The Storm

By Lee A. Graff

A storm is brewing in the galaxy. An analyst from the Confederation of Free Worlds sees a growing darkness that threatens to engulf the galaxy in war. A volunteer starfighter pilot encounters a new threat being tested in a small civil war. The two of them see threats from opposite side of the galaxy. They will need to work together in an attempt to prevent the coming war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jul 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781365288319

Book preview

The Storm

The Storm

By

Lee A. Graff

Copyright © 2016 by Lee A. Graff

All rights reserved.  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

This book is a work of fiction.  Names, characters, places, and incidents either 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.

First printing: 2016

ISBN 978-1-365-28831-9

GraffX Workshop

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Part One

The Gathering Storm

Chapter 1

Panolis Union, Dridma System

The unmistakable hyperspace trails streaked across the blackness of space.  Jason Wallin watched as the turbulence caused by spacecraft skimming through space appeared before him.  The enemy moved through the system just as his commander had figured they would.  His right hand fiddled with the flight stick of his fighter, while his left hovered over the power activator.  When the enemy formation finished passing by, the order would come to swing around and engage them from behind.  Until that moment, though, Jason could only sit and wait for the order to come.  Sit and think.

For as long as Jason could remember, he desired to touch the stars – or failing that, to at least be among them.  Nearly every day when the suns faded and the stars revealed themselves he dreamed of becoming one of those who piloted a great star cruiser through the darkness between systems, or perhaps one of the nimble single fliers where he could show off incredible piloting skills that seemed to defy logic and physics.  He spent his youth listening to his grandfather tell the tales of flying the earliest of the single pilot fliers in the last Great War.  He worked hard and studied constantly to achieve his goals, but he never stopped dreaming.  The galaxy’s vastness did not intimidate him.  The dangers of space travel did not scare him.  The tales of battles and wars fought between great empires did not bother him.  He believed adventure waited for him just beyond the atmosphere of his home world.  He just needed a way to go and meet it.  He knew that someday adventure and Jason Wallin would become close friends.

After finishing his secondary education, Jason enrolled in flight school.  His father had tried to discourage him, but Jason had no intention of missing his best chance at getting into space.  Jason knew he had the math skills, the tri-dimensional thinking, and the reflexes for admission into the school and raced off to send the application before the end of graduation day.  Jason sailed through the classes.  The first year never got him off the ground, except for one field trip to the school’s orbiting station to show off the training vehicles the students would fly during their second year.  His first visit into space only fueled Jason’s thirst for excitement and adventure even more.  He finished off the first year of flight school in the top fifteen percent of his class.  During the second year, Jason finally held the controls of a real spacecraft and met space on a solo basis for the first time.  Jason did well with the larger transport vehicles, but his passion turned toward the single flier with a love and desire that he had never known.  He finished the second, and final, year of flight school in the top ten percent.

Jason had looked out at the galaxy and the possibilities before him.  He could have joined any of a number of transport firms, either cargo or passenger.  Transport firms rarely, if ever, used single fliers.  He would be restricted to piloting the larger crafts that he didn’t like as much.  Law enforcement units always seemed to need qualified pilots, and the military would take anyone with his skills and test numbers in a minute, but either of those organizations contained a few too many rules to truly allow for the adventure and excitement that Jason craved.  He considered entering the racing circuit.  His scores could get him a starting sponsorship from some small company and he could work his way up to a major corporation someday.  Of the options Jason saw before him, entering the racing circuit seemed to promise the most of what he wanted out of the galaxy.  It would provide the exhilaration of high speed flying, and the element of danger (especially on the courses that went through asteroid belts or nebula) that he wanted so badly.

For the next year, Jason entered a number of amateur races and gathered the experience he needed to become one of the great race pilots of his age.  The inquiries and offers for sponsorships started to come in, but events in another part of the galaxy caught his attention before he accepted any offers.

Legends say that all of the people living throughout the galaxy came from one single world.  There were some groups who really held to that idea.  They pointed to the compatibility of DNA from the different people of the different worlds saying that it proved that everyone came from a single ancestral background.  Those who preferred the idea of a single world as origin of the human species were often referred to as Edenites, taking their name from an even earlier legend.

