The Sirens of Space

by Caminsky, Jeffrey

  To further complicate matters, one cosmic light year is called a “parsec;” a “light year” refers to the distance light in nature travels in a standard solar year ie, one Earth year. A “meter” remains as defined on twentieth century Earth; however, the standard unit of distance in the twenty-sixth century is the “foot,” which is defined as the distance light travels in 0.000000001 seconds (give or take a decimal point), and roughly corresponds to the “foot” used in the old English system of measurement. An “astrometer,” by contrast, is defined as the distance light travels in 1 second; and an “astrokilometer” is 1,000 astrometers, or the distance light travels in 1,000 seconds—defined as the average diameter of the orbit of Planet Earth around its sun. A “second,” correspondingly, was redefined in 2206 as the time it takes light to travel 1/1,000 of an astrokilometer—or one astrometer, which is approximately 186,000 miles, calculating under the old English system.

  Aside from the use of local time by every planet, this system of measurement finds acceptance everywhere in twenty-sixth-century Terra, except for a few provinces on the North American continent of Earth.]

  * * *

  Like moths drawn by the beacon of adventure, Earth’s brightest, best trained, most curious minds drifted skyward. The end of the twenty-second century saw human colonies on nine planets, including large settlements on New Babylon and Zarathustra; and still the mass exodus continued. Humanity formed the Terran League, to govern itself and help the Cosmic Guard keep the fractious and stubborn member planets from warring among themselves over such cosmically significant causes as tariffs, trade, and immigration....

  * * *

  New Babylon itself enjoyed many advantages, conferred both by nature and by accident. It was among the first inhabitable planets discovered outside the planetary system of Earth; and like the planet Zarathustra, which was discovered at roughly the same time, it was a garden teeming with life lovingly spawned from its warm and salty seas. But the twelve parsecs—about thirty-eight light years—east to New Babylon took a full solar year less to travel in the early days of interstellar flight than the ninety-six parsecs west to Zarathustra, and most of the major inhabitable planets that the early Cosmic Guard discovered were to the cosmic east of Earth—Athena, Gaea; later Ceres and Demeter. And of the fifteen member planets of the Terran League through first half of the twenty-sixth century, the only planet west of Zarathustra was tiny Isis, a small outpost on the way to the then-as-yet unvisited Rigel star system. So, by default as much as by the beauty and bounty of the land itself, New Babylon became the Mecca for the first flood of emigrants from Earth; and the Cosmic East became the focus of Humanity’s destiny, while the two planets of the West seemed destined to be Man’s forgotten stepchildren....

  * * *

  What historians call the Babylonian Exodus stirred the human soul like no event since the dawn of civilization. The cream of a generation, dazzled by the chance to participate in the greatest adventure they could imagine, and anxious to escape the squalor and misery of Earth, scratched and clawed for the chance to claim the future for their descendants. Soon, they had flooded the virgin world with shining cities and great universities, with roads and factories and great modern farms stretching endlessly into the horizon. Before long the planet blossomed with a modern, cosmopolitan culture, embracing all human accomplishments while leaving most of Humanity’s problems behind them on Earth....

  * * *

  As what was now called Terra expanded eastward, Earth remained its most populous planet. But with each succeeding generation, the skilled and educated fled as far as their money and talent could take them, searching for a new life and a less dismal future. The constant flow of Earth’s boldest, most energetic, and most adventuresome offspring to the beckoning new worlds of the East drained her vitality and robbed her of hope. And the very eagerness with which the East welcomed its immigrants, often including relocation subsidies for professionals in fields suffering critical shortages, gave the talented and ambitious few reasons to stay behind. Meanwhile, Earth’s ancient problems—hunger, poverty, ignorance, mindless and contentious division—chased away all but the poor and the helpless, and the most hopeless of idealists....

