To Touch the Stars (Founding of the Federation Book 2)

by Chris Hechtl

  “Huh,” Jack grunted, rubbing his chin. “And the other megacorps?”

  “Pavilion and Star Reach are stumbling along. I don't have access to any Intel sources security may have gotten in, so I can only go off what we've gotten publicly. I know they haven't built as many test probes we've done. I also know they are following along with what we're doing. I'm pretty sure Pavilion is playing dirty pool. According to the journals they've been accused of not only industrial espionage on Star Reach and others, but they've been luring or even blackmailing employees away from Star Reach.”

  “That part is normal. Companies have been doing crap like that for centuries,” Jack said, shaking his head. “It's one of the reasons we filter for loyalty and do periodic security reviews.”

  “And why we've got the perks and benefit packages we've got,” Trey said smoothly. “And before you ask, no, we haven't lost anyone. At least not that I know of.”

  “That too,” Jack said, digesting what Trey said. He made a note to have security do a follow-up on everyone who'd been in the design program and where they were now. Anyone who left in the past was out of date, but they could certainly give the competition a leg up. “So those three are the top runners? What about everyone else?”

  Trey shook his head. “Not even in the running really. Oh a few may band together, but those other four are the only ones up to the hardware stage, and as you know, Pavilion and the Chinese are the only ones who have actually launched a successful hyperdrive probe. Star Reach is trying, but they haven't succeeded in that critical step yet.”

  “I wonder if we should give them some pointers,” Jack mused.

  Trey goggled at him. “Are you serious?” He demanded.

  Jack nodded slowly as he turned away. “I don't want us to be the only player on the field. Others will resent us, and we'll be a target. Hell, we're already a target. But if we have competition it'll drive the prices down.”

  “And here I thought you really were a money grubbing capitalist, gleefully rubbing his hands together because he could set his own price,” Trey replied with a snort.

  “Hardly,” Jack retorted with an amused snort of his own. He eyed Trey and then shrugged. “You know how I operate. Getting a profit is important. The bottom line is always there, or we wouldn't be able to do what we do. But I'm about getting people up and out.”

  “Well, I suppose, if you are interested we could put something up on the public affairs pages. A breakdown of a ship design, say one of the older designs. Maybe a cut away or something. It'll be of interest to the media and public too.”

  Jack smiled. “I can see some people drooling over it. Even if it's just the dreamers and schemers,” he said. “I'll run it past the board,” he said. “Even just a basic write up would probably be amusing.”

  “I think it's funny. On the one hand, we're trying to stop their spies, but on the other, we don't want to kill their copying completely. Anyone else tell you that's a bit … off, boss?” Trey finished lamely.

  Jack's smile turned into a grin. “Only every damn day of the week. Sure. The sincerest form of flattery is an imitator. But we're going to make certain we've got a patent lock on this tech. I know they’ve got lobbyists lined up to fight it, but we've got our own.” His grin turned to a grimace.

  “Some of the drive tech is public domain,” Trey said, nodding in understanding. “The theories are in the papers and scientific journals,” he warned. “I'm not sure how a patent will fly.”

  “I know,” Jack said, with an impatient wave of his hand. “The US has blocked patents they thought were detrimental to progress. And hell, just giving them the plans as part of the patent gives the basic design away to anyone who wants to copy it. They can always pay fines if we try to bring them to court, which we will.”

  “Again boss, the left hand and the right hand …” Trey shook his head.

  “I'm trying to get them to come to us for a partnership or to buy a license for the tech,” Jack said, rubbing his chin. He scrubbed his face with his hands then ran a frustrated hand through his hair. “We'll see. Right now, it's all up in the air … or in this case in the hands of your people. If it doesn't fly, it's a moot point anyway.”

  Trey nodded wryly. “We'll get it done, sir.”

  “See that you do.”

