Cygnus Rising: Humanity Returns to Space (Cygnus Space Opera Book 1)

by Craig Martelle

  Cain was first to finish his task and he ran to the fifth obstacle and started raking the approach like a madman while time seemed to skip ahead. Stinky joined him, then Ellie bounced past them to the rope climb. Tandry joined Stinky as time was about to expire. They raced to the finish, declaring it satisfactory although knowing that they could have done a better job with one more thorough pass.

  The four of them stood at attention, before Stinky realized that Briz was nowhere to be seen. His rake was lying in the dirt between the balance beams. He dropped to all fours and raced at Wolfoid speed to the obstacle. Before he made it, a cry echoed across the entire obstacle course.

  “FIRE!” DI Katlind yelled. Flames licked at the bottom of the old observation tower. At the top, Mixial and Briz stood, waving their arms frantically. Smoke started to billow skyward.

  “Save the ship!” Cain yelled as the recruits ran toward the tower. The flames enveloped the stairs, preventing a climb up or down. Tandry used her shovel to throw dirt on the quickly spreading flames. The others beat at the flames with their rakes. DI Katlind yelled for Ellie. The shed contained a hose and pump. Together they manhandled the heavy contraption to the mud pit and dropped one hose in the water. Cain and Stinky joined them to race for the tower with a hose fighting to pump muddy water. They attacked the fire climbing the steps, but they were already too far gone for anyone to use the steps to escape. The stairs were burned through. Then the recruits kept the fire from the four legs of the structure, wetting them extensively to make sure the tower didn’t come down.

  A platform in the middle burned and they arced clear water over it. Ellie had moved the hose closer to the inlet that fed the mud pit, which greatly improved the water pressure. Soon, the flames were beat back, then extinguished. Two of the four platforms were gone and most of the stairway to the top. Briz’s white fur was sooty from the smoke, but he waved tentatively to show that he was okay. Mixial was unimpressed by it all and told them that she was hungry.

  The group of recruits looked at the structure and tried to devise a plan to rescue their teammate. They looked at DI Katlind and for the first time, they noticed that she’d gotten muddy. She had waded into the mud pit to ensure the collection nozzle was clear before they started the pump.

  “What are you looking at?” she bellowed at the recruits, who looked quickly away.

  Black Leaper turned to face the DI and stood at attention. “Master DI, if you have any suggestions, the recruits would greatly appreciate your continuing assistance in rescuing our teammate.” The other recruits looked shocked. No one asked the DI for help unless that person wanted extra calisthenics, derision, and physical pain.

  “The rope on the last obstacle has a quick disconnect at the top. See it? Hurry up now, they’re waiting on you.” All four scrambled to the last obstacle and two started climbing at once. The DI shook her head. Ellie was the quickest climber so she continued while Cain dropped into the sand. She was at the top in no time. With one arm wrapped around the rope and her foot firmly twisted in, she reached with her free hand for the other, but the quick connect was too far away. Cain and Tandry grabbed the bottom of Ellie’s rope and helped her swing until she caught the next one over. She worked the quick connect, but the tension was too great and she couldn’t undo the hasp. Stinky grabbed the rope and started leaping, snapping the rope to send a wave upward. When Ellie saw what he was doing, she waited and with a wrist flick, the clasp unsnapped and the heavy rope headed downward, where surprised recruits ran for cover.

  The DI laughed to herself. All thrust and no vector, as the flyer types would say. At least they had spirit.

  They each secured a section of the rope and dragged it to the tower. Then they looked at each other. How would they get the rope to the top? They looked at the DI and she only dipped her head in dismay, twirling her finger which meant, “hurry up.”

  “Talk to me,” Stinky said to the group as he looked upward.

  “We have a big heavy rope that we can’t throw to them. We only have to throw it as far as the lowest safe step and that’s still too far. If they could grab it with something, then they could pull it up. So we have to get the rope to that point there.” Cain pointed as he talked. “And they can pull it to a point where they can secure it. What can they grab it with?” They collectively shook their heads, then started looking around, close, then farther, then to the trees.

