Sentan

By Declan Molloy

Mankind has been saved from disaster by his own ancestors. The Sentans were removed from Earth when they were still Homo erectus 400,000 earlier by a super intellegence. The galactic anthropologists who do this recognise mankind's potential and decide to “spread the risk” Years later these distant cousins themselves rescue mankind from geological disaster.

As Earth destroys itself a fleet of vessels arrive to remove orphans and scientists to a strange yet beautiful world. As millennia pass, these survivors integrate and adapt their hosts culture with surprising consequences. When they themselves prepare to return to Earth they have become alien.

Those left behind on earth survive only to return to a “New Stone Age.” A flood basalt event and continious climatic upheaval ensures that the remnants of life on Earth struggles to stay alive.

The book follows the lives of both the Sentans and those of the humans left behind, their loves, their fears and their struggles with unimaginable challanges.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 11, 2015
• ISBN: 9781329456938

Book preview

Sentan

SENTAN

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, and resemblance to actual persons living or dead, is purely coincidental.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, or otherwise be circulated without the authors prior consent in any form or binding, cover or electronic formats whatsoever except with the authors permission and without similar conditions being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

About the author

Declan Molloy is an avid amateur astronomer who was born in Dublin Ireland in 1959. He has always pondered the biggest questions in the universe such as whether we are alone in the cosmos or if there are others out there, also searching. His other interests include oil painting and gardening. Declan feels passionately about the environment and believes our care of nature is one of the most important tasks that we as citizens of earth must focus on.

The cover picture is a painting by Heather Grogan entitled: 

Plains of Galbar

Table of contents

Sutta

Passengers

The Dome

Morning on Suplanter

The disappeared

North Dakota

Storm warning

A Sentan Funeral

Creek Air Force Base

Red Rivers

Chile

The sea

Anarchy

New arrivals

Attack

Deliverance

Launch

Survival

Greetings

The Shuttles

Awoken

Empire

The new generation

Dust

The young Prince

Innocence lost

Morris

Suspicions

Frozen seas

Corrigan

A funeral

Santorini

Tribes

The Mediterranean

The Sentan years

Our Sea

The Visitor

Desalination

End of infancy

Devolved

Hybrid

The Dog Age

End of Exile

Sutta

Sutta kept hold of her hat while she looked towards the northern mountains. She stood on the edge of a precipice with one hand wrapped tightly around a branch while the other was placed on top of her head. The grey mountain peaks were set against the orange sky but moisture in the atmosphere made them indistinct, made details difficult to see.

Suplanter’s radiation meant that its children understood the need to protect themselves and few ventured out during the hottest part of the day. The girl waited on the edge of a very steep drop as the evening wind began to blow while the dim red sun began to set. On the western horizon she could see the white sun peek above low lying hills. Sutta stepped from the edge, lingering a little longer and held tightly onto the brim of her hat with small fingers to prevent it from blowing away. Soon, even standing here would not be an option. Already the first spears of light had begun to stab the mountain tops making her position on the edge of the bound forest perilous. Her mother had told her to wait by the Granove entrance of their tunnel dome until she got news her father had landed, but Sutta couldn’t wait. She had defied her mother and left shelter early in the hope that she would see the great ship cross the beacon lights and run down the side of the hills before eventually landing on the plains.

Sutta had to return to the cover of the bound wood and wait just a little longer. She stepped backwards still hoping that she would catch a glimpse before being forced to retreat even deeper into the shadows. While she considered what do next she watched the small reptiles at her feet grow bolder and start climbing onto her sandals. There were at least ten of them leaping onto her exposed toes before jumping off again to be replaced by more. Above her the trees were also coming to life. Blooms were beginning to open. Camoss flowers were beginning to unwind their single curled pink petals, ready to ooze sugars for the waiting Sammot reptiles.

