Free Stories 2015 Read online

  Table of Contents

  Disaster

  When the Lion Feeds

  Lion Country

  The Adventurer and the Toad

  Chimera

  We Fly

  The 100 MPG Carburetor and Other Self-Evident Truths

  New Moon Wolf

  The Teacher

  Not For Ourselves Alone

  Kiss From a Queen

  Ember of the Past

  Imperium Resource

  The Siege of Denver

  Baen Books

  Free Stories 2015

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Disaster © 2015 by Ryk E. Spoor

  When the Lion Feeds © 2015 by John Lambshead

  Lion Country © 2015 by Whit Williams

  The Adventurer and the Toad © 2015 by Ryk E. Spoor

  Chimera © 2015 by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

  We Fly © 2015 by K.B. Rylander

  The 100 MPG Carburetor and Other Self-Evident Truths © 2015 by Robert Buettner

  New Moon Wolf © 2015 by David B. Coe

  The Teacher © 2015 by Robert Conroy and J.R. Dunn

  Not For Ourselves Alone © 2015 by Charles E. Gannon

  Kiss From a Queen © 2015 by Jeff Provine

  Ember of the Past © 2015 by Mike Kupari

  Imperium Resource © 2015 by Jody Lynn Nye

  The Siege of Denver © 2015 by Brendan DuBois

  A Baen Book Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-380-5

  Disaster

  by Ryk E. Spoor

  Sue Fisher tried to force herself to stay awake. Three more hours of this. If only something would happen!

  But nothing ever happened in Orado Port Control. Once in a great while a starship would arrive — an event scheduled usually years in advance — or somewhat more frequently one of the inter—system shuttles or the few private vessels would want to dock. Mostly, though, it was just the automated manufacturing pods, bringing raw materials from the asteroid mining operations to be sent down the beanstalk to the ground, or collecting manufactured cargo or key materials from the ground and distributing them around the system.

  If I actually had to do anything, that would make it less boring. But all of that was automated. The only reason she was there — the only reason anyone would be here on the Port Control Deck — was that regulations stated that a qualified human observer would be present at all times in case of emergency. AIs could handle virtually any situation a human could — usually better. It would take something extraordinary to make the AI even consider cutting a human into the loop, or for Sue to decide to override the machine herself.

  And the last time there had been an emergency in Orado system had been —

  ERRRRT! ERRRRT! ERRRRT! ERRRRT!

  Sue snapped out of her half—daze, adrenalin washing through her in a cold tingle that drove subtle spikes into her gut as she focused, triggering a situational download to her retinals.

  The first thought she had was a starship? There isn’t one due for at least six months, the Explorer’s Compass out of Vellamo.

  But the second thought was spoken, as enhanced imagery from the distributed telescopic array materialized. “Oh my God.”

  It was one of the Initiative line of colony vessels, immense transports three kilometers long and over a kilometer wide that carried colonists and cargo to and from the now dozens of colonial worlds that could be over a hundred lightyears from old Sol. Sue had seen Initiative class ships twice before, beautiful graceful spindles with a perfect, sparkling circle of a habitat ring standing out from the central body.

  Except that this one was anything but perfect. Chunks were gone from the hab ring, cut in what seemed impossibly smooth arcs, as though some titanic spacegoing shark had taken a series of bites out of that circle of carbonan, titanium, and steel.

  She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. What in the name of God happened to her? You can’t attack a ship in Trapdoor, and even if you could, how could you find a ship between the stars? But if it wasn’t an attack, what was it?

  Even as she was taking in that horrific sight and trying to grasp what it meant, she saw that there was an incoming transmission.

  “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. Orado Port, this is Outward Initiative, out of Earth,” it began. But not in the calm, measured voice of a ship’s AI, which nearly always controlled communications, but the exhausted, worn, yet triumphant tones of a human being. “Request assistance immediately. We have suffered severe damage on multiple ship systems, we have multiple severely injured people on board who require medical assistance, and our remaining ship systems are unreliable. Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. Orado Port, this is Outward Initiative, out of Earth . . .”

  She sent a query to the station, and once again found herself stunned. According to the schedules received eight months ago, Outward Initiative should still be en route to Tantalus! Her closest approach shouldn’t have brought her closer than ten light—years from Orado!

  Focus! Her brain had finally caught up to the situation. She restrained the impulse to try to respond directly by radio; Outward Initiative had arrived about one point two billion kilometers outsystem from Orado Port, meaning that the Mayday itself had taken over an hour to get there. Unfortunately, that part of the Orado system currently had almost nothing there. Odds were that she really was the first person to hear that terrible message, and if she tried to respond by radio, it would take hours just to ascertain the ship’s condition and decide what kind of help was needed and could be sent.

  But there was an alternative. “Orado Port,” she said aloud.

  “Yes, Sue?” answered the Port’s AI instantly.

