Augmented, p.1
Augmented, page 1
Augmented
The Transcended Book 1
Anthony James
Contents
The Graveyard
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
© 2018 Anthony James All rights reserved
The right of Anthony James to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed upon the subsequent purchaser
Illustration © Tom Edwards TomEdwardsDesign.com
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The Graveyard
The sixth planet in the Hiol system was alight, its cold, rocky surface hidden beneath a conflagration of intense whites, oranges and reds.
High above this doomed world, the human and Estral fleets exchanged missile and particle beam fire. Incendiaries blossomed across a million kilometres of space, their detonations enough to destroy a number of the smaller ships outright and deplete the energy shields of the larger ones.
The Hadron battleship Precept-2 launched wave upon wave of sublight missiles and its tactical computer kept track of a hundred thousand others already in flight. Gauss slugs from the Estral Vule cannons and the human Bulwarks streaked through space, thinning the salvos of inbound missiles.
The Precept-2’s battle computer recorded the impacts of its third wave of Lambda missiles against one of the Estral capital ships. The enemy craft was lost for a moment in a wave of thunderous explosions, and then it burst free from the inferno, its energy shield trailing plasma fire a thousand kilometres behind.
The battle continued for what seemed like an age, with each side unable to land the killing blow. In space combat, no stalemate could last forever. A group of Galactic class heavy cruisers broke away from the main human fleet and attempted to smash through a cluster of Estral vessels which acted as a soak for the enemy battleships.
For a moment, it looked as if the daring attack would be successful. Then, the Precept-2 detected the deployment of an Obsidiar bomb. The battleship was too far away to be caught in the midst of the blast, but the heavy cruisers and the sixth planet were not. The Galactics vanished from the tactical screen and fifty percent of the planet disintegrated, leaving its molten core visible like a beacon.
Precept-2:: War protocol breached. Deploy Enlightenment.
The Hadron’s sensors recorded the retaliatory deployment of a second Obsidiar bomb and this detonation was far larger than the first. Many Estral spaceships were completely obliterated, their energy shields incapable of withstanding the force of the explosion. The battle continued.
The soft bleeping of an alarm roused Lieutenant Becky Keller and she cut off her interface with the Precept-2, returning her consciousness to the cockpit of the shuttle which hovered high above the Graveyard on planet Eriol.
“You are not permitted to interface with these ships, Lieutenant,” the shuttle’s AI node, Exar chided her.
“You won’t tell, will you?” she asked teasingly, not caring one way or another.
“If I had lips, they would be sealed, ma’am.”
Keller lifted one arm and pointed a finger at the sensor screen. The feed was aimed directly at the left-most of the Hadrons. The battleship was a hulking wedge-shape, broad and menacing. Its six-thousand-metre hull was extensively cratered and burned, with hardly any of its armour plating intact.
“It’s lost none of its pride. Exar, when was the Precept-2 decommissioned?”
“The Precept-2 was decommissioned 118 years ago, ma’am. It was one of the final Hadrons to leave service. Its duty lasted to the end of the third Estral war before it was classified as obsolete.”
“Shame. It feels like a betrayal to abandon all of these ships. To leave them here like we never needed them.”
There were hundreds of open receptors in the Graveyard and Keller reached out again to the Precept-2’s ancient processing cluster. The battleship’s cores were painfully slow and incapable of preventing her gentle interrogation of its databanks. There was a yearning there, like an entity denied full access to the consciousness it was capable of. Keller pulled away, trying to convince herself she only imagined the spaceship’s disappointment at her withdrawal.
Keller had seen enough. Darkness was creeping across the horizon and she suddenly wanted to be away from this place.
“Priority 1 message from Admiral Cody,” said Exar.
“What is the message?”
“You will return to the base immediately. Please acknowledge.”
“Of course I damn well acknowledge! What does he want?”
“I have no further information for you, ma’am.”
“Can’t he speak with me here?”
“I have no further information for you, ma’am.”
Keller used her Faor augmentation to link with the transport’s flight computer and ordered it to fly to the Fortress-3 base at top speed. The journey didn’t take long, but Keller had ample time to interrogate the Space Corps databanks, where she discovered something entirely unexpected.
“Well, well,” she said under her breath. “There’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.”
With a feeling of nervousness and anticipation, Lieutenant Becky Keller brought the shuttle in to land.
