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The Pirates
of Pangaea Book 4
by
Jonathan Edward Feinstein
Copyright © 2013 by Jonathan E.
Feinstein
All Rights
Reserved
No part of this
publication may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher. For information
regarding permission, write to Megafilk Press, Jonathan E. Feinstein, 923 Drift
Road, Westport, MA 02790
Cover
art: The Orion Nebula as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. This image was
composed from 520 Hubble images taken in five colors between 2004-2005.
Courtesy of NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (Space Telescope Science Institute/ESA) and
the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team.
Stories by Jonathan Edward Feinstein
Gaenor’s Quest
The Red Light of
Dawn
The Black Clouds of Noon
The Rainbow of Dusk
The Cold Clear Skies of Midnight
The Maiyim Stories
The Maiyim Tetralogy
World of Water
Men of the Earth
Island of Fire
Gods of the Air
Three Stories of Maiyim
A Deadly Union
An Interesting Title
A Shattered Family
Ars Nova Magica
(and related side
stories)
The Maiyim Bourne
The Staff of Aritos
A Promising Career
A Fine Adventure
The Tears of Methis
Freshman Orientation
The Book of Candle
Dry Dock
Ars Scientiaque Magicae
Unexpected Reactions
Hypothetical Notions
Theoretical Bases
Lift Off!
Required Components
Experimental Proofs (Forthcoming)
The Terralano Venture
Agree to Disagree
By the Light of the Silvery Moons
There Goes the Neighborhood
Down Time, Ltd.
Down Time
Taking Time
Time Out
Show Time
!
Double Time
A Plethora of Deities
Downhill
All the Way
In the Sky with Diamonds
The Seed
The Tree
Tempting the Fates
Teasing the Furies
Inspiring the Muses
Dancing with the Sphinx :Waltz
Dancing with the Sphinx :Tango
Dancing with the Sphinx :Foxtrot (Forthcoming)
The Wayfarers
A Land
without Borders
A World without a Name
A Nation without Maps
A Country without Unity
A Continent without Form
An Ocean without Charts (Forthcoming)
The Pirates of Pangaea
An
Accidental Alliance
The Unscheduled Mission
A Planned Improvisation
Other Stories
Elf Alert!
A Study in Ethnology
Off on a Tangent
Author’s Foreword
I am not sure why, but while this
series has proven fairly fun and easy to write, figuring out what to say in
these forewords has been an uphill battle. Fortunately, I know where to start
this time.
It is always with mixed emotions
that I come to the end of a series. There is a feeling of accomplishment that I
have brought a long story to what I hope is a satisfactory conclusion, but that
melds with a feeling of loss because I will not be working with these
characters any longer. That does not mean that I will never write another story
involving the far future of Pangaea Proxima, but for now at least, I have no
plans to do so. To explain why would be to drop spoilers here and if I waited
to make this an afterword, it would not need saying.
So, instead here is a quick summary
of the series so far; In
An Accidental
Alliance
Parker Holman meets Iris Fain on the evening before they both
enter the stasis chambers of Project Van Winkle. The Project, headed up by
Colonel Arnsley Theoday, was intended to safely store away five thousand of the
best and brightest in case of a disastrous asteroid strike or a nuclear war.
The plan was to wake them up again once the danger had passed, but whether
someone forgot to set the alarm or else it was decided it was easier to keep
the team on ice rather than to round them up again if ever needed, the next
thing anyone in the project knew, it was two hundred and fifty million years
later and a lot had changed.
Park organized a corps of
explorers and together with Iris took a boat downstream of Van Winkle Base
where they met a young Mer named Marisea Waisau and her father Teodore. The Mer
look like the mermaids amd mermen of old myths with human bodies from the waist
up and dolphin-like tails from the wasit down. Park and Iris also met the
mystic Okactack, an Atackack, a species descended from ants. Okactack’s mission
is to seek out and guide a pair of strangers who will save the Earth from
destruction and he believes Park and Iris are those strangers.
