The new Admiral had also directly supervised the creation of the Navy's current 7th fleet. While not yet completed, this fleet would be its most modern and most lethal fleet to date. The 7th fleet would be comprised of two battlecruisers, the Galaxy and the Supernova, and would be accompanied by seventeen corvettes and the super-carrier Megalodon, and its compliment of one hundred and twenty-seven fighter ships and bombers. The 7th fleet could easily rival many, if not all, of the Dominion fleets in manpower, size, and firepower.
That had been the plan nearly five years ago. Now, on the eve of the completion of the Megalodon, the Alioth navy was in a holding pattern. With the Dominion civil war raging on full tilt, and more and more news coming in of their mutual destruction, the threat of a Dominion attack lessened. The high council had nearly come to the decision to scrap the 7th fleet, but instead did away with the 1st, 2nd and 4th fleets. All the older ships were sold to independent owners and the useless ones scrapped for parts and material. Even if there was a clear victorious side to the Dominion civil war, it would be years, if not decades, before they would be reestablished as a galaxy power, if ever.
The news also pointed that if the new upstart empress won the war, it would be a completely different kind of Dominion, one Alioth may not need be afraid of. And while Alioth and Earth were in all points competitors, there had never appeared to be any sense of military aggression from Sol towards Alioth. In fact, the recently scrapped 1st fleet was based nearly entirely on ships purchased directly from the Commonwealth. The two powers held similar interests, governments, and economies. Both systems benefited from the other and with the further expansion of discovery and new resources to exploit, the galaxy was big enough to share.
In the last three years, it was truly amazing to see just how much galactic influence the Dominion actually had. Alioth was the clear leader of the Independent systems, but that alliance had been fragile at best. It was an alliance mostly in name, because the Dominion still demanded the vast majority of resources and wealth many of those systems had. With the civil war, though, many of the larger independent systems had enjoyed a dramatic economic boom. Systems like Eta Cassiopeia, Alpha Cigni and Gormoha had risen to the forefront of power players in the alliance with Alioth. They had even been able to provide material, men and money to help the creation and construction of the 7th fleet. The alliance of independent systems had actually taken shape.
Marcus had watched the growth with pride. He had actually been in orbit around Eta Cassiopeia in the Galaxy when he had been called back to meet with the high council. Generally, he reported directly to Councilor Aopes of Alpha Cigni, the military secretary. But this request had come from High Councilor Hames. The Admiral’s presence had been requested directly in the chambers. In most cases, he thought such a request might mean his dismissal, but he couldn’t foresee that happening now. Especially not after all he had done for the alliance.
Marcus nodded at the attendant and stood up. He walked through the large marble doors that swung close behind him very slowly, but making no sound at all once they closed. He walked into the large circular room. He had been here just once before, when he had been promoted to the Admiralty. Eight large columns divided each of the seven councilors from each other. They all sat on large chairs. In front of them were equally as impressive marble tables where their staff sat. He knew that the room was mostly for show as all the real work was done in their offices, but the show was impressive nonetheless.
He approached the middle of the room where he found a large chair had been set out for him. He walked in with his formal Captain’s hat in hand, and when he sat down in the chair, he placed it on his lap. He looked up and with a nod of his head, acknowledged each councilor. Their staffs were working furiously at paperwork, while simultaneously typing and plugging away at video screens. Each councilor made eye contacts with him, though. There was an air of seriousness that was the complete opposite of what he had experienced the last time he had been here. Something was wrong. It was a feeling he got when a battle was about to turn against him, and he knew there was nothing he could do.
Marcus took a quick look around the room again. The columns were unadorned, and plain white. The marble floor was etched with a marking right in front of his chair, the symbol for the Alioth alliance, a triangle with the letters A, E and C at each point of the triangle. It was a simple symbol, very unlike the usual complex symbols of the Dominion or the highly artistic symbols of the Commonwealth. The walls of the chamber were unadorned as well. There were no paintings or pictures or other art forms. The walls were a deep black, the natural color of the marble. The lack of lighting in general didn’t help, and whatever light there was glowing from each councilor’s tables, seemed to be soaked in by the black walls.
The chamber sat at the bottom of an inverted tower, deep within the waters of Alioth’s Northern ocean. Politicians joked that the chamber was the next step to being in hell. Those who had been voted councilors might agree, and most had sat in this chamber and felt like hell when they had to make the decisions they did. The High Council was composed of the seven councilors. Each was voted in by the large body of senators from all the independent systems. Each served a twenty year term and was then replaced by another. They did not represent any specific system, but had instead been voted in to make the major decisions for the alliance itself. They had no say in their own planet’s politics once they held the position of councilor. It was a position of high power within the alliance, but one of isolation as well. All matters were voted on and the High Councilor could break a tie if needed. The High Councilor was chosen from among the seven councilors each year.
