Endeavour: A Sleeping Gods Novel
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialog are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 Ralph Kern
Cover Art by Gary Compton
Edited by J Scott-Marryatt
“Endeavour: A Sleeping Gods Novel,” was originally published by the author and as of October 2014 is being published by Tickety Boo Press Ltd. Check out www.ticketyboopress.co.uk for other exciting titles.
Table of Contents
Copyright Page
Endeavour (A Sleeping Gods Novel, #1)
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1: 2078 AD EARTH
CHAPTER 2: 2118 AD EARTH
CHAPTER 3: 2118 AD EARTH SAN DIEGO
CHAPTER 4: 2118 AD EARTH ORBIT
CHAPTER 5: 2130 AD TAU CETI
CHAPTER 6: 2130 AD EDEN ORBIT
CHAPTER 7: 2130 AD EDEN ORBIT
CHAPTER 8: 2130 AD EDEN
CHAPTER 9: 2130 AD EDEN
CHAPTER 10: 2130 AD EDEN
CHAPTER 11: 2130 AD EDEN
CHAPTER 12: 2130 AD EDEN ORBIT
CHAPTER 13: 2130 AD EDEN SURFACE
CHAPTER 14: 2130 AD EDEN ORBIT
CHAPTER 15: 2130 AD EDEN SECOND SITE
CHAPTER 16: 2130 AD EDEN ORBIT
CHAPTER 17: 2143 AD EARTH-MOON SYSTEM LA GRANGE POINT 1
CHAPTER 18: 2147 AD EARTH SAN DIEGO
CHAPTER 19: 2147 AD EARTH SAHELIA
CHAPTER 20: 2169 AD GLIESE 581 POSIEDON
CHAPTER 21: 2169 AD GLIESE 581 POSIEDON
CHAPTER 22: 2169 AD GLIESE 581 POSEIDON
CHAPTER 23: 2169 AD GLIESE 581 POSIEDON
CHAPTER 24: 2189 AD EARTH
CHAPTER 25: 2191 AD EARTH SAN DIEGO
CHAPTER 26: 2191 AD JUPITER SPACE
CHAPTER 27: 2191 AD JUPITER SPACE
CHAPTER 28: 2232 AD 55 CANCRI
CHAPTER 29: 2232 AD 55 CANCRI
CHAPTER 30: 2232 AD 55 CANCRI RING FRAGMENT
CHAPTER 31: 2232 AD 55 CANCRI RING FRAGMENT
CHAPTER 32: 2232 AD 55 CANCRI SYSTEM SCAVENGER SHIP
CHAPTER 33: 2232 AD 55 CANCRI SYSTEM
CHAPTER 34: 2232 AD 55 CANCRI SYSTEM
CHAPTER 35: 2232 AD 55 CANCRI STAR SYSTEM
CHAPTER 36: 2232 AD 55 CANCRI STAR SYSTEM JEWEL ORBIT
CHAPTER 37: 2232 AD UNKOWN
CHAPTER 38: 2232 AD 55 CANCRI STAR SYSTEM JEWEL ORBIT
CHAPTER 39: 2232 AD UNKNOWN
CHAPTER 40: 2232 AD 55 CANCRI SYSTEM JEWEL ORBIT
CHAPTER 41: 2253 AD CA3812 STAR SYSTEM
CHAPTER 42: 2274 AD MIZAR AND ALCOR SYSTEM
CHAPTER 43: 2274 AD MIZAR AND ALCOR SYSTEM
CHAPTER 44: 2274 AD MIZAR AND ALCOR SYSTEM
CHAPTER 45 2274 AD MIZAR AND ALCOR SYSTEM UNKNOWN WORLD
CHAPTER 46: 2274 AD MIZAR AND ALCOR SYSTEM UNKNOWN WORLD
CHAPTER 47: 1587 AD EARTH ROANOKE ISLAND
CHAPTER 48: 2274 AD MIZAR AND ALCOR SYSTEM CROATOAN
CHAPTER 49: 2274 AD MIZAR AND ALCOR SYSTEM CROATOAN
CHAPTER 50: 2274 AD MIZAR AND ALCOR SYSTEM CROATOAN
CHAPTER 51: 2274 AD MIZAR AND ALCOR SYSTEM CROATOAN ORBIT
CHAPTER 52: 2274 AD MIZAR AND ALCOR SYSTEM CROATOAN ORBIT
CHAPTER 53: 2274 AD MIZAR AND ALCOR SYSTEM CROATOEN ORBIT
CHAPTER 54: 2274 AD MIZAR AND ALCOR SYSTEM CROATOAN ORBIT
CHAPTER 55: 2274 AD MIZAR AND ALCOR SYSTEM THE CENTRE
CHAPTER 56: 2274 AD MIZAR AND ALCOR SYSTEM
EPILOGUE
Authors Note
‘The apparent size and age of the universe suggests that many technologically advanced extra-terrestrial civilisations ought to exist. However, this hypothesis seems inconsistent with the lack of observational evidence to support it.
or
Where is everyone?’
