by Jim Rudnick
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
The RIM Confederacy
A Message to you from the Author
Prologue
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
Epilogue
Eons Semester Prologue
Reviews
BOOK SEVEN OF THE
RIM CONFEDERACY
Ruined Memories
by Jim Rudnick
This is purely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
This book may not be re-sold or given away without permission in writing from the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, copied, or distributed in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means past, present or future.
Cover art by Lasse Perala
ISBN-13: 978-1-988144-08-5
Copyright © 2016
Jim Rudnick
All rights reserved.
For my Susan…
The RIM Confederacy: Ruined Memories
"When a ship of refugees plead to come to the Barony for help, the Lady St. August is more than pleased to offer refuge and it falls to the Barony captain, Tanner Scott of the Atlas to provide that aid. In doing so, he learns about the real truth behind the refugees and why they are fleeing something that appears to be coming to the RIM, invaders!
While the Atlas delves into the details of the refugees, the RIM Confederacy Council and its leaders find that providing that refugee status and sanctuary, might be a process that will take the RIM into war.
With Admiral McQueen and his flagship, the RIM Navy calls on it’s member realms to add more ships to the task force that is assigned to beat the invaders and their best laid plans go awry, except for captain Scott’s reliance on what he calls his battle insurance. While the invaders do not communicate, it appears that they have superior technology and use it to try to win the day…and only captain Scott’s plan may work…or will it?”
A Message to you from the Author…
I just wanted to say thanks so so much for reading Book Seven of the RIM Confederacy!
As my Amazon bio says, being a youngster in the 1950's meant that I was a voracious reader in what has been called the Golden Age of Science Fiction. That meant that for me, my heroes were not on the hockey rink or gridiron - but instead in my local Library where at 12 I had a full Adult card (thanks Dad!) and took out more than 5 books a week.
Everyone from Heinlein, Norton, Leiber, Pohl, Anderson, Simak, Asimov, Brackett, Gunn, Van Vogt and more....I fell in love with and eventually owned Ace Doubles of my own. And while I never knew who wrote the Tom Corbett - Space Cadet series, I fell in love with them and they had a place of honor on my own bookcase too!
With that kind of an introduction to Science Fiction, it's no wonder that when I got my writing work done, I turned my own fictional side of my brain to writing same. It's one thing I know how to write - and a totally different matter to release same to the world - something that I've just started to work on....
Suffice it to say my own works are rooted in that Golden Age and it's that era that I'd like to one day be known as a teensy contributor to in some small way...
So once again, thanks for beginning my RIM Confederacy series and wait'll you learn about the alcoholic spaceship captain that is my hero, who fights and beats aliens but maybe not the bottle!
Enjoy and remember, in a series, characters develop and mature not the way we sometimes want…instead, it's like they have a life of their own!
And while you can read the series in any order, I'd highly recommend to start with Pirates, then Sleeper Ship, Prison Planet, Ancient Relics, Hospital Ship, Desert Planet and Ruined Memories too…and yes, there's more coming soon too!
Prologue ~
It sat rock still, this large terraforming foundry with the dust of centuries on its skin. It should be moving as a part of its task, but instead it was unpowered. Wonder what she'd be like when she has power, the Merchant Marine third mate thought, as he yanked even harder on the cables. The cables attached to the big transformer that now sat alone on the skid dolly usually transferred the power to the unit, but not anymore. Or ever, the third mate thought. This terraformer had never been turned on as far as anyone on his ship, the Scavenger, a Merchant Marine freighter, could tell. While this was their first trip to this terraformer, they'd already stripped one completely of everything salable in the past year and this was their number two foundry.
“Pretty easy to tell,” he said to himself as he jammed a foot against the edge of the cable port and worried the lines back and forth trying to get them to unhook. When you landed a terraformer, it moved. And it left a very noticeable trail behind it as it did its job of turning an uninhabitable planet into one you could colonize. This one had only unmarked grass and weeds around it; it had never moved for as long as it had been here on the planet Memories.
“Probably part of it”—He chewed on his lip as he strained and then yanked and yanked harder again—“is that this dumb planet, with no sentients on it, is tucked in a pocket in the huge nebula that lay south of the RIM Confederacy.” Between the RIM and the Pentyaan empire, the nebula was thick, heavily loaded with particulate matter—in fact a danger for most to enter.
“Not us, nor for that matter, whomever had delivered all of these terraformers either; we found this planet almost a year ago.” He had to stop his exertion for a moment as his nostril filters were slow on catching up, turning the ugly atmosphere into something he could breathe, but barely. “And we still raid the planet to steal equipment and rare earths and salvage whatever we can, time and time again.”
