Returning Gods: Houses Align Book 2

By Toby Keen

The first clash between the Qran and Huknatans may have passed, but the war is far over. Both systems scurry to rebuild their fleets, terrified that their new foes may seize upon any advantage. All the while, there are those that would work tirelessly to undermine those in control.

Ranaks strength waxes as he sets his sights upon the emperors throne, while the king of Huknata willingly remains ignorant of the trials his people are suffering-content in his immutable role.

Faegre, the child of a noble family, gets conscripted to find the world isnt as comfortable as he once believed, as he finds himself immersed in the darker side of human nature. As he finds his new place in the desolate worlds, innocents are starving and the solutions to food shortages are becoming bleak.

All the while, the greatest threat that either system has ever faced inexorably marches toward a culmination that will pass beyond the borders of reality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504901222

Toby Keen

Toby Keen was born in 1977 and is still not dead. After making a career out of getting electrocuted, the latest jolt gave him the idea for this series of books and looks forward to writing until someone tells him to stop. Toby has had a deep-seated interest in all space-faring news since before he could walk and is always keeping up with the latest technology.

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© 2015 Toby Keen . All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 03/18/2015

ISBN: 978-1-5049-0124-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-0122-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015904257

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Prologue Q’ran

Chapter 1 Q’ran, Dark Matter Belt

Chapter 2 Huk’na’ta, Edge Of System

Chapter 3 Huk’na’ta, Chut’ro

Chapter 4 Huk’na’ta, Chut’ro

Chapter 5 Huk’na’ta, Chut’ro

Chapter 6 Huk’na’ta, Chut’ro

Chapter 7 Huk’na’ta, Loth’ra

Chapter 8 Huk’na’ta, Edge Of System

Chapter 9 Huk’na’ta, Chut’ro

Chapter 10 Meridas System

Chapter 11 Huk’na’ta, Chut’ro

Chapter 12 Huk’na’ta, Chut’ro Space Station

Chapter 13 Huk’na’ta, Chut’ro

Chapter 14 Huk’na’ta, The Tunait

Chapter 15 Huk’na’ta, Cumas Moon Installation

Chapter 16 Q’ran, Orbiting

Chapter 17 Huk’na’ta, Chut’ro

Chapter 18 Huk’na’ta, Cumas Space Station

Chapter 19 Huk’na’ta, Cumas Space Station

Chapter 20 Chut’ro, Dark Side Conspirators Base

Chapter 21 Deep Space

Chapter 22 Q’ran, Q’ran Chele

Chapter 23 Space, Close To Vequin

Chapter 24 Q’ran, Vequin

Chapter 25 Q’ran, Turata

Chapter 26 Huk’na’ta, Chut’ro

Chapter 27 Huk’na’ta, Chut’ro

Chapter 28 Huk’na’ta, Chut’ro

Chapter 29 Q’ran, Turata, God’s Realm

Chapter 30 Huk’na’ta, Chut’ro

Chapter 31 Q’ran, Deep Space

Chapter 32 Huk’na’ta, The Tunait

Chapter 33 Q’ran, Vequin

Chapter 34 Huk’na’ta, Chut’ro

Chapter 35 Huk’na’ta, The Tunait

Chapter 36 Huk’na’ta, Inner System

Chapter 37 Huk’na’ta, Edge Of System

Chapter 38 Q’ran, Planet Q’ran

Chapter 39 Q’ran, Nethgard

Epilogue Q’ran, Deep Space

Characters

PROLOGUE

Q’ran

Jofrid grinned as the lights flickered to life, confirming the engine’s successful ignition. The noticeably physical rumble that chattered through the small craft worried him slightly as he had been under the impression that the stabilizers they had installed would be able to counteract the vibrations of the uniquely powerful engine. He decided not to worry about it. Never before had an engine this powerful been created and it was a guarantee that there would be unforeseen issues with the run. If this was the worst that arose, creating a mildly bumpy ride then there would be nothing to worry about at all. He would be able to fix that issue for the next flight.

As he sat in the cockpit, memories of his father scratching to make a living in the Q’ran research and development laboratories surfaced. He remembered how his father and worked so hard to have every original idea stolen from him for "further study. It strangely struck him as funny as the excitement of his present situation built within him.

Throughout his childhood, Jofrid had seen many of his father’s concepts stolen by the company that he refused to leave. Generally they had been of mediocre applicable use which was why Jofrid believed the man wouldn’t strike out on his own.

When his father had burst into the house a year ago, exclaiming that he had invented an engine that would send a craft moving faster than light, a claim that more than a few had made over the years without any prior success, his son had only raised an eyebrow. There was no way that this mediocre man could possibly have succeeded where so many more brilliant people had failed in the past. But when Jofrid had seen the plans that his father had brought home, he had admitted to himself that the idea may indeed work.

The theoretical Alcubierre drive that Jofrid’s father, Lonus, had based his concept upon had never previously passed beyond the theoretical stage. The idea was a good one, yet it had been imagined without a true, in-depth knowledge and understanding of physics. The name had become synonymous with failure as Alcubierre had spent his entire family fortune on attempting to make the plan succeed. He had died penniless and alone, but the name had never been forgotten. It was almost a warning among inventors to not go too far.

His father had probably been struck by the same bug that hit many research and development workers during their careers, trying to make the most famous failure a viable creation, but Jofrid had never bothered to find out, he had very little respect for his own father. No matter what the reason though, Jofrid had immediately taken to his father’s concepts.

