Omnipotence: Book I: Odyssey

by Geoff Gaywood

  Omnipotence

  Book 1

  Geoff Gaywood

  Copyright © 2017 Geoff Gaywood

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, eventsand incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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  Contents

  1 A Hole in the Sky

  2 Wild Oats

  3 The Team Comes Together

  4 Into Virtual Reality

  5 The Passion of Julia Rogers

  6 Ethnicity Ubiquitous

  7 The Paragon and her Context

  8 The Grilling

  9 Prometheus is Born

  10 Underway

  11 Pandora Strikes

  12 Bad Salad

  13 Uneasily to the Threshold

  14 Into the Wormhole

  15 Assault

  16 The Wayward 19

  17 An Unwelcome Discovery

  18 Fire Red 1

  19 The Test

  20 Stargazers and Dreamers

  21 Planet Omega 16-3

  22 Footfall on Ceres

  23 Phase Two

  24 The Safari

  25 La Cucina Ceresana

  26 Mayhem on Prometheus

  27 Chang’s Descent

  28 Sombre News

  29 Dark Shadow

  30 War Games

  31 Silver Streak

  32 The Truth in the Parable

  33 The Battle of Ceres

  34 Shaping the Future

  35 The Parting

  36 Omnipotence Theory

  1

  A Hole in the Sky

  Arlette raised her head off her sweaty wrists and blurrily surveyed the expanse of soft white sand before her.

  “Henri, where the hell’s my piña colada?”

  There was a grunt from the direction of the brightly painted bar just across the beach, then a shadow fell across her upper body.

  “Your phone ’as been buzzin’,” said Henri.

  She rolled over and smiled up at him.

  “Come down here and smother me with that sublime black body of yours.”

  He dropped onto one knee, carefully balanced the glasses on the sand under the shade, and pulled her up into his arms as though she were practically weightless. He caressed her face with such tenderness that she could have purred with pleasure, and she opened her eyes to soak up his great brown eyes with their huge, silky lashes. There followed a long, languid kiss that left her limp and breathing deeply.

  He laid her down on the sand, sat up and pulled her phone from his trunks.

  “You ’ad three calls,” he announced, “all from the same … from Washington.”

  “I know,” said Arlette quietly. “I’d have let them through if I had wanted to” – she pointed at the finely textured little black disk of her earphone – “but I’m not receptive right now – to phone calls.”

  Henri grinned. ‘A powerhouse, this woman,’ he thought to himself. ‘Tender, almost vulnerable one minute, utterly and unquestionably in command the next.’

  “We’re going to enjoy the rest of our day together – to the full,” said Arlette with exaggerated lust.

  At 8.00 a.m. the following morning, the breakfasters on the terrace of the Acapulco Paradise hotel witnessed the soundless arrival of a craft that appeared from nowhere and hissed to a standstill on the grass before them. Arlette, dressed immaculately in the pale blue uniform of a colonel in the International Space Exploration Agency, stepped smartly across the lawn towards it. Her mouth barely moved as she responded to her incoming call. “Yes. Who? Oh.” The machine almost imperceptibly engulfed her as she reached it.

  Seconds later it was gone. A wave crashed on the beach.

  The birds, only slightly confused, began to sing again.

  Arlette sat back, tightly belted in her contoured seat, as the machine hurtled into the stratosphere. She did not glance to the left or right, but intensely studied the plush, pinkish padding above her and turned over in her mind the sole piece of data she had just been provided with – General Lee, Special Operations, 9.00 a.m.

  ‘Why is he in Washington?’ she thought. ‘And why do I have to be snatched off the beach with no notice?’

  No explanation was obvious to her and, conceding to herself that she would find out soon enough, she relaxed into a comforting reverie that began with her recalling a hilarious story that Henri had recounted over dinner the previous evening. It had begun with his mother in Haiti, a chicken, a priest and some underwear. It had gone on and on, articulated in his charming fractured English, becoming more and more absurd until the tears were running down her face and her throat ached from laughing. “Oh, Henri, I do love you!” she had blurted out, and instantly regretted it.

  But Henri knew exactly what she meant, which was not what she had said, and anyway he was far too savvy to allow a slip like that to spoil the mood of the evening. So he had taken her hand, pulled her graciously out of her chair, and walked her along the beach as the light of an exquisitely beautiful honey-coloured moon had danced on the sea beside them. At the end of the beach he had stood her against a palm tree, given her one of those deep, languorous kisses and then, without any hesitation or change in his almost perpetually joyful expression, he had lifted her off her feet and made love to her, there and then.

