Rise of the Valkrethi

  RISE OF THE VALKRETHI

  Fifth Book in the INVARDII series.

  Warwick Gibson.

  © 2019 Warwick Gibson.

  All Rights Reserved.

  DISCLAIMER.

  This novel is a work of fiction. It does not draw from actual events. The characters in this story are entirely fictitious, and do not bear any resemblance to any persons living or dead.

  ALSO by WARWICK GIBSON

  And available at Amazon Kindle

  THE UNSOUND PRINCE (Sword and sorcery fantasy)

  ROUGH JUSTICE (Small town Chief of Police)

  MARIC’S REPRIEVE (SAS thriller set partly in Borneo)

  STRUGGLE FOR A SMALL BLUE PLANET (Sci-fi thriller)

  The INVARDII Series

  ANCESTRAL HOME

  CHAOS and RETREAT

  MEDIEVAL PLANET

  BOXED SET: BOOKS 1 -3

  FEDIC VITS

  RISE OF THE VALKRETHI

  ANTARES CRUCIBLE (coming soon)

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3 CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5 CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7 CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9 CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11 CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13 CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15 CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17 CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19 CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21 CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23 CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25 CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27 CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29 CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  APPENDIX A

  APPENDIX B

  APPENDIX C

  APPENDIX D

  DECLARATION OF PERSONAL INTEREST.

  My name is Herodotus. I am an historian.

  The extraordinary story of the Valkrethi must take pride of place in any recount of the monumental clashes between the alliance and the Invardii as the enemy laid claim to alliance territory.

  From the first discovery of the Valkrethi at Orouth to their eventual use in pitched battles involving hundreds of starships, this is a tale of Human endeavour. A tale of our strange ability to grasp an opportunity with both hands and run with it. The Human capacity to hope for a better future, based on little more than a feeling, seems to be unique among the races of the known planets.

  Why the long-vanished Rothii left the Valkrethi for us – more than 200 thousand years ago – is still a hotly debated topic. The Rothii knew that hostilities between the Rothii, Invardii and Druanii, the races derived from the Caerbrindii, would never cease. Why the Rothii transferred a Human population to Earth, and left us to carry on in their place, can only be answered by an alien intelligence we are struggling to understand.

  In this, and the other papers in this series, I have been given the task of recording the terrible events of the last four years as the alliance forces have been driven relentlessly backward.

  Our cause seems hopeless, but leaders appeared when they were desperately needed, and the people of Earth rallied behind them. Despite the incontrovertible evidence of Invardii superiority in all technological matters, the population of Earth continued to hope, that magical Human quality, and they were rewarded with the Valkrethi.

  The time is coming when I will have to honour a promise I made to Regent Cordez when I took on the task of recording the history of the enemy invasion, and the alliance response to it.

  Regent Cordez has always wanted a record of our way of life, and the calamity that befell us, in case we do not endure. Indestructible copies would then be distributed across all the planets and moons our starships can reach, inhabited or uninhabited, that our story may be know by alien races in the far-distant future.

  But the promise I made Regent Cordez was this. When I have finished recording our recent history, to my satisfaction, and when the end is near, when the Invardii fleets approach Earth, I will go out with the fighting men and women of the alliance. I will record for all time exactly how it felt to be part of that last great stand against our implacable enemy.

  Not that I will wield a weapon. With most of my bodily functions performed by machines, I will be no more than a passive observer. But the likelihood of my imminent demise, along with the rest of the crew, if our ship is destroyed, will I’m sure wonderfully focus my ability to see, hear, and record.

  Once again, I refer you to the appendices below, which cover the entire four years in depth, as they may be needed.

  Appendix A provides a time-line covering all four years.

  Appendix B consists of brief descriptions of locations.

  Appendix C describes the main characters.

  Appendix D covers the racial groupings.

  CHAPTER 1

  ________________

  “Pass the godsdamn’t thing!” yelled Jeneen, thundering past on Andre’s right. Celia stood off from one of the pilots on the opposing team, frantically signalling she was free to take a pass. Unfortunately Andre was locked in a battle with Roberto, spinning this way and that as he tried to get the giant rubber ball past him. A whistle blew.

  “Foul by Blue five, take the penalty Red one!” bellowed a voice over the sound system.

  “That was not a foul!” protested Andre. “I slipped, and he threw himself at my elbow!”

  “Yeah, right,” came the voice of the umpire, not at all impressed.

  Roberto fired a long overhead pass to Cagill, who flicked it quickly on to Celia. She scrabbled for it with her fingers, getting jostled by her opposite number. Then she was able to claw it down into a safe position.

  There was a moment’s silence while she lined up the shot, followed by pandemonium when she landed it. The whistle blower tried futilely to restore a measure of order.

  “Game over, 16-12 to Red team,” he managed at last. The giant figures dwarfed the group of Human bystanders watching from behind a solid divide of unbreakable glass. The Valkrethi trudged off to the next cavern, where they would be stored in stand down mode.

