The Moons of Valder

Paul Saunders

Description

W261 was reared in an incubation tube by the Moon System of Valder’s ruthless dictator as a warrior to execute his bidding. However, W621’s inner yearning and belief that there was something better than a life as one his warriors discovered a completely different destiny.
Imagine if Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich had succeeded in fulfilling his vision of 1000 years of rule.
“The Moons of Valder” picks up what life might be like under after 1000 years of such a dictatorship.
The book may be described as ‘Gothic Sci-Fi’. It is has elements of “Pilgrim’s Progress”, “The Chronicles of Narnia” and “A Brave New World”. A number of people who know little about faith have found that using a fictional format can be helpful to understand the underlying principles without what can appear confusing jargon. This is such a work and the third book by the author.

Sujets

• Science Fiction
• Paul Saunders
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris AU
• Date de parution: 09 octobre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781664104938
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

The Moons of Valder
Paul Saunders

Copyright © 2021 by Paul Saunders.
 
ISBN:
Softcover
978-1-6641-0492-1

eBook
978-1-6641-0493-8
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
 
 
 
Rev. date: 11/22/2021
 
 
 
 
 
Xlibris
AU TFN: 1 800 844 927 (Toll Free inside Australia)
AU Local: 0283 108 187 ([phone] from outside Australia)
www.Xlibris.com.au
513564
Contents
Chapter 1:The Escape
Chapter 2:The Sanctuary
Chapter 3:The Companion
Chapter 4:The Feared-One
Chapter 5:The Scar
Chapter 6:The Rescue
Chapter 7:Treasures of Moon Four
Chapter 8:The Recovery
Chapter 9:Unravelling the Mystery
Chapter 10:Resistance Grows
Chapter 11:A New Twist
Chapter 12:The Awakening
Chapter 13:The Confrontation
Chapter 14:The Grip Loosens
Chapter 15:A New Era Begins


