Starclash (Stealing the Sun Book 4)
Page 18
“More busy than I imagined.”
“Glad to hear it.”
They both ate for a moment.
Katriana was nearly two decades older than Deidra, and she looked about as tired as Deidra felt. The pace of their movements and the decisions had been daunting.
“How are you feeling?” Katriana said.
“We’ve got a lot to do, but I think the team came up with a good plan today. We should have a real ground presence in two weeks. Base manufacturing up and running in six months. Maybe another Star Drive a year later,” she said, smiling. “Assuming UG doesn’t suss us out before then.”
She didn’t have to say that Icarus and Vengeance would spend a good chunk of that time running guerilla operations in the Solar System in order to keep UG off balance enough to give 37 Gem cover.
“That’s not what I asked.”
Deidra frowned.
Katriana put her fork down, reached across the table, and placed her hand over Deidra’s. “I asked how you are feeling.”
“Fine,” Deidra said.
Her friend nodded, then withdrew her hand, leaving a chilled spot at the back of Deidra’s.
“I was barely older than you when I lost my girls,” Katriana said. “Rosa and Talia. I know how hard it makes you. You lose people, and you dry up like cane.”
“You were strong enough for them, though,” Deidra said.
“No.”
“You made it through.”
“I guess. But those are two different things.”
“How did you do that?” Until she said it, Deidra hadn’t realized this was the question that she had been wanting to ask Katriana since the day the UG ripped up Atropos City.
“How did you keep your sanity?” she added.
Katriana shook her head absently. “I thought of them every day.”
“I’m doing that now, and it’s killing me.”
Katriana took a sip of her hot tea and grimaced as she swallowed it down. The lines that ran down her cheeks grew stronger as her expression tightened.
“I know. Every time I thought about my girls I felt like someone took a razor and slashed my heart. The world felt so big and terrible. I wanted to curl up and die. I wanted to quit because there was nothing I could do. But, every time I thought about that I realized that doing that meant that my girls wouldn’t have mattered.”
“So you decided to strike back.”
“I decided to make whatever difference I could, regardless of how little that might be.”
Deidra looked around the room.
Perhaps forty people were here, eating, talking with friends. None of them could do this alone, and yet together they formed a group that was preparing to make Star Drive spacecraft on a planet that had never before even had a human visitor. An image of Ellyn Parker climbing the human pyramid came over her, the sound of Papa’s voice reverberating in her memory. She thought of Matt Anderson and Timmon Keyes leaving the briefing room together after a pre-mission brief.
She raised her fork and took a bite of cake.
It was sugary and chocolate.
“Thank you,” she said after she swallowed it down. “Can I ask you another question?”
“Of course.”
“Are you proud of yourself?”
Katriana gazed away and a distant smile came to her lips. Then the smile grew warm and her gaze returned to Deidra’s, her brown eyes showing a hint of moisture at their corners.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I still think of my girls every day. I hope they know I love them.”
“I’m proud of you,” Deidra said.
Katriana smiled, and glanced at their plates. “Thank you,” she said. “Now eat your dinner or I’ll have to tell your mother I’ve lied to her.”
“We wouldn’t want that, now, would we?”
“No,” Katriana said. “We wouldn’t want that.”
EUROPA
Europa Station
Local Date: Classified
Local Time: Classified
Torrance stood at the edge of Europa Station’s observation deck, which was a little compartment that was currently positioned to stare out at Jupiter. The radiation-hardened coating of the shield was older technology, giving the orange striations that ran through the gas giant a green tint. He had just come from Marisa’s compartment. She was doing well—the burns had healed, and the DNA therapy was doing its best to rebuild her skin. Torrance figured she was nearly out of the woods now because she was joking with him one moment and calling him out on his bullshit the next.
That made him happy.
Or, if not exactly happy, at least content in a way that felt right. The future was, of course, uncertain, but now he felt confident that she would be part of it.
As he stood on the observation deck, however, Torrance was not thinking about Marisa.
Instead, he was thinking about the cloud cover that encased the planet, a hydrogen and helium atmosphere that surrounded the planet’s metallic core in a configuration and composition that made Jupiter almost more of a sun than a planet. By mass, it was nearly three times the size of the rest of the Solar System’s planets, combined. A little more oomph, Torrance thought, and perhaps it would have collapsed to form a star itself.
