Descent

by Erik Schubach

  A Fixit Adventure…

  Descent

  By Erik Schubach

  Copyright © 2018 by Erik Schubach

  Self publishing

  P.O. Box 523

  Nine Mile Falls, WA 99026

  Cover Photo © 2018 Ravven / Depositphotos.com license

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, blog, or broadcast.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  FIRST EDITION

  Contents

  Chapter 1 – Cheater

  Chapter 2 – Pacification

  Chapter 3 – Troublesome Logistics

  Chapter 4 – Betweeners

  Chapter 5 – On Orbit

  Chapter 6 – Contact

  Epilogue

  Chapter 1 – Cheater

  “Hey!” I blurted when I noticed Flower sneaking another card as I stared idly out the windows of the huge Quonset hut repair bay of pinger maintenance in Agri-Grid A1 here on Tau Ceti Prime. I had been watching the dim auroras play across the green and blue sky, the last remnants of ionization in the atmosphere from the superstorms of the Perihelion Pass. And we hadn't felt an earth tremor in days.

  I pointed an accusing finger at the innocent looking pinger, her orb-shaped body tilted to the side as her ocular port iris widened to accentuate that faux innocence. “You little cheater!” So that's how she always seemed to get a disproportionate number of full moons in the game!

  She squeed out a two-toned response which sounded suspiciously like, “Full moon,” as she ignored my accusation and laid down her eight cards in front of me.

  I sputtered out, “I saw you stealing a card this time, stinker!”

  She rolled her orb to mime shrugging her shoulder while my other pingers who were already eliminated from the game all warbled in what I knew to be laughter at my expense. Well, of course, they took her side, all the silly boys had crushes on her. I poked her right below her ocular port and said, “You, Flower, are no lady. Now I know why you are undefeated in Eights.”

  She squeed in an oscillating high, and low pitch, the audible binary language my pingers have developed to communicate with me audibly. Over the months since they started using it, I've found I don't need to count the highs and lows much anymore to understand what they are saying. It's just like learning any other new language.

  I sighed at the cheat-bot and replied as she turned her orb down bashfully. Yeah, I know, she was playing me, but she's just so flanterskelling cute. I droned out, “Love you too, Flower.” Then I leaned forward and kissed her right on the ocular port and confiscated her cards. “No more Eights for you.”

  She squeed out a disappointed but somehow smug, “Aaaawww.”

  Then I looked around at the boys with an accusing smirk. “Don't look so innocent guys. You could have warned me.”

  Glitch was warbling in what sounded like a giggle. The little bootwaffle. I smiled at him as I put the cards back in their box. It was an actual pressed paper box, like the cards, which were of thick pressed paper too. They were positively antique. Any bio-matter on Prime was used to mix into the soil here dirtside to enrich the carbon content of it in the farms and to fertilize the crops.

  These weren't made of the silicate-based cerama-plastics that have been required to be used in place of bio-products the past few hundred years here on Prime. They were my mom's cards, contraband, and I never did learn where she got them before she passed.

  I eyed the makeshift memory matrix assembly I had cobbled together from matrix crystals from a couple of the broken maintenance isopads from around the repair bay. It wasn't pretty, but it allowed her to use her grappler... to cheat at cards among other things after she sacrificed her own grappler memory matrix control crystal to help save my girlfriend's life.

  I absently looked up at the ceiling imagining the cities that were in high orbit of Prime at the moment. I still didn't know how my sexy Sky Guard ranger was doing. In the past two weeks, I was only able to contact New Terra once between breaks in the monster storms of the perihelion, and it was spotty communications with the high amount of ionization in the atmosphere.

  It was Lady Peregrine herself who responded when I used the old hand-cranked communication station that was hooked into the huge satellite transceiver arrays at the terraforming station. From what I could piece together from the fragments of the transmission that got through, was that Vashon was stabilized and the 'doctors' were working on 'healing' her injuries.

  I understood the need for her basically speaking in code like that, stressing those words. It was after my girl had saved Glitch and me in one of the monster storms and she was seriously injured, that I learned of all the secrets she has kept from me, even though I had pretty much sussed it all out on my own by then.

  She had been the ranger who had stopped the Gamadine raid but had suffered so many injuries in her sacrifice, from calling her tumbril down onto her and a renegade Betweener captain, Horatio Tanner.

  She should have died from her wounds, but one secret that Captain Vashon Peregradopolis of the Sky Guard had, was that Lady Peregrine, ruler of Prime, was her mother. And the woman told the doctors to save her daughter no matter the cost.

  She was told that with implants, they could save her body, and it would even be technically legal with thirty-three percent organic replacement, just below the hard limit of thirty-five percent for high hazard, non-military individuals. As the Sky Guard is a civilian peacekeeping force and not military, they could justify it under the 4078 Humanities Act.

  The problem was the catastrophic brain damage Vash had suffered.

