Prologue
November 13, 2407 AD
61 Ursae Majoris Oort Cloud
31 Light-years from the Sol System
Tuesday, 11:30 A.M. 61 Ursae Majoris C Capitol Standard Time
“It will only be a moment now.” The strange expressions on the alien-controlled clone body always unnerved Alexander Moore, and he was pretty certain he’d never get used to it. “I am receiving a QM ping from our guests.”
“I hope they have some insight or magic weapons they might can let us borrow,” Alexander said smugly as he looked out the clear panel at the large QMT transmission system’s exterior. The facility was the size of a Kuiper Belt object and was artificial. That fact alone had always amazed and startled Alexander. The alien had somehow managed to send bots to this system centuries, if not millennia, before and had them build the mammoth device. The wall around Copernicus continued to ripple but it didn’t cloud Moore’s view of 61 UM. It was very small at the Oort Cloud distance where they were. It was almost a light year away but it was still the brightest star in the sky.
“Don’t count on it, son,” Sienna Madira grunted pessimistically as she adjusted the long, white-streaked lock of her otherwise jet-black hair that curled down her forehead and left cheek. “One thing I’ve learned over the years is that you can always count on people not to really help when they offer to. Especially if it means they have to put their own necks onto the chopping block with you.”
“I think you’ll find the people I’ve invited to be, well, unlike any you’ve met thus far.” Copernicus responded and turned to them, making a screwed-up facial expression that Moore had no idea how to interpret.
“Uh huh. That’s great,” he said, not sure what to expect.
Copernicus continued manipulating the fuzzy boundary of the clear, rippling wall with his left hand, and the surface morphed around his fingers like oobleck. As the alien pulled his hands from the wall the material stuck to his fingers and stretched outward to them. There was no splatter, only ripples and waves. The clear, glowing pudding danced about his fingertips, with each movement sending trails of green light shooting through the image in the window like fireworks and skittering fireflies. Alexander couldn’t get his brain around how any of that was a repeatable control function. There were no buttons, knobs, switches or displays. It was just damned confusing. As far as he could tell there was no direct-to-mind interface either, unless it happened through the skin-to-goo contact. Otherwise there were no known detectable signals.
How the hell does he know what he’s doing? he thought.
I am studying this very closely, sir. I’m not sure either, but I do believe the light patterns and the wave patterns are the key, Abigail, his artificial intelligence counterpart, or AIC, said in his head. The AIC computer was one of the smartest ever made and had been implanted in Moore’s brain since long before the Martian Desert Campaigns almost two centuries prior. He trusted she would figure it out. Abigail had gotten him and his family out of many scrapes in the past. He had high confidence that once she had set her AI mind to the task she’d crack the code.
“Aha, now. We are ready,” Copernicus stated. Then the exterior skyscraper large spires over the central QMT pad of the facility began to spark and glow. A circle of rippling, watery blue light appeared and then flashed like an explosion in the kilometer-wide expanse between the spires. There was no sound or shock wave and there was no damage, but the phenomenon briefly left Moore lightheaded just as it had the last time he’d seen the thing in action almost two years before—the first time that Madira and Copernicus had shown him the Chiata Horde.
Then the wall turned opaque, like a dimmer switch was being turned down. Just as quickly as the wall faded dark, it began to fade to clear again, but this time the view was different. 61 UM was no longer outside in the field of view. Instead there was a different star system, and in the background was a large ship. The ship was more than three times larger than any U.S. Navy supercarrier or any Separatist hauler. In fact, Moore was guessing it was three times larger than a supercarrier and a hauler combined. Scalewise, it was on par with the Chiata ships they had fought at the battle of Alpha Lyncis five months prior. Then the screen zoomed rapidly into the bridge, and it was as if the interior of the ship was just on the other side of the window.
