Sleeper Ship

by Jim Rudnick

  Contents

  Sleepers on the RIM!

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  Epilogue

  Prologue for BOOK THREE

  "As penance for not being honest with his Admiral, Captain Tanner Scott has been sent on a boring routine maintenance mission of checking the RIM boundary buoys one after another and that lets him enjoy his Scotch in peace.

  Imagine his surprise when a Sleeper ship suddenly arrives on the RIM and he learns that the thousands of alien Sleepers are all children! While making that known has already gotten RIM Confederacy realms fighting, the real hidden problem is the secret that a virus infects the alien Sleepers.

  Finding out the Sleeper’s secret is one thing but the news of what that virus could bring to the RIM and what it might do is the real reason that a powerful RIM Royal realm wants to enslave the alien Sleepers.

  When Captain Scott realizes that another RIM planetary realm has also learned what the virus could be worth, they too try to take over the Sleeper ship and that means that Tanner can’t as per usual self-medicate with Scotch but instead has to overcome the RIM’s adversaries and somehow save them all…"

  BOOK TWO OF THE RIM

  CONFEDERACY

  SLEEPER SHIP

  By Jim Rudnick

  This is purely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This book may not be re-sold or given away with permission in writing from the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, copied, or distributed in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means past, present of future.

  Copyright © 2015 Sleeper Ship

  Jim Rudnick

  RUDNICK PRESS

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9939410-7-8

  For my Susan…

  Prologue...

  At the very southern border of the RIM Confederacy, the spaceship Keshowse moved ahead, and at its slow cruising speed, it could have been mistaken as a comet. It expelled no exhaust, plasma, or anti-matter shower of protons; it simply coasted along at its maximum speed as it unhurriedly went by the boundary buoy and began to enter the RIM Confederacy.

  It was of a shape and design that one could see would never ever touch down on a planet—it was meant for interstellar movement only. Arrays hung off the front of the ship and pods that held unknown equipment jutted out all along some of the sides in haphazard random fashion.

  There was none of the usual armament ports or arrays one would normally see for plasma cannons, laser weapon barrels, or energy pulse lenses. The bridge was plain to see, set back from the front of the huge craft as it jutted up and spread out on the forward decking, its rounded view-ports facing ahead and abeam to port and starboard.

  The strangeness of the ship was most apparent amidships where there was a huge four-sided shell-like box that circled the ship's axis and ran for almost 1500 feet populated with ports and lights that had no apparent purpose. Each of the four sides had ports strung in six rows all across the length of the box, and each was bright from interior lighting.

  The whole ship was huge at more than a half a mile long; it was truly a colossal ship bigger than any other that had ever entered the RIM.

  At its speed of slightly more than 30,000 miles per second, it was certainly the slowest of intruders into RIM space as it flew too slowly to make any kind of a beep on any ships’ display, and that was a part of what was wanted by the ship’s builders.

  Yet the RIM boundary buoy noted it passing, and its automatic plotting algorithm mapped the course this RIM trespasser would take. At its current speed and heading, it would clear the RIM space with no collision worries in more than 240 years, hardly worth worrying about, the AI stated, as its algorithm drew its own conclusions that it was simply a fast-moving comet.

  The AI made that entry in its logs; it then transcribed the message to be sent to Juno and the RIM Navy network and parked it in the buoy’s Ansible queue where it waited to be sent.

  It would wait forever as the Ansible arrays had been sheared off more than a month earlier during a rogue meteor shower that had come through the RIM space, and the few messages the buoy wanted to send continued to stack up and were never sent.

  Juno never learned of the incoming alien ship that had just entered its space, and the intruder's entry year passed and then another and another ... the alien ship crawled into RIM space until now four years later, it neared Novertag, the planet in the system sitting almost on that southern boundary.

  CHAPTER ONE

  "Do you believe it," Captain Tanner Scott said to the bartender who was way down at the far end and not paying much attention at all, "I'm a repairman now. A rescuer of hundreds of hostages, but a repairman nevertheless ... Goddamnit," he barked out and slammed the now empty shot glass down on the sloppy wet bar in front of him.

  "More," he barked again at the bartender who was now ambling down the bar toward him. "Lots more," he said as he pushed his pile of money into the condensate rings on the old wooden surface and emptied his beer glass too.

  The bartender merely nodded and filled up the shot glass with a healthy shot of Scotch and then tapped the keg of Randi beer and with a flourish, added it to the bar in front of his best customer of the day. More they drink, the better, and he liked it he seemed to say as he pawed through the pile of bills and took what was owed.

  "Stupid thing is," Tanner went on as if he was in a real conversation with the bartender, "is that this is definitely no way to treat heroes. No way at all!" was and he punctuated this with the slamming down of his now empty shot glass.

  He leaned back for a moment as he chugged from his glass, relishing the feel of the slick hoppy beer with that tang he so much enjoyed. On his left, he noted the same stupid 3D photos of those huge waterfalls over on Randi still showed the falling water, and the spray almost leapt up and off the frames. Besides the photos, he noted there were no self-evident vid ports that might have recorded the goings on here in the bar, and for that, he was at least a bit happy. No sense in saying shit that might be recorded and make its way back to Navy Hall, he reasoned. Might of hidden them, he thought, but nah, that'd take too much money, and if there was one thing that the bar screamed, it was cheap. Cheap beer and Scotch, and no one to bother the drinkers ... perfect!

