Chapter 1
The void surrounded him, hiding the truth
Voices called to him, calling him to war.
Drums beat, to lead him on
He reached out into the never-ending darkness and found his hand clenched around a gun.
A figure emerged from the darkness, or perhaps he moved forwards, it wasn’t clear.
The figure raised it’s head, reptilian scales revealing it as a VortronWarqueen.
He raised the gun and levelled it at the kneeling creature.
The trigger moved under his finger and a beam of harsh white light smashed into the beast’s face, removing a huge chunk of flesh, leaving a gruesome wound. It was all charred edges and slowly leaking blood around a pulsating grey mass that had once been a brain.
Sakara Frost woke, disgusted.
Every time he had that dream he pulled the trigger, no matter how hard he tried not to, he killed the defenceless creature.
He hated himself for this.
Not only that but the dream was coming more and more often.
He rose in the semi-dark of his room and turned the windows to transparent, filling the space with amber light of dawn. A wide expanse of grass was revealed, beyond which was a large lake complex.
He sighed.
Today they were leaving all this behind to go sell Agri-Tech to a newly established colony on Exlixia. It would mean spending the rest of his teenage years in a relatively backwards community, learning via holo-study instead of in the First Earth Academy as he was at the moment.
But then again, at least he was getting away from the still overcrowded cities that dotted the revitalised surface of Earth.
He walked to his wardrobe and opened the doors, only one set of clothes remained as the rest were already at the spaceport, ready to be packed onto the nine-twenty to Exlixia.
He dressed in the strong carbon-fibre fabric that was used almost exclusively nowadays, but unlike the modern fashion of tight, Star-trek style space suits, he wore loose olive cargo trousers and a dark-beige polo-shirt.
He was six foot four with a mess of limp brown hair tossed haphazardly over his head which, surprisingly, became relatively smart with a few brushes with a nearby comb.
His skin was lightly tanned but his most striking feature were his emerald eyes that stared out from beneath seemingly permanently lowered eyebrows.
Reaching the door, he picked up his hand luggage and popped a toothpaste tablet in his mouth, letting it dissolve before spitting out into the sink and left the room, turning once to regard the four walls that had been his bastion for most of his life.
“Salve et vale.” He whispered before heading downstairs. “Hail and farewell.”
Much had changed since the colonial wars, Earth was no longer the centre of Terran power but just a museum covered rock with a couple of good academies, the true heart of the empire was Empyrion, a giant city covering the whole of the planet’s surface, far out into the western spiral arm, protected behind the colossal might of the Intercolonial Terran Fleet and the giant battle station, The walls of Babylon.
This was because only five years ago the Terran empire had clashed with an alien race over the rights to a planet near the core of the galaxy and war had begun. War packs of Vortron knights and raiders slipped past Terran lines and decimated colonies. On the other hand, Terran forces used biological warfare and developed the EX-120, a highly advanced robot with high level AI and combat training. This was followed by the EX-150 and a new range of robots, the AN-100’s, heavily armoured assault drones that fell in swarms to decimate the bombarded Vortron worlds.
The war had ended the following year and the church of life succeeded the church of blood to power, bringing in an act of interplanetary law declaring that no world with sentient creatures may be colonised or attacked unless the Terran empire comes under attack from identical sentients.
The church of blood retreated to their monasteries and continued to preach all out war and expansion until a young and revolutionary priest became pope and the church of blood fell silent.
Sakara himself was a member of the church of answers, a church followed by many scientists as it preaches that to find the true reasons for their existence they must find out how the universe works and only then will god appear to them and answer their questions.
He had however trained for five years in a church of blood when he was too young to travel with his parents to a newly established colony where they were working and understood many of their beliefs; honour, the constant training to improve oneself, valour and the control of emotions but disagreed with how many members read the book of martyrs. Seeing it as a call to war whilst he saw it as the advancement of the human form and the preparation to defend others.
Other than the church of life, the church of blood and the church of answers, the only other influential churches are the church of Liber, a pagan god of parties and music whose followers opted out of society and lived in camps in forests and other wild places, and also the church of shadows, a strange church followed by a reasonably large number of people but who never preached to the populace, leading to many theories about what went on inside the ink black walls of their churches, human sacrifice, demon summoning and orgies to name but a few theories. The only way to enter this church was to be invited and such invitations were rarely refused.
When Sakara arrived downstairs he walked over to the kitchen and punched in for a light breakfast, receiving a plate of nutrient bars and fresh hyperfruit, a genetically engineered fruit that was not only tasty but also contained nearly all vitamins and ions required for a healthy body. The nutrient bars on the other hand were disgusting and Sakara opened the fridge in the corner of the room and coated the three grey slabs in honey, available only because his father was not only an inventor but also an avid beekeeper.
Sakara returned to the living room and stared out the windows at the view again, a family of swans floated near the shore and an osprey swooped low over the lake hunting for one of the abundant fish in the lake to feed its young.
The dawn light flowed like liquid gold over his skin as the sun rose behind wispy cloud, the remnants of the once choking pollution turning the light a soft amber as the rays pierced the atmosphere for longer than usual.
Skyfire was the name given to this spectacle and as the light shifted and danced over the furniture in the unlit room, Sakara saw why.
“And now we leave this all behind.” came a voice from behind him, voicing his thoughts
He turned to find his sister there, Hannah Frost, black haired with brown eyes, two years younger than him and striking in appearance.
“You read my mind.” He replied
“I read your stance” she retorted, “mind reading is for psychics, stance reading is for psychoanalysts.”