Others used the minor differences in DNA to show the separation of worlds.  According to those old legends, the human species had spread through the galaxy in only about six thousand years, and those who discounted the one world legend pointed to how ridiculous it was that the trillions of people throughout the galaxy could rise in a mere six millennia.  Opponents of the one world idea also said that the similarities of DNA from the different worlds showed that the basic building blocks of life could only come together in a very limited number of combinations.  Those basic patterns led to the similarities that happened again and again across the galaxy.

Counter to the basic pattern idea, Edenites pointed to the fact that no other sentient species (other than humans) had been encountered anywhere in the galaxy.  Surely, even with the basic building blocks being what they were, something other than just humans would have rose to sentience.

Well, there were other legends of two other species that had been encountered, but no confirmed reports of those had ever been recorded.

Regardless of the origins of the human species, recorded galactic history only extended back four or five thousand years.  Nations and empires had risen and fallen throughout history.  In the present, there were dozens of nations throughout the galaxy, though some would prefer to call themselves empires.  Some were loose alliances between a dozen worlds that had grouped together for mutual protection from aggressive neighboring groups or roaming raiders.  Others were tightly woven galactic nations knit together under a single governing body or leader.  Some groups comprised hundreds of worlds and trillions of people.

Jason had been born in one of the largest of the galactic nations – the Confederation of Free Worlds.  Originally a series of colony worlds from another older nation, the CFW had fought a War of Separation nearly two centuries before Jason had been born.  Since then, the new galactic nation had expanded into uncharted parts of the galaxy and now stood on the edge of being one of the greatest powers ever known.

The galaxy was a big place, though.  It always had been and always would be.  Advances in transportation methods made the galaxy seem like a much smaller place.  Ancient sleeper ships had taken years to travel between systems, while progress in technology allowed crafts to eventually move from one side of the galaxy to the other in months or even weeks.  If the legends about the human race originally starting from one single world were true, then it had taken almost all of the recorded galactic history to explore most of it (a few regions were still not completely charted and only a few explorers have ever made it to the galactic core).  In the past four centuries new advancements in hyperspace and subspace drives had allowed smaller crafts to traverse great distances in a matter of days.  The new drives and developments in other areas made the galaxy seem a much smaller place, but to anyone who has ever been on a ship with a failing drive system in the darkness between systems – they knew how big the galaxy remained.  It could take weeks to travel between systems and if anything happened along the way, a crew could pretty much write themselves off as lost forever.

Then, about century ago, something extraordinary happened.  An explorer ship came across an anomaly in space at the edge of a solar system.  The scientists on the ship scanned the anomaly for days with no understanding of what it really was.  They aimed various types of signals at it trying to get some type of reaction.  After weeks of study, examination, and experimentation, they hit on a combination of signals that created a reaction.  It just wasn’t anything they expected.  The anomaly created a huge gravity well that seemed to pull the unprepared ship in toward its center.  The ship passed through the event horizon and the scientists found themselves in a completely different solar system.  They had found what they called a wormhole.  With a little experimentation, they found that they could travel back and forth between the two systems.  They had found a shortcut through space and suddenly the galaxy again felt like an even smaller place.

Naturally occurring wormholes were found in various places throughout the galaxy.  These wormholes always connected one specific system with another.  There was some relationship between the gravitation forces of one system that connected it to another.  Maps began being drawn showing the connections from one system to another and how these wormholes could be used as shortcuts in space.  Systems that had been backwater worlds with no value suddenly became strategic hubs.  The balance of power shifted and the race to find more of the wormholes was on.  What had once taken months to do now was done in mere hours.  It was an incredible change to the nations of the galaxy.  Then the next phase came, and it changed everything.  Once naturally occurring wormholes were found, the work began to create artificial wormholes.  It took the next thirty years, but a breakthrough was made and the first jumpgates were created.  It didn’t take long for the technology to spread from one empire to the other and the beginnings of a massive jumpgate system unfolded.  The borders and understanding of what was an empire and a nation in the galaxy began to change.

