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  CHILDREN OF ZERO

  Planet Zero Trilogy BOOK I

  Andrew Calhoun

  CHILDREN OF ZERO

  Copyright © 2018 by Andrew Calhoun

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner

  whatsoever without the express written permission

  of the author except for the use of

  brief quotations in a book review,

  or as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

  Cover by germancreative

  Map of the Sollian Sea by renflowergrapx

  You are constrained by three sets of laws:

  those of your nation, those of the goddesses

  and those of righteousness. Above all

  adhere to the latter.

  Dania Gachi, Lavic philosopher

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  1 COLLISION COURSE

  1.1 KETTLE

  1.2 SAELIKO

  1.3 KETTLE

  1.4 SAELIKO

  1.5 KETTLE

  1.6 SAELIKO

  1.7 SAELIKO

  1.8 KETTLE

  1.9 SAELIKO

  2 COLLISION

  2.1 SAELIKO

  2.2 JANX

  2.3 KETTLE

  2.4 SAELIKO

  2.5 KETTLE

  2.6 SAELIKO

  2.7 JANX

  2.8 KETTLE

  2.9 SAELIKO

  2.10 KETTLE

  3 DAMAGE

  3.1 JANX

  3.2 KETTLE

  3.3 KETTLE

  3.4 SAELIKO

  3.5 JANX

  3.6 SAELIKO

  3.7 JANX

  3.8 KETTLE

  4 COURSE CORRECTION

  4.1 SAELIKO

  4.2 KETTLE

  4.3 SAELIKO

  4.4 KETTLE

  4.5 SAELIKO

  4.6 KETTLE

  4.7 SAELIKO

  4.8 KETTLE

  EPILOGUE

  PROLOGUE

  Twenty-five years ago

  The Kye-shiv banked sharply, re-adjusting its course to navigate a path between two rocky islands. The pale grey surface of the aircraft’s angled belly was only a few meters above the crests of the waves, and as the Kye-shiv rolled to make the turn, its wing-tip nearly cut the water.

  In the cockpit, Radovan Mozik sat at the controls with one eye on the HUD feeding him course and speed data and the other on the proximity alert warning light, which, thankfully, was still unlit.

  Beside him was an empty co-pilot seat. Behind him in the hold were twelve more empty seats, six on each side, backs to the hull. He was the only soul onboard, which meant he would also be the only one to blame for what was about to happen.

  The Kye-shiv was a multi-engine platform designed for both stealth and speed – just not at the same time. It wasn’t multi-engine in the sense that there was more than one engine; it had two completely different engine types. Integrated into either side of the Kye-shiv’s outer ribcage, a matching pair of massive jets were situated with their inlets near the front of the craft and TVC-nozzled exhaust exits at the rear beneath twin tailfins. Both were shut off.

  The third engine, the one intended to make the craft a silent shadow in the night, was buried deep within the Kye-shiv’s fuselage, its uppermost components pushing up into the center of the hold between the seats. Had there been passengers sitting across from one another, they would have only been able to see each other’s heads above the contours of the protective cowling. The stealth engine was where it was to hide its thermal signature as well as to keep noise levels to a minimum.

  Radovan felt the subtle thrumming of this engine through the control stick and the pedals beneath his feet. Its soft tone was comforting. He knew that even if there were people on the islands nearby – a possibility he doubted given their remote location – they probably wouldn’t hear a thing. The aircraft’s stealth came at a price, however. It plodded along at a cumbersome 120 meters per second, fast enough to pass by the islands under half a minute, but still only twenty percent of the Kye-shiv’s top speed when the two external engines were engaged.

  He wasn’t worried about being detected by the inhabitants of this planet out of fear for his own safety. They didn’t have radar or anti-aircraft defenses. There was nothing harmful they could do if they did happen to see the Kye-shiv tearing its way through the sky. The good people of VGCP Eleven, technologically speaking, were somewhere between four and four and a half centuries behind Radovan’s own planet, VGCP One. They hadn’t invented the light bulb yet.

  There were, however, two good reasons why Radovan was running in stealth mode, and one of those reasons was presently much more pressing than the other. First, it was standard protocol to remain unseen. It wouldn’t do to have the locals gawking at a piece of sophisticated military-grade hardware like the Kye-shiv; this kind of abrupt introduction to future technologies led to all sorts of problems, practically and ethically.

  Second, and far more acute, Radovan was not the only One-er flying over VGCP Eleven today. There were at least a half dozen single-seater fighter jets patrolling the airspace over the mainland, probably more. Unlike the indigenous population, these interlopers actually did have the firepower to blow him out of the sky.

  He wasn’t overly concerned. He knew the limitations of their aircraft – forty-year-old Movox M9s bought from a now defunct regime – and he could guess the tactics they would be using. The craft would take on a defensive cruising pattern in a wide circle around their incursion point. They didn’t know Radovan was coming; the jets had only been activated as a precautionary measure.

  There was the coast. Hills formed in the distance, slowly violating the straight line of the horizon. This region wasn’t overly mountainous, but it was rugged with undulating topography covered by deciduous forests and boulder-strewn clearings. Lavanthene was a big, populous nation that spanned a third of a continent, yet the coastline here was sparsely inhabited by a handful of hardy mountain clans. They were a world away from the sophistication found in the larger cities to the south and west.

