The Perihelix

By Jemima Pett

Two asteroid miners, three women, one spacecraft, and five pieces of a legendary weapon scattered around the galaxy.

Big Pete and the Swede are rich, or so they discover after bringing in their latest haul of orichalcum from the asteroid belt. So some well-deserved vacation awaits them. It starts out just fine, with one of the men winning the big flyer-race of the season, but they start to receive odd messages, and despite the attentions from the girls, both realise that someone is trying to drag them back to their pasts, pasts they have tried hard to erase.

They set out to discover who’s bugging them, but get kidnapped by some particularly nasty aliens, which leaves the girls in a mess – stranded on the spaceship with very little idea how to fly it. Kidnap, archaeology, imperial politics, and a chase from the centre of the galaxy to its very extremes... and sentient trees.

This second edition has been completely overhauled for your reading enjoyment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princelings Publications
• Release date: Feb 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310820670

Jemima Pett

Jemima Pett has been living in a world of her own for many years. Writing stories since she was eight, drawing maps of fantasy islands with train systems and timetables at ten. Unfortunately no-one wanted a fantasy island designer, so she tried a few careers, getting great experiences in business, environmental research and social work. She finally got back to building her own worlds, and wrote about them. Her business background enabled her to become an independent author, responsible for her own publications.Her first series, the Princelings of the East, mystery adventures for advanced readers set in a world of tunnels and castles entirely populated by guinea pigs, is now complete. The tenth and final book, Princelings Revolution, came out in October 2020. Jemima does chapter illustrations for these. She has also edited two volumes of Christmas stories for young readers, the BookElves Anthologies, and her father's memoirs White Water Landings, about the Imperial Airways flying boat service in Africa. She has compiled four collections of flash fiction tales, publishing in the first half of 2021. She is now writing the third in her science fiction series set in the Viridian System, in which the aliens include sentient trees.Jemima lived in a village in Norfolk with her guinea pigs, the first of whom, Fred, George, Victor and Hugo, provided the inspiration for her first stories, The Princelings of the East. She is now living in Hampshire, writing science fiction for grown-ups, hatching plans for a new series, and writing more short stories for anthologies.

Book preview

The Perihelix

Viridian System series Book 1

By Jemima Pett

Second Edition fully revised

Published by Princelings Publications, Norfolk, UK

© J M Pett 2018

Smashwords edition v 2.1

Cover by Dawn Cavalieri and Jemima Pett

Vega asteroid field background graphic courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech

The rights of Jemima Pett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of names or characters to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to all those who have read and commented on the stories that led to the development of this series, in particular to Rebecca Douglass, Noelle Granger, David Prosser, Annette Abel, Patricia Lynne, Damyanti Biswas, and Vidya Sury for their continued support, and to these people together with Margaret Elcox and 'Hellvis' for their comments on early editions of the Perihelix.

As always, my thanks and appreciation goes to my editors, Dawn Cavalieri, who worked on the original document, the late Kate Jackson, who gave me honest and constructive advice on my revisions, and whose untimely death left me in a spin, to Mary McGuire for referring me to her, and to Rebecca Douglass who made sure I put all that advice into action eventually.

Thank you all.

Language and cultural notes

I attend avidly to the 'word of the day' feature on C4's Countdown, and note how words have evolved in their usage and meaning over a mere two hundred years. Having set this series some 800 years in the future, I wanted to let the language evolve, especially since the cultural influences of a many-species intergalactic society should have enriched 'Standard' extensively.

On the whole I have used words for technology that have immediate resonance with the state of technology in 2017, indeed, some of it may seem old fashioned within a couple of years. But as references to the 'Exodus from Old Earth' suggest, some technologies have continued and others have had to be rediscovered in those 800 years. I hope that technology has reverted to being a servant rather than a driver of society, but it means that I can use words for swearing on the basis of their sound or resonant effect, rather than their current usage in America, for example. Equally, old racial tensions on Earth have been displaced by questions of alien domination in the Alpha Quadrant, and skin color is not generally an issue, save when it is accompanied by poisonous skin secretions or a knife-blade tail.

I am also glad to see that sentience in ‘animals’ is no longer questioned.

