The Emperor's Daughter (Sentinel Series Book 1)

by Richard Flunker

  He pointed at it, “Did you see…”

  “Midnight Oil, message coming…”

  The CEO was on the screen again. The terrified look on his face shocked Kale.

  “Kale, change……there has been……clear……an attack……Ayia……sorry…” The connection went dark.

  There was no confusion now, the tower was falling.

  Ayia screamed.

  Ahead of them, the giant colossus of Antan was falling from the sky. For a second the ship just hung there, the tower tipping to one side. Then, they were moving with it.

  “Oh no,” Kale muttered.

  “What?” Ayia, still in shock.

  “We’re still slaved to the tower, we’re going down with it,” he pointed to the tower, his hand shaking, “FEI? FEI?!?”

  There was no answer. The ship was slaved to the tower. That meant all software functions as well.

  Kale undid his straps and stood up quickly. They still had a full gravity field, so he wasn’t being tossed to the side. He quickly thought about his altitude and roughly calculated how long they had. He reached over and unstrapped Ayia from her seat, guiding her over to his. She was barely reacting to his forceful actions as her eyes focused on the tower falling.

  “Sit here, Ayia, LISTEN!” he shouted, his eyes meeting hers. She could barely see from the tears forming in her eyes. “We have two minutes, maybe. I need to run back and manually disengage the gravity. When I do we’re going to be floating and I need you to his this button here,” he pointed at a blue button just to her right under a panel around knee level, “This will bring FEI online in a second and he will keep us from crashing.”

  Kale started running out, then looked back.

  “Ayia, did you hear me?”

  “Go!”

  Kale turned and ran down into the Midnight Oil. When the ship was slaved, the rings that produce the gravity field had docked into the ship to avoid any damage. Kale rushed into the main room, ran to the far side of the room, towards the rear of the ship, and kicked a chair aside. He reached down and turned a latch, spinning it many times until it came undone. He pulled the latch and the small hatch popped open. He swung it open and lowered himself down into the maintenance room. Their Hausen reactor was still powered, but not projecting at all.

  While he couldn’t feel anything, his brain was telling him they were falling from the sky. Tied directly to the tower, its own gravity field projecting onto them would most likely pull them down until it crashed into the city far below. He hoped a cool mind within the tower, knowing their impending deaths, would still be able to unlock their ship. But maybe they didn’t have that capability anymore.

  If he brought his rings online, they would disrupt the field being projected by the tower unlocking him. He would still need the AI to bring his own field up so that they could fly. Kale rushed around the circular Hausen reactor. On the other side he saw the two coils that could be sprung to release the rings. The quickly undid the lower ring, springing it loose. The ring snapped into place outside of the ship. He then put his hand on the second coil, ready to release it. He grabbed on to the nearest collar, gripped it tightly, and sprang the coil. The upper ring sprung out and the gravity field was broken. They were now in an uncontrolled free fall and all the gravity forces that came with that. Kale nearly wrenched his arm on the collar as he was swung into the ceiling of the room.

  In the cabin, Ayia was watching in terror as she and the tower fell together from the skies of Mondla. The ship maintained a perfect alignment with the platform, but the tower itself was now almost sideways to the rest of the world. She peered out of the side to see if she could judge how far they were from the ground, but everything was dark. The only thing she could tell was the shape of the broken tower against the glow of the fire behind it.

  Then she lost the tower. The ship went spinning out and Ayia was squeezed into her seat. Centrifugal forces pinned her in place. She tried reaching for the button but was surprised at how strong the force of gravity was on her. She tried to bring herself up but couldn’t raise any of her arms to reach towards the button. She began panicking. The window was a blur. She focused on the button instead, a blue glow in the darkness. She sat back into the seat and for a moment, her father’s face came up on the display. It was the final image from his last message.

  Ayia closed her eyes and kicked at the button, hitting it.

  The whole cabin lit up.

  Kale was thrown back to the floor and he felt the air vibrate. A new field was established. He picked himself up slowly off the floor.

  “FEI?”

  “Field is established sir, we are picking up altitude. Clearing the debris range.”

  The ship came to a stop, spun around, and began moving straight up, away from the falling tower. Ayia sat quietly, trying to get her eyes to focus again after the spin. The image of her father was still on display, slightly distorted.

  “FEI, up now, burn it all if we need to,” Kale ordered.

  The ship angled up, then straight up, and began flying out of the dying city. As Kale limped into the cabin, Ayia was sitting there.

  “You ok?” he asked.

  For the second time in the short time he’d known her, she began crying.

  3124 – Alsafah Academy, Alioth Prime, 82.6 Light Years from Earth

  Gheno was bored.

  The fourteen year old was counting the minutes since the class started. He was a student in the Alsafah Academy, the school for the rich and the most prestigious school on Alioth. In an already wealthy system, this school was the destination for the greatest families in the shipyards and corporations. Not only was an endowment required along with tuition for a child to attend, but their teachers were expected to have the highest pedigree of education and training, comparable to the galaxy's largest universities. They were also paid better than most, and this to teach five year olds the basics of alphabets and numbers.

