Dark Beyond the Stars Read online

  Dark Beyond The Stars

  STORY SYNOPSES

  Containment (Susan Kaye Quinn)

  The Mining Master of Thebe is all alone… not counting the scavenger drones, foundry nanites, and magtread tractors buzzing across the tiny Jovian moon. So when a spindly tower of rocks mysteriously appears at the pole, it’s enough to vex the Mining Master’s machine-sourced intelligence like dust trapped in a harvester joint. Reporting it could mean reassignment to the Outer Belt… but probing the mystery further threatens to unlock something that might have been better left… contained.

  Nos Morituri Te Salutamus (Annie Bellet)

  The war with the Spidren is going badly; the United Fleet faces utter destruction. To snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, Commander Moira Ilvic and her hand-picked team undertake a desperate mission that might turn the tide of war in their favor. Their odds of success are low. Their odds of survival are worse. But if they don't succeed, humanity itself will be lost.

  Protocol A235 (Theresa Kay)

  Beth is a maintenance tech on the Genesis, the spaceship that will carry her, along with fifty thousand other passengers, to a new home in deep space. But when she comes out of cryosleep to serve her thirty-day solo shift, she finds the ship in disarray, its systems malfunctioning. Worse yet, a previously undisclosed protocol has been put into effect. Protocol A235. And now Beth finds herself facing much more responsibility than she signed up for.

  Winner Takes All (Elle Casey)

  Langlade, captain of the Kinsblade Fleet, has pulled into a station for some repairs to his ship—and to share a little down time with whatever willing female he can find to warm his bunk. But on this stop it’s not just a dockside dolly tempting him to stay, it’s a game of chance. There’s a card game with a very interesting proposition from the girl across the table: his number three ship anted up against the gift of her innocence. And one would be hard-pressed to determine which is the more valuable pot out here in the badlands, otherwise known as Centurion 4, the farthest Dark Settlement Station in the Triangulan Galaxy.

  Carindi (Jennifer Foehner Wells)

  Stranded in a ship orbiting a dying red giant, Ei’Pio is alone and without hope—until she discovers the child, Carindi. Despite being of two different species, the two form a bond and build a life together. But that life will be a short one unless they can find a way to get their ship in motion. The star they orbit is about to go supernova.

  Animal Planet (Patrice Fitzgerald)

  Earth is hot and crowded, and Jane is ready to leave that old rock in the dust, embarking on the grand adventure she’s always dreamed of, zipping across the galaxy to colonize a new planet. But when she arrives, the people are gone, and the Animals have taken over.

  The Event (Autumn Kalquist)

  Zenith has been forced to live one thousand lives. Now she must escape before she loses her own.

  Dragonet (Sara Reine)

  The inhabitants of Drakor III shouldn’t have seen the invasion coming, yet when Allied forces arrive for an assault on the dragons’ homeworld, the planet is teeming with life. After a desperate crash landing that leaves her Carriage destroyed, Aja Skytoucher doesn’t stand a chance—unless she can find a way off the surface.

  Lulu Ad Infinitum (Ann Christy)

  Lulu is a copy of the original Lulu who once lived on Earth. Her home is a self-replicating ship, and her entire purpose is to create new worlds like Earth. But when her ship is all but destroyed by a catastrophe, she’s left with only a dog for company and too much work to do. And getting her mission back on track will require a little bit more than just tanking up some new copies of her crew.

  To Catch an Actor (Blair C. Babylon)

  The only immortals now are the performers—the musicians, dancers, and actors who sell themselves to ride the near-lightspeed century ships to the many suns of the Known Worlds. If Police Detective Cordelia Hernandez can’t get actor Daveen Kelly to confess to a murder a hundred years old, he’ll board another ship and escape justice forever. But he doesn’t realize just how far technology has advanced while he’s been away.