The young man had been cursed from an early age with an almost unreasonably large imagination, combined with a mind capable of making most of his strangely exciting ideas come true. Many considered him cursed because although always outshone everyone around him, it left him in a void of constant loneliness that few understood. Much like his father, he had invented numerous contraptions during his teenage years and now at over 25 years the man’s junior and barely out of his teenage years, he held almost as many patents to his name as his father.

On the other hand, his father being a bullied and beaten child himself, he had treated his own son the same way his father had treated him while his mother seemed not to care in the slightest. No help ever appeared to save him from the painful situation and Lonus was too weak willed to break the abusive cycle that had begun generations before.

The inventions that Jofrid had eventually started creating after one particularly painful session with his father’s belt were done in private with nary a friend or a parental figure to approve or more likely, to disapprove of. The positive side was that it had freed his mind from the constraints most adults had forced upon them from their own parents.

Years after his self-induced seclusion, with just a summer left before he could legally leave his parents behind and a choice of universities at his fingertips he had created a masterpiece that he doubted he would ever be able to top despite an unwavering faith in his own mind. His father had the concept in his grasp but had failed in some of the fundamental design choices that Jofrid could so easily see which were required to ensure the successful creation of a craft able to pass the speed of light. What the man had created would be a craft that would barely be able to pass one third of the speed of light without some serious re-engineering if it was built the way that he had planned. Admittedly it would be a step forward for spacecraft, but not the one that the man thought that he had his hands on.

Jofrid had stolen and copied the prints the same night that his father had come home with them, believing he was the next man to lead the system in technological advancement.

He knew that in just over a year, the engine that his father had imagined would be in the prototype stage and would be tested. The flaws would be realized if not altered to create the first faster than light hyper-drive but it would be a race at that point. Anyone worth their salt would be able to make the necessary adjustments to succeed where Lonus had mostly failed and it wouldn’t be that long after the initial attempt that they would actually succeed.

If everything worked out as he believed it would though, he would soon have the honour of being the first person to actually travel past light speed.

‘Come in Helen?’ He called out, achingly conscious of the nervous hitch in his voice.

‘Helen here, how are you doing Jof?’ came the sweetest and most sensual voice that he had repeatedly heard in his wildest dreams. He hoped that the lilt he heard was a tinge of concern.

Had he known the true depth of feeling that she held for him he would have thought more than twice as to actually turning the engine on to full power.

‘Good, this ship you built is perfect.’ He lied, wishing not for the first time that she was coming with him even though he knew that the craft was only designed for one.

He looked around the small cockpit, fully realizing for the first time that he would have to spend at least a month in the tiny space, unable to move much beyond a small stretch, one group of muscles at a time. The toiletries were already hooked up to his suit to expel his waste and his food source, a nutritional paste that looked and tasted relatively revolting despite containing everything that his body needed to survive and even thrive, including an interchangeable variety of flavours, was fully stocked to keep him alive for up to two full months in case of difficulties.

Neither he, nor the small crew that he had recruited to assist him with the creation of the craft had wanted to admit that if difficulty did arise then he would most likely not survive the flight. There were no safeguards, no contingency plans nor any backup craft able to retrieve him if something serious went awry. If through some miracle he didn’t die in such a case then there would be nothing he would be able to do but float in space in the hopes that someone would happen by and find him. Even as the thought travelled through the recesses of his mind, he felt a shiver at the semi-formed imaginings.

‘You know the Q’ran and Treal fleets are heading approximately in the direction you are aiming…’ she said although they had been over that fact numerous times in the past few days since the information had leaked out on the broadband.

Is it me or is she having second thoughts? He wondered.

‘And they will get to see me fly past them and wonder at the fastest person ever.’ He replied with an uneasy smile, hoping that the smile and his tone of voice would help convey his supposed lack of worry despite his true feelings.

‘Yeah…’ he could now hear in her voice that she definitely having second thoughts about the operation. It had seemed like a lot of fun when they were planning it, full of wild ideas and fantasizing about what their futures could hold but now that he was ready to leave he knew that the thoughts of everyone involved were turning to everything that could possibly go wrong.

‘If I worried about everything that could go wrong then I wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning…’ he muttered to himself.

‘What was that?’ she asked, the catch in her voice more obvious now.

‘Nothing, just muttering to myself.’ He replied, putting as much strength and authority in his voice as his few years could convey. ‘Ready to start engines. How does everything look on your end?’

‘All go on this end.’ Came the reply after a tiny pause. ‘The external cameras are working perfectly, we just finished testing and it is sending us sixty thousand frames a second. It should be fast enough to still see everything that you are passing even when you hit peak speed, though I doubt that anything you pass will really see you.

‘So all you need to do is accelerate to max speed which should occur within thirty minutes at the predicted rate after you set the drive in motion, which I may add is also lit up green on our end. After that, put on the brakes and turn around. We will see you again in three days. Plenty of time for your nav-system to route the correct return trajectory. How is your end looking?’

He looked at the cornucopia of screens, gauges and dials all lit up with a mild, inoffensive green. If even one had been red then they would have had to put off the trial run but he had been over every inch of the craft himself. He knew it had been constructed perfectly. ‘All green here too.’

‘You know we could still set it on autopilot and you wouldn’t have to risk yourself at all.’ She said, worry as ever tinging her voice with care.

