Starshine: Aurora Rising Book One (27 page)

“Yes, ma’am. Kennedy. Ma’am. It’s just the dampener field doesn’t block everything, even at its strongest. It only tamps down the strength of the waves. For reverse-shielding to work, it’ll have to be impermeable.”

“True, but the energy the dampener field blocks is on the order of terajoules. The energy we want to block here is far smaller.”

“Right. Good point.” He ran calculations on the screen in front of them. The blue and teal glyphs coating his arm pulsed brightly to splash color in the air. “It shouldn’t be too difficult to create a strong Faraday cage using a silver-based nonlinear metamat. We could—”

“And we should do that—but not now. For
this
project to be successful it has to be easy to install and inexpensive, relatively speaking, not another costly lattice which has to be painted on.”

He stared at her. “A cheap virtual shield blocking the
entire
spectrum?”

“No, I’m not that crazy. It has to protect against directed signals, not space radiation or anything. I think it doesn’t need to be a Faraday cage at all. It simply has to disrupt specific signals, after all. We disrupt signals all the time.”

His eyes widened and looked to the ceiling for inspiration. “We can certainly design a shield to diffuse or disrupt incoming waves. But it would disrupt the exanet as well, including messaging, and I, um…” he chuckled to himself, then blushed “…don’t think our customers would like that, right?”

She patted him on the shoulder in encouragement. She loved nerdy engineers; they were so
pure
. In point of fact this was the root of the problem she had sought him out to solve. But she had wanted him to work through the variables and come to it on his own, because now he would feel
he
owned it, too.

“You are absolutely correct, which is why I need you to figure out a way to allow exanet signals in without creating a hole big enough for the evil pirates to sneak through. What do you think? Can you do it?”

His brow furrowed and his gaze bounced around the lab. “Well, it will have to be adaptive and semi-intelligent, so we’re looking at some manner of active ware in its core and—”

She laughed and began backing away. “Just let me know when you have something.”

He nodded distractedly, his mind already lost in a magical mathematical world.

In truth she needed ‘something’ rather fast. The Board presentation had gone better than expected, and they had requested practical design plans as soon as possible. But the fastest route to those plans was to get a techie intrigued by the challenge then give them the room to be brilliant.

She stepped out the glass doors of IS Design’s offices onto the broad sidewalk, only to grin in delight. Light, fluffy snowflakes danced about in the air to become a luminous gold in the refracted evening rays.

She pulled her hat snugly over her ears and started off, though not too quickly. Her apartment was eight blocks away in the heart of downtown, and she decided to enjoy the walk.

Erisen had been her home for eleven years now, but having grown up in Houston and attended university in Pasadena, she still found herself a little enamored by snow. It made everything feel…softer. Gentler. Brighter. It was okay to be a child again when in the presence of snow.

Halfway down the next block she lingered at the window of a shoe boutique, futilely as always. She was going to Houston for her parents’ anniversary in two days and required eye-catching attire to wear to the party. In her parents’ vernacular, ‘party’ meant gala extravaganza involving five hundred guests, a private orchestra and delicacies shipped in from half a dozen worlds. And while Erisen’s fashion offerings had matured to a point, retailers tended toward the practical attire required by a cold and snowy climate.

Alas. Maybe she should head to Earth early and swing by Manhattan first. She wouldn’t want her parents’ friends thinking Erisen was some backwater hick world, because at a hundred seventy-two years old, it wasn’t. Much.

Her eVi indicated an incoming message, and a frown tugged at her lips when it opened. Miles, the eco-dev executive, would like to take her to an art exhibit the next evening. She pondered it a moment while crossing the street, and abruptly stuck her tongue out to capture a falling snowflake.

Once the initial thrill of a new romance had worn off, she was finding him increasingly high maintenance. He had turned out to be a horrific skier, which could have been cute if he hadn’t been so damn
whiny
about it. He prattled on about his work incessantly, which could have been interesting if his work didn’t consist mostly of lobbying. And while he was quite handsome, his mouth did this odd downturn thing in response to whatever you said; it made him look churlish.

With an eye roll she sent back a decline and excuse. The excuse was easy, as she legitimately wasn’t available on account of needing to get ready for the trip home. Whether he interpreted it as a more permanent decline…well, she would worry about that on her return.

Another one bites the dust. She laughed to herself, fully aware she had done it
again
, but opened a compose anyway.

Alex,

…or not. He’s entirely too needy, and on the verge of petulant. Oh well, tomorrow is another day.

— Kennedy

She sent the message as a gleam to her left caught her attention. The last moment of the sunset over the mountains tossed glittering beams into the snow-filled sky. It looked—

Message unable to be delivered. Recipient is not connected to exanet infrastructure. Message will be queued until it can be delivered.

What?

The person behind her collided into her, and she barely caught her balance in time to prevent a tumble to the ground. She mumbled a “sorry” and moved out of the way.

