Seeds of Calamity

By Joseph Dooley

Felton wrangles asteroids for a living. With his brother Levi and shipmates Blake and Castor, he scours the Asteroid Belt for valuable minerals on a space cruiser dubbed the Marillion.

When the Marillion crew lose financial backing, they’re left to fend for themselves in the dog-eat-dog depths of space. They enter an uneasy partnership with the smuggler Keegan, who’s delivering sensitive cargo for a secretive client.

Joined by Customs agent Greta Holtz, they descend on Mars, where men’s unchecked ambition violently collides with the power of an alien lifeform. Tossed about by forces far greater than himself, it’s all Felton can do to survive, let alone avert a calamity that threatens everything he holds dear...
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From hard sci-fi novelist Joseph Dooley comes Seeds of Calamity, a new tale of the future packed with twists, thrills, and heart-stopping action.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joseph Dooley
• Release date: Nov 5, 2019

Joseph Dooley

Joseph Dooley is a writer, as well as a Christian, a Texan, a husband, and a father.

Book preview

Seeds of Calamity

by

Joseph Dooley

©2019 Joseph Dooley.

All rights reserved.

This book may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without prior express written permission of the author.

This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed herein are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Edited by Deborah Dooley.

Cover design by Joseph Dooley.

For tender Margaret, who is too young to appreciate the joys she gives to an old soul like mine.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

About the Author

Prologue

After the dust storm blew through, it was like an alien world again. The footpaths and vehicle tracks were swept away. A fresh tawny film clung to the idle equipment and manmade structures. The steel mill’s gas wastes, which usually fogged in this end of the canyon, were scattered, giving clear views of Mars’s two moons to the south.

Regan resumed climbing the canyon’s east face. Slung over her shoulder were a climbing axe and a long-handled brush. They dinged the back of her helmet as she clambered over a granite outcropping jutting out of the sandstone.

She checked her footholds before applying her weight. Carbon dioxide frost layered on top of fine silt made the rock slippery. No problem, she thought. She’d been playing on these cliffs since she was four. Her slender limbs were ideal for spanning holds, easy to twist and fit in confined spaces. She didn’t even need to use her climbing axe.

Across the canyon, Torrance walked along the funicular rail, borne aloft on trestles built into the cliff that rose up between the town and the dull western expanse above. He blasted the track and towrope with compressed air, sending up puffs of red-orange dust. The dust that didn’t disperse stuck to his activity suit, camouflaging him against the cliff face. If he didn’t occasionally turn the compressed air on himself, the dust would corrode his suit and foul his air supply.

She knew which radio channel he was camped on in case they needed each other. She didn’t like talking when she was out here. In town, there were always people who you couldn’t help hearing, smelling, or touching. Solitude came at a premium no one she’d ever met could afford.

She cleared the shadow line cast by the west cliff. The slope leveled and she no longer required the use of her hands. Before her a rough volcanic plain tilted to the west, unvaried but for lava trenches cut into the plain. Most times she would have seen the broad flank of Alba Mons looming behind the solar farm, but all she saw now was the dust storm’s ruddy smear. To her left were the Cottian Hills and behind her, Artynia Catena, the 160-mile canyon her people called home.

She arrived at the substation at the solar farm’s southwest corner, where high-voltage transmission lines fed into an oxidized lead pipe buried in the claypan. The pipe followed the canyon’s east rim and was bundled to the funicular rail. After cleaning the solar panels, she would meet Torrance on the rail platform and ride it into town.

She brushed an inch of tacky dust off the transformers and moved on to the nearest panel, which had been locked up since the dust storm hit. As the first light in days touched a corner of the panel’s surface, the array’s motor grinded and the panel swiveled to face the brightest light source in the cloudless amber sky, the Sun. Most of the dust still caked on the panel cascaded to the ground on its own.

She gave the panel a once-over with the brush and proceeded along the row, repeating the process for each panel. There were 20 panels per row, 600 panels in all.

She made the turn at the southeast corner of the solar farm and started down the second row. To her chagrin, the panels she’d already cleaned pivoted all at once like a line of soldiers marching in formation.

She looked at the sky. An emerald light shimmered above the horizon, bigger and brighter than the Sun. It drifted north, leaving a trail of dark smoke.

Her mouth fell open and she dropped the brush in the dirt.

The descending object’s speed became apparent as it neared the surface, spanning the 2-mile-wide canyon in a fraction of a second. Regan shut her eyes to the blinding light.

The pressure wave struck first, no more forceful than a shove in the negligible atmosphere. Then the ground heaved violently, throwing her down. Something heavy fell on top of her. A stabbing pain shot up the backs of her thighs.

She twisted out from beneath the downed solar array and staggered toward the canyon. The ground all around her shook and fractured, slabs of clay thrusting up and down at wild angles, sifting the topsoil. Both transformers blew and showered the area with sparks.

