Month: February 2021

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Earth’s first interstellar mission … An alien colony in ruins … Their fight for survival has only just begun. Called “True Science Fiction” … A must-read!


When Jack Harrison climbed down the short ladder from the airlock and stepped onto the debris covered soil, the ground crackled with the sound of dried leaves and twigs. Warm sunlight shined through his helmet, making him almost forget the decade he just spent captaining Earth’s first ship to another star system. The serene tropical surroundings, though, stood in stark contrast to the long abandoned structures that lay nearby.

Evidence points to a massacre – the systematic extermination of an alien colony hundreds of millennia ahead of humanity. Time, however, has erased any trace of the attackers. Jack and his crew barely start probing the ruins before their curiosity betrays them as an abandoned alien device cuts them off from their main ship. Lost and short on supplies, survival soon becomes their only goal. Even their short-lived rescue by an alien race, who themselves are under siege, offers little hope. As they struggle to find a way home, signs begin pointing to a danger darker than any they could have foreseen. Jack knows that playing it safe may no longer be an option – but his only other choice is to confront a threat that they don’t even begin to understand.

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Narrative

Troubling Conclusions

Over the years, Ursula Doorne had done a lot of work with statistics. Modern radio astronomy was just too heavily dependent upon statistical analysis of massive amounts of data for a professional astronomer to not master that subject. And since she’d come up here to the Moon, she’d been involved in analyzing data on projects very far afield from her actual specialties.

However, she’d never looked at any data as disturbing as what had just come in from Schirrasburg’s Medlab. What Tanner had told her was scuttlebutt, rumint, hearsay. But the numbers scrolling across the screen before her were the course of illness for one after another human being.

No, she was not going to have Spruance Del Curtin sanitize this data for analysis. That kid was just too damned perceptive, and he had the Shepard attitude about working the system.

What really worried her was the simple fact that this was not a random selection of people from a general population, as data from a dirtside hospital would’ve been. You didn’t get up here unless you were fit and healthy, and the mandatory exercise ensured you maintained your fitness. That meant she was working with a much higher health baseline than any data coming from Earth.

The typical epidemic hit hardest among the most vulnerable populations: the very young, the very old, those with pre-existing conditions, and those whose lives were in perpetual disarray. And in the early days of the diablovirus pandemic, anecdotal evidence would seem to have borne that out. She still remembered the human-interest spots on various news stations’ websites about it sweeping through homeless camps, the desperate searches for next-of-kin for deceased who often had only the most tenuous ties to society. And of course the nursing homes — she’d gotten some letters from home about various elderly relatives falling ill, being taken to the hospital, not making it.

In fact, she had gotten an impression that the diablovirus had cut a pretty clean swathe through those parts of the dirtside population Rather like those early villages up in the mountains of Asia, where travelers were reporting nothing but corpses in the houses, and domestic animals wandering the streets and fields.

But a healthy population, mostly in the late-twenties to early-fifties demographics, should not be showing the patterns of deaths and serious illnesses she was seeing — unless the disease itself was one of those statistical outliers that somehow combined high communicability with severe symptoms. Ursula wasn’t by any means an expert on infectuous diseases, but as she understood things, the higher the communicability, the less severe an illness tended to be, for the simple reason that if the disease hit people hard, they didn’t move around as much and spread the disease as far.

Which did not bode well for the other lunar settlements. A single breach of quarantine, a careless moment, could spell disaster.

And she knew as well as anyone that astronauts were still human beings, with the same basic needs and drives as everyone else. Which made it all the more likely that someone, somewhere, would commit just a little rules breach, and it would be just enough.

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Social Breakdown

One of the most shocking revelations of the diabolvirus pandemic was the discovery of just how fragile some of our largest cities actually are. There had been some awareness of this problem for years, but most simulations had focused on supply-line breakdowns. What would happen when the trucks of food, fuel, and other essentials stopped arriving at stores all around a major metropolitan center?

However, there was another critical element that all of them had overlooked: social trust. All too many of the people doing this modeling had simply presupposed the sort of social trust they were accustomed to in their comfortable suburban and academic communities. They assumed that everyone would feel confident that government agencies could be relied upon to provide services, and to do so impartially.

