Heavens of Glory

Part 2 Chapter I

The year had passed quickly. The semesters had each come and gone in turn until even the final day of the school year was behind him. Orion found himself staying in a cheap apartment down on the Water Planet, working as a computer technician for the summer to sustain himself. He had learned how to hack during the year. The Battle School had not taught him this skill, but he had learned it, nonetheless. Now he had to forcefully refrain from using this ability in his new job- it would have made work far easier, but would have attracted far too much attention.
         It had become a steady habit to hang out in bars with Seedo at the end of each outer month, catching up on each other’s summer. But one night Orion had to cancel. He had a date with someone he had met at a computer science conference that he attended earlier that month. Her name was Tournia, and she was the most beautiful woman that Orion had ever seen…

         The farmer gazed happily over the rows of yellow crops as the extravagant flowering leaves glittered silver in the midday heat. The sun had been plentiful this year, and the gods had blessed his fields with much rain. The harvest would be ready and rich in a few weeks. He leaned down upon one of the many stakes placed in the ground at regular intervals, one at the end of each row, and gazed out upon his growing work.
         A shattering noise, unlike anything the aging farmer had ever heard before, rattled through the skies. He looked up to see a dark shape, too large to be a bird, thundering across the heavens. It was headed for the nearby town. It disappeared over the horizon and the farmer heard nothing more of it for three days.
         But at the end of those three days, strange beings came to his door. He was frightened, at first, by these aliens; nothing like them could have come from his planet Utral. However, when the three visitors did not move off after long times had passed, but merely stayed quietly by the door, he cautiously opened the plank the slightest bit, thrusting out a menacing knife. Something grabbed the knife from out of his hand and he heard it clatter to the ground. Seeing the futility of his position, the farmer opened his door the rest of the way.
          “We are soldiers of the Great Marconeon Empire! Bow before our might! We have come to collect taxes from your farm.” They spoke in a strange, barely discernable accent.
          “Marconeon Empire? Taxes?” The words came slowly to the farmer, who had not spoken aloud anything in almost a year. He did not understand the purpose for this visit in the least.
          “Surely you received our notice?” One shoved a sheet of valuable paper into his hands. On it were words showing that all of Utral was now under control of this new Empire, and that they would start collecting taxes immediately. “We are here for the taxes.”
         The farmer had never been part of a nation of any sort, and was not sure what this ‘taxes’ was, but it sounded nasty. He waited for them to illuminate the subject to him, but they merely began tearing at his crop- his CROP! He rushed them in protest as they bent and tattered the precious leaves, but was merely thrown carelessly onto the ground. He struggled under the heavy foot of one of the visitors as they stole his crop and loaded it into their strange wagon. He stood up, once they had left, confused and melancholy.

         The Marconeon Empire was a harsh overlord to the agricultural world of Utral. It destroyed the planets economy with its hefty taxes, it drove millions of farmers into the cities, forcing them to work in the mills that produced the steel vital to the upkeep of their fleet. It worked the planet dry as it attempted to gain more and more power. But the slaves learned to hide there stores when it came time to collect taxes, and how to steal items from the mills to barter in the filthy streets for precious food beyond the few rations that the Empire afforded them.
         The people of Utral became more wary, more prone to crime as their cities became larger and filled with smog. Their streets and buildings were blackened with burnt coal, and the faces of all in the city were always crestfallen, never looking up towards the skies anymore for fear of seeing a hateful Imperial ship. But the planet adjusted to the new regime. For years it labored under such oppression, until all the Utralians had forgotten what it meant to be free.
         But one day a different ship appeared in the sky. It was fast and almost silent, unlike the Imperial ships, and the Town Elders looked up at it knowing that change was again coming. Two days after this ship was seen across the globe, all the Imperial soldiers and ships began leaving the planet in a hurry, for reasons that the Utralians could not comprehend. Perhaps the new arrival had scared them off.
         But the planet had seen to many ships to expect anything good to come out of this new one. Perhaps it brought change, but it still carried slavery. Elders across the world were firm in this conviction.
         Yet for two moons after the Empire had left the planet, nothing happened. No ships appeared in the skies, and the abandoned governments crumbled and died, replaced by week, un-enforced rulers seeking to gain more power by claiming a meaningless title of Emperor.
         Yet even this ended soon, and again there were ships in the sky, and the people prepared to hide their stores from taxes and to hoard their belongings. This time they were always the faster and more quiet ones, not the great lumbering ships of the Empire. Few cared to wonder what prompted this change, but they did know that the newer ships did not demand so much. They provided security in the form of a police force, they protected the elections not held since before the time of the Empire.
         But they still forced the people away from their farms into urbanization, they still erected countless factories and structures throughout their towns. The only difference now was that they gave the workers more food now, but they still lived in abject poverty amid filthy streets.
         And then one day the new ships announced that they would be moving more people to this planet. At first the Utralians quelled at the thought, knowing it would certainly be cause for more taxes, but the new ships explained that they would be bringing in millions of technicians and workers to build better factories and provide new technologies, and to clean up the blackened cities. The Utralians were allowed to go back to farming as the off-worlders flooded their cities, working their own factories and creating their own markets. The planet divided into two distinct societies: the native farmers, and the invading city-dwellers, and for once both sides seemed content with this final situation.

