James Wittenbach - Worlds Apart 01 Read online

  Worlds Apart Book One:

  Meridian

  What a long, strange trip this will be

  Copyright © 2001, 2005, 2007

  James G. Wittenbach

  www.worlds-apart.net

  All rights reserved. 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 permission in writing from the publisher.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Wittenbach, James

  Worlds Apart Book 01: Meridian

  I. Title

  ISBN 0-0-9763384-0-8

  Prologue:

  The Called and the Chosen

  Eddie Roebuck

  New Halifax, Sapphire

  It was an hour or two past midnight on the last night of the Platinum Festival. Somehow, Eddie Roebuck had ended up on the top of the great stone fist of Kennecott Rock with his best friend Barnes Asahi and two girls he did not remember meeting. The top of the rock was crowded with people who had come to see the lights of the city and the harbor. By day, New Halifax, Carpentaria, was not much to look at; it was a working town, spread out across the rocky islands of Halifax Harbor Bay, but on the nights of the festival, when the city was lit up (along with most of its citizens), the view was spectacular. The bridges that joined the islands and the mainland were strung with lights like incandescent pearl necklaces. The lights of the buildings dappled in the waves of the harbor. Giant holographic advertisements and corporate logos danced in the sky above the city like neon seraphim.

  Any night of the year, you could go down Cobalt Avenue – the stretch the locals called “the Gauntlet.”

  – and get tossed out of one bar and land in the next from dusk until dawn. It was different at festival time: The bars stayed open during the day. He and Barnes were utterly destroyed. The women looked like they could shower, change and be ready for church in half an hour. Women amazed him.

  “I’m going to retro-digest,” Asahi reported.

  “Neg, beauty,” said Roebuck. “Don’t be crude. Alcohol is for internal use only… internal use… aw, slag…” Asahi was already on all fours, heaving onto the badly littered gravel of the footpath.

  “Poor Baby,” cooed the girl with the tattoos and the artificially blond hair. She knelt beside Asahi, who rolled over and lay his head in her lap.

  Roebuck couldn’t tell whether his friend’s position was technique or happy accident. He turned to the brunette, whose name he could not remember. She raised her bottle of Old Matthias (“The Ale the Made Matthias Significant”) and downed all but the last swallow before passing it to him. Roebuck reached for it, missed on the first grab, then caught it and sucked down the remainder. He put the bottle down and tried to focus on the woman.

  “Are you having a good time then, Eddie?” the brunette asked in the annoying fake Republic accent she affected. Republic was Sapphire’s sibling world, orbiting the other sun of their double star system.

  “Za.” He reached toward her and missed.

  “I think this one’s asleep,” the pseudo-blonde called-out.

  “Roll him on his side so he won’t choke if he decides to review his beer again,” Roebuck said, then added to the brunette: “‘Scuse my crude. Maybe we should go back to my place, y’know?”

  “If we sleep now, we’ll be all hung over in the morning.”

  “Not if we keep drinking.”

  She checked her chronometer and grabbed his arm. “Come with me, Eddie. It’s almost time.” Eddie liked the sound of that. She pulled him away, down a trail that led to the dark side of the rocks, away from the lights of the city where the night was as black as it gets. There were no moons visible in the sky and the stars were billiant. Even the black and orange glow of the Monarch Nebula was visible.

  Eddie noticed none of it. All he knew was that an intoxicated woman was taking him into a dark place where nobody could see them, and that this was the general template for most of his sexual experiences.

  He moved in to kiss her, expecting lips, but finding neck and ears. He kissed anyway. “Eddie…,” she said.

  “That’s me.” He continued planting wet sloppy kisses on her.

  “Eddie,” she said again.

  “Za,” he put his arms around her waist and rubbed his body into hers.

  “Eddie,” she said, much louder, pushing him off her. “Look!” She pulled the hair at the back of his head, twisting his head up. She leaned close and whispered in his ear. “The shuttle to Republic is about to launch.”

