by Robert Boren
The Clarke
Chronicles
Book 1
Escape from Earth
Robert Boren
South Bay Press
Copyright © 2019 by Robert Boren.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Book Layout ©2017 BookDesignTemplates.com
Cover Design: SelfPubBookCovers.com/VISIONS
The Clarke Chronicles Book 1/ Robert Boren. -- 1st ed.
For Bill Boren
“What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight- it's the size of the fight in the dog.”
―Dwight D. Eisenhower
Contents
Escape from Earth
Probability
Mosasaurs
The Hut
Plasma Bursts
Evolution
Ocean Base
Meeting of the Council
Railguns
Alone in the Zone
Deep Space
News Reports
Amberis
Ice Base
Starship New Jersey
Military-Industrial Complex
Stun Attack
Ecason
Mystery Ship
Rail Car
The Nudge
Projectiles
Triple Team
{ 1 }
Escape from Earth
T hings came to a head a couple weeks ago.
I looked at the horizon, the blue water of the Pacific Ocean seeming to end at infinity, the air clear all the way out. There was a strong breeze, salt spray hitting my face as I stood just beyond the waves.
“Are you sure these things are waterproof, Captain Clarke?” asked my first mate Timothy. He stared at the row of eighteen shipping containers, three foot by two foot rectangles, as tall as they were wide.
“Good enough to get them on the Zephyrus,” I replied, “but we need to handle them carefully. Those lids can come loose. I’m not expecting to have them in the water, at least. Izzy’s gonna fly to the beach and drop the ramp right in front of us.”
“We’ll be seen as soon as the ship’s out of the water,” Timothy said, squinting as he looked into the mid-day sky. He was a young man of twenty-five, large and muscular with sable-brown hair and thin black eyebrows.
“We won’t see her coming,” I said, looking over each gray shipping container sitting on the beach. “We’re ready. Want to call the ship?”
“I still think we should float them out first.”
I shook my head no. “Izzy already has the Samson drive set. We’ll jump out of here as soon as these are loaded, and she’s got crew members in the loading dock to help us load them up.”
Tim gave me a worried look. “I hope this works. Sucks that all of the ports are locked down.”
“Simone is getting smarter, but she’s not smart enough. She can’t cloak her ships inside the atmosphere, so we’ll see her if she approaches.”
“You hope,” Tim muttered, pulling his left arm towards his face, looking at the embedded communications device we call a PA, grafted directly into his skin. He swiped the screen. “Izzy, we’re ready.”
“Roger that, Tim,” she said, her Cuban accent coming through crystal clear. The water a few hundred meters offshore erupted, a sleek gold-plated ship rising, water dripping off as it shot over them, a ramp opening in the bottom, extending to within half an inch of the ground. Tim and I picked up containers and ran up the ramp. Several crew members rushed down to grab more of the containers, struggling to run in the sand.
“Hurry up!” Tim shouted, rushing down to help with the remaining containers. I joined them, grabbing the last of them. Then I felt static electricity raise every hair on my body.
“Oh, crap,” one of the crew members shouted. “Captain, we’ve been made.”
“Told you,” Tim said, running towards the ramp with a container.
A much larger ship appeared out of nowhere, half a Kilometer long, sitting several hundred feet above the water. Flashes of light shot from our main gun and radiated around the massive ship like lightening, its shields absorbing them.
“Keep at them so they can’t fire,” I shouted into my PA. “Last box up. Get us out of here!”
“Can we outrun that ship?” Tim asked as we ran inside, the cargo ramp closing behind us with a heavy clunk.
I got that tingly feeling on my neck and forehead, my body freezing in place and my brain blacking out for a split second. The jump.
My body and mind were free again. “Don’t worry, we’re already gone.”
“I’m still not used to this,” Tim said, shaking his head to clear it.
“C’mon.” I motioned to him, and we walked towards the bridge. Izzy was at the main controls, looking at a monitor on the front wall, set up to look like a windshield.
“How’d they find us?” Izzy asked, turning towards us. She was a beautiful Cuban woman in her mid-thirties, both ears covered with metallic ornaments which tinkled when she moved her head.
“Don’t know yet,” I said, sitting down in the captain’s chair. “How close are we?”
“Patience, it’ll be a while,” Izzy said, her dark eyes flashing. “We’re making good time, but the Bootes Supercluster isn’t just around the block.”
“Are we being tracked?” Tim asked.
“No way,” Izzy said. “They can’t get on the same frequency as us, thanks to Nolan’s new control module.”
“Thank you, my dear,” Nolan said, swiveling his chair towards us. He was an old man with long gray hair and a beard, looking scroungy in his battered jump suit. “They didn’t catch us in their sensors. Somebody spilled the beans.”
