Rumors of Wars: The Askirti Chronicles - Book 2

by Danny A. Brown

  “Just how big is that thing?!” Jackie exclaimed.

  The sensors told her the size. It was five kilometers tall, nine kilometers at its widest and approximately thirty-three kilometers long. Such was the mass of this ship that there were loose pieces of wreckage from this very ship in slow orbit around it.

  At ten kilometers long, the Bojovník-class dreadnought from the Commonwealth was considered a technological marvel. Engineers from all over had been invited to see its christening. Before this, common knowledge was that it was unlikely that these super-battleships could ever be made larger than seven kilometers. A lot of the problems had to do with limitations of materials regarding strength and flexibility. For instance, making high-speed maneuvers could crack an improperly designed ship in two. These massive warships had been designed not only with high-speed maneuverability in mind but also that they had to perform after receiving battle damage. The fact that the Commonwealth now had a ten-kilometer dreadnought had pushed far beyond what most considered the safe and practical limits of technology. And now they looked upon an ancient ship over more than three times as long than what common knowledge told them was possible.

  “Pari, what is this?” Jackie asked.

  “This is the Homem Empire’s dreadnought Freedom, High Queen,” it responded. “It is also the flagship of the last High Queen.”

  There was complete silence on the bridge.

  Jackie was stunned. The thought that this was the real flagship of the last empress of a galaxy-spanning civilization was beyond all expectation…Then she got a chill thinking they might find the woman’s body. A woman who looked just like Jackie in every way, only older, according to some ancient video that was uncovered on Wellington in an archeological dig. The thought of “finding herself” dead and floating in this broken vessel caused her stomach to tighten.

  The relic was an utter wreck. There were holes large enough to fly a light cruiser into it. What looked like divots from a distance were actually huge craters in the armor. Even if they had the technology to perform repairs on a ship such as this, this one was a total loss. A total loss as far as warships are concerned, but a technological treasure trove for her people.

  This was also the biggest historical find ever.

  “Take us closer, and spread the ships out, active scans,” Jackie ordered. “And come in slow.”

  The ship was massive. So many weapons emplacements, or at least where many of there were at one time.

  “Start peppering it with miniprobes.”

  The miniprobes were developed for search and rescue operations and would seek out openings, mapping out the interior, at least as far as it could get. Hundreds were sent out to investigate and map the ship.

  “Pari, could we reverse engineer some of the tech here?” Jackie asked, excited about the possibilities.

  “Perhaps some things, but honestly this is so far past where you are, it may take hundreds of years.”

  “Even with your help?”

  “Damaged AI here, remember? I’m also missing many modules that were supposed to be loaded,” it said.

  “Perhaps those modules exist somewhere over there,” she retorted, pointing at the image of the dead ship.

  “Perhaps.”

  “You did pick up a signal coming from it, so you can’t be totally broken.”

  “Thank you, High Queen!” Pari responded.

  “Any idea how or why it would be sending an intermittent signal after all these eons?” Jackie asked.

  “Hopefully we can answer that.”

  “And hopefully that will mean a working computer system somewhere, which might contain a valuable library of information!”

  ##

  Jackie sent a corvette away with requests for engineers and as many ships with towing capacity as could be spared along with a Gate as she was not about to waste another second that did not need to be spent getting this back to her new base of operations, San Agustin. Having a Gate brought out here would mean they did not need to transport this behemoth via FTL, as it could very well break up under the stress of travel.

  After a day taking exterior and interior scans, they were able to estimate the point of origin of a power source. It happened to coincide with a few sections of the ship the miniprobes could not access, which hopefully meant areas still intact.

  “This is creepy,” Rick said, watching as they approached the massive ship, of which the sheer scale was mind blowing. The shuttle was approaching a large hangar which had the doors partially blown off

  Jackie was just trying to take it all in. This was her heritage, her ancestors built however many of these. They ruled the entirety of the galaxy for eons until it all came crashing down. This ship might provide clues to that past, but more importantly, this was a technological bonanza.

  Coming into the ship, she had a feeling that was so familiar to her.

  Sevinc. There are Sevinc nodes here or at least a single node. I can feel it’s power, if just barely. Perhaps this is what they used to power their ships? Pari?

  <>

  The shuttles had their exterior lights on due to the hangar being pitch black. Each was designed for zero-gravity landings and were equipped with magnetized skids. Safe operation in space for vehicles that resided inside moving starships was paramount.

  Exiting the transports, each member of the team magnetized their boots, standard procedure for boarding a dead ship.

  The landing party included Jackie, Rick, a few teams of scientists, a hundred marines and hundreds of ACUs. This ship was enormous, and there was no telling what sort of difficulties waited for them trying to move from section to section. The ACUs were growing on her because they were just so darn versatile. Though she thought that bringing guns was a waste of time, Rick insisted everyone was armed.

