The Archeon Codex: Guardians of the Galactic Sentinel Book 2 Read online

  Tingey looked at him for a long moment before barking out a derisive guffaw. "Let me see if I have this straight, Everett. You want me to divert one of the Navy's warships to follow up on a wild goose chase you say is legitimized by an association with the supernatural?"

  "That's not quite the way I would put it, Bill, but yes. Besides, the expedition included two Federation naval officers, officers whose participation was approved by you."

  "I am painfully aware of that fact. It was a decision I now regret making."

  "But what they're doing could be important to the future of the Federation and all of Mankind."

  "Grandiose words, Senator, but it will take more than your gut feelings and a bunch of mumbo-jumbo for me to send one of our ships and its crew into the dangers of the Sol system."

  "But what about Ariane MacPherson and Zachary Lynton?" said Dawson, attempting to personalize the two officers on the off-chance Tingey had a human side.

  "You are aware they both volunteered?"

  "I am but..."

  "No buts, Everett. That expedition was a bad call in the first place. If you can provide me with a more compelling reason to follow up on them, I might consider it. For now, the answer is no."

  Dawson hadn't really expected to be treated any differently, but that didn't make the rejection any easier to swallow. He clenched his teeth and stood up, knowing an intense and counter-productive argument would ensue if he stayed much longer. "Thank you for your time, Mr. Secretary."

  "Good day, Senator"

  Dawson turned and left, feeling anger and disappointment in equal measure. Time to try a different angle.

  What that might be, he hadn't a clue.

  Chapter 2. Alien Aggression.

  Uncharted Star System X78904, October 1, 2676.

  The strange spacecraft continued to grow in size on the forward bridge viewscreen of Soviet People's Ship (SPS) Lenin. The Soviet craft appeared to be nothing more than a run-of-the-mill courier ship, but despite her mundane appearance, she was actually an armed and rather formidable warship -- a wolf in sheep's clothing. She was under the command of Soviet People's Captain Nicholas Kozloff who was, at the present time, seriously questioning why he'd been ordered to pursue the obviously unconventional ship currently displayed on the viewscreen. Though Kozloff was nominally in command of Lenin, it had been made clear to him from the start of this mission he was obligated to take any action requested by the ship's political officer, Commander Boris Pavlovich. The politico was, even now, in his customary station up against the rear starboard bulkhead, a position from where he could observe all six personnel currently manning the bridge, including the ship's captain.

  This Kozloff will bear watching, thought Pavlovich as he too kept track of the events unfolding on the main viewscreen. Though the man appears to be a competent leader, his loyalty to the party is very much in doubt.

  The captain had questioned the political officer's orders on several occasions during this current foray, infractions that would be highlighted in Pavlovich's reports. Now that the mission had reached a critical point, it was mandatory the captain carry out his duties. We will need to replace him with someone more malleable as soon as the opportunity presents itself, Pavlovich concluded.

  "Inform me when we are within weapons range, Captain," said Pavlovich.

  "Are we attempting to capture that ship?" asked Kozloff, once again undermining the politico's authority."

  "Negative, Captain. Our mission is to destroy it."

  "Our scans indicate it is a ship of unknown design," said Kozloff. "It doesn't appear to be armed or even shielded. Such an action could well be an act of war! Should we not at least hail them and give them a chance to surrender before we open fire?"

  "My orders are not to be questioned!" replied Pavlovich in a flash of anger, his face livid.

  "As captain of this ship, I am ultimately responsible for her actions," replied Kozloff firmly, his lips a tight line. "I will not order an attack on that ship until I have a very good reason."

  "You may then consider yourself relieved of command!" shouted Pavlovich, rising out of his seat. "Escort this man to the brig, Sergeant Zlotnik!"

  Zlotnik, commander of a six-man Marine contingent assigned to Lenin, was a hard-as-nails veteran who had seen pretty much everything during his long years of service. One thing he'd never seen was two officers, each with a legitimate claim for command, arguing over what the next course of action should be. He had also never been ordered to relieve a superior officer of command before. He hesitated for a moment before deciding his only real option was to acquiesce to the officer with the higher rank, in this case Pavlovich. The burly marine reluctantly approached the captain of the ship. "I suggest you come with me quietly, Captain. Please do not give me cause to draw my weapon. I have complete authority to use it on you and I will if I have to."

