Inheritance (Rise of the Empire Book 5) (15 page)

But it still hadn’t been enough. She’d needed to feel strong, to regain the control over her life. So she’d joined Warpath, had started learning what it truly meant to be a warrior. With a deep breath, she gathered herself and turned around to look at her former master. He had waited, not trying to make her feel better.

“I guess that we will see if I can do that. I will meet with the Ra’a’zani sooner or later,” Aileen said.

“You will, and that will be your moment,” Master Hayashi said. Then in a single second, his demeanor changed back to his regular cheerful self. “When are you leaving?”

“Tomorrow,” Aileen said, relaxing as they changed the subject. “They are adding some last-minute cargo to the ship now.”

At the mention of the ship, Master Hayashi got a wistful look on his face. “Ah…I hear that it has the new drives,” he said.

“It does,” Aileen said. New drives that were born from the knowledge the Empire had gained from Axull Darr’s sphere. They allowed the ship that was already capable of traveling through both trans-space and hyperspace to move at faster-than-light speeds
inside
a star system through normal space. But only in relatively short bursts, and with moderate recharge time. Aileen didn’t know much about the technology, aside from the fact that the techs nicknamed it ‘skimming’ and that it was similar to technology humanity had once theorized about called the Alcubierre drive. All the newer Empire ships had the technology.

“The new drives are probably the only reason why I am not worried that I will go crazy on the trip,” Aileen said with a smile. “I should go, there are still a few things I need taken care of before I leave.”

“Of course, child,” he said, reminding Aileen of the man that was the reason she was alive now. She stepped forward and took the much older man into a hug. With no hesitation, he returned the embrace. And then she stepped back. Master Hayashi smiled. “Don’t forget to send me a message when you have a chance.”

“I won’t,” Aileen said.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Aileen stepped into the large docking stations inside Warpath’s Forge, one of its three asteroids that served as the center of the Clan. She walked towards the area where the ship she would take to Sol was docked, all the way avoiding people running around the halls and large open areas where cargo was constantly moved around. It took her a good half hour to get to her destination. She could have taken a train cart, but she still had time to kill until her scheduled departure. As she entered the docking area where her ship was, she saw a flurry people moving about, still putting cargo boxes on the ship.

She was just to ask someone what they were doing when she noticed a familiar person standing in the middle of the commotion talking with the dock master. She made her way towards him.

“Clan Leader,” she said as she reached him.

“Ah, Aileen. Good, I was just about to comm you,” Clan Leader Isani said.

Alieen looked at his Nel face and tried to catch any indication of his mood, but Nel faces were always hard to read. “Well, here I am. Why did you want to speak with me?” she asked.

“I wanted to let you know that we have made some last-minute additions to your cargo. They are some things that Adrian ordered from the research department. We managed to get most of them done before now, so I thought that you might as well take them to him,” he said while he gestured with his left hand, making a circle, meaning tiredness. “Adrian would have annoyed me to no end if he’d found out that these things were finished and I’d waited another four months until the rest were done to send them.”

Aileen smiled, relieved that it wasn’t anything concerning her departure. “Of course, Clan Leader, I’ll make sure that he gets them.”

“Good.” Isani brought his palms to his stomach and turned them sideways, thanking her. “I shouldn’t even be here, I have too much work to do. But more work is worth it if it keeps Adrian from not annoying me.” With that, he turned and left.

Aileen watched as the dockworkers finished loading the cargo, and then she boarded her ship. She walked through the access hatch and made her way to the observation deck. Once she entered, a hologram appeared in front of her. It was of a male Nel, dressed in typical Empire garbs—tight skin-suit with an overcoat.

“Welcome on board, Sentinel,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said. “Will we be departing soon?” she asked as she sat down in one of the chairs. A holographic interface appeared in front of her. She tapped the few hard light switches floating there and the walls of the room disappeared, showing the area around the ship as if seen through a wraparound window.

“The Forge gave us permission to leave at our leisure, Sentinel,” the ship’s AI said.

“Good,” she said, sitting alone in the observation deck. This wasn’t a passenger ship, and the rest of the crew was busy with their jobs. She was just hitching a ride.

She watched as the ship slowly disengaged from the docks and started towards the tunnel that led out of the asteroid. She looked around at the thousands of ships docked. Some were in various stages of construction, while others were there simply to leave off supplies or take them from Warpath to some other system.