I shook my head. “That’s a guess, though, isn’t it?”
“It’s educated enough that it’s breached the boundaries of a guess, Captain.”
Tim chuckled. “Just tell us, okay?”
Nolan laughed. “You Earthlings need to expand your focus. We’re in a multi-faceted situation, but you always want to reduce things to the bite-sized pieces your minds can access inside your comfort zone.”
“We Earthlings have a lot to learn, but we’ll get there,” I said. “Pretend we’re already there. Why are you thinking somebody spilled the beans?”
“Our transport system works on a complex set of modulating frequencies that the Central Authority can’t interpret,” Nolan said. “This is a fact, not a guess. Think of it as an impossible level of encryption.”
“Okay, so?”
Nolan sighed. “So they didn’t see the Zephyrus come out of the water and pinpoint our location in an instant. We’ve also got more than a quarter-inch of gold on the outside of this ship. That plays hell with Central Authority sensors, and we can see them looking when they turn up the gain.”
“How do you know they didn’t change their set of frequencies?” Tim asked.
“Simple. That Centurion-class ship
doesn’t have the capability to adjust its frequencies. They were hidden in a space port before they jumped here. A third party hid them, and they knew where we were.”
I leaned back in my chair, staring at the video representation of our progress. Nolan saw me looking at it and shook his head. “We should remove that. It doesn’t serve any purpose.”
“It does when we’re docking, or when we’re in battle,” Izzy said.
“It’s only there to provide comfort,” Nolan said. “Until your people learn to ignore crutches like that and expand your thinking, Earth will remain a fourth-level world.”
“Ah yes, use the force,” quipped Tim. Izzy giggled.
Nolan rolled his eyes. “That stupid film series from four hundred years ago. Quaint. Love all the cute but impossible wild life.”
“We’re higher than fourth-level,” I said. “We’re officially designated as second-level. We invented the Samson Drive. That alone puts us at level 2. Maybe level 1.”
“One extreme genius does not an advanced society make,” Nolan said. “You knuckle-draggers still have separate nations on your planet.”
“Let’s not get into that one,” I said, wanting to change the subject. “If we’ve got a spy in our ranks, the Overlords are liable to know where we’re going.”
“Why did you think I brought this up?” Nolan asked.
Think. What should we do? I eyed Nolan, Izzy, and Tim, all of them waiting for my reaction. There was no way I was giving up command, but most of the time I felt completely out of my depth. More on that later.
“Good, you’re thinking,” Nolan said. “Somebody watch for smoke.”
“Is there any way for a transmission to be sent from this ship without us seeing it?” I asked. “And I mean any way–assume we have a very smart individual against us.”
“Not while we’re underway,” Nolan said.
“Is that a guess or a fact?”
Nolan eyed me for a moment. “It’s a fact.”
“Good, then we can change our destination and watch. Where can we hide out for a couple weeks?”
“I’ll find us someplace,” Nolan said. “Thanks for using the old noggin. That’s not a terrible idea.”
“How will this tell us anything?” Tim asked.
Izzy laughed. “It’ll save us from an ambush, and this guy’s complaining.”
Nolan turned towards Tim. “It’ll tell us what we need to know.”
“How so?” Tim asked.
“If we get to the alternate location un-molested, we’ll know for sure this ship isn’t being tracked. If we get attacked while we’re sitting someplace hiding, we’ll know somebody on this ship is sending transmissions.”
“Unless we tell somebody who’s not on the ship where we are,” Izzy said.
“We’ll have to contact our people on Sheppard One, or they’ll think we got blown away,” Tim said.
“True,” I said, “but we can bounce it so they can’t tell where we are, and we don’t tell anyone. That’s an order.”
“We could give them a false location and watch,” Nolan said. “I can track their ships if I put my mind to it.”
“You didn’t put your mind to it just now?” Izzy asked.
“I tracked it from the hiding place to Earth, but the trip only took 43.254 seconds,” Nolan said.
“Wait, forty-three seconds? They were in Earth orbit?”
“No, Captain, they were in Mars orbit, at the big space doc that the Overlords put there five years ago. That ship has probably been there for a month or more. They’ve been waiting.”
“I thought that space dock belonged to the Central Authority,” Izzy said.
“Ultimately it does, but the Overlords control it.”
Izzy shook her head. “I’m still not getting it. Why would the enforcement arm of the Central Authority be running an outpost so remote from their headquarters in the Virgo Cluster?”
“You Earthlings really are stupid,” Nolan said.
I shook my head. “Spare me. We understand. They don’t trust us. They think we’re too backwards for the technological capability we have.”
“Bingo! Give that boy a cigar!”
“Nolan, don’t be an asshole,” Tim said. “How do we know you’re not the plant?”
