The Starborn, Part 1 - Lonely Among the Stars

“Thou dost presume too much, poor needy wretch,
to claim a station in the firmament…
…Back to thy loath’d cell;
And when thou seest the new enlightened sphere,
Study to know but what those worthies were.”
- Thomas Carew

Peter Spruance knew that there were some wars that had to be fought. The history of his own people had provided many lessons: Mithridates and Themistocles at Marathon and Salamis; Leonidas and the Spartans, undone by betrayal at Thermopylae – all fought in the war between the coalition of Greek city-states known as the Delian League against the mighty Persian Empire, whose two generations of emperors, Darius and Xerxes, wanted all of Greece subjugated and would not stand for any alternative. For the Greeks, it was either fight or have themselves and their wives and children enslaved and oppressed with no promise of mercy. Over two thousand years later, the American Indians fought against the invading Europeans who would stop at nothing to take their lands and destroy their heritage in a struggle that was both hopeless and hopeful. And in perhaps the greatest war of them all, the world stood together against the Axis Powers and the madman at its head and fought for seven bitter years to prevent him from enslaving all peoples. Adolf Hitler would not have stopped at Russia or England; nor would Japan in the end have been content with extending its rule to China and the South Pacific. The war was a long tale of both triumph and tears, for before it ended countless millions had been the victims of genocide, rape, torture, and slaughter. Entire cities had been bombed until they were consumed by raging firestorms that sucked the very air out of the streets into the inferno. Young men went away thousands of miles from home to fight and die on foreign soil or to fall in flames from miles high in the sky or to plummet to a cold, dark grave beneath the sea. And yet, though the price of victory was dear, it was but a pittance compared to what would have been if Hitler had gone unchecked. Today was the first of September, 4739, the two thousand five hundredth anniversary of the invasion of Poland. In the intervening years, mankind had grown out of its adolescent self- destructiveness and reached out and touched the stars. The children of Earth scattered like seeds across the tiny points of light that populated the void. Along the way, they had met other peoples. There had been misunderstandings and there had been bloodshed, but it was not of great magnitude and soon enough many of the space-faring races together built a unified civilization. For the peoples who populated it there was happiness and peace for over a thousand years.

Then came the first contact with the Praedon Empire, far beyond the borders of civilization in the galactic center where explorers and colonists ran across Praedon ships. The Praedons wanted to colonize the entire galactic center and let no one else do the same. What were minor, faraway incidents soon escalated into the First Interstellar War, which raged hot and bitter for several years in the core. Eventually, however, the Praedons and their allies were defeated and forced to give up their claims. For five hundred more years there was peace. Unfortunately, during those five hundred years the victors relaxed their vigilance, and when war came again they were not ready. The Second Intergalactic War was not fought in the core, but in the heart of civilized space after the Praedons launched a surprise invasion. For three years the two sides fought, trading space back and forth until at last the Terrans sued for peace. With both sides weary, the Praedons agreed, but the damage was done. Less than fifty years later the Third Interstellar War was fought and this time the Praedons won an overwhelming victory. The defeated were split up and forced to fend for themselves, alone in a galaxy that was not safe anymore. Though there was still political stability, the days of prosperity were at an end. The worst blow fell upon Earth, which had resisted the Praedons most bitterly. Her colonies were stripped from her and the children of Earth born among the stars were forbidden to return home. They stayed where they were, while law and order crumbled and outlaws and pirates began to terrorize the spacelanes. Little traders and businessmen suffered while the larger ones consolidated and began to grow fat at the expense of the people. The Praedons let the pirates be, as this state of affairs was favorable to them. Worse still, the pirates began to raid the colonies, stripping them of what little they had left. People died trying to resist and as a result of the poverty caused by the raids. Some were taken and sold into a slave market that had not existed just two centuries before, but was now back with a vengeance. It had been that way for five hundred years.

