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  Books by B. V. Larson:

  STAR FORCE SERIES

  Swarm

  Extinction

  Rebellion

  Conquest

  Empire

  IMPERIUM SERIES

  Mech Zero: The Dominant

  Mech 1: The Parent

  Mech 2: The Savant

  Mech 3: The Empress

  OTHER SF BOOKS

  Shifting

  Velocity

  Visit BVLarson.com for more information.

  EMPIRE

  (Star Force Series #6)

  by

  B. V. Larson

  Copyright © 2012 by the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the author.

  -1-

  I stood on the bridge of my battle station, gazing into a sphere filled with photo-reactive nanites. We called this three-dimensional display system a “holotank”. The unit took some getting used to, but it was definitely superior when it came to depicting space battles and had replaced our planning tables. The base of the unit was surrounded by flat screen consoles which could be manipulated by touch. I ran my fingers over the consoles, and the imagery in the holotank responded, displaying data from anywhere I wished in the Eden star system.

  The Eden system was like most of the star systems we’d encountered in that there were two “rings”, each of which connected the system to another. The rings were interstellar gateways. Each of these vast structures was a massive alien artifact. Most of the rings hung in space in stable orbits. They were often miles across and to the best of our knowledge they were made of collapsed star-matter. When passing through a ring a spaceship was instantly transported to another location, usually to another star system.

  We didn’t know who’d built these amazing structures we called “rings”, but they now provided our only realistic method of travel from one star system to the next. Our ships weren’t fast enough to make interstellar leaps on their own, not without many years of travel time.

  Collectively, the rings connected a long chain of star systems. The chain went back to Earth and one step beyond that to Bellatrix. At our end of the chain, there was only one system we’d discovered beyond Eden, which I’d named the Thor system. All told, we’d discovered six connected systems.

  The battle station I was aboard now was the only one of its kind. I’d built it very close to one of the rings to protect the Eden system from invasion. Like a castle built atop a mountain pass, it guarded against intruders by focusing its defenses on a single, small entry point. The station and the ring it guarded both orbited Hel, the coldest, most distant planet in the system. On the far side of the ring was the Thor system with its population of unfriendly lobster-like inhabitants. Beyond Thor, we didn’t know where the chain of rings led. It was my suspicion there were more chained-together stars out there, each circled by alien worlds. I suspected there was a lot more of them.

  The holotank showed the local tactical situation, which was routine at the moment. I manipulated the consoles again, causing the imagery in the holotank to shift. Green slivers of light flashed into focus as I panned across the system. The green slivers floating in space represented my ships, which were scattered around Eden’s star. When I located the biggest cluster of ships, I zoomed in. I’d assigned most of them to guarding the second ring, which began a path of interstellar jumps that led home to Earth.

  I no longer needed ships on guard here, at the gateway to Thor. The battle station took care of that duty now. It had been a tremendous effort to build the battle station. It wasn’t finished and I didn’t have enough people to man it properly, but it was an amazing fortification. No one was going to pass by without having to deal with this monster I’d built on the border.

  I spent an hour going over reports and adjusting a few standing patrol orders. Reassured that nothing interesting was happening, I left the command center and walked the long, echoing corridors. The battle station was as big as a sky-scraper and the exterior bristled with weaponry. It wasn’t finished yet, but it would have to suffice, as I had new worries now. I’d put so many of my resources into this station, I’d neglected the fleet. This was an elementary flaw in my strategy. Ask any commander running a war: you have to have fleets, not just forts. Fortifications were cheap and powerful, but they couldn’t move to meet the enemy wherever they might come. If Earth was hit next, and Crow begged for my help, this monstrous battle station might turn out to be a colossal waste of effort. If it turned out to be badly placed when the time came, it wouldn’t save a single life.

  I walked down an echoing shaft to a big observation window on the sunward side of the station. The blast shields had been rolled back and the stars outside were visible to my naked eyes. I stared out there in the stark beauty of open space. Outside the station, the stars around us formed a thousand points of light. This far away from the G class sun, they were intensely bright against the perfectly black void.

  My boots clanged on metal floors as I approached the big window. There, almost pressed up against the frosty quartz plane, was Sandra. Her pose reminded me of a housecat watching the world go by outside.

  “I knew I’d find you here,” I said.

  “I knew you’d come looking,” she responded, and gave me a warm smile over her shoulder. Then she turned back to the darkness of space that rotated gently as we watched.

  “I think this station is done for now,” I said. “I think it’s time we moved back to the planets, and retooled our factories. It’s time to produce mobile defenses.”

  “Ships?”

  “Yes.”

  I walked up to join her at the window. She didn’t move, but continued staring.

  “I can see them sometimes, you know,” she said. “My eyes aren’t like normal eyes anymore. I can see the faintest flicker of movement out there, when one of our vessels drifts between my eyes and a star.”

