Damocles Read online

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2013 S. G. Redling

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North

  PO Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781611099652

  ISBN-10: 161109965X

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012954517

  DEDICATION

  This book is for my first tribe, my siblings—Mary, Monica, and Matthew. You made me brave.

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY ONE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ONE

  MEG

  * * *

  Meg decided that any word that started with re was evil. Reanimation, rehydration, recalculation, restabilization, reatmospherication—okay, maybe that last one wasn’t really a word, but that endless drone of the computer over every loudspeaker on the ship made her brain start to tack re onto every sound in her aching head. If the computer wanted to throw a few applicable words onto the list, why not discuss the urge to regurgitate her reconstituted meal of reengineered proteins? She pressed the heel of her hand into her left eye where an especially intense hammering had begun.

  “Feel any undue pressure, besides the usual readjustment?” Elliot Cho, the bioscience officer, scrolled through several data screens beside her head. He had been the first roused from deep sleep to oversee the rest of the crew’s awakening.

  “How long have you been up?” Meg’s lips felt thick and gummy.

  “Couple hours.”

  “You look like shit.”

  He turned a bleary eye to her. “Want a mirror?”

  Meg shook her head and reached for the water tube hanging beside her sleep sling. The water tasted like warm iodine with an undertaste of rock salt, but she sucked it down greedily. When the thin stream trickled out to only drops, she groaned.

  “Pace yourself,” Cho said, “or BESS will pace it for you.”

  She knew the drill of waking up from deep sleep, but it didn’t make it any easier anytime she did it. All of their bodies had been put into a suspended state, their brain functions lowered and their bodily functions maintained by BESS, the Biological Equilibrium Sustainment System. For the duration of their sleep, BESS had been doing the breathing, swallowing, and basic living functions for them. BESS had run the show, and BESS would decide when to hand the power back over. Meg decided she hated BESS.

  “Everyone else up?”

  Cho grunted. “Would you believe Wagner woke up with a hard-on?”

  Meg laughed and then winced at the ache it caused. “Aren’t you violating his confidentiality rights by telling me that?”

  “Report me.” He helped her to her feet, holding his hands out until he was sure she could balance. A few tentative steps and Meg turned her naked back to him, letting him whisper in her ear. “I like this part.”

  “Shut up.” She laughed, tipping her head forward as he removed the thin netting of wires that branched out from her neck, down her back, and out to her limbs. She knew she’d have little red marks where BESS’s stimulators had kept her muscles from atrophying during the journey. Cho’s hand felt warm where he carefully peeled a glue pad from the back of her knee. “No wonder Wagner had a hard-on, if you were touching him like this.”

  Cho wrapped the wires into a bundle around his hand. “I should have paid more attention to how he was wired up. Maybe I’m stimulating the wrong muscles.”

  “Are you saying we’re not going to have morning sex?”

  He watched her tie her robe around her waist. “Give me a light-year or two.”

  Meg licked her still dry lips. “Yeah and a toothbrush. Morning breath takes on a whole new meaning out here.”

  They were on schedule and on course, inasmuch as they had a schedule or a course. The Damocles and her crew followed instructions and star charts for a portion of the universe that no one in the fleet had ever ventured into. Launching off of Hyperion, the deepest of the deep-space exploration stations to date, their faster-than-light travel had been guided by directions some heralded as the ultimate leap of faith, others as a suicide mission. They followed directions that had arrived from deep space seven years ago, directions in an unknown language, directions that Meg had been instrumental in translating. If her translations had been correct, and it was too late to doubt them now, they followed directions from The Set, an ancient race that had originally seeded Earth and brought humanity into existence.

  All of that was a moot point at the moment, since Meg’s biggest obstacle was getting her pants on. Deep sleep turned the cleverest, most agile space traveler into a mushroom-brained bowling pin for the first several hours of reawakening. She knew all she could do was ride it out. Resting on the edge of the cot, she tried once again to get her left foot into the left leg of the pants, all the way through to the opening at the floor. Finally, with one leg on, Meg began to feel confident she wouldn’t have to spend the rest of her life naked.

  As the ship purred back to life, the sleep sling retracted into its case above her bunk and the systems around her rebooted themselves. The loudspeakers stopped their squawking as workstations came back online throughout the ship. The six crew members deep slept in their own compartments on separate life-support systems, ensuring that should damage befall the ship during their slumber, the odds of at least one crew member surviving would improve. Meg tried not to think about what it would be like to be the only crew member to survive this far out into space, to wake up and find your companions dead and nothing but vast, empty space stretching out in every direction.

  She tried not to think of it and failed every time. It really was a wonder she’d qualified for this mission or any deep-space mission at all. She didn’t know if it was possible for anyone to hate the vacuum of space as much as she did. Of all the crews she’d manned she was the only member who never, ever went to the observation deck when they weren’t in orbit around a mass. She heard others waxing and marveling at the wonders flying past them. All she saw was the void, the black, and all it made her feel was a deep twisting in her gut. They could keep it.

