Diggory's World (Wayworld Book 1) Read online

  Diggory’s World

  Wayworld, Book 1

  by T. Daniel Sheppeard

  ©2017 – T. Daniel Sheppeard

  Cover art & design ©2017 – T. Daniel Sheppeard

  All Right Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without the express written permission of the author, except for the use in brief quotations in a book review, especially if you’re saying how great the book is.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, and events are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.

  www.tdaniel.com

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Appendix A

  Appendix B

  Afterword

  Chapter 1: The Ship

  Titan is a miserable place. I stooped to avoid hitting my head on a hatch as I followed Lena down the passageway—Lena, whose short, shapely legs saved her from the same problem. My inspection of the still-in-construction LodeCorp Titan station complete, I would soon be free of the cramped quarters and the freezing temperatures that seeped through the bulkheads no matter what. That was the good news.

  The bad news was then I would be away from Lena, as well. Lena with her heart-shaped face and slightly buck teeth—so slight that you probably wouldn’t notice. But I noticed. And I loved them. I watched her long, lustrous, dark hair sway behind her in the low gravity as we strolled (or for anyone taller than Lena, crouched) past that still-unfinished wing of the facility that my inspection had conveniently “overlooked”. (What can I say? Lena knew how to drop a hint and I knew how to take one.)

  Lena brought me to a storage-closet sized “office” near the control center to check in with the base manager, Ed Klock. Mr. Klock was a shrewd man whose frame had softened from too many years in low-g, not that I was a fitness model, myself. Klock wasn’t there yet, so I was left alone for a few precious moments with Lena.

  “You don’t have another inspection for about four months,” I said.

  “Okay.” After a week of flirting and the occasional bit of cuddling in the media room, she was now uncharacteristically terse.

  “Yeah,” I continued, “but I’ve got some vacation time coming up. Any chance we could meet up planet-side?”

  “Actually, Lena has some leave coming up, too, if I’m not mistaken,” came the voice of Klock from behind me.

  “I’m… I’m not sure,” stuttered Lena.

  “I’m pretty sure you do,” said Klock with a wink at his subordinate, “but we can double-check later. It’d probably be a great time to use the company’s beach house in Melbourne if you’d like.” Klock pretended to think a moment. “Have you ever been to Melbourne, Inspector?”

  Oh yes, I had. That’s where I’d met Lena. Wearing a bathing suit. She’d complained about her “pot belly”, but that hadn’t stopped her from choosing a two piece. I would have moved the stars in their orbits for just one more glimpse of that sweetly rounded tummy. Melbourne was where our playful romance had begun, with both of us on extended leave.

  That’s what led me to volunteer for every inspection tour of LodeCorp Titan in the last twelve months. I’d even snuck into my manager’s office to re-arrange the scheduling. It wasn’t hard to do: she habitually left her door unlocked and her computer password was Love1234. No one complained when they found they’d been taken off that route—as I said, Titan is a miserable place.

  “Thank you, Inspector,” Klock’s voice shook me out of my reverie. “The expedient work of URSA [1] inspectors like yourself is very helpful in our maintaining a break-neck speed in getting this station fully functional.” Klock always spoke like he thought he was being recorded, but his face held a playful, knowing smirk. “And at LodeCorp, we understand that dedicated public servants like yourself are often under-appreciated. As my personal thanks, I’d like to extend an offer for you to use some of my own time at one of our corporate vacation houses, if you should fancy some time in Calais, or Cancun, or hey, maybe Melbourne.”

  I had to fight back a scowl. Klock had just crossed a line. Don’t get me wrong: I was thrilled at the idea of spending a few weeks with Lena in Melbourne—or anywhere else, for that matter, but now I felt Klock was pimping her out. I had no doubt he’d made her my liaison for the inspection because he knew we had a thing going and figured she’d inspire more leniency. But to hint at time with Lena as sort of reward was a little too much.

