Star Resistance Read online

  Star Resistance

  A Lori Adams Novel 02

  Author: D. R. Rosier

  Copyright 2018. This is a work of fiction. Names, Characters, Places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Afterword:

  Other erotic fantasies by D. R. Rosier:

  Non-erotic Fantasy titles:

  Book Description

  Chapter One

  The bridge was silent and felt tense as we looked at the five holograms. The writing was on the wall so to speak.

  My life had changed drastically in the last week and some odd days. I’d gone from an assassin under the thumb of my government, to a slave of the Stolavii, and then for the first time in my life I was free, and working on a ship among the stars.

  I had true friends, and lovers, for the first time in my life. I didn’t even mind Rilok’s jackass nature all that much, and although having three lovers was strange, I was getting used to the idea. The only concern I really had was jealousy, but so far, I’d been the only target of their affections. I wondered how they dealt with that aspect of things, since friends with benefits seemed to be a racial trait and constant, maybe they didn’t have that instinct at all?

  But… looking at the holograms I wasn’t sure how long I’d get to keep them. Things were about to change for the Isyth empire, permanently.

  We’d picked up the fighters after the battle, and were now at a full stop and ready for FTL travel. The repairs to the subspace emitters would be finished in just a few minutes. The question was, where would we go?

  Denik, Vik’s piece of shit brother, had a revolutionary fleet of two thousand three hundred and some odd destroyers, all under the control of artificial assistants and brainwashed humans, along with five Stolavii cruisers and an Isyth Battleship. He’d taken them all into subspace nine hours ago, and was on his way to deliver death and betrayal to the empire that his own family ruled.

  We couldn’t see his fleet in that moment, but we were able to trace it for five light years with the subspace sensors, which was long enough to extrapolate their courses. Not that it took a genius to figure out where they were going. Five sub-fleets, five empire worlds.

  The holograms we viewed were of the five worlds of the empire. Isyth, Kaprorix, Raitov, Xulia, and Vehiri. Thanks to our warning, the king had recalled the Isyth fleets back to the worlds for defense. Isyth had a home fleet five hundred strong, most of those were destroyers and the even smaller scouts, but there were also fifteen cruisers, and three of the large battleships.

  At the last check, that wouldn’t be enough, close to fifteen hundred of Denik’s fleet were heading toward that system. They’d be out massed by more than two to one. The only hope was that more ships might show up there, but there weren’t that many left to be recalled.

  The other four systems in the Empire had between fifty and a hundred ships. Two hundred of Denik’s ships were heading for each of those four systems. In short, the revolution was all but successful as things stood right now, all that needed to be counted were the deaths and the amount of destruction.

  We couldn’t get to any of them in time to help, we were nine hours behind Denik’s fleet by the time FTL came online, so at best we’d get there in time to watch the battle from the edge of the system, as we flew in. Even if we could have joined them, we wouldn’t be enough to turn things around.

  So, the bridge felt tense, and grim.

  Vic asked, “Suggestions?”

  I sighed, “Call your family now, tell them to run.”

  He scowled at me, but didn’t say anything.

  Jillintara said, “We need to focus on a long-term fix, the battle is already lost.”

  Rilok said, “I hate to agree with Lori, but going to any of the five worlds right now would be suicide, we might as well just blow up the ship.”

  Vik asked, “What do you suggest we do then?”

  I said, “Take a page out of your brother’s playbook. We need to… appropriate what we’ll need to establish a building facility in one of the unexplored star systems, and start building ships. With Jillintara’s help, I can start on A.I.s, and creating our own separate data-net for operational security. At the very least, we need to disable the location reporting feature on the new ships, until this is done.”

  Telidur said, “That will take a long time, at least a year or two to build enough ships to meet his numbers, even if the defensive fleets take out a lot of them before going out. Denik will be able to do a lot of damage in that time.”

  “We don’t have a choice, it’s either that, or give up. Blame Denik for the death and horror of the next few years, it isn’t on us.”

  Vik said, “Alright, we raid a system, take enough mining and fabrication equipment to build a whole lot of shipyards, and start pumping out ships with a unique data-net and A.I. build. We’ll also need a synth lab to synthesize the element we need in our power cores. After that, we go and kick Denik’s ass, and restore everything he changes.”

  He sounded dubious when he said all that. I was too, I wasn’t sure if Denik didn’t have a few good points. He was an asshat, and going about it the wrong way, but I got his frustration on some things. Such as the Stolavii running amuck and causing trouble, running around behind them to clean up seemed like a bad way to handle that to me. Of course, I didn’t have a good alternative either.

  He continued, “Okay, first problem, crews. Denik will have ships in all the systems, it won’t be easy to recruit, and virtually impossible to sneak in. He’ll also catch anything we do on the data net, we might be able to hide ourselves on a new one, but the five worlds will still be using the old one.”