Peter had been born in New South Orange Colony, light-years away from Earth on the fringes of the galaxy where the stars were thin and far between. He was one of the Starborn, those whose parents and grandparents and ancestors had been born away from Earth for countless generations, living out a lonely and hard existence amid the bright lights and the dark night. Around his neck on a fine chain of thin gold and silver was a jewel of fused sapphire, emerald, and topaz, round and translucent with hundreds of glittering faces and studded with small impurities of white quartz, embedded off-center in a tetrahedron of black glass studded with more quartz; the Earth lonely in the void with the golden light of the sun and the silver light of the moon on the chain. It was a reminder to the Starborn of the home which they longed for and the far reaches of space which caused them so many tears and yet drew them like a magnet draws iron filings.

Peter was in the smoky bar of a space station orbiting the sixth planet of a star system inside the “free space” of small, independent governments set up by the Praedon Empire after the Third War, spanning about five thousand light-years towards the Galactic Center and sharing a border with the Principality of Earth and a larger one with the Free Republic of Alandi, which had once been an ally of Earth before the forced breakup after the Third War. The planet was a gas giant with large amounts of helium and argon in its atmosphere, which was mined and the gases sold for use as inert gases in industry. The majority of the population was made up of a race of squat, four-legged creatures with hard exoskeletons and upright torsos holding two arms, calling themselves the Umbri and native to the seventh planet which had about 1.3 times the gravity of Earth. The station temperature stood at about 38 degrees centigrade with low humidity and an atmosphere that was composed of slightly higher concentrations of carbon dioxide and nitrogen than humans were used to. The station itself consisted of a roughly cylindrical main part about one thousand feet long that bulged in the middle to about four hundred feet in diameter and sent out three long docking arms along the equator, with a circular concourse that took up two of the station’s decks above the docking arms. The bar was on the upper deck of the concourse taking up about one-third of circle of businesses in the central core of the station. It was rather dingy, with a few wide doors opening out onto the upper deck of the concourse. There were booths along the side walls, hexagonal tables taking up most of the floor space, and the bar on the inside wall facing the doors. Peter made a conscious thought and two invisible wires that adhered to the skin just above his eyelids turned on, projecting an augmented reality display in front of his eyes. He scanned the room, looking for a telltale signal on his display, found it, and headed over quietly to a two-person table near a side wall about halfway between the bar and the door. On one side of the table sat a young man dressed in tan canvas pants, a nondescript t-shirt, and a zippered grey corduroy jacket lined with flannel. He had medium-length brown hair and fairly common though handsome features.

“Hey, Peter, sit down,” the man said. “It’s good to see you.”

“Likewise,” answered Peter, “and happy birthday, Patrick.”

Patrick Blakeslee smiled and ran a hand through his hair. “I haven’t seen you since maybe six months after we left home. That was a year and a half ago. I was seventeen then.”

“You left five weeks before I did; then I turned seventeen too and I’m off to roam. Been home much?"

“I wish I had more chances to get back, but I hire myself out as an escort and most freighter runs take me all over. I’ve only been home twice in the past two years. You still running freight?”

“Yeah; I have a few nice runs that aren’t too dangerous that take me home eventually. My end cargo is always something we need – foodstuffs, raw materials, stuff like that. A side benefit is that it helps keep me in touch with Jenny. I write her pretty often, too.”

“Not enough because I always have to go back out after a day or two. But what else can we do? Either we risk life and limb out here getting what we need and earning money, or we all die. The colony’s barely hanging on as it is – If only those pirates wouldn’t keep coming back like old bad pennies two or three times a year and taking everything we have.” They both nodded. At this point a waitress came over and asked them for orders.

“You got any coffee?” Patrick asked.

“Imperial Select,” the waitress answered. Patrick made a face, then nodded. “Two, please.” The waitress left and after a minute returned with two steaming cups of black liquid, along with the thin green milky extract of a native plant and some low-grade granulated sugar. Peter grimaced, took some of the extract and sugar, dumped it into his cup, and stirred it all together with a cheap plastic stirrer. Patrick followed suit and sipped gingerly at the mixture. “Doesn’t exactly measure up to Jenny’s black coffee, does it?”

