by G. H. Holmes
G.H. Holmes
The Silent Planet
Book One
of the
COSMIC CYCLONE
Series
A Science Fiction Space Opera
featuring
Ben Harrow
and
Charity Jones
Copyright 2015 by G.H. Holmes
All rights reserved!
No part of this book may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law, or in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction.
Any similitude to actual persons, incidents or locales is coincidental.
***
A Cosmic Cyclone is about to break!
The Human Union has a mysterious enemy it knows nothing about—and the enemy is ready to pounce. To clear the way, it has to destroy the one person standing in its way:
Ben Harrow.
The COSMIC CYCLONE series tells the tale of the greatest war mankind has ever fought.
The universe is its battlefield.
***
Chapter 1
Looking like a morose eighteen-year-old, Ben Harrow lay on his cot and stared at the ceiling. He hadn't blinked in more than seven minutes and neither had he breathed in that time. Lying perfectly still, he concentrated on the sounds that were drifting in from outside.
It was the night wind.
A sharp breeze had sprung up in the last few minutes, which was unusual this time of the year. There were plenty of storms, to be sure, but they usually occurred only in the fourteenth month and not in the fifth. The gale now howled and buffeted the building, and when Ben finally did draw a breath, he tasted the peculiar air of an electric storm on his tongue.
But beyond the storm there was the faint sound of something else, something that Ben couldn't quite pinpoint. If he wasn't just imagining things, something was giving off a deep and steady frequency that crawled into your gut and resonated there.
Something was brewing outside.
Ben Harrow's house was a simple sheet-metal-and-vitrum structure, whose modules were held together by big rivets. It sat in the middle of a wilderness that was called Harrow's Dale by the five million citizens of Terra Gemina.
The colonists and their offspring usually gave its lone occupant a wide berth and rarely ventured into his valley.
Right now a silent storm was raging in the night sky above his lonely abode. Within a mass of dark clouds, a ball of lightnings was constantly re-weaving itself. Some of its quivering tentacles reached down to Ben's house and almost touched it.
When he heard them crackle, Ben sat up and blinked. He'd finally decided to go out and check what was going on—when a sudden gust of wind exploded on him from above and chilled him to the core. He looked up and while he watched, the ceiling was drawn upward and vanished without a trace. A bright white tunnel was forming right above his head. It seemed to rotate and came down on him, and before he knew it, it had sucked him in. His feet left the ground; he hovered and sunk backwards.
Ben realized that he was floating up.
He picked up speed, until it felt more like falling—in reverse.
The walls of the tunnel—if this was a tunnel—seemed not to be solid. They were see-through thin as Ben saw the silver vein of the river in front of his house below and the pond. He turned around and looked in the direction of Gemina City, whose far-away lights he could see from up here.
Still accelerating, he now shot up like an arrow, rising higher and higher through giant halls of air, until he saw the curvature of the planet on the horizon and the first rays of the sun sparkling behind it.
An awesome force was drawing him out into space!
A second later he seemed to smash through a metal wall and when he blinked once more, he stood in a brilliantly white room. All around him sparks were dancing like a billion fireflies. The brilliance soon faded, the tide of fireflies subsided and Ben became aware of the gray silhouettes of people.
Humans.
Traditional ones.
They were all staring at him. Plenty of tension filled the air—like always when he showed up anywhere.
But where was he?
And what strange force had brought him here?
The dramatic experience hadn't unsettled him physically. He didn't feel the last bit nauseated. Instead, he merely marveled. His curiosity was piqued, to say the least.
Ben blinked again, took in his surroundings and realized that he was inside a starship, a TGSN command vessel, Nolan class. He felt its vibrations in his feet and there was the familiar background hum.
How'd he get here?
His gaze snapped to the group of officers that looked down from the bridge. When they saw that he was looking up at them, the line began to move and they came down.
A silver-haired gentleman wearing nothing less than the white uniform of a TGSN rear admiral (upper half) walked up to him, but stopped outside the pulsating cubicle in which Ben stood.
The admiral smiled.
"Ben, that really you?" he asked. "Why, you look pretty good for a four-hundred-year-old. Don't look a day older than eighteen. Twenty at the most."
Ben was embarrassed. He'd indulged himself. Looking like twenty wasn't really appropriate for the only human in the universe of his maturity. He thought of something intelligent to say.
"That's because I'm only three-hundred-and-eighty-two," he offered. "Wait until I'm fully four hundred. I'll be showing my age then. Daniel, what's going on?"
"Quantum wind technology, Ben, and welcome," Admiral Daniel von Schwarz said.
"What?"
"Matter of fact, the meter says you're still in two places at the same time right now."
"What?" Ben repeated. He scrunched his brows.
"Think of your house down on the ground," the admiral suggested. "Imagine you're still at home."
Ben's eyes became unfocused as he did just that.
