Renegades, page 1
Contents
Foreword
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
Afterword
Published by Dinesta Central Publishing, LLC Slingerlands, NY
First Printing November, 2022
10 8 6 4 2 1 3 5 7 9
Copyright © 2022 David Salisbury All rights reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13 978-1-957222-04-2
Printed in the United States of America
Cover Art: Emily Salisbury
To D’Anna, my wife, who stopped me from mowing our lawn to tell me how much she hated the original ending of the manuscript. She helped me open a door that I had slammed shut and locked in my haste, and it will serve the greater series that she did.
Foreword
Renegades, book two of The Orris Project, is our first proper introduction to the actual machine world, or starship, depending on the preference of the observer, called Orris.
We caught a glimpse of the massive machine in the half-dreams of Envoy Garrett Rhodes in the first chapter of Origin & Earth, the opening book in the series.
In the first volume, we discovered Garrett walking the barren surface of the hot, dry, and recently hardened surface of the young Earth, about three and a half billion years before our current era. He went under the influence of Sterilex, a powerful drug that both kills and preserves, allowing for the eventual reanimation of the imbiber.
He awoke four hundred million years later to a planet Earth awash in water, but with no observable life to speak of. After walking for two months, our Envoy finally reaches the coast of an early ocean, and “doses” it with cyanobacteria, a very specific lifeform that both captures the energy from the sun and excretes oxygen. After the dosing schedule is complete, he explores a cavern, only to get trapped. He puts himself under the influence of Sterilex once again, this time for three billion years.
When he comes back to us, he finds himself buried alive in the loose soil of a forest in northern Italy in the year 550 A.D. He survives the challenging ascent and spends time with a family on their farm. He goes under again for about thirteen hundred years and travels to Rome before backtracking through Italy and eventually France with the help of a young deacon named Pietro. They settle in Paris, where Garrett makes some money and learns both French and English before separating from the young holy man and taking an early steam-powered ocean liner across the Atlantic Ocean to America. He walks for days and goes under again, this time for only one hundred and fifty years, in the Appalachian Mountains of New Jersey.
Garrett wakes up in or near our current time and learns about the achievements of mankind while he slept. He meets a young NASA employee who is looking for a roommate and ultimately moves in with him.
For the balance of Garrett’s time on Earth, he convinces first NASA, then the U.S. government, then the world of his true identity and the reality of the Orris Project. The developed countries of Earth sign their nations onto the effort, and they begin construction of the Lance, the intergalactic ferry that will transport roughly five hundred people from Earth to Orris.
The “origin” part of Origin & Earth is also covered. Garrett’s home planet, Osa, was in one of the original solar systems making up the Andromeda galaxy. The Osan people were the ones to discover that the universe would eventually collapse. While they observed the interior of the universe expanding and even accelerating, the eflix ring, the enormous and massive band of dark matter at the farthest reaches of the universe, was slowing down. They started the Orris Project as an answer to the threat. Garrett was selected at twenty-two years old as the first of twenty-seven eventual envoys. Each would be tasked with visiting five planets to send a sampling of their intelligent populations to Orris, both to enrich and bolster the population as well as preserve some of the other peoples of the local universe.
Before he leaves Osa to begin his grand adventure, Garrett meets and eventually marries Dr. Lauren Astor, one of his instructors in envoy training. Lauren and Garrett spend less than a year together, and after Garrett leaves Osa, Lauren gives birth to their baby girl, Hope.
The first book ends after Garrett ties up all the loose ends on Earth and discovers that the video messages from his family stopped working at a point about two decades after he left. The problem was not on Earth. The files were coming corrupted from Orris.
In the last scene, our Envoy loads himself into T5, the misnamed transport built for him on Earth. The story ends with the open bottle of Sterilex falling into his lap and soaking through his jeans. Before falling under its effects, he recognizes that instead of the eighty years he had planned upon, he will accidentally have put himself under for billions.
Chapter 1
Intercept
1
When Jemma first sat down at the operator panel, she knew it would not be more than a minute before getting back up to make herself a cup of coffee. Her sleep had been wracked with dreams and terrible, and she was exhausted. She quickly logged into the operator application, a step that had to be done within three minutes of her predecessor logging out to avoid a loud and embarrassing alarm. Her terminal was one of thirty spread out equally along the outside edge of the round room, with the supervisor’s desk situated in the middle. The welcome notification illuminated on her screen, officially declaring her login successful, and she was free to get up from the heavily padded chair she spent her shift in.
