Fleeting Glimpse

by David Gowey

  Fleeting Glimpse

  Title Page

  Preface

  Preface

  Also by David Gowey

  THE DEFAULT KING

  Kaschar’s Quarter

  First Instance

  Jire

  FLEETING GLIMPSE

  THREE SHORT STORIES

  DAVID GOWEY

  First Edition

  Copyright 2017

  Copyright © 2017 by David Gowey

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  https://davidgowey.wordpress.com/

  www.facebook.com/thedefaultking

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing, 2017

  Cover illustrations courtesy of canva.com

  Table of Contents

  Preface

  A Land of Promise (2615 AD)

  Waiting on the Rain (2915 AD)

  Against the Deluge (2923 AD)

  Preface

  I've always wanted to write a space opera. Well, maybe not always, but for a while. This is a sort of teaser for that universe, which is supposed to incorporate an awful lot of other stories. To give you a taste, here are three that I've finished and put up on my blog and various social media accounts. Since they're still available for free elsewhere, I've decided to put these together in a DRM-free, e-reader-friendly format for easy distribution. If you like them, tell your friends. If you don't like them, I guess you can tell your friends about that too, but hopefully it doesn't come to that.

  Since these are taken from my blog, there isn't really much to them than what's here. You may see some common threads—space colonization, terraforming, corporatism, the occasional existential crisis—but they aren't really intended to be prequels or sequels to anything else, though they are presented here in chronological order. There are plans for plenty of novel-length stories and even a few series within the larger timeline, but these three are intended to be just little glimpses of what happens outside the big players' respective fields of vision.

  Hopefully, you enjoy them enough to come back for more. As soon as more gets written, of course.

  Humanity has spread itself to the stars, the colony orbiting Triton is dying, and 95-year-old Frank Peterson wants nothing more than to be done with it all. But is this desire just another heresy, a death wish, or something more?

  The news of an alien fleet inbound came too late to save Rell's life, but it was never about her anyway.

  The Ark Keeper holds the most important secret in the universe, but who does it protect more: the countless species it contains, or humanity itself?

  A Land of Promise

  “You guys all get your own planet when you die, don’t you?” Frank Peterson said to himself as sweat dripped into his eyes. “Oh, we’ll see who’s laughing when I’m done. Yes, we will.” Assuming his little contraption didn’t blow up on ignition, because then he wouldn’t have to wait nearly that long.

  Of course, this wasn’t a little contraption at all: it was the largest Alcubierre Drive-capable freighter he could afford on his not-insubstantial pension from Excelsior Dynamics, packed full of enough life support and cryonics equipment to last him at least two decades. They said that ninety-five years old these days was as good as sixty was a couple centuries ago, but Frank was a realist. Giving himself twenty more years on the outside was his best guess, and anything else packed away in the ship to last him longer would mean less room for the finer things. Real paper books and real glass bottles of Coke weren’t things you could just pick up next door if you were thirty-five lightyears from Sol.

  He knew these ships as well as he knew that he didn’t want anything to do with anyone else for the rest of his life, however long that was. When he realized that one night about two years ago, leaving was the only choice that made sense anymore. If he’d told anyone at work what he planned on doing, they probably would’ve called him a pioneer, if they didn’t just laugh at him.

  It was funny the way other people talked about pioneer spirit. Those who did hardly struck him as the type. He knew pioneers; Grandma Ann had made sure of that. Frank Peterson could trace his ancestors all the way back to Earth, which was enough of a feat these days, but more than that, he could take them straight back to Nevada, even back to Utah and Missouri and Denmark before that. Olaf and Katerina Peterson had gone just about as far as someone could go back in those days, and he thanked them for it. But Frank had something on them all, or at least he would in a few more days. That plus the four years or so he’d spend in transit.

  Frank let out a grunt as the manifold cover slid back into place with a satisfying thunk. With that done, it was time for the last run through the power-up procedures before he did the real thing.

  “Prepare full drive warm-up protocol,” he called out to the onboard computer. There wasn’t even a sound to let him know that the reactor was getting ready to begin fusing atomic particles at temperatures and pressures closely resembling the core of a star. Still, his brain seemed to put something there just to reassure him that it was working.

  But Frank knew that Alcubierre Drives didn’t purr like any kittens he’d ever seen, making the silence the actually reassuring part. Noise coming from engineering could mean the generator intended to maintain the exotic particle bubble around the ship had malfunctioned, which would definitely mean getting sprayed across a few cubic lightyears of vacuum at superluminal speeds. Now that he thought about, though, there were far more painful ways to die in space, so maybe rapid unplanned disassembly wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to him.

  Little blips on the reactor readout meant that heat transfer still wasn’t up to nearly the right efficiency levels. On a trip to Jupiter or even Venus, you could afford to flub the numbers a bit, since a couple hours at maximum wasn’t nearly enough time for heat retention to cause any system failures worth raising an eyebrow about. Where he was going, though, straying too far from acceptable levels of either radiation or retention could turn his dream into his coffin in a hurry.