The Fermi Paradox
Enrico Fermi, Los Alamos, 1950
PROLOGUE
Ambition, determination and curiosity. Those traits had all led to this journey being attempted. If every voyage the boldest of adventurers had undertaken were to be placed end to end, they would make up but a tiny fraction of the traveller’s long and lonely quest. Finally, Delphi was nearing its destination.
Swinging into the Tau Ceti star system, Delphi slowly came online, waking from its decades-long slumber. The dull housekeeping program that governed the probe’s systems on its long cruise between the stars closed down. The more inquisitive, curious, artificial intelligence was now to take stewardship of the mission; to explore on behalf of its distant creators.
Delicate sensors extended and covers retracted from the equipment encrusting its hull. Delphi began to look, listen and taste the space around it. The probe sighted the still distant target and began to slowly adjust its course. The scoop of the massive, but intangible, electromagnetic funnel fed on the minute and ethereal wisps of hydrogen and helium found in the void of space. They were sucked into the maw of the Bussard ram scoop that was the intake of Delphi’s mighty engine, where it was squeezed tighter and tighter until it erupted in a furious blue fusion stream, lancing into space, as hot as the surface of a sun. Thick plates vectored the burning hot jet of energy so it fired ahead and Delphi began to decelerate from its interstellar journey, shedding speed desperately, slowing to a velocity that would mean that it was captured by the gravity of the star it had found itself near.
Spiralling in closer to the warm heart of the Tau Ceti system, Delphi let loose a swarm of daughter probes. They unfurled vast solar sails and began their own journey towards targets that the governing mind had prioritised and found interesting. Some of these were odysseys in their own right, and would take years. Others would merely take a few months. Their courses would deviate over the coming days and weeks, scattering around the system. A few would reach targets close to Delphi’s own destination, whilst the others journeyed further on towards the cold outer planets.
Delphi knew where it was going already though. Closer and closer it got to the world which was the reason for it crossing the dark, empty void between the stars. The intriguing place that its mission planners had chosen as its destination so long ago and so far away.
The vast rocky world Delphi aimed for dwarfed any of the terrestrials in its home system. The heavy gravity would make visiting there impossible. Like Venus, its surface was hidden by thick roiling milky clouds, forever out of reach of humans. Delphi steered closer and closer to the planet. The stems of its scoop retracted, reconfigured and restructured into a heat shield. Delphi still needed to slow down even more, and this world would help.
The bulky probe became a fiery streak as it dipped into the atmosphere, so low that the clouds began to take shape under it. Lightning from the storm-cloud filled the sky, creating blinding flashes, some so close it seemed that the forks of electrical discharge would strike the probe as it streaked by. As the planet rolled under the burning craft, another world began to rise above the horizon. This was Delphi’s true destination. The probe finally shot out of the atmosphere leaving fiery embers, the remains of its heat shield in its wake. Delphi would never again be a starship. It had sacrificed the ability to cross between the stars in order to be able to slow enough to arrive at its destination.
Finally, Delphi slid into orbit of the moon-world circling the fourth planet. If Delphi could give a sigh of contentment, it would have. After its long voyage it had finally arrived, and the real work was to begin.
The world looked, from Delphi’s high vantage point, like the Earth. Over one green, lush and verdant continent it could see strobe-like lightning flashing through the clouds. Elsewhere beautif
ul atolls and islands sat atop deep blue oceans.
More probes disgorged from Delphi’s hull and plunged into the rich atmosphere. If Delphi had been a person, it would have excitedly clucked over the results that rapidly began coming in. The oxygen and nitrogen content was a little different than on Earth. Trace elements of other gasses were in slightly odd proportions. The atmosphere was protective, but seemed to be structured in new ways. Yes, a few things were different from Delphi’s distant home world but everything was close enough.
