The Army Of Light (Kestrel Saga)
Read The Army Of Light (Kestrel Saga) Online
Authors: Stephen Fender
The Army
Of Light
A novel by
Stephen A.
Fender
Kestrel Series: Book I
JRP
©
Jolly Rogers
Productions
The Army of Light
Copyright © 2013 Stephen Fender
www.StephenFender.com
First Edition: 2013
Published through Jolly
Rogers Productions (JRP) ©, a subsidiary division of StephenFender.com
Seattle, WA
All rights
reserved.
Ordering
information:
Printed in the
United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
1
ISBN of Print Edition: 1482311437
ISBN13 of Print Edition:
9781482311433
Cover art layout
and rendering by Stephen Fender ©.
All characters,
settings, and events depicted on this novel are the sole intellectual property
of Stephen Fender. Characters in this novel are not intended, nor should they
be inferred by anyone, to represent actual living beings—either now or in the
24
th
century. However, if you’d like to infer, then go right ahead.
I can’t stop you.
Table of Contents
I’d like to thank to my family and friends who have
been there through this whole process. I’m grateful for all of you, and each of
you has a special place in my heart.
I’d also like to extend a very special thanks to my
wife. You have been my biggest supporter, and my #1 fan. There’s no way I could
have done this without you. I love you.
“Twenty years from now you will be
more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do.
So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade
winds in your sails. Explore.
Dream.
Discover.”
- Mark Twain
Early in the twenty-fourth century, the Unified Collaboration of Systems, a
peaceful collection of over two-hundred member worlds, was flourishing in the
arts and sciences. Near faster than light travel—known as jumping—was enjoyed
by nearly every one of the two hundred and thirty species in the UCS. Trade and
commerce were at an all-time galactic high, as the sharing of ideas, cultures,
and wealth was enjoyed by every system that had been admitted to the
Unified Collaboration. Poverty, disease, and hunger had become words
without example, barely spoken within an area of hundreds of square light
years.
Then the invaders arrived.
It had started with an attack on a research station in the frontier, the
furthest portion of the Outer Sphere of Unified space. Then, one by one,
subsequent systems began to fall victim to the interlopers. At first,
multilateral government agencies in the UCS scurried to find as much
information as they could about the threat they now faced. All that was
initially known was that the invaders were fierce combatants, and they held no
mercy for their conquered foes.
In a bold move, the various heads of the Unified council agreed to organize a
massive effort to halt the invaders advance into their territory. A full scale
Unified Sector Command fleet of warships was sent out to the edge of explored
space in an attempt to warn the alien menace away. Like an unstoppable force
meeting an immovable object, the two factions ignited a conflict that was sure
to go down in history as the greatest struggle for survival the galaxy had ever
known… if anyone survived to tell the tale.
The Galactic War had begun.
The war raged on for over half a decade. Dozens of Unified planets succumbed to
the invaders, known only by name as the Kafaran. The old allegiances of the UCS
waxed and waned as some worlds—those once dedicated to peace and
prosperity—joined forces with the Kafaran’s in their quest for victory.
Enormous fleets were built on both sides, and each struggled for supremacy in
the stars high above distant worlds in the far reaches of Beta Sector—one of
the three wedge shaped sections of the First Quadrant. Whole civilizations
crumbled, tens of thousands of military personnel perished on both sides, and
billions of innocent people lost their homes… or their lives.
In the end, the herculean Unified Sector Command fleet had managed to push the
Kafaran’s back into an otherwise unexplored region beyond the edge of the
galaxy. Then, without any warning, the fighting ended as abruptly as it had
begun. The area of space that was recognized as belonging to the Kafaran’s was
quickly deemed off limits to all Unified members. Outposts—some manned and some
automated—were installed along the borders of the region in an attempt to
monitor the Kafaran’s movements. It seemed to the Unified government that
victory was theirs.
However, the toll on the Unified Collaboration had been exacting. Of the five
original founding members of the Unified government, only three of the Core
Worlds now remained. Soon after the war, many outlying member worlds
formed a deep mistrust of the large governing body of the Unified council. The
overall economics of the region were in ruins, and many worlds expressed a
self-guided interest to guard their own people and materials instead of
trusting the UCS bureaucracy to handle those affairs. One by one, the fringe
worlds began to splinter off, fracturing back into their pre-member status.
Others formed new allegiances of their own, coalescing into small pockets of
semi-government factions. Some planetary systems had even given up interstellar
travel all together. In the end, a large portion of the Outer Sphere of planets
abdicated their positions on the council, with the far reaches of the frontier
long forgotten as the struggling Unified Collaboration of System's
foothold in the Milky Way reverted back to a size it hadn't known in centuries.
