The Harbinger
A Novella
Graham Leslie
Quill Books
College Station, Texas
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by Graham Leslie.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Quill Books.
Map
Sizes and positions of celestial bodies are for illustrative purposes only.
To Aidan, who inspired me to tell a story.
Prologue
Mankind has spread to the stars. Fleeing political turmoil on Earth, the first explorers traveled to Mars to form a new civilization. The Martians survived when the nations of Earth ultimately incinerated themselves through thermonuclear war. Far above the hundred-year firestorms, the Martian domes were erected in the spirit of community; a heterogenous melting pot of former-Earth cultures amalgamated in the pursuit of progress. Martians value community and perseverance above all else, and see themselves as the caretaker and cradle of humanity.
Earth was ravaged by fire that burned for decades, leaving the birthplace of the human race perpetually blanketed by clouds of ash. The surface is cold, dark, and icy. The few scattered, dying remnants of humanity on Earth struggle for survival, abandoned by the prospering civilization beyond.
Over time, some Martians frustrated by the lack of individual identity in their society’s rigid culture emigrated to the moons of Jupiter: Europa, Io, Callisto, and Ganymede. They built massive vessels to transport the means of civilization to the lifeless rocks, great families taking root and consolidating power. These families, colloquially referred to as the Jovians, spread their influence from their compounds in the blistering cold orbits of Jupiter in a delicate detente. Valuing individuality and achievement, the families of the moons frequently skirmish for influence and power.
Beyond Jupiter, Saturn’s moons are on the edge of civilization. Pioneering humans establish the first colonies on the surfaces of far colder rocks, seeking to once again create new societies and push the boundaries of human civilization.
In the vast distances between the bodies of the solar system is deep space. The journeys made by spacefarers between the bastions of humanity consist of long months of travel, and near speed-of-light optical communication can still take hours to cross the solar system.
Bridged by millions of kilometers, the Martian and Jovian economies are self sufficient and their cultures are unique. While the advent of the internet and swift surface travel made Earth a seemingly small planet, the incomparably vast distance between Mars and Jupiter leaves their inhabitants almost entirely independent of each other. As they grow, so do the tensions between them. Distrust, fear, and conflict are inevitable, and the burgeoning animosity can be felt in every corner of the system.
Our story begins with Apollo, a lost soul traveling across deep space. He is the lone engineer, a case of redundancy aboard the mostly-automated Riyadh, a transport vessel owned by the Al Harbi family. This ship transports supplies from Ganymede, the largest moon of Jupiter, to a budding colony on Rhea, the second-largest moon of Saturn. Following a successful drop of the supplies from orbit, the Riyadh circled Rhea and is en-route to its home port in the space docks orbiting Ganymede. The Riyadh cruises through deep-space under constant thrust to provide a practical one-half of Mars gravity, the standard scientific measure of the system. Once at the halfway point of its journey, the Riyadh will flip one hundred and eighty degrees and thrust in reverse to begin deceleration while maintaining gravity.
Beyond the Riyadh, deep space is pitch black, impossibly cold, and unfathomably empty.
Chapter 1
I’m not alone. I stand behind my parents as they hand boxes of basic medical supplies and blankets from the trucks and distribute them to the frail Earthers. The historical world leaders that proselytized overpopulation could not have been more wrong. Today, the once-East Harbor of Baltimore barely shows signs of life. Spared from a direct nuclear blast, the harbor still felt the effects of the global firestorms after the bombs dropped. The harbor is a snow-blanketed forest of scorched buildings. The sun barely penetrates the thick, rolling clouds. The wooden marinas and yachts all burned, their carcasses sinking to the bottom of the harbor. The dark ice obscures the yet darker remains below. The fallout is still strong by the impact sights, but we’ll be unharmed for the short time that we’re here.
One of the other missionaries behinds me hands me a stack of boxes from the electric truck, and I bring them up to the pile before my parents. I put them down at the edge of the pile, but pause before returning to get another stack.
The crowd slowly trickles out from the buildings to the ice where we stand. These poor Earthers are disfigured by wretched deformities from the fallout. They move slowly, as if the will to live left them long ago. They are clad in tattered, scavenged clothing; what little of their skin is visible is frostbitten or worse. The sight is horrible. Many lack shoes or boots and walk on stubs of bone and flesh. Medical defects run rampant among the population. These creatures have devolved to a point where they may no longer be considered human.
In Martian classrooms we were taught that the people of Earth were too lost to save. Their selfishness and lack of community led to the war that burned the planet and left them this way. My parents disagreed and told me that they deserved something more than abandonment.
I look beyond and see thicker men staring at us from the back of the crowd. They look healthier, but only in their present situation. They belong to the local warlord. He feeds these men well to herd the crowds in their search for usable scrap. An economy of subsistence servitude. They watch my parents and I from a distance, as they have since shortly after we touched down.
The warlord doesn’t want us here. My parents’ missionary work is a problem for the him. He keeps these people in a balance of desperate need — just enough to survive. Our medicine and rations upset the balance. He picks the strongest to form his raiding parties that hunt down other survivors and bring them back as slaves, loot in tow, establishing dominance over his small corner of a big, dead world.
