by M. D. Cooper
“Caldwell is an old, low-metallicity glob,” Finaeus said, his tone dismissive. “We might spend thousands of years hunting around in there for the resources we need. If we’re looking at flights that long, we might as well go for Andromeda. Finding the right materials there will be easy.”
“Well, easier.” Tangel cocked a brow. “Building gates is no simple task. We’re practically going to need to establish a colony.”
“A mining one, at least.” The engineer replied with a slow nod. “Either way, we should get a move on.”
“What’s the rush?” Tangel asked. “We have forever.”
The typical smirk Finaeus wore faded, and he weezed softly. “Because the thought of everyone I ever knew being dead is not something I can bear a second time—not for long, at least.”
“A second time?”
He grunted in agreement, sitting up straight. “It took a bit for Earnest and I to travel back in time.”
“That’s not too long,” Tangel gave him a comforting smile. “Lots of people we know will likely live that long.”
“Sure.” He nodded. “But you didn’t. Earnest and I worked to find a solution, growing increasingly desperate because, back in the Milky Way…well…without you in play, the core AIs won, and began their campaign to eradicate all organic life in the galaxy.”
“Stars,” she whispered. “That’s…I’m sorry. And not knowing if you’d ever succeed….”
“Exactly. We feared that we’d made the wrong choice, that maybe if we’d been back in the thick of things, we could have made a difference.” His head sank as he spoke, eyes cast down at the deck.
Tangel reached out and cupped a hand under his chin, gently lifting his head until their eyes met. “There’s a lesson to be learned there.”
“Oh? What is that?”
“You did do something that made a difference. You saved me, and we won the war.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, for now.”
She didn’t say anything, instead letting her ephemeral limbs slip free from her physical form, wrapping him in their embrace. Strands of herself slipped through his being, her energy shoring the man up and revitalizing him.
“Stars…” he whispered, eyes shining as he straightened in his seat. “Is this what it feels like to be you?”
Tangel nodded. “A taste, at least. Now relax. Sleep. I’ll get us on our way and take care of you for the duration.”
Earnest’s eyes began to droop, head dipping forward again until a spasm rippled through his body, and he whispered, “Oh, shit. There’s only one stasis pod aboard.”
“Don’t worry,” Tangel cooed. “I know. I’ll be alright. I’ll get the ship close to c. It’ll only be a year real-time for me.”
“Hope you enjoy one-player Snark….”
A minute later, he was out, his face utterly relaxed, almost beatific.
She marveled at how, though he had been through countless rejuves, Finaeus always managed to look old. But now, with all of his cares soothed away, he looked how she imagined he might have thousands of years ago when he and his brother first hatched a plan to begin seeding the galaxy with homes for humans to expand into.
Innocent…idealistic.
She carried him back to the miniscule medbay—more like a closet, really—and slipped him into the multi-function pod inside.
The medtube could perform a host of repairs on a person, but if the patient had been injured beyond the system’s capabilities, it could place them into stasis, freezing their body by introducing a field that caused the cessation of all atomic and subatomic motion.
She closed the lid and instructed the medtube to activate emergency preservation procedures. A few seconds later, it initialized stasis, and the slow rise and fall of Finaeus’s chest ceased.
Satisfied that he’d be safe, Tangel shed the human shape she maintained when around corporeal people, and drifted back to the Starkiller’s cockpit. Once inside, she ran through the data on the Andromeda Galaxy, scanning through the surveys of its nimbus stellar disk, searching for concentrations of young, hot stars.
~There~ she whispered to no one at all. ~That is where we’ll find the materials to build our gate.~
After a few course adjustments, she spooled out the ship’s antimatter-pion nozzle and fired the engine, running it at seventy gs of thrust for five days, until the Starkiller reached ninety-five percent the speed of light. Once there, she powered down the engines, focusing the ship’s energy stores on maintaining the forward shield.
The days passed slowly; a week turned into a month, then a month into four. Before long, she could begin to make out small, blue stars with the Starkiller’s onboard instrumentation.
