Every Last Mother's Child

Every Last Mother’s Child

  William J. Carty Jr.

  Copyright 2012, 2016 by William J. Carty

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  First edition September 2012

  Revised June 2016

  Acknowledgements

  There are always people a writer feels he has to thank or acknowledge. I am no exception. The first acknowledgement is to the wonderful men in my life, my father, uncles, great uncles, who were firefighters at one time, who taught me what it meant to have a duty to protect and to serve the people of our community. They and other firefighters are true heroes, and were long before September 11, 2001.

  The others I would like to acknowledge are the volunteers of the American Red Cross especially the men and women who make up the disaster action teams of the Columbus Area Chapter of the American Red Cross. When I say finest kind, I mean that with all my heart. Many have and will give up their nice warm beds to go out in the elements to assist a family that has suffered a fire at O dark thirty, and then report to their jobs the next morning and do it again later that night. Please keep up the very good work you have done for many years.

  To my friends and family who let me babble when I was on the jazz. There are many others who have helped me get this story written. Thank you all.

  Prologue

  In the 418th year after landing, the planet Trena was in trouble. For four centuries the planet at the cross roads of the galaxy had experienced the turmoil that a cross roads could be. She was situated several light years from the Earth Empire, and from The Thonian Realm. Both large star nations bordering the star system of Trena. These large star nations consisted of ten or twenty star systems each with many habitable planets. Because of its location on the trading routes Trena had, through the centuries, become a very wealthy independent star nation. Along with the Earth Empire and the Thonian Realm she was part of the GaTO or Galactic Treaty Organization which had come to the kingdom’s defense when the Republic of the Stars had attempted to invade the kingdom half a century before. When the Theocracy had harassed the kingdom’s shipping on occasion, GaTO ships had come to her ships aid outside of Trena, as Trena had no interstellar capable warships. Neither of these two small star nations had learned that it was better to have Trena a friend than an unruly colony or occupied planet.

  Their trouble wasn’t man made. Well at first it wasn’t. The comet didn’t have a name. It had been knocking about the Trena Solar System for millions of years. There had been two of them until the larger of the two was destroyed when it had collided with a small airless world about 2 Astronomical Units out from the Trena primary creating the Trena Asteroid Belt. The smaller of the two comets had survived the destruction of the larger. Even though a chunk of the larger comet had hit it, it had survived; but was thrown out of its normal orbit at the time. That change had been beneficial as it bounced it a little bit above the asteroid field that the larger comet had created, and would ensure its survival for millions of years. This was about to end.

  The comet’s successful navigation of the asteroid belt ended in a spectacular collision with an asteroid of modest size. This modest asteroid of several hundred miles in diameter was halved by the collision. The bigger of the two rocks began a domino-like effect. One asteroid colliding with another and another until several large asteroids had had their orbits changed. What was left of the comet and one large asteroid were now traveling together away from Trena, and appeared to be headed out of the solar system.

  The authorities on Trena had been aware for months that this was going to happen.

  They had taken steps in the asteroid belt to make sure none of the mining interests which provided Trena with raw materials including precious metals for the kingdom and trade would be greatly impacted. The Crown had studied several of the possible outcomes of the impact, only one or two of them were of serious enough to make the Crown take notice. The crown authorities had taken what precautions they thought prudent for a cosmic incident. A rare one that hadn’t been recorded in any inhabited system ever. It was widely believed that the one or two of the worse scenarios wouldn’t happen. The collision itself was highly improbable; the odds of it happening were nearly incalculable. So the authorities felt the one or two serious events would be nearly impossible. Although they had thought of every conceivable thing that could happen they hadn’t a glimmer of what would actually happen.

  The astronomers felt certain that on their current trajectories that the remains of the comet and the asteroid wouldn’t be seen again for thousands of years. Everyone relaxed, thinking that the cosmic event was over.

  It wasn’t.

  A month later as the comet skimmed the top of Trena’s second smaller less dense asteroid field, it collided with some abandoned ordinance, a gravity bomb.

  A surveyor flight was following the comet and asteroid as a science mission, not a recon mission. The Royal Academy of Science had convinced the Crown to let it borrow a surveyor long range recon platform. It was an unprecedented opportunity to observe what happen when a comet struck other astronomical objects. They had already gathered several thousand terabytes of data. The Surveyor Ship detected the bomb seconds before it detonated. Surveyor 011’s captain had just finished his flash traffic message when it exploded.

  The Thonian battle ship Aggressor had fought a vicious battle with a Republican pirate and was nearly lost with all hands before Trena had been founded. If it hadn’t dumped its magazines it would have been destroyed. One of the weapons it dumped was classified as a planet buster. The weapons team had set the bomb to self-destruct. A small explosive was to go off destroying the weapons arming circuits. The battle happened a full century before Trena was founded. Later the Aggressor had been lost with all hands. Because of the destruction of the battleship no one knew it was there. With the arming circuits destroyed it was safe from most accidental detonations, however the bombs self-destruct system had been compromised to the point that when several million tons of comet collided with the ancient bomb it was too much to prevent its arming sequence from completing its program.

  The Thonians had no idea it had been there. It wasn’t a big bomb for such a device but it was enough. It was a gravity bomb designed to alter the gravity of the planet it hit. It was designed to rip a planet out of its orbit and causing catastrophic damage. Having no planet to interact with it vented its micro short lived black hole in such a way that its gravitational field caused the orbits of thousands of nearby asteroids of all sizes to be ripped from what had been stable orbits. Not all the asteroids in the second less dense belt had been affected only a small portion of it.

  That was enough though.

  The asteroids now, ripped from what had been stable orbits, were now on a trajectory that would cross the path of the Free World of Trena. Although not many, not even a tenth of the entire field, would fall on Trena, it would be enough to cause problems for the planet of Trena.

  If Trena had been as much as four days farther along in its orbit it would have been impacted a thousand years later, one day the other way and most of the fragments would have missed it. However, Fate or the Gods conspired against the small independent free world of Trena. It was going to come to a spectacular end in less than a standard year.

  Book 1: The announcement