42

In four hours, my fleet would arrive around Ceres’s orbit.

It would mark the farthest manned mission humanity had ever reached through the stars, counting the seven thousand souls on board the First Fleet: the Achilles, two additional frigates, and seven corvettes—The Jupiter, The Ajax, Asteria, Endymion, Hector, Calypso, Andromeda, Icarus, and Pollux, respectively. For three days, we flew farther and farther away from home. While the crew first viewed the journey with an adventurous spirit, the closer we got to Ceres, the more that childlike wonder was replaced with dread and anxious anticipation.

They knew what was waiting on the other end.

“We outnumber them ten to one,” Proconsul Damien Staheli said around the war room. He was a man in his late forties with light salt and pepper hair, a well-trimmed beard, and a stocky build. He was one of the three generals I dubbed proconsul—recruited to lead Legion Invictus’s ground troops.

Damien was a former United States Armed Forces marine battalion commander—one of their best. But when he reported two of his commanding officers for rape and sexual abuse against their female subordinates, the case was unceremoniously closed shut. It didn’t take long until Damien was dishonorably discharged for substance abuse and possession of illegal narcotics. He admitted he had a drug problem after Fallujah on his application, and though he partly blamed himself for getting kicked out, he also blamed the men who got away with it. Languishing from one dead-end job to another, two failing marriages, and no future prospects, no wonder Prime picked his file out of the pile once he applied for immigration. My attempted assassination spurred him to join my cause, but it took me three times to convince him to accept the position as Proconsul of the Imperial Marines—one of the highest ranks in the legion.

Weeks later, he now commanded half my troops with finesse. Together with Uncle Nathan, they were the glue I was looking for to whip these soldiers from different backgrounds, serving from various military services, into one cohesive unit. Though Damien excelled at training and disciplining my men, he favored a direct frontal assault with no room for subtlety.

“We don’t know what they are doing in Ceres, proconsul,” Uncle Nathan said. “It wouldn’t hurt to be more careful with our approach.”

“We have ten ships, and the quartz only has one. We fire our cannons with everything we’ve got, and their ship’s obliterated in seconds! I don’t see why we need men on the surface.”

“Because of this, proconsul,” Lehane pointed at the odd smudge mark on the hologram image, which Ben enhanced with his datapad. Prime had only reported the anomaly to us when we were a day away from the dwarf planet.

“Maybe your robot’s got some screws loose, your grace,” Staheli said, swiveling his chair to face me. “We’ve kept a close eye on Ceres for weeks. A bombardment from space should destroy whatever they’re building on the planet’s surface and then some.”

“Incorrect, proconsul,” Prime said through the speakers. “The anomaly is one mile wide. A quartz ship is between a thousand to fifteen hundred feet long, with the largest currently hiding on Mars. I conclude that the anomaly on Ceres is a megastructure.”

“It could be another ship,” Ben suggested.

“Maybe it’s their mother ship,” Nick added.

“If it is their mother ship, shouldn’t Prime had detected that vessel when they entered our systems?” Lehane asked.

“Gentlemen, we’re wasting time guessing!” Uncle Nathan said. “We have to stick to what we know. They came here with five ships, but we don’t know their full strength.”

“The emperor defeated them once before,” Staheli said. “We can do it again, admiral.”

“I have no doubt of your courage and confidence, Staheli, but we have no idea how strong they are in a ground fight and whether this thing they’re building can destroy our ships from orbit,” Uncle Nathan said.

Half the men in the war room nodded in agreement while others shook their heads. Uncle Nathan and Proconsul Staheli had butted heads since the two met, the former leading the naval forces while the latter led the boots on the ground. The day they’d see eye to eye would be a miracle.

Lehane turned to me. “What should we do, your grace?”

The twenty-two men gathered in the room turned to look at me expectantly.

They were building something on Ceres, and I didn’t like that one bit. This should be an easy fight by bringing ten of my ships and ten thousand soldiers, hunting prey that was outmanned and outgunned—an overkill. I was curious why they chose Ceres as their hiding place and why they had never left it since their arrival. I didn’t even know why the other quartz ship chose Mars.