  Roebuck looked up and tried to focus. A second later, a tiny halo of silver-white light appeared in the sky, expanded and dissipated.

  “It’s off,” she said with something like reverence. “One day, I’ll be on that shuttle.”

  “Za?”

  “Za, when they began taking applications for the Odyssey Project, I camped out in front of the recruiting office for three days so I could get my application in first.”

  “Congratulations,” Eddie whispered although he didn’t see what good it would do to be first. The selections were made randomly, in keeping with Sapphire’s egalitarian traditions.

  “Did you sign up?” she asked him.

  “Za, for sure… well, I mean, I haven’t yet, but …”

  Her body stiffened. “You haven’t applied for the Odyssey Project? Don’t you want to go into space? ”

  “Za; I told you was gonna sign up. It’s all part of my plan. See, I’m gonna get a job with the Mining Guild…”

  “I’m not talking about the Mining Guild. I’m talking about the greatest adventure of all time…”

  “Exactly, me, too.” Eddie returned to his kisses.

  “Eddie… neg…” She pushed him away. “You have to register for the Odyssey Project. You have to register this very instant.”

  The next thing Eddie knew, he was standing in Molybdenum Square, squinting into the gray light of a foggy dawn. The other three stood off to the side as he approached the recruiting kiosk, a crystalline obelisk about three meters high, with lights dancing on the interior. The kiosk was a node of the Odyssey Project Artificial Intelligence network. The AI’s designed their own interfaces and were inexplicably fond of the translucent-tombstone-with-dancing-lights design. Across the top of the kiosk, the slogan of the Odyssey Project was emblazoned in flashing red neon: “The Greatest Adventure of All Time.”

  “Hoy,” he said to the AI. “I’d like to apply for the Odyssey Project.”

  “State your name, please,” said the kiosk in a pleasant feminine voice as the dancing lights brightened and jumped

  “Eddie Roebuck.”

  “Good morning Eddie Roebuck. Personal Access Codeword?”

  “Pretty-Frankenstein-zero-zero-zero-zero.”

  The kiosk scanned him with a beam of blue light. Eddie saw his ID photo come up on the screen. It was a couple of years old, but he figured he still looked pretty good. The dark brown eyes and cafe-au-lait skin, the sharp nose and mischievous grin. His face, he figured, was the only good break he’d ever gotten.

  “Does the Odyssey Project have permission to review your public records, including educational, professional, and credit files?”

  “Za.”

  “Thank you and good luck, Eddie Roebuck.”

  The kiosk’s internal lighting faded. He stepped away from the kiosk and down the two steps to his waiting friends. “I did it.”

  “Oh, Eddie,” said the brunette, shoving her hands under his jacket. Roebuck kissed her forehead.

  Roslyn, he thought suddenly; th
at was her name. And her friend was Cecily.

  “Hey, I’m starting to feel sober,” said Asahi. “Let’s find a bar and breakfast.” Eddie looked to Roslyn for her opinion and was answered with an affectionate squeeze from under his jacket. “Neg,” he said. “Let’s get on back to my place.”

  “You know,” said Barnes Asahi as they walked away from the square. “The odds against you actually being picked for that are like three million to one.”

  Roebuck smiled. He not only knew it, he was counting on it.

  Matthew Driver and Kayliegh Driver

  Midlothian, Republic

  Through the canopy of the shuttlepod, beyond Matthew Driver could see nearly the entire southern hemisphere of his homeworld, 10 066 Pegasi II, Republic. The greater part of that great gray, marginally habitable rock was obscured by white and yellow clouds.

  “Overlay, Meteorological,” Kayliegh Driver, his twin sister, commanded. Yellow and aqua blue sigils appeared. She whistled low. “There’s a huge storm pushing across the Trans-Arctic Shield, converging with another front west of Midlothian.”

  The ship shuddered against a high altitude updraft. When Matthew reached for the stabilizer controls. Kayliegh had to squeeze far back in her seat in the cramped cabin. “What kind of landing conditions can I expect?” he asked.

