Invasion: Journal Three (Shockwave Book 3)

by Hammer Trollkin

  Shockwave: Invasion

  Shockwave, Volume 3

  Hammer Trollkin

  Published by Hammer Trollkin, 2021.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  SHOCKWAVE: INVASION

  First edition. July 30, 2021.

  Copyright © 2021 Hammer Trollkin.

  Written by Hammer Trollkin.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE. Journal Three.

  Chapter One | THE CRAWL OF LIGHT

  Chapter Two | READY OR NOT, HERE WE COME

  Chapter Three | THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

  Chapter Four | OF FRIENDS AND ENEMIES

  Chapter Five | PRIME TIME

  Chapter Six | WHAT’S NEXT

  THANK YOU!

  INTERLUDE. Songs of the King INtelicast.

  JOURNAL AID SECTION

  TERMS AND DEFINITIONS

  SHOCKWAVE TEAM EXTREME FORCE MULTIPLIERS | (TEAM CAPABILITIES)

  About the Author

  To God, from whom all blessings flow. To my grandchildren, who helped reignite the imagination of my youth. To my wife and children, for encouraging and tolerating an author’s frequent muse.

  PROLOGUE. Journal Three.

  Invasion! During their first invasion of Earth, using their bug vassals, the Darkstar Empire of Cygnus Prime tried to subjugate us. They lost. Then the Empire came with their own special forces and tried to destroy us. They lost. I think I can speak for all of humanity. We’ve had enough. Now, it’s our turn. We finally have the means, motive, and opportunity to take this war to them. Let the enemy twist in the winds of interstellar war for a change.

  Soon our cosmic weapons of war will stream over the new portal bridge from Oort Base. It’s the last days for the evil Empire of Cygnus Prime. Here’s what’s coming for them.

  Orion battle carriers loaded with Starfighter drones equipped to launch 10 THOr munitions shells that launch a plasmatic barrage of devastating energy.

  Battlestar weapons platforms have a main gun pulling enough power to run a dozen cities, releasing the energy in a tremendous bolt of raw destruction. In a devastating duality, the ships are also equipped with two brand new Interstellar-war Model Railguns. The large-bore and small-bore IMRs throw a mix of conventional rounds and spooky penetrator projectiles. Spooky munitions utilize a quantum shift displacement field to help push through energetic shielding and hulls.

  Destroyers capable of FTL travel are recon marvels with plenty of offensive capability, carrying conventional and unconventional ordnance. There is the tried-and-true Hypervelocity Active Kinetic Impactors with a high yield nuke for that extra bit of pop when needed. The unconventional surprise is the new SSC3 missile with Growler Warp Field Quake technology, perfectly tuned to tear up the very fabric of space-time, not to mention enemy dreadnaughts or their pesky pentalinks.

  ***

  Important information regarding Timeline Drops. A Timeline Drop looks like this:

  + BEGIN TIMELINE DROP.

  You’ll see Timeline Drops that look like this, occasionally. This is the Journal for SpecOps team Shockwave. It is difficult to make any Journal changes due to encryption protocol. There is one exception. The Keeper of the Journal can “drop” information developed at a future date into the Journal to improve timeline accuracy. In that way, the Journal is a living document. It’s all very simple, unless the Timeline Drop process uses quantum entanglement principles to move information to the past. But Solcom Directive Three prevents me from either confirming or denying the existence of any sort of limited timestream data dumping.

  END TIMELINE DROP. +

  ***

  *COMMUNAL is a level 10 or higher Artificial Intelligence. They also write in the Journal from time to time. No one can stop them. Communal is still a bit of a mystery, with no certain classification. I think you will like them. Or maybe I should refer to them as an it. I don’t know. I like Communal most of the time.

  ***

  There is a Journal Aid Section in the back with definitions and a brief section on Shockwave team capabilities.