What we found was that social trust is not evenly distributed throughout the country. Far from it, while some areas were able to carry on through informal arrangements, each neighbor confident that other neighbors would do the right thing without needing to be watched over, others devolved into a brutal and cynical rule by local strongmen who would provide essential services, at the price of self-abasement from those under his protection.

This latter situation should be distinguished from the phenomenon of leaders spontaneously arising from a group in a time of emergency. The latter almost always arise from a general recognition of their abilities in the area of organization, and will cooperate or step aside as soon as normal civil society reasserts itself. By contrast, many of these local strongmen regarded themselves as a replacement for government bodies and officials, and often refused to work with government officials, even going to the point of resisting police agencies who tried to come in to restore order.

—- J. Parkinson. “The Phenomenon of Warlordism in American Inner Cities” in The Diablovirus Pandemic: Social Effects. Carpenter Point: Kennedy University Press, 2038.

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On the Scent of a Story

Over the course of her career in radio news, Autumn Belfontaine had been in plenty of sticky situations. Her very first political assignment had been to cover a demonstration that turned into a “police riot.” She’d gotten out mostly because her news director had told her to stay on the periphery and do man-on-the-street interviews, which meant she didn’t have to push her way out of a crowd.

Just coming up here to the Moon had started as a brief visit to cover the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the original Apollo landing. When Captain Waite had discovered she was the daughter of Lucius Belfontaine, he’d invited her over here to Shepardsport for a visit. She hadn’t expected to get the go-ahead to extend her stay — rescheduling a spaceflight wasn’t exactly like changing an airline ticket — and now she wondered whether someone knew the Expulsions were in the works.

However, she’d never expected to be handed a USB stick full of hot video files by one of the DJs. Although Shepardsport Pirate Radio was all about getting the truth out when the Flannigan Administration was trying to suppress it, there were still limits.

Not to mention the problems created by the uncertain provenance of these files. Given Brenda’s evasive answers about how she’d gotten them, Autumn was pretty sure someone had been poking around on the dark side of the Internet. Malware was everyone’s first concern about those iffy parts of the information superhighway, but for someone in the news business, there as also the problem of whether these could be considered reliable sources.

She knew all too well about the stories that had blown up in various reporters’ faces. Some of it was just plain dishonesty, with sources and accounts fabricated out of whole cloth. But there were more than a few cases of reporters who wanted to believe a little too badly, and had failed to do their due diligence on following up.

On the other hand, if she could get confirmation on some of this material from sources she could trust, she had one hell of a story. No, not just a story, but two, which needed to be treated separately.

Time to do some digging. Now that she knew what to look for, things might be getting a whole lot easier to track down.

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From one of the bestselling science fiction authors of all time comes this heart-stopping far future novel of an asteroid on a collision course with Earth.
 
A century into the future, technology has solved most of the problems that have plagued our time. However, a new problem is on the horizon—one greater than humanity has ever faced. A massive asteroid is racing toward Earth, and its impact could destroy all life on the planet.
 
Immediately after the asteroid—named “Kali” after the Hindu goddess of chaos and destruction—is discovered, the world’s greatest scientists begin researching a way to prevent the disaster. In the meantime, Cpt. Robert Singh, aboard the starship Goliath, may be the only person who can stop the asteroid. But this heroic role may demand the ultimate sacrifice.

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Narrative

How Thin the Margins

The lunar community was fortunate in one way, Barbie Thuc reflected as she made her daily rounds. They started with a much higher baseline health than most communities dirtside.

That meant there was a whole range of ailments she simply didn’t have to deal with. Take for instance the diseases of obesity. People with weight problems to the point it affected their health couldn’t get the necessary medical clearance for spaceflight. And once people got here, mandatory exercise requirements made sure they didn’t slip-slide into it.

Even over at Grissom City, which had catered to the tourist trade before the present crisis, no amount of money could buy one’s way past that requirement. More than a few spoiled-rotten scions of wealth and privilege had learned that the hard way, and had to either learn the necessary self-discipline to meet the physical requirements, or give up their dreams of a vacation on the Moon.