It couldn’t be called excitement that Delphi felt, the governing artificial intelligence wasn’t sophisticated enough to feel such emotions, but it followed some lines of investigation more enthusiastically than others. One of its lander probes sighted some kind of huge, lumbering animal that looked like a cross between a dinosaur and a horse grazing on plant life. Another lander had splashed down in a vast blue ocean. Whilst it was bobbing around Delphi watched as a huge whale like creature surfaced and gave a fountain like squirt of water before sinking out of view again.
Thousands of hours of footage and sensor readings were compiled and Delphi collected them all. The mind sifted through the treasure trove of information. It was prioritised, and sent with a powerful transmitter to the scientists who would eagerly be awaiting the data twelve long light years away.
No, Delphi couldn’t feel any of the emotions that a human would. It could not feel the satisfaction of having crossed that vast distance, nor the excitement about the strange life it had found. But if it could, it damn well would.
CHAPTER 1: 2078 AD EARTH
Curt Paskett loved an audience, and more importantly the audience loved him. His carefully cultivated image, smart yet casual, was one that went down well with both the masses and his own staff. He was, as his boss liked to slap him on his back and tell him repeatedly, the ideal front man. Not just for Paskett’s own department, and the subsidiary companies that surrounded it, but for the whole vast and labyrinthine organisation that was Helios Industries.
Smiling warmly, he sauntered onto the stage at the Leicester Space Centre lecture theatre. His left hand was in the trouser pocket of his charcoal grey suit, the other arm swinging nonchalantly. Paskett reached out to the host who had just introduced him.
‘Thanks, Hugh,’ Paskett said.
The host took his hand and pumped it enthusiastically, ‘Welcome, Curt,’ he said, turning to the audience. ‘I’ll leave you in his capable hands.’
As the host retreated, Paskett surveyed the people crammed into long rows in the dark lecture theatre in front of him. The audience was a mix of hundreds of reporters, scientists, engineers and fellow players in the corporate world.
‘Well, folks, thanks for turning up,’ Paskett leaned casually on the lectern, illuminated from above on the dark stage by a single spotlight. ‘Eighteen years ago, I was just an up and coming young executive and I told my boss: “I have an idea. An idea that will future-proof Helios forever and, what’s more, do some good in the world”. Now, Clinton looked at me from behind his desk, leant back and said in his gruff old voice: “Curt, whatever it is, give it me in fifty words or less.”’
The audience gave a collective chuckle at this. Clinton Mayhew, the CEO of Helios, was a legendarily bad-tempered man, one of the reasons he needed people like Paskett. He was the public, friendly face of the huge multinational company.
‘I looked him in the eye and said: “they’re selling Delphi, we need to buy it”. Now Clinton put down his tablet and listened to me - the young buck. He gave me some of his valuable time. Now I’m not saying that was the turning point. It wasn’t by a long shot. In fact that was just the beginning. I think Clinton liked the idea, but he’s a pragmatist too. I needed to sell the benefits to him for sure, and after a while I swung him round.’
The fire sale of NASA’s assets was still legendary in aerospace circles. The American government had decided that it needed to start putting as much of the financial burden of space exploration into the hands of private industry as possible. Once that decision had been made, NASA had indiscriminately sold off everything that wasn’t government or military related. Delphi itself had been a controversial program from the outset. A particularly progressive government had managed to drive the first interstellar probe to launch, despite the fact there was no realistic prospect of any kind of return within its own administration. It had been something that had polarised the tax payers of the time completely. A starship costing tens of billions of dollars was designed and built. It was then sent on a punt, or depending who was asked, a stunt to a neighbouring star, using technology that had hardly been tested. It was one of those things that people either loved or loathed, there was no middle ground. Fortunately the horrendous economic downturn of the early twenty first century had been followed by a massive boom as the banking sectors were finally brought to heel. The American government had found itself desperately in need of a flagship project to counter the expansionist far Eastern powers that were making leaps and strides in space exploration. Delphi was that flagship, the first human spacecraft to explore another star. It had been a perfect storm for that kind of project.
Much to the chagrin of the NASA scientists and their ESA colleagues who had been involved, the objective of trumping China and India was completed as soon as the probe had been sent on its way. This small fact made it one of the first things to be put up for sale a few years later. A consortium of universities had managed to scrape together the funding to keep Delphi going for a few more years. Eventually though, they were forced to seek some serious financial backing. Helios Industries had been ready to pick up the ball.
‘So, after a few months of being put through the ringer,’ Paskett gave a slight mental grimace as he casually swept through months of cost benefit analysis and negotiation. ‘We ended up with our own starship, one that was nearly at Tau Ceti. Let me tell you this, folks. If you thought you have a large mortgage, well, it’s nothing compared to the repayments we’d taken on for this thing.’
