Starship: First Steps to Empire

by R J Murray

  STARSHIP

  Book One

  First steps to Empire

  R J Murray

  Copyright © 2016 R J Murray, All rights reserved.

  Disclaimer

  Any resemblance between the characters in this book and any person alive or dead is a very strange coincidence, totally unintentional and incidental. Reality is not a part of my writing, now, in the past or in the future and real people, while amusing, could never live up to my characters weirdness levels. This is a work of fiction and is intended as such. It is solely a product of my imagination and the voices in my head. I think that about covers it.

  I really tried to do this one with some semblance of the actual distances found between the stars. It is big out there, which is about all my brain can handle. Big, Very Big and ginormous. (gigantic + enormous) My calculator saw great use and is very tired now. I downloaded apps like crazy to my tablet (which is normal for me anyway) for research into where things are and how long it would take to get there. Bicycles make terrible interstellar transportation, by the way. There are errors, mistakes and deliberate fabrications contained within these pages. (Or electronic simulations of pages. Whatever.) Please enjoy finding them.

  Dedicated to our wonderful Pastor, Dave

  Other books by R J Murray

  Fantasy Series 'Tales of the Triad'

  The Event

  Dragons and Wizards and Goblins Oh My!

  The Departure

  Lyra

  The Dark Lands

  Emma

  Elizabeth

  Science Fiction

  Kingdom of the Sky

  Conquest (KotS2)

  Starship – First Steps to Empire

  Militia – Berserkers

  Fantasy Humor

  Wizard for Rent

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 Pathfinder Mission

  Chapter 2 Little Green Men. NOT!!

  Chapter 3 The Astangii

  Chapter 4 The Other Guys

  Chapter 5 Space Base

  Chapter 6 A New Fleet

  Chapter 7 Colony

  Chapter 8 Planet Fall

  Chapter 9 We Need More Everything

  Chapter 10 Earth

  Chapter 11 The Second Year

  Chapter 12 The Administrator and Other Fables

  Chapter 13 Welcome to Paradise

  Chapter 14 Payback

  Chapter 15 Consolidation

  Chapter 16 Dark Star

  Chapter 17 Where Did They Go?

  Chapter 18 New and Improved

  Chapter 19 Less is More

  Chapter 20 Admiral

  Chapter 21 Invasion

  Chapter 22 The Real enemy

  Chapter 23 The neighbors

  Chapter 24 Children

  Chapter 1 – Pathfinder Mission day 927

  The multi colored swirls and globs that marked the faster than light drive were difficult to look at for all their beauty. Eric always felt lightheaded for the first few minutes after the Pathfinder made the jump to FTL but when it was over and he dropped back into normal space, he missed the textures of the colors and swirls he could feel in his bones. The psych boys said it was just your mind trying to grasp something so far outside human experience that it invented feelings to fill the missing understanding. Eric did not care if it was real or imagined. He just missed the feeling after he cut off the Hiroshi/Vanderburgh star drive.

  The current view was spectacular in the view screen, even if it was normal now that he had dropped out of FTL. After almost two and a half years away from Earth, the sight of another star system was less odd than it had been at first, when the excitement of being the first man out filled the entire ship with a rosy glow. Eric Charles Maddwell, Starship Captain. It had sounded great then and still had a nice ring to it. The fact that he was alone tended to make the rank useless. He could have been the custodian for all that the title mattered.

  “Mission control this is Pathfinder One, date 3-6-2244. Entering Kepler-186f system inner ice belt in 27 hours. Data links up and all systems recording. Will report again, when I am inside the orbit of the planet Kepler 5. Pathfinder out.”

  Eric sat back in the chair, his message both recorded by the data logs and his flight logs even as it was compressed to travel the immense distance toward Earth. Nearly five hundred light years from Earth, Kepler-186f had been one of the first Earth type planets found, although thought to be very cold and rocky. It’s four companions orbited close to the star and were probably too hot for life, as we know it, also being roughly one and a half times the size of Earth. The innermost planet was impossibly close with an orbit of thirteen days and temperatures that would melt lead. The other three planets, discovered much later, were somewhat further out and two were thought to be in the habitable zone for this star. Eric picked up his personal logbook, and jotted down his last remarks and observations. While the electronics did the same thing much faster and more efficiently, Eric liked to write. It gave him something to do while he waited for the ship to arrive at the fifth planet.

  The icy Kyper Belt marked the outer boundary of what had been long considered the solar system proper, the area where planets would be found. Outside of the solar system, the ice belts were not named, but still served as the boundary of the star system for the purposes of the mission. He had to pass through the belt in normal space, a very large pain in the butt. The way the star drive shifted space made the amount of mass in the belt dangerous. More than one prototype starship blew up in the solar systems Kyper belt before they realized the problem.

