by Saxon Andrew
Soul of the Swords
Brotherhood is
More Than Metal
Contents
Books by Saxon Andrew
Chapter One • Chapter Two • Chapter Three • Chapter Four • Chapter Five • Chapter Six • Chapter Seven • Chapter Eight • Chapter Nine • Chapter Ten • Chapter Eleven • Chapter Twelve • Chapter Thirteen • Chapter Fourteen • Chapter Fifteen • Chapter Sixteen • Chapter Seventeen • Chapter Eighteen • Chapter Nineteen • Chapter Twenty • Chapter Twenty-One • Chapter Twenty-Two • Chapter Twenty-Three • Chapter Twenty-Four • Chapter Twenty-Five
Epilogue
Books by Saxon Andrew
The Annihilation Series
Love Conquers All
The Power of a Queen
A Rose Grows in Weeds
Tommy’s Tale
Searcher
Demon’s Sacrifice
Finding Keepers
(The Seven books above are audio books at Audible.com)
Prequel-Psychic Beginnings
Searching for a Hero
Dahlia’s Deception
Annihilation-The Complete Series Box Set
Ashes of the Realm
Juliette’s Dream
Greyson’s Revenge
Death of an Empire
The Return of the Realm
Lens of Time
The Pyramid Builders
Planet Predators
Pray for the Prey
The End of Time
Star Rover-The Worst of Time
Star Rover-Running Out of Time
Lens of Time-Chosen To Die
The Fight for Creation
Life Warrior
Scout Warrior
Ultimate Warrior
Star Chase
The Lost Prince
(An audio book at Audible.com)
Nowhere to Run
Nowhere to Hide
Probe Predators
Jesse’s Starship
Mike’s War
Joshua’s Walls
Nemesis
Revenge is Best Served Hot
The Search for Orion
Trapped in Time
The Time Takers
Taming A Planet
Exinction
Escape to Earth
Running From Fate
Fighting for Space
Defending Holy Ground
The Legacy of a Conqueror
Living Legends
Defending Earth
The Sequel Series to Escape to Earth
Searching for Death Feeders
Discovery Means Death
The Death Prophecies
The Coming of the Prophet
The Eyes of the Prophet
The Unknown Enemy Will Kill You
No Technology Is Invincible
Survival is Never Free
The Last Prophecy
Stories from the Filament Universe
Gregor’s Run
A Pirate’s Tale
Soul of the Swords
Coming soon
Jimmy’s Dreams
Chapter One
Hefin sat in his command chair on board the Fleet’s Flagship and waited for his replacement to arrive. He was finally going to retire and leave the military for a quiet existence on Heaven. He’d been fighting or preparing for a fight since he was ten years old and the last forty years had been brutal. It would be good to go home and live out his remaining years in peace. He leaned back in his chair and thought about all he had witnessed during his career.
He looked out of the main viewport at the blue, green, and white planet below and smiled. Heaven was a good name for it. More than thirty different species of intelligent beings lived on it and all of them saw each other as brothers and sisters. The cities were beautiful and the tall crystal skyscrapers soaring up into the sky were awe inspiring. Heaven was a truly beautiful place to live.
From above the planet, it was clear that most of it was uninhabited and there was little or no urban sprawl around the cities. The original inhabitants of the planet were his species and they had a love and respect for the planet that all the others that came to live on Heaven accepted as part of their culture. The first species to join the Cryan on Heaven came from a commercial freighter that was forced to crash land on the planet more than two thousand years earlier during the Age of Conquerors. There were more than four hundred beings on the freighter representing ten different species. This was long before the giant commercial trading companies came into existence and most commercial ships were privately owned. The owners and crews lived on their giant vessels along with their families. The freighter’s reactor failed and the giant vessel was barely able to make an emergency landing using emergency power. Most of the ship’s electronic circuits were burned out and the communication system was the first thing to get fried. The freighter’s shuttles were operational, however, they didn’t have stardrives. The freighter and its crew were stranded and help would not be coming. There was no way to replace the damaged electronics on a primitive planet.
The owner of the ship was a Delgat and he knew that he, his family, and the rest of the crew were going to be forced to learn how to survive on this new world. It was at least a beautiful planet and the freighter’s cargo was intended to be delivered to a new planet that was being colonized in another galaxy. They had enough to survive for the short term.
They were there four weeks before the first Cryan airship arrived. It could have gone poorly but the Cryans accepted the stranded beings and welcomed them to share their planet. The Cryan scientists and engineers soon arrived and began assisting the crew in learning how to survive and build the structures needed to house them. The stranded crew came to respect and eventually love the gentle species that came to their assistance.
The Cryan were not an advanced society, they were just entering the atomic age but had not developed space travel. The freighter’s engineers began assisting the Cryans in developing nuclear energy as well as advances in metal alloys. In less than a three hundred years, the planet had built a starship and began exploring the universe around them.