Out of the north, a plume of dust and ash churned like a dust storm more violent than any she’d seen before. It engulfed New Monviso, gateway to the Cottian Hills.

She tuned her radio to the preset channel and keyed on her helmet mic. Torrance!

The boy’s voice shuddered with fright, barely discernible over a howl of static. What’s happening?!

Something fell out of the sky. There’s a storm headed this way!

She approached the rim cautiously. The quake was shaking loose massive swaths of rock from the escarpment and throwing them into the canyon. The route she’d taken up the east cliff face was gone. All the routes on the east face were gone.

She glimpsed Torrance clinging to the rail a thousand feet above the canyon floor. Even from a distance, she could see the trestles swaying, the joists buckling, bowing the rail like a clothesline. Steel was not supposed to bend like that.

She hurried south along the rim. Hold on! I’m coming!

She could reach the platform in 5 minutes at a dead sprint. She would ride it down and pick him up. The dusty towrope would degrade the pulley wheel and earn her a reprimand, but at least she and Torrance would be safe.

Don’t! he screamed. The rail won’t hold!

No sooner had his words reached her than the struts halfway up the trestle he was on severed. The supports on either side of the break leaned against the cliff, snapping from their bases. The trestle disintegrated and tumbled to the bottom of the canyon. Torrance’s diminutive figure vanished in the red haze. She heard his cries and the awful squelching sounds of his body being crushed under rock and steel.

Farther below, the town’s central dome collapsed, the roof inverting under hundreds of tons of fallen rock. The atmosphere displaced faster than Mars’s thin air could suck it out, creating a secondary debris field like an aureole around the dome.

Regan blinked in shock. The devastation below her was so complete, so sudden. All she had ever known was gone in an instant.

The plume reached the solar farm, burgeoning higher, arcing bolts of lightning to the ground. Her mind raced. She could still survive, but she would have to make do with what she had.

She ran from the cliff’s edge to a piece of rebar poking out of the dirt. A crack in the claypan had opened nearby, exposing the lead pipe 2 feet under the surface.

She went to her knees and wielded the climbing axe for the first time that day. She choked up on the haft and hacked frantically at the clay and topsoil, widening the crack. Sparks flew as the blade nicked the pipe.

Satisfied, she pulled a foil sheet from a pocket in her suit and wrapped it around herself like a shawl, pinching the edges shut in her left fist. She burrowed into the hole as far as she could and curled her right hand under the pipe.

The pipe must be broken in a hundred places from the quake, but the section she clung to held firm.

A blast of wind lifted the foil like a sail, tearing it from her grip. She lost sight of it in the dust and ash. She turned her shoulders to get her other hand around the pipe.

An enormous weight settled on top of her, crushing the air out of her lungs. She gasped and started to cry.

Then everything went black.

Chapter 1

The drill bit turned soundlessly between Felton’s boots, spitting flecks of slate-like rock. They bounced off his spacesuit, neither propelled by wind and gravity nor slowed by air resistance.

He released the clutch on the rock drill and extracted a round bar of rock a handspan long out of the cut. He tied it to the sling and winched it up to the Marillion for analysis.

Sample’s on its way, he said, spotlighting the sample with his headlamp, a solid white beam in the mellow wash of the cruiser’s floodlights.

I’m ready, he heard Castor say in the background.

Castor had pegged the asteroid as an M-type, a rarity in the outer Belt. Rare and valuable. If they didn’t document the asteroid’s mineral content, they exposed themselves to unscrupulous collectors low-balling its market value, a lesson they’d learned the hard way.

The sling jammed against the block on top of the winch. A reticulated arm reached out of the auxiliary airlock and untied the rock sample from the sling. The arm retracted, pulling the sample through the outer hatch.

Got it, Castor said.

Felton detached from the rigging and flicked the tip of his tongue against his lower-right wisdom tooth. The circuit in his jaw closed. The electric current made a faint ringing in his ear. He brought his gloved hands together to feel the resistance from the magnetic field. He bent down and stuck his palms on an ice-free patch of coarse stone.

Keeping his hips low, he climbed across the asteroid, pressing his crampons in the opposite direction as his arms to stabilize his body. He worked up a good lather methodically following his progressions. Reach, hold, step, rebalance, hold, step, rebalance, repeat. Between each hold, he turned his wrists to twist his hands off the stone.

This asteroid was big, bigger than the Marillion itself and a thousand times denser. With any luck, it would consist of minerals vital to sustaining life but that were too costly to ship out of the inner solar system.

EVA time: 1 hour, Levi said, his voice wound tight.

