The Farpool_Exodus Read online

  The Farpool: Exodus

  Published by Philip Bosshardt at Smashwords

  Copyright 2018 Philip Bosshardt

  Smashwords 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 purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  PROLOGUE

  SpaceGuard Center, Farside Observatory,

  Korolev Crater, The Moon

  May 17, 2115 (UT)

  Nightfall at Korolev Crater came abruptly, too abruptly, thought Percy Marks. He stared out the porthole of the SpaceGuard Center and watched the shadows drop like a black curtain across the face of the crater wall. Korolev was a massive place, fully four hundred kilometers in diameter, with stairstep rim walls and a small chain of mountains inside. Like a bull’s eye on a target, the crater lay dead center in the rugged highlands of Farside, forever banished from the sight of Earth.

  Percy Marks watched the black creep down the crater walls and ooze across the crater floor like a spreading stain. Somehow, it seemed depressing…another two weeks of night with only the stars for company. Cosmic grandeur, my ass, he muttered to himself. Give me a beach in the South Pacific and some native girls and I’ll tell you a thing or two about cosmic grandeur.

  Marks was pulling late shift today…tonight…whatever the hell it was. Tending the radars and telescopes of Farside Array, scanning sector after sector of the heavens for any little burp or fart worthy of an astronomer’s interest. The High Freq array had just gone through a major tune-up last week and it was Marks’ job to give her a complete shakedown for the next few days.

  At the moment, she was bore-sighted to some distant gamma-ray sources somewhere in Pegasus…where exactly he’d forgotten.

  Marks took one last look out the nearest porthole and begrudged the final wisps of daylight before Farside was fully enveloped in the nightfall. At that same moment, he heard a beeping from his console and turned his attention back to the array controls.

  What the hell…

  Percy Marks looked over his boards, controlling the positioning of the great radars out on the crater floor and the optical and radio telescopes that accompanied them. He quickly pinpointed the source of the beeping…Nodes 20 through 24…the south lateral array…was picking up some anomaly.

  He massaged the controls and tried to focus the array better, get better resolution on the target. SpaceGuard didn’t beep without reason.

  A quick perusal made the hairs on the back of Percy Marks’ neck stand up. The system displayed a list of likely targets, based on radar imaging and known ephemerides. He scanned the list, mumbling the details to himself.

  “ Hmmm….right ascension 22 degrees, 57 minutes, 28 seconds. Declination 20 degrees, 46 minutes, 8 seconds---“ Just as he was about to consult the catalog, SpaceGuard threw up a star map.

  It was something in Pegasus. Nearly six thousand light years away. A point source of energy had just spiked. Probably a gamma ray burster...maybe even a Type I supernova, if they were lucky.

  Marks studied the details. “This one’s a doozy--“ his fingers played over the keyboard, bringing all of Farside’s instruments to bear on the new source. The energy spike was showing up in all bands now: X-ray, gamma ray, infrared, even optical.

  He stared for a moment at the brief flare that erupted on the screen in front of him. Must be one hell of a source.

  Before he could decide what to do next, Marks was interrupted by the sound of a door opening…it was Max Lane, the shift supervisor.

  “I heard SpaceGuard got something--“Lane was short, big moustache, squat legs of a former weightlifter, now going soft in the Moon’s sixth-g.

  Marks showed him the readings. “I’ve got it designated Delta P. Big sucker, too. Ephemerides point to a star we’ve got catalogued as Sigma Albeth B. Blasting out on all bands. See for yourself.”

  Lane examined all Farside’s instruments. Whatever it was, Delta P was a big gamma producer. He twiddled with his moustache for a moment. “Maybe we got us a Type I. You know, Westerlund had that theory—singly ionized silicon, thermal runaway, Goldberg radiation, and all that--“

  Marks nodded. “I’ll pull up the spectra, see what kind of match we get.” The astronomer massaged the keyboard, calling up spectrographic profiles of previous supernova radiation sources.

  “Anything in this sector before?”

