Struggle for a Small Blue Planet Read online

  STRUGGLE FOR A SMALL

  BLUE PLANET

  Warwick Gibson.

  © 2018 Warwick Gibson.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Content 96,300 words.

  DISCLAIMER.

  This novel is a work of fiction. It does not draw from actual events. The characters in this story are entirely fictitious, and do not bear any resemblance to any persons living or dead.

  ALSO by WARWICK GIBSON

  Maric's Reprieve Rough Justice The Unsound Prince

  PART ONE: Emergence.

  Chs 1-22.

  PART TWO: The Berber Kingdoms.

  Chs 23-44.

  PART THREE: The Alien Citadels.

  Chs 45-66.

  Table of Contents

  PART ONE: EMERGENCE

  1 2 3 4

  5 6 7 8

  9 10 11 12

  13 14 15 16

  17 18 19 20

  21 22

  PART TWO: THE BERBER KINGDOMS

  23 24 25 26

  27 28 29 30

  31 32 33 34

  35 36 37 38

  39 40 41 42

  43 44

  PART THREE: THE ALIEN CITADELS

  45 46 47 48

  49 50 51 52

  53 54 55 56

  57 58 59 60

  61 62 63 64

  65 66

  Epilogue

  PART ONE

  EMERGENCE

  1

  327 years before Emergence

  Chuvan tribe

  Siberian tundra

  The warm sand felt good after the biting cold of the hunt. Kutaa wriggled deeper into the softness of it, urging the heat into his hide jacket and leggings. He lifted a handful of black grains and let them run through his fingers, before resting his arms on his stomach. The back of his hands were seamed and varnished like old leather, and it was only now, as he relaxed, that his eyes were visible in a deeply lined face.

  Above him was a ceiling made of tusks. They were as long as two men, and stained from their time in the swamps. They were a mystery the gods had buried in the land for his people to find.

  The bindings that lashed them together were a deep black, almost charred. The leather had been soaked in black water bogs to cure it. The frame of tusks had been covered with peat from the barren landscape of the tundra. The makeshift roof had thickened over the years, and now supported colonies of plants, and occasional wildlife.

  Behind him stood an imposing throne made of pieces of tusk. Sometimes he sat in that chair, holding the long staff of his office, and made decisions for the tribe. Sometimes he entered trance states, and foretold the future, or spoke to the people of happenings in far away places. The long wooden staff was wound about with strips of rare and fabled furs, many from animals his tribe had never seen. There were always traders, speaking strange languages and gutteral versions of the common tongue.

  The sun was a pale disc, low and watery in the sky. From the floor it appeared to hang from the entrance to the cave, just like the spirit circles the tribe hung in their peat and hide dwellings. The sun stayed above the horizon all the time now, rising and falling at its turning points. It shone directly into the cave twice each day, warming the black sand.

  The sun was at its lowest in the sky, and the pulse of the tundra had quietened, when Kutaa woke from a tired sleep. Light was flickering over the walls of the cave, and for a moment he thought of the forest fires that came in Autumn in the Taiga forest, when the tribe went south. Then he saw that the light was coming from outside the cave.

  As he made his way into the open air a vast bellow of sound roared across the tundra. He looked up, and saw a second sun in the sky. A ball of fire was slanting toward him, too bright to look at. It was headed for the plains between him and the Ice sea in the distance.

  Then it slowed, and veered to his right. The sound of its passing died away, and it came to a stop above the widespread swamps along the foreshore. He could feel the immense heat as the giant rock settled slowly toward the lake.

  Kutaa got down on his knees. This was not a phenomenon of the natural world. He tried to reach out with his spirit senses, to make contact with the life within it, but there was nothing. Then the floating mountain hit the water, and a great cloud of steam burst from the lake as it sank. When he could see the area again, the great rock was gone, though the water still boiled and frothed.

  Kutaa knew that place. It was part of a line that ran in from the Ice sea and headed south-east into the Taiga. It was a line that was nowhere standing, a place where the swamps were bottomless. The strange formation met a similar line that came in from the far horizon on his right, just where the rock had vanished.

  Using the ivory rods he had been given when he was first a spirit seeker, Kutaa could find seams of metal for the tribe to work into ornaments for trade. He could sense water, and salt licks, and the great tusks. Some days he could feel the presence of the rock plains that lay deep under the tundra. The ball of fire had fallen where there was a break in the rock plains, a place where three great plates of the tundra joined. He wondered why it had fallen there.

  Then he fell into a motionless state. He stayed that way, dumb and unblinking, for a long time. At last he shook himself. He had been reliving the stories of the tribe. The great depths of the past, and the more recent things that had happened within living memory. He was the shaman. It was his job to know the tribe's history.

  The story of the great rock falling from the sky had taken him into old memories. The oldest of memories. He had momentarily relived the creation myth of the four cycles of the world. It was the one story familiar to every member of Kutaa's tribe. He ran through it in his mind once more.

  "In the beginning the world was covered with water. The Creator told Otter to dive deep, and bring up some dirt.

