Victory at all costs (Spinward Book 3)
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Spinward
Volume 3
Victory at All Costs
by Rupert Segar
Text copyright © Rupert Segar 2014
Cover photograph copyright © Pete Lawrence 2013
“Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror,
Victory however long and hard the road may be;
For without victory there is no survival.”
― Winston Churchill
To my family, for putting up with me during long holidays in a caravan in Scotland.
Table of contents
Cast of Characters
Prologue: Aggressors
Chapter 1: Star Crossed Lovers
Chapter 2: Attack on Fair Isles
Chapter 3: Garth’s Mission
Chapter 4: The Brood King’s Price
Chapter 5: Pools of Light.
Chapter 6: The Fate of Humanity
Chapter 7: Casket Head
Chapter 8: Arcadia under Occupation
Chapter 9: Willow Subscribes
Chapter 10: The Wild Wood
Chapter 11: Spiders in the Machine
Chapter 12: Slave World
Chapter 13: Surrender or Die
Chapter 14: Old Earth
Chapter 15: Departure from Devastation
Chapter 16: The Isle of Hope
Chapter 17: Dakota
Chapter 18: The Doctor’s Medicine
Chapter 19: Intergalactic Threads
Chapter 20: The Prodigal Returns
Chapter 21: The War on Land
Chapter 22: War in Space
Chapter 23: Sun Buster
Chapter 24: Raising Hope
Chapter 25: In the Blood
Chapter 26: Shadow in the Pool
Chapter 27: Super Novae
Chapter 28: Preparing for Battle
Chapter 29: The Guardians Strike Back
Chapter 30: The Brooding Dark
Chapter 31: Revenge of the Spider
Chapter 32: Loading Bay 7
Chapter 33: The Dark Wood
Chapter 34: The Final Conflict
Chapter 35: A New Beginning
Cast of Characters
The Ship and crew
The Ship – an alien entity created by the Creators
Mr Angry – one of the seven pods that constitute the Ship
Arthur King – the Ship’s moral compass and former Imperial pilot
Yelena Kolowski – former Imperial Chief Engineer
Becky Bhuna – former recorder and reporter from Columbus, gateway world to the Alliance
Lea Whey – former librarian from the Quintox Library on Willow
Sub-Lieutenant Carole Porter, former science officer from Imperial Valliant
Creators on Last Haven
Zeeann – Oracle, religious leader of the Creators on Last Haven
Asclepius – Zeeann’s father and scientist
Hari – Asclepius’ assistant
The Kargol Empire
The Kargol Emperor aka the Kings of Kings, King of Ten Thousand Worlds, etc.
Colonel Garth, the Emperor’s enforcer
Gorky Parks, Colonel Garth’s henchman
Tim Bartz, brother of Tom Bartz, killed in action against the Ship
Guardians
Suxie Wong, veteran ex-explorer
Thistle and Nigeal, Suxie’s adopted niece and nephew, joint captains of Explorer Spirit
Dylan Moran, AKA ‘Dylan the Devoted,’ cosmologist and one of the original voyageurs
Captain Ewoma Isoko, master of the French Canadian colony ship and Dylan’s wife
Anton Blanc, master voyageur
‘Sy,’ Sying Chang, casket case, former captain of the Valliant
Peter Berlinski, former Valliant lieutenant
Bazza Foster, defence commander and former chief explorer
Arcadia
Dr Robert Fillips – gynaecologist
Dr Alicia Gomez – plague specialist
Intendant Terrance Thorn – military dictator
Lady Thea – Imperial Spouse to the Intendant
Prologue: Aggressors
The small vid screen blinked on showing a grainy image: a parabolic dish transmitter squatted on a small asteroid. The dish was lined up with a sun. The asteroid was quite some distance out in the solar system as the sun was little more than a bright star. A graphic showed the parabolic dish sending waves towards the sun. The vid screen cut to a close up of the sun. Suddenly, the sun exploded. The vid screen cut back to the earlier wide shot with the transmitter in the foreground. The distance sun went supernova. The vid screen went to white then blanked out.
