The Grays Read online

  The Grays

  Technomancer: Book Three

  Author: D. L. Harrison

  Copyright 2019. 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 - Interlude

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen – Interlude

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Prologue

  Afterword:

  About the Author

  Other books by D. L. Harrison:

  Book Description

  Prologue

  The body of the Colonel was quite crispy as his personal guards watched the idiot carried out. Not only had the colonel’s plan failed to take out the humans, but their entire stealth probe intelligence network had been revealed and destroyed. There wasn’t even a way to know how it happened, since it was destroyed utterly including the command and control center and related data.

  Worse, there was no way to restore the system, at least not inside the solar systems of FTL races. Only the pre-technological worlds. The cloaking didn’t work well on powered up or moving vessels.

  The High Leader Tellus brooded, at least they knew who had done it. Several hundred calls had come in to their communications center for the empire worlds. All of them loudly decrying being spied on, and some even questioning if the humans had been set up. That number was going up by the hour, as the worlds that did have connections passed the word along. He knew that would end up being around two thirds of the empire worlds.

  So far, none of the worlds had threatened retaliation, but he knew from their history it was just a matter of time. They’d been caught breaking the law spying on them, and they were suspected breaking the law of the great game and setting up the humans. They would no doubt determine that they’d do it again now that trust was broken.

  Correctly, as it stood, since the Grays had often removed dangers, species who were close to gaining equity in warships and weapons often found themselves destroyed for one reason or another.

  Tellus looked up at Admiral, he was at attention and awaiting orders, but the High Leader could see the disgust in the being’s eyes.

  “Admiral, I want you to pull back a quarter of each external war fleet, and then keep them close to the six core worlds, a light year or two. I believe the humans will be attacking soon, and the best way to combat their long-range superiority is to surprise them before they move in system, and we’ll take them down at energy range with overwhelming numbers.”

  The admiral frowned, “I will do as you order, but that may make our great enemies stir, if they scent weakness in our empire. The fifty galaxies could find themselves embroiled in a seven-way war. Eight way if we include the humans in that number. Thousands of civilizations could burn.”

  Tellus replied, “What would you suggest? Our people are decadent after ten millennia of peace, it’s hard enough keeping twenty-four million warships on six fronts and five million scouts manned, despite our fifty thousand planets. If I thought I could fill them, I’d order the fleet doubled over the next month.”

  The admiral took a deep breath, “We could sue for peace, and tell the truth. If the humans knew our empire falling would end up in six other great empires carving up the fifty galaxies and crushing them underfoot, they might hesitate to attack us. I’m sure their planet is stretched extremely thin to man over two million warships, split six ways they’d never be able to stop our external enemies. Perhaps it is naïve, but self-preservation is a driving force in all the races, and I see in the humans one of the best indexes of cooperation for most of the empire’s species, save a handful of others.”

  Tellus grunted, “That might work now. I’ve gotten word the humans have already claimed out to five hundred light years, a thousand light year diameter sphere. That will open up about eight thousand planets to colonize. What happens in a few thousand years, when they have the population and can run a billion ships? Perhaps multiple billions. If we tell the truth, they’ll back down and work hard at that, until they can safely remove us and defend their new empire. Our empire.”

  The admiral sighed, “Of course, forgive me.”

  Tellus waved a hand, “Nothing to forgive, I am quite disturbed by this situation, and we appear to be caught between two webs. On the good side, I suspect our ancient enemies won’t move fast. As soon as we destroy the Earth’s offensive fleet, we’ll send those six million ships to Earth and remove the problem. They’ll be back on the borders within weeks, a month or two at most.”

  The Admiral asked, “You’re sure they’ll attack so quickly?”

  Tellus nodded, “They have our tech, they understand very well how quickly a fleet can be built with it, and they’ll want to minimize that threat. They might wait, if they had a clue that we had no one to run a new fleet, but it is what it is.”

  The Admiral nodded, “We could force a draft.”

  Tellus sighed and waived dismissively, “They’d rebel.”

  The Admiral asked, “If they attack outside of the six core planets?”

  The core planets were the ones that had the command and control centers for the six fleets, and the seventh internal fleet which was on their original home world. The planets also held their highest caste and decision makers for the empire. They were in the end, the origin planet and first five colonies of their nascent empire.

  Tellus said, “You’ll have a million ships nearby the core planets, and you can respond in seconds. The other planets will be too far away to intercept on their way in, and those small defense fleets and perhaps worlds will be lost. But… you will time yourselves to arrive there on their way out of the system, and you’ll ambush them right before they leave the FTL line. Facing their new tech at any distance is suicide, you will avoid that at all costs. Our scientists are working on it, it disgusts me that the humans found a way around the vacuum power vulnerability problem that has been plaguing the empire for millennia, in two hours.”

