Legacy of Pandora Read online

  Legacy

  of

  Pandora

  Shan Takhu: Book One

  Eric Michael Craig

  Copyright © 2018 Eric Michael Craig

  All rights reserved. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author and publisher.

  Cover Art: Bristow Design

  Cover Design: Ducky Smith

  PUBLISHED BY

  Rivenstone Press

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Next Book in the Shan Takhu Legacy

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  Other Works by Eric Michael Craig

  About the Author and Links

  Dramatis Personae

  Jephora Cochrane

  Commander Jakob Waltz

  Petra “Rocky” Rocovicz

  Chief Engineer Jakob Waltz

  Kiro Kamoto

  Pilot Jakob Waltz

  Shona McKeigh

  Navigator Jakob Waltz

  Alyx Donegal

  Sensor Technician Jakob Waltz

  Chei Lu

  Nuclear Specialist Jakob Waltz

  Dr. Danel Cross

  Geophysicist Jakob Waltz

  Dr. Anju Soresh

  Physician Jakob Waltz

  Corin Stone

  EVAOps Specialist Jakob Waltz

  Seva Johansen

  EVAOps Specialist Jakob Waltz

  Katryna Roja

  Chancellor FleetCartel

  Isao Nakamiru

  Admiral FleetCom Operations

  Jaxton Quintana

  Admiral L-2 Shipyard Ops FleetCom

  Graison Cartwright

  Chief of Staff for Chancellor Roja

  Elayne Jeffers

  Captain Armstrong, FleetCom

  Cassandra Mei

  Captain Challenger, FleetCom

  Carter Takata

  Captain Galen, FleetCom

  Nathaniel Evanston

  Captain Archer, FleetCom

  Anson Hayes

  First Officer Archer, FleetCom

  Tamir bin Ariqat

  Chancellor SourceCartel

  Derek Tomlinson

  Chancellor DoCartel

  Dr. Arun Markhas

  Chancellor DevCartel

  Dr. Tana Drake

  Chancellor WellCartel

  Carmen Ambrose

  Prime Minister Executive Council

  Paulson Lassiter

  Steward of the Human Union

  Edison Wentworth

  Investigator General

  Josiah Carsten

  Deputy Inspector

  Dr. Ian Whitewind

  Science Officer, Hector

  Zora Murphy

  Materials Reprocessing, SourceCartel

  Hector: Neptune L-4 Trojan Cluster: Date: 2232.094:

  Thirty seconds. The timer scrolled across the bottom of the screen. Relentless. Certain.

  Unavoidable.

  He sat staring at the display, his eyes unable to focus on the numbers.

  He was afraid.

  And alone.

  Beyond the edges of civilization, with only a clock to watch over his last fleeting seconds.

  Weeks ago he’d run out of options, and hope had died soon after. So he made peace with himself and pointed his ship toward the inevitable.

  Twenty seconds. The stars ahead blinked out as he dove forward. He could see it, almost visible in the dim light of the distant sun. Dark, ominous, and unforgiving.

  The engines behind him coughed once. Then again. The roaring fell away as his fuel supply failed. The last of the reaction mass exhausted, gravity would finish the task, hauling him to his destiny.

  He tapped the control to jettison the marker buoy, listening to its thrusters hissing against the outer skin of the ship as it shot off into the darkness. He knew it would remain trapped in orbit as certainly as he had found himself ensnared, but it gave him some solace that his last thoughts and actions might live past his own mortality. If anyone ever came looking for him.

  Ten seconds.

  He floated free from the seat and closed his eyes.

  Counting down the numbers in his mind …

  CHAPTER ONE

  Jakob Waltz: Neptune L-4 Trojan Cluster:

  “Commander, report to ConDeck immediately.”

  Jephora Cochrane was not the type to take his duty lightly, but his engineer’s tone made every word an order as she ripped him from sleep an hour early.

  Petra “Rocky” Rocovicz always sat third watch alone. No one on the crew wanted to spend time working with her, except as absolutely necessary. She didn’t mean to be offensive, but she had a way of expressing herself that was brutally forceful.

  Machinery didn’t care if she spoke her mind. People on the other hand, were less fault-tolerant.

  “What’s the problem?” he asked, pulling the seal-edge of his coverlet loose and rolling slowly toward the open air. He tried to keep his frustration from showing in his tone.

  “Payload Four is lost,” the chief engineer said.

  “How the frag do you lose 500 billion tons of ice?” he asked.

  “Is good question,” she said.

  “I’ll suit up and be on deck in five,” he said pushing off his bed and over to the autovalet.