The Brood King grasped the vid screen with three of its legs. Its pincer shaped mouth was salivating.
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The Kargol Empire was the biggest and most brutal dominion in galactic history. The iron grip of the kingdom stretched across more than ten thousand worlds, a number that was increasing rapidly. From the Orion Belt to the Chimera Sector, imperial warships and foot soldiers were using an alien network of gateways to take new territories. Most of the worlds had little choice but to accept the yoke of military oppression. Those who resisted found themselves facing overwhelming force and ignominious defeat.
To the victor the spoils, but the unpleasant and generally unknown fact was that the Kargol Empire had been infiltrated by a species of mind controlling spider. This inter-galactic invader was seeking complete dominance over every living creature in the cosmos. If it wins this war, the human race will become little more than food for the Brood King’s children.
How did humanity find itself so threatened?
The grey portals which allowed near instantaneous travel between solar systems had been constructed by an alien race. The aliens had premonitions of a galaxy wide cataclysm. They used the gateways to escape this fate by travelling more than 230 million years into the future. Shortly after the aliens’ departure, two portals were found by the crew and passengers of a French Canadian colony ship. For nearly a thousand years, their descendants, calling themselves voyageurs, explored the network of gateways criss-crossing the galaxy. Two of the original voyageurs, a cosmologist Dylan Moran and the captain of the colony ship Captain Ewoma Isoko, attempted to follow the fleeing aliens into the future but they became trapped behind a sealed gateway.
Another ‘gift’ left behind by the aliens was a space vessel which had a mind of its own. In fact, it had seven brains. The alien vessel was run by a collective mentality made up of egg shaped pods. It called itself “Ship.” The Ship was convinced it was on a mission to save the galaxy, but it could not remember how or why.
The alien ship had lost its memory when it was infected by a human made virus. The Great Plague had destroyed artificial intelligence computers right across the galaxy. Without AI machines to balance the flux fields needed for hyper flight, all interstellar travel ceased. The Millennium of Isolation, saw civilisations collapse and billions die. It only ended when a cure for the plague was found. The Second Great Expansion saw much of humanity re-united by the Cult of Explorers. These dedicated missionaries used a fleet of small ships to take the cure from world to world.
The Ship was found drifting in an asteroid field, Colonel Garth, right hand man of the Kargol Emperor, determined to use it as a secret weapon against enemy worlds. The tiny alien vessel could do something no human built, faster-than-light ship could do. It could return from the Upper Realm to normal space right above a world, instead of 90 million kilometres away from any planetary bodies, where space time was flat. The alien vessel could sneak up on an enemy and bomb their world to oblivion.
The Ship had no wish to be used as a weap
on. It escaped from the clutches of the Empire with test pilot Art King and Chief Engineer Yelena Kolowski. Both had been given death sentences by Colonel Garth who wanted to keep the existence of the ship an absolute secret.
While on the run, looking for its alien creators, the Ship found two more crew mates. Glamorous Becky Bhuna was a reporter from the Alliance world of Columbus. She had been framed as a spy by a Kargol agent who tried to impound the ship. The historian Lea Whey was a leading academic on the library world of Willow. He had been exiled by the autocratic ruling committee of chief librarians for being too popular. Lea’s work on ‘Forbidden Worlds’ pointed towards a distant region of the galaxy as the likely location of the Ship’s makers. They set off for the Chimera Sector, unaware the Emperor’s Royal Fleet had the same destination. On the way, Art was kidnapped by Kargol agents and taken to be interrogated on the Emperor’s flag ship.
Veteran explorer, Suxie Wong, and her crew were already in the Chimera Sector. She found one of the mysterious gateways on a planet. Stepping through the portal, she discovered what she thought was a band of aliens. In fact, they were puppet robots controlled by the aliens, who had a fear of other species. The automatons gave her a device to operate the doorways. Suxie released the trapped voyageurs, Dylan Moran and Captain Isoko. Together they met Yelena, Lea, Becky and the Ship on Chimera 6.
