Trace the Stars

by Nancy Fulda

  Now Pardee’s ship skimmed low over the surface, beneath the enemy’s sensor net. The ffrall worked the cadet’s body, lifting gloved fingers to activate precise targeting controls and prepare the weapons systems. As soon as the scout ship soared over the upraised lip of a large crater, the ffrall reacted. It was just like one of the simulated exercises stored in the computer database.

  The four pirate ships were there, now refueled and ready to fly. The scout fired precise blasts, each one destroying an engine pod and leaving the enemy ships grounded. As the scout circled again, the ffrall carefully targeted the base’s life-support sheds and eliminated them. Every step went like clockwork, by the Corps Manual.

  Now the pirates had no way to get off the asteroid, and their air and power would fail within a few days. They would have to send out a distress call and surrender to the Corps.

  Within the cadet’s body, the ffrall did not respond to the pirates’ shouted curses over the comm lines. Instead, it calculated how much longer its energy would last and decided it had just enough strength left to animate this body and take the scout ship to the nearest Corps base. Back home.

  Coursing through the young man’s nervous and circulatory systems, the ffrall was too much for the fragile human body, close to igniting cells on fire. Its own life energy was dwindling swiftly, but even as it faded, its memories and thoughts were linked to the other ffrall. It could still operate the ship’s controls. It could complete the mission.

  Because the gathered ffrall had repaired the ship’s engines perfectly, and because the animated body in the suit was no longer alive (and therefore no longer vulnerable to extreme acceleration), the ffrall was able to fly much faster than any human could have endured.

  By the time the scout ship reached the Corps base, the lone ffrall had dwindled to little more than a spark. As Cadet Pardee’s ship delivered its appropriate ID signal and landed inside the main dock, the ffrall transmitted a synthesized recording. During the journey, it had patched together voice records from the log entries so that the words sounded as if they were spoken by the young man.

  “This is Cadet Connor Pardee, delivering my report. I located a secret base of asteroid pirates and surprised them before they could launch their ships after me. I destroyed their ships and took out their life-support capabilities. They’ll need somebody to pick them up. By the time a mopup squadron gets there, I don’t expect they’re likely to put up much resistance. Transmitting the coordinates now.”

  With the last flicker of its energy, the ffrall ended the report, “This is scout ship XFE0017, christened Mongoose—signing off.”

  Investigation Summary—Classified: Restricted Access

  This report has many questions and few conclusions. Because no logical answers fit the recorded facts, I will simply state the data.

  Cadet Pardee’s information was valid. We dispatched a Corps squadron to the location of the suspected enemy base, where we easily rounded up thirty-seven prisoners, all of whom will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of galactic law. We have reason to believe this was an extremely important base, housing several of the most-wanted asteroid pirates. The information we gleaned from this operation could well shut down their whole network in the sector. This one victory probably saved thousands of lives.

  However, we cannot figure out what Pardee did, or how he did it.

  Our engineers and technicians have combed his scout ship and found many anomalies. The craft appears to have been severely damaged and then repaired. Perfectly repaired. Onboard diagnostics show that it was flown back to base at extreme acceleration, which would certainly have been lethal to any pilot.

  Cadet Pardee was found dead in the cockpit, though his suit was intact. The autopsy found severe cellular damage, as if from extreme energy exposure. However, the actual cause of death appears to have been explosive decompression and deep trauma from a foreign object, presumably shrapnel, which was found still deeply embedded in his chest, though his skin was perfectly healed over it. His last transmission was made immediately prior to his arrival at the base, but our doctors insist that Cadet Pardee had been dead for several days before he landed in our docking bay.

  I had the sad duty of informing Cadet Pardee’s mother and sister of his death. Unfortunately, I was forced to be vague, because the details make no sense. I informed them that Cadet Pardee died in the line of duty and that he was a genuine hero. I recommend awarding him a posthumous medal of honor.

