Exiles (The Progenitor Trilogy, Book One)

by Dan Worth

  ‘Rekkid look at this!’ cried Katherine. ‘We need to access these systems, this could be the key to what happened on this planet a million years ago during the civil war and whatever your people got up to ten thousand years ago that kick started the Maranist religion. We have to get this thing working! Think of what it might be able to tell us about what happened back then.’

  Against the background hum of the machines, Rekkid read out aloud. ‘Authorised Access Only – Please Enter Passkey: Unauthorised access of this device and its computer systems is punishable under Arkari Law. Meritarch Council Dictum 233, Article 3, Section 7. A31775.4.32. Well,’ he said, giddy with elation. ‘Anyone here any good at hacking?’ Grinning madly he looked at Katherine and doubted he had ever seen her seem so full of joy.

  Chapter 22

  Commander Haines staggered through the smoke filled gangway, the pain in his head almost unbearable despite the drugs that the medics had administered. They had patched him up as best they could under the circumstances, but it looked like he was going to lose the eye. What the hell, he thought, they were all dead men anyway and he had to get back to the bridge. He had to do something.

  His progress was slow. The corridor was full of medical and repair personnel, tending to the wounded and the damage the ship had sustained in the battle as best they could. A number of wounded lay slumped against the walls, Haines wondered if they were all still alive: several were starting to turn blue from blood loss. The air was acrid, filled with the smells of combat. Parts of the ship were still on fire and the smoke was being cycled through the environmental systems so that the scent of charring flesh and shipboard materiel permeated the entire vessel.

  The captain of the Borodino was dead, cut down as the K’Soth boarding party stormed the bridge. Haines had led the counter assault. He and the ship’s complement of marines had retaken the bridge at the cost of many lives and he himself had been badly wounded. It had taken half a dozen shots to the warrior’s head from Haines’s pistol before he had gone down, but not before his claws had gouged the Commander’s face and eye.

  He would grieve for his dead comrades later if he got the chance, but with Captain Acheson dead he was now in command of the destroyer group, or what was left of it. He hoped that the hurried orders he had issued from the infirmary had been carried out. If this was going to be their last stand he was damned if they weren’t going to go down fighting and take as many of the K’Soth with them as possible.

  This war had turned into a disaster. If you could even call it a war, it had been little more than a hurried rout as the K’Soth smashed through the Commonwealth’s defences. Their ships were too few and too poorly armed to repel the swarms of marauding alien craft. Now the remnants of the fleet had gathered in Eta Cassiopeia to make a final, perhaps futile stand to defend the system. The orbital batteries around Elysium would bolster their defence, but it seemed that the end was upon them one way or another. Once Elysium fell, the last bastion of defence before the Solar System would be gone and the Commonwealth could expect little more than slavery at best or at worst, annihilation.

  Haines would make them pay though. Lying in agony he had formulated a plan that could blunt the K’Soth assault and perhaps buy them some time. He hoped the K’Soth would take the bait he had set.

  Their group of Mars class destroyers had been deployed to a forward position at the edge of the Eta Cassiopeia system to act as point defence. As they approached the system’s asteroid belt they had encountered a large scouting party of K’Soth Eviscerator class destroyers lurking in the rock field. In the ensuing battle the alien vessels had succeeded in boarding the Borodino and destroying the Joan of Arc before they were driven off. It was the escape of the scouting party that Haines was counting on. He was hoping that the K’Soth would take the bait and, unable to resist the opportunity of easy pickings outside of Elysium’s defences, would attack here first.

  Haines finally reached the bridge as a dull thump confirmed that they had finally broken free of the wrecked K’Soth destroyer that had conducted the boarding action against them. The scene of carnage he had left here had been cleaned up somewhat. The bodies had been stretchered away and the gore hastily wiped from the floor and consoles. Looking out of the port windows he was greeted with the satisfying sight of the alien wreck, broken and venting its atmosphere, being given the finally coup de grace by the guns of the destroyer group.

