The Rylerran Gateway

by Mark Ian Kendrick

  Siloy assessed that comment before answering his son. “Sedition is an interesting choice of words; one that I would never consider for a second. What we’re quite informally talking about is merely a change from a central corporate authority to a true representative form of government that’s purely local. No more interference with our affairs. No more profits siphoned off for the good of who knows what.”

  Darreth didn’t know what to say. It was a lot to absorb.

  Siloy continued. “Our Planetary Director doesn’t represent any local corporate interests, only those who have the closest ties to the interests of the Central Planning and Direction Committee on Earth. As PD her sole concerns revolve around maximizing profits.”

  “I’ve never liked Director Alarr,” Darreth stated acidly. It was starting to come out now. Siloy could tell that Darreth had been holding back. “She’s a hollowhead,” he said with distinct disgust.

  “Like the boy you’re seeing?”

  “He’s… different. We’re… dating. He’s a Citizen, and naturalized. She’s not. She’s can’t be by law.” He said it that way more to make it more real for himself than anything else. He was desperately trying to make sure that in his own mind he had a nice neat distinction between Naylon and the Planetary Director.

  “Then you agree…”

  “Agree? With independence? I don’t see how we could ever achieve a complete separation from Earth. After all, the Consort built Andakar. Their researchers discovered the secret hidden in our ocean. They’re the ones who started the first pharma development facilities as a result. They built the space stations. They fund the division that employs me. I could add a couple of hundred other things to that list.”

  Siloy assessed the fervor with which Darreth argued his case. “You’re waffling,” he finally said, looking Darreth straight in the eye. “You said it yourself. You’re not happy about when and where not to engage pharma pirates. Try looking at this on a much larger and grander scale. Independence isn’t about who built our infrastructure or who settled our world. It’s about having a far greater say in our destiny than we do right now. All of the Inhabs, including us, have very little control over internal affairs despite appearances. The Consortium has tremendous say over local affairs and we have absolutely no say over how they run Earth or the rest of the Consort.”

  Darreth was dead silent, mulling it over. He knew the history of his planet. The Consort was sort of a benevolent taskmaster. When Andakar had been settled, Deep Sky Mining had been running everything for centuries. Although most of the corporations that did business on Andakar were locally owned now, all had to ultimately answer to a chain of command which lead back to Deep Sky Mining Consortium, and thus to Earth. It had been that way ever since the first Mars mining concern began in the Sol system. Virtually all corporations were in one way or another tied to mining. Andakar was different in that it had a planetwide ocean teeming with life forms that were discovered to have nearly miraculous medicinal benefit to humanity.

  “You’d need military help. As soon as Earth finds out about this, all hell will break loose,” Darreth offered.

  “Trust me. That’s being taken care of.” He didn’t dare tell Darreth what he meant just yet.

  Darreth studied his father’s face. “I’ve not heard a word about it from other Citizens.”

  “You will soon. Very soon. But remember. Not a word about this to anyone.”

  “What about Director Alarr? How are you going to keep this a secret from her?”

  “She’s not been invited to some of our, uh, more informal council meetings,” his father said.

  “Once she finds out about this, and you know she will, then what will you do?”

  Siloy grinned then started cutting his slices of hejbird. “She’s not going to find out any time soon.”

  Chapter 5

  Lieutenant Commander Rehl Takaramyus stood casually in the corridor looking out the window on the Guardian space station. The ground shuttle had just arrived. Darreth was onboard. The pod was still docking as Rehl watched.

  “So how was your date?” Rehl asked through his neural implant. The close proximity of their tiny encrypted transceiver signals made it seem like they were actually vocalizing their discussion.

  “Yummy,” Darreth answered.

  Rehl heard the faint sound of the docking clamp engaging. “You had sex on your first date?” he asked with feigned shock.

  “Well… sorta,” Darreth replied sheepishly. No actual penetration took place that night.

  “You’re worse than me. Or maybe your date is,” Rehl mocked. “Merrin made me wait until we’d gone out four times before she let me get past third base.” The outer door opened and Rehl walked to the docking ring door on his side of the airlock. “What’s his name again?”

  “Naylon Ress. He works at the Tokaias Museum of Natural History on the north end of the bay. And don’t forget. Women are different. If you were on my side, you’d have had a lot more sex before you married her.” The inner docking ring door cycled open. Rehl could see Darreth and the two other men with him on the shuttle.

  “Listen to you. She was just making me wait for the hottest dessert I could imagine. She’s still the best dessert I’ve ever had.”

  “She’s very nice,” Darreth genuinely noted, now speaking out loud to Rehl as he approached. “And I’m sure she’s a great dessert, too.”

  Rehl elbowed Darreth in the ribs playfully. Their friendship was such that they had never had any issue telling each other anything.

  The Guardian space station was the main operational center for patrols warping to and from the space lanes on the look out for pharma pirates. Due to the prevailing technology, a starship was only able to make a journey of twenty light years before its energy ran out and the wedge failed. It was entirely due to the power source. The only known power source dense enough to create a warp bubble was cryo-crystalline Helium-3 Tetra Ganide, or Tetra-G for short. Although warp engines had been improved upon over the last half millennium, the fuel source had never changed.

