Egg Ships Land

By J Itchen

This may be our real history. Why things are as they are and where our almost lost stories come from.

The new planet has been terraformed, but can the reptiles colonise it successfully? The four are immortal, but will the colonists accept their leadership? Will the four be able to stick together despite fundamental differences? Do they need to develop intelligent mutants to survive forever in new bodies?

You will find that the story has evidence that we all can recognise. Is it all real?

This is the second book in the Egg Ship Trilogy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: J Itchen
• Release date: Mar 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301826575

J Itchen

J is a graduate from Bristol University, England, who is married with four children. Currently lives in Southampton, England, although when young also lived in other parts of the world (Malaysia, Thailand, Yemen Arab Republic).J has been writing for several years mainly for magazines (more usually science rather than science fiction), for specialist books and recently a web site. Starting with science fiction (not fantasy), genres published have also covered the erotic, plus a combination of the two.

Book preview

Egg Ships Land

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by J. ITCHEN

ISBN: 9781301826575

Published by J. Spottiswoode at Smashwords

Copyright: ©2013, J. Spottiswoode, all rights reserved

License Statement:

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

They left by concealment

They arrived with destruction

They rebuilt a world

They never pass away

Contents

1. The second coming

2. Urth at first

3. Cold Urth

4. The Mother Ship

5. Couple Bonding

6. Urth Satina and Zenus

7. Alam and Zenus take a break

8. The ‘other’ pods

9. Back to the mother ship

10. Re-seeding

11. The first on Urth death

12. Alone

13. Religion

14. The intelligent apes

15. Back to the colony

16. Zenus visits

17. Satina’s Hell

18. The Massacre

19. The reunion.

20. The attack

21. A new barbarity

22. Rebellion

23. Sacrifice

24. The Return in the new Millennium

25. The Search

26. Zenus and Rosa

27. The first mutan mind transfer

28. Back again in the future

29. The prophet

30. Mutan City

31. Mutan Rescue Mission

32. Exodus

33. The son of Alam

1.The second coming

His mind was a fog - this felt familiar. What was going on? That precautionary mind store had certainly taken it out of him, and now he had woken up like this! It was just not reasonable. He had to find Gallia. He struggled to move, but his limbs felt like lead and refused to respond. Was he paralysed?

Alam, Alam. Are you there? A tiny voice called him. Who was that? It sounded like a hatchling. It was a hatchling! Odd! He was meant to be on the space ship, circling their potential new planetary home, and there should be no hatchlings on the ship any more.

Alam opened his eyes. Everything was misty, a misty white. He started to realise that something unusual was going on. He had had this exact experience before sometime. When was it?

Alam. Are you OK my love? The tiny hatchling voice again. It sounded very worried, even desperate.

Alam tried to jump up bolt upright but found he still could not move. This time he realised that he was strapped down.

Where am I? Alam tried to say. It came out as a high pitched whimper. He had definitely been through this before. He tried to focus on the fratern hatchling that stood by his bed and held his hand. Her tail stroked his.

Don’t try too hard. It will come with time. The hatchling said.

Alam tried to indicate that he wanted to write with his free hand. That had become the standard signal that he understood that he had been re-born.

Yes! YES, YES, YES! Shouted the hatchling as it jumped up and down before it thrust an electro-pad into his hand. Was that really a re-born Gallia? Why now?

Alam wrote with his maximum concentration. It was difficult with the straps on and it took an age to scrawl a barely legible message.

‘I am Alam. Are you Gallia? Undo straps - please.’ He felt like adding ‘What’s going on?’ but that was too much effort.

The hatchling hopped up and down with excitement, giving out various whoops before he felt the straps come loose. Yes. I am Gallia. My love, we are together again - at long last, the hatchling almost sang.

Where was he? Was he not on board the space ship? What had happened? Why the full scale mind transfer back into a young fratern hatchling? At least he knew that he was with Gallia, but why was she a hatchling as well? What did she mean, ‘at long last’? Where were Zenus and Satina?

The questions flooded in as he slowly gathered his senses together to work for him and before he could communicate properly. He sat up very slowly, careful not to fall off the bed, especially in this crushing gravity. That answered one question. This gravity meant that they had left the space ship and were on Urth. But surely Urth was not yet terra-formed fully! He had at least one more super volcano that he had to make erupt. Urth was not a safe place to be, so why was he being re-born there now? Or was it now in fact thousands of years later than he thought?

