The Siege of LX-925

By J.J. Mainor

In the early 23rd century, four nations dominate interstellar travel. Their programs have remained a mystery to the people of Earth, including their own people, and the UN wants to know why. Previous inspectors have yielded little insightful information. Dr. Remy Duval is the latest to venture into the unknown.

The Republic Ship Freedom has been ordered to remove a group of defiant miners from the dead world LX-925. As Remy marvels over the advanced technology at the crew's disposal, he quickly understands the horrific downside to these wonders. Risking everything, Remy schemes to bring a peaceful end to the stand-off before it escalates into genocide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: J.J. Mainor
• Release date: Oct 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310561245

J.J. Mainor

I can talk about my characters and stories far more easily than I can talk about myself. The best way to learn about me is through those stories. Writing primarily science fiction, I enjoy worlds and universes that aren't so black and white. Every story has something to say, and every message is not as straight-forward as it seems. We tend to boil ourselves down and define ourselves according to neat labels, whether by race, gender, political identity, or whatever; and the truth is, we're more complicated than that. I try to write worlds and characters that reflect that complexity and diversity of belief.

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The Siege of LX-925

Copyright 2015 by J.J. Mainor

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Table of Contents

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

Chapter 29

Chapter 1

A being materialized on the medical bed, human in form, with a green, scaly skin, looking more lizard than man. It opened its mouth to speak, but nothing came out. It tried to move from the bed, but found its arms and legs ending in worthless stumps. Panic set in its eyes as it explored the surroundings.

Across the room, a man turned from a control panel and approached the subject. His long, white lab coat suggested he was a doctor, while the cammies peeking from beneath, and the insignia on the collar suggested military. The creature recognized the metal pin. This man was a Major. If he was a doctor, he must have been an experienced one.

The Major leaned over his subject, studying the creature close up.

Remarkable.

The creature looked into his face, pleading with his eyes. This was not how he remembered himself. He was supposed to have a voice. He was supposed to have arms and legs.

I’m sorry about all that, the Major told him rather matter-of-factly as he took up a clipboard to make notes. But the experiment doesn’t require you to move or speak. He looked up from his work to the creature as if a truth just came to him. Not that you could go anywhere if you tried to escape, or alert anyone if you tried to scream.

The Major ran his fingers across the lizard skin with fascination. The creature tried to struggle against him, so the Major backed off to get to work. He took up his scanning equipment to get a look inside his subject. Heart rate was elevated, and pulse was racing, but that was to be expected given the shock to his system.

Body temperature seemed to be dropping. Unlike the individual beneath the surface, the skin was cold-blooded. The warm-blooded organs pumped heat outward, but the scales were losing it faster. This creature’s systems were not compatible with each other, but the Major was not willing to give up on it yet. He returned to the controls. Pushing a few buttons, a heat lamp materialized beside the bed.

This should keep you alive just long enough to collect my data.

The Major continued with his work-up on the creature, taking blood samples, tissue samples, even fecal samples. All the poking and prodding did little to assuage the creature’s tensions and fears, though his spirits were lifted when someone called for the Major from outside the room.

The Major gave his subject a look of annoyance, but interruptions were to be expected. He pulled his sleeve back to access a small device wrapped around his wrist. Pressing it and triggering a faint flash around him, the Major appeared to the creature to have grown translucent.

He watched his captor approach the far wall. With the push of a button, a door dematerialized, yet a wall remained in its place. Then, to destroy what reason remained in the creature’s mind, the Major passed through it like it wasn’t even there.

Looking back into the room, the Major spied the empty bed where his subject lay in some other dimension, out of sync with space-time as normally perceived. His secret lab had been constructed in this other dimension with its own walls, and its own equipment, and its own bed, all situated exactly where their counterparts sat in this dimension.

Light could pass one way from this dimension to the other. To the Major, having returned to normal reality by way of his wrist device, the bed in the room looked empty; but the creature in that dimension could see him, and watch his interactions with his patients so long as they were within these walls. If that creature could not figure out where he was, the activity around him would be more disconcerting than his newfound appearance.

The Major found two men waiting for him. The first was one of the new officers, Lieutenant Anders. The other man was unfamiliar, though he could guess his identity. He wore camouflaged cargo pants with a powder blue tee shirt bearing the letters UN on each sleeve. Certainly the medical records already forwarded to him were familiar.

Major Sadile, this is that UN inspector. The Colonel wants a full work up before we get underway.

Salut, Major, I’m Dr. Remy Duval. The Inspector extended his hand to the Major, and waited.

After an unsettling pause, Sadile decided to take the friendly gesture, offering phony glee in exchange. I was just going over your file. He led the Inspector into the same exam room hiding his secret lab, and motioned for his patient to take a seat on the bed.

In the secret dimension, the creature’s panic nearly induced a heart attack as he watched the new patient sit within his mutilated body. He knew Remy was there, even if Remy didn’t know he shared a bed with a monster.

Sadile struck up conversation as he took the scanning equipment, those versions that existed in this reality, and began his examination.

Tell me, Dr. Duval, how did the UN ever convince the Republic to allow an inspector aboard one of their space ships? He cast a brief smirk to the invisible creature. He knew how frustrating it must be to be so close to help, yet unable to reach it. Sadile was the only one with access. Even if someone managed to get the device around his wrist, he was the only one who knew that other room was even there…that is except for his subject.

You’re asking the wrong person, Major. I’m an inspector, not a diplomat.

Well then, what do you hope to find during your stay with us?

What I hope to find, Major, is the reason you and the other three spacefaring nations are so secretive about your programs.

