THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS AND HAS NOT SEEN ANY EDITING PASSES-WHICH IT WILL NEED.
Going Down
A novel by Alaric Toft
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat." – Theodore Roosevelt
Dedicated to Pam M, without whose cheerful co-conspiring over many years the universe wouldn't be nearly as vast nor nearly as well-sorted.
Thanks to:
Interplay ("By Gamers, For Gamers" still moves hearts and minds.)
Parallax (Six degrees of creative freedom.)
Gene Roddenberry (A little less idealism and a little more human nature and a little more development ought to be interesting.)
Peter Telep (We may not use the same kind of whole cloth but we both needed just as much.)
Z (Emotional support and limitless patience.)
Kristin (Calling an alternate-history bluff with three simple words and a resulting profoundly pleasing timeline harmonization.)
Apogee (Fleet Admiral Yoshiro's playful banter all those years ago sparked a leading lady.)
And last but not least, all the hotel clerks who let me into hot tubs at 3 AM with a bathing suit, a laptop, and a frozen dinner and asked no questions.
Author's note:
There are some necessary high-tech handwaves here, of course, as marrying Star Trek with a 1990s video game and then attempting to force-feed the resulting unholy hybrid enough science to straighten it out again while preserving the core possibility of the story is NOT a straightforward endeavor. Nevertheless there is more attention paid to physics, logic, and repercussions here than in either of the originals. That said, a surprising number of the concepts were tested and proven in the 1960s and 1970s-Project Pluto, SNAP-10A, etc. NASA has a few excellent freely available monographs on human G tolerance. The US Navy is currently planning railgun and laser deployment on its next frigates and hypervelocity missiles and drones are already here.
Author's note for FanFiction readers:
Grammatical constructions that seem absurd, obscenely inaccurate, or just peculiar derive directly from the highly idiomatic and fragmentary nature of familiar communication between very (very!) flawed entities. Cursory observation of specialists at work, especially those in a blue-collar profession, will reveal similar patterns and frankly I had my fill of reading the 'dueling monologue' style by the end of high school. I have tried to vary and space out the profanity a bit more than it is generally exchanged...these are highly articulate specialists, after all. As for adult themes or detailed descriptions of violence, if the implications get to you then you're old enough to handle them. Fuel burns, lasers cut, explosives explode, metal bends, sanity leaks, smokes and burns off, the laws of physics claim victims-especially Newton's Third Law, applied in a much more general sense-and not everybody has happiness and butterflies in their pasts. Some may legitimately have sunshine and kittens, however.
If you came here looking for trigger warnings, I subscribe to Aristotle's view of purgative, relieving catharsis rather than Plato's view that drama was emotionally evocative in order to permit an audience to wallow in negative emotion. This "argument" is older than you'd think.
My primary purpose of archiving this tale as I write it isn't for publicity-well, perhaps slightly-but rather to keep another copy safe. In basic form, this idea has been kicking around since I played the original game back in 1994 and has been written three times now, each time considerably better. The first form is safely lost, the second exists but shan't see the light of day. Most notably it was written on a calculator (TI-92+) when I was supposed to be paying attention to lectures and I was surprised I reached ~90 pages with it. This iteration has gotten to over three hundred pages and I harbor no delusions about my ability to surpass it with a fourth version...so I preserve the third via multiple avenues. When I finally discharge this gigantic spiralling nightmare from my brain then no doubt there will be an equally massive editing pass. As-is, this doesn't really hit its stride until past the first couple chapters and the split narration starts.
For the curious...Book 1 was largely written under the influence of excessive travel and my preexisting music collection. Book 2 drew heavily on internet radio for background inspiration, mostly electro house. Book 3 was largely motivated by internet radio and in particular Bar Rockin' Blues which has introduced me to some phenomenal artists, driven some Amazon purchases, and provided surprisingly fertile creative and chapter-quote ground.
