Ranger 8: A Science Fiction Adventure Story
The following is the Prologue of my science fiction adventure story, Ranger 8. The full novel is available on Amazon in print, E-book and audiobook formats.
Check it out here: Ranger 8
Enjoy!
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Synopsys:
The Year is 2062. Earth and Lunar orbit are open to the masses. In this new and wild frontier humanity needs peacekeepers. The Ranger Program was created to uphold orbital balance for all and ensure the safety of those who choose to Traverse the first frontier of space.
Adrian Bowman, an Orbital Ranger, finds himself caught in the political machinations of a secret project deep in the Australian Outback, known only as Black Kite. His wife, Anna Bowman is a gifted robotics engineer for the Artemis Corporation. She comes into possession of a file that contains incriminating data that could reshape global politics forever.
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Prologue
Acacia branches swayed in a rare hot wind laced with red sand. A weathered face half covered by sweat stained fabric peered through the partially filtered light breaking through a tiny singular canopy, a lone guardian valiantly standing tall against the oppressive onslaught that was the midday sun. Beneath the sand blasted foliage the seeing eyes of a dreamer spotted a streak of white piercing the sky.
From the lips of the dreamer a songline emerged, streaming forth with the will of the ancestors, a bright and cool counterpoint to the white hot spear cutting through the clouds. As one rose the other rose with it, beyond the sand blasted acacia, beyond the sky that held thin whisps of half remembered promises of life and longevity, to the flaming streak of white. And when the counterpoints met a cycle was completed.
The spirits exhaled bringing anticipated relief. Atop the acacia’s highest limb a small brown bird of prey allowed its feathers to ruffle. It’s accusing eye fell upon the dreamer as the streak of white faded into a blue black abyss. The bird of prey took flight, riding the end of the cycle to higher places.
The dreamer stood and looked towards the setting sun. His cracked lips widened into a smile.
“Good luck Ranger.”
#
Braxton Turner sat alone at the head of a long empty table in Conference Room Nine scratching his chin through his manicured copper beard in impatient irritation. Behind him, the first of three double doors electromagnetically locked and opened by a key card that he didn’t have access to reminded him that he couldn’t leave until they got what they wanted. Braxton hated coming to Pine Gap. The locked doors, the armed guards and the security cameras severely hindered his negotiating power. Going to Pine Gap once every three months was like wading into a shallow swamp. Below the murky surface lied any number of threats, he just couldn’t see them yet. When at the Pine Gap Satellite Surveillance Base all Braxton could do was try not to get pulled under. But he had to admit that there was no better place to talk about Australian government secrets.
The double doors swung open behind him and slammed closed with a metallic thud. A man wearing blue digital camouflage uniform and a blue beret walked smartly in and sat at the opposite end of the long table. In his hand was a glass tablet. He scrolled the surface of the glass for a moment, his eyes scanning the data that lied within. Group Captain Kelly, the officer placed in charge of monitoring Braxton’s project, didn’t break his gaze from the tablet when he spoke.
“Braxton Turner, do you consent to giving a full and honest disclosure of Project Black Kite’s progress with the knowledge that any withholding or falsifying of information is punishable by law?”
Suddenly the windowless conference room felt a bit more like an interrogation room.
“I do. Although, I don’t consent to hypnosis or water boarding while I’m here. Wait a sec, no one consents to water boarding. Is lying to you punishable by water boarding?”
“I’ll take that as a yes. Legally I have to inform you that this conversation is being recorded both audio and video. Any proof of fabricating or withholding information will be used against you in the Military Court of Australia.”
“That’s always my favorite part. What if I forget a minute detail? This is a complex project and I’ve got a lot of data floating around my head. If I forget to mention something are you gonna lock me away down in some bunker?”
“Braxton, can we have one meeting where you’re not a sarcastic jerk.”
“Sorry Kelly, its just my nature to sling sarcasm at bureaucratic lunacy. Look, the Black Kite is coming along great. Structural is done, electrical systems are eighty percent, we’re having some trouble with the AI. It keeps wanting to talk to itself before it talks to the pilot which leads to garbled information- “
“Oh, so it talks like you do?”
“Hey, so the Group Captain can tell jokes!”
“Maybe you’re rubbing off on me. The top brass wants to know about the rocket engine test. They want proof of flight.”
“And they’ll have it. In three weeks we’re scheduled to perform the final ground tests of the propulsion system. I already have my test pilots lined up-“
“About that, we’ll supply you with test pilots.”
