Talus
Page 1
TALUS
A Silver Ships Novel
S. H. JUCHA
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by S. H. Jucha
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
Published by Hannon Books, Inc.
www.scottjucha.com
ISBN: 978-0-9600459-8-3 (e-book)
ISBN: 978-0-9600459-9-0 (softcover)
First Edition: July 2020
Cover Design: Damon Za
Acknowledgments
Talus is the twenty-first novel in the interwoven series of The Silver Ships and Pyreans, which tell the stories of Earth colonists and the spread of humankind throughout a galaxy filled with alien races.
I wish to extend a special thanks to my independent editor, Joni Wilson, whose efforts enabled the finished product. To my proofreaders, Abiola Streete, David Melvin, Ron Critchfield, Pat Bailey, and Tiffany Crutchfield, I offer my sincere thanks for their support.
Despite the assistance I’ve received from others, all errors are mine.
Glossary
A glossary is located at the end of the book.
CONTENTS
1: Close the Cage
2: Curiosity
3: Probe Signal
4: Captive
5: Another Signal
6: We Invite You
7: Vermin
8: A Nest Saved
9: Reduced Duty
10: Under Sail
11: Crowded Space
12: Arbiters
13: Negotiate
14: Diverse Sisters
15: Ultimatum
16: Transport Duty
17: Apologies, Admiral
18: Rescue
19: Figaro
20: Gauntlet
21: Envoys
22: Negotiations
23: The Lair
24: Kirmler’s Ilk
25: The Objectives
26: Ude’s Vision
27: Admirals’ Review
28: Final Discussion
29: Choose Sides
30: Nefarious
31: Quandary
32: Ellie’s Game
33: Conundrum
34: Tech Trade
35: Don’t Fire
36: Intrigues Unfold
37: Aftermath
38: Sargut’s Visit
Glossary
My Books
The Author
1: Close the Cage
That was a fabrication. Ellie had run through the list three times. What was embarrassing was that she was acutely aware that Alphons, fleet senior officers, and every SADE in the Celus system knew that. Due to the critical and dangerous nature of the test that was about to be conducted, her implant link with Alphons was being widely shared.
A sophisticated Omnian probe built by the SADEs, the self-aware digital entities, was attached outboard of Ellie’s fighter for the test. It wasn’t expected to survive the massive electromagnetic pulse to be applied to it any more than was Ellie’s fighter, but its transmissions up to the point of failure were expected to provide extremely useful data.
Ellie took a deep breath. The intake made her shudder, and she blew it out harshly.
Ellie signaled the faceplate of her environment suit to close. Then she shut down her implant. Hereafter, everything she did would be manual. It was an unnerving experience for a Méridien, who’d depended on her implant for decades.
When the bay crew deactivated the beams holding the fighter, the chief sent,
As the warship eased away from the aging craft, the chief thought, May the stars protect you, Admiral. His sentiment was echoed throughout the Celus system.
The lone Trident reversed course and headed system inward, leaving the Dagger and the probe floating in the dark, outward of the far asteroid ring. The ship’s controller directed the Trident’s movement, having been preprogrammed by the SADEs.
Per Hector’s orders, there wasn’t a SADE aboard Alphons’s warship. Hector, who was in charge of the fleet stationed at Omnia, knew, under these conditions, it was too risky for a SADE.
In that regard, every precaution had been taken to protect Admiral Thompson. She was a biological like every individual aboard Alphons’s Trident.
When the Trident reached the far belt, which was the SADEs’ predetermined safe distance, it slid behind an enormous iron core asteroid.
Ellie’s implant chronometer counted down the time until the weapon’s firing. She nervously chuckled, recalling her visit to the bay that held the remaining Daggers, the fleet’s first fighters. They’d been built on New Terra for then-Captain Racine. The ships were ugly stubby constructions. They exhibited none of the sophistication and power of Omnian travelers — sleek, deadly, beam-capable fighters.
However, Ellie’s memories of her time in the Daggers were burned deep. She’d learned on the fighter, while incarcerated on Libre as a Confederation Independent. Like the other Libran pilots, she had been fiercely determined to succeed. The opportunity to leave their planetary prison aboard the planet’s new city-ships drove the efforts of every colonist.
For this test, the piloting of the Dagger fell to Ellie for the simple reason that she was the only individual in the system who had trained on the craft. The outdated fighters were chosen for the series of tests, because their construction imitated the control systems found in federacy battleships. Those enormous and deadly warships would eventually be the weapon’s targets.
Of course, any SADE could pilot a Dagger, but an entity who was dependent on electrical signals to exist would be in great danger.
