A Star Wheeled Sky Read online

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  PART ONE Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  PART TWO Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  PART THREE Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  PART FOUR Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  A STAR-WHEELED SKY

  Brad R. Torgersen

  A Star-Wheeled Sky

  Brad R. Torgersen

  ORIGINAL TRADE PAPERBACK

  THE WAYPOINT TO ULTIMATE POWER!

  Over a millennium in the past, humans fleeing Earth in slower-than-light vessels discovered the Waywork, an abandoned alien superhighway system that allows instantaneous travel from star to star. The problem: there are a finite number of Waypoint nodes—and the burgeoning population of humans is hemmed in as a result. Furthermore, humanity is divided into contending Starstates. One of the strongest is based on an oligarchy ruling families, but still mostly democratic. The other is a totalitarian nightmare. War seems inevitable.

  Now a new Waypoint appears. Might it lead to the long-lost creators of the Waywork? If so, there may be knowledge and technology that will tip the balance in the coming war.

  Three people race to make it to the new Waypoint—and beyond. These include Wyodreth Antagean, the reluctant son of an interstellar shipping magnate, Lady Garsina Oswight, the daring daughter of a royal family, and Zuri Mikton, a disgraced flag officer seeking redemption. They are facing an implacable foe in Golsubril Vex, a merciless, but highly effective, autocrat from the Waywork’s most brutal regime. Vex is determined to control the new Waypoint and whatever revelation or power lies on the other side.

  Now humanity’s fate—to live in freedom or endless dictatorship—depends on just what that revelation might be. And who gets there first.

  BAEN BOOKS by BRAD R. TORGERSEN

  The Chaplain’s War

  A Star-Wheeled Sky

  A Star-Wheeled Sky

  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.

  Copyright © 2018 by Brad R. Torgersen

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4814-8362-9

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-673-8

  Cover art by Alan Pollack

  First Baen printing, December 2018

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)

  Printed in the United States of America

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  To Toni Weisskopf and Tony Daniel, of Baen Books—both of whom were more patient with me than I deserved.

  And to Dr. Stanley Schmidt, who edited my first readers’ choice award-winning story at Analog magazine. Stan played a large part in not only my genesis as a Hard Science Fiction author, but me becoming a Baen man too.

  Prologue

  The monitor Daffodil was fairly standard for her class: just thirty-seven crew, all packed into tight living conditions, with most of the ship’s space given over to mammoth tanks for both fuel and reaction mass. She hung in space well outside her Waypoint’s transit radius, far beyond the flotilla of security ships which patrolled the Waypoint’s perimeter.

  Unlike the rest of the watch fleet, Daffodil possessed minimal weaponry. In the event that a hostile force emerged from the Waypoint, Daffodil had exactly one job: leave the flotilla to do the fighting, and hie to the planets of the inner system. If she were to be jammed or intercepted, Daffodil possessed a dozen high-gee launches which could sprint ahead of the mothercraft. All it took was for one launch to come within broadcast range of the command force, thus sounding the alarm.

  Daffodil herself—and all of her crew—were deemed expendable.

  The Constellar office of Deep Space Operations and Defense ensured that all of Daffodil’s crew were accorded commensurate hazard pay.

  Moreover, to do the job right, Daffodil had that rarest and most expensive piece of equipment: a Key. The Key was the only way to alert the attendant security flotilla that their Waypoint was in use—gaining precious seconds of time which might make the difference between victory and defeat.

  Presently, Daffodil’s on-shift Waypoint pilot was tucked into his gee chair. The half-meter-sized spherical Key itself was mounted in the center of a control console over the Waypoint pilot’s knees. Unlike the people actually flying Daffodil, the Waypoint pilot was oblivious to his ship’s relative attitude and velocity in relation to the orbital plane of the system’s primary sun. His mind was focused purely on the Waypoint itself, as well as the other Waypoints he could sense through Daffodil’s single Key.

  His eyes were closed, and his hands moved across the Key’s impossibly smooth, alien surface. It was mentally exhausting work. Waypoint pilots took triple downtime as a result. Without sufficient sleep and recovery, constant use of a Key would drive most men mad. Likewise, the aptitude tests—for Key training—had a steep failure rate. Perhaps one individual in a hundred showed any ability for the vocation. Something to do with the Keys not being originally built to interface with human minds. Or so the schoolmasters said.

