The Queen's Daemon (T'aafhal Legacy Book 2) Read online

  The Queen's Daemon

  Doug L. Hoffman

  Copyright © 2015 by Doug L. Hoffman

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN 978-0-9884588-9-5

  Published by

  The Resilient Earth Press

  http://resilientearthpress.com

  Books By Doug L. Hoffman

  The T'aafhal Legacy Series

  Ghosts of Orion

  The Queen's Daemon

  Starflake

  Pleiad Found

  The T'aafhal Inheritance Trilogy

  Parker's Folly

  Peggy Sue

  M'tak Ka'fek

  Non-fiction (with Allen Simmons)

  The Resilient Earth

  The Energy Gap

  Preface

  This is the second book in the T'aafhal Legacy series—the continued adventures of the officers and crew of the starship Peggy Sue. Once again we find Captain Billy Ray Vincent in command of the Honorable Orion Arm Trading Company's vessel Peggy Sue. After their adventures in the Gliese 667C system, chronicled in the Ghosts of Orion, almost a year has passed and the merchant explorers are more than 30 parsecs from home, well beyond the current 10 parsecs “safe” human bubble in space. On the way home they stumble onto a T'aafhal artifact, a developing interplanetary war, and a sinister plot by the Dark Lords.

  As usual, all units of measurement—distance, mass, time, etc—have been rendered in familiar human terms. It is much easier to do that than have the reader trying to translate what a hundred ferniks per wizbat means. Most of the characters are still referred to by rank, at least on occasion, even though the Peggy Sue is now a civilian vessel sailing for a merchant company. As always, I have tried to make the science as realistic as possible, given our current understanding. Some speculative liberties are taken, particularly in the realm of faster than light travel. I also assumed the use of primitive spears and stone cutting tools by hominins a half million or so years earlier than has been documented, but then sticks rot away and knapped stones are hard to find and date.

  As usual, the text is sprinkled with quotations, some from historical sources, others from contemporary humans. Not all are attributed in the story itself, people tend not to do that, but I will say that there are lines from all sorts of folks—from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Friedrich Nietzsche, from Charlie Daniels to Dana Perino. I hope you enjoy finding the “hidden” ones.

  I would like to thank the following early readers and editors of this novel. Most of these have been with me from the beginning of my writing career and without them these adventures would probably have never seen the light of day. Special thanks to Rik Faith, who helps keep my science honest and my phraseology understandable; Bobby Johnson, whose eagle eyes find errors I've missed time and time again; David Metheny, Clayton Ward, and Jesse Perkins. Mistakes that slipped through are all my fault, certainly not theirs.

  This, of course, brings us to the obligatory disclaimers: all the characters in this book are fictional, not representations of any real person, living or dead; Any mistakes in the science, cosmology, engineering, etc. are purely my own and not the responsibility any of those thanked above. The book was written using LibreOffice and the cover art done using the GIMP. Ebook formatting was done using Calibre.

  Finally, if you like this book please tell your friends, and if you really like it consider writing a review online at Amazon.com. Online reviews are the best way to spread the word about my books and to reach more possible readers. They also help motivate me to write that next novel.

  Regards,

  Doug L. Hoffman

  Conway, Arkansas

  May 28, 2015

  For my mother,

  Mary Hoffman

  Prologue

  Alpha Phoenicis

  The primary and its companion were a mismatched pair, one a swollen orange giant, the other a small ruddy dwarf. From Earth only the primary was visible, shining bright in the southern sky it was called Ankaa by Medieval Arab sailors. It was known to more modern observers as Alpha Phoenicis, the brightest star in the constellation of the mythical Firebird—the Phoenix. The system lay at a distance of about 26 parsecs, roughly 85 light-years, from humanity's home world. With a mass of around 2.5 times that of the Sun and a radius 13 times solar, the star appeared to be in a short-term but stable helium burning stage. Eventually, it would expand into a brighter, larger red giant, and then, after a short time, expel its outer shell to become a tiny white dwarf; the fate of all such K type giants. Nonetheless, it currently supported a planet with indigenous life.