  "It's alright, Sergeant," said Kozloff, "I'll go peacefully." With a scowl on his face, the captain vacated the command station and turned to leave the bridge. On his way out, he treated the political officer to a look of pure hatred. "By attacking that helpless ship, we are almost certainly committing a war crime. I will be no part of such an atrocity."

  The political officer ignored him. "Lieutenant Grasmik? You are now the captain of this vessel. We are within range of our target. Open fire with our front battery immediately!"

  Lieutenant Pytor Grasmik, a young and inexperienced officer only just a year out of the Soviet Naval Academy, swallowed hard and moved into to the captain's chair. With his voice shaking, he gave the order to target the alien ship.

  While Kozloff was arguing with the political officer about the advisability of attacking the unknown target, the operators of the strange ship apparently had time to realize the danger they were in. The ship began to accelerate away and did so far more quickly than any of the Soviet crew expected. In fact, it was moving away at a rate Lenin couldn't match, even at maximum thrust.

  "Open fire NOW!" shouted Pavlovich, "Before they get out of range!"

  Grasmik, following protocol, contacted the weapons captain.

  "Weapons? Do you have a lock on our target?"

  "We do...Captain, but it is at extreme range."

  Grasmik looked back at the political officer.

  "Fire, damn you! Or I'll have the lot of you thrown in the brig!"

  "Open fire," ordered Grasmik.

  A shot from the powerful single-mount pulse cannon of Lenin's front main battery strobed out toward the strange ship and missed, the pulse flashing harmlessly underneath the unconventional craft. The gun crew had better luck on their next try. The second pulse struck the lower edge of the target, but the impact didn't seem to slow the strange ship down at all. In fact, it continued to accelerate.

  Sensor operator and science officer, Ensign Tatiana Nuriyev, who possessed a Ph.D. in biology, among other notable attributes, scanned her instruments and made a report, "Target impacted, sir." After a moment she added, "Debris detected!"

  Before Grasmik could order another set of pulses, he was contacted by the captain of the gun crew, Chief Petty Officer Ivan Volikov.

  "Captain? This is weapons."

  "Go ahead," said Grasmik.

  "We no longer have a lock on our target."

  Pavlovich got up from his seat at the back of the bridge. "Tell weapons to stand down," he said, managing to sound remarkably calm in spite of the anger he was obviously suppressing.

  "Shall we pursue?" asked Grasmik.

  "Negative, Captain, we'll never catch that ship. We cannot possibly match their level of acceleration. That damnable Kozloff has cost us a golden opportunity. See that the rest of you do not repeat his error. I warn you all these events are considered to be of the highest secrecy. Any violation of the security protocols will be dealt with severely. Do you all understand?"

  Seeing nothing but wide-eyed nods, he gave a final order, "Our mission has is yet to be completed. Set course for the Beta hyperlink zone. We will be leavin
g this system immediately." With those words he turned and stormed off the bridge.

  The members of Lenin's bridge crew looked around at each other in disbelief, appalled by the series of events they'd just witnessed and vastly relieved the political officer was no longer there.

  "Focus, comrades," said Grasmik. "We still have a job to do."

  Tatiana was the first to recover. "I have an analysis of the debris, captain."

  "Yes, Ensign?"

  "There is..." she paused, frowning at her instruments, "...this makes no sense, let me rerun the analysis."

  "Do it."

  The sensor operator took nearly a minute to recheck her data.

  "This is very strange, Captain," she said, eyes still glued to her instrument console. "I am reading absolutely no metal or composite residues."

  "No metal?" asked Grasmik. "What are you reading then?"

  "Nothing but organic compounds, sir."

  "You are certain?"

  "As certain as I can be. Would you like me to run the analysis again?"