  “Visibility zero. Ion interference with landing guides and comlinks. Surface winds gusting to 200

  kilometers per hour. Ammonia, sulphur dioxide, and methane contamination from the Cauldron Extremis volcanic region. You’ll never be able to land in that.”

  Matthew might have taken this as a challenge, but he knew the zeta-class shuttlepod was not designed for extreme weather. Soon, however, he’d command an Odyssey Project Aves — big as a transport, fast as an Interceptor, nimble as a Defender — could handle far worse. He looked out through the canopy again. Somewhere below that storm front was Midlothian, their city. “Why does our weather have to be so awful?” he wondered aloud.

  She was only too happy to explain. “Republic has an eccentric orbit because the gravitational pull of Sapphire’s sun combined with that of the gas giant Colossus pulls us off center. As we orbit our sun, the planet tilts on its axis more by almost forty degrees. Because we’re in the extreme south, we get the worst of it in both seasons. We get the coldest, darkest winters, because we’re turned away when the planet’s farthest from the sun. When Republic is closest to the sun, our hemisphere is turned toward it, and we get heat and sunlight forty-four hours a day.” She had repeatedly ecplained this since she was seven years old. Matthew never quite got it, except that it made for horrid flying weather.

  Midlothian was not only the southernmost but also the smallest Republic city-state, with barely 800,000 inhabitants. However, its importance to Republic belied the size of its population: Midlothian provided access to rich geothermal energy reserves, mineral wealth, and water and oxygen of the south polar ice cap, on which the huge megacities of the north depended. It also served as a safely remote location for Republic’s fusion generating plants. To protect the city from the extreme climate, it was built into a mountain range. Only transport tubes, and utility works lay outside the rock walls.

  Matthew raised his comlink. “I’m going secure an alternate landing permit at … City of Iron. We can wait out the storm there and fly in when it clears.”

  “Matthew,” said Kayliegh, in her soft but certain voice, “We can’t put this off until tomorrow. We have to tell him.”

  “This is not the kind of news you relay over an open communication channel.”

  “Tomorrow, the Directorate will make the announcement,” Kayliegh argued. “He deserves better than finding out that way, or hearing it from a co-worker.”

  Matthew turned to his sister, seeing a feminized version of his fine face and features. Her hair was lighter, and fell in curls past her neck while his almost black curls were clipped to a military trim, but her green-brown eyes were the same as his own. She looked hard back at him, always the one to do things the proper way, even when it was harder.

  He sighed. “See if you can raise the Weather Station. That’s where father will be.” She engaged the other comlink while Matthew plotted a course around the storm. The first two channels were blacked by interference, the third was at maximum capacity and taking no more traffic.

  Kayliegh hesitated for a moment, then accessed the Weather Directorate’s direct priority channel.

  Calloway Driver was the Chief Administrator at Midlothian’s weather station. Although his city was small, the facilities it cared for were spread over 8,000,000 square kilometers of territory. Storms like this were a constant threat to the power stations and pipelines that criss-crossed his southwest quadrant.

  When his face appeared on the communication screen, he was still holding a finger to the back of his jaw where the communication link was implanted in every Republicker. “Kayliegh, you can’t use priority lines during a storm alert.”

  Matthew checked his instruments, and avoided the stern face of his father. Calloway Driver had been a proud man, once, and his careworn face was testimony to how years of exile in Midlothian had almost broken him.

  “No choice, Pato,” Kayliegh told him, using a Republic term of endearment. “It was the only way to get through to you.”

  He frowned. “Somewhere out in that toxic cyclone I have a sensor tower caked in frozen carbon dioxide; probably irreparable. So, I have a blind spot and scale 6 windshear cells developing in the vicinity of one of the Energy Ministry’s precious geothermal rigs. It isn’t that I don’t what to talk, but the penalty for using this channel during a storm alert… I can’t get sanctioned.”

  “I know,” Kayliegh responded. “But this is very important.”

  Their father turned away from his storm model. “For both of you to break into a limited access channel… I should hope so.”

