Chapter 1

I jerked the controls left, barely avoiding the orange ball of star-hot plasma that shot past. “Sam!” I yelled over the comms. “When’s the Navy going to get here?!”

“Two minutes!” Sam yelled back.

“That long!” I yelled at the same time as I fired the thrusters on the side of the ship. It carved out a swooping arc in the air, bolts of energy passing by our ion trail.

“I can’t shake them! These pirates are getting to be crackshots with all the practice we’re giving them!” I pulled back, causing the ship to shoot upwards, narrowly dodging the EMP blast.

For another tense minute I swerved, weaved, bobbed, ducked, and generally pulled every trick I learned from my days as a fighter pilot in the Navy. The only thing keeping me from blacking out was the inertia dampeners. They used artificial gravity to counteract the g-force from my insane maneuvers.

“The Navy called! They said they’re going to warp into the system in thirty seconds!” Sam yelled from the co-pilot's bubble.

“Great! Now hold on!” With that warning I cut the engine and fired the rear bottom thrusters. Flipping the ship backwards, I reactivated the engine and the afterburners, giving us that little bit of extra thrust. The inertia dampeners whined as it tried to deal with the hundreds of extra g’s. I was pushed back into my seat, almost blacking out from the extreme force.

The three pirate fighters that were in pursuit shot past us as we decelerated at the tremendous rate. Then, in a flash of white light, a huge rectangular ship with hatches and bulges sticking out of its hull, appeared a mile above and five hundred yards to the front right of my ship

The pirate fighters, which were banking to come after us, lit up their engines and flew directly away from the Navy destroyer. Five hatches on the destroyer opened and missiles launched out of them, a plume of blue ions leaving a beautiful trail behind them.

The missiles flew after the pirates ships. The pirates banked rapidly, trying to avoid the missiles. Unfortunately, missiles will forever be more agile than ships with fragile creatures inside. The missiles unleashed an electric-blue sphere of light as it passed the pirate’s fighters.

The missiles EMP caught the pirate ships, shorting out their shields along with the delicate electronics inside. All three ships flew along, powerless in the void of space. If the pirates weren’t picked up soon, their oxygen would be used up due to their life support being cut-off. The missiles used their engines to slow to a stop. The cruiser launched tuges to pick up fighters and missiles. Ammo was scarce after the galactic war.

Meanwhile, I came to a stop myself. Activating the LCA (Laser Communications Array), I called the Navy destroyer. Unexpectedly, Anna, a very familiar face from my Navy days, appeared on the viewscreen. Her brown eyes widened in shock. As we stared at each other I took in the captain bars displayed prominently on her military cap, her brunette hair hidden underneath.

Anna recovered quickly, immediately getting down to business. “Hello Lone Wolf. Glad we could be of service. Were they able to damage your vessel?” Her formal tone seemed to indicate that she wanted to keep it business like, but the smirk on her face said otherwise.

Anna had been the captain of the carrier that I’d been assigned to during the galactic war. I doubted anyone else would be able to talk to her so casually, due to her status. We had both been honored with medals for our services during the war. I’d retired but Anna had decided to continue working for the Navy, though she had refused any promotions.

I smiled at her. “Nah, these mangy pirates weren’t able to scratch an old wardog like me, Centurion.”

She smiled back at me. “As expected from my ex-ace fighter. And what’s this talk about being old, you’re still in your late twenties.”

Sam appeared on a separate viewscreen. His blue eyes twinkling mischievously, his blonde hair hanging down around his shoulders. “But darling, what about me? Don’t I get some loving too?”

Anna quickly waved here hand. “Oh no. Nothing for you, you grease monkey. When are you going to get a haircut? I know that your hair isn’t up to standard.”

Sam shrugged. “I’m not in the Navy anymore sweetheart. Don’t need to worry about the regulations anymore, one of the perks of going solo.”

Anna smirked. “Uh-huh. Anyways, where are you headed next?”

I shrugged. “Just delivering some mining tools. Should be back in the Veltrus System within a week though.”

She smiled. “Great, I have shore leave then. How about we catch up the, for old times sake?”

Sam immediately piped up. “Sure. I think we should be free, right man?”

I shrugged helplessly. “Fine. Let’s meet on the Lunar Station, Deck 3 Bay 5. Does next Monday at five pm local time sound good?”

Anna nodded. “Perfect. Until then, Centurion out.” The viewscreen disappeared. Sam whistled on the remaining viewscreen.

“Alright, it’s a date then. So Tony, you gonna spiff up for our daaate?” Sam asked teasingly.

