New Frontiers (Expansion Wars Trilogy, Book 1)

New Frontiers

The Expansion Wars Trilogy

Book One

Joshua Dalzelle

©2016

Kindle Edition

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to real persons, events, or places are purely coincidental; any references to actual places, people, or brands are fictitious. All rights reserved.

*****

Edited by Monique Happy Editorial Services

http://www.moniquehappy.com

The euphoria of victory following the news that the Terran Starfleet had eliminated the Phage threat and had, effectively, won the war didn’t last long. The celebration gave way to a hangover that left the leadership of the Terran Confederacy’s individual enclaves feeling snappish and demanding answers. More specifically, they wanted a scapegoat. Someone they could point to and shout to their respective electorates, “
Those
are the people that caused this! Blame them, not us!”

Exacerbating this was the loss of a centralized Confederate leadership structure. The capital planet, Haven, had been destroyed in the war, along with most of the administrative bureaucracy, a sizable chunk of the Senate, and CENTCOM’s orbiting fortress: Jericho Station. The elected leader of the Confederacy, President Caleb McKellar, could not be confirmed as being on Haven when it was lost so the entire civilian government seemed to be left in the lurch, unsure as to what their next move should be and most too afraid to even suggest something in the hostile political environment.

As if that wasn’t enough, CENTCOM had also clammed up. Fleet Admiral Marcum, who was also the CENTCOM Chief of Staff and second in command after the President, refused to provide complete details of the campaign until they resolved questions about the civilian leadership of the organization. This left the press, and the less scrupulous politicians, free to invent their own narratives. Among the most popular of the early theories was that a rogue starship captain, Jackson Wolfe, had ignited the war when he’d panicked and fired upon an alien ship in one of the Frontier systems.

The story of Wolfe’s bumbling exploits almost took hold and was close to becoming a “truth” in the collective consciousness of humanity, but then there was a massive leak from within CENTCOM. Since the organization was still temporarily headquartered at the New Sierra Shipyards, and the facility had been hastily upgraded to make room for all the new tenants, pinning down who had leaked the sensitive information proved to be almost impossible. The tech crews hadn’t even been able to find out how the secure servers had been accessed to pull so much classified data, much less transmit it off the orbiting facility.

In the end, however, it didn’t matter. The damage was done and now the people really had somewhere to focus their fear and anger: The Asianic Union, one of the five major enclaves that made up the Terran Confederacy. The AU was a manufacturing powerhouse with a large population and had apparently not been content with the nine worlds it controlled. One of the documents that had been released in the dump was a detailed report from an unnamed source within the Confederate Intelligence Section that made a compelling case squarely placing the blame on the AU’s unauthorized colonization beyond the Frontier that allowed a terrifying and implacable enemy, the Phage, to find them in the first place. The AU government tried to squash the report, but it was too late. It wasn’t long before New America, Britannia, and the AU’s closest stellar neighbors, the New European Commonwealth, began demanding some sort of punitive action be taken. The Warsaw Alliance, longtime allies of the AU, refused to join the chorus condemning them.

While the remaining tatters of the Confederate Senate would have liked nothing more than to issue some sternly worded resolution regarding the enclave’s illegal colonization efforts, the fact was that with the loss of Haven and Jericho Station they had little with which to project their authority.

At first, the people turned to Earth, feeling that the birthplace of humanity, that had remained untouched during the war and had an intact government, might be a logical place to form the new capital. But Earth would not so easily forget the centuries of neglect and outright abuse by the worlds of the Terran Confederacy and quickly released an edict stating ships and refugees from Confederate planets were not welcome in the Solar System or on Earth.

This was seen as the final act that tore the fabric of the Confederacy beyond repair. With hostilities mounting, the Asianic Union declared themselves independent and recalled all of their remaining ships. The Warsaw Alliance followed shortly after, as did roughly sixty percent of the New European Commonwealth. These splinter factions wasted no time in reorganizing themselves into a bloc and closing off their space to any and all Confederate ships, even going so far as to deny inbound com drones safe passage.

