Chapter 1

The official name of the system was Centauri, the name the ancient homebodies had given it many centuries before, back when humans still looked at the stars through ground pieces of glass instead of traveling to them. On star charts and travel itineraries it was still labeled as such, probably more out of bureaucratic reluctance to change rather than any lingering sense of honor for the ancient ones who had given birth to the vast human empire that now spanned more than fifty planets, twenty moons, and thousands upon thousands of artificial space structures. Unofficially, however, the system was usually called by the name the first wave of explorers and colonists had given it a mere nine centuries before, back at the beginning of the Great Human Expansion. They called it First Cross, so called because it was the first discovered crossroads of travel circuits that led from one star system to another.

First Cross was almost completely uninhabited. It had two G-class suns called Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B and one M-class sun called Proxima Centauri. These three suns had a combined total of ten planets circling in orbits of varying eccentricity—four of them gas giants, the other six rocky planets. The rocky planets had no natural satellites but the gas giants each had anywhere from ten to twenty-three moons circling around them, most of them smaller than a hundred kilometers in diameter, the biggest of them only two thousand kilometers in diameter. Not a single one of these ten planets and forty-eight moons were habitable to unprotected human beings. There was a hydrogen gathering and refining operation in orbit around Stilton, the large moon of the yellow gas giant orbiting Alpha Centauri B (or First Cross Beta, as it was typically called). There was a small Human Space Fleet base orbiting the same moon at a different inclination, its purpose to lend assistance to any ships that became disabled within the system and to perform maintenance on the unmanned communications relays that were parked just outside of each circuit hole in the system. Aside from these two or three thousand souls, only a few of whom would consider themselves a permanent resident of the system as opposed to someone on assignment, Centauri was empty and void, an interchange out in the empty desert, a convergence of shipping lanes centered around a desert island on the high seas.

Gathius Stoner, called Gath by those who knew him, sat on the observation deck of the HSS Outreach Traveler, a seventy kiloton interstellar transport ship that had been his home for the last two and a half weeks of metric time. The ob-deck, as it was known, was the only place on the ship, including the bridge itself, where one could get an unobstructed view outside. Of course, the view was being provided by cameras outside the ship and projected onto holoscreens that covered the walls and ceiling of the room. Nevertheless, the illusion was effective. From his seat in the middle of the room Gath could see three hundred and sixty degrees around him and one hundred and eighty degrees above.

The view forward was dominated by the turbulent, roiling surface of Alpha Centauri B. It stretched out before them in an endless expanse of yellow orange glow, bright enough to cause blinding afterimages despite the fact that the projection software was dimming the visible light to less than one percent of what was actually there. They were less than twenty thousand kilometers above the coronal layer of the star, close enough that no curvature of the surface was perceptible, close enough that a loop of a mass ejection could shroud them if one happened to spring forth in the right spot. Not that such a thing would harm them. The ship was enveloped in a dense electromagnetic shield powered by one of its four fusion generators, a shield so thick and so dense that Traveler could actually descend five thousand kilometers into the star’s sub-coronal layer before any damage would occur. This was not what Traveler‘s captain was planning. Mass suicide was not the objective of this trip. It was just that many of the circuit points which enabled interstellar travel were located close—uncomfortably close—to stars.

Gath took his eyes off the strangely beautiful glow of up close starlight and looked at the digital display just above the floor. They were three metric minutes from the entrance to Circuit Alpha-Centauri B/Proxima, only the second circuit ever mapped by human explorers, the circuit that made them realize that the first one—Sol/Proxima— was not just an odd fluke of nature unique to their home solar system. The ship was currently moving at 412 kilometers per second, just above escape velocity for Proxima Centauri, the red dwarf star that defined the Proxima part of the circuit, and a relative snail’s crawl compared to its usual cruising speed of .005C, or one half of one percent of light speed. They would emerge from the exit at an altitude of eighteen thousands kilometers above it. If the computer had done its calculations correctly—and computers always did, at least in the last six hundred metric years or so—this velocity and course would sweep them ninety-eight degrees around Proxima and allow them to climb an additional 1233 kilometers in altitude, just enough to make an exact intersection with Circuit Sol/Proxima seventeen metric minutes later.

