White Seed: Seed World, #1

By Kenneth Marshall

The White Seed Brings Life to Worlds

Three thousand years ago, the seeds arrived from Earth on hundreds of worlds. The developed worlds formed the Network, connected only by radio and laser. Since the time of the seeds, nothing but information has traveled between the stars. Now a starship, The Child of Ambition, is changing that. Her first mission: to explore the dark worlds, the ones that failed.

Kali Hakoian, pilot-astronaut and war hero, thought landing on the super-Earth of Keto would be routine. The emptiest seed world—its global ocean matted with algae and crawling with hurricanes—hides the oldest human ruins. Her crew of scientists: a dreamer, a believer, and a retired assassin. Their hypothesis—self-termination of the seed base.

But when an act of sabotage strands her in the path of a superstorm, she’s forced to escape with the man she trusts the least. They may never find out what happened to the settlers—unless it happens to them. Can she trust her crew enough to find a way out of the darkness?

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Athenian
• Release date: Dec 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9780990327219

Kenneth Marshall

Soldier, sailor, engineer and pilot--Kenneth Marshall was the world's second most interesting ex-convenience store clerk until he decided to sit in a chair and write a book. He lives in Generica, USA, with his pet stalactite. In his spare time, he chugs whiskey, munches chocolate, and stalks the flea-bitten rodents in his basement. Occasionally, he travels to beautiful and exotic places, which are invariably destroyed by natural causes shortly after he leaves.

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Dedication

To my wife, who was the first to see these worlds with me

Part I — Athena: The Divided World

Athena at War

Year 5307

Mission Time: Minus Seven Years

One minute before S-Second, Kali Hakoian had the Denialist rebel leader Chon Dō in her bombsights.

A thousand meters below her Vertel, the top of the Spiral Hotel reached into the morning sunlight, burning like the tip of a flaming torch. Athena Prime had risen in the east between the twin mountains behind the city of Bruno. The arc of the Lesser Sea glittered to the west in the direction of the northern continent and its capital Einstein. The Vertel hummed as it circled, the sound of its electric engines and thrust fans vibrating through its diamond composite airframe.

The North Athenian Forces would attack at any moment. Kali imagined the crumps and bangs of munitions detonating and pictured the flashes of light in the streets near the base of the Spiral Hotel. The first wave of northern attacks would be precise assassinations, launched from within the city. The second wave would take down the main air defenses and cripple the largest ekranoplanes in the port. The third would bring in the Vertels to pick off targets of opportunity.

Kali had hauled in five thousand kilograms of high-precision munitions, and she was going to put them down on someone’s head. A drone could have done her job, but the North Athenians didn’t fight by proxy. Their constitution didn’t allow machines lethal authority. In hundreds of years of automated combat on ancient Earth, military casualties had fallen to zero, while civilian deaths soared. Cities had been wasted by machines as operators a continent away watched their screens. Athena was seeded to be different—if a war was worth fighting, humans would fight it.

And Kali believed taking the islands of Haffay from Chon Dō was worth it.

From the two-thousand meter altitude of the Vertel, she could see Chon’s robes flowing in the wind as he strode from the capitol building of Haffay to the Spiral Hotel. Her helmet visor’s magnification showed the red cloth of his sunshall and the golden dot of a burning Wheel of Syncwar on his back. Following him was a force of two dozen fighters and a crowd of civilians who wouldn’t let him out of their sight, regardless of the danger.

Kali flagged Chon for two thousand kilograms of fresh RDX. That’d wipe him off the road at the same moment it wiped the road off the island. The intelligence service would need a DNA sequencer to identify Chon’s atomized body. The bombs would kill his bodyguards and his civilian entourage at the same time. But the collateral damage didn’t mean anything to Kali—not compared to the lives Chon would end if she let him live, or the lies he’d continue to tell about Athena and the seeds.

The seconds ticked away as her thumb hovered over the trigger. She needed clearance from Command. The assassination wave had to launch before she could engage. Then Bruno would be a free-fire zone. What were the Shinigami hidden in the city waiting for?

She let the Vertel circle closer to the Spiral Hotel and the capitol park.

