Starstuff (Starstuff Trilogy Book 1)

by Ira Heinichen

“Captain Balta is certainly gruff,” said Arris from off to the side, “and I don’t know what that was about, but she is the only one who came to our village offering to take whoever could pay their way to escape the mining draft.”

  “Mining draft?” Haber asked, full attention now on the couple.

  “Yes,” Dedrin answered. “You have not heard of it?”

  Haber and the children shook their heads.

  “Then you are lucky,” Arris said, “so far. But the Authority will come for your village eventually, as they did for ours.”

  “They instituted a sector-wide mining draft for the Fringe Worlds to work in the last remaining Wandering Giants in the Outer Rim,” Dedrin elaborated. “It’s why we’re fleeing to a planet in the Outer Rim like hundreds of thousands of others to try to build a new home, away from the Authority.”

  “Wandering Giants?” Suzy asked.

  Petrick spoke up. “It’s what they call the mines. They’re whole planets without a star, rich in starstuff ore. My dad’s told me about them.”

  “Why ‘Wandering’ Giants?” Barry asked, absently chewing another strip.

  “We don’t know where they came from,” Haber answered, and everyone turned toward him. “They have no star to tether them into an orbit, and so they wander through empty space. They’re hard to find, hard to track. And where they come from is richer in starstuff than the rest of the galaxy by a factor of a million. The Source.”

  “But wait,” said Petrick, “what’s so bad about the mines?”

  Dedrin shuddered at the question.

  “They’re brutal,” Haber continued. “I’ve never set foot on one of the Wandering Giants, but the mining machinery is exceptionally large and fast. It takes thousands to operate one rig, and they run around the clock. Remember, these are planets with no star to light them and keep them warm. There is no sunrise in a starstuff mine, no spring or summer, only night.” Haber looked over at the doorway where the pirate captain had strode out. “Eyesight is the first thing to go.”

  “My father didn’t tell me that part . . . ,” Petrick said.

  Haber turned back to the couple. “But surely the miners are retiring long before that happens,” he said. “There was pay for their retirement and their families. That was the incentive to work the mines.”

  “Not since the draft.” Dedrin shook his head. “There is no pay. No retirement. No incentive. Those who can no longer work disappear. Balta has told us.”

  “How is this possible?” Haber said.

  “We are the Fringe Worlds,” Dedrin answered with a shrug. “There is no one to miss us.”

  “This is why we flee,” Arris said. “We hope to start a new life. Free.”

  “The Authority now has exclusive control over the remaining starstuff stores,” Dedrin said. “Except for a shrinking group of pirates and smugglers, like Captain Balta. They run Liberatia, which is a haven for those fleeing conscription located in an isolated section of the Wall. And they have a traveling lane that’s mapped out from there to the Outer Rim.”

  “Liberatia?” Haber repeated in surprise. “The smugglers’ colony?”

  Dedrin nodded his head. “We’re catching a colony ship from there. The Outer Rim is supposed to be wide and far enough to make us impossible to find.”

  “Things have progressed far worse than I ever could have imagined.” Haber shook his head, trying to process what he was hearing. “I can’t believe that families would be using Liberatia as a means to get to the Outer Rim. That must mean the Authority has blocked off the Central Gateway.”

  “The gate has been closed for ten years,” Arris said. “Since private travel was outlawed.”

  “How do you know all this?” Haber asked.

  “We would not leave our home, break our customs, without being informed,” Arris said. “This was the only way.”

  “You have truly been ignorant, then, of the goings-on?” Dedrin asked him.

  “He was asleep till we found him,” Barry said. “And we didn’t know anything until we found Petrick’s father’s laboratory.”

  “I did not know that Fenton the Seeker was from Indacar,” Arris said. “Was your village a safe haven for the practice of the technological?”

  “Oh, no,” Petrick answered. “I couldn’t build so much as a circuit board without being in danger of expulsion. Our village was ‘of Mother Indacar.’”

  “Ours as well.” Dedrin nodded.

  “We would play in secret,” Barry said, chiming in again. “And his father’s workshop was out in the woods, away from Childer’s.”

