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    Passing In The Night
    Passing In The Night
    Passing In The Night
    Ebook66 pages1 hour

    Passing In The Night

    By Michael Kingswood

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    About this ebook

    Prelude to The Pericles Conspiracy.

    A year-long shift in the middle of the interstellar void can get pretty boring.  For the Fourth shift crew of the starliner Pericles, enroute to Earth from one of the colony worlds, the passage could best be called routine.

    Until the forward sensors detect an unknown and unexpected object ahead.  What they find there, in the endless night of space, will forever change the universe, for them and for all mankind.

    Assuming they survive to tell anyone about the encounter.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSSN Storytelling
    Release dateAug 6, 2011
    ISBN9781513063836
    Passing In The Night
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    Author

    Michael Kingswood

    Michael Kingswood has written numerous science fiction and fantasy stories, including The Pericles Conspiracy, The Glimmer Vale Chronicles, and the Dawn of Enlightenment series. His interest in scifi/fantasy came at an early age: he first saw Star Wars in the theater when he was three and grew up on Star Trek in syndication. The Hobbit was among the first books he recalls reading. Recognizing with sadness that the odds of his making it into outer space were relatively slim, after completing his bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering from Boston University, he did the next best thing - he entered the US Navy as a submarine officer. Almost seventeen years later, he continues to serve on active duty and has earned graduation degrees in Engineering Management and Business Administration. Fitting with his service onboard Fast Attack submarines (SSNs), he does his writing on Saturdays, Sundays, and at Night. He is married to a lovely lady from Maine. They have four children, and live wherever the Navy deems to send them. Sign up to receive email announcements of Michael's new releases and other exclusive deals for newsletter subscribers here: http://eepurl.com/eND22 .

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      Book preview

      Passing In The Night - Michael Kingswood

      Passing in the Night

      Passing in the Night

      Prelude To The Pericles Conspiracy

      Michael Kingswood

      SSN Storytelling

      Contents

      About This Book

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Preview of The Pericles Conspiracy

      Pick-up Lines

      Message From The Author

      Mailing List

      Supporting Patronage

      About The Author

      More Books By Michael Kingswood

      About This Book

      A year-long shift in the middle of the interstellar void can get pretty boring. For the Fourth shift crew of the starliner Pericles, enroute to Earth from one of the colony worlds, the passage could best be called routine.

      Until the forward sensors detect an unknown and unexpected object ahead. What they find there, in the endless night of space, will forever change the universe, for them and for the all mankind.

      Assuming they survive to tell anyone about the encounter.

      Enjoy the book! After you’re done, please come to Michael’s website and sign up for his mailing list. Guaranteed to be spam free, he uses it to announce new releases and special promotions for his fans.

      Chapter One

      Space travel sucks sometimes.

      The thought crossed through Carlton's mind as, for the three-hundredth time this shift, he checked the navigation display. Just as it almost always did, the ship's position tracked exactly with projections.

      Terribly boring.

      But then, that was to be expected of interstellar travel. With hundreds of thousands of Astronomical Units—AUs—to cover, even a relatively short trip could take years. Unfortunately, this was no short trip. The run from the Gliese system to Earth, though routine, was also 20.5 light years in length. Even at the ship's cruising speed of 95% of the speed of light (.95c), it would take almost six and a half years to complete the trip. Of course, it took a little less than a year to get up to cruising speed, and another year to slow back down again, so the total trip was closer to ten years. But it could be worse. Without the time dilation caused by relativity, it would be almost twenty-five years.

      God bless Einstein.

      It was just rotten luck that Carlton drew this portion of the trip. The center passage was mind numbingly dull: nothing much to do for the year but monitor instruments and readouts and maybe make a slight course correction every now and then. Which is why it paid the least. But everyone drew the short stick sometimes.

      He tapped the upper right corner of the display, and it shifted from Navigation to Engineering. Another tap pulled up the reactor specs.

      Located two kilometers aft of the crewed area of the ship to save on shielding material, the reactor was an old-style fission device. Newer ships had fusion generators these days, of course. But construction on Pericles completed two years before Kilpatrick and Holbert patented the containment device that made fusion practical, and there was no point in scrapping a new and perfectly capable ship just because some new tech came along.

      So the Company put Pericles in service on the Gliese run. This was her fourth transit of the interstellar void. When they reached earth, it would be time for her hundred-year overhaul.

      That didn't make a whole lot of sense to Carlton. Sure, Pericles would be about a hundred Earth years old when they docked, but she had only experienced a little less than 40 years of time-dilated service. No one asked him, though. He was just the driver.

      The reactor specs all fell in the normal range. No surprise there, considering that without the plasma generators online to power the main engines, the reactor put out just a small fraction of its rated power.

      Carlton moved on to life support.

      Again, everything read normal. Consumables were depleting as expected. The crops in the hydroponics section were looking good, and the waste reclamation system was churning along nicely. Carlton expected this, as the system was operating at much less than its maximum capacity.

      Next, gravity.

      The crewed section of the ship consisted of two rings, each a kilometer in diameter and fifty meters wide, with three decks. They connected to the central hub of the ship through four passage tubes, and rotated continually in opposite

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