The Others Read online

  The Others

  Blood on the Stars 13

  By Jay Allan

  Copyright 2019 Jay Allan Books Inc.

  All Rights Reserved

  Chapter One

  HWS Effestius

  Venta Traconis System

  Year of Renewal 267 (322 AC)

  The beam sliced through the vast expanse of dark and frozen space, an electric blue spear, speckled along its vast length with bits of swirling black and dark gray. There was an eerie aspect to it, a feeling of coldness despite the massive amounts of energy that drove it and it brought death in its wake.

  The extraordinary energy lance was a thing of sinister beauty, possessed of a magnificence that provoked wonder and astonishment for a passing instant, at least, before those emotions turned quickly to darkness and terror. The deadly beam continued its way across hundreds of thousands of kilometers of emptiness and then through the heavily armored hull of the Hegemony monitor, cutting through deck after deck and leaving fire and death behind it. Heavy alloy plating seemed to offer no more resistance to the weapon immense power than had the vast emptiness of space.

  Effestius’s scanners were going wild, their feedback a flow of indecipherable nonsense, as every attempt to analyze the deadly weapon, to identify the massive energy even then slamming into the ship, was stymied by the indecipherable…strangeness…of the thing. It was energy, that much was clear, and it put out some kind of radiation as well, but only two conclusions were truly clear in those terrifying moments. First, it was something utterly unlike the weapons the Hegemony’s ships carried…or anything else the monitor’s crew—or its AIs and their vast petabytes of records and data—had ever encountered.

  Second, it was the deadliest and most powerful destructive force anyone on Effestius, or anywhere in the rest of the Hegemony fleet, had ever seen, vastly surpassing the power even of the battleships’ great railguns.

  The beam, no more than twenty centimeters in diameter, cut through the hardened hyper-steel hull of the great battleship, and sliced more than a kilometer and a half through, before emerging from the other side, leaving a second gaping wound in the hull. Inside, all along the deadly beam’s path, decks were torn open, systems damaged and destroyed, and hundreds of Kriegeri crew were killed, sliced apart by the beam itself, incinerated as secondary explosions tore through the guts of the vessel, or taken by the deadly cold and vacuum in compromised compartments, killed before they could even shut helmets or activate emergency life support systems.

  “Scanner command, I need something better than you don’t know. That thing just tore through the entire ship. What the hell was it?” Kel sat stone still in the center of the monitor’s massive bridge, exerting all his will—backed up by the pompous self-grandeur he’d always accorded himself as a Master of the Hegemony—to remain calm, to do what he could—what little he could—to staunch the wave of fear spreading through his flagship.

  Spreading through the entire fleet…

  Through his own transfixed mind, too, though he struggled to deny that last fact, even to himself.

  “The AIs have no answer, Megaron. The energy readings we’re getting…they can’t be correct.”

  “Why can’t they? Because it’s more powerful than anything you’ve seen before? Have you witnessed everything in the universe, Kiloron?” Kel despised sloppy thinking and flawed logic. He was arrogant, some might even call him insufferable, but at his core he was a creature of intellect. The beam had cut through one of the Hegemony’s grandest and strongest vessels of war with a strength that defied imagining. But it was still only an energy weapon. It could be explained…his people and their machines simply didn’t know how.

  Yet.

  “Damage reports, all decks.” Kel almost disciplined the officer for his careless and shoddy logic, but there wasn’t time, not then. He had to save his ship.

  Save his fleet. If there were more enemy ships out there—and he still hadn’t been able to get a precise location on any of them—his entire advance force was doomed. His orders were to hold in the system, and to send a report back to Calpharon if any enemy were contacted. His flagship was gutted—that was certainly contact—and he knew his first and foremost duty.

  He turned toward the comm station, even before he got a response on the damage reports. “All courier ships are to depart at once, at maximum thrust. The high command has to know about this. Transmit all available data to the ships before they enter the tube.” Kel’s voice was still strong, but it was an illusion. His thoughts were becoming more erratic, the realization that he was very likely facing his death in the coming hours, if not minutes, chipping away at his resolve.

  “Courier ships acknowledge, Megaron.”

  “Damage reports on your screen, Commander.”

  The two responses were almost simultaneous, and it took a second or two for his mind to process both. Then, his eyes dropped to his screen, moving slowly over the scrolling reports. He expected the worst…but what he saw was even more terrible. The damage to Effestius was vast, probably mortal if his damage control teams didn’t pull off a miracle in the next few minutes.

  Something was still holding Effestius together, amid the internal explosions and rolling power failures, his own continued existence confirmed that. But it wasn’t much. His ship was critically damaged, three of its reactors knocked out completely, along with half the transmission lines leading from the fourth. There were widespread malfunctions throughout the ship, and every weapons array he had was down. As if to emphasize the dire nature of the situation, the bridge lights flickered twice and then a few seconds later, they went out for good.

  The emergency units kicked in almost immediately, not exactly replacing all of the lost illumination, but providing enough light for his officers to run the ship. What was left of it, at least. The battery power would last for a few hours, four or five at most. But Kel knew, deep in his mind, and in his rapidly beating heart, that Effestius’s backup power systems would never get the chance to burn through their charge.