“Decided on a career path then?” he asked
“So what if I have mister jack of all trades?”
“I was thinking of going into pharmacology or biochemistry actually, sister.”
“Fun.” she replied in a sarcastic tone and disappeared into the kitchen to get breakfast, emerging a few minutes later.
Sakara handed her the honey jar and she left again.
His father was the next down, and after having breakfast, headed for his shed to collect the last of his sketches so that he could continue to work on a couple of ideas while in transit. He was an absent minded looking man with mussed up hair and crumpled shirts but once you got to know him he was sharp and focused, always looking for new problems so that he could invent a solution.
His mother on the other hand, an Agri-Tech supplier and co-inventor of the FM-018 auto-harvester and the MP-095 multi-purpose farming mech, was his antithesis. Seemingly smart and focused but below that shell, distracted and constantly worrying about one thing or another.
It took us another hour to get out of the house as she had to check every room and cupboard for anything we’d left behind, which was nothing.
Traf
fic on the southbound was no longer stationary as it had been before the new colonial age. As the Frost family shot past the spires of Cambridge in the fifth tier the only other travellers were the multitude of tour busses traveling out to pick up passengers from the London Spaceport.
They drove a SAAB SkyGracer, one of the most reliable hovercars on the market. Not as fast as the Bugatti Vapour or the Ford Sonic but far more reliable due to it needing only a tier six fusion core instead of an unstable tier ten. It also handled very well in storms and had even been known to fly through hurricanes unharmed.
Hovercar technology works on two principles. The first is the stable and reliable turbofan or rotor system used by the majority of hover-vehicles working via the air displacement system and not requiring that much power when compared to the other system.
This other system is the extremely unreliable and often dangerous system of gravity manipulation initially developed by the D28 the secret projects division of ISF for use with their devastating kinetic rod weaponry used to destroy whole cities from orbit. As the patent is still under D28 control only a few military test vehicles have been recorded attempting to use gravity manipulation to hover, most ending with temporary singularities or permanent gravitational re-alignment for anyone on board. No-one outside D28 knows how the system works, only that it needs extremely powerful fusion cores to power it.
The SAAB of course used turbofans, sporting large air intakes along the sides and bonnet to allow for maximum air intake. It was even propelled by a turbofan unlike most other makes that were propelled by fans or ion thrusters. Its fuel was hydrogen cells.
Fusion power had revolutionised the world. At the end of the twenty third century the world was split into the four major powers of the Chinese Republic, The Neo-Russian Supremacy, The European alliance and the North American confederacy. Many countries such as Britain refused to join the empires of these states and suffered under high export taxes and import costs leading to many countries becoming self sustaining.
It was 2284 when the war broke out. Oil supply was at an all time low and no new source had been discovered for some time. The American Confederacy tried to set up the downfall of their rivals in order to jump in and steal their oil stockpiles after they had been weakened by years of war but it soon became clear that all four states had come up with the same plan and World War three broke out.
It was at this point that the church of life was founded in England. Initially just a group of scientists they expanded into a worldwide movement within the minor countries, collaboration followed, leading to the development of the fusion reactor. These countries agreed to become the Terran republic and defeated the weakened forces of the four superpowers in the same way they had planned to conquer each other.
Some of the countries in the Terran republic thought that they had been pressured into the republic and rebels called it the Neo-British empire, three rebellions followed but all were unsuccessful.
Modern fusion cores were less stable than fusion reactors but far more portable. They are fitted with emergency shut off systems that deactivate the core when it becomes unstable. The latest core is the tier X core, the first variable fusion core that is compatible with any system and any energy level. It is currently in stability testing in the military but recent reports say that it is working better than the tier 14 used on most of their spacecraft.
Sakara stared out the window, forests and plains shot by, glimpses of wildlife, there for an instant then gone for good. The North London church of life shot by, a giant, genetically engineered tree, grown, then hollowed out and furnished.
Then the Shard, a monument to the past, left shattered and crumpled where it had fallen after the middle-eastern rebellion against the Terran Republic.
That had been three years of car bombs, IEDs and suicide bombings, but now only a few people survived who remembered that distant past.
London spaceport was the second largest spaceport in the world, boasting the largest single launch loop in existence. Reaching 80 km into the sky and stretching 2000 km deflector to deflector, the other end of which was in Sicily. It was a monument in glistening steel, held in the air by permanently active turbojets and a rotor system that flung spheres along a 5 cm tube within the launch loop.
The structure was capable of launching payloads with acceleration of 30 ms-2 and launched a payload every half an hour, usually shuttles taking passengers to the starliners waiting in orbit beyond the shining disk that was the Earth’s version of the Walls of Babylon, a battle station known as The Walls of Terra, a structure so large that the moon had had to be moved into a different orbit resulting in lower tides.
The church of life had tried to stop the planning permission but at the time public opinion had been strongly for a defensive battle station above the Earth as it was just after the Vortron war and Earth had been one of the worlds hit by the Vortron.
The family arrived at the west station and boarded the waiting shuttle.
The shuttle was lowered into the loop and prepared for launch, even locked in place there was a jolt when the magnetic field generator was activated, lifting the craft off the floor and trying to accelerate it at 3G.
Once the craft was prepared the clamps were deactivated, launching the shuttle at great speeds but with tolerable levels of G-force, around the same as what the original space pioneers of the twentieth century faced in their rockets.
It took around six and a half minutes to reach escape velocity and the shuttle flew out of the sheath into the void, passing through the gates of The walls of Terra on momentum alone.