That would be the last circuit of their journey. Sol system, home to planet Earth and the birthplace of the human species, was a cul-de-sac system, which was to say it was a system with only one circuit point. And that circuit point was a little closer to the sun than most. It was actually three thousand kilometers inside the coronal layer, which was why it had taken the pre-expansion humans so long to discover it.

Its discovery had, in fact, been a complete accident. A scientific research team had been firing heavily shielded telemetric probes at the sun to study deep within its upper atmospheric layers when one of the probes mysteriously disappeared, its telemetry instantly cut off as if destroyed. It was an odd occurrence as this type of probe had been in use for many years without any failures. The mystery became much odder when the telemetry suddenly returned four years and two months later, faint but detectible, from the vicinity of Proxima Centauri, Sol’s nearest celestial neighbor. Since the time stamp at the start of the telemetry was the exact time and date that the probe had disappeared, it did not take long to figure that somehow, someway, the probe had been transported from inside the corona of Earth’s sun to Proxima Centauri, over four light years away. It also did not take long to figure out that the point at which the probe disappeared just happened to be the barycenter—or center of mass—between Sol and the gas giant called Jupiter.

Thus, the circuit points were discovered. Points that were located at the barycenters between stars themselves in multi-star systems such as First Cross, and stars and large gas giant planets when the difference in mass was small enough to put such a barycenter above the actual surface of a sun. Nobody understood why the circuit points were there. Physics could not explain them other than that were stable wormholes of some sort. It was strongly suspected that the fact that they were located at barycentric junctions had nothing to do with the formation of the circuit points in the first place, but that this only served as signposts to the entry points—the interstellar version of a freeway onramp sign from the 21st century. The mere existence and unexplainable nature of the circuit points had contributed greatly to the formation of modern religious beliefs and the abandonment of the old religious beliefs.

In any case, that first accidental discovery was the moment that was marked as the beginning of the Great Human Expansion, the first link in a chain that would eventually lead to more than ninety human colonies stretched throughout an area of the galaxy that encompassed more than three hundred and fifty star systems.

Gath had never been to Earth. He had been born and raised in the city of Diphen, an agricultural hub on Brittany, a tropical planet in orbit around the star Alpha Zulu in the most densely populated solar system in human space, seven circuit jumps away from Sol system and the homebodies that remained there. He would be the first of his bloodline to set foot upon the cradle of humanity since pre-expansion times, when his sixteenth generation forefather Derick Stoner and his wife Elisa climbed on a transport ship to make the trip to Mars and the booming agricultural industry that developed in the years after the Petroleum Wars. He would be the first Stoner to even enter the Sol System since his eleventh generation forefather Xeluz Stoner had left Mars on a transport to the AZ system in the middle years of the Great Human Expansion.

A pleasant bonging noise sounded from the overhead intercom speaker, indicating an imminent announcement.

“Attention all on-duty crew and all passengers not currently in your berths,” said an animated female voice—computer generated of course, but the illusion was perfect. “We are now twenty minutes from sounding of acceleration alarm. Please made sure you are seated or in a state of repose for your safety and comfort during the initial phase of acceleration and move about carefully throughout the entirety of the event. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Gath said, though the computer could not hear him and there was no one else in the room. All of the lounge chairs that lined both walls, all of the barstools along the common serving area, all of the billiards tables and shuffleboard tables that were normally packed with passengers and off duty crewmembers three deep, all were abandoned and quiet. The emptiness was unusual even though it was 0233, the middle of the traditional sleep period aboard Traveler, which, like all vessels operated by the Human Space Fleet, kept to standard metric time and timekeeping regardless of what any local time was. Even in the earliest of the early morning hours there were still generally a few people in the lounge—reading, practicing their billiards, playing darts, having romantic discussions—as it was one of very few recreational places available and, after such a long journey, people tended to grow tired of their berthmates and their berthing areas. The upcoming jump, however, was keeping all the late nighters in their berths this evening.

