Moraturi Ring: Paradisi Chronicles: Lost Missions: Moraturi, #2

By Marti Ward

What a 21st!

Eva's big birthday 'present' was a tired old spaceship lost in space and time, a motley crew of amnesiac patients, 500 colonists in cryo, and a mission that would take a lifetime - assuming she could keep everyone alive till they made planetfall.

SS Moraturi is a Lunar Earth Transfer Orbiter - a kind of spider robot designed to construct space stations and ships in and around the Earth-Moon Lagrange points 1 and 2. Now Moraturi is taking two cryoholds full of colonists to New Eden, an earth-like planet in the Paradisi system, 2.5 million light years from Earth in the Andromeda galaxy.

Eva's problem is that the trip that was to take one year is now going to take decades - their emergency supplies were based on 200% of expected needs for just 16 crew members with the 500 passengers in cryo, and the cryotechnology can't keep them alive for even a decade at a stretch. And the success of the mission will be in the hands of a bunch of teenagers.

Casindra Lost and Moraturi Lost take us on two different ships as they commence their mission, and each is the start of a separate arc, arcs that take several books to resolve.  Each volume is designed to be readable on its own, and provide all you need of the backstory without unnecessary spoilers. But the stories and arcs are not independent, and intertwine in a number of ways - still you can read either arc independently, starting either one and picking up the other later.

Casindra Lost won the Gold Medal in Science Fiction in the 2021 Global Book Awards for Self-Publishing, while Moraturi Lost won Silver in Science Fiction/Adventure, and together with Moraturi Ring won Silver for Science Fiction Series in the 2021 Global Book Awards. (~300pp)

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: SupRes
• Release date: Sep 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223749523

Marti Ward

Marti Ward is an award-winning writer, teacher, scientist and entrepreneur known for his serial startups and his interdisciplinary research. Marti hasn't been into space yet, but has travelled extensively on this planet, living in half a dozen countries and speaking and reading a variety of languages with varying degrees of fluency. He hasn't yet built an AI as sophisticated as Al or Alice — but is working on it.

Book preview

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Moraturi Ring

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Lost Mission Series

Moraturi Ring

Marti Ward

Moraturi Ring: Paradisi Chronicles

Kindle paperback edition ISBN: 9798640426106

Kindle hardcover edition ISBN: 9798397828468

Draft2Digital eBook edition ISBN: 9798223749523

Draft2Digital paperback edn ISBN: 9798223481393

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This work is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, locales or persons is entirely fortuitous.

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First published by SupRes: January 2021

Draft2Digital Edition: September 2023

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Copyright © 2020-2021 SupRes Inc. South Australia

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Front cover art: betibup33/thebookcoverdesigner.com

Acknowledgements

First of all, I would like to acknowledge the effort and support of those who created and opened up the Paradisi Universe to all writers of whatever background, experience or genre.

I would especially like to acknowledge Cheri Lasota, Bill Patterson and Louisa Locke for their careful world building and extensive documentation of the Paradisi Universe, as well their willingness to help me with my many questions and pedantic detail as I sought to understand and reconcile the facts of the extant historical documents with those events that I was seeking to relate.

I must thank all my friends, family, colleagues and students who read, corrected and commented on the early drafts of this volume and the earlier Casindra Lost and Moraturi Lost episodes. In particular, I would like to thank Louisa Locke and Kain Massim for their support, as well as stylistic and plot suggestions.

Of course, while I took all the comments into account, I made up my own stubborn mind about what to do about them and kept to my science-driven story for better or for worse...

I also want to acknowledge the inspiration of my teachers from science to philosophy, linguistics to psychology, geology to biology, mathematics to neuroscience — and I want to acknowledge all my students across these and all the Science, Technology, Mathematics & Engineering (STEM) disciplines.

I love science, and I love teaching and researching it, explaining and applying it, and it is my humble hope that my science and technology fiction and faction will inspire a new generation of students and teachers to a similar love of STEM.

The Paradisi Chronicles

By the early decades of the twenty-first century, the problems of over-population, antibiotic resistant epidemics, civil war, cyberterrorism, nuclear proliferation, and climate change have set Earth on a path of escalating disasters.

In the year 2025AD, ten men and women come together to address these problems. These powerful leaders each have enormous personal wealth that they made in a variety of commercial enterprises around the globe. What they have in common besides their great wealth is a deep pessimism about the future of Earth and an enormous optimism about space exploration as the only viable solution for the continuation of humankind. To that end, these men and women, who call themselves the Founders, begin the Paradisi Project.

