Wrath of the Hegemons Read online

  Also by David Welch:

  The Chaos Quarter

  Chaos Quarter

  Chaos Quarter: Imperial Ambitions

  Chaos Quarter: Horde

  Other Titles

  The Gods’ Day To Die

  The Fallen Angel Hunters

  Tales of the Far Wanderers

  CHAOS QUARTER:

  WRATH OF THE HEGEMONS

  David Welch

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the express written consent of the author.

  Copyright © 2019 by David Welch

  All rights reserved.

  eBook Cover Design by www.ebooklaunch.com

  Contents

  Silverton System, Chaos Quarter, 07/23/2508

  Enjebi, Enjebi System, The Perfected Hegemony, 07/23/2508

  Trøndelag System, Valhalla Free State, Chaos Quarter, 07/25/2508

  Vaxtarland Base, New Trondhjem, Trøndelag System, Valhalla Free State, Chaos Quarter, 07/25/2508

  Command-Beast, In Orbit Above New Trondhjem, Trøndelag System, Valhalla Free State, Chaos Quarter, 07/26/2508

  Vaxtarland Base, New Trondhjem, Trøndelag System, Valhalla Free State, Chaos Quarter, 07/26/2508

  Vaxtarland Base, New Trondhjem, Trøndelag System, Valhalla Free State, Chaos Quarter, 07/27/2508

  Vaxtarland Base, New Trondhjem, Trøndelag System, Valhalla Free State, Chaos Quarter, 07/28/2508

  In Orbit Over New Trondhjem, Trøndelag System, Valhalla Free State, Chaos Quarter, 07/28/2508

  Keld System, Unclaimed Space, Chaos Quarter, 08/01/2508

  Argolis System, Achaean Confederacy, Chaos Quarter, 8/5/208

  Vaxtarland Base, New Trondhjem, Trøndelag System, Valhalla Free State, Chaos Quarter, 08/07/2508

  Néa Athína, Achaea, Achaean Confederacy, 08/08/2508

  In Orbit Over New Trondhjem, Trøndelag System, Valhalla Free State, Chaos Quarter, 08/19/2508

  Vaxtarland Base, New Trondhjem, Trøndelag System, Valhalla Free State, Chaos Quarter, 08/23/2508

  The Command-Beast, New Trondhjem, Trøndelag System, Valhalla Free State, Chaos Quarter, 08/23/2508

  City of Norrænheima, Valhalla, Valhalla Free State, Chaos Quarter, 09/08/2508

  City of Norrænheima, Valhalla, Valhalla Free State, Chaos Quarter, 10/03/2508

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Achaean Confederacy: A civilization that is known to exist on the far side of the Chaos Quarter. We do not know its actual borders, as no Commonwealth ship has ever reached this far and returned to tell the tale. Given the whole of the Chaos Quarter lies between the Free Terran Commonwealth and the Achaean Confederacy, this is not unusual. Much of that region of space is mystery, as is the space beyond the Achaean Confederacy.

  What we do know of the Confederacy comes from rumor, and the historical record. In 2207 a group of Greek neo-pagans, angered at what they saw as ‘discrimination’ and ‘slights’ by the majority Greek Orthodox Christian religion of Greece, pooled their resources. It should be noted that at this time, and since, religious discrimination has been illegal in Greece under the Commonwealth Constitution. Regardless of whether their cause was justified or not, the pagans purchased several vessels with early-model jump drives, and terraforming nanobots. Led by the millionaire founder of the expedition, Constantine ‘Xenophon’ Castellanos, the splinter group disappeared from Sol system on May 17, 2207. They had seven ships in their fleet, and at least three thousand followers on board. No word was heard of them again for nearly a century. No knowledge of how many made it to their new home has ever come to us. What is known, with a fair degree of certainty, is that terraformed worlds by the name of Delphi and Achaea exist, and that there are other worlds settled by these people. Based on these rumors, the Achaeans cannot be considered a ‘Chaos Quarter’ state, as they have shown a level of organization not seen throughout the Chaos Quarter. It is the opinion of analysts that they should be considered a normal power, perhaps a regional power, though the last supposition cannot be verified.

