night, furiously scribbling down notes he had dreamed to apply to some experiment the following day, and no matter where Ali went, his faithful, worn electronic Personal Assistant Dataport accompanied him. Everyone nowadays had a PAD remotely slaved to a personalized cortical implant, and more than anyone else, Ali would be lost without his.
Meals were another matter. Ali would take time for those because he loved eating so. His mother was a fine cook, and she always seemed to know it was his one anchor to the real world. She took pride in creating one culinary delight after another, barely teasing the young, growing boy away from his world of electronics.
His best friend was Peter Campbell. Peter and he had met two times before coming to the VCB at various military bases, first at Jackson’s Landing and then at Mars. Once the two boys met they bonded immediately, but only for a short time once Ali was told he needed to leave yet again due to his father’s next appointed “sleep session.” They seemed to share the same thoughts, and it often took only a single look to convey an entire conversation.
* * *
“Well, just you and me left,” Henrietta observed as she watched Ali fade out into his world of studies. Most likely, it involved advanced electronics and organomechanics. “When are you going to get used to this, Peter?”
“Never,” he replied. He thought of planet Stagecoach, where the Northern Cheyenne were making their new home. Proud to a fault, his ancestral native heritage produced a culture of independence and traditional ways. Captain Stephen Campbell—Peter’s father—cherished their ways, and contrary to the deep-teach schooling techniques adopted by the rest of humanity, Stephen firmly believed in passing on knowledge by the Northern Cheyenne oral tradition, as he had learned from his father-in-law. And like Peter’s grandfather, Stephen would sit with Peter for hours on end, carefully instructing him in a varied course of studies ranging from biology and land management through calculus and starship navigation. It had been that way with Peter’s mother and her grandparents too, as he was told.
“Stuff my dad taught me is all I need to know.”
“Huh,” Henrietta replied. “I doubt that. You sure can be stubborn sometimes.”
“Mr. Campbell; Ms. Moreira, I’m ready for both of you now. Come along.” The Overseer led them to the two remaining crèches, sitting side-by-side, and split his time strapping both of them in. He was just finishing with Henrietta, helping her into her crèche—form-fitted to her interesting curves—as Peter began to feel the first effects of his crèche take hold. As he faded away, he looked on admiringly as he watched her recline comfortably within her personalized cocoon.
* * *
Henrietta vividly recalled the tepid blue-green rainforests and shimmering ivory beaches of her old home, and whether consciously or not, she often looked as though she had just stepped off the sun-drenched coastline. Home had been such a contrast to the sterile, dry, rock-lined construction base she now found herself confined to. She could have been bitter about the move, but she made the best of her experiences, and as her father often reminded her, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” Unfortunately, he had first-hand knowledge with the saying; shortly after Henrietta was born he suffered a crippling rock-climbing accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down.
Henrietta’s main passions in life were torn between medicine and psychiatry. Whatever she decided to do when she grew up would unquestionably involve helping people in distress. Whether it would be focused on the body or the mind was yet to be determined. She was in no hurry to decide, though; she was having way too much fun learning and exploring all the possible fields.
Love was heaped on Henrietta, and she, in turn, dearly loved her parents. After all they had been through—after all the obstacles thrown their way—both her mom and dad had kept smiles on their faces for the fourteen years Henrietta had known them. She had trouble recalling a time when either parent had lost their temper, or bemoaned their fate. Yes, she loved her mom and dad with her whole, expressive heart, but would likely never quite forgive them for the horrible first name they had tagged her with.
Henrietta spent her first module studying the development of telepathic abilities in humans. Although few humans truly gained the ability, great strides were being made in the field as a result of interaction with the highly-telepathic, but mute, Hive aliens of Tau Ceti. Many people, however, had recently reported isolated instances of strengthened telepathic connections, oftentimes subconsciously, and without actually trying. Those who learned the ability were highly prized as intermediaries and ambassadors to their green, gelatinous Hive allies. Some researchers even suggested that psi ability was enhanced in those people who shared similar experiences or held strong emotional ties with each other.
Henrietta put the deep-tape on hold for a moment and concentrated very hard on a single point in her mind. The center of her head throbbed faintly at the unusual experience.
* * *
Peter arrived at the Vega base three years ago, at about the same time as Stiles. He flew in on a military courier with his father at the controls. Once they arrived, his father was placed in charge of base protection and military administration, second in command only to Stiles’ father.
His mother, Erin, was also in the Colonial Academy, and held important posts throughout the 2-14 Corridor, so named by the string of ten populated planets along the azimuth from Earth’s perspective from the second hour to the fourteenth in the imaginary 24-hour zenith surrounding Earth’s equator. Peter had not seen his mother since his days on Jackson’s Landing, and pined for the day when she would finally arrive at Vega. He would need to wait six months more for that to happen.
