Starburst Read online

  Table of Contents

  Blurb

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  STS Includes

  Other Work

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  INTRODUCTION

  The Birthday Story (Part 1)

  The Birthday Story (Part 2)

  The Birthday Story (Part 3)

  Prologue

  On Space Clippers, and Messages From Deep Space

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  The Art of Waiting

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Operation Starburst

  News

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Bugout

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Punch

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Counterpunch

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  The Galopar Mission

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  On Castles, Balconies, and the Meaning of Life

  Chapter 33

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Great characters I cared about, a kick-ass plot with surprising twists, great techie details, and a powerful story. Pick up Starburst. I guarantee you won't set it down until you’ve read every last word.

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Hugo Award–winning author of the The Diving Universe

  STARBURST

  STEALING THE SUN: BOOK 2

  RON COLLINS

  STARBURST

  STEALING THE SUN: BOOK 2

  Copyright © 2016 Ron Collins

  All rights reserved

  Cover Image:

  © Philcold | Dreamstime.com

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All incidents, dialog, and characters are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Skyfox Publishing

  ISBN-10: 1-946176-03-6

  ISBN-13: 978-1-946176-03-5

  STEALING THE SUN

  includes

  STARFLIGHT

  STARBURST

  STARFALL

  STARCLASH

  STARBORN

  Other Work by Ron Collins:

  Saga of the God-Touched Mage

  includes

  Glamour of the God-Touched

  Target of the Orders

  Trail of the Torean

  Gathering of the God-Touched

  Pawn of the Planewalker

  Changing of the Guard

  Lord of the Freeborn

  Lords of Existence

  Picasso’s Cat & Other Stories

  Five Magics

  Six Days in May

  Follow Ron at:

  http://www.typosphere.com

  Twitter: @roncollins13

  For Dennis, again.

  Death is not the worst of evils.

  General John Stark

  INTRODUCTION

  When you have a full course meal, the order of things matters.

  Appetizers are selected for specific purposes, and then you’ve got your palate cleansers and your entrees. The salad holds a specific place in things. As does dessert. Depending on the formality of it all, even the table setting carries its purpose and must be served just so.

  An event like that is about the composite of the parts, and all the parts need to be in the right place to give them their proper due.

  Against that idea, let me say that I’ve written several stories in series, and, for me, writing part two of anything carries its own set of challenges—the bulk of which are a lot like that.

  I get concerned about basic continuity, of course, and I worry that the story needs to move along well. I want to knit it all together. It has to feel like the same world, but be fresh and interesting at the same time. Then you add in the simple human neurosis of not wanting to let anyone down. I mean, folks reading book two of anything are almost certainly doing so because part one worked for them—and therefore they come back to the world with expectations large enough that I can almost hear the “don’t screw it up, Collins” whisper in the background as they crack open the first page.

  But there’s only so much I can do for those things.

  The work will be the work in the end, and you guys will either like it or you won’t.

  For me, though, writing this set of books has been like putting together that full course meal.

  I touched on this a bit in the introduction of Starflight, the fact that the structure of this series is a little different than other multi-part stories I’ve worked on. This story is built around characters who inhabit vastly different regions of our galaxy, who live their lives separated by light years of distance. So the telling of the whole isn’t as linear as some others. And, the key word in that conversation is the word ‘character.’

  I love these characters.

  I want to do right by them.

  I want to put them all into the right course.

  So one of the challenges for me in developing this series was coming to the viewpoint that the stories were about the characters (quite surprising, eh?), and that this meant I had to structure the first three books in such a way as to give them extra breathing room (You get a story! You get a story! You get a story! he says, pointing at each character). I’ve had this entire saga in my head and in various forms of manuscript for a long time, but in the early days I put them together in ways that resulted in the whole of the books never quite working for me. The broccoli was always touching the potatoes, you know? (Yes, I’m stretching the metaphor, are you hungry yet?).

  Then I started “talking to” my characters—or, more appropriately, started listening to them as they argued with me. Until then, many elements of the story that you now hold in your hand were scattered over several parts of the series. But once I gave each of these characters their own space—let them do their things in their own books—well, things started to feel right to me..

  So the fact is that Starburst is completely what it is because the characters told me this is how it had to be. As usual, I think they were right.