I was missing something, and it frustrated me that I didn’t know what it was. We detected their vessel in orbit eighteen hours before it disappeared again, probably after they detected my fleet approaching. They had the advantage of knowing the topography better than we did after months of hiding. I should have sent a satellite first, but the quartz would destroy it once it reached Ceres’s orbit.

“Prime, zoom in on the anomaly.”

The holo-table changed shape from the rotating Ceres to its crater-filled terrain. The Ezinu crater was easy to notice, being one of the largest. The heat signature grew more opaque the closer we got to the planet. They’ve built it on a ridge by the southern side, half-hidden from its shadow.

The quartz vessel remained elusive.

“The fleet will remain on the other side of the planet,” I said. “In the meantime, I want a hundred drones to cover the southern side. I want all eyes on that area. Ben, I want your boys flying out there once we make orbit. We’ll make a slow approach to whatever that fucking thing is after. Uncle Nathan, I mean, admiral, I want you ready for an orbital bombardment to cover our backs in case we need to retreat.”

“What about the enemy ship?” Ben asked.

“As Proconsul Staheli said, it’s one ship. When we see it, we kill it.”

“And this potential megastructure?” Nick asked.

“We’ll deal with that, too.”

We waited in the war room as the hours ticked by. The holo-table displayed my vessels in blue while the quartz was red as we approached Ceres, the anomaly’s heat signature still getting larger on the hologram. After I dismissed them from the meeting, the other captains had already returned to their respective ships via shuttles. Only Uncle Nathan, Proconsul Staheli, Ben, Nick, Lehane, Sagan, Bradley, and Captain Sully stayed behind. Once we reached orbit, Prime displayed the drones’ live feed as they flew across the crater, closing in on the structure.

“What the fuck is that?” Staheli pointed out.

My stomach sank. Black and grey struts, stone, and metal jutted out of the landscape against the ridge, sprawling wide in an amalgamation of a breathing lung, trenches dug deep into the surface for hundreds deep. Vapor fumes from the towering stacks shrouded the area not by shadow but a thick black smog mixed with ice vapor.

They were building a mine.

The quartz ship hovered above the structure, half-obscured by the smoke, and the unmistakable plasma dome covered the area. Just like San Francisco, the quartz ship shielded and protected the structure, which told me it must be important. How vital was this structure in their grand scheme if the other quartz would risk their lives to protect Captain Iraket? I’m going to have to change tactics.

I am going to destroy it.

“If that is the same plasma shield from San Francisco, there’s no way in hell we can break through their defenses,” Sagan said matter-of-factly. “I’ve seen fighter jets smashed and exploded flying into that thing. Our star-fighters will be the same.”

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

“No, we can get inside,” I said. They all looked at me as if I was crazy.

“Well, we’ve never tried our weapons against their plasma shields because President Howell refused our help,” Uncle Nathan said. “This could be our testing ground; see if the fleet’s combined firepower and ground forces would be enough to shatter their shields.”

I shook my head. “Not by smashing it or bombarding it from orbit. That’ll be a waste of our resources,” I said. “Look, the quartz activated their shields as a response to us, which tells me it hadn’t been up until this hour. Again, this tells me they do not have enough power to maintain it. The quartz in San Francisco siphons power from the city’s electrical grid and saltwater from the bay, but these quartz is in the middle of nowhere. They’d have to mine the water and use the vapor plumes to power their machines. The only problem is that it will be expensive and time-consuming.”

“The ship will run out of power?” Staheli asked.

“The plasma shields will, but I do not doubt that the quartz ship can still dish out a few hits at us after it drops. The most important question is when? And given the mine’s size, their hydroelectric supply would be unfeasible to support both the shields, the ship, their machines, and the mines together. The same reason why the quartz ship in San Francisco couldn’t attack and defend simultaneously.”

I already knew what they would do: they would stay put, and we’d be in another lengthy siege. This is going to be another San Francisco.

“How long do we have to wait?” Ben asked.

