Phoenix Wars: Book II, Phantoms (The Phoenix Wars 2), page 1
The Phoenix Wars
Book II: Phantoms
By
C. R. Daems
The Phoenix Wars: Book II: Phantoms
Copyright © 2021 by C. R. Daems
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from C. R. Daems.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ISBN-13: 978-1-7362282-1-0
Check out all my novels at
talonnovels.com
Table of Contents
Prologue
[1] You Must Be Mistaken
[2] It won't Work
[3] Never Satisfied
[4] What Now?
[5] Change of Plans
[6] Our Responsibility to Make It Work
[7] New Hope
[8] Making it Work
[9] Pitohui
[10] Fighter Upgrade Training
[11] Players Willing to Roll the Dice
[12] People Are the Weak Link
[13] In Case You Aren't Busy
[14] The List Expands
[15] Not So New Cruisers
[16] Theory Meets Reality
[17] The Prophecies
[18] An Unexpected Ally
[19] Explanations Required
[20] Not A Moment Too Soon
[21] Trial Run
[22] The LTN Club Expands
[23] All Stars Are Not Equal
[24] A New Way of Thinking
[25] Searching for A Solution
[26] Friend or Foe?
[27] Leaving the Nest Prematurely
[28] Complications Galore
[29] Tough Decisions
[30] The Plan Meets Reality
[31] Talks Continue
[32] Building the Team
[33] The Trial
[34] No Need for Private Security
[35] Revelations
[36] Never Ending Decisions
[37] Understanding Is the Key to Success
[38] A New Neighbor Arrives
[39] Golden Cats
[40] The First Great Test
[41] The Hammer Versus The Stick
[42] Free for All
Captain Basson
Golden Issatfi
Commander Kayla
Golden Issatfi
Commander Kayla
[43] From the Ashes, A New Phoenix
[44] Who to Trust
[45] I'm Not Ready, Again
[46] In Way Over My Head
[47] Mother Jumanu
[48] The JAC
[49] The Jumanu Council
[50] Planet Haadon, The Draak
[51] Phoenix, A New Player
[52] A New Government
[53] Priorities
[54] Cannot Trust Lizards
[55] Close Doesn't Count
[56] Alliance Conference
[57] Council Meeting
[58] Force Commander ju-Takeshi
[59] Detour to Dagaz
[60] Some Never Give Up
[61] No More Time to Waste
[62] The Selection Process
[63] Building A Cohesive Space Force
[64] Reinforcements
[65] Soofir
[66] Tullizor
Ju-Takeshi
Golden Claranfi
Ju-Takeshi
Golden Claranfi
Ju-Takeshi
Golden Claranfi
Ju-Takeshi
Golden Claranfi
Ju-Takeshi
Golden Claranfi
Ju-Takeshi
[67] Dagaz
Cat Lavanfo.
[68] War Games, Kayla
Golden Zenalfi
Captain Hyun
Commander Kayla
Golden Zenalfi
Commander Kayla
Golden Zenalfi
Commander Kayla
[69] Endless War Games
[70] War Games, Dagaz
Commander Kayla
Cat Lavanfo
Captain Hyun
Commander Kayla
Cat Lavanfo
Senior Force Leader ju-Takeshi
Epilogue
Prologue
Many millennia in the past, intelligent life appeared on Anixia. Capable of flight and having few predators, the species evolved as pacifists and devoted their energy to the sciences rather than defense. Their peaceful existence remained undisturbed for thousands of years.
An end to their tranquility was foreseen two hundred years ago by a bald eagle named Grey-seer, who revealed an ominous prophecy:
Anixia will soon be plagued by destructive creatures.
They will destroy the land's ability to support life.
To survive, the Anixians must make a two-hundred-year plan.
One that prepares the Anixians to survive while they await a featherless and wingless Anixian.
A wingless-featherless Anixian who will lead us back from the brink of despair.
The Anixians knew they must prepare for war even though they were not a warlike people. Over the subsequent years, they developed small spacecrafts and discovered faster than light speed travel. That enabled them to discover Earth, as well as an uninhabited planet comparable to Earth during its early Permian Period. The planet had a climate suitable for growing food and supporting animal life. It also had minerals that could be mined to manufacture what they would need to defend themselves. They named the planet Potoo, a bird that avoided detection by camouflage and stealth. Like its namesake, they used camouflage to make the parts of the planet that they utilized appear to be uninhabited. In addition, Potoo had an extensive asteroid field that allowed for undetectable manufacturing facilities.
