Infinite Exploration

by D. L. Harrison

  Infinite Exploration

  Technomancer: Book Six

  Author: D. L. Harrison

  Copyright 2020. This is a work of fiction. Names, Characters, Places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve – Interlude

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Afterword:

  About the Author

  Other books by D. L. Harrison:

  Book Description

  Chapter One

  The rocking chair moved back and forth soundlessly as I tried to rock my son back to sleep. It was a year since we’d ended the war with the Vrok and my three-month-old son was determined to never let me sleep again. Michael Scott Akin had been born to the world.

  Unlike my daughter, he’d grow up to be an elemental mage, like his cousin Brock and Aunt Jayna.

  Not all that much had changed over the last year, except of course for my son being born. Astraeus had grown by a half again, there were now three million citizens in my care, and we’d opened up a second level of the city.

  There’d been no military technical advances the last year either, though that was still a priority. My wife hadn’t gone back on her word. We were a lot more powerful than we’d been before last year, but there was no pinnacle of technology. That was something hard to remember, when we were the most powerful seventy-six galaxy group among the disparate empires for a hundred million light years around Earth. But who could say when the next threat might show itself?

  The last year had seen Earth double her colonies, another two hundred in a tenth of the time the original two hundred were made. The expansion and huge number of available worlds throughout the seventy-six galaxies had spurned an explosive outgrowth that way.

  I had a feeling that frenzy of colonization had run its course however, there were only three billion people left on the Earth now. There were whole cities on Earth that had been shut down with the population more than cut in half.

  It might be another generation or two before the next wave was sent out.

  Our own world which was an extension of Astraeus was a popular destination. There were nineteen ski chalets and twenty-two beach resorts, not counting our personal ski and beach houses that were booked out over six months right now.

  My relationship with the eight was touchy, but cordial enough in truth. I wouldn’t ever trust them to direct my military again, and they were politely wary of me, but we managed to work together on some things. It could’ve been a lot better, but at the same time it could’ve been a lot worse.

  Alien wars continued for a very small percentage of races, both inside our seventy-six-galaxy territory and among the various empires around us, but no one was attacking us, so we didn’t interfere. As I’d already alluded to, the stealth network of ships was long completed, and we kept an eye on all the habited FTL worlds and empires within a hundred million light years.

  As I’d already said, nothing within range of us was a challenge to us, and we’d have plenty of warning if they became one. If there were challenges beyond that, we’d see them coming a long way away as they gobbled up the interstellar empires at the edge of our surveillance range.

  The temptation to get involved in those wars were still there to put a stop to senseless death, and even the occasional destruction of a world, but I’d continued to resist. It was harder than I’d thought it’d be. It was hard to convince myself that stepping in on that kind of thing and ending it would be a bad thing, when it would save lives and in the rare cases whole races.

  Even I wasn’t immune to the temptation of power and ambition. I couldn’t trust myself with power over other races like that, no human could.

  Life would be a whole lot less complicated, if I’d never walked into Dale’s bar and tried to pick up a hot vampire so long ago, getting in over my head trying to impress her. That was ultimately what brought me to the attention of General Schafer and how this whole mess started. I really didn’t like the authority I did have, which helped me resist the idea of stepping in.

  Still, if all that hadn’t happened, I’d have never met my amazing wife, or have a brilliant daughter and newborn son. A family. I couldn’t imagine not having them in my life, so I couldn’t regret the path I’d taken.

  My wife was currently sleeping. The blankets covering Diana’s five foot six athletically curvaceous form. Her beautiful face was turned toward us, with her long shiny raven hair fanned out on the pillow, and her green eyes were hidden behind her eyelids.

  It was quiet as Michael settled down, and I got up and walked over to his room and laid him carefully down in the crib. He had my blond hair and blue eyes. I walked away like navigating a minefield. I was determined not to make a sound and wake him up. I stopped at Melody’s bedroom and peeked in to check on her, and she was tucked in under the covers and safe and sound, so I closed the door back over.

  Melody had grown a couple of inches during her thirteenth year. She had her mother’s raven hair and my blue eyes. She was also starting to develop and was showing even greater interest in boys which made me worry. I’d have considered the whole buying a shotgun cliché, but Darrell was more than enough protection. She was definitely a teen, not really rebellious yet, but touchy and not as quick to accept hugs and kisses from her parents.

  Other than all that, not much had changed.

  I slipped back into bed next to my warm wife, and then shut my eyes. My body had just started to relax, when the monitor picked up Michael’s cries.

  I wondered if I’d ever sleep again.

  The sun felt good as it kissed my skin, as I dozed on and off on the blanket laid out over the white sand of the beach. It was our personal beach, and instead of a house we had built several small open bungalows just fifty feet or so from the water.

