Galactic Invasion
Never Underestimate Humans
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A small man from Earth offers to win the galaxy’s war in exchange for command of everything, and the galaxy laughs Standalone novel · 371 pages · Military science fiction Coming soon in paperback and ebook. |
| 371Pages | 67Chapters | 231,000Worlds lost before he knocks | 4Words in the Interdict |
People don’t come to you because you’re strong. They come to you because they were wrong about you in public.
from the novel
The lattice comes in over the rim of the galaxy where the stars are thin. It doesn’t hail and it doesn’t answer. It holds still above a world in lines so regular they look drawn with a rule, and then the lines come down. When it’s done the clouds still move and the tides still run, and nothing under them is alive.
The Galactic Confederation is four hundred million years old and it can’t stop this. The lattice doesn’t fight its fleets. It goes through them on its way to the worlds behind. By the time the Assembly meets in emergency session it has lost 231,000 worlds and 410,000 warships. Then a small man in a plain dark coat walks the nine kilometers of the Long Hall, says he’s from Earth, and offers to win the war in exchange for command of every ship, world and yard the galaxy has. The hall laughs. One delegate doesn’t, because the registry shows Earth’s corner of the Orion Spur flagged no routing, and the reason for the flag lapsed a million years ago.
| Element | Detail |
|---|---|
| Protagonist | The Destroyer, a small man in a plain dark coat who speaks for Earth |
| Opening | Teshra, a world of four hundred million, goes gray while a hauler captain haggles over fish paste on the station above it |
| The enemy | The lattice: ships in ruled lines that kill every living cell on a world and leave the matter whole, so nothing rots |
| The Confederation | Four hundred million years old, governed from the Long Hall at Aurem, with one law every member shares: make nothing that thinks |
| The offer | Earth will win the war in exchange for command of every ship, world and yard in the galaxy |
| Told by | A Drevani hauler captain, a six-limbed surveyor, an old Thel delegate, a Terran cruiser with opinions, and the transcripts and logs of the people in the way |
| Format | Standalone novel, 67 chapters, 371 pages, 79,915 words |
For readers who like space opera at fleet scale, ship minds that talk back the way they do in Iain M. Banks, and a war where somebody counts what each win cost.
How does Galactic Invasion open?
The Outer Edge and Teshra High
The Outer Edge
The rim of the galaxy, beyond the Orion Spur.
The lattice comes in over the rim of the galaxy where the stars are thin.
It does not hail. It does not answer. It holds still above a world, in lines so regular they look drawn with a rule, and then the lines come down.
At Teshra the cloud tops go gray over the northern sea. At the same hour, four hundred light-years spinward, the gray reaches a cold world with one city and no name the Confederation ever recorded. Ninety light-years past that it moves across a jungle that has never had anything in it that could look up.
The ships rise to meet it everywhere. Patrol cutters, a few warships, a mining tug with a cutting laser. Their lights go out, and the lines keep coming down.
The seas go still first, then the shores, then the cities on the night side. When it is done each world turns the way it turned before. The clouds still move and the tides still run, but nothing under the clouds moves, and nothing on the shores will rot.
Behind it the edge of the galaxy is dark in a long curve, world after world. Ahead of it the light goes on for a hundred thousand light-years.
Teshra High
“Forty crates,” the broker said. “At thirty a crate, and I’m being kind.”
Hesk breathed out through his gills, a long wet rasp. The broker’s ear-fronds folded flat against her skull. Pallin hated that sound, and Hesk had been making it for twenty minutes.
“Thirty is robbery,” he said. “At thirty I haul your fish paste across four systems and sell it at a loss to people who’ll spit at me.”
“It isn’t fish.”
“Whatever it is, it smells like fish.” He scratched at the wet collar around his throat. The station kept its air dry for the Pallin, and the collar had been giving up its water since he came aboard. Now it itched like a rash.
The broker’s office was a box bolted to the outside of the ring, with one window nobody had cleaned in his lifetime. Through the grime Teshra turned below them, blue and green and heavy with weather.
A storm the size of a continent was coiling over the southern ocean. He had flown through its little brother on the way in.
“Thirty-two,” the broker said.
“Twenty-six, and I take the paste off your hands before it starts to sing.”
She showed him her teeth, which on a Pallin meant nothing friendly. Behind her a speaker on the wall muttered traffic control, the same flat voice that had been reading out berth assignments since Hesk docked. He had stopped hearing it an hour ago.
