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ALAZON

AuthorHouse

Chapter One

On a ship nearly half a mile in diameter, and designed to carry over three thousand people from the moon of Earth to a new world, Jason was the only one left alive.

He had been awakened from his sleep in the hyperbolic changers by the computer. It had taken him a moment to realize where he was and what events had brought him to this point. Sitting up and stepping tentatively from his chamber, he had moved to the one next to it, the one that encased Nadia, only to discover that she, along with the others, was dead, and that he was now completely alone.

As that thought came crashing down on him one more Jason gripped the arms of the seat and tried unsuccessfully to fight back his tears. He knew that no amount of crying would bring them back, but that didn't stop the tears from flowing from his eyes.

After what seemed like an hour he touched another portion of the panel, giving him verbal communication with the ship's computer. "Mother?" he called softly.

"Yes?"

The subdued, almost muted reply from the computer seemed inordinately loud to his ears.

"Where are we?" he asked.

"Near a planetary mass close to Canis Major," the computer replied with a throaty, feminine voice.

"So we made it," he said as much to himself as to the computer.

"We made it," Mother replied. "We're approximately two, point seven parsecs, or roughly fifty-two trillion miles from Earth."

The voice of the computer sounded almost as if it also felt the loneliness and pain that prevailed within Jason. He closed his eyes and thought of the long chain of events which had brought him here.

The scientists of New Hope One, who had finally succeeded in combining neural netting and computer hardware with an organic brain had designed 'Mother', as the computer had been playfully dubbed,. The result had been the world's first computer capable of independent, rational thought. A computer with an unlimited capacity for knowledge and learning, capable of handling six trillion mathematical calculations at once. Mother was just one of the scientific breakthroughs those of New Hope had not informed Earth about.

New Hope had been conceived and constructed on Luna ten years prior to Jason's own birth. It was the brainchild of the best scientific minds in a last, desperate attempt to bring peace to a world on the brink of nuclear insanity.

By the year 2123 Earth had been more or less divided by the three super powers of China, Russia and the United Americas which, by then, consisted of what had once been Canada, the United States, Mexico, and most of Central America. An uneasy peace existed between the three powers, with each of the looking for the right opportunity to take over the other two.

In 2092 the United States, which then included Canada and Mexico, had mounted massive air and ground attacks on Central and South America, using tactical nuclear weapons to drive out the Chinese Communists who had taken over. Most of South American had been destroyed in the process. After the smoke cleared they simply annexed whatever was left.

In what had once been Europe a similar scenario had taken place. After the great social and political upheavals that had occurred in the former Soviet Union during the late 1980's and early 1990's, the fourth freely elected Russian President had been assassinate by a group of radicals. Power had reverted to the military, which promptly set their sights not only on the former republics they had lost, but the rest of Europe as well.

After a bloody war with China in which Russia lost most of their land holdings in Asia, the former Soviet Union regrouped and turned their sights south and west. The Russian military had plotted and planned well, and before anyone realized what was happening, they had overrun all of Europe in a daring gamble that had paid off. They had then gone on to take over Africa, killing or enslaving most of the people of that continent.

China, the third major power, had wrested Siberia and Mongolia from Russia during the Sino-Soviet War, and had then turned its attention to the rest of the East and Middle East. They quickly swept the countries of those areas beneath them in the sea of humanity China now possessed.

Egypt, Israel, Syria and Saudi Arabia had put aside their political and religious differences to join forces in an effort to fight the Chinese invasion. For a while it seemed as if they might at least hold things to a draw, as Brazil had done in South American a few years earlier. But when China finally unleashed chemical and germ warfare weapons upon the four countries, not caring what the rest of the world thought, the war was over within a week.

The world had then settled down for a while, with each of the three powers now controlling nearly equal thirds of the globe. They each sat back to lick their wounds and regroup, each of them keeping a wary eye on the other two. It had been the scientists of the world who had seen what was coming and had taken steps to halt it.

At the World Scientific Conference of 2131 a group of the world's best minds had formulated a plan to establish a scientific colony on the moon. It would be a colony that would share all knowledge and discoveries equally with all three powers on Earth. Instead of working against one another, they would work together, hopefully to find a way to bring peace to the world.

