Stealing the sun books 1.., p.18
Stealing the Sun: Books 1-3, page 18
Only the people.
CHAPTER 37
Aldrin Station
Local Dates: January 18, 2215
A memorial was held for the Everguard dead, and then the skeleton of the ship was scuttled shortly after.
When the scuttling service had finished, Torrance went to one of Aldrin Station’s many observation panels to stand alone and just watch space as it expanded on its way into darkness. It felt as cold and distant as he did. He was tired. He felt stretched in a hundred different ways. He felt out of sync with his quarters in Aldrin Station, and hadn’t slept well.
And yet, despite the crevasse of loss that was etched into his mind, he thought about Thomas Kitchell lying in his bed, not giving up, already planning what he was going to do when he was all healed up.
As he looked out at the bright glow of the Alpha Centauri trinary, he pulled the data crystal from his pocket. The Eden files were loaded in that matrix. Its translucent tint made the piece look almost liquid against the palm of his hand.
“LC?”
He put the crystal back into his pocket as he turned.
It was Ensign Whalen, who had also attended the service. She was dressed in a purple sarong draped over a black tank and pants.
“Very nice,” Torrance said, motioning the dress. “I haven’t seen that before.”
“I’m decommissioning, sir. Going Earthside. My parents say some friends, well, they’ve got a job for me.”
“You’ll do great.”
“I wanted to thank you, sir. For everything you did.”
“You’re welcome. Let me know if I can ever give you a recommendation.”
“Thank you.”
They stood and watched space together.
“What are you going to do next, sir?” Whalen asked.
Torrance smiled.
“A few weeks ago I was pretty sure I was going to do the same thing you are.”
“And now?”
Kitchell’s words echoed in his mind as Torrance turned to her. The boy was still youthful enough to be brash at times, but he was whip smart.
“To be honest with you,” he said. “I don’t have a clue what’s next for me. But a good friend of mine says that when your time comes you have to take a chance. So now I think I’m going to take a little time to get my act together, and then I’m going to do everything I can to find out what life is really about.”
Whalen gave a toothy smile.
“Sounds like a wise friend.”
“Yes,” Torrance said as he stared out into space. “I’ve learned a lot from him.”
This is the end of
STARFLIGHT
STEALING THE SUN: BOOK 1
If you enjoyed this story, please consider taking a moment to stop by your booksellers’ websites and leaving it a review. Word of mouth is the most powerful force in the universe when it comes to the livelihood of your favorite authors. Even a few lines can help!
Now, on to Book 2
STARBURST!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ron Collins is an Amazon best-selling Dark Fantasy author who writes across the spectrum of speculative fiction.
His fantasy series Saga of the God-Touched Mage reached #1 on Amazon’s bestselling dark fantasy list in the UK and #2 in the US. His short fiction has received a Writers of the Future prize and a CompuServe HOMer Award, and his short story “The White Game” was nominated for the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s 2016 Derringer Award.
He has contributed a hundred or so short stories to Analog, Asimov’s, Fiction River Anthology Series, and several other magazines and anthologies (including several editions of the Fiction River Anthology Series).
He holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering, and has worked to develop avionics systems, electronics, and information technology before chucking it all to write full-time–which he now does from his home in the shadows of the Santa Catalina Mountains.
Ron’s website is: www.typosphere.com
Follow Ron on Twitter: @roncollins13
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As usual, I’ve got more people to thank than I’ll be able to remember. Since, as I noted in the introduction, this work grew out of a story I wrote during a workshop, I’ll start by giving posthumous thanks to AJ Budrys. AJ let me know I was onto something with his gruff “pretty good” critique of the original short story, as well as pointers on a few places it could be made better. And I thank Dr. Schmidt for running that story in Analog back in the day.
I certainly thank Analog readers for giving the short story a runners-up slot in the AnLab Awards voting that year, and to Locus for putting it on their Recommended Reading list. Those two things kept me working, even when I wasn’t sure how to make it work.
Thanks to my fantastic set of early readers and advance publication group. This kind of support is beyond invaluable in worth, yet impossible to repay. Thank you so much.
Thanks to one of my favorite authors, Robert J. Sawyer, for the very generous comment that somehow made it to the front of the book (sheepish grin).
I also thank every beta reader of the novel in all its stages, of which there have been many—but in particular I want to highlight Sharon Bass for great insight and quite rapid turnaround, and Brigid Collins for putting her finger on the heart of the novel version—which made all the difference to me.
Thanks to my old writers group, the Fishers Five—who waded through early versions of the work when it was…umm…well, you know.
As always, thanks to the most important person in my life—Lisa, whose editing is, of course, brilliant and perfect, and every other superlative you can use here, but whose heart is even better.
STARFLIGHT
STEALING THE SUN: BOOK 1
Copyright © 2016 Ron Collins
All rights reserved
Cover Images:
© Aleksandar Mirkovic | Dreamstime.com – Sun Over Planet
© 1971yes | Dreamstime.com - Spacecraft Photo
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Portions of this book appeared in substantially different format in Analog. 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: 1-946176-01-X
ISBN-13: 978-1-946176-01-1
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 Diving Universe
STARBURST
STEALING THE SUN: BOOK 2
RON COLLINS
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 multipart 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 into 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.
