by Rick Partlow
Seeds of Gaia
By Rick Partlow
Copyright 2018 by Rick Partlow
Also by Rick Partlow:
Glory Boy: https://www.amazon.com/Glory-Boy-Birthright-Book-0-ebook/dp/B01N6DXM8C
The Birthright Trilogy: https://www.amazon.com/Birthright-Complete-Trilogy-Rick-Partlow-ebook/dp/B01LY3T1YT
The Duty, Honor, Planet Trilogy: https://www.amazon.com/Duty-Honor-Planet-Complete-Trilogy-ebook/dp/B00LDZFS3U
The Tales of the Acheron Series: https://www.amazon.com/Tales-Acheron-Complete-Rick-Partlow-ebook/dp/B07BH24PX6
The Psi War Trilogy: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07HNGR553
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Chapter One
The fabric of spacetime writhed in birth agony and delivered the sharpened wedge of a starship. Fusion flares lit at the spacecraft’s drive plates, sending it desperately lurching away from the already-closing rift in space and the looming mass of Proxima Centauri at a punishing five gravities of acceleration. The reason for its haste emerged from the awful nothingness of Transition Space a hundred thousand kilometers closer to the star: a naturalistic, predatory shape bristling with weapons pods and fitted with massively outsized fusion drives.
Deep within the pursuit ship Raven, encased in the gelatinous fluid of an acceleration tank, Captain Samuel Avalon watched his prey through a neural feed from the exterior sensors. With a thought, he called up the intercept course his navigator had already plotted, watching the animated line overlay itself on the sensor image of the fleeing bandit.
Estimated intercept time? he asked, his implanted neurolink relaying the question to the navigator’s g-tank.
One hour at maximum g’s, came the immediate reply.
Execute.
Sam felt his chest squeezed by a giant fist and remembered to whisper a prayer of thanks to Gaia for the blessings of oxygenated biotic fluid. Without the g-tanks, twenty gravities’ acceleration would have ruptured his organs and left him choking in his own blood.
Bandits increasing acceleration to eight g’s, his weapons’ officer announced. They really don’t want to talk to us Sam.
Devon, Sam called to the navigator, can we still get them before they reach the antipodal Transition point?
Not at this rate Sam, the woman replied. He could almost see her shaking her head. Our only chance is if they don’t have g-tanks. They won’t be able to keep up this sort of acceleration long without ‘em.
We can’t chance that, he decided. They’ve already killed three freighter crews…we can’t let them do it again. Arvid, he addressed the weapon’s officer, take out his drives. Make it as clean as you can.
Launching.
The Patrol cutter shuddered as the flattened dart of a missile detached itself from the outer hull, maneuvering jets kicking it away from the vessel before its drives lit in a flash of annihilated antihydrogen. The missile streaked away from the cutter as if the ship were standing still, accelerating towards the fleeing bandit at over a hundred gravities.
Throttle us down to one g and let’s get out of these tanks, Sam declared. The missile would stop the bandits or it wouldn’t---there was no point in wasting fuel to be there a few hours sooner.
The pressure eased from his chest and almost immediately the fluid began draining from the g-tank. Taking a breath of air for the first time in over an hour, he gagged, choking out the remains of the oxygenated fluid from his lungs before it had a chance to evaporate. The last of it drained from the tank and then the seal hissed open, letting in a rush of cold air and sending him into involuntary shivers.
The others were stumbling from their cabinets as he made his way out of the g-chamber and into the communal shower. Sprays of warm water erupted from the walls, scrubbing the dried biotic gel from his skin and hair as the rest of the ship’s crew filed in behind him.
“The hunter-killer should arrive on target in less than half an hour, Sam,” Devon told him, leaning back to let the streams of water at her close-cropped hair. She had an athlete’s physique, but after two years of serving with the same crew, Sam hardly glanced at it anymore.
“Do you think we can get a clean hit?” Carlos, the ship’s medical officer asked her as he moved into the shower.