I sighed.“Shut up Sam!” I yelled at him. Man, Sam sure was annoying sometimes.

“Sir yes sir!”

Abou twenty minutes later, I could hear Sam’s impressed voice. “Wow those tugs are fast. It’s not easy moving that much weight with a small engine. The Navy destroyer just warped out. I’m really jealous of those huge engines. They can warp a lot deeper in the system than we can.

“Me too Sam. Especially since we have to be 450 million miles from Veltrus’ star. Speaking of which, when are we going to cross the warp boundary Sam?”

“We’re still about twelve thousand miles from the warp boundary. We should be able to warp out in an hour.”

“Okay. Tell me when we can warp then.” I went back through the ships logs and reviewed the fight. I wanted to see if there had been any mistakes I had made during the fight. There were a few, but most of the time I could pin it to the ship’s fault. It was simply too outdated and underpowered in order to fend off three fighters at once.

“We’re ready to go Tony. Fire it up!” Sam called out.

“Let’s go then. Off to the Delgatho mining system.” The tachyon drive opened up, capturing a load of tachyon particles. The viewscreen flashed white as we entered warpspace. The tachyon particle would allow us to travel as far as we wanted until we dumped the charge.

Gravity interfered with tachyon particles, making them unstable. This caused ships to be unable to enter or exit warp space close when strong gravity was present. This could be resolved with better tachyon drives though, allowing one to jump closer to the Sun and planets. Asteroids would cause tachyon drives to be unusable with a mile or two, just a second of flight or two in space.

The pirates had laid in wait along a popular lane to the warp boundary, using an asteroid as cover. Fortunately the Navy had better warp engines and we were really close to the boundary otherwise I’m sure that it wouldn’t have ended as nicely as it did.

“Alright, now we have another four hours before we reach the coordinates.” Sam told me. He pulled himself through the entrance hatch, floating through the air. I undid my buckles and floated up myself. Unfortunately, the power drain to stabilize the tachyon particle was too severe to power the artificial gravity except for inside the cabins and mess hall. Of course, large ships wouldn’t have this problem with their bigger reactors.

“I’ll be in my room if you need me Sam. Going to catch up on the news I downloaded in the Veltrus.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Sam waved dismissively as he sat down in the pilot seat. The view screen’s holographic display lit up with a diagnostic scan of the ship. Sam started to study it, muttering about how space jocks didn’t know the pain of grease monkeys.

I smiled at that. That was just like Sam. He was like that even back in the Navy when he was my engineer for my fighter. Sam had also been cross-trained in navigation and sensors during the time at the Navy. He loved learning how to use the equipment he serviced.

After I retired, Sam decided to tag along. I used the money I had saved during my service and for merits earned to buy a small cargo ship. Ships were pretty expensive but it was nothing compared to what I had earned. Most of my money was in savings until I could finally buy a bigger hauler, one that had better engines and some guns. I always felt so vulnerable in this flying coffin. It didn’t even have any defenses at all, not even a tractor beam. Sam chipped in for repairs, upkeep, and general maintenance. We made small runs to systems, making a tidy profit from deliveries

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I went to my room, floating until I opened the door. Adjusting myself, I floated in like I was walking, catching myself when I fell to the ground. I caught a glimpse of my blonde hair in the mirror, a flash of blue as my eyes drifted over the silvered surface.

Going back to the mirror, I inspected my image. My body was rail-thin and tall, almost seven feet. My hair was a dirty blonde, closer to that of a brunette color honestly. My eyes were a greyish blue with little flecks of green close to the middle. My abnormal height was just one of the side-effects of being born on an asteroid mine. The company that ran the asteroid field didn’t want to pay the expenses of keeping a gravity generator running at top capacity so the gravity was 0.8 that of earth’s, causing my bones to become thin and brittle, though that was only compared to earthers.

Compared to Sam though, I was still short. Sam grew up on Mars. Because he lived in the 0.6g of the habitat dome, he was actually 8ft tall. Due to nanite infusions, his bones were reinforced enough to still walk around normally in earth gravity, though he would become tired very easily. I was lucky compared to Sam. The only thing I had needed was some calcium supplements. Those nanite infusions were extremely painful. I’d heard them described as every bone in your body catching on fire simultaneously.

Sam also had blonde hair, though his was a very light blonde. His eyes were a hazelnut color and there were some laughter lines around his eyes. Physically, we weren’t too much alike. Still, it was enough to were some people might mistake us as distant cousins.

Shaking my head, I walked past the mirror before sitting down in the chair in the corner of the room. Opening up the metal case on the stand next to me, I put on the E-Glasses and pulled up the news I downloaded in the Veltrus System.

