The Simmering Seas

by Frank Kennedy

  The

  Simmering

  Seas

  Beyond the Impossible: Book 1

  By

  Frank Kennedy

  Dedicated to all those who think peace is a real thing.

  c. 2021 by Frank Kennedy

  All rights reserved

  To my amazing readers:

  Introduction

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  Exogenesis

  Artemis Station

  Planetoid Y-14, Oorton System

  Standard Year (SY) 5363

  W HEN THE NEWS ARRIVED, Exeter Woolsey was practicing somersaults atop fifty-meter barrels that once smelt brontinium ore. Mother forbid these actions, but what was Exeter to do? Recreation was in short supply at Artemis; suiting up for a jaunt outside the cascade barrier was more trouble than it was worth.

  Exeter needed to stay fit while he waited. Other boys his age were fighting and dying in the last great war of the Chancellors. They honored the legacy of three thousand years of supremacy by refusing to be cast as equals to the indigos who once crawled at their heels. They fought to preserve centuries-old family lines. What might they think of Exeter, the boy who ran away?

  He completed a triple somersault, landing but an inch from the edge of the barrel. That’s when he saw her approaching. The boy expected more chastisement, loud and repetitive. Yet Mother did not walk with the same furious urgency as the previous twenty times.

  Exeter triple-blinked, igniting his stream amp, and stepped off the barrel. His shoes defied gravity.

  “You see?” Exeter said when he landed. “Grav-mod boots. Work every time. Safe as can be.”

  “Until they are not,” she said. “I need you to shut up and listen.”

  Rather than the usual condescension, he heard surrender in her voice. Mother wasn’t here to berate his recklessness.

  “What’s happened?”

  “The Earth war is over. They declared an armistice.”

  A chasm opened inside his gut. He’d never have the chance to join the fight.

  “We lost?”

  “Yes. The Warner Alliance declared total victory.”

  “It was the attack on the Horatio. The final straw.”

  The disaster happened weeks ago, but the after-reports were soul-crippling. Thirty thousand corpses, mostly soldiers of the United Chancellor Front, floated amid the ship’s wreckage in Earth orbit. The new weapon deployed in the WA’s sneak attack tore apart their bodies from the inside out.

  “The Horatio was the latest defeat,” she said, “but the end was inevitable. Our decline began long before the war.”

  Exeter pivoted toward Command and Control, where Chancellors used to oversee brontinium refinement, providing enough extract to sustain the ruling caste and its hyper-developed growth rate.

  “What now, Mother?”

  “Be patient.”

  “You’ve been saying that for two years.”

  She, too, cast a long eye toward C & C.

  “And I will continue for as many as it takes.”

  “How is he handling the news?”

  “Amayas doesn’t know. He’s been obsessed with work for hours. You know how he gets when he believes a breakthrough is near.”

  Indeed. Sometimes, Amayas disappeared for days into the bowels of the facility, locked away from all but his closest two confidants. He last ate in the commissary two days ago. Not that it particularly mattered. Exeter reckoned Amayas, with his remarkable bulk and stamina, didn’t require food with the same regularity as most. Or perhaps he grew tired of the limited selection of powders, soups, and nutrient packs they called sustenance. Exeter wished the occasional visiting ship would leave whole food rations.

  “I thought we might tell him together,” she said. “He thinks of us as family. He’d prefer it coming from us.”

  Family. What a strange concept. Not a genetic link between the three of them, yet fate decided they’d walk this path together. The odds of it ever happening were infinitesimal. Sometimes, Exeter stayed awake at night wondering what it all meant.

  Did need keep them together? Three frightened lunatics fleeing from the past, hoping for a miraculous twist of fortune? Or did Amayas know more than he dared let on? Were Exeter and his adoptive mother the instruments of the boy’s salvation, as he claimed? Might he reward them by bending the galaxy to his will, as he often suggested?

  “I had a dream last night,” Exeter said as they passed through C&C then took the lift to the subterranean levels. “Amayas was laughing, but his true face was crying. There are days I don’t trust him anymore.”

  “Come now. We guided each other this far. Our situation might not be optimal, but it would be far worse on Earth.”

  “Or in the colonies. I know, Mother. What was the final death toll?”

  “For both sides? Almost ninety million. More than all Chancellory wars combined. We lost more soldiers on the Horatio than any single day in the past three thousand years.”

  “At least they died fighting for their honor. I’ll never have the chance, Mother, not when I’m thirty light-years from civilization.”

  She rarely touched the boy anymore, so it surprised him to feel a hand on his shoulder.

  “Trust Amayas. He’s our best hope. There might be one more battlefield, Exeter. Hold on to your honor.”

  When the lift opened, an ovoid security drone scanned them, red light flashing. They dared not pass until the floating device cleared them. Its laser mount could slice open intruders. When the flickering light disappeared, they proceeded.

