Starbound (Stealing the Sun Book 5)

by Ron Collins

  In the end it all boiled down to the simple fact that he was afraid to die.

  CHAPTER 14

  Florecer: Galactic Council on Wormhole Physics

  Local Date: Third Quarter, Setting 13

  Local Time: 1612

  A week after meeting with the CIO, Torrance found himself on Florecer, the innermost planet of the 16 Cygni B system, a tiny type-K star some twelve light-years from the Solar System. He sat in the convention center conference auditorium, glancing nervously across the way at Oscar Pentabill. The chairs were large and cushioned, arranged in elevated circles around a central podium. The configuration made the conference feel more like a political debate than a scientific gathering—a fact that brought him a sardonic smile as he sipped chilled water and listened to scientists from around the galaxy argue.

  “Alpha Centauri A is going to run out of energy, and we’ve got to find a way to keep the spacecraft attached to it flying.”

  “It was supposed to last ten thousand years.”

  “That assumed the star fueled only a single spacecraft.”

  “So we’re supposed to trust the government this time, too?”

  “Don’t be an extremist, Vlad. The original estimate also assumed seventy percent flow conversion. Reality is closer to twenty-five.”

  “That’s because Kransky-Watt is so horribly wasteful.”

  “Reality is their fault?”

  “Would you suggest the missions not be flown, and the war lost?”

  “There’s the problem, then, isn’t it?”

  Heads nodded.

  Torrance sat quietly, watching. Nothing positive was coming from this discussion, and, maybe ironically, he felt a bittersweet tingle of, well, let’s call it superiority. It wasn’t that he felt good. He didn’t want to feel good right now. His assignment was cowardly and vile. The idea of killing Pentabill sat in his gut like cold oatmeal. It would change him forever. But he felt something important as he watched these people bickering. This was only a stage, he realized, a place where names came to rub elbows with other names. Hermann, Yang, Jacob—pick a name, they were here.

  No truth was being discovered at this conference.

  No science was being performed.

  Science was done in labs and behind consoles.

  Science, at its core, was an endeavor one undertook in isolated groups, developing results to bring back to the entire community for review. It was the way of the world—the way of history. Bring ideas and you create spaghetti. Bring hard data and you change the world.

  Now Torrance had data.

  Late at night, between the seemingly never-ending briefings and training programs that UGIO agents had been stuffing into his head, he had been working with Thomas Kitchell to review Kitchell’s work and package the information about the most recent Alpha Centauri emissions into a presentable paper. The effort left him tired and drained. His stamina dropped off earlier in the evenings than it once did, and he had not progressed as far as he wanted. But it was good work, and he was proud of it.

  If they played it right, it would make Kitchell into a superstar, and Torrance into…well, it would add to whatever he already was in ways he wasn’t sure how to predict. But in the end, that didn’t matter to Torrance any more. Not really. What mattered to him, he discovered, was only that he might be able to actually help the defenseless creatures who were now stuck in their home planet, a planet that was almost certainly being bled to death as their sun was stolen from them.

  Most current estimates said that Alpha Centauri A would remain viable for something short of four hundred years. Only a few short generations, really. Assuming they could handle the distress to their homeland that was clearly going to happen, and was almost certainly already happening.

  Thinking about it was enough to make him sick, but at least he was doing something about it now.

  Watching this debate go on around him, he was no longer certain he could say that about this collection of people he once admired, and even perhaps had once thought of as friends.

  “No.” A wavering voice came amplified through the PA. “That is not the problem at all.”

  The room shuffled nervously as Fredric Parson stood on rickety knees, gripping a brown cane. His back was bent like a hook. His pate was bald and mottled.

  Dr. Parson was 148 years old and living on his last telomere extension. Torrance flashed on their earlier squabble all those years ago. Parson was crotchety even back then.

  “We are missing the forest for the trees, my friends. The problem has little to do with spacecraft or missions or even the war as a whole. The problem here is that as we drain away the star’s fusing material, we leave the trash behind. It’s only a matter of time before energy released by the star’s fusion engine will be unable to resist the star’s gravity. When that happens, Alpha Centauri A will collapse under its own weight.”

  “Then we get a supernova,” Kalista McKenna interjected.

  Scientists across the room rolled their eyes to the ceiling as McKenna stood up. The young woman from Colorado University was brilliant, but she didn’t know when it was best to be quiet. The membership had given her leeway for two years, but their patience was drawing to an end. Now McKenna stood like a corporate martyr in her white business dress with a scarf of pink and purple showing tastefully from her collar.

  “That’s a fanciful notion, Kalista,” Parson replied. “Centauri A, however, is similar to our own sun. It will not go supernova.”

  “A star reacts differently when its mass is in flux.”

  “All theoretical.”

  “As is everything we do in this field—all we have is theoretical science backed up by computer simulations. I have a new solution that indicates pressure waves caused by transient masses act as a pseudo mass. At the rate we’re tapping Alpha Centauri A, its effective mass will rise dramatically. Alpha Cen will go supernova, and it will go supernova sooner than most of our models are predicting the star to run out of fuel. The only question that remains unsolved is whether we’ll get a black hole or a neutron star in its place.”

