Sidereal Quest

by E Robert Dunn

  Echelon’s End

  Book 4:

  Sidereal Quest

  By

  E. Robert Dunn

  Here’s what some of the experts say about the Echelon’s End series:

  “…going where no Sci-Fi author has gone before…”

  -Andy Zeffer, The Express News, author of “Going Down In La-La-Land”

  Books in the Echelon’s End© series:

  -Book 1: Last Generation

  -Book 2: Marooned

  -Book 3: Persisting On The Edge -Book 4: Sidereal Quest

  -Book 5: Chasing Infinity -Book 6: PlanetFall

  -Book 7: Enter The Fury

  -Book 8: Perils Of The Gulf -Book 9: The Hidden Enemy -Book 10: The Furthest Shore -Book 11: Hunted

  -Book 12: The Road Yet Traveled -Book 13: Eclipse

  -Book 14: Into the Abyss

  Echelon’s End©

  The Series

  Book 4:

  Sidereal Quest

  By

  E. Robert Dunn

  All Rights Reserved © 1994, 2006, 2008, 2011, 2019 by E. Robert Dunn No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.

  Any resemblance to actual people and events is purely coincidental.

  This is a work of fiction.

  PROLOGUE:

  Hopelessly lost from her home berth, the Pioneer Pod Four had become a wanderer in the interstellar frontier, a hobo on a runabout with no foreseeable end. The crew of the Pioneer Pod Four had come to terms with a way of life where the unexpected had become the norm, where no experience, however bizarre, could be ruled out. They were stranded where the writ of Aidennian-based logic no longer ran. When the alien world they had crash landed on began to turn from a barren, hostile badland to a virtual wilderness beyond the grasp of imagination, Capel Perezsire, commander of exploration and research, reckoned soberly it was an answer to an unspoken prayer. But, he clamped down on optimism. His crew could think he was the cold-hearted bastard of all time, but he wanted emotion out of the equation as much as possible. The newly born jungle and one of its inhabitants had claimed the life of a crewmember … his son, Lunon.

  The great, saucer-shaped ship, with its complement of over three hundred pieces of sophisticated hardware, was nearing a launch point. After months of repair and preparation, the Pioneer Pod Four was once again ready to join the glowing jewels on the black velvet pad of space. Once again, the refugees from the sundered planet of Aidennia would venture out into the cold reaches of the void and try and find a place to call...Home.

  “Paradise Lost”

  CHAPTER ONE:

  Gliding through the blackness of deep space, the Tauron Imperial Strikecruiser Rue Saxer kept its mighty snub-nosed shape toward the remoteness of the Outer Rim. It’s one cycle mission in this sector, which was relatively lifeless and of little interest to anyone except xenogeologists, was almost complete. Other than the unusual composition of many of the planets' atmospheres, there was little to note about the Outer Rim sectors -- except that some areas of the war had flushed several System worlds' refugees into fleeing to the Rim's border planets. Its bridge was alive with activity, punctuated by a voice that called from the starboard-side crew pit through the din of background conversation and ship noise. "Ba’al Sirdar Eyer-le?" the voice said. "Message from the launching bay: the probe droidships are ready."

  Eyer-le, leaning over the shoulder of the Tauron at the Rue Saxer's bridge engineering holomonitor, ignored the shout. "Trace this plasma line for me," he ordered, tapping a light pen at the schematic on the display.

  The engineer threw a questioning glance up at him. "Ba’al --?"

  "I heard him, Ensign," Eyer-le said. "You have an order. Make sure you tie stellar cartography files in with your quantum distribution scan."

  "Aye, Ba’al," the other said carefully, and keyed for the trace.

  "Ba’al Sirdar Eyer-le?" the voice repeated, closer this time.