Levi got like that when his little brother left the safety of the cruiser. Compounding the stress was the chance this asteroid could all but erase the remaining balance on the ship lease. In that sense, everyone was wound a little tight. The anticipation had been building for a week.

Felton neared the point on the asteroid’s surface farthest from its center of mass, the point at which torque could be most efficiently applied.

I’m at the rudder site, he said.

He hammered a piton in the stone, hooked a D-ring through the eyehole on the end, and roped in. A flick of the tongue against the same tooth opened the circuit, de-electrifying the iron plungers in his hands.

He unloaded a pion rocket from the pack, one of two he had on him. This one would serve as the asteroid’s rudder en route to the collection point. The rocket was half as tall as he was and had four short nozzles. Below the nozzles was the accumulation chamber, a truncated, chrome-plated sphere bigger than his fist.

With a few swings of the hammer he staked the rocket’s tripod legs to the stone. Then he connected the battery. A neon diode pulsed, indicating the rocket was connected remotely to the ship’s computer.

Are you receiving, Blake?

Sending and receiving, Blake said. His voice took on a flat, robotic quality, a hint he was collaborating with his neural implant. He coded the rocket’s flight plan, entering variables for mass, mass distribution, and density, for which he would plug in real values when they knew more about the asteroid’s composition.

EVA time: 90 minutes, Levi called out.

Felton clawed the piton out of the stone and started toward the next rocket site. I’m clear. Fire the rocket when you’re ready, Blake.

Levi tsked. You know we don’t test-fire the rockets till you’re back inside. That’s how we’ve always done it, cowboy.

Felton hated being called that. Just trying to move things along now that a sense of urgency is shared equally by commander and crew.

Not at the expense of safety, Levi said. Speaking of which, I noticed you didn’t protect that last traverse. What’s going to catch you if those magnets fail, huh? We’d have to cut the asteroid loose and come get you. Think of the time we’d lose then. Your tools are there to help you. Use them.

Felton squinted up at the cruiser. Typical Levi. His determination and resilience were without peer, but he had no imagination. He viewed mining the Belt as a long grind for which his patience and circumspection were uniquely suited.

But it did not suit the rest of the crew. Felton was weary of the grind. So were Blake and Castor. It showed in their slumped shoulders, the hush of strained camaraderie. If Levi didn’t show a more expeditious attitude, he risked losing their confidence.

Felton had used that to convince him to chase this distant M-type when it was nothing more than a blip on the spectroscope. Even if the deviation from routine failed to pay off, the new life it gave the men was priceless.

Go ahead and cut it loose anyway, Castor said.

Levi’s breath caught. Oh no. What’d you find?

There was a thud as Castor dropped the rock sample on the console. Over 90 percent carbonaceous chondrite. In a word, worthless.

Most asteroids were carbonaceous chondrite, but they commonly had albedo characteristics of a C-type, not an M-type. They had been duped by false advertising.

Worthless? Levi said. Surely it’ll fetch something.

There’s no line in the rate table for asteroids this rich in chondrite. If you want to send it for collection, that’s fine, but no one will bid on it.

Felton sucked on his cold wet mustache. He wasn’t going to give up easily. If this asteroid was a dud, he was going to make sure.

Send the sling back down, he said.

He retraced his steps to the rigging, slung the drill on his back, and drilled a second sample 10 feet from the first cut. No one made a peep except for Levi, who continued to count off the time that had elapsed since Felton left the cruiser. To avoid radiation burns, industry best practice was to limit extravehicular activities to 4 hours.

Felton tied the second rock sample to the sling and winched it up.

The verdict came moments later. It’s the same, Castor said.

That’s that, Levi said wistfully. Sorry fellas.

The sting of failure resonated on the dead air. They had foregone an attractive play for this asteroid, enticed by the prospect of a big payday. That payday turned out to be fool’s gold.

Levi would bemoan the decision to come out here, especially since it wasn’t his idea to begin with. He might become more risk-averse as a result. Felton couldn’t let that happen.

I’ll fetch the rocket, he said. Let’s regroup over supper. I’m famished.

I’ll have it ready in a jiffy, Blake said.

Felton collected his gear and stuffed it in the pack. Back at the rigging fork, he pulled the pin and turned the crank to retract the barbs on the carbon steel tines. He squatted under the rigging fork and extended his legs to lift the tines out of the rock. He cut his feet from the asteroid and rode the rigging cable back to the cruiser, wrapping the lengthening slack around the tines.

The rigging gun was on the cruiser’s centerline. Felton wedged the rigging fork partway into the breach, then belly-crawled to the portside airlock forward of the wing, knees bent so as not to ding the fuselage with his crampons.

He climbed through the outer hatch, which irised shut behind him, and turned on the compressor. It started as a vibration and grew louder as air filled the chamber.