For further discussions on world-building for the Viridian System series, and further revelations from the Cavalieri-Chang Modern Universal Word Usage, 2822 edition, please see the website viridianseries.uk

Chapter 1

~~~

Orichalcum: n. a rare metallic element, much prized for its malleability, ductile strength, and conductivity. Principal uses in the civilized universe are for components with instantaneous communication capability, those with super-sensitivity to heat-cold and esper radiation, and works of art. Naturally occurring in certain types of asteroid, generally a long way from civilized parts. Legendary use: as coinage in Old Earth Ancient Greece (pre-Exodus), for weapons with strange powers, and as a power source. Contrary to some descriptions in legendary uses, orichalcum emits a green aura, not red. (Cavalieri-Chang Modern Universal Word Usage, 2822 edition)

~~~

Just one more day. Just one. That was all.

Don’t mess up.

I won’t. I always check. You know that.

Lars Nilsson, known as the Swede, ignored the narrowed eyes and shake of the head from his partner, and swung himself into the airlock. Pete would always state the obvious. It was part of his safety check. But it was always Lars that did the tricky mineral extractions. Pete did ores, Lars did seams.

Twenty minutes later he was on the asteroid, checking the security of the pins in the rocky entrance to their current mining site. Next was the fiddly job of fixing the safety net behind him. Lars swore a few times as his space-suited fingers fumbled with the antique hooked tool. What was the name of the planet they’d found it on? It fixed the netting in place quicker, but it was still fiddly. He kept meaning to look up what ‘crochet’ was. He shook his head, reminding himself: concentrate—last day.

Across the void of space the pale green light of Viridium, their sun, cast an eerie color wash over the asteroid’s surface; it was bright enough for Lars to read by, but then, he was born on a dim-sun planet. Further in, Pleasant Valley and Sunset Strip, the twin habitable Viridian planets, reflected the sunlight across the ecliptic, left and right, the furthest separation they would have when seen from the asteroid belt. It was a grand sight.

Sometimes Lars stopped to admire it, but not when he was drilling. He checked back across the one hundred meters to the skin of their craft. His partner, ‘Big’ Pete Garcia, waved his arm from one side to the other: ‘all clear’. He had a brief memory of their first few mining trips back on Excelsior, when they used voice comms—might as well put out a homing beacon for pirates. The Viridian system was too far from most places to be a target. A few claim-jumpers would love to know which rock the system’s most successful orichalcum miners were working.

Lars floated down the tunnel to the fresh rock face.

Don’t mess up. Safety first. Last day.

The end of a mining tour brought fatigue, greed, space-craziness, and over-confidence, and the outcome was nearly always irreversible. Lars checked his safety gear, his emergency pack, his tether feeding out along the tunnel, and hoisted the pneumatic drill whose hose stretched all the way back to the ship. He located the seam he’d hit at the end of the previous shift, and started to cut it out.

Back on the ship, Pete would be monitoring the hose. It was years now that they’d been using something that ran on compressed air, adapted to work in a vacuum, and they had been pleased with the results. Hacking orichalcum out with a pickaxe was effective, but tiring; the price of an uncontrolled rebound could be a pierced suit or a cracked helmet. Electronic machinery didn’t work well near orichalcum; it would cut out for unknown reasons, just as the ship systems could if you got too close to the asteroid. This drill’s compressor and hose were archaic, but worked. Lars could focus entirely on the rock face in front of him; Pete would be running through his checklist of safety precautions, keeping one eye on the net across the end of their current tunnel. Lars joked about the many redundancies Pete built into their operations, but it had kept them alive for more than twelve standard years. Every conceivable incident had a procedure. All had been tested, and most had been used.

Lars braced himself against one side of the tunnel and drilled between his feet on the other wall. Dust hung around in the vacuum of space. So much of this work was feel and instinct. The sound waves from the drill pierced the tufa, vibrating into his suit where he touched the surface. The feel of the drill in his hands changed; it juddered, hitting metamorphoid rock. Lars paused, watching swirls of dust and smaller rocks as the microgravity turbo-collector sucked them up to their ore processor. The routine helped him keep track of time without having to wipe the surface of his qwatch.