The Sector Command fleet had likewise dwindled in size, strength, and overall
authority. Space that was once freely traveled was now riddled with merchants,
dubious civilians, and pirates of every conceivable shape and size. Planets
that were once patrolled and maintained by the Sector Command warships were now
considered too dangerous to approach, as the safety of the USC crews could not
be assured. Many of the men and women that had fought in the Galactic War
left the service in search of fortunes to be had on worlds no longer governed
by the Collaboration. Some found them… others lost everything.
Outside of the relative safety of the Inner Sphere, nothing could be trusted,
and nothing was.
In the now feral reaches of the galaxy, beyond the comfort of the Inner Sphere,
people struggled to rebuild and survive as they stopped looking toward the
tentative future and instead focused on the now problematic present.
1
Everyone seems to overlook the fact that, in order for the mythical Phoenix to
rise from the fiery remains of its predecessor, it had to first be on fire, and
that’s precisely where Shawn Kestrel found himself. His last five days were
supposed to be spent on a simple two-legged trade route from his home port on
the planet Minos to the small mining colony on the planet
Averna
,
about three light-years distant. That’d been the easy part. It wasn’t until
after the drop-off, when Shawn had stopped into the local bar on
Averna
to imbibe and count his profits—or lack thereof—that
he’d willfully invited misfortune into his life. With Unified credits not
flowing through the adjoining systems as freely as they used to, and with the
seller of the cargo making quite an attractive offer, Shawn had reluctantly
agreed to add a third leg to his journey, picking up a last minute shipment
bound for
Donatue
III, a desolate planet near the
edge of the Outer Rim of the sector.
He should have known better. After all, it was one of the first unspoken rules
of interstellar trade: never add more than you planned for when you took off.
Now, with his ship burning up as it plummeted toward the surface of Minos at an
incredible rate of speed, he wasn’t in a position to argue the logic of that
doctrine.
It’s fascinating what can pass before your eyes in those final moments as you
plunge to your death. It was interesting that, considering what most people say
about seeing the faces of loved ones, various deities, or having regrets about
cheating on your sixth grade trigonometry homework, Shawn now considered them
all apocryphal. The only thing presently buzzing about the synapses of his grey
matter was how to avoid having his treasured flight jacket torn in the imminent
crash.
After all, there were just some things you simply couldn’t replace.
He grasped the dual handled control stick with one hand, which seemed to
strenuously object by shaking violently and demanding his utmost attention. His
right hand, however, was occupied controlling the lateral maneuvering jets as
he attempted to get his lumbering craft on the right glide slope for planetary
reentry—not an easy feat without the raw slowing power of the four reentry
thrusters. Red warning lights, the universal color of danger, began popping up
like lemmings on his control board. More annoyingly, the proximity alarm had
begun to sound, and there were very few noises in the galaxy more ear
shattering or cringe inducing.
The normally beautiful blue and white world outside of the ship was a blur of
motion as the shuddering of the Mark-IV interstellar transport threatened to
rattle its rivets and screws from their resting places. With the maneuvering
jets of little use for gross movements, and knowing that his ships nose needed
to be more starboard in the next thirty seconds—less he be burned to a crisp—he
reluctantly fired the portside main drive engine, a dangerous move, considering
the extreme heat of the outer hull was likely to damage the finely balanced
unit. At the moment, however, it seemed a small price to pay to save one’s
life. With small, controlled blasts, the planet Minos swung from the starboard
side of the wide view port to rest dead-center with his craft.
Finally, something is going my way.
A moment later the quaking subsided as the nimble freighter transitioned from
the mesospheric to the stratospheric layer. Shawn watched as the temperature of
the outer hull also began to decrease rapidly, already dropping below seven
hundred and fifty degrees from the peak twelve hundred of a standard reentry.
Blessedly, the proximity warning had stopped nearly as soon as it’d started
shrieking through the speakers. He was now immersed in the upper cloud layers
of the planet, the wisps of white flowing around his craft as if he were flying
through sheets of silk. All he had to do now was strike a bargain with the
universal law of gravity and he’d be right as rain.
His ship, which he’d christened
Sylvia’s Delight
, was doing more of
a controlled fall than an actual landing. Not intended for extended atmospheric
operations,
D
was essentially a great metal brick slaloming
around the cumulonimbus clouds that stretched from six-thousand to as high as
twenty-thousand feet into the sky. The maneuvering thrusters, designed for precision
landings while hovering, were none the less doing an admirable job of slowing
the craft’s plunge. After descending to just under five-thousand feet, Shawn
saw the welcoming mile high spire of Mount
Di’Kul
—the
island chains largest volcano—jutting through a layer of cumulous clouds that
had gathered low around the islands. Above the mountain, not far from Shawn’s
original entry point into the atmosphere,
was
the
fragmented remains of
Charnt
, Minos’s long dead moon.