Starclash (Stealing the Sun Book 4)

by Ron Collins

  “You’ll support me, then?”

  Yamada nodded. She ran her hand through her hair after the breeze picked it up again. “Yes,” she said. “Given that, I think Miranda Station is the place.”

  Deidra breathed a sigh of relief.

  It was good to know she had Yamada’s support.

  CHAPTER 27

  Sidney, Australia

  Local Date: February 3, 2215

  Local Time: 0615

  Willim Pinot, manager of the Interstellar Insurgency branch of the UG Intelligence Office, scanned the display as he walked on his treadmill. He was tall, and his gait was still the same awkward motion it had been when he was younger. His knees ached now, though. Not good for someone who wasn’t yet officially old.

  An insulated coffee mug sat in the holder to his right.

  A plush, golden towel draped over his shoulders.

  Outside the twenty-fifth-floor hotel exercise room, the sun rose out of the Pacific Ocean. An hour from now he would be gathering with several hundred other people—leaders of every faction in the Solar System’s governmental structure, and their entourages, of course—in the hotel’s basement conference center, a large meeting hall outfitted with both physical and virtual stations.

  They would be voting on an proclamation to officially make the production of additional Excelsior class Star Drive systems the highest priority on all agendas. It was a sham vote, of course. There was no political drive to do anything else, and actions were already being taken as if the directive was signed. So the session would mostly be about leaders making preconfigured speeches that played to their constituents, as if that really mattered—which, he supposed it did, really. The idea that people still had a choice in who led them was vital to manage unless one was interested in an uprising.

  Pinot, however, was here for a different game.

  He thought about that as he pushed the velocity on the treadmill up to five kph.

  His official reason for being here was to support his boss, Sela Matz, who was still the system’s Chief Intelligence Officer. While it wasn’t openly discussed, Pinot knew Matz was going to leave her post soon. Some said Supreme President Laney Mubadid had asked Matz to help in her reelection efforts, others thought Matz was being pressured to run for the position herself—which was a stupid idea in the end. No spook leader stood a real chance of beating a corporate leader, and Pinot knew his boss to be smart enough to understand that.

  Regardless, it meant the CIO position was going to be open, and Pinot was here to stake his claim.

  And now, more than ever, that would mean being right about Universe Three.

  More reports from the Natim raid were coming in.

  He smiled as he scanned them.

  With Casmir Francis dead, the rest of the intelligence community was busy determining who was in charge of the terroristic group. The general consensus leaned to the Number Two man, Gregor Anderson. That would be the standard play. Anderson had been part of the U3 power structure for a long time, and the transition would be smooth. It was natural to think U3 would simply move their second in command up to fill the leadership role of their dead martyr.

  Pinot’s team analyzed the stream of bits that had come into UG receivers, small snippets of communication that had passed between Universe Three raiders as they completed the mission. One mentioned Aldrin Station, which is near where Everguard had been scuttled. Another spoke of Kensington Station, a key element of the mining operation that fed the Excelsior manufacturing capacity. Two separate items mentioned Tethys, which was interesting because of the exotic matter containment plant located there.

  Together, his team had decided they were possible points of the next raid.

  And if Gregor Anderson was the man in charge, perhaps they would be right. Anderson had a straightforward sensibility to him. Anderson wouldn’t play a game of feints and dodges before reaching for the UG’s gonads.

  But Pinot had studied Anderson as fully as he had studied Francis, and the bottom line was that the Natim operation wasn’t in the man’s playbook.

  In retrospect Icarus’s arrival point was the first domino to fall for Pinot. The Universe Three spacecraft had entered Mars orbit in the exact coordinates relative to the planet that the UG had jumped Orion to in order to launch the attack on U3’s outpost all those years ago. He had noted it then, but hadn’t put the whole thing together until later.

  Now, every report that came in included a tidbit of information that filled in the gaps as certainly as if they were mortar being used to lay bricks.

  Just as Icarus’s launch coordinates were precisely placed, the flight paths had been sublimely coordinated. The battle order—U3’s work to strip gun placements first—was a familiar callout to that first assault, too, and the drop pattern of the bombing runs had been matched as perfectly as they could have been matched to the UG raid.

  He smiled as he took in the entire work.

  The whole of the plan told him what he needed to know.

  This operation had been a piece of art.

  It was about revenge, yes, but a special kind of revenge.

  Specific. Pointed.

  This was an attack that meant something personal to whoever laid it out, and that alone led him to one person.

  Deidra Francis was in charge now.

  And Deidra Francis was a different beast altogether.

  Pinot stopped the treadmill, wiped a bead of sweat from his brow, and went to the shower room to prepare.

  Life in this little nook of the galaxy was about to get interesting.

  * * *

  Pinot was a touch late getting to his seat, so the representative from Calisto was already on the floor giving a fiery speech in which he promised the peaceful people of his station were not willing to let Universe Three get away with this atrocity, and pledged to take any steps necessary to see them come to justice.

