Dadr'Ba
Authors: Tetsu'Go'Ru Tsu'Te
By
Tetsu’Go’Ru Tsu’Te
Ah’Ma’Go Publishing
Honolulu, Hawaii
Published by Ah’Ma’Go Publishing
Dadr’Ba Copyrigh
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2015
Ah’Ma’Go Publishing
Cover Art by Tetsu’Go’Ru Tsu’Te
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organizations, events, and incidents are fictitious, and the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to a real person, organization or event is utterly coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may b
e
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 permission in writing from the Publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015959731
ISBN: 0-9817327-2-0
ISBN-13: 978-0-9817327-2-5
First Edition: May 2016
This book is dedicated to Su’Zi
Our world has become uninhabitable, unchecked technology, industrialization, overpopulation, greed and war had poisoned our world.
The uncommitted attempts, distrust of our neighbors and unwillingness to make sacrifices that would through necessity cost the lives of millions of people forced our species into that age old philosophical debate; do we forfeit the few to save the many? Or even forfeit the many to save the entire species? If we allow ourselves to get backed into that corner, is our species even worth saving? We had made the choice, and it was doubt, delay, and inaction. Though not intentional, we chose to risk sacrificing the species. All because the world couldn’t agree on what to do, when to do it and who would pay the cost, in money, labor and lives.
This by itself would not have forced the launching of the arks, that we came to call, “Dadr’s.” Had it not been for two natural events.
Our world’s magnetic field was weakening and moving, signs that the world’s magnetic field was going to reverse, as it had reversed in the past. This time it was in conjunction with a steady increase in solar flare activity that if predictions held true, would together with our weakened magnetic field, strip off a significant portion of the world’s atmosphere, and threatening us with extinction.
Our technology enabled us to send out ark’s destined for exoplanets that had been identified as habitable and without intelligent life. The targets were examined closely with a variety of instruments and proven absent of mechanization or industrialization indicative of intelligent life and quite as peaceful as a deserted isle.
Prolog – The Future Remembered
Chapter 7, Su’Zi’s ToG Ceremony
Chapter 9, Dr. Pan’Ju Performs Su’Zi’s Bio-mod
Chapter 11, Su’Zi Wakes After Bio-mod
Chapter 12, P’Ko Turns Sixteen
Chapter 13, Detection of Radio Signals from O’M
Chapter 14, Su’Zi’s Boy Friend
Chapter 15, Chn’Gi Reports to CA Council
Chapter 17, Chn’Gi’s Reports to CA Council Two
Chapter 18, Su’Zi Visits Mi’Ka
Chapter 20, P’Ko and Mi’Ka Discuss his Mentor
Chapter 21, P’Ko and Mi’Ka Discuss P’Ko’s Mentor Part Two
Chapter 22, P’Ko’s Interview with Z’Shi
Chapter 23, P’Ko’s Bio-mod Approval
Chapter 25, Meeting at the Hn’Gri Bo’R
Chapter 28, Chi’Yo Reviews P’Ko’s Grad
Chapter 29, Chn’Gi Seeks Out Information
Chapter 30, P’Ko Gets Chn’Gi’s Reader
Chapter 31, P’Ko and Su’Zi at the Beach
Chapter 33, Chn’Gi Starts Using Reader
Chapter 34, Su’Zi Meets P’Ko after Mentoring
Chapter 35, P’Ko’s First Day at Work
Chapter 36, Chn’Gi Reads Or’Gn’s History
Chapter 37, Prep for Run with the Se’Ro’Bs
Chapter 39, Run with the Se’Ro’Bs
Chapter 41, Tn’s Psychic Reading
Chapter 42, Mi’Ka’s Counselling of P’Ko and Su’Zi
Chapter 44, Chn’Gi Gets Religion
Chapter 45, P’Ko’s Quarters Broken into
Chapter 46, P’Ko’s Burglary Investigation
Chapter 47, CASS Report on Failed Burglary
Chapter 48, Meeting of the Resistance
Chapter 51, Heroes’ Celebration
Chapter 52, Detection of Nuclear Detonations on O’M
Chapter 53, CASS Meeting Regarding O’Mi’s
Kr’T
[1]
pulled himself along the suspension line past the strategically spaced explosive armor meteoroid shields, towards the damaged section of the number one shield. The number one shield suffers the most frequent damage, and has increased in frequency since the ship began nearing O’M’s
[2]
Oort Cloud. The number one shield, due to its location usually suffers the kind of damage that can’t be repaired by the automated systems.
