Starfire

by B. V. Larson

  This project wasn’t a simple matter of risked profits or getting fired. Her company wasn’t going to go broke, instead her country was going to be leapfrogged by the Russians, of all people.

  Throughout her professional career, the Russians had been a joke. They’d always had nukes, sure. They had an effective military, but their economy had been in shambles before the fall of Communism, and afterward it hadn’t been all that much better. They were too full of corruption and lacked the kind of unity of purpose and sense of fair play the Americans had enjoyed. That was the reason America had excelled.

  At least, that’s what she’d always believed. Looking back, she saw a slightly different reality. The United States, apparently, had been cheating a little. They’d mined out advances from this ship, secrets in processing and materials that had been discovered and quietly passed on. They’d doled out these technical triumphs for decades.

  Putting aside any philosophical or ethical concerns, the situation had changed drastically for her country. They could lose their spot to a hungry wolf. To a nation long spurned and left behind technologically.

  The Russians were not an easy-going lot. She knew that. She’d worked with eastern euro types in her science endeavors. They were everywhere in universities across the U. S., and in technical companies. They didn’t smile when you made a mistake. At best, they stared. At worst, they sneered.

  By comparison, American scientists were often boisterous and jovial. They played pranks and enjoyed their lives. They seemed, in retrospect, to be the frat-boys of science when compared to Asians and Europeans.

  Jackie heaved a sigh. The free ride had apparently come to an abrupt end. Her kind had always danced rings around the grim-faced foreign engineers who did uncounted bitter hours of homework every night. But now these legions of unhappy technical people were about to rise up and take the crown from her nation.

  Preventing this disaster was all up to her. The Brandts were more critical, but only because they couldn’t be replaced. The work part—that was all on her head. This ship’s engines had to function. The ship had to fly as soon as possible.

  While working inside the ship, she wore a full body-suit. These suits were uncomfortable. They were heavy with insulation and lead. The ship was slightly radioactive. She got the feeling that whoever had built it didn’t mind these conditions. They must have come from a place where radiation and cold were a constant factor. That would give them an advantage in space travel, she knew. Space wasn’t much more than a cold void full of deadly flying particles.

  The ship was broken down into two levels, or decks. The top deck had the control systems, such as they were, and chambers dedicated to living space. The upper chambers were roomy, perhaps ten thousand feet of open area, but the sloping walls made it difficult or even impossible to stand erect in many areas. Maybe the aliens were short, or built low to the ground.

  The lower deck was different, more unpleasant. That’s where Jackie found herself stationed for long hours. Here the cold was less intense due to the equipment she found everywhere. Most of it was earthly, but there were large enclosures of metal alloy that housed the machinery to drive the vessel. The enclosures looked like dome-shaped bubbles of dull gunmetal. The metal was covered in a dimpling of perforations. These puzzled Jackie.

  “What are these things?” she asked one of the techs. “What purpose is there to layering metal with dimples and perforations?”

  “It has a hardening effect,” answered the tech in a voice that was rather high-pitched for a male. “You may have read about it, Dr. Linscott. They call it super bainite.”

  Jackie thought back over her subscription to Scientific American and the countless technical websites she regularly perused for fun.

  “Yes, I think I’ve read about it,” she said. “What properties does it have? How does it work?”

  “Metallurgy,” the tech said. “We’ve learned a lot on that topic from this ship over the years. This perforated alloy is fantastically strong. Essentially, it’s steel, but it’s gone through a process of countless low-temperature heatings. The result is steel that is strong without becoming brittle. The carbon crystals are much smaller, you see.”

  Jackie nodded. She knew quite a bit about metallurgical processes, being an engine designer. She’d usually focused on ceramic material, but metals were always involved.

  “How strong?” she asked.

  The tech shrugged. “Well, it can support something like five billion pascals—double our best efforts to copy it. We can’t duplicate it, not even today.”

  She ran her hands over one of the domed surfaces. The dimpling felt rough to her touch. “So it’s less than a centimeter thick, but it’s as armored as a tank.”

  “Pretty much, yeah.”

  “You ever feel bad about lifting things like this from the ship, then passing them on to industry?”

  “Hell no,” said the tech. “Listen, if the Japanese or the Germans or any of the rest of them out there had this ship, they’d do the same thing. But maybe they would build an unstoppable military instead, and use it to lord it over our planet. Better us than them, I say.”

  It occurred to Jackie that some might argue the U. S. had done exactly what the tech was suggesting for the last fifty-odd years, but she held her tongue.

  The tech moved on, and Jackie went back to work. She didn’t want to become distracted by the wonders this ship held. She had a job to do, and she was becoming steadily more determined to do it.

  Why? She had to ask herself that. It wasn’t in her nature to throw herself into a government project. These people were everything she’d always feared government might become. Clark was a manipulative force of nature, and the scientists were robotic in their focus to obey him.

  Jackie knew why she wanted to make the ship fly, even before she’d asked herself the question. She had to know what was out there. From an early time in her life, she’d been fascinated by the stars and the planets which astronomers now knew swung around them in silent circles. Who lived on those planets? Who was out there, waiting to greet them?

