Flying On The Fringe

Arrived at the regional wormhole. I passed through it many times back when I was a crewman on a C-100 cargo vessel, but this will my first time piloting through it myself. There really isn’t much to “piloting” through the wormhole—it drags the ship through from one end to the other. The ship’s computer has to be shut down during transit because the gravitational distortions drive the computer crazy—so to speak.

The entry/exit of the wormhole is marked by a circle of ten luminaries in geo-stationary orbit. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to see it, though that isn’t really necessary either. The space station in permanent orbit near the wormhole guides ships into proper alignment for entry, and once you get close enough, the wormhole sucks you in. Only one ship is allowed through at a time, so at present I’m sitting in queue waiting for my turn. The stationmaster on the opposite side has notified the one on my side that a ship has clearance to enter. I have to wait for it to exit before I will be given clearance.

Marlon Tave, Captain

Encountered pirates one standard day out from Argus. There’s an asteroid belt halfway between Dagran and the wormhole, and I had to drop out of warp to traverse it. A handy place for the pirates to hide. Some pilots try to outrun them among the asteroids, but that’s as risky as dealing with the pirates themselves. I thought I might be able to talk my way out of getting boarded, and fortunately succeeded. The cargo I’m carrying, dilurian sensor chips, isn’t particularly valuable. It’s produced from a crystal common on Argus and other planets with a volcanic past, but rare on Dagran. They are not much use on many other worlds, however. If the pirates tried to unload the chips on Dagran, they would be easily identified as stolen goods, and the planets that might accept them probably wouldn’t pay much for them. My sensors detected them scanning my hold, and they evidently decided I wasn’t worth the hassle. I was allowed to pass without further hindrance. However, I have notified port authorities at both Argus and Dagran, and have posted an image of the ship below. If you encounter a ship with the designation B2F69#, keep your distance.

Marlon Tave, Captain

Got my shipment loaded for Argus and took off from Dagran at 03:20 AS time. The outbound flight path carried me over the pearl islands, and so named because that’s exactly what they look like from the air, a slightly oblong string of jewels against the dark blue ocean, all that remains of a super volcano in our ancient past. I will miss my home here, but I confess it was a thrill blasting up through the atmosphere on what is likely to be an adventurous new chapter in my life. Radical change is as good a medicine for grief as I am likely to find for the time being. I am grateful that my parents enrolled me in pilot school when I was young.

Argus is a five-day trip, two days to the regional wormhole and another two days on the other side of it. With the warp rings deployed, my little ship looks like a hoop-glider, though it has a rather dull gray solid core rather than the iridescent translucent filament between the rings that the glider fish has. They are quite beautiful, though rarely seen, one of my favorite sea creatures.

Surinia, Argus’ sun, is falling rapidly behind me, and I can no longer see Dagran itself. The Gia One moon colony and its parent planet of Madra are on the opposite side of the sun at this time of year, so ahead of me is one last planet, Fiesten, an uninhabitable, moonless, gas giant before I exit the solar system.

Marlon Tave, Captain

Entry 001 by Captain Marlon Tave

Checked out my new ship today and registered her as the Gilded Starlilly. Martsa loved starlillies and gold jewelry. I will be piloting this ship alone. Several people have told me that’s insane and have reminded me how dangerous it is to be out in deep space by myself, but I want the solitude. Martsa died three months ago, along with our unborn son, and I’m worn out from people trying to console me. Why can’t they realize words can never replace what I’ve lost and just leave me alone? Perhaps I will find some peace out there in that vast emptiness.

I will miss my beautiful planet Dagran, a jewel among all the inhabited planets, blessed with abundant oceans and more species and types of plants and animals than any other known planet. And I will miss my serene seaside home, but home no longer offers me peace. I will be trading here of course, so I will have a chance to visit. I may settle back down here again someday, but right now I am not planning that far ahead.

Checked in with the cargomaster. He has a shipment for Argus arriving tomorrow, so that will be my first official run.

Welcome to Flying On The Fringe. I’m going to try a little experiment. Since I am a science fiction writer, I thought I would try posting a short story that won second place in the Space Journey contest at Ozark Creative Writers Conference last year. (If you’re interested, the 2017 conference runs October 8-10 in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, and you can register at the door. Visit their site at www.ozarkcreativewriters.com).

The story is too long for a single post, so I am breaking it into two installments. The second installment will be posted October 10. Please leave a comment so I will know if you enjoyed reading it or it drove you absolutely bananas.

If enough people enjoy this, I have other stories I may post this way. If not, oh well, its back to the drawing, I mean writing, board.

Hope you enjoy reading First Contact.

First Contact

(Installment 1)

It had been a normal cargo run from Earth to the moon colony until sixty seconds ago.