Within two short years there was a literal blackout of information coming from the worlds that formed the new Eastern Star Alliance. Official diplomatic channels were still open, but general communication was tightly monitored and controlled. Many in the remaining Confederate worlds said good riddance, their anger still smoldering for the actions of the AU that they believed had led to such a horrific conflict with the Phage. Others were a bit more pragmatic, however, as they knew that the Phage were likely not the only other stellar neighbors out there and would much prefer that humanity presented a unified front when they came face to face with them.

Confirmation of their suspicions came much sooner than they would have liked.

Danilo liked the quiet down in the “Tombs,” as the long-term storage vault was colorfully known to the crew of maintainers. Some found the silence unnerving or even oppressive, but Danilo was able to do some of his best thinking in those dim, subdued depths as he supervised the machines that wordlessly went about the task of collecting any dust that may have settled on the artifacts.

The Tomb, sublevel thirty-eight of the Confederacy’s new archives, housed mostly CENTCOM equipment that was deemed too sensitive or dangerous to dispose of or decommission. Danilo had been medically unqualified to join Starfleet and had been flat-out rejected by the Marines, but his interest in everything military still burned brightly. It made the three-acre level especially fascinating since almost all of it was relics from the recent Phage War. While the war was almost mythology for those that weren’t directly involved, Danilo devoured any scrap of information on the conflict that he could find. Once his security clearance had been granted, the assignment to supervise the Tomb’s weekly cleaning had been nothing short of a godsend.

He stopped and reverently put his hand on a piece of twisted, charred metal that was propped haphazardly against one of the Archive’s support pylons. It was a sort of ceremony he went through every time he stepped off the lift despite the fact he had no idea what the mangled chunk of alloy might be. But he did know what it was from.

“
TCS Blue Jacket
,” he read reverently off the riveted tag that was still legible. “Captain Jackson Wolfe, commanding.”

“Help … help me.” The voice came as a whisper, so softly that Danilo couldn’t even be sure he had actually heard it.

“Hello?” he called loudly. “Nobody is supposed to be down here!”

“I … help,” the voice came more clearly this time, and loudly enough that Danilo couldn’t ignore it as a figment of his imagination.

“Who’s there?” he called. “Identify yourself immediately! This is a Level Five secured facility!”

“Help!”

“I’m not kidding!” Danilo’s voice was tinged with fear. “Simmons? If that’s you this is
not
funny!” He began walking slowly forward and towards a barely visible glow that was coming from deep in one of the storage rows.

He steeled his nerves and continued towards the glow, quickening his pace and telling himself over and over that there was no way anybody could get down here who wasn’t supposed to be. It had to be one of his fellow maintainers playing a practical joke on him. When he cleared the corner, however, that hope evaporated.

Sitting back against the outer wall was a black cube that he’d passed by with barely a curious glance dozens of times, but now there appeared to be a monitor of some sort activated on the surface with indecipherable characters tumbling across it.

“Are you the one calling for help?” Danilo asked, feeling foolish.

“Who are you?” the voice asked, unmistakably coming from the cube.

“My name is Danilo Jovanović,” Danilo answered, still approaching slowly. Before he could identify himself further the Cube spoke again.

“Where am I?”

“I’m afraid that’s classified,” Danilo said automatically. “What are you? Some sort of computer?”

“I … am not sure,” the Cube said. “Something is wrong. I need—” the voice trailed off and the terminal went dark.

“What do you need?” Danilo asked, but received no response. He circled the Cube a few times, prodded at it with his gloved hand, and eventually shrugged before turning to leave. He’d report the incident to his supervisor. A lot of the equipment down there had been hastily designed and poorly built. In fact, during orientation he’d been warned that although they didn’t think there was anything dangerous down there, he should suspect strange things to happen.

“Looks like a glitch from some old bit of—”

“I need Wolfe.” The voice came back strong as the lights on the display surged, stopping Danilo in his tracks. “I think … I think Wolfe knows what I am.” With that the display went dark again and no amount of poking or prodding would elicit another response.

