Fleet Vanguard (Transcended Book 2), page 1
Fleet Vanguard
The Transcended Book 2
Anthony James
Contents
The Arrival
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
© 2019 Anthony James
All rights reserved
The right of Anthony James to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed upon the subsequent purchaser
Illustration © Tom Edwards
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The Arrival
The weapons scientist checked his diagnostic tablet for the dozenth time, raised his head and glanced at the group of white-uniformed personnel gathered around. A few of them smiled nervously. The man with the tablet cleared his throat and spoke.
“We’ve done some tuning. Activate the phase jump again.”
Lieutenant Joe Nation narrowed his eyes. “Is the medical team on standby?”
The man attempted a smile. “You won’t need a medic.”
Nation stared at the solid wall of steel which divided the two lab areas. The wall stared back impassively.
“I don’t want to spend another week under the knife.”
“You won’t. Trust me.”
The scientist withered beneath Nation’s gaze and he pretended to look at his tablet. There wasn’t much sense in waiting around any longer – some things just had to be done. Without further hesitation, Nation gave the command and his phase jump augmentation activated. He experienced a momentary sense of dislocation and then he found himself on the opposite side of the wall, facing a second group of scientists. They broke into spontaneous applause.
One member of the group came towards Nation. Research Lead Bonnie Smith’s perfect skin made her appear far too young to be leading a team in a cutting-edge augmentation lab. She grinned and shook Nation’s hand. He grinned back.
“I’m not dead.”
“Don’t sound so surprised, Lieutenant.”
“Does that mean I’m good to go, RL Smith?”
“Maybe not yet. The new ISOP modules are fully-tested, but the phase jump is going to need more work before I’m confident you won’t suffer any more mishaps.”
The conversation ended abruptly. Nation’s comms augmentation went live and the Fortress-3 base mainframe pushed a top-priority message into his brain. He read it twice and then a third time. The words didn’t change and Nation swore.
“Lieutenant?” asked Smith, a look of concern on her face.
Nation dragged his attention away from the message. The details were high-priority, but not top secret. Smith would learn about it soon enough.
“One of our monitoring stations just sighted a fleet in the Future Sector. Hundreds of ships. They aren’t ours, they aren’t Ghast and they aren’t Estral.”
“Then what?”
“Something new.”
“Friend or foe?”
“When was the last time an alien fleet arrived with good intentions?”
Smith’s expression said it all. “This is another attack?”
“That’s not yet confirmed, but when was it ever different?” spat Nation in disgust.
The lab complex alarm started wailing.
Chapter One
Admiral Tisha Stone had dark, red hair, sharp blue eyes and a voice which sounded like she gargled with crushed volcanic rock every morning. Her office was dressed with a minimalist style which suggested she either had hidden depths of good taste, or simply no interest in furniture. Today, Stone didn’t look as if she were in the best of moods. There again, a bad temper was seemingly a pre-requisite for promotion to the Space Corps’ upper echelons.
“Look!” she commanded.
Lieutenants Becky Keller and Joe Nation looked.
A screen on one wall of Stone’s office played through the same footage which both officers had seen countless times already. One moment, the feed from Monitoring Station Tau showed an empty area of space, the next, many hundreds of spaceships appeared. These spaceships were unfamiliar in design – their hulls were matte grey, long and sleek and, though there was some variation, most of them possessed an overall shape similar to that of a heavily-barbed harpoon head. Some of the spaceships were thousands of metres in length and others were much, much smaller. Not one of them had any visible landing gear.
Stone placed her clenched fists onto the polished wood surface of her desk and leaned towards Keller and Nation.
“What a steaming pile of crap.”
Evidently satisfied with her announcement, Stone straightened, her eyes not once looking away.
“This footage is two weeks old, ma’am,” said Nation. “What’s new? I thought the Trivar told us their intentions were peaceful?”
“I was informed you were an intelligent man, Lieutenant Nation. Since when did the forging of peace require a thousand spaceships?”
“Perhaps my sarcasm wasn’t plain enough, Admiral. What are our plans?”
Without any apparent prompting from Admiral Stone, the largest screen on the side wall of her office changed to show something new. This time, it displayed a map of the seventy-four worlds which made up the human Confederation. Three of the planets were displayed as circles of red, whilst another seven were orange. The rest were green.
