The Expanding Universe

by Craig Martelle

  “Is there anything you don't know?”

  “The future. Same as you.”

  The building shuddered. Peter wondered if it was the capsule rattling to near-light speed or if the Fleet had finally arrived. It was always going to be a close call.

  The Vampire still didn't turn around.

  “I'm sorry for this next part, commander. I can't leave any witnesses. But, if it makes you feel any better I plan to be there when our daughters wake up. My fate is tied to theirs, just as yours is tied to mine. I give you my word I will look after both of them.”

  “That gives me no comfort, whatsoever.”

  “Nor would it for me.”

  The Vampire walked away, hopped on his drop capsule, and looked back. With a slight nod, he rode the platform back up through the roof.

  The shiny bomb on the console only caught Peter's attention a few seconds later when it emitted an annoying buzz. His last thought was of his adopted daughter and the Vampire nightmare she was heading for. He hoped he'd given her the right tools and training to remain hidden among them. Humanity depended on it...

  More About E.E. Isherwood

  E.E. Isherwood has been a storyteller for over 30 years. Initially the muse took the form of childish comic strips. As a teen it manifested itself under the guise of Dungeons and Dragons adventures. In college it culminated with a Master's thesis on Missouri geography—an extremely boring kind of story. Three decades and several careers later he realized that siren song never stopped, so he began to author books. A life-long enthusiast of apocalyptic fiction, writing about zombies was his passion. Future titles in science fiction and fantasy are in the hopper. He lives in the St. Louis, Missouri area. Join him at www.zombiebooks.net for his latest books, giveaways, and more!

  Genre: Colonization

  New Beginnings by Paul C. Middleton

  They were fleeing a grinding war. Fleeing further than anyone had successfully traveled before. They hoped to avoid their enemies. Hoped to travel before their goal was discovered. Their enemies caught them as they left, forcing them to take dangerous measures. This story is a Betrayed by Faith 'Origins' story.

  Chapter 1

  "Blue Squadron, break to six o'clock zenith, take out the crippled destroyer. White and Red Squadron, follow Gold in and assist in taking out the damaged cruiser." Ki'antha snapped out orders to the rest of her fighters. She was somewhat frustrated by the fact that the fighters were under orders to only go after heavily damaged and crippled enemy ships. Anything to keep them from ramming the fleet units in the battle line. The battle line had to hold until the colony vessels, and the fighters currently based on them fled through the Astral gate that was being formed by Jove of the Jehed on the Command ship. The largest ship that had ever been built by the Alliance, that Command ship was critical to everyone’s survival.

  Although the other colony ships had a smattering of specialists in case the Command ship didn't make it, their chances of surviving without it were minimal at best. In fact, they were under orders, despite the losses they would take, to protect it at all costs. Without its massive gate drive and the specially picked people to power it, they had no chance of jumping to another galaxy.

  Ki'antha whipped her fighter around, jinking it in three dimensions to confuse the cruiser’s remaining tracking ability, as well as varying her speed. Rather than using their expendable munitions on these cripples, they used their heavy internal weapons. Each fighter was keyed into their pilot's unique talents in drawing on the planes. Their internal mechanisms converted that energy to add to the power of the craft’s guns. She fed her frustration at having to go after cripples into her weapons and found some satisfaction in the massive collateral explosions that ran across the structure of the heavy cruiser as she fired.

  After that firing run, the heavy cruiser slowed to drift on its current course. They must have taken out its engines, removing its possible threat to the battle line. The destroyer she’d sent Blue squadron after disappeared from her sensors in a burst of energy. The squadron had obviously taken out their target.

  That was the last of the light units the enemy had brought to this battle. "All fighter squadrons, return to your ships. Gate formation imminent. Return to your ships." echoed across the comms in a fleet-wide transmission. Ki'antha swore softly and swung her fighter around leading her wing back to the Command ship. It seems such a waste to use their most effective units against the cyborgs, on the small fry, but orders were orders. It didn't help that she knew the battle plan had been originated by her mother.

  She continued to weave the fighter until they were well out of the enemy’s missile range, refusing to give them easy lock-ups, even if the small and agile craft were unlikely to be either targeted or hit by the enemy now that the screening ships were down. The fighters would be integral to the survival of the colony’s fleet. Without them, its chances of reaching the galactic edge, let alone jumping to the nearest galaxy, were non-existent.

  She swung the fighter towards the landing bays and accelerated up to landing speed. The magnetic capture field needed a craft to be at a certain speed to hold them as they landed. If a fighter’s engines were heavily damaged, it had to meet up with a docking port. The fleet didn't have the resources to repair damaged craft. Instead, it carried one spare for every two pilots. The spares wouldn’t be as effective as the original fighters because they were universally adaptive models, rather than customized ones. Still, any fighter was better than none to most pilots.