We were warned about the warlord. Months ago, we met with an anthropologist at the university in Acidalia Planitia. He’d been here just months before, to observe human culture on Earth. He warned us not to come, that it was too dangerous and these were no longer humans, just feral creatures. He sounded like the teachers. My parents told me that he and my teachers just had a different opinion, but we would help these people. Finally, after approval from the Martian Cultural Board, we were granted permission to make this single trip.
We touched down on the ice less than twelve hours ago, after weeks of travel from Mars. The leaders of the mission declined any men of arms to join us, confident that their work was just and would not be challenged. Our craft, a small transportation vessel on lease from a shipyard in Mars-orbit, sits upright on the ice some distance behind us. The landing was harsh; the pilot killed our ion engines in the air so that the heat would not melt the ice and put us in a hole. We used airjets for the remainder of the descent, but the landing was still quite rough. We unpacked the first load of boxes from the cargo bay and loaded them into the open electric truck, then drove across the ice to where we stand. It will take several trips to get everything off the ship. I thought it would be good to get out of that ship after the long, boring weeks in space, but looking at the crowed before us I’m not so sure. I’m scared, and I think the rest of the missionaries are too.
I refocus my gaze and realize that for the first time the heavyset men
sulk towards us. My father catches a glance of the men but ignores them and continues to unload supplies. My mother drops a supply container into the snow. She reaches down and picks it back up. I notice her hands are trembling as the snow shakes off of the box. The others continue to grab more boxes from the truck and hand them to the poor people. My mother whispers something to my father, but he shakes his head and responds in a hushed voice. I look beyond to the men who near us. The sick people fear them. They spread apart to allow the men through. A final box is handed out, but those next in line shy back, fearful. They won’t take our aid while the heavyset men are near.
I look over my shoulder. The others have stopped unloading boxes from the electric truck. They stand transfixed, looking past me towards my parents. I turn back around.
With a few final heavy steps through the snow, the men reach us. One unwraps a thick scarf of tattered fabric from his face, revealing his scarred mouth. Cracked, mirrored sunglasses cover his eyes.
“Leave the rest,” he commands in a gravely voice.
“You are each welcome to a box, like the rest of these people,” my father says, “We will be on our way once everything is unloaded.”
The one gruff man looks to the other, raising an overgrown eyebrow above his mirrored glasses. The other grunts. My mother’s trembling becomes more pronounced.
“I don’t like how you talk, ruster,” says the man. His cracked lips form a wicked smile. He reaches his right hand beneath his jacket and brings up a pre-war kinetic weapon, aims it at my father’s face, and pulls the trigger.
A shock wave slaps me backward, followed by pelting lead, then followed by what was formerly my father’s head. I think I’ve been hit too. My vision and sight are a blur as I crumple into the cold snow. I feel the reverberations of another shot, and feel another body drop before me.
“Kid’s still alive,” says one man. The other grunts.
Snow crunches as one man steps forward.
Searing pain races through my chest, and the world goes black.
Chapter 2
My eyes open to the patches of rust in the metal ceiling of my bunk room in the Riyadh. Just dreaming. I’ve relived this memory many times. I can’t yet move, but I quickly realize it's just sleep paralysis again. It used to panic me, but it doesn’t anymore.
I remember learning that the human mind just retains ideas in memory, not details. Details are forgotten, but imaginary details are interpolated in to preserve the continuity of memory. I wonder what I remember wrong all these years later. It’s pathetic to think I could forget any detail of that. It’s their fault really, my parents, for all that happened. Too opportunistic to think we could be unharmed on that fateful trip. What a waste.
Still can’t move. The sleep paralysis is from the neural network-driven microcomputer that rests in the base of my skull where my hypothalamus was peppered by that blast of lead; it hasn’t been serviced since I left Mars. It’s begun to glitch out more frequently in the past few weeks.
From what I was told, the other missionaries gave up the electric truck filled with supplies and dragged my frozen body through the snow back to the ship. They kept me on ice and burned like hell back to Mars. Given my effectively-zero chance of survival, the state doctors handed me over to the Martian Democratic Navy’s research division, where the researchers brought my icy corpse back to life. They successfully thawed me, replaced several elements of my brain and chest with both mechanical and lab-grown organs controlled by neural networks trained on healthy patients, my eyes with healthy donor eyes, and my face regrown with stem cell therapy.
The thing about neural networks is that they try to learn on their own — the key word being “try”. As much as artificial intelligence revolutionized technology and the human race, neural networks inevitably make mistakes and require human intervention to remain effective. In this case: making sure my motor functions return as I come out of sleep.