  Kayliegh spoke with some difficulty. “Father … You know of the Odyssey Project.” Even Matthew could sense Calloway Driver’s heart dropping. But their father’s voice remained calm, precise. “We do get news even in Midlothian.”

  “We’ve been selected for Pathfinder Three. Matthew will be an Aves pilot. I’ll be assigned to Geological Survey as a Climatology Specialist.” She could see her father staring blankly at the screen, words having abandoned him. “It’s a very important job,” she added

  “It’s an important job here!” their father protested. “The whole planet depends on Midlothian for energy, for water, for the air they breathe. We need good climatologists”

  “Father,” Kayliegh said soothingly. “It’s a great honor, and it’s our duty…”

  “Duty? Isn’t that the word they always use when they order you to throw aside your own life and submit yourself to the service of the common good of the Great Republic, as defined, as always, by the Great Republic in her undeniable wisdom.”

  Matthew was busying himself with securing a landing authorization from the City of Iron aerospace port, but he bristled at the sound his father, railing against the Government, and on an emergency channel no less.

  Kayliegh tried to soothe him. “This is a tribute to you, father, to the upbringing you and mother gave us.”

  “So, this is what the Great Republic demands now, families split apart, flung across the stars like …

  like dust… like cosmic dust?”

  “You know that isn’t true. Families can go together.”

  “Not our family,” Calloway Driver said, anger and defeat in his voice. “You know I can’t go with you.” Kayliegh had no answer, and Matthew and his father had never, in the course of their lives, discovered a place where words were easy to find between them. “I had always hoped you would come back to me, but I should have known better. No one stays in Midlothian unless they have to.” Matthew took a turn to speak. “We’ll fly in as soon as the storm clears. We have twenty days leave before we report to training.”

  “Twenty days…” Calloway sounded copmpletely def
eated. “That is not a long time to say good-bye to your family.” A small red notice appeared in their viewscreens. “I have an incoming priority message,” Calloway Driver said. “Driver out.”

  The image of their father vanished, replaced with the shield of the Telecommunications Ministry done in the same style as the shield of the other 127 Ministries; an impressionistic rendering of heroic people marching bravely into the future, or in this case, telecommunicating bravely into the future.

  Neither spoke until they saw the lights of the City of Iron appear on the horizon. Kayliegh touched Matthew’s shoulder. “Was that as hard as you thought it would be?”

  “It was hard, but now it’s done.”

  “Not quite,” she said. “I still have to tell him I’m getting married.” David Alkema

  Joshua-Nation, Sapphire

  From the top of the WatchTower, Cadet David Alkema could look out over all of the Odyssey Project Primary Training Complex. Sixty-four enormous, interconnected buildings hunkered beneath a giant dome, an assortment of cones, cylinders, and scalloped cubes and parallelograms typical of hyper-modern Republicker architecture. Beyond the done stretched an ash-colored landscape of dull, eroded mountains and a debris field of large, cracking rocks. Even on rare cloudless days, the sky was gray. That was Republic, a drab planet for a drab people.

  Cadet Alkema was often mistaken for the visiting little brother of some other cadet. His hair was dark and curly, his complexion ruddy, and his build athletic, but all scaled to the size of a young teenage boy.

  According to his biography, he was barely fifteen, the youngest age at which one could, with parental consent, train for Odyssey. He could easily pass for younger. When he had come through the reception hall, the adminicrat at the gate had checked his credentials four times before letting him pass. That had been a close call.

  Odyssey training was a nonstop ordeal, memorizing a thousand different science and engineering formulae, mastering a few hundred ship systerms, team-building exercises, and long missions to the desolate moons of the Republic system. As training progressed, reviews and examinations thinned the herd. Some of the Sapphirean cadets whispered that the reviews were skewed to wash out more Sapphireans than Republickers. Alkema did not know whether there was any truth to that, just that three-fifths of the cadets who had started with him had already washed out, that he was damn lucky to have gotten as far as he had, and that he had three months still to go.