by Ron Collins
After their second pass, U3 aircraft began to appear in the sky. Probably from Icarus, he thought.
His Firebrand had only a few minutes of fuel to spare, so he juked his machine up and hit the solid rockets to engage. His neck snapped back and he nearly blacked out. He started to call Jarboe’s name, then felt sick to his stomach. The Z-pads were no match for his Firebrand, though, and he was the best flier still in the sky. It was too easy. Like time came to a stop and the Z-pads just hung in the sky for him. He flamed three before it seemed anything moved.
The sound of the atmosphere scouring his skimmer rose to a scream. His external temp gauges rose again.
He flamed another Z-pod just as it was coming up on a Quasar.
The shuddering of his rocket engines ruddered though his Firebrand. His fuel gauge screamed at him.
It was all up to the rangers, now.
He had to get down.
Nimchura put the Firebrand into a hard dive and hoped that he had enough fuel left to put the son of a bitch down.
A small patch of grassland was available to the southwest. Open, vast enough. He twisted the craft into a line that would get him there. The Taylor part of the T&G engines gave up the ghost then. He yanked the stick hard left to correct for the missing power stream and neared the field.
He was maybe thirty meters off the floor when the Getz part coughed dead.
A Firebrand isn’t designed to glide.
There is a feeling of emptiness that is unable to be described.
It is a feeling emptier than lying alone at midnight. Emptier than a dead spacecraft. Emptier than being alone in the dark null-space of gravity where there is no up and no down.
The ground came up hard.
The spacecraft bounced once, then twice. Its left wing clipped a mound, and the Firebrand spun. His voice recorder would later prove that Nimchura screamed, then, but he wouldn’t remember it. Nor would he remember the columns of smoke that were rising in the sky above him, or the images of more fighting between Z-pads and Firebrands. Instead, all he could say afterward was that five seconds later everything was done.
That, five seconds later, there was nothing but silence.
That then the wind began to blow over his cracked cockpit and the heat pings started coming from his ship as that same wind cooled the Firebrand’s overtaxed engines.
And all he would remember was that he sat there, gripping the Firebrand’s joystick in his hands, staring out at the pitted and gored shell of what was left of his Firebrand’s crunched-up nose cone, and understanding that those scars came from Jarboe’s ship. That the pattern, torn into his craft as he flew through Jarboe’s debris, was all that remained of his wing leader.
Nimchura’s vision blurred. His chest clutched.
Jarboe was gone.
Nimchura didn’t know how long he sat there. All he could say for sure was that the cockpit smelled of sweat, dirt, warm electronics, and cold metal.
He had to do something. Had to get out of here.
He tried to pop the cowling, but the mechanism was stuck. He pounded on the cracked plasteel with his elbow, but that did nothing but bruise him up good.
He pulled his helmet off and pounded it against the cowling.
The first few blows shattered the surface, turning it into a rounded, opaque shell, but leaving it together in its basic shape. It took many more blows before he created an opening that he could focus on. But a few minutes later he had a path out. Fresh air flowed into the cockpit, which he gulped like a parched man at a river.
He unclipped his restraints, climbed his way out of the derelict craft, and found himself surrounded by four members of Universe Three, all with weapons drawn.
On Castles, Balconies, and the Meaning of Life
.
CHAPTER 33
Atropos
Local Standard Day 249 (ECA 249)
Local Standard Time: 2030 Hours
Sitting on a bench on the rooftop of the building that the colony had taken to calling the Castle, Casmir Francis watched the land around him smolder. The Castle was an adobe brick building, cast from the planet’s hard dirt and “finished” only a month prior. It was a simple building, though ostentatious for the moment, a single story shelter, solid and respectable. It protected him and Yvonne from the elements—a fact that had caused the rest of U3’s leadership command to prioritize it over his objection. “We’ve been here long enough,” Gregor argued when he formally proposed the build. “We’re not going to have our leader die of a cold.”
Yvonne hadn’t allowed him to say no.
