Starbound (Stealing the Sun Book 5) Read online

  Halper, who previously ran the Kanisco Agricultural Conglomerate and has spent a decade Earthside working on corporate policy, announced his candidacy amid speculation that his backers include many in the military complex.

  Sector Admiral Lassiter does not agree with Halper’s assessment.

  “Space is very big, of course,” Lassiter said. “But our mission planners have devised a fail-safe method of canvasing the nearby starfields. We believe the recent increase in frequency of attacks show that even Universe Three understands that it’s now just a matter of time before we find them in our crosshairs.”

  SOURCE: INFOWAVE — NEWS for the 23rd century

  TRANSMITTED: December 21, 2233, Earth Standard

  HEADLINE: U3 Cripples Florecer Agricultural Centers

  For the first time, Universe Three has attacked the remote colony of Florecer, destroying much of its local agricultural business center, and leaving several of the infrastructural systems the facility needs to sustain itself in shambles.

  In a profile that has become horrifyingly routine, field reports note that Universe Three skimmers performed bombing and strafing runs across the establishment’s eastern regions for thirty minutes before returning to their ships and jumping out. It left food stores blazing, destroyed the waste processing plant, and shattered the primary dam that helps the colony manage its water.

  The attack brought a fresh round of bitter attacks on the terrorist organization, and upon Deidra Francis, their reclusive leader.

  “As we always do, our people will band together over this,” said Supreme President Halper. “I have already directed the purchase of food stock being developed across the entire structure of our Solar System’s vast capabilities. We will not allow Universe Three to distract us from who we are.”

  SOURCE: INFOWAVE — NEWS for the 23rd century

  TRANSMITTED: August 16, 2235, Earth Standard

  HEADLINE: Earth Farmers Band against “Alien” Growers

  Farmers gathered in an Iowa cornfield, where they stomped a field of nearly ripe corn to the ground to protest the sale of alien crops in Earth markets. For several years growers have fought efforts to allow colonies in the Delta Pavonis, Tau Ceti, and Eta Cassiopeia systems to have access to their markets.

  The protest was held on a farm owned by Henri Armbrister, whose family has managed agricultural businesses since 1900.

  “I lost a full crop, but it made our point,” Armbrister said. “Foreign farmers have given the government millions of solar dollars.”

  Several farmers explained they were worried about viruses, bacteria, and “other space bugs” being released into the Earth’s food supply if corn from off-world colonies were to be imported.

  “We have no data to justify that fear,” Representative Cash Naru said. “The nutrient content of the soil is different in various systems, so the chemical compositions of foreign corn will vary to an extent. In addition, growth patterns are obviously different because of diverse harvesting seasons across the wide array of environments we have in our network—we get three crops a season from Tau Ceti Warsaw, for example, where we get only two from Iowa. But science has proven that corn grown in the Delta Pavonis system is no less healthy than corn grown in the heartland.”

  SOURCE: INFOWAVE — NEWS for the 23rd century

  TRANSMITTED: June 2, 2244, Luna Communications Center

  HEADLINE: Supreme President Halper Elected to Third Term, Predicts “Decades of Prosperity”

  Amid constant news of war on multiple fronts across the galaxy, United Government Supreme President Tomas Halper accepted the election results that provided him a third term.

  “The people have spoken,” Halper said. “And I am humbled to respond.”

  The supreme president spoke for forty-five minutes, touching on several campaign issues including tax rates, laws for colonial rights, and the accusations that he has purposefully extended the war with Universe Three and several copycat terrorist organizations in order to keep the population in fear.

  “There has never been a better time to be a human being,” he said. “We are populating the stars, poverty is a thing of the past, and our ability to create and deliver a high quality of life continues to be on the right path. I expect we’ll have decades of prosperity coming as we grow into the uncharted areas of our galaxy.”

  He did not make any comments regarding the bill he expected the United Congresses to send him that would increase military spending by 72.5 trillion solar dollars, nor did he take questions.

  THE MESSAGE

  CHAPTER 10

  Apogee

  Local Date: C198D12

  Local Time: 2/9:45

  The physics required was a complex array of quantum geometry and multidimensional tensor theory. Dr. Catazara was the man who found the critical path forward, though he passed three years before he could see the final form of the equations, and before the simulations proved it could be done.

  As the math evolved, Deidra wanted to understand it.

  It didn’t help that she had a civilization to support—that the leadership council agreed that spreading the Universe Three presence as far across the 37 Gem system as their numbers would support was important. And it didn’t help that the war efforts had to be maintained. It added up to say her days were packed.

  Still, she struggled hard, met with Catazara and his team often, had the team send her notes which she studied at night until she fell asleep. She could conceive the geometries and the use of the exotic matter shunts the team envisioned, but even after years of effort and hundreds of personal interviews with the science team, Deidra now admitted she would never fully comprehend the extra-dimensional math it took to cap the equations.

  Her brain just would not twist that way.

