Starburst (Stealing the Sun Book 2)

by Ron Collins

  As another wave of UG fighters swooped in, a member of the crew stepped toward Casmir, carrying a folded triangle of cloth.

  “The colors,” the man said as he proffered the triangle.

  It was blue and green, with a red and gold trim, an older model of the Universe Three flag of freedom from the time just after Ellyn Parker’s death.

  Casmir took it. “Thank you,” he said.

  The flag would be destroyed in the launch, of course, but that didn’t matter. Only a few moments were left before they had to board. He glanced at Yvonne, who came to his side. Holding the flag in one hand and his staff in the other he stepped to the main bay, feeling both the crunch of time and the invisible pressure of a thousand sets of eyeballs. Over the years, Casmir had learned that the art of being visible was in the way a person carried themselves: straight and controlled, walking with a sense of dignity and purpose.

  As he and Yvonne made it to the center of the launch bay, the area grew hushed.

  The bay was a huge, high-ceilinged cavern that had been dug out of the core of the planet, buttressed with arching beams of stone and metal spans that disappeared into the tall darkness like fading bands of light. The floor was smooth and even, polished to a glossy sheen. In the distant heights, Casmir could barely make out the mechanisms that would peel the rooftop back. A muffled cough echoed from the crowd.

  The bay’s lighting was sharp here.

  The ceiling doors were closed, of course, but in his last moments here he imagined the sight of the sky above him, picturing UG fighters as they finished their missions, the plasma burns of their engines raging blue and purple as they flew back up to their posts.

  Yvonne cleared her throat, and Casmir unfurled the flag.

  We’ve come a long way, Perigee, he thought. I hope you would be proud of us.

  Yvonne helped him place it ceremoniously into a hole that had been predrilled in the floor.

  He took a final look around the spaceport, breathed in the sense of the moment, then took one corner of the flag and pulled it taut to expose the colors and the figure of the gold-clad climber as she reached the pinnacle of a pyramid.

  “Perhaps someone should take a picture,” he said.

  Applause began, slowly at first but building to a crescendo before fading.

  “All right,” he said in his loudest voice. “We all know what’s at stake today, so I’ll leave the speechmaking for later.”

  He looked to the three spacecraft.

  “Let’s get to work and make this happen.”

  Ten minutes later, he stood with Yvonne and fifteen leaders of his staff at the base of Freedom Three. They all wore the light pressure suits required for flight, and each had pressure helmets open for the moment.

  Freedom One and Freedom Two cut sharp figures into the dark background as they sat on two other launch pads. They were thick tubes, nearly a hundred meters tall and with pointed capsules that seemed eager to split space.

  Every system had been tested. Every test had been reviewed.

  Freedom One was loaded with the equipment, material, and science the organization would need to grow. Freedom Two carried workers and support staff as well as some of the command staff and the most critical engineers. More citizens and workers, the leaders and support staff, the people who analyzed the cosmos around them and made decisions filled the holds of Freedom Three.

  They would launch in that order. Science first, people second.

  His staff would split among the three vessels.

  “Ready for retraction, sir,” the voice came into Casmir’s earpiece with a tinny tone.

  Casmir glanced at the roof.

  “This is it, Gregor,” Casmir said to Anderson. He smiled despite himself. “Faceplates down, my friends. It is time.”

  He toggled his own controller, and the covering snapped into place. His breathing rasped inside his suit.

  “System command,” he called into the radio. “Please retract the roof.”

  “Retraction initiated,” came the reply.

  Mechanisms sprung to life with the sound of grinding wheels.

  The floor vibrated.

  Above them, the ceiling split into four pie-shaped quadrants. Early morning sunlight streamed in to form a simple X and then became a full circle as the four slices disappeared into the rounded edge of the opening’s expanse. The natural light took the blue edge off the artificial illumination around them.

  “It feels right, sir,” Kazima Yamada said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “It seems right that the natural light of the sun would replace the light we made at a time like this.”

  And it did feel right.

  Casmir couldn’t help but feel the hugeness of the world around him then. He thought about Mars and its poisonous surface, its irradiated soil, and its craggy terrain. He thought about the fury of creation that was a never-ending cycle inside star systems. He thought about his father and his mother, both dead and buried on Luna. As the sky lay open above him, Casmir thought about the UG Natim complex on the other side of the divide, their greenhouses and their power plants. He recalled how it felt to stand on Perigee Hill again and tell Deidra the birthday story.

  He thought about the moons orbiting Mars.

  Their spacecraft would be gone long before Deimos rose tonight, but Phobos, complete with its oddly shaped Stickney Crater, would be orbiting just over the horizon as they left. Phobos was a much smaller rock than Luna, but its orbit was close enough that it appeared to be easily a quarter the size of the Earth’s moon. A trick of perspective, these two moons.

  Phobos and Deimos.

  Fear and dread.

  How much of human life was fueled by those two emotions.

  Sunlight traveled down the bay wall as the roof finished its retraction.

  “Thank you for that thought, Kazima,” Casmir finally said. “If not for you, I would have missed it.”

