Celestial Incursion (Edge of the Splintered Galaxy Book 1) Read online

  The two rangers ran out with their rifles drawn into the dark office floor, the fighting in the area had long ago knocked out power and backup power. The all clear was given and everyone fanned out with guns drawn, hoping they wouldn’t have a need to use them.

  “Check your fire, we got non-hostiles,” said the Vorcambreum as he entered the far office.

  Odelea backed up slightly and saw Ienthei reunited with his twin sister, Queenea, the two shared a hug while the surviving office personnel were rounded up and whisked away to safety down below. There were about ten of them, should be enough to cram into a military transport, not very comfortably but doable.

  With only one elevator in use and it being full, Odelea had the perfect chance to stride into her personal lab and office. She accessed a computer interface screen with her implants and searched for a machine that had power and therefore was able to link with her HNI. Only one device was found, it had been plugged into an ethereal battery supply in case of an emergency, like now.

  She placed an empty data crystal into her hand and inserted it into the computer. Using her implants, she selected a command that ordered the computer to copy its contents onto the crystal. A blue progress bar manifested before her, it slowly moved while the files were being copied.

  “Odelea,” Iey’liwea called out to her as she entered the lab. “Let’s go.”

  The progress bar was at 45 percent. Just a little bit longer. “Can it wait? I’m almost done here.”

  “Not really, we’re the last load to go down.”

  “I could stay,” the Aryile ranger offered. “I’d hate for her to come all this way and lose whatever she needed to get.”

  “We,” his superior corrected.

  Iey’liwea placed her hands on her hips. “I thought you guys had orders to protect the council?”

  “The transport you demanded is inbound now,” said the Vorcambreum. “You’ll be safe once you reach the lobby and step aboard. With that said, as of now, it’s safer to be downstairs than it is up here with us.”

  “Head down with Ienthei,” Odelea said to Iey’liwea. “We will meet up with you, this I assure you.”

  Iey’liwea released a long exhale and then turned toward the elevator where Ienthei stood waiting for everyone. It began to descend, officially leaving Odelea alone with the two rangers, who passed back and forth with rifles in hand waiting for her file transfer to finish, 22 percent left when she last checked.

  “I guess you work for her as well?” said the Aryile ranger.

  Odelea nodded. “Yes, of course, do you not recognize my name?”

  “I just transferred here recently from the outer colonies. I never did pay much attention to politics on this side of the quadrant.”

  Meaning he was young and experiencing the life of a young adult for the first time, unlike Odelea experiencing it for the second time. To him, the events that happened over the last hundred years were stories in a history book, assuming he took the time to read one, which was doubtful. Rangers needed to know how to fight and defend the Union and often recruited personnel that failed to progress through the ruthless education system the Radiance Union employed.

  “So, no,” he added. “Don’t recognize the name, but I think it’s a beautiful name for a beautiful girl like you.”

  Odelea’s face flushed, visible through her sun-kissed bronze skin. It muted her lips, his charming smile didn’t help, in fact it distracted her from the fact the file transfer had completed. The body and brain chemistry of a young woman, she was still trying to get used to it, more like remember how to be used to it. She had forgotten how a young woman reacted to situations like this. The Vorcambreum ranger entered the lab gesturing to the two.

  “Are you finished?” the Vorcambreum asked. “The elevator just returned to this floor.”

  “Oh, ah, ye . . . yes I am finished,” Odelea’s jittery voice said.

  “Well?”

  All eyes were on Odelea and her spaced out face. Right, she needed to take the data crystal. She returned to the computer and plucked the tiny diamond-like object away from it, storing it carefully in her side pocket, and joined up with the two rangers, eager to leave the towers.

  The Vorcambreum stopped suddenly as he stared ominously at the opened elevator door and rapidly brought his weapon forward. “What’s wrong, sir?” said the Aryile.

  “The elevator . . . look at it.”

  All three of them glanced at it, Odelea saw nothing out of normal in regard to its construction and layout and configuration of its control panels. Yes, it showed signs of battle damage, but that was expected, this was a warzone. Yes, it had blood that was splashed into its walls from the dead invader that was inside—

  The invader.

