Anno Stellae 1987 & Anno Stellae 1994: RetroStar Chronicles, #1

By R.D. Ginther

Although spotted by astronomers in the sky and divers in the deepest parts of bodies of waters, the red star Alien Entity, is still elusive. The fact that it can move easily between these two extremes of physical properties is mind blowing. It seems to be almost everywhere all at once and the only species that seem to be aware of the Alien Entity's presence are the creatures that live in the environment where it is invading. Just when you think that a scientist, or rather any of the scientists thus far, gets a hint of this ominous presence, something goes wrong, critically wrong. It's as if this Alien Entity has unseen powers to interfere and disrupt nature and physics, even the physical bodies of humans. The most brilliant of minds are being systematically destroyed by this Entity, but how long before it finally meets its match? 

 

Chronicle 9 Anno Stellae 1987 and Chronicle 10 Anno Stellae 1994 is almost 100 pages long. You can definitely feel the building up to that pivotal moment when humans will finally clash with this Alien Entity once and for all. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: K.A.Edwards
• Release date: Mar 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393449812

Book preview

C H R O N I C L E  9

A N N  O  S T E L L A E  1 9 8 7

WHO WILL DISCOVER THE IDENTITY OF THE ATTACKING ALIEN?  WHO IS THE CHAMPION WHO WILL COMBAT IT? IT IS REMINISCENT OF THE TIMES OF THE BIBLE’S 0K CORRAL SHOW-DOWN OF DAVID AND GOLIATH, THOUGH THIS TIME THE HERO MAY LOOK TOTALLY UNLIKE A SHEPHERD BOY AND THE ANTAGONIST MAY BE SOMETHING THAT LOOKS LIKE DIAMONDS IN THE SKY, OR STARS...EXCEPT THE COLOR IS ALL WRONG, NOT THE USUAL WHITE OR YELLOW BUT A DEFINITE REDDISH HUE INSTEAD, SOMETHING LIKE YOU FIND IN A CARNELIAN GEMSTONE OR SOMETIMES IN A STAR ABOUT TO SELF-DESTRUCT IN A SUPERNOVA...

1  Black Tuesday II

As long as there are Greeks on Earth,  it’s a sure thing  they will periodically remind the human race that Constantinople, the City of Light on the Golden Horn and Bosporus, that stood so long against the Empire of Darkness, lost Asia Minor the empire’s heartland in the Battle of Manzikert and the trunkless capital fell to the Turks on the first Black Tuesday,  ANNO 1453. 

Until 1987,  as far as Greeks were concerned,  there could be no darker Tuesday for the Western World.  Many chroniclers from the Venerable Bede to Procopius and on to modern counterparts  would have to agree after considering the primal role the imperial city played for over a millennium. 

Yet  the first—however baleful an event—would pale in comparison with the second. 

It was a disaster it would take the world centuries to recognize for what it was.  By then, of course, it was—shades of Troy, Nineveh, Babylon, Thebes, Rome, and Constantinople!—too late, finish, The End.

TUESDAY,  FEBRUARY 24,  Cerro Gordo, Peru

Thirty year old Hanno Spackle from Mississippi was one  astronomer who never got tired looking at the skies, as extremely near-sighted as he was.

What was he hoping to see from the vantage of  so off-the-beaten-track and foreign a country? In Peru the place names couldn't even be counted on. The astronomical community went by the official government map and knew the site as Cerro de la Estrella,  Mountain of the Stars.  To its Peruvian neighbors,  five thousand or so  villagers,  it was simply, less grandly,  Cerro Gordo,  or  Fat [Man] Mountain,   since all the foreigners come to camp on it were considered to be rich, or fat in both wallets and bellies.

There was another story for the name of course, there is always another.  It went, "the grand Inca the emperor planned to go up there to worship and appease the gods afflicting the empire in his time with famine and foreign devils at the same time, and he had a pavilion built for the human sacrifices planned for the appeal.  The retaining wall was built, which Spackle noticed and threw his pop can empties over, and that wall was all that came of the venture.  The emperor died, strangled by the foreigners soon as they baptized him in the name of their god.

Fat Man was the emperor himself, not because he was obese, but because the locals thought anyone so high and mighty was fat in the sense he was most blessed of the gods.  Thinness was associated always with scarcity, famine, and lack of such blessing.  Spackle arrived there thin as a proverbial fence rail, and they naturally looked upon him as unblessed and pitiable and needy as themselves, so  an instant affinity and identity with him sprang up.  And he capped it off with a stunning little lyric, almost a national anthem for their country, Peru I Love. 

He ordinarily could not speak Yankee English in a literate way, but his years in the halls of higher education forced him to write like he handled the accursed language as a native speaker, which he definitely thought he was not.  No, he was Mississippian Cajun, born and bred in the swamps!  And he would die that way, he fully determined to fight in the Civil War to the finish, a war with Yankeedom which he believed had not ended and only stalemated in 1865.

2:00 a.m.  Spackle was passing through a sleepy cordon of  AK-47-toting Peruvian guards and throwing them some packs of Lucky Strikes, their favorite.  While crossing the compound  Hanno did what he always did—star-gaze with the naked eye—as he walked the last several hundred meters to his work station, the massive-bulbed University of Carolina Observatory.