  -EID database entry on the Achaean Confederacy, last updated 5/4/2506

  Silverton System, Chaos Quarter, 07/23/2508

  “It is a truly momentous task, one I do not take upon my unworthy shoulders lightly. Burdened with heavy purpose, I set out in search, seeking beyond the edge of all things for that one ruinous foe that so defies our comprehension. So vast and terrible is said foe that, overcome by awe, I take now to preserving my thoughts in the diction and tone of an Old Earth English gentleman.”

  Rex Vahl leaned back in his command chair, and nodded to himself. To anyone looking on, he would appear to be thirty, though he was actually fifty-seven, his rate of aging halved by medical nanobots. He was decently handsome, though a bit worn from being out on a mission for far too long. He ran a hand through his brown hair and turned his head.

  “How’s that? Good? You’re better at this stuff than me,” he said, looking over to his gunner and second-in-command, Lucius Alvadile. The young, blond man had a severe look to him, as if he were always about to scold somebody. You had to know him a while to figure out that was just his face’s resting expression.

  “It’s missing something,” Lucius said in his British-sounding accent. He was actually Europan, originally at least. He’d sort of had a falling out after he’d murdered his butcher of a father and fled with a stolen ship, following the brutal murder of his own lover and their daughter. Such were the family squabbles of counts and earls and dukes. The aristocratic Europan Empire, however, frowned on patricide and things of that sort. Well, they pretty much frowned on things of every sort. But killing your father, then deserting your noble birthright to slum it with the freedom-lovers of the Commonwealth—that was unforgivable. Hence the standing death sentence for treason they’d placed on the man.

  Their loss was his gain, though. Though only in his late twenties, Lucius was an excellent gunner and right-hand man. And Rex couldn’t help but admit that British-sounding lilt and rarified language sometimes added a touch of class and gravity to the boredom of long-distance space flight.

  “Wait, I know what it’s missing,” said Rex, then put on his best ‘bad’ English accent: “Right’o guv’ner!”

  Lucius raised a curious eyebrow, then shook his head.

  “Perhaps you should return to narrating the ship’s log in a cowboy-voice.”

  “Can’t. Reports too short, pard,” Rex replied.

  Lucius shrugged, and went back to the puzzle game floating above his console. Rex didn’t blame him. So far, their mission, or rather, the new mission that had been unceremoniously tacked onto the one they’d just completed, was remarkably boring. And given they were flying through the Chaos Quarter, an area universally recognized as the ass-end of explored space, this was quite unusual. On his previous trips out, they’d always been running into brigands and pirates and the various crazies who infested the void. But these last two months? Nothing. One pirate band had radioed their evil intentions from thirty million miles away, but hadn’t bothered to come any closer. Probably some half-wits trying to sound big and make a name for themselves. After that it had been smooth sailing. So smooth, in fact, that he’d thought up the idea of doing the logs in overly wordy Charles Dickens English in an attempt to liven things up. So far, though, all he’d done was conjure up memories of trying to slog through David Copperfield in high school. Good Lord, that book had gone on…

  “Maybe Shakespeare next t
ime. Mission reports in iambic pentameter. Should give the analysts a break from the hum-drum,” Rex continued. “The engine broke, and all was lost in space—is that ten?”

  He paused and counted on his fingers, giving up four beats in, when he remembered he’d never finished reading any of the plays he’d been assigned in high school. Honestly, he was surprised he even remembered what iambic pentameter was.

  “Shakespeare, so far the only writer I know of that both the Commonwealth and Empire read,” said Lucius.

  “You read Shakespeare in your imperial days?” asked Rex.

  “We all did. The Martinet of Venice was my favorite,” Lucius explained.

  “The Martinet of Venice?”

  “Yes. Why do you say it like that?” Lucius said, raising an eyebrow.

  “Because it’s The Merchant of Venice,” Rex said.