  I glanced at her, but said nothing. What she was describing should not have been possible. The ships were too far, too tiny relative to the stars. A specialized telescope might not have been up to the task. But no one, not even Sandra herself, fully understood the natural capacities of her new body. She was part human, part nanotized super-soldier—and part something else. She’d been changed by an extinct colony of Microbes. In essence, she was one of a kind now. I’d undergone similar baths administered by Marvin. But his application had been much more controlled and specific. Hers had been done by the Microbes themselves, free to experiment and edit whatever they wished in her flesh.

  “I thought when I went through the baths we’d become closer,” I said. “You know that don’t you?”

  Now, she did look at me. She seemed troubled. “That’s why you did it? Not just so you could run off and be the first human to risk your life landing on a gas giant?”

  I hadn’t actually landed on the gas giant, if such a thing was even possible. I’d only dipped down several thousand miles into the dense atmosphere. But I’d met the Blues there, and talked to them in their own environment. Most importantly, I’d survived.

  This business of her body alterations and mine was a sore point between Sandra and I, so I decided to switch the topic. I turned my attention back to the scene outside. I knew my ships were out there somewhere, dark and invisible to my naked eyes among these jewel-like stars. I’d reorganized them since we’d driven the Macros out of the system. One ship patrolled each of the habitable worlds, and the rest were out at the
far ring, the one that guarded the route home to Earth.

  “What do you think is happening back home?” I asked Sandra.

  “Crow is taking over, of course,” she said quietly.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “If he was in serious trouble, he would have begged us for help. If he was in minor trouble, he would have whined and complained. Since he’s being quiet—that’s the worst. That’s when he’s up to no good. That’s when things are going his way.”

  I nodded. “Your analysis matches my own. He’s planning something. He’s not talking because he wants to catch us by surprise.”

  “You have a history of underestimating him. Let’s think bad thoughts for a moment. What is the worst move he could make?”

  I shrugged. “He could send out a fleet, maybe. A force strong enough to order us to submit to his will. Or something else—something I haven’t even thought of yet.”

  “What are we going to do about it?”

  We both looked at one another. Her pose was relaxed, crouching there in the window, but I could see her eyes were troubled. I forced a thin smile.

  “Don’t worry. I’m building a fleet of my own.”

  “We only have three hundred marines. After you train every last one of them to pilot a ship, what will we do then?”

  I frowned, she had a good point. My battle station was operational, and I was convinced it could stop a small Macro invasion consisting of one hundred ships or less. It couldn’t be at both ends of the star system at once, however.

  “We could built a second station at the Helios ring.”

  She shook her head. “Where would you get the raw resources?”

  “That’s the problem. At the other ring, we don’t have a handy planetoid to mine and provide all the metals and fuels we need. Hell, we don’t even have any real idea if this one can stop the Macros when they come again. How big will the next enemy flotilla be when it finally arrives? It’s unnerving, having no true concept of the extent of the enemy empire or their forces.”

  “Intel has still produced nothing?”

  “Exactly squat.”

  “Then we have to guess, and guess right.”

  I nodded, unhappy that I was the one doing the guessing. The Macros didn’t keep rolled up maps or computer files on hard disks, explaining their plans. As closely as we could determine after dissecting their artificial brains, they didn’t have a grand central plan. They operated like a termite mound. Each individual linked with whatever others were available. Each piece of the puzzle did its part without central command beyond the local area, which at most consisted of a star system. In a sense, they were centralized and decentralized at the same time. Whatever Macro forces were close enough to one another to coordinate did so automatically, but they had no discernible grand strategy, other than the outcome of their programming.

  I’d once theorized there was another kind of Macro, a Macro-Superior. But now, I’d abandoned the idea. The enemy did appear to become smarter when there were a lot of them in close proximity. But this was apparently due to their design, not the existence of a Macro-Superior. When the machines came close to one another, they automatically linked up and each shared part of its processing time with the others. This process formed what we called “Macro Command”. In a sense, when I communicated with Macro Command, I was talking to all of them in the local region at once. There was no single super-macro that held the role of leadership.

  Logic dictated that smaller groups should be dumber, and that there would be a lack of grand strategy. They had no overall plan, just sets of heuristic rules to follow. Still, this disadvantage didn’t seem to bother them all that much. Individual colonies were very effective at building up forces until they metastasized to the next star system along the chain of rings. They didn’t need a grand strategy, which was difficult to maintain over such a vast region of space anyway. If each little soldier robot did his job, the effective end result was a steamrollering force of endless machines.

  I had no way of knowing how big the next fleet would be, which left a gnawing sensation of worry in my gut. I knew the battle station could hold against the invasion fleets I’d seen in the past, but maybe they’d been scouting missions on the fringe of a vast amorphous blob of star systems.

  “I’m flying out tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll hit the inner planets, and see how our exploration teams are doing. Will you be coming with me?”

