Starfall: Stealing the Sun, #3

Ron Collins covers the spectrum with clear prose, compelling characters and settings, and a bright imagination.

Kevin J. Anderson, New York Times bestselling author of ETERNITY’S MIND

STARFALL

STEALING THE SUN: BOOK 3

RON COLLINS

STARFALL

STEALING THE SUN: BOOK 3

Copyright © 2017 Ron Collins

All rights reserved

Cover Image:

© Ig0rzh | Dreamstime.com | Full sun eclipse, asteroid impact

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Portions of this book appeared in substantially different format in Analog. All incidents, dialog, and characters are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Skyfox Publishing

ISBN-10: 1-946176-12-5

ISBN-13: 978-1-946176-12-7

STEALING THE SUN

includes

STARFLIGHT

STARBURST

STARFALL

STARCLASH

STARBOUND

STARCRASH

STARGAMES

STARDUST

STARBORN

Other Work by Ron Collins

Saga of the God-Touched Mage

includes

Glamour of the God-Touched

Target of the Orders

Trail of the Torean

Gathering of the God-Touched

Pawn of the Planewalker

Changing of the Guard

Lord of the Freeborn

Lords of Existence

The Knight Deception

Wakers

Picasso’s Cat & Other Stories

Five Magics

Six Days in May

Ron’s website is: www.typosphere.com

Follow Ron on Twitter: @roncollins13

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For Brigid, whose heart has always held wonderful places and who has always loved aliens.

Star light, star bright,

First star I see tonight,

I wish I may, I wish I might,

Have this wish I wish tonight.

INTRODUCTION

As with the first book in this series, the underpinnings of Starfall began as a short story first published in Analog magazine. After reading Stealing the Sun (the original story in the sequence) Stan Schmidt asked me what happens next. The answer came in the form of The Taranth Stone, which was a novelette that eventually went on to do well in the AnLab reader polls and be named by CompuServe readers as the best novelette of the year.

That’s the thing about this writing gig. You never know where a story is going to go.

Given that Starfall is a story set on a distant planet and therefore focused on an alien species, I sat down to write the Taranth Stone with great trepidation.

The problem here is that dealing with different cultures is hard work. Make your aliens too alien and readers have a hard time relating, too human and they don’t carry the story quite right. Then there’s the planets themselves. The climate, the geology, and the overall ecosystems that these can generate—all these things need to play together just right.

This becomes more than obvious when you sit down to do it.

That said, I admit I love these kinds of stories. The whole idea of alien worlds and characters who are not human is just fun.

Like the corporate world, right?

Can anyone say Dilbert?

I knew you could.

Anyway.

Let me get back on track here by saying that I’ve occasionally said that science fiction is the most human of literatures. Sure, this sounds great as a sound bite, but I think it’s true because every SF story ever told—even those full of pulpy goodness, or especially those full of pulpy goodness—is really about what it means to be human.

I hope that Starfall is no different.

It’s been an incredibly fun story to write. The transitions of the story through its characters, and their relationship to the planet they live on taught me a lot. The idea of time passing, both in the events of the story itself and in relationship to events that we readers know are going on around them in a universe that is so much bigger than these characters can conceive, made me feel such a wide range of things.

That’s part of what it means to be human after all, right?

Time passes.

Societies change faster than the people in them want to change, but not fast enough to save them from a certain sense of inevitability.

Through it all, there is always that most human of emotions.

Hope.

Ron Collins

October 2016

PROLOGUE

An umbrella of orange and white plasma blazed over the pod’s nose cone as it powered its way through the planet’s upper atmosphere. A contrail of gray condensation and brown smoke curled in its wake.

The pod’s body consisted of many microlayers of self-aware, nanointelligent titanium, each sandwiched between sheaths of bioactive tissue tightly matched to coolant molecules through quantum links at the atomic level. Together, they acted as sensors and shields, designed, coded, and configured by some of the best engineers in the Solar System to withstand Alpha Centauri A’s six-million-degree corona.

Caustic as the planet’s upper atmosphere was, comprised of dense sulfuric acid and other corrosive oxides, it was no star field.

The pod’s protective shell allowed it to survive entry without damage. As it cleared the upper layers of cloud, its rocket engines—also designed to drive the pod through fusioning material for long enough to complete its mission—sputtered and kicked, suffocating in open sky as the pod glided toward the planet’s crevasse-lined surface.

The engine kicked once, then twice, attempting to restart.

The stubby flaring on the pod’s fuselage was meant to provide guidance surfaces while deep inside the star. It caught the thick air. Pressures scrubbed speed. The pod lurched downward into the lowest layer of the atmosphere, an oxygen-and-nitrogen-rich segment that held only wisps of clouds and buffeting winds that tossed the pod into a wild flight. The engine gave a final cough, then went silent.

Its velocity was forty kilometers per hour at impact.

The ground shook.

Rocks and dust flew.

The pod rolled and crumpled along a barren landscape, flipping end over end like an errant rock tossed down a hill before eventually coming to rest in an orange cloud of sulfuric dust, wedged between a pair of basaltic boulders at the base of a small mesa. The land here was a vast and desolate desert of what would appear at first, to the pod’s creators, to be filled with nothingness, but which upon second, third, and fourth looks might reveal a piela lizard here, or a hoi root there. If the time was right, perhaps one might even see the graceful form of a jah gliding through the air, hunting, watching for that piela lizard or even a tiny kax stirring amid the hard-packed dirt of the desert floor.

When the dust settled, only the hollow sound of the wind remained, moaning through the harsh ridges of broken ground, while all around the hardy brush clung to the crevasses like the rock was the giver of life itself.

