Gamma Nine (Book One)

Gamma Nine

By Christi Smit

Copyright © 2017 by Christi Smit.

All rights reserved.

This book is protected under international copyright laws and by the Republic of South Africa. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited.

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Warning: It is recommended to read the series in chronological order. Reading the series out of sync will not make sense.

Chronological Order:

Gamma Nine (Book One)

Artemis: A Gamma Nine Short Story

Gamma Nine: Dawn of Extinction (Book Two)

For more information visit:

www.gamma-nine.com

Table of Contents

Author’s Foreword

Chapter Zero

Chapter Zero.One

Chapter Zero.Two

Chapter One

Chapter One.One

Chapter One.Two

Chapter Two

Chapter Two.One

Chapter Three

Chapter Three.One

Chapter Three.Two

Chapter Four

Chapter Four.One

Chapter Four.Two

Chapter Five

Chapter Five.One

Chapter Five.Two

Chapter Six

Chapter Six.One

Chapter Six.Two

Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven.One

Chapter Seven.Two

Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight.One

Epilogue

About the Author

Leave a Review

For G

The brightest light in the ever-growing darkness.

Even the stars envy you when you shine.

You made all of this possible.

A FEW WORDS FROM THE AUTHOR OR THE THIS MIGHT BE AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE BUT PROBABLY ISSN’T PART

The idea for this novel was conceived many years ago, I say conceived because it grew in my mind for as long as I care to remember, growing little by little into what it is now and what it will become, hopefully. It was only when I started writing this novel that I realized how big of an enemy self-doubt can be. This novel pushed my sanity to its very limits, I doubted myself after almost every passage or chapter, and I still do. The questions you ask yourself hinder your productivity and make you one angry bastard. I appreciate my partner even more for putting up with my sour and downright difficult moods. Is there enough action in the first chapters? Will your readers read through the slower parts? Maybe they won’t like your writing style. Maybe you missed a fact and it buggers up your entire novel. These questions and more flowed through me every time I sat down to write, perhaps certain days to my own detriment.

But, I did it. Even through all of the self-doubt, you are reading this and are about to go on a great journey with me and my characters. I was not going to write something here when I started out, afraid that I might sound pompous or arrogant. My intention is to butter you up for what is to come. Let me explain before I lose your already wavering interest.

I dislike novels without a proper stage and background. As a lover of everything Science Fiction, I enjoy reading about the past of whatever is currently happening in the novel. The details are what make the story for someone like me. Why was that there? What happened during that time? Why are they fighting? So on and so forth.

In certain novels it works to just drop a reader in the middle of a frantic or dire circumstance and watch the character, and reader, struggle their way out of the hole that the author has dug for them. You might grip a reader better that way, but later on down the path the novel might lack enough information to carry the story further, or too many world building passages need to be inserted into the story, breaking the flow of the main path. Many times I found myself having to page back to try and find something mentioned earlier or referred to in an obscure passage. I was always afraid that I might have missed some vital piece of information, maybe ruining the novel for myself a little.

This novel is different. This novel starts off slow, I have no illusions about that, but it is like that for a specific reason. You would not expect to watch a film from halfway in and know exactly what transpired before you started watching, only if you watched it before can you piece together where you are in the story. I chose to build the world or universe my characters inhabit before the story kicks off. I like the finer details, reading about how something came to be, or how past events led to the present time. The stage pieces have to be perfectly set before I can call action on my story. I prefer to call it galaxy building, world building is not the correct word for what I am doing. Think of it as billions of lights turning on one by one across planets and sectors, you - the reader - might not see or read about every single light’s story or journey, but no matter how insignificant, they are still vital to how everything moves forward as time passes. A man might die in the shadow of his mining craft on the other side of the galaxy, his death will mean nothing to the current story arc, but it is still part of the universe and might just play some role in it eventually.