  Kel stared at the readings coming in, and as he did, a thought slowly began to take shape, a conclusion that stripped him of the last of his courage. His ship was as good as dead, one of the grandest warships of the Hegemony, gutted by a shingle shot from the enemy ships still defying his efforts to precisely locate them. He was there to fight, to defend Hegemony space, but none of that mattered anymore. It was over, save perhaps, for the technicality of actual death, at least for him, and for the fleet’s flagship.

  He didn’t have to wait long for that verdict to become official. Even as he sat there, transfixed for a moment in the cold shock of his conclusion, he felt the shadow of death closing in around him.

  He could hear explosions all throughout the massive vessel, and moving closer. The air was caustic, tinged with fumes from the fires and the sharp smells of chemicals released from compromised storage facilities. He imagined the hell on the ship’s lower decks, the heat and intense radiation, the Kriegeri, Hegemony warriors all—his warriors—dying, choking to death as the air became increasingly toxic.

  Kel was no coward, but in that instant, he felt his resolve drain away, his eyes watering as he struggled to deny the death he knew had come for him. He clawed out for hope, anything, even self-delusion was preferable to the dark fear and misery overcoming him.

  But there was nothing…nothing but a yawning black pit in front of him, the great cold hands of death reaching for him, taking hold.

  He snapped down the visor of his helmet, feeling an instant’s relief as cool, pure air flowed into his lungs. But the respite was short-lived.

  A moment later, the containment on Effestius’s last reactor ruptured, and the great ship vanished in an instant, transformed for a brief few seconds into somethin
g almost like a new star…before it slowly disappeared, leaving only radiation and residual energy readings to show that a six-kilometer long warship had once been there.

  If Kel had been aware, if he’d been granted a few second’s more sentience, he might have considered it a merciful end, a less painful way death than fire or suffocation offered…and an escape from a war that could only bring obliteration and despair.

  But there had been no time, no realization. One instant, he was battling against his fear, and then…he was gone.

  * * *

  “All units, full thrust. Active scanners on maximum power. I want a complete report immediately. I want to know what’s going on up there!” Ilius sat in the command chair of the Hegemony flagship, the position occupied until recently by Chronos, his friend and immediate superior. Number Eight was still the fleet’s overall commander, and the Hegemony’s effective military leader, but he’d been stuck on Calpharon for weeks, immersed in emergency sessions of the Council. Talk, Ilius thought with caustic derision. Pointless prattle.

  Between the politically-charged inquiries about the failure of the Rim absorption campaign and the likely tsunami of fear-driven arguments and debates about the Others and how to meet the possible invasion, he suspected Chronos already missed the relative simplicity of the stress and danger of battle.

  And we can upgrade that invasion status from ‘possible’ to ‘actual’…

  Chronos was a true leader, and Ilius missed his superior’s presence. Despite the failures in the just concluded war, there was no one Ilius trusted more with the top command than Chronos, and in the absence of his friend, the responsibility weighed heavily on him.

  There was enough blame to go around about the results of the war on the Rim. Chronos had failed, certainly, as Ilius himself had. The millions of Kriegeri committed to the war had as well, and the Council on Calpharon, too, which had prevaricated on sending resources to the Rim. Mostly, perhaps, they had all underestimated the humans on the Rim—their numbers, their industry, their capability—and the whole thing had fallen into a deadly cycle. The more the Rimdwellers proved their capabilities and their worth, the more essential it became to make them a part of the Hegemony. The greater the losses suffered, the more pressure to show gain for it all, to add the rich industry of the Rim to the Hegemony’s economic base. The Rim worlds had suffered from the Great Death, certainly, but far less severely than those systems coreward. Underestimating them had been understandable enough, especially when comparing their worlds to the irradiated and damaged planets the Hegemony had already reclaimed, but that didn’t change reality.

  None of that mattered now. The Others had come, and they had to be faced, with whatever force remained, the Rim forces alongside the Hegemony’s, if Carmetia could somehow achieve that seemingly impossible bit of diplomacy, or without if need be.

  Chronos had welcomed Ilius warmly on the commander’s return from Confederation captivity. That had been friendship, to a point, but Ilius knew it had been more, that it had come from a place of desperate need, too. Chronos had been desperate for someone to fill his chair, someone he could trust with the fleet, all that remained of ready Hegemony military power after the losses suffered on the Rim, as it moved to face the coming onslaught. Someone capable and trustworthy to face the enemy coming from without, while Chronos addressed the fractures and weaknesses from within.

  Ilius knew Chronos had faith in him, but he had also seen something in his commander’s eyes, the doubt about leaving the fleet himself on what seemed likely to be the start of the Hegemony’s greatest challenge. Chronos had always despised the political maneuverings so prevalent on the Council, but both he and Ilius had realized immediately, there was no choice. The Hegemony faced the greatest threat in its history, and no one—not the Council, not the military, not the legions of highly-ranked Masters in the elite think tanks—seemed to know just what to do. More than a century of fear, of preparedness, of shouted warnings, were all for naught. The Hegemony was in dire peril, weaker than it had been in generations, and the only people it could look to for help had been turned into inveterate enemies by its own actions.

