Pollux

The following is the first part of a short story I'm working on, one that is almost finished. The story itself is made up of four parts, maybe five if I need another (I just started the fourth). I don't want to post the whole thing in one place because of its length (3/4=7,700 words), and I'll only post the next few parts if it is requested. All I can say, really, is that the story twists about quite a bit, and that there is a great deal more to it than the first part. So hopefully you'll enjoy.




KING OF KINGS
I

Tingling. I felt tingling, all over. Painful pricks nipped at my skin, my muscles, my eyes, my head. I had a headache, a splitting headache…everything hurt almost beyond description, and my ears were ringing. I think my eyes were opened at that point, although I couldn’t see anything, my vision was completely blurred over. No color, no objects, nothing. Almost like my eyes were closed. I tried to undo my restraining harness, but I couldn’t move my arms. Memory came back slowly. I was in cold sleep, just a moment ago they had closed the metal cocoon I was in, I remembered hearing the hiss, feeling my heartbeat slow. The blood rushed to my ears, and then…I was awake again. Something must have gone wrong.

First my hearing returned. The ringing cleared and softened, and was replaced by the frantic klaxons of the starship…what was its name…the…the Ozymandias. Klaxons, more klaxons. This put me on edge. I had to get out, but everything still hurt, all my muscles were sore, like I had placed second in the decathlon only a minute ago. The headache turned to dizziness, my stomach seemed to be devouring itself. I couldn’t think straight; I was dreaming…I was back on Earth, back in Maine, before the Idelek hit us, when it was still sunny, when the chirps of birds drifted about in the air, and when there were still birds to chirp at all. Shimmering trees, wind, sea, and stars…

Another prick, much stronger, on my right upper arm. I was back in reality. I felt a coldness seep from the prick, felt it dilate as it flew through my blood vessels. It met my heart, and then lanced across the rest of my body, tingling my spine and the back of my neck, rolling like a satin blanket across the folds of my brain. My muscles were renewed, and many flexed themselves on their own without my command. My blurred eyes cleared almost instantly, and I could see once more.

The shell of my cocoon was opened, it seemed, and the small amphitheater holding the crew was dark but periodically flashed red. Steam was fissuring out from the other cocoons, the caskets were opening slowly, and the people inside of them were dead still, their faces still blue from the cold sleep. Next to me was a small service robot clutching a large, empty syringe at the end of one of its thin arms. I unbuckled my harness and climbed out of the cocoon, my bare feet hitting the cold metal grating. The klaxons were still blaring.

“Report?” I asked, aloud.

The piece in my ear crackled, and the soothing voice of a motherly female came on the line. It was the ship’s autocomp, a machine with a brain far superior to anything nature on its own could possibly produce. For the moment it was just telling me what the hell was going on, lowering itself to my primitive level by actually speaking. “Heavy damage to all starship systems, Atmosphere failure on all loading decks, speed falling to below Three Hundred c, coolant leakage in all propellant tanks—”

“What happened? Was it the Idelek?”

“Unknown.”

“Status of soldiers?”

“No casualties at this time. Casualties predicted to reach 100% in under ten minutes, fifteen seconds.”

“Suggested course of action?”

“None. Captain’s discretion.”

Wow. This wasn’t good. The most complex machine brain ever created by man didn’t know what to do. They told us that was statistically impossible. And yet, here I was, standing near the cocoons of my command crew, almost naked, and with a hopeless situation to contend with. I heard a voice in my head, or maybe it was a feeling, yeah, a feeling, probably came from the heavy hypnosis they put starship commanders through. It was instinct, probably. I think it said: follow procedure. You don’t know what the hell to do, so do what the book tells you to. I didn’t know what a book was but that was beside the point. It was just a figure of expression.

“Engage Alert Protocol Alpha. Wake the entire command crew immediately.”

Monitors next to each of the cocoons flickered to life and beeped, and the flat lines that represented their heartbeats began to quiver. I could already see some of their eyes moving beneath their eyelids, the expressions of disgust and pain spreading across their faces. But I didn’t have time for this, I couldn’t wait for them. I took off in a dead sprint, climbed out of the sleep chamber and sprinted through the corridors of the starship, the painful fluorescent lights above coming on as I moved beneath them. The cockpit door hissed as it opened, and I flew past the dark computer consoles and beeping readouts, taking my seat in the pilot’s chair. The ship was on autopilot, and so was I.