  “Relay that alert to the Portmaster immediately, even if you have to wake her up from a dead sleep. Alert the Alabastra and Vilayet that we will probably need towing duty and they should prepare to intercept Outward Initiative and help bring her home, and they’ll need to have medical personnel aboard. This is a rescue operation; I don’t see a Nebula Drive deployment yet, and with that much damage they certainly won’t be able to do short—range Trapdoor hops, so I don’t think they can come in by themselves. Also, make sure that President Jami is briefed. Whatever happened here . . . I don’t think anyone’s ever seen it before.”

  “No reasonably parallel situation is found in my databanks,” Orado Port said. “That is why you were immediately given full authority. What are your intentions?”

  She was already pulling on her EVA suit, settling her helmet over short—cropped blonde hair. “I’m taking Raijin.”

  ii.

  Raijin lay before her, a perfect sphere of polished silver and glass cradled in a setting like an egg cup, every feature of airlock, impulse jets, Trapdoor coils, and all others meticulously set as flush with the surface of the sphere as possible. At her approach, the circular airlock door swung open, and she could feel her omni establishing full link connections, readying the little ship for launch. I wonder if —

  “I’m here, I’m here!” came a somewhat breathless voice behind Sue.

  The sight of the cheerful face under too—curly—to—restrain hair made Sue smile with relief. “So you were here. Thanks, Orado!”

  “It was the obvious next step,” the station replied.

  Sue extended her hand; the other took it. “Dr. Pearce, I’m glad you were able to make it. Orado’s briefed you?”

  “Well, summarized, yes,” Dr. Carolyn Pearce said. “I can’t really believe it myself. Do we have any idea what happened to
— “

  “None. That’s why we’re heading out.” She noted the black case — a far more advanced version of the legendary “black bag” of traveling physicians — and nodded. “That’s all you need?”

  “Without holding us up much, yes.” Dr. Pearce clambered into Raijin with practiced ease; she’d been one of the physicians of Orado Station for twelve years, much longer than Sue had been here. Sue could hear the harness snapping shut around the doctor even as Sue got into the pilot’s seat. “Raijin, prepare for launch immediately.”

  The spherical perfection of Raijin was the key to its unique performance. It, and all the other “Lightning” rescue and courier vehicles were designed to allow the most carefully controlled Trapdoor jumps possible. A normal Trapdoor vessel had to take roughly thirty seconds for a minimum jump, and had what amounted to a startup and cooldown time that was short but variable. However, “variable” when dealing with something moving at roughly seventy times the speed of light meant that you might end up ten million kilometers to either side of your ostensible target with only a total startup/cooldown variation of one second.

  But Raijin could boast a maximum variation in endpoint location of less than one hundred thousand kilometers, a hundred times better than standard commercial drives and ten times better than even tuned Trapdoor drives on more standard craft. Moreover, its minimum jump time had been reduced to about one second, meaning that it could manage jumps of about twenty million miles with good accuracy. The perfect sphere simplified the field interactions immensely, making it possible to approach the theoretical minimum responsive times of the Trapdoor Drive.

  Combined with a built—in fusion reactor to drive a nuclear rocket, the Trapdoor Drive, or an extremely large—volume Nebula Drive, this gave Raijin and its siblings the ability to carry messages from point to point, or more importantly rescue people at speeds far in excess of any conventional drive ship, if the job could be done by no more than three people.

  “Orado Station, this is Raijin. We are prepared for launch. Check our flight path.”

  “Flight path is clear. Launching now.”

  The bottom literally dropped out of the “egg—cup” in which Raijin sat, and the spherical ship shot outward. The launch bay was located on the edge of the rotating ring of Orado Station, and thus the centripetal force which had kept her sitting solidly on that surface was gone, releasing Raijin to follow the commands of Newton for a few minutes before she would end up sneering at him and Einstein both.

  “Wheee!” she heard from Dr. Pearce’s seat, and despite the gravity of the situation Sue chuckled. It was a rather fun way to launch.

  “Glad you like it, Doc. Some of my passengers have been less than thrilled with that process.”

  “I’ll bet they hate roller—coasters, too. How long to Outward Initiative?”

  “Depends on how good I am today.”

  According to the data, Outward Initiative had been at one billion, two hundred and fifty—three million, five hundred thousand kilometers from Orado Station at time . . . mark. Fortunately, the huge ship hadn’t entered “hot” — going at high relative speed — or it would have taken a long time to adjust her speed to match. The relative speed was about five kilometers a second, well within Raijin’s twenty kps delta—vee from its nuclear jet. That also wasn’t fast enough to matter much at Trapdoor speeds, so she discounted it for the most part.

  That’s just under a one—minute jump.

  The key to real performance here, however, depended on the pilot. Even the best AIs yet made could not match human gut instinct on the final instantaneous adjustments to the field just before jump. Some liked to claim this was proof of some ineffable human superiority, a sense beyond the material; Sue thought it simply showed that current AIs didn’t quite know how to integrate everything from the tactile feedback on the controls, the sound and vibrations transmitted through the ship, the miniscule variations in the system readouts, and simultaneously apply it to the external conditions that were fed to a modern pilot through their retinals and haptic simulation links — that could make the pilot very nearly be a part of the ship.

