Dragons and Dancing Trees

By GA Douglass

Emerging from a darkness stretching back into prehistory the peoples of Terra awaken to a hope born of the realization of a common identity. For the Terran people even winning simple survival will be an ordeal. Beyond the borders of their stellar system forces gather to strike down the new species. Within the labyrinth of terrestrial politics old foes scheme to return the reins of power to their own hands. In order to forge a future for her species Sarah Thompson will have to face down threats on all fronts and somehow deal with beings as unlikely as Dragons and Dancing Trees.
The final book in the Post First Contact trilogy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: GA Douglass
• Release date: Jun 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310603129

GA Douglass

GA Douglass is a trained IT professional holding a BS from SLU who served in the United States Navy and has worked in the electronic security industry. Aside from writing science fiction his interests include history, science, and creation of the odd artistic doodle. He lives in Dacula, Georgia with the obligatory cat.

Book preview

Dragons and Dancing-Trees

By GA Douglass all rights reserved

Published by GA Douglass at Smashwords

Copyright© 2015 by GA Douglass, all rights reserved.

Cover art by GA Douglass

Dragons and Dancing-Trees is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are, fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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 recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Comments and questions may be directed to [e-mail]

Special thanks to everyone whose support and contributions helped to buoy me through this process.

Please remember to leave a review

Dragons and Dancing-Trees

by GA Douglass

Prelude: Oort Cloud Observations

Labels are useful for dismissing people and things as unique. Labels make it easy to avoid thinking. Does it have the right label? Then it's good. If it has the wrong label, then it's bad. It's seductively easy to choose to respond to things based on the label others have defined for you. It's hard for the human mind to accept everything in our vast universe as being unique.

- Sarah Collins, To The Cradle Clinging Published 89 P.F.C.

Captain Ife took a moment to meditate as the chaos raged around her. Closing her eyes, clearing her mind, and setting aside the many problems they were contending with to find a moment of peace for clear thinking. While this in no way improved their situation it was more productive than the far more tempting prospect of losing her temper.

As Captain Ife reopened her eyes she was temporarily blinded by another bridge console overloading, its display winking out in a blinding flash. While the failure was impressive visually it presented no physical danger to the crew. Not that the lack of immediate danger prevented a crewman from recoiling violently from the flash. The resulting cartwheel across the bridge in the microgravity was even more impressively dramatic than the display overload that triggered it.

Closing her eyes again, and for the umpteenth time since being assigned the mission, Ife reminded herself about the great honor that this mission represented. It was both a practically important and tremendously historic mission. She had beaten out several other promising candidates to have the privilege bestowed upon her. In spite of the honor it was tempting for her to think in terms of all the myriad ways that the mission could have gone wrong, mainly because it largely had.

In the defense of Ife and her crew they weren't just testing one new system, but rather several new systems were being tested far from home. It was a mission of firsts for what they had begun calling the Terran Concordance Navy (TCN) and the Concordance Council that had sponsored it. In addition to being a regular shakedown cruise of an new vessel it was also a test of the Terran people's first faster than light (FTL) drive, the first fusion reactor, the first multiple weapon ship platform, and the first long duration life support system. Any one of these would have been sufficient to mark this as an historic event, however in addition to all of that the plan had been for them to venture out to the Oort cloud which was further from Terra than any of its inhabitants had ever gone before.

Everyone involved had prepared extensively for their mission, and everything checked and triple checked before their departure. They were well equipped with a good crew in addition to the team of engineering specialists aboard to shepherd the little technological miracles on their maiden voyage. Each of the teams tended towards a cliquish and protective attitude towards their particular contribution. All of the teams could boast of impressive successes with the exception of those responsible for the faster than light drive.

In theory the FTL drive functioned by moving the space around the ship so that the ship itself wasn't technically what was traveling faster than light. While this shortcut around the speed of light sounded simple enough the putting into practice of actually moving space around was a complicated process. Also it was poorly understood, and required a massive amount of energy. Even the multiple megawatt fusion reactor could only meet their energy requirements for short periods of time with the aid of even more immense electrical capacitor bank. It also required open space that wasn't already too distorted by things like gravity, and which couldn't be found in the inner solar system.

In practice the faster than light drive had proven even more temperamental then they had expected, and they had expected quite a bit given the copious operations warnings in the alien database. It had taken two weeks more of checking and double checking than what had been expected just to make the initial trial run. After that first use they had spent days recalibrating it, and then more time had been spent searching for periodic faults that had been detected in the electrical system that served it. As a result of these delays they were three weeks overdue to return to Terra.