For a while it actually worked. The three super powers threw themselves into the project and within months the facility was completed. Equal numbers of scientists from each country were selected to staff it, with the prayers of a frightened world wishing them well.

However, within six months of its establishment a strange metamorphosis began to take place within the inhabitants. Not a physical alteration, but a mental and emotional one that quickly spread to them all. It was one in which they found a new allegiance with one another and their new home rather than with the planet below and its maniacal leaders.

The idea of escaping from their world began innocently enough with a casual remark, but it soon became the only topic of conversation among them. Shortly they developed the idea of escape into a realistic goal. Quietly, gradually, as if by silent agreement, they began to withhold certain items of information, certain discoveries from their mother countries, using them to plan ahead for a new life for themselves and their children.

Using new techniques and discoveries in nano-technology, the scientists of New Hope began to construct the Stargazer, the ship that would transport all of them to another world. The skin of the ship, while lighter in weight than aluminum foil, was constructed of perfectly aligned diamond rods a thousand times stronger than the hardest steel alloys known. Spatial displacement engines were developed which would bend the fabric of space, allowing them to travel light years in relatively short periods of time. All of their knowledge was used to prepare the ship for their journey.

But their most prize possession and accomplishment was the super computer which had affectionately become known as "Mother". Teams of eight programmers had worked in four-hour shifts around the clock for over two years to feed into the computer every scrap of knowledge and history known to man. Every scientific discovery, even projects yet unfinished was programmed into it. Laser discs and holographic cubes covering the arts, music and history were included, as were such things as children's fairy tales and movies.

The scientists worked frantically, never knowing how much time they really had. Yet, when the end came it arrived with a suddenness that caught them off guard by the insanity of Earth. Because of that, and an error in the programming of the computer, it had cost most of them their lives.

Jason and the other children had been aboard the Stargazer for a daylong training exercise when the alarms had sounded. There had been no wild panic, no screaming among the children, but rather a quiet acceptance of what was happening. Jason had rushed to the nearest com unit and quickly established contact with his father. It was then that he discovered that "Mother" had sealed the ship and was in the process of lifting away from the moon, leaving the adults behind.

Jason had practically sprinted to the bridge of the ship, bouncing off the bulkheads in the light gravity in his mad rush. Once there he had activated the main view screen to see what was happening back on Luna. Watching with the other children, he began to feel a sense of lose he really couldn't understand.

Jason watched in stunned horror as rockets lifted from Earth in parabolic arcs that would bring them directly to New Hope. It was at that point that his father contacted him and told him to move the ship away from the moon as quickly as possible to prevent any possible damage to it.

Jason, with the help of Mother, moved the ship almost two hundred miles away, all the while watching as those of New Hope tried to defend themselves. While some manned the photon and phaser canons in a desperate attempt to shoot down the missiles headed their way, others were trying desperately to contact their children aboard the ship. The last sight Jason had of his father was as the man nodded at him through the com unit and turned away, his eyes moist with tears.

Acting on training drilled into him from years of daily practice, Jason moved the ship to a position a thousand miles from the moon just as the first rockets struck and obliterated everyone there. He and the other children had watched through the view screens as those they loved, and the only world they had ever known, vanished in brilliant explosions and clouds of radioactive dust. The maniacs of Earth had wanted to make sure no one escaped their final destruction.

For two days Jason and the other children had merely drifted in space near Saturn, the older ones doing what they could to calm and console the younger. At the end of the second 'day' they had all gathered to decide what their next move should be. They had assembled in the mess hall, with all of them turning to Jason and Nadia, their young, frightened eyes watching the two of them expectantly.

Trish, Jason's nine-year-old sister, had climbed onto his lap. She was clutching the raggedly sewn teddy bear he had made for her when she was only a year old. Her face was a calm repose of trust and confidence. He knew that in her eyes he could do anything. "It's up to you now, Jay," she had told him solemnly. "But I'll be here for you if you need,"

Seventeen children, aged five to twenty, were all that remained of Earth and the human race. Seventeen children who had grown up in a world that had been one giant classroom and playground for them. They had never known restrictions or been hampered in their learning, always being encouraged to dig into things to see what made them tick. Although they had formal educational classes, they had also been given the freedom of any lab or facility at New Hope, allowed to do whatever experiments they wanted, just as long as there was a knowing adult around to make sure they didn't blow themselves or the lab up. Or come up with some mutant gene virus that could wipe out the entire colony.

