Post by srbrant on Jul 2, 2017 5:23:01 GMT
Greetings!
I've been writing a series of short story teasers for my novel, Kemono. A taste of the vast universe I've developed and crammed into the epic. I have high hopes for it and I hope you enjoy the first part of Straylander: the story of a captain seeking more of his kind after leaving what he sees as a moribund empire. It's still a work in progress and I do take critique well. But please enjoy and tell me all 'bout what you think of it. I'm an absolute sucker for feedback.
Captain Stanislaw Gollirow
UEVS Night Flight
Day 731 - 11.24.5523CE - 1043H
High orbit of Bergsen
Another uneventful day of travel, though on the upside we will be able to reach Lagrange Point Adam within less than eight hours based on our ongoing trajectory. We have spent what felt like an eternity and a half wandering through this system looking for more Straylanders. We have not seen another one of our kind in over three months. Earlier this morning I broke my promise not to check our position relative to the Kemono Union. I was shocked. We are currently two-hundred-and-six-point-two lightyears away from the KU’s Core Worlds and tonight that number will increase to two-hundred-and-twenty-one-point-eight. I never had much of an attachment to any particular planet owing to my nomadic upbringing, but out here in Deep Sargasso it feels like I am lost at sea. Nothing to greet us here but alien stars, ruined civilizations and unloved worlds. Without any fresh and familiar communications to keep us company it feels like we are on a fool’s quest as the Union crumbles behind us.
But I still have hope. Hope that we can still find more of our kind out here.
Stanislaw let out a heavy sigh before hitting the S key, saving yet another entry onto the ship’s manifest. The screen on his Codex turned black with the push of the sleep button, reflecting his furry face like an ebony mirror. For a few seconds he stared at his bestial yet sapient countenance as he did nearly every morning for the past year or two. The repetition felt like a canker growing on his psyche, the captain fearing that the status quo would cause it to fester.
The Kemono were a particularly unique strain of Transhuman — Humans whose ancestors shaped themselves into anthropomorphic animals. He like the rest of his kind was a being sculpted into a specimen that was a perfect mix of both man and beast: ten fingers, a bushy tail and a face shaped to express Human intellect and emotion without dipping anywhere close to the uncanny valley.
Stanislaw himself was a Kemono of the Skunk variety, physique like a Greek statue and fur the color of wood charcoal with cream highlights. Lacking the Chinese crimson and polished silver of those who worked for the Kemono Union, the captain’s dress armor bore the flamboyant colors and iconography of Rogue Trojan, one of the countless orbital city-states that speckled the Union’s interior. Upon his thin armor were aposematic oranges and yellows arranged in a camouflage pattern, pauldrons crowned with an ornate emblem resembling three shuttle thrusters arranged in a trefoil pattern. The ship itself bore the same shapes and colors upon its hull, as if to say that the captain was merely its avatar — the prophet of a god wrought from adamantium, aluminum and boron carbide.
A cautious sip from a hot mug of peppermint-ginger tea interrupted his brief moment of silence. Shifting in the captain’s chair, he took time to observe the state of his crew. Most of them Kemono, the rest Human; all of satisfactory morale. From where he sat, Stanislaw felt like the ruler of a nomadic empire, his ship a mobile castle. A fantasy made tangible by the layout of the bridge, consisting of a horseshoe-shaped trench bending itself around the captain’s chair in the center, fitted with consoles and the crewmen that worked them like factory laborers. A massive Flight Director Attitude Indicator adorned with several lights sat above the main viewscreen like a comedy mask over a stage, overlooking the crew with the vigilance of an unblinking glass eye. The curved slopes of the overhead were lavishly decorated with depictions of rural life on Kemona, a reminder of the simple life on the Union’s capital world painted and laminated on plasteel panels.
Like nearly all Kemono Union ships, much of the walls were a patchwork of panels intersecting each other in seemingly random angular shapes, blinking lights peering out of gaps in the panelling like watching eyes. Upon these walls between the display screens and service ducts were momentos: framed photographs, heraldic shields and banners both military and civilian. These additions made the bridge feel less like a control room and more like a throne room.
“Captain,” said a Fox, swiveling her seat away from the astrogation console. “A colony has been spotted within the Lagrange point’s gravitational influence. Should we alter course to rendezvous and replenish before we jump?”
Stanislaw took another sip of his tea before snugly fitting it into the chair’s cupholder. “Fullscreen.”
The Kestrel communications officer pressed a few keys and displayed a bio of the colony’s characteristics on the main screen, including name, facilities, heraldry, population and tonnage.
