FOREWORD
by Zachry Wheeler
Authors have a distinct reputation for being a bit quirky and eccentric. This may seem like an unfair depiction, but once you meet several of us, you start to realize that this particular stereotype is rooted in reality, supported by evidence, and bolstered by cold hard fact.
In short, it’s a very entertaining group to be a part of.
I first met Eric Michael Craig in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We frequented a local writers group that served as a catch-all for anyone in need of tips and guidance. When writers congregate into large groups, a predictable rift will often appear. On one side, you have those who simply wish to improve their craft and meet other like-minded scribes. On the other side, you have the white-knuckled types who yearn to conquer every facet of the writing world. The latter is much smaller than the former, but it’s where Craig and I resided.
It’s one thing to find a fellow wordsmith who shares your love of spaceships, but it’s another thing entirely to find someone who shares your desire to understand the brain-melting mechanics of FTL drives because you wish to create a fresh portrayal rooted in plausible science. Once we understood that about each other, our interactions in the writers group quickly expanded into post-event outings.
This is why I remain close friends with Eric to this day. Our conversations never start with “Check out this neat writing tip I found.” We open with things like “If you crush a clump of atoms into a tiny neutron star and then focus the resulting gravity, could that create a spacetime rip to use as a wormhole generator?” And of course, many of these conversations take place over visits to the local pub.
Eric is a retired physicist who writes hard science fiction, a notoriously difficult genre to get right. Most authors trip over their expertise and end up with bland stories that read like research papers with plots. The truly talented of the lot can weave gripping narratives while revealing the foundational science in a clean and coherent manner. The best of the best can also tickle your funny bone.
Craig is one of those authors.
We had established a friendship well before I read his debut novel Stormhaven Rising, a harrowing tale about an Earth-killer asteroid with numerous characters and numerous conflicts (and thus, numerous opportunities to derail). When I finished the novel, I also became a fan. The story had satisfied all the critical elements of quality sci-fi and even managed to create a few new ones. I invested in the characters and sensed their plights while marveling at the advanced tech and top-notch worldbuilding. I also enjoyed several belly laughs, which cemented the fandom.
When it came time to read the Shan Takhu Legacy, I was positively giddy. I was also fortunate to serve as a beta reader because Eric trusted me to uncover any narrative trenches. I finished Legacy of Pandora in a single sitting and gave myself a full day to digest the story. Not only was this book some of the best hard sci-fi I had ever read, but the ending was so viscerally compelling that I started goading Eric into telling me what happens in the second book.
I finished Fulcrum of Odysseus and Redemption of Sisyphus in similar fashion, and without giving too much away, let’s just say that Craig has a particular talent for creating sympathies where there shouldn’t be any. His storytelling methods remind me a lot of Robert Heinlein, one of the pillars of classic science fiction. This is no coincidence as Heinlein is Craig’s favorite author, to whom he pays appropriate homage with every word he writes.
I consider myself fortunate as Eric and I are friends and fans of each other. While my work resides on the lighter side of the spectrum, his work shows me just how rich a science-heavy plot can be. I continue to recommend his works to general audiences, as their accessibility is quite rare in the genre. I know for a fact that his tales have created new fans of science fiction and I am confident that they will continue to do so for many years to come.
~ Zachry Wheeler author of Transient and the Max and the Multiverse series.
Contents
Foreword by Zachry Wheeler
Legacy of Pandora
Fulcrum of Odysseus
Redemption of Sisyphus
Walls of Life
Next Book in the Shan Takhu Legacy
Leave a Review
Other Works by Eric Michael Craig
About the Author and Links
Legacy
of
Pandora
Shan Takhu: Book One
Eric Michael Craig
Copyright Shan Takhu Legacy Box Set © 2019 Eric Michael Craig
Copyright Legacy of Pandora © 2018 Eric Michael Craig
Copyright Fulcrum of Odysseus © 2019 Eric Michael Craig
Copyright Redemption of Sisyphus © 2019 Eric Michael Craig
Copyright Walls of Life © 2019 Eric Michael Craig
All rights reserved. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author and publisher.
