Rocket’s Red Glare

by David Hardy

  Rocket’s Red Glare

  Brad R. Torgersen

  Keith West

  Martin L. Shoemaker

  Nathan E. Meyer

  Sarah A. Hoyt

  David Hardy

  Robert E. Vardeman

  Christopher M. Chupik

  Lou Antonelli

  James Reasoner

  Rocket’s Red Glare

  Copyright© 2017 Rough Edges Press

  Rough Edges Press

  www.roughedgespress.com

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13: 978-1546670537

  ISBN-10: 154667053X

  “Orphans of Aries” copyright© 2017 Brad R. Torgersen

  “Manifest Destiny” copyright© 2017 Keith West

  “A Hamal in Hollywood” copyright© 2017 Martin L. Shoemaker

  “Performance Bonus” copyright© 2017 Nathan E. Meyer

  “Freemen's Stand” copyright© 2017 Sarah A. Hoyt

  “A Man They Didn't Know” copyright© 2017 David Hardy

  “Jupiter Convergence” copyright© 2017 Robert E. Vardeman

  “Graveyard Orbit” copyright© 2017 Christopher M. Chupik

  “The World Turned Upside Down” copyright© 2017 Lou Antonelli

  “Aloft in the Whirlwind” copyright© 2017 James Reasoner

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Table of Contents

  Orphans of Aries by Brad R. Torgersen

  Manifest Destiny by Keith West

  A Hamal in Hollywood by Martin L. Shoemaker

  Performance Bonus by Nathan E. Meyer

  Freemen’s Stand by Sarah A. Hoyt

  A Man They Didn’t Know by David Hardy

  Jupiter Convergence by Robert E. Vardeman

  Graveyard Orbit by Christopher M. Chupik

  The World Turned Upside Down by Lou Antonelli

  Aloft in the Whirlwind by James Reasoner

  Orphans of Aries

  Brad R. Torgersen

  “American,” said the alien voice, using heavily-accented English.

  A large human male, seated at the long countertop, did not respond at first. He merely sat hunched over his drink, staring down into the approximation of beer that filled his mug. His ocean blue flight coveralls were faded, with patches sewn into both knees and elbows. On one shoulder there was a frayed patch featuring red and white bars, with a small blue square filled by white dots. One the other shoulder was a cartoon depiction of a bighorn ram’s head: teeth bared, and curved horns aimed forward, as if about to strike.

  “American?” repeated the alien voice, this time with raised inflection at the end – questioning.

  The human male looked up from his drink and turned his head to the side.

  “Can I help you?” he said to the blob-like creature that approached on six spindly legs. Its clothing consisted of a thin-layer pressure garment tailored to match the alien’s sextuped gait. A metal ring – as if for a pressure helmet – circled the creature’s waist. The bare part of the torso-skull showed greenish skin and numerous tentacle-like appendages, some of which appeared to be tipped with what passed for eyes and ears.

  “Your insignia identifies you as being from the human nation of the United States,” the alien said. “Is this correct?”

  “It’s correct,” the human said, studying his interrogator.

  “And your individual designation, spelled across the upper right part of your torso. How is it pronounced?”

  “Esterlan,” the human replied, using short vowel sounds. “But most of my friends call me Charlie.”

  “You have many companions?” the alien asked, assuming a seat at the countertop and using the little electronic touch pad on the surface to request a beverage from the automated libations tender. Within moments, a panel at the end of the countertop slid open, a small tray with a bowl on it appeared, and was silently levitated down the length of the countertop, coming to rest in front of the alien. Who began to sample the concoction in the bowl with an extended, fleshy siphon.

  “Not out here,” the man said, waving his hand half-heartedly around his head. “Back home, I mean. On the planet I am from.”

  “It has not been an easy time for Americans,” the alien stated matter-of-factly – its vocal flute being a separate organ from the digestive straw that presently poked into the bowl. The human watched uneasily as the alien’s siphon undulated.

  “What would you know about Americans?” the human asked.

  “I know that you can never return to Earth.”

  “Because the Galactic Aggregation won’t let me!” the man half-shouted, drawing the attention of other patrons in the bar.

  The human remembered himself, and where he was, then further muttered, “Not that it’s your fault. We’d be fine, except for the fact that the Aggregation deals only with planetary global governments – which on Earth means the United Nations.”

  “Is your United States not part of your United Nations?”

  “Once,” the human said, then took a long drink from his mug and slammed it back onto the bar. “Before we got sick of the lies, the graft, the backstabbing, and all the petty dictators playing like they were our equals. So we threw them out. Stopped paying their bill. Demolished their building on the East River, in New York City. They’ve been butthurt ever since.”

  “Butthurt?” the alien said, testing the strangeness of the word.

  “It’s an old American phrase,” the man said. “Means the United Nations is still angry, and holds a grudge against Americans. And since the United Nations controls the contract for the interstellar gate the Galactic Aggregation put in lunar orbit, no Americans or American ships are allowed to return to Earth space – not without United Nations approval.”

  “An embargo,” the alien said.

