Wandering Star

by Steven Anderson

  Published by Steven J. Anderson

  © 2017 Steven J. Anderson

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions contact:

  RuComm352@gmail.com

  Cover art by Fiona Jayde.

  eBook Formatting by the Deliberate Page

  Ebook ISBN: 978-0-9991788-0-5

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1—WANDERING STAR

  CHAPTER 2—PALMA SOLA

  CHAPTER 3—MARGO ISLANDS

  CHAPTER 4—MARGO ISLANDS MUD

  CHAPTER 5—REDEMPTION

  CHAPTER 6—HANNAH

  CHAPTER 7—BETWEEN WORLDS

  CHAPTER 8—CLEAVUS

  CHAPTER 9—THE TARAKANA

  CHAPTER 10—MONSTERS

  CHAPTER 11—INTERLUDE

  CHAPTER 12—BACK IN THE UNIVERSE

  CHAPTER 13—FALLING STAR

  CHAPTER 14—THE WARRENS

  CHAPTER 15—FREEDOM

  CHAPTER 16—THE PLAN

  CHAPTER 17—HOMO VIATOR

  Provide ships or sails adapted to the heavenly breezes, and there will be some who will not fear even that void…

  —Johannes Kepler (in a letter to Galileo), 1593

  CHAPTER 1

  WANDERING STAR

  “TED. TED. TED.” HAVING YOUR name repeated endlessly while alarms are sounding and lights are strobing is a disorienting way to wake up. I couldn’t do anything about the lights or sounds but I could stop the voice repeating my name. I reached up and put my hand over Jake’s mouth.

  “Again?”

  Jake moved my hand away from his face and pulled me into a sitting position on my bunk. “Hull breach through both aft engine rooms. Next time I’ll just leave you here to suffocate.”

  “That’s what you promised me last time.”

  He tossed a pressure suit at me. “Get tight. The sooner everyone is at the rally point the sooner we can get back to sleep.”

  I slid into the suit and checked valve settings and fittings. I made sure oxygen was flowing because I knew Captain von Muller would check and I did not want to fail inspection again.

  Jake was waiting by the door with his helmet on but visor still open. I snapped his visor down for him with unnecessary force. “Get tight.”

  His voice came to me through my helmet, “Get bent.”

  “Comm check good,” I replied.

  We hustled down the passageway to the central lab, our usual rally point unless it was affected by the current disaster. Von Muller and his Executive Officer, Lieutenant Velena Copeland, were waiting for us. We were not last to arrive, which was good. Being the last to reach the rally point was frowned upon. The Wandering Star was a small ship, her mass almost too light to use the Deep Space Holes. She carried a crew of four and could accommodate a technical team of twenty, which the crew called ‘passengers’ when they were being nice about it. Our current team was just nine, but we were supposed to pick up additional members on our first and third stops.

  Hannah Weldon was the last to report, which was not unusual. This was Hannah’s second hop and she liked to play the old-hand, choosing what to take seriously and what to let slide. She took her work seriously, but not the Captain and certainly not his random middle of the night safety drills.

  We stood by waiting for our Captain’s verdict.

  “Star,” he commanded, “report.”

  “Response time from similar scenarios has improved two percent,” Wandering Star’s AI replied. “Chance of all hands surviving at eighty-five percent.”

  Von Muller looked stricken, as he always did. The XO shook her head. The Captain was on his twelfth trip to the outer worlds, or maybe his sixteenth or twenty-fifth, depending on which version he was telling. Regardless of the number, each retelling of Captain von Muller’s story had the same moral. Be prepared if you want to survive.

  “A fifteen percent chance that one of you is dead. That is unacceptable.” For the next hour he reminded us that each of us had beat the odds to join the Reunification Commission, which selected only the top twenty percent of applicants, and he detailed what death in space was like (gruesome) and what the odds of rescue were (zero). The Captain was one of the best extemporaneous speakers I had ever heard. He told us that we were the unsung, unrecognized, unappreciated heroes of mankind and all he asked was that we help him keep us alive so our urgent work could be accomplished. Our jobs were hard and dangerous, and the people of Earth and the planets we worked to reunite might never know how we made their lives better, but we would know. By the time he was finished we couldn’t help but feel more patriotic, filled with a sense of purpose and pride in our mission. It would have sounded better at 1400 than 0400, but damn, he was good.

  At length, the XO leaned over and whispered something in his ear. The Captain nodded and said, “All right then. You may resume your duties.” Which right now to me was sleeping a couple of more hours. He turned to Hannah. “Walk with me, Ms. Weldon.” Hannah, the XO, and von Muller headed forward. Jake and I headed aft.

  Jake turned to me as we walked back to our quarters. “I don’t know what the Captain will do to Hannah, but I doubt it will change the way she behaves.” There was real concern in his voice.

  “You care?” I looked at him. The warm lights of the passageway made him look more awake than I’m sure he felt. “You do care.”

  “I just don’t want to see her get into trouble.”

