Second Earth

SECOND

EARTH

Kestrel Saga: Book III

A novel by

Stephen
A. Fender

Edited by

Lynda
Dietz

Published by

JRP
©

Jolly
Rogers Productions

Second Earth

Copyright © 2013
Stephen A. Fender

www.StephenFender.com

First Edition: 2013

Published through
Jolly Rogers Productions (JRP) ©, a subsidiary division of StephenFender.com

All rights
reserved.

Ordering
information: [email protected]

Printed in the
United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
1
 

ISBN:
        
1494232480

ISBN13:
     
978-1494232481

Cover art layout and rendering by
Stephen Fender ©.

I’d
like to thank to my family, friends and fans that have been there through this
process. I’m grateful for all of you, and each of you has a special place in my
heart.

I’d
also like to thank my editor, Lynda. She spent countless hours going over this
text, and it was time well spent. This novel is the culmination of a lot of
hard work, and I’m exceedingly grateful for her assistance.

I
want to extend a very special thanks to my wife. Your support has been nothing
short of amazing.

All characters, settings, and events depicted in this
novel are the sole intellectual property of Stephen Fender. Characters in this
novel are not intended, nor should they be inferred by anyone, to represent
actual living beings—either now or in the 24
^th
century. That being
said, I think we’d all like to hope that there will always be a Shawn Kestrel
somewhere in the universe.

“
To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

A truth that’s told with bad intent

Beats all the Lies you can invent.

It is right it should be so;

Man was made for Joy and Woe;

And when this we rightly know

Thro’ the World we safely go.

Every Night and every Morn

Some to Misery are Born.

Every Morn and every Night

Some are Born to sweet delight.

…and Some are Born to Endless Night.
”

—William Blake

  
T
o
Shawn Kestrel, infinity had never looked so beautiful. Outside the cockpit of
the Maelstrom fighter, the brilliant red and violet Carina Nebula stretched for
ten parsecs in every direction. Even though the outer fringes of the diffuse
nebulae were almost a thousand light-years away, Lieutenant Commander Shawn
Kestrel still had the impression he could reach out and gather a handful of the
charged space dust in his hands. The twin suns of Eta Carinae—hundreds of times
more massive and over a million times the brilliance of the sun of Old
Earth—were thankfully at the fighter’s stern as Shawn brought his craft level
after a series of successful evasion maneuvers.

  
Everything
looks so beautiful out here,
he mused.
It’s hard to
imagine that lying out there amongst the twinkling blue, green, and yellow
stars could be an enemy force lying in wait, hell-bent on ending humanity’s
reach for the heavens.
It had been two weeks since the Unified Sector
Command carrier
Rhea
had left the
protection of Unified space for the quarantined planet Second Earth; two weeks
of not knowing if or when another fleet of Sector Command starships would again
vanish as the
Valley Forge
and her
escorts had; two weeks of simulator training, shipboard drills, classroom
studies, and actual patrol flying. While the former was still whispered about
in the corridors and wardrooms of the supercarrier
Rhea
, Shawn Kestrel was nonetheless content with how well he was
progressing toward the latter.
 

  
A vid-call from Drake broke him free of his
wistful stargazing. “Commander, you’re looking good. Prepare to execute an
alpha-three turn on my mark.”

  
Shawn placed a firm hand on the control
stick of his fighter and got ready to perform the desired maneuver. Lieutenant
I’rondus, call sign ‘Drake,’ was flying a parallel course behind him, watching
and waiting for his commanding officer to begin his turn.

  
Also with them was the fresh-faced
Lieutenant Jerry ‘Nova’ Santorum. Playing the part of the aggressor, he had
been trying his hardest to shoot his CO out of space with no positive results.
In fact, his commander had, time and again, gotten the better of the younger
pilot, blasting him from the stars in four different scenarios. Drake’s
suggestion for Kestrel to perform the alpha-three maneuver was a sign to Nova
that he likewise needed to put his own fighter into the proper position.

  
Nova grunted into the intercom, dejected
over the fact that he was probably about to die again. “Really, Drake? Don’t
you think I’ve been killed enough for one day?”