He almost flinched, because he now stood back in his dark bedroom down in Harrow's Dale. His gaze immediately went to the ceiling that the powerful draft had torn off just moments ago. But now it looked entirely unmolested. Ben looked left and right and there was no doubt: he was back in his modules in the wilderness. He saw the bed, the dresser, the cracked door to the loo… It was all there.
He reached out his hand and felt the sheets.
The admiral's disembodied voice said, "That's quite something, isn't it?"
In an instant Ben found himself back on board the spaceship hovering far above Harrow's Dale.
In the back by the wall, a young specialist was intently studying a screen. "He's all here, Sir," she shouted.
Ben willed himself back into his house again, but nothing happened. He stayed where he was, within a white square whose pulsating edges measured two meters each.
Had he been dreaming?
"Dan, did you just say that I was in two places at the same time?"
"Sure did. But the transition is complete. You're only up here now. You left your house downstairs for real."
Admiral von Schwarz smiled and stretched out his hand, which Ben shook.
Ben stepped out of the square in which he had arrived and people got out of his way as he did. The crowd was made up of men and women.
He wore just a black T-shirt and dark gray jogging pants and his feet were bare, while everybody else wore the multi-hued uniforms of
the Terra Gemina Space Navy. But even though he looked sorely out of place, everybody eyed him with respect and nobody stood closer than two meters. And when he moved they backed off.
All except for one.
Ben noticed a particularly brave—and pretty—young lady in a blue pilot's uniform. She stood close enough that he could read the name on her patch. The little blue-eyed blonde was one Charity Jones. Probably one of the fighter jocks.
A female fighter jock…
Ben barely kept from rolling his eyes. On top, she looked like a teen. Wasn't she too young for this?
He could sense her increased heartbeat. Charity Jones held her breath when Ben Harrow walked by, but she didn't shy away. Instead, she eyed him precociously. He suppressed a smile.
"Welcome aboard, Ben, and forgive me for yanking you out of the house in the middle of the night," said the admiral, who obviously didn't share the apprehension of the crew. He was perfectly at ease with Ben, albeit without exhibiting any signs of undue familiarity. Von Schwarz was respectful, too. "You never sleep anyway and I wanted to surprise you with this newest piece of technology out of Bagong Lupa. Thought you might like it. Getting surprised, I mean. When does a guy like you ever get surprised?"
"You achieved your objective," Ben said. "I'm duly astounded. Last I checked, quantum mirroring worked only on inanimate objects."
"Cho and Guofeng solved the riddle," the admiral said. "It's not really mirroring anyway, it's more like translating. Well, for seven years intergalactic travel wasn't possible. Seven years we were without supervision by Terra Originalis and what do those fellows do in their unsupervised moment? They revolutionize space travel. What does that say about the need for government interference? Is that a teachable moment or what?"
"I'll say," Ben said.
Intergalactic travel was possible again…
"Don't ask me how they did it, but they did," the admiral went on. "Pylon jumping is on its way out. From now on it's quantum wind. Well, we're getting there. Very interesting science to look into, if you want to do that sometime." The officer suddenly fell silent as if somebody had punctured the balloon of his exuberance. His mind didn't seem to dwell entirely on quantum wind technology.
Was he going to ask Ben to leave the planet, to go back to Neo-Ba?
Nonsense.
Nobody would suggest such a thing to Ben Harrow, not even Daniel von Schwarz. Something else had to weigh on the admiral's mind.
"This is absolutely great science," he said. "But come on, Daniel, that's not the real reason you brought me up here this late, is it?"
They wouldn't dare bother him in the middle of the night for such a trivial reason. There had to be something that couldn't wait.
"Nope," von Schwarz admitted after a brief pause.
Something major had happened, Ben figured, for the government of Terra Gemina to come to him—of all people—and in the wee small hours. Usually they were polite and kept their distance. Just the way Ben preferred it as he was still dealing with the aftermath of forty years of involuntary solitude. He considered himself in exile on this fair planet right now and Terra Gemina respected that. He hadn't made any trouble and he hadn't been troubled.
And now they wanted something from him.
Of course they'd send Admiral Dan von Schwarz, the only man he owed anything in this galaxy. He was the go-to man if they had any requests to make from Ben.
Ben looked kindly at the fifty-year-old officer, who'd saved him so many years ago.
"You gonna stay? Or you going back home?" The apprehension penciled a frown into the admiral's pleasant features as he awaited Ben's reply.
The entire crew froze and everybody's eyes were on the new arrival. For a moment only the hum of the ship was audible.
This was peculiar. Thinking hard but coming to no fast conclusion, Ben furrowed his brow and massaged his forehead. He finally nodded his assent. He'd stay. It wasn't like he had anything planned anyway. His last thirty years since the rescue had been spent in much-needed quiet contemplation and not much else.
Von Schwarz immediately relaxed. "Thank you."
He gave Ben the once-over. By now the four hundred-year-old was already looking more like twenty-five. His complexion was as hale and clean as ever, but his brown hair, though short, was sticking up every which way and his casual clothes weren't really suited for this environment, which prized discipline above everything else.
