The Artemis Trap: The Trellon Adventures Book 2

by DN Farrell

  The Doctor looked around the room for support, finally looking over at science officer Jebelt. But Jebelt just looked over at him with a defeated look on her face and shrugged her shoulders slightly, before folding her arms and looking back over in the direction of the captain.

  "Is that it then!" Exclaimed the doctor, possibly more outraged by the apparent indifference of his fellow offices, than the reaction of the Artemisians.

  "Look Doc, we would like to help but we can't force our help upon them and there are no formal treaties or ties between the Federation and Artemis 11." Trellon explained, while moving his right hand, with open palm, in an effort to calm the doctor down.

  "Sorry doctor." Said the captain. "But we must accept the wishes of the Artemisians. I'm sure the king would like to help, but his hands are tied."

  "Sccchhhhtttt!" Kell exclaimed, while making a knife cutting gesture across his throat, indicating that if they go down to the planet surface again, that the king will end up losing his head.

  The doctor just looked over at kell with an irritated look on his face. Then standing up, he exclaimed "I joined the Federation to explore the galaxy and help bring medical care to the needy, what is this craziness all about!" Then he quickly turned and walked out the sliding briefing room doors.

  The captain looked over at the door, with an intensely irritated look on his face, but as captain sometimes he had to tolerate deeply irritating behaviour, from his crew members, and although he was tempted to punish the doctor, for his breach of correct etiquette towards the captain, he held his tongue instead, after all Caskew had rotted in a jail cell for a few days, with the threat of immanent death hanging over his head, only to find out in the end that the entire experience had been a waste of his time and effort.

  "Captain, he'll calm down, he put a lot of work into this program and he hasn't the faintest clue about political matters." Science Officer Jebelt said, in an effort to pacify the captain.

  With that the captain suddenly jumped out of his chair and stood by the Plexiglass viewing window, with his back to his officers. "I'm deeply sorry for all the time waste but there you have it, dismissed." He said and with that everyone knew that the meeting was over and the last few days of hopes, tensions and worries, were just a great big waste of time, like most of their activities in the Kolatian Quadrant.

  Over the next minute or so, the various officers quietly got up and left, some of them simply walking out the door, while others chit chatted for a bit, before leaving. The captain was the king of the ship and once the captain dismissed his crew, they all knew it was time to leave and this included Colonel Kell, who while being the equivalent rank to the captain, the rank of colonel in the marines been equivalent to the rank of captain in the navy, he respected the fact that Jobi was the boss of this ship and with that, he also up and left as he went of chit chatting with Lieutenant Chandrima. A minute or so later only Captain Jobi and Commander Trellon were left alone in the briefing room.

  "Set the lights on dull Commander." The captain said. "It makes the planet Artemis 11 look all that much more attractive.” Commander Trellon did what his skipper asked him to do and then stood beside him, as the two men looked out of the Plexiglas window, at the bright blue green world below.

  "The dim lights make the planet Artemis 11 look very attractive don't you think?" Captain Jobi asked Trellon, without deviating his gaze away from the planet below.

  "Yes captain, but then again every planet looks nice from two hundred kilometers away."

  "That's true of course Trellon, that's true, The captain agreed and then he addressed the commander. "Trell you did well down there. Surviving the assault from the king’s guard and the Murcu was a great achievement and your wild plan to catch the conspirators really paid off, keep up the good work." The captain said, happy to give a complement in private, but never in public. "If you hadn't survived and the princess had been killed, then the entire away team could have been executed and the word would have spread like wild fire across the quadrant, that the Federation was up to no good." The captain said, while looking over at Trellon, with a leery expression on his face.

  "Yes captain, I understand." Replied Trellon. "But we only caught one conspirator, I think the real big fish was the bearded man who dematerialized."

  "Yes Trell, also do you think he was the same man who took the ransom from you in the Qorabo temple?" The captain asked, while now looking over at Trellon and indicating for him to sit down.

  "Probably captain, if so that's a pretty neat deal, they took one hundred kilograms of gold from the King, while setting up the Federation for a fall, if they're plan had succeeded." Replied Trellon, who now sat on the left hand side of Captain Jobi.

  "Well it's a good thing then that you foiled their plan."

  "But what about the man sir, if we can find him we can make a significant step forward in making this Quadrant a safe place to live in?" Trellon queried his captain, in an effort to get some closure on the incident.

  "Yes I agree Trell, but we couldn't find him."

  "Couldn't or wouldn't captain?"

  "What do you mean Commander?"

  "It’s obvious that the man teleported to another location on the planet, as there were no other space ships in orbit around the planet, but where did he go to?"

  "He obviously had an automatic teleportation device Trell, you know how they work, you teleport down to a world and bring along a mini- teleporter, you plant it somewhere and then if you want to get out of there in a hurry, you simply press a button and you zip from point A to point B." The captain replied with an acerbic look on his face.