  Right now, everyone was operating off their HUDs, which used maps provided by the tiny drones and headed to the back of the hangar. The open door there led to a series of corridors.

  Freedom. Perhaps there is a lot to be guessed about a people by the names they choose for their warships.

  <>

  Apparently not powerful enough.

  They took another turn down another wrecked corridor. There was much debris, even deep into the ship. Well, perhaps not very deep considering the scale of it all.

  There did not appear to be burns from laser fire on the walls of the section they were in. All the damage thus far in this tiny section seemed to have been caused by massive explosions elsewhere in the ship, cascading the damage.

  Up ahead was a grouping of bodies. Rick turned one over and shined a light.

  “Frozen crew members,” he said.

  “How do we know if it’s crew and not a boarding party?” Jackie asked.

  “We don’t.”

  Another twenty meters and they had to have the ACUs clear away debris that was obstructing the path.

  Their interior maps of the ship also included areas blown out due to battle damage. From there they were able to narrow down reasonably intact sections of the ship rather quickly. Not surprisingly, the undamaged regions were towards the center of the ship.

  “The main cavern this debris is from is huge! We are on the outer edges of it, but will hopefully be able to cut our way in shortly. Was probably a nuke that penetrated the skin of the ship and went off inside,” one of the engineers said.

  The thought made Jackie shiver, as she could not help but think of all those who perished.

  Up ahead was a closed door, the probes were not able to see anything past it. Rick called for two ACUs to force it open. Upon opening it, there was nothing but black.

  “Send in some more probes,” Ri
ck commanded.

  One of the marines took his backpack off and retrieved two probes from it. After he pressed a few buttons on his tablet, the probes took off into the black to map it out.

  Rick then took out half a dozen glow sticks and threw them in at various angles. They just kept going in every direction, except directly ahead.

  Taking out a spotlight, Rick lit up the expanse directly in front of them. Debris cluttered the area, bodies and body parts were everywhere. This would not be exactly safe to cross, but they could make it safe instead of waste time looking for another way around.

  Once they obtained complete imagery of the area, it became apparent what happened. This section of the ship had suffered a secondary explosion, probably an internal system. It took out an area larger than the WFS Colt, the Westerly Federation destroyer on which Jackie had once served.

  “Okay people, time for zip lines!” Rick belted.

  One marine secured one end of a line to a bulkhead and shot the other end with a gun specifically made for this. She then crawled across to the other side, carrying one end of a heavier line that her buddies had secured to the bulkhead. Upon reaching the other side, she secured the line and everyone started making their way across.

  Once they crossed over, they had to force another door open. This time, they crossed into an area of the ship that thus far looked undamaged.

  “Shining a light around, this place looks like it was built yesterday. Looks as new as the Hania,” Jackie commented.

  “I know, it’s kind of eerie,” Rick responded.

  Pari indicated they needed to go down a shaft that was up ahead and on the left.

  So much we are skipping past, so many discoveries.

  <>

  Agreed.

  Going down the shaft was fun for Jackie. Up, down, forward, it was all the same in a weightless environment. It was both intimidating and peaceful making that trip. Their suits had small jetpacks that provided light, controlled thrust all the way down, one and a half kilometers. The two internal probes went down ahead of them, illuminating the way. Once at the bottom of the shaft, they forced another door open and went into the attached corridor. Now it was time for the magboots again, so they could walk and stay oriented.

  As they entered another new looking section of the ship, the lights automatically came on.

  “I guess we’re close to the power source,” Rick said.

  “I just hope our movements don’t activate internal defenses,” Jackie responded.

  The doors they passed had writing next to them that was unrecognizable, Jackie presumed it was the ancient Homem script.

  “The power source is just ahead,” she said, pointing to the large double doors.

  After forcing yet another set of doors, they entered a small room, the lights automatically coming on.

  “A break room? Tell me we did not come all this way because some Homem crewmember didn’t turn off the coffee pot!” Jackie said.

  “I think this is a control room,” one of the engineers pointed out, with an audible gulp.

  “A control room for what?” she demanded.

  They moved towards another set of double doors and forced them open.

  Stepping in was an enormous space, the lights in there came on automatically. This was a storage room of sorts. It had row after row of containers stacked on retractable shelves. Jackie approached one of the shelves to get a better look.

  “Oh, my God!” she exclaimed.

  The shelves were storing stasis pods. Active stasis pods. In this room alone, there were thousands of members of the dead Homem civilization.

  Out of everything she thought she would find, this was not one of them.

  “Pari,” Jackie said over the audible comm so that his response could be heard as well, “is there any way to tell if these pods are viable? While I can only hope, I find it difficult to believe after all this time reviving these people is possible.”

  “I can actually establish a wireless connection here! Yes! The pods are indeed in good condition, and the occupants are viable!”

