The Tangled Stars

by Edward Willett

Genres: Space Opera; Cyberpunk; Time Travel

Synopsis

This new novel from an Aurora Award–winning author presents a sci-fi caper of high-stakes interstellar travel.



More than a century ago, the network of MASTTs, the space-time tunnels that made interstellar travel possible, violently collapsed, the backlash destroying a lot of the solar system's space-based infrastructure. Cooper "Coop" Douglas, a thief and conman is in serious debt to outer-system crime-lord Eric Galioto. While trying to salvage a valuable chunk of a space station destroyed by the backlash, Coop makes a startling discovery: MASTT Primus, the tunnel that used to lead to New Earth, is open again. That raises an intriguing possibility: Coop could flee the solar system and his debt to Galioto and make a new life—and possibly fortune—around another star.



Accompanied by his first mate, the wisecracking, AI-uplifted, genetically modified cat Thibauld, Coop sets out to "liberate" the solar system's only remaining functioning starship from an Earthside museum, enlisting the help of Laysa Grey, a former-lover-turned-cop on Luna. Along the way, he is pursued by Galioto and dogged by law enforcement and thugs.



And beyond MASTT Primus, the tangled stars await . . .

Release date: October 18, 2022

Publisher: DAW

Print pages: 420

Sample

Chapter One

“Every bit of empty space is like every other bit of empty space. Until it isn’t.” —Thibauld’s Private Log

A soft-but-solid batting of my cheek woke me from a disjointed dream in which I was about to be shoved out of an air lock. I gasped (air, thankfully) and then blinked up into two yellow eyes framed by a black-furred feline face. “Collision risk,” Thibauld said. Pulling back his outstretched paw, the cat turned, his tail sweeping across my face. Then, with a solid kick to my midsection, he leaped toward the open hatch of my cabin and the glowing lights of the control room beyond, a distance of several meters that he cleared with ease in the Ernest Cox’s sub-Lunar gravity.
 
“Collision risk” was a statement full of alarming possibilities but low in actual information content. Thibauld was still a cat, for all he was both genetically and cybernetically enhanced, with a high-level autonomous AI overlaying his brain (literally: if you’d taken the top off his skull, you’d have seen a silvery sheen of quantum-computing nanofoam covering the gray matter of his brain, or so he said). As a cat, he was largely unconcerned about a mere human’s desire for detailed communication, even when said human was his putative captain and, even more putatively, owner.
 
I pulled myself out of my sleeping bag and got up carefully, since I knew from experience leaping out of bed in low gravity was a good way to crack your head on the ceiling. I told those rare individuals who came aboard the Ernest Cox that I kept the grav-web at that level because—as a native of Luna—I liked it, but the truth was, the Ernest Cox was so old, decrepit, and chronically short of power that she literally couldn’t generate anything stronger.
 
Thibauld sat on his stool in front of the smart-matter primary display, which he’d configured to show all the information he thought I needed to know. I blinked at it. For the past three days, the most important thing displayed there had been the vector plot of the piece of space junk we were pursuing and our own, the two lines slowly converging toward a rendezvous in a little less than forty-eight hours. There, I would find out if said space junk had enough salvage value to keep Eric Galioto and his violence-prone associates from seizing my ship and tossing me out the nearest air lock to become space junk myself, though my lifeless corpse would be a sad disappointment to any future salvage-seeker who might encounter it.
 
That very real possibility had been the genesis of the dream from which Thibauld had awakened me. As I stared at the display, I wondered if I’d actually been better off in the dream world. “What is that?”
 
Thibauld just looked at me, yellow eyes unblinking. He didn’t deign to answer, which meant he didn’t know.
 
What it looked like was a flaw in the display, as if a circular set of pixels had gone blank. Trouble was, that wasn’t possible in a smartmatter screen. Its display elements couldn’t fail—or rather, if they did, they were immediately reconstituted into new, working ones.
 
Which meant that blank hole lying directly athwart our current trajectory was really there.
 
