Interstellar Starpilots Read online

  Interstellar Starpilots

  Into the Core Worlds

  F. Stephan

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, events, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 F. Stephan

  All rights reserved.

  Foreword

  Hello and welcome to the Federation. This book is the direct sequel to Human Starpilot. I recommend to read the former first as the two books form a complete story arc. But if you wish, you can proceed directly and you will find what you need to know in this book regardless.

  Welcome to the core data Sphere

  The Core Data Sphere is the knowledge repository shared freely by the Federation with all.

  The year is 3180. Check unit of measures for details.

  Please find below all articles relevant to your query “Brian Evans, training as interstellar pilot.” The first articles will provide preliminary background information on the Six young Pilots from Earth; full accounts as gathered at that time are supplied afterward.

  Brian Evans – initial training on Adheek

  Brian Evans is one of the six young adults from Earth to train as starpilots for the Federation after Contact.

  At first, he found it hard to acclimate to the academy. New friends, new lovers, and new enemies made his life quite difficult. But, little by little, he adapted and demonstrated unique abilities, such as the creation of a link across space with Emily, a fellow student.

  This led the academy to send him as an apprentice on a trade route with Captain Derantor on the ship TheOldCow. There, he faced pirates from the rogue planet Lelet and an AncientsAI on the planet Fizhert. That mad being had been awakened by the Origin Cult, a powerful sect, and had used Nanites to destroy the human settlement.

  Brian barely survived that trip. Yet he also found five Ancient starships and gained, due to the Federation’s finders’ rules, one ship for Earth and one ship for himself. With this success, he was allowed to go on to the Core Federation World to train as an interstellar pilot.

  Ancients

  The Ancients were a powerful human civilization, centered on a powerful empire, which disappeared ten millennia ago in a noticeably brief period. Only relics survived that period, including starships now used by the Federation.

  Details of this civilization’s downfall were not known at this time in history and the knowledge of the Imperium was limited.

  Contact

  In 2034, the Federation contacted Earth, following its standard procedure, and offered its assistance in managing the ecological collapse. At that time, Earth was desperate. In return for the help, all Earth had to do was to provide starpilots, needed to run all the ships linking the different planets together.

  The Federation

  The Federation originates from the planet Alkath and tries to link all human planets together by sharing knowledge, including trade routes, in the Core Data Sphere. At the time of this story, the Federation was barely ahead of Earth in terms of technology, relying on rare and precious artifacts from the Ancients. Those artifacts included the spaceships themselves. Earth did not own any—no ships, no artifacts of any kind.

  The Federation still relies on a standard charter and has minimal requirements for joining. But its level of support to a planet depends on the contribution of that planet to the global economy in the form of starpilots and goods. All pilots are bound by their contract to the laws of the Federation.

  Nanites

  Nanites were specialized nano-robots, inherited from the Ancients, which granted immense power to people who could control and withstand them. They received the nanites in three injections, one per year, which gave their bearers time to adjust.

  In normal situations, they were dormant, inactive within their bearers’ bodies.

  When activated, which required a specific set of actions, different for each pilot, they would enhance the senses, strength of mind and body, and would even enable the bearer to change his own form. To provide all of this, they used huge amounts of energy from their hosts, potentially consuming them in the process.

  If a bearer lost control over his nanites, they could transform him randomly, changing his mind or his shape, depending on their type. If let loose, they would find a weak host and transform him according to their needs. Military nanites were especially dangerous.

  They were banned in 3121.

  Six young Pilots from Earth

  The first group of students flew in 2037 to the distant planet of Adheek, including six young adults, accompanied by an ambassador, Don Mariano, and his assistant, Mathias Huckendorf.

  You will find more details on Brian Evans here.

  Emily Cattlin, the brightest of them all, decided after graduation to go on to the central worlds of the Federation to become an interstellar starpilot.

  Natalya Podorovski, nicknamed Tasha, who had lost her father in an ecological crisis on Earth, graduated as full starpilot but decided to come back to Earth. She would support Wilfried and Leopold, allowing them to fly, and would care for her family.

  Li Bao Jiang became addicted to nanites and was forbidden any further use, due to the risk of losing control and dying.

  Wilfried Bauer reacted badly to the first injection of nanites and had to stop the injections. He would be able to pilot but in an extremely limited manner, only within the solar system. He later trained as an observer, a special law enforcer among pilots in charge of the fight against nanite abuse.

  Leopold Sengare got scared and asked to stop the injection at the same time, and was thus doomed to the same restrictions.

  Starpilots

  Why were these pilots so valuable at that period? They were the only link across all human worlds, and very few humans could become one of them.

  To jump across hyperspace, a pilot needs to force a singularity, an anomaly in the space-time structure, to create a breach in space and then carry a ship through. The injection of nanites, deadly for most people, enabled him to carry out such a mission.