What are you doing? Odis, her co-pilot, asked.

Kali pressed her visor close to the side window for a better view. Her face reflected back at her—dark skin and gold-flecked eyes. I’ve got Chon—I can take him out!

We’re too close. They’ll get a lock on us.

I know it’s him, she insisted.

How can you tell?

See how many follow him?

Chon had sailed west from the continent of Senta to take the islands. He’d abolished the local government, executed his opponents, and preached his Denialist ideology. To Kali, the last crime was his worst—if the chain of history was broken, it couldn’t be joined again. Once the connection to the Network was cut and the knowledge that came with the seeds lost, it would never be recovered. If Chon succeeded in spreading his philosophy to the northern continent, Athena would have no future as a developed world.

Odis put his hand on Kali’s shoulder. Let the Shinigami get him. The Provies will shoot us down!

If they were going to kill Chon, they’d have done it already.

She didn’t trust the Shinigami to make the kill—even more so now that Chon was in her sights. He was hers. She let the Vertel slip closer and tightened her finger on the trigger, ready to drop the bombs.

She saw two quick flashes near the capitol building, at the far end of the park. Thin trails of smoke rose from the ground and turned in her direction—a stereo pair of acoustic missiles. Kali’s eyes fixed on the missiles and her hand tightened on the joystick; adrenaline surged in her veins. Odis was right—the Provies had sensed them.

The Vertel absorbed radio waves and re-emitted light; it was invisible to radar and human or machine eyes. But it wasn’t silent—its fans had a distinctive sound. Kali cursed herself. She’d let the Vertel get too close to the air defenses, and one of Chon’s fighters had heard it. She’d pushed too hard and screwed up.

The old missiles Chon had stolen from the Lost Arsenal of the Second Autocracy were perfectly capable of homing in on the Vertel. Working together, they could hear its engines the way an owl hears a mouse in the night, then steer to the sound. Kali needed to get the Vertel out of their way or it would go down in flames.

Turn us around. Get us out of here! Odis shouted.

Kali glanced quickly at Odis. His eyes were locked on the approaching missiles. No! That won’t work—we can’t outrun them!

If the missiles had had infrared or radar seekers, she could’ve gotten out of their field of view by cutting across their path and letting them fly by harmlessly. But acoustic missiles could hear three-hundred sixty degrees, and at this altitude they had enough propellant to make a full turn. A tail approach would be easy for them—slower closing speed and less need for their old proximity fuses to react quickly.

Kali rolled the Vertel over and pulled the joystick and throttle back. All of Athena filled the Vertel’s front window as its nose pointed at the heart of the planet. The missiles rose toward it head-on from below. If there was hope of escape, it was for the missiles to pass behind the Vertel without detonating, their fuses too slow to detect the sound of its engines at idle.

The shockwave from the first missile rattled the Vertel’s windows as it roared by. The second missile exploded milliseconds before it passed. The pair could localize front-to-back as well as left-to-right; the first had signaled the second when it entered the Vertel’s wake. Fragments from the warhead struck the Vertel on Odis’s side, penetrating the window and fuselage. Odis screamed as his helmet slammed into his headrest. Blood spattered on the front of his visor.

Kali pulled the Vertel out of the dive at full throttle. It roared through the streets at near zero altitude, below the flat roofs and between the colorful stucco walls of the slums of Bruno. The blast of its engines tore down clotheslines and power cables.

Odis slumped forward in his seat, unconscious. Kali pointed the Vertel up the hill, between the mountains and back to base. No telling what damage had been done to it, and Odis needed medical attention right away. Chon would have to wait; Kali had lost her chance. She felt immensely frustrated—she’d blown the mission and gotten Odis hurt along the way.

But she’d be back over Bruno, and she’d do everything she could to make Chon pay for his crimes.

Part II — Keto: Wet Super-Earth

Lander Assignment

Mission

Discover the cause of the loss of the seed world Keto.

