Starship Relic
Lost Colony Uprising Book 1
Darcy Troy Paulin
WWW.darcytroypaulin.COM
Starship Relic - Book Description:
Ancient technology. Secret histories. And squids. In space.
Max is completing a survey in the barren, frozen north of planet Grailliyn, when he makes a startling discovery. There's a high-tech pod buried beneath the ice, and inside the pod is a young woman. She speaks his language, but with a strange accent.
The two are barely past awkward introductions when they are attacked. Max and his new friend are forced to flee. The worst part? They don't even know who is trying to kill them, or why.
Now, with assassins on their tail, the duo must find a way off the planet without blowing their cover. And then, if they can do that without getting eaten by space monsters, they might just find out the truth about their world.
Starship Relic is book one of the Lost Colony Uprising Trilogy, a sci-fi space opera adventure with spaceships, alien contact, deep conspiracies, wise-cracking characters, and lots of pew-pew (space battle action).
Content rating: All ages, teen and up. Minimal language.
Cover illustration by Sarah Tyrrell, Briar Fox Design.
Part One
The Wrong Fairy Tale
Chapter 1
Planet Grailliyn
“If I call you a fool, I wager I won’t be the first,” said the weathered man standing behind the counter of the supply depot.
He wasn’t wrong. Max had been called a fool before. By the teachers at school, the other boys in the orphanage, and even by his own mentor.
Max let the old man’s insult bounce off him as always. He had his own plan, and while it might not seem so to others, the young man was well prepared.
The proprietor, Nerrian, lifted his nose. “You’ll need another month more to get your sled team trained up. I could introduce you to—”
“No need,” Max said coolly. “This fool is heading out in the morning.”
“So soon?” Nerrian’s disdain slipped away, replaced with surprise. “Your team is fully trained?”
“Fully trained,” Max said. Or at least as trained as any team of sled-pulling crabs could be. They were willful creatures, as headstrong as they were physically adapted to life on the frozen coast of the True North. The team was far from perfect, but they would have to do, because Max couldn’t wait any longer.
Before the old man could shake Max’s faith in his sled team and his plans, Max placed an envelope on the grubby counter.
Nerrian’s bushy eyebrows rose. “A letter,” he said, more statement than question. “Am I to be your local point of contact?”
“If you don’t mind,” Max said, “I would be honored if you agreed.”
The old man’s expression softened so much, he appeared to be a different person.
“Is that so?” Nerrian tapped the letter. “I suppose it’s only fair that I do you the favor. I may be a good number of years older than you, child, but I remember the rules. I remember how it felt to begin my own survey.” He rubbed his scruffy chin and looked off wistfully.
Max sensed that if he lingered any longer, he might be trapped by the telling of a long story. He had no doubt it would be interesting, but he was too wrapped up in his own tale to be distracted by another’s. He excused himself quickly and left the supply depot.
Outside, though it was night, the snow-covered village was well lit, thanks to Mega, the twin planet that shone high in the sky like an enormous moon.
Gazing up at Mega, Max wondered if anyone was up there, on that other ice-covered terrain. Was there another twenty-two-year-old like himself staring back at planet Grailliyn, wondering the same thing?
Just then, Mega’s tiny moon, Little Sister, emerged from her brother’s shadow. The moon seemed to wink at Max. The wink, a bright flash that occurred sporadically, was regarded as a sign of luck. Max grinned.
A sudden gust of bone-chilling wind took the shine off his smile. He pulled up his hood against the cold. During the full twelve day month he’d spent in the hamlet, Max had adapted to the harsh conditions, but he was still not as resilient as the local fisher-folk. He’d witnessed one of the locals casually reaching a bare hand into the waters of the ice filled harbor.
Max returned to his one-room rented cabin, finished making his preparations, and lay down on the narrow bed. He was too nervous and excited to get much sleep.
Morning came. The wind had not let up.
Max had hoped for better weather, but he could not delay his plans. Like all surveyors, he had only the celestial bodies to guide his navigation. Mega was in position now, which was why he had to leave now.
Max loaded the sled, harnessed the crab team, and set out. He was on schedule.
Perpetually stretched out ahead of him were the crabs. The team consisted of ten crustacean beasts. Their hard carapaces were covered in shaggy white fur that matched the landscape. The crabs were not perfectly matched in size, but they worked well as a team. For the first leg of the journey, the resilient creatures drew the sled onwards with apparent ease, chittering happily as they did so.
Max and his team passed through the line of low hills separating the coast from the great fields of ice beyond. The wind grew only stronger.
Over the next three days, which amounted to one hundred and eighty hours on Grailliyn, Max learned new lessons on what it meant to be cold.
At the end of the third day, as Grailliyn’s twin plant Mega slipped below the horizon for six days of rest, the wind finally relented.
The bad weather had slowed their passage. But over the coming days, Max and his team reclaimed some ground.
Max made regular entries in his journal, but there was little to note. The frozen terrain was as unchanging as it was unwelcoming.