The Skunk narrowed his eyes at the screen, muttering the information to himself. “‘Undertow, independent faction, Population: fifteen-thousand, dominant races Human and Eltarl, dominant language German, accepts universal credits, refueling station provides over one-hundred-thousand tons of both decane and hydrogen-deuteride reaction mass each…’”
“Alright,” said Stanislaw in his authoritative voice, “shift attitude ten degrees antigrade and burn at full for three seconds. Reduce speed to seven meters per second once Lagrange point has been reached.”
“Aye, sir,” the vixen replied, pushing and pulling several levers.
Bright geysers of hydrazine erupted across the ship’s ichthyic form, pitching it forwards before a plume of chemical fire burst from the four ball-mounted engines. The Night Flight was a behemoth of a ship, tipping the scales at over one-hundred-thousand tons in mass. Like nearly all starships in known space, the unique demands imposed by the final frontier forced them into marine and avian forms, low-profile bodies stretching them outwards with heat radiators that mimicked wings and fins.
Like all other Kemono Union ships, the sharp edges of its hull and hooked prow below made it resemble a prehistoric fish with a low polygon count. Its midsection was bloated with ten-thousand tons of liquid decane: a paltry sum for a ship of its scale were it not for incredible advances in fuel efficiency. Within its hardened belly were the components that were not so much modules as they were organs of a great beast with systems mimicking the regenerative and protective affinities known to evolution, be they ferrofoam hull-sealants or crawling anti-boarder drones.
Within its polished halls did life proceed as normal for the next eight hours. Routine maintenance gave percussion to empty halls and taverns were alive with chatter and laughter. Crew quarters, built like capsule hotels, housed the asleep and off-duty - a quiet occasionally marred by coitus or the odd toilet flush. No true sense of time but a quiet yearning. A pregnant longing for a home. This was a colony ship, destined to stake its claim on an ideal world and then orbit the planet as a silent sentinel. The Night Flight was to be, as was hoped, to be the Mayflower of a new nation, far and away from the chaos that became of the Kemono Union.
A fresh slate. Tabula Rasa. This thought and a thousand of its permutations paced through Captain Gollirow’s head as he paced through the habitat deck like a nervous man, striped tail flickering with every battle of thought.
“With respect, captain,” a Human engineer spoke as she sat in a seat at the lounge. “But your pacing is really starting to make me nervous. Or us nervous if I could speak for the crew.”
Stanislaw stopped and looked at the Human: black in hair and dark tan in skin, harness strapped with satchels and pockets with an acetylene torch holstered like a gun - a telltale sign she just got off her shift. “I’m sorry?” he asked.
“You’ve been wandering aimlessly around nearly every deck for the past twelve days whenever you get the chance. What the hell is going on in that brain of yours?” she added, tapping a finger on her temple.
“Sorry, I’m just…very introspective,” the Skunk said, scratching his head. “Just been thinking about, err, our mission as of late. Been giving it some thought.”
The engineer rested her chin on her left palm, the booth table her support. “What kind of thoughts?”
Stanislaw sat down in the booth, narrowly missing the waiter carrying a plate of reheated food. “Well,” he elaborated. “Thoughts of our mission.”
“Uh-huh, you said that,” she said, nodding. “But really, what’s on the captain’s mind here?”
“What’s been on my mind? Ehh, I’ve just been contemplating our flight from the Kemono Union,” the Skunk began absent-mindedly fiddling with a napkin. “Why we did it and if it was really worth it.”
“Not to put a stop in this, but shouldn’t you be telling the First Officer about this?”
“At this point, I’m willing to tell anyone this,” he added, rubbing the now tattered napkin between his index and middle fingers. “I’ve even put it on my PopTalk account in case there’s anyone out here with the right social media channels to see it.”
“Spacecafard starting to get to you?”
“No, or at least not yet. It’s not so much a matter of being on a ship for two-to-three years, but one of political philosophy. What do you think of the Kemono Union?”
The Human shrugged. “Okay, I suppose?”
“Then why did we leave it?” Stan replied, brushing the remaining napkin fragments off the table. “Why did we leave an empire with so many trade routes and resources for the wilderness of Deep Sargasso?”
“That I can answer. A failing government, hungry pirates and every faction worth its weight in Universal Credits trying to take advantage of its weakness.”