  Keeping his snake-like eyes on the engineering display, Eyer-le waited until he could hear approaching footsteps. Then, with all the regal weight that thirty cycles spent in the Strikeforce Fleet gave to a Tauron, he straightened up and turned. Eyer-le’s gharial tail twitched with controlled rage as his cordovan V-shaped pair of cranial crests trembled enough to make the young duty officer's brisk walk faltered. He came to an abrupt halt. "Uh, Ba’al --" He looked into Eyer-le's eyes and his voice faded away.

  Eyer-le let the silence hang in the air for a handful of heartbeats, long enough for those nearest to notice. He took into consideration the age of the junior officer; his body scales just as green as his manner, his mandible tusks just nubs behind his prominent jowl pinchers. "This is a bridge of a Tauron Imperial Strikeforce warship. Routine information is not -- repeat, NOT -- simply shouted in the general direction of its intended recipient. Is that clear?"

  The ensign swallowed. "Yes, my Ba’al."

  Eyer-le held his ophidian eyes a few micronodes longer, and then lowered his crested head in a slight nod. "Now. Report."

  "Yes, Ba’al," the ensign swallowed again, the hue of his emerald scales returning some. "We've just received word from the launch bay, Ba’al, the probe droidships are ready for their scans within the Outer Rim's frontier space for any refugees from the encounter with The System."

  "Very good," Eyer-le nodded. "Tell the deck officer to launch and track each droidship's progress. Report anything interesting immediately."

  "Understood, Ba’al," the ensign breathed, turned on his booted heels, and hurried off to his abandoned station to relay the order. His tail almost tucked between his scurrying legs.

  From the Strikecruiser's enormous underside hull hangar bay, came tiny pinpoints of metal that instantaneously ignited their compact, ion-plasma engines as soon as they cleared the mammoth ship's gravity field. With a fierce determination, each probe shot out across the heavens toward a pre-determined destination in pseudo-motion, then was gone from sight within micronodes as hyperspace took them.

  * * *

  Pioneer Pod Four Log. Mission Status Report. Five hundred and fifty-five rotates since launch. Commander Capel Perezsire reporting. Because of the uncertainty of this planet's primary sun, and to prepare for any critical change that may affect the safety of the Pioneer Pod Four's crew, we have been assembling data on atmospheric levels and beyond. To collect the necessary data, observation satellites have been set up at a distance several kiloretems above this planet's surface. There, swinging in endless orbits around this planet, are twelve drone probes. For six consecutive rotates since their launch they have reported by all means of communication without incident. Each providing primary information needed to prepare a detailed information bank on this planet's companion suns and worlds. This information will hopefully prove vital on the rotate that the Pioneer Pod Four becomes spaceborne once again. The effects of gravitational loss, showers of meteoritic dust, and the fierce and undiluted radiation of this solar group's ternary stars -- are all being studied. However, as of 09:00 nodes, four rotates ago, all twelve satellites have gone silent following a massive solar flare eruption on the surface of this planet's primary star. This is only one of a long list of cosmic bombardments that have been plaguing this tiny rock with which we, the crew of the Pioneer Pod Four, have been clinging to life on. At present, all crew are on Yellow Alert status and all emergency systems are on standby with all major and secondary systems at top priority for diagnostic review and repair.

  ***

  It was a hot world, a dry world, a brick-dust world, where the sky was always red. A supercontinent belted t
he baked orb and stretched from its south to its north poles and separated a paleo-inland sea to its east, from a panthalassic abyssal ocean to its west. The broad volcanic central pangean mountain range formed an equatorial highland that was the equatorial locus for a rainy belt. The volcanic mountain range moved northward into drier climates and the interior that became desert-like as the continued uplift of the mountain range blocked moisture-laden equatorial winds. A range of hills divided this area into northern and southern desert basins, where strong dry winds created huge sand dunes able to migrate unopposed across great distances. Wind-blown sediments usually well sorted, which also gave them a very good reservoir potential. The strong winds and high temperatures made the area very hostile. In some areas, the land subsided and was flooded by the shallow seas. The dry and extremely hot climate caused constant evaporation of the seawater, with the salt left as a seabed deposit. In this bleak landscape, the planetary inhabitants’ biggest battle was with the elements. A massive surge in volcanic activity was beginning to superheat the planet’s atmosphere, creating the highest temperatures yet known for this radically changing orb. Life on this planet was about to change…

