Cold Star: The Carina Reality, #1

By R C Ducantlin

The blessing of interstellar travel has become a curse. Corb has one chance to save Earth. It has become impossible to tell friend from foe.

 

Corb learned he could make interstellar travel possible. He promised space travel in weeks or days instead of years and decades.

 

Every major nation, several religious sects, and a few cabals stoop to infiltration, sabotage, and pay any price to control the new technology, including assassination. 

 

Corb agrees it is worth what he and his team will sacrifice to secure the technology.

 

Aliens threaten Earth. Will his team live long enough to see the transaction completed? How did he get sucked into this powder keg of a mission? 

 

It was the Mayan Shaman who showed Corb how to contact the aliens. They are the ones who put Corb onto the interstellar portal leading to the Others. The Others led to the history of the galaxy.

 

At first, the proposition was a no-brainer, a blessing to humanity. But now, the Others are expecting more from Corb and Humanity.

 

After learning the Others are involved in the betrayal undermining Earth's political and religious powers, Corb vows to find the truth.

 

The blessing of interstellar travel is on the verge of becoming a curse.

 

Corb and his team have one chance to save the arrangement and Earth. One option to make interstellar travel safe for humanity. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: R C Ducantlin, Ltd.
• Release date: Oct 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781949211009

R C Ducantlin

Fortunately, in secondary school, my interest in reading was sparked. A close friend and an instructor, who took interest in a boy he later called ‘The rebel without a clue.,’ were instrumental in my learning the value of a good book. Both piqued my interest in reading. My lifelong friend inspired me to read J.R.R. Tolkien and I became addicted to the fantasy genre. The instructor required I read interesting historical novels for academic credit. Frank Norris, Leon Uris, and Ken Follett are inspirations and fuel my love of history. Born to a military family, it was logical that I follow the military tradition. However, after four years of “yes sirs” and scraping the wax off floors I decided there must be more fun in a corporate career. Thirty plus years of work experiences across the globe, the corporate career landed me in Colorado, where I live with my wife and I can be close to my children and grandchildren.

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Preface

November 2022

Initially published in 2015, Coldstar is the story of how a would-be journalist uncovers a plan to eliminate seven-billion people. The goal: Create, then cure, a pandemic. A by-product of the extermination strategy is more than humanity thought possible.

This edition is a re-edit of the series and corrects but remains true to the original story.

My humble ask is for you to read on.

Let the imagery fall over you like the stars on a clear night.

The story begins now.

Prologue

"Everyone has a plan,

'till they get punched in the mouth."

Mike Tyson

With the tilt of my coffee mug and a silent nod, I committed my life to end the slaughter before it could begin. Agreeing to fight with your life is surprisingly straightforward. It is an uncomplicated commitment when the alternative is worse than death. Yet, I retain the permanent scars that prove what I am telling you happened.

How did I come to write about the events that prevented a global genocide? The shortest explanation is I lack the personality that would allow me to mind my own business. I suffer from eidetic memory. The affliction of an eidetic memory means you remember everything you experience. If I am not careful, the volume of information swirling in my brain prevents common sense from keeping me out of trouble.

When I decided to fight, I had known the team with whom I chose to fight for less than two days. Nevertheless, they were an exciting two days, and the following weeks were nothing less than spectacular.

This story began several months before I met the counter-terrorism team. Oddly, this tale contains no ogres, fairies, or other fanciful creatures.

Except for the alien contact…

Part One

Biomass: Noun

The amount of living matter

in a unit area or volume of habitat.

One

How swiftly it was that I trekked down the rabbit hole. It was approaching the ninety-minute mark of my downward spiral when I realized I had failed to apply common sense. I should have been practical. I should have ignored the rapidly increasing agitation emanating from seat 4A.

My seat, 5B, was comfortable. All the gin and tonic I could consume and my choice of dozens of movies to watch. Gin and tonic because whiskey is not my friend. Flying first class is preferred, and my frequent business excursions allow me to travel in a well-heeled manner. I used to be a well-respected mid-level corporate go-getter in the world of higher technologies. After saving enough money to live a few years without a regular paycheck, I became an author and freelance journalist.

Yeah, before you ask, being unemployed pays incredibly well. Being out of high-tech for a couple of years means that universe passed you by and won’t let you back in. I have lifetime perks with airlines, hotels, and rental car companies. So, I got that going for me, which is nice.

Nice, but you can’t eat a rental car.

