Starshine by G. S. Jennsen

by Discover Sci-Fi Special Edition

  Santiagar paused to sip his water, and Jaron leaned in to chuckle at the punch line of a joke being shared by his table companions. He hadn’t caught the setup, but it hardly mattered.

  Mid-level members of the Senecan delegation surrounded him at the white-clothed table. While the Summit was by most accounts going well, few on either side were ready to mix socially yet. From a hierarchical perspective, he surmised this was the ‘auxiliary’ table—occupied by those on the fringe of real power.

  He swallowed a frown in the fiery burn of the cocktail. By right he should be seated next to the Director, but he had been bumped in favor of the Chairman of Elathan Pharmaceuticals, with the admonition that this was a trade summit, after all.

  “For though we have our differences, we are all members of the human race. We share thousands of years of history. We share a heritage, for Earth is the motherland for each of us.”

  Jaron nearly choked on a bite of ciabatta and quickly covered his mouth with a napkin. The Minister’s eyes shown with the fervor of a true believer. It was revolting.

  “We are here this week to take our first steps on a new path. A path which will bring greater prosperity to the citizens of our galaxy, no matter the affiliation of the world they call home. Director Kouris shares my commitment to forging this new path, and I give him my deepest appreciation and thanks.”

  The arrival of the soup dish provided him an opportunity to surreptitiously glance over at the press contingent. He didn’t know what he expected to see—a ninja in a mask with a saber strapped to his back? He hadn’t the faintest idea what the man looked like, or even if it was a man at all. Perhaps he might at least spot a steely gaze or an indefinable aura surrounding a dangerous person. But he could discern nothing. No sign or clue as to who among the two dozen reporters was the wolf in the fold.

  He did however notice the vision in red crossing the room on her way to a corporate table near the corner. Silver hair cascaded down sculpted shoulders to frame a plunging neckline and ample cleavage.

  Santiagar had abandoned the podium to stride along the front of the dais. His hands animated the energy of his words. “I believe, as the Director believes, commerce between private corporations and individual entrepreneurs should not be curtailed by political boundaries. Both the Alliance and the Federation espouse the principles of free enterprise and economic liberty. The time has come to practice what we preach.”

  Jaron gestured to one of the junior attachés seated at a lesser table to come over. When the young man—Cande-something—reached his side, he leaned in to mutter in his ear. “Do me a favor and see that a Velvet Fantasy is delivered to the lovely lady in red over there. And make damn sure she’s made aware it’s from me.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll take care of it.” The man—Chris Candela was his name, he thought—nodded and scurried off. Jaron relaxed back in the chair and pretended to gaze with interest at what mercifully appeared to be the conclusion of the speech.

  “Tomorrow we will be presenting a series of real, concrete initiatives which will relax trade restrictions on a number of consumer goods, opening new markets for Alliance and Senecan companies alike. In addition, I’m pleased to announce Director Kouris and I have agreed to meet again next year in what we hope will become a regular conference devoted to expanding galactic commerce.”

  The Minister stopped at the perfect center of the stage and smiled with assured conviction at the audience. “Here’s to new beginnings.”

  As Santiagar descended the stairs to shake Kouris’ hand, Jaron looked over his shoulder to catch the eye of the lady in red. She raised her drink to him with a small dip of her chin and a seductive smile.

  Diffuse lights transformed the waters to a glowing turquoise beneath the translucent walkway. Tiny ripples danced in the mild breeze cooling the air after what had been a warm, sunny day. Glare from the many hotels, restaurants and clubs fashioned an eerie blue-filtered aurora in the night sky.

  The Summit banquet had concluded three hours earlier. Afterward the attendees had practically trampled one another in their eagerness to scatter throughout the resort colony and partake in their sin of choice.