As she scanned through the region of space surrounding her destination, Tangel came to a troubling realization: there were not as many stars as there should be.
Spreading her search out to other nearby clusters, she found the same thing. Over half of the large, hot type A and B stars that should be present were entirely absent. Further analysis of stellar drift over the past one and a half million years showed that the mass in the outer fringes of the Andromeda Galaxy appeared to be unchanged.
The stars had just gone dark.
One hundred and sixty-five days into her journey, Tangel spun the ship and began her braking sequence. She’d carefully rationed the Starkiller’s reserves, and there was just enough antimatter aboard to bring the ship down to a tenth of the speed of light.
As the ship slowed, the light coming from Andromeda redshifted back to near-normal compression, and Tangel was able to get a much clearer view of the galactic composition.
Like the Milky Way, Andromeda’s nimbus stellar disk extended far beyond the main arms of the galaxy. This disk was peppered with open clusters, the closest of which was her destination. Based on the cluster’s mass and movement over the prior half million years, it should have contained at least two hundred stars above three solar masses.
However, there were only thirty-five visible, and of those, seventeen were partially occluded by thick stellar disks.
~A mystery I am not pleased to encounter.~
She let the Starkiller continue to drift at a tenth the speed of light, surveying the cluster as she passed over the scattered stars at the edge of the galactic disk.
Days passed, and she carefully mapped stellar motion, tracking everything around her, looking for the missing stars. On the thirty-sixth day, the draw of a nearby gravity well pulled at the Starkiller.
There was no star in the well, and she estimated the mass at the bottom of the well to be only a little above a solar mass—too small to be a black hole.
Though the risk was low, she chose caution and released a probe in order to get a closer look. At first, there was nothing, just the empty void…then, small objects began to appear on scan, a smattering of frozen planetoids and comets—typical objects for a star’s Oort cloud.
Three days later, the drone drew close enough to the bottom of the gravity well to make out why no starlight reached out into the void.
It was a dyson sphere. And not a diffuse cloud of satellites, but a solid object like Star City, absorbing and utilizing the star’s entire energy output.
Tangel was tempted to slow the Starkiller in order to take a look, but with their fuel nearly depleted, she kept on course, targeting the dense cluster of stars, now realizing that the strange stellar occlusions were the remains of destroyed dyson spheres.
With the knowledge of what she was dealing with in hand, Tangel altered the ship’s scan systems to detect the faint infrared coming off the massive spheres. It took some fine-tuning, but before long, all of the missing stars were accounted for.
One was almost directly in front of the Starkiller, just three light years away.
~A strange thing,~ she mused. ~I crossed nearly half a million light years in one hundred and seventy days, but now it will take me thirty years to cross this small stretch of space.~
She briefly considered dropping in
to the dark layer to close the gap, but without any idea of what she might run into, she opted to take it slow.
~Besides, Finaeus is comfortable, the ship is in good condition, and I have no problem drowsing for a few decades. For once, time is on our side.~
THE END
* * * * *
I sincerely hope that you’ve enjoyed Scions of Humanity, the first book of the Ascension War series. The hunt for the ascended AIs has uncovered more questions than answers and led the heroes of the Orion War into new mysteries that must be solved.
Find out what happens next in Galactic Front.
THANK YOU FOR READING
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THE BOOKS OF AEON 14
This list is in near-chronological order. However, for the full chronological reading order, check out the master spreadsheet.
