This book is a work of fiction. Its contents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any similarity to actual events, places, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Kenneth Marshall
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
ISBN-13: 978-0-9903272-1-9
ISBN-10: 0-9903272-1-3
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http://www.kenneth-marshall.com
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Cover Design: Alexandre Rito
Stock Art: Vadim Sadovski/Shutterstock.com,
solarseven/Shutterstock.com
December 23, 2014
CONTENTS
Colophon
Dedication
White Seed
Prologue: Athena at War
Part I — Keto: Wet Super-Earth
Lander Crew Manifest
The Shore of the Sea of Keto
Asymptote of History
Chip Detect
Breakage Factor
The Memory of a Dream
Shinigami
Part II — Athena: The Divided World
The Shore of the Sea of Athena
The Spiral
Part III — Keto: The Last Machine
Spirits
Memories
Dreams
Desires
Ghosts
Part IV — Athena: The Wheel of Syncwar
Fighting
Killing
Knowing
Part V — Keto: The Edge of the Storm
Waking
Jumping
Running
Falling
Losing
Living
Judging
Contact Info
Sample Introduction
Black Seed
Part VI — Aestas: The Sublimated World
The Fallen
Invasion Force
Dedication
To my wife, who was the first to see these worlds with me
WHITE SEED
Prologue: Athena at War
Year 5307
Mission Time: Minus Seven Years
One minute before S-Second, Kali Hakoian had the Denialist rebel leader Chon Dō in her bombsight.
A thousand meters below her Vertel, the top of the Spiral Hotel dipped into the morning sunlight, burning like the tip of a flaming torch. Athena Prime had risen in the east between the twin mountains above the city of Bruno. An arc of the Lesser Sea glittered to the west in the direction of the northern continent and its capital Einstein. The Vertel hummed as it circled, the sound of its electric engines and thrust fans vibrating through its diamond composite airframe.
The North Athenian Forces would attack at any moment. Kali could almost hear the crumps and bangs of munitions detonating, and she imagined flashes of light in the streets at the base of the Spiral Hotel. The first wave of northern attacks would be precise assassinations, launched from within the city. The second wave would take down the main air defenses and cripple the largest ekranoplanes in the port. The third would bring in the Vertels to pick off targets of opportunity.
Kali had hauled in five thousand kilograms of high-precision munitions and she was going to put them down on someone’s head. A drone could have done her job, but the North Athenians didn’t fight by proxy. Their constitution didn’t allow machines to have lethal authority. In hundreds of years of automated combat on ancient Earth, military casualties had fallen to zero, while civilian deaths soared. Cities had been wasted by machines as operators a continent away sipped their coffee. Athena was seeded to be different—if a war was worth fighting, humans would fight it.
And Kali believed taking the islands of Haffay from Chon Dō was worth it.
Even from the two-thousand meter altitude of the Vertel, Kali could see Chon’s robes flowing in the wind as he strode from the capitol building of Haffay to the Spiral Hotel. Her helmet visor’s magnification showed the red cloth of his sunshall and the golden dot of a burning Wheel of Syncwar on his back. Following Chon was a force of two dozen fighters and a crowd of civilians who wouldn’t let him out of their sight, whatever the danger.
Kali flagged Chon for two thousand kilograms of fresh RDX. That’d wipe him off the road at the same moment it wiped the road off the island. The intelligence service would need a DNA sequencer to identify Chon’s atomized body. The bombs would kill his bodyguards and his civilian entourage at the same time. But the collateral damage meant nothing to Kali—not compared to the lives Chon would ruin or end if she let him live, or the lies he’d continue to tell about Athena and the seeds.
The seconds ticked away as her thumb hovered over the trigger. She needed clearance from Command. The assassination wave had to launch before she could engage. Then Bruno would be a free-fire zone. What were the Shinigami hiding in the city waiting for?
Kali let the Vertel circle closer to the Spiral Hotel and the capitol park.
“What are you doing?” her co-pilot, Odis, asked.
Kali pressed her visor close to the side window for a better view. Her face reflected back at her—dark skin and gold-flecked eyes. “I’ve got Chon—I can take him out!”
“We’re too close. They’ll get a lock on us.”
“I know it’s him,” she insisted.
“How can you tell?”
“See how many follow him?”
Chon had sailed west from the continent of Senta to take the islands. He’d abolished the government, executed his opponents, and preached his Denialist ideology. The last crime was his worst—if the chain of history was broken, it couldn’t be joined again. Once the connection to the Network was severed and the knowledge that came with the seeds lost, it would never be rediscovered. If Chon succeeded in spreading his philosophy to the northern continent, Athena would have no future as a developed world.
Odis put his hand on Kali’s shoulder. “Let the Shinigami kill him. The Provies will shoot us down!”
“If they were going to kill Chon, they’d have done it already.”