  Soon, like the dawn that follows the sunset, Terra’s cultural center followed the emigrants, and before the end of the First Cosmic Century, the Terran Senate moved the capital. The debate was emotional and traumatic, but history had already decided the outcome; and in the Earth Year 2334, Terra finally abandoned the Old Earth for New Babylon, and the gleaming and ascendant city of Covington....

  ...Once its leaders had escaped the filth and squalor of our ancestral home, Terra found it could focus on nobler aspirations. Freed from constant reminders of Humanity’s humbler beginnings, art and science soon bloomed in a new Renaissance, a phoenix rising from the ashes of Earth.

  And freed from the clamorous misery of Mother Earth, Man was free to conquer the stars.

  From Volume V: THE DEMETRIAN REVOLT:

  [A]s lush as any planet in Terra, and jealous of the attention lavished on New Babylon merely because that lucky planet was the focus of the First Migration, Demeter loomed sullenly in the east, like a younger brother resentful of a doting parent’s praise of a prodigious sibling....Just south of the galactic plane, and forty parsecs to anticenter of a line drawn between Earth and the new Terran capital, Demeter’s hospitable climate and ambitious people produced an industrial colossus that quickly rivaled and soon surpassed the early settlements of the older worlds....

  * * *

  [By] the Earth Year 2349, barely a century after its discovery, Demeter found itself the center of a social upheaval and ferment unknown since the darkest days of the Bloody Century...[as the] stubbornly independent worlds of the eastern frontier rose in revolt against the very concept of union as defined by the ruling Federalists, preferring to chart their own course in the pursuit of the riches to be found in the giant gas clouds and uncharted systems of eastern Terra, rather than suffering the indignities imposed by the government of Austin Prendergast.

  * * *

  [But] the rebel faction of the Terran Civil War was doomed from the start....All the factories and farmlands of Demeter, Ceres, and their outlands could not long stand against the rest of Humanity—or, at least, against the troops of the Terran Army, and the ships of the Cosmic Guard. So, inevitably, peace descended on the brooding planet, and its leaders were taken to judgment. And though its populace grudgingly accepted union as a practical necessity, they quickly took to heart the concept of planetary sovereignty advanced by the nascent Tory Party. In the meantime, the devastation of war soon faded into memory with the rebuilding of the ecomonic muscle of a people too proud to allow the lack of victory to spell defeat....

  * * *

  And in its own way, Demeter finally had its revenge, for by the twenty-sixth century, Demeter would come to dominate the economy of eastern Terra in much the same way as New Babylon dominated the West....

  Though inconceivable in the war’s immediate aftermath, the same planet that chafed at the visible presence of the Cosmic Guard would later feel wounded by the decision to move Eastern Fleet headquarters “from Mullinberry’s Star to Ishtar,” and the factories of Demeter would soon outbid and outperform their eastern rivals in building ships and equipment for their old nemesis. And as surely as one day it would lead the agitation against a new menace from the East—which by then would sport a reptile’s countenance rather than a lilting Demetrian brogue—the pocketbooks of its citizens continued to fatten with the advance of technology. Two centuries after his forces reduced New Dublin to ruins, the velvet voice of Prendergast would find a Demetrian echo in the crescendo of warnings from another silver-haired prophet of doom determined to profit in the next election by proving his manhood; and another chapter of History—alas, requiring another volume—would loom in the blackness of space.

  From Volume VI: THE CONFLAGRATION:

  By the year 2496, reckoning by the Old Ear
th calendar, the Terran League had grown to fifteen full members, each with colonies of its own....

  In midyear, a CosGuard monitoring station detected the faint but unmistakable subspace blips of alien vessels in the space far beyond the planet Ishtar....