The original crew split up into the ten different species on board and lived in small communities that were close to each other. Their numbers began increasing and over the years, other species began arriving and settling on Heaven. The planet’s name came from a human ship that was fleeing from an aggressive civilization that was attacking the planet they had settled on. The Commander of the ship landed, took one look around and said, “I think we’ve arrived in Heaven.”
The planet was being called Cryan, after the name of the original species, but soon everyone started referring to it as Heaven and the name stuck. The numerous species that came to call it home never had a dispute or war between them; they learned to live together in peace. And the peace continued for more than a thousand years.
But then sixty years ago, a Heaven Starship was attacked and destroyed not far from the filament intersection closest to Heaven by a much larger warship. The Heaven Ship managed to launch a message probe before the ship was destroyed and the planet leaders on Heaven saw the coming of a conquering civilization in their future.
They didn’t want to build weapons of war but knew if they didn’t and the planet was attacked, they could lose their world and their lives. Weapon construction started immediately and every starship was armed with blasters. Small arms were made in the millions and distributed to the population but it was all to no avail; the conqueror arrived before enough warships could be built to defend them.<
br />
The six hundred and twenty Heaven Warships defending the planet were blasted into rubble without damaging a single enemy vessel. It took more than five days for the Huddes Fleet to remove the last Heaven ship, which allowed huge numbers of the cities’ inhabitants to take their small arms along with food supplies and disappear into the surrounding forests and jungles. But millions of civilians were caught in the cities by the Huddes armored landers that brought tens of thousands of warriors to the surface. They enslaved the cities’ populations and forced them to farm and mine the resources a conquering civilization needed. The period of Huddes occupation began with thousands being killed simply to terrorize the inhabitants.
But the Huddes began paying a heavy price for taking the planet. The civilians that managed to flee into the forests began hit-and-run attacks and thousands of the invaders were killed each year the planet was occupied. The Invaders learned quickly that entering the untamed forests and jungles was a death sentence. Even bombarding from space did not remove the rebels and eventually, the Huddes erected giant electrified fences around the cities to keep the rebels out and the captured civilians in. But the Huddes still lost thousands. There were millions of weapons hidden in the cities and though many civilians were killed to punish the rebels, the attacks did not stop.
This continued for twenty-six years until the Huddes Home World suddenly ordered all the warriors on the surface of the planet to their warships holding orbit above it. The Huddes Fleet Leader announced to the suffering planet that the forces were needed against a new enemy and that, once that issue was handled, he would be back very quickly. The Invader left the population of Heaven stunned and reeling from the depravity of the brutal Huddes Warriors.
• • •
Hefin was born ten years after the Huddes landed and he, like all the children born in the forests, lived in the forests with his parents learning how to survive against an advanced aggressive civilization. By the time he was ten, he was deadly. He was elected the leader of the resistance forces by the time he was twenty and his unit was known as Death’s Angels. Most of the Huddes in the city he was assigned to attack were killed before the recall and the survivors screamed for additional forces to help them against the rebels.
Hefin remembered the time well along with the memory of hundreds of brothers and sisters that lost their lives attacking the Huddes Forces in the wilderness of Heaven. He was lucky he hadn’t died with them. Once the invaders were gone, the survivors elected leaders and a meeting was called to determine what to do next. The Huddes had made a huge mistake in leaving before they blasted the ship building facilities on the planet’s surface. They must have thought they would return quickly and didn’t feel the need to destroy them. It was clear they did not want to have to rebuild them from scratch. Almost fifty warships were in the last phases of being completed and the Leaders decided to finish them and start building others. The planet went to war preparations with a passion and within a year, sixty more ships were completed. A hundred new ship building sites were completed within three years and Heaven had a fleet of four hundred warships that were twins to the ones being used by the Huddes.
It was at that point that Hefin suggested that more powerful weapons needed to be found. The Huddes would return with far more warships and Heaven’s Fleet would be overwhelmed again. More than a hundred warships in the fleet were dispatched to find another civilization that could assist them against the Huddes promised return.
Two years later, a powerful civilization in a distant galaxy agreed to sell Heaven six of their warships for a freighter load of rare metals. The mines were already built by the Huddes on Heaven and the ore was mined and sent to purchase the six modern warships. The technology was duplicated and the existing warships were modified and the building sites began constructing the new more powerful vessels.
Now fifteen years after the Huddes left, Heaven had a fleet of more than six thousand advanced warships. A year ago, a squadron of ships were sent out to find the Huddes Home World to determine why they had not come back as they threatened. What they eventually discovered was a blasted planet with all life on it exterminated. The Squadron Commander was able to date the destruction to twelve years earlier. It appeared the new enemy the Huddes had attacked won the war and eliminated the Huddes as a threat to Heaven.