Even this, what was supposed to be a short paragraph or two, turned into a lengthy meandering about personal feelings and my universe. I am surprised I have not mentioned my love for unicorns or crayons yet...oh never mind, I just did.

If I can say only one thing to you, my reader, is thank you for giving me the chance to tell you my story, thank you for getting your hands on this novel and taking a chance on a random stranger. I hope in some way my stories can ignite only a small flame within your imagination, if you could see everything unfold as I have, and if you can dream like I do, then I have succeeded in every way possible.

Get through the slower opening parts, but pay attention to it as well, the Zero chapters contain many interesting facts, watch as the universe I wanted to create comes alive and follow the people through it until the end. You will not regret it. You can, if you wish to, skip the Zero chapters, but you will be missing out on some great detailing, motivations and crucial information pertaining to the story I am telling. The choice I leave up to you, just don’t expect a lot of dialogue in the Prologue. Most of it is purely there to set you up for an epic journey through the stars.

Now, take my virtual hand, and let me guide you through the first part of my story. Let me show you all the magnificent things along the way as we walk in the footsteps of Titans.

Chapter Zero

Subjugation

"We had become the masters and kings of Earth. We had conquered disease, war and famine. The flag of our race stood firmly planted on the highest mountain of our home world. We stood there, on the highest peak, together. We watched as humankind flourished and lived together in peace. A few of those that stood on that peak were content with what they saw, some were not. As ever, those that were not content wanted more, their hearts needed more. They looked to the stars and saw the infinite potential hidden between them. They saw the resources and treasures just waiting to be plundered, and their hearts grew covetous. We should have considered the consequences of living and building among the stars. But we were too ignorant and too greedy. Our reach always exceeded our grasp. For in the darkness of the void an entity had been waiting for centuries, waiting for something exactly like our race to sink its teeth into."

Centuries had passed since the dominion of humankind had scattered itself throughout the known systems in the Milky Way. It was so vast that no ship could travel from one end of our star kingdom to the other end in a single decade. Our race had spread like an infection across the stars, plundering as we went. Nothing we encountered on alien planets could match our prowess and intellect. Most, if not all, alien species we found were nothing but mere creatures, wildlife in most cases. There was no semi-intelligent species capable of posing a threat to us.

Perhaps this was why we became so arrogant and lax in our protocols, and little by little we made mistakes. It was one of these small mistakes that led to one of the major events in our race’s history. We were so strong, so arrogant, nothing and no-one could dethrone humankind. We were oblivious and blind to the weakness of humans and the dangers that lurked in the dark unknown. This time, however, there was a hidden and much darker hand pulling at the strings behind the scenes of our unplanned demise.

At first there seemed to be no plan to what was unleashed on humankind, but during the war it was made clear by the actions of our enemies what the plan for our kind really was. We were not to be dominated or conquered. There would be no slaves or prisoners. We were to be consumed to satisfy an ancient insatiable hunger.

On a planet in the Seraph Cluster far in the Galactic North an entity waited to be set free. This organism had no body of its own, only a dark will to feed. The planet Angelicas would become the epicentre of the war against our race.

The planet Angelicas was one of the first planets colonized during the initial phase of exploration by P-SEP, now the most powerful corporation in the dominion of man. The Pegasus Space Exploration Project created and built the first Star Explorer vessels used during the first exploration missions. These giant vessels were specifically built to travel from Earth using their BEAM, Beta Electron Accelerator Module, drives to propel them and their cargo to distant star systems in a fraction of the time, as opposed to conventional void drives. Star Explorers contained millions of crew and civilians to colonize new planets, vast engineering capabilities and bays, agricultural storage and enough materials to build or manufacture whatever a new colony could possibly need. Hundreds of these moon sized vessels were built, only a handful of them never reached their destinations. P-SEP’s master plan of taking humankind to the stars was a resounding success. The Star Explorers also acted as communication arrays once deployed in the orbit of a planet. Forming one of the many important communication nodes in the web of nodes located throughout the galaxy.

