This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living, dead or undead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © Dennis E. Smirl. Lost Aardvarks Press.
Copyright © Ian Hall. Hallanish Publishing.
Published by Dennis E. Smirl & Ian Hall
ISBN- 9781310681028
All rights reserved, and the author reserves the right to re-produce this book, or parts thereof, in any way whatsoever.
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Contents
Copyright
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
In ancient days before humans spread their populace to the stars, a company that got too big for its britches would find the Government gently reining it in or roughly shackling it down. And when a company got too big for Government oversight, usually its own weight would cause an implosion; the force of natural expansion and demise. When a company gets bigger than its Government, then you have a problem on your hands.
The MacCollie Company grew beyond that: they ruled travel to the stars.
The development of the L-Space FTL drive—the first practical Faster-Than-Light propulsion system—created a monopoly that only allowed access to the stars to those MacCollies deemed fit.
At first, they trusted only the Government—the Fellowship of Humanity. Slowly, carefully, cautiously, they expanded access to a few independent businesses, and the race to colonize other worlds took shape.
Traveling into space put Earth’s problems in a new light. When you’re orbiting Aldebaran three checking for possibilities of Terra-forming, a flood in Bangladesh seems a long, long way away.
Of course, even with the L-Space drive, interstellar space travel was in its infancy. It took twelve years to reach Earth’s nearest neighbor, Alpha Centauri, just four light years away. With the advances in drive technology, it took only took four years to reach Luhman 16. It took a mere six months to travel ten light years and orbit the distant planets of Epsilon Eridani.
Yeah, we humans are good that way; give us a problem, and we’ll work it out.
But let’s get distances into perspective… Our galaxy is 200,000 light years in diameter. Flying at Light Speed (LS), to get to the nearest edge would still take us 87,000 years.
Then Hector Faber (a MacCollie scientist, of course) discovered and developed the H-20 Drive; capable of faster than light speed by quite a bit. As usual, Earth politicians took two years to decide what to call it; the ‘H-2O Drive’, the Faber Drive, but the pilots were way ahead of them. The invention was Faber’s, the process was simply called FTL-VII (Faster Than Light, Version II). Yeah, it didn’t make a dent in those Galactic-Edge distances, but it sure sped up travel in the Fellowship Worlds. Thanks to MacCollie, nearby suitable planets were colonized tout suite!
When MacCollie Scout Benjamin Steele discovered “jump holes”, it was the time to head into the unknown en mass. Basically rips in time and space which, like a star, seemed to exhibit long stable periods, these jump holes transported FTL material across huge distances in an instant.
MacCollie jumped at the opportunity like only they could. In a year they manufactured 1000 Survey-Scout ships, recruited 1000 pilots, and fired them to every corner of the Milky Way. The Galactic Gazetteer had begun.
Enter our hero… Seth Gingko.
For a boy that memorized the constellations, it’s a bitch that when you actually get up amongst the stars, their familiar patterns soon disappear. With some it takes a few light years of travel, some considerably longer, but the farther you go from earth, the more the lines distort. New shapes manifest, new forms morph into place, but they’re never the same. They’re not the ones you knew as a kid.
The more you search for them in the forward screen, the longed-for familiarity soon becomes a distant memory; a part of the place and people you left behind, never again to see.
But trust me, it’s an incessant itch that never goes away… and that’s a bitch.
As I sped across our galaxy sometimes I thought I glimpsed a memory, the belt of Orion, the ‘w’ of Cassiopeia, the seven sisters of the Pleiades, but it’s just space playing tricks with your head. After five years in a dart shooting solo through the galaxy, I know space is cruel if you let it get to you.
At near light speed, the constant change in the star pattern becomes the norm; every day something different, every day new stars to see. Every day I’d compile notes for the forthcoming blockbuster; the MacCollie Galactic Gazetteer. After a while the stars’ permanent shifting is a kick-in-the-face reminder of just how far away from home you’ve gone.
Anyway.
Brought back to reality by the familiar whooshing sound of the ship dropping out of FTL mode, the zipping lights stopped, and the screen gave a clear view forward. Dropping out from Faster-Than-Light speed is a thrill anyway, but today it held something quite special.
Just when I thought I’d seen it all, I don’t know why I never expected to see no stars at all. I mean, it made sense. I’d reached my objective… the edge of the galaxy… the final stars of our milky way left behind. As the ship began its automatic deceleration, I kinda took offense to the black screen in front of me.
