Daniel Keys Moran - Lord November

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I, Daniel Keys Moran, "The Author," hereby release this text as freeware. It may be transmitted as a text

file anywhere in this or any other dimension, without reservation, so long as the story text is not altered

IN ANY WAY. No fee may be charged for such transmission, save handling fees comparable to those

charged for shareware programs.

THIS WORK MAY NOT BE PRINTED OR PUBLISHED IN A BOOK, MAGAZINE,

ELECTRONIC OR CD-ROM STORY COLLECTION, OR VIA ANY OTHER MEDIUM NOW

EXISTING OR WHICH MAY IN THE FUTURE COME INTO EXISTENCE, WITHOUT

WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM THE AUTHOR. THIS WORK IS LICENSED FOR READING

PURPOSES ONLY. ALL OTHER RIGHTS ARE RESERVED BY THE AUTHOR.

DESCRIPTION: Prolog and first two chapters of the novel "Lord November: The Man-Spacething

War."

Lord November:

The Man-Spacething War

A Tale of the Continuing Time

Prolog:

The Shepherds

2049 Gregorian

On Tuesday, October 5, 2049, a starship of the Zaradin Church exited Sol System's Second Gate.

Not just any starship; this was a Cathedral, one of nine to be found in the galaxy. Sol's Second Gate

lies outside the orbit of Saturn, and far off the ecliptic; but had the Cathedral stayed at the Second Gate

long enough, darkened though it was, humanity would have found it in time, through its gravitational

disturbance upon the orbits of the other bodies in the System. It was that large.

The Dalmastran who crewed the Cathedral did not plan to stay long enough for that to happen. They

had more important business than this minor matter, the collection of a species that had so recently begun

to boast of its existence, pouring radio waves and television and lasers indiscriminately out into the

interstellar darkness. They did not want their existence known to humanity-- not out of any concern for

humanity's reaction, but because they did not want the sleem empire to know they had passed this way.

And as they had already observed, humans were distressingly disinclined to keep silent about

themselves, or, the Dalmastran presumed, about those they met.

The Dalmastran's concern about the empire might have been over-cautious; some in the Church

thought so. True, the sleem had been growing restless, had more than once recently interfered in the

travel of the Church's emissaries. But it was a grand leap, to go from harassing the servants of the

Church, to interfering with the business of one of the great Cathedrals.

The Dalmastran did not think that the empire would be so foolish--but the sleem had been disturbingly

arrogant of late, and the Dalmastran had been taught, by the Zaradin themselves, to avoid confrontation

over matters not involving theology.

They studied the Solar System for several days, its scattering of planets, moons and asteroids and

comets; listened to the broadband echoes of radio and television and InfoNet, and came to their

decision.

A Missionary fell in toward the Sun.

Peter Janssen followed a Hoffman trajectory, heading down to an orbit some 125,000 kilometers

above the cloudy surface of Jupiter. He was already 240,000 klicks above the clouds, and dropping; it

put him well inside the orbit of all Jupiter's satellites except Amalthea. His target was an observation buoy

he had dropped into Jupiter's atmosphere, with seven other buoys, a week past. This buoy was the only

one to successfully blast itself back up into space, and unless Janssen snagged it on this pass, the buoy

would drop helplessly back into Jupiter's lethal atmosphere, burning up on re-entry, losing its atmospheric

samples and whatever data had not made it through via telemetry.

He had to pick up the buoy on his first pass because his margin of delta-V was close to nonexistent.

His craft, a modified Chandler BlackSmith, had heavy radiation shielding to protect him from Jupiter's

deadly and incessant radiation storms. (That was only one of the dozens of ways that Jupiter duty was

different from the Earth-Luna runs of which Janssen, an ex-SpaceFarer, was a veteran. Bar the odd

sunstorm, cis-Lunar space is largely free of radiation hazards. Around Earth-Luna, shielding is more a

drawback than an asset. Most solar radiation passes straight through the human body without damaging

it. Moderate shielding is actually worse than none; cascading secondary radiation from light shielding is

worse for the human body than the primary solar radiation against which it is designed to protect.)

Because Peter Janssen's slipship was so heavily shielded, his delta-V was correspondingly reduced;

his slipship massed half again what Chandler Industries had intended.

He whistled tunelessly as he made final approach to the buoy. They were awaiting him eagerly back at

the settlement on Ganymede- -well, the research scientists were. Or rather, he corrected himself, the

research scientists were eagerly awaiting his return of their buoy.

Whatever. At least someone was looking forward to seeing him.

He was not a popular man, Peter Janssen. His own moodiness and irritability contributed to it, he

knew. While at St. Peter's CityState, he had missed Luna; and now that he was at Ganymede, he missed

the CityState. He brooded at times that his life in the last few years had been a series of increasingly poor

decisions, made increasingly at random. Most of those who knew him these days had never seen him

smile.

Those same people would have been surprised to see the change that had come over him now. A grin

played across his lips; his eyes drooped closed and he lay slackly in the webbed padding of the pilot's

enclosure.

He was the slip.

The ship cameras were his eyes, fed video to his inskin, and he drifted alone inside a glowing

cathedral of stars. For all he had learned to hate Jupiter, it had the loveliest sky in the System; Amalthea

and Ganymede and Europa hung behind him in the view from his rear holocams, gray and white and

reddish; in his fore holocams Jupiter covered most of the sky with swirling bands of scarlet orange. The

rockets lay silent now, but soon they would come alive, pressing Janssen back into his webbing with a

savagery a street racer a hundred years past would have appreciated.

For a brief while, submerged in the identity of his ship, Peter Janssen, one of only a dozen or so

people of his time who had managed to get himself exiled from the SpaceFarer's Collective, was as

content as he would ever be in his life.

Something beeped on his radar, almost exactly a hundred and eighty degrees away from the buoy that

should have been the only large object in close. A frown passed like a ghost across Janssen's features.

He danced commands into the inskin socketed at his temple, and the slip's rear holocams selected and

telescoped in on the item causing the commotion.

Shining and black and silver came out of nowhere. Janssen had a brief fragmented impression of a

spider web dropping on him from a great height--

Every instrument in the slipship, every powered system, died.

Terror clawed at Janssen, vast and mortal. The muscles in his stomach clenched painfully and he

thought he would be sick inside his ship. A Presence touched his awareness, shuffled through his

memories. The Presence withdrew, and for the merest instant Janssen was empty.

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Daniel Keys Moran - Lord November

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