Perhaps a smidge of arrogance.
She cracked her neck and dipped until she cruised thirty meters from the sloping incline and tilted the belly of the ship toward it. No trees softened the scenery, and boulders rushed past in a blur.
Ahead, a ridge split into a deep fissure, more gorge than valley. She plunged into it, staying close to the ground .
Kyril emerged from the bluffs behind her. He’d drawn far closer, which represented a problem. He must think she was zeroing in on a find.
This gorge was doing nothing for her. She spotted a narrow cleft to the right. Too narrow? Nah.
She increased her speed, flipped the ship sideways and slipped into the gap.
“Alex, the hell!”
She gritted her teeth and tried to concentrate on flying. The gap hadn’t widened yet. “I did tell you to strap in.”
Reluctantly she spared a brief motion to activate the comm channel. “Bob, get down here and head to…33.2° N, 114.1° W.” The coordinates lay a hundred kilometers northwest of her current location. It should work.
“I’m not finished yet.”
“Bob.”
“Right. Heading there now.”
Finally the terrain opened up, though the mountains grew far steeper. Jagged spikes jutting up from a dead landscape.
She swerved to the left to dart between two peaks then dropped down as low as she dared.
Kyril’s blip followed. Motherfucker.
But it stayed more distant now. He was flying safely. “Coward.”
Emboldened, she sped onward, dipping and weaving through the range. When another fissure came into view, she pivoted hard and raced through it, a mite too snugly for comfort. She was glad Kennedy wasn’t up here to see how near to the cliff walls they flew.
On the scanner, Kyril slowed almost to a stop, handing her the break she needed. She found a basin on the topography map six kilometers to the northeast.
“Bob, shift to 33.8° N, 113.9° W and get ready.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
One last corkscrew turn…and….
She decelerated hard and plummeted toward the ground; when ten meters remained she killed the engine. “Now, Bob—17.8° N heading, then get back to space ASAP. ”
The ship shuddered roughly as it slammed to the ground. A couple of yellow warnings flashed across the HUD, but nothing critical.
“You are one crazy woman, Solovy.”
“Thank you. I’m flattered.”
Kennedy’s voice sounded shaky behind her. “Um, did we crash?”
“Not technically. It’s not crashing if it’s on purpose.”
Kyril had begun moving again and closed in on her location. Alex peered up as he passed overhead, but the paltry light didn’t allow her to make out his ship. Keep going. Keep going.
He kept going, following Bob’s blip into the darkness.
Bob did a surprisingly decent job of picking up where she left off. She was moderately impressed, not as if she’d tell him so.
But if she reengaged the engine too soon, Kyril’s scanner might pick up the energy flare.
She breathed in. Out. Waited.
Slowly, cautiously, she lifted off the surface, spun and climbed through the atmosphere in the opposite direction from where Bob had flown.
They exited on the opposite side of the satellite from the gas giant, at which point she had no choice but to run the impulse engine for a minute or so.
“You can unstrap now.”
Kennedy stumbled into the cockpit. “Okay, that sucked. What’s next?”
Alex didn’t answer. Better for her friend not to know until it was already done.
No time to reconsider. She activated the sLume drive and executed a pinpoint superluminal traversal to barely outside the not-a-white-dwarf-not-a-planet’s orbit.
The warp bubble had hardly formed around the Siyane when it evaporated. Only then did the surge of adrenaline hit her .
A 2.7 AU superluminal trip was not a maneuver one did every day, mostly due to the fact it was dangerous as all hell. If she’d delayed another second—three-quarters of a second—before disengaging the sLume drive, they would’ve found themselves inside the pulsar. And dead.
“Did you…oh my God, you did. I think I’m…yeah, I’m going to go back to the couch and faint.”
Alex grinned a bit wildly. “What? It worked, didn’t it?”
“And if it hadn’t?”
“We’d never be the wiser.”
“Because we’d be vaporized.”
“Yes. Now I don’t have a lot of time, so hush.”
Kennedy nodded weakly and wandered off. “Couch. Fainting. This is the worst vacation ever.”
Alex blinked and worked to focus the adrenaline rush on productive endeavors such as catching up to the object, whatever it was, and matching its orbit. Something else guaranteed to be fun, since it was moving fast .
At such close proximity the pulsar taxed the radiation shield, but it would hold. She hoped. If this panned out, Astral-owned industrial vessels equipped with far stronger shielding would be able to hang out here for weeks at a stretch, but she couldn’t risk staying more than…she checked the diagnostics…twenty-four minutes.
She had a solid bead on the orbital path of the object now, and she accelerated into a parallel trajectory. It gained on her from behind; she continued increasing her speed until she’d matched its velocity and it whisked along a sliver under four megameters off her port.
Trajectory stabilized, she blocked the massive X-ray radiation of the pulsar from the viewport and looked over.
She’d seen many interesting things in her three years of freelance scouting. Beautiful things, terrifying things. She needed a little sleep and a lot of drinks to process what she saw now, but she suspected this topped them all.
“Ken, get up here. ”
“But I’m still fainting.”
“Whatever. Get your ass up here.”
