Hannah Sawyer (Kinsella Universe Book 3) Read online

  Hannah

  Sawyer

  Gina Marie Wylie

  Copyright © 2006, 2012 Gina Marie Wylie

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN:

  ISBN-13:

  CONTENTS

  1

  Chapter 1

  1

  2

  Chapter 2

  28

  3

  Chapter 3

  54

  4

  Chapter 4

  78

  5

  Chapter 5

  98

  6

  Chapter 6

  119

  7

  Chapter 7

  145

  8

  Chapter 8

  175

  9

  Chapter 9

  201

  10

  Chapter 10

  228

  11

  Chapter 11

  265

  12

  Chapter 12

  293

  13

  Chapter 13

  330

  14

  Chapter 14

  375

  15

  Chapter 15

  408

  Chapter 1

  Snowflakes swirled and twirled in the gray dawn. A tall, thin young woman stood like a gray shadow on the hotel balcony watching the dancing shapes fall from the sky. She was motionless and indistinct -- hard to discern in the dimness of the early day.

  She was tall, nearly two meters, and she stood with her shoulders hunched as if against the icy air. But then, she’d have stood the same way in Death Valley on the hottest day of the summer. Her gray eyes were cast down, but she was able to watch what was in front of her; a skill she had long practiced.

  Hannah Sawyer was wearing a thin blouse, thicker ski pants -- and was barefoot. She stood unmoving and inert, letting the snow dust her shoulder-length brown hair. Hannah wished for many things, but it was with the certain knowledge that her wishes counted for nothing in either the great scheme of things or in father’s grandiose plans. That explained why she was indifferent to the cold seeping into her bones and the discomfort from her feet.

  She heard the glass balcony door slide open behind her. She didn’t bother to turn; she knew who it was.

  “Something has come up. I have to return to Honolulu at once. Go to your room and pack your things. There’s a limo coming. Hurry.”

  Her father’s voice was like it always was: brusque and commanding. Concern for his daughter? Not a concern! None!

  “Yes, Father,” Hannah replied mildly. She turned and stared at the retreating figure without expression on her face, while inwardly her thoughts were bitter.

  You left out, Father, that this was supposed to be my two weeks. We would do together, you told me, whatever I wanted. I wanted to come to Christchurch so I could ski in the first week of June, something you couldn’t do at any time of the year in either Honolulu where I grew up or in Pasadena where I went to school.

  It was supposed to be her graduation gift. How many fathers have daughters who graduate a week after their eighteenth birthday with a BS in Benko-Chang physics from Caltech? Hannah had been pleased to get three days of skiing in; one of them had even been what she truly wanted -- that was the first day when her father was still busy with problems from work. She’d been left to herself and she’d spent the time on the cross-country runs.

  Her father had dragged her to the downhill courses after that. There was nothing, he averred, that surpassed the pleasure of hurtling down a mountain at seventy kilometers an hour. Hannah, of course, was supposed to be behind him, on his left, the entire time.

  Resigned, Hannah went into her bathroom, swept her few cosmetic and personal items into a small bag, zipped the bag shut and dropped it into her suitcase. She emptied the closet into the same suitcase, then two dresser drawers into a second suitcase. She made no attempt at order or neatness, just concerned about getting it done. She did, though, put on some socks and a pair of boots.

  There was a knock on her bedroom door and when she answered, it was a bellman with a cart. Her father was standing in the main room of the suite, a phone stuck in his ear. “Hannah, five minutes!” he told her.

  “I’m ready now.”

  He didn’t bother to acknowledge her; instead he went back to talking into his phone.

  A few minutes later they were in the limo headed for the airport.

  It was impossible not to notice that something unusual was happening. Her father was talking to a lot of people. He was either giving direct orders or talking around things with people for whom a simple command wouldn’t suffice.

  He was preparing to spend money, a lot of money. Hannah knew he had been preparing to bid on a major Fleet Aloft contract for missiles. He wasn’t acting as though he’d won a single bid -- he was behaving more like he’d received an exclusive order from the Fleet for every missile Sawyer Astronautics could produce.

  For weeks his assistants had been looking into sites in one of belt habitats for a new facility. Now, instead of picking one, it was clear he was trying to acquire several.

  By the time they reached the airport at Christchurch the snow had increased to the point visibility was just a few hundred meters. Instead of going through the usual checkpoint, her father’s limo simply went to a gate, where he handed the guards thousand dollar bills and pointed at his aircraft. Richard Sawyer was well known and well feared. It was far easier to take the money and let him pass than dispute the issue.

  The two crew members of her father’s plane met them. Without a word they loaded the luggage into the belly of the aircraft and then boarded after their passengers.

  It was early June 2445. Someone who watched the Wright Brothers aircraft struggle into the air might have recognized that what they boarded was an aircraft, but probably not. A person a hundred years after the Wright Brothers would have recognized that it was likely a very fast aircraft, probably a jet. Fifty years later someone seeing the aircraft would have had to think what was meant by “jet,” an obsolete term, for all that modern aircraft were propelled by turbines. Just not jet turbines.

