by Scott Rhine
Supergiant
Characters
Timeline
Roz’s Star Chart
Prologue – Meeting the Astrogator
Chapter 1 – Ghost in the Machine
Chapter 2 – Bedridden
Chapter 3 – Paranoia
Chapter 4 – Visions
Chapter 5 – Prairie Station
Chapter 6 – Traveling Salesman Problems
Chapter 7 – Guild and Wergild
Chapter 8 – Probability Mechanics
Chapter 9 – Plausible Deniability
Chapter 10 – Motives
Chapter 11 – Hidden in Plain Sight
Chapter 12 – Crystal Ball
Chapter 13 – Enigma Cube
Chapter 14 – Cerulean
Chapter 15 – Blindsided
Chapter 16 – Fallout
Chapter 17 – Treason and Reason
Chapter 18 – Let He Who Is without Sins
Chapter 19 – Toxic Secrets
Chapter 20 – Land Mines
Chapter 21 – It’s Raining Shoes
Chapter 22 – Seat of the Pants
Chapter 23 – Butterflies of Doom
Chapter 24 – Experiment
Chapter 25 – Profits Roll In
Chapter 26 – Paved with Good Intentions
Chapter 27 – Spin and Deception
Chapter 28 – Outpouring
Chapter 29 – Alien Anatomy Lessons
Chapter 30 – Wishes
Chapter 31 – Retrofit
Chapter 32 – Cathedral
Chapter 33 – Celebration
Chapter 34 – Prejudice
Chapter 35 – Magi Adversary
Chapter 36 – First Contact
Chapter 37 – Smoke and Mirrors
Chapter 38 – We Uplift One Another
Chapter 39 – Farewells
Chapter 40 – Subbasement
Supergiant
Book Two of Gigaparsec
by Scott Rhine
Amazon Edition
Copyright 2015 Scott Rhine
Thanks to my editors, Melissa Duclos and Weston Kincade. To my beta readers Tammy Rhine, Steven Terry, and Matt Erler.
Cover art by http://www.thecovercounts.com
Characters
Alyssa Greenberg – A Human cook with a criminal record.
Deke – A Bat pilot who crashed in a shuttle race.
Echo – Astrogator of the reclusive Magi race. She is missing her two partners and accused of murdering them. Instead of her own form, she echoes the face of the person the viewer wronged most.
Eesan Crakik – A Bat physics professor whose math papers provide Echo with hope of navigating the subbasement, the dimension below subspace.
Feeveerkahn – A pure-white Bat prince, third in line for the throne.
Grady – A retired Union Navy repairman with bad memories of fighting Phibs on Winedark.
Herb Greenberg – An old man who owns Just Desserts ice cream parlor.
Ivy DeLaurelin – A psi who communicates instantly with her triplets at interstellar distances. Roz’s best friend.
Jeeves – An odd alien mimic that hides under the bed … and makes it.
Kesh Far Traveler – Former money launderer for the Saurian mob posing as his deceased brother, the former captain of The Inner Eye.
Lord Aviar – A Bat nobleman who resembles Anubis, exiled for playing the violin too well and leading the youth astray. A fan of Nero and Satan.
Max Ellison – A Human !Kung doctor and ex Turtle Special Forces operative. His name was selected from the Catholic prayer Kyrie eleison—Lord have mercy. He wants to start a new life devoid of killing.
Reuben Black – A descendant of the Black Ram, capable of boosting the mental skills of others. The Goat computer programmer chose this mission name because of his penchant for Reubenesque women and his pure artistry as a forger.
Roz – Chief Engineer Shiraz Mendez. Human starship repair tech from a high-gravity world. Because she grew up as a poor migrant worker, she has a scar over her left eye and a chip on her shoulder.
Yenang – A Bat weapons expert with an unhealthy curiosity about the Magi ship.
Timeline
The Anodyne calendar begins the year of the colony’s founding (1 AF).