  Catching a few minutes of sleep whenever I could was a fairly high priority. Diana was next to me playing with Michael, while Melody was by the water swimming with her cousin Brock with Darrell the A.I. on overwatch.

  My sister Jayna looked a lot like me, with the same light blonde hair and ocean blue eyes. She was lithe and athletic. Carmine was her husband and my brother in law and was a built man on our security force.

  She was standing next to her husband Carmine chatting while he barbequed our dinner that night. The planet Astraeus had a twenty-three-hour day, so every twenty-three days the cycle of differing time zones reset. Right then, it was midday on Astraeus at our beach even if it was after six at night station time. Tomorrow, it’d be an hour earlier, and so on.

  So, some nights when we went to our beach on the planet, we had night barbeques, and sometimes it was during the day. It felt a little wrong, like it should be later, but I’d gotten used to it over the last year. The bungalows all had a quantum jump room in them that led to our private part on the station, so we didn’t even need a ship to get here. They also went to the mountains, on the days o
ff we went skiing. It’d actually been a few months for that latter, since Michael was born. The beach worked well for a baby, not so much the snow laden slopes of a gigantic mountain.

  Cassie and Jessica were around somewhere too, maybe in the forest. It wasn’t odd for our lioness shifter to go hunting and sometimes Cassie went with her to explore the area.

  Cassie was forever unchangeable as a vampire. She looked like a coed in her first year of college. She was one of the most beautiful women I’d ever laid my eyes on, and she was a great friend. She had light brown hair, hazel eyes, and an angelically beautiful face. Her body was petite and curvy at five foot one.

  Of course, the aura of her vampire power put lie to her apparent youth, something I could feel with my own magic.

  Over the last year Cassie had stepped out of the public view for the most part, splitting her duties into jobs and assigning them out. Mostly, she was still in the command center every day and my advisor, but she was much less directly involved in the government.

  Jessica was five foot eight, with red hair and brown eyes, and an athletic build. She was a lion shifter, but she was also my chief of security on the station. Her real title was chief of police since we were a country, not just a station. She usually came along on all our excursions, as protection, but she was also a friend.

  We typically spent a couple of nights a week on the beach to unwind after work, and it’s where we had our family meals most of the time.

  “Hey, gorgeous,” I said sleepily.

  Diana smiled down at me, but her cheeks still flushed slightly when I complimented her that way, even after being together for fourteen years. She clearly enjoyed it as well. At least, from me.

  Of course, I was just as smitten as ever, and the way the sun shone on her hair was dazzling in the bright sunlight. Her bright and intelligent green eyes were mesmerizing to me, still.

  “Done lazing about and sleeping?” she asked in a playfully accusing tone.

  “Sleep?” I asked in mock confusion, “What’s that?”

  She laughed, and she looked as tired as I felt. I knew it wouldn’t be too much longer before our son slept the nights through, and it couldn’t come soon enough for both of us. Don’t get me wrong, he wasn’t even all that fussy, he was a good baby for the most part. He just didn’t sleep all the way through the night yet, fed every two hours like clockwork.

  Carmine announced, “Food’s ready!”

  I snickered, at the answering lion’s roar from the forest. My life was a bit crazy.

  My life had its complications, but it was a good life. I’ve said it before, but humanity had entered an age of true plenty, with no resources to fight over and our sicknesses practically wiped out. The world had never been better, with new clean technologies, comforts, and conveniences almost all could afford. The world was unrecognizable.

  Of course, we were all still human with all the same foibles. Religion, politics, and culture were all things that we still argued over. That would probably never change.

  Chapter Two

  The god juice, otherwise known as coffee, felt good going down as I guzzled the last half of it, then stood to get another cup. It was me, Cassie, Jessica and a couple of guards in the command center the next morning.

  Cassie asked, “You busy?” as I poured myself that second cup.

  I shrugged, “Designing a transportation system, for pay. Most of the races in the fifty galaxies are still stuck with subspace FTL, which is slow when considering intergalactic distances. I got the idea the other day from our quantum jump chambers. Imagine a dreadnought sized and shaped jump chamber. I could set up four in each galaxy.

  “A merchant flies their ship in, uses their quantum communicator on a specific data channel to make a payment and specify the destination. Then it will quantum jumps them to the closest jump chamber to their ultimate destination. It would still take a merchant a week or two to get places, but that’s a lot faster than years, and it opens up more opportunities for trade.”

  Cassie asked, “Won’t that cut into the Arnis’s deals?”

  I shrugged, “They mostly transport politicians around for the other races, delegates and the like. They do offer delivery services between worlds far apart that want to do business. It’ll overlap a bit I guess, but that’s free enterprise, they can survive a little competition.