The humans of Van Winkle soon
learn that Earth is under a sort of quarantine enforced by people the Mer refer
to as Galactics, but who are a myriad collection of human species with a few
non-Earth descended peoples mixed in. These Galactics call themselves the
Alliance of Federated Planets. One thing leads to another and when the Humans
of Van Winkle and their Mer allies attempted to travel in space to repair a
communications satellite, Alliance ships stop them and in a brief exchange of
gunfire shoot down the unarmed human/Mer ship. That was hardly enough to
dissuade the people of Van Winkle and on a second attempt, the battle goes the
other way. Two ships are destroyed and one retreats, calling the humans, “Pirates,”
a name that sticks. Meanwhile the humans and Mer undertake a humanitarian
mission to rescue the crewmen and women from the destroyed ships, making
friends among them at least. The Alliance Base on the Moon promises to
surrender as well.
In
The Unscheduled Mission,
it turns out that merely beating the
Galactics once is not enough. In the time since the first book the Lunar base
has still not surrendered, but the Alliance has sent an official negotiator.
The negotiator, however, has no intention of allowing the Earthlings off their
planet and after a series of stall tactics, orders an attack on the spaceport
at Van Winkletown. After picking up the pieces, it turns out that the people of
Earth are not without friends in the Alliance. Their main ally is Lord Rebbert
of Dennsee, whose son was one of the rescued personel in the first book.
Meanwhile, the Alliance has sent another negotiator. This one, the Pahka
Grintz, is an honorable, albeit stern man whose people live by a radically
strict code of behavior.
Grintz is impressed by the people
of Earth in spite of himself, especially the insectile Atackack and their
mentor at Van Winkletown, the Mer teen, Marisea Waisau, but while he leaves in
peace another Alliance warship has been sent to arrest the infamous Pirate,
Black Captain McArrgh, a name Park used once as a joke, forgetting that anyone
who heard him would take him seriously. By the time the shooting was over,
Earth had captured two Alliance ships, complete with their working stardrives.
In the name of peace, the
Earthlings are forced to trade those two ships back, but not before the
brilliant human engineer, Veronica Sheetz, has had time to examine them. She
assures Park she can duplicate the star drive which will guarantee Earth full
membership within the Alliance.
At the start of
A Planned Improvisation
, Ronnie Sheetz
is still working on a usable star drive, and her first successful probe with
the new drive has attracked the unfriendly attention of a species of human
called “The Premm.” The Premm believe that they alone are the rightful heirs of
the “Original Humans,” and consider the humans of Van Winkle to be abominations
as are their allies, the Mer. The Premm also believe that it is their mission
to “Cleanse the Earth in nuclear fire.”
Lord Rebbert’s faction within the
Alliance government (The Diet) is managing to keep them from acting on that
mission directly, but the Premm have allies with amazing technology from
outside of the Alliance. These allies, known for their “Dark Ships,” so named
because they were hard to spot by most Alliance censors, have been attacking
both Earth and the worlds of Rebbert’s allies. Finally, they become bold enough
to attack Owatino, the capital world of the Alliance just about the time the
first Earth starship is ready to fly. That ship is armed to the teeth and sent
to Owatino to help break the siege.
Due to the Earthly stasis
technology and weaponry unknown in the rest of the Alliance, The Earth ship is
instrumental in breaking the Siege. In the aftermath, the Premm resign from the
Alliance and Park is shoe-horned into the Diet as Earth’s temporary representative.
As this story opens, it has been two years…
Jonathan E. Feinstein
Westport, Mass.
June 10, 2013
The Holy Amphitheater had not
been seen by mortal eyes since its consecration. There were lights at each of
the holy stations, but all surfaces had been treated in a way known only to the
now-dead builders that caused them to absorb all light. With no reflections,
the walls could not be seen. In turn, the lights at each station were shielded
so that only a dull glow could be seen from elsewhere in the large hall. The
effect was that, when occupied, the half-cone shape of the room was defined by
barely seen glows from each station.