  Near that world—a super-Earth on the outer edge of the K type's habitable zone—a starship hung in space. The ship looked like a spindle, turned out of a kilometer long shard of blackest obsidian. Tapered to slender points at either end, its central section exhibited a number of bulges, hinting at spaces contained within. Amidships, a thin silver ring encircled the shaft. Fifty meters wide, the ring's diameter was nearly a third of a kilometer. Held in position by an almost invisible tracery of dark filaments, the band seemed to float in space without connection to the glassy black spindle.

  Inside a sizable bulge just forward of amidships there was a large room filled with liquid—a mix of ethane and methane, with some liquid nitrogen thrown in for good measure. The temperature remained constant around minus 166ºC, almost 300º below zero Fahrenheit. Within this liquid environment floated a number of creatures, which bore an uncanny similarity to barrel jellyfish. Ranging in size from one to two meters across, they floated in place, their translucent bell-shaped mantles slowly pulsating. But, with metabolic pathways suited only to life on cryogenically cold worlds, these creatures were no relation of earthly Scyphozoans.

  The largest of these medusoids was a behemoth two and a half meters across, with a purple fringe around the bottom of its mantle. Beneath its slowly pulsing dome hung five clusters of unripened eggs, each ending in a profusion of stinging tentacles. Situated between the dangling egg clusters was a central mouth opening leading to a digestion chamber. Having no durable hard parts—no head, no skeleton, and no specialized organs for respiration or excretion—it nonetheless possessed a distributed neural network that allowed the creature to think.

  A number of its tentacles were evolved beyond the grasping and stinging of prey, forgoing the nematocysts found on those surrounding the creature's mouth. The specialized tentacles made contact with polyp like protuberances attached to the sides of the chamber, allowing the Commander to communicate with its ship and crew. For the giant pseudo-jellyfish was in command of the starship and all it contained.

  “Our survey of this system has been completed,” the Commander announced to its companions. “It is as the others informed us, there is an artifact on the planet orbiting the M type star—an artifact left behind by the accursed T'aafhal.”

  A wave of agitation spread through the creatures at the mention of the Dark Lords' ancient enemy. Though it had been millions of years since the last encounter with warm life's paladins, their name still struck fear in the minds of the dark ones and their minions.

  “How are we to retrieve this artifact, Most Wise?” asked an underling, barely a meter across, floating nearby the Commander. “And why are we orbiting the terrestrial planet of the K type primary star?”

  “Because, underling, I have devised a stratagem for said retrieval.” The Commander's words were laced with contempt and rebuke for the presumptuous crewmember. “Have we not found that both planets are infested with warm life?”

  “Yes, Most Wise,” replied the senior crewmember, before the lesser crewmember could further antagonize the Commander. “The planet orbiting the M type
is dominated by a form of invertebrate creatures, arthropods, while the planet below is dominated by a species of burrowing vertebrates.”

  “And what level of technology have these two misbegotten races of vermin achieved?”

  “The invertebrates live in colonies and seem to posses no notable technology,” the senior crewmember replied, “while the vertebrates communicate using electromagnetic radiation and have successfully placed artificial satellites in orbit using chemical rockets, Most Wise.”

  “Precisely.” There was a hint of satisfaction in the Commander's terse reply. It paused to admire its solution to their mission before continuing. Into that silence the underling again rashly spoke.

  “But the artifact is on the planet of the invertebrates, orbiting the other star. Why do we concern ourselves with the warm life scum on the world below?”

  A shudder of rage rippled through the gelatinous material of the Commander's umbrella like body as its tentacles reached for the underling floating nearby. Realizing its peril, the underling frantically pulsed its body in a vain attempt to escape—but it was too late.