The trees formed a wind tunnel causing her gown to press tight against the front of her small body. She was leaning a little against the cool wind when without warning her hat flew away to roll and bump across the intermingled tree roots until it was eventually stopped by her brother’s quick reactions.

‘Mother is looking for you Sutta, you didn’t answer, no answer.’

Sutta looked at the small silver disc on her sleeve with great round eyes for a moment and noticed the green glowing circle was pulsating. Her mother had been trying to contact her.

Sentan communication technology was simple as was its various methods of use.  If you wanted to communicate with another Sentan but your communication was not urgent – you simply tapped the device twice slowly with a long interval created between each tap while speaking the name of the person. If on the other hand you needed to contact the other individual urgently, you double tapped a little quicker. The receiver of the message would determine to answer or not, based on the speed of the corresponding flashing on their own discs. Very fast flashing meant trouble. Sutta knew she was in trouble when she looked at the silvery grey device tucked into its fabric holder on her left wrist.

She looked at her brother impassively for a moment before getting a small black band from her pocket and tying her dark hair back to prevent it from running around her face. She tapped the disc on her wrist slowly.

‘Mother, I’m here, here at view point.’

There was silence now as the wind died away and the overlying branches stopped creaking. Sutta waited, her arms folded across her chest as the voice from the disc spoke.

‘Sutta, you should return with your brother.’

Her mother’s voice didn’t sound displeased or irritated in any way – Sentan’s rarely displayed any anger or uncontrolled emotion. Her brother Muratt handed back her errand hat and the siblings turned and walked back beneath the laced tree boughs towards the shelter. Muratt was tall, so tall his father often told him he would diminish the local population of Sammot reptiles by brushing them off the flowers with just his head. Even now, as they walked, young reptiles would leap onto the brim of his hat and then disembark at the nearest viable bloom.

The bound woods were a feature of the upper lands. The natural protection afforded to Sentan’s was partly as a result of evolution finding a way to protect the delicate reproductive parts of the trees by creating a system of inwardly or curved tree trunks. It ensured the foliage was mostly in shade.  Sentan’s had simply exploited the adaptation and grown the trees in groves to create natural tunnels of perpetual twilight.  Now and then a tree would die leaving a gap where the white sun would pour a shaft of light like a deadly blade bisecting the shady protection of the trees. This was never a problem during the darkness of winter. The tree growers would replant and erect temporary shading until such time as the tree could grow and provide the necessary protection. As the siblings walked along the avenue of deep shade, occasionally they would side step one of the small holes in the cover of the foliage, holes too small to infill and where side-stepping was a necessary part life for Sentan’s who walked the groves in summer.    

She knew her father would be home soon.  It had been nearly three years since they all sat to eat in the dining pit.  Nearly four years since the first selection by the Senate.  Sentan’s were curious but at the same time practical beings who would not take on a long voyage lightly. However this voyage was something planned for millennia, something Suplanter knew it would have to make. This was the voyage to Earth. It was a journey to see the ancestor’s. In the language of Suplanter they called it Birth World – a strange and violent place.

Passengers

Carl and Vicky had a strange journey. Their departure from North Dakota three weeks earlier had been swift and now they were about to step onto a strange world. They got to know the four strangers on the voyage and had learned a lot from the Sentan crew – or more correctly the Sentan android. In the beginning they were nervous of their hosts, but after a while the congenial nature of the Sentan’s came through, they learnt that Sentan’s were not all that different to humans. But then, Sentan’s were humans, cousins who had been transported from earth as a kind of insurance by an advanced race nearly 400,000 years previously.

Even their appearance which at first seemed odd had less and less effect on the human passengers. Their most striking feature was their faces – a little shorter than a human face. Sentan eyes were different too. The size of the iris was strange at first as well as the size of their pupils. The Sentan's had dark brown eyes and showed very little white around those irises unlike their own. Both crew member’s male and female had long black hair. Both of them wore the same grey green full-length gown to their ankles with the only difference being the motifs on the front. The male had a large dark circle on his while the female had a circle within a circle. They wondered back on earth whether it signified rank or some sort of status. The android explained it showed that females bore young – the inner circle of the motif was simply in recognition of this.