Ellie shoved the throttle control forward, and the Dagger’s engines promptly responded. She smiled at the acceleration pressure that shoved her hard into the pilot’s seat. It was a sweet and yet unsettling experience. Omnian tech had come so far.
Memories flashed through Ellie’s mind. As a young woman on Libre, she’d been alone for years. Now, she had a partner, whom she loved — Senior Captain Étienne de Long. But she couldn’t forget that this rudimentary fighter had started her on the path to the life she cherished.
Ellie reached out and patted the console. Thank you, she thought.
The Dagger accelerated, flying toward its death.
Lying ahead in the deep dark was the Omnians’ newest offensive device capable of delivering a powerful non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse. Essentially, it was an NNEMP weapon.
The SADEs had constructed the NNEMP inside one of Mickey Brandon’s banishers. The fleet had many of the devices, which had been built to remove Artifice’s probes.
The entire concept for the weapon had originated with Ellie. She’d been the senior admiral of Hector’s fleet in the Talus system and tasked with defending the nascent Talusian society from federacy battleship wedges.
Unexpectedly, Hector’s fleet was inundated by
many aggressors. In concert with the Talusian wedge, Ellie had successfully led the fights to defeat the attacking races. Those experiences led her to suggest a weapon that might incapacitate the lead battleship of an enemy wedge and prevent an inordinate loss of life.
A nuclear-driven explosion would have provided the greater electromagnetic pulse, which would disable a battleship’s systems, rendering it a huge piece of space junk. However, Omnians were opposed to developing that sort of weapon, which would have resulted in the deaths of those individuals aboard ship.
An alternative source of an NNEMP could be a chemical explosion, but that power source was miniscule to what was desired. Instead, the SADEs lined the banisher’s interior with banks of power crystals. The energy from the banks would drain in a rush and provide more impetus for the microwave pulse. It was a more efficient use of the energy release. In addition, a focused antenna in the nose of the banisher would direct the pulse at the intended target.
Ellie eyed her surroundings again. To protect her, the pilot’s seat was encased in a cage, which was lined in fine metal mesh. The holes in the mesh would interrupt the pulse’s wave frequency. In addition, the highly conductive cage would transfer energy released from the cockpit panels by grounding to the craft’s metal hull.
Tucked inside Ellie’s suit was a device that would monitor the fighter’s systems, the cage, and the mesh. It would record the effects of the weapon’s pulse on the Dagger.
As Ellie’s chronometer reached the final seconds, she released the fighter’s controls and pulled her arms inside the cage. Then she latched the door, ensured the connections were solid, and crossed her arms. Her safety lay in the hands of the SADEs, who had taken great care to ensure she was completely isolated from anything electrical or conductive.
Suddenly, a bright light bloomed in the dark. It signaled the rush of energy from the power crystals, which had overwhelmed the weapons’ control circuits.
While Ellie waited for the energy wave, she took slow controlled breaths. When it struck, she felt the impact against the hull.
Then the Dagger’s electronic systems failed in a swift cascade. Circuits sparked. Blue and white lines of electrical charge jumped from the console to Ellie’s cage, and she sat absolutely still to keep her body from touching her protective enclosure.
Gray smoke filled the pilot’s enclosure obscuring Ellie’s vision. Then the cockpit and the console went dark.
To be safe, Ellie waited several seconds more. Then she flicked a manual switch to activate a package under her pilot’s seat.
The package, equipped with its own power supply, signaled charges in the fighter’s canopy and Ellie’s cage. In quick succession, the canopy shot off into the dark, and Ellie followed.
The Dagger, which was now no more than space junk, sailed on. A Trident squadron waited outward on the opposite side of the weapon’s site for the fighter to arrive. A warship would tether it and return it to the Sardi-Tallen Orbital Platform, an Omnian ship construction station, for engineering to research.
It was the possible failure of the engine containment systems that was the purpose of Ellie’s separation from the Dagger. The SADEs calculated that the immediate cessation of reaction mass delivery to the engines would prevent a feedback ignition, which might explode the tanks. However, having no experience with a fighter undergoing this type of energy assault, they couldn’t be absolutely sure.
The launch of the cage headed Ellie on a slightly different trajectory than the fighter. Given a sufficient amount of time, it would achieve a safe separation distance.
With the passing of seconds, Ellie breathed a sigh of relief. The Dagger had disappeared into the dark without an explosion. However, her moment of respite was premature.
A yellow orange fireball not far from Ellie signaled the eruption of the fighter’s reaction mass tanks.
Ellie curled into a tight ball to minimize her target area. She knew it would only take a small piece of hurtling metal to penetrate the suit. Even if the suit managed to self-seal, the injuries could be too severe for the nanites in her system to overcome during the time it took to be recovered.
