Starship Cincinnatus

By Samuel Parkins

Fleet Admiral Will Mackenzie was in command of the perfect starship.  It had no weaknesses, except for him. 

When the galaxy faces a threat to every world, he has to make a command decision that may cost him everything.  

He is not ready for this much responsibility.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Samuel Parkins
• Release date: Apr 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223823377

Samuel Parkins

Sam Parkins was born and raised in Minnesota and now lives in Kansas. In between, he moved around for education, jobs, and military service.  His oath has no expiration date and he continues to serve as a life member of the Vietnam Veterans of America.

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The Cincinnatus

The Cincinnatus was a really big starship.  She was 5000 miles long, 3000 miles across and 1000 miles tall.  Imagine the continental United States of America times 1000.  The top few miles were under a clear dome and were essentially a map of that country with mountains, cities, plains, lakes, and rivers.  The lower decks were a variety of other environments from desert to jungle to urban, and included an internal Star Base with fleets of other ships on the underside. 

It was also completely imaginary,

or so everyone thought.

The Beginning

The others were among the oldest of the races.  Perhaps they were the oldest.  All the other races who still survived and knew of them considered them ‘gods’, but that depended on your definition.  They decided long ago, not long after this universe had been born, not to create any more life.  It seemed to just spring up on many worlds by itself anyway. 

Sometimes it developed well and sentience came naturally as a tool for survival.  Some worlds started out well, but lost their ability to sustain life when their inner core cooled and stopped creating a magnetosphere to protect life from cosmic radiation. 

Mars was one such world. 

Sometimes a system had not cleared up the debris of creation and cosmic collisions prevented life from taking hold.  Few were able to last long enough for both intelligence and technology to appear without the people destroying themselves.

In all the time since suns and planets had arrived, only a handful of worlds had ever reached the point where one of their beings could even be tested.  Fewer still ever passed.  Will Mackenzie was one of these and was unaware that the testing had begun.  He just thought he had been unlucky in life.  Mackenzie thought his life was ruled by Murphy’s Law.  Whatever could go wrong, would go wrong.  Careers started and ended early.  Marriages and relationships never lasted.  He couldn’t even keep a plant alive for long.

Still, he persisted.  Some people would give up.  Mackenzie simply thought that his life was normal, with a wide variety of experiences.  The test was to see if he would keep trying and not give up.  As he would pass one test, the others would send another.

One night, after Mackenzie had started yet another job, the Others decided to send a taste of his future.  That night he had a new dream.  He was in command of a star ship.  He could travel to new worlds and closely observe black holes and super novas without any danger to his ship or crew. 

The test was to see what he would do with it. 

He chose to scan his home world for people in danger and rescue them.  In one dream he found children who had been taken and sent anonymous tips to police to catch the kidnappers and save the children.  He also found time and course data for drug and other smugglers and fed that to the Coast Guard, FBI and other appropriate agencies.

The next night he dreamed that he used the ship to find old land and sea mines and beamed them into the sun where the explosions would not even be noticed.  It was time now to start testing his ability to handle ‘no win’ situations.

These dreams would not be happy ones.

No Win

With the abilities of such a ship, one would think they could have made life on Earth a paradise, but even a gigantic, all-powerful star ship was never able to overcome every problem.  Too many solutions would cause the more observant people to suspect the truth and the logical projections to that always had bad endings.  The apparently huge capacity for evil in some, or the limitlessness of stupidity in others was always projected to end in disaster.  It did seem true that someone would always find a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

In his dream tests one such situation happened.  A bus load of children on a church outing was prevented from crashing on a mountain road.  The religious leader of the children then led them to believe that they were ‘chosen’.  Their families believed that their God had prevented the crash and whatever the children did afterward was sanctioned by God. 

The result was a whole group of little sociopaths who believed in their own righteousness and that all else were heretics.  They tried to purge humanity of the evil of other religious teachings.  Hundreds became the victims of this ‘holy war’ before some of the original children died trying to publicly prove their immortality and the others lost faith.

Mackenzie learned from these dreams and tried to be more subtle in dealing out miracles.  That you can’t save everyone was a hard lesson.  He told his therapist about the dreams of a gigantic star ship and the struggle to not let absolute power corrupt him absolutely.  She dismissed the dreams as coming from feelings of inadequacy and suggested doing crafts to feel better. 

His therapist was not the only one.  He also told a friend about the dreams.  While being supportive, as good friends should be, the friend complemented