Gamma Nine (Book One) Read online

  Gamma Nine

  By Christi Smit

  Copyright © 2016 by Christi Smit.

  All rights reserved.

  This book is protected under international copyright laws and by the Republic of South Africa. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited.

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Author’s Foreword

  Chapter Zero

  Chapter Zero.One

  Chapter Zero.Two

  Chapter One

  Chapter One.One

  Chapter One.Two

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Two.One

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Three.One

  Chapter Three.Two

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Four.One

  Chapter Four.Two

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Five.One

  Chapter Five.Two

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Six.One

  Chapter Six.Two

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Seven.One

  Chapter Seven.Two

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Eight.One

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Star Explorer Club

  For G

  The brightest light in the ever-growing darkness.

  Even the stars envy you when you shine.

  You made all of this possible.

  A FEW WORDS FROM THE AUTHOR OR THE “THIS MIGHT BE AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE BUT PROBABLY ISN’T PART”

  The idea for this novel was conceived many years ago, I say conceived because it grew in my mind for as long as I care to remember, growing little by little into what it is now and what it will become, hopefully. It was only when I started writing this novel that I realized how big of an enemy self-doubt can be. This novel pushed my sanity to its very limits, I doubted myself after almost every passage or chapter, and I still do. The questions you ask yourself hinder your productivity and make you one angry bastard. I appreciate my partner even more for putting up with my sour and downright difficult moods. Is there enough action in the first chapters? Will your readers read through the slower parts? Maybe they won’t like your writing style. Maybe you missed a fact and it buggers up your entire novel. These questions and more flowed through me every time I sat down to write, perhaps certain days to my own detriment.

  But, I did it. Even through all of the self-doubt, you are reading this and are about to go on a great journey with me and my characters. I was not going to write something here when I started out, afraid that I might sound pompous or arrogant. My intention is to butter you up for what is to come. Let me explain before I lose your already wavering interest.

  I dislike novels without a proper stage and background. As a lover of everything Science Fiction, I enjoy reading about the past of whatever is currently happening in the novel. The details are what make the story for someone like me. Why was that there? What happened during that time? Why are they fighting? So on and so forth.

  In certain novels it works to just drop a reader in the middle of a frantic or dire circumstance and watch the character, and reader, struggle their way out of the hole that the author has dug for them. You might grip a reader better that way, but later on down the path the novel might lack enough information to carry the story further, or too many world building passages need to be inserted into the story, breaking the flow of the main path. Many times I found myself having to page back to try and find something mentioned earlier or referred to in an obscure passage. I was always afraid that I might have missed some vital piece of information, maybe ruining the novel for myself a little.

  This novel is different. This novel starts off slow, I have no illusions about that, but it is like that for a specific reason. You would not expect to watch a film from halfway in and know exactly what transpired before you started watching, only if you watched it before can you piece together where you are in the story. I chose to build the world or universe my characters inhabit before the story kicks off. I like the finer details, reading about how something came to be, or how past events led to the present time. The stage pieces have to be perfectly set before I can call action on my story. I prefer to call it galaxy building, world building is not the correct word for what I am doing. Think of it as billions of lights turning on one by one across planets and sectors, you - the reader - might not see or read about every single light’s story or journey, but no matter how insignificant, they are still vital to how everything moves forward as time passes. A man might die in the shadow of his mining craft on the other side of the galaxy, his death will mean nothing to the current story arc, but it is still part of the universe and might just play some role in it eventually.

  Even this, what was supposed to be a short paragraph or two, turned into a lengthy meandering about personal feelings and my universe. I am surprised I have not mentioned my love for unicorns or crayons yet...oh never mind, I just did.

  If I can say only one thing to you, my reader, is thank you for giving me the chance to tell you my story, thank you for getting your hands on this novel and taking a chance on a random stranger. I hope in some way my stories can ignite only a small flame within your imagination, if you could see everything unfold as I have, and if you can dream like I do, then I have succeeded in every way possible.

  Get through the slower opening parts, but pay attention to it as well, the Zero chapters contain many interesting facts, watch as the universe I wanted to create comes alive and follow the people through it until the end. You will not regret it. You can, if you wish to, skip the Zero chapters, but you will be missing out on some great detailing, motivations and crucial information pertaining to the story I am telling. The choice I leave up to you, just don’t expect a lot of dialogue in the Prologue. Most of it is purely there to set you up for an epic journey through the stars.

  Now, take my virtual hand, and let me guide you through the first part of my story. Let me show you all the magnificent things along the way as we walk in the footsteps of Titans.