  I do not wish for the mystery to diminish or taint in any way the service our brave cadet performed for the Corps. In some exceptional people, dedication to duty is so strong it survives even their physical death. We do not need to understand our dead to honor them.

  I recommend that these records be sealed. Permanently.

  The Ghost Conductor of the Interstellar Express

  Brad R. Torgersen

  As planets went, New Olympia was a hopeful disappointment. The right size and mass—to roughly match Earth—it even orbited within the theoretical green zone of its yellow dwarf home star. Alas, similar to Venus, the atmosphere of New Olympia was choking and toxic. A problem that was not wholly insurmountable, given current bioengineering and atmosphere conversion science. But if there ever was to be a truly blue sky on New Olympia—and seas of water to match—these things were very far in the future. Humans had only been working on the problem for a scant handful of years, since the colony boat Mainfront arrived—following its two century journey from Sol System.

  Caddy Brenton barely remembered the cities of Earth. She’d been single-digit-old when her parents put her into the stasis bed before the flight, and she’d emerged more or less in the same state on the other side—just she and her older brother, Peter. Mom and dad hadn’t been qualified for the flight. Too old, according to the surgeons doing the colony screening. Caddy had begged mom and dad not to make her go. But Old Earth had been dying. Too dirty. Too crowded. Too used-up. Or so she’d been told. The accessions officials for the Emergency Resettlement Project had been taking children—and children only—for their bulk colonist manifests. So, Caddy and Peter were consigned to one of the big boats being built. And launched on a very long, one-way trip.

  Strange, Caddy often thought, that twenty decades could pass, without her mind being wise to the fact. Life in the stasis bed had been virtually dreamless. Sometimes, she wished she could get back into the stasis bed and let twenty more decades pass. Maybe by then New Olympia would be ready for habitation. What good was a new life, if all it meant was being confined to the habitat modules slowly spreading across the surface of the asteroid Mainfront had towed into New Olympia orbit? Perhaps her great-great grandchildren would get to rub their toes in the New Olympian sand. But Caddy would not. And this filled her with an almost unutterable bitterness.

  That, and the fact that Peter had left.

  “Uh oh, I know that look,” said a voice over Caddy’s shoulder.

  She turned away from the observation bubble—aimed perpetually down at New Olympia’s rocky, dangerous, altogether inhospitable surface—and greeted her friend Troy.

  “Yo, man,” she said, waving a hand half-heartedly.

  “Blues got you down again?” Troy said, floating up beside her. The asteroid had a tiny bit of gravity, enough to eventually bring everything to rest on the floor, if you stood still. But not enough to make walking possible. Every module and connecting tube was therefore lined with railings and handholds—a person pulled herself through the world, as much as pushed off.

  “You might say that,” Caddy said, turning her eyes planetward. Even she wasn’t sure why she spent so much time here. It wasn’t like staring at New Olympia was going to transform the surface any faster. There wasn’t even a guarantee that the aerosol pods being dumped into the atmosphere every month—containing hundreds of kilograms of genetically-modified one-celled plants—were going to work. There was only the theory of them working. Just as the Mainfront had come all this way on the theory that a roughly-Ea
rth-sized world at roughly the right distance from its roughly-Sol-like star, would have liquid water, and the potential to support an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. And Caddy knew damned well how that particular gamble had turned out. Much to her dissatisfaction.

  “Just think,” Troy said, “We could still be stuck—”

  “—on Earth,” Caddy said, finishing his sentence for him. “Spare me, please. I see the broadcasts that the Mainfront mayor disseminates into the school files. How the skies on Earth are always gloomy. How they’re rushing to do for the Earth’s atmosphere what we’re trying to do here; before Earth goes like Venus. Everyone walking around wearing masks. Barely any elbow room. It looks awful. But Troy, did you ever stop to wonder how accurate that all is?”

  “What do you mean?” the teenaged boy—young man, really, with arms and shoulders thickening and broadening handsomely—said, looking at her sideways.