  "When Otter did so, the Creator multiplied the dirt, until there was land. Then the Creator made the soil deep and black, and fertile. But while this was happening a large, black bird flew out of the land, and announced that its name was Raven.

  "The Creator put Otter in charge of the things of the sea, and Raven in charge of the things of the land. Then the Creator made plants and animals to cover the land, before finally making people. But as soon as Raven saw the Creator had made people, he made an announcement.

  "Raven decreed there would be four cycles of the world, and each cycle would have a beginning and an ending, and after four cycles the world would be destroyed. Raven said that people were greedy, and thoughtless, and only the experience they might gain from the four different cycles could give them wisdom.

  "The Creator was sad, because this would make life hard for the people, but it could not be denied that people were greedy and thoughtless – so the life of the world was broken into four cycles, as Raven had decreed."

  Kutaa jumped forward to the end of the third cycle.

  "The people that learn bravery at the start of the third cycle, and gain mastery of all things, must now learn humility, if they are to survive.

  "Fire will fall from the sky, like a second sun, and make the lakes and seas boil. The first of these events will come once in a generation, and then more and more often. Demons will climb out of the Earth where the great rocks have fallen, and all will be chaos. Few will remain in these times."

  Kutaa paused, his mind trying to form the exact meaning of 'demons'. The context was a difficult one. The word's ending suggested something that was unknown, and from far away. It wasn't like the forces of the night, or spirits that haunted burial grounds.

  Kutaa looked once again at the swamps along the foreshore, at the spot where the great rock had fallen. He hesitated to draw a conclusion, but h
is experience fitted exactly with the story of the third cycle.

  The third great cycle was ending. Not today, and not for generations to come, but it was said 'few will remain in those times'. He felt sad for the people who would have to endure it.

  2

  82 years before Emergence

  Sullivan Engineering

  Southern Alps, New Zealand

  One of the workmen came to the window of the hut and tapped on the glass. Sullivan raised his head, and the workman brought his fists together before slowly rolling them apart. Sullivan sighed. Another of the massive grinding plates at the front of the tunnelling machine had split in two; or, if he was lucky, had chipped off a piece they could weld back on. He waved in acknowledgement, and the workman left.

  Sullivan could feel the hut starting to shake, and hear the wind howling round the low roof. That meant another storm was coming in. The hut was securely tied down, one of a dozen built in a tight little cluster, but the sooner the men could move the living quarters inside the tunnel the better.

  The Southern Alps in the middle of Winter was not the way he would have chosen to build this tunnel, but he was way behind in his race against the government team at the Homer saddle. Fortunately, the Homer team were using pick axes and conventional blasting techniques, and that gave Sullivan a huge advantage.

  He blew out a long sigh, and rolled his shoulders to ease the tension in them. He hoped the advantage the machine gave him would be enough. The government wouldn't pay him a brass penny if his team didn't break through the mountain range before the Ministry of Works. If he wasn't careful it would be the Homer tunnel that led tourists into New Zealand's magnificent Fiordland, and not the Sullivan tunnel.

  The government team had started in 1935, once a rough gravel road had been put through thick native forest to the Homer saddle. It was now 1938, and Sullivan had branched off the existing road to build a much rougher track down the Hollyford Valley. Then he'd brought in some of the grinding plates that had been so successful on the San Francisco Bay bridge.

  The new technology had bored a 160m tunnel through a rocky island in the middle of the bay in 1936, and Sullivan had incorporated the plates into a better, and purely New Zealand made, version of the machine. Sullivan's tunnel at Lake Adelaide would be nearly fifty percent longer than the Homer tunnel, but it ran with the 'seam' of the rock, and his tunnelling machine rumbled on 24 hours a day. Until it broke down, which it had just done. Again.

  He wondered if the breakdowns had anything to do with the northern arm of Lake Adelaide. His men were now directly under it. While he knew the depth of the lake at every point, he didn't know much about the accumulated sludge along the bottom. Any sort of geological abnormality could be hiding down there.

  Reluctantly, he put on his coat, and battled out into the growing winds. The sun had already set behind the massive range west of him, and it wasn't even 4pm. Winter was tough at this latitude.

  A few minutes later he was out of the storm and into the glare of the electric lights. His engineers had installed a small hydropower plant just to run the operation. The tunnelling machine had been winched back to a wider section of the tunnel when he arrived, and several men now crowded round the front of it. Sullivan joined them.

  "Think you can weld it while it's still in place?" he asked hopefully, but the engineer shook his head.

  "It's the same old problem," said the man sourly. "If the alignment is out by more than a few thou, the gouging claws on one side will bite just that bit earlier than the other. Then you get stresses on the plate, and the weld fails."

  They both knew the hardened steel of the plate was always going to be stronger than the weld.

  "Swap 'er over, then," said Sullivan, loath to use the one unfractured plate he had left, but not wanting to lose another day.

  "Two hours?" he queried, knowing he was pushing it.

  "You're a hard man, Mr Sullivan," said the foreman, smiling as he said it.