Large green translucent glowing monsters stood at what Moore could only assume were bridge stations, and the largest of the monsters sat in a thronelike chair in the middle of the room. Moore had seen enough starships and battleships to know that the throne was the captain’s chair and he was looking at the Ghuthlaeer in charge. If proportions were right, and Moore thought they were, the captain of the alien ship must have been at least three meters tall and a meter and a half wide at what he assumed were shoulders. He appeared bipedal with heavily armored clawed boots or feet, Alexander wasn’t sure. The creature had extra-long, very beefy, heavily armored muscular biceps and forearms ending in humanoid hands. Each hand had seven very long fingers, with spiny protrusions that looked like fins or plates from the back of a stegosaurus along the back of each hand and up the forearms. And the damned things glowed and pulsated. The entirety of the creature from foot to topknot pulsed in a bright luminescent green. The glow was too bright to determine the type of skin the thing had. The creature’s face looked more like a human’s than Alexander had expected. That was, if a glowing green spiky foreheaded creature with glowing orange eyes looked human at all.
“I am Ghuthlaevex Uurrgan,” the creature said, almost with a guttural throaty growl and rolling of the r’s. Boomingly and somewhat over the top, it continued. “I am captain of this vessel. Whom am I speaking to?”
“You speak English?” Moore was shocked. But the creature did something that could only be interpreted as laughing, maybe with a side of annoyance. At least Alexander hoped it was laughter.
“Language is so primitive a concept. But yes, human, you can assume I understand your language, as I know there is no hope of you learning mine,” Ghuthlaevex Uurrgan replied. “Now why am I here so far away from the battle zone?”
“Captain Ghuthlaevex,” Copernicus nodded. “You have been briefed on the humans’ raid on the Chiata star system Alpha Lyncis?”
“Yes. Courageous, surprising, and most probably stupid,” he replied. “And, I must say, interesting tactics, even if they were very three-dimensional. The use of your Von Neumann automatons was quite impressive and with some upgrades could be useful in the future. But know this, the Horde will adapt very quickly to these primitive technologies and tactics.”
“Yes.” Copernicus nodded again, this time in agreement. “Nevertheless, they did manage to make a dent in the Chiata machine at that system.”
“Ha ha ha.” Ghuthlaevex boomed in what Moore recognized as pure laughter. The strange alien creature was easier to understand than Copernicus in a human clone body. “A dent, you say? Not even a single hydrogen atom in a sea of stars!”
“Granted it was a small impact, but an impact, you must agree,” Copernicus argued.
“Bah!” The alien grunted in dismissal. Moore wasn’t sure about Copernicus, but he could tell by looking at Madira that she was getting impatient. He needed to take the bull by the horns before she stepped in. It was time to quit beating around the diplomatic bush and start being Alexander Moore—in other words, an armored bull in a china shop.
“Enough of this small talk. We made enough of an impact that you are here.” Moore raised a hand. “I’m General Alexander Moore, the commanding general for the human expeditionary forces. Our attack on the Chiata system was apparently significant enough that you brought your battleship a thousand light-years from your present battle to speak with us, so stop looking down your big-assed glowing green fucking nose at us and start talking about how we can align ourselves to generate more orchestrated attacks against our common foe and how we might defend our region of space.” Alexander had read the details that Copernicus had given him on the Ghuthlaeer. They had been fighting the Chiata for so long that war was all they knew anymore. Moore hoped that speaking to this alien as a soldier rather than a diplomat would make a difference.
“Ha ha ha,” the alien boomed. “I like this human. He has more freazles than you amorphous leeches, Copernicus. Although I must admit you would be much easier to kill in your present form, and I very much like that.”
Copernicus made no facial expression or response. He simply waited. Moore wasn’t sure what a freazle was, but he got the gist of it. The concept of courage to bull into a situation even when outgunned must be universally accepted as “having balls,” he thought. A smile almost crossed his face, but he fought it back.
“So you’ll help us then?” Madira asked. Ghuthlaevex Uurrgan looked at her as if he was studying her closely.
“I already have helped you. These slugs didn’t invent what you call quantum membrane technology. The great scientist Ghuthlaeven Shoffire did. He discovered this technology over thirty thousand of your years ago and because of it we have kept the Horde at a stalemate on the outer arms of the galaxy. Unfortunate for you that your spur was not under our protection.”
“I see.” Madira smirked at Copernicus. Moore could see she was having some revelations of her own and was most likely spinning up some god-awful complicated plan within plan within plan to use that information.