“Or your mother’s espresso, when we could get it.” They both laughed, then Patrick leaned in. “I have something that might be a little more interesting than your next trade run.”

“What is it?” Peter asked.

“I came across someone recently who has few scruples and has to get rid of some… contraband.” Patrick’s voice was almost at a whisper now. “Machine tools, Pete, and they’re dirt cheap. If we have them, we have a machine shop.” He didn’t have to go on. A machine shop meant that the colony could manufacture vital equipment without having to scrounge for it. They could even manufacture weapons and have a chance at fighting off pirate raids.

Peter was catching on. “You need me to haul them.”

“I can escort you the entire way. We go to a planet about six hundred- fity light-years away, pick it up, make as quick as we can for home. I’ve already found a merchant convoy headed for our destination that leaves in three hours – 901-CX. I’ve already been hired on as an escort, so you join the convoy. I’ll watch your back.”

“I don’t like the look of those guys – your eight o’clock.”

“They’ll try to pick off one of us if they see us split up for two ships. We’ll have to confront them beforehand.” The two of them paid their tab and left the bar together, going to a computer terminal on the concourse where Peter accessed the station’s system and signed on to convoy 901-CX, his escort fee paid automatically from his personal bank account. Then, after waiting for an hour and a half watching ship traffic out the concourse windows, the two entered a lift and left the concourse, headed for a level below where the docking arms met the core of the station. The two were docked on different arms, which were about a hundred fifty yards apart down the corridor. This was too far for the two of them to stay together, especially considering that both of their ships were docked a ways down each arm.

“We’re being shadowed,” Patrick whispered. They could both hear footsteps behind them, four feet on each Umbri going at a slow trot. They reached the entrance to Patrick’s arm with Peter’s as the next one and stopped. They turned to face their shadows.

“Good day,” said Patrick, knowing that the translator chips worn by each Umbri in the bowl-like ear recesses on the sides of their heads would automatically translate his words. “May I help you?”

The lead Umbrian spoke. “There is a fee due from all traders who dock at this station to an… unofficial organization. You two haven’t paid up.”

Pirates. Discriminating pirates at that, but they usually were. “Bull,” said Peter. “I never saw any Umbri traders have to pay any fee.”

“That doesn’t matter human,” the Umbri sneered. “When your kind is gone we’ll all breathe air that is a little cleaner.” He drew from the loose tunic that covered his torso a gleaming black metal pistol, the kind that shot an electrified wire patch at low velocity in order to inflict a stun upon its target with as much pain as possible. Instantly Peter and Patrick ducked around the corner into the docking corridor and drew their sidearms. Peter pulled out a heavy, ancient pistol painted in a dull olive drab. He thumbed the safety off and pulled back the slide with a loud metallic click and boldly stepped around the corner with the pistol leveled.

“This,” he said with a voice as dangerous as a knife-edge, “is a Browning M1911 .45 automatic, used in a war where firefights raged that would make this one look like a popgun duel. It doesn’t kill cleanly like a railgun slug. Oh, no, this uses smokeless powder to fire a very large bullet. The velocity’s lower than more modern weapons, but that doesn’t make it any less lethal. Now I suggest that you gentlemen holster your weapons right now before I have to use this thing.”

“He’s got a mouth! Get him, this will be more fun than I thought!” And the Umbri gang made their first mistake by running towards Peter first and shooting later. Patrick stepped into the corridor beside Peter with an electromagnetic railgun pistol in hand as Peter lined up the post sight and squeezed the trigger. The metal walls of the corridor rang from the report as a flash shot from the muzzle and pungent white smoke drifted around the gun. A spent brass cartridge flew from the ejector and Peter felt the gun jump in his hands. A terrible scream went up as the leader of the gang clutched at a wound in his lower chest which was spurting indigo blood. He tumbled over and the rest of the gang, stunned by the sight and sound and smell of the gun going off and seeing one of their number fall, stood shocked for a second or two. Then rage took over and they charged, firing their weapons wildly. Patrick and Peter began firing in unison and wounded all three of them before they had the presence of mind to take cover in side corridors. At this the pair split up and ran, Patrick racing down the docking arm and Peter going all-out for the next one.