Together again, tra-la. Gallia’s hatchling sang at full volume, swinging around with her tail rotating around her. She managed to avoid hitting anything, luckily all the delicate instruments were well protected and hidden away. This was definitely not the space ship.

Eventually Alam managed to speak, but just to say a very blurred Hello.. He found it very odd to find Gallia in yet another body, never mind him as well. She gave him some nasty tasting zurfat to drink. This he found difficult to hold and even trickier to drink, but he struggled on, knowing from before that the more he did this sort of thing the sooner he would gain control over his new body.

They should be still on the space ship from Soill, circulating the new planet they hoped to make their new home, but clearly they were not. The surroundings were mainly white now, for a start, like in a Landing Pod. And the gravity felt massive, although he was not sure if this feeling was partly because he found it difficult to control any of his body.

Till me abut what appened az I recober my snses. Alam said groggily

What? A pause as Gallia deciphered what he had said. Oh. It’s a long story, a very long story for me. You died in a terra-forming accident ten thousand years ago. The super volcano blew up just as you were over it trying to trigger the explosions.

Alan spluttered on his mouthful of zurfat. Zen thouwsa.... It was difficult to comprehend. The journey from Soill had only taken a thousand years. They had left just in time, Soill no longer sent out messages and a solar flare must finally have destroyed it, as predicted.

I died ten thousand years ago as well, but ten thousand years minus sixty Soill years. It was terribly lonely. Gallia continued. We discovered that the Urth terra-form would take at least ten thousand years to stabilise into something we could live with. Even now it is far from ideal. Anyway I spent an incredibly lonely sixty years up in space in my laboratory without you. I did not speak to Zenus and Satina for months on end. They built up their relationship so ironically they are almost like a couple as well now, although they do have a tendency to row. After all the scorn and derision they poured on us because we formed a pair bond that Satina said was unnatural, they went very much the same way. Satina denies it, and Zenus certainly is ambivalent about it at times. She still believes it is wrong and just a temporary way to live until fratern pride separation of the sexes can re-form on Urth. That is when we have a big enough fratern colony.

Anyway, that is an aside. It was a very long and desolate lifetime in my space laboratory. You would have to have been there to appreciate what it was like. Satina worked separately and Zenus moped around as he missed you almost as much as I did. He spent some time messing about on another planet just to give himself something to do. He blamed himself for your death, which was a very devastating thing for him to bear. You must get together again when you are up to flying the anti-gravity agraft.

Pods? Wer in pods? On Urth? Alam asked. It was taking a while to understand what she was saying.

Yes, confirmed Gallia. We are on Urth with one of the batches of egg pods. We have arrived! This was the fruition of ten thousand years of preparation. Oh, by the way, we were not completely sure that the eggs could last ten thousand years as the Soill planners did not allow for that sort of timescale, but it appears that the eggs can! Luckily for us and our future, we can now be re-born in a series of new hatchlings continuously. We can live for ever!

So thir are jist two of us? I mean here, in this pod cluster? Alam asked. His speech facility improved by the minute. This was important. He did not want another lifetime with Satina, or even part of a lifetime. Relationships had deteriorated too far on board the space ship and separation seemed the best policy for their colonies.

Spot on! You remember! Gallia was pleased. Do you remember that somewhere else on this planet, probably at exactly the same time and in exactly the same way Satina and Zenus are being re-born in their pod cluster? There is also another version of you and me, probably having exactly this conversation up in the northern colder lands. It’s mind boggling isn’t it? There are also two Zenuss and two Satinas doing exactly the same.

Four pid clusters with two sets of identical mind transfers?

Quite so, Gallia said. She snuggled up on the chair right next to him as close as she could come. I feel that today I have been released from over sixty years of anguish, even if we have been dormant for ten thousand years. This is Satina’s hell as against your heaven.

So you know how to use the mind transfer equipment.

How do you think that you were revived? Gallia smiled at him. I know it all now, after sixty years of training.

I feel that I have missed out on an enormous amount, a bit like last time. Except this time there are sixty years for me to catch up on, not just two. Alam said.