He heard it now, because it changed.
“Unidentified vessels above the northern limb, you are inside the Teshra control sphere. Identify.” A pause. “Unidentified vessels, identify.”
The broker didn’t turn around. “Twenty-nine.”
“Shut up,” Hesk said.
He got up and went to the window. He rubbed a patch of grime away with the heel of his hand and put his face close to the glass.
Above the curve of the planet, where the north pole was turning out of shadow, there were lights. They weren’t running lights. Ships under pilots bunched and drifted and blinked while their crews argued about who had right of way, and these held still in a lattice so regular it looked drawn with a rule.
He counted forty before the count stopped meaning anything.
“Unidentified vessels,” the voice said again. Then a different voice cut across it, older and slower. “All traffic, this is Teshra High. Hold position. Hold position and stand by.”
The broker had come up beside him. Her ear-fronds were up now, both of them, stiff as blades.
“Navy,” she said. “Some Confederation exercise. They never tell us anything out here.”
“The Navy talks.” Hesk’s gills had clamped shut on their own, a bad-water reflex. He had to work to open them again. “Those aren’t talking.”
He left. Behind him the broker shouted about twenty-eight, and then about his deposit, and he let the door cut her off.
* * *
The ring corridor was full of people who hadn’t looked out a window. A Drevani woman was selling hot kelp from a cart, steam curling off the tray. Two Pallin dockhands argued over a game board balanced on a cargo sled while a child of some species Hesk didn’t know chased a toy drone along the ceiling rail.
He walked fast. Running made people look at you, and people who looked at you remembered what you did next.
He thumbed his throat mic. “Oss.”
“Here.” His mate’s voice came back thick and bubbled, like every Drevani on a wet ship.
“Spool the drive.”
“We’re on a clamp with half the hold empty, and you haven’t signed for…”
“I know what I haven’t signed for. Spool it. Full.”
“Spooling.” No argument after that. Oss had flown with him for twenty-two years and knew which of his voices meant he was scared.
He switched channels. “Pell. Where are you?”
The kid took his time answering. He was eighteen, Hesk’s sister’s boy, and he took his time with everything. “Chandler’s. Deck four spinward. They’re out of the good salve, so they’re mixing a batch…”
“Leave it. Come back to the ship.”
“It’s two minutes, Uncle. They’ve nearly got it in the jar.”
“Now.”
The channel clicked. Hesk didn’t know if that was a yes.
The ring lights flickered once, the whole length of the corridor, and came back. The kelp seller looked up at the ceiling. Nobody else did.
The chapter keeps going.
Who should read Galactic Invasion?
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Read it if
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Not for you if
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What do people ask about Galactic Invasion?
Also in Far From Earth
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Seventeen million years, one family, and a galaxy that means well |
Forty thousand years of building, and what got voted on afterward |
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A survival epic told by something that’s never seen a solid surface |
A war that’s run for eons, fought by two sides that have both worked out they can’t win |
Never underestimate humans
The galaxy laughed at one small man in a plain coat. He told it to come find him when it was ready.
READ A CHAPTERTABLE OF CONTENTS
Coming soon in paperback and ebook.
The Long Hall
Galactic Invasion
Orsevane had sat through four hundred and twelve emergency sessions of the Assembly, and this one smelled like all the others. The air carried warm stone, the sweet resin the Ithrane burned to keep their skins supple, and the fear sweat of every delegation whose species sweated.
The Long Hall ran nine kilometers from the petitioners’ doors to the Presiding Dais. It had been built that long on purpose, so that anyone who came to ask the Confederation for something walked two hours past the gathered powers of the galaxy before they were allowed to open their mouth. Orsevane had always thought it petty.
Above the transparent vault the Lantern burned, a hard white eye, and the vault filtered its light down to a cold blue cast over the stone, the delegates, and the long gray hands Orsevane kept folded on the rail of the Thel tier.
Hessarine had gone silent eight days ago.
Orsevane had seeded that colony personally, nine thousand years back, on a pleasant wet world in the outer arm with a ring of moons. Two of Orsevane’s own budlings had chosen to live there. The relay logs from Hessarine ended in the middle of a weather report.
“Outer disk losses since the last session,” the Presiding Voice said.