  There was a thin rope that detailed the outer boundary of the obstacle course. Ellie and Tandry ran for it.

  “We’re going to throw a rope to you, and then you can pull the climbing rope the rest of the way,” Cain yelled. Stinky’s speaker still hadn’t reached a point where he could yell properly. Briz waved. The ‘cat looked at them through narrowed eyes, willing them to pick up the pace. When Mixial presented the plan to DI Katlind, she hadn’t foreseen being trapped at the top of a rickety old observation tower. She expected they’d be down by now, although she was surprised at how quickly the fire had burned. It was never her intent to die trying to teach the team a lesson. It was fun, just until it wasn’t.

  With the thin cord in hand, they tied a heavy stick to one end, the climbing rope to the other, and twirled the end to build up speed, slinging it skyward at the last moment. That didn’t go as planned and resulted in more scattering recruits. On the fourth try, the stick sailed to the top flight of steps and stuck. Although Briz was stocky, the climbing rope was heavy and he struggled greatly to pull it up the stairs. He only moved it a few feet before deciding he would have to anchor it there. He used the other rope to wrap around a support beam and tie it to itself, then hooked the climbing rope’s quick connect hasp and was ready to attempt the climb. A Rabbit’s hands were small, with dainty fingers instead of paws, while his back feet were huge and semi rounded. With the strength of his back legs, he held the rope between his big feet, and with a Hillcat wrapped around his head, he hugged the rope to him as he slowly slid down. He used his shoulder to push away from the charred ruins of each of the lower levels.

  The recruits yelled encouragement until he was close enough to drop the rest of the way. Mixial jumped first, landing on her feet and then bolting for the trees before Tandry could pull her into a hug. Within a few heartbeats, they heard the scream of a Hillcat killing a squirrel. Briz winced, not understanding how the ‘cat could be such a barbarian when the dining hall had the freshest vegetables, grown in a field nearby, tended by his kin and the ever present development units, the bots that did the routine maintenance and field tending in New Sanctuary.

  Tandry smiled, happy that her ‘cat was safe, but suspected something had gone on between Mixial and the DI. She’d prod her friend later, see if the ‘cat would be forthcoming with the whole truth or just enough to keep Tandry wondering.

  “Bring it in,” the DI told the recruits.

  “Yes, Master DI,” they yelled as they took a knee in a semi-circle around the DI.

  “The best lessons aren’t planned,” she started. “What do you think you learned today?”

  The recruits looked at each other. Stinky raised his half-hand/half-paw. The DI pointed to him. “By saving the ship, it gave us time to save the people.” She nodded and encouraged him to continue. “No one alone could have saved them. It took all of us, including you, Master DI. And for me, know where your people are at all times. I lost track of Briz and because of that, we could have lost him.”

  “Yes and no,” the DI told them in a normal speaking voice. The recruits leaned closer, understanding that this was a test that they had passed. The DI had to reinforce the lessons before the best of it was lost, although they wouldn’t forget. It was an emotional high with an adrenaline surge. Even if it was staged, it was more realistic than anything they’d gone through with the mockup ship. They believed that Briz and Mixial were in danger. And they weren’t paralyzed with fear. That was an important lesson that they had learned about themselves.

  “You could berate yourself all day long for not knowing where your pe
ople were, but did you give him a mission, with clear follow-on orders for when he completed the first task?” Stinky nodded. He had. “And you worked, too. You didn’t sit back and watch your people, showing them that you didn’t trust them. No! You all agreed on what needed to be done and you were doing it, including you, Recruit Black Leaper. You have to trust your people to do what they committed to do. You have to take responsibility for your own actions. In this case, Recruit Brisbois climbed the tower because I told him to. No one did anything wrong, and there is no reason to have a lack of trust in any of your teammates.” She looked them over, one by one, ready to complete the day’s lesson.

  “Recruit Brisbois,” she said, pointing to him. His ears perked up and his nose twitched. “Recruit Brisbois hasn’t been sleeping, has he?” No one moved.

