The Emperor's Daughter (Sentinel Series Book 1) Read online

  The Emperor’s Daughter

  Richard Flunker

  Copyright © 2014 by Richard Flunker

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the author

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Published in the United States of America

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. If anything even remotely similar happened to you, I would LOVE to hear about it.

  First Publishing, 2014

  Editing by Alan Harris, © 2014

  ASIN: B00L0OZVCC

  For news, info, and updates, find me on:

  https://www.facebook.com/RichardMFlunkerAuthor

  Or email:

  [email protected]

  Or Twitter:

  @RichardMFlunker

  Follow and like me to get updates on future books.

  If you enjoy this book, please consider leaving a review on Amazon.com, Goodreads.com, or your favorite review site.

  Other works by Richard Flunker:

  Deadfall: Survivors

  To those who are alone

  Contents

  3101 - Zeleen AB

  3124 - Quator

  3124 – Threaded Space

  3124 – Mondla

  3124 – The Crooked Lights

  3124 – Alsafah Academy

  3124 – Devil’s Den

  3124 - Quator

  3124 – Alioth system

  3124 - Unknown

  3124 – Mars

  3124 - Coran, Prime

  3124 – Eileen System

  3124 - Zeleen AB

  3124 – Alioth

  3124 – Alioth

  3124 – Devil’s Den

  3124 – Alioth

  3124 – Alioth

  3124 - Alioth

  3124 – Alioth

  3124 – Alioth System

  3124 – Alioth System

  3124 – Threaded space

  3124 – Oxaoca

  3124 – Oxaoca System

  3124 – Oxaoca System

  3124 - on the Harmoa

  3124 – In threaded space

  3124 – Tau Ceti

  3124 – Edge of Oxaoca system

  Prologue

  3101 - Zeleen AB, Unexplored system in proximity of Zeleen AB 7, Gas Giant – 729.7 Light years from Sol

  The Magyo was the Dominion flagship. It was by all measurements the largest space bound vessel in the known universe. It even dwarfed the large container ships known as tugs that transported lesser crafts throughout the galaxy and up and down through planet atmospheres. The Magyo had enough power to jump from one side of the civilized space to the other in just under two weeks. This made it a threat, challenge and presence wherever the Dominion felt it needed.

  It was just less than ten miles long, narrow and angular. It was shaped like a spearhead not only to produce firepower above, under and directly in front of it if needed, but to clearly point out to those under Dominion rule that this was a weapon of destruction. It was designed with the long broad part of the spear being its sides. This gave the ship a very narrow face from the top, bottom, front or back. For an enemy ship to have a good target, it would have to move to either side. Doing so would put it face to face with an incredible broadside like the ships of ancient Earth. Two semi circles orbited the rear of the ship, a symbiotic organism of metals and plastics that provided the power necessary to move the behemoth with a commanding presence.

  It was the elder sister of two other ships just like it, and the largest of the three. It took the Dominion eleven Coranian years, seventeen Earth years, to build. It took countless wealth, both monetarily and physical, as well as the effort of a well-established slave labor the Dominion had cultivated for hundreds of years. Except for her two younger sisters, there was no other ship that came even remotely close to being compared to it, not in the Dominion, not on Earth, the Commonwealth of Free Planets, or in any corner of the civilized galaxy.

  The Magyo was named after the traditional first wife of the first Dominar of Coran, the Warlord Ergos the First. She was elevated to godhood by Dominion religion due to her actions in establishing the empire. She was the real warrior’s mind behind the Warlord himself. She was also replaced by the first Dominar shortly after the creation of the Dominion of Man on Coran. Dominion theology states she gave up her position as wife of the warlord god in order to ascend to a higher state of divinity. Earth history tells us that she was executed when it became apparent she was the real force behind the Dominion and not the Warlord. The second wife, the Mother of the Dominion, was far more docile.

  The first Magyo was also the first and last wife of a Dominar to actually give natural birth to a child.

  The name carried weight as the ship saw action in two wars against Earth. Twice it led The Spearhead, as The Magyo is also known, to a decimation of the Commonwealth fleets located on Earth. This ultimately led to the current arms race between nations and planets between the Commonwealth, the Dominion and all those caught in between.

  Despite its terrifying vastness The Magyo was no phenomenon of advanced technology. Instead, it was an amazing display of labor and power. It carried no super weapons, just an insurmountable number of air to surface and vessel to vessel weaponry (e.g. fully automatic cannons, projectiles, cruisers capable of deploying for field combat and scouting missions, caravans capable of transporting vessel to vessel or air to surface infantry). Over seven thousand well-trained humans worked deep within the ship. No other ship had this many crew on board. But more so than anything else, the Magyo had the one thing no other ship truly had. It was the only vessel with the ability to completely bombard a planet’s resources and defenses from outer space. This threat alone was a driving force in the negotiation of many planets, whether forcible means of attack were necessary or not.

