Children of the Dark World

by Will Townsend

  She was reminiscent of the sleek long necked swans Callum Farr had observed as a boy growing up by the storm tossed shores of Lake Michigan. The best thing about her though was that she was his, utterly and completely, not his first command to be sure, but his most important.

  As he basked in the incredible view laid out below him and his beautiful ship dominating the view in front of him, his mind drifted back to those turbulent days growing up by the ravaged shores of the Great Lakes. It was there that the wander lust had first crept into his soul while trekking along those deep wooded shores beside the ruins of ancient Chicago. He’d spent every day of his youth, whenever possible, devising ways to sail on the turbulent waters of the lake that the Ojibwe tribe had called Gichigami, and that the poet Longfellow and a twentieth century folksinger had butchered into Gitche Gumee. He built rafts by the dozens, all of which sank shortly after launch. But he hadn’t cared. When one sank he simply built another and then another after that. The journey was the grandest thing, or so he’d heard once, so he’d never had a destination in mind when he shoved his rickety craft into the fickle waters of Lake Michigan.

  But, as with all good things of his youth, this too came to an end. He couldn’t remember his father, but his mother obviously couldn’t forget him. He’d been an officer in the Earth Services and she must’ve loved him deeply, he thought, remembering what his loss had done to their lives. By the time he’d reached his early teen years his mother had begun to decline. This was not something the physicians of the day could understand. But Farr could, because of his Native American ancestry. She was a Cherokee and she’d passed on the oral traditions of the tribe to him. But as the years moved on, she could not. He noticed time and again the way her eyes would shift to the door of their small place as if expecting his father to walk through at any time.

  The doctors had labeled it depression but he’d known otherwise. He’d listened eagerly to her tales of the tribal way of life where each member was a necessary part of the whole. He’d also listened with a heavy heart when she’d described how a Cherokee could will their self to death if it served the greater needs of the tribe. It was, he thought in hindsight, almost as if she had been preparing him for what was to come. And his conjecture proved all to true, because when he was fifteen years old, she had died, a victim of a broken heart that would not heal.

  He was little more than a boy at that time and was left bereft of family with no anchor in his life. The inner rage that he’d fought his entire life to control could be traced to that day and not understanding it, he’d taken that rage out on any target at hand.

  His father had been killed while attacking a slaver’s nest in what was left of Central America and the animosity he bore from that point on burned like the heat of the sun toward that particularly foul commerce. And because his mother had been unable to go on without his father, the slavers were again to blame for that loss in his life. But at fifteen, on the shores of Lake Michigan, there were no slavers to bear the brunt of his ominous rage and so he was constantly in trouble until the day his uncle, Albert Duncan McDougal, known by all as Albie, had arrived.

  When Albie arrived he’d found Callum bloody and bruised, the badges of his latest scuffle against a band of bullies, or so he’d maintained to Uncle Albie.

  “Have you considered ducking lad?” he asked wryly, addressing the boy’s current condition.

  “I won, that’s enough for me,” Callum had answered him just a tad belligerently.

  “Aye, so you said. What did you gain by fighting?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Number one, why were you fighting and number two, what did you gain by doing so?”

  “They were…” he started but he found his hands waving and he had no answer for the question, so finally he said, “They were bullies.”

  “I believe you believe that, but exactly what did they do to make you mad enough to fight.”

  “They were yelling at a kid across the street, you know, and calling him names,” he’d replied haltingly, a mask of puzzlement on his face.

  “Did they actually do anything to this other bairn?”

  “Well no, but they were going to, at least I think they were.” The more he answered Albie’s questions, the more it seemed that the actual bully in the scenario might’ve been him. He realized that the boys he’d fought had actually tried to leave when he’d confronted them, and, it was only after he wouldn’t let them leave that violence had erupted.

  “Remember this lad. Never fight if words are enough to settle the situation. Never fight unless there is something to be gained, whether it is in defense of someone weaker than you or to stop violence that’s already begun. If there is nothing to be gained then it is a wasted effort and people will judge you harshly for your actions. They always do no matter who was the actual instigator of the matter.”

  Thus had begun his time with Uncle Albie, who was not, strictly speaking, his uncle. He was a member of a tight knit group of families who were generally related, all of whom were of Scottish lineage and had formed a clan, of sorts, during the Dying. When the members of this ‘clan’ had heard of his mother’s death, they’d sent Albie. At the time Callum had been sixteen years old and had less than two years until he was an adult. They’d reckoned that at his age what he really needed most was a strong male role model to keep him in line and Albie was just that.

  Albert Duncan McDougal was a former Earth Services chief petty officer who’d served with distinction under Callum’s father. He’d been wounded five times, the last time when he’d accompanied Callum’s father on the mission that had claimed his life. He’d been permanently disabled by his injuries in that battle and mustered out of the service.

  Albie’s flaming red hair, an anachronism that had delighted his shipmates in the service to no end, had ensured that he’d used his fists often in his childhood, a matter which allowed him to understand Callum better than the boy knew.