“No way of knowing,” she shook her head. “The bandit ship is a freighter hull, but you know how they chop those things up. They could have a shitload of armor or they could have stripped off most of their shielding to mount weapons and fuel pods.”
“Why worry about those SOB’s?” Arvid muttered. “They knew what the risks were when they decided to work for the Consensus. Damn Earthers are getting what they deserve.”
“We worry about those SOB’s,” Sam fixed the smaller man with a glare, “because they are human beings, just like us.” The others fell into embarrassed silence, not meeting his gaze. “Get dressed and get to the control room.”
Sam turned and walked through the warm air of the dryers, trying not to look back at them. He knew he was hard on Arvid, but they couldn’t let themselves become like the Earthers, couldn’t allow themselves to have such disrespect for life. If that happened, there would be nothing left worth fighting for.
***
Less than ten minutes later, the entire crew was strapped into acceleration couches in the ship’s main control room and Sam Avalon was staring at the tactical holodisplay, watching the blue arrow representing his missile closing on the red dot of the bandit ship.
“He isn’t increasing his boost,” Devon commented.
“They must not be equipped with g-tanks,” Carlos said. “I’d be surprised if any of them were still conscious.”
“The missile has hit burnout,” Arvid announced. “Still gonna take them before they hit the Transition point.”
Sam thought, not for the first time, how pressing and instinctive the human need for conversation was. Each of them had a computer link and transmitter implanted at the base of their skull and could wordlessly access tactical displays, technical readouts and situational updates from the computer or from each other, yet each of them still felt the need to make such periodic announcements. He didn’t bother trying to prevent it---he might as well have asked them not to breathe.
“We all clear of civvie traffic?” Carlos asked.
“I ran a general area scan when we jumped in,” Devon replied. “Nothing then, let me…”
There was a discontinuity.
For a moment, none of them were aware anything had happened---it was as if they had blinked in unison. Then Sam noticed that the red dot representing the bandit had disappeared from the tactical holotank.
“What the hell?” he blurted, leaning forward against his acceleration restraints. “Where are they Devon? Did they jump?”
“No, they’re just gone.” Devon shook her head. “Our missile, too…not a shred of wreckage. What in Gaia’s name?” She looked over at him, frowning in perplexity. “We were just hit with a massive EMP, Sam---all of our sensors were out for almost a second.”
“An Electromagnetic Pulse?” he repeated. “From what?”
“I don’t know, even the cameras blanked out.”
“I can try to get a feed from the Resolution habitats in the Centauri Belt,” Arvid suggested, making the connection without waiting for permission.
The Raven’s AI negotiated with those of the collection of asteroid habitats and within seconds, each of the crew was watching a video feed from an optical telescope located near the inner edge of the belt. Frame by frame, the images downloaded into their individual neurolinks, beginning with the view of the fleeing bandit craft, its fusion drive glo
wing like a miniature star. With the next frame, the dart of the intercept missile came into the picture, a computer-generated outline allowing them to see it against the black background.
The missile drew closer to the bandit ship, and when it was only a thousand kilometers away, something superimposed itself on the blackness, something huge and gray and formless that wiped out everything else in the frame. And then there was nothing.
Raven, Sam ordered the ship’s computer, enhance that image…get me an ID.
Working on it, Sam, the AI promised. There was a long pause, and when the computer spoke to him again, it was with a hesitancy that Sam had never heard before. Sam, I recommend we make for Aphrodite at maximum emergency speed.
“Hey Sam, what gives?” Arvid asked plaintively. “Raven just shut me out of the net.”
“Me too,” Devon confirmed, frowning.
Tell me Raven, Sam ordered.
Let me show you, Sam.
He found himself floating in the darkness, watching the frozen image of the bandit starship, the replay slowed down an order of magnitude below normal speed. It still only occupied the image for a moment, less than a heartbeat, but there was no doubt as to what it was. Basically cylindrical in shape, its fore-end was a gigantic funnel a dozen times the size of the main body, while the aft was a cauldron of fusion fire, an engine so powerful it was contained only with magnetic fields.