The situation wasn't entirely grim. On the bright side Ife could boast that they hadn't lost any crew. In fact they hadn't even experienced any serious injuries, Which included the acrobatic crewman nursing a bruised shoulder as they returned to their post. Also on the positive side they still had almost eighty percent of their fuel load and had made it to the Oort cloud. Lastly Ife could take solace in that they hadn't embarked any of the journalists who had wanted to document the historic trip.

After a moment's consideration Ife had to concede that another positive was that the ship wasn't nearly as cramped as what made up the majority of the defense force. Although most working spaces were generic like the bridge with its standardized command chair flanked by sensor and navigation stations on the left and tactical and communications consoles on the right. Everywhere the dull grey of ship metals was covered in a bright clean color coded coating that only revealed the reality underneath near access panels and machinery. The living spaces were larger and better thought out making her ship more comfortable for prolonged habitation.

Here they had actual cabins even if these were small and most of the crew had to share. Along with a cafeteria, a lounge, and exercise facilities the living spaces were housed in four extensions radiating out from the ubiquitous cylinder ship shape. The arrangement provided more space as well as a bit of centrifugal force to simulate gravity when the ship was rotated on its axis.

At present the ship was not rotating on its axis. Stopping the rotation was one of the many things they had almost randomly changed in order to see if it was impeding the FTL drive systems. While there was no indication that the centrifugal force had any impact on faster than light travel Ife had ordered the ship maintain microgravity. In part this was to save fuel and in part it was to give her mostly inexperienced crew more time to acclimatize to what were generally normal space service conditions.

Ife herself was considered a veteran of spaceflight. Although she'd only been on one patrol and a shakedown cruise previously that was enough to put her in the top tier of experience. It also helped that she also had actual space combat experience; a claim that few could make.

Keying the general communications circuit with her left pinkie and a fair amount of dread Captain Ife addressed her ship, All stations status report.

Captain Ife felt as if she were shouting, but somehow managed to keep her voice merely adequate to bring silence to the room. As commanded one by one in order the assorted stations around the ship chimed in telling the story of their umpteenth failed effort to bring the faster than light engines online. It was a story Ife was far too familiar with.

As sheepish and uncertain as ever the team in charge of operating and maintaining the FTL systems responded, We need to swap fuses on the bridge bus circuit before we can verify this, but we think the fault is some kind of electromagnetic interference. Our recommendation is to power down all non-essential systems before our next attempt at activating the drive.

Ife kept her expression neutral as she inquired, Can I trust that you're counting life support as an essential system?

The FTL engineers looked at each other nervously before one of them found the courage to speak up. Maybe not the lighting. The confessing crewman drew angry looks from the others on their team.

Great. Ife muttered.

Not for the first time she wondered how Captain Brice would have handled the situation. It was after all originally to have been Ife's former captain's ship and mission. Terra's most famous captain, the hero of what they were calling the Battle of New Marathon, was busy shepherding her own miracle. In that absence the honor of completing this vital mission had fallen to one of the world's lesser known heroes.

Captain? The crewman at the sensor systems console interjected into and interrupting Ife's thoughts.

What is it? Captain Ife asked with a certain amount of resignation. It was bad enough to have the untested systems behaving erratically, but if they started losing core systems the mission would have to be aborted entirely.

The response came with a calm urgency that barely concealed the crewman's fear. I've got something at extreme range.

Extreme range was not an official technical term. They generally measured distances around the solar system in terms of light seconds, minutes, and hours. To date they hadn't had to measure anything as far away as a light month, let alone a light year, due to the limitations of their sensor systems.

Given the ambiguity and tension in the report Ife inquired with genuine curiosity, How extreme?

Once again the answer was vague. About three light weeks out.

It was an absurdly vast distance. Three light weeks? How could you possibly detect anything that far out?

There was only the slightest tremor in the crewman's voice as they responded, It's a very large contact, or more likely a mass of contacts, about eight light seconds across.

Captain Ife tapped the button to bring the image from the sensor station to one of the swing arm mounted displays that surrounded her command chair. Of course it wasn't an image exactly, it was a computer rendered abstract of the raw data feed from the ship's massive forward mounted sensor array. Blues and greens predominated but Ife's eyes quickly picked out a highly regular pattern of pale red dots indicating infrared radiation being rendered in the human visual range. The dots were of varying intensity but were very evenly spaced, far too much so for them to be some natural phenomena.