As the exploration and colonization of the galaxy progressed, the galactic nations established new relations with each other and pacts of mutual defense were made.  It didn’t take long before the first battles of the new galactic map erupted.  Nearly three decades ago, those various alliances dragged nearly the entire galactic community into a war that threatened to wipe out some of the worlds in the oldest parts of the galaxy.  This was the same war that Jason had heard dozens of tales concerning the hyperspace skimmers from his grandfather.  After years of fighting, an armistice was signed and most of the blame for the war was leveled on the Manicger Alliance.  The Armistice Treaty forced the Manicgers to pay incredible; some would say unfair, reparations to the other nations of the galaxy and disarm their military.  The aftermath of the war left the worlds of the Manicger Alliance destitute and disillusioned.

While the fighting never did reach the borders of the Confederation of Free Worlds, attacks on neutral CFW transport ships as well as other established treaties and alliances eventually pulled the CFW into the fighting.  After the war, the people and the leadership of the CFW began to turn their backs on the rest of the galactic community.  Trade lanes remained open, but all military units were pulled back to the borders and a blind eye was turned to the dealings of the rest of the galaxy.  After a couple decades, most people in the CFW found their lives rather uneventful.

Jason Wallin found his life a little too uneventful and kept looking for something else.  He found it at the end of his first year on the racing circuit.  In one of the oldest regions of the galaxy, the nation known as the Panolis Union fell into a state of civil war.  Both sides of the conflict called for outside volunteers to fight.  Mercenaries and adventure seekers from all over the galaxy descended upon the Panolis Union looking for whatever they could find.  Whether it was riches or adventure, this war would surely provide it.  Jason jumped at the chance and immediately found transport across a quarter of the galaxy to sign up.  Jason wanted to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps and be able to tell his own tales of flying and fighting through the darkness of space.

While somewhat annoyed at the isolationism of the CFW, Jason still felt it right to fight on the side of the established government for the region – the government that the CFW had diplomatic ties with.  He joined the ranks of the Loyalists and found himself in a light fighter craft facing down a determined enemy.  He fought side by side with the Panoli Loyalists in trying to defeat the insurgents.  At first, the fighting excited him, but that quickly turned to fear as his craft was damaged on several occasions and he lost more than one friend.  After four months of fighting, he had learned to balance his desire for excitement and the fear that clawed at him every time he flew out to engage the enemy.  He knew, as a foreign volunteer, he could walk away at any time, but he felt compelled to remain and see it through.

On this day, his unit remained powered down, drifting within the rings of a gas giant waiting for the rebel fighter squadron to pass by.  Outside he watched the streaks from the fighters pass through the darkness – a disruption, he had been told, in the fabric of the space-time continuum made by the skimming of the dimensional barrier between the realm called hyperspace and real space.  Whatever the cause, Jason always thought it looked like the contrails made by atmospheric transports.  This particular squadron had just destroyed a supply depot on a moon in the core system of the Panolis Union.  Jason’s unit had not been able to respond in time to save the depot, but they were determined to make sure that this group of rebels did not make it back home.

Jason’s musing about how he came to be in this place ended as an orange light began blinking on his forward control panel.  His squadron leader had indicated the last of the rebel units had passed, and the time for their counter-attack had arrived.  Jason flipped the series of switches that brought his starfighter to life.  The HUD formed before his eyes and the graphic interface of built in screens and instruments lit up as power began to flow again from the power core.  The orange light continued to blink until Jason mashed the button next to it, sending a return signal that his fighter was ready.  With the fighter ready to go, he continued to drift for another moment.  Then a short burst of static came across his headset followed by his squadron leader, Falcon Leader to Falcon Squadron.  I counted twenty fighters.  That’s six more than we’ve got, so when we go at them we’ve got to make sure that we get the odds back into our favor.

Jason had really grown to like his squadron leader.  Falcon One, as the rest of the squadron referred to her, was also known as Karen Jacobs.  A native to the Panolis Union, she had fought during the Great War and remained one of the few pilots from that era to still have an active duty status.  She had great tactical skills, and still enjoyed the thrill of the dogfight.  Jason imagined that his grandfather would have been a lot like this.  Maybe his grandfather would have liked her.

