Star Runners:
A Star Run Anthology
by
Clayton J. Callahan
For all who have rolled dice with me across gaming tables going all the way back to 1981.
Copyright Pending. No part of this book can be reproduced by any means whatsoever without the expressed written permission of Clayton J. Callahan. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Cover art by Patrick Smith of Ignition Design PDX. For more information on Ignition Design PDX, please visit www.ignitiondesignpdx.com.
Author’s Notes
What does the future truly hold?
Who cares?
Face it; we who love science fiction are only mildly interested in predictions of what tomorrow may hold. Don’t believe me? Fine, then please tell me why the show, Space 1999, still has an active fan base.
What we fans want from good SF is not prophecy but possibility. We look at the possible and imagine ourselves taking that journey into the fantastic. Interstellar travel, time travel, inter-dimensional travel, all are unlikely but nonetheless possible. Worlds of discovery and amazement dazzle before our eyes as we turn each page or discover a new SF show. That’s what we crave in our fiction.
Now, I’ve been a fan of such speculative works since age ten. What happened to me at age ten, you ask. Why I turned ten in 1977, and a little film called Star Wars had just come out. This while Star Trek re-runs were still in circulation on local TV stations and Flash Gordon comic books could be found in any drug store for a quarter. Ah, good times.
Time really does fly, and I'm now I’m a man in his fifties, with a career in the military behind him, and what do I do with my limited spare time? I write science fiction.
They say write what you know, but I believe one should go beyond that and write what you love. So, here it is, a book of my beloved SF fantasies mixed with some of my realities for you to enjoy. Within these pages, I’ve taken story elements from my Star Run novels and blasted them into full-blown tales of science fiction adventure, humor, and heart. May they tickle your fancy and inspire your imagination. I may not have predicted our future with any accuracy (and I’m personally still waiting for my real life flying car), but I hope I’ve captured the human condition in a way that any fan of science fiction can relate to and be intrigued by.
Enjoy!
Clayton J. Callahan
To Reach The Unreachable Star
Although taken for granted today, it is worth reflecting upon the miraculous speed at which Earth’s various nations recovered from the Doom War. In the space of a single generation, survivors came together and organized themselves into thriving communities that soon reclaimed much of what was lost.
Of particular note is the amazing speed at which North America jumped from a collection of subsistence farming villages to a spacefaring nation-state in a mere hundred years.
Excerpt from Gordon’s History of The Spacelanes
***
All the indicator lights read green.
Naomi took in a deep breath and closed her eyes. After fifteen months in the bunker, this was it. Air quality: acceptable, temperature: seventy-eight degrees Fahrenheit, radiation level: safe. She looked down and to her right to see little Benjamin chewing on his finger like he always did when he got fidgety. Fifteen months is a long time for anybody, but to a six-year-old, it was an eternity, and the bunker’s confinement probably felt as safe as the womb to him.
The stuffy bunker had been home, school, and playground for him and the wider world was now a vaguely remembered mystery. “Mom, do we have to go outside?” He asked.
She nodded, and the child went back to chewing his finger. They had been lucky. The only house she could afford when they moved to the area was an old two story that dated back to the 1950s and it happened to included a bomb shelter. When things got bad in the news, Naomi cleared out the raccoon nests and stocked up on canned food and other supplies. It proved to be a good move, but the bunker would not sustain them forever.
And besides, she longed for sunshine.
But Naomi also understood how her son felt; she’d been the same way twenty odd years ago when her family left Uganda for the States. She was only twelve at the time, and everything was new and scary to her then. Now, she’d been an American so long that going back to Uganda was simply unimaginable. Just like she couldn’t imagine what waited for her beyond the sealed airlock door.
Partly to buck up the boy’s courage and partly to buck up her own, she said, “It’s all right, Benjamin. We’re going to do this together, okay?”
The child nodded nervously, and she hit the release lever. With a hiss and a rush of air the door parted and the sun shown down upon her face for the first time since the bombs fell. For a moment, she just stood there, still as a statue, basking in the sunlight. Looking down, she saw Benjamin shielding his eyes from the glare but not recoiling from the light. She always knew her son was brave.
Together, mother and son took their first, hesitant, steps into the new world. It was not, however, an improved world by any stretch. The shattered remains of Atlanta, Georgia stretched out far as the eye could see, and her heart sank. The once gleaming towers of the Buckhead skyline now blackened and bent by atomic fire glowered at them in the distance. Closer to hand; their once pleasant suburban neighborhood now consisted of concrete foundations overgrown with Kudzu. Naomi marveled at how fast that wily weed had recovered from the apocalypse. Twisted pipes reached up for the sky like the arms of penitent men at the foot of some unforgiving deity. And the towers of man’s communications arrays? All were half melted and resembled hunchbacked giants lumbering for the grave.
The mother sighed. “Well, it’s more or less what I expected.” She reached for Benjamin’s hand. “Let’s take a walk, sweetie.”
Feet following the path of a broken sidewalk, they took in the fresh, unfiltered air and watched the birds flitter about. Benjamin’s eyes were wide, his face wearing the expression he wore when she took him to the zoo two years ago.