His morning brief said that a college class was coming tomorrow to run an exercise that would have them launch an instrumentation probe into the planet’s atmosphere so they could learn about orbital dynamics and chaotic weather patterns.
Torrance smiled at that.
It wasn’t that long ago that he was standing on a different observation deck and contemplating the effects of another exercise designed to put probes into a different ball of hydrogen and helium.
Had he made a good decision then?
How would everything be different if he hadn’t completed that mission? Probably not much. There’s always another guy, anyway. Always someone who will do the job.
Still.
A hundred million people dead in two hours.
Jesus.
Even months later, the size of that destruction was staggering.
He shook his head. What can one man do in this world? What can you do when events are so big and the wheels of power and fate turn in ways no one can expect?
Torrance had taken his position as the UG ambassador to Europa a month before Venture and Voyager were launched. It was a strange place to be—full of academics and mega-brains that weren’t afraid to have opinions about politics and the military. A place where the hallways were full of arguments.
His office was a corner nook of the Excelsior wing of the Jovian Science Center, which was the consortium responsible for the design, assembly, test, and staffing of what was planned to be the UGIS Magellan, the first, and possibly only spacecraft that the United Government would build for nonmilitary purposes.
He was a bit of an enigma in the center, part war hero, part government crony, part technical guru.
In other words, every day was full of stress.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Jared Kulpani asked as he stepped to Torrance’s side. Kulpani, Torrance’s new boss, was JSC’s president and he looked the part—tall and athletic enough that it was clear Kulpani was a runner or biker or regular participant in some other sport. Torrance made a mental note to find out what that was. As president, Kulpani was the ranking civilian officer on Europa Station, and as ranking civilian officer he held sway over most every decision he wanted to hold sway of.
“Yes, it’s beautiful.”
“How is Lieutenant Harthing?”
“Better every day.”
“That’s good. Settled in to your quarters, yet?”
“Yes. Maybe. I guess.” Torrance hesitated, feeling that awkward sense he got when it came to chitchat. “I can’t say that anything’s really felt like home since Everguard, to be perfectly honest.”
“I suppose it takes time.”
“That’s true enough.” Torrance gripped the rail before him. “It�
��s fun to be around so many smart people, though. That’s the thing I liked best about being a systems leader. It’s good to be somewhere I can at least pretend to be technical.”
“We do have a bucketload of brains here, that’s for sure.”
Torrance managed to succeed in his efforts not to roll his eyes. The term bucketload of brains was distinctly hated by every member of the staff as far as he could tell, so Kulpani’s use of it let Torrance know how far out of touch the president was.
Not that it mattered.
“How can I help you,” Torrance said, getting his mind fully back into gear in his role as ambassador.
“I had an application come across my desk this morning that I thought you might be interested in.”
“Really?”
Torrance wondered if Reyes had briefed the president during his visit a month prior. It would be like Reyes to plant such triggers with a leader like Kulpani.
“Does the name Thomas Kitchell ring a bell?”
Torrance couldn’t help but smile. “It does at that,” he said. “Do tell on.”
“He wants to come here for an internship next semester.”
“I would give him the highest recommendation, sir,” Torrance said. “It would be great to see him.”
“I’m glad to hear it, especially since his application specifies that he wants to work under you.”
“Is that so?” Torrance said.
“He’s been quite explicit. He comes to work under you, on a special project of your choosing, or he’s going accept a role with the Mars observatory system. His scores are already at the top of his class, and I understand he’s quite persuasive—so I can see why he’s interested in the ambassadorial side of the fence. I know this is technically outside his academic program, but I would hate to lose him.”
“I concur with that.”
“Should I tell him we accept his conditions?”
Torrance grinned and glanced back out at the clouds of Jupiter. He put his hands in his pockets, and felt his right hand close around the hard surface of the data crystal that still held the Eden data.
With everything going on, he hadn’t been able to bring himself to look at it.
He had planned to, of course.
He wanted to.
But he couldn’t tell himself that it mattered anymore, and to be fully truthful with himself, he wasn’t sure he could handle the idea of study after study ending in failure. So the idea of doing more work on the cube had left an ugly taste in his mouth. Even if he found something, he wasn’t sure that bringing an alien race into the mix of human politics today was particularly smart.
But Thomas Kitchell wanted to work with him.
The news was like a light switch hitting his adrenaline spigot.