Its course passed hundreds of thousands of kilometers beyond the bandit ship, but the unsuspecting starship disintegrated in its wake, torn apart at the molecular level by an electromagnetic field so powerful it could collect interstellar hydrogen for use as fuel. The intercept missile, another two hundred thousand klicks distant, spontaneously detonated, its explosion lost in the passage of the…the alien. Sam had to force himself to use the word.
But there was no other word to use. No human had built that ship, he was sure. And so, after nearly three thousand years in space, after a century of routine star travel via the Transition Lines, he, Captain Samuel Abanks-Avalon, was the first human to encounter an alien intelligence.
No, not the first…the bandits were the first. Unfortunately for them.
Where is it going? He asked the Raven’s computer.
At its present trajectory, it will skim the outer atmosphere of Proxima Centauri, Raven told him, presumably to pick up extra fuel. After that…it is on a direct collision course with the Earth, at nearly ninety percent of lightspeed.
Sam’s chest tightened as the AI’s words sunk in.
That thing has to be the size of a small planet, he said slowly. If it hits at that velocity…
If it is not stopped, the computer told him, in five years there will be nothing left of Earth but a cloud of rubble.
“Devon,” Sam fairly snarled the words, noticing the shocked expressions on the faces of the others but not caring, “get us to the Transition Point. Fastest circuit back to Aphrodite. Get us home now.”
Chapter Two
Priscilla opened her eyes for the first time and realized she was no longer herself. She sat up, shivering with the chill in the air, feeling the cloying stickiness of biotic fluid on her skin.
“Good morning,” said a voice from somewhere above her.
She tried to focus on the source of the words, but her eyes didn’t want to work yet. It didn’t matter. Among the vast knowledge with which she had been “born” was the knowledge of who was speaking.
“Is it morning?” she asked, surprised she could manage sarcasm so early.
“Somewhere. Your shuttle leaves in twenty hours. You’ll be travelling on a Patrol cutter, the Raven. Commanded by Captain Samuel Abanks-Avalon, the man who discovered the artifact.”
“I have his personnel file,” Priscilla realized, frowning. “He could be a problem.”
“We do what we can with what we have,” the voice replied. “It would be wrong to exclude the man who discovered this threat. But I leave the details up to you.” There was a humorous edge to the voice. “You have my complete trust.”
“Of course,” Priscilla said, smiling thinly. She rubbed her eyes until her vision finally cleared. What she saw did not surprise her. “Let’s get to work.”
***
As he crossed the suspended walkway between the Aphrodite shuttleport and the Resolution Government Megaplex, Sam Avalon paused to regard the new Jerusalem that was Dauphin City. It stretched out before him for a hundred kilometers on any side, a crystalline jewel inlaid in a living planet, glowing in the midday light of Epsilon Eridani. Mother had built the City first, before her nanomachines had gone to work terraforming the planet or cloning its future inhabitants. She had built it as a symbol of her love for her children. The sight of it still took his breath away after all these years.
Smiling softly, he passed through into the twentieth-floor entrance of the kilometer-wide headquarters of the Diaspora Resolution. After months cooped up in a ship with the same half dozen people, it felt extraordinary to be among the throng of humanity passing through the halls of the gigantic Government Complex. Some experienced agoraphobia upon their return from space, but not Sam; he drank it in like a fine wine.
These past few weeks aboard ship had been the worst in his memory. After reporting the alien starship, they had been sent on a month-long patrol of outlying systems, carefully planned to keep them away from any human contact. Sam had thought they were going to be shut out of it until the Resolution was ready to make a public announcement, but here he was, recalled to Aphrodite for a mission briefing, and no announcement had been made. He hoped the rest of the crew could keep their mouths shut until they lifted again.
