by Mark Wandrey
Overture
Book One of the Earth Song Cycle
(Second Edition)
By
Mark Wandrey
PUBLISHED BY: Theogony Books
Copyright © 2017 Mark Wandrey
All Rights Reserved
Get the free prelude story “Gateway to Union”
and discover other titles by Mark Wandrey at:
http://worldmaker.us/
* * * * *
Cover Design by Brenda Mihalko
Original Art by Ricky Ryan
* * * * *
License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.
* * * * *
Author’s Note on the Second Edition
This book first saw print more than a decade ago. At that point, it was titled Avatar’s Overture, and, as you might have guessed, it was before the movie Avatar came out. It was published in a vanity press and was an utter disaster. A few years later, when self-publishing was beginning to become a thing, I revisited the book and realized it would make a good trilogy. I made a few changes and released it as Earth Song—Overture. I really wasn’t into writing for the career at that point; it was just fun. When I wrote the sequel, Earth Song—Sonata in Orionis, I realized it was much, much more than I’d originally believed. It was quickly becoming an epic space opera. Now, with five books in the series, a sixth well on its way, and a new publisher owning the rights, I realized the writing in that first book was woefully dated.
I went back and examined Overture with a more studied eye. Not only were the details of the world dated (pre-smart phone), but my skill as a writer was not very developed—it was rather amateurish. Overture was 130,000 rambling words with a half-dozen commingled plot lines. What I wanted to say was all there, but it was hard to find through the clutter. So, I embarked on a rewrite.
What you find here is the result of a rigorous distilling process. Those who’ve read the previous versions may or may not be disappointed. The story is the same; Earth is faced with obliteration and some will survive. However, the method by which we get to the end and some of the players are somewhat changed. These changes, I believe, create a more readable, quicker-paced, and enjoyable end product. It’s a smaller book, more concise. You’ll find everything you need to lead you to the later books, including a few plot points that will hit you in the face seven books later.
Sit back and enjoy the ride.
Mark Wandrey
Portland, TN
* * * * *
Thanks to my many friends who helped with some details in the reimagining of this story. Sorry True, the subs stay. In particular, thanks to Stephanie Osborn for working out the physics of a really big explosion, among other things, and making the impossible at least sound a little scientific. You can read about her books at http://www.stephanie-osborn.com/.
* * * * *
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Epilogue
About the Author
Titles by Mark Wandrey
Excerpt from Book Two of the Earth Song Cycle:
Excerpt from Book One of the Revelations Cycle:
Excerpt from Book One of the Kin Wars Saga:
Prologue
May 21st
Dawn was still an hour away as Mindy Channely opened the roof access and stared in surprise at the crowd already assembled there. “Authorized Personnel Only” was printed in bold red letters on the door through which she and her husband, Jake, slipped onto the wide roof.
A few people standing nearby took notice of their arrival. Most had no reaction, a few nodded, and a couple waved tentatively. Mindy looked over the skyline of Portland and instinctively oriented herself before glancing to the east. The sky had an unnatural glow that had been growing steadily for hours, and as they watched, scintillating streamers of blue, white, and green radiated over the mountains like a strange, concentrated aurora borealis.
“You almost missed it,” one man said. She let the door close, but saw someone had left a brick to keep it from closing completely. Mindy turned and saw the man who had spoken wore a security guard uniform. The easy access to the building made more sense.
“Ain’t no one missin’ this!” a drunk man slurred.
“We figured most people fled to the hills over the past week,” Jake replied.
“I guess we were wrong,” Mindy said.
“Might as well enjoy the show,” the guard said and offered them a huge, hand-rolled cigarette that didn’t smell like tobacco. She waved it off, and the two men shrugged before taking a puff.
“Here it comes!” someone yelled. Mindy looked to the east. There was a bright light coming over the Cascade Mountains, so intense it was like looking at a welder’s torch. Asteroid LM-245 hit the atmosphere at over 300 miles per second. It seemed to move faster and faster, from east to west, and the people lifted their hands to shield their eyes from the blinding light. It looked like a blazing comet or a science fiction laser blast.
“Maybe it will just pass over,” someone said in a voice full of hope.
Mindy shook her head. She’d studied the asteroid’s track many times.
In a matter of a few seconds, it shot by and fell toward the western horizon, disappearing below the mountains between Portland and the ocean. Out of view of the city, it slammed into the ocean.
The impact was unimaginable. The air around the hypersonic projectile turned to superheated plasma, creating a shockwave that generated 10 times the energy of the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated as it hit the ocean’s surface.