Kali Hakoian (Ha-koh-ee-an)

Pilot-astronaut

Former combat pilot

Daughter of Kaera, Minister of Unification

Alon Ienian (Uh-Lohn Ee-en-ee-an)

Science team leader

Geologist

Additional qualifications classified

Toran MacAten

Anthropologist and student of human history

Former lead excavator of Exile bases in Senta

Northern Syncretist

Ai Saraya (Eye Sah-ra-ya)

Microbiologist

Former student of chief scientist Zansai

Galia Zansaian (Zan-sah-ee-an)

Climatologist

Daughter of Zansai

Manus Wirinya Lintonian

Zoologist

Partner of Galia

Asymptote of History

Year 5314

Mission Time: Day One, 06:00

Ninety seconds to deorbit burn, Alon Ienian lay staring out of the cockpit window of the lander at the hot, algae-laden seas of Keto. The sun reflected from the swirling red and green currents in the water, and storms crawled over the face of the planet like white spiders. He searched ahead of the lander’s flight path for the island it was destined for, but he couldn’t see it. In fact, he couldn’t see any land at all—only a single global ocean.

He imagined the white seed penetrating Keto’s atmosphere from above and falling to the sea. Three thousand years ago, the seeds from Earth had arrived on Keto, as they had on hundreds of other worlds—his homeworld of Athena, Mineral, Avia, Ambition, and the other two hundred worlds of the Network. The seed had coasted for centuries in space and braked against the magnetospheres of Keto’s sun and the gas giants around it. It had floated in the ocean for years before it washed up on an island. And then it had gone about its work, building a settlement and incubating children.

There’d been people on Keto once, but that was a long time ago, and they were gone now.

KU antennae stowed. Air data probes stowed. Deorbit attitude—good. Burn targets loaded. Gimbal check—go.

Alon became vaguely aware of the voice of Kali Hakoian—lander pilot, team commander—coming from beside him as she went through the deorbit checklist.

Main engine valves—on. Ignition systems armed. Propulsion now fully unsafed. Kali held up a gloved thumb. Thirty seconds to pre-burn.

The lander was almost committed.

They’d hung in orbit for weeks waiting for a gap in the storms to take the shot. Keto—the emptiest seed world in the Network—hid some of the oldest ruins, things that had been lost long ago on the developed worlds. The initial base and its supporting facilities, the machines that built it, and perhaps even remains of the first humans that lived there.

How had the base failed on Keto? That was the mission—at least the one Alon could talk about. For a time, the machines had transmitted to the Network, and then they’d fallen silent. The seeds allowed the first generation to terminate a base in the event of a disaster or fatally unsuitable world, if all surviving humans voted in favor. Every base had the means available in the fuels that powered it. Nuclear detonation would be a quick and painless end, and it would sterilize the planet of most life from Earth. Self-termination was suspected on many of the dark worlds, but it couldn’t be proven. If Keto had self-terminated, the physical evidence would be here.

Alon felt a gentle pressure on his back as the thrusters started the ullage burn. Forty meters below him, a hundred tonnes of liquid oxygen and methane were sloshing into the bottom of their tanks.

Thirty seconds to main engine burn, Kali said. Listen up, everyone—this is your last chance. Weather?

Go, came a voice over the intercom.

Microbio?

Go.

Animal control? Alon saw Kali grinning in a mirror on the instrument panel.

Huh? said an annoyed voice. Zoology is go.

Books?

Anthropology—go. Calm, as always.

Rocks?

Alon hesitated. He was the mission geologist and the science team leader; Kali was overall commander. She couldn’t deorbit the lander without his agreement.

He thought it useful to pause a moment before taking an irreversible action. So many things could go wrong—landing on a small island in a very large ocean, the alien biology of the planet, the storms wound up by thousands of miles of its hot waters. No one from Athena had ever landed on another world—they were the first. No one from the Network had ever done what they were about to do. Since the time of the seeds, nothing but information had traveled between the worlds.

There was a reason no one lived on Keto anymore.

Rocks, Kali said. If you’re having second thoughts, now is a real good time to go out the top door. I hear you’re an awesome jumper! You might make it back to the ship.

Alon let his head sink back into his helmet and breathed out. Geology is go.

All go for deorbit, then.

The main engine below ramped up smoothly. Alon felt some of his weight return.