  “On your mark, Officer Dupris. Phase Three recon drones at the ready.”

  She flexed her fingers to limber them up before tapping on the display screen. After fat-fingering a few incorrect commands, she switched to full audio command. “Placement situation,” she said and paused, trying to remember what it was she was looking for. This wasn’t a standard trip to an outer colony. She searched her sleep-clouded mind to remember why the drones had been sent in phases in the first place.

  “First phase, life signs,” the machine droned in the softly modulated female tones Meg had set during programming. “Cross-reference bioscan drones as per Officer Cho. Data uploaded to mainframe.” Meg nodded as if the machine could see her. The Damocles navigation system would have launched the first round of drones to check for life on the planet, environmental conditions, sustainability, and the like. Each planet p rogrammed into the ship’s navigational system was supposed to be compatible with human life. Of course, the data they had received was billions of years old. Planets change. Humans change. The journey to make contact with something that might be human was the ultimate crapshoot. If the biodrones returned with no signs of life or an environment that was too hostile to make contact with, this leg of the trip would have been in vain. The crew would remain in deep sleep and they would go on to the next set of coordinates.

  Data streamed on several different screens as Meg rolled her shoulders waiting for good news. As her head cleared and BESS released more water into the drinking tube, she knew the biosigns had to have come back positive. Only good news would have kicked off the awakening procedures. Whatever planet this was, there was life, and the environment was not overtly hostile to human life. The signs had been so good, as a matter of fact, that Phase Two drones had been launched.

  Phase Two drones collected research for everyone on board—engineering, bioscience, and cultural protocol. The drones assessed the life on a given planet or moon, determining levels of technology and mineral resources. Had this mission been in the corner of their known universe, the drones would also look for signs of colonization, since people had been terraforming moons and planets for decades. Here, however, the drones were working with a blank canvas. Any signs of human life on this planet might have little to no resemblance to human life that had been nurtured and launched from Earth. That meant the drones had been programmed to look for patterns of inorganic organization of material. In other words, the crew of Damocles, and Meg in particular, were looking for signs that the humanoid life on this planet would share that Earthly humanoid need to control their environment.

  And they did.

  When the initial data of the Phase Two drones began to stream past, Meg felt her stomach flipping from more than just hunger. Images and graphs of structures and roadways flashed by. Registered levels of inorganic noises and bursts clouded the airways, and never in her whole life had Meg been happier to read the long and convoluted list of chemicals and by-products being reported in soil, air, and water. Pollution. There was nothing more human than pollution.

  Her voice trembled as she gave the command. “Launch Phase Three drones for maximum contact.” She knew the Damocles nav system was already interfacing with the drones to determine the optimal launch targets for the next round of drones, her drones. The drones were miniscule, inserted into larger capsules that would burn off upon entering the atmosphere. They would drop down in densely populated areas. Smaller than mosquitoes, they would drift on breezes, drawn by magnetism. They would attach themselves to electronic systems or anything resembling communication devices or manufacturing facilities. They were tiny little spies that would record every sound, every digital pulse, looking for patterns that would be fed into the ProLingLang system Meg had designed. And then Meg Dupris would do what she did best, what she had always tried to do—she would unlock the door to the languages around her.

  She pushed back from her console as the screen signaled the launch.

  “It’s a mind fuck, isn’t it?”

  Meg spun and saw Katie Prader, the engineering officer, leaning in the doorway, her blonde hair pulled back in a greasy, crooked braid. They grinned at each other.

  “Have you seen it?” Meg asked.

  “Un-fucking-believable.” Prader’s lips were chapped, and she still had a sticky pad stuck to her elbow. “I was second up, not long after Cho. When those first phase readings came back, I was afraid to hope. When the second phase started pouring in data about transportation systems? I don’t even…I can’t…” Meg was on her feet, hugging the shorter woman.

  “They were right.” Meg pulled away and held Prader at arm’s length. “The message. They were right. Humans, down there. All this way from home.”

  Prader wiped a tear from her cheek. “This calls for coffee.”

  They could hear laughter coming from the dining room. Cho made a show of disengaging BESS from the kitchenette to great applause from the crowd gathered around him.

  “Thank you, BESS,” Cho intoned as the yellow screen went black. “You’ve been a wonderful caregiver and life-support system, but as a cook, you suck. We’ve traveled millions of miles through who knows how many space dangers mindlessly absorbing liquid reengineered protein. It’s time for us to do that one thing we’ve waited to do—chew. So with no further ado, I give you chewy reengineered protein.”

  Bowls were slung, spoons tapped together, and as one the crew of the Damocles dug into their first self-fed meal since leaving Hyperion.

