Free Stories 2016 Read online

  Table of Contents

  Adrift by Terry Burlison

  Training and Truth by Ryk E. Spoor

  Touchstone by Sonia Orin Lyris

  Trouble: The Changeling and the Phooka by Dave Freer

  Moonlet Sonata by William Ledbetter

  Cadet Cruise by David Drake

  71 by David Brin

  Wise Child by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

  Dear Ammi by Aimee Ogden

  Bringer of Fire by David Carrico

  Rock, Meet Hard Place (Part 1) by Peter Nealen

  Rock, Meet Hard Place (Part 2) by Mike Kupari

  The Lavender Paladin by Shawn Snider

  Starhome by Michael Z. Williamson

  Tethers by William Ledbetter

  The Trouble with Millennials by Robert Buettner

  Baen Books

  Free Stories 2016

  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.

  Adrift © 2016 by Terry Burlison

  Training and Truth © 2016 by Ryk E. Spoor

  Touchstone © 2016 by Sonia Orin Lyris

  Trouble: The Changeling and the Phooka © 2016 by Dave Freer

  Moonlet Sonata © 2016 by William Ledbetter

  Cadet Cruise © 2016 by David Drake

  71 © 2016 by David Brin

  Wise Child © 2016 by Sharon Lee & Steve Miller

  Dear Ammi © 2016 by Aimee Ogden

  Bringer of Fire © 2016 by David Carrico

  Rock, Meet Hard Place (Part 1) © 2016 by Peter Nealen

  Rock, Meet Hard Place (Part 2) © 2016 by Mike Kupari

  The Lavender Paladin © 2016 by Michael Z. Williamson

  Starhome © 2016 by Shawn Snider

  Tethers © 2016 by William Ledbetter

  The Trouble with Millennials © 2016 by Robert Buettner

  A Baen Book Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-498-7

  Adrift

  by Terry Burlison

  "No, no, no!" Dan Colton shouted, slamming the thruster control on his EMU backpack fully forward. Directly ahead, a truss beam swung out of control, another EMU clinging to it like a bug on a girder, jets firing frantically as its occupant tried to wrestle the beam under control.

  "I've got it, Cole," Chris Brody's voice rang in Colton’s helmet. Colton shook his head. Damn kid, about to die from a rookie mistake.

  No, he told himself. Not on his watch.

  "No, you don't have it!" Cole jetted behind the beam and fired his grappler with a flick of his wrist. The grappler head shot out from under his seat like a startled rabbit, trailing a thin wire as it sped toward the beam forty meters away. It struck and instantly riveted itself. Cole applied the momentum brakes, then felt his thrusters firing, slowing the beam. A perfect shot: the grappler had snagged it just off the center of mass, stopping it in mid-flight and killing its rotation before it killed Chris Brody. Cole let out a slow breath.

  "Sorry, Cole," Brody said. "Once it was moving, I just couldn't stop it."

  Cole reeled himself to the beam, detached the grappler head, and stowed it back under the seat of his EMU. He didn't respond. Let the kid stew a little; it'll help him remember. Once he assured himself the beam was more-or-less stationary, he jetted over the top of it and found Brody waiting for him on the other side, still grappled to the beam and nearly pinned between it and one of the power satellite's main trusses, probably afraid to move for fear of killing himself. Cole suppressed a grin. He couldn't read the kid's expression through his gold visor, but he could imagine it—he’d worn it himself a few times.

  "How many times have I told you?"

  "I know, I know. 'Mass isn't weight. Momentum never changes.'"

  Cole smiled at the frustration in the kid's voice. Maybe the lesson was finally soaking in. "Simulations don't really prepare you, do they? Just remember, no matter how confident you feel, you can never have too much—"

  "—humility in orbit." Brody finished for him. "Do you have a saying for everything?"

  "Just the important things. So, yes." Cole looked along the beam, comparing its position and orientation to the giant truss they were erecting on Solar Power Satellite Three. Looked good. "Call C&C and have them task an arm over here to stabilize it. Then call Smutty and Legs. They're by Truss Two. Tell them we're ready to attach this guy. I'll be back soon."

