Children of the Dark World

by Will Townsend

  THE LOST CHILDREN OF EARTH SAGA

  ‘CHILDREN OF THE DARK WORLD’

  by

  Will Townsend

  Copyright © 2014 Will Townsend

  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 the express written permission of the publisher.

  Children of the Dark World is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and/or incidents are a product of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A Powers Publishing Company eBook original

  Ebook formatting by www.ebooklaunch.com

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  APPENDIX

  A GLASS HALF FULL

  THE CALAMITY

  THE TIME OF THE DYING

  THE LONG ROAD

  THE LOST CHILDREN

  THE SILENT SKY

  PROLOGUE

  The yellow sun of humanity’s cradle spun to life from the vast swirling maelstrom of primordial dust and gas. And the tremors of its birth throes set the remainder of the whirling mass into convulsions. Eddies formed within the tumultuous maelstrom as the increasing gravity of the new born sun spun to life its favored children, the eight innermost worlds. The gathering was not limited to the grand eight but continued throughout the luminescent disk. Particles clinging desperately to other particles to form clumps. Clumps clung tenaciously to clumps to form boulders. Boulders collided with boulders to form mountains and so forth and so on, ad infinitum, with the race on to see which bodies could accumulate the greatest mass so that they could accumulate still more. Further and further from the shining warmth of the sun they formed. This was not because of some grand celestial plan, but because celestial mechanics deemed that it must be so. Only in the zone where the gravity fields of two stars met was there truly a void. And while it may have seemed daunting to living things it was insignificant on the scale of the universe.

  Worlds formed of dust and ice between Sol and the other star systems filling the void with their cold hostile environments doomed never to know the touch of life or intelligence. And the other stars dutifully followed suit so that the immense expanse between systems was not so much empty, but a staggered mass of bodies like stepping stones across an infinite pond.

  Beyond the orbit of Neptune hovered the worlds of the Kuiper Belt and beyond that the Oort Cloud, forming a swarm of icy worlds.

  Wandering in the gaps between the stars and their voluminous Oort Clouds were the twilight worlds, the rogue planets, the wandering comets and lastly, the brown dwarfs. These were failed stars, denied sufficient mass to reach hydrogen-1 fusion and, therefore, stellar celebrity. Nevertheless these bodies made the void not so empty and linked the separated star systems.

  It was into this lifeless dark kingdom that Death and Chaos were born.

  The Event occurred in the cold, dark and daunting wasteland of the Oort Cloud, although it wouldn’t be called that for another three million years. In the absolute zero temperatures of the vastness two orphans of the distant cold sun wandered seemingly without purpose toward a rendezvous with destiny. They had no names, because the clever handed anthropoids of the third planet had not yet arisen to dominance. So we will call them Death and Chaos. These were apt enough names considering their gifts to humanity.

  Their meeting was by no means an unusual event, having happened in this lonely region many times since the beginning of the universe itself. But this particular event would ripple across time as few others had ever done, changing and altering the fates of all those in its’ path.

  Perhaps the God of this dark, forbidding realm looked with envy and malice on the children of the inner solar system. They basked in the warmth of a yellow sun that was forever denied to his children. His children were relegated to the cold sterility of his dim domain. They were the leftovers of creation, stepchildren not deemed worthy for inclusion in their parent star’s warmth. So with a flick of his mighty and malevolent finger the dark god exacted his vengeance for this perceived slight.

  Or perhaps only the cruel laws of probability, happenstance, time and celestial mechanics colluded to bring about the inescapable result.

  Or maybe the universe operates on some grand celestial plan after all. And the Event was just another necessary cosmic cog in the enormous machinery of some master plan. Perhaps it is a plan that cannot be comprehended by mortal beings, but is somehow vital in achieving some unknowable, unattainable destiny. In the end, the cause mattered not at all, only the results.

  The two Gypsies, Chaos and Death, for want of better names, were somewhat typical inhabitants of this region. Composed of a very small rocky center, wrapped with layer upon layer of primordial ice, Chaos was over 2,200 kilometers in diameter. Its partner in destruction, Death, was very nearly 1,400 kilometers in diameter.

  If the universe were not a place of action, reaction and mechanical imperative then these two vagabonds would’ve drifted blindly by each other by a few thousand kilometers and into perpetual anonymity. A few million years prior to this event, however, Death had been struck by a nonlethal cosmic snowball of indeterminate diameter. The snowball had been ever so slightly deflected from its normal orbit by the passage of the brown dwarf non-star, that would one day be called Twilight, far away. It was not a body capable of destroying Death but just big enough to deflect it a small fraction from its ancient orbit. But a fraction over millions of year’s increases exponentially and in celestial mechanics a fraction is enough, so Death and Chaos were fated to destruction in the outer ethos.

  At the time it could not be known that their dying gasp was the harbinger of doom to the jewel of the inner eight. Nor could it be known that hope, unlikely as it was, would also spring from this clash of titans in the outer ethos. It was just another occurrence in a region of space that had seen its’ like many times before.

