Spindle Station (eBook)

Book 2 of the Alliance Conflict

Jeff Sims (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2015 | 1. Auflage
250 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-68222-813-5 (ISBN)

The Hiriculans have moved a gigantic space station to the very edge of neutral space. It is in the perfect location to spring a surprise invasion on Alliance territories. The Alliance must determine the station's true intent and respond to this latest provocation before it's too late. Captain Solear now has to evaluate an entire crew of humans. Once again, he finds himself directly in the midst of the interstellar conflict. This time, however, he may have to expose his well-kept secret in order to survive.

Chapter 1

Lorano’s communicator buzzed yet again. This was the 3rd time in the last hour he had received a hail from the hangar bay. Lorano sighed in despair and answered it.

“Lorano, we need your help on the assembly line. The electronic boards are not passing the final test,” said Jim Donovan.

Lorano heard another voice in the background say, “I think it is the pressure transducer. The pressure tube isn’t aligning properly between the housing and the board.” He heard a third voice say, “No, it is definitely the solenoid connection. I think we should be soldering the joint instead of relying on a press fit.”

Lorano started to answer and realized that the humans had already broken the connection. He would have preferred to stay in the control room and try to fix the issue via the com panel, but he realized that he would have to personally go down there.

Carank said, “Well, the humans are starting to re-design the gravity missiles. That doesn’t sound good.”

Lorano placed his palm on the weapons cabinet and said a password to unlock it. He took a beam weapon from the cabinet and handed it to Carank. He took a second and tucked it under his shirt. Carank saved his latest project on his work station, grabbed the weapon and stood up. Lorano said, “Let’s go.”

They walked carefully around the large piles of equipment that were waiting to be installed and exited the control room. This equipment would be used to track the missiles once they were fired into hyperspace. The priority at the moment though was properly assembling the missiles that would be used to chart hyperspace.

Lorano contacted the Sunflower and said, “We are going to the landing bay and interacting with the humans. Please have Lexxi monitor us.”

Lexxi responded directly by screaming “Aaaahhh!” She continued, “Do you think I have nothing to do but sit around and monitor you? Just squirt mustard on your head and go in there.”

Lexxi put her giant headphones over her ears and broke the connection without waiting for a response. Realistically though, she really didn’t have anything better to do.

Lorano laughed at her thinly veiled joke and said to the closed communicator, “You are welcome to join us and bring the condiments.”

The Sunflower was on a little-known mission. It wasn’t exactly a secret mission, but very few beings knew where the ship was or what it was doing. The ship had been assigned to assist scientists Lorano and Carank in their search for Old Solaria.

The Sunflower had been stripped of all crew members save Captain Solear, his first officer Clowy, weapons officer Lexxi, and 20 human fighter pilots. The remaining crew members and recently promoted Captain Arean had transferred to a new cruiser called the Dandelion. Ella Birdsong, the pilot, had remained on the supply depot in Conron.

This was technically against an Alliance regulation requiring a minimum of 30 beings to be on board before starting a mission. However, Captain Solear had secret orders that allowed him to temporarily break the regulation.

The planet Solaria was not the home world of the Solarians. They had been forced to abandon their home world approximately 4 millennia ago when it was struck by a severe band of cosmic radiation. The system’s general location had been recorded by the evacuees, but the exact location and name of the planet was lost. The Solarian council had ceremoniously named their home world Old Solaria.

When the Solarians joined the Alliance, they requested that the Alliance Navy try to find their original home world. The Alliance Navy had been searching for the planet on and off for the last two decades. To date though, the search had been fruitless.

However, the outlook had recently changed when Lorano invented a new way to chart hyperspace lanes and search for cosmic bodies. The new method was far, far cheaper and quicker the previous method.

The previous method made use of hyper charting missiles. These were enormous missiles about the size of a fighter that were capable of jumping into hyperspace by themselves. The method was to launch a missile, have it jump to hyperspace and travel to a specific location, chart that location, then open a tiny hyperspace window and send the information back. These missiles were hugely expensive to produce and could only be used one time. Thousands or even tens of thousands of missiles were required to chart a hyperspace lane.