  The bottom level of Artemis was twenty degrees colder than the surface. The automated climate controls failed seventeen years earlier, when an explosion tore through half the facility and forever halted production of brontinium extract. Amayas restored controls to the C&C and residential quarters, but he preferred a chill down below. He said it kept his mind clear and the air sweet. Exeter and his mother boarded one of two rifters stationed outside the lift and began the half-kilometer journey to the surviving labs. Exeter took control.

  “You’ve never given up on him, Mother. I know it’s not because of love. Why do you still believe?”

  “My father once told me, ‘Katherine, when you run out of options, you have only yourself to blame. Circle back. Look closely. See what you missed the first time.’”

  Katherine Woolsey sighed and looked away. Exeter hated when she made obtuse references.

  “What do you mean, Mother?”

  “Think of the sheer mathematical improbability of finding each other at our most desperate hour! Would we have survived another day? I realize Amayas can be difficult, and he ties his promises in knots. But he brought us here when he could have left us behind. He’s working so hard to give us a better future. When I circle back and review all my options, I see nothing comparable. He is ours. We are his. So yes, I believe. I’ll die believing.”

  He didn’t share her boundless fealty, but Exeter played along – not that he had options. The fifty other permanent inhabitants followed Amayas with fanatical devotion and enjoyed isolating themselves from the Collectorate’s thirty-five billion citizens. On rare trips outside the system, they returned weeks later with a handful of new allies. They never offered him a seat on those ships, nor was he introduced to the recruits.

  The laboratory where Amayas spent most of his time was a multi-level series of platfo
rms, on which huge phasic tools left over from the Chancellor glory days performed assorted functions. They constructed most of the devices to mold brontinium into everything from deep-world core drivers to Carbedyne nacelle heat shields to medpod frames. Amayas found new, clever uses for each, none of which Exeter fully understood. But each was vital, Amayas said, calling them instruments in a symphony. Drone loaders sat unused in a far corner, their AI dormant since the disaster years ago.

  Exeter pulled back on the rifter’s steering arms and eyeballed the giant cavern for Amayas. The two-seat vehicle hovered in silence.

  “There,” Katherine said, pointing northeast. “Take us up.”

  They found Amayas running calculations through a holowindow, his hands doing gymnastics through screens of algorithms beyond Exeter’s comprehension. Farther ahead, a translucent cylinder twenty meters long hung tethered to four cables. At either end, an elevated pilot’s seat – cannibalized from the navigation ports of old Scramjets – faced the empty cylinder.

  “We bring news,” Katherine said, standing next to her son in the rifter. “Might we have a moment of your time?”

  The giant man raised a familiar finger, the one demanding silence. He raced through the floating schematics, swiping away equations and replacing them with a representation of the cylinder. Below it, a series of commands awaited. He nodded and turned.

  Though Amayas Knight was only a few years older than Exeter, he appeared mature enough to be the boy’s father. His features were rigid, battle-worn, and his prosthetic eyes a faint gray. He had not shaved in days. His obsession showed, as did the purple bruise over the right corner of his jaw. For reasons unknown, the bruise never healed after his transplant. Amayas covered it when visitors arrived, afraid it would be off-putting to potential allies.

  “Only a moment, Katherine,” he said. “I’ve reached a critical stage.”

  His voice belied his withered appearance. It carried the zestful tenor of youth.

  “May we step off?” She asked.

  “No. There’s nothing you can say so important.”

  Katherine shaded her eyes. “The war is over, Amayas. The UCF has surrendered to Warner.”

  “Oh. Is that all? Well. Good.”

  Exeter didn’t anticipate this reaction. He shared a confused glance with his mother.

  “Ninety million people died,” Exeter said. “Most of them were our kind. Don’t you care?”

  “About the outcome? Yes. It went against us, which I predicted from day one. As for the toll? It’s small relative to the whole, but large enough to fuel the next war. It’s exactly what we need. New allies will turn a desperate eye toward us.” He pointed to the cylinder. “Our chance has arrived.”

  “For what?”

  Amayas eyed the boy with an unsettling curiosity.

  “Exeter, I’d like you to stay. Katherine, take the rifter and return to the surface. I think your son and I are long overdue for a talk.”

  She didn’t hesitate. “As you wish.” She turned to Exeter. “I’m sure you’ll be happy to fill me in over the evening dine. Yes?”

  He committed to nothing, unsure Amayas would give him permission to break their confidence. Exeter joined him on the platform and waited in awkward silence until the rifter left the lab.

  “You don’t trust me,” Amayas said. “Not like before.”

  His gut tightened. “No, Amayas. It’s not about trust. I … well, look around. What are we doing here? All these experiments and secret meetings and … Sometimes, I look in your eyes and I think, well, I think perhaps you’re going mad.”

  Exeter didn’t expect the generous smile of recognition.

  “You wouldn’t be wrong, Exeter. A man alone in his lab, playing with his contraptions. No food. No sleep.” He wrapped a giant arm over the boy. “I went mad years ago. But I learned how to avoid stepping over the cliff. I am disciplined in that way.”

  “How so?”

  “I learned from the mistakes of my family, which were too many to count. I created a unique strategy suited both to these times and to a future no one ever thought possible.”