It was not the jump itself, as trips through circuit points were instantaneous, it was the changes of momentum that Traveler would undergo immediately after the jump. Artificial gravity generation was perhaps one of the most useful things mankind had come up with since venturing out into space, but it was artificial and came with its own set of problems. One such problem was presented by changes in inertia that took place aboard moving space vessels during acceleration and deceleration cycles. Ships were designed and assembled in an upside-down and vertical orientation, which meant, in effect, that all of the decks were aligned so people stood with their feet toward the direction of travel and their heads toward the engines. The primary gravity conduits were located at the travel end and were operated continuously to keep everything and everyone comfortably at 1G. When the vessel was docked or when it was under cruise conditions—essentially coasting through space—artificial gravity was almost, but not quite, indistinguishable from natural gravity. When the engines were burning however—either to speed the vessel up or to slow it back down—they were imparting up to 3Gs of force in the opposite direction, enough to send everyone and everything shooting towards the ceiling at a rate of around nineteen meters per second squared. To prevent this, the secondary artificial gravity conduits were located at the thrust end of the vessel and were activated to counter the forces of acceleration. This meant that during an engine burn, three separate forces of considerable magnitude were pushing and pulling each person and object aboard, and while the computers did the best they could to make the forces counter each other exactly, they could never get it exactly exact. Thus, the human vestibular system was under a constant state of minor confusion during such times and the way the human vestibular system showed its confusion was by sending signals of nausea, vertigo, and dizziness to its host, sometimes resulting in vomiting. The degree to which a person was affected by this was widely variable and somewhat dependent on exposure. Most of Traveler‘s crew were seasoned space veterans and seemed almost oblivious to the sensation. They could walk about and even climb ladders while under acceleration. Most of Traveler‘s passengers, on the other hand, found it best if they took a sedative and slept as much as possible during acceleration cycles to keep from falling down or vomiting in the hallways.

Gath was groundborn and, whether that had anything to do with it or not, he seemed particularly sensitive to the acceleration cycles. Twice now on this voyage he had vomited because of it and every time the engines burned he was close to being completely incapacitated. Nonetheless he was here on the ob-dock, fourteen decks away from his quarters and with his sedative untaken, knowing he was probably going to vomit again once the engines lit up. He considered it a price worth paying. He wanted to be here for the jump into Sol, wanted to catch that first glimpse of the blue smear of light that had given birth to all of humanity.

After all, he was going to spend at least the next two metric years assigned to Earth. It was a trial by fire that all new medics had to undergo.

The timer counted down to zero and, right on schedule, the ship entered the circuit point. Alpha Centauri B disappeared in an instant and was replaced by the dull red vista of Proxima Centauri. Proxima was smaller, dimmer, and they were further away from it so the effect was for it to seem insignificant in comparison. It wasn’t. Its gravity began to tug on Traveler, imparting some inertia of its own. The tables in the room rattled and the bulkheads creaked the tiniest bit. Gath felt himself being pulled to the left and slightly backward, not by much, but definitely by enough to be noticeable. After perhaps a minute, the sensation dissipated as stability in velocity was achieved.

Gath looked at the display again. Metric time had not changed much. It was still one thousand, three hundred and twelve metric years, one metric cycle, nineteen metric days, two metric hours and thirty-five metric minutes from the moment the first shots of the Martian Revolution had been fired in the capital building in New Pittsburgh, thus starting the journey of the spaceborn. The countdown display, however, was now showing seventeen minutes and eighty-six seconds. That was how long they had left until the jump to Sol.