  -*-*-^-*-*-

  Jack rocked in his chair after Trey had left. He wasn't sure about the competition, and he definitely didn't like the military trying to get their hooks into space and his company. He had military contacts and contracts. They even had some ties to Aurelia's Neos, more than she was comfortable with, but … he sighed mentally and shook his head. At least they had no idea just how intelligent the Neos were. He'd been very careful about that. Also there was no full record of the Neos out there, at least as far as they knew. Undoubtedly, someone somewhere knew something, but without confirmation … He shook his head and reminded himself again to make certain only the older generation of Neodogs were exported to both law enforcement and the military.

  He liked the lucrative pay his company earned for moving military payloads to orbit or the pay they got when they sold a new powered exosuit design or AI build. But the idea of the military having a presence in space was one step towards the UN declaring they had jurisdiction over space and backed it with force. It gave the threat teeth, something he wasn't happy about. He didn't like the idea of storm troopers shooting up his hard built habitats or putting a boot on his neck.

  Of course, there were ways to deal with that. Putting their own back doors into the hardware for instance. Buying their own senators and such too, but he always hated that idea. He shook his head.

  Pavilion wouldn't hesitate; they'd jump all over the project. Star Reach wouldn't take it, of that he was sure. Pavilion was a bit of a clone of Lagroose Industries; they had actually gotten their start as a series of smaller companies that had merged to compete with Lagroose. Sure they didn't have the same diversity, but they were into genetic engineering. They were into superconductors, force emitters, fusion tech, and space. But they had the ethics of a rat.

  Star Reach on the other hand was too idealistic. They had been started by a kickstarter program nearly a century ago. At the time no one had thought they'd work, but they had shocked the world by actually coming through with a few space projects. They had a few good people, but they were dreamers. They did a good job spinning the product, but sometimes fell apart in the execution. He shook his head.

  The Chinese … he frowned. The company was most likely owned through a bunch of cut outs by the government or by someone in the government or their backers—A conglomerate. He didn't trust them at all, he thought with a black scowl. And he knew they'd definitely turn whatever tech they could produce to military means … and if possible sell it to the highest bidder. They'd already spun off tech they'd stolen from Pavilion, Star Reach, and Lagroose, Jack thought with a wince.

  The board was after him to do something to offset the massive costs of the ship building now that they were getting into the actual hardware production. He'd socked money and infrastructure away for this phase of the project for years, but even he had been a bit put out over the initial costs. He made a note to get someone to go through the tech and look for purely civilian applications that they could spin off. There had to be something. Life support improvements…he sighed.

  Part of the spiraling costs of the project had been the long design time. And since they were still ironing out the bugs with the hyperdrive, Trey hadn't allowed grass to grow under the other subsystems; he'd systematically brought them up to speed with the latest tech since they had the time.

  They still didn't have a final design for the habitats he noted. Part of that was Aurelia's bailiwick. She was reluctant to let the dolphins choose for themselves. They were her babies. He could understand the protective streak, but they'd both agreed that the Neos needed to make choices as adults. He’d have to look into that if they didn't make progress there, he thought. Reminding Aurelia wou
ld be tricky, he thought, grimacing. She was in the throes of pregnancy, and he didn't want a hormonal induced temper tantrum. And her sullen ones could last days … he shuddered, trying to think of what to do. … Or … he could do an end run around her with that woman assistant that was on the design board … what was her name … Abrams. He nodded. He made a note to have a chat with her or drop an e-mail asking her if she'd heard anything from the dolphins.

  Aurelia wouldn't appreciate it; but she'd get over it, he thought. He was lucky to have her he reminded himself with a fond smile. She was an incredible woman. His mother had been after him to settle down for decades, but he hadn't realized what a prize Aurelia was. Not at first, not until Aurelia had used a big enough clue stick to get it through his thick head that she was interested in him. He smiled wryly. What a whirlwind courtship that had been! His mother had brought on Aurelia as her understudy and eventual successor to the initial advanced Neodog project. When his mother's advanced age and problems with her health caught up with her, she'd turned a lot of the project over to Aurelia's capable hands.