  So, yes, the physics were hard.

  But the final plan, when it all came together, was amazingly simple—far more pedestrian than the math it took to enable, anyway. Multidimensional physics would never be simple, but creating a surprise plan generally wasn’t that hard—just figure out what the other person expects, and don’t do that.

  No, Deidra thought as Icarus launched and she stood alone on the control station floor, the hard part of this plan didn’t lie in its creation.

  Nor was it trying to sell the plan to the rest of Universe Three’s Leadership. After thirty years of leading raids and organizing development of what was currently five separate outposts on three of the system’s planets, Deidra had a handle on how to approach them, and the fact was that news regarding the United Government’s efforts to find Universe Three’s home had been flowing long enough that everyone knew the UG’s random explorations would eventually result in the Solar System’s scouts stumbling upon them. The only variable was time.

  Some simulations gave Universe Three as few as five standard years, others as many as fifty.

  So it hadn’t been hard to get the leadership council to okay the plan.

  The hard part was when Katriana Martinez looked her in the eye and told her she was volunteering.

  Seeing the depth of commitment in the older woman’s gaze.

  Feeling the passion in her voice as Katriana told her what it meant to her.

  “It’s too much to ask,” Deidra said.

  “I want to do it for my girls,” Katriana replied as she took Deidra’s hands. “I want to be the one who lets us live free.”

  The hardest part of all was knowing there was only one answer that made sense to give.

  “Initial jump complete,” the controller’s voice came over the intercom.

  As she watched telemetry from Icarus fade from the mission screen, Deidra felt fractured, but complete.

  If it had been anyone other than Katriana, the depth of the lesson here may not have stuck with her—the actual idea that Universe Three absolutely had to find a way to live free, fully untethered from the Uglies, and what that idea really meant may not have fully registered.

  As it was, though, the lesson stuck. />
  Deidra already admired Katriana Martinez beyond doubt, but it was her insistence in running this mission that confirmed for Deidra exactly why Universe Three existed in the first place.

  She sighed.

  “Are you all right, Director Francis?”

  It was Allie Feder, an intern who had been working on the pods that would be used to deliver the final connection, and who Deidre understood was being groomed for a big future. Feder stood beside Deidre, tall and thin, dressed in dark pants and a crisply pressed top made of fiber that had been milled on Apogee. Her face was unlined. Her skin glowed with an amberlike beauty.

  The sound of her voice snapped the rest of the control room into place.

  Deidre took it in.

  The energy of the people here was palpable. The room buzzed with certainty and confidence. The links between these people could not have been more obvious if they were physically tied to each other—the teams each working in their own places, each depending on each other to succeed. No group more important, or less so, than the next.

  A weight came off her shoulders.

  It as the strangest thing she had ever felt.

  Her heart ached beyond her ability to describe. But her soul was singing.

  Looking at Allie, it was suddenly not hard to remember that at one time Deidra herself had been that young. She had struggled. She learned how to lead on the job, which meant that she fought her self-doubt in private while publicly keeping on her game face.

  It was hard.

  Sometimes she wondered what the hell she was doing.

  But from this point on, Deidra would never again doubt.

  “Yes,” she said to Allie Feder. “I think I’m fine.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Mars: Kochi Station

  Local Date: June 2, 2252

  Local Time: 1200

  The process ran, as it did every day.

  It started with a Very Large Array spread over the three hundred square kilometers of Martian surface that comprised Kochi Station observatory. Each day Kochi, and several other observatories for that matter, compressed data and transmitted it on tight-beam laser to a receiver in Earth orbit, where it was then split and forwarded to several other destinations—one being a computer in an office on a mountaintop in Chile.

  There, a program that had been written by a student many years before stored the data in overlapping fifteen-minute segments and compared these fresh radio emissions to stored files of noise Everguard had recorded during its last mission. Depending on the outcome of this comparison, various routines filed records, updated logs, and categorized the data.

  A messaging routine forwarded results to a communications server, where—each morning—Thomas Kitchell’s personal system picked them up and performed some additional comparisons.

  This particular morning, when these last comparisons finished, a new routine toggled on. A loop that had never been executed before was finally executed, and a new file was created, encapsulated in a security shell, then dropped into the holding bin.

  At the same time, a notification flag began to pulse in Kitchell’s personal account.

  CHAPTER 12

  Crystal City, Virginia

  Local Date: June 3, 2252

  Local Time: 0507

  For all the time Torrance had spent dealing with such events, you would think he could handle this kind of thing. There had been worse abuses in the past, of course, some of which he had even participated in. But for some reason, the news this morning bothered him.

  SOURCE: INFOWAVE — NEWS for the 23rd century

  TRANSMITTED: June 1, 2252, Earth Standard

  HEADLINE: Parkridge, Inc., Renames Planet

  Parkridge Mining Company announced that it will rename the fourth planet in the Tau Ceti system Parkridge Four. The company purchased the planet three Earth weeks ago for an estimated 25 trillion solar dollars.

