Shipyard Ahoy!

Science Fiction Storytelling

[If you are following the setlist for my Immigration Control collection, then this is the first story in Part II. The previous story is Fortunately, I was Saved by the Aliens, which you can find at that link. I’ll be posting the next story soon, at which point I’ll add that link at the end.]

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I did say I would do something for my sci-fi afficionados, so here it is.

This ironic little story is one I am entering into the Lunar Awards Season VI, along with Fragment of a Time Capsule, which was the one I did for the Prompt Quest (that link is to The Gathering, where people post their stories - there’s some good things there, by the way). The word limit is 2,500 - so I have just spent the afternoon doing repeated close reading edits to remove the 80-odd words required to get it down to 2,500. I did have some chocolate though, so that helped.

This story is intended to be in my second collection, Immigration Control, if I ever get round to finishing and publishing it. I have been stuck on the very last story for a month now. I will just have to trust that it comes. This one is set in the same setting as a whole load of other stories which reference each other and do have a kind of chronology to them, charting what happens after humans start doing interstellar spacefaring in the 22nd century (this one is about fifty years or so after the first voyage to Alpha Centauri in 2133 or thereabouts. That voyage is dramatised in my first collection, Rejected Messages (I generated a 100% off promo code MH63R if you wish to get it for free before 30 April - but if you like it, I’m holding you to the condition of subscribing if you haven’t already! Obviously I wouldn’t know if you didn’t fulfil the condition, but hey). Two of the characters from that story (Grissom & Shari’ana, the Paschat) make cameos in this one. If you like this one, you’ll like that collection. [Update: obviously that promo code is no longer valid - sorry!]

Although this is a kind of dramatised version of events, I can assure you that it will happen just like this. Naturally, if the globalist cabal get their New World Order then I’m afraid it won’t happen, of course, because they would be perceived as a very serious threat, necessitating intervention. So this is what you will be missing if they win. It really is about the future of the species.

As you’ll understand, these events tend to happen to every species, because they are psychohistorically inevitable. I’m sure you’ll get what I mean when you read it.

I also say it’s definitely one for science fiction fans - it’s not fan fiction, as will be clear, so I’m not plagiarising anything. Call it postmodern irony, if you will. I like that kind of stuff. But it’s definitely one for the fans.

Anyhow, you don’t want to listen to me rambling on, so without further ado, here it is. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Oh - and please do feel free to like, comment and share! Or subscribe, if you haven’t already. The more support I receive, the more I can write, and the more I can hope to do this for a living.

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Shipyard Ahoy!

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Master shipbuilder Jenthan shuffled back and forth restlessly outside the vast double-portals to the Council chamber. His apprentice, Manthu, likewise not a little nervous, largely due to his master’s irritable demeanour.

Should’ve had at least three more drinks first, he decided.

Jen checked his timepiece. “They’re late. That’s not a good sign.”

Manny frowned. “You think they’ll say no?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me. You know what Councillors are like. In my experience, there’s a directly proportional relationship between length of deliberation and no.”

“Current percentage?”

Timepiece check. A little side-to-side head-shifting, calculating. “22.7%, by my reckoning.”

“We’re not doing too badly, then.”

Jen harrumphed. Manny said nothing.

“In my opinion,” Jen said, “they should never have lifted the quarantine on Gaia. They clearly can’t cope with other species. They’re xenophobes.”

Manny did not disagree. But continued to say nothing.

Two minutes later, which is to say, approximately 30.2%, the portal doors slid open and they were ushered inside.

The Council chamber made everyone look small, even the Councillors. It was designed that way. Thirty thousand orbits back when the Tausies first considered the stars. A soft amber light perfusing a vast, cavernous hall within a forest of hexagonal columns fifty metres high, laced floor to ceiling with glowing incandescent blues and scarlets highlighting their edging. Star-born frescos and filigree and rose nebulae adorning the ceiling dome. All designed to foster humility and humbleness, for Councillors and plaintiffs alike, a nostalgic reminder of their place in the grand galactic scheme. And yet possessed with a resonant echo to every heavy sentence, aesthetically defined acoustics, constructed to impress and inspire awe, majesty, destiny.

