The lighthouse of kuiper, p.1
The Lighthouse of Kuiper, page 1
THE LIGHTHOUSE OF KUIPER
BOOK ONE OF THE HELIOSPHERE TRILOGY
E. M. RENSING
Copyright © 2022 by E. M. Rensing
Cover Design: Ryan Meeks
Cover Font: “Ailerons,” Adilson Garcia
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Generative AI was not utilized for any component of this book; narrative development, drafting, editing, formatting and cover artwork were all accomplished by humans. With help from caffeine, toddlers, and synthwave compilations on YouTube.
For my Dad
CONTENTS
Book One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Book Two
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Book Three
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Epilogue
Author’s Notes
About the Author
BOOK ONE
4VESTA
CHAPTER
ONE
“So. Ma’am. What do you think?”
“I think it’s a spider scat problem, Olin.”
“This is not normal.”
“I don’t see why this matters.”
“Not normal comes back to bite you in the ass, Lieutenant Chen. Hold the lamp.”
And that was a direct response to their toolkit floating off. The female lieutenant took a better grip on the ceiling as her sergeant kicked off in the microgravity after it.
“You really should start calling me Tharsis, Olin!” she yelled. “Everyone else does!”
He stopped as he grabbed the bag, swinging himself back around in a low drift, and gestured towards her neck and the rank insignia there. “You outrank me, ma’am.”
Fat lot of good her commission had done her. Tharsis stared at the jumble of ruined chairs below. Now little more than a convenient dumping ground, the floor of the old auditorium had been collecting broken scat for decades.
She hated wasting her people’s time on routine maintenance inspections in the lower levels of base, but then, that was their job here. Maintain a post designed for thousands with a squadron of barely two hundred. If it hadn’t been for Olin’s patience with her, she wasn’t sure if she could’ve put up with the assignment.
Tharsis had been working through yet another pile of paperwork that afternoon when her Transmissions Superintendent had shown up.
“Found something in Main Briefing,” Olin had said. “Need you to go down with me.”
Come down. To poke at wetware that wasn’t theirs, in a place that nobody used. Again.
He’d seemed worried, though. Unusual for him.
So down she’d gone.
The spherical auditorium had been carved directly out of 4Vesta’s crust. Inside the asteroid’s mass, olivine-enrobed, neural-synthetic cabling grew where it would. The wetware honeycombed the interior of the ʼroid like a fungus, forcing its way through the base walls on a regular basis. Amazing, really, that anything worked in the lower levels.
Even considering that, today’s findings were unusual. Fist-sized, turgid nubs had broken through the walls in amazing number. Like demented mushroom caps, they glowed with pained maroon light, wiring inflamed, spread out across a space at least ten meters square.
Not normal, indeed.
But then, her eye caught movement.
On the floor. Between the chairs. Dashing through an open space. Not just dark but somehow absorbent, the shape consuming the light from their broad-spectrum maintenance lamp.
Olin fastened the bag to a maintenance handhold. Steading himself with another, the sergeant flicked the lock open on the canvas box, rummaging. “Something down there, El-Tee?” he asked conversationally.
Looking back, the space below was empty. “No.”
“If you’re seeing something, ma’am, we can always go get Tommy.”
“I don’t see things,” she said, eyes still fixed on the spot. Had she imagined it? The shadows playing with her mind? “We don’t need the cat.”
He had the decency not to press. “So, what do you think of our tumors here?”
Master Sergeant Caleb Olin was unremarkable in most respects, a standard-issue career enlisted man who carried the extra kilos on his lanky frame with self-deprecating humor. He’d been at Humphryes for over a decade—the definitive expert on not only the installation’s infrastructure, but the civilian sprawl beyond the guardhouse air lock. He did his job and did it well, but with a kind of quiet, world-weary attitude. The Arran Self-Defense Force did that to people, she’d learned. But the sergeant had taken her under his wing from the first, and she trusted his judgment more than her own.
“Tumors?”
“Definitely cancerous, mutation in the synthetic DNA. Energy surge, maybe, or radiation cross talk.” He huffed. “That’s what you get with this unethical wetware scat.”
Tharsis grabbed a spare wrench that had escaped its magnetic anchor, tucking it away again. “I don’t know. I mean, it seems to work for everybody here. And isn’t it necessary for the grav-generators?”
The sergeant produced a small Cimmerian-glass jar. “First time you see a myling leaking out of a line, you’ll understand why the Tenancy banned human-based biotech.”
“Human-based biotech was a horror show, I know. But mylings aren’t real.”
