I have a number of ideas for different tales to go into Pax Orionis, including standard third person narratives, bits of memoirs, articles, interviews, technical descriptions, etc. Some of them I’ve started poking away at. Because why not, below are the opening paragraphs of four such yarns. Some I have little more than what’s here, others are good long chunks. None are done. The titles are just placeholders for the moment,
“Deadliest Catch”
The crew of the crab boat Rosalinda Sanchez-de Clerk would, on rare occasion, take a fleeting moment to look at the northern lights that sometimes flickered above them in the arctic night sky. But on that night, the deck crew stood motionless, staring in wonder at an auroral display the likes of which men had never seen: aurora being pumped by the flares of hundreds of nuclear weapons going off in near-Earth space. A bomb would detonate, a pinprick of blindingness that came and went in an eyeblink. Sheets and pillars in red and green would burst into life a split second later, dying off over a fraction of a minute. Pulses of dimmer nuclear explosions, in regular strings a bit faster than once a second, traced the paths of warships boosting across the sky. Beneath each burst the upper atmosphere would be briefly energized, glowing here like a fluttering flag, there like a pillar, over there in a painful, grasping shape like the crabs the crew should be hunting. It all took place in silence, with no sound but the light breeze and the slapping waves.
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“Magicians”
Transcript
Interview with Marv Herschman
Conducted by Ross Jenkins
Ross: Thanks for seeing me, Mr. Herschmann. Do you mind if I record?
Marv: Yeah yeah, sure sure. Someone better, anyway. Not too many of us left, you know.
Ross: Alright. This is Ross Jenkins, interviewing Marv Herschmann in his home in Tucson, Arizona, December 4th, 2003. Mr. Herschmann, first off I have to ask you about why you asked me to come and interview you. You have famously avoided the press for decades. So… why now?
Marv: Well, shit, son. Doctors say I only have a few weeks left. Lung cancer, you know. It’s been a real popular way to go these last fifteen years, with the fallout and all, but the docs say I probably got it from lungin’ down a carton of smokes a day for the last thirty some odd years. (coughs) You’d smoke like a tire fire too if you’d known what I’d known all these years and had to keep your trap shut. Well, before you publish this, you wait till I’m dead. Won’t be too long of a wait now.
Marv: I’ve been sitting on this for decades, but the government has kept it top secret from the beginning. Doesn’t make any sense now. Back then, yeah yeah, sure sure. But now? What difference does it make? It’s not like we have enemies who amount to diddly, or that it matters if anybody finds out how we got Orion and the Soviets didn’t. That history is never going to be repeated. But, I dunno. Maybe it’s just government inertia. (coughs) It’s been a secret this long, why change it? Sure sure, that’s the way it’s always been, I guess. But I want people to know. Hell, I want my family to know. There are lots of families out there that aught to know that their old granddad isn’t just some old loser, but, thirty, forty years ago, he did something important. You let everybody know, right?
Ross: Yes, sir, that’s my plan.
Marv: Good boy. Well, where to start. I guess… (coughs) Son… do you know what the biggest secret of Orion is?
Ross: I suppose not, sir.
Marv: There’s one secret above all other. Beyond how the Casabas work. Beyond how atom bombs work, or how to make an a-bomb the size of your fist with only half a pound of plutonium. No, there’s one secret that just the suspicion that you might blab got a lot of guys visits in the night by some real unfriendly folks. A secret that got a lot of people killed, that guys on our side killed other guys on our side just to shut them up. Know what it is, son?
Ross: No sir.
Marv. It’s this. The Orion program, right from the get-go… was a hoax. (coughs)
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“The Hole”
Airman First Class Jeffery Williamson arrived for his first day on the job the same way everyone else there did: drugged unconscious, strapped in a chair in a locked padded cell.
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“Knock Knock”
The USS Broadaxe drifted serenely along its orbit deep within the inner van Allen belt, its weapons bays containing the equivalent of several World War Twos. A decade earlier this orbit would have been a dangerous enough place, where the Earths natural magnetic field captured charged particles from the Sun. The induced ionizing radiation would normally have been bad enough to make the region unhealthy for not only organic life, but solar panels and microcircuits. But after years of NASA and the US Space Force launching nuclear-pulse spacecraft from the Caribbean to Earth orbit and beyond, the van Allen belts were now deathtraps for any but the most heavily shielded spacecraft.
The Broadaxe, being a Warhammer class CVNDS, was more than adequately shielded. The thirty-meter diameter steel pusher plate at the tail of the ship stood as testament to the shielding built into the ship. While under drive, a 40-kiloton nuclear bomb would be detonated a hundred meters behind the ship every second. By necessity, the ship could shrug off the paltry radiation thrown at it by the artificially pumped-up magnetic belts outside. The bullet-shaped ship was armored inside and out, in preparation for the day that someone might try to blow the ship out of the sky.
The Broadaxe had been on station for six weeks, keeping a watchful eye on the Earth and the space around it. She and her three sister ships were tasked with keeping the peace in Earth orbit. And “keeping the peace” meant policing anything sent into orbit, and shooting down anything that should not be there. And if the Soviets didn’t like that… well, that was just too bad.