Eschaton - Season One

by Kieran Marcus

  Panting heavily and with his eyes wide open in shock he looked at Aeneas.

  The older boy threw his arms in the air. “What are you waiting for, idiot? Answer it!”

  Dizzy with excitement, his heart pounding in his chest, Tetra touched the screen to accept the call. He put the phone to his ear, and with a trembling voice he said, “Dad?”

  1.10 Pale Yellow Dot

  ARK-SHIP KRONOS – MAY 29, 2137

  Hieronymus van Zandt reclined in his leather chair and took a sip of his oolong tea, holding the cup in one hand and the saucer in the other. He let the full-bodied, spicy liquid sit on his tongue for a moment before he swallowed it as looked at his e-window, lost in thought. The four-square-meter 3D flatscreen monitor wasn’t an actual window. In order to protect the passengers and crew on board from lethal doses of cosmic radiation, the ark-ship Kronos—like all the ark-ships—didn’t have any windows. Instead, a phalanx of cameras lined the hull of the ship, providing a continuous live stream of images and allowing everyone on board to look in all directions of space in real time whenever they didn’t use their e-window-units for communication or entertainment purposes. A few months ago, their flyby of Saturn had made for some spectacular viewing that had lifted everyone’s spirits. Every child born on Earth knew what Saturn looked like, so seeing it from up close almost felt like home. But it had been the last familiar sight they got to see on this journey, and eight months on, the memory was fading fast. The next time they’d get so close to another planet, it would be their new home world, some twenty-two light years down the road. For now, they had barely reached the inner edge of the Kuiper belt—the beginning of the outer edge of the solar system. On a cosmic scale, this was still the Earth’s backyard, but looking at his e-window, Hieronymus would have been hard-pressed to put his finger on the sun if he hadn’t known exactly where it was. It was so small now that it was almost indistinguishable from the rest of the stars. He could also see Jupiter and Saturn as two even smaller, fainter dots. Earth, along with the other inner planets, was already too far away and too small to discern.

  Hieronymus took another sip of his oolong before he placed the saucer and cup on his desk. He tapped a few buttons on his control panel and cleared his throat before he began to speak.

  “This is captain Hieronymus van Zandt of the ark-ship Kronos, calling the good people back on Earth. It’s day 589 since we left the Earth’s orbit and day 35 since our last communication with Earth. You may not be able to reply, but we do hope you are still listening. Everyone on board has seen the horrifying pictures of Fat Boy’s impact and the cloud of ash and debris spreading across the planet before the transmission ceased. The last thing we have seen of our home planet was how it turned from a shiny blue marble into something that resembled a dirty dung ball. Even though we knew what was coming, many of us haven’t taken it very well. The number of people seeking treatment for anxiety, depression, and related mental health issues has quadrupled in the last five weeks. Alas, save for medicating them there is not a lot we can do to alleviate their distress, except … many seem to find comfort in sending messages back home—much like I am doing now. We’re 4.8 billion kilometers away from home now, and it takes our transmissions four and a half hours to reach the Earth. An immediate response would take another four and a half hours to reach us. That makes for nine hours of hope—hope that one of these days communications will be restored and that whatever it was that happened to you back there on our beloved Earth, it wasn’t quite as bad as it looked after all.

  “Remarkably, despite the increase in mental health patients, our suicide rate remains low. We’ve had only seven in the twenty months since our departure, and the last one was actually two weeks before we’ve seen the devastating pictures of Fat Boy’s impact on Earth. From my monthly briefings with the other captains I know that ours remains the lowest suicide rate of all the ark-ships with the exception of the ark-ship Iapetus. However, the passengers on the Iapetus are systematically sedated and their medication is administered to them against their will through their food. The captain of the Iapetus insists that his passengers are not drugged against their will but merely without their knowledge. I’ve had long philosophical discussions with him about whether something that happens without one’s knowledge automatically violates one’s will. Captain Hogarth denies it, because according to him, the will is a property of consciousness and thus cannot be affected by something it is not aware of. Complete and utter nonsense if you ask me, but there we are. Anyway, this is not something that I would ever condone or consider a viable option here on my ship.

  “Speaking of the ship, a test run of our magnetoplasma ion engines the other week has led to some rather disquieting results. It seems that if pushed to the limit, two of our three engines are unable to exceed eighty percent of their capacity. It’s not an immediate problem. We are currently operating our engines at twenty-five percent capacity and we will continue to do so until we’ve cleared the Kuiper belt. The region is simply too dense with too many large objects that could severely damage the ship if we run into them at ten percent of the speed of light. But once we’ve reached interstellar space, we need to be able to operate our engines at a hundred percent capacity for decades at a time or our journey time will quickly increase by a generation or two, and that’s just not acceptable. I’m having my engineers work day and night to locate—and hopefully solve—the problem, and I am confident that they will not let us down. My entire crew is comprised to the most passionate, most capable, and most honorable individuals, for which I am truly grateful. Back on Earth, many people have criticized the selection process for the ark-ship crews. I can only speak for myself and my own ship, but I have the best crew a captain could ever ask for. As for our passengers, they are a mixed bag in the best possible sense. Coming from all walks of life and all social strata, none of them are angels, but they are a representative sample of humanity. We may not be a crimeless society, but our crime rate remains low and is nothing we cannot deal with. We have yet to see the first homicide on this ship, which is remarkable, and I think that in hindsight it was a wise decision to exclude individuals with a criminal record—especially violent criminals and sex offenders—from the Exodus lottery. I’m confident that the people on this ship will prove worthy to build a colony on a distant planet and ensure the survival of the human race in the Milky Way.

