Scout Ship: Rise of the Empyrean Empire: Novel 01 Read online

  Scout Ship

  Rise of the Empyrean Empire: Book One.

  Author: D. L. Harrison

  Copyright 2017. This is a work of fiction. Names, Characters, Places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Epilogue

  Afterword:

  About the Author

  Other books by D. L. Harrison:

  Book Description

  Prologue

  Anise looked up from her desk, and studied the twelve students in her class. It was their last year of basic schooling, and as such they were ready to learn of the origins of the empire. Mature enough to grasp the truth. They felt her gaze and quieted down. She really didn’t like teaching this subject at all, it was a reminder of the grim past, before the Empyrean Empire rose. The empire wasn’t perfect either, after all, they were still human, but most human foibles were now a thing of the past.

  Still, it was necessary, even in this day and age the saying, those that don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, is still true to a certain extent. That didn’t mean she had to like it, old enough or not there were too many faces that were far too innocent in her class. There was one inescapable truth about the empire, about any empire. The rise of any empire required the fall of the one that preceded it.

  “Alright class, does anyone recognize the name Michael Williams?”

  She smiled sardonically at all the blank stares. Teens. Some things truly don’t change.

  “Michael Williams was one of several pivotal figures in the years before and following the founding of the Empyrean Empire, when true peace was finally achieved. We won’t be painting him as a hero or a villain. He was a complicated man with a number of foibles, but as you’ll find out, he also had a penchant for doing the right thing. To truly understand the time, the people, and the worlds that came before, to understand the pain and fear in the past, we will be sharing excerpts of his stored memories directly this morning.

  “Close your eyes class, prepare, get comfortable, and open your minds…”

  Chapter One

  The blaring klaxon jerked me out of my sleep, and I started to rise off the bed in a slight spin. There was a loud clang of metal, and the klaxon cut off. My heart thundered in my chest at the disorientation of my rude awakening, and I closed my eyes and took a deep breath to calm down. I reached up and grabbed the ceiling, and then pushed down gently to get my feet on the floor, bending my knees slightly, I grabbed the bed so I wouldn’t bounce off. Then I reached for my magnetic boots.

  There should be gravity, we still had a week of deceleration at one G before we arrived 61-Virginis, which was almost twenty-eight light years from Earth. Humanity did have faster than light travel in the year 2263, but it was problematical at best, barely understood well enough by our scientists to use at all, and only available after getting somewhere the long way first.

  I’d been out here almost a year now, the crew of Columbus had taken over the forty-six-year mission from the last scout ship. It was required duty for anyone in the defense force, a year exploratory mission to stretch Earth’s reach into the stars after each promotion, for training purposes and to become accustomed to new duties in a relatively low stakes mission that at the same time was still useful. Despite that, I still wasn’t used to the Lt. Commander insignia on the collar of my ship suit, at twenty-seven years old I was among a handful of people in UE history that had attained that rank so young.

  My mind shied away from the reason for that.

  A scout ship didn’t rate a full captain rank, so despite my rank I was first officer, and the captain of the ship had a commander’s rank officially, though was still called captain. The rest of the command crew were four experienced Senior Lieutenants, who had just been promoted, and four very green ensigns who were fresh out of officer’s school when we launched. I shook the cobwebs out of my head as my heart rate finally slowed.

  “Columbus, status?”

  The scout ship Columbus, of the United Earth Defense Force, had an A.I. system that automated most things, including limited self-repair. The crew of the ship was only twenty, ten of those being command crew, the other half the chief cook, chief engineer, and eight other enlisted crew for things A.I.s still had trouble with, like adapting repairs if the unforeseen occurs.

  The Columbus was relatively small, a spheroid a little over a hundred yards in diameter, like a fat rounded flying saucer in shape. The center of the ship held engineering and the bridge, and only had gravity during a long burn. The round edge of the spheroid was set up with virtually everything else, from crew quarters, R&R, a gym, mess, sickbay, and a few labs. In between the center and outer ring, was taken up with rooms of supplies, spare parts, robotics, reaction mass fuel, and other things required for a mission that could last years.

  The external ring could have gravity even without a long burn, by using the attitude thrusters to put a spin on the ship. The rooms on the edge of the ship were rounded with a floor about a third of the way up, and below the floor was heavily counterweighted. The spherical rooms were gimballed, allowing the rooms to either face down at the bottom of a ship during a burn, or rotate out ninety degrees toward the edge of the sphere when spin was in effect, giving those rooms artificial gravity at about point eight of Earth normal when required. It would be essential for health once we reached our destination and performed an initial survey of the system which would take weeks, not to mention the scans required to make FTL through subspace safe to use to find the system.

