Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (65 page)

With the government’s blessing, the
GMO companies have been working tirelessly to ensure that you don’t
know if you’re eating a GMO product. Despite the long and loud
protestations of numerous consumer groups, there’s no requirement
for labels on food products to say if the product contains GMOs. In
fact, at one point, there was a strong push to allow GMO foods to
carry the “organic” label, again based on the concept of
substantial equivalence. And in what I have to confess has been a
rather shameful act for the Land of the Free and the Home of the
Brave, the United States has been trying to browbeat the European
countries into changing their food labeling, which currently
requires GMO products to be labeled as such, to be more in line
with U.S. labeling standards.

It was also interesting to discover
who really determines if these GMO products are safe: the companies
that produce them. There isn’t a third-party “honest broker”
testing the products, and there’s a substantial body of evidence on
the web indicating that scientists who try to perform independent
testing often have sudden “career issues.” Or worse.

The companies do, however, put their
products through an expensive testing process. While this looks
great on paper, the net result is that they provide “proof” that
their GMOs are safe, and the government rubber stamps it. The only
real effect of requiring these expensive tests is that it’s
extremely difficult for new companies to join in the fun unless
they have very deep pockets. It’s like a high-stakes game in the
back room of a shady night club. If you want to play, you’d better
be ready to pay.

Even more interesting was the
discovery that GMOs are patented products, and the companies that
make them have a ferocious reputation for going after anyone who
may be infringing on their patent rights. Even if GMO seeds were to
accidentally spill out of a passing truck into a farmer’s field
(where non-GMO crops were being raised, in our hypothetical case),
if the seeds took root and were “discovered” by a company
representative who just happened to later wander through that
farmer’s field, the company could sue the hapless farmer for
infringing on the company’s patent rights. From what I learned
during my research, this wasn’t a rare occurrence: it happened (and
still happens) a lot.

The economic effects are also
interesting. Perhaps the most spectacular example is GMO cotton
seed that India imported from the United States. These cotton
varieties have led to a series of devastating crop failures, and
instead of being the miracle plants for which India had hoped, they
have left many Indian farmers deep in debt after spending a fortune
for the seed. Suicides among these farmers has become a commonplace
occurrence, the soil where the GMO cotton has been planted is
suffering nutrient depletion (here in the U.S. we get around that
simply by dumping more artificial fertilizer into the soil, which
has its own negative effects), and there have even been reports of
livestock dying after eating the plants.

Last of all (well, not really:
entire books have been written on this topic!) is the issue of what
impact GMOs have on our health. This has probably been argued about
almost as much as Global Warming (a.k.a. Climate Change), but if
you look around on the web, there are more than just a few
documented reports of serious health issues, including fatal
reactions, pointing back to the consumption of GMO products. I also
have to wonder at the seemingly ever-rising trend of cancer and
other major illnesses: where is all that coming from?

And while you may think the
metamorphosis of the rhesus monkey in the story into a nasty
harvester was pure fiction, there is evidence indicating that
chunks of DNA large enough to contain a complete gene can survive
the digestive process. Not only that, but those genes can be
absorbed into your body’s cells. It doesn’t mean you’re going to
turn into a bug-eyed monster overnight (hopefully), but it brings
new meaning to the old adage that you are what you eat.

At the end of the day, it’s tempting
to just write all this up to corporate greed. After all, with some
of the GMO companies making annual profits in the billions, not far
behind the pharmaceutical companies (with which some of the GMO
companies are very closely related, by the way), there’s certainly
a lot of motivation to make sure GMOs are everywhere and eaten by
everyone.

But as my wife and I were talking
about it one day, I suddenly blurted, mostly tongue-in-cheek, “You
know, this is all so loony that only aliens could be behind it.” On
reflection, however, it didn’t seem so strange at all.

And that, dear friend, is how this
story began…

IF YOU
ENJOYED
SEASON OF THE
HARVEST
…

First Contact
is the lead novel of the
bestselling
In Her Name
science fiction/fantasy series. If you think you
might enjoy some “rollicking space opera,” as one reader put it,
give
First Contact
a try. The best thing is that it’s
absolutely free in a variety of ebook
formats
, so you’ve got nothing at all
to lose but a bit of time checking it out.

To give you a taste, here is the
first chapter — enjoy!

***

Captain Owen
McClaren was extremely tense, although a casual observer would
never have thought so. Commanding the survey vessel
TNS Aurora
, he was one
of the best officers in the fleet, and to his crew he had never
appeared as anything but calm and in control. Even when one of the
ship’s newly refitted reactors had suffered a breach during their
last run into dry dock, McClaren’s deep voice had never wavered,
his fatherly face had never betrayed a hint of fear or apprehension
as he personally directed the engineering watch to contain the
breach. A man of unusual physical and moral courage, he was the
perfect captain for the exploratory missions the
Aurora
and her sister
ships mounted into distant space, seeking new homes for
humanity.

McClaren had made thousands of jumps
in his twenty-year career, but every one was like the very first:
an adrenaline joyride. As the transpace sequence wound down to
zero, his heart would begin to pound and his muscles tensed like
spring steel. It wasn’t fear that made him react that way, although
there were enough things that could go wrong with a jump to make
fear a natural enough reaction.

No, what made the
forty-three-year-old former middleweight boxing champion of the
Terran Naval Academy hold the arms of his command chair in a
white-knuckle grip wasn’t fear. It was anticipation. To
Aurora’s
captain, every
jump, particularly out here in uncharted space, was a potential
winning lottery ticket, the discovery of a lifetime. No matter
where the
Aurora
wound up, as long as she arrived safely, there was bound to
be a wealth of astrogational information to help human starships
travel ever farther from Man’s birthplace: Earth.

