Post #150 December 24 2018

“Year End Summary”

On this Christmas Eve, it’s fitting to take a summary look at the writing year for me.  Here are some statistics:

Total downloads this year (all titles) = 5228

Total downloads since starting with Smashwords (2014) = 18,189

As of this writing (12-17-18), my newest sf novel The Farpool: Union has earned 98 downloads (it was uploaded) the day before Thanksgiving.

Other novels put up this year and their total downloads are as follows:

The Farpool: Convergence = 340

The Specter = 279

The Farpool: Exodus = 545

The Farpool: Marauders of Seome = 615

That’s the basic summary of my writing life this year. 

Which leads me to what’s coming next.  In a word, my new series Time Jumpers.  I’ve posted about this before, so I thought I’d end the year with an excerpt from Episode 2.  Time Jumpers is a serial story in 12 episodes.  The first episode is uploaded on February 1.  I currently have two episodes in the bank, and will start on Episode 3 on 2 January 2019.

Herewith, an excerpt from Episode 2:

 

Ten hours later, a warning chime awakened Dringoth from a dreamless sleep in his stateroom.  It was a message from Libra.

“URME, put it through.”  Dringoth winced as he banged his head on a stanchion above the bunk.  Surat’s mustachioed face appeared in a small puff of display over the bunk.

“Just thought you’d like to know, Captain Dringoth.  Libra won our bet.  We just punched through the bottom of the ice layer and we’re in some kind of dense shale layer ourselves now.  Probably the same thing you got stuck in.  Libra now on course and underway to the target.”

Dringoth started to reply, but an insistent beep interrupted.  Golich’s voice came over the 1MC.  The TT1 was up on the command deck, monitoring Felix’s progress.

“Fathometer sounding…it’s programmed to go off when rock density drops below a certain threshold.”  Golich manipulated a small dial, then his fingers flew over a keyboard.  “I’m cutting back the borer to half power…and dropping our track speed.  Looking at the plot…density’s dropping fast.  Some kind of void must be just ahead.”

Dringoth got dressed and made his way up the gangway to A deck.

The hum which had pervaded Felix for most of the past day now slackened to a muted vibration.  Just as Golich dropped speed a little more, a shuddering lurch rattled through the ship’s hull and high-pitched scraping and squealing could be heard just outside. 

“Going to forward vid, sir—“ Golich announced.  The screen went from dark to crazy bouncing and careening, speckled with lights, then the luminescent globe of the borer lens materialized into view.  Beyond the glare of the borer head, a deep black swelled into view.

“The Hollows—“Dringoth said quietly.  “There it is.”

“Dead ahead…dropping tracks to one quarter.  I’m shutting the borer down for now.  Looks like we’ve bored right into some kind of void.”

Just then, they all felt the ship go weightless for a moment, as Felix dropped through the void and smashed into a rock formation below.  The ship shuddered and creaked as she settled against the face of the rock.

The air was still for long moments.

Dringoth shook the dust off, wincing at some kind of laceration on his left shoulder.  “Everyone all right?  Crew, report back now.”

One after another, they all called in: Golich, M’Bela, Acth:On’e, Yang and URME.

Dringoth checked the sounder, then the profiler.  “Where the hell are we?”

Golich took a peek out the side porthole, then stabbed a button on his console.  Strong floodlights from Felix’s forward hull illuminated the void around them.

“Looks like we’re in some kind of narrow cavern.  You know Gibbons is full of these places…caves, tunnels, mazes, ancient lava tubes.  We must have bored right into one.”

M’Bela had been checking the cat’s hull.  “Hull still intact, sir.  Pressure down a bit, but within the safe zone.  No further breaches that I can detect.  Our repairs seemed to have held.”

“Great.  What about—”

But Dringoth’s words were interrupted by M’Bela from the Search and Surveillance console aft of them.  “Captain, deco wakes strong and close aboard…readings converging on bearing oh eight five…off to our starboard.”

“Find out what Libra’s seeing.”

A few minutes’ parley between the cats determined that Libra had punched into the same void/cavern, some three hundred meters away, but she hadn’t been damaged in the fall.  Comparing readings and sensor indications, both Temporal Sensor specialists concurred: whatever it was, the source of GIDECO was nearby, possibly in the same cavern.

Dringoth thought for a moment.  “If we start up again, we may just collapse this void on top of both of us.  I think the cats can handle it but I’d rather not try it.”

URME pointed out, “Sir, studying Queenie’s profiler readings seems to indicate our target may well be inside this same cavern, perhaps at a lower elevation.  Perhaps, we could egress in hypersuits and recon on foot?”

Dringoth thought that a good idea.  “I like it.  Okay, let Libra know what we’re doing.  Queenie, you and Yang are with me.  We’re taking a little hike.  Golich, Acth:On’e and URME will stay with the cat for now.  Let’s go.”

Suit-up and egress through Felix’s lockout took an hour.  Advised of their intentions, Surat agreed that Libra would join the search party.  Half an hour later, a platoon of time jumpers clad in armored hypersuits assembled on a sloping shelf of rock between the two cats.