  Albie ran a tight ship, his florid, broad face barking orders like the chief petty officer he’d been in the service and Callum actually blossomed under his discipline and order. Life with his mother had always been sort of disorganized and chaotic, although he’d loved her dearly and did not blame her for anything. But her unending love of her husband had doomed her son to a troubled childhood.

  Albie had recognized the rage in Callum caused by the loss of his father and mother and channeled that same rage into the martial arts and Asian disciplines. The boy was a natural at Aikido, Tai Kwan Do and Thai kick boxing and Albie had to no more than mention a new discipline to have Callum eagerly pursuing it. But it was not just physical excellence that Albie had sought and so he encouraged Callum to discipline his mind as well.

  After two years Albie had turned a rebellious, confused boy into a budding future naval officer. He taught Callum, through the disciplines as well as their personal talks, to control and channel his rage. At the end of two years Albie had done such a good job that Farr was accepted to the Academy and they’d celebrated his acceptance together, not as a father and son, but as an older brother will sometimes do with a much loved younger brother. Quite literally, Albie McDougal had saved his life, but more importantly, he was responsible for where he floated now, just meters away from his newest, and most prestigious, space command.

  Albie had died just a year after Callum had received his first command, the light cruiser St. Louis, and Farr had once more been alone in the world. Well, with the exception of Admiral Ngata.

  Farr pulled himself away from such thoughts and back to the present.

  He’d been one of sixty-five thousand applicants for the upcoming missions to Mars, the asteroids and the moons of Jupiter to search for the lost colonists of Earth. And he’d been the youngest of the applicants selected to command one of the five ships.

  The other applicants seemed to think he drew the worst assignment of the five as well. Of the five ships, his was the only one specifically designed to operate in low gravi
ty, the other four having been designed for Mars and the Jovian missions and having significantly reinforced hulls to deal with the more powerful gravity wells. The other four ships were all flagships of the Takashi Line with all the amenities and luxuries the corporate elite of old could imagine, while the Cybelean Princess was, in the opinions of the other captains, exactly what she’d been called in the previous century, a “trash hauler”.

  Mars had been the most sought after assignment followed by the Jovian moons. The crews of those ships would walk on the surfaces of worlds with large gravity wells while his crew was doomed to whatever gravity was generated by her acceleration and deceleration (minimal) and, perhaps, if the asteroid colonies were still there, low g environments generated by electromagnetic fields. But those were a crap shoot at best and he knew it. The asteroids were just as likely to be cold, lifeless mausoleums, monuments to humanity’s first failed sojourn off the planet. At least that was the argument the existing corporations were making.

  He didn’t care in the least. To Farr, his ship was the most beautiful lady he’d ever laid his eyes upon and, thanks to corporate ineptitude he thought grimly; she’d be the first ship to leave Earth in nearly a century. He looked lovingly at the great hulk floating before him and knew, beyond any doubt, that he’d willingly give his life in service to her.

  He completed his final sweep of the outer hull in the maintenance pod, nicknamed a crab by the other members of his crew. The crab was a maintenance vehicle of his own design and sported an array of instruments including the hull scanning attachment he had just swept over the ship. When he’d first been selected as the junior captain of the five, Admiral Ngata, his mentor and the chief advisor to the World Council on this matter, had assigned Farr the task of getting the ship mission ready. No one had objected to this arrangement but the World Council had decided that the other four ships, being larger and more complex, required much more sophistication in their refurbishment than the erstwhile Cybelean Princess, so the six corporations were enlisted to assist the captains of those vessels. This had been over the strenuous objections of Admiral Ngata.

  Only six corporations now remained from the time before the Calamity, due mostly to laws and restrictions issued by Lansing and Lao. It had been the corporations, Farr remembered from his histories, with their greed and corruption that had left humanity vulnerable to the icy emissaries of the Calamity. The defense system that they’d supposedly been operating for decades turned out to be a hollow shell and the Earth had been ravaged by the bombardment from the depths of the outer solar system. The corporations had wilted and their leaders had fled when the terrible truth became known. They had left humanity to die, he thought with outrage.

  But arising out of the chaos of those days Lansing, the Speaker of the House in the United States and Lao, the Premier of China, had saved humanity. Farr remembered proudly the stories from those bygone days of ninety-seven years ago. How Lansing and Lao had formed a bond of friendship with each other that would last a lifetime and had used every resource available to them to limit the destruction of the Calamity, and afterwards, to relieve the suffering in the two decades known only as the Time of the Dying.

  No Farr told himself, his precious ship had not been defiled by the corporate presence. He believed with all his heart, as did the greater part of humanity, that whatever the corporations touched, they corrupted.