  Daffodil’s on-shift Waypoint pilot was nearing the end of his day. As always at that hour, he had a headache, and his steel-blue one-piece spaceflight uniform was moist with perspiration. Pushing these discomforts out of his conscious awareness, the pilot concentrated on the skein of the Waywork proper—hanging like a spider’s web in his mind’s eye. If he took both hands off the Key’s surface, this mental picture of the Waywork blurred and disappeared. Keeping at least one hand on the Key at all times ensured that his perception of the Waywork remained clear. Like any properly schooled Waypoint pilot, he knew the Waywork intimately: fifty-six stars, spread across an irregularly shaped lump of interstellar space, each star joined to the whole by the filaments of the web.

  The majority of that territory belonged to Starstate Constellar’s sworn enemy: Starstate Nautilan. Some of it also belonged to the other Starstates: Yamato, Sultari, and Amethyne. Only a few systems remained friendly: Constellar’s home territory—the last bastion of freedom in human space.

  The extent of the Waywork had never changed. Not in the many centuries since people had initially stumbled across the first known Keys, during humanity’s long, desperate, slower-than
-light exodus from Earth.

  Earth, the Waypoint pilot thought, now there is a name straight from legend!

  Where exactly the cradle of humankind could be found—in the vastness of the Milky Way—was unknown. No records had survived the migration, nor the battles which had ensued thereafter. Human space was defined by the Waywork, and the Waywork defined human space. Earth was somewhere outside. Perhaps far outside? Lost, orbiting one of the countless number of other suns, all burning silently across the galaxy—systems humanity could not hope to reach without a prohibitively monumental investment in time, blood, and treasure.

  As if on cue, a new Waypoint suddenly manifested in the pilot’s mental map.

  Audibly gasping, he yanked his hands off the Key, and rubbed at his eyes with balled fists—the throbbing in his head becoming especially pronounced.

  “You okay, Herreta?” asked a nearby voice. The Daffodil’s lone surgeon spent the bulk of her time in the ship’s command module, keeping an eye on the Waypoint pilots during duty hours. Like himself, the surgeon wore a standard one-piece space duty uniform, only her shoulders were decorated with the insignia of a medical officer.

  “Affirmative,” he replied, still rubbing at his face with his hands, then wiping the sweat and oil on his thighs.

  “Twenty more minutes, then you’re done for forty-eight hours,” the surgeon said reassuringly.

  “I’ll be okay,” Herreta said, more to bolster his own confidence than to reassure the medical officer presently peering at him over the back of her gee chair. Hallucinations were a known sign that a Key user was about to tip over the edge. But Herreta was young. Too young, yet, to file his medical papers. Besides which, Constellar was still at war—and needed every able-bodied trooper it could get.

  The Waypoint pilot gently put his hands back onto the surface of the Key. When his mental map of the Waywork steadied, Herreta quickly counted up the Waypoints…and held his breath. The fifty-seventh Waypoint hung apart from the familiar, ageless shape of the Waywork proper.

  Exhaling slowly, then taking several deep breaths, Herreta opened his eyes, stretched his neck from one side to the other, cracked his knuckles, then reapplied his hands to the Key’s surface…and again counted fifty-seven Waypoints.

  “Do you need someone to jump in early?” the surgeon asked.

  “Maybe,” Herreta replied. “But get the captain over here first.”

  In a command module so small, with so few crew, the skipper of the Daffodil heard every word the Waypoint pilot said, and was out of his gee chair almost instantly—floating over to the Waypoint pilot’s station.

  The light from multiple displays and holograms glowed across the air-circulation ductwork which composed the command module’s ceiling. There was precious little direct illumination. It would have interfered with the readouts. And was superfluous, when every switch, touchpad, knob, dial, and lever was backlit.

  “Incoming?” the captain said, his voice grim. “We’d better alert Commodore Iakar, aboard the Comet.”

  “Nossir,” Herreta said. “Something else. Something I thought I’d never see—not in my whole life.”

  Now the entire population of the command module were turned in their gee chairs, staring quietly at the Waypoint pilot.

  “Go on,” ordered the captain.

  “It’s a new coordinate on the Waywork map, sir.”

  “I beg your pardon?” the captain blurted.

  “A new Waypoint, sir.”

  “But…that’s not possible.”

  “Yessir. Nevertheless, it’s there. Plain as day.”

  “Get the other Waypoint pilots down here,” the captain ordered firmly. “We need confirmation.”

  “But they’re sleeping—” the surgeon began to protest.

  “Do it,” the captain barked. “Now.”

  In short order, the entire ship’s compliment of Waypoint pilots were clustered around the gee chair where the Key was integrated into Daffodil’s architecture. One by one, they took turns in the seat, each of them applying his or her hands to the Key’s surface. And one by one, each of them repeated what Herreta had said.

  “What do we do now?” Herreta asked, swallowing hard. He still couldn’t believe it.

