Starborn Odyssey (The Starborn Odyssey Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  Starborn Odyssey

  by

  Haines Sigurdsson

  Copyright © 2014 by Haines Sigurdsson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,

  scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form

  without permission.

  First Edition: June, 2014

  Printed in the United States of America

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-620-30982-7

  Print ISBN: 978-1-620-30980-3

  Cover design by Amanda Coffey

  Cover Images from Shutterstock.com

  “It is good to have an end to journey toward,

  but it is the journey that matters in the end.”

  —Ursula K. LeGuin

  For Duncan, who gave our hero a name,

  and gave the Tersine its stature. With love.

  —H. Sigurdsson

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Starborn

  The Arrival

  Now What?

  The Mystery

  Trouble

  Waiting Game

  A Short Break

  The Unexpected

  The Flood

  Deceptions

  Retribution

  Tersine

  Farewells

  Annex: Characters, Planets, And Ships

  Starborn

  I was born on a spaceship called the Astro II, in the twelfth generation of travel to the stars. The ship wasn’t your typical sleek, shiny, silvery, spaceship of the standard old sci-fi stories. It was as far from that as you could get. It was, in fact, an asteroid converted to a ship that we could live on—or rather in—and develop into living space as we traveled for generations to the stars. On Earth, they called them Roid Ships, and ours, the Astro II, was the largest of them all. That is, it was at the time we departed.

  Although our ancient ancestors were Earth People, we were not. We were Starborn—living our entire lives in space. During my early childhood, all I really knew of the world was thoroughfares with ceilings, and large chambers, with ceilings, and a large area called the Hydrop, our hydroponic gardens that served to transport all the trees and plant life necessary to sustain life and replenish our atmosphere with as much natural oxygen as we could produce. It also served as a park and recreational area for the thousands of people who lived in the ship and supplemented our food supplies with some organically produced food, though not enough to really feed the whole colony. The Hydrop’s educational purpose was to keep farming an active skill for when we once again had a home world. It, too, had a stone ceiling, high above.

  The Hydrop, by the time I was old enough to walk in it, was two hundred yards long and one hundred ten yards wide. It had been only a fraction of that when the ship first left the Earth, with larger areas grown and cultivated by every subsequent generation.

  We had developed Matter Synthesizers that made most of what we needed, by processing rock and iron mined from the inside of the asteroid to provide or duplicate molecules for just about anything we needed. That included water, air and food, as long as we had samples to program it from. It even provided fabric for clothing and metal for making machinery. Although the Synthesizers made it unnecessary for us to carry large manufacturing equipment, our ancestors had decided long ago that we needed to maintain our fundamental skills in engineering and manufacturing, or we’d never be able to break free of the ship and establish our colony, when we got to a habitable planet.

  For many years before our departure, Earth astronomers searched the skies for planets that might be habitable, with telescopes both on the ground and in space, but there was no way to tell how many planets were in a system, or their size. Many thought they had a pretty good idea from the wobble of a star, and by the dimming of the light from a star. This would have worked to some degree if all of the systems had rotated on a level plain with the same orientation. That however had not turned out to be the case.

  When our course was set for the Centauri System, for a star only four and a half light years from Earth, the best our scientists could say was that it had at least two planets, and at least one was in a habitable range in distance from its sun. We carried with us all the technology to terraform a planet, provided it wasn’t too far out of range in temperature and atmospheric pressure. That is to say that a Venus or Jupiter wouldn’t do. It most certainly had to be Mars or better for us to be able to terraform in a reasonable period of time.

  Our technology on the Astro II had far surpassed what we’d had when we left Earth, with each generation discovering new ways to allow us to thrive for so many years in deep space.

  Living in the Roid Ship wasn’t really as hazardous as you might think. We had the protection of a mile or more of shielding in the front of the ship to protect against small meteoric impacts, and at least a third of a mile shielding against radiation in space. It was the main reason that we had turned to the solution of using asteroids as ships. All we had to build was the engines and start the mining process to create living space for the original colonists. We would have used spin gravity if a brilliant scientist named Oscar Rommel hadn’t discovered a way to compress matter to increase the density, creating a sort of controlled black hole, suspended in a magnetic field. It provided gravity, electric power, our magnetosphere and our matter thrusters, which were basically ion drive, that ran steady for long periods of time creating tremendous speed over the years. Still, it was a long way from light speed. Many thought a ship going faster than light would reach us long before we reached our destination; but that hadn’t happened, and we would reach our destination within my lifetime.

  We would soon know if we could stay, or if we would have to travel another twelve generations to another system. Now that we were closer, we could see in our scopes and scanners that there were at least ten planets in the system; at least three in a habitable zone. If they had developed around their G-type star in anything near the way Earth had developed, we’d be in luck. Several of the planets even had moons that we could detect.