  The Magyo was a goddess in space, as Magyo, the bride of the first Dominar, was considered similarly by her admirers, unparalleled and unmatched by any manmade vessel.

  This goddess was dying.

  The Commandaer of the Magyo was a Dominion human of noble birth, as only one of such lineage could command at such a high place. He was, as all nobles were, a product of the one technological aspect the Dominion had above everyone else, genetic engineering. His name was Arguntai, of the Alsadah family, the brother of the patriarch and current Dominar. He was a towering man of nearly twelve feet, massive in size and keen with mind, as nearly every noble was. His family’s wealth and power was instrumental in the creation of this giant war vessel and it was his duty to command it.

  He wore his hair short, dark hair slowly turning gray, maybe prematurely. He had the darker skin tone the current Dominar had and common through the Alsadah family. He was two hundred and twelve Coran years, barely middle aged, but already a titan of the Dominion’s conquests throughout the galaxy. He was a veteran of countless wars and already a direct genetic contributor to the Dominar’s bloodline. Of the many heroes the Dominion worshipped, Arguntai was at or near the top of that list. In the royal court, the biggest rumor was that his DNA might make up fifty one percent of the next Dominar, an honor beyond any. It was because of this incredible pedigree that he was asked to command the Dominion’s greatest exploration mission. The Magyo and its support fleet departed nearly twenty years earlier on a mission to explore be
yond the known civilized galaxy, always in search of new resources, planets to colonize, and most importantly, the never ending search for intelligent life other than human.

  She and all of her men and women would never make it back.

  The bridge of The Magyo was a replica of the royal throne room on Coran, either an homage to the Dominar, or a display of the ambition of the Alsadah family for their Dominion designs. The room usually emanated power and command were it not for the smoke and gas.

  “Have we restored power to the forward drive? We need forward movement and control,” thundered the voice of the Commandaer.

  The responses were varied. Reports were coming in over his direct screen, some of it fed directly to his eyes via a wireless data stream. His genetically enhanced eyes were imbued with an organic video monitor the size of a fingernail that kept the vessel’s leader connected to it. There was no forward thrust; there was no thrust at all. What little power was left was being used to keep life support running. Gravity was barely holding, and in many locations on the ship, men and women were being thrown into the walls and ceilings.

  “Sensors? Do we have something we can target yet?”

  The attack came out of nowhere. The fleet made its second stop on the long route back to Coranian space, resupplying its fuel supply from the hydrogen easily found in a large gas giant. Every single one of its scout ships missed it. The attack came suddenly and it was vicious. The Commandaer wasn’t even sure if his fleet survived the attack or not. Communications between the ships disappeared with the sensors immediately. He hadn’t heard a word from them. If the Magyo was in the state it was, then he could only surmise that all the other ships were either in equal states or completely destroyed.

  “Nothing sir,” was the reply he foresaw.

  The readings were unlike anything he had ever seen. Something seemingly invisible was tearing the Magyo apart. It was moving out there and he couldn’t even tell if it was one enemy or more than one. Weapons were hitting the Magyo, but there were not projectiles weapons, nor were they energy weapons, beams, plasma or kinetic. And yet, every piece of the ship was coming apart with every impact. Each hit was like two hands digging into a fruit and peeling the skin back. He could not explain it.

  And they knew where to dig their hands into as well.

  The first hit struck the Hausen reactor. They were completely at still in dead space and thus they remained.

  “The rings are off sir,” the shout came from across the bridge, but the Commandaer couldn’t even see who shouted the report as the smoke was denying his vision.

  The two half circles that spun around the ship were what held the entire ship together. It was the control of gravity by creating three microscopic black holes, and using that event to control how the ship moved and how gravity worked within it. All this was within the Hausen reactor. The gravity field it produced was distributed to the two rings around the craft which then created a bubble of earth like gravity within the Magyo itself. Even before the call echoed through the smoke, the Commandaer could feel the gravity leaving. Without that artificial field, the ship would fall apart on its own, even without the help of its mysterious attacker.

  He took a quick look down on a screen that popped up to his right. He hoped for one last chance at firing up the ring to create a cocoon of gravitational protection around the ship, enough to allow some escape ships to flee, before colliding into itself with the force of a thousand suns. The screen showed him what he knew though. With the ring detached, that last chance was gone.

  He was bringing home what would have been the Dominion’s greatest treasure. It would have completely solidified the Dominion’s hold on all of humanity, bringing all of mankind together under the rule of one purely human Dominar, instead of the hodgepodge collection of inferior humans spread throughout the civilized galaxy. It would have ended the bloodshed and warring of a thousand years since humanity began leaving Earth. Instead, man’s salvation would be destroyed along with his ship.