This time there were only three of them behind the table in the central clearing. Two cushpods materialised invitingly a few metres before them on the engineers’ approach, proving to be extremely comfortable, as it happens, their contours morphing specifically to match their bodylines.

They sat, and blinked. In the formal way, Jenthan waited to be addressed.

“We’ve come to a decision,” was the predictable first line. Councillor Shemsa, it seemed to him, wore the kind of sly smile suggestive of mischief. The other two likewise. Conspiratorial, no doubt. Typical Councillors, Jen decided.

Shemsa didn’t follow up with an explanation.

Definitely mischief. “And?”

Her smile widened. “Favourable opinion.”

“Yes!” He turned to his apprentice with a grin.

“I sense a condition coming here,” Manny whispered.

“Your apprentice is correct,” Councillor Kalli added.

That wiped the smile off his face. He turned it into a frown. “Erm, what condition?”

“The two of you shall accompany the convoy to Gaia and oversee the construction.”

“But I’m a shipbuilder! I build ships, not shipyards!”

“Which will make it the best shipyard the Gaians could ever want. You are aware of how enamoured they are with your work, aren’t you?”

“Well, yes, but…”

“But, what?”

“It’s not as if I have a choice. They were given fifty years priority commissions as a new arrival, remember.”

“They could’ve gone elsewhere. Some of them have.”

“Except some bright spark told them our shipyard is the best in the sector.”

“They would’ve found that out soon enough.”

Shemsa laughed. “Especially given how much they like their ships.”

“That’s not funny, actually.”

But she was still laughing. “How many is it now?”

“How many what?”

“Starships Enterprise.”

“Fifty-nine. Number sixty will be ready next week.”

The other two couldn’t help chuckling either. Councillor Phorma chimed in, “And how many of those round ones, -”

“Millennium Falcon. Seventy-three. Pieces o’ junk every one of ‘em.”

Manny added, “And every bloody time they ask whether it can make point-five past lightspeed and do the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs.”

Shemsa chortled again, “And what do you reply to that?”

“Obviously not,” Jen said, “you know what the speed limits are.”

“So you tell them, what, point five of lightspeed?”

He nodded, “and that we have no idea what this Kessel run thing is.”

“Ah,” Councillor Kalli waggled a finger at him, “so you haven’t actually watched their visidramas?”

“Not the whole way through, no, only the bits with the ships in. To get an idea of specifications, you know.”

Phorma said, light-heartedly, “You know you should watch them, they’re quite entertaining.”

“And,” Shemsa added, “they may just help you remember.”

“Oh? Remember what?”

“Nostalgia,” she continued, seriously, “help you remember what we were like, when we were their age and first came out of our system.”

“You may even,” Kalli ventured, “feel a little more sympathetically towards them.”

“I don’t know about that. They’re irritating,” Jen said – irritatedly – “and arrogant. They think they’ve got the best ships in the sector.”

“And you don’t?”

“Of course they haven’t. We have.”

And all three of them burst out laughing again. “Spoken like a true Tausie! Nice!”

Even Manny couldn’t help laughing with them. “What are you smirking at?” his master glared at him.

“We’re also aware that you view them as a little xenophobic, yes?”

“I’ve made no attempt to hide my opinion about releasing the quarantine.”

“You do understand they have to learn sometime?”

“Of course. I just think, well, it’s too early, is all I’m saying.”

Councillor Shemsa leaned back thoughtfully, then said, “May I make a suggestion, Master Jenthan?”

“Erm, sure.”

“Why don’t you take a few days off and peruse the Archive for our own spacefaring visidramas from, let’s say, the two centuries before we learned electrogravitics.”

Jen looked sideways at Shemsa. “Hmm. Are you saying I’ll find the ships in those visidramas somewhat familiar?”

“Well, they’ve come on a bit in the last twenty thousand years, but, yes, essentially the core designs aren’t that different.”

“He might even get some new ideas?” Kalli looked across at Shem. Shemsa nodded approvingly.

“And maybe you could show the Gaians some of those visidramas as a kind of cultural gift when you arrive. What say you?”

“You’re not giving me a choice, are you?”

“Nope.”

