June 2024 Archives

Thumbnail image for MTP cover.jpg

Amazon link here Books2Read retailers here

It was hard to believe she was gone.

For over an Earth century, Sephia had been the commander of Bolthole Base. She'd been the one constant, unchangeable thing about the mission on Calmena. The base was four times the size it had been when I started, Calmena itself was utterly changed, but Sephia was changeless - until this morning. She'd had a cerebral hemorrhage at some point overnight and died in her sleep. Her bright blue eyes were forever closed and I could have used a shot of her no-nonsense grandmotherly attitude. But her body had already been fed back into the converter as per standard Imperial procedure; she was one with the universe now.

Section Private Kryphan was senior-most of those in the line of command; therefore he was interim commander. It was unlikely a successor for Sephia would be more than two days in coming - today's courier run would have taken the news to Earth, almost certainly the new base commander would arrive tomorrow. But whoever it was, they'd never replace the grandmother hen who'd watched over us for the last century, kept us focused on the task, held us together through all the setbacks, and kicked us into action when it was necessary.

It had been pointless to Portal back to Bolthole Base, but every single one of the twentytwo teams currently working the Advancement Mission nonetheless made the journey, each of us making a solemn pilgrimage to the door of the base commander's office that had been hers for so long, just standing at the door looking in in silent farewell, bore executing tatzen, the Imperial gesture of respect, before turning and walking away silently. Tatzen was a variable gesture. Fingertips to chin was respect. Fingertips to upper lip was more. Nose to the joining of the ring and middle fingers was the limit of ordinary. Nose to wrist and palm to heart was all that and love and loss and you couldn't get any higher. Anything more than that was simple pretension, and none of us would do that to her. Sephia's absence was a burning hole in all of our hearts. She hadn't had to do anything beyond her job as commander of Bolthole Base, but she'd done everything she could to make our jobs easier as well. She would be missed.

Both Asina and I had last messages from her in our datalink queue. Likely a last farewell and whatever last message she'd wanted us to be reminded of. We'd play them back in Yalskarr. Speaking of which, we'd be missed if we lingered more than a few minutes. Sephia was gone, and not coming back, but we still had our work to do. After a quick chat with Arrel and Dildre, we portaled back to the Calmenan city that had been our home for over sixty Imperial years now.

Yalskarr was a different place, sixty Imperial years on. It had been a port town when we arrived; now it was one of the busiest ports on Calmena as well as an industrial center rivaling anything Earth had had in the mid-twentieth century. Nearly a million people lived in the city itself and another four in the territory it governed, which included the oilfields to the north as well as enough farmland to feed them all. It had its growing pains but Asina as First Captain had done her best to help the area remain livable as well as defensible from demonic incursions. She was retired from that now but still consulted from time to time; administering the industrial conglomerate that built ships, airplanes, and automobiles as well as the engines to power all of them took all of her time while I worked on advancing the technology as fast as I could, largely using the blueprints from Earth's Industrial Age. The time was coming when the lives of every human on Calmena would hinge on how fast we could upgrade.

From the little copy of the Bleriot monoplane that had begun aviation here, Calmena's aircraft industry was ready to transition into the jet age, but that was far from an unmixed blessing. For most of the things that would be needed in repelling large bodies of demonic troops, propeller driven aircraft were more effective. Jets were expensive; the only real need for jet fighters was fighting other jet fighters and I couldn't see the demons fielding fighters that something of that era could fight. Either the demons would copy something like an Imperial Starbird in which case jets would simply be expensive targets, or they wouldn't bother at all, in which case Calmenan jet fighters would be wasting resources that could more profitably be used elsewhere. But it was difficult to explain this to people who'd never been allowed to see Imperial starships and thought jets were the pinnacle of development.

Fortunately, most of the military organizations of Calmena understood who their real enemies were. Thousands of years of oppression and regular waves of demonic legions attempting to reconquer human nations made that abundantly clear. Over on Wilmarglr Continent where we'd started, Bazhen had imperial aspirations but fortunately the demons kept graphically explaining the folly of attacking fellow humans when there were demons trying to eat both them and their intended conquests.