Naomi’s feelings warred within her. She wasn’t sure whether she should be happy or sad. The elation of finally being free of the bunker battled with the depression that arose upon seeing her world ruined by short-sighted and stupid men. Men, whose imaginations looked no farther ahead than the next election cycle, and whose stewardship of the world was eclipsed by the next quarter’s profits. Why people followed such-stuffed shirts always puzzled her. But they did, perhaps because believing the golden promises of blowhards was preferable to them at election time than facing the hard truths of a world in crisis. And now, there were no profits, no elections, and no hopes—just the current crisis of simple human survival as faced by the cavemen of millennia ago.
The world was dead, and she wept for it.
Naturally, she didn’t intend to. After all, Benjamin was watching. “What’s wrong, mom?” the child asked.
“Nothing, I’m fine,” she lied through her tears.
Benjamin squeezed her hand and then moved in front of her to block her stride. “Mom, what’s wrong?”
She could never successfully lie to her son, and she knew it. The kid was unnaturally bright for his age and approached life in a very measured and rational way. He’d spent the last fifteen months taking apart and putting back together every tool and device in the bunker, determined to discover what principals made them work. He read books two and three grade levels above his age group. And he knew how his mom worked, inside and out.
Benjamin was an extremely smart boy.
“This is…was the monorail stop where I used to wait for the number fifty to take me to work at the Hartsfield Space Center. You remember? I used to wear a blue uniform to work every day
?”
“Yes, you were a nurse with the flight surgeon’s office. I remember you liked Dr. Bill a lot. He was your boss.”
“That’s right, Sweetie. He came here from Texas after they succeeded from the US. He helped transfer the NASA clinic from Huston to Atlanta when our spaceport was just starting up. Anyway,” she sighed, “it looks like I won’t have to worry about missing the monorail again. Funny, I used to hate getting out of my nice warm bed and rushing off to work. Now, I’m sad I’ll never do that again.”
Benjamin looked at the twisted metal and burned over concrete that had once been a transit stop. “You could go to work again. It will just be different.”
She fought back her anger, the child didn’t mean to be insensitive, and she knew it. But hard reality left her little room for parental finesse. “Honey, look around. There’s not going to be any work at the Space Center ever again.” She shook her head. “I just hope the colony on Mars survived. They may have enough infrastructure up there to carry on without support from Earth. But we’re not going to be sending any more ships into space. And all the sleeper ships are going to be arriving at distant stars soon. But when they wake up from cryo, their transmissions home will fall on deaf ears. There will be nobody to answer the phone if the phones are all dead, right?”
Benjamin sat down on the stairs that lead up to the monorail station. He chewed his finger, and his eyebrows scrunched together. Naomi knew he was concentrating but had no idea about what. This was a problem well beyond any six-year-old child and certainly beyond a grown woman of thirty-five. The stars be dammed, she had more immediate problems to deal with. Back in the bunker they still had enough food and such for a few more months, but by winter she’d need a new source of sustenance for herself and her boy.
She cast her eyes about, hoping to find something that would aid in their survival. In the distance, she saw a dozen or so wooden shacks. Structures like those would never have survived the blast that leveled Atlanta. Therefore, she reasoned, they must be new. Obviously somebody else had survived the Doom War and that somebody or somebodies could probably use a nurse. It’d be a long walk, but she and Benjamin might make it to the shacks by nightfall. Looking closer, Naomi saw a man step out of one of those shacks. He looked in their direction and waved, and she dared to feel hope in her heart.
“Mom, we can do it. We can go to space and tell them we’re still here and everything’s will be all right.”
“What?” Naomi couldn’t help but laugh. “Child, see those shacks over there?”
“Yes,” Benjamin replied. Then he looked where his mother was pointing and said, “What about them?”
“Those shacks might have people who can help us. See the man waving now? But it’s a long way off. It will take maybe a couple of hours to walk there. Mars and the star colonies are a lot farther off than that, child; millions and millions of miles away. We can’t get there, Benjamin.” She let a smirk cross her lips. “It’s much too far for anybody to walk.”
Then Benjamin smiled. “Then we’ll just have to run.”
The End
The Forever Voyage
Of all the starships that have made the history tapes, none is more renowned than the CEC Yang-He. Not only was it the first human constructed jump vehicle, but the exploits of its maiden voyage are the stuff of pop-culture legend. As to those who claim to have seen its ghostly apparition in more recent times, no such sighting has proven entirely credible.
Excerpt from Gordon’s History of The Spacelanes
***
“Clemens, What the hell is this bullshit!?”
Director Clemens slowly set down his coffee and leaned back in his office chair, as the dark short haired amazon strode into his office. “Commander Robishaw, what a pleasure to see you.”
She slammed his office door behind her. “Oh, I’m sure it is. Now, tell me what the hell is going on here.”
“Right to the point, as usual, Helen, I always liked that about you.” He took in a deep breath. “Upon the passing of Dr. Benjamin Buganda, the board has decided to honor his last wish and place Dr. VanDer in command of the Yang-He. The decision was made two levels above my head. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do. Care for some java?”