  Forty-six years for the first trip, the next ship would take minutes, or hours, FTL travel time was a little random, subspace was a strange place our scientists barely understood. We only understood it enough to allow the A.I.s to perform the calculations and navigate it. Some said it changed as it did due to the expansion of the universe, it was a smaller space that matched the universe, so flowed and changed drastically from moment to moment. Other scientists swore it was simply because subspace had more than three dimensions, and we didn’t have the instruments or minds to perceive it correctly.

  Regardless, it would be some of the scans we’d take at 61-Virginis, that would give the A.I. the ability to find it in subspace. It had something to do with quantum signatures, but in truth I didn’t really understand the Chavez-Teller FTL drive at all. We did use it at the start of our mission, when the last scout mission had finished, they’d taken scans of the space a quarter light year away from our target, and we used those to get to that spot and continue the mission on the last leg to 61-Virginis.

  The final exploratory reach was a highly sought after post for the required exploratory missions, they didn’t happen often. We’d be the first humans in that solar system, and the first to have local scan data, though full survey missions would be sent immediately after. I hoped when we g
ot there, we’d find a life bearing planet, if we got there that is. We were just a week away, but losing our deceleration thrust couldn’t be a good thing.

  If we didn’t get it back soon, we’d fly right by the place, if we were lucky and didn’t hit anything on the way through. The ship was capable of a max thrust of eight gravities for short periods, but anything more than two would be impossible, and dangerous, if sustained for too long.

  We’d visited many solar systems within twenty light years of Earth, and had only found two life bearing planets. The rest of the systems which humanity has reached only have artificial habitats in orbit of precious resources, like gas giants for hydrogen and xenon reaction mass, or dead planets or moons that could be mined for resources. Most of them are merely marked for future mining.

  I stared up at the ceiling in annoyance, “Columbus? Report!”

  Yes, because yelling at an A.I. will help, I couldn’t even contact the bridge without the A.I. to route it, which meant I’d have to get to the bridge to figure things out. Losing our A.I. would be extremely bad, we wouldn’t even be able to abandon the mission and go home, not that we’d do that.

  “Amy, can you tell what’s going on?”

  Amy was my personal A.I. assistant which ran on my implant. She wasn’t nearly as powerful as the ship’s A.I. but she was better than nothing. In 2263 everyone had one, everyone had to have one. It was my identification, access credentials, personal assistant, it held my medical, military, and financial records, and was a medical implant in and of itself as well, for a condition that had plagued all humanity since the year 2102.

  Amy answered, “Negative. Speculation available.”

  I rolled my eyes, anything that wasn’t a hundred percent certain was speculation to an A.I. They were very good at it at times, but had to give a warning first.

  “Go ahead.”

  Amy replied, “Implant failure of one of the other crew members is likely.”

  A shiver went up my spine and I suddenly felt cold.

  “Supporting data?” I asked, my mouth dry.

  “Your auditory sense picked up the screeching and tearing of metal. The only other causes could have been the Columbus A.I. damaging itself with robotic systems, or we ran into something large enough to get past the deflector shields. Both of those latter options are extremely unlikely given our position in the void between stars, and the stability of A.I.s.”

  That was true enough, in interstellar space there wasn’t anything larger than dust and radiation, which the deflector systems could handle without a problem. Even if there had been, the ship’s sensors would have detected it long before the collision, and could have changed the trajectory of the ship to miss it. Even if that failed, it would have alarmed long before we struck something, even at a respectable percentage of light speed.

  Implant failure.

  It was one of the things most people didn’t think about, much less talk about. The implants worked just fine for most for a lifetime, but there was a two percent failure rate in people older than forty, and less than a point zero zero zero one percent failure rate below forty. That was just one person out of every million. There were only twenty people on the ship, and only two of them were forty years old, the captain and the chief engineer, which meant it was extremely bad luck for this to have happened. It meant death for the one with the implant, a horrible thing, but far better than the alternative.

  Still, during those few moments a lot of damage could be caused around the person with implant failure. I hoped that wasn’t really what happened, but I couldn’t argue with Amy’s logic.

  I stood up and started to walk toward the door in my quarters. The captain was on the bridge while I was off duty, but every hand was required in an emergency. Walking in magnetic boots was a little awkward, but not too bad. Amy controlled the strength of the magnetic fields, and adjusted them automatically as I walked. It was almost as smooth as walking normally, but not quite.

  It was almost a hundred and eighty years since the first one was found. The first human with the condition, a mutation back in 2085. Allyson Chambers was just barely a teenager, it was reported she simply threw a fit out of anger at her parents, like any other teen starting puberty in the world. Except, she managed to kill her whole family, and destroy the house she’d grown up in.

  With her mind.

  She wasn’t evil, history says she simply lost her temper, and when she’d realized what she’d done to her family in a moment of pique, she lost her mind and destroyed the house. She killed herself less than a week later out of remorse in an isolation ward. The suicide watch was worthless, because she didn’t need any sharp objects, or pills, she just needed her own mind.