The planet-sized body—a quick measurement suggested a 40-50K kilometer diameter—appeared to be composed of a crystalline mineral so clear it was nearly transparent. The sole reason she was unable to see all the way through to the other side was that eventually, thousands of meters below the surface, the inner core darkened into an extremely dense form of carbon. Beyond the brilliance of the outer material, the body retained no more than a trace of natural luminosity. Plainly no longer a white dwarf; not for millennia.
The result of it being stripped of its outer layers then its stellar nature was a surface and outer core which looked a great deal like diamond but was likely something far more precious.
“What…ohhhh.” Kennedy brought a hand to her mouth. “This is the most exquisite thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Pretty much.”
“You upgraded your radiation shield, right? Because I can get you a next-gen kit for cost.”
“Let’s do that. Soon as we get back.”
Many white dwarfs had carbon-oxygen cores, but humanity thus far lacked the technology to harvest stars. Cold planetoids, on the other hand?
A dozen so-called carbon planets had been stripped bare to minimal riches for companies long forgotten, but only one other true ‘diamond planet’ had ever been discovered, orbiting the Fyren pulsar. A hundred twenty years ago the Magellan Aeronautics founder had made a fortune and funded an entire generation of interstellar private spacecraft by being the first to reach it and mine it.
Alex jerked out of the reverie. “Crap, the beacon!”
She’d been mooning over the splendor of the singular object speeding alongside them to the point of forgetting her mission. She hurriedly programmed in the details she hadn’t known until now and launched it directly at the body .
The beacon plummeted to six kilometers above the ground, then decelerated and adopted a low-altitude orbit and began transmitting to everyone in the galaxy who mattered. Alex sank in her chair with an exuberant cackle.
“Bob, you and I are going to be rich—well, I�
�m going to be rich. You’re going to be slightly more affluent.”
Kennedy’s face lit up in excitement. “If you’re truly earning that much money from this find, I have got so many ideas—”
“Assuming you survive the next few minutes. Kyril just turned tail and made a beeline for the pulsar. Or for you. I’m guessing for you.”
Couldn’t she spend five seconds enjoying her success in peace? Apparently not.
She straightened up in the chair and began to retreat from the planet. Her shield only had eight minutes worth of full functionality remaining before it started failing. She needed to move to a safe distance, and soon.
“Solovy, you bitch! You think you can get away with such a bullshit scam right in front of me?”
“Nice to talk to you, too, Kyril. Oh, wait. No, it’s not. So sorry your plan to ghost then leapfrog me didn’t pan out. Better luck next time. Or preferably, worse luck.”
“Is that a bloody diamond planet? No. No way are you stealing millions from me. Not this time.”
“He wouldn’t dare try to shoot you down, would he?”
“Strap back in.” She killed the heat and lights in the cabin and diverted the extra power to the defensive shield and increased the distance between her and the pulsar. Another couple of megameters and she’d be distant enough to engage the sLume drive and disappear—
—the Siyane shuddered as the laser hit it full-on broadside.
Kennedy’s shocked gasp echoed behind her. “That bastard shot at you!”
“Not so cute now, is he? ”
The shield held, but it had depleted to thirty-eight percent from the single hit. Kyril had top of the line everything it seemed, including weaponry.
Alex hit the comm. “Goddammit, Kyril, if you shoot at me again you will regret it.”
“It would be such a shame if you accidentally got too close to the pulsar and met an unfortunate demise. Astral Materials will mourn your death while they pay me for the contract.”
Fuck, no. Not going to happen.
She frantically pulled power from everywhere she could find it to recharge the defensive shield faster, located Kyril on the scanner and locked on.
She returned fire. The laser skimmed off his hull.
Nose down. Fired.
Hard port. Fired again.
She arced above him in a high-g maneuver, firing the whole way.
His shield had to be getting low. Hers had climbed to seventy percent, which was a good thing as he finally managed to track her and return fire. In a flash she was down to nine percent shields….
“Hit him again. I got your back.”
Bob arrived out of nowhere above Kyril’s ship, bless his drunken soul. She fired once more.
So did Bob.
Hers hit first, but it was Bob’s shot that broke through the shield and caught the port rear of the ship. Hard.
The force of the strike sent Kyril’s ship hurtling toward Shanshuo in an uncontrolled spin.
No blip on the scanner appeared to indicate the launch of an escape pod or chute as the ship was swallowed up by the pulsar.
Alex threw her arms on the dash and dropped her head onto them.
“Okay, Bob, twenty percent…and two drinks. You earned it.”
“I didn’t actually mean to kill him. ”
He sounded almost remorseful; she got that. “He intended to kill us . If you try to show mercy to someone like him, they will twist it back on you and use it to destroy you.”
“When you put it that way…frankly, in your sultry voice it’s kind of hot. Drinks—when and where?”
She sighed in weary amusement. “I’ll be in touch. Promise.”
When she lifted her head from the dash, Kennedy was standing beside her staring out the viewport. Her hands trembled at her sides. “Is it always like this?”
“Scouting? Nah. Sometimes it’s dangerous.”