“A dying dream if you ask me.” Stanislaw closed his eyes and gave a ragged sigh. “The Kemono race - my race - believed that, because we’re part animal and part Human, we were the perfect successor to the Human race. And what did that lead us to? Everyone losing themselves in wild orgies and a culture of pleasure-seeking to take their mind off the fact that we’ve pissed off every single faction in Sargasso with our endless saber-rattling and now the so-called ‘heart of culture’ is bleeding and ripe for the slaughter. Like, well…an animal. An animal which I look like.” The Captain sighed, cabin fever starting to press like a hydraulic pump against his mind.
“Calm down,” the Engineer said. “Take it from the top: what’s going on in that head of yours?”
Stan sighed, ear twitching. "It's just…we've passed this invisible line, right? That line where we can't turn back because we've gone too far to turn back…to turn back to a place that might be in ruins by the time we return. And if we keep going forward, we risk either destruction or starvation."
The Human felt a cold chill at his last word. "Are…are the algae farms working? We're running low on spare--"
The Skunk held up his hands. "Calm. Down. The farms are working at peak efficiency and should be for at least a year. But we've gone through most of our luxury foods and I don't think the colonists are much in the mood for more sirloin-flavored ration bars."
"That's a relief. But with all things considered, I think you're overstressing yourself," the Engineer added, putting a hand on the Captain's shoulder that was quickly nudged away. "You're so focused on finding other Kemono settlers out here that you're forgetting about the possibilties!"
Stanislaw raised a white eyebrow. "Possibilities?"
"You've forgotten what it means to be an explorer," she exclaimed, adding a slight lilt to her voice to boost her leader's spirit. "To find new worlds, to seek out new life and civilizations and to go where nobody's been - like what that one bald guy from that one show says!"
"Good thing we have that DataVault copy onboard," he muttered, running gloved fingers through his mane of bone-white hair. "But the issue still remains if any of this was and still is worth the effort--"
++ATTENTION ALL HANDS++ The autotuned voice of the Night Flight's computer boomed. ++PREPARING TO DOCK AT UNDERTOW - HARNESS EIGHT IS CLEAR++
The Captain and Engineer pushed themselves upright and out of the booth. "Looks like it's time for a bourbon," Stanislaw quipped as he strode out of the room. He shook his head, as if anxiety were sweat to be shed.
The Engineer gave him a slight smirk, following close behind. "There's plenty to drink onboard."
"It always tastes better when the air hasn't recycled your smell over a thousand times over," he snarked.
TO BE CONTINUED...
I've been writing a series of short story teasers for my novel, Kemono. A taste of the vast universe I've developed and crammed into the epic. I have high hopes for it and I hope you enjoy the first part of Straylander: the story of a captain seeking more of his kind after leaving what he sees as a moribund empire. It's still a work in progress and I do take critique well. But please enjoy and tell me all 'bout what you think of it. I'm an absolute sucker for feedback.
STRAYLANDER
—————
"A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space."
-- Thomas Carlyle, DataVault 6643
—————
"A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space."
-- Thomas Carlyle, DataVault 6643
Captain Stanislaw Gollirow
UEVS Night Flight
Day 731 - 11.24.5523CE - 1043H
High orbit of Bergsen
Another uneventful day of travel, though on the upside we will be able to reach Lagrange Point Adam within less than eight hours based on our ongoing trajectory. We have spent what felt like an eternity and a half wandering through this system looking for more Straylanders. We have not seen another one of our kind in over three months. Earlier this morning I broke my promise not to check our position relative to the Kemono Union. I was shocked. We are currently two-hundred-and-six-point-two lightyears away from the KU’s Core Worlds and tonight that number will increase to two-hundred-and-twenty-one-point-eight. I never had much of an attachment to any particular planet owing to my nomadic upbringing, but out here in Deep Sargasso it feels like I am lost at sea. Nothing to greet us here but alien stars, ruined civilizations and unloved worlds. Without any fresh and familiar communications to keep us company it feels like we are on a fool’s quest as the Union crumbles behind us.
But I still have hope. Hope that we can still find more of our kind out here.
Stanislaw let out a heavy sigh before hitting the S key, saving yet another entry onto the ship’s manifest. The screen on his Codex turned black with the push of the sleep button, reflecting his furry face like an ebony mirror. For a few seconds he stared at his bestial yet sapient countenance as he did nearly every morning for the past year or two. The repetition felt like a canker growing on his psyche, the captain fearing that the status quo would cause it to fester.
The Kemono were a particularly unique strain of Transhuman — Humans whose ancestors shaped themselves into anthropomorphic animals. He like the rest of his kind was a being sculpted into a specimen that was a perfect mix of both man and beast: ten fingers, a bushy tail and a face shaped to express Human intellect and emotion without dipping anywhere close to the uncanny valley.
