Relics of Utopia (Starship Gilead Book 1) Read online

  CONTENTS

  Also in Series:

  Overture

  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

  Coda

  Thank you for reading Relics of Utopia

  Want More Starship Giliead for Free?

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Grand Patrons

  RELICS OF UTOPIA

  JOHN GRAVES

  ©2022 LITERARY OUTLAWS, LLC

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the authors.

  Aethon Books supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  Print and eBook formatting, and cover design by Steve Beaulieu. Artwork provided by Vivid Covers.

  Published by Aethon Books LLC. 2022

  Aethon Books is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

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

  All rights reserved.

  ALSO IN SERIES:

  [1] RELICS OF UTOPIA

  [2] PRODIGAL

  [3] THE LAST BATTLEFIELD

  For Eric Summers

  OVERTURE

  The age of exploration was over.

  The stars had been charted, the planets colonized, and the flag of the United Planetary Federation had been planted on every habitable world from Earth to the edges of known space. The citizens of the Union lived in peace and prosperity, pursuing their fortunes and their dreams as the stars wheeled overhead. But the price of peace is eternal vigilance, and tyrants are always waiting in the wings.

  The Union dissolved into civil war in the year 2611. Millions died in the systematic purges that led up to the conflict, and millions more gave their lives in a war that divided lifelong friends and set brother against brother. The final battle took place near the Vanguard colony in Sector 99 Alpha. An armada of rebel starships had pursued the so-called Emperor of Earth across light-years to this distant battlefield in the stars. The starship Gilead was the first to arrive.

  Lieutenant Commander Eldred Manthus served as Gilead’s second officer. He had lost most of his family when the purges began, and he wasn’t alone in his sorrow. Most of the crew were orphans now, clinging to each other because they didn’t have anyone else. Eldred believed in what they were doing here—making a stand against a tyrant whose hands were stained with blood. It was good and it was right, but that didn’t make it easy.

  Eldred was dark-haired and tall, with a hawkish nose that bent slightly in the middle which he’d hated since he was a boy. He was below decks when Gilead arrived at Vanguard, coordinating a boarding plan with the ship’s contingent of space Marines when his communicator chirped.

  He raised the device to his ear. “Manthus here. Go ahead.”

  “We need you on the bridge, STAT.” Captain Nathan Avery sounded almost excited. Gilead had been on the front lines of the Galactic Civil War ever since President Kokabiel declared himself emperor, and now they finally had the tyrant cornered. His flagship, Babylon, had hit a minefield and was dead in space. The situation was perfect.

  Too perfect.

  “I’m on my way, Captain.” Eldred clipped his communicator back onto his belt and turned to Gunnery Sergeant Declan. “You know what to do to, soldier.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Red alert klaxons blared, and Eldred was almost to the bridge when he felt the ship shudder beneath his feet. He was thrown violently to the floor, striking his head against a wall. When he sat up, Eldred felt warmth on his face. Touching the wound, he found his fingers stained with blood.

  Gilead had been hit. Their shields must have failed.

  Eldred staggered to his feet and ran. His heart pounded against his rib cage by the time he reached the bridge. The motion sensors controlling the doors didn’t activate, so Eldred yanked the manual release lever, pried his fingers into the junction, and pulled with all his strength. The doors slid open on a scene of twisted, blackened metal. Eldred’s heart leapt into his throat when he looked up and saw that the bridge’s domed ceiling was gone. In its place was a jagged gash open to the blackness of space.

  The burned bodies of Captain Avery and most of the bridge crew had been sucked into the void and now floated in the eternal darkness. Only a handful remained—their prone forms splayed across the bridge.

  It took Eldred Manthus a moment to realize that the ship’s emergency systems must have kicked in and erected a force field to seal the hull breach. It was too late to save the captain and the rest of the fallen, but that invisible wall of energy had prevented Eldred from sharing their grim fate. He realized something else as well. Both Captain Avery and Commander Storil were on the bridge when Gilead was hit.

  The senior officers were dead.

  He was the captain now.

  Eldred stood there for a moment, tears welling in his eyes as he looked past the bodies of his friends and co-workers to the titanic white starship in the distance.

  Babylon.

  “Gilead,” said Eldred. The ship’s computer did not respond. He wasn’t surprised. Nothing could have survived the blast that destroyed the bridge.

  Unclipping his communicator from his belt, Eldred said, “Gilead, what is the ship’s status?”

  The ship’s nearly perfect impression of a human voice responded through his communicator. “There is a hull breach on Deck One. Shields are offline. Weapons are offline. Life support is functioning at thirty-three percent.”

