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  Unite the Frontier

  Book three in the United Star Systems series

  J. Malcolm Patrick

  © 2017

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  J. MALCOLM PATRICK.COM

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Second star to the right… and straight on ‘till morning

  Books in this series

  Border Worlds

  Beyond the Frontier

  Unite the Frontier

  Contents

  Chapter 1-Destiny

  Chapter 2-A Bad Feeling

  Chapter 3 –Old Friends

  Chapter 4 –Once More Unto The Breach

  Chapter 5 –The Man

  Chapter 6 –Reminus Octavian

  PART II

  Chapter 7-Heir to the Empire

  Chapter 8-Into The Fire

  Chapter 9- Weapons of Mass Annihilation

  Chapter 10-Ghosts

  Chapter 11-Marcus

  Chapter 12-Greater Good

  Chapter 13-Unwelcome Guests

  Chapter 14-Never Alone

  Chapter 15-Nefarious Intentions

  Chapter 16-Marcus

  Chapter 17-Once More Unto The Breach

  Chapter 18-New Friends

  Chapter 19 - Dining With Imperials

  Chapter 20-They Made Their Move

  Chapter 21-Brute Force

  Chapter 22-Brothers

  Chapter 23 - Loyalty Above Honor

  Chapter 24-Plan W

  Chapter 25-Falling Out

  Chapter 26-The Emperor Is Dead

  PART III

  Chapter 27-Invasion of Sol

  Chapter 28-Sacrifice of Angels

  Chapter 29-Incoming

  Chapter 30-Lower Decks

  Chapter 31-Evening The Odds

  Chapter 32-Unthinkable

  Chapter 33-Save The Empire

  Chapter 34-Storm Heaven

  Chapter 35-Battle of Hosque

  Chapter 36-Battle of the Brothers

  Chapter 37-Long Live The Empire

  Chapter 38-Greater Love

  Chapter 39-Force of Nature

  Chapter 40-A Time to Mourn

  Chapter 41-Unite the Frontier

  Epilogue

  Chapter 1-Destiny

  “No one lives forever, remember?” - Lieutenant Malcolm Lee

  Somewhere beyond the wormhole

  Planetary system—Velon

  Velon-1

  Commander Aaron Tyler Rayne forced open his eyes and glanced out the port side again.

  It wasn’t any less frightening the tenth time. The more he looked, the more his stomach crawled into his throat. He couldn’t fathom how anyone might consider doing this for fun. He fiddled with his suit’s controls, checked his oxygen supply and adjusted his feet in the launch cradle. The cradle would propel him clear of his drop craft.

  Aaron didn’t handle motion very well. And this was motion. It reminded him of a long dead sport where people stood on an oddly shaped board surging along huge crests of water. Supposedly, the soaring forward movement was thrilling and terrifying at the same time. It horrified him just watching the old recordings.

  That’s the downside to being born on a spaceship. Not only was Aaron born in space, but he lived and worked in space. That fact alone doesn’t quite foster one’s fondness for atmospheric flight. And by not fostering fondness—that meant he would rather hurtle through space without a vac-suit—than jump from low orbit. At least the terror of the former ordeal would be short-lived.

  “Commander, the jump point is coming up soon, are you ready?”

  Aaron shook his head. He would never be ready.

  Lieutenant Malcolm Lee grinned. “Ready or not, Commander—we jump.”

  “Lee, I will inflict pain on you someday for this.”

  The lieutenant laughed. “As someone once told me, that seems mildly inappropriate.”

  “No . . . it’s justifiably deserved!”

  “You’ve trained for this,” Lee said. “It’ll be over before you know it.”

  The lieutenant’s choice of words left much to be desired. “Over, has many connotations, Lieutenant. You could at least not look so happy about it.”

  “You know I won’t let you down, Aaron.”

  Aaron smiled inwardly. The lieutenant rarely addressed him without protocol. Friends or not, it wasn’t his way. Aaron clapped him on the shoulder. “Lee, my friend forever.”

