Impact Event (Dargo Pearce Chronicles #1) Read online

  IMPACT

  EVENT

  By David N Frank

  A planet destroyed. A galaxy-wide panic. A nefarious plot. And one man searching for truth.

  When a terrorist attack wipes out an entire planet and threatens the safety of the known galaxy, the Confederation’s top agent is sent to eliminate the threat.

  Impact Event, a novel by David N. Frank

  Copyright © 2018 David N Frank

  All Rights Reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photo-copying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright owner.

  First Edition

  Cover Art: iStockPhoto/Getty

  For more information: https://davidnfrank.com/

  In memory of my mother.

  Impact Event: a massive collision between astronomical objects causing measureable effects, and may sometimes be followed by mass extinctions of life.

  “Any interesting space drive is a weapon of mass destruction.” – Jon Souza

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  EPILOGUE

  Dear Readers:

  The Science Behind the Fiction

  PROLOGUE

  New Shanghai, Shenzen System

  United Sol Confederation Colony

  On the last day of his life, Matthy Chou was running late for work. His chrono read 28:47 and was ticking the seconds away in the corner of his eye; he knew even without the gentle nudging from his Virtually Intelligent Assistant (VIA) that if he didn’t run he would miss the express train. The next one wouldn’t get him to the city until almost an hour later and would guarantee a tardiness demerit, and given he was already on probation was likely to get him fired.

  As a single parent on a colony with an almost constantly full employment rate he could not afford that. It didn’t matter that his daughter was sick. There would be someone else willing to take his seat and be on-time. Then he’d be forced to go back onto GovSub – Government Subsidy – and would have to give up his modest home in the suburbs for a GovSub tenement flat back in the capital. No way was he going back there.

  As he hurried towards the end of the last block on his route to the station, he heard the high-pitched whine and hissing air of the train approaching. Turning the corner, he began to sprint towards the crowd assembled by the platform.

  Increase speed to 7.5 meters per second. The VIA’s instruction materialized in his mind as if it was born of his own thought. After living with his neural implant since shortly after birth like nearly all Confederation citizens, in many ways the genesis was indeed indistinguishable.

  His VIA had replaced the time and now displayed his speed at 7.2 m/s in red, superimposed in the upper right corner of his eye. Matt pumped his gangly arms and legs faster until the augmented reality visage generated by his ocular heads-up display—OHUD— changed to green.

  Sweat began beading on his forehead as he ran through the dry air under the hot midday sun. He was halfway to the platform when he heard the loud hiss of the train coming to a stop, and he saw the crowd start to surge forward through the open tube doors. He started to doubt that he would make it.

  Maintain speed.

  Matt was a hundred meters away when the last of the passengers disappeared from view. The green light above the doorway started blinking.

  Fifty meters. He could hear the automated announcement stating the obvious: “The train is preparing for departure; please stand clear of the closing doors.” Just a few seconds more.

  He vaulted up the steps to the platform two at a time. He heard the final warning chime and saw the doors start to close. With two long strides he cleared the threshold of the outer doors.

  The airlock detected an occupant and buzzed angrily at him. The outer doors finished closing with a soft bump and a hiss. The inner doors had halted in their tracks and now reopened. Matt slowed to a jog and then a fast walk as he covered the last few meters. By the time the inner doors had fully reopened, Matt was through them and looking for a seating pod. Not surprisingly, most of them in the immediate vicinity of this particular airlock were already taken.

  Even as Matt received a cheerful notification through his VIA that he was being charged a convenience fee for delaying the train, a directional guide arrow overlaid his vision and pointed him in the direction of the nearest unoccupied pod. He hustled through the train car and found his designated seat, secured his bag, and strapped in.

  The final launch warning came over the loudspeaker and Matt closed his eyes as he was pressed back into his seating pod from the tremendous acceleration.

  Most people didn’t think twice about the launch but Matt worked for Galaxy Travel Systems, which had built this hyperloop train. He knew that the most dangerous time of the entire ride was the initial electromagnetic launch, which took the train from 0 to over 1000 km/h in only a few short minutes. If the magnetic accelerators failed or the air pressure regulators malfunctioned, the result could be catastrophic.

  Matt also knew that the chances of either happening were so small as to be infinitesimal with all of the redundancy features and that hyperloops in general had a stellar safety record statistically, but he still felt uneasy during every launch. It was the price he paid for living so far outside the city, but his daughter loved the open spaces and the school system was excellent in the small suburb they lived in.

  The train quickly reached cruising speed and the g-forces subsided. Matt opened his eyes and took a deep breath, pushing his sweaty cheek-bone length dark hair out of his eyes. He was still breathing heavily from his sprint. He had an athletic build but was hardly in track-star shape.

