Echoes of Starlight

by Eric Michael Craig

  Echoes of Starlight

  Wings of Earth: One

  Eric Michael Craig

  Copyright © 2019 Eric Michael Craig

  All rights reserved. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author and publisher.

  Cover Design: Ducky Smith

  PUBLISHED BY

  Rivenstone Press

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Next Book in Wings of Earth

  Leave a Review

  Other Works by Eric Michael Craig

  About the Author and Links

  Chapter One:

  The Olympus Dawn dropped out of cruise as it passed the outer threshold marker, ten light-hours from Starlight Colony. It was a picture-perfect sub-light transition as the residual photons snapped clear of the ship’s hull with the usual flash of infrared that swept up to ultraviolet across the forward screen. From outside, it would have looked like the typical hellish white-light flash of a photon boom, but from the inside, it was a wonderful phototechnic cascade of unimaginable colors.

  “All hands rig for space-normal operation.” Captain Ethan Walker made the announcement more as a formality than anything else. His small crew had done this hundreds of times, so they knew their jobs. With only a couple exceptions, they’d be snoring and waiting for something interesting to happen.

  “You just like the sound of your own voice don’t you?” Nuko Takata said from the seat beside him. When he glanced over, she winked. She’d been his copilot for over two years, and she knew him well enough to understand sarcasm was his preferred language. They had the ConDeck to themselves and she had her legs up and crossed on the corner of the console as she thumbed through the latest newswave on her thinpad.

  “Marti, plot a course for the transfer beacon and set speed to half-light,” he said. As the ship’s resident Artificial Awareness, Marti did most of the real piloting and at least it wouldn’t give him any lip. Usually.

  “There is a problem with that, Captain,” the AA said in its rich contralto voice. “The beacon seems to be down.”

  “Down?” Nuko said. Dropping her feet to the deck, she tossed her screen to the side and leaned forward to look at her console. “It could be in eclipse but the nav-time says that won’t happen for another sixteen hours.”

  Starlight and its co-orbiting sister planet Shadetree were some of the earliest exoplanets discovered by an old sky survey system that used transiting observation to find worlds orbiting distant stars. Kepler 186 was 178 parsecs from Zone One, but its stellar plane lined up with Earth, so a ship coming in on a direct line from the home system might catch the worlds lined up with each other. When that happened they’d have no beacon to use to get a navigational fix. The colony’s beacon sat at the barycenter of the binary planet and winked out for almost an hour out of every forty-eight.

  “You’re sure we’re in the right system?” he asked, poking at her. She wasn’t the navigator, but since she’d punched the buttons last, it had to be her mistake.

  “If it’s Tuesday, this has to be Starlight,” she said, shaking her head.

  “It is Kepler 186,” Marti said. “I have located the other threshold markers and they triangulate to a high degree of certainty.”

  “This is a dinky red-dwarf, so let’s point our nose down-system and make feet. I’m sure we can find a binary planet within twenty million klick of the big glowing thing down there,” he said, not wanting to waste a lot of time digging up problems that might have an easier explanation. “Maybe they’ve blown a fuse and they’re waiting for us to deliver parts.”

  “Should I try to raise someone on the long-comm?” Nuko asked.

  “Let’s give them a chance to come out of the shadow and see if the beacon reappears,” he said, standing up and shrugging. “We don’t want to sound like noobs to the locals, in case it’s nothing. Maybe we’re reading an old chart that somebody forgot to update and we’ve got our times off.”

  “We do not run interstellar navigation on charts,” Marti said. “They are inefficient and inaccurate.”

  “They did when I was in school,” he said, rolling his eyes and grinning.

  “Improbable, Captain,” Marti said.

  “Nuko, hold the deck down. I’m thinking I need a little time out of the seat.” He turned and headed for the door.

  “Sure thing boss,” she said. “I’ll scream when we catch the beacon, and in the middle-time we’ll set a course ... that way.” She waved a hand in the general direction of the dim red star in front of them.

  “Lock it in and make feet,” he said over his shoulder as he headed out in search of a meal and some time off the deck. It was his ship, at least on paper, so he took the majority of the time on duty, but after three years running consignment cargo to pay his license and lease, it was getting skinny around the edges.

  The door hadn’t completely closed behind him when one of the two passengers on this run ambushed him. “Are we there yet?” she said, grinning as his face dropped into a stony glare.

  Dr. Keira Caldwell was in her mid-thirties and was the type he once would have chased to ground, although for some reason he knew she was beyond his orbit. There was something about her that told him she didn’t breathe the same air he did. She was casual and friendly in an easy sort of way, yet it had a hint of a studied edge to it. He couldn’t tell for sure, but he suspected she had money somewhere in her tree. “It’s just been a while since I was home and when I heard that we were back down from cruising speed, I figured we were close enough to the end to ask,” she said.

  “Actually Doctor, we’ve still a little over twenty hours to go,” he said, trying to slip past her in the narrow corridor.

