Starshine

by G. S. Jennsen

  “That’s wonderful to hear.” It took all his considerable skill to inject a note of enthusiasm into his voice. Even so, he managed only the mildest cheer. She hadn’t completed an architectural design in at least fifteen years. This one would be no different—and there would be no value in him pointing it out. “So, you’re set then? You have everything you need?”

  “Oh, yes.” She gave him a vacant smile. “Glados and Meriva from the neighborhood association stop by once a week, we go out shopping and such.” The smile faltered. “I thought I saw your father the other day while we were at the syn-org market…” three seconds passed until she blinked “…anyway, everything’s fine. You go see to your shuttles and don’t worry about your mother.” She patted his hand to emphasize the point.

  Harsh, frustrated words rushed forth; he choked them back in his throat. “Okay, Mom. I have to go, I have a meeting—about the plant. I’ll try to stop by again when I can.”

  He prepped his most affectionate facsimile smile—but she had already drifted off, dreamily caressing the incomplete sketch of a low-orbital bio-friendly campus which had clung to the edge of the table.

  He nodded to himself and stood, leaving the house without looking at the wall of visuals in the hallway displaying a couple in love and a happy family at play. He definitely didn’t look at the largest visual, the one dominating the entryway. It portrayed a distinguished-looking man with close-cut black hair wearing a perfectly pressed suit, taken two months before his father had packed a bag, walked out the door and not come back.

  As he cruised into the lot behind the Crux Happy Nights Cantina, Caleb decided he was exceedingly ready for a drink—so much so he didn’t even cringe at the dreadful title. Granted, he didn’t laugh either.

  But the beer turned out to be quite cold and surprisingly crisp. He welcomed the assistance it provided in forcing away the darkness which never failed to haunt him after a visit home. Escaping the gloom was an acquired skill, and he had largely regained his form by the time Noah Terrage slid onto the stool next to him.

  He flung long bangs out of his face and dropped his forearms on the chrome bar. “Caleb, friend, how’s it hanging?”

  The first rule of undercover work, spying and black ops in general—okay, probably the third or fourth or perhaps even fifth rule, but it certainly made the list—was anyone who made a point to call you ‘friend,’ wasn’t.

  Still, Noah was a good guy, and he felt inclined to give him a pass. Despite the rebellious attitude which came as an almost inevitable consequence of the man’s upbringing, Caleb suspected an honorable soul resided somewhere beneath the bravado and shady deals and wild stunts. For one, it spoke in his favor that he had managed to overcome the fairly significant disability of being a ‘vanity baby.’

  Cloning remained legal on most worlds with the express consent of the cloned—new births only though; all attempts to grow a fully developed adult body from existing DNA had thus far proved horrifically disastrous. Clone clauses in wills were, while not common, growing in popularity for what might be understandable reasons. Vanity babies, however, were frowned upon in most circles and rarely worked out well for either party. Nonetheless, there always seemed to be another billionaire narcissist convinced he or she deserved one.

  A clone of his father, a wealthy business magnate on Aquila, like most vanity babies Noah had been brought into existence above all to feed the source’s ego. From early childhood he had been expected to behave precisely as his father saw himself, sit and learn at his father’s knee and grow up to become his father’s devoted protégé in the business.

  So naturally, Noah had run away from home at fifteen. Caught a transport to Pandora and never looked back.

  He was a criminal, of course. A ‘trader’ in polite company and a smuggler everywhere else. And while the guy came off like the buddy you watched the game and drank too many beers with on the weekend, he possessed a skill bordering on magic: he could find anything. If it existed in settled space, he could make it appear in your pack inside a week—as with all things, for sufficient credits.

  In this instance he had far less than a week, but the item wasn’t a particularly rare one and the compensation generous.

  Caleb leaned over to shake his hand. “You know, just the usual—wine, women and song.”