Peter heard shouting and soon shots began ringing out towards him. In less than twenty seconds he had reached his docking corridor and snuck a look back to find two members of the gang coming after him, firing as they came – and even though they were both wounded four feet were faster than two. He had to buy time. He bent his body around the corner and emptied his magazine. He got two hits on one and he dropped while the other ducked into another side corridor. Peter knew that had been his last chance to return fire, so he didn’t bother taking time to change the magazine. He sprinted down the corridor freely for about ten seconds, then heard shots. After two hundred yards down the corridor under fire he arrived at his docking port completely winded. He entered the unlocking code he had been issued upon arriving and slammed his palm against the DNA lock on the heavy airlock door, which slowly slid open. As soon as there was room he ducked inside and smashed the closing button on the wall panel, watching the door seal shut. He was safe – for now.

On the other side of the small airlock was the port airlock door of his own ship, the Bastogne. Peter quickly opened the small panel on the hull that protected the door controls, keyed in his personal access code, and pressed his palm to the panel. The door slid open and he stumbled into the airlock of his ship. He closed the outer door once inside, opened the inner door, and entered the cargo hold of his ship with the airlock closing behind him. He opened a bulkhead door along the line of the keel and walked up a gangway and along a short corridor into the cockpit. Collapsing wearily into the command chair on the port side, Peter keyed his ship’s short-range radio and found the small encoded sub-frequency he and Patrick used when they were together. “Patrick, come in. You all right?”

“Whew. Yeah, I’m all right. You?”

“I’m fine. Let’s get out of here.”

“Let’s. I’m guessing that our friends out there were a gang from the local band of outlaws. They’re sure to have friends, and now they know where we’re docked at.”

“Roger.” Out the forward viewport of his ship Peter could see a few ships docked in front of him and the core of the station with lights in the windows against a beautiful backdrop of the gas giant and the starry expanse of space. He punched a command into the pilot’s computer terminal for the reactor startup sequence. A schematic of the Bastogne appeared on a screen flipping out from the control panel while status displays across the main control panel, sides, and overheads began to show the progress of power-up. The Bastogne took about two and a half minutes to bring up to full sublight readiness from a cold start; that is, with the ship connected to external power and the fusion and antimatter reactors completely shut down.

leftThe Bastogne was a small Hesperus-class light freighter, a design nearly a millennium old but a relatively new ship of thirty-one years, designed at first to haul small cargoes short to medium distances. After the Second War the design was modified to be armed as the spacelanes became more and more dangerous. The Bastogne herself was eighty-six feet long with a beam of forty-four feet and a draft of fifteen feet, not in the traditional nautical sense of drawing water but in a sense of how large the ship was along the y-axis, how “tall” it was. Physically, the ship looked somewhat like a box, with a large cargo hold aft tapering a little to a wide, blunt bow where a large, horizontal viewport denoted the cockpit. The ship consisted of two decks, with the forward living area split up into two decks and the cargo bay spanning the vertical space of both. The upper deck consisted of the cockpit and two cabins on the port and starboard sides. On the lower deck was a small kitchen/living area and another two cabins. Ships like this would have had a crew of four in their heyday, when they not only made cargo runs but also did surveying and other odd jobs. However, it was quite easy for one person to handle the ship.