  There was no witness to the Event that unfolded in the stygian blackness, but still it happened. It is strange that such a calamitous event occurs in absolute silence but the dark cavernous vacuum of space knows no sound. As Death and Chaos approached each other, like gladiatorial combatants from a bygone age, the destruction began before they ever met. As their gravitational fields merged earthquakes rattled the worlds and huge fissures spider webbed across their icy surfaces. This released a flood of dark carbonaceous material in plumes that erupted hundreds of kilometers into the inky black and blanketed thousands of kilometers of space. Mountains began to topple and valleys heaved. At the first touch between the two bodies an incredible explosion rocked the worlds in an absolute and deafening silence warping the space around them. Ejecta raced spaceward in sizes ranging from dust to mountains. And still the objects plowed on into one another with a hyperbolic force beyond the comprehension of simple beings.

  Continent size masses were spewed forth as each of the dark gladiators sought the destruction of the other. If they’d been equal combatants then they would’v
e ripped apart each other’s rocky cores and the Calamity would’ve been far worse than it was. But the random probability of two objects in the Oort Cloud being identical is far more astronomical than the results of the Event.

  Chaos ground through to Death’s rocky core, obliterating it and causing the collapse of the planetoid’s framework sending a million pieces of it in as many directions. Some small remnants of Death’s remains were joined with those of Chaos and would eventually form a new, smaller planetoid, but overwhelmingly the greater mass of both contestants was hurled into the opaque vastness of the void. Chaos’ core was still intact, but the vast majority of Death’s core was launched on a trajectory that would one day take it beyond the grip of the yellow sun. Like vast armadas, dwarfing any flotilla ever assembled by man, the remnants of the event set off in many directions.

  Most would wander the dark void waiting to be discovered. Some few would, millions of years later, endure additional collisions and a further diminishing and still others would be captured by larger bodies and enslaved. But one of the icy armadas settled into a three million year collision course with the inner solar system of the yellow sun. Passing through the carbonaceous clouds that had initially erupted, they were coated with the dark organic lifeblood of the combatants that would make them difficult if not impossible to detect in later years.

  Now this was a fairly large fraction of the whole of the destruction caused by the titanic collision between Death and Chaos. As the deathly armada slowly wound its way around the yellow sun and toward the inner solar system some stragglers were lost. A few of the more robust pieces of the flotsam were pulled away by competing gravitational forces, but, for the most part, the main body remained intact.

  At this point in the armada’s journey it couldn’t be said with any degree of certainty exactly which bodies of the inner solar system were in peril. There were a thousand uncertainties along the way any one of which could change the equation, only to have another factor along its’ trajectory change the equation yet again.

  More of the armada was lost as they journeyed into the Kuiper Belt, being nudged and plucked by the gravity of their wandering, icy cousins. And so it was a diminished, but still formidable, force which reached the outskirts of the realm of the inner eight.

  Into this crowded (at least on a cosmic scale) realm the armada plunged, running the gamete of the gas giants. Neptune hardly figured into the equation although it did entice a few bodies onto a harmless path. Uranus’ and Saturn’s influence gathered some small measure of the gargantuan flock, but not nearly enough. And so it was left to Jupiter, as ever, to play the role of ‘Horatio at the gate’ against the invaders from the frigid outer realms.

  For eons of uncounted history Jupiter had faithfully guarded the inner rocky worlds from the chaotic bombardment of the distant outer realms. Some scientists of the twenty-first century even claimed that no intelligent species could arise on a planet unless it had a guardian such as Jupiter.

  Yes, mighty Jove the vigilant had protected the rocky worlds throughout history and its massive gravity well strove mightily to do so once more. But this was no ordinary bombardment, as humanity would soon discover. It was a watershed event of cataclysmic significance and mighty Jove the protector failed utterly and completely to avert the Calamity. In the end the numbers were too overwhelming and the inner system lay bare before the invaders from the dark god’s domain.

  Perhaps there is a kindly god of the inner system or perhaps in the end it was all just a mathematical equation with predictable results. But whatever the reason, god or mathematics, the inner system was spared the largest members of the invaders. They plummeted in fiery trails into the roiling atmosphere of Jupiter, unseen by human eyes.

  No objects in the flotilla were larger than a kilometer, but even so there were hundreds of these. The invaders were mostly ice with little of the iron residue from the titanic clash in the outer realms. Still the remnants of the Event were more numerous than the stars in the Earthy night sky.

  Although mighty Jove failed to halt the ferocious onslaught, portions of it were diverted so that the result did not spell the complete annihilation of any single world. Instead, it rerouted the deadly cargo of incalculable misery to all of the realms within the inner system. None of the four rocky worlds would escape unscathed, although the jewel called Earth, birthplace of those clever homo-sapiens, would bear the brunt of the brutal onslaught. Venus, Mercury and Mars would not see the results of Jupiter’s intervention for several decades, and in these cases it was not necessarily a catastrophe to the planet so much as a redirection of the body’s evolutionary path. Humanity was granted no such reprieve and stood unaware of the extinction level event that hurtled relentlessly towards it.

