Starburst (Stealing the Sun Book 2)

by Ron Collins

  The entire mission took just under an hour.

  The destruction would cripple the Uglies for months, if not years.

  As they prepared to jump back to Atropos, Casmir thought he might beam a message to the UG—something short but reasonably stated to suggest they could avoid a devastating war if they just left Universe Three alone, something that invited their people to join U3 in the Eta Cass system if they wanted.

  Yes, he liked that idea. Not that the United Government would pay it any mind. But that kind of message would play well with the people, and he always needed enough of the people on his side. It was the people who mattered, after all. They were the ones who would use the pipelines his people were now going to be able to make in a nearly unlimited fashion.

  In the end, though, he didn’t.

  Not yet.

  Once his Universe Three was settled and it was safe to publicize their location, though, that’s what he would do.

  He smiled to see Einstein was in orbit when they returned.

  It’s over, he thought.

  They had made it to Eta Cass in one piece. The UG couldn’t find them. The war was done. The colony was free. The family was together again.

  He felt a new essence inside him.

  His mind went to Ellyn Parker, Perigee.

  Then he turned back to his crew and began to direct their shuttle down to the base.

  They had lives to build.

  The Galopar Mission

  .

  CHAPTER 28

  UGIS Orion

  Local Solar Date: June 15, 2206

  Local Solar Time: 1112 Hours

  Nimchura pressed the targeting sequence on his e-lint system, engaging the atomic tagging process that latched the prototype rocket’s guidance system onto the bandit skimmer. His breathing was controlled, his mind engaged and focused on the controls as his XB-25 Firebrand hurtled through space on full burn. A trim rocket along his fuselage fired staccato bursts of blue and purple plasma that snaked in trails alongside the machine’s body and finally trailed under his cockpit. He banked on a hard left. Artificial gravity built in his spine as the Firebrand slid away, leaving the rocket to run on its own.

  A moment later, the target was gone, and Nimchura released a breath.

  “Bandit destroyed,” he said into his intercom.

  “Roger, Yuletide. You can shut her down now. Good work.”

  He sat back in the seat and flipped the switches that disconnected him from the program, then pressed the latch that released the pneumatic door. It rose like the wing of a bird, revealing Jarboe standing there with an impatient scowl covering his expression.

  “If I have to drop another fake skimmer, I think I’m going to go crazy,” Nimchura said.

  “Time’s coming,” Jarboe replied. “Need to be sharp when it gets here.”

  “Nothing like optimism from the mission man.”

  Jarboe glared, and Nimchura actually stepped back.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m just kinda ready to burst, you know?”

  “Yeah,” Jarboe said as he stepped into the simulator to take his turn. “It’s like dancing with a holo.”

  “So to speak,” Nimchura added.

  “It beats working with the press, though,” Jarboe said as the door to the sim pod swung down.

  “Burning my eyes out with a laser rod beats working with the press,” Nimchura replied.

  The door slammed, cutting off Jarboe’s laughter.

  Nimchura rubbed his hand over his scalp. He needed a haircut.

  Jarboe could still piss him off, but the fact was that Nimchura saw his wing leader differently now. Not that it had mattered in the end. The failure to take back Einstein, and the destruction of Miranda Station’s manufacturing capacity changed everything for everyone. Orion was being kept on alert, but held within the close confines of the Solar System to protect her against further attacks. Instead of actually flying, every UG pilot was assigned a half a thousand training missions inside sims and told that “something big” would be coming sometime.

  Theoretically all this sim work provided the crew experience with new tech they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise, and let them practice maneuvers with the high-precision jumps that interstellar war would require. Each exercise included hours of simulated skimmer battles, which, yeah, were good practice—time in the bucket was always valuable—but scripted training runs were dry as toast: Launch, fly around a bit, press a few buttons on a disabled weapon stick, then hit reset. All of it played with professionally clipped voices and hearty handshakes afterward.

  Whoop-de-do.

  He wanted to fly.

  “Having fun?”

  He turned to see Igrid Messier, one of Interstellar Command’s press relations crew, and the contact assigned to manage Deuce and Yuletide’s Ex-Comm—which was Command-speak for External Communications, which was UG-speak for Meeting the Press and Answering a Bunch of Dumb-Assed Questions. She leaned against the doorway with one shoulder, her short hair staying in place as she cocked her head and appraised him.

  “Hi, Igrid,” he responded, knowing Jarboe had set him up.

  “That was pretty good,” she said. “I almost didn’t see the eyes rolling.”

  The simulator made an airy screech that mimicked what a mission sounded like inside the cockpit. Jarboe was launching. The bandits would arrive in a few minutes. Nimchura wished the bandits luck, and considered bribing the controller to give the skimmers a couple extra atomic blasters.

  “What is it today?” Nimchura said to her. “Kids in a hospital? Dogs need walking? A senator in hot water?”

  Messier gave a smile. “Talk show.”

  This time he made no attempt to hide the rolling of his eyes.