  The dawn of flight came sixty years before the dawn of space travel. Except the first dawn of space travel had been a false dawn. The Americans put a couple of people on the moon; they and the Russians orbited space stations of the most primitive types. The Chinese put a few people into space. Robot probes had been sent to orbit most of the major bodies in the solar system, but that was pretty much it. Space travel was too expensive, too complicated and too dangerous for the public’s taste and pocketbook.

  Then, fifty years after space flight’s false dawn, everything changed overnight.

  Hannah smiled slightly as she took her seat in her father’s aircraft. It would be forever a joke to Caltech alumni. Halfway through the second decade of the 21st century, Benko and Chang, Caltech doctoral students, discovered how to create a point gravity source at a remove from their equipment. Both Benko and Chang had gone on to receive doctorates -- but those had come a decade after the discovery and had been honorary.

  The point gravity source had a magnitude that varied depending on the parameters of the equipment. The gravity source was vanishingly small and, as a result of some rather unusual gravity equations, the effect on another point source a few meters away (a vehicle, for instance) was considerable. The Earth, with its center of gravity thousands of kilometers away, wasn’t affected by it, even if the point gravity source was affected to the same degree anything else was on the surface of the Earth.

  Benko-Chang fields created very deep gravitational wells, with microsc
opic diameters. It didn’t take much to change the field to a puncture in space-time instead of a deep well. Then the hole and anything near it went somewhere else, at a velocity that exceeded that of light in the familiar universe.

  Benko-Chang fields were affected by the way large gravity fields distorted the fabric of space -- and the larger the gravity field, the further from the center the Benko-Chang effect needed to be to work. This was called the “fan well,” inside which the “High Fan,” the faster-than-light mode of Benko-Chang turbines, didn’t work.

  Fortunately for humanity, there was a large gap between a gravity field that killed the Benko-Chang effect completely, and the one we all live in: Earth’s. Earth would have to shrink by two-thirds and keep the same mass to stop Benko-Chang on the surface. Still, the sun was so large that you had to be just outside Earth’s orbit to go to High Fan.

  Benko and Chang discovered how to create the Benko-Chang effect, but they didn’t discover what was happening or how it worked. That had fallen to the spiritual mother of both Caltech and real space flight. Even now, four hundred and thirty-five years later, people recognized that. Stephanie Kinsella, then twenty-two years of age, a tenured professor of physics at Caltech, had done the math; she was the one with her eyes famously on the right place to aim.

  Two years later the first purpose-built faster-than-light manned vessel lifted from Earth. Politicians and dirty-feet -- a term that didn’t enter the lexicon for another hundred years -- screwed Stephanie Kinsella. Instead of commanding the expedition of the ship she’d built with her own hands, from a design of her own, the politicians relegated her to supercargo: she was essentially along for the ride.

  As a sop, the President of the United States had made her a rear admiral in the new Space Service. They saddled Stephanie Kinsella with an Air Force general commanding the expedition and an Air Force colonel commanding the first starship, the ship she’d built herself, the Ad Astra.

  You could, Hannah thought with a grin, quiz ten thousand Rim Runner kids and they would, each and every one, be able to tell the entire story. You could quiz a million dirty-foot kids and be lucky to find one who knew what had happened on that flight. Most had never heard of Stephanie Kinsella -- unless they matriculated at Caltech or the Fleet Academy near Honolulu. In those places you heard about Admiral Kinsella on your first day and every day after that.

  The flight of the Ad Astra was the first manned space flight beyond the solar system. The ship looped around the moon and then went to Mars. The expedition landed on the Red Planet, the general in charge stepped off and said bold, cribbed words about a greater leap for mankind. Then the scientists got their turn to leave the ship and do some research on the planet. In three days they learned more about Mars than from all the previous robot probes had learned from Mars.

  Then Ad Astra lifted off and the next stop was at Tau Ceti, more or less just around the stellar corner, a dozen light years from Earth. Ceti III was an Earth-like planet with an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. More importantly, the planet had a DNA biosphere. Evolution was about where Earth’s had been in the Permian period of its own geologic evolution.

  Evolution is a funny process. At the time of the first interstellar flight no one understood that DNA was a self-organizing system. When sand in an hourglass falls, individual grains of sand have a random set of locations that they can end up at. Except it isn’t a true random set because the actual final positions are highly constrained. Sand falling free onto a pile of similar grains makes a cone-shaped pile. The angle of repose of the grains is a function of gravity and grain size, but the sand always forms a cone. Always.

  Evolution goes through certain stages. True, some planets go through one stage or another faster or slower than others. But all the points are hit along the way, just like hourglass sand always forms a cone.

  On Ceti III, flowering plants had gotten off to a relatively quick start; insects followed in lock step.