  The sound of clearing throats reverberated.

  Chairs rocked backwards.

  Torrance nearly snickered aloud at the level of discomfort around the room. Admittedly, McKenna’s idea was brash and most likely wrong. But it was also new and unexpected. Torrance could not help but delight in the ripples the mere suggestion caused this gathering of scientific minds. For the first time, he was actually glad he had come to the council.

  Parson’s reed-thin voice echoed throughout the center. “All we can really say is that never before have we had an opportunity to learn about this type of an event. We need to prepare. We need to push for new programs and more funding.”

  “Hear, hear.”

  A smattering of low-voiced conversations ensued.

  Torrance thought they were preparing to move to the next item on the agenda, which was to be a review of the less-than-glorious results of the Newton project—an ill-fated effort that several physicists had undertaken to study a concept that would allow remote wormhole creation anywhere in the universe, and potentially render spacecraft, even the vaunted Star Drives, obsolete.

  “What if our fanciful friend is correct?” Benaj Ritta from Mars Colony Kasbian said. “A supernova so close to the Solar System would be a catastrophe.”

  “Blast it, man! There will be no supernova!”

  Torrance sat back to wait out the next cycle of the argument. Academics were so predictable.

  He glanced across the chamber.

  Emil “Oscar” Pentabill sat quietly in a suit that matched the wiry gray of his hair, listening but not adding to the conversation. He sipped from a white mug, jotted a note or two into his comm system, and glanced around the room, pausing only momentarily to stare at the conversation.

  Why had Pentabill done what he had done? Torrance asked himself. What would motivate a man of science to turn his back on the people he worked for? What could take him ov
er the edge of destroying everything he had worked for with a single decision?

  The questions angered him.

  The whole thing was Pentabill’s fault, after all. It was Oscar Pentabill’s activity that had resulted in Torrance’s assignment.

  But Pentabill was not answering Torrance’s questions.

  Instead, he just sat placidly, and took notes until he got tired of it all, stood up, and hobbled out of the conference center.

  Torrance waited a cautious moment, then got up and followed.

  CHAPTER 15

  Florecer: Galactic Council on Wormhole Physics

  Local Date: Third Quarter, Setting 13

  Local Time: 1815

  The hotel hallway stretched ahead like a launch tunnel. The carpet was green and black with checkered patterns. Torrance looked for room 1512. Downstairs, the reception was beginning—cocktails and hors d’oeuvres at six, dinner at seven, and an informal presentation on FTL aging patterns at nine.

  Pinot’s agents had given Torrance more details about Oscar Pentabill than he felt comfortable knowing. Pentabill had been married for twenty-three years but had no children. He was a quiet man who avoided the limelight. His habit at such gatherings as this was to eschew social drinks for quiet time in his room with a martini and a trade magazine. He would arrive for dinner a fashionable five minutes late, eat a vegetarian plate, and play with dessert. Then he would excuse himself to turn in.

  The number 1512 stood out in relief against the door.

  Torrance pulled a magnetic locksmith from his jacket and held it between his index finger and thumb.

  The glass vial in his pocket was solid against his thigh. Bionites swam in the clear liquid, ugly critters—creepy crawly things half organic, half machine designed to systematically attack a person’s nervous system then dissociate into the cellular realms of his biology.

  Torrance’s palms were clammy.

  The scent of fear mixed with the dry odor of the door’s latex paint.

  The locksmith clicked against the wall.

  The processor spun numbers.

  Flickering digits fell into place.

  Torrance turned the knob.

  The room was beige and yellow—bathroom to the left, bedroom large and comfortable. A netvision rumbled from the far wall. Sheer inner drapes fluttered in the breeze of the open sliding door. The city splayed over the horizon below, a dirty tapestry of gray and blue as Cygni set on the opposite side of the hotel.

  Pentabill sat facing the city, his legs propped against the balcony rail. The drapes obscured his shoulders and head. An iced drink sat on a knee-height table—a martini, complete with a local dashtar fruit skewered on a green swizzle. A portable reader lay propped on his lap.

  The door shut with an audible click.

  Pentabill peered around the drapes, his expression more confusion than fear. A nested mat of his hair caught in the breeze.

  “Torrance,” he said jovially, collecting his drink and standing.

  Pentabill must have seen something on Torrance’s expression because he froze, one hand on the doorway’s frame, the other dropping the reader mechanically to his side. His shoulders slumped. He was tall and slim, probably an athlete when he was a kid.

  He swayed as if the drink was not his first.

  Torrance put his hand in his pocket. The vial was cold and smooth, its cap small and ridged. The automatic hypo would react to sudden pressure. The injection would be quick and nearly painless.

  “I’m sorry it’s you, Torrance.”

  Pinot’s evidence left no doubt that Pentabill was guilty. He had to know it was only a matter of time before the United Government would strike back.

  “Why did you do it, Oscar?”

  Pentabill’s hand shook as he drank. “It’s worse than you think.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Universe Three.”

  “What about them?”

  Pentabill tossed the reader onto the bed.

  Torrance gave him time.

  “Do you ever notice how we talk about decisions in the name of organizations—but organizations never make decisions.”