  Noah laughed and took a swig from the mug Caleb had ensured would be waiting on him. “I do know it, man.” His voice dropped as he leaned in and casually passed over the small, unremarkable-looking yet very advanced communications scrambler. Caleb dropped it in his pack and just as casually returned to his beer.

  It wasn’t that he planned to engage in anything overtly criminal, much less traitorous to the Federation. In fact, he believed Volosk and likely the Division Director knew about and expected such things. Black ops were ‘black’ for a reason, yet they also fell under government supervision and oversight. A difficult quandary.

  Most things he did, most of the time, qualified as legal actions under Division’s mandate, if not always under civilian law. But every so often a mission called for actions which…weren’t. In such circumstances, his superiors winked and nodded and ignored the troublesome details, provided they had been sufficiently obscured. Hence the state-of-the-art communications scrambler—a necessary tool for those moments when even Special Operations didn’t want a recording of what was said or to whom.

  Noah’s voice stayed low and conversational, barely audible amid the din of spirited patrons and generic pub background music. “I guess you misplaced the last one, huh?”

  Caleb shrugged and sipped his beer. It really was rather good. “Eh, it blew up.”

  “What? Dammit, I’ll have a conversation with my—”

  “Not the scrambler—the ship it was in.”

  Noah’s head cocked to the side. “Oh. Yeah, that does happen.”

  He had met Noah nine years ago. An influx of chimerals had begun flooding the streets on several of the smaller Federation worlds; he tracked the source to a drug ring on Pandora. Noah was little more than a freelance street merchant back then, hocking black market surveillance equipment, hacking tools and modified energy blades. Illegal, but nothing hardcore. The modded gear had come in handy, as had the inside information provided as a bonus.

  After a few years, Noah earned enough credits to move his operation off the streets and began serving a more discerning clientele and their more unique needs. Caleb had called on him on occasion over the years, and now…well, they weren’t friends. But in another life, they might have been.

  “So how’s Pandora these days? The last time I visited, holo-babes in the spaceport terminal were selling head trips which would make you believe you sported three cocks and twice the women to fill with them lounged in your bed. Oh, and the bed floated upon a golden nebula in the stars. God knows what they were selling in the markets.”

  Noah laughed in wry dismay as he motioned the bartender for a refill. “Trust me, Caleb, you do not want to know what they’re selling in the markets. I don’t mess with such insanity, nothing but trouble.”

  “As opposed to the trouble you already get in?”

  He shrugged. “Yeah? Still, it’s all good. Business is good. Life is good. Nobody’s tried to kill me in at least a month.”

  Caleb chuckled in spite of himself. “I guess that’s all you can ask for, right?”

  Noah sighed wistfully. “No…you can ask for a beautiful, witty, intelligent yet minxy woman in your arms every night, a mansion on a hill—or better yet in the sky—and the best bodyguards to protect you when someone does inevitably try to kill you. For starters.”

  Caleb raised his mug to clank against Noah’s. “I’ll drink to that.”

  6

  EARTH

  Vancouver, EASC Headquarters

  * * *

  Miriam sat at her desk and tried to focus on reviewing next week’s schedule. For a moment, she failed.

  She prided herself on superior compartmentalization skills…ye
t hours after the Board meeting, she couldn’t seem to shake a lingering unease. Disappointment. Annoyance.

  Being overruled gave her no pleasure, particularly when the facts were on her side. Egos coupled with narcissistic insecurity had won out over logic and reason once again. Hopefully they wouldn’t come to regret this decision, or the dozens before it.

  With a private groan she sat up straighter and returned to her calendar. Schedule.

  The christening ceremony for the new cruiser EAS Thatcher was on Monday, followed by a status meeting for Project ANNIE. She had various staff meetings on Tuesday, then Phase II testing review of new biosynthetics for special forces in the evening. Wednesday she left for the TacRecon Conference in St. Petersburg.

  Her mouth twitched involuntarily. She had tried to get Richard to go in her place—it was more his area of expertise anyway—but he was elbow-deep in the damn Trade Summit.