Comms, set up a tight beam secure channel to the Council Island. Sensors, tag out all active systems, we're going dark. FTL crew you do not eat, you do not sleep, and you get that drive working. Is that understood? A chorus of curt affirmations and exchange of worried looks acknowledged the orders.

A second later the crewman at the communications station console voiced their misgivings. Captain we're beyond extreme long range for any tight beam communications.

Ife pulled down and checked the strategic situation map panel to look for alternatives. The Citadel is on deep patrol between us and the Terra. Try routing the signal through them. There were enough ships now to maintain constant patrols both close to and distant from the homeworld, providing a layered defense that should deter any but the largest and most determined aggressors.

After a moment Ife asked the question whose answer she'd already guesstimated, Sensors, how many ships do you estimate in that formation?

A formation light seconds across? There would have to be hundreds of ships at least to justify that large a formation. After a second the crewman conceded, Probably thousands.

Fresh from checking the status of the ship's capacitor banks the crewman at the tactical station suggested, Maybe they're just passing through?

I'll call FOL on that. Ife commented using the common mild expletive, often and easily confused for the word foul. The service had adopted the term to describe the institutional view of our luck as a species. Abstractly she realized that the anxieties of their mission were melting away before the imminent threat.

Moments later the crewman at the communications console was able to relate some success in their endeavors. Captain, I've locked in the coordinates of the Citadel and sent the handshake code. At this distance it's a five hour turn around on the signal. Do you want to wait for a confirmation that they're receiving or transmit?

In her sternest no-nonsense tone Ife announced, We wait for no one.

Chapter: 1 One of Those Days

We all start somewhere, we all end somewhere else entirely. Between beginning and ending we are subject to influences that chart our course far more firmly than all of our planning ever could, but what truth about ourselves is revealed by this?

- Sarah Collins, Of Hopes and Fears Published 105 PFC

Sarah had been having one of those days where it felt like everything she had accomplished had been something from a dream. In spite of her efforts to keep the power of the position of First Chair minimal there were those who inferred upon her more power than she really had or wished to have. Patience and a pile of stock responses did much to get her through each encounter, but it was frustratingly repetitive.

Getting people to rephrase their often far too subtly imparted requests often required a bland statement like the one Sarah evoked now. I'm forced to admit that I'm not sure I understand your concerns.

In the old days Sarah could have vented about it all to her mother, but these days she had to be careful what she said to anyone. At the corner of her vision at any given time she was being watched, her conversations eavesdropped on, by the ever present press corps or the common person with a mobile device. It was a situation that tended towards the paranoia inducing, but then she'd been told recently that a little paranoia was good for the soul.

Father Turchin's demeanor never wavered from calmly pleasant. It's just that we expected something in the Embassy Quarter. As you're aware the Vatican is an independent state.

Sarah had thought they'd already covered this issue weeks ago when the Catholic Church had announced their intention to set up services for the faithful on The Island but she was willing to reiterate. I don't have a problem with the Vatican running an office in the embassy quarter, but you won't get any special consideration. Contributions to the defense force entitle the groups making them to proportional seats on the Council and all the benefits that go with that, but there's still no space in the Embassy Quarter to hold Mass.

As if embarrassed to bring up the idea directly Father Turchin waded into it gently, I was thinking the Council Chambers would...

Sarah quickly squelched the idea. Not a chance. That would be a can of worms that Sarah had no intention of opening, then more belatedly she determined to be diplomatic. What would happen with there's an emergency vote? I'm not putting myself in the even remotely likely position of having to displace a congregation at worship.

It was a good argument and Father Turchin had no ready response as he tried to move the conversation back in the direction of acquiescence, Well I…

Not wanting to have to go over the entire list of potential pros and cons of such a move Sarah bulled ahead, And I'm not putting you in the Industrial Quarter, and I can't put you in the Navy Quarter without displacing training space, which isn't going to happen. That leaves the Commercial Quarter. Of the four quarters that made up The Island it was what they called the Commercial Quarter that was the largest and most general purpose.

Deftly changing tactics the priest continued, It would be a better situation if there were some assurances as to the use of surrounding spaces; perhaps an assurance in the form of a simple zoning regulation. It was an inarguably valid concern, one that other tenants had brought up.