  “Put Commodore Iakar on my chair’s secure channel,” the captain ordered his communications officer. “Then sound the ship-wide underway alarm. We’re breaking station as soon as the reactor is ready.”

  “What for?” the surgeon asked. “We’re not under attack!”

  “If our Waypoint pilots can see it,” the captain said loudly, returning to his seat, “that means every other Waypoint pilot in the Waywork can see it too. Including those of Starstate Nautilan. We dare not let them reach the new Waypoint first!”

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  Zuri Mikton’s resignation letter was short, and blunt. Perhaps a bit too blunt? She was friends with a few people who would be highly disappointed in her for quitting. Given the present state of Constellar’s affairs, the nation needed experienced officers. But in Zuri’s case, she knew she wasn’t doing anybody any favors by hanging around—taking up space at a desk assignment, with precisely zero chance for advancement. Better to put her soldiering days behind her, and get on with the business of life. Let somebody much younger, and with far fewer blotches on his record, take the job.

  Yet, Admiral Mikton hadn’t been able to push the SEND icon. For weeks, she’d brought the letter up every morning. Rereading its terse few sentences. Changing a word here, and a word there. Once the letter was received and acknowledged, there would be no going back. Zuri would be done. The Constellar Deep Space Operations and Defense personnel office would process her for retirement, and she’d find herself shipping back home—or anywhere else across Constellar—in civilian clothes.

  What would it be like, to be a sixty-year-old military dropout, albeit with a significant military pension?

  Zuri didn’t really have an answer to that question. Which is why she kept committing the letter to her DRAFTS folder at the end of every evening.

  “Ma’am,” said one of the three young ensigns who worked the communications desk of Admiral Mikton’s Interplanetary Command Center, “there’s an encrypted message coming in from the Waypoint monitor, Daffodil.”

  Like everyone else in the ICC, the ensign wore a pressed two-piece DSOD duty suit, with sharp creases in both the steel-blue pants—an officer’s black stripe down the exterior of each leg—and the mustard-yellow topcoat. His subdued silver rank was pinned to the topcoat’s largish oxford-style collar, but he didn’t have maroon battle stripes below the elbow, like some of the older veterans—both commissioned and noncommissioned alike. His boots were brown simulated leather, low top, fashioned spacer style, with a high shine. And what little was visible of his undershirt, at the neck, was aluminum gray. A communications branch insignia—black, to match the stripe on his pants—decorated each of his shoulders.

  Zuri sat up in her chair, snapping her attention away from her mail to the main hologram suspended in the air over the heads of the ICC’s duty personnel.

  “If the Waypoint security force is under attack, why didn’t our alarm system trip over?” Zuri demanded.

  The ensign’s fingers flew across his keyboard. “It’s not that kind of message, ma’am,” he said. “Commodore Iakar’s code has been attached—so we know he’s authenticating it…whatever it is. The decryption warning says this is for your eyes, and your eyes alone.”

  Zuri slowly leaned back in her chair. How odd.

  “Send it to my workstation,” she ordered.

  The ICC was shaped like a small amphitheater, with Admiral Mikton’s seat and computer console being positioned at the highest level, toward the very rear. From that vantage point she could survey the entire room, and every piece of the Interplanetary Command puzzle. But her specific seat had no one behind it—no eyes to watch over Zuri’s shoulder. She received the encrypted message from the Daffodil, using her worksta
tion’s battle traffic interface, then pressed her hand to the workstation’s reader. A tiny stripe of blue light swept over her palm, then the battle traffic interface glowed green, and Zuri was able to read the full text of the message which had been transmitted.

  Like her resignation letter, the message from the Daffodil’s captain was short, and to the point. She reread the message three times, to be sure she was understanding the situation correctly, then Zuri double-checked Commodore Iakar’s attached code. Yup. Authenticity confirmed. It was not a joke.

  Zuri sat silently for a few moments, her fist at her mouth while she gently gnawed on the knuckle of her thumb. Of all the things she might have expected when she dressed for work that morning, this particular bit of news was at the very bottom of Zuri’s list.

  “Watch commander,” Zuri called out, “put us on class-three alert.”

  Several heads swiveled around, eyes staring up at the admiral as she looked out into the air—at the holographic representation of the star system over which she had presided, as top-most DSOD officer, for the past few years. A class-three alert was unusual. Most of the staff in the room who’d not gone on a fleet exercise had never even heard a class three being called—outside of mock drills.

  “Class-three alert, is that correct, ma’am?” asked the lieutenant who was sitting at the watch commander’s station. Like the younger ensign before him, the lieutenant too lacked maroon battle stripes below his elbows.