“Take it or leave it, then?”

“Yep. Leave it, and our orbital space will continue swarming with ships from Gaian visidramas and you won’t have time to accept the more interesting commissions.”

“Well,” he admitted, “they were interesting initially. They got all excited when I told them the electrogravitic drive allows spaceships to be designed to any specifications they desired. ‘Any design?’ says he. ‘Sure,’ says I, ‘I am a master shipbuilder, you know.’ Why they wanted those two great struts sticking out the back of their flying saucer was beyond me at the time. ‘Warp coils’, they said. ‘What’s that?’ says I? ‘Warp bubbles, warps spacetime around the ship to allow faster-than-light travel blah blah blah, powered by antimatter.’.”

“Ah, I can see why that concerned you,” Kalli said, sympathetically.

“Quite. Especially given their warlike social history. They were disappointed as anything when I said that was prohibited, along with photon torpedoes and the like, because of The Ancient War and all that. ‘What’s The Ancient War?’ they say, so I explain, and they go ‘Cool! Sounds like Star Wars!’. ‘You know it wasn’t fun and it certainly wasn’t cool,’ says I.”

“Is that why you haven’t watched it?”

Jen nodded. “Yeah. Something like that.”

“Well, that is understandable. But we had a visidrama like that too, you know?”

“Of course I know that. I only watched it once. Like everyone had to. It was too scary.”

“Which is the point. The Gaian version isn’t scary, though. It’s actually, well, a bit silly actually.”

Jen chuckled, finally. “Ok, I’ll give it a go.”

“On the way to Gaia with the construction ship?”

“On the way to Gaia with the construction ship.” Spoken like a stroppy adolescent to his parents on tasked with ship-cleaning duty.

“Excellent! We knew you’d agree, in the end.”

He harrumphed again.

Then Shemsa smiled maternally at him. “I think some time with the Gaians will help you think more kindly about them. They’ve been through a terrible trauma, remember? They need all the friendship they can get.”

“You’re saying,” Jen said, prodigally, “it’s actually me, not them, who needs to rethink my attitude?”

Shemsa just raised her eyebrow a little, and repeated the affectionate smile.

He sighed. “Fair enough, Mother. Fair enough.”

#

Starship Enterprise number sixty shot through the hypergate, pursued closely in its wake by the huge Tau Ceti construction ship, a thousand metres long and five hundred in girth, a sight to behold with its swirling spirals of luminescent green, colouring modelled on one of the large predatory therapods which hunted their eastern forests. Flanked by two Slave Ones and a squadron of Tie Fighters (all transmitting an awful screeching noise to any passing ships), with Millennia Falcon seventy-two and seventy-three bringing up the rear, they entered the Gaian system at 0.12 lightspeed, one billion kilometres perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic and directly above Saturn.

Jen had instructed the navigator not to accelerate for the approach to Gaia. He still had Episodes Seven to Nine left to watch.

By the time he reached Gaia, he wished they’d gone maximum velocity.

They settled into a comfortable orbit alongside Selene, the large Gaian quasi-satellite, which had been their sole moon until only just a century ago, and looked on curiously at the huge ring-like station orbiting Selene.

“That’s gonna be a bugger to dock with,” he muttered, “the way it keeps spinning like that.”

“Why do they have to keep it perpetually rotating?” Manny wondered.

“It’s from another one of their visidramas.” A familiar feline figure strode forwards to join them and stood alongside, surveying the scene through the observation window and smiling slyly.

“Another one?”

“Yes,” Shari’ana said. “Quite relevant to my work, ironically. This station is an exact replica of the one in the visidrama. The rotation simulates gravity using centrifugal force.”

“But they’ve got electrogravitics now!”

“Nostalgia, remember?”

Harrumph.

“You know it’s the same for virtually all spacefaring species?”

“Mother did mention something along those lines.”

“In the century or so just before they discover electrogravitics and interstellar travel nearly all of them have some visidrama about an exploration ship traversing the galaxy discovering new lifeforms and meeting new civilisations. And when they do get electrogravitics, it’s only to be expected they would want to design ships to look like their beloved Enterprise, or whatever its name happens to be.”

“What was yours called?”