  Gheno's adoptive father was a research scientist for the GorpSpace Exploration and Logistics, an R&D company that was under Earth contract for nearly ten years. They developed smaller and more powerful Hausen reactors and explored the universe for new jump points and systems. There was still no alternative to the Hausen reactor, but if one were developed, the reactor would likely have their name. Gheno's adoptive father was a leader of his own group, but certainly was not a high earner, at least not by Alsafah Academy standards. Instead, Gheno, at the early age of seven, managed to falsify documents that showed that his test scores were genius like, and with another falsified sponsorship by a completely made up corporation on Earth, was accepted into the academy. His father accepted this without even a hint of anger. The old man knew what skills his son had and readily encouraged them. He did make it clear that if they were ever caught, the consequences would be bad, but then made it clear to not get caught.

  He had never been around much and Gheno had never known his own mother. Oganno was biologically his uncle, and he had willingly taken him in and adopted him when Gheno’s mother vanished. Oganno was a very busy man, constantly enthralled in his research, whether in one of the shipyards or somewhere deep in space. But he taught Gheno to be completely independent and self-reliable. Gheno understood their odd relationship and was thankful for all the freedom Oganno allowed him.

  Oganno told him several times he looked a lot like his mother. He had her same curly blonde hair, if just shorter. He had the fairer skin typical to the Scandinavian race of Earth, lighter than most. He had small brown eyes and barely weighed anything for a fourteen year old boy. It was rare to find someone such light skinned. The extremes of the human race as far as skin color had melded dramatically in the hundreds of years of the human exodus from Earth to all the other planets. The large racial divides, both biologically and culturally, had nearly vanished from Earth, and had instead been replaced by new ones.

  The first couple of years at the Academy was amazing for Gheno. For once in his life he was challenged intellectually and thought
he had found his place in life. It didn’t take long for him to quickly outpace his classmates and start getting bored in the classrooms where the classes were not offering anything to him. He found that even in the Academy, everything was biased towards the independent systems, and issues, customs and technology from both the Dominion and Commonwealth went ignored. This was something Gheno thought limited him. He wanted to know everything there was, and he found that remaining at the Academy would end up hindering him in the long run.

  He was in History class. Professor Honathan was actually a good teacher. He was able to engage his students well. When Gheno first had him as a teacher years ago, he soaked everything in. His fascination with human history was unending. When he couldn’t get enough in the class, he scoured books, the net and virtuavids and filled in any gap he had in class. That was years ago though, and now he just wasn’t learning anything new.

  History though, always held his interest.

  “Man. Son of Ape. Son of God. Son of the flesh. Son of the spirit. Man. Son of Earth. Child of the stars.” Gheno recited his favorite line from his favorite history book, ‘Man and Stars’.

  Nearing the end of the twenty second century on Earth, mankind had reached the limits of his own planet. Resources were counted carefully and the population controlled for survival. Technology was at its apex, with the sunset nearing. The planet and its people were stalled before the stars, with no path forward. Men landed on Mars and visited Venus and the moons of Jupiter, but there was very little to be found there. Even the resources available within the Solar System, Sol, could not be used in any fashion that could enable a new burst of human progress. Mankind seemed poised to circle the drains.

  An experiment on the moon changed that. What was known as the Lunar Crown, a circular ring around the northern pole of the moon, created to accelerate particles into each other unleashed an entirely new discovery, micro black holes. The lead scientist, Frederick Hausen took this new discovery and played with it. The ability to produce these forces of nature not only opened the eyes of the universe to man, but also created a new possibility with the manipulation of gravity. It was found, almost disastrously, that bringing three micro black holes together within a magnetic containment locked them into a tidal force that created waves of gravity around them. This discovery nearly ripped the moon apart.

  This new power source, when fed by hydrogen atoms, created vast amounts of power, creating a whole new revolution of energy on Earth. Fossil fuels were made obsolete almost overnight. One percent of Jupiter’s hydrogen was calculated to provide enough power through gravity fusion for the entire Earth population for nearly ten thousand years. A whole new frontier was opened in energy.

  Beyond the energy applications though, was man’s new ability to wield gravity. He was able to alter existing fields and create new ones, virtual fields. Earth’s gravity well, once requiring incredible amounts of energy to escape, was now easily bypassed. Space flight became a viable possibility, and the Solar Systems resources were opened up to man.

  On Earth though, man was limited in space. Mars hosted a small population, but any possibility of terraforming the red planet was still centuries away with the technology available. Instead, man looked beyond their star to others, bright in the sky. Every plausible method of long distance space traveled was researched and tested, but none stood the test of time. The nearly infinite time between the stars were measured in pure energy: light. Even with the largest of Hausen reactors, flight between even the closest stars was measured in decades, if not more.

  It was for this purpose that mankind searched for a means to travel to the stars.