  Haines leant against a console and cleared his throat. ‘It is my sad duty to inform you all that the Captain did not survive his injuries,’ he said with sadness. There was a stony silence. Haines guessed that many of the crew, those that had seen Acheson’s injuries at least, had probably resigned themselves to this fact. He continued. ‘Therefore as of now I am assuming command of this vessel and this group. Have my orders been carried out?’

  ‘Sir,’ said one of his lieutenants. ‘We have deployed the mines as you detailed. The other ships report that their crews have done the same.’

  ‘Excellent Lieutenant,’ he replied. ‘Let’s hope this works.’

  The Lieutenant, a young and frightened man, began to speak. ‘Sir, sir may I speak frankly?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Sir, are we going to die?’ The man was visible shaking.

  Haines noticed that the other bridge crew were also looking at him. He couldn’t tell them the truth, that yes; they were in all probability, doomed. He was their leader now and they looked to him for inspiration. ‘We all have to die sometime Lieutenant, but I’m damned if it’s going to be today. Trust me, those bastards can’t resist a fight, and I’m going to use this to our advantage.’ Behind the lieutenant, Haines could see the remains of the Joan of Arc as she drifted broken-backed in a cloud of debris, vented gases and the tiny figures of human bodies. ‘For now though,’ he continued. ‘We wait. Helm, plot a course to the Elysium defences, I want us out of here as soon as our K’Soth friends arrive.’

  They had to take the bait, they had to. Haines had ordered that the asteroid field and the space around the destroyer group be sown with matter/anti-matter fusion mines. The tiny weapons would be very difficult to detect, but fitted with proximity fuses they could wreak immense damage on any fleet that blundered into them. The K’Soth had not shown much tactical subtlety or caution so far in this war, instead relying on weight of numbers. He hoped that they would act true to form, or else they were all going to die. The fear welled up in him, threatened to overwhelm him as the pain in his head grew and grew.

  Admiral Haines shuddered into wakefulness and found that his body was drenched in sweat. He lay in the darkness of his cabin as his mind sought to distinguish reality from the nightmare it had just experienced. Except it had been reality, once. Haines had been there at the Battle for Eta Cassiopeia and had seen his friends and comrades die in the face of the K’Soth onslaught.

  It had been years since he’d last had this nightmare, now it had resurfaced and he was about to face the old enemy once again. Perhaps that explained it. He had spent every waking moment of every day for the past few months planning the forthcoming war. It had to be right. They had to prevail. Failure could not be contemplated. Now everything was in place it was only a matter of time until the Commonwealth found an excuse to put his plan to the test.

  He knew the next part of the nightmare that would come. After all, he had re-lived it countless times before. Resigned to a restless night he slipped back to sleep.

  They had waited for hours with no sign. The wait was agonising: each minute seemed like hours, each hour stretched into days. They had to come. They had to take the bait. Then his sensors operator began to speak, he was agitated.

  ‘Contact! Commander, we have multiple inbound warp trails converging on this position bearing zero by three fifty, range one hundred and fifty one million kilometres and closing. My god….’

  ‘Numbers Ensign?’

  ‘Commander, there’s over a thousand ships inbound!’

  ‘Activate shields, bring th
e weapons on-line. Helm, prepare to engage full reverse thrust and bring us about to engage the drives. Ensign, are they taking the bait?’

  ‘Sir, it seems so. Range is now under a hundred million kilometres.’

  ‘Stand by all stations.’

  There was a tense wait as the range to the enemy vessels counted down.

  ‘Sir the first wave of ships is coming out of their jump, they are heading straight for us.’

  Haines could see them, a hundred or so ships in a huge claw formation reaching out for his small destroyer group as they arrived in a wall of spatial distortions hundreds of kilometres across. Another wave arrived behind them, and another, and another. They powered through the asteroids at full speed towards the Borodino and her fleet. Haines watched them intently as they drew closer, they hadn’t seen the mines and if they had, it was too late for them to do anything about it.