  Being a native of Juno, his light-world ectomorph physiology would never function well at anything above a tenth-g, and working with a mixed-physio crew meant that he had to be ready at any time for hard acceleration. His Pressure Support Exosuit let him work on an even footing with any of the heavy-grav mesomorphs on the crew by boosting his strength and compressing his extremities and torso with enough force to keep the blood flowing to vital body parts. Like his lungs and brain.

  As the suit’s polymorphic liner wrapped around him, he flashed through the familiar sensation of suffocating under tons of water before the actuators kicked in and began carrying his breathing. It was a moment of terror that anyone who’d ever wrapped into a PSE knew.

  The autovalet’s arms finished the rest of the dressing process. Contact pads first, then legs, arms, torso shell, and finally neck-support struts all slipped into place
. He resented having to wear his suit because every time he put it on, it reminded him why he’d never been given a real command after twenty years in FleetCom.

  A nearly inaudible beep told him the process was complete and his augmented body sprang to life. He shoved himself forward, a slug encased in an armor shell. He hated it, but it didn’t matter because without it, he’d be dead at an acceleration level most of his crew could take naked.

  He thought about grabbing something to eat on the way by the galley, but instead he swung himself feet first up the chute toward the ConDeck. After four years working with her, he could tell that Rocky sounded worried, even through her gruff.

  Flipping out onto the deck he stopped abruptly, snapping his maglock boots down with a firm click.

  Ordinarily, Dutch flew the Jakob Waltz with little human intervention, but this morning, Rocky hovered over the shoulders of both the pilot and navigator. They occupied two workstations and had several viewscreens oriented around them.

  It was routine for one of the flight crew to sit watch as a matter of formality, although the only one who had anything to do while they traveled from one payload to the next was the engineer. When she was on Con duty, the rest of the crew found excuses to be anywhere else, so she’d obviously summoned them. And neither of them looked happy about it.

  Without turning or giving him a chance to ask for a report, she shook her head and pointed to the wall kiosk. “You will want double-black.”

  “What happened to the payload?” he asked as he headed over to the VAT to get his hardball. He passed on the double caffeine.

  “At 0218 ship time this morning, Payload Four began streaming anomalous data that indicated it was rotating. Twenty-seven minutes later it ceased transmitting,” Dutch said. The Artificially Aware computer was as much a part of the crew as the human members, but fortunately it wasn’t prone to Rocky’s fits of frustration.

  “Did we shut it down?” he asked, turning back to face her. “Maybe one of the units came loose or melted a blowhole and lost compression?”

  “Da, I pulled plug as soon as I saw was foobed,” she said. “It does not appear to be ice failure, as instruments showed nominal pressure and heat. Has to be navigation error.”

  Growling, the navigator launched herself toward the VAT to get a drink. The engineer was obviously poking fire into a raw nerve, since Shona was responsible for programming the iceberg’s trajectory. Another ectomorph, she was far too frail for a tangle with Rocky, but she looked ready to give it a try. Instead, she jerked the nozzle from its clip and shot her cup full before she slammed the tube back into place.

  Hopefully without added stimulant.

  “Assuming it’s rotating can we get a visual to confirm?” Jeph asked.

  “I am attempting to locate it on the NavCom optics,” Dutch said. “However it seems that Payload Four is substantially off course.”

  “Excuse me?” Shona said, her PSE hissing audibly as she hurled herself back to her station. “Under full thrust, it would take hours to move visibly from this distance.”

  “That nogo,” Kiro said leaning over from his pilot seat and looking at her screen. “Maybe it smacked something? That might kick it off a long ways. If so, there’d be debris we could track to find it.”

  “There it is!” Shona said, rotating the view several degrees and locking the reticle around her target. “There’s no debris, but I got it from the spectrographic signature of its vapor trail.” She paused and scratched her nose as she studied the image. “That can’t be right. It’s above us.” She pulled her console closer and furiously tapped calculations into the navigational computer. Holding up one finger she waited for it to display the results.

  “As in a higher energy orbit?” Jeph asked.

  “As in,” she confirmed as she read the output.

  “Is not possible,” Rocky said. “Payload is slower than we are. It must fall inward.”

  “If our position is accurate, then she is correct,” Dutch said. “It is approximately two hundred thousand kilometers further from the sun than we are.”

  “Is our position accurate?” the commander asked, picking up on her meaning and feeling acid trying to boil through his stomach wall.