‘And you know that if we did that then we wouldn’t get all the data we need, nor the proof that it is possible for living people to travel that fast…’ a chime cut him off, telling him that the time was approaching rapidly for their proposed launch window.

‘Four minute and counting.’ She came back, all questions now gone and nothing but confidence in her voice. Jofrid was very glad to hear that, he didn’t need any doubts or questions clouding his mind, nor his judgement.

‘Check. All systems go, engines running green.’

‘Anything to say to your adoring fans? You will be live in fifteen seconds.’

They had set up his cockpit camera to send pictures out over the broadband throughout the test flight although the external cameras were to be sent back to the ground crew only. They didn’t know what they were going to find or see, if anything at all, so they decided to keep it to themselves until they had been able to go over it.

The light beside the camera went white.

‘Welcome to the ground breaking faster than light expedition.’ He said, hating that his voice was cracking slightly under the pressure he was feeling.

‘You will all have the unprecedented privilege of being able to watch me as I move past the limits of our imagination combined with occasional views outside the Celeris, the craft my team and I have built. You will see real time figures of how fast I am moving…’ He faltered for a second, looking at the camera that stared back at him, uncaring that he had forgotten what it was that he wanted to talk about.

‘You have one minute until you begin your historic journey Jofrid.’ Her sultry voice cut in, helping him out of the awkward moment. In his earpiece he heard her speak privately to him. ‘Don’t worry, when you get back a little pause will be completely forgotten and you will be the hero of the entire system!’ He smiled at the camera as she said this, realizing how completely true it was. Trust Helen to bring me back to the real world. He thought happily as he checked over his entire system once more, searching for any irregularities that could have popped up in the last few minutes. Unsurprisingly there was none.

‘Twenty seconds until history is made…’ he muttered to himself, watching the second tick away a little slower than he thought necessary.

‘One hundred and twenty eight thousand viewers and growing fast!’ she told him through his earpiece. They had sent out a broadband invitation to the event of the millennia and apparently the widespread call for attention had not gone unnoticed.

When he got back, he knew that he would have to finally ask her out, tell her his feelings for her and when he was the first person to travel past the speed of light then there would be no way that she could ignore him, no way that she could possibly say no. He smiled at the thought as the last second ticked away.

He knew that he should say something else to mark the historic occasion, but there was nothing that he could think of, so he just winked at the camera, flicked the release on the engine and started the automated acceleration procedure.

The entire craft shuddered like a horse that had finally been allowed to run free and he could feel the pressure increasing against him and he watched the gauge reading his velocity raise rapidly. In under five seconds he was already moving faster than anyone previously recorded. He looked at the view cams to the external views and noted with a little disappointment that it didn’t look like he was travelling that fast at all, in fact the difference between what he had seen travelling on regular space liners and this new craft was impossible to discern.

His eyes flicked back to the speedometer suddenly as the craft seemed to jerk to once side. He had just reached a third of the speed of light and the acceleration was increasing rapidly. He wondered for a split second at this. His own calculations had told him that it should have taken far longer to reach the speeds that he had already surpassed.

The pressure on his body had already passed over into the thresh hold of pain and he felt the adrenaline suddenly pour into him as he realized that they had never taken into account the acceleration effect on the body. All they had been concerned about were the effects on the body once such speeds had been reached. How could we have been so stupid?

His face flushed with panic and his eyes involuntarily glanced towards the single failsafe button by his left hand to shut everything down.

The pain was becoming intolerable as he noted that he had passed half of the speed of light and black spots started to appear in his eyes.

The next wave of adrenaline that his body pumped into his system let him start to reach momentarily for the button that was barely two inches from his fingers but there was nothing that he could do against the sheer pressure against him. It may as well have been on the other side of the system.

There were systems in all space bound ships to assist in acceleration sickness and they hadn’t thought to put any of them in this craft. All they had thought about was the engine and whether the ship would be structurally sound.

As he lost consciousness all he could think was that they had been so desperate to pass the speed of light that they had only given the slightest thought to his survival. He finally realized why his father had been on a team of people to work on the problem. There would be others to work on the technology to keep the pilot alive during the entire acceleration process and numerous other concerns that they hadn’t even considered.

The camera watched on impassively as the young man’s eyes rolled into the back of his head and blood started to leak from his ears to pool on the comfortable but compressed seat behind his head. Within moments his eyes deflated as the pressure burst the orbs, the liquid pressing into the back of his eye sockets, unable to find any other exit.

Barely four minutes later, as the dial before his unseeing form read three-quarters of the speed of light, his ribs began to pop and crack. First the weakest, then quickly followed by the rest, they shredded his internal organs as they passed through the soft tissue. His heart, which had still been spasmodically beating was pulped by the very bones that nature had placed there to protect it. His brain finally liquefied within his skull, removing anything that may have been considered life as the skull itself finally collapsed, the last and strongest bone to fail. He had virtually liquefied as the massive number of people watching his widely broadcast death saw the speed reach light speed. No one cheered the incredible accomplishment, most were already being sick at the revolting sight.

He had finally gotten the honour of being the first person to travel the speed of light from his own solar system. Or at least almost everything that made up a living being did do, everything except that all important spark of life.