  I wasn’t offended by his “personal thanks” to a “dedicated public servant”. Call it a “gift”, call it a “bribe”, call it what you want. We all knew how the game was played. No one took these inspections seriously. Even a surprise inspection like this one was perfunctory, at best. I didn’t know anyone in my department who’d taken this job because they were deeply committed to making sure every box on a form was appropriately checked off. It was the kind of job you took when your Bachelor of Communications wasn’t taking you anywhere. There was no real risk, no real responsibility. No real rewards, either, but hey, that’s the package. Not a bad trade-off, really. You put in your time, you grab what perks you can while you can, then someday you retire with a pretty decent pension.

  I shook off my half-formed objections and wrapped up my dealings with Klock who exited hurriedly after a few brief murmured words with Lena. I turned to her and smiled.

  “So… Melbourne, huh?” I asked.

  “Hey, yeah, I… I don’t know, Diggs,” she stuttered out. “This isn’t really a good time to talk. You’ve got a shuttle to catch, and I have a, uh, I’m scheduled on a maintenance flight in about an hour.” She gently took my elbow and herded me out of the office and down the passageway toward the skyhook.

  “Well, why don’t ride up with me and we can talk along the way,” I said. “It’d give us a little more time for ‘goodbyes’”, I continued. She didn’t say anything for a bit. Clearly, something wasn’t right. I turned to Lena as we reached the hatch to the skyhook lift. “Did I do something to upset you?” Her face, stern a moment before, softened considerably.

  “No, Diggs, no,” she protested gently. “It’s not that at all.” She paused a moment, then took my hands in her and looked up at me. “I like you a lot, Diggs. I do. But you’re looking for something more serious than what we’ve got, and I just don’t see that happening.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. Thus far in my relationship with Lena, I’d been content to hint and flirt, and things just kinda happened. Coming straight out and saying things was proving uncomfortable. “I mean… you like me… I like you. It’s… I mean… I thought things were… pretty good with us. I thought maybe… we could… really have something special.”

  “Diggs, it’s not that simple,” she said. “C’mon, we’re both grown-ups, here. There’s a lot more to a serious relationship than ‘I like you; you like me’.”

  “Well, sure, but I’m willing to —”

  “It’s not a question of willing, Diggory,” she interrupted. “I live on Titan, for Pete’s sake. You flit about the solar system. There’s just no way that we can be together enough for something serious. You can’t build a future on a week here, a week there, as fun as that may be.”

&n
bsp; “I… I…” I struggled to find words. I didn’t have an answer. She was right, but I couldn’t help but believe that it was worth trying, anyway. “Lena, it’s not just fun to me. I really care about you.”

  “I’m sorry, Diggs,” she said quietly. “But what you’re looking for—it’s not going to happen.”

  “You’re not always going to be on Titan, though, right? Sooner or later you’re going back to Earth…”

  “I don’t want you to get your hopes up, Diggory,” she said. “Who knows what will happen between then and now. People change. Maybe you’ll meet someone else. Maybe I’ll —” she cut herself off, swallowing visibly, then nervously licking her lips. “Don’t make this harder than it has to be, Diggs. I’m sorry, but there’s really nothing more to talk about.”

  She stood on tiptoe a second, about to kiss my cheek, then apparently changed her mind. Her heels returned to the deck and she punched in the code to open the hatch to the skyhook. She put her right hand on my cheek.

  “You need to go now, Diggs,” she said softly, and gently nudged me into the climber. Without another word she closed the hatch and hit a key to start my ascent to the IP dock [2]. The climber, empty except for me, lifted off slowly, miserably, from Titan and I dejectedly watched Shangri-La vanish in the orange haze of Titan’s atmosphere.

  A loud clack told when me the climber finally reached the IP dock, moments before a realistic-sounding female voice chimed “You have arrived at Titan IP Dock Zero One. Please confirm the fittings on your flight suit and…” I didn’t really listen. The artificial voice droned on and I opened the hatch to a hiss of unbalanced pressures, my ears popping. The lights on the other side flickered on as the dingy metallic grey of the climber gave way to the white and green panels of the docking station.

