Starburst (Stealing the Sun Book 2)

by Ron Collins

“That’s right,” Casmir replied. “The fact is, I’ve always admired UG’s intelligence people. They’ve consistently built highly effective operations that the average slob behind a news slate would never see as anything more than a simple squabble among riffraff on the fringe.”

  “Who, of course,” Gregor added, “none of those average slobs actually care about.”

  “Exactly,” Casmir said.

  A sense of momentum built that told Casmir it was time to step up.

  He glanced at Tamira Weston, who was the essence of his team’s anxiety as she stood before the closed door. No matter how much she promised to keep quiet, Weston would eventually tell people about this moment. The words he chose now would make a difference in more ways than one.

  He stood, thanking the powers that he had doubled the C-Pak just before the session, and ran his hand deliberately through his hair.

  “It is true that I often admire UG strategists, but the fact is that the actions they take are illegal as hell. And it is also true that they get away with them because they understand that the public could care less about the methods they use to bring ‘peace’ to places like Europa—as long as that same public doesn’t have to actually digest their methods. It’s a truth as old as humanity that, while a few heads may get knocked around out in the wilds, that was to be expected.”

  He paused.

  “This action of theirs on Europa is no different in the end. And as Gregor suggests, I am certain it’s a diversionary tactic—an attack to draw our focus from the real issue at hand, which, of course, is the existence of the life-changing technology that allows for faster-than-light travel.”

  Some in the team nodded, but none spoke.

  “But this exercise proves to me beyond any doubt that they don’t understand who we are.”

  He looked at Yamada. “You see that, don’t you?”

  Yamada pursed her lips. “Their action assumes we are merely responsive.”

  Casmir looked at young Tamira Weston.

  “Do you understand?”

  “No, sir.”

  He was impressed the youth spoke firmly at that moment.

  Perhaps she didn’t understand the true nature of just how important this moment was, specifically with regards to Universe Three but quite possibly all of humanity.

  “Their action,” Casmir replied in an educational tone, “assumes that we have nothing already in place. It tells me they are unaware that we’ve been thinking about this for years, that they are unaware of the people we have already established in hundreds of places around the Solar System.”

  The set of her lips told him she understood.

  “So it tells me—reminds me, actually—that they are incapable of looking beyond their own noses. It says to me that they have no idea what we are capable of. In the end, it tells me we will win.”

  He took in the rest as he paused.

  “It is unfortunate that this time has come,” he said. “But given the situation before us, I agree that Operation Starburst is the only proper response to the UG’s Star Drive program.”

  “What about Europa?” Matt Anderson said. “We can’t leave our people stranded there. If these UG actions have damaged their atmospheric controls, they’ll have ripped up its radiation cover, too. Without those, Jupiter’s emissions will fry them real soon now.”

  Casmir looked at the elder Anderson, then at Yamada, then back to the younger Anderson, who was slowly gaining control of himself.

  “I will need anyone not involved in Operation Starburst to work with Ms. Weston here to find out what Europa needs, and get it to them. Beyond that, we’ll need an extraction team. I want it on its way tonight.”

  “It’s too tight, Casmir,” Eugene Rickell, the team’s supply leader, said. “Tomorrow is the best we—”

  He cut the man off with a scythe-like wave of his hand.

  “Just the idea of Universe Three leaving Europa sets my teeth on fire,” he said. “But the fact is that whatever happens now will change our relationship with the United Government forever. Our people are no longer safe. So Matt is right. We need to be there for them if we ever want them to be here for us. You will work with Deego and anyone else you need to make this happen.”

  “Let me call Io Station,” Deego Larsi broke in. “They are nearby, and should have spare equipment. That would reduce the immediate problem, but I’ll have to get them something in return.”

  “Whatever they want,” Gregor Anderson said. “Make it happen.”

  “All right.”

  The room dropped to total silence.

  “The rescue and extraction operation will launch at 2100 hours tonight,” Casmir said. “Earlier if possible.”

  He glanced around the room before his gaze fell back to Rickell.

  The two of them had been through a lot together, and Casmir understood exactly how much pressure he was putting onto the man, especially in front of the rest of the team.

  “Any questions?” Casmir asked.

  “I understand,” Rickell replied.

  “No, sir,” Yamada, aggressive as always, added. “No questions.”

  Casmir scanned his team.

  A feeling of velocity filled the moment, an invisible but deadly sense of purpose that radiated from each of them like particle fields off a black hole. Even Casmir was surprised to feel more energized. That was the thing about clarity. Clarity begets certainty, and certainty allows for movement.

  “Leave it to UG to make Operation Starburst seem like the easy job,” he said.

  The team’s chuckle was nervous, but it was a chuckle.

  “All right, then,” Casmir said. “We’re now Go for Launch. Let’s all get to work.”

  The Art of Waiting

  .

  CHAPTER 8

  Kensington Station, Asteroid Belt: Section 912

  Local Solar Date: February 13, 2206

  Local Solar Time: 1206 Hours

  Kensington Station was a piece of junk.