  She’d dedicated her life to working on propulsion systems. But that was only a means to an end, a way to get out there and find what was lurking. Who was living in the next star system? What unknown neighbors did humanity have?

  That’s what kept her nursing coffee and working on algorithms and control units. That’s what kept her going until she couldn’t hold her eyes open. They had to figure this out.

  She had to figure it out.

  Chapter 42

  Interplanetary space, Aboard Troika

  Starlight

  Lev was getting tired of the routine. He’d been aboard this ship for days—what was it, a week now? He felt like he’d rather be back wandering around on the polar icecap.

  His mood improved only in the evenings, when the vodka ration was released. This was the best time of each twenty-four hour cycle of monotony. He never failed to take his entire ration and make instant use of it. Afterward, he harangued the various scientists until they gave him their rations as well.

  Only after he’d consumed three full rations did he feel good again. After that, he’d sleep until awakening in a foul mood to be bored until the next “evening” began.

  The scientists did little to alleviate his tedium. They were all happy enough. They were like pigs playing in mud and shit. They had measurements to take and an engine to care for. They stared at the pinpricks of light outside and marveled at their swift motion—but to Lev, they seemed to crawl by. He’d as soon watch the hands of a clock.

  Everyone aboard the ship was happy—except possibly for Dr. Norin and Lev himself. He went to talk to her after having avoided her for days. He didn’t know why—the woman was a crazy bitch who might still find a way to kill them all.

  “Dr. Norin,” he said one evening, after having consumed two and a half rations of alcohol. The last one he usually got off a man named Pokhis had been half-gone by the time he got his hands
on it. The man had possessed the temerity to guzzle some of his ration and not hand it over to Lev. Pokhis had survived the encounter, but only because Lev was already in a pretty good mood.

  “Ah, if it isn’t my drunken watchdog,” she replied without looking at him. “Sorry, I poured my ration into the toilet. Bit of a blow, I imagine.”

  Lev’s good mood evaporated. This woman could always do that to him. She’d proven it on a dozen occasions. “Damn you.”

  She snorted and shook her head. “You should dedicate yourself to higher pursuits, Lev,” she said.

  “Such as?”

  “This is a fantastic journey. Even I am engaged. Aren’t you curious what we’ll find out there under the ice?”

  “Ice? What ice?”

  “Europa is covered in ice, Lev. It’s rather like our polar icecap, in fact. An ocean of liquid water exists under the crust.”

  “Why should there be something under the ice?”

  “Well, the beam went out this way for a reason, there has to be a base or something out here. The surface would be too dangerous for anything to live on it, so most of us are assuming there will be something like our fallen starfish—a base of sorts under the ice.”

  Lev frowned. He wasn’t in full command of his faculties, but he could hold his liquor. His mind could reason fairly well even when under the powerful influence of an overdose.

  “Dangerous, you say? What kind of dangers? Animals or something?”

  Dr. Norin laughed. He hated when she did that.

  “No,” she said. “Animals—absurd! There is no air for them to breathe. And the radiation from Jupiter is intense. Anyone living on the surface would get about five hundred forty rem per day.”

  “Oh,” he said. That was an intense blasting of radiation. Even he knew that five hundred rem was a fatal dose. “A man wouldn’t last more than a day out there. That explains the heavy suits.”

  “Yes. Lead-lined, insulated.”

  “What was that surface temperature like again?” Lev asked, taking a seat he had not been offered.

  Dr. Norin frowned at him briefly but didn’t say anything about his presumption. “About negative one hundred seventy degrees centigrade.”

  “Hmm, a garden spot.” The polar icecap, which Lev was far too familiar with, rarely went below negative eighty. He put his head back against the wall of the room and closed his eyes. “What’s it look like, this planet?”

  “It’s not really a planet, it’s a moon,” she answered. “The fourth largest moon circling the biggest planet in the Solar System. There are sixty-six other moons around Jupiter, you know. It’s quite a busy place.”

  “Didn’t know that. Jupiter is just one bright dot in the sky on Earth, when you can see it at all.”

  “Lev,” she said suddenly. “Do you mind if I join you?”

  His eyes snapped open. She was standing now—standing rather close to him. She lifted her squeeze-bottle ration of vodka and waggled it to show what she meant.

  “I thought you’d dumped it.”

  She shrugged.

  He snorted. “By all means, then!”

  She drank her serving, and to his surprise, produced another bottle. He frowned at her.

  “Where did that come from?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Some of us drink our rations every night. A select unlucky few are talked into giving up their rations to you. I opted to save mine.”

  “What? Every night? Do you mean you have…?”

  She nodded, and pressed the drink into his hand.

  He smiled despite himself. He knew he shouldn’t, but he drank it. He drank it all. That felt good. He’d been getting teased by a shot or three, but now he was feeling it—and it was good.

  Dr. Norin sat close to him.

  He looked her over appraisingly. He considered shoving her away—but didn’t. She wasn’t a bad looking woman. She was a raving bitch, of course. She’d tried to freeze him aboard the sub, and she’d callously slaughtered her own people under the ice for some incomprehensible reason. But she reasonably attractive, and he was full of good drink.