A sense of optimism welled up in him stronger than any he had felt since…well…since he was on Everguard.
“Do you ever get the idea that the most important things we do in our lives don’t really have much to do with our jobs?” Torrance said.
“I suppose that depends on your job,” Kulpani said.
“Maybe you’re right,” Torrance replied.
But that was a lie as far as he was concerned. Thomas Kitchell was coming to work for him, and he was coming to work on a project that was outside Kitchell’s formal program of study, and a project no one else would understand.
Not yet, anyway.
Maybe never.
But Kitchell was coming, and despite everything else that was happening across the universe, that made Torrance happy. It made him feel like there was some kind of hope still left.
Still, he lied and said the president was right.
So maybe Reyes had been right when he told Torrance that he had the skills to do this job.
“So, do we accept Thomas Kitchell?” Kulpani said.
“Yeah,” Torrance replied. “But when you do, I want you to tell him he’ll have to toe a tight line here. Tell him that as long as he does that, I’m pretty much always willing to take a chance.”
“Great,” Kulpani said. “I’ll do that.” He turned to walk away.
“I mean it,” Torrance said, grabbing the president’s arm. “Word for word, all right?”
Kulpani seemed uncertain, but said, “Sure.”
Then he left Torrance alone to stare out into the clouds surrounding Jupiter, which he did for the next hour until Europa Station rotated such that the view was filled with the velvety darkness of deep space, highlighted by a pattern of stars.
NEWS
SOURCE: INFOWAVE — NEWS for the twenty-third century
DATE: August 20, 2215, Earth Standard
HEADLINE: Retaliation Finds Empty Nest
“They aren’t there,” said Press Secretary Kevin LaPierre as he displayed photographic evidence of a desolate Atropos City, the place that until just recently was known to be the home base for the renegade terrorist organization Universe Three.
It was clear that the civilization was evacuated recently, leaving even some construction in semi-completion in order to abandon the city. The photos revealed a ghost town that was at times unnerving in its simplicity. The stories they revealed spoke of the difficult lives that were likely led there.
“This is good news and bad news,” LaPierre added at one point. “It means that Interstellar Command has the upper hand, but it also means that Deidra Francis and the rest of the U3 leadership structure has likely split itself.”
LaPierre avoided several direct questions, but the prevailing wisdom seems to be that this interstellar war has now entered a new and very difficult phase.
“We’re not sure how to win a guerilla war in space,” one adviser said off the record. “This could get very ugly.”
This is the end of
STARCLASH
STEALING THE SUN: BOOK 4
If you enjoyed this story, you might be interested in the rest of the series:
STARFLIGHT
STARBURST
STARFALL
STARCLASH
STARBOUND
STARBORN
S
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ron Collins is an Amazon best-selling Dark Fantasy author who writes across the spectrum of speculative fiction.
His fantasy series Saga of the God-Touched Mage reached #1 on Amazon’s bestselling dark fantasy list in the UK and #2 in the US. His short fiction has received a Writers of the Future prize and a CompuServe HOMer Award, and his short story “The White Game” was nominated for the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s 2016 Derringer Award.
He has contributed a hundred or so short stories to Analog, Asimov’s, Fiction River Anthology Series, and several other professional magazines and anthologies.
He holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering, and has worked to develop avionics systems, electronics, and information technology before chucking it all to write full-time—which he now does from his home in the shadows of the Santa Catalina Mountains.
Ron’s website is: www.typosphere.com
Follow Ron on Twitter: @roncollins13
Sign up for his newsletter and get a free book!
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As always, I would like to thank John Bodin and Sharon Bass for their outstanding work and diligence in helping me with early drafts. Their effort is greatly appreciated.
I also want to thank Mike Resnick for his support throughout my career as well as for taking the t
ime to give me such a fantastic endorsement. Very little is more thrilling than to have a writer like Mike say such nice things.
And finally, I want to thank my wife and copyeditor extraordinaire Lisa Collins for her usual fantastic work, and for going above and beyond the call by providing insights that were critical to making this work what it is. As always, all errors are mine!
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Blurb
Title Page
Copyright Page
Series
Other Work
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
Prologues
Summer
Two Standards Ago
One Standard Ago
The Olive Branch
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
The Meeting
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Fallout
News
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Starclash
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
News
News
Epilogues
Galopar
37 Gem
Europa
News
Infowave
End Note
About the Author
Acknowledgements