There! The seam of pure orichalcum he had hit the day before was now exposed for around forty centimeters. He started drilling above and below the edges, tracing its line. A long one—seams rarely went more than a few cents. It was not just the metal’s obscure locations that made orichalcum so rare. This find was a long, flat thread, almost a ribbon. He reached for his hand pick and carefully felt out all along the visible part. Pincers, where were they? He let the pick float and angled the pincers to cut through the ribbon where it dove deep into the rock. He retraced his path out of asteroid tunnel, and stowed the ribbon carefully in one of the holdalls that was anchored there.

Is that enough? It’s worth a few million credits on its own. We’ve got a good haul.

He rubbed the face of his helmet, wishing he could rub away the sweat and grime from his face. However clean they got the suits, rock dust got into the fabric in the airlock and accreted onto their skin while mining.

I hate this. One more go.

Back at the face, he lifted the drill, braced his feet, and tried to intercept the ribbon again.

The jet of gas spewed out with the merest microsecond of warning.

In the minuscule time it took to thrust Lars back down the tunnel to crash into the netting, he registered the miracle of missing the rough edges, the need to hang on to the netting with all his strength, and to make sure his suit’s integrity wasn’t lost. He screamed as the force threatened to cut him in two, and squirmed to avoid the blast as the net lost its seatings on one side. He grabbed the threads with his fingers, and fought to control his breathing in fear of decompression. Adrenalin rushed through his system as his tether tightened and he heard Pete’s calm voice saying ‘zed three’ in his helmet.

He let go of the net, crossed his arms across the blackening fabric of the suit, and allowed the auto-retract to pull him the hundred meters to the ship in under six seconds. He rolled into a ball, allowing the capture net to suck him into the airlock but minimize the damage to his soft human organs from momentum change. The hatch above him slammed shut just as his suit threatened to rupture. His vision blurred, but the color in the pressure gauge still showed red…. green!

Lars breathed. He shuddered. He made himself release his arms. He’d prevented a major breach in his suit, but the burn marks were still spreading where the jet had scorched them. He wanted to curl up with eyes closed, but he had to get out of the suit. As he struggled with the tough fabric, he realized that Pete was above him, looking through the porthole on the airlock hatch. He gave him a thumbs-up, and a weak grin. Pete responded likewise. One more safety procedure that worked in practice. Lars crawled out of the airlock back into the ship, and curled up in the medibunk to recover.

Two hours later, Pete woke him, having rescued the holdalls with their largest finds, and completed hosing up all the other debris.

You’re fixed, for now, according to the chart.

Damn chart knows nothing.

Pete smirked and went through to the console in what they called the office. Lars followed, groaning as he moved. Pete took a drink from the beaker of warm flavored water they tried to imagine was coffee, and rubbed his moustache.

Okay, then?

Yeah. Maybe we need better auto-sealing suits. Lars scratched his head and looked at the result showing under his fingernails in disgust. Have I ever said how much I hate this job?

Once or twice. Always near the end, though. Maybe we should make the trips one month shorter.

We tried that when we finished at Kappa Venturi.

Well, next time…

Lars nodded. Yeah. My belly hurts.

Let’s get Zito to sort us out a real holiday place this time. Take it for six months. A year, even.

What about a place we could live if we really liked it?

Sounds good. After the Amberson, of course.

Sirtis! When did the entries close?

Lars tapped the console to bring up the rules of the Amberson Trophy. If they’d missed the entry deadline for the big flyer’s race on Pleasant Valley, he’d kill someone.