  There were two levels of pilots. Starpilots cross space within a star system in small jumps. Interstellar starpilots cross space between star systems in longer jumps, which required a lot more concentration and ability. Three academies, on Adheek, Baol, and Alkath, trained starpilots. Only one, the one on Alkath, trained interstellar starpilots.

  The situation would only change later.

  Units of Measure

  The Core Data Sphere automatically adjusts the time and date to the planet of the reader. Even then, many different calendars may exist simultaneously. In this extraction, the years and months are based on the Earth Gregorian calendar. The purpose is to show events occurring at the same time in different locations since time is, in here, of the essence.

  Standard calendar refers to the Ancient main calendar.

  The distances are based on the current standard Federation decimal system of digits, yards, and klicks. One hundred digits to a yard and a thousand yards to a klick.

  PART 1

  ADHEEK SECTOR

  Prologue

  Imperial Research Center Crimson, 3565 Standard Calendar

  The station had been hidden inside a dense asteroid field on the outer edge of an isolated system. There were no habitable planets around the blue star. The single human presence was a lonely refueling station that orbited on the other side of the giant sun in the habitable zone and closer to the main trade routes. Few ships ever came around to that field.

  To further protect it, the research lab could only be reached through a single path calculated in the confusion of rocks crashing perpetually one upon another. The central
station’s computer updated it constantly on a tiny satellite outside the field. Any newcomer had to know precisely where the satellite, only three yards wide, was to request from it the entry point and the course that led to the docking port. Going in without that path could only result in instant death. But when a ship reached the asteroid, an impressive sight rewarded it. The station had been built inside one of the larger rocks, fifty klicks wide, and the docking area was a deep cave that, from the outside, looked just like the den of a fantastic beast. Coming in at the correct speed, the ship was grappled and secured to the walls while exit tubes allowed passengers to reach the inhabited section. Two great caves, one for a hydroponic farm and the other for the research labs, had been dug with all the living quarters and control rooms between them. Gravity here was artificial, using a tiny singularity, a stable black hole, to disrupt the normal continuum of space. If some constructions of the Imperium were of grandiose scale, this one was an intimate cocoon of rock, protected, self-sufficient, capable of sustaining life indefinitely.

  In the central control room, at the highest level of the inhabited part, a tall woman, beautiful and muscular, sat in a cozy chair, legs crossed, frowning at an array of consoles in front of her. She was dressed in a classy dark suit that contrasted with her pale silver skin. Her long dark hair was tied in a long braid. She wore a diamond necklace and a matching bracelet. Both had been crafted to highlight one star surrounded by four planets grouped in a ring, a symbol that could also be found on the ceiling above her. The room itself was decorated with paintings hanging on all walls over a wood flooring. A large window on one side overlooked a vast garden with apple trees, flooding the room with natural light. On the other side, another window showed the different labs from above. In contrast, the console was nearly dark, with a very few lights blinking here and there.

  A door opened silently, and a man walked in without a sound. He was tall also, and there was a haunted look in his eyes when he approached the console. His eyes were deeply set with sorrow and he wasn’t shaved properly. She had known him to be muscular in the past but found him beefy today. Brother, you aren’t spending enough time at the gym! she thought in sudden disgust.

  “Sister? You called me?” he asked in a muffled voice, and the words sounded harsh, as if he hadn’t spoken in a long time.

  “We’ve got visitors.” Her voice was soft and musical, yet calm and betrayed no emotions. With a delicate handshake, she called up a large 3-D image in the middle of the room. In it, an Imperial battleship was blasting rocks one by one, pushing its way forward into the field toward them.

  He circled the projection for a few minutes before muttering angrily. “Are they joking? Are they really trying to force their way through?”

  “If they continue like this, they will find us, sooner than you’d think.” She was upset by the whole setup. She hadn’t expected to find herself trapped and chased by her own soldiers. Yet, she remained focused on the current situation.

  “No, they won’t. Fools. Do they know who they attack?” He was shrieking now. “Do they know we are their emperors?” He had always liked being the older brother, playing at war.

  “They seem to. They are sending threats on all channels, asking us to surrender the antidote. Maybe we should.” Guilt gnawed at her still. She showed him the video they had sent. Ten men and women, visages changing shape every few minutes, were shouting barely coherent instructions. Their nanites, a red cloud of minuscule robots only visible with her enhanced awareness, had taken hold of them and they had barely any sanity left.

  “They’re too far gone. We can’t cure them anymore.” His analysis was clear, reason coming back to him. His voice had gone from anger to utter coldness in a second, and he began giving instructions. He had activated his own nanites, and a dark cloud of nanorobots extended from him into the console. Sharp and quick orders were given there on the enemy’s bridge. The crowd milled around, lost in its own madness. “They are our own forces, betraying us, turning againt us. Where are our defense forces? We should have fighters on guard.”