After an agonizing wait, Ellie slowly relaxed and uncurled. She activated her suit lights rather than sit in the dark. “Still alive,” she whispered.
To occupy the time, Ellie activated her implant and reviewed the data recorded by the device in her suit.
The swiftness with which the Dagger’s electrical system failed was shocking. Ellie had expected a casual winking out of the control panels. Instead, it was if the fighter had been directly connected to an overwhelming charge. Especially stunning was the amount of electrical discharge. Panels blew out, circuit boards fried, and smoke inundated the cockpit.
Well, this will be our one and only test with a live subject, Ellie thought.
As the lights of an open bay hove into Ellie’s side view, much of her remaining anxiety disappeared. Belatedly, she engaged her implant’s communication app and received the tail end of the chief’s thought.
<... behind you, Admiral,> the chief had sent.
Knowing the admiral and the chief wouldn’t know if she was injured or hadn’t yet initiated her implant comm, Ellie sent,
Soon after the chief’s warning, Ellie felt the impact of the loader’s arms as it gripped the sides of the cage. Her forward view shifted from the deep dark to the welcoming expanse of a lit bay.
To Ellie, it seemed forever for the loader to make the bay and deposit the cage on the deck.
The chief unlocked the cage, while the bay’s hatches closed, and the space was pressurized. Quickly, he unlatched Ellie’s harness restraints.
When Ellie struggled to stand, her legs shaking uncontrollably, the chief, a robust New Terran, sent,
When Ellie felt her boots touch the deck, she kept a hand on the chief’s substantial shoulder, while she accepted the heartfelt comments of the bay crew.
The time it took the bay crew to remove Ellie’s environment suit enabled her to steady her nerves. As her boots were replaced with deck shoes, she caught sight of one crew member elbowing another. They’d been staring at her cage.
“Something that needs to be said?” Ellie inquired. It generated guilty expressions on the faces of the two crew members, which made her curious.
Examining the cage, Ellie found several chinks in the metal frame. Multiple pieces of the Dagger’s shrapnel had struck it. In the soundlessness of vacuum, she’d never heard the impacts, but she wondered why she didn’t feel their impact. Then she recalled that her pilot’s seat sat on dense rubber supports to isolate it from the cage.
What caught Ellie’s eye were several smaller tears in the metal mesh. Most were in places that wouldn’t have worried her, but one of the holes was in line with her body.
“Chief, my suit,” Ellie requested.
Reluctantly, the chief pulled the air tanks from behind the back of a crew member, whom he’d instructed to hide them.
“It’s a scratch, Admiral,” the chief admitted, pointing to a slight gouge across one of the twin tanks.
“Guess I should have curled even tighter,” Ellie remarked and made her way out of the bay with slightly unsteady steps. She was expected on the bridge for an after-action briefing. Instead, she made her way to her quarters, shut down her comms implant app, and lay down for a nap.
When Ellie woke, she connected to the Trident’s controller. She was surprised to find that the ship was stationary, occupying a position off the Our People, Omnia Ships’ second city-ship. She checked her chronometer and found her nap had transformed
into nearly a full day’s rest.
While stepping into a refresher, Ellie ordered a traveler for transfer to the city-ship. During the short flight, she hurriedly consumed a meal.
Exiting the bay into the city-ship’s bright broad corridor, Ellie was greeted by twin rows of fleet officers, who stood at attention with their backs to the bulkheads.
As only implanted humans and SADEs could perform, the twin rows of individuals delivered perfectly synchronized salutes.
At the head of one row, Étienne’s sharp serious salute was marred by his wink, and it made Ellie laugh. Then her partner broke ranks and swept her into his arms.
Ellie reveled in the warmth that accompanied his thought, but she also detected his fear.
In a conference room, located aft of the city-ship’s expansive bridge, Ellie met with the SADEs, Fleet Admiral Hector and Lydia. Also present were Rear Admirals Alphons Jagielski and Adrianna Plummer, and Commodore Descartes, and the twins, Senior Captains Étienne and Alain de Long. Some of the SADEs who were responsible for the weapon’s design had joined the group.
“I presume you’ve already started on the analysis, while I took my extended nap,” Ellie remarked. She’d intended to make light of her experience, but the faces around the table reflected their concerns over the harrowing event.
Holding up her hands, Ellie added, “Yes, it was a close one, but I’m sitting here, whole, rested, and fed. So, let’s move forward. By the way, there’ll be no more tests with any individual, human or SADE.”
“Agreed,” Hector swiftly replied to Ellie’s final statement.
“One question,” Ellie said. “Why did the pulse affect the Dagger so thoroughly and heavily? Okay, more questions. Why did the fighter explode not long after I was launched from it? Shouldn’t that have been immediately or never?”