On day twelve, three days after Mega had returned to the sky, Max stopped to rest the sled team and took out an old journal. He knew all the words by heart, but he had brought it along anyway, sacrificing the added cargo weight for the inspiration it gave.
The journal was his mother’s. Max had been an infant when she passed, but she lived on in the writings of her coming of age survey journal.
His mother’s handwriting was messy, but the details were meticulous. The pages described the step by step, day by day path that she and his father had taken, traveling through these same frozen and lifeless lands. The journal was all that he had of his mother and the sole reason he chose to journey here for his survey.
Most prospective adults chose somewhere warm and pleasant to perform their surveys. Most prospective adults lacked what Max had, which was the unshakeable faith that there might actually be something important to find on a survey. Something of great value or historical significance, as opposed to the mundane rock formations and land-locked lakes that most surveyors were satisfied to put on maps.
Max’s faith had been sparked by his mother’s survey.
The one she had not returned from.
His mother’s final entry, at the bottom of the last page, before the journal had been torn in half, read: “We’ve found a star in the ice!”
And that was the end. Max had so many questions. Who had torn the book? How could a star be in the ice? Stars were for the night sky. In her other writings, Max’s mother was precise and scientific, not prone to hyperbole or metaphor. What could she have meant?
He would have his answer soon.
By morning, he would reach the location as noted in the final entry of his mother’s journal.
By morning, if all continued to go as planned, he would reach the “star in the ice.”
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br /> With a mixture of excitement plus sorrow, missing the parents he had never known, Max carefully replaced the old journal inside his pack.
He got the team moving once more, and settled back on his sled, swaddled in blankets against the cold.
He’d only been traveling a short time, just long enough to doze off, when the sled hit a bump and slammed onto the icy snow with a hard jolt.
A burst of adrenaline shot through Max, followed by perspiration along his spine. He cursed himself for being careless. Sweat and cold did not mix.
He sat upright and forced himself to focus. He’d made it this far, faithfully recreating his parents’ expedition, and he would not falter now, this close to getting his answers.
Ahead of him, the ten shaggy beasts continued at their steady pace. He was still on schedule. Everything was as it should be. This final leg of the journey would be swifter and easy, as long as he didn’t make a mistake.
But he did make a mistake.
Lulled by the smooth rhythm of the sled, Max drifted toward sleep once more.
He awoke to find himself airborne. Max reached for a handhold but missed. The sled continued to move, shooting out from beneath him. Max tumbled at speed across the snow. He opened his mouth to halt the sled team. Before he could shout the command, his face hit the snow, and the movement packed ice and snow into his mouth, muting him.
He kept tumbling, onto a patch of ice. Now he was on his back, skating across the smooth surface on the rigid back of his parka. He jammed his boots into a ridge of snow. His heels caught. Too well. He lurched forward, flipping onto his chest. The impact knocked the breath from his lungs.
Wheezing for air, he skidded helplessly. At last, a chunk of ice stopped his movement, cruelly thumping him on the midsection.
Max got to his feet, dimly aware of the throbbing pain in his body. He spat the hard-packed snow from his mouth, and shouted for the sled team to halt.
The sled team did not halt. They continued running, the empty sled in tow, unaware that their pride master had been left behind.
Max glanced around the barren tundra. He was alone.
Panic gripped at his chest with icy fingers.
The schedule, he thought, then hated himself for such a foolish worry.
Never mind losing a few hours from an unscheduled stop. Without his sled team, a lone human in a remote location like this was as good as dead. He would starve or freeze to death long before encountering another human being.
Was this what had happened to his parents?
Max became aware of his nostril hairs, freezing and defrosting with each breath. The wind picked up, driving home its threat.
He pushed back against the rising fear, and began to jog in the sled’s tracks. He wasn’t dead yet. As long as he kept moving, he stood a chance of catching up with the team. He might catch a lucky break and find them at rest, distracted by the appearance of their preferred prey. It could happen. They’d been distracted plenty of times on the journey thus far.
Also, there was a chance some of the smaller crabs might notice he was gone. The two youngest crabs were different from the others. He wasn’t confident enough to say they cared for him, maybe they were simply sucking up to the boss. Whatever the case, they were the most responsive of the lot.
He paused to fill his lungs for a loud whistle, hoping they might hear him. Don’t let me down, little beans.
He would keep whistling and calling to them periodically, and he would try to stay positive, thinking of the team in terms of his pet names for them, and not cursing them too much.
Max jogged at a sustainable pace along the tracks. His focus was on his path, but he glanced around to note changes in the terrain, comparing it to his mother’s notes.
The landscape had changed, from smooth terrain to a broken and jagged icescape. If he hadn’t been thrown from his sled already, there were dozens more opportunities here.
The tracks led him further down, into a tiered circular depression. At the center of the depression, he was surprised to find columns of ice. The columns rose unnaturally, in concentric rings. They appeared to be solid ice, glinting in Mega’s light.
