Stardogs, page 1
Table of Contents
Prologue
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
EPILOGUE: ENDS, ENDS AND BEGINNINGS
APPENDIX I
APPENDIX II
A sample of Dave Freer's other work, available from Amazon:
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
STARDOGS
DAVE FREER
About the author:
Dave Freer is the author or co-author of some 19 novels (hard to keep track) including SLOW TRAIN TO ARCTURUS, which was listed as a Wall Street Journal sf bestseller. Various other books have been on Locus bestseller lists. He is also the author of a large number of shorter works. For a complete list and work will be available nowhere else see the Dave Freer website. He lives on a remote island off the coast of Australia. For more about this and links to other sites see his Amazon Author’s page.
COPYRIGHT
“STARDOGS” © by Dave Freer 2014.
Cover Art: Flightpath of an Alien Spaceship over a Distant Planet © Angela Harburn
Electronic edition published by Dave Freer, June 2014.
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction, in whole or in part in any form. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Amazon Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to the memory of the Old English Sheepdogs who have been the loves of my life, and whose loyalty is the original inspiration for Stardogs.
Author notes:
The Future History, and notes on the Empire, Denaari Homeworld, and the major protagonist groups are contained in the appendices at the end of the book. My thanks go to many people who read, advised, proofread and offered support for this book. Any errors are mine, not theirs. My especial thanks as usual go to Barbara, and, of course, to the dog at my feet, the nose touching my forearm, the loving eyes looking at me through the fringe.
Prologue
BEGINNINGS AND BEGINNINGS
Everyone, everything, is from somewhere. To see into their future you must look back to their past. For the root, though hidden, is what gives rise to the plant.
Introduction to the third Veda of Kali-dewa and all the Saints.
Every story has many beginnings. Where does anything start? Well, you might say that this story began forty-three thousand years ago with a wild pack and a savage, brutal hunt. It was before the beginning of recorded human history. Before the rise and fall of two star-spanning empires. Before microscopic things destroyed not one but two sentient species. A time when the great packs used to roam freely across the empty spaces…
The feral pack hunted one of their own with a terrible, ferocious intensity. The old one, great, gaunt and silvered, struggled desperately to reach the distant rocks. Perhaps they would offer refuge, perhaps a place to stand against the younger males who wanted to pull him down and kill him. He gave his all to the flight.
Yet despite this, the pack were gaining. The faster young males ripped cruelly at his exposed flanks. He tried to turn, baring his huge, chipped and yellowing fangs. He was too slow. Even a few months back it would have been different. The younger ones with their sharp new teeth closed in. Briefly, all too briefly, he managed to hold them at bay.
They weren’t dogs. Nor even wolves. Not even remotely related. Yet, because of convergent evolution, very like them in some ways. They did not roam the empty plains of Earth, but the depths of deep space. Here, on Earth, evolution has filled every niche under the heavens. Inevitably, somewhere, around a distant star, she didn’t stop when she got to the heavens.
The Alien sample-ship got there at last. It was too late to save the old pack leader. Despite knowing this the Denaari nest-minder pilot aimed at the squabbling, tearing beasts, trying to drive them off.
The pack scattered. In space they could neither snarl nor yelp, so in this way they differed from wild-dogs. Instead they bared fangs and circled. It was dangerous place to be, for the huge walrus-like tusky teeth of the space-dogs were not only used for pack hierarchy duels and mating fights. They could also rip chunks off asteroids as mineral sources. One bite from one of creatures could shatter the fragile chitin-silicate-metal shell of the little craft. Besides, flying something with metals in it into this situation was like riding a steak into a crocodile tank. If just one of the dogs swooped in and wrapped itself around the unarmed craft, then its belly cilia would cold-weld onto it. In a few minutes it could electrochemically leach out of the tasty hull-metals. The silica-metallo-chitin bonds would part. The ship would be gone in puff of disintegrating dust and space-lost air.
However, the feral space-dogs were alarmed too by this sudden alien intrusion in their realm. They showed no real sign of fight, and when the ship darted at one that came too close, they instead jetted away. The pack gradually drifted off toward the clump of asteroids that the old one had been trying to reach.
They left the dead creature hanging like a shredded blanket in the void.
The Denaari could not cry. Instead the eight emotionally traumatised nest-minders on the sample-ship chewed their wing tips and moaned softly as they huddling together. Proximity to the ferocity and cruelty of the killing hurt.
The two egg-layers, less emotionally sensitive, had already donned protective gear and gone out to see whether they could recover some of the creature’s cells intact.
Later, in the together-hanging of roost, the ship matriarch reassured her still-distraught nest-minder mates. She promised that the creatures they would breed from the reservoir of cells now held in in vitro storage units down in the hold of the tiny ship, would be gentle. They would be creatures that the nest-minders would love. The smaller nest-minders gibbered doubtfully. She enfolded them in her wings.