  “Where’s the invader’s body?” she asked.

  “I was hoping one of you two knew,” said the Vorcambreum. “It was there when the elevator returned not long ago.”

  Odelea’s face wasn’t flushing anymore. Fear, anxiety, ancient Aryile self-preservation instincts triggered, the same kind that kept their people alive during ancient times when they were close to the bottom of the food chain and heavily hunted by predators, the downside to being an herbivore species.

  The quickest and easiest action they could take was to sprint into the elevator and descend back to the lobby, while nobody was actively trying to shoot them. The longest and hardest was to search the entire floor and verify the invader they thought was dead wasn’t planning an ambush.

  The quick and easy option was taken.

  They regretted it seconds later.

  Odelea heard the Vorcambreum scream as she stepped onto the elevator first. She spun around facing the office with her pistol in hand. The Vorcambreum was pinned to the floor with the armored invader on top of him, clawing away at his shields, well what remained of them. Whatever the invader used to blindside him, hit him hard as indicated by the pistol’s targeting data that outputted into her implants.

  The targeting scans revealed his shields were down to 32 percent and were falling 8 percent per slash. He wouldn’t last long unless she shot the invader. She opted not to, after all the Aryile who had been at her side was there, she waited for him to do the honors.

  The Aryile’s rifle fired multiple rounds at the invader. It only angered the invader and forced it to display the speed and agility it possessed as it leaped inside the elevator, pouncing on the Aryile like a beast from Paryo. Of course, this meant Odelea now shared the stationary elevator with the Aryile ranger and the invader. The melee attacks of the invader made the Aryile drop his rifle. Fear made her drop the pistol. The Aryile’s will to live forced him to fight and wrestle with the invader, forcing its back to face Odelea, Odelea’s fear made her retreat backward.

  She didn’t take the shot. The shot the Aryile ranger so desperately hoped she would take. She couldn’t, not while her hundred plus year old memories returned to 2018, when she took a life for the first time with a pistol. Then forward to 2040, when she held a rifle and nearly ended the life of a friend with it.

  She sank to the floor with trembling hands covering her eyes. Her frightened mind deactivated her neural link to the pistol, seconds before its cameras captured the ranger’s shields shatter, his helmet’s visor smash, and the sound of the flesh on his face being peeled away from his head like it was skin on a piece of fruit.

  Rifle fire roared.

  It wasn’t from the Aryile, his unmoving body fell to the floor before the shots were fired. It was the Vorcambreum most likely since the rounds came from the office. With her eyes still covered and her fear-gripped body weeping on the elevator floor, Odelea heard the Vorcambreum’s body crash into a wall. Then heard what sounded like his shields failing, and then his screams that ended abruptly.

  Her eyes opened, the pistol was still there on the floor. Ahead of it was the Aryile with his face a bloody mess of shredded flesh and muscles, and his eyes gouged right down to his brain. The invader rejoined her in the elevator, droppin
g the head of the Vorcambreum next to him. It took one look at her with its helmet now fractured and collapsed, holding onto the freshly created gunshot wounds it received.

  The elevator began its descent to the lobby, delivering Odelea to an empty victory. She looked gloomily at the dying invader, looking into its eyes and face now partially visible in the darkness. She looked so long she failed to notice Ienthei helping her up as the elevator had arrived at the lobby.

  “What happened?” Ienthei asked her.

  She replied with another question. “What was his name?”

  “Who?”

  Her distraught finger pointed at the fallen Aryile ranger. “What was his name?”

  “I don’t know, maybe his squad leader knows.”

  The Vorcambreum, only he was dead too, along with the other ranger earlier. The two people that could have known his name were gone, and with that was her chance to get to know him better and who he was.

  The transport had landed outside the ruined lobby entrance, its doors wide open, awaiting the last two survivors to board. Odelea wasn’t ready for that, not after she heard vocalized sounds come from the dying invader’s mouth.

  Sounds she partially recognized.