  “Shit.”

  “Please restate query.”

  Eldred deactivated his communicator. Something had caught his eye. Outside the ruined bridge, a brilliant light ignited in the distance. At first, he thought that one of the other ships in the rebel armada must have fired on Babylon, but the starburst didn’t behave like a normal explosion—it intensified. Was a star going nova in the middle of this battle? That didn’t seem likely, but anything was possible in this strange universe where men sailed among the stars.

  He stood still, transfixed, knowing that he must assume command of the ship but unable to look away from whatever was happening out there in the darkness. Suddenly, a blue and purple fissure erupted from the center of the light—a wormhole.

  Eldred stared in awe as Babyl
on adjusted her heading and entered the wormhole’s gaping maw. The emperor’s flagship vanished in a flash as the wormhole collapsed in upon itself.

  “What the hell?”

  His words echoed across the empty bridge. Gilead had survived the battle, but Eldred wouldn’t exactly say they won. He took one last look at the devastation surrounding him, closed his eyes, and whispered a quiet prayer for the fallen. Eldred had been raised Catholic, but he had fallen away from the church during the pogroms that led to the Galactic Civil War. But in this moment, he felt like a remnant that God had preserved for some unknowable purpose. He finished his prayer and crossed himself. His shipmates’ troubles were over now, and his had just multiplied.

  The wormhole’s afterimage was still branded on his retinas as Lieutenant Commander—no, make that Captain—Eldred Manthus set about the momentous task of building the future.

  He wondered if it always would be…

  1

  The Union had been gone for almost three hundred years now, and a dark age had obliterated man’s progress across space. People still spoke sometimes about the glory days of old, when mighty starships traversed the great black sea in search of new worlds to colonize and new resources to exploit, but out here, on the frontier, only one starship stood watch against the terrors in the dark. Her name was Gilead, and the safety of dozens of worlds fell under the jurisdiction of her captain.

  Windham Manthus stepped through a gateway on his starship in orbit high above the planet Cheron-4. He emerged instantly from a networked portal thousands of kilometers below in the city of Avalon. The portal—a ten-meter-high arch—was erected near the center of the city and formed one half of an Einstein-Rosen bridge. When a ship such as Gilead was in range, tinkers above and below could network the portal on the ground with a portal onboard the ship and create a stable gateway between the two. In Avalon, the portal system was mostly used for moving cargo from the settlement up to an orbiting vessel. The technology was expensive, but it was infinitely cheaper than trying to transport cargo from the surface to a starship via shuttlecraft.

  Avalon was the only major outpost on this otherwise agrarian world. Cheron-4 had been settled near the end of the old Union’s expansion across the galaxy, and the planet was one of Gilead’s primary food sources. Like many societies in the difficult years after the cataclysmic failure of democracy, the people of Cheron-4 had returned to an ancient system of government: monarchy. After of the upheaval of the Galactic Civil War, the strongest seized power and held onto it, tooth and nail. And now, after seven generations, monarchy had become the norm.

  The people of Avalon didn’t call their ruler a king, of course; they called him a governor, but the title didn’t matter. The governor of Cheron-4, the potentate of Ansalon-Prime, and the captain of the starship Gilead—they ruled for life and passed their titles down to their heirs. They were kings in all but name, and their people understood this concept deep in their bones. These were farmers—men and women who worked the land just as their ancestors had done since the origin of man—who considered the ideals of liberty and equality as decadent; their only concern was how to keep their livestock healthy, the crops watered, and their debts at a manageable level. Their governor was a fair man, a good man, and at one time, Windham had called this man his brother.

  The captain observed a line of cargo haulers queued into the distance as far as the eye could see. The hover trucks were there to unload their cargo—enough provisions to feed a city for three months—into Gilead’s hold. There was no parade waiting for him in town, even though this planet was a protectorate in the Barony of Gilead, and for that Windham was grateful. He had no use for pomp and pageantry. Some other captains whose ships had survived the Galactic Civil War were known for making their subjects genuflect in their presence, but Windham didn’t care about ceremony. He was here on business, and he was here for a long-awaited reunion.

  A heavyset man was waiting for Windham when he emerged from the portal. This was Charles Morrison, the governor of Cheron-4. He took a step forward and Windham stepped up to meet him. They stood face-to-face for several moments, and then Charlie’s lips spread into a grin.

  “Windham! My brother.”

  “Charlie!”