The population here also was much younger. That would change now that the Expulsions meant people would be retiring up here rather than being shipped back to Earth when they reached the age at which the cumulative wear and tear on the body started showing up in the form of degenerative diseases. But at least for the next decade or so she shouldn’t have to worry that much about that.

On the other hand, they did have a lot more injuries to deal with. Maybe not all that much different in terms of the population as a whole, but it was certainly a lot more of her caseload. Which meant a lot of Medstaff’s time and resources went to fixing people up after they’d busted themselves up in various ways.

And that was one of the things she was becoming concerned about. What would happen when vital resources began to run low, if shipments of supplies from Earth were not restored, or could not be relied upon?

Some, even most, could be produced locally, although they might still have problems with the amount they could produce. Most drugs were a matter of chemical synthesis. But there were some things, particularly some of the more sophisticated medical devices, that were still simply beyond the ability to reproduce locally. Which meant that once they ran out, they would have to face the problem of people dying or being left permanently debilitated by conditions that they should’ve been able to recover from.

Which meant raising the question of rationing. How should the few remaining supplies be allocated, if it looked like they could not be replaced for a month? a year? a decade?

She didn’t think “ever” was really an issue. On a world where human life was completely dependent upon sophisticated technology, there was a floor beneath which they could not fall and survive. Therefore, even if Earth had to be written off, it would be only a matter of time before lunar industry would regroup and begin to expand and innovate to replace the manufacturing capacity that they’d lost access to. Most likely it would not take more than a decade or two — but in the meantime things could get painful.

Definitely this was not a decision she should be making on her own, or even with only the other members of Medstaff here. She needed to start raising the question with her colleagues at the other settlements, and with the command structure. Do it carefully, so as to avoid tilting the conversation in any particular direction, but make the decision-makers aware that criteria and procedures needed to be developed and in place before they had to make the determination that a patient would not be treated so that other patients who would be more likely to benefit could have it, before they had to deal with angry family members, before the angry murmurs and pointing fingers could begin.

Yes, there was a certain element of military discipline in the space community — every spacecraft and space settlement was under the command of a senior pilot-astronaut who was also a military officer. But NASA had been a civilian organization from its beginnings, and no settlement, not even the earliest moonbases, had ever tried to impose full military discipline upon its civilian technical staff. And the Expulsions had given Shepardsport a large population who were still in the process of acculturating into the space community.

Which could make things more difficult as the crisis progresses beyond the terror of the initial virgin-field pandemic to the privations of long-term survival and rebuilding.

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Making Do

Getting the go-ahead to fabricate low-temperature bearings had proven easier than Ken had expected. After all, they were dealing with parts for landers, which meant all kinds of very technical FAA regulations. Quite honestly, he’d expected Reggie to balk hard, to say no way in hell was this project going through on his watch.

On the other hand, this was an emergency situation, and a lot of slack got cut when your back was against the wall. Although Ken had spent the Energy Wars stateside, overseeing maintenance operations at one or another airbase, he’d heard plenty of war stories from the guys who’d been in the sandbox. Guys who’d been downed in a hot landing zone and had to make emergency repairs with whatever they could cobble together — stuff that would put a plane out of spec if it had been done in a peacetime situation, let alone a civilian aircraft. But when the enemy was breathing down your neck, you did what it took to let you get back to friendly territory, and sorted things out afterward.

Up here the enemy wasn’t religious fanatics who believed God wanted them to kill infidels. The natural world could be far more relentless than any terrorist, and just as deadly. In normal times, specifications and procedures kept you safe. But in an emergency, blindly following procedures could become a case of following a rule straight over a cliff.

And Reggie was a combat veteran. He’d spent most of the Energy Wars flying off carriers, and he’d had all the training those guys got to prepare them for the possibility of being downed in enemy territory, of being captured and held prisoner, all things that required more than a cookbook approach.

Now that they were beginning the production process — he couldn’t really call it a line, because it was going to be a small-batch process — he needed to convince Bill Hearne down at Flight Ops to actually test their product. He’d been an astronaut for decades, plenty of time to grow set in his ways — but he was also the last commander of the Falcon, and keeping his crew alive until Nekrasov and the Baikal could rescue them had taken some incredible feats of improvisation.