  He quickly hit a few indicators on his screen then got up and rushed down to one of the main display screens on his bridge. Of the three men that worked that console, two were either dead or too far gone into death’s dark embrace to help while the third man had a large amount of blood coming from his leg. A small pool of it gathered around his feet. His time was would soon come to an end.

  The Commandaer put his hand on the man’s shoulder, and the much smaller man looked up at him. He was as close as mankind got to being a god, and he knew his men worshipped him as such.

  “Are the logs ready?” he asked.

  The man was breathing heavily, with some difficulty. He took a look down at a secondary screen, and with a swipe of a hand, moved the information on that screen onto the main screen. A full bar displayed the words ‘complete’, and the man smiled at his leader. He didn’t even have the breath left in him to say yes.

  “Move it to my chair,” was the order, but it fell on deaf ears. His smile remained, but his eyes were already vacant.

  The Commandaer reached across him, the stench of blood and smoke now heavy in the air. He heard the sound of metal ripping deep within the ship. He touched two buttons on the screen and the display went blank. He turned to walk when he realized his hand was still on the man’s shoulder. He couldn’t recall what his name was. He never needed to know. He was there to serve, and that he had done.

  He sat back down on the chair. There was an odd calm in the air. There was very little shouting going on anymore. He brought up the screen and began to finalize the deployment of the jump probes, the last vestiges of a destroyed ship. They would be uploaded with all of the information the ship collected and make jumps back to Coranian space. From this point though they would take nearly three years to return back to Coran. It would take even longer if they stopped and refuel. Even the Commandaer wasn’t sure how that technology worked. They would be long gone by then, but maybe the Dominion would learn what they found and maybe mount a new expedition.

  He glanced up when he heard another implosion, somewhere off ahead of him.

  He looked back down and put in his final authorization code and hit complete. The drones worked on their own power and would fire off independently. The Commandaer felt a sense of satisfaction. His life was grand, and once the drones returned home, his legend would be guaranteed and his blood would certainly live on in the new Dominar.

  He sat back into his chair and took one more look out onto his bridge. His thoughts went to his own impending mortality and wondered how it would be like to die. It was then that he noticed that all the smoke had cleared from the bridge. The sounds of the foreign weapon hitting the Magyo stopped as well. There was a strong hissing sound, but he couldn’t place from which direction it was coming. There was no one left alive on the bridge, but that could be taken for granted considering his physical superiority to normal men.

  He then began to feel faint.

  The attack had stopped. Whoever attacked his ships wasn’t trying to destroy it, just kill them. The invisible hands had ripped the skin off, and the ship’s atmosphere had bled out into space, leaving them to die by asphyxiation. It wasn’t the sudden death of vacuum, but the slow drowsy death of oxygen deprivation. The attack was surgical and precise. He wondered just how much of the Magyo actually was destroyed.

  He collapsed on the steps in front of his command chair. The lights were still on, but they seemed to be dimming. He knew that the bridge had its own independent power source that could survive anything. His oxygen starved brain, even at a genius level, was losing the ability to deduce that the dimming of the lights was his life slowly ending.

  He recalled the first genetic donation he was asked for. The greatest honor a Coranian could get. He would have liked to have had natural children. He remembered asking his favorite meal when he was a young boy. The last thing he remembered was the taste.

  Outside the Magyo, silence reigned eternally. The debris field one could usually expect from the des
truction of such large spacecraft was nonexistent. The two halves of the gravity ring floated off in opposite directions and littered all around the Magyo were twenty small blinking drones. They floated aimlessly around the ship. They appeared to have power as their small drives were firing. They didn’t move though. The invisible hand that had torn into the Magyo now held them in place.

  The Magyo itself was intact except for its entire outer hull. It was skinned back in several locations leaving long streaks all over the hull as if a galactic sized knife had cut into it multiple times. All if its support ships lay around their queen. They were servants sacrificed with their master. Some of them were crushed into small masses of metal while some was cleaved in half.

  Nothing had survived and no one would ever know.

  Not for a very long time.

  Part 1

  3124 - Quator, Tempura Station orbiting Quator 2 mining planet, 45.56 light years from Sol

  He would have preferred if it was his own alarm clock. He liked his alarm clock. It was the voice of his ship, usually trying over and over to get him to wake up. Lately, his ship liked trying to wake him up with fake warnings, or temptations of breakfast. At times, the ship would drastically lower the temperature in his cabin and on one occasion, threatened to vent the atmosphere to wake him up. He eventually woke up. It wasn’t that he was lazy. It was simply that the life of a space ship pilot usually involved a lot of time in flight, alone. There was rarely a real reason to wake up early every day.

  This wasn’t his alarm though, and he hadn’t really slept well the previous night. The wall came alive with numbers blinking on the display wall, counting down. It was an organic display screen, using living material as opposed to metal and plastics. It was very expensive. He had thirty minutes till he was to be executed. What should have been a simple pick up and deliver mission was now very complicated.