Surat pointed in the direction of their target.  The cavern was black as night on that heading, and footing was treacherous with ice and loose sand or gravel.

Libra’s commander noted the slope.  “Ground drops away pretty sharply up ahead, Dringoth.  Maybe we ought to use suit boost.  My TS tech says GIDECO’s that way, somewhere down below us.” 

“Let’s get as detailed a sounding as we can before we go anywhere,” Dringoth suggested.

Acoustic pulses produced a rough outline of what lay ahead and below them.  The void was shaped like a bent teardrop, curving down at an ever-increasing slope for hundreds of meters below their elevation.

Whatever the Gibbons Decoherence Object was, it was down there.

“Okay,” Dringoth commanded, “Felix crew, light off.  And keep your helmet lamps on low.  I don’t want too much glare as we go down.”

Libra’s team did the same and, one after another, the small party of hypersuit-clad time jumpers fired off their suit boosters.  Compressed nitrogen gas thrusters along their suit legs lifted each of them a meter above the ground and they descended into the dark chasm slowly, carefully dropping down what seemed to become a near-vertical shaft of rock.

Surat’s sensor tech called out the approach.  “Deco wake signal growing stronger.  Advise adjusting course three degrees to port….”

The search party shifted left and descended further on boost deeper into the opaque depths of the void.

Yang’s sounder beeped in her helmet earphones.  “Pinging ground coming up…seventy meters below us.”

“Signal still growing stronger,” the Libra tech added. 

It was Yang who figured out what the crazy profiler outlines on her instruments were telling her.  “Point source directly below us…some kind of object.  Approximately twenty-five meters main dimension, some kind of added echoes from the edges.”

Carefully, one by one, the search party alighted on pebbly ground, slick with ice.  It was M’Bela who shone her helmet lamps on the object first.

There were audible gasps around the comm circuit.

“What the hell--?”

“My God, what is that?”

“It’s a—”

“Some kind of ship, maybe?”

The ship…the object…looked like a giant Christmas tree ornament, lying on its side.  Conical projections extended into shadows fore and aft, on either end of the bulbous, mostly spherical mid-section.  A thick patina of dust caked the entire structure; clearly, the thing had lain there for a very long time.

“Clearly a ship of some kind,” Surat decided.  He motioned his sensor tech forward.  “Can you get a reading on the hull…looks like it was breached along the equator.”

Libra’s sensor tech was Nuwen Kharg.  Kharg eased forward through ankle deep dust, slipping on the ice and probed the object with his sounder.  “Sir, my read shows no clear differentiation on the material, but it’s showing isotopic dating that can’t be right…something like two point five million years…hundreds of thousands of decaterrs.  Could be instrument failure…let me run a diagnostic.”

“Your instrument may be right after all,” Dringoth said.  Cautiously, he pushed by Kharg and went straight up to the hull, experimentally touching the outer plates.  “Surat, didn’t T2 put out some kind of report a few years ago—probably archived now—about the early Coethi encounters?  That they first used actual ships in early time jumping…before the swarm could manage temporal shifts as a swarm.”

“You think this may be an early Coethi jumpship?”  Surat was openly skeptical.  “Time Guard didn’t have a lot of intel behind that supposition, just theories.  Nobody ever saw an actual Coethi ship of any kind.  My guess is such things don’t exist.  T2 fairy tales, if you ask me.”

Something caught Dringoth’s eyes…maybe a reflection.  A glint off something solid inside the hull breach.  Startled, he backed away quickly.  “Queenie, Yang, power up your HERF guns and get up here.  Shine a stronger light inside—”

Surat was more cautious.  “Take it easy, Captain. Give that thing some room…we don’t know what this contraption is.”

As ordered, Yang and M’Bela came forward carefully.  Yang twisted her helmet lamp to put more light inside the breach.  Piles of gear had spilled out of the breach, littering the cavern floor, now nearly buried in dust.   Nobody had any idea what the gear was but it looked old, rusted and shattered, like discarded junk. 

“Right there,” Dringoth said.  “That direction.”

Yang shone her light.  The shadows parted and for a second, it was clear what had caught Dringoth’s eye.

“It’s a body,” Yang muttered.  She shivered in spite of herself.  “In a suit—”

Dringoth climbed partway through the breach, perched precariously on a piece of the gear, which wobbled under his boot.  He steadied himself by holding onto the edge of the hull breach.

“It is indeed.  And it looks…”  He swallowed hard.  “It seems to be human...or was.”

 

So that’s the excerpt.  The Word Shed will take a two-week sabbatical for the holidays.  The next post comes on January 7, 2019.  In this post, I’ll provide a little background on what comes after Time Jumpers.  It’s a novel about two future architects, distantly related to each other but separated in time by 800 years.  They’re both competing with each other to cement their legacies as architects, but the competition raises an existential threat for Humanity.  It’s called Monument.

Have a great holiday.  See you in 2019.

Phil B.