  He took a moment to admire the view out the window as the rolling green hills and automated farms sped by at an incredible rate. The train was moving so fast that it would pass a dozen solid o-pillars each second, which broke up the hyperloop tubes large transparent windows at every connection point, every fifty meters or so. The blinking on/off effect was like an old-fashioned flip book. Farther in the distance, purple gray mountains anchored the horizon.

  As a town began to blur by the window, Matt closed his eyes and had his VIA bring up the sports highlights, relaxing for his short commute to work.

  ***

  A half hour later, Matt stepped off the hyperloop at the downtown terminal and made his way to the station exit. As he emerged from the underground into the brightly lit midday sky with hundreds of other third-shift commuters, he was overcome by the symphony of sounds from the vast metropolis. Ground vehicles hummed by on the nearby roadways providing the bass, while their skyspeeder cousins roared past high overhead amongst the skyways adding tenor and baritone. The thousands of commuters and workers going about their business on the walkways provided a wide range of alto and soprano, while somewhere nearby an emergency siren hit the coloratura.

  His office was just a few blocks away, but major construction of a new high-rise was underway near the
terminal and the cacophony was almost deafening. Matt quickly used his VIA to switch on his implants’ sound dampening and play some music to drown out the noise.

  The city was also an assault on the eyes. Tall gleaming glass and metal towers stretched towards the clouds, a tumultuous mix of bright and shiny colors reflecting off each other. Near street level, thousands of bright electronic signs and displays littered almost every inch of usable space. The young colony was still in its toddler stage, but had grown tremendously to over twenty million citizens, and the vast majority of them lived and worked in or near this city. They had taken the colorful aesthetics of their ancestors to new extremes when designing their new home, and so the entire cityscape seemed to be painted with a neon palette.

  As he walked by the construction site he watched as several power-loaders secured the next assembled floor to the gravity crane. Matt, like every boy with an affinity for “big stuff”, had always fantasized about being able to jump inside one of the three meter tall power-loaders and pretend to be a mech-pilot from the movies, even for just a minute. Just lifting massively heavy construction items would be pretty amazing in and of itself. Then again, he supposed many kids thought it would be pretty slick to work in Space Traffic Control and Matt knew the boring reality of that.

  Across the street from his office he walked by his local coffee spot, which had the order his VIA had automatically sent minutes ago ready for him. As he neared the array of secure grab-and-go’s facing the sidewalk one irised open, and he grabbed the hot beverage without barely breaking stride.

  A few moments later Matt walked inside the GTS building and through the security gate with a hardly any time to spare. The Artificial Building Intelligence welcomed him back and politely informed him that he was due for shift change in less than 3 minutes. He took the lift to the top floor and passed through another security gate before he approached the Near Space Approach Control Center; NSACC as the official acronym painted on the door stated, or “the Pit” as everyone referred to it. Matt paused for a second at the open doors and took in the sight.

  The room was designed in a similar fashion to every control tower since the dawn of commercial spaceflight. It was laid out in a symmetrical hexagon shape with the lift and security area occupying the center, and a series of three sunken landings fanning out from the center and continuing around the entire floor. Consoles and workstations occupied each landing and allowed everyone an unrestricted view of the rest of the floor, lending to the sobriquet

  Three stories tall, the walls and ceiling were all made out of HoloGlass, which wasn’t actually glass at all but rather a super strong transparent polymer embedded with display technology. They allowed for complete transparency or opaqueness and the ability to display imagery on any or all of the individual panels. As it was just nearly noon and there were no scheduled departures or landings from the spaceport imminent, the ceiling panels were almost perfectly dark and the walls let in ample natural light, with various reports, data, and visuals being displayed on them.

  Matt didn’t see a supervisor in the immediate vicinity and quickly entered the Pit with a smile. No ass-chewing today. As soon as he passed through the door threshold his VIA handshook with the NSACC virtual assistant and immediately enabled his work OHUD modules. A steady stream of updates and several messages were calling for his attention in his peripheral vision before he even neared his workstation. Matt ignored them and approached the second shifter he would be replacing.

  “Hey Char, how many in the queue for the afternoon?” Matt asked with practiced intonation.

  Char turned in his seat with a smile, playing along. “Two for sure. Three if I can convince the other two to share.”

  “What lucky lady wouldn’t want to share a prize like you?”

  ““My wife for one…see you tomorrow man” Char replied as he stood up and slapped Matt on the back as he turned to leave.

  The workstation automatically disconnected his primary VIA feeds, and replaced them with Matt’s as he sat down and situated himself. He saw that the next ship wasn’t due to enter near-space for another three hours and that the last ship Char had handled had already been handed over to Low Orbit Docking Control, which meant that he effectively had nothing to do for a while. His workstation AI would prod him to run some training sims in a bit and as usual there were plenty of reports to review but Matt found himself staring out the windows of the Pit.

