Clarion: The Sequel to Voyage (Paul's Travels) Read online

  CLARION

  By

  C. P. Lockman

  *****

  Published by C.P. Lockman

  Published in EBook format by Holdrian Press

  Copyright © C. P. Lockman 2015

  All Rights Reserved, including the right to reproduce or transmit this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  WARNING: This book features graphic adult content.

  Contents:

  Chapter 1: The Diary of Haley Amber Scott

  Chapter 2: Falik at the Council

  Chapter 3: The Phoenix and the Larssen

  Chapter 4: Super Courier

  Chapter 5: The Forest of Wonders

  Chapter 6: Distress Beacon

  Chapter 7: Dvalin Diplomacy

  Chapter 8: Hardware Upgrade

  Chapter 9: Rescue One

  Chapter 10: Morning on Qelandi

  Chapter 11: Outbound

  Chapter 12: Dinner on Triton

  Chapter 13: City Boy

  Chapter 14: The Triton Summit

  Chapter 15: The Mistress of Serona

  Chapter 16: Recruitment

  Chapter 17: Phoenix Reborn

  Chapter 18: Eliria’s Mission

  Chapter 19: Merchant Banker

  Chapter 20: The Bay of Islands

  Chapter 21: The Orion Lounge

  Chapter 22: Sleep Systems

  Chapter 23: Into the Belt

  Chapter 24: Green and Blue

  Chapter 25: Traitor

  Chapter 26: The Visitor

  Chapter 27: Revenge

  Chapter 28: Through The Rings

  Chapter 29: Clear Light

  Chapter 30: Possible Worlds

  Chapter 31: First Contact

  Author’s Afterword

  ***

  Chapter 1: The Diary of Haley Amber Scott

  Aboard the Aldebaran

  MET [Mission Elapsed Time]: 3 years, 19 days

  He did it again tonight.

  I found it as I was drying my hair. It was a new model, the successor to last month’s Apate 550. The one I so gleefully pitched into the garbage tube. This one, according to its snazzy label, he called the 620. It sports a self-zooming feature – new, and very innovative. If Curt put as much time into finishing his engineering degree and less time filling laserdiscs with videos of me in the shower, he might actually get somewhere in life. And how droll it was of him to name his series of invasive recording devices after the Greek goddess of deceit.

  I confronted him but I should have waited; he was watching the newly-captured video on-screen in his room, with his cock out, fixating on the images of me. I stood there while he finished. He was either oblivious, or just disgusting enough to do it in front of me. He actually cried out my name as it started coming out of him. I nearly retched but instead marched in and slapped him really hard. Maybe the hardest I’ve ever hit him. He just grinned while I stood over him, furious.

  You know, I’d always wanted a sister. Instead, when they assigned me to the Scott family, I ended up with a half-brother who is probably the foulest human in a population of only 450. I mean, what are the chances?

  Fate, or Chance, or God, or whoever… If you’re listening: eat a bag of dicks.

  MET 3 years, one month, 6 days

  The Captain announced at breakfast that our long-range scanners have picked up Valaan, exactly where it was supposed to be. Everyone is excited; we haven’t had a firm fix on our destination – our future home – for months and to know its exact location is such a boost. Yes, interstellar travelers, we finally know where the fuck we’re going!

  I’ve been reading about it; in some ways, it sounds too good to be true. A lush world of jungles and waterfalls, of huge meadows, of long days in warm, equatorial sun or shorter ones, at higher latitudes, under the lights of spectacular, constant auroras. Most of the indigenous animals are either relatively tame, too small to be dangerous, or too stupid to conceive of attacking us colonists. All this, and a healthy level of gravity and a thickly oxygenated atmosphere... sounds perfect. If only it weren’t so very, very far away.

  Curt is taking the idea of blackmail out for a spin. His latest was is a beauty: he said he would give his friend Finn – who is almost as big an asshole as Curt – a copy of his complete laserdisc collection unless I blew him.

  I told him to go fuck himself.