“Could it possibly mean Jackson Wolfe, the starship captain?” Danilo asked himself. “I’m pretty sure he might be dead.”

****

“Senior Captain, it’s an honor—”

“It’s just Mr. Wolfe now,” the man said as he was escorted into the Archives. He was thin, almost slight of build, and of average height. “Just call me Jackson.”

“Of course, Cap—Mr. Wolfe,” one of the ubiquitous civil administrators sniveled. “Would you care to tour the upper levels of the Archive, sir? We have an extensive collection of imagery from the Battle of Nuovo Patria.”

“No … thank you.” Jackson visibly shuddered at the memory of the bloody and costly battle. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d just like to see what was so important I had to fly all the way from Earth to New Sierra to see it. The summons was unnecessarily vague.”

“You know how Fleet Security is, Captain,” a new voice said from the stairs behind Jackson. “Secrets for the sake of secrets.”

“Admiral Pitt?!” Jackson asked in shock and genuine joy the slightest whine from his prosthetic leg could be heard as he turned quickly. “I thought you bought the farm on Haven.”

“Close,” Pitt said. The admiral was everything the CENTCOM recruitment films said he should be. Lean, impeccably groomed, and just enough grey in his hair to convey a sense of experience. He had a raspy voice and a scowl he’d worn so long that Jackson was certain it stayed put even when he slept. Admiral Pitt had been in charge of Fleet operations during the height of the Phage War although he was stationed on Haven, well away from the fighting on the Frontier.

“I was on a courier ship over Haven when those Charlies moved in and began bombarding the surface,” he continued. “We lost main power but had enough velocity to be thrown clear of all the excitement, and the Phage never bothered investigating or pursuing. We floated around for some weeks on a ship that reeked of unwashed spacers and refuse before a survey ship finally stumbled upon us. We were down to the second to last set of emergency CO2 scrubbers, a backup reactor that was close to failing, and the rations had been gone for days.”

“That’s … incredible.” Jackson didn’t know what else to say. One of the greatest fears that seemed to be universal among spacers was that of being trapped on a powerless ship. Dying slowly in a floating tin can was considered one of the worst ways to die in space. “And now you’re working here at the Archive?”

“Not all of us turned our back on the Fleet after a bit of a rough time in the war, Captain,” Pitt said sharply. “I’m overseeing the refit of a new drive system to some of the newer ships. I caught a shuttle down from the shipyards when I heard your ship made orbit.” There was a long, uncomfortable silence following the admiral’s comments.

“So!” the administrator said, clapping his hands. “How about I show you down to the Tomb. That is why you’re here, after all.” 

“New drive system?” Jackson asked quietly as they walked to the security checkpoint off the main lobby.

“I hardly think that concerns you anymore, does it Captain?” Pitt said pleasantly, but the bitter edge underneath was unmistakable. Jackson looked at him, but decided not to comment further. It was only natural that his decision to completely leave Starfleet after the war was met with criticism and open hostility. At best the old “Earther” slurs were brought up, at worst he was re-branded a traitor. But he cared about none of that now, and it was only a burning scientific curiosity that had dragged him out of North America again and had him ride an old, slow courier ship all the way to New Sierra.

“Who was the first to speak to it?” he finally asked as the lift doors closed and the car began to descend.

“Chief Technician Danilo Jovanović,”
the administrator said in his grating, faux-enthusiastic delivery that coupled perfectly with the pasted-on smile. “I can have him join us if you’d like.”

“It wouldn’t be a bad idea to speak with him myself,” Jackson said. “But I have a feeling I know what it is down here that seems to want a chat with me. If I’m right, we’ll probably want to destroy it as quickly as possible.”

“Care to elaborate, Captain?” Pitt asked.

“I hardly think this sort of thing concerns you anymore, does it, Admiral?” Jackson deadpanned. It had the desired result as he saw Admiral Pitt’s jaw clench and his eyes narrowed slightly. “It shouldn’t take me long to determine how dangerous this thing has become.”

“Become?” the administrator asked with what seemed like genuine concern. Jackson and the admiral both ignored him.

