Moraturi Lost: Paradisi Chronicles: Lost Missions: Moraturi, #1

By Marti Ward

When you're 2.5 million lightyears from help, you can't afford people who only have a single skill…

20-year-old Veterinary Nurse/Trainee Medical Officer Eva Hughes is junior officer on SS Moraturi, transporting 500 colonists to New Eden. Eva's responsibility is the domestic and farm animals they are bringing, but she is working towards qualifying as both a veterinary and a medical doctor.

 

After a gamma burst in the wormhole, Eva finds herself looking after colonists whose cryobeds failed, and who now show memory loss for specific things. When another wave of radiation hits, the ship slips out of the wormhole, somewhere, sometime… and Eva finds herself in charge of an impossible mission. The quick trip through the wormhole has turned into an epic journey of biblical proportions. The saga begins...

• Language: English
• Publisher: SupRes
• Release date: Sep 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223441458

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

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to help me with my many questions and pedantic detail as I sought to understand and reconcile the facts of the extant historical documents with those events  that I was seeking to relate.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 Moraturi Lost volume and its sister Casindra Lost story. 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 human kind. 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 earlier unmanned missions — 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: the Casindra Lost arc 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 voyages with the second ship on a tumultuous and deadly journey through the wormhole and beyond — as a young vet finds herself responsible for much more than she signed on for.

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 Asteroid 243 Ida  Sol-Jupiter Lagrangian 4

Chapter One  Wormhole — Day Shift

Chapter Two  Wormhole — Red Eye Shift

Chapter Three Nowhere Notime

Chapter Four  Somewhere Sometime

Chapter Five Andromeda — far from Paradisi

Chapter Six  Andromeda — many lightyears from  New Eden

Chapter Seven Andromeda — years from New Eden

Chapter Eight  Andromeda — too far too fast

Chapter Nine  Andromeda — a difficult decision

Chapter Ten  Andromeda — a plain plan

Moraturi Lost Epilogue Moraturi Ring Prologue SS Jim Pruett

Moraturi Ring Extract SS Moraturi — Nightmare to the stars

Coming Soon

About the author

Other works in  The Paradisi Chronicles

Moraturi Lost

Prologue

Asteroid 243 Ida

Sol-Jupiter Lagrangian 4

Hoopball. A game in which the ball is propelled around the upper or lower shuttle bay of a LETO with strikes of the hand or the head. Hoops are placed as goals in the middle of the port and starboard bulkheads. Similar games played on Earth originally used a fruit basket to catch the ball, or a fish net to slow it. In the early versions of the game, the ball had to pass through the hoop from top to bottom, and could be projected through the hoop directly.  In the current form of the game, points are scored, according to difficulty, only if the ball is bounced through the hoop (backboard=1, ceiling=2, floor=3). Due to the differential effects of centrifugal and Coriolis forces, children normally play in the cargo bay at around 0.4G while adult teams play in the main bay at 0.5G.

The LETO Dictionary, 4th Edition (2077)

––––––––

Michael Evans

1 February 2079 10:00

Captain Michael Evans was waiting for his initial briefing by Solar Command, the arm of the Solar Horizons Foundation board responsible for ship and gate operations within and between Sol and Paradisi. The observation lounge of asteroid 243 Ida’s command module boasted a massive crystal fenestella that gave a direct view of his ship, SS Moraturi.

As he waited, Evans watched the ongoing preparations for its three year mission to the Andromeda Galaxy, two and a half million lightyears away, contemplating his role in this exciting but daunting mission.  He had been recruited from the British Airforce by Henry Thorndike, but knew little about him or Solar Horizons. He’d worked with Thorndike in a joint operation years ago, but his impression back then was that he was officious and indecisive. As for Solar Horizons, it seemed like it had only been a few days since he had learned of the Paradisi System and their hidden agenda of intergalactic colonization.

In fact, it had been over six months. But Evans, like the rest of his crew and passengers, had made the journey out to Jupiter in cryostasis — the passengers would not be woken till they reached New Eden, while crew would be on deck in shifts at the appropriate stages of the mission.

At the moment there was little unusual about the LETO that was being prepared for the mission. The LETOs were renowned as the backbone of Reach Corp’s construction fleet, enabling construction of the sky elevators, the Nautilus-11 space station and the experimental Asteria class starships. The SS Casindra used for the first manned mission through the wormhole had also been a LETO, with similar add-ons to the ship he would be commanding

Designed for a Low Earth Transfer Orbiter role, LETOs were built like an octahedral tank with fore and aft scissor cranes and hatches on each of the eight sides. The design was famous for its dexterous role in construction, as well as for tugging massive containers and substructures around the solar system. Like all LETOs, Moraturi was basically a cylinder 50 meters in diameter and 100 meters long although it could be lengthened by bolting on a variety of different bridge and bay modules, and of course its effective diameter depended on what load it was carrying on each of its eight sides.