Marcus’ eye caught Councilor Aopes’ eyes and he then realized the room was quiet and everyone was looking at him. He stood up and took two steps forward, standing directly over the symbol in the middle of the room.
“Thank you for joining us on such short notice, Admiral Mueller,” spoke Councilor Hames.
Marcus turned slightly to the right to face him.
“I am here to serve,” he stated.
“I do hope that progress with the 7th fleet is progressing as planned.”
“It is. We will be done under schedule, even with the diminished threat existence,” Marcus replied. “These are all matters that I report on consistently.”
“They are,” Councilor Jammina chimed in. She was from Nachodes, a small system, but rich in minerals. “For this we are grateful.”
“Let’s dispense with the pleasantries,” Councilor Aopes. “The Admiral is no fool and we should not treat him as such.”
Marcus turned and met his former supervisor. Councilor Aopes had once been Admiral Aopes, and Marcus had served under him just prior to his election to the council. He remembered him as a no-nonsense kind of guy. He appeared to have kept that personality trait.
“Admiral, please have a seat,” Councilor Hames ordered.
Marcus turned around and sat back down. From somewhere in the dark, two clerks came filing out, carrying a small table. They brought it out in front of Marcus, pulled the legs out and set it up in front of him. They reached down under the table, drew out a cable, and plugged it in directly into the floor. Marcus hadn’t even seen any kind of outlet there. The table came to life and the top of it turned on to display an interactive screen.
“Admiral. What you are about to be told is about as new to us as it will be to you. We have only had two weeks to digest all of this and we are about to ask you to take it all in now,” Councilor Hames began.
“There is no easy way to describe all of this, so we will begin in the way it came to us,” he continued.
The screen in front of Marcus began displaying a flow of news articles and virtuavids. Marcus leaned forward to try to make sense of it.
“Admiral, have you ever heard the old sailor’s tale of the Black Drones?” Councilor Jammina asked.
Marcus looked up. It was a tale as old as space travel. Ever since humanity had found a way to travel be
tween the stars, it had searched earnestly for intelligent life that wasn’t human. It had become increasingly clear that if there was any intelligent life out there, it was well beyond the range of what humanity had colonized. It appeared that humans were alone, at least in this galaxy. But that had never stopped the stories of sightings of UFO’s, eerily reminiscent of the times before space flight on Earth. Every year there were hundreds of supposed encounters with unidentified spherical objects. Some of these objects might only follow spaceships, or attempt to communicate with them. Others were said to attack, destroy and kidnap humans; again, just as the stories of pre-space flight on Earth. As humanity spread out from Earth, there were more and more of these stories, yet never once had there been a shred of evidence.
Many would say that government conspiracies existed. Most claimed the Dominion had received their genetic super powers from such an encounter. Yet still others would say that the large governments had already made contact with these entities and withheld the information from the general populace. It was the typical civilian tripe Marcus routinely heard. He knew full well there had been no such contact.
For one, there were nearly thirty million actual registered space ships and probably ten times that many that weren’t registered. And yet with that many flights in space, there was not one shred of evidence, physical or visual, of these entities. If such beings existed, the evidence would have showed up by now. It was mankind’s unrelenting desire to find intelligent life that continued to feed the rumors.
Marcus nodded along with the councilor as she recounted what he already knew. He saw the news articles and virtuavids of the countless of reports from just the past year fly by on the screen. He began to chuckle for a moment until he realized that all of the councilors were dead serious. Could it be they had found the first actual evidence?
“Admiral, you are aware of Project Tube?” Councilor Cigones asked.
Marcus faced the short black man from Antigonnes.
“Of course, Councilor. All alliance ships are now equipped with the tubes.”
“They have been one of the best uses of gravity tube technology and the greatest modern discovery after the Gora hook.”
Communication between systems was still horribly delayed. Ships could get to a system faster than a message could and the further out you went, the slower communications got. Alioth researchers had uncovered a method though, that a ship could send a coded message as a gravity burst back through the remnants of a hook opening. These messages had to be kept simple and no data could be sent through, but messages could be sent from hundreds of light years away back to home bases like Alioth. It was essentially a very high-tech form of SOS.
“We have several relays in Alioth and each of the major systems. Each of the relays continuously read the tube messages. It has saved countless lives already,” Marcus explained.
“Three months ago, one of our relays on Klykk received a very unique tube message from one of our deep space scouting missions,” Councilor Jammina explained.
On Marcus’ screen, data began to flow. It was gravity burst readings, translated into the simple, almost Morse code, message. Most codes were actually SOS, or simple date readings to relay back how far they were. This code repeated FC. Marcus looked up quickly. Councilor Aopes nodded back to him. FC stood for First Contact. Such a code would have been an amazing piece of news, except that if it came from a gravity burst, then it was bad news.