The Sentience Wars: Origins (Age of the Sentience Wars – w/James S. Aaron)
- Books 1-3 Omnibus: Lyssa’s Rise
- Books 4-5 Omnibus (incl. Vesta Burning): Lyssa’s Fire
- Book 0 Prequel: The Proteus Bridge (Full length novel)
- Book 1: Lyssa’s Dream
- Book 2: Lyssa’s Run
- Book 3: Lyssa’s Flight
- Book 4: Lyssa’s Call
- Book 5: Lyssa’s Flame
The Sentience Wars: Solar War 1 (Age of the Sentience Wars – w/James S. Aaron)
- Book 0 Prequel: Vesta Burning (Full length novel)
- Book 1: Eve of Destruction
- Book 2: The Spreading Fire
- Book 3: A Fire Upon the Worlds (2020)
Enfield Genesis (Age of the Sentience Wars – w/Lisa Richman)
- Book 1: Alpha Centauri
- Book 2: Proxima Centauri
- Book 3: Tau Ceti
- Book 4: Epsilon Eridani
- Book 5: Sirius
Origins of Destiny (The Age of Terra)
- Prequel: Storming the Norse Wind
- Prequel: Angel’s Rise: The Huntress (available on Patreon)
- Book 1: Tanis Richards: Shore Leave
- Book 2: Tanis Richards: Masquerade
- Book 3: Tanis Richards: Blackest Night
- Book 4: Tanis Richards: Kill Shot
The Intrepid Saga (The Age of Terra)
- Book 1: Outsystem
- Book 2: A Path in the Darkness
- Book 3: Building Victoria
- The Intrepid Saga Omnibus – Also contains Destiny Lost, book 1 of the Orion War series
- Destiny Rising – Special Author’s Extended Edition comprised of both Outsystem and A Path in the Darkness with over 100 pages of new content.
The Sol Dissolution (The Age of Terra)
- Book 1: Venusian Uprising
- Book 2: Assault on Sedna
- Book 3: Hyperion War
- Book 4: Fall of Terra (2021)
Outlaws of Aquilia (Age of the FTL Wars)
- Book 1: The Daedalus Job
- Book 2: Maelstrom Reach
- Book 3: Marauder’s Compass
Althea’s Raiders (Age of the FTL Wars)
- Book 1: The Fall of Rome (2021)
- Book 2: The Terran Empire (2021)
The Warlord (Before the Age of the Orion War)
- Books 1-3 Omnibus: The Warlord of Midditerra
- Book 1: The Woman Without a World
- Book 2: The Woman Who Seized an Empire
- Book 3: The Woman Who Lost Everything
Legacy of the Lost (The FTL Wars Era w/Chris J. Pike)
- Book 1: Fire in the Night Sky
- Book 2: A Blight Upon the Stars
- Book 3: A Specter and an Invasion (2021)
The Orion War
- Book 1-3 Omnibus: Battle for New Canaan (includes Set the Galaxy on Fire anthology)
- Book 4-6 Omnibus: The Greatest War (includes Ignite the Stars anthology)
- Book 7-10 Omnibus: Assault on Orion
- Book 11-13 Omnibus: Hegemony of Humanity (includes Return to Kapteyn’s Star)
- Book 0 Prequel: To Fly Sabrina
- Book 1: Destiny Lost
- Book 2: New Canaan
- Book 3: Orion Rising
- Book 4: The Scipio Alliance
- Book 5: Attack on Thebes
- Book 6: War on a Thousand Fronts
- Book 7: Precipice of Darkness
- Book 8: Airtha Ascendancy
- Book 9: The Orion Front
- Book 10: Starfire
- Book 10.5: Return to Kapteyn’s Star
- Book 11: Race Across Spacetime
- Book 12: Return to Sol: Attack at Dawn
- Book 13: Return to Sol: Star Rise
Non-Aeon 14 volumes containing Tanis stories
- Bob’s Bar Volume 1
- Quantum Legends 3: Aberrant Ascension (2021)
Building New Canaan (Age of the Orion War – w/J.J. Green)
- Book 1: Carthage
- Book 2: Tyre
- Book 3: Troy
- Book 4: Athens
Tales of the Orion War
- Book 1: Set the Galaxy on Fire
- Book 2: Ignite the Stars
Multi-Author Collections