  Radovan pointed the nose of the Kye-shiv toward the mouth of a river disgorging its flow into the ocean. His thoughts drifted to the Lavics and other peoples that called VGCP Eleven home. Millions upon millions of men, women and children living their lives, every husband and wife, every master and apprentice, every criminal and victim, every wealthy trader and moneyless pauper, all living out their days oblivious to the fact that their world was connected to others. If knowledge was power, this absence of knowledge, this ignorance of a single, all-important fact, this inability to comprehend that there were civilizations far more advanced than their own, left them defenseless. They would pay for that lack of knowledge today, and Radovan was the unhappy deliverer of the penalty.

  He felt a tightness in his chest. He wanted to sob. He wanted to vomit. These were his people. He had lived among the Lavics for the past six years, passing himself off as one of their own, working his way into their political circles, gaining their confidence and achieving no small measure of success. He had made countless friends, and a few enemies. He had even met the Empress of Lavanthene once. Over the past three years, he had also been entrusted to join in Lavanthene’s diplomatic negotiations with her neighbors. He had reveled in the opportunity to learn their cultures and peculiar modes of thought. He was a sponge, and the vibrant, enigmatic citizens of this world were the water.

  His experiences had given him a deep appreciation for his newfound home. That was a hopeless understatement. Radovan was madly in love with this world. He loved everything about it. It held an unending catalogue of mysteries for him to explore and unlock. Back on VGCP One, he had been no one; here h
e was a man of prominence with the means to influence the development of nations. Here he mattered.

  Among the seventeen inhabited connected worlds, VGCP Eleven was one of only two that were almost entirely matriarchal. There were five great powers, Lavanthene being one of them, each ruled over by an empress. Among families, women were the heads of households. Children took their mother’s family name. The realms of politics and finance were almost entirely dominated by women. Military hierarchies were female, although the brawnier males were permitted to serve as soldiers in the army and sailors in the navy. Men were all but barred from the sciences, and they were barred from priesthood, too. Priestesshood, rather.

  The five great powers were polytheistic, believing the world to be watched over by five goddesses. To deny the existence of the Five was heretical and, in most places, punishable by death, though a few of the more remote reaches of the globe contained relatively more primitive groups that followed animalistic religions and spiritual belief systems. In large cities, cathedrals were second in importance only to government palaces. Even empresses sought the advice of priestesses. At the outposts of empires, however, where isolated governesses and military leaders rallied resources to battle back the wilderness and the savages who lived within, the importance of churches often fell a few notches with ale houses and brothels filling the void.

  Radovan’s home planet would be unfathomable for the Lavics. Nanotechnologies, bionic implants, terra-forming, artificial intelligence, unprecedented connectivity. All of it defied description to a people that had yet to master electricity. Likewise, they had no concept of massive environmental damage, grey rain, yellow air, gene-hacked crop failures, terrifying over-population and food shortages.

  Nor could they imagine the destructive power of the bomb that Radovan carried in his Kye-shiv.

  The people here were bumbling merrily through the Age of Sail, exploring their world via its rivers and great oceans. They built large wooden ships with three, four, sometimes even five masts. They traded with one another and sometimes went to war with one another, but there was still ample room for imperial expansion. There were still plenty of unexplored coasts and islands to seek out and plant flags upon.

  They had discovered bacteria, but had no idea how to pasteurize milk. They knew their planet revolved around a sun, but had not invented telescopes powerful enough to know that there were twelve planets in their solar system, not six. They had dappled in calculus and knew a great deal about geometry and the keeping of time, but they still couldn’t figure out how to determine longitude.

  That had been his way in, his gateway to acceptance as a man living in a woman’s world. Initially, he had posed as an inventor rather than a scientist, but as his fame grew, he began submitting papers to influential institutions. He was hailed as a freak by the established scientific community, a young genius – and a male genius at that – sent by the goddesses to aid holy Lavanthene in its quest for global domination. Radovan had made sure not to give them too much; there were limits to the knowledge he could justifiably transfer to a new world. They had to be allowed to develop for the most part at their own pace. His technological contributions had to be small. Last year, he had invented VGCP Eleven’s first mercury thermometer, a nice step forward, but hardly paradigm shattering.

  The proximity alert warning light suddenly flashed, illuminating the cockpit on and off in amber tones. Radovan emitted a mental command to the SageSeven implant in his brain, which was currently importing data from the Kye-shiv’s main computer. A holographic three-dimensional image appeared in the space between Radovan’s chair and the thick, blast-resistant glass that made up the aircraft’s windshield. The contours of the topographic map showed rivers and valleys in considerable detail, so much so that he could make out individual trees and, here and there, small building clusters that indicated villages. At the edge of the map nearest Radovan, he could see a re-produced image of the Kye-shiv as if he were looking down at it from behind at a 45-degree angle. Its brown, jagged lines and bulky girth made the ship look like a flying chicken on steroids. On the side of the map closest the windshield, the red outline of a Movox M9 flew a course perpendicular to the Kye-shiv’s.