  The Admiral swallowed, and must’ve sensed the High Leader had run out of patience, because he bowed to Tellus and left the room without any further questions…

  Chapter One

  The command center felt comfortable, it was a familiar place and I thought I was getting used to it and how busy things were. I was the President of a country, space station resort manager, not to mention CEO of a diversified company that made me a weapons dealer to countries, interstellar ship seller, and of course all the smaller inventions we sold through Amazon like entangled phones, weaker power sources for disparate personal tech, items, and even in the home. Then there were the bio-beds working with hospitals, and fuel-less planes and cars, trucks and buses, artificial gravity lifts, and many other disparate things. It seemed I was also a broker for Vax products, both medicines and enhancements for testing, and of course the implants that would no doubt be approved a lot quicker.

  Diversified didn’t cover the reality, and I knew that was just a pale shadow of the possibilities inherent in this new human age. Many of the merchant ships out there had already returned with other advances that would generate wealth and improve a lot of people’s lives.

  One more piece of good news, the probes I’d sent out to all the G-type stars in a five hundred light year radius had found just over eight thousand living worlds, a full quarter of them were already compatible with human needs, and another fifty percent of them could be made that way over time. No doubt, it’d take thousands of years of building populations and making new colonies before we’d fill the space, six thousand worlds with humans on it, and need to expand again, if we could do so without butting heads with another race. In short, overpopulation wouldn’t be a problem for a long time, if anything we had the opposite problem at the moment. That data on worlds I shared freely with the U.N. and all countries, I had no interest in starting a new world, and was quite happy with my space station nation, and protecting the birthplace of humanity.

  I’d just sell more colony ships and wish them luck.

  Of course, it wasn’t all roses and outstanding growth potential for this new age of humanity. It was just three days since we’d defended against a combined ten thousand fleets, sixty million ships, whose only purpose had been the genocide of the human race. In just three days since then, we had two point four million warships of a new class. Actually, two days, the ships were done yesterday. The old largest warship was the mass that equaled a quarter of the mass of my station or a colony ship. The new one was half the mass of my station, doubled in mass, and quadrupled in weapons complement.

  Our two point four million dreadnoughts had a combined number of twenty-eight point eight trillion mini-platforms. It sounded insane, overkill beyond belief, but yet… I wondered if it’d be enough. I’d speculated a week ago the empire had to have external enemies. Everything I’d learned from our trading partners pointed to the Grays’ empire not expanding in over ten millennia. There had to be a
reason for that, and them bumping heads with other empires was the most obvious one. Of course, the empire’s security wasn’t something they shared with member planets, all they told us about was the rules, and the game of genocide when a new world gained FTL.

  If that was all true, then chances were the ship network I’d been on via magic five months back when all this craziness started, was just the internal fleet used to control and monitor their own empire. It was all speculation though, and in the end it didn’t really change the facts. The war had started, and the Grays had fired the first shot. It was either fight back, or we could lay down and die. Not a true choice at all. But… it worried me, what we didn’t know could kill us.

  Cassie smirked, “Stop brooding about the fate of the galaxy. It’s not your responsibility, at least, not alone. We have enough to worry about, taking out the enemy and protecting our little corner of it.”

  She was right of course, it sounded selfish in a way, but we had to protect ourselves first. We had a right to exist, and if a whole lot of crap happened, and civilizations died, well that was the Grays fault for being assholes in the first place. We didn’t have the capacity to save everyone even if we wanted to, and in the end if we tried, we’d just wind up being no better than the Grays, dictating to other cultures and worlds.

  Cassie was a stunning goddess, and quite probably my best friend despite the fact she was here on behalf of her ancient vampire council to keep an eye on me. Their whole purpose there was to maintain a balance, and prevent humanity’s destruction, their food source. That said, it didn’t mean Cassie wasn’t a wonderful woman and friend, it just meant if I ever went mad and decided to take over humanity, she’d snap my neck when I wasn’t looking. She had long light brown hair, hazel eyes, and lightly tanned creamy skin. She was five foot one, athletic and curvy, and she had the face of an angel. She was one of the most beautiful women that I’d ever laid eyes on, in real life or the silver screen. Of course, I was beyond immune to it at that point, she felt like a sister, and I was a total goner for my wife.

  Cassie also took care of most of the government things, laws and such, which allowed me to focus on our business, and protecting the station, not to mention making sure the Earth had what it needed to defend itself. Technically, the entire fleet save about a hundred ships, belonged to me. It’d been necessary for survival, while the countries on Earth had supplied the five million or so soldiers to fly and fight them. They’d practically gutted their armies to fill the ships. Nothing brought together humanity and disparate nations more than genocidal aliens. No doubt most of that would go away once the aliens were dealt with, and we could mothball most of the fleet.

  Jayna said, “I don’t think he can help it, he has that whole hero complex going on. We really aren’t responsible. If the Grays’ enemies move in after we take them out, all we can do is defend our small bit of space. We have enough ships for that.”