Moraturi had already been retrofitted with an advanced immersion bridge, providing an impressive level of augmented reality that allowed the crew to feel like it was sitting in space, while individual head surround immersion technology facilitated controlling LETO appendages as if they were your own.

He could hardly see any difference in the light of the distant sun and stars, but forward of the bridge there was now the Solar Energy Collector and Svaiter Mirror: it was the SECASM’s ‘antimatter mirror’ that would enable him to open a wormhole to another galaxy.

Moraturi also carried two thorium-powered BiCavitran Em­Drives which had been engineered and tested to provide Moraturi an acceleration of up to 0.2G under full load. Those he could see as clear nacelles, reminiscent of the famous Star Trek ships of the ever-continuing vid franchise. Now he was truly going where no man had gone before — well one man...

In construction-rig configurations, no particular side of a LETO was ‘up’ more than the others, but in the BiCavitran configuration, the ships was configured in a plane-like way, as a fuselage where the top two diagonal surfaces supported the drives. The main load was supported directly above so that the whole structure could be rotated around a center of gravity within or just below this load to provide simulated gravity —  but for this mission they’d been retrofitted with artificial gravity throughout the habitation and engineering zones.

For the voyage to Andromeda, the top cargo would be a fully loaded Transfero shuttle, and eventually the Moraturi would link on a cryohold on each side, as well as two atmospheric-capable Vanguard shuttles — each with a capacity of 250 passengers.

Evans turned at the sound of a slider opening to find a uniformed figure addressing him as she gestured towards the open door. Captain Evans, the Board will see you now. Three gold bands marked the woman as having the rank of commander.

Thank you, Commander, Evans responded with a smile as he made his way through the door.

Please take a seat. That was Thorndike, wearing his gold bird insignia.

Thank you, Colonel, Evans answered with a reserved nod as he took his seat. There were two men in suits and two women in lab coats flanking Thorndike — he swept his eyes around them with further nods of acknowledgement.

"I trust the preparation of SS Moraturi is proceeding to your satisfaction," announced Thorndike, as if it were impossible to believe otherwise.

"Actually Colonel, I haven’t had the opportunity to go aboard to see! But I have read up on the standard specifications as well as the briefing on the mission configuration and parameters, as well as the logs of the Casindra mission. They seem fine as far as they go, but they do leave a number of questions unanswered — and I haven’t had a chance to look at the thousands of reports generated from that mission."

"We don’t have formal presentations or a fixed agenda today, and I suspect your questions will touch on some of the issues I want to discuss. You will have a few months to familiarize yourself with the Casindra documents — but I suspect your questions relate to some of the unusual features of that mission that are not satisfactorily explained in the logs."

This initial briefing ended up focusing on what happened in the Casindra mission rather than what was expected of the Moraturi. Evans would have over a year to understand the expectations of this mission, and learn about each of the groups of specialists that would make up his cryofrozen passenger manifest. The main purpose of this meeting was actually for him to have temporary access to the full set of records from the SS Casindra, to help him understand what had gone wrong with the previous mission, including details that were not included in the official logs but had influenced the shape of his own mission — although he would not be permitted to retain a copy of these records.

Evans was sure those suppressed logs would make for an invaluable and totally unexpected start to his mining and colonization mission. Just as well he had a near photographic memory.

Chapter One

Wormhole — Day Shift

Michael Evans

28 July 2080 13:20

The ship bucked and buckled. Alarms blared and blazed.

Silence the alarms, Captain Michael Evans ordered calmly, thinking, Casindra never reported anything like this!

KILL THE ALARMS, he yelled across the hullabaloo, eyeing the row of red indicators as the cacophony died away, and making a quiet note in his log to have the automatic cutoff activate much more promptly. He watched some of the indicators return to orange, and one even went green as calm returned to the bridge. Critical systems report, he ordered per regulation. This compound report automatically prioritized individual reports as a function of criticality of system and disruption. Unless the ship was about to blow up, life support and artificial gravity should be top of the list — and indeed the color-coded list appeared immediately, headed by AGG.

The voice that accompanied this had stilted metallic tones to mark it as a level 1 artificial intelligence belonging to one of the autonomous subsystems. Artificial gravity nominal, life support nominal, scrubbers at 40%, emergency oxygen enrichment active on Deck 3, hull breach autosealed forward of the port maintenance bay on Deck 3.

The leftmost light was already orange again, and the window above them was showing deck views focused around Deck 3 with the indicated areas of Engineering magnified into view as the system reported on them. ETR was still not showing, and O2 enrichment reserve was a little over 2 hours. Expected Time to Repair, he queried.

A human voice responded — it took Evans a moment to identify it as belonging to Lt Parker, one of the Life Support Engineering team. We have evacuated and closed off the forward compartment of Deck 3 and ceased enrichment. AGG Engineer Roberts was the only crew member in there but got out quickly. He seems fine, but has been sent to medbay for observation. ETR for restoration of full scrubbing on remaining decks is less than one hour. We have enough spares to simply replace the damaged units on Deck 2. Deck 1 is maintaining at nominal. Deck 1 was the cargo deck and less critical, but Deck 2 encompassed the main bridge and both medbays, and housed most of the command crew.