  
A three-dimensional image of Drake’s face
appeared above Nova’s main display. “Lieutenant Commander Brunel wants to make
sure the Skipper is fully versed in basic combat tactics out here. That means
you’ll die as many times as is necessary to make sure that happens.”

  
Nova rolled his eyes and slumped his
shoulders. “Yeah, well…Raven isn’t the one out here getting her butt kicked.”

  
Drake, the Rippers’ tactical officer, shook
his head slowly. “Take it like a man, Lieutenant. We’ll be laughing at this
later over drinks.”

  
“Only as long as you’re buying, Drake,” Nova
chortled back. “You still owe me from that little mishap in the Gorgon Sector
three months ago.”

  
Shawn watched on his own screen as Drake
offered Nova a grandiose salute. “You got it, buddy. Commander Kestrel, are you
ready?”

  
Shawn nodded approvingly. “Ready, Drake.
Executing.”

  
With a slip of his wrist, Shawn sent the
fighter into a hair-raising maneuver that would have caused even the staunchest
of pilots in normal Earth atmosphere to lose his lunch. His sleek space
interceptor dipped down, did a half-axial rotation to starboard and then
abruptly did another half rotation, this time to port, as he engaged the twin
thrusters at full power. The concept behind the maneuver was to ‘fake out’ a
pursuing aggressor into believing that Shawn was heading off in one direction
when in fact he was going toward another.

  
Despite Nova’s best efforts at evasion, the
alpha-three maneuver worked beautifully. Shawn was quickly behind the junior
officer and in a perfect firing position on his tail. With a flick of the
trigger on the control stick, Nova’s Maelstrom was strafed with simulated
plasma bolts, and Shawn watched with morbid satisfaction as the fighter was
deemed ‘totally destroyed’ by his ship’s onboard computer.

  
“Well done, Commander,” Drake said over the
communications channel. “You’ve really taken to these new fighters.”

  
“I’ll say,” Nova replied dryly.

  
“Old habits die hard, I guess,” Shawn
replied to the three-dimensional image of Drake that was projected onto his
cockpit monitor.

  
Drake smiled. “You know, they try to make
the simulators as close to the real thing as possible. I think they’ve missed a
few of the nuances myself. There’s really nothing that can simulate what you
can do with a real fighter out here in the void.”

  
Shawn agreed completely. “That’s for sure.
I’m just glad Raven talked Captain Krif into allowing me more flight time to
learn some of the new tactics.” He brought his fighter into a perfect barrel
roll, then pulled back up and aligned himself with Drake’s fighter. Nova wasn’t
far behind, and soon the three fighters were in a V formation with Drake in the
lead.

  
“I think we’re done for the day, gentleman,”
Drake offered. “Time to head for home. The
Rhea
will be arriving at jump gate one-five-nine in less than an hour.”

  
The wonder of jumping still captivated
Shawn. A hundred years ago, the stable wormhole had finally been perfected.
Using sub-light propulsion, the gates were sent out from every planet in the
once-fledgling Unified Collaboration of Systems, a prelude to what would become
known as the Golden Era of space exploration. Now stationed at various points
across the charted galaxy, all one had to do was input the proper codes for one
gate to communicate with another, lock it into the navigational computer, and
let the ship’s jump drive initiate the tunnel. There were limitations of
course, the main one being that a gate could only transmit to another that was
in a pre-defined range, but that was only limited by the jump gate’s onboard
transmitter, and someday soon even that barrier would be overcome. For now, it
was a sub-light ‘crawl’ between gates. Thankfully, the gate closest to Second
Earth was set as absolutely near to the planet as could be afforded, given the
exotic nature of the artificial tunnel. The
Rhea
’s
journey would still take another day or so, and Shawn was looking forward to
the downtime.

  
Realizing he still hadn’t acknowledged
Lieutenant I’rondus’ transmission, Shawn tapped at his intercom. “Roger,
Drake.”

  
With that, the trio turned their formation
one hundred eighty degrees and headed back to the
Rhea
, each pilot pulling down his face shield to protect himself
from the brilliance of the Eta Carinae stars now squarely on their bows.

