VESTA
VESTA - the books
Colonize the Solar System
Protect Mankind
"Part of the Roadmap to create the enthusiasm for support of the effort to colonize the solar system is a set of possible and achievable futures distributed as youth books, hard science fiction, movies, and gaming. All will be supported by actual launches to asteroid sites within the Solar System."
Colonize the Solar System
Protect Life and Mankind
These novels are for Young People of all ages.
Welcome to Vesta, a hard and soft science fiction story. A fun read. An engaging tale set during mankind's colonization of the solar system, sprinkled with nuggets of life’s experience. None of the ideas are impossible, but many are new. It is written with a certain pragmatic optimism that only surviving the future can bring. If you want to berate civilization’s hard climb and imperfections, focus on depressing news, or blow up the world, there are plenty of those kinds of stories. Vesta is about standing upon the foundations set in the past, the struggle to survive today, and the quest to grow into the future.
Within the narrative you can mine for gems. It introduces leading edge technology and projections of today's science, as well as possible explanations of dark matter. It proposes the root causes of human behaviors based upon humanity's past survival. It recounts the experience of living within a submarine and inside the space shuttle to reconstruct the issues which would confront the space cultures of the future. Survivors laugh at death, and the book contains humor throughout.
Finally, and most importantly, Vesta contains a message: Given guidance, opportunity and responsibility, people thirteen years old can successfully become adults. Many of the ancient culture allowed this, and today’s society is doing our youth a disservice by not allowing competent individuals becoming adults with full rights at that age.
In addition, a road map as it were, is included, suggesting a path that today's people could take to strengthen mankind's chance of survival. By colonizing the solar system, humanity and life itself is given additional assurance of not only survivability, but for the opportunity to achieve our potential.
Evidence indicates that despite all the terrible problems of the world, we are not necessarily doomed. Additionally, despite the incredible growth and achievements from our small beginnings, we are not assured a future. This can be summarized as follows:
Life is a Gift,
In our Uncertain World,
The future is not Guaranteed,
However, if We Work Hard Together,
We have a Chance, and that is
Reason for HOPE
The Shadow’s tenor increased slightly. “Vesta is in extremis, sirs, and we need every bit of help we can get. You two criminalists are being drafted into the cause, because … because we have to use every avenue of exploration we have, and you, Wild Bi1l, have a reputation of thinking outside the box to the point of being reckless, but capable of getting results.
“Why, I have actually watched your gig at the IMP, the hook in the joke about the prostitute, dirtman and aardvark was pure genius. How your mech brain works is anybody’s guess, but perhaps you can unlock the mystery of the threat.
“And you sir, our Earthman, our dirtman, our unaugmented human, a child, as it were. You are a loose cannon. What are your capabilities? What could you contribute? On the surface, nothing, nothing more than a child, yet, of all the resources Earth could have sent in response to our request, they sent you, an unknown, from the rustic Northwest of the America’s, named after a heroic historical figure from that region.
“What can you do? I have no clue, but one of the Sphinges recommended that I throw you, a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, that I throw you into the fire. What you can do, I don’t know. But it can’t hurt. We must act! The very existence of our people is being threatened by the HOB!”
VESTA
Coming of Age
(preview the book, available now)
Preview
Vesta: Hektor - War and Peace
(available 2023)
After their escapades on Wunderland, Jon and Cat find themselves unwittingly between massive forces circling Hektor, a major asteroid in Jupiter's trailing Trojan's, and the unhuman AIs and their SKIP fortress, Citadel.
Encumbered by the stolen space suits, they ran in the micro-gravity as best they could from the slavers. Nervously, Jon and Cat scuttled into one of the dark caverns that were ubiquitous on this C-class rock. The life pack they had swiped didn’t weigh anything but its mass prevented it from rounding the boulders without colliding and jerking Jon’s arm. They had to make sure it stayed intact, it was the energy source they needed to recycle their air water and food and allow them to send distress signals.
As they pressed deeper into the cleft, Cat noticed that the patterns of the ice and hoar frost seemed disturbed, perhaps this rock had been mined in the past and there might be stores and/or useful detritus from the previous occupants. She turned to Jon to share her observations when her headlamp outlined a smooth metal wall behind him.
“Jon, there is an old fabricated bulkhead behind you.” He swung about causing the shadows to shift and dance with highlights and extreme dark running along the walls and floors. The hairs on her neck tried to rise while her ears laid down flat inside her helmet, was the wall moving? “Jon, be still.” He turned towards her causing everything to shift again. “Jon! I need you to freeze, quit moving your head!” Jon did as he was told, they were a good team and he trusted her instincts.
