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Chapters (27)
  1. Prologue
  2. Chapter 1
  3. Chapter 2
  4. Chapter 3
  5. Chapter 4
  6. Chapter 5
  7. Chapter 6
  8. Chapter 7
  9. Chapter 8
  10. Chapter 9
  11. Chapter 10
  12. Chapter 11
  13. Chapter 12
  14. Chapter 13
  15. Chapter 14
  16. Chapter 15
  17. Chapter 16
  18. Chapter 17
  19. Chapter 18
  20. Chapter 19
  21. Chapter 20
  22. Chapter 21
  23. Chapter 22
  24. Chapter 23
  25. Chapter 24
  26. Thank you for reading New Frontiers,
  27. From the author:

“You taught it to talk!” Pike nearly shouted.

“I didn’t teach it anything,” Jackson shook his head. “It … woke up … for lack of a better term. It’s self-aware. An unforeseen accident that popped up in a hastily designed system.”

“There aren’t any Phage bits still in it are there?” Pike whispered.

“No,” Jackson said firmly. “There was some talk of preserving the organ we had in there, but in the end the piece was incinerated and this machine put into storage. Then it started asking for help.”

“I think you’d better start at the beginning,” Pike said, following Jackson up to the cube that was surrounded by equipment and technicians.

Chapter 14

The Phage was essentially a biological weapon, an entity that had been designed by a species called the Vruahn to act as their guardians, allowing them to give up martial pursuits and focus their energies on purely scientific endeavors. But their creation became sentient and, eventually, insane. It repurposed its original mission to one that saw it try to eradicate all competing life from the galaxy.

While humans had discovered the existence of a “core mind” and had launched an expedition to find it they had also struck an uneasy alliance with the Vruahn to try and corral their creation. One of the items exchanged in the partnership was a stasis chamber, the Cube sitting in the Pontiac’s cargo hold, that could fool a formation of Phage combat units that a human ship was actually one of them when it was loaded with a transponder from one of the Phage heavy units. The transponder was actually a biological organ and needed to be carefully protected and hooked to a support system to keep working.

Before the plan to use the Cube could be fully executed, however, Jackson Wolfe, commanding the Ares at the time, had located the core mind and destroyed it with a fast-acting neurotoxin. But Jackson had moved the Cube to the Icarus prior to hunting down the core mind and, before the Ares could complete her mission, Celesta Wright had used the device to fly right within one of the largest Phage formations ever recorded during the entire war and singlehandedly destroy over four hundred combat units.

“So I get that the Cube’s sentience is likely an aberration created by the Vruahn programming, but as anything other than a scientific oddity, what good is it?” Pike asked before turning to the Cube. “No offense.”

“None taken, Agent Pike,” the Cube said. “To answer your question, my processing power is greater than all of your planetbound supercomputers … combined.”