TROJAN: Nefra Contact

TROJAN: NEFRA CONTACT

Trojan Series Book Two

by Brian Henry Dingle

Copyright 2015 Brian Dingle

Smashwords Edition

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This is a book of fiction. Any characters in this book are fictional, and resemblance to anyone living or dead is coincidental.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Cover

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE: Postlude The Leaving

CHAPTER TWO: The Sentence

CHAPTER THREE: The Fall

CHAPTER FOUR: The Crime

CHAPTER FIVE: The Pit

CHAPTER SIX: The Vanguard

CHAPTER SEVEN: The Reversal

CHAPTER EIGHT: The Arrival

CHAPTER NINE: The Rebound

CHAPTER TEN: The Hanging

CHAPTER ELEVEN: En Passant

CHAPTER TWELVE: The Impact

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: The Pendulum

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: The Explorers

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: One's Tether

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: The Investigation

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: After the Fall

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: The First Rescue

CHAPTER NINETEEN: Re-contact

CHAPTER TWENTY: The Second Rescue

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Meetings of the Minds

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: The Sting

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: The Emigration

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: The Pillow Talk

Other Books by the Author

Connect with the Author

Gravitational Analysis of Trojan

Dedication

This book is dedicated to our first two grand children, aged six, A.S.D. and Z.B.D, who announced to me shortly after publishing Trojan: Hollow Moon of Jupiter…Jupiter right, you got that, Jupiter…that Mars is actually their favorite planet.

Cover

The cover is created upon a photograph (STScI 2008-42) obtained using the Hubble Telescope. Permission has been granted as follows:

Material credited to STScI on this site was created, authored, and/or prepared for NASA under Contract NAS5-26555. Unless otherwise specifically stated, no claim to copyright is being asserted by STScI and it may be freely used as in the public domain in accordance with NASA's contract. However, it is requested that in any subsequent use of this work NASA and STScI be given appropriate acknowledgement.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and E. Karkoschka (University of Arizona)

The author is appreciative of this permission. The Hubblesite (available at hubblesite.org which the author hopes you will explore), the North American Space Administration, the European Space Administration and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) provide a wide variety of educational material, including this photograph of Ganymede setting behind Jupiter used on the cover. A copy of this book will be provided to STScI as requested.

The moon depicted is not Trojan; Trojan, which is actually larger than Ganymede and tidally linked in the same orbit, is fictional, and as such, even the Hubble Telescope cannot see it.

Cover design by Nicholas J. Dingle.

CHAPTER ONE

Postlude: The Leaving

I am handwriting this in English, hand-writing for the first time, for a document of significant size, for the time has come that I must leave this world.

Jeg always said that he enjoyed my writing, which always amused me, for he was never exposed to it. What he read was transcription of my dictations, of my speeches, never my writing. What he saw was extemporaneous stuff that carries no risk, and requires less effort.

Writing is a very personal thing. Writing is working with words in a way that exposes intimate parts of oneself, that reflects who you have become and even how you have become it. Writing is a labor, a travail, a molding and caressing of thought and experience, to be worked and reworked, in times of explosive creativity that cannot be resisted, or later in struggling emptiness of thought. It is a task, which is at the same time an unwanted compulsion and a nagging fruitless exertion.

And it is Sisyphean. Completion is always just out of reach.

The introspection of writing can be narcissistic and selfish. It is doubly selfish in that if the task never ends, perhaps I will not have to leave.

Jeg never saw this, my writing, because in truth, any such creation of real writing was for the purpose of me, and not for anyone else. And so, little, if any, will survive me.

I am hand-writing this in English. Masochistically. Writing is hard enough. Grammar and syntax are hard enough, but English idiom is ‘over the top’, ‘beyond the pale’, and can make one ‘as mad as a box of soapy frogs.’ That writing should be plagued with English is quite simply too unfair, for the non-English.

And I am most assuredly non-English.