  “We can not comfortably travel to the surfaces of either of these hell-spawned worlds, so we will need to act through agents,” the Commander said for the edification of the remaining crew. As it spoke tentacles wrapped around the unfortunate crewmember and began dragging it toward the Commander's central mouth opening. “The surface gravity on either world is sufficient to make use of our standard cyborg workers untenable so we must recruit from the available local lifeforms.”

  “Perceptive, indeed, Wise One. Would you deign to enlighten your humble crew as to which species you have chosen?”

  “Which would you choose, Senior Functionary?”

  Edging carefully away from its commander, the senior crewmember carefully considered its answer. “Most Wise, the obvious answer would appear to be the invertebrates on the planet where the artifact resides, but I suspect that my perception falls woefully short of your superior intellect.”

  “It is well that you recognize your inadequacies,” the Commander answered, satisfied with the senior crewmember's unctuous reply. “The invertebrates are primitives, making it difficult to communicate with them effectively, whereas the vertebrates on the planet we now orbit already have the means to communicate electronically. The vertebrates also have the rudimentary beginnings of a space program.”

  “I float in awe of your superior perceptiveness,” intoned the senior crewmember.

  The Commander pulsed slowly, falling quiet as the hapless underling was drawn into its mouth opening. The pause briefly made the senior crewmember wonder if its last statement had been a bit too transparently obsequious. Eventually, the Commander continued.

  “We will make contact with the vertebrates and present ourselves as beneficent higher beings from the stars, on a mission to help elevate other races throughout the galaxy.” The Commander paused again to let the crew savor that bit of irony. “We will feed them enough technical knowledge to build effective spacecraft for a voyage across the system to the world circling the companion star. There they will conquer the invertebrates and retrieve the T'aafhal artifact.”

  “A sublimely subtle and ingeneous plan, Most Significant One.”

  “Yes, it is. I shall suborn the vertebrates, who will subjugate the invertebrates, and, once I have the prize we seek, both shall be exterminated.”

  As the Commander admired the plan of his own devising, the last trace of the unwisely verbose crewmember disappeared into its superior’s digestive chamber.

  Part One

  Down To A Sunless Sea

  Chapter 1

  Ice Moon, Unnamed System

  The icy moon orbited its gaseous parent, a banded giant three times the size of Jupiter. The gas giant itself orbited an unremarkable white dwarf. Too faint to have been named by ancient sky watchers, the star was known only by catalog numbers. An unnamed moon of an unnamed planet of an insignificant remnant of a dead star—pretty much the definition of a galactic backwater.

  The moon's surface, composed of water ice, was remarkably smooth as lunar surfaces go. Not that it was featureless, being striated by cracks and crevasses, though craters were relatively rare. Due to the gas giant's immense gravitational field, orbital bondage kept the surface active, explaining the lack of cratering—no surface feature lasted long on the icy moon. The smoothness of the surface was a result of the ocean lying beneath it. Five kilometers of ice capped a sixty kilometer deep water ocean, kept liquid by heat from tidal flexing.

  Thick continents of ice collided with each other, crumpling and grinding in a cryogenic version of plate tectonics. Volcanoes and fissures expelled liquid water into cold black space, where it instantly turned to snow that drifted slowly back to the moon's surface. The moon's white covering of ice and snow reflected the faint light from the system's central star, creating a ghostly wasteland of ridges, plains, and chasms.

  Nestled between two large pressure ridges, almost invisible against the icy terrain, was a silver and crystal needle. It appeared a tiny thing, dwarfed by the scale of the terrain, but it was in fact 155 meters in length and massed more than 8,000 tons. It was the Earth starship Peggy Sue.

  On the bridge, Captain Billy Ray Vincent gazed out through the ship's transparent bow and across the frozen panorama beyond. Peggy Sue's bow was a fanciful structure, composed of curved crystalline panels joined by thin flowing strips of silver. Its elegant beauty was lost on the Captain in his current frame of mind. The ship had been sitting on the moon's surface for more than three days and the Captain was becoming impatient.

