Casindra Lost
Page 1
Casindra Lost
Lost Mission Series
Casindra Lost
Marti Ward
Casindra Lost
Kindle paperback edition ISBN-13: 9781696380911
Kindle enlarged print ed ISBN-13: 9781708810108
Kindle large print edition ISBN-13: 9781708299453
This work is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, locales or persons is entirely fortuitous.
First published by SupRes: December 2019
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Copyright © 2019 SupRes Inc.
Front cover art: betibup33/thebookcoverdesigner.com
Set in 11pt Iowan Old Style
To Romana
without whom we wouldn’t be reading this book
Acknowledgements
First of all, I would like to acknowledge the effort and support of those who created and opened up the Paradisi Universe to all writers of whatever background, experience or genre.
I would especially like to acknowledge Cheri Lasota, Bill Patterson and Louisa Locke for their careful world building and extensive documentation of the Paradisi Universe, as well their willingness to help me with my many questions and pedantic detail as I sought to understand and reconcile the facts of the extant historical documents with those events that I was seeking to relate.
I must thank all my friends, family, colleagues and students who read, corrected and commented on the early drafts of this Casindra Lost volume and its sister Moraturi Lost story. In particular, I would like to thank Louisa Locke for her support, developmental editing, and stylistic and plot suggestions.
Of course, while I took all the comments into account, I made up my own stubborn mind about what to do about them and kept to my science-driven story for better or for worse...
I also want to acknowledge the inspiration of my teachers from science to philosophy, linguistics to psychology, geology to biology, mathematics to neuroscience – and I want to acknowledge all my students across these and all the Science, Technology, Mathematics & Engineering (STEM) disciplines.
I love science, and I love teaching and researching it, explaining and applying it, and it is my humble hope that my science and technology fiction and faction will inspire a new generation of students and teachers to a similar love of STEM.
The Paradisi Chronicles
By the early decades of the twenty-first century, the problems of over-population, antibiotic resistant epidemics, civil war, cyberterrorism, nuclear proliferation, and climate change have set Earth on a path of escalating disasters.
In the year 2025 AD, ten men and women come together to address these problems. These powerful leaders each have enormous personal wealth that they made in a variety of commercial enterprises around the globe. What they have in common besides their great wealth is a deep pessimism about the future of Earth and an enormous optimism about space exploration as the only viable solution for the continuation of human kind. To that end, these men and women, who call themselves the Founders, begin the Paradisi Project.
The purpose of the Paradisi Project is the colonization of New Eden, a recently discovered planet in the Andromeda Galaxy that scientists deem capable of sustaining human life. Fearing interference from various factions on Earth, the Founders hide their ultimate goals from the public by the fiction that their activities are only to set up viable commercial colonies on the Moon and Mars. The real goals of the project are passed down from the head of each family to their successors and close advisers, who act in concert as the Council of Ten.
The Paradisi Project harnesses the best minds on Earth to develop the scientific breakthroughs in interstellar travel and wormhole technology needed to transport the ten Founding Families, and the necessary personnel and resources, to establish a viable colony on New Eden. Once there, their mission will be to ensure that this new colony doesn’t make the same mistakes that are destroying Earth.
Solar Horizons is set up as the public face of the ten. But, as far as the public knows, its mission is Mars and its moons. Solar Command sends its first manned mission through the wormhole, and the detailed reports from the Captain Sideris on SS Casindra confirm and fill out the long-distance reports from the unmanned mission – until they lose contact…
Casindra Lost follows this ship, as it embarks on a mission that places the future of the Paradisi colonization program in the hands of a lone wolf of a captain, a diverse collection of flora and fauna, and an experimental AI trying to understand how humans and animals work.
The Paradisi Project and its historical accounts are works of fiction but try to be true to known science. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of our authors’ imaginations or used fictitiously. Owing to effects of cryosuspension and wormhole travel, apparent dates and effective ages at departure can be quite different from what they are at arrival.
To explore The Paradisi Chronicles and find more books in the series, please see the list at the end, or better still, take a look at the official web page:
https://paradisichronicles.wordpress.com/
Or check out my explorations in science and fiction:
http://martiward.blogspot.com/: the science behind the fiction
http://martiscifi.blogspot.com/: my science fiction stories
Or sign up to my mailing list for Paradisi Lost Missions updates and free stories:
http://tiny.cc/PLM-Subscribe
Or just key an eye on my Amazon author page:
https://amazon.com/author/martiward
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
The Paradisi Chronicles
Prologue Asteroid 243 Ida Sol-Jupiter Lagrangian 4
Chapter One Wormhole – SJL4 departure
Chapter Two Wormhole – PTL4 approach
Chapter Three P–Praelium L5 superhighway
Chapter Four Tenebra bypass
Chapter Five Petra elliptic
Chapter Six P–Tenebra L5 superhighway
Chapter Seven New Eden elliptic
Chapter Eight New Eden polar orbit
Chapter Nine New Eden ground truth
Chapter Ten New Eden eclipsed
Chapter Eleven New Eden hunt’n’hide
Chapter Twelve NE–Acerba L2 – pre-shockwave
Chapter Thirteen NE–Acerba L2 – mid-shockwave
Chapter Fourteen NE–Acerba L2 – post-shockwave
Chapter Fifteen New Eden polar orbit
Chapter Sixteen New Eden revival
Epilogue Asteroid 243 Ida – Sol-Jupiter Lagrangian 4
What’s next
About the author
More Paradisi stories
Casindra Lost
Prologue
Asteroid 243 Ida
Sol-Jupiter Lagrangian 4
Football. A game in which the ball is propelled around the decks of a LETO with the feet. Originally it was played on earth, often on earth planted with a kind of green vegetation that was cut very short (grass q.v.) Some variants of the game involved hands and heads as much as, or even more than, feet. The typical earth football field was roughly the same size as a LETO cargo deck, but lacked the maze of corridors, hatches and shafts that give the modern game much of its interest and appeal.