  "Exactly captain, but we could have tracked the teleportation emissions and found that base unit and then tracked the bearded man?" Enquired an excited looking Trellon.

  "Oh now I see." Smiled the captain back at him, happy at Trellons tenacity. "I know we could have done that commander, but you have seen how tenuous the kings position is down there, it was bad enough that I sent a squad of marines down there to run around the castle and chase down the kings own guard; from a political perspective I couldn't follow best practice, I had to hold back, what else could I have done?" he asked rhetorically, then added "The trail has become cold and really we have nothing to follow up on. Kell saw an outline of a fat bearded man in the light of a blaster shot and you saw a bearded man with a knife to the princess's throat, from over fifty feet away, we have nothing more at this stage..., just let it go Trell."

  "But sir, if we could catch that man, it would help the Federation a great deal, as our time in Artemis 11 was a trap from beginning to end."

  "I agree Trell, but like I said we have a cold trail and an urgent call to meet up with the rear admiral." The captain said and then gave a quick look back out of the Plexiglass window, before looking over at commander Trellon.

  “Rabil Rangha captain.” Trellon said in a slow whisper while looking out through the Plexiglas window once again. “So what then captain we catch Rabil Rangha, then what, we just wait for the next ambush from the Vis Yar?”

  “You feel we’re simply running from pillar to post?” Queried the captain.

  “Yes captain, we forget about one rebel and chase another, only for that first rebel to come back and attack us at a later date!”

  “We have to think of the bigger picture Jack; sure we have to capture rebels but the only way we can make progress, in this quadrant, is by keeping on looking for opportunities . The Vis Yar rebels are intricately tied in with the Analusian Alliance and the peoples of the Kolatian Quadrant are conservative and distrustful, we will have to win them over time, that's the only way we can win here. So long as we are the external aggressors, running around the quadrant, with blaster in hand, we will be the fall guys!"

  "Well captain," Trellon said with some irritation, “that’s exactly what we are about to do now as we chase Rabil Rangha!”

  Captain Jobi shrugged simply and then said, “Yes we will catch Rabil Rangha or at least we will try to ca
tch him, half the security services in the three nearest quadrants have tried to catch him and failed, but there’s more to this than the drama of chasing down rebels Jack. We have to make some friends along the way, even while hunting down Rabil Rangha, we have to try and make strategic alliances, for sooner or later we won’t just have a mad bomber to think about, rather we will have full on war.” The captain looked back over at Trellon and then added, “Exugenes was only the beginning, a way for the Vis Yar to do some fundraising, but the real big attack is only coming, you just wait and see Jack, just wait and see.”

  The captain then gave Trellon a quick slap on his right shoulder, before heading off and leaving him alone. Trellon walked back over towards the Plexiglass window and looked at the beautiful blue green planet below. The competitor in him wanted to win and make a home run, by getting the fat bearded guy. But the captain was correct, if they were to get past the infuriating frustration of having all their efforts thrown back in their faces, the Federation were going to have to win over some of the rebel forces and get them to side with them. But how to do this was turning into an intriguing challenge, not just for Jobi and Trellon, but for the entire senior officer team of the Kolatian Quadrant Expeditionary Force.

  Preview to Death at Dusk

  Wondering what happens next?

  Read the prologue of “Death at Dusk” below. Keep your eyes peeled as the book “Death at Dusk” will be released soon!

  Prologue

  There's big trouble brewing at Space Station Alpha, will the crew of the Byrant manage to save the fifteen thousand space station personnel from certain doom?

  Prelude to Chaos

  The bearded man fiddled with a package and then taking a quick look over at the security guard, standing at the entrance to the naval offices on Space Station Alpha, the bearded man stopped fiddling with his package and then placed it in his coat pocket. Looking from left to right, at the busy road, he could clearly see a mixture of pedestrians and flying cars and bikes, which swept overhead.

  The man walked over towards a small retail outlet, which lay directly opposite to the naval offices, he stopped for a few seconds and bought himself a small packet of candy, paying for it with a swipe of his right palm, across the payment screen. Thanking the retail droid, he slowly crossed the road and started walking past the naval offices. He threw a few pieces of candy into his mouth and then dropped the candy wrapper along with a small package into a litter bin, about twenty feet from the naval offices. The man took a quick peep back at the naval offices and the two sailors, who guarded it, they seemed to be oblivious to any wrong doing.

  Then quickly walking down the road, he hailed a taxi droid and hopping in he ordered, "The Spaceport and make it quick!"

  "Right ho!" Replied the jolly looking taxi droid, a small cylindrical bodied droid, with a rectangular head, rapid moving eyes and a small cap and a scarf. Some taxi companies on Space Station Alpha, liked to play with the idea of themed taxi droids and "The Scottish Hills" company, had decked out all of its droids in suitable attire, usually a scarf and a cap and a Scottish accent, so as to entertain the clients, who were mainly earthlings (people either from earth or off earth colonies).