The purpose of the Paradisi Project is the colonization of New Eden, a recently discovered planet in the Andromeda Galaxy that scientists deem capable of sustaining human life. Fearing interference from various factions on Earth, the Founders hide their ultimate goals from the public by the fiction that their activities are only to set up viable commercial colonies on the Moon and Mars. The real goals of the project are passed down from the head of each family to their successors and close advisers, who act in concert as the Council of Ten.

The Paradisi Project harnesses the best minds on Earth to develop the scientific breakthroughs in interstellar travel and wormhole technology needed to transport the ten Founding Families, and the necessary personnel and resources, to establish a viable colony on New Eden. Once there, their mission will be to ensure that this new colony doesn’t make the same mistakes that are destroying Earth.

Solar Horizons is set up as the public face of the ten. But, as far as the public knows, its mission is Mars and its moons. Solar Command sends its first manned mission through the wormhole, and the detailed reports from Captain Sideris on SS Casindra confirm and fill out the long-distance reports from the unmanned mission, until they lose contact.

A second manned mission is launched through the wormhole, with 500 passengers covering a range of essential specializations, but SS Moraturi is never heard from again.

The Paradisi Lost series follows these two lost missions: Casindra Lost tracks the first ship, as it embarks on a mission that places the future of the Paradisi colonization program in the hands of a lone wolf of a captain, a diverse collection of flora and fauna, and an experimental AI trying to understand how humans and animals work; Moraturi Lost and Moraturi Ring voyage with the second ship on a tumultuous and deadly journey through the wormhole and beyond — as a young officer finds herself responsible for much more than she signed on for, dumped out of the wormhole two lightyears and many years from the Eden of her dreams.

The Paradisi Project and its historical accounts are works of fiction but try to be true to known science. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of our authors’ imaginations or used fictitiously. Owing to effects of cryosuspension, relativity and wormhole travel, apparent dates and effective ages at departure can be quite different from what they are at arrival — all times given are ship’s time and time will always be different in other inertial frames of reference.

To explore The Paradisi Chronicles and find more books in the series, please see the list at the end, or better still, take a look at the official web page:

https://paradisichronicles.wordpress.com/

Or check out my explorations in science and fiction:

http://martiward.blogspot.com/: the science behind the fiction

http://martiscifi.blogspot.com/: my science fiction stories

Or sign up to my mailing list for Paradisi Lost Missions updates and free stories:

http://tiny.cc/PLM-Subscribe

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

The Paradisi Chronicles

Prologue SS Jim Pruett — SJL4

Chapter One SS Moraturi — Nightmare to the stars

Chapter Two  Holes and mirrors

Chapter Three  Push and shove

Chapter Four  Arrivals

Chapter Five  Shifts

Chapter Six  Lessons

Chapter Seven  Preparations

Chapter Eight  Departures

Chapter Nine  By hook or by crook

Chapter Ten  Wouldn’t be cricket

Chapter Eleven  The gravity of the situation

Chapter Twelve  The next generation

Chapter Thirteen  Going around in circles

Moraturi Ring Epilogue Moraturi Star Prologue — Birth

Coming Soon

About the author

Other works in  The Paradisi Chronicles

Moraturi Ring

Prologue

SS Jim Pruett — SJL4

Cricket (1). A game in which a ball is propelled around a LETO shuttle bay with strikes of a long three-sided bat. A wicket (q.v.) consisting of three upright nanosensor bars (stumps q.v.) is protected by the player with the bat. The bowler (q.v.) seeks to strike the wicket with the ball, bowling the ball down a pitch against the direction of CFG rotation. The batsman scores points (runs) by running up the pitch and back, but is out if the stumps record a hit when bowled or when returned while the batsman is running. Earlier versions of the game were played on grass (q.v.) with mechanical sensing of wicket strikes and two batsman who alternated ends. In the modern game an extra level of skill is required due to centrifugal and Coriolis forces.

Cricket (2). An insect related to the grasshopper (q.v.) that is a primary source of protein in the LETO fleet. Powdered cricket is a standard protein supplement used in nutrishakes (q.v.) and various baked foods and emergency rations.  Whole fried crickets are popular with children as chips (q.v.), although for adult consumption the legs are usually removed (and ground to produce the protein supplement). The most common species of cricket used as a LETO protein source are Acheta domesticus and Acheta marinus. The latter is a gemod that silences the deafening chirps of the former.

