Gliese 581 Read online

  Gliese 581: The Departure

  A Kapalaran Universe Novel

  Christine D. Shuck

  Published by Christine D. Shuck, 2018.

  G581: The Departure

  Book 1

  Christine D. Shuck

  Copyright © 2016 Christine D. Shuck

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1523820497

  ISBN-13: 978-1523820498

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Code Red

  What We Need

  Beginnings

  Guizhou Province

  World Geographic

  Just a Fever

  Politically Correct

  Our Father

  Patient Zero

  Tens of Tens

  Guiyang Gone Bad

  The Final Cut

  Sam I Am

  What Have We Done?

  Vision in Red

  Cape Canaveral

  Dark News Indeed

  The Hunger

  One Last Hurdle

  We Need to Talk

  Unhappy Meal

  Fade to Black

  Leave-Taking

  No News is Good News?

  Hong Kong Outbreak

  Say Goodbye

  Mother Was Right

  Mr. President

  Last Row

  Departure

  Schism

  The Center Cannot Hold

  End of Days

  Death by Monopoly

  Major Tom

  Cabbage and Beets

  How the World Ends

  Let Her Go

  Time to Run

  Forever Sleep

  Mars Needs Moms

  This Doesn’t Make Sense

  Point of No Return

  The Door to Hell

  Under Suspicion

  This Empty World

  Tribunal

  Aftermath

  Planetfall

  What You Ask of Me

  Hi there!

  Before you begin, I need to ask you, do you like to read for free?

  Sign up for my newsletter and each month you can read a brand-new, short story set within the Kapalaran Universe. You can learn more about the Kapalaran Universe at my website: http://christineshuck.com

  You don’t ever have to spend a dime.

  I promise to never:

  Sell/share your email address

  Avoid greasy used car salesman tactics (I apologize if you are a used car salesman, obviously, I’m talking about the other guy)

  Make unsubscribing as easy as pushing a button.

  Interested? Great! Join the newsletter list here: https://mailchi.mp/c05ceb84e66a/subscribe-me

  And now, on with the story. Enjoy!

  Prologue

  Date: 01.27.2104

  Calypso Colony Ship

  In the years following The Collapse, the world took time to heal. In the United States, the Second American Civil War (SACW) officially ended. The financial collapse and political instability it had caused throughout the world slowly righted itself. Fighting slowed, panic dissipated and finally there was quiet and peace throughout much of the world –– all-out war dwindling once more to the dark backwater mud holes where such things are a matter of course.

  Many countries were brought together across the scattered continents. Sharing in the unease of the social and economic instability that they had survived, they moved away from their previously isolationist tendencies. What happened next was nothing less than a world-wide scientific renaissance.

  Nations rebuilt themselves, proclaiming an end to war and focusing their intent toward renewed explorations of the deepest ocean reaches and the mysteries of space. Previously non-political, one particular organization rose up in the vacuum to enact social and scientific change. National Geographic, once known for its printed magazines and stunning photography had become a progressive organization of scientific and geopolitical hegemony. Now known as World Geographic, the organization collaborated with nations around the world to create a string of space stations which were designed and collaboratively built. These three space stations, bright beacons of progress in the sky, circled Earth, the Moon and finally brought a permanent colony to Mars.

  World Geographic helped promote a renewed search for life in near and far-flung corners of the galaxy, funding science on a deeply speculative level.

  Despite the troubles Earth had seen and the widespread peace it now enjoyed, there were still very real problems facing the future of the world’s population. Several bouts of swine flu had made pork an often expensive luxury. The conventional farming techniques had grown more and more unsustainable. There were continued reports of Colony Collapse Disorder among bee populations and, along with it, increased troubles with famine in newly drought-stricken countries. A great many innovative agricultural techniques were adopted in order to stabilize food production in the ensuing years.

  As with the end of war and existence of relative peace, there was a spike in births, which threatened to overwhelm the production abilities of countries around the world in the decades to come. As the 21st century entered its final decade, trouble was brewing.

  Code Red

  “Always listen to experts. They’ll tell you what can’t be done and why. Then do it.” – Robert Heinlein

  Date: 01.27.2104

  Calypso Colony Ship

  Somehow he had to save them. Daniel’s hair was matted on the left side of his forehead, still actively dripping blood from a gash near the top of his head. Each breath was a challenge. It felt as if he were underwater, sharp knives with each gasp in and thick bubbles on the way out. He tried to breathe shallowly; it hurt less when he did that. One of his ribs felt cracked, possibly broken and he tried to think clearly as dizziness and pain fought for his attention. Attention that was desperately needed elsewhere.

  “I never should have left them.” His fingers moved feverishly over the damaged keyboard and his vision blurred. The blood dripped into his eyes and a fresh wave of dizziness washed over him.

  Oxygen levels must be low.