The Voice belonged to the Sarrakh, the oldest delegation in the hall, and it came out of a bronze interpreter drone that hovered over the dais because no Sarrakh had physically attended an Assembly in two hundred thousand years. The Sarrakh delegate lived in a pressure tank somewhere far below the hall. Orsevane had never seen it and knew of no one who had.
“Forty thousand six hundred worlds sterilized,” the Voice went on. “Cumulative, two hundred and thirty-one thousand. Fleet losses, cumulative, four hundred and ten thousand warships of the line. Survey Office classifications are attached.”
Nobody in the hall said anything. Four tiers down, the Vashk delegate shifted his bulk on his bench, and the bench complained.
“Sterilized,” Kurro of the Vashk said at last. His voice filled the hall without any help from the amplifiers. “What kind of word is that? We used to say dead.”
“A surveyor coined it,” the Voice said. “The Office adopted it.”
“The Office can adopt my fist.” Kurro stood, which took a while. “I move that every core fleet still deployed in the outer disk be recalled to defend the core worlds. The outer arms are lost. We should stop pouring ships into them.”
The Ithrane delegate rose on the far side of the hall, all fronds and indignation. Orsevane stopped listening.
The outer arms are lost. Kurro said it as he said everything, loud and in front of everyone, and half the tiers were already nodding.
Hessarine was in the outer arm. So were four hundred billion Thel, and most of them had never seen the core and never would.
Orsevane looked down at the agenda slate and scrolled past Kurro’s motion, past the Ithrane response, past a dispute between three shipbuilding powers over fuel tariffs that had somehow survived into a war session. Near the bottom was an item Orsevane had skimmed without reading.
Petition. Unregistered polity, Orion Spur. Requests the floor. Granted under standing protocol.
Standing protocol said that any polity in the galaxy could walk the Long Hall and be heard. It was one of the oldest rules the Confederation had. In practice it meant that once or twice a session some minor species with a grievance or a new religion made the walk, said its piece, and went home.
Orsevane pulled up the navigation registry on the slate and entered the polity’s coordinates out of habit.
The registry showed a scrap of the Orion Spur, twenty-six thousand light-years out from the core. There were perhaps a few hundred stars in the region, ringed in amber, and across the amber was a flag Orsevane had never seen used.
No routing. Reason: archived.
Orsevane touched the flag. Archive retention lapsed. Original entry age: 1.02 million years.
That was all. Somewhere in the Confederation’s past, a million years ago, someone had decided that no ship should route through that region, and then the reason had been allowed to expire like an unpaid berth fee. Orsevane sat looking at the amber ring for longer than the debate on the floor deserved.
The petitioners’ doors opened at the far end of the hall.
A human came through them. Orsevane had to check the registry again to put a name to the species, and the registry had little to say about it.
He was small. That was the first thing anyone in the hall would have seen, if anyone had been looking, and almost nobody was. He wore a plain dark coat with no insignia, and he carried nothing at all: no case, no slate, no escort, no gift.
He started walking.
Kurro’s motion went to debate and the debate went the way debates went. The Ithrane spoke for an hour about obligation. Two of the shipbuilding powers used the time to whisper to each other about tariffs.
Orsevane watched the human walk.
He walked at the same pace from the first step, unhurried and even, like a person walking through a market with no intention of buying. He looked at the tiers as he passed them, the Ithrane with their burning resin and the Vashk on their groaning benches and the clouded tanks of the Mnemar, each for about as long as it took to count.
The Thel tier was halfway down the hall. When he passed below it, he looked up and found Orsevane looking back at him.
He nodded. It was a small, friendly nod, the kind one stranger gives another on a street, and then he walked on.
Two hours under the blue light should have told on him. Orsevane had watched petitioners from a hundred species make that walk, and every one of them arrived at the dais winded or sweating or swaying on its feet, and some of them had to be helped up the steps. The human climbed the steps to the petitioner’s platform as if he had walked across a room.
The Presiding Voice let Kurro’s motion hang without a vote. “The Assembly recognizes the petitioner from the Orion Spur. State your name and polity.”
“I’m the Destroyer,” the human said.
A murmur went along the tiers. It was the sound of several thousand delegates who had not been paying attention starting to.
“Your polity,” the Voice said.
“Earth.”
The drone paused while the Sarrakh, wherever it was, consulted the registry. “The registry shows Earth as unregistered. Sol system. Orion Spur.”
“That’s us.”
“State your petition.”