In another life, he’d been something more than a geologist, and there’d been no end of dangerous missions. Seven standard years ago, he’d fought in the invasion of Haffay. He’d run across Kali there, even if he didn’t remember it clearly now. Haffay had made her something of a hero, whether she wanted to be one or not.

She had to know as well as he did about the moment of calm between committing to a mission and starting it. The moment in which the plans were in order and everything seemed clear—the unknowns, known, and all doubts eased, the mind ready.

It was usually the moment before everything fell apart and the plans became worthless.

This mission was more important than Alon could say. It wasn’t about archaeology, it was about the future—the future of Athena. There was something he was looking for. He wasn’t sure it was on Keto, or that he could find it if it was, or even what it looked like.

But if he found it, he could change the course of Athena’s history and save his homeworld from itself.

∞

Fuck.

Kali twisted the abort handle clockwise one stop. The mesh and diacom frame of her couch vibrated against her body from the distant hit of a shattered turbo-pump impeller. Forty meters below, a chaotic rush of oxygen and methane flushed the crystalline fragments out the lander’s tail into the oncoming mesosphere.

Four out, startup on three! she shouted into the helmet mike. Surface abort—same target!

The lander rocked under her back as its engines shifted fuel between power heads to stay on course. Three of the five engines were running at low throttle, aiming down the lander’s shallow flight path, shielding it from re-entry plasma. The concentric oxygen and methane tanks of the propulsion stage were almost empty, only full enough for a final burst at touchdown. The lander would reach Keto—the only question was where and how fast. Long and it would go into the volcano on the other side of the island; short and it would hit the water off the coast.

Same speed? Alon asked, from her right.

Yeah, same speed! She knew he was needling her. The lander had five engines; it could land on one, take off on three. It had a lot of redundancy—losing one engine wasn’t a problem. Her eyes caught the heart rate monitor on the instrument panel. The line for Ai Saraya—microbiologist—was pinned at a bird-like one-eighty; Alon’s line had already fallen back to resting. She didn’t want to know what it would take to raise that bastard’s heart rate.

Kali’s eyes went to a mirror-sheet above the instrument panel. Lying with the planet over her head, her view cut off by her helmet, she could only see the surface in the sheet’s reflection of the overhead window. The water was streaked with red and green eddies that looked like some lousy painter’s abstract spatterings. It reminded her of a stagnant lake in the south-west of Senta—a stinking pot of misguided life otherwise known as the main water supply of Duth. An entire ocean gone rotten. Fuck it.

Good trajectory, she said. Two minutes!

The engines were kicking her in the back now, and the flight path arcing down. She glanced at the flow indicators on the engine panel to see the pumps sucking down growing volumes of fuel and oxy. Speed was bleeding off at the correct rate. Too fast and the lander would crash into the surface; too slow and it would run out of fuel mid-air—and crash. But the right speed would put the lander over the target with enough fuel to touch down gently.

Ninety seconds! she said.

The paper-thin diacom shell of the lander transmitted every cycle of engine volume, ringing the capsule like a bell and filling her helmet with a roar. In the mirror-sheet, she could see waves on the ocean below—the heaving water, and the spray in the wind. Keto was close now.

They could have gone to Shinju and gotten a beer and a sandwich, or shots and a local lay. But, no, Alon had to come here for the ineffable science, and the anthropologist Toran, for the first time since launch, had agreed with him. That wouldn’t happen again; home star Apollo would fry Athena first. Fuck ’em both.

Sixty!

The lander tipped vertical, and Kali’s seat rotated ninety degrees forward, dropping her into position at the landing window in the side of the capsule. Her hands hovered over the rotational controllers. The window showed blue sky, then the surface of Keto rotated into view from the bottom. The lander glided forward rapidly over the dirty ocean, standing on its tail. She imagined it blasting up a nice rooster tail of steam behind.

The island ahead was a black hole in a shit-stained sea. It looked like the hump of one of those ancient black and white sea monsters the Einstein zoo incubated now and again, frozen as it surfaced to suck up the air. Apparently, the last one had eaten more than one keeper and they still had it. Must not be edible. Fuck it, too.

She touched two fingers of her glove to her visor as if to kiss them and tapped the Global Astro-Dynamics logo under the window. GAD, don’t let me screw up now!