Chapter One
Admiral Scott Cody was a broad man of advancing years and with the same short-cropped grey hair worn by seemingly every male admiral in the Space Corps, as well as some of the females. Cody paced the length of his office, making no effort to disguise his agitation. He stopped exactly two paces before one blue-painted wall, spun, walked and repeated the process at the opposite wall. Every so often, he cursed under his breath.
Admiral Cody was not renowned for his patience and today he looked properly pissed off.
Lieutenant
Nation flexed his right arm and felt the faintest sensation of movement from the Istoliar motors which powered his body. There were some parts of him which were almost original, but he was damned if he could remember where in his body they were. He’d given up his flesh and here he was – a pile of augmentations clad in artificial skin, with his consciousness fed into a data array designed to withstand a direct hit from an Estral sledgehammer. He suppressed a shiver. Istoliar leaked cold and he could never seem to get warm since the surgeons finished with him.
Another five uneasy minutes passed before Nation heard the office door hiss open. He turned in his seat to see a very familiar woman enter – she was in her late twenties, with a slim, athletic build, dark hair tied up and the most piercing green eyes. She wore a tight-fitting black cloth uniform without adornment.
“Lieutenant Becky Keller,” said Cody with a nod. His voice was deep, like he’d taken lessons in how to project it. “Take a seat.”
Keller sat.
“This is Lieutenant Joe Nation,” Cody went on. “He’s another one from the labs. Covert Ops.”
Nation nodded acknowledgement. “We’ve met before, sir.”
“Once or twice,” said Keller dryly.
“Well that’s good,” said Cody. “It means we don’t have to waste time on how-do-you-dos.” He began another trip towards the wall, thought better of it and sat opposite the two of them. His desk was clear apart from a communicator and a couple of screens. Without moving his eyes, Cody leaned forward and switched the communicator to silent. “Folks, there’s some shit going on,” he said.
Nation knew when it was time to stay quiet and Keller had the same instinct. They waited.
“We’ve got ourselves a problem over on Isob-2.”
Nation scratched his head and took the bait. “That’s an Estral facility, sir.”
“Quite right, Lieutenant. It’s one of their six Obsidiar-Teronium refinement bases. You know the ones – where they perform civilian research.” He drummed his thick fingers on the desktop. “There’s been an incident.”
“What kind of incident?” asked Keller.
“It’s one of those everyone’s dead kind of incidents. Under the terms of our treaty, we sent a team out two days ago. Their attempts to find out what happened aren’t going to plan.
Humans and Estral had been involved in on-off wars for decades and it was only recently the Confederation had gained enough of an upper hand to begin dictating conditions at the end of what was a long, drawn-out conflict. One of those conditions imposed strict controls on the Estral’s ability to refine Obsidiar-Teronium into its much more potent form Istoliar, and, more specifically, to put it to military uses.
“Two days is plenty of time for a preliminary evaluation. What’s the hold up?” asked Keller.
“The Estral don’t want us there.” Cody’s face twisted angrily. “They’re clearing up the evidence even while our team tries to find out what’s going on.”
“They signed an agreement to limit their refinement to just stabilised Obsidiar-Teronium. Why don’t we clear the facility of Estral and get on with the job?” said Nation.
“Isob-2 is deep inside Estral territory, Lieutenant. It’s all very well talking about imposing our wishes, it’s another thing entirely when it comes to doing so. I think if we’d given our friends another few hours to get their act together, they’d have turned away our investigation team.”
“And risk another war?”
“You know what they’re like. Proud bastards. Like every other race is a piece of crap stuck to the sole of their shoes. The Confederation Council have made their wishes clear – this isn’t worth a resumption of hostilities.”
“The Estral take everything to the edge, sir. Every time we blink first, they become bolder.”
Cody sighed. “You’re not telling me anything new, Lieutenant Nation. If it were my choice, I’d turn up at Isob-2 with fifty warships and see what these alien bastards have to say about it. We can’t piss around when it comes to Istoliar – it’s the only thing keeping us ahead.”
“Which is why they crave it so much,” said Keller.
“We can’t trust them with it. We know what the results will be.”
The Estral were ruthless when they had an advantage. There was no way the Confederation was going to slacken the rules on the refinement of Obsidiar-Teronium. Humanity had teetered on the brink of extinction on more than one occasion and now the determination to survive was ingrained. Whatever it took.
“What information do we have about Isob-2, sir?” asked Nation. “Surely our team found something?”