And there it was. The hidden threat in the murky depths of the swamp that was Pine Gap. Braxton had nothing but admiration for those who chose to serve their country in the military. In fact, Braxton had served eight years in the Royal Australian Air Force as a support airman. There was a certain unspoken kinship between Braxton and Kelly. They both knew what it meant to be airmen. However, every time Braxton came back to Pine Gap there always seemed to be some veiled attempt by Group Captain Kelly and his superiors to ascertain more control over Project Black Kite.
Up to this point Braxton had been able to outmaneuver their attempts to seize his project piece by piece. When it came to drawing up the contract for this project Braxton was careful to ensure that no mention of designating test pilots was included. He knew that there were plenty of talented pilots in the RAAF but the best of the best went to the United Nations Ranger Program.
Braxton would pay a king’s ransom to get a Ranger in the cockpit of his aircraft, but the Rangers were in orbit keeping the peace. No, Braxton chose his test pilots on their ability to think freely and adapt in creative ways. He wasn’t about to let Kelly burn his roster.
“No, no, no, that wasn’t part of the deal. I’ve talked to air force brass all over the world and you’re all the same. You think just because you went to some fancy flight school and you got a shiny collar you’re the best aviators this world has to offer. Well, I got news for you! Your best pilots are all Rangers now. I’ve sourced my test pilots globally mate! And, it wasn’t specified in the contract. It’s my vehicle, I use my test pilots.”
“It’s your vehicle that the Australian government is funding Braxton. To be frank, we don’t trust your test pilots.”
“Well, you better suck it up Frank because we’re about to change the world. We are this close! Give us the space to do what we do.”
“We’ll need all of the information you have on your test pilots and more. Background checks, surveillance, the works.”
“Fine.”
“Braxton, this isn’t a game. This isn’t the private sector, the consequences for information leaking are real. A lot of money has been dumped into the project. This vehicle of yours better work.”
“Oh, its gonna work. It’s gonna make your fifth generation fighter jets look like hobby drones.”
Chapter 1
Anna Bowman sat leaning back in her chair, her glasses clinging to the tip of her slender nose as her auburn eyes darted across the large glass monitor that occupied the workstation of her corner office. Behind her and to her right were tinted glass walls that overlooked a small concrete courtyard with a fountain depicting abstract artforms with water cascading down them.
Anna liked to keep her office spartan. She felt that clutter distracted the eyes and the mind. Her office was a perpetual blank slate, the perfect environment for creation. The glass monitor of her workstation was a blur of data and code. Anna was currently working on solving a complex programming issue with the Artemis UT Plex drone prototype.
Anna enjoyed working for Artemis Corporation as a robotics engineer for the most part. The pay was good and the drone concepts the company wished for her to develop were relatively simple in nature. In short, working for Artemis corporation helped Anna keep her skills sharp and funded her life so that she could pursue her passion projects on the side.
Squeezing the bridge of her nose and rubbing her eyes, Anna took a moment to look away from the glass screen. She was searching through the Artemis Archives for old code constructs she could use to repair some logic issues within the UT Plex prototype drone. So far, nothing had come up. It was getting late and Adrian would bring Raiden home from soccer practice soon. Anna spun her office chair around and gazed out the tinted glass wall at the abstract art fountain for a moment. After accomplishing so much in her personal projects recently such a simple problem as this shouldn’t be so taxing on her. She supposed there was never a good time to get high and mighty about one’s accomplishments. Life always seemed to provide challenges in the strangest ways.
She felt that there was one way to overcome this particular hurdle. She hadn’t done such a thing since she was an idealistic teenager who wanted to change the face of society all on her own. Anna was well aware of Artemis Corporation’s cyber security protocols and they were standard but nothing to write home about. It would be a simple task to upload her Gatecrasher and bypass the firewalls undetected. Besides, chances were that there was some good programming hidden away in a long forgotten file from a completed project years ago.
Anna spun around and fixed her attention back to the glass monitor, resigning herself to one last dive into the Artemis Archives. However, this time Anna was going to unlock all the gates. Anna recalled the program she wrote when she was a kid. It was her first programming project. She used it to bypass her school’s cyber security and instigated a cascade failure in the school’s main server on the first day of finals week. All of the students ended up having to take their tests with paper and pencil. Anna almost knew the program by heart and it was a simple task for her to recreate it and upload into the Artemis Corporation Archives.
Undetected Anna began searching the secure files of the company for an AI program file that could be useful to her work. For a while Anna found nothing of importance, financial logs, time cards, incident reports. It wasn’t until Anna stumbled upon a file titled VanceData, embedded within the Artemis Corporation executive logs. Upon clicking on it Anna realized she was in a file system that technically existed outside of the Artemis Corporation servers. Or at least it appeared to be. The only reason she could see this file was because of the Gatecrasher. This particular executive log belonged to Shaun
Vance. Anna had heard of him in relation to the company somewhere along the way.