  The ship’s speaker’s brought him Robert Schumann and the same A7omit3 that caught him off-guard each of the hundreds of times he’d heard this piece. Just the way it jumped out of such an otherwise remedial melody, with all the longing and incompleteness of tension between those stolid As and their companion E, placed in conflict with a lone G, made him wonder if there was a metaphor in there somewhere. He’d heard there was no dreaming while under cryo sleep, and any there might be was certainly not any of a kind that could’ve been predicted by a composer seventy hundred and fifty years dead next summer. All he wanted anymore was peace and quiet; longing, like heaven, could wait.

  He wasn’t sure how many hours had gone by tinkering with the safety thresholds on the secondary heat sinks when the computer called to him.

  “Bishop Lim for you,” came the computer voice over the speakers as the sounds of Childhood grew softer for a moment.

  Figures, Frank thought. He hadn’t said much about his little trip to really anyone other than his friend Norm and his retirement planner, but reminded himself that knowing everything was the bishop’s job anyway. Grabbing for a greasy towel next to him, he wiped his hands and started on the two flights of narrow stairs standing between his workshop above the engine room and the bridge, where he’d told the computer to route any calls. Not that he really expected any, even though he should’ve predicted this one.

  By the time he’d reached the top, a longer time than he’d hoped on creaky knees, he was grateful that his future planet wouldn’t have too many mountains. Plenty of open plains, a breathable atm
osphere, and a comfortable temperature range would make it appealing to someone else eventually, but at least it would be his in the meantime.

  “Receive call,” he said, and a holo of Bishop Lim appeared standing in front of him, looking not entirely displeased but not happy about it either. It was as if he’d gone and done something his mother told him not to do while knowing that he’d do it anyway. “I guess you discerned that I was leaving,” Frank said, a sly grin growing on his face.

  “Something like that. In case you’re wondering, it wasn’t Norm who spilled the beans.” Frank put a hand to his forehead to feign relief.

  “And here I thought I’d have to kill him or take him with me into the wilderness to keep my secret. Who was it?”

  “Sister Castro. Turns out her daughter Mai is dating your lawyer’s son. Really is a small world out here, isn’t it?”

  “Triton’s been dying since before we were born. Proxima Centauri was just the final nail in the coffin.” It was true enough. With habitable planets just a few months to years away, and without relativistic travel at that, who in their right mind would want to spend the rest of their life trapped in a rotating tin can thirty AU out from Sol? Anyone still out this far in the darkness was either too broke or too deep in denial to leave.

  “Then it looks like you’re getting out just in time,” the bishop said. “Where you headed?”

  “I know this’ll sound like a joke, but I picked out my own planet.” Bishop Lim snorted in laughter. “It’s true! Habitable zone, oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, about thirty-five lightyears out, eighty-seven percent Earth gravity. Should be easier on the knees than a gee of spin gravity.”

  “Anything remotely habitable within a hundred lightyears has already been scouted and claimed by someone. Claim-jumping’s a felony, you know.”

  “Yeah,” he replied. “That’s why I’m not registering my flight path.”

  “Also a felony. You leave Neptune’s gravity well and there’s a good chance you’ll get interdicted before you leave the Oort Cloud.” It was nothing he hadn’t already thought of and judged to be entirely worth the risk. After all, risk was his business; that’s all tolerances really were, whether for machining, printing, heat, or any other variable that could get transgressed and turn an entire starship and its contents into a cloud of vapor and plasma.

  “I’m not too worried about that. What could they do to an old man who says he just got lost on a little cruise?”

  “Just seize your assets to cover applicable fines and throw in jail for the rest of your life.”

  “The joke’s on them, then. The ship’s all I’ve got left.” Bishop Lim fell silent for a moment. Taken aback was not a reaction most people could elicit from someone who’d probably heard it all, so Frank took the tiniest bit of pride in the fact that he’d managed to provide some new thing. Only the tiniest bit, and that he tamped down immediately. He wasn’t here to break anyone’s heart.

  “You’re not kidding after all. About leaving. Why?” It was the only question that really mattered anymore, even with a convoluted, self-righteous answer that probably only made sense in his own mind.

  The only reason his retirement planner didn’t laugh at him was because she didn’t get paid to laugh, but only to make sure he never went broke. Once he’d done that by blowing sixty years of benefits and savings on a private starship, her job was done and so they only shook hands and went on their way. It didn’t matter to her what he bought after he’d cashed out. No worrying about judgment or the Judgment, only a good day and a deposit in his checking account large enough to raise in vain Triton Colonial Bank’s hopes in their ability to loan startlingly large amounts of money to dirt-poor prospectors looking for a break. Too bad he’d spent all that within the week, all while still basking the afterglow of corporate profit sharing.