The lander aimed at a spot on the beast’s tail, its efforts to stay upright swinging the capsule back and forth under her. Alon had poured over multispectral charts for hours, burrowing into the island from orbit, to find the one piece of land that could hold the lander’s million-kilogram max takeoff weight—a volcanic plug on the south side. That was it: Keto spaceport. Zero facilities; no alternate destination.

She felt a change in the vibration under her elbows and saw a flash of yellow in the heads-up overlay. Tumbling spindle on number three high-pressure fuel pump. Another one down? She watched the indicator bounce off the edge of red. The lander had throttled the engine down—no shutdown, still intact. The next engine was ramping up in its place.

A layer of clouds was condensing on the top slope of the mountain. To the northwest, Kali could see craggy valleys on a rain-soaked coast. To the east, thick columns of steam and vog climbed from the shore where the lava hit the ocean.

The plain rose quickly, but the lander knew what to do. Kali felt it tilt as it steered—small changes of thrust balancing it in the air like a stick on a fingertip. It pitched sideways to neutralize the crosswind, then backward to slow to a hover over the target. Dust and gravel shot out from beneath as the engines brushed the surface clean. A moment before the engines cut out, the gear pyros fired like the final volley of a Seed-Day firework show. The lander sank in a gentle, slow-motion bounce.

Kali waited for any indication of ground fire or surface collapse, but the lander was still and all the indicators green.

The turbo-pumps whined distantly as they spun down from their ridiculous operating speeds, and the early morning sunlight streamed in the window onto the storage bins to her left. She relaxed, punched in the safing commands, and hit her harness release with the bottom of her fist. Spinning around in her chair, she rose on one knee to look at Ai and Alon, still suspended above on their backs.

Nailed it! she shouted, slamming one glove into the other. She twisted her helmet off and let it bang onto the deck. Her hair exploded in a wavy mess as she pulled off her cloth cap. First match, she said, grinning.

Alon pushed up on an elbow to look at her. What’s an impeller or two?

No fuck ups! The hardware could blow out all day long for all Kali cared, as long as she didn’t have to go down in history as the one who rode it into the ground. She felt like she’d hammered the ball from her hip to the ramp and over the goal line seconds from the end of the toughest ballgame of the season. It was the clean shot she’d hoped for, the opening win she’d needed; it was their first landing on another world.

She’d come a long way from flying Vertels, and a long, long way from Athena.

Still on her back in her couch, Ai fumbled with her buckle but couldn’t unlatch it. She lay for a moment before pulling her gloves off and turning a pale hand over in front of her faceplate. Kali could see Ai’s fingers shake. Ai studied them carefully, as if measuring the full amplitude of her nerves.

Hey, Shortie—I’m gonna graph your heart rate for a laugh, Kali thought. But with Alon there, she cut off the urge to say it. She didn’t want her name on his shit-list; that could be life-limiting. Bastard.

Kali turned and sank back into her seat. Out the window she could see a terrain of humps, cracks, faults, and vents—a twisted maze with no solution that went on for kilometers. It swept from the sea to the distant mountain without a tree or bush or blade of grass to get in the way. Its starkness gave her pause. It wasn’t the pretty little island she’d expected.

Damn, she thought, that’s empty.

∞

Ai rested her fingers on the handle of the capsule door and knew she couldn’t open it.

Opening the door might affect the lives of millions or it might affect almost no one—but it would certainly affect the crew in the lander and on the starship The Child of Ambition. In the history of Earth, when the continents met, millions had died from the exchange of microorganisms. How many more might die when the worlds of the Network came together?

She stared out the small, round window in the door, her fingers resting on the cold surface of the handle. The door—its locking pins removed—would open easily when the time came, the handle traveling through a slight detent and the door swinging inward. She only had to apply a little force; she knew that from training.

On the other side of the window, she could see the rugged surface climbing toward the mountain in the distance. The illuminated strip of paper above the door showed good numbers for the air on the other side: high oxygen, low carbon dioxide, the temperature of a crisp morning. A dash of light brushed her wrist—the ethereal touch of the world outside.

The crew sat or stood around the