  “Nada,” Marks told him. “She’s been dead as a doorstop for years. How many planets was this place supposed to have now?”

  “Last I heard, at least two or three Jupiter-sized places. Check Planet-Finder…maybe we ought to run a radial velocity scan…see if anything else has happened in the neighborhood.”

  They put SpaceGuard to work and the results came back in less than an hour. Marks superimposed the current velocity scan over the last one Planet-Finder had made a decade before.

  Lane shook his head. “I don’t get it. Something’s missing--“ He fingered the absorption lines on the screen. “Should be a tick right there…that was supposed to be where the bigger planets were…what was that big one called?…”

  “Storm, I think—spectral analysis said it was mostly ocean.“

  “Yeah, that’s it. Wasn’t it here?”

  Marks swallowed. “Maybe the whole shebang got swallowed. Supernova must have eaten it.”

  Lane stood up and went over to a porthole, which gave onto a constricted view of the nearest arrays of the Submillimeter Interferometer, and a shadowy backdrop of Korolev crater’s steep craggy walls beyond. A triangle of blazing sunlight still illuminated the upper rim, last gasp of the lunar day.

  “Maybe--“Lane shook his head, turned back to the consoles. “But this sector’s been quiet for years…SpaceGuard’s not showing anything. Now, all of a sudden, BLAM! Energy spikes all over the place. We should have seen something before…rising X-ray, rising gamma levels, something. Supernovas don’t just appear out of nowhere. They’re always burping and farting radiation for years before.”

  Marks shrugged, staring at the velocity scans superimposed on each other. “If that signature’s not a micro, then what the hell is it? Other than a Type I supernova, what eats whole planets?”

  The two astronomers both had the same thought at the same time.

  Chapter 1

  Earth

  The Atlantic Ocean, near Bermuda

  May 21, 2115

  After the detonation, no one detected the small fleet of Coethi jumpships quietly withdrawing from the Sigma Albeth B system, having let loose a final volley of starballs, which had impacted the sun and initiated the deadly sequence of events.

  Several hundred thousand Seomish, from all kels, had managed to emigrate through the Farpool to Urku…to Earth. Twenty million others had died in the End Times…the great ak’loosh. The Farpool had been destroyed…for now. The Time Twister, originally built and operated by the Umans of the First Time Displacement Battery, had now been destroyed, as had the wavemaker the Seomish had constructed from Uman schematics, to keep the Farpool going, to keep an escape route open for the doomed world of Seome. To re-create the Farpool now, another Time Twister would have to be built.

  The emigrants (known among themselves as tu’kelke) had mostly traveled in lifeships and modified kip’ts to 22nd century Earth. However, some of the immigrants did not have proper control of their lifeships and wound up on Earth in different time periods…mid-20th century Earth, 16-century Earth, 28th century E
arth and one small group in the Cretaceous period of Earth, just before the big asteroid Chicxulub struck, dooming the dinosaurs. None of these tu’kelke had any way of communicating with each other, or traveling, since the Farpool was gone.

  In a small cave near the growing encampment of the tu’kelke at the Muir seamounts, Chase Meyer (still em’took-modified) found a familiar face in the form of Tulcheah li, half-Omtorish, half-Ponkti, working with other members of her em’kel to unpack pods and cases and make some kind of home in the dim warren of caves. They were glad to see each other and they embraced hard, first in the Uman way, then as Seomish, though Chase was only a halfling. Chase then invited Tulcheah out for a roam about the settlement.

  “They’re calling it Keenomsh’pont,” Tulcheah was saying. “Kind of like ‘Little Omsh’pont’.” It had been named for the great capital city of the Omtorish, nearly destroyed long ago in a Ponkti assault.

  The base of the seamount was a craggy broken land, pockmarked with caves, niches, folds, burrows and hollows, nearly four kilometers in circumference, blending into the broader Bermuda Platform, itself a flat-topped guyot thousands of feet above the abyssal plains of the seafloor. Over every fold and crack at the base of the seamount, small knots of kelke had built shelter, drawing hundreds of sheets of fibrous netting over the openings, carving out small tunnels, channels, warrens and passageways right out of the volcanic tuff of the mountain. The effect was to make the base of the Muir complex resemble a vast spiderweb or honeycomb of cells and caves.