  She sighed and shifted in her seat. It had irritated her intensely when he had told her later that she had “yelped like a puppy”. But in the end he was just a man, a source of entertainment, social and physical, nothing to get overly sentimental about. Their relationship had sprung from a chance meeting, his perfect manners and his irresistible banter. It had barely touched the cultural or intellectual, and yet there was a tantalising mystery about him. He was somehow deep and powerful under all that polish. Arlette cleared her head.

  The machine juddered, the engine note changed and then died. A door slid open.

  “Good morning, Colonel Piccard,” said a fresh-faced young lieutenant with an impeccable uniform and an obsequious expression. “Welcome to ISEA Washington HQ. You have twelve minutes to freshen up. General Lee will see you in his office.”

  Arlette ‘freshened up’. She followed the young lieutenant down a corridor lit by a kaleidoscope of moving images of space equipment and events, breathing deeply and thinking to herself, ‘I don’t really need this. I am thirty-seven years old, have a brilliant career behind me, I’ve been decorated for gallantry and I’m happy with myself. I am not going to be sold some tedious mission requiring years of self-deprivation and h
ardship for some obscure purpose.’

  She stiffened as she entered General Lee’s spacious, brilliantly lit office.

  He was standing with his back to her, looking at one of perhaps a dozen screens of ongoing space operations. He was a tall, elegant Han Chinese, perhaps fifty, with a great mop of very black hair, wearing a heavily decorated uniform.

  “Good morning, Colonel,” he said brightly. “I am so sorry to snatch you away from your well-deserved leave. We’ll have you back in Acapulco later today. Please sit down.”

  Arlette sat.

  The General glanced at a file on his monitor, frowned, and then came and sat with her, an expression of good-natured attention on his face as though he was about to be sold something he actually wanted.

  “What was it about Acapulco that attracted you?” he asked.

  Arlette surveyed this innocuous question with some suspicion – he most certainly knew where she had been in the previous three months, but she answered honestly.

  “I love the place and felt there would be no one there who might recognise me and chase me around,” she said simply, “and it worked.”

  “Oh good,” said the General, and, after a pause, “I notice you are not wearing your Crimson Star.”

  Arlette raised her eyebrows. “I haven’t got round to it, General. It’s rather – prominent – and I’m not overly fond of ceremonial trinketry.”

  The General’s face hardened. He rose and walked back to his monitor.

  Rather testily, he said, “Colonel Piccard, you have recently been awarded the most prestigious decoration with which this great global institution can honour its heroes. There are no other living recipients. It says on the record that you showed exceptional courage in the face of almost certain disaster, that you personally intervened medically to save the lives of two severely injured crew-mates, that you showed extraordinary ingenuity and presence of mind to resolve complex technical problems in conditions of extreme personal danger and that you were instrumental in saving the Dalian space station and nineteen of its twenty-four crew members.”

  Arlette looked at the floor.

  “You will wear your Crimson Star out of respect for this institution and your five dead crew-mates, and you will not allow your personal vanity to detract from your responsibilities as an example of the qualities we aspire to.”

  “Yes, General,” said Arlette in the most deferential tone she could muster.

  General Lee returned to the chair next to her with the same good-natured expression back on his face.

  “Colonel Piccard,” he said, “you are of course well aware of the progressive deterioration in Earth’s climate, and the mission of the ISEA to address the issue of potential alternative habitats.”

  Arlette nodded.

  “You are to take command of a very important mission,” he said calmly.

  “Where to?” asked Arlette rather guardedly.

  “To a solar system in the Omega 16 sector of the galaxy which contains two rocky planets harbouring conditions considered to be in the range of human habitation.”

  Arlette started to laugh. “Is this a cosmology test, General? Omega 16 is at least 10,000 light years away. It is far beyond our technical capabilities to…”

  “No it isn’t,” said the General, “We’ve done it.”

  Arlette stared at him in utter disbelief. This had to be some joke, or some kind of virtual exercise.

  “But we can’t travel faster than the speed of light…” It was a helplessly redundant comment.

  “No, we can’t,” agreed the General.

  A pause.

  “Then you have a shortcut?” said Arlette, her eyes widening slowly as realisation crept up on her.

  “Yes,” said the General.

  There was a long silence.

  “How did you do it?” asked Arlette, adjusting herself to a dimension of theoretical thought where she had often played before, but that she had never considered could have approached the realms of reality in her lifetime or the conceivable future.

  “We created what is euphemistically called a wormhole, although that is hardly an appropriate term for a conduit large and stable enough to enable a spaceship to pass from one area of the universe to another.”

  Arlette considered this carefully. “Never mind the complexity of positioning and orientating such a monumental contrivance, you would need an astronomical amount of energy to do that, equivalent to…” She thought hard for a second or two. “Equivalent to the mass of a sizable star,” she said, smiling incredulously.

