Fictional Novel

© Darren White 2013

"theFomalhautPlague"

b y

d a r r e n w h i t e

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Excerpt 1 of theFomalhautPlague:

© 2013 Darren White

“We found the secret chambers almost by accident!” the thin woman whispers excitedly, her hand over her mouth to prevent lip reading. She glances furtively around the bustling recreation deck, checking for any eavesdropping before continuing. The dim lighting helps to conceal them in their booth. “It still contained their technology.”

“Yeah,” her partner continues, explaining the story further to Enola, “we accidentally found a hidden door in the wall of the great chamber in the main tower.”

“At Gargantuan?” Enola asks, using the human name for the alien city. “Show me,” she asks impatiently, pointing at her eye augment.

“I can’t,” the woman adds, “they wiped it from us. Said it was a security risk.” She shakes her head. “It felt like a violation, someone taking part of your life like that.”

“What gives them the right?” Enola consoles her.

“Look,” the thin woman tells Enola, pulling a rolled-up piece of ipaper from her breast pocket. She opens it, tensions it and begins to manipulate the controls. When she locates what she’s searching for she turns it towards Enola. “These chemical markings were on the walls of the smaller outer chamber.” The ipaper shows a low resolution, low frame rate version of a chemical analysis display. One large smear next to a smaller one, lies atop a triangle of smears. A list of proteins present slides down the page next to the video, all of alien origin. "It’s a different configuration to anything we’ve seen before."

“You said the smaller outer chamber?” Enola asks. “What was in the inner chamber?” The other woman shook her head quickly.

“The military declared it off limits instantly,” the man begins to explain. “They called it a quarantine zone. Virtually no one got in,” he continues. Enola bangs the table in annoyance.

“Some of our guys did get a look inside,” she states. Enola holds her hand up to silence her,

“Wait for the comms tube. It’s due any second.” Enola glances around, taking a sip form her drink. “Everyone will be distracted,” she adds. The others furtively glance silently around the recreation desk, waiting for a sign that everyone is receiving the latest updates from Earth’s solar system.

Somewhere just beyond the orbit of Fomalhaut Three a sleek, shiny torpedo drops out of NeitherSpace and instantly begins to transmit yottabyte upon yottabyte of data, at fantastic speeds, over a myriad of streams.

In the rec deck everyone stops what they are doing and instantly becomes entranced by the updates broadcast into their heads; emails, video, pictures, web sites, music, movies and books pour into their augment’s data stores. In data centers around the system, local caches of Earth’s solar system data stores update.

The people in the bar smile, laugh, even cry, at the hidden messages from home. In their rapture the one thing that none of them are doing, is paying any attention to three archeologists sat at a discreet table in the corner. Enola waves the other woman on. She glances around,

“Is everyone shut down?” They take a second to power down their augments, not wanting to be overheard. She covers her hand with her mouth, to hide her words. “They saw multiple skeletons. One of them was enormous. Like nothing we’ve seen so far.”

“Really?” Enola seems genuinely taken aback.

“Do you see what this means?” he adds. “This proves that the military have tampered with the whole thing.” He licks his lips and leans forward, closer to Enola. “This proves what we thought all along. They’ve already removed all the important artifacts.” Enola raises her voice slightly,

“Don’t they know that these finds belongs to everyone?”

“We know,” the thin woman agrees, resting the tips of her fingers on Enola’s hand. “We all feel the same,” she consoles.

“I bet the military know exactly what happened to them,” he adds bitterly.

“You know we’re only here to please the All-Earth Council,” Enola concedes. “Make it look to the folks back home as if the military are sharing the planet,” she snipes bitterly, taking a sip on her drink.

“And it’ll only get worse when they forget all about us,” the man adds. Enola gave him a perplexed look.

“Some of the new technicians told us that the land auctions have already begun back home,” the woman explains.

“Already?” Enola asks incredulously.

“The corporations are falling over themselves to throw cash at this place.” Enola slowly shakes her head, considering the consequences.

“Before we know it this place will be called ‘NuEarth’, and everyone will be trampling all over our digs with size twelve boots.” He bangs his glass on the table. “Except by then our sites will be called ‘AlienDisney’.”

“It won’t come to that,” Enola assures them. She looks into their skeptical eyes. “Will it?”

“You’ve been here too long Enola,” he tells her. “You don’t know the mood back home. No one cares about the aliens and what happened to them anymore.”

“That planet,” the woman adds, pointing out of the observation port below them, “will be crawling with billions of homo sapiens, before we get anywhere near to finding out what happened to the indigenous inhabitants of Fomalhaut Three.”

“I still don’t know,” Enola questions, shaking her head in disbelief. “This was an alien race for Christ’s sake. Someone must care?”

“Not back home,” the thin woman tells her categorically, “not with all the problems of Earth. Most people are too poor to care, and this all sounds too much like Mars. They just see millions of undeveloped square miles and the promise of jobs.”

“And certainly no one cares here,” he adds sarcastically, gesturing at the roughnecks and off-duty military milling around the deck. They look as if they care more about getting drunk and surviving another day. He powers up his augments, glancing at the overlaid time in his vision,

“We should be somewhere else,” he states. “We’re supposed to be packing our equipment for the elevator drop planet side. We’re leaving Stallitano in two hours.” Enola nods in agreement.

“Thanks for telling me the news so soon after you got back.”

“Anytime,” he answers, draining the rest of his drink as he rises from the table.

“We’ll see you soon,” the woman adds, shutting down her ipaper AI, rolling it up, and also rising from her chair. Enola powers up her various augments and implants.

“Gotta go,” he finishes, helping the thin woman from her seat.