Nolan laughed. “I’ve got two life sentences and a death sentence. I didn’t bust out to go back to them. Quite the contrary. It’s more in my interest that we succeed than it is in yours.”
“Maybe they’ll give you a pardon if you play ball,” Tim said.
“I’ll remember you said that.”
“All right, enough,” I said, glancing at the two of them. “Let’s get off this. Get us a good alternative world, Nolan.”
Nolan grinned. “Already got one. I can multi-task, unlike you guys.”
“Fine. Where?”
“Valla Cappos,” he said.
“Just a sec, let me look that up,” Izzy said, focusing her eyes on the screen in front of her, speaking softly into her PA.
“We should change course soon if we’re going to,” Tim said.
“Uh, Captain, there’s a problem with this recommendation,” Izzy said.
Nolan laughed.
I eyed Nolan, then looked at Izzy. “What’s the problem?”
“It’s only a level eight world. It’s illegal for any ship to go there without a permit from the Central Authority.”
Okay, I should back up for a moment. She said level eight world. You need to understand a few things.
First, worlds are classified from level one all the way down to level twenty. The levels denote what stage of development the worlds are. Level one is the top. Only the worlds that house the Central Authority are considered First-Level… in our side of the Universe, anyway.
Starships can freely travel only to worlds that are level one to level five. Why? Because those worlds have space travel capability and are aware of the governing body, in our case the Central Authority. A level eight world is in a sensitive period of its development. It’s comparable to Earth’s history between the Romans and the Renaissance. There is organized human society and they’ve started recording history in physical form, meaning the history is written down and protected. They understand quite a bit of the world around them, and there are levels of thought above superstition. These worlds, and the two on either side (levels six, seven, nine, and ten) are humanity nurseries. They are protected, like a game reserve or a national park. Certain organizations can get permission to visit, but they must hide their ships, and have no interaction with the population that would suggest space travel or life on other planets.
What about the worlds that are level eleven through twenty? These worlds are pre-human. There are restrictions on these worlds too, but they aren’t as tight. You can get permission to visit for various reasons, as long as you don’t take natural resources or alter eco-systems.
Oh, and one other thing. Forget all those stories you’ve read about worlds populated by alien species, like lizards or insects or little green humanoids or various types of monsters. Remember the Big Bang Theory? The universe was created and seeded with life all at once, from the same matter. What does that mean? Every world starts out with the same sets of DNA. Every life-capable world has very similar flora and fauna to Earth. There are some differences, of course. Species went extinct early in some worlds and survived into the modern age in others. It’s the luck of the draw. Some worlds don’t have horses or elephants any more. Other worlds still have sabre-tooth tigers and wooly mammoths. Humans are basically the same everywhere, although things like political differences or which races are dominant vary, again due to the luck of the draw.
So, do you get it? Good. Let’s move on.
I looked at Nolan. “Did you know Valla Cappos was level eight?”
“Of course. What do you think will happen if we land on a level four or five world?”
“I know where this is going,” Tim said.
“Yes, I realize it’ll be
much harder for us to be seen if we go to a level eight, but it’s a major violation. It could land us in prison for the duration.”
“If we get caught,” Nolan said. “We won’t. Trust me. There’s always territory on level eight worlds which aren’t settled by humans yet, and we can find out where those are.”
“I’d feel better if we were going to an un-inhabited world,” Tim said.
“You want to be fighting large animals for survival?” Nolan asked.
“This is risky as hell,” I said. “You assume that there won’t be any moderns on Valla Cappos. You’re probably right, but if there are, they’ll be in places they’d be most likely to get a permit to visit. You know, like the un-populated places you’re talking about.”
“We’re talking needle and haystack,” Nolan said. “There’s nothing interesting about Valla Cappos. Boring place. It’s got almost the same flora and fauna as Earth did when it was level eight.”
“Almost the same?” Tim asked.
“They’ve kept Neanderthals alive as a slave class. Those are the only humanoids we’re likely to meet in the regions with no humans.”
“That’s kinda sick,” Izzy said.
Nolan laughed. “They’re barely smarter than non-human primates from a social standpoint, but much more easily domesticated. Never understood the outrage. We don’t complain about horses or dogs being used for the good of mankind. Neanderthals are a lot smarter than them, but that’s not the issue. They simply look too much like us. Emotional arguments are a waste of time.”
I glared at him. “Very sensitive of you. Neanderthals are smarter than humans in certain ways, and that’s why people have problems with them being used as slaves.”
Nolan chuckled. “Spare me.”
“Find us a spot there and give us a complete workup of the risks. I want to know if humans are already sailing across their oceans, for instance. Most of all, I want to know if there are any rogue leaders controlling their human population centers. Any of them. Got it?”
“I’ll just look that up in the rogue registry,” Nolan said, shaking his head.