  LOUL

  * * *

  Loul watched his desk mate’s eyes as they focused on the images passing before them. He knew that if he waited, if he stayed very still for another couple of seconds, she would lose herself in her work and forget to keep checking on him. He saw her blinks slow down, steady out, and heard the even whistle of her breathing. He was now free to slouch down in his chair and relax. He didn’t really mind her that much. He didn’t even bother to remember her name. The seat across from him at Workstation 14 had become something of a no-man’s-land since Jep had been promoted. People came and people went, with the obvious exception of Loul himself.

  He risked a glance down the line of workstations to the window at the end of the room. Between him and the glass, seven other workstations hummed with whatever job they were assigned. At least he’d gotten over his paranoia that other people were being given more interesting work than he got. He could tell just from the way her elbow was twitching that the woman three stations down was playing a game of Flange online. He wasn’t the only slacker.

  If he leaned back in his chair, he could just make out the edge of the second of the Zobos twins shining through the shaded glass. There were only two or three times a year both suns came into view, paralleling each other on the western horizon. They made the sky turn a sticky shade of yellow and generally put Loul in a grumpy mood, mostly because he would rather be out at the Observatory watching their path than stuck at this workstation charting storm patterns over the Ketter Sea. The way the shadows lengthened in the north, however, gave him an idea for a strategy he’d been mulling over for the game tonight.

  Loul let his chair fall forward again. His desk mate—he’d taken to calling her Temporary 7 in his mind—looked up with a scowl that he ignored. She thought she was going to get somewhere in this department. She thought if she worked hard and met her deadlines and researched just a little bit beyond what was asked of her she would rise in the ranks and get a bigger desk and a better desk mate, along with more status and a bigger paycheck. And she was probably right. Jep had done it, and so had the other six people who had taken his seat since. Work hard, think hard, and keep your eye on the future. That was the way to the top. “Don’t be afraid to think beyond what you already know,” his bosses were fond of saying. Good advice unless what you happened to think of was aliens.

  It was so stupid, such an asinine thought that he still ground his teeth when he thought of it. Eight years ago he had graduated with a degree in telemetry with a guaranteed spot in the Cartar Satellite Telemetry Administration. He had shown up for his first day of orientation with a notepad and a head bursting with ideas. When the commanders had told him to think beyond what he already knew, he knew just where his mind was headed. When he’d received clearance to work at the extra-atmosphere satellite observatory, he’d nearly crowed with enthusiasm. When he had taken his first real look at Space (he always capitalized the word in his mind), the vast, velvety blackness of real Space, he had just known that his work was going to change history forever.

  It had certainly changed his. He had spent eleven months of his own time putting together the report. Eleven months he could have been dating or bowling or trying to get some girl to lift her shirts for him. Instead he’d spent them wracking his brain, laboring over minute details, charting probabilities, and researching contingency plans to the point where he had al most convinced himself that the event had actually occurred. And after eleven months of uninterrupted and unpaid labor, he’d marched into the office of his superiors, put the report before them, and sealed his doom.

  Six and a half years later, here he sat at Workstation 14, charting storm patterns over the Ketter Sea, plotting his strategy in a stupid game of Circle that he and his friends were still playing even though they all knew they were too old for it. Without an official word, his report had been filed away and an invisible mark had been placed on his career file. Well, not completely invisible. He’d had to report to Employment Resources to answer his superiors’ concerns that he was “unrealistic, paranoid, and beset with juvenile fantasies not congruent with the objectives of the administration.” In other words, he’d had to stand before a panel of generals and administrators and tell them that, despite the assertions of his report, he did not in fact believe alien life did exist, nor did he believe these nonexistent aliens would ever make contact with Didet or its inhabitants.

  Loul’s best friend, Hark, had shown his support by exploding with outrage when he’d learned of the inquisition and recanting. Of course, it was easy for Hark to take the high road. He had a cushy job at his mother’s furniture plant overseeing the installation of heavy-duty casters for office chairs. His career path didn’t have a lot of room for improvement, but at least the only people outranking him were his own family. It wasn’t so much a glass ceiling as a blood ceiling, and short of outright embezzlement, he wasn’t in danger of losing his job. Loul wasn’t either. He just had no hopes of ever rising any higher in the ranks than his current midlevel weather-monitoring position.

  Hark had gone so far as to suggest that Loul upload the entire report to the Internet, targeting those fringe groups who believed that alien life could and probably did exist, some even going so far as to claim to have made contact with non-Didet life-forms. After the humiliation at the hands of his superiors, he’d been tempted to. His administrators and the generals above them hadn’t even tried to suppress their contempt at his report, some even laughing right in his face at his recommendations. Word had spread quickly throughout the department that Loul Pell was “one of those people,” those nut jobs who claimed to have implants under their skin, who claimed to have had years taken off their lives, who knew for a fact that aliens had probed their bodies and attempted to mate with them. If that was the group he was going to be lumped into, why shouldn’t he share the hard work he’d put into his report?