SE6-Angelicas orbited the planet once designated as Gamma Nine for more than three hundred years, the planet was later renamed in honour of the Star Explorer that had found and colonized it. It was when this old vessel went silent that we knew there was trouble stirring in that sector. The Angelicas communication node fell silent without warning. No distress signals were ever sent, no word of any problem ever received. At first only the Star Explorer went silent, but as the silence spread through the Seraph Cluster, the unease of the people neighbouring that sector grew.

The silence spreading across the sector was a delayed response to a mistake made by our own hubris. A mining crew out on routine excavation duties mined too deep and hit a cavern of unknown organic life. They could not see the organic life within or begin to understand the nature of the organism hidden there, only a microscope could reveal the horrors that were trapped beneath the crust. The miners that accidentally inhaled the organism that fateful day were unaware of the calamity yet to come.

Maybe we could have saved more, and maybe we could have stopped the war. No-one knows exactly how long this organism was trapped beneath the crust of Angelicas, slowly consuming the planet from within. We only knew the destruction it was capable of once it could feed. The organism that was freed that day only came into the light of our consciousness after it had infected too many to count or stop. Many years passed after the cavern was breached, and yet no knowledge of the organism’s existence was ever known until it was too late. An invisible entity had found a suitable environment to evolve into its next phase, inside of our own flesh. There it was waiting for the time to strike, sharpening its claws in the darkness of our souls.

If it was not for the unsettling and terrifying means the enemy used to make itself known, we would have never known what lurked in the shadows of our ever expanding star kingdom. The silence was the first sign that something was wrong, but what followed in its wake crushed our spirits before we even saw the enemy. Out of the silent hole that was the Seraph Cluster came an inhuman scream, carried by the voices of the infected.

This scream filled the communication nodes on all broadcasting networks and reached as far as our home planet, Earth Prime as it is now called. Those of us that were not weak minded survived the scream’s initial psychological onslaught, but others were not so lucky. Some were killed the instant the scream was heard, others descended into madness. The madness that afflicted the weaker ones destroyed their minds, and the mindless ripped and clawed at their own flesh. Survivors of the inhuman scream that penetrated our kingdom and our minds didn’t dare speak of what they saw the mindless do. The atrocities of the mindless were, as the future would teach us, nothing compared to the real reason for the scream being unleashed upon us.

The monstrous scream was not a warning of any kind; instead it was the way the enemy communicated over vast distances. Soldiers that faced the enemy on the battlefield would later describe the scream as the voice of demons pouring into their minds. It used our own communication network against us to awaken the dormant infected hidden across the cosmos.

The infection had spread so far and had infected so many. Later testing done by scientists during the war would expose the manner of infection. Microscopic spores, disguised as sores on an infected person’s body would release its deadly invisible payload into the atmosphere, artificial or planetary, and infect everyone in close proximity to an infected host. The manner of infection made it almost impossible to stop others from being infected. Infection rate also increased after the scream activated the sleeper cells within us.

Infected humans and creatures on distant alien planets that were scattered into the wind by time were all awoken when the scream spread throughout the networks. All of them were instantly transformed in mind, frozen in a trance state. Shortly after the infected just seemed to stop and form part of a single consciousness. They moved as one and started hunting those of us that were not infected. On space stations, aboard ships and in colonies, hordes of infected moved, stalking the rest of us like a predator stalking its prey. So many of us died without even a chance of defending ourselves, we were ripped and torn apart without a hope of escape. The infected had only one goal, to feed. And as if the realization of being fed upon by our own kind was not enough, the mutations that changed the infected brought new levels of fear to humankind.

The infection changed and mutated the bodies of the infected into grotesque parodies of humans. Bones grew to new and horrible forms, some forming blades, others adding to their bulk. No infected looked the same, every single one a different creature from our worst nightmares. Some had elongated faces like mythical creatures out of ancient tales, while others looked like amalgamations of demons and men. There was no single template, it was as if the gates of Hades had opened and every manner of monster had spilled out into our reality. The most frightening thing was perhaps that there was nothing supernatural about the mutations. Only the bravest of humankind could face down the beasts and not falter.