  Chapter Zero

  Subjugation

  “We had become the masters and kings of Earth. We had conquered disease, war and famine. The flag of our race stood firmly planted on the highest mountain of our home world. We stood there, on the highest peak, together. We watched as humankind flourished and lived together in peace. A few of those that stood on that peak were content with what they saw, some were not. As ever, those that were not content wanted more, their hearts needed more. They looked to the stars and saw the infinite potential hidden between them. They saw the resources and treasures just waiting to be plundered, and their hearts grew covetous. We should have considered the consequences of living and building among the stars. But we were too ignorant and too greedy. Our reach always exceeded our grasp. For in the darkness of the void an entity had been waiting for centuries, waiting for something exactly like our race to sink its teeth into.”

  Centuries had passed since the dominion of humankind had scattered itself throughout the known systems in the Milky Way. I
t was so vast that no ship could travel from one end of our star kingdom to the other end in a single decade. Our race had spread like an infection across the stars, plundering as we went. Nothing we encountered on alien planets could match our prowess and intellect. Most, if not all, alien species we found were nothing but mere creatures, wildlife in most cases. There was no semi-intelligent species capable of posing a threat to us.

  Perhaps this was why we became so arrogant and lax in our protocols, and little by little we made mistakes. It was one of these small mistakes that led to one of the major events in our race’s history. We were so strong, so arrogant, nothing and no-one could dethrone humankind. We were oblivious and blind to the weakness of humans and the dangers that lurked in the dark unknown. This time, however, there was a hidden and much darker hand pulling at the strings behind the scenes of our unplanned demise.

  At first there seemed to be no plan to what was unleashed on humankind, but during the war it was made clear by the actions of our enemies what the plan for our kind really was. We were not to be dominated or conquered. There would be no slaves or prisoners. We were to be consumed to satisfy an ancient insatiable hunger.

  On a planet in the Seraph Cluster far in the Galactic North an entity waited to be set free. This organism had no body of its own, only a dark will to feed. The planet Angelicas would become the epicentre of the war against our race.

  The planet Angelicas was one of the first planets colonized during the initial phase of exploration by P-SEP, now the most powerful corporation in the dominion of man. The Pegasus Space Exploration Project created and built the first Star Explorer vessels used during the first exploration missions. These giant vessels were specifically built to travel from Earth using their BEAM, Beta Electron Accelerator Module, drives to propel them and their cargo to distant star systems in a fraction of the time, as opposed to conventional void drives. Star Explorers contained millions of crew and civilians to colonize new planets, vast engineering capabilities and bays, agricultural storage and enough materials to build or manufacture whatever a new colony could possibly need. Hundreds of these moon sized vessels were built, only a handful of them never reached their destinations. P-SEP’s master plan of taking humankind to the stars was a resounding success. The Star Explorers also acted as communication arrays once deployed in the orbit of a planet. Forming one of the many important communication nodes in the web of nodes located throughout the galaxy.

  SE6-Angelicas orbited the planet once designated as Gamma Nine for more than three hundred years, the planet was later renamed in honour of the Star Explorer that had found and colonized it. It was when this old vessel went silent that we knew there was trouble stirring in that sector. The Angelicas communication node fell silent without warning. No distress signals were ever sent, no word of any problem ever received. At first only the Star Explorer went silent, but as the silence spread through the Seraph Cluster, the unease of the people neighbouring that sector grew.

  The silence spreading across the sector was a delayed response to a mistake made by our own hubris. A mining crew out on routine excavation duties mined too deep and hit a cavern of unknown organic life. They could not see the organic life within or begin to understand the nature of the organism hidden there, only a microscope could reveal the horrors that were trapped beneath the crust. The miners that accidentally inhaled the organism that fateful day were unaware of the calamity yet to come.

  Maybe we could have saved more, and maybe we could have stopped the war. No-one knows exactly how long this organism was trapped beneath the crust of Angelicas, slowly consuming the planet from within. We only knew the destruction it was capable of once it could feed. The organism that was freed that day only came into the light of our consciousness after it had infected too many to count or stop. Many years passed after the cavern was breached, and yet no knowledge of the organism’s existence was ever known until it was too late. An invisible entity had found a suitable environment to evolve into its next phase, inside of our own flesh. There it was waiting for the time to strike, sharpening its claws in the darkness of our souls.

  If it was not for the unsettling and terrifying means the enemy used to make itself known, we would have never known what lurked in the shadows of our ever expanding star kingdom. The silence was the first sign that something was wrong, but what followed in its wake crushed our spirits before we even saw the enemy. Out of the silent hole that was the Seraph Cluster came an inhuman scream, carried by the voices of the infected.