  “Brother?” She looked at him in surprise. “The Imperium has crumbled into ashes in the last years.”

  “What?” The look of surprise in his eyes could not be feigned. After having lived for so long, they had developed a way to clean away cumbersome memories. This time, her brother had gone too far, denying reality.

  “We don’t know what happened. People lost control over his nanites suddenly. Some went berserk and killed everyone in sight. Other were eaten away, becoming nothing more than drops of water. Nanoplagues erupted, killing everyone in sight. Always that red swarm of bots you see on the screen.”

  His eyes focused more, his hands now meshed into the console by the dark nanobots. “Yes, I’ve been working on those red bots for a long time now.”

  “We are isolated here, in our most secure center. We tried to send the antidote back, but the madmen blew our ship on its way.” Somehow, they had survived the fall of the Imperium thanks to those people. They had no way back to their capital. What happened? Why did their nanites get so out of control? Why such madness? Everything seemed so quiet and stable. She had asked these question over and over, pouring over records with her console while he looked for an antidote in the gene labs. “The same kind as this crew, probably,” she added with a sigh.

  “No pity for them then. Our team was unarmed, on a relief mission. Death unto their murderers.” His rage was now ice, burning cold, his eyes wild. She couldn’t bring herself to explain to him that forty years had passed since the beginning of the downfall and the murder of their crew.

  The battleship had stopped a full light-seconds outside of the asteroid field and launched a plasma bolt every minute in their general direction. At a command, twelve explosions sent asteroids directly toward the ship, all converging to intercept at the same exact time. He also launched a missile from the station, hiding it behind the rocks. Her brother adjusted in an easy fluid movement the sequence of operations and took a step back, watching.

  “Won’t be long now, little sister. Don’t worry.” His smile was wolfish. She had never liked that part of him, the bestial predator lurking behind the bright mind and the charismatic personality.

  The battleship began blasting the asteroids into shreds, which created a swarm of little rocks heading their way, masking the missile. The rocks couldn’t breach the ship’s armor; they flew by, leaving it intact. But the missile detonated at close range, breaching the hull and destabilizing the singularity. In a split second, the black hole collapsed upon itself, carrying the ship with it. She looked at the main clock. Only half an hour had elapsed.

  She looked bitterly at the empty space. “Here goes the last remaining battleship of the Imperium. All we worked so hard to build, leaving us in a ball of fire. Back to the beginning.”

  Her brother began to laugh, first a cackle and then a burst of mad guffaws. He left her bridge without another word to her to bury himself in his research laboratory once again.

  She sat alone, tears in her eyes, looking repeatedly at the last images, red robots flying madly everywhere.

  Brian

  Adheek, 2140 AD, June

  “Hyperspace jump minus five minutes. Final checks. Is the jump point free?” The words broke the silence that had fallen over the bridge of the Iambignow. Suddenly, the crew moved to their consoles and a 3-D image appeared in a rush. The captain was fidgeting with his console, waiting for his answers. Around him, the crew sat facing the five metal consoles controlling the whole ship. Every task could be handled by voice command from anywhere within the habitable section, but protocol dictated they should be at their posts in case they needed to take manual control of the ship.

  Brian activated his bracelet and linked silently to Emily. “Why is he so nervous? He’s making everyone edgy.” She looked beautiful, slender and slightly smaller than him. Her auburn curly hair fell lightly over her shoulders, highlighting her delicate green eyes. She had also added t
o her uniform a silver and red brooch, her own brand on the standard uniform.

  “Wouldn’t you be, if you were in his boots today?”

  “What? Captain Derantor was always so cool.” He really enjoyed working with Emily. She had welcomed him, the engineer from the poor side of Chicago, the uncertain pilot from the academy, without second thought and had turned him into a decent pilot effortlessly.

  “Not the same situation today. Give him some slack.” Her reminder was gentle, but she was clearly annoyed. “Check your numbers. One hundred billion humans in the Federation, one thousand interstellar pilots, forty academy masters. And today, one master and eight potential pilots on his ship. That’s a lot of eyes watching over his shoulder. On top of that, we’re flying straight to the Central Academy, to Alkath itself. He doesn’t want any bad marks on his performance.” She smiled at him from the other side of the bridge. The students gathered along the walls, watching the procedure with Master Heikert, their teacher at the Star Academy in Adheek.

  “Jump point is stable and clear. No incoming ship from the other side, no outgoing ships.” The voice rang in the large room. Again, solemn and formal. Smile, man, it won’t hurt! Brian had enjoyed the relaxed discipline in theoldcow. His parents had never been formal, never cared for it, NorAm middle-class citizen, independent minded and distrustful of any authority, and he chafed under the rigid atmosphere of this ship. His sister would have done better here. She was now a Conglomerate high performer, always had been the bright star of the family, until fate had put him forward on this interstellar job. Irony bit him as he thought about her.