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The Sunseed Saga

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by Brett Bam




  The Sunseed Saga

  By Brett Bam

  Copyright

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to any real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or means, without the prior written permission of the author.

  Copyright Brett Bam 1999

  Acknowledgements

  There are several people I would like to thanks for their assistance in this work, without them and their support this story would never have been completed. Andrew Kinnear, the only true genius I have ever met. Douglas Mc Cusker, who first helped coin the idea of Kulen De Sol while we were young. Kevin Wright, killer of rabbits. Darrell Bam, for the unbridled enthusiasm which always motivates me to write more. Lisa Chant, for her creative contributions and without whom I would still be struggling at the jigsaw. Eric Imbs for the inspiration and motivation.

  And finally, for Amelia and Isabella who have taught me true joy.

  For Gumby, who rolled while I wrote

  Prologue

  1000 years before the flare

  Earth, the way it used to be.

  Cities dotted the surface of the planet, each bordered by a great diversity of thriving wilderness. The oceans, blue, clean and filled with life did much to feed the world. Energy was clean, cheap and plentiful. The biosphere was healthier than it had been in centuries thanks to the actions of an enlightened and educated populace. Poverty, famine and disease were universally absent, eradicated by the concerted effort of a united civilisation. They were determined to avoid the terrible societal blunders of the twentieth and twenty first centuries, which led to the end of American hegemony and a global resurgence of conflict.

  The climax was a limited nuclear exchange between China and the United States late in the twenty first century. Two nuclear weapons were deployed, turning Beijing and Washington D.C. into irradiated wastelands. It was only through massive international pressure on both warring states that a further exchange was prevented.

  The world reeled in shock and horror as hundreds of millions of people died. Social media transmitted the images of suffering everywhere. The horror of the attack went viral, and the impact was felt globally.

  As a result of the exchange, the people of the world began to abhor government-sanctioned violence, terrified of the very real threat of nuclear annihilation. Pictures of the mushroom clouds and ruined cities became the most discussed and displayed images of all time. A worldwide movement of pacifism led to billions of weapons being destroyed. Cease-fires were declared. It was a turning point in history. The war of the world that had been bouncing around the planet from Europe to Africa to the Middle East finally fizzled out and died amidst the peace and love movements that dominated the twenty second century.

  The next 300 years heralded a peace and vibrancy beyond the wildest dreams of any society.

  Understanding and communication ruled the day. People stopped judging by skin color or belief structures or differences in culture. Religions began to respect their disparities and preached unconditional tolerance, love and, above all, forgiveness.

  By 2350 the world’s population had grown to a staggering 19 billion human beings.

  The earth was full to bursting with a noisy humanity which had survived everything life, luck and fate could throw at it. Eventually, Life, Luck and Fate became a popular catch-phrase and soon blossomed into a statement of belief in humanity and its potential in the face of adversity.

  Diseases were conquered, the borders of nations blurred, science thrived. Space exploration became a priority on an overburdened Earth, and soon the planet had a thriving wealth of orbital facilities including space stations, research and development platforms, industrial processing plants, and captured asteroids.

  Mankind finally became a multi-planet species when, in 2143, a scientific colony was established on Mars.

  It was a time of peace and prosperity. Education was universal, cultures thrived, travel to all corners of the world was free and fast. For the first time ever, people enjoyed a nobility that no generation before had known. Crime, poverty and disease were things of the ancient past. Ignorance was replaced by enlightenment, love and laughter were common everywhere, and hatred and violence were met with zero tolerance by a global community of healthy, educated, culturally diverse and accepting human beings. The true golden age of mankind had begun.

  And then, with no warning, true disaster struck.

  On the 16th of June, 2414, our Sun pulsed a single cataclysmic tremor, as if it was a ringing bell. A coronal mass ejection, a massive storm of solar wind and magnetic fields, swelled up from its centre. The growing bubble stretched the Sun’s apparent size tenfold.

  Then the bubble burst and sent a surge of hard radiation outward from the photosphere in a solar-system-engulfing cloud that swept outwards at relativistic speeds. The wavefront was immeasurably wide, erupting from the Sun and washing over the elliptical plane and the small blue marble of Earth like a wave engulfing a pebble on a beach.

  The elementary particles thrust from the sun blazed and burned. They seared the atmosphere, creating in the first moments great auroras that were visible in every sky in every part of the planet. Night and daytime skies blazed and flickered like flames. When the rays penetrated the scant protection of the atmosphere, Earth’s deep blue and white face was torn and shredded, blackened beyond recognition. The heat-wave on Earth caused the sea to rise up in a boiling curtain of water and steam which swallowed whole continents. The Amazon and Mississippi rivers and the Great Lakes in North America and their surrounding farmlands became a single sheet of burning matter, no longer recognisable from space. The Caribbean Sea and great parts of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans boiled and were turned to steam. All life on and in those two oceans was killed instantly. Nations toppled and corroded into nothingness in an instant.