Sarah nodded. I agree, unfortunately all administration issues require the approval of the Council. Last time the possibility of zoning regulations got brought up the arguments against it were pretty strong, Sarah sighed, but I can't recall any of them right now. In fact Sarah suspected that the main reason for opposition had been her support of the idea. So if you want to open that can of worms again I can suggest it to one of the voting blocs. I think the Eastern Europeans were the ones pushing it last time, but you may have more success if you approached them independently.

In an almost ritual exchange of congeniality the encounter, with what increasingly were referred to as 'petitioners', ended. Like most such encounters it concluded with vague reassurances that procedures would proceed and ideas would be given consideration. Always there was the push for Sarah to do more in service of some cause or concern and this always required a response of firm and diplomatic push back. Always Sarah felt the world's vacuum of authority ever demanding to be filled.

It wasn't the same world it had been, and in spite of the reluctance of many to accept it, the world had changed. The great powers had eviscerated themselves. As power decentralized the once lesser powers surged in prominence and vitality. There was no aspect of the world before first contact that remained untouched, from the grandiose to the mundane, and there was no going back.

While no official numbers had been comprehensibly compiled it was generally accepted that half of the world’s population had died in the Great Wasting. Many of the largest cities in the world still stood empty with their populations dead or dispersed and afraid to return. Within the great nations there were almost none alive that could claim to have suffered no loss among family or friends.

Where the once populous first world rejected the alien technologies introduced by the self proclaimed Ambassador Ech the less prosperous nations prospered in their embrace of the alien technology that promoted self sufficiency. Those sciences carefully perfected over millions of years to allow travel between the distant stars had immediate application in water purification, food production, and resource recycling. All the contrivances that had made the poor countries of the world dependent upon the rich were quickly passing into history.

With the bonds tying one nation to another irreparably breaking the intricate network of global trade had quickly disintegrated. Before first contact the first world’s markets had presented the rare and exotic from around the world as commonplace. After first contact even the most basic of imported goods had become unobtainable luxuries for all but the wealthiest citizens.

Those who companioned the use of force to return the world to the way it had been could not avoid the reality that martial strength was also not what it had been. Military might had been a primary target for the process of conversion that had transformed into the Great Wasting plague. As a result the number of professional soldiers in the world had been reduced to levels not seen for centuries. Those surviving forces were forced to admit their technological incapability of dealing with threats even a few light seconds distant. If it hadn’t been for the species’ historically founded distrust of its own neighbors the world’s militaries might have been disbanded altogether.

Attitudes had changed as well. In what had been the third world there was a growing sense of optimism. For the survivors in what had been the first world there was a deep distrust of any but the most locally controlled of governments. All over the world there was a newfound sense of local community born of the threats they had all faced, and this was continually reinforced by the scars it had left on the moon and in the Great Wasting.

It was a dark irony that the plague of the Great Wasting was inflicted as a way to force Humanity to come together. It had been meant to purge from the masses all personal want, and reinvent the species as a centrally driven and efficient machine that produced peace and prosperity. The destruction of the control satellites had left the converted populace to wither and die, and instead of global unity there was a spiraling balkanization.

Most of the world's population focused on adapting to the radically altered world they found themselves living in. Most were content to let go of the past so that they could better deal with the present. Most ignored the fact that the present is merely an echo of the future, and Sarah was left increasingly alone to worry about what would come.

Sarah knew it would not be enough to rely on the will of the peoples of the world to thwart the ambitions of the unscrupulous. In their world's current state any who dared could seize powers more vast than any which had existed previously. So the fight to keep power from concentrating in any one place was constant. It was a fight that Sarah feared she was losing.

Things were not uniformly bleak. It was perhaps the existence of so many tangible global changes towards the positive that seductively lulled people into thinking that things could only get better. Certainly most agreed that the horrors of the Great Wasting would never be allowed to happen again, but even there Sarah could not afford to be so complacent.

As the First Chair of the Concordance established Council Sarah could see there was an emerging sense of global unity when it came to global defense. Even peoples without direct representation in the Council could look up at the scars on the lunar surface and say, That was done to us. As a result of this unity a strong defense of their world was now in place and it was growing stronger with each passing month. Multiple crews rotated onto ships to keep the fleet of fifty four ships on nearly perpetual patrol. Plans to make their defenses layered and proactive proceeded in a determined and methodical manner.