The craft was passing the outer edge of the planets that made up the solar system as this occurred and the external cameras sent back images of the planet Turata, the asteroids that specked the dark matter cloud and a craft of unknown origins deep within, then very shortly afterwards, as the craft kept accelerating, an approaching fleet of ships could be seen. They were obviously of the same origin as the one sitting idly in the dark matter cloud but of a size that would have beggared anything the solar system had ever seen prior to the joining of the Treal and Q’ran fleets.

However it was gone long before any eye could register that anything had been there in the first place. No one was now watching any of the cameras back at the home base any longer. The images of the liquefied remains of their friend had turned all their eyes away from the momentous occasion. It continued to leak off his chair as the acceleration finally ceased and the craft continued on at its maximum speed, just beyond the speed of light.

As the acceleration finally died down, the body dropped to the floor, no more pressure being felt upon it. This would be useful information in the future, but for now, the horror of what had happened had struck the entire system and most of all the crew that had made it happen. Helen fleetingly wondered whether they would be prosecuted for involuntary manslaughter but even as her petrified mind reeled at what they had done, a small part of her knew that they had covered their tracks well. They would never be found.

It would be days of mourning followed by weeks of searching through the images before they would find the images of the approaching fleet. And that would only be after she would be able to force herself to return to the scene of the crime. None of the others would ever do so. They never spoke to one another again.

Mere days before the Q’ran and Treal fleets would jointly meet the newcomers in battle, Helen would send the images both to the Q’ran council and out into the broadband for anyone to see. The council would reply with barely disguised disdain that some children were just attempting yet another stunt to gain notoriety. Had the information been sent to the correct people who would actually care about such things then it could have saved countless lives. As it was, it became a forgotten footnote to the general public in a matter of hours after the actual battle commenced.

The craft continued its trek through the stars, the images sent back in information packets for years. The time between each grouping of pictures became further apart as the innovative drive took the decaying corpse further from the imaginations and memories of any who could any longer care.

It was only one day after the tragic battle at the dark matter cloud, which would become commonly known as the Battle of Turata that a squad of highly trained operatives had taken over the small base of operations for the doomed craft. All the equipment was confiscated and no one was ever told where it was taken. The government didn’t know that Helen had retrieved the all-important transponder after the first whisperings of their fate filtered through underground channels. She had only thought wryly that she thought that their location had been well hidden.

And the craft kept flying perfectly. Flawless engine pushing the body of Jofrid ever onwards to sights no one would eventually ever see.

CHAPTER 1

Q’ran, Dark Matter Belt

The ship slowly limped away, trailing parts of itself and a line of fuel like a wounded animal trying to escape a trap having gnawed its own foot off to finally escape. The few others of its kind had already left under the more powerful drives available, leaving the last to makes its way back in its own time.

The highest ranking member of those left alive aboard the decimated craft looked at the screens with exhausted eyes. The screens surrounded him like a globe of information, just under a third of which were now completely blank. Through the screens he could see almost everywhere around the ship, including externally, far off in the distance lay the remains of so many others. The self-destruct capabilities of most of those craft left behind had already been activated, destroying all the technology that they may hold. He knew that more than a few were still there, lying dormant in the empty cursed space of the new system though, unable any longer to destroy the possibility of the alien race discovering any of their secrets.

Normally he would have had complete control over his own craft, its movements and its weapon systems reacting to his every whim, but now he had to rely on secondary methods to control the abused vessel. He could just barely see behind them to the destruction that was now days behind them but so little in terms of distance compared to how far they still had to travel.

He ordered the computer to once more calculate how long it would take for them to return to Huk’na’ta, their home solar system at their current speed. When the response came, it had altered in only the most insignificant way. It would take one hundred and thirty seven years, two hundred and four days, to make it to their destination if they were able to continue at their current speed.

He cursed at the information and his own lack of ability to affect any significant changes to the timeline. Without their light drive becoming operational they would never make it back to their home in their own life times, let alone have enough food or fuel to support them for a tenth of that time. Unlike the larger crafts of the fleet, it didn’t have the botanical gardens or fields of semi-sustainable supplies. It had never been designed to be this far away from its home for any extended period of time, but as soon as the call had gone out from the King for capable warships of a certain class or stronger to come together for a glorious battle to claim new lands for the Huk’na’tan people, the ship under its former captain had willingly, even excitedly heeded the call.

Now they found themselves over a thousand light years away from home, alone with an enemy that they had been told would be destroyed with pitiful ease. Even with no one within range as far as he could tell, the enemy was far too close for comfort.

No one knew what the weapon had been that the Q’ran had used against them, but those that remained of the crew agreed that it was the most formidable weapon that had ever been conceived. The consensus was that the Q’ran had never actually used it before as the destruction that it had wrought had also decimated a significant portion of their own fleet simultaneously.

Had it not been for the overwhelming superiority of the Huk’na’tan craft, there would have been no survivors in their fleet whatsoever. Even as it was, the only ones to actually survive had been the most heavily armored and furthest from ground zero.

The Q’ran. He thought to himself, mulling over the oddly sounding name. They had come across it only by accident prior to the battle, when an unknown observer in the fleet had noticed that a large portion of craft in the enemy fleet had symbols that they took were words, written on their hulls. Whether or not it was being pronounced correctly, they had no way of knowing, but the name for the first enemy of the Huk’na’tans in hundreds of years had stuck.

‘Acting Captain Hak’nar.’ Called the only other person left alive on the bridge; his navigator.

‘Yes First Pilot Jun’to?’ he asked, the formality in his voice obvious. There was no love lost between the two of them due to her belief that she should have been given command, but they both had a job to do and would not let the decision that the former captain had made on his death bed get in the way of working to the best of their abilities.