The kinetic energy was more than 1,000 megatons; however, the object didn’t slow as it flashed through a half mile of ocean and into the sea bed, then into the mantel, and beyond.
On the surface, the blast effect appeared as a thermal flash brighter than the sun. Everyone on the rooftop watched with wide-eyed terror as the Tualatin Mountains between Portland and the Pacific Ocean were outlined in blinding light. As the light began to dissipate, the outline of the mountains blurred as a dense bank of smoke climbed from the western range.
The flash had incinerated everything on the other side.
The physical blast, travelling much faster than any normal atmospheric shockwave, hit the mountains and tore them from the bedrock, adding them to the rolling wave of destruction traveling east at several thousand miles per hour. The people on the rooftops of Portland only had two seconds before the entire city was wi
ped away.
Ten seconds later, the asteroid reached the core of the planet, and another dozen seconds after that, the Earth’s fate was sealed.
* * * * *
Chapter One
February 9
February on the South Dorset coast of England could be considered cool, even by British standards. Alicia Benjamin sat in an aluminum lawn chair inside a tin shack and watched her telescope track stellar bodies millions of miles from the Earth.
The 16” Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope was considered quite small among professional astronomers—nothing more than a large hobby job, but, she’d spent hundreds of hours and thousands of pounds having it professionally installed in a 4-meter dome. It had a nearly state-of-the-art charge-coupled device camera and computer recording equipment, and its drive set was well maintained.
Powerful little motors hummed efficiently as the telescope moved in minute fractions of a millimeter in concert with the dance of the spheres. Alicia sipped her tea as the images resolved on the monitor in the center of electronic crosshairs. “LM-245,” she said and jotted a note in her journal, “always one of my favorites.”
She’d first observed the twelve-kilometer-long, irregularly-shaped asteroid more than a decade ago when her Worth Hill Observatory officially opened. The rock was discovered by the United States space agency NASA in a project called NEO, or Near Earth Orbit, years earlier. The asteroid was well-studied and easy to find because of its high albedo. Alicia normally preferred to hunt for comets, but this was an old friend.
As the images loaded, she went into the equipment shed adjacent to the observatory to check on a drive motor that had been acting up lately. It really needed to be replaced, but at more than ₤50 each, she really couldn’t afford it. She’d found a little dirt in the motor’s worm gear earlier and had spent the twilight hours cleaning and reassembling the structure. Now it appeared good as new, and she’d saved the pounds.
She was about to change the telescope’s positioning to another quadrant of space when she glanced again at the monitor. Her hand stopped just short of the tracking control knob.
“What in the bloody hell?” she grumbled and sat back down. She picked up the control box and punched buttons. Anything done in the shed could also be done from the warmth of the observation building with its little propane heater, but she didn’t want to waste the moments it would take to get back to the bigger monitors.
In seconds, she used the observatory’s spotter scopes to verify the aiming of the telescope. “That’s not possible,” she said to the night sky. LM-245 was gone. Her telescope was pointed in the right direction, but there was no asteroid.
Alicia shambled back inside on legs sore and almost numb from the cold. She fairly fell into the salvaged recliner, grabbed the computer keyboard, and began punching in commands. Outside, the telescope began a series of slow, methodical movements, executing a sequence designed to locate a comet. It took two hours of painstaking searching before she found it.
“There you are,” she said. The asteroid was supposed to be relatively stable. It rotated slowly, each rotation measured in days. Only now it was tumbling end over end and spinning faster. “Did something hit it?”
She’d been distracted for 15 minutes or so while she checked on the repair. When she’d set the visible area to check the motor, the asteroid was there, but when she was about to refocus, it was gone. The visible area of her telescope was almost 1/10th of a degree of sky. So LM-245 hadn’t only moved, it had hauled bloody arse!
What was the chance that she’d been watching at exactly that moment when something hit it? A billion to one? A trillion to one? More? Grinning like the proverbial Cheshire Cat, Alicia accessed her computer and made a copy of the video file, then loaded it to her laptop before playing it.
There was LM-245 in its stately orbit, rotating ever so slowly. Then, as the time stamp showed, minutes before Alicia came back to the equipment shed, there was something. A movement. A second later, there was a flash of blue light that overloaded the camera for several frames. When the image cleared up again, LM-245 was in motion, flipping end over end.
“What was that?” she wondered, playing it back again. She hadn’t been zoomed in or using the high definition camera she depended on for recording potential discoveries. There just wasn’t enough detail. She cursed both her fortune and her luck. In an isolated freeze frame, for just an instant, an intense blue light highlighted LM-245, almost as though an incredibly powerful searchlight was illuminating it from the other side.
