by Greg Remy
Endless Sky
An Island in the Universe Trilogy: Book 1
Greg Remy
© 2017 Greg Remy
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0692986774
ISBN 13: 9780692986776
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017917932
Greg Remy, Albuquerque, NM
Dedication
To you.
Thank you.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Loomings
Chapter 2 A Proper Introduction
Chapter 3 The Aviatrix
Chapter 4 Smooth Seas and Soothsayers
Chapter 5 A Lesson on Quantum Entanglement
Chapter 6 To Infinity and Beyond
Chapter 7 Majora’s Mask
Chapter 8 From Eggs to Onions
Chapter 9 Signs Point to a Mild, Yet Abrupt Spring
Chapter 10 Two Eyes, One Nose, and a Forked Tongue
Chapter 11 A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Troy’s Banner
Chapter 12 Some People Just Have Too Much Time on Their Hands
Chapter 13 The 13th Day
Chapter 14 A Bear on the Moon
Chapter 15 Cheers, My Friend!
Chapter 16 The Riotous Dr. Earl Saknussemm
Chapter 17 Manifest Discrepancy
Chapter 18 Doors
Chapter 19 Don’t Expect Compliments from a Serpent
Chapter 20 The Witching Hour
Chapter 21 Good Thing No Little Ones Are Present
Chapter 22 Requiem for a Doctor
Chapter 23 The Fury and the Anthropos
Chapter 24 Let’s Try That Again
Chapter 25 Kratos Snubbed
Chapter 26 The Storm of the Century
Chapter 27 Profundity at its Simplest
Chapter 28 Let History Make Its Own Judgments
Chapter 29 A Sparkler in Time
Chapter 30 Syzygy
Chapter 31 After All, We’re Only Ordinary Humans
Chapter 32 An Absolute Resolution
Chapter 33 Who Watches the Watcher?
Chapter 34 Kappa Ignites
Chapter 35 Verve, Nerve, and Adventure
Chapter 36 A Somewhat Good Man Goes to War
Chapter 37 Out of the Frying Death Ray into the Sun
Chapter 38 I’m a Fan of the Doppler Effect
Chapter 39 Cold War
Chapter 40 Scuttle!
Chapter 41 To the End
Chapter 42 The Photon, the Glitch, and the Cosmos
Chapter 43 Blood from a Stone
Chapter 44 Divided
Chapter 45 The Only Real Prison is Fear
Chapter 46 The Torpor Torpedo
Chapter 47 Rise
Chapter 48 Interlude to a Showdown
Chapter 49 In the Thick of It
Chapter 50 The Watchers
Chapter 51 The Age of Enlightenment v2.0
Chapter 52 Endless Sky
Chapter 53 Epilogue: The Imperial Bower
About the Author
Chapter 1
Loomings
She peered out the cockpit window; nothing in particular to be seen, but still on course. She threw her arms around the backside of the chair, stretched, and exhaled; her breath lightly fogging up the lower corner of the window.
“Humph,” Zoe murmured to herself. Boredom had all but become her. She looked down at the control panel. With great accuracy, she speedily typed away on the touch screen, autonomously paging through folders and opening the music player she so often used.
“Turn music uuuup,” she said to herself, cranking the projection dial near max. Music came blaring out from all around the tiny ship. She leaned back in her chair, relaxing and closed her eyes, feeling the beat thumping away at her innermost core.
The bantam craft rocketed on in the black yonder. Along the backdrop, millions of stars created paths along every vector, mimicking her directionless journey.
A beeping suddenly started, signifying an anomaly found by the gamut-tracking sensors. Zoe immediately bent down, looking at the screen. Typing away with flying fingers, she identified the source’s location, about .75 floating-parsecs away portside and changed course to intercept.
At moderate speeds, it would take several hours to reach the source. Zoe set the ship to auto-pilot while busying herself with programming knick-knacks, however soon dozed off. Sometime later she awoke suddenly to a blaring countdown alarm and jerked her face up from the control panel. In a flash of thought she figured she had accidentally initiated the ship’s self-destruct sequence. She quickly turned it off and yawned. Turning up her bass-infused music, she went back to coding once more.
