Theocracy: Book 1.

by Doug Dandridge

  The station shook under the officer’s hand, and Chung looked back into his link to see that the Admiral had used a matter-antimatter warhead against the door. The bright flare was stepped down by his systems, and still blotted out the stars in view from the vantage of the sensor feeding him the image. When the flare cleared the door was still there in its five square kilometers of glory. There were pieces missing, and more of it scarred and crumpled, but it had held up.

  Something flared on one of the battleships and another missile was headed toward the door. Chung watched this one intently through the link, wanting to see it take out the barrier and allow them into the hangar.

  Chung yelled out as the missile detonated in space, a thousand kilometers from the door. He wasn’t sure what had happened until the firing ship flared under a hit of coherent light and part of the hull ruptured out. And then it was a battle, as the weapons of the station opened up on the fleet.

  “Get us in there,” he yelled at the marine officer, turning back to see that the hatch was opened almost wide enough for a man to get through.

  Not able to affect any changes to the local situation, he turned his attention back to the fight. One battleship had been wrecked. With great holes torn through its hull it was adrift. Another flared from a dozen hits as he watched, gas spraying from the pierced hull to flame for an instant before vacuum pulled it apart. The other ships were firing back with lasers, particle beams and missiles. No missiles were coming from the station, which made sense since it was supposedly a completely civilian operation. But the beams that were coming from it were very energetic, causing considerable damage with each strike.

  The station shuddered again as some more antimatter warheads struck. The fleet was taking a pounding, but the fire from the station was rapidly being reduced, and it seemed to Chung’s calculations that they would win this battle. But how many more will we have to fight before this is over, he thought. And when will we not be able to win.

  “We’re through,” yelled out the officer with a sound of triumph.

  Chung turned to see that the airlock was now open, and the ten meter long chamber beckoned. There was another door at the end of the chamber, as they knew there must be unless the ancients had put their full trust in plasma fields. And this was an indication that, at least in inhabited areas, they didn’t.

  The station shook underfoot again, and Chung checked back on the battle, to find with relief that it was well in hand. Some lasers still struck from the station, but most of its weapons had been taken out, and the fleet had only lost a trio of ships, one destroyed, two badly damaged. Only three, thought Chung with a shake of his head. Almost a quarter of our force to try and get past the defenses of civilian station.

  The marine officer hit the big green button on the wall by the inner door with his hand. The door didn’t move, didn’t even budge, and the green button turned red.

  “It probably won’t open if the outer door is also open,” said Chung to the officer.

  That man nodded and motioned for a marine to disengage the opener. With the push of a couple of buttons the opener retracted and the outer door closed. Another marine sprayed a patch in place over the hole. Chung looked at the inner door and saw that the button had turned back to green. He nodded at the officer, who pushed the button, and watched as the inner door slid open.

  Chung’s eyes widened as he saw the many robots that were waiting in the hall outside the door. There were man sized robots in the shapes of men and aliens, down to smaller maintenance and pest control bots. His skin prickled as he looked at their expressionless faces. And then they opened fire.

  * * *

  “We have another open one here,” yelled Derrick.

  Alyssa turned from the gate she was looking into, watching the small monitor she carried at the view of the small flyer she had released into the wormhole. It was showing yet another hallway, and the ship had said it was an industrial center on a large metallic moon. She left the two centimeter robot on automatic recon and looked over to where Derrick stood.

  “Have we found the control center yet?” asked Patrick, running down from the end of the hall where he had been scouting.

  “Not yet,” yelled Alyssa back. She turned and trotted over to where Derrick was looking into the other open wormhole. She looked down at the hand held monitor and recoiled from what she saw.

  If it was the inside of a pyramid the far wall had been destroyed. A bright, almost blinding light shone down on the rubble strewn area. And the rubble was glowing red hot, white in some areas. Derrick moved the scout robot so that it was looking up into the swollen white ball of a monstrous star.

  “I wonder if anything ever lived on that surface?” said Derrick, grimacing at the scene. “If that planet was always in that position, then it must have been something other than carbon based.”

  “Or the planet was further out at one time and has since been pulled in,” said Alyssa, nodding. She looked down at Shadow, who sat at her feet and looked up. “I’m glad you didn’t jump through that one, you little stinker, or we would have only gotten ash back.”

  The cat meowed, looked over at the wormhole, and turned away.

  “Can you move the scout out of the room?” she asked Derrick, who nodded and worked some controls.

  The view moved out of the chamber to the nightmare landscape beyond. Volcanoes erupted in the near distance, sending plumes of smoke into the already roiled atmosphere. Rivers of lava flowed through the valleys below, and the hellish blue star pumped heat into the rocks, which shimmered with heat.

  “Atmosphere is about double normal, with enough oxygen to survive,” said Derrick, looking at his monitor. “But there’s also a lot of carbon dioxide and sulfur in the air. Too much to take for long. Air temp is four hundred and eighty degrees Celsius.”

  “So obviously not a target for exploration,” said Alyssa with a frown. “Not unless we get together a fully equipped expedition.”