Every warning siren on the ship screeched and every light that could be red was. Strings of vibrating colors surged past the ship. Then, as suddenly as the nightmare had begun, it was over. The sirens shut off, systems turned back to green. Everything on the ship was normal.

The stars were not.

Jack Daniels stared in disbelief. He couldn’t identify a single pattern.

Dead ahead lay a massive structure the size of a small moon. It had a solid cylindrical core surrounded by at least a couple dozen concentric rings that rotated around the core. He estimated the rings were about two kilometers apart. Humans had never built anything like this.

“All systems normal,” reported his co-pilot Peri. Never ruffled, perfect female form, brown hair, brown eyes. He could go for a dame like that. If only she wasn’t an android.

They were blasting toward the alien thing at more than 36,000 kilometers per hour, twice their normal cruising speed. The ship must have picked up a sling-shot effect when it exited the anomaly. Jack was certain it was a wormhole, though no human had ever seen one. Alien stars, alien space station.

“All engines, full reverse!”

“Firing retros.”

Their speed slowed to three hundred kph. Steady, not accelerating, a controlled approach. “Peri, why are we still moving forward?”

“The alien station is pulling us in, but I have been unable to identify the type of force.”

“How long would the rockets need to burn in reverse, full thrust, to move the ship to a safe distance from that thing?”

“This ship does not have sufficient power to overcome the current attractive force. The object is the diameter of the Mars moon Phobos, but has significantly less mass, indicating the core and the rings are hollow. No other ships evident.”

In less than thirty minutes their ship closed the distance to the nearest ring. Peri slowed their ship to five kph, docking speed. A giant port rotated open before them like a camera lens.

Jack grabbed his spacewalk suit, custom-built for his six-foot-four, two-hundred pound frame. It was always cool in space, but his black hair was now sweat-plastered against his forehead.

A gentle bump and a hiss signaled successful docking with the ring. “Open dock port,” Jack ordered. The ship’s door pulled inward and rolled to the right, revealing a corridor about twenty feet wide. The walls and ceiling were a matte gray metal and followed the curvature of the ring, but the floor was flat.

Jack pulled up readouts on his helmet. “No artificial gravity, no atmosphere. Wait, its changing. Must have sensed our ship’s atmosphere. It’s coming up to standard Earth composition. I think I can ditch the suit, but I’ll still need my magnetic boots.”

“And helmet,” Peri answered. “Just in case it should change again.”

“Right.” Jack shed the suit, leaving it heaped close to the airlock. He strapped on a laser pistol, slung a high-powered forty caliber rifle over his shoulder, and stepped into the opening.

“Peri, stay on board. I want the ship ready to launch on command.”

“Bad idea. You should take backup.”

“You’re right. But if this goes horribly wrong, I need you to get back through that wormhole and warn earth. That’s an order.” She eyed him with a cold stare, but she couldn’t disobey.

Two feet into the ring, a metal sphere rolled up to Jack. It sprouted four legs and two spidery protrusions which “sniffed” around his leg. Jack froze in place. Seemingly satisfied, it closed up and rolled away.

More of the spheres rolled past in each direction without stopping to pay any attention to the human or his ship. “Guess I passed the first test,” Jack said.

Farther ahead on the interior wall of the ring was a control panel and viewscreen. Symbols on the panel looked more like Braille than lettering. Jack didn’t risk touching it.

He could see about two kilometers around the ring in either direction. Straight ahead was another corridor. It had the same shape, but was narrower, and the walls were pale blue. Symbols glowed in green and gold just inside it. Probably sector identifications for those who could read them. He figured the blue corridor was a spoke that connected the outer ring to the inner core. He followed the spoke to where it ended with a closed circular door. A single round glowing green button protruded from the right side of the spoke’s wall.

“I’ve reached a door with a button. I’m going to go through,” Jack said over his helmet com. Unnecessary, since Peri was watching every step through his helmet’s camera. “Humans have never had confirmed contact with another sentient species. We’re gonna go down in the history books. That is, if we live to tell it.”

Jack pushed the glowing green button. It started blinking, but nothing else happened. Jack frowned.

“The outer rings are rotating around the core,” Peri advised. “That door opens to a chamber similar to an airlock. My scans indicate the chamber is currently moving to your location and the door will open when it syncs up to the spoke. There will be a similar pause for the exit door to come to a stop and open on the station core.”

Jack nodded. As if in agreement, the button turned a steady green and the circular door rolled into the wall. He stepped into a small chamber facing another circular door. Jack pressed an identical glowing green button and it started blinking. This time he could feel a slight deceleration and a barely perceptible bump as the chamber synced with the stationary central core.

Then the door slid open.

