Starfall (Stealing the Sun Book 3)

by Ron Collins

  But Estaut was dead the next heat.

  A cold shiver came over Baraq.

  He went to the room where he had heard from both of the now-dead scientists. A round table sat in the room’s center. He stepped quietly about, looking under the table and chairs and lifting decorations from the wall. He found what he was looking for behind a rendition of Eldoro chasing Katon across the sky, blue bolts of lightning encircling both.

  A wave talker was embedded in the middle of the lower frame rail, placed there so as to avoid throwing the image out of balance. Wires led to thick battery packs in each corner.

  Ironic, he thought. The rendition had been one of his personal favorites. Now it was forever ruined.

  Two quadars were dead because of him.

  And he knew exactly who had done it.

  “You killed them,” Baraq said, controlling his anger.

  His father folded his hands over his belly. His face was rounded and jowly, his skin hanging from his cheekbones like molten slides of flesh. Ranya Waganat was becoming an old quadar.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because they both died shortly after briefing me, and because of the wave talker you have in my office. No one else has wave talkers, Father. I’m sure you understand that.”

  The story was legendary inside their Family, yet unspoken of outside.

  Some years ago, Jarka’el Waganat, Baraq’s cousin a few times removed, had developed a machine that sent and received encoded waves of energy that could be descrambled with an appropriate receiver. It was a monstrous machine that created waves of incredible power. He demonstrated the device by sending a message asking his pair-mate to make havra stew for dinner. The Family’s fortune had been made through negotiations, and they didn’t need schooling to recognize power in the ability to speak rapidly via invisible waves.

  In a discussion that raged for weeks, the Family decided to keep the wave talker for themselves rather than sell it.

  They had improved it over time, learning to boost power and focus the waves, and learning to use higher frequencies where waves could be made to carry voice more readily than the irregular, massively powerful spark-generated waves of Jarka’el’s first machine. They doled out systems within the Family when it suited them, using wave talking as bargaining levers for critical contracts and other business advantages.

  “You should have known better than to develop technology for the council, Baraq,” his father finally replied.

  “It was work.”

  “You should have come to me.”

  Baraq remained silent.

  “We’ve had this discussion before,” his father said. “You have your business because of the Family. You have your life, your wealth, and your home because of the Family. Don’t choose this time to forget that.”

  Baraq cringed.

  He was far removed from any real power within the Family, and he always would be. He considered telling his father off. He thought of exposing him, going to the full public with the existence of this glorious device that could be used to spy on others. He thought about the danger that would befall his father if he did that. Then he thought about Crissandr and his soon-to-come child.

  I’m drowning, Baraq thought. As certainly as Estaut did in the caves, I’m drowning.

  His father spoke.

  “You will tell Hateri that you can find nothing of worth.”

  Baraq’s stomachs dropped. “You know who funds me.”

  His father gave a nonchalant shrug. “Hateri will be discredited shortly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You think the rest of the council doesn’t know he’s broken from their ranks?”

  “You told them?”

  “That’s what partners do.”

  The sentence settled fully.

  “Does that surprise you? Did you really believe the council actually ran this city unilaterally?” his father said. “Did you think we don’t care?”

  “No,” Baraq said. “Not really.”

  Baraq’s insides tried to rise up and clog his throat. A fire burned over his skin.

  For much of the past year he had felt alive. He was studying the Taranth Stone, doing something important. And for once he was working on his own. At least, he thought he had been. Now he realized once again that he was no more than a drist leech, a sand worm. Useless, meaningless. Removed from the structure of his Family, unable to affect its decisions, unable to break from their clutches, and too weak to buck them.

  “How big of a cut do they get in return for laws that keep others at bay?”

  His father laughed with a smile full of yellow teeth. “You have grown into a good businessman, Baraq.”

  “How big?”

  “Big enough.”

  Baraq considered recent events. How much did his father know of Louratna? She did not travel from her home and would not visit Baraq’s office, so their discussions had been away from the prying wave talker.

  “So, two quadars are dead, and you will discredit Hateri.”

  “Yes.”

  “What about me?”

  “What about you?” His father’s eyes were level and unwavering now, their challenge firmly placed. If Baraq let this go, he could continue to run his shop, continue to go home to sleep each night. But the Family would protect itself. Wave recorders. Spies. Inspections. He would never know from one moment to the next when someone was watching him. And if he did not let this go, Baraq saw the result in his father’s eyes.

  Though no one would say it aloud, the Waganats were not above disposing of their own if necessary.

  “What will happen to the Taranth Stone?”

  His father smiled. “Do not fear, Baraq. The time is coming for it to make its public appearance. We will continue the investigation and will bring any useful discoveries to market, just as we always have.”

  “I understand, Father,” Baraq said.

  And he understood something else, too. His father did not know of Louratna’s work.