  The reputation of the man Matei followed was not that of a sinner. Those who knew him regarded him as squeaky-clean to a fault, which would be why he walked alone rather than joining any of the roving groups of his coworkers. It would also be why the man was heading toward the less well-lit area of the entertainment quarter, where his carnal lapse was unlikely to be witnessed by those same coworkers.

  Matei trailed his target into a sizeable crowd spilling out of a large theatre. The façade was festooned with garish flamingos, frolicking dolphins and a strange yellow-and-orange flying creature, all intertwined with neon magenta crystals. The marquee advertised a full-sensory interactive circus performance.

  Past the theatre the crowd dispersed somewhat, and with a right turn shadows began to fall across the illuminated walkway. Progressively seedier bars competed with body art parlors, sensory booths and ‘leisure’ clubs. He quickened his pace.

  As they passed the entrance to one of the more popular clubs and the foot traffic briefly increased, he bumped against his target. “Sorry, excuse me.” A clumsy grasp of a fleshy upper arm masked the pinprick of the microneedle.

  The man didn’t even glance at him. “It’s fine.”

  Matei blended back into the passersby to continue following three meters behind. Twenty steps later the man’s gait became erratic, then slowed to sway unsteadily.

  He sidled in beside his target and placed an arm around the man’s waist for support. “Easy there. I think you’ve had a little too much to drink.”

  Unfocused eyes looked over groggily. “Wha…you….” The eyes drifted closed as the man sagged into his arms.

  He held the slumping figure upright and guided him to an offshoot alley, then down two more alleyways, until the discordant sounds of the quarter faded to a low buzz. They moved around the corner of the rearmost building and he let the man collapse against the wall. A few incoherent mumblings escaped, but by this point all motor function control had ceased.

  Matei squatted down and placed a hand under the man’s chin to hold his head up. “Okay, smile for the camera.” His ocular implant scanned the facial features and hairstyle; he had to hold an eyelid open to get a retinal imprint. The man sank to the ground while he turned over a palm and scanned the fingerprints. Lastly, he yanked a single dark brown hair from the scalp and pressed it between the glyphs on his index fingers to extract the DNA sequence.

  Satisfied, he reached in his pack and pulled out a ball. It was a mere four centimeters in diameter, made of an ultra-dense alloy and attached to a length of fine woven rope. He wound the end of the rope around the man’s ankle and knotted it securely.

  The man had slipped into a fully catatonic state. Matei lifted him enough to shift him to the edge of the narrow walkway. After injecting the man’s neck with another needle, he straightened up and nudged the body and the ball over the edge into the water.

  Here in the deep recesses of the entertainment quarter there were no lights in the walkways or neon lights adorning the buildings. Within seconds the body vanished beneath the inky blackness.

  The rope was constructed of a special water-soluble metamat fiber. It was coated with a resin designed to dissolve over three days, after which the rope would disintegrate and the bloated body rise to the surface. The injected solution acted to keep the core organs minimally functioning long past when the man had drowned, thus delaying the apparent time of death.

  In the bright daylight sun and crystal waters, the corpse was certain to be discovered. To the world it would look like the man committed suicide shortly after committing the heinous act he intended to perform the next evening.

  He picked up the pack and retraced his path through the alleyways, where he rejoined the revelers. He wound his way back toward the hotel, where he would spend the remainder of the night transforming himself into Chris
Candela, junior attaché to the Senecan trade delegation.

  11

  SPACE, NORTHEAST QUADRANT

  Border of Senecan Federation Space

  * * *

  Caleb sat on the floor in the open space of the main deck tinkering with a spare circuit panel. It was a trick he had learned as a teenager when he had spent a summer placing monitoring stations for the Park Service in the mountains outside Cavare. Occupying your hands with a detailed task became a form of meditation, allowing your mind to work through concerns in the background.

  His hands worked to separate the main and below deck temperature control circuits; his mind pondered Volosk’s oblique suggestion that he might, if he wanted, take Samuel’s place in Division.