  ***

  Chapter One

  THE CRAWL OF LIGHT

  Hi. This is Viz, reluctantly jumping in again as the Keeper of the Record for team Shockwave. How can I not take up my role as scribe when another invasion is in the works? But I’m all smiles as my thoughts etch into the cloudbank.

  Invasion! But this time the bells are tolling for them. We’re going to invade the bug worlds of Kreahaam. Then we’re going to push on to Cygnus Prime. It staggers the imagination.

  What an insane concept. Earth has been invaded twice in the last 10 years, by forces with vastly superior technology. Now we’re planning to invade them? On their own turf? Insane. Unless it’s the only option for survival. Then, it’s pure genius. And we’ve made an incredible technological leap in that short time. But time is not on our side. The military-industrial capacity of one star system, our tiny Solar System, is no match for a vast stellar empire.

  It’s April 2nd. I’ve only got a minute to catch up on three years. We’d better get to it.

  ***

  MAKING WAVES

  After the Oort Base battle, the Empire super-dreadnaught cruised in ahead of the main battle group at twice the speed of light. Our best information had the other ships moving at close to 90% light, so they were a good 6-months behind the pentalink.

  We made a lot of noise when we creamed their super-dreadnaught, the invincible pentalink. A matter/antimatter explosion will do that. It was our pleasure to add the exclamation point to any sitrep the crew sent along before their demise.

  Solcom suspected the battle group would turn about when they learned their unstoppable ship was destroyed. But there was real concern they had brought the goods to set up a teleportation gate in-system. The secondary gate set up by the bugs as they cruised in to invade Earth was bad enough and would have to be dealt with. But we wouldn’t stand a chance if the enemy set up a near-Earth teleportation bridge to Empire occupied space.

  It was a cold dark day in November, not long after the pentalink battles, when Solcom received an ominous signal through the patchy deep space ISR system. A Logan sensor picked up an energy signature with all the markings of a portal gate near Saturn. That news spurred Solcom on a spin-up that morphed into a distress-spike when the source of the signal was nowhere to be found. Sensor drones were sent to scour the sector, in the hope of picking up any odd energy readings. After a long two weeks, the signal returned.

  Shockwave happened to be in the Solcom war auditorium on another matter when the source of the portal signal was confirmed. The relief in the room was palpable as the news was shared that the energy emission was produced by an Empire repeater communication ring. Those are tiny teleportation gates that allow quasi FTL comms. A message crawls at light speed until it hits a repeater ring which then boosts it to the next ring and so on. No warships would be coming through one of those.

  A message sent by the pentalink crew hit the FTL comms ring at Saturn and jumped ahead of the energetic flash from the matter/antimatter explosion that signaled the crew’s demise. Our intel guys went to work and were soon able to pick up on two separate return messages from the Empire battle group. Solcom tasked their best quputers to work on cracking the encryption. In that way, they were able to verify the fleet had turned about in retreat

  That meant the Empire battle group would return to that secret teleportation gate, the one dropped by the bugs on their way to invade Earth. Looking Glass is in orbi
t around a failed star called Sleepy, to take advantage of the gravity well for power. We know from our bug friend Scotty, and follow-up recon work, Looking Glass leads to the Kreahaam system. Kreahaam would serve as our bridgehead for the military expedition to distant Cygnus Prime.

  The official Solcom position states: Kreahaam is an objective, not because they invaded Earth, but because it is the closest direct jump-point to Cygnus Prime. Looking Glass is the best option to move in force to Kreahaam. Even more important, control of the gate is necessary to stop the Empire from using it to attack Earth.

  With that, Looking Glass would be ours to use, or it would be destroyed.

  If it was necessary to destroy Looking Glass, our own quantum gate system could be used to gain general access to Kreahaam, or even Cygnus Prime. Quantum gates can be manufactured in port-able sections like the original Oort Base gate used to bridge Darkside Base. Port-techs could move the sections to a location fairly close to the intended target.