  CHAPTER 25

  Hateri entered the smaller of the three council meeting chambers just as he always did, running just a touch late as he almost always was, and wearing his council robes which he also almost always did.

  “I apologize for my lateness,” he said as he opened the doors and stepped in.

  Jie-Kandor was there, as was Asha. They were the council members selected from the Kandar and Hlrat clans. Both were due to be out of their terms at the end of the cycle.

  Four other service members were there, however, which was not per usual. They stood stiffly upright, their primaries on edge. Unid was one of the four. Hateri cast a question in his gaze, but the runner gave no indication.

  “What have I missed?” Hateri said as the door swung shut.

  “The better question is, what have we missed?” Jie-Kandor said. He was as still as the runners.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m sure that is not correct.”

  “I see,” Hateri said, suddenly understanding why he had not heard from Baraq Waganat for a considerable time. “This is about the Taranth Stone.”

  “We thought all actions regarding the stone were to be decided by the three of us,” Asha said.

  Hateri considered his position.

  “I won’t lie,” he said. “I was afraid we were not moving fast enough.”

  The door opened behind him. The bent form of Ranya Waganat stepped through, moving in a fashion that reminded Hateri of old L’rdent from Harshish Point. Hateri had not thought of that place or those quadars in a long time. He wondered if L’rdent was still alive.

  “Elder Waganat,” Hateri said in greeting.

  Ranya nodded, then sat at a table with such deliberate effect that the full depth of what was happening fell over him. His game was over. The Families would have the Taranth Stone.

  “What’s going to happen to Baraq?” he said.

  “We will deal with him inside the Family,” Ranya said.

 
“I see.”

  “You, on the other hand, are a different problem.”

  Hateri saw that Jie-Kandor and Asha were taking a back seat now, and that said only one thing.

  “You’re here to remove me as the Terilamat selectee,” he said.

  “You will be allowed to resign.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  Ranya gave a hand movement that said he didn’t care either way. “Once the rest of the Terilamat clan hears of your deceit, they will decide it’s time we had fresh blood in the office and you will be shunned.”

  The answer told him everything.

  Leave quietly, and Ranya Waganat would take over the councillorship, including proprietary control of the Taranth Stone. The salvage would be kept together because then the Waganats could control it all. Oh, sure, Jie-Kandor and Asha would have fingers in it, but Hateri had seen what the Waganats did. In short order, Ranya would have Jie-Kandor and Asha so confused that Ranya’s would be the only fingers that mattered.

  Make a fuss, though, and the full truth would come out.

  And if the full truth came out, the Taranth Stone would not remain together.

  He made a click at the back of his throat, and realized it didn’t matter.

  Ranya Waganat wouldn’t keep the Taranth Stone together even if he held control of the entire thing. He was in business. He would do what the business needed.

  This was over.

  He had failed.

  The weight of the elder Waganat’s stare said everything that had happened since the expedition was announced was finished now. The twelve. Taranth. His father. Even M’ran. Hateri had failed them all. The only open question was whether he would step down in silence or be subject to discredit.

  “I see,” he said.

  “I suggest that perhaps you might want to spend the rest of your time in one of your father’s colonies,” Asha said.

  “I have already arranged for such passage for you,” said Jie-Kandor. “I’ve asked the support staff here to escort you to your quarters to pack the few things you might need on the way.”

  Hateri’s central caught the gentle nod of Unid’s head.

  “Convenient,” he said to Jie-Kandor. “Almost like you planned to get me completely out of the way.”

  “Almost,” Jie-Kandor replied.

  “All we need now,” Ranya Waganat said, “is your resignation.”

  Hateri wrapped his fingers around the back of the chair in front of him, and bowed his head. Worse things existed than living out the rest of your useless life in a colony that your father had built, but very few worse things than knowing you could do nothing to save the whole of your species.

  “You have it,” he said, sealing his defeat. “I resign my commission to the council.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Crissandr’s belly swelled as time passed.

  Baraq worked in his shop, selling automatic door openers and machines that served food. Each transaction sent money to the Family and a slice to the council. With every good sold, Waganat control fueled more Waganat control.

  He wanted to contact Louratna. Every heat he told himself that he would try, but someone from the Family was constantly loitering around his shop, and he told himself that he could not risk causing her a similar fate as Kaatla and Estaut. The truth, though, was that he was more afraid for himself than for Louratna.

  Heats passed as Katon caught slowly up to her brother, bringing chills to the darkness when Baraq walked home and skies that were sometimes cloudless and sharp.

  On one such night a dark form stopped Baraq.

  “Come with me,” it whispered with feminine softness. She grabbed his arm and pulled him along.

  Baraq’s hearts pounded. “Why? What’s going on?”

  “No time,” the intruder replied fervently. “Come now.”