  Breaking free of Ienthei’s hold, she skirted back to the elevator to listen to the invader’s last words.

  “Odelea!” Ienthei cried out to her. “We need to go, now; other invaders will soon be here!”

  Odelea stood before the fading invader, and watched its lips move. “Let me listen to it speak.”

  Ienthei furiously grabbed her from behind. “We came here for my sister, nothing more!”

  “No please, just one more minute—”

  “We don’t have that!”

  This time, Ienthei picked up her lightweight body, sweeping her feet away from the floor, and ran with her to the transport. He carried her away to freedom and safety and carried her away from a major scientific discovery.

  And a warning to the rest of the galaxy.

  8 Moriston

  Earth Cube, EISS HQ

  Geneva, Earth, Sol system

  August 3, 2118, 09:24 SST (Sol Standard Time)

  Special Agent Albert Moriston’s transport arrived at Earth Cube early in the morning after he received an HNI phone call that his presence would be required. As he took the elevator down, his HNI feed him links to various UNE news websites, all reporting about the devastation left in the wake of the unknown invaders. Invaders . . . he had really hoped it was the Empire. It would have been the perfect chance to demonstrate the military might of the human race, and how far it had come in the last century since they became a spacefaring species.

  Radiance and the Hashmedai had been in space for thousands of years, fought each other and failed to officially claim victory. Many analysts believed that had the Hashmedai Empire’s invasion took place today there wouldn’t be much of an Empire left. Earth had the power to do what Radiance couldn’t with fewer ships. But no, it had to be an unknown enemy attack, one that turned tail and fled leaving behind their minions to harass the people of Earth.

  He shut down the internet news feeds for the time being once his HNI informed him the elevator ride was halfway down. He pulled up the reports gathered about Captain Foster and her crew of the Carl Sagan. The ship was launched from Earth in 2033, arrived in Sirius in 2050, pissed off some crazy Javnis who thought he was a space god, killed him, and then vanished later that summer. Sixty-eight years later they arrived back at Earth with the assistance of the invaders that defended them until Park and her team boarded.

  And they call themselves the good guys? Please.

  Moriston arrived in his office with a cup of hot coffee. Behind him was Gunnery Sergeant Grace Park of EDF-17, in her regular EDF uniform. She took a seat at the front of his desk, while he sat on his chair.

  “Gunny, thanks for taking the time to sit down with me,” Moriston said then took a sip of his coffee. “I’ll try to be quick, I know you and your team have some leftover invaders to deal with.”

  Park offered Moriston a holographic projection of her team’s recordings as they boarded the Carl Sagan. He held onto the projection and pulled on its sides, enlarging the window for him to take in the full view.

  “As per my report,” Park said. “We didn’t find anything out of the norm on the Carl Sagan other than the fact its crew was in cryo and awoke moments after we boarded.”

  “Then Foster attacked you,” Moriston said.

  “She claimed to have been acting on information their EVE AI told her.”

  “An EVE AI that you mentioned made an emotional outburst correct?”

  “Yeah, not every day you hear a computer cry out that they don’t want to die.”

  “The same AI that was no doubt responsible for conveniently awaking the crew as you boarded, then told Foster to attack you.”

  “You saying their AI went nuts?”

  “We don’t know for sure.” Moriston took another gulp of his coffee. “There’s a team searching through the wreckage of the Carl Sagan now, but from what I’m being told all ship logs and recorders have been wiped after the date we lost contact with them.”

  Park leaned back on her chair. “Strange.”

  “No, what’s strange is that only the Carl Sagan’s senior crew was aboard.”

  “I heard them say something about they went to Sirius with a small crew to start with.”

  “And where’s the rest of that small crew?”

  “Chevallier had escaped in a transport that crashed downtown.”

  “Yes.” Moriston created a projection showing a typed-out report. “I received this report from Sergeant Boyd in regard to that, and her assistance helping his team rescue the civilians from the mall. I wanted to have her brought here as well for questioning, but downtown Geneva is still a hot spot for invader activity. Boyd has temporarily recruited her into his team to assist because of that.”