Pop! Pop! The cables let go somewhere behind the bulkhead, and he stumbled over backward and fell on the floor of the storage room. As he slowly got back up, he noted the cables in his hand now ended with some kind of plugs he'd been able to pull out of the connection hidden behind the bulkhead. He smiled as he coiled them up and then hung them on top of the transformer so he'd be able to roll the dolly down the short corridor to his left to where he could dump the whole thing out of the side port of the terraformer.
Once it hit the ground, some of the crew would drag it toward the Scavenger and then hoist it up and into the hold. This transformer had more than six thousand credits’ worth of rare earth magnetics in it that they'd strip out during the trip back to the RIM and sell on KappaD.
Turning back toward the storage room, he looked inside and took a quick inventory of what was left. There were still three more of these transformers or whatever the hell they were called, three huge spools of some kind of fiber he thought might have something to do with lasers maybe, and more than dozens of some kind of bags of purple gel. No idea what it was for, and they'd found out on KappaD on the last trip, no one wanted to buy them either. As he looked around, he noticed something odd—a set of lights had suddenly lit up along one wall, in the ceiling. As he looked at that, the floor began to vibrate a little and then a little more.
He felt a lurch and that scared him.
A lurch meant—as any space man knew—that they were underwa, but this was not a ship; it was a terraforming foundry.
Someone had started up this huge arena-sized machine, and as he pounded down that co
rridor once more and looked out the side door, he could now see the very slowly moving ground drifting by.
“This thing is moving ...” he said as he knew it would soon be drilling down into the ground of Memories with a laser that was more powerful than one might imagine. It had taken them almost six months to learn they couldn't salvage that on their first foundry they'd picked apart. They had learned that the laser was powerful and could be used to drill down up to three miles as it searched for what was on its AI list: ores of a certain type and radioactivity along with minerals that were needed for formation of atmospheric compounds that were also needed.
They also had learned that all of the foundries had lain dormant for more than thousands of years until just a few moments ago—at least for this one. He clicked on his PDA and the Scavenger's on-duty deck cadet sounded scared but confirmed that yes, the terraformer was underway at about six feet per second. He had no idea about the others they'd already recorded locations for.
The third mate made a choice. He had to get out of this foundry, and that meant he'd have to go down the rope ladder as it was slowly swaying the thirty feet to the ground. It was something any able-bodied seaman would be expected to be able to do—he just hoped he could too.
He spun and slowly lowered a leg down so that his foot reached the first rung, and as he found it, he then lowered his other leg and slowly began to move down the ladder. He had already made it three more rungs down when the terraformer stuttered to a halt, and he missed a rung and swung freely by only his hands. His nose filters were clogged with sweat and stress, and yet he pushed on.
No more than five feet away from him, a laser beam from above appeared. With more than five petawatts of power, it was like the searing power of a sun almost close enough to touch.
It turned the third mate into a cinder in a millisecond as it drilled down deep into the planet below. It boiled everything it met, and it read the chromatics of the ores that came back and then recorded the location for later machines that were on their way to the planet.
Around the terraforming foundry, the air was barely that; very high in carbon dioxide, it made the planet a hothouse but that didn't matter much as it was uninhabited. Not a single sentient species was on the globe though it was full of what could be called normal predator-prey animals. The thick air now smelled horribly of burned vegetation, peat, ores of unknown type, soil, and rock.
The laser snapped off, its trillions of watts suddenly gone.
The foundry slowly started its movements again. Ahead of it lay a continent's worth of laser drilling and testing the ores it needed. They were quickly liquefied, and the resulting up-welling of the gas billowed. Behind it was now only one such vented hole.
This terraforming foundry had sat idle for thousands of years, and now it would move along its path doing its job, making this planet a colonization candidate.
CHAPTER ONE
Tanner looked across the street at the front of the bar and thought, looks okay. One would never know that it had just been refurbished earlier in the year. The OneTon Bar and Grill still had windows, but as Tanner squinted, he could see the glass had the telltale blue of a force field. He grinned as he realized the owners had sprung for a real unbreakable way to let light in but nothing else neither in nor out.
“No pool table balls, obviously,” he said to himself and smiled.
He had always heard people say if you wanted to make amends, you did it in person. He shrugged and wished this was over, but instead of walking away, he crossed the street and went right up to the front door.
He couldn't go in—at least he didn't want to—so he waited until someone else said "excuse me" and tried to go around him to get into the bar. He asked nicely if the marine would please ask the bartender to come to the door and slid a twenty-credit note in the marine’s hand for a beer for the favor. He backed away from the door.
Moments later a middle-aged man came out, looked first to his left and then to his right, and saw Tanner standing there alone. He grunted. "Whatta you want this time? Back in to play some more pool, Captain?" His voice was full of dislike, and he raised a single eyebrow at Tanner.
