Star Rebels: Stories of Space Exploration, Alien Races, and Adventure

by Audrey Faye

  I knew.

  I understood.

  I was the universe and I knew how it worked. I knew how old it was and how stars were born and how they died. I knew what happened at the end of time.

  And then it was gone.

  I was back in the bedroom, and someone was trying to break down our door.

  Thud. The walls shuddered.

  Paul still muttered, unresponsive. His words scrolled over the screen. The data had stopped flowing from my computer. The backup had gone straight past him. I sat there, breathing hard, becoming dimly aware of another blaring alarm in the corridor. A general alarm this time.

  If this went on Habitat Operations would call for an evacuation. When the air composition systems went down, there was always a risk methane would build up in sections of the dome, and methane did interesting things when someone flipped a light switch.

  Thud. The door rattled.

  I looked around frantically. Was there anything I could use as a weapon?

  In the corridor, a mechanical voice started calling, Evacuate, evacuate, evacuate.

  Thud.

  “Paul! Damn it, listen to me! We need to get out.”

  The door opened with a crash, and that scarecrow Thomas Newton ran into the room.

  “Stop it, damn you, woman!”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Getting your arse out of here. Come.” He had to shout over the alarm.

  I couldn’t argue with that. I ripped the sensors from Paul’s head—clumps of hair came out. I flung the computer aside—

  “Hey, woman, what are you doing?”

  “Getting the fuck out of here, what else—”

  “Look at this!” He gestured wildly at the screen.

  “What about it?”

  “This is the most brilliant astrophysical work ever written. This will win many prizes.”

  He picked up the computer and put it in his bag, where Aphrodite had told me he’d put the disk. “Come.”

  We each took one of Paul’s arms and dragged him up. In the corridor, a stream of people was heading in the direction of the vehicle bay. I pulled Paul in the same direction, but Thomas Newton went in the other direction.

  “Hey, where are we going? The trucks are that way—”

  “No trucks. I’m taking him with me before you kill him. Copying a backup. Honestly, only a construct agent can think something as stupid as that.”

  “It didn’t even work.”

  “No, thank goodness. All his brilliance would have been gone.”

  “Thomas Newton,” I said, and I wondered if his last name was a coincidence, and I remembered that single moment of clarity, in which I understood everything, and in which I had seen the faces of people who had shaped our understanding of the universe, in which I had been one of them, looking through Paul’s mind. Those were the Luminati, the most brilliant minds ever.

  “You are one of the Luminati. Those who know everything.”

  A look of alarm flitted over his face. “It showed you that, did it?”

  “Those balls form some sort of interstellar network powered by knowledge. It’s stored in the unusual matrix of the glass molecules and passed to those who touch the spheres or try to scan them.”

  He nodded, slowly. Was he impressed? “An inorganic life form. Humans are creatures of flesh and blood. Our currency is food and air. This inanimate intelligence we are dealing with survives on knowledge. The Luminati are the ones blessed with the infection. It has inspired the minds of many of the Earth’s greatest thinkers.”

  “People found balls like these on Earth?” I knew it to be true. I had seen the images.

  “The last one was found many years ago.”

  “Grace Nkwame.” She’d been a peasant’s daughter somewhere in Africa. “But the balls ran out, and people from the sect died. Though obviously you must have cloned some—judging by your name.”

  “Yes, but the clones are not as effective. We needed to expand our search to find other seeds.”

  “Then how come the museum has some?”

  “We’ve made sure they only found the cloudy ones—they’re spent.”

  Spent, on what sort of creatures—I couldn’t help but think—and how long ago.

  “So what about the one Paul found?”

  “We needed to have fresh blood. I’m here to pick him up and make sure his departure doesn’t leave a trail that will lead to our discovery.”

  Then he produced the gun.

  But you see, you can’t kill a construct. Sure, you can kill the body that houses the mind, but you cannot kill the mind itself, because there is always a backup. It’s not as if he didn’t try, but Aphrodite, bless her soul, made a habit of storing everything on Mars Base, where privacy laws make access to mindbase copies by third parties near-impossible, even, it seemed, if you were one of the Luminati.

  The backup will continue to live inside machines, and hear the stories of the brilliant scientist Paul Ormerod, who wins awards but whose face looks deeply unhappy in the news reports. And the mind will eventually be reunited with a body and that is when the Luminati will get a big surprise.

  Because I gave up my life for Paul, and he gave up his life for me, and I will continue to fight for us as long as his aura glows with purple luminescence.

  ~END

  Luminescence is set in the ISF-Allion world. Shifting Reality, the next in series is available now. If you like to know more about Patty, you can find her website at pattyjansen.com or subscribe to her newsletter and get four free books.

  Glome

  A Great Symmetry Story

  James R. Wells

  Humanity’s first interstellar colony ship has arrived at its destination, only to find an inhospitable death trap of a planet. Crew member Amanda Bowen wishes that was the biggest problem she faced.