Stanislaw himself was a Kemono of the Skunk variety, physique like a Greek statue and fur the color of wood charcoal with cream highlights. Lacking the Chinese crimson and polished silver of those who worked for the Kemono Union, the captain’s dress armor bore the flamboyant colors and iconography of Rogue Trojan, one of the countless orbital city-states that speckled the Union’s interior. Upon his thin armor were aposematic oranges and yellows arranged in a camouflage pattern, pauldrons crowned with an ornate emblem resembling three shuttle thrusters arranged in a trefoil pattern. The ship itself bore the same shapes and colors upon its hull, as if to say that the captain was merely its avatar — the prophet of a god wrought from adamantium, aluminum and boron carbide.
A cautious sip from a hot mug of peppermint-ginger tea interrupted his brief moment of silence. Shifting in the captain’s chair, he took time to observe the state of his crew. Most of them Kemono, the rest Human; all of satisfactory morale. From where he sat, Stanislaw felt like the ruler of a nomadic empire, his ship a mobile castle. A fantasy made tangible by the layout of the bridge, consisting of a horseshoe-shaped trench bending itself around the captain’s chair in the center, fitted with consoles and the crewmen that worked them like factory laborers. A massive Flight Director Attitude Indicator adorned with several lights sat above the main viewscreen like a comedy mask over a stage, overlooking the crew with the vigilance of an unblinking glass eye. The curved slopes of the overhead were lavishly decorated with depictions of rural life on Kemona, a reminder of the simple life on the Union’s capital world painted and laminated on plasteel panels.
Like nearly all Kemono Union ships, much of the walls were a patchwork of panels intersecting each other in seemingly random angular shapes, blinking lights peering out of gaps in the panelling like watching eyes. Upon these walls between the display screens and service ducts were momentos: framed photographs, heraldic shields and banners both military and civilian. These additions made the bridge feel less like a control room and more like a throne room.
“Captain,” said a Fox, swiveling her seat away from the astrogation console. “A colony has been spotted within the Lagrange point’s gravitational influence. Should we alter course to rendezvous and replenish before we jump?”
Stanislaw took another sip of his tea before snugly fitting it into the chair’s cupholder. “Fullscreen.”
The Kestrel communications officer pressed a few keys and displayed a bio of the colony’s characteristics on the main screen, including name, facilities, heraldry, population and tonnage.
The Skunk narrowed his eyes at the screen, muttering the information to himself. “‘Undertow, independent faction, Population: fifteen-thousand, dominant races Human and Eltarl, dominant language German, accepts universal credits, refueling station provides over one-hundred-thousand tons of both decane and hydrogen-deuteride reaction mass each…’”
“Alright,” said Stanislaw in his authoritative voice, “shift attitude ten degrees antigrade and burn at full for three seconds. Reduce speed to seven meters per second once Lagrange point has been reached.”
“Aye, sir,” the vixen replied, pushing and pulling several levers.
Bright geysers of hydrazine erupted across the ship’s ichthyic form, pitching it forwards before a plume of chemical fire burst from the four ball-mounted engines. The Night Flight was a behemoth of a ship, tipping the scales at over one-hundred-thousand tons in mass. Like nearly all starships in known space, the unique demands imposed by the final frontier forced them into marine and avian forms, low-profile bodies stretching them outwards with heat radiators that mimicked wings and fins.
Like all other Kemono Union ships, the sharp edges of its hull and hooked prow below made it resemble a prehistoric fish with a low polygon count. Its midsection was bloated with ten-thousand tons of liquid decane: a paltry sum for a ship of its scale were it not for incredible advances in fuel efficiency. Within its hardened belly were the components that were not so much modules as they were organs of a great beast with systems mimicking the regenerative and protective affinities known to evolution, be they ferrofoam hull-sealants or crawling anti-boarder drones.
Within its polished halls did life proceed as normal for the next eight hours. Routine maintenance gave percussion to empty halls and taverns were alive with chatter and laughter. Crew quarters, built like capsule hotels, housed the asleep and off-duty - a quiet occasionally marred by coitus or the odd toilet flush. No true sense of time but a quiet yearning. A pregnant longing for a home. This was a colony ship, destined to stake its claim on an ideal world and then orbit the planet as a silent sentinel. The Night Flight was to be, as was hoped, to be the Mayflower of a new nation, far and away from the chaos that became of the Kemono Union.
A fresh slate. Tabula Rasa. This thought and a thousand of its permutations paced through Captain Gollirow’s head as he paced through the habitat deck like a nervous man, striped tail flickering with every battle of thought.
