Starshine Read online

  She let go of the metal to screw her face up at him. “What?”

  He attempted a self-deprecating smile. “Hey, even us backwater Senecan rubes study history. The Kappa Crucis Battle is famous, it…well it was an important event in the war.” The battle turned the war in Seneca’s favor and ultimately led to the armistice. She knew this. It didn’t need to be said.

  He took on an officious tone as he recited from memory, having reviewed the entry a mere two nights ago when studying her file. “Commander David Solovy, commanding officer of the Earth Alliance cruiser EAS Stalwart, successfully blocked the Federation fleet’s advance for twelve minutes, giving a number of Alliance vessels, the staff of a nearby monitoring station and nearly all of the Stalwart crew time to safely escape. It is estimated he saved the lives of over 4,000 Alliance men and women before the Stalwart was destroyed.”

  “4,817.” It was less than a whisper.

  “I’m sorry, Alex.”

  “Why? You weren’t to blame.” Her gaze rose to meet his in challenge. “Unless you were there—were you?”

  “No. I was sixteen, and finishing primary.”

  The taut raise of her lips was somehow the antithesis of a smile. “Well there you go. Clean hands.”

  “It was war. A lot of people died—on both sides.”

  “Which made it so much easier for a thirteen year old to understand.” She reached over and tried to wrench his piece up to meet the hull. It wasn’t sufficiently heated and refused to budge, leading to a harsh, frustrated expulsion of air from her lungs.

  “I’m not saying it….” He squeezed his eyes shut in equal frustration. He was doing this all wrong, and in serious danger of wiping out whatever goodwill he may have built up. After a moment’s pause he tried a different tack. “You were close to your dad?”

  She shot him a fierce glare; her eyes blazed silver ice. He resisted the urge to retreat into the corner to get further away from the glare. He thought he would do almost anything to not be the recipient of such an expression ever again.

  “That is none of your business.”

  So yes, then. He gave up any attempt at a kind, sympathetic tone of voice; it clearly made no difference. “Right. Of course. My mistake.”

  They worked in silence after that, save for the occasional instruction or question. It was efficient, for they had naturally settled into a productive routine. Even with the weight of uneasy tension hanging ignored in the air, they undeniably worked rather well together. He wanted to diffuse the tension, but under the circumstances silence seemed the least damaging choice.

  Since his position forced him to move backwards through the hold, he hadn’t been focusing on what lay behind him. Therefore he wasn’t as prepared as he probably should have been for her abrupt shattering of the heavy silence.

  “Dammit!” She dropped her torch to the floor and rose to her knees, only to sink back on her heels and drag a hand down her face. “It’s not enough. We’ll keep going, but there’s not sufficient material to seal her up. Not even close.” With a visceral growl she sent the torch skidding across the hold.

  While his own self-interest led him to wish for a friendlier, more amicable situation, he had to admire her intensity and spirit. Far too many people hid behind holos and aurals and sensory overlays to project an air of cool aloofness and detached disinterest. This woman though…she had fire. And even when directed at him, it was something to see.

  He sat up and leaned against the nearby wall. Once he saw the entire area, he didn’t dispute her assessment. A much smaller but still substantial opening ran along much of the center. The metal converged in only two locations, and they had already used all the spare mats.

  He raised a hesitant eyebrow. “The shield’s at full power now, right? Will it hold in space?”

  “Maybe, but I’m not particularly anxious to test the theory out in the void. Are you?” It sounded like another challenge.

  His head tilted as though an idea had come to him. In truth the option had occurred to him immediately upon seeing the enormous rupture in the hull the day before, but he hadn’t known if it would be needed, and if it were needed whether it would be feasible. Now, however, their options were rapidly dwindling.

  “What about my ship?”

  “What about your ship?”

  “The hull was made of an amodiamond metamaterial. It’s similar enough to yours to patch the gaps, isn’t it?”