  Pinot nodded to his boss, who was, as always, seated in a position that gave her access to see the entire room with the exception of the few seats that had been reserved for her people.

  Her nod on his arrival said she had received his notice.

  The tilt of her head said she wanted to discuss it.

  He took the open seat beside her.

  “Your team says Universe Three will strike Kensington,” she said to him while keeping her gaze on Calisto’s representative.

  “Yes,” Pinot replied while keeping a similar posture. “That’s what they say.”

  “It’s unusual for a leader to argue against his own team.”

  Pinot ran his fingers down the sides of his thin goatee. He understood her comment—leaders who went against the grain of their own organization ran certain risks no matter what happened, different risks depending on if they were right or wrong, but risks. It was easier to take the advice of others, and then sidestep blame if that advice wound up wrong.

  “You know me, Sela,” Pinot replied.

  Her grin was cold.

  “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

  “She gave us those snippets on purpose.”

  “She?”

  “Deidra Francis.”

  Matz’s eyes closed slightly as she considered his inference.

  “Universe Three will go back to Miranda Station,” Pinot said as she thought. “It’s all in the brief I sent you. She’ll attempt to cut the head off our program right now. I can even give you the plan she’ll use.”

  “If this is wrong, we’re both done.”

  “It’s not wrong.”

  As the silence grew, Pinot felt the strength of that statement also grow. He was right. He had to be right. Such certainty is dangerous to a person of his profession. Certainty in the eye of probability is the first step to false ideology. But now that he had said it out loud, the sensation of certainty fell over him like a warm shower.

  “Get me on Admiral Umaro’s calendar,” Matz finally said. Then she sat back and listened impassively as the representative of Calisto gave the floor to the
representative from Europa Colony Davies.

  Pinot pressed his lips into a single line, rose from his chair, and left the room. He had won. There was only one reason to call on Umaro. His boss was a person who knew how to push buttons, and now she was going to push Admiral Umaro’s buttons.

  Orion was going to be deployed to Miranda Station.

  CHAPTER 28

  Sidney, Australia

  Local Date: February 3, 2215

  Local Time: 0815

  From across the conference hall, Torrance watched the tall man pick his way to a seat beside the UG’s Chief Intelligence Officer. He should know who this man was, he thought. Reyes had been pushing him to learn all the administrators of all the major factions in the UG hierarchy by sight, but there was so much to learn in so much time. He knew Sela Matz was the CIO, but he came up blank on the man.

  He watched them speak, though.

  It felt unreal. Like he was watching a spy movie.

  After a few minutes, the man got up and left the room.

  “Did you see that?” Reyes said when it was obvious Torrance had. “Willim Pinot,” the ambassador added.

  “Thank you.”

  “When you come to these, you watch everything,” Reyes said. “There are games being played everywhere.”

  “What game was that?”

  The shoulders of Reyes’s ambassadorial robes rose in a shrug.

  “The games played by intelligence agents are rarely clear, Torrance, but the right question to always ask is what is it that they want.”

  Torrance took in that idea.

  What did the CIO want here?

  What game was Pinot playing?

  What would the intelligence community get from a decision on how to accelerate building the Excelsior spacecraft or the decision on where to put the additional production capabilities?

  “Are they worried about losing funding?”

  Reyes puckered his lips and shook his head no. “Most of their money is black, anyway. Not even the supreme president knows what the intelligence community actually spends.”

  Torrance thought harder.

  The intelligence community didn’t really have a play here, did it? Sela Matz had no vote in the decision. She wasn’t lobbying anyone.

  “Why would the intelligence community even be here?” he said.

  “That’s another good way to phrase the question.”

  Torrance took a breath and scanned the entire room, noting how Sela Matz was doing the same thing. He watched her work, watched the men and women who sat in her area work—because that’s what they were doing, working, watching and absorbing, taking in behaviors, making notes. As he scanned the room, the CIO’s dark brown gaze locked directly with his.

  His breakfast turned sour in his belly, and he suddenly felt the same chill that he had felt when he first stepped into Government Security Officer Casey’s office on Everguard.

  On the floor, the leader from Io asked his compatriots to add a new production line to enhance scientific research. “Vote yes on the military,” he called out, “but let’s add more, vote yes on the brave adventurers we have in our midst, too. Vote, yes,” he said amid light applause. “I say vote yes, and yes, and yes.”

  * * *

  A grueling six hours later, the resolution passed with only three nays and four abstentions. The bill included an immediate spending increase for the defense of all existing manufacturing facilities that supported the Star Drive program, and military support for all space stations, corporations, direct contractors, and suppliers that touched on the manufacturing pipeline.

  “We will also be putting key science personnel under lockdown to protect them from harm,” added General Ophelia Nichols, who was announced as the new UG press secretary, responsible for all information regarding the action that was now officially being considered as the first interstellar war in history.

  As far as Torrance could tell, the spending bill had no defined cap.

  Not that it mattered.

  As he left the conference hall, Torrance thought about the ruins of Mars Colony Natim, some of which was reported to still be burning. He remembered Everguard.