The arrival of the imperial fleet saw the Battle of Chimera One. With the help of Suxie’s gateway controller and the Voyageurs’ map of the gateways, the Ship defeated the entire armada. Yelena and one of the pods, Mr Angry, rescued Art from the clutches of Colonel Garth on board the flag ship. Then a cluster of security engrams encoded in Art’s comms link saved them all by shutting down a self-destruct programme triggered by the Emperor.
Explorers and voyageurs joined together to form the Guardians of the Gateways. Their aim was to stop the Kargol Empire and other aggressors using the portals to dominate the galaxy. The guardians employed alien weapons to control the portals. However, the Empire fought back developing stronger shields and weapons and new stealth technologies. After several failed attempts, Imperial forces captured a guardian ship and a voyageur controller. They had the keys to the doorways. The Empire was about to strike back.
Suspecting the enemy had found a way to control the portals, Yelena set off to get the Ship’s help. Following an ambush and a chase across several worlds, Yelena was captured by Garth’s henchman, Lieutenant Gorky Parks.
Meanwhile, the Ship finally found its makers, or at least some of their relatives. A small group of aliens had stayed behind, hiding on Chimera 6 when the rest of their race fled to the future. The Creators blamed the Human race for the cataclysmic doom fast approaching the galaxy. The omniocular, a machine that predicted the future by detecting changes in entropy, indicated an imminent, galaxy-wide convulsion, wiping out both Human and Creator civilisations.
Lea Whey the former librarian proved that the disaster had not been caused by Humans but by the Creators themselves. The building of the doorways, meant to help the Creators escape, had actually initiated the disaster. Zeeann, the Oracle leader of the Creators, overcame her xenophobia to mate with Art. Zeeann became pregnant. She believed an age old Creator prophesy that their offspring would, somehow, save both their races.
Meanwhile, mind-controlling, carnivorous spiders, from another galaxy, had infiltrated the Kargol Empire. The arachnids had taken over leading officers in the navy. Even the Emperor was infected. The Brood King, the spider overlord, was installed on board Orion, the royal flagship. With the spiders secretly in control, the Empire was ready to conquer the galaxy.
Chapter 1: Star Crossed Lovers
In geostationary orbit above Chimera 6, the alien Ship was nose to nose with a nemesis class battleship. The confrontation looked ridiculously unequal. It was a sprat versus a whale. The warship was a full kilometre long while the compact alien vessel was just 60 metres from prow to stern. Two imperial cruisers stood guard on either side; even they dwarfed the alien vessel. The three warships had ambushed the Ship in a surprise pincer attack. The giant battleship had come through the grey portal hanging above the planet; the two cruisers had been flying in-system hidden behind an electromagnetic flux field which masked their mass and shape. Synchronising the de-cloaking of the cruisers with the transit of the battleship had been no mean feat.
Vice Admiral Putin was wary. It was mandatory for all naval officers to watch a recording of the Battle of Chimera One. The 3-D holotable account was a detailed and accurate depiction of events, not the sanitise fiction which had been released for public consumption. Seeing a mirror wrapped ship cripple the biggest fleet ever assembled had been humbling. The accepted military analysis said the alien vessel had split in two. The larger portion acted as a decoy. It penetrated the fleet and exploded using a flux cascade which knocked out most of the Imperial fleet. At the point of maximum disruption, the smaller part of the alien vessel emerged from the gateway above Chimera One and attacked Orion, the royal flagship.
Now, there was another of these silver coated alien craft, less than 200 metres away from Putin’s battleship. It was bigger than the vessel which had attacked the Emperor’s flagship. Putin thought it must be a different ship but then he remembered the gossip from intelligence which said the alien vessel could grow like a plant. Ridiculous, he thought, they just have a whole lot of different vessels and keep swapping them about.
Capturing the alien ship was a priority order from the Emperor himself. Putin could almost feel the extra star on his collar already. The mysterious vessel seemed to be disabled. Maybe the lucky shot they’d got off when they first arrived had done serious damage. All it had done since their arrival was to wrap itself in a defensive shield, like a cocoon. The vice admiral was not going to employ his ion cannon. He remembered at Chimera One a mirror like force field had reflected ion beams backwards, knocking out vessels. Putin wasn’t going to try to use his weapons on the ship; he just wanted to make sure the vessel could not run away.
