The StarMaster’s Son: (Formerly The Master War) Read online

  Felik frowned.

 

 

  Landi continued,

  Felik folded his avatar body's arms over his chest. And it didn't matter anyway. No one knew if the sim about the StarMaster was true. Hundreds of fake sims presented as real ones showed up in the scholar realms every sol.

  Landi said.

  Chapter 2

  About forty solar cycles earlier...

  "You're dead. You're dead. You're dead. You're all dead," Kai said, ticking off three alien humanoid lifeforms right outside the ship.

  She watched the three of them kick and flail in the middle of space as their bodies succumbed to a lack of oxygen. Suction holes opened and closed, spines extended and retracted. The aliens turned pale as beads of slime floated off them.

  "You sure do like killing things," said Euphrates, her ship and friend. His avatar stood beside her. He was nibbling on a chicken drumstick, bits of grease dripping into his bright red beard.

  Killing Starbleeders, she thought but didn't say. "You know it. That's why I'm an in-quis-i-tor," she said, emphasizing each of the syllables of the word. It wasn't so different from a bounty hunter, but that was an older term from an older era—before the Union Omega.

  Bounty hunters fired gauss rifles and wore combat armor that if penetrated would lead to death. Inquisitors used godwebs and implanted their minds in bodies that were hardened to tolerate extreme conditions, including some enemy attacks.

  Kai sauntered across Euphrates's command sphere, her boots thudding against its shiny black surface. It was a metal ball, twenty feet in diameter, floating inside the ship's primary chamber. It replaced the typical bridge of older ships. Since most of Euphrates's maintenance was automated, she could remain on the sphere. And since she didn't need to go anywhere else in the corvette-class ship, the walls and interior were replaced by a live feed of the cosmos around her. It created the illusion that she was on a giant ball in the middle of space.

  Vaguely aware of the gorgeous purple and orange Tarsinia nebula a few billion klicks away, she checked her nexus for updates from her mother. Not so much as a meme. She groaned but heard the woman's words in her head. If the Hellion network is to grow with the Union Omega, sacrifices must be made. Both metaphorically and literally. As heir, you must not only understand this, you must embody this.

  "Yeah, no shit," Kai thought aloud. "That's why I'm way the fuck out here."

  The Lumerian Quadrant's Outer Rims could be beautiful, as evidenced by the Tarsinia nebula, but they were also the technological dead zone of the universe. Type II species (by the Union Omega scale) were considered advanced lifeforms out here.

  She snorted, a vestigial behavior. As the proverbial princess of the Hellion network, she wasn't going to be caught dead in a lower-tier body frame that required breathing. And crapping, like some damn animal. Those primitive obligations would only slow down an inquisitor like her.

  "How's my boy doing?" she said, pulling up a display of a Clorondite, an imp of an alien species with a volcano of a head. Its single eye was a mess of swirling light that dominated its blue and orange face.

  In her feed, she could parse his thought bubbles directly, including the mood.

 

  To the credit of his species, Raksamat was still putting up a fight after two entire sols—almost fifty hours. Then again, no one had ever questioned the Clorondites' mental fortitude. And it was his mind, his core that was locked in containment. She'd destroyed his body, his frame, in their battle.

  Let that teach the damn Starbleeder network. She waved away the holodisplay of Raksamat's digital containment stasis. She would let him stew a little longer. Then she would plant his mind into an organic frame and toss him out the airlock.

  Kai pulled up a menu of all the racing sims available on the realms that would last longer than two weeks.

  Using a warp-gate to reach planet Burkos would likely let her target know she was coming given that they rarely used warp-gates out here. She would have to rely on low-tech, sublight travel. Calculations suggested her trip would take a few weeks. Maybe an entire lunar cycle—a month by old Terran terms. She needed something to pass the time.

  She settled on a racing sim that took place during the early lunar cycles of the Great Cosmic Wars. When the Minds of Errukav were obliterating other Type IV species on a whim. Players started in the Triangulum Galaxy and had to traverse eight million light-years of warring space to reach the Vexos Galaxy. Everyone started in a standard Terran frigate. Players were allowed to ally with the Minds of Errukav or any other entities they encountered. That would make it fun. A buy-in guaranteed decent competition.

  She requested access from the host. Thanks to the ansible beacons the InfiNet and realms were built upon the message would reach its recipient in seconds rather than millennia.

  "Hey," Euphrates said.

  "Yeah?" she said, stretching out the word.

  "I'm monitoring the spread of particles and dust and I've detected a growing trail of cleared debris."

  In other words, a ship trying to be stealthy.

  "Some idiot Starbleeder hoping to hide." Not that she didn't mind destroying her network's rivals, but this seemed sloppy. Even for them.

  Most ships used gravity shovers or nanites to clear debris from their path and avoid kinetically charged impacts that would act like asteroids hitting a planet's surface. Of course, either of these required a godweb—fields of control that acted like a magical aura around a ship. It wasn't magic, though, just control of dark energy and dark matter tamed by the right amount of extremely quick-moving, highly energized subatomic particles and alien tech, a million solar cycles in the making.