“It’s not a petition.” He put his hands in the pockets of his coat. “I’m here to tell you that me and my people can defeat this invasion.”
The hall was quiet for perhaps two seconds.
Then Kurro laughed. It started low in the big chest and came up through the Vashk tier like water through a broken floor, and the Vashk around him took it up because Kurro was laughing.
The laughter went sideways from there, tier to tier. It ran through the shipbuilders and the Ithrane, and the Mnemar flashed amusement in slow colors through their tanks.
Orsevane did not laugh. The amber ring was still on the slate in Orsevane’s lap.
“Little man,” Kurro called down, still wheezing. “How many ships does Earth have?”
“Enough.”
“We’ve had over a million warships in the outer disk.” Kurro spread his arms to take in the whole Assembly. “We’ve lost four hundred thousand of them. Four hundred thousand. Do you know what that number means?”
“I know what it means,” the Destroyer said. “I’ve been watching you lose them.”
The laughter thinned. It didn’t stop, but it thinned.
“And what does Earth want,” the Presiding Voice said, “in return for this service?”
“Command.” He said it in the same tone he’d used for his name. “Every ship you have. Every world, every yard, every factory, and everything that feeds them. All of it, under me.”
The hall came apart.
Orsevane had seen the Assembly angry. This was the Assembly insulted, which was worse and much louder. Delegates were on their feet in every tier, and the interpreter drones fought to keep up, and the Ithrane delegate was shouting about a minor polity’s place that the drone over the Ithrane tier rendered, with apparent embarrassment, as Who does he think he is?
The Destroyer waited. He didn’t raise his voice or move his hands from his pockets. He stood on the platform and let the noise go over him like water over a rock.
The Presiding Voice waited too, and when the hall had shouted itself out the drone spoke in the soft formal register the Sarrakh used for disposing of things. “The Assembly thanks the petitioner from Earth for his offer. It will be entered into the record.”
“Sure,” the Destroyer said.
He turned to go. He got as far as the top step before he turned back, and Orsevane saw him smile for the first time. It was a pleasant smile, entirely without heat.
“When you’re ready,” he said to the hall, “come to us. Do what we ask, and we’ll destroy this enemy for you.” He looked along the tiers, and his eyes stopped on the Thel tier for a moment and moved on. “Until then, have a great time taking losses.”
He went down the steps. He didn’t walk back up the Long Hall. He went through a service door beside the dais that petitioners were not supposed to know about, and the door closed behind him, and he was gone.
The tiers buzzed with it. Kurro was telling the Vashk around him what he would have said if the little man had stayed. Somebody in the shipbuilders’ tier was laughing again, a high thin laugh that wouldn’t quite stop.
Orsevane looked down at the slate. The amber ring sat where it had sat for a million years, around a scrap of the galaxy nobody routed through, for a reason nobody had kept.
Orsevane opened a request to the Thel deep archive for any record, of any kind, touching the Sol system. The archive answered in under a second that the request had been logged.
“The Assembly returns to the motion of the Vashk delegation,” the Presiding Voice said. “Following the vote, the matter of fuel tariffs.”
Table of contents
Galactic Invasion
- The Outer Edge
- Teshra High
- Survey
- In Tray
- Hessarine
- Saro
- The Durnholt Line
- The Far Side
- The Buoys
- The Approach
- The Long Hall
- After Session
- Lane Nine
- Traffic
- Anvil Nine
- Peace Day
- Shore Leave
- Standing Orders
- The Green Lamp
- Drift Station Ninety
- The Book
- The Front Face
- Long Odds
- Wakinyan
- Sixty-One
- Salvage
- Escort Duty
- Cause Undetermined
- Lorcan
- Make Nothing That Thinks
- Patch
- Mess Deck
- Tharn
- Dominion Channel
- Ivesh
- The Long Lever
- The Lance on the Wall
- Corrath Prime
- The Galleries
- Deliverance Day
- Listening Post Kessel Deep
- Varn Street
- The Small Cloud
- Halfway
- The Night After
- Brightwater
- Holding Action
- Falling Stars
- Night Shift
- Relay
- The Corridor
- Two Words
- Asse
- Wolf
- The Central Parsec
- The Northern Wedge
- The Breach
- Fuse
- Classification
- The Arena
- Nineteen Thousand Yards
- Full Rate
- The Ones Who Stay
- The Guest Quarters
- North
- Bode’s
- Plus One