Starshine: Aurora Rising Book One (12 page)

A clone of his father, a wealthy business magnate on Aquila, like most vanity babies Noah had been brought into existence above all to feed the source’s ego. From early childhood he had been expected to behave precisely as his father saw himself, sit and learn at his father’s knee and grow up to become his father’s devoted protégé in the business.

So naturally, Noah had run away from home at fifteen. Caught a transport to Pandora and never looked back.

He was a criminal, of course. A ‘trader’ in polite company and a smuggler everywhere else. And while the guy came off like the buddy you watched the game and drank too many beers with on the weekend, he possessed a skill bordering on magic. He could find
anything
. If it existed in settled space, he could make it appear in your pack inside a week—as with all things, for sufficient credits.

In this instance he had far less than a week, but the item wasn’t a particularly rare one and the compensation generous.

Caleb grinned and leaned over to shake his hand. “You know, just the usual—wine, women and song.”

Noah laughed and took a swig from the mug Caleb had ensured would be waiting on him. “I do know it, man.” His voice dropped as he leaned in and casually passed over the small, unremarkable-looking yet very advanced communications scrambler. Caleb dropped it in his pack and just as casually returned to his beer.

It wasn’t that he planned to engage in anything overtly criminal, much less traitorous to the Federation. In fact, he believed Volosk and likely the Division Director knew about and expected such things. Black ops were ‘black’ for a reason, yet they also fell under government supervision and oversight. A difficult quandary.

Most things he did, most of the time, qualified as legal actions under Division’s mandate, if not always under civilian law. But every so often a mission called for actions which
…weren’t
. In such circumstances, his superiors winked and nodded and ignored the troublesome details, provided they had been sufficiently obscured. Hence the state-of-the-art communications scrambler—a necessary tool for those moments when even Special Operations didn’t want a recording of what was said or to whom.

Noah’s voice stayed low and conversational, barely audible amid the din of spirited patrons and generic pub background music. “I guess you misplaced the last one, huh?”

Caleb shrugged and sipped his beer. It really was
rather
good. “Eh, it blew up.”

“What? Dammit, I’ll have a
conversation
with my—”

“Not the scrambler—the ship it was in.”

Noah’s head cocked to the side. “Oh. Yeah, that does happen.”

He had met Noah nine years ago. An influx of chimerals had begun flooding the streets on several of the smaller Federation worlds; he tracked the source to a drug ring on Pandora. Noah was little more than a freelance street merchant back then, hocking black market surveillance equipment, hacking tools and modified energy blades. Illegal, but nothing hardcore. The modded gear had come in handy, as had the inside information provided as a bonus.

After a few years, Noah earned enough credits to move his operation off the streets and began serving a more discerning clientele and their more unique needs. Caleb had called on him on occasion over the years, and now…well, they weren’t friends. But in another life, they might have been.

“So how’s Pandora these days? The last time I visited, holo-babes in the spaceport terminal were selling head trips which would make you believe you sported three cocks and twice the women to fill with them lounged in your bed.
Oh
, and the bed floated upon a golden nebula in the stars. God knows what they were selling in the markets.”

Noah laughed in wry dismay as he motioned the bartender for a refill. “Trust me, Caleb, you do
not
want to know what they’re selling in the markets. I don’t mess with such insanity, nothing but trouble.”

“As opposed to the trouble you already get in?”

He shrugged. “Yeah? Still, it’s all good. Business is good. Life is good. Nobody’s tried to kill me in at least a month.”

Caleb chuckled in spite of himself. “I guess that’s all you can ask for, right?”

Noah sighed wistfully. “No…you can ask for a beautiful, witty, intelligent yet minxy woman in your arms every night, a mansion on a hill—or better yet in the sky—and the best bodyguards to protect you when someone
does
inevitably try to kill you. For starters.”

Caleb raised his mug to clank against Noah’s. “I’ll drink to that.”

8

SIYANE

S
PACE,
N
ORTHEAST
Q
UADRANT

A
LEX OPENED HER EYES
to the best surprise.

The brilliant red and pink glow of the Carina Nebula filled the wide viewport above her bed. The vivid colors shone with a dazzling splendor only nature could create. She wound her hands behind her head and settled back onto the pillow to drink in the sight.

It was good practice to drop out of superluminal speeds for a few minutes at least once a day to diffuse the particle buildup. She spoiled herself by arranging it so the deceleration occurred just before she routinely woke up, and was often treated to lovely vistas as a result—but few so spectacular as this one.

There were no colonized worlds in the vicinity due to the imminent (any time in the next five hundred or so years) supernova of Eta Carinae. As such, one rarely had cause to linger so near to Carina. What she knew to be over a million stars clumped into multiple open clusters to glitter crisp and bright through the nebular cloud. She grinned, captivated, and watched until the sLume drive re-engaged and the stars blurred away beyond the bubble wall.

With a contented sigh she crawled out of bed and splashed water on her face. She slipped on an athletic tank and shorts, twisting her hair up in a knot on the way up the circular stairwell to the main deck. After a brief check of the cockpit to make sure nothing unusual had occurred overnight and she remained on course, she grabbed a water, put on Brahms’
Academic Festival Overture
and hit the treadmill.

