Sunkiller: Odyssey, page 1
Copyrighted Material
Sunkiller: Odyssey Copyright © 2022 by Variant Publications
Book design and layout copyright © 2022 by JN Chaney
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing.
1st Edition
CONTENTS
Don’t Miss Out
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Interlude
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Interlude
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Epilogue
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PROLOGUE
“We’re coming out of the Rift in ten seconds, Captain,” Lt. Kahlenberg reported.
He sounded nervous, Monica Feragni thought. She didn’t blame him. There was nothing out here, as far as they knew. Not a mine, not an outpost, not so much as a wildcat farmer who paid some independent cargo hauler to take them as far away from everyone else as possible. If anyone had ever been here, they’d never returned to tell the tale.
“Take us out, Lieutenant,” Feragni ordered.
She kept her voice calm because someone on the bridge should be calm. She wasn’t used to a bridge instead of a cockpit, nor had she completely adjusted to being a captain instead of a colonel. When she’d left the Union Space Force and transitioned into the Colonial Authority Navy, she’d been prepared for the larger ships, the larger crews, the different responsibilities, but she hadn’t been prepared for the changing rank structure and the shifting nomenclature. No more pilots. Now, she had a helm officer. No more cockpits, no more crew chiefs.
And also, no more dealing with Union politics. It was bad enough when she’d originally been commissioned in the European Union military, but once the US and the UK were added to the mix, the whole situation became a nightmare. Not that the new Colonial Authority wasn’t without its own version of politics, but most of it was above her pay grade.
A low hum was the first hint that the Charles Martel was coming out of FTL, but there was a hint of a falling sensation in her stomach as the blackness of the Rift disappeared from the main screen and the stars returned. Everyone told Feragni that it was psychological, that there was no physical effect of transitioning in and out of the Rift, but she knew what she felt.
“Slow to station keeping,” she ordered even before the image on the screen cohered into the glowing orb of a K-class star.
“Station keeping, aye,” Kahlenberg acknowledged, his fingers dancing across the touch screen at his station.
There was no roar, no stutter of maneuvering thrusters, none of the sensations the ten-year-old Monica Feragni had imagined when she’d dreamed of being an astronaut. No rockets anymore, not since Dr. Mara Soong-Tierney had unleashed her creation upon humanity. That it violated every known law of physics didn’t bother Feragni—it had given that ten-year-old her dream of the stars. But the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge had come with its own fall. Setting the nations of Earth loose on the universe and throwing their governments into utter chaos had been the spark for a war that killed tens of millions. It had also given birth to the Treaty of Luna and the Colonial Authority and guaranteed her employment.
The drive did…something. That was as close as most people could put it. It twisted spacetime, smacked it with a boat propeller was how her instructors at flight school had put it, and propelled their ship without expelling reaction mass. No reaction mass meant no mass buildup from acceleration, which meant no limit to how fast they could go except energy production. Any hull with a nuclear reactor could go faster than light, but what was more important to her current situation was the ability to stop on a dime and take a look at their surroundings before stumbling into them.
“What have we got, Uzomah?” Feragni asked her sensor tech.
The woman’s narrow, dark face was screwed up in concentration, eyes flickering up and down with the stream of data on her readout, and for a moment, Feragni was sure Uzomah hadn’t heard her.
“We knew there were six planets in the system already,” Uzomah said, finally, “but no one’s done an official survey because the only planet in the Goldilocks Zone was a super-Earth.” She finally looked up from her screen and pointed to a computer animation on the main screen that showed the system from above. The primary star was brighter than the Sun, with a narrower habitability zone, but the terrestrial giant was smack-dab in the middle of it, and Feragni assumed the blues and greens gracing the computer animation weren’t just for decoration.
“It’s got life, though, and the spectrographic readings I’m getting might mean it’s got a lighter core than Earth and has close to standard gravity.” Uzomah shrugged. “It might even be habitable for us.”
“Interesting,” Feragni admitted, “but that’s not why we’re here. Get the telescope aligned.”
“I can see the nova almost with the regular camera view,” Uzomah told her. “Hell, you might be able to see it with the naked eye from the surface of that planet. It’s only six light-years away.” Feragni cast her a baleful glare, and Uzomah raised a hand in acknowledgement. “Yes, ma’am. I’m aligning the scope now.”