  Tetra-G was only available from sources located on Triton in the Sol system. A unique power source, it was carefully controlled by the Consortium, although it was considered a commodity for trade purposes. When it was discovered that the compound had an unusual volatility as well as being a dense source of Helium-3, an impressive array of testing was begun. Within months, an amazing discovery ensued. Under intense pressure in a properly coated reaction chamber, and under bombardment by a highly focused sound wave, a beam of anti-tachyon particles could be emitted from a containment vessel. Under the right conditions, a stable field that ‘wrinkled’ then ‘pushed’ spacetime away from a ship could be created by this energy emission. It was an unprecedented discovery. Once the implication of the steady stream of anti-tachyon particles was fully analyzed, the results were clear. Mankind could finally go to the stars!

  Within thirty years after its initial discovery, all the remaining interrelated systems needed for a warp ship were put into place. It took such a short time because the theoretical designs for all of them had been established for as long as anyone could remember. The last hurdle had been finding a power source energy-dense enough to create a sustainable and stable spacetime warp field. Field-testing found what was at first considered a severe limitation. The twenty light year limitation. A standard sized container (exactly 314.206 kg) of Tetra-G could cause a wedge of spacetime to be ‘wrinkled’ only that far before the energy ran out. Once out of the ‘wrinkled wedge’, as it became known, the ship was only able to use sublight engines while the FTL drive, more commonly called the wedge drive, was recycled and reset. This created a three-hour delay before the next leap could take place due to fatigue on the wedge drive. A ship kept as many containers of Tetra-G onboard as would fit in storage. Thus, allowing for essentially unlimited travel. Unfortunately, trying to restart a wedge drive in a shorter time than the speced three-hours resulted in severe and costly damage.

 
It could have been different from the very beginning. Two wedge drives could have been installed in the ship, but thermal dissipation considerations and cost overruns had removed it from all blueprints. Ultimately, more and more starships were built with a single engine simply because demand for FTL ships was so great. There had never been a second engine in any starship due to their extremely high cost anyway. By default, the single wedge drive design became derigeur for all starliners, cargo ships, fighters and all other starships. Luckily, one could exit the wedge and reenter it as long as the ship didn’t exceed the twenty light year distance. Thus, short wedge runs occurred all the time within star systems and between adjacent ones.

  Rehl wasn’t assigned aboard the Challenger as was Darreth, but rather was co-pilot of the Wavefront. Nonetheless, since they had attended flight school together they had been buddies since the day they met.

  With Rehl following, Darreth continued down the corridor to his locker. He glanced out the window to his left. The transparent transduranium alloy afforded a completely safe view of the sun at the far edge of his vision to the left, while still allowing him a beautiful view of Andakar’s night side.

  Night across Andakar was bleak when the continent wasn’t in view. Except where thunderstorms illuminated the clouds, the auroras lit up the polar regions, or the Tovar nebula reflected enough light from the ocean surface, the night side was pitch black. Population centers on Andakar were confined mostly to Koehkelko Bay, the cities and towns along the shores of the other provinces, and the scattered islands that mostly lay within a few kilometers of the continent.

  Looking down at the landmass during a clear day as the station passed overhead was a sight to behold. The Patoria Mountains took up more than a third of the continent and ran down to the foothills just tens of kilometers beyond the city limits of Tokaias. Only a single peak, ten kilometers west of dead center of the continent was high enough to be snowy, and that was only in some years. Most of the Kattan continent, except for the highlands, was a tropical jungle environment, with patches here and there of what could loosely be called grassy savannah, and a couple of small deserts. The two volcanoes to the west had long been extinct and had never been pyroclastic. Ancient lava fields spread out from both of the low shields they had created millions of years previous. All of the known active volcanoes were either underwater or spilling lava into the ocean from various seamounts that dotted the planet.

  Darreth’s locker was located in a changing room several dozen meters from the airlock. He quickly shucked his flight suit and donned his work jumper, which was a typical light blue one-piece affair with an array of zippers holding it together at the sleeves and legs. Their removal made for a much more comfortable experience when strenuous work was required.

  “Hungry?” Rehl asked.

  “Yeah, I didn’t have breakfast.”

  Darreth closed and locked his locker, then they headed down the corridor once again.

  The corridors were wide enough for six people to walk abreast. The station looked like a huge cylinder in space. The central core ran along the length of the station and held the graviton generators, which kept one standard g at all times. The mess hall was three decks ‘up’, and had plenty of windows with which looked out into the cold of space or at transport vehicles as they arrived and departed the station. There was rarely a time when traffic wasn’t visible somewhere in their field of view.

  After they made their food selections from the buffet line, they took a seat near one of the windows.

  “Okay, let’s hear more,” Rehl prompted, a grin spreading across his handsome face.

  “More about what?” Darreth replied, with as innocent a look as he could manage.

  “That guy, of course.”

  “Why are you so interested in him?”

  “I’m not interested in him, but rather what you think of him.”

  “Oh, you had me worried for a second.”