Like all other ships, the Bastogne drew its power from two types of reactors, fusion and antimatter. The fusion reactor generated heat by fusing two molecules of the isotope of hydrogen known as deuterium, which has one proton and one neutron in the nucleus, into a single molecule of helium. The second type generated heat by bringing deuterium or regular atomic hydrogen into contact with its antimatter counterpart, at which point the two molecules would annihilate and be converted into various forms of energy. The fusion reactor was less powerful and as such was used for auxiliary power, while the antimatter reactor provided ships with their principal source of power. The Bastogne had three fusion reactors, two aft feeding directly into the paired sublight engines and a third backup reactor forward, and one antimatter reactor at the forward end of the cargo bay. Each reactor was jacketed by a complex but efficient heat exchange system which transferred the heat to an outside loop of deuterium. This heated up enough to become the hot ionized gas known as plasma. At the temperatures the plasma is at, any matter the gas comes into contact with will be instantly vaporized. Luckily, at these temperatures electrons are stripped from the atoms leaving only positively charged nuclei, which allows the plasma to be moved and contained by electromagnets. The plasma flows through ducts to the systems of the ship. However, most systems require electrical power and not hot plasma to operate. To this end, the plasma runs through special sections of ducting where they are directed around a flywheel, using the interaction of magnetic fields to push a heavy disk around which is coiled electrical wire to induce a current. The system also had the advantage of confining the volatile plasma to the systems that needed it directly, reducing the chance of accidents and major explosions in combat.

As the ship’s external sensors came online Peter began to scan for active ships, the computer going through each ship’s transponder code and checking through Peter’s personal database to determine whether the ship was friend or foe. He noticed a freighter and two small fighters putting out a lot of energy and accelerating toward him from the docking arm behind. He also saw Patrick in his tiny Bunker Hill-class gunboat, the Monitor, coming to join him, as well as a few ships of convoy 901-CX gathering about twenty kilometers off the outside of the circumference made by the station’s docking arms.

“Looks like we’ve got company,” said Peter excitedly. “Convoy 901-CX, I’m making a run for formation. Three jerries inbound, estimate your weapons range in about forty seconds.” At this point they were well inside his weapons range, but he was still powering up and so were they. Peter requested permission to depart, switching over to the traffic control channel: “S.S. Bastogne requesting permission to depart.”

“Permission granted, Bastogne,” the controller told him. “You may undock at your discretion.” Peter touched the control that released the docking clamps and used his thrusters, small ducts through which drive plasma was vented, to maneuver away from his berth. Then he brought his two sublight engines smoothly up, angling the Bastogne towards the convoy while he consulted the holographic tactical display situated between the commander’s and pilot’s seats. A wide circle around the edges ticked off clock hour marks and degrees, and another ran vertically. The hologram showed an image of the station, with green points representing the convoy and Patrick and red points representing the three pirates. The station core was now at about Peter’s eight o’clock, the convoy at twelve, Patrick at four o’clock, and the pirates on the other side of the station at five, uncomfortably close but moving slowly as they accelerated. The convoy was moving away from the station towards their jump point, Peter was running to catch them, the pirates were running to catch Peter, and the escorts and Patrick were running to intercept the pirates; range and bearing information lit up the hologram.

The Bastogne was armed with two twin-mounted Mk. II plasma turrets mounted dorsally and ventrally at the front of the cargo bay along with a box launcher of twenty unguided light chemical rockets in the bow and two launchers firing small nuclear missiles, one forward, one aft, each launcher drawing from four missiles. She was rather well armed for a freighter, and Peter was proud of that. He targeted the lead pirate and the turrets swung around aft. The ventral turret opened fire with a vengeance, sending twin pulses of white fire burning hot against the pirate’s shields. He diverted power from his own forward shields to distribute it 30% forward, 70% aft. The pirate fighter in the lead returned fire with its own plasma cannons, and Peter heard the whine of the shield generators increase as his aft shields absorbed the blow.

The first directed energy weapons in space had been lasers, traveling unseen at faster-than-light speeds over long distances. But there had been limits to how powerful lasers could be, and even though new short-pulse lasers provided considerably greater power than that of the earliest generation, soon countermeasures were developed including an electromagnetic sheath around ships that diffracted the laser beam to impotence along a wide area of hull. The next step up was to take hot drive plasma, gather it in a dense, compact package, and shoot it at high velocity using an electromagnetic accelerator. Though far slower than lasers and with a far shorter range as the plasma cooled quickly in the chill of vacuum, it worked because the plasma could not be dissipated as easily and had to be deflected brute force alone. One could extend the sheath outward, giving the plasma more time to dissipate, but this took up massive amounts of power and could not be maintained for any length of time. The downsides were not only the loss in speed and range, but the fact that the cannons needed high-energy plasma piped directly to them. A direct hit on such a high-volume plasma main could cause it to burst and create a catastrophic explosion.

