Gamma Nine (Book One)

By Christi Smit

Copyright © 2016 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
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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.

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
Star Explorer
Club

For
G
The brightest light in the ever-growing darkness.
Even the stars envy you when you shine.
You made all of this possible.

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.

“
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.