  “Not a chance, pal.”

  Darreth grinned.

  Rehl pointed his fork at Darreth. “You needed a date. I helped you out. So you owe me to let me know how you think things might go with him.”

  Rehl was right, of course. He had needed a date. He’d been spending way too much time off world. It was beginning to be a pain not having intimate contact with someone. And his persistence had paid off, too. After being blown off twice he wasn’t about to give up so easily. After having a nice dinner with Naylon, he was surprised at how easily he found himself enthralled with the guy. It helped that Naylon was his perfect type, if a little younger than he normally was attracted to. But that was okay. He found himself equally surprised at how he so easily dismissed that Naylon was from Earth. Maybe he’d been a little harsh about his usual blanket dismissal of Earthers.

  “I asked him out again, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Now that’s more like it,” Rehl replied with a wide smile. “My boy’s growing up.”

  “Eat me.”

  “Nope. Just this bite of yast.” He poked the forked piece into this mouth and began chewing contentedly.

  “Well, it’s going quite well. He’s nice, actually. Someone I didn’t expect either.”

  “In what way?”

  “I guess mainly because he’s from Earth and I didn’t expect to like him that much.”

  “Oh. Sorry,” Rehl said slowly, with sincere regret in his voice. “If I’d known…”

  Darreth dismissed the apology outright. “Don’t agit. He’s Andakari through and through. And he makes me laugh.”

  “Huh?”

  “You know, the expelling of air and all when you find something humorous.”

  Rehl rolled his eyes.

  “He’s got a unique perspective on things. He’s in academia. He works in a lab and does some pretty interesting stuff.” Darreth elaborated on Naylon’s job.

  “Really. Well, I’m glad it’s working out. It’s about time you found someone you could relate to, even if he’s light years ahead of you in the brains department.”

  “Fruck you,” Darreth replied with a grin.

  Chapter 6

  It was Friday. Even on Andakar, the days were named after those on Earth. It was the same on all the Inhabs that had near 24-hour rotations. The main difference was that months were renamed because no other planet except for Earth had a 365-day year.

  Darreth had been on spacelane patrols the entire previous week. After that was another week in orbit on the space station. Now he was on a five-day planetside rest and relaxation stretch. He had placed vids to Naylon twice in the last week while still in the sky. He was quite surprised at his continued infatuation with Naylon. It wasn’t because Naylon was an easy lay either. He’d had that before, yet more often than not getting laid, especially on the first date, rarely happened. Most of the time a second date didn’t materialize at all.

  A broad, stiff, white mesh canopy was draped on a dozen three-story tall poles above the downtown plaza. The plaza was a good city block square and was one of many such outdoor spaces scattered around the urban area. The canopy worked well to bring down the heat but did nothing to mask the high humidity, both of which were just this side of tolerable. Naylon sat on one of the many benches near a huge circular fountain; his overnight bag was next to him. This was their agreed-upon meeting spot. It was the nearest bench to the entrance of the underground shuttle station from where Naylon knew Darreth would emerge.

  The large fountain to his left was quite noisy and when the wind kicked up, droplets hit his skin even from this far away. With the humidity as high as it was, it wasn’t evaporating all that well from him. He decided he’d move if the wind didn’t shift.

  While he waited, he wondered what he saw in Darreth. Maybe it was because the man was such a smooth talker, unlike what he expected. They still only knew each other but a few days. He was surprised that on his first date they had sex. Sort of. It made sense though. Darreth was hot. He was still the best looking man he’d ever had the good luck to date. B
ut there was more just under the surface of Darreth’s beautiful skin. Naylon had been on dates with guys before where the chemistry just hadn’t happened despite there being an attraction. Maybe it was the way Darreth kissed. Naylon had already decided that Darreth’s lips were genetically designed to produce perfect kisses. Maybe it was simply that Darreth was paying an awful lot of attention to him despite him being gone so often. It intrigued him as he tried to figure it out. Finally, not getting anywhere, he sighed, watched more people go by, and let the thought go.

  Darreth appeared through the crowd several meters ahead of him, making a beeline toward the bench. Naylon stood, all smiles, watching Darreth approach as he casually maneuvered his way through the throng of men and women who were milling about taking pictures, eating lunch and socializing. He was dressed in a loose thin planetside jumper with his rank insignia on the epaulets, making it obvious he was a Space Navy officer. It wasn’t altogether unusual to see someone wearing a military division jumper on the plaza, but it wasn’t an everyday sight either.

  “Hey,” Darreth greeted.

  “Yum,” Naylon said before he realized it.

  “Yum?” Darreth asked as he scanned Naylon up and down.

  “I, uh, meant hi.”

  Darreth chuckled. “Yum will do. In fact, I should have just said that to you.” With that, he licked his lips seductively.

  “I’m already embarrassed and now you’re making me even more so.”

  Darreth grinned. “So, where to?” he asked.

  Naylon pointed. “The restaurant’s that way.” They headed diagonally across the plaza, then down a flight of stairs below street level. They pushed their way through the revolving door. The restaurant was cool inside. The dehumidifiers were quite effective. They were seated immediately.