“Not anymore, maybe, but the Euphemism’s nightmares are well documented. Besides, even synthetic DNA can still produce umbran,” Olin said, a tone of finality in his voice, a pair of stainless steel forceps and a huge chunk of medical-grade gauze in his hand. “Hold this,” he said, and tossed her the jar.
“Wait, what are you—”
But before she could stop him, Olin sealed the forceps around the base of one of the nodules and ripped it out. A dull glow surged, then died. Suspension fluid sprayed out under pressure, soaking them both. A smell akin to rotten shark meat filled the space.
“Fuck,” Olin cursed, and slapped the gauze down on the bleeding tear of the wall as another huge glob struck him on the cheek. “Jar, El-Tee, come on. Fuck.”
The now slippery nodule, suspended in the ʼroid’s natural microgravity, almost got loose from the jar before Tharsis was able to screw the cap on. “Seriously? You’re just gonna rip it out?”
“Need to figure out what’s in that,” he told her, and unclipped his tool bag from the wall, securing it back onto his work belt. “See what’s been jumping through the wires.”
“Can we do that?”
“Sure. Why not? Biopsy the cancer cells, isolate the type of radiation that formed ʼem. Basic stuff,” Olin said, and paused. “But I’m going to need some discretionary cash.”
Tharsis groaned; so that was why he’d brought her along. “From Captain Hinden?”
“Technically, he is in charge now, El-Tee.”
“Can’t I just ask the Major instead?”
“Major Lanin ain’t the boss no more,” Olin reminded her, and dabbed away the last few drops of fluid from the rotten surface of the wall. “Change of command was last night.”
It was clear that he’d killed the line; the neural carrier tissues were already necrotizing. Strange. She’d never known her sergeant to be so careless when conducting repairs on the Ibbie infrastructure. Normally, he was meticulous about cauterization, disinfectants, all those extra little touches biologic cabling required.
“Major Lanin doesn’t leave until the rotator comes on Sevenday. Hinden’s not going to care about this.”
“You gotta learn how to deal with the man.”
“You deal with him,” she snapped back.
His amused smile turned sympathetic. “Let’s get out of here before that thing bleeds on us again.”
Despite its ostensibly prime location, Contingency Base Ewan Humphryes was far from an elite posting. Its existence was owed to the disastrous events of the Sixth Propagation, almost a hundred and fifty years before. One of the plug-and-play, prefab installations common to this region of the Heliosphere, it contained everything a station needed to rapidly deploy combat troops, both within and beyond the ʼroid. Everything had been considered: gravity, filtered water, radiation shielding, ai r-locked gates with atmo sterilization scrubbers, an extensive manhole system, molecular welding around every nut, bolt, and joint, denatured wrapper defense systems, cattery and kennel facilities, dorms, chummer.
It was an effective design. But it had been built for far more people than it currently contained, expected to run on funding far exceeding anything the Inner Shoals Command could currently provide. INSHOALCOM handled that region of space between Mars and Jupiter, a relatively small region of the Heliosphere, yet one of the most densely populated. It was also one of the least fractious. Its Landlord was more hated, but less problematic, than many others. Whenever they could get away with it, whenever Mars’s own Landlord didn’t force the issue, Congress tended to cut Command’s budget to the bone. And Mars’s Landlord hadn’t been public for nearly thirty years.
The Inner Belt wasn’t a region of primary concern and it showed.
Projects started in the fat years after the Seventh Propagation were still undone, raw concrete subfloors exposed, walls left only half-painted, entire buildings held together with nothing more than the ingenuity of the guys in the fabrication shop. Gravity was kept off in all nonessential areas. Tired carpet, worn tile. Even the landscaping had suffered, the trees and grass long dead and nothing to replace them but bare dirt. Everything about Humphryes spoke of age, of dysfunction and emptiness. It was nothing, a tiny spec of Arran utilitarianism in the vast archipelago-city of New Stockholm.
Yet there they were. Stressing the ancient, jury-rigged atmo scrubbers to fill the cubic meterage with breathable air, wasting manpower on routine maintenance inspections, a hedge against the next war that never seemed to come.
Eight years in officer school, void-qualified as a female, and Humphreys was where she’d ended up. Tharsis hated the place.
Olin was pulling away from her, almost to the exit hatch that opened into the base proper, and Tharsis hurried to catch up. He hadn’t bothered to turn on the shaft’s lighting system. The lamp he was carrying was the only light in the darkness. Combined with the weightlessness of mig, which was the sensation of floating that the Arran mind could never quite ignore, it was almost scary.
Falling out of the shaft was awkward as always. As with the difference between the heat of a late summer day and that put out by a carrier’s air cycling systems, the distinction between the natural mig and artificial gravity was uncomfortable. She barely caught herself, swinging up and around onto the bare dirt.
