Frozen Soul, and other works: Chapter 220

(Conference Room, Blackstone Station, Star’s Reach)

Slave-Major Selanar Irabalar stood at attention in front of the people seated at the table. Behind him, Captain Hardbrew, Lieutenant Sharel, and Corporal Hicks were also present. That wasn’t what concerned him, though. What concerned him was who else was at the table.

General Chris Khan was the overall leader of the Black Star Marine Corps. He was the Nomad that had joined the Black Star Company back when its navy was barely more than a handful of Assassins and one pocket carrier. He had literally built the Black Star Marine Corps from the ground up, and scuttlebutt said that he based the whole thing off his own experiences in the Nomads’ world.

Selanar had been attached to the Space Guard as part of a Confederate Marine detachment before Jagloth. His story wasn’t any different from many others. Usually not one to run from a fight, he’d still seen the writing on the wall early on. The Legion Plague spread too easily. There was no way the military was going to be able to stop it, short of destroying the planet. When he came to that conclusion, he sold himself into slavery to get his family off that planet before the Legion took over completely, like many others did. And, like many others, he’d been taken up by the Black Star Company, and his combat experience launched him to becoming the leader of the Second Company of Black Star Marines.

So, he’d seen the organization that General Khan had put together, and he was proud to serve in it. Prouder still to be leading one of its companies. If the Confederate Marines had been organized half as well, then they might have actually had a chance at stopping the Legion on Jagloth. Maybe. But that organization only took hold because the man over the General let it, which was damn rare for someone in control to actually let the people who knew what they were doing do their jobs without bright ideas from higher.

Which is what made Admiral Mollen all the more an enigma. Everyone knew that the Nomad CEO and Admiral was a playboy and disregarded the common sense of the world. And yet, he didn’t act like the newly rich typically did. Nor did he try and puff himself up and make command decisions he wasn’t qualified for, just to show that he was in charge. There were even rumors that, back in the Nomads’ world, he had actually been an engineer in one of their world’s navies! Not even a chief engineer, but one of the people who actually got their hands dirty on a regular basis!

The Admiral was sitting next to the General, looking at them. He’d only met the man once, but that was in his persona as the CEO of the Black Star Company. Everything regarding the Marines went through the General. At the time, he’d been acting like your typical playboy bigwig, same as in any other stretch of the universe. But now, he was in the Black Star Navy’s uniform, and sitting straight.

The Admiral spoke. “As you know, it is Black Star policy that any action resulting in more than twenty-five percent combat losses is subject to a mandatory review, so that we can learn from it, and not make the same mistakes in the future. At this time, after reviewing the evidence brought before us by the data recorders in the Marine combat armor, it is the conclusion of the General and myself that Second Company performed as well as could possibly be expected under the circumstances. As such, no penalties or censure will appear in your records.”

Selanar had to fight from letting out a sigh of relief. The number of Marines killed in action may have been just barely above the twenty-five percent threshold, but when taking the critically wounded into consideration, it rose to almost thirty-five percent. Walking wounded brought it to fifty-eight percent. Not shining numbers, by any stretch of the imagination.

The General spoke next. “Ship-board combat, especially in an unknown vessel, shares many similarities to urban combat. The only difference is that you have fewer snipers on a ship. These actions always run the risk of turning into bloodbaths, especially when fighting on someone else’s home turf. Your company performed well, given that they were literally going into unknown territory, with no intel on what they would be facing. So, we’re going to work on finding ways to better prepare for things like this in the future.”

Selanar frowned. “In the future, sir?”

The Admiral nodded. “While we did destroy the T’ler and the alien bioforms that were nesting in it, we have to assume that both parties are not alone in the universe. The T’ler may have been designed around an old Earth space probe, but someone built the thing. And those aliens didn’t just sprout from nowhere. The T’ler fought an unholy battle in Beta Darconyx, and we can’t assume that it managed to render the aliens extinct, save for those that got on board. So, we’re working from the assumption that these groups are still out there.”

The General nodded, and said, “That’s why we’re going over the artifact Alpha squad secured, the memory cores of the ship, and the suit combat data. But raw data only accounts for so much. Combat reports from those actually in the field are just as important, if not more so. The Navy has already had a briefing with the bomber pilots, to go over the combat data of the ship’s destruction, but you all were on the ground, as it were, so we want to hear from you. Take a seat, all of you, and let’s work this.”

(Black Night Saloon, Blackstone Station, Star’s Reach)

I sighed as I slid into my seat. The Black Night Saloon was a bar catering to the Navy and Marine forces stationed in Star’s Reach. The owner was actually the mother of one the captains in the Star’s Reach defense group, and was originally from Dembara, a rustic frontier world in the Confederacy, and the bar was billed as an ‘authentic Dembaran experience’. Whether that was true or not, it was the best place for drinks on the station.

Sheila shook her head. “Honestly, you act like you’ve been hard at work all day. Only a couple meetings, and you act like you’re going to collapse. Don’t tell me thinking strained your brain.”

I eyed the Princess as she sat next to me, the rest of the harem sat around me. She’d been getting a bit snippier of late. Probably because I’ve been too busy with administrative and military matters to spend as much time with the girls as I normally did. I’d have to handle that before she got even more out of hand.

I heard a snerk, and turned my gaze on General Khan. “Oh, laugh it up, Chris. You don’t think I haven’t heard about your ‘issues’ with that little lady you picked up on Dimiya?”