  “This step ensures the integrity of our brand as we move even further into the space age,” Maya, the spokesmodel for the company, said in the corporation’s video release. The model wore a white pantsuit and the new Parkridge line of cosmetics.

  Parkridge Four’s atmosphere is nearly 100 percent chlorine, making it inhospitable to human life. The company, however, has engineered their production processes to use that atmosphere itself as a scrubber device to remove toxins while processing their full product suite of industrial-grade solvents. “We will be using the entire planet as a production facility,” Maya said in the release. “No part will be wasted.”

  I’m getting too old for this, Torrance thought as he checked the trim of his sideburns in the bathroom mirror of his room in the Kendra Hotel. Seventy may be the new sixty, but getting older still sucked. This spring marked his thirty-seventh year in the ambassadorial sector—all of them as a science liaison officer, none of them particularly exciting.

  He was doing his best to stay in physical shape: An hour in the rec club every day. Skipping dessert. Monitoring his sleep. Every night he ran a bio scan. The numbers were as perfect as could be expected. On the other hand, while extending a man’s telomeres may double his life, the signs of age remained as obvious as rings on a tree stump.

  Lines and dry patches marred his skin. His crew cut was shorter than he used to wear, but the hair was thinning and graying to white anyway, so it looked better this way. Even his eyes were worn and faded. He pursed his lips. This was not how he expected his career to have gone.

  The Kendra was a high-rise overlooking the western shore of the Potomac River.

  Willim Pinot—the chief intelligence officer of the United Government Intelligence Office—expected him at 0700 and Torrance still hadn’t had breakfast.

  He sighed, then ran a brush over his scalp.

  The CIO had been vague about the agenda, and politics always left Torrance uneasy, even after thirty-seven years of playing the game.

  He stepped back from the mirror and yanked his jacket to the side so that his buttons were aligned and his shoulders square. He was seventy-one locals—no longer the slender “kid” he had been on Everguard—but he still presented the uniform with a bit of dignity. If he ever did decide to do something rash like retire, he would miss the uniform as much as anything else. He strapped his personal comm system over his forearm, punched up his temperature and blood sugar, and glanced at the time.

  That was when he first noticed the red icon flashing.

  * * *

  To the few who knew about them—or at least remembered them—the Eden files had been destroyed with Everguard. No great loss. Images of storms on desolate planets are interesting only to a handful of scientists and hobbyists. But to Torrance, the Everguard files had always been like hand-inked parchment stuffed in green bottles that were floating on the currents of the most massive sea known to humanity. They were words sent from unknown people who lived on Alpha Centauri A’s second planet. To hell with folks who said life couldn’t exist there—he knew better.

  Once, Torrance thought he had made inroads with a professor, but it turned out she had only listened to his arguments because she needed ideas for two of her students’ dissertations, who both were working in science journalism rather than in any serious technical field. They interviewed him, and set him up with a modeler, who turned the noise into a set of intriguing posters and a piece of multidimensional art.

  Another time he spent a week with Lars Messier, an astrobiologist who, it turned out, had just signed a contract with an entertainment company and wanted to use Torrance’s experience for an episode of Strange and Unexplained, a series that examined a collection of what were mostly sensationalistic events that no one actually believed were true. Messier waited until the very last hour of the last day, just before recording was to begin, to tell Torrance that their earlier interviews were really just preludes to a show, and to ask him to sign the release forms. “Just a formality, really,” Messier said as he put the legal pad in front of Torrance.

  He still remembered the smell o
f spicy mustard in the sandwich line of the buffet the production crew was setting up.

  “We just need to make the episode now.”

  It had been the lowest point of Torrance’s efforts.

  Other than those two opportunities, a career spent with planetary scientists hadn’t resulted in any real progress.

  That was why he had kept up with Thomas Kitchell’s work as the kid went through every new stage in his career: a stint at LUMI, an assignment in the Interstellar Command’s Cosmological Center, three standards spent in comet analysis, where his part in using quantum foam sound analysis to map entire swathes of the space in near real-time won him the prestigious LiKay Award, and a grant that he then spent digging deeper into Alpha Centauri and her planets. As the years passed, Thomas Kitchell had become one of the Solar System’s most prestigious minds when it came to deep space signal processing. The kid had done work on a hundred key questions, including spearheading a group that was focused on sensing possible locations for Universe Three outposts. As far as Torrance knew, it was Thomas Kitchell’s efforts that had key Interstellar Command people suggesting that the time scale to discovery was now years rather than decades.

  Kitchell’s reputation was why Torrance was depressed for days after each time he heard Kitchell had again come up empty.

  It was why he had kept studying the files himself for years as he had been stationed at Tau Ceti and Delta Pavonis and all the others, even though it became more and more obvious that Torrance didn’t have the skills required to crack the code. Working on the files was important to him. To him, they would always mean something.