Q&A FOR VENATORIS
INCLUDED IN
BEYOND THE STARS: A PLANET TOO FAR
I loved the atmosphere you created in Venatoris . We got the "feel" of it right away... the frontier vibe and the scent of unbridled competition. How do you go about envisioning an unknown world in an imaginary galaxy?
All my writing is grounded in the core concept that no matter how much our technology advances, so long as keep these bodies of ours (however heavily augmented) we’ll remain fundamentally human. This means whatever we find out there in the stars, we’ll see it and experience it through the same human perspective we have now. This allows me to present what are often mind-blowing, nearly incomprehensible sights and experiences in a familiar, relatable way. The reader can put themselves in the world and imagine being there, because their perspective isn’t so different from that of the character.
As for coming up with those sights and experiences, I’ve loved astronomy and space my entire life. I’m always researching, looking for wilder, more amazing creations I can bring to life, then throw characters into the middle of them.
What authors, past or present, got you jazzed about writing SF?
Goodness, I’ve been reading science fiction since I was a kid. In the old days, Isaac Asimov for the sweeping space exploration and fantastical future, Frank Herbert for the deep world- and culture-building. Later, Catherine Asaro for daring to mix serious, hard science fiction with romance and Lois McMaster Bujold for daring to have fun with science fiction. William Gibson for painting masterful imagery with mere words and Peter F. Hamilton for telling vast, grand stories.
R E/ G ENESIS
In a future too distant to measure, a hyper-evolved breed of humans calling themselves Anadens rule multiple galaxies and alien species with an iron fist. But a small group of dissidents are willing to pursue any and all measures, no matter how extreme, to return freedom to the universe. Now one rebel Anaden will make the ultimate sacrifice in order to break the reigning Directorate’s stranglehold on civilization—however many times it takes.
Set just prior to the events of Relativity: Aurora Resonant Book One , RE/GENESIS pulls back the veil on the universe of Amaranthe, where the fate of all living beings—human, alien and synthetic—will soon be decided.
*
Re/Genesis is unique in several respects. If you’re current on the novels, then you know a major shift in setting, plot and tone occurs for the final trilogy, Aurora Resonant. Set between Abysm, the last book in the Aurora Renegades trilogy and Relativity, the first book in Aurora Resonant, Re/Genesis provides a glimpse into this new world. It stars one of the most interesting, dynamic and confounding characters I’ve ever written—and one who became an instant fan favorite after Relativity—Eren asi-Idoni.
Thanks to the radical change in scenery, Re/Genesis works well as a self-contained story.
D RAMATIS P ERSONAE
* * *
Eren asi-Idoni
Anarch resistance agent.
Species: Anaden
Maeli
Anarch resistance agent.
Species: Novoloume
“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
— Albert Camus
6142.319
12 TH E POCH P ROPER
( I MMEDIATELY F OLLOWING THE E VENTS OF A BYSM)
* * *
AMARANTHE
PHOENIX ARX
M ILKY W AY S ECTOR 14
WHEN YOU’RE AN ANARCH, DYING is the easy part. Completing your mission objective before nulling out? Not always so easy.
“A scan of your credentials does not return a valid result. Present Accepted credentials or be pacified.”
The weaponized arm pointed at my chest by the Vigil unit suggested the pacification would not be of the gentle sort. It rarely was.
I brought my hands up from behind my back and stretched them into the air, fingers curled in but giving every indication they were opening in surrender. As the nail of my left index finger reached the center of my pa
lm, I flicked it outward.
The gossamer dampener net unfurled as it sailed through the air to envelop the Vigil unit.
The floating orb began jerking to and fro in the narrow hallway in an attempt to unsnarl itself. I leapt forward and collected the edges of the net in one hand, then wrangled it under some semblance of control until I was able to wrap my arms around the wide, circular frame and brace it against the wall.
It squirmed savagely, but after two tries I found the input port and shoved a spike into it .
“Not this time, Vigil. You don’t get me yet.”
The unit dropped from my grip to the floor and rolled into the opposite wall.
I’d bought myself twenty minutes.
I stripped off my infiltration suit, shrank it and stuffed it in my kit. The fete-worthy attire which remained looked ridiculous to my mind, but nevertheless appropriate to the venue I’d be visiting. I unbound my hair and began scaling the service duct.
The galactic core hung in the sky like an ornament placed just so to best complement the pavilion. The prodigious light it provided, even here on the verge, filtered through an invisible prism field to cast soft, color-varying rays upon the conveniently reflective flooring.
See how small you are, it whispered.
See how powerful we are, it hummed.
In this case the core acted as a stand-in for the Anaden Directorate, obviously.
The guests enjoying the Phoenix Arx amenities acted oblivious to the implied message, though in truth it was because most of them had internalized it decades if not centuries ago and would never question it again.
Yet as a backup if the message didn’t come through clearly enough—the Directorate didn’t practice subtlety—every rotation of the Arx brought them a stunning view of the Phoenix Gateway in the distance. The colossal triple rings gleamed in the unfiltered glow of the galaxy, beautiful and menacing. This close to the ancient structure, the Gateway appeared more massive than the core itself. It was an optical illusion, but an effective one.
Short Stories of Aurora Rhapsody Page 12