  Once he was into the ice belt, it could take several weeks to reach a point where he could use the star drive in micro bursts to get closer to the planets he was interested in surveying. He was not supposed to stop. He did anyway, taking a day to collect ice to refill his water tanks and to break down into more oxygen, something he did at every ice belt now. Much earlier in the voyage the Pathfinder, while travelling through an ice belt, was hit by a small object. It punched a hole through both hulls and caused a leak in one of the backup oxygen tanks, making him realize just how easy it would be to die out here. Refilling not only gave him a chance to add a bigger safety margin, but to analyze the gasses and chemicals found in the ice belts. It was developing into one of his better ways of killing time between stars, something he had not needed earlier in the voyage. Fresh water was always welcome, especially if you add in what happened to the taste when water was sitting in metal tanks for a year. Refilling and even purging the tanks occasionally was something to look forward too.

  He had repaired the tank from the inside, squeezing between the tank, the inner hull and the framework that held it all together. He was not claustrophobic but it was uncomfortable due to the tight fit and the few rough welds he encountered. He had several fresh scratches and one deep cut in his leg by the time he finished the work. The auto med took care of it all with ease but it was still an unpleasant experience.

  In the airlock, he experienced a different kind of feeling. He was worried about the suit. It was level two, a more flexible suit but one with a tough outer ply of woven Kevlar. He had never worn a suit before except in training when he learned to put them on and move, spending weeks in the training tanks and in space out of L.O.S. Three. He had trained in several different types, all of which were now located in the bay by the airlock. He had checked the pressure, the fittings and the tanks several times with Betty and she patiently went through the checklist three times with him. Now, he was inside the airlock and the outer door was about to open.

  The hiss faded as the air grew thin and he hit the button to pop the door open. It slid back and Eric gasped. The Milky Way was lying out in front of him, the sta
rs bright and clear. No twinkle here in the vacuum to ruin the image, nothing between him and forever. He drifted out the airlock and looked down. His training was to fix his eyes on the ship, never look down. He looked into nothing for a billion light years and it astounded him. He had never felt so free in his life. He finally stopped gapping at the view and moved to the damaged area, taking so long to finish that Betty called him twice to check whether he was still alive.

  Once he could get more ice to break down into air, he went out to get it rather than have Betty maneuver the blocks into the open hold area. It took longer but he did not mind. He was in love with the universe. Finally, he continued on his way, taking advantage of the added water for his second favorite activity, long hot showers.

  While he could cross the distances between the stars at almost one light year every four hours, dropping out of FTL meant weeks of slow motion travel to cover the billions of kilometers to the inner planets of the system. Using the star drive in short bursts of two to three seconds would enable Eric to shave years off the travel time for each star system. Although he had started using the short jumps with large safety margins, continued practice had given him the ability to fine-tune the process. He could make a micro jump of only a few thousand kilometers or one of a billion with equal ease. It was something he had developed almost into an art by this time.

  If he decided to return to Earth, it would take him only four and a half months using the star drive, but it would be a straight line. His trip out had been a zigzag, hitting different targets as mission control laid them out. The time he spent in orbit around each world varied, but was usually less than a week if it was obviously a dead planet without hope of sustaining life. Just enough time to do a rough survey, drop a few satellites and send data back home.

  Satellites took up a quarter of the ships available space at lift off. Communications satellites, dropped around each star Eric visited to relay data to Earth, planetary survey satellites to scan the planets for years after Eric had left for other places and send data to Earth. Weather satellites, astronomy satellites, geology satellites and on and on. Eventually all the information would be used when the next set of ships left Earth for the stars, to guide them further out as survey ships or to relocate to a new home for the human population of the Earth aboard colony ships. All Eric had to do was find the first inhabitable planet. So far, his score was zero and half of the cargo bays on the first two levels were empty.

  Earth, or rather the people of Earth, desperately needed another planet and the resources it contained. The loss of petroleum and the resultant collapse of the oil economy in the middle of the twenty first century had begun a downward spiral of crop failure and a brief and unbelievably contained nuclear war where fewer than twenty nukes fell, leaving nations with thousands of warheads still sitting in silos and aboard submarines. Troops at their stations refused to fire the missiles, the subs crews mutinied and the pilots returned with bomb bays full. As a result, the world was not totally fried.

  Unfortunately, not using nukes proved to be a fleeting blessing. The continuous conventional and biological wars of the twenty-first and twenty-second century destroyed so much cropland and created so many new plant viruses that most of the wars casualties died from starvation Nations that had existed for hundreds of years collapsed as did many of the younger nations. A few third world nations simply died out as the food disappeared and what little was left fought over and in many cases destroyed by the battle. Refugees attempting to cross national borders were confronted with machineguns and tanks and slaughtered without mercy. A new world rose from the famine years, one with a lot of technology, reduced populations and a desire to eat rationed food and drink murky water more than once or twice a day.