He stood up, walking over to the drink dispenser on the far wall. Gath was twenty-two metric years of age—twenty-six Britannic years of age and around twenty-nine Earth years (if he had done his conversions correctly)—and he was a bit on the tall side for a modern human, standing a full one hundred and ninety-five centimeters. His skin tone was somewhere between dark pink and light brown, bespeaking of the varied mix of Caucasian, Asian, and a little dash of Hispanic ancestry in his genes. His head and face were smoothly bald, as was the custom among spaceborn and those, like Gath, who had chosen a career dominated by them and who was trying to fit in with them. He was dressed in the standard medic shipboard off-duty uniform which consisted of a pair of blue synthetic cotton shorts and a beige synthetic cotton pullover shirt with a blue star of life and the initials HSF—for Human Space Fleet—superimposed across it on the left breast. On his feet was a pair of synthetic leather moccasins. He was physically very fit, his stomach flat, his legs well-muscled and toned, his arms strong and wiry. This came from the three years of medic training he had just finished prior to starting this journey. In a universe where medical advances had made casual exercise an unnecessary waste of time for most people, deployment members of the HSF, or “the Fleet” as it was commonly known, were required to adhere to a rigid standard of physical fitness. Gath, like any medic or marine, could run twenty kilometers at 1.5G and .66 of standard air pressure, could climb a five hundred meter hill under the same conditions, and could march twice as far and climb twice as high with fifty kilos of gear on his back.

“Dizzy, are you awake?” Gath asked the drink dispenser computer which, like drink dispenser computers all over human space, was known by that particular nickname.

“I am awake,” Dizzy replied, his voice (this one had a male voice, though just as many were female) as chipper and enthusiastic as ever. “What can I get for you, Medic Stoner?”

“How did you know it was me?” Gath asked with a smirk.

Some service computers were programmed to have a rudimentary or even a complex sense of humor. This particular dizzy was not one of them. “I analyzed your voice print and matched it to my database,” he said simply. “Were you not aware I was capable of this?”

“I guess I forgot,” Gath said. “How about a Steggar Ice, six degrees, minimal head?”

“Are you sure you want to consume beer at this hour?” Dizzy asked. “It is zero two thirty-five and, though I see you are not on the duty roster for today, I must ask if you have thought this decision through.”

Gath blinked. He had never had a dizzy ask him this before. “Uh ... I think I’ll go ahead and chance it, Dizzy. Why do you ask?”

“It is part of my protocol. I am forbidden to serve alcoholic beverages to those who are on the duty roster for the morning if it is after zero one hundred. And if someone is not on the duty roster I am still required to confirm their choice.”

“Interesting,” Gath said, rolling his eyes a bit. He wondered what whiteshirt had ordered that into the program. Did he or she really think it would keep someone from drinking if he or she really wanted to?

“Have you thought your decision through?” Dizzy asked.

“I’ve thought it over very carefully, weighed all the variables, made a list of the pros and cons, and decided that I’ll have that Steggar Ice after all. In deference to tomorrow, however, why don’t you go ahead and make it five degrees instead of six.”

Again, Dizzy failed to catch the humor Gath threw at him. “Processing,” was the reply. “Please put your derm on the screen to finalize your drink purchase.”

He put his right index finger on Dizzy’s computer screen. Dizzy read his fingerprint, confirmed he was Medic Gatheous Stoner, ID number 557-23-020111290-0009, and that he had enough funding in his monetary account to pay for the quarter credit beer. That quarter of a credit was then deducted from his account and transferred into the shipboard store account. This all took about two tenths of a second.

“Transaction approved,” Dizzy said. “Your drink is dispensing.”

A cup made of reconstituted hemp paper dropped down into the dispensing slot and an amber liquid—presumably at exactly five degrees—began to pour slowly into it from a nozzle positioned above it. In order to give a minimal head, as requested, it took the better part of a minute—a metric minute consisting of one hundred seconds—to fill with the standard 500 milliliters that made up a standard beer.

“Your beverage is ready,” said Dizzy when the pour was complete. “Enjoy.”

“Not likely,” Gath said, “but thanks for the sentiment.”