  I

  Glome

  Glome: A naturally occurring hypersphere in space. Scientists theorize that glomes may allow travel to other star systems. As of the year 2118, twenty glomes have been discovered in the vicinity of Earth and other planets in the solar system.

  For the third time Amanda Bowen attempted to figure out where in the galaxy they were. The same program, running the same algorithms on the same hardware with the same inputs, returned the same non-answer. Unknown.

  The arrangement of stars as viewed by their ship did not resolve to any position within hundreds of light years from Earth. They could be anywhere.

  Amanda began to set up the next level of analysis. A detailed spectroscopic scan of several thousand stars, seeking an exact genetic match rather than just positional.

  She was supposed to use the link, which should be second nature by now. The system would seamlessly assemble each instruction from her thoughts, then execute the program on her mental command. It was far faster than typing, in theory.

  Amanda hated everything about it. During training she had tried and tried to get past the symptoms, but every time was still an ordeal. Evading the link as much as possible, she had become an excellent typist – a skill now fading among her shipmates.

  The analysis was set up, and she let it fly with a command from her keyboard. Execution would take several minutes, not because of computing time, which was trivial, but because actual instruments would have to scan each star.

  She looked up from the streams of detailed readings at her console to take in the scene on the main screen of the bridge. A sharp blue eye glared at them. The image of the star was damped on the display and didn’t show its full brightness, but the processors could not filter out the crackling energy of the object.

  The captain’s voice came from behind her. “Let’s have the best visual on the planet.”

  Even with the new view there was no escaping the electric blue. Now it bathed a world of swirling clouds. Displays on either side of the image told the tale. Temperature range sixty to one hundred fifteen Celsius – even the coldest places on this planet were hotter than the most scorching desert b
ack on Earth. Typical wind velocity three hundred kilometers per hour. Atmosphere, carbon dioxide laced with nitric acid vapor.

  The planet on the screen was the leading candidate for humanity’s first interstellar colony.

  Protocol demanded no unneeded chatter during mission critical periods, and this was such a time. But even with the immaculately trained crew, there was no mistaking an intangible change in the soundscape. Perhaps it wasn’t possible for the crew to breathe while in the presence of that image without an underlying sense of despair escaping.

  Amanda saw nothing but beauty. An entire new planet to observe and learn about. A planet that had never been seen by human eyes or measured by human instruments. Years, or perhaps a lifetime, of learning. It was somewhat like Venus, but even the quick initial scans showed differences.

  She couldn’t wait to dig in to exploring every facet of the new planet, and seeing what other mysteries were in the star system. Her childhood dreams, realized. She just needed to get the location problem out of the way.

  Captain Hunt spoke from her station, directly behind Amanda. “How’s the assessment going? Any viable settlement scenarios?”

  “We’re going to need a closer look,” Mayor Blum replied. “At this point it looks like our best bet may be at one of the poles. I recommend a polar orbit, as low as we can take her.”

  Mayor Blum represented the one hundred forty colonists. While Captain Hunt was in command of all operations on board the Rubicon, a core purpose of the voyage was to locate a suitable planet and settle it, so Blum’s opinion carried weight, if he chose to express it.

  The console in front of Amanda was still running the new scan. She stole a moment to close her eyes and take a slow, controlled breath. She felt herself deliberately moving the large muscle of her diaphragm up into her lungs, pushing the air out, then retreating and reversing the flow. It didn’t help settle her.

  She was trying to process the fact that she and the rest of the crew were still alive. Their trip through the glome had not shredded the Rubicon into its component subatomic particles as some theoreticians had predicted. By entering into the Omega Entry of a glome just a few million kilometers from Earth, they had traveled across some unknown number of light years in a fraction of a second.

  Most importantly, Earth was long gone. No matter what they found here, she would be free of Earth.

  “Bowen! Report!” The captain’s command crashed through.

  Amanda startled, only managing not to fall out of her chair due to the safety straps. “Unknown, captain,” she stammered. “We can’t get a fix. I’m running a spectroscopic scan now. If we can positively identify a few stars, we’ll have our position.”

  “When will you have it?” The captain was always to the point.

  “Two more minutes,” Amanda answered. “Provided we get matches in the first pass.”

  “Why wouldn’t we?”

  Amanda rotated her seat to face the captain, a knee scraping against the wall. She reached for the button to adjust the seat back, but she had already done that, and it was as far away from the work surface as it could move. Everything about the Rubicon was designed to pack as much useful material, and as many people, into a limited space as possible.

  “It depends how far we went,” she said. “The farther we have traveled, the longer it will take to positively identify stars we can see from home. We may need to try matching gross structures of the galaxy – assuming we’re still in the same one.”

  Captain Hunt was an imposing presence. Decades in the military had sculpted her face into a permanent expression of intense, no-nonsense concentration. The captain always asked short focused questions, pondered for about two seconds, then issued the next order. She knew everything there was to know about the Rubicon and its crew.