  It all seemed too good to be true. Sustainable stasis for the fifty-thousand years that had passed since that once great empire fell?

  “Pari, what is your estimation of the crew size of this thing?”

  “Freedom had a crew complement of ninety-five thousand and eighty-two individuals,” he responded.

  Something sounded fishy about that number.

  “Weren’t the Homem’s advanced?”

  “Yes, they were, High Queen! Why do you ask?”

  “Then why a large crew? Why didn’t they automate more?”

  “The Homem Empire abhorred independently mobile artificial intelligence,” Pari answered.

  “Um, like the killer robots you made for us?”

  Silence.

  “We’ll talk about this later,” Jackie said. “In the meantime, tell me more about how many crew are in stasis and if there are more chambers like this one.”

  “There is a total of fifteen chambers like this one, each holding sixty-four hundred stasis pods. Two chambers appear to be in areas of the ship that suffered catastrophic damage, so I doubt we will find active pods there. Another one of the chambers was logged as being half full, but a power failure occurred approximately forty-three thousand years ago, and their occupants perished. While a few of the pods in the intact areas have pods that have failed over the millennia, it appears we have twenty-two thousand, three hundred and twelve viable pods.”

  “Wow. Well, we obviously cannot take them out of stasis here. Any grand plans, Pari?”

  “Yes, High Queen. These are meant to be unloaded in bulk. With the damage to the ship, we will have to cut through several bulkheads to get them out.”

  “What about power? I don’t want to kill them by moving them.”

  “Then we should get moving fast. The power core is close to an emergency shutdown and will not last another one hundred and twelve years.”

  Jackie could not help by bust out a laugh.

  “High Queen, these are very energy efficient, but I need to amend my earlier statement. I compute that with the lights on in here, and whatever other systems that were activated suddenly by our presence, that power estimate is more like sixty years.”

  Only running the lighting and whatever minor systems that went with it was draining the battery dry. Any other system suddenly coming online could kill the power and the last survivors of the ancient Homem Empire.

  We have no time to lose! she thought to herself.

  “And High Queen,” Pari added with a pause.

  “Spill it!” she said.

  “The former High Queen is here. She’s alive.”

  Chapter 11

  San Agustin

  Jackie’s head was spinning. She was now the owner of the largest private system containing around a dozen shipyards, an ancient dreadnought of unimaginable proportions, and over twenty thousand survivors of an ancient civilization. Oh, and their fearless leader.

  That and the influx of personnel, numbering fifteen million and climbing, was an administrative nightmare. The fact that she had her handy-dandy AI create non-sentient administrative AI’s to help out was the only thing preventing major accidents from happening.

  Many of the ground-based facilities were plug and play, with soft boots connecting the buildings to one another. There were now thousands of buildings housing every type of facility, entire cities being created with modular, portable buildings.

  Food, supplies, more equipment, and more personnel continued to flood into the system as the Commonwealth and Reslorians wanted to move critical assets there in lieu of the now hot war the Zikars had launched. Thankfully they were only concentrating on the Westerly Federation, but that could change any day now.

  The engineers had successfully created compatible power supplies for the stasis pods, which
could be plugged in per rack or pod. The important thing had been getting them off the wreck safely without injuring or killing the occupants. The racks were carefully transported and secured in one of the empty hangars aboard the Hania before the dreadnought was brought across the Gate system. Jackie was proud of the fact that not a single pod was damaged. And to top that off, the ancient super ship received no further damage in the transport process.

  The chaos that ensued its arrival in San Agustin was comical as no small number of ships moved far from it. Seeing a giant ghost ship entering into the system was no doubt going to launch a lot of lore as many spacers were superstitious.

  “I wonder if these people will be able to help us,” Jackie said, referencing the Homem individuals in stasis.

  “I imagine their technology is so far past ours that it may be difficult for them even to understand their own foundations or relate to ours,” Alice commented.

  “I’m told they located the power source and disconnected it, preserving whatever is left. Having an active one will be important for our scientists to study.”

  “What is the opinion of the powers that be?” Alice asked, referencing the Commonwealth and Resloria.

  “‘The timing is astonishing!’ is what the prime minister said. The king was asking how soon the old ship can be armed and sent into battle. I’m not sure he was pleased when I told him that was unlikely ever to happen.”

  “I imagine not.”

  ##

  Jackie had been to the secure facility where the ancient stasis pods had been transported. She had spent hours in front of one particular pod, that of the former High Queen.

  While named identifiers were missing, presumably part of another system they did not have, this one was special and stood out. It had additional backups and internal power.

  The woman was visible from behind a window, exposing only her face. By examining the failed pods, it was determined that people were naked when put into stasis. The scientists had presumed this was to remove as many artificial substances as possible from contact with the skin for whatever purpose, but they just did not have enough information to faintly hazard a guess.