  Aside: a few years back a friend of mine asked if I ever got lonely writing (because, let’s face it, creating words is a solitary task). I told her that since I had hundreds of characters running around in my head, I rarely felt truly lonely. She looked at me then, got one of those intriguingly amused expressions on her face, and said “I might not tell certain other people that if I were you.”

  Heh.

  Regardless, the structure of this book, and arguably the entire series then, is essentially a full course meal that’s been thrown together by my characters talking to me.

  And, yes, I really do absolutely love these characters.

  I hope you do, too.

  Ron Collins

  October 2016

  On Human Pyramids & the Creation of Wormholes

  THE BIRTHDAY STORY (PART 1)

  Chang Park, Mare Imbrium, Luna

  Local Solar Date: April 3, 2173

  Local Solar Time: 1245 Hours

  Casmir Francis leaned int
o the slide and crushed on the rush of power that rumbled through his pressure suit as the shimmy-pad skidded to a stop. A knifelike rooster tail of regolith fanned out against the black sky in a stellar display of low-g art. He was twenty-two and finally feeling good. Life was very, very fine.

  Chang Park may be barren and gray, but sometimes barren and gray was pretty damned sharp. The park was a stark, nearly smooth plot of Lunar land that started about ten klicks from campus and ran all the way to the jagged peaks to the east. The makeshift rows of workstations his team had constructed last night were scattered along the southern pavilion, surrounded now by a growing gathering of students.

  After months of planning, this was Pyramid Day—the day the United Government would see what his people could do. The day the Solar System would see what kind of statement his generation could make—what kind of people were going to break the stranglehold of the commercial branch of government and lead the Solar System into the future.

  The park was safe enough that he didn’t need to lock his shimmy-pad, so he just left it with the other couple hundred scooters, shimmies, and skimmers—their bodies ancient, dented, worn, and otherwise splattered with prismatic swirls and multi-d stickers that had been pasted fashionably into chaotically brilliant individual statements of the whole.

  One read “42 or Bust.” Another “Expand the Expanse!”

  These are my people, he thought.

  Casmir breathed the crisp air of his pressure suit and looked up into the deep darkness they were all standing under. The power of the universe pulsed through his entire being.

  He couldn’t keep the smile off his face.

  The advance crew had pressed a pathway into the regolith to keep the dust and grit down. He crossed it, thrilling to the coarse rhythm that reverberated inside his helmet as his boots crunched over the surface. Even the taste of his saliva was sweet. The path wouldn’t save him any effort cleaning his pressure suit, but it made running a bit easier so he bounced forward, enjoying the low-g movement while he could.

  He felt incredible today, too—which was brilliant.

  Cystic fibrosis was strange-assed condition, a disease with hundreds of variants that each required their own unique remedy. It was just his damned luck that even though half the damned CF world was cured, his variant was merely semitreatable. It was just a matter of time, though. That’s what the doctors all told him whenever he went for examinations.

  Just a matter of time.

  Easy for them to say.

  Living with CF meant a lot of things.

  It meant always thinking about his diet. It meant taking the right pancreatic enzymes at the right times as he ate, and understanding the values of minerals like zinc and iron in ways most people never had to think about. He replaced his mucus thinner patch twice a day, and kept old-fashioned nebulizers with him at all times, just in case. And he could spot a possible home for festering bacteria from a hundred paces. Living with CF meant he could throw on a percussion vest in record time and practiced a variety of lung percussion techniques. He knew twenty-two different ways to cough that could help clear his lungs. At one point, Casmir had made a game of his coughing, calling them each by their own special name: The Baritone was deep and intentional; the Dignified Dump was where he turned his head to the left, angled his jaw down, and tightened up just so.

  At one point, Casmir considered a lung transplant, but his doctor didn’t think it was time, yet, and he didn’t want to deal with everything else that would mean.

  All because of his cystic fibrosis.

  In the end, living with this disease came down to the fact that he had to deal with never knowing what tomorrow meant. He dreaded things like calendar commitments and class schedules. Mostly things worked out, of course. Mostly he kept himself healthy by avoiding infections, staying away from places that screwed with the respiratory system, and exercising to keep his capacity strong.

  But nothing was ever certain, and yesterday had been touch and go.

  Between power-dosing antihistamine blocks and heroically failing to write his defense amid bouts of dozing, he spent most of the day worried his lungs wouldn’t let him make it out here—which would have pissed him off in the hardest way possible. His mom said that having CF meant never having to say you’re sorry, but that was the biggest piece of bullshit he could imagine. There was a good chance this pyramid would be a record: over a thousand blocks. Almost too big to imagine. If the record fell it might last forever. And everyone knew that a record like that would be impossible to ignore. If the record fell, only the hardest core of hard-core UG supporters could miss the message it would send.