  He wasn’t going to lie to himself and pretend that the escalation he had seen in the past few weeks didn’t leave him unnerved, but as he watched the show unfold before him a certain essence of resolved understanding came over him. What else was there to do, after all? The UG had tried peace, and its own military had intervened. Universe Three was most unlikely to agree to another parlay.

  Still, Torrance was also not going to deny the sense of hopeless dread that crept over him, a feeling accompanied by a touch of helplessness.

  Even if he could see a different way out, which he couldn’t, Torrance felt the unstoppable wheels of power moving now.

  The blood in the room was up, and that gave everything a sensation of being out of control that he didn’t like. Torrance understood reason. He understood cause and effect. This was what made him good at what he did. But sitting here amid this discussion, watching the speakers parade up to the podium and watching the security and intelligence officers in the room work, Torrance felt the world shifting underneath him.

  When the meeting had started, the United Government was not expected to launch their next Excelsior class ship for as many as nine months, but now he was sure that date would be considerably sooner.

  That was good, wasn’t it?

  CHAPTER 29

  U3 Ship Icarus, Pod Bay

  Local Date: Conejo 14, 9

  Local Time: 1320

  Matt Anderson had run this mission before, though they were approaching from the west and north this time, rather than the east, and this time he had an entire squadron of combatants under his command rather than just two. Intel suggested a new ring of plasma cannons had been placed on Miranda herself, and their mole was assigned to bunker three, positioned in the northern hemisphere.

  Anderson sat in his Z-pad, waiting for the jump to finish, wondering about the mole.

  It was a dangerous life, infiltrating the UG and feeding information back. Intense. He wouldn’t want to do that kind of work, live that kind of life. Certain identities were kept quiet, but the rumor was that the average lifespan of a U3 spy was no better than a few years at best. This one, whoever it was, would be running a tight line. He or she was going to take down the bunker from within, allowing the mission to proceed more quickly and effectively than it would have if Z-pad cover had to be peeled off to destroy the cannon before the rest of the mission could proceed.

  A voice came through his headset.

  “Jump target achieved in five…four…”

  He scanned the control panels, and saw the mission plan was scrolling.

  “Three...two…”

  They had forty minutes from bay door open to return. Anything more than that would give UG’s Orion time to jump in and disrupt the cycle. Icarus would arrive, the doors would open, and then they had five minutes to shoot the gap to Miranda’s horizon, ten minutes on station to destroy as much of the thing that they could destroy. That was the good thing—they weren’t here to gather up anything, only to destroy. The mission had patterns planned, but everyone knows that a full-scale battle like this wasn’t something that played to plan. At the end of the day, he was going hunting, and that was fine by him.

  UG had killed Casmir Francis like the cowards they were.

  He gripped his yoke.

  “One…”

  He swallowed hard. The rumbling of the engines shook the entire craft as its engines spun up.

  “On zone.”

  The doors began to open. Light from the edge of the moon illuminated the dark Z-pad bay.

  “Go mission,” the voice said.

  Acceleration pressed Anderson into his seat as the Z-pad launched, then released. His squadron formed up as it streamed toward the horizon.

  The sensor screen began to scream at him and flash yellow. “Intruders locked,” the system told him.


  Intruders.

  He gritted his teeth and twisted the yoke to make an avoiding roll. A plasma rocket flashed past. Another Z-pad exploded at the depths of his periphery.

  He saw UG skimmercraft homing in on him, and homing in on Icarus herself. He was going to be too late. He saw that, then. The attack force was intense—too intense to mean anything except that Orion had been stationed here. None of the Z-pads would make it back before Icarus was destroyed. If she stayed on station, everything was lost.

  “Abort!” he called into the communicator, and stomped on the deflector to put his skimmer into an inside loop that would bring him around. “The bastards knew we were coming!”

  He didn’t see the UG skimmer on his left, but his sensor screen alerted him, and his threat analysis system adjusted his course. He put himself into a wide barrel roll, focusing his sight on a single bright star in the middle of the velvety black patch of deep space that filled the view outside his cockpit.

  That darkness and that star were the last things Matt Anderson saw.

  In the distance, Icarus shut its pod bay doors, and, as Z-pads exploded into fragments, jumped its way out of the Solar System.

  SOURCE: INFOWAVE — NEWS for the twenty-third century

  DATE: February 6, 2215, Earth Standard

  HEADLINE: Universe Three Attack Thwarted

  With news of the attack on Mars Colony Natim still fresh on everyone’s minds, word that UG forces have repelled a second such operation comes as revitalizing news. Officials announced that a sortie of U3 Z-pad fighters had been intercepted prior to their arrival on site at Miranda Station.

  “We stopped them cold,” said Press Secretary Ophelia Nichols.

  She went on to suggest that the rapid-fire attacks coming from Universe Three suggest that the terrorist organization is worried they will fall behind UG’s production capability.

  “I would worry if I were them, too,” she said.

  When asked if Interstellar Command had plans to take the attack to the U3 bases in Eta Cassiopeia, Nichols had no direct answer.