Well, of course, it wasn’t totally black, there were the countless neighboring galaxies I could zoom in on, map, verify, and scan. At that point in time I was the furthest man in the galaxy, with the best view of everything outside. Well, me and a thousand other recruits, sent out from earth like the spokes in a wheel, in a giant MacCollie mission to map the galaxy. To ‘go where no man has gone before’, and all that ancient jazz.
But against all my experience, the empty screen was disconcerting; blackness, the far galaxies looked like small white smudges, like bugs on a windshield, except, of course, that we didn’t have a windshield. No glass could withstand the constant particle bombarding at such high speeds. Sub light speeds were bad enough on a ship’s hull, never mind the Faster than Light stuff. I mean FTLx10 was so bad, I almost always did it sleeping, dozed out on pharmaceuticals.
“Anything to report, Ship?” I asked the computer, my only companion since normal communications died out after just a month of the mission.
So today was my big day. “Front screen, no magnification.” I ordered. The screen changed instantly, the far galaxies vanishing.
Pure blackness.
As I looked through normal resolution; I got the kind of objective viewing I’d get if I were outside looking through a spacesuit visor, I couldn’t see a damn thing; nothing. Even the windshield bugs were gone.
It was a momentous day of my life, but I had to
admit feeling kinda numb. Not only had I got to the edge of our galaxy, but I’d finished my contract with MacCollie.
“Ship?” I linked my personal holoscreen to the view, just so I’d remember it. “Get ready to record to needle.”
I toggled the screen between full magnification of the distant galaxies, and the pure black of normal vision, enjoying the comparison.
“Rear screen,” I said, and was hit with a view of dust; six hundred billion particles, stars filling my screen like a vacuum bag that had just burst. I had a perfect picture of the Milky Way; a view that no man had ever seen before. My home galaxy, viewed from the very, very edge.
After I’d exhausted every view, I settled down to my job, taking readings, filling my last communication needle with every scrap of data I could cram into it. MacCollie Central wouldn’t get it for ages, of course, but that’s just the norm for space, it being so big and all.
“Ship; Personal Diary, and include a copy to needle.” I said, and my holoscreen changed. “Seth Gingko here, Commander and sole occupant of MacCollie Survey-Scout #3497. I’ve eventually passed the last sun in our galaxy; I’m going to name it Denon Prime, just because I can, after my dad. I’m sending my last needle, and officially signing off from duty. Thanks for the ride, thanks for the memories, but most of all, thanks for the ship. For your Fellowship records, please note MSS-3497 is now denoted as Seth Gingko’s Cutey-Pie.” I grinned at the last piece of impudence at my suddenly previous employer, and hit ‘send’.
Seconds later, I heard the vacuum seal hiss, then a slight jarring as the needle slid away, bound for earth.
I leaned back on my command chair, more an expansive comfortable figure-hugging armchair, and began to wonder what I’d do next. “Not as if you’ve never pondered that one, eh?”
Ship gave me no answer.
I soon found there’s not much to do when the routine of ship’s duty slips away. But I knew my plan. There was no point in trying to cross to another galaxy, heck, we hadn’t explored 99% of our own. I had the rest of my life to live, and it was time to do some exploring.
“Denon Prime, full magnification. We’re here, I’m as well having a look around.” The star filled most of my screen, digital details being added as Ship scanned the system. Yellow star, stable burn period, very stable, no flare activity, exactly 1.4 times the size of our own sun. I let the ship grab the stats, and popped a nutrient pill, knowing the growing pangs of hunger I’d been feeling would be gone in minutes. “Search for planets, report when ready.”
MacCollie Survey-Scouts by definition are not built for comfort. Being little more than a kid’s dart, they have only four main compartments; Control, Crew, Cargo and Engineering. Control sat obviously at the front, the pointy bit, Crew sat behind that with four beds (yeah, four), a food processor, waste recycler, exercise machines, and automatic med-unit. Cargo was further back, full of stuff I’d never needed, spare parts and the like, and of course Engineering at the back-end made the ship work.
Basically seventy meters of faster-than-shit honey-comb silico-titanium frame… and me.
