Starburst (Stealing the Sun Book 2)

by Ron Collins

  As usual for this day, he thought about Ellyn Parker as he slid his legs over the running board. It was over thirty years ago she died. Long enough that he’d lived on two planets, eight moons, and a couple dozen asteroids. Long enough that he’d lost friends. Long enough that he’d won a hundred battles against the UG, and yet—despite victories—the United Government and the companies behind it were bigger today than they had ever been. He was tired and worn down this time, getting to be an old man—fifty-four now, but fifty-four for him was probably like a hundred-four for the average bum. The years of fighting had been long enough to grind whatever idealistic enthusiasm he once had down to a stub of simple practicality.

  What would Ellyn think of them if she were here?

  He hoped she would be proud, but he was no longer sure.

  On young legs, Deidra ran ahead to the foothills of the formation.

  “Come on, Papa! I’m beating you!”

  He thought about warning her against UG surveillance again, but though she was the youngest of his children, she already understood that aspect of their lives better than the rest. As long as she stayed on this side of the hill she should be fine.

  He leaned on his walking staff, and coughed up phlegm again. The weight of his custom suit made it feel like he was walking through water. The surface of the planet bent to brown at his periphery outside a faceplate that misted over with each breath. Vital signs glowed on his display: blood oxygen on the low end of “still living,” heart rate pounding at one-forty, pressure on the embarrassingly high side—but good enough, goddammit, good enough despite the scowl on Yvonne’s face as she took the readings this morning. He’d barely been on the surface for a minute and already his knees were screaming. His lower back was on slow burn, and every time he took a breath, pain raked his ribs.

  He stopped to arch his back again.

  The suit’s ventilation system cleared his faceplate, but the supply of fresh air was too dry. He sucked water from the reservoir. It tasted like plastic, but it helped cut the burn everywhere except his nasal passages, which still felt like he was sucking on razors every time he breathed. Just the thought made him cough again, so he swallowed more water.

  “That’s all right,” Casmir replied. “You go ahead.”

  He and Yvonne had decided to shield their children from certain realities until they were old enough to understand them.

  They both watched everything as closely as they could. They both blocked news and both set penalties. Yvonne handled the schooling herself. But information is a bitch, there are limits to what can be controlled, and their kids weren’t stupid. Wallace and Cash picked up things by accident, but put the bits together just fine, and Deidra was a natural sleuth, pure and simple. She knew how to dig. As such, Casmir and Yvonne decided their children would learn everything at thirteen standard years old.

  “Papa!”

  Deidra was already at the top of the hill.

  “Hold your rockets, little one,” he called, suppressing another cough.

  He took another glance at the sky.

  The weather had been stagnant for long enough that Casmir wouldn’t cry if it kicked up one of those dust storms that left people talking for days afterward. A storm like that could be a pain in the ass, but afterward the air would be filled with sheets of ice crystals and particles of magnetite, hematite, and any other mineral the atmosphere could pick up and hold.

  During the morning hours those particles caught the sun to make gauzy drapes of purple and blue. At nighttime, though, for just those few moments after the sun set, light bending from under the horizon would reflect off the thinnest layers of the atmosphere to catch those crystals and those flakes of minerals, and it would turn them into jaw-dropping rivers of silver and blue that burned like a prismatic fire against the backdrop of stars.

  Yvonne called them silver bows, but he preferred to leave them nameless so he could think of them as some kind of magic.

  These were the kinds of things that kept Casmir fighting. They reminded him that, despite pain, life was beautiful.

  He looked to where the Alpha Centauri system would be visible if it wasn’t daytime. If the Everguard mission was both successful and on schedule, the UG’s new Star Drive spacecraft could achieve faster-than-light travel any time now. The idea depressed him. No matter how beautiful the world, or how noble the act of living on it, Casmir didn’t know if he could fight that kind of power.

  “I’m on my way,” he said, pushing himself up the hill.

  Yes, he was tired, but his daughter was waiting and it was her thirteenth birthday.

  CHAPTER 2

  Perigee Hill: Mars Colony Divide

  Local Solar Date: February 12, 2206

  Local Solar Time: 0855 Hours

  Casmir made it to the ridge to see his daughter gazing over the landscape. The United Government’s Mars Colony Natim complex was spread out before her.

  “It’s pretty,” Deidra said.

  “I suppose it is,” he replied, sitting on a flat rock so he could catch his breath. “In its own way.”

  The UG complex covered the northern edge of the slope. Its network of plastiglass domes and rounded tubes made it look like a galactic hamster’s wet dream. Black and silver antenna rose like prickly pear, and a wafting cloud of beige steam clung to the central power station.

  Clippers hovering among the buildings made Casmir grit his teeth.