Alicia switched back to the live view. The telescope was automatically tracking the asteroid now, crosshairs centered precisely on it. She fed the data into her tracking software and stared at the graph and results. The asteroid was moving, quickly, in a new direction. The impact, or whatever, had imparted better than a kilometer per second delta-v. She was amazed the asteroid hadn’t broken up from that kind of hit, and she glanced back at the laptop’s frozen image. There was no debris cloud.
The computer plotted the movement and matter-of-factly stated the asteroid would be dropping below the viewing angle in only 10 minutes. If it had stayed put, as any proper stellar body should have, it would have been viewable all night. She cursed and grabbed her index of Commonwealth observatories. Only Lockyer Observatory in Sidmouth would be able to see it any longer than her.
Alicia dialed the phone as she continued to punch commands into her equipment and record as much as she could. She used high resolution now, of course.
With the sun down and a clear sky, she watched until LM-245’s new course took it into the light pollution of France’s coast and out of her view.
Without contacts within the professional astronomer community, Alicia’s options were limited at best; however, she had the internet. The telescope tracking program continued to flash a ‘target below horizon’ warning over and over as she opened the laptop’s browser program and headed for the British Astronomical Association’s web site. Her post to the ‘New Sightings’ forum would prove historic in many ways.
* * * * *
Chapter Two
March 16
The last glimmers of sunset over the Tualatins had become a dim red glow through the windows of Burns & Burns CHB, and Mindy Patoy sighed as she turned back to the computer and reviewed another line of data. Born and raised in Boston, she far preferred the wonderful west coast sunsets to the rare, beautiful sunrises of Beantown. She suppressed a yawn as she brushed her shoulder-length bright red hair away from her face. Her jade green eyes watched the data with practiced precision.
Her desk at the modest-sized customs brokerage was in a good location. Like most modern businesses, almost no one had an office, something she missed dearly from her previous career. The desktop was covered with a vast array of pictures and memorabilia of her previous life.
There was a picture of her and Dr. Edward Kristof overlooking the deep dish of the Arecibo Radio Astronomy Telescope in Puerto Rico. Next to it was one of her climbing a treacherous path to a privately-owned mountain observatory in Hawaii, delightfully named Mahi Mahi Observatory. Over further, a candid photo showed her stuffing a slice of pizza into her mouth between study sessions at MIT. Still another was of her hamming it up with a bunch of her fellow grad students outside Effelsberg, Germany. On and on they went, documenting her treks. Mindy was better-traveled than the average British spy. The reflective glass on one picture cast back the image of a face quick to smile, though worry lines had crept in around the edge of her eyes as she’d passed 30 years of age.
She rarely spared time to look at the photos lately. She’d nearly packed them up on more than one occasion to take home and store with her other lost memories. Her phone rang, and she answered it mechanically.
“Burns & Burns, Patoy speaking.”
“What are you still doing there?”
“Working, why aren’t you, Jake?” She smiled despite her mood.
“I’m not working because I’m staring at a couple pounds of
prime rib ready to go on the grill, with all the trimmings.”
“Oh…” she said lamely. Tonight was their one-year anniversary. “Damn, I forgot.”
“Are all astronomers this forgetful?”
“Ex-astronomer, now a customs broker,” she reminded him, “and actually, yes. We’re wired differently.”
“So I’ve noticed. You nearly missed our first date a year ago, if I recall.”
She giggled in a most un-Mindy-like way. “Yeah, I remember your text message. Look, I’m really sorry. I need to transmit this entry as soon as the tuna quota opens. It’s like 10 minutes until midnight in New York. I’ll be there in no time afterward, okay?”
“Edward Burns does not pay you nearly enough,” he said in mock seriousness, though she could hear the humor in his voice. After all, he was the nephew of one of the owners.
“Or you,” she said. “I’ll be there in half an hour, I promise.” They exchanged words and she hung up the phone, automatically checking the time. Sixteen minutes to go.
She caught herself glancing at the old photos and thinking back. Five years ago she’d been a young, brilliant radio astronomer on the verge of breaking into the field. She’d already published six papers, and at only 24 was the youngest woman to ever hold an associate professorship at Cambridge.
She had started out studying archeology but had quickly soured on the field. It was just so…dead. Astronomy was alive and vibrant. She spent hours looking through telescopes at million-year-old starlight or listening to the distant hiss and pop of pulsars, and she imagined distant galaxy-spanning star empires spreading across space. No one was surprised when she ended up at SETI after graduation.