Wait on my mark Falcons, Falcon One’s voice intoned calmly over the headset.  Jason gripped the throttle and waited.  The order would come any second.  He could feel the butterflies in his stomach that always came at this moment – the anticipation before the time when life and death would be decided.  If the Falcons were very lucky they would all survive; if they were very unlucky – none of them would.  Most likely at least some from both sides would fall this day – skill, luck, and fate would decide just who.  Jason hoped that his skills helped tip the balance toward the Falcons, and he always hoped his luck stayed with him.  He knew that he couldn’t control fate.

Go Falcons! the order was barked, and Jason pulled back on the accelerator to the max and felt the sudden change in inertia that the dampeners could never quite compensate for.  He thundered out of the ice clusters of the gas giant’s rings and formed up with his wing.  He made up one third of Beta Wing within the Falcon Squadron.  Jason’s lead ship was Falcon Four.  He was Falcon Six and watched Four’s port wing.  Falcon Five was on the opposite side.  Jason’s wing had the job of spearheading this little attack.  They rocketed away from the gas giant, and activated their hyperspace skimmers as they reached the edge of the gravity well.  The universe shrank around them as they accelerated up to and surpassed the speed of light.

Falcon Four to Beta Wing, Jason’s lead called.  Accelerate to factor seven, enemy formation moving at factor five.  We should be able to catch them within a minute or so.  Activate your skim-seekers and prepare to fire.  Jason made the adjustments to his firing controls and made sure that his missiles were set on the proper programming package.  The skim-seekers would home in on the dimensional rifting made by the engines of the enemy fighters.  The weapons were very effective at this type of attack, but not very good during real dog-fighting situations.  Unfortunately, the skim-seeker package did not have the capacity to distinguish between friend and foe.  Once they were fired, they would drive straight for whatever skimming engine was in front of them.  If a friendly got in the path, they could be taken out just as easily.  Once this opening salvo had been fired, Jason and his wing mates would need to switch back over to standard Friend-or-Foe or Image-Recognition packages.

The space between Jason’s wing and the enemy formation closed rapidly and after a moment, the HUD indicated that they were in firing range.  Triggers are free.  Fire when ready, Falcon Four ordered, Seekers away!  As Jason pressed the trigger that released his payload of missiles, he watched the streaks from his wing leader’s fighter as his missiles accelerated into the distance.

Seekers away! Jason hollered.  When his payload finished dropping off his wings and accelerated away, he pulled back on the flight controls and executed a loop that brought him up, around, and dropped him in behind the rest of the Falcon Squadron.  Falcons Four and Five had done the same thing and they now formed the rear of the flight.  Jason’s tactical display showed several explosions on the edge of its range.  The weapons had hit something and apparently the Falcons had caught their prey by surprise.

Good job Beta Wing, Falcon One congratulated.  All units advance and mop up any stragglers.   Wing commanders lead the way and wingmen watch their backs.  Okay Falcons, let’s take them down.

The enemy fighter wing was still in disarray when the entire Falcon Squadron descended upon them like the birds of prey that they tried to emulate.  Confusion gripped the rebel force at first and four more fighters fell before they could get any organization together.  Coupled with their losses in the opening salvo, only nine rebel fighters remained.  Those nine fighters, though, fought hard and with expert precision.  By the time the battle had ended, all the rebel fighters had been destroyed, but the Falcons had lost four of their own, including Jason’s wing mate Falcon Five.  Jason reflected that another toast for another friend would have to be made tonight - another four friends.  Of course, he thought with a morbid sense of relief, at least he would be able to make a toast tonight.

The Falcons collected two enemy escape pods and brought them along for interrogation and incarceration.  Their flight took them to the desert moon orbiting Dridma, the central planet of the Panolis Union.  The remaining Falcons set down on their landing pads and climbed down from their ships with the help of the ground crews.  Handshakes were exchanged, but everyone tried to avoid looking at the four empty pads around the landing area.  No one would openly acknowledge the losses until the evening when it was time to toast those who had not returned.

Chapter 2

Confederation of Free Worlds, Columbia System

Therefore, the current state of affairs in the Old Systems has little relevance to our policies here in the Confederation.  Most of the Old System empires have continued to recover on their own from the economic down turn that occurred after the Great War and there has not been a major conflict among any of them in decades.  With the exception for the current civil war within the Panolis Union, there is little to concern us here in the CFW, the senator addressing the Confederation Assembly concluded.