  The first machines that helped cross the long distance between the stars were called the Prokhof Kryuk, or the Prokhof hook. The distance between stars was far too great to traverse, so instead, they learned to pierce space and make the distance far shorter. Instead of traveling in a straight line through space, the hook pierced space and time. The hook would come out the other end and then draw those two points together, allowing a far shorter flight path through a subspace outside of space and time called threaded space. A flight that might have taken ten years, only took a few weeks. The first flight to Proxima Centauri, Earth’s brother in the sky, broke open the gates to man’s confinement to the planet that bore them.

  Years before even this event, the skies were being scoured for any evidence of planets that could provide mankind with a new home. In the southern skies, a yellow sun was found, similar to Earth’s own, a mere thirty two light years away. Around this sun were several planets, a system very similar to our own. There were smaller planets near the sun and larger gas giants further away. All evidence pointed to water and an atmosphere on the system’s fourth planet, and maybe even on it’s fifth. When the first flight to Proxima Centauri docked from its return trip in the station that would be known as Valhalla, the exodus of man began.

  Large corporations, governments, religious groups, and wealthy individuals all pursued the building of ships to traverse what would be at the time, a nine month trip to this new system. Asteroids in Sol’s system were hollowed out to become arks into this new unknown. Within five years of that first historic flight, nearly fifty million of mankind’s most powerful, and their followers, left their planet for the first time on a one way trip across a small portion of their galaxy. What they discovered in this system was yet another great discovery of the many that were coming quickly for man.

  Life was discovered on both planets.

  Both planets contained their own biospheres, from the most microscopic of creatures to gigantic flying reptiles on the second and smaller planet. The abundance of life on both planets stunned the first men to land. It was a paradise to rival Earth. The settlers and colonizers brought from Earth their own plants and animals, but soon found that their new worlds held no place for Earth’s creatures. This new world was not Earth, and mankind quickly adapted, learned to eat its plants and hunt its creatures. This new world would be completely separate from the planet that brought them to be.

  They named the bigger planet Coran, in honor of the first group that found it. The second was named Ingria, because it reminded the first settlers of their home back on Earth. For nearly fifty years, there was nearly no contact with Earth, and the only news that arrived on the two planets were from the ships that still came into orbit from the long stream of humans migrating.

  On Earth, long term exploration of the nearby stars had just begun, delayed only by the further increasing times needed to travel between the stars. That distance vanished in 2284 when the jump points were discovered.

  Piercing space required very large amounts of energy. The process involved sending a hook of gravity threads, piercing physical space through to the other side, and pulling the two sides close together and dragging the ship through. The higher the energy, the closer you could pull the sides together. It was discovered though, that at the edge of every solar system, the fabric of space was somehow much thinner, weaker, and the energy restraints found in normal space decreased substantially, the two sections of space were able to be brought much closer together, allowing for a dramatically faster flight between systems.

  The flight between Earth and Coran decreased from nine months one way to three days by using these jump points. The galaxy just became a very small place.

  Mankind spread out in every direction. No longer limited by time, each star system was explored, map and categorized. Every hundredth system discovered contained planets similar to Earth, and nearly every one contained life of some variety. Humankind embarked on its greatest pilgrimage, nearly emptying Earth in just one hundred years. A new human empire, controlled very loosely from Earth, spanned nearly fifty planets in forty systems. Most became self-sufficient quickly enough, depending on Earth only for technology. Within that time frame, Earth’s population collapsed as the planet emptied. Soon after though, the home world stabilized and resources came pouring in. Earth became a paradise unlike any history had e
ver recorded.

  And yet, explorers continued to move out slowly, like a cloud, into the galaxy. Planets with life were routinely reported back to Earth. Mankind’s ability to expand beyond Earth seemed nearly infinite.

  The greatest discovery in all this was not the Hausen reactor, the jump points, or even the countless planets with life. Instead it was the complete lack of intelligent life anywhere, or even the hint that one had existed at any point. Billions of humans spread out through the galaxy, and the more they spread out, the more we realized we were still alone.

  “…the warlords had made the pacts, formed under the one banner but were really following her, she was the key to everything…”

  Gheno snapped out of his daydream, listening to the words the teacher was saying.

  “Always fascinated by the Dominion,” he thought, “They mock them, but they admire them as well. Never will they admit it though.”

  Magyo was always a fascination with anyone who studied history. Gheno always thought that it was everyone else’s way of ridiculing the Dominion. No better way to put down a man than by insisting everything they say he created was actually brought about by a woman, a wife, a human being far greater than he ever was. Gheno could only assume that the current bloodline in the Dominion had a good portion of her DNA in it. Certainly they wouldn’t have wasted it before putting her to death.

  History and Genetics. Gheno was truly bored.

  Gheno arrived at the small apartment he and his father lived in. On nearly every other day, he arrived to an empty house. He enjoyed the quiet and used that time to research and study. If he was bored of that, he would browse the net or the Virtuavids, digging for any information he needed for whatever was interesting him. That afternoon, he wanted to do some research on organic memory storage. He wanted to see just what the current capabilities were and if there were any new research avenues.