On rare occasions, precious
habitable planets were to be found. Finding such systems was the
primary goal of the survey ships. McClaren was currently the
fleet’s leading “ace,” with twelve habitable planets to his credit
in return for nearly fifteen years of ship-time, sailing through
uncharted space.

“Stand by for
transpace sequence,” the pilot announced, her words echoing through
every passageway and compartment in the
Aurora’s
five hundred meter
length.

McClaren tensed even more, his
strong arm and back muscles flexing instinctively as if he were
back in the ring, preparing to land a solid upper cut to the chin
of an imaginary opponent. But his calm expression never wavered.
“Very well,” he answered, his dark brown eyes drinking in the
growing torrent of information on the navigation
display.

“Computer
auto-lock engaged,” interjected a faux female voice reassuringly.
McClaren always had to suppress a grimace: the one thing he had
never liked about
Aurora
was the computer’s voice. It reminded him too
much of his first wife.

For the next few
seconds, the crew was little more than excess baggage as the ship’s
computer guided the transition from hyperspace back into the
Einsteinian universe with a precision measured in quadrillionths of
a second. While the bridge, which was buried deep in the
Aurora’s
core habitation
section, had no direct observation windows, the wraparound display
depicted the eerie streams of light that swirled around the ship in
complete detail. But what the human eye saw in the maelstrom of
quantum physics beyond the ship’s hyperdrive field was an illusion.
It was real in one sense, but in another it wasn’t. Space and time
as humans commonly understood it did not exist in this realm. As
the captain of a starship, McClaren had to understand both the
theory and the practical application of hyperspace and the means to
travel through it. But he was content in the knowledge that he
never could have come up with the breakthroughs that allowed this
miracle to happen: he stood on the shoulders of the scientific
giants who had made the first test jump into hyperspace long before
he was born.

While in hyperspace, the display
would normally show the computer’s assessment of the relative
location of stars and other known celestial waypoints as the ship
moved along its straight-line (relatively speaking) course. But
McClaren always cleared the display to show what was really outside
the ship just before they dropped back into normal space. It was a
sight he never tired of.

“Ten seconds...” the computer’s
voice began counting down to the transition.
“Five...four...three...two...one....sequence initiated. Hyperspace
Engines disengaged.”

The display suddenly shifted, the
swirling light streams condensing into a bright yellow sun against
a background of stars. McClaren knew that the system had several
planets; gravitational perturbations observed from their last jump
point had confirmed that much. The question was whether there were
any orbiting at a distance from the star where water could exist as
a liquid. For where there was liquid water, there was the
possibility of carbon-based life. The trick now was to find them.
Planets were huge close up, but in the vast expanse of a star
system they seemed incredibly small.

“Engineering confirms hyperspace
engines are secure, sir,” the executive officer, Lieutenant
Commander Rajesh Kumar, reported. “Engineering is ready to answer
all bells, and the ship is secured for normal space.”

Nodding his thanks to his exec,
McClaren turned to the most important person currently on the
bridge: the navigator. “Raisa, what’s the word?”

The navigator
looked like she would have given McClaren a run for his money in
the boxing ring. Big-boned and heavily muscled, Lieutenant Raisa
Marisova had in fact been a champion wrestler in her college years.
But it was her genius at stellar astrogation that had won her a
place on the
Aurora’s
all-volunteer crew.

“Well...” she murmured as she
rechecked her readings for what McClaren knew was probably the
fifth time in the few moments the ship had dropped back into normal
space. Raisa was always able to confirm the ship’s emergence point
so quickly because her calculations for pointing the various
telescopes and other sensors at known stars to make a positional
fix were always so precise. “It seems we are...right where we are
supposed to be,” she said as she turned and smiled at her captain,
“give or take a few meters. We’re above the ecliptic plane based on
our pre-jump survey information. Now it’s up to the survey team to
find your next habitable planet, captain.”

McClaren grinned,
then opened a channel to the entire ship. “Well, crew, it looks
like we’ve made another successful jump, and emerged right on
target. The bad news is that we’re even farther out in the Middle
of Nowhere. But that’s what they pay us for. Great job, everyone.”
The last few words were more than just a token verbal pat on the
back: he truly meant it. Unlike most transits that took regular
ships into hyperspace for a few days or even a week or two,
the
Aurora
routinely made jumps that lasted for weeks or months. While
McClaren’s crew made it look easy, he knew quite well that an
amazing amount of planning and preparation went into every jump,
and his crew followed it up with painstaking diligence every moment
they were in hyperspace. It wasn’t just that they didn’t want to
wind up somewhere other than where they had planned, or because
their captain expected perfection. It was because they had no
intention of settling for second best. Period. “Everybody gets an
extra round on me when we get back to the barn. Carry
on.”

The bridge crew grinned at one
another: the captain ran up a huge bar tab on every mission, but he
never failed to deliver when the ship made port.

They had no way of knowing that all
but one of them would be dead in a few short hours.

***

The stranger’s arrival was no
surprise to the Imperial warships that orbited the Settlements on
the third and fourth planets from the star. While even the greatly
advanced technology of the Empire could not track ships while in
hyperspace, they could easily detect the gravity spikes of vessels
about to emerge in normal space. The stranger had been detected
many hours before, as measured in the time of humans.