  Two crewmen from the Ad Astra had been injured on Mars. They had been part of a group of several people who engaged in a foot race across the Martian landscape trying to break the Olympic hundred-meter track sprint record. A dozen crewmen ran, three broke the record; however the slowest times were significantly longer than the others because the runners had sprained ankles on some of the trillions of rocks littering the surface of Mars.

  On Ceti III the first fatality of interstellar flight occurred. The death provided a needed lesson to those who would later travel away from Earth.

  In those days, pathogens from alien planets were a serious concern. Eventually, it was realized that species specificity was too hard to achieve and while there were infectious bugs off Earth, they could be dealt with.

  The expedition commander, General Samuel Greene, had been walking a short distance from others of the expedition. He spotted something that looked similar to an earthly rose. Curious, and in spite of warnings, briefings, admonitions and the hour anyone who went off the ship had to spend in decontamination, he undid his helmet and bent over to smell the flower.

  More than one person heard him say, “What a pretty flower! I wonder what it smells like?” Only one was close enough to realize that the general was undoing his helmet. A shouted warning didn’t suffice.

  General Greene leaned over and sniffed the faux rose. He went into anaphylactic shock and was dead a minute later, shortly after the first person reached him.

  It turned out that while pathogens weren’t a significant concern off Earth, allergens were. A few years after the Ad Astra returned to Earth, work was completed on anti-allergy medications and allergies never posed a significant hazard after that.

  Stephanie Kinsella was the first Rim Runner; all the Rim Runners acknowledged that. She set the standard for those who came later. One of the standards was that Professor Kinsella loved to bet. She had, in fact, bet the President of the United States that she was right and he was wrong. She bet him the people he’d placed in command of the mission were incompetent -- and that she was competent.

  Thus it was that the man who commanded Ad Astra opened his secret orders to take effect in the event of the death of his superior -- to find that Rear Admiral Kinsella outranked a mere colonel and he remained second fiddle.

  Professor Kinsella brought everyone else back from the expedition alive and uninjured. It took hostile action for that to change, the deaths of more that six hundred million people, and at a personal sacrifice that few would make. On the other hand, no one ever doubted the resolve in the fledging “Federation of Democracies” ever again, nor the willingness to sacrifice for others that members of the Federation Fleet, particularly its Marines, were willing to endure.

  Hannah snapped back to the present when the pilot came back from the cockpit and asked her father, “Honolulu, sir?”

  “Yes. As fast as you can get me there. I don’t care what you do, get me there as fast as you can. I will pay any fines, I will go to bat for you before any board. Do whatever it takes.”

  One thing Hannah knew was that if her father promised, he would do his level best to fulfill that promise -- unless he had something else to do. In which case you’d better be able to take care of yourself.

  “We could go sub-orbital, sir. We can do it safely, even if we’re technically not certified. The difference in air pressure between twenty thousand meters and two hundred thousand is about as much as a sneeze. Less, more like.”

  “How much time would that cut from the flight?”

  “Forty-five minutes from now, Mr. Sawyer, you’ll be deplaning in Honolulu. If we follow a standard flight plan -- call it two and a half hours.”

  “I wish I could have been there yesterday,” her father told the pilot. “As fast as you can!”

  The pilot nodded and went back up front.

  Her father turned to Hannah. “It’s a felony to break the Official Secrets Act. You don’t know anything and you don’t want to ask any questions. Shortly, within the hour, the Federation Council is going to be declar
ing an emergency. I can’t tell you why, but I can tell you that Fleet Aloft is going to be in the market for every missile and laser we can sell them.”

  Hannah contemplated what he’d said as the aircraft lifted away from Christchurch.

  All her life she’d known no financial concerns, but that didn’t mean her life was without stress and fear. Her father was always doing something athletic, always insisting that his daughter should share in that.

  They’d gone hang-gliding and scuba diving. Her father exulted in a break-neck pace down a steep ski slope. They’d climbed mountains in the Alps, Rockies and Andes. From the time she was six, she’d been ski jumping and running downhill courses.

  There was one reason and only one reason the Federation and Fleet Aloft would want to buy every weapon her father could produce. And that reason had to be a war. Wars of any size had ceased three hundred years before. But if they were about to have an emergency declaration -- that had to mean it was serious.

  Later, the intercom popped and the pilot’s voice came back to them. “Mr. Sawyer, Fleet Aloft has ordered all vessels, orbital or sub-orbital, to land forthwith.”

  “Do as you’re told.”

  “Sir, we’ve been told to land in California. Ontario airport.”

  Her father’s eyes focused on the bulkhead for a few seconds, before he spoke. “Are they serious?”

  “Yes, sir. They broadcast the nuclear release order in the clear. They say they will nuke anyone who doesn’t obey.”

  “Then do as we are told,” Hannah’s father told the pilot.

  “Yes, sir. Ontario it is.”

  Hannah had never traveled sub-orbital before. It was a pleasant surprise to find that the flight time to California was only ten minutes longer than that to Hawaii. And most of the extra time turned out to be waiting for the tower in California to clear them to land.