I have been the author of over thirty-seven books, 236 journals articles in such fields as socio-biology, nuclear physics (including quantum gravity, of course), comparative languages, religion and complex analysis (mathematics, not psychology). I never really liked the stuff I did in psychology, so I refuse to give it any accounting. Oddly, I have never authored anything in medicine, although I have been senior author on many articles that others actually wrote, and I have been a Principle Investigator in uncountable numbers of clinical trials during my medical career. I have prepared speeches and lectures which I have given around the world, but many of those I would simply create in my mind, repeating and expanding them while en route, by air limo to the office, or shuttle to the moon station. So I never really ‘wrote’ them.

I have chaired meetings of powerful men and women, people whose influence is felt in every part of this beautiful world. I have run battle plans in war rooms, and commanded armies of hundreds of thousands, fleets of battle ships and destroyers. I have issued orders controlling the destiny of fine young men and women who would fight to protect freedom, to defeat tyranny, to conquer the ‘ethos of subjectivity.’

I have chaired meetings of countries, or their representatives, and I have worn the heavy mantle of power of the largest governing body on Earth, hopefully handling that mantle gracefully.

But this is the only thing I have ever written, physically written.

Mostly I dictate to my scribe, Elper, which frankly I prefer to voice activated computer productions. It keeps Elper employed after all. Elper surprised me with his gift for language.

Written in English, because if anyone ever reads this, it will be my friends and enemies of that language background.

Oh, there are several other languages I could have chosen, but that would simply be narcissism, mental masturbation in English metaphor I suppose…I mean, who is going to read this? Who would I want to read this?

Only Jeg, I think, and he is gone now some eighty years. Certainly not my daughter, I would shudder to think of her reading this. Too many secrets. Too much weakness exposed, hinting at selfish pain.

So this very personal accounting must be private for now, and therefore written. Not dictated to Elper. Not somehow inserted into a computer, by voice or thought, or even by finger typing.

My life on this world has been wonderful, more than I ever could have imagined. Miraculous, almost. From such humble beginnings, even by my people’s standards, to such exalted heights, even by your people’s standards. You and I are so different and so similar in so many different ways. That could have lead to persecution instead of commendation, to denigration instead of adulation, to hatred instead of love. Certainly, that would have been the case where I was raised, for my people revile elevation in status through hard work and merit. So, this has been a fair and thus wonderful life.

But I can feel that I must leave this world, not as Jeg did. I can sense it, if you will excuse the obvious pun. Yes, I can almost smell it. For the call to leave is almost like a scent. At least, that is the best way to explain it, this feeling I have. Some psychiatrists and psychologists will tell you that scents and smells can trigger memories more deeply than sights or sounds, especially those deep emotional memories, memories of long past events.

Many of you, I find, imagine in the form of sights and sounds. Your wishes, your dreams, your fantasies come to you in this guise. The impression that I must leave my life here is quite simply a scent, deep in my brain, without any external contribution such as small molecules mixing with watery mucous in a nose and absorbed by olfactory nerves.

An hallucination of scent. This one tells me I have not long.

Of course, I knew when Jeg was leaving, but that’s not what I mean. Most people fail to realize that death is not a moment in time, but rather a process, and certainly a process that I could smell, even though others could not.

There is a certain comfort in the writing, the reliving of sentinel events in which I played a part; but there is pain as well, in the memories of loved ones past, for as was expected in the beginning, I have outlived so many of them. My wife. My son. My best friend and savior, Jeg, who lived to a ripe old age himself. Not my daughter, though, who carries more of my telomeric structures.

It is not lost on me that all people are curious about what I have done and how I have done it; this is not conceit. The people are curious about their leaders, and in an open, democratic society, of all the privileges that governors enjoy, privacy is not among them. And yet, I have declined too many interviews, and failed to write too many autobiographies, avoided too many exposés.

So now, I correct that with this writing, but I dissemble, for it is a writing no one shall read.

But where to start? Where else, but with the beginning. 

Mer Primus

54th Day of First Quarter

2294 Earthside CE

CHAPTER TWO

The Sentence

Mer caught the scent of his jailer and torturer fully two minutes before the man arrived. The jailer was a sadist, ignorant and twisted; he enjoyed giving pain. Elper’s whimpers were trailing off from the screams a moment ago, and the echoes from the hall outside Mer’s cell suggested Mormath was on his way. Mer’s worry for himself was now gaining on his concern for his friend. Elper didn’t have the stamina for this, but then, Mer wasn’t sure he did either.