Asina and I each had half an hour of putting out those routine little metaphorical fires that seem to sprout like magic when the boss is away even momentarily. Hers had to do with the supply of metals - both iron and aluminum - that our shipyards and plane assembly required in thousand ton lots. Taman, her assistant, was a good accountant who couldn't be told we had access to more wealth than was apparent, and had tried to scale back or split an order of metal we needed immediately if not sooner. Mine had to do with a design issue on the proposed gunships. Makis understood why the main firepower had to sprout to one side, but Ghent, our liaison, was a former fighter pilot who wanted it all firing forward and tried to coerce a design change from him. I explained to Ghent for the seventeenth time that transports could keep one wing and therefore the guns aligned with it pointed at a target indefinitely, a feature that couldn't be replicated for any forward firing weapons. Ghent may have had experience using fighters to strafe demonic legions; I had access to records from an Earth he didn't know existed, and from the Empire as well, although Imperial tech was tens of thousands of years past anything Calmena could produce. We looted technology from pre-contact Earth because there was no living memory of Imperial equivalents and few designs for their production. The Swass-class transports that were the basic design were an almost exact copy of an Earth transport plane called a C-130 Hercules, and the gunships based upon them had been known as Spectres. I'd been told the new guns for them would be every bit as effective as the original Spectre.

Once the metaphorical brushfires were out, we retired to Asina's office to play Sephia's message on our datalinks. The basic message was what we'd expected - how Calmena was important to the upcoming war, how we were going to make an outsize difference to the outcome, how she knew we'd make her proud. The basic message was one she'd repeated over and over again in our time on Calmena, but it brought tears to our eyes hearing it from her mouth one more time, and we loved her for it. Her straight pale blonde pageboy cut was slightly longer than the last time we'd seen her - it wasn't a recent recording. We checked the timestamp and it was almost ten years old. Asina had loved Sephia as a replacement for the mother she'd lost as a child. I wasn't an orphan, but she'd become a beloved aunt, equal in my affections with Tia Esperanza and Tia Luz and Tia Grace. I made a point of copying the message to archive; I wanted to be able to play this message again someday, a cherished memory of a dear friend.

The message had an update - numbered twelve. Evidently one through eleven had been deleted. It was short and to the point. The Sephia in this message looked a little thinner, her hair a little shorter, and her face more determined. She spoke straight into the screen, bright blue eyes blazing defiance. "Joe, Asina, and the rest of you. They don't want me to tell you yet, but if you're seeing this, I'm beyond any discipline they might impose. Believe me when I tell you that right now your most important concern is ammunition for the weapons you have. Make what use of this information you can."

The timestamp was three days old.


Copyright 2021 Dan Melson. All Rights Reserved.

Thumbnail image for STB book cover.jpg

Amazon purchase link Books2Read retailers here


Our first destination was Bolthole Base, high up in the most inaccessible area of the Collision Range on Wimarglr Continent. A lot of work went into keeping natives from realizing it was there, from holographic projectors to avoidance fields and forbiddings with auros. In the long run, they'd find it, but the general thinking was the long-awaited rematch between the fractal demons and the Empire would be underway before then, rendering it a moot point.

There's a moment on approach when you make a mental shift from thinking you're in space getting closer to the planet to thinking you're on the planet even though you're not on the ground yet. For me, it's when I start being able to make out individual features in the video feed. The nameless mountain in which Bolthole Base was embedded was usually it, followed by the small alpine meadow below the base. The mountain itself - second highest peak on the planet - was perpetually ice crowned, even though it was no higher than Mount Whitney in California and within a couple degrees of the planetary equator. There wasn't time in Calmena's short year of 145 Earth days (136 Imperial or local) for the snow that fell to melt. The lake below waxed and waned with the weather.

The pilot picked up the approach path, and slowing still further apparently headed straight towards the side of the mountain. At the last moment, the illusion of solidity melted and the viewscreen showed a massive cavern holding fifty or sixty Starbirds and cutters. The base and the cavern holding it had expanded in the time I'd been here, but it was still too small for anything bigger than cutters to land.

The base commander, Sephia, was waiting to greet us. Sephia looked like a blonde college coed of my youth, her white-blonde pageboy cut barely ruffling in the sheltered cavern. "Welcome back, my young friends!" she greeted the two of us. As soon as she opened her mouth, her attitude and manner of speaking betrayed the fact that she was old for a natural state human - perhaps a full square by now. I didn't know exactly - what I did know was she'd held a higher rank than she did now at the end of the Reunification, three thousand Imperial years ago. Except for occasional leave, she'd been base commander for over an Earth century now, and she had no intention of applying for promotion. "This is where the next war with the demons will start," she'd told me when I first arrived. Taking a promotion would mean leaving Calmena for her.