  She didn’t want to go to St. Petersburg, where memories of David lurked around every corner and across every street. Even the places they had never visited held shadows of the stories he had told of his childhood.

  She would need to visit her father-in-law while there. David had made certain his father received the latest in stem cell rejuvenation treatments, though the elder Solovy had accepted little else in the way of financial assistance. As a result, at one hundred sixteen years old he was built like a boxer and working low-altitude field construction ten hours a day.

  It would be uncomfortable and melancholy. He would ask after Alexis, say, ‘I’ve always loved that little girl,’ leaving unsaid the insinuation ‘as opposed to how I feel about you.’ Her position of prominence meant nothing to him. In his own twisted way he would forever blame her for David’s death, ignoring the fact that David had joined the military six years prior to meeting her. He would inquire as to whatever man she must have moved on to by now, oblivious to the reality that in twenty-three years she hadn’t moved on; that she had no intention of ever moving on.

  After two miserable hours she would excuse herself and return to her five-star hotel room, order her 250-credit room service, allow herself one glass of sherry and occupy her mind with vitally important matters of galactic security until she was too tired not to sleep.

  She didn’t want to go. But she’d do it anyway, because it was her job, and because she didn’t trust anyone else other than Richard with the responsibility. At least next year the conference location rotated out to somewhere—anywhere—other than Russia.

  She blinked to push aside the dangerously sentimental thoughts, opened the ANNIE briefing and proceeded to dive into breakdowns of recurrence quantification analysis, time series prediction, stochastic controls and most importantly, dynamic security feedback loops.

  Nearly two hundred fifty years after the Hong Kong ‘incident,’ synthetic intelligences of all types were still locked down and circumscribed on every world, but nowhere more so than in the military. The Alliance didn’t curtail the advancement of non-cybernetic synthetic technology; they merely kept it corralled inside safety fences, as it were.

  ANNIE (Artificial Neural Net Integration and Expansion) represented the most advanced Alliance-sanctioned synthetic neural net to date. It also promised to be the safest, most secure Artificial ever constructed, for they had had centuries to perfect every control and safeguard.

  Yet believing such to be true was exactly what had resulted in the Hong Kong incident in the first place. So she intended to double- and if necessary triple-check the dynamic security feedback loop protocols.

  She had made it through an entire third of the file when her secretary pinged her eVi to inform her the Minister for Extra-Solar Development was in the lobby asking to see her.

  She frowned in annoyance, and a bit of surprise. She didn’t care for people dropping by without an appointment, but the man was influential enough she couldn’t afford to rebuff him. “Give me two minutes before you send him in.”

  The layers of screens vanished; she went to the cabinet to fix a cup of tea. By the time the Minister walked in she was in perfect form and smiling with poised grace.

  “Minister Karolyn, so good to see you again.”

  “And you, Admiral.” He half-bowed from the waist. She dipped her chin and gestured him toward the chair opposite her desk.

  There was only one conceivable reason for the visit—but she never made assumptions where politicians were concerned. “What can I do for you?”

  He nodded and adjusted himself awkwardly in the chair. “I apologize for the unannounced visit. I found myself in the area this afternoon and thought I might drop in.” Her left eyebrow raised the slightest bit. “I wanted to take the opportunity to impress upon you in person how much we want to see Alexis in the Deep Space Exploration directorship. She’s a stellar candidate who can bring new energy and initiative to the department.”

  Her lips pursed briefly. “She would unquestionably do so, and I regret she was unable to accept your generous offer. But if I may be honest? This seems rather a lot of effort for a position which, while prestigious, is not one I consider to be world-altering. I imagine you have other qualified candidates.”

  “Yes, obviously.” He fidgeted again, though this time it didn’t seem to be related to the comfort level of the chair. “If I may also be honest, Admiral, I’m getting a fair amount of pressure to make sure your daughter is named to this post, and soon.”