Cover Designs: Ducky Smith
PUBLISHED BY
Rivenstone Press
Dramatis Personae
Jephora Cochrane
Commander Jakob Waltz
Petra “Rocky” Rocovicz
Chief Engineer Jakob Waltz
Kiro Kamoto
Pilot Jakob Waltz
Shona McKeigh
Navigator Jakob Waltz
Alyx Donegal
Sensor Technician Jakob Waltz
Chei Lu
Nuclear Specialist Jakob Waltz
Dr. Danel Cross
Geophysicist Jakob Waltz
Dr. Anju Soresh
Physician Jakob Waltz
Corin Stone
EVAOps Specialist Jakob Waltz
Seva Johansen
EVAOps Specialist Jakob Waltz
Katryna Roja
Chancellor FleetCartel
Isao Nakamiru
Admiral FleetCom Operations
Jaxton Quintana
Admiral L-2 Shipyard Ops FleetCom
Graison Cartwright
Chief of Staff for Chancellor Roja
Elayne Jeffers
Captain Armstrong, FleetCom
Cassandra Mei
Captain Challenger, FleetCom
Carter Takata
Captain Galen, FleetCom
Nathaniel Evanston
Captain Archer, FleetCom
Anson Hayes
First Officer Archer, FleetCom
Tamir bin Ariqat
Chancellor SourceCartel
Derek Tomlinson
Chancellor DoCartel
Dr. Arun Markhas
Chancellor DevCartel
Dr. Tana Drake
Chancellor WellCartel
Carmen Ambrose
Prime Minister Executive Council
Paulson Lassiter
Steward of the Human Union
Edison Wentworth
Investigator General
Josiah Carsten
Deputy Inspector
Dr. Ian Whitewind
Science Officer, Hector
Zora Murphy
Materials Reprocessing, SourceCartel
Hector: Neptune L-4 Trojan Cluster: Date: 2232.094:
Thirty seconds. The timer scrolled across the bottom of the screen. Relentless. Certain.
Unavoidable.
He sat staring at the display, h
is eyes unable to focus on the numbers.
He was afraid.
And alone.
Beyond the edges of civilization, with only a clock to watch over his last fleeting seconds.
Weeks ago he’d run out of options, and hope had died soon after. So he made peace with himself and pointed his ship toward the inevitable.
Twenty seconds. The stars ahead blinked out as he dove forward. He could see it, almost visible in the dim light of the distant sun. Dark, ominous, and unforgiving.
The engines behind him coughed once. Then again. The roaring fell away as his fuel supply failed. The last of the reaction mass exhausted, gravity would finish the task, hauling him to his destiny.
He tapped the control to jettison the marker buoy, listening to its thrusters hissing against the outer skin of the ship as it shot off into the darkness. He knew it would remain trapped in orbit as certainly as he had found himself ensnared, but it gave him some solace that his last thoughts and actions might live past his own mortality. If anyone ever came looking for him.
Ten seconds.
He floated free from the seat and closed his eyes.
Counting down the numbers in his mind …
CHAPTER ONE
Jakob Waltz: Neptune L-4 Trojan Cluster:
“Commander, report to ConDeck immediately.”
Jephora Cochrane was not the type to take his duty lightly, but his engineer’s tone made every word an order as she ripped him from sleep an hour early.
Petra “Rocky” Rocovicz always sat third watch alone. No one on the crew wanted to spend time working with her, except as absolutely necessary. She didn’t mean to be offensive, but she had a way of expressing herself that was brutally forceful.
Machinery didn’t care if she spoke her mind. People on the other hand, were less fault-tolerant.
“What’s the problem?” he asked, pulling the seal-edge of his coverlet loose and rolling slowly toward the open air. He tried to keep his frustration from showing in his tone.
“Payload Four is lost,” the chief engineer said.
“How the frag do you lose 500 billion tons of ice?” he asked.
“Is good question,” she said.
“I’ll suit up and be on deck in five,” he said pushing off his bed and over to the autovalet.
Being a native of Juno, his light-world ectomorph physiology would never function well at anything above a tenth-g, and working with a mixed-physio crew meant that he had to be ready at any time for hard acceleration. His Pressure Support Exosuit let him work on an even footing with any of the heavy-grav mesomorphs on the crew by boosting his strength and compressing his extremities and torso with enough force to keep the blood flowing to vital body parts. Like his lungs and brain.
As the suit’s polymorphic liner wrapped around him, he flashed through the familiar sensation of suffocating under tons of water before the actuators kicked in and began carrying his breathing. It was a moment of terror that anyone who’d ever wrapped into a PSE knew.
The autovalet’s arms finished the rest of the dressing process. Contact pads first, then legs, arms, torso shell, and finally neck-support struts all slipped into place. He resented having to wear his suit because every time he put it on, it reminded him why he’d never been given a real command after twenty years in FleetCom.
A nearly inaudible beep told him the process was complete and his augmented body sprang to life. He shoved himself forward, a slug encased in an armor shell. He hated it, but it didn’t matter because without it, he’d be dead at an acceleration level most of his crew could take naked.
He thought about grabbing something to eat on the way by the galley, but instead he swung himself feet first up the chute toward the ConDeck. After four years working with her, he could tell that Rocky sounded worried, even through her gruff.
Flipping out onto the deck he stopped abruptly, snapping his maglock boots down with a firm click.
Ordinarily, Dutch flew the Jakob Waltz with little human intervention, but this morning, Rocky hovered over the shoulders of both the pilot and navigator. They occupied two workstations and had several viewscreens oriented around them.