  The first ship triggered a mine. The actinic flash of pure matter-energy conversion blossomed outward in a beautiful but deadly sphere of annihilation. More followed, in a random staccato of immense explosions that destroyed the alien ships entirely, or else turned the great vessels into gigantic hunks of tumbling slag. The second wave of ships tried to turn away in vain and slid sideways or backwards into the expanding blast waves. Shattered ships collided with each other, producing fresh explosions and further carnage amidst the storm of radiation.

  A wall of debris, broken ships and shattered asteroids began to hurtle toward the Commonwealth vessels and by now the other waves of K’Soth ships had realised what was happening. They began to veer away and around the minefield, seeking to outflank the destroyers and trap them amidst their own weapons. It was time to leave. Now. Haines gave the order.

  ‘All ships, make for the rendezvous point around Elysium. We’ve done all we can here, this should give us more of a fighting chance. Helm, get us the hell out of here.’

  The Borodino began to turn, agonisingly slowly, until she faced towards Elysium. Haines watched the monitors as the K’Soth fleet began to encircle them in an immense four pronged pincer movement. He felt elated: his actions had just destroyed a quarter of their assault fleet. Doubtless the K’Soth would want to exact revenge and now they were almost within gunnery range. Sensors displayed power spikes within the reactors of the enemy vessels as they brought their weapons to bear; one hit from the main gun of one of those War Temples and it would all be over.

  As the Borodino’s jump drive activated Haines breathed a sigh of relief, they had made it, for now.

  They arrived in Elysium orbit with most of their fleet battered but intact, save for the Joan of Arc and the Megiddo which had failed to escape from the minefield, falling prey to a War Temple as her jump drive stalled. But with the K’Soth hot on their tails they had little time to rest.

  The defences around Elysium seemed desperately inadequate. A couple of hundred ships, the remnants of the Commonwealth Navy, drawn up in a ragged battle line around the planet’s orbital defences, versus seven hundred or so K’Soth ships with the likelihood of reinforcements.

  They had not long to wait. The enemy fleet jumped in a hundred kilometres from the Commonwealth position, filling the sky with ships as the K’Soth war machine bore down upon the defenders. As weapons and shields were powered up and the last few fighter and bomber wings launched toward the enemy, there seemed to be little hope. Haines knew then that in all likelihood he was witnessing the end, that human civilisation and those of their allies would be crushed underfoot by the K’Soth to become another footnote in galactic history to be pondered over by alien historians centuries hence. If this was to be the end, then so be it. He wasn’t going to go down without a fight. He watched a vast armada of ships bearing down on them and gave the order to fire everything that they had left.

  Hours later and Haines was still alive. His crew lay dying around him, his was ship cut almost in two and drifting out of control towards the decimated planet below, yet it was still firing with every available weapon. The defenders had fought fiercely with every means available to them. Crews fought and died by the hundreds with the desperation that only those at bay can muster. Yet it was not enough. They were being steadily ground down, and the world of Elysium lay in ruins, its cities reduced to ash by the long range bombardment of the K’Soth fleet that the trapped Navy was powerless to prevent. The night side of the planet was pin pricked with the light of entire cities ablaze as shockwaves churned its atmosphere. Haines knew that Earth would meet the same fate and that humanity’s brief spark would be erased from the universe.

  But it was not to be the end, not yet. Haines was about to witness judgement wrought upon the K’Soth for all that they had done in this war. He first noticed it on the sensors console, over the shoulder of the now headless Ensign who had manned the station, decapitated by the shrapnel from an exploding kamikaze fighter that had penetrated under the Borodino’s shields. The view port it had shattered was now obscured by an armoured blast door.