  MET 3 years, one month, 13 days

  The Captain got groups of us together yesterday for a review session on how to use the Aldebaran’s ‘escape’ shuttles. By the looks of them, they are badly misnamed. If we had to bail out of the ship, the best we could hope for– in these antiquated, heat-shielded capsules – would be a hideously long deep-space cruise followed by a crash-landing which would probably kill everyone on board. The sooner we’re docking at Valaan, the happier we’ll all feel.

  Mr. Philpot, the Senior Electrical Engineering Manager, was found dead in his pod three nights ago. He had a plastic bag over his head and was mostly naked. His wife and kids have been told he’s suffering from an unknown virus and they have him in strict quarantine. Which is worse – scaring the whole ship’s company with a malevolent disease, or destroying a family’s memories of their husband and father? Kiri told me about it, while we shared an inhaler near the airlock of the science module where she works. I love getting high with her. We passed the smoke back and forth during a long, sexy kiss, which totally made my day.

  MET 3 years, 2 months

  Oh, the perks of being 19! Finally, I have the run of the ship… not so many forbidden areas or red-light refusals of my Ident-Card. The zero-G sections are still off-limits (not that I plan on obeying that forever) but I can jog in nice big circuits all through the arboretum and the science labs. Kiri always waves as I pass by. One time, when No one else was there, she gave me a quick titty-flash through the Perspex screen.

  When we’re not trying to turn each other on, or talking about plants, we’re worrying about hypersleep. Once the ship reaches 0.8c – or some ludicrous velocity – we’re all going to be put to sleep.

  For hundreds of years.

  Oh, the Captain’s full of confidence, and Dad says it’s the easiest thing imaginable. He reminded us that he and Mom did it for a year, right after they got married, as part of their first interstellar assignment. He made it sound like kids’ play, but any machine which can send a human being to sleep and then just stop their clock is just going to scare me. I don’t care what anyone says.

  Under those thick bubble canopies, some kind of time device - which, given its importance, I really should understand, but I simply don’t - keeps us at the same age, indefinitely. Well, at least for as long as the units have power. But since Aldebaran is running on a suite of nuclear engines and will be producing plenty of energy far into the future, no one’s really worried about that. Good old quantum physics. Without it, my great-great-great grandchildren would be the colonists, and not me.

  In my defense, my ignorance of the hypersleep system isn’t my own fault. We’ve been banned from researching or asking about the technology which, the Captain claims, will keep us perfectly safe for as long as necessary. I don’t understand even the basics. Cryogenics would make sense – freezing our unconscious bodies to prevent decomposition, while circulating nutrients and sugars to keep us alive. But this is different; time itself will stop for us. The state could last indefinitely. If there’s a malfunction, we’ll carry on in our dreamless, timeless state, drifting across the universe as if entombed. Forever.

  I asked the Captain after breakfast one day last week, and even he
denied knowing what physics drives this worrisome process. One of the engineers who felt like talking – rare among those secretive people – reminded me that time, rather than being a fixed construct which will inevitably roll out, irrespective of events, time is in fact a mere measuring system. “There is no time”, he kept repeating. “There is just the measured, predictable pace of cause and effect. Their rhythm defines our perception of time itself but there is no underlying, ‘absolute time’ which regulates events. They regulate themselves.” None of this helped and I left as confused as ever, feeling distinctly teenaged and stupid.

  [Later] The Captain just announced that we’re now in sub-space radio contact with Valaan. The descriptions of the place make it sound a lot more appealing than this spinning, glass-and-metal bubble in space. The intrepid Valaani colonists there say that everything is going fine and that, by the time we arrive, they will have the full range of facilities set up. All they need is more people, and a bigger range of edible plants; I guess that’s where we come in. Aldebaran is chock full of seeds and saplings, preserved eggs and frozen larvae; there’s enough to populate a whole system full of planets the size of Valaan. Someone said, the other day, that the animal and plant life on our ship outnumbers the human population by seventeen billion to one. I just hope we make it, so that I can see this great task reach its fruition. I sometimes dream of great meadows, teaming with herds of bison and cows, under an azure blue sky.