  It did not help that the planet held an elliptical orbit around a star held in its own revolution around two other stars, one of which was a bloated red supergiant. At any given time, one to three suns could be present in the primordial sky. The planet's primary star was a yellow blowtorch searing down on its landscape, too bright to look at even through tinted visors. It was enough intensity nearly to suffocate the planet under the oppressive heat. Shadows cast by the two early morning suns highlighted the fresh tracks of a side-winding adder in the sand. Following the marks, Lieutenant Retho Capelsire climbed a golden dune slope to where they ended beside a large clump of grass. Retho cautiously circled the grass, searching for signs of the viper's presence, but found none. Frustrated, Retho removed a field biocoder from his short-sleeved fatigue’s cargo-styled pants utility belt and scanned the clump. Still nothing.

  "Where did it go, and how did it vanish so quickly? It must have buried itself deep into the root zone," he muttered to himself, rechecking his hand-held biocoder. "Damned heat levels," he cursed, clearing the sensors and then resetting them. The thermal readings that came back were still inconclusive. "I don't know which is worse on the sensors; the ambient air or the solar ultra-violet interference."

  During the cycle and six months he and his family had been marooned in this desert region on this alien planet, Retho had spent many free moments walking in the shrinking dunes nearby. The desertscape was disappearing due to the rapid growth of the surrounding jungle that had metamorphosed as long-buried seedlings sprung to life after a plasma firestorm some eleven months past. Retho had originally been out scouting around for meteorite impact craters. Recently, small pieces of debris pelted the planet without any known origin other than outer space. His attention suddenly diverted from one such gout in the desertscape by the appearance of an object streaking across the sky, leaving behind a lingering trail of smoke as it dipped toward the hazy horizon. After retrieving his electron binoculars from his utility belt, Retho had followed its fiery course and watched intently as it had crashed on the butter-yellow dunes and consumed in its own explosive brilliance. That explosion had been somewhere near where he now stood; but, then came the diversion of the viper. Now Retho found himself engrossed in this planet's indigenous version amongst the sand and stone.

  Retho occasionally encountered vipers side winding across the sand, but never did he find one lurking in the shrubs where he expected it to be. Succumbing to the facts that his biocoder presented, Retho closed the device and returned it to his utility belt. Seating himself at the base of a dune, Retho's careful eye focused suddenly in on a sand lizard endemic to the dune fields surrounding the Pioneer Pod Four's crash site. Slowly the lizard foraged along the bottom of the dune's steepest face, where food often collected. Stopping periodically, it pushed aside the sand with its broad, shovel-like snout, searching for seeds from grasses and succulents, as well as for insects and other small arthropods. Unsuccessful, it continued.

  Suddenly the sand above it exploded, blurring Retho's vision. As his eyes refocused, he saw the lizard violently thrashing in the distorted maw of the adder he had been tracking. Soon the lizard was still. The snake unhinged its lower jaw and shifted the lizard from side to side, aligning it for its headfirst passage into its stomach.

  Retho had seen many System species of captive venomous snakes and Aidennian vipers strike prey, and each time their speed amazed him, but nothing had prepared him for the stealth of this attack. While Retho's research focused on the ecology of the sand lizard, he had learned a great deal about the various strategies organisms on this planet had evolved to cope with the peculiar climate and topography. The remaining desert's shifting sand dunes supported very little plant life, which would have supplied shade and food and be the base upon which all other organisms depend. It also was doubly important, for plants not only provide energy, but were also the main source of water for most of the desert animals.

  Because of the desert topography, the amount of time an animal could forage during the day for food and water was about half what it might be in a flatter, more vegetated desert. That was why Retho had to make the best of the short time allotted to make his observations. He had only approximately two nodes.