  “Twenty-three days on this ship and you still won’t call me by my name,” she said, winking and shaking her head as she dropped into position and walked with him back toward the lift.

  “Sorry… Kaycee. Force of habit,” he lied, shrugging. He knew it was safer to keep the wall of propriety firmly in place with her. “We have to drop out of cruise far enough from a star to be outside the clutter. Unfortunately that means it’s crawling speed from here. We’re still eleven billion klick from a parking orbit.”

  “Is there any chance I can comm with the colony before we get there?”

  “Yah, you can send a message, but since we’re running at half-light, and there’s about twenty hours of comm loop time, we’ll almost be there by the time you’d get anything back.” That was a slight exaggeration but since he didn’t see a need to authorize the comm time, he let his oversimplification stand.

  “What about the deep-comm?
” she asked. “I know it takes a lot of energy, but at this range it isn’t too bad is it?”

  Stopping at the rail edge, he waited for the lift and twisted to study her face. “Is there something urgent that I need to know about?” After several seconds he realized he was staring at her and his mind had gone into standby. She was a paying passenger, and he was just the hired help, so it was doubly dangerous that something about her tempted his eyes to wander, along with his thoughts.

  “Not really,” she said. “It’s just that I need to make sure they’ve got a cargo lander waiting at the transfer station. The payload is a bit delicate, and if you’re running a tight turnaround, I don’t want you to be held up, or to drop and dart leaving us free-floating while we wait on the down-leg.”

  “I don’t have a problem with giving you the comm time, but Starlight’s transponder is in eclipse at the moment so it can’t be for a while yet,” he said. “Since deep-comm runs through the same relay as the beacon, we’ve got no link to the colony until it comes back into line-of-sight.”

  “So it could be as much as an hour before we can downlink.” She frowned.

  “We’re not tight, anyway. We came in about ten percent hot, so we’ll make station early,” he said. “If you’re worried about the environment of the transfer, why didn’t you have us contract the downside handling? Nuko’s an artist with the drop-ship loader.”

  “That’s good to know,” she said, stepping onto the lift platform once the rail opened. “Unfortunately I didn’t arrange that side of the contract and your Cargo Compliance Controller doesn’t seem like she’d be much inclined to look the other way and let me make you a side offer.”

  He followed her into the small cage and they started down. “Leigh is a good Triple-C, but she does tend to be somewhat …” he stopped, trying to find a diplomatic way to finish his thought without overstating his opinion.

  “The phrase you are looking for is, tight assed,” she said, winking. “I bet when she breaks wind, dogs come running.”

  Walker’s mouth fell open. He blinked several times as he looked down at the deck and struggled not to laugh. “Rigid was the word I was thinking,” he said.

  Leigh Salazar was a corporate enforcer and responsible for making sure they executed the transport contract from end-to-end on any run they accepted. It meant she was as inflexible as an iron-bar. He didn’t particularly like her, but she was the legal agent for the load, and she was excellent at her job.

  “Regardless, I didn’t even think to ask her because I know what she’d say,” Kaycee said.

  The railing opened, and they stepped out onto the mid-deck. The majority of the deck was an open space that served as the dining room and recreation area. Because the Olympus Dawn also carried passengers, the area was much larger than it needed to be for the crew alone. Captain Walker spotted his Triple-C sitting alone at a table across the room and nodded, making sure Kaycee caught the significant tilt of his head and the warning to change the trajectory of their conversation. Leigh glanced up but paid them no attention. She appeared to be busy reading her morning newswave while she munched on what looked like a brick of yeastcake.

  Lowering his voice he asked, “Do you want me to ask her if she’d be willing to let us make the landing leg for you?”

  “Can we feel that out and keep it as a backup in case there isn’t a cargo lander available?” she asked.

  “Cando,” he said. “I’ll poke the bear and see if she might be willing to dance.”

  “Kaycee, may I have a word with you?” Elias Pruitt said as he angled across the deck in their direction from the workout room. He was the other passenger on this run. Wearing a thinskin, he looked more like a two meter slab of bodyguard flesh than the biomedical systems engineer he was. He was traveling back to Starlight from a vacation at New Hope City and had boarded before they picked up their cargo modules and the doctor at Armstrong Station. Their boarding passes said they weren’t traveling together, but they seemed suspiciously casual.

  “I’ll go grab a meal, and will let you know when Nuko says we’ve got the beacon back,” he said, nodding at Elias and ducking out of their conversation.

  “The beacon is down?” the engineer asked.

  “It’s probably in the shadow of—”

  “No, sir,” he said, glancing at his chrono and shaking his head. “I’ve been running on Starlight local time since we left Zone One. It’s got another fifteen hours and forty-eight minutes.”

  “Angular position of the planet in orbit relative to our position would change the time,” the captain said.

  “I know, but that should be very close to right,” he said.