The blank hard metal cell door slid into the ceiling above as Mormath strolled in. He had a casual air in manner belying the intense pleasure he anticipated with Mer.

Two days stubble covered his double chins. His chest was wheezing heavily from lumbering his excessive body mass. Mormath was the picture of carnage. A set of keys clanked from his oversized leather belt, rancid with grimy sweat oozing through his coveralls from those secret moist places between rolls of fat. Grubby torn leather boots encasing dirt calloused feet, ominously blood spattered, planted into the stone floor with each step. His tail, swollen with expected pleasure, whipped back and forth menacingly, sweeping dust and debris in its wake as it snaked across the floor.

The cell was essentially a cave. Mer was standing, naked and bloodied, stretched by ropes and restraints, arms and legs apart, arms pulled toward the damp stone ceiling. Two guards held winches that controlled the tension on the ropes. To one side was a small fire pit with glowing embers heating the end of an iron rod.

Mer was tall, by human standards. Even Nefra human. Certainly he was taller than his guards, and definitely taller than Mormath. His dark matted hair, shoulder length, was tied back by a leather cord. Scintillating blue eyes, typical of many Nefra, and the large muscular tail identified him as part of that sub-species, separated from their origin planet so many years ago.

At Mormath’s entry, the two guards with Mer immediately leaned back on their tails and yanked the ropes with the large manual winches stretching out Mer’s body. Sharp wrist and ankle bands at the ropes’ ends dug into Mer’s calloused limbs. Blood seeped around the tight edges as the limbs were pulled to their limits, and then some. Mer’s body was suspended by these ropes and constraints, balanced precariously on his own muscular tail, which was extended to its limits.

The ropes tightened at a nod from Mormath. Mer groaned.

What’s that you say? asked Mormath with a snarl. Not so clever now, are we? Not so quick with the answers. Not so quick to show up your betters.

A hard punch to the solar plexus followed, matched precisely with the word ‘betters’, as Mormath’s rank breath drenched Mer’s already blood streaked face. Mer’s body tried to buckle, but was constrained from doing so by the ropes and the sharp wrist bands. Mer coughed uncontrollably. Just as he was about to breathe in, Mormath’s large muscular tail slapped him across the side of his head, and in a whirl, was followed by a reverse round house kick from the trailing leg of this bully. Mer’s vision faded in a wall of pain. He was gasping for air through gushing blood in his mouth. Sweat mixed with blood stung his eyes.

No more lectures for us. No more quoting from texts and theories and treatises you think you understand better than your betters. A ridge hand strike to his throat lifted Mer off his tail briefly, closing his airway with swelling making every breath a struggle.

Mormath let Mer recover as he tended to the iron in the glowing coals his guards had been stoking earlier. He pushed the bellows in and out with a wheeze that sounded rather like his own breathing. The tip, narrowed to a point, was white hot now, with the red glow further up the iron rod, the handle wrapped in a ragged dirty rag.

You need a mark, my boy. A mark that people could identify you by, so they know not to pay you any heed. A mark that says ‘This Nefra knows nothing. Pay him no mind.’ A mark that says ‘Ignore him.’ A mark that makes obscurity, that guarantees obscurity.

Mer could not stop himself from glancing over at the poker and shuddering. Mormath smelt it, smelt his fear, and chortled deliciously.

Yes, you’re scared now, ain’t ya, Mormath grinned. Scared to be scarred, that everybody will see. No one will ever listen to you or speak to you again. You will be as a ghost no one can hear or see or smell or touch. The jailer stuffed the poker back in the coals for a moment, leaving the cool end and scrap of rag wrapping the handle out for his easy reach. He turned back to Mer, and pulled his prisoner’s face up with a hand, looking into his eyes.