  They were armed pods filled with law enforcement people assigned to patrol the grounds under the guise of protection, though protection in this case meant compliance and a shield against illegal import/export.

  Above them, in Low Mars Orbit, a network of twelve S-class electronic intelligence satellites would be following them. The trackers probably couldn’t ID either him or Deidra, but since they followed every Universe Three surface operation no matter how small, he was certain they had surveillance company.

  “They look different in person,” Deidra said, staring at the stark white clippers. “Will the Uglies come after us?”

  “Only if they think they can get away with it.” Casmir let the use of her slang pass. He didn’t mind the idea of it, but he didn’t like the word itself. He didn’t like how that lumped everyone together and that it belittled the power of the UG, but he understood its humor.

  “What does that mean?”

  He shrugged and grimaced under his faceplate. The UG police would harass them if they could, but it was a tough game for them right now. Businesses liked civilization to be stable. Violence, especially unprovoked violence, futzed with the currency pipelines those businesses had so carefully laid across the Solar System. Casmir worked hard to see that Universe Three’s activity always stuck in the UG’s craw, but he was also careful to avoid going so far that the UG could be justified in blatantly attacking their outposts.

  Ignoring the occasional dustup or deep-space riot, it worked well enough. Of course, if the UG knew it was “the” Casmir Francis and his daughter sitting here today, it would cause a clutching of hearts and a scrambling of squadrons that would be humorous to watch if it wasn’t so dangerous.

  He wanted her to understand that, but it was too much for her now. He needed to introduce her to the idea that their world was different from what she thought it was first. The time for such complexities would come.

  “We’ll discuss that later.”

  “Tell me the birthday story, Papa. I want to hear it.”

  “I will. But we need to talk about a few other things first.”

  She waited.

  “You see the greenhouses?” he said, pointing to rows of glass-walled buildings constructed low to the ground and lined with individual solar panels.

  “They look like dominoes,” she said.

  “They do, don’t they? But what they actually are is home to the UG’s Martian agricultural program.”

  “Their farm?”

  “Yes,” he said, smiling to himself.

  Deidra was a brilliant young girl,
but she was still a young girl. He had to remember to speak in simpler terms.

  “Inside that farm is the UG’s latest attempt to grow genetically designed crops that can survive in the open Martian atmosphere.”

  “Like fields on Earth?”

  “Uh-huh,” Casmir confirmed.

  Her sigh was an audible expression of disappointment that matched the deflation in her body language. “That’s not going to work,” she said.

  “No, it won’t,” Casmir replied, knowing he didn’t have to explain exactly why the effort was doomed to fail.

  The arrogant bastards were trying to convert a predominantly CO2-laced atmosphere into one of nitrogen and oxygen using terraforming concepts that were outdated even a century ago. Even if vegetation alone could ever provide the cleansing they needed, there were soil issues and radiation effects to deal with, both of which would take trillions of solar dollars and decades of time to overcome. And those were just the first of the hurdles the UG was pretending they could leap past as they made Mars sustainable.

  He flexed his hands. His circulation was for shit these days and his fingers ached with cold inside his gloves. The suit regulated his body temperature, but it didn’t do anything for his circulation, something that made it harder to forget that the temperature outside was fifty-eight below zero—another little problem for UG’s ag engineers to waste a few billion solars on.

  “It won’t work, but still the UG has built these dominoes,” he said. “Do you know why?”

  “No,” she replied.

  Her attention was diverted by a clipper that turned toward them, then back on its preprogrammed profile. Casmir watched his daughter’s body language as she tensed and relaxed. He was glad she was worried. You should never trust the UG.

  “Why are they doing that?”

  “To understand the UG, you have to see how solar dollars flow for the companies that run it. When you do that, you see that the UG is more interested in commerce than in progress.”

  “Don’t the two go together?”

  “Sometimes, yes. But not always. For example, what do you think happens when the government makes it possible for companies to make money while doing research and scientific studies regardless of whether those studies are successful—and that, in fact, failed experiments are in many ways more profitable than successful research?”

  He remained silent, interested to see how Deidra processed the idea he had just given her.

  “Every time they fail they get to start a new project?”

  “I’m glad you can see that.”

  Then he went on a coughing jag hard enough that he wished he was back home. It was definitely time to see Dr. Iwal.

  “Are you all right?” Deidra said, turning to him.

  “I’m fine.”

  He took a drink and cleared his throat.

  “You were correct, though. Each failure breeds new scientific efforts that can be funded through the government—which means through taxing the people—whereas a success moves the project further out of the realm of pure science and into production, which eventually turns the result into a commodity—at which point profit is sustainable based merely on the marketplace rather than the grossly obscene pile that comes on demand from the government.”

  “It’s a big money pump,” Deidra said.

  Casmir laughed. “Yes, it is. And it means progress comes only at the pace with which industry needs it to keep the people happy and occupied enough to keep tax solars flowing.”