Enola watches them leave the table and head quickly for the recreation deck's exit. They stride through the open hatch without looking back. She lets her gaze drift through the view deck below her feet, watching the endless, infinity of space drift slowly past the reinforced window. Every few minutes, the glorious explosion of colour that is the planet Fomalhaut Three, make its ponderous journey through her field of vision, obscuring all but the brighter stars as it slides by.

She grips her cold glass tightly every time it comes around. It was the reason that she is out here, so far away from home, at the farthest reaches of humanity’s expansions. She suddenly laughs softly to herself. Then, without knowing exactly why, she calls a picture of Hank into augmented vision.

The planet below her - was that even the right direction? - is the reason why Hank and her had first met. The reason why they were all here at all. The reason why they had fallen in love in the first place. Ultimately though, the planet beneath her was also the reason why they would spend the next few months apart.

She became aware of a slowly growing speck of light, as it fell toward her, towards the station.

At first, she had convinced herself that it was no more than just another star. But, on each carefully controlled spin that the station took on its engineered axis, each time it came back into view, it was larger and brighter than before. Until now she could almost make out the shape of the shuttle as it sped towards her.

She checks the time in her own vision augments, it was right on schedule. She had hoped that it was going to be early. That she could see him that much sooner. But the military ran its shuttles with the sort of precision that the mining and scientific transporters could never match.

She sips at her drink. Its artificial, Spartan taste reminds her just how many times it had been recycled. She checks the time again. Docking, customs, security and acclimatization would mean that he was still more than an hour away.

She glances around the recreation area. The weary bodies milling around are a mixture of off-duty personnel, spacers awaiting their departures and military enduring what must surely be the universe’s worst shore leave.

She found herself looking towards the circular entrance, willing another of her small band of colleagues to walk in. But she knows that she is the only one of her kind without something to do or somewhere to be. All of the others are waiting to go back planet side, on the shuttle’s return journey - to carry on the work that Hank and her led.

That he, for the foreseeable future at least, would carry on without her.

Excerpt 2 of theFomalhautPlague:

© 2013 Darren White

“Control, this is Mosaic Two,” the space suited figure said into his internal communicator. “Do you copy?” He edges slightly along the skin of the station as he waits for an answer. The projected face of his controller appears in one corner of his vision.

“Mosaic two,” the distorted voice crackles in his in-ear speakers, “this is control. Copy loud and clear. What do you want, Jack?”

“Control, I’ve just finished my exam of array twelve.” He looks towards the overlaid image of the controller. “Request permission to return to base?”

“Er, permission denied. Proceed to array thirteen and execute diagnostic.”

“Are you jerking me around or something?” he shouts angrily. “I’ve been E.V.A. for hours! Surely someone else can do this?” The head in the projected image drops to one side.

“Oh, stop it please,” he pleads, “you’ll have me crying next.”

“It’s not your ass roasting out here?” the suited figure complains, the annoyance and frustration evident in his voice.

“Look, you’re the one who asked for overtime!” the controller shouts.

“Yeah, but not now,” he complains, “and not out here for Christ sake.”

“Just do it, ok?” the controller insists.

“Thirteen?” he asked in defeat.

“Yeah thirteen.”

“Unlucky for some.” The controller kills the link and his image disappears abruptly, leaving the suited figure staring at the outside skin of the space station. He checks that his augment’s communication functions are disconnected, before adding,

“Asshole,” he shouts to himself, a smile on his lips. “Suckered you,” he whispers, pleased by his deception. He releases his grip on the metal skin, and allows himself to drift slowly back, away from the station. As soon as he considers himself far enough away, he mentally activates the jet suit controls, and steers himself to his right.

Tiny jets squirt out into the vacuum, propelling him forward. Then abruptly, they die and similar, smaller jets in front of him slow his orbit around the structure. He curves inwards, back towards the station. He reaches out with his gloved hands, touching the metal of the space station, and arrests his slight forward motion.

In his augmented vision he makes a quick text remark in a group conversation, the comment a preset signal for software to execute. He can’t feel it happen but the software disrupts his in vision ‘AllLife’ video recording, ending the video in a way that will look like a digital glitch. To anyone examining the stream, it will look like damage caused by a high-energy particle strike. He knows these augments will need at least thirty seconds to reboot. Plenty of time, although he feels uneasy at the thought that even these moments may be lost forever, left at the mercy of his unreliable biological memory.

His right hand slides towards the array controls, but something blocks his progress; something magnetically attached to the metal skin of the artificial satellite. He pulls the containers quickly away from the station hull and examines them. They are just two tiny featureless, metallic boxes, not much longer than his gloved hand is wide.

Suddenly, his augmented vision is interrupted by an attention-stealing advert for sexually available singles in the Fomalhaut system. He’s about to pay the skip fee when his augments begin to directly manipulate his desires with subtle synaptic stimulation and the release of manufactured chemicals. He can feel his arousal swell as the advert ends. He notes the link.

Desperate to return to the station, he frantically pulls off two similar rectangles, magnetically attached to his suit’s breastplate, with his other hand, and throws them towards the planet behind him. They spiral gracefully away from him, destined to burn up in the planet’s thick atmosphere, his augments highlighting their trajectory into the mesosphere. Then he quickly attaches the new blocks to his chest, in place of the discarded ones, leaving his hand nearby until he is sure that they are not also going to float away.

He turns first one way, and then the other, ensuring that he has not been overlooked by any nearby automata. Eagerly he turns back towards the control panel, and grudgingly imitates a diagnostic cycle on the sensor array. His recovery of the contraband secondary in his consciousness to someone he’s aching to meet from the advert.