  “Speaking of our survival, it gives me great pleasure to report that our cryonics program is in full swing. We have now frozen a total of thirty-seven individuals, including three IVF and four naturally conceived embryos. Those numbers will rise into the hundreds over the next few years. So far, everything is going according to plan, but we will have to be very careful to maintain a working order on this ship. Unlike on some of the other ark-ships, here on the Kronos we remain committed to our promise to offer every single individual—no matter if they were born on Earth or conceived on board—the opportunity to one day set foot on our new home planet. At the same time we will need a crew to operate this ship over the next two hundred years or so. In order to maintain that very delicate balance, we have devised a system that allows individuals over the age of forty-five—if indeed they wish to do so—to retire and be frozen until we arrive at our destination. Since our cryo-space for grown individuals is limited, we’ll be enforcing a strict one-child policy. As for our frozen embryos, we have decided to gradually defreeze them over a period of ten to twenty-five years prior to our arrival. That way we hope to ensure that our colony on Gliese 667 Cc is not going to be built by a bunch of senior citizens only, but that we have a fresh, passionate, and well educated young generation at our disposal to build the future of the human race when the time comes.”

  Hieronymus paused and chuckled.

  “And if all this sounds way too easy,” he continued, “then that’s because it probably is. I am quite certain that out there in the vast emptiness of interstellar space lie countless obstacles and dangers in wait for us that we can’t even
begin to imagine, but those we shall …”

  A buzzing noise alerted him that someone was outside the door of his ready room, asking to be let in. Hieronymus sighed and paused the recording.

  “Come!”

  The door opened and his first officer entered the room. “Excuse me, Captain,” he said.

  “Ah, Mr. Fletcher. I was just speaking to our dear friends back on Earth.”

  Fletcher frowned.

  “Speaking to them,” Hieronymus clarified, “not with them.”

  “I see.”

  “Doctor’s orders.” Hieronymus leaned forward and picked up his cup. “Sending messages back home as if someone’s still listening is supposed to help us cope, according to my wife, and I wouldn’t dare contradict her. But anyway, have a seat, my dear Mr. Fletcher. Can I interest you in a cup of this delicious Vietnamese oolong? Grown in a private garden in Phú Minh, a very small town just outside of Hanoi.”

  “Very kind, Captain, but I’m fine, thank you.”

  “Suit yourself, Mr. Fletcher. So what can I do for you?” Hieronymus took a sip of tea.

  “Captain, it seems we have discovered a blind passenger.”

  Hieronymus raised his eyebrows. “Really?”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned! Twenty months into our journey and we have our first blind passenger.”

  “Apparently, the man was a construction worker on the Kronos and faked his death in an accident. He hid in a storage room on the Z-deck until we left orbit and has been hiding in plain sight ever since.”

  “Son of a gun!” Hieronymus said. “So how do you propose we deal with the scoundrel? Should we keelhaul him or let him walk the plank?”

  Fletcher frowned. “Captain?”

  Hieronymus sighed. His humor was wasted on this ship. “Never mind, Mr. Fletcher. Where is the man now?”

  “In a holding cell, Captain. He’s being interrogated by security officers.”

  “Good,” Hieronymus said. He placed his cup back on his desk and rose from his chair. “Let’s have a look at him, shall we, Mr. Fletcher?”

  “Very well, Captain.”

  Fletcher turned and left the room. Hieronymus followed him. Before he closed the door behind him, he glanced back at his e-window, looking for the sun amid the vast sea of stars. When his eyes finally came to rest on a pale yellow dot almost too faint to see, he wasn’t sure if he was really looking at the sun or just some random star dozens or hundreds of light-years away, one of too many that all looked the same. And he wondered if at this point it even mattered anymore.

  Thank you for reading Eschaton - Season One. If you liked this book, a quick review over at Amazon.com and/or Amazon.co.uk would be greatly appreciated. It will help other readers decide whether this book is right for them.

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  About the Author

  When Kieran Marcus was little, he thought there was only one number that came between six and nine, and it was called ‘ignition sequence starts’. The Apollo missions took men to the moon and back, but encouraged by their extraordinary achievement, Kieran’s imagination traveled on beyond the solar system, across the universe. On his journeys through time and space he witnessed the birth and death of stars and galaxies, and the rise and fall of proud civilizations that ruled over distant planets. He encountered strange creatures very different from ourselves and yet in many respects eerily similar. Kieran periodically returns home to Earth to recruit new minions. Because the galaxy needs us.

  Follow the author on Twitter @KieranMarcus

  Kieran Marcus also writes Young Adult fiction under the name Marcus Herzig.

  Idolism by Marcus Herzig

  A new Pope, a world in social and political chaos, and a 17-year-old singer and songwriter who has his unbelief tested as his big mouth accidentally propels him towards global superstardom. These are the ingredients of this delightful, quirky romp for the young adult religious skeptic, taking a tongue-in-cheek look at the differences and similarities between religion and stardom. Available as ebook and paperback.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents, and trademarks are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is entirely coincidental. The use of any trademarks within this publication was not authorized by, nor is this publication sponsored by or associated with, the respective trademark owners.

  Eschaton - Season One

  Copyright © 2015 by Kieran Marcus

  The right of Kieran Marcus to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  The stories in this book were previously published in:

  The Eschaton Tales: Vol.1

  The Eschaton Tales: Vol.2

  The Eschaton Tales: Vol.3

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

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