“No.” She paced about. “So you’re just going to sit there, drinking your coffee while a bunch of bureaucrats puts an unqualified man in charge of the most important space mission of our generation?”
“Yep.”
Robishaw looked around for a chair and collapsed into one. “Dave, I had a lot of respect for Ben, you know that. But Dr. Buganda was never a spacer. Hell, he hardly ever left his lab. And this new drive of his has never been tested. The crew is going to need an experienced officer on the bridge, and there’s no getting around that.” She looked at her hands. “I’ve flown over fifty missions, thirty-five as a flight officer and the rest as a commander. This should be my job.”
“Yep.” Clemens reclaimed his coffee but didn’t reply further.
“And this mission is already quite the sausage festival. I’m one of only six females assigned to the crew. Tell me gender didn’t play a part.”
“To the best of my understanding, gender didn’t play a part in this particular decision. Although, I agree that an all-male panel of ‘experts’ picking a mostly male crew stinks to high heaven. We’ve gone backward in gender politics in the past few years, and I’m not a fan of that.”
She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. “Huh, I hear we even have some Arabian prince who wedeled his way onto the crew.”
“Well, I won’t say his family’s influence didn’t play a part in that. But Al Jabbarie is a fully qualified technician. If he didn’t pass all the tests he wouldn’t be on the roster.”
“Fine. Can you at least tell me anything about this VanDer guy? All I know is he was Benjamin’s lab rat or something.”
“Well,” Clemens replied, “he is a certified genius. He got his first Ph.D. from the Delft University of Technology in Holland at age fifteen. Then the guy went on to publish several groundbreaking papers in quantum physics before being recruited by Benjamin to be his right-hand man. He’s never been married and as far as I can tell never even been to a party in his whole adult life. His meals are delivered to him in the lab, and if exposed to sunlight, I expect the eminent Doctor Hobart VanDer might simply turn to dust and blow away. But I’ll give him this, with Buganda dead, there is nobody, absolutely nobody, who understands the jump drive systems better.”
Robishaw opened her eyes and nodded. “The drive that will take us to the stars again…if it works. Travel light-years in literally no time at all as the ship pops into another universe and then pops back into ours. I’ve never flown a ship with a drive like it. Hell, nobody has.”
She took a moment to look out the window at the new silver skyscrapers that dominated the Atlanta skyline. It was a new age, full of bright possibilities and the chance to make a difference. Slightly over a hundred years ago, humankind had sent out sleeper ships to the unknown planets of distant stars. Slower than light, they would have arrived at their destinations without any support from an Earth wracked by war. No light speed communication had yet been established with any of them, although attempts were sometimes made. As of now, what became of those sleepers when they awakened could only be discovered by direct contact. And all of humankind was burning to know.
She shifted in her seat. “The Yang-He is christened for a great explorer who knew how to lead sailors under incredible pressure. What kind of leader do you think a man like VanDer will make?”
Clemens crossed his legs and took a moment of his own to look out the window. “I honestly have no clear idea. It’s my hope that he will rise to the occasion. You know, Admiral Yang-He didn’t start out as a great leader either. He began his career as a court eunuch, and if that’s not an unlikely start for a hero, I don’t know what is.” Clemens took a sip of his coffee and leveled his gaze at Robishaw. “But, I still have my doubts. Tha
t’s why I want you as First Officer. If things get tough, I want to know he’s got an experienced space veteran by his side.”
“That can be a small consolation.” Robishaw shrugged. “I just hope he’s the kind of guy who will listen to good advice.”
“I’ve been in contact with your superiors in the Re-United States military. They’ve arranged to have you promoted to the rank of ‘captain’ in the Space Service. Although that won’t translate to the Explorer Corps, it will allow you to retire a little more comfortabley.”
She shrugged, “Well, that does sweeten the pot I’ll admit. Still, ironic that I can retire a captain without ever having been one in active service.”
Putting down his coffee with some benign ceremony, Clemens rose from his chair to address the veteran spacer. “So, Commander, you’re taking the job?”
She stood up as well. Through gritted teeth, she said, “I’d put in for commanding officer of the Yang-He.”
He winced. “I know, and you were my first choice. But like I said, the board overrode me.”
Nodding, Robishaw accepted her fate. Although she longed for the distinction of being the first captain of a jump capable ship, she was equally motivated to see that ship’s first mission succeed and clearly saw the need for a person like her aboard. “Okay, I’ll take the job, but this will be my last voyage.”
Clemens raised an eyebrow.
She shook her head. “The kids are now three and two. I’ve spent half my marriage away from John, and I don’t intend to miss out on my family for much longer. With this trip’s compensation, we’ll have enough that we won’t have to worry about money, and I can retire comfortably, even more so on a captain’s pension I suppose. Maybe I’ll teach at the academy or just write a book or something.”
“I understand, Helen.” Clemens held out his hand. “Still, I’m counting on you. This mission has to succeed, and when it does, I’ll know who to thank.”
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