  “Have you even talked to her much?” I knew I hadn’t. We were two weeks out from Earth and Hannah still seemed unapproachable to me. She was a little exotic both in appearance and behavior. She was always ‘on’ in our team meetings, always looking for a way to challenge what was being said or proposed. Being next to her felt like working on an electrical circuit without first making sure the breakers were off.

  “We’ve talked a bit. It’s hard not to on a ship this small. She’s all right. And she’s part of our team. I don’t want to see any of us in trouble.”

  Jake was walking next to me staring at the deck under his feet. Was he trying to convince me or himself that his concern was just for a fellow teammate?

  “OK, but don’t you get into trouble. Don’t forget what happened with Debra at the Academy, or Jenna in eighth grade. Or Libby in fifth grade.”

  “Libby? I never got in trouble with Libby in fifth grade.” He finally looked up at me. I smiled. “Just shut up,” he said.

  “Now we’re even for you waking me up.”

  “Like I had a choice. I don’t want you in trouble either.”

  We reached our cabin and I stripped off my pressure suit, dumped it in a pile on the floor and collapsed onto my bunk. “Just don’t wake me up anymore tonight.”

  Jake consulted his watch. “Not for forty-five minutes.”

  “Shit.”

  “Well said.”

  Jake developed a sudden interest in cross training in Hannah’s mission specialty of linguistics. I’d seen him like this before, like a puppy chasing after rabbits. I tried to warn him that this particular rabbit could probably eat him in one bite. He ignored me and followed her around the ship helping her do things she didn’t need help doing, sat next to her at meals, every meal, and otherwise made a nuisance of himself. I expected it to end badly. Either she’d get tired of it and crush him, or worse, the Captain or our technical team lead would hear of it. I considered warning him again, as his friend, but I’d known Jake since we were eight and he and Libby did get into trouble in fifth grade.

  Jake was at least smart enough to know that if anyone suspected h
is new infatuation the consequences could include extra duty, loss of pay or getting a trip home at his own expense. Not that any of those fears diminished the longing in his eyes when he was with Hannah. I was worried the extra thrill of it might be making things worse. Friendship on board was encouraged. Team building or anything to improve morale, was great. Going beyond that was forbidden by the terms of our Reunification Commission contract. RuComm believed that a failed romance was bad for the efficiency of the team.

  So once again it was up to me to keep him safe. As his shield to defray suspicion I had the dubious pleasure to cross train Hannah and Jake on geology, my mission specialty, while Jake and I learned linguistics. Jake was supposed to cross train us on biology but he always seemed preoccupied when Hannah was there with us. I think my real function was to help him help her to do things she didn’t need help doing. I also sat with them at meals, every meal, listening to him flirt with her and, occasionally, her flirting back with him. Her banter was sharper than his. She had a quick mind and the ability to find his weaknesses. It was hard to watch him take the abuse and be too dense to even realize it.

  I was sitting with Hannah while Jake made his way through the chow line at breakfast, four weeks out from Earth, two weeks into their covert relationship and only one week from our first planet fall on Dulcinea. When Jake joined us he was looking sleep deprived. Hannah looked alert as usual, working on a pile of scrambled eggs.

  “I’ve got to get more sleep.” Jake sat heavily at the table. He sipped his coffee, wincing at the heat on his tongue.

  “Hannah doesn’t seem tired,” I noted. “Try to be more like Hannah.”

  “I never sleep.” Hannah stabbed aggressively at her eggs. She maintained eye contact with Jake while she put them in her mouth and swallowed. “Sleep is for children and the dead. I have too much to do.”

  “Perhaps you aren’t doing anything exhausting enough,” Jake challenged her.

  “You seem to be. Perhaps you need to work on your stamina.”

  “I’d love to, maybe you could help me by—”

  I kicked him under the table to shut him up while the XO walked by. This also had the unfortunate side effect of drawing Hannah’s attention to me.

  “What about you, Ted? Are you getting enough sleep?”

  “No, Jake makes too much noise when he comes in late.” I paused. “And he snores.”

  “Really?” She looked at him, eyes narrowed as though evaluating him for some future task she had in mind. She turned back to her eggs.

  I pushed the potatoes around on my plate with my fork, added more salsa and shoved them around some more. This was going to get out of control if it wasn’t already. I gave up on the potatoes after another couple of bites and pushed away from the table. “I’m going back to our cabin to get some things. I’ll see you in the lab in a few minutes and we can look at some more geomorphology examples this morning.”

  “And this afternoon, more on linguistic drift,” Hannah added. “This time, Jake, pay closer attention to the way my mouth forms the vowels. Up here.” She tapped her lips.

  I sighed, dumped my tray in the recycler and walked back to the cabin. I was still gathering some printouts when Jake came in, happily humming to himself.

  “You need to be more careful. You and Hannah both.”

  “About what?”

  “You know Wandering Star watches everything that happens, right?”

  “Yes, but she can’t report anything. It’s in our contract.”

  “Almost true, Mr. Barton.” Star sounded sad, a little frustration in her normally calm, sweet voice. “I can’t report anything to your team lead unless it endangers myself or our mission. You and Ms. Weldon haven’t yet crossed that line but I would hate to see you go, as many before you have gone.”