  Finally, she gave me a full-fledged smile. “Just try to stop me. I’m sick of this ghost-filled station. The air still smells canned no matter how many algae tanks you run it through.”

  We left, and headed back to our quarters. Sandra hadn’t been too happy about my recent associations with Captain Sarin, but she’d gotten over it once Jasmine had left the system. This was a positive for me, as I had my girlfriend back and she was sharing my bed again.

  As our simulated, preprogrammed nighttime fell over the station, the hull creaked and rattled in odd ways. The inner layers of the station were thick, layered metal, but the outer armor was a blanket of raw bedrock. The combination never stopped shifting, as the various metal sectors expanded and contracted in reaction to sources of radiation. To make things worse the station rotated slowly, exposing new portions of the exterior to the star’s radiation then to the cold of deep space in turn.

  Sandra and I had become used to the noises and weren’t deterred in making some unusual sounds of our own. I think knowing we were getting off the station in the morning energized us both.

  As a newly rebuilt man, I was able to keep up with Sandra in bed now. I thought to myself when we’d finished how pleasant it would be not to wake up bruised and chafed the next morning.

  But our happy farewell party to the battle station didn’t last all the way to morning. Long before the night shift was over, the klaxons wailed and yellow flashers went off in our bedroom. The lights bathed our sweaty bodies in a rhythmic amber glow.

  -2-

  The klaxons forced all thoughts of sleep from my mind. Still naked and slick with sweat, I slapped a wall with four fingers and a thumb. A channel-bump welled up in response, pressing against my forefinger as the wall’s smart metal interface identified me and brought up valid options. I applied pressure to the bump, and a voice began speaking from the dim walls of my chambers.

  “Sir? Colonel Riggs?”

  “Go ahead, Welter,” I said.

  Commander Welter was my exec on the station and led the bridge team when I was off-duty. I wasn’t surprised to hear his voice, but I was a little irritated. I’d just fallen asleep. I thought to myself hazily that this had better not be a minor malfunction. Welter was an excitable officer who tended to sweat the details. This trait made him an attentive exec, but he was also something of a pain.

  “Scout one has returned to base, sir. They’ve made a sighting.”

  “How many ships? What type?” I asked, sitting up in bed and shoving my feet in the general direction of my boots. The boots sensed my feet, recognized their beloved owner and immediately wrapped themselves around my flesh in a perfect fit.

  “I’m going over the report now,” Welter said. “Give me ten seconds.”

  “What’s going on, Kyle?” Sandra whispered behind me.

  I shrugged, struggling to get my pants to activate next. My chest piece was getting frisky, and tried to grab me, but I dodged. Smart clothes were great, but a little tricky at times. I still wasn’t sure the design was the best. They didn’t always understand when I wanted to stay nude, such as when I crossed the cabin to take a shower. They occasionally sprung traps on me, reaching out from closets or from where I’d dropped them on the floor.

  “Dammit,” I muttered, shaking off my jacket. I had to have my pants on first to ensure a good seal. If we were going into battle soon, I wanted the suit to work in the case of a sudden loss of pressure. My jacket didn’t give up. It clung to my elbow, pulling out a few dozen arm hairs. When smart clothing went into target-acquired mode, it was
like being wrapped up in packing tape.

  “Colonel?” Welter asked, coming back on the channel. “We’ve got one ship incoming. An unknown class from the Crustacean water-moons.”

  “Just one ship?” I demanded. “Why the klaxons for one ship? Is it really big or something?”

  “No sir, not according to the report. It’s about the size of one of our cruisers.”

  I nodded. “That is big, but not panic-worthy. Are they transmitting?”

  “Yes sir, they claim they’re on a mission to provide ‘understanding and clarity’.”

  I frowned. “Is this a diplomatic mission?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I asked for them to provide some immediate understanding and clarity before they arrived. The scouts relayed the message, and they simply repeated they’re coming to ‘personally enlighten’ us.”

  “That’s just great,” I said, “What’s this ship’s ETA?”

  “Six hours or so.”

  I grunted in disgust, finally getting my jacket under control enough to allow my pants to wrap me up first. “Six hours? You set off the all-hands alarm for a single diplomatic ship that’s six hours out?”

  “Just following orders sir—your orders.”

  I broke the connection and muttered something unpleasant about Welter’s heritage.

  Sandra stood beside me, naked and gorgeous. “Aren’t you going to take a shower? Sounds like you have the time—and you could seriously use a shower, Kyle.”

  I sighed heavily. She was right. I slapped the disrobe points on my clothing, which fell back onto the floor in a trembling heap. I hopped away gingerly before the jacket could get any ideas and headed for the shower stalls.

  Freshly washed but slightly sleepy, I marched through a series of nanite doors. The doors dissolved as I came near, and some of the thicker, automated bulkheads hissed open then slammed down behind me with a clang. When I reached the bridge my staff had already assembled there.