  I floated through the hatch toward a lit panel where tiny letters flashed in red, green, and orange. My eyes skimmed the list until I read:

  LODECORP IP TRANSPORT #FM1382, EUGENE ETA: 6HRS:29MIN

  Six-and-a-half-hours. Why had I been sent up six-and-a-half hours before ETA? A hour was standard. Two was not exceptional. Three, maybe. Six? Had Lena arranged to send me up early to avoid any more awkwardness?

  I logged into the terminal to confirm my arrival. I pulled out my pad and finished my final inspection report, double-checked all my reports, read my mail, and played a game of chess against the computer; I lost, as always. I did everything I could to take my mind off the fact that Lena had just ended our… whatever our relationship had been. Maybe not exactly a romance. I played human ping-pong by myself, bouncing off one bulkhead and sailing across the empty ten-person cabin to the opposite side, then bouncing again. I ate a supposedly chocolate flavored protein bar. The Eugene was still over five hours away.

  After a little more reading, I strapped myself to a wall-cot and tried to sleep. I gave up an hour later, which turned out to be only fifteen minutes. I floated a while, still and motionless, moping about Lena’s rejection while I stared out a porthole across the dimly orange dome of Titan. Halfway to the horizon I made out a white, bean-sized shape I realized was Titan IP 02. That must be where Lena was, or had been earlier, or would be later, preparing for her maintenance flight. I stared morosely at the platform for a long time, thinking of Lena.

  In time, a brief burst of light near the platform signaled the launch of a ship. I’d been around ships enough that I could tell it desperately needed some maintenance if its launching thruster flared that much. A pop of static caught my attention, then fell silent. I let myself drift away from the porthole. I checked the terminal again:

  LODECORP IP TRANSPORT #FM1382, EUGENE ETA: 4HRS:38MIN

  Blast, I was bored! Lovelorn depression surmounted by crushing boredom. I returned to reading.

  The lights flickered suddenly. Static popped, then hissed. The lights went black, the static ceased, and the ever-present hiss of the air supply stopped. All was dark, silent, and still. Terror knotted my gut. I was dead in the sky.

  But I wasn’t bored anymore.

  * * *

  A half a minute or so crept by far more slowly than the boredom-plagued hours that preceded it. I listened intently for any sound. Unconsciously I held my breath, though I knew the cabin would have air for hours. I drifted over to one porthole to look for some sign of damage to the port, but it wasn’t angled to show me any of the exterior hull. I reminded myself to breathe, and pushed myself over to the first porthole I’d looked out. Still no view of the dock’s hull.

  I fought the onrushing panic that I was going to suffocate or freeze alone in the sky. Slow, deep breaths. Calm. Breathe. Calm. I closed my eyes for moment; it didn’t help. I opened them again and gazed out the porthole. Did IP02 have power? Could they tell something was wrong with 01? I found the floating white bean that was IP02. It was not where it should have been. It was floating at the wrong angle. More notable was the flare closer to me. I had seen a flare like that before: a ship on fire. Lena? The Eugene? I gazed on the sight, squinting, trying to make out more detail.

  The lights came on as suddenly as they went off, though dimmer. The static resumed, fainter, and the hiss of air, slower. Backup power. I realized I was sweating. And holding my breath again. I pushed myself toward the terminal.

  BOOTING… BOOTING….

  Back to the porthole. Back to the terminal.

  BOOTING…

  Waited. Breathed. Was Lena burning to death? Blasted into space? Was the Eugene dead in space? I tried the comm; it was dead. Finally the terminal had booted up. I looked for some sort of diagnostics for the port, but I didn’t know the system. Where the terminal had read out the ETA of the Eugene it now read “NO NETWORK CONNECTION. COMM SYSTEM OFFLINE”.

  I scrolled through the menus until I found an external camera. The picture came on line surprisingly sharp and clear. The camera was apparently mounted to a rail that encircled the docking station. The angle did not give me a good look at portions of the dock, but what I could see looked fine. No visible damage. I swung the camera around until it was aimed at the strangely tilting station and zoomed in.