  She suppressed a frown, but barely. It concerned her if political forces had taken an interest in Alexis without her knowledge. “Pressure? Wherever from? Alexis is hardly politically connected.”

  “That’s the thing about political pressure, ma’am. One rarely can see from where it truly originates. All I can say is someone higher up than me very much wants your daughter in this job. So if you were able to reach out to her again and reiterate the degree of interest, I’d greatly appreciate it.”

  She sipped her tea, both to buy herself a moment and to center her thoughts. She wasn’t eager to divulge the abysmal state of her relationship with her daughter to a stranger, much less a politician. But if there was any chance of Alexis accepting the position, she wanted to help make it happen. It would be good for her…eventually, it might be good for them. “Minister, do you have children?”

  “I’m a bachelor, so not as far as I’m aware of.” He smiled.

  She didn’t. “I see. You will not have experienced this yourself then, but like many children, my daughter developed a mind of her own before she was two years old and has never lost it. She stopped taking my advice around the time….” A shadow passed across her face she couldn’t fully disguise.

  The security office on Le Grande Retraite was as bright and clean as the rest of the orbital luxury resort. A young lieutenant in a spotless uniform greeted her at the entryway with a salute. “Commodore Solovy. It’s an honor to meet you.”

  She leveled a dismissive glare at him. “This is not a social call, Lieutenant. Take me to my daughter.”

  His posture wilted as he stammered out a response. “Y-yes, ma’am. We put her in one of the interview rooms. I, um, gave her a juice. And some popcorn.”

  She fell in beside him. “And the young man?”

  “Uh, he was of age and no laws had been broken, so we weren’t able to detain him.” He stopped in front of a doorway and glanced at her, then hastily opened the door and stepped back.

  Alexis tossed a kernel of popcorn in the air and caught it in her mouth. Her feet were clad in braided flip-flops and kicked up on the desk, legs crossed at the ankle. She was all elbows and knees, half a child and half a woman. Her hair was bound in long pigtails draped over her shoulders and down her chest—strange, they somehow made her look older, not younger. Perhaps it was the sharp, spirited fire in her eyes. David’s eyes.

  “Mom. Here to throw me in the brig?”

  “I am here to take you home.”

  Alexis gave a melodramatic sigh, rolled her eyes in exaggerated annoyance and pulled her feet off the d
esk. “Fine, whatever.”

  She turned to the lieutenant. “Thank you for taking care of my daughter, Lieutenant. I do apologize for any inconvenience she may have caused you.”

  “She was no trouble, ma’am.” He jumped when Alexis tossed the bag of popcorn to him as she passed.

  “Thanks for the snack, mes’ye.”

  Miriam didn’t say a word until they reached the ship. She set the autopilot then shifted in the seat. “What were you thinking? You are fourteen years old and had no business flying off-planet without supervision.”

  “It’s not like it was far off-planet….” Her hand jerked toward the viewport dominated by Earth’s profile.

  “How did you access the ship? The security should have prevented you from flying it.”

  Alexis snorted. “Please. I hacked full access to it weeks ago. It actually recognizes me as its primary owner now, you know.”

  “Not for long it doesn’t. You will—”

  “Did you even know I was gone until they called you? You didn’t, did you? You spent another night at the office, doing whatever the hell it is you do there.”

  She felt her jaw tighten, but made certain her voice remained even. “I trusted you were mature enough so I didn’t need to check on you constantly, trusted you would respect your curfew and not, for instance, steal the family ship and run off with a boy four years older than you.”

  “Nick? He’s a tupïtsa, and entirely too easy to impress. I was bored with him before we got to the station.”

  “That is not the point. The point is I was mistaken. You aren’t worthy of my trust.”

  “Bullshit. The point is—”

  “Do not speak to me in—”

  “The point is you will do everything in your power not to have to spend time with me. I’m nothing but a nuisance in the way of your damn career—but hey, it’s fine. Say the word and I’ll be out of your hair forever. I’ve got things to do anyway.”

  She opened her mouth to retort…then closed it.