Staying in shape while spending most of her days on a ship with under two hundred square meters of living space wasn’t easy. Prenatal genetic tuning for physical hardiness and agility—a gift from her parents by way of the Alliance Armed Forces—made it easier to be sure, but even the best genetic enhancements didn’t replace simple physical activity.

Nearly a quarter of the port wall was taken up by a treadmill, pull-up bar, pulley-based weight machine and pilates pad. It wasn’t mountain hikes or barefoot beach runs, but it mostly got the job done.

Then she activated a full-sensory overlay of Discovery Park at sunset, and it effectively
became
a barefoot beach run. Almost.

A heavy sheen of sweat coated her skin by the time she slowed the treadmill to a stop, lowered the music to a pleasant background level and headed downstairs to shower.

One could make a reasonable case for the utility of every item on the main deck. But there was simply no denying the truth that the lower deck represented pure personal extravagance. She didn’t feel the slightest bit contrite about it either; it was her money and her ship.

Still, she occasionally had to giggle in wicked delight at the full waterfall shower, oversized garden tub, cushy lounge chair and queen-sized bed with a view of the stars. Her own personal retreat, tucked into the void of space.

She sat at the kitchen-area table and munched on a banana and peanut-butter toast while she checked her overnight communications.

First up was a cool note from her mother letting her know she would be going to St. Petersburg to attend a conference in a few days, and would tell her grandfather ‘hello’ for her.

She ignored the tone of the message and smiled to herself. She had always rather liked her grandfather. He was simple and down-to-earth in a way few people were these days. Grumpy as all hell, but in a loveable way. A brief pang of guilt struck when she realized it had been more than four years since she had seen him. She
really
should try to rectify the lapse once she returned to Earth.

She was about to delete the message when she noticed it included an attachment. Puzzled, she opened it, only to find a sterile listing of Alliance command postings for the previous month. A frown tugged her mouth downward as she scanned down it while wondering if her mother had attached it in error—except that was an absurd notion, because her mother didn’t
make
mistakes.

The name leapt off the list as if it were scripted in meter-high fluorescent neon colors.

EAS Juno: Lieutenant Colonel Malcolm Jenner

She sank back in the chair, chuckling a little at the irony. He had left her because she spent too much time in space, and now he was serving in space. God, he must be miserable. He had never been able to grasp why she loved it so much, no matter how many times she had tried to explain it, had tried to show him what a wonder the stars were.

Maybe she should send him a brief message wishing him luck…but some wounds were best left untouched, the better to fade away. In truth, he
hadn’t
left because she spent too much time in space—he had left because he believed she didn’t love him enough to spend
less
time in space and away from him. That wasn’t the way she had viewed the issue, but in declaring such he had made her realize it didn’t much matter, because the relationship was doomed to failure. He would never
understand
.

She didn’t know what her mother imagined she was accomplishing by sending the attachment. Whatever. She munched on her toast for a moment, thoughts adrift in memories, before straightening up and forcing herself to refocus on the task at hand.

Her brow crinkled up in bewilderment at the next message. It contained a personal note from the Minister for Extra-Solar Development asking her to reconsider the Deep Space Exploration position, increasing the offered salary by twenty percent and offering to meet with her this week to discuss her needs.

Okay, seriously?

A somewhat disbelieving laugh escaped her lips. She didn’t deny she felt flattered at the special attention; she had a great deal of confidence in her abilities, and her record spoke for itself, but
damn
.

She chewed on her bottom lip and pondered what in the hell might be the reason behind the lavish adulation. She didn’t care for mysteries. Well, it would be more accurate to say she didn’t care for mysteries she couldn’t solve…but perhaps this mystery could be solved merely by the application of the universal law that politicians were
svilochnaya peshka
. Mollified by the thought, she shrugged and sent back a gracious decline.

The only other message of value came from Kennedy. It detailed her
enchanting
dinner with the eco-dev executive and proclaimed she was absolutely positively head-over-heels in love. This guy was the
one
. No doubt about it.

“What is this, the third ‘true love’ this year?” The woman went through men like most people went through flower arrangements. She responded with as much, then put away her plate and walked over to the data center.

The heart of the main deck consisted of a long table, rectangular except for rounded edges. Along the starboard wall were a set of embedded screens, a small desk and a workbench. A waist-high holo control panel, linked to both the screens and the table, spanned the gap at the cockpit-facing end. A plain cylinder twenty centimeters in diameter hung suspended from the ceiling to hover a meter and a half above the length of the table.

Both the cylinder and the surface of the table were made of a platinum-germanium based n-alloy. The inert, nonreactive platinum provided an ideal tableau upon which to display the data transmitted flawlessly through the zero-dispersive, semi-conductive and highly refractive germanium.

A series of commands entered in the control panel rendered a full-spectrum image of Metis above the center of the table. The EM bands gleamed in the traditional rainbow hues but stretched far beyond the range of visible light to cover the spectrum.

She reached into the display. One by one she pulled out each band and flicked it to the side, until eight discrete images bordered the center one. She couldn’t help but smile; the images now resembled nothing so much as an old-fashioned painter’s palette. Fitting, as to her it was pure art.

She leaned against the workbench behind her and let her eyes drift across the palette. It was time to get serious about this expedition.

9

ATLANTIS

I
NDEPENDENT
C
OLONY