  “What? No, it’s not.”

  “Yeah, it is. Check the data-stores,” Rex insisted.

  Lucius frowned, and turned to his station. He brought up holograms ahead of him, finding the play and skimming through it.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “It is The Merchant of Venice.” He shook his head. A bitter smile came over his face. “And no Montague either.”

  “Montague?”

  “Where Lord Montague defended his family honor by killing his son, who betrayed him for a whore in the employ of his Capulet enemies?”

  “Uh…no. That’s not how it went,” said Rex. “I think your former people may have rewritten some things. Maybe there were some themes or ideas they weren’t fond of.”

  Lucius thought for a moment, then nodded. “I wouldn’t put such a thing past them. They did not care much for thoughts beyond the ‘Divine Order.’ Good Lord, so this whole time I’ve been imagining the greatest writer of history entirely wrong?”

  “Not sure he’s the greatest…”

  Lucius didn’t hear, just shook his head again. “It seems I have some reading to do.”

  “Well, have at it. We got plenty of time,” Rex replied, slumping back in his chair again. He sat quietly for another ten minutes, while Lucius familiarized himself with the actual Shakespeare. Rex stared dully ahead, bored out of his mind.

  “You know, Jake theorizes that you spend so much time on the bridge because you wish to avoid talking to Second,” Lucius said, finally glancing up from the holograms.

  Rex frowned, not liking the direction this was going. Jake Gaderi was one of their crew. Like Lucius, he was a cast-off. Unlike Lucius, Jake was a cyborg exiled from the world of Cyberdan, for having a few too many theological musings, which was apparently something of a crime amongst his people. Rex had found him during his first mission into the Chaos Quarter, and brought him on board. Since then, he’d functioned as an engineer, pilot, utility infielder, and provided brute muscle when needed. And given his muscles were electroactive fibers, he had quite a lot of it available. He also has a tendency to meddle in relationships.

  “Last time I tried to talk to Second, she slapped me.” Rex sighed. “Just like the time before that, and the time before that. All the women in the universe, I find the one who doesn’t like to talk.”

  Lucius chuckled. “Yes, well, there are exceptions to every rule, I suppose. Though I can’t help but think you’d be less ‘bored’ if you were back in her ‘good graces.’”

  “Really? You turned the phrase ‘good graces’ into a euphemism?”

  Lucius smirked, and turned back to his holograms. Rex sighed again, and shook his head. It wasn’t like the thought hadn’t occurred to him. Second was the last member of his crew, and currently very mad at him. That was understandable, even to him. He was taking her into the backyard of the very people who had tormented and enslaved her for nearly a century.

  Second had not come into the world in a normal way. Nearly a century ago she’d been genetically engineered by the ‘Perfected Hegemony,’ a reclusive superpower populated by somewhat genocidal, genetically engineered bastards. The Hegemons did not take kindly to normal people. They referred to them as ‘primitives,’ and treated them like sub-human vermin. But they had needed a ‘primitive’ capable of blending in with crowds and to act as a servant to their ambassador, a man/woman/whatever they’d sent out to discourage ‘primitives’ from coming near their space. The result had been Second, genetically engineered to be beautiful, alluring, and entirely devoid of free will. For ninety-seven years she’d been a slave, the perfect slave, unable to feel emotions beyond physical sensation and bereft of anything resembling actual personality. Then, during his first trip out, Rex had freed her. He’d gotten a brain surgeon on Byzantium to remove a mass on her brain the Hegemons had implanted to restrain her natural humanity. The surgery had worked, and for the last two years she had been human, complete and whole. And, up until two months ago, she and Rex had been making the beast with two backs, with gusto.