  “Well, here goes. Orado Station, Raijin preparing for in—system Trapdoor jump, estimated time fifty—nine point seven seconds.”

  “Confirmed, Raijin. Jump when ready.”

  She grasped the controls, both physically and mentally, concentrated on the feel of the ship. Nice balance. Resonance sounds almost perfect. Very slight beat coming from coil seven… about five point seven hertz.

  She nudged the jump parameters just a hair… and activated.

  A faint green sparkle shimmered and Orado Station — and the stars themselves — disappeared. Raijin was now hurtling through a lightless void, the Trapdoor Space. The only light that existed there was from Raijin itself, but its perfectly spherical exterior had no angle or vantage to project light upon itself, nor to provide a view, so the screens were darker than the waters of distant Europa’s oceans, a perfect blackness that made ebony and pitch seem bright.

  “You said fifty—nine seconds?”

  “Turned out to be fifty—nine point six nine seven seconds by the jump command. The exact full time of transition varies slightly.”

  “You changed it?”

  “A bit. Felt right. If my instincts are still good; been a long time since I had to try this.” She felt the usual tension rising. “We’re about to find out. Here it comes. Jump completion in three, two, one –”

  The stars sprang into existence again — and in the first screen, to the lower left, something that was not a star, something large enough to show signs of structure.

  Sue let out a completely unprofessional whoop of triumph. I can see it without magnification! We’ve got to be less than six thousand kilometers away!

  “Outward Initiative,” she said into the radio, “This is Lieutenant Susan Fisher, pilot of Raijin, S&R out of Orado Station.”

  “From Orado?” came the same voice that had given the Mayday. “Thank God! Raijin, do you have any medical personnel on board?”

  “Outward Initiative, this is Dr. Carolyn Pearce,” her passenger said. “I am a fully qualified physician, frontier, traditional, and nanomedical.”

  The relief in the voice was palpable. “Wonderful. This is Masashi Toriyama, acting captain of Outward Initiative.”

  “We’re on our way, Captain,” she said, checking vectors and activating Raijin’s nuclear rocket. Acceleration shoved them both back in their seats. “We’ll be matching with you within an hour.

  “Now that we’re close enough to talk — can you tell us what happened?”

  “Something I’ve never seen before — nor heard of. We were cruising along on Trapdoor just as smooth as you like, and suddenly the field stability alert starts screaming. We followed the book, authorized an emergency stop, but the field oscillations were so out of control that it took us thirty seconds just to damp them enough to do the shutdown.”

  “Jesus,” Sue heard herself say. “Oscillations? You’re saying that the Trapdoor Field is what did that to you?”

  “Oscillation depths were increasing so fast that if we’d been a second or two slower in reacting it might have bit straight through into the main hull,” Toriyama said. “As it was… well, you saw. Took five chunks out of the hab ring, compromised the integrity of the ring itself — part of what took us so long to get here was that we had to repair the ring well enough to keep it rotating.”

  The hab ring — as its name implied — was where most people lived; it rotated, providing effective gravity for the crew and passengers. But that meant… “How many people…”

  “. . . did we lose?” Captain Toriyama’s voice was grim. “Fewer than we might have, I suppose. We happened to be in an emergency drill at the time, so everyone except a skeleton crew was in the lifeboats already. No one was killed in the living quarters, but we lost six lifeboats out of the hundred twenty on board. Wasn’t the worst of it, though, the bad luck was just starting.
We lost all three of our ships’ doctors — two were on the lifeboats and the third . . . well, she was too close because she’d gotten a call that someone was sick on one of the boats and the captain gave her permission to go tend to them.”

  “That was a violation of —”

  “Lieutenant, I’m fully aware of that. So was he. But routine . . . routine kills, whenever routine stops. You know that. We’d had twenty-odd of these drills and everything had gone just fine.”

  Sue shook her head, but she couldn’t argue with Toriyama, either. There wasn’t an organization in the world that didn’t start to relax when nothing broke the routine and everything kept working fine. It was the price you paid for working with humans. “Never mind, Captain. Go on.” Raijin vibrated to minor thrusts, as the automatic systems adjusted their vector to match more closely with Outward Initiative.

  “Well, like I said, we lost six lifeboats and all three doctors. Total of sixty-two people, mostly colonists.” Sue’s omni informed her that this was out of a complement — passengers and crew — of one thousand, one hundred, and fifty-seven. “That was bad enough, especially since it included Chief Master Sergeant Campbell, our head of security and navigation and piloting backup. But it wasn’t long after we got shut down and started trying to fix the vital damage that people started getting sick.”

  “Sick?” Sue repeated. A disease at the same time?

  “Good God,” Dr. Pearce said. “Trapdoor intersection radiation pulse, yes?”

  “I’m impressed,” Captain Toriyama said. “Took us a while to figure that one out.”