  After following a circuitous path from system to system for more than a year, ending up almost one hundred light-years from Earth, Captain Vincent decided to stop and refuel his ship before the trip home. Unfortunately, deuterium, the fuel on which the Peggy Sue's thermonuclear reactors ran, was much less common than normal hydrogen. One good place to look for deuterium was in water where approximately one water molecule in twenty million was heavy water, at least in Earth's oceans.

  “Engineer Baldursson,” he called over the comm, “what is the status of the borehole?”

  “Captain, we are down well over four kilometers and should reach the liquid layer in less than an hour.” Arin Baldursson, the ship's chief engineer, was outside the hull in a hastily constructed enclosure, supervising the drilling of a shaft through the ice. The drill was a powerful laser assembly that could bore through solid rock or, as in this case, solid H2O.

  “Very good, Mr. Baldursson. Let me know when the ice is breached and you begin installation of the molecular filter and pumps.”

  “Aye, aye, Skipper.”

  The reason for drilling the well—indeed, the reason for the Peggy Sue's presence on the icy moon—was to access the liquid ocean trapped beneath the moon's solid surface. Once they tapped the liquid below, equipment would be lowered into the water to filter out molecules of heavy water. Heavy water contains deuterium, which makes it 11% denser than “normal” water. The deuterium substitution alters heavy water’s hydrogen-oxygen bond energy. This changes its physical, chemical, and biological properties enough so that heavy water can be readily separated from its more pedestrian cousins.

  “You seem a bit on edge, Captain,” observed the First Officer, Beth Melaku. The strikingly tall officer was standing beside the Captain's command chair, hands clasped behind her back, keeping an eye on the bridge crew. “It's like you are anxious to be headed homeward.”

  “Yer right about that. We haven't found much of anything worthwhile since the mess at Paradise.” The Peggy Sue was owned by the Honorable Orion Arm Trading Company, a joint venture by a group of billionaires back in the solar system. The object of the voyage was to find interesting things, which was to say profitable things, beyond the boundaries of humanity's current territory. “All we got to show for the trip is a couple of tons of oversized gemstones, a bunch of half busted alien electronics, and an empty world that kills any
thing that lands on it.”

  “That's not true,” Beth said with a faint smile. “We did manage to establish trade relations with that group of six-limbed meerkat like creatures a few systems back.”

  “Yep, they were happy to trade carved sticks for some of the smaller gems that PO Jacobs polished up.”

  “We do seem to have a lock on the carved stick market, don't we?”

  Billy Ray shook his head and squinted at the horizon. “The ship is safely at rest and the bridge is manned; I say we retire to the bar for a drink, Number One.”

  “Now that is the best offer I've had all day.”

  “Mr. Lewis, you have the deck,” the Captain called out as he followed Beth aft.

  “Aye, aye, Sir. I have the deck,” replied Lt. Lewis from his station at the helm.

  As Billy Ray caught up with Beth he slipped his arm through hers—not normal behavior for a captain and first officer. Of course, on most ships the First Officer is not the Captain's wife.

  Armory, Peggy Sue

  It was crowded in the armory, with a pair of polar bears, a human scientist, and most of the engineering staff in attendance. Also assisting were two of the senior crew: Petty Officers 1st Class Matt Jacobs and Steve Hitch. The reason for the assembly was fitting those going diving in the hidden ocean with pressure suits. Once the Captain's refueling plans were made clear, work began on suits for Umky, Ahnah, Dr. Krenshaw and Senior Engineer's Mate James Michaels. Quickly designed and fabricated by Chief Engineer Baldursson's artificers, all that remained was to make sure the suits were comfortable enough for their intended wearers to spend several hours working in them.

  “Tell me again why these things are so bulky,” said Umky, a full grown male polar bear who was attached to the ship's Marines. “Why couldn't we just wear our normal armor?”