  It was the first time Amanda had ever seen the captain appear taken aback. But it was just for a moment, which passed quickly. “Tell me when you have an answer,” and with that Hunt pivoted to the next topic. “Mister Deijia, your findings on our point of emergence.”

  Deijia was at the station to Amanda’s left. She turned to hear him speak. “Nothing,” he replied simply.

  “You’re still evaluating?”

  “No, Captain. The findings are complete. There’s nothing there. We arrived at a spot in empty space. No hint of a glome at our point of emergence, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Yes, that was the real question. Thank you. Looks like we’re here to stay.”

  Many of the colonists and crew members had clung to the belief that they would emerge from a glome, a twin of the one they had entered from space near Earth. It’s the kind of symmetry that defines much of the universe, and which had dominated theories about glome transit. A comforting concept, assuring everyone there would be a way to return to known space. That a ship could simply reverse course and go back to the place from which it had started.

  But no.

  Now it was clear why no ships had ever returned to Earth from a trip into a glome, nor even any hint of a message received back. Even the most artfully programmed artificial intelligence, or the most skilled test pilot, could not return through a portal that didn’t exist.

  The only view that mattered was ahead of them.

  Amanda was fine with that.

  She listened to the discussion with one ear as she watched the results of her scan come in, one star at a time. Captain Hunt efficiently directed questions to each duty station, focusing more and more on the planet in front of them.

  In a layer over the top of everything, there was procedure. Checklists, duties, and actions that had been practiced hundreds of times by the crew for the first few minutes after the trip through the glome. A machine of combined human and computer elements, designed to respond to any circumstance.

  Amanda wondered how many of the processes had been designed to keep them all busy and feeling useful.

  A chime brought her back to the scan. They were located! And just forty two light years from Earth!

  She started scanning the calculation notes, preparing to notify Captain Hunt. There were definitely error bars in the results.

  At that moment a series of alerts rippled around the bridge. From her post, Amanda could see each crewmember reading for a moment. Some staring intently at the empty space in front of them, others using old-school physical display panels as Amanda preferred.

  She turned back to her console. The alert was serious. The astrogation system reported a major failure – distorted readings indicating the instruments were out of alignment, or worse.

  “It may be glome distortion,” Deijia spoke into the silence. “That was theorized, and we may have just seen the first case. According to some theories, anything going through a glome could be changed in some subtle manner – distorted just a tiny bit.”

  “What does this mean for us?” Hunt asked.

  “That specific system, I expect we can repair it,” Deijia returned. “But the bigger question is whether anything else has been damaged. Until we get to the bottom of the issue, we can’t trust any system on board. No piece of equipment, no program. In light of this, we may be lucky we all made it. Picture the effect of just a few blood vessels or neurons, in any of our bodies, suddenly in just slightly the wrong place.”

  Although she had been aware of the theory, Deijia’s frightening description had Amanda assessing how she felt. Pulse at the edge of racing, a little short of breath. A tremble, kept under control and not quite visible. In other words, normal for her in recent days. Evidently her neurons and blood vessels were still connected.

  “Shut down everything except life support and lighting,” Hunt ordered. “We’re going to verify every system and every component on this ship.”

  “Crew and colonists are all accounted for, no health or safety emergencies,” Estwing reported. “On our current path we’ll fly by the planet at about half a million kilometers, then we’ll be back in her neighborhood in just over four hundred days. Plenty of ti
me to verify or repair anything needing attention.”

  Commander Estwing’s mission was to stop things from going wrong. Safety, security, and any kind of risk reduction – those topics were his domain. During the past few months, Amanda had come to see past his manner and understand his purpose. Ever and always, he was about protecting everyone on the ship.

  Captain Hunt picked up the key point Estwing had not quite stated. “So we’ll miss orbit of the planet if we don’t thrust?”

  “Aye, captain. We can easily make orbit on the next pass, assuming our systems are in good order. Four hundred eleven days.”

  Amanda wanted to scream out. A year, gone! More than a year tracking around the star, before they even got started. On the bright side, they could potentially launch probes to collect more data about the planet, and the other planets that were much farther out from the star.

  “How soon do we have to thrust if we want to make orbit?”

  “We won’t be able to, captain. We would need to thrust within thirty eight minutes, but to verify everything about the engines will take several weeks.”

  “Thirty eight minutes. What can you check in less than that time?”

  “Visuals from existing cameras, and current readings. That’s only a couple of minutes.”

  “How about this: We’ll review images from every camera we have in place right now. See if you find a showstopper,” the captain ordered. “And while that’s in process, I have something for us. A video message I received eight minutes before we entered the glome, and have been requested to play as soon as we were out of full emergency mode. You guessed it – from Noel.”

  This time there was no mistaking the chorus of groans. “Light years away, and there’s no escaping him,” put in Estwing. “How far do we have to go? Another galaxy?”