  He hadn’t exactly planned on that happening. He’d known there was an attraction there. Hell, he’d felt it himself. It was hard not to around a woman genetically engineered to be impossibly beautiful. But for a long time, he’d tried to downplay it. Second, though, now free of her mental shackles, was not a very normal person. Being thrust into free will as an adult, not having been able to grow into it, being saddled with ninety-seven years of horrific memories of slavery—that kind of stuff couldn’t just be shrugged off. Second was an odd duck. She was too blunt and honest for her own good, she had trouble understanding emotions or matching them with appropriate behaviors, and sarcasm tended to escape her. He’d held back so she’d have time to grow, learn to master her emotions; learn to be a little more human, in the conventional sense. And for nearly two years, he’d succeeded. Then, after he’d been rescued from the captivity of a brutal, ravaging space horde, he’d had a moment of weakness…a sweaty, mind-blowing, pulse-pounding moment of weakness. And then another. And then another still. Hell, for several weeks the two of them had been nothing but weakness. He’d almost convinced himself that all was well, that she was ready for relationships, that they’d go on for years and years and have countless crazy children scampering around the ship …

  Then the new mission had come. They hadn’t even had time to go home or get a few weeks off. They’d finished their task of delivering a Maori princess back to her homeworld, only to be told by Commonwealth diplomats on the planet that the External Intelligence Division had set them a new task: investigate the nations bordering the Perfected Hegemony. Establish preliminary diplomatic contact. Collect any intel you can on the Hegemony, but try to avoid detection by them. All the normal phrases that went with jobs like this. But the only words Second had heard were ‘Perfected Hegemony.’ And with those two words their weeks of crazy, animal sex had come to a screeching halt.

  Try as he might to find a way to fix things, he was beginning to wonder if he ever could. The Hegemony had grown Second for the sole purpose of using her as a slave. The ambassador who had been her master had treated her like an object, used her for his pleasure…and she’d been entirely unable to feel an emotional response to it! Now that she had emotions, the thought of going near such monsters again, or putting herself in a position where she could be recaptured, or reenslaved—he couldn’t imagine what was going through her head. He could imagine her blaming him, since he had taken on the mission, though he had little other choice. And he could imagine her never forgiving him. But he could not imagine what she was feeling now. The one thing he did know was that it wasn’t good. A part of him felt a little guilty even worrying about relationship stuff when she was going through this. What were his concerns compared to the mind-numbing fear she must be living with?

  His fists balled, and he rose from his seat.

  “You have the conn,” he said abruptly. “I’ll be in the cargo bay, trying to work out.”

  Lucius said nothing, just nodded. Rex stalked to the door and was just about to exit, when the ship computer chirped. He paused, and Lucius looked up from his station.

>   “A large vessel has appeared at the edge of radar range,” said the ship’s computer. Unlike Lucius, it spoke in an Australian accent, delightfully female. “It is oddly shaped, and is moving erratically.”

  “How big is it?” Rex said, turning back.

  “At this range accurate measurement is impossible, but I am estimating the vessel is at least five hundred feet long. The radar returns are unusual. I am seeing both hard angles and curving shapes.”

  Rex paused, thinking. It could be nothing. There were a lot of weird ships in the Chaos Quarter, most of them welded together from whatever scraps the people out here could get their hands on. An unusual shape was not unexpected. But he thought back to his first mission into the Chaos Quarter, the last time he’d run into the Hegemony. He’d seen, close-up, the mostly organic warships they’d used. He remembered the curves of the bioship that had chased him, looking like some massive whale with crab arms and claws sticking out of it. Most nations did not build spaceships with organic shapes and swooping lines.

  He shook his head, and paced back to the command seat.

  “You think it might be something we need to investigate?” asked Lucius.

  “I do,” said Rex, still shaking his head. “Computer, set intercept course, maximum speed. Feed me all information as it comes in.”

  “Changing course.”

  ***

  It took nearly two hours to reach the strange vessel, even at the ship’s maximum speed of .1C, or one-tenth the speed of light. As they drew nearer the picture became clearer. It wasn’t one ship, it was two. One was blocky, metallic, and had two large gashes in its hull. The other looked like a squid covered in armadillo scales. It only had four front tentacles, but they had wrapped around the more normal, metal spaceship, latching on. The back end of the squid-ship was big, twice the size of the metallic vessel.