  Aaron took several deep breaths—a useless attempt to slow the thumping in his chest.

  Ensign Yuri “Flaps” Miroslav’s voice boomed in the cabin.

  “It’s time! Good luck!”

  Lee hooked into Aaron’s suit. “No one lives forever, remember?”

  Aaron cut his eyes. “Do I really sound that insufferable?”

  “That’s why we adore you, Commander!”

  The alarm blared. Aaron braced for the wind shear and jumped.

  ***

  Velon-1

  Aaron plummeted to the surface. 150 thousand feet below a messy, squishy death beckoned to him. Nearby, Lee dove head first in the same position. Hands and legs tucked in tightly.

  Their armored suits protected them from the harsher effects, but it couldn’t mitigate the crushing g-forces. It made Aaron’s eyeballs feel like they would explode. A high-altitude low open jump. HALO.

  Aaron would prefer no-altitude and never-jump.

  As his body raced to the surface, the events of the past two days surfaced. They’d “liberated” a small transport ship from an Outer Rim Alliance (ORA) crew near Velon—an ORA stronghold where the main star was half the size of Earth’s sun. The only habitable planet Velon-1 was much closer to its star than Earth to the sun. The United Star Systems Fleet ship Phoenix, with all her advanced tech, didn’t have the ability to get close enough without risking detection.

  This ORA system was noticeably different from the little base they’d stomped on seven days ago at Indri-3. Here, the ORA had an established presence. They scanned everyone and everything. All ships, cargo, and passengers. Powerful sensor arrays littered the outer and inner system. At first, Aaron and the crew had discussed stowing on a planet-bound cargo transport. That idea quickly faded when they realized the extent of the ORA’s security apparatus.

  Several days ago, it was likely the ORA had intercepted and boarded Lieutenant Delaine’s ship, Reliant. She’d dispatched an emergency transmission which reached Phoenix as the ship was about to return to the United Systems’ side of the wormhole.

  The ORA had made a fatal error seizing Reliant. It was clear they didn’t have much knowledge of dark matter tech at all. The exotic matter powering Reliant’s reactor core was a derivative of Phoenix and left faint traces of dark energy while traveling at warp.

  Lieutenant Zane, Phoenix’s operations’ officer, had tracked those traces the past seven days here to Velon. The ORA should have scrapped the captured ship, but they were still so dead set on reverse engineering its technology, they had overlooked the risks. Either that or they didn’t care. The initial readings indicated Reliant had been in orbit around Velon-1. Now it was likely planet-side. Aaron could continue tracking it once they inserted onto the planet.

  It might be safe to assume the ORA were forcing Rachael to instruct them how to use the ship and its various technologies. She wouldn’t be of much use in that regard—she wasn’t an engineer. In either case, the ship’s location was the ideal place to begin searching for her.

  Their targeted landing coordinates would place them outside a sprawling mega-city. From there
, once they pinpointed Reliant’s location, they would assess the security surrounding its location. They were on their own for now. Fleet Admiral John Shepherd, the Supreme Commander of the United Star Systems Fleet (USSF), gave Aaron fourteen days to find Lieutenant Delaine. Any message they sent to Shepherd now, would take seven days on the round trip for a reply. They couldn’t wait another seven days to rescue Rachael, and that was the soonest they could expect reinforcements.

  “Commander, we’re nearing deploy altitude.”

  Aaron clicked an acknowledgement. The light on his suit arm blinked, and he triggered the parachute. It deployed from the pack on his back and arrested his descent. Minutes later, he braced and took the hard impact as his feet hit the surface. Without the suit, even with their arrested speed, the impact would likely have smashed his legs and other parts necessary to remain upright and enjoy long, peaceful walks on a moonlit beach.

  Lee had already retracted his suit and waited. The lieutenant dropped his pack and triggered the self-destruct. The little pack melted. Lee attached a jump-pack where the chute was before and checked his sidearm. The jump pack could propel up to two hundred pounds, forty feet.