  2092 (Rysa Walker)

  The Elisi Alliance is facing defeat in its struggle against the Lor, when Mila, an Elisi requisitions scout, uncovers evidence of a time-altering technology that could reverse the course of the war. The device is on XE7, a small planet Mila fears will be destroyed if pulled into the conflict. Can she retrieve the technology without sacrificing XE7? As a bonus for readers of The CHRONOS Files, this story answers the question Katherine never would: What really happened in 2092?

  Table of Contents

  Foreword (Julie E. Czerneda)

  Containment (Susan Kaye Quinn)

  Nos Morituri Te Salutamus (Annie Bellet)

  Protocol A235 (Theresa Kay)

  Winner Takes All (Elle Casey)

  Carindi (Jennifer Foehner Wells)

  Animal Planet (Patrice Fitzgerald)

  The Event (Autumn Kalquist)

  Dragonet (Sara Reine)

  Lulu Ad Infinitum (Ann Christy)

  To Catch an Actor (Blair C. Babylon)

  2092 (Rysa Walker)

  Foreword

  by Julie E. Czerneda

  Space.

  Sends shivers down the spine, doesn’t it? We want to be there, not just here, on our admittedly gorgeous planet. We want to see ourselves among the stars. See what else is out there. Boldly go! That passionate shared curiosity inspires not only the science and technology behind current and future space travel, but our imaginations.

  And imaginations are in full glorious flight in this anthology. Welcome to Dark Beyond the Stars, where space meets story. Space opera at its finest, for all these authors ask is that you leap with them into a future where faster-than-light travel exists. From this single launch point come tales both intimate and cosmic, where what it means to be human, out there, is not only explored—it is shaken, stirred, and renewed.

  The result is a treat for readers. As for the authors? Trust me, it’s not easy to write in an unknown, unexplored future. The rules don’t change. No matter how wildly original, every bit of world—and space—building has to mesh together, to fit and convince, or credibility suffers. That takes work as well as craft, and you’ll find both here. Then there’s the whole business of telling a complete story within the pages allowed, when your canvas is so vast.

  Which is, of course, the allure.

  I love space opera. I love stories like these that dare me to think wider and deeper, that offer a future not yet within my grasp, but well within my heart and mind. I gobble up the words, close my eyes, and see the dark.

  My kind of dark. And yours.

  The dark beyond the stars.

  —Julie E. Czerneda, author of This Gulf of Time and Stars

  Since 1997, Canadian author/editor Julie E. Czerneda has shared her love and curiosity about living things through her science fiction, writing about shapechanging semi-immortals, terraformed worlds, salmon researchers, and the perils of power. Her fourteenth novel from DAW Books was her debut fantasy, A Turn of Light, winner of the 2014 Aurora Award for Best English Novel, and now Book One of her Night`s Edge series. Her most recent publications: a special omnibus edition of her acclaimed near-future SF Species Imperative, as well as Book Two of Night`s Edge, A Play of Shadow, a finalist for this year’s Aurora.

  Julie’s presently back in science fiction, writing the finale to her Clan Chronicles series. Book #1 of Reunificat
ion, This Gulf of Time and Stars, will be released by DAW November 2015. For more about her work, visit www.czerneda.com or visit her on Facebook, Twitter, or Goodreads.

  Photo credit: Roger Czerneda Photography

  Containment

  by Susan Kaye Quinn

  Chapter One

  It all started with a pile of rocks that shouldn’t exist.

  By rocks, of course I mean the regolith—the assortment of pebbles, boulders, and grain-sized dust that coats the surface of Thebe, my current Commonwealth Mining assignment. And by shouldn’t exist, I mean it wasn’t there on my last check of the near pole, and there’s no one currently on the tiny moon who would stack up a precarious tower of rocks. Thebe is tidally locked with Jupiter, which means the near pole is the one place where the massive gas giant perpetually looms exactly overhead… but I can see no purpose in a spindly stack of regolith making note of that fact.