015 Stewart Llewellyn rules Anodyne colony
070 Anodyne purchases first ansible
080 Anodyne teaches Earth oligarchy to build starships
091 Jotunheim mining colony founded by oligarchs
105 At Union convocation, Anodyne named mentor for the Panda race
106 Venice founded as an oligarch farming and biofuel colony
125 Shangri-La founded, first Anodyne colony
130 Vegas founded by oligarchs to establish trade lines
138 Anodyne’s great terraforming project begins to save Earth
140 Eden oligarch colony attempted, the great mistake.
141 Anodyne cosigns a long-term Goat loan from Bankers
149 Laurelin founded, Llewellyn’s private retirement planet
150 Jotunheim orbital shipyards established
151 Earth slips into the time of chaos, and the oligarchy inhabits the Moon
160 Cocytus founded by Blue Giant Fuel Corporation and an Anodyne defector
170 Over one million Humans in space
210 Commercial interests dominate space and second Earth exodus begins
230 Stewart Llewellyn dies
256 Anodyne pays installment of Goat loan in exchange for New Hawaii
270 Mayflower colony ship misjumps
271 Black Ram Xerxes dies
278 Pirate activity forces construction of first Human warship
312 Border skirmishes lead to thawing of embryo Churchill Llewellyn
320 Evidence of Phib theft and genocide uncovered
321 Last Llewellyn raised by Stewart destroyed with his diplomatic vessel
333 Max Culp joins Union Navy as a medic
338 New Hawaii falls
345 Mnamnabo falls, but tide turns in favor of alliance
351 Max joins Turtle Special Forces
385 Gigaparsec War officially ends
392 Max frees Echo and forges the Far Traveler partnership
Roz’s Star Chart
Prologue – Meeting the Astrogator
Chief Engineer Shiraz Mendez hadn’t been on many dates. During her brief social encounter with Max, she had faced death twice, acquired a criminal record, and been recruited to be the pilot of a prototype Magi starship. As an expert in alien ship repairs, Roz wasn’t a particularly good pilot, but she wasn’t going to turn down a chance to work on this magnificent vessel. Hundreds of jump drives bristled from the spherical core like a high-tech hedgehog, twice the number needed to enter subspace. The extra drives were useful to cushion the passengers against the effects of acceleration, making the ship steer like a silken dream.
If Roz were honest, she might admit that a second date with the good doctor might be an equally exciting possibility. He was a mass of internal conflicts—a !Kung tribesman with blue eyes and a notorious hunter who didn’t want to kill. Right about now, though, Max was freaking her out. When she had asked to meet the mysterious owner of the ship, he had looked frightened for her.
This was a guy who four of the six species in the Union had awarded the Order of the Dolphin for bravery. He had pinned the silvery dolphin medal on her when she left to visit the astrogator’s chamber.
The Magi known as Echo plotted the ship’s course. No Human had ever seen what a Magi looked like. As humanity’s patron race, they remained hidden. Were they hideous monsters? she wondered.
Too late for second guessing, Roz held her
breath as the cylindrical elevator dropped toward the core of the ship. When the door slid open, she was alone in a huge, mirrored, spherical chamber. The magnitude of the reflected light nearly blinded her. “Wow. Does this chamber have something to do with your prototype star drive?”
This ship had been the first to dip into the theoretical area below subspace, nicknamed the subbasement. Although Echo had spent over a hundred years recovering from the maiden voyage that had veered drastically off course, the ship had achieved faster-than-light travel outside a gravity lane between stars.
For an engineer like Roz, the advance was worth a risk or two. “Hello?” A sheet-covered table stood a third of the way across the room. Max had lured her down here with the promise of a massage, which seemed silly compared with a private audience with one of humanity’s reclusive, high-tech uplifters.