  “I mean,” Caddy said, “What if they just tell us that Earth’s terrible, because they don’t want us to get homesick?”

  “How can we get homesick for a place we barely remember?” Troy asked.

  “Well I remember,” Caddy said defensively, still glaring down at New Olympia’s surface. “It wasn’t that bad when we left. It wasn’t like they show it now.”

  “The way they show it now,” Troy said, “is the way it looked two hundred years ago. Two hundred years for the broadcasts to reach us. I bet it’s worse, at this very moment, than either of us can imagine. Only we won’t see it for two hundred years. Do you really think we’d be better off if we never came?”

  “I . . .” Caddy said, then shut her mouth.

  Troy maneuvered up close to her and put a hand on her shoulder.

  “I don’t know what to think,” Caddy finally said, rubbing her eyes with her fists.

  “Peter believed in this place,” Troy said, sweeping his arm out toward the planet below. “That’s why he volunteered to be part of the first wave of comet-catchers.”

  “And vanished into thin air,” Caddy said.

  “Yeah, well . . .” now it was Troy who shut his mouth.

  “Sorry,” he said, after a long pause. “I know you don’t like to talk about it.”

  “No, I don’t,” Caddy said.

  “But you for sure will want to talk about this,” Troy said, fishing a small phone out of his jumper’s zippered breast pocket, and using his fingertips to pull something up on the small screen.

  Caddy peered at what the screen said.

  “Scores have been released?” she asked.

  “Not officially,” Troy said. “But I know the girl in the office who runs the workstation for the testing administrator, and she slipped me the data a day early.” He winked at her.

  “Dance your way around too many flames,” Caddy chided him, “and you may eventually get burned.”

  She followed up the comment with a fist slugging playfully into Troy’s shoulder. He went flying across the module, laughing and rubbing his arm. His phone remained in Caddy’s hand, as she looked more closely at what he’d come to show her.

  “I’ve passed,” she said, suddenly turning serious.

  “Not just passed,” Troy said. “The same girl who gave me the scores, told me that they’ve already been picking names for the next class being trained to run the comet-catchers. Your name is on that list. And a year earlier than you expected it to be, too.”

  Caddy clutched the little phone to her chest.

  “I’d hoped,” she said, then allowed herself a small giggle, and a grin. “I mean, I worked hard and I pestered them endlessly to let me try for the next group. So what if I am only seventeen.”

  “I think the fact you’re following in Peter’s shoes . . .”

  But Troy never finished the thought.

  Caddy’s brother was like a friendly ghost, forever flitting about in the periphery of their vision. Not dead. Not here. Just . . . missing. One of the other comet-catchers had found Peter’s ship slowly drifting back into the inner system, gently shoving its captured comet; on pure autopilot. No Peter. No sign of an accident. No evidence at all that there had been any problem. And a log that had been wiped blank, so no records or telemetry to tell what had become of him.

  After that, solo missions were off-limits. All comet-catcher ships went out with two and even three people aboard. At minimum. Whatever had happened to Peter, the Mainfront executive council determined that they didn’t want it to happen again.

  Caddy?

  Part of her still felt that Peter was out there, somewhere.

  “Hey,” Troy said, “remember what I said when I came in here? About knowing that look on your face? Now you’ve got a different one. I am sorry I brought your brother up.”

  “No, this is great news,” Caddy said. “Peter would be proud of me, I am sure. This is my big chance to get out of here, too. To see the far edge of the system. Being stuck here? It’s like living on the front porch of a house I can never enter. I don’t want to spend my life doing that. So, if I can’t go down there—”

  She pointed at the planet.

  “—I want to be out there.”

  Her finger moved off the limb of the world, and aimed for deep space.

  “Well, I hope you make it through training,” Troy said. “I am sure you’ll be the best comet-catcher of them all.”