  Katriana Martinez, a security systems officer, second class, for the Excelsior project, sat at an empty booth in the station’s dimly lit cafeteria and laid her rubber-rimmed datapad beside the plastic plate that held something the ship’s processing system called a three-egg frittata, complete with bean paste and cheese. She had been stationed here for a year, about nine months longer than it took to decide she hated it.

  At first, Katriana thought being stationed here would be no different from going to school, a gig she did for six years, and one that also took her away from people she loved, setting her down alone and silently afraid in a distant place where she mostly stayed in her assigned space and minded her own business. But Kensington was a cranky old station that something around thirty-five thousand people called home. It came complete with creaks and groans and exposed metal bulkheads, and was filled with the smell of molding machine oil. For her it was like a jail cell. It was a self-contained biosphere stuck in the isolated wildlands of the asteroid belt that felt different from anywhere else she had ever been. Despite the thousands of people who made up the staff, it felt obscenely vacant at its core, like one of those dilapidated mansions on the islands where folks who were mostly out of work took root, the places everyone used to say were haunted.

  And it was cold.

  She pulled her jacket tighter, but it didn’t come close to combating her chill. Katriana found herself shivering even though the compartments were kept at a standard 22.5 degrees C.

  The place was built as a halfway house where UG solar ship crews could refuel and get a brief respite from travel. It was also a remote research shop for UG engineers to practice their secret wizardry away from prying eyes. As all such transfer centers become, the station was also a hub for black market commerce and off-line information transfer: aka, scuttlebutt. Not that Katriana cared much about that. She was more focused on the fact that Kensington was the central hub for all logistics associated with the construction of Excelsior class spacecraft, which, of course, were soon
going to be famous for their Star Drives.

  That was the plan, anyway.

  Today, however, as she sat down to gnaw her lunch, she was just tired: tired of twelve-hour work shifts, tired of Pisha Kalliente and her incessant jabbering, tired of waiting.

  The cafeteria’s floor was a synthetic material laid over the artificial gravity system. The walls were tiled with a mosaic of yellow and white. A dome that had probably once been sky-blue rose above the pavilion, threatening to crash down upon them like a frozen tidal wave. The configuration made for a perfect echo chamber, merging the sound of hundreds of voices into a single jumble that was as mushy as her three-egg plate of goo.

  She was tired of that, too.

  The artificialness of the entire place made Katriana sick.

  She ran her hand through her golden hair and forked a bite of the frittata. It was too cold at the center, and too chewy at the edges. She sipped coffee that did nothing but make her stomach twist up in knots.

  So much for the idea that the frittata would be a substitute for home.

  That had been crazy thinking from the beginning. As if a bland glop of reheated protein paste could ever take the place of the frittatas she made herself, or her mother’s pork empanadillas, spiced up with fresh guava and cracked pepper. A warm place grew in her chest at the memory of her father standing over a steaming pot of asopao, spooning the stew and breathing in big lungfuls of the peppery essence of garlic and onions that would fill the room.

  The poor little frittata never stood a chance.

  She picked at the datapad. Her in-box registered twenty-eight messages. As she worked through them, a shadow darkened the table.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  Orlando Jackson, an electronics tech, stood beside the small booth with a steaming bowl of chili on the tray in his hand.

  “I would rather be alone, if that’s all right,” she replied.

  “Oh, uh, sure,” the tech said. “All right.”

  She watched from the corner of her eye as Jackson ambled to a table full of men. Their laughter hit her like a cold blast.

  Assholes.

  She was tired of them, too.

  Did they think she didn’t know what they said about her? Did they think she hadn’t heard them call her everything from the classic “Station Bitch” to the much more original “232,” a backhanded reference to the first robot that had explored the frigid surface of Pluto—and now was presumably embedded in a creeping block of the planetoid’s dry ice?

  For the ten thousandth time she thought about coloring her hair.

  Nothing brought attention like a thin woman with a golden mane, but it was her own goddamned hair. She shouldn’t have to hide it just because testosterone-laden space jockeys couldn’t keep their pants on.

  The men laughed again. Jackson had probably just lost a bet.

  She hoped it was at least a week’s pay.

  Focus, Katriana, she thought. Focus.

  The muscles around her eyes tightened as she concentrated on the datapad. She hated the people here. She despised the whole concept behind the Star Drive project—trillions of solar dollars thrown into a mission whose goal was merely to steal resources from another system.

  It was obscene.

  She thought of her little girls, Rosa and Talia, buried now in the dirt of San Juan.

  Their bodies may well have returned to the land, but their spirits remained attached to every atom in her body, stuck inside her anger like one of those ancient insects buried in amber. That anger, the flare of pain that came when she let herself think of them, made her feel ugly, but it was better to feel ugly than to let them fade.

  Through her periphery, she took in Orlando Jackson and his buddies, still laughing.

  They wouldn’t be so jovial if they knew what she was here for.

