Destiny’s Crucible
Book 1
Cast Under an Alien Sun
by
Olan Thorensen
Copyrighty 2016
All rights reserved
The is an original work of fiction. Any resemblance to people and places is coincidental.
ISBN 978-0-9972878-0-6
Maps and More
For maps to help orient the reader to the planet Anyar, a web site is under construction at www.olanthorensen.com. Additional maps, background, side stories, and information on the series will be added as the story evolves.
A list of major characters is given in the back of the book.
Crucible (a.t. Merriam-Webster)
: a pot in which metals or other substances are heated to a very high temperature or melted
: a difficult test or challenge
: a place or situation that forces people to change or make difficult decisions
“It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.”
― William Shakespeare
“One meets his destiny often in the road he takes to avoid it.”
― French Proverb
“It is a mistake to try to look too far ahead. The chain of destiny can only be grasped one link at a time.”
― Winston Churchill
“Only in the crucible of strife does God burn away the impurities to reveal the essence of a person, an inner core that might otherwise have remained hidden for an entire life.”
― Rhaedri Brison, Caedellium, Planet Anyar.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: A Change in Destination
Chapter 2: Alive
Chapter 3: Planet Anyar
Chapter 4: Recovery
Chapter 5: A Gathering Storm
Chapter 6: Acceptance
Chapter 7: Caedellium Life
Chapter 8: Thorns
Chapter 9: Interview with the Abbot
Chapter 10: Buldorian Mercenaries
Chapter 11: Yozef Learns about the Narthani
Chapter 12: What to Do?
Chapter 13: Great Hall of the Keelans
Chapter 14: The Snarling Graeko
Chapter 15: Chemistry
Chapter 16: Guinea Pigs
Chapter 17: Impact
Chapter 18: Supplicant to Tycoon
Chapter 19: A House of His Own
Chapter 20: Maera
Chapter 21: Keelan Justice
Chapter 22: The Buldorians
Chapter 23: Earth Fades
Chapter 24: A World beyond Abersford
Chapter 25: Ignition
Chapter 26: Fertilizer
Chapter 27: A Close Encounter
Chapter 28: Not to Be
Chapter 29: Could Be Worse
Chapter 30: The Raid
Chapter 31: Panic and Preparation
Chapter 32: Battle for St. Sidryn’s
Chapter 33: Aftermath
Chapter 34: Not Over
Major Characters
Chapter 1: A Change in Destination
The plane lurched, hitting the first pocket of air shear. He cinched his seatbelt tighter, and his grip on the armrests ratcheted up two notches. He wanted to close his eyes but instead looked out the window at the last of the mountains. A dot in the sky appeared above the distant horizon, then zoomed larger, expanding as if to engulf the plane!
Before his brain reacted, he catapulted forward. The seatbelt cut into his abdomen, his view whirled, and he slammed back in the seat as the Boeing 737 disintegrated.
The belt held him to the seat as his torso, arms, and legs gyrated. Something hammered against his legs, turning him toward the girl in the seat beside him. Her eyes wide, she opened her mouth, but her scream was lost among other noises assaulting his ears. The man on the aisle was—gone. The spot where he’d been sitting had turned into blue sky, brown and green earth, and . . . pieces.
He tumbled, wind tearing at his face. He had glimpses of open sky, felt freezing cold, and gasped for breath. Intense pain accompanied impressions of people, baggage, seats, metal sections, and the shock of contact with something, and then . . .
***
Flight 4382
“We continue with boarding of United Flight 4382, direct from San Francisco to Chicago. Group 3 may now board.”
What Joe Colsco heard was something closer to, “Wek you board tid ight flity-ate-and-tuh, wrecked farm saloforsco shillack. Grope eemaywo ord.”
He wondered if they deliberately trained the announcers to sound like they had a mouth full of mush. It took inquiries to a nearby elderly woman with gray hair and a man in a cowboy hat and boots for the three of them to come up with a plausible translation. Reasonably confident their group was called to board, all three joined the queue. They shuffled forward, presented their boarding passes, and snaked down the gangway.
As the line of passengers reached the aircraft door, Joe looked up at blue sky and fluffy clouds, then back at the aluminum cylinder where he would spend the next four hours. The plane looked so small against the vast sky. Sweat beaded his forehead and plastered the shirt to his skin.
Why am I so nervous about flying?
It certainly wasn’t because of the conference in Chicago. While it was his first presentation at a major scientific meeting, he knew his results were impressive, and once he started the talk, he could ignore an audience of any size.
Inside the plane, passengers jostled for space. Joe’s apprehension persisted. The elderly woman took her seat, then Joe went to his row. He had a window seat. He shoved his bag into the overhead bin and sat his 5 foot, 10 inch, 175 pounds into 28A, slid his laptop and a folder into the seat pocket in front of him, and crammed against the back of the seat.
His attention drifted to Chicago and the huge annual weeklong American Society of Chemists (ASC) gathering. Scores of simultaneous presentations would be held in rooms that varied in size from hardly more than a large bedroom to an auditorium holding several thousand.