  For the next seventeen years, until the year 2102, several more were found, and quarantined for the safety of everyone around them while the government tried to get to the bottom of the mutation. That worked in some cases, but in others the young people afflicted with the mutation got angry, and fought back against the government. The ones afflicted could use telekinesis, but the real issue was that they couldn’t control it, not all the time. A simple surge of anger or annoyance could cause mass damage and even death.

  People were panicked worldwide, and there were riots. It was even worse for those mutated who were wrong inside, evil, and wanted to hurt people. It wasn’t just telekinesis either, the mutated humans could use a strange form of telepathy. It wasn’t reading minds though, not exactly, it was more a merging of minds, with one dominating the other.

  That was far more frightening to most people, not even being safe in their own minds. They could be taken over and controlled by one with the mutation. Mind rape. Fortunately, that portion of their abilities took a concerted act of will and effort, so while some of the monsters with the mutation did do it and dominate others, it wasn’t done on accident by any of the rest.

  No, the innocent and pure that were infected merely killed on accident, with stray thoughts.

  That was nothing though, compared to the horrors of 2102, when one of the mutated, a scientist, discovered the DNA sequence responsible for releasing the mutated powers. Doctor James Gilead stated that he was tired of the human governments calling them aberrations, and truly believed in his insanity, that this was some kind of evolutionary step for humanity. An ascension of sorts. He may have been insane, but brilliantly so.

  So, he designed the Gilead virus which was highly virulent, and it spread across the world like a brush fire in dry grass. It had a four percent death rate, but everyone that recovered had been changed. The virus carried a vector, and inserted the DNA mutation. In his insanity, he believed the government would stop trying to limit mankind and fight against it, if everyone was the same. Worse, the changes made couldn’t be undone with a similar approach, and all attempts have failed to undo it, up to this day.

  James Gilead was wrong. What followed on Earth was what the history books called the year of hell.

  All governments fell, the population dropped from nineteen to twelve billion as humanity self-destructed. Some men and women rose as warlords, dominating others with their mind. Simple arguments even among the best of humanity, became accidental murders, and riots didn’t damage stores and property, they destroyed whole cities. Humans simply lacked the self-control in their own minds, they weren’t used to controlling their thoughts and desires in their minds, like they grew up learning to control their mouths and actions.

  The phrase looks could kill, was no longer a joke.

  Criminals couldn’t be held in prisons, not when they could destroy concrete walls, and kill their jailors with a thought. Mob justice became the rule during the year of hell, as humanity formed into groups and gangs to end the criminals and darkest members of humanity who perpetrated horrific crimes.

  The year of hell actually lasted closer to two years, but I guess the two years of hell didn’t quite have the same ring to it. Those humans that were left after the monsters among us were killed by mob justice, did have
some marginal control, but the accidental murder rate was still ridiculously high. The world’s infrastructure had broken down, and it was suicide to get on a plane or ship. The people that feared that type of travel would quite often cause the accidents they feared would happen.

  The world was a mess.

  It was in 2104 when Doctor Avery Mandell invented the first implant. Exactly like the one in my own head. It had all the same capabilities, plus the A.I. could create certain energy and sound wavelengths directly in the brain that could suppress the mutated mind abilities of the one implanted. Which was everyone.

  It wasn’t easy, but Dr. Mandell led humanity out of the dark and gave people hope, it took two years and a lot of fighting, but in the end every human on Earth was implanted. Most humans wanted to be implanted, but there were notable exceptions throughout the world. The criminals that managed to survive mob justice because they weren’t all that violent, were returned to the jails, and people could start to rebuild the world’s infrastructure.

  It was in 2106, when Doctor Mandell was elected the first president of a United Earth council, and became the leader of the Earth he saved. The earth recovered eventually, and in this day and age had a mostly automated A.I. infrastructure. Working was no longer mandatory for the human race. A lot had changed. Farming, electrical grids, water purification, manufacturing, food stores, construction, fuel, all of it and much more was automated by A.I.s and robots.

  I’d chosen to serve on the space defense force when I’d turned eighteen, after graduating college. It was a worthy effort, Earth was overpopulated, and exploration and expansion was extremely important.

  I got off on a tangent there, but it reinforced my original point. So yes, the fact that one in fifty people wouldn’t live much longer than forty years, because of malfunctioning implants, was a horrible thing. It was a failure rate that the scientists had been attempting to improve on for over a hundred years, but in the end, we simply didn’t dwell on it. It was a known risk we all accepted and grew up with, like car accidents, plane crashes, or cancer. It was horrible, but it was also worth it. If my brain was burned out by a malfunction in twelve years, or even sooner if I was truly unlucky enough to be one in a million, so be it.