  “Besides, I bet they’re very close to a jump drive by now. Why, do you need something?”

  Jump tech was just a matter of time, then everyone would have it. I knew my four human competitors in ship building had to be close, the Arnis as well. The Vrok were also working on jump tech, but we had our eyes on that. As soon as they succeeded, we’d destroy the first ship they jumped out of their underground build base. Eventually, they’d get the point, the Vrok weren’t going anywhere.

  Still, I’d come to the conclusion my wife was even more brilliant than I’d thought. Everyone was having much more trouble moving from a quantum communicator that jumped energy to a physical matter jump drive. It’d taken her about four days. Of course, she’d invented the communicator, everyone else had to reverse engineer it and fully understand it before they could modify it for matter jumping.

  Even for the Vrok, that was true.

  We’d learned from their database that they’d gotten the technology and upgraded their fleet with it by intercepting my wife’s designs with one of their stealth probes. Before fourteen years ago they’d still been using quantum paired molecules for FTL comms.

  Cassie said, “It can wait if your busy.”

  I nodded, “I’m also working on a science vessel of sorts. That’ll work in space, air, land, and sea, for more detailed research than our probe scans give us. But they can both wait a few minutes, neither are critical.”

  Cassie replied, “The council has recalled me and wants to send someone else, to keep an eye on you at a distance. In hindsight, I believe that was their plan all along, and why they wanted me to step out of the light of political influence. So the move wouldn’t be questioned.”

  I frowned, “Why?”

  Cassie grimaced, “They believe our friendship and how closely we work together has influenced my objectivity, which compromises our mission and purpose as a council. I can’t say they’re wrong. The very fact I just told you they were going to replace me with someone working in the shadows out of your view, probably means they’re right.”

  I snorted, “That sounds like they’re the ones that are compromised. You are a member of the council, and they’re manipulating you to get what they want? That’s not right, no better than what the eight did to me, and it isn’t like Jayna and I wouldn’t feel a vampire aura.”

  Cassie shrugged, “There are ways when dealing with other supernaturals in a place of political power. A witch could hide a vampire aura with an enchantment, and we have plenty of them on the payroll so to speak.”

  I shook my head and thought it through before responding.

  “We are friends, and more than that, you’re a part of my extended family. I know nothing lasts forever, but I don’t like the idea. What we have works, because I listen to your council. I always imagined you’d be around a lifetime, if only mine, because you seemed happy here.

  “I also don’t like the idea of being manipulated, and it’s less efficient besides. I don’t want to lose you, and I’m willing to fight for it, but if you decide to go then I won’t stop you either. Lastly, I’ll question every damned thing my people tell me if you go, and I’ll wonder if they’ve been compromised and if I’m being manipulated to modify my political stance. It’s a bad idea.”

  Cassie nodded, “I do like it here. If it was for the mission I wouldn’t even hesitate, keeping humanity from self-destructing is at the core of my purpose in this life. But this… isn’t about that. It’s about internal council politics, which is the only reason I’m even mentioning it, much less considering resisting the orders. It’s not a simple thing, because they’re my family too, in a lot of ways, but th
is place has become home to me in a way none others have.

  “It’s our friendship that bothers them. I’m painting outside the lines. They know what works and they stick to it. Like standard operating procedures in a service. This is… new, and it’s got them spooked, I think. I have a different view. I believe I’m more effective working with you because of the kind of man you are. I’d also miss you, and I’d miss Diana and Melody who are dear to me.”

  “But,” I prompted.

  She chuckled, “But if I say no then they might do something, precipitous. The council has taken out old vampires that have gone rogue from the council before, those that didn’t go along with the consensus. It would be a risk, and it’d put you and your family in danger.”

  I shrugged, and she glared.

  “I’m not dismissing that, but me and my family are already in a lot of danger, from me being a world leader and top power. What’s one more deadly enemy? Besides, with your knowledge and insight into the council’s workings, and my technology, we’d have more than an even chance. The question is if my friendship and being a part of our family is worth it to you to turn your back on those backstabbing idiots who’re letting fear of something different make them make bad decisions.

  “I won’t live forever after all.”

  Cassie nodded, “But your son or daughter will eventually take over, and we’re already friends. I’ve thought about that already.”

  I said, “So if you want to stay, stay. You’re always welcome.”

  Cassie tilted her head and replied, “I’ll consider it a little longer, think it through a little deeper. There will be consequences we can’t foresee.”

  I supposed that was all I could ask, but I didn’t like it. Part of that was on her behalf, but a lot of it was on me needing her. I’d grown to depend on her a lot over the years, in our personal and professional lives.

  I sat back down with my coffee, and then got back to work.