The activity onboard increased. They felt their journey was finally about to come to an end. Vicky looked over at the Sentan female as she gave a command to the glowing holographic globe centred over its white table in the centre of the cabin. It was the first time she had seen the globe expand to its full size since before their departure from earth. The globe suddenly brightened as it showed the surface of the world they were about to land.

‘Here is our world, Suplanter; we will be on the plains soon – no fear.’

Despite the vastness of the vessel, there was only two Sentan for the duration of the journey, a male and female with the addition of the android. The only part made habitable was this relatively small section where they had spent the majority of their time. The rest of the vast ship was only an instrument to move this smaller section through the complicated space-time equations and dimensions needed to cover the light years between Earth and Suplanter. The physicists amongst them speculated that the forward part of the ship altered space by compressing it the aft end somehow stretched it to allow the ship to travel beyond the speed of light. It was something he said was theorised on earth, but beyond present capabilities.

They also discovered the control room, crew quarters and other habitable parts of the ship occupied less than ten percent of the overall mass of the vessel and it was insulated from these effects.

They felt light headed for the first few days, Vicky also noticed – as she described it, a floating feeling in her limbs. It wasn’t until she mentioned it that the others felt it too. Lee Salmon the engineer thought it might be the effect of acceleration or deceleration.

Each Sentan day appeared to be twenty-one hours long – shorter than an Earth day. The android had confirmed their observation and told the human crew the system of night and day created on the ship was a necessary one to maintain Sentan rhythms. The android’s grasp of syntax had steadily improved and although their hosts were mostly busy the android spent some time explaining what he could. The android never seemed to be annoyed at the constant barrage of questions from the curious humans. He answered everything in the same level tone and showed amazing patience. The group learned that he was very ancient by human standards and was self-learning. His manufacture was so long ago that his component parts had been replaced many times, all of them with the exception of his memory.

Androids were common on Suplanter. Most worked outside the shelters and were originally designed to repair and maintain planetary systems. There had been other androids built with emotional and empathic ability millennia ago but they no longer existed. When the android failed to elaborate on this point, the human passengers agreed among themselves to drop the topic. They did however learn during these conversations that the android interpreter was called Cran and the male and female crew were named Boldmir and Tilak. The names were created as close approximations of the sound their names made in the language of the Sentan’s and bore no resemblance to the true sound of their names.

Vicky and Carl were unique as regards the rest of their travelling companions. They were mostly younger than the other four and had no useful academic credentials. The others were all last minute volunteers from astronaut training, originally destined for the International Space Station. The group also included one Russian who assumed the role of comic on the three-week journey. He was the oldest member of the six by a long way. Sergei’s expertise was planetary mechanics and the design of navigation systems. He had an uncanny ability to crunch numbers so rapidly it was almost supernatural. Grace Levine was a PhD student studying plasma physics and was a recent edition to the astronaut training programme, and was seen as a rising star by her mentors back at MIT. 

Lee Salmon was African-American with no appreciable sense of humour but he was courteous and helpful at all times. Lee was an engineer working on propulsion systems at JPL and like Sergei, was an accomplished mathematician. The last of the six was Dr Mike Levison, a tired looking man with a dry wit bordering on sarcasm. Mike was an academic who joined the astronaut programme relatively late in his career – his speciality was Anthropology.   

It was Vicky and Carl who were special in another way. They had been picked simply on the basis that it was they who discovered the bone fragment on a camping trip to Kalo ridge a few months earlier which led to a series of events that culminated in the Washington administration choosing them as Earth’s emissaries when the Sentan’s first landed. It was in a sense that their ordinariness made them special. Less than a month earlier they had said their goodbyes to their parents and Carl’s uncle.  Everything had moved quickly.  The couple had been camping above the Kalo River when they discovered the lower jawbone of a Homo erectus. Now they were on a vessel heading towards the place where the owner of that artefact had apparently come from.