  In any case, godwebs could detect other godwebs within their range. Stealth technology hadn't gotten around that yet.

  "I'm not sure about that," Euphrates said, folding arms chiseled like axes over his gray and brown leather tunic. "There's no energy signature."

  That piqued Kai's interest. The thing about godwebs was they emitted an energy signature. A ship couldn't deploy gravity shovers or smart dust nanites without doing so. Even without a running godweb, sensors should've picked up the ship's drive.

  "Must be experimental. Three guesses who," she grumbled.

  "If your target is as big as your mom says, it has to be the Starbleeders."

  "How far away is the trail?"

  "Within thirteen thousand klicks. I assume that it's been following us."

  Kai winced. "That close? What the hell were you doing? Playing another martial arts sim?"

  It must've warped in. The thing was that warping left traces and gave heads-ups due to the molecules and radiation involved in skipping across space. Her corvette-class ship was no serious war bird, but its godweb range was larger than thirteen thousand klicks. It should've picked up on the warping inside that.

  "That was a one-time malfunction," Euphrates said.

  "This thing is giving us an
easy target. See if we can capture it in a gravity hold."

  "You said it yourself, the bogey is giving us a very easy target. Too easy. Maybe we should send out a warning. Or at least consult a protocol?"

  "We don't need a damn protocol," Kai said sharply. She'd downloaded the standard ship commander modules and then some. Her decisions were as sound as any.

  For all she knew this was the work of the Starbleeders, yes, but they were only trying to scare her off. If she ran away now even she would have to call herself a coward. "What we need is to show some aggro."

  Doing so might alert her primary target, but the Starbleeder ship was a more pressing matter.

  With a wave of her hand, Kai brought up a hologram of Euphrates' ship frame above her hand. It was a long, elliptical disk with a surface as smooth as a Dancing Sleeda's skin.

  Presently, the bogey appeared as a generic red prism above the command sphere she was standing on. In other words, they didn't have a visual on it yet. Hell, they didn't have any direct evidence of it on their sensors. No radiation, gravitational pull, or ansible signals.

  "Based on the path it's clearing, I estimate the size to be consistent with that of a corvette-class vessel." Approximately three hundred feet long, the same as Euphrates, indicating the power of its godweb should have matched. If this were experimental tech, however, all bets were off. "And I can estimate its physical coordinates."

  Normally, she'd run a combat script to guide the flow of any potential battles. Since they didn't know what they were dealing with, however, her modules compelled her to shoot first and ask questions later.

  "Give them a taste of laser," she said deadpan. Kai wouldn't kill anyone yet. Just force them to seriously reconsider their current path.

  The bluish white flash of an ion beam was all she saw of the attack.

  "No effect," Euphrates' avatar said, thrumming his fingers along a particularly poignant vein on his bicep. Kai watched a slow-mo replay. The laser hit what appeared to be a force field, bending like it was being sucked into a black hole and dispersing. Except it wasn't a black hole.

  Maybe it was time to make it one, though. "Synthesize a black hole directly in front of them."

  Countless tiny reactor cells integrated into the ship's frame allowed the godweb to function. Some of these reactor cells also contained weapons. The ship's godweb would warp one of these weapons, a microscopic Kugelblitz bomb, from the reactor cell to the enemy ship. There, the Kugelblitz bomb would detonate, unleashing a mass that functioned as a more efficient, malleable type of limited-life black hole.

  That's what Kai actually meant.

  "Done." Blips of data on her HUD and feed revealed that the black hole was devouring debris for a few seconds before it timed out and evaporated into a soup of particles.

  The fact that they couldn't really detect the ship itself introduced a strange scenario. They didn't know if the black hole had sucked it in. They hadn't been able to directly detect the ship before, and with no debris to watch, it would be practically impossible to confirm it was gone.

  "Oopsy," Euphrates said, apparently realizing the same thing. "Well, I did say we should've consulted a protocol."

  A protocol would've foreseen this and suggested something else.

  Kai balled a fist and pumped it into her palm. Yeah, she'd screwed up. Which was strange because her inquisitor mods were supposed to keep her emotions in check.

  She checked the status of her mods now and noticed that they'd been switched off without so much as a feed notification. That was bizarre. She reactivated them, knowing the bogey must've done this somehow.

  "It's back! And it's gonna ram us," Euphrates cried.

  The ship had apparently continued on its path toward them. The cloud of particles near Euphrates hadn't been sucked into the momentary black hole, and they could map the trail of the bogey again.

  "You've gotta be kidding me. Running combat scripts. Let's psi.link," she said. While her ship didn't possess the best weapons or fastest drives, the Hellion network combat algorithms were first-class.

  "There's no ti—"

  Everything went dark and the chamber howled with the escape of air. She formed lights with her utility fog. The walls defaulted to their dull metal color, revealing a gaping hole, but no visible enemy ship. Kai's own body was no longer touching the floor. The artificial gravity was gone. She'd never expected initial penetration to be so painless. Her consorts could learn from this. "You still with me, Euphrates?" she called over the rush of the air venting.

