The Emperor's Daughter (Sentinel Series Book 1)

by Richard Flunker

  “And when I blow up and you kill your children?” Kale asked, raising and eyebrow.

  “You're not really my children,” Oganno smiled.

  Gheno laughed in the background.

  “I don’t like it when that joke works against me,” Kale grumbled, “So what’s the big deal with this one? How does it work?”

  “You are, of course, aware of how the Prokhof hooks work, yes?”

  Before Kale could answer, Ayia shouted from the wing that she didn’t. Oganno smiled, much to Kale’s disgust, and began walking over to Ayia. He did motion the techs and they began moving the sphere over towards the rear of the ship. Kale, feeling completely defeated, followed his father.

  “Prokhof hooks are aptly named. When the drive builds up enough of a gravity field, a Prokhof hook actually pierces time-space and travels through it towards the destination, let’s say, another system. The hook pops out of the other side and actually pulls that point in space closer to your ship, making the distance between the two points much closer. When you couple this mechanism with the forward thrust of the ship you are basically time traveling.

  The amount of space that is pierced depends on the strength of the hook. That of course, is based on how much energy you can put out with your hook. It is why bigger ships can sometimes travel faster than smaller ships. They have bigger reactors and can generate more energy.

  Once the hook is through there is a weak point between the locations and the hook pulls the vessel into this hole. Once the ship enters the hole it is pulled in by threads, strands of matter and antimatter, inside of this fold, or wormhole, or whatever it is that we go through, we’re not completely sure about that, and the ship rides these threads through to the other side. Just like a boat on a river, a boat that can fold space and encapsulate time.”

  “Yes, yes, navigation 101,” clapped Kale, “so what is this, a bigger hook?” He was clearly not amused. The intrusion into his ship was already more than enough without his father making him appear clueless.

  “No, not a bigger hook. Once a transport link has been established a normal hook remains behind. What we have attempted to do is to continue using the hook. Instead of just riding along the threads, we’re recoiling the hook. This new device draws the hook into itself, shooting you through threaded space. The other side of the hook pulls you in. It’s far faster than just riding the threads.”

  “So instead of riding the river, you're shooting us through the hole,” Ayia pointed out.

  Kale didn’t like the sound of that. Oganno continued to smile.

  “That is exactly correct!”

  “Ok, so what speeds are we talking about?”

  “Well, we need tests, but, we think the jump from Alioth to Earth could be done in twenty nine hours,” Oganno glanced back down at his tablet, looking for the data.

  Gheno jumped when he heard that. Using a normal hook the jump between the two systems was usually seven to ten Earth days depending on the drive. Even Kale was impressed.

  “Ok, that’s,” he paused, running the numbers through his head, “yeah. That is something.” He walked off toward his room.

  “Something like that would make deep space exploration more feasible,” Ayia pointed out. She was taking everything in from on top of the wing.

  “HA! Yes, that is exactly it,” the old man laughed, almost gleefully, “You are a smart one.”

  He then wandered off to where the engineers began to remove a section of the outer hull just under the ship. The Midnight Oil was getting more than just a tune up.

  The goodbyes were much less dramatic than expected. It was a gradual buildup the entire week to when they would leave. Kale was monitoring the news bits every night just to see what was going on around the galaxy. For its age and use, the Midnight Oil had actually shown very little wear and tear. Some systems were updated via software and there were a few minor patches done to the hull. The only manual upgrade conducted on the ship was the installation of the new hook. By the fourth day Kale was anxious to get flying again.

  It was that night that he informed everyone that there was some kind of a breakout of Cavarian Virus on Quetlzatl. That was opportunity knocking. One of the best sources of anti-virals would be found on Mars and that played perfectly into testing the new hook’s capabilities. If the new equipment worked as the researchers intended, Kale would have a huge jump on all of the other merchants by making the trips from Mars and other medicinal production facilities to Quetlzatl, in just a fraction of the time. The news was only four days in. It was imperative to get on the move.

  News did travel around the galaxy. It was the basis of the entire manmade universe. The existence and survival of men on every system relied on the continuous flow of news between the systems. When human ships first flew from of Earth, and planets were being settled, getting information between galaxies was a very difficult proposition. Ships could travel between the stars faster than the speed of light. However, any attempt to send wireless information between the systems would only go as fast as light allowed.

  Each planet had its own worldwide network for news and information, data transfer. The connection between each of these individual systems had initially been nonexistent. When the Earth Commonwealth first formed in opposition to the Coranian Dominion, a whole fleet of ships were created for the sole purpose of connecting each individual system. These mail transporters carried large nodes that routinely transmitted and stored the most current news, mail, and messages from their ships to the planets they traveled between. Unfortunately this system proved to be unreliable and strategically unsound. An enemy fleet could take these vessels out strategically with the intent of crippling the Commonwealth. Additionally, there were not enough enough mail transporters to keep the connection between each planet’s network updated enough to be useful, or truly current.