         In high orbit around the industrializing planet, where only a few months before the fourth Alliance Home fleet had fought off the aggressive Imperial Armada, new stations were being assembled from the supplies of hundreds of cargo frigates. Dozens of structures, many of which were small null-G factories for some of the most delicate parts of a ship, were being assembled metal plate by metal plate by the thousands of worker-ships.
         The entire city of spaces stations was engineered to stay as a group in orbit. The northern and southern ends would switch sides twice with every revolution about the planet. The centerline of the city was forced to go slighter slower than the extremities, forcing daily corrections into the routes of the slowest and fastest stations.
         Amid all the other smaller structures, one station, although only half built, was towering over all the others, so to speak. It already sported thousands of gigantic, 20-grasec-long poly-carbon beams. Huge plates of biolith metal were connected to create a gigantic inhabitable structure within the colossus.
         With more worker-ships building this particular structure than any other, the mammoth began to take form. The thousand-cubic-grasec living quarters and enclosed ships docks were slowly built up from the inside, while the gigantic struts housing millions of grasecs of conveyor belts and worker-ship tubes extended their reach outwards, with the tens of millions of cubic grasecs staying wide open between them. Slowly the visage of a shipyard, larger than any ever built before, became apparent.
         The eighteen worlds in thirteen systems that had once been the ambitious Marconeon empire centered around the otherwise insignificant planet Marconeon. It stood in a huge gap in the Great Wall, unpatrolled by Union ships and affected only by the parsec-spanning anti-tachyon grids emitted from the single platform in the center of Marconeon space. The Union had not bothered to build defensives structures here for they had made a treaty with the Marconeon Empire, one which guaranteed that the Empire’s fleet would defend the gap against the unlikely chance of an Alliance invasion.
         The Alliance had only been too happy to take the thirteen systems from the un-negotiating Empire. They began to install a huge structure around the lonely central platform designed to negate the effects of the anti-tachyon grid, knowing that to destroy it would immediately alert the Union of their new position. So the Alliance technicians engineered the ugly structure, the product of decades of research and six months building.
         The Alliance began installing its own defensive platforms. Many, like most Alliance defensive systems, were in constantly changing orbits around the eighteen worlds. Some, however, were built in the style of Union platforms- huge immobile laser towers. These were positioned around the jagged edge of the Great Wall and on the Union side of the Marconeon region.
         It was thus that the Alliance finally created a permanent hole in the Union defensives, forcing the Great Wall back from this hole with its own miniature version of the behemoth preeminent Union system.
         It was because of this strategic location that Tash had ordered the Galactic Shipyards to be built here. Shipyards which would serve but one singular purpose: to build the four Galactic-Class Supercruisers, the most powerful ships the Alliance had ever built, any one of which was capable of taking on hundreds of vessels, and the four together would be strong enough to destroy worlds. These four spacecraft were destined to become the paramount ships of the Alliance, for they, alone with their complements of hundreds of fighters, would be the raj-ships.
         It was the day after Tash had issued the orders to construct the Galactic Shipyards that he was shot.