She caught sight of her straight, unwashed hair in the mirror and cringed. Everybody on this ship was better looking than her, even the Goat, and none of them had chunks of hull ceramic caked in their hair. So much for a good first impression. Her image grew as she crept toward the padded table and then vanished altogether. She played with the focal point of the lens for a moment, stepping in and out of view like a magician’s assistant.
Her white jumpsuit uniform with red stripes was relatively clean, but Max had told her to remove it for the massage. Why was she so nervous? He had prescribed a legitimate medical treatment for the arm she had strained when using a Turtle-tech sonic cutting tool. She wouldn’t be visible to anyone else, and this was just like visiting the doctor. Shyly, Roz looked both ways and unzipped.
The chill in the room gave her goose flesh, causing her to hug herself. Perhaps she was trying to hide the dark, sapphire-colored bra leftover from her party outfit. She had wanted to look nice, but black would have been too much of a statement. Who am I kidding? I waited beside Max’s bed all night, and only his pet mimic creature sat on my lap. Even the odd, wrinkled Jeeves fell into the category of “so ugly he’s cute.”
After she slipped from her magnetic ship boots, she padded uneasily in her woolen socks. Ugh! She should just hold up a neon sign. Men weren’t interested in women over thirty who wore wool socks and cut their hair to fit inside a helmet. By contrast her best friend, Ivy, had done the nasty with the Goat man several times last night. She had the nerve to brag that male Goats could perform twelve times in a day … enough for every unoccupied room on the cargo level.
And I’m too puritanical to let a gender-neutral alien see me. Shaking her head, Roz sprawled on the table, which had the standard cutout for her face to fit into. The furniture’s surface seemed to be composed of hundreds of hexagons that sprouted from the floor.
Her muscles tensed further from cold and dread as she waited. In utter silence, warm, delicate hands touched the base of her back. Roz said, “The pain isn’t there, it’s—oh, that’s good.” Her spine tingled as the hands worked her over. Echo’s fingers felt Human in number but more delicate. Even this amount of information was more than most people learned about the Magi in a lifetime.
Instrumental harp music played in the background, reminding Roz how long it had been since she had slept. She forgot to quiz the astrogator about her ship’s design as the muscles loosened. Long before the hands returned to her neck, her eyes rolled back into her head, and she drifted off into slumber.
****
Roz relived the worst day of her life. She hated farming, but as a migrant worker on the high-gravity moon Napa, the only way she stood a chance of attending university was earning the women’s math and science scholarship to Anodyne. Her father’s sister, Alicia, had been the only member of the family to escape in this way.
The world had been colonized decades too soon when rumors of war threatened to close the space lanes. Workers wore breathing filters to block out arsenic and other poisons still in the atmosphere. However, she could never make quota if she changed the filters as often as the manual suggested. Every farmer over the age of twenty got sick eventually. Those who could no longer harvest were moved to the manufacturing moon, Flux, where the extreme temperatures hammered the workers instead. The only way to truly live was to leave before the poisons reached critical levels in her body.
The sole scholarship on the ag world depended on the results of a test given once a year. Trying to eke out a few extra points, Roz had stayed up too late studying. While she slept, her kid brother Merlot had borrowed her computer pad to play games. By the time her computer was supposed to wake her, the battery was long dead. On the most important day of her life, she missed the only bus into town. By the time a misdialed call woke her, the exam has already begun.
“There’s always next year, chica,” her father had advised. Of course, he had been the one to tell her when she was five, “You’re smart and have small hands. Maybe you can free the jammed combine blade so we don’t have to wait hours for the mechanic.”
She still wore that scar. The injury to her head had made her the mental equivalent of a deaf-mute—a null. Everyone else in the Union had some sense of when another sentient was in the room. They could bond to another person in marriage and share intimacy. Anyone could tell from her aura that she was damaged, like a bud clipped from the rosebush before opening. It didn’t matter that she had designed the safety mechanism that prevented anyone else from becoming injured this way. She was alone.