  Bad. Very bad. Though I could not see great detail, I could make out enough to tell that some of the tethering for the Titan IP02 must have broken. The climber drifted in space free of the docking station. If anyone was on there, their chances were slimmer than mine.

  I zoomed back out and looked around until I found the source of the flare. It was a ship. It was drifting, not positioned for a standard orbit. I had never seen its configuration before: the fuselage an elongated egg; three massive pontoon-shaped tanks mounted on struts around the body, terminating in what I could only assume were its engines. I saw no insignia, only a serial number. The now-dwindling jet of flame shot forth from an augie [3]. on one side. A augie berth next to it was empty, its occupant apparently jettisoned.

  Lena was on that ship! I knew she was—she had to be! She couldn’t come with me because she had a maintenance flight. A ship flares out on launch, then returns drifting and in flames. Judging from the damage to the station, there must have been an explosion—surely from a ship in desperate need of maintenance.

  But the ship! From the viewer, it looked structurally intact. Perhaps Lena was still alive. I had to help. Desperately I tried the comm. Still dead. Static. No way to contact the ship. No way to contact Titan. No way to help.

  From here.

  No, I couldn’t. That’d be crazy. Insane. Ridiculous. The ship was dozens, maybe a hundred, kilometers away. I couldn’t go EVA. It was nonsense. It was impossible.

  It was the only way I might save Lena.

  I scrambled across the cabin to a storage closet and opened it. Three orange EVA suits (which always looked to me like humanoid basketballs) were strapped to the wall. Adjustable: they were for generic workers, not custom jobs. I selected the one that came closest to fitting me and fumbled into it. I had worn one only once during a training seminar on ship decompression—I had never worn one in the vacuum of space.

&nb
sp; I mangled the straps and re-did them. How to engage pressure? I consulted the terminal, finding the instructions eventually. I double-checked the latches on the helmet and engaged pressure. Nothing. I checked again. Blast—I forgot to plug it into the pressure hose. Ran through it again. The suit began to squeeze like a full-body blood pressure cuff as a faint swoosh signaled the filling of hundreds of tiny tubes lining the suit with hydraulic fluid.

  Taking the smallest EVA suit with me for Lena, I floated across the room where the emergency airlock stood. I keyed in the activation sequence and stepped through the first hatch. In the lock were two sets of clunky looking maneuvering jets. I hoisted one up and strapped it on like a giant cartoon backpack. Fret-filled seconds ticked by as the airlock hissed free of air. A green light lit above the outer hatch. I was free to disembark.

  Free to disembark. My hand hovered over the key panel. A slow terror gripped me. I was about to leave behind the safety of the docking station to float free in the void of space, nothing to protect me but a thick, plastic, squeezing suit and an aluminum oxynitride faceplate.

  I couldn’t possibly do this. I wasn’t trained. I wasn’t brave. I was a low-level bureaucrat on an inspection tour, not an astronaut. But Lena—Lena was out there and needed me. The comm was dead—Titan didn’t even know what had happened out here. How much air had the ship lost? I couldn’t go—but I had to go. I had to— The hatch opened as I keyed the pad without really thinking about it. Slowly and trembling I nudged myself out of the station and into space. And fell.

  I didn’t really fall but that was the sensation: emptiness “below” me, above me, around me on all sides except behind me. My limbs flailed foolishly as I instinctively tried to catch myself. I had gotten used to weightlessness years before, but this was different—no walls, no floors, no ceilings. Emptiness. A dizzying sensation as though I was falling in every direction at once. Panic. Terror. Maybe a little screaming…

  When I was a child, my father used to take me camping out in the wilderness—far enough from the cities that we could actually make out some stars. On one trip I fell out of a boat on a lake. I wore a life preserver, and quickly bobbed to the surface. I thought the water was shallow but wondered how deep it was, so I let myself slip out of the preserver to touch bottom. There was none. It was as though the world had given way beneath me. In fear I flailed my limbs to push back to the surface, but without success. Water flooded my nose and mouth and I was sure I was drowning when my father pulled me out of the water. Now it felt like this again, only my father was millions of miles away and no one was going to pull me up.