  “How long is this trip going to take?” he asked her.

  “Don’t you listen to any of the briefings?”

  “No. There’s nothing for me to do on this ship. They dragged me along to watch you, that’s it. If my mission isn’t covered by a briefing, I sleep through it.”

  “Ten weeks. Maybe eleven, as slowing down and getting into orbit might be tricky with the new engine.”

  “Ten weeks? What?”

  She laughed. “You already forgot what you asked me?”

  “Oh—yes right. Ten weeks? Fuck. That’s a long time. I’ll be a wretch by the time we get there.”

  “Ten weeks is gloriously fast, Lev,” she said. “You don’t understand. This trip should take years. The new propulsion—”

  “If it had taken years, we wouldn’t have bothered to come out here at all. That would have been better. Space people—you’re all mad.”

  Dr. Norin didn’t say anything. Instead, she popped open another plastic bottle. She nursed it and told him in a soft voice more than he wanted to know about their destination, Europa.

  For years, the people of Earth had carefully considered Europa, a cold lonely outpost in space. The key to their fascination lay under the surface. It was the only place in the Solar System, other than Earth, which had liquid oceans. The oceans were like those under Earth’s northern pole, buried forever under thick ice which never melted. There had been endless speculation that this world could support life under the ice despite the bitter cold and the radiation. Water, liquid water—that was the major essential for life to exist.

  “But,” Lev asked her, “what keeps the water warm? Why isn’t it a solid block of ice? Are there volcanoes or something down there?”

  “Very thoughtful, despite your state of mind,” she said. “After a fashion, yes, there are volcanoes. Jupiter is a huge world, you see. It generates the heat that warms the heart of Europa.”

  Lev frowned, taking another bottle from her hand without even thinking about it. He was still managing to focus, though it was a struggle.

  “Jupiter? What? Does it function like the Sun?”

  “Jupiter is thirteen hundred times the size of Earth—but no, that’s not how it works. Think about the Earth. The Moon circles our world and causes the oceans to shift, forming tides. Well, on Europa, Jupiter does the same thing. But these tides are vicious and powerful. They tear the world to the very core because Jupiter’s pull is a thousand times stronger than that of our Moon. The ground itself moves and that creates heat through friction.”

  “Huh,” he said, thinking about it. “One more reason this place sounds like the cold version of Hell. What did the Vikings call it? Their Hell?”

  She smiled. “They called it ‘Hel’.”

  He laughed, and took in a deep breath. The simple act of breathing stung, and he knew that meant he should stop drinking. He knew this from long experience. He closed his eyes for a moment—then he felt movement, and he snapped them open again.

  Kira was on top of him, straddling him. He grabbed her wrists reflexively, squeezing hard. She yelped.

  His lips, moments earlier wearing a pleasant smile, curled into a snarl.

  “You’ll have to work harder than that to sneak up on a Spetsnaz man,” he told her.

  “Fool,” she said. “I was going to kiss you.”

  He examined each of her hands for weapons, but found nothing. Unconvinced, he searched her. She rolled her eyes and crossed her arms as he ran his hands over her body, checking every pocket.

  Nothing.

  By this time she’d begun to get up and leave.

  “Uh,” he said, releasing her. “Sorry. I didn’t expect this.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Are you still in the mood?”

  “Not in the slightest.”

  Lev reviewed his options. It had been a long, long time. He’d probably nev
er see Nika again, even if he did live long enough to get back to Moscow by some wild chance.

  “Have you got any more vodka?” he asked her.

  She glared at him. “Is that all you want? Another drink?”

  “I was thinking you could drink it.”

  Her mouth got very small. Finally, she burst out laughing. He could not recall having heard that sound from her more than once or twice. It was rather pleasant.

  “Budem zdorovy,” she said, and she produced two more plastic bottles of booze.

  Lev set his aside. “You first,” he said.

  “Still suspicious?”

  “I would suspect my own grandmother on Christmas morning.”

  She drank, and when she was done, they kissed. Soon, things progressed. Lev tried to hold back, to remain aloof, but it had been too long, and he’d consumed too much bad vodka.

  They made wild, desperate love on an uncomfortable bunk. The act was further complicated by the fact they were both floating, making leverage difficult. They had to wrap their feet and hands around handholds, rather than one another.

  But they managed it, and they enjoyed it, and afterward Lev knew he’d never be able to look at this she-devil in quite the manner she deserved.

  Chapter 43

  Area 51, Gamma Level

  Underground

  Brandt made his play on a Thursday in broad daylight.

  He’d been planning it for two weeks. He didn’t know if it would work or not, but he thought he’d give it a shot anyway. After all, the security people all had orders by now not to kill him. They’d have to subdue him the old-fashioned way—and he wasn’t going to make that easy on them.

  One of the keys to his plan was the suits they had to wear while working inside the ship. He’d insisted on opening it up every day for Jackie Linscott. She was a nice enough sort, even if she was working for his enemies.

  Opening up the lower deck required a suit. Anti-radiation, anti-cold, and made of incredibly tough fabric. It was better than Kevlar—he’d tested it. One more trick these people had gleaned from the ship over the years.