  A dull red light flashed through the Cryo Deck, accompanied by the thick, oily smell of melted plastic from the handful of Cryo pods a few rows over. His mind, desperate to compartmentalize, to avoid the full panic he found rising inside, lingered on the memory of Janine’s skin beneath his. The memory of Toby’s small hand on his cheek, his brother Luke and his easy smile hung there beside him, real enough to touch. The years had passed easier for him – not knowing, barely realizing the truth until it was years gone. Were they all ash and bone now?

  Each Cryo pod was equipped with a shrieking alarm. They were designed to emit a series of escalating warning sounds from a simple “Hey, something seems out of place” warning beep to a “The pod is failing and the subject will die,” shriek that energized each nerve in a Cryo Tech’s body to do something now.

  But Daniel wasn’t a Cryo Tech, Deeks, Daniel’s poker buddy and best friend on Calypso was. And Deeks was dead, along with his assistant, Evers. Their lifeless bodies had been shoved into storage lockers at the far end of the Cryo Deck. And the doors leading to the rest of the ship, where there were others far more capable and knowledgeable than a Comm Tech could ever be were shut, the opening mechanism fried. Daniel was trapped and alone.

  He could hear them, working at the doors, doing whatever they could to get through, the banging only adding to the cacophony provided by shrieking alarms.

  All of the doors on Calypso were thick, reinforced steel, with rods of titanium woven through for maximum security. Space travel was an uncertain thing, and all areas of the ship had double and triple protections to stop any hull breaches as well as prevent against the unlikely event of a ship-wide contagion. However, the
blast doors were something new, yet another layer of protection that ensured that anyone remaining on the Cryo Deck had the best chance of survival.

  It was ironic that this added security precaution might be their undoing.

  The people in these pods were integral to the mission. Without them, those currently not in Cryo would have a hell of a time and that was just the realistic side of his brain talking. God damn it, Sam was in one of these things.

  The screen on the console in front of him scrolled the same message...

  OVERRIDE PASSWORD FAILURE

  PERSONNEL RECOGNITION FAILURE

  SYSTEM FAILURE - CODE RED

  SYSTEM RESET ON ALL CRYO PODS IN 14:39 MINUTES

  Daniel pounded the keyboard in frustration. The man on the floor to the right of his foot moved slightly and moaned. Like Daniel, he was bleeding heavily from several wounds – one on his head, where Daniel had slammed it against a pillar during the fight. Daniel gave the man a hard kick.

  “You sonofabitch! What the hell were you thinking? Why would you do this? WHY?”

  Daniel’s left arm hung uselessly at his side. His left foot slipped sideways and he realized there was a sizable puddle of blood on the deck, accumulating over the long moment he had fought with the half-melted keyboard. The hole in his shoulder screamed red hot agony at him every time he moved, but the arm itself just hung there, whatever muscles it needed to move rendered useless by the knife still buried in it. It hurt, bad, and Daniel debated pulling it out.

  “Not low oxygen levels, no. It’s got to be from the blood loss, onset of shock.”

  He said it, mainly to himself, a part of him distanced from what was happening, the words sounding as if they were issuing from someone else.

  “Yeah, blood loss. It affects higher brain function and reasoning skills.”

  His voice was barely registering over the endless shrieking of the alarms. Had his lips moved? Had he actually spoken out loud? Another wave of dizziness washed over him.

  Behind him, the hammering at the doors had taken on a different tone. Sharper, higher grinding sounds, instead of the dull pounding. What was it? Some sort of saw? Daniel felt a flicker of hope. Perhaps they could break through in time, do something he couldn’t.

  But did he really have time to wait for the others to break through? Should he wait for the captain and the others to get here, so he didn’t screw something up further? He wiped the fresh blood from his brow; droplets fell to the view screen below, almost obscuring the countdown.

  The message continued to scroll...

  OVERRIDE PASSWORD FAILURE

  PERSONNEL RECOGNITION FAILURE

  SYSTEM FAILURE - CODE RED

  SYSTEM RESET ON ALL CRYO PODS IN 14:18 MINUTES

  The door behind him looked untouched, despite the application of the saw or whatever they were using on the other side. It could be hours and from the looks of it, none of the people in the Cryo Pods had hours. How the hell had this madman done it? And why?

  Daniel struggled to clear his mind, muddled and confused from the fight, filled with memories of the past. He had to stop this countdown before it was too late.

  What We Need

  “As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.” – Arthur C. Clarke

  Date: 12.23.2098

  Earth – Kansas City, Missouri

  “You want me to go where?” Edith Hainey set down her notes and stared at Scott Dorns, the head Virologist and her immediate superior, in shock.

  He had the decency to look uncomfortable.

  “It isn’t until after Christmas,” he replied, “Obviously with your family situation at present, you...”

  Edith didn’t need a reminder of her family situation. She lived it every day. Baby Jessica was a handful, after all, one of those children with two settings, blissfully asleep or awake and screaming. At forty-five years of age, Edith couldn’t help but feel she was caught between two settings herself, the one that insisted she respond to a screaming child in the middle of the night and the other that demanded she leave the parenting to her unrealistic seventeen-year-old who had dreamily announced she was keeping the baby no matter what Edith said.