I’ll send Zito a message. Relax, Lars. Go take another spray. Then sleep.

~~~

Zito, who if pressed for a first or second name would reply ‘Zito’, strolled back from Horatio’s bar to his own. The Amberson Trophy flyers’ race always caused them headaches. The influx of competitors and spectators stretched the limited resources of the city, yet it gave the Viridian System a good name for tourism, and that helped his bank balance. The solution they’d come up with this year was to kick the miners out of rooms into free board and accommodation in one of the spare hangars on the west of town. Most of them would be glad to save on rent and food. They were only here because they couldn’t afford to go to Sunset Strip. Competitors needed rooms, but since he and Horatio organized the race, they knew exactly how many by the time entries closed a week earlier.

In Horatio’s, Zito had taken a look at the race list and added two more names to it.

You can’t do that! Horatio had complained.

Zito had stared him down. Entry was in my computer. Why hadn’t it been processed?

The memory of Horatio’s sigh made Zito smile again.

Although they reckoned they’d covered all eventualities for this year’s festive season, Zito continued to look for problems, risks not properly assessed, unthought-of dangers, as he kept to the shadows. It was second nature to him—Pleasant Valley was anything but well-named. Maybe it had been appropriate a thousand years ago, but its orbit had brought it closer to Viridium, and one day they might have to leave it altogether. Or go underground, or even—as some visiting ‘expert’ had suggested—just relax and wait for it return to a tropical paradise climate again.

The middle of the day was siesta time. The bazaar was quiet. The dogs slept. Even the flies took a nap. Only the smells and the garbage took their usual strolls around the alleyways.

Zito turned another corner, crossed the dusty track that led from the spaceport, and went in through swing doors to a cavernous building with a balcony and three more floors above, hewn out of the side of a cliff. It stood in glorious decrepitude across the block from the pristine, classic architectural wonder occupied by the Exchange. A lot of money passed through Walton City, as the main settlement was officially known, and the Exchange handled all of it. Zito got the small change. There was enough of it for him.

He dusted himself down and went behind the bar to pour a cooling beverage, which he took back to the tiny note-strewn desk filling the cubbyhole that he called his office. He ignored the papers in favor of the incomings.

Took you long enough to ask for that, he muttered, as he read Pete’s request for entries and flyers for the Amberson. Sparking futzes! They had used his new system to book the girls, but Aramintha wasn’t available. Lars was upset. I bet he is. Serves him right. Book ’em straight away, why don’t ya? Well, if I can’t reschedule her, you’ll have to wait.

~~~

Lars! Wake up, you baboon’s backside; we’ve drifted.

In the second bunk, built into the wall of the spacecraft midway between the control room and the galley, Lars reacted with a groan and a shiver. Futzing fernandos, it was cold. Lars collided with the opposite wall in the space black of an unlit ship, as he sought out his coveralls to ward off the sub-zero temperatures. How long’ve we been down?

Who knows? How long have we slept for?

Lars cursed the timing. Why now, while they both slept? Why not earlier, when one would have been on watch. Then he could have blamed Pete. Mining was done for this trip—just a day’s ore processing, then they could leave. So both had slept.

Why had they drifted this time? They’d spent hours of waiting time throwing around possible reasons for the power-loss effect of orichalcum. This was the third time the ship had drifted closer to the belt, lost power, and gravity had taken over.

Lars emerged from his bunk right behind Pete and slid into the established routine. In the control seat, Pete tapped switches to confirm it wasn’t an ordinary failure, Lars prepared to take their position. Without knowing that, they couldn’t use the best ‘escape’ option. He pulled out an aluminum chest from a snug fit in the sidewall. Flipping the catch, he extracted an expanding wooden frame with a number of pegs sticking up. Then he snapped a round object into its centre and stretched the wood this way and that, looking from one peg to another and through the side window. He read some numbers on the round object, grunted, and repeated the operation through a porthole in the cabin roof.

Pete took out two grey shiny pads, each with a stick attached by string, and an assortment of hand tools.

One nine seven, one four five, zero three zero. Lars called his readings to Pete, who wrote the numbers on the grey pad with the stick.

Damn.

Space anchor’s still there.

Rate of descent?

Slow enough.

Solar sail?

Best option.

Having used the ancient device he had acquired from a junk heap on Beta Kareninas, Lars had fixed their position relative to Viridium and the arc of the asteroid belt. They could deploy the delicate sail that caught solar wind to move them away from the asteroid. Lars relaxed slightly: the only real alternative was to suit up, hope for a soft collision and bounce off fast enough to leave the orichalcum influence. They only knew of one mining outfit that had succeeded.