  The bystanders began to discuss the game among themselves, but in an overhead gallery a more serious discussion was going on.

  “You’re saying we lost nearly five percent of the air in the cavern in that one game?” exclaimed Finch. He was consulting with the mining engineer who had sealed the internal surface so the Valkrethi could use the cavern for training.

  “There’s just too much mass in those things,” said the engineer, “and too many fractures in the rock under Prometheus.” He was a short man with an extravagant hairdo that towered over his head.

  The engineer brought Finch up to date on other problems the giant figures were creating in the bedrock of Neptune’s second largest moon, Proteus. The sprawling construction site known as the Prometheus project took up many square kilometres of surface above them, but a lot of it had been excavated into the moon itself.

  “How are the deep-space life support systems coming along?” asked Finch of the man next to the engineer. John MacEwart, head of construction at Prometheus, had insisted on being given a role in the assessment of the giant Valkrethi.

  “All check out fine,” said MacEwart. “We’re ready for a test in deep space any time you like.”

  “Easy for you to say, you’re not going out in one,” said Andre, who had climbed down from the hatch at the back of his mount and hurried upstairs to join them. He had come to see what Finch thought of the Valkrethi’s athletic abilities.

  “It’s not your life on the line if something goes wrong!” he added.

  Finch smiled. He knew Andre would be the first to take his Valkrethi into any situation he was asked to.

  The research team who had tracked down the Valkrethi during their journey to the planet
Orouth were all now ‘observers’, and had their own giant mounts. They were training alongside the Valkrethi pilots, and would be with them when they went to war. To do that safely they would need to be able to defend themselves, so they had been added to the training squad.

  “The Valkrethi’s reflexes are not yet second nature to the pilots,” chipped in MacEwart. “They’re having to think about most of the things they do.

  “16-12 is an abysmally low score for a game like this, particularly when the Valkrethi are capable of moving many times faster than a Human athlete.”

  “All right, all right!” said Finch, laughing at the interest the Valkrethi had aroused. “I understand you’re interested in what’s going on. You guys don’t get enough excitement in your lives!”

  He grabbed the engineer and steered him in the direction of the atmospheric controls for the cavern.

  “I don’t expect to train the Valkrethi down here for much longer,” he said to the man quietly, “but I need this place to hang together for a few more hours of exercises like today.”

  The engineer grumbled about the difficulties he was having just to keep the cavern functional, but he was already changing the settings. He did things to make the lining a little more flexible, and hopefully more air tight under impact.

  Finch was usually too busy with the demands of the giant Prometheus project to attend to things like this himself. But this was different. The arrival of the Valkrethi from caverns on Orouth, where they had been stored for something over 200 thousand years, had aroused an intense curiosity in everyone on the base.

  That first trip to the planet had been to see the ancestral home of the Human race. It had come as a shock, some months before, to learn that a population of early Humans had been transplanted from Orouth to Earth 200 thousand years ago, by the long-vanished Rothii. The gesture appeared to have been an insurance policy against the resurgence of a galaxy-wide conflict that had been going on for over a million Earth years.

  That insurance had paid off. The warlike Invardii had come boiling out of the galactic core two years ago, and claimed this entire region of space as their own. It had affected Earth, and the Sumerian empire with its many colony planets, and the K’Sarth trading planet, and a number of other civilisations that didn’t yet have star drive.

  The alliance had lost every encounter with the huge Invardii Reaper ships since then, and a number of the Sumerian colony planets had been made uninhabitable by their deadly ground ships.

  A second trip to Orouth had brought back 24 of the giant machines to Prometheus, and training of pilots for them had begun in earnest. The great war machines were sorely needed. The Invardii advance outward from the galactic core had so far been unstoppable.

  Regent Cordez’ alliance with the staid Sumerians, and the diminutive Mersa from the planet Alamos, was yielding better results than anyone could ever have hoped. Unfortunately the alliance was still generations behind the technological superiority of the Reaper ships, clothed in the plasma shields of suns.

  Finch headed over to where the rest of the pilots were gathered around Neuman Cagill. The head of the Solar System’s military forces had insisted on giving up his role as chief of staff for the destroyer class Javelins to lead the Valkrethi.

  Prometheus was now producing Mark VI versions of the Javelins, and some early experiments with unconventional weapons had been successful against the Reaper ships. Unfortunately, the Invardii had already developed a lines of defence against those weapons.

  Finch thought yet again that this war would be won by the side that adapted most quickly, and did it most often. But that didn’t take into account how far behind Prometheus was in the technology stakes.

  Finch walked Cagill off to one side.

  “What do you think of the research team’s performance?” he asked. Cagill blew out a long breath as he considered his answer.

  “I have to admit they’ve got something over the pilots transferred from the Javelins,” he said at last, “and I hadn’t expected that. I guess our pilots have a way of doing things by set routines, while the research team are more flexible in their thinking.

  “The researchers are more capable of doing the unexpected,” he continued, “and that’s proved to be quite an advantage.

