Starbound (Stealing the Sun Book 5)

by Ron Collins

  A light flickered from atop the lift. The platform was nearing.

  To hell with it.

  Torrance found a service bay and accessed the lighting system. The hallway went dark. Luminescent rows of crimson emergency lights flickered on along the hallway.

  The controls on the maintenance panel glowed dimly.

  He followed the crimson dots to take a path to Weapons Command that wouldn’t leave him exposed to the lift. He heard the door open. The air was thick. Palpable silence left him to imagine hunched guards stalking him through the hallways.

  A corridor crossed just ahead of him.

  It should lead to Weapons Command.

  Torrance glanced around the corner and saw empty hallway.

  The double doors to Weapons Command were dead ahead, but more passages opening into this one gave his pursuers plenty of opportunity for ambush. The hallway behind him was empty, too.

  The guard was somewhere, though.

  He had to choose. Fifty-fifty. Which way would she come?

  He took a breath, turned the corner, and raced toward the double doors. By the time he neared the T, he was running at something near full speed. He stepped like a shadow across the open expanse of the hallway, then knelt in the alcove outside Weapons Command’s door.

  Voices came from a distance. More crew.

  Trying not to breathe too hard, he pushed an entry pad.

  The doors rasped open. Light spilled into the hallway darkness. Torrance stepped in and pressed the panel on the opposite wall to close the door.

  He sidled up against a barrel painted blue.

  Though he had been assigned to Orion rather than Icarus, and though U3 had made a few modifications over the years, the configuration seemed comfortably familiar. It was strange to be back in this place.

  He liked that it still smelled of electricity.

  The barrel was cool against his fingers.

  He rested his forehead on the barrel’s surface to catch his breath. He was tired and sore from running. His calf muscles burned like they had been flayed.

  Weapons Command lay below him, the open pit several meters down and row upon row of programmable pods stacked like cords of wood on a Wisconsin farm. The second-floor control center looked over the pit, its walls consisting of a belly-height solid wall and plastiglass extensions that rose to the girded ceiling. Three technicians worked on a pair of wormhole pods in the pit.

  Torrance counted eight tubes closed and locked.

  Staggered rows of olive-coated ion torpedoes lined a distant wall. A gritty calm spread over him. He couldn’t let them launch these wormhole pods. Every torpedo had a detonation routine that could be programmed to provide a sequenced time-on-target capability. If he could detonate a few torpedoes, they would certainly destroy the bay. If he could get to the entire rack, it might well be enough to take out the entire ship.

  His lips tasted of sweat and grime.

  A pair of engineers hunched over a holographic display in the command center, probably loading navigation parameters into the pods. The weapons calibration station was in there.

  Destroying Icarus here would stop U3 from planting the black hole. It was enough for him.

  It had to be.

  Or did it?

  The shuttle bay was a short jaunt from Weapons Command.

  A shuttle could never make it all the way home, and the likelihood of anyone in the United Government’s structure ever coming to Alpha Centauri was nonexistent. But a shuttle was certainly capable of sending radio messages back to the Solar System, and he knew there would always be at least one person listening. Given that they were over four light-years from home, he would never live long enough for help to arrive, but at least he could make sure someone knew what had really happened.

  It was as good a plan as he was going to get.

  He crept toward the command center, staying out of sight of the workers below and feeling the years in his legs. He didn’t have much left in him.

  The door to the center was open.

  “Pod nine is loaded.” The voice came from the communications system—a technician relaying status from below.

  “Thank you,” another of the engineers said.

  Nine pods loaded. The tenth would be complete soon. Assuming they had the same design parameters Everguard had dealt with, nine were enough to set the link. He had to move.

  “How long until we go black?” the other engineer said. He was nervous. Not surprising. Torrance would be nervous, too.

  “I don’t know. Maybe fifteen minutes? Probably less.”

  “Plus flight time, right?”

  “Yeah. Plus flight time.”

  Torrance peeked through the plastiglass.

  Guidance and launch control lay directly ahead, maintenance to the left, inventory to the right. The weapons calibration station was just out of his field of view. If he could draw the engineers near, he could catch them off guard. He positioned himself at the edge of the door, then scratched quietly against the metallic edge of the frame.

  Neither engineer reacted.

  He scratched louder.

  “What was that?” the nervous one said.

  Torrance stopped.

  “What’s what?”

  He scratched again.

  “That.”

  The floor was tile. Footsteps drew near on the other side.

  Torrance sprang forward and threw his shoulder against the closest engineer. The whumpfh of air leaving the man’s lungs accompanied them as they fell, Torrance tangled atop the engineer.

  Torrance rolled forward, stood, and caught the second engineer with a right cross that sent shivers of pain up his wrist and forearm.

  The man collapsed like a sack of potatoes.

  The first engineer raised to one knee, his hand rubbing the back of his neck. “What the hell are you doing?” he said to Torrance.

  Torrance took two steps and kicked.

  His foot struck the man’s jaw and sent him spinning away.

  The back of the man’s head hit the corner of a desk with an ugly thud, and he fell limply to the ground.