Two Hundred forty-three,
black-robed priests and priestesses of the third degree entered. They walked
slowly to their seats, but remained standing. When they had arrived at their
stations in the uppermost tier of the room, eighty-one people, priests and
priestesses of the fourth degree, clad in dark green robes, filed in to fill
the next tier. Twenty-seven priests of the fifth degree, in bright blue, filled
the second lowest tier and nine highpriests in bright red took their places at
the base of the Holy Amphitheater.
When the entire Premm Council had
taken their places, the Archpriest, entered the room from the back of the
raised dais. His robe was dazzlingly striped in not only the black, green, sky
blue and blood red of the Council, but also the white and yellow of the lower
priests, those not of Council Rank. Furthermore, he also wore a shimmering cape
of violet and orange so that his garb encompassed the colors of the rainbow. He
stood in front of the tall, carved throne for a long moment. The seat could not
be seen by anyone but him and in the decade since his ascension to the
Archpriesthood, he had wondered why a more comfortable chair could not have
been used. It was not as if anyone but the Archpriest ever saw it.
No
, he corrected himself,
the servants must see it when they clean
this place.
They would talk if
something as out of place as a reclining chair were found here.
The archpriest, looked out at the
room and observed the rings of lights, each faintly colored the robes of the
men and women at their stations. “We are the True!” he intoned formally.
“The True!” the Council echoed as
one. “The Chosen!”
“We are the Only,” the archpriest
continued. “The sons and daughters of the Originals.”
“The Blessed Ones!” the Council
replied. “We are the Premm!”
“We are the True,” the archpriest
nodded, finishing the ceremony. He remained standing as the others found their
seats and then, at last, he too sat down. “We are in a Crisis of the Faith,” he
told the Council. “I hereby invoke our emergency rules of session. Speak freely
and without the usual ceremonial. We may not have the time and the Originals…”
“The Blessed Ones!” most of the
Council intoned automatically.
“…will forgive us,” the
archpriest continued as though there had been no interruption. “The question of
the hour, of the century, indeed of all Eternity is Mother Earth and Her place
in the Holy Prophecy. Trohavn,” he commanded the highpriest of the capital of
the Holy Premm Empire, “report.”
The face of Highpriest Morrack
Nixixn appeared holographically in front of the Archpriest. In the Holy
Amphitheater, only the archpriest could see the faces of the Council. “It has
been nearly two years since the Pirates and the Mer abominations joined the
Diet of the Alliance,” Morraxn reported. “In that time their prestige among the
infidel has increased. The Earth must be cleansed of their impurity, but the
Alliance will fight us. Our allies remain true to our cause, but they were
badly injured by the unholy weapons of the Pirate leader, Black McArrgh.”
“Yes, yes,” the archpriest
nodded. “The Unholy One will pay for his sins and very soon. Graranoa, how fare
our allies today?”
The face of the highpriest from
another of the Premm worlds appeared before the archpriest. “Our allies
recover. They have rebuilt their lost ships and improved them. They will all soon
carry the Holy Flame of Purification.”
“Good,” the archpriest decided. “Then
it is almost time to bring about the Holy Prophecy. Mother Earth will be
cleansed.”
There were religious cries of joy
around the Holy Amphitheater, but not everyone was expressing approval. A faction,
mostly among the priests of the third and fourth degrees, were clamoring for
the floor. The Archpriest knew what was coming, but he needed to allow them
their say.
“Your Extreme Holiness,” the main
spokesman of the dissidents, a blue-robed priest of the fifth, began, “the Holy
Prophecy is vague on this point. There is some uncertainty as to the meaning of
cleansed.”
“The cleansing will be
accomplished by the holy atomic fire,” the archpriest replied. “What other
means could there be?”