The LETO Dictionary, 5th Edition (2080)

Avanish Goda

17 May 2083 11:00

Captain Avanish Goda got up out of the command chair, where he’d been fidgeting for the last two hours, to stand stonily on the bridge of his Lunar Earth Transport Orbiter, SS Jim Pruett. It was a matter of hours before the departure of the Pruett on the third manned mission through the wormhole to the Andromeda Galaxy, the Paradisi System, and New Eden, and he still had things to do in preparation for the mission. The fate of humanity rested in his hands. If this mission wasn’t a success, there wouldn’t be a fourth.

As the long speeches droned on, he fell into his own reminiscences, tuning out the monologue about the two lost missions, about what an intrepid explorer Captain Jerome Sideris had been (Single-minded is the word I would have chosen), about his deep compassion (Knnhh! I knew the man — are we thinking about the same person?), about his selfless solitary existence aboard the SS Casindra, alone in a new galaxy (That’s the way he liked it!), about his fearless aerial, marine, submarine and ground-based exploration of a new planet (His Volcans and his AI did most of the work!), his hunting and returning of specimens of new flora and fauna from prairie to jungle (That part was all Sideris!) and his discovery of their identical DNA and RNA mechanisms (This part was all AI!).

The whole crew was turned out for the ceremony on the secret station on — built into — the captured asteroid 243 Ida: a ceremony in remembrance and mourning of the two lost missions; a ceremony in celebration and contemplation of the completed upgrades to the station and its massive Ford-Svaiter mirror, and finally, a ceremony for the long-awaited announcement of the name of this station.

By regulation, a LETO couldn’t be left unmanned and he was required to leave a skeleton crew. By inclination, he chose to make himself the sole member of that skeleton crew.

In the pregnant pause as they awaited the announcement of the new name, he could hear the soft slow ticking of a Newton’s Cradle in low-G — he tended to fiddle with it when he was thinking.

As he played with those cool calming chrome-plated orbs, he’d been thinking what a bad idea this was... not the mission, but sending the Pruett off on the six of a remembrance ceremony for the failures of the past... So much about Sideris and Casindra, yet so little about Moraturi and the 500 souls that had been aboard her... Both of them LETOs just like the Pruett...

ANS

2 August 2080 05:35

Automated Navigation System reports navigation failure! Position unknown!

The automated announcement echoed around the bridge, but there was nobody to hear it.

Automated Navigation System reports navigation failure! Position unknown!

The automated announcement echoed around the ship, but there was nobody to hear it.

There were bodies, and most of them were probably alive, but none could hear...

ASS/ALS/AIS/ABS/ARS

2 August 2080 06:00

Automated Security System reports failure of bridge Shift A to log in!

Automated Security System reports bridge Shift A still at secure stations!

Automated Security System requests validation of life signs at secure stations!

Automated Security System requests validation of peripheral and core processors!

Automated Security System A broadcasting signcrypted diagnostics for validation.

Automated Security System B broadcasting signcrypted diagnostics for validation.

Automated Security System C broadcasting signcrypted diagnostics for validation.

"Automated Life Support System reports

10 crew at secure stations with heart rate and respiration within nominal parameters!

18 crew logged in at secure stations with heart rate and respiration not detected!

490 humans in cryosleep! Status green!

50 animals in cryosleep! Status green!

"Abnormal cryoreadings in Vetbay A. Status unknown!

10 patients in sickbay in automated life support! Status orange!"

Automated Internal Sensing A broadcasting signcrypted diagnostics for validation.

Automated Internal Sensing B broadcasting signcrypted diagnostics for validation.

Automated Internal Sensing C broadcasting signcrypted diagnostics for validation.

Automated Biobed Support A reports radiation medication levels below 5%! Install refill now!

Automated Biobed Support B reports radiation medication levels below 5%! Install refill now!

Automated Biobed Support A broadcasting signcrypted diagnostics for validation.

Automated Biobed Support B broadcasting signcrypted diagnostics for validation.

Automated Navigation System A broadcasting signcrypted diagnostics for validation!

Automated Navigation System B broadcasting signcrypted diagnostics for validation!

Automated Navigation System C broadcasting signcrypted diagnostics for validation!

Automated Repair Systems reports Em­Drive 2 repairs complete. Please confirm diagnostics and authorize withdrawal of bots.

Chapter One

SS Moraturi — Nightmare to the stars

Patient Tom Robertson

4 August 2080 09:00

Faces swirled, someone swears, nurses whirled, something tears...