  Torrance leaned over with his hands on knees, panting. His shoulder throbbed and his foot ached. Had he broken anything? He hobbled left and right. No. He didn’t think so, anyway, but suddenly all he could hear was his doctor telling him his bones were getting brittle, and that he really shouldn’t be kicking younger men in the face.

  He stared at the man with a surrealistic sense of the absurd.

  Had he just done that? Was the man dead?

  The second engineer groaned but didn’t move.

  Torrance went to the weapons station. It was active.

  He paged through screens, his fingers shaking with adrenaline. Too long—it was taking him too long. He found the screen entry system, selected a torpedo, and set the detonation time for seven minutes. The next he set at seven, also, and the next, and the next. The work went smoothly once he had the rhythm. When he had keyed them all, he reset the system, closed the screen, and opened a security layer that locked the display against manipulation.

  He started the system counter, and that was that.

  The torps were programmed and armed.

  It would be almost impossible to find and fix them all in time to stop him, now.

  Which meant he had seven minutes to make the shuttle bay.

  A footstep sounded behind him.

  The area lit up in scarlet flame, and the weapons station exploded as Torrance leapt away.

  The woman stood in the doorway, the same guard as before, her uniform streaked and smeared with grime, her hair dangling in short ringlets. She trained her glowing weapon on Torrance. Her eyes, dark and cold, told him her first shot was no accident. She had taken out the station to keep him from completing whatever work he had been attempting.

  She was too late, of course, but she didn’t know that.

  A ventilation grate was mounted on the near wall. The grills were plastic, about three meters lo
ng and one high, mounted a bit off the floor.

  Torrance half dived and half leapt at the duct, rolling to strike the grating with his shoulder. Plastic splintered around him. Laser ozone from her weapon cut into his nose and throat. He crashed into the duct, slipping on the dirty floor.

  Pain lanced his ankle like a dagger.

  Was he hit?

  He crawled into the duct, scrambling on his hands and knees into the darkness like a psychotic crab. His foot burned but there was no other choice. He kept moving.

  Echoes clamored from behind.

  Metal ductwork screeched and popped.

  The woman was following.

  He was afraid then, afraid with a sensation like falling.

  Torrance wanted to live.

  Maybe it would be for only one additional breath, maybe for only a minute more—maybe for a mere week in a dingy shuttle floating out in space. But there in the darkness of Icarus’s ductwork, Torrance knew that, more than anything, he wanted to live.

  His fingers slipped in the grime as he clawed his way forward.

  The place smelled like oily linen.

  He crashed painfully into a wall ahead, and suddenly his world was small and claustrophobic.

  His ankle felt like a railroad stake had been driven through it.

  Raw fear pushed him onward, but he felt the woman pursuing him, younger, fresher, and armed. His muscles screamed with every movement. His lungs seemed to collapse as he drew breath in the tiny space. He wasn’t going to last much longer.

  He took the left passage, thinking it the most likely to lead to the shuttle bay. A flash colored the duct crimson. The smell of hot metal brought a stifling pall to the chamber. Torrance crawled over a heavily buttressed segment of the flooring—a vacuum containment element that he realized marked the perimeter of the bay area.

  A grating loomed ahead.

  He threw himself into it.

  It gave way, and he was falling and falling.

  The ground knocked the wind out of him, and the world swam. He thought he might pass out from the pain in his foot.

  Three shuttles sat in a line like massive green insects.

  People raced in from the main bay entrance. Laser fire was suddenly everywhere. He crawled to take cover behind a landing strut.

  The closest shuttle’s ramp was open, maybe two meters away.

  Gritting, Torrance launched himself toward the ramp just as something bit his thigh.

  The ramp’s rubber lining burned with an oily reek.

  He ignored the pain and dragged himself into the shuttle.

  His pants were charred and smoking.

  The guard, he thought. She had shot him.

  The shuttle air lock was still open. Footsteps scrabbled below. He crawled into the cockpit, sucking air against knife-sharp pain. The captain’s chair was upholstered in leather. He keyed the hatch system closed.

  The craft shuddered as it engaged.

  Holding a nervous breath, he commanded the bay doors. They irised into six elements, dilating to expose the vacuum.

  He almost cried with relief.

  Rockets on. Firing. Docking release made. Yaw commands steady. Right attitude. Trimming thrusters active and warmed. He pointed the craft out the doorway and throttled the engines.

  The shuttle slid forward.

  Zero g took over as he left the ship’s artificial gravity field and entered the umbra of Icarus against Alpha Centauri A. The blackness of vacuum was an open horizon in every direction. The stars glittered like pinpoints of glorious, glorious freedom.

  Icarus fell away.

  Torrance deployed the protective view screen against Alpha Centauri A’s hard radiation.

  Would he be far enough out when the torps went?

  The briefest flame roared from a launch tube.

  At first Torrance thought it was the torpedoes exploding, but instead a black silhouette belched from the flame, a needle-shaped figure Torrance would recognize anywhere.

  A wormhole pod.

  Then another and another until ten pods were flying, rocket engines engaging, turning, looping about, before taking a course toward the blazing star.