By the time the survivors had regrouped after the initial onslaught an uncountable number of humans had lost their lives. The beasts destroyed and consumed anything in their path. We had lost more than half of our vast star kingdom to the beasts feeding on our flesh. Most of what we had built was now a silent tomb to the dead, in some sectors there were still desperate fights for survival. But the outlook was grim, and the humans in the unaffected zones held little hope for those trapped in the dead zones. The monsters we now had to face were referred to as the Beast by propaganda spewing networks. The name stuck and our enemy now had a name.

The Beast had caught us off-guard, overwhelmed most of our colonies in the dead zone, and it had annihilated man, woman and child without hesitation. The call went out in the safe zone for all volunteers to assemble at pre-determined locations to fight the Beast by any means necessary; we needed to contain the threat before it overwhelmed the zones that had less infected running rampant.

Many planetary and void skirmishes were fought to keep humankind from becoming extinct. Millions of P-SEP’s own personal defence force was sent from Earth Prime to help with containment. Soldiers from planets on the frontline between the safe zone and the dead zone fought and died to protect what was left of our star kingdom. Planets on the edge between the two zones were highly contested and neither side could achieve victory. The planets turned in to charnel house for human and Beast alike. Our military resources capable of destroying or eliminating vast amounts of the Beast was trapped behind enemy lines, destroyed or held in reserve around Earth Prime. It was not yet clear if the Beast was capable of breaking out of the dead zone and pushing further into the safe zone. Our planet killing weapons were not yet operational and we were left with a tug of war with the Beast for over fifty years. Neither side gained ground, everything hung by a thread as the stalemate could not be broken.

Our resources were limited and in some sectors dwindling dangerously low. The sectors that were safe were mostly newly colonized planets in the Galactic South. Only a few of the sectors were first generation colonies. Production and colonization took time and manpower, things we didn’t have in abundance. We needed something new and powerful to push back at the Beast. We needed to retake our lost sectors and re-unite our star kingdom. We needed what the faithful still among us called a miracle. The answer came not long after our hope had begun to fail.

Chapter Zero.One

Rise

"They were the tip of the sword. They were the first to deploy and last to withdraw. They made the best of a dire situation, achieving victory where most could only see defeat. They numbered only a few thousand, yet their bravery never wavered in the face of evil and insurmountable odds. Because of them we were given more time, because of them we were able to rebuild. The Titans were the hammer and shield of humankind, but as history taught our race - all Titans must fall."

The great minds of our time spent every waking moment after Subjugation Day - the name we had given the day the Beast had awoken - trying to find an answer to the Beast. Intellectuals, engineers and tacticians worked tirelessly for decades, scavenging for resources to build better weapons, and research new ones. There were many new breakthroughs in the fields of weapon development and soldier enhancements, but none of them were enough or viable on the field of battle against the Beast.

Chief Scientist Thomas Wexler from the planet New Horizon P-SEP research centre gave us the answer we had been searching for. He brought together multiple fields of research and made them all work in unison to create what he named The Titan Project.

The Titan Project consisted of a new type of mechanized suit, manually operated by its Operator from within. These suits were named Articulated Refuge Constructs, or ARC suits as the Operators called them. Operators were enclosed by the strongest materials known to humankind. Anctinium armour plating covered an Anctinium-mesh suit, and beneath the mesh suit the liquid nanites protected the outer epidermis and internal organs from within. The Liquid Nano Robotic system was injected into an Operator’s body when interfacing with the ARC suit. The liquid nanites healed any damage an Operator could sustain during operation. Interface plugs were surgically implanted into all Operators in the limbs and spine, with the most important plug situated at the top of the spine just below the nape of the neck. Without these plugs, Operators could never control the ARC suits to their full potential. It is said that the surgery to implant the interface plugs for the ARC suit was excruciatingly painful.

