Warlord's Invasion (Starfight Book 1)
Read Warlord's Invasion (Starfight Book 1) Online
Authors: Lee Guo
Tags: #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Alien Invasion, #First Contact, #Galactic Empire, #Military, #Space Fleet, #Space Marine, #Space Opera
Warlord’s Invasion
Starfight Saga
By
Lee Guo
Text copyright © 2015
Lee Guo
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the author, except for brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews are permitted.
This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Content Editor: L. Elliott
Table of Contents
Author’s note: Please don’t be alarmed by the short number of chapters. In this novel, chapter breaks mean a significant passage of time, such as hours or days. Some chapters can be extremely long, as much takes place within a short period of time.
Human Federation Logo, Circle and Wings of Protection
CHAPTER ONE
December 12
th
3986 AD
Orbital Station Meerlat-01
Command Room…
R
ear Admiral Vier Kleingelt sipped her coffee. She flinched when it burned her lips. “This is too hot!”
“I’m sorry, admiral!” the ensign apologized profusely. “You said you wanted it immediately.”
Vier sighed, then put the coffee cup on her armrest. It was disappointing, to say the least, not because of the burning coffee but because she had been demoted to this frontier world, instead of one of the human crown worlds. At one time, she’d been among the greats. She had personally advised the President on numerous issues, but now because of some flaw – a horrendous mistake in the vast military chain – she was the protector of KSID1107-B, otherwise called Meerlat by the human natives. It was a demotion in all respects. The only reason she remained a rear admiral was because of the President’s respect for her.
She stared at the system’s red dwarf, which glowed a silent auburn in the orbital station’s main viewscreen. The star was still in its early evolution. One day, at the height of its power, it would be thirty percent brighter. That day, billions of years in the future, Meerlat would be scorched and uninhabitable to all except the most protected Exo research stations. Of course, that analysis did not take into account the technological development that would happen through the eons.
For now, she liked the red dwarf just as it was. It gave life to the millions of humans on the planet, as well as powering the thousands of solar collector stations in orbit around Meerlat.
“Here is the report you asked for, Admiral.”
“Thank you, Ansel.” Vier opened up the data pad and scanned it. Thirteen megatons of food were being exported everyday on average to her star nation’s core systems. The main export destination was Serenal, a world orbiting a red supergiant named Betelgeuse, sixteen hundred light years away. The main import was still industrial equipment that would aid in all the construction that was taking place planetside. A shipment of sixteen megatons of hydroplasma had just arrived two hours ago. Its contents were being processed by the engineering corps to make sure all of it was safe. Two mega freighters were currently put on hold and told not to go in the direction they were going because of a minor fleet exercise involving thermonuclear weapons. Eighty starfighter pilot trainees had just arrived from one of the core worlds, as part of the student exchange program mandated by the Royal Star Academy. In return, she had lost an equal amount of native students.
The population check today on Meerlat was still near six million, but an additional twenty thousand immigrants were expected to arrive later in the evening. Hospital equipment would arrive later today... for one of the main colonies on the southern continent...
When she finished, she closed the pad and handed it back to her aide.
She stood up, stretched her body, and sighed. Life couldn’t get any more boring. One day, she longed to return to the crown world, Trantor, where she’d be able to influence national politics once again. But for now, she had to settle with maintaining the well-being of a pebble within a much larger pond. What could she do? Maybe if she did her job well enough, she’d be taken back to where she belonged...
Suddenly, one of the nearby stations beeped. The officer that manned that station suddenly looked puzzled.
“What is it?” Vier twisted around to look at him.
“Hyperspace openings, ma’am!”
“We have no visitors scheduled for twelve hundred hours...”
“No ma’am, you don’t understand! There’s fifty of them!”
Vier ran to the officer’s computer display and saw it for herself. She stared, eyes aghast, at what terrible news lay before her. They were unlike anything she’d ever seen. Hyperspace openings so big that they carried things that were multitudes larger than any conventional freighter or, for that matter, a warship.
“Call off the fleet exercise, now!” Vier yelled.
“Yes, Admiral!”
“Signal all hands, red alert!”
“Yes, Admiral!”
A sharp alarm vibrated throughout the command center of the orbital space station. Red lights flooded the room, basking it in auburn glow along with the siren.
“All crews to battlestations,” the ensign’s voice broadcasted throughout the station. “This is not a drill. All crews to battlestations...”
Vier stared at the monitor, and looked at the other readouts near the station. She saw four dozen ships emerging from just outside the system’s hyperlimit. Twelve—no, fourteen of them were—
larger
than two kilometers in length! She stared in complete bewilderment at such a readout. For a second, she wondered if the sensor suit had gone berserk, then she realized that even if one part had, there were so many secondary systems that were supposed to keep it in check that this couldn’t be some type of malfunction. Yes, these readouts were real.
Her next thought was of pirates. But no pirates could create such a vast fleet. Then, there were always the Orions, but the Orions and humans were at peace . Plus, they didn’t have ships like this. No, not Orions then. If not, who the hell were they? And what the hell did they want? These couldn’t be human starships or even anything related to human starships. As far as she knew, no human starship, not even a hyperfreighter, was larger than two kilometers in length. No, this was something entirely new, entirely extraordinary. Like an act of god. “Com,” she called to the blond lieutenant. “Hail them on all tachyon bands. Ask them who they are and what they want.”
“Yes, ma’am!”