"Let's go up to flag quarters on o-two," the admiral said and began to walk towards the exit. "There's a uniform waiting for you."
Ben understood that he'd need one. He just hoped it wouldn't be a white one. He still had no taste for the trappings of power.
The admiral seemed to read his mind, because he said, "It's just a gray uniform. No insignia. Don't worry. You won't get mixed up in the dynamics of rank around here—unless you want to."
"I don't," Ben replied.
The round door they were approaching sported a spiral pattern. It dilated open with a pneumatic hiss to let them through. Ben, the admiral and a small entourage walked down the narrow hall until they'd reached a woodpaneled stateroom, whose door a sailor on steward duty held open with a white-gloved hand. The two men went inside and the steward closed the door behind them.
Chapter 2
"Let me get right to the point," Admiral von Schwarz said to Ben Harrow and leaned his back on the door. The officer's mien had darkened considerably since they'd got to be alone.
Ben, who had reached out to the hanger with the gray uniform on it, withdrew his hand when he noticed. He looked expectantly at the admiral.
"Like I said earlier, the pylons got fixed; you may not have noticed our activity in the sky, since you keep to yourself so much. We even got the quantum wind development. That's all very encouraging."
"But?" Ben said.
"Since the pylons work again, a couple of bold souls have started to jump galaxies like before and it seems they are doing fine. Just as important, we have reestablished communications with all Human Union colonies outside the galaxy. We're no longer isolated from one another. Headquarters on Terra Originalis is glad to have everyone back, too."
"So, everything is fine then," Ben said.
"Well, almost," the admiral replied. "It's the far place, the one beyond us, Kasaganaan, that's troubling us."
"Isn't that where Vlad Jones went with his settlers?"
"That's right," von Schwarz said. "Jones is a great scientist and a forceful leader, but he hasn't given up on the idea of utopia."
"A man can dream," Ben said.
The admiral sniffed and didn't reply.
Ben finally pulled off his T-shirt and pants and put on the gray uniform waiting for him. When he was done, his scraggly hair had got into shape without him having to comb it.
"Ben," the admiral looked at him sternly, "forgive me for putting it bluntly, but whenever a group of ideologues has tried to bring on Paradise, the result has been a living hell for all involved. And Jones is an ideologue."
Ben swallowed, but didn't say anything.
"We tried to establish communications with him, too," the admiral went on, "I mean, the universe is waking up to one another again. We're coming out of a communications ice age. So, we called just to say that we're online again. But all we got was silence. A brooding silence. It seemed that there was an ominous presence on the other side that heard us, but didn't reply. We could establish neither audio nor visuals with them."
"Seven years of no contact is a long time," Ben said. "Did you send a drone over to see what the place looks like nowadays?" He sat down on a chair to tie his shoelaces.
"A whole volley of them. They showed that the inhabitable ring around its equator is still adequately green. Atmosphere's okay. Their population of bees is active."
Always an important factor.
"There are rivers full of water, there's game. There was no ecological catastrophe. But the drones didn't record a living soul—human I'm talking. Kasaganaan City is a
windblown ghost town."
"Did they retreat into their space station?" Ben asked.
"It's still there," the admiral replied. "But if they were in it, they would have answered our call for sure. Instead, there's only a red haze or fog of some kind that was observed wandering around in the tubes that connect the modules."
The tubes were made of see-through vitrum and what was going on in them could be observed by passing drones.
"Red fog?" Ben said. "What do you think that is?"
"I hoped you'd tell me."
Ben rubbed his chin.
"We're only getting subliminal acoustic signals from the planet that we can't place," the admiral said.
"Did Jones move underground for some reason?"
Daniel von Schwarz sighed. "The drones did locate a pyramid structure out in the northern desert beyond the lifebelt."
"A pyramid?" Ben got pensive. His gaze went to the ceiling.
"Anywhere outside the lifebelt the air is too thin for humans," the admiral explained. "A human would feel like sitting on a high mountain on a Terra—even without climbing up that pyramid. You'd get nauseated, your mental capacity's abbreviated; when you move you turn into a robot, your consciousness slips around as if it's on ice. Other people than you, that is. I'm not talking about you specifically. You're immune to things like that."
Ben knew what the admiral was trying to get at. "You want a certain person to check out that pyramid?"
"Possibly an alien structure," the admiral said.
Now it was Ben's turn to sigh. "Daniel, there's no such thing as an alien." Strictly speaking.
The admiral looked at the tips of his shoes. "I know how you feel about that."
Humans had been conquering the galaxies for more than three hundred years by now. Ever since the advent of the pylon jump they'd scattered all over the star-spangled expanse. During that time many new and diverse races had sprung up as some scientists took to genetic experimenteering with great gusto, ostensibly to help humans adjust to their new host planets. Such experiments were frowned upon by Terra Originalis, since some new creations looked rather frightening and had questionable qualities. But what was a conscientious government of bipeds on Earth going to do when the mad scientist's lab in question was a billion light-years away—or two? You couldn't monitor everything. The universe was just too big for that.