  After the first major war between the Commonwealth and the Dominion, one of the resultant treaties ensured the installation of smaller mail nodes, as they were known. They were put on every single space-bound ship marked for travel in the known universe. It became almost a code of honor between the two powers that the sole purpose of these mail nodes were used simply for the delivery of data between planets, not for political or strategic purposes. To this end, laws were established in both realms requiring that every ship jumping between planets have one of those devices. They were not to be tampered with, altered, or removed. So important was the necessity of this data transfer that both powers even enforced the law in the harshest manner. Any ship found without a mail node was instantly impounded and later destroyed. It became second hand for each ship to have one.

  With so many merchant ships, communication between the planetary networks expanded into an intergalactic network. When a ship jumped within range of a planet, data would instantly be uploaded and downloaded between the two of them. Information transmittal included updated news, messages, pictures, and data transfer. As the vessel continues on to new reaches, it provides the same service to other planetary systems. This constant cycle ensured that galaxies were connected. It was a reliable system and it worked. It would continue working until a new technology made it obsolete. So far, there had been no advancements to take its place.

  The systems furthest from Earth or Coran suffered from a lag in news. Sometimes there was actually a price to be paid in delivering updated network data. Kale had twice taken two week jumps out to the furthest outlying systems just to establish data links. It had paid reasonably well at the time. The next set of jumps would not take nearly as long, if the hook worked like it should.

  Gheno spent his fifth, and last, day on Devil’s Den with his father.

  “You've been a good lad,” Oganno imparted, “Your mother would have been proud of you. You get, nearly, all of who you are from her.”

  Gheno learned from the years that asking Oganno to tell him about his mother was ineffective. The old man stated that some secrets were best kept that way.

  “When I was yo
unger, I made up images in my mind of who she was and what she looked like,” he told his adoptive father, “But I can’t do that anymore.”

  “And I am very sorry I can’t help you with that. I can tell you this. Once you are gone, you will have everything you need to find out who she was. I wish I could have been an actual father to you, as opposed to just, well, a caretaker.”

  Gheno hugged the old man that morning.

  “You were and still are everything I could have ever needed,” Gheno had never really remembered crying. That morning he came close. He held it in though. Letting his emotions flare wouldn’t help construct an ideal image aboard his new home.

  Just after the noon meal, a simple arrangement of fruits and breads, Kale, Ayia and Gheno boarded the retooled Midnight Oil. After being gently lifted out into the harsh winds of Devil’s Den, the ship lined up with the equator. It used the planets rotation to sail into orbit. From there, the ship engaged the Hausen reactor and slung out to the edge of the system. This is where they would make their test jumps to Earth and Mars.

  Sixteen hours after leaving Devil’s Den’s orbit, the Midnight Oil used its gravity field to slow the ship down just at the edge of where the Alioth system met deep space, at the very edge of the sun’s significant gravity range. From that point forward, Alioth’s sun had very little gravitational pull. It was also in this small sphere around the entire system where the ability to pierce space was most accessible. At this border and beyond, the Prokhof hook could penetrate space time using far less energy. As Oganno pointed out, energy-efficient hook utilization created for greater potential in deep-space exploration.

  Ships traveled by two main methods. Travel within systems used a simple gravity sling. A ship’s drive would create a mass of gravity directly in front of the vessel, in the direction the crew wanted to travel. This mass would pull the ship and then sling it in that direction. When a ship began reaching its destination, another gravity mass would form to draw the ship into it, slowing it down. This method was effective only for shorter ranges but kept the ship within the known space. Navigation and trajectory in this kind of flight was especially important. Many ships were destroyed when they didn’t plan their flight precisely and ended up smashing into a rock, or pulled into a gas giant. With the AI on board, Kale never had any troubles. The largest and most populated systems also dropped navigation points around their galaxies. These space buoys could be locked onto to provide a common jumping point. In a system as large and wealthy as Alioth, these jump points were usually quite crowded and busy. As the Midnight Oil slowed down, Kale spotted at least twenty to twenty-five other ships and one Super Tug, the behemoth tugs that carried many ships at one time in singular jumps between systems.

  These two to three mile long cylindrical slabs of metal weren’t actually ships themselves, as they had no jump capacity of their own. Instead, they served as a ferry for many smaller ships. These smaller crafts would dock onto the tow, just like the planetary tugs, and each individual Hausen reactor would link up to send the entire beast into a jump. The combined energy resulted in a shorter jump time. The owners of the tugs charged a moderate sum for this jump. However, this operation only worked well in high-traffic jump points, and Alioth was one of them.

  Kale would not be using a tug this time, even though he had many times in the past. As soon as the Midnight Oil came to a complete standstill in space, if there ever was such a thing, he moved their gravity field slightly ahead and began moving towards that sweet point where the jump would be the easiest. Ayia was sitting behind him in the second chair and Gheno was in the doorway to the cockpit. He would have to sit down back in the ‘Hall’ before the jump though.

  Ayia enjoyed the jump. She had been in many jumps in her life. After her rescue, in the cabin of the Midnight Oil, she had finally seen how the jump looked.

  “It looks like someone just smeared butter all over your windshield.”