“A day. Maybe a week. A month? We know little about the quartz and their technology as it is.”

“We have provisions for ten thousand men to last us a month,” Staheli said. “This was only supposed to be a run-and-gun mission. We never expect to find them multiply like roaches.”

I nodded. “I agree, proconsul. We can’t hold a siege, and I am not waiting that long. We’ll have to find a way in—our tunnel—just like the ones the Americans have been using in San Francisco to ferry out the survivors trapped behind the dome.”

“And the Americans were slaughtered when they brought their army the same way. The tunnels will become a death trap,” Nick pointed out.

I held my tongue. I knew that men and women were going to die by my orders. Call it ignorance, hubris, or maybe naivety, but I had hoped to keep everyone alive by the end of this mission. But war was a nasty business, and rarely anyone came out unscathed. I glanced at the Ezinu crater on the holo-table, a massive area to look for a needle in the haystack—the only opening under the quartz’s defenses.

Suddenly, the drones burst into static; one by one, they went down. I had to recall them back to the fleet before they were destroyed. I caught a glimpse of a lightning-green streak hurtling toward each camera—toward each drone—on the hologram.

“Twenty drones down, forerunner,” Prime said.

I paused. “Where did that come from? Uh, there! The feed on the right. Open that up. Prime, can you enhance that?”

“Enhancing.”

I smiled. They didn’t get everything, I thought.

There were dozens of turrets as big as houses stationed around the mine’s borders, blending in with the landscape. The plasma dome could not reach them along with the mine’s outer perimeter, which created an eight-hundred-foot gap from the turrets to the dome’s edge. Prime detected hundreds of heat signatures around the eight turrets; each was fifty feet tall and mounted on a box-shaped foundation connected to a narrow and shallow rift leading to the main mine.

“Are those the quartz?” Ben asked, gesturing at the moving heat signatures on Ceres’s surface.

My smile turned into a grin. “Yes. Some of them are stuck on the wrong side.”

Nick let out a loud whistle. “Damn. I’ve never seen that many. One of them was bad enough.”

“Prime, patch me a link to the captain of the Quartz ship,” I ordered.

General Staheli and Uncle Nathan both raised their eyebrows. They hadn’t expected that diplomacy was on the table. I slightly raised my hand to quiet their protest. I didn’t want to hear more advice about how to talk to the quartz. I’ve had plenty with the brief exchange I had with Captain Iraket.

“Open a link to Ajax, Icarus, Andromeda, and Pollux,” I said to Captain Sully. “Have them be ready in orbit above the mine.”

Captain Sully nodded and opened his datapad. It took a while before Prime got back to us.

“The Quartz captain accepts to discuss the terms of your surrender, forerunner.”

“My surrender?” I asked, amused.

“Yes.”

I chuckled. “We’ll see. Patch me through.”

“Is this the emperor I have heard so much about?” The captain spoke. At first, I thought he would have the same voice as Captain Iraket because of Prime’s translation modules. However, his voice was silky smooth and soft, far from the anger seeping through Iraket’s lips.

“Yes, I am. Let me introduce myself: My name is Emperor Anton Segerstrom, the Forerunner of Earth. To whom am I speaking?”

“Captain Finvalil Tovragga. The Hand to the Seventh Scion of Merretta,” he said. “Forerunner, you say? Ah. Such an ancient title to be claimed by a creature from a backwater planet.”

I raised my chin. “So, you’ve heard of me.”

“The galaxy is a vast place. We hear many things, whispers of ancient powers that disappear through the age of time only to be found in such curious places. Of course, these are just stories. Legends and myths, if you believe them.”

“It seems to me you know exactly who I am.”

“Not quite. These stories have been lost through eons, morphed into bastardized versions. Unrecognizable. You see, memory is a fickle thing. Knowledge is more so. But As I’ve said, these are just stories for children of my kind. It is curious to find it in the lips of an alien race.”

I looked across the holo-table at the grim faces of Ben, Uncle Nathan, Staheli, and the others. They held their tongue but could tell the quartz captain was hiding something.