  The war on the Rim had been a failure, but now Ilius began to see the true scope of the disaster his people had suffered there. He had questioned the order to surrender Colossus, and he’d ached to fight on, to take whatever chance had remained to retake control of the great vessel. He’d been ready to send his Kriegeri against the boarders in a last mad assault, struggling to take the explosives before the Confeds could detonate them. But then Chronos had told him why he’d issued the order, passing on the latest intel he’d received from Akella.

  Ilius could still remember the feeling, like a cold hand gripping his spine. The Others. They were real, and by all accounts, hey lived up to the descriptions Ilius had long discounted as exaggeration. They were a deadly danger, validating the fears long fanned by legend and rumor.

  And they had returned.

  No doubt remained, no refuge for hope that Armageddon could be averted. Ilius didn’t know what he faced, but his concise intellect stripped him of the ability to grasp for pointless shreds of hope. With Colossus, with the power of the Rim aligned alongside the Hegemony’s own, he dared imagine there would be a real chance of victory against the terrible foe. But his people had lost both of those things. The Rim viewed the Hegemony as a hated enemy, and Colossus had been surrendered and left behind. The Hegemony had gambled on gaining control of the Rim, and it had lost. It stood alone.

  Ilius didn’t expect the Rimdwellers to return Colossus any time in the foreseeable future, but the fact that the great ship still survived was something. At least he tried to tell himself that.

  Colossus might still return and join the fight, though only in the seemingly unlikely eventuality the Rim nations could be turned from enemies to allies, convinced to leave behind their rage and their thirst for vengeance for the losses they had suffered and join with the Hegemony against the greater enemy.

  That task lays heavy on Carmetia’s shoulders…

  Ilius knew Carmetia. She was a Master, and a distinguished one, though her rank was considerably lower that his own. He considered her to be reasonably competent, if a bit too strident and annoying for his tastes, but he wondered if she was up to the enormous task that had befallen her.

  If she realized her success or failure might very well determine the future—the survival—of the Hegemony itself.

  The Rimdwellers are stubborn…

  Part of Ilius wanted to look down on his recent adversaries on the Rim, to view them as something just the near side of barbarians, and to despise them anew for allowing petty grudges to blind them to the deadly danger they all faced, the Rim no less than the Hegemony, if the Others could not be stopped.

  Then, he questioned how he would feel, if, for all his prized intelligence, he could so easily reverse his attitudes, to embrace an invader as an ally. To forgive millions of deaths, to allow the possibility of trusting those you’d just fought desperately against. Yes, there was danger coming, and a fate far worse than absorption into the Hegemony, but how could he expect them to believe that? The Rim lacked any recent experience with the Others. The Rimdwellers had no reason to fear the Others, or to realize that their recent enemies were now their only possible allies. The only hope they had. To them, the dark menace even then moving toward Ilius’s fleet, would seem a phantom, or more likely, a lie told by those seeking to undermine them.

  “Commander, we are receiving a transmission from Alpina.”

  Alpina? Effestius is the fleet flagship…

  His stomach went cold, tense.

  “On my link, Kiloron. At once.”

  “Yes, Commander.”

  A moment later, a voice poured into Ilius’s ears. It was familiar. Megaron Helas was Ilius’s colleague, not just a comrade, but one among the minuscule group the normally reclusive Master called friends.

  And the fleet’s second in command…

  Iliu
s could hear the stress in the officer’s voice. No, it was more than stress. It was stark terror.

  “Ilius…they came out of nowhere. We couldn’t even detect them, not until they were right on top of us. We picked up strange readings, spatial anomalies, but nothing useful for targeting. Effestius…destroyed. Commander Kel and the entire crew…dead. Jellas and Cormacen, too. We’re trying to pull back, but…”

  Ilius winced as Helas’s voice was drowned out by the sounds of explosions. Alpina was a massive ship, one of the Hegemony’s monitors, the largest warships known, save only for Colossus itself. The great battleships had been built to face the Others, and they’d remained in place on the coreward border, even through the war on the Rim. Ilius tried to tell himself he was hearing a transient explosion, a random case of energy feedback, but he’d never been very good at ignoring reality. Alpina was in trouble, bad trouble if the ship’s deeply-located and heavily-armored bridge was taking damage. Monitors had been built for war, and they were designed to be as close to impervious to damage as possible.

  But as he watched, Ilius knew, that wasn’t close enough.

  “Helas, full thrust, all ships. Get the hell out of there. Get your fleet back to the tube.” It was precisely the kind of pointless speech Ilius despised when he heard it from others. Helas’s ships were clearly already at full thrust, or as close as the damaged vessels could manage, and just as obviously, it wasn’t going to be enough. Hegemony’s Glory’s scanners were struggling even to detect the attacking ships, but what little data they’d gathered was clear. The immense dark cloud on the display was advancing relentlessly. It was an image of blackness and danger, one that seemed almost to pull his courage and his will from his body as he stared at it. Whatever force was out there, it was pursuing Helas, and it was going to catch her battered fleet. Not a ship would escape.