“We’ve identified elements of the Trivar fleet within striking distance of Vinxe, Lodston and Levent – these are the planets they have found.” Stone gave a thin smile. “We believe they are close to locating further planets.” She aimed a finger towards the map. “Wode, Lunar, Stentor, as well as these you see here.”
“How sure are we that they’re looking?”
“Absolutely certain. However, they aren’t so much looking as they are aggressively hunting.”
“I thought we had no way to track their spaceships?”
“We don’t.” Stone left that one hanging.
“Assuming they are hunting and they are successful, what happens afterwards?” asked Keller. “Do we allow them to search out every other planet in the Confederation until they’ve got all seventy-four?”
“Not a cat’s chance in hell. Something is going to give long before that happens.”
“What message are we getting from the Trivar?”
“The same crap they gave us when they first showed up.” Stone gave a derisive snort. “They are nothing but travellers, and we are merely an interesting diversion on their journey to an unspoken destination.”
Nation leaned back and heard his chair groan under the strain of 400lbs worth of reinforced alloy skeleton and Istoliar augmentations.
“Why don’t we tell them to piss off, or launch a pre-emptive strike?”
“We have no idea of their capabilities, Lieutenant. What if we attack and fail because we lack sufficient intel on their weapons and defences?”
“They’d probably attack a few of our planets,” Nation conceded. “Still, some things are better than sitting on our hands and waiting. I guess the psi team have come up with something?”
Admiral Stone nodded once. “Lieutenant Keller will fill you in.”
Nation turned his head and raised an eyebrow. “I’m all ears.”
Lieutenant Becky Keller tilted her head so that Admiral Stone couldn’t see the wink she offered Nation.
BK> Prepare for a complete lack of surprises.
JN> I could write out a list of everything you’re about to tell me, before you tell it.
BK> Admiral Stone likes to see everything properly discussed.
JN> In that case, let’s discuss.
Keller switched out of neural talk and used her voice instead. “A couple of my team were granted some insight and from that we ran a variety of predictive models. There is almost zero chance the Trivar are here on a mission of peace.”
“What outcome tops the probability tables?”
“Subjugation comes top, every time. Secondary to that comes an interest in our resources and production capabilities.”
“For once we’ve encountered another species that doesn’t simply want to kill every single human? It makes me feel almost happy.”
“Stop the wisecracks, Lieutenant,” snapped Admiral Sto ne.
Nation was unrepentant. “The cynicism is ingrained. Here we were, slapping ourselves on the backs because the Estral have got their hands full with Antaron, and now another species shows up to treat us to the same thing. I’d laugh if it was funny.”
“We will not be passive observers in this,” said Stone. “Nor will we act with such haste that we are given cause to repent later.”
This meeting was clearly building to something, though Nation had yet to divine the purpose of it. “Then what, ma’am?”
“A mission, Lieutenant Nation. A mission for which you are uniquely equipped.”
“Okay, I’m listening.”
“You should not be aware, unless you’ve been reading classified documents…” began Stone.
BK> Have you?
JN> Not that I know of.
“…that we have been asked to make diplomatic representation on one of the Trivar spaceships. One of their larger spaceships.”
JN> I thought you said no surprises.
BK> I lied.
“It’s news to me, ma’am,” said Nation. “This is our first official meeting with the aliens?”
“We’ve spoken to them extensively over the comms, however they haven’t given much away so far. This meeting is where we expect to learn their intentions.”
“Hence why we haven’t done anything rash,” said Keller.
It wasn’t hard to put two and two together.
“Am I going to be included in the diplomatic party?” asked Nation.
Stone’s desktop communicator bleeped and she rejected the inbound call. “Not exactly, Lieutenant. You’ll be coming along, but you are distinctly not with the party. The Space Corps would like you to infiltrate the Trivar spaceship and find out as much information about them as possible.”
“Does that mean I miss out on the vol-au-vents?”
Admiral Stone ignored the comment. “We have no idea how easy it will be for the Trivar to detect you, or even if success is feasible.”
“The labs upgraded my stealth modules,” said Nation. “Plus, they added some new shielding around my processing cluster, boosted my comms module and…”
Stone raised a hand. “I know what they did, Lieutenant. I’m about to send you on an important mission. Do you think I forgot to read the files?”
It was Nation’s turn to ignore a comment. “I am pleased to be given this mission. I will do my best.”