“What is your purpose in my solar system?” I asked. “What is your direct objective?”

“Has my superior not told you why?” He asked, almost incredulously.

“He mentioned that we are a class zero civilization and are not supposed to wield this technology. Beyond that, he was less elaborate on the details and was preoccupied with trying to kill me. Instead, I grounded him.”

Tovragga was quiet for a time. “On behalf of my superior, I apologize for any misunderstandings that Captain Iraket caused. He is not known for diplomacy.”

Or even-tempered. “What misunderstanding would that be? Invading my planet?” I asked.

“This is not an invasion. For thousands of years, we have total jurisdiction of this sector.”

“We did not agree to such terms with you and your people.”

“Unfortunately, we do not negotiate with lower life forms.”

“Look outside your ship, captain. Does my fleet look like a lower-life form to you?”

He was silent again. “No, but you wield a toy that you barely understand.”

“And you do?”

“Your people may view this technology far more advanced than you currently have, but we’ve seen better from other sentient species. Although I do not claim to know your technology, bad things still happen to those who don’t understand their place in the galaxy.”

“I know more than you realize, captain. I know that you and your men are trespassing within my borders. If you do not leave, I will take drastic actions against you.”

“Captain Iraket seems to hold on well.”

“That is a different matter. I have total sovereignty out here, including the dwarf planet you are illegally mining,” I said. “Wherever you came from doesn’t change the fact that we are neighbors. I do not want our first contact with our neighbor to start with an interstellar war, but if it must be done, then I can assure you, we humans will fight with our last breath.”

“It will be a futile war on your side. Our reinforcements are going to receive Iraket’s message. They will arrive in one local solar rotation, and your people won’t stand a chance.”

“Was that assessment before or after I’ve incapacitated three of your ships?” I asked. “And you still haven’t answered my question. What is your purpose here?”

I could hear an audible sigh. “We are on a reconnaissance mission to assess the potential of your star system.”

“Potential for what?”

“Construction.”

“And what exactly are you building?”

I could hear the smile on his face. “You fail to understand that your planet is within the edge of our boundary against another hegemony. That is why I view this as a futile war for your people, and it saddens me. To wage war against us, you must also wage war against the other. You will battle two fronts, and I don’t see your people winning.”

I bit my inner cheek. I get it now, I thought. The solar system was stuck between two galactic superpowers. They were shoring up their borders, which was why they were here. Could this other hegemony be another forerunner civilization? But what are they building? I already knew the answer before the question left my tongue.

“You are going to make my planet an outpost.”

“Precisely,” Captain Tovragga answered. “I hope this will persuade you from taking any further hostile actions against my people. It will only deteriorate your already fragile position. You are in violation of interfering with coalition activity, punishable by your death and stripping your planet into a permanent class zero civilization without a possibility of a pardoned petition in the future.”

That doesn’t sound good.

“For the crimes of exercising and utilizing unsanctioned technology, your planet’s population will be reduced to a quarter of its current size, and any further technological development will be closely monitored. The crimes of killing Merrettian high-ranking officers and destroying coalition property are punishable by the annihilation of your planet and the extinction of your people. Approval for relocation denied.”

“Is that it? Will you destroy my planet? I thought you need us.”

“We don’t need a habitable world. There are plenty of celestial bodies in this star system. One will do.”

“And you serve a galactic coalition? Another empire? Is that who I’m dealing with?”

“I serve the galactic empire—the only sovereign of the galaxy. To claim yourself emperor and impersonate him is also punishable by your death.”

“Does that mean I get to die twice, then?”

“This is no laughing matter, human. If you call yourself the true leader of your people, you must submit peacefully, and perhaps we can salvage the survival of your people. Or die. You should do the right thing.”

“On that, we agree, captain. If the crimes you listed all mean our deaths and the destruction of my people, then we only have one choice to make.”

“Very well, Forerunner of Earth. I wish you good luck.”

The comms went quiet. With curled fists, I turned to the others and said, “Fire at the turrets. Reduce it to rubble. And Proconsul Staheli, prepare our men for landing.”