  “I wonder why we’re not feeling the heat come through the wormhole?” asked Derrick.

  “They probably have some kind of control over the surface of the hole,” said Alyssa, who had wondered what would happen if a hole opened up on a vacuum. “It probably only allows solid objects to move through as a safety measure.”

  As she said the last word the picture died, and Derrick cursed under his breath.

  “Let’s move on to the next ones,” she said, motioning the way down the hall. “I have mine on autonomous explore, so it should let us know if it finds anything interesting.”

  “At least the station’s not shaking anymore,” said Derrick, looking up at the ceiling twenty meters overhead. “I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing.”

  “Daedelus,” said Alyssa, looking up herself like she was going to see through that ceiling. “What’s going on with the invasion?”

  “I regret to report that the station’s outer defenses are no longer operating. The enemy was stung, severely. But they are starting to board the station at numerous points.”

  “So when will they get here?” asked Alyssa, continuing to walk down the hall until she spotted another mirror surface. She pulled a scout robot from the bag at her hip and set it in motion through the wormhole.

  “Station robots are still contesting their entry into the station,” said the ship.

  Alyssa looked on her hand monitor and cursed as another ruined room appeared on the screen. At least things weren’t melting, and the temperature readout was in the thirty degree centigrade range, with plenty of oxygen and low CO2. But the ruins told the story that it was not the control center on a station, since large blocks of stone would not be used in the construction of such. She set the scout to auto and moved on.

  “We might have something over here,” said Derrick, and Alyssa and Patrick came running over, Shadow leading the way.

  “So what do you have?” she asked, looking over his shoulder at the picture revealed. She whistled as she made out the shapes of what ha
d to be spaceships floating in a star filled night. There was a massive hole in the wall the wormhole looked out on, with melted edges that indicated violent entry.

  “The wormhole is about a hundred meters further back in this, what looks like, a hold,” said Derrick. “Temperature is almost minus two hundred degrees centigrade. No atmosphere whatsoever. Looks like something happened to all of these ships.”

  The scout was at the hole now and was looking out into the night. It zoomed on one of the ships, and the damage to the hull was apparent from the start. Punctures and twisted alloys, along with no sign of power. And they had probably been floating there for thousands of years, a fleet of the dead.

  “Well, we know that’s not the command center in this system,” she said, looking over at a disappointed Patrick. “We didn’t see all those capital ships floating around her.”

  “I wonder what happened to them?” asked the Monk, his eyes narrowing. “Were they invaded through the wormholes? Or did other ships come upon them and destroy them in a great battle.”

  “We may never know,” said Derrick, moving the scout away from the hole and moving it toward a large door that appeared about fifty meters away. He played the lights of the scout over everything he came to, there being no internal illumination in the area.

  He turned the scout when he caught something lying on the floor. The light played over a mass of space suited bodies that lay there. Derrick moved the scout in closer and they all saw that most of the bodies were not human, and that their suits had been penetrated, often at the helmet, by something that had surely caused the death of them.

  “Maurids,” said Derrick, as the gangly creatures’ specially made gloves came into focus.

  “The demon creatures?” said Patrick with a sick expression.

  “They’re not really evil, Patrick,” said Alyssa, laying an arm across his shoulders. “They are predators, and so have those instincts. But we have them in my home system, and they can be as fine a people as you would ever want to meet.”

  “People,” said Patrick, spitting out the word. “They didn’t look like people to me.”

  “You’re going to have get over that prejudice, Patrick,” said the woman, patting him on the back. She looked over at Derrick. “Put this one on auto and lets move on.”

  “You really think we’re going to find one that leads to the control station in this system?” asked the ex-marine, a frown on his dark face.

  “We won’t know unless we try,” she replied. The station shook again, a sign that someone was still fighting someone else. “And we may need a bolt hole before this is all said and done.”

  * * *

  The young officer was the first to die, struck through the body by several projectiles while a laser burned his face off his head. Two more of the troopers were hit, one killed, before the organic creatures could fire back. And one marine got his arm tangled in a net fired by one of the small vermin hunting robots.

  The heavy beamer man stepped forward while several others were firing their rifles. As soon as he had a clear field of fire, he pulled his trigger and sent the energetic particle beam sweeping the hallway. Where it struck metal glowed white hot and flowed to the floor like lava, or exploded from the heat differential from the surrounding metal. He was halfway through the congregation of robots when the grenades started going off among them, blasting robots into scrap. Chung turned to see the grenadier finish firing the magazine of munitions into the robots before he started to change out the drums.

  “We need an assault platoon at our position immediately,” yelled Chung into the com that linked him to the marine command center on the flagship.

  “We’ll try to get you one, sir,” said the officer on the other end, tension underlying the calm of his voice. “But we’ve lost five of the entry teams already, and the Admiral is calling for a force to take the hangar he just opened.”