Yes, but the last sixty years were eminently miss-able, Gallia said. I feel I have a mental scar to be loved away. She paused. Zenus has a scar too.

Tell me more about how I died, Alam asked.

I will have to show you the vid recording. It is imprinted on my brain like a permanent stain. I know every nuance of what you said, what Zenus said, what the shape of the explosion was, how your agraft did not respond. I must watch it with you as part of my healing process. Gallia paused. By the way, why did you take the same craft that you went to get the asteroid with? Satina said that the safety mechanism was faulty.

I must have taken that craft as I knew it so well after I had lived on it for so long with Satina. I probably felt it was the natural one to take. I did have a vague doubt about the safety mechanism but not enough to warrant taking a different agraft. This felt very odd to Alam, he was talking about something that his current brain still thought of as being in the immediate future, but had taken place disastrously ten thousand years ago.

It probably was not the safety mechanism anyway, Gallia commented. The consensus was that even if the safety mechanism had worked, it was unlikely that it would have saved you. But it did not seem to kick in at all! Never, ever, ever, go out in a craft that there are any doubts about, my love. I could not bear it a second time.

There will always be risks in whatever we do, Alam said. His eyesight and speech were developing very fast. Gallia looked appealingly at him. He could see that even though his eyes still did not focus fully. However I will undertake to do all reasonable checks on things like that.

At least we had the mind recording from after your trip to the asteroid and after we had regained our closeness. Gallia said. We lost a lot of our closeness with the first mind transfer when you missed the critical two years. Your recording then predated most of our relationship, if you remember. It was hard for me to recreate it with you then as I felt you were so cool about us for a long time. You even thought that pair bonding would not work, despite the message we received from our original selves back on Soill.

Alam laughed the high-pitched laugh of a hatchling. He almost felt back to normal now, normal for a young hatchling anyway, just out of the reptilian egg. Yes, your closeness in those early days on the ship was most unnerving for me. I wondered if we would ever recreate it or whether we would go totally separate ways. It helped seeing the message from our original selves back on Soill who had obviously formed a very close pair bond. Satina would have gone mental if she had seen that, as it is totally against the traditional sex segregation that she insists upon.

Did insist upon! Ironically she has been forced to set up with Zenus as a pair when we were adamant that we split into two types of colony, them and us. Gallia said. Love won through with us, but it took a long time. We must not lose it again in out hatchling days here.

Are there any other hatchlings born with us? Alam asked.

No. We are all alone as the first two hatchlings on Urth in this pod colony. Four will be hatched in ten Urth years time, but we have those ten years ahead of them. They will also not have the benefit of mind transfers. We will be the only ones to store our minds for rebirths as we do not have the computer memory for more. So we will be the leaders, now and for ever. The colonists will have to live normal, finite lives. We did invent the mind storage technique, after all.

Well, you and Satina did., Alam looked at Gallia closely. By the way, what were the results of your sixty years of research? It was not on mutants, by any chance was it?

Erm. Funny you should ask that. Mutants did...erm... figure, Gallia laughed out loud. Of course I did research on mutants! Other things as well, to stop Satina from getting too suspicious, you understand. But I don’t think that she ever found out! It helped that we hardly ever talked.

What were the results?

Inconclusive I am afraid, Gallia looked at her hands. It does not say much for a life’s work to say that it was ‘inconclusive’ does it? She paused. No. I have made great strides and mutants look like they are a strong possibility. I need to continue the work in this lifetime and take advantage of the new species that have developed on Urth in our long absence. We rescued at least one pair of most major species. I did a lot of genetic engineering on the animal samples we took. We then put most of the creatures back after we wiped the planet clean of life during the terra-forming.

Gallia paused and looked at the screen showing the outside world of the planet. There were two or three small animals very close to the pod. They have developed remarkably quickly to populate this world and to evolve. I fear that it does look more and more likely that we may need mutants to get any real success for our race on this barely hospitable planet. I think that our long term future may be as mutant mammals! That is if Satina does manage not kill our mutants when she finds out. She is bound to try sooner or later, so we need to plan how to protect them.

Alam reached over and gave her a close hug, entwining the end of his tail with hers. Urth history has just started.