  The armada approaching Earth was spread over a considerable portion of space, such that it came not as a single event, or a string of isolated occurrences, but as a continuous wave of calamities that would echo throughout the summer of the Northern Hemisphere, sometimes referred to as the summer of death, but most frequently as simply the Calamity. When the celestial bombardment finally ended those who had survived thanked whatever God they worshipped for his mercy, not knowing in the euphoria of the moment that the true days of death and misery were before them and would change the course of their world forever.

  CHAPTER 1

  “And today, May 30, 2216,” Mariko Hitoshi intoned, “it was announced by Admiral Ngata of Earth Services, that the long awaited departure of the first relief ship would occur five days from today. As everyone in our viewing audience knows, this is the first mission to be sent in search of the off world colonists who were stranded by the Calamity ninety-seven years ago. Five days from today, on the ninety-seventh anniversary of the Calamity, the E.S.S. Resolution will embark on its’ historic journey in search of the colonies that Earth lost contact with so many decades ago. With us to discuss this momentous event is Dr. Stuart Covington.”

  “Dr. Covington welcome back. We are always pleased to see you and I know the audience at home is as well. You might say you’re the favorite in all of our audience polls.”

  “Thank you very much Mariko, for the welcome, as well as the flattery. This is truly one of the red letter days in history. Everyone at home will mark this day and tell their grandchildren about it and their children will tell their grandchildren. The Resolution, under Commander Callum Farr, will be the first of the humanitarian missions to leave Earth’s orbit,” Stuart Covington said speaking to a global audience, “with its first destination to be the former lunar colonies and then afterwards to the asteroid belt.”

  “Dr. Covington, as you know, the late beloved leaders of the human race, Stephen T. Lansing and Lao Liang Li, referred to the colonists as their ‘lost children’. After the Calamity and the two decades of the Dying they formed the World Council and they voluntarily relinquished power, leaving us a united Earth. They always referred to humanity as their children and they extracted a promise from the Council that they would agree to seek out the ‘lost children of Earth’, the colonists that the corporations marooned in June of 2119. On their death beds they again extracted the promise from a grieving world and we reaffirmed our resolve to follow through. Do you think, with the imminent departure of the Resolution, that humanity has kept its promise to the men who saved the human race?”

  “Many see this as the culmination of the promise a grateful world made to the beloved leaders that brought them through the Calamity and the Time of the Dying afterwards, and guided humanity down the Long Road. But some say it is just the end of the beginning, and there is much more to be done to keep ‘the promise’, as it has come to be known.”

  “I, for one, am a member of that group. We’ve just begun to fulfill the oath we made to those two beloved leaders who authored the Long Road which has led us to this point. But that oath should mean more than just the fulfillment of the dying wishes of two men, however important they were to us. It should mean something to us as a species, that we�
�ve not forgotten our own because they’re part of humanity too. So we can’t just do this for the sake of these two men whom we loved and respected so much. That’s not what they wanted,” he said passionately, “They wanted us to realize that we, as members of a species, owe a debt to that species.

  “An important leader in the twentieth century once said when he was asked if good news from the battlefront meant that it was the beginning of the end to the Second World War, the most heinous war in humanity’s history. He responded that “it is not the end, it is not the beginning of the end, it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning”. And that is what the departure of the Resolution really is, the end of the beginning, for we’ve much more to do to find our lost kindred. We’ve four ships that still aren’t ready to depart, ships that are being refitted by the corporations I might add. But the departure of the Resolution truly does mark the end of the beginning and I wish Commander Farr and his crew the very best of fortunes as I know those of you at home do as well.”

  —————

  Far above the tumult of the Earth below, the ship floated in the blackness of space twenty-two thousand kilometers above the Arctic Ocean, where she’d waited patiently for humanity’s return for ninety seven years. It was the closest she’d ever come to the world that had forged her and it was the closest she ever would. She was fully three hundred and fifty meters long, being roughly equivalent to the length of a twentieth century aircraft carrier, but lacking the bulk of the huge waterborne craft. In her former life she’d been known as the Cybelean Princess, a rather grand name considering her primary function of support ship, providing mining support and cargo transport to the colonies of the asteroid belt. She was commonly referred to as a “trash hauler” by the captains and crews of the space faring fleet of Earth in the twenty second century.

  Her design reflected her purpose, which was to operate in low gravity environments and her appearance reflected that design. Graceful was the only word that could be applied with any depth of accuracy. Her lines were sleek and elegant as she consisted of a cylindrical body with a large bulbous command and crew area at what would be considered the bow and a rotating hub at the center, contained within the width of the ship, whereby centrifugal force could be generated up to full earth gravity for the physical and mental well-being of the crew. Two smaller cylinders ran parallel to the main body cylinder half way down her length and these housed the propellant used by the Vasimr Ion Propulsion system.