  I found the construct while running a crawl-check on the tether. Its ultra-tensile strength material encircles Thebe, wrapping around the moon from near pole to far and anchoring all the equipment involved in breaking, sorting, and melting the regolith. On the first pass, I didn’t stop. After all, tether maintenance is a primary level protocol—anything goes wrong there, and the entire operation flings off into space. Even if I could manage to rescue Thebe’s extensive mining equipment, I’d end up burning precious organic fuels and losing several orbits worth of production time. And that’s how Mining Masters get reassigned to Outer Belt asteroids with minimal harvesting complexity and maximum dust. My machine-sourced sentience level of 90 might not compare to the 1000+ sentience level of my ascender masters, but it would be completely wasted there. And that’s a punishment few Mining Masters return from.

  I wait until I’ve completed the second pass of the crawl-check, then I maneuver off-tether for a closer inspection. The stacked rocks are precisely aligned, each irregular chunk carefully balanced on the one below, creating an unlikely structure that defies Thebe’s slight gravity.

  I leave it intact and return the crawler to base.

  Unlike my four previous assignments in the Outer Belt, Thebe is primarily a tourist destination. Fortunately, my relatively new duties attending to tourists don’t usually conflict with my primary mission of efficiently mining Thebe’s resources—I’ve only had two visitors in my forty-seven orbits.

  I don’t know why my masters named this hundred-kilometer-wide piece of Jovian real estate Thebe—I don’t have access to the ascenders’ common knowledge database on Earth—but its composition is interesting for mining purposes. According to the Commonwealth Mining database, less than four percent of Belt asteroids have Thebe’s combination of carbonaceous material—silicates with sulfide inclusions primarily—and iron-nickel alloy. Essentially, it’s a rock with metal armor. Thebe orbits the planet fast and close, making it a frequent target for wandering asteroids pulled in by Jupiter’s gravitational well—that’s how a metal plate was welded to the near pole and a giant crater, Zethus, was carved out of the far one. Most of the mining operations reside at the crater.

  The moon takes sixteen Earth-hours to orbit Jupiter, providing a full spectrum of viewing opportunities for my masters. The Commonwealth database has given names to the four phases of the planet. Full Glory showcases the fully lit Jovian surface, prime time for visitors; the Setting Quarter gains its name from the sun setting on Thebe, when only the reflected glow of Jupiter’s high albedo clouds lights the cratered landscape. During Full Dark, Thebe traverses the dark side of the planet; the utter lack of light—Jovian or solar—during those four hours means draining the solar-cell batteries for operation, lighting, and navigation. And finally, the Rising Quarter brings the sun and Jupiter’s tourist-attracting sights back into view.

  We’re currently in the Setting Quarter, and I hurry to attend to the nanite depletion problem at the foundry before Full Dark sets in. I am Master of mining operations and the tractor transport is Slave, so I could simply instruct it to move the nanites from the depot to the foundry. But instead, I download to the tractor and attend to it personally. Nanite operation is difficult to resurrect once it reaches minimum viability level—something I learned the hard way on Daedalus, a tiny depleted-comet asteroid that was my last assignment. But tractor operation is fairly mindless… allowing a significant fraction of my cognition to be occupied by the Mystery of the Rocks. I’ve never seen anything like the stacked regolith, and it vexes me like a harvester clogged with dust in places I cannot discern.

  It goes without saying that the construct was not present at my previous crawl-check. Granted, I had stretched the time between crawl-checks to the maximum recommended by safety protocols… I was busy. But not so busy that I wouldn’t have noticed a visit from one of my ascender masters, especially if they had taken one of their bodyforms on an eighty-kilometer trek from basecamp to the near pole to stack up rocks. I would have been alerted, if only so I could ensure my master used the proper radiation-tolerant bodyform.

  So… what could have created the rock formation?

  Random accretion from a micro-impact event I didn’t notice? Unlikely.