"Good to see you, grandmother!" I teased her in return. I was aware the base was busier than it had been in times past. There were more troops visible in the main cavern. I wasn't sure why; it wasn't any of my business. I could ask if I wanted, but I was certain Sephia wouldn't give me a straight answer. The Empire has a habit of keeping operational information to those with a need to know, Asina concurred. I wasn't aware that the combat soldiers were doing any more work but there had to be a reason the Empire had done it. Likely it had to do with the heightened sense that open war with the fractal demons was close. I'd heard rumors of more troops being assigned to Earth as well.

"Staying the night, or just heading on through?" she asked.

"The plan is to take the portal to Tabbraz immediately," Asina responded, "But there's no rush. If you'd like us to stay for some reason, there are ships heading to Yalskarr from there all the time." Tabbraz was on the south coast of Hashiboor, from which passage on a steamship to Yalskarr, at the base of the Karnel Peninsula, would take a few days. We had to be a little more circumspect these days. Rather than just walking out of a portal or setting up a compound in the middle of nowhere, we had to leave something of an arrival trail and something of a departure trail. Calmena was getting civilized. Somebody might ask where we came from - it was important for them to be able to find something of a trail.


Copyright 2019 Dan Melson. All Rights Reserved


Thumbnail image for Building the People cover 4.jpg


Amazon purchase link Books2Read retailers purchase links

The forges of N'yeschlass began their beat at dawn, every day without fail. Things had changed since we began.

The town had never been officially named. The name had grown from the unofficial motto of what my wife and I and the original group of refugees cowering in the jungle had begun not quite twenty Imperial years ago. The demonic tongue of Calmena had no word for freedom. N'yeschlass translated literally as "no slaves." It was a promise to all - come to us and be free. It didn't appeal to everyone, as it included freedom to fail and freedom to starve, but those were simply the terms of life everywhere on Calmena. In the portions run by the fractal demons, slaves were eaten when they began to show signs of aging. Where the pseudo-feudal human agaani held sway, grinding poverty and recurrent famines were almost as brutal. Only in N'yeschlass and its confederated territory was there a significant chance of a human being alive on what an Earther like me would consider their fiftieth birthday.

I still worked my smithy a couple hours per day. It had seen upgrades since the day we'd built it - it was probably the equal of a mid-19th century forge on Earth now. But these days, the metal was mined out of the Collision Range and I didn't have to pretend to cart it in while pulling most of it out of a converter. We still had the secret room with all the technological conveniences underneath our forge, but these days I bought all of the metal I used. I might create the gold and silver I used to buy it out of the converter, but the metal I actually worked was honestly mined by miners who were part of our new nation. N'yeschlass the nation held better than a third of Wimarglr, the North America sized continent we'd called Continent One when we discovered Calmena, including most of the Collision Range.

There were probably twentyfive square people in N'yeschlass the city these days. After better than twenty years of thinking alternatively in demonic and Imperial systems, the former for everyday interactions with Calmenans and the latter for reports and planning to our Imperial sponsors, the decimal system and all the other standards of measurement I'd grown up with on Earth was almost alien to me now. 90,000 was a fair number of people for a city to have with this level of technology, and N'yeschlass the nation probably had four or five cities that were bigger now. N'yeschlass the city was the gateway to the mining regions in the Collision Range, a name that had stuck when I'd used it inadvertently in conversation with a Calmena native. "Collision" didn't mean anything in demonic; they just thought it was a good name. Probably half the place names on Earth came from circumstances not too different.

N'yeschlass the city had a very European feel to it. I don't mean the architecture was similar, it wasn't. That looked like nothing in my experience. By any reasonable definition, construction here was mostly wooden squalor. But the streets had grown organically rather than planned. Asina and I still owned a good bit of land, but these days most of it was in use. I spent more time managing others than working metal myself. The city was where more metal was smelted than anywhere else on Calmena. Iron, nickel, copper, tin, lead and even small amounts of aluminum and others. N'yeschlass' metallurgy was probably late eighteenth century equivalent on average. Not bad. Asina and I owned a good bit of the production, and had shown everyone else how to do it.