It was a long recovery on Mars. Under the watchful eyes of the cold researchers, I was slowly healed by synthetic tissue and cybernetic components. My every-day consisted of ivory labs, dull sedatives, crisp lab coats, grueling physical therapy, and exhausting neural network training sessions. In the end I was healed, and the doctors had four years of successful research to present to their oligarchical funders among the inner ranks of the Citizen Democracy of Mars. The research was ended save for my yearly check ins, and I was cast out of the laboratories and back out beneath the domes, left to fend for myself among the regular food, medicine, and job shortages. Mars’ state-centralization of economic functions prospered for decades after the glassing of the Earth, but the inevitable stressors of lacking natural resources and corruption pushed down hard on the Martian people. Many looked to the Jovian moons with envy, and I was among those to hitch a ride aboard a trade vessel to a new life in a different corner of the system and leave my perilous past behind.
I’m starting to be able to move my fingers and toes. Good. I keep moving them. The feeling of control crawls up my arms and legs, and I wiggle it back until I feel I have ownership of my body again.
Finally, I’m able to slowly sit up in bed. I swing my legs over the side and rest my feet on the cold, steel floor. I feel the gentle hum of the Riyadh under my feet. The spacecraft is over two hundred years old; like the seafaring vessels of old Earth, it’s often more economical to retrofit old vessels than to scrap them and build anew. In her heyday and under some different name, the Riyadh carried emigrating Martians, supplies, and equipment to the Jovian moons. Now her port-of-call is in the orbit of Ganymede, and she carries goods from the Jovian moons to the colonies on Saturn. As for me, I’m her sole human occupant. Well, mostly human, excluding the past-its-prime junk in my head and chest. Anything to keep me traveling away from the center of the solar system, at least half the time.
The Riyadh and I are headed back to Ganymede. We carry little; there’s not yet much of value produced by the colonists to bring back — just some heavy equipment needing specialized repair and large coring and ground samples to be analyzed for the prospect of mineral extraction. It wouldn’t be economical to mine minerals at the colonies and ship them back to the markets of the Jovian moons, so the colonists intend to mine for raw materials to support themselves. The Jovians support this because they know mining and refining equipment will be in high demand for decades to come. Why support the gold rush when you can simply sell shovels on the side of the road?
Confident I have my control back, I stand on my feet and take a single step to reach the wall where one clean jumpsuit hangs; the rest lay in a pile on the floor. I slip into the jumpsuit and pull the connected boots up around my bare feet. The boots detect they are on, and the gel cushion inside electrifies and forms to my feet. They’re remarkably comfortable for company gear.
Next to the hook that held my jumpsuit is an array of cabinets holding supplies and rations. On the opposite wall is a cheap, low color-range holographic display, connected to a thumb-sized microcomputer that interfaces over the ship network to download the latest news and films from the networks broadcasting across space for travelers like me. Ordinarily you’d have to pay for these services, but I purchased the black-market microcomputer back on Ganymede with cracked decryption keys pre-programmed for each service so I get the programming free. It’s one of my few sources of entertainment on this ship. Next to the holographic display, my tennis racket is propped up against the wall with some tennis balls scattered around it. It’s actually a fairly amusing game to play alone against a cargo deck bulkhead in low gravity. The small folding tray built in to the wall next to my cot, my nightstand, holds a cup of stale coffee that I need to clean in the sink in the bathroom at the rear of the quarters. Later; I’m in no rush. Honestly, the instant coffee purchased back at port is not much better than just popping a caffeine-theanine pill. Real beans are far too expensive; agriculture is usually reserved for essential plants that are good for both eating and oxygen-production, making them a high-cos
t delicacy that I’m just not in the market for.
I leave the personal-protective equipment hanging as usual, no safety supervisors here, and swing open the creaking port and step out into the corridor. The corridors of the Riyadh aren’t long as the craft is laid out vertically. The corridor briefly becomes the Spine, a tunnel with a service elevator that runs the length of the ship vertically, headed by the emergency EVA port not far from my quarters, and terminating at the bottom of the ship where the air tanks are situated. The ion drives are entirely outside the ship as a safety measure; it’s unspoken but clearly more so to protect the cargo than the human occupant. I walk across the service elevator that runs up and down the Spine, continue down the corridor, and reach the far end. I open the port to Operations.
A vessel like the Riyadh doesn’t have a bridge in the sense of the old sea vessels of Earth, but instead has an Ops deck. Most systems on the ship are run by instances of narrow artificial intelligence. With the time delay, artificial intelligence subsystems must be capable of responding independently to unplanned events in real-time, rather than waiting with a time delay for instruction from home port on Ganymede. Most of the time, they make decisions guided by company policies, but can improvise within some boundaries. I am here for when things don’t go quite right. General artificial intelligence, of course, has eluded mankind still, which is good because I keep my job. In Ops, I spend most of my time reviewing events classified as potential issues by the control systems. I sit down leisurely in the almost-comfortable central chair and the holographic display powers up before me, displaying events after my last session that require my review.
An agent, a small robot capable of electronic and some structural repairs, was lost after it careened off the hull of the spacecraft into space. Likely failed radiation shielding corrupted the logic board inside the central processing unit. I archive the event — nothing for me to do there. At least it wasn’t my favorite agent, Chip. He’s really no different than the rest of the agents, but I like Chip anyway. You’ve got to improvise for social interaction when stuck on this ship for months on end.
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