He watched as ships started appearing beside his own, first dozens, then hundreds. It would take time for the full fleet to assemble from all the corners of their dominion. An invasion takes a long time to plan, and more than just the war vessels. They needed support, fuel, and extra ammunition, all of that was required. But once all were here, their invasion fleet will be the largest his people had ever assembled. First, they will cleanse the remnants of the Consortium, then they will move after the other ungifted.
Adjunct Michael Jorgenson sat at his station on board the Jinn. The Jinn was a patrol ship, capable of trans-travel, fast and lightly armed. It was one of fifteen patrol ships that patrolled the Empire’s border with the Sowir Dominion. The border itself stretched across multiple systems, and while it was extremely hard for anyone to actually keep a border in space, the systems that were patrolled were closest to the Sowir controlled systems, and were most suitable as staging points for an attack. The Jinn was traveling through the mostly empty system, aside from a small refueling station, dozen or so sensor drones, and two planets orbiting a red dwarf, there was nothing else of interest in the system.
The system was four light years away from the Nuva system, the capital system of the Nuvan Clan. And presumably the first place the Sowir would attack. The non-aggression agreement between the Empire and the Sowir had been in effect for thirty years. And in that time no Sowir Dominion ship was seen past the agreed border line. Empire’s exploration ships had likewise stayed out of the Dominion space. Focusing their explorations on the star systems that were rimward from Sanctuary, in other words towards the outer rim of the galaxy. While Sowir territory spread coreward from Sanctuary, towards the galactic core, when using Sanctuary as a reference point, which all the Empire’s maps did.
Jinn had a small crew of fifteen. The patrol class ships were small, they have been made for the long term patrols with most of the cargo space inside them delegated to fuel and supplies. Which allowed them to operate for long periods of time without the need to return to base. They were around a hundred meters long, and shaped like a one-sided knife blade.
Michael looked over the sensory data that the Jinn received from many sensor drones in system and from the surrounding systems through their FTL comms, seeing nothing out of the ordinary. He was just about to get up and grab something to eat when an alert flashed on his screen.
Michael leaned closer and saw that something had triggered the emergency protocols in one of their sensor drones, in a system about fourteen light years away. Swiping with his hand Michael brought up the scans. After a mere few seconds of looking at them he swallowed hard and commed his Ship Master.
“Ship Master, you need to get up to the command, there is something you need to see right away.”
Chapter One
May; Year 30 of the Empire – Sanctuary
Elias Bakas sat and watched the meeting between the Clan Leaders of the Empire and the Emperor, although to them he was just a faceless figure. One of many such figures throughout the Empire. Elias was now the leader of the Hand of the Empire, an organization that was tasked with protecting the people of the Empire and enforcing the letter and the spirit of the Empire’s laws. In order to do that, no agent of the Hand ever showed his or her face.
Their uniform was a black armor suit and a dark blue coat over it, the coat had the symbol of the Hand of the Empire on the back, a metal hand with an eye on its back. Their helmets completely covered their heads, and the face plate was smooth save for a thin horizontal silver line across the eyes. The only place where an agent could walk freely and interact with other people was on Sanctuary, in their sanctum. And that was the sacrifice that every member of the Hand made, so that they could be as bias as possible, and to eliminate things like corruption and bribery. No person in the Empire could ever be sure that they had talked to the same agent more than once, their voices were modulated and all sounded the same. And Elias made sure that all agent’s rotate around the Empire.
But their isolation also posed a problem, people could come to distrust them, even hate them as they went around the Empire punishing those that betrayed the Codes of the Empire. In order to counter that, Elias made sure that the Hand of the Empire wasn’t seen just as enforcers of the law, but also as someone the people can rely on and trust. The Hand helped new colonies in their infant stages by providing help to the workforce, even though back then there weren’t that many of them, it was their presence that mattered. The Hand helped with relief efforts on colonies struck by disasters, and they made themselves available to the people, anyone could ask for the Hand to investigate if they felt their rights were being harmed.
The Hand of the Empire had the trust of the people, and that was extremely important, considering the scope of their power, influence, and purpose. The Hand of the Empire had great power in the Empire, they were the Emperor’s failsafe. The Emperor wielded absolute power over all clans. The Clan Leaders had many liberties, they set the policies of their worlds and they could even make new laws, as long as those laws didn’t violate the codes. But the Emperor had the last word on everything, the fact that he rarely exercised that right didn’t take away from the fact that he could very easily become a tyrannical dictator. And Emperor Klein was fully aware of that. The Hand of the Empire was created as a check on his power, and on power of every Clan Leader.
When the Empire was founded humanity was in a very fragile place. With most of the human population dead on Earth, strict reproduction laws were enforced, there were only about ten million humans left at a time. The new laws made sure that every able woman donated her eggs twice a year, just like men were required to donate their seed. The eggs were then artificially inseminated, and placed into artificial wombs. The laws worked, and in thirty years the human population had reached two hundred million. The Nel population of Nuva that had joined the Empire was exempt from the law during the first five years after the Empire’s founding, until the geneticists managed to create the immortality treatment for them.
The Nel population in the Empire now almost equaled that of the human population. The Empire’s population was now close to four hundred million, not even close to the numbers humanity or Nel once had, but still much more than what they had thirty years ago. Although most of that number were children, the last decade saw a significant increase in every area of the Empire, as the children born in the first ten years of the Empire grew up and finished their education. The Empire had worked hard to keep up with the growth, at times barely managing to follow.
Now the Empire had sixteen colonized systems, including Sanctuary, and it consisted out of six clans. The six Clan Leaders met on Sanctuary in person twice a year, at the end and the middle of the year, to discuss various matters concerning the Empire with the Emperor. The last thirty years had been peaceful, which fuelled their expansion efforts greatly.
An exchange at the table made Elias focus on what was being said.
“Terran Clan needs more resources! The tidal season on the New Earth is coming soon, and we need to adequately prepare!” Clan Leader of the Terran Clan Barbara Brown demanded.
“The yearly allotted resource quota for your Clan was more than enough to cover your projected needs.” Clan Leader Annbjörg Johansson of Clan Gudólfr said as she turned and looked pointedly at Clan Leader Brown.