  There was a hard limit the Galactic Office of Ethical Standards had as to what made someone human or simply property that needed to be recycled when it came to brain tissue replacement with cybernetic implants. Thirty percent. That is what they determined in all their wisdom, as to what constituted the line between a person and a machine.

  The crystal licking bootwaffles don't have a clue as to what constitutes life and sentience. My pingers are proof of that. They live, they laugh, they love. If that isn't life, then I don't know what is. I dare anyone to spend five minutes with my family, and tell me they aren't alive and self-aware.

  Over half of Vashon's brain had been damaged in the battle; fifty-three percent to be exact. So the doctors could not operate, or they would be imprisoned for life or put to death if they did, depending on how the GOES representative here on Prime was feeling that day.

  So Lady Peregrin turned to the Director of Sciences for Prime, Anna Germaine. Doctor Germaine was also the head of Covert Sciences, a group kept secret from even the Galactic Federation.

  Doctor Germaine agreed, and she was able to replace the damaged portions of Vashon's brain. And because of another black project they were experimenting with which Vash had been assisting them with, they had a complete synaptic scan of her brain, and they were able to imprint it on the cybernetic implant.

  This had saved Vashon's life, but an unintended consequence of the process was that all of my girl's old memories have no emotional component as the associations between each memory and the emotional reciprocal in another portion of her organic brain is
not there. So every memory she has from before the operation is just raw data to her. She feels like she is just watching the memory or reading about it rather than experiencing it.

  Her newer memories are all stored in her organic brain and have their emotional counterpart, so she views them as her real memories. The whole thing would be maddening to me. While stabilizing Vash here dirtside and hacking her systems and cobbling together makeshift power harnesses and control systems, I think I devised a plan to reunite her old memories and emotions. If anyone can make my concept work, it is Anna Germaine.

  If anyone ever found out the extent of my girl's implants, the GOES would force an Asimov inhibitor chip on her, and view her simply as a pinger that needs to be controlled or put down.

  Thus the need for Lady Peregrine to not openly transmit any information about her injuries on the airwaves. I appreciated what little she did share, as it had taken a huge weight off my shoulders. I was so in love with my Sky Guard ranger that my chest physically hurt with fear and worry for her after she left between lulls in the storms to go to Germaine's covert labs to be repaired.

  And now that the PP, which had lasted a few days longer than anticipated, had now passed, normal communications should be restored to the floating cities when the ionization of the atmosphere settles down. I was almost giddy with excitement.

  The great cities would start their descent back into the atmosphere in the next few days, riding the gravity wakes in the atmosphere, where there is an equilibrium between the gravitic up-currents and the static gravity well of the planet, to allow the cities to float above the surface in the sky. It is a phenomenon that is unique to Prime.

  Then I could fly the Albatross, my open air tumbril, up to visit my girl as she recovers before I have to clear away the destruction the storms left in my Agri-Grid and replant the crops that will keep all the people in the Tau Ceti system from starving to death.

  I looked at the boys who were congratulating Flower on her win, the scamps. Glitch looked over at me, his orb-shaped body swiveling on his mobility platform, sparks drizzling from below; I really needed to fix that for him, and he gave a shrug, and if the silly guy had a mouth I know he'd be smiling sheepishly. Not even he, my oldest friend, was immune to Flower's charms.

  Now I owed her another... flower. Her orb was painted in a forest of vines and colorful flowers now, instead of the safety yellow that all my other maintenance pingers were covered in. Hey, I've been really bored the last two weeks, so sue me.

  I told them, “I'm going to see if I can't get some more gain out of the com system. We should have been able to contact New Terra already, the ionization isn't half as bad as the last contact.” I saw Flower watching me. I'm sure she would be cocking an amused brow if she had one. I defended, “What? I miss her.”

  They all giggled. I wasn't that bad. It was like living with a bunch of twelve-year-olds, I swear to the gods of the cosmos. And... I loved them all.

  I prompted Glitchy, “Do me a favor? The scanners show the last storm system is hundreds of klicks out, we're in the clear, and we can shut down the photonic shields over our grid now. Can you take Blip and Wrongway out to do that and salvage any partially used backup crystals from the projectors for use in the shop?”

  He saluted and his body rotated up and down, his nod, and his four toned whistling squee sounded like an, “Aye aye, Fixit.”

  I gave him a quick grin, and he trundled over to the boys, who looked excited to be doing something other than just sitting around waiting for the Pass to end.

  I headed upstairs while Flower followed them to the door, I knew she was heading just outside the door to the little flower bed she had been tending and protecting from the small percentage of the raging storms that made it through the photonic shields and rocked the very world around us for weeks. She is fascinated with all living things and dotes on her flowers.

  The irrational part of my mind had been postulating that the photonic shields over the Agri-Grids were causing some sort of harmonic dissonance in the ionosphere and having a cumulative effect over time, and that's why we haven't been able to make contact with New Terra yet.

  I know, impossible. It was just wishful thinking. I just needed to be patient and let the ionization from the storms dissipate naturally. I stepped into my office and looked around and sighed. About a dozen Crop Hatches were trying to nest in my cot again. Those silly Fluffers weren't even scared of me anymore so didn't fly off in an explosion of feathers to the rafters like they used to.