Having reached the edge of the number one shield, Kr’T unclipped from the tight suspension line and let himself fall out, or more accurately, thrown out to the end of his safety line. A dangerous move but one that allowed him a better view, but an action that he knew would bring a challenge from the monitors at job control that watched his every move. He didn’t care much about job control, they’ve worked with him long enough to expect him to stretch the limits, but can be relied on to get the job done.
At the end of his tether, Kr’T turned the adjustable attachment on his harness around so that he faced outward toward space, his tether straining under the centrifugal forces and causing blood to surge to his head. He immersed himself into the universe passing in front of him and around him. He spotted his favorite constellation and then started naming them to himself as they slowly passed in front of him, like the last time he and his daughter Su’Zi
[3]
visited their private observation port.
Seconds later, job control broke the moment of solitude. “Four-Tango-Seven-Three, is everything okay?” Job control, like all guards monitoring the inmates, is prohibited from using the inmate’s real names, required instead to use “the last four” of their alphanumeric conviction number, but the tone was cordial.
Kr’T, irritated by job controls interruption, responded with “everything’s fine, just backing off to better assess the damage.” Job control could see everything Kr’T could see from Kr’T’s helmet cam and knew that he had looked but wasn’t now looking at the damage. They already knew approximately where the damage and its extent by the visual monitors and impact sensors placed at key positions on the structure. Seismic data helps to assess the magnitude of the damage and general location. However, seismic data is perturbed by mining operations and fluctuations in the fusion rocket engine output caused by the ship passing through dust or a gas cloud creating a kind of space turbulence. The number one shield is the only one that has limited angles of view, and only a personal visual examination can precisely assess the damage.
Turning back, Kr’T radioed in what Job Control already knew, that the damage is confined to a single explosive panel.
It’s been three years since his capture and sentencing and over seven hundred years since the half way point, the braking maneuver and the Touch of God Event.
Had this grain of sand hit, seven hundred years ago, when the ship was traveling at its peak velocity, the damage would have been a thousand times greater. Fortunately, the halfway area of space was tens of light years away from any system, and devoid of anything much larger than hydrogen atoms and cosmic rays.
The ship has slowed down dramatically since and a grain of sand meteoroid only packed the energy of a hand grenade. A large meteorite that can’t be detected, avoided or destroyed in time can punch through several of the shields each causing an explosion the size of a house.
Each layer of the shield protects the main body of the ship; the outward direction of the explosion disperses the energy of the meteoroid strike and simultaneously helps to slow the forward motion of the ship. Repairs are made by Kr’T and the other convicts on Kr’T’s work detail.
Upon Kr’T’s conviction his choice was simple “volunteer” for hard, dangerous work or be “forcibly retired” the CA’s (Central Authorities) pseudonym for execution. There’s no wasted labor aboard a starship in interstellar space.
As much as Kr’T hates the CA and its oppressive totalitarian regime, knowing that this work is helping to bring himself and his family to their new home on a new world is comforting.
This ship, the only home they have ever known has been traveling for almost two thousand years. They are now only around one hundred years from arrival, and most of his family and friends will step foot on a new world. Kr’T will see it, he’s only one hundred thirty-seven, young by most standards, most people on Dadr’Ba
[4]
live well into their two or three hundreds. Kr’T could expect the same… providing he survives his sentence.
