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

corridor (except for the brainless idiots who evidently did). But thankfully there appeared to be no brainless idiots in the vicinity this morning, and in minutes she was accelerating into the rings.
    Without the buffeting forces of the atmosphere fighting against her, it was a brief four minute trip. A swipe of her hand brought up the engineering controls and she initiated the transition to the WM impulse engine. Then she curled her legs underneath her and surveyed the view.
    Earth’s outer atmosphere constituted a barely organized chaos of commercial and residential space stations, zero-g manufacturing facilities, satellites and military defense platforms. The cornucopia of structures sped along a dozen progressively larger concentric orbits. Up close, it made for an extraordinarily beautiful vista: sunbeams reflecting off gleaming, smooth metals streaked in the luminous glow of the lights within. A testament to the triumph of human ingenuity.
    As her distance from Earth grew, however, it began to more closely resemble a swarm of ants feeding upon the discarded remnants of a meal, a dichotomy which had always amused her. The ship’s acceleration increased as the engine reached full power, and the ants soon faded into the halo cast by the sun.
    She stood up and stretched. It would be four hours before she reached the Mars-Jupiter Main Asteroid Belt and was ‘allowed’ to engage the sLume drive.
    Originally named the Alcubierre Oscillating Bubble Superluminal Propulsion Drive when the first working prototype had been developed nearly two hundred years earlier, a clever marketing executive had quickly coined the far more consumer-friendly term ‘sLume Drive.’
    The mechanism which propelled her ship across the stars bore little similarity to the initial prototype. The ring which held open the warp bubble was now dynamically generated and consisted of exotic particles too small even en masse to be visible. The energy requirements were met in full by the He3 LEN fusion reactor thanks to the boost in negative mass provided as a byproduct of the impulse engine.
    And while the first prototype had achieved a mere seventy times the speed of light, her drive was faster by a factor of thousands. Admittedly, it was a very high-end model.
    The particles released by the bubble’s termination were funneled into micro-singularities so as to not destroy everything in a 0.2 AU vicinity. Still, space traffic in the Earth-Lunar-Mars conjunction was quite heavy, as the region housed greater than fifteen percent of the galactic population. Though volumes of research indicated it was perfectly safe, Alliance bureaucrats insisted on concern over the idea of billions of micro-singularities being created every day in such a congested sector—some notion about destabilizing the space-time manifold.
    So superluminal drive operation by private spacecraft was forbidden inside the Main Asteroid Belt; military vessels and commercial transports naturally got a pass. And she wasted half a day on 0.1% of her trip.
    Her natural instinct would normally be to work up a case of righteous indignation at the blatant capitulation to fear rather than science, but she just couldn’t muster the necessary outrage.
    After all, she was home.
     

4
    EARTH
    V ANCOUVER, EASC H EADQUARTERS
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    T HE MEMBERS OF THE E ARTH A LLIANCE Strategic Command Governing Board positioned themselves around the oval table. Five of them were present in the flesh, the four Regional Commanders via full-dimensional holo.
    The table was a true antique, crafted for the Politburo Standing Committee headquarters in Zhongnanhai in the waning years of CCP rule. Constructed of natural Burmese Teak and lacquered in the ancient Chinese tradition, the finish now lay buried beneath multiple layers of AgInide secure conductive glass.
    The table was, of course, impressively large—far larger than required for a mere nine occupants—but a more practical table would have been less grand and not