  * * *

  The discovery of alien civilizations had long been the dream of scientists and visionaries. The literature of five hundred years had glowed with anticipation of the day when the enlightened races of the Universe would deliver the answers to the conundrums of creation to the human race, and lead them from the chaos and disorder that they had built for themselves. But as with many things, the anticipation was far different than the reality, and the sudden confirmation of alien ships built by alien technology proved more traumatic than any event since the Terran Civil War. Disorder ruled the streets of every major city for months as the authorities struggled to control the panic—caused foremost by the knowledge that Terra was not alone, and helped along by the handsome profits to be found in the doomsday trade. In the capital the government fell, unable to persuade the Senate that it could guarantee the safety of the people. A crisis government rose in its place, committed to preserving Terra’s security whatever the cost, and Terran science was once again conscripted to military ends, striving to improve the ships and technology that were Humanity’s only defense against an unknown and therefore terrible menace....

  * * *

  To help secure the border and preserve domestic peace, the Cosmic Guard began constructing a monitoring station and starbase ninety light years past the agricultural colony in the Hodges Binary system, and clamped strict, if futile, restrictions on further settlement or private exploration in the area. Within ten years Starbase 102, christened “Looking Glass” by a forgotten media wag, was plotting alien trade routes and tracking the steady progress of alien colonies toward Terra. Slowly the panic subsided, but it remained a shadowy memory lurking beneath the consciousness of every man and woman, like the knowledge of mortality, an unpleasant reality pushed into the seamless future....

  * * *

  ...[I]n 2547, some unlicensed Terran ore miners landed on a fertile planet 50 parsecs beyond Looking Glass, seeking easy riches and a comfortable home base. Instead, they found a small alien settlement. Within hours, Humanity’s first contact with an alien civilization had produced the first interstellar massacre, and threatened interstellar war.

  * * *

  It is 2550.

  Three years of negotiating with the alien Consortium have not brought peace. The Senate echoes with fifty years of warnings about the alien menace.

  And Terra’s factories are desperately making starships.

  The Players

  The Cosmic Guard

  Yeoman Lars Anderson, shift supervisor

  Commander Jeremy Ashton, ship’s systems officer

  Denny Barrett, crewman

  Captain Tom Chandler, a starship captain

  Admiral Porter Clay, commander of the Eastern Fleet

  Yeoman Chief Gregory Connors, supervisor of enlistees

  Roscoe Cook, a native of Planet Isis

  Ens. Kirkland Dexter, apprentice systems officer

  Captain Brian Fitzgerald, a starship captain

  Ens. Tom Gerlach, apprentice weapons officer

  Commodore Jefferson McKinley Jones, senior wing commander, Demeter Command

  Andrew Larsen, crewman

  Lt. Cmdr. François LaRue, first officer of the Cruiser Constantine

  Jim Martindale, crewman

  Ens. Mary Mathison, apprentice radio officer

  Commodore Jason McIntyre, senior wing commander, Looking Glass

  Ens. Connie McKenzie, apprentice navigator

  Lt. Janet Mendelson, ship’s helmsman

  Lt. Vera Nkwete, supervising communications officer, Ishtar Command

  Lt. Karen Palmer, weapons officer

  Yeoman Rick Sillars, shift supervisor

  Tom Sullivan, crewman

  Lt. Ronald Talbert, ship’s navigator

  Captain Art Tanana, a starship captain

  Lt. Dennis Underwood, communications officer

  Lt. Cmdr. Bruce Van Horn, ship’s chief engineer

  Admiral Winthrop Weatherlee, commander of Demeter Command

  Commodore Miriam Wright, commander of Looking Glass

  Spacers and Assorted Riff-Raff

  Cyrus McGee, spacer and former pirate

  Mason McGee, brother of Cyrus

  Chadborne Wilkes, a space pirate

  Terrans

  Andrew Cook, Roscoe’s father

  Cornelius Cook, Roscoe’s uncle

  Thomas Cook, Roscoe’s grandfather

  Jonathan Osborne Grant, Terran Ambassador

  Duncan Heathcoate, senior senator from Demeter

  E. Emerson Hollenbach, senior senator from Earth

  Irene McGinnis, senior senator from Isis

  Nicholas Schiller, a Demetrian industrialist

  Mikos Sarkisian, President of the Terran League

  Suzie Yang, presidential aide and journalist

  Veshnans

  Munshi, a translator

  Zatar, a diplomat

  Crutchtans

  G’Rishela, the Imperator’s ambassador to Terra

  Ja’Rend XCVI, Imperator of the Crutchtan Empire

  A Select Gazetteer

  of Obscure Heavenly Bodies

  Athena, a Terran planet

  Balarium, seat of the Grand Alliance of the Consortium

  Ceres, a Terran planet

  The Crutchtan Cloud, a vast natural formation of rocks, gases, and precious elements