Tharsis lay on her back for a moment, staring up at the wrappered sky, letting her organs shift back. In the past year, she’d come to hate the weight of her planet-born body. The thick wrists, ruddy-pink skin, large breasts, pronounced facial features, bore witness to the lot she’d pulled in Mars’s unregulated genetic lottery. It was an unfair comparison; she was still well within military weight standards, and she’d been told she was pretty. It didn’t matter much. Not home on Mars and certainly not here. The local Ibbie women were painfully gorgeous. Far thinner and paler and more feminine than any Arran had a prayer of being. Custom-designed, purposeful phenotypes mixed up in prettily skinned home wombs.
She did keep her dark hair as long as she could manage, though. Her one little bit of pride in herself as a female, she supposed.
“Why do you even want to get Hinden in gimble-spin about this, Olin?” the lieutenant asked as her sergeant offered her a hand up. “He’s not going to care. This whole base is an anomaly. It’s so far off giddie as it is, it’s a miracle it’s still running.”
“Doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter,” Olin said firmly, and cut a course for squadron HQ.
Captain Hinden was already making himself at home in the major’s old office. The place felt bleaker, despite the half-opened boxes of memorabilia littered across the floor, the stacks of dedicated report tablets on the desk.
Gone was the mini fridge, with its stock of cheap liquor and pressure bottles of cider. Gone was the battered lamb-leather couch. Gone was the laid-back man who preferred impromptu rugby games to briefings on Fiveday afternoons.
Present was the least-liked officer on base.
Captain Mikael Hinden was a thin, gangly sort of man, hair lank and dead even in its buzz cut, the rank tattoos on his neck dark against ashen skin. There was speculation amongst the lieutenants that he suffered from calcium depletion, organ failure, his self-vaunted time in the magnetic nightmare of Europa’s Trilan Watch Base still taking its toll on his body. His might have been a pathetic presence. But there was a kind of power-hungry intention in him that made Tharsis’s skin crawl. It was hard for her to look him in the eye.
Already, Hinden had covered the wall immediately facing the door with all of his various plaques and trophies—commission certificate from the Academy, graduate degree from Deimos Technical University, a signed picture of him with the Speaker of the House he’d gotten while serving on the man’s communications detail, Company Grade Officer of the year plaques. Six of those. How he’d managed that feat, Tharsis had no idea.
“Arrogant little scathead,” Olin muttered under his breath, examining one of the frames, but before Tharsis could correct him on it out of principle, the officer in question was waving them deeper into his lair.
“Yes, Tharsis, you’ve got five minutes before my next meeting,” he said, feet up on his desk. “What’s so damn important?”
“Umm,” she began, the chaos of the office chasing her half-formed arguments from her mind. “Sergeant Olin found something growing out of one of the local wetware lines tangled up in our scat downstairs. Looks cancerous, sir. I’d like to request that we send the sample to the Titan lab downtown.”
Hinden laughed. High and whiny. Tharsis could almost see him formulating his refusal. “Cancer? In the wetware? Since when do we care about the Ibbie’s wetware?”
Olin pulled the jar out of his pocket. Holding it up, not handing it over. “I’d like to make sure we don’t have a cross-talk radiation issue going on.”
Captain Hinden brought his feet back to the floor and glared at the sergeant. Olin’s expression didn’t budge, and Tharsis had to bite back a smile as Hinden’s own scowl wavered.
“We’re off their power grid. Communications, too,” the captain said, neat, as if saying it made it so. “No cross talk possible.”
Tharsis stepped in. “Sir, I get that this isn’t exactly on giddie, but I wouldn’t have brought this up here if the shop wasn’t sure it was important. I—”
Hinden cut her off with a flick of a bony hand. “You need to stop letting your enlisted men walk all over you. Remember when you let him,” and Olin bristled, “talk you into proposing we spend half the base operating budget on Lighthouse repeater repairs?”
Scat. He was still pissed about being overridden on that? Major Lanin had supported it. Command had even coughed up additional funding for it. “Sir,” she began.
“I am not Major Lanin, and I’ve inherited a scat-ton of problems from him without you making up a bunch of new ones. You with me on that, El-Tee?”
Tharsis bit the inside of her cheek. “Yes, sir.”
Moods switching with ionic polarity, Hinden grinned his unhinged grin at her. “Good girl. I knew you’d see it my way. So, you don’t need the lab now?”
“What?”
Olin tapped the back of her elbow. “No sir, we’ll get out of your hair,” he replied with a smile, and all but hauled her from the room.
“Shut the door on your way out!” Hinden called. Tharsis’s last glimpse of him was the man putting his feet back up on the desk, pulling a reading tablet out of a drawer.