The LETO Dictionary, 3rd Edition (2075)
Sideris
22 June 2075 08:58
Commander Jerome Sideris was awaiting his final briefing by Solar Command, as Thorndike was styling the militia-like organization he’d imposed on the Solar Horizons Foundation and its secret Paradisi Project. These were the two faces of what they described as a plan to save humanity. But for most of humanity, it was i
n practice a conspiracy to save ten of the richest families on Earth: the so-called Founders.
As Sideris idled in an anteroom of Ida’s command module at SJL4, an unexpectedly large heavy-glassed fenestella gave a direct view of his ship, eerie in the stark black-and-white shadowing from a distant sun on an airless asteroid. The pale ping pong ball on his right was the sun, and on his left Jupiter appeared as an uninspiring unblinking star.
He’d only been here a couple of days, and had been surprised at how many people had opened by asking what he thought of Jupiter… and then admitted that they’d expected to see Jupiter much bigger now they were out here in its orbit round the sun. But the Sun-Jupiter Lagrange points L4 and L5 were just as far from Jupiter as they were from the Sun. Earth was by definition 1 Astronomical Unit from the Sun, and thus at its nearest approach to Jupiter would be around 1AU nearer to Jupiter than Ida was.
The story he’d been given was that 243 Ida was the first asteroid they mined, and they then made it the Ida base for the Ford-Svaiter mirror that opened the wormholes… But Sideris didn’t for a moment buy that they’d pushed 243 Ida to SJL4, over 2AUs from the Mars side of the asteroid belt. That was a distance equivalent to the diameter of Earth’s orbit… But supposedly 243 Ida was what he was standing on.
Why would they do that? When the Sun-Jupiter L4 and L5 were each the focus for a cloud of millions of asteroid-like Trojans, or Greeks as the ones around SJL4 were known… Just part of the misinformation he guessed, since 243 Ida was an obvious target for mining. The official story was that they were mining asteroids and preparing to colonize Mars.
Sideris suddenly realized that the fiction that they were mining 243 Ida only worked because their new, secret, EmDrive could get out to Jupiter’s orbit just as fast as conventional drives could get out from Earth to Mars, or the nearer asteroids. For decades, he had believed implicitly the ‘Mars colony’ ‘asteroid mining’ stories – and had learned the devastating truth only a few months ago…
At the time, he’d thought he was under arrest! He had been working in the Phoibe shipyards between Earth and the Moon, at EML1, and had returned for his regular resupply at Nautilus Station when he was surrounded by four black suits of the type favored by three-letter government organizations. They wore discrete lapel badges bearing the intertwined ‘S’ insignia of the Abramov Solar System Security, but he had been taken to see a Colonel Thorndike – who’d informed him that he’d been assigned to a secret precolonization mission.
The initial meeting had been brief, telling him that the Mars colonization mission was propaganda for the media and the masses, while the real mission was colonization of a planet called New Eden… And this only after a ten-minute reminder of the confidentiality provisions that his contract to Reach Corporation incorporated in from their contract to Solar Horizons, along with a reminder that Casindra was not in point of fact even his, but owned by Solar Horizons through the Quinn-run Solar System Banking Corporation – who had an effective monopoly on off-world mortgages.
Now six months later he was here, on an ‘asteroid’ in Jupiter’s distant orbit around the sun, watching his ship being prepared for a mission whose scope he was only just starting to comprehend: going where no one had gone before, into a wormhole – and hopefully out of it… into another galaxy… to a new Earth and a new Sun…
No pressure, huh!
Sideris’s gaze through the fenestella naturally tended to settle on his own ship, Casindra, as it was prepared for its three-and-a-half year, two-and-a-half million light year, one-and-a-half crew member mission to the Paradisi system in the Andromeda galaxy. He still wasn’t sure what he’d done to deserve this honor, if indeed it was an honor… He and his ship had been seconded from Reach Corp without any prior discussion with him, and without his crew… except there was some kind of half-baked AI.
The LETO class ships looked like little more than a cylindrical tank hemispherical caps at each end. He couldn’t see anything different, but his ship should have had a SECASM: the fancy reconfigurable ‘Solar Energy Collector And Svaiter Mirror’ installed in the bow. The SECASM incorporated the antimatter reflector that, in conjunction with Ida’s gate mirror, would enable him to open a wormhole to another galaxy.
But LETOs were hardly designed for a colonization mission to another galaxy. What they were designed and named for was a ‘Lunar Earth Transfer Orbit’ role, and they had for decades been the backbone supporting Reach Corp’s construction of the sky elevators, the Nautilus-11 space station, and the experimental Asteria class starships.
Sideris had lived pretty much his whole life on LETOs. With the experience of growing up on a LETO, going to school on a LETO, completing Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in astrophysics and aerospace engineering… and then coming back to a LETO. Having worked up through the ranks to oversee the direction and maintenance of the LETO fleet, Sideris knew a fair bit about LETOs…
But what did he know about planetary surveys, or looking after plant, animal and fish habitats? Unbeknownst to Solar Command, he had had a chance to study the technical data on the array of engineering ‘upgrades’. The main hole in his knowledge about the reconfiguration was now the new generation of ‘intelligent systems’ – but then nobody really understood what made an AI tick, let alone how much they could be trusted. But so much of this mission lay outside his engineering expertise, not to mention the lack of documentation on the three biohabitats, let alone the aims and purposes of whatever experiments they embodied.
For Sideris, the most exciting new technology was the Cavitran EmDrive, two of these engines being clearly visible above Casindra. This electromagnetic cavity-reflector technology, with its internal Thorium reactor, was a drop-in replacement for the familiar nuclear drives, but a LETO powered by a Cavitran could do the trip from Earth orbit to Jupiter, or its Lagrangians, in 6 months instead of 18 months; 2 months to Mars instead of 6 months.
He’d heard rumors of the EmDrive technology all his life, and even of controversial early microNewton and milliNewton demonstrations a decade before he was born. No wonder Solar Horizons could pretend to be working towards a colony on Mars, when in fact it was testing wormhole technology out in Jupiter’s orbit.
Sideris stretched awkwardly in the micro-G. He had the beginnings of a headache and tried to relieve it by slowly turning his head from side to side in a figure eight. In the process he effectively surveyed all he could see of the spot-lit construction going on around the station and its Ford-Svaiter mirror, but his gaze was drawn back to Casindra as it sat like a spider in the midst of a web of activity.
Once you got close to a LETOs you quickly noticed that they weren’t actually round, but had an octagonal cross-section that facilitated their role in construction and heavy equipment transport. The spider-like look came from the eight crane-like scissor latches that stretched out forward and aft from its hatches. These scissor latches could be used to transport all kinds of equipment, including modules like the one he was standing in.
He could see another LETO being used, like giant two-faced spider robot, to actively lift and secure equipment into place.
As he watched he saw the gym was being swung back out of the way so that Casindra itself looked more like a bee stuck in a web. Hopefully that wasn’t some kind of premonition. There was a lot that could go wrong.
Despite the spider-like anatomy, one normally thought of the LETO in a plane-like way. In its minimally loaded form it did look more like a bee, with the gym pulled back out of the way on a scissor link, and a pair of engines attached to the upper diagonals using three scissor cranes each.
This became a drunken bee effect as, once under way, the whole octagonal configuration was usually spun to provide a semblance of gravity. The heaviest payload was attached overhead to pull the centre of gravity as high as possible, aiming for the lowest rotation rate that would provide half Earth normal gravity, 0.5G, on the command deck, a little less on the cargo deck, a little more in engineering – and at least
0.9G in the gym.
Even internally the octagonal theme continued in all the shafts, passages and hatches. The main corridor along the command deck was basically square in terms of the bulkheads that made up floors and walls, but corners were cut off to provide walking and climbing frames that could be used with standard locking space boots, as well as providing a kind of inverted caterpillar track that allowed multidirectional elevator functionality – that was useful when gravity effect was based on high forward acceleration rather than rotation.
Sideris glanced at his wristcom and commenced a circuit of his small waiting room, his gait awkward as he lifted each Velcro space sock carefully, one after the other, in the low gravity of the asteroid. It was frustrating to be cooling his heels here, when he should be over there overseeing everything…
By now, six of the twelve Volcan drones should have been stored in the multifunction bay aft of the main deck. He could vaguely make out two of the four externally-mounted EmProbes, and could see enough to recognize that they were the ones carrying the rest of the Volcan planetary survey drones. The other two carried M-drones, message drones that would be sent back through the wormhole and constituted his sole means of communication home. The remaining six M-drones should already be berthed in Casindra’s upper shuttle bay.
Speaking of shuttles, there were still two scissor latches available for his little surprise.
However, he did still wish that at least one of the EmProbes and three more of the M-drones had been loaded internally. But no, the wisdom of the committee decreed that EmProbes were not designed for shuttle bay launch, and it was most efficient to have them pre-loaded with a full complement of message drones – after all two of them would be sent back with status reports and wormhole experiments from within the wormhole, and a third with a safe arrival message and initial scan of Paradisi. Of course, once he was in his own private galaxy, things might change…