“We thank you for that,” Alexander said. “Now we need to move farther and we need to be able to hit the Chiata harder than our technology has allowed us.”
“Yes. While you have destroyed a Chiata ship or two, you have yet to stand face to face with them and push them back,” Uurrgan replied, thumping a seven-fingered fist against the armor on his chestplate. “Law prohibits me from directly giving you technology. While Copernicus is sneaky, it can still be argued that the female behind you discovered quantum membrane technology for humanity. His plan was clever for a slug.”
“I cannot ‘give’ you new technology. But if you were to find it on your own there is nothing the courts can say about that. Not even the Chiata-controlled and -threatened ones could win such a case. The law is still the law for now.” The alien captain tapped several locations in midair in front of him and then nodded to another alien sitting to his right. Moore wondered if direct-to-mind and virtual battlescape projections had also somehow been seeded into humanity or if it was coincidental development. He didn’t really give a shit. He needed a way to fight the damned Chiata. They were knocking on humanity’s door with a battering ram, and he couldn’t care less about these aliens’ laws.
“How might I find something of use?” Alexander grunted, getting tired of the ping-pong match.
“There is a system you should look at. If you can get there, stay there, and perhaps defeat the small contingent of Chiata there you might find something of use to you,” Uurrgan said. “But be warned, the system will let you QMT in, but will not let you QMT out. We do not know why and are no longer attempting to take it. We lost several engagements in that system attempting to combat the Chiata. The Horde is using the system for a staging ground as they know we are no longer able to push that deep into their territory to study the phenomenon. At least, we have let them believe this. Also know that our intelligence-gathering operations have learned that there is something on that planet that scares the Horde. We are not actually clear on what. We think this is why they continue to protect the system rather than rip it apart for its resources. That, or for whatever reason, they cannot destroy it.”
“Where is this system?” Moore asked.
“And what are we looking for?” Madira added.
“I am sending the system location and all intelligence we have on it to Copernicus now. It is roughly seven hundred lightyears from your Sol. It is within Chiata space, so you will have to stay away from star systems along the way. While we don’t know why QMT, as you call it, will work into the system but not out of the system, we do know that the Chiata do not have this technology. Somebody else put it there.”
“Who else?” Madira asked.
“Sadly, we do not know. And that suggests that the Chiata must have destroyed them all,” Uurrgan replied. “But there is non-Chiata technology at work there.”
“What if the Chiata reverse engineer it?” Moore almost gasped. “That would remove our one advantage.”
“Yes. This is a fear the Ghuthlaeer Dominion has had for more than ten thousand years. So far, we have been lucky.” Uurrgan turned and nodded to an alien to his left. “The information has been sent. Perhaps this will help you, perhaps not. The only other advice I have for you comes from my chief engineer. He says you are not putting enough power into your new point barrier shields and that you should also implement it as personal armor, like we do.” Uurrgan smacked a seven-fingered fist into his chest again, this time much harder, causing a wave of green light to ripple across his body. “We must be getting back to the fight now. It will take us days to return.”
“That’s it?” Madira snapped.
“Yes, human, that is it. The law forbids us to do more at this point. Perhaps if you continue to impress, who knows?” The alien captain’s face seemed to glow slightly brighter for an instant. “General, I wish you good luck.”
“Thank you, Captain Ghuthlaevex.” The wall instantly zoomed out, flashed dim, and then Moore was looking at the distant UM61 once again.
“That female is so elusive,” Copernicus said. “Mutual hatred aside, she never can talk straight with me.”
“The captain was female?” Moore asked. “How do you tell them apart?”
“Perhaps I forgot to put that in my briefing notes. Family names ending in -vex are female and -ven are male. The females are much larger and are dominant. And by the way her face pulsed and lit up when talking to you, General, I’d say she was somewhat fond of you.”
“Ha!” Madira couldn’t contain her laughter. “You better not be stepping out on my daughter for a seven-fingered orange-eyed monster!”
“Not that type of fond,” Copernicus added. “More like you, Sienna, with your cats. Yes, fond in a master and pet sort of way.”
“Son of a bitch,” Alexander rubbed at the stubble on his chin. “This alien shit is gonna take some getting used to.”