  Wei hadn’t cared much about his non-monetary fortunes, and that was just fine, but the bishop was a different story, and so Frank prepared to give the reason why.

  “You were too young to remember the Centennial mission,” he began, “but it still feels like yesterday to me. The first generation to take to the stars, not just the little puddle of a solar system that was all humanity had known for our entire mortal existence. The first feet to walk out onto a completely alien planet were maybe ten years older than I was when I watched the landing in chemistry class. Heck, everyone had watched the landing; even a rocky-but-otherwise-nondescript flare star satellite like Proxima Centauri b was and would be the biggest news in human history short of discovering alien life just by virtue of its uniqueness as the first interstellar outpost. It’s what pushed me into this career in the first place. For a moment, it’d seemed like humanity was on the brink of something wonderful, like the stars were a bright carpet laid out to welcome their newest inheritors with open arms.”

  He’d never been one to bear his soul; definitely never one to cry in church. Sure, it wasn’t frowned upon, but if he had to listen to one more weepy high councillor assure the congregation that they were all just one nitpicky secret away from true righteousness, he’d beat someone over the head with a sacrament tray.

  Bishop Lim was not one of those people. Analytical but never distant, bold but never overbearing. Someone you could share a death wish with, as the case may be.

  “And then,” Frank continued, “for whatever reason, it felt like the fire died. Colony ships still left the system regularly, full of prospectors and weary-eyed refugees bound for anywhere else but here, but soldiers went too. Bureaucracy and order followed where they could, with lawlessness and vigilantism filling in where they couldn’t. Humanity had gone to the stars, alright, and taken with it its every vice, demon, and lust without ever thinking to leave behind what it shouldn’t have been carrying in the first place. But when wasn’t that the story of humans in general? Every book of scripture is nothing but that same story on endless repeat: the righteous get sick of the wickedness around them, pack up and take off for the other side of the world, then realize that they’d been their own worst enemies all along.”

  He realized how bad that must’ve sounded as soon as the words left his mouth, but he didn’t really care. Well, he cared, but not enough to retract what he said. It was true, after all, enough that he would never exempt himself from it either. Frank knew he was just as unrighteous in his own little ways as the next guy in High Priests group, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t also be sick of it all.

  He’d had a lot of time to think about what it meant to be sick like this. It wasn’t that he was a misanthrope, really, just more that he wanted everyone to get along but didn’t have much faith in the species’ ability to pull it off. Nor was the problem that he thought himself too pure to exist in an increasingly sinful world such as this, as he’d heard insinuated plenty of times by others at church. The metric he’d always gone back to was that if the people of his day ever thought up something more depraved than what the Romans or twenty-second century could, then they might have a point. Until then, he was content to assume that the world had always been a pretty nice place, only full of scummy people.

  No, what he felt most of all was that he was done. Done with the spiteful partisanship, the weight of the world, the fraughtness with implications… Everything. It was time to be alone for a change, and in a universe that was filling itself more and more with the nosiest creatures of which he knew, there was only one way to really escape it all. He’d have to go find his own planet. Perhaps not the most utopian one out there, since that was bound to attract attention one day, but something boring, orbiting a comfortable distance away from a star that no one particularly cared about. It’d taken him two years to find one, when he wasn’t working on putting together this little ship of his in preparation for said hypothetical planet to be found later. Now with the launch so imminent, it felt like he’d just been lying in bed yesterday dreaming the whole thing up. Now it was actually happening and more importantly, knowing that it was actually happening hadn’t changed his min
d. Yet.

  He realized then that his eyes had wandered off in the silence Bishop left him. Bringing them back to the softly glowing face across from him, he thought he found a smile.

  “You know, Frank, I never took you for one to be this corny.”

  “Where else did you think I’d go?”

  “Why not Venus?”

  “Too crowded,” he replied, and earned a laugh. “Besides, someone down there would hear about me and come try putting me to work.”

  “Your new bishop, you mean?” Now it was Frank’s turn to burst out laughing. Anyone already out on his new planet must be in an even sorrier state than he was.

  “No, no. It’s the Excelsior people, or even worse: those sharks at IRI.”

  Another questions struck him.

  “Are you gonna tell me the Solar System’s a land of promise too, and that we shouldn’t leave?” he teased, trying to lighten a mood that refused to follow along. “That’s what Sister Lefler said about last week’s batch of colonists passing through.”

  “I could,” the bishop replied, and in that moment looked more weary than ever. He regretted the question instantly.

  Frank assumed that all bishops were weary, with everything they had to put up with. All the visitors from down the well stopping off here for a few days or weeks at a time to stock up before the big plunge outward to the colonies, the occasional prospector back for a few months’ leave before heading back into the Oort Cloud to harvest comet ice, and now a crazy old man bent on what sounded an awful lot like an expensive suicide.