  Chung looked around at his team, really his now that he was the only officer present. He had seven effectives and three wounded, along with the two dead. He looked down the hall where the metallic carcasses of robots lay everywhere. He thought he caught movement at the end, but it was gone as soon as he focused on it. It still seemed a sure thing that more of the robots would show up.

  “Look,” he said into the com. “I want the first available force sent to my location. I don’t care where else they might be needed. The first available troops are to come here. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” stammered the com tech at the other end. “But, sir.”

  “No buts. If those troops don’t come here first, I will have the hides of every man working in that center. Do you hear me?”

  Chung signed off from the com sure that he had put the fear of the Gods into the crew.

  The robots showed up twice before the reinforcements arrived, and Chung listened in on the coms of several units that had been overrun. But finally his reinforcements arrived to relieve the five tired survivors of his squad, including himself. And he smiled as he looked at the five human leaders and the thirty-seven Maurid troopers that came with them.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  “Now this looks promising,” said Derrick, looking down at the monitor. Alyssa came over and looked at the screen, which showed a hall much like the one they were in, free of rubble and full of well tended furniture and vegetation.

  “Daedelus,” asked Alyssa, watching the camera eye view of the robot move about the hall. “Where is this?” There seemed to be a lot of open wormhole gates in this hall. In fact, of the score in view, only a couple of them were dead. And there was a second tier above the first, and the hall seemed a bit wider and longer than the one they were in. So probably not the opposite hall in this station, she thought.

  “This is one of the gate rooms on the Donut,” said the computer.

  “Where all of those murderous robots came from?” asked Derrick, his voice breaking in a squeak. “Oh shit. Does this immortal guy know we’ve sent something through?”

  “I am sure he does,” said the ship. “He would, of course, be monitoring all the gates of the station, in their millions, with the Donut’s computer.”

  “And this was the center of the Galactic Empire, correct?” asked Alyssa as the scout moved down the hall, its camera sending back a clear image of murals and statues and even a beautiful fountain.

  “There were actually two Donuts in the history of the Empire,” said the ship. “Both were massive structures built around black holes. The first was the center of the early Empire, in the first two thousand years, and was destroyed in one of the wars of consolidation. The second is the one that still exists today, and was built as a replacement to the first.”

  Damn machine goes into lecture mode, thought Alyssa, looking over at Derrick, who was still following the scout through the hall toward a large double door at the end. All I wanted was the simple answer. But two of the damned things, each as massive as a large moon. Amazing.

  “Uh oh,” said Derrick, as the doors opened and a robot Hustedian hopped through. It was equipped for combat, and the rifle it carried tracked onto the scout and the camera went to static. “I guess that wasn’t a welcome aboard, see you in a few.”

  “It might just mean see you in a few,” said Alyssa, backing away from the wormhole. “We need to see what else we can find before we have to start running.”

  Derrick nodded, then looked over at Patrick. “Think you can give us warning if something comes through this gate? And maybe keep it from coming in too far?”

  Patrick pulled his sword from its sheath with a swish and held his shield up. “I’ll make sure that nothing dangerous comes through. And if it does, I’ll make sure it doesn’t get far.”

  “The invaders have made it into the station,” said the ship. “I have powered down my systems so that they will not key on me in the hangar.”

  “They’re in the damned hangar?” said Alyssa, feeling a bit of panic.

  “They have inserted troops into the ship
hangar, yes,” said Daedelus. “And they have also penetrated the defenses of a half dozen of the maintenance locks.”

  “Can you throw more robots at them?” asked Alyssa, walking toward the next active gate portal and getting a scout robot ready to launch.

  “The station had a limited supply of active robots,” said the ship. “I am afraid that most of them have already been destroyed or damaged beyond repair.”

  “Keep us appraised as to their location,” said Alyssa, launching the robot into the open wormhole. “Especially if they get within five minutes of this location.”

  “I will do that,” said the ship.

  The scout appeared in yet another room with multiple gates, and Alyssa was wondering if the ancients ever had a single gate going to someplace important that didn’t need that many connections. Those are probably under lock and key, she thought. Her society wouldn’t have an entrance into a sensitive area that was open to the public, so she seriously doubted these people would either.

  The scout robot cruised through the small room, which was almost choked with rubble. Strange looking vines with sickly appearing flowers stretched across the room, and as she watched one moved and tried to swat the robot out of the air. She moved it up toward the ceiling, trying to get out of reach, when something from behind hit the robot and knocked it toward the floor. A couple of the vines grabbed it and pulled it down toward one of the flowers, which opened up and revealed a sharp toothed mouth. Then the camera went dead.

  “I guess that ones not for us either,” she said, looking over to where Derrick was probing another gate. “What do you have?” she yelled, turning away and wondering what kept the vines on their side of the wormhole, since they were solid objects. For all she knew they did wriggle over to this side every once in awhile, and finding nothing of worth, were pulled back.

  “Looks like a real nice place,” said Derrick.

  Alyssa looked at his screen and had to agree. The gate must have let out on an open outdoor area, which was a wide plaza. Shining buildings stood around the plaza, and snow capped mountains rose beyond the structures.