Instinct instinct instinct.

As my hands flew across the loud, chattering console in front of me I managed to glimpse out the small window at the front of the cockpit. To my great surprise there was a planet there. Still quite far away and straight ahead, the planet seemed to be almost entirely ocean, but even at this distance I could see that it was scarred by white clouds. The only landmass I could see was toward its center and very small, Australia-sized, I’d say—

Amongst the chorus of beeps, a louder one tugged my eyes back to the computer screen below my fingertips. It looked like there had been some kind of engine explosion just after deceleration had started, most of the engine room had been incinerated, and there was a large hole into space. Luckily the troopers hadn’t been touched. My army. They were still sound asleep, all ten thousand of them, at the heart of the starship, nice and snug under a blanket of polymeter alloy.

As soon as the ship interfaced with me, and as soon as we landed on the Idelek homeworld, if we ever repaired the ship in time to do so, they would break upon the Idelek cities like fire upon forest. They were a thing to see, each man thirteen feet tall when he’s inside his suit, their heads shaved bald and wired with enough machinery to make a mechanic cringe. In that wiring pumped the commands emanating from my brain, not theirs, as if each trooper was no longer a man, but in fact little more than a finger or an arm. I had never done it before, but I had heard from others that commanding soldiers, even just a handful of them, was more incredible than anything I could ever experience.
A new beep drew me out of my daydream, and I realized that it was the signature alarm that every starship captain fears, that every living man educated in basic astrophysics dreads more than death itself.

“Relativity bubble collapsing,” said the voice in my ear, “Time dilation will increase exponentially in t-minus two minutes.”

One of my crewmates came out of nowhere and sat down next to me, I didn’t bother to look at her, I had more important things on my mind. The Bubble Generator was the pride of the human conquest of nature, somehow it inflated a spheroid of another dimension around the hull of our ship, a dimension that had a looser model of physics, that allowed us to move through space at untold speeds using a minimum amount of energy, while also keeping the world outside from aging faster than we were.

But if the bubble collapsed, it would all be over. We’d drop to an infinitesimal fraction below the speed of light, and whole human lifetimes would fly by outside that window with every beat of my heart. And you can be sure that my heartbeat was going pretty fast by then, even after being in stasis for a few months.

“Saskia,” that was her name, “can we keep the bubble in one piece or do we need to decelerate?”

She shook her head (to which question I didn’t know at the time), and I noticed that she was actually quite attractive. “I’ll try to slow us down. It’s all I can do, sir.”

My eyes went back to the planet ahead of us. “Is there any way that we could use that planet to slow us down?”

She shook her head, not looking up from her console. “Too small. We need a heavier gravity well.”

I typed out several commands onto the computer in front of me, realizing how clunky my fingers were on the keyboard, and also wondering how long it would take for the computer to interface with my consciousness. It had been…what, three minutes since I woke up? Why was it taking so long?

The blue world ahead of us was actually a moon, one that looked oddly familiar for some reason. At the time I couldn’t really place it. And then there was also a gas giant a few dozen times the size of Jupiter…just to our right. We would likely tear the giant apart by flying through it, with so much mass, but it was the best course of action we could commence under the circumstances. We needed a star, a big star, but the nearest Red Supergiant was lightyears away, at our speed it would take days to get there, and we only had minutes. I didn’t like to get too technical. With my hands on the control sticks, I eased the nose of the ship just a little to the side, allowing us an unobstructed view of a green crescent packed with wrathful, swirling clouds. The planet was so big…so big, even at this distance. I nodded to the window.

“How’s that?”

She looked up from her console for a few seconds, her eyes trembling as she thought, considered, checked her calculations. She looked back to me, smiled. “Couldn’t hurt.”

I plotted a course that would take us almost straight through the planet, only a few miles above what my computer told me was an earth-sized core of solid diamond. I wonder if I’d get to see it, through all the clouds.