“Fine, fine. But you’re the one who decided to go and start a harem, so you have to deal with the consequences.” The General chuckled as he leaned back against his chair. “So, what do you think of what we found over there?”

I shook my head slightly, as a waitress came up to get our order. Once everyone had ordered drinks, I said, “There’s plenty to take away from the whole thing. First, no matter what we might think, we’re definitely nowhere near the top of the food chain when it comes to tech. Unfortunately, we can’t prep countermeasures for either the shipbuilders or the aliens until we know more about them, and we won’t know that until we can get into the memory devices, since we blew the ship and everything on it to their component molecules.”

Cali shook her head. “Well, I’ve seen those combat logs from the Nomads that were fighting. Those beasties are tough to kill, and are natural killing machines. I didn’t notice any worn armor or equipment, and their claws aren’t exactly made for manipulation. I don’t know how they could get into space, unless they have some kind of biological ships like the X’thari do.”

Jaynie shook her head. “Nah, these were just shock troops. I bet they’re some kind of hive species, you know? Soldiers, especially shock troops, don’t need to be the smartest or able to manipulate tools. They just need to be able to take down the target when it is in range. There’s plenty of species in nature who have used barely intelligent individuals as cannon fodder before.”

Raven added her thoughts to the discussion, “There’s also the consideration that we may be dealing with a devolution, in a sense. There’s no telling how long the ship has been derelict, but our best guess is somewhere on the order of twenty or thirty thousand years. That is plenty of time for a species to devolve when forced into a situation of cannibalism and limited breeding partners.”

Shearah blinked “Twenty or thirty thousand years? But, didn’t the Traveler probes leave Earth only a few hundred years ago?”

I groaned, and said, “Time travel. It has to be fucking time travel. Don’t know how the probe did it, but somehow it must have gotten thrown through space and time to somewhere else. Time travel always gives me a headache when people talk about it. The paradoxes involved when, inevitably, some idiot decides to try and start changing things are enough to drive a man to drink. I’m putting a solid rule down: no time travel experiments. I don’t care WHAT data is on those memory banks, under no circumstances am I authorizing time travel experiments. I don’t want the damn universe to unravel because someone wants to go back and, say, kill Hitler before he started the Nazi party on Earth.”

Carissa frowned. “But, surely, a noble goal like that would be worth pursuing? Think of all the lives saved!”

I shook my head. “But it doesn’t end there. It never ends there. If you intervene and change history for one thing, where do you draw the line? Just this thing, but not the other? Why Hitler and not Stalin? Why Stalin and not Genghis Khan? Why not save Julius Ceasar? Introduce medicine to make King Tut live a long and full life? All of these sound like good ideas, right?”

“But that’s where the trap lies. You never just change the one thing. There’s always ripples and knock on effects as you see how that one decision affects twenty others. Everything is connected. Removing one man from history to save a few thousand lives may result in a new chain of events, where humans annihilate themselves before ever leaving Earth.”

I could see Carissa and Shearah looking at me with disbelief. “OK, here’s just one possible outcome. Say Hitler doesn’t come along to create the Nazi party. The Germans are still bitter about the end of World War I, but, without a charismatic leader to act as a lightning rod and focal point, the movement takes longer. Say, twenty or thirty years longer. Meanwhile, technology continues to advance. So, when the next war starts, it begins with Germany, who kept the likes of Einstein and other intellectuals in their borders, fielding rocket artillery that is able to decimate enemy positions, with Paris coming under bombardment mere hours after war is declared. But that isn’t the worst of it.”

“In secret, the Germans have been working on a new kind of weapon, one that could avenge the wrongs done to them at the end of the Great War. The other nations have not been idle in their works, but they don’t have the results of the German ‘brain drain’ they had in our timeline, meaning their work is all far behind Germany’s. So, instead of allowing them to get bogged down in a two-front war, Germany unleashes nuclear Armageddon upon London and Moscow, wiping their major opposition off the map in a flash of light. Their spread through Europe, is uncontested in the shock of what has happened. And then they set their sights on Africa, and Asia.”

“Or perhaps the war is delayed, and spies are effective enough that, when the second great war comes, both sides have nuclear weapons. Perhaps they even have missiles tipped with nukes, capable of reaching their enemies, no matter if there’s an ocean between them or not. But there hasn’t been a Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and they haven’t realized the truth of Mutually Assured Destruction. There’s still people who believe that they can ‘win’ a nuclear war. And then that war comes, and man is wiped out.”

I looked at the ladies. “All of that, because you went and stopped Hitler from leading the world into an insane war. And that is only one of the possible futures. One of many possible ways that time travel can screw everyone in the name of saving others, or ‘doing the right thing’.”

The waitress returned with our drinks. I took a long swig of mine, and relished the burn of alcohol in my throat. “So, no. There will be no time travel on my watch. Anyone attempting crap like that will be purged, with prejudice. They’ll be lucky to just get thrown on the Amazon world.”

Previous Chapter Table of Contents Next Chapter

Be sure to read my published works!

Frozen Soul series (Sci-Fi Supervillain story):
Frozen Soul - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071R125QT
Tales of the Void Traveler - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06ZZ52G37
Memoirs of a Supervillain - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07R9NWS8J

Rules-Free VRMMO Life (Dark Fantasy GameLit):
Volume 1 - Tutorial
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071VPRNDB

Omnibus 1 - Volumes 1-4

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0774T354X