Anthology of the Guardians: Genesis

By Alexander Dundass

In Book I of the Triumvirate Chronicles, a group of immortals were introduced, their true history long lost to the galaxy. Genesis tells the tale of how a group of men and women were experimented upon to turn them into immortals by transforming them into cyborgs, 110 000 years before the events described in Desperation. The roots, the reasons for their creation, their struggles and a picture of a much different galaxy at war is introduced in this first exciting installment in the Anthology of the Guardians Series.
Man is facing extinction and in an act of desperation, twenty men and women are turned into cyborgs that can absorb and transform energy from the environment, turning them into the perfect weapons to defeat the invaders, an alliance of non-humans that are bent on the elimination of man. The project is discovered and this leads to the first confrontation between the immortals, named Guardians by their creator, and the aliens. Will they survive and who will ultimately win the war?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9781304733764

Book preview

Anthology of the Guardians: Genesis

Anthology of the Guardians

Genesis

A Story By

Alexander Dundass

Other Works by the Author

The Triumvirate Chronicles

Book I – Desperation

Book II: Conquest (coming soon)

Book III – Triumvirate (coming 2015)

Anthology of the Guardians

Genesis

Huntercats (coming soon)

Author’s Website: www.alexanderdundass.ca

Author’s Blog: www.alexanderdundass.blogspot.com

ISBN:   978-1-304-73376-4

Copyright © Alexander Dundass 2013

Foreword

So here I am writing another foreword dealing with my universe as I have created it.  When I started writing back in 1998, I quickly found that while working on Triumvirate (at that time it was Book I of the Triumvirate Chronicles, but later was bumped to Book III as Desperation was completed and the original Triumvirate split into Conquest and Triumvirate), that there was truly a back story to my characters, and to add even more to that, characters existed that I didn’t even knew were a part of this overall story until somewhere around 2008.  But then again, I am often surprised by my own writing while working on it.  In realizing there was a back story, I started writing short stories that filled in gaps in the character’s history.  Genesis is the first such of these stories, and unfortunately it falls somewhere in the realm of being stuck between short story and novella, that ever feared length of work most authors avoid. 

In using the title Genesis, you the reader just might think that yes, here it is, the beginning of the story I have created, the first part of the whole universe that I introduced in Desperation.  But as my real life friends hear me jokingly say all the time:  wait, there’s more (I am often up in the wee hours of the morning and between commercials trying to sell me the latest item that I apparently can’t live life without or that little chair my cat keeps asking me for that the goes up the stairs that the old man insists was cheaper than he thought, you start quoting stuff like this).  But to honestly answer the question posed, the most probable start point, at the time of this foreword, is approximately 2500 AD, not the 500 000 BC or older that my universe encompasses.  No, I don’t take the easy way out of this, especially given that there is a point where there are two characters that are father and son where the father is the father of the son, but at the same time, the son is the father of the father.  Yeah you go think about that for a bit and see if you do need that cocktail after all.

Ok, now that I have revealed a few more secrets about my world, time for us to just get to the grit here.  This story is really one part of a five part series, the other parts coming soon enough for your perusal.  But what this story does for you, the reader is reveal how the immortals came into being, and why, one hundred and ten thousand years before Desperation on a little planet we call Earth, they were in fact created.  This story also shows a much different galaxy than portrayed in the Triumvirate Chronicles.

Alexander Dundass August 15 2013

Dedication

I would like to dedicate this short story to some of my friends in graduate school and others out there who I met as we were all trying to write and get published.  They had the not so lucky time of reading Triumvirate as it was being written back in 1998 when I was discovering my voice on paper.  They suffered through the early drafts of this book and all the craziness that went with it.  But it was their questions that led to this story being written and the subsequent stories that erupted from this single one.  My thanks and gratitude go out to:

Rene R

Trevor P

Jay S

Laura C

Jennifer D

Sandie B

Sharon P

Diana H

Elizabeth H

Bob A

And one last thank you to my liver, for without the many nights of alcohol induced writing, this and other stories (such as the Bigfoot one, once again it may never come to light) would not be as creative as they are.  Trevor I am sure you remember some of those nights and of course the Toilet Gnome.

Alexander Dundass

Historians Note 

The Grand Galactic Empire, as it was referred to by the humans who lived in it, more out of arrogance than anything else, was only a few thousand years old.  In those few thousand years, two major civil wars were fought that ultimately brought nearly all of its inhabitants together under one rule.  The last civil war had ended about one hundred years ago, bringing a new peace that lasted for about forty years. 

Because many of the weapons used in the civil war caused long-term ill effects on many of the more complex life forms, a new wave of expansion on a level that the empire had never seen before was initiated, in order to find habitable new worlds.  Many new systems were annexed without difficulty, at least until a certain blue green orb was colonized with drastic and severe consequences caused by to the arrogance that is all-too-inherent within the human species.

While out on a hunting excursion in their new world, a group of human colonists tracked and killed for food, a creature they took to be only marginally-sentient, not knowing that the creature, was in fact, highly intelligent.  The creature’s mates were instantly outraged, and responded to the humans’ attack by killing all of the colonists. This in turn, started a new war: one that made the still-fresh civil war seem just that:  civil.

The Emperor sat in the observation room looking down into the medical ward, staring hard at a tall man who had once possessed slick, black hair, a well-muscled body, and who had, until recently, been one of the best Generals in the fleet.  Now that man was badly burned, breathing only with the aid of respirator, and slowly dying; and there was nothing the Emperor could do about it.

The small and care-worn man, who was slowly running to overweight in his middle age, didn’t sit by himself for very long.  After a few moments, the Secretary of War joined the Emperor in his lonely vigil, taking a seat next to him.

We were winning, dammit; we were winning, the Emperor said as the War Secretary sat down.  He wiped the sweat from his brow, adjusting his hair piece in the process, still finding himself unable to come to terms with the idea of General John Zabin being on his death bed.  Not surprisingly, there were also dark shadows under the Emperor’s eyes from many weeks of little sleep.

I read the report; he saved his entire ship by going against standing orders for the high commanders to not personally engage boarding parties during battles, the War Secretary replied. 

It was well known to the Emperor that Zabin’s ship was boarded often, but this time he was shot four times in the chest