Updates will be somewhat erratic but the story will not be abandoned barring something taking away my ability or intelligence (debate the presence of either of those as you please). I like to think I've fired all my Chekov's Guns. Certainly on the couple occasions I've read start-to-finish and forgotten what I set up before, it's surprised me that they just keep going off.
Thank you for taking the time to read, if you do. If not, thanks for taking the time to consider reading it. I always felt the official novels strayed a little further from the spirit of the game than I was comfortable with...but I've gone and strayed just as far.
Technical notes for fellow geeks (SPOILERS):
As alluded to above, Star Trek is built on the Space Is The Ocean trope from the get-go. With Descent, a game very much of its era, the players ought to consider themselves lucky to get seven briefing screens in lieu of a couple optional manual paragraphs. Subspace no-lag comms and sensors, the entire concept of warp drive, and shielding are functional tenets of Trek...and it seems that comms and sensors work instantly in Descent as well or Dravis would be trying to reach MD1032 from several hours behind. That said they're damned difficult to reconcile with reality in a way that makes any degree of sense. We are seeing the prequels to Starfleet emerge in this timeframe. First Contact will be very different. I've heavily drawn on the shields-as-particle-reservoirs theory propounded over at the force dot net...because it seems a logical way to reconcile the two depictions. (And enables the possibility of the iconic shield globe actually being FOUND in one of these facilities.) The bubble-shaped as a warp bubble will eventually need to be shaped-is a very crude first approximation of what will become impulse drive...but first you need the warp engines to alter the relativistic mass of the ship. THEN you can use deuterium-powered exhaust as a MHD/MPD thrusting system...oh yeah, and when you have that kind of power to burn, you can throw down the structural integrity field to solve spaceframe limitations, and some inertial dampers to solve internal G issues. We're not quite there yet or space would be considerably smaller and the element of significant time passing while you try and get there would be utterly lost. Achieving a feasible SSTO airframe that is as aerodynamically dirty as a Pyro-GX requires truly obscene handwavium in materials and specific impulse (especially since it's got to function interplanetary and without topoffs). To say nothing of the ship's computer...but there are canon precedents for both the method and the medium. I'm sure I've still missed a lot but at base this is still a Man Vs Nature Campbellian conflict and I don't believe I'm a good enough author to preserve the story and elements of both canons and get much harder science than I have. At least I haven't erred on the side of Lensman-ism, entertaining though it is.
For fans of the games, the Descent 1 ending and opening/ending of Descent 2 will be largely preserved, albeit with a large change of implications. Descent 3 is not mentioned for good and obvious reasons. I reject the opening cutscene and the protagonist. Amusingly, I can no longer play Descent or Descent 2. They make me wretchedly motion sick and the following adventure has gotten me expecting lasers to be hitscan and the Vulcan to act like the Gauss if you let off the trigger. To say nothing of slight guilt at using the plasma cannon or a mega missile-this will become clear in later chapters.
Yes, I've taken certain liberties with the story of Descent, yes, but whereas the original was rather minimalist I like where it's gone. Also, trying to assign real-world functions to random swooping level geometries created for gameplay is not always possible. Neither is meticulously chronicling each and every mine's exploration and neutralization because that's not an arc, that's a straight line. In large part Peter Telep's novels inspired a reaction of 'wait, that's not how it happened at all' and here we have an alternate take. If you really feel that I've butchered something important, please do try one of your own-and I most sincerely wish you the very best of luck.
Book 1: Going Down
Chapter 1: Down To Earth
Clouds appear
and bring to men a chance to rest
from looking at the moon.