Patrick Windsor stood up from his seat in the observation area of the Assembly and silently walked out.  The delegates and the analysts would be at it for a few more hours, but the result would be the same as it had been for the past several years.  Protect the Confederation, had been the slogan at the end of the Great War.  It had meant something about ridding the galaxy of those elements that could possibly threaten the CFW from the outside.  Now it meant protection from the inside.  Close the borders and let the rest of the galaxy take care of itself.  Public opinion favored the view, and few politicians stood up to public opinion.

Some felt that prevention by pre-emption was the way to go.  Patrick Windsor agreed with them, but damn few others did.  Many of those that did agree with Patrick didn’t have the authority, position, or political clout to act on their beliefs.  So they bowed to public opinion as well.  If there was anything Patrick would not do – it was bow to anyone.  At least in the philosophical sense anyway.  Patrick left the Assembly building and rode the next transport to the other side of the city to the First Residence.  He was waved through security checkpoints and made his way into the building.  Security personnel scanned him for weapons from remote locations and allowed his progress into the heart of the residence to continue.  He entered the Advisory Wing and made his way straight to the office of his supervisor, the Confederation Minister of Defense, Charles McCallum.  The Minister’s assistant checked first and then opened the door to allow Patrick to enter the inner office.

McCallum sat behind a large desk smoking something large and foul.  Thick green smoke hung in the air as he turned from the window overlooking the city and said, Well, Pat?  What’re they doing over there?

As we expected, sir, nothing’s going to change in the Assembly.

McCallum snorted.  Figures, he said.

Patrick shifted his weight uneasily for a moment.  What do we do now?

Do? McCallum snorted again.  We are going to do nothing.  As long as the Assembly makes cuts in the Intelligence and Military fields, there is damn little we can do.  McCallum walked around the desk, took another long puff on whatever it was he was smoking and sat down on the couch.  He blew out another green cloud and continued.  We barely have the funds to keep the fleets in space, certainly no long distance stuff.  Border patrols and supply runs only.  Our intelligence capabilities are limited too.  We have precious few funds to recruit new operatives, hell, we have barely enough to keep the information flow coming from the sources we do have.  We get more current information from the news than our own people.

Yes, sir, but some of the information we do get, like from the Manicgers is rather disturbing, Patrick interrupted.

Like what?  Them moving into the demilitarized zone recently? McCallum chuckled.  Why some would say that they were only reclaiming what was rightfully theirs to begin with.  Those same people would say that the victors of the Great War were overly harsh on the poor Manicgers to begin with, and we should let them have it.  Those same people would go on to point out that the other neighboring empires in the Old Systems haven’t raised a stink about it, so why should we?  Officially, the Confederation has taken a hands-off policy to the events in the Old Systems.

Patrick shifted again.  Nothing in this office was new information.  McCallum was often like this and he often used Patrick Windsor as a sounding board.  Patrick didn’t like going over the same thing again and again, but he played the game and used McCallum as a sounding board as well.  I know, sir, but they had to break a number of treaties to accomplish it, and why should we believe that they would stop with just the DMZ?

Good question.  Those same people don’t want to think about that, McCallum replied.  If we even entertained the idea that the Manicger Alliance was to become an aggressive force in the galaxy again, we would have to change the entire way we planned for our defense.  Since we can’t officially entertain that idea, however, we cannot officially prepare for it.  It doesn’t matter if it’s the Manicgers or the Naps.  The Napar Empire on the other side of the CFW was rattling sabers about something in their region of the galaxy.

Patrick sighed, this is frustrating, sir.  We know there are threats out there.

McCallum held up a hand and waved Patrick off.  I know, son, but we can’t officially do anything until the Assembly lightens up a little.

Patrick snorted in disgust.  Well, then, sir, what can we un-officially do?

Ah, the golden question my boy.  McCallum took another long drag off of whatever it was that he had.  Officially, he began and let out another green cloud, "in my position, I cannot ask or order anyone to do