  “No need to answer. I know he hasn’t. I saw all of you carry him on the run, help him. So when you turned him loose to work, expecting him to do as you did, was that a fair expectation?” Stinky bowed his head. “That’s the hardest lesson of all. But he was doing fine. He rose to the occasion and was keeping up with you. I have to admit, before the ‘cat tells on me, that I’m proud of you. If any of you insulbricks ever repeat that, I’ll deny it and call you every name I can think of. Do we understand each other?”

  “Yes, Master DI!” the recruits belted out in unison.

  “Now get your nasty butts back to the barracks and clean up. Chow at noon and I’ll see you in the classrooms for the afternoon sessions.” She stalked off without waiting for the recruits, hoping that no one saw her in her current state. DIs were never supposed to be covered in mud. She also had to report a fire that nearly destroyed the old observation tower. She honestly had no idea how the fire started. The fact that she planned it and agreed to it would be found nowhere in her report.

  The recruits ran fast, in their usual formation, to the barracks, where they each grabbed an individual shower, stripped and washed. Wrapped in towels, they returned to their bunk cubicles for that half-wall of privacy. They dressed in clean uniforms, which were simply a coverall that was the multi-purpose uniform worn aboard an SES spaceship.

  They bodily dumped Briz into his bunk, taking the book away that he tried to sneak out. At least he’d get a couple hours sleep. When they checked in on him a few heartbeats later, he was out cold. They expected the rest of the recruits were still in their morning damage control classes.

  “Did I hear that right? I think my Wolfoid ears are playing tricks on me. The DI said she was proud of us?” Stinky said, starting a full replay of the morning’s events.

  “We got something no one else did,” Tandry added. “Thanks to Mixial!” She beamed at her Hillcat, who was curled up on her bunk, sleeping off her recent meal.

  “So, what would we do differently?” Cain prodded. The others shrugged. “I’d know everything that was available to us without having to search. Where’s the damage control, the DC equipment. When you don’t have any time to think, that’s not the time to start thinking of what you should have done…”

  Space

  What’s Space School without a taste of space? It was the group’s thirteenth week, and they were exploring the effects of zero-g on fluid dynamics. Specifically, they learned how toilets worked in space. They paid attention too, as nothing would ruin your day quicker than having a sewage leak within the self-contained biosphere of a spaceship.

  That was also the week that new recruits arrived, meaning that Stinky, Cain, and the rest of class Beta 37 weren’t the most junior people at Space School.

  They also got to go to space. There were two different ways to get into space: by the matter transfer system tying New Sanctuary to the Resettlement Vessel Traveler in orbit around Planet Vii or by shuttle. The recruits would use the former system.

  The shuttle was triangular-shaped with two Scramjets, engines that could transition seamlessly between subsonic, supersonic, and hypersonic flight speeds and two small rocket boosters for exoatmospheric thrust and maneuvers. Two larger, reusable rockets pushed the shuttle high into the atmosphere before the other engines helped it achieve escape velocity and travel beyond the pull of gravity. It was a pretty simple concept with millennia-old technology.

  Having one ship that both landed on a planet and traveled through space was not only impractical for the ship’s construction, the logistics support would require a second ship stationed in orbit to refuel it. It was easier to use two ships, a shuttle system for the stress of flying within a planet’s atmosphere and spaceships for travel in space. The shuttles provided travel back and forth between the planet and the RV Traveler, which had transitioned into a fully functional and self-sustaining space station.

  The Space Exploration Service had three types of ships: shuttles, intra-system ships, and deep space vessels. The shuttles and the intra-system ships used conventional means of propulsion, rockets and thrusters to maneuver within the Cygnus star system. The deep space vessels used the engines designed by the Cygnus VI engineering team over a period of four-hundred years following the civil war and reestablishment of civilization on Vii.

  The ISE, called ice, was the interdimensional space engine. It linked two points in the universe, sending the ship from one point to the other without actual motion. The space collapsed between the points and the ship vibrated from one location to the next. The ISE-driven ships were ungainly looking beasts, rounded to facilitate a spherical vortex which engulfed the spaceship, moving it without moving. The round nature of the ships also made sense for the rotation necessary to act as artificial gravity. The people of Vii needed it for long-term health. They’d never found a way around gravity or inertia and that was what made the ISE the greatest invention of all time.