  Back a bit along one wall at one of the booths, a Navy CPO sat. From what Tanner could see, his uniform was a bit non-compliant as his tie was askew and the right shoulder chevrons were hanging off to port.

  Tanner nodded back as the CPO nodded to him first and was glad that in here, there was no rank, no order ... just booze. He turned back to the front of the bar and sipped more beer as he agreed with the look from the bartender who had just raised his eyebrow with a question of more.

  "Yup, I'm off to mend fences," he said, "from UrPoPo all the way up to Pentyaan space. We're gonna be locating all the RIM boundary buoys and fixing 'em, repairing 'em, or replacing 'em. Very important duty and mission I was told by the admiral, very important indeed."

  He slugged down another gulp of beer and shook his head noting that it didn't hurt his temples yet.

  "Bullshit is what I think. I think it was payback for the dang ... uh ... uh ... never mind—" He cut himself off, remembering there were other Navy men in the bar.

  T
hey were most likely more pissed than he was, and they wouldn't even have probably remembered he'd used the word 'mutiny.' But still, the mutiny he'd setup to rescue the hostages from the Pirates was still a secret to one and all, and he knew better than to even say a thing about it, even after all these Scotches ... guess self-preservation works.

  He sighed once and then again.

  "Speaking of which, need another there, barkeep," he said and watched the pouring of it. Love Scotch and beers, he thought. And together they'd make a perfect couple just like a man and a woman.

  That slowed him down a bit as he immediately remembered how good that Lady St. August had looked over on Eons, tall, blonde, and yes, quite the looker not to mention she owned nine worlds plus a handful more that were as yet unsettled and ready for colonists.

  He toyed with the rings on the bar, drawing lines between two of them to make them look like a—what ... what was the name for that old two-wheeled? Bicycle, he thought suddenly, like a bicycle for two ... for him and the Lady.

  He shook his head. She was a bit—admittedly a teensy bit only—but still a bit interested in him. She had worked with him on the rescue, hadn't she? he thought as he drew lines on the bar through the watery bicycle rings left by his beer glass.

  Enough, he thought. When you start to think about her, heir to the Barony out here on the RIM, you'd had enough ... enough to still be able to get back to the Marwick as she was being outfitted with those stupid boundary buoys and all their collateral parts and God only knows what else.

  Paying up was quick and his tip was acknowledged by the bartender with a grunt, and he moved outside of this hideaway to get a robocab back to the landing tarmac. He sang right out loud on the trip and was still swiping his card in the pay slot when the door opened from the outside.

  "Sir," Lieutenant Bates said as he opened the door, "just about to come and get you. We're ready for space, Sir." He noticed that his captain was slow in getting out and twice almost offered up a hand to help him out of the robocab, He obviously thought better of that and moved closer to be ready to help only if needed, Tanner thought.

  "Not a problem," Tanner said quite slowly and was careful to step along in a fairly straight line toward the Marwick, which lay a hundred yards beyond the perimeter fence. At more than 600 feet tall and lit by loading bots that were about finished, she was the only source of any kind of action at this time of early evening.

  "All cargo in and stowed?" Tanner asked, articulating his words carefully.

  "Sir, aye, Sir. They're closing down the cargo bays now, and we're say an hour ready before take-off ... uh ... that is if you order same, Sir ... begging your pardon, Sir," Bates finished off a bit apologetically.

  "Not a problem, Lieutenant," Tanner said once again, and at the bottom of the landing escalator, he turned to his officer of the day.

  "Soon as you're able, Lieutenant, contact the XO and have her take us out—UrPoPo is the heading, and light the candle as soon as we're able. I'm retiring, Lieutenant, so dismissed!"

  He rode the staircase up, stared off at the rest of the ships lying here on Juno's landing pads, and wondered where they were all bound.

  There lay the Navy frigate the Vermeer and its sister ship the Skoali that he knew were bound for Leudi to help settle some kind of a trade war. Over there sat the Wyoming, the Navy destroyer that rose four times as high as the frigates, but was closed down now and off to somewhere he was sure didn't include boundary buoy repairs.

  And why he'd been stuck with the senseless fence-mending chores that'd take half a year to finish—well, he knew the answer to that one. Apparently, it doesn't pay to help out, Tanner thought. Apparently. He continued to think on that as he rode up and into the Marwick.

  Above the darkness that lay across the enveloping night sky, there were only a few handfuls of stars between them and the end of the galaxy. Out here, he thought, there was nothing to see other than that, a few stars. And blackness. And Scotch too. He grinned as he turned when the boarding escalator deposited him at the top, and he ambled into his ship.

  #

  "Remind me again, Nibin, on what the readings should be and what the regulated procedure is to fix this," Sachem Ahanu said, peering at his Epsilon Row counter. Most likely, he thought, the answer will come to him anything but quickly. Nibin, he knew, was an exact man and would consider before answering.