  No response, and his avatar was gone. She sent him a nexus message and got nothing.

  Kai's mouth fell open. For the first time on this operation, she felt genuine fear. She'd never heard of a ship doing what the rogue ship had done. And now it seemed on the verge of striking its finishing blow. Okay, staying here was out of the question. She accepted that. But she couldn't abandon the mission.

  Hoping he'd be able to hear her, even if he couldn't respond, she spoke to the empty room, "Euphrates, are you there? I'm going to try the escape pod."

  Of course, she'd have to get it moving manually. Kai swallowed dryly.

  No inquisitor worth their salt had to rely on an escape pod. She considered herself a good inquisitor, so she'd never bothered setting up this one. The only reason she even had it onboard was because her mom wouldn't stop nagging her otherwise.

  She reached down and palmed the command sphere's slick black surface. It was cool to the touch. A slot opened and two small orbs floated free. One contained Raksamat's compressed core. The other contained the mind of an asset who was supposed to help her eliminate her target.

  She pressed both against her arm and a mesh utility fog web bound them there. Her godweb was still running along with its gravity manipulators. She used that to fly to the wall, palmed it, and hurried into the capsule.

  Godwebs and the reactor cells that emitted them were not the same as ship drives. She couldn't fly off into space. Well, she could, since her body didn't require oxygen and was mostly hardened to survive in any rigorous environment. But she wouldn't be able to travel more than a few thousand kilometers an hour. And her energy would dry up quickly if she continued flying herself at full speed for the entire duration of her trip. She'd also make for an easy target.

  Either way, an escape pod was a better choice than staying here. Willing her godweb to generate motion via gravity manipulators, she shoved the escape pod forward from the inside. She could let it cruise freely for a while once she got it moving at a high velocity. Which it would reach in a matter of seconds.

  Yet routing an optimized path to Burkos in her nexus left her crestfallen.

  The output pinged on her feed.

  Over a decade just to sneak into Burkos. Fuck. That was even after accounting for any shortcuts and gravity assist maneuvers from nearby astronomical bodies.

  If she wanted, she could message her network and request an immediate extraction. Except that she couldn't live with herself if she ran out on the most important hunt of her life. There would be no aborting the mission.

  That was until a warning flashed in her HUD. Her nexus and godweb were failing. Suddenly, the escape pod's white sterile interior began pixelating. Jagged pixels of every color flooded her vision as the world she knew disappeared.

  Chapter 3

  FELIK

  * * *

 

  Felik groaned as his feed filled with news from his quadrant of the universe. Some sapients preferred to experience the news through realm sims as if they were right there at the scene of the crime or witnessing protests of some crazy network of an alien species firsthand.

  Usually, he liked to receive it on his feed, parse out the useful bits in a couple seconds, then go to the next update. He'd heard that the StarMaster had been old-fashioned like that.

  "What's wrong, you poor lit
tle neural virus survivor?" Lindsay said in a mock baby-tone. Her cosmetic cat ears made her look even cuter than she was. That and her perfect body—her skintight shirt and shorts emphasizing all the right parts—were the reasons he let her make light of his condition.

  Felik rolled over on the grass and met her gaze. "It's just that everyone I knew on the scholar realms suspected Union Omega officials of selling high-tech weaponry to the Coalition. Now that it's official, everyone will act like it was common knowledge."

  He'd tried to tell other sapients about this, but they'd dismissed it as the rantings of a neural virus victim.

  She ran her hands along his six-pack. "But everyone did know about it."

  "See?!"

  "I think you're overreacting."

  Felik groaned again. He knew it was a small thing, but the little deceits added up. Eventually, the combination of dozens of lies changed sapients' perception of reality. "Maybe you're right. The adjudicators never seriously punish them anyways." They hadn't this time. Nor would they unless someone with real political power spoke up.

  "The Coalition only wants its advanced technology for self-preservation like everyone else. Don't look so disappointed."

  "I know. I just wish I could punish these scumbags." Even downgrading their karma didn't work because they could recoup their losses with karma farms. Or take the losses out of network karma insurance.

  "Felik, the Chief Philosopher," she teased. They both knew a Chief Philosopher didn't suffer from neural viruses that made them into gambling addicts and would kill them in a decade. The Union Omega Chief Philosopher was supposed to be a moral compass. A sapient with the power to sway the StarMaster for the good of the universe. Which was probably why there hadn't been one for so long.

  And partly why no one wanted him to have the job. "Yeah and if I were, I would do it really well. Like Astro Phoenix." Like many sapients, he'd grown up idolizing Phoenix as his hero. Not just because Phoenix had literally been a hero—saving the universe from the Minds of Errukav with his reality-warping powers—but because after the end of his adventures, he'd tried to spread peace and justice via political means. Plus, like him, Phoenix had only used one living frame—Felik's neural virus prevented him from having more than one body at a time.