Suppose We Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title page

  Geoff Nelder’s Books

  Dedication

  Travellers’ Notes

  Foreword

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Appendix

  Water crossing optimising problem in Chapter 30

  Sequel in the Flying Crooked series by Geoff Nelder

  Biography

  Acknowledgements

  Quotes about Geoff Nelder’s books

  Social Media and other links for Geoff Nelder

  Humorous thriller ESCAPING REALITY.

  Award-winning science fiction mystery with a hot-blooded heroine, EXIT, PURSUED BY A BEE.

  Another thriller, HOT AIR, received an Award d’Or from an Arts Academy in the Netherlands.

  A science fiction trilogy, ARIA with an original premise is published by LL-Publications. It won the P&E readers poll in 2012.

  An experimental science fiction story released as an ebook, THE CHAOS OF MOKII.

  Historical fantasy, XAGHRA’S REVENGE is set in the Maltese islands and based on a true mass abduction of the people of Gozo in 1551.

  INCREMENTAL is a collection of 25 of Geoff Nelder’s more surreal short stories.

  Dedication

  Gaynor, Geoff’s wife, will not read his stories she says, in case she finds herself as a character. She isn’t and yet in some ways she is, for without her support and bemused tolerance this novel would not have been written. Dedicated also to son, Rob, daughter, Eleanor, and to their marvellous families.

  Travellers’ Notes

  All the characters in this tale are fictional. The organic and inorganic lifeforms in the Keplerian system on the other hand are as real as I am sitting here, on a fence.

  For those readers who enjoy exploring fiction via the real world they will find the Kepler 20 system really exists although the Kepler-20h planet has yet to be spotted. If you point your fingers between Cygnus and Lyra, they’ll be in the right direction for the location of this story. As a geographer, I relish locational accuracy but here I allowed my imagination to soar with a strange new world.

  As a child, I loved reading those space exploration stories. Already this planet was becoming too limited for my developing imagination. Luckily, there were hundreds of science fiction authors with strange planets in their heads for me to explore. My tastes have become subtler but I still enjoy reading and watching movies that explore new vistas in outer space. Hence this book realises a lifelong urge to paint my own vision of what a strange yet habitable planet might be like. I enjoy breaking tropes. For example the natives, instead of attacking the human ‘invaders’ are so far ahead they ignore them. Think how far we’ve advanced in the last century, now imagine how far we’ll be in a million years! Rare in the books I’ve read are ecosystems where there are no predators larger than insects, until I wrote this one.

  SUPPOSE WE

  Flying Crooked

  The butterfly, the cabbage white,

  (His honest idiocy of flight)

  Will never now, it is too late,

  Master the art of flying straight,

  Yet has – who knows so well as I? –

  A just sense of how not to fly:

  He lurches here and here by guess

  And God and hope and hopelessness.

  Even the aerobatic swift

  Has not his flying crooked gift.

  Robert Graves

  A lilac butterfly alighted on my laptop. I was in my favourite writing spot: outdoors with the sound of the Mediterranean Ocean lapping a stony beach, me and the computer barely keeping sufficiently cool to function. Yet, there it was. A delicate creature flapping its wings at page 39 demanding to be let in. So I did. The thing is, it grew on me and became a kind of silent character. An alien butterfly yet it wasn’t really a butterfly as you will see.

  This novella takes you to outer space, to a planetary system in the Milky Way that the Kepler orbiting satellite discovered. I’ve always devoured stories of astronauts discovering strange planets, things going wrong and how would I cope? Kepler-20h is very strange. Surprises around each twisted tower and creatures so intelligent they ignore the humans even when they’re desperate. However, we’ve not arrived there yet… nearly….

  A blue spot of sunlight found its way through a viewport, flickered around the cockpit and woke up Gaston Poirer. He’d only been asleep for three hours, unlike his three-member crew, immersed in their dreamtime for months. They weren’t supposed to dream in suspension, but he did, or perhaps only in the last second or so. After all, his thoughts travelled at one twenty metres per second and his fantasies faster, in their crooked flight.

  No wonder he fell asleep. This module was a cross between an actor’s green room and a padded cell. A psycho-designers’ experiment. He tapped for the sleep log and grunted. He must have missed Em’s doodles: yellow petals on the console’s margins during her shift. How unprofessional, just wait until Commander Penn sees it. He’d go ballistic, but then they all were, literally.

  Umm, he’d assumed it was time for shift change, but he must have napped. What alerted him? Presumably not the spilt coffee aroma on his SpaceWeb T-shirt, a blue world image now sporting the invasion of a mud monster. Ah, oui the uncertain light in his eyes. So soon? It should have taken 1062 years for the Suppose We to reach the Kepler-20 system.

  He checked the navigation status. Yes, that’s Kepler-20, humanity’s hoped-for future system, but the planet Kepler-20h, their target remained months away.

