Starfire & Snowball Read online

  Starfire & Snowball

  Content copyright © Alastair Mayer. All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States of America

  First Publishing Date September, 2010

  Second edition, January 2011

  Table of Contents

  Author's Intro to ... Into the Fire

  Author's Intro to ... Snowball

  Author's Intro to ... The Gremlin Gambit

  Author's Intro to ... Renee

  Author's Intro to ... Light Conversation (new to 2nd edition)

  Author's Introduction to “Into the Fire”

  A “masterpiece” originally referred to the work—or piece—that a skilled apprentice continued to labor over until finally it demonstrated his mastery of the art. In that respect, this story is very much my masterpiece, although like those early artists I continue (I hope!) to improve with time.

  The core of this story has remained constant, but key incidents and the overall framing have changed as I learned my craft. I remember spending a full day dissecting Larry Niven's award-winning story “Neutron Star” to gain insight into its narrative structure, and applying the lessons learned. That version earned my first personalized rejection letter, from Toni Weisskopf at Baen Books, then Managing Editor of New Destinies. She liked the story, but they were overstocked.

  More recently, a revised version of “Into the Fire” won Semi-Finalist in the renowned Writers of the Future Contest. The story you hold in your hands has been tweaked just enough to fix the nitpick that kept it from making Finalist.

  The technical problem that our starship pilot, Jason Curtis, has to overcome had its genesis in a non-fiction article I originally wrote for (but never submitted to) The Space Gamer, a magazine devoted to space and sci-fi role playing games. Sometimes it pays to never throw anything away.

  Although I didn't know it at the time, this is the first written of my T-Space series. Chronologically this and the other Jason Curtis stories take place about halfway between the first Alpha Centauri expedition and the events of The Chara Talisman. (See my website for more about T-Space and my other writing.) This story chronicles how Jason came to buy the Starfire and how it was nearly the last thing he ever did. Sometimes the only way out of the frying pan is . . . .

  INTO THE FIRE

  (A Jason Curtis Adventure)

  by Alastair Mayer

  The star was the wrong color. I’d expected bright, almost blinding white when I switched on the forward window, but the star off my bow was dull, with a reddish tinge. How had that happened?

  I checked the instruments; no, not red shift. Odd. Procyon should be bright yellow white, not red. I hailed Procyon Station.

  Nothing. I could be as much as a light-hour out, so I didn’t expect an immediate reply, but I should have picked up something from one of the beacons. I heard no radio chatter at all on the Procyon frequencies, just a ghostly whisper of static.

  There was nobody out there. There were two possibilities: one, some disaster had hit Procyon, leaving it red and wiping out everyone in the system; or two, this was the wrong system, and something on the ship had gone wrong.

  The odds favored the latter. But what? If I couldn’t figure it out and fix it, I was going to die a lonely death out here, wherever here was. This trip had seemed like such a good idea at the time.

  * * *

  The day I got fired I went out to my flying club—aircraft, not spaceships—to fly a few circuits and think about something else. I had one of the club’s old rocket-racers—the XCOR, almost an antique—at the fueling pad and was intent on the liquid oxygen transfer procedure. Condensation flowed around me like cold smoke, making miniature fog banks on the concrete. I could feel the chill through my gloves.

  “Well, if it isn’t Jason Curtis!” came a voice from behind me. “Hey, Jason, got a light?”

  “Menzies, that joke wasn’t funny the first dozen times you used it.” Greg was an old buddy from the club, who’d gone on to become a commercial pilot. “Where’ve you been keeping yourself?”

  “Off-planet.” He said it so casually I figured he meant the Moon or Mars. “So why are you out here in the middle of the day, shouldn’t you be working?”

  I took a moment to close valves and disconnect the LOX coupling before answering. “I just got fired.”

  “Say again? I thought you owned the company.”

  “Part owner. Was. We were bought out a couple of months ago.” I stowed and secured the hoses.

  “But you said fired?”

  “Forced into early retirement. Yeah, look, this isn’t the best place to talk.” I had to raise my voice at the end, the roar of a plane on the nearby runway drowned me out, emphasizing my point. “I’ve got the racer ready to go for a few circuits, will you be around?”

  “Affirmative, I’ll see you in the clubhouse.”

  Flying the old rocket racer felt good. Technically it’s a kind of powered glider; you use the rocket to take off and build speed, then cut the engine and glide to conserve fuel, firing the rocket again when you need a boost. Racing strategy is to find the right trade-off between using the rocket to maintain a high speed, and not using it so much that you run dry and waste time refueling.

  I wasn’t racing today, and I loved the kick in the back that full throttle gave me. It was tough keeping my airspeed below redline, I wanted to just go and keep going. Ten short minutes later I dead-sticked it back in for a landing and just managed to extend the rollout to the hangar.

  Back in the clubhouse I found Greg in the small dining area eating lunch. I joined him and ordered a cola, lots of ice.

  “So, Jason,” Greg said around a mouthful of fries, “what’s this about being fired from your own company?”

  “Officially I’ve ‘departed to pursue other interests’. NanoDesign’s new owners didn’t like my management style.”