The Major chuckled. The Confederation and the Eastern Imperium couldn’t be trusted if the fate of the galaxy was at stake, and the Independent Union had shifting loyalties. But if there was one thing all four nations could agree on, it was secrecy against the UN. It wasn’t as though the UN was irrelevant to those particular nations. The organization, after 270 years, had a very noble mission on Earth, maintaining order among hundreds of nations that felt they were being picked on by the other nations. They coordinated humanitarian efforts to civilian populations when disaster or war struck. And they made sure civility ruled on the home world.

But there was ambivalence toward the organization when it came to space matters. Only four powers had developed technology allowing travel outside the solar system. None of them felt the rest of the world had a right to the technology or the resources discovered out there. The space programs didn’t involve the entire Earth, so the UN was shut out. All four nations remained tight-lipped to the happenings, their ambassadors sharing winks across the chamber floor whenever talk of their programs came up in front of the General Assembly.

Every now and then, someone would agree to allow an inspector aboard a ship. They would be given a sanitized tour, followed by cake and tea, and then sent back to the UN with no more information than they started off with. Major Sadile figured they were taking a cruise to Alpha Centauri and back. Finishing the notations on this exam, he figured it was nothing but a ruse to placate Dr. Duval. Anyway, he already had everything he needed from Remy to do his job.

I hope I didn’t violate you too much, Doctor. Sadile gave him another broad, toothy grin to keep him happy, before returning him to Lieutenant Anders and whatever activities the two of them had planned.

After the door to the medical bay was sealed and he was again alone, he returned to the exam room. Feeling for the device around his wrist, Sadile returned to his hidden lab and the creature lying terrified on the bed.

Now we can get back to work. He took up his scanner and examined the creature. The heartbeat raced faster than before, his breathing had grown strained, and the heat lamp had been unable to slow the heat loss.

Oh dear. Sadile recorded the last of his figures and approached the control panel on the edge of the room. It looks like this blending was a failure. The good news, my friend, is I’ve learned enough to start over again.

With a flick of a switch, the creature vanished in a flash of white light. Its atoms were returned to storage. Sadile didn’t bother to save its pattern into the computer.

Chapter 2

Led through the corridors of the R.S. Freedom, Remy considered his liaison, Lieutenant Anders. He had been through a number of inspections back on Earth. Sometimes the military would pair him with an officer, sometimes not; but the liaison always had experience. Every government in the world under UN scrutiny wanted an experienced individual babysitting the inspectors to make sure state secrets weren’t spilled or hidden facilities weren’t accidentally discovered.

One time, Remy had been sent into a tiny African country. He couldn’t remember the name of the country; the region had been divided and divided again too many times to keep track. Eventually there were so many nations carved out, none had the resources beneath the ground to support a fully functioning government. Many of these nations didn’t even have enough land for crops. Infighting would break out within a village and the solution was always to split the village and carve out two new nations. It never worked and the wars and conflicts always intensified as the new nations scrambled for survival.

It was rumored the army indiscriminately slaughtered resistance forces to keep them from rejoining the fight later on, so the UN sent in a team of inspectors to investigate the claims. Remy remembered their army paired them with a salty old Colonel, a veteran who went back to when the dozen or so surrounding nations used to be a single entity.

The Colonel was a man who knew how to keep secrets. He knew where the skeletons were buried and was a master at diverting the inspection team. This Colonel could not be bought, he could not be threatened with international prosecution, and he could not be loosened with alcohol. He had been playing this game long before Remy was born, and he had been chosen for the duty because his loyalty to his own people was unshakable.

Anders was such a different man. He was young and inexperienced. His dossier claimed he had been commissioned only a couple months before his assignment to the Space Force. Though he had finished college before joining the Marines, he was still green as the eighteen year olds coming out of high school, and probably unaware of just how secretive this branch of the military was.

He considered the possibility that Anders’ inexperience made him the ideal liaison. If he didn’t know anything, he couldn’t spill any secrets. No doubt, he had been briefed on what areas of the ship were off limits and what technology he was prohibited from discussing. But without a prior space deployment under his belt, he had no knowledge of or experience with anything beyond the home system.

Still, Remy remained confident he might obtain more information from a Lieutenant than he might from a major or a colonel. Anders had already been more helpful. He had been engaging in conversation, explaining all the technology he had been exposed to.

That transporter, for instance, was a foreign concept. It had been a science fiction staple for more than two hundred years, but there had been no knowledge on Earth of it being successfully developed. Yet, Remy had been taken from the military base to the R.S. Freedom in an almost instantaneous flash of light. This kind of technology could have revolutionized the civilian travel industry. Hailing from Candia, he had visited the Republic to the south hundreds of times and never once saw evidence this technology was in use.

It’s called the molecular scrambler, Anders had corrected him when their journey aboard had begun. Some of us affectionately call it the blender.

Remy imagined the kinds of horrors that must have unfolded to earn that nickname: people rematerializing incorrectly, rematerializing within a solid object, or not rematerializing at all. But Anders put his mind at ease, assuring him the scrambler had been perfected.

The reason we haven’t introduced it on Earth is because there are too many communications signals zipping through the atmosphere. The scrambler signal can’t penetrate all that noise.

They reached the quarters assigned to Remy and Anders pressed a button, dematerializing the door. Remy had seen the same thing in the medical bay and wondered if this was a variation of the scrambler.

It’s the same technology. The Lieutenant pointed out the devices fixed within the door frame. We use a Class 3 scrambler for the doors. The transportation unit is a Class 5. He led the inspector into the room, a modest yet sufficient suite with a standard bed to the back next to a private bathroom. A work station rest against the wall to the right, and a dining area