  “You are all three parentless?” Arris asked.

  “That’s right,” said Suzy. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing, of course,” Arris said. “We had a house for the parentless in our village as well. Dedrin and I . . . we are childless.”

  The couple hung their heads, shame descending upon the room. The children took it in. They’d never seen the shame from this side, only from theirs, desiring to be Chosen. Taken home. To see the same shame from the Childless, those who did the choosing . . . it was surprising.

  “Family is life,” Petrick said to them, the customary Indacaran conclusion to any thought on children.

  “Family is life,” Dedrin echoed back.

  “Well, I’m sure glad you decided to hire this ship,” Barry piped into the conversation. “Otherwise, we would never have been able to leave the planet either. You guys can start over in your new world, and we can save the galaxy.”

  “It was a fortunate circumstance,” Haber agreed.

  “We are pleased that our good fortune has become your good fortune,” Arris said, smiling.

  “We’ve heard of others on Indacar, from other villages, who are likewise fleeing,” Dedrin said. “You may have found another ship to stow away upon.”

  “Possibly,” said Haber. “But unlikely. We are in your and Captain Balta’s debt.”

  There was another awkward silence after that. Petrick looked carefully and slowly at the couple. They were tired, worn, beaten down. Petrick turned his gaze to his group of motley travelers and realized that they struck him the same. Even Balta, with her blustering demeanor and her shiny tower of a robot friend—even she had seemed low to the ground. Lonely.

  The mess hall was the perfect place to be feeling such a way, with its piles of broken machinery and junk collecting dust and abandoned spiderwebs. The entire galaxy seemed deserted to Petrick, and everything he was hearing seemed to back that generalization up. This mess hall designed for dozens of rowdy crew members, this ship with its winding corridors and closed doors, Aaron’s Landing with its slouching roof, his father’s lab with its dusty rows of forgotten gadgets, his friends with their tired eyes so far from home . . .

  “We should retire to our quarters,” Arris said, breaking the silence.

  Dedrin nodded in agreement, and they stood. Dedrin offered his hand in appreciation to Haber.

  “The meal was excellent, mister android,” he said.

  “You can call me Habersham,” he answered in as pleasant a tone as the dour machine could have possibly managed. Dedrin and Arris then both shuffled out of the mess hall, leaving just the children and Haber.

  “I would suggest that we do as the captain has requested,” Haber said after a moment, “and clean this room.”

  “Maybe she won’t be so upset with us that way,” Petrick offered.

  “Let her be upset,” Suzy said, sulking at the thought. “She’s a mean old windbag anyway.”

  “Yeah!” agreed Barry. “Why do we always have to clean?”

  Petrick shook his head. Mutiny already.

  “There’s no discussion about it,” Haber said. “As the de facto adult of the group, I say it’s happening.”

  “You’re not an adult, though,” Barry pointed out. “You’re an android.”

  “That’s why I added ‘de facto’ to my statement.”

  “What does ‘de facto’—?”

&
nbsp; “Master Barry, I suggest you snap to it unless you want to be eating survival rations from here on out.”

  That got Barry’s mouth closed and his body up, and Suzy begrudgingly roused behind him.

  Petrick surveyed the work ahead of them. Mess hall indeed, he thought.

  27

  PETRICK’S EYES OPENED, and in the haze between sleep and waking, the inky black of the unlit bunk above him seemed like it was crashing down toward him. He flung his arms in front of his face, but nothing came.

  A moment later, his bleary eyes adjusted to the dull blue floor lights, and the bunk above was exactly where it had been when he’d fallen asleep. The room they’d been assigned was small, with triple bunk beds spanning the two sides of the long walls. A thin walkway stretched between them, and with the lights off for sleeping, they were lit by a soft blue night-light.

  He peeked his head out the side of his bottom bunk. He saw that Haber was silent with eyes closed across the way from him, recharging in the other bottom bunk. Looking upward, he saw a leg slung over the side of Suzy’s top bunk on the far side, and he heard Barry’s soft snore in the middle bunk directly above his own.