  A hole formed in Torrance’s gut. There’s no way to win, he thought. Somehow, through the confusion and the turmoil, with both command station engineers knocked unconscious, somehow Icarus had launched the pods. He pounded his armrests, cursing aloud, feeling powerless and shrill.

  Then the torpedoes blew.

  Icarus’s forefront disintegrated, fragments peeling silently from the surface, debris racing haphazardly into blackness. Flames spouted and died. Sheets of metal and composite crumpled under pressure. When it was over, Icarus looked like a trick cigar, one end charred and serrated, the other slim and perfect. This bird was dead, its insides gutted by pyrotechnics and vacuum.

  Torrance closed his eyes.

  His proximity to Alpha Centauri A obliterated the stars of deep space, but he knew they were out there.

  He thought about wormhole pods.

  They were away.

  He had failed. They had all failed, really, hadn’t they? The whole of the Everguard mission had caused more damage than good in the end, hadn’t they?

  The shielded surface of Alpha Centauri A glowed like a green fire from behind the shield. The pinprick that was one of her planets lay as the only bright point in the darkness opposite the star.

  Torrance sat in the cramped shuttle pod cockpit, and thought about the black hole that would likely be set inside the star. He thought about Willim Pinot and people like him smiling, and about the carcass of Icarus floating freely in space, being pulled into Alpha Centauri A’s gravity well. He thought about Thomas Kitchell, and Marisa, and his girls.

  Yes, he thought, he had failed.

  He had tried, but he was just one man and the galaxy was so goddamned big.

  He felt totally alone.

  CHAPTER 19

  U3 Shuttle Aurora, Alpha Centauri A System

  Local Date: Unknown

  Local Time: Unknown

  Torrance stripped his pants leg, cutting around areas that adhered to his burns. His thigh was darkened and goopy—radiating heat like he had been skinned, then dipped in rubbing alcohol. A small laser hole laced the fleshy place between his Achilles tendon and the bone of his ankle. He tried to prop it, but moving brought tears to his eyes. He started to pull the cloth of his pants away, but merely touching it was like razor on bone.

  Finally Torrance decided merely to rest.

  He gathered his senses.

  It had come down to this. He was four light-years from home. The pods would make Alpha Centauri A in a few hours.

  Torrance closed his eyes and remembered the last time he had been here, remembered Everguard and the team that had launched the original wormhole pods. The memory of his plaque came to him. The expression of faces on the return trip when Malloy blew the hull.

  Funerals.

  Memorials.

  A chaplain extolling the virtues of a single person’s contribution to the whole.

  At first, that memory made him mad. One person couldn’t do anything at all, could he? One person, properly motivated, could do nothing but beat his brains out on a world that was too big for him.

  But a few minutes later, as his shuttle rolled and tumbled to face Eden itself, he thought about that signal. The files that had formed so much of his life.

  He had one last message to send.

  He toggled the radio.

  “This is Ambassador Torrance Black, Captain, Interstellar Command. Icarus is dead,” he said. He explained U3’s plans for a black hole and described the flight of the wormhole pods. He warned of the threat to kill his daughters and asked for someone to look for them. He gave them his coordinates, then finished by asking whoever found this to tell Mercy and Ana he loved them. “And do the same for Oscar Pentabill,” he said, remembering the man’s last wishes. “Tell his wife…tell Glory…that he loved her.”

  He clicked off
the message and set it to replay every thirty minutes, automatically casting the message upon the vacant and immense waters of the vacuum to drift in its own invisible bottle of time.

  Then he lay on the captain’s seat for many minutes, thinking.

  Maybe someone would be close enough to hear his message and come get him.

  Just the thought made him snarf.

  “Fat chance, old man,” he said out loud. “Stick a fork in yourself, Torrance. You are done.”

  What a way to go—alone inside a machine drifting about in the deepest deep space, stranded by the people he had tried so hard to serve, and unable to do a damned thing about it.

  Fitting in so many ways.

  He was not afraid, though, which was a strange sensation, really.

  Throughout his life, he had always been afraid—afraid to be himself, worried about fitting in, afraid someone was going to walk in the door someday and see him for the fraud he so often thought he was. So he wrapped himself in cocoons whenever he could. He gave his entire life to the military, the government. Yet, now, when he had the most to lose, he wasn’t afraid at all.

  If anything, he was merely angry.

  At one time in his life Torrance thought he might make a difference, and it turned out that he had. His command had launched the wormhole pods that brought all this on. He laughed, then. It wasn’t a good laugh. Full of bitterness. Spite and regret. Maybe he had changed the world, but not for the better.

  He would do so many things over again, if only he could.

  He wished he had found a way to stay with Marisa, and that he had truly known his daughters. He wished he had followed the lure of the Eden files to their fullest.

  That was the regret coloring his laughter.

  The right thing to do had been right there in front of him the whole time, and he had always let some form of expediency stand in his way—expediency in the idea of saving his career, or in terms of doing something “more important,” or “more urgent.” Expediency in the name of being afraid for his professional reputation, whatever the hell that turned out to matter.

  He had let all of these things take him away from the one question that mattered most.

  Torrance looked out the shuttle’s cockpit screen.