  The sensor console was showing more ships entering the system, a very great number of them. But they were not K’Soth, they were Arkari. Unable to do anything else, Haines rushed to the starboard bridge windows and looked out at the enclosing ball of K’Soth ships that were steadily smashing the remaining Commonwealth defenders. Energy beams played across hulls, tearing great gouges from vessels as battered wrecks and fragments of ships and fighters spun lazily amidst the firestorm.

  The Arkari arrived. It seemed that the K’Soth had already detected them, for many of the ships on the outer shell of their fleet had begun to turn outwards towards the new threat to meet it head on, but it was no use. The Arkari emerged from their jumps on all sides of the K’Soth and tore into their fleet like nothing Haines had ever seen. The graceful winged craft were far larger, far faster and far more manoeuvrable than those of their enemies and their weapons were without equal.

  Based upon the distortion of space-time itself, the main guns of the Arkari fleet literally ripped the K’Soth ships apart: splitting them in half, scooping out their vitals and scattering them in the void as they swooped and danced among their victims in a display of utterly bestial destruction. Even after K’Soth ships lay sundered, the avenging Arkari vessels returned to further batter them, dissect them, nay - even toy with them like sharks in a frenzy.

  Panic began to sweep through the K’Soth fleet as their moment of victory at once turned into a rout. In extremis they resorted to more desperate measures. Haines saw it happen to another ship first; the carrier Sun Tzu was split in half as a K’Soth War Temple, already burning, rammed it amidships in a suicidal gesture of defiance. As he looked he saw an approaching destroyer. Head-on, its superstructure appeared as miniature city skyline mirrored above and below the jutting line of its forward gun decks. It grew larger as it closed with increasing speed. The Borodino’s guns made a desperate attempt to stop its kamikaze charge but without success. Haines began to scream.

  He heard himself call out aloud as he came awake. He was shaking, the memory of that awful moment still fresh in his mind when his ship had been split in two. The raw fear and sense of utter helplessness as the enemy destroyer had rammed the Borodino amidships.

  He needed a drink to calm himself. Still shaking slightly, he got out of bed and staggered towards his desk to retrieve the bottle of whisky that he kept in there. Sitting heavily in his chair he began to pour himself a finger of the golden liquid. His console chimed and he pressed the key to answer it.

  ‘Sir, you have a briefing with the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in an hour over the encrypted hypercom.’

  ‘Thank you Commander,’ Haines replied wearily. ‘I’ll be there.’

  ‘Sir, are you alright? You sound a little…’

  ‘I’m fine Commander, I ah…’ he gave a short embarrassed laugh. ‘I just had bad dream that’s all. See you in an hour, Haines out.’

  He sat and sipped his whisky thoughtfully. Some part of Haines hoped that this was it, that his superio
rs had come to a decision. He was a man of action. The waiting was killing him and all this prolonged tension had stirred up his old demons again. His crews were fresh and eager enough. Too much hanging around would be bad for their morale and their capability as a fighting force. If they were going to have a war he would rather it be sooner than later. He would try and impress this upon the President. Haines finished his drink and went to get properly dressed for his briefing.

  Chapter 23

  ‘Captain Spiers, you should see what we’ve found down here! We can scarcely believe it ourselves. A whole underground complex of advanced alien technology, and it’s all perfectly intact and in working order!’ Rekkid was speaking hurriedly to the Darwin via his comm., almost babbling with excitement. The signal was faint and on sound only: the depth of the chamber prohibited anything else and the assembled ranks of alien machinery appeared to be causing further interference. He could barely hear Spiers as he asked for his initial assessment of the find.

  ‘Say again Captain?’ he strained to listen to the scratchy, broken reply. ‘No, no we don’t know what it’s for, but it looks like some sort of control centre. We’ve also found a terminal for the computer system but it’s been locked with an encryption key. We need…’ Rekkid made an exasperated gesture. ‘Captain we’ll come to the surface and contact you again,’ he said loudly, his voice echoing inside the room. ‘Rekkid out.’ He turned to the others: ‘Come on, we have to get back to the surface and talk to the Darwin from there. ‘