Empire Ebook Full

EMPIRE

(Star Force Series #6)

by

B. V. Larson

Copyright © 2012 by the author.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either
products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual
events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, without permission in writing from the author.

-1-

I stood on the bridge of my battle station, gazing into a sphere filled with photo-reactive
nanites. We called this three-dimensional display system a “holotank”. The unit took
some getting used to, but it was definitely superior when it came to depicting space
battles and had replaced our planning tables. The base of the unit was surrounded
by flat screen consoles which could be manipulated by touch. I ran my fingers over
the consoles, and the imagery in the holotank responded, displaying data from anywhere
I wished in the Eden star system.

The Eden system was like most of the star systems we’d encountered in that there were
two “rings”, each of which connected the system to another. The rings were interstellar
gateways. Each of these vast structures was a massive alien artifact. Most of the
rings hung in space in stable orbits. They were often miles across and to the best
of our knowledge they were made of collapsed star-matter. When passing through a ring
a spaceship was instantly transported to another location, usually to another star
system.

We didn’t know who’d built these amazing structures we called “rings”, but they now
provided our only realistic method of travel from one star system to the next. Our
ships weren’t fast enough to make interstellar leaps on their own, not without many
years of travel time.

Collectively, the rings connected a long chain of star systems. The chain went back
to Earth and one step beyond that to Bellatrix. At our end of the chain, there was
only one system we’d discovered beyond Eden, which I’d named the Thor system. All
told, we’d discovered six connected systems.

The battle station I was aboard now was the only one of its kind. I’d built it very
close to one of the rings to protect the Eden system from invasion. Like a castle
built atop a mountain pass, it guarded against intruders by focusing its defenses
on a single, small entry point. The station and the ring it guarded both orbited Hel,
the coldest, most distant planet in the system. On the far side of the ring was the
Thor system with its population of unfriendly lobster-like inhabitants. Beyond Thor,
we didn’t know where the chain of rings led. It was my suspicion there were more chained-together
stars out there, each circled by alien worlds. I suspected there was a
lot
more of them.

The holotank showed the local tactical situation, which was routine at the moment.
I manipulated the consoles again, causing the imagery in the holotank to shift. Green
slivers of light flashed into focus as I panned across the system. The green slivers
floating in space represented my ships, which were scattered around Eden’s star. When
I located the biggest cluster of ships, I zoomed in. I’d assigned most of them to
guarding the second ring, which began a path of interstellar jumps that led home to
Earth.

I no longer needed ships on guard here, at the gateway to Thor. The battle station
took care of that duty now. It had been a tremendous effort to build the battle station.
It wasn’t finished and I didn’t have enough people to man it properly, but it was
an amazing fortification. No one was going to pass by without having to deal with
this monster I’d built on the border.

I spent an hour going over reports and adjusting a few standing patrol orders. Reassured
that nothing interesting was happening, I left the command center and walked the long,
echoing corridors. The battle station was as big as a sky-scraper and the exterior
bristled with weaponry. It wasn’t finished yet, but it would have to suffice, as I
had new worries now. I’d put so many of my resources into this station, I’d neglected
the fleet. This was an elementary flaw in my strategy. Ask any commander running a
war: you have to have fleets, not just forts. Fortifications were cheap and powerful,
but they couldn’t move to meet the enemy wherever they might come. If Earth was hit
next, and Crow begged for my help, this monstrous battle station might turn out to
be a colossal waste of effort. If it turned out to be badly placed when the time came,
it wouldn’t save a single life.

I walked down an echoing shaft to a big observation window on the sunward side of
the station. The blast shields had been rolled back and the stars outside were visible
to my naked eyes. I stared out there in the stark beauty of open space. Outside the
station, the stars around us formed a thousand points of light. This far away from
the G class sun, they were intensely bright against the perfectly black void.

My boots clanged on metal floors as I approached the big window. There, almost pressed
up against the frosty quartz plane, was Sandra. Her pose reminded me of a housecat
watching the world go by outside.

“I knew I’d find you here,” I said.

“I knew you’d come looking,” she responded, and gave me a warm smile over her shoulder.
Then she turned back to the darkness of space that rotated gently as we watched.

“I think this station is done for now,” I said. “I think it’s time we moved back to
the planets, and retooled our factories. It’s time to produce mobile defenses.”

“Ships?”

“Yes.”

I walked up to join her at the window. She didn’t move, but continued staring.

“I can see them sometimes, you know,” she said. “My eyes aren’t like normal eyes anymore.
I can see the faintest flicker of movement out there, when one of our vessels drifts
between my eyes and a star.”