  There were other ships like ours, some having left before we did, but more after. We got messages from Earth from time to time; but it took ten years for messages to make the round trip, now, and the intervals between messages were farther and farther between, sometimes decades. We transmitted messages to the other ships also, though never got any answers from them. We didn’t know why; but we sent messages periodically anyway, hoping we might hear back some day.

  The Astro II was five miles long and three across. The tunnels that composed our living space were around the central core containing the MCS (Matter Compression System) and were continually being expanded as we mined for material for the Synthesizers and the thrusters as needed.

  My father was the Captain aboard the Astro II, Capt. Byron Duncan, and my mother was Rhonda Huston Duncan. The rest of my family was made up of me, Eric, and my little sister Angel, who preferred to be called Angie. She was almost 11 years my junior, and something of a surprise, but as far as I was concerned, we were the perfect family. The project of colonization required families to propagate sufficiently to maintain the population, and preferably increase it to insure survival, so having a little sister was, from a cultural standpoint, a good thing. I was also rather fond of her, which didn’t hurt.

  Our living quarters were small but adequate; the process of mining created the rooms, and glazed the walls, which were then painted to whatever scheme we preferred, though the surfaces didn’t hold paint as well as one would like. It was only recently that one of our engineers developed a way to glaze the wall with enough of a texture to hold paint better in the newer
units. In the older ones like ours, we had to scrape and repaint, every two or three years. We could bring in a mining machine and re-glaze the walls to the new finish; but since we only had a short time to go before reaching our destination, it really wasn’t worth the hassle. Looking at the bright side, at least we could change the decor every few years, making it feel like a new home.

  School was vastly important on Astro II, with students attending six out of every seven days (as we kept to the Earth calendar for regulating hours and days).

  It was at school that we made friends, and discovered enemies. My best friend was Annette Jordan, who lived near me and went by Nettie; my arch enemy was Roger Turley. The first time I realized he didn’t like me was when I was nine, in our Earth Studies class. I was in the middle of my presentation on the Pletheosaurus, my hands—but not, thank goodness, my voice—shaking with nerves, when Roger Turley burst out laughing —a rude, loud bark of a laugh that startled me.

  “Mr. Turley,” our professor, who was young and pretty, said sternly, “are you paying attention?”

  Roger smiled meanly. “Of course. Nerdy Eric was just telling us about a completely inconsequential creature from a completely inconsequential planet. I could be taking an advanced math class right now instead of this silliness.”

  I bristled, because Earth Studies was actually one of my favorite classes, but I didn’t say anything. Roger was ten, a year older than me, and infinitely more bold.

  “You don’t see the value in Earth Studies, Roger?” Prof. Jane seemed amused.

  “No! Why should we have to learn about the place that we had to leave, where the people were too dumb to figure out how to keep an ecosystem balanced? I don’t care what kind of history that planet had; wherever we go will have its own history. And our books and art right here on the asteroid are far superior to the nonsense culture of Earth.” Roger looked extremely pleased with himself; he was clearly citing what he’d heard his parents say more than once.

  “What do the rest of you think?” Prof. Jane asked the rest of us, my presentation clearly on hold now. “Nettie, what about you?”

  Nettie scowled at Roger and then very sweetly said, “The study of Earth is important because it is the planet we have the most in-depth information about. Knowing it’s evolution, geology, animals, all that stuff, will help us when we find our own planet.” She grinned at me triumphantly.

  “But what about its movies, and books, and lingo?” Roger challenged. “That doesn’t help anything.” Nettie glanced up at me but didn’t have an answer for Roger.

  Prof. Jane nodded, answering him directly. “I understand why you feel that way. It feels so remote from our reality, what could a movie from Earth, from any era on Earth, give us? Well, I think there are two things. First of all, it is our history, and the volume of literature and art, including movies, from Earth so far exceeds what we’ve produced here; although I do think we have achieved some level of greatness that perhaps could not have been reached from the limited perspective of planet-side. Secondly, no matter what changes in our surroundings and circumstances, human nature is constant. We might never climb a mountain on Earth, but a story about surmounting that physical obstacle can be just as relevant to our study of human nature as discussing the difficulty of surface walking the asteroid to refurbish the steel brackets on the exterior bands. Humans, in adversity or love, are the same whether they are here, or on Earth, or somewhere we cannot imagine. Aside from which . . . “

  “It’s tradition!” I jumped in, having gathered the courage to defy Roger. “We want to keep our history alive, so we don’t ever forget where we came from.”

  “We came from weakness,” Roger muttered under his breath; “we should forget it.” I shrank back, feeling abashed and a little foolish.

  Prof. Jane smiled. “You all know how much I enjoy our philosophical discussions, but now I want to give Eric the chance to finish his very well-prepared presentation.”

  I rushed through the end of my presentation, not realizing ‘til later that my nerves had made me skip right over a whole section on the dinosaur’s eating habits. However, it was done and I was much relieved. Unlike Roger, Earth Studies fascinated me. All over the asteroid were remnants of Earth culture from the first set of colonists. Those relics meant home to most of us; it fascinated me that the movies and stories that mattered to our great, great, great— many times great —parents were still the things of comfort to us. I think perhaps that’s an interesting consequence of having a completely self-contained society.