It was routine for one of the flight crew to sit watch as a matter of formality, although the only one who had anything to do while they traveled from one payload to the next was the engineer. When she was on Con duty, the rest of the crew found excuses to be anywhere else, so she’d obviously summoned them. And neither of them looked happy about it.
Without turning or giving him a chance to ask for a report, she shook her head and pointed to the wall kiosk. “You will want double-black.”
“What happened to the payload?” he asked as he headed over to the VAT to get his hardball. He passed on the double caffeine.
“At 0218 ship time this morning, Payload Four began streaming anomalous data that indicated it was rotating. Twenty-seven minutes later it ceased transmitting,” Dutch said. The Artificially Aware computer was as much a part of the crew as the human members, but fortunately it wasn’t prone to Rocky’s fits of frustration.
“Did we shut it down?” he asked, turning back to face her. “Maybe one of the units came loose or melted a blowhole and lost compression?”
“Da, I pulled plug as soon as I saw was foobed,” she said. “It does not appear to be ice failure, as instruments showed nominal pressure and heat. Has to be navigation error.”
Growling, the navigator launched herself toward the VAT to get a drink. The engineer was obviously poking fire into a raw nerve, since Shona was responsible for programming the iceberg’s trajectory. Another ectomorph, she was far too frail for a tangle with Rocky, but she looked ready to give it a try. Instead, she jerked the nozzle from its clip and shot her cup full before she slammed the tube back into place.
Hopefully without added stimulant.
“Assuming it’s rotating can we get a visual to confirm?” Jeph asked.
“I am attempting to locate it on the NavCom optics,” Dutch said. “However it seems that Payload Four is substantially off course.”
“Excuse me?” Shona said, her PSE hissing audibly as she hurled herself back to her station. “Under full thrust, it would take hours to move visibly from this distance.”
“That nogo,” Kiro said leaning over from his pilot seat and looking at her screen. “Maybe it smacked something? That might kick it off a long ways. If so, there’d be debris we could track to find it.”
“There it is!” Shona said, rotating the view several degrees and locking the reticle around her target. “There’s no debris, but I got it from the spectrographic signature of its vapor trail.” She paused and scratched her nose as she studied the image. “That can’t be right. It’s above us.” She pulled her console closer and furiously tapped calculations into the navigational computer. Holding up one finger she waited for it to display the results.
“As in a higher energy orbit?” Jeph asked.
“As in,” she confirmed as she read the output.
“Is not possible,” Rocky said. “Payload is slower than we are. It must fall inward.”
“If our position is accurate, then she is correct,” Dutch said. “It is approximately two hundred thousand kilometers further from the sun than we are.”
“Is our position accurate?” the commander asked, picking up on her meaning and feeling acid trying to boil through his stomach wall.
“Working on it.” Shona opened her navscreen and checked their stellar orientation. The targeting rings located the stars they used to align themselves and flashed green to indicate a lock. “Our heading is correct, but it’ll take me a few minutes to get our physical position.” She punched more commands into her console and Jeph could hear the servomotors swinging the main communications dish as she located several beacons. The Deep-Space Positioning Network signals were weak this far out, so she had to manually target and integrate them.
After several seconds, she pushed herself back into her chair and shook her head. She put the
current positions for the Jakob Waltz and Payload Four up on the main screen. “We’re a quarter million klick off course,” she said quietly.
“What the hell could have caused that?” the commander asked.
“It would require a massive gravity source to deflect our trajectory by that amount,” the computer said.
“Gravity source?” Kiro asked. “Like a planet?”
“Unless we were right on top of it, that amount would make it substantially more than a planet,” Shona said, making significant eye contact with the commander.
“Can we correct that?” the commander asked.
“It’ll be dirty math, but I should be able to,” she said. “We’ll have to clean up our trajectory afterward.”
“Do it,” Jeph said as he strapped down and watched her working the numbers into her console. He punched into the shipwide com. “All hands, prepare for emergency maneuvers and a sustained hard burn.”
“On your orders,” Kiro said, looking over at the commander once Shona’s calculations were on his pilot panel.
“Standby,” Jeph said. He watched the crew status lights shift from yellow to green as each of them reported ready. The last one was Alyx Donegal. She was the sensor technician and the only other ectomorph on the crew. It was still before first shift, so she probably hadn’t suited up yet and it took what felt like an eternity for her to get her into her PSE.
Finally, her light turned green and Jeph nodded. “Let’s get on the pedal, shall we?”
The ship pivoted for almost a minute before the engine rumbled to life. Kiro edged them up to two-and-a-half g and held that mark for almost five minutes.
Shan Takhu Legacy Box Set - With an Extra Bonus Story Page 1