Only the bravest and the best soldiers that could be spared from the armed forces were recruited and put through trials. The Titan Trial was the worst kind of military training known to man, gruelling and sometimes just cruel. Recruits were stretched mentally and physically beyond what could be considered acceptable levels. Out of over ten thousand recruits less than half survived the trials, and implantation and calibration with the ARC suits claimed even more lives. By the time the few thousand Titans that survived the trials were ready, more than sixty years had passed since Subjugation Day. The Titans were broken up into smaller squads before deployment and Operators maintained their former armed forces ranks.

Their first deployment would be on the frontline, on the planet Arkelis in the Iona sector. The Beast and soldiers from the armed forces had been waging war for over a decade on that planet. Arkelis was on the verge of being overrun by the Beast, the soldiers stationed there were barely holding out against our tireless and ravenous enemy. It was on the surface of Arkelis that the Titan’s metaphorical and literal metal would be put to the test. Arkelis would be the ultimate test for our new weapon. Humankind’s future sat on a knife’s edge. Win or lose, our hope rested solely on the shoulders of the Titans.

The years had not been kind to the mutations of the Beast. On the surface of Arkelis our race saw what time had done to the infected. With every passing decade the Beast had evolved into more vicious and less recognizable monsters. What was left of the human templates underneath the mutating flesh and bone was now completely gone, soldiers facing them on the battlefields throughout our star kingdom could not discern if these creatures were once human or of alien origin. It seemed that a new race had been born into the light decades ago, a race born to consume every living thing in the universe.

Humankind stood in the Beast’s path. We could have left the rest of our universe to fall under their claws and teeth, running and surviving for as long as it took for the monsters to find its prey. Or we could fight; stand against it while we were still able to, and stop the tide of nightmarish fiends assailing our kingdom’s walls. We were after all, at least in some way, to blame for what happened.

Our resources were limited, our soldiers tired and our hope almost depleted. The fleet that was still available for military action were mostly made up of infantry carriers and cargo haulers. Very few battle ready cruisers and scout ships were left, and almost all of them were now on patrol between the safe zone and the highly contested dead zones. Subjugation Day had taken its toll on the fleets and the military docking facilities situated in the dead zones, most of them now only derelict ghost ships hanging in the void. Only three capital ships still remained, these armoured and deadly behemoths were assigned to the defence of Earth and its solar system. After Subjugation Day, Earth’s solar system entry points were blockaded by P-SEP and its military wing to protect our home planet from whatever threat was able to reach it. Nothing was allowed in or out of the solar system, Earth and its sister planets were all isolated from the rest of the star kingdom. Like a king going into hiding during a siege, the councils and leaders of those planets closed the doors on the rest of us. The rest of the star kingdom could only communicate with the outer nodes within our home solar system and report progress on the war with the Beast.

Circumstances were grim, but we still had a tiny spark of hope left that we had not used yet. Our experimental weapon was about to join the war against the Beast. Two cruisers named Hammer Break and Hyperion were loaded with battle ready Titans and all of their supporting crew and gear. On the eve before they would take to the field of battle, the Hammer Break and the Hyperion entered the space around Arkelis unannounced and unnoticed. The deployment of the Titans would be a surprise to all that fought on the planet’s surface. It ensured tactical advantage, something we desperately needed.

Drop ships descended from the Hammer Break and Hyperion now orbiting the silent void above Arkelis. The drop ships headed straight for the largest land mass on the planet’s surface, Evodus; there the raging battle was the most ferocious. A little over two thousand Titans were deposited amid the frontlines across Evodus, to the surprise of the soldiers already fighting for their lives.