  It wasn’t a question of whether he thought he could do the job. It was a matter of whether he wanted to do the job. Samuel hadn’t been confined to a desk in his last few years, but he had certainly spent less time in the field. Caleb liked the way things were now. He liked the chase, the intrigue…the simplicity. There were no politics to worry about and no bureaucratic entanglements; there was only the mission. He hadn’t—

  —alarms began pealing in the cabin, the high-pitched wails bouncing off the narrow walls to clash in a discordant clangor.

  He leapt to his feet and lunged for the cockpit—in the small cabin it wasn’t a great distance—dropping into the seat as he brought the alerts front and center of the HUD.

  The primary alarm alerted him to the fact that a particle beam had missed the ship by thirty-eight meters, sent off-kilter by the passive defense shielding. Weapons fire skimming the hull was the first warning of other ships in the vicinity?

  They must be sporting hardcore stealth, and since they were firing on him unprovoked they were definitely mercs. Drop out of superluminal for ten damn minutes and he’s getting shot at….

  “VI, identify hostiles and ready weapons.”

  The medium-pitched female voice responded in its pleasant, forever-placid tone. “Tracking hostiles.”

  The VI represented the top-layer interface for the onboard CU which monitored and manipulated the various ship systems. In 1.7 seconds the CU used the trajectory of the beam to extrapolate the attacker’s location and analyzed the energy readings in the region to identify the unique signature of the vessel.

  A red dot appeared on the HUD’s regional map.

  Having used the information to match similar energy signatures in the area, two additional dots quickly joined the first one. The three dots flew in formation and closed rapidly.

  “Let’s do this, you bastards. VI, autopilot off.”

  “You have navigation.”

  He engaged the safety harness then activated the manual-guided controls and yanked the ship upward into a sharp arc. He sailed above the pursuers, locked on and fired at the lead attacker.

  Particle beam weapons were standard fare on merc vessels, because they were comparatively cheap, standardized and mass-produced. However they weren’t particularly agile, with limited on-the-fly adjustability and a non-negligible recharge time.

  He’d noted earlier how Division hadn’t scrimped on the ship’s hardware, and was never more grateful for it than at this moment. The dual neodymium-crystal pulse laser weapons his ship wielded exhibited far greater responsiveness than particle beams. They realigned each pulse to account for the movement of the target and were capable of firing continuously for upwards of twenty seconds before needing to recharge. Granted, each pulse carried rather less force than a particle beam shot—but in practice the continual fire more than made up the difference.

  Twenty seconds of fire was enough to rip through most vessels’ primary and secondary shielding, much as it was doing right…about…now.

  The lead ship ripped apart into jagged metal shards, followed shortly thereafter by the bright white nova-like implosion-explosion of the sLume drive. His ship shuddered in his hands as the shockwave passed over it.

  He concentrated back on the HUD and the two outstanding attackers. The rush of adrenaline in his veins focused his thoughts and created the illusion of time stretching out. Intellectually, he knew nanobot regulators in his bloodstream were honing and directing the adrenaline to enhance the effect. Physically, he only knew his eyesight became sharper, his reflexes faster and his decision-making clearer.

  He’d exploited an advantage with the initial shot; they hadn’t known he could track them. Now they did. Predictably, the two ships began zigzagging while attempting to track his own erratic path.

  Maneuvering to slide behind them, he flipped the ship around and set the weapons to track one of the them until it gained a reliable lock then automatically fire. Unfortunately, while he did so the other attacker got a lock on him. The ship jerked in a violent wrench from the instantaneous impact of the particle beam. The shielding held but after two hits now stood at thirty-seven percent power.

  He tried to make his movement as unpredictable as possible. It was one of the reasons why humans remained better pilots than CUs. Even seemingly random variations by a CU were able to be predicted to a reasonable probability by another CU; an Artificial might be another matter, but building a synthetic neural net into a ship remained impractical, not to mention highly illegal. The decisions of a human acting on instinct under combat pressures, however, could never be predicted with any degree of accuracy. Or so the scientists said.