  Aaron did the same. There’d be no trace of how they’d arrived—besides them being here if they were captured.

  Lee pulled his handheld to guide them.

  “Lead the way,” Aaron said.

  ***

  It was night on this side of the planet. Darkness might not offer true cover given detection technology, but anyone would take comfort in darkness when trying to move unseen. Fortunately, their suits had built in countermeasures to heat and motion sensors. After a while, enemy scanners might penetrate those countermeasures, but they weren’t out and exposed. As Lee led them through the ruins of an old city beneath the new mega-city, Aaron’s thoughts drifted.

  Somewhere out there Rachael waited for him. Aaron wouldn’t let anyone or anything take her away. This was what he feared the most. That he’d love someone he couldn’t be with. That he might have to give up one thing he loved, for another.

  Could he give up the frontier? Maybe he could find a small ship and journey the cosmos with Rachael. Sometimes, figuring out what you wanted was life’s greatest challenge. Other times you might meander along, searching for purpose.

  Had he reached some kind of mid-life crises?

  He tried never to think of how his thoughts might differ from that of his original self since his mother’s revelation of cloning his mortally wounded body. A year ago, on the frontier, life had been simple. Then . . . he’d lost his ship and half his crew. And before he could process that, Shepherd had tossed him into a situation where the choices he made could lead to a lasting peace with the Baridian Empire, or doom humankind to a catastrophic war.

  Then his feelings for Rachael complicated things even more. Maybe he’d have preferred it if all there was to her was this rigid, cold person. But Aaron had discovered another side to her, a side he loved. It was a feeling he’d fought against for a long time, but now, he’d embraced it. How would she feel if she found out what really happened to him? How would the others feel? What about the Fleet? If the USSF found out he was given a second life, in the same manner which had divided Earth in the twenty-second century, how would they react? Would they associate him with the ORA, whose stated goal was the destruction of Earth itself?

  Aaron forced that grim prospect from his mind. Then his thoughts circled right back to the beginning and twisted into a mass of confusion. What was happiness, anyway? For Aaron, the frontier had answered that question. But was it worth the sacrifices he’d have to make to achieve what he most desired? Was the sacrifice worth it? It was something one could spend a lifetime debating, and then the life was over. And it went by without you taking that step, making that sacrifice, daring to try that one thing you feared, but which you believed might yield the ultimate reward.

  If Aaron left the USSF, would he regret it? Was that his ultimate test? If for one moment you believed you might regret not doing something, then you owed it to yourself to do it. Regret could be the catalyst of any downward spiral.

  Aaron took a deep breath. Maybe out here beyond the wormhole, he’d find something—an answer to all these questions—and more. Something which might remove the cloud of doubt which had taken hold of him.

  In the days since reading his mother’s letter or what felt like her confession, he’d struggled to make sense of what she’d written. Centuries ago, the Immortals as they referred to themselves, had embedded themselves in the human colonies already living in the Outer Rim.

  As a result, came the rise of the Outer Rim Alliance. The Alliance didn’t even know Immortals ruled it. At least that’s what his mother believed. After Lazarus left the Immortals, a power struggle played out among The Old Ones. And men like Rylar Kane won. Technologically, from what he’d seen so far of the Outer Rim Alliance, the USS was far ahead, but the ORA had made a critical breakthrough in FTL travel. A breakthrough which could prove to be a game-changer.

  The ORA might not have the power to drive their starships at excessive multiples of c but they’d conceived an innovative alternative. They’d developed and perfected the ability to generate, stabilize and use wormholes. These FTL bridges linked the Alliance’s planetary systems and facilitated instantaneous travel between outlying colonies and major hub-worlds.

  Perhaps when Kane took over, his military caste took the technology further. By studying the Einstein-Rosen bridges as they had these past hundreds of years, the ORA had somehow devised a way to enable their dreadnoughts to create temporary artificial wormholes. But it was all only speculation, given what Aaron had learned so far about this new enemy.