Nearly an hour later, Zoe came in proximity of the location, signaled by a long tone from the ship’s computer. She looked out and examined the empty environment through the cockpit window, shaped as an acute triangle coming down to a long point just below the horizontal.
“There!” She spotted a ship slightly off her port bow. Zoe stared at it for a few minutes, both herself and her craft silent. It was floating with a slight spin seeming abandoned and set adrift. “Odd,” she thought. She corrected her course while initiating thermal scanners with agile finger movements. As the unprocessed numeric information came flooding back, in forms of compounding polynomial loops and infinitesimal tensor strings, she visually scanned the rapidly flickering pages, analyzing the raw data, and concluded the ship’s engines were working. For whatever reason, the vessel was in a prolonged abeyance, aimlessly floating along. Moments later, the information collected by her ship’s computer was compiled. On the main screen, results showed what she had already concluded: the interstellar drive, capable of speeds around .06 floating-parsecs/ year, was functioning normally and had been set in a recursive mode. Thermal scans had also determined the cabin was still pressurized but temperature levels neared 10 degrees Celsius.
Zoe visually inspected the derelict ship as she neared it. She recognized it as a transport vessel, smiling as she thought of how they were often called ‘semis,’ as a throwback to the days when transporting goods was accomplished by such vehicles. There it drifted among the stars. She slowly curved her ship around the floating vessel. It was several times the size of her ship, having a large cargo bay as its thorax surrounded on either side by oversized engines; a vehicle plump with power and ungainly in gait. On its side it bore the logo of IQS Express, a common ship-building freight company. She promptly recalled their motto, used in every advertising campaign as far back as she could remember: “Neither snow, nor rain, nor supernova will stay us from swift completion.”
As Zoe’s ship moved to the semi’s front, she peered into the head of the semi. All was dark in the cockpit, with no pilot to be seen, an abandoned carrier ship in outer-space. “Odd,” she thought again. Zoe knew it was standard for the pilot’s door of a semi to be on the starboard bow, which is, as she came about, exactly as she had expected to find it. “At least that’s there” she said aloud.
Approaching the hatch with nimble maneuvers of her tiny craft, Zoe brought her ship next to the entryway, preparing to board the semi. She stabilized her position to be in unison with the drifting ship’s trajectory. With her fingers on the virtual haptics keyboard and flipping unlabeled switches all around her, Zoe instructed her ship to extend its vacuum seal to connect the two ships’ hatches.
The vacuum seal adit extended several meters to the opposing ship’s hatch, suctioning around its edges, and establishing a concatenation for Zoe to delve into the unexplored mine. She leapt out of her captain’s seat, grabbed a wrench, and opened her hatch. Though her ship had a faux gravit
ational field, it did not extend through to the vacuum seal and as Zoe left the confines of her ship, into the cylindrical connection, she became weightless. Pushing herself from her hatch, she gracefully and silently floated to the abandoned ship’s entryway. During her approach, Zoe examined the hatch and upon reaching it, turned and kicked against it, flying weightlessly back to her ship.
She came back momentarily with a grin on her face and a larger wrench in hand. She had noticed the metallic locking mechanism was not standard; it was larger than she had anticipated. Resting the lower jaw of the wrench’s mouth under the rounded handle and with her feet on the semi’s hatch, she gripped the lock and forced it upwards. As it stiffened, she quickly twisted left in a precise manner and the lock popped off. It floated away, and Zoe scrambled to open the hatch.