Aileen watched in awe as the ship exited the massive asteroid and set a course towards the outgoing trans-lane that would take her to the Waypoint system, and from there she would make her way to Sol and Mars. Once, the trip would have taken her more than a year. But that was mostly because ships lost a lot of time trekking through star systems between trans-stations. Now, with the skimming technology, they could move from one trans-station to the other in a matter of minutes. The trip to Sol would take her barely a month and a half. They even had much better hyperspace tech now. With the new power generators and hyperspace generators, they had vastly increased their speeds. A hyperspace trip to Earth would take barely nine months, compared to the 60 years it had once taken Olympus to cross that same distance. It was amazing. But trans-space travel was still faster, especially now when they could skim from trans-station to trans-station.

The cargo ship reached the outgoing trans-station and waited as more ships scheduled for transfer to Waypoint arrived. The transfer to Waypoint occurred on a schedule, as a trans-lane couldn’t be used while ships were still in transit. Transfer from Warpath to Waypoint happened once per day, as travel time was about twenty hours.

Aileen waited for another twenty minutes, looking around her at the many different kinds of ships. From transports to cargo ships, to even two patrol ships. Then the massive station placed just outside of the trans-station sent out a countdown to transfer. The cargo ship wouldn’t be using its own trans drives to pass through—it had nowhere near enough power to send all ships inside the area through, as the amount of mass that had to be pushed through was great, and that meant a more powerful field was needed. Instead, the massive station would project the field and send them through.

The timer reached zero, and all the ships in the trans-station disappeared in a flash of violet light.

Chapter Twenty-Three

October; Year 53 of the Empire – Sanctuary

“And I need to do that why, exactly?” Tomas asked.

“They fulfilled your demands, Tomas,” Nadia said, infuriated with her Emperor, “and you already set the precedent when you accepted Nuva into the Empire.”

Tomas sighed in defeat. “If I summon the Clan Leaders outside of the scheduled meetings, I am going to pay for it. They already grumble because they need to come here twice a year.”

“Do you want the Trivaxians to feel slighted on the day they are finally accepted into the Empire?” Nadia asked pointedly.

“No,” he grumbled.

“Then summon the Clan Leaders,” she told him.

“Fine. But they better not try to make this about more than a simple acceptance ceremony, or I swear to everything the next meeting we have I am going to just let them yell at each other.”

“No, you will not,” Nadia said, and stood from her chair in front of Tomas’s desk. “Now, I have another hundred things to care of,” she said, and left the office.

Tomas cursed under his breath. It had taken the Trivaxians more than sixteen years to complete all of Tomas’s demands. To remodel their society, to invent and build a hyperspace generator all on their own, and then go and colonize another system, with the Empire only supervising. And they had done it. Their colony was thriving. Their society had adopted the ways of the Empire, and now they would join them and get access to all the technology Empire possessed, everything that they needed to start as the newest Clan of the Empire. There would be oversight, of course, until they grew comfortable with the technology. But in another five years, they would have all the advantages of being a part of the Empire.

They would be the first non-human or Nel race in the Empire, whose numbers were now almost equal. Both the Nel and the humans numbered around a billion, placing the Empire’s total population at just north of two billion. It was all thanks to the laws he’d put in place when he’d created the Empire regarding the progeny centers. But now, with the Trivaxians being added, that number would skyrocket, and people of Trivax would outnumber both the humans and the Nel. Their population was close eight billion. And the other race that was trying to be accepted, the Furvor, had about nine billion, and they too were close to finishing all their requirements. But they would suffer penalties because of their attack on Trivaxians.

And then there were the Guxcacul, who would also ask to be accepted, if what he was hearing was correct. They had a small population, and as they already possessed a lot of advanced technology, Tomas didn’t need any special requirements for them. But they were still trying to rebuild their homeworld back up after the war with the Sowir.

And lastly there were the fifty billion Nel living in the Nelus system. They were holding out, trying to recover on their own through trade with the Empire, but over the years Tomas had seen their frustration. They were watching the growth of the Empire and were likely wondering what they could do if they were a part of it. But he knew that he couldn’t just let them in like that; they needed to change their beliefs fundamentally if he was going to accept them.

Tomas turned his holo table on and started looked at the countless number of reports. With a sigh, he opened one and started reading.

