Dark Matters
Kirov Series #78 meets an alien species composed of Dark Matter!
The Universe is far stranger than we might ever imagine, but I’ve been giving it a shot with alien encounters in my Earthforce segment of the Kirov Series. The mission in volume #70 Goliath, served as a prelude to what followed, a series of eight books where Director Kamenski warns of a great invasion coming by an alien race he calls the Kroth. Kirov series readers have already encountered these beings on one or another mission, and they called them the “Skeletals,” and then the “Ice Men,” because they were transparent, and they could see their skeletal structure and look right through them. But these were things of normal Baryonic matter.
After the successful diversion of the Asteroid Goliath, I got a hankering for a story set in interstellar space, and there were the Kroth, already embedded in the story. They made the perfect aliens for a threatened invasion story, and for that, Earth needed a navy in space to put up a defense. The rationale was ‘better to fight them off the moon or Mars than in London or New York.’ So when Karpov learns of this invasion, coming in the year 2135, Kamenski says they must go back 100 years and warn Earth, capture and show them the threat, and urge all nations to unite as one against the Kroth. To face this invasion, Earth begins designing and building a fleet of space faring warships, finishing at least one each year in the century before the date of the invasion revealed by Kamenski.
The Earthforce Saga is born
That building program creates “Earthforce,” Earth’s first military star fleet in Space, and Admiral Karpov is selected to command it. He quickly organizes the new fleet and plans missions to Mars, where he wants to set up military outposts. He soon finds the Kroth are already there, outliers that arrived five years before the main invasion. A series of books follow that take readers on a grand tour of the Red Planet, from Valles Marineris, to Olympus Mons, to Noctis Labyrinthus and Utopia Planitia. Karpov and Earthforce Marines root out hidden cadres of Kroth sleepers and repel major attacks aimed at destroying their own bases. Then Fedorov learns that the Kroth have been buried in the polar and subsurface ice on Mars for eons. Fedorov and Troyak make astounding discoveries of an ancient race that lived on Mars long before Humanity ever rose on Earth, including the remains of one of their underground cities in Noctis Labyrinthus, the “Labyrinth of Night.” The Kroth visited Mars in ages past, and their target was the ancient race Fedorov comes to call “The Sons of Ares,” the Martians.
Then, when the Main Kroth fleet begins to arrive, Karpov leads Earth’s new Carriers, Battleships and Cruisers in a series of battles to defend Mars, secure the Inner Asteroid Belt, expand Earthforce influence to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and drive the Kroth back into the Kuiper Belt and Oort cloud. At one point, the aliens make several attempts to occupy the moons of Mars and then make daring leaps from those satellites right down through the Martian Atmosphere to the surface. They come to awaken a sleeping Kroth army on Mars that had been left there during their first visit to this solar system, millions of years ago. But Karpov is Karpov, and he leads the Earthforce fleet to a series of major victories in space against the main Kroth fleet, and they subsequently withdraw to Alpha Centauri, where they remain for about 30 years before returning to their home world in the Tau Ceti system. Will they be back?
The Outreach Program:
Not long after the Kroth war ends, a proposed Outreach Program is funded to visit star systems within 15 Light Years of Earth, and again, the hero of the Kroth War, Vladimir Karpov, is selected to lead this Expedition. Yet be careful what you wish for. There are dangerous life forms out there, and one more alien than any Fedorov could imagine.
A fleet of 24 Earthforce naval ships is tasked with an expedition to newly documented star systems in the Cyonid Spur, and the Outreach expedition visits five new exoplanets and founds the colonies that were first mentioned in the author’s “Dharman Series” science fiction saga. At each site they encounter some life form that needs the attention of Major Troyak, so there is a lot happening in this volume. The World and characters in the Dharman Series stories meet and weave together as one new strand in the second half of Kirov Series #77 Outreach. Then a new alien species is encountered infesting one of these star systems, but it is nothing you could hit with a stick, or a bullet from an assault rifle.