It was mostly garbage. New politician elected, such and such planetary rules revisited, local marathon, local astrology and weather reports. The basics. About the only thing out of the ordinary was the large amount of pirates. Ever since the end of the fourth galactic war, many veterans became jobless. Especially those on the Empire’s side who lost the war. As a result, thousands of marines and ex-pilots turned to piracy to make an income. Unfortunate. Most likely some of my squadmates would be mixed in with the riff-raff.

Of more concerning news was the rumors that remnants of the empire were getting organized. Apparently, some propaganda from an ex-Admiral of the Imperials had leaked out. The Federation had made an official announcement but there were many news outlets that were covering the story anyway.

I zoned out as I started thinking what this meant for the Federation until a small beep sounded. Sam’s voice came on the internal comms. The space suit I had on integrated all of my comm systems, such as the ones on the ship or on public networks, into one system. All I had to do was specify who I wanted to reach and it would call them for me. “Tony, we are coming out of warp in five minutes.” Huh. How time flies when you’re busy.

Sighing, I got up with a groan and headed to the mess hall, pulling myself along the handlebars in the hallway. Repeating my trick, I landed on my feet and grabbed a couple slices of Salami from the fridge. Munching on them, I set off for the cockpit. Pulling myself past the door, I noticed Sam was still sitting down in my chair. “Hey! Get out Sam! That’s my chair!”

Sam jumped in shock. Unfortunately, he didn’t strap himself in so he shot upwards like a rocket, hitting his head on the ceiling. Rubbing his head he glared at me. “You know you could have asked me nicely.”

I shrugged unapologetically. “But where's the fun in that. Anyways, get to the co-pilot's bubble. I need you to handle the sensors and comms.”

Sam huffed a bit but still set off for the co-pilot’s bubble. Sitting down in my chair, I pulled up my usual interface on the view screen.  He kept the seat nice and warm. Way to go Sam.

I looked out the view screen at the space around us. It was the solid white of warpspace. The timer in the upper right corner of the screen reached zero. Immediately the white space pulsed brightly as we dropped the tachyon particle, exciting the warpspace momentarily. Then the white shifted to become a field of stars, along with a bunch of asteroids.

The view screen flashed red, alarms blaring. Even without looking at the sensors, I knew what the problem was. A large portion of my viewscreen was covered by a hunk of space rock. Quickly glancing at the sensors for any asteroids heading for me, I banked upwards avoiding the looming asteroid. A baseball sized chunk of rock whizzed by as I dodged another asteroid.

Cursing our lack of a navigation A.I. (Artificial Intelligence), I started flying by the seat of my pants. Keeping one eye on the sensors and another on the viewscreen, I began dodging asteroids frantically. I could barely anticipate the trajectories of some asteroids using this method and others were too small for me to catch before they hit us, dropping our shields down rapidly. “Sam! What in blue blazes is going on!” I yelled.

“No idea! We somehow warped into the middle of an asteroid field! I’m scanning for the edge of it now!”

Luckily an asteroid field is pretty spread out. Each large asteroid, most of which were a mile or two long, were separated by hundreds of miles. The real problems though were the fast moving, small chunks of rock and metal that filled the vast space between the asteroids. They were spawned by the occasional collision between asteroids and unfortunately, this one was unusually dense, resulting in a much larger amount of cosmic debris.

Finally, the view screen lit up with a series of green arrows. A suggested velocity was blinking in the top left of the screen. “Alright Tony, I have a path leading outside the asteroid field. Go ahead and get us out of this mess!”

“Ok partner, will do.” I trusted Sam’s calculations since he was using the programs he created. We had used them to navigate battlefields during the galactic war before when he had been my operations manager. He had proven himself, and his skills, trustworthy.

I activated the thrusters, speeding up to the velocities shown for the translucent green path. Banking, rising, twisting, turning. I followed the highly convoluted path outside the asteroid field. Sometimes asteroids would pass less than ten feet from our forcefield. As a matter of fact, our forcefield flared up a couple times, deflecting fist asteroids.

But within five nerve wracking minutes, we were out of the asteroid field. Letting out a breath I didn’t know I was holding, I sunk into my chair, exhausted. Dodging pirates and asteroids can take a lot out of someone. I turned on the autopilot. It would keep us away from all objects on the sensor, though it would have been overloaded in the asteroid field since there were so many objects.

I got up and walked out of the pilot’s bubble and met Sam in the mess hall. Artificial gravity was automatically restored when we exited warpspace, otherwise I couldn’t have pulled all those fancy maneuvers without ending up a puddle of goo from the extreme g’s they brought on.