-Matsuo Basho
It was 9 AM when he finally opened his eyes, stirred to troubled wakefulness by a night of sweating terror that the alcohol's imparted sluggishness had kept him mired in. The last of the fading images-blackness, stark shadows on a cratered plain and vivid green splatters, drifting endlessly-stuck in the back of his mind for long moments as he threw off the stained and clammy silken sheets. Morning had come, although the sky was as black as nightfall still, and as scarred hands gripped the windowsill for support he stared heedlessly out onto the busy cityscape. There was a certain subdued nature to the ebb and flow of the cars and trucks in transit lanes high and low, and Brazilian flags flew everywhere. Today, every human across the solar system within range of communications from Earth-perhaps even the crews of the rumored Nazi battlewagons, supposedly lying silent in wait for a century out beyond the colony worlds-was a Brazilian. A lip curled up, exposing the corner of a pointed canine tooth, as he wondered just how many people in total considered themselves Brazilians today and if the total number matched the number of vaporized bodies when the city of Rio de Janeiro had evaporated under the deliberate lashing of an out-of-control petawatt power beam from the transmitters on the Moon, linked together in a fashion that ought to have been impossible. The link had been erased by the grossly disproportionate and nearly immediate military response, and along with the link the entire colony that had sprung up around the mine, power station, and transmitter farm. The airborne dust and debris from the crater of the city as well as the dislodged chunks of moon rock and colonists reentering the atmosphere would make for firey and dark nights of the days. Perhaps even another ice age. None of it concerned him except at a theoretical level, because now one hundred percent of the people he was closest to in the world were quite unmistakably dead.
With a groan he pushed himself upright and turned away from the window, hands clutching his head in an effort to hold the contents in. Yesterday he had been out on the town when the newscasters began their reports. Tabs were forgotten, consumption something one did by habit as one watched in horror at the footage. It was hard to grasp the enormity of the thing-like being an ant when a child focuses the sun on your colony. Some said the death toll was already theorized to be in the hundreds of millions. Others were already calling it an extinction level event. For all that Jerome was concerned, humanity could go hang. Through the headache drifted the vision of the last time he'd seen his parents, two days before the event. They'd invited him and his choice of companions...although everybody knew who it was going to be...to their place on the beach on Rio for an 'unforgettable barbeque' sometime in the next week, Raspberry already in her sundress and chef's apron that showed off her tail so well and Thomas busily chopping wood in the background, old asteroid miner muscles laughing at mere trees to split. It was the blackest of humor, in retrospect, but nobody would forget the recent barbeque for a very long time. As he blearily glanced around the sparsely furnished shipping container that served as his apartment his eye fell upon the quietly blinking red light at the base of the communicator. It was a bit hard to make out in the grey dimness that was all that would be daylight for some time now until the ashes were rained from the air. Two lights. One light. Three lights. They danced, splitting and merging with reckless abandon as he stared blearily at them, attempting to by sheer willpower force them to become one light. Nobody called on that line unless it was important. And if it was important, why hadn't she...
A soft feminine throat-clearing floated through the air, and he felt the light pressure of fingers on his shoulder. His skin tingled, as it always did, at that so very unconventional manifestation and manipulation of raw energy, but nevertheless he leaned back onto what felt like a female torso with a sigh. It wasn't exactly supple, but there was enough give and the contours were right, and who cared if it made hairs stand on end? Any comfort was welcome, and it was more than he wanted to do to look at his shoulder and see no flesh resting on it, or look behind him and be reminded that his companion had to choose between being visible or being felt. For now, she was there, and she understood well enough. Still...the light was blinking. And, since he'd done all his banking in Rio with antiquated paper funding and no electronic records, he was broke. And a blinking light usually meant a job. And keeping his companion fed and healthy took a considerable investment. He patted the ghostly touch on his shoulder, reluctantly leaning forward once more and reaching for the communicator.
"Don't bother..."
She of the fingers and torso and theoretical message screening—along with so much else-spoke softly behind him, the voice coming from a point roughly congruent with where a head on the invisible torso-shaped forcefield would have been perched. Normally annoyingly cheerful, for once Jenny's contralto was smoky and low, colored with grief.
"It's PTMC. No, listen!"
He had already opened his mouth to deny wanting any involvement with the military-industrial conglomerate that had made a virtual slave of his father, but her tone was sharp enough and her track record sufficiently impeccable that he closed it again, hissing in the back of his throat in distaste.