  "No, that will not be necessary. File the information along with your report. We can turn it over to the engineers when we get back to Soviet space. Let them worry about it. Helm? Set course for hyperlink zone Beta."

  Upon exiting the bridge, Pavlovich immediately headed for the passenger section of the courier ship where he paused outside one of the doors in the short corridor. After taking a deep breath, he touched the panel beside the door, sounding the warning chime within.

  "State your business," came a raspy voice through the speaker.

  "This is Commander Pavlovich, Your Excellency. I have a report."

  "Enter," replied the voice.

  The doorway to the chamber scissored open and closed behind him as Pavlovich entered the darkened chamber.

  The same voice rasped out of the darkness, "Success, Commander?"

  "I regret to inform you the target has...escaped, Your Excellency."

  The announcement was greeted with a long silence followed by, "That is most unfortunate. How did this failure occur?"

  "We had our pulse weapons locked on target, but Captain Kozloff refused to follow my order to fire. During the delay, the enemy ship recognized the threat we posed and went to full thrust. We did score a single hit at extreme range, but it was insufficient to stop them from escaping."

  "I see. What of Captain Kozloff?"

  "He has been relieved of command and now resides in the brig."

  "He will be dealt with. We must now set course for star system X97610."

  "The 'X' designation indicates it is another unexplored system, Excellency. Are the hyperzones safe?"

  "They are indeed, Commander, and we should have another go at our target shortly after we arrive there. Thank you for your report, such as it is. You may leave me now."

  "As you wish, Your Excellency."

  Down in Lenin's brig, Nicholas Kozloff realized, perhaps a little too late, that his political officer was utterly and dangerously mad. What kind of spacecraft had they been pursuing and why had Pavlovich insisted it be destroyed? It made no sense. He resolved then and there he would regain command of Lenin before the political officer disgraced the ship and its crew by performing additional atrocities against other unarmed targets. Kozloff had good reason to believe most of the crew thought as he did: what the political arm of the military had been doing lately was wrong. He was confident the crew would follow him if given a choice -- and an opportunity.

  Hopefully, there would be time before the ship encountered another target. Kozloff would have to be careful, but if he could organize his crew, they should be able to imprison or...dispatch the political officer, if it came to that. He was pretty sure the other thirty crew members felt exactly the same way about Commander Boris Pavlovich that he did.

  He wondered briefly if it was considered mutiny if you wrested control of your own ship back from the clutches of a madman?

  Chapter 3. Reunions.

  Sol System, somewhere within the Martian moon, Deimos. October 1, 2676.

  "Sentinel Guardian Zackary Lynton, it is time for you to cease sleeping."

  "What time is it?" Zack asked irritably, just barely awake.

  "The time is 0600. I have awakened you according to your wishes."

  "Give me another fifteen minutes."

  "I do not understand, the interval of time required for human sleep has been exceeded."

  A cascade of awareness flooded Zack's consciousness and, with a rush, he realized where he was and who, or what, he was speaking to. He pried his eyes open and threw the covers back.

  "I wouldn't expect you to understand," he said. "You're a computer."

  "Full understanding is not necessary. I will awaken you in fourteen minutes, thirty-three seconds."

  "Never mind, I'll get up."

  "For future reference, this entity is not a computer. It would be more correct to refer to me as an Artificial Intelligence."

  "Okay, a glorified computer then." The AI had no rebuttal and Zack decided he'd won this particular interchange, or at least scored a draw, either of which were a rare occurrence.

  Marine Second Lieutenant Zackary Lynton and nearly a dozen of his companions had been inside Deimos, the smaller of two Moons orbiting planet Mars in the Sol System, for more than a month. The interior of the little moon was riddled with so many tunnels and larger hollowed-out spaces it resembled an asteroid-sized hunk of Swiss cheese. Zack had wondered more than once if maybe the moon had been mined at one time in the distant past and later converted to its current purpose.