*           *          *

         By the Earth calendar, it was a Tuesday. The clerk was standing at his desk just outside Tash’s office, where the Warleader was meeting with the General of the Army, discussing a new unit to replace the famous Sumo Tank. The room had been quiet for the last two hours, and the clerk waited patiently. These things took awhile.
         A noise echoed out of the office. At first the clerk merely assumed that they were done discussing, but the noise grew in intensity, the muffled sounds bearing ideas of panic, and then were cut short. The clerk threw open the door to the office and found the two bodies.
         Immediately the battle-alert sounded throughout the Warleader’s ship. The room, normally airtight except for the vents and the door, was magnetically sealed. Doctors rushed over to the room to examine the bodies from within the suits that allowed them to safely penetrate the magnetic seal.
         Both the General of the Army and the Warleader had been shot precisely through the neck. A residual ion analysis of the wounds showed that the General of the Army had been shot first.
         The newscasters cried injustice. The government cried treason. The clerk was taken into custody while the ship was searched for any sign of the assassin. Such an event was not the most unexpected thing, for the Union kept a constant bounty on the position. Nonetheless, the Alliance was not prepared for it, and especially the skill with which it was done. Use of the automated weapons system was ruled out, for surveillance vids of the weapons-control room showed that it had remained empty for over day, and no sign had been found of forced entry into the system. The clerk, as the only possible mastermind, was court-martialed and tried for murder and treason, upon which charges he was convicted and executed.
         An emergency meeting was called for the eight army Generals, twenty-six fleet Admirals and the High-Admiral, twelve navy admirals and their High-Admiral, and the six air force Generals. Knowing that that the Union would see the successful assassination through its scanning of Alliance news casts and would interpret this period as an excellent time to strike, every planet in the Alliance, both citizen and colony, was placed on Black Status. The repercussions were felt throughout a quarter of the Milky Way.

*           *          *

         And it was in this same galaxy, in the remotest regions of a distant spiral arm, that a small, dull sun shown on three unremarkable planets. Near the second moon of the third of these planets, should any observer have been present, he would have seen a sudden painfully bright flash.
         The Dead-ship charged out of epsilon space at insane speeds. Two probes overloaded while making the transition and exploded in blinding flashes around the ship. The tractor beam holding the third gave out and it went spinning crazily for twenty feet from the ship before crashing into the imminently near asteroid. The last probe was maneuvered into the cargo bay with a tractor beam as the ship used every iota of thrust to slow it down from its current relativistic speed.
         Orion had fallen painfully onto the floor during the transition back to alpha space. He got up slowly, painfully aware of a severe ache in his knee.
          “Spar, link into the astrometric sensors and figure out where we are,” he ordered, and science officer quickly did so.
         When the computer had beeped the conclusion of its search, Spar brought up a galactic map on the view screen. “Sorry for the 2-d view, Captain, but it’s all we got.” Using his console, he highlighted a section on the map and zoomed in, saying “Haftic region of the Taurcsol arm.” Having done that, he zoomed in again, this time saying “Ict sector.” And then he highlighted a star. “In an unnamed system.”
         Orion stood up and walked over to the main screen, now showing all three shots with the appropriate area highlighted. “And in the farthest tail end of Union Space.”
         In a straight line, the captain’s hand ran down the screen. “A couple weeks ago, we were thirty galsecs from Alliance space. Now we’re thirty thousand parsecs. It is an improvement, even if we did end up farther in than we had intended.
          “The rest of the journey will have to be made with standard hyperspace travel. Epsilon space is completely out, and it’ll be slow on our damaged engines. The trip will probably take close to a month, but we will get back, nonetheless.”
         Orion’s hand began moving across the screen again. “We’ll bypass the Great Wall altogether. We’re far enough into Union space that it won’t add any appreciable time if we take a spin-ward route for a while until we are out of the Union territory, then we can travel core-side straight into Alliance territory, in the Vist region.” He turned to the sixteen other people, all of whom had assembled on the bridge for their reemergence. “And then we’ll be home. Once we’re back within Alliancic space, we can transfer over to another ship and get back to Toan within a few days. We may even get close enough to establish contact and organize a rendezvous. Seedo has informed me that our damaged communications relay system should be strong enough to get a message about a hundred parsecs, more if we divert extra power to it. Obviously, that’s not a huge distance, but if we can get in contact with any one of the dozens of small independent factions along our route, they can relay a message for us.”
         Orion’s eyes twinkled with delight as he turned to the lone denesec standing near the back of the assembled crew. “And now, Mork, I would like to welcome you, the first of your species, to our galaxy, the Milky Way.”