They quieted, but she knew she must make good her promise. Should the nest-minders decide that she was callous, they would withhold their warmth from her gene-line. Still, the alien matriarch pondered, it was worth the risk. With the space-dog genetic material she could create something of immense value. The creatures were perfectly equipped for life in deep space. They had excellent bifocal visual imaging, with eyes that resembled oil-lens telescopes, but with better and more precise control. Their gravity-detecting organo-metallic nerve-net was complex and hypersensitive. They even had some small amount of wormhole surfing capacity. The genes could be teased, changed and manipulated. The result would allow her species to reach out their wingclaws to the stars.
Step forward forty-two thousand years.
The vast, gentle Stardogs, who could leap the impossible distances between stars with the ease that a Jacana does the seemingly improbable trot across floating lily pads, had given the Denaari the stars. But now… the adored Denaari were gone. The Stardogs were lonely.
Some still cruised the routes between the now empty star systems. Systems their masters had colonized and later fled from in their panic. Yet, they were forever forbidden to go back to the distant Solar system that had spawned them and which was the only place they could breed.
Sometimes one would even return to visit a boring G0 type star in the vicinity of Sirius. The masters had had a field station there.
Then, after thousands of years, there was a ship…
The planet the masters had visited here had never been a potential colony. It was too wet and too high G, to be worth it. But it had a sentient alien species on it. The Denaari had been observing this species. Homo sapiens had not been space-traveling at that time, but, as the nest-minders always said, it was better to withdraw warmth from the egg, than the new hatched chick. The Stardogs rarely visited this system. Without their beloved masters the Stardogs preferred hotter suns, with far more sweet ultraviolet to bathe their back-cilia in, or systems more cluttered with tasty Lanthanide-rich fragments. Still, it had been one of the last posts abandoned, so still they came, once every half century or so. Lonely. Miserable.
Then they would drift away again, star-surfing back to the once crowded inner Denaari worlds. Only this time… The Stardog who came, planning on drifting the asteroid belt for something tasty… saw a bright-metal asteroid. An asteroid under power. Joy stirred and leaped along with her hopes. Along the far edge of the Stardog, the chemical reactions for rarely used flatulent rocketry began. With the consummate precision achieved by having several billion nerve inputs feedback-looped through half a million nerve nodes, the ten kilometer diameter bearskin rug accelerated toward the Mars-exploration vessel EU Gloria Mundi. Maybe if the Stardog had encountered the US Ronald Reagan instead, the future might have been very different. As it was the EU and their friends to delight in reducing the US and its allies to second-class powers. The US was subsumed into the world and then galaxy spanning Empire that this chance incident caused. Her people — or at least those that dreamed of freedom — moved or were transported out to the colony worlds like New Texas. Their dreams of liberty were suppressed, but not destroyed.
People and their pets tend to resemble each other. Usually in outlook, but often even physically. This is particularly true when the bond is close. Joan Cheng, the life support engineer of the EU sponsored Mars-explorer, had kept and adored a St. Bernard. A big, lugubrious-eyed, slightly overweight St. Bernard bitch called Matilda, who was terrified of thunder and quite a lot of other things. It said quite a lot about Joan. And right now she was lonely and miserable to the absolute core of her being. She had gone from the heights of happiness to the depths of despair. A week ago her cup had been overflowing. She, a deaf, too bright, Eurasian girl, had won a place on the long-delayed Mars exploration voyage. Yes… she had two PhD’s, but studying had meant escape from the misery of a home where cultures had clashed and used her as their pawn. She’d never thought she’d get accepted… Then, she’d been in love. She had been deliriously happy, the happiness transforming her normally stolid face. Captain Johannes ‘Hans’ DeMari Wienan. Handsome. Blond. Smooth talking. Captain of the vessel. He was a political appointee, true, but he was a rising man in the European Parliament. And he, in one of the few private spots on a crowded ship, had introduced her to sex. It had provided that physical contact she’d desperately needed for so long.
Looking back now, she was sure it hadn’t been love. Not from Hans, the idol of thousands of girls, Earthside. Just incidental lust. He’d popped into her hydroponics room on a routine inspection, or perhaps seeking the one place on the ship that you didn’t have to share with three others. They were forced close by the high-racked narrow corridor between the plant-racks. As she had tried to step past him, terribly aware of his presence, his hand had brushed across her breast. Or maybe she’d brushed her breast across his hand… Anyway, her eager response had been electric and unplanned. She’d been ashamed, embarrassed. He’d been aroused. And he’d known exactly what to do. It had been a heady couple of weeks. A secret couple of weeks… but not secret enough in that tight community. They all thought that because she was deaf they could say what they liked.
She could lip-read.