She didn’t trust the Shinigami to make the kill—even more so now that she had Chon in her sights. Chon was hers now. She let the Vertel slip closer and tightened her finger on the trigger, ready to drop the bombs.
Near the capitol building, at the far end of the park, she saw two quick flashes. Thin trails of smoke rose from the ground and turned in her direction—a stereo pair of acoustic missiles. Kali’s hand tightened on the joystick and her eyes fixed on the missiles; adrenaline surged in her veins. Odis was right—the Provies had sensed them.
The Vertel absorbed radio waves and re-emitted light; it was invisible to radar and human or machine eyes. But it wasn’t silent—its fans had a distinctive sound. Kali cursed herself. She’d let the Vertel fly too close to the air defenses and one of Chon’s fighters had heard it. She’d pushed too hard and screwed up.
The old missiles Chon had stolen from the Lost Arsenal of the Second Autocracy were perfectly capable of homing in on the Vertel. Working together, they could hear its engines the way an owl hears a mouse in the night, then steer to the sound. Kali needed to get the Vertel out of their way or it would go down in flames.
“Turn us around. Get us out of here!” Odis shouted.
Kali glanced quickly at Odis. His eyes were locked on the approaching missiles. “No! That won’t work,” she said. “We can’t outrun them!”
If the missiles had had infrared or radar seekers, she could’ve gotten out of their field of view by cutting across their path, letting them fly by harmlessly. But the acoustic missiles could hear three-hundred sixty degrees, and at this altitud
e they had enough propellant to make a full turn. A tail approach would be easy for them—a slower closing speed and less need for their old proximity fuses to react quickly.
Kali rolled the Vertel over and pulled the joystick and throttle back. All of Athena filled the Vertel’s front windows as its nose pointed at the heart of the planet. The missiles rose toward it head-on from below. If there was hope for Kali and Odis to escape, it was for the missiles to pass behind the Vertel without detonating, their fuses too insensitive to detect the sound of its engines at idle.
The first missile roared by, the shockwave from its nose rattling the Vertel’s windows. The second exploded milliseconds before it passed. The pair could localize front-to-back as well as left-to-right; the first had signaled the second when it entered the Vertel’s wake. Fragments from the warhead struck the Vertel on Odis’s side, penetrating the window and fuselage. Odis screamed as his helmet slammed into his headrest. Blood spattered on the front of his visor.
Kali pulled the Vertel out of the dive at full throttle. It roared through the streets at near zero altitude, below the flat roofs and between the colorful stucco walls of the slums of Bruno. The blast of its engines tore down clotheslines and power cables.
Odis slumped unconscious in his seat. Kali pointed the Vertel up the hill, between the mountains and back to base. No telling what damage had been done to it, and Odis needed medical attention right away. Chon would have to wait; Kali had lost her chance. She felt immense frustration—she’d blown it, and she’d gotten Odis hurt along the way.
But she’d be back over Bruno, and she would do everything she could to make Chon pay for his crimes.
Part I — Keto: Wet Super-Earth
Lander Crew Manifest
Kali Hakoian (“Ha-koh-ee-an”)
Pilot-astronaut
Former combat pilot
Daughter of Kaera, Minister of Unification
Toran MacAten
Anthropologist
Student of human history
Former lead excavator of the Exile settlements in Senta
Northern Syncretist
Alon Ienian (“Uh-Lohn Ee-en-ee-an”)
Geologist
Additional qualifications classified
Ai Saraya (“Eye Sah-raya”)
Microbiologist
Former student of chief scientist Zansai
Galia Zansaian (“Zan-sah-ee-an”)
Climatologist
Daughter of Zansai
Manus Wirinya Lintonian
Zoologist
Partner of Galia
The Shore of the Sea of Keto
Year 5314
Mission Time: Day Three, 11:00
Alon Ienian stood on the shore of the Sea of Keto and imagined the seed entering Keto’s atmosphere and falling to the ocean below.
Three thousand years ago, the seed had landed on Keto, as had other seeds on Athena, Mineral, Avia, Ambition, and two hundred more worlds of the Network. It had coasted for centuries in space, and braked against the magnetospheres of Keto Prime and the gas giants around it. It carried all of Earth’s ecosystems, its plants and its animals, its technology, and a thousand of its best people.
A bone-white pebble washed up on a black-stone beach, Alon could have picked the seed up and held it in his hand. It carried nothing but information.
He stood on a strip of volcanic rock that stretched across the mouth of a valley. The wind from the ocean ruffled his silvered hair, and the gray clouds reflected in his eyes. His feet weighed heavily on the lava beach in the planet’s strong gravity. He ground his heel into the basalt surface, dislodging a sharp-edged piece, and crouched to pick it up.
Alon remembered Keto from orbit—hot, algae-laden currents swirling through blue waters, and spiral storms crawling like white spiders over its face. The seed had penetrated the world from above in an ablative burst, re-formed into a balloon, and floated to the water. It had landed somewhere on the global ocean and sailed for years before washing up on the shore of this island, the largest piece of land on this wet super-Earth. Then it had unfolded and started its work.
