Starflight (Stealing the Sun Book 1)

by Ron Collins

  She ran her hand over his back.

  “Don’t sell yourself short, LC. If the kid is excited about shipboard systems, he needs someone who is just as excited about them to teach him.”

  “And I’m just the guy, eh?”

  “No one else on board gets tears in their eyes when they talk about garbage processing equipment.”

  Torrance chuckled.

  “It could be good for you. It would look good on the record when we get home. Besides,” she said, bringing a mocking lilt to her voice, “it beats spending all your time thinking about life on Eden.”

  Torrance froze. He hadn’t talked to her about the Eden files, because he didn’t know how she would feel about him ignoring a direct order and perhaps even doing a bit more than breaking a law. She was, as he said, all service. He didn’t think she would see this situation quite the same way he did, so at this point he figured it was better to let sleeping navigation officers lie.

  “How…?” He stopped. “Silvio.”

  “He’s never been one to keep a story close to the chest.”

  He frowned. “Shit. What did he say?”

  “It’s not a big deal, Torrance.”

  “What did he say?”

  She rolled over onto her back. “Just that the two of you were studying the data files together before the launch, and that at one point you thought they might be aliens calling out for pizza.”

  He dropped his head.

  “Who else has he told?”

  “Everyone, I guess. You know how these things go. But it’s really not a big deal. I don’t think anyone really thinks much of it. Pizza delivery is funny, you know? You could lighten up a bit more.”

  Torrance let the comment settle. It was going to be all right. Silvio had just told the pizza story. She didn’t actually know he had the data files.

  “Great. So now I’m a laughingstock.”

  “That’s okay, though.” She lay back on the bed. “I think it’s kind of cute.”

  He took a breath and tried to relax.

  She was right. He could lighten up a bit more, he supposed.

  His first concern, obviously, was that Silvio had actually caught him in the files themselves, but that wasn’t the case. As long as everyone was talking about just pizza he doubted Casey would tie the two together. So he could live with it. It worried him, though. He didn’t like investing whatever was left of his career into the idea that the ship’s government security officer would miss that detail, as semi-small as it might seem.

  “You want to know what I think?” he said, turning back to Marisa.

  Her face was outlined in the darkness. He propped his head with one hand and ran the other over the smooth skin of her belly.

  “I think you are about the most beautiful woman in the universe.”

  Marisa laughed out loud and tried to twist from his grasp.

  Torrance grabbed on, held tight, and kissed her.

  She giggled again and reached for him. “I suppose you say that to all the lieutenants?”

  “Only the ones where it’s actually true.”

  A moment later he knew he was in for another rough morning.

  Such are the penalties for being bold.

  CHAPTER 18

  UGIS Everguard

  Ship Local Date: June 18, 2204

  Ship Local Time: 1015

  As he strode through the nearly empty hallway toward Education Deck, Torrance enjoyed the fresh tingle of excitement that picked at his sense of calm. He was usually a little more pragmatic than aspirational, but today he enjoyed the idea that he was doing something special. The fact that it was all Marisa’s fault just made him that much happier.

  The flooring absorbed his footsteps in such a way as they disappeared into the background. The walls were two-toned, the lower half a faded blue, the upper half an off-white that made it less sterile than it might otherwise be. The upper panels were covered with images the students had put there as part of history class.

  The image of a wormhole pod falling into a star caught his eye.

  Sure, dropping the wormhole pods into the center of Alpha Centauri was an interesting legacy, but it was something anyone could have done if given the role.

  But changing a kid’s life was different.

  Work with a kid, and you change the kid, Marisa had said at breakfast earlier in the day. Change the kid, and from that day forward everything they do has a line back to you.

  He liked that.

  The idea of mentoring Kitchell had been tugging at him ever since Marisa suggested he take the kid under wing, and the more he thought about it the more attractive the idea had become. The idea made him feel bigger. Marisa had helped him see that helping Kitchell would give him a touch of that very odd sense of immortality that people talked about when they discussed their children, and that so many people seemed to depend on in some way or another.

  Who would have known he was one of them?

  He came to the classroom.

  The doorway was closed, but the low white noise of conversation radiated from it.

  He peered through the glass.

  The room was done in an open plan, full of teenaged kids who milled about in whatever haphazard situation they felt comfortable with. Some stood around a computer table, others lay on cushioned chairs, reading or marking on scribble plates. The team of instructors huddled together at the back of the room, talking about something in animated tones.

  Now that he was here, a burst of nervous tension pressed against the back of his neck.

  “Get your act together,” he muttered. “Kitchell’s just a kid.”

  He stood taller and settled himself down.

  He could talk to kids. Hell, he’d just finished handing Kitchell a punishment. But this was different, and he knew it. As soon as Torrance stepped into this room, he was making a personal commitment about something outside his ability to completely control.

  He pressed the door mechanism and stepped into the room.

  All activity continued as if he wasn’t there.

