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eBook Category: Science Fiction
eBook Description: Quill wanted to be a starship pilot more than anything else. When the alien object just appeared in his path while he was linked to his ship's sensor array, he tried desperately to deal with the imminent calamity, and touched the mind within the huge artifact--and subsequently tried to kill himself and everyone on his own ship. Released from hospital months later, his self-destructive obsession tempered by a new-found religious fervor, he crews another starship that is going to look at another enormous alien artifact. There, amid a mixed crew of radically disparate beliefs and hidden agendas, he comes face to face once more with the intelligence that demanded death and destruction, and the answer to a puzzle spanning millennia of time and vast distances of space.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Science Fiction Age, ed. Scott Edelman, 1999
Fictionwise Release Date: March 2002

20 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [252 KB], eReader (PDB) [85 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [77 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [69 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [102 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [136 KB], hiebook (KML) [206 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [109 KB], iSilo (PDB) [63 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [79 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [107 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [108 KB]
Words: 22184
Reading time: 63-88 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

"Chasing Sacrifice" by Mark W. Tiedemann is a knockout novella that challenges and engrosses in the opening sequence and continues to do so through to the end, without shortchanging any of the Big Issues it juggles so impressively. Like so many other sf stories about religion, this is a Big Dumb Object story, the huge and inexplicable alien artifact being the most effective mysterium tremendum in literature since Conrad.

"... as engrossing a novella as I have read in some time, and one I found myself re-reading immediately afterward, because I couldn't stop pondering the issues it raised. There I was, minding my own business, and BAM, Tiedemann's novella was right there in my path. Its trace signals are with me yet. Oh, for more science fiction like this, that is less interested in answers than in questions!--Andy Duncan, Tangent Online (Learn more about Tangent Online, the Internet's leading SF&F short fiction review website)

Quill floated in the datastream of the ship's argus. Sensor tendrils extended out far in the vanguard of the Talleyrand's path, feeds that gave Quill a complete image of space--the entire electromagnetic spectrum, the full range of particle telemetry, the weave of relativistic distortion from stars, planets, stray rocks, and pebbles. Even the dust, which without the envelope surrounding the ship, that let them slip through space at translight velocities, could demolish the Talleyrand with a glancing blow, could be tracked if Quill wished.

But objects that small oozed around the fields enfolding the ship. Quill saw them as impressions, like the trace of a pin against clear plastic, sliding past them. Larger things still had to be avoided--skirted or moved aside by one of the ship's ductile fields--but space at that scale really was mostly empty.

Ahead lay home, Markab. The shipmaster had passed on the word that the commission was a success, the clients were happy with the ship, the crew, the project. Talleyrand had spent the last two months in and around a binary system that contained large fragments of an old, nonhuman Dyson sphere humans called the Lyra Construct. Evidence of many others, possibly built by the same race, existed around other stars, but this one was the most intact. The university team--which included a Rahalen Quill had yet to see and a couple of Menkans--had run a mapping and analysis investigation, using shipboard tools coupled with their own specialized probes and remotes. The big supplementals riding behind the usual environs array were stuffed now with artifacts and data, sandwiched with the recovered equipment. They had left a few pieces behind, monitors to watch the slow ballet of shattered structure as it danced between the two suns, eventually to fall into one of them. Quill had listened with interest to the speculations of the xenoarchaeologists. The Lyra Construct existed just outside of the volume of space nominally controlled by the Menkans, which was one reason humans had managed to put together this survey. Even so, rumor had it that this had been the last such expedition to be mounted by the university. Still, in the glow of success, assurances came easily, like the warm smiles and temporary camaraderie.

A ship like this, however, could not afford to rest idle in station. The shipmaster had a waiting list of clients. Twenty days from now they might be running cargo or a diplomatic mission to one of the seti reaches or a cartography run for the council or courier service--

Quill thought himself lucky to be with Talleyrand. A big ship with a big reputation. He had worked his way up to co-engineer on board in the last six hundred days. He was pleased with himself and grateful for the chance. Especially when he could enter the flow like this and become part of the datasphere, to see with expanded eyes...

The alarm shrieked through the system. Time in the flow passed in increments of seconds. Quill damped the warning signal and requested data on the trigger. The feed narrowed to focus on a point directly in Talleyrand's path.

Quill stared at it, baffled. Nothing had been there a moment before. At their velocity anything larger than a human would have prompted either a firm nudge from the fields or a slight course correction. The alarm meant the object was inside the range for safe maneuver and could not be pushed out of the way, but the only circumstance that described was a large mass on a collision vector. But--Quill checked a second and third time--this thing had no momentum.

In another second, Talleyrand's system would automatically start dumping velocity and dropping out of translight, while simultaneously trying to change delta vee. The object was too big and too close for them to go around, even at diminished velocity. He tapped the recording and started a replay to find out where it had come from.