***

Laura Reiss, Fleets Master of the Empire, stood in the fleet command room of the massive command-class ship. Around her were countless floating holograms, surrounding people sitting in chairs around the room. In the middle was a dais, and from there she gazed around at the people working. To her side was a hologram of the ship. Its enormous size was not apparent on the scaled-down hologram.

“It is impressive,” Laura said.

“Thank you, ma’am,” Fleet Commander Nair Hakeem of the First Fleet said from her side.

Laura studied the wide arrowhead-shaped ship. Sitting at 4200 meters in length, another 3000 wide, and 1800 tall at its tallest, it really was impressive. It held the most sophisticated communications and battle sensors that they possessed. But it was not meant as a ship for battle; it was the ship that guided the battle. Designed specifically as a flagship of a fleet, it had few weapons, sacrificing that for armor, shimmering fields, and shields with enough power to make sure that nothing could pass through them. It of course had the latest Watchtower interface that now ran on multiple levels of communications, hyperspace communications, lasers, radio, and the newly developed normal space FTL comms built from the technology they’d learned from the sphere. It also came with several levels of the best encryption that the Empire had.

The ship also served as control point for the drone command teams, whose control had been removed from the Watchtower interface and delegated to designated teams of pilots. The command ship had one hundred and twenty teams with ten people each, meaning that it could control up to twelve hundred drones.

With a gesture, Laura zoomed out and the hologram showed the fleet of ships surrounding the Empire command ship Avalon. Around it were the ten new Leviathan-class dreadnoughts, sitting at 3000 meters long, 2000 wide at their widest, and 700 meters tall, shaped like arrowheads too, borrowing the design from Warpath’s Harbinger. Like all dreadnoughts classes before it, they were almost fleets unto themselves, only now they were larger and much deadlier.

Ever since the Fleet had gotten reorganized—the older models retired to Clan defense or put into storage, and newer models built—the form of the fleet had changed. They wouldn’t be building a great number of these new dreadnoughts, only ten per fleet. And they didn’t need to; those ten alone had firepower enough to lay waste to entire fleet like the one that they had used to invade the Sowir home system. Their weapons and defenses all used tech from the sphere, or adapted from it, with a few purely human inventions. The Fleet had also started to build all their ships to be modular, like the Vanguard Fleet. This would allow them to upgrade their ships much easier, although it did add a bit to the construction time, as they didn’t fabricate entire hulls in several large pieces.

Around the dreadnoughts floated the one hundred new battleships, 2000 meters long, 1200 wide, and 550 tall. They followed the design similar to Warpath’s Titan, with its apparently overlapping carapace-like plates. Then there were the four hundred new cruiser ships, 1000 meters long, 300 wide, and 500 tall, designed like sleek talons. And lastly the twelve hundred drones, which were the upgraded versions of the former Vanguard drones. These were 760 meters long, 380 wide, and 180 tall, and shaped like irregular rectangular boxes.

This made the grand total number of the First Fleet 1710 warships, plus the command ship and the auxiliaries that pushed that number to 2000, which was the number that all their new fleets now had. And once the last five command ships finished their production, the Empire’s six war fleets would be finished. Twelve thousand warships protecting the Empire’s territory, which was now a prolate spheroid almost 1000 light years across at its two furthest points, and some 600 at its two closest. The Empire’s territory was now split into six sectors, each with an area of at least 150 light years across in all directions. And each of the fleets would be stationed and charged with patrolling and protecting their sector.

Soon, all fleets would leave for their areas of the Empire. The Third Fleet was the one that was stationed in the First Sector, which encompassed Sanctuary. The First Fleet was stationed in the Second Sector, which was now former Sowir territories. The other fleets had been spread out across the area of space between Sanctuary and Sol, although there wasn’t yet the same number of people and colonized systems in the volume of space that they were charged of protecting. And the Sixth Fleet, with Fleet Commander Johanna Stern back in command of a war fleet, would be stationed in Sol, at the border of their Empire.

“Congratulations, Fleet Commander.” Laura turned to Nair. “Looks like you are the first Fleet Commander to have a fully completed fleet.”

“Thank you, Fleets Master. But Avalon’s sister ships will be finished in a few days,” Nair responded.

“Yes,” Laura said as she turned to look at the holo again. “Soon enough.”