He was very aware now that the gravity really felt extremely heavy and although the atmosphere and temperature inside the pod were good for them, that may well not be the case outside on the planet’s surface. They always knew that they would need elevation units and breathing apparatus surface-side, at least for a while.

Gallia smiled weakly at him through tearful eyes. My first proper hug for sixty years! A new chapter may have just started on this planet, but our story goes on, hopefully for ever.

What’s the surface of the planet like now? Alam asked.

Exhaustingly heavy gravity, even in the pod, as you can feel. Still too cold on large parts of the planet, but OK in this area. However it does occasionally freeze, even here. And we will need to carry a gas supply and filtration units, at least for this lifetime. And that’s just from an initial analysis in the three or four days I have had before you were re-born.

We need to get outside as soon as possible and see what it is really like and what we can do. Alam said.

Only once the pod thinks that it has trained us enough! Remember the problems we had in space trying to convince the computer to give us control of the agraft early. Because we hid our mind restores on board in the computer, and no-one knew about it, the ship insisted that it must train us before it allowed us rights to do anything serious. Gallia laughed. She was still deliriously happy to have Alam back, despite the possibly insurmountable problems they both knew that they faced. The dangers of the outside could wait.

2.Urth at first

When he had woken up to life after one thousand years on the space craft had been bad enough, but ten thousand years this time! Ten thousand years was much more than any of them had envisaged, but apparently once everything was in cold storage it seemed that the eggs could last almost indefinitely.

Alam sat in front of the computer screen, in theory being trained by the pod, as it did not know that he was re-born, but in fact trying things out to see what the pod would allow him to do. He sent a message to the mother Egg Ship up above the planet. No response. What had happened to it?

He sent a ‘ping’ to the ship, yes it was there. Why was it not responding properly? Even though there would be no fratern alive on it, the computer on board should still answer him.

Did this mean that the mother ship had failed? Assuming that it must have, was this catastrophic or could they retrieve it? He would have to go and investigate once the computer thought he was properly trained and allowed him to fly the agraft. Without the mother ship in operation they would lose all sorts of back up functions, extra computer power, not to mention all the spare eggs stored up there. In theory if they stripped the mother ship of its resources then they should have little need of it. The ship had done its job to get them across the galaxy from Soill and as a base when they terra-formed the planet. The most important thing it still held was lots of spare eggs, in case this colonisation did not work and did not spread successfully.

In truth he was glad to be off the Egg Space Ship as it was so cramped and claustrophobic. Although it was still in orbit but would be redundant before too long and could be steered into the sun when no longer of any use.

He needed to think in terms of Urth now. Alam remembered that his other persona on Urth had probably beamed back exactly the same message as he had done at almost exactly the same time. That could confuse the Egg Ship if it did receive the messages! It could be confusing for him as well. It felt weird; knowing another version of himself could be having exactly these same thoughts at exactly the same time. Or had their slightly different experiences started to cause their thought processes to diverge already? He would have to warn his other existence not to go at the same time to the space ship. They had agreed not to interact for a thousand years so they could develop separately and become unique again.

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Later Alam and Gallia anxiously looked out using the pods monitors at the surrounding land. They had landed quite close to the equatorial region in a hilly area with a river that passed by very close to them. There were seven pods in a line and they were in the end one, nearest to the river. All the others were dormant at the moment but would be activated when the new hatchlings started to be born. Next to their pod, just feet away to the side, was the most useful item they had. It was an agraft, their all purpose anti-gravity flying machine that he could use as transport on the planet or over it.

It looks very pleasant out there. Alam said as he sat in front of the monitor, his tiny hatchling legs dangling from the chair, well off the ground, tail tucked to the side of him.

It is deceptively so. Look at the temperature, Gallia responded as she stood leaning against his side, rather low down. It is warm enough now, when it is almost mid-day but what about at other times? What about early mornings and at night? I understand it can nearly freeze sometimes. She shuddered, the fear of freezing affected her every bit as much as it affected all fraterns. Being cold blooded they did not have the bodily warming to fight off freezing weather; they just slowed down, eventually stopped and then froze solid.

We will have to wear suits and develop warm clothing.

"The

Reviews for Egg Ships Land

[J Itchen · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A very novel way to see how things can develop, or maybe did develop. Very innovative and interesting