The audience on cue gave another polite chuckle, enjoying his faux casualness. No one was under any illusions that Paskett hadn’t rehearsed this speech to a tee. But still he acted like it was all off the cuff.
‘But,’ he paused. His voice lost the levity that it had previously held, ‘Not since the days of Sputnik, Apollo, Zheng He or Trident has the world’s imagination been captured like it has for Delphi. And what did we get for our money?’
As was rehearsed, the carefully selected choral music started, whilst next to Curt a huge hologram slowly brightened into view. Ten worlds span and danced around a star in the centre. Many of them were swinging around their parent star far closer than seemed right to people used to in the far ranging distances of the solar system.
‘Welcome to Tau Ceti, ladies and gentlemen.’ The audience gave a round of applause and cheers. ‘Twelve light years away,’ Paskett continued, his voice getting louder. ‘A veritable home away from home. Okay, the star’s a bit smaller than ours...’
Perfectly timed, the hologram image view began swooping in and out to emphasise Paskett’s points as he made them.
‘Some of the worlds are different beyond our imagination. Take this one for example.’ The image swept into towards the grey fifth world. ‘One of the first rocky exo-planets discovered back in 2012, a huge beast of a thing.’
An image of the Earth blinked into existence next to the huge cratered rocky world for a few seconds, showing it to be nearly twice the size of the home of humanity.
‘Or this little world.’ The image focussed o, the innermost world. It was a tiny black rock that was glowing with heat from its proximity to its sun, seemingly skimming the very surface itself. ‘But the one that interests us most is this one.’
With a dramatic flourish the image spiralled dizzyingly in towards the fourth world. As it got closer it swung around the planet, revealing its green and blue moon. The music, perfectly timed, reached a crescendo.
‘We call this plan
et Eden, ladies and gentlemen. Not an original name but a fitting one,’ Paskett continued. The hologram image focussed on a world that looked verdant and lush. Blue oceans glistened in crisp high resolution whilst dazzling white ice packs were visible at the poles. Despite the unfamiliar shaped continents, it looked the twin of Earth.
‘Discovered in 2025, we knew it had life a few months after that from spectrographic observations. Sometime later we had our first hazy pictures from the Very Large Telescope on the moon. But now, we’ve been there and seen such wonderful things.’
Paskett moved to one side of the stage whilst, at the other end, the hologram shrank away. A dazzling montage of images started on the huge cinema screen behind him. A few images showed huge grazing animals, plodding around on fields of moss. Other videos showed strange, scaled flying creatures that looked like pterodactyls swooping and soaring through the air. On yet another recording was what seemed to be tree-sized blades of grass with chirping little rodent-like creatures scurrying over them.
Abruptly the images and videos came to a halt, the music stopped and Paskett walked back to the centre of the stage. The images began to fade before finally disappearing. The spotlight lanced back down on Paskett, the whole rehearsed sequence designed to emphasise his next few words. He leant slightly forwards on the lectern, both hands gripping it. Paskett’s voice became business-like and the half-smile was gone.
‘So.’ He paused, his eyes tracking from left to right, seemingly in an effort to meet every member of the audience’s gaze. ‘We’ve seen it, now how do we get there?’
***
Marcus looked at his hand, desperately hoping it would stop trembling. He hated public speaking with a passion. He could barely hold it together when giving a lecture to a class of twenty or so undergraduates who usually, at least, pretended to be interested in his field. Now Paskett was dragging him out in front of hundreds of people who needed to be told why they wanted to know about his rather esoteric field of speciality.
Observing from the side of the stage where he was waiting, he could see Paskett smoothly delivering his part of the presentation. The audience was paying rapt attention to his clear, concise Californian accent. He looked every part the polished speaker in that expensive sharp grey suit with the designer black sweater underneath. His mid-forties age was tempered by the youthful movements of someone who had decided ‘jogging meetings’ were the way forwards. That was something that Marcus still hadn’t forgiven him for, although he had to admit begrudgingly, that edict had reduced his waistline somewhat. Doctor Marcus Caison knew he looked his part too. Thinning hair he had never bothered having rectified, a slightly scruffy and dishevelled appearance and a shirt and tie that had clearly bought a fair few fashion seasons ago. Marcus knew he wasn’t paid to look good, that was Paskett’s job. He was paid because of what his mind could do. Paskett was, however, insistent that he was to be wheeled out on stage like some kind of dancing monkey. All because, according to him, the audience would want to see the guy who came up with this mad idea.