The heat had got to politically sensitive Hans too. He’d avoided her, suddenly and without explanation. At first she’d rationalized his behavior… still believed he loved her. A catty exchange with the girl from the reactor room changed that. It was a cruel, barbed interchange, between a jealous ex-conquest, and an emotionally insecure deaf girl. Joan didn’t know how loudly she was shouting. Half of the solar system must have heard her, never mind the fifty thousand cubic feet of the ship. The inevitable letter, on a ship whose living space you could cross in a sauntering two minutes, had come, appearing mysteriously on her tiny desk. Her tears had obscured the stupid, mundane, noncommittal words with which he’d buried their pyrotechnic physical relationship. “I hope we can still remain friends…” How do you say that to someone whose life you’ve just ruined?
Then, when it seemed that the blackness could get no deeper, in the routine two-hourly radio coms with earth had come the news that her Matilda was dead. Just that. You don’t waste off-planet radio coms with details of unimportant irrelevancies like ill pets.
She stared into the void in the bleakness that precedes suicide. Her eyes were cried dry now. Looking out at the too clear unblinking stars she tried to face the question: How do you kill yourself when your death will mean that 23 other people must die, slowly and cruelly, as the fragile life support system fails?
She couldn’t hear the alarm bell. She was so absorbed in her relentless peering into space that she didn’t see the panicky flashing of the warning lights. Condition red lights. All she saw was that the emptiness outside her tiny viewport was full of an eye, a huge beer-brown soft eye. Deeper than oceans. Full of care. And she could feel the love, the unquestioning love of a lost dog who has found its most important person.
People who don’t know dogs are often frightened by really big dogs. This merely displays their ignorance. When you’re breeding animals the size of a small cart horse you’d better selectively breed for gentleness. For real trouble, medium-sized dogs-German Shepherds, Dobermans — that sort of thing — are more dangerous, and for sheer-nasty mindedness the little snappers take the lead. A Pekinese is infinitely more likely to bite you than a St. Bernard is. Owners of crocodile-jawed bull-terriers can actually describe the monstrous beasts as ‘soppy old things, really’ with perfect accuracy. Toddlers can take sticky-fingered liberties with walk-underable Great Danes that would have a Toy Pom in snarling apoplexy. The toddler’s greatest danger is either being knocked over by accident, or being licked to death. Of course, you don’t threaten the big dog’s owner, or the owner’s territory, unless you’re tired of life. The only thing that could possibly be more dangerous is to hurt the dog. Then the besotted owner will probably kill you.
Those in the control room of the Gloria Mundi didn’t know much about big dogs. They were frightened. Frantic messages to Ground Control with a twenty minute delay weren’t going to help, and the Gloria Mundi carried no weapons.
Joan Cheng, however, knew a big soppy dog when she saw one. The panicking crew failed to notice an airlock being cycled, as they tried to move and assemble a geological-laser, which the Stardog would have found rather pleasant. The first the crew knew of it was when someone caught sight of the tiny white-suited figure actually climbing up between the Stardog’s eyes.
At first they thought it to be some suicidally brave hero. It was only when someone thought to switch into the suit radio frequency that they heard her say in flat, nasal, yet adoring tones “You beautiful, gorgeous girl. Oh, you beautiful, beautiful girl,” as she lovingly stroked the filaments. If the ship had been further off they would have been able to see the ten mile long creature ripple and squirm with pleasure. The control room began frantically signaling to her. She ignored the LED display frenetically flashing across the top of her suit’s vision plate.
Telepathy is little understood, and both the League and the Empire have long quashed any research into this area. Evidence of its occurrence existed long before humans encountered Stardogs, however. The evidence was fragmentary, the manifestations of the phenomenon diverse. The one common thread in all the scattered bits of information about the subject, is that it is inevitably tied to emotional states. Many dog owners will swear their pets are telepathic. Well, Stardogs are. They were bred that way.
Stardogs aren’t very intelligent, but their diffuse minds have billions of gigabytes of storage and processing ability. Human telepathic output was different from that of the Denaari nest minders, but not so different that the Stardog could not understand that it was getting the love it had missed so badly. Communication had begun. Image to image at first. The adored new master wanted to go to that red planet - it would oblige. Well, not that red planet, but a similar one. The Denaari star routes imprinted in her hadn’t included the nearby red planet, but there was one in the vicinity of Centaurus that was similar, at least in color.
The terrified crew of the Gloria Mundi found their ship enfolded in the outer mantle of the Stardog. Seated between the huge eyes, Joan Cheng rode the starswirl and became the first human to ever experience the mind jarring beauty and terror of wormhole surf. She wasn’t frightened out of her wits, for the simple reason that the Stardog wasn’t. Fortunately it was not too far, as distances in theta-space go. Her suit-tanks and suit insulation held out, although she was cold when they arrived. The red planet below them was indeed like Mars, in color, if not in potential for human habitability. This desert world had a humanly breathable atmosphere. It also had extensive ruins, of such size that they were even visible from space. The Stardog wriggled in pleasure at her amazement. It was much better than the other red planet, wasn’t it? The old masters had liked this world very much. They used to bring the Stardogs such delicious little mineral titbits up from the gravity well…would she? Pleeeze?