  They wouldn’t spend a thousand years accelerating and another thousand decelerating, a process that did not turn the human body into a jelly on the aft bulkheads.

  The ISE was fueled by dark matter and operated within a dark matter environment, which meant that all travel started and ended within interstellar space, no closer than the edge of a solar system. The trip from the Cygnus star system to other points in the galaxy took only an instant, but then travel to planets within a solar system were long, deliberate affairs. Some of the exploration missions took years, simply because of the time it took to travel within a system’s heliosphere using the shuttles carried by the deep space exploration vessels.

  The SES had been formed a hundred years ago, when they still called a year a cycle of the seasons. From space they came, to space they returned, better than they ever were. The people of the Cygnus system were determined to find other life, maybe even return to Earth as they explored the known galaxy. Humanity would not be denied.

  And they had the company of the intelligent species humans created centuries past, who evolved and became equals, partners in the journey to a better place. They were all the people of Cygnus VII.

  From the ashes of their past, Cygnus was rising.

  Welcome to the RV Traveler

  As part of their visit to the RV Traveler, the Space School explained the philosophy behind the ship’s construction. It was built in two huge main sections called cores. Each of those was cylindrical, with five decks that rotated around a central axis. This rotating five-deck unit was contained within an external shell. The shell, made up of the cryo-storage units and other equipment necessary for interstellar travel, protected the internal sections of the ship. When in deep freeze, the humans survived best in zero-gravity. When awake, life happened in the rotating sections.

  The rotation was necessary to keep both humans and animals from losing the ability to survive in a planet’s gravity.

  Both fore and aft five-deck sections were over ten kilometers long. Each deck, floor to ceiling, was nine hundred meters. With the last deck being open, five kilometers side to side, without a ceiling.

  The aft section’s decks were designated 6 through 10. The outermost cylinder of the aft core, Deck 10, was the Livestock Level. That deck
provided some of the meat and meat products for the crew. Most of the animals had long ago been transplanted to the surface after the ship arrived at Cygnus VII. For the resettlement, they used surface landing ships, which were then dismantled to build Sanctuary, which was subsequently destroyed during the war.

  New shuttles had been built in the past century and all creatures could readily travel back and forth from Vii to the Traveler. The reestablishment of a fully functioning Livestock Level came with the designation of the Resettlement Vessel Traveler as Space Station Traveler, with full staffing and support for the growing fleet of spaceships.

  DI Katlind’s responsibilities were focused on the continual disciplinary development of all recruits, but she exercised the greatest influence over the first twelve weeks of their lives at Space School. She stayed with the new recruits in class Charlie 37, while two teams from Beta 37 came under the watchful eye of Space Instructor Hendricks.

  The no-nonsense Hendricks had been raised in a fishing town on the Eastern Ocean. He traded life on one ship for a different life on a different ship. He wore a perpetual scowl. The class’s Hillcats shied away from him, although they considered him mostly harmless. SI Hendricks knew ships and was terminally miffed at having gotten removed from service on an active spaceship to become an instructor, although from a career standpoint, the senior leadership insisted that the quality of the instructors was far more important than having a single quality engineer on board a ship. They selfishly wanted a spaceship filled with quality engineers, which took quality training in a long pipeline.

  SI Hendricks looked over the two teams, scowling further. The only one he was impressed with was the Rabbit. Second was the Lizard Man. He was in a constant struggle with the other instructors at Space School because he maintained that academics and technical knowledge were far superior to any physical ability or general knowledge. The SES needed smart people who understood every single aspect of how the ship operated. He’d lectured a class on fluid dynamics in a zero-gravity environment when one of the recruits said, “ewww” after he mentioned sewage. He wanted to run away screaming. Children! He loved spaceships and everything about them, even the sewage process system. Only Briz shared his love of the technical elements required to make a ship move through space.