So Universe Three built the house Casmir and Yvonne lived in, and even added the steps up to the rooftop that he was sitting on now, a place that he used so often that he and Yvonne had taken to calling it the balcony.
They had been here a year—or at least a full year for Atropos. It was just under that as Standard Solar Time would measure it, but an Atropos year was just past nine standard months, and its days were just under twenty-eight hours. They had a team working on a calendar, but for now they were still merely counting days.
It was late in the afternoon, growing toward evening.
Another day coming to an end. Day number 249.
The sky was deep purple, streaked with clouds that ran the spectrum of blues and pinks. Thin tendrils of smoke curled from the ground. The odor of charred wood and burnt grasslands had settled over the entire landscape as a sickeningly sharp reminder of the attack from earlier this morning. The action was finished now. They had survived, though many on both sides were killed.
If he tried, he could still smell the exhaust of UG skimmers on the wind.
The damage was mostly under control, but he still wanted to be out there fighting the fires. Dr. Iwal was adamant in his direction to stay out of the smoke, though, and Yvonne made it clear that she would be considerably more than upset if she found him down in the trenches there.
So he sat alone with his hands wrapped around his walking staff, thinking.
They had taken prisoners—eight UG rangers and two pilots—so the next question was going to be how to deal with them.
That was not the question he was thinking about, though, as he sat on the bench atop the Castle and watched his village smolder.
Instead, he was thinking about Ellyn Parker—about Perigee, and the fact that her viewpoint about fighting the UG had been so different from his.
She said real change comes only from inside—that fixing the UG meant actually changing the people. Casmir went a different direction. Get ahead of the process. His approach was to keep UG corporate imperialism from spreading, and then compress it. But as he looked at what remained of what his Universe Three had built and as he smelled the caustic odor of burnt grasses coming from the smoldering remnants of what had been bombed, Casmir understood how wrong he had been.
You cannot stop a tidal wave from flowing over the shore.
Perigee had been right after all.
He coughed hard, though it was more of a psychosomatic reaction.
Footsteps came from behind, but he did not turn.
“The council is here.” It was Deidra.
“I will be there shortly. Show them in. Ask your mother to join us.”
He sat there for several more minutes.
He was getting old, he thought. Very old.
The Castle had three rooms: a kitchen, a bedroom, and an open-framed great room that they used for most of the leadership team’s meetings.
Casmir ambled into the meeting room. Eight members of the team were settled around the table—the rest being up on Icarus now, or on Einstein, which had been away during the attack. There was so much to do when your entire civilization is starting from scratch.
The team seemed uncomfortable and finicky.
Good for them, he thought as he sat down.
They should be.
Yvonne slipped in from the side door, Deidra just behind.
They were a disheveled lot, most unbathed
and still covered in soot and dirt from working all day. Some were bandaged, others merely dirt-streaked. They made him feel useless.
“Where did they come from?” he asked Matt Anderson.
“We don’t know for sure, yet,” Anderson replied. “But the mission trajectory suggests they have a base somewhere on the second planet of Eta B.”
“If that is true,” he said. “We will need to confront them now. Do you understand?”
“We’re not ready for that, sir,” Gregor said. “We don’t have the equipment built yet to fight a remote action.”
“I don’t care,” he said. “We can’t run anymore. We can’t allow them to keep us from making Eta Cassiopeia our home. I’m tired of running. We cannot allow the United Government to have a presence here.”
Gregor’s gaze let Casmir know that his friend had sensed his change. It was almost surprising that Gregor didn’t rise to the comment and force the issue there in front of everyone else. But he didn’t. Instead, Casmir’s lifelong friend gave him his space. For the moment, anyway.
He took a deep breath.
“This afternoon’s events hurt me more deeply than I can possibly admit,” Casmir said. “Like most of you I had convinced myself we were safe. Thank the powers for Gregor’s preparations, once again. If the Z-pads had not launched from Icarus, we would probably not have survived. We all owe him our lives for his due diligence.”
“It is nothing,” Gregor said.