  “Lieutenant Commander,” one of the instructors said as he picked his way through the students. “How excellent to see you here. What can we do for you?”

  “Can I speak to Thomas Kitchell?”

  The room grew palpably quiet.

  “He’s over there,” the instructor said.

  The young man pushed back from a lab table.

  Torrance walked through the room, aware of how his green and blue Systems Command jacket, even worn in the informal unsealed fashion, set him apart him from these kids who parted before him like water before Moses. Their movement gave him a sense of control as he drew close to Kitchell.

  A circuit card with a tangled mass of wires and components sat on the gray table in front of the young man. An alkaline battery sat beside the assembly, but wasn’t connected.

  Kitchell seemed to have grown an inch in the few days since Torrance last saw him. A blotch of acne grew high up on his cheek.

  “Old-school electrical assembly,” Torrance said with a smile. “I love the basics.”

  “I didn’t do nothing,” Kitchell said, squinting as he looked up from his chair.

  “I didn’t say you had.”

  “What do you want, then?”

  Torrance peered at the mess of wires on the table.

  “What are you working on there? Ah—an oscillating circuit. Depending on what you’re planning to time, you would be better served to use a purified ceramic crystal.”

  The kid held his tongue.

  Torrance sat beside Kitchell and pushed wiring around on the circuit board. The kid’s loops were too big, not a problem in a school lab, but potentially faulty in critical ship systems where sudden electromagnetic shifts can play havoc with sensitive electronic systems.

  “You’re pretty good with these things,” Torrance said. “And I know you’ve got a lot of, uh, energy for playing with equipment.”

  Kitchell’s blue-green eyes narrowed.


  “How would you like to work on shipboard systems?”

  “What?”

  “You would work directly for me—mostly grunt work at first, replacing black boxes and running diagnostics, but as you get more familiar with the layout of the ship, I could see you getting deeper into testing and troubleshooting. If you do your job well you could get into some pretty slick stuff.”

  “What’s your angle?”

  “No angle at all.”

  “I don’t need no grunt work.”

  “Don’t run down grunt work. It’s how you learn the guts of a system.” Torrance sat back in his chair and picked at his jacket arm, then took the kid in. “That’s what you’re about, isn’t it? Understanding the way things work?”

  “Damn right.”

  “A good sensor. A software routine that runs faster than another one. They’re gorgeous, aren’t they?”

  “They’re truth,” Kitchell said, while the widening of his eyes exposed the rabid sense of youth that bubbled in his gaze.

  Torrance smiled. “I’ve got no angle here, Mr. Kitchell. If you’re interested, I’ll help you work on systems as you’re ready for them. If you’re not interested, then I’ll go away and mind my own business.”

  Kitchell peered at him.

  “There is one catch.”

  The kid got an “I told you so” expression.

  “I find you messing with restricted systems again without my authorization, you’re gone. No warning, no appeals, no nothing.”

  Kitchell pushed his bangs off his face and looked at his oscillator circuit. “You’ll let me work on real systems?”

  “That’s what I’m offering.”

  “That’s edge,” he said.

  “Edge?”

  “You know. Good. Cool. Phreak. Whatever.”

  “So you’ll do it?”

  “When can I start?”

  “I need some approvals to make everything legit, but how about you show up at my office after your classes today and we’ll talk about what gets you excited.”

  “That’s a deal.” The kid held out his bony hand.

  Torrance shook it, then stood, finally noticing that every face in the room had been watching them.

  “Have a good day,” he said to them all, then stepped toward the door.

  The young man next to Kitchell elbowed him as Torrance left. “That’s edge …”

  “So goddamned edge it’s bleeding,” Kitchell replied quietly.

  The door shut behind Torrance.

  He grinned to himself.

  The kids were right. That was pretty edge.

  Mid Flight

  .

  CHAPTER 19

  UGIS Everguard

  Ship Local Date: June 18, 2204

  Ship Local Time: 1815

  Marisa had a team social to attend that night, so after the kid left his office, Torrance took advantage of the quiet of late-shift to pull the data files. It was a glorious way to cap off the day, a full evening set aside to focus on the files from the safety of his office. It was still dangerous, of course. He would have to be careful. But he knew how to be careful, and the idea of being alone in the Command gave him what may have been the tiniest bit of a bloated sense of control and oversight, which he could admit to himself felt good.

  He liked when things were in control.

  And he liked working in binges, focusing in longer spans that brought on that hazy zone where it was like he was swimming in data.

  He picked at the file, mapping the evening’s analytical steps the way an archaeologist might make a grid on an open dig site. It was a game for him, his own little puzzle. How quickly could he prepare the parsing routines? How much sophistication could he put into the reporting tools he was developing? How much of the pattern recognition routine could he run in private channels in the background?