  She huffed a breath that was almost a laugh. “Well, yes—but I kind of blew up your ship. Or have you forgotten?”

  “Oh, I have absolutely not forgotten. But we’re okay to fly in-atmosphere? If we can locate some of the wreckage, I’m sure there are intact pieces large enough to salvage material from. Especially since we don’t need very much.”

  She regarded him in surprise…and perhaps a measure of appreciation. “That’s a really good idea.”

  He smiled, relieved more than he cared to admit to be the recipient of a softer, gentler expression. “Great. Now we just have to find the wreckage.”

  She was already climbing to her feet, renewed vigor in every motion. “It shouldn’t be too difficult. I dodged the remains of your ship most of the way down. Navigation ought to be able to extrapolate a landing zone from their trajectory.”

  When she reached the first step of the ladder she paused. “You know what, I’m certain it will. Let’s go ahead and finish this work while we’re in the groove. We’ll go hunting in the morning.”

  He watched her retrieve her torch from the corner where it had landed and return to her previous spot on the floor then joined her and flicked his torch on.

  “We have a groove? I mean, I felt like we definitely had a groove thing happening, but I didn’t know for sure if you thought we had a groove.”

  Her eyes cut over to him, now dancing with mirth rather than ice. “Are you going to help, or is droll commentary going to be the extent of your contribution?”

  He bit his lower lip, and was intrigued to see an odd flare in her eyes before she directed her attention to the hull. “I can’t do both?”

  “Nope. It’s scientifically impossible.”

  He sighed for added effect. “Ah well. I guess I’ll help then.”

  “Thank god.”

  As they settled back into the routine, this time with considerably less tension in the air, he pondered her rapid and dramatic shift in mood. Unquestionably the prospect of locating additional materials for the hull would be a welcome development and should cheer her up, but not to so great an extent.

  It took him a few minutes to figure out the answer, though in retrospect it seemed blindingly obvious given what he had ascertained about her thus far.

  He had provided her the means to make her ship whole. To fly again.

  23

  ERISEN

  Earth Alliance Colony

  * * *

  “It’s the same principle as the dampener field, except blocking signals from getting in rather than keeping them from getting out. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel, merely reapply the principles in a slightly adjusted manner.”

  The young engineer looked at her as though she had sprouted a second head. She checked, she hadn’t. “Well? I’m not forgetting some fundamental rule of chemistry, am I? Quantum physics? Electronics?”

  “Um, no ma’am, not as—”

  “Kennedy’s fine.” She smiled at him in the ghostly light. The prototype lab was of necessity windowless and dark, save for the scattered glow of dozens of screens and interfaces.

  “Yes, ma’am. Kennedy. Ma’am. It’s just the dampener field doesn’t block everything, even at its strongest. It only tamps down the strength of the waves. For reverse-shielding to work, it’ll have to be impermeable.”

  “True, but the energy the dampener field blocks is on the order of terajoules. The energy we want to block here is far smaller.”

  “Right. Good point.” He ran calculations on the screen in front of them. The blue and teal glyphs coating
his arm pulsed brightly to splash color in the air. “It shouldn’t be too difficult to create a strong Faraday cage using a silver-based nonlinear metamat. We could—”

  “And we should do that—but not now. For this project to be successful it has to be easy to install and inexpensive, relatively speaking, not another costly lattice which has to be painted on.”

  He stared at her. “A cheap virtual shield blocking the entire spectrum?”

  “No, I’m not that crazy. It has to protect against directed signals, not space radiation or anything. I think it doesn’t need to be a Faraday cage at all. It simply has to disrupt specific signals, after all. We disrupt signals all the time.”

  His eyes widened and looked to the ceiling for inspiration. “We can certainly design a shield to diffuse or disrupt incoming waves. But it would disrupt the exanet as well, including messaging, and I, um…” he chuckled to himself, then blushed “…don’t think our customers would like that, right?”