Why, dear reader, was I staring over some guy’s shoulder while he scribbled all over the Dallas Morning News sports page? Is it unusual for a professional-looking black man, presumably from Texas, seated in first class, to scratch all over the hockey box scores? What was the point of frantically, randomly doodling all over the hockey results?

Judging by the dark blue Python boots, he probably wasn’t Canadian and, without a doubt, never heard of Don Cherry.

The well-groomed businessman was striking goals, time of the goals, penalty minutes, and keeping a running tally of seemingly random digits.

Why?

He wore a pressed oxford button-down shirt, white with thin red stripes, and clean jeans. His snow-white hair was cut close. Designer bifocals, an expensive pen, and he was pounding Jack on the rocks.

I like this guy.

Was I mired in some form of subconscious racial profiling? Nah, this isn’t some simpleminded profiling. This guy is a professional, and I couldn’t stop watching him doodle all over the newspaper. Large quantities of gin could not push a question out of my head.

Why was he increasingly agitated with each new scribble?

It is easy to see now. All I had to do was go back to watching a movie or reading some more Jim Butcher and forget about the nut bag. Henceforth, a nut bag we will refer to as 4A. 4A was likely an obsessive-compulsive bag of hammers, unable to stop scribbling arbitrary notations all over the hockey scores in the newspaper. The flight was a little over two hours, and 4A did not get up, he did not eat, and I counted a minimum of four Jack with ice. 4A only took his eyes off the newspaper to order more whiskey.

Mind your own business is a good motto.

Who lives by mottos?

I neglected to determine if the newspaper was from today, Saturday, or Friday. The dates were easy to remember. It was Super Bowl Sunday. The girlfriend and I were on our way to visit friends for a long weekend.

Our trip was timed for an arrival a couple of hours before kick-off.

I created a mental note to retrieve the Saturday and Sunday papers when I return to Ft Worth. My subconscious was working in overdrive. After meeting our friends, I spent most of the short vacation thinking about 4A, the numbers he scribbled, and looking at the clock. I couldn’t wait to get home and determine if there was meaning to the numbers about which 4A was so disturbed.

Who is the obsessive-compulsive bag of hammers now?

I am ahead of myself and the story.

Despite being several rows back, when the Pavlovian chime rang, 4A pushed 4B and 3C aside in his rush to the front of the aircraft. Why rush to deplane? Even more unsettling was the scene at the gate. 4A cut the line in front of the gate agent and demanded the agent sell him a return ticket to Dallas/Ft Worth. He landed two minutes ago and is loudly ordering to return on the next flight. Listening for a moment, 4A had an accent I could not quite place. Possibly an English brogue muted by living a long time in Texas?

Watching the scene for a moment, I considered keeping 4A’s leather attaché, which he left in overhead in his haste to deplane. I removed the attaché from the overhead compartment with my roll-aboard and remarkably cool Jacaru Explorer hat. I handed 4A his attaché.

Of course, I handed over the attaché after covertly peaking at the contents.

Without acknowledging my existence, 4A took the bag and returned to demanding a seat on an oversold flight.

The pouch resembled a bicycle messenger's bag, not a typical businessman’s attaché. A large flap concealed two inner compartments and one zippered pocket. Real brass clasps secured the supple tan leather. On the outside of the long flap were the initials: B. E. W.

All of this means nothing more than 4A has a name and probably a good job or a wife prone to giving expensive gifts. The meaningful part was the letterhead. I was able to scan it for hints and suggestions. One of the two large inner pockets was empty, and the other contained A4-sized papers. The pages had a royal blue embossed letterhead: Morningstar Pharmaceuticals.

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It occurred to me that a letterhead with limited contact information was unusual in both context and design. I thought it was some new marketing model. It seemed reasonable at the time.

The lack of standard contact information should have been my first clue. Reasonable or not, I was too focused on trying to remember the scribbling and being distracted by 4A’s piercing demands for a seat on the next plane to DFW.

I remember little of the visit with friends or the Super Bowl. It was three long days spent in anticipation of boarding our return flight. After a two-hour weather delay, we arrived home in the early evening of the Wednesday after the Super Bowl.

Buying a week-old newspaper was easy when people habitually read the daily newspaper. Now, however, you must go to the publisher’s offices. If you have not been to DFW, everything is a trudge in the Dallas/Ft Worth Metroplex. If you are lucky, the grocery store is not more than a couple of miles from your house.

Often, everything in the Metroplex is no less than a thirty-minute, one-way drive. I calculated, that if I left after the morning rush hour, it would be a ninety-minute roundtrip to collect the newspapers from the Dallas Morning News offices. So, I endured the toil of hiking to Dallas proper and bought two copies of each of the prior week’s newspapers from Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

Why copies of Friday’s newspaper also? It never hurts to be compulsive. Wait, not compulsive. I mean, it never hurts to be thorough.