Peter had been on the move with his parents his whole life, and much of that time had been without his mother. It was forty–eight years ago when he was born at the distant Stagecoach frontier planet. There, he had spent his first six and a half years of life, blissfully enjoying life as a real family unit. He still vividly remembered his time with his extended Northern Cheyenne family, and could still smell the tanned leathers and sweet dust of his pleasant communal home.
His mind drifted, realizing he was only eight when his mother last saw him. He wondered if she would even recognize her own son when she returned. Six months …. He found himself counting the days in spite of his studies. Peter hated deep-teach, but quickly snapped his attention back to where it belonged, but not without considerable effort.
He continued his coursework like all the other children in human space—entwined in an electronic maze of pre-packaged instruction, working out the latest developments of humanity’s colonization of the ten worlds.
Habitable planets were found along a general line within the Corridor and quickly became the focus of human expansion. Although a handful of other stars surrounding the Corridor were probed by manned and unmanned exploratory spacecraft, other habitable planets had yet to be found outside this
line of expansion. As a result, human-Hive space occupied a narrow, sinuous crack within the local galactic arm, with established trade routes running from one colonial world to its neighbor like stops along a railroad. For millennia, humans viewed the stars surrounding them from a great distance, but in actuality little was known about other planets within the black space surrounding the 2-14.
Peter lost his concentration yet again and wondered why he was thinking so much of his mother. That was so easy to do in deep-teach. He hated it so. He also cringed at the thought of that obnoxious Overseer stepping in and making him re-up his session.
Essen would sure love that, he realized.
With a start, he realized it was not his mom, but rather Henrietta, occupying his thoughts. He shook the cobwebs of deep-teach from his head and slowly pried open his eyes. Glancing toward her crèche, Peter caught the young girl staring at him. Her eyes widened at the contact, and he watched her hide her face back into the folds of her small cocoon. The whole experience was like a fleeting thought, and as quickly as the connection had been made it was gone.
He spent the next few seconds wondering what that was all about.
Confused, and with a faint buzz still radiating in the center of his head, Peter readjusted his headset and went back to his lessons.
* * *
Fifty–five years ago the Wasatti were discovered. It was a momentous day. It was a day filled with hope. The explorer Tiberius Kay happened upon a strange ship in interstellar space as she traveled along the inauspicious thirteenth-hour spoke away from Beta Comae Berenices. It was a treasured first contact. It was the first in 260 years, and the only one since contact with the Hive.
The Hive emissary on the Tiberius Kay collapsed into a quivering ball of mint-colored jelly when the unknown ship was first approached. At first the human captain could not understand why her telepathic ally had acted that way, but it did not take long for them to realize the Hive legend of monsters in the dead of night were based on fact, and not merely from a Hive-sprout’s formless tale.
The ’Kay was reduced to a ball of slag twenty–three seconds after it had sent a copy of its logs back to human space as its final warning to the mother world. The ship was never heard from again, and it was from that incident that humans and their Hive partners discovered that space would become a vast battlefield.
The distances between stars were so great that it took a long time to travel between them. After the first couple hundred years of flying, humans were able to design spaceships that could approach—but not quite break—light speeds. Those primitive ships were efficient, but they took excruciatingly long times to travel relatively short distances, even at ninety–nine percent of light. And to go anywhere beyond the one or two nearest stars, humans had to travel faster than light, which required tricking nature in very peculiar ways, which involved K-T-space.
Even with Faster-Than-Light drives, which cheated normal space, time in travel was not insignificant. As Dr. Turner explained two hundred years ago, people inside a ship at FTL were themselves not immune to aging as their Krenholdtz-Turner engines fought to curve the space around them. The current generation of K-T engines could fold one light-year of space fabric at a time, and was able to compress the frequency of the fold down to 1.8 days. So, for each light-year traveled, a person in the ship aged 1.8 days, although due to the unusual effects of K-T-space they did not even notice that passage of time as they sped through hyperspace in an unusual form of semi-stasis. For those left behind in the real world of normal space, the time interval from their perspective was much, much greater. In a hyperspace star voyage of fifty light-years, the people onboard would age only three months of K-T-adjusted time—where in actuality they did not even notice the passage of time—whereas their friends back in normal space would age fifteen years. And due to the additive effects of cheating time, a series of trips feeling like two years wandering in and out of FTL would be more than 260 years back home.