  The chamber he found himself in was, like most of the spaces within the moon, a hemisphere. This room, at about eight meters in diameter and four meters high, was the perfect size for quartering a single person. The bed, a raised, rectangular platform covered with padding made of an unknown material, was actually very comfortable. He rolled out of bed, grabbed his toiletry kit out of his duffel and headed into a smaller adjoining chamber, this one a quarter sphere with a flat floor and one vertical wall. The vertical wall bisected yet another hemispherical space, and Zack suspected there was a mirror image facility on the other side of it.

  After using the toilet, he entered a small, transparent booth housing a totally unexpected luxury, a genuine water shower. He savored the invigorating experience for several minutes before stepping out and drying himself off with a towel hung just outside the shower stall. The towel was soft, absorbent and also made of an unrecognizable material. He pulled his marine-issue, nano-blade shaver out of his kit and stepped in front of the stone sink jutting out from the wall. After he finished shaving, he waved his hand over a sensor plate to run some water into the sink, washed his face and combed his short, brown hair using his image in the circular reflective portion of the wall just above the sink.

  Resigned to the fact that he looked as good as he was going to, he went back into the larger chamber, selected a clean military coverall and got dressed. He then left the sleep chamber through a green, translucent force curtain shielding the door-sized exit portal.

  The portal opened into a corridor curving away in both directions. Zack went to his right, headed towards one of the larger dome-shaped spaces in the burrowed-out moon. The corridor, bored out of the solid rock of the moon by some means, had smooth walls, almost as though they'd been polished. The corridor would have been perfectly circular in cross-section except the lower fourth of the circle had been left flat to serve as a floor.

  Zack was able to walk normally because the living areas inside the moon were outfitted with artificial gravity, a necessity because the little moon generated a gravitational pull of a miniscule 306 micro gravities. This meant the escape velocity of the moon was a mere twenty kilometers per hour. Out on the surface, a healthy sneeze was probably sufficient to launch a human into orbit. Near weightlessness within the moon would have been a real pain in the neck, especially given the size of some of the larger chambers and how smooth the walls were.

  A
s he walked, his thoughts turned involuntarily to the uncertain future ahead of him and his colleagues. Sometime within the next hour or so, he would be meeting with the three Human Representatives to the Grand Amalgamation of Galactic Civilizations and his two fellow Sentinel Guardians to discuss what their next course of action should be. He felt a surge of expectation. Today was the day he and his fellow humans were going to see the end of more than a month of training with the Deimos AI and get to work.

  They were also scheduled to actually meet a member of an alien race for the first time! Amalgamation Sentinel Guardian for the fourth quadrant, Symantia L'Proxa, was supposed to be coming to Deimos later this morning. Zack and his colleagues had managed to eke out a victory against a small of group of dangerous aliens called "Custodians," after the beasts had high-jacked a Soviet warship, and killed the entire crew. All any of them had seen was a short video of the creatures, taken by the last survivor, just before the warship had been destroyed. As far as he knew, no surviving Human had ever actually had a face-to face-interaction with an alien species.

  Zack and his companions had been briefed on what to expect concerning Regional Guardian L'Proxa but such exposure was far from the same as an actual meeting. He and his colleagues had a formidable task in front of them and no clear plan on how to accomplish it. Nor did they have unlimited time.

  Zack and the others had been living inside Deimos since his team had unknowingly activated some of the ancient mechanisms within the moon. Zack himself had placed the Galactic Sentinel Key or, as the members of the expedition referred to it, "The Deimos Artifact," on the base receiver platform they'd discovered in a chamber just inside a hidden entrance to the interior of the moon. Like the Key itself, the base unit in the moon had been placed in the Sol system thousands of years ago by an alien species whose identity remained unknown.

  As he headed down the corridor, he was amazed all over again at the sheer complexity of the construct he was in. Posing as one of the moons of Mars, Deimos was made of rock, though it was actually more like a huge machine, packed with technology so advanced he could never hope to understand it. By interacting with the moon's AI through "Teaching and Learning" modules, he and his fellows had been brought up to speed about the Grand Amalgamation Mankind had been invited to join with, and a bewildering amount of other information concerning the complex workings of the Milky Way Galaxy. The T-L modules interacted directly with the brain and allowed the transfer of huge amounts of information in a very short time.