  She pulled him through several tight streets and then behind a row of buildings.

  Soon, he found himself in the small candle-lit cellar of a shop. It was a spare chamber, one wall still barren earth, the rest made of mortared brick. A female sat behind a simple table, draped in a robe of coarse cloth.

  “Louratna,” he said.

  She wore a headdress of twined katja that rested on her knobby head in several places. She looked at him with her unshakable demeanor as if they were merely sitting together in the middle of the bazaar and not as if he had just been essentially kidnapped.

  The device he had given her sat on the table before her.

  “Good evening,” she replied in her throaty voice.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t contacted you,” he explained rapidly. “But, there have been…complications.”

  “Complexities are bound to arise.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What did you suspect when you gave this to me?”

  Baraq’s smile had the flavor of self-congratulation to it.

  His father would never have brought someone like Louratna into this study. Nor would Hateri have, though Baraq understood the council member had studied under her.

  Louratna was a mathematician.

  She had studied in the university under Hunta Askalin, the male who had developed an understanding of numbers in an imaginary plane. But she was a philosopher, also, something she had proven to Baraq during long discussions they had held when he was in school, discussions that ranged in topic from simple calculus to Devinian logic and all points in between. Yes, she was subject to the occasional bout of a philosopher’s stereotypical enthusiasm for theories other scientists saw as being merely thought experiments. But Baraq had grown to appreciate her wisdom and her reason. A calmness enveloped her that made everything she did seem important. All of this—her wisdom, her reason, and her calmness—had led Baraq to give her the strange mechanism he had found embedded in the device.

  “I wasn’t sure what to suspect,” he said, finally answering her question.

  “But you did suspect?”

  Baraq nodded.

  Louratna pursed her lips, then leveled her gaze. “I think the device rends space.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “I said, I think the box tears a hole in space, connects one place with another.”

  Baraq laughed, feeling suddenly a bit foolish. Louratna’s silent stare made him immediately uncomfortable.

  “Why do you say that?” Baraq finally said.

  “Dimensional breaks have been mathematically understood for nearly a cycle.”

  “No one believes they can exist in the real world, though.”

  “Experimentalists are often limited by a lack of imagination.”

  Baraq let the words soak in. “All right. But how do you get there from this?” He waved his hand at the box of wire and hardware.

  “I will walk you through it when we have more time. But I’m convinced the system amplifies and funnels energy through its spokes. If enough energy is focused at a single point in space, singularities result.”

  “Singularities?”

  “Holes in the fabric of the world.”

  Baraq shook his head. “Of what use is a hole?”

  “A good question,” Louratna replied. “But there’s another one that comes first.”

  Baraq hesitated, not wanting to appear stupid. He was an engineer, after all. He should be able to follow basics. He tapped his fingers together as he considered his answer.

  “How much energy would it need?”

  “More than we could harness—a great deal more. But that’s not the question I had in mind.”

  “Where would the energy come from?”

  “That is the right question.”

  Louratna waited.

  “Maybe one of the other systems on the Taranth Stone is an energy generator.”

  “No. Nothing on the craft could be big enough to be capable of generating that kind of energy on demand.”

  “Then I am at a loss,” he admitted.

  “Think about what is happening to our world.” She waited while he thought,
but nothing came. “What is our greatest source of energy?”

  The answer brought him a cold chill, a touch of wrongness, something evil and dire at a level that suddenly seemed so large as to be impossible to grasp.

  “Eldoro,” he said. “The energy source is Eldoro.”

  Louratna nodded. “Do you now know the answer to your first question?”

  “Which was?”

  “You asked: of what use is a hole in the world?”

  “To use it as a source,” he said, falling back in his chair, totally overwhelmed. “The hole is inside Eldoro. It’s there to take its energy.”

  Louratna nodded. “That interpretation matches the data.”

  Suddenly, everything made sense—the clouds thinning, the melting rain of acid, temperatures dropping so slowly as to be unnoticeable unless looked at over a span of time. Eldoro was dying, its heat being siphoned away. And as Eldoro diminished, their home was changing.

  Baraq’s hearts ached as he walked home. The night was crisp. Fresh dew sparkled with a glimmer that he once thought beautiful. He scanned the buildings along the path. Quadars slept in each. Quadars ate, and they joked with their Families, and they struggled with making the payments that kept their lives going. In between they made more Families, and they read books. In the distance, the Esgarat peaks glimmered with the light of tiny Eterdane.

  His stomachs churned.

  Louratna had talked further on—about a great, vast universe, about alien creatures with intelligence and vigor. About the Esgarat, their world that was dying with no way to save itself, and about other worlds—worlds filled with other beings with technologies that those here could barely imagine.

  “You’ve got to convince your Family to work on something that will break the hole, Baraq,” she had said. “We have to break the singularity or we will all die.”