  He accessed the central signal processing libraries with his ghost admin account, and picked out some custom analyzers he had found in the private spaces of three sharp engineers—Silvio Nivead expressly being one of them—carefully removing every trace of his actions. He ran the waveform from the Eden disturbance through the analyzers, hoping he could find a stable shape that would give him something he could then cut even further. He filtered frequencies. He ran interference patterns, did fractal transformations, and put them through higher ordered filters.

  When each day’s segment was complete, he recorded the findings—or lack thereof.

  There were no matches in the linguistic database.

  No stability to the waveform.

  Nada. Squat. Bupkis.

  And that added up to say he was probably wrong about life on Eden. Or, more likely, he just didn’t have the mathematics background to figure it out on his own.

  He didn’t like either of those ideas.

  Suddenly the ship clock somehow said it was 2220 hours. The realization made him hungry.

  Torrance put his toys away, cleaning his pathway as he did so. No mistakes, he thought. He had to be meticulous. No paths to give him away.

  “Abke,” he said when he was done. “Patch me through to Marisa Harthing.”

  “Hey,” her voice came through his speaker. “What’s up?”

  “I know you’re probably getting ready for bed, but I wondered if you wanted to join me for a midnight snack at the observation mess.”

  “What?” she replied in false monotone. “And just watch the stars together?”

  “I can only think of one other thing that’s better,” he replied.

  Even though he couldn’t see her, he could feel her smile. He had never felt this comfortable with someone before.

  “Sounds delish.”

  “Ten minutes?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  He shut the link and left the office.

  Yes, life was good.

  Very good.

  CHAPTER 20

  UGIS Everguard

  Ship Local Date: January 13, 2205

  Ship Local Time: 0722

  Torrance stood in Systems Command, taking in the main status panel and feeling the weight of everyday work pressing in on him. It was going to be a busy day. On top of all the routine stuff, C Deck was reporting an issue with their hydraulic lifter, and the control panel showed that the laundry bot hadn’t been updated as planned. He had to follow up with Yarrow about that. Or maybe give it to Kitchell.

  The boy was good—a hell of a lot better than Torrance thought he would be. He was energetic, and active.

  And he was good on the deck, too. The team liked having someone around who could ask the obvious dumb question that often turned out to not be so dumb after all. Torrance had to face the fact that the kid’s brash act was really just that—a defense mechanism made necessary because he was quicker than the kids around him, and quicker than most of the adults around him, too.

  His standard response to any challenge was “Hey, take a chance, right?”

  Sure, there were times Torrance would prefer the kid was a little less daring. The day Kitchell screwed up and had to reset the entire power feed for the Rearward janitorial bots would be legend among Systems Command for the rest of the trip, but Torrance had come to realize that half the time he wasn’t taking a chance at all—that half the time, Thomas Kitchell knew what the answer was, and that he was just buffering the situation for the idiots around him who didn’t understand the system.

  Of course, the other 50 percent he was actually taking a chance.

  Either way, the fact was that Torrance liked working with Thomas Kitchell, and he figured the kid could probably handle this one as it was. Maybe it would be a good one to let him run solo on.

  But none of that was very interesting right now.

  His brain was loaded with a question.

  An idea.

  A flame of thought about his latest run through the Eden files had been rattling though his brain all morning, screwing with his thoughts so hard that Marisa had tossed a fit at him for not listening as
she ran through her day’s calendar. It had grabbed hold of his mind so firmly that he couldn’t concentrate on anything else long enough to be productive.

  The game was afoot, as it were.

  He was wondering if he could split the signal and triangulate multiple positions—that perhaps the signal wasn’t actually a single entity, but had been created from different sources, two or three or even more, and that those sources had somehow interfered with each other.

  He wanted to know if his theory was possible, but the start of the day was closing in on him.

  “Are you okay?”

  It was Yarrow. She was bright-faced and ready for the day. Like always.

  “Yes, thank you,” Torrance replied. “If you see Kitchell, tell him to come to my post, will you?”

  “He’ll be a little later, I think. He has a test at 0800.”

  “That’s fine,” Torrance replied, thinking that it would give him time alone.

  He went to his office and commanded the glass panel door to close behind him. “Projector on,” he said. “View to back.” He walked around his desk, and his gaze made a last pass at the nearly empty command floor. He had ten, maybe twenty minutes.

  It wouldn’t take him long.

  He had to know.

  “Abke,” he said. “Please access my personal space.”

  “Accessed.”

  He cut a stream from the first flare and ran a quick Fourier transformation, then pushed it through a matcher, looking through the map for multiple mathematical patterns. He parsed frequencies and created a multidimensional model based on what they knew of the planet’s geography in the area—which was a fascinating study on its own, an area dominated by a single curved ridge of mountainous rock. Then he set the system to run on a pattern that moved two, then three hypothetical transmitters around on the ground, trying to find combinations that might make the signature.

  Graph theory on amplifiers, he thought.

  Nothing.

  He picked another waveform at random.

  Still nothing.

  Maybe he would try a broader spread between the transmitters.