Doing this labor, although benefiting the CA is essential for the survival of his people.
He had taken a risk dangling at the end of only one safety line that kept him from being thrown out into interstellar space. If that line were severed and he wasn’t caught by the safety nets shot from catapults along Dadr’Ba’s perimeter, he could be lost in space forever. His space suits systems would eventually run out of resources, and he’d slowly expire, never to retire.
A more likely fate would be to get caught in the ship’s powerful magnetic field and slowly drawn into the fusion rocket engine intakes. A horrible process that meant risk getting beat up against the sloped meteoroid shields, not having the kinetic energy needed to detonate them, then mashed against particle collection plates on his way to annihilation in nuclear fire.
More likely, due to his relatively slow velocity and large mass, he would fly fairly well centered, guided by the ship’s artificial electromagnetic field. He would skirt passed the particle collection plates into the electrostatic fields that focus and accelerate the input to the engine, straight into the ultra-strong electromagnetic fields that contain the front edge of the fusion reaction. The heat increasing as he passes each stage he would first fry, then vaporize and finally ionize. His plasma would be squeezed, heated, channeled and accelerated through increasing strong energy fields until finally, his lighter atoms will be squeezed together with so much force that will fuse. Causing the release nuclear energy, the same energy that powers stars, impossible to contain but instead focused out the ships rocket exhaust.
As expected but forgotten, job control came alive over the radio, the noise shattered the intense silence, causing Kr’T to recoil out of the solitude he was experiencing. Kr’T activated his space suits HUD (heads up display) that he had turned off to clear his view of the universe and checked his suit. His suit, a tightly fitted, millimeters thick material that uses direct contact against his skin, and constriction bands to compensate for the intense vacuum of the interstellar space. A compressed air system is necessary only for his face plate and breathing apparatus.
Kr’T thought he could feel a tingling through his suit, imagining the attack of the vacuum, or more accurately the nothingness hid underneath the vacuum. Nothingness so intense, that, over time, acts as an acid, striving to rip away every molecule it can from the intruder. It being nothings way of saying “you don’t belong here.” Space, especially interstellar space, hates matter, and anything to do with it and at every turn tries to eliminate it. Kr’T then realized that the tingling must be a side effect of him being head first at four G’s at the end of a safety line.
Kr’T began to make his way back toward Dadr’Ba and in front of him Kr’T saw the nuclear fusion engine exhaust in the distance, it’s small diameter, only meters across, yet impossibly bright giving the appearance of it being many times further away than the five hundred meters that separated it from him. Kr’T could feel the heat and noticed his suit’s systems adjust in response, its surface, changing color from a near black to a metallic silver facing the heat, reflecting the thermal radiation as the thermoelectric membrane compensated for the heat that was able to penetrate. Kr’T noticed that the suits thermals were acting a little slow, he’d need to report that later.
The fight between the energetic photons, high kinetic energy ions, and Dadr’Ba’s magnetic field produced a kaleidoscopic light show of blues, turquoise’ and purple’s, with a rare red and orange in front of the slowly decelerating ship.
Kr’T followed up the beam with his eyes as it stretched out as far as his eyes and his suits HUD with its built-in camera system could see. The wave effects causing ripples or bands to run down the beam of super-heated plasma, in turn causing it to disperse slowly. Kr’T used his suits camera and filters to zoom in and see a light show as small perturbations in the plasma jet, causing it to splinter, sending off small jets making the pillar of fire appear to sparkle.
Farther out and very faint today, Kr’T could see the Aurora, waves of color passing across the plasma perhaps thousands of kilometers distant. Caused by the plasma interacting with clouds of hydrogen, (if you can call hydrogen molecules separated by meters a cloud) all to be captured in Dadr’Ba’s magnetic field and fed into its nuclear fusion engine.