Slowly the jailer raised his left hand, extended fingers straight up to Mer’s face, palm up, wrist straight, arm bent at the elbow, while holding Mer’s face in a vice grip with the right. Mer smelt it, as any Nefra would be forced to do by this maneuver, the pungent odor of enjoyment, glee, even sexual climactic pleasure. The pheromones were oozing out of this obese sadist, in a message to Mer that said, ‘I am loving this. I could do this all day. This is approaching orgasm, hell, this is orgasm.’

Still too pretty in my view, and with that Mormath shifted his weight back on his tail, balancing, and kicked with both feet into Mer’s eyes, heals into the sockets, with accuracy obviously from years of practice. The pain was excruciating, as Mer’s head snapped back. His sight reddened immediately from the phosphor’s stimulation in the retina, then mixed in paint-like swirls of blue and gold.

Don’t blind him, one of the guards said, he’s going for terminal grav tranny.

Pheromones of fury permeated the dungeon; Mormath whipped around in anger, tail lashing out viciously at the guard. Shut your filthy mouth, you turd, he shrieked. The guard staggered under the blow, and released the manual winch. His legs buckled, and he dropped to the floor semiconscious, spitting blood. The guard on Mer’s right, shocked at the sudden outburst, cringed back, and released briefly the other rope. Mer’s arms went slack, and his feet drifted quickly down to the hard cold stone floor. Mer’s eyes cleared, lifted to his tormentor, and flickered for half a second as his brain processed this new information.

His world was now in slow motion.

Grav tranny. Gravitational transportation. The intergalactic transport systems, and he, Mer, was to be sentenced to be a grav tranny. Certain death by starvation or exhaustion but probably both. Grav trannies were expendable slaves, destined to work to exhaustion to assuage drug-enhanced implacable hunger, only to die as their project was completed. No one returned from grav tranny, and so the sentence was reserved for the worst criminals Nefra society in its judgment needed to punish. The worst part was that the work they did earned the only source of food they ate, a food which was laced with Egrin, a leptin receptor blocker, making subsequent hunger ever worse. The caloric content was designed to not quite meet the energy requirements of the project. The worker gradually lost body mass over time, a time calculated to be precisely matched to the end of the project.

Attempting resistance to the Egrin induced hunger was agony, and invariably the convict lost that battle to let themselves starve to death. It was quite simply impossible. Avoidance of the sentence was the only solution to grav tranny, avoidance by any means possible. So awful were the effects of Egrin, that its official use was restricted by law to off-world. The Nefra had battled the problems of the penal use of this drug for several centuries.

Slow motion. Mer assessed his situation.

With tension removed from his ropes, he no longer required his tail to support him, to prevent his hands from being amputated by the sharp metal bands.

The blow that Mormath delivered to the guard, if given at full force, could easily have been fatal. As it was, the guard had stumbled, lost his footing and fell to the floor. The winch he had been holding slowly rotated back on its axis, releasing the tension on the ropes to Mer’s right arm and leg. The other guard’s momentary release due to the shock of the moment allowed Mer to stand on his left leg as well.

Mer’s tail instantly whipped around and grasped the rag end of the white-hot poker. Amid a shower of burning coals, the tip of the poker arched over the jailer’s head and plunged down into the soft tissue immediately below Mormath’s chin, entering his body above the sternal notch. The white-hot poker burnt its way through the tissue in an instant, rupturing the aorta. The smell of burning blood coiled its way through the bars of the cell, and further down the hall. The jailer screamed out in pain, mercifully lasting only seconds. Then his body dropped and writhed on the stone floor. Mer pushed the poker further, and moved it around, but the jailer was past feeling any more. Mer pulled the poker back out, and with one flick of his tail, tossed it into the coals, with sparks, pink smoke and steam arising from the conjunction.

Mer stood immobilized. He slowly looked back and forth at his guards, and consciously quelled his own pheromones, forcing himself to exude surrender. The guards scented the submission.

The first guard arose looking at the second, wondering what they should do. He looked down at the jailer, motionless on the stone floor. Blood was seeping into the cracks between the stones. The guard rubbed the side of his face where the jailer had hit him, and then looked at the blood on his hand. After a few moments, he and his colleague carefully removed Mer’s ropes and returned Mer to his cell down the hall. Mer was compliant. His guards were confused.