Distracted by troubling thoughts, she managed to wind through the busy pedestrian foot traffic to the low ledge marking the barrier between the sidewalk and a small sculpture park. She sank against the ledge.

There were a few instances when one might be cut off from the ubiquitous exanet infrastructure. Spelunking beneath a couple of kilometers of solid heavy metals, for instance, or catching a front-row seat to a supernova explosion. Not much else…other than being dead, of course.

The
Siyane
was equipped with the most robust radiation shielding available, but even it had limits.

Oh Alex, what
are
you doing?

23

SIYANE

M
ETIS
N
EBULA,
U
NCHARTED
P
LANET

T
HE
S
IYANE
SKIMMED FIFTEEN METERS
above the ground, cutting through a harsh wind toward the only reading for kilometers which showed any signs of being artificial.

Alex pointed at the screen taking up the uppermost-right quadrant of the cockpit display. She had given him view rights to the HUD, because it was simply practical to do so. “Keep an eye on this readout while I try not to crash into any sudden mountainous objects. Let me know when it spikes.”

Caleb nodded from his position leaning against the half-wall separating the cockpit and the main cabin. “Gotcha.”

They had spent the previous evening stretching the hull material as far as possible and called it an early, tired night. This morning they had set out in the direction of the region the navigation system identified as the likeliest crash site zone. They’d been flying for more than an hour to reach the edge of the region; for obvious reasons she flew conservatively.

He had baked muffins after they had lifted off, then showed up in the cockpit and casually handed her two.

Muffins. He had utterly confounded her with
muffins
. Banana nut multigrain muffins, to be precise. The man’s arsenal of weaponry was truly impressive.

She found her mind wandering to what other weapons he might have in his—
Jesus, Alex, get your mind out of the gutter. It’s far too early in the morning for those sorts of thoughts
.

“Hey, got a spike.”

She blinked hard and glanced at the display. “Yep.” She arced toward the flashing signal. When they were in range she slowed to a crawl until they could see the wreckage among the blowing sand.

He moaned and sagged against the wall in apparent despondence. “My baby….”

“Look, I
said
I was sorry. There’s nothing else—”

“She was a loaner. I’d had her all of a week.”

“Unh!” She leaned over and punched him in the shoulder. “Very funny.”

“Ow.” He rubbed his shoulder gingerly. “So what’s the plan?”

She studied the hazy outline of the wreckage. “It looks promising. The wind is nasty strong though, so we’ll tether ourselves to the hull. I say we take turns slicing off a piece and bringing it to the airlock. I’d like to end up with at least three square meters, as solid and flat as possible.” She leaned in closer to the viewport. “Given the state of the wreck, it may mean a lot of small pieces.”

“Works for me.”

The ship’s landing gear settled to the ground, and she cut the engine. “Let’s get to it.”

She rejoined him after depositing a sheet in the airlock, her fourth such trip. They had accumulated a nice stack of material by this point, but she didn’t want to come up short and have to do this all over again. The wind made every step a challenge, and the swirling dust reduced visibility to a few meters. “Goddamn this planet sucks.”

He chuckled over the vicinity comm. “You don’t have to tell me—I’m fairly certain I’ve been telling you. But that’s not even what bugs me the most about it.”

“And what
does
bug you the most about it?”

“How is it even here? What is it orbiting? We’re a
long
way from the pulsar, and there’s no indication of another star in the vicinity.”

“Perhaps the answer’s in that unusual radiation. I don’t know. Regardless—”

A powerful gust swept across them from out of nowhere; the crashed ship rocked precipitously, several loose sections tearing off to disappear into the sky.

The punishing wind ripped the piece of hull he had just severed out of his hand. Its jagged edges sliced right through the line tethering her to her ship on its way to oblivion.

The velocity of the wind increased yet more and began to push her relentlessly backward. She reached to grab onto the wreckage, and had succeeded in doing so when a fresh gust whipped in and her tenuous grip slipped on the metal surface.

His voice was low and steady. “Hang on. I’m going to—”

“I
can’t
!” The gust shifted direction, and she felt herself being blown sideways away from the wreck—

—his arms wound around her waist and gripped her against him. She didn’t understand
how
he managed to reach her. Somehow he had.

“It’s
okay
. I’ve got you.”

Her pulse raced, pounding in her ears above the howling wind. A wave of dizziness crashed over her with the rapid flood of adrenaline. She gasped in a breath. “Don’t let go.”

His faceplate dropped forward to rest on hers. “I won’t. I promise.”

Her eyes rose to meet his. She was shocked at how frightened he looked. Those beautiful eyes had darkened to a raging midnight blue surrounding pinpoint pupils. Rigid lines of clenched muscles cut beneath his cheekbones.

But the tone of his voice remained calm and confident. It made her feel safe…as did the firm grasp of his arms around her. It seemed his deceptively lean build hid a great deal of strength. She sucked in several deep breaths until her pulse began to slow. “Thank you.”