  The AI—still largely dumb after a malfunction—must have wanted him not to remain dozing at his post and turned the cockpit eight degrees to allow that distant sun, a mere pinprick, to peep at him. Why not the other alert systems? He ran a diagnostics check. He’d been pinged and vibrated. Some deep nap. Maybe intermittent hibernation over a thousand years had residual snoozing as one of its side effects, or it was just him. Age had crept up on him, after all theoretically he could celebrate his one thousandth and eighty-seventh birthday tomorrow.

  He waved fingers at the console to pick up those alerts. Proximity threat. His stomach tightened but there was nothing nearby on radar. He checked X-ray and infrared along with the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum. Que fais-tu? False alarms had dogged this flight although some had been dealt with by Suppose We without human interaction: one comet avoidance and a green iridescent gas cloud for which the AI decided to hold our breath and plough through rather than a lengthy detour.

  Unlike in
the movies there was no engine hum. The quasi-Alcubierre drive was shaped as a ring and warped spacetime just in front of Suppose We pulling the needle-shaped ship through the universe at point eight lightspeed. The only wings were forcefield deltas deployed in orbit. They wouldn’t rattle. Gaston heard the odd gurgle from recycling and life support, but it was all green.

  He should investigate further. Double check the sensors, run through cam footage and—hello, qu’est-ce que c’est? The cockpit swung again, like a tank turret, changing the viewport view from the blue sun to a blank piece of sky. Should it be blank? He pulled up a star map, nothing much to see in that direction. A red light came on dead-centre and threw itself into a blinking frenzy.

  Was this a pivotal moment when he should wake up Penn such as an alien contact? No, it was probably a glitch, and what would the bearded wonder do? Send out rapid Quantum Mech probes fore and aft to triangulate time decoherences. He could do that. No one understood how they worked anyway.

  Off they went. He couldn’t see them, the size of marbles and no doubt tinier ones were on their way from Earth using cusps, leap-frogging space to get to Kepler before them. Marbles loaded with people, somehow. What a waste of time this trip was. Ah, a ping turned into a frantic dinging. The QM beasties have found a mass where everything said there was nothing and it was coming at them. He should be more excited than when Fransesca Dupont sat on his lap at a concert, but sadly, Earth’s experience of its first contact ended badly, if it ended at all.

  In the Oort cloud, a remotely-controlled SpaceWeb explorer craft detected an alien ship, shaped like a croissant and the size of the Arc de Triumph. Its hatch was open, no one aboard. Earth Control signalled the explorer craft to tow the alien ship back to Moon orbit. The media repeatedly screamed warnings about Trojan Horses, however, it exploded near Neptune, along with the Earth craft. Analysis of sensor data continued for centuries with no agreed conclusions. Gaston was in the accident camp, Penn in the evil-alien camp, which possessed far more followers. He would. Penn’s younger brother was in the destroyed explorer ship.

  Gaston examined the data from the QM marbles. Insufficient data with a range of possibilities. Sadly for Penn, and maybe for Gaston, it was wakey-wakey time.

  There was no rapid waking from hibernation. It took a day to drain, refill, remove the wax, massage, stimulate those dormant parts that preferred to stay out 0f it. Luckily, for everyone, Gaston wasn’t personally involved. By the time Penn had assumed his usual belligerent intelligence, Suppose We had made three course alterations, but the invisible object changed too and closed in.

  The commander reminded Gaston of lollipop trees: a mass of auburn hair and beard on stick torso and legs, reeking of ammonia from the cleanser. His American – apparently Seattle – accent became stronger with rage. “Why the hell didn’t you wake me earlier?”

  A French bottom lip stuck out in reply.

  Penn poked at console screens. Freckled white fingers tipped with overgrown nails making Gaston shiver. “So it’s a blasted stealth ship? And let’s have proper answers.”

  “Is it?”

  “Well, man, we can’t see the damned thing.”

  Gaston pointed at his own console. His own natural-olive skin fingers with carefully trimmed nails. “Those marbles can, using infinitesimal time and space decoherences, so they are not that superior at remaining hidden.”

  Penn harrumphed and sat while sucking a wakeup tube, reminding Gaston to punch a request for double croissants with confiture and coffee.

  The Commander grunted at Gaston, “Why can’t our tiny spies see inside the mass? I’d like to see if it’s a ship, a fleet or just a steered rock.”

  “The coffee smells manifique, but always comes out too soon.”

  A croissant found itself disappearing into Penn’s starving maw, but spluttered out again. Just as well they have gravity – the bits floated downwards at three-quarters g. “Why isn’t it gaining on us? And I see we’ve slowed to point six.” He glared at Gaston, who decided against a Gallic shrug.

  “I think they might be steering us, Sir.”

  “Really? By horse manure you’re right, by making our AI manoeuvre an optimum escape route. Clever.”

  Gaston reached for the wake-up panel. “I should wake the women, Oui?”