  Everyone was still asleep. They’d been completely wiped out by the cleaning of the mess hall, which had been quite the monstrous task. It had taken them a couple hours, but they’d finished and then passed the stars out.

  Except for Petrick, and Clarke.

  The small dog was sitting down by Petrick’s feet, shivering. Petrick rubbed his forehead where the dream had left its stabbing pain. It was exhausting, waking like this. He was thankful, at least, that the sickness seemed to be waning with each night. The fatigue from the sleeplessness, however, was doing the opposite. He was increasingly exhausted and increasingly sleepless.

  He lay in bed and tried to go back to sleep, but after mere seconds, he knew it was going to be impossible.

  Petrick swung his legs out from under his thin blankets and down onto the floor, which was cold to the touch. He quickly slipped on socks and stood, feeling entirely unable to sit still, let alone lie back down in his bunk. He wobbled but stayed upright.

  We really are in this together, huh? he thought, looking at Clarke. He cocked his head to indicate that the pup should follow him, and he cracked the door that led out into the hallway open a smidge. Barry snorted behind them, but when Petrick looked back, he could see that everyone was still fast asleep. He and Clarke slipped through the door and closed it softly.

  The corridor was brightly lit. The lights, it would seem, were one of the few things on the Red Robert that were mostly in good working order, at least in the walkways. Petrick’s foot caught on a cable laid haphazardly across the corridor, and he grabbed on to the wall just in time to avoid falling to the floor. No wonder the lights out here had been maintained; one would break one’s face otherwise tripping on the clutter. All the better for keeping quiet and sneaking around.

  The crew quarters turned out to take up a rather large section of the vessel. Petrick had counted at least ten bunkrooms, and he assumed each of them was similar to the room they’d taken up residence in. Beyond those were the mess hall, another room piled even higher with junk that said rec on the door, and a set of bathrooms with lines of showers and sinks.

  In the next section was the circular area where they’d first hidden on board in the ducting system. It appeared to house the various control rooms for the Red Robert, including the cockpit, which Clarke and Petrick didn’t dare go close to.

  Off that circular area were the corridors to the staterooms, which was where Captain Balta’s quarters were, and where Dedrin and Arris seemed to be staying. From the little that they had seen, Petrick deduced that these were single-occupant rooms, larger than the ones on the crew deck and most likely designed for officers, or any of those on the ship with a higher status. The boy and the dog tiptoed very softly down that corridor and put an ear to each of the six doors there.

  He could hear Dedrin and Arris whispering to each other through one door and some clanging around in the other, which he assumed must be Balta. It seemed that what Haber had said earlier was very accurate: there really was no day or night in space. One had to make one’s own routine or cycle in the absence of having a spinning planet show you the sun’s light, and then take it away again.

  When he came to a large metal door marked core, he realized what he’d been looking for the whole time.

  “That’s the starstuff core in there,” Petrick whispered to Clarke, who responded to the excitement in his master’s voice by opening his mouth and panting.

  A clunking sound came from the other side, and Petrick pressed his ear up to the door to try to hear more clearly. He felt the tiniest whisper of air on his cheek. He moved slightly to better view the seam of the door, and sure enough, it was open just a crack. Petrick looked back down at Clarke, who cocked his head to one side.

  “It’s open,” he whispered to his furry companion.

  He reached to ease it open a smidge more. Clarke cocked his head to the other side curiously, as if questioning the wisdom of opening a hatch that apparently was supposed to be locked. That, of course, did nothing to stop Petrick. The door inched open with the softest of creaks, and the two stuck their heads through.

  The room beyond was dark, save for a bright pulsing gold-yellow light. It was hard to see from the door, but Petrick was sure that it was the stardrive. Nobody appeared to be inside, and so Petrick opened the door a little further. It was ajar enough for them to slip through, and so they did.

  The core chamber was roughly circular with a squat cylinder-shaped contraption smack-dab in the center, the source of the pulsing golden light. The color of the light was such a signature feature of the starstuff particle, Petrick knew instantly the contraption was the core. Petrick stepped toward it with wide eyes.