  Space Station Alpha was the Naval Space Station, in the Kolatian Quadrant, and it consisted of a city in space, consisting of an equatorial cityscape set into a giant plastic sphere. You could go Overworld or Underworld; Overworld had all of the buildings facing upwards towards the sphere, while Underworld was based on the flip side, of the equatorial landscape, and the bottom of the buildings, in this case, faced downwards towards the other half of the great plastic sphere. Gravity been maintained in the three kilometer wide sphere, via a large series of Gravitron Engines (gravity engines), based in a ten thousand square feet compound in the heart of the equatorial cityscape.

  In total, the Space Station Alpha at its equator was three kilometers in diameter, so from ground level, the plastic globe surrounding the equatorial cityscape, which lay a good one and a half kilometers in height. At any one time, there was approximately fifteen thousand navy and marine personnel and families, based upon the Space Station Alpha and a few hundred civilians, most of whom where Kolatian natives. The Space Station acted as an administrative base for the Galactic Federations Expeditionary Force, in the Kolatian Quadrant. It also contained large hospital facilities and large factories and farms, which could produce everything which the thirty thousand man strong expeditionary force required.

  Racing across the two kilometers distance between the naval offices and the space port, the bearded man, a man in his mid-thirties of stocky build, with a small neat black beard and attractive yet intense look about him, went by the name of Rabil Rangha. He was wanted in three Quadrants for his Vis Yar rebel activities and he had boldly walked straight through immigration control, simply relying upon a palm and eyeball transplant to provide the authorities with a different biometric profile, than his own. He hadn't even bothered hiding his face, figuring that most of the men in the Kolatian Quadrant looked like him, as in they had beards and were on the younger side of middle aged.

  Also his prolife matched his appearance, with his fake profile describing him as been a Kolatian admin officer form the planet Penurys 11.

  Once at the space port, Rabil checked his time, twenty seven minutes before the bomb would explode. He knew it would decimate the naval office's, it might even damage the plastic sphere, which protected the space station from the near vacuum of space. But that would be hoping for too much, from such as small bomb, but next time, next time his bomb would suck out the entire cities population into the inky bleakness of outer space!

  But for now he was in a hurry to get off the space station, before the authorities locked it down, which they would do, once the bomb went off. With hardly seven minutes to detonation, Rabil Rangha, took his one man space ship and exited the spaceport. Once in space, he increased the engine speed quickly, until it was reaching Half Pulse speed, about one hundred and twenty five thousand kilometers per second.

  It would take him a good half an hour to reach his actual ship, which was in orbit behind the moon of the planet Saures 6, which lay about two hundred million kilometers away from the Space Station.

  While waiting, he reached into his overcoat pocket, which was difficult to do, as a one seater spacecraft was about as big as a broom cupboard. Then he flicked his small readout Tab on and watched form several micro sized camera's, which he had planted around the naval HQ. The combined data was collated into a 3 D hologram image, which presented a nice 3 D picture before Rabil Rangha.

  The seconds counted down and passer's by either walked or flew by unaware that in seventeen seconds, they were more than likely about to die. Rabil Rangha also felt a little bit bad for the two sailors, who were standing guard outside of the naval offices. But there was nothing he could do about it. The worst part, for a man who was a former school teacher, was having to take out innocent lives, but the cause was worth his while. The Federation were just another empire who were destroying the way of life in the Kolatian Quadrant and Rabil Ragha had no interest in taking sides, he simply wanted them all dead or gone, ether way was fine by him.

  Watching now finally, there was a sudden glow of red light and the picture momentarily went black and then suddenly it re-emerged, as the cameras based directly outside of naval offices had been incinerated. Instead Rabil Rangha was now reliant upon cameras from hundreds of meters away and he smiled broadly. He had felt a pang of tension and nervousness before the bomb went off. Always that same guilty feeling, like the kid who had accidentally put the house on fire, but he didn't want to tell mommy and daddy it was he who burnt down the house. Then the sudden elation, when he saw months of planning succeed. It was a sacrifice, but a worthy one in his view.

  A large hole in the street was present, where the forty thousand square foot naval offices had once been. Of course the large plastic sphere was still intact, but he had just pierced the heart of the Naval Expeditiona
ry Force and he knew only too well that either killing or maiming the two thousand personnel, who were based there, would really piss off the Federation!

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  Authors Technical Notes

  In this book I present a futuristic society whereby everyone whizzes around way over light speed and where space battles are fought with Hi-Tec equipment. Hopefully it is all self-evident by simply reading the text. But here are a few added notes, which attempt to explain some aspects of the technology, just in case you are finding it difficult to follow.

  Speed

  Regarding speed, although it is apparently impossible to break the light barrier (the speed of light been three hundred thousand kilometers per second or one hundred and eighty six thousand miles per second), I reckon that mankind will find a way around it sooner or later and more than likely it will involve some way of warping space/time, so that the ship doesn’t actually move, hence it is not breaking the laws of physics, rather space moves.