While each child specialized in one particular field or area, they also became functionally adept in almost every other field of science as well. It wasn't that unusual to find one specializing in micro bionics slipping on a pressure suit to go outside and do some welding on one of the crawlers, or a geneticist helping to do some farming in one of the domes.

Seventeen children with an average I.Q. of one hundred and thirty, but 'egg-heads' they were not. They were like any other group of children, except that they were a lot more inventive in their brands of mischief. They constantly devised new ways to play tricks on one another or the adults. Life was never dull with them around.

But beneath their banter and fun ran an undercurrent of seriousness that propelled them to take an active interest in the work of their parents and the other scientists. As a result, the 'Loonies', as they had dubbed themselves; a term the adults claimed was apt in more than one sense of the word, contributed to many of the scientific breakthroughs of New Hope. They brought a fresh, frank approach to many of the problems they faced.

As Jason opened his eyes and stared at the stars, thinking of this, and of what had happened since their escape, he painfully realized what he now had to do. He felt heaviness forming in the pit of his stomach as he stood and slowly made his way through the gravity free ship to begin the most difficult task of his life.

With tear filled eyes Jason slowly removed the lifeless bodies of the other children; his friends, his lover, his sister, from the hyper-sleep chambers and placed them in black plastic body bags. At the top end of each bag was a clear panel that allowed him to view their faces. Faces that were so peaceful in the sleep from which they would never awaken.

One by one he consigned them to space. The last two, his sister and Nadia, he saved for a moment. Kneeling between them Jason opened the bags to kiss each of them for the last time before sending them out to join the others. It wasn't until he stood and wiped the tears from his eyes that he realized he was clutching Trish's teddy bear in his left hand.

Jason gradually made his way back to the bridge, his mind a jumbled mass of thoughts, emotions, images and fears of what the future might hold for him. He was over fifty two trillion miles from an Earth that no longer existed. And he was alone, with little hope of finding a world where he might be able to settle among his own kind again.

If there even are others of my own kind, he thought sullenly. No scientific proof had ever been brought forth to conclusively establish the existence of other intelligent life in the universe, despite the fact that nearly everyone on New Hope, and many on Earth, believed there must be.

Jason looked up and realized he was at the door of the cabin that had been designated as the Captain's Quarters. "I guess I'm the Captain now," he said softly to himself.

He entered the quarters. They were much the same as all the others, with the exception for size and the communication links with the bridge. He opened the closet and found a number of the jump suits of the style everyone at New Hope had worn. He shook his head when he realized he would have to get rid of them and restock the closet with those of his size. At six feet, two inches tall, and two hundred pounds, Jason had actually been considered small by the standards of the world he had come from. The Captain had been a man nearly a foot taller and fifty pounds heavier. Jason began to remove the clothing, stacking it in a neat pile on the bed before finally carrying it to another cabin.

It took him the better part of an hour to replace the Captain's things with those of his own, doing what he could to make the cabin as comfortable as possible. He had no idea of how long he might have to use it, so he figured he might as well make it as livable as he could from the start. Once he was satisfied he asked Mother to increase the ship's gravity a little more, noticing that she had already begun to do so while he had worked.

Jason stripped off the jump suit he was wearing and took a hot shower, letting the stinging spray ease the tension from his muscles. By the time he stepped out of the shower he noticed that the gravity was now nearly Luna Standard. Making a mental list of the questions he had for Mother, Jason dressed and returned to the bridge.

Sitting in the Captain's seat, he ran his trained eyes over the various instrument panels surrounding him before leaning back and collecting his thoughts for a moment. "Mother?" he said at last.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from ALAZONby Dean R. Marsh Copyright © 2009 by Dean R. Marsh. Excerpted by permission.
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