Within the Council the Concord's representatives for the majority of the world's people met in a regular, if not consistently productive, manner. Many of the membership's traditional feuds and ideologies had been set aside, at least within that forum, in pursuit of the necessities of defense. Bound by the mutually agreed to diplomatic protocols the conflicts were subdued under the weight of mutual dependency and reliance on each other. Increasingly these points of conflict were seen as the part of the past that no longer remained relevant to be replaced with petty squabbles over distribution of the alien technologies.

After initial fears had been overcome alien technologies were integrated into terrestrial civilization with increasing ubiquity. The obvious impact on standards of living soon produced equally unavoidable improvements in prosperity. This kept the focus of most of the world on what could be done next with these off world marvels.

So it was that the world adapted. Entrepreneurs maneuvered to harness the new economic realities. Religious and spiritual leaders struggled to define their beliefs in the light of a broader universe. The masses looked to what would most quickly improve their lot in life. Sarah was left increasingly alone to worry about the future.

It was the future of one specific unscrupulous character, maneuvering for the position of First Chair through means both overt and covert, that most worried Sarah. That this individual had been responsible for at least one attempt on her life, and much death and destruction besides, didn't help matters. Where most of the people who could even indirectly be linked to the Great Wasting had met their ends, either in prison or at the hands of angry mobs, Nigel Rossi had managed to remain aloof. He spent his days in the artificial island stronghold that was built to house the Prospera Corporation, a locally produced imitation of The Island.

Nigel Rossi was also sometimes known as Niro in a play on his name that only a few even claimed to understand. He'd been a part of an organized collusion of powerbrokers that had fallen short of its goal to be a true world controlling conspiracy. Now he ran the collected remnants as an investment company that operated offshore in the literal sense of the word as well as being outside of the reach of normal law enforcement. Then again Sarah was forced to admit to herself that all of this was mostly unproven conjecture based on information from the self proclaimed alien ambassador, Ech.

No one really knew what was going on with the island that bore its company name. Prospera Island had been variously rumored to be the hold out of mafia bosses on the run, and the hiding place of vast Templar treasures. Little firsthand knowledge was available because of the secretive nature of the company and their unyielding stance on maintaining the privacy of its shareholders. That the company was a prominent member of the Council and a very public underwriter of technology investments in undeveloped parts of the world was all most people knew for certain.

Secrecy was fundamental to everything Prospera did. To gain access to, let alone become a resident on Prospera, one had to be a shareholder. Shareholders were an invitation only affair although there was always publicly available stock which conveyed no rights while allowing the common man a stake in the venture. Being secluded on their own island with their own laws, which were also a matter of great debate, allowed them to ignore the sort of public disclosure that was mandated by most national regulatory laws.

Chapter: 2 The Daily Grind

"I am sometimes asked how we lost what we once were. For one thing I’m not entirely certain we’ve ever truly held what we were.

"That’s the nature of the question, what were we once, but are no more, and how did that happen? Maybe it was when survival became our all consuming goal, maybe when we stopped reading, but probably more than anything else it was when we stopped studying history.

Of all the things that contact with the civilizations of the galaxy did to us, even worse than the war, was that it made us forget many of the answers that we already had.

- Sarah Collins, To The Cradle Clinging Published 89 P.F.C.

In limiting the powers of her position Sarah in no way reduced the demands on her time. Meetings of the full Council tended to be overlong affairs that ate up a lot of time just getting started and she was thankful that the Council itself didn't meet daily. For the everyday issues there was the Upper Council with much more streamlined and informal rules of procedure, and yet still these daily meetings were a time sink that most often produced nothing more than the passage of time.

If only Council meetings and the political and economic maneuverings of Prospera had been the only demands on Sarah's time they'd have been manageable, but they were far from it. Sarah's second meeting of the morning was with the head of the independent Cargo Handling Company. This in turn would be followed by a presentation by one of the innovation design teams looking into new warship plans in turn followed by the daily gathering of the Upper Council before lunch.

With the artificial island's mass transit system and concentration of official political dealings in the Diplomatic Quarter Sarah's schedule still demanded a lot of walking. Even without the public jokes made at the expense of her sensible shoes it was tempting to have everyone come to see Sarah at her office. Knowing well that the world was not in her office Sarah avoided the temptation and as much as possible visited people in their own work places.

Cargo handling took place on the rooftop landing fields. A steady sea breeze washed cool air over the tarmac occasionally lifting up the scent of greenery from the Courtyard. The heat which should have been unbearable in the early midday was greatly mitigated by the thermal conductive properties of The Island's