“There was no reply from the scout ship. Under normal protocol, if such an encounter is made, deep space scouts are supposed to record and immediately jump back,” Councilor Jammina continued. “As you can imagine, we have not heard anything back from the ship.”
Standard protocol was to send drones up to where the ship was in order to ascertain the problem. The drones were operated by simple software programmed to enter the system, attempt to locate the source of the burst, document and then return back. Some drones were equipped with additional emergency supplies in case the crew of the distressed ship needed them. Three drones were sent out, one after the other in a span of three weeks to the system of the distress, a Gemini system, and none had returned. At that point, it was still a standard search and rescue case and the council had no need to hear about it. Rescue crews then dispatched five drones at one time, with new commands to ascertain the situation in the system and immediately jump back out.
Only one had returned.
The inspection of the drone had prompted the rescue relay station crews to get in touch with the military. Marcus was at first surprised he hadn’t heard about this until the councilors explained to him that the moment the information reached military intelligence, long before it would have come to his attention, it was all rerouted to the High Council.
“So what was found?” Marcus asked. He asked despite knowing deep down he wasn’t going to like what he had to hear.
Councilor Aopes glanced over at councilor Jammina and she looked down at her staff. They in turn hit some buttons on their screens and data began flowing across the screens on the admirals table. On one of the displays there was gravimetric information. He recognized it, but had no idea how to interpret it. The other screen had some still images on them. Just beneath them the software indicated there were seventeen other pictures. Marcus touched the screen and began dragging the pictures out onto the table. Many of the images were blurry with black streaks cutting across the images. But three images were caught in the clearest resolution possible for the drone, and the images left nothing to the imagination.
Two pictures showed two small black spherical objects. All the other pictures were likely these objects streaking across the screen. On one of those pictures, the black spheres could be seen hitting and attaching themselves to one of the other rescue drones. The third picture was the most disturbing. In the background was a far larger spherical object with what appeared to be four straight legs coming off the bottom at an angle. Marcus looked closely at the picture and could see a trail of more of the black spheres pouring out from under it, in between the four “legs”.
Marcus looked back up at the councilors. It was apparent why they were so serious.
“Black drones,” he uttered. The sound carried through the silent chamber.
“It would appear that the old rumors were true,” councilor Jammina commented.
“Almost too good to be true,” Marcus observed, looking back at the pictures, “too close to the real thing. It never works that way.”
“So it would appear,” councilor Aopes pointed out. “Admiral Mueller, you have known me for a long time now. You know full well that I have never believed in all that mumbo jumbo and honestly, I am having a hard time believing it now.”
“Is it some kind of Dominion ship?” Marcus asked.
“With the state they are in right now? If they had more ships, they’d be using them to fight off the upstart empress. No, we don’t believe so.”
“That system is also far out from Dominion space,” Councilor Frakkes, who had remained quiet up to this point, explained. “While the Gora hook is free technology, we haven’t seen them adapt it too much yet with the war they are in.”
“So is this…” Marcus began.
“We don’t know what this is,” councilor Aopes interrupted, “and honestly, I don’t feel like declaring what it is before we know for sure. What we do know is that this sphere and the smaller spheres have done something to our scout ship and all the drones we sent into the system. That there is enough to make it a threat to us.”
Now Marcus knew why he had been called in.
“Admiral, you must take a ship out there. Which you take is up to your discretion, but be advised we have no idea what this is.”
“We also need to maintain this knowledge as ‘need to know’,” councilor Jammina explained. “It will certainly not do for the general populace to get their rumors fueled even more. Not at least until we know something.”
“Just one ship?” the Admiral asked.
“Again, at your discretion Admiral. We just can’t arouse suspicions. It would not look good if the newly commissioned 7th fleet goes vanishing into deep space. We don’t need the Dominion taking a charge at us. A wounded lion is still a lion.”
The Admiral stood up off his chair. He understood that time was of essence. He nodded at the councilors and was about to turn when councilor Hames waved at him to stop.
“One more thing Admiral. As you are fully aware, the infiltration of the God is Near church is quite thorough. The last thing we need is for them to find out about this. Be sure this information only reaches the ears of those you trust completely.”
Marcus nodded. He hadn’t even thought about that possibility. With the development of the Gora hook, their numbers had exploded. They harassed governments about discoveries and were routinely found out in high positions in all governments, seeking to sabotage and steal information. An entire corvette, the Captain, crew and marines, had defected to them right under his command.
He did not like them at all.
The Admiral saluted the councilors and headed towards the large marble doors. He would want to leave immediately, and there was one ship that was ready. He also knew the command crew he needed for such a mission. As the large black doors silently closed behind him, his assistant, who had been waiting patiently behind security gates, came rushing to him.
The Lost Tribe (Sentinel Series Book 2) Page 6