"Put your claws away, love."
She chided him.
"They want a good percentage of their operations destroyed. Full immunity, eight-figure retainer, unrestricted weaponry, full resupply contracts. I know you feel like shit, but..."
She trailed off, running fingers—or at least, without looking, what felt enough like them to get the point across-gently down his back.
Jerome stood up uneasily, wobbling but staying more or less upright thanks to the eighth of him that was apparently feline. Not for the first time he damned the early programs of genetic experimentation once both the Axis and Allies had taken their little skirmish into orbit. Raspberry might have joked for the ten thousandth time that choosing to raise a 'man-kitten' proved she was an insane half-cat Nazi superweapon, but he still would have preferred to take his chances with being fully human. Post-Terran Mining Corporation? It was every bit the equal of Boeing, or Lockheed-Martin, or Kuat Drive Yards as far as size and funding went. They must have mines on a score of worlds and colonies supporting them...they paid next to nothing for good work, but would hire anybody competent at the lowest levels of their operations, the everpresent turnover and occupational deaths meaning there was always a place open. Men were cheap. Machinery was cheap. And as one of the biggest defense contractors and suppliers, with a stranglehold on the vertical chain, they could buy a lot of both. And now they wanted their operations removed on an eight-figure scale? It didn't make sense. He shook his head in hungover confusion, padding to the bathroom and running a hand through his stubble and short whiskers. For that kind of money, you could pick up a lot of cheap women, a lot of expensive whiskey, plenty of places to live, retire comfortably on your island, and pay to be very well forgotten indeed, no matter your past. But what kind of insane bastard would contract to wipe out that many facilities? It'd take massive firepower, it'd take time, it'd take...Christ, to do it right would take a destroyer, or a small flotilla of them!
Almost silently he muttered aloud "Dad'd be proud. Get paid to break their toys." Thomas had spent most of a lifetime working for PTMC out in the asteroid belt, driving himself with inhuman ferocity to be able to pay for air and food and to buy his leased ship outright. He'd found Mom out there, under circumstances that had been kept very quiet by everybody involved. Declaring one on all official documents and paying for supplies for a crew of two, much less making enough to eventually retire, hadn't been an easy process and by the time Jerome was old enough to listen all the tolerance and patience for bullshit had long since been burned out of the elder Corbell. He'd always told a young Jerome the truth, saying life was too unpredictably short to waste time in lies, and from the truths that had been remembered the repeated consensus, inescapable and endlessly reinforced by every other source, that PTMC was humanity's biggest bureaucracy to date and therefore a rotten bunch of overpaid underresponsible monkeys with a stranglehold on outsystem mining and most of the military contracts.
Water splashed in the sink as he held his face under it, spluttering and trying to bring coherent thought back about more than the sheer number of tentacles the prospective client might have, metaphorically speaking. Hopefully. When he straightened up again, a towel hung in midair, draped over an invisible cylindrical shape. As he took it, mopping at himself, the image of the young woman faded in. She was pale-featured and strikingly pretty, elfin you might say if you had fast enough reflexes to dodge the inevitable following swat. Her large eyes were puffy as if she had been crying as well, with disheveled long straight hair hanging down over half her face. Her skin was blue, her eyes blue, her hair blue, the entire insubstantial image of his long-time companion, lover, and friend hung in the air projected in a gently glowing tinge of blue, down to the little spaceships on her pajamas—Allied designs from 1972, he thought absently, doing battle with a German fleet. Saturn's rings and the curve of the planet were nicely rendered on her also nicely rendered rear curves, and it never ceased to amaze Jerome how detailed and accurate she made her image. Of course, it was one of the less dangerous ways she spent her time.
"Hey, wasn't my place to say that it would seem like a good tribute to 'em..."