  With her fighter safely cradled in clamps, she was about to dismount when a strident warning came over the speakers. "All troops lock down for jump. Jump imminent. Jump imminent." Ki'antha sighed and locked herself back into her cockpit. The familiar nausea of an astral jump washed over her. It wasn't traveling through the astral that caused nausea, but rather, the translocation over such vast distances that jump engines allowed. It caused massive disorientations to anyone on board when it happened.

  She sent up a silent prayer to those in the battle line. Most of them were volunteers, and the others had agreed to serve in order to give their family members a chance of escaping on the colony ships. They had to hold the line for an hour to prevent the cyborg fleet from following.

  She hoped they gained a clean death in battle, rather than surviving and being converted into more cannon fodder for the enemy.

  Chapter 2

  The plan was not going well. Although most of the colonization fleet had made the jumps safely, many of the ships had been damaged by the surprise attack the enemy dropped on them. Half the remaining defensive fleet had been forced to act as a rearguard, staying behind to prevent enemy ships from following through the astral portal that Jove had made. If they were struck again before the final jump, it was unlikely that the remnants of the colonization fleet would make it. Only the core ships and the Command vessel were capable of making a transit now. The fleet was down to two battleships, five battlecruisers, with half the support ships, parasite cruisers, and destroyers, from the larger vessels remaining combat capable. There were other surviving parasites, but they would only be useful in suicide assaults. Their shields were being strengthened for that role.

  Pilot exhaustion had taken its toll as well. The fighters had been forced to stay aboard ship during the last battle to give the pilots and flight crews some rest. In eight jumps along the galactic arm, they had been attacked five times. Another hazard of any long jump, her mind had started to wander through the past, to how she had come to be here in this time and place.

  Times were desperate all round. Their planet, Oly'ma'katas, had been on the far side of the Alliance from where the enemy had initially struck. They also had the advantage of being able to use the much safer method of faster than light travel which involved astral portals, rather than having to warp time and space physically. The enemy relied on cybernetic/organic amalgam connections that did not always survive in the astral environment. Damage could be negligible, all the way up to complete destruction
if they were exposed to the astral plane.

  No one was sure why the Alliance had been attacked without warning. There were many theories, the most popular was that the cyborg horrors which made up the bulk of the enemy's forces needed the nerve tissues and other parts of sentients to sustain themselves. That reasoning had never rung true to Ki'antha's mind, nor to her mother's. After the first reports had come back from the front lines of the battle, her mother had started organizing other retired military officers, wealthy individuals, and specialists to arrange a last-ditch, hopefully never to be used, colonization escape fleet.

  Although the Alliance won that first battle, it had been at a significant cost. The losses they had inflicted were in the order of 5 to 1 in ship tonnage. But this new, aggressive enemy integrated its ship’s crews into their vessels. They merged the crew member’s head and torso with their technology, leaving enough of the body to keep the brain functioning.

  When the enemy had finally dropped troops onto an Alliance world, the truth became clear. Those they captured on the planet were also integrated into support for the war machines. All of these hybrids were incorporated into some form of battle suit, tank or aircraft. Once they proved their loyalty to the cause, they were then merged into weaponry and sent to fight. Some very few, not even one in a thousand, had switched sides back to the Alliance once integrated into combat tech.

  Early on in the war, when the enemy had been defeated for the first time, those that had been assimilated begged to be released, by disconnecting them from the technology keeping them alive or killing them outright. Those that had defected kept saying something about the song, how hard it was to resist the song. How much they wished to join the song, but their anger at the deaths of their friends and families had allowed them to ignore it for a time at least.

  The enemy could literally consume entire populations and convert them to their own cause. Only those strongest will could resist whatever technique these conquerors used.

  After the first several years of war, it has been discovered that their cyborgian connections interacted poorly with the Astral plane. As this was a common method of interplanetary transport used by the Alliance, for a time this worked well to their advantage. They could jump in and out without being easily followed by the enemy. In time, however, the cyborgs had found a method of tracing, especially shorter jumps to their destination. Sometimes they would even risk sending part of their fleet through an Astral gate, on the off chance that some or all of them would survive the jump and be able to immediately attack those ships trying to escape.

  Ki'antha’s mother had started convincing specialists, politicians and retired military personnel that they needed to prepare. They must design, build and create a colonization fleet with a ship capable of creating a jump gate that could take them further than ten times the longest previously reported jump. Her mother had been a research physicist after retiring from the military. She had been involved in the project that developed their method of traveling down a path that might be able to jump that distance.

  Their method was in some ways elegant, but incredibly energy intensive. From her calculations, while they could create a jump gate to a nearby galaxy, for the enemy to follow them using their current technological methods, it would require them to consume a sun simply to power the jump.

  In the military, her mother had been an analyst. Sometimes Ki'antha envied her mother's ability. She could analyze any situation and predict probable outcomes, as well as probabilities that they would occur. As a fighter pilot, no one had been able to match her mother. Although her reaction speed was slower than normal, her ability to predict the patterns in which someone else was flying allowed her to seem to react faster than anyone else. When command picked up on this unusual ability, she had been transferred to intelligence. She'd served in intelligence for over twenty years before her retirement, and had been beyond recall age when the war had started.