  Fine-grain avalanche that boosted the local regolith to nearly escape velocity? Improbable.

  Were the rocks, in fact, left over from a prior ascender visit, and I simply didn’t notice it on previous inspections? Review of my memory stores proves this false.

  I need more information about the construct.

  Once the nanite supply is reinvigorated, I upload from the tractor transport, download to my humanoid form, and hike back to the near pole to perform a second inspection. When I arrive, the precision of their alignment is even more clear.

  There are a total of twenty stones involved. I tentatively remove the uppermost rock, careful to not disturb the entire display. It’s a silicate with tiny inclusions of metal, clearly sourced from the unharvested stones on the surface nearby. The near pole is at the low point of a bowl created by an ancient impact. It provides a natural depot of materials for a construct of this type… whatever this type is.

  I record the exact orientation of the stones, then pull down the rest of them, determined to replicate the feat. It takes much longer to recreate the arrangement. It’s nearly Full Dark before the construct once again points to Jupiter like a compass.

  Is it possible to stack any random set of stones? I gather a dozen more—a mixture of sharp-edged metal fragments and chunkier carbonaceous rocks with smoother-textured surfaces. I analyze the form factor of each, calculate the center of gravity, and orient each such that they balance, one on top of another.

  It’s much more difficult to create a second tower, not knowing the “solution” of the correct alignment ahead of time. I make corrections for Thebe’s eccentricity and the small variations in the local gravitational field. My bodyform’s auto-illuminator activates. Most of Full Dark passes before I can maintain a three-stone tower. Once this is accomplished, however, successive placements are much easier. The key is sensing balance through feedback in my humanoid form’s fingers. This delicate tuning allows for the tiny variations missing from the generalized equations of mass, surface roughness, and Thebe’s contribution to the… wobble. An imprecise term, but somehow a fuller expression of the balance of forces involved. I step back to observe my tower: it is nearly as tall as the original. And yet knowing how the stones were placed provides no clue as to why.

  The construct serves no purpose.

  For some reason, I’m considering creating a third tower. I’m only stopped from gathering more regolith when I receive an alert that a scavenger drone has become entangled in its tether. I trek back to base, upload from my humanoid form, download to a more functional-for-this-purpose repair tractor, and set out toward the steel plain where the hapless drone is caught. The Rising Quarter has begun, and the sun peeks over Jupiter’s rim, bringing the planet’s red spot into view as well.

  As I trundle across the steel surface, my magnetic treads keep me ancho
red. The regolith here has been harvested, leaving a mirrored finish that reflects Jupiter’s palette of red and orange in a constantly moving storm across the kilometer-wide expanse. This is a unique feature to Thebe as well—the moon’s past clearly had a violent shearing event that polished this portion of its metal armor. That knowledge doesn’t capture the uniqueness of the sight, however. My treads claw against the swirl of color underneath them, chewing at an ephemeral thing that doesn’t actually exist… and yet transforms the plain into a vision of the molten lava fields of Io.

  When I reach the periphery, I hone in on the drone’s plaintive call for help. My four articulated arms make quick work of anchoring it while disentangling it from its secondary tether. It’s soon set to work again, random-walking the edge of the plain and widening it one sweep at a time. It’s already gathered most of the regolith near this edge of the crater. It’ll be fine for a while, but I’ll have to return soon to transport it to a new scavenge location.

  As I trundle back across the plain, I return to the Mystery of the Rocks. I consider how large the Sol System is compared to my personal experience knowledge base. Shared experiences are logged in the Commonwealth Mining database, but I’ve searched that, and there is no mention of anomalous stacked rock formations. I consider the possibility that this might not rise to the level of an official entry; registering anomalous phenomena without adequate explanation is not the way to impress the ascender governors of the Commonwealth. I certainly have yet to register the find myself. I check the chatterstream, the unofficial net of the Mining Masters, but there’s nothing but complaints about shipping schedules and poorly constructed harvesters.