Copyright 2017 Dan Melson. All Rights Reserved


PTG Amazon thumb june 2023.jpg

Amazon purchase link and Books2Read retailers

Imperial vehicles were more like this ship: quiet, and almost too powerful. Thirty meters from nose to tail, roughly twenty six from wingtip to wingtip, with the central cylinder being roughly eight meters in diameter, Golden Hind was reminiscent of one of NASA's old space shuttles. It had the same type of outer hull, minus the rocket nozzles - it was powered by a main siphon that could provide about ten percent of the power of the sun, essentially forever. A converter was attached that could use that power to produce matter in most configurations from machine tools to food. Impellers were capable of about 1200 gravities of acceleration in normal space - from grounded to 99% of light speed in less than seven hours. The Vistula Space Corporation, or VSC, had ordered a standard transport cutter, with a time-jammer addition. The faster-than-light time-jammer was designed and rated for over two hundred thousand times the speed of light. That meant Earth to Barnard's Star in about fifteen minutes at top speed - which would be like traveling to the corner store at Mach speeds. It even had a Vector Drive in case an operant pilot became available. One person could operate Golden Hind, but we had a crew of five.

The titular commander was John Dulles. I wasn't privy to why VSC had named a corporate vice-president to command the ship. I didn't think it was a good idea, but nobody asked me. Earth MBAs didn't have the background I thought likely to make good decisions in that sort of situation. I thought that if he had any brains he'd pretend to think it over and do what Major John Kyle (newly mustered out from U.S.A.F.) - our pilot - suggested. A graduate of the Air Force Academy and former fighter pilot, Major Kyle at least had the kinds of training to understand what was important if we got into trouble. Jayden Smith - a graduate of Johns Hopkins with a decade of solid work in molecular biology with medical application - was our biologist, and William Miyazaki was our astronomer. Will had had a doctorate from CalTech before his twenty-first birthday, and had spent the ten years since expanding Earth's infant science of detecting habitable planets at interstellar distances - technology that had become irrelevant overnight when the Empire arrived to save us from ourselves.

What was I doing here? Well, the family had more than enough people to work the dog business, even the shipborne part involving Tia Grace's two huge spherical transport ships, Earth and Indra. Her husband's family had given them to her to help grow the dog business, and she'd needed cargo handlers, for which she wanted family - me and all the rest of her nephews and nieces. She'd given us datalinks so we could interface with Imperial computers just by thinking, plus they gave us a lot of other capabilities. Think of a datalink essentially like having a tiny super smartphone right there in your brain. Then she'd left us alone on her ships for a week at a time, with nothing to do except work and study. Of course the first things we all learned were the rest of the skills of Imperial space crew. Everything from in-system pilot to power engineer. Which made us pretty unique on Earth after the unification. When a couple Earth consortia got the funds for small spacecraft, the first thing they did was offer an unbelievable amount recruiting us, as the only Earth people with working knowledge of Imperial spacecraft. I had a better understanding of the Imperial technology we were using than almost anyone else. I was engineer, repairman, janitor, and back-up for everyone else. If something broke, I was pretty much the only hope of fixing it. Finally, unbeknownst to the rest of the crew, the Empire essentially required that the command pilot be someone who had passed the Imperial adulthood tests, not just a temporary adult-by-courtesy. That meant I had final authority as far as the ship itself was concerned - I could over-ride anyone and everyone else if I had to. However, I'd get a bonus if I didn't reveal it - VSC's financial backers were Earth business people, steeped in the business traditions of Earth. They didn't want to tell successful professionals with a decade or more experience that the ultimate boss was a twenty-two year old kid who had been working his way through community college a little over year ago. Our family had had over a year to deal with those tests; it had only been about eight weeks since the Imperial arrival notified everyone else.

Some people might gripe about no women on the crew. Cramped living quarters meant we were living in bunk beds about six feet by three with about eighteen inches of vertical space and absolutely no privacy, so Golden Hind had an all-male crew. The offsetting reality was that my cousin Adela was aboard all-female Victoria, headed off towards Alpha Centauri and other stars in that direction. We were supposed to be gone for five to seven days each, each returning in plenty of time for our next turn onboard Tia Grace's ships. That was in fact written into my contract - replacement for wages lost if the ship went past nominal return date.

There had been a lot of interest in us, as if in disbelief that the Empire was really going to let Earth people pilot interstellar ships with no oversight from its own people, less than two months after taking over the planet. I don't know about no oversight, but as long as we stayed within the framework that had been pounded out over the millennia, there wasn't any reason to treat Earth humans as different from any other citizens of the Empire. Golden Hind and Victoria had responsible, qualified adults in charge, so the Empire was fine with VSC's two new interstellar craft. VSC had had a departure ceremony, with speeches by half a dozen people who would have been Very Important Politicians just a couple months before, including the President of the United States and our very own self-appointed luminary Mr. Dulles. Everyone from both crews had less than complimentary pet names for that clown. He talked of the glories of exploration and bringing back treasures. Idiot. Mines, even "pick the pure, no refinery needed stuff up off the ground"-type mines would never compete with siphons and converters. We were looking for livable planets, or planets that could be made livable. Nothing else.