She returned her attention to the scan station and observed the fleet—it had to be called a fleet—of ships as they lost the electronic fuzz that came from hyperspace travel. When their fuzz disappeared, the station’s sensors could scan them deeper and clearer. These ships were shaped like...insects. Vast central structures with hundreds of outward legs that sprouted in every direction. Some of these legs moved. Most were black, like natural silicon, and as the sensors reached their insides, it was apparent that they were made of metal unknown to any human construction technology. What the hell were they?
At this moment in time, one of the doors leading into the command center opened. A man slid through, half dressed and in complete bewilderment. “What’s going on, Admiral?”
“Shenks, take a look at this. What the hell do you make of it?”
The man walked briskly through the deck. His feet clinked across the metal floor. “It’s a goddamn invasion,” he replied when he reached her.
Vier said nothing. She was as silent as prey hiding from a predator. Her heart rate was skyrocketing, however.
“Look at the formation they’re using,” Shenks noted. “They’re adopting an Alpha Wave pattern. That’s the formation you use when you’re about to attack a planetary target. Like us.”
“Lieutenant Browder, any response?” Vier asked.
“No, ma’am,” said the com lieutenant. “Wait—they’re broadcasting! I’ll put it up on speakers.”
Suddenly, an alien language could be heard throughout the command center. Vier had no clue what they were saying, but it was obvious they were speaking, that it was in a language. The pattern sounded neither male nor female, but very harsh, and at the same time, unemotional.
“Is that any known language?” Vier asked. She knew it wasn’t Orion. The Orion language was much more musical, with softer consonants and tones. This—this was like listening to a broken record.
“No, ma’am,” Lieutenant Browder answered. “That’s nothing I’ve ever heard of. It’s definitely not human nor Orion nor Vesuvian, nor anything.”
The alien voice repeated, again and again…A harsh, military, like a demand for surrender.
“Ma’am!” the sensor ensign exclaimed. “They’re moving! They’re heading towards us!”
“Shira protect us,” Vier whispered, then, in a loud commanding voice she ordered, “CAG, launch all starfuries! Anything we got! Signal all military starships into Omega formation around the center. We’ll use ourselves as a point of defense. And fire the nadion disruptors once they get in range! Eject all missile pods and launch missiles as soon as they’re at a safe range.” The missile pods were designed to protect against pirate raids, but not this. She had no idea what the hell they’d do against this, but she had to try. “Comm, get emergency distress packet ships and send them towards Betelgeuse. Put all the data from our sensor suit on those packets. Let them know I’m prepared to fight to protect our colonists. God knows I won’t abandon them.”
“Yes, ma’am,” came the replies.
“Tell all civilian ships to get the hell out of here!”
“Yes, ma’am!”
“Hail Colonel Streit.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
A moment later, a man in a military buzzcut stared back through one of the monitors near her chair. “Yes, Admiral?”
“You see what I’m seeing?”
“Yes, ma’am.” By convention, the ground commander always reported to the leadership of the star commander, which was Vier.
“Are the marines ready?” Vier asked, as she gazed at the incoming alien fleet.
“They’re moving towards deployment around the population centers just like a normal pirate attack, ma’am. Anti-air cannons have been readied and are pointing upwards. It’s the only drill we know that barely resembles this event.”
“Good,” Vier said. At least, she thought, the aliens or whoever they were hadn’t deployed kinetic kill slugs. If they wanted to destroy the planet and make it uninhabitable, that’s what they would do. There were no signs of hypervelocity missiles, either. Good. That meant they didn’t intend to kill the civilian population, but perhaps pacify them or make them surrender. But hell! She wasn’t surrendering without a fight, not even against
that
. “Browder, send a reply message. Here’s what I want it to say...”
Orbital Station Meerlat-01
Fighter Crew Quarters…
Brigum Yung was playing beer pong when the alarm sounded. He had already drunk five cans when he heard the command to go to battlestations. At least, he thought, he wasn’t in worse shape than his copilot, an asteroid girl named Darcy Gibbons. Darcy, who’d been born and raised on board a mining facility located on an asteroid, had drunk
nine
12 ounce cans of beer. She was as drunk as she could get, and he'd almost
had
her if it weren’t for the alarm. Now, he had to reconcile with the fact that she’d be the one piloting the starfighter while he did the aiming. It wasn’t at all how he’d expected to spend the evening.
Darcy wasn’t the prettiest girl in the sector, but he had gotten to know her well, well enough to know her tendencies and all her minor habits. Essentially, within a period of a year of official assignment, he had fallen in love with his copilot. She wasn’t as beautiful as she was capable. She could do things in and out of the pilot seat that could surprise even the sternest commanders.
Brigum, on the other hand, came from a farming complex near Alcubierre City. He told her on numerous occasions about how rich his parents were, or about all the marriage proposals he’d received and
rejected
during his early years in secondary education. He wasn’t joking, nor was he trying to seduce her. Well, he was…but he wasn’t trying to seduce by lying. Still, none of it had sealed the deal, and this roadblock puzzled him deeply. Usually, he
could
seal the deal within hours of meeting. Combined with his good looks and outright charm, he was a good bargain for most.
Which made it even more puzzling...and interesting.
He just couldn’t understand it. He even wondered if the woman of his heart was some sort of lesbian or, worse, a prude like no other. But, after nearly a year of trying, he’d almost done it. If it hadn't been for the alarm.
“Ready, Darcy?” Brigum asked as he cross checked his fighter’s readouts.
“Umm—Y-yes,” Darcy replied from the seat six feet in front of him. Cockpit equipment was all that blocked the way.
“You all right?”