So, for the intervening years between first contact and the present, the Wasatti were only encountered a second time—ten years after first contact, which for the crew on the speeding ships felt only like two months. The result of that second encounter was much the same. Two Wasatti Empire ships were lost for three human and one Cetian destroyed. The other Cetian ship was barely able to escape. And the news it brought back was not good. So the first encounter with the Empire was not an act of misunderstanding, as some humans had hoped. It was a harbinger of things to come. It was a signal to naïve humanity and trustful Hive that not all species living in space were friendly. It served as a call to arms, showing that space was no longer meant for the casual civilian traveler or unarmed transport ship. It was the start of a new war footing and a new industry designing new classes of warships, and of Marines training for null-gravity combat.
The new war forced the humans and Hive to fall back into a protective shell. Now, instead of successful, highly independent colonial worlds vying for economic and cultural dominance, the populations cried out for unified protection. Resources could no longer be expended on exploration and expansion. Common defense became the universal priority. That realization brought humanity quickly back to Vega.
Inhospitable, unforgiving Vega territory turned out to be valuable after all. It served as the perfect location for a secret research and development base that no species would ever suspect of being present. The Vega system became humanity’s hole-in-the-wall enclave, hidden within a debris-filled landscape the most desperate traveler would bypass without a moment’s notice. It was a place where the best human and Hive scientists could gather and plan for the protection of their species without fear of being discovered.
The small asteroid enclosing the Vega Construction Base was an odd-shaped chunk of iron-rich rock as hollow as it was solid, looking more like a misshapen lump of Swiss cheese than humanity’s best hope of developing a force strong enough to fight their new-found foe. Three thousand humans and a Hive colony of two hundred lived and worked there, secure in the fact they were safer there than anywhere else in the Corridor.
Many successful projects were developed at the base, and most of the research gave the alliance a slight edge over the technology the Wasatti had. That edge so far was barely enough to keep the emerging war at a stalemate despite the fierce tenacity exhibited by the Wasatti warrior. The base became a treasure trove of military innovation, and in all the experiments and projects completed thus far, they all culminated in the current one. It was humanity’s best hope of ending the war: a starship so advanced it could, by itself, replace a three-fleet armada. As great as the location of the colony worlds themselves, it was the human-Hive’s closest-guarded secret.
The base’s best defense was secrecy, like a chameleon hiding in plain sight. Strategic planners figured the only way the Wasatti could ever discover the base would be if they accidentally detected the patrolling ships in space around it. As a result, only three small frigates coasted within the debris field—each in imitation of a sterile asteroid—passively monitoring system space for any unwanted guests. It was a duty no one asked for but was the Academy’s most important posting.
The strategy worked to perfection for over forty years.
CHAPTER 2
Sigma Bootis Border Patrol – Argonaut Fleet – May 16, 2353 (Twelve Years Ago)
Twelve powerful ships patrolled the outer fringe of Human Space. The Sigma Bootis star system, at 14.5 hours azimuth and plus 30 degrees from Earth’s ecliptic, was fifty light-years from humanity’s birthplace in a universe where light traveled 186,282 miles each second. Considering there were over 1.5 billion seconds in fifty years, it struck her that it was a long way away from home indeed. She shivered at the thought.
Erin bit her lower lip. Everything had been fine a few minutes ago, but all that had changed in an instant … and now here she was. It was all happening so fast, and she wished she was anywhere else but here. Despite her concentration, thoughts of Stephen slipped into her mind. r />
And who in their right mind would wish him here in the middle of all this?
She pushed thoughts of her husband aside, focusing instead on what was happening around her and not liking what she saw. The action began just a moment ago with the sudden appearance of an advanced Wasatti destroyer line boring into her fleet like an unstoppable tsunami. This won’t be pretty, she convinced herself.
And what in the world ever made me choose this line of work, anyway? Erin reflected for the millionth time.
Commodore Erin Campbell was born eighty–five years ago in the anchor of normal space, but was physically only 35 (+50 K-T-adjusted). She was dark, trim, and experienced beyond her years. Her long, black hair was neatly pulled back in a tight wrap. On anyone else it would have been a severe look, but her attractive smile lines betrayed the jovial personality she always presented. She was a natural beauty, made more so by the faint, exotic Northern Cheyenne Native American lineage she inherited from her ancient forefathers. It was a proud heritage that persisted against great odds, now securely preserved on the frontier planet of Stagecoach. Erin was a demanding commander, but a fair one. She seemed to know the names of all 1,500 crewmembers on her ship. She at least knew them all by sight.
Her fleet was spread out in three groups of four, drifting through the system for maximum coverage. Her tactical screens revealed her forward group four light-minutes out—nearly 45 million miles. Ironically, the command ship for her group nearest the Wasatti was the Achilles. She desperately prayed it would not turn into her personal weak spot.
Erin glanced at the battle clock, amazed that only a single minute had passed since the Wasatti first appeared. “Get the entire fleet up to battle speeds,” Erin commanded. She knew much of the action would be decided long before her forward group even received the message, but Erin trusted they would have acted on their own initiative by now anyway.