Horizon ebook Now On Sale
Three hundred years after the fall of the Federation, star systems like the Tiere system have fallen into chaos. Three inhabitable planets and dozens of scattered habitats all out for each other as they each face their own internal struggles.
When a crew of transgenic debris scavengers they come upon an experimental Federation starship they think they’ve hit the jackpot. But instead, they run…
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#book #Fiction #Horizon #SerialHorizon: Salvaged Heroes, Book 1 Epilogue
Aboard the Resolution a wide variety of constructs skittered and rolled about the ship, delivering parts from the vessel’s printers and installing them with their arrays of integrated drills and welders. One construct in particular, though, which had not arrived with the ship from the Ronkalli system, stood waiting in the medical bay for her master to be decanted.
The transparent aluminum wall…
Horizon: Rebuilt Ch. 5
“So,” Jenny thought out loud as she and Horizon left the canteen. “In order to figure out what all is going on in your head, you need to kill an asshole oligarch?”
“No,” Horizon replied. “If he’s still alive I won’t be able to kill him because my implants would recognize him as my commanding officer and stop me.”
The squirrel paused to consider her statement. “Wait, if they won’t allow you to…
Supposedly Spotify won’t let me monetize this version of the podcast until it gets 100 listeners a month.
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Horizon: Rebuilt Ch. 7
Horizon ducked just in time for the claw aimed at her visor to graze the top of her helmet instead. The drone tried to pull back the claw for another strike, but it stuck in the helmet’s gel layer and pulled her head with it. Aggravated the raccoon grabbed the clasps holding her helmet on and released them, freeing her head as the drone tried to shake the helmet off. She quickly assessed her…
Horizon: Rebuilt Chapter 3
The flight back to the base was subdued, slowed by the damaged aircraft. By the time they arrived Bill, and three of the survivors they’d rescued, had expired. Jenny, one of the few members of the Friendly Society who was privy to Horizon’s identity and had medical qualifications, came to extract her from the cockpit of the drone carrier.
The arctic squirrel tugged at the shrapnel in Horizon’s…
The podcast has reached chapter 8 of Horizon: Salvaged Heroes.
As has the video version viewable on YouTube https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB__3VGpTflZmF_U_AA3SCxnDCxxrsUD5
Horizon: Rebuilt Ch. 6
Three days after the rig explosions Horizon raced through a burning factory complex. One of Surtr’s regular moonquakes had finally overwhelmed the under-maintained safety systems of a fifty-year old chemical plant along the equator. Even with her FedTech environment suit and helmet the fumes from the open chemical vats, heat from the flames, and falling girders would tax her regenerative…
An excerpt from a lecture on Interstellar Travel 101 by professor Rchel Coligera of the University of Dawson Sphere, 3002 PX.
Now I can see that most of you have turned in your pre-course surveys and there was one question that just kept appearing. “Why aren’t we covering wormholes?” Well, I can answer that quickly: Wormholes are obsolete, expensive, and slow.
Yes, slow, I spoke correctly.
”How can that be?” You ask? Well that’s a bit more complicated.
How many of you are from Carrack? Okay, seven of you, good. How about Algernon? Eight, nice. Persephone? Eleven, really? Well, we’ve got quite a few relativist students, that’s no surprise for Interstellar Travel 101.
What would you say if I told you that under the Federation none of you would have left your home system?
At the Federation’s height it’s estimated that less than one in one hundred star systems were within a year’s travel of a wormhole. And most ships took close to a year to reach a wormhole, even the fastest ships of the Federation era took a month to travel from an inhabitable planet to the Oort Cloud where wormholes could be safely emplaced. Travel from systems without wormholes often took decades. You interstellar students are aware that by the time you return home your siblings and classmates will be middle-aged grandparents, unless they were fortunate enough to have access to leukosynths. But if you’d taken a wormhole to Alpha Centauri, they’d be long dead.
Sure, we could combine modern singularity drives with wormhole travel, but why would we? The wormhole network is gone, with a few rare exceptions. And it would be far too expensive to try and rebuild it.
You might have heard that the micro-singularities powering a 1,000-hydro-ton liner consumed a small planetoid, but the mass consumed to make transversable wormholes is measured in stars. We can only guess how many brown dwarfs were sucked up into Proxima Centauri’s StarForge. Just one brown dwarf could support a population of billions, as many peripheral polities have discovered after obtaining singularity drives, or build a fleet of thousands.
Due to this expense the StarForge took the better part of a century to produce the first traversable wormhole. Even in the Federation’s final century we only have records of four, maybe five new wormholes opening. This was one reason why 90% of all wormholes connected to the Alpha Centauri system, and collapsed when Sol went nova.
So, the better question is, why did the Federation bother with wormholes at all? Why didn’t they just build stellar swarms like the one you’re all sitting inside? Two words: Dispersal and security.
The Core Worlds were colonized by refugees from Sol after the Destroyers scrubbed the system of life. When the Federation formed they knew that the only way they could survive as a clade was to keep a low profile, thus they adopted a policy of spreading parahumanity thin across the stars. Since the Destroyers were apparently destroyed, the university has detected five other stellar swarms in the past two centuries, including around Alpha Centauri B, Tau Ceti, and Epsilon Eridani; the Federation’s Core Worlds.
As for the second point, the Federation could not tolerate competition. You might have heard of a “Pax Federaci” but I’m going to tell you right now that entire concept is revisionist bullshit. The university’s archaeological expeditions have uncovered sizable evidence that “deportations” to Outworlds were far more common than the records would indicate. Helped, naturally, by the Federation’s policy of erasing all evidence of the deported’s existence in the name of “memetic containment.” We have even discovered a few Outworlds that appear to have started as fully Federated colonies, only to be bombed back to the Stone Age later on.
So, yeah, we might be islands in space and time separated by years, but we’re more connected than ever.