  Left to its own means the earth would, in time, become another barren planet, like Mars. Its atmosphere stripped away by the Sun, it would drift soullessly through the void of space on its eternal path toward final destruction in the pit of the monster that had so grievously wounded it.

  All hope was lost.

  And yet out of the ash and ruin and death grew hope. In Australia and Asia, on pacific islands, people lived, despite the odds.

  Mars was unscathed, but stranded, cut off suddenly by an ocean of radiation.

  In orbital platforms and moon-bases, in orbiting space-bound rock and the vacuum between, in covered bunkers and strong buildings, in buried conduits far beneath the dirt of the world and the depths of the oceans, in hardened lines of communication safe from the Sun’s wrath, our machines survived. Built by the advanced science of the dead Earth, our machines were intelligent. They had strength and stamina when humans did not. They stood and faced the new dark day when humans did not. They came out from their basements, garages and caves and looked upon the tragedy. Rescue protocols went into effect and the machines began to search for survivors, a simple child searching for its lost parents. They gave the remnants of humanity the means to recover. They built planes and trucks and trains. Harsh clattering machines that were different to what had been before. Hard, vicious machines that could survive the hellish landscape. They built safe havens, deep caverns hidden away from the Sun’s wrath and radiation. They collected what was left of mankind and transported us to a place where they built rockets capable of achieving orbit.

  They evacuated the earth. They gathered the last sad remnants of humanity from every desperate hiding place and lifted them into orbit.

  They had a mission, a prerogative. They pursued that end with a single-minded de
termination that shamed the best attempts of humanity in the thousands of years of our history. They had no economy to worry over, they had no greed, they had no selfishness, no individual needs to pollute their works. They had a single goal, a single work ethic. They had a single unalterable and sacrosanct set of rules. They called it the Protocol and it ruled them all. It was how they named themselves, the identity they took.

  The Protocol used the orbiting rocks of Earth’s former space-bound society. The damaged stones in their decaying orbits were quickly salvaged before they plunged to Earth and caused further hurt. A massive operation began there while men still suffered on the ground. The small population of humanity still alive trickled upward into the new cities, sheltered from the blistering and murderous heat shining from the Sun. All told a little over a billion survivors were crammed into 23 orbiting asteroids. People plucked from the jaws of hell.

  From the abandoned surface of the world they shone among the stars as bright sparks sliding across the sky. There, despite unbearable overcrowding, people collected themselves. They nurtured the small bud of Homo sapiens left in the heavens and prayed to Life, Luck and Fate it would one day bloom again.

  And that it did. The chamber cities were restocked with water, earth and air. Each of the chamber cities became an ark, carrying what was left of the world’s cracked and shattered biosphere.

  The populations of the asteroids were unique in the history of mankind. There were approximately 300, 000 people per square kilometre. Living conditions were horrendous, and all were poverty stricken. Famine and disease were rife in the first few months but they were balanced by the absolute absence of violence. Human life had become most precious and no person would lift a hand in anger to another. They were all survivors. They were all human. People had nothing but each other. They were united as no generation before had ever been,

  a melting pot for the human race. Within a few generations, humanity became so mixed that the predominant skin colour was not white, or black, or yellow. Instead it was a concoction of them all. Most people had a light brown complexion and it became fashionable to have hair all the colours of the rainbow.

  They had grown into something new, the Caramel Culture.

  Life, Luck and Fate grew beyond a simple expression to be the basis of a new belief system, God was dead, along with the world since He had abandoned humanity. They were responsible for themselves and answered only to the vagaries of Life or Luck or Fate.

  The new men looked down on their broken home and despaired. For generations it was like this - men, women and children creating a legacy in the sky while they yearned for the planet below.

  But eventually the newer generations began to look away from the old dead earth and see the bounty that space offered. There were entire planets and moons, worlds for the taking. Mankind could spread and grow. They could become a new thing, a creature of the sky. So the Caramel Culture turned their back on their benighted planet. They turned and faced the stars, and the great treasures they found there fixed their attention. With the Protocol’s help they began to leave Earth and establish colonies in far away places.

  Within a hundred years of their flight from Earth, the asteroid belt had a sparse but active population, and people lived in the orbits of most of the solar system’s planets and moons.

  Despite the odds, Mars still lived and prospered, although they eventually grew in a very different direction.

  The Protocol worked on the ground below. They worked shrouded in darkness and poison, in an environment deadly to humans.

  And a thousand years passed by.

  Chapter 1

  Dalys

  80 days before the flare

  Captain Dalys Xristian looked up from her work, she wiped the sweat from her brow and puffed hair out of her eyes. The Ribbontail’s port side loomed above. The metallic blue sheen of the hull casing was damaged and scarred and the harsh white lighting of the gantry high above enhanced every nick and bump. She was using a data rod on its scan function to examine the hull’s integrity, looking for hairline stress fractures that were invisible to the naked eye.

  Luck, Life and Fate knew the Ribbontail went through enough heavy thrust to justify her worries. The task was enormously intricate, and by rights she should have had a dockside maintenance crew tender for it, but the Ribbontail had to keep a low profile in this port. If the authorities knew Dalys was here they would go to extraordinary lengths to get her into custody.