‘The Q’ran fleet has finally left the area. The Makchonat has finally given out the last of its life support, there will no longer be any survivors as the autodestruct has been set off, though they sent you a report prior to their final farewell.’

‘Thank you Navigator. Is there anything else that I should know?’ he replied, unable to find any more despair at the news. It was just another group of casualties in a war that already had so many at its onset. Their code forced them to go down with their ship and for the first time he wondered why such things were considered acceptable. He couldn’t spare too much thought though, he had their own survival to worry about.

‘Not at present sir.’

He thought about the previous captain and the unpleasant way that he had been killed by his own life support system even as it tried to keep him alive. He had given his last few orders in full expectation that he would die within the next few hours but somehow the system had retrieved a massive backlog of electrical energy, burning him to death from the inside out in the very seat that Hak’nar now occupied. He hadn’t even been the second in command, just the security officer, but according to the on-board Cloud system he had been the one with the most experience in the simulators as well as the only one with any officer training of the level needed to become captain. Apparently the previous captain had known this as well. At this point he didn’t want to admit it to anyone but he had absolutely no idea what he was supposed to do. His training had been at best, brief.

The best and brightest on board that were still able to move around under their own power and who were mechanically minded were trying to fix the damaged light drive, life support systems and weapons systems, all at the same time. So far the only success that they had was with the life support system which, although not working at peak efficiency, would keep them alive for month at the very least. The few dozen others that were still alive were doing what they must to ensure the ships survival while he sat there, hour after hour for the past three days watching the remnants of their fleet incrementally disappear behind them.

‘Turn around.’ He muttered.

‘Excuse me sir?’ the navigator responded, slight anger marring her voice.

‘Turn around. Turn around and head back to the battlegrounds. We will all just die useless deaths and be forgotten if we are left out here.’

‘But the Cloud will remember you all for eternity.’ A third voice spoke out of thin air.

Not for the first time, Hak’nar wished that the computer that housed the Cloud had been destroyed with so much of the rest of the ship during the explosion. His opinion was unspoken though, it was not a popular one.

‘The Cloud may remember us, Cumas, but we will all still be dead. I would rather be remembered while still alive and able to enjoy life.’

‘I understand Acting Captain Hak’nar but as you are aware, if we return to the scene of the battle there is a twenty-seven point three percent chance that the Q’ran will have left some sort of hidden force behind to capture or kill any further incursion craft. If we progress on our current course and speed there is a thirty-two percent chance of one of our sister ships coming to our aide within the next four months.’

‘And if they don’t then we will die from a complete lack of food aboard this tub or possibly die due to one of many systems finally failing. Did you forget this?’

‘I forget nothing Acting Captain Hak’nar. I am just informing you as to the best option that you can take under the circumstances.’ The emotionless voice returned.

He rubbed his face vigorously. There would be no way to explain to the all-pervasive machine that he had a feeling that this was in fact the correct choice to make. The Cloud didn’t do well with feelings. In fact the Cloud Unit Memory Augmentation System, or Cumas as it was sometimes called, didn’t do well at all with anything remotely similar to emotion. It only dealt in cold logic and although that logic had been incredibly useful time after time, Hak’nar knew that it was not the time to think in that particular fashion.

‘Your comments have been noted.’ He said and entered into his permanent log that he had refused the recommendations of Cumas. He knew that if they ever made it back to Huk’na’ta, he would be placed under review, one that may lose him his position. Ignoring the recommendations of the cloud wasn’t something that anyone ever did lightly.

‘Turn us around please, first pilot Jun’to.’

Without a word the woman turned the craft ever so slowly to face the way that they had just come from. He would be asked about his choice if and when they made it home, but he knew that the crew wouldn’t say anything about it.

Sometimes he caught himself wondering why every really believed that Cumas knew the best out of everyone but he stopped that thinking quickly. He knew that the stories of the Cloud being able to read thoughts were probably just folk lore, used to scare children, but it wasn’t worth the risk of having it decide that he was an insurgent and having the crew forcibly remove him from the ship without his express approval, or a suit.

Not for the first time he found himself wondering about the afterlife. The one true religion told him that God would rescue the souls of the dead from anywhere throughout the universe as he was all powerful but Hak’nar had often found himself wondering at the truth behind it all.

Is there really a god? Does he really care about all of us? All seventy six billion of us? And what about the other civilizations that we have discovered? What of them? Are they also loved by the one true god?

So many questions coloured his mind sometimes that he was scared the cloud would realize that he was a non-believer but so far he had always been able to hide this side of himself. Not for the first time he wondered if this would be the time that he was finally discovered to be a heretic. Despite the lack of belief that his entire race held, it was considered good form to at least pretend.

He concentrated on the screens once more. Both Jun’to and Cumas were oddly silent but he saw that the craft was now facing directly back the way they had just slowly fled from. If he was right, they would be able to recover enough spare parts to repair their own light drive and make it back to their own system inside of a month. He hoped that enough of the crafts self-destruct systems that had been destroyed in the attack had failed. If he was wrong they would all be dead in a few days, but considering that the slow route that had been previously attempted was most likely to lead them to a much slower and unpleasant death, he didn’t see any harm in trying this route instead.