A glassy dome ascends, cloudy vapors rise, a scent sharp and sweet, fills his nose, his lungs, his eyes...

Voices, faces... That voice, that face... Nurse Hughes? Eva? Tom, Bill...

Have we had an accident? Have we been kidnapped? What is this place?

A ship on the way to a new planet, a new sun, that sounded like something from the bible, or a fairy tale. A science fiction story about a trip to Mars, a trip through a wormhole, a trip to another galaxy...

Andromeda?

It’s either my wildest dream or my worst nightmare!

Eva seemed nice enough, but who is she?

I feel I can trust her!

Or was this some kind of good cop bad cop, with the doctor whose name was like a fuzzy blur... Saunders was it?

Why did it seem so important to remember?

Bill was very taken with Eva? Or was it that Eva was very taken with Bill? That red hair was so striking, but neither the doctor nor the nurse had anything like the expected bedside manner...

The robot orderly at least behaved as it should!

Tom woke in a groggy daze with no idea of where he was or how he got there. Just a feeling of being mired in memories.

Thirsty, lost in the desert, a long way from home... a desert without water, without earth, without any living thing... the great expanse between an old Earth and a new Earth...

A new Earth, a new Eden, a new Paradise... in the Andromeda galaxy...  

Tom knew he should know all about the Paradisi system... but all he had were nebulous snatches, questions rather than answers. Asking him about something he should know seemed to drive it away. Telling him something he should already know seemed almost as bad... It just seemed to slip and slide away.

The sound of the alarm was almost comforting, as it brought Tom back to his new reality. Were those dreams a sign that he was regaining his missing memories? Or that he wouldn’t regain them?

Gradually it started to come back to him... His parents had brought them along on a secret mission to the Andromeda Galaxy, a system called Paradisi. He and his twin brother, Bill, had been in cryo, but it had dropped out early on in the emergency, all but one of the crew dead or incapacitated. His mother, Evalyn, was here too — as well as another teenager and half a dozen older passengers who like them had been kept out of cryo to address their selective amnesia problems.

Like how I got onto this ship!

Martha’s advice on that was that he should start at the beginning, work through the history of the Paradisi project, talk to his mother, learn about the family’s history with the project.

Martha... the same age as me as far as I can tell... shy and mousey, but then wham... what she was taking on...  a teenager given the role of ship’s psychologist moments after waking... way to make an impression...

Funny that he should dream of those first moments of unreality and disbelief, when now, just two days later, it was all too real — and he was the one who had discovered the truth and had had to convince the others — or hide it from them.

Tom tried to draw it all into a coherent whole... He was one of ten amnesiac patients who’d woken to find themselves on a ship they’d never heard of on their way to a planet they’d never heard of. And now, after whatever catastrophic event threw them out of that top secret wormhole too early, they been pressed into service as crew, sharing a responsibility for the 500 passengers still in cryostasis...

The nurse who had woken him was a pretty redhead in a crumpled uniform. A vet who was one day his nurse, and the next his captain... who had introduced herself as Eva — but was now telling him he needed to address her formally as Captain Hughes.

I can still hardly believe the Captain is letting three teens participate in crew briefings, that she is prepared to consider the ideas that Bill and I come up with — not to mention all the trust she placed in Martha. And now she’s actually given us official titles.

The moment Tom woke and saw his brother looking at her, he’d seen that Bill was falling for Eva.  He could understand that... Bill had always liked the assertive types. But very quickly his own eye had been caught by Martha. They’re both such incredible girls, women, young women... Martha seemed so quiet and reserved, but then ...

Martha was now ‘Trainee’ yet ‘Senior Psychologist’ Martha Edwards. Tom and Bill were now (like her) ‘Acting Ensigns’, in the roles of ‘Trainee Pilot Navigator’ and ‘Trainee Gravitational Engineer’.

Yes, he and his brother had been listened to when they opened their big mouths — and for their sins, Tom had been given the task of figuring out how to get the ship and its passengers to New Eden in one piece, or perhaps half a piece... while Bill had been given the job of working out how to maintain a semblance of earth-like gravity and appropriate living conditions without using power they didn’t have.

Bill’s half-baked proposal not only provided gravity, but a sun with a hydroponic farm around it — and the Captain had encouraged him to pursue it.

Tom’s half-baked theory explained why some sensors and navigation systems placed them 10,000 lightyears from New Eden and others only around two lightyears away — but the Captain had forbidden him from sharing it.