  Where could we get bodies. Oh hell, that’s a really bad idea Lori. Still, I didn’t see much choice.

  “Umm, how about Earth? Not brainwash them of course, but since the Stolavii, and your brother, are both clear and present threats to the planet they might work with us?”

  He frowned, “What if they go rogue, or try to steal the ships?”

  “The artificial assistants will have Isyth morality, and loyalty to those ideals. They’ll be the ones fighting to restore the free food and current makeup of the empire. If necessary, they can prevent it by removing the human’s access and jailing them until they can be taken home and booted off. We just need to deal from the point that they’ll be warriors protecting Earth, but they don’t get to run off with the ships when it’s over. Maybe we could let them keep a few to protect Sol, once the war is over? They’ll eventually reverse engineer it all, but it will take a long time without access to Isyth educational downloads.”

  He nodded, “So no uplift, and an invitation to join the empire?”

  I looked at him horrified. What a terrifying idea.

  “Nope. Think your brother, but a million times worse. A human can be good, some humans are monsters, a large
group of humans are stupid, reactive, and will kill anything they fear that’s different.”

  Harsh, but it was true. Earth was still too paranoid and warlike, they needed to grow up. They couldn’t even get along with other humans with a different skin color, much less aliens. Not all of them, some would shine, and be an inspiration, but too many still had darkness in their souls and instincts.

  Rilok smirked at me, and I suppressed the urge to flip him off.

  Vik sighed, “Alright, ships and crews, any other suggestions?”

  Rilok said, “We need to pick an unknown system close to Earth, but farther than five light years, and use the stealth systems whenever we go to visit Earth to ensure we aren’t picked up by a random ship on subspace sensors. Once we’re at Earth, it should be safe enough to uncloak if there are no other ships there.”

  Vik said, “Good idea, pick out a system.”

  Telidur looked at me, “What about all those ideas last night. We could probably buy you the courses.”

  Vik looked between Telidur and I, and asked, “What’s this?”

  Telidur said, “Lori had a lot of good ideas for weapons and design changes, as well as other applications. If we’re going to build a new fleet from scratch, we might as well make it the best with cutting edge technology and new ideas. But, Lori planned to take a year to get the four other courses she needs for it.”

  Vik rubbed his jaw and closed his eyes. I could tell he was low on patience, very frustrated, and trying very hard not to take it out on his crew. It was hard to blame him, considering what was about to happen to his family, and the empire, their legacy.

  “What ideas?”

  I said, “Longer range missiles with a more powerful plasma explosion, viable small self-contained disposable probes that could cheaply explore and monitor a solar system. Destroyers with battleship level shielding, wormhole drive capability, and enough energy to power more plasma weapons. The hull is large enough at an eighth of a mile to fit twenty-four plasma weapons, half a cruisers plasma weapon complement, instead of just eight. Can’t do anything about the missile launchers, a small ship will only hold so many missiles inside.”

  I paused for a moment, the probes could be powered through the dimensional port technology. They’d be slow with an alternate drive, since they’d be too small for a gravity drive, but speed wouldn’t matter for a probe. It could leisurely go through a solar system in a month at one gravity, instead of a day at a hundred. The important thing was the sensor blister, and the fact it would be cheap enough to just drop it into a system, forget it, and leave it there to monitor things. In fact, it would be cheaper energy wise than going into the system with a small scout ship. Which was the point, it wouldn’t catch on if it wasn’t cheaper, and didn’t have more long-term advantages, such as watching for activity in that area of space.

  “With more powerful shields than a cruiser, even though it will still have only half the plasma weapons than the opponent ship, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for two destroyers to easily match a cruiser, instead of six. Eight of them to match a battleship, instead of twenty-four. With surprise against Denik’s cruisers, they would mismatch and underestimate their response, and we’d roll over them quickly.”

  I took a breath, “That much I’m almost positive I can do already, with the right knowledge that is. I’m also determined to look into cloaking and power generation, to make things more efficient and less costly, but no promises since I really don’t know anything about how they work yet. The cost of energy production is really the most limiting factor.”

  The energy didn’t really cost anything, since it was extracted from the universe itself. It was dark energy, zero point energy, or vacuum energy, called so depending on the scientist and day of the week. What made it cost so much was the precious element to make the extraction process work, it was a painstaking and exacting process to make it, and precious fuel for the reactor of a ship. Worse, the higher the power draw the more of it was burned off, and the more damage it did to components which had to be swapped out. I think the damage was less the element though, and more the stray dark energy that bombarded the molecular bonds as it was being transformed to electricity. That guess of course, was from human science and conjecture on the properties of dark energy, I wouldn’t know for sure until I took the courses.