  But sectional gates are expensive, short lived, and prone to error. The first sectional Oort gate fault-errored to the open position. We could have lost the second battle for Earth because of that. It was for good reason a new non-sectional gate was sent by hauler to replace the gate at Oort.

  First things first. To track the retreating fleet and find Looking Glass, port-techs were dispatched to set up passive sensor arrays along the likely course of the Empire battle group. Sensor hits would provide fleet position and port-techs would play leap frog, placing additional passive detectors ahead of the Empire warships. In that way, they hoped to track the fleet all the way to the gate.

  But Primers aren’t dumb. And arrogant as they may be, they have learned to respect our porting capabilities. Perhaps they managed to scan one of our port-techs while dropping a sensor. Maybe they decided to be extra cautious with their sneaky gate. As their fleet moved further from Earth, they became increasingly evasive. What if the fleet vanished into the depths of space, with Looking Glass still close enough to hang over Earth like an executioner’s sword? We needed an ace-in-the-hole.

  Our science guys have continued to develop new tech marvels and improve the innovative technologies that helped us overcome the bug invaders. Case in point for this mission was the InnerEar transponder used against the bugs. It has a nano-shell casing that renders it invisible across the electromagnetic spectrum using quantum cloaking technology derived from Schrodinger’s equation. QuIM technology provides instant communication over any distance. Yeah, all that is my paraphrase of the straight-up from Rock.

  The cloaking tech worked well to hide the transponders from bug scanners. Spoofing Empire scanners is a bit more theoretical. It would be best NOTto give the Empire a reason for a close sensor-sweep once the device was planted.

  The idea of setting a tracking transponder finally gained solid support.

  Shockwave was happy to help with that, but we would need three things. First, the SSC3, the only FTL ship in human possession at the time. Second, Para, with her amazing gift that enables her to work with the Higgs field, gluons, and gravity. And finally, we would need a tracking transponder invisible to Empire sensors, an InnerEar device.

  The SuperShark C3 was labeled a prototype 3rd-gen missile prototype, capable of faster than light travel. The engineers would scale it down at some point to fit the missile label, but the prototype was more of a small spacecraft with an actual holding compartment. It could hold a small payload or a crew of two. But the Space Force was reluctant to authorize use of the ship. It was, after all, the only FTL ship available to the military. We would have to demonstrate our need, and to that end, our report was clear and succinct.

  A teleport-and-catch program could easily be developed if a ship’s velocity was constant. Unfortunately, with Empire ships, there are constant minor random variations. With that, location as a factor of time is uncertain. On top of that, there are relativistic visual distortions and the problem of time dilation. Yeah, we would need a way to smooth out the kinks, relatively speaking. The SSC3 would be awe-stounding for that. It was important to get our point across to those in command.

  Our report meandered through the chain of command all the way to the Solar League’s top admiral, the one in charge of the entire Solar League Space Force. We had Communal perform a background check. The admiral has an advanced degree in physics. He definitely understood the issue and was also in a unique position to help. We couldn’t figure out what was taking the decision makers so long. The longer this sort of thing twists around in the wind, the more chance a hole will get poked in a plan.

  A quick call to our general, General Whitehall, got us through the gatekeepers, and ended with Rock and Para standing in front of the Solar League’s top admiral. I know it gets confusing with old Earth service ranks all jumbled together.

  Admirals, generals, what’s the difference? Crud. That didn’t come out right. I’m working hard these days to fit better into the rank-and-file bureaucracy.

  Hi, Rock. No, I didn’t forget about the meeting. I’ll catch up with you in a minute. What’s that? You’re right. I should explain our odd relationship with the military. How much of my etching can you see from the hallway? Oh. I should probably use the illuminator instead of the cloud setting. Anyway.

  Even though Para and I have technically been in the military for a long time, there have been extenuating circumstances. When Shockwave was formed, during the first invasion, there was no time to figure out how we would fit in the normal military chain of command. We had to improvise.