Lorano had created a new type missile that could continuously send back gravity readings as it traveled through hyperspace. From this, they could then create a map of the gravity fluctuations throughout the missile’s flight path. The gravity information wasn’t nearly as good as a detailed scan, but a ship could follow a missile’s path with a high degree of confidence that it wouldn’t smash into anything.

Using Lorano’s method, the same area could be effectively charted using only hundreds of missiles instead of thousands. Plus, each missile was significantly cheaper since it didn’t need a hyperspace generator or advanced communications gear.

Lorano’s idea for locating Old Solaria was to inundate a particular location with gravity reading missiles. The result should be a chart showing areas with high gravity and their relative width and breadth. Once identified, they could follow-up with hyper charting missiles or actual visits to these locations for exact scans.

During his brief stay at the Conron Depot, Lorano reviewed all of the legends and stories about Old Solaria and made note of any that gave a spatial location. The task hadn’t been as arduous as it sounded. There were only a handful of stories that gave a general location of the planet and only one (the monument on Solaria) that gave actual coordinates.

Carank had also been busy. He reviewed all of the previous Alliance Navy searches. He created a multi-layered chart that showed the known astronomical objects such as stars, planets, and meteoroids against the gravity profile of the regions in question. He was searching for any area that had a high gravity spike without a corresponding identified object.

Their research hadn’t yielded any new information or insight, but Lorano had identified four potential areas that he thought were promising. According to the star chart, the obvious place to search for Old Solaria was Trilon.

The old historical records suggested that there may have been a hyperspace jump path between the two systems. Although there is mention of a path, it doesn’t list actual jump coordinates or actually mention Trilon by name. This was strange because Trilon had been discovered before Old Solaria had been evacuated.

The Navy had conducted multiple searches from Trilon and could find no evidence of a previous path to Old Solaria; nor were they able to chart a new one. Every conceivable direction from Trilon was blocked by gravity disturbances and/or cosmic radiation.

The Navy next tried to find a way around the radiation field by starting in Uselon, Waylon, and Dunron. If they couldn’t find the planet by going right to left, perhaps they could stumble upon it by going left to right. They made several, unsuccessful searches from each location.

Since the Fleet had left a hyperspace charting platform in the Waylon system, Lorano agreed with Carank’s earlier assessment that Waylon was the most logical place to begin the new search. Lorano and Carank had boarded the Sunflower in Conron and had made a relatively short series of jumps from Conron to Uselon, and then on to Waylon.

The Waylon system consisted of an average star with five planets. The system was unusual in that all five planets were clustered very close together and were very high in raw materials such as iron ore and polonium. It appeared that at one time the five planets were probably one giant asteroid that was struck by a meteoroid and splintered.

They had arrived in the system approximately two days ago and docked with the hyperspace charting platform. The Sunflower made a complete scan of the system while it was traveling to the platform. The system was unoccupied. They also queried the traffic control buoy; it showed that no traffic had been here since the Navy stopped looking for Old Solaria almost a year ago.

Well, official traffic anyway. Lorano and team had flown the mini-freighter Vista around the outskirts of the Waylon system roughly four months earlier when they were forced to find an alternative hyperspace path from Earth to Conron because the existing hyperspace corridor was ‘accidentally’ damaged and was no longer viable.

The fancily named hyperspace charting platform was in reality simply a drilling platform and its corresponding control sphere and living quarters. The drilling platform wasn’t being used; the team was located in the control sphere. The conversion from mining control sphere to hyperspace charting platform had been straightforward – the Navy had simply dragged the structures to the Waylon system and changed their name.

Lorano and Carank reached the hangar and saw the Sunflower. The Sunflower was docked to an exterior bay right beside the main hangar. It was connected to the station via an airlock. Carank waved at Lexxi as they passed. She couldn’t literally see him, but there was a camera in the corridor and he knew...

Erscheint lt. Verlag	2.12.2015
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Science Fiction
ISBN-10	1-68222-813-4 / 1682228134
ISBN-13	978-1-68222-813-5 / 9781682228135

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