It only took a few seconds, but it was evident her eyes hadn’t tricked her, the wall was opening up. “Jon, let’s get out of here, something’s coming and it can’t be anything good!” They turned towards the depths of cavern since the way they had come was blocked by the unknown. As they rounded a corner Cat glanced back to see a mech with some sort of hydraulic claw enter into the space they just vacated. The glimpse was burned into her memory as they clambered down further into this catacomb.
Jon’s and Cat’s attempt to escape the slavers on this ‘roid was turning disastrous. Oh, where was the Ghost? Everyone said he must be the key to solving this war, and Uncle Bi1l was so far away.
Preview
Vesta: Antiope - Wunderland
(available 2021)
A preview of Antiope – Wunderland. This is a story of a distant asteroid encapsulating an enormous atmosphere, insignificant gravity, and genetic engineering; creating a destination wonderland. However, now with the collapse of the infrastructure, Dragons, Trolls, and Centaurs awoke in a nature red both in tooth and claw…
… Cat’s stripped tail whipped about and her feathered ears laid flat against her neck as the winged mule frantically beat its strong wings towards the sea cave where they had last seen W0ody and Richard. The red dragons that had dropped out of the clouds when the suns suddenly were extinguished were gaining on her and Jon and their only hope was to gain the marginal safety of the cave and its surrounding waters.
Their mules flew on in a powered dive, perhaps two klicks to the sanctuary, but the dragons were gaining and now only a hundred meters or so behind. Cat reached into one of the bags strapped to her ride and pulled out a RTE meal, popped it open and throwing the contents over her shoulder in the hopes of distracting the beasts behind her.
Jon yelled to her. “What!?” she couldn’t hear him due to the noise of the air flow.. He swung close and yelled: "Keep going! I am going to distract them and lead them away! Get to Richard and W0ody!" With that he looped up and to the right while she continued her dive down to the sea deck. A few of the dragons had rolled away to pursue Jon, but the majority were still behind her. Suddenly from a roost she hadn’t even known existed in the cliffs behind the caverns erupted a murder of brown and golden dragons to join the fray. Roars bellowed behind her and she could discern answering clamors from below. As panic began to overcome her heart she leaned her mount to the left to parallel the enormous waves that surged these low gravity seas, trying to dip between swells in any attempt to improve her marginal odds at escape. She threw herself against the broad neck of the mule and dug in with all her might. More howls of carnage erupted directly behind her and her hope that Jon had got away began to fade.
But the massive beat of the wings under her and the accompanying surges of her flight continued without interruption and she became aware that the noise of the dragon battle had begun to be left behind. She was flying low between two gigantic waves which over topped her, in the dim she could barely make out the tops of the cliffs associated with the sea caves on her right. She slowly sat up and looked back and saw an incredible mêlée of dragons in full battle three or four hundred yards back, the reds had been set upon by the golden browns. She belatedly noticed that the golds had a vane on their tails and remembered in her brief that meant they were descended from dogs and iguanas, not wolves and crocodiles. She pulled the mule to a slower pace and turned to watch, but the battle seemed evenly matched, so she continued to depart, although not in such a panic.
The dragons were fighting over and amongst the wave tops, dipping and diving about. The golds were more maneuverable but that didn’t seem to throw the fight their way. As three of the reds suddenly descended upon a single gold the wave beneath them began to hump. As she watched, a hill of water rose towards the group, and she saw an enormous eye inside the laminar surface surrounded by black darkness, and as the water bulged it acted like a lens and the eye was magnified until she thought it was looking directly at her.
The dragons were so intent on their adversaries that they didn’t react to the danger beneath them until the water broke and a maw the size of a dinosaur began to open and surge towards them, closer than they could respond. She was frozen in awe as the behemoth exploded out of the ocean and became a monstrous black and white whale snapping and crushing the panicking dragons which began fleeing as fast as they could, but for a number of them, their inertia prevented a successful flight and they were wounded or died amongst the carnage.
Finally, after an eternity, the whale began to ponderously fall back into the chop with a dragon in its mouth, followed by the limp bleeding bodies of two more, and then they all disappeared within the spray of a huge splashdown.
She looked around and all she could see were fleeing dragons in the distance and now the quiet cliffs above the sea caves. She guided her mount towards the temple atop the cliffs but saw no one. Where was Jon? She could not locate him, nor his hammer headed bipald mount. She tried to locate him though the WET but the numbness was still there in those senses. The shades of Vesta were coming back to haunt. Was she all alone here?
The loss of the WET was as alarming as was the violence of the dragons, indicating as a minimum, help wasn’t coming and more terrifyingly, as a huge fist began crushing her heart, that war was near. Some vacation this was!