Mindshard (ON HOLD)

Chapter 1: Call Up

     In the late 20th Century, humanity’s scientific community suggested the Solar System with its array of planets wasn’t unusual in the galaxy.  The conditions, their science told them, needed to create the nine worlds spinning around Sol, were easily duplicated and were indeed responsible for the formation of star systems all throughout the universe.  With that assumption in place, the search for extra-solar planets began.  First with the National Aeronautical and Space Administration in the United States of America, along with other world agencies then with the Deep Space Exploration, or DESE initiative.

     As technology improved and their instruments were able to see further and further into space, they quickly found the assumption was true.  Planets abounded in the galaxy, spinning around yellow stars, like Sol, and most other star types as well.  Only the great giants of the stellar fields, with their massive gravity fields and searing radiation belts seemed to lack worlds with stone skins and molten cores in orbit.

     What were rare, however, were planets that orbited their stars within its life zone, where temperature and light was sufficient to keep water in its liquid state, necessary for earth-like life.  Which made the discovery of a planet in the life zone of Venda Lassitus, a class G4 yellow giant, that much more important.  For Humanity had outgrown not only its home world, but every other colonizeable planet in the Solar System and, as war raged over ever-scarcer resources and space, they desperately searched for space to expand to.

     The fourth planet in a crowded system of over fifteen, Icarus Prime was discovered during the renaissance of deep space exploration in the late 20th Century.  Well within the giant’s theoretical life zone, it was a lush world of sprawling oceans and mountainous continents.  Both land and sea teemed with floral and fauna life, ranging from nearly every climate zone on the planet.

    Additionally two moons swung in orbit around her, the largest big enough to have an atmosphere, water and a biosphere of its own.  The colonists named the big moon Icarus Secundus, its smaller sibling, Damocles.  Between Prime and Secundus, the Icarus Colony, the furthest colony established by humans outside the Solar System, was a thriving place, with well over 50 million people, spread over eighteen major cities and several agricultural and industrial complexes.

     Spinning out of orbit through a layer of satellites, platforms, orbital industrial nodes, and factory stations and in towards the central continent of Ghandi, one immediately caught sight of Icarus’ largest city, New Angeles.  The administrative and commercial center for the colony, New Angeles was a massive cluster of habitation nodes, industrial and commercial complexes and spindly processing plants.  In possession of a number of key centralizations connected by mass transit, and surrounded by no less than three fully functional spaceports, New Angeles rivaled cities of old Earth in size and splendor.

     One of the most popular and heavily used of the mass transit media in the city was the tube train, a modified maglev system that used concentric push and pull magnets to pull passenger units through an enclosed tube network.  The network spider-webbed over the whole of New Angeles, allowing any point to be accessed by the system.

     Caught between one point and the next in his long trip home, Ian Finn sagged against the vertical seat he was using, its morphogenic gravity shell working to hold him in place against Prime’s insistent pull.  Such vertical seating was common on tube cars to maximize available space.  However, considerations of gravity and tube cars were distant from the wiry Finn’s mind as he passed a trembling hand over his face, fighting exhaustion.  Having just completed a 12-hour shift at work, one of DESE’s ‘eggheads’ was finally on his way home.

     Originally born in faraway Dublin, Ireland, Finn was one of the lucky few that had parents with enough money, position and importance to escape the overcrowded hellhole Earth was swiftly evolving into and catch a deep space colony ship bound for places unknown.  That ship, the Mayflower Avenger, plodded through XLS for nearly seven months before hoving to in Icarus orbit, offloading her cargo of travel-weary colonists onto shuttles and down to the planet.