Then the interface hit me, like a metal can that had been in a freezer for a few hours suddenly pressed up against the back of my neck, like the feeling you get when your teacher scratches her long nails on the chalkboard to get your attention. It was such a rush, I had to close my eyes and smile for a second, let my mind feel and comprehend the status of every molecule on board. And that’s no exaggeration. My body was no longer a human one, my skeleton was no longer of bone, but of metal, and through the wires of my bloodstream passed electrons instead of blood cells. You really have to love Nanotechnology.

I was suddenly running thousands of trains of thought, remembering wonderful things, calculating trajectories, projecting future outcomes of events, playing chess with myself, engaging several make believe partners in sexual intercourse, and all with the slightest of ease. I’m not supposed to focus my many attentions on anything but the mission when the interface is on…but I can do that many, many times over and still have plenty of concentration left for the fun stuff. It’s so wonderful…the privilege a starship captain gets, having the minds of his crewmates, his troopers, his ship, all tightly packed into his mostly mechanical brain.

Now it would be a walk in the park, guiding the transport through the titan looming in front of us. All in the space of less than a second I had switched the ship’s hull reinforcements onto full power and pumped ten mg of preparatory stimulant into the ten thousand men sleeping at the heart of the ship, just in case the g’s became too much or if a hull breach left them without enough air to breathe. Another restraining harness guided itself across my chest and connected with its locks at my thighs. Warning lights flicked on and flashed, Saskia tried to keep up with them but couldn’t. She sat back from her console and could only watch as I silently guided the craft in. From the information pouring out from her link to me I knew that she knew well enough that she could do nothing to help, that she had no interface, had neither the rank nor the social status necessary for one, and would be unable to assist me in any way because of how meaty her fingers were. Among other things, too, of course, but you get the picture.

The planet kept getting bigger and bigger, long before we pierced its skin of gas and haze. The sharp edges of the green fingernail crescent had long since passed out of view of the forward window, and the clouds on the surface merely became more detailed, more evil, I guess you could say. I could pick out faces, skulls, the dark shadows that form in eye sockets when there aren’t any eyes to fill them. Grinning evil, hands stretching out, some of them long and jagged, others packed with fat and muscles, all of them seeming to coalesce at the precise spot that I would fly the ship through. Even at this distance I could feel the ship’s hulls begin to buckle and creak under the pressure, but the Ozymandias would hold together, it always did. Through every battle, every Idelek boarding party, every direct hit from their missiles, it had pulled through. The Ozymandias was a veteran, and made of something more than just metal.

Luckily some of the ship’s braking mechanisms were still in good shape, most of them were shot to hell by now, but without them it would be nearly impossible to slow the ship down before the Relativity Bubble snapped. Even a planet this size wouldn’t do the trick, a Red Supergiant would probably have enough gravity, but even the Idelek didn’t have armor that could survive a trip through the core of a star. Then there were black holes and other gravitational anomalies, but you’d have to be crazy to go anywhere near one of those things.

Yeah, in spite of our bad luck, we still had some good luck on our side. I could pull her through easy.

There. Passed through the atmosphere. At this height it’s pretty light stuff, mostly helium I thought, but I wasn’t sure. It’s mostly green for some reason, why was beyond any of my minds. I think that it was the first real green planet I’d ever seen. Uranus has a little bit of a tint to it but you can hardly see it at all because of how far away it is from the sun. For some reason an image replaced the other readouts and headings in my minds eyes, an image of the Ozymandias, my huge troop transport, the pride of the Federal Navy, being swallowed up in the mouth of a great, verdant cloud, and then disappearing forever, the wisps from my entrance fading as the heavy winds blurred them away. Of course I wouldn’t be able to see that happening, going faster than light makes you perfectly invisible, but it gave me an odd feeling. An omen, I guess.

More clouds tore by the front window, it would only be a few seconds before we reached the core at the speed we were going. And it was working, quite well, the ship had slowed down to only a few times the speed of light. I had to get her down to less than a quarter. The clouds cleared, quite suddenly, and Saskia gasped beside me. Something in the atmosphere must have allowed us to see further than we usually did, I guess. The horizon was so huge, so infinite, the clouds were above, lightening was flashing with a, I don’t know, an anger I guess, such an anger, probably because we had escaped the atmosphere’s gaseous clutches, at least for a few seconds. Then, below was a blinding necklace of diamonds flying by fast enough to make your heart stop. Hardly a moment had gone by before it was gone, and we were back in the clouds, lancing toward the other end of the planet, the computer telling me that most of the world’s atmosphere was trailing the wake left by the back of the ship.