  Their time with the press began a month earlier when they gave a commencement address to the graduating class at LUMI, sharing the podium as Number One and Number Two, Deuce and Yuletide, the best fliers in the command: two brave pilots, competitors apart, deadly combined. Their story, Deuce using his Firebrand as a transport’s engine to salvage a mission and Yuletide saving Deuce, glowed with a message of unity, daring, and honor that made even grown adults cry. The fact that the rangers probably did not survive was glossed over.

  When the news cycle picked it up, talk shows began to ask for them.

  The UG, eager for anything to change the press’s focus away from inept war-planning and devastating losses, was only too happy to oblige. Soon Deuce and Yuletide were reassigned to doing commercials, giving inspirational talks at conferences, and air shows.

  It was the first time Nimchura had ever been asked to do anything like that.

  All his life had been about fighting for what was his, but now he had reporters fighting to get in front of him, and women, who he had rarely had great difficulty with before, now actively hunting him down. It bent his mind to read stories of dogfighting aerobatics that were technically impossible and kill ratios that would have made the bloody Red Baron faint. And at first it was fun. He learned how to use his Mississippi drawl to be endearing, and that if he let himself get excited some people thought he was happy to be there. But it didn’t take long for things to get out of hand.

  “I promise you,” he once said to Jarboe after reading something called the E-Z-See Daily, “I never said an alien sat on my wing.”

  Jarboe laughed at that.

  The only good thing about all the talking they did was that Todias Nimchura felt like he was slowly beginning to see the wires and ropes down inside his wing leader’s psyche, understanding that Jarboe was just as frustrated with the fact that they weren’t flying now, but that his wing leader could manage that frustration so that no one could see it. By seeing those wires and ropes Nimchura was getting an idea of how the guy worked—which he admitted was strange as hell, but interesting. More interesting, though, was that he was learning how to do a little of it himself.

  It only took a few cycles to realize that PR work made them both need a barf bag, thou
gh.

  No one else seemed to quite notice it, but he had grown to know Jarboe better than anyone else. He knew his wing leader was nearing a breaking point when he saw Jarboe snap at questions and get lost staring out windows in spaceports as they waited for shuttles.

  The only thing that Alex Jarboe really wanted to do was to fly, and that was the one thing they most definitely were not doing.

  CHAPTER 29

  Washington, DC

  Local Solar Date: July 6, 2206

  Local Solar Time: 1115 Hours

  It had been twelve weeks since Willim Pinot had taken Paul Kane’s old job in the wake of the Orion and Miranda fiascoes. The news had not gotten particularly better, though the losses since then had come in a less public fashion.

  Now Pinot sat on a bench, his business coat folded up beside him as he sweltered in the heat and watched a scattering of people move up and down the sidewalk. Everything from the sweat on his palms to the way the bench’s peeling green paint clung to his pants made him feel sticky. He wasn’t used to being in the field himself, but the opportunity had been too good to pass up. He had taken a tube into town this morning, and would be back home this evening.

  The Lincoln Memorial was to his right, the Washington Monument to the left. They were remainders from the old world, as out-of-date as the idea of spending time outdoors. More decrepit statues and vine-clotted buildings stood scattered across his view, but Pinot quite honestly had no idea what they were, nor quite honestly did he care. Starlings and grackles moved across the lawns with the ugly motions that made him think of witches and sorcerers. The sun filtered through a few trees growing behind him. He was glad for that, at least. The wind picked through the hairs on his rapidly balding head. His tiny bag of popcorn drew a crowd of sparrows. Pinot put a kernel in his mouth while looking aggressively at the birds.

  “Do they scare you?”

  The voice came from a man seated on the bench behind him.

  “Only when they cry,” he replied as expected.

  “Yet they only cry when called upon.”

  Pinot crunched another few kernels.

  “Colonel Dembu,” Pinot said, not looking over his shoulder.

  “What do you have?” The military man’s voice was smooth as vanilla bean coffee.

  “All business today, eh?”

  “I have a war to win.”

  Pinot, feeling it was wise to understand the people around him, had studied the colonel closely for some time and come to the conclusion that the man did not use this scarcity of words due to any desire to drive efficiency, but rather as a show of power. Dembu prided himself on the ability to wield words like swords. He swung his sentences in killing arcs that drew attention as much for their grace as their precision.

  They could use more of that, now.

  The news services may be full of jingoistic optimism and stories of expectation, but Pinot knew better. The United Government couldn’t find U3 now, and even if it could its leadership was at odds regarding what to do about it. Without a fully operational Miranda Station, their responses were as limited as the wiggle room the political structure was giving them, and the vast remoteness that served to make it perfect for manufacturing the Solar System’s most sensitive military systems was now serving to make it more difficult to bring it back on line.

  Given the current political situation, though, men like Adubai Dembu were caught in the middle with a job description that read: Make it go away, but don’t hurt anyone in the process.

  “You’ve got leaks, Colonel,” Pinot said. “Universe Three has been buying secrets.”

  The sound of paper rustling was the colonel’s only immediate response. Pinot smelled the faint aroma of mustard and salami sandwich.

  “Who?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “There’s knowing, and there’s knowing.”