He stood slowly, holding the stone in his hand, and raised it behind his head. With a powerful swing of his arm, he threw it out to sea. It skipped off red and green eddies, and sank into the water with a dirty-white splash.
Go back, go home, there’s nothing for you here. The seed had brought people to Keto, but they were gone now. They were dead, and that was better.
He brushed his hands over his head, slicking his hair back above thick brow ridges and sharply arched eyebrows, over a blunt, bullet-shaped skull. He looked down at his arm and closed his hand into a fist. It felt good, it felt right. Finally, after all these years, his arm had healed—better, even, than it had been. He let his hand open and studied the lines on his palm.
Alon had planned this mission. The dark worlds—the ones that had failed—had seemed important to him months ago. But now he wasn’t sure they were worth the risk. There was a reason the base had failed on Keto; the team had only a few hours left to find it, and now they had little chance of success. He tugged at his jacket, running the fastener down the front to seal in the warmth. It was unlikely his scientific work in this valley would settle the matter, although perhaps his death in it would. But if there was hope for an answer, it lay with the others.
He turned and looked down the beach. Ai Saraya—microbiologist—laughed and played by the edge of the water as it washed in and out. She chased its ebbing flow and ran from its algae-stained wash as if it would paint her the colors of the sea. Holding out her sampling pole, she dipped its scoop into the water to gather the red and green streaks, then poured them into jars sitting on a drift of black sand. Shiny strands of hair blew over her cheeks, forming dark lines on her pale skin, and the folds of her eyes crinkled into horizontal curves as she smiled.
Alon smiled faintly back. He admired the gentle toothiness of her grin—the subtle imperfection brushed in by a design-geneticist. She was the girl with the teardrop eyes; the eyes that gazed and laughed, and gave away nothing.
Ai poured the last sample into a jar and knelt to clamp the lid onto its knife-edge seals. She brushed her hair from her face and held the sample out to Alon.
“Name them,” she said, laughing. “Name them all!”
A million new species in a liter of seawater—a lifetime of naming.
So childlike, he thought. So far from Athena. So far from home. She stood on an alien shore, light-years from everything she knew, beneath the smile and the laugh—he believed—afraid. But her eyes told him nothing. He smiled gently again and turned away to the sea.
“We should go soon,” he said. “The Child will be over in a couple hours.”
Ai collected her equipment, telescoping the pole and returning it to her backpack. Alon lifted his own pack from a boulder and put it on. They walked around the shallow pool inland of the beach, steering a few meters south to give it a wider berth. When it rained, the river in the valley passed through the pool and out to the sea, but when it was dry, algae accumulated in the trapped water. In the morning, they’d smelled rotting fish and eggs, none of which existed on Keto. Now they stayed away from the pool to avoid breathing the toxins produced by the algae.
Alon had watched her take samples from the pool while wondering at the quick flow of her emotions, and the slow flow of his own, in the hour since she’d asked her questions. He’d had answers for her, but not the ones he wanted to give. He’d told her the truth; but the truth doesn’t have to be complete to be the truth, and there aren’t words for all of the truth.
Ai walked ahead of him in the direction of the camp. She pulled her flight jacket closed and hugged her arms to herself. “Was it a mistake to come here?”
“We could have waited,” he said and shrugged. “But it wasn’t getting any better.” They’d hung in a low orbit for weeks waiting for a gap in the storms to make the shot.
“I mean for the seed.”
“Tell Earth, send fish next time.” But there was no one to tell—the flight time of the seeds had been long enough for Earth itself to fall silent. No seed world had ever received a signal from it.
“Not enough land…” Ai said.
“Couldn’t see that in a spectrometer two hundred light-years away.” He looked at the Athenian world-logo on the back of her jacket, the twin continents of North and Senta outlined in gold, and laughed to himself. “Maybe we can donate Senta. Then we’ll be even.”
“What is your hypothesis, then?”
“Self-termination.”
“Still? You haven’t changed your mind?” Ai said.
How did the base fail on Keto? That was the question. The seeds allowed the first generation to terminate a base in the event of a disaster or fatally unsuitable world, if all surviving humans agreed. Every base had the means available in the fuels that powered it. Nuclear detonation would be quick and painless, and it would sterilize the planet of most Terran life. Self-termination was suspected on many of the dark worlds, but it couldn’t be proven. Final termination messages were never sent directly to the Network, only to Earth, and because it was silent, none had been relayed.
If Keto had self-terminated, the physical evidence would be here. Alon was looking for something he didn’t know existed. But if it did, it could change the course of Athenian history.
Ai stopped and breathed deeply for a moment with her eyes closed. The sky over the valley had become uniformly gray, the patches of blue from the morning gone.
“Will they pick us up in time?” she asked.
White Seed Page 1