  “We’ve also got spare Valkrethi available, if you think the risk of losing some of the research team is acceptable. We’re training up two squadrons of our top pilots with the Valkrethi, and that leaves enough of the giant machines for the research team.”

  “So you might be able to take them along when the Valkrethi go into action?” queried Finch.

  “I don’t like it,” said Cagill. “You know as well as I do that we need a chain of command, and we need pilots drilled to obey orders. One flashy civilian could kill themselves, and dozens of others.”

  “The research team aren’t like that, though,” said Finch gently. “I just need them to tag along from time to time, take recordings, do some tests, make assessments, you know the sort of thing.”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Cagill, still unhappy with the suggestion.

  “Is it really that important?” he said at last, looking Finch squarely in the face.

  “I’m sorry, Neuman, I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t necessary.”

  Cagill nodded, and started to walk away. “Godsdammit, who would have believed it, civilians on board!” he said, shaking his head.

  Finch had every confidence in the research team. Celia and Roberto had already unravelled critical secrets for the alliance from their studies of ancient Rothi artefacts, and Andre and Jeneen were the technicians who made it all possible.

  The relationship between Jeneen and the much older Andre was a model of togetherness around Prometheus, and had only deepened since Jeneen had come close to losing her life using a Rothi mind-enhancing device in her work. Up until the time it had almost destroyed her, the device had allowed Jeneen to advance Human understanding in leaps and bounds as Prometheus strove to catch up with the Invardii.

  Two days later Finch declared it was time for the Valkrethi to stretch their space legs. Cagill decided that if the research team was going to be part of the Valkrethi force, he wanted them to be fully involved in this as well.

  Celia was given her orders, and she pulled the rest of her team away from their work and down to the cavern where the Valkrethi were stored.

  “Mount up!” ordered Cagill, as soon as they arrived. The research team could see the other Valkrethi had already been boarded by their pilots. The giant machines were stretching and flexing as the servo mechanisms went through warm up routines.

  The bonding of the pilots with their mounts seemed to improve over time. The Valkrethi were now beginning to look more and more like the people who rode in them. The composite hair on the giants shortened or lengthened as required, and facial detail became sharper. Shoulders filled out or waists slimmed down.

  Celia identified herself by a handprint in the mechanism just above her giant mount’s heel. Then she climbed the slim metal ladder that extended from its back.

  The space inside the pilot compartment always felt claustrophobic as the entrance closed behind her. She had a moment of panic before the helmet adjusted to her head, and the optics came on line. Now she could see through the Valkrethi’s eyes, and its vision was better than her own. A moment later the life support system began to circulate air through the helmet.

  Celia’s mount went through the same stretching and flexing exercises as the other giants. It was an automatic warm up and servo motor check built into each Valkrethi. Then she strode across the cavern to join the main group, the others in her research team behind her.

  The complex machine felt lighter and more manoeuvrable than it had in the games session two days ago. There was no doubt her mount was adapting to her, as quickly as she was adapting to it.

  CHAPTER 2

  ________________

  “Listen up, all of you,” began Cagill, once all three squads were assembled in
front of his Valkrethi.

  “The mining engineers have fitted the cavern with a rapid fire ejection system, in case you have to get space-born while Prometheus is under attack. The ejection system is like an airlock, but it can have all of you out of the cavern within one minute, and clear of the moon’s gravity seconds after that. That means you have to hit the portal at around one every second, so get ready to concentrate!”

  There were various noddings of giant heads, while other heads flicked up to look at the circle of light at the far end of the cavern. The movements were so life-like, thought Celia in wonder. So Human. And the faces of the Valkrethi were looking more like their pilots every day.

  “There is no door, repeat no door, in the portal. It is a ‘no go’ area for anyone without a spray suit system or higher-rated protection against hostile environments.

  “The air in the cavern is ionised as it approaches the portal, and is held back by a force field. The portal exits into a deep fissure in the moon’s surface, well away from Prometheus. That will make the exit hard for hostiles to detect.

  “This is what you have to do,” said Cagill. “You run, you aim for the circle of light, you jump with your arms outstretched, and the ejection system will pick you up and fling you away from the moon.

  “Any questions?”

  There were none.

  “Good. Alpha Squadron follows Alpha leader, the research team follows Celia, and Delta Squadron follows me, in that order. Am I clear?”

  There was much nodding of massive heads, and a few ‘affirmatives’ on the common sub-space link.

  “Alpha Squadron, disembark!” snapped Cagill, and a squadron of ten Valkrethi lumbered across the cavern, gaining speed as they approached the circle of light. The first of them launched itself at the centre of the ring. It was picked up and thrown forward as it went through the exit.

  One at a time the others followed, and then it was Celia’s turn. Near the circle of light gravitysum switched off, leaving only the moon’s weak gravity, and each of her steps became an uncoordinated bound. She faltered momentarily, and swore at herself for not anticipating that. Then she launched herself head first at the exit.