Even if Roz could afford the exam fee a second time, she wouldn’t be able to stomach the stares and insults for another year. She already had two strikes against her record, defending herself from people who thought it was funny to pick on a null. Even her own family had referred to her as “special.”
Excelling in academics was the only way to prove her brain was undamaged in other ways.
Using her life savings, she invested in a cab. The test was four hours long, an hour for each section. If they did the math section first, she could still catch up. When she rushed into the testing room, the only seat remaining was in the back next to sexy Sylvia, her primary competition. Sylvia’s hair was wavy and perfectly groomed, while Roz’s was bound in a ponytail and cut with a pocketknife.
They were in the middle of the English portion of the exam. Though the workers spoke primarily Spanish, English was the official language of the university, and her weak point. She could waste a ridiculous amount of time scouring a paragraph, only to be asked a stupid question like, “What should the title of the paragraph be?” None of the choices fit for Roz. She didn’t see the shape of the forest, but she could tell the number of leaves on each tree. It wasn’t fair.
She skipped the reading section at the start and went straight to vocabulary, filling in bubbles at astonishing speed. Still, she had too many left when the bearded proctor had them flip to the next test. Roz completed the math section in record time and went back for more English. She did the same for logic, but there still wasn’t enough time. The essay portion would take every second remaining. She hadn’t completed the idiotic reading questions, and those twenty-four empty bubbles would end her chances of attending university.
Then it happened. During the final break, high and mighty Sylvia wanted to challenge a question in the logic section—a mistake in spacing that misled the reader. She left her exam answer book closed and face up so no one would cheat off her math or logic answers. The first page had personal information as well as the first twenty answers.
The pattern of the bubbles was quite distinctive, even at a glance. Having seen the sheet, Roz couldn’t forget them. Here was the real question of the exam: who would be left here on this poisoned rock to die? Sylvia routinely attended social events with the landlords. If she missed out on university, she would use her wiles, piano lessons, and fancy literature references to marry the son of one of those rich men.
Sylvia could afford a retake.
Recalling the stains on her father’s fingernails and the coughing fits he experienced at night, Roz filled in the bubbles.
Returning to
her seat, Sylvia sneered. “That section of the test is over!”
Heart pounding, Roz held up her answer key for the proctor to see. “I came in late, sir. My name isn’t bubbled in yet.”
The bearded professor had an understanding face. “I’ll give you a few minutes at the end.”
Later, he did, leaving her alone in the room for the few minutes Roz needed.
****
Roz’s stomach had churned for days afterward, but she won the scholarship by a nose.
At her congratulation party, the mental reenactment deviated from true memory. When Roz met the foreman’s daughter, Sylvia accused, “We both know you robbed me of my future.”
“I’m so sorry. Once I got a job, I gave back the amount I stole from the original scholarship fund.”
“Too late for me,” Sylvia said.
“I checked on you when I came back for my father’s funeral. You have a super palate, more taste buds than normal people. You parlayed that into a better job in the vineyards and a husband from the elite moon of Ravenna.”
Sylvia glared at her. “Would that have been good enough for you?”
“No,” Roz admitted, “but I would’ve died on the farm. Will you forgive me?”
The scene flickered for a moment. The voice changed. “I can help to heal you if you want.”
This wasn’t a normal dream.
Roz willed herself awake. She could feel the alien sitting on her back, hands around her neck. “Stop messing with my mind!” She willed the false Sylvia to change appearances to that of the hologram actress, Gina Millhouse Graham, in a short sari that showed too much leg.
Soon, the shape blurred, like vision seen though tears. The dark, wavy hair and facial symmetry were similar, but the skin tone paled. The face seemed to grow kinder. “You’re very strong.”
Roz snorted. “High-g world. Are you going to call me a burly girl in addition to a retard?” She crawled to her hands and knees on the table, ready to throw the Magi off.
“I meant mentally. Very few Humans have the ability to guide my projections. Your will is formidable. Please, lie back down or both of us could be hurt.”