Rogue Stars

by C Gockel et al.

  As they had the last two nights when she went to bed, the lights dimmed; a second later they returned to full strength. The strains of a synthwave ballad began wafting through the cabin. A frown, and the volume decreased.

  Her right hand brought the sandwich to her mouth as the left waved toward the cockpit. The glyphs along her wrist pulsed faintly.

  “It’s a brisk -54° outside, while in here it’s a cozy 23°. The system repairs are essentially complete: the plasma shield is up to 93%, and the self-healing hydrogel on the damaged conduit should bring it to 100% by morning. The impulse engine reports all systems fully functional.

  “The LEN reactor is expending 12% of its output capacity on keeping us alive and comfortable…and it’s a little cranky at having to work harder on account of there being two of us.” She winked at him—sending an unexpected wicked shiver down his spine—and took a bite of her sandwich.

  “Most impressive. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen such extensive wireless interconnectivity from cybernetics alone, no hardware adjunct.”

  “Planet-side there’s almost always too much interference for it to work reliably. The invisible yet teeming cloud of electronic signals permeates everywhere, clogging the air with noise. Here though, it’s just me.”

  “And, as the reactor noted, me.”

  She gazed at him a moment, and he could see thoughts flitting across her eyes. He wished like hell he knew what they were. “And you.”

  Her gaze darted down to acquire an apple slice. “Bet you didn’t think I was a warenut, huh?”

  “I still don’t. I would say you have simply optimized both yourself and your ship for maximum capability and performance.”

  She shrugged but seemed pleased by the response. “More or less.”

  He took another bite—despite her admonition, neither of them were hurrying through lunch—and cocked his head to the side. “This music…Ethan Tollis, right?”

  “Yep. You’ve heard of him?”

  “Of course. Music doesn’t respect political boundaries. But it’s a different style than what you’ve usually had playing.”

  “He’s a friend.”

  He arched an eyebrow in genuine surprise. “You’re ‘friends’ with one of the most successful prog synth musicians in the galaxy.”

  She nodded, her mouth full. “Mmhmm.”

  Hmm, indeed. She came off as so serious, so focused and no-nonsense, he would’ve thought she’d have no patience for artistic types.

  She caught him staring at her. “What?”

  “Nothing.” He didn’t try to hide the mischief in his eyes. “Good friends?”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s not supposed to mean anything. I’m merely asking how good of friends you are.”

  “Very funny.” She took a sip of water. “If you’re asking me if I slept with him, it is so far beyond your business.”

  He laughed. “So yes, then.”

  She sighed in clear annoyance and picked up her sandwich, only to set it down again to glare at him. “Fine. I met him after university while I was doing an externship at Pacifica Aerodynamics. He was a struggling coffeehouse musician at the time. We dated for around a year. I took a job on Erisen, we parted friends. A few years later he hit it big. I was happy for him. End of story.”

  The notion of her dating a musician threw him for even more of a loop. It appeared he had quite a bit more to discover about her—but he’d ponder it later. “Interesting. You keep in touch?”

  “We catch up every now and then.”

  He really shouldn’t rile her up; it was not conducive to him making it off this rock alive and in one piece. But he couldn’t help it. When she got annoyed or flustered her nose crinkled up and sideways and her mouth contorted into the oddest shapes. It looked so….

  “And by ‘catch up’ you mean?”

  She glared at him again and…yep, there it was. Adorable.

  “Are you done? You look like you’re done.” She reached across and snatched his plate away, stood and marched to the sink.

  He grinned to himself and began clearing off the rest of the table. “You know, feel free to ask me embarrassing, invasive things about my life. I’m good with tit-for-tat.”

  She glanced over her shoulder at him. “Why bother? Whatever you said would be a lie.”

  Ouch. The lighthearted mood instantly evaporated. “No, it wouldn’t be.”

  “And I could tell the difference…how?”

  He opened his mouth, then closed it. He gave her a pursed smile that wasn’t. “You probably couldn’t.”

  Her shoulders notched upward to emphasize the point. She turned back to the sink to stow the dishes.

  He didn’t think he had ever been shamed so thoroughly and to such stinging effect by a few casual words. He sank against the table, taken aback by the rebuke…and by how badly he wanted to change her mind.

  They lay on their stomachs at right angles to one another in the engineering well. She heated an edge of intact hull while he heated a torn section and brought it to meet her edge; she aligned them and they held the pieces in place until they cooled and bonded together.

  The conversation since lunch had been polite but strained, and fairly minimal. He struggled to find some way to get back to the comfortable interaction they’d been playing at having all morning. Because it had been nice.

  He nodded in appreciation as the metal melded seamlessly together. “This is seriously high-quality material, not that I’m surprised. Maybe the Trade Summit was a success, and we’ll get access to material of this caliber.”

  “What Tra— oh yeah, that political circle-jerk. Yes, let’s decide to sell doilies and mantle ornaments to each other, it’ll make everything better.”

  He followed her lead and scooted to the next section. “It’s been twenty-two years, it’s arguably time to at least try.”

  She didn’t respond, acting as if she were focused on heating the metal at her fingertips and positioning the now pliant material. She kept her gaze on it when she finally spoke. “My father was killed in the war.”

  Well this topic isn’t likely to bring back the lighthearted atmosphere. Way to go. His voice was carefully soft. “I know.”

  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.

  29 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 mathem
atical 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.