She stood to fetch her breakfast drink when the welcome screen dissolved into, not the home screen, but an alert. Jemma sat back down hard in the chair, forgetting about the chemical boost she needed as adrenaline temporarily satisfied it. Alerts were not common. The last alert message had been three years before, and it was only to notify them of a depleted fission bank on one of the links toward the back of Orris.
Jemma was twenty-seven years old and had made history just six years before as the youngest Command Operator to occupy the position. She was extremely proud and excited at the time, but at her current age, the job had devolved into a state of routine, and she had developed a general disregard for any prestige that came with the position. It had certainly not improved her love life. She was still single and was even gaining weight as her boredom translated into snacking.
The alert message on the screen made her forget about all this drudgery. She opened the alert and read the contents, which alternated between Osa K-3 and another language that she could not understand. “Transport five, Class 7, destination reached. Operator deceased or incapacitated. Trailing target, awaiting intercept. Systems stable. Nuclear Cell 17 over-temp state, non-critical.” The message repeated in a language that she assumed was the base language for the planet of origin. It was an envoy. Excitement stirred up in her chest and she stood up.
“Phillip! Come to my terminal, now!” Under normal circumstances, she would have referred to Phillip Rolli as “Sir,” as he was the Operations Supervisor on duty, but it was an extraordinary event and she forgot herself. Jemma and Phillip had been working together for four years, and her indiscretion did not seem to register with him. He walked over to her terminal.
“What’s up Jem?” he asked. She sat and pointed at her screen before activating the audio, which reverberated throughout Orris Command.
“…STINATION REACHED. OPERATOR DECEASED OR INCAPACITATED. TRAILING TARGET, AWAITING…” She clicked the audio off again, as it was painfully loud.
“Alert,” she said, and smiled. Phillip leaned over her so he could read the text displayed on her screen. She breathed his scent in deeply and smiled, relishing his proximity. She had developed a crush on the man, ten years her senior, during the time they had worked together.
“An envoy,” Phillip said. He smiled at Jemma and hugged her shoulders with one arm. She melted into his half-hearted embrace. “This is big. Get on the box with Rear Command. They’ll need to set up the intercept.”
He released her shoulders and went back to his desk to rouse his superior, Commander Bellinger. Jemma could still smell him on her sweater and her mind was a turmoil of affection, excitement, lust, and duty. She shook herself out of this irresponsible state and welcomed the professional nature she had grown accustomed to. After taking a deep breath, she picked up the two-way communicator and waited for the two flashing red indicator lights to turn a steady green. She then pressed the transmit button for two seconds and released it, waiting for a response.
Orris was not just a large intergalactic craft; it was enormous. Traditional communication using either electrical or radio messages between the front of the ship, where Orris Command was situated, and Rear Command, at the back, would take twenty-eight minutes. Although the crew of Orris Command still called their tangle-box new technology, the reality was that it had been over four hundred years since its original development. It was this device that allowed them to communicate over the vast distance instantaneously, albeit in audio format only. Data could not be transmitted this way, as there were thousands of errors per second in each transmission.
“Rear,” a voice said among pronounced static.
“Rear Command, this is operator Jemma Fredrick of Orris Command. We have an alert that a class 7 transport is trailing Orris. Please intercept. Potential envoy on board.” Jemma could hear her voice wavering with every word. Dread overtook her at the possibility that the voice might tell her she was wrong, that there was nothing trailing Orris and her alert was an anomaly, even though she knew it was impossible.
“Copy, Command. I have isolated the craft. We’ll go get her.”
The communication popped out, but Jemma knew she needed more information. “Rear Command, identify, please,” she asked.
“Sorry, Jemma. It’s Chuck Simms, Ops Supervisor, Rear Command.”
As Chuck finished his sentence, Jemma could feel Phillip standing next to her again.
“Tell him Bellinger is on his way to Rear.” Phillip said.
“Thank you, Chuck. My supervisor has just informed me that Commander Bellinger is traveling to Rear Command,” she said in her most professional sounding voice.
“Copy,” Chuck said, not enthusiastically.
2
Chuck Simms dropped the communicator back on the tangle-box and yelled out to Bixly.
“Todd!” he shouted, then stood up. A small man with neatly cut black hair, just under five feet four inches tall and a shadow in Chuck’s six-foot frame, stepped through the doorway of the closet-sized office.
“Yes, sir?” Todd Bixly pushed his glasses up on his nose and looked apathetically at his boss. Chuck walked past him onto the floor of Rear Command, which was pitiful in size and staffing compared to Orris Command at the front of the great ship. Orris Command had a staff of over a hundred and focused only on the operation of the greater machine world, where Rear Command was staffed with ten and acted as a loading and receiving dock with a handful of minor operational responsibilities.