He’d based his presentation on a paper that one of the better chemistry journals had accepted for publication, contingent on what the editor considered minor revisions. He had resubmitted those revisions to the journal two days ago. The title of his talk, “A New Approach to Synthesizing Derivatives of the Thiopyran Class of Heterocyclic Rings,” might be nap-inducing, according to his girlfriend Julie, but Dr. Ellsworth, his graduate school advisor, thought the title and focus appropriate for the setting. Joe had developed a novel method of synthesizing cyclic bases, a class of compounds that included both the information-carrying parts of DNA and RNA and other compounds with important industrial and medical applications. Joe and Ellsworth had submitted a patent application and expected significant interest from chemical companies.
In two months, Joe would give another talk, this one at the Western Chapter of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference in Sacramento. At this catch-all meeting for every branch of science and for any social and political issues impinged on by science, many presentations would be less about hard science results and more about implications and speculations.
Ellsworth referred to them as “pseudoscience,” but Joseph didn’t care. The meeting gave him a chance to relate his research to a topic he found more interesting than his ACS talk. His AAAS talk, “Alternatives to Standard Heterocyclic Bases in DNA of Exobiosystems,” would address one of the basic questions in biochemistry and exobiology: whether the four bases of Earth DNA (adenine [A], thymine [T], guanosine [G], and cytosine [C]) were required or the result of randomness in the first organisms that evolved on Earth. Could life have settled on other hete
rocyclic bases? A, T, G, and X? Or even X, X, X, and X, where each X was a different base from Earth’s ATGC?
Joe’s novel path to base synthesis used conditions both relevant to efficient commercial production and similar to the environment theorized to have existed on Earth as life developed. He had already prepared presentations for both meetings, but his focus this day was the ACS gathering in Chicago.
Getting his advisor’s agreement to reveal their latest data at the Chicago meeting hadn’t been automatic.
“Joe, you know what can happen if you reveal results before publication. I know the good reviews are encouraging and the requested changes minor, but you can never tell for sure. It’s always best to wait for formal acceptance before talking at a meeting.”
While Joe had pretended to take everything Ellsworth said seriously, he knew Ellsworth always drummed into everyone in his lab horror stories of people being scooped by trolls at meetings who hurried home and published preliminary results to claim priority of publication. Joe understood the concern. Revealing approaches, much less results, before publication had a checkered history in science.
Joe’s reasoning and his insistence the conference was a chance for him to impress the academic community assuaged Ellsworth, and the title and summary were submitted to the meeting’s organizers. Joe only felt minor guilt at his lapse in honesty. It was not the attendees from academia he was interested in impressing, but those from industry—particularly, chemical companies. Joe’s ambitions were limited to an interesting job that paid well, a secure future, and marriage in suburbia with two kids. He had seen enough of the rat race of grant applications and the politics of academia and was even less interested in teaching the same classes to cookie-cutter students, year after year. Neither Ellsworth, whose lab he worked in, nor the Berkeley Chemistry Department would be pleased if he left early. Their goal consisted of churning out PhDs after years of benefiting from cheap graduate student labor.
But that’s their problem, Joe thought, comfortable in his small subterfuge.
In theory, only the journal editor and the three reviewers knew details of the paper. In practice, word of the paper was already circulating. Joe had been contacted by two chemical company recruiters with job offers, each at a salary comparable to that of a full professor with twenty years’ experience, plus generous benefits—information he had not shared with Ellsworth. He and Julie anticipated a further increase in interest once he publicly revealed the latest results in his meeting presentation. They would have to do some hard thinking if they got an offer they couldn’t refuse.
“Then you wouldn’t get your PhD,” Julie pointed out when he told her of the first offer.
“No, but a doctor of philosophy degree is less important in industry than at universities, where they wouldn’t even look at your application if you weren’t Dr. Somebody. I’ve asked around, and there’s not much difference between a master’s degree and a PhD for companies unless you aim to become head of a division or even of the whole company, neither of which I have any interest in.
“If we decided to bail on the PhD, all I have to do is withdraw from the doctoral program, and a master’s degree is automatically granted, based on my first two years’ work. Is sticking out two to three more years as a graduate student worth adding three letters behind my name?”
“You know my feelings, Joe. I’m ready to nest and move on. And there’s the other little item to consider.”
They had been living together for three years, with a wedding scheduled in two months, soon after Joe’s AAAS presentation. Julie and her family were in full wedding-planning mode, something Joe was happy to leave to them. Then, a week before Joe left for Chicago, a complication appeared when a pregnancy kit came up positive. They had been careless. Having a family was something they wanted “someday” in the nebulous future. Now, whether “someday” would come in seven months or whether Julie would end the pregnancy was under discussion. The option of Joe having a well-paid job would factor into their decision.
From his seat, Joe saw his vague reflection in the plane’s window. What stared back was the face of a man twenty-six years old, of average appearance, fine, mousy brown hair, and unusually light blue eyes. He accepted himself as a classic science nerd. He loved watching sports but was not athletic, being too slow, too uncoordinated, too unmuscular, too lazy, and from an early age too reluctant for the physicality of team sports. Occasional hiking and jogging, spurred on by Julie’s nagging, were his only vigorous activities.