- Volume 1: Repercussions
Perilous Alliance (Age of the Orion War – w/Chris J. Pike)
- Book 1-3 Omnibus: Crisis in Silstrand
- Book 3.5-6 Omnibus: War in the Fringe
- Book 0 Prequel: Escape Velocity
- Book 1: Close Proximity
- Book 2: Strike Vector
- Book 3: Collision Course
- Book 3.5: Decisive Action
- Book 4: Impact Imminent
- Book 5: Critical Inertia
- Book 6: Impulse Shock
- Book 7: Terminal Velocity
The Delta Team (Age of the Orion War)
- Book 1: The Eden Job
- Book 2: The Disknee World
- Book 3: Rogue Planets
Serenity (Age of the Orion War – w/A. K. DuBoff)
- Book 1: Return to the Ordus
- Book 2: War of the Rosette
Rika’s Marauders (Age of the Orion War)
- Book 1-3 Omnibus: Rika Activated
- Book 1-7 Full series omnibus: Rika’s Marauders
- Prequel: Rika Mechanized
- Book 1: Rika Outcast
- Book 2: Rika Redeemed
- Book 3: Rika Triumphant
- Book 4: Rika Commander
- Book 5: Rika Infiltrator
- Book 6: Rika Unleashed
- Book 7: Rika Conqueror
Non-Aeon 14 Anthologies containing Rika stories
- Bob’s Bar Volume 2
The Genevian Queen (Age of the Orion War)
- Book 1: Rika Rising
- Book 2: Rika Coronated
- Book 3: Rika Destroyer
Perseus Gate (Age of the Orion War)
Season 1: Orion Space
- Episode 1: The Gate at the Grey Wolf Star
- Episode 2: The World at the Edge of Space
- Episode 3: The Dance on the Moons of Serenity
- Episode 4: The Last Bastion of Star City
- Episode 5: The Toll Road Between the Stars
- Episode 6: The Final Stroll on Perseus’s Arm
- Eps 1-3 Omnibus: The Trail Through the Stars
- Eps 4-6 Omnibus: The Path Amongst the Clouds
Season 2: Inner Stars
- Episode 1: A Meeting of Bodies and Minds
- Episode 2: A Deception and a Promise Kept
- Episode 3: A Surreptitious Rescue of Friends and Foes
- Episode 3.5: Anomaly
on Cerka (w/Andrew Dobell)
- Episode 4: A Victory and a Crushing Defeat
- Episode 5: A Trial and the Tribulations
- Episode 6: A Bargain and a True Story Told (2021)
- Episode 7: A New Empire and An Old Ally (2021)
- Eps 1-3 Omnibus: A Siege and a Salvation from Enemies
Hand’s Assassin (Age of the Orion War – w/T.G. Ayer)
- Book 1: Death Dealer
- Book 2: Death Mark (2021)
Machete System Bounty Hunter (Age of the Orion War – w/Zen DiPietro)
- Book 1: Hired Gun
- Book 2: Gunning for Trouble
- Book 3: With Guns Blazing
Fennington Station Murder Mysteries (Age of the Orion War)
- Book 1: Whole Latte Death (w/Chris J. Pike)
- Book 2: Cocoa Crush (w/Chris J. Pike)
The Empire (Age of the Orion War)
- Book 1: The Empress and the Ambassador
- Book 2: Consort of the Scorpion Empress
- Book 3: By the Empress’s Command
Bitchalante (Age of the Orion War)
- Book 1: Bitchalante (2021)
The Ascension War (Age of the Orion War)
- Book 1: Scions of Humanity (2020)
- Book 2: Galactic Front (2021)
- Book 3: Sagittarius Breach (2021)
OTHER BOOKS BY M. D. COOPER
Destiny’s Sword
- Book 1: Lucidium Run
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Malorie Cooper likes to think of herself as a dreamer and a wanderer, yet her feet are firmly grounded in reality.
A twenty-year software development veteran, Malorie eventually climbed the ladder to the position of software architect and CTO, where she gained a wealth of experience managing complex systems and large groups of people.
