The Princess of Caldris

by Dante D'Anthony

  “And you felt that…there?” Tokushima asked with impending sense of dread.

  “Yes.”

  “Where did it come from?” from Father, sharply. Hammerstein gave a cold thousand yard stare.

  I looked at him directly, “Officer Hammerstein knows, in more detail than I can sense from a threshold darkly.” I said. “Princess Clairissa.”

  “Her archaeological expedition,” Hammerstein answered with steeled emotion. “…at the ruins of an Arcturian Neely station, which was in a decayed orbit around a red giant star.”

  That was the first time I had heard anyone use the expression “Neely” to describe an O’Neal station. I knew what he meant though, a very long cylinder with high grade environments on the inside. An Arcturian O’Neal station would have been a thousand years old.

  “An attack frigate from the CCCE Armada had crashed into the Neely” he said.

  “Kamikaze?” Farther hissed.

  Hammerstein’s bottom lip rose stoutly, “Valid question, but no. There’s evidence it was a combat accident. However, the archaeologists opened two files on the ship. A black box log, and a transmission the ship had received.

  “A Sunrider 3000 attack ship.” I suddenly knew. Hammerstein’s jaw tightened. “Yes. Then the expedition went dark. Apparently, whatever was on that transmission completely disorganized the neural nets of the entire Cyborgian CCCE crew. And when the archaeologists opened the file, a millennia later, it did it to them too. Strangely, it seems the file was sent from the archaeological site to the hypercaster at the palace by automated systems.”

  He let the implications run through my mind a moment before he continued.

  “It sent itself.” I said, and let him consider the implication; a sentient program.

  “Why didn’t it hurt the Princess?” Tokushima wondered aloud.

  “The Palace hypercast receiver runs automatic screens on all incoming transmissions. This file was coded so unusually, it tripped the screens. The Princess never saw the files. The data on the files was incredibly dense, and a cursory scan reveals a hologram with…numerous geometries in three dimensional patterns and fractals.”

  “Where is the original hardware?” A worried look shot across fathers face.

  “In the Sunrider. We brought the ship back, it’s at Fort Oort Station. In the Kuiper belt.” Hammerstein said at last.

  Something was turning in the back of my mind. I didn’t know what yet, but it was not good. “Don’t bring it any closer in this star system. Keep it out in the Oort clouds. I should go there as well. I need to know if the transmission in the ship is fundamentally different than the transmission on the derelict frigate.”

  Father rose, “Hammerstein”-he cut himself off, his thought unfinished. Only his emotion conveyed to me across his den: dread, desperation, and a chillingly morose sense of imminent doom.

  “What choice do we have, Sir Sole? The boy himself insists with warning. He hasn’t missed yet. We can’t ignore him. He needs to go. He needs to go now. I can have a Hammerhead make an in-system hyper jump. With normal space time on both ends of the jump, he’ll be at Fort Oort in the morning. He can sleep on the journey.”

  I gathered my resolve. A Hammerhead jump ship. The jumps Hammerheads were designed for were large star carriers to planet jumps and back. I had never heard of one with hyper jump capabilities. Apparently the Royal Security Police had made some modifications. In system jumps were not that unusual, but neither were they very common either. There is lot of stuff to hit in an Oort cloud at the edge of a star system. Hammerheads were manufactured in CCCE space.

  The irony of going to meet the galactic derelict, an ancient CCCE frigate, on a contemporary CCCE manufactured vessel struck me then. However, even their fearsome Hammerheads are incomparable to the technologies of CCCE’s first armada.

  The Great Arcturian war, devastating the Arcturian Colonials, had left an economic and technological chill in the Galaxy for centuries. When they say they ‘don’t make them like they used too,” rest assured they mean the likes of a Sunrider.

  One of the greatest star ships ever built, military class or civilian; and I was going to see one.