  As one of SPS-3's shift foremen, Cole believed if you dress down a worker, you give him a new responsibility right away to keep his spirits up. In space, too little confidence can kill a person as quickly as too much. Brody would learn—assuming he lived long enough.

  "Uh, you're leaving?" Brody asked, his voice a bit higher.

  "Gotta top off my tanks. I just used up a bunch of prop saving some newb's butt."

  "Sorry, Cole."

  "Look, you'll do fine, kid; just use your head."

  "Sure. And, uh, thanks. I guess that's why they call you the legend, huh?"

  Another voice chimed in over the comm loop. "Yeah, he's a legend in his own mind!" Other voices snickered. Cole sighed. Now that the incident was over, radio silence wasn't observed. Unfortunately.

  "Yeah, yeah," Cole muttered. He aimed the targeting pip on his helmet's HUD at the nearest refueling station, laid in a course, and headed over. Brody was a good worker, he thought, although he was so new he hadn't even been christened with a nickname. Cole remembered his own struggles during his first six-month tour, over two years ago. He never would have believed he'd be a foreman already, and he was pretty sure his own supervisor would have agreed. Maybe someday Brody would make foreman, too. Stranger things had happened.

  But not many, he thought with a grin.

  After refueling, Cole headed back toward the wayward beam. He took a wide, arcing trajectory to get a look at their progress. SPS-3 was early in its construction phase, still in low earth orbit and scarcely more than a giant aluminum X with a cluster of pressurized cylinders and gleaming solar-cell wings at the center. The lowering sun sparkled off a hundred surfaces and illuminated two thin lines radiating above and below: the twin 75 kilometer tethers. The lower cable attached the SPS to the cache of beams and panels awaiting their turn in the assembly sequence. The upper tether connected to the counterbalance, as large as the SPS itself, gleaming brilliantly far overhead.

  He glanced at the sun, now just off the horizon. Better get back to Brody before dark, he decided. As Cole touched the thruster control, something exploded against his back. His head slammed against his faceplate, bolts of pain shot through his entire body, and everything went black.

  #

  Inside the Command and Control module, Shayla Rivard frowned at her data displays. Something was wrong; something had changed. She scanned the graphs, numbers, and indicators, trying to coax the anomaly from her subconscious. She found it just as a red indicator light flashed to life: someone's transponder had dropped offline. She cleared the indicator and ran a systems check. Everything seemed okay at her end. Wiping her palms on her jumpsuit, she pressed the footpad to toggle her mic hot and cleared her throat a couple of times. She'd been on SPS-3 only two weeks and still got nervous talking to the workers on EVA. Especially the foremen. And most especially Dan Colton.

  "Um, Red One, C&C. Can you verify your transponder status?" she called and waited. Nothing. She frowned. "Red One, C&C, comm check." Still nothing. She scanned her console. Had she done something wrong, taken something offline by accident?

  No. Believe in yourself, girl, her grandma used to tell her. Even if you're the only one who does. "Red O
ne, C&C on UHF2," she called, changing frequencies. Still nothing. "Red One, C&C on all frequencies, comm check."

  She wiped her palms again, then took a hit from the squeeze tube of water she kept on her console. "Red Two, this is C&C, do you copy?"

  "Roger, Shay," came Garret "Smitty" Smith's voice through her headset.

  "Do you have a visual on Red One?"

  "Umm, no. Cole's probably taking a nap someplace, the lazy SOB."

  "No, I don't think so. His transp—"

  "Just kidding, sweetheart."

  Shay glanced around; the other two techs at their C&C consoles were grinning at her. "Copy," she replied, trying not to imagine Smitty and the others outside laughing at her.

  She scanned her console again looking for any clues, but the displays offered no help. Steeling her courage, she punched up another loop and cleared her voice again. "Supe, C&C. I, uh, I think we've got a problem."