Mer looked across the hall. Elper was moaning in the shadows of his cell, naked, lying on the cold stone floor, his tail quietly swaying back and forth, the smell of agony slowly receding. His flayed back was visible to Mer, with clear signs of tail gashes, where the calloused tip of Mormath’s tail had ripped his flesh.

You killed him? Elper asked. 

Yes. 

Mer extended his left arm, elbow bent, wrist straight, palm upward, fingers pointed toward Elper, to disabuse Elper of any disbelief, but Elper could barely move.

That is good, and right, Elper whispered, but he could not lift his arm in response. He gradually settled and lapsed into sleep.

A slight stirring of the shadows in the cell next to Elper’s caught Mer’s eye. Slowly, a tall male, with slightly yellow tinged skin emerged from the darkness of the back of the cell. Mer just caught a glimpse of the sad eyes, as the face of this thin gaunt foreigner slipped back into the shadows, leaving only his body from the neck down visible to Mer. Not Nefra, Mer realized. The tall man’s hands came up, palms together in a pose like a Gothic arch. Mer thought he was stooped, too tall for the cell, but it was a bow to Mer’s direction which briefly brought the yellow man’s face out of the shadows. The foreigner then backed into the shadows again, and returned to silently kneeling on the floor of his cell. There was no scent.

Yenna.

The Yenna was praying. Praying for Mer.

Mer sat back in the shadows, and wondered why the guards did not beat him further. He shuddered at the thought of killing another Nefra, something he’d never done before. The dank smell of his own pheromones, as his body responded to his own endogenous violence, nauseated him. He sighed. His own fate was as he had suspected, though. His sentence was grav tranny and there was nothing worse than grav tranny.

But the guards, well, it seemed to Mer that he was more concerned Mormath’s death than they were.

Most of all, from his childhood, Mer remembered his brood nurse, Begnia. Begnia was warmth. Soft and solid, honey breath and a soothing voice, Begnia nurtured her brood and Mer within it. A bondsman’s life, right from childhood, is jagged and sharp. Begnia was squashy and plump, reliable and safe. Thinning grey hair, back in a bun, burgeoning arms bursting through her coveralls, matronly apron and a velvety tail that swaddles, Begnia was stability among the drifting Nefra brood children.

Raised in a brood house, Mer was a member of the bondsmen class, born to provide servants to the Elite, and the less skilled to become laborers. His mother was a raw sinewy girl, disheveled, dirty, a product of the back streets of the capital, where she made a meager living through sex and pregnancy with anyone who happened by and could pay with a bit of food or drug. She would deposit the progeny with a brood house, and the Brood Master would give her the cash she needed, but only on delivery. The final months of gestation were lean indeed, for only the terribly down and out male wanted a pregnant Nefra, for anything other than conversation, and who would pay for that. Anyway, that was not something Mer’s mother provided, conversation; it got in the way of the cash.

He had seen her occasionally, in later years, bringing the latest progeny to deliver to the Brood Master. Mer had been too young to recognize her from sight when he first arrived at the brood house, but the first time she came, he could smell her. The pheromones were undeniably his mother’s. He had happened to be down in the front hall, where he should not have been, chasing Elper in their never-ending game of hide and seek. He had ducked through the legs of Begnia, slipping deftly under her outstretched tail as Elper disappeared around a corner. Begnia gave chase in a half-hearted and completely impossible way, her pudgy aging body no match for the scamperings of the two young Nefra. Mer was almost on Elper’s heels when the scent stopped him cold.

There she was, at the front door with the Brood Master, cash in hand. There was a small bundle of dirty stale white linen wriggling slightly at her feet. She was haggard, thin, and beaten by life itself. Her dull eyes were the product of the drug she immersed her consciousness in. She was turning quickly to implement a hasty retreat, when she smelled Mer. Drug laden though she was, she could not deny the biochemistry, as she briefly locked eyes with her son. Mer’s pheromones could have identified the father to her, had she even a passing familiarity with him. Instead, her memories flashed a beating she vaguely recalled, and her face instinctively flashed a hatred she felt, not for Mer, but for her life, her long string of male tormentors like Mer’s father, and her future.