Ensign Tom Robertson

4 August 2080 11:00

Tom had been lost in thought, thinking over the discoveries of the last few days, wondering about the strangely disjointed dreams... when he realized that he had been staring at Eva the whole time she’d been speaking.

Now she was looking specifically at him and his brother, asking them for their reports.  Speaking in public was not his thing — sure he could answer the occasional question in class, but putting multiple sentences together in a coherent way... Well, he could read his notes, if he had any.  He had kept detailed logs of his experiments... but now he needed to summarize.

Bill gestured impatiently that Tom should start, and he did — bringing up a display of the Andromeda galaxy on all the screens.

Thank you, Eva — Captain Hughes — I should make sure I practice that, and this is a formal occasion... Captain Hughes has asked that I not go into technical detail, so I will keep this brief.

Although the audience was familiar and friendly, and Eva nodded in agreement, Tom didn’t meet anyone’s eyes. Instead he reached for a beaker of water before continuing, taking a quick sip. What was hard was that he couldn’t explain his timeslip theory and its implications. 

So he kept it short, closing his mouth as soon as he’d delivered his core message, and before he could put his foot in it.

We can confirm that we were thrown out of the wormhole 2.2 light years from the Paradisi system, and that expending all our energy on getting into New Eden orbit in the shortest possible time will take around 33 years consistent with the Automated Navigation System’s previous cautious estimate.

The reaction to that was muted — they’d all had time to get used to this 33-year estimate. Meagan’s emphatic sigh attracted everyone’s attention to her, but Tom looked away in embarrassment as a tinge of red rose to her cheeks. Meagan was a primary school teacher, but often acted more like a schoolgirl than Martha did — who was one.

Rhys mumbled something under his breath — no idea what it was, but it sure wasn’t good. He’s a bit of a dark horse... What’s his background, really? Linguist and anthropologist doesn’t really make sense when heading to a planet without intelligent life...

It seemed a few of their ad hoc crew had hoped that, by some miracle, the journey would be more like the few months they were originally expecting — those few that remembered at all. Of course, some like his mum, Evalyn, and their computer graphics expert, Hugh, were already in the know for obvious reasons. And his biologist mum seemed to be getting close to farmer Mary Jones who had been advising on the food growing side of their decades-long journey.

In the absence of any actual comments, Tom decided he should at least mention the practical outcome and Bill’s plan.

There is a big problem with the 33-year estimate though. It does not leave us power for life support, artificial gravity or cryosystems — let alone account for our need to eat. Taking just the power consumption into account, we are talking about triple that time estimate, a full century — making the food problem even worse. But Bill has a plan to help with that.

Bill took over seamlessly, not waiting around for further reactions to their revised estimate. He hit a button on his pad and an image of the ship sprang up on all their screens.  Labels were included for various attachments, the gym below, the cryoholds and Vanguard shuttles latched to the main deck and engineering deck...

As most of you will know, Artificial Gravity Generation is a fairly recent invention. Indeed, Captain Hughes was brought up on a LETO just like this one, in the days before interdimensional inertia AGG, and it was always carefully configured so that it could be spun to provide a centrifugal effect that simulated gravity.

Bill gestured and the whole system started rotating about some point above the ship — it looked like it was centered in the big transport shuttle that was nestled above the Moraturi between the two huge Em­Drives.

Of course, that centrifugal effect is different on different decks, with people often getting literally light-headed because the gravity at head height is different from the gravity at floor level. For this reason, the ship doesn’t simply rotate about its central axis, but around the center of mass of the entire complex of attached modules — and this is kept as far above the ship as possible. That’s why the LETOs have a plane-like layout, and why the gym underneath has the highest effective gravity. Although at the moment that extra gravity is simulated, with the gym having its own gravity boost up to Earth gravity.

Tom watched the meter on the border of the display as it showed a reduction in energy use, alternating between a stark red and a burnt orange as the Em­Drive pulsed for their 0.1G acceleration.

The rotation speed is normally around two to three revolutions per minute depending on the ship configuration and crew tolerance. 3rpm gives us close to Earth gravity in the gym and close to Mars gravity on the upper cargo deck and in the docked Transfero. You can see from the meters in the visualization that swapping to CFG, that is Centrifugal Gravity, has achieved a major power saving. Indeed, Tom could see the power meter was now in the yellow to orange range, and was aware of a few nods from those around him.

Tom turned his attention back to