Sam made his way through the labyrinthine halls of the complex, catching a ride on a lift that took him deep into the underground levels and nearly a half a kilometer closer to the center of the building. As he approached the center, Sam noticed that the human traffic began to thin out, and the uniforms began to change: the bright blue of the Patrol and the forest-green of the Scouts gradually gave way to the gray of the Intelligence Corps and the stark whites of the Political Service. The Grays and the Whites made him feel uncomfortable, like an unruly child sent to the counselor’s office for correction.
But no one questioned his presence, even when he entered the Holiest of Holies, the Central Planning Office. It was here that Mother interfaced with her children through a sophisticated network of Artificial Intelligence nodes linked to her orbital home. Outside the entrance was a life-sized model of the original Gaia Probe, a spherical Mylar bubble three meters across. Launched from Earth during the legendary Golden Age late in the Twenty-First Century, the Gaia Probe had been the life’s work of Dr. Charles Dauphin. Forty years of effort to unite such diverse fields as AI computer systems, nanotechnology, cloning, interstellar transport and planetary engineering had all culminated in that one bubble of hope, containing genetic samples of thousands of different life forms, a small nanotech self-replication factory and the most sophisticated Artificial Intelligence the Twenty-First Century had produced, Mother.
Sam hesitated before the display, watching the hologram recreation of the launch of the Gaia probe from lunar orbit late in the Twenty-First Century. An electromagnetic cannon had given the probe its initial impetus, then a solar-powered microwave laser had carried it to Epsilon Eridani. The plan had been for a dozen of the probes to be launched in a twenty-year period; but before Mother had made it halfway to her destination, the Consensus Government had collapsed like the beautiful but fragile thing it was. Charles Dauphin had died in the brutal civil war that had followed, swallowed in a wave of military nanotech that had killed billions and swept the Earth clean of high technology. He had never known that his heritage had indeed made it to the stars.
And Mother had given birth to far more than he ever could have dreamed. Not only had she transformed Aphrodite and Hephaestus from desolate lifelessness into life-bearing jewels, she had also constructed copies of herself and launched them to other star systems, finishing t
he work Dauphin had started. A millennium later, the discovery of Transition Space had united all her children into the Diaspora Resolution, a union of more than two dozen systems and twenty habitable worlds.
There, the narration ended, looping back to the beginning of the recording, and Sam proceeded into the Planning Center. He was struck almost immediately by the relative lack of people. On a purely intellectual level, he knew that the lavishly decorated walls disguised an incredible amount of raw computing power, but a small part of him couldn’t shake the impression that the endless hallways had been constructed merely to make the trek to the Central Conference Room seem more intimidating.
They were waiting for him there, and he thought for one, blood-curdling moment that he was late, but a quick check of his headcomp reassured him that he was ten minutes early. Damn, this must be a critical situation if even the Whitesuits were showing up early for meetings. There were four of them seated at the table, deep in a conversation that ended abruptly as he entered the open doorway and came to attention.
“Captain Samuel Abanks-Avalon, Resolution Patrol Service, reporting as ordered,” he clipped off in his best Academy voice.
“At ease, Captain,” the senior political officer present told him. “Pull up a chair and let’s get down to business. We don’t have much time.”
“Yes ma’am,” he nodded to her. He accessed her ID file with his headcomp: her name was Ursa Tellesian and she had a stern bearing that reminded him of one of his Primary-Ed teachers…but then, almost all of the politicos he’d met reminded him of his Primary-Ed teachers.
“Captain Avalon, I’m sorry if it seemed to you that you and your crew had been shut out of the loop after your historic discovery, but it was necessary. Upon receipt of your report, we immediately sent an investigative team to the alien ship’s projected system of origin.” A large hologram sprang to life at the center of the room, showing a G-class star and then panning out quickly to a planet at around one and a half Astronomical Units. It was a living world, that much was obvious from an orbital view---small, scattered green continents dotted a vast blue of water oceans.