  That said, it’s still truly strange to see myself merely as a conveyor for life, a box out of which new people will emerge. I don’t like the idea of being turned into a mere test tube. But Mom keeps telling me it’s our duty, our responsibility to seed the universe in myriad ways.

  Deep, mom. Very deep.

  MET 3 years, 4 months, 8 days

  I’ve been assigned a Valaani pen-pal called Milly. She’s smart, cool, and unphased by the weird new environment she’s been sent there to shape. Our interests are similar: plant biology, astronomy, colony dynamics. I wonder what kind of algorithm chose her for me? She sounds a lot like the kind of woman I want to be.

  Mrs. Philpot has been taken to the medical pod and put on suicide watch. Apparently she had bundled the kids into an escape shuttle and was preparing to seal it, then blow the shuttle’s own hatch and whisk them all out into deep space.

  I had a long nightmare about it. I was stuck in there with this mad woman, yelling and crying, and then suddenly a pressure change in my ears meant the air was gone, and I was swept out into the frozen void. I could even feel the cold.

  I woke up sweating and shivering, tangled bedsheets everywhere. I ran around my favorite jogging circuit, through the atrium and around the cryo-storage units, until I nearly collapsed. Then I drank a gallon of electrolyte and slept for twelve hours.

  I shouldn’t have, but I read an article on it. Funny that I’ve been traveling in space, in one way or another, for most of my life, but seldom imagine it. We think of it as empty, but it’s an environment.

  It’s not the worst way to go, I guess. You don’t die from the cold, at least not straight away, because heat travels only slowly away from your body. You get massive lung injuries as the low outside pressure allows the air within your lungs to expand. The saliva boils off your tongue. Then you become hypoxic, your brain starved of oxygen by the sudden reversal of gas exchange in your blood. Perhaps a little delirium, major sunburn and some hallucinations, followed by blindness induced by the hypoxia. The body’s openings freeze. You pass out.

  Dear diary, I have only this advice for you, should you find yourself spinning helplessly through space without the protection of a suit: Hold your breath, open your mouth and let it happen.

  MET 3 years, 5 months, 21 days

  I’ve had the same nightmares for six weeks now. I’m going completely out of my fucking mind.

  Milly says it will pass. I trust her but... dear diary I make this promise to you: I’ll step off the ship and into the vacuum of space if I have that dream again tonight.

  MET 3 years, 5 months, 24 days

  The nightmares have stopped, like Milly said they would, although I still have disturbing, disjointed dreams. Cause and effect are reversed in some of them, so in my dream, Aldebaran explodes before its engines reach critical mass, and we’re all dead even before the pressure changes and implodes us.

  Speaking of imploding… One of the arboretum pods was hit by something yesterday. There was a full-scale alarm but the emergency panels slid into place before we lost atmosphere or pressure from the pod. The trees didn’t like it, but they’ll recover. The Captain says it was a tiny speck of rock, too small to be on the charts. Kiri says that, if there is one, there could be others. Bigger ones.

  Mrs. Philpot’s children have been taken into a foster family. Kiri told me she’s completely gone to the zoo; her husband’s death – shocking and humiliating in equal measure – added to the stresses of being out here on her own with two challenging kids. Anyone could see how it was just too much. She’s medicated and restrained. No one seems sure what’ll happen to her once we reach Valaan. There are already mutterings about a sweepstake predicting who’ll be the first of the passengers to die. Sick fuckers.

  MET 3 years, 6 months, 2 days

  About a month to go until our long period of sleep begins, and this little community is showing some cracks. I wish there were better news to report, that my diary wasn’t just a litany of disasters, but…

  Mrs. Philpot was found dead in the medical pod. She had dislocated her own shoulder in order to wrench it free of the restraint. Then she managed to pull out one of the metal pins which kept the bedside drawer in place, and attacked her own throat with it until she passed out from blood loss. They didn’t get to her in time. The ship feels depressed.