  Of course this meant he couldn’t predict their movements either. The weapons would fire within a picosecond of achieving a lock, though—and everyone paused at the controls for a picosecond or two. He was sweeping below and aft of the attackers when his weapons locked and the second vessel followed the first into the beyond.

  He made a snap decision and pushed the ship’s speed to one hundred five percent maximum. The mercs—one merc now—were fast, but not that fast.

  He had been traveling at seventy-five percent max sub-light speed when the attack occurred, and they had been gaining on him. Still, on the assumption the pilot of the final ship would spend at least a few seconds reeling from the close-proximity explosion and the fact all his companions were now dead, he figured he stood decent odds of escaping in those critical few seconds. Given the depleted state of his shielding, better odds than surviving another hit.

  “VI, divert non-critical power to impulse.”

  “Eighty percent of environmentals and utilities power diverted.”

  He amped the speed an additional twelve percent. It wouldn’t be maintainable for long without blowing out the engine—maybe ten minutes—but it should be long enough to lose the merc and transition to superluminal.

  “VI, divert communications power to dampener field.”

  “Communications is classified as a critical system.”

  “I’m aware. Divert communications power to dampener field.”

  A slight pause. “Dampener field at 97.2 percent strength.”

  He sped ‘north-northwest’ toward a region of denser interstellar gas and dust. Concepts like “north” had no real meaning in space, true. Nonetheless, the intrinsic human need for directional bearing had led to the development in the early days of extra-solar space travel of a heading scheme based on Earth’s location relative to the center of the galaxy.

  Eight minutes later he decreased his speed to ninety-eight percent max, sent the diverted power flow to the dampener field and began altering his route. He’d veer about for a couple of hours and approach Metis from a different angle than his previous trajectory. As a precaution.

  The air in the cabin started to get uncomfortably cold. He withstood it for another fifteen minutes, tucking his arms against his chest to maintain body heat. When his jaw shivered so violently he accidentally bit his tongue, he decided the success or failure of his escape had by this point surely been decided.

  “VI, return power to normal distribution.”

  “Standard power flows restored. Primary systems nominal. Two thermal blankets are located in the aft supply cabinet should you
require them.”

  “Thank you, VI. I’ll be fine.” The breath he had metaphorically been holding since the attack began escaped in a very real expulsion of all the air from his lungs as he sank deeper into the chair. No longer required to focus on escape, evasion or keeping warm, the last of the adrenaline dissipated. He was left with little to do but sit there and attempt to wrap his head around what had just happened.

  How had they tracked him? For all practical purposes ships were not able to be tracked while superluminal. Theoretically the warp bubble could be detected, but to track it one would have to be traveling at the same precise speed on an identical trajectory. Even then, the minimal maneuverability coupled with the vast distances being covered made it effectively impossible to follow a ship in superluminal through a miniscule change in trajectory.

  At sub-light speeds his ship was virtually invisible from greater than 0.1 AU; the odds of a band of mercs randomly encountering him at such close proximity in deep space were so low as to be nonexistent. Certainly, merc bands loitered in space waiting on targets all the time; but they did so in populated, high traffic areas and preyed on far larger, less stealthy vessels.

  Lycaon was almost 0.6 kpcs behind him, Gaiae more than 0.7 kpcs to the southeast—and neither of those worlds were exactly hotbeds of activity. There was essentially nothing between here and the borders of explored space except the Metis Nebula.

  “VI, initiate an analysis of all systems and a nano-scale scan of the interior and exterior of the ship.”

  “What am I to look for?”

  “A tracking device or item capable of sending out a signal, but I’ll settle for anything which doesn’t belong. Also, run diagnostics on the dampener field and let me know of any errors.”

  “Acknowledged. A scan at such a level of precision will take 3.62 hours.”