“Do we really think there’s anything to this, ma’am?” Reinhardt asked, rotating his chair away from the tactical station to face her command seat. “I mean, I know the string of supernovae is peculiar, but the idea that there could actually be some alien machine doing this…”
“Whether I think it’s likely isn’t the question, Commander,” she said, leaning back in her seat, arms folded across her chest. “Our orders were to investigate, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Reinhardt sounded abashed, and she wondered if she’d come across more aggressively than she’d intended. A ship’s captain couldn’t have crew questioning her orders in combat, but neither did she want her junior officers afraid to ask questions.
“Ma’am…” Uzomah’s tone was hesitant, tremulous even, which was unlike the assertive young lieutenant.
“What is it, Jasmine? Do we need to adjust our orbital position for the telescope?”
“Ma’am, I don’t think we’re going to need to worry about the telescope. Look.” Uzomah pointed at the sensor readout on the main screen, at what could only be described as a flood of energy, a miniature supernova coming straight across the ecliptic only a few light-minutes away.
“What the hell is that?” Feragni blurted.
“I’m trying to sort that out, ma’am.” The sensor tech shook her head. “It’s one hell of an electromagnetic field, and from this, I’d say it stretches a couple light-seconds ahead of the thing. And behind it is something as big as an asteroid…a big asteroid, like Ceres. Behind that is the biggest fusion reaction I’ve seen outside the heart of a star, and the whole thing is moving at pretty damned close to the speed of light.”
A low murmur went across the bridge. That was the disadvantage of the naval model, in Feragni’s opinion. A cockpit had three people, maybe four. A bridge had a dozen, sometimes more, which meant the oohs and ahs took three times as long to make their way through the pack.
“I’ve got it on optical,” Reinhardt announced.
It wasn’t as easy as it had looked in the movies she’d watched as a kid to get an optical view of something from the external cameras, not when there was a whole solar system out there and each camera only showed a tiny portion of it, but the computer stitching software helped. This thing was big and bright enough that they almost didn’t need any magnification. If Jasmine Uzomah was right about the size of it, they were close enough to see the main body of the thing just from the reflection of the system’s primary star off of it, but the body was barely visible against the eye-searing blast of the fusion drive.
Feragni had seen the tests that the Union Space Force had done out in the belt of a fusion pulse drive. Why they bothered with it, she’d never been sure. There’d never be any use for any sort of reaction engine, not with the Soong-Tierney drive, but she supposed the Union military R&D section had enough money at their disposal and enough incentive to justify their existence that they’d allowed some researcher to build a fusion drive test bed. The Colonial Authority and the Alliance military had taken advantage of the fact that there was nowhere to hide such a thing and sent ships out to observe. It had been impressive, a star-bright flare of white, one fusion explosion after another triggered by laser ignition.
Next to this, the pulse drive had been a child’s toy, a pocket flashlight beside a searchlight. Closer to them than the sun, it outshone it on their screen, and yet resembled it not at all. It stretched across the stars, a comet the size of a planet, moving faster than she could follow, a hair’s breadth below light speed. Her head ached with the knowledge that it was already hundreds of thousands of kilometers past before the light reached her.
“What’s the course?” she asked sharply. “Where’s it heading?”
“Unless it course-corrects,” Reinhardt announced, stepping over Uzomah, since projecting courses was technically the responsibility of the tactical officer rather than the sensor tech, “which is probably impossible at its current speed and acceleration, it’s going straight into the heart of the star.”
“Oh, damn,” Feragni murmured. “How far away are we from the star?”
“About eight light-minutes, ma’am,” Kahlenberg told her, the helm officer’s voice grim. “Given the speed and last known location of the”—he seemed to struggle to find a term—“spacecraft, it’s probably already collided.”
“And how long would we have until the star explodes?”
“God alone knows, ma’am. All the science I studied at the Academy says a star that size shouldn’t even be able to go supernova. But we’ve seen it happen over and over. I’d say there’s something aboard that ship, something besides a rock hitting the star at close to the speed of light. As to what, I have no idea. It could take minutes, it could take months.”
Feragni sighed, but it was the answer she’d expected. The question had been more rhetorical. They hadn’t even been certain these things—these Sunkillers—even existed, much less how they worked. All she was certain of was that they were Bussard ramjets, scooping up their fuel from the interstellar medium, sucking in atoms of hydrogen from millions of kilometers around with their magnetic field and fusing it in order to accelerate continuously and build up a speed of close to the speed of light. It was the ultimate method of rocket transportation, the most advanced a civilization could get if they’d never developed an S-T drive system, and it was something that humanity wouldn’t have achieved for hundreds of years, if ever.