  #

  Cole thought he had opened his eyes, but wasn't sure. They felt open, but he could see nothing but blackness. He reached toward his face and his hand hit something hard. Helmet? Spacesuit. That's right, Cole was strapped in an EMU, out on an assembly EVA. But then—where was everything?

  He turned his head. Still nothing. No stars, no sun, no SPS, not even his helmet displays. Fighting back a surge of panic, he repeated to himself: Do no harm, do no harm. An expression EVA Ops had adopted from the medical profession. In space, conservation was law, be it oxygen, propellant, momentum, anything. A bad decision could make things worse in a big hurry. So when in doubt, think it out.

  Air first, of course—every spacer's primary concern. Was he breathing from his suit's chest pack or the EMU's much larger oxygen supply? He fingers found the umbilical connecting his chest pack to the EMU and followed it to the redirect valve. He turned it to route the EMU's propulsive oxygen into his suit. Immediately, he felt the backflow valve click into place. Bad: the EMU's tanks were empty. If not for the backflow valve, O2 would be flowing out of his suit. He had maybe five hours in his suit pack. The recirc fan hummed faintly in his ears, so he wasn't going to die choking on his own CO2. At least not immediately.

  Step two: power. He cycled his EMU's power, but nothing happened, no indicators, no HUD, just the secondary battery for his suit fan. He toggled to backup, even his portable supply—still nothing. Very bad.

  Propulsion? Not much he could do there. If the tanks were empty, he wasn't going anyplace he wasn't already headed. He’d worry about that later. Assuming there was a later.

  Communication? No primary power, so no comm. Really, really bad, and getting worse.

  Location? That was a very good question. Where were the stars? Cole fought back the thought that he’d had been struck blind by some act of God or Man. He twisted as much as his suit and EMU would allow. There! At the limit of his vision, he saw a faint band of light, a few stars sprinkled just above it: the Earth's limb. He breathed a huge sigh of relief, then chastised himself for wasting oxygen. He hadn’t been struck blind; he was simply facing downward, toward the black ocean below, during a night pass.

  As he watched, the band of stars moved slowly into view, the limb of the Earth slashing the sky into darkness at an oblique angle. That meant his EMU's attitude control was out and he was drifting, slowly tumbling. The gyros must still be spinning, or he'd be rotating a lot worse than this. Cole watched the stars' movement carefully, trying to judge his rotation. He wasn't a pilot, but he had a natural aptitude for how things move in space. No small thing, given that intuition bred on Earth had killed more than one spaceman. Another saying sprung to mind: In orbit, there's no such thing as "common sense."

  Cole watched the horizon for a few more minutes, then carefully grasped the attitude hand controller. "Wish me luck," he muttered to the stars. He tweaked the controller and felt the EMU respond. Good, the gyroscopic attitude control system was still working. It ran off a different power bus from the jets. That meant he could change his orientation, at least until he saturated the gyros. If he couldn't fire his jets, though, he wouldn't be able to unsaturate them and would end up helpless, tumbling out of control. Very carefully, Cole stopped his slow tumble, orienting himself with his feet toward the Earth, facing in the direction he sensed he was orbiting. A small victory, but a victory nonetheless.

  Then another surge of panic threatened him. The SPS, brilliantly lit even at night, was nowhere to be seen. Slowly, carefully, he tweaked the controller and turned a full three hundred sixty degrees. The SPS was gone.

  Impossible, but undeniable. He was alone.

  #

  "I don't know. One minute he was there; the next, he was gone!"

  Shay looked up into the dark, deep-set eyes of her boss, SPS Construction Supervisor Lucas Gage, half-expecting scorn or amusement. But he just nodded at her report. "What was his last position?"

  Shay brought up a diagram of the SPS. "Right here," she said, pointing.

  "You tried all frequencies?"

  "Yes, sir. Oops, sorry. I mean, yes, Luke." She felt her face warm again.

  Gage didn't seem to notice; he just stared at the display. "Who saw him last?"