Chapter 1
The Escape
Pzzst! Pzzst! The blue light of an energy cannon streaked across the sky. Pwzat! Pwzat! The ray gun returned fire with a flash of pink light. A moon fighter was under attack from a pirate fighter. Pwzat! Pwzat! A second pirate fighter joined the first. A worker inside a farm bubble dome peered through the condensation on the inside of the dome but all that could be seen were pink and blue streaks of light across the sky.
A crisp stern voice snapped over the intercom, ‘W621! Get back to work.’
W621 was under extremely strict surveillance by the warrior overseers because of disciplinary problems. W621 was a little too questioning and occasionally failed to execute orders without question or hesitation.
The long brown muscled arms swung the pick into very hard, bone-dry, red-brown soil to form a narrow trench, down which a trickle of precious water flowed. Meanwhile, the dogfight between the moon and pirate fighters intensified.
Crash! The moon fighter, which had been flying at ground level, broke through the glass and metal wall and came to rest inside the bubble dome.
The cockpit of the moon fighter slowly raised and the pilot climbed out clutching his eyes and screaming in pain. ‘Ray gun blast to the eyes. I can’t see. I can’t see.’
The pilot was a very thin very short man. He ripped off his helmet and cast it to the ground. W621 bathed his eyes with the water trickling along the recently dug trench.
The whole dome was thrown into chaos. Broken pipes gushed water and severed electric cables crackled and sparked. Dome workers rushed to turn off taps and maintenance workers to switch off power. Security guards came and took the pilot away as warning lights flashed and sirens wailed.
The clean dry air of the outside desert quickly replaced the thick, misty, drug-laced vapour of the dome. W621 stood and looked at the moon fighter. Apart from a few dints, it appeared quite sound, in spite of his injuries, the pilot had managed a reasonable landing.
This dome was a campus of a military academy for trainee warriors where brainwashing and strict discipline were administered prior to graduation. W261 had completed six months of their final two years.
The fresh clean air and lack of guards left the rookie warrior time to think. Seeing the discarded helmet and the moon fighter with its engine running W621 grabbed the helmet, jumped into cockpit, flicked the switch to close the canopy, fired up the reverse thrusters, moved out of the dome and in a few moments the fighter was approaching escape velocity.
The genetically engineered warriors have extremely fast reflexes and exceptional eye hand co-ordination. They are approximately four and a third moon cubits tall and are approximately ten times stronger than drolls. (Drolls are from a class of people specially bred to perform factory and menial work.) The moon fighter had been designed for these warriors. The pirates who were renegade drolls, found the controls harder to manage. When the pirates who had caused the moon fighter to force land, came to attack it again could not match the flying skills of W621. This time they could not even fire on it because of the superior warrior skill.
The time of W621’s flight was a super convergence. Valder is an extremely large planet consisting of a thin rock-crust with a water vapour atmosphere. At each convergence, the combined gravitational pull of her orbiting moons causes Valder to erupt with gigantic volcanoes that spew vast amounts of dust and steam. The complex gravitational pull of the moons is sufficient to pull this erupting moist water crystal laden dust towards them. During the time of a super convergence the phenomena is increased. In space these form into thick dust-drifts. When these mingle with the atmosphere of any of Valder’s moons they seed any existing clouds and cause rain themselves. As can be expected the moons closest to Valder receive the most and the most distant the least. At every convergence, the whole moon system becomes choked with dust such dust-drifts, which causes the light emanating from the solar system’s distant white star sun to glow an eerie red.
W621 flew the moon fighter quickly into a vast, red dust-drift, not knowing, or even fully comprehending where the journey would lead. An overwhelming force gripped W621 to fly on and on, spurred by an exhilarating sense of freedom. During this flight, several groups of pirates tried to engage W621’s fighter into dogfights. W621 easily out-manoeuvred and out flew them until there was no sight of them or Moon Six. In the last attempted dogfight W621 had flown into an especially thick dust drift such that there was virtually no visibility. Suddenly the exhilaration of the escape and scrapes with the pirates was replaced with an awesome sense of emptiness.
Thoughts like, where am I? Where will I go? What will I eat? How much fuel is there? How long will the air last? rushed into W621’s mind. The intense warrior training pushed these fears back. A quick check of the instruments revealed that there were twenty-four hours of air, and a quarter of a tank of fuel, and a week’s supply of food and water. A check of the navigation instruments revealed the moon fighter was half way between Moon Six and Moon Eight.
Tsark, to maintain supreme power, did not teach much history, geography or politics. Moon Eight had once been covered with vast forests and oceans, which had left a legacy of extensive coal and oil deposits. These deposits were heavily exploited by Tsark to fuel his gigantic industrial and military empire.
W621 did not know much about convergences and in particular the super-convergences. The instruments indicated Moon Eight would be approximately twenty hours away. One of the greatest attributes of the genetically engineered warriors is stamina. They can endure heat, cold, high radiation exposure, and oxygen deprivation. W621 knowing the air supply was limited set the automatic pilot to fly to Moon Eight and withdrew into a self-induced comatosed state. Therefore, only four hours of air would be used.
Suddenly W621 was jolted out of the coma by the noise emitted by the fighter’s crash beeper. Moon Seven, which was not in the fighter’s navigation computer, was directly ahead. This moon had a completely different orbit to the system’s other eleven moons. It had a large elliptical orbit at a forty-five degree angle to the other moons whose orbits were on the same plane. It only crosses between Moons Six and Eight every super convergence. It had enormous polar ice-caps and the unfrozen part was mountainous with deep ravines cut by the rivers emanating from the melting ice. Tsark had never developed it because its elliptical orbit was not on the same plane as the other eleven moons, which made it much harder to reach. It also had an extremely strong and variable magnetic field so when vessels did approach it, their electronic systems became completely erratic thereby making landing virtually impossible.
W621 steered the moon fighter away from a collision course and checked all the instruments. There was only four hours of air left and fuel was nearly empty. A synthetic voice broke the silence of the cockpit.
‘Your vehicle has been re-programmed to land at the edge of the north ice sheet. When your landing light flashes, turn off your engines, a tractor beam will bring you into dock.’
The control stick moved in W621’s hands. Instinctively W621 pulled against it.
‘If you resist your vehicle will not be able to land,’ the voice spoke again. ‘Your air and fuel are low, show trust, you will come to no harm,’ it continued.
W621 released the grip on the stick and it continued to move on its own. Eerily the fighter continued on its flight. W621 felt lost and trapped. The escape did not seem so clever now. Never before had W621 been alone. To be going to an unknown moon and being given directions by a strange voice struck chilling fear into W621. However, there is too much steel in warriors for this feeling to last too long. The mood changed to