He had fought against himself in his own mind since beginning the slow trek about whether or not to go against Cumas’ suggestions but for some reason, hearing how the Makchonat had finally given up despite their odds of survival being only marginally less than their own, had convinced him that the last thing he wanted was to end up as a footnote in some text at best and that the only people who cared about were immediate friends and family.

‘Ship call.’ He commanded the computer which instantly allowed his voice to be carried throughout the ship, wherever the speakers were working that was. Corridors and rooms that no longer could contain life combined with the areas of the ship that were still habitable hummed with his soft tones.

‘We are turning back to make a scavenging run to our wounded brethren. If we are able to save any lives while there we shall do so,’ he didn’t bother stating that the odds of any survivors was negligible. They all knew that already. ‘For now I need each of you to make a list of the most pressing needs aboard this ship to keep us alive, fix the light drive and get us back home as fast as possible.

‘A meeting for senior staff will occur on the bridge in two hours to discuss our present predicament. Acting Captain Hak’nar out.’

The computer translated the inherent command to turn off the intercom system and powered down to a fraction of full capability. Their battery reserves were painfully low also due to the recharge drive and the battery systems also being damaged. There was only a very small time frame per day that they could run at full power now and each time Cumas told them that they had burned out a few more battery cells, leaving that much less. He knew it would not be long before they would not be able to rely on Cumas at all.

It seemed like no time had passed at all when the five other remaining officers appeared on the bridge looking impossibly tired.

‘Reporting as per your request Acting Captain Hak’nar.’ The oldest of the group spoke out with a sharp salute.

Hak’nar returned the salute and motioned for them to sit around the meeting table in the centre of the room. The table was used in times of battle for twelve people to sit around to control the various weaponry bristling the outside of the craft. Now that most of those weapons had been destroyed and the system that ran them was virtually no longer in existence, the table was little more than somewhere to sit.

‘From the reports that I have received this day, everything has been repaired that are at this time possible to be repaired. From here on out it will be maintenance unless we can get some spare parts. Is this correct?’

The group looked at each other, each plainly hoping for even a glimmer of good news. No one said anything though and slowly, one after the other, they all nodded their acceptance of the statement.

‘Ok. As you all know we are going back to pick up the desperately needed spare parts to get us back on our way and home before we all die of old age.’ He wished that it could have just been a terrible joke, but it was a future that they all had to contemplate as a real possibility. ‘What I brought you all together for is to discuss what happened. This is the first time that we have all had the time to get together and as much as I realize that you are all tired and would greatly appreciate sleep, I believe that we need to ascertain what actually occurred.’ He looked around the table at the partially blank looks looking back at him and sighed.

‘We are the most advanced fleet of ships ever to have assembled and we were outdone by a system that still uses nuclear energy. Can anyone even begin to explain how this could be?’ Once again he looked at the blank faces and hoped for any sort of response.

‘Sir, the truth of the matter is simple, they had a weapon of mass destruction that they were willing to use to save their people even at the cost of their own lives. We don’t have anything of the sort that is powerful enough to do anything close to what we saw there.’

‘And do you really believe that in one specific field their own technology so outshines our own that they could do that? That they could create something that our own people haven’t even theorized? No, there is something else going on that we are unaware of. What it is I could not begin to guess, but there is something there.’

A few of the group looked at the others, none of them willing to admit that the captain had a point.

‘Sir, if I may.’ Said Kulotha, the ships weapons expert.

Hak’nar waved for him to continue.

‘I have spent my life learning about all weapons from the humble sword to the atomic bomb and far beyond to today’s most advanced artillery. Nothing that I have ever seen can react that way in space. It is against everything that we know. It was as if there was a catalyst surrounding us that ignited to create such an effect, but we all know that the entire area was scanned prior to our arrival and there was nothing to be found.’

A few of the others nodded, confirming the truth of the statement.

‘So that means one of two things: either there was something there that we could not see or scan,’ one of the others snorted at the idea. ‘Or something was placed around us during the battle, but once again there was nothing that was picked up by Cumas and we all know that it scans continuously for any anomaly that could cause any issues whatsoever both during battle and beyond.’ He shook his head obviously confused about the entire situation.

It wasn’t anything that he hadn’t thought before but he hadn’t been able to put it so succinctly. He sighed somewhat dramatically and looked around at the rest of the cabal. None of them seemed to have anything do add. It was obvious from the looks passing around the table that they had all discussed it from time to time over the past few days. More than a few of the remaining crew were still in shock though, unable to do much except exist. They had lost over half of their crew and many friends and family had been killed during the battle and the unexpected finale.

Discussions turned to the sundry items that they would need to make good their escape from the accursed solar system and although they didn’t speak of it again, the thoughts of what had caused them so much difficulty lay in their minds, blackening all of their thoughts.

The next three days passed fitfully as most of the crew, whenever they weren’t patching anything that could be patched, watched space for any returning enemies. The only scanners that were working aboard were their close range ones which were useless for their current needs, only outside cameras were being used to see if anyone was out there and it was only one small step above not being able to see around them at all. A ship could hide in the pit of space easily against the eyes of a camera.

When they flew within range of the wrecks, the scanners would be put to great use to keep an eye out for any enemy ships playing possum while scanning their own comrade’s wrecks to identify any possible remains that were still viable. Until then they would be virtually useless.

No one thought it particularly likely in the wake of the disastrous battle for both sides that there would be anyone waiting for them. Everyone had witnessed the destruction either first hand through vid screens or by being involved in the battle itself. Those who were not able to watch as everything occurred took to watching the videos that had been recorded by the external cameras when they finally had some spare time long after the battle was over.