Extreme myopia failed to hold him back from his destiny.  Born of  poor but proud Mississippi river swamp people, he was too stubborn for that.  Though refusing glasses,  claiming that nothing could be worth seeing through new-fangled  Yankee specs,  he saw no contradiction in using the biggest Yankee eye-glass in the Western Hemisphere.  Built by optical firms in eight countries, each zero-expansion glass ceramic mirror of the four weighed 22 tons.  Ole Miss could have never funded the thing, of course, and Carolina was not likely either.  How exactly the national treasury was raided to finance the world's largest optical telescope was hard to say. His colleagues speculated afterwards that the appropriation was mixed up with secret agencies and elite claques—the  capital's  shadow government  in which certain old families of Southerners, for some reason, predominated.  Maybe the fact that bee-keeping ran in those families way back had something to do with their keeping close to the nation’s honey-pot, the U.S. Treasury.  At any rate, Carolina's modest 16 incher was replaced with the incredible, world-champion 300 inch Zerodar Telescope after his arrival and nothing was said. 

He stopped,  removing his cob pipe to gaze up at the indescribable Magellanic galaxy.  There, where he knew it hadn't been the night before, was a new glow-bug—the most wondrous swamp glow-bug he had ever seen

By Grant’s granny’s pisspot!" he swore, employing his worst Cajun oath.

He continued walking, his plaid shirt flapping round his gaunt frame like a scarecrow's from last summer in the brisk breeze of the high Andes.

Giving his head a slight shake to knock his night vision free of  the nagging glow-bug,  he went on into the observatory and hunkered down to work on the latest observations. 

Cerro Gordo Inter-American Observatory (CGIO) was a complex of seven observatories,  built and staffed by a consortium of  leading American universities under the sponsorship of the National Science Foundation.  While Hanno Spackle methodically plowed through the usual preparatory paperwork on his work schedule,  a fellow astronomer, Hal Ventura,  in a nearby but much smaller observatory operated by the University of  Nevada was looking at a photographic plate he had just made.

His eyes widened.  A glowing spot of light was clearly captured, in the large Magellanic Cloud galaxy.  Exercising a scientific skepticism that had been born amidst the bright lights of Reno, he thought there was some flaw or mistake involved, but the plate could not be denied—it was proof he was looking at a stellar, Exo-galactic event of the first magnitude—a  SUPERNOVA.

Still unwilling to trust one single piece of evidence, he stepped outside.  But there it was, plainly visible to his naked eye—a crimson gash in the heart of  the soft-glowing Magellanic Cloud.

He went to look up Spackle and found him, head down as if asleep on his star charts.

Caught you!  Ventura said, though he knew Spackle worked best that way,  being so myopic,  no better than a bat or mole at navigating by sight.  Awful strange business, Astro-astronomy, for such a sight-challenged person as Spackle to go into, you would think,  yet everything about the character was weird!

Why, you old cuss,  sleepin’ again on the job and getting paid for nothing, I'll report you yet!

Only old friends can talk that way—in this case, friends who diplomatically ignored the Mason-Dixon line.

They chuckled and then got down to business.

Taking a look at Ventura's plate, Spackle darted a glance heavenwards, then swore something having to do with the former occupations of  mothers of Yankees.

Ventura had to pull the plate out of  Spackle's hands, or rather, he had to pry it away from his red, greasy face.

Careful not to take umbrage at a little slip into Confederate roots, Ventura persisted.

Well,  what do you think?  he blurted out, after an unbearable wait.

Spackle leaned back in his chair. His belly hair showing through holes in his tee shirt,  and heaved  his feet—his incredibly smelly Adidas-shod clods—up on the star map table.  Sizzling hot to the touch like a green manure pile, they were just right to him, since his lanky body came with the affliction of perpetually stone-cold feet and hands.

Ventura, meanwhile, was manfully fighting nausea and gagging.  He could never get used to that overwhelming wave of  ripe, maggoty, fish entrails that seemed to grow worse, if that was possible, even at that high, cool altitude.

What do I think?  repeated Spackle, with a devilish rebel gleam in his weakest eye.  He spat to one side and  more or less into a coffee urn,  the top removed.  Well, I maybe ain't paid to think.  What I see,  my boy, is jist this.  It's gotta be something a little out of the ordinary.  I might jist add:  EXTREE ordinary, and not be splittin' a hair on a sow's snout.

With that understatement Ventura had to make do for the moment.  Spackle was famous for never letting on what he knew or surmised, not until he first saw how the winds blew, whether North or South.  If northerly, he would remain inscrutable as the Sphinx of Thebes.  If southerly, he might warm up enough to divulge a few significant facts.

Even so, the moment Ventura had gone back to his work station, Spackle was scrambling upwards on a mounting pile of trash and soft drink cans and discarded, worn to shreds underwear, even a dead cat’s ant-eaten carcass that had been the observatory mouser but ate too much of Spackle’s cooking and expired.  Up high enough, one foot on the cat, he worked to fit a giant improvised sun screen to the lens so he could have himself a good, close look at something out of the ordinary—how out of the ordinary on that Black Tuesday  he would soon discover.

As for Ventura, he sat in his observatory, wondering what  Spackle was already seeing, just from one look at the plate, that he would rather die than share with his fellow astronomers.

The Nevadan swore, he was so upset and frustrated.

The wind must have been blowing northerly again!

It was so like Spackle to withhold, withhold, withhold!  Other than his star-craft and tobacco, withholding was the cussed Johnnie Reb’s passion and reason for being!  Keep the Yankee world guessing, keep it from getting the right information, keep it wasting time and wandering about in unknown territory, keep it muddling and mucking about  in the darkest swamps of and most stagnant, twisting bayous of the mind—and, eventually, somewhere down the road, the Confederate stars and bars would fly a notch higher than the stars and stripes.  That,  dreamt,  prayed,  plotted, was the Great Astronomical Comeuppance, or, more to the point,  the Southern Fried Stellar Shift—so great it was on par