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    Kingston's Legacy & Nothing but the Stars
    Kingston's Legacy & Nothing but the Stars
    Kingston's Legacy & Nothing but the Stars
    Ebook97 pages1 hour

    Kingston's Legacy & Nothing but the Stars

    By Thomas Walker

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    In Kingston's Legacy, the people of Weeping Cross have been living under a dictatorial government for seven hundred years. After an attack on the government capitol leaves the president disfigured, the people see their opportunity to move. As the rebellion gathers strength, different forces come into play, secrets begin to be revealed, and the future of this one small world begins to change dramatically.
    In Nothing but the Stars, the crew of a small cargo transport ship are stranded light years from rescue. They must contend with separation from their loved ones, the fear of dying alone, and with each other. As tensions rise and the situation looks more and more desperate, a new, greater threat joins them in the emptiness of deep space.
    These two short science fiction stories offer the first look at an expansive and varied universe, intended to be the setting of many future stories.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThomas Walker
    Release dateMay 14, 2014
    ISBN9781310556159
    Kingston's Legacy & Nothing but the Stars
    Author

    Thomas Walker

    I have been writing fiction as a hobby for many years, as well as writing academic papers for my master's degree. I have strong, lifelong interests in science, transport, history, politics and music. I write mostly science fiction and fantasy, although I intend to diversify out as time goes on. My most significant influences as a writer are Kevin J. Anderson, Alastair Reynolds and Ben Bova. Outside of writing I am a keen transport photographer, music researcher and science buff.

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      Book preview

      Kingston's Legacy & Nothing but the Stars - Thomas Walker

      Kingston’s Legacy & Nothing but the Stars

      Published by Thomas Walker at Smashwords

      Copyright 2013 Thomas Walker

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      KINGSTON’S LEGACY

      ONE

      At first I did not know where I was. I woke lying on my side, a shrill ringing in my ears. My mind struggled to handle the complaints coming from across my body. I had clearly fallen on my right arm, which I could no longer feel nor move. I was winded, my diaphragm aching with every breath. My stomach's pain was only lessened by the greater pain coming from the base of my spine. It was as though something had hit me from both in front and behind. I used my left arm to free my right before pressing my hand against my back. Immediately the pain intensified as my hand applied pressure, but I persisted. I could feel blood under my shirt, and a number of skin scratches, but there did not seem to be anything more severe.

      I tried to sit up, enough feeling having returned to my right arm for it to support some weight. My vision was foggy, my hearing impeded by a constant ringing, an incessant modulating wail drowning out every thought. As I sat up, the pain from my back intensified again, but no part of my body failed to move; no sudden stabbing attacks of agony. No broken bones, I thought to myself. That was something.

      As I started to stand, breathing became much harder. There was a taste in my mouth; thick, particulate, with the taste of something in it that I hadn't experienced for many years. At the same time my eyes began to sting, watering heavily as my hand reacted to cover them, the other hand supporting me against a jagged stone surface.

      I realised I was breathing smoke.

      With a cold rush of fear, the reason I could neither hear nor see became clear to me. The ringing in my head was not in my head at all; it was in the room around me. An alarm, screaming out from some part of the ceiling. The room I was in was filled with smoke, which tasted distinctly of oil, something I had not smelled for a very long time. Seventy years, I reminded myself. The odour took my mind back to a visit I had made to an oil refinery on the sand planes of the southern continent seven decades earlier. A routine visit that had ended in tragedy. I thought of my son.

      No time for that now, my conscious mind snapped, before my chest had time to turn cold in remorse. Pushing myself off from the wall, I stumbled forward, both hands arresting my fall against a wooden surface in front of me. It was the wood that told me where I was. I recognised its skilfully sculpted lines, the way it seemed to flow along its length as though it had been moulded out of a liquid form, rather than chipped and hammered into shape as was actually the case. What I was admiring was the edge of my table, turned through ninety degrees so the equally elaborate legs were pointing horizontally on either side of my own.

      I was in my office.

      The smoke made breathing almost impossible, but now that I knew where I was I could start to do something about it. On the floor next of the table was a half-burned flag that had clearly fallen during whatever event had befallen the room. It was the flag of the Kingston Administration: the government of Kingstonville, the whole of Weeping Cross, and several light-hours of space around it. I looked at it for a second, allowing myself time to apologise for what I was about to do, before tearing a section of unburned flag off from the rest and tying it around the lower part of my head.

      Something was wrong with my face. I could feel the flag cloth against my right cheek and my mouth, but on the left there was no sensation of contact. I touched the skin with my hand, feeling an uneven surface harder and coarser than human skin should ever be. My cheek failed to register the contact at all.

      Standing up fully for the first time, I got some sense of what had happened to my office. There had been an explosion, one large enough to burn most of the flammable elements of the room's interior before the fire suppression systems had activated. From where the burns were most intense it looked as though the explosion should have blown the table away, but instead it had fallen towards what looked to have been the epicentre. Then it occurred to me; had I been sitting at the desk when this happened my body would have suffered the same fate as the walls and I would not be experiencing anything. Clearly I had turned the table and used it as a shield, suggesting that I had possessed some forewarning of what was about to happen.

      As far as I could imagine, only two things could have caused an explosion in the office. The first was some kind of technical failure; a ruptured gas main perhaps, or maybe even a rogue aircraft crashing into the building. But this didn't satisfy the oily taste of the smoke. Oil hadn't been used on Weeping Cross for seven decades; it was outlawed. That left only one other conceivable option: an attack by the Planetary Union. But my agents in the Union had not reported any activity regarding to the Weeping Cross system. Besides, any ship or message from the nearest Union planet would take at least three months to make the journey travelling in infraspace. The perimeter defences had not detected anything enter the area around Weeping Cross, either in infraspace or in normal space. Even if a Union agent had carried out an attack, the Union had outlawed the use of oil longer than we had.

      Disturbed by the lack of an explanation, I pushed myself off the table and stumbled towards the door.

      ***

      Anthony meandered into the laboratory, feeling the rough coldness of the steel tables as he ran his fingers along their edges. It was only when he came to the room alone that he could grasp fully what he and his associates had done here. His organisation was founded on a very basic fundamental principal: that all human beings, regardless of any discriminatory factors, were valuable. It was their core tenet that the loss of human life, irrespective of the individual in question, was to be avoided at any cost, except only the loss of a greater number of lives. The sorry truth was that on Weeping Cross, the value of an individual's life varied massively depending on their background, their allegiances, their physical strength or their intellect. It was this that the group had originally met in secret to oppose, over a century and a half ago, some decades before Anthony's birth. In the years since, it had come to stand for so much

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