I glanced at her, but said nothing. What she was describing should not have been possible.
The ships were too far, too tiny relative to the stars. A specialized telescope might
not have been up to the task. But no one, not even Sandra herself, fully understood
the natural capacities of her new body. She was part human, part nanotized super-soldier—and
part something else. She’d been changed by an extinct colony of Microbes. In essence,
she was one of a kind now. I’d undergone similar baths administered by Marvin. But
his application had been much more controlled and specific. Hers had been done by
the Microbes themselves, free to experiment and edit whatever they wished in her flesh.

“I thought when I went through the baths we’d become closer,” I said. “You know that
don’t you?”

Now, she did look at me. She seemed troubled. “That’s why you did it? Not just so
you could run off and be the first human to risk your life landing on a gas giant?”

I hadn’t actually
landed
on the gas giant, if such a thing was even possible. I’d only dipped down several
thousand miles into the dense atmosphere. But I’d met the Blues there, and talked
to them in their own environment. Most importantly, I’d survived.

This business of her body alterations and mine was a sore point between Sandra and
I, so I decided to switch the topic. I turned my attention back to the scene outside.
I knew my ships were out there somewhere, dark and invisible to my naked eyes among
these jewel-like stars. I’d reorganized them since we’d driven the Macros out of the
system. One ship patrolled each of the habitable worlds, and the rest were out at
the far ring, the one that guarded the route home to Earth.

“What do you think is happening back home?” I asked Sandra.

“Crow is taking over, of course,” she said quietly.

“How can you be so sure?”

“If he was in serious trouble, he would have begged us for help. If he was in minor
trouble, he would have whined and complained. Since he’s being quiet—that’s the worst.
That’s when he’s up to no good. That’s when things are going his way.”

I nodded. “Your analysis matches my own. He’s planning something. He’s not talking
because he wants to catch us by surprise.”

“You have a history of underestimating him. Let’s think bad thoughts for a moment.
What is the worst move he could make?”

I shrugged. “He could send out a fleet, maybe. A force strong enough to order us to
submit to his will. Or something else—something I haven’t even thought of yet.”

“What are we going to do about it?”

We both looked at one another. Her pose was relaxed, crouching there in the window,
but I could see her eyes were troubled. I forced a thin smile.

“Don’t worry. I’m building a fleet of my own.”

“We only have three hundred marines. After you train every last one of them to pilot
a ship, what will we do then?”

I frowned, she had a good point. My battle station was operational, and I was convinced
it could stop a small Macro invasion consisting of one hundred ships or less. It couldn’t
be at both ends of the star system at once, however.

“We could built a second station at the Helios ring.”

She shook her head. “Where would you get the raw resources?”

“That’s the problem. At the other ring, we don’t have a handy planetoid to mine and
provide all the metals and fuels we need. Hell, we don’t even have any real idea if
this one can stop the Macros when they come again. How big will the next enemy flotilla
be when it finally arrives? It’s unnerving, having no true concept of the extent of
the enemy empire or their forces.”

“Intel has still produced nothing?”

“Exactly squat.”

“Then we have to guess, and guess right.”

I nodded, unhappy that I was the one doing the guessing. The Macros didn’t keep rolled
up maps or computer files on hard disks, explaining their plans. As closely as we
could determine after dissecting their artificial brains, they didn’t have a grand
central plan. They operated like a termite mound. Each individual linked with whatever
others were available. Each piece of the puzzle did its part without central command
beyond the local area, which at most consisted of a star system. In a sense, they
were centralized and decentralized at the same time. Whatever Macro forces were close
enough to one another to coordinate did so automatically, but they had no discernible
grand strategy, other than the outcome of their programming.

I’d once theorized there was another kind of Macro, a Macro-Superior. But now, I’d
abandoned the idea. The enemy did appear to become smarter when there were a lot of
them in close proximity. But this was apparently due to their design, not the existence
of a Macro-Superior. When the machines came close to one another, they automatically
linked up and each shared part of its processing time with the others. This process
formed what we called “Macro Command”. In a sense, when I communicated with Macro
Command, I was talking to all of them in the local region at once. There was no single
super-macro that held the role of leadership.

Logic dictated that smaller groups should be dumber, and that there would be a lack
of grand strategy. They had no overall plan, just sets of heuristic rules to follow.
Still, this disadvantage didn’t seem to bother them all that much. Individual colonies
were very effective at building up forces until they metastasized to the next star
system along the chain of rings. They didn’t need a grand strategy, which was difficult
to maintain over such a vast region of space anyway. If each little soldier robot
did his job, the effective end result was a steamrollering force of endless machines.