  Retho moved his attention away from the dining viper to a cluster of cameloids situated across the desert expanse. They appeared to be unaffected by the rising heat. He knew this one-humped dromedary of this desert thrived in this the hottest and driest climate on this planet. In the cool of the night and early morning, the cameloids core temperature could drop to about ninety-two noches Heit, rising with air temperatures during the day to one hundred noches. As a result, the difference between a cameloid's body temperature and that of its environment was never as large as it was for other mammals, and so the flow of heat from the air to its body reduced.

  The alien cameloids were not alone in coping to climate. The Aidennians shared a physiological adaptation to heat -- that being, a network of blood vessels, called a carotid rete, just below the brain. The rete insured that when core body temperature was high, venous blood draining the nasal cavity cooled arterial blood destined for the brain. That was not the only upper hand the Aidennian survivors had over the endemic species. Retho and his comrades, being bipedal hominids having very little body hair had the advantage of exposed skin having direct contact to the flow of air, promoting the shedding of excess heat by convection, and when necessary, enhancing the effectiveness of sweating. Yet, with all the superior adaptations to extreme climate that Aidennians had, in order to continue to observe, Retho knew that he could not stay as he was now. He could feel something odd in the air. The suns overhead were different -- not just unseasonably sweltering, but different. Intense enough to make Retho need shelter and try to ignore the scratch of thirst in his throat. Even though he had had plenty of water to drink, Retho was suffering from the accumulating heat, and began sweating profusely. He did not have fair skin and was not obsessive about avoiding sunlight for fear of skin cancer, but these suns were...deviant.

  Reluctantly, Retho stood from his crouched position and moved back to where he had parked the convertible-styled, Roadster-class hovercar. Placing the shouldered, portable gear he had been toting in the back squab, Retho hauled himself up and into the driver's seat in one quick, graceful move. It was time to join up with his sister, pick her up from her observation outpost near the coastline, and then return to base camp with a full report.

  Activating the small craft's hyperatomic motor, Retho eased the directional controls forward and the Getabout surged forward in a sudden rush of air. Although the region was only two hundred and twenty-seven square mets in size, it was really a mini-continent within the main continent, with a wide variety of habitats. Along the east coast were the remnants and the beginnings of rich tropical rain forests. In the south whe
re the Pioneer Pod 4 crashed was a spiny desert, a dry land studded with prickly cactus-like plants and bulbous baobab trees. To the west were dry forests, and in the middle was a central plateau.

  Movement from off-center to the Getabout’s course caught Retho’s eye, and he tracked the disturbance with the ‘car’s sensor pallet. It was a migrating synapsid theraspoid herd. Each was of a massive beige body with a spiked head, and bony armor developed to an extreme. These proto-mammalian creatures were sniffing out waterholes. It was possible they smelled water from several mets away; making any discovery the first drink the herd may have had in six months. To survive, the synapsids had adapted to squeeze out every ounce of nutrients from the dietary poor desert plants they grazed on in their treks across the sandy expanse in search of their next water ration.

  Honks and snorts of the advancing herd reverberated across the desert basin, seemingly announcing the rabble’s arrival. However, it was more than mere posturing for the sake of bevy members, but also for those that shadowed the herd’s progress.

  The herd was not alone. Carnivores, too wise to attack a group so large who knew how to defend itself, trailed at a safe distance. These were theriodonts, therapsid hunters -- lightly built saber-toothed carnivores, with long running legs that fed on the abundant dicynodont herbivores that shared the environment. It was a migratory standoff.

  Within a few rotates after the therapsid herd uncovered a water source, the members would drink it dry and then move on. The ever-vigilant predators would euthanize any weak or sick individuals trailing behind. It was an age-old symbiotic dance. One that played out more and more, for suddenly more and more the water everywhere was turning up missing. Life quickly threatened by what was becoming a global draught.