It was working, much better. The damaged interdiction systems wouldn’t have been able to slow us down on their own, we’d still be going ¾ c at the very least if we didn’t have a planet’s atmosphere to plow through. As we pulled out back into the stars the speed of my ship dropped exponentially, down to only a few thousand kilometers per hour. The Relativity Bubble collapsed in what can only be described as a slight shimmer visible through the forward window, and the gas trailing the starship overtook us, tossing the ship about like a caravel in a typhoon. I felt different systems disappear from my consciousness, like limbs gone numb, one after the other, and as I looked out the window all I could see was a violent, churning green haze. The ship itself was shaking and tremoring as if an earthquake was splitting its hull, and I looked briefly to my side to see that Saskia had not fastened her safety harness, and her body was jumping about like a rag doll, her eyes closed, a thin stream of blood traveling down her forehead.

I couldn’t help her now; I had to hold the ship together. I could feel the hull straining, feel the metal bending and stretching as an entire obliterated planet flew by. The different tactical radars were mostly shot, but the picture I could glean from them told me that I had torn a huge portion of the gas giant away from itself, leaving a projection of freezing particles to travel ahead of me in space. More systems failed, left and right, my consciousness was going dead. I had to unhook myself from the computer or I would die with it, I could barely move because so much of my brain’s computing power was occupied with commanding the ship, and I would have to move in order to deactivate the interface. The interface’s only drawback was that it occupied an enormous portion of my brain’s conscious power, forcing it to put most of my body on automatic, so that only subconscious functions, like a beating heart, breathing, etcetera, were carried out. Moving was close to impossible because it wasn’t automatic, it was a conscious action, and my consciousness was being eaten up by the interface.

With great effort, I managed to tell my hand to lift itself to the control panel, fighting the staggering g forces and my numbing inability to move my limbs at the same time. I hit my target, an unambiguous red switch, and everything went black.

__________________
Listen, kid, we're all in it together.

[referring to life]--Harry Tuttle, Brazil

AdamR

I enjoyed it so far. Your descriptions are well written. Good job!

__________________
"Excellence in all things, and all things to the glory of God."
- Motto of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church

Pollux

Awesome. One reply requires another section to be posted...
II

Idelek. The Idelek are a race with many striking similarities to humanity, in that both Human and Idelek specimens are bipeds. There are notable differences however. Most of the Idelek strikingly resemble the traditional Nazi “Aryans,” in that they have short, blond hair, noticeably blue eyes and each is usually at least two and a half meters tall. With rare exceptions the Idelek have the same skin color, which is a pale white with a slight bluish tint, enough to make them look like they’re always very cold. Idelek and Human scientists alike don’t know why both species are so similar; it is generally thought that it is just a cosmic coincidence of sorts. Although I’ve never met an Idelek before, almost no one has, they are thought to be extremely calculative, complex, and egotistical. As individuals they think themselves superior even to other Idelek.

The Idelek have been a spacefaring species for longer than any other species encountered by mankind. The limits to their Empire are unknown, however it is known that several dozen other species of intelligence at about the same technological level as man have been conquered and either destroyed or been enslaved. It has been theorized that whole planets populated by billions, perhaps trillions of slaves, are the center of the seemingly invincible Idelek industry. It is very likely that there are more species that mankind has not yet encountered. Earth itself is actually located near the heart of Idelek space, apparently it was overlooked by the Empire for some odd reason, and the first encounter with the Idelek about two years ago resulted in the destruction of most of humanity’s starship navy and all of its interplanetary colonies. Almost a hundred million people have been either enslaved or killed in the ensuing battles. Although the Idelek are far superior to mankind technologically, because humanity has been almost constantly at war with itself for its entire history (spacefaring and pre-spacefaring) we were well prepared for a fight. We destroyed the first, second, and third waves of their assault, however the most recent wave several weeks ago resulted in the UN losing Eastern Europe to the Idelek. Fighting is heavy there, and fusion weapons have reduced the occupied area to little more than a scorched hearth. The climate of Earth itself has been altered by the Idelek fleet in orbit around Earth, and the entire planet is steadily becoming a barren wasteland. What the UN has left of a fleet is being used mostly to relocate Earth’s inhabitants to Venus, the only inhabitable planet the Idelek have not yet hit. While humanity’s weaponry is by no means ineffective against the Idelek, their weaponry and their defenses are far superior to ours.