  Clairissa Maggio, Caldris palace Library archaeological log. 3983, Moonsweek, Apogee, Threeday.!:55 E.H The Arcturian O’Neal station is a testament to their space engineering. Fifty kilometers long the station had apparently been the largest settlement in system and directed high energy farming from a solar panel array. The array, of some note in archaeological architectural circles for some time, remains still in various conditions in orbit. A matrix of panels encompassing a full inner orbit of the star, its Herculean scale remains impressive; one more testament to the greatness of the ancients and that era. No modern array equals it size in any of the Republics and Kingdoms, save Imperial CCCE of course.

  Yet the O’Neal station was not the only find, and from here luck turns to legend. A Sunrider war frigate is lodged in the side. It is a timely find as well. The two artifact menagerie’s decaying orbit would reach a soft cloud corona sometime in the near future, and with the hull breach caused by the Sunrider impact, not even the hard shielded O’Neal could shelter the plethora of artifacts inside. Apparently the Sunrider had careened into the hull of the O’Neal. The Sunrider’s Stasis Shields had flashed on and off, moving through the O’Neal first like butter, the ragged ultra steel against ragged ultra steel. Back and forth, again and again in a matter of half a minute. The interlocked ultra steel then held her in like a stinger, while the entire atmospherics on the interior of the O’Neal bled out furiously to space.

  We’re not sure why the other environmental habitat compartments in the O’Neal Station were breached. Further examination will surely provide the answers. The breech safeguards should have preserved them. We have found no intact environmental compartments yet.

  Conceivably in a colony station of this size and sophistication biome environment compartments could still contain living forests, with fauna and ecosystems still thriving, unseen by human eyes for centuries, the life support still servicing away soft rains and light.

  Now that would be all the stars in a jewel box, aye! Ha! My Archaeological Avarice is showing! Great Space Ghost, what the technological systems on that Sunrider will be worth to the reverse engineering departments of numerous corporate interests...

  Neil Thacker

  III

  Flyboys and Archaeologist girls.

  I remember vaguely, for even Empaths tire, Tokushima helping me into the aircar and the strange maternal sense she conveyed mixed with the warrior aspects of her police training and how the two worldviews like a yin and a yang were curled up comfortably in her being. The Royal Police Headquarters on the tangerine sea exuded a strong sense of “home” for her when we arrived, but to me it’s Brutalist style architecture, a combination of form follows function and mechanical exigencies, looked none the less like giant robots, vanguards watching over the waters.

  The sun was rising before the Hammerhead was fully prepped. Hammerstein fumed, walking around the service bay like a caged Ripjackle from some primitive outworld one sees in the holo-dramas. He kept thinking of how back in the Navy, if such delays were taking place he would have had the joy of dressing down the techs at the top of his lungs calling them, “Pin-head-dung-birds-pencil-necked-booty-grabbin-clowns-without-a-pair”, but this was the Royal Police and their protocols were different than the Navy, so he merely whispered it under his breath as he walked around and around the service bay, eyeing them with murder in his eyes.

  Finally one of the techs gathered the courage to stand their ground and face the leering Detective, “Sir,” he said, “It’s a modified troop shuttle. The in system hyper-jumps she’ll be making are the stuff of stunt pilots and professional racers. I don’t know what you’re emergency is, because it’s above my pay grade, but whatever it is, it will get a whole lot worse if you start popping in and out of normal space deep in the complex gravity wells of a star system and one of
the field manipulators fails. Even a little failure, and g-forces will turn you, the lovely police lady, and the kid over there into a crushed pulp in a micro second. This bird isn’t going up until she’s five-five-five, good-to-go and secured. Okay?”

  Hammerstein made a low growl at the tech but I felt a grudging respect forming. He just raised his hands in defeat and found a place on a stainless steel bench where Tokushima and I had been half sleeping, half watching.

  At length my rest restored me enough to grasp the excitement and strangeness of what I was experiencing again. This was no pleasure cruise with oversized cushions, buffets and family chattering. The plexisteel and astercrete world of the police base mimicked the military Spartan furnishings from which most of these police actually came up through in their careers.

  Comfort was for civies; contemptible. We were headed to Fort Oort, and already I could feel the sensibilities of the space Navy. As had often been the case through Human kind’s long and twisted histories, the military’s main source of recruitment was from men and women in the worker-bee classes; farm boys no longer needed on the farm, daughters of fork lift operators from corners of the worlds where economies dragged-children from situations and scenarios proper society moved away from.