  “You have a management style? I thought you were an engineer.”

  “Funny.” I took a sip of my cola. “Yeah, they originally wanted me to stay on for my expertise, but their approach is to over-analyze before starting anything. I like to just give things a quick pass and then dive in.”

  Greg chuckled. “Quick pass? Like the time you came back with leaves in your landing gear from a ‘quick pass’ over some trees?”

  “Hey, I pulled up in time, didn’t I?” I swiped some fries from Greg’s plate; too greasy, as usual. The aging autochef was either long past due for an overhaul, or the tech liked them that way. “Anyway, a quick pass is the way to succeed in a startup market. The thing is, our new owners are over-cautious; I’d probably have left on my own if we weren’t bound by contract.”

  “But you’re out now?”

  “Yeah, they even waived the penalty clause and let me keep my share of the buyout money.”

  “Sounds like a great deal, but you don’t look happy about it. Why not?”

  “I had to sign a non-compete. I can’t work in nanotech for the next five years, and by then I’ll be obsolete.”

  “Ouch.” Greg hesitated, as if debating his next words. “So, what did Sharla say?”

  “Nothing, we split up a couple of months ago. And no, I’m not looking.” Greg had always been trying to fix me up with someone. Come to think of it, he’d introduced me to Sharla.

  “Oh, sorry.”

  “Never mind.”

  I broke the awkward silence that followed with a new subject. “You know, I was thinking up there in the racer, I need to get away for a while. Maybe I’ll buy a sailboat and see the world.”

  “Sailboat?”

  “Yeah, I used to sail. I kind of like the idea of just heading off, setting my own course. It’s not like I have anyone to answer to now.” I tossed back the rest
of my drink.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” said Greg. “Buy a starship and see the galaxy.”

  I almost choked on the ice cubes.

  “What!” If I hadn’t finished my drink, I’d have spewed it over Greg. “Starship?” Then I remembered his remark about having been off-planet.

  “Sure. Well, not the galaxy, obviously, but the nearby stars. Lots of interesting things to see out there, all those terraformed planets. I’m headed out to Procyon—”

  “Yeah, yeah.” I remembered some of the buzz about terraformed planets, how the first expeditions had found many more Earth-like planets than astronomers had predicted, but I’d been a kid in school and hadn’t paid much attention. I’d been more interested in the nano scale. “But me, buy a starship?”

  “Just think of it as a sailboat with a warp drive.”

  “Come on, starships are huge things. I’ve seen pictures.”

  Greg shook his head. “Jason, what kind of planes do we have at the club here? Two-seaters, four-seaters, a couple of single-seaters like that racer you were just up in. What do most people think of when they think of airplanes? Five-hundred seat airliners.”

  “Oh.”

  “Exactly. The Alcubierre-Broek equations put an upper limit on how big a warp bubble can be, and the power goes up exponentially with size. Small ships are more efficient. Most of the charters I fly are in the ‘sleeps eight’ range.”

  “You fly starship charters? You said you’d been off-planet.”

  “Yes, shuttling research and exploration teams, some tourist flights. But,” Greg returned to his point, “you’re a good pilot, if you can handle that rocket racer you can handle a starship. A small one would be in your price range.”

  “Really?” I doubted that. “How much?”

  Greg told me.

  “What? That’s only a third of what my house cost. How come there aren’t more private ships around?”

  “Jason, you have expensive tastes. Anyhow, you can get a mortgage on a house. Buying a starship is strictly a cash proposition.”

  Of course. Life would be tough for a repo man in the starship business.

  * * *

  The autopilot was still locked on to the star in front of me, just as I’d lined it up in the guidescope nine days ago. This had to be Procyon, even if it was the wrong color. You can’t turn a warp bubble. So what had happened?

  Whoever said “getting there is half the fun” never went anywhere in a warp bubble. I’d spent the first half-hour staring out at the black lack of scenery, broken only by the occasional sparkle of a dust grain ripping itself apart in the tide at the warp boundary. Finally I admitted that travel between stars really was as unspectacular as I’d heard, and turned off the window. The rest of the trip, I’d read and listened to music; I have a large collection of classical rock from last century. Nothing had happened.

  It would by nice to talk the problem through with someone, but this was a solo trip. Too bad there’s no such thing as faster-than-light radio. A thought struck me and I cued up Klaatu’s “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft”—music sometimes helps me think—and pondered the situation.

  I was more annoyed than worried at that point. “When all else fails,” I muttered, “read the frigging manual.” I loaded Dumarest’s Principles of Interstellar Navigation into the reader, scrolled through the first few pages, and wished I’d picked up something more interactive instead. I kept glancing up at the window.

  The silent taunting from my red nemesis made it hard to concentrate. I muttered an expletive, turned up the interior lighting and switched off the window. I looked around the cabin with a critical eye. It was perhaps a bit more lavish than standard but still snug. Bed, eating area, head, everything arranged to make optimum use of space, adaptable to gravity or freefall, a bit like an RV or, yes, a sailboat. With just me aboard I could probably stretch the life support to six months, but it wouldn’t be fun. I told the galley to fix me a coffee and floated back to get it.