As it turned out, Bill was already waiting for Ken when he arrived at Flight Ops. Yes, it had been a good idea to send all the documentation down for review ahead of time.

“You’ve got some pretty ambitious plans here, Ken. I know your guys do good work, but this isn’t exactly the thing you can spitball together with chewing gum and baling wire like we used to do the chiller in the milkhouse back on the farm. This stuff’s running a hell of a lot colder than any Freon setup.”

“True, but if we wait until we completely run out of spares, what do we do when half the lander fleet is grounded? We may not be making as many orbital runs to Luna Station these days, but we’re still making all those suborbital hops to the outlying settlements that don’t have their own greenhouse farms or manufacturing, or a whole laundry list of things that work a lot better at scale.”

When he got Bill’s agreement on that front, he pressed home his real ask. “So what we’ll do is set all the existing spare parts aside for the actual landers, and start testing the ones we’re manufacturing here on ground-based applications. Start with the stationary cryo-pumps. I know there are plenty around here. Then we start using them on the crawlers, since they have cryo-pumps in their fuel cell systems. If they hold up to those uses, we can start judiciously using them in the landers.”

“In which case I’ll have to find volunteers to test-fly every one that we put a non-standard low-temperature bearing in, before they can be re-certified for routine operations. Just like Slayton Field had to re-certify every goddamn lander after the cyber-attack.”

“Of course.” Ken had learned those requirements back when he was a second lieutenant overseeing maintenance back in his Air Force days. “Now we have a procedure to go by, and we can evaluate it as we proceed.”

Right now, even a small victory was a welcome one. And he had a bad feeling that the shortage of spare low-temperature bearings was just the first of many chokepoints that was coming down the pike.

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Sutty, an Observer from Earth for the interstellar Ekumen, has been assigned to a new world—a world in the grips of a stern monolithic state, the Corporation. Embracing the sophisticated technology brought by other worlds and desiring to advance even faster into the future, the Akans recently outlawed the past, the old calligraphy, certain words, all ancient beliefs and ways; every citizen must now be a producer-consumer. Their state, not unlike the China of the Cultural Revolution, is one of secular terrorism. Traveling from city to small town, from loudspeakers to bleating cattle, Sutty discovers the remnants of a banned religion, a hidden culture. As she moves deeper into the countryside and the desolate mountains, she learns more about the Telling—the old faith of the Akans—and more about herself. With her intricate creation of an alien world, Ursula K. Le Guin compels us to reflect on our own recent history.

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High Anxiety

Brenda Redmond wasn’t sure whether she felt better or worse after giving the news director a copy of Lou’s little treasure trove of information. She’d been careful not to leave anything on it that could trace it back to Lou, so she shouldn’t be putting him at risk. On the other hand, Lou had gotten it specifically because Drew was wanting the information, not so she could pass it around.

Except giving Autumn Belfontaine a copy wasn’t exactly “passing it around.” Autumn was a professional, and part of being a reporter was knowing when to be discreet. She’d even commented on the issue of needing to protect one’s sources, which made it plain she recognized the issue.

For that matter, maybe Autumn could give her some pointers on how to get it to Drew without attracting attention. Right now she could certainly use some advice, since her ever-so-carefully worded hints had apparently zoomed right past him.

Today the kids were eating lunch with their classes. Normally she would’ve been happy not to have to keep them corralled in the dining commons, but right now she really could’ve used the distraction to get her mind off her worries.

Maybe she could meet up with a colleague or two, talk shop…

And then she saw Cindy Margrave, looking very alone and very worried. Sometimes lending a listening ear to someone with worse problems helped take your mind off your own.

“Want some company?”

Cindy gestured toward the seat beside her. “Go ahead. I don’t know why everybody’s decided I’m toxic all of a sudden. I mean, sure I’ve got Constitution test coming up, but it’s not like I’m going to jinx everyone else.”

Brenda quick suppressed the urge to laugh at the notion. Until Cindy could laugh at her own fears, it would sound too much like ridicule. “I know, it’s scary because it’s make or break. They’re always warning you that you have to pass to graduate, but it’s not nearly as hard as they make it sound.”