  That was the best description Kale had ever heard. And it made perfect sense. When space was pierced the ship entered, what was described as, another dimension. Within the vessel, time continued, but from everything that was understood time did not exist in the dimension. Space existed, but it was unlike the space humanity had evolved in. Instead, this one was, deformed and abnormal. The light it displayed was off, angular and blurred, just as if someone had smeared butter all over a glass and shined light through it.

  “Do they even use the term windshield?” She asked.

  “I guess it’s one of those terms that changes meaning with history while keeping the same name,” Kale attempted to explain, even if he found it odd as well.

  Ayia was going to have a front row seat to this new jump. Even Kale, who begrudgingly allowed for the new hook to be installed, was excited. His excitement came from a very different source. He stood to make a lot of money if this worked as his old man had intended.

  Then, to his left, just above the display shield in the glass, a small green light started blinking. Kale’s head tilted to the side. He hadn’t seen that light in a long time. It was an open range com request from another ship. Someone was trying to communicate with him.

  It was common for people in space to talk to each other. It was essential and necessary for survival. Oftentimes, lonely captains just needed someone to talk to. To refuse an open range com request was unheard of and quite frowned upon.

  “FEI?”

  “Yes, one ship, seventeen thousand kilometers off the horizon, sunward. Too far to scan sir,” came the AI’s reply.

  Kale reached over and tapped the button. It stopped blinking and turned solid green. Kale dragged the button and threw it into the main screen. An image appeared.

  Ayia gasped.

  Kale sank into his chair.

  “This is…” Kale muttered.

  “AYIA!” It was the face of her jilted fiancé, the son of the crime boss on Tempura station. “I knew I would find you!”

  3124 - Quator, Tempura Station orbiting Quator 2 mining planet, 45.56 light years from Sol

  He really hoped she would change her mind. He knew he could find another but something about Ayia left him feeling vacant. He sensed a different appreciation for life when he was with her. He’d been separated from the world of anarchy that ruled over the fringes of humanity. He felt civilized, for once. He felt smarter, more whole, more a man than he had ever felt before. Yet, there she was, being led into her coffin along with the man that she apparently loved more than him.

  He was Cruxe, son of the crime boss of Tempura Station in the Quator system.

  His father was forcing him to watch. It would make him stronger, more apt to his image. He was already physically similar to his father. He had the same dark skin and smooth black hair as the station’s boss. He was also built the same way, short and stocky but powerful. He understood what would happen. Death would be quite instantaneous. The camera angles showed every view of the ship as it was carried out of the deep bowels of the station and emptied out into space. The ship was beautiful, streamlined and noble. It was a fitting tomb for his bride.

  It would take only a few seconds once it was released from the tractor. Then it would be destroyed, along with his hopes. Around him, a raucous murmur was arising in anticipation of the destruction. It was the wanton violence often desired by the types his father surrounded himself with. With her, he felt a different peace, an embrace to order, not chaos. To his left, a large brute of a man smashed a bottle of an alcoholic drink on his head in a show of rage, intent on impressing whomever was watching.

  Cruxe closed his eyes as the ship exited the docking port and into space. He preferred not to watch. He heard what sounded like a pop and then all at once the room erupted, but not in cheer. They were cries of horror. Cruxe opened his eyes; he was unable to detect anything around him. The room was pitch black. The power had been cut off in the room where he stood. Bodies were crashing into each other and Cruxe smartly crept forward into the main dashboard of screens that had just recent
ly been displaying the ship. Someone lit a flame to an alcoholic drink and he saw the faces of many men around him, flickering in the light of the fire. All eyes turned to the chief.

  He stood at the back, an imposing figure with a large scar across his entire face and a burn mark down the left side of his neck. He appeared calm before breaking out into a laughter that shortly turned into a roar.

  “That bastard! That smart, wily bastard,” he roared, “too smart for dumb shits, the likes of you all.” He pointed his fingers around the room, implicating all of his cohorts.

  “Did anyone think of looking for an EMP on the ship?”

  Cruxe smiled as he saw the dumbstruck looks on their faces.

  “You told us to take off any weapons boss,” one of his subordinates replied, hesitantly.

  “Looks like you missed one,” snapped the chief as he grumbled his menacing laugh.

  The chief didn’t care. He was upset that he missed out on watching an execution. He also realized, much to his discontent, that he would have to explain what happened to the Theor, the religious figure head of their odd movement.

  “Alright, let’s get out of here and fix this up before too many people die,” he ordered.

  The attack on the station was disastrous. Every electrical component, except for the Hausen reactor, was fried or shut off. Whole rooms took hours to get open and a number of people died in the meantime, suffocating from lack of oxygen. The magnetic field that held the atmosphere intact from out on the dock malfunctioned. This caused in were down and the crowd that had gathered out to jeer at Kale and Ayia to be swept out into space to their deaths. In all, nearly seventy people died that day on the station.

  Of course, the chief didn’t care. He never cared about the lives of his people. They brought him money and he would replace them with more people that could do the same thing. It took them many hours to bring enough power back online to receive the message left behind. It took them almost two days to disable the mines. The pilots in the ships outside the station, the executioners, nearly died of dehydration and hypothermia.