  The Neodog project had been a basic thing for the military and law enforcement, a sort of give back for Jack's father and his partners, Chauncy, Duke, and Max. Improving the dogs, filtering for genetic problems that affected their health … and eventually improving their minds to make them more effective partners had been what his mother had been after. Jack remembered it all well; he'd heartily supported it. He rocked for a bit then pulled up an image of his dad and Max.

  Two of his other family members had also been K-9 partners, his Aunt Belle and Uncle Owen. Dad had lost Chauncy early on; he'd died from a genetic defect. Duke had died in the line of duty, which had been a bitter pill for six-year-old Jack to swallow, Duke had been like the family pet. Max had been with his dad for four and a half long years before he and his father had died in the line of duty. Mom had told him his dad had thought long and hard about getting another partner but had never regretted getting Max. The two had been like one mind and had racked up a lot of collars and awards before they'd been cut down.

  Mom had told him about his dad's wish, one developed not just as a partner, but for his love of old science fiction movies. He'd watched an ancient series of movies, K-9 as a kid, but he'd also found another, K-9000 that had inspired his wish and his mother's raw appeal to her son. Jack had gone along with it, not just to humor his mother or grant his father's last wish, but to make certain what had happened to his dad wouldn't happen to another K-9 team.

  His mom had relished the opportunity and had made great strides. But when she'd taken on Aurelia the project sort of blossomed. The bills had piled up rather quickly, beyond the budget Jack had set for them. When he'd gone down to confront his mother, Aurelia had stepped in and put him in his place. He'd been amazed by her intellect and charm. Of course, he had no intention of doing anything about it … he hadn't been comfortable about hitting on a subordinate, let alone one nineteen years younger than him … even if his mother did everything but draw him a map and lock them in a room together.

  He smiled in amusement. Aurelia had studied the situation and confronted him. She hadn't quite seduced him … at least, not at first, but she had made it clear she'd set her sights on him and wouldn't take no for an answer. She'd intimidated him; he freely admitted it. A woman who knew what she wanted and wasn't afraid to go after it … he shook his head. She'd gotten it too, and he certainly had no regrets. They'd made for a formidable team. With his and his mother's backing she'd expanded on the Neo program to do things he'd barely dreamed about. She'd also saved his uncle with the cybernetics she'd created …

  “Sir, you are going to be late for your eleven o'clock meeting about building new stations with artificial gravity if you don't get moving,” his computer personal assistant reminded him from his tablet.

  “Gotcha,” he said, breaking out of the woolgathering. He got up, stretched, straightened up, then checked for any food on his front. He gathered the tablet up and trotted for the door.

  Chapter 6

  Kathy reminisced about genetic engineering history as she waited on the latest compiled simulator to be finished. It bothered her that they had hooked up the pain receptors of the dolphins to the simulation to train them to avoid hitting objects in hyper. That was a little bit more stick than she liked. It was effective though; before, they just tried to swim through a virtual object thinking it was a different form of water or basic turbulence. Now they got the point to avoid them.

  There was really nothing to do. Well, she could catch up on paperwork or bug someone else, but no, she'd wool gather, she thought as she sat at her desk and took a sip of water. She made a mental note to go to the dolphin habitat in twenty minutes to check on things, then relaxed.

  Cloning, despite being illegal, came about on Earth in the second decade, first as cloned organs, then limbs and people. Scientists had taken cloning people back as early as 2003, but they'd held off for years until someone waved enough cash under someone's nose to let greed cloud over their common sense.

  That kicked off virulent hatred and fear that led to people who through their ignorance were xenophobic hunted down and destroyed labs and killed clones and any scientists they could find associated with the projects. The other genetic engineering companies saw the writing on the wall and either shut down or moved into orbit, away from the mobs. They'd learned from the abortion clinics, they didn't want protestors on their front door with bricks, Molotov cocktails, bombs, or sniper rifles. It was a lot harder for protestors to get to orbit in any number.