  The flying rodents are one of the three mammalian life forms on Tau Ceti Prime. Apparently, they are like a cross between a sparrow and a squirrel from Old Earth. And they get into everything here. They are about the only thing native to this planet that isn't out to kill us.

  I tolerate them because they kept all of the various insects of Prime at bay around my crops, and keep the creeping fungus away from the fruits since the fuzzy little critters find the fungus a delicacy. Well, that and they are so flanterskelling cute.

  They are the only animal life besides insects here on Prime that can fly. It keeps them out of the Cath Saber and doglike Magna Lupus' jaws.

  All of the Fluffers that were stuck here in Agri-Grid A1 with us inside the sonic fence, now that we put a lid of coherent photons over it, have started migrating into the shop for shelter from the part of the storms that made it through the barriers.

  It was cute at first. But the past couple weeks they have grown in numbers that I don't think there is a single one flitting around outside and I wake up feeling like it is a thousand degrees in my office, just to find out I am covered by dozens of the little critters who snuggle in to steal my body heat.

  I guess it doesn't help that I've been feeding them all during the storms. Once we open the big bay doors again, I hope they go back outside and let me have a moment's peace.

  Flower has taken to naming them and seems to have a different squeeing chirp for each of them. I can't tell the cute little things apart. Well, except Dawn.

  Almost on cue, the little one with the missing front paw landed on my shoulder and wrapped her little fluffy tail around my neck. I absently reached up and scritched her between her eyes and she cooed to me.

  I looked down to the repair bay through the wall of windows and smiled at the harvesters and tenders which have been patiently waiting to get back to work. I saw Turk watching me, one of his ocular ports on its stalks tracking me. He was the biggest and smartest one in my family here and was fiercely protective of all of us. I gave him a little wave, and he bobbled his eyes in return. He must be bored out of his gourd just sitting down there.

  Well, once Glitchy drops the shield, I'm going to send all of them out to stretch their treads and prep the fields for replanting. There's no rest for the wicked. They're going to love that!

  I moved over to the communications system that was hard-wired to the arrays at the terraforming station and sat. I spun up the dynamo with the manual crank, then started the routine I have recently taken to three times a day as I spoke into the receiver, “New Terra, this is Agri-Grid A1 Actual. Please respond. Again, New Terra, this is Vega Hasher from Agri-Grid A1, requesting communications with Lady Peregrine. Please Respond.”

  It was static I was met with... well not with static, but with nothing. I had to stare at the earpiece. Was it on the fritz? I should at least hear the hissing static background noise of the ionization. I checked the relays, and they were all green.

  I looked up at the ceiling like I could see the sky. If everything was green, that meant things had cleared up enough I was getting a clean signal through. But then why wasn't I getting a response? I grabbed the big dial on the mechanical system and turned slowly to listen to all the orbiting traffic but got nothing between the bands of static from cosmic radiation.

  Deflating, I realized what that must mean. The receivers in the communications arrays must have taken a hit in that last storm. So that would mean they can hear me,
I just can't hear them. The gods of the cosmos must be laughing at me now.

  I sighed then perked back up. Well if there wasn't any more interference in the atmosphere, then I could just connect to the Prime information grid! Finally! I needed some different waves to watch down here, you can only watch the same shows a limited number of times before going flanterskelling nuts.

  I'll just send a request for Vashon's condition. I tapped the virtual screen on an iso-pad and frowned at the flashing red “Unable to connect to grid, please contact technical support if the problem persists.”

  I growled at it. “Piece of trollite.” Everything down here was going to crap. I needed parts and supplies to get the repair station back up to specs. Maybe it was time to take a stand? I grabbed another iso-pad but got the same thing.

  Ooookay... they didn't rely upon the transceiver array, as they had their own lower powered transceivers in them. So what the heck was going on? For coms and data to both be down is almost impossible. There were hundreds, if not thousands of ships on orbit or in-system, and a dozen cities and agri-domes, I should be able to connect a data channel to one of them.

  I paused as something in the back of my mind chilled, and I pushed myself and rolled on the chair to another console that was covered by a dust encrusted canvas tarp. I pulled the tarp off, and the Fluffers on the cot exploded into the air to avoid the dust cloud that had me coughing. They flew to the rafters and over the wall, and I saw them all flying as a flock down to land on Turk and the others.

  I stared at the console that had probably never been used since the first days of terraforming when the Agri-Grids were first set up. An ancient air traffic control console. Once the Prime information grid was set up, consoles like these became obsolete relics of a simpler time.

  I stared at it like someone would look at some other long-extinct species, like the platypus. “Ok, so if I were an air control system, how would I work?” I would need... “Ah ha!” I'd need a transceiver array. I found an old lead and looked from it to the comm system and plugged it into a corresponding jack. The screen started to flicker, and I ran to the com system and cranked up the dynamo to charge the capacitors.