  He turned to his team.

  “It’s time,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  As scripted, Casmir, seated with Yvonne in the control capsule, was the last to strap in. When he was finished, he gave a single hard swallow, then uttered the command. The piloting crews took over from there.

  Solid rocket fuel lifted them against the Martian gravity well.

  The first stage broke off after a four-minute burn, then the stabilizing trim rockets fired to keep them on course, nudging them intermittently one way and then the next. Natim’s control tower radioed to deny permission to fly, but the Freedom pilots of course ignored their hails. The two UG bombers that remained from the attack wave diverted toward the launch vehicles, but it was too late.

  Casmir watched a video feed as they rose.

  The original launch pad was a blackened mass of smoking debris.

  As the three launch vehicles peeled away, he looked at Yvonne and pointed to the black dots that were UG bombers skimming their way toward their secret bay.

  “The animals have left the barn, eh, Vonny?” he said.

  She grinned back, but her expression remained tense.

  That was all right, he thought as datascreens displayed each of the Freedom ships’ telemetry streams as they lifted themselves out of the Martian atmosphere.

  Yvonne was his regulator.

  He needed that. It was one of the many reasons he loved her so dearly. They were a perfect pairing. He was her optimism. She was his pragmatism. Without her, he would be a foolish blowhard. Without him, she would be an overly cautious miser.

  Numbers streamed over the screen above them.

  One more step, he thought as the shuttle moved into zero-g.

  One more step and they were free.

  CHAPTER 16

  Freedom Three

  Local Solar Date: March 14, 2206

  Local Solar Time: 0615 Hours

  The wait for intercept was the moment Casmir dreaded the most.

  The three Freedom vehicles raced for a point in space outside Martian orbit on a pr
overbial wing and a prayer. Literally everything they had ever worked for was on the line. If intercept didn’t come, the entire population of Casmir’s Martian colony would be dead soon.

  A fatalistic sense of dread covered him at times, so he understood how the others had to feel, too.

  This is why he unclipped his belt and made his way through the spacecraft, doing his best to delight in the sensation of zero-g in hopes that his love for it might mask his own fear. Yvonne followed closely behind, pushing her own fears aside to bring her a message of hope to the people who were with them. She talked to one family about planting lettuce, another about how they might help set up a construction team.

  She made him smile, and that helped more than anything he could imagine.

  As Casmir made his way toward the back, he saw firsthand that Freedom transports were not designed for comfort. They were painted a stark white and gray. They were cramped and awkward, built of solid composite material, and designed to make the maximum use of every cubic meter. Beyond that, they had no method of creating gravity.

  He talked to people, making jokes with them, giving them thumb’s-up signs, and anything else he could do to keep their minds occupied.

  They were afraid.

  They were worried.

  A few sat to the side, nursing nauseous stomachs and clutching the obligatory zero-g barf bags.

  It all made sense to him.

  “Keep your chin up,” he said to one young boy whose eyes were as big as a full Luna from Earth. “We’ll be fine soon.”

  When he and Yvonne returned to the forward section, he felt better.

  “When will the shuttle come?” Wallace asked, holding on to a book reader that was playing instructions and examples of oil painting techniques.

  “Soon,” Casmir replied.

  “Will we be going on your shuttle?” Deidra asked.

  “Yes,” her mother replied, as she caught up and buckled back in.

  “Good. Everyone should see us all get off together.”

  Wallace rolled his eyes.

  Deidra grimaced at him and went back to checking her appearance in the reflection of a nearby porthole, focusing on the acceptability of her pressure suit and smoothing the U3 patches on both shoulders.

  “Where is Cash?” Yvonne asked, taking over the conversation.

  “He’s with his girlfriend,” Wallace said, equally disgusted at his brother as he had been at his sister.

  “We need to be ready when the shuttles begin to launch,” Yvonne said. “It will go quickly. And Deidra is right. We should get off together, so I need you paying attention. We need to be ready to leave soon.”

  Casmir left Yvonne to control the preparations.

  He took a breath and stifled a cough. The display was filled with data that depicted all the ship’s operational parameters. It flickered like a heart monitor might.

  Casmir didn’t say anything.

  Just scanned the display every few seconds, waiting for intercept, and hoping they would all be able to step off the shuttle together.

  “Freedom Three, this is Icarus reporting,” the voice finally came over the cramped cockpit’s intercom. “We have you on-screen.”

  “Icarus, this is Freedom Three,” the pilot said. “Copy your message. Preparing for transfer.”

  Then the pilot began to report status to his passengers, but Casmir was barely listening. He looked at the scanner and saw the electronic signature of the Excelsior class spaceship lying just before them.

  It had worked.

  Icarus, under U3 command, had jumped to their location.

  An electrifying sense of relief filled him, a swell of emotion that bordered on exaltation.

  Soon, Icarus would deploy its fleet of shuttles to ferry material and members of U3 aboard. The logistics of it all was complex, but Deego Larsi promised the process could be accomplished in less than thirty minutes—less time than it once had taken to build a human pyramid on Luna. Thanks to modern logistical engineering, the ferry shuttles would latch onto loading compartments, pull them off the Freedom transports in mass, then automatically shove them into receiving bays in Icarus.