Pete climbed into his spacesuit and went out of the airlock to unfurl the solar sail. Lars crawled underneath the corridor into the hold to check that the air supply was still pressurized, then checked his scorched spacesuit. Only a fool would risk the integrity of that fabric. He squeezed into the spare and went to join Pete.

Lars controlled the base of the sail while Pete pulled himself along a rope attached to its head. The sail stretched out for hundreds of meters. Lars kept a close eye on his partner as Pete went just far enough to attach a second coil of rope to the gossamer fabric. He pulled the rope out as he came back, crabbing to the back of the spacecraft and then climbing some way along the drift anchor rope. Lars waited for his hand signals and responded, mainly with a thumbs-up. Pete tied off the rope and shimmied back to the hatch. They floated and watched for a while, swapped ‘maybe’ hand expressions, and re-entered the ship.

Either it will or it won’t, Lars grunted, pulling on his ice-planet coveralls.

Pete shrugged, dressed, and kept a lookout through the porthole. Lars smoothed medication on his bruised stomach and went back to bed, until the hum of the craft rebooting roused him.

By the time they’d finished pulling in and stowing the sail, the ship’s systems were recharged and the ore processor was ready to rumble.

What I don’t understand is—why did it drift? Space anchor stayed put.

Pete shrugged his shoulders. All systems go, anyway.

Lars gritted his teeth against the vibrations from the ore processor. At least it signaled the end of the trip. He concentrated on checking the log for a clue to when and why the systems failed. Something odd here, he commented.

Pete looked over at his screen. Lars pointed.

Computer, display security log.

Lars looked over at Pete’s screen as the log scrolled through. There.

A few taps and Lars brought up a comms exchange just before the computer had shut down through loss of power.

We lost power and then drifted? Weird.

I don’t remember that happening before. Ever. Lars sighed. We’re going to have to—

Yeah. Vvoice on. Hi, computer.

Working. The computer’s voice, emanating from the viewscreen level with their heads, raised hairs on the back of Lars’ neck. It had a flat, dull tone, not human, not quite electronic.

What does this exchange at 9073.25 mean? Lars put his finger on the log, to emphasize.

Unauthorized entry.

We were hacked?

An attempt was made, yes.

How far did they get in? Pete asked.

Preliminary interchange only. I’m not dumb, you know.

Snarky comments will get you turned off again. Lars rolled his eyes. He could swear the computer sniffed. Where did the hack originate?

Attempted hack origin unknown. Three waypoints detected before blocked.

Path? Pete asked.

Unreliable data.

Go on, give us your best guess. Lars had a hate-hate relationship with the computer in voice mode. After years of attempting to train it to their preferred style, they had given up.

Imperium Security 30%; Federation 28%; Imperium agency 21%; Imperium Senate 12%; Brotherhood 8%; someone else 1%.

That’s only 99%, Pete said.

1% error.

Yours or theirs? Lars pounced; he was sure the computer sniffed.

Rounding errors.

He grinned at Pete, then wondered. How come you included Imperium Senate separately?

Comms fingerprint. You asked for a best guess. You got it.

Thank you, Vvoice off. Pete cut in as Lars started a rejoinder. Doesn’t take much to remind us why we keep him off.

Lars took in a deep breath and let it out audibly. Why the Senate, though?

Why not?

Why not indeed, Lars thought, shoving unwelcome memories away as he checked the rest of the comms to make sure everything was normal. Maybe he was behind with his own hacking skills. Maybe he just needed a woman. His favorite woman—Aramintha.

Twenty-seven hours later they docked at Pleasant Valley’s space hub—rather than the more expensive groundside space port—leaving an order for full service and parking until further notice.

On the walkway to the transit, Lars stood out among the arrivals; his height and coloring were a throwback to legendary fair-haired warrior nations. Most miners knew him and ignored his appearance. A couple of other space travelers spat at his feet. He ignored them. He was easily mistaken for an Ouroboron or the detested Imperium Inner Circle. He walked tall and chose his adopted names to support the third alternative, Scanian.

He sometimes envied Pete’s deep-space tan over his already copper-colored skin, typical of his origins on a farming planet. He passed unremarked amongst the various shades of spacer. The large sack of orichalcum ore swung over his shoulder was another matter; it drew admiring glances.