Only a year ago, in what could only have been called a huge temper tantrum, Tanner had fought with Caliphate marines in a huge barroom brawl. He'd sent a few to the emergency rooms and had been so, so drunk that he could not remember a single instant of the whole evening. That had gotten him arrested, charged with assault among other things, and shortly after, sent to the Barony Hospital Ship for a ninety-day sanity quarantine.
“They found me sane,” he said to himself and wondered what this bartender would have found.
He nodded to the man. "I wanted to stop by and tell you—well, the owners really, how sorry I am that I had such a violent confrontation with those marines. I wanted you to also know that I've put a credit transfer to the bar owners for a further ten thousand dollars in credits for what I'd call a fund for my acting that way. You—the owners—can use that money as you see fit—I'd buy the Caliphate customers their first drink every time one of their marines comes in. But that's me. Would you please tell the owners what I've done—and that I'm so sorry that this all happened, too."
Tanner was ashamed of what he'd done the last time he was here. He really had no idea, but as his psychiatrist on the Hospital Ship had pointed out, his PTSD had exploded that night.
The bartender wrinkled up his mouth, and furrows appeared on his brow. "Ain't you that captain that stopped the big revolt over on Halberd?" he asked, referring to the prison uprising a year ago.
Tanner nodded and said, "Aye, that was me."
"Then we all probably owe you. I'll pass this along to the owners, and yeah, I think the first drink for any Cal marine would be a great way to start that off. Thanks Cap'n," he finished off and went back inside.
Tanner nodded, turned, and walked back along the sidewalk and down the block. Rounding the corner, he joined Kondo, his XO on the Atlas, and smiled a little at him. "Thanks for the space, Kondo," he said, "and we're done. I explained and the bartender seemed okay with it."
Penance is as penance does, he'd heard somewhere inward decades ago, yet that still rang true to him.
He'd done something he called a temper tantrum—but in fact, he knew he was so much under the influence of the PTSD that he might have done much worse. He could have killed someone—and that would have been inexcusable.
Of course, he thought, keeping in the same train of thought, I'd done just that back on Halberd, when I’d had to shoot and kill two of the revolting Caliphate citizens. One a convict and the other a woman; a woman I liked with those violet eyes ...
Kondo clapped a hand on his back and fell into step as they walked along the street. "Come on, Captain, we've still got a day of shore leave ‘til we leave for KappaD, so let's see what trouble we can get into!" he said and then smiled out of the side of his mouth. He was being facetious, he knew, and so did Tanner, who just walked along beside him.
Tanner didn't say anything. He didn't have to. He had been the XO for the Atlas, yes, but more than that, he was also a friend and that, Tanner knew, was something that came seldom.
And was meant to last...
#####
The double doors of the huge RIM Confederacy Council chamber were still wide open, the Baroness saw as she and her retinue strode down the long walkway from the lift in Navy Hall on Juno. She was upset and didn't care to hide it; her heels slapped the marble floors with a loud click on each step. In one arm, she carried some folders, but the other arm swept back and forth as she sped down the hall, eager to get into the Council room and get the damn meeting started. Two aides struggled to keep up, and another dragged along a huge double briefcase of other files and folders. The Baroness was like a volcano ready to erupt, and they all tried to stay out of her way.
She was glad to see the DenKoss member had already been put in the water tank at the table as that always took way too long to wait for. Minor spills of water ha
d been already mopped up by the Council chief steward, and the drips and slops were all now gone.
Still can hear that stupid clicking though, she thought as she rounded the bottom of the huge horseshoe table and aimed for the top end where her seat was located. The DenKoss language when filtered through air rather than the water they lived in was unintelligible without the translations of her PDA.
She moved past the Duke d'Avigdor and nodded to him but didn't stop moving ahead toward her seat.
At the head of the U-shaped table lay the chairman's position, and just to the left and rear lay the RIM Navy table where Admiral McQueen was seated as the head of the RIM military forces. Her own seat was to the immediate right of the chairman’s—as that was where the vice chairman was always seated.
And she sat with a big huff, tossed around those files, and then barked at her aide to fix her chair just a bit higher, which took a moment or two to get straight.
Sounds in the Council Hall grew as more and more members were arriving and taking their seats at the table, their entourages arranged behind them. The single member present from Ttseen seated himself on his rear legs and sat up as tall as his five foot height would allow him. Beside the vice chairman’s seat was the seat for the member from Leudies, and out of the corner of her eye, the Baroness saw the blue-skinned alien had already seated himself and was uncoiling his neck snake. He tucked the snake into the crook of his left arm on the table in front of him. The snake, of course, was still attached to the alien via the nerve port at the rear of the alien's left ear, but she could see the snake preening itself as the alien slowly rubbed its belly. The symbiotic link between a Leudi and his snake went back to puberty, and these blue-skinned traders were renowned for their attachment to each other. It still made her shudder.