The House Of Covenant

By D. A. Buckley

The House of Covenant is set among a federation of planets somewhere in space and somewhere in time. The Federation is held together and maintained in peace through the power of a blood covenant. Captain Jared Tricantor and his Executive Officer, Nalen Pal, operate a Merchant Marine star freighter named the Fidelis, and within this ship they travel throughout the Covenant Planets. Seeking only prosperity and professional advancement in their predictable lives they find themselves suddenly at the center of an interplanetary war. The breaking of the Covenant, through murder and genocide, brings a brutal end to millennia of peace among the Covenant Planets and millions of lives hang in the balance.
Nalen Pal especially is thrown into circumstances far beyond his ability to control as he is pulled into a reality he could never have imagined or prevented. His wife, Su-In, her royal family, and Alephot Lituri hold the ancient secret as to why the Covenant was broken, how it can be restored, and the duty of vengeance should reconciliation fail.

Blood is thicker than milk.

• Language: English
• Publisher: D. A. Buckley
• Release date: Jan 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301652198

D. A. Buckley

Born again, spirit filled disciple of Jesus Christ looking for the consummation of the age and the catching away of the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. Anticipating the soon beginning of the millennium reign of Christ on earth and after that a new heaven and a new earth.

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THE HOUSE OF COVENANT

The House

Of

Covenant

by

D. A. Buckley

Copyright 2009 D. A. Buckley

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1 - Life Aboard A Star Freighter

Chapter 2 - Renewing The covenant

Chapter 3 - The Calling

Chapter 4 - The Joining

Chapter 5 - Bon Chance

Chapter 6 - To The Enemy’s Gate

Chapter 7 - The Offering

Chapter 8 - Wake-up

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Life Aboard A Star Freighter

The captain of the star freighter Fidelis, Captain Jared Tricantor, had certain privileges. Like an executive cabin big enough, just, to entertain a small group, say eight to ten guests. The cabin had, over the years, been well appointed with various metal, stone and wood trims and furnishings as well as souvenirs and interesting decorations from throughout the Covenant Federation of Planets or Fed. There was never any lack of interesting things to break the ice with new guests in Captain Tricantor’s quarters. Being the captain also meant privacy, as often as he desired it, and it meant respect from the twenty-three men and two women who crewed his ship and from the occasional non-VIP passenger or two who happened to hitch a ride on the cheap side. The food was usually very good to excellent, he thought, and there were ample distractions in his required duties. And when there was absolutely nothing else to do there were electronic entertainments to fill the long voids in between planets.

A star freighter wasn’t a war ship per se, but it was designed to be converted into one, should the need arise, though no reason had existed for over two millennia, within a matter of days due to its compartmentalized design structure. The Fidelis had three coupling rings on one side and five on the other enabling a Defense Materiel Base or DMB to very rapidly emplace, or snap in as they called it, a total of eight Battle Center Emplacements or BCE’s. These BCE’s would then be controlled from the bridge using an assortment of Command and Control or C² consoles behind a locked sliding door that had only been opened twice a year for scheduled cleaning since the day the Fidelis was commissioned thirty-seven years ago. Though the Fidelis’ normal engines were rated all the way to Delta Jump speeds, an accelerator package coupled to his own power plant could more than double that speed to Golf Jump speed or roughly seven times the speed of light. At Delta Jump speed the travel time between two planets in separate solar systems averaged one and one half years. With the accelerator package snapped-in the time was cut to about two and a half months on the Fed’s standard three-hundred and sixty planetary rotation cycles per year calendar. That’s as fast as a single ship could travel.

If the Fidelis was ordered to join to another ship, something the captain hoped would never happen, the resulting consolidated ship was capable of Juliet Jump speed or ten times the speed of light. The ability to travel at ten times the speed of light would be worth any sacrifice … except yielding command to another captain if he happened to be junior to him. But those decisions were made by the higher ups - not the captain of the Fidelis. Yielding personal command of his ship to another and subordinating himself to another captain was an unpleasant thought, but could only happen in a time of war. And war had not happened for a very long time indeed. To control his own destiny, his most private ambition, he would have to buy his own freighter and he was not wealthy enough to buy his own private freighter – yet.

And so, Jared reasoned, a conscientious captain should spend as much time as possible in the simulator, preparing for the unthinkable. In this way he could become thoroughly familiar with the functional nuances of the BCE’s, if snapped-in, as well as the personnel and logistics load increases of a converted combat freighter, and more importantly, with the tactical applications of such enormous firepower and drastically increased speed of maneuver. And besides, space travel, he reasoned further, especially in the freighter service, was mostly an unending and unchanging routine of such very long duration that he wondered at times just how resilient his own mental stability in fact was.