No ground has been gained for humanity in the war, however colonies on fifty-seven Sol System bodies have been destroyed, and it has been estimated that if the tide of the war is uninterrupted Earth will be overrun before the year is out. The only real victory for the UN so far was the capture of an Idelek sleeper ship two months ago, which destroyed itself moments after our parties boarded it. But before they were incinerated, the men onboard managed to relay the location of the Idelek homeworld back to UN Headquarters in the fortress of New York City.

My starship, the Ozymandias, has been sent with as many soldiers as could be spared from the fight to the heart of Idelek space, virtually undetectable because of its both liberal and unusual use of the Relativity Bubble. While it is easy to manage the energy requirements for entering the “free” dimension, the power cost does increase exponentially as the time spent there lengthens, so generally a starship will deactivate the field, recharge its batteries in normal space, and then move on once more. Most of my starship is little more than a battery, built specifically for making one single voyage from what remains of the spacestations in Earth orbit to the new Idelek homeworld. The Idelek homeworld is toward the heart of the Orion Star Nursery, it is thought that the bulk of the Idelek species moved there from somewhere else because of an unalterable environmental problem. My soldiers have orders to initiate a guerrilla war once we arrive, and I am to attempt to saturation bomb the planet with fusion warheads for as long as possible before the ship itself is destroyed. Preliminary data suggests that the world is packed with Idelek industry as well as its central feudalist government institutions, so striking it should not only hurt Idelek production capability but cripple morale—


My eyes opened and the briefing playing through my mind ended. The cockpit was dark, but thrummed to life once the computer detected my stabilizing life signs. Bent over me like a worried mother was the command crew’s doctor, a dry, old woman, holding what looked like a flashlight in her hand and a piece of bloody gauze in the other. “Hold still,” cracked her lips. She aimed the flashlight device at my head, and it beamed a bright, blue beam onto my forehead and hummed annoyingly at the same time.

“Little damage, you were just out for a few hours,” she said again, standing up. I looked over to my side, saw Saskia nursing her head, a bandage wrapped tightly over the cut I had seen before.

I tried to queue the interface but I got nothing. “Something’s still…wrong,” I breathed, “the computer core…must be down.”

“Techs are working on it, sir,” she said, robotically. “Try not to stay awake, since you’re still interfaced it’ll only make their job harder.”

I gritted my teeth, the effort to speak exhausting me. “Status…report.”

She sighed, and looked at Saskia. Saskia was clearly not in the mood for talking. “Heavy damage everywhere, sir. We’re trying to fix the nav systems, all of them are shot at the moment, and we have no idea where we are.”

“Options?”

Saskia closed her eyes and shook her head. The old battleaxe frowned. “We’ll tell you when you wake up. Go to sleep. That’s an order.”

I felt a prick in my arm. My vision narrowed, and the voices of the people around me blurred and dulled.


Now there are no memories, no information, the interface must still be down. There are no dreams, just blackness, dead, lifeless blackness, as if my eyes are closed and all of my other senses are cut off. I have no body, no center, I am everywhere and nowhere and then I am somewhere else. It is neither physically nor mentally tangible, and I’m hardly conscious in it at all, but I can still swim the breastroke within its confines…


There are lights in my eyes again.

Oh…no…the interface is gone. They said it would be hard, the first few times I was severed, but I never imagined it would be like this. So much was gone from my mind; I could no longer carry on the tens of thousands of trains of thought…could no longer feel the motionless molecules making up the hull…and the minds of the troopers being transported, blank as they were before, were now completely gone. It was amputation, like my arms and legs were cut and lay on metal grating nearby, bleeding warm blood, and I could look at them, but not control them at all. I felt great pressure in my chest, and tears pressed their way to my eyes…then, my throat tightened, and the grunt-coughs spurred by feelings of suffering and weakness and uselessness uttered themselves from my widened mouth.