  “I understand that.”

  “I thought Casmir Francis would lead us in the right direction, but he didn’t, and his daughter is no better than the rest.”

  “What are you talking about, Oscar?”

  Pentabill waved his drink around. “Doesn’t matter, I suppose. Dead men tell no tales, eh?” He chuckled to himself and glanced at Torrance with an impish grin. “I did it, Torrance. Everything. Kransky-Watt. Exotic material.”

  “Tell me something I don’t already know.”

  “I sold them Newton.”

  Anxiety was a moth under Torrance’s breastbone. Pinot’s cube said nothing about Newton. “Why would they want a failed program?”

  Pentabill pointed a bony finger. “UG would be best served to not underestimate Universe Three. Bright folks there—some of the best. Catazara went to their side, you know? He did us one better, too. Figured out how to set a remote link. It’s trial and error, but within a range of error U3 can create and destroy wormholes anywhere they want.”

  “You’re kidding me,” Torrance said.

  Pentabill’s response was a wry curl of his lip and a shake of his head.

  That’s why they wanted Newton, Torrance realized.

  Newton gave them something that made remote links work.

  This meant Universe Three was ahead of the game. The Star Drive gave human beings the ability to travel faster than light, but that was limited to “just” a spaceship. A truly configurable wormhole, though, a door that could be used in “set and forget” mode, would provide the ability to instantaneously step from, say, wherever it was that U3 had their home base, directly to, for example, Earth. And nothing could keep them from bringing along an army of an additional ten thousand people.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’ve seen the work,” Pentabill said. He took a slug from his drink. His face was shadowed and drawn. He looked tired. Pentabill’s knuckles became white around his glass. “It took a few tries, but Catazara’s team has planted the end of a wormhole in the middle of a black hole.”

  “Holy Mother of God.”

  “The other end is going into Alpha Centauri A.”

  Torrance was taken totally aback. “I don’t understand.”

  “Simple math, Torrance. Alpha Centauri A fuels the spacecraft. Kill the star, kill the spacecraft.”

  “It could be worse than that,” Torrance said. “The physics gets calculated as if the black hole were actually inside the star, and we have no way of knowing the mass of the black hole Universe Three is connecting to. A supermassive black hole so close to the Solar System could be dangerous someday.”

  “Like I said—no better than the rest.” Pentabill breathed deeply through his nose, and killed the rest of his drink. “The world protects its own, though, Torrance. I used to believe U3 truly wanted the holistic world they talk about. But the Francises of the world are just card sharps. They speak a great game, but…who knows what’s next?”

  Torrance shrugged.

  “But one thing I do believe with all my being,” Pentabill continued, “is that Casmir Francis deserved whatever happened to him, and Deidra will deserve no better.”

  The handle to the door jiggled. Pentabill’s face went pale.

  “Who is it?” Torrance asked him.

  Pentabill looked at Torrance with a pallbearer’s grimace.

  “Do me a favor?” Pentabill said. “If you get a chance, tell Glory I love her.”

  The door swung open. A man wearing waiters white blew past Torrance and collided with Pentabill. Pentabill grunted. His glass smashed against the wall with the smell of gin. The man was big and quick—probably juiced. He lifted Pentabill in stride and rushed to the balcony.

  Pentabill disappeared over the edge.

  He did not scream. Did not even speak.

  Torrance anticipated the thic
k sound of a body hitting the ground, but the impact was not audible.

  “You’re with Universe Three?” Torrance asked, the truth dawning.

  The waiter looked up. He was maybe twenty, with brown hair and an angular face. He flexed his hands, bent, and reached to his pants leg where Torrance could see the bulging shape of a weapon.

  Torrance would get only one chance.

  He kicked.

  The waiter pivoted away and Torrance’s foot crashed against the bed railing. His momentum carried him, though, and his body twisted, losing balance, bouncing off the mattress and sprawling to the floor with a lung-crushing thud.

  The waiter spun and locked onto him, pressing his weapon to Torrance’s temple. The gun was small—a laser system with charge enough for two or three good shots.

  Torrance raised one hand.

  Kalista McKenna, he thought. Supernova. It was the only idea he had.

  “If you kill me, U3 will be making a big, big mistake.”

  “Tell it to the bosses.”

  “Let me.”

  “What?”

  “Take me to your bosses, and let me tell them about the mistake.”

  The waiter put his gun against Torrance’s forehead.

  “My name is Torrance Black. I’m a scientist from the United Government. U3 is working without critical information. If you do what the man you just tossed off the edge of the world said you’re going to do, U3 is liable to blow away most of the civilized galaxy.”

  The agent’s face was impassive.

  The weapon’s muzzle was cold against Torrance’s skull. He hoped his bluff was convincing.

  The man’s face softened. “I don’t want to leave you splattered here anyway.”

  Torrance nodded. He knew a bit of how this game was played. Soon the nets would carry headlines about Oscar Pentabill’s suicide. Another body in the room would ruin that story line.

  “Get up and let’s go.”

  Torrance complied, straightening his pants and jacket as he went through the doorway.

  The hallway was as quiet as it had been earlier.