  The M9 would have its own radar equipment, but it was older and its range was stunted. Radovan watched for nearly a minute to be certain that he remained undetected and then rattled off a stream of commands through his SageSeven. The holographic map shifted to a new location to Radovan’s right where he could keep an eye on it while channeling the bulk of his faculties on navigating the Kye-shiv. He kept the craft low, generally following along riverbeds but now and again coming up to cross ranges of rocky hills. His path took him in an arc around the backside of the M9 until eventually he crossed over the fighter jet’s roll axis and moved into the territory that it was supposed to be protecting.

  The ground below flattened out into marshland, only to give way a few minutes later to actual mountains. Radovan guided the Kye-shiv across and through a range he knew to be called the High Knuckles, taking about twenty minutes to make his way past the snow-capped peaks. On the plains and plateaus that appeared next, he began to see larger communities, particularly where rivers intersected one another or along the shores of lakes. He made a half-hearted attempt to avoid flying over buildings, but he knew it was a moot point now. The M9 pilots wouldn’t bother to remain concealed, and by the time this day was over, there would be plenty of witnesses to claim that they had seen something not of this world.

  Ten minutes passed. Then he saw a group of outlines form on the edge of his holographic map. Six shuttles sat stationary on the ground collectively forming a circle. About five kilometers to the east a small town was nestled with its back to a forested bluff. Radovan imagined the townspeople riding their horses out across the fields to investigate the strange, shiny objects that had descended from the sky. They would have no way of knowing that they were riding to their deaths.

  Radovan mentally recalled the map to its original position in front of his chest. He magnified and focused in on the shuttles, the SageSeven taking its cues from Radovan’s pupils and optic nerves. The silhouettes of a few dozen people blinked into existence milling around and in between the shuttles. At this distance the Kye-shiv’s sensors were unable to provide details other than outlines, so there was no way of knowing if they were male or female, adults or children. But he knew who these people were.

  Enders. They constituted one of the more powerful religious entities on Radovan’s home world, which in and of itself he didn’t have a problem with. Radovan was religious himself. He strongly believed in a God that took a personal interest in the affairs of the good peoples of each planet. With the Enders though, it was the particular variant of faith that served as the source of trouble. It had also warranted their nickname. They were an apocalyptic religion. Not just apocalyptic; lots of religions spoke of a time when all things would end. For the Enders though, the apocalypse was the goal, the prize they were seeking. They longed for the end of days, which still wouldn’t have been a problem had they kept to their churches and moped around hoping for volcanoes to erupt and meteors to rain down to announce the last hours and minutes of humanity. To each their own.

  The problem was that Enders actively conspired to bring about the apocalypse. Their life’s work was to bring about mass death. That’s why they had come to VGCP Eleven, and that’s why Radovan was now on his way to kill them all.

  And therein rested the second problem: the weapons brought to bear by both sides. The Enders were infected with the Zero Virus. Evil incarnate. The Zero Virus was nothing short of a planet killer, particularly on a planet like this one where the population was unknowing, unprepared and incapable of response. There were no cures, no antidotes and no real defenses against this malicious invader that waged war at the cellular level. Great scientific minds had spent careers trying to crack it, and they had only been able to slow it down.

  Modern medicine offered no salvation. The only o
ption was military. The Zero Virus was tenacious and resilient, but it couldn’t survive a nuclear blast. Temperatures over ten megakelvins tended to be fatal to all forms of life, viral or otherwise.

  Speed was critical. The Enders had only just landed. For the moment, the virus remained localized, but the zealous followers of the faith were nothing if not efficient. They would most likely perform a brief ritual or two and then look to spread the infection, a relatively easy task. Transmission happened via airborne pathogens, so all it would take was a short meeting with the locals to start the chain of destruction. Infected individuals would pass it on to friends and family before they ever had a clue that something was wrong. It would jump from village to village, city to city, empire to empire.

  Unless Radovan bathed the virus in nuclear fire before it could spread.

  Which was exactly what he was planning to do.

  The Kye-shiv’s sensors detected no ground-based threats. The Enders hadn’t thought to bring with them anti-aircraft defenses; they hadn’t expected anyone to react quickly enough to stop their plan from succeeding.

  This was it. “Here we go,” he muttered in a voice that cracked with emotion. He fed the commands into the Kye-shiv’s computer, which translated the digital signals into mechanical actions. The craft accelerated and picked up altitude. Being close to the ground when a nuke went off wasn’t a good idea.

  He briefly thought of an anecdote from another planet he had been to once. That planet, too, had learned to split the atom. The scientist who had overseen the first test explosion had been said to have been reminded upon seeing the explosion of a piece of scripture that read Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. Radovan could understand the sentiment, knowing full well the savage horror bottled up in the twenty kiloton nuke within the Kye-shiv’s armaments. The blast would kill absolutely anything within two kilometers, and he didn’t fancy the chances of anyone within four or five kilometers of the hypocenter. Radiation would then take its ugly toll. There were innocent children in the nearby village who hadn’t lived long enough to fall in love or have their first sip of summer wine. They never would, and his gut twisted painfully at the thought.