  This same girl could sleep like the dead while her baby screamed in the very same room. This did nothing but wake up Edith at the far end of the hall. Edith was convinced she was the most unwilling and resentful grandparent who had ever existed.

  “What about the conferences?” she asked.

  She had been scheduled to attend two conferences in January already, one in London the second week of the month and one in New York at the end of the month, and now this?

  Between the sleepless nights, Tom’s lawyer calling her during the day with demands that she sign the paperwork or face being hauled into court again, and her son Tommy devolving into a petulant frat boy who was failing half his classes – Edith was well and truly beside herself.

  “Oh, don’t worry. You will be in and back out of there in no time.” Scott said, smiling just a little too brightly, “Just four days in China, a few days back to report on the situation and then off to the conferences.”

  This wasn’t how life was supposed to be, Edith reasoned. She had done everything right. As a child she had followed the rules, always received high grades, went to college and even worked part-time on campus to cover her living expenses. It was during her college years that she had met Tom. At first, it was perfect. They had met at a cattle ranch –– she was finishing her training in gene therapy and was working on her Master’s thesis. He was the public relations rep for a nearby branch of EcoNu, a genetics and food production company that had recently expanded from Europe to the United States.

  He later admitted that the job offer she received just a few months before graduating had more than a little to do with him. He had bent the ears of a few key people. Edith began working at EcoNu that fall, and they were married a year later.

  Edith ignored Scott’s foot tapping out a nervous rhythm on the floor. He could wait. Let the weasel sweat it for a moment or two. She knew how terrified he was of air travel, and his aversion to it was what had taken her away from her family and marriage at crucial junctures, helping to ensure its demise.

  She had done everything right – even kept her career in the Hybrid Genetics division of EcoNu through the births of all three of her children. She had been faithful, even if Tom had not, and worked equally hard at her career, family and marriage.

  But when the middle-aged spread had caught up with her, and Tom’s extra-marital adventures came in the form of calls from random women in the middle of the night, even Edith had to admit that the marriage was dying rapidly. The killing blow had been their middle child, sixteen-year-old Liza’s bombshell that she was pregnant and determined to keep the baby. It was all the excuse her husband needed to blame Edith, who was still reeling from her mother’s death the year before, and exit their sham of a marriage stage right.

  Scott looked increasingly nervous. “I can see about getting you an extra week of vacation and make sure everything is first class, the whole way there and back.”

  Edith stared at her computer, the lines on the page blurring. On top of everything else she needed new glasses, these old ones just weren’t cutting it.

  Scott shifted, nibbling at his lower lip. “Perhaps a mid-year bonus?”

  Edith was sure he had a long line of excuses, including an intact family, the nerve damage in his back that limited his ability to travel long distances, and more to explain why she was the perfect person for the job.

  While she was stuck going to China. China. And not the civilized section, oh no, some backwoods hell, one of the poorest parts of China, some place called Guizhou Province.

  Scott had long thin fingers which were currently shuffling several documents around on the table next to him. Edith could see that there was an itinerary, travel documents, the works. This wasn’t
a question or even a polite request to think about it, this was a “we are shoving you on a plane whether you like it or not” kind of talk.

  Edith sighed wearily, running her hand through her prematurely gray hair. It was feeling shaggy and irregular; she really needed to get it cut. She had missed the last appointment, just completely forgot it after a particularly sleepless night and then a fight with Liza over diapers or formula or God knows what. By the end of the fights, she really had no idea what had been the issue.

  Liza was experienced at verbal repartee, having learned it well at Tom’s knee. He had been such an excellent teacher, and Liza such a quick study. She could run circles around Edith, argue everything from how the sun and the moon orbited the earth to somehow twisting Edith’s simple request to please throw the diapers into something other than the kitchen trash into a scorching attack on her own shortcomings as a mother and wife. She blamed Tom for this; he had been a spectacular role model at making Edith look like the unreasonable one.

  Edith was worn out - from the divorce to the fighting at home and the endless crying of her tiny granddaughter. She was tired of arguing with Tommy over his grades and trying to convince him that studying was more important than girls and guitar solos. Perhaps a break from it all was just what she needed, even if it meant heading for some backwater hell. Just a few days for Edith to breathe and be able to forget that her life was a mess despite her best efforts.

  She reached out and took the documents from Scott, sighing again, “Fine. Fine.”

  She ignored his rushed departure from her office, staring at the travel schedule. At least, she didn’t have to worry about Joey. At twelve years of age, next to her, he was the most mature person living in the house. His grade card had arrived two days ago, straight A’s and a note from one of his teachers extolling his virtues. She held onto that thought, one small warm light in the dark mess that was her life.

  Beginnings

  “Are we an exceptionally unlikely accident or is the universe brimming over with intelligence? (It’s) a vital question for understanding ourselves and our history.” - Carl Sagan