I am a mother. Parenthood has been the greatest adventure of my life, and one that I (almost) never tire of. Through my sons I have discovered many interests I probably would never have noticed otherwise. I used to love horses—now I love dragons. I have learned about Pokemon and Yugi-oh, and now Cosplay.

In Cosplay adults (and sometimes the kids, too) get to dress up like their favorite, comic book, TV, movie, science fiction, or other character. Conventions that include Cosplay as part of their event are springing up all over the country, even in boring, conservative, Missouri.

My younger son Matthew and I had watched a series on the Syfy channel that tracked several costume artists who participated in Cosplay competitions. We both enjoyed the show, and in May we had the opportunity to attend our first “con” in Kansas City. I am hooked.

So, yesterday I spent a good part of the afternoon painstakingly coloring strands of an artificial wig with a permanent marker. Sounds insane, I know, and it probably is. I want a wig that looks like the female protagonist is my book. Unfortunately for me, I have written her to have predominately light blue hair with streaks of blonde, orange and deep red. Very difficult to duplicate.

I had already tried the spray-on temporary hair coloring that people use to give their hair bizarre shades of green, red, purple, what-have-you, to show support for their favorite sports team. It flaked and rubbed off on my shirt. Not a great option. The clerk at the store where I bought the wig says hair dye will not work on the synthetic fibers in the wig, and who knows a store that carries blue hair dye anyway.

So I am throwing this problem out there for any of my Cosplaying readers. If you know of a good way to dye or color a synthetic wig, please let me know.

Until next time, live long, play hard, and fly free.

As a science fiction writer I love to speculate about the possibility of open contact with another sentient species (I say open since a lot of people think there’s already been some secret contact). But how would we communicate? I’m sorry to say that I think it’s most likely we would be dependent upon the aliens to learn, or be able to translate, our language.

There is a significant body of evidence that indicates that dolphins and whales are capable of intelligent communication, yet their form of language is so different from ours that we still haven’t developed a “rosetta stone” for interpreting their communications. If we can’t figure out how to interpret the communications of another species from our own planet, how would we figure out what aliens were saying?

A study titled The study of acoustic signals and the supposed spoken language of the dolphins by Vyacheslav A. Ryabov, published last month in the St. Petersburg Polytechnical Institute Journal of Physics and Mathematics, reported strong evidence that dolphins really do “talk” to each other.

The study reports that two Black Sea Bottlenose dolphins emitted series of sounds that could be construed as sentences, and that they took turns sounding off to each other, similar to humans in a conversation. Scientists have identified approximately 200 unique sounds emitted by dolphins.

“Most species of dolphins produce two types of sounds, which possibly play the role of communication signals in their social relationships. These are packs of broadband pulses and ‘whistles’.….The presence and the function of these packs still remain unclear, even though the hypothesis that dolphins use them for communication has been discussed since the 1960s….This hypothesis is based on the fact that the…signals are recorded when the dolphins are engaged in high social activity and at short distances…, and the interpulse intervals of these signals have a shorter processing time typical for echolocation….”

Ryabov mentioned shortcomings inherent in previous studies, some of which studied only a limited frequency range, and some in situations where some dolphins were swimming freely and were beyond the recording range of the equipment in the studies, though not necessarily beyond the range that other dolphins could hear. Ryabov’s study used a two-channel recording system and two dolphins confined to a pool that made it possible to determine which dolphin made which sounds and verify that the two were taking turns communicating.

The full text of the paper is available at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405722316301177

Maybe some day we’ll be able to talk to the dolphins. I doubt they will say “thanks for all the fish.” If I were a dolphin I’d be asking why we humans feel the need to imprison other species and force them to perform for our entertainment.

The full moon falling later this week on September 16 offers several unique features. It’s the 2016 Harvest Moon, the full moon closest to the autumn equinox. The equinox falls on September 22.

It may also be a supermoon—a full moon that occurs at or close to perigee, the point at which the moons orbit is closest to earth. Not everyone agrees whether September 16’s moon will be a supermoon. An astrologer (not an astronomer), Richard Nolle, is credited with coining the term supermoon, and he does not include September 16 as one of the supermoons occurring in 2016. His list of supermoons includes full moons that fall at their closest perigee for the year.

However, Nolle’s original definition of a supermoon was “a new or full moon which occurs with the Moon at or near (within 90% of) its closest approach to Earth in a given orbit.” Astronomer Fred Espenak therefore calculates the supermoon based on the perigee of each orbit, and includes September 16 as a supermoon. (Bruce McClure, earthsky.com/tonight) Either way, it’s bound to be big and beautiful, if clouds don’t get in the way.

In addition to being a harvest moon and possibly a supermoon, September 16 will also offer a subtle penumbral eclipse in earth’s eastern hemisphere—unfortunately not visible in the U.S.

For more details about this week’s moon show, follow the link: http://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/harvest-moon-2