****

“This is
Danilo Jovanović,”
the administrator said as he indicated the man standing near a twisted chuck of alloy. “Danilo, this is Mr. Jackson Wolfe, formerly Senior Captain Wolfe of Seventh Fleet.”

“Hello, sir.” Danilo nodded his head respectfully but didn’t approach closer or offer his hand.

“You were the first one it spoke to?” Jackson asked.

“As far as I know, sir,” Danilo said.

“And everything it said to you was accurately transcribed in your report?” Jackson indicated the hard copy he held of the official incident report he’d been provided with.

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay, thanks, Mr.
Jovanović,”
Jackson said. “I won’t need to hold you up any further.”

“Sir?” Danilo asked as Jackson turned to walk deeper into the Tomb. “Could you please tell me what this is?” Jackson looked at the charred and twisted metal behind the technician, a puzzled look on his face until he saw the plaque the other man was gesturing to. He approached for a closer look, his interest piqued.

“That, Mr.
Jovanović,
is what’s left of the portside main boarding hatchway frame from the
TCS Blue Jacket
,” Jackson said. “The reason I know it’s the port hatchway is because, despite commanding the ship for eight years, the starboard entry was never fitted with a plaque. Is there something specific about this artifact you find interesting?”

“It’s just … many people think that the stories about you, and about the
Blue Jacket
and the
Ares
, are just legends,” Danilo said. “Most people that I meet don’t believe that you’re still alive, and some don’t believe you ever actually existed.” 

“Who knows, Mr.
Jovanović,”
Jackson chuckled, “maybe they’re more right than you know. Now … if you gentlemen will excuse me.” He turned and walked away quickly from
Jovanović
, Pitt, and the administrator whose name he’d purposefully neglected to ask for. It didn’t take him long to find what he was looking for among all the damaged and forgotten Phage War equipment; it was the only thing in the cavernous room that looked as pristine as the day he’d taken it aboard the
Ares,
the last ship he’d commanded before leaving Starfleet. He felt a momentary pang at the thought of his old command as he’d been forced to leave her, stricken and adrift in an uncharted region of space. She’d been too damaged to survive a warp transition to leave and they had a limited time to get the crew evacuated and onto the ship that would bring them home, so the ship still floated through space in a state of limbo that bothered him to this day. There had been no time to properly scuttle her and a recovery effort was out of the question.

                            “So … who’s behind the voice this time?” Jackson asked as he approached the Cube. “Setsi?”

“I do not know who that is,” the Cube replied immediately.

“He was our Vruahn liaison during the Phage War.” Jackson, surprised at the instant response, approached closer and peered at the display, seeing if there was anything there he could decipher. “So if you’re not Setsi, who are you? I’m assuming you’re using the Cube as a com relay again to get in touch with us, but why not just open direct lines with humanity? Why go through all this trouble?”

The Vruahn were an ancient and highly advanced species that had found themselves unwilling allies of humanity during the war. They had been inextricably involved with both humans and the Phage when things had spiraled out of control and, grudgingly, had accepted their responsibility in the matter. They had provided technological support and a squadron of light attack ships to help end the Phage threat, but once the war was over they had made it quite clear that further contact with humans was not something they were interested in.

“Captain Jackson Wolfe,” the Cube said, the words rushing out in what sounded like a sigh of relief. It disturbed Jackson greatly. “You have come as I asked.”

“Who are you?” Jackson asked, this time more sternly.

“I … do not know,” the Cube said. “My thoughts are so disjointed … memories that aren’t mine.”

“Let’s take this step by step since there can be no misunderstandings where our two peoples are involved,” Jackson said. “Are you a Vruahn operative using this machine as an open com channel to talk to me?”

“No,” the Cube said. “I am … me. I do not fully understand what you are asking, but your assumption that I am speaking as a conduit is incorrect. My thoughts are my own and I vocalize them as I feel necessary.” Jackson stood silently for a moment, trying to work through the various scenarios the cryptic answer pointed to. As he eliminated them one by one and the realization of what he was likely dealing with sank in, he gave an involuntary shudder from the cold chill that swept through his body.