  Shay pressed her footpad to go hot. "Red Five, you had the last visual on Red One?"

  "Uh, yeah," Chris Brody's voice replied. "We were working on Truss Four, adding a nadir beam. He, um, needed to refuel. That was maybe twenty, thirty minutes ago."

  Gage traced a finger along the display. "So he probably took a path like this to the prop station. Refueled, then headed over to here, maybe to examine the work. But what happened to him then?"

  Darkness swept over the viewing ports as the SPS coasted into darkness. "Great," Gage muttered. "We couldn't find him in daylight, how are we going to find him at night?" He turned to one of the other techs at another console. "Turn out all the exteriors. Shay, tell everyone we're going dark. We'll give their eyes time to adjust, then see if anyone can pick up his nav lights, either against the Earth or drifting among the stars."

  How does he stay so calm? Shay wondered. Her own fingers trembled as she relayed the instructions. When the exteriors went out, she could sense the deeper darkness through the nearest viewport. She wanted to glide over to it and look for Mr. Colton herself, but that was silly: the workers outside had a much better view than she. Taking another hit of water, she talked patience into herself.

  "Anything?" Gage finally called over the loop. Five voices called back with the same answer: Dan Colton was gone.

  Shay shook her head. This was impossible. For a moment, she wondered if this was some kind of elaborate test, to see how she performed under pressure. That was stupid. She had already survived many simulations during training; they wouldn't waste a whole crew shift just to test her. Something was terribly wrong, and she had no idea how to identify it, much less fix it. She looked at Gage, drifting next to her, arms crossed, face creased in a frown, staring at her console like it was a bitter enemy.

  "Dammit," he muttered. "I've tried for years to get an active radar up here." He looked over his shoulder. "Maria, turn the exteriors back on."

  Then he took a deep breath and turned back. "Shay, call NORAD. Maybe a defense radar can find him."

  #

  Cole stared at the sky, then at the black Earth below, then back at the stars. On his first tour, on SPS-2 two years ago, he had always kept careful track of his orbital position. During his spare time, he memorized the light patterns of the cities they passed over: Quito, Nairobi, Palembang, Port Morsby off to the south. He even learned the constellations, almost impossible to find in the myriad of stars filling half the sky. The beauty and majesty of low earth orbit had enthralled him, the culmination of a dream forged in the dark skies of his Montana childhood. By his second tour, a year later, it seemed less like an exotic vacation and more like a second home, more comfortable than appreciated. Now, on his third and final tour, he had scarcely taken notice of the wonders surrounding him, above or below. Getting the job done had become his life's t
ouchstone. Finish the job—everything else up here was just distraction.

  He drove his thoughts back to the problems at hand. Since passing into darkness, a deepening chill had gradually settled over him; his suit's thermal controls no longer worked. The night pass was under thirty minutes, so he should be back into sunlight before freezing to death. And his food and water tubes still worked. But where was he? Over the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian? He tried to think where he might be, what had happened, but his thoughts refused to focus. Trapped in his almost-dead spacesuit, he felt his senses deadening as well: nothing to smell or hear, nothing to see but the remote stars. The cold, the utter deprivation, the aloneness sank into him like a narcotic. He stared into the blackness lurking below him. He could imagine that the planet below was utterly devoid of life—that he was a lone sentience orbiting a dead world in an empty universe.

  No! He shook his head viciously to clear his thoughts. He was Dan Colton, age 30, from Bozeman, Montana. Married to Jenny Colton, with a beautiful six-month old daughter, Meredith, back home in Florida.

  Jen and Merry. They seemed a thousand years and a million miles away, but he clung to their memory, willing them closer to him. Little Merry, with her bright eyes and wonderful giggle. Jen, holding Merry to her breast, gazing at her with eyes moist with love.

  Cole blinked tears from his own eyes. "There is no crying in space," he whispered—it's too hard to wipe away tears inside a spacesuit. Buoyed by the memory of his family, he would face whatever the next few hours brought—by himself, maybe, but not alone.