The Titans stormed out of their drop ships and immediately rushed the Beast, hammering them with volleys of automatic fire while others suited and outfitted for close quarters charged into the Beast horde. Soldiers close to the drop points rallied to them without question, their lustrous new armour like beacons to those around them. Bodies of the enemy were heaped up around the areas were Titans were locked in combat with the Beast. They had little difficulty in dispatching the human-sized infected, bigger and bulkier infected were downed by squads working as one. None fell during the first few hours of the Battle for Arkelis, and slowly but surely they were proving that they could be our saviours. Kill counts and reports flooded the battlefield networks all confirming one thing, that the count of enemy dead was in the thousands and climbing all the time. Soldiers fighting with the Titans witnessed acts of great valour on the battlefield. The tide had finally started to turn in favour of the humans fighting on Arkelis. Within a few hours they had the Beast on the back foot and reeling from their surprise assault. Already they were becoming legends.

One squad in particular fought tirelessly to break the back of the beasts they faced. They protected the soldiers around them with fervour, not letting one single soldier die while they still drew breath. The officers and soldiers that fought in close proximity to this particular squad all reported the same thing. A snarling white wolf, painted on the upper arm of every member of this squad, could be seen blazing as they fought. These Titans fought in silent tandem as they obliterated everything around them, pushing the beast further back as they were cut down by bullet and blade. They had fought hard and had pierced deep into the Beast’s lines, eventually reaching a plateau overlooking the battle lines. From the elevated plateau they had the perfect vantage point of the surrounding areas. It was there that the legend of the Grim Wolves was forged in blood and courage.

The Grim Wolves, their name bestowed upon them by the survivors of Arkelis, rallied all of the soldiers around them to their new vantage point. They fought off wave after wave of Beast assaults, their elevation making them a prime focal point for the enemy’s wrath. The dead piled up as the Titans fought on, normal soldiers were dying as the Grim Wolves could not protect all of them while trying to keep the monsters from overrunning their position. Dead soldiers and Beast alike heaped up on all sides, yet they fought on. The Grim Wolves were reaping the mutated lives of the infected as easy as smothering a candle’s flame, their kill count now lost in the fury of battle. When their ammunition was no more they fought with blades, when their blades were broken they fought with their armoured hands.

They lost all sense of time as they fought the enemy, not realizing that the battle around them had begun to wind down. They never heard the scream that had spread through the Beast horde signalling the time to turn and run. Other squads were now converging on their position as well, squads that were able to move more freely now that the Beast was in retreat. The Beast had been broken by our new weapon. By the time the surrounding Titans had reached the top of the plateau eight of the Grim Wolves still stood, one knelt and another had fallen. Silence gripped the squads that found them, as the dust settled the true carnage that the Grim Wolves had inflicted became clear. The height of the plateau had been raised by a dozen or more feet, the dead forever tangled together to form a new mountain peak on the continent of Evodus.

For eleven hours they had fought without pause, without rest. From the moment they had deployed, they had slaughtered their way through the Beast horde, killing thousands in their path to victory. Of over the two thousand Titans that fought during the battle on Arkelis, only three hundred had fallen, with half of that injured or incapacitated. Deaths recorded by regular military units were deemed within acceptable levels by military command. The number of soldiers that lost their lives on Arkelis was never released, it was rumoured to be close to four million lives spent defending that planet.

The Titans were now a proven concept and P-SEP military command ordered more to be trained for the war against the Beast. Resources from all planets located in close proximity to New Horizon were requisitioned to help further the Titan Project. Facilities on New Horizon would create and train new Titans as resources allowed. These requisitions rendered economies in required materials and resource trading obsolete in most of these neighbouring sectors. Sectors that had only limited resources descended into poverty and chaos, piracy was rampant and entire sectors went dark as they tuned on each other or refused to supply any more resources. Civil wars broke out across the star kingdom as sectors declared their independence, distancing themselves from the war with the Beast and the rest of P-SEP owned sectors. The war with the Beast had drained P-SEP and humankind, and we were forced to turn a blind eye to these rebellious sectors. Sectors that had broken away from the star kingdom would have to be dealt with at a later time, when resources allowed it.