The image in the holographic globe was astonishing. Carl could see oceans and land masses beneath high wispy cloud. The surface was bathed in a strange light reminiscent of an earthly sunset. The landmasses showed linear continents running north to south with each one having a mountain range running down its centre. The ocean surfaces themselves looked patchy; some looked orange and other parts looked green. It was familiar yet different – and it was beautiful. He nudged Vicky beside him

‘It looks beautiful down there.’

The android spoke to one of the Sentan’s who smiled at Carl then spoke in its scratchy voice a rough approximation of the words, we welcome.

The Sentan’s had remained silent for long periods during the voyage. Occasionally they would give a verbal command to the suspended globe at the centre of the main cabin – causing it to expand a little.

Other commands would follow leading the rest of the passengers to assume it was a ship that was voice controlled.  The silence of their hosts was a little unsettling but they grew accustomed to it and instead relied on the android to keep them informed of their progress.

The android now stepped into the large cabin behind the command centre of the shuttle to address the arrivals.

‘In a few minutes we will be on the plains of Suplanter, no fear. You will feel disorientated during and after arrival.  This is normal, normal.  Object attraction is less than Earth, no fear.’

Sergei was standing directly behind Vicky when he leaned in and whispered in his heavy Russian accent, ‘He means gravity I presume.’

Just as he said this all six of them felt that floating feeling Vicky had first described. It was strange but all of them felt as if they had been wearing lead boots for the last few weeks and were now free to walk in their bare feet. Suplanter’s gravity was 85% of Earths and all of them could feel the benefits straight away. What they had not realised was that the Sentan ship had artificially created a specific gravity for much of the voyage to acclimatise the human passengers to life on Suplanter. It also meant that the Sentan crew had to endure additional gravitational forces during the voyage home.  Maybe that was that reason they didn’t appear to venture into the other section of the shuttle too often, spending long periods of time on their body forming couches instead. The android they supposed was probably immune to these discomforts.

Their three-week trip had some entertaining moments too. When Grace mentioned to the others that she needed a bathroom shortly after leaving earth, Dr Levison suggested that their alien crew would surely have anticipated this contingency and Sergei interrupted him with the comment that even Sentan’s probably had assholes. They were sitting on their couches trying to stifle their nervous laughter like school children.

Grace eventually asked in an almost apologetic way if the ship had a restroom.

The android showed the young scientist to a small room that had many of the same items that would be found in a well equipped bathroom anywhere on earth. The toilet was a simple funnel shaped hole at floor level and the rest of the white cubicle served as a shower except that the holes in the showerhead peppered the entire ceiling. All of them thought the facility was for their benefit alone until the noticed their hosts use the same door at least twice a day.  Although in retrospect it was obvious. It was strangely comforting to know that Sentan’s needed to crap just like they did and that they showered too.

A major feature of their three week voyage was the amount of time they slept. Six large white cubes were spaced evenly throughout the inner chamber where they spent most of their time. They were only allowed to remain awake for a total of two and a half hours in each cycle. The six of them had grown accustomed to the regular round of hand gels the silvery grey android administered. He would appear with a small instrument similar to a glue stick and ask them to sit on the square blocks. These would immediately change shape and slowly slide beneath their feet before magically forming into something resembling a bed.  After he drew the stick along the back of their left hand, all of them would lose consciousness within seconds. At its first use they felt panic, but as the days went by they grew to almost welcome the calming effect of the alien gel. Carl noticed that the foam material beneath his body would give way and his body would sink into the material. The sensation was odd at first and they would all have enjoyed it more except that they were usually asleep before the couches configured themselves fully. On a couple of occasions he would be the one to wake before Vicky or his fellow travellers and he would notice how their bodies were recessed into the material. It reminded him of how his camera was seated in its camera box – nestled securely in foam. As his friends regained consciousness their bodies would appear to almost float back to the surface of the couches.