As she opened the file she found personal photos and documents. One photo depicted the Artemis CEO, Ewen Vance, on a fishing trip with an older gentleman who shared his likeness. That’s right, Shaun Vance is Ewen’s father. If Anna remembered correctly Shaun had a
sizable stake in the company as well. Anna’s first instinct was to close the file and go home. She wasn’t a voyeur, she just happened to stumble down a digital rabbit hole that led her to an unexpected outcome. Besides, Shaun probably valued his privacy. Hiding a personal file from plain view of the company made sense.
Anna moved to exit the file when a subfolder titled Heliopolis caught her eye. The draw was too much to resist, she had to know. Anna felt almost giddy like a school girl who was about to crash her schools data server. She opened the file and inside she found a text document, half a dozen video files and several subfolders titled with various names, some names of politicians that Anna recognized.
Anna recalled when she was a teenager living in Maine, she self-identified as a hacker. She believed that her digital piracy would change the world forever. Of course, her network shenanigans never evolved to the point of major crime. However, when she was about to deploy a nefarious program to slow the efforts of the immoral establishment that she felt she was trapped in she always felt a perverse, euphoric adrenaline rush as she initiated the process.
In the moment that Anna accessed the Heliopolis file she felt the same euphoric rush of excitement. Anna felt like she was a teenager again. She felt like she was doing the world justice by accessing this file. Her eyes wide, the blue light from the glass monitor dancing across her face in the dark office, Anna found herself delving into a treasure trove of debauchery, decadence and immorality. The initial text document within the secure folder was a simple list of names. Next to each name was the description of an activity or action.
· Dexter Ward (Office of Orbital Market Development) — Man Slaughter
· Anthony MacSanly (UN Security Council Ireland Rep.) — Embezzlement
· Franeks Eglitis (UN Security Council Latvia Rep.) — Religious Duplicity
· Payam Kashkouli (UN Security Council Iran Rep.) — Funding Extremist Organization
· Peter Carpenter (Ranger Program Major General) — Adultery
· Melissa Knight (Artemis Corporation Board of Directors) — Emotional Affair
Anna’s hand was trembling now as she backtracked to the main folder. She accessed the first video file named Dexter. The video appeared to have been shot from a high angle up near the ceiling of a motel room. The video was framed by a black ring as if the lens of the camera was filming from a recess of some kind. A woman in a red cocktail dress lied motionless on a disheveled bed. A man in black slacks and a half unbuttoned white dress shirt stood over the woman, running his hands through his hair.
The man leaned over the woman and touched her neck. He straitened quickly and began
to pace. His movements were manic and irregular. He hurried over to the small desk in the corner and began to clear it, carefully. Because of the grainy nature of the video it was difficult for Anna to tell what was on the desk. After the contents was cleared, holding his nose the man leaned over, pressed his face to the surface of the table and then jerked his head up violently. The man swiped the surface of the table with his hand before turning back to the woman lying on the bed. He awkwardly slung the woman over his shoulder and hauled her out of the frame into what Anna could only guess was the bathroom.
The video ended and Anna moved back to the main folder. She spent the next fifteen minutes browsing through incriminating video, and audio files. She found detailed financial reports that indicated money laundering and embezzlement. She found screenshots of text conversations and account access data. If Anna remembered correctly, Shaun Vance was a very wealthy, very influential man. Did the majority of his influence come from blackmail?
Suddenly, Anna’s watch began to vibrate. She almost jumped out of her seat, her attention returning to the surroundings of her office.
“Hey, I’m so sorry I lost track of time. I just got sucked into research again.”
As she spoke Anna pulled a small portable drive from her desk and placed it near the base of the glass monitor. The contents of the file began to transmit.
“How was Raiden’s practice? Oh good. I bet he’s tired.”
With the incriminating evidence copied to her portable drive Anna covered her tracks and made it look as if she had never found Shaun Vance’s dirty secrets.
“I’m pretty sure we have ingredients for spaghetti. Great, I’ll see you at home in twenty.”
When she ended the conversation she let out a long exhale. Anna thought the hacktivism days of her youth were over. This was big and everything in her told her to blow the whistle. But then worry began to creep into her thought process. Could this information potentially destroy Artemis Corporation?
It was all too much to process in a single moment. Anna wasn’t even sure she would do anything about the information. The teenage version of herself demanded justice, where the mother in her wished to provide safety and stability for her son. Anna stared at the portable hard drive for a moment. It had never felt so heavy. Anna placed the hard drive in her pocket and shut her monitor down. For now, she needed to think and no one could know, this would be her secret and hers alone.