The closest wreck eventually came close enough to use their failing scanners to search for any of the items that they needed to make good their escape. The entire time the crew was on high alert, everyone scared witless that they may be spotted by the unexpectedly powerful enemy. If they were spotted, they would not be able to run and fighting back would be a pitiful sight. There was very little weaponry aboard that was still functional and most of that had been torn apart to steal important components to keep other more important systems working.

‘Captain, there are supplies of oxygen aboard that we could certainly use, just in case we take longer than we think to affect our repairs.’ Jun’to called over to him from where she searched the scanners with two others.

‘How are our food supplies?’ he responded with a question and nodding at her, accepting that she knew what she was talking about and letting her decide whether or not to send anyone over to reclaim the tanks.

‘We have enough to last for months, thankfully.’ Replied the present ship chef who had previously enjoyed a career in astrophysics. Once in the past when Hak’nar had found a reason to talk with the man, he had confided that the pressure of his prior position had forced him to take an early retirement but he couldn’t sit around and do nothing, his hobbies being mostly non-existent, so he had reenlisted with the fleet to cook and found that he loved it. The past ten years had flown by for him.

‘Fuel?’

‘Our supplies are low but without repairing or replacing over half of our fuel cells, there is nothing we can do about it.’ Answered the lone engineer left aboard. They all were well aware that any craft that had completed the self-destruct sequence would have lost all of the fuel cells in one of the initial explosions.

‘Great, well is there anything the left aboard… well aboard whatever ship that was, that we can use at present?’

Jun’to shook her head and he sighed. He had held a small grain of hope that the first wreck that they came across would hold everything that they needed and they would be able to get away from the scene of carnage as fast as possible, but it was just not meant to be.

A tense day passed slowly as every spark and minor explosion from the graveyard sent them scurrying in fear that they had been discovered, to realize time after time that there was nothing to hide from. The place really was a cemetery. They saw frozen bodies float by, or at least parts thereof so often that it had become almost commonplace. Eventually both Jun’to and Hak’nar ignored them completely.

Slowly though, they found one craft after another on which they could rustle up all of the necessary items to repair their engine and fuel cells. The next few days were spent furtively replacing everything that they could. This was the most worrying time for the crew as if they were discovered at this point, there would be no possibility of escape, not even a half-hearted limp to hide. By the end of the week, without finding any survivors they had created an ugly but functional beast out of their engines that the engineer assured them would work.

During the entire process they hadn’t found a single living soul, despite sending out a continuous call for response from any of their damaged compatriots in the hopes that some others had survived and were simply without power, but not a whisper was heard over the air waves.

Hak’nar thought about the fact that there were likely living people out there with no way to communicate their location and that there was nothing that he could do about it. He could spend months searching the wreckages and not find a single person, or he could start looking and find dozens of people immediately. After much thought he had opted for searching the ships that they stripped parts from, but there had been nothing but frozen corpses and a complete lack of breathable atmosphere aboard all of those crafts. No one had spoken of the possibility that there could be people out there just waiting to be saved.

In the end he had decided to retrieve the Cloud data from each of the crafts that they accessed so that the crewmembers would be able to have the last few weeks of their lives returned for their families back on their home planets of Chut’ro and Loth’ra.

The cloud was not just an assistant for the crew but also a backup for memories and lives. Everything that they saw would be recorded within certain parameters and at the very least their families would be able to see them one last time and put their memories to rest.

By the time they had stripped the fourth craft of all usable equipment and supplies, they had also been able to replace the battery cores for their own Cloud unit and transferred what memories they had been able to salvage from the unfortunate scrap ships to be transmitted back to the central servers as soon as they were in range of their own solar system.

When Cumas had reenergized in a more permanent way it had been like a veil had been lifted from his mind. He had always known how pervasive the system was but he hadn’t truly understood how much it had meant to him. It was like an unconscious safety net for the way that he thought. It knew him better than anyone or anything else in the known universe and feeling his mind being taken back into its gentle embrace was barely short of a religious epiphany. The thoughts had surprised him even as it had formed in his mind.

‘Acting Captain Hak’nar,’ Jun’to called out. ‘Our course to Huk’na’ta has been set and we are ready to warp on your command sir.’

He could hear the yearning in her voice to get back to their own system, away from the death and destruction that this evil system seemed to hold in store for them. It had supposed to have been a simple sweep, an overwhelming show of force that would have either decimated their new enemies or made them flee in terror and they would have shortly gained unmitigated control of the entire system.

However, their approach had been discovered and they had been met with a force even greater in size than their own. Even though the unexpected force was comparatively lacking in technology, they obviously had a greater weapon that they were willing to use even to the detriment of their own fleet, in service of their own system. It spoke to him of a level of sacrifice that he could barely comprehend.

‘Engage.’ He said, surprised at the lack of interest in his own voice. He realized that there was a large part of him that wanted to stay and keep searching for any more lost souls, even though he knew that if there were any left alive, they wouldn’t stay that way for long without power, atmosphere and sources of food. The odds were actually remarkably good that had there even been any survivors, he heard himself trying to convince his own thoughts, they wouldn’t have survived long enough for them to even have returned to begin their scavenging. It had been almost two weeks since the battle and no one could survive for that long without power. He hoped that he was correct in his estimations and sat back in his chair knowing that the decision would probably haunt him until his dying day.