  It hadn't mattered. When she consulted for the military, the situation had become clear to her over the first three years. The greatest limiting factor for the Alliance's military was its manpower. The biggest limiting factor for the cyborgs seemed to be non-organic raw materials. In the third year, this had been proven to everyone’s satisfaction when a raid showed them stripping a barren solar system’s asteroids and planets of all raw materials.

  Her mother had come to the conclusion that the cyborgs could recruit, effectively, from within the Alliance's population. Alliance space had a number of unexploited, barren systems available with the raw resources the enemy needed. The only way for the populations in nearby systems to survive was to remove themselves. Leaving the galaxy that the cyborgs were attacking. Several colonization fleets were already being sent to far sectors of the galaxy in hopes that they might be far enough away to survive. Her new plan was more ambitious.

  They had no idea what awaited them in the next galaxy. In fact, Command Ship ‘ Ouranos-vouno,' was the only ship of its class ever built. Designing the massive ancillary jump engines that powered its ability to create a gate powerful enough to jump to another galaxy had taken a year and a half to plan. Building the Ouranos-vouno itself had taken three years.

  Even then, without the Sages, led by Jove, volunteering to power it, they wouldn't have been able to jump the fleet to another galaxy. Ki'antha’s mind turned back to what she had learned, to the truth that had been revealed to her by the Sages and her mother. The cyborg’s race was of the same origin as the Sages, the Jeheds as they called themselves. They had split millennia before over a philosophical difference. The Jehed, led by the Sages, believed that perfecting their ability to touch the planes was preferable to perfecting technology. The Sages never spoke the name by which the cyborg’s leaders had called themselves, and comparing them to the warmongers these others had become would have been deeply insulting to them.

  The faction behind the cyborgs believed in using technology to augment the perfect form and function. Thus the Sages and their supporters had been driven from their original home world, settling a new one in the center of what was now Alliance space. Like now, the only reason the Jeheds had escaped the Cyborgs was that they could create Astral gates and travel through them. They had thought that because of the detrimental effects of cyborg connections to connect to the planes the Jehed would be safe forever.

  Unfortunately, the Cyborgs had found another way to travel. By warping space-time and punching through the physical dimensions, they didn’t need to be able to directly access the planes. It did cost far more in raw energy than traveling through the Astral, and no-one was sure of what other effects it might have but, apparently, the cyborgs either didn’t care or thought the risk was worth it to achieve their goals.

  The biggest problem for the cyborgs had probably been that more than 90% of the female Jeheds had rejected the cyborgian philosophy for several reasons. Firstly, the cyborgs found cloning an absolutely acceptable method of reproduction, something that had left many of the female Jeheds without a true mate. There was also something about the cyborg technology that interfered with the forming of mate-bonds. These connections were a unique function of Jehed reproduction and psychology. They were a necessity for the natural continuation of the race. This had resulted in most of these women leaving with the Sages and their followers. Some stayed behind, grudgingly willing to be genetic contributors to the cloning programs or because their true mate was amongst those who followed the cyborgian philosophy. These felt that even a stifled link was better than no link at all according to Jehed histories.

  A female Jehed was far less fertile with someone they hadn’t bonded with and was never satisfied in a relationship they formed which hadn’t achieved the bond. Content, they could be. They never chose a partner they didn’t respect. But without the bond (which didn’t always form with just Jehed males) they seemed to always be looking for something or someone just over the horizon.

  Ki’antha’s mind switched focus again, back to the status of the fleet. This
colony fleet was the last resort. Other colony fleets had been sent out to colonize the far side of the galaxy. Because of how technologically capable the cyborgs were, there was no communication from those colonies. The risk had simply been too great. They were to set up and spread out in their new areas as quickly as possible. There were several potential problems with that effort. The first, was each race sent out their own colonies, giving them none of the strengths of the Alliance as a whole. The second was that if enough time passed, then the empires those colonies built might end up at war with each other. The Alliance was one of desperate necessity, not mutual admiration. There was much antipathy between many of the races.

  The Ajyeptos, especially, were disgruntled at their side role as ground troops. They simply didn't make competent fighter pilots. Their abilities to link to the planes were almost entirely devoted to the manipulation of their physical forms so they couldn’t throw planar energy into weapons, engines or shields as required by the pilots of the one man craft. Although they did form a significant percentage of lightship crews and officers, their primary role was as ground forces for which they were supremely adapted. Their unique ability was to take on the partial attributes of animals and shift their physical form to fight. They were also unique in being not susceptible to the transformation into a cyborg. Their bodies resisted any connection between electronics and the nervous system that directly interfaced into the nervous system. This meant even if they were captured, they weren't able to be transformed and sent back against their comrades. Having divisions of them on the frontline supported by other troops was how the ground war efforts were being fought now.