*           *          *

         Tournia was teaching a class of seventeen young children about the structure of the Alliance military body, a strange juxtaposition with her previous class, which had been about the subtleties of inter-continuum transitions using different arrangements of various types of tachyons.
         It was because of this very unit that Tournia had not wished to teach this particular class. As she tutored her students, her mind kept wandering off to a particular member of the military body, now unseen for nine months. She had seen the tag attached to him on his public file: POW-MIA. In other words, the Alliance could only assume his death.
         She cleared her head of such thoughts for the ninth time in the past hour. “Now, can anyone tell me how many space fleets there are in the Fleet division?” A number of students raised their hands. “Yes, Leila.”
         A young felon spoke. “There are eight home guard fleets, labeled fleets H1 through H8, and eighteen attack fleets, labeled A9 through A26, Ms. Sakaguchi.”
          “Thank you, Leila. Yes, there are a total of twenty-six fleets. Each with their own Admiral. Now…” She stopped, for the walls of the hemispherical classroom had suddenly changed color. Instead of the normal steady red hue, they were now flashing a deep ultra-violet just within human vision. The school’s intercom turned on.
          “Teachers, the Curia has just issued an emergency switch to Black Status. This is not a drill. You know what to do.”
         Tournia pulled out the blue guard vest and threw it over her shoulders as the students were standing and lining up. She stepped up to the head of the line and walked out of the classroom, glancing behind to make sure that they were all following. The class stepped into the hallway, already rapidly filling with other similar lines of students, all heading down in the same direction- to the basement. The roar of jets passed by overhead as Frist’s air force took flight. The jets would be flying non-stop for days.
         Through the biolith double-doors, down the packed but swiftly flowing stairs, and into the steel basement, where already over a hundred students had gathered. Tournia ran through the roll call of her class, and then told them to sit down quietly and not to talk, only whisper. She walked over to a group of the other teachers that had gathered next to the stairway.
          “What’s happened?” she prompted.
          “All wev heard es rumors, though the mos’ predominan’ un is tha’ the Warleader’s been shot.”
          “Shot?”
          “Mm-hmm. It’s just a rumor, though. Don’ tell the kids, they’ll get upset. The schoolmas’er was jes’ down here and told us tha’ the army pos’ over in Gambria has deployed a squod of soldiers ta guard tha school. Whatever it is, it’s serious.”
          “They’ll probably keep us on Black Status for an outer month,” agreed another.
         Tournia nodded to them respectfully and headed back over to her class. Sitting down in front of them, she made sure they were calm. “Of course we’re calm,” Leila immediately put forth. “We’re not some stupid class of mindless tukers.”
          “Leila!” Tournia scolded, but she was kind of glad that they were still making jokes. “Calls have been made to all your parents. They will be by to pick you up soon.”
          “Wha’s goin’ on, Miz Sakaguchi?”
          “It’s probably nothing, Gren. Just something very small very far away in the central sectors.”
          “Oh no it isn’t. They wouldn’t bother putting even the colony planets on Black Status, if that was the case.”
         Damn, why did they all have to be so smart? Tournia gave the slightest chuckle. “You’re right, Enda. They wouldn’t. But I don’t know what it is. Your guess is as good as mine.”
         They sat there, silent except for the occasional whisper, for hours. One by one, the parents came in to take away their children until there were only fifteen left in the entire school. The schoolmaster came by each of the teachers and told them to go back to their homes, that he could take care of the rest. Tournia asked to stay a little longer, and the monte agreed. Together, the two of them waited as the last of the parent arrived, carrying away the lonely children, who were starting to get afraid that something had happened to their parents.
         The last child was picked up, and the schoolmaster told Tournia to go home. “I can take care of closing up the school. Thank you for your help, Ms. Sakaguchi. If you wouldn’t mind preparing some lessons for your students to work on at home while the schools are closed, I’m sure the parents wouldn’t mind helping to teach their youngins.” Tournia smiled, aware that even in the well-educated schoolmaster some of the local dialect had rubbed off.
          “Of course.”
          “Thank you. I’ll send out a notice to the other teachers asking them to do the same. I’ll see you again when the schools reopen.”
         One of the Bonscouts at the door offered to escort Tournia home, but she declined. No matter what the locals thought, Frist was far too much of a backwater world for even its largest cities to be a possible target. She knew that she was in no way imperiled. The roads were empty during the walk back. The fields deserted. The only movement was caused by the eager vombo gnawing away at the plants and the rustling half-animal half-plant tukers as they grew. All the birds had been scared into their nests by the constant flights of sleek airplanes overhead.
         The setting sun made the world glow gold.