The material, they were informed, was mostly organic and had been modified millennia ago. He also explained that the medication they received was necessary to relieve the boredom of long voyages. When Lee asked him if the Sentan crew used it too, he told them Sentan sleep patterns were far different to theirs – but he himself as a synthetic life form needed no sleep or rest whatsoever.

Sutta returned to the gate as instructed by her mother and waited for news of the imminent arrival of her father.  Muratt had left her to pursue his own affairs while she stood in the tiled plaza in front of the Grenode arch watching people come and go. Most of them were heading towards the groves to make their way back to their own domes and caves - as it was the hottest part of Suplanter’s summer, there was less movement in the groves. Those she could see around her were there to await the arrival of their guests. 

Most of Galbar’s northern continent was covered in large domed structures surrounded by the bound woods criss-crossed by dark groves. There was also a large number of natural cave systems below ground, some of these had been excavated millennia ago by the Sentan’s themselves. The southern end of the continent had more caves with fewer surface domes. One advantage for the south was that some of these caverns were enormous, opened directly to the sky with large transparent roofs protecting the inhabitants from the white sun radiation.

As the vessel held in orbit the Sentan crew escorted their passengers into the main cabin to watch the final stages of their landing. The first thing Carl and Vicky noticed was their separation from the larger vessel before what seemed like an extremely slow descent to the surface.

The android spoke. ‘We have arrived, your new home, welcome to the surface of our world.’

They could see on the large central globe that they were now moving horizontal to the ground and heading towards some low hills straight ahead. Lee had remarked during landing that the inhabited parts of the land mass were probably at higher elevation and his intuition had proven to be correct. They had seen the reflections from vast domes that were so large the shuttle had taken nearly a minute to traverse one, before it swung around to hover above the lower plains as it headed towards its final destination.

The shuttle was suddenly swallowed by darkness as it gently came to a stop beneath a vast rock overhang. They had finally arrived. As with the landing on earth it took a couple of minutes before the recessed door moved and finally slid to one side. The android stepped out before turning and beckoning the others to follow. The six were ready if a little apprehensive, to walk down the grey metal steps even if all they could see outside was deep shadows but the historical significance of the moment wasn’t lost on Vicky as she was first to tentatively walk out into the strange subdued orange light. The first thing she noticed was the smell, it was somewhere between sulphurous and sweet. Not unpleasant but different. She was still surprised how the difference in gravity made her feel though, so alive, more noticeable now that they were off the ship. Carl was standing next to her feeling and sensing the same and was first to spot the delegation standing deep in the shadows. Like the two crew members on the shuttle they were attired in the same grey gowns except they all wore grey wide brimmed hats. They looked slightly comical and they all smiling unselfconsciously as the rest of their travelling companions who slowly and hesitantly joined them. Carl noticed one of the waiting group of Sentan’s was considerably shorter than the rest – she must be child he thought. Carl didn’t know why but the little face made him smile. Sutta smiled back at the tall funny looking stranger, then walked quickly away from the group to stand directly in front of him. Sutta said hello, but all Carl heard was a serious of hoarse squeaks and clicks.

The android followed and translated.

‘Sutta has greeted you; she said that Suplanter gives its hands, its friendship and protection.’

‘Thank you, my name is Carl.’

He put his palm on his forehead as he spoke his name.  The same gesture the Sentan’s had used when referring to themselves.

The Android translated for the little girl who tried unsuccessfully to form the word with her mouth.

‘Arrr,’ was the closest she could manage. Little Sutta then did something none of the visitors from earth had ever seen before – she laughed. It was like the crackle of silver foil being tortured.  It caught them by surprise causing all of them to laugh, if a little nervously, while the Sentan’s shuffled forward to greet the visitors.

The Dome

The group walked up an endless set of