Our actual departure from Earth had been pretty prosaic. We'd used the old runway the shuttles used to land on in Cape Canaveral, for no good reason. Imperial ships could take off vertically and safely from anywhere, with noise about equal to an electric car until you hit Mach. Major Kyle took us up and out of the atmosphere, then out of the plane of the ecliptic preparatory to transitioning to light speed. It wasn't far as in-system distances went, and it really only took about half an hour to get well clear of most of the junk in the solar system. We watched Earth drop away, becoming a blue-white marble behind us before diminishing to a point. We hadn't used maximum acceleration, so we were only about ten million kilometers from Earth - twenty times further than any previous ship manned by Earth humans - when we engaged the time-jammer and went superluminal.

The aforementioned capture buffer built quickly. It didn't matter if we caught a photon that had left Sol before us, or one traveling towards us from one of the stars in the "forward" half of the sky. Photons impacting the bubble entered the capture buffer, and only slowly worked their way loose, resulting in the pretty soft pastels I talked about earlier.

We started off slow and built speed up over the course of an hour or so. It had been planned that we'd peak at about fifty thousand times the speed of light, but Major Kyle ended up ramping more slowly to a lower top speed, about thirty thousand times the speed of light, which we stayed at for about an hour and a half before it was time to start slowing down again. During that time he jogged us three times to miss objects large enough to worry about. A couple of times, Dulles tried to talk to him but Major Kyle said, "If you want to talk, we need to stop first." It wasn't exactly difficult piloting, but you couldn't let your attention wander at all. In one second at thirty thousand times the speed of light, we were traveling about nine billion kilometers, or roughly the entire diameter of Neptune's orbit. There were a lot of reasons why Vector Drive was better, if you had the pilot to handle it. For one thing, when you went directly from point A to point B, there was a lot less to hit.


Copyright 2016 Dan Melson. All Rights Reserved.

 



Buy My Science Fiction Novels!
Dan Melson Amazon Author Page
Dan Melson Author Page Books2Read

Links to free samples here

The Man From Empire
Man From Empire Cover
Man From Empire Books2Read link

A Guardian From Earth
Guardian From Earth Cover
Guardian From Earth Books2Read link

Empire and Earth
Empire and Earth Cover
Empire and Earth Books2Read link

Working The Trenches
Working The Trenches Cover
Working the Trenches Books2Read link

Rediscovery 4 novel set
Rediscovery set cover
Rediscovery 4 novel set Books2Read link

Preparing The Ground
Preparing The Ground Cover
Preparing the Ground Books2Read link

Building the People
Building the People Cover
Building the People Books2Read link

Setting The Board

Setting The Board Cover
Setting The Board Books2Read link



Moving The Pieces

Moving The Pieces Cover
Moving The Pieces Books2Read link


The Invention of Motherhood
Invention of Motherhood Cover
Invention of Motherhood Books2Read link

The Price of Power
Price of Power Cover
Price of Power Books2Read link

The End Of Childhood
End Of Childhood cover
The End of Childhood Books2Read link

Measure Of Adulthood
Measure Of Adulthood cover
Measure Of Adulthood Books2Read link
The Fountains of Aescalon
Fountains of Aescalon Cover
The Fountains of Aescalon Books2Read link

The Monad Trap
Monad Trap Cover
The Monad Trap Books2Read link

The Gates To Faerie
Gates To Faerie cover
The Gates To Faerie Books2Read link

Gifts Of The Mother
Gifts Of The Mother cover
Gifts Of The Mother Books2Read link

The Book on Mortgages Everyone Should Have!
What Consumers Need To Know About Mortgages
What Consumers Need To Know About Mortgages Cover
What Consumers Need to Know About Mortgages Books2Read

The Book on Buying Real Estate Everyone Should Have
What Consumers Need To Know About Buying Real Estate
What Consumers Need To Know About Buying Real Estate Cover
What Consumers Need to Know About Buying Real Estate Books2Read

Dan Melson's San Diego Real Estate and Mortgage Website

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

About this Archive

This page is an archive of entries from June 2024 listed from newest to oldest.

May 2024 is the previous archive.

July 2024 is the next archive.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Powered by Movable Type 4.21-en
******

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner


Copyright 2005-2024 Dan Melson. All Rights Reserved