  Even now, smaller ships and freighters were hauling ice from the asteroids back to Earth, adding to the clean, fresh water so desperately needed. Colonies had been planted on the Moon and Mars in the last century, farm colonies to grow food for Earth. It had all helped but it was not the needed answer. Earth needed more than the few hundred kilometers of farmland available to the colonies; it needed an arable, livable planet.

  The desperate need drove technology and this ship was one of the results. It was not the first design built, but it was the first that did not blow up after a few dozen light years. Eric was glad of that fact but disappointed in his lack of results. The ship was equipped with five small cabins for crew, two people in each except he would have a single as the captain. The quarters were on the small side even for one. The original idea had been to send out a fleet of ships, each with a crew of twenty, Officers next to the Captain’s cabin with the rest living in quarters in what was now a storage area, Bay One North. Things had happened and the fleet was slow in starting.

  Even in the unified Earth of the Terran Federation, politics had slowed crew choices and designs for everything from the quarters, the toilets and even a proposed bowling alley hit snags from the beginning. The government was designed to be slow and cautious, everything by committee, to avoid all the mistakes and horrors of the politically divided Earth. Somewhere along the way, it took a wrong turn and created a mass of deadwood whose sole purpose was to say a resounding ‘NO!’ and maintain the status and luxury of the top tier of government, the Council.

  A single ship was finished to the original specs. Eric, somehow, ended up picked as Captain, crew and sanitary engineer. He often suspected it was because nobody told them to stop. Since no one said otherwise, the committee in charge had just gone ahead and done it, fearful of being wrong by stopping without orders from above. Eric’s job was to find worlds so that when the bickering ended on Earth, ships with full crews could begin investigating and/or terra forming the new worlds. Nothing had gone according to plan after that.

  While many thousands of exoplanets had been discovered in the last few decades of the twentieth century, many were gas giants like Jupiter or had something else wrong with them. Too hot, too cold, too big or too small, wrong atmosphere, no water, hard radiation or just not there. Far too many were just not there when Eric arrived, twelve out of thirty-two stars he had visited. He had several theories given to him after he sent the data back from the first few star systems, most of which could be boiled down to oops. One scientist actually apologized for the error made by the twentieth century astronomers who made the finds. Seems they had not been told to recheck the two hundred year old data, even with new technology available so it must be those long dead astronomers who were at fault. It didn’t change the time wasted or the fact that Eric continued to find empty orbits but the scientists did refine their search parameters eventually, based once again on the data Eric gave them. Many times the work was anticipated but never even started.

  Once enough probes had been launched, Eric used part of the empty space in Bay One North to set up a lounge area, a reading section, an entertainment center and an exercise/gaming area to occupy his time while the ship slowly reached the point where he had work to do. With the hold empty, the rec area took up only a small corner and Eric had thought more than once to set up screen to enclose the smaller space and cut back on the empty echoes.

  “Did something right at least.” Eric had picked up the habit of speaking to the ship and had programmed a few responses to statements he made. He even changed the voice so it was a cute female, then a talking dog, then an anime character. Eventually he turned it off, since it made him realize even more intensely just how alone he was. The personality he had implanted remained, and occasionally surprised him.

  Eric sat upright when the collision alarm sounded and the androgynous computer voice came on.

  “Object detected. Alter course to . . . “

  Eric checked the numbers and entered them into the navigation station. If the object had been close enough or dangerous enough, the computer would have just sounded the alarm and altered the ships trajectory immediately. Since he was given the option of checking the figures first, he knew that whatever it was, it was not that
close.

  “Betty, show me the object.” Eric asked. Betty was the name he gave the first voice he programmed and he still used it occasionally. The screen across the front of the bridge changed focus and a small object appeared off to one side. Eric checked the left side of the screen for the magnification factor and was surprised to see it was actual, no magnification. This thing had gotten very close before Betty spotted it. Only the minor difference in relative speed gave Eric the luxury of watching first.

  “Center and magnify by four.” The screen changed and the object grew in size. It was round, and appeared to have ice crystals in places, the silvery sheen sparkling a bit with the light from the approaching star. The surface was covered in micro craters and dust, not unusual for an asteroid.

  “This thing is awfully close to us.” Eric checked the screen and radar once more. “I assume it’s drifting along our flight path at our speed but still . . . Why did you fail to see this object sooner?”

  “Object has some stealth qualities. Scanners have limited return and visual detection only occurred due to reflected light.”

  “Holy crap. How big is it?”

  “Three kilometers in diameter in all planes.”

  Eric paused. In all planes meant it was truly round and nature didn’t usually make things round until they were planet sized, five hundred kilometers in diameter or more. “Record all data and transmit continuously to mission control. Can we dock with this thing?”

  Eric wondered why he wanted to land on a chunk of rock. He had passed many asteroids and planets during the mission but had never had the slightest interest in getting out and exploring. He shrugged.

  “It doesn’t really matter why. I just want to, that’s all.”