“Get this place cleaned up. Bellinger is on his way. Do a good job, Todd. Do not go home without my permission. I want this dumpster looking spotless before he gets here. Do you understand me?” Chuck spoke in a calmer voice than he usually used with his lowest ranking staff member.
“Yes, sir,” Todd said, and shook his head as he turned to walk away.
“Todd, I’m serious. You’ve pulled this crap before. You leave without telling me, and the job I told you to do isn’t done. If you do that this time, I’m not going to fire you. I’m going to put you in that trash chute and send you down into the incinerator.” Chuck was at his wit’s end with his subordinate and thought serious threats may be the only way to get through to him. Todd’s look of general disregard melted away and, instead of answering, he began nodding rapidly, the color having drained from his face.
Chuck walked back to his office and sat at his desk. He pulled up the staffing directory on his terminal and selected Jerrick Yunis from the list. The image of Jerrick’s staff photo filled his screen, pulsing brighter and dimmer pending his answer to the call. The image froze, and the audio clicked on. Jerrick had opted for audio only.
“I’m sleeping, Chuck. What is it?” Jerrick asked. Under normal circumstances, he would already have been working, but his day-shift equivalent was on vacation, so he was working long split-shifts with the third operator, and the latest part of the overnight went unmanned.
“You’re done sleeping. Get back to Rear right now. I got a transport for you to pull.”
His order was met with silence at first, but then Jerrick finally replied. “Who the hell scheduled a transport to come in? They can sit out there and wait as far as I’m concerned. My shift doesn’t start…”
“Now, Jerrick! Now!” Chuck cut off the rigging operator on the other end of the call. “Bellinger is on his way. This was not a scheduled transport. They think it’s an envoy.”
Another moment passed as Jerrick stitched together this information. “Oh. Oh! Okay. I’ll be there in ten minutes,” Jerrick said, and the image of his face dissolved from Chuck’s screen as he ended the call.
Chuck looked at his watch. His communication with Jemma had ended twelve minutes before this call to Jerrick. Rear Command was nothing more than a massive loading dock, really just a wide expanse of open floor, with twenty-two doors that could receive craft approaching from outside, in open space. It was located on the three-hundred-and-twelfth cylinder of link 180; the last cylinder on the last link. The distance between Orris Command at the very front and Rear Command was over three hundred million miles, but Bellinger had his own transport with a flex drive and could be at his location in a matter of seconds. Chuck closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. He had only met Bellinger once before, but it was a spectacular disaster. Rear had not been ready for a visit from the Commander that night, and this was reflected in his assessment. Command put Chuck on probation, a state to which he was still assigned, now six months later. He needed his subordinates to perform well. He needed Jerrick to get to Rear before Bellinger, and he needed Todd Bixly, the useless bag of bones on the floor, to do a better job than he had ever done before of cleaning and organizing the space. Chuck had faith in Jerrick, but not Todd. He decided he could not let his future rest in the hands of a fool. He stood and walked to the dock floor to prepare Rear Command to receive the Commander himself.
3
Len Bellinger was struggling with a mix of excitement and discontent as he wrestled to dress in his formal uniform. Excitement because only one in twenty or fifty or five hundred Commanders would ever have the opportunity to receive an envoy, which the craft trailing Orris at that moment must have contained, and discontent because he felt his position in the role of Commander was diluted. He had assumed the post three years prior, only days after the Orris General Senate voted to create a five-person board to oversee all executive activity. From the day the Commander pin was pressed through his lapel, he had prying eyes scrutinizing his every action and decision. Eyes with power.
Len smiled as he thought about the current situation. It was a little different from his daily stresses. Orris did not rotate and orbit around the light of a star, so its days and nights were arbitrarily scheduled on a twenty-eight-hour basis, mimicking the days on Osa, billions of years ago. When the transport first alerted Orris Command, it was in the deepest hours of ‘night’ on Orris. The board was asleep. Len could execute the entire operation without any of them knowing a thing until it was all over, and he planned to see that this was exactly what happened.
Once his uniform was buttoned and zipped into place, he exited his dressing room and walked down the single flight of stairs and then to the parlor, where his wife was sitting, waiting for him. She had coffee prepared for the two of them and spoke as he entered the room. “Do you really think it’s an envoy?” Messia asked. Len smiled at his wife and leaned in to kiss her before sitting down.
“I do. The communication that came in was scripted by the Lance team ages ago, and the format fit exactly,” he said, and picked up his coffee.
“Is he alive? Or she? Do we know who it is?” Messia asked. Although she was in her sixties like Len, the excitement on her face disguised her age.
