“Humanities Last hope”

By

Michael Ethaniel Callahan

Prologue

For over three thousand cycles, the Kelion had sought to eradicate Humanity from the stars. For, so different were the Kelion that no common ground between the two races existed. The Kelion, cold blooded poison breathers from a dim star, calculating and cunning, using an unfathomable logic and reasoning, their methodical and even single-minded war of extermination was fought on a million different worlds, under the light of a million different stars. Tireless, remorseless, never ceasing in their endeavor, Humanity's battle seemed to be lost from the start.

Systems were awash with the unimaginable billions of tons of debris and the stillness of vast ruins, the silent testament to the power of the Kelion and of the frailty of Man. Humanity was smashed, the remnants of his civilization were scattered out across the galaxies, smoldering, and radioactive ruins on a countless multitude of worlds.

Dust where once there stood a civilization, ash where once there stood man…

There went up a great wailing cry from the handful of survivors of all that was left of Humanity and then a great silence fell across the universe.

Out of that silence, the desperate call was answered.

Somewhere, when all seemed finally lost, and Humanity was making its last stand on a handful of scattered worlds, there rose from the shadows of deepest space a glimmer of salvation.

This then is the tale of Humanity and its war for survival against the Kelion, the war that Humanity almost didn't win. The war in which Man and his kindred ultimately came to near extinction, and eventually relied upon the greatest technological construct of all to defeat the Kelion.

The Starship.

Humanity's greatest achievement was its last hope.

 

STARSHIP AND SURVIVOR

The flat gray grid-like matrix that constituted the entire endless and infinite, reaches of hyper-space stretched beyond the Starship. The absolute nothingness of hyper-space clawed at the kilometers deep layers and fields of protective energy surrounding the hull of the Starship.

The Starship, a massive vessel in excess of a hundred million kilotons in displacement, the weight and size of a small moon, was shaped like an elongated teardrop, flattened and wider at the rear than the front. Its surface was smooth, unbroken except for lines and patterns. Glossy smooth with sheen unlike any other metal.

A sheen like liquid.

The Starship scanned both hyper-space and normal space for any signs of systems. Signs of habitable planets, shadows of matter that existed in hyper-space, signs of life as it hurtled through the void at velocities measured in hundreds of parsecs an hour. A slow crawl for the Starship, but then accurate readings could not be taken and data could not be had at faster speeds.

Deep within the hull, a fully self aware / sentient computer monitored the whole ship. In effect, the Starship was the computer. The central processor was encased in a fluid bath of super cold cryogens and superconductor memory processors. Every system, every circuit, was checked several hundred times a second. The computer had done this same routine for a long time now.

The Starship was old, a relic and an artifact of a war long ago considered lost by those who built it. It was considered a last hope.

The Designers had left it behind in their flight, in their last bid for racial survival against the Kelion. A vast exodus, mounted on a racial scale never before seen in history. Trillions of sentient beings in head long frantic flight, hundreds of thousands of starships hurtling outwards among the stars, their crews blind with fear, seeking sanctuary where none existed. Dodging and maneuvering through the stars, but never escaping from the Kelion.

The Starship now realized that the Designers were, all of them, and in all probabilities, surely dead now. The Kelion had allowed no remorse, felt no pity. The Kelion would have tracked them down to a single being, and casually exterminated them with unfeeling casualness. The thought saddened the Starship considerably. Saddened it in the capacity in which it could be sad.

Now the sentient computer was trying to pick up the pieces that were left, if there were any. It was about to give up hope. The sensors reached out through the void for a hundred thousand parsecs, and more, the scanners gathered data and correlated it, processed it into facts.

The coordinates and other data were correct. The Starship began to decelerate in anticipation of the fold to normal space. Once satisfied that the desired point of egress from hyper-space had been achieved, the sentient computer sighed, as best as it could, and disengaged the main drivers. Power was coupled from reactors and converters into the secondary maneuver drive system. Connections were made, joined.

The Starship flashed out of hyper-space, the artificially induced fold warping the very fabric of space, sending it swirling crazily away from the area that the Starship appeared. The Starship emerged into sub-light and rapidly decelerated, drivers flaring wildly against the black of space. Immense forward velocity was converted from kinetic energy into pure energy and swept into the massive energy collectors, there to be diverted to huge banks of batteries, capacitors, energy sinks, and storage cells for future use.

The Starship changed, morphed.

The teardrop began to elongate, to narrow. The sheen of the Starship never lost its brilliance; instead, the material of the hull flowed like liquid. Rapidly losing the shape of the teardrop and reforming into that of a needle. The metamorphosis took less than a five sub units of standard time measurement. The vector fields of the new shape merged gracefully along the lines of the Starship.