  This scream filled the communication nodes on all broadcasting networks and reached as far as our home planet, Earth Prime as it is now called. Those of us that were not weak minded survived the scream’s initial psychological onslaught, but others were not so lucky. Some were killed the instant the scream was heard, others descended into madness. The madness that afflicted the weaker ones destroyed their minds, and the mindless ripped and clawed at their own flesh. Survivors of the inhuman scream that penetrated our kingdom and our minds didn’t dare speak of what they saw the mindless do. The atrocities of the mindless were, as the future would teach us, nothing compared to the real reason for the scream being unleashed upon us.

  The monstrous scream was not a warning of any kind; instead it was the way the enemy communicated over vast distances. Soldiers that faced the enemy on the battlefield would later describe the scream as the voice of demons pouring into their minds. It used our own communication network against us to awaken the dormant infected hidden across the cosmos.

  The infection had spread so far and had infected so many. Later testing done by scientists during the war would expose the manner of infection. Microscopic spores, disguised as sores on an infected person’s body would release its deadly invisible payload into the atmosphere, artificial or planetary, and infect everyone in close proximity to an infected host. The manner of infection made it almost impossible to stop others from being infected. Infection rate also increased after the scream activated the sleeper cells within us.

  Infected humans and creatures on distant alien planets that were scattered into the wind by time were all awoken when the scream spread throughout the networks. All of them were instantly transformed in mind, frozen in a trance state. Shortly after the infected just seemed to stop and form part of a single consciousness. They moved as one and started hunting those of us that were not infected. On space stations, aboard ships and in colonies, hordes of infected moved, stalking the rest of us like a predator stalking its prey. So many of us died without even a chance of defending ourselves, we were ripped and torn apart without a hope of escape. The infected had only one goal, to feed. And as if the realization of being fed upon by our own kind was not enough, the mutations that changed the infected brought new levels of fear to humankind.

  The infection changed and mutated the bodies of the infected into grotesque parodies of humans. Bones grew to new and horrible forms, some forming blades, others adding to their bulk. No infected looked the same, every single one a different creature from our worst nightmares. Some had elongated faces like mythical creatures out of ancient tales, while others looked like amalgamations of demons and men. There was no single template, it was as if the gates of Hades had opened and every manner of monster had spilled out into our reality. The most frightening thing was perhaps that there was nothing supernatural about the mutations. Only the bravest of humankind could face down the beasts and not falter.

  By the time the survivors had regrouped after the initial onslaught an uncountable number of humans had lost their lives. The beasts destroyed and consumed anything in their path. We had lost more than half of our vast star kingdom to the beasts feeding on our flesh. Most of what we had built was now a silent tomb to the dead, in some sectors there were still desperate fights for survival. But the outlook was grim, and the humans in the unaffected zones held little hope for those trapped in the dead zones. The monsters we now had to face were referred to as the Beast by propaganda spewing networks. The name stuck
and our enemy now had a name.

  The Beast had caught us off-guard, overwhelmed most of our colonies in the dead zone, and it had annihilated man, woman and child without hesitation. The call went out in the safe zone for all volunteers to assemble at pre-determined locations to fight the Beast by any means necessary; we needed to contain the threat before it overwhelmed the zones that had less infected running rampant.

  Many planetary and void skirmishes were fought to keep humankind from becoming extinct. Millions of P-SEP’s own personal defence force was sent from Earth Prime to help with containment. Soldiers from planets on the frontline between the safe zone and the dead zone fought and died to protect what was left of our star kingdom. Planets on the edge between the two zones were highly contested and neither side could achieve victory. The planets turned in to charnel house for human and Beast alike. Our military resources capable of destroying or eliminating vast amounts of the Beast was trapped behind enemy lines, destroyed or held in reserve around Earth Prime. It was not yet clear if the Beast was capable of breaking out of the dead zone and pushing further into the safe zone. Our planet killing weapons were not yet operational and we were left with a tug of war with the Beast for over fifty years. Neither side gained ground, everything hung by a thread as the stalemate could not be broken.

  Our resources were limited and in some sectors dwindling dangerously low. The sectors that were safe were mostly newly colonized planets in the Galactic South. Only a few of the sectors were first generation colonies. Production and colonization took time and manpower, things we didn’t have in abundance. We needed something new and powerful to push back at the Beast. We needed to retake our lost sectors and re-unite our star kingdom. We needed what the faithful still among us called a miracle. The answer came not long after our hope had begun to fail.