The Titans that were still operational after the Battle of Arkelis had no chance to recover, they were immediately sent on new operations within the dead zone. It was during these operations that a weakness in the Titan Project was discovered. The success of the Titans on the field of battle was a double-edged sword. They called it Nano-sickness, but it was much more complicated than that. Those that fought for extended periods of time relied more and more on the Nano machines to repair muscle damage from battle strain, and protect their vital organs from complete failure. As they fought the Nano machines supplied them with vital fluids and nutrients, which is why they were able to fight without rest for weeks.

But the reliance on these Nano robotics caused damage of their own, once Operators were removed from the suits they would fall into deep healing comas due to the strain the body was under during operation. The comas were part healing and part exhaustion, the body shut itself down to protect the vital organs from burning out. They were never tested for extended battle periods and this weakness had escaped the notice of the scientists and researchers that created them. The Titans themselves never noticed this fatigue during combat as it only occurred after more than a week of suit operation, and none had fought for such a long time before full deployment.

To combat this weakness, scientists built specialized recuperation tanks to decrease the down time of Titans after missions. Operators were removed from their suits immediately upon operation completion and placed within one of the recovery unit tanks. Operators were drained off all Nano machines and pumped full of stimulants to help recover body mass and speed up the body’s natural healing process. Because of this recovery cycle Titans were used in more single strike operations on planets and void missions.

There was no visible command structure to the Beast, so there were no valuable targets to use our new weapon against or leaders to assassinate. Instead, the Titans were used on the frontline, commanding and strengthening the soldiers around them. Salvage and recovery missions were standard practice as Titans were the perfect tools to recover derelict ships drifting in the void. The recovery and salvage of these derelict ships were paramount in the eyes of P-SEP, vessels could be used to maintain other vessels, or they could be repaired and used again. Void recovery and salvage missions were the most dangerous, the Beast trapped within the confines of a dead ship were more deadly than those set free on the battlefields. They were also deployed to protect and defend installations throughout the star kingdom under attack from the enemy. Mass Titan deployment was left as a contingency plan should the situation ever call for it. They were helping to hold the Beast at bay, and did so for many years after their deployment. The Titans were spread out across the operational ships within the P-SEP fleet, achieving extraordinary records of missions successfully completed throughout the star kingdom. However, as the universe had taught our race many times...

Nothing ever lasts.

Chapter Zero.Two

Fall

"The constructs they wore granted them the strength of mythical beings, their courage unrivalled on the fields of battle. But underneath all of the technology and armour plating they were still only human, we were foolish to ever think of them as more than that. Our foolishness overestimated their capabilities, perhaps due to our hope growing in the wake of their victories. In the end, they fell like the rest of us."

As time passed after the Battle of Arkelis, more and more isolated incidents of infected humans appeared throughout the sectors. On planets, in colonies and on-board void stations the infected would appear out of nowhere, spreading their infectious hunger and hate for our kind. The Titans were quick to respond to all threats; their efficiency staggering, the speed at which they completed operations was beyond what we thought possible. Together they reclaimed colonies, defended refugees, held back attacks from our enemy and found precious lost commodities. A large portion of the close proximity dead zones to the frontlines were purged of all Beast infections. Our gamble on such an expensive weapon seemed to be justified. We expected losses, everyone did, but we never expected the losses to impact us in such a way. With every one that died, a hero passed from life into history, and we felt every one that didn’t return from an operation, we needed them to survive for the sake of all of us. The Beast somehow sensed this and retaliated in sectors all over the star kingdom, how they knew that we were beginning to show weakness we will never know, but it was not just mere coincidence.

Following the years of their first deployment only a few had perished during missions, and those ranks would then be reinforced by new recruits from New Horizon’s facilities. For a period all was well with the P-SEP military machine feeding the Titan Project with everything it needed. But out there in the darkness between the stars the Titans