The Fidelis contained sufficient support capabilities for two hundred times its normal crew size. It was quite a large ship. But there were times when Jared felt the walls closing in and he often contemplated just suiting up and walking around outside for awhile. But then there really was nothing outside but dark, empty space. There were no vast plains of grass, no majestic mountain ranges and certainly, no foggy beaches or pristine forests to admire. There was just endless blackness accentuated by countless shinning stars. And so, understandably, he, as often as not, felt as if he were incarcerated, punished for a heinous crime about which he had no personal memory. What the simulator really provided then was an opportunity to escape the pervasive sensory deprivation of deep space travel. An enhanced imagination could mean the difference between a long and happy career and a disappointing reassignment to a terrestrial position and that only after a stint in a mental hygiene facility.

His wife, Janicedar, the Loading Officer, and one of the two women on his crew, on the other hand, often lamented that the Dynamically Interfaced Enhanced Imagery Simulator, or DIEIS, which was pronounced dice, and which was the captain’s and the executive officer’s favorite sensory over-stimulation opportunity, should contain divorce papers in the instruction files, since she was certain to be a simulator widow for the twelve to fourteen hours that her husband would pursue inter-galactic enemies in his mind while he was in the simulator. She didn’t know what men found so interesting in the simulator. Why do men always want to blow things up? she often thought. Why are they always looking for enemies where none exist? The Covenant Planets had known only peace for more than two thousand years. Yet men like her husband were always preparing, always looking out for bad guys never satisfied that peace had grown so pervasive, in the universe that they knew anyway, that it was just inconceivable that it would ever change. They were, she was certain, just rationalizing the fact they had never grown up and still liked to pretend that they were great heroes and warriors when none were any longer needed.

The simulator itself it was an enormously powerful computer that interfaced directly with a person’s brain via two thin benorite metal patches, about the size of a small coin, that were attached, one on each temple, by a non-aggressive adhesive. Benorite is a highly conductive alloy that easily senses electronic brain activities. An interface is then created by incorporating a redundant set of extremely miniaturized, multi-spectral, transmitters directly into the benorite sheets. One thousand times thinner than a human hair, and at half the weight, it draws more than enough energy to operate within the simulator room from ambient electricity from within the user’s skin. Once the user is plugged in they are completely unaware of the interface. The adhesive even contains a mixture of readily absorbed vitamins and an immuno-reinforcement compound. So simulator time was a matter of good mental and physical health, rationalized the captain.

Once plugged in to the simulator the sensation was like living inside a dream. Whatever was possible in a dream was possible to simulate in the mind of the player who was then free to wander throughout the confines of the simulator room and experience his or her fantasy. The simulator complex was actually a series of four domed circular rooms padded on all surfaces with Neprotantum, a fibrous and very spongy material extracted from a sinuous water grass found only on Neprotan. The simulator room was quite large, in fact it was the largest single room on the ship, except of course, for the primary cargo bay, measuring more than two Dulcantor Fields across.

Observing a person plugged in was often a comical experience as the observer usually had no clue what the user was experiencing in their mind. Most people, out of a sense of polite mutual respect, refused to indulge their voyeuristic tendencies and peek while someone was plugged-in. It was, in fact, considered lowbrow to do so. A pillar of Baradaran society, a society long predicated on terrestrial and then extraterrestrial shipping, was to allow every person the freedom and respect of privacy to enjoy their own fantasies while in a simulator and especially while on a deep space voyage. After all, how would extended space travel have ever been accomplished without this kind of intellectual stimulation during long, tedious and uneventful passages through uninhabited space? The Baradaran Primary Expansion almost three millennia ago would certainly not have occurred. The House of Baradara would likely still be as isolated as the Bocondo, a much older race, were when they were discovered during the Primary Expansion along the border planets.

However, the captain of a ship was personally responsible for the safety of all passengers and crew. So from time-to-time the Fidelis’ captain had observed DIEIS users in their fantasies, often longer than necessary, sometimes much longer than necessary. This was especially true considering that the ship’s main computer continually monitored everybody all the time anyway, and would instantly respond to an emergency without his personal observation. But, in his defense, the captain reasoned, Many a captain had experienced failures of one sort or another by relying too much on automatic resources to do their jobs. He would never allow himself to be one of those. Besides, a DIEIS on a freighter was classified as a public simulator. No one entertaining themselves here, it was assumed, would allow themselves to pursue things not public in nature.

When not in use as a simulator the simulator complex could be opened up by removing the interior DIEIS walls making a very large room that was perfect for Dulcantor. The Fidelis had in fact hosted the Baradaran Inter-planetary Dulcantor Millennial Championships. His home planet, Johulst, had been favored over Enterminas. But the Enterminas outside spoiler had played his best game ever by scoring an unprecedented two outside penetrations resulting in scores both times. It was, in fact, a game to remember for many seasons to come. Even though his planet had been bested, the championship game was so stunning