  Tulcheah pulsed the vast heaving expanse of the refugee settlement, noting how frightening the trip through the Farpool had been.

  “We just made it, eekoti Chase. Our ship twisted and turned and shook and shuddered and we thought it would come apart. It was awful. Thank Great Shooki we were lucky.”

  Chase could barely pulse for himself the extent of the congregation of Seomish immigrants—Omtorish, Ponkti, Eep’kostic, Skortish, Orketish—they were all crammed together, beak to tail, in the bosom of the sea mount and her surrounding hills.

  “Yeah, sometimes the Farpool is like that. But I wonder: how many didn’t make it?”

  At this, Tulcheah turned somber. “Perhaps a number beyond counting, eekoti Chase. It is written that when Shooki sends the great wave, the ak’loosh, many will die.”

  They roamed in silence for a time, circling above the crude camps scattered about the seamount.

  Tulcheah spoke quietly, swishing her tail back and forth against downdraft currents coursing down from the upper reaches of the mountain. “See how they’re are already gathering themselves into kels? We haven’t even been here very long and the old divisions, the old conflicts, are returning. Even in new waters, we fight.”

  “I guess that’s to be expected. It’s the same with my people. By the way, we don’t call ourselves Tailless. We call ourselves Humans. Get used to it.”

  At that, Tulcheah smirked and bumped him playfully. “You’re both, eekoti Chase. Human and Seomish.”

  And it was true. The thought of it made Chase both sad and proud at the same time. If only Dad could see me now, he told himself. His beach bum son has become a kind of intergalactic ambassador.

  They soon ran into a school of Ponkti midlings, engaged in learning tuk moves and defenses from none other than Loptoheen himself. Tuk was the martial dance and close-quarters combat discipline for which the Ponkti had long been renown. Loptoheen had been the acknowledged master of tuk for as long as anyone could remember.

  Tulcheah and Chase stopped to watch but it was quickly clear that the Ponkti wanted to keep to themselves.

  Loptoheen growled at them. “Be off, kelke! There’s nothing here for you. And stop stirring up the waters too…these students need to concentrate.”

  Tulcheah, who was half-Ponkti, barked back at him. “Litorkel ge, old Loptoheen. Calm waters to all of you.” There was a twinkle in her eye and she tried to stifle a half smile. “It won’t be long before your students give you a real thrashing.”

  “Kah!” came Loptoheen’s reply. The Ponkti school moved off and was soon lost in the chaos of the settlement below.

  Tulcheah and Chase resumed their roam about Keenomsh’pont. It was clear to both, though unspoken, that even in this strange and difficult new setting, the kels were organizing themselves into traditional water clans again.

  Listening in to the chatter, they soon learned of the rumors of a great roam being organized by the Metahs of all the kels: Mokleeoh, Lektereenah, Okeemah and Oolandra…a roam for the purpose of settling disputes and setting conditions for how the new settlement would operate. Already big crowds had started to gather near the edge of the settlement, anticipating the start of the vish’tu.

  “We should grab a spot, eekoti Chase. Get in position, near the front. The best spots will be gone quickly.”

  Chase had other ideas. “Tulcheah, it’s not leaving for a day. Maybe more. Besides, I think I know a place on the other side of the mountain.”

  “A place?”

  “Where we can be alone. You taught me that, you slut. There’s more to roaming than just seeing the sights.”

  “I thought you came by to learn how the rest of the Ponkti are getting along.” She stopped, picked up an old scentbulb somebody had left behind and sniffed experimentally.

  “That’s not why I came.”

  “I know why you came…it’s written all over your insides. A blind tillet could see it halfway around the world. What makes you think I’m in the mood?” Tulcheah held up the scentbulb and let its odors drift out.

  “For the love of Shooki…that thing smells like a seamother herd…what is that stuff?”