“With respect, captain,” a Human engineer spoke as she sat in a seat at the lounge. “But your pacing is really starting to make me nervous. Or us nervous if I could speak for the crew.”
Stanislaw stopped and looked at the Human: black in hair and dark tan in skin, harness strapped with satchels and pockets with an acetylene torch holstered like a gun - a telltale sign she just got off her shift. “I’m sorry?” he asked.
“You’ve been wandering aimlessly around nearly every deck for the past twelve days whenever you get the chance. What the hell is going on in that brain of yours?” she added, tapping a finger on her temple.
“Sorry, I’m just…very introspective,” the Skunk said, scratching his head. “Just been thinking about, err, our mission as of late. Been giving it some thought.”
The engineer rested her chin on her left palm, the booth table her support. “What kind of thoughts?”
Stanislaw sat down in the booth, narrowly missing the waiter carrying a plate of reheated food. “Well,” he elaborated. “Thoughts of our mission.”
“Uh-huh, you said that,” she said, nodding. “But really, what’s on the captain’s mind here?”
“What’s been on my mind? Ehh, I’ve just been contemplating our flight from the Kemono Union,” the Skunk began absent-mindedly fiddling with a napkin. “Why we did it and if it was really worth it.”
“Not to put a stop in this, but shouldn’t you be telling the First Officer about this?”
“At this point, I’m willing to tell anyone this,” he added, rubbing the now tattered napkin between his index and middle fingers. “I’ve even put it on my PopTalk account in case there’s anyone out here with the right social media channels to see it.”
“Spacecafard starting to get to you?”
“No, or at least not yet. It’s not so much a matter of being on a ship for two-to-three years, but one of political philosophy. What do you think of the Kemono Union?”
The Human shrugged. “Okay, I suppose?”
“Then why did we leave it?” Stan replied, brushing the remaining napkin fragments off the table. “Why did we leave an empire with so many trade routes and resources for the wilderness of Deep Sargasso?”
“That I can answer. A failing government, hungry pirates and every faction worth its weight in Universal Credits trying to take advantage of its weakness.”
“A dying dream if you ask me.” Stanislaw closed his eyes and gave a ragged sigh. “The Kemono race - my race - believed that, because we’re part animal and part Human, we were the perfect successor to the Human race. And what did that lead us to? Everyone losing themselves in wild orgies and a culture of pleasure-seeking to take their mind off the fact that we’ve pissed off every single faction in Sargasso with our endless saber-rattling and now the so-called ‘heart of culture’ is bleeding and ripe for the slaughter. Like, well…an animal. An animal which I look like.” The Captain sighed, cabin fever starting to press like a hydraulic pump against his mind.
“Calm down,” the Engineer said. “Take it from the top: what’s going on in that head of yours?”
Stan sighed, ear twitching. "It's just…we've passed this invisible line, right? That line where we can't turn back because we've gone too far to turn back…to turn back to a place that might be in ruins by the time we return. And if we keep going forward, we risk either destruction or starvation."
The Human felt a cold chill at his last word. "Are…are the algae farms working? We're running low on spare--"
The Skunk held up his hands. "Calm. Down. The farms are working at peak efficiency and should be for at least a year. But we've gone through most of our luxury foods and I don't think the colonists are much in the mood for more sirloin-flavored ration bars."
"That's a relief. But with all things considered, I think you're overstressing yourself," the Engineer added, putting a hand on the Captain's shoulder that was quickly nudged away. "You're so focused on finding other Kemono settlers out here that you're forgetting about the possibilties!"
Stanislaw raised a white eyebrow. "Possibilities?"
"You've forgotten what it means to be an explorer," she exclaimed, adding a slight lilt to her voice to boost her leader's spirit. "To find new worlds, to seek out new life and civilizations and to go where nobody's been - like what that one bald guy from that one show says!"
"Good thing we have that DataVault copy onboard," he muttered, running gloved fingers through his mane of bone-white hair. "But the issue still remains if any of this was and still is worth the effort--"
++ATTENTION ALL HANDS++ The autotuned voice of the Night Flight's computer boomed. ++PREPARING TO DOCK AT UNDERTOW - HARNESS EIGHT IS CLEAR++
The Captain and Engineer pushed themselves upright and out of the booth. "Looks like it's time for a bourbon," Stanislaw quipped as he strode out of the room. He shook his head, as if anxiety were sweat to be shed.
The Engineer gave him a slight smirk, following close behind. "There's plenty to drink onboard."
"It always tastes better when the air hasn't recycled your smell over a thousand times over," he snarked.
TO BE CONTINUED...
