ALAZON
By Dean R. MarshAuthorHouse
Copyright © 2009 Dean R. Marsh
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4389-9325-6Chapter One
Jason sat with dulled, numbed senses in the padded Captain's seat on the bridge of the giant ship. The air whispering through the ventilation shafts was the only sound to intrude on his thoughts. Slowly, as if moving under water, he reached out to lightly tap a spot on the smooth panel before him. Instantly the view screen, which ran nearly the entire width of the room, came to life. Stars, in configurations strange and alien to him, appeared. It was an alienation that only served to heighten his sense of aloneness.
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...