These three discoveries formed the core of the Anixian’s two-hundred-year plan. They moved a sizable portion of their population and equipment to Potoo and began to grow food and plants for their pharmaceuticals, created manufacturing facilities within several of the asteroids, and conducted extensive research about the planet Earth. They found Earth's population intelligent, aggressive, and centuries behind Anixia in the sciences. The Anixian’s two-hundred-year plan had just begun to develop when the Tullizor, an intelligent life evolved from lizard-like animals, invaded Anixia, killing the people and poisoning the land with their missiles. The Anixians on Potoo built armed cruisers but their pacifistic nature made them unable to effectively wage war. In desperation, they built Oracle, an advanced artificial intelligence program, to pilot their cruisers and to defend their planet from the Tullizor. When that didn't work, they devised an incentive to enlist humans into their military: a cure from their existing lethal disease in exchange for enlistment into the Anixian military. The candidates had the necessary aggressive nature to fight the Tullizor; however, this solution had multiple weaknesses:
* Few of the human candidates had any military training, fewer had combat experience, and none had knowledge of spaceship warfare.
* The available candidates were limited to less than a few hundred per year, which was fewer than the losses incurred during the average Tullizor engagement, meaning they could not win a war of attrition with the Tullizor.
* The Tullizor were not the only warlike race in the area.
Consequently, the only hope of surviving was the appearance of a wingless Anixian without feathers.
[1] You Must Be Mistaken
I was surprised when Black Eagle, the leader of the Anixians, had not sent word for me to see him for over a week. Didn't he want to know what I had discovered on the expedition scouting nearby systems, or did he know from Oracle or some other source and was unhappy with what I did or didn't do? Just because I was satisfied with what we had accomplished did not mean he was equally satisfied. Maybe he was upset over the rumor I had started, that the Anixian's cures to our fatal diseases we received for joining the Anixian military were only effective for a finite amount of time.
When he did summon me, I was a nervous wreck and had a cruiser-sized headache by the time the lift deposited me on the shelf to his quarters. If I were in trouble, I rationalized it could have a good outcome. He could send me back to the fighter unit. Of course, it could have an unbelievably bad outcome if he decided to banish me, which would involve my being left to die on the abandoned, poisoned surface.
"Kayla, why are you so depressed looking?" My translation implant that continuously converted Black Eagle's beak clicks, trills, caws, and other sounds into understandable English jerked me out of my endless speculations. When I looked up, he sat in his normal chair; however, there were five other Anixians seated in the room, and judging by their robes, which displayed their house color and emblem and had silver trim on their hems, they were the leaders of the five houses that formed the Anixian race. I was obviously in way more trouble than I had imagined. "Sit child before you faint." When I sat, his translation-voice box spoke, "Marie, get Kayla something to drink. She looks pale."
Marie appeared only minutes later with my preferred almond-coffee drink. "If you didn't warn Kayla the Anixian Council would be present, you probably scared her to death," Marie said in a mother-to-child tone.
"I apologize, Kayla,” Black Eagle said. "The House of Law has a story, actually a prophecy, to tell you. One every Anixian house has been waiting for almost two hundred years to occur." He nodded to a female great-grey owl.
"Kayla, I am named One-that-sees," she said. "Two hundred years ago, my great grandfather, Grey-seer, spoke a prophecy:
Anixia will soon be plagued by destructive creatures.
They will destroy the land's ability to support life.
To survive, the Anixians must make a two-hundred-year plan.
One that prepares the Anixians to survive while they await a featherless and wingless Anixian.
A wingless-featherless Anixian who will lead us back from the brink of despair.
"We have been waiting for an Anixian to be born without feathers or wings for over two hundred years," Black Eagle said and laughed. "We now understand. He saw a human–a being without feathers or wings–would come to Anixia and be accepted as an Anixian. Although you are young, and without any military experience, I suspected you were the one Grey-seer saw after you developed the K-box strategy and used it to defeat the Tullizor's five cruiser invasion with no losses. I knew it after you defeated six Tullizor cruisers with only one cruiser, my namesake the Black Eagle. If that were not enough, the results of your expedition confirm you are the Anixian we have been waiting for to lead us back to our old ways."
I wasn't sure if this was a joke and I was supposed to laugh, or if it was a complex problem I was supposed to solve. If a joke, it wasn't funny. If a complex problem, the solution was years beyond me.
"Kayla," Black Eagle's voice jerked me out of my chaotic thoughts. "We are thinking we should move you up to our living quarters–"
"No, M-seer," I said quickly, using his more common form of address, knowing intuitively that wouldn't work. "I don't know if I'm the person that…Gray-seer saw, but whether I am or not, we will only succeed if the Anixians and the humans can work together. The Anixians supplying the tools, and the humans supplying the operators. Treating me as an Anixian will make the humans see me as more Anixian than human. I will be of more value if I am considered a conduit between the two cultures. If you must, you can consider me the head of the human houses, but please do not make that official. We must avoid controversy, no matter how minor, if we are to work together and realize a future where each of the human and Anixian houses is part of the Phoenix House–each different but all under one house. Some with wings and feathers and some without."
That produced laughs and what I thought to be agreement. Ironically, I wondered if the Anixians, who were pacifists and akin to doves, could survive among humans, who were predators and akin to hawks.