  “Try blockade,” the man retorted, again a bit louder than he should have. Many different aliens around the establishment had raised eyes, ears, or sensor clusters to determine what the fuss with the big, primitive biped was all about.

  “Tell me, Charr-lee,” the alien said, its voice somewhat subdued, trying to strike a calmer tone, “why did you go to space in the first place? Knowing that your country would be at odds with the United Nations?”

  The human grunted and took another drink. It was a bit of a story.

  Charles Esterlan was tall, for an astronaut. Before leaving Earth, he’d played basketball for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas – a sports scholarship student, working on a mechanical engineering degree. He’d done okay, plying his trade as a rebounding and defensive specialist. But upon going undrafted, Charlie had taken his degree to the Navy. Who commissioned him, taught him to fly, and eventually put him through a post-grad program in large-scale space construction applications. Then they rolled him into the Aries Initiative.

  “So you went to space as a soldier?” the alien asked.

  “Sort of,” the human replied. “The Aries Initiative was the United States’ way of converting Defense Department hardware, personnel, and budget, for rapid restructuring and expansion of America’s anemic manned effort, left moribund under multiple Presidents, during the many years of International Space Station operation. This was back when many of us didn’t even know if all of you existed. Once the ‘hello’ signals came through, and it became clear that you did exist, there was just one thing for us to do.”

  “Humans were not already interplanetary by then?” exclaimed the alien. “This does not match w
hat I know about your Voyager and Pioneer spacecraft series.”

  “Probes only,” the man said. “No people aboard. Anyway, the Aries Initiative put Americans back on the moon – for keeps. Just in time for the arrival of the Galactic Aggregation’s robot gateships, which began construction of the interstellar gate proper. American lunar mines and smelters provided the bulk of the raw materials the gateships needed. But it was the United Nations which claimed all the glory, once the emissary ships from afar ultimately began to arrive. The United States was demoted to just another country, even though the Aries Initiative continued to increase the amount of personnel and permanent hardware we had on the lunar surface – as well as launching long-duration missions to Mars and the asteroid belt.”

  “I had not realized that humans are so recent to space. When the Aggregation’s ‘hello’ messages, as you call them, reached my home star, my civilization had already been in space for many hundreds of your Earth years. The infrastructure of our space effort was established and robust. It sounds to me like you are saying your infrastructure did not exist at all. Or, at least, was in its infancy?”

  The man wiped a meaty hand across his mouth and sighed.

  “My grandfather was born the year Alan Shepard made the first American suborbital flight. My father was born exactly two decades later, when the first reusable American space vehicle launched. By the time I was born, the space station was up and running, but the space station didn’t go anywhere. Many people questioned why we even needed a space station. Space just wasn’t interesting anymore. Not enough for the politicians to invest their careers in pushing for renewed, vigorous development.”

  “Until the Galactic Aggregation announced itself?”

  “Right. That changed everything. Including my Navy career. I spent some time on lunar flights, setting up the mining equipment. Then got myself posted to one of the asteroid boats going to Ceres – that’s one of our biggest asteroids, about like a small planet. But we got diverted for interstellar work instead, at the behest of the Aggregation, the first invitation for humans to go see other stars. Talk about exciting! Only, once we were on the other side, that’s when U.S. relations with the U.N. really began to sour.”

  “What happened? Specifically?”

  “Russia and China took it very personally, that they didn’t get to be first through the gate. The Middle East was mad too, but for different reasons. Same with the European Union, because we took some British and Canadian personnel with us, but nobody from the Continent.”

  “Exclusion would seem to naturally breed resentment, yes?”

  “Exclusion, hell, we pretty much paid for the damned gate. It wasn’t Russian or Chinese guys working twenty-four-hour lunar surface shifts to get the mining and smelting up to speed. We lost some people during that operation, too, you know. Good people. Anyway, instead of getting into a shooting war, the U.S. merely withdrew from U.N. participation. Cut the cord. I think the President assumed that the country with the most demonstrably developed space program would retain lead status with the Galactic Aggregation’s ambassadors.”

  “A flawed assumption,” the alien said.

  “That’s an understatement! None of us have been back to Earth in almost fifteen years. We’re scattered now. And getting older. We tried to keep our ships together, but they weren’t built for extended operation without refurbishment – human industrial refurbishment. Every Aggregation depot we tried to use practically laughed at the antiquated nature of our equipment – antique by their standards. And adapting ‘modern’ Aggregation technology to our spaceframes proved impossible, because we didn’t have any capital to spend, and we couldn’t convince any of you ‘mature’ species to sponsor us. So we split up. Hitching on with whichever Aggregation commercial ventures would have us. Doing menial work, mostly. Because we’re not ‘qualified’ to do anything else.”

  “You resent your fate.”

  “Of course I do! I didn’t intend to spend the rest of my life scrubbing some other species’ shit stains off some other species’ zero-gee toilets. But it is what it is. Look, again, this whole situation isn’t your fault specifically. I don’t even know which species you are, and I apologize for not knowing. That’s rude on my part. Though you certainly seem to know a bit about me and mine. Just what in God’s name do you want with an American, anyway?”