  "My shout Friday if you get it done in two," said Sullivan, with a wave of his arm as he turned away.

  The engineering team were finished with seven minutes to spare, but shortly after 8pm the same workman was back at the window of Sullivan's hut. By now the storm was in full force, and he had to rap loudly on the glass to get his boss' attention.

  When Sullivan looked up, the workman gestured frantically at him to come back to the tunnel. It must be serious. The boss got up from his desk in a hurry, and caught up with the messenger on his way back to the electric glow of the tunnel entrance. When he got to the rockface this time, he was dumbfounded by what he saw.

  "It's a cave the size of a goddamn cathedral, in the middle of a mountain!" said the head engineer. Sullivan looked at the hole where the tunnelling machine had broken through. Then he went up to the yard-wide aperture and peered through it.

  There was a vertical drop off below the breach, and then the start of a slope. That was all he could see by the electric lights behind him, and it troubled him. The inside of the cavern looked dry, which didn't make sense. There was groundwater everywhere in these mountains, and he should be looking at a lake. In fact they'd been damned lucky they weren't blasted out of the tunnel by an avalanche of water.

  One of the workmen arrived with a box of emergency flares, and broke it open. The foreman fired one at an angle through the breach, and the two men watched it soar away. It floated eerily in the vast space, then went out.

  Sullivan was sure the flares lasted longer than that, and the sudden disappearance unnerved him. He looked at the engineer on his right. Had he seen what Sullivan had seen, far below? Whatever it was, it looked man-made. A building, or a giant machine perhaps.

  Then a weird humming began, followed by a vicious stab of pain. It seemed to be everywhere at once in his body, like something was playing hellfire with his nervous system. Sullivan pressed his hands to his head, trying to shut the noise out. He forced himself to keep breathing, and to stay upright, even as his stomach churned and the tunnel spun crazily. Next to him someone vomited against the rock wall and went down, and stayed down.

  Sullivan staggered away from the breach in the rock, and cannoned into another man. He had a brief impression of staring, vacant eyes leaking blood, before the man collapsed beside him.

  Sullivan made himself keep moving. He lifted one impossibly heavy foot after the other, tracking back past the tunnelling machine. At each moment he thought he would lose consciousness. Then he heard the deep thump of an explosion behind him, and the shock wave slapped him to the floor. His world tilted crazily, and he was looking back toward the breach.

  The end of the tunnel was glowing red hot. Rock was melting, flowing like toffee before it set, and he could feel the heat on his face. Then he was up, and stumbling desperately onwards, crouching low and bouncing off the rough walls. He staggered out of the tunnel when he least expected it, and found himself in a lull in the storm.

  He made it a few more steps before collapsing onto a bed of ferns at the side of the gravel road. He was looking up at the great Rimu trees of the New Zealand forest. They were dressed in a light covering of snow, with bright stars twinkling above. It looked so much like a peaceful Christmas scene, so much out of place with what had just happened to him and his men, that a shuddering sob tore out of his throat.

  He looked back into the tunnel and called out, his voice breaking, but there was no reply. Was he the only one to make it out alive? He realised something was obscuring his vision. He lifted a hand to his eyes, and it came away covered in blood. Then the electric lights went out.

  3

  63 years before Emergence

  National Centre for Atmospheric Research

  Boulder, Colorado

  Charlie Kettle padded quietly into a large, open office space and placed an armload of reports before Professor Theodore Arms. The old man looked up at him and smiled broadly.

  "You son of a gun!" he exclaimed. "This should be more than enough data, given what we've a
lready got. Your Cheyenne people really came through on this one!"

  Part of his enjoyment came from seeing a man he thought of as a son return safely from a long trip – and Charlie had been gone for over a month. He was a descendant of Black Kettle, the Indian chief remembered for trying, unsuccessfully, to live peacefully with settlers in Colorado in the mid 1800s.

  Charlie Kettle was a top researcher, and he was helping the professor in a line of research that was taking up a lot of their time. Ted Arms felt it was a pity postgraduate degrees in Native American studies weren't being offered at Colorado U. Charlie was as good as any postgrad student he had.

  "Not just Cheyenne," said Charlie. "Sioux, and Kiowa, and some of the Utes. They all know the old stories, and they all want to help."

  Dr Ted, as his students called him, nodded appreciatively. He was no anthropologist, but how the Raven creation cycles had made their way to Colorado from the Artic circle never ceased to amaze him. It was as if a seperate layer of belief lived alongside the Cheyenne story of Grandmother Earth.

  The starting point for both was the same, that the great plains were made from a piece of mud; but in the Cheyenne version Grandmother Earth grew out of a giant floating turtle, and buffalo had been created at the same time as people.

  The two men clasped forearms, in the Cheyenne way, and then looked at the pile of reports.

  "When do you want me to start coding the information?" said Charlie, looking across at the pondorous, slow machine that took up half of one wall. Dr Ted shared the room with two other professors at the University of Colorado.

  "Whenever you want," said Ted. "As soon as you've caught up with family, that is – and make sure you put in for some travel expenses this time!"