“We have to assume,” Feragni said with deliberate calm, “that it won’t take months, because if we guess that and we’re wrong, then we’ll be sitting right here when the gamma ray burst hits us.”
“Maybe we could fall back to the edge of the system, ma’am?” Reinhardt suggested. Feragni scowled at him.
“Did you fall asleep in physics class at the Academy, Hans?” she asked. “The gamma rays from the supernova will be traveling at right around the same speed as the photons. We’ll just wait longer to die.” The man’s ears reddened with a deep blush, and he mumbled an apology, but she went on. “In fact, the latest estimates are that we’ll have to be light-years away before the gamma ray burst isn’t deadly to us. We have to assume the Sunkiller worked this time, because it has over and over between here and the Sagittarian Arm of this galaxy.” Feragni motioned toward Kahlenberg. “Set course for the Wakan Tonka system. The task force will be meeting us there.”
“Aye, ma’am,” the helm officer said crisply, and the view on the main screen was shifting even before he finished the acknowledgement, as if he’d been itching to run and only needed an excuse.
“Do you think it’ll work, ma’am?” Reinhardt asked her, his voice small and hesitant, as if he was loathe to make another mistake. “The plan they have to stop them at Wakan Tonka?”
Feragni didn’t bother asking the man how he’d heard of the plan. It was classified, compartmentalized, and anyone who’d leaked it would have been subject to court-martial, but the Colonial Authority was new enough as an organization that the threat didn’t hold the same cache it might have in the Union or the Alliance military. Of course, it had been leaked. Hell, even the existence of the Sunkillers was technically classified, but the message from Dr. Cortez and the crew of the Tamar had been broadcast in the clear. Even gossip ’casts had the story now, though most people didn’t believe it.
A starbow was forming in the front screen as they accelerated to near light speed, the stars forming a rainbow ring around them. In seconds, they’d break through the light barrier into the Rift, and safety.
Safety. That’s a relative term.
“I sincerely hope so, Mr. Reinhardt,” she told him, shaking her head. “If it doesn’t, our options become…limited.”
“To what, ma’am?”
Feragni pictured Angel Cortez’s face in the video, and she frowned.
“It’s really not worth considering.”
1
“You’d better take good care of my baby, Andre,” Priyanka Ambedkar said, shaking a finger at the short, pudgy bald man in the greasy coveralls. “I’ve been a good, steady customer, and I’d like to keep it that way.”
“Pri, my darling,” the man cried, throwing up his hands as if she’d insulted his family, “my reputation is my life! Would I cheat a customer?”
“Not if you didn’t think you could get away with it.” Pri admitted, brushing strands of dark hair out of her eyes and tying it back into a ponytail. She usually kept her hair too short to require tying back, but visiting a stylist hadn’t been high on her list of priorities these last few months. “I’m sorry, Andre, I didn’t mean to bust your balls. But we’re running close to the edge here, and I can’t afford mistakes.”
The bald man barked a laugh, slapping her on the shoulder hard enough to make her stumble.
“You’re running close to the edge, Pri?” he repeated, still chuckling. “So, nothing’s changed then? Come on, girl, you’re always running close to the edge.” Andre shrugged. “Now, being wanted by the Union government is a new low even for you, but it is all the same to Andre!”
The bald man waddled around the ship, a five-foot-six emperor penguin squeezed into torn and faded work clothes, a cleaning rag across his shoulder.
“Good God!” He paused, waving at the improvised metal patching at the nose of the craft. “What have you done to her? It would have been better just to leave the cracks in the hull rather than do this sort of shoddy work! Have some self-respect!”
“Give me a break. We were pressed for time, and it was this or just wait for a micrometeorite to break through the hull and drain our air.”
Pri followed the fat man around the wedge shape of the starship, rolling her eyes as he tsked and clucked over every scar in the matte-gray hull and bemoaned her lifestyle choices. Her ship was isolated from the rest of the spacecraft at the port and from the prying eyes of pedestrians by the high sheet-metal walls of the repair stall, but she glanced instinctively off to the side every so often just to be sure.
The walls cut her off from her surroundings just as effectively. The sky was gray, but she could see nothing of the rest of the port or the city beyond it from within the stall, which was all the same to Pri. She’d seen enough of Barataria Bay. It was named for an old pirate port from the days of sail, and for good reason. Barataria was the place you went when you had nowhere else to go, when you couldn’t even afford the docking fees at Gateway station. And like most shelters for the lawless and desperate, it was a place no one else wanted. Habitable planets weren’t exactly rare, but hospitable ones were.