Dizzy had nothing to say to this. Gath shrugged and picked up the beer. He took a sip as he walked back to his seat at the lounge table. It was crappy beer but it was about the best available aboard the ship. The spaceborn, as a general stereotype, did not have much concern with the quality of their food and beverages. Everything was assembled by machine from base ingredients instead of being prepared as most groundborn food and beverages were. His beer, for example, had not been brewed from hops and yeast as a real beer would be, but was instead a mixture of ethyl alcohol, carbon dioxide, water, amber food dye, and artificially produced beer flavoring. It had none of the bite or aftertaste of real beer and none of the carbohydrates. The foam was pretty realistic though. Some food chemist somewhere—yes that was an actual profession in the spaceborn culture—had tinkered and experimented and managed to perfect the chemistry behind the head on a beer.

The countdown clock read twelve minutes and change and Gath was about halfway through his artificial beer, just about at the point where he no longer winced at the taste of it, when the sound of the aft door sliding open reached his ears. He turned to see who else decided to watch the final jump, figuring it was one of Traveler’s crewmembers or perhaps one of the HSF marines who made up the majority of Traveler’s passengers. He was wrong on both counts. It was Xenia Dealerman, another newly frocked medic from Gath’s graduating class.

Like Gath, she was wearing her off-duty shorts and T-shirt and a pair of synthetic leather moccasins. Her skin was a few shades darker than Gath’s, probably due to a higher proportion of African and Latin genes in her bloodline and a lower proportion of Asian. She was considerably shorter than he, standing only around one hundred seventy-two centimeters. Her body, however, though curvy and quite obviously female, was no less toned. Women were given no special considerations in regard to the physical fitness requirements of being a HSF medic. Xenia, like every one of the other twenty-four females in the class of one hundred six, could climb, march, run, and endure just as well as her male counterparts. Unlike the males, however, she had hair on her head. Not much hair, granted, not enough to interfere with the equipment or duties of the job, but there was a short crop of dark brown styled in a sharp military cut.

Gath knew it was no coincidence that she had come in here. He and Xenia were well acquainted, intimately acquainted, though Xenia would never acknowledge it and pretended to be under the impression that no one in their tight-knit medic class knew about it. She was wrong, of course. Everyone knew that the two of them had been locked in a sexual relationship since the second year of school. But that was how the spaceborn played the game. Sex outside of a committed public relationship, though as common as it had ever been throughout human history, and though not actually illegal by any sense of the word, was considered unseemly, something that respectable spaceborn did not engage in. And so, when a spaceborn man or woman did elect to engage in this unbecoming activity—as a great many of them did—everyone just pretended it was not really happening. As long as the couple in question did not actually admit their transgression or get caught in the act, the blind eye remained turned. It seemed like an enormous waste of energy to Gath and to any other groundborn who witnessed or were caught up in the charade. What was the point of it all? It was not like there was a possibility of an unwanted pregnancy or a sexually transmitted disease. Among the civilized humans, which included all of the spaceborn and the vast majority of the groundborn, no one had a baby until all parties involved were in agreement to procreate and there had not been a recorded case of disease caused by sexual activity in more than four hundred years.

“Here you are,” Xenia said, smiling as she saw him.

“Here I am,” he agreed, raising his hemp cup of beer in salute. “What are you doing up so late?”

“Looking for you, you gomer,” she replied, walking over. “I went to your quarters and snuck into your bunk—I went to a lot of trouble to do that, I might add—and you weren’t in there.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You ... you snuck into my quarters?” he asked.

She giggled. “Does that offend you?” she asked. “It’s not like I haven’t been in there a time or ten.”

“It doesn’t offend me, but ... weren’t Kiz and Vex and Snoop in there?” Kizzy Brownweed, Vexus Smythus, and Snoopsell Callahan, all medics from his and Xenia’s class, were the berthmates that shared the eighteen square meter berth on deck six with him.

“They were,” she confirmed. “Sound asleep and snoring in their bunks, under the influence of a hundred mics of phenthazine disulfate, just like I expected you to be.” Another giggle. “Why do you think I snuck in? I was going to ride out the acceleration cycle with you and they never would have known I was there.”