  “I’d still like to know who the hell these invaders are.”

  Moriston conducted a quick search and found classified reports, data, and video with his HNI. He created a projection listing each of his findings, pushing them over to Park. “It’s not the Empire,” he pointed to the video of Paryo in the aftermath of an attack. “The Hashmedai were attacked by the same ships, we don’t know the extent of the damage. The Empire is keeping silent on that. But our agents in that sector reported at least seven thousand Hashmedai have been killed on the planet alone.” The projection shifted to video of Aervounis and the devastation Radiance experienced. “Radiance was also hit; their mammoth-sized fleets weren’t enough to stop the invaders. They lost sixty-seven ships in orbit, and the death toll in Veromacon has risen to eleven thousand.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Then, there’s us, thirty ships lost, twelve thousand dead, and fighting in the streets of Geneva, Perth, and New Moscow continue.”

  “What about the colonies?”

  “All safe, the invaders ignored them, even Mars was spared. Hell, they didn’t bat an eye at the wormholes which would have given them direct access to the rest of UNE space. They bee-lined it straight to Earth, Paryo, and Aervounis, then targeted Geneva, Veromacon, and the Imperial Capital at the same time. They knew exactly where the heart of our three nations were.”

  “Then left without finishing us off?”

  “We suspect this might have something to do with it,” Moriston said as his HNI brought up footage from a UNE battleship.

  He returned to his coffee, while the video loaded and played for Park to see. One of the invader ships had a green glowing sack on its top and bottom. It was destroyed as five nuclear warheads hit it dead-on. As the brightness of the nuclear blast in space subsided, the fleet of invader ships pulled away from Earth and entered FTL.

  The video switched to an external camera of a listening outpost at the edge of the Sol system. The invader ships flashed into existence after exiting FTL and neared another ship similar to the one that had been destroyed i
n the previous video. Said ship created a disturbance in space that triggered storm clouds to form and grow, and the invader ships flew into it. The clouds vanished minutes later along with the ships.

  “And just like that, poof, they’re gone,” Park said drily.

  “The Radiance Navy apparently had a similar thing happen, supposedly the Imperial navy as well,” Moriston said. “The destruction of those ships got the invaders to panic and flee to another of the same type, then vanish within that storm cloud. The key to understanding this mess . . . lays with Captain Foster and her crew. Their ship, after all, was flying in a tight formation with the invaders’ ships when they first arrived.”

  “You think they brought them here?”

  “They were gone for sixty-eight years, then return with a fleet of ships that knew where the capital cities of the UNE, Union, and Empire were and can’t remember a damn thing, plus their databanks have been wiped out.” He finished the last of his coffee. And that’s where I come in.

  Earth Cube, EISS HQ, Interrogation room

  Geneva, Earth, Sol system

  August 3, 2118, 10:21 SST (Sol Standard Time)

  Moriston sat down with his first ‘interview’ for the day, the infamous Captain Foster. The two sat in an empty room with one light shining down onto a barebones table that separated the two chairs they sat on. Guards were posted outside, just in case Foster had some kind of alien programming within her head the doctors failed to pick up.

  There weren’t any two-way mirrors in this room, as those had long been rendered obsolete. Moriston’s HNI recorded everything he saw and fed it to other EISS personnel watching from another room via a three-dimensional hologram.

  “Please state your name for the record,” Moriston said.

  “I’m Captain Rebecca Foster of the Carl Sagan.”

  “Left Earth in 2033, arrived at Sirius in 2050, returned to Earth . . . in 2118. Sleep-in of the century.”

  “I’ve heard that term a lot.”

  “Long story short, we’ve managed to reverse engineer Lyonria wormholes and use them to connect our systems together. That combined with the invention of FTL in the late 2060s means we spend less time, if any, in cryostasis. The Carl Sagan, like other ships built before these advancements, used sub light speeds to reach the stars. Ships that were deployed and were still traveling in space when FTL was invented were called sleep-ins, since their crew arrived at their destination during a time when we could have travelled there a lot faster.”