*
* *

  
The gaping maw of the
Rhea
’s landing bay opened wide, like the mouth of a great
space-born whale preparing to devour a swarm of plankton. Shawn brought his
fighter in first, slowing to a near halt just before the ship’s guiding and
landing beam, known as “the GLiB” by veterans, lightly snagged his fighter from
space. The carrier’s onboard computer then took control of the fighter’s flight
computer, guiding the sleek Maelstrom gently into a preprogrammed landing spot
on one of the upper loading elevators. When the fighter’s magnetic landing pads
were made fast to the deck, the elevator upon which the fighter was now positioned
moved down on repulser beams, the opening above sealing itself with the closure
of two large doors sliding into place. As the lift came to a halt on the main
hangar deck, the interior atmosphere of the fighter began to equalize as Shawn
removed his helmet.
 

  
Shawn watched the bustle of activity outside
his canopy with marked fascination. A small antigravity truck was fast
approaching his position, ready to retrieve his fighter from the elevator in an
instant. The fighter would then be tucked away inside a maintenance bay,
reequipped and repaired if necessary, and then be positioned to prelaunch from
one of the ten magnetically driven launch tubes that lined the port and
starboard sides of the supercarrier. The entire evolution from landing to prelaunch,
taking an average of ten minutes, was almost entirely automated by mechanized
maintenance equipment—with the exception of any repairs that would need to be
performed. Shawn was amazed at the crews’ level of efficiency, noting with
satisfaction that it would have taken the same team of technicians twice as
long to do the same job only a few years before.

  
As the angular, bright yellow tow tractor
neared the fighter, Shawn’s bubble-like canopy completed its opening sequence,
and he hopped out onto a metal staircase that had locked itself into the
starboard side of the fighter’s fuselage. He exchanged a friendly wave with the
tractor’s multi-limbed Areelian driver and then made his way to the pilots’
briefing room for a post-mission review.

  
Lieutenant Commander Brunel was there
waiting when he arrived. Not long after, Nova and Drake appeared and the
debriefing commenced. Thankfully, everything during the training mission had
gone smoothly, so there was very little to talk about. Much to Shawn’s surprise,
even Raven was full of praise, making very few recommendations about her new
commanding officer’s performance.

  
From there, Shawn had retired to his cabin
to shower and change into off-duty attire, only to be confronted with his
computer terminal notifying him that someone had left a message for him in his
absence. When the computer asked in its perfunctory female voice if he’d like
to have the message read aloud, he declined the offer with the push of a small
button. With the computers still not working at one hundred percent, the last
thing Shawn wanted was for the amatory voice of the ship’s computer to read aloud
a verbal lashing from Krif.

  
As he read the name of the originator, a
large smile crept across his tired face. Melissa Graves wanted to meet him for
dinner in the observation deck. The two had hardly seen each other in the last
week; unfortunately, Shawn had been too busy flying, and when he did have a
chance to see her, she was neck-deep in mission preparation, planning for their
pending investigation of Second Earth. Shawn had to admit to himself that he
was tired, both physically and mentally, from the last few flights he had been
on. However, the simple fact remained that he cared for Melissa—even if he’d
never fully admitted those words to himself, much less to her. To do so would
have been too dangerous, he often told himself, although he never really
defined in his mind what ‘dangerous’ meant. After hastily crafting a reply, he
showered and changed, and then headed up to the observation deck, one of the
few compartments on the
Rhea
that was
blessedly un-military in both form and function.

 
 
Twenty
minutes later he found himself in a familiar corridor just beyond the lounge.
Before he entered the space, he passed near a computer terminal on the
bulkhead, and it seemed second nature to him that he should scowl at it. He
remembered with disdain the last time he’d encountered this particular hunk of
mechanized debris. Unconsciously, he moved to the opposite side of the corridor
from the terminal to avoid any unwanted attention. Nonetheless, the terminal
seemed to sense his presence, and the synthesized voice sprang from the
speaker.

  
“Good afternoon, Lieutenant Commander
Kestrel. Can I be of any assistance to you? Ready for query.”