Upon easing through the half-opened door, her leading leg became weighted once more and Zoe tripped over herself. She grumbled and stood up. The gravitational field was obviously still present within the semi. She jumped to test its might; it felt slightly less than the standardized Earth-1. Zoe began to shiver as the frigid air began working its way through her skin; it sure felt colder than 10 degrees. Looking around, she could see little through the darkness, but definitely did not perceive any signs of life. She reached in her shirt and produced a small, flat, rectangular card. Upon touching one side of it, the screen turned on and with a few finger gestures, the device came alive. A bright light shone in a singular direction from its top edge. She stuck the lightcard to her wrist. Holding her arm out, she illuminated her surroundings and continued on, quickly passing through the semi’s small vestibule, noticing it still contained all its hung jump-suits, and exiting through its only doorway, arriving at the cockpit. She shined her light over the dashboard but touched nothing. It seemed the ship’s computer was hibernating though still active, hence the gravitational stabilizers, air pumps and thrusters continuing to be online.
Zoe moved past the cockpit to the cabin in the back. Nothing abnormal was seen, just the usual space trucker’s untidy living quarters containing a bed, commissary, and bathroom. She backed up and went through the cockpit’s left doorway, opening it up to a corridor. Leaking mechanical lines salivated along the hallway’s ceiling while tarnished metal walls gorged on what little light there was, rejecting all external radiance from lack of portholes. Halfway down was a hatchway, undoubtedly leading to the cargo bay. Zoe could see a second hatch, at the far end, to which she surmised must be to the engine room.
Coming up to the cargo bay hatch, she stopped and examined it with her light. The metallic door was without a handle or window, though at its center was a small touch-screen, inferring an electronic lock. She leaned her shoulder on the door and tested it with her weight, but it remained secure. “Humph,” she mumbled and continued on.
The engine room’s hatch was open, and she could feel warm air flowing out from it. Crossing the hatchway, she entered into a cramped room of wires and piping, all chaotically hung about, as if it were a maze for unsuspecting fuel and additives to navigate and be thusly rewarded for completion by annihilation to near pure energy.
Narrow walkways led around various ancillary components strung up by the very cables utilizing them, half of which lacked thermal and electrical insulation. She walked around evaluating the engine; various upgrades could be seen, but ineptly installed and obviously of second hand parts from speeder vessels. It seemed the engine was hacked for extra speed, though these enhancements would undoubtedly not be authorized by any transport agency. To her pleasure, as she continued further into the engine room the warmer it became.
Her wrist rounded a corner, guiding her steps, when suddenly a scream was heard. Zoe jumped back and tripped once again over herself, landing on the unforgiving metallic floor. She quickly stood up and went into a combat stance, mentally trying to locate her wrench but realizing she had left it on the ground where she had first fallen. A man scrambled around the corner in the opposite direction she had come so close to pass. He looked as shocked as her and put both hands up.
His initial scared expression soon began to dissipate. It was evident he now was making new assumptions about the stranger in his vessel. Zoe stood, with fists raised ready for battle; though she knew her presence was limited, as she was in good shape being in her 20s, though of small stature. Through the diffuse illumination, reflected from the ceiling by the light she wore on her wrist, she could see him first fixate for a moment on her hair, jet-black with hues of blue in it, and move downwards, pausing again with the smidge of a smirk at her half-shirt, emblazoned with her favorite comic character and his accompanying catchphrase, “Bazzinga!” Again, his eyes tended downwards, to her black shorts and then to her pale legs, doubtlessly catching the glare of the light, and finally grounding at her cobalt sneakers.
“I am Zoe,” she said emphatically, with fists still raised.
“Ahem.” The man cleared his throat and gutturally responded. “I am Captain Henry, pilot for this heap-of-rubbish.”
Though staying mentally combat ready, she lowered her fists and shined her lightcard on the Captain. He covered his eyes with his hand as the bright light passed over his face. He was perhaps in his early 40s, with an unkempt beard, unkempt flannel shirt dyed in oil stains, and exceedingly unkempt overall. She surmised her evaluation that this hermit-looking man was probably as he said he was, the captain of this ship.
“Unkempt,” She muttered to herself.
“Pardon?” He asked.
“Captain Henry,” she started, ignoring his question, “why are you flying in such a nonlinear trajectory? Surely you have shipments to be delivered, things to do, people to see?”
“Aye,” replied the captain throatily. “Do ya mind lowering the light Miss Zoe?”
