Invasion, Farthinghome Series Vol. 1-e

Farthinghome Series, Vol. 1

by Nina M. Osier

For years, the peculiar "nosey-globes" have harmlessly visited Farthinghome. Now that’s about to change, along with the life of every Human who calls that star system home, because this time the “noseys” are anything else but harmless.

ISBN 1-59431-407-1 Sci-fi / Adventure / Futuristic Romance

Cover Art by Shelley Rodgerson

Also available in RTF and HTML formats



Prologue

Kiev and Sedna hung in the after viewports like blue-green gems awaiting the jewel smith's mallet. A mad smith, who would soon fling them into a furnace--the heat of which their fragile loveliness couldn't hope to survive.

Viewports on a sleeper ship seemed like such a useless luxury. After today, who would be awake to appreciate them? And what was there to see, anyway, in open space?

"Janna, our stasis couches are ready. It's time, don't you think?" Fraya, the watching woman's sister and research partner, stood at the hatch that led from this narrow compartment (a mere viewing gallery, no wider than a corridor) to the place where they would lie through the long years of their journey. Just the two of them, close to the vessel's secondary controls. At its bow, near the primary control center, their brothers already slept.

Janna asked nevertheless, without turning around, "Are Kar and Adair all right?"

"Yes. Their readings show everything's normal." Fraya took the single step that carried her to her sister's side, and stood at the viewports with her arm around Janna's shoulders. "It's difficult to imagine, isn't it? That when we arrive, we'll wake up and not realize time has passed at all."

"It'll be like when we did this to test our tolerance for it." Janna nodded as she ran the tip of her tongue over numb, dry lips. "As if we'd gone to bed for a night's rest, and wakened with the morning."

"Yes. That's exactly how it will be." The other woman tightened her clasp. "But that's not why you're so afraid right now. Is it, Janna?"

"No. It's not what's going to happen to me physically." How well her sister knew her. "It's everyone for whom we're responsible, Fraya. All those lives, suspended. All that distance to cross, with no one to take care of an emergency if one arises. And then, at the end--what if we've made a navigation error? What if our calculations are wrong, and we wake up somewhere that Humans can't live?"

"That won't happen. Farthinghome is a recognized, charted colony world. We know where it is, and how to get there safely. We will get there safely, Janna. If I didn't believe that was true, I wouldn't be here. I'd have stayed behind, to die with our grandmothers on Kiev. And so would you." Again the warm arm tightened.

"I still think we ought to try for Earth. After all the time it's been since they banished our foremothers, surely they've forgotten there was ever a reason for sending us into exile. It's not too late to plot a new course. We could do it from here. Without waking Kar and Adair." Janna was grasping at sun sparkles now. Grabbing water in her hands, watching it trickle through her fingers, and then trying again to get a grip on the elusive stuff, because she'd reached a pitch of desperation at which such behavior almost made sense.

"No. Terra sent us here because they didn't want people like us contaminating their society any longer, and that can't have changed. Our ancestors didn't leave the home-world that long ago." Still gently, but with growing firmness in her tone, Fraya pressed her case.

"They didn't want people like the ones they sent to Farthinghome, either! What makes us so sure there'll be room for us when we get there?" Janna snatched at one last handful of beloved, fast retreating Kiev's golden lake-water. At one last breath of Sedna's blossom-perfumed breeze. "What if the people already on Farthinghome tell us we can't stay?"

For that question Fraya knew she had no answer. So she said, "We'll deal with whatever we find on Farthinghome when we get there. The last time our worlds communicated, the settlers had taken hold and started building themselves a good life. In spite of what the prognosticators on Terra predicted they'd do, if dumped together on a planet and left to fight each other as they'd battled the authorities where they came from. They've had centuries fewer than we had, to fill their new world and move out into space beyond it. And unlike us, they didn't arrive united by a common culture and a coherent belief system. So I can't imagine they won't have room. Especially once they understand what we can offer them that Terra never could!"

"If they're still Human at all, I suppose they'll have to take us in. Just because we're Humans, too. Because by the time we get there, we really won't have any choice but to stay." Janna put up a hand and wiped her face. "All right, Fraya. I'm ready now."

"Good." The other woman lowered her arm so they could walk separately through the narrow hatch. Leaving their final view of twin worlds soon to be swallowed by a star going nova, to enter the state that everyone on board this ship must attain before its hyperdrive could kick in and put enough distance behind them so the coming catastrophe wouldn't engulf them in its fringes. And, by so doing, wipe out the last few hundred Humans whose dangerous customs and unholy skills had sentenced their ancestors to perpetual banishment.



Chapter 1

"It's just another damn nosey, Brenna. Don't get your keezers in a knot." Lieutenant of the Home Guard Gregory Wolfenden lifted the nose of his tiny spacecraft and climbed away from the object of his flying partner's exclamation. They'd seen dozens of those things during the years since the two of them, Greg Wolfenden and Brenna Taggart, first took to Farthinghome's skies. Shimmering silver spheres, loaded with a weird jelly-like mess that probably meant something to someone, somewhere--since that was what the scientists found when they opened the spheres and analyzed their contents. Clearly these so-called "noseys" had been made on purpose, by someone or something intelligent. But just what they did remained a mystery, because so far Farthinghome's best minds couldn't dope it out. All anyone knew was that the noseys had never hurt people or damaged property, and that after surviving the impossible heat of passing through the planet's atmosphere they self-destructed following varying periods on the ground. Or in the ocean, or (if collected but not opened right away) in storage at one of Farthinghome's research laboratories.

When opened, they didn't do anything. Their organic contents decayed quickly when exposed to air, and their gleaming shells soon followed.

"I got it!" Taggart's voice announced over her comrade's suit-comm, in triumph.

"Nice shooting," Wolfenden answered, but his words came out on a groan. "Brenna, target practice is all those things are good for! D'you really need it today? Just ignore 'em if we see any more. Noseys aren't worth the power it takes to blow 'em out of the sky."

They'd had this discussion, which occasionally turned into an argument, many times before. Taggart sighed as she answered, "Greg. Dammit all, every one of those things ought to be blasted before it can get anywhere near our atmosphere! I don't care how long ago the Powers That Be decided there were just too many, and quit bothering. I don't care how harmless the experts' stupid tests claim they are. They come from an alien species somewhere, one we don't know anything about. You can't tell me those aliens aren't sending 'em here on purpose. For a purpose. Besides, they just plain give me the creeps! Unless someone who's got the right to give me orders tells me I can't do it anymore, I'm gonna go right on taking out every nosey I see."

"Some people are too damn stubborn to be believed!" Wolfenden muttered that with his head turned aside from his comm pickup, addressing himself to the universe in general. When he turned his face so his flying partner could hear him again, he said, "Brenna, did it ever occur to you that maybe the people, beings, whatever who've been sending the noseys our way are friendly? Or at least want to be? That's what I've read some of the authorities think. If they had any interest in hurting us, they've had more than ten years to do it. And they haven't. That sounds pretty conclusive to--"

"Greg!" Taggart's scream cut him off. "Look!"

He looked. At a swarm of nosey-globes, coming in faster than any he'd seen before. Normally they almost drifted out of space, and let Farthinghome's gravity capture them and pull them down. But not this batch. These spheres moved toward Humankind's home with purpose.

The two pilots also moved deliberately, as Wolfenden switched from private comm-cast to his partner and shouted instead to a battery orbiting high overhead.