We stared at each other for a little bit. Finally, I broke the silence. “What happened Sam? This is most definitely not the Delgatho mining system.”

Sam shrugged. “I don’t know either, let me pull up the nav data.” Sam had on his black, skin tight flight suit, same as I did. Reaching out, Sam activated the mess halls holo-projectors pulling up the mess halls view screens. His suits gloves gave him tactical feedback, giving him the impression that he was touching something. That was how everyone's view screens worked.

Sam tapped at it for a bit while I waited impatiently. Sam finally looked up. “Well, the systems nav data does not line up with any other known system. The computer used the stars to place us at over ten light years outside the frontier.

I swore for a bit. “Dang it Sam! I know this shipment was supposed to be on the very edge of the frontier but this is uncharted territory. Even the Navy’s probes only go five light years beyond the frontier. We can’t be out here!” The frontier was a border of space that was unexplored. The probes would constantly expand the border, letting us know if there were any alien civilizations that we needed to watch out for. Explorers were allowed to jump to any systems inside the border but going beyond it was something that endangered all of humanity. It was a capital offense, one punishable by death.

There is a very good reason for that specific rule about not going beyond the frontier. When tachyon drives were first mass produced, the various colonies and business of Earth started desperately claiming planets as their own. A small colony ship owned by a civilian crusie company started attempting to colonize a planet they found. Turns out, that planet was the property of an alien empire. They didn't take too kindly to being invaded and wiped out the human colonists. They then proceeded to attack the rest of humanity. This lead to the call for unity and the Federation was born in order to unite humanity. This was also the start of the first Galactic War.

The number one rule of the Federation upon its creation was that none were to pass beyond the border of explored space. The Federation's Navy would explore for them and approve of planets for colonization. All of this was to prevent another galactic war from breaking out.

After humanity finished the fight, there were many calls for the aliens to be wiped out. The aliens weren't against destroying civilians and entire planets were left devastated. There was a vote and 52% of the Federations ruling body was against it. The 48% that were for it were livid. They declared independence, eventually becoming the empire.

Another was fought after the Empire and Federation separated and this one was with corporations within both factions. The Empire wanted control of all wealth inside their territory, stating that it would be necessary to protect themselves from any alien threat. The Federation simply wanted to stop several different monopolies from ripping them off with their high fuel, construction, and maintenance costs that they demanded the public and the Federation pay. While smaller in casualties than the first, it was actually more intense. The reason for this was that news reports were hard to come by with such large distances. QE comms hadn't been invented yet, so news was radioed back to media ships and then those ships would jump back to Federation territory. The war with the corporations took place inside the Federation and the Empire, the perfect place for news coverage. The public were able to see the latest casualties and damages for the first time. Those monopolies lost to the Federation and they were split up into several smaller companies that controlled the same exact product. They simply sat back and let economics do the rest.

As for the Empire, they were able to successfully take over the private sector. IT was because of this that they were able to appropriate many different scientific studies and conduct research on military weaponry. While it took a while, the Empire was able to gain a technological advantage over the Federation. It made the Empire bold, causing them to make the first move to start the third Galactic War.

Sam shrugged. “I know but here we are. Let me check the coordinates.” After a couple quick taps, Sam looked up, grinning sheepishly.

“Well? What did you find out?” I demanded.

“Wellllll. I put the coordinates into the tachyon drive during the fight. And when that happened, I may have added an extra zero onto the coordinates.”

“....”

“....”

“Seriously?” I asked Sam, an incredulous expression on my face. Sam shrugged helplessly.

“I’m fraid so.” I was about to tear into him. We were almost killed over such a basic mistake like that. But right as I started to yell at him, an alarm sounded.

Beeep. Beeep. Beeep.

The alarm was faint but at a very high pitched tone. Alarmed, we darted to the bubbles. However, none of the alerts were going off. Activating the comm, I called Sam. “You got anything?”

“Nope. I think it might be coming from the cargo bay.”

“God I hope not. This day is already bad enough. I’ll check on it, you keep an eye on things here.”

“Alright.” I immediately headed to the cargo bay. Sure enough, the alarm got louder the closer I got. Pressurizing the cargo bay, I went inside. Nothing was askew as far as I could see. The alarm was coming from the large metal structure strapped down on the edge of the bay.

I groaned. It had to be a problem with this thing. The ‘thing’ I was referring to was a mineral scanner. It was also the most expensive thing in the manifest. Going over, I accessed the interface which was blaring red.

Then, I just stared at it in shock.