  During the seven days spent following Reliant’s trail, they observed an ORA dreadnought open a wormhole and enter. It took the behemoth an hour to build the energy required, and the wormhole closed after fifteen minutes.

  Long enough for a fleet to traverse.

  The dreadnoughts weren’t merely massive warships—they were mobile wormhole platforms designed to create a frontier beachhead anywhere.

  Rachael had attached a data package to her comm wave before she was jammed. It showed the ORA had plans to, or had already constructed and deployed six dreadnoughts with a hundred smaller escorting ships each. Each dreadnought had a target. Sol, Rigel, Epsilon Eridani, Alpha Centauri, Atlas and even the Imperial homeworld Hosque.

  The attack would occur simultaneously. The fleet of ships coming through each wormhole would be enough to cause catastrophic damage to their chosen targets. Even if the orbital defense platforms around those tech-5 worlds could stop them, it wouldn’t be before the dreadnoughts obliterated half the planet.

  With one swipe of their hand, the ORA would cripple the United Star Systems and Baridian Empire. It seemed obvious now to Aaron, that Rylar Kane was likely their leader. And Kane had made some big mistakes. Beginning with when he abducted Endeavor’s crew.

  Aaron’s thoughts drifted back to the present when Lee abruptly stopped. He almost careened into the back of the lieutenant. It seemed they’d reached the designated coordinates.

  Chapter 2-A Bad Feeling

  “Keep your doomsday premonitions to yourself” – Aaron Rayne

  Velon-1

  When they reached their destination, Aaron and Lee waited several hours for their palm-sized recon drones to laser a path underneath the ORA structure. Their handhelds showed Reliant’s location now, somewhere within a large hangar bay deep inside the base.

  The drones mapped out abandoned tunnels and bunkers beneath the base stretching outward for miles. All earlier infrastructure from past generations.

  The ORA were nothing if not confident. First, they surmised you had to breach their planetary security. If successful, what would it take to infiltrate any of their bases? They never believed for one minute someone would map out the ruins beneath their new city and exploit it.

  Lee and Aaron trudged through endless dark tunnels. The smell was
likely horrendous, the suit saved them from the worst of it. It reminded Aaron of images he’d seen of underground transit systems from old Earth. Despite his suit’s vision enhancement, the ruins still held an eeriness he couldn’t explain.

  They finally came to a weak point in the structure to breach the base. The question was, were there any security sensors in this abandoned part? They’d soon find out. It was their best choice.

  Their only choice.

  Aaron planted the breaching charge. It was a simple strip of super-heated gas. It would melt away a large enough hole in the wall. “Any last words?” he asked the lieutenant.

  Lee shook his head. “Nothing particularly inspiring comes to mind, Commander.”

  Aaron’s finger hovered over the execute command on his handheld.

  “Although,” Lee began, causing Aaron to pause. “I have a bad feeling about this.”

  Aaron dropped his head. “I remember Lt. Delaine telling me that very thing . . . before it all went to hell on Atlas Prime. Sometimes I wish you empathic people would keep your doomsday premonitions to yourself.”

  “You know this is by far the craziest thing we’ve ever done. We’re far from home, invading an enemy stronghold, just the two of us. Who do we really think we are?”

  Aaron looked his friend in the eyes. “A bunch of determined people who’ll do anything to save our friends. In any regard, it’s sure to get a reaction from ‘the man’ if he’s got a clone of himself near here,” Aaron said.

  “He’s here,” Lee said, knowingly. “At least some part of him. I guess someone else will have told him how he met his death. Since he didn’t have time to upload his latest updates, so to speak.”

  “Quite right.”

  Lee regarded Aaron, smiling. “Why don’t we check if they have any spares of you lying around? Just for a backup.”

  Aaron narrowed his eyes.

  “Too soon?” Lee asked.