  “No, not if you can focus the energy to do just what you want to do and avoid the wasteful pyrotechnics. A small planet, or a large satellite would do,” said the General as if he was also considering an interesting theoretical possibility.

  Arlette stiffened sharply.

  “A moon?”

  “Yes,” said General Lee, as though he were getting close to conceding a game of ‘I spy’.

  “Which one?” demanded Arlette.

  “Proteus,” said General Lee quietly.

  Arlette was outraged.

  “YOU’VE BLOWN UP ONE OF NEPTUNE’S MOONS TO MAKE A HOLE IN THE SKY? FUCK MY BOOTS! HAS NO ONE NOTICED?”

  “It’s been one of my trickier diplomatic missions to convince national governments to suspend academic observations of Neptune,” said the General with some feeling. “But after all we are pursuing an objective here that has their unconditional support.”

  “Like what?” demanded Arlette.

  “The identification of a long-term home for the human race once this planet becomes uninhabitable due to climate change.” said General Lee with some obvious impatience.

  Arlette was breathing deeply. “What about the amateur astronomers?” she asked. “The guys combing the sky for something new? How did you keep them quiet?”

  The General stiffened slightly. “That is being dealt with on a national level,” he said with slightly flaky nonchalance.

  Arlette arched her eyebrows.

  “There have been no wet operations, if that is what you are alluding to,” he added.

  She let it go.

  “So there is a direct passage to a planetary system 10,000 light years away hidden behind Neptune?” she observed. “Cool!”

  “We have brought about a severe and targeted localised distortion of space–time, or LDST, which has resolved itself into a stable intragalactic shortcut between two defined coordinates. Obviously it is not hidden behind Neptune any more because Neptune is following a defined orbital path, which, I am happy to say, has not shown any significant deviation since the, er … transformation of Proteus,” said the General, in what sounded very much like ‘the official version’.

  “So it’s just hanging outside there? Is it detectable?”

  “Of course it is if you know what you are looking for, but, if you don’t; not easily, no.”

  “So,” Arlette continued with her inquisition, “how did you know whether you had identified a suitable planet?”

  The General took a deep breath. “We knew that it was a suitable environment 10,000 years ago, because we could analyse the radiation which reached us directly. Of course we had to send a robot there to check in more detail, and to test the stability of the shortcut. The mission was successful. It returned most of the data we needed.”

  “But how could you monitor and control a device 10,000 light years away?” asked Arlette, still grappling with the enormity of this apparent accomplishment, which she could not get her head around with any astrophysical theory she was aware of.

  “We used the shortcut as a conduit for communications. We positioned repeater satellites at the mouth of each end of the shortcut to bounce the signals to and from wherever the robot was in Omega 16.” The General shrugged. It was obvious.

  “So, you want me to go there?” Arlette was beginning to sense the biggest sinking feeling she had ever experienced.

  “Yes, we want you to command a mission to Omega 16, assess th
e suitability of the two candidate rocky planets for human habitation, set up bases that are secure and can be expanded on subsequent missions, and bring your crew and ship safely back to Earth to report.” General Lee was wearing his good-natured expression again.

  “How long will it take?” asked Arlette, returning to her normal, clipped tone of communication.

  “Thirty days’ familiarisation and set-up, 320 days operational.” And before Arlette could articulate her next question, he added, “Your ship is approaching completion at the lunar construction platform. Virtual training starts at the Shanghai facility next Thursday. The only task you need to focus on in the meantime is crew selection. You can take the recommendations and profiles back with you on the shuttle device to Acapulco. Any further questions?”

  “Yes. Do I get to vote on this?”

  General Lee looked her straight in the eyes, wearily.

  “You are without doubt the right candidate for this job, and you are about to become the greatest navigational explorer in the history of our civilisation. You will have every resource you require.”

  He sat back and smiled. That was that, as far as he was concerned.

  Arlette rose slowly to her feet.

  “OK,” she said.

  2

  Wild Oats

  “Colonel Piccard, please remove your jacket.”

  Arlette slipped off her jacket and handed it over.

  The young lieutenant handed her a replacement and a spare in a plastic sack. There was an addition to the medal bar, a broad scarlet band with five gold stars on it. Arlette thought it gross, but she buttoned her lip. She had agreed to wear it and it was of no further consequence.

  A few minutes later she was buckling herself into the shuttle, and as the whine of the machine’s engines rose for take-off, she had the entire structure of the crew of her new command displayed above her holographically.

  There was not a single rookie. All had had spaceflight experience and had fulfilled their roles with distinction. All were trained in spaceflight practice and had shown aptitude to perform under stressed conditions. Their professional specialisations were carefully selected: