Flying On The Fringe

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. Below is the second installment of a short story that won second place in one of the contests at the Ozarks Creative Writers conference in 2015. If you missed the first installment, just scroll down—it appears just below this entry. Hope you enjoy reading it.

First Contact

Installment 2

The open door revealed an atrium, perhaps a kilometer in diameter, populated with a wide variety of plants, some as tall as large trees on Earth. Most specimens had silvery-blue foliage. Several had blossoms that ran a full spectrum of colors, including some that fell into an ultraviolet range that Jack was only able to see with the aid of his helmet.

“Wow,” breathed Jack. “Peri, I’m going to take some samples.”

“I don’t recommend that, Jack. The flora could be poisonous, or even aggressive. And you don’t want to do anything to rile the natives, although I still haven’t seen anything that would qualify as fauna. Jack, there is now another object approaching the station!”

Jack spun a hundred and eighty degrees to look at the nearest viewscreen. A small blinking red dot drew steadily nearer the station, approaching a point at the next spoke starboard from his present position. The screen shifted to an external view of the station. Three of the rings split apart, one section rotating up and the other rotating down so that they formed a circular receiving area.

“Peri, shields up! Get those engines ready. I’m going to stay a bit longer. I’d really like to get a look at these guys.”

On the viewscreen, a sphere ten times the size of their own cargo vessel was now visible on the far side of the circular opening in the station’s rings. The newcomer slid neatly into the space created for it. Four arms moved out from the rings to secure the ship. An announcement sounded in the alien language.

“Again, bad idea,” Peri said. “They might not be too happy to see you.”

“Yeah, I know. But you don’t make history playing it safe. I don’t intend to let them see me, if I can avoid it. I just want to get a look at them.”

“Please don’t do anything dangerous. Just get a quick look and then run.”

“Roger that.” Jack headed for the junction of the next spoke. He found a “tree” with a thick trunk and ducked behind it as the connecting door slid open.

Jack had a hard time wrapping his head around what he saw—a giant eye surrounded by a translucent blob with tendrils trailing off behind it. Sort of like a jellyfish with a huge eyeball. The thing floated through the air as easily as the ones on earth swam.

In spite of his efforts, it spotted him behind the tree. It uttered an almost supersonic shriek that forced Jack to grab for his ears, forgetting he still wore his helmet. The jelly-blob darted back into the connecting chamber and the door hissed closed behind it.

“Hey, Peri, I just scared the daylights out of an alien.”

“Jack, please return to the ship! Don’t take any more chances.”

“Okay. I got to see it anyway.”

Jack turned and headed back to the spoke where his own ship was docked. He’d only made it a few steps when the door where the alien had come from slid open again and aliens flooded into the atrium. Great moons of Jupiter—too many to count! Jack turned to run for the door, but you don’t run in magnetic boots.

He felt a sharp stab in his right shoulder and saw a spray of blood. Then two more sharp jabs in his back. He looked over his shoulder and ducked as another tendril snaked toward him. He pulled his laser pistol and fired a warning shot above the group. They surged forward.

He made it to the door that led to the spoke where his ship was docked. It was already connected to the core and opened immediately. He pressed the button and the core-side door hissed shut.

“Peri, I’m under attack, I’m injured, and I’m coming in hot!”

“True to your profile. Engines ready.”

He had to wait for the chamber to sync with the outer ring, which gave him a chance to shed his boots.

When the door opened, two dozen jelly-blobs were already waiting for him, tendrils flailing. Now weightless, Jack pulled himself back into the door chamber. But with aliens on both sides, he had nowhere to go.

“Peri, they’re just outside our airlock!”

He fired another warning burst, but they ignored it. No choice but to make it count. He shot one of the aliens. It exploded, spraying thick liquid and tentacles everywhere. Jack’s head nearly exploded from the cacophony of high-pitched shrieks.

They scattered momentarily. Jack used their momentary confusion to shove off hard from the wall of the chamber. He scooted past and under the flailing aliens. “Peri, door!” The airlock hissed open just as he nearly slammed into it, and he hit the far wall of his ship’s docking bay. The airlock hissed closed behind him.

Peri didn’t wait for further orders. She shoved off from the near wall and blasted for the cockpit. Jack shoved off right behind her and landed in his seat two seconds later.

When Peri released the ship’s airlock connection, the station released simultaneously.

“All engines, full reverse,” stated Peri. “No resistance from the station. No attractive force. Speed five hundred kph and climbing.”

“Get us back through that wormhole. Are they following?”

“No. Speed 10,000 kph and accelerating. Now experiencing gravitational pull from the wormhole.”

“First contact or not, when we get through that wormhole, you drop a V-bomb and close it,” ordered Jack.

“Please countermand,” Peri said. “That would create a black hole that would eventually swallow the Earth.”

Jack rolled his eyes. “Countermanded.” Good thing she was smarter than he was. “I want to know the instant anything comes through that wormhole.”

“That won’t be a problem. It’s gone.”

“What do you mean, it’s gone.”

“Just that. It’s closed up.”

“Son-of-a . . .No one’s ever gonna believe that jellyfish story!”

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.

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

Is there alien life close enough for us to actually make contact some day? Most of the research I’ve done on interstellar travel, alien planets and the conditions necessary for complex life to develop have led me to believe that the chance of laying eyes on alien life was a very distant (as in light years distant) hope.

Never say never.

Scientists recently discovered a planet in Alpha Centauri, which includes the three stars nearest to earth. The newly discovered planet orbits the closest star, Alpha Proxima, a small red dwarf, in the “goldilocks zone.” That means it’s close enough to its star for the planet to have liquid water. Currently identified as Proxima b, the planet is 1.3 times the size of earth and orbits four million miles from its star every eleven days. By comparison earth is 93 million miles from the sun. But Proxima is much smaller than our sun—just a little larger than Jupiter. (For more details, check out earthsky.com at http://earthsky.org/space/next-nearest-star-has-a-planet)

Proxima is just four light years from our sun, so if we manage to achieve light speed travel at some point in the future—not an impossibility considering a Mexican scientist has already developed a mathematical model for a warp drive, that would be a realistic target.

Of course, besides speed, we have a myriad of other technical problems to solve before humans could traverse open space, among which are the long-term effects of weightlessness and cosmic radiation, for which we have no adequate shielding once we fly beyond the protection of earth’s magnetic field.

First we have to figure out how to get humans as far as Mars. One thing at a time. But we can all dream (and write great science fiction)!

Friday, August 19, I spent the day in Kansas City at Mid Americon, the annual meeting of the World Science Fiction Society, which sponsors the Hugo Award, highly coveted by science fiction writers.

Aside from just plain fun, attending cons such as this one is a great learning opportunity. Themed conventions such as Mid Americon and Planet Comicon, which I attended in May, have dozens of presentations and panels to help artists and writers from a broad spectrum of genre perfect their craft. There is a great deal of overlap in all types of the events labeled as “cons,” so if you have the opportunity to attend one, I highly recommend it. Go in costume if you can—you’ll have more fun, but you can wear normal clothes if you’re more timid (chicken!).

At Mid Americon I had the opportunity to attend sessions on fantasy/scifi world-building, two sessions by panels of physicists and NASA scientists on the future of space propulsion, and one in which participants could ask questions of an astronaut.

My second book includes a chapter in which the crew encounters a radiation storm in space and has to retreat to a shielded section of the ship, then decontaminate the ship afterward. I was thrilled to learn from the astronaut that during coronal mass ejections from the sun, if they are large enough, NASA recommends that the space station astronauts retreat to quarters that have extra shielding. I was not so happy to learn that it is not necessary to decontaminate any parts of the station afterward, as the station is very well shielded from radiation.

Sometimes, however, you learn what questions to ask. The astronaut mentioned the earth’s magnetic field, which is what shields the earth, and the space station, from most of the sun’s radiation. Aha! What if the ship in question is beyond such a field? In that case, it is subject to the far more dangerous “galactic cosmic radiation.” Cosmic radiation poses one of the greatest problems for a mission to Mars.

I will have to do additional research before I know if my current rendition of decontamination aboard an interstellar ship after a radiation storm will pass scientific muster, but at least now I know what questions to ask.

P.S. One thing I learned is that there is a page on the Science Fiction Writers of America website (sfwa.org) that lists thirty one pages of questions to ask in order to craft good science fiction. (http://www.sfwa.org/2009/08/fantasy-worldbuilding-questions/) If you have trouble with the link, just go to the sfwa.org home page and enter “questions” in the search bar in the upper right corner.

Was there anyone out there who didn’t think writing was hard work?

TO: Hrkajan Science Central

I last contacted you less than a templas ago (June 16, 2016, local Earth date) regarding Earth’s discovery of the energy-collecting oculon we are constructing around our star. Earth Astronomer Tabetha Boyajian reported her studies in an online forum called Ted Talk in February, 2016, and speculated that the reduction in light from our star might be due to construction of a megastructure called a “Dyson sphere” (what we call an oculon). Astronomers thereafter dubbed Hrkajan “Tabby’s Star,” though its official Earth astronomical designation is KIC 8462852.

Boyajian’s report generated so much interest that astronomers pursued a private funding campaign to purchase time on one of Earth’s few high-powered telescopes. I understand such an endeavor seems like a pathetic and ridiculous approach to scientific inquiry, but that is how things frequently work on this planet.

I had hoped that the funding campaign would fail, and that would be the end of the focus on our development of the oculon. Unfortunately, the opposite has developed. The campaign has already generated more than $100,000 (a large but not amazing sum of “money” for this planet), but they aren’t done yet.

Earlier this year, Bradley Schaefer with Louisiana State University published studies of photographic plates that had captured Hrkajan going back to the 19th century. He reported a long-term dimming in the light from the star by nearly 20 percent over the past (Earth) century.

Most recently, On 65783.123.12 (Earth date August 3, 2016), Benjamin Montet with the California Institute of Technology and Joshua Simon with Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington released their study of the star that analyzed data from Earth’s Kepler space telescope over the past four years. They have discovered that our star has been decreasing in brightness at an unprecedented rate. (Deborah Byrd in Space, earthsky.com, August 13, 2016)

Following is a direct quote from the article:

“That result might suggest a megastructure in the process of being built, hiding more and more of the star’s light from our view.”

I can’t stress to you what a danger Earth’s interest might pose for our civilization at some time in the future. Earth is not yet capable of interstellar travel, but as I mentioned in my earlier communique, humans have a history of making major technological leaps when motivated to do so.

I recommend we take immediate steps to disguise the oculon. The scientific community on this planet is too dispersed and disorganized for me to mount an effective disinformation campaign on my own. While many noted astronomers do not accept the theory that an artificial structure is being built around “Tabby’s Star,” given enough time and mounting evidence, Earth scientists are bound to realize the truth at some point.

Once they do, I have no doubt they will expend great effort to contact us, to our great detriment. This is an illogical and violent species.

Respectfully,

Akij Zimth, Earth Observation Unit