“As it is we still have brothers and sisters lying dead. We need to talk about defense,” Casmir said. “And by defense, I mean we need to talk about controlling our world, our entire system. And that means dealing with the UG on different terms. I want plans for monitoring every planet in this system. And I want plans for a series of orbiting sensors and weapons that will allow us to protect ourselves at times when Icarus or Einstein are not here. We need to build more Star Drive craft. We need to grow. But first, I want plans to take out the base that the United Government used to stage this attack. We need to find it, and we need to take it over.”
The room was silent, but listening.
“Do you understand?”
The conversation started slowly, but picked up steam as the sky grew dark. By early the next morning, Universe Three had the initial workings of a viable defense strategy.
After the debating was finished, Casmir returned to the balcony to watch Eta Cass rise. He had not slept, of course, and he was feeling numb. It was damp here in the morning, the dew thick from the planet’s humidity. It made the mornings an odd combination of sticky, but cool.
“I thought I would find you here,” Yvonne said from behind him.
The sound of her footsteps were strong as she walked to his side.
“I like seeing the horizon,” he said. “The hills and the sea.”
“I know you do.”
“They feel quite expansive, don’t they?” he said.
They sat together, listening to the wind as it rustled over the fields and the trees, hearing the distant break of waves. Despite the UG attack, those fields were still planted, and the summer should see them yield. They had learned a lot in their first year, though he was sure this coming year would bring new surprises again. Winter would be here soon enough.
Einstein had returned.
In the sky he saw the two Excelsior spacecraft as bright dots that hovered close together like a pair of binary stars. They were still in place, he thought. Still theirs.
He thought about another spacecraft flying outside the Solar System today, Everguard, the old UG warhorse that started this whole chain of events when it planted the wormhole pods to begin with, and was now trotting its way back through space at subluminal speeds.
What kind of civilization would those people return to find?
A civilization at war.
That’s what they would find. A civilization that would probably always be at war.
Movement came from a field across the way.
It was a beast he had come to call a thunderhoof, stepping out of the woods across the far grassy field. It was a beautiful animal, tall and brown with antlers that rose like a cage over its head.
Casmir reached up and touched Yvonne’s shoulder and pointed at the animal with a silent nod. Instinctively, she relaxed into his touch as she peered at it.
It was a painful thing, life.
The battle was over, but the war might never end.
This is the end of
STARBURST
STEALING THE SUN: BOOK 2
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You might be interested in the rest of the series:
STARFLIGHT
STARBURST
STARFALL
STARCLASH
STARBORN
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ron Collins is an Amazon best-selling Dark Fantasy author who writes across the spectrum of speculative fiction.
His fantasy series Saga of the God-Touched Mage reached #1 on Amazon’s bestselling dark fantasy list in the UK and #2 in the US. His short fiction has received a Writers of the Future prize and a CompuServe HOMer Award, and his short story “The White Game” was nominated for the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s 2016 Derringer Award.
He has contributed a hundred or so short stories to Analog, Asimov’s, the Fiction River Anthology Series, and several other magazines and anthologies.
He holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering, and has worked to develop avionics systems, electronics, and information technology before chucking it all to write full-time–which he now does from his home in the shadows of the Santa Catalina Mountains.
Ron’s website is: www.typosphere.com
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to thank Nick Kendall and Brigid Collins for their very helpful beta reads in the earliest stages of the work, and then Brigid again for help with identifying important aspects of the story as we were working out back cover stuff. This is an area I always stumble over, and I really appreciated it. In my totally unbiased opinion, the young lady is turning into quite the writer.
I want to thank beta reader extraordinaire Sharon Bass once again for her outstanding help—particularly in this case with a few medical items.
And thanks also goes to Kristine Kathryn Rusch for her kind words about the work that now grace the cover. Kris has always been one of my favorite writers of all time, and to get such support from her is one of those things that makes this writing gig the Coolest Job in the World.
Then, of course, there’s always Lisa, who I get to thank both for her outstanding editorial hand, as well as all the other things she brings to my life every day.
I can assure you that any issues that might remain in this work are totally on my shoulders.