I’m not certain why, but as the communication needle left, and I took full ownership as per my contract, a feeling of loneliness engulfed me. I’d completed my duties as a MacCollie employee, and as such the ship, Cutey-Pie, now belonged to me. I knew I’d passed a Rubicon in my life, and I felt different.
“Talk to me.”
Shit.
For the next few days I zipped around the system, surveying Denon Prime’s planets, finding nothing interesting whatsoever. It was a great start to my new life; doing exactly what I’d been doing for five years. I guess habits had set in.
Then, of course, as so often on my trip, Ship changed that. I stood in Crew, washing my face before sleep-time.
“What?” I nearly shat myself.
“I know!” I roared, striding along the short corridor to Control, wiping my face with a towel. “I heard you. What type of communication?”
“Details on screen!” I jumped into my chair, but all I saw on the monitor were the far away galaxies. “Full magnification!”
“How far away?”
That was new. Ship had the best computer MacCollie could buy. “Then put everything on the task. Analyze signal. Compute for red or blue shift, get me every bit of data you can.”
I waited for an answer from Ship.
And waited some more.
As I did, I thought about my first wife. She liked keeping me waiting.
“I won't sleep with you until we're married,” she said. She was a member of some cult or religion, don't ask me which, that put an enormous premium on chastity. Not that it made any difference. Women, at least in the strata of civilization we both enjoyed, never bore children. Growing a child was all ex utero and the likelihood of two people producing a child by 'sleeping together' was zero. Reproduction had almost totally become lab work. Still, I managed to accept the strange prohibitions supported by her beliefs, and went along with the program.
In other words, I waited.
Was it worth it?
In one word, no.
After we got married, she had other reasons to make me wait, and I waited. One day I concluded she wanted to be known as a married woman, but had no desire to be my wife. So, I divorced her, and felt the burn as both she and her lawyers did whatever they could to make me a pauper. My attorney was better—and smarter—than hers, and the big surprise what that instead of my ex-wife's lawyers impoverishing me, my own lawyer did it through billable hours.
“Ship, I need an update.”
Nothing.
“Ship, I really need an update.”
“Why don't you have any data?”
If I kept at it we could go in circles for hours. Entertaining, but an utterly fruitless waste of time.
“So, no other attempts at communication.”
“Rescan the Denon system.”
“I told you not to call me 'Captain', Ship. My name is Seth.”
“That's new.”
“No.”
I waited for a moment. Ship had sounded even more petulant in that last conversation than before.
After a minute had passed, I asked, “Have you rescanned the Denon system?”
“And what did you find?” It was like pulling teeth.
“So you were incorrect.”
“And sufficiently contrite?”
I gave up. “What message is contained in the transmission?”
“Is the transmission encrypted?”
“Where's the source of the transmission?”
&
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“What's our distance from the signal?”
“Are we on course to intercept that second planet?”
“Are you trying to influence me?”
“Why, indeed.” I gave it some thought. My job, as a MacCollie scout on the way to the edge of the galaxy, had been to find habitable planets, or failing that, planets that could be Terraformed at a minimum expenditure of energy and money. The Denon system appeared to have neither. The preliminary scan told me that only one planet orbited in 'The Goldilocks Zone' and that planet didn't have enough atmosphere or water to be a candidate for Terraforming. In fact, Denon Two, as I was now calling it, looked more like a colder, dryer Mars than anything else. The problem was, Mars wasn't worth Terraforming, at least with current technology.
So why would I bother?
Maybe it had to do with my second wife. She really liked being married, especially the tickle and giggle part that went on beneath the sheets, but she was always trying to make me a better man. She wasn't really a nag, but she was always on the lookout for opportunities.
For me, of course.
“You could go back to school,” she often said. “Get yourself prepared for a career in the management class. Things don't run by themselves. They need smart, capable minds—like yours—to keep the wheels turning.”
I was teaching at the time, influencing young minds, preparing them for a world in which the average lifespan had reached three hundred years, the retirement age had crept up to one hundred and fifty, and the unemployment rate, due to Ship's cybernetic cousins, hovered at eighty percent. I considered myself lucky to have a job as a teacher, and to be able to teach Cyber-psychology was one of the sweetest plums in academia. Training people to be able to keep Artificially Intelligent Computers sane was, as far as I was concerned, an important job.
Star-Eater Chronicles 1: A Galaxy Too Far... Page 1