  No one knew what to do with us, other than our general. And even General Whitehall, without whom, I am certain, the members of Shockwave would be in a black-ops lab somewhere; even he said we gained his attention because of our antics. Our antics! He's definitely our general though.

  Can you imagine us in a military war game? Soldiers, we need to take that hill. Cloak, port, overwhelm the defenders, done. Sorry you didn’t get to do anything, guys. Well, why not just throttle it down, Viz? We can’t operate that way. It would get us killed. Don’t get huffy. I’m not trying to say Shockwave is a one-squad army, but in limited confrontations, it’s just the way of things. And, yes, with the expansion of teleportation capable squads, things are finally changing. Hence, my trying hard to fit better into the rank-and-file bureaucracy.

  At least Rock and Roll were immersed in Solcom because of WASP. True, Para and I were involved with Shockwave operations, but we seldom had direct involvement with the regular military. In college we did a stint in ROTC. Even that was haphazard, since Shockwave ops took precedent, and those seemed to come at us regularly in those days. Then, I founded Vizualized Dynamics, which ended up in the Essential to the War Effort category. Para was directly involved with the company as a key employee. That put us in de facto military positions, without actually having normal duty assignments. We had a lot going on.

  Yikes. That was quite the explanation. I’ll have to dig in to see if there’s evidence of a guilty conscience rattling around in all that. It’s all in the past, really.

  Now, we have opportunity to run around with awe-stounding SpecOps teams like Dirty Feet and Gopher Guts. That’s bound to rub off on us.

  Why are you still here, Rock? And what are you laughing at? Oh. Ha... ha.

  Where was I? Right. The debrief meeting with the admiral.

  It made sense to send Rock and Para to the meeting. Rock would be able to answer any science related questions. Para and her capabilities made her the essential mission operator. And it couldn’t hurt that Para had celebrity status. Perhaps the admiral was a fan. Here’s how the discussion went.

  After introductions, Rock began carefully. “Admiral, sir, I understand the nature of porting probably as well as anyone.”

  The admiral nodded. “Agreed.”

  Rock continued. “Just imagine, porting to a remote spot in deep space without a ship, trying to eyeball a vessel moving at 90% light, and then porting Para to just the right spot for a gravity wal
k. Think about that for just a minute.” Rock wasn’t done yet.

  The admiral nodded. “And?”

  Rock added. “I need to get Para to the sweet spot at the edge of the ship’s gravitational wake. Too close and we’re atomized. Well, maybe not Para, but I would be atomized, and I happen to like my atoms in their current arrangement.

  “Even if I do hit the sweet spot, within a fraction of a second the ship is already thousands of miles downrange, taking with it the gravity wake we need. Or I could miss entirely, which is the more likely outcome, and untangle in front of the ship, resulting in our ground to atomic dust deaths.”

  The admiral looked interested. “How does the S3 fit in?”

  Rock explained. “We need the S3 in order to match velocity with an Empire ship; to attain relative uniformity for the sake of teleportation prediction, visual distortions, and time dilation. It will give us a chance to transfer Para without risking a wipe-out. That should be possible, even at relativistic speeds, as long as we can match their velocity. Only the S3 can give us a shot, relatively speaking.”

  That was one way to look at it. The situation would be dynamic. We would have to be ready for anything, even using the S3 as bait to get a dreadnaught to come and take a close look. Then we wouldn’t have to chase anomalies. Yeah, the mission could definitely become complicated. Best to leave room for eventualities. Rock decided to not open that can of worms.

  The admiral seemed to be having a good time as the meeting progressed.

  He almost cracked a smile. We suspect he was already sold on the idea even before the meeting, but wanted to have a little fun. “The SSC3 is a planetary treasure. As for the op, no guts, no glory, son.”

  Para likes to have fun as well. She smiled her brightest smile, eyes open wide, and chimed in. “I’m willing to try a landing without the S3, sir, if you’ll come along with me. You know, for an extra boost of confidence.”