  A malfunction in one of the water filters has left our drinking water tasting slightly of piss. Not my favorite flavor.

  Milly my Valaani pen-pal, has cut off contact after only three messages. I asked around, because I was disappointed and wanted to fix things if I’d done something wrong. One of the engineers told me that I shouldn’t have asked her about the hypersleep technology. All I wanted to know was how it would feel and if there were any side effects, but now the system told me I was banned from contacting her. So that’s that.

  By the time the Aldebaran reaches Valaan, Milly will already have been dead for centuries. I still don’t know how this damned machine works, and no one will explain it to me. I’m not used to knowledge being controlled in this way and it makes me nervous.

  So Kiri cheered me up with her amazing mouth and three wonderful, expert fingers.

  MET 3 years, 7 months, 4 days

  We were five days from hypersleep when it happened.

  Here’s what I know. There may be no other record, so I’d better put it all down, the final hours of the Aldebaran. The preceding drama – for all its intrigues and lies – seems like a shallow, meaningless prelude compared to this.

  During the night watch, a rock the size of a big hill just slammed into us. The impact was devastating. Everything went to hell immediately. The ship lurched and threw everyone around; artificial gravity ceased as our rotation was interrupted. I was lying awake with Kiri when it happened; I’ll never forget it. The sensation of helplessness, of imminent death, of the inhuman, destructive power of nature, was the worst feeling of my life.

  A lot of families were killed. The Captain was never found. In the end, Mrs. Philpot’s children were blown out into space anyway, along with a lot of other people. Some tried to find their way to shuttles, grabbing the handles to pull themselves along hallways, through hatches, into seats. I lost track of everyone as we fled.

  The ship developed a wicked spin and, with no thruster control, we were all in danger of passing out. I don’t know how many of the shuttles were able to leave. I’m sorry, I just don’t. Dad, Mom, Curt, Kiri and I got into shuttle Epsilon and were quickly away from Aldebaran. The sight of it, shedding panels and gases, spinning lik
e a top, gradually destroying itself, made me sick to my stomach. We watched the engines fly off their mountings and career off into space. Pieces went in every direction at great speed. Crying, we couldn’t watch any more.

  Dad desperately wanted to help some of the people who had been thrown out into space. We could see two of them, through the hatch window, holding onto each other. If we had gotten suits on, depressurized the capsule and opened the hatch, we might have been able to fly alongside and drag them in, but it would have taken many minutes. It was pointless, he told us, his eyes tearing up. Ultimately, even a single depressurization would have been a major risk, given our limited air supplies.

  Kiri was in the worst shape in the beginning. She just howled. We strapped her into her seat and had a hushed family conference at the other end of the cramped capsule, trying to filter her out, but eventually Mom broke open the medical kit and injected Kiri with a sedative. I watched her cry in her sleep, which broke my heart.

  The Epsilon’s computer is pretty basic but we do have a fix on our location relative to Aldebaran and Valaan. We found out pretty quickly that the Aldebaran had been knocked clean off its trajectory by the rock impact, and that we had lost a good chunk of our velocity. An interstellar cruiser, the wounded ship was now just a sluggish, ruined behemoth on a random course. We made our escape from the huge debris field around the ship, and then tried to figure out what might come next. Dad spent hours with the computer, trying to plot a landfall, but our options were few, and all totally shitty.

  In those early hours, we were faced with two massive problems. First, we were, at the absolute minimum, six months from anywhere large enough to land, even if we burned half our fuel right now and just coasted there. Getting to Valaan was, Dad found, entirely out of the question; our trajectory was so fucked, and our speed had been so badly curtailed, that we wouldn’t intersect the far-flung moon for many thousands of years. Curt raged for hours, cursing and banging about the capsule like a benched high-school jock. It was a pathetic display, especially when we knew that staying positive was the only way of surviving. Dad silenced him and kept us focused.