Jenny said, with half a grin tilting elfin lips upward for a moment. She'd heard. She heard everything. It went with the job, and the tiny microphone buried in his mastoid bone acted as an amplifier and secured transmitter for subvocalized speech so they could talk clandestinely. There were times Jerome would've sworn that she nevertheless picked up on thoughts that never even made it to his mouth at all.
"But you know Mom would've told him to do it for free."
She finished her comment a little sadly.
Reluctantly, Jerome nodded. It was true enough, and he had to admit to himself that his own horrified grief and upsetness needed some sort of useful outlet, some way to lash out. Something to destroy, something to bear the brunt of outraged human—despite the cat—fury. And PTMC property might be worth the bid.
"But…"
He stepped toward the shower, the knobs turning before he even reached them as Jenny's image flickered out of sight for a moment, then back in once she'd stopped moving things.
"Why us?"
Off came the briefs, unselfconsciously, and the curtain slid closed. As soon as he was out of sight, Jenny's image vanished again and there came a series of noises from the kitchen.
"Well, I told them the truth as your secretary."
Came her voice, positioned from where her head had just been for logical ease of conversation.
"We just happen to have an assault-converted mining ship at our disposal. Your record and certifications and family association were why they called you in the first place, but that can't have hurt. Incidentally, don't drop the soap, this was an urgent cattle call to come to their orbital office station….as of four hours ago."
The faintest hint of mischief had crept back into her voice, never suppressable for long. Jerome swore feelingly and the buzz of an electric razor echoed hollowly around the bathroom.
"In that case, I'll eat on the way up…throw that sludge in something with a good lid."
A mocking scoff answered him.
"You think I'd waste good caffeinated sludge on you? Happens I found some spray-in seat foam, figured this soon after waking up you'd never taste the difference!"
Jerome thought about it for a moment, carefully shaving around his vestigial whiskers—even a near-miss would give him quite the headache and he didn't need the current one worsened, not when heading into the lion's den—and finally grunted in assent. She was right. He'd probably only notice when it glued his mouth together.
"Moving on…"
"Hah!"
She crowed in victory and interruption, his change of subject only confirming her comment.
"…what would you recommend for a monkeysuit? Full dress?"
It was the young woman's turn to pause, although activity in the kitchen didn't stop. He wasn't looking, and eggs and coffee were too tricky to be left to their own devices.
"Hnnn…"
She crooned to herself softly, quizzically, thinking aloud.
"…no. Too flashy. Anything this prompt, they'll value the brains for subtlety more than the all-in showiness. Plus they'd never want anybody who looked like they were coming in on terms of equality enough to bargain, not unless there weren't any other qualified candidates. Bet you a backrub against a waxing we see one of those little tinpot dictators with a scrap-metal capital ship heading out in a high dudgeon because their acres of broccoli weren't enough?"
Jerome laughed derisively at that, the razor stopping and blending into the hum of a powered toothbrush. His speech was indistinct but they'd been communicating under worse conditions for a great many years.
"S'unfr wagrr—bssides, Mm brwk! No wax money."
He spat out the toothpaste and grimaced at the length of his nails and the filth beneath them, shutting off the water and stepping out of the cramped shower cubicle. Jets of hot air came to life from above and below, although he still started drying himself the old fashioned way while he danced from foot to foot above the rushing currents.
"So you think the decent jumpsuit with all the unit decorations and none of the dangly decorations, then?"
Naked and more or less damp, he jogged back into the bedroom, deliberately speeding up to try and burn the last of the hangover away. The closet hissed open, a carelessly stored helmet tumbling from atop the piles of Jane's Space Gunnery supplements that were stacked unevenly across the top shelving. Poised reflexively on the balls of his feet, Jerome sprang back in next to no time, a hand lashing out to swat the helmet midair with a loud thud onto the bed where it tumbled to rest against his lumpy pillow.
"Hmm?"
Came Jenny's curious voice, as the kitchen noises ceased for a moment. When he looked back, ears twitching in annoyance, she was projected there in little more than an oversized tee shirt and an apron that said "CLEAN THE OPTICS OF THE COOK", gazing cutely up at the piles of magazines and simulating a blush.