  They wouldn’t laugh if they understood that Security Systems Officer Katriana Martinez was also an operative with Universe Three. They wouldn’t crack jokes if they knew she graduated from an underground training program in Puerto Rico well before coming to Solar Command, and they wouldn’t laugh if they knew there were a hundred other sleepers just like her stationed on Kensington. Her identity as a deep agent was the only thing that made the rest of this back-assed assignment bearable.

  Her stomach churned as she picked at her lunch. The chatter from the men’s table burned in her.

  Patience, she thought. Patience.

  Katriana Martinez was a secondary officer on Kensington’s stationwide security team, but due to changes in UG security policy she had been cross-trained as a navigation specialist—a process that allowed the UG intelligence and security offices to keep their hands in the game in the early stages of any project. Assuming the Everguard mission completed on schedule, she was due to be billeted on Icarus as navigation specialist until the organization was certain the ship was secure, then she would be assigned back into a more traditional role: chief computer security officer.

  Over the past two weeks, Lieutenant Commander Wagner, her UG CO, had doubled the intensity of the team’s exercises, a step that meant twice daily runs on each Star Drive spacecraft in addition to their normal monitoring and law enforcement roles. Staff officers had been disappearing for days at a time. Communication from Command had gone suddenly silent.

  All these were signs that something was up, and since it was possible Everguard could finish its mission any time, it didn’t take Katriana any great mental acrobatics to guess what that something might be.

  She chewed processed cheese, then cleared her throat.

  “Can I see my messages, Abke?”

  Abke, the station’s self-contained Autonomic Bioprocessing Knowledge Engine, sent a list to her datapad that was sorted by priorities she had set earlier.

  Roster assignments from Wagner were on top, followed by a commandwide policy change with regard to liberty—as if that mattered. Other internal discussion chains were next.

  Then she saw something from her mother.

  Adrenaline washed over her. It took all her self-control to keep from jumping straight to that message. She didn’t break training, though. She hung tight. Business first. That was her way. To break the process now would be a small thing, but it would be a thing and Katriana knew exactly what kind of tracking and analysis mechanisms UG security teams had in place. If something was actually up, those systems would be on high alert.

  So she read everything in its proper order.

  The clamor of the cafeteria folded into the background as she responded to a question about a cipher key, then worked through an inane issue that had resulted in the station’s dual password protocol locking down a private data core. She tagged a few notes onto the archive for use in later troubleshooting before finally getting to her mother’s note.

  It was chitchatty.

  Her father was doing well, still gardening. Her mother was worried that he wasn’t going to go to his normal checkup. One brother was in school, the other had taken a junior partnership in a law firm specializing in Earth/Martian trade law.

  It was all false, of course.

  Katriana’s father farmed a plot of land in Puerto Rico. Her mother had passed years ago of complications arising from pesticide poisoning that the cane farmers had lobbied to put into place to ensure their profits didn’t drop.

  The note’s closing sent a chill down her back.

  Nos vemos en las estrellas.

  See you in the stars.

  Her hand shook as she sipped her coffee.

  The men in Orlando Jackson’s group laughed and joked again, but this time she grinned like she might be the Cheshire cat.

  It was started.

  The public-address system crackled.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of Kensington Station,” the voice came over the stationwide channel. “This is Admiral Gleason speaking. I have exciting news from the Everguard mission.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Kensington Station, Asteroid Belt: Section 912

&nb
sp; Local Solar Date: February 15, 2206

  Local Solar Time: 0800 Hours

  Two days later Sunchaser, the first of the UG’s four Excelsior class vessels, attached itself to the feed from Alpha Centauri A, lit its Star Drive engine, and made its maiden trip to Barnard’s Star and back in less than a day.

  The crew did not suffer the aging effects of Einstein’s famous twins. Traveling at speeds faster than light had not sent anyone ahead in time, nor, as a few mathematicians had continued to predict, did it send anyone backwards.

  As famed Princeton professor and now Nobel laureate Ranya Denaldi quipped in summing up her Theory of Space and Time, “Photons move in accordance with the laws of relativity, but time is its own master.” Sunchaser’s confirmation of her theory made Denaldi an instant icon, and her v-book, which was half dissertation and half memoir, became an overnight bestseller. In the aftermath of the Sunchaser’s maiden voyage other mathematicians and astrophysicists took turns toasting themselves and speaking with hyperbolic excitement on news shows and discussion bands.

  For the layman, interviews of crew members were just as fascinating.

  “It was like stepping into a tunnel of neon,” one crew member said.

  A rash of holo games were released a day after the news, setting off a spending spree greater than any recorded before.

  In the hallways of aerospace companies throughout the Solar System, however, a different fervor took shape.

  Sunchaser’s second mission would be to retrieve Everguard’s triumphant admiral. Then would come Starburst—the UG’s ostentatious show of force that would simultaneously send all four Excelsior class Star Drive vessels on their way, each with separate mission profiles that would begin the story of humanity’s entry into intergalactic exploration.

  After those gaudy missions, talk would turn to colonies and exploration.

  Targets were already being generated. Young families were already considering career options in services and systems that might well support new cities on distant planets.