  Piloting in the new school was an exercise in learning to think big. Technically, every single person who’d come with the Mainfront—both young and old alike—knew how to operate the little shuttles and other vehicles that serviced their budding, single-asteroid civilization. If you understood thrust vectoring in a microgravity environment, and could manage a finite fuel source, there was very little chance to screw it up. The comet-catchers merely amped the equations, because instead of pushing ore cargo or container boxes about, a comet-catcher literally herded an entire cometary body out of its long-period orbit at the edge of the star system, into a short-period orbit which would eventually line it up for an insertion around New Olympia proper—before eventually being de-orbited at a velocity that wouldn’t send the comet smacking into the planet’s crust at speeds guaranteed to cause tectonic turmoil.

  To that end, each comet-catcher was almost like a miniature version of the Mainfront itself: big fuel tanks—both for reactor consumption, and for working mass—and a big, high-efficiency, low-thrust fusion engine. The life module and pilot’s globe were small in comparison to the rest of the ship. It was made of as few parts as possible, all machined in the colony’s ever-expanding nano-augmented fleet yard. And each prospective pilot—as well as her onboard backup assignee—was trained to make fixes to potential problems en route.

  Losing comet-catchers was not unheard of. The risk merely added to the job’s glamour. But the executive council didn’t want to sacrifice any more ships or lives than were absolutely necessary. The objective was to bring back water—as much as could be had—for the terraforming effort. Not fill the comet-catcher academy memorial board with names.

  “Your objective is the snowball,” Caddy’s instructor said to them all as they floated in a loose formation around the scale model of the comet-catcher the academy had constructed at the center of its bubble-domed, one-room schoolhouse. There were two dozen in Caddy’s class—the biggest yet. With the fleet yard able to build more ships with greater efficiency each year, the comet-catcher arm of the terraforming effort was picking up steam.

  The instructor—Chief Pilot Okatsu—pointed a thin stick at the bow of the model.

  “Your most delicate piece of equipment is also your most important. The pusher web is stored in its protective cocoon until you need to deploy it. Once it is deployed, it cannot be quickly stowed. The web itself expands until it forms a semi-flexible glove or bowl, roughly one kilometer in diameter. Far, far bigger than your craft itself, but more than big enough to serve as a . . . as a snow shoe for you, when you have to begin ‘kicking’ your target back home.”

  Caddy raised her hand.
/>
  “Candidate Brenton,” the Chief said, pointing at her with the stick.

  “Why doesn’t the web collapse as soon as it touches the comet’s surface?” she asked.

  “Good question,” Chief said. “I was just getting to that part. The web itself is actually a nanofiber filament that can be electrically charged. When it’s left idle, it’s like a draw string on your jumper. It hangs loose. When you activate the charge, the filaments in the fiber compress and align in one direction. The web is woven such that the compression and straightening forces the web to assume the shape we want. But it’s still flexible and large enough, so that when you touch down on a comet’s surface, the web should bend without breaking. We want both you and the comet to come home in one piece.”

  Chief pulled up a holo-video above the scale model, showing a sped-up animation that demonstrated what he’d just described. Like a flower blooming, the web unfurled out of the front of the comet catcher, until it was like a wide, shallow cup.

  “Now, ordinarily, that web wouldn’t stand up to you or I pushing against a single strand with so much as a finger’s strength. But taken as a whole, the web will disperse the force of your ship’s thrust across the surface of the cometary body, allowing you to manipulate the comet without sinking into it.”

  As if on cue, the computer animation showed the little ship maneuvering to place the near side of an amorphous comet—lumpy, somewhat rounded in shape—into the business end of its web. When the ship began making sudden movements, the web eventually shattered, and the little ship tunneled its way into the comet.

  “Bury yourself like this,” the Chief warned, “and you might be digging yourself a grave. I’ve been on this operation from the get-go—when most of you were still young, and fresh out of your stasis beds. I’ve lost friends to carelessness. Please don’t join their ranks.”

  Which is not, Caddy thought, how Peter was lost. His ship had come back fine—just missing the pilot, was all.