  * * *

  The more I had thought about it, the more I liked the idea. There wasn’t anything tying me down. No wife or girlfriend. No job, obviously. If I sold the house I could easily afford a starship with plenty left over, or so I thought.

  Greg Menzies had given me a couple of suggestions on what to look for, and the ship I settled on was a mid-size Mitsubishi Sapphire. I liked the lines, a streamlined lifting body capable of a gliding reentry from space. In the simulator, she handled in atmosphere like some planes I’d flown.

  Greg had been right, the basic price was less than an average house might cost. Then the broker started getting into the details.

  “So, will this be just the basic hull and drive package or will you be wanting the optional life-support and avionics?” he’d asked.

  “Excuse me?” I couldn’t have heard him right. “Life support is an optional extra?”

  “Well, Mr. Curtis, some clients want customized installation. Exploration outfits in particular often have specialized requirements—traumapods, decontaminating airlock, things like that—and want to make separate arrangements for that. Of course we’re quite prepared to arrange any customization you’d like, or we have several standard packages to choose from.”

  It went on like that. By the time I’d included the necessary “options” and fitted her out with extra computer gear, comfortable living area, auto-bar, and the custom music system, the price had more than doubled.

  The fuel tanks held enough hydrogen to give me a four-parsec—about thirteen light-years—range, or an enormous delta-vee if I used the fusion unit to power thrusters instead of the warp. A warp bubble uses a lot of power. One exploration model option is gear to do raw fuel processing, avoiding dependence on commercial hydrogen supplies. I threw that in too.

  I named her Starfire.

  “Jason, how could you not call it Argo?” Greg said when I told him.

  “I’d rather not tempt fate.” I’ve read about my namesake.

  With my aircraft pilot’s licenses, I only had to pass a test on space traffic regs to get a “no passengers” captain’s ticket. I didn’t want passengers anyway. I spent a couple of weeks playing tourist in the Solar System, getting used to the ship’s handling on thrusters and in atmosphere. At Mars I decided it was time to try the warp drive.

  Space Traffic Control frowns on anyone using warp in-system for more than microseconds at a time, and gravity wells make it difficult anyway. Where to go for the first real flight? Sawyer’s World, around Alpha Centauri, was already getting more civilized than I wanted; the company that had bought out Nano even had an office there. Greg had said something about Procyon. There was small settlement around Procyon A, that’d be a good first trip for Starfire. Maybe I’d run into Greg again.

  I got clearance from STC and undocked from the Mars Beanstalk, then moved out to a departure orbit and pointed the ship toward Procyon. I put the guidescope’s view on my console and turned on the image amplification to look for asteroids or comets. Even though my path took me out of the plane of the solar system, and even though the odds were beyond minuscule, it would be stupid to run into a rock that I could have seen by looking. There was nothing. I lined up the targeting crosshair on the bright spot that would be Procyon and let the autopilot bring the ship into exact alignment. When the drive engaged, it would create a pointed bubble—a reverse teardrop—of tortured space that would propel itself, and anything inside, through normal space at about 500 times lightspeed. I pushed the button.

  And somehow got myself utterly lost.

  * * *

  As I read through Principles it dawned on me what I’d done wrong. Or rather, what I hadn’t done right. Procyon is one of the brightest stars in that section of sky, seen from the solar system, and I’d lined my guidescope up with the brightest spot on my screen. But I’d set the guidescope to amplify light, and if Procyon had been just out of frame . . . . What I hadn’t done was confirm that the spectrum of my target matched Procyon’
s.

  Well, I knew where I wasn’t. The problem now was to figure out where I was.

  I had a way to do that. I brought up the astronomical database and ran a query to find all the stars whose spectral type was similar to that of the star out the window. The list began scrolling off the screen. I canceled that, cursed the computer for a stupid machine and added “within five degrees of Procyon as seen from Sol”. That scrolled off too, and I jammed down on “CANCEL” again. I added “within four parsecs”.

  One star matched. BD +5 1668. What kind of name was that?

  It was a red dwarf, about three degrees from Procyon. If I’d really missed by that much, the guidescope was out of alignment. I’d have to check that. The distance was 3.76 parsecs from Earth. That would make it—I keyed in a calculation—just over a light-year from Procyon, which should be roughly back over my left shoulder.

  I swung the ship around. Sure enough, a bright, yellow-white pinpoint burned like a distant arc light. There’d be no missing it this time. With a sigh of relief I settled down to program the autopilot to finish the trip.

  That relief shattered when I keyed in the distance. An annoying beep synced to the flashing orange warning message: “INSUFFICIENT FUEL”.

  Oh, crap.

  * * *

  It still wasn’t time to panic, although the thought crossed my mind. There was no handy refueling station in this system, but the ship had its own fuel processing gear. I popped up Starfire’s manual on the screen.

  The ship’s fusion fuel was hydrogen, the most common element in the universe. I could extract it from water or ice if I found a source, say a planet or comet nucleus. Alternatively I could use the extensible scoops to skim the atmosphere of a gas giant. Water sounded easier. Back to the astronomical database. I keyed up BD +5 1668, and began reading.