Kr’T could see occasional streaks of light as the plasma gobbled up larger molecules and meteorites, some perhaps like the one that caused the damage he was now repairing. It must have been one lucky meteorite to have made it through or around the plasma beam pushing out in front of Dadr’Ba. The plasma beam that everyone on Dadr’Ba lives to support, the beam that’s retarding Dadr’Ba’s velocity preparing it for gravitational capture in our new O’M’s system.
Dadr’Ba’s artificial magnetic field pushes charged particles out of the impact zone Kr’T is repairing and down around into the fusion rocket intake on the other end of the massive ship. The glare from the blast is so bright that even at five hundred meters away it makes it difficult for Kr’T to see his repair job. His helmets automated shielding system is blocking out too much of his view. He may have damaged it by looking directly at the plasma beam for too long. Job control didn’t complain; they must have appreciated the view too. Kr’T adjusted his helmets mechanical shield and pressed on.
Kr’T pulled himself back to Dadr’Ba struggling against the four G’s of centrifugal force from the ships spin, thankful that he had been genetically engineered to handle the four G’s here at the outer edge of the spinning ship. The force declining to a more comfortable one to two G’s where the bulk of Dadr’Ba’s population resides within the ship. Kr’T examined the damaged shield brackets and supports and notified job control what components are needed for the repair.
Kr’T secured the damaged plate and mounting bracket then maneuvered on the suspension rails to position himself in the right spot to release them. They fall away, caught on the retention cables and returned for recycling or repair via the same cable and rail system that brought him to the site and deliver the replacement parts.
Once the bracket system is fixed, the blast plate management system will promote the number two plate into the now vacant number one position and number three promoted to number two, and so on until the meteorite shield system is complete and fully functional once again.
The damaged number one plate and brackets fell free dangled on the cable retention system and began their trip back to the ship’s maintenance airlock. Kr’T would have a little break waiting for the transport system to return with the repair brackets. Kr’T relaxed to admire the view, wishing he could share this spectacular view with his wife and two children, sending them a mental message of love and how much he missed them.
Then it happened, a larger than average sized grain of sand meteorite, hit the plate nearest to him and the explosive armor material detonated. The odds of this happening twice in the same place so quickly was astronomical. The armor is made to explode in sections and only when struck with very high-velocity impacts. The blast totally obliterated the particle, the force of the blast directed in such a way as to assist with the desired motion of the ship.
A significant portion of the plate exploded in a blinding flash of light. The explosion and blast occurred so close to Kr’T that it made a sound inside Kr’T’s helmet in spite of it being in the noiseless vacuum of space.
Had this meteorite struck Kr’T it would have ripped through the flexible layered ceramics that make up the outer layer of his suit, easily penetrating the carbon fiber ballistic material making up the inner shell of the tight fitting suit.
The damage would be catastrophic; hydrostatic shock on his flesh would explode the fluid-filled vessels of his body, possibly sending a shock wave to his heart causing it too, to explode. Depending on the location the exit wound could rip a hole the size of a person’s head, or tear off limbs, it would be instant death.
As it was, he and the remnants of the blast plate were exploded out into space with the added boost by the G forces generated at the edge of the rotating ship.
The once taught retention cables flailed freely in the vacuum; useless because the retention cable Kr’T was using was now part of the damage. The remainder of the damaged and detonated plate now came free; its mounting brackets some of which Kr’T had removed for the repair fell free, along with Kr’T. The plate a severely twisted, mangled outline of a shell with many jagged edges and scarred with blast marks followed Kr’T out into space.
Kr’T stunned, unable to move, the echo of the explosion still reverberating through his senses, suddenly weightless, no longer felt control of his body. The ship seemed to cartwheel and fly away as if launched by a gigantic catapult. The remnant of the distorted blast plate spun end over end, a large ragged hole through its center. The spinning plate intermittently blocked Kr’T’s view, providing a brief glimpse of the ship. On each rotation, the ship grew further and further away.