Max kept up his pace, though he would have loved to have stopped to examine the strange ice. What natural process could have formed such a symmetrical arrangement? Could the pattern be a result of chance alone? His instincts said no.
He felt a tingle of excitement from the adventurer within him. Was this what he’d been looking for?
His mother had written of a “star in the ice,” but might she have meant pillars of ice? These columns might even sparkle like stars in a certain light.
He wasn’t scheduled to arrive at the final location for several more hours, but he had to entertain the notion there had been an error, either in his mother’s journal or in his own calculations.
He scanned the horizon for his team, and spotted them. They were in the distance, nearly hidden from view by one of the columns. Even in ideal conditions, they were hard to spot, with their white fur that matched the terrain, but he could see the dark sled well enough.
His heart skipped with hope. Was it a trick of his eyes, or was the sled slowing down?
He shouted, “Hey! Back here!” He waved his arms.
Not only did the dark sled slow, but it changed direction. They were coming back for him. He fell to his knees and fought back a torrent of emotions, including relief.
He stood again, and called to the team some more, lavishing them with praise and making promises of treats.
Something bright at the edge of his vision was calling for his attention, but he didn’t dare look until he was certain the team was returning to him. It would take some time for them to backtrack, but they seemed to be moving with purpose.
Max turned his head and allowed himself to take in the sight of the strange columns.
It was good that he’d waited, because what he saw was so startling that he forgot all about his life-threatening situation.
At the center of the circular depression was not just one light, but several, flashing in a dizzying pattern. They were white, then orange, then red, then indigo, then blue.
For Max, the shock of seeing something so strange, after days of nothing but snow, threatened to overwhelm his senses.
The lights were everywhere, bouncing off snow and ice in every direction. He squinted against the glare as he searched for the source.
The central ice column was brighter than all the others. The colored lights continued their dazzling display, shifting through every color of the rainbow. The lights were like stars.
Stars in the ice.
After a year of planning, making preparations, training his sled team, and then a grueling month of frigid cold, he had reached his destination.
Dimly, he was aware of his sled team’s return. He was running, moving toward the center column to get a better look. The white crustaceans cantered along with their pride master. For all they knew, this was a game.
His relief at their return was overshadowed by pure joy and satisfaction.
He reached the column.
The light within flickered faster and faster.
What was inside the solid ice? He used the hard edge of his glove to knock off a layer of snow then scraped away a crust of pebbled ice.
The vivid, colored lights sparkled within, brighter than ever. Beneath the crust he’d scraped away, the ice was smooth and clear, like a window. He could now see an object within the column. It was a long, wide cylinder.
As he peered deeper into the column, the flickering lights became a steady, blindingly bright white. Max’s eyes shut tight of their own volition.
When he opened them again, the lights had gone out. He could see nothing in the darkness, but the image was seared into his mind. Deep within the column was a long cylinder. A strange cylinder, not formed by nature.
If this cylinder was the “star in the ice” his mother had written of, then he had found it, even though it was not wher
e he’d expected it to be. Had the ice sheet moved? Or was he simply out of his reckoning? Perhaps later he would figure out where he’d gone wrong, but for now he would simply accept this joyful reality.
All Max’s fears of failure, his doubts that he could find the site, and his worry that it might not even exist, all faded away now. He allowed himself to rejoice, to savor this moment of victory, but it wasn’t before his thoughts turned to new worries. He had quite the job ahead.
Whatever the object might be or not be, it was currently trapped, deep inside rock-hard ice. If Max was to return home with the prize, he would have to shift all that ice, by hand.
He checked the sky as he began the next calculations.
The twin planet that lit up the sky like a giant moon was now at its peak. It would remain in the sky for three more days and nights before setting below the horizon.
Mega provided nighttime illumination, but more importantly, it reflected enough energy from the sun to significantly affect the night time temperature. The True North, when lit by Mega, was still deadly cold, but it was downright pleasant when compared to the inky blackness and deadly cold of True Night.
And True Night was coming.
In just three days.
Chapter 2
Max had only just found the ‘star’ mentioned in his mother’s letter, so he was reluctant to abandon it. But in order to dig down and free it from the ice he would need the right equipment. And he was in any case running low on other supplies, the most crucial of which were oil to fuel his lamp heater, and food for both his crab team, and his personal digester.
His trek back to Tuk, the fishing village that was his link to the civilized world, would be a direct run, not the circuitous path his mother’s letter had led him on during the long search. Even so, he estimated it would take eight to ten hours travel to reach the village.
Max was only an hour into his village bound journey when he first smelled, then heard, then saw, a vast colony of seabirds in the distance. The birds vocalized a chorus of hoots, clicks, and pops. The air reeked with their stink, and the tundra was stained and eroded from their activity. These birds were the main competition to human fishermen for the Candy Catch of the coast.
Starship Relic (Lost Colony Uprising Book 1) Page 1