For those too young to have held the disparaging teenage job titled Newspaper Route, or never ran out in the snow to gather the day’s news from the curb, newspapers are printed on low-quality paper with ink that rubs off on your fingers. Buying two copies of each day’s newspaper is me being, as always, over-prepared for little reason and limited purpose. Scanning the sports page with hockey scores and taping the sheets was quick. Reading the scores for hints, and trying to remember 4A’s scribble patterns, was a grind that proved to be an effective sleep aid.

I know what you are thinking, but I am not a compulsive bag of hammers.

It varies slightly from newspaper to newspaper and publication to publication, but hockey box scores have the same essential components. For every game, there is a lot of data. Score by period, final score, shots by period, total shots on goal, time of goals, saves by period, total saves. Also, the basics are penalty minutes and the team’s season record (wins, losses, overtime losses, total points). Numerous other variant and nuanced bits of game data are available if you look in the right places.

Often, the expanded sports sections include player statistics. A few extended statistics are games played, goals, assists, points, occasionally penalty minutes, goals for, goals against, and plus/minus. You understand the gist. Most hockey numbers mean nothing to ninety-nine percent of the population.

The result of multiplying the number of data points by the number of National Hockey League teams, and the number of players, are thousands of data points on a single sheet of newspaper. It was more than five months before I determined what 4A was doing with the numbers.

Of course, it took them only two days to begin shooting at me and, in general, trying to kill me.

Two

Whoa, cowboy, we are way ahead of the story. The simple part was spending a few hours collecting and collating the newspapers. Trying to remember 4A’s frantic scribble patterns and deciphering the thousands of numbers was a herculean effort. I did not like my graduate courses in finance and statistics. That dislike was a function of the syllabus and instructors. I love spreadsheets, and I am fond of what-if analysis using statistical methodologies.

You probably concluded, correctly, that I am a pseudo-geek and not a bag of hammers.

The reality is more mundane. I am another thirty-something former corporate drone living in a suburb of Ft Worth, Texas. I am, like most people, trying to find meaning in why I live in Texas when the summers are so damned hot and sticky. Someone whose girlfriend seemed to arrive one day and never left. I live the American dream from the home office during daylight and from the couch when Breaking Bad is on the Teevee.

The good thing about being a technology and statistics wannabe geek is the inherent willingness to maintain a dogged pursuit in getting to an answer.

Plugging numbers into a spreadsheet is easy peasy. Creating formulae to evaluate the numbers is also relatively simple. Getting to a meaningful answer, not so much.

Grinding numbers is what the bookmakers in Las Vegas do when creating the Betting Line or Vegas Line. Of course, several times, I became sidetracked into chasing down what I thought might be an edge over the Vegas Line. Of course, there was no edge in the hockey betting lines, and I wasted a couple of weeks and a few grand, but that is another short story.

Assessing rows and columns in a spreadsheet is mundane, and honestly, boring. However, the more I looked at the data, the more adamant I became at determining what was so damned important to 4A. I never considered quitting the analysis. It became my go-to hobby. It was three full months of pivoting the data in every way possible before an epiphany showed me the direction.

As often claimed, the breakthrough was exceedingly simple, laughably straightforward.

First, let me tell you an epiphany is not always a lightning-bolt event. I assert that an epiphany starts with a simple thought or idea, which leads to another thought or idea.

Ideas coalesce faster and faster until the answer is illuminated in your mind’s eye so brightly that you think it is lightning or enlightening.

We all know the best hockey games are the playoffs or any game with a good fight. I looked for games with more data points, like a high number of penalty minutes. I kept expanding my research using pivot tables, weighted averages, and standard deviations.

Enough! I bored myself, and being bored is a self-inflicted insult to one’s character.

It took me months to comprehend something markedly simple: 4A wasn’t doing any fancy statistical calculations. But what was he doing, and where was this leading?

4A appeared to be doing simple math based on random selections from the hockey box scores. Oh! It took months to achieve this enlightening two-part realization. The answer is simple. First, it is not the sum or specific numbers that were the significant factors, but the relative position of the numbers on the sports page. Second, the tally 4A was keeping was not a total. It was a perfect day when I realized I was not looking for a word.

You can also put your size twelve Justins in the oven, but that doesn’t make them biscuits.

What do I do now? It took me three more weeks to figure out the next clue. The next clue was when I received the first conscious