  And so the work had commenced, and Farr had spent his every waking moment on the refurbishment of the now renamed E.S.S. Resolution. There had been a brief discussion regarding the name, with some proponents arguing that it should be re-christened with either Lansing’s or Lao’s name. That had fallen apart quickly, however, since the first two of the new and massive Earth To Orbit (ETO) ships commissioned had been named after the mentors of mankind. Besides, the two ETO’s named for Lansing and Lao had already created a storied history for themselves. It had been these two vessels that had stormed into space after mankind’s forced isolation and deployed the first Earth communications satellites in almost a century. They’d also been the ships that had deployed the satellites of the new Planetary Defense System that would assure an event such as the Calamity would never happen again.

  The inner and outer skins of the Resolution were in surprisingly good condition considering she was a hundred and three years old, but still, micro-fractures were apparent after the initial scans of the hull and a treatment of carbon was prescribed for the patient. The self-healing mechanism of the advanced graphene compounds required little more than a replacement of liquid carbon cartridges which the ships systems then pumped around the hull. The liquid carbon sought out any fractures and bonded with the graphene causing a reaction that transformed the carbon into graphene, sealing the ship as tightly as it had been in the heyday of its’ youth. But the scanning of the ship was an extremely slow process using the corporate equipment provided, so Farr had solved the problem by piecing together the crabs, a name given to them by the ships chief biologist, Lao Tzu Ming, because of the appendages protruding from them. Ming was the only member of the crew in the same age group as Farr, except for the Senior Sergeant of the four person marine contingent that the Admiral had insisted on.

  “I’m done with this side, Commander,” Ming chimed in at exactly that moment.

  “I’m done here too. Let’s get inside.”

  “That suits me just fine. There’s too much open space beneath my feet anyhow.” Farr looked at the Earth displayed in all its vibrant and colorful glory suspended below him. Some found this experience to be overwhelming but Farr reveled in the image that floated below him. It somehow forced a man to contemplate his proper place in the universe. For all of the self-importance humans were afflicted with, you simply couldn’t look at the scene that swung just below him and not be humbled.

  The two men piloted the crabs through the open shuttle bay and onto the platform designated for them. The doors closed slowly but as soon as the seal engaged they heard the familiar hiss of pressurization and shortly thereafter the green lights above the platforms announced that the environment was now safe for unprotected humans.

  “I think she’s better than she ever was,” Ming said, taking off his protective gear and detaching himself from the Crab. “I can’t even find a micro stress fracture anywhere. How was your side?”

  “The same as yours. She’s ready Ming, she really is,” Farr responded with a note of pride in his voice. Ming grinned and let out a loud whoop.

  “We’re on our way! Assuming, of course, that your Admiral comes through. The corps are getting their own way with the Council these days,” Ming said, using the popular idiom for corporations these days.

  “Admiral Ngata knows that and he’s certainly no supporter of the corps, so I imagine he’ll use the Lansing/Lao card in his address. No bureaucrat has found a way around that for the last forty years.”

  “I wonder what they would say if they could see the Council allowing the corps to work on the very ships that had abandoned humanity and were now preparing to voyage in search of their “lost children”?

  “I’m pretty sure it would be fire and brimstone. By the end of their speeches the people would probably be building scaffolds for the CEOs. I’m going up to the bridge. I’ll see you there.”

  Farr floated down the lighted passageway in the zero g feeling slightly guilty about not being able to tell Ming the truth about the ships that had fled during the Calamity. Ming was a good man and he considered him to be a potentially vital cog in the running of the ship. Hell, Farr thought, he already was.

  Ming stood just short of one hundred and ninety centimeters but then again, who wasn’t since the genetics engineers had started tinkering with the human race. Farr himself was about two meters tall, just slightly taller than the average person in the age of genetic enhancement. Ming’s hair was black and wavy and he had a devil may care look in his eyes that, Farr had to admit, significantly aided his romantic endeavors.

  Ming also had an infectio
us personality, which had actually put Farr off when he’d first met his potential crewmate. He was always joking around and delighting his other shipmates with tales of his many romantic conquests. Farr didn’t mind that. A crewmember like Ming was usually good for morale but he didn’t seem to take anything seriously and space was a very serious place. Death awaited those who didn’t take the void seriously and in an environment where everyone depended on each other, the lack of seriousness usually meant an unjust fate for someone who didn’t deserve it. He’d also been worried that the tales of his sexual exploits would offend the female members of the crew. He was so worried, in fact, that he’d sought out the Resolution’s new doctor, Ilsa Alexeyev, for her opinion on the matter. It had led to one of his more humbling experiences in command.

  Alexeyev was of Euro-Scandinavian ethnicity and generally considered to be one of the most brilliant medical doctors on the planet. She was in her early forties and in perfect physical condition and, oddly enough in this day and age, a professional woman who wore her thick blond hair halfway down her back. She was utterly unselfconscious with regards to her physical attributes and, if Farr admitted it, she was a little intimidating. Not because of her sexuality but because she had revived the old field of psychiatry. Farr didn’t like to be dissected mentally and emotionally and that seemed to be the ultimate goal of the discipline.

  “I must say Commander,” Ilsa started, “you were not quite what I pictured from your name the first time I saw you months ago.”