While Flight 4382 continued loading, Joe reviewed the notes for his talk. He lost his concentration when the occupants of the other two seats in his row appeared. A tall man of about forty-five and dressed in a suit nodded a greeting as he sank into the aisle seat. The man rose again a moment later for the occupant of the middle seat—a teenage Hispanic girl. She said hello to Joe with a friendly smile and took her seat. They all settled with minimal elbow joggling as the plane finished loading. Joe smelled perfume on the girl, and when she bumped his elbow and apologized, he responded politely, then promptly forgot about both of his row-mates and resumed mentally practicing his talk.
“Sir, please buckle up,” said a flight attendant.
“Oh, sorry.” He tussled with the seatbelt, then loosened it to accommodate his girth. He really needed to lay off pizza so often. Never one to mince words, his fiancée called him pudgy.
The plane taxied to the runway and waited in a queue. When cleared for departure, the engines roared as the plane picked up speed and lifted off. Joe clamped his hands on both armrests. They rose to cruising altitude, and the engine noise settled to a steady drone.
Three hours fifty-five minutes before they touched down in Chicago. Joe’s stomach churned. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes.
“You okay?”
Joe turned to the girl. “What?” He pulled out a handkerchief and mopped his brow, then laughed. “Guess I’m a little nervous.”
“Do you fly often?”
“Nope, only my third time.”
“Then this isn’t the best route.” She smiled sympathetically. “It’s normally bumpy when we cross the Rockies. But don’t worry. We’ll bounce around for a bit, and then it’ll be okay. They seldom lose a wing.” A mischievous grin played on her full lips.
“Thanks for nothing,” he muttered.
“It’s quite exciting when we go through turbulence.”
Joe’s mouth twitched, and he glanced at her. She couldn’t be more than sixteen. “My need for an adrenaline rush is limited to computer games.” He tightened the seatbelt. “Even roller coasters are more than I can handle, and they’re a few hundred feet off the ground.”
“Then you haven’t lived. I can’t wait to try skydiving.”
Not for him. Nor bungee jumping, rock climbing, or any other inconceivable activities. Video games and watching sports were plenty of action for him. He pulled out his laptop and opened it, hoping she’d get the message he wasn’t interested in conversation, and especially not the sort that involved aircraft wings falling off.
“What do you do?”
Joe sighed. To work, he needed to escape this chatty teenager. “I’m a scientist.” He opened his presentation and turned the screen so she could see his slides. “Sorry, I need to work.”
She shrugged and pulled out a book.
Joe worked on his presentation, which helped calm his nerves. Two hours into the flight the plane jolted, and his stomach spasmed.
The girl giggled. “Turbulence. Guess we’re over the Rockies.”
His belly tightened, and beads of sweat reappeared on his forehead. He put the laptop away, cinched the seatbelt tighter, and clutched the armrests.
The plane lurched. Joe’s seatbelt squeezed his stomach. Gasps and squeals reverberated through the cabin; somewhere a child cried.
The captain’s controlled voice drifted from the address system. “Please return to your seats and fasten your seatbelts. We’ll have rough air for the next few
minutes.”
His anxiety mounting, Joe’s grip tightened. He opened his eyes and stared down at mountains far below. A wave of vertigo swept over him, and he raised his eyes to the horizon. A dot appeared in the distance and drew Joe from his thoughts. He frowned. A plane? His eyes widened in panic as the dot expanded to fill the window.
The plane lurched sideways, and an explosion rocked the aircraft. High-pitched wails filled the air, and a flight attendant and a drink trolley careened down the aisle. Baggage compartments burst open, and bags became missiles.
A second explosion sent shards of metal flying. A ball of burning fuel burst in through an exit door several rows to the front, incinerating passengers close to it. The inhalation of smoke stopped the scream in Joe’s throat.
The plane tilted, nose down, and the seatbelt bit into his midriff, then the aircraft swung nose up. The seat in front jerked back violently, slamming into his knees. Joe stared at his legs. A femur jutted through torn flesh, and blood pumped from the wound in thick ribbons, but he felt nothing. He looked at the girl next to him. Her eyes were wide, mouth open in a scream that was lost in the noise of grinding metal and chaos.
The plane cartwheeled. The wall across the aisle peeled open, and seats vacuumed out. The suited man disappeared through the hole in the fuselage. Other passengers followed, including the cowboy and the teenage girl.
Still strapped to his seat, Joe hurtled through the gaping hole, jagged metal slicing into him. Arms and legs spiraling like a puppet, he twisted helplessly as icy air engulfed him.
I’m dying!
He tumbled, caught glimpses of open sky, felt freezing cold, and gasped for breath. Intense pain accompanied impressions of people, baggage, seats, metal sections, and the shock of contact with something, and then . . .
Cast Under an Alien Sun (Destiny's Crucible) Page 1