  Although, it’s also silly to think that if we can keep water, and waste, and food all in balance within this asteroid, that Earthlings couldn’t manage the same thing with an entire planet to work with. Roger was at least right about that. We all wondered, at one point or another, if there was any reason to believe that Earth was a good pattern for other planetary systems we might discover. But ultimately the truth was, it was important because it was the only planet we knew.

  In other Earth Studies sections, we learned about a time period in which people actually inherited the right to rule over other people; they were called Kings, or Queens. It was hard to imagine the concept, but what was even harder to accept was that the main character in the educational vid (with a story that was supposedly “true”) was a very fat man named Henry the Eighth. How could anyone have really been that obese? There were no obese people in our society, since our science had found ways of defeating it chemically, and our lifestyle would have kept it at bay in any case. It made the concept hard to fathom for our young people. Medical conditions on Earth in general were fascinating and appalling to us. There were time periods when people lost limbs—arms and legs!—and had to live the rest of their lives without any replacements for them (or even wooden replacements)! It used to make us giggle in class because it was so absurd. Can you imagine how terrible that would be? Our world was secure compared with those ancient times, and our medicine was far superior. We could fix a limb, it just took a little time.

  In addition to our excellent medical facilities, we had a public transportation system that was extremely efficient. Electric cars that ran slowly through the hallways on magnetic guidance lines buried beneath the passages to keep them on their appropriate routes. The routes were coded by different frequencies so all you needed to know was what number cars went to which sector of the ship. Since all of us were taught how to get where we wanted to go from a very early age, the system worked well. Most people got on without stopping the cars since they didn’t go more than five or six miles per hour, but if you needed to stop them, all you had to do was tell it to stop, and it would. Even that was a game to kids at times, much to the annoyance of the adults who needed to get places, like work or home, etc.

  Roger set me up on a number of occasions by learning to imitate my voice so well that he’d sit near me and say “Stop!” in my voice, and everyone on board thought it was me. I got raked over the coals several times for that, until I learned to move or get off a car if Roger got on. It’s the little daily things that really get you when you’re young, and I was especially stung to have to change my routine around a bully, but I hadn’t, at least at that age, figured out another option.

  Because of the security of Astro II (it’s not like we could disappear on an asteroid), we were allowed even at a young age to wander on our own. By the time I was four years old, I used to walk to the Hydrop by myself, and play ball with the other kids my age, or climb the rock walls at the edge of the school yard meant to teach us mountain climbing skills, should our colony planet turn out to be mountainous. Nettie often joined me, and we walked to school together most days. By the time I was ten, Nettie and I were inseparable.

  I was actually a year and a half older than her, but she was just as smart as me, and very clever. She was always curious about new things, and interested in how plants grew and all the inner workings of the Hydrop, which at that age were still mysterious to us.

  One day in the Hydrop, while a
bunch of us were playing ball, I noticed a new row of bright blue flowers along the edge of the tree line at the park. When we took a break from the game, I wandered over to look at them, thinking Nettie would like to see them. She wasn’t around, so I picked a few of the flowers, carefully, to bring to her.

  It had slipped my mind, quite innocently, that we were not allowed to pick the flowers, as the seeds were important for the future of our colonizing effort and our botanists were very deliberate about what was planted, and seeded, where. When Nettie’s dad saw me trotting toward home with the purloined flowers, he snatched me up by the arm.

  “What do you think you’re doing, Eric?” He growled at me. “Do you think the rules don’t apply to you?” He snatched the flowers from me, unnecessarily harsh, I thought, as it caused them to crumple and bruise. “Don’t ever pick the flowers.” He let go of my arm and glared at me for a long moment. I looked up at him sullenly. “I’ve a right mind to talk to your mother about this.” Then he shook his head, thoroughly disappointed, and stalked off, taking my flowers with him.

  “What a jerk,” I muttered at his back, incensed that he had assumed ill intentions on my part. And then I heard it behind me, Roger’s nasty snicker. “Oooh,” he said. “Now you’re in for it.”

  Roger shoved me on the shoulder and then darted off to find Nettie to tell her what I said about her father.

  Nettie had looked very solemnly at me, but Roger’s intention, which I’m sure was to make her hate me, failed. “My dad’s not really a jerk,” Nettie said, and I felt so ashamed I couldn’t meet her eye. Roger laughed and I glared up at him; but he was bigger than me and a lot meaner, and I wasn’t, at least then, ready to fight.

  Nettie turned, suddenly, and snapped “Shut up, Roger, you bully.” He looked shocked for a moment, hurt even, but then sneered and any trace of sympathy in me vanished.

  “As if I care what you think, you little twerp.” Roger said to Nettie, ignoring me. He turned, deliberately unconcerned, and strolled away.