  I sighed, she was right of course. Still, I’d feel horrible if thousands of civilizations were burned as a result. Maybe we weren’t responsible, that rested on the Grays for trying to erase us from history, but we were involved.

  Jayna was my sister, and like me she had light blonde hair and ocean blue eyes. She was toned, and a lot happier now that the station was full of people. She went out a lot, to the clubs and resorts, I wasn’t sure if she was dating anyone at the moment though. Unlike me, she was an elemental mage, where I’d gotten the weird power to control and understand technology. The first and only Technomancer that I was aware of. Still, that ability had come in more than useful. Without both my ability and Diana’s creativity, the Earth would be nothing but a cinder right now.

  Jayna was also responsible for our image, ads, and social media stuff. Which was good, because I had no idea how to market stuff, and though I was getting better at it, I didn’t know all that much about government either. Between Jayna and Cassie I was freed up to do what I liked doing, except on the odd occurrence when Cassie insisted that I put on a suit and give a speech, or to hold a press conference. Fortunately, that’d only come up a few times. Most times, I was left to do what I liked and wanted to do. Invent, design ships, and all that.

  “Yeah, I’m trying to work up unmanned defensive platforms, but it’s not a simple thing. That would possibly free up most of the fleet, or maybe just send two million of the soldiers back to Earth. I don’t know, that level of automation is risky, and bound to have vulnerabilities without people at the helm and responding to unexpected circumstances.”

  Cassie shook her head, “It sounds like a bad idea, and might make others nervous. They already don’t like the fact all those ships out there are yours, despite having their own soldiers serving on them. No world leader would be pleased, because they’d know you could turn on them and take over the world in a second. The fleet should be enough to defend, or at least wait until it’s not enough to take down the Grays.”

  I nodded, “I get that. You know I have no interest in ruling. Hell, I don’t even want to be president of my country, but I get why I have to be.”

  Jessica smirked, but didn’t say anything.

  Jessica was a shifter, and my head of security for the stations police force as well as my protection detail. She was five foot eight, a redhead with soft brown eyes, and athletically svelte in appearance.

  Cassie asked, “The meeting’s going to start in five, want a coffee?”

  The meeting would be more of a debrief, where the admirals of separate countries all represented in the fleet would debrief us on their plans and seek approval. The sooner we went after the Grays the better. No war fought defensively could ever be won, and they’d earned their comeuppance.

  “Do you really have to ask?” I grinned. I’d never turn down a cup of the god juice.

  Jayna and Jessica got in on that as well.

  Cassie snickered, and headed out of the command center to pick us up some coffees. It wasn’t her job, we all took turns doing it actually, including me, president or not.

  Diana wasn’t with us in the command center, she was working her own stuff as head scientist on the station, working with her teams on several different technologies. I only knew about a few of them, the ones she was most sure would be figured out at some point, but I knew they were working on a lot of other things, some merely for the knowledge of how the universe worked that may inform a new direction and technology sometime in the future. She actually very rarely joined us in the command center, unless there was something major going on, like an invasion.

  My wife was the smartest person I’d ever met, which only made her sexier in my opinion. She was also more beautiful to me every day. She had shiny raven hair, bright intelligent green eyes, and an athletic tight body at five foot six. She tended to dress down for work, even to the point of wearing glasses instead of contacts at work, so I knew it wasn’t just me that thought her beautiful, but she was incredibly attractive when she dressed up for a night out. Our marriage of just ten days was going well, and we were trying to make a child together. I missed her sometimes during the day, but the fact we only mostly spent evenings and nights together was probably a good thing. Our professional lives were connected in that I designed and sold her inventions, but different enough that they didn’t really overlap at the office level.

  In short, time apart was healthy for our relationship, and made us that much more eager to reconnect in our evenings.

  Cassie came back in and passed out the coffees.

  “Thanks.”

  She winked, and then sat down and took a sip of hers.

  Jayna asked, “Why difficult, the platforms I mean.”

  I nodded, “Well, they’d just be a platform to hold the mini-platforms. We’d strategically place a million or two around the inner solar system. Defensively, they could launch a third of their missiles for a very powerful defensive array of independent mini-platforms all able to take out a missile. Offensively, they’d be able to launch mini-platforms to take out a target, given the mini-platforms don’t have a practical range with internal power.

  “Essentially, instead of using friend or foe to prevent friendly fire, and us using the humans in ships to determine the threats and lock on and fire, the platforms would do the opposite. Everyone by default would be friend, and not to be attacked. It’s the safest way to do it with an automated system. Instead it would be the enemy that had to be defined as a target. So… say we were invaded. I’d run scans on their ships, and enter them as enemy targets, the scan definitions in general, not specific ships. Then the system would take that data, scan their assigned areas for a ship that met the scan definition, and then launch missile attacks against the enemy automatically. Much like our defense is currently set up as automatic to take out missile threats, it would automatically target and shoot down an enemy ship if it was defined.