Tractor beams from the cruisers could gain no purchase on the alien ship’s silvered force field; they just slid off the mirrored surface. The captain of one of the cruisers came up with an ingenious solution. She fired a metal ingot at a low velocity from a rail gun. Her vessel’s tractor beam slowed the ingot, while the cruiser on the other side targeted the block of metal and locked on with its own tractor beam. The two beams, one from each cruiser, became a pair of rigid legs, each strung between a cruiser and the metal ingot on top of the alien ship’s defensive shield.
At first, it was a balancing act: the two tractor beams had to be continuously fine-tuned to keep the ingot in place; and, the two ships had to use their lateral thrusters to stop them being pulled any closer to the potentially dangerous alien ship. A dozen ingots later, the alien ship was trapped in a cage made from tractor beams. The metal blocks all vibrated in fixed positions above, below, ahead and astern of the silver coated vessel. Bright idea, thought Putin. I must give the captain a citation.
The battleship laid down a dampening field which prevented the alien ship escaping. The dampening field prevented the build-up of flux, an essential precursor to hyper flight. Nearly 20 kilometres off the stern of the warship, the gateway began flashing, probably as a result of the dampening field. The portal was surrounded by an illuminated multi-coloured cloud. It looks like the Northern Lights on Crandos, thought Vice Admiral Putin, nostalgically recalling his home world. Looking ahead at the caged alien ship, he thought, you ain’t going nowhere, not caring he was using a grammatically incorrect phrase with a double negative.
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On board the alien ship, Sub-Lieutenant Carole Porter was beginning to despair.
“Can’t we get some help from the planet?” she said in the medical bay. Carole directed her question to a space near her left-hand elbow where until minutes before the Ship’s holosphere had hovered, spinning in mid-air.
There was no response.
Carole checked on Yelena
’s condition. The renegade chief engineer, who was top of the Empire’s Most Wanted list, was still deep in a coma. The medibot surgeon said Yelena’s life signs were extremely depressed but stable. Carole had sympathy for Yelena. Although she helped track down the runaway rebel, she had changed sides towards the end of the hunt. Like many a junior female officers before her, Carole had been sexually exploited by Colonel Garth. Even before the abuse, Carole realised had she detested the Imperial Navy and the Empire and all it stood for. Carole became a dissident, which was a life threatening position to take in the authoritarian Empire. She deliberately misled the troopers chasing Yelena. Nevertheless, the rebel was captured and kept shackled to a bed on board Imperial Valiant. Colonel Garth refused to allow Yelena to be put into stasis or be connected in any way to the ship’s computer. He said she and her boyfriend had some way of infiltrating and defeating the ship’s systems.
Ironically, after Yelena’s capture, Carole had been given the duty of looking after her. Carole thought the two women ought to ‘stick together.’
On arrival at the temporary flagship Dreadnought at Chimera One, Carole was ordered to escort Yelena and the amputated living remains of another Guardian officer to the medical interrogation centre. Two nurses arrived to transfer the prisoners. Despite direct orders that Yelena was not to be given any access to the ship’s computer system, the nurses connected her to their medibot boxes, cyber control devices grafted on their skulls.
A security protocol, made up of engrams embedded in Yelena’s subcutaneous comms unit, rapidly took over the two nurses and the command programmes that controlled them. Speaking through Yelena, the security device told Carole there were secret orders to have her mind wiped and then be reprogrammed to work in a military whore house. That was the moment Carole decided to desert the imperial navy.
The security engrams activated a Trojan virus, left behind by the Ship when it defeated the Imperial fleet. As a result, it was able to subvert the command and control computers on board Flagship Dreadnought and divert a supply ship to Chimera 6. Carole went aboard taking Yelena, the two cybernetic nurses, and the casket containing a dismembered Guardian officer.