Starshine: Aurora Rising Book One by G. S. Jennsen Read Free Book Online

out beneath her. She far outpaced the sun, and like a clock winding in reverse dawn soon turned to night.
     
“Alex, would you like to fly her?”
The smile breaking across her face morphed to a frown at the midway point. The viewport revealed only the stars above and moonlight reflecting in the water below. They had left the San Pacifica Regional Spaceport after breakfast, but this far out over the Pacific the sun had not yet risen. “But Dad, I can’t see anything. It’s too dark.”
“You will, moya milaya. Come sit in my lap and I’ll show you.”
She scrambled out of the passenger seat and onto his thigh in a flash, fidgeting a bit to get situated. Though she was tall for her age, her feet didn’t quite reach the floor; instead they danced an excited rhythm in the air.
“Are you ready?”
She absently tucked minimally brushed hair behind her ear and nodded. “I’m ready.”
“Okay. I’m going to send you the access code for the ship’s HUD. You won’t be able to control it right away though. I want to walk you through what each of the screens mean first.”
A tiny light in the corner of her vision signaled a new message. She zoomed it, and a question floated in the virtual space in front of her. ‘Access ship flight displays?’
She both thought and exclaimed “Yes!” Her father chuckled softly at her ear.
The world lit up around her. A wall of semitransparent screens overlay the viewport. They painted a canvas of aeronautical splendor in radiant white light.
Airspeed. Altitude. Bearing. Pitch angle. Air temperature. Atmosphere pressure and air density. Radar. Engine load. Other readings whose purpose were a mystery. The screens’ relative focus and opacity responded to every shift in her gaze, then to her intentional thoughts. Secure in her father’s lap, she grinned in delight.
Her life would never be the same again.
     
    At seven kilometers altitude she began maneuvering toward the Northeast 1 Pacific Atmosphere Corridor. Technically two corridors—one for arrivals and one for departures to avoid nasty collisions—it was one of twenty-two such passages located on the planet, spaced 4–5,000 thousand kilometers apart at 55° N, 0° and 55° S latitudes.
    Nearly all starships possessed the drive energy, hull strength and shields necessary to pass through any planetary atmosphere having an escape velocity value within fifty percent greater or lesser than the habitable zone. The exceptions were dreadnoughts and capital ships, which were built and forever remained in space. But that didn’t mean it was an especially fun or comfortable experience, and the wear and tear from frequent atmosphere traversals wreaked havoc on a ship’s structure and mechanics.
    The solution was the corridors: reverse shields which held back the majority of atmospheric phenomena from a cylindrical area. A series of rings made of a nickel alloy metamaterial absorber generated a plasma field between each ring to create the corridors.
    On Earth the rings measured half a kilometer in diameter and stretched from an altitude of ten to two hundred sixty kilometers, well into the thermosphere. The details varied on other worlds, but every planet with a population in excess of about twenty thousand had at least one paired corridor.
    It was midmorning back on the coast and traffic was brisk. She slowed and eased into the queue of vessels departing Earth.
    For basic security or record-keeping purposes or perhaps merely to give a few bureaucrats something to do, a monitoring device recorded the serial number designation of every vessel to enter the corridor. If one was flagged for any of a variety of reasons—but most often due to a criminal warrant—a containment field captured it at the second ring, immobilizing it until the authorities arrived.
    She’d seen it happen once or twice and found it an absurd annoyance. The system was ridiculously porous; if someone wanted to avoid capture, he or she simply wouldn’t take the