This new threat is a devious virus that hijacks the DNA of other life and repurposes it to serve its own aims, the so called “Colony Virus,” a name with a double meaning. It was first found in the stellar colonies founded by the Outreach Program, and the virus also gathers together in watermelon sized colonies wherein it becomes sufficiently complex to achieve a kind of consciousness. This virus, and the creatures it creates as hosts to inhabit, was a major antagonist in the three book Dharman Series.
At the end of book three in that series, Nightwatch, Commodore Tico takes a Task force of about 20 ships out to investigate the possible source of a strange signal that was aimed at the Dharman star system from Fomalhaut, a star known as “The Eye of Sauron” in a regional void dubbed “Mordor.” There they meet the senders of the strange signal, an alien race born in the realm of Dark Matter that has discovered how to cross over into the world of Normal Matter. They have strange crab-shaped ships, and a battle ensues that eventually sees Tico ordered to withdraw to the Dharman system again. Now matters darken considerably as Fedorov and Karpov plan ways of dealing with both the alien virus, and the space faring aliens from the “Dark Side” of the Universe.
After Commodore Tico withdraws from Fomalhaut at the end of Nightwatch, he eventually meets Karpov’s Outreach expedition there, and the two fleets join forces against the alien species they call “The Shadows”—beings that first arose in the domain of Dark Matter. They are all trying to find ways of detecting, tracking and killing them. Radar is useless, as is infrared, because light does not interact with Dark Matter in any way. The domains of Dark Matter and normal Baryonic Matter have only one common denominator—Gravity. When Earthforce learns they can find and track the Shadows by detecting their gravity wells, Karpov is confident this enemy can also be defeated in ship-to-ship combat using new Gravity based implosion weapons.
Dark Matters
Fedorov comes to realize the real threat is not battling the aliens in space, but in the Wild Zone of Dharma-6, where life is undergoing rapid mutation driven by the alien virus as it reaches for a control solution to make Humanity its new host species. This leads him to the staggering conclusion that the Shadows are not the beings inside their ships, which are merely hosts for the real Shadows, the Colony Virus! It's the microbial threat they they must focus on, and their exploits in space are meant mainly to screen Earth and keep the Shadows from discovering the Homeworld. This is a daunting task, because the Alien ships remain difficult to detect, particularly when they use streams of Dark Energy to travel long distances at amazing speeds.
When news of a strange illness on Earth arrives at the end of Dark Matters, Fedorov fears the Shadows have stolen a march on them and finally found Earth. Now he and Director Kamenski hatch a plan to try and contain what could be a devastating outbreak of the Colony Virus on Earth. The virus is clearly there, at work mutating things in the Earth’s oceans to create creatures that can walk on the land as well. These hybrid beings emerge from the seas at night to raid coastal villages and towns along the Norwegian Sea, but the real contagion comes to Earth another way. In the next volume, Contagion, the struggle is to find a way to contain the viral outbreak in Norway, while Earth’s military must deal with these mutant invaders coming out of the seas.
So the three book Dharman Series: Wild Zone, Mother Heart, and Nightwatch has now merged with the Earthforce segment of the Kirov series, in Outreach, which is now followed by book #8 in that saga, Dark Matters. (On sale 8 SEP 2024 on Amazon.) The two story lines will continue in the Earthforce Saga.
A new Reader? All the Earthforce books can be read as stand-alone stories, but they are all linked to present one larger saga. You can enter this amazing story in a number of places. You might try Kirov Series #70, Goliath, which stands as a kind of prelude to the Earthforce saga that follows in volumes #71 through #78, or you can also skip Goliath and dive right into the Earthforce Saga with Kirov Series Volume #71, Earthforce Mars.
Reaching volume #77, Outreach. Readers might first want to get all the details of what happened in the Dharman Series by reading that trilogy before you get to Part VII of Outreach. Your understanding of what follows in the second half of Outreach and through Dark Matters will be much enhanced, and the entire three book Dharman series is now on sale for just $9.99. It’s a great story, and then, comes Part VII in Outreach, where its characters meet Karpov, Fedorov and company, and both story lines merge and forge ahead into the book being written now, Contagion, to see if this new alien threat can be stopped.
Thanks for reading!
John