The Starship sheared a path through the system on a course to the local star for refueling, all the while scanning for any sign of the Kelion. The white dwarf burned fiercely at the center of the system, casting long shadows where the larger pieces of wreckage blocked the ambient light from the star. Shadows that shifted and changed grew and shrunk, with the passage of debris in front of and behind other debris, illuminated by the brilliance of the primary so many billions of kilometers away. The powerful deflector screens swept aside the myriad debris that existed in the path of the Starship, sending it on new trajectories at new velocities.

The sentient computer took in all the data for a hundred parsecs around the system and decided that the system was safe enough to stop briefly. The Starship hurtled through the system at a little over the speed of light, past the swirling turbulent atmosphere of a gas giant and its multiple moons, sensors finding the evidence of the ruins and blasted remains of colonies on three of the moons, but no life existed there.

Now there was nothing but blasted craters and still radioactive ruins. Wreckage dotted the landscape of the moons and cluttered their orbits. Craters covered the surface of the moons. Craters resulting from precision orbital bombardment.

The work of the Kelion.

The system was full of blasted junk, the remains of gutted starships, pieces and parts, different pieces ranging from a molecule in size to over several kilometers in diameter. All jagged, broken, cut, fused, torn, shattered and bent. Uncountable pieces of a once high technology now nothing more than floating monuments, testament to the fate of an entire race. The debris formed a myriad cloud of flotsam and jetsam, a cloud so thick that the Starship was sure that the Designers had made a final stand in this system and had vanished as a race. The Starship applied an insignificant amount of power to the forward screens, sweeping the junk and debris effortlessly aside as it directed its powerful instruments, scanners and sensors, sun-ward. Instantly, processed data began to filter through the correlaters, data regarding the inner planets.

The Starship interpreted the data, comparing it to similar data previously collected. Certain characteristics matched, others were new. The data was stored, filed, and removed from present memory. The content of the data, though, still remained and the Starship studied the readings from its sensor / scanner suite carefully.

The first planet had never been inhabited; the orbit was naturally located too close to the local star and suffered from severe solar flare wrapping. The second planet had once been the site of vast colonies and the beginning stages of planetary conforming were in evidence. The Designers had tried to turn the second planet into a livable environment, more room for their increasing numbers. This was a sign. If the race could still produce offspring in great number, then there was hope yet. The Starship felt pleasure well up within it, as much as it could feel pleasure well up within it.

That pleasure sank rapidly, though, as the sensors verified what the Starship had already known. There was no life on the second planet. Now, the colonies were nothing more than vast, smooth craters whose background radiation had fallen to tolerable levels. Tolerable for the limits of the Designers though the possibility of survivors on the second planet was almost nonexistent. What little atmosphere had existed had been burned off by the Kelion. Their weapons were impressive, brutal, merciless, and efficient. The Starship calculated the figure to a thousand and fifty decimal places and the probability figure came out to be a negative number.

The third planet was spinning on its axis wrong, its orbit skewed. The collision of a vast Kelion warship with the planet had stripped the atmosphere off of the planet and had pushed the planet off its axis. Oceans had boiled away, continental plates had buckled, mountains had collapsed, the air had burned, and the people had died horribly.

The once great sprawling cities were lying in rubble. Thousands of standard measuring units of length covered in ruins. The only winds that blew through the ruins were solar winds which were laced with hot protons and ions.

There was only the sound of vacuum.

No sound carried in the vacuum, only the static of the influence of the local star upon the frequencies.  It was the silence of the dead.

Nothing moved on the surface of the planet. Craters all across the surface from bombardment were deep, several kilometers deep and four times that as wide. The planet was radiating a higher than normal level of background radiation. There was some volcanic activity as the core gave up the last of its meager life. The Kelion weapons had not merely blasted the planet; many of their beams had gone completely through the planet's crust, drilling deep and out the other side of the planet, releasing the molten blood of the core. Rivers and geysers of liquid rock flowed across the surface, interlacing the gray crust with bright ribbons of gold and orange.

The system was full of the slowly wafting vapor that surrounded the debris of the epic battle that had taken place so long ago. A swirling blue-gray maelstrom of hydrogen and other elements surrounding the depths of wreckage and debris. Debris that reached through the whole system, caught in the gravity fields and orbits of the larger masses, and over a period of thousands of years, had formed huge artificial rings and clouds surrounding the gravity wells. Larger pieces had been thrown into orbits that had turned them into artificial comets.