  There wasn’t much action to see as the airspace in the direction he sat facing was restricted due to the planetary tether being located just a few blocks away. Unless a lifter was making its way up or down the kilometers long cable it was usually a pretty boring sight.

  Matt was stifling a yawn a few minutes later when it started. One second everything was normal, and the next it was utter chaos. The lights dimmed. He suddenly had an excruciating pain in his skull. His OHUD lit up with random fractal-like patterns and scrambled data that obscured his vision and made it nearly impossible to see. His primary workstation screens flickered and displayed similar nonsensical patterns.

  An emergency alarm sounded, and several people in the Pit screamed in terror and pain. A supervisor who had been making the rounds collapsed into a nearby workstation with a loud crash. Matt felt queasy and squeezed his eyes shut but the persistent brilliant display of colors in his vision only made it worse, and he suddenly vomited his lunch all over the console in front of him.

  He tried to disable his OHUD but his VIA didn’t respond to the unspoken command. It wasn’t responding to anything at all. In all his life that had never happened before, and it was like suddenly being unable to move a limb.

  Finally there were several loud pops like balloons exploding inside his head and the crazy colors dancing in his eyes disappeared, even as his headache somehow grew worse. Matt could feel the blood pumping through his skull and his head was ringing, even as the sounds around him were eerily muted as if he was underwater.

  He heard more popping sounds and realized that his workstation had gone dark, and he could smell the acrid scent of burnt wiring. People were still screaming as Matt slowly spun around in his chair to look around, holding his head with both hands as if he could somehow stop the pain by pressure alone. He felt a trickle of blood running from his nose.

  The Pit was in utter chaos. Many people were on the floor or slumped over their workstations, not moving. One workstation was on fire. Most of the others were dark. Only a few seemed to still be operational, with their users twitching on the floor next to them. Matt found he could barely think with the migraine he was experiencing.

  As he spun around in a complete circle he began seeing colors in his OHUD again. Then he realized it wasn’t from his OHUD implants but was an external source of light, but his terminal was still dark in front of him. He looked out the window and his jaw dropped open. The sky itself was changing colors before his eyes.

  He looked up and saw that the power to the HoloGlass had failed, and the panes had all gone transparent. At first Matt thought he was hallucinating, but then realized what he was seeing. It was an aurora, across the entire sky in an amazingly rapid movement of colors. No aurora should have been visible within thousands of kilos of the city, even at night. Was this a solar flare? With no advanced warning? Impossible, thought Matt even as he winced in pain. And he suddenly realized what was happening.

  He stood quickly from his chair, which was a mistake. He was disoriented and had lost all of his sense of equilibrium, and nearly toppled over sideways before grabbing the console. He took a deep breath and slowly and painfully made his way over to one of workstations that still had an image on the screen.

  The first one didn’t seem to be responsive, it just had a jittery array of colored interference that wouldn’t respond. The next one had less interference, and Matt could make out a VIA handshake error message appearing on the screen as he approached it. The workstation couldn’t connect to his VIA, but Matt realized that was because his VIA was likely fried, which
was why he no longer had the OHUD visible at all in his vision. Most of the rest of the staff seemed to be completely disabled by their OHUD malfunctions as he had been moments before.

  Matt sat down and logged into the workstation manually with the keyboard. There was still a lot of interference on the screen but Matt instantly saw the cause of the crisis. In bold red letters an alert on the system stated “Unauthorized Arrival in Restricted Zone C. Unknown Contact Detected.”

  “Gàn!” Matt cursed above all the noise. He started to pull up the approach vector, but it seemed like several of the NSACC systems were non-operational or blocked by interference. He couldn’t get telemetry out of either of the two primary approach control satellites and not even the Orbit Docking Control systems were feeding him data. He kept trying to pull up different sat feeds frantically.

  “What do you have, Controller Chou,” shouted a voice behind him. Matt glanced back, once again too quickly as dizziness blurred his vision, and saw the supervisor who had collapsed teetering on his feet, holding one hand up against a bloody temple. The building then shook and Matt heard a sound that he thought could only be an explosion.

  “Sir, I still don’t believe it but we have a ship that just flashed in, “Matt responded, turning, slowly this time, back to the terminal. “Just inside Zone C.”

  “That’s not…possible,” the supervisor stammered, mirroring Matt’s own thought process. Hundreds of safeguards would have had to simultaneously fail in order for a ship to drop out of FTL this close to the planet. Even if they had, there was no way the detection systems would have missed a starship screaming through the inner solar system at faster than light speeds. Active countermeasures would have been deployed. It didn’t make sense.

  “It sure as hell shouldn’t be, sir…but clearly we’ve been hit by a flash pulse,” Matt replied as he furiously typed on the keyboard.