When word of the Huddes destruction reached Heaven, there was a massive celebration and the constant stress of being attacked again was gone. But if it could happen once, it could happen again. The Leaders decided to continue to build against the day when another would be conqueror appeared. A fleet of eight hundred warships was always on standby close to the intersection where Heaven’s filament passed through. Additional warships scouted the other filaments that fed the intersection. Heaven would not be surprised again. Military training was mandatory for all citizens of Heaven and they would be twice as deadly if the planet was ever invaded again.
• • •
Hefin saw the shuttle in the distance through the viewport leaving orbit and moving toward his flagship. He was going to miss serving in the Navy and military; it was all he had ever known and he didn’t know if he was going to be able to adjust to just being a civilian. But his family deserved to have him at home and he had put it off for far too long. Heaven was at peace and he had done his duty in defending it. The new Fleet Commander was a good choice but his Second-in-Command worried him. The Guyton was…Hefin shook his head. There was something dark and deadly about him. He wondered how the new Human Commander had paired up with the Guyton. He looked at his panel and queried the database about the Guyton and discovered that it had fought alongside the Human’s father in the forests outside Heaven’s Capital City, Killamed. The Guyton species were extremely long lived and it appeared this one was originally bonded to the new Commander’s father. Hefin sighed, it was understandable that the Guyton would remember the days of the Huddes brutality and was affected by it. But other Guytons he knew didn’t give off the same aura as this one. Well, this wasn’t his problem. He looked up at the wall monitor and saw the shuttle enter the landing bay and waited for the new commander to arrive on the bridge.
• • •
Fleet Commander Samson Oliver entered the bridge followed by a tall Guyton. Hefin’s Second-in-Command announced loudly, “Senior Commander on Deck!” All sixty crewmembers on the bridge stood up at their stations and went to attention.
Samson Oliver walked up to Hefin and placed his right hand over his heart in salute. Hefin returned the salute and said, “As you were,” to the bridge crew. “Return to your duties.” The bridge crew sat down and stared at their new commanding officer. He was about six feet tall with long black hair tied in a braid behind his neck. His eyes were brown and they seemed to have a steely gaze at everything he looked toward. Hefin said, “Welcome aboard, Fleet Commander.”
“Thank you, Sir. I’ve been ordered to relieve you of your command.”
“I am relieved and the fleet is now yours. May I speak with you in my conference room?”
Sam nodded, “Yes, Sir.” Hefin stood up and left the bridge with his Second-in Command following him. Sam followed with the tall Guyton right behind him. They entered the conference room, which was located just outside the bridge, and Hefin went to a chair at the front of a table with his Second sitting beside him. Sam sat across the table from the two of them as the Guyton took a chair at the far end of the table away from the others.
Hefin looked at him, “You may sit with us.”
Sam smiled, “He’s more comfortable where he can view everything happening.”
Hefin stared at the Guyton and wondered what it was about him that bothered him so much. The Guyton stood about seven feet tall and his hairless skin was pitch black. His yellow eyes with black pupils were deep set under his eyebrows and his nose was thin and sharp to just above its thin lips. His black skin was highly contrasted against his deep green uniform and he stared at the two officers without blinking. Hefin turned to Sam, “C
ongratulations on your promotion.”
“Thank you, Sir. I suspect I was promoted because of my last mission.”
“I’ve been wondering how you managed to find the Huddes Home World so quickly.”
“It wasn’t as difficult as I anticipated, Sir. I just followed the planets that were conquered by the Huddes on the filament that they originally used to find our planet. I asked the right questions and was assisted by other civilizations that they attacked.”
“I’m surprised you were able to get others to assist you.”
Sam nodded toward the Guyton, “Jek was a big help in the effort.” Hefin looked at the Guyton and saw him nod. “He’s telepathic and could hear what was being thought by those we questioned. And you’re right, many of them tried to mislead us.”
Hefin looked at the Guyton and smiled, “I suspect you can see what I’m thinking about you.”
“I can.”
“I apologize for my feelings and I honestly don’t know why I feel this way.”
Jek smiled, “I can see that, Sir. I do not take offense at your thoughts.”
Hefin turned to Sam, “Were you able to find the civilization that destroyed the Huddes?”
“No, and I didn’t go looking for them. I did learn from one planet we communicated with that the Huddes were the aggressors against it and died for their mistake in attacking them. Leaving sleeping dragons alone was the best idea in my opinion.”
Hefin smiled, “I agree with your assessment. I just wanted to let you know that if you ever need my assistance, I will be more than willing to help.”
“Thank you, Sir. You are a legend in the resistance and I admire and respect all you’ve done to keep Heaven safe.”