  Tulcheah sniffed indignantly at the bulb. “Home, eekoti Chase. This is all we have left…of home.”

  “I’ve got something better than an old bulb,” he told her. Chase swam up close and bumped her. “Look, I’ve got to get back to Tamarek’s place…how about we—“

  But she put a hand to his mouth, fondling his lips, the way she always did. “Eekoti Chase, you never change. Come with me, o’ great and famous traveler. I’ll show you things you never imagined—“And she slapped her tail at him, disappearing into a small cleft in a nearby space, a narrow fold in the rock, draped with torn shreds of fabric and fiber. It was dark inside, but the scents were strong. Chase followed.

  From somewhere out of the dark, Tulcheah spoke. “Do all eekoti look so ugly as you?”

  “Hey, this was some kind of surgery, remember…you know, to let me live in your world better. Normally, I’m just a stud.”

  Tulcheah laughed at that. She nuzzled up under Chase’s chin with her beak. “You have funny words, eekoti Chase. You know about Ke’shoo and Ke’lee?”

  As she bumped him again and rubbed herself along his side scales, Chase said, “Love and life…I think I understand it. You like to have a good time.”

  Tulcheah pulled up and stared into Chase’s eyes. She had black button eyes, and they gleamed in the faint light. “You pulse anxious…no need for that. Just relax…these threads look like old man Terpy’t’s.” She smiled. “I’ve got an idea…here, I’ll show you. Take this knot in your mouth—“ She gave Chase an end of the thread.

  Chase stuffed the filaments in his mouth. It tasted like rope. “Like this?—“he mumbled.

  “Hold on to it and pull. Follow me… I’ll guide you.” Tulcheah took one arm and together, the two of them swooped up and down the hold, spinning and weaving denser strands of the frayed web, back and forth. It was erotic and sensuous, all the more so as Tulcheah rubbed herself against his sides with each cycle.

  Blast this scaly skin…I’m getting turned on…can’t feel what I—

  The mat of fiber grew thicker as they made turn after turn.

  Tulcheah asked, “Where is the other eekoti? Female is this one?”

  Chase was in a heavenly daze and had to shake himself to clarity. “Huh, oh…Angie? Yeah, female. A girl. My girlfriend…yeah.”

  “And where is
this eekoti Angie?”

  “Right now, I really don’t know. I need to find her. Back at Scotland Beach, I imagine.”

  By some unseen signal, Tulcheah stopped the spinning and hovered on one side of Chase. She nosed up and down his body with her beak, clearly looking for something, poking, probing, sniffing.

  Then she stopped, looked up into Chase’s eyes. “I’m not familiar with this em’took…where is the ket’shoo’ge?”

  “The what?”

  Tulcheah laughed. “All of us have ket’shoo’ge…how do you translate this?…little lover…maybe, small…em’too… love hold?”

  “Hey, mine isn’t that small, if you’re asking. Hell, if I know…this skin is so scaly…I don’t really know where—“

  Then Tulcheah found it.

  Later, after they had coupled, Chase remembered seeing something on Nat Geo, a vid or something, about how fish had sex. Many females just ejected eggs into the water. The males ejected sperm. The eggs got fertilized…end of story. But some marine animals had specialized organs called claspers. That’s when things got interesting.

  Tulcheah had found Chase’s claspers. The Omtorish, in their infinite wisdom, had designed the em’took procedure so that the Lizard Man that Chase had become would have claspers.

  And it was clear that Tulcheah knew what to do with claspers.

  When Chase and Angie made love, the best time for Chase was in the little fishing boat in Half Moon Cove. You had to have lots of blankets to make a soft landing. It was awkward at times…you had to be clever and inventive on how to use the space—but when the boat was rocking in the swells and you had the right rhythm…it was …really awesome!

  That’s what Tulcheah did to Chase.

  Chase found his claspers exquisitely sensitive. The two of them formed one body and drifted softly about the tiny hold, occasionally getting entangled in the webs, tearing them, pulling them apart.