  They embraced, two old friends who had known one another for over twenty years. They had been brothers-in-law once upon a time, but that ended when Windham’s wife died five years earlier. Gilead had returned to Cheron-4 numerous times in the ensuing years, but Windham had not set foot on the planet in all that time. It was just too painful to return to his wife’s homeworld without her. He might have stayed away on this visit as well, but Charlie had personally requested this meeting, and Windham owed his former brother-in-law that much at least.

  “You got old,” Charlie said. He mimed stroking a beard on his clean-shaven face. “Still tall though.”

  Windham smiled. His dark hair had thinned in recent years, and his beard was streaked with silver. “And you got fat,” he said, patting his own midsection while nodding at Charlie’s gut.

  They both laughed, and the sensation was strange to Windham. He had been burdened with so much trouble these past few years—between Eowyn’s death and the enemies that were constantly threatening the peace in the sector—he couldn’t remember the last time he had laughed. His burden seemed to lighten, if only for a little while, and the feeling was sensational.

  Windham and Charlie walked toward the Governor’s Palace, traversing streets in town where Eowyn had once called home. The memory of his wife twisted in Windham’s heart like a piece of shrapnel. He loved this place, it was his home away from home, and he had long considered returning here when his time in the captain’s chair was done. Of course, no one in his position had ever retired. Captains of Gilead usually left the bridge feet first, and the thought of quietly retiring to this rural paradise was nothing more than a dream he’d once shared with his late wife. Windham’s father was killed fighting the Brethren on Seti-3, and his grandfather was assassinated by an ambitious first mate. Windham had to go back three generations to find an ancestor who’d died in his sleep, but he didn’t suppose that any man would choose such a fate over a full life and a glorious death.

  Still, he was weary of the stars. There were days when he wanted more than anything to get away from Gilead and to watch the ship’s light disappear into the darkness.

  “We’ve been having some trouble,” Charlie said once they finally reached the governor’s office. The room was bright and spacious—a comfortable place to work or to meet with dignitaries from offworld. There was a portrait of Charlie and Eowyn’s father hanging on the wall behind the governor’s desk, and his late father-in-law’s eyes seemed to stare at Windham with a look of condemnation. How could you let my daughter die? those eyes seemed to accuse him. Logically, Windham knew that Eowyn’s death wasn’t his fault; nevertheless, the guilt and shame that he had not been able to protect his beloved weighed upon his shoulders like a heavy iron chain.

  “What kind of trouble?” Windham asked, turning his eyes on Charlie.

  “It’s the Brethren,” said Charlie. He sighed heavily as he settled into the chair behind his desk. “Those damn cultists have been harassing my citizens nonstop for months. They’ve been attacking outlying farms—burning down homes, murdering the menfolk, kidnapping women and children, destroying crops and livestock—the bastards even attacked a funeral last week. It’s getting out of hand. You’ve got to do something…”

  As Windham understood it, the Brethren’s religion was rooted in the idea that ancient aliens called Watchers had seeded the human race and taught man about fire and science and basically how not to be a dumb monkey. If that wasn’t weird enough, they also thought that Kokabiel, the last president of the United Planetary Federation, was one of these Watchers.

  Kokabiel was a piece of work. He’d destroyed the Union, declared himself emperor, and provoked a civil war that undid thousands of years of human progress. And then he was killed in a
battle not too far from Cheron-4.

  There were Brethren sects all over known space, each with its own slightly different eschatology, but all held to the idea that Kokabiel would someday return, conquer the disparate realms of the universe, free the rest of the Watchers from some prison where they were all being held, and together they would rule the galaxy until the end of the age. The Brethren zealots also believed that they could speed up their emperor’s return—or reincarnation—by spilling blood in his name. Thus, they had committed countless acts of murder and terrorism across the breadth of known space. Windham’s own father had died fighting these fanatics, and he hated them for that.

  “I’ll leave a contingent of rangers,” Windham said. “They can investigate the situation and attempt to smoke out the Brethren faction operating on this planet.”

  Charlie smiled—a sad smile that reminded Windham of his late wife. It almost felt like Eowyn’s ghost was here with them, sitting on the desk with her legs crossed and staring out the window at the city that her ancestors had helped to found almost two centuries before.

  “I miss her,” Charlie said, not meeting his brother-in-law’s eyes. There was no need to say her name; they were both thinking of Eowyn.

  “I do too,” Windham admitted. “Every single day.”

  “What do you say we go down to Gadsey’s Tavern and have a drink in honor of her memory? They’ve got a country singer down there; he’s pretty good. Knows a bunch of farming songs… some I’ve never heard before.”