  Demeter, third most populous Terran planet

  Earth, former capital of the Terran League, most populous Terran planet

  Gaea, a Terran planet

  The Great Divide, the Crutchtan name for the Neutral Zone

  g’Khruushte, ancestral home and capital of the Crutchtan Empire; also, Crutchan Empire

  Gr’Shuna, a Crutchtan planet and regional capital

  Gutterman’s Gap, a narrow passage to Isis through the Nakahashi Storms

  Hodges Binary, an agricultural colony east of Ishtar

  Ishtar, Terra’s easternmost planet

  The Ishtari Belt, a formation of rocks, gases, and precious elements near Ishtar

  Isis, Terra’s westernmost planet

  Khu’ukhana Rift, a narrow passage through the Crutchtan Cloud

  Looking Glass, colloquial name of Starbase 102

  Mullinberry’s Star, the star dominating the Demeter system

  The Nakahashi Storms, a large and intense formation of gases and rocks east of Isis

  New Babylon, capital of the Terran League, second most populous Terran planet

  New Calais, a Terran planet

  Pirate’s Alley, a dangerous stretch of space from the Ishtari Belt to Demeter

  Riley’s Station, a private starbase and interstellar port of call along the Terran frontier

  Shun’Galanga, a Crutchtan scientific outpost

  Valhalla, a Terran planet

  Zarathustra, one of two inhabited Terran planets west of Earth

  Acknowledgments

  While technology enhances our lives in many ways, nothing will ever replace the people close to us, or those who help us confront the challenges we encounter along the way.

  Writing can be a lonely endeavor. Producing a book, however, is impossible without the assistance of a great many people—many of whom an author never even gets the chance to meet, let alone to thank. Among the many who have helped bring this book to print are many whose contributions are no less critical merely because they pass largely without notice—including the workers running the printing machines, who literally bring a book to life.

  Often taken for granted is the indulgence of an author’s family, as they patiently listen to a thousand worries and complaints, as well as enduring the endless debates and controversies within the author’s own mind which occasionally are vented audibly—often abou
t minuscule revisions and word choices that would otherwise pass unnoticed, and are often undetectable by the human eye. During the many years of writing this series—spanning the entire Reagan and Bush Administrations, as well as the first two Clinton Years—and the even longer time it took to bring the work to print, it was a great comfort to be able to count on their tolerance and forbearance, no matter how maddening or difficult I might be at any given moment.

  Other friends and colleagues, in and out of the legal profession, have proven to be a constant source of strength and help. While they number too many to list, I have to give special thanks to Mark Cavanagh, James Shaw, and Kevin Huntsman for their early encouragement; to my son, Jason, for helping to keep me from giving up hope after the entire work was completed and nobody seemed the slightest bit interested; to Jeff Joyce, Marilyn Eisenbraun, Jaimie Powell, my parents, Wallace and Alice Caminsky, and my wife, Nonie, for providing feedback and suggestions, and for helping me proofread and edit the text in order to get it ready—or, at least readier—for print; and to Nadine Dyer and Christopher Reaske, my favorite English teachers, for correcting as many defects in my writing as they could manage in the short time they had.

  Despite everyone’s help and best efforts, the shortcomings in what follows are mine.

  Jeff Caminsky

  September, 2008

  The story continues in

  Part II of The Guardians of Peace:

  The Star Dancers