  She patted him on the shoulder in encouragement. She loved nerdy engineers; they were so pure. In point of fact this was the root of the problem she had sought him out to solve. But she had wanted him to work through the variables and come to it on his own, because now he would feel he owned it, too.

  “You are absolutely correct, which is why I need you to figure out a way to allow exanet signals in without creating a hole big enough for the evil pirates to sneak through. What do you think? Can you do it?”

  His brow furrowed and his gaze bounced around the lab. “Well, it will have to be adaptive and semi-intelligent, so we’re looking at some manner of active ware in its core and—”

  She laughed and began backing away. “Just let me know when you have something.”

  He nodded distractedly, his mind already lost in a magical mathematical world.

  In truth she needed ‘something’ rather fast. The Board presentation had gone better than expected, and they had requested practical design plans as soon as possible. But the fastest route to those plans was to get a techie intrigued by the challenge then give them the room to be brilliant.

  She stepped out the glass doors of IS Design’s offices onto the broad sidewalk, only to grin in delight. Light, fluffy snowflakes danced about in the air to become a luminous gold in the refracted evening rays.

  She pulled her hat snugly over her ears and started off, though not too quickly. Her apartment was eight blocks away in the heart of downtown, and she decided to enjoy the walk.

  Erisen had been her home for eleven years now, but having grown up in Houston and attended university in Pasadena, she still found herself a little enamored by snow. It made everything feel…softer. Gentler. Brighter. It was okay to be a child again when in the presence of snow.

  Halfway down the next block she lingered at the window of a shoe boutique, futilely as always. She was going to Houston for her parents’ anniversary in two days and required eye-catching attire to wear to the party. In her parents’ vernacular, ‘party’ meant gala extravaganza involving five hundred guests, a private orchestra and delicacies shipped in from half a dozen worlds. And while Erisen’s fashion offerings had matured to a point, retailers tended toward the practical attire required by a cold and snowy climate.

  Alas. Maybe she should head to Earth early and swing by Manhattan first. She wouldn’t want her parents’ friends thinking Erisen was some backwater hick world, because at a hundred seventy-two years old, it wasn’t. Much.

  Her eVi indicated an incoming message, and a frown tugged at her lips when it opened. Miles, the eco-dev executive, would like to take her to an art exhibit the next evening. She pondered it a moment while crossing the street, and abruptly stuck her tongue out to capture a falling snowflake.

  Once the initial thrill of a new romance had worn off, she was finding him increasingly high maintenance. He had turned out to be a horrific skier, which could have been cute if he hadn’t been so damn whiny about it. He prattled on about his work incessantly, which could have been interesting if his work didn’t consist mostly of lobbying. And while he was quite handsome, his mouth did this odd downturn thing in response to whatever you said; it made him look churlish.

  With an eye roll she sent back a decline and excuse. The excuse was easy, as she legitimately wasn’t available on account of needing to get ready for the trip home. Whether he interpreted it as a more permanent decline…well, she would worry about that on her return.

  Another one bites the dust. She laughed to herself, fully aware she had done it again, but opened a compose anyway.

  Alex,

  …or not. He’s entirely too needy, and on the verge of petulant. Oh well, tomorrow is another day.

  — Kennedy

  She sent the message as a gleam to her left caught her attention. The last moment of the sunset over the mountains tossed glittering beams into the snow-filled sky. It looked—

  Message unable to be delivered. Recipient is not connected to exanet infrastructure. Message will be queued until it can be delivered.

  What?

  The person behind her collided into her, and she barely caught her balance in time to prevent a tumble to the ground. She mumbled a “sorry” and moved out of the way.

  Distracted by troubling thoughts, she managed to wind through the busy pedestrian foot traffic to the low ledge marking the barrier between the sidewalk and a small sculpture park. She sank against the ledge.

  There were a few instances when one might be cut off from the ubiquitous exanet infrastructure. Spelunking beneath a couple of kilometers of solid heavy metals, for instance, or catching a front-row seat to a supernova explosion. Not much else…other than being dead, of course.