“Ah, well, we’re one of those few exceptions. We’re a far more homely and spiritual species, and as you know we didn’t really go through those materialistic phases before we had to leave our world.” Then she looked a little sad again. “Not that I remember much from that time.”

Jen wasn’t the kind of person who knew what to say to mournful stuff like that. So he just looked back out the window at all those Gaian ships flitting about SS-V (or Selene Station One, to give its official name).

Shari’ana noticed, and thoughtfully broke the uncomfortable silence. “I like what you did with those redundant struts sticking out the back of their flying saucer, by the way.”

“Hah!” Jen smiled broadly. “They went all sullen when I told them they couldn’t have warp coils and all the rest of it, so I says ‘how about a meditation space?’ ‘You mean a chill out zone?’ says he. ‘Erm, yeah, something like that,’ says I, ‘I’ll make both of them zero gravity and yes, you can still have that illumination if you must.’ They liked that.”

Shari’ana chuckled.

Then Manny asked, “You said that visidrama was relevant to your work? How so?”

“Because it’s about extraterrestrial intervention in their evolution. Provoking quantum jumps in maturity.”

“Ah, like what your species has been up to?”

“Quite,” Shari’ana chuckled again. “And as it happens that story was one of those we inserted into their cultural consciousness.”

“Do they know that?”

“I certainly hope not.”

Jen sighed again. “I have a bad feeling about this,” he muttered.

#

The next day they boarded a little shuttle and – sensibly letting QAI-TI do the work – docked with SS-V without difficulty, even if the constant rotation was not a little disorienting.

They were greeted by a very happy man with the warmest of smiles. A Gaian elder, clearly, perhaps eighty or ninety in Gaian years, but patently still sprightly and handsome. His youthful smile certainly hadn’t lost any charm. He, like most of his companions, was wearing a uniform, however, that was entirely not to Tausie taste. Too tight-fitting and, judging by the other members of the greeting party, available in a variety of garish colours. As for the females, they were clearly showing far too much leg. You wouldn’t get away with that kind of thing on Tau Ceti Four. Besides, far too cold most of the year. They each had a kind of silver insignia over their left breast. He discovered later they were communication devices, linked with QAI-TI’s translation subroutine. The Gaians were still struggling to master Galactic Common, and for important occasions continued to rely on QAI-TI. The man stepped forward, curtseyed ever so slightly with a hint of embarrassment (it was not the done thing for Gaian males) with his hands out to the sides a little, in the customary manner, then issued his welcome.

“Welcome to SS-V, Master Jenthan. It’s a pleasure to have you here, we’re so glad you’ve agreed to come and help us. My name is Admiral Grissom. You are very welcome.”

That kind of politesse took Jen a little by surprise. He definitely wasn’t expecting it. “Erm, well, that’s, erm, that’s mighty kind of you, Admiral Grissom.”

Grissom just smiled.

Then Manny burst out, “Oh! You’re the Grissom who commanded the Centaura?”

Gris beamed a little. “The very same, thank you.”

“I learned all about you from the Archive. Well done! Going 1.3 parsecs in a piece of junk like that, that’s bravery, that is!”

“Well, I’m, erm, flattered, thank you. But that was a very beautiful ship. And she never let us down. Anyway, won’t you join us for a drink and then we’ll discuss some plans.”

“Now that’s what I was hopin’ you’d say,” Jen smiled.

#

And so now we can see them all, seated around an oval glass table, and Grissom has a mischievous glint in his eye.

“I was wondering if we might trouble you for another favour?”

“Hmm, what kind of favour?” Jen was a little suspicious.

“Could you help us construct something like this?”

Grissom placed a modest visisonar in the centre of the table and pressed a little pad on its plinth whereupon it immediately displayed a somewhat familiar object. It looked a little bit like a moon. Grey, with a single, large crater on one side.

Except of course it was no moon. It was a space station.

And that’s when the master shipbuilder erupted, all diplomatic niceties forgotten.

“Absolutely not!” he thundered. “Absolutely not! There is no way, I repeat, no way in the entire galaxy I am ever going to build you a BLOODY DEATH STAR!!!”

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And if you liked it…

Bon Voyage…