  “You’re probably right,” Walker said, trying to play it off with a shrug. “Then they might have it offline for maintenance.”

  “That would be possible, but don’t they send out advisories through FleetCom?” Elias challenged, his dark eyes flashing between the captain and Kaycee.

  “They do, but sometimes those don’t make it this far down the deck-list,” he said, holding up his finger and tapping into his collar comm. “Nuko, have we received a FleetCom advisory on a maintenance cycle on the Kepler 186 beacon?”

  “Negative, Captain,” Marti answered for her. “There have been no updates to the beacon schedule.”

  “Yah, Boss can you come back to the ConDeck?” Nuko asked. He knew her well enough to recognize the stress in her voice even if it was undetectable to anyone else. He immediately regretted having used the open comm rather than the command channel. It meant that anyone in earshot was listening in on what she said.

  “What’s swinging?”

  “The beacon isn’t in eclipse, it’s hard down,” she said.

  “Down, as in for maintenance,” he offered.

  “No.”

  He turned toward the lift and realized both his passengers were following on his heels. “You’re obviously saying something else here. Connect the dots for me,” he said, trying to figure out a diplomatic way to tell them to wait here. Nothing came quickly to mind, so he tried to ignore them instead.

  “Marti used the main navscan dish to boost the sensors, and as far as we can tell, everything else on Starlight is offline too,” she said.

  “The colony is offline?” Elias asked.

  Walker had reached the railing on the lift cage and was hoping that if he stopped there and waited they wouldn’t follow him to the ConDeck. “What does that mean?”

  “There are no RF signals anywhere on the surface,” Marti said. “There are also no automated comm signals between the orbitals and the ground.”

  “We can’t even detect EM from the power grid,” Nuko added.

  “Can you tell if something’s happened to the colony?” the captain asked.

  “Not from this range,” she said.

  “I’m on my way,” he said.

  Chapter Two:

  The captain stood behind the empty pilot’s seat staring at the screen as they eased into position at the barycenter between the two worlds. Marti and Nuko were flying the ship, so he just watched. Normally seeing two Earth sized planets this close together would be a sight he’d want to enjoy, but the strangeness of the silence stole the pleasure from the moment.

  To port, Shadetree was three-quarters illuminated, a blistered red wasteland of scorched barren rock, and to starboard, Starlight was a mottled brown and gray desert with nearly iridescent thin clouds along the poles. Most of its surface was dark and only visible in the reflected light of its companion world.

  “We should be able to see the lights of the colony from here,” Kaycee said. She sat beside Elias in one of the observation jump seats along the back wall of the ConDeck.

  Walker had allowed both of his passengers to stay on the ConDeck as they made their approach, and for the most part, she had spent the time whispering with Pruitt. When Ethan glanced over his shoulder, he could see she was chewing on a big ball of acid. “It could be clouds obscuring the light,” he offered.

>   She shook her head. “It’s an ultra-arid desert. Way too hot for heavy clouds.”

  “The power has to be off,” Elias added.

  “I would concur with his assessment, Captain,” Marti said.

  “And I’m sure they’d have backup systems,” Nuko said. “There’d be medical centers with emergency generators and who knows what else. There should be some light somewhere down there.”

  “What could take out the entire power-grid?” Walker asked, swiveling his seat and sitting down. He scratched at his chin while he thought.

  “I’m not a power systems engineer, but nothing I know of would do it,” Pruitt said.

  “Kepler 186 is a red dwarf. They tend to burn their fuel slowly, but sometimes they burp hard.” Renford Pascalle was the ship systems engineer, but he was also an armchair astronomer so that made him the closest thing they had to a science officer. “As tight in as these planets orbit, it might not take much of a solar flare to blast the surface in a big way.”

  “Rene’s got a point. That would also take out the beacon,” Nuko said, nodding.

  He shook his head. “Someone might have shut it down on purpose, but not because of a flare. All space-based systems use broadcast power distribution and have for the last seventy years. Those beacons use narrow-bandwidth filtering that makes them impervious to surge.”

  “A stellar eruption of that magnitude would also leave detectable background radiation across wide areas of the star system for weeks,” Marti said. “We would have picked it up when we made our approach.”

  “I assume that means you didn’t observe any?” the captain asked.

  “Correct,” the AA said. “The background stellar winds are normal. There is no detectable evidence of a recent coronal mass ejection.”

  “That’s probably a good thing, since an incident that powerful would have affected people on the surface,” Rene said.

  “Are there any life signs?” Kaycee asked.

  “We’re not a science vessel,” Ethan said, shaking his head. “Our sensor kit isn’t tooled to scan for biosigns. We can pick out the electromagnetic signature of a ship at a distance of better than a light year, and we’ve got high-end optics to go with that, but otherwise we can’t do much beyond sniffing out a base level atmospheric analysis. Spiffs like fancy sensors are a pointless upgrade on a cargo hauler.”