“Looks like he’s coming around. Why is he squinting?”

“Get the doctor, Saskia.”

A light patter of boots on metal, slowly fading away.

“He’s not taking it too well.”

“Well how the hell would you feel if you were given the power of a god, and then had that power taken away?”

A sigh. “Point taken.”

I groaned, rubbed the tears of my eyes and tried to focus them, but couldn’t see past the lamp they had swung over my face. I squinted. “Someone get that goddamn light out of my face,” I murmured, my arms waving at its source in the air, unable to touch it.

There was a pause. “Light, sir?”

My hands went to my eyes, tried to cover them from the intensity of the light source, but they were unable to do so at all. It hurt, quite a bit, everything was painfully white, as if I was staring at a thousand suns, and my eyes were watering like there was no tomorrow.

“Power’s down, captain. Except for Basic Subsystems—heat, life support, artgravs, everything is out. Even the computers are dead, sir.”

I kept rubbing my eyes, trying to ignore the light, but finding it very difficult. “What…what’s the status…the repair status…?”

“Ellis says he can have most of the ship back online in a few hours, sir.”

“How…how can he? Engine room…destroyed…”

“It was one of the earlier system failures of your interface, sir. The ship’s outer hull has sustained heavy damage, and there are several power fluctuation problems elsewhere, but other than that the mission is not yet in jeopardy.”

“My eyes…why…”

“Doctor’s on his way, sir. She was checking up on a platoon near one of the damaged zones. She should be here any second.”

“Or I should be here now,” came the dried voice of the ship’s doctor…what was her name…Romano…Liza Romano. I never liked her that much. Too prissy, too old—

My eyes began to burn even further, noticeably so, and a groan that began in my stomach slowly progressed into a scream, and I writhed on whatever I was laying on, and it seemed that I could feel hands trying to hold me down, but not successfully. The pain was intense, thick, blots of torture bloomed like flowers over my eyes. I could hear their voices, distantly…as if they were miles away.

“Christ…christ his eyes are bleeding!”

“Shut up and hold him down…come on, argghh, no, no Captain, calm down. Hold him still. I’m not sure what’s causing this but it must have to do with the interface—stay still sir!—I’m going to try to introduce some general repair nanos into his bloodstream, hopefully they’ll be able to fix whatever the problem is.”

“God…the blood is everywhere! Get a rag or something to wipe of his face—”

“It can wait. Captain you need to stay still. Sir—”

“I need to get him in the heart…but he needs to be still. You don’t want to mess around with nanotechs. I lost the magnets we need to pull them out if I screw up.”

Distantly, now, I heard someone shout “what? If you screw up? Don’t screw up man, I don’t know how the hell to work this thing, no one on board does. Starships don’t come with goddamn manuals—”

“Just hold him still and there won’t be a problem!”

I felt something go through my chest, a chilled needle, and it seemed like the tingling I had experienced when I had woken up increased ten, twenty fold. It spread like static through my body, crinkling and prickling every skin cell. I couldn’t scream, it felt like my lungs were constricting, and when the tingling struck my head I thought that my skull was going to burst, that my warm blood, now black with nanotechs, would spill all over the floor of the random room I was lying in. The light brightened, if that was at all possible, and I think I was screaming then but I couldn’t tell, and I had long since gone numb to the pairs of hands holding me down. I started kicking, writhing more, coughed, scratched, howled like an animal, I can’t remember, actually, what I did then, what was going on, I was really just on automatic, and was in far too much pain to think. For a time I had ceased to be and was somewhere else…that dark chasm we all go to when our bodies tire of harboring our souls.

__________________
Listen, kid, we're all in it together.

[referring to life]--Harry Tuttle, Brazil

Pollux

bump.

__________________
Listen, kid, we're all in it together.

[referring to life]--Harry Tuttle, Brazil

Pollux

The entire story in its mostly final form is at sublunari.blogspot.com, under a new name.

__________________
Listen, kid, we're all in it together.

[referring to life]--Harry Tuttle, Brazil