“The Estral are playing their cards close to their chests. Our monitoring hardware picked up traces of certain contaminants within the facility. Granol-42, for instance.”
“You said no survivors?”
“I said that to get your attention. We have no real evidence to say every Estral was killed - we’re relying on a degree of assumption.” Cody’s expression told exactly what he thought about assumption.
“What killed them?”
“The Estral won’t say or they don’t know. We don’t know either.”
“Have we been given access to the bodies?”
“That’s one of the main sticking points at the moment. They’ve locked the base down and the lower levels are off limits, ostensibly to allow the level of contaminants to subside.”
“Smells fishy.”
“You don’t say?”
There was an elephant in the room and Nation felt obliged to mention it. “They’re up to something at Isob-2 which breaks the treaty.”
“More than likely.”
“And they’re shit scared we’ll find the proof.”
“I see all that training hasn’t gone to waste, Lieutenant Nation.”
Nation used his comm augmentation to tap into the Space Corps records and dozens of files streamed into his databanks. It took him a few nanoseconds to pick out the salient details. “We’ve been covertly monitoring Isob-2 for months.”
“They’ve brought in several disguised shipments recently – in shielded containers, or mixed up with other materials which can produce false positives on our sensors.”
“What’s the best guess from the strategy guys?”
“Obsidiar-Teronium refinement gone wrong.”
Nation watched Keller from the corner of his eye. “If it’s so cut-and-dried, what do you need us for?” he asked.
“Proof. We can’t act without it.”
“And if we find proof?” asked Keller. “Is this the beginning of a new war?”
Cody didn’t look entirely pleased with the question. “Quite the opposite. We see it as a method of stopping a war.”
“What happens next?”
“You’re going to join our existing team, except you aren’t going to be playing it by the book. You’re two of the Space Corps’ most accomplished officers and you know how to get results.”
“I take it we’ll be catching a spaceship to Isob-2 and having a poke around the facility?”
“That’s about it. The evidence we have suggests this is the tip of an iceberg that could be big enough to cause some real crap in our immediate future if we run into it.”
“Or if it runs into us.”
“A turn of phrase, Lieutenant Keller,” said Cody testily.
“Does this mean we have clearance to take risks?”
“You know the answer to that.”
Nation almost laughed. “Find out everything there is to be found out and don’t get caught. One day I might get a mission with a different brief.”
“Who else is on our team?” asked Keller.
“We’ve got some men and women already out there. Rapid Response Team Alpha from the SC Givens.”
“So, when we pitch up uninvited, what exactly are we going to tell the Estral?”
“The story is, you’re part of RRT Alpha. That makes you military scientists.”
“I’m no scientist,” said Nation. “And Lieutenant Keller is in Psi. What are we supposed to do when they start asking technical questions?”
“Use those core clusters the Space Corps implanted in your heads at vast expense. That’s what they’re there for. Try and sound convincing.”
Nation shrugged. As far as briefings went, this was neither the longest nor the shortest he’d ever sat through. “I can do that.”
“I saw the SC Gundar on the landing strip,” said Keller.
Cody gave a half-smile. “We couldn’t send you in a beat-up piece of crap. The Space Corps likes to look good when we’re trying to strongarm a mob of warlike aliens into letting us into one of their prize facilities.”
“A Class 1 Retaliator. I’m impressed,” said Nation.
“One of thirty in the fleet. Four hundred metres from nose to tail.” Admiral Cody was far too young to have flown one of the older-style warships, some of which exceeded five thousand metres in length, but the curl of his lip suggested he longed for the days he’d never experienced. “And we’ve had to remove some of its external armaments in case the Estral take offense.” Cody’s lip curled even further. “Damned tip-toeing around like we’re the bad guys.”
Nation kept his expression neutral. “Have we got clearance to fly or are we putting in a surprise appearance?”
“The Estral are expecting to see you on the far side of the Primol-1 wormhole within four hours. The urgency saves you from spending the next two weeks with one of my briefing teams. The Estral aren’t happy about it, so don’t expect handshakes and party hats.” Cody stared for a long moment and then clapped his hands with a single, loud crack. “Why are you still in my office? Get moving and bring me back some good news!”
Keller and Nation exchanged glances. Whatever the outcome of this mission, it was unlikely to be anything which could be classified as good.
“Yes, sir. Good news it is.” Nation stood easily and his chair creaked in relief.
Keller remained seated. “One more thing. Who is in charge?”