  Nibin shuffled the papers in front of him and looked for the answer, even though he knew it was not there. He glanced down at the top of the row cart for help and found none.

  "Ahh ... well, what the reading should be on this tank is Albedo-17.0-Hz ... and it's down to A-13.889-Hz ..." he answered quickly.

  "And yes, Nibin, I too can read the tank display and note like you probably did, that it has been dropping by ... um ... 0.031 every day. The question is, what do we do about it?" Ahanu said.

  He stood quietly at the edge of the bright red cryonic tank. The display on the facing end had a flashing alarm icon every couple of seconds, lighting the floor around them in an amber bath. He noted the tanks that stretched out ahead of him by the hundreds in the Epsilon Row; there were no more amber flashes.

  One tank this year, he nodded to himself. Yes, that was acceptable as long as it would be fixed. Could be fixed. Must be fixed, he knew.

  "Sachem Ahanu," Nibin said humbly, "you know that this is only the third alarm I've ever seen, and our tank support manual says that I'm to contact my superior when I discover such a failure ... or failure to be ..." he trailed off.

  While Nibin was stuttering and still shuffling his papers, Ahanu moved toward the display panel and pressed his thumb on the ID field to identify himself ... and the display panel lit up. Moving his forefinger over a button or two and clicking one toggle, he again re-entered his thumbprint into the ID field, and the screen went back to amber on black ... the diagnostic had begun and the countdown showed on screen.

  "First, we run an Alpha-diagnostic, Nibin ... it'll take a full three hours, and then you come back to read the metrics. If the Albedo can be boosted back to the full 17-Hz, then all is good and the sleeper sleeps. If not, then we may have to arrange for a substitution tank, move the sleeper, and take this tank offline and back to tech repairs. We won't know though ‘til after dinner. That's what we do. All of which you know as you've had a full 100 years of training, Nibin. These are our first steps," Ahanu said quietly.

  Nibin stopped his movement and looked directly into his Sachem's eyes.

  "And if the alarm didn't work, would we have ... would we have perhaps, I mean ..." he said quietly.

  "Could happen, but almost never ever does ... in all these centuries, we've lost nine sleepers, but not a single one could be saved as the tanks went offline after their redundant alarm circuits were faulty." Ahanu almost smiled but didn't as this was a good lesson for his new row counter, and lessons learned at this “hands-on” level were of value. Always of value ...

  Nibin nodded and then pointed ahead down the Epsilon Row.

  And Ahanu nodded.

  "Yes, continue but add this tank—uhh, Epsilon-1293 to the end of your tour today. Double back, check the diagnostic, and report it to me personally. Dismissed, Nibin," he added softly, knowing this was one lesson that had been learned and would be remembered.

  Nibin turned and pushed his row cart ahead the ten feet or so to the next tank, ID'd himself to the display panel, and began doing the normal daily recording of the next red tank in the ship's Epsilon Row. Today he'd do his 200 tanks, and then tomorrow he'd move up in the tank hierarchy and do 200 more until he had done all 2000 of the tanks in the Epsilon Row. With six full rows of sleepers, he, like the rest of the row counters, went through the full 2000 sleeper tanks until he finished off the complete Epsilon Row, and then he'd restart the whole row again.

  Ahanu walked back along the tanks just read and tried to make good time, but sometimes he stopped to look down through the view-plate to the sleeper below. Most of the plate was rime covered i
n frost that was thick after all these years, but he could still make out features ... and was pleased to see that whenever he did stop to look, all the faces were calm, peaceful, and asleep.

  Like they may be just children dreaming, he thought, as he reached the end of the Epsilon Row, and mounted the stairs up and up above Delta Row, and then Gamma, Beta, and finally Alpha. Within the sleeper amphitheater atrium, he could look up at the rows above him and the rounded ports that showed space and the pure blackness outside the ship.

  Moving up the stairs, he stopped on impulse just below the up most level, made his way down the short corridor to the Course mezzanine room, went in, and sat quietly against the rail to peer below. It appeared a Beta Row Kikinamagan was being tested, and he watched avidly as she appeared to be restarting the course. Judging by the look on the course instructor’s face, she hadn't done well, Ahanu thought, and he leaned forward to watch closely.

  From the start area where the participants got ready for each timed testing, the Course spread out in front of them for more than 100 yards. Green half-walls and large rock boulders populated that space, and there were small hills and some drops down twenty feet that made the Course a trial just to walk its length. But one didn't walk it, Ahanu knew ... one charged through it as the clock counted the seconds. Each of the Kikinamagans had to work on their bowmanship, their accuracy, and their timing over their 121 years as a Kikinamagan ... until they were up to the Ikarian standards. Being on a sleeper ship, Ahanu knew, did not negate the simple fact that each Ikarian had to have the same skills as had been honed into them over the millennia back on their home world. He smiled as he remembered that second drop almost eleven feet and his inability for almost a decade in trying to get the three arrows off and on target in less than a second. He shook his head, and those thoughts of his own Course trials faded as the Kikinamagan stepped up to the starting area once again.