He felt the ship buck rather more sharply than he was used to as the engines kicked in. The screens began to blur as they quickly sped up to light speed, unable to feed the information to him correctly. Yet another part of the ship that was working incorrectly. He couldn’t ignore the sigh of relief that issued from Jun’to as everything seemed to settle into relatively normal operational parameters. He had only barely been able to suppress one himself. It would not do for anyone to hear that he had anything but complete confidence in the work that the crew had done.

They would have to travel for just over a month and a half at their present rate. It was as the engineer had said though, they would rather get there alive than try to push an untried, patchwork engine anything past their slowest warp speed. Had their engine been undamaged they would have been able to travel much faster, being able to reach their home system in a matter of weeks, but they would have to deal with what they had, as they could. At the present speed that Jun’to seemed comfortable to let them cruise at, it would be at least a month before they were able to make it home. But at least they would make it home unlike an uncountable number of their brethren.

They would have little to tell when they returned, having been placed well in the rear of the rest of the fleet at the start of the battle, but he looked forward to being involved in the next step. He had lost a lot of good friends and family in the unnecessary and ill-prepared battle that his own king had thought would be such a coup. The second battle that he knew must occur would not be so easy for the Q’ran to defend.

CHAPTER 2

Huk’na’ta, Edge of System

The fleet commander, still feeling amazed that he had survived the battle that was already months in the past tried to settle his own mind. Most of his crew and fleet had been decimated but somehow he had survived. He breathed out slowly once more, slowing his heart rate then sighed with relief as a message from Huk’na’ta appeared on his screen, asking for identification. He sent back his ID and the system replied with an all clear.

He had hated leaving the Gholiat and Makchonat behind with two untested acting-captains, but had no choice in the matter as the man on the Gholiat had been the only surviving officer with any of the required pertinent training, despite what the navigation officer of the seemed to believe. The newly acting-captain of the Makchonat had received greater training but had seemed even less at ease being in the captain’s chair. He had made the choices and left them behind, most likely to die. But there had been no other viable choice, as the Cloud had repeatedly told him.

Right now he would have traded his position, power, influence and almost everything he owned just a little peace of mind. He had been constantly questioning himself over his own choices during the battle. Whether or not he had placed the fleet in the optimal positioning, what he could have done to have stopped so many from being killed and destroyed in a system so far from their own. How he could have pre-empted the attack and planned for such an outcome. He never let his crew see this, though. It would not have been good for anyone for them to see that he was questioning himself. A person in his position didn’t ever have that kind of luxury.

It wasn’t long until Chut’ro grew to an identifiable size in his view screen and he give the command for them to slow and head to one of the four massive space stations surrounding the planet. It was the only station that was completely military based, the others being both civilian and corporate as well as having minor military defensive positions as well, although all of them were well known to be the easiest positions for a military person to get posted to, typically given to those with a few years of faithful service with no interest in any more advancements in their careers.

It had been over twenty-nine centuries since the unification of the planets, when the people of Chut’ro had gained the upper hand in a war that had lasted for dozens of generations. They had placed the people of Loth’ra in a position where they had a choice between surrender and annihilation. Peace had been achieved. The two habitable worlds in the system had become one and since then, although there was the occasional voice of the people that wanted the release of Loth’ra, the massive majority believed that the combination of the two planets under one leader was the best thing to have happened in their entire history. There had been no war in almost that long, only skirmishes of small groups that seemed to truly believe that they could rule the system better. They never lasted long and the military might had grown in strength of technology, but never in competence. They had training programs galore to assist those that chose a military life, but they were more often used as a police force than anything else. The military mind had grown weak and it had showed in the battle that had just passed. Too many assumptions had been made and not enough of the training that they all had been through had shown its face. Once again he shook his head to remove such thoughts and concentrated on their destination.

The creation of the Cloud had followed just two centuries after the unification of the two planets. It had been a massive undertaking, an entire moon completely refitted and even partially gutted to fit all of the computers and data banks necessary for the concept of the cloud. It was funded by a multi-corporation conglomerate that looking back had obviously just wanted to use it as a way to ensure people would buy what they wanted them to buy at any given moment via a direct feed into their mind.

The original construction when finally completed after a period of just under seventy years had been a monumental failure and drained the coffers of three out of the four corporations, collapsing them and causing a twenty year recession causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and creating a dozen times that number of families becoming homeless. The government eventually purchased it for a pittance of the building cost in the proviso that the last standing corporation would run its activities and within a generation had made it mandatory to have a direct feed chip installed in the minds of every newborn. Initially this caused massive riots but as with anything new and unpleasant, it was forgotten within a few decades and the next terrible advancement was attacked instead.

The only point that the government publicly acceded to was that the chips could never be used as mind control in any way, all that they could do was collect memories and experiences and upload them to the central cloud data base so that the experience of the entire race on the whole could be learned from. The chips were built to exacting standards and were proven to be unable to do anything that the public feared. People still were scared but the process continued heedless.

Many spoke of urges to purchase items that they had never had an interest in before, but it was widely believed that these statements came only from dissidents wanting to cause problems and were for the most part, completely ignored.

Crime was virtually wiped out overnight, deviant activities of any sort decreased substantially to the point where only the most desperate of people committed such acts that although not illegal, were frowned upon by society as a whole. As all of the information the cloud collected was accessible by