  Two passes for each shuttle and the transfer would be complete.

  Simple.

  Then they would light Icarus’s Star Drive engines, leave the transport shuttles behind, and enter a new phase of Universe Three’s existence.

  They would start with Eta Cassiopeia—a system where their astronomers said inhabitable planets almost certainly existed, three of which were already predicted and spatially projected.

  “We’ll have our own place soon,” he said to Yvonne.

  “We don’t have anyone aboard Icarus, yet,” she replied.

  He smiled, but turned to Gregor Anderson.

  “What are the chances a UG launch can catch us now?”

  Gregor pursed his lips. “Not good.”

  Casmir knew his friend well enough to hear the “but not zero” at the end of his response.

  The pilot turned in his seat to face Casmir and Yvonne.

  “We should probably prepare for the shuttles.”

  “Indeed we should,” Casmir said. “I will give the command.”

  “Why should we go last?” Deidra asked, the dark locks of her hair drifting in zero-g. “Aren’t you in charge?”

  “We go last because I am in charge.”

  Her face grew dark. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “That’s how Ellyn would have done it,” Casmir said sharply, watching his daughter absorb the information. “The people go to safety first, then the leadership team, then us.”

  “Go easy on her, Casmir,” Yvonne said.

  “She needs to learn.”

  “As did you at one time, as I remember.”

  Casmir pursed his lips. “Touché,” he replied.

  Yvonne may well be the only person in the Solar System who could get away with that kind of comment without pissing him off, which was also among the reasons she was the perfect person for him. He relaxed and looked more closely at Deidra. She was going to be a great leader once she grew up, but now was not that time.

  “Once we get settled, we can think about her training,” Yvonne said, mirroring his thoughts before he knew he was having them.

  A latching mechanism from the first of Icarus’s shuttles attached to Freedom Three’s rearward doors, the booster rockets sending shudders through the transport’s structure that brought a few yelps and sharp cries.

  Nervous giggles followed.

  The second shuttle docked with another rattling clank.

  Casmir imagined what the sight was like from Icarus’s side of the process—people and material on automated trim shuttles that flowed across the distance between the ships. He wanted to see the videos, though the sights couldn’t match the majestic images he could build in his mind. A system of spaceships painted white and silver, flowing back and forth in smooth transitions—a ballet of its own form, like blood pumping with the mechanics of a metronome.

  “Come,” Casmir said when everything was collected. “It’s time we head to the docking bay.”

  The third shuttle arrived.

  Then the fourth.

  Necessary or not, a security detail escorted the Francis clan to their pod.

  The external door irised open to reveal the shuttle’s internal structure. The pneumatic sounds of air-lock seals hissed through the compartment.

  “Whoa,” Deidra said. “It’s beautiful.”

  Casmir smiled. He couldn’t have said it better himself. Everything about the shuttle’s design was smooth and sleek, which stood out in stark contrast against the threadbare efficiency of Freedom Three’s basic monotony. Seating was padded, and had automatic restraints that each user could control themselves. The ceiling was lined with a continuous video display that was currently flashing with a request for everyone to take seats before the artificial gravity system was enabled.

  Once they were settled, even Wallace stared ou
t the shuttle’s porthole as the pod launched and the sleek-hulled Icarus came into view.

  Casmir looked at Yvonne, who was staring intently into the darkness outside the other porthole. He took her hand to squeeze it.

  “I think we’re in the clear,” he whispered into her ear.

  She shook her head, but gave his hand a return squeeze.

  This wait, of all of them, seemed the hardest for Casmir. It was two minutes only, three at the most, while the shuttle ferried them from the carcass of Freedom Three to the future inherent in the Icarus loading bay. But every second seemed to stretch for him. Every moment seemed to fold in on itself until finally they connected to the Star Drive’s loading bay.

  Doors opposite them irised open to reveal an air lock.

  The sound of air streaming into the environment built.

  Then the far doors opened.

  “Welcome aboard the UGIS Icarus,” a piped voice said over the speaker. “Please take your time and disembark carefully as the artificial gravity systems may be gently mismatched.”

  Finally, after all others had left the shuttle, Casmir, Yvonne, his children, and his entourage stepped through the bay and into the ship’s corridors.

  The lighting was bright enough that he had to blink several times.

  The air was fresh and clean.

  Holo projections lined the walls with images of Earth and Mars.

  The artificial gravity system was perfectly balanced.

  For that moment he put politics and the industrially complex issues of the UG aside, and merely admired the beauty of something as miraculous as a spacecraft that could travel faster than light.

  He admired everything about the moment: the expanse of the craft, the clean aroma of the service bay, the sensation of engineering and vision that had combined to make it happen. Everything. Everything about Icarus that there was to envy, Casmir envied. He saw that same envy on the face of every person in his circle, Yvonne, Cash, Wallace, and even Deidra.

  It would be wrong to ever underestimate a people who could make something like this, he thought. But for now he merely enjoyed their efforts.