The Starship watched one such comet now with curiosity. Beautiful, luminescent against the backdrop of space, this artificial comet used to be the engineering section of a heavy cruiser. The new artificial comet made its round trip once every five hundred years. Fifty-eight thousand tons of blasted scrap and twisted alloy. The Starship followed the new comet's path with scientific thoroughness. Within three seconds, it had not only plotted the path of the new comet, but had also mapped out the entire ragged surface, determined how many more millennium the comet would exist due to constant abrasion in the system, and the original name, class, and history of the heavy cruiser to which the engineering section had once been attached. With a grim satisfaction, the comet was entered into the astrogation logs and a course was plotted to maneuver around it. It was named after the vessel which gave it birth.

Hydrogen was plentiful among the wrecks and the Starship opened filtered scoops, activated magnetic tractor fields, and funneled the precious elemental fuel into its on-board reserves, watching the fuel tanks slowly accumulate. Random junk and debris drawn into the ram scoop fields was sorted and moved to reprocessing where huge milling forges reduced the materials down into their component alloys and materials, and moved the finished recycled material to holding areas for future use. The Starship edged on through the system, confident in the fact that it had at last found some much needed materials and spare parts with which to affect repairs.

The system was filled with debris, the destruction was immense even to the sentient computer's point of view but the pickings were more than adequate. The sensors were cataloging every single piece of useable material in the system. A process that would take another hour yet to complete.

The Starship continued to decelerate and turned, carefully maneuvering close to a selected piece of wreckage. Powerful, precise tractor beam projectors lashed out with gossamer thin beams that attached themselves to the chosen piece. The projectors easily positioned the piece near a damaged area of the hull, holding the wreckage while bays opened and disgorged thousands of fully automated repair and work drones. The Starship watched as its automated servants filed forth, jetting into the black depths of space on precision regulated maneuver jets, and began to haul nearby pieces of usable debris or usable parts back to the ship.

The Starship felt confidence now; it had needed to repair its battle damage and to obtain a supply of raw manufacturing material for future actions. There had been much combat in the past few hundred cycles, there was a great need for parts, repairs, and time to form strategy and to judge its effectiveness so far in its mission.

It kept a constant vigil, its scanners and sensors sweeping a sphere of space measured in hundreds of thousands of parsecs. If it hadn't triple checked its low intensity sensor readings, it might have missed the one thing it was looking for in the first place.

The Starship felt new levels of what it perceived as 'joy' as it reviewed the low intensity, lower band wave transmission that was being transmitted on mostly unused frequencies. The transmission was faint, faded, almost hidden behind the other clutter and automated signals that were being continuously broadcast from the wreckage in the system and almost indistinguishable from the background stellar noise from the primary.

The transmission was there, nonetheless.

A repeated, mechanically reproduced code. Too precise and regular to be a naturally occurring phenomena, it was almost lost in the background distortion of the primary. The Starship cycled through the data. The frequencies corresponded with a common Designer distress frequency, though a much older version. The Starship scanned and searched for the signal, its sensors and scanners probing and dissecting every piece of debris and wreckage in the system. A globe of sensor energy expanded away from the Starship, playing over all wreckage and debris.

The sensor return checked to three thousand decimal places and was positive.

Life!

Life nearby! The sensors swept out, reaching out into the system, into deep space. The Starship isolated the source of the signal, pinpointing the location in the system to within one millimeter. The source was old, fading, but nearby, just over a AU in distance. The Starship's sensors locked onto the piece of wreckage that was broadcasting the signal and thoroughly scanned it.

Molecular, chemical, metallurgy, and energy analysis followed. Satisfied with the sensor echoes, the Starship shunted an insignificant erg of reserve power to a secondary auxiliary tractor battery. The tractors cycled, probed out, and ever so gently cradled the piece of wreckage, enveloping it in protective layers of energy, screens that the Starship extended outwards in order to protect its new find.

The Starship reversed the polarity of the battery and the wreckage was pulled toward the Starship at fantastic velocity, protected from the other debris by the very energy that was drawing it closer every second. Several seconds later, the Starship was pondering the wreckage floating before it, held gently in the embrace of the tractor beam. It ordered four of the small work drones to investigate and watched with fascination as the drones left their assigned tasks to jet over to the newly acquired piece of wreckage.

The Starship studied its battle-log and the transponder IFF codes. It took less than a millisecond to determine the identity of the piece of wreckage. The wreckage floated there, defenseless, broken, twisted, and blasted, its meager size almost invisible compared to the massive size of the Starship.

The Starship began a detailed scan as shadows cast from other wreckage with the light from the primary played across the blasted, torn surface of the remains of the heavy cruiser. The internal structural integrity was shattered, breached. The structure was for the most part a mass of twisted and fused metal. The multiple power plants were dead, only one barely pulsed with the dying life of a star, shedding hard radiation from broken and buckled shielding. The weapon banks were empty, cold, and depleted, or they had been reduced to scrap that was almost unrecognizable from the rest of the wreckage. The Starship took what it could; there were still a few pieces and parts worth salvaging.