"I only read them for the articles, I swear!"
And with a giggle, she vanished again, the noise of frying bacon crescendoing from the other room. Jerome shook his head, by now thoroughly distracted from the events of the day before for the time being, and reached up to pull down his black jumpsuit. It unfolded at a shake, neatly pressed creases still sharp and the small forest of decorations a kaleidoscope of colors in a discreet patch above the right breast. The insignia on the left shoulder, gleamingly bright even in the subdued light of the apartment, marked the wearer as not only a member in good standing of the Mercenary Guild—entitled to possession and use of vessels and technologies normally reserved for the military, providing the paperwork was in order—but as a graduate from the Io Institute, the school reserved for the best talent and largest backing funds. Respectfully, Jerome ran his thumb along the bottom pennant set with two stylized Is. It had taken Thomas and Raspberry every credit they'd ever saved and then some to get him sent there instead of boarding school. He would be the first to admit his youth had been somewhat troubled, and also that the Institute had quite possibly raised as many new troubles as it solved, nevertheless…it was something to be proud of. Something to be less proud of was getting hit in the back of the head with a thrown pair of rolled up socks.
"I don't hear you dressing in there!"
Called Jenny's voice liltingly, from the general area of the kitchen.
"And when I don't hear you dressing, bitching, or snoring in the morning—"
"I don't snore!"
Came the indignant interruption.
"My delicious ass you don't, I have recordings, edited to the melodies of popular tunes—you're probably standing there morosely contemplating your sad, sad life. Cram your hairy self into that little sparkling spandex number, we're gonna go out there and blow some shit up!"
Jerome began to swear, then caught himself. She had just called that out as one of the other options likely…reluctantly, he acknowledged that a perfectly good sulk ought to be put off for a better time and shimmied into the jumpsuit. It did sparkle. It hadn't the last time he wore it. As he struggled to zip it up the long way, he contemplated what he would do to his companion with a paintbrush and a can of something garish. It was hard to think of something she wouldn't like, or the process of applying, and it was with a certain degree of annoyance that he let the idea go. Oh, she was practically impossible to ruffle! Nevertheless, with a little more spare time something would inevitably come to mind.
"Yeah, and what about you? Are you dressed and ready to go?"
He shot back, weakly enough. The only answer that came back was a loud blown raspberry. Concentrating for a moment as he sat down to pull on the thin-soled silvered boots that completed the outfit, he could hear a series of mechanical sputters from underneath the floor, like the coughing of a great metal predator.
"Apparently you're not ready."
Jerome commented with a certain degree of smugness, but paused as he heard the quiet high-pitched whine start and quickly spool up beyond human and even part-cat hearing.
"Turbine troubles?"
It wasn't smug any more but rather concerned. Boots on, he turned around to get his helmet, suddenly peering straight into Jenny's frowning face. She had changed her projection into a matching jumpsuit with duplicates of all the 'fruit salad' rendered in various shades of blue as with everything else and was standing next to the edge of the bed, hands on her hips in exasperation.
"Not that you'd notice. The starter gears are a little worn, that's all. I think shutdown heat is playing tricks with the alloy the Guild specifies…"
He nodded.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was going to take some time off while we were in Rio and mill some better ones with Dad…oof!"
Jenny vanished and the helmet bounced off his midsection with reasonable force. He caught it, frowning at where she'd just been as she popped back into view.
"The hell was that for?"
Jerome frowned right back, and Jenny just shook her head at him.
"You were in danger of being maudlin. Call it a preemptive strike. Look…there'll be time to cry about it later, for both of us. We'll go out and get sloppy drunk, deliberately, break some laws, deliberately, see if we can break our record for statutes violated per hour. I promise, sweetie. But right now, we both gotta hustle up to Shiva Station before they start the property-destroying party without us."
She was right, that gentle voice sharing his emotions as she always had. First things first and time to go.