Mer stood, staring at the small bundle that was still wriggling on the floor, and looked up too late, only to see the door closing behind his mother. She had left. She had seen Mer, smelt him, knew him, and she had left. Two stray pieces of paper currency, crisp and clean, were floating back and forth to the floor like leaves of fall drifting down to a quiet pond, having escaped her cringing hand. They settled in a muddy footprint for only a moment before the door opened just enough for that hand to sweep in and snatch the two bills, crumpling them up with the dirt of the footprint.

The Brood Master gathered up the wriggling bundle. Mer never identified the child in the bundle in later years of the brood house. The child’s pheromones would more closely match the father, and of course, he was unknown to Mer, as unknown even to his mother.

Mer’s own father was one of those men, part of the unending string of port workers and interstellar ship’s company down by the docks. Which actual one was immaterial. So Mer grew up with the group of young Nefra from the brood house, playing casually and in the carefree way. Only rarely did such play break out in the occasional spats children are prone to, quickly quelled by their ever-loving Begnia. With her large arms and soft tail she would enfold and caress the most bothersome child until the anger abated, generally swiftly. Begnia kept a soft spot in her heart for Mer, and he would often crawl into her lap as she was reading a tablet and sit quietly there as other children were playing. He would even linger on long after the meal siren, when others would scamper aggressively for their food.

At bed time the children were usually exhausted, and apart from the occasional plaintive crying, slipped into blessed sleep quickly and easily. It was times like these that Mer enjoyed the most, often crawling out of bed to climb into the lap of Begnia as she read her tablets by the light of the single green lamp on her desk. Begnia would enfold him once again, rocking back and forth and murmuring the words of the current book she was reading, as she gently eased Mer to rest.

Mer rarely slept, for he enjoyed these times too much, but he pretended for the benefit of Begnia. In truth, he was captivated by the symbols that rolled across Begnia’s tablet and the soft murmurings of her voice as the symbols passed by. It was all an idle wonder for the longest time, but gradually Mer began to understand and on rare occasion mumble a word or two before Begnia. This happened several times, largely without Begnia noticing, but one night it went too far. Mer was particularly intrigued by a somewhat erotic passage in a romance novel, and in his interest spoke up a bit too loudly.

Begnia sat back in horror, holding the young child out at arm’s length, her tail dropping to the floor with a thud. The mixture of fear and embarrassment permeated her scent. Mer instantly knew he had done something wrong.

He had known of the subject matter, of course. Exaggerated descriptions of male and female coupling were part of the giggling and childish talk that filled the brood house when the adults were not around, especially the adults of the Elite class, or even the merchant class, like their brood nurse, Begnia. While the brood all secretly talked about it, they knew it was a subject that they should not venture into. They could smell the disapproval of the adults when they did.

But the scent was different this time. Begnia was not simply angry, nor simply embarrassed. Mer knew that she was frightened, and her fear was his fear.

You can read! The scent of fear intensified. Who taught you to read?

Mer shivered in apprehension, cowering in front of one of the few adults he thought truly loved him.

Who taught you to read...? No, wait, don’t tell me, Begnia hissed, the pheromones now smelling of sadness mixed with fear.

You did, Mer’s voice squeaked in his shame.

Immediately fear overwhelmed sadness in an almost intoxicating mixture of scent. Mer did not understand.

Begnia enfolded the young Nefra into her arms, wrapped her tail about both their bodies, and rocked back and forth. She held him this way for what seemed like forever, and gradually the scent of fear and sadness gave way to the scent of purpose.

Mer, she murmured, softly so that none of the brood could hear. You must never tell. You will die if you tell. I will die if you tell. She smelled of tears, not tears of self-pity, but tears of despair, and love for this young child. She held him even closer as she rocked back and forth.

After that evening, Begnia didn’t seem to hold Mer as much as she had in the past, and