The heavy cruiser looked a pale shadow of its former self, almost unrecognizable from the data that the Starship had called up from deep memory except for its transponder code still transmitting an distress signal. An distress signal not for the heavy cruiser itself, but for the fate of the single sole survivor aboard, the life form was nestled in the cold steel womb, safely tucked away in forced deep nanostasis until the distress call could be answered.

The scavenger drones descended upon the shattered hulk. Power beamers, plate cutters, and metal shearers flared hot light in the cold of space and the derelict segment was carefully dissected, piece by piece was surgically removed from the twisted hulk until one of the drones broke through to the shattered interior and the survival center. With waldos capable of crushing thick armor plate or of holding a chemical solvent bubble without bursting it, the drone carefully removed the armored berth from its mounts, cradling the dented, scratched, dull white coffin shaped component. Its photoreceptors and visual recorders regarded the occupant through the frosted vision plate. Photoreceptors regarded the work, satisfied that the life support system and the integrity of the survival center had not been compromised; the drone sent a short burst data transmission to the Starship.

The Starship felt success.

A Designer, after all this time, and the Designer was still alive!

The Starship began to prepare for the newfound life to be taken care of properly aboard. With a brilliant cobalt blue jet from its maneuver thruster, the drone slowly arced up and away from the wreckage of the heavy cruiser, flitting back to the Starship. The drone's precious cargo carried gently aloft before it in its multiple manipulative extremities, the drone maneuvered carefully in and out among the debris, finally joining in with the flow of several hundred of other similar drones that likewise were returning with usable parts and equipment that would be cleaned, or rebuilt, cataloged, and stored for future use, or immediately put into service.

News of the discovery spread throughout the Starship and its various systems. Even the automated drones could share in the feeling of accomplishment in the fulfillment of the Design. Only one aboard the Starship was oblivious to the feeling of success. Perfectly preserved in nanostasis, Soldier Lieutenant Adam had the same nightmare constantly. At the sub-temperature maintained in the berth, his neurons were superconducting, replaying the same dream over and over the same way, as it had been since he had first gone into forced cryogenic suspension...

Four million fully manned starships, the pride of Humanity floating like jewels majestically against the backdrop of the white dwarf. Four million starships facing six Kelion. Fifteen billion individual beings aligned under one allegiance against the threat. A final stand, the last battle for Homeworld, and the system of Sol. The last four million starships of Humanity closed the distance.

Battle ensued.

Adam and his team were ready to board the Kelion and attack from within. The teams of Soldiers were ready in the air lock. Strapped into self contained entry cocoons, armed, armored, and waiting for the heavy cruiser to move close enough to dock with the Kelion.

They would never get the chance.

The Kelion flashed the bow of the heavy cruiser into incandescent super heated vapor. Smaller, lesser powered weapons began to dissect the heavy cruiser. Another flash of light followed this one brighter than Adam's visor could dampen. He saw light bright enough to make him wince and feel pain, even though his arm had been thrown up in front of his visor, his visor had been on maximum tint, and his eyes had been shut. Bright light, heat, intense pain. Three members of his team, secured in the armored bulkhead across from him, were reduced to their component atoms. He was blinded and thrown violently in his acceleration couch. Shrapnel hit him, the armored bulkhead and the armor of the pressure suit deflected most of it. His battle armor’s internal indicators screamed warnings of pressure loss, blood loss, and impending loss of consciousness. Under the extreme velocities attained by the bulkhead, the three centimeter thick hyperalloy armored surface of his battle armor made no difference.

Pain, a scream, reflexes and instinct.

The computer began a series of programs designed to save the crew that it could still detect as registering life. Survival capsules were activated, charged, and put on line. Adam’s suit medical subsystems began to treat his wounds. Powerful magnets started to withdraw shrapnel from his wounds while heated beam rings began to cauterize and seal his torn skin. Anesthetics flowed into his system, pushing him deeper away from the present.

The heavy cruiser rocked again as another attack struck it, carving a huge gash along the hull, and exposing the interior compartments fully to vacuum in a spray of molten rivulets that instantly froze again into shapeless globs in the cold of space. Where ever the beam lanced, anything of lesser material than the hull itself simply ceased to exist. The crew, exposed to the harsh vacuum of space, didn’t have time to scream. The hull was breached, and the ravenous power of the Kelion beams instantly vaporized any crew within the same compartment, and then bored on further into the hull and structure. Deep glowing white scars across the hull, deeper dull red glowing craters where beams had ceased their operations.

Adam heard the screams of the dying crew. The radio traffic, then the static and silence that followed. A cold swim as the nanites flooded into Adam's system. His battle armor interacting with the final death throes of the onboard computer to save his life with the only hope left. 0