“Oh! Sorry.” She quickly lowered her wrist light to the floor; the diffuse light now barely allowed each to perceive the other.
“Follow me,” he said and stepped past her, leaving the engine room. Zoe caught a whiff of a long unwashed man. She followed him as he slowly walked through the hallway. He began, “I have been sleeping in the engine room. The heat there keeps me warm; confound this ship!” He stopped and kicked the wall. Zoe smirked, how often she had done the same on her ship. He was a captain indeed. He continued walking, with Zoe following close behind using her light to illuminate their way.
“You see, about three weeks ago I was struck by a damn meteorite, two in fact! Let me show ya.” They entered the cockpit and he pointed in the direction of the ship’s port beam from the main window. Zoe pressed her face against it to get the best possible view of the portside hull. “Right above the external LOX tank,” he said.
“Ah! Wow.” Zoe spotted it; she hadn’t noticed the damage during the initial overpass of her vessel. Directly above the main oxidizer chamber, two small identically circular perforations could be seen, creating burnt holes straight through the thruster’s supply line. From the charred dust around the impact site Zoe gathered they were high velocity impacts.
“Took out my primary fuel lines, now all I can do is hobble in reverse. Heh. I tried some repairs, but I don’t have the tooling for this. So here I remain, adrift. I set all systems to hibernate to conserve energy.” As he leaned back to sit in the captain’s chair, Zoe could see the ungainly shape of his body fitting perfectly into its grooves. He huffed and crossed his arms tightly across his chest. “I have sent out a Smart Beacon to go fetch some help.” Zoe coolly leaned against his computer dashboard as he continued, “by the time I saw those rocks coming towards me it was too late.”
Zoe interrupted further dialog from the captain. “But why didn’t your proximity sensors go off?”
“I do not know. They seem to be performing normally, as with all other systems on this ship, except for my engine…,” he trailed off with aggravation in his voice.
Zoe cleared her throat and put on her serious facade. “Redundant systems are required on all transport vessels and if there was a technical
glitch, your diagnostic aid, located here,” she pointed with a svelte finger above the captain toward a black hexahedron module, “would have identified the problem.” Zoe was suspecting the captain was leaving certain details out.
“True. Ah, this ship.” He paused, evidently reminiscing the annoyances associated with his vessel, though, through a slight positive curl of the lip, a certain pride shined through, doubtless from the powerful feeling of respect towards it. Zoe was all too familiar with this paradoxical emotion. “And truth be told, I am one lucky bastard; they lit up the side of my ship like the surface of Eta Carinae. I’m thinking they contained magnesium. If they had hit here I’d still be smoldering.” He half smirked and then solemnly added, “probably dead.” The captain cleared his throat a few times and relaxed, sinking deeper in his seat.
Zoe slowly inhaled, evaluating all she had heard and witnessed: she had never seen such strange meteor impacts; the speed modifications to the engine; and all the other oddities associated with this transport vessel. The compilation of these mysteries gave the situation a vague aspect and she did not like the feeling. Zoe exhaled.
“Okay Captain Henry, just what do you have stowed away here?”
The captain looked suddenly stunned and dissimulated, “ah the usual—Vanadium construction plates, and some other construction supplies.”
“Uh-huh,” Zoe retorted flatly. It was the captain’s turn to take in a deep breath. He again looked her up and down and then stared out beyond the cockpit. She knew, based on the apparent verisimilitude of her rebellious persona and the silent sanctity of outer-space, he would see little danger in telling her. She leaned in to hear the truth.
“I’m transporting space moonshine.” He turned and closely scrutinized Zoe.
“Space moonshine? That’s illegal in all quadrants of the galaxy, captain,” she responded matter-of-factly. “And this isn’t an IQS vessel, is it?” Henry shook his head no. “Hmmm.” Zoe paused, then quickly straightened up and ran back to the engine room.
Once there, she began investigating conduits and cables, rapping on pipes with her knuckles and poking her head through interstices of engine parts to get better views of various components. The captain had followed her.