“That’s what everybody tells us, but Colonel Hearne gives us really tough quizzes.”

Brenda leaned over to Cindy and kept her voice low. “I’ll let you in on a secret. The actual test you have to pass is standardized, from the state department of education. That means it’s going to cover the basics, not whatever esoteric matters of interpretation. They’re trying to measure our ability to be good citizens, not constitutional lawyers.”

That was just absurd enough to get a laugh. Not a nervous giggle, but an actual laugh. “I sure hope you’re right.”

“Actually, your biggest danger is going to be trying to overthink the questions, especially if you’re used to having to watch out for traps. If it’s the same test I took, all the questions are straightforward. Use your common sense and you’ll do fine.”

Seeing Cindy’s relief, Brenda guided the conversation to more neutral topics.

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Behind the Rumors

Autumn Belfontaine hadn’t like the paucity of information coming out of Schirrasburg ever since they closed up, and the longer things went, the more it bothered her. Something was going on, and if they were keeping it quiet to “prevent panic,” that made it sound all the more frightening.

Although she didn’t have any close friends over there, she did have a few contacts. But texts and e-mails went unanswered, or just plain bounced. Which meant that they’d not only cut off all physical interaction; they’d also descended a cone of silence over Schirrasburg’s Internet connections. Given that Schirrasburg had a much heavier scientific focus than Grissom City or Shepardsport, such stringent measures were downright extreme.

Scientists talked to each other as much as reporters did, if not more. A big part of doing science was reporting your discoveries to your colleagues so they could verify them independently.

Autumn tried to imagine what would happen if Reggie Waite were to announce that Shepardsport was deliberately instituting not only a physical quarantine, but an informational one as well. The scientists had been unhappy enough during the Internet outage, but they’d accepted it as a malfunction, and had endured as best they could while IT worked to resolve it. That best had included a lot of grousing among themselves, and several of her reporters had either teaching responsibilities or work in Science.

Unless there were a damned good reason, like a truly nasty malware spreading through the Internet, the howling would be so intense it would probably register on the seismographs in the science packages at the old Apollo landing sites. There were probably dozens of scientific investigations going on that depended upon daily transmissions of data back and forth between multiple sites, both on the Moon and on Earth. Interrupt that flow of data, and it might set someone back years, even waste millions of dollars if it were something that couldn’t be put on pause while waiting for data.

Which meant that whatever was going on at Schirrasburg was so serious that the scientists were accepting this restriction without any measurable resistance. If it weren’t a diablovirus outbreak, why else would they shut off communications with the outside world under the rubric of preventing panic?

On the other hand, if it was diablovirus, the very fact that it hadn’t spread to any of the other lunar settlements was reassuring. It meant that diablovirus could be identified and contained before even essential travel could spread it.

But she also recognized that all of this was speculation, on far too slender of evidence to go on the air about it. Especially if this might well be an actual legitimate reason to suppress information.

Her thoughts were disturbed by someone calling her name. She looked up to find Brenda Redmond standing just inside the newsroom door. “You need to talk to me?”

Brenda pulled out a USB stick. “I’ve got some files you might want to see.”

Autumn looked over the USB stick. It was pretty basic, the sort that were manufactured in great numbers both here and on Earth, so cheaply that a lot of companies put intro versions of programs on them and handed them out as advertising. “What kind of information, and where did you get it?”

“Most of it’s video about a gang war in Chicago, but there are also a number of files out of Schirrasburg. Apparently someone’s been able to access some subchannels and get information out of there.”

Autumn noted that Brenda had answered only half of her question. “If you need to protect your source, I won’t pry any further. But you might want to talk to that person, because if I do end up running a story on any of this, being able to identify sources will give it extra credibility.”

“Understood. But this stuff looks hot enough that I thought you ought to take a look at it before I showed it to anyone else.”

Autumn accepted the USB drive. “I’ll take a look at it. I trust that this is not your only copy.”

“Don’t worry. I did learn data management procedure. The first thing I did was back up everything on the computer I was going to use to look at it. Then I copied it onto that machine and then onto a fresh USB stick. At least those are easy enough to get, unlike actual computers. So yes, you can keep this copy.”