Evans could see the damaged scrubbers red coded on his exploded deck view — he couldn’t help smiling at the thought of that bit of ironic terminology. And then he really had something to smile about as the two scrubbers on Deck 2 changed from red to green — the command deck had rightly received priority attention. Thank you lieutenant, well done! Captain out, he acknowledged formally.

As Evans thumbed off the life support channel, the next light highlighted and the screen reoriented the ship schematic to show engines.

A strident cockney assailed his ears, leaving no doubt that it was Chief Ballard in person. The forward reflector on the port EM drive is badly crumpled and will take the best part of a week to properly repair — I’ve got the bots onto it, but it may not be usable on wormhole exit. Starboard EM, main nuclear thrusters and starboard chemical thrusters are operational. Port steering thrusters will take at least a full shift to fix, let’s say 12 hours. We should have another two days in the wormhole, and I am prioritizing a full assessment of the damaged EM cavity, in the hope that we can have full reverse thrust available by the time we reach normal space.

Evans had tuned out for a moment as he contemplated the impact of being without one of the two Em­Drives. It was not just a matter of doubling the time of their acceleration and deceleration phases, but the need to reconfigure and rebalance the ship. Then something in Ballard’s ongoing report caught his attention: We could be running it close there, and that’s assuming we don’t get another gamma blast. I've also transferred technicians to support restoration of life support in the cargo deck as I’m concerned about the gen2 cryobeds.

Gamma blast? he interjected.

All microwave and nanowave sensors were off the scale! The bump was partly a result of the radiation overloading the AGGs — but they are all functioning at nominal now. The damage to the EM cavity seems to be external in nature — the wormhole must have temporarily contracted around the ship. Science has already accessed the logs.

Yes, AGG was the first system to return to green — repairs without artificial gravity generation would have been a real pain. And five days out of the wormhole without reverse thrust... at a differential exit speed of over 500 kilometers a second, that could take them a quarter of a billion kilometers out of position, almost 2AU. Thank you Chief, you’ve got your work cut out for you and I’ll leave you to it... Captain out!

Next was cryogenics, in a mellow alto voice with a Welsh lilt: Bellamy here! The western cryoring isn't looking so good. Seventy-two gen2 beds have failed, along with life support. Emergency resuscitation is ongoing. All cryo and medical shifts have been called in. We seem to be having successful recoveries, but some patients show significant disorientation and suspected brain damage. The first few were taken to medical, but we don't have the capacity for them all. Recommendation is prep for immediate recryo in a spare cryobed irrespective of their condition. Survival rate for rapid recryo is estimated at 80% based on primate data. Better than that if it can be kept short.

Cryochief Bellamy was a new arrival that Evans hadn’t really gotten to know yet, and now he had hard decisions to make based on her report.

Provisioning and life support was on the basis of 16 waking crew for the in-system transits with an overlapping crew of 28 for the wormhole transit. The ship had been provisioned with a 100% overrun margin on its one year voyage, and 10% additional cryobeds, plus those designated for the crew. Moraturi can't handle another 50 let alone 100, Evans concluded.

Agreed, Evans replied Get everyone you can back into cryo. Limit waking treatment to emergency cases and at most half a dozen patients to explore the brain damage. We can't accommodate more than eight extra passengers, and we only have ten medbeds. Engineering reports overscale X-ray exposure, but the bridge crew seems fine and I've heard no reports of radiation sickness.

Chief Medical Officer Parry chimed in out of the black — Evans instantly recalled that the CMO was automatically commed in when lives were at stake. Can take up to 24 hours for symptoms of radiation syndrome to present, although tests will be able to detect damage earlier. That's one reason why I want to retain cryosubjects from each compartment. Will limit to 10 breathers and will not resuscitate further medical staff. CMO out!

Ignoring the slight breach of protocol from the busy Chief Medical Officer, Evans continued down through the less critical systems, looking at damages and casualties, talking to the chiefs where clarification or encouragement seemed to be needed.

Sideris had reported on a radiation storm, and there had been disruption of the wormhole. Perhaps it was worth another look at the logs from SS Casindra. Paradisi might not be quite the paradise they were expecting.

Bill Robertson

29 July 2080 07:00

The noise of someone shuffling around the room woke him. Bill lay with his eyes closed as he took in the unfamiliar sounds and the sharp clean smells surrounding him. Where was he? Who were these people? He could hear a muffled conversation, then a sharp tap of feet as someone left the room.

He felt someone approach and lean over him, then turn away and tap on a pad.

Mr Robertson! Are you awake? William? Bill? Can you hear me? asked a pleasant female voice. He opened his eyes as she moved away and tapped a panel, turning back to catch him looking at her. Dr Saunders! she spoke into the panel. "Mr