Admiral Stone’s face softened. “Of course you will, Lieutenant Nation. Your record is exemplary, even if you are flippant towards superior officers.”
BK> She’s got you there.
JN> It keeps coming up in the psyche evaluations. I don’t know why.
“When does the diplomatic team leave, ma’am?”
“It leaves Vinxe in eight hours. The Space Corps vessel SC Overland, accompanied by a suitable escort, will carry six senior members of the Confederation Council to the Trivar ship. The Overland will dock, a series of open-ended meetings will take place over the course of several hours, and then the spaceship will depart, bringing with it the members of the Council and one member of Covert Ops.”
“Sounds straightforward enough. What else?”
“There’s a mission briefing document to familiarise yourself with.”
Nation used his comms augmentation to locate the document on the Space Corps network. It was locked and he didn’t have the authority to access it. He opened his mouth to speak, just as the file lock disappeared. Nation downloaded the file.
“Got it.”
“Read it thoroughly,” said Stone.
It took Nation a fraction of a second to absorb the two-thousand-page document and he found a lot of interesting facts inside, along with plenty of guesswork and supposition regarding the Trivar.
“There’s something we’re missing,” he said. “It’s less than eighteen months since we found the Antaron on Isob-2 and, as far as we believe, there are dozens of them in the process of wiping out the Estral. Now the Trivar show up. This isn’t coincidence.”
“This is Lieutenant Keller’s field,” said Stone.
“You’re correct – it isn’t coincidence,” said Keller. “We believe that humanity has reached a tipping point where our technology has achieved a level that makes us interesting to other species which have reached or surpassed the same level of technology as we have.”
“This mission briefing says we believe the Trivar’s technology to be somewhere between fifty and a hundred years in advance of ours,” said Nation.
“That’s right.”
“What about the Antaron?”
“Let’s start with the Trivar,” said Keller. “They are bipedal humanoids and they fly around in spaceships. That gives us a point of reference and something from which to base our estimations. The Antaron are something completely and utterly different. We have nothing upon which to base our guesses or assumptions. When it comes to the Antaron, we are completely in the dark.”
“Have the Estral learned anything useful?”
“You are aware the Estral completely severed diplomatic ties when we refused to send any of our fleet to assist them against the Antaron,” said Stone.
“That doesn’t mean there is no communication.”
“There is communication,” Stone confirmed. “We still don’t know much about the Antaron and I think most in the Confederation are happy for the Estral to deal with that particular threat.”
“How many other species are flying around out there, wanting to get their hands on our Istoliar reserves?”
“Some or none,” said Keller with a wide smile.
“And we’ve resumed production of Faor, haven’t we?” asked Nation.
“Yes,” said Stone flatly, suggesting it wasn’t a topic she wished to discuss.
“How many additional species will come sniffing around when we have Faor spaceships and begin researching the next tier above Faor?”
“Some or none,” repeated Keller.
“I don’t feel reassured.”
“You aren’t here to be reassured,” said Admiral Stone. “The mission begins in eight hours. We are on Eriol and you need to reach Vinxe in time to join the others.”
“Which requires the use of a lightspeed catapult.”
“There’s a suitable spaceship on the landing strip. Lieutenant Keller will be your pilot. Once you rendezvous with the others, the SC Gundar will join the rest of the escort, to ensure the Trivar are aware we have advanced capabilities.”
“Another mountain of shit to dig our way through,” said Nation, not attempting to keep the bitterness from his voice. “Maybe one day we’ll find ourselves in the clear.”
“No one’s holding their breaths for that, Lieutenant.” Admiral Stone had fought in three previous wars and she had the ingrained scepticism of many senior officers.
A question jumped into Nation’s head. “What do the Ghasts think of this?”
“Same as usual. They don’t want to get involved.”
“Bring back the old Ghasts, that’s what I say.”
“That’s what a lot of people say, Lieutenant Nation.” Stone glanced at her desktop communicator and raised a single eyebrow. “It looks like you will be reporting to Admiral Cody from now on.” If Stone was upset by this sudden change, she didn’t show it. “Is there anything else before you depart?”
Admiral Stone’s question was clearly translatable as why are you still in my office? Nation and Keller took the hint and rose to leave. Stone had one final thing to say as they headed for the door.
“Try not to get into any trouble.”
“If only,” muttered Nation.
They left the office and headed for the parking lot to find a pool car.
Chapter Two