  “Not yet, two heads are better than four, and that Em with her constant nattering about home, scrambles my brain. How did she get a place on this mission?”

  “Top of the class in nav and comms and you picked her. Not just because she is a blonde, no?”

  Penn looked away while coughing into his hand. “Plan A. Turn off the auto AI nav, increase speed to our max point eight to the Kepler-20 sun following a projected intercept with planet h.”

  Gaston switched panels. “Coming at it out of the sun, to fool their detection strategies?”

  “Sure, in one, why what d’you know?”

  “That has been the AI choice all along and it redirects to it after the diverging from the mass following us.”

  Penn reached for coffee, downed it in one. “Okay, chief exo-linguist, exo-biologist, and ex0-wiseguy, you’ve had more time than me. What’s your plan?”

  “A petite change, No, a big one. Leave now at right angles to our current trajectory for two or three weeks.”

  “Got you. Check if they’re following, maybe sneak behind this stealth mass to find out more about it. Let me dwell on it… No.”

  Gaston slowly shook his head. He’d anticipated the commander’s response. “Consider it, mon ami, Sir. What is a few weeks compared to the millennium we have travelled?”

  “No and Non, Gaston. It’s not that simple. Follow my screen.” Penn used two fingers drawing red and blue lines that had animated numbers following trajectories. Gaston smirked with the memory of himself using his ambidextrous skills to conduct an orchestra with two batons. The Blue Danube had never sounded so chaotic on the right yet languid on the left.

  “…furthermore… you’re not damned listening, are you?”

  “Pardon, but my eyes were listening. I see a week away would take four weeks to catch up because of their orbit and us not being able then to use Kepler-20 for slingshot manoeuvre. Our resources, though, are surplus. Checking yesterday, the hydroponics and protein trays are one hundred percent operative.”

  “Um, maybe so, but if that beast behind us follows and swallows us, we’ll be even farther away from possible help from Kepler.”

  Gaston did a better job this time of keeping a straight face. “Help?”

  Penn kept his face at his screen as he pulled up data from planet Kepler-20h. “Yeah, it was you, remember, who interpreted these radio spikes as signs of culture.”

  “Possibly, but they could just as well be random radio noise generated by natural events such as lightning. Let us divert for one hour. Then see what happens.” Bartering had always been Gaston’s strong point. He only needed one hour.

  “Fine. Set it for twenty minutes time while I update the log.”

  Gaston glanced sideways at Penn, assessing his demeanour. Perhaps his increasing irascibility and overtly military hard line was a side effect of the hibernation.

  “Well, I’ll be darned, they’re not following us!”

  “I did not think they would. We are nothing. They happened to be using our trajectory. Oui, maybe tweaking a little for reasons of their own, making our AI do little avoidance strategies.”

  Penn scratched his mop of red hair, sending fragments of hibernation wax and hair into the air. “They must be en route – hey see what I said there, my Parisian pal – to Kepler.” His relief at Suppose We not being the obvious target manifested itself with a grin.

  Waving Penn’s musty slow-falling detritus towards a suction filter, Gaston refrained from suggesting a post-hiber-shower was overdue. “Perhaps they are neither friend nor foe. We need to stop thinking like humans.”

  “Whoa, since when has the damned cockpit started rotating like that?”

  “Ah, I b
elieve it is my fault.” Gaston didn’t want to admit to napping so deeply that the AI had to resort to physical manipulation for its alerts. “Regardez, the viewport. The red alert cross-hairs point to behind the stealth mass. Merde.”

  “Another one? Hang on, that’s our marbles sending data back, but the AI must have known about the first one. How?”

  “I really do not know. I’ve not had time to interrogate it. Outside the usual detection parameters. The marbles are able to see it with QM time decoherence differences, so perhaps it did too.”

  “Goddammit, Gaston, that first one is bigger than Jupiter! If that’s an enemy then Kepler’s in trouble and we’ve had a wasted journey.”

  Gaston waved his hands apart. “Might just be an echo. It is eighty light minutes away, approximately the same distance as our sun to Saturn. We have no idea if it has mass. Perhaps a light gas, or just a web entity.”

  “Or a cunningly disguised heavy-metal Death Star. We need to stop it.”

  Gaston wanted to sigh. “You know that if it was a Jupiter-size ferrous body, our petite craft will already have—”

  “Yeah, experience perturbations from its gravity and it would be hard to disguise…”

  “And stop, without detection, but we mustn’t assume anything. Probably not a spaceship at that size. It could be a directed planet or… whatever, it is what it is.”

  “Yeah, right, but since we don’t know what it is, my job is to assume they aren’t friendly. They’re obviously a threat to the Kepler system and so to Earth’s hope for when we have to leave the home-world.”

  Gaston took a long breath. “How do you know they are a threat?”

  Penn pointed, ironically, at the viewport. “Just look at them!”