  “Then what makes you suspect leaks?”

  Pinot ate more popcorn.

  “We know U3 acquired control of the ships by first accessing and overriding the security systems—which alone would require several sleeper agents. But they were also able to modify our laser defense systems much more rapidly than they should have been able to, and they understood classified navigation techniques well enough to sit down perfectly on Miranda. They knew enough to dump X-ray trash before a second jump, which makes it almost impossible to determine their eventual course.”

  “I see.”

  “So they’ve got people in each of those areas, and they’ve almost certainly been buying scientists.”

  “Engineers, too.”

  Pinot nodded and wiped his greasy fingers on his pant leg. “I suspect they’ve been bird-dogging every technology we’ve looked at for the past fifteen years. Maybe longer. Probably had an ear to the comm lines of half the influential members of Supreme President Mubadid’s staff for at least that long, too.”

  “Hard to believe a fringe organization can pull this off.”

  The sound of the colonel eating his sandwich came through the breeze.

  “You’ve been reading my reports.”

  “They’re better than Kane’s were.”

  Pinot smiled, retrieved a handkerchief from his pocket, and mopped his brow.

  He had been telling people for months that U3 was not the tiny fringe organization they were categorized as by most analysts. This trail of reports had gotten him his position when Kane was canned. The more Pinot studied Casmir Francis, the more he admired the man. Universe Three may well be the largest single political organization in the known universe, yet Francis had both public and military opinion of his capability so deeply bluffed that the popular opinion said they were just another ragtag band of grease-painted commandoes that ran occasional pain-in-the-butt operations every now and again.

  The storyline was that U3 had just gotten lucky this time.

  Pulled off a one-in-a-million heist.

  But, as the storyline went, now Francis had to live with his luck, and that was a different story all together. The big joke around the UG-shaped civilization was how absolutely stunned Casmir Francis was going to be when he figured out what a colossal mistake he had made.

  Idiots.

  Pinot waited while a father and three red-cheeked kids stepped past them.

  “I know where U3 is,” he finally said to Dembu.

  “I thought it was impossible to track them.”

  “It is almost impossible to track them.”

  “I see.”

  “I thought that might interest you.”

  “How did you find them?”

  “We all need our own little secrets, now, don’t we?”

  Francis was not the only person in the universe who understood how to use the “human” part of human intelligence, and Pinot wasn’t going to out anything that might result in an agent left hanging.

  “You found one of their agents?”

  The sound of wind filled the place where Pinot’s voice wasn’t.

  “Where are they?” Dembu said.

  “I know the star system, but I’m still working on the exact details.”

  The bench creaked as Dembu shifted his weight. He was angry now. Not that Pinot blamed him. The cat-and-mouse game Pinot was playing was shitty.

  “We’ve got soldiers dying out in space, son,” the colonel said. “Do you know what the hell you’re doing?”

  “Details will come soon.”

  “I want details now.”

  “Soon,” Pinot said. He ate popcorn and felt the bench shift under Dembu’s weight again.

  The colonel was getting ready to leave.

  “That’s not why I called you out here, though.”

  The bench grew still again.

  “I’m listening.”

  “I’ve been reading about you, colonel.” He rolled the paper bag up to seal the popcorn and put it on the seat beside him to give Dembu time to consider what that might mean. “We share certain opinions. We
both know Francis has to be dealt with. We also share a distrust of politicians. We both know that if we do this in certain ways that it won’t get done right because some grunty UG commando will find some way to screw it up. We both know that war on the galactic scale is going to be impossible to win, and even more impossible to get out of. So we both lose sleep at night because we know that if we just do our jobs, there will be soldiers dying out in space for the next several decades.”

  The colonel said nothing.

  “I’m thinking that rather than go that direction, it might make sense to set up a team, let’s say a group of military and intelligence personnel, a couple hundred folks, maybe, in a small base out there where U3 calls home, a hidden outpost near the terrorists’ den that we can use as a central hub.”

  “That could take months.”

  “Maybe years,” Pinot said.

  He waited while the idea settled.

  Star Drive ships altered the face of space travel, but now the next-generation cruisers—Venture and her sister ships—would not be built for years. And until these ships rolled off the production line, the UG had only the Orion at their disposal. Dembu was smart enough to know this meant that at best Orion could be theirs only part-time and only by wielding a great deal of political clout—clout that Pinot was pretty sure Dembu had just enough of—and even when they could win a mission, it would be a watered-down jaunt somewhere useless so that the craft was guaranteed to remain in service—unless that mission could be finagled just right.

  Dembu was smart enough to know that despite the fact that the UG wouldn’t take audacious risks with their only Star Drive craft, the distances associated with space were impossible to deal with if they didn’t have feet on the ground in the proper systems. The career military officer would know instinctively that if UG politicians were to ever learn where Universe Three’s camp was, they would fall over one another to be the first to send a mission to destroy it—but that this mission was certain to be a tactical loss, that Universe Three had Star Drive capability and an all-out attack was destined to fail and leave worse behind for the kids who were dying out in space to deal with.