The Marillion was an old third-generation cruiser built for a conveyance of five, but even with four crew, quarters were tight. As there was no proper mess hall, they set up the frame for the unoccupied capsule as a dining table. When placed in the cockpit and centered behind the pilot bench, it left enough elbow room to seat all four men.

Felton left the burning smell of the airlock and stripped off his activity suit and coveralls in the mudroom, exposing his sweaty skin to the cruiser’s dank air. Forward one compartment, in the head, he washed and dried his scruffy beard, and he braided his mustache so it wouldn’t hang over his mouth while he ate.

Topside, in the cockpit window, the false M-type asteroid hung deathly still, robbed of its rotation. A band of brown specks spread out over a hundred million miles muted the Sun’s pale disc like wisps of cloud.

They sat around the converted dining table, Felton and Castor in the jump seats, Levi and Blake in folding chairs. Before each man was a cup of lukewarm recycled water, a 3-inch square slab of meat culture, fried pea pods, and a roasted beet.

The men looked expectantly at Blake, who, as senior crewman, recited a rote blessing to Providence and Fortune, then ate. That is, Felton, Blake, and Castor ate. Levi sat with his hands on his knees, staring dourly at the asteroid looming outside.

Blake nudged Levi’s plate closer to him. He spoke tenderly, as if to a child. Let it go, lad.

I’m not ready to, Levi said, eyes burning with rebuke. Not until we agree on a strategy moving forward.

Can’t you wait till after supper before you go pointing fingers? Felton said.

If blame’s what you’re worried about, brother, I’ll spare you the suspense. I blame myself. I’m the leader of this outfit. That makes me responsible.

Give us a little credit, Blake said. He gestured around the table. We all agreed to the plan.

The plan was to chip away at our lease until it was paid off, Levi said. Not to get distracted by the nearest shiny object."

Eat, lad, Blake urged, trying to salvage a peaceful supper.

Levi cut a piece of liver and shredded it between his teeth. I know better than to think you’re not upset. Don’t hold back on my account. Let’s hear it.

The only one who’s upset is you, Felton said. The rest of us are frustrated by the slow rate of progress. We took a chance and it didn’t pay off. So what? The alternative was to keep plodding along like we were before.

Levi shook his head. Don’t downplay this, brother.

Is that what I’m doing? Felton said heatedly.

Yes, that’s what you’re doing. You remember the play as well as I do: eight S-types lined up single file like a string of pearls. Not as pretty, but good enough to get the job done.

Felton scoffed. You’ve never seen a pearl, Levi.

I will when I go Sunward. But that won’t be anytime soon if we make tactical decisions based on whim.

Ask your shipmates if coming here was a whim, or if they think it was the right choice.

Levi’s intense gaze alighted on Castor, who sipped his water to hide his face from scrutiny. Felton wasn’t worried about Castor, whom he knew was on his side. The question was Blake. A longtime friend of the family, he’d mentored Levi after their parents died. Sometimes Felton thought the bonds between them were stronger than their own bonds as brothers.

Did you know half the rockrunners operating in the Belt don’t make a penny before their charters expire? Levi said.

The din of the meal subsided. No one said a word.

It’s not for lack of dedication, he continued, or industriousness. It’s discipline. They reach the Belt thinking they have oodles of time, and they go for the big score. They test Fortune without putting forth the effort. A crew may get lucky once in a while, but most of the time they don’t. Before you know it they’ve lost the plot. They’re behind schedule and it’s too late to change tack. It’s when you need a bet to pay off that it never does. So they end up where they started with nothing to show for the time and the work they put in.

Felton sat back. Levi’s argument was devastating to his more aggressive agenda. He must have spent all week preparing it in anticipation of their failure.

Now… Levi rested the heel of his right hand on the table’s edge, past the midpoint. This is the time that’s left on our charter. He placed his left hand slightly forward of his right. And this is how much value we have to provide the company to get in the black. We can’t afford wasted effort.

We’re going back to the string of pearls, then? Felton said with disdain.

There are no recoverable S-types in closer range. If you have a better idea, I’m all ears.

Felton glanced at Castor, who nodded. We should stay aggressive, Felton said. The real mistake would be to reverse course. We owe it to ourselves to try again.

Try what again? Levi asked. Is there anything out here worth pursuing? He posed the question as a hypothetical, not realizing Felton and Castor had planned ahead for this part of the conversation.

Castor cleared his throat. Perhaps. While you were spearing the asteroid, I was looking around the neighborhood. I spied a viable candidate not too far from here. Another M-type. A shiny object, as it were.

Levi’s brow furrowed. Show me.

They abandoned the meal, long since cooled, and went belowdecks. Mineralogy was farthest astern, directly beneath the tailplane. All four of them crammed inside. Castor referred to notes on his worktable and pointed the spectral telescope through a small bubble canopy.