  “We can’t discuss the details here.”

  “Oh?”

  “Let’s just say that your days of lacking sponsorship may be at an end.”

  The man’s eyes got big.

  “Let’s go somewhere private, shall we?”

  ○●○

  The Galactic Aggregation depot’s commercial district was as huge and metropolitan as any. Tunneled into the hulk of an asteroid about the size of Vesta, the depot stretched away in all directions, with simulated gravity provided by the curious omni-gee motors which were ubiquitous throughout Aggregation space – technology which had, so far, eluded the understanding of Earth’s brightest forensic engineers.

  On Charlie’s first day in port, he’d rented out a space down in the warren of transient interspecies apartments – the ghetto – and immediately hit the town, looking for old friends and seeing if maybe he could make some new ones.

  Like anywhere else, opportunities for humans had been few and far between. Charlie had been forced to take what he could get.

  Ultimately, working on the depot’s sanitation crew wasn’t glamorous. But it gave Charlie an income, which kept him housed and fed.

  As one of the few humans taking up permanent depot residence, Charlie was also something of a curiosity, looked down upon by the non-American humans who occasionally passed through, and pitied by the many different aliens who knew Charlie’s fate.

  Now, for the first time, somebody seemed to have a genuine interest in Charlie’s piloting skills. Though he was struggling to get specifics out of the alien he’d met one hour prior.

  They were seated across from each other in Charlie’s miniscule living room, which also doubled as the bedroom when he lowered his bunk out of its stowage compartment on the ceiling.

  “I still don’t understand what this is about,” Charlie said. “Surely you’ve got plenty of people to do this work for you, from your own world?”

  “Charr-lee,” the alien – who passed himself under the phonetic name Slurrngt – said, “like your United Nations, the Galactic Aggregation has many competing interests – among rival species, and among rival ideological factions, which also stretch across species lines. Most of the member sapients have been members of the Aggregation for a long time. In some cases, tens of thousands of Earth years.”

  “Tens of thousands?” Charlie blurted, mouth half open.

  “Yes,” Slurrngt said. “Does that surprise you?”

  “I would think, with tens of thousands of years to develop... well, why aren’t these races ruling the whole of the galaxy by now? Every available world?”

  “If by ‘rule’ you mean dominate, you must remember that not every sapient is ‘wired’ for imposed hierarchy, the way other species may be. In fact, it’s precisely because some of the oldest members are not particularly competitive that the Aggregation has existed in a state of relative peace for so long. Young, aggressive sapients get the sharp end of old-sapient technological discipline, if you understand my meaning. Yet the old-sapient races seem to have little interest in anything like conquest. Very few of us have even met or seen any of the old-sapient peoples. They tend to be aloof. Except for when they’re forced into not being aloof. Do you understand? Which is why when conflicts arise among those of us who might best be deemed ‘middle children’ of the Aggregation, we tend to conduct these conflicts in such a way as to not attract undue old-sapient attention.”

  “Cold wars,” Charlie said.

  “I am unfamiliar with the reference,” Slurrngt admitted.

  “On my world, there was a period between the years 1945 and 1995 when my country was on particularly hos
tile terms with the Russians. Yet, no Russian nor American leader ever directly initiated open conflict. They were terrified of nuclear war. So, we fought through conventional proxies, among the smaller nations, which were often considered clients of one side or the other. In fact, the very reason America went into space to begin with, was because the Russians went into space first. With machinery and then men. America refused to be second. We eventually caught up with, and surpassed, the Russians. Going to the moon – our moon – the first time, was just to prove we could do it before the Russians did.”

  “I think, then, that you grasp the nature of the Aggregation,” Slurrngt said. “Many ‘cold wars’ being conducted at once, between various parties. Some of these disputes are very old. Some are new.”

  “There are a lot of philosophers back on Earth who’d be very, very upset to learn this.”

  “Why?” Slurrngt asked.

  “Because before the Aggregation became known to us, lots of humans had this extremely idealistic vision of what advanced alien life might be like. That you’d all have your shit together way better than we on Earth do.”

  “That reference is also unfamiliar to me. What does excrement—”

  “Forget it. The point is, humans idealized you. We wanted you to be more evolved than we are. Some of us even hoped you might rescue us from ourselves.”

  “Yes, the Aggregation has a long list of appeals from your U.N. regarding this very phenomenon. Humans are not alone. Almost every species, upon coming into contact with the Aggregation, immediately petitions for various remedies to difficult technological, economic, medical, and social problems. I am afraid the Aggregation is not now, nor has it ever been, a civilizational cure-all. The Aggregation is the Aggregation is the Aggregation. Some species willingly share knowledge. Most species will parse things out, but with a price. Virtually every new sapient world learns to craftily take what it needs, over time. There are few secrets in the Aggregation which are so secret, that they cannot be deciphered... with enough effort, over a long enough period. My race itself continues to grapple with many matters which the old-sapients no doubt consider pedestrian. Perhaps if all goes well regarding the work I need you, specifically, to do, my species can afford to be generous toward your species. More to the point, your nation.”