[2] It won't Work
My mind refused to work as the lift carried me down to the humans' area. I was only nineteen years old. I needed structure, a mentor, a boss, and what do I get? Adult responsibilities, I ranted on my way back to my sleeping quarters.
"What did Black Eagle want?" Yells from Hyun and Hanna greeted me as I opened the door. Before I could respond, they grabbed me by my arms and dragged me over to our small table and chairs. "Well?"
I laughed. "He confirmed Hanna's prophecy," I said, to stunned looks. After a few minutes, I took pity on them. "The Anixians also have a prophecy. A two-hundred-year-old one from an Anixian called Grey-seer. He foresaw an Anixian with no feathers or wings who would lead them to victory."
Hyun and Hanna stared at me for several long minutes. Then to my surprise, Hyun jumped up and screamed, "Yes!" Hanna followed, giving her a high-five. "I give you the modern Fu Hao," Hyun said with a wave of her arm and a small bow in my direction.
"Who the Hell is Fu Hao?" I asked, puzzled at their excitement since I considered it a disaster of galactic proportions.
"She was China's first female general, and you are going to be the Phoenix's first female general," Hyun shouted and made a pumping motion with her arm and a closed fist, "and Hanna and I are going to be your faithful companions and guardians protecting your back."
"You are as crazy as Black Eagle, but I love you idiots anyway." I rose and joined them in a three-way hug.
"What's next?" Hyun asked, looking serious.
"Find out if the medical staff has pharmaceuticals for migraine headaches, and if they do, order in a year's supply," I said, "because, I don't have a clue." They were both high on visions of grandeur and historical battles as they dragged me off to the mess hall for dinner, claiming it would help me think. My current problem was thinking too much.
The problem with the current plan – gathering volunteers from Earth each year, indoctrinating them into the military, and training them to be warriors – was that it would not create enough recruits to provide replacements for even minor confrontations with the various warlike intelligent species that we now know to exist: Tullizor, Soofir, and Jumanu.
Consider a thirty-year scenario given our current four-thousand human population, if eighty percent marry and each couple has four children, one every other year, in thirty years, we would have increased the population to about ten thousand. Given the same conditions, those children would increase the population by another ten thousand for a total of just over twenty-plus thousand in another thirty years. I am no doctor, but I suspect we would begin to have potential inbreeding concerns. The real problem is that this calculation assumes we have no deaths in the sixty-year period. An unlikely assumption given the high probability of confrontations with the likes of the Tullizor, Soofir, and Jumanu over that sixty-year period. Unlike our small human population, our adversaries have been around for thousands of years and have populations in the hundreds of millions to rely on to provide replacements for their losses. Any of those nations could survive a war of attrition, while we cannot. That puts me in charge of a plan that does not make sense on paper under ideal conditions, much less in reality where we will have to defend ourselves against multiple warlike nations like the Tullizor, Soofir, Jumanu, and undoubtedly others.
[3] Never Satisfied
"I don't know, Bennett," Frazer said, shrugging in a gesture of indecision as he appraised Bennett. He had met Bennett over a year ago when he had a question about specific information in his records. Bennett had been friendly and helpful and the two had become friends. Bennett had been a professor at a small New England college, teaching various computer systems used by manufacturing companies. He looked the quintessential image of a college professor: average height, a little overweight, round face with a neatly trimmed full beard, and always smartly dressed in a jacket. "The last several attempts at hijacking a cruiser failed rather spectacularly."
"True," Bennet said, nodding agreement. "But why? For the same reason most bank robberies are unsuccessful. The thieves believe they can just walk into the bank with a gun, scoop up the money, and drive away. That may work if you are only interested in the money the tellers have at their stations, but the real money is in the safe. Furthermore, the amount on hand varies by month, day, and time. The few successful bank robberies took months of planning and had inside help. The last three hijacking attempts assumed the Anixians were fools. If they were, Earth would already have an Anixian cruiser. They know from experience that humans are warlike, unpredictable, and can't be trusted to honor their agreements, especially when the rewards for reneging on their agreement is disproportionately large compared to the risk."
"The price for breaking the agreement is your life!" Frazer exclaimed in disbelief.
"Against the opportunity to live the rest of your life healthy, world famous, and obscenely wealthy? Besides, we can control the risk vs reward ratio with due diligence. Would you bet your life on one roll of the dice against one hundred billion dollars and a guarantee of good health if the odds of succeeding were nine out of ten and the alternative was serving in a military where your odds of living ten years were close to zero?"
"Put that way, I would roll the dice," Frazer said, giving a weak smile. "What about the rumor that we need booster shots to remain cured?" His face, pale and smooth like someone who never spent much time outdoors, was wrinkled in thought. An engineer, he was a meticulous individual who needed to understand the details.
"I think that was a clever distraction for the weak-minded crew, but definitely something we will need to verify before we roll the dice," Bennett said. "One of many things we will need to understand before we act. For now, we need like-minded individuals to help us acquire the information we will need to ferry a cruiser to Earth."