  “It’s so much smaller than I would have thought,” he said to Clarke.

  It was maybe only three feet tall on its own and perched atop another, larger cylinder. Petrick recognized it as where the particle rods would be placed to feed into the reaction chamber, which was really what the core was, an insulated chamber that controlled particle reactions. At the base of the reaction chamber, there was a small window glowing with golden light. Petrick peered into it. He was amazed to see, with his naked eye, bright gold particles dancing inside. They’d float slowly to the bottom of the chamber, then swirl wildly as the plate there was zapped at regular intervals.

  “It must be a magnification,” Petrick said to Clarke.

  No pipes or tubes were running from the core up into the ship, nor were there any that fed into the stardrive from the outside, like for cooling purposes. No, Petrick had long ago learned that all a stardrive needed to propel a ship far past the light-speed barrier was a controlled release of refined starstuff. The more starstuff you released into the reaction chamber, the faster your ship would go.

  There were no thrusters, no propulsion whatsoever, in fact. There was simply a displacement field generated around the ship that moved you through space, albeit at incredible speed. And it was instantaneous. There was no acceleration. No need for seat belts or stasis chambers to keep one from becoming jelly after being smashed against the rear walls. No, all you needed was a place for starstuff particles to concentrate and react to each other; it was that simple.

  As they looked around the room, Petrick saw another corridor leading deeper into the engineering section of the vessel, which he realized must extend to the thruster controls and fuel room. Starstuff was fantastic for cruising in open space, but it would do nothing to land or launch a ship on or off a planet. Further in their rotation, they saw another large imposing-looking door labeled “Rod Storage.” It dawned on Petrick that it must be where Balta kept the reserves of the particle rods, the actual starstuff that fed the drive. He tried the door, but it wouldn’t budge.

  “It’s locked,” Petrick whispered.

  He looked down and realized suddenly that Clarke was no
longer next to him. And that was when Colossus’s giant claw clamped down on his shoulder and hoisted him forcefully up off the ground.

  Petrick bellowed in pain and surprise.

  “Let me go!” he demanded of his captor.

  He tried to wiggle loose, which resulted only in Colossus’s shifting his vise grip and holding him even tighter. Petrick again cried out in pain, and Clarke began to bark. Colossus kicked him aside and turned his emotionless and utterly inhuman eyes back on Petrick. They glowed red in the darkness, and Petrick wanted to cry.

  “You’re hurting me,” he said to the machine.

  Nothing. Colossus just held Petrick in the air, as if unsure what to do. His red eyes were expressionless. No compassion, no emotion, just calculations and directives. He did what he was told, and Petrick was apparently not someone who could tell him what to do. Was he programmed to guard the core? If so, how far would he take that job? What horrible things could something that had no feelings do?

  “Put him down,” said a voice from the doorway.

  It was Balta. She was half-dressed in some kind of ratty robe.

  Colossus immediately dropped Petrick, and Clarke ran over to him, possessively jumping onto his lap and growling at Colossus.

  “What are you doing in here?” Balta demanded of them.

  “I . . . couldn’t sleep,” Petrick answered.

  “You are not to be in here,” Balta told him, and she opened wide the door out to the corridor beyond. As she did, Petrick saw a gold chain with a medallion slide from her chest into partial view. “Get out.”

  Petrick didn’t argue, and he bowed his head and left. He didn’t steal a look back until he was into the corridor, and he saw Balta closing the door fully and talking to Colossus. No doubt telling the robot to keep the core room locked.

  Petrick thought about the medallion around Balta’s neck. He hadn’t seen it in full, but it had looked so similar . . .

  Was Balta a Star Farer?

  “I saw an actual reaction chamber today.”

  The statement slipped out. Petrick had taken to doodling idly while his father was scratching away at the blackboard, stuck on the same “lesson” since the distress call had taken over and invaded their time together. It was a rude reminder even before the hornets inevitably came that these dreams had never just been dreams. They were recordings. Programs. Incredibly built for spontaneous interaction, yes, but they were not real. The figure with a pleasantly confused face turning toward him was not his father, even if it called him “son.”