  It cost a lot of credits to keep a ship going just because of that. Metals and building ships was cheap and easy otherwise.

  Weaker energy sources, such as fission or fusion, didn’t produce nearly as much energy, and the drive systems, all three of them, impulse, subspace, and wormhole, along with gravity systems and inertial dampening all needed magnitudes more energy than other reactor types could create. Plasma weapon arrays weren’t cheap on energy either.

  All my ideas depended on the dimensional science which made my plasma ball palm implant work. A second reactor would be outside the ship, and be able to feed the ship power directly into the shields, weapons, and wormhole drive. Everything else about the ship, except for the extra plasma weapons, and the more robust shield emitters, would be the same. The missiles too, they could connect to and channel energy through a dimensional power portal from the ship that fired it, which means they won’t run out of energy after two light minutes, or ever really.

  Vik blew out a breath, “Alright, it’s worth a try if you can even make one of those happen. Go to your quarters, and take the downloads. Then work on a new destroyer ship design, along with the A.I. design. Don’t get too creative on the latter, we want A.I.s with the same morals and beliefs as Jillintara’s. If you can, design one of those probes and the new better missile. While you’re doing that, which I know will take weeks at the very least even if you start with current designs and work in upgrades, the rest of us will get the equipment we need to start building ships. Once that’s working and pumping out ships and A.I.s to control them, our last step will be to head to Earth and find someone to talk to about recruiting.

  “If you can make the ships that much more powerful, we’ll only need about five hundred ships. It will take us at least three months to build the infrastructure to push out sixty ships a month plus supporting weapons, A.I.s, the energy core element, missiles, and the probes. I’d prefer the designs faster than that, so we can build a prototype and put it through its paces, so let’s call it six weeks from now we build whatever you have set up. Also, five hundred ships means at least two thousand humans.”

  I nodded, “Yes captain, will you notify me when the battle starts? I don’t really want to watch it, but I have to. It will… motivate me.”

  He smiled grimly, “I understand.”

  I got up and left the bridge, hoping like hell I was right about some of the things I could do…

  Chapter Two

  There were three main sciences at work in the Isyth empire. Quantum physics was all about this universe, and related to the power systems, gravity, inertial dampers, and other systems. Dimensional physics was all about, well, other dimensions. It related to the microscopic portals that could be made to bypass normal space. I didn’t know much else about it, yet, except that quantum physics didn’t match up with it. Each dimension had its own rules. The third science was subspace physics, which again had its own rules, and was related to both versions of FTL travel, actually flying through subspace which was the cheapest way, or creating a wormhole through subspace, which was quite a bit more energy intensive, but also virtually instantaneous as a result.

  The fourth course was for fabrication and design. All the knowledge in the world wouldn’t help me, if I couldn’t design a technology around the physics I learned, and put it in a design template for fabrication. Normally, that would take years of testing and experimentation. Except, everything I wanted to do was already a mature and known science, I was simply going to put it together in different and new ways.

  The only exception to that was my determination to figure out how to tap vacuum energy in a cheaper way, and the cloak technology. That wou
ld take experimentation, and probably a lot more time than I had to work things out.

  I also felt a little ashamed, because I was thrilled to be getting this knowledge so much faster than I expected to. The guilt and shame of course, came in because a lot of people were about to die, and I’d much rather wait a year than see any of that happen. But still, selfishly excited.

  I took a look at the ship’s status, and noticed we were moving in system. I laughed, he was going to steal his older brother’s equipment, since the idiot hadn’t left any ships behind to protect it. Well, since we were turning to thievery to mount our resistance and counter revolution, I couldn’t imagine a better person to steal our base needs from. We wouldn’t need much, just enough to establish a base infrastructure, and use that to build more infrastructure, until we had enough to go to production.

  The most difficult thing would be food, hopefully we had enough to get by before going to Earth. The only way this would work would be by staying off the radar, which meant no going to one of the five worlds, or one of the major production star systems in the empire. Hopefully, they’d enjoy human food as much as I did Isyth food.

  Ann said, “Twenty thousand credits has been added to your account.”

  I sighed, “Alright, download the four courses, then feed them to me one at a time.”

  This was going to be intense. I laid on the bed, I didn’t want to fall on my ass again. The intense rush hit me, and knowledge flooded into my mind…

  I blinked, and had a headache, but it was fading by the second, good old medical nanites.

  “How long?”

  Ann said, “For all four courses, twenty hours.”

  Holy crap, no wonder I had a headache.

  I checked the ships status, which was no longer updating to the military data net. Right now, we were still in system, and bots and shuttles were still raiding fabrication and mining equipment, as well as grabbing free raw materials. We were also swiping the precious element, and raiding their synthesis lab for equipment.