To quadars on the surface of the planet, the pod was a brilliant streak of golden light that burned in an arc across the southern sky, out beyond the One Great Esgarat, and out past the ring of other peaks that gave them protection from the desert. This magnificent javelin of a flare, this ominous omen, this stunning symbol hung in the always cloud-filled sky, brighter than any fire they had seen.

The light dropped jaws. It drew deep clicks from the backs of throats.

Some pointed and spoke to their Families or to clan members. Others ran from it, shielding their vision against its glare. Some spoke of the old gods. Others grew silent, their lips closed, their centrals wide and full of awe.

As the pod fell, the flare left behind a twisted smudge of smoke that faded into the burnt sky. Only those with the sharpest vision could see the dark point of the pod then, as, bereft of its power, it fell further, out beyond those mountains, into the distant zones that all quadarti knew as the lands of the dry and the dead.

CHAPTER 1

Jafred E’Lar fidgeted as he used his central to watch Ambassador Tacor gather his notes and step down from the podium. Tacor’s scuffled footsteps echoed in the half-filled chamber as he traversed the stairs and crossed the floor of polished obsidian. The material of the floor came from the core of the One Great Esgarat itself. It seemed to glow with the life of the quadars who had made it.

The heat was growing late, and all three of Jafred’s stomachs were now clenching hard enough he wished he had been able to take an early dinner. He wrapped his six-fingered hands around his own collection of notes and waited his turn.

Tacor, the ambassador from the Kandar clan, was a distinguished Ancient of the Quadarti, named such by the council nearly a full twenty-two-year cycle before—a span during which the rising point of Eldoro, the greater heat, moved across the horizon and back.

Each of those years had a name. This was the year of kax, named for a small creature of four legs that was hardy enough to survive on the surface yet prevalent in the underground caves. Next year would be the year of tal, named for a slow and thick beast of no little burden that could manage its water well enough to survive in places that would kill a quadar, specifically including the heated pits of river rock atop Esgarat northern volcanoes.

Tacor was hunched over with his years. He moved in slow, lurching steps that spoke of chronic pain. Brown spots mottled his hairless gray skin, which bore both the deep wrinkles of his age and the scarred patterns that the quadars of the Kandar clan traditionally marked themselves with. He had made the long trip here on limited notice, and his message was important enough to him and his Families that he was still dressed in his travel informals, a rugged poncho of root fiber grown in the hanta pits by Kandar’s Elganjo Family, and a pair of loose-fitted leggings made of animal skin. The ambassador’s footwear consisted of sandals laced up over those leggings.

His fatigue was obvious as he wheezed his way to the far aisle to take his seat.

Tacor’s commentary had been good. He built a strong case for why the Kandar clan should be given the honor of finding the Light That Fell from the Sky three heats prior.

That was why the council was gathered here.

The quadarti were talking.

They had seen The Light That Fell from the Sky.

They were grumbling, worrying, listening to the words of the priests and the Families and the shyster free-sellers who were always ready to make a profit from any rift in the seam of society. Those words were spreading fear and concern because—in Jafred’s mind—all of them, priests, Families, and free-sellers, had come to understand that fear and concern always served to create commerce.

The council had to address the situation soon or the Families would take it upon themselves, and that would create even more chaos which would then cause the council to lose power. In reality, that was already happening. The Families were growing stronger each cycle. He saw that in the way Tacor was given leeway in his arguments even though this emergency session was a closed affair, attended only by the primary members—meaning neither Families nor members of the general public were admitted. Theoretically no information would flow to the individual Families, but Jafred scoffed at that idea. Tacor was given that leeway expressly because his words would be disseminated to the Families.

As the world advanced, the entire idea of the Family caused problems. No one else seemed to see it, yet—no one in the council, anyway. Or at least they wouldn’t admit to it. While the value of the Family hierarchy was becoming a routine topic among philosophers and the ranks of scientific thinkers, his fellow council members rarely weighed in on such discussions. His council mates did not consider the ranks of those thinkers to have much value, unless, of course, they happened to employ one of their own.

In that way, the council was no better than the Families.

The council was, after all, about stability.

Business as usual.

The question at hand, however, did not fit business as usual. Nor did it pertain to research, development, or production. The question before the council was about salvage and retrieval, which followed an altogether different set of guidelines, guidelines that usually fell into the relatively simple category of deciding which Family had lost the material in question, and assigning it back to them. No Family, however, could lay claim to the Light That Fell From the Sky.

So now the council and the three great clans had called themselves to this caucus to decide which Family would be given the honor of undertaking the project, and, therefore, which Family would be provided ownership of said find.

This was, to Jafred E’Lar’s way of thinking, a singularly dangerous question.

When Ambassador Tacor reached his seat and had gotten himself settled, Chief Councilor Pelorit spoke.

The council recognizes Jafred E’Lar, of Terilamat.

Jafred stood, then straightened, pressing one bony hand over the folds of his robes as he clutched his notes with the other. The pressure of more than thirty gazes fell upon him. Those robes were the orange colors of the Quadarti Council, rather than the usual red that marked his original home as the North Slope of the Esgarat.

Despite the air’s stagnation, Jafred wore the robes fully covering the plates that ran over his shoulders and acted to regulate his internal temperature. It made him warm, but it showed both deference and concern. It also covered the Terilamat markings of passage that had been branded onto those plates when he was just a whelp.

He hoped his choice set the proper tone.

The chamber echoed with hushed whispers and the clacks of cleared throats as he approached the dais. He closed his central as he climbed the steps.

The podium, offset from the center of the chamber, was made of finely marbled rock, brought here from deep under the mountain, carved by the Lezi Family, and presented to the council as if it were a gift and not an investment in future decisions around the commerce of construction and quarry. It came to his chest, and was polished to a warm red shine that matched that of the floor.

It was carved with the three interwoven triangles that symbolized the council.

Jafred used