  It was an open secret how the rich still used genetic tests to look for disease, but it was kept quiet. Now genetic engineers and their families were in orbit and on Mars. They were especially welcome on Mars where genetic engineered crops and animals were the norm. They'd even bio-engineered moss, bacteria, and low level plants to live and thrive outside the greenhouses twenty, no, thirty-four years ago, she corrected herself.

  Many of the genetic engineers had been ready to move to Mars…or even to wait on Venus until rich clients lured them into remaining around Earth. The stations at the Lagraine points had several gene clinics. Now, if you needed a replacement organ or other problem resolved, you either went to donor on the ground or went to orbit … or the black market.

  Efforts to aid wounded military veterans during the decades of the terrorism wars had led to a lot of regeneration therapies in 2010 and beyond. Surgical techniques had been perfected to graft tissue replacements and tie them into existing blood and nervous systems. But they were still bound by law not to grow replacement limbs. That meant prosthetics became wide placed for many years just like it did during and after World War I.

  Even though they could grow just the body part in a lab, the UN still refused to revisit the century and a half old A/59/516/Add.1 decision and take another vote on it. A complete ban on human cloning was absurd. She knew of over two dozen cases where it had been violated since the nasty riots happened seventy years ago. Each time it had proven in the end to be a disaster, the clone had aged at a rapid rate or had been sick from one illness or another. Scientists still had problems resetting the body's biological clock properly it seemed.

  But that wasn't the only problem, the ban on human cloning meant organs couldn't be cloned on Earth, but they wanted people to abandon space and come home. The entire thing was short sighted stupidity in her opinion. It was in many ways class warfare though she was fairly certain Jack and Aurelia hadn't intended it to turn out like that. Most of the masses on the ground couldn't afford to come to orbit to get a cloned replacement organ when they were sick, which meant only the rich could do it. She'd heard some had gotten into experiments on anti-aging techniques. She wasn't sure what to make of that.

  In a way, the continued ban on cloning meant humanity was performing its own form of population control. Still as a doctor she saw it was wrong, she thought. There was a backlash publicly, an undercurrent that things needed to be changed, but
no one was willing to do anything about it. And if someone tried the fanatics came out of the woodwork all over again. No supporter of cloned organs wanted to put up with that.

  Many thought that viral gene therapy was terrifying or the future. It had matured, but at a cost. In order for a genetically modified virus to enter the body and alter cells in the body to grow cells according to a program, they still had to find ways around the host body's immune system, which was a problem. Throw in the people who still shuddered at the idea and many scientists and doctors on the ground had given up on the therapy and its possible potential all together.

  She really couldn't blame the doctors who had worked on those projects though. It wasn't the hysterics that bothered her so much as the body's reaction long term to the cells. It seemed good in theory, growing new neuron cells to act as an organic pacemaker for instance. But the host body tended to treat the cells as foreign bodies, attacking them, which caused all sorts of issues long term. She shook her head. No, the best form of genetic engineering remained at the beginning, before the fetus was formed.

  Viral medicine was a form of nanotech that had been around for over 120 years but was still terrifying to the masses. Even when scientists figured out how to modify a virus to attack not only cancer cells but also fat cells and the HIV virus, people were still terrified. There was something … primal about a virus, something you couldn't fight. Like a shark, she thought with a shiver. See, she reminded herself, even she could fall back on subconscious fear given the right stimulus, no matter what she knew.

  She rocked a bit, staring off into space as she rubbed the tip of her pert nose. Still, using a virus to fight another virus may have been fighting fire with fire … it had worked after all, but some still considered it heretical. She thought of such people as hypocrites. What was wrong with using the virus's own attack against itself? She shook her head in wonder of the stupidity of the cranks and willfully ignorant.