  “You told me this before, Amayas. A year ago. What are you planning? Another war?”

  He grunted. “There will be war. Then again, many of the colonies are already fighting amongst themselves. As humans, war is our natural default position. Peace is nothing but an interlude while we prepare for the next battle. That, Exeter, was the guiding philosophy during the Chancellory’s rise to power.

  “The first five hundred years was a period of endless war, marked only by the briefest of interludes. The early Admiralty developed a strategy of engaging in only one war at a time. They quelled all other hotspots through diplomacy and containment. They believed in allocating all resources to the complete decimation of a single enemy. The conclusion of one war gave permission for the next. As they marched forward, no one in their wake dared oppose Chancellor supremacy.” He grinned. “The Earth war is over. Good. Now I have permission to begin the next one.”

  “With what army?”

  Amayas laughed. “Come, Exeter. I have something to show you.”

  He escorted the boy to the pilot’s chair.

  “Take a seat.”

  “Why?”

  He pointed to the cylinder. “To have the best view.”

  “Of what?”

  “A miracle. A dream. Evolution. Hope. Terror. It will mean different things to different people.”

  “Will it hurt?”

  “Possibly, but no more than spending the best years of your life in this forsaken place. Yes?”

  Finally, Exeter heard a truth he believed in. He climbed into the chair, but his gut was no less knotted. Amayas patted him on the head.

  “I want to trust you, Amayas. I always have. What you did for Mother and me can’t be repaid. You won’t betray us?”

  “Never.”

  “Then tell me one thing, and I’ll go through with this.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Who are you? Who lives behind your false face?”

  “A man who learned then ran away. A man who comes bearing gifts. A man who will always protect you, Exeter.” Amayas grinned. “There. I told you three things. Strap in.”

  Exeter knew better than to expect more from the man. Truth without the truth. This was the story of their two years together. He engaged the strap and buckled in.

  Amayas returned to the holowindow and engaged the controls. The cylinder lit up like glass refracting thousands of colors at once. The cylinder did not move, nor was there sound. At first, it seemed nothing more than a fanciful light show.

  Then the interior blurred. The far end disappeared.

  Night fell inside the cylinder. Or so Exeter thought.

  The stars came out. At first, constellations he recognized. Compressed, twisted, intertwined. He was moving past them at countless times the speed of light.

  No, wait. That’s wrong. That can’t be. It’s …

  They were moving past him. They were seizing him, wrapping around his mind, eating at his core.

  He fell. Or so Exeter thought.

  The boy took on the collective weight of all the stars surrounding him and was pushed and pulled by their gravity wells.

  How far away now? In what galaxy? Would he ever return to Artemis? He never knew his birth mother.

  And then, something else reached out among the stars. A string of fire twisted into a rope and coiled around Exeter. It tugged. It tugged. And it whispered. Words beyond his comprehension.

  For a microsecond, he saw the rope’s owner, and his heart stopped. He shrieked into the deaf, infinite universe.

  PART ONE

  UNSEEN

  “What is the song they used to sing about Hokkaido?”

  “I don’t remember, but I’m sure it was beautiful.”

  1

  Three years later – SY 5366

  Planet: Hokkaido

  Pinchon, capital city of The Lagos

  T H
E PINNACLE OF KARA SYUNG’S life happened too soon. She flew into space on her eighth birthday for a special tourist excursion of the Kye-Do rings. Those were the heady days, when her Honorable Mother and Father spent obscenely on anything she and her brothers requested. She wrote an essay for class at the Vox School for Girls, wondering what life might be like for those who lived and worked among the quadrillions of acenomite rocks orbiting the planet. She won a contest to interface with a Kye-Do miner, but her parents insisted on more. She was, after all, a daughter of Syung-Low.

  They lowered her little body from the orbital cruiser in a transparent but impenetrable cube, held steady by a tractor beam. Kara was terrified on the way down. Don’t focus on Hokkaido, they said. You’ll become disoriented.

  When the cube nestled into position amid the outermost ring, all her trepidation peeled away. She floated weightless inside the cube and extended her arms as if they were the wings of a red-billed jackswan. Yet the enormous seabird whose mating call was legend across Greater Oceania had nothing on the girl who flew among rocks as old as the planet itself.

  They were so close. Some no larger than her fist. Others the size of her family’s estate house in the Haansu District of Pinchon. Some were smooth, even polished. The jagged, malformed rocks twinkled with surface fragments of acenomite. They twinkled at Kara as if she knew their secret and they were glad of it.

  She ignored the streaming voice in her ear.

  Perfection. Bliss. It was the death of rules and protocol, or the burden of expectation and obligation. The continuous efforts of her family to stand above all Hokkis felt microscopic.

  I belong here.

  It was a beautiful notion, even if lasted only until the voice in her ear reached a feverous pitch. Someone said her cruise would end momentarily, but Kara wanted more. She’d been drifting among the rocks for an hour, the voice said. Kara asked for another.

  Maybe if I close my eyes, I’ll stop time. I’ll never leave here. I’ll always fly.