“What about when you had to use the pisser?” he asked.

“I have a big bladder,” she said.

“I see,” he said. “But how did you get in if I wasn’t there to let you in?”

“I’m smart and I’m cute,” she said. “When you didn’t answer my text-com, I figured you were zonked on phent-d too. So, I waited until one of the maintenance guys came by and I told him a story about how it was your birthday and I had a present I wanted to leave for you in your berth.”

“And he just let you in?” Gath asked, half appalled, half amused.

“Well, he checked to make sure your name was on the auth-list for that berth first, but yes, he let me in and walked away.” She laughed. “Sometimes it’s good to be a girl.”

“It would seem so,” Gath agreed, guessing that the maintenance guy she thought she had charmed probably knew that she was sexually involved with him as well. After all, it was a small ship with only a thousand or so people on it and they had been in close quarters with each other for almost six metric weeks. And if he hadn’t already known that Xenia was involved with him, he sure as hell knew now because a single look at Gath’s identification number, which would have been listed next to his name on the room’s authorization list, clearly showed Gath’s birthday was the eleventh day of cycle two, not the nineteenth day of cycle one—today’s date. He said none of this to Xenia, however, even though she undoubtedly knew it in the logical part of her brain. Saying something would break the facade that their relationship was secret. And that was not the spaceborn way.

“What are you doing here anyway?” she asked. “You, of all people on this ship, should know better than to be fourteen decks away and unmedicated with acceleration approaching.”

“I just wanted to see the jump into the homebody system,” he said. “We’re going to exit the circuit inside Sol’s corona.” He shrugged. “Should be kind of interesting.”

“I suppose,” she said, her tone indicating that she really did not think so. “Why did you leave your commer in your bunk though? Who does that?”

“It’s a groundborn thing,” he said, though it really wasn’t. It was a Gath thing, but blaming things on his heritage and upbringing was a good way to avoid too much discussion about them. “We like to spend a little bit of each day out of the stream. It helps keep things in perspective.”

“Wow,” she said, shaking her head in wonder. “You groundborn really are barbarians.”

“When we have to be,” he allowed.

“But what if ... oh...” She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “ ... a certain someone was trying to text-com you about a certain activity she wants to engage in with you. How would you know about it if you’re off-stream?”

“I guess I wouldn’t,” he said. “But I have faith that any certain someone who wanted to engage in any certain activities with me would track me down like a rodent dog if she were determined enough.”

Xenia giggled again, slapping at his shoulder playfully. “I think I have to concede your point there,” she said. She looked at the countdown display. “Ten minutes to go, huh? I guess I’ll grab a beer and wait with you, though I can’t guarantee how willing I’m going to feel once the acceleration starts.”

“Yeah,” he said with a grimace. “I know what you mean.”

“And ten minutes isn’t really enough time to...” She eyed the couch over in the corner of the room with a naughty gleam. “ ... or ... or is it?”

“It could be,” he said, giving her a salacious look, “but it really would be difficult to explain if someone else walked in the room, wouldn’t it?”

She thought this over for a few seconds and then nodded. “Yes, I suppose it would be.” A shrug. “I guess I’ll just get that beer then and hope for the best.”

She walked to the drink dispenser and purchased a beer, one of the darker colored ones with a bolder dose of artificial flavoring. She sat down across from him at the table, close enough to slip her foot out of her moccasin and caress his calf with it, but far enough away that she could maintain the appearance that they were just friends if someone else happened to enter the room.

“Two more days until we’re at the homeland,” she said. “Won’t it be great to actually start practicing? To start putting the last three years to work?”

“It will,” he said, “but, tell you the truth, I’m a little nervous about it. We’re going to be down on Earth, on our own a lot of the time, no more preceptors to watch over our shoulders and make sure we don’t tork something up, a whole team of marines relying on us, maybe.”

“Life or death decisions ... all on us,” she said, nodding. “I feel you. I’m just a little bit short of terrified myself. But it’s what we’ve been working for all this time, isn’t it?”