*           *          *

         Orion lifted the steaming cup of coffee to his lips, relishing the strong flavor, but before the rim could tip far enough to spill the liquid into his mouth, the brown coffee began floating out of the cup. Orion quickly released the mug and clamped his hands onto his chair in sudden confusion. All around him, plates and cups were floating towards the ceiling. Orion snatched his comm out of the air a couple feet in front of him.
          “Seedo, what’s happening?”
          “I don’t know, captain,” came the lenothias’ familiar reptilian articulation. “The hyperspace engines suddenly gave out and we were jerked back to alpha space. All secondary systems are offline, including the containment device and artificial gravity.”
          “I’ll be right there. Just give me a second.” Orion contracted his legs on top of the chair before shooting off from it has hard as he could. The anchored metal creaked slightly as it released his weight. Orion shot towards the ceiling, where he grabbed the built-in handholds and pushed himself towards the door.
         All along the corridor, he dragged himself quickly across the ceiling. The lift wasn’t working when he arrived at the end of the hall, so he turned and propelled himself through the narrow tube on the lift’s left to the top level. He arrived at the bridge, flying just next to the ceiling, which to his perspective now seemed to be the floor. He shoved himself down to his chair, where he strapped himself down.
          “Scan for any ships and platforms in the area, Seedo. Tano, did the automated distress signal go out?”
          “No sir, I stopped it before it could.”
          “Good. This is just a little too much like an anti-tachyon beam for my liking. Scarth, do we have engines and helm control still?”
          “Aye sir. Should we keep moving?”
          “No. Let’s maintain engine silence. Tano, set the ship on Black Status.” Metal plates expanded over each of the windows on the Dead-ship as the engines were completely muffled. The brightly illuminated ship turned completely black, invisible to the eye. The slightest shimmer evinced the anti-radar shields being activated.
         But it was already too late.
          “Sir, there’s a warcruiser on an intercept course. They saw us before we went to Black Status. Visuals show it has Union markings.”
          “Ah shit. Seedo, do we have any weapons whatsoever that can be activated?”
          “Forward lasers are at fifty percent capability right now. That’s all we got.”
          “Charge them. Put the ship in Battle Mode. Sound the all-call. All hands to battle stations. We have contact with a Union warcruiser. This is not going to be pretty.”
         The main screen showed the mammoth warcruiser rapidly approaching.
          “They’re charging weapons,” Seedo reported.
          “Scarth, see if you can the delta-tachyon packs back online. Hurry! Seedo, fire the lasers once they’re within range. We may be weak and cornered, but we can still scratch. Target their weapons systems. And get someone down to the Stingray.”
         The small fighter detached from where it had been docked to the Dead-ship’s hull as space lit up with the Neyna’s laser fire. The warcruiser’s shields lit up as hundreds of balls of energy hit it.
          “Minimal effect,” Seedo reported.
          “Keep firing!” Orion ordered. He opened a link to the Stingray. “Fire at will, lieutenant.”
The Stingray never had a chance. It was blasted out of existence by a single shot from the warcruiser’s main cannon.
          “Oh shit, Captain. They just slagged our fighter in one shot. We don’t have a chance!”
          “Keep your cool Scarth. Just keep working on those tachyon packs.”
          “Captain, they’re hailing us.”
          “Patch them through, Tano. We may have to negotiate our way out of this.”
         The display on the arm of Orion’s chair switched to show the grotesque tonorian face.
          “Alleeance sheep. Serreender now, or ye weell be aneeihielaoteed. Ye are nay match fer aes.” The beast’s common galactic held a strange accent, barely understandable, but Orion got the message. He looked at his bridge officers, then turned back to the small screen in defeat.
          “Union warcruiser, the Alliance vessel Dead-ship surrenders to you.”
          “Wieese choeese. Preepeer to be traicteered eentoo aer haingeer baeey.”
         Orion cut the channel. “Well, this may be it for us. I’m sorry.”
          “You had no choice, Captain. We couldn’t have fought them.”
         The ship rattled as it settled into the shuttle bay, barely large enough to hold the tattered vessel. The warcruiser’s artificial gravity kicked in on the Dead-ship, and Orion unstrapped himself. He told the rest of the crew that they had been forced to surrender, and would soon be boarded, then he walked down to the main airlock, waiting for the Tonorians to step aboard his ship.
         It would be the first time in have a century that any Tonorian had been within a still-commissioned Alliance vessel, and the first time a Bonscout had stepped upon a Union ship. It would prove to be just the first of numerous such instances soon to come.