  “How many?”

  That’s right, Jake, I thought to myself, bait the damn ship that sees everything you do.

  Our main screen illuminated with the flickering images of a dozen or more smiling young men and women whose careers in RuComm had been cut cruelly short.

  “Captain von Muller and Lieutenant Copeland are the finest officers I have ever served,” Star continued, pride now in her voice. “I will protect them and the RuComm mission. It’s why I exist.”

  I glanced at my watch. “We have places to be.”

  Jake joined me as we walked out into the passageway. “Later, Star.”

  “I will always be with you. Have a good day, gentlemen.”

  I looked over at Jake as he walked along next to me. “That was stupid.”

  “You worry too much.”

  “That’s because I’m worrying for two now. I’d say three but I’m not sure Hannah knows how to worry.”

  “I like that about her.”

  “Jake, I’m going to miss you when you’re gone.”

  “What is it with you, Ted?” He stopped and turned toward me. “We’ve always pushed the rules, all through school and everywhere else. Does Star actually have you scared?” He took a step toward me. “Or are you jealous?”

  “Of you and Hannah? Yeah, no. More like you and Hannah are actually scaring me. We’ve had a lot of fun and pushed more boundaries than I can remember, with me usually saving your ass. But how am I supposed to protect you from…” I gestured at the ceiling where Star was certainly watching and listening. “Don’t you get that this is different?” I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him.

  “I get that you’re different.”

  “I’m not—” I stopped as Angela Dawkins came around the corner. She was an older woman, hair starting to go grey, with a perpetual look of disapproval on her face. She had spent her entire career in RuComm and was the lead of our technical team, the lab manager and acting senior engineer. Angela stopped next to us and looked up at me from a fifteen centimeter disadvantage.

  “Theodore. Jake. Are you gentlemen planning on getting any work done today?”

  “All day, every day,” Jake replied. There was still some heat in his voice from our interrupted argument, enough to get a raised eyebrow from Angela.

  “Yes, ma’am, we’re right behind you,” I added. Angela nodded, still suspicious, and preceded us toward the main lab. We followed at a distance.

  “Suck up,” Jake whispered to me.

  I whispered back, “Yeah. That’s how I plan to keep you from a zero expense paid trip back to Earth. You should be thanking me.”

  Jake snorted, “Not likely.”

  We entered the main lab. The walls and ceiling were covered in dark sound absorbing material. Dim lights, white noise from the ventilation system and the glow of display screens gave the space a serene, serious feel, separate from the sterility of the rest of the ship. It felt like a refuge and always had a calming effect on me. I hoped it would have the same effect on Jake this morning.

  Hannah was already in the sim lab, of course. She was sitting on one of the tables next to a tray of core samples, legs swinging in the air, looking pleased with herself. My geomorphology simulation was already running, shimmering in the display tank. I had protected the geosim file but apparently not well enough. Annoyed or impressed? I’m not sure which I felt. I decided it was some of both. It was only a geosim after all. But what else of mine had she gotten into? I looked at her sitting there daring me to say something, defiant amusement playing in her brown eyes and one lock of her dark hair falling across her face. I decided to let it go for now and spend the evening encrypting my whole damn file system. Barn doors and horses probably.

  “Since you two were running late I decided to set up the sim for you.” She smiled an innocent smile.

  “Thanks. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that.” I smiled back at her. “Are you ready to get to work?”

  “Born ready.” Hannah slid off the table and walked to the display tank, Jake following close behind her.<
br />
  “We’ll watch this several more times, but pay attention.” Jake and Hannah leaned in, Jake taking the opportunity to press up against her. I placed the simulation in motion.

  “This is the city of Palma Sola on Dulcinea.”

  Jake looked at the expanse of open ocean displayed in the tank. “This is where we’ll be staying in a couple of weeks? Star told us there would be beaches. And dry land.”

  Hannah pushed him away to open up some space so she could whack him gently on the back of the head. “I think this might be a few years ago. Pay attention.”

  I added, “And it’s the middle of winter in Palma Sola now, so don’t get your hopes up for warm sand and bare skin.”

  “Damn.”

  “Maybe you were expecting this?” I switched to Palma Sola’s current topography, showing a city built along a large bay, a long curve of beach and tall white cliffs on the northern shore. “The goal is for you to be able to see this, as it is today, and be able to visualize the open ocean in the first view, and understand the processes that were occurring in deep time that would form white cliffs and sandy beaches millions of years later. What I want you to get out of this is to be able to see what’s beneath the surface, both what you’re standing on and how this moment in time is just part of the past and the future. ”

  “Do it.” Hannah waved at the display. “Make it go again.”

  Jake’s face wore an expression I’d seen many times sitting next to him in class. It meant, OK, I’ll watch and I might learn something, but I don’t really care. I reset the simulation and tried to cover a semester’s worth of material in four hours. At least Jake might see Palma Sola as something other than Dulcinea’s ‘Beautiful City on the Bay’. Hannah seemed to be getting most of it, asking good questions and seeing the bigger picture.