  The Siyane was equipped with the most robust radiation shielding available, but even it had limits.

  Oh Alex, what are you doing?

  24

  SIYANE

  Metis Nebula, Uncharted Planet

  * * *

  The Siyane skimmed fifteen meters above the ground, cutting through a harsh wind toward the only reading for kilometers which showed any signs of being artificial.

  Alex pointed at the screen taking up the uppermost-right quadrant of the cockpit display. She had given him view rights to the HUD, because it was simply practical to do so. “Keep an eye on this readout while I try not to crash into any sudden mountainous objects. Let me know when it spikes.”

  Caleb nodded from his position leaning against the half-wall separating the cockpit and the main cabin. “Gotcha.”

  They had spent the previous evening stretching the hull material as far as possible and called it an early, tired night. This morning they had set out in the direction of the region the navigation system identified as the likeliest crash site zone. They’d been flying for more than an hour to reach the edge of the region; for obvious reasons she flew conservatively.

  He had baked muffins after they had lifted off, then showed up in the cockpit and casually handed her two.

  Muffins. He had utterly confounded her with muffins. Banana nut multigrain muffins, to be precise. The man’s arsenal of weaponry was truly impressive.

  She found her mind wandering to what other weapons he might have in his—Jesus, Alex, get your mind out of the gutter. It’s far too early in the morning for those sorts of thoughts.

  “Hey, got a spike.”

  She blinked hard and glanced at the display. “Yep.” She arced toward the flashing signal. When they were in range she slowed to a crawl until they could see the wreckage among the blowing sand.

  He moaned and sagged against the wall in apparent despondence. “My baby….”

  “Look, I said I was sorry. There’s nothing else—”

  “She was a loaner. I’d had her all of a week.”

  “Unh!” She leaned over and punched him in the shoulder. “Very funny.”

  “Ow.” He rubbed his shoulder gingerly. “So what’s the plan?”

  She studied the hazy outline of the wreckage. “It looks promising. The wind is
nasty strong though, so we’ll tether ourselves to the hull. I say we take turns slicing off a piece and bringing it to the airlock. I’d like to end up with at least three square meters, as solid and flat as possible.” She leaned in closer to the viewport. “Given the state of the wreck, it may mean a lot of small pieces.”

  “Works for me.”

  The ship’s landing gear settled to the ground, and she cut the engine. “Let’s get to it.”

  She rejoined him after depositing a sheet in the airlock, her fourth such trip. They had accumulated a nice stack of material by this point, but she didn’t want to come up short and have to do this all over again. The wind made every step a challenge, and the swirling dust reduced visibility to a few meters. “Goddamn this planet sucks.”

  He chuckled over the vicinity comm. “You don’t have to tell me—I’m fairly certain I’ve been telling you. But that’s not even what bugs me the most about it.”

  “And what does bug you the most about it?”

  “How is it even here? What is it orbiting? We’re a long way from the pulsar, and there’s no indication of another star in the vicinity.”

  “Perhaps the answer’s in that unusual radiation. I don’t know. Regardless—”

  A powerful gust swept across them from out of nowhere; the crashed ship rocked precipitously, several loose sections tearing off to disappear into the sky.

  The punishing wind ripped the piece of hull he had just severed out of his hand. Its jagged edges sliced right through the line tethering her to her ship on its way to oblivion.

  The velocity of the wind increased yet more and began to push her relentlessly backward. She reached to grab onto the wreckage, and had succeeded in doing so when a fresh gust whipped in and her tenuous grip slipped on the metal surface.

  His voice was low and steady. “Hang on. I’m going to—”

  “I can’t!” The gust shifted direction, and she felt herself being blown sideways away from the wreck—

  —his arms wound around her waist and gripped her against him. She didn’t understand how he managed to reach her. Somehow he had.