They waved their miner tags at the securicop, who nodded at them while responding to a flashing light; the cop steered the female behind them into an interview room at the side. Lars looked at Pete, shrugged, and pulled the cuff on his coverall over his telltale scar. Eighty percent of people in this part of the galaxy had a similar scar where they’d dug the legacy of their birth out from their bodies. Nobody here wanted microchips, all had hidden pasts, and most enjoyed Pleasant Valley’s lawlessness. People with microchips were from an Imperium planet, and only their wealth was wanted.

An assorted lot of space jetsam pressed against them as they took the transit planetside. When Pete growled at the second who attempted to touch their sack of orichalcum ore, Lars took it from him to carry in better view. He looked down at Pete’s shaggy hair, heavy eyebrows, and rumpled outfit. He could have done better to clean himself up. He looked what he was: just out of the asteroid belt. Lars could see own his reflection in the mirrored panel; a hint of chubbiness over good bone structure might once have made women call him attractive, but the twice-broken nose and his complexion spoiled the overall effect. He hefted the sack artlessly over one shoulder, and he trusted Pete to make sure that nobody got their hand or other appendage on it.

A few minutes in the miner’s transit area in the space port allowed them to use the spa facility for a real wash and change into their clean planet-style clothes. Brown-haired, green-eyed Pete emerged in his customary dark brown pants and loose tan shirt, supported by an unnecessary faux animal-hide jerkin and matching boots, while Lars let his well-developed shoulder muscles and biceps stretch the fabric of his white shirt, which was neatly tucked into tailored dark blue pants.

The dusty streets of Walton City greeted them like old friends. Lars breathed in the heated atmosphere and sighed, then ducked as two drunks reeled out of an alley throwing fists at each other. Pete grabbed the wrist of a slithy Barbarian, twisting it back till it clicked. The Barbarian howled.

Try someone else’s pocket, fool.

Lars grinned at him. Home! They passed three bars with varying degrees of raucous laughter, shouting, and what passed for music from the Aldebaran dive. By the sound of it, there was a cockfight going on in Swindle’s Alley. Not their scene. Gambling had always seemed a waste of time and money to Lars. Pete was usually happy to play, provided it was for small change. He led the way into their favorite bar. They took up positions on two stools, elbows on the stone counter, the sack on the floor between them.

Big Pete! The Swede! Welcome back! Usual?

Pete and Lars ignored covert glances from the other customers; most would be assessing the size of their sack. The two miners had eyes only for the golden liquid as the bartender drew them two liters of the local brew.

Just in time for your Krismas, eh? the bartender asked as he put the glasses on neat mats and wiped the bar around them.

Lars always enjoyed the welcome that they received at Zito’s Bar. They might look like dozens of other workers, but the pairs’ presence aroused whispers among the other customers. At least three groups would by now be taking bets on how much was in the sack.

The asteroid miners sank half their ale in one long draught, savoring the cold freshness and the hop flavor as it passed over their tongues. They put the glasses down and wiped their mouths with the backs of their hands. Pete wiped his moustache as well.

Good pickings? The bartender was used to miners fresh out of space. They nodded and sank their noses in their glasses again.

Boys! Welcome back! Zito came scurrying from the depths of the back rooms to greet them. The exchange is closed today. Do you want anything put in my safe?

Still drinking, Lars leaned sideways, lifted the sack with one hand, and swung it onto the counter. Zito put one hand on it, then the other, dragged it to the edge, and grappled it to the safe in the back room. Lars listened for the whizz and clunk of the safe being opened and closed.

How long are you staying? Zito called.

Four or five nights, assuming you’ve got us in the Amberson, Pete called back.

I haven’t got a room with a view till full moon. I’ve booked you in the Amberson, though, he said, coming out. Here. He handed the miners a card.

Thanks, Zito. Lars pocketed it.

First floor back.

Lars valued Zito’s care of them. Apart from the bar, its hotel, recreation rooms, and a couple of other hangouts, he ran a number of useful enterprises, including his thriving escort agency—the only official one in the system—and could supply most things other than space hardware for travelers vacationing