  “Working on it.” Shona opened her navscreen and checked their stellar orientation. The targeting rings located the stars they used to align themselves and flashed green to indicate a lock. “Our heading is correct, but it’ll take me a few minutes to get our physical position.” She punched more commands into her console and Jeph could hear the servomotors swinging the main communications dish as she located several beacons. The Deep-Space Positioning Network signals were weak this far out, so she had to manually target and integrate them.

  After several seconds, she pushed herself back into her chair and shook her head. She put the current positions for the Jakob Waltz and Payload Four up on the main screen. “We’re a quarter million klick off course,” she said quietly.

  “What the hell could have caused that?” the commander asked.

  “It would require a massive gravity source to deflect our trajectory by that amount,” the computer said.

  “Gravity source?” Kiro asked. “Like a planet?”

  “Unless we were right on top of it, that amount would make it substantially more than a planet,” Shona said, making significant eye contact with the commander.

  “Can we correct that?” the commander asked.

  “It’ll be dirty math, but I should be able to,” she said. “We’ll have to clean up our trajectory afterward.”

  “Do it,” Jeph said as he strapped down and watched her working the numbers into her console. He punched into the shipwide com. “All hands, prepare for emergency maneuvers and a sustained hard burn.”

  “On your orders,” Kiro said, looking over at the commander once Shona’s calculations were on his pilot panel.

  “Standby,” Jeph said. He watched the crew status lights shift from yellow to green as each of them reported ready. The last one was Alyx Donegal. She was the sensor technician and the only other ectomorph on the crew. It was still before first shift, so she probably hadn’t suited up yet and it took what felt like an eternity for her to get her into her PSE.

  Finally, her light turned green and Jeph nodded. “Let’s get on the pedal, shall we?”

  The ship pivoted for almost a minute before the engine rumbled to life. Kiro edged them up to two-and-a-half g and held that mark for almost five minutes.

  “Shona, how long ‘til you can confirm our new trajectory?” he asked, shaking off the fog that clung to him after the engine cut out.

  “Yah, hang on,” she said, leaning forward to get a new set of beacon locks. She shook her head and rubbed her eyes. “Sorry. Give me a few minutes, boss.”

  Jeph understood the gray fugue that clung to her brain after the blood flowed in the wrong direction during a burn. She came from a much lighter gravity colony than he did, so she struggled even more with hard acceleration.

  “That’s impossible,” she said. The green line that had been their previous flight path disappeared as she put their new position on the plot. It sat squarely on the same heading they’d been traveling. “Our course hasn’t changed.”

  “Dutch, can you confirm that?” he said.

  “Confirmed commander,” Dutch said. “Internal accelerometers indicate that we have added seven thousand meters per second to our velocity, but we have not deflected from our previous trajectory.”

  Executive Council Chamber: Galileo Station: Lunar Lagrange One

  FleetCartel Chancellor Katryna Roja stood at the podium in the center of the Executive Council Chamber and looked up at the Prime Minister and the Union Steward. She smoothed the front of her black dress uniform with a firm tug and squared her shoulders as she scanned the room. FleetCom, as the operations branch of Roja’s cartel, was a non-military space navy and her service uniform carried an air that set her apart in a crowd. She knew its sharp lines gave her an edge when she wa
s in the Council Chamber. A veteran of three decades of space service, she projected confidence that came across in her appearance. Formality on the podium translated to respect in a debate.

  As a heavy-world endomorph that lived most of her life in light gravity, she looked much younger than the reality of her sixty years. Already entering her third term in office, she was at the median age of the chancellors, yet wielded an exceptional amount of power for as early in her political career as she was.

  Each of the chancellors seated around her also stood at the top of a specific technical or social discipline, and represented the interests of the millions of aligned members in their respective cartels. The Union Steward set the executive agenda based on the represented will of the unaligned majority, while the Chancellery and the Prime Minister voted to codify law from that and that alone. No one else carried any weight in running the entirety of human civilization and as a result, the Human Union operated as a well-balanced technocracy.

  The Chamber was a lofty pinnacle with rarified air, but what they had achieved in these halls was how the Union maintained the peace and kept humanity alive after the Great Collapse sent humankind out onto the rocks of the solar system.

  Although Chancellor Roja’s private personality stood at odds with the showmanship of the arena, she understood the game intimately. Sometimes though, she resented the need to make speeches. Particularly when it was the same one she’d made on several previous occasions.

  “We’ve covered this before,” she said, clearing her throat and locking eyes with the Prime Minister.

  “Since Chancellor Tomlinson took his position over DoCartel, he’s argued that FleetCartel has a stranglehold on the operations of the Union. We all know this is absolutely preposterous.

  “FleetCartel does have a limited check against the abuse of power. But this is the exact same check that each cartel has over the others.