  The reason she had chosen the port was its tremendous size. They were berthed under a false ID to escape attention, and where relying on the sheer volume of traffic to stop anyone paying too close attention to what, she hoped, looked like just another tug under maintenance. A large crew of Korporatsie, the Martian version of corporate police, swarming all over her ship was the last thing she wanted, so she tolerated the inconveniences caused by an increased workload.

  Sighing at the sheer amount of work left, she bent her head to the task once more. Her thoughts were occupied by the decision to do one more H2O run before they quit the Mars system. The trips were highly profitable and more than justified their dangerous proximity to the Korporatsie, but every cycle they stayed on Deimos brought them closer to the moment their subterfuge was uncovered.

  While it was spinning its way around the sun, Mars had approached conjunction with the Ribbontail’s home sector in the asteroid belt. It would only be in this highly populated vicinity for a matter of standard weeks, creating a small window of productive and profitable opportunity which Dalys intended to use as best she could, despite the presence of violence and despotic terrorism wrought by the Martian military corporation.

  Her crew had already completed two of the three jobs they could schedule before Mars’ orbit carried the planet into a greater western elongation, too far from their home sector of space to warrant any further trips. They had accelerated several million tons of ice and had a contract for the next run all set up. Dalys had hoped to accelerate a fourth load before Mars receded to unmanageable distance, but now they were out of time.

  If the Korporatsie caught her doing what she was doing, they would hang her for sure. The ice she had slung was tagged with a package that would detonate after a month of drifting through empty space. The small explosion would alter the trajectory of the massive iceberg by a slight margin and it would miss its intended target, a Korporatsie fortification positioned in the belt nearby. A beacon would sound about three months later, and the community on Saturn would collect the iceberg, without paying for the trajectory information. Essentially, the Korporatsie was paying her to steal their water. In spite of the threat of hanging, she smiled to herself.

  Her crew was starting to struggle under the restrictions she’d placed on them, and cabin fever exacerbated the situation. They had to keep a low profile, because she needed their stay to be as inconspicuous as possible, which was not the easiest thing to do considering the wild personalities of her crew and the variety of temptations on offer.

  Deimos was a pleasure ground, designed to cater to the diverse needs of the spacers and crewmen who stopped by on a regular, and irregular, basis. It was outside the strict moral laws of the Korporatsie and, as such, its bars, clubs and casinos were wildly debaucherous, providing satisfaction to every perverted desire of the men and women who travelled there. It was ignored by the normally morally uptight Martians.

  Their war-based paranoia placed a severe limitation on how they did business with the rest of humanity. All of Mars was tightly controlled by DNA scans, gated communities, Korporatsie guards and strict moral laws supported by socially accepted behavioural constraints. The constant daily routine of moving from one protected atmosphere to another through the complex systems of airlocks and underground habitats prohibited free movement of the populace and created a strangely submissive mentality in the average citizen. All the authorities had to do was shut down a tube or an airlock and entire swathes of the population could be immobilised with no way out. It was i
mportant for them to not panic in situations like that, so they were taught from birth to have complete faith in their controllers, to surrender their lives and their will entirely. It was a necessary evil in a world of fragile biospheres and huge crowds. The people could not be allowed to run riot and that meant harsh and spartan discipline.

  Here on Deimos, however, the staunch procedures of the Korporatsie were relaxed. The Martians needed this type of interplanetary interaction to turn a profit. The twin cities of Swift and Voltaire on the dark side of the little moon were built in the typical fashion of Korporatsie efficiency. Buried into the craters after which they were named, the tourist traps were nestled in the deep depressions and covered by woven plasteel monofilament lattice domes. They were low gravity pleasure-domes, cheap and gaudy and drowning in depravity on every level, from sex dens and gladiator circuses, to rape and murder on the streets. People flocked here in their millions to play in the ultimate Sin City, while a small amount of the wealthiest Martians ascended to the little moon to indulge themselves in ways forbidden on the surface.

  It was a haven for off-worlders and aliens. Here on Deimos the Community of Man was welcomed and entertained, no matter the state of the Endless War raging outside.

  If anyone worried Dalys, it was Moabi Mahlambo; the big black man had once been a slave on Mars, one of the warrior elite, bred for battle in the belt. Mars was his home, the land of his birth, yet he was classed as a deserter and war criminal by the Korporatsie. He had to be particularly quiet when they were here, and with good reason. A death sentence hung over his head if he was discovered, it would be a nasty public spectacle – most probably a grisly death in the gladiator circuses.

  So, to alleviate the tension, Dalys increased their workload and kept them all challenged and busy with the most complex maintenance tasks she could come up with. For the most part it worked; they took their time off while sailing between atmospheres, distracting themselves with education and entertainment, but remained confined to ship while on the moon. Dalys worried and planned and debated with herself as she played her lasers over the hull of the ship, patiently looking for minute fractures in both her vessel and her crew.

 

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