  Through the ages they had come, to the brutal and uncompromising training bases. Mastering the arts of war, ready to give that last full measure of devotion –their very lives, everything they had and would ever have, for the very nations and peoples who more often than not watched the wars comfortably from home, sometimes even profiting, and morosely, fashionably, protesting indignation.

  Through the ages the soldiers had come, duty, honor, sacrifice. To stand in the horror for their fellows. No matter what world or before the worlds’ nations; their uniforms earned in struggle and often deprivation spoke the same words: “I will die that you may live.”

  So when the pilot arrived I wasn’t surprised he was Navy. Justin “Coco-butter” Parsons. Son of an avocado farmer from the Southern archipelagoes, he assumed any number of pilot clichés easily; devil-may-care daring do, live for today because tomorrow your hyperdrives must miss a cog, find all the pretty ladies and give ‘em a big wet kiss before you fly away.

  Funny thing about clichés, I realized then. Clichés or no, the pretty ladies are still beautiful when they’re getting a big wet kiss, and the flight is still dangerous as you order the engage command. Beauty and danger. They are what they are, and those that have the mettle to pursue them, well, they are what they are too.

  Even swaggering, live for today, Coco-butter Parsons got a big fat dose of “Uh-oh” when he walked in to the service hangar and felt the vibes oozing off Hammerstein. Parson’s pay grade didn’t make him privy to the abduction of the Princess, the details of the salvaged Sunrider at Fort Oort, or the fact that the government had commandeered the son of an aristocratic family as psychic to root out an unsolvable crime, but a lifetime of living by his wits and landing on his feet gave him the sense to know this was a….well, he had some very artful expletives in his mind when he summed up the situation.

  As a young gentleman whose Grandmatron had always told him, “Remember who you are, Winteroud. Chin up and white tie for dinner”, I’ll of course leave the ribald Navy expletives out of my recounting of the tale, but they are, as I said before, rather an art form unto themselves; a proper response, at some level, to the absurdity the universe so often persists at presenting mankind. Sometimes even my Grandmatron would add, “Chin up, shoulders back, and boobs out”, but of course only rarely and then with the unending embarrassment of my mother who mostly preferred delicate pretense and propriety to the certain genius of real recognition that we live in an absurdly off kilter universe which we did not make.

  Parsons whispered to the head tech not knowing I could read him across the service bay, “You got any idea what’s going on here with this little fly by night run?”

  The tech gave him a sidelong glance, “Nope. The Detective is top brass, the kid is rich, and the female captain is smoking hotter than a volcano. They all have to be at Fort Oort yesterday. Any questions?”

  Parson looked at the Hammerhead. “Yeah, how’s my Honey?” He ran his gloved hand along the hull with a loving caress.

  “Well, Officer Hammerstein over there wasn’t too happy with the time we’ve been eating up prepping your Hammerhead, but I’ve kept it by the numbers.”

  “Thanks. I like coming home with my heart still beating. Any word on the winds?”

  “Solar wind at a minimum. One more diagnostic and you’re good to go.”

  “Roger, Roger, Kazi, kitty! Thanks, Buck!” Parsons quipped and climbed into the Hammerhead and began his flight deliberations and lockdowns.

  The tech nodded to Hammerstein and we climbed aboard. There wasn’t a thing on that airship that didn’t need to be there except a small plastic Hula dancer someone had glued over a structural reinforcement over the door and painted, “Aloha baby let’s dance!” below. Dancing of course a metaphor for combat flight. If you’re going to die in combat, in a Hammerhead, best to do it with a Cavalier attitude. You've either got, or you haven’t got style.

  Welcome to the dance.

  The Hammerhead hummed to life and all I could think of was “The little Engine that could.” Not much bigger than a standard city airbus, the vehicle was mostly intended for air support of ground troops securing areas in conflict. Their simplicity, reliability, and sheer versatility had made them beloved of any military or police forces that acquired them.

  Steve Allman

  One of the airmen buckled us in, “Each of your seat has an emergency force field and life support back up pending a hull breach. If you get knocked out into the void, you’ll have twenty-four standard hours of protection. Then the seat trips into a stasis mode to preserve you. Time will stop within the

  stasis field. If someone one homes in one your beacon before it goes stasis, you may be picked up. Otherwise you’re under stasis indefinitely-alive, but unable to call for help.

  “Thank you for that, Airman.” Tokushima eyed him dryly.

  “Just doing my job, Maam.”

  “Woolly Bully!” Parsons snapped from the cockpit and I could feel the craft alight itself, aloft quickly into the airstreams and high lights of dawn, rushing like a puppy to the cumulonimbus and the high places in the stratosphere. Parsons delight was palpable to me; behind us a shimmering white line, purposeful action made tangible arcing up and across the sky. Below us marshmallow clouds now, subdued and silent in their perfect patterns and spiral motions over the seas and the volcanoes of Caldris.

  Far and away…. Below us my world, spinning, turning, its geographies like abstract speckled studies of color and light; above us the planets of Caldris System. The sky becomes black and the sun a star and still; from Parsons, wonder and joy; ever and always the miracle of flight for primates such ourselves, the staid gleaming of dreams ineffable since our dawn of self awareness when our distant ancestors, worlds away, looked out upon the hummingbirds and eagles with envy and impossible aspiration; to fly.

  And thus we set upon the worlds, to fly, in search of our Princess.

  Parsons’ calls to his co-pilot were less poetic than his joy, but they too were a form of phonetic poetry of flight: “Apogee reached, increasing thrust, apparent solar wind five, radiation shields five, current velocity at target, orbit traffic control clear, flight path gravity assist off Electra, gravity assist off Maia to jump point EMC5.”

  And thus we jump skipped among to moons to point where we could shoot deep through the wall of space-time and cheat the laws of physics for a fast forward to the distant corners of the star system in a day instead of months or years.

  Sleep came again with Tokushima’s radiant glow (with echoes to another floating world, Japan, Edo period) on one side of me, and Hammerstein’s sharp-shooter dead eye dick focus (with echoes of John Henry and a heavy metal sledge) on the other. They my surrogate parents now, with badges and high ene
rgy particle weapons as big as my arms.

  I was twelve, and that was as magnificent as it gets. Gonna be missing school for a while. Sorry (not really).

  Sleep, dream, sail away, beyond the tangerine seas and volcanoes, dream, the moons of Caldris, the daughter of Atlas, sail away.

  Somewhere in the dream Parsons gives the command, “Swirl the Mesons, Buck! We’re breaking for Hyper!”

  And all the stars in a jewel box, darkly.

  Neil Thacker

  Standing in the ruins at the great starport at New Galen I came for the first time to that nihilistic place where as Ecclesiastes said, all is vanity. Among the crumbled stones I picked up a broken brick. In the still radioactive ruins lie the ultimate futility of life and reason, so many people-come and gone-and where to go from there, and what should I respond to this inevitable wall of dark and unknowable fate? Yet Einstein claims time is a continuum; the past in all its beauty, struggle, folly, and grandeur somehow remains. Perhaps it is good there come a rest from this existence, and dipping into the well of quanta we become again?

  Foolish musing! Still-philosophers and Priest kings debate upon the epochs these eternal questions-one must answer this present darkness. I didn’t have an answer, so told my droid to play Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue as loud as his speakers would, back into the ruins. Music came again to the long era of devastation, a small revolt against man’s fate. I imagined the ghosts of New Galen danced that day, grateful that I slapped back at despair. Perhaps they did. –Princess Clairissa Maggio.

  Parsons woke me with a yell from the cockpit, “Ba-boomah! Thank you Great Space Ghost we are home and dry, normal space again, Oort cloud below us, above us only sky!”His co-pilot (I forget his name, perhaps intentionally, he was quite the irritant) was lamenting loudly, “I really hate, hate, hate the OortCloud. What a dump.”