  Together we will rise up, their pyramid would say.

  Together we will build the future.

  He couldn’t wait to see the United Government stewards choke out their commentary.

  Given that he was graduating next month, this P-Day might also be his final shot—the last time he could be part of a real build.

  To miss it would have crushed him.

  He headed toward the mat, which was a film of roughened rubberized compound the size of a football field, carefully marked with each build station. The clock flickered at the corner of his display.

  He didn’t want to let Perigee down.

  She would be late of course. But Perigee, the name Ellyn Parker performed under, was a diva. Her “entrances” were part of her thing, which meant they were part of what made everyone love her.

  People would notice if he was late, though.

  Ellyn would have his back, of course.

  She had always had his back—even in the early days when the shit was particularly rough. He owed her more than he could ever really repay. And this was her time. With only a few weeks until graduation he wasn’t going to cause her grief if he could help it, so he wanted to be on time.

  He did a hop-and-skip run to the assignment station.

  “Caz!” The voice came to his private channel.

  “Hello, Jess,” he replied.

  Jess Igari was in the Social Policy department where Casmir was taking a political science major and a minor in business philosophy focused on Solar System structures. It was a pairing he explained as “I think, therefore I should be the hell in charge,” which he considered hilarious but pretty much no one else seemed to get. Perhaps that said something about his sense of humor. Igari sharp enough, a year behind Casmir but having already served internships in the asteroid belt and on Io Station. He sat at a bench in his orange and blue pressure suit, waving a computer scanner at the dataskin interfaces on the pressure suits of students gathered around the table.

  “Happy P-Day,” Jess said to him.

  “You too.”

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t make it.”

  “I’m fine,” Casmir replied, hiding his scowl. No one else needed to know that yesterday he could barely breathe on his own. He raised the back of his hand to show his dataskin. “You got my assignment?”

  “E2,” Jess said, pressing the scanner against the suit.

  The assignment scrolled across his display. “Excellent!”

  E2. Fifth slot over, second row up. Made sense. He exercised like his life depended on it, so he was as strong as a horse. The lower in the build, the better. Being a second rower was good, too, because that meant he represented the disenfranchised.

  The base stood for the broken and disabled.

  Row 2 was the disenfranchised, row 3 the working poor.

  As the pyramid grew upward, each row represented those more well off before topping off with the ultras who had gotten so powerful after the Contraction that they almost shouldn’t be there. He liked that he wasn’t on the base, because he already represented the “disabled” as far as a lot of people were concerned, and he saw no reason to double down on that shit.

  “Where do I get my shelves?” he said.

  “See Preeti,” Jess replied, pointing across the mat to where the organizers had set up the equipment shelters and the emerge
ncy air locks that were required anytime a lot of people gathered a distance from the protected atmosphere on LUMI’s campus.

  “Great,” he replied.

  “Have a good climb,” Jess said as Casmir bounced away.

  THE BIRTHDAY STORY (PART 2)

  Casmir had loved Ellyn Parker since the day he first saw her, four years ago during orientation week.

  She was in the student dome on Union Corner that day, performing dance poetry to the beat of an island percussionist while sporting dye-dark hair, a collage of face paint, and nails that flared with a rainbow of colors. She wore a yellow leotard programmed to flash phrases like Ten Men Down, which referred to the mines on Ceres, and Save the Ice Cap, regarding the Free Europa environmental movement—all of which marked her as overtly political, and all of which meant that she was the most intensely interesting person he had ever met.

  A week later, at the end of his Intro to Poly Sci class, he suffered what his mother had long ago termed an event.

  His lungs were full of crap that morning, and he had a searing pain in his lumbar. He was tired and listless from being up too late. He considered skipping but wanted to be a real student, and as his primary school football coach always told him, you can’t play from the goddamned sideline. So when the coughing started, he did the Baritone and the Transcendental Huff, and he took his thinners and he ran the percussion vest for even longer than he normally would.

  A half hour later he found himself in one of those mass sessions with some two hundred students smashed together, taught in the infamous LUMI-1 Dome.

  At first his coughing drew only a few spurious glares, but he knew right away where it would end.

  After a moment, space began to clear around him.