  He could almost see her frown. It would take a while for the complexity of the system to settle on her, but he could see it happening already.

  “Compare their approach to agriculture with our own,” he said, motioning to the greenhouses.

  “We grow our food down in Mushroom Canyon.”

  She referred to the underground stations Universe Three had built years ago, where their botanists had developed a sustainable form of farming based on molds, recirculating fertilization, and strictly controlled environments. The resulting cuisine was sometimes less than attractive, but was quite easily sustainable within the colony itself if they could not trade for other food that was more exciting.

  “It’s not as beautiful as fields of grain,” he said. “But while UG bureaucrats try to create their lines of corn that fade into the orange horizon, and while their farming industry spends trillions of solar dollars selling the idea of new markets to these same bureaucrats, our approach frees resources to focus on more valuable ideas.”

  Deidra came closer, and her helmet reflected a fish-eye image of the Universe Three side of the divide.

  The landscape there lay like a stone tapestry, scarred and broken with crevasses and a pair of small observation domes but otherwise barren and natural under the bright, uniform sky. A patch of ice flared in the distance.

  He always loved the starkness of the Martian horizon.

  “Is it not beautiful there, too?” he said to her.

  “It is,” Deidra said. “But it’s different.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s so…jab.”

  “Jab,” Casmir replied. “Indeed.”

  He let his gaze linger on the image in Deidra’s faceplate.

  The outline of his daughter’s unlined face under the image that splayed across the visor gave him a flush of connection.

  His people lived under the Martian crust that served to protect them from the harsh climate. They called their quarters the Hive, which he liked for both the physical image the word brought him and the essence of community it contained. It meant togetherness. It meant sacrificing for a culture. The name made him feel like his people enjoyed the sense of being one without the coercion of UG’s clippers hovering just outside their dome.

  Deidra took three steps to stand before him.

  “I’m ready, Papa,” she said. “Tell me the story.”

  Inside his helmet, he smiled.

  Yes, he thought. She’s ready.

  CHAPTER 3

  Perigee Hill: Mars Colony Divide

  Local Solar Date: February 12, 2206

  Local Solar Time: 0900 Hours

  “Come on, Papa,” Deidra said, standing with her arms crossed and her back arched—classic Deidra. “You told it to Cash and to Wallace.”

  “Yes, I did,” he groused. “But they were quiet about it.”

  The edge to her gaze was visible even beneath the sheen of her faceplate. She was stronger than her brothers. Deidra had the fire inside.

  “This is the last time I get to tell the story, so I’m going to enjoy it.”

  Her glare burned through her faceplate.

  Down in the colony, one of the clippers made a considerably wider turn than usual. Casmir wondered what the pilot had seen to cause the deviation. Was it them? Was it movement elsewhere?

  “I wish I could see the clipper pilot’s face,” he said when the clipper returned to its usual cycle.

  “Don’t change the topic.”

  “In a strange way that was the beginning of the story.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “That’s where your patience has to come to play. Come. Sit.” He patted the flat rock beside him.

  She huffed, but sat down.

  “Today,” he said, “I am going to tell you how we came to live on Mars.”

  “I already know where we came from.”

  “That is true. But I misspoke to a degree. This is a story about how we came to live as we do rather than how we came to live where we do. But I will begin with the fact that when I was a boy, I lived in a place called England.” He pointed to the sky. “If it weren’t for the atmosphere, it would be a very bright spot right there.”

  “I know where the Earth is.”

  Casmir chuckled.

  “But then Grandpapa picked you up and moved you to Luna,” she said.

  “That’s right. Just like we move sometimes, but different. Companies were just beginning to figure out how to do Lunar commerce then, and it was
a busy time. Your grandpapa built things, and they needed people like him. We lived in caves a lot like the tunnels we live in now, but colder. We didn’t have good radiation protection back then, either, so for the first few years only the workers were allowed on the surface.”

  “That’s where you went to school.”

  “Yes. Eventually, we moved to surface domes. The college I went to—Lunar University: Mare Imbrium—was one of the first. And it was while I was just starting there at LUMI that all of the independent governments of Earth did a very dangerous thing.”

  “They Contracted.”

  Casmir appraised his daughter. How much did she already know? “That makes it sound like a good thing, doesn’t it? Contracting?”

  “Sounds smaller.”

  “Yes. Like the government is getting less powerful. And a less powerful government sounds like it should be good. More freedom for people, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “But what happened in this case is that all the businesses came together and drove the governments into a single group because that is what all those businesses needed to happen.”

  “Why?”

  “Why do you think?”

  He waited.

  “Easier to control.”

  “Sounds right to me, eh?”

  “So,” Deidra said. “One government got very big and the rest just went away?”