Peter continued to trade shots with the pirates, his plasma turret firing about once per second as it gathered up plasma in the firing chamber and cooled after each shot. The lead fighter made the mistake of not staying behind him but cruising past and above into his dorsal firing arc, allowing him to bring his second turret into play while concentrating on another ship with his ventral turret. Meanwhile, Patrick had closed the gap and was in the fray. His gunboat was heavily armed with a pair of Mk. II fixed cannons firing forward and two smaller, less powerful Mk. I turrets mounted dorsally and ventrally, as well as two pods of light rockets and a single missile launcher. When one took into account that his sixty-foot gunboat accelerated and maneuvered faster than most ships and had quite a bit of armor on it for a ship of its size, it was clear that the fight was already over against two light pirate fighters mounting two Mk. Is and a light rocket pod apiece, while the freighter was considerably less well-armed than Peter. As Patrick’s turrets tracked the fighters, He bore down on the freighter from the starboard quarter and a little below, sweeping his gunboat into a gentle turn to force one of the freighter’s turrets to track him. He opened fire at maximum range and slowed down, pouring fire into the shields. The freighter’s shields were not very strong and as the Monitor kept firing away they buckled and cannon fire got through, searing into the hull and transforming it into a glowing red. The pirate fighters, realizing that the freighter was in trouble, peeled off their attacks on Peter and started back towards their brethren in accelerating turns. Meanwhile, another convoy escort had joined the fray and was already shooting at the fighters with light turrets as Patrick wheeled and attacked the freighter again from its still-healthy starboard quarter. The shields held, but barely. Meanwhile, a pirate fighter managed to make a slashing attack across the Monitor’s rear, pouring in fire and battering at the shields.

“Whoa,” shouted Patrick. “Equalizing shield power.” Patrick shunted power from his other shield generators in order to bolster the weakened area. He turned and got in close behind the stern of the freighter, which was still heading for the convoy, and matched speed, depending on Peter and the other escorts to keep the two fighters off his back. He began plugging away at the ship’s nearly broken aft shields and within seconds had burned through. With the outer shields gone, he concentrated on the engines, adding a few rockets to the mix. The unprotected sublight engines exploded suddenly, turning the aft end of the freighter into a mass of white-hot plasma and spinning debris. The Monitor wrenched away and avoided most of the explosion, while the now badly damaged freighter drifted without power, spinning helplessly on a haphazard course. Peter heard a distress signal being broadcast over the radio.

“Scratch one!” shouted Patrick with elation. Peter watched as he got in behind one of the fighters and nailed it with a direct hit from both cannons and the dorsal turret. The aft shields of the fighter went down and the remains of the plasma caught it dead center; not enough to destroy it, but enough to completely disable the ship as plasma vented from a great rent in its hull and the glow of its engines faded. Patrick swooped away, for by now Peter had joined the convoy and was in formation.

“Convoy 901-CX, let’s get out of here.” The other freighter captains and the escorts agreed. They began accelerating towards their jump point just beyond the effective gravity well of the gas giant. Peter’s antimatter reactor was now spooled up to full output, running all systems with ease. The convoy was in a tight box formation with four freighters, including Peter’s, forming the corners and two inside, with the escorts - two fighters, two gunboats – spaced in between them. As they reached the jump point the convoy leader, a freighter captain in the middle of the box, called out over the radio, “All ships, check in for jump readiness.” A chorus of voices answered him as every ship in the convoy prepared to jump.

“Initiate jump on my mark: three… two… one… mark!” Peter pressed the EXECUTE button on his control panel and he was catapulted into the empty space between the stars.