Except . . . it couldn’t be.
 
Nor was it, according to the data from all the other sensors, whose readouts Thibauld had also thoughtfully displayed. The thing didn’t register on any of them. It gave off no signals. It reflected no light or radio waves. It had no mass.
 
It wasn’t there—except it blocked the light of the stars beyond it.
 
I looked closer. It also wasn’t a hole. It only looked that way because the display was 2D mode. “Ernie,” I said to the ship AI, “convert main display to 3D.”
 
The display reconfigured itself into a cylinder, revealing that the “hole” was really a sphere. One thing hadn’t changed, though: our projected trajectory led straight into it.
 
“Ernie,” I said, “are you trying to miss that thing?”
 
“Affirmative,” replied the ship. “Under current energy-use restraints, however, I am unable to generate sufficient Delta-v to avoid it.”
 
I looked at the data again. No wonder: the black sphere was fully half the size of Io, my current moon-of-residence.
 
“How come this hasn’t been charted? Why doesn’t it have warning beacons around it?” I demanded of no one in particular.
 
“Because it wasn’t there until approximately five minutes ago, just before I woke you,” Thibauld said.
 
“It popped into existence out of nowhere? Something of that size?”
 
“It popped into existence out of nowhere, but it wasn’t that size,” Thibauld said. “When sensors registered it, it was only a few meters in diameter.”
 
I stared at him. He looked back, unblinking. I looked back at the display again. Sure enough, the thing was growing. Rapidly.
 
“Great,” I muttered. “Ernie, can you generate the necessary Delta-v if I lift energy-use restraints?” Ernie’s energy came from a working antique of a fusion reactor, which tells you all you need to know about the age and general decrepitude of my ship. Energy-use restraints were really fuel restraints, the fuel in question being deuterium, of which we had a far-from-unlimited supply.
 
“Affirmative,” said the ship.
 
Well, that was something.
 
“Ernie, if you use sufficient energy to keep us from colliding with that thing, will we have enough deuterium reserves remaining to make the necessary changes in trajectory and velocity to return to Io?”
 
“Affirmative,” the ship said.
 
I let out a relieved breath. It was premature.
 
“However,” Ernie continued, “we will no longer be able to capture the target.”
 
I winced. That hunk of space junk was the only slim hope I had of paying off Galioto—or, at least, paying him enough to convince him I was worth more to him alive than dead.
 
I glanced at Thibauld again. “Should we just accept collision with that thing? It doesn’t seem to have any mass. It’s not giving off any energy. Maybe it’s just an . . . optical illusion.”
 
Thibauld looked at the display, then at me. “No,” he said.
 
And, of course, he was right. If even photons couldn’t pass through it, it seemed unlikely something the size and mass of the Ernest Cox could.
 
I conceded defeat. “Fine,” I said. I looked back at the display. “Ernie, all energy restrictions are lifted. Target capture is no longer a priority. Avoid colliding with that . . . anomaly . . . at all costs.” I realized what I’d said and hastily rephrased. “Um, at all costs, congruent with maintaining the health and safety of Thibauld and me.”
 
“Affirmative,” Ernie said. “This is an acceleration warning. Secure cabin. Shaver Drive engaging in sixty seconds. Impulse duration forty-nine seconds. Grav-web cannot fully compensate. Project four point two-three Gs.”
 
“Four point . . . crap.”
 
Large, expensive, well-appointed space vessels and space stations not only had grav-webs that could be set at any level they desired, they also had far more effective inertial dampers than the Ernest Cox.
 
Both grav-webs and inertial dampers are near-magical technology I cannot begin to explain the workings of for the very good reason that I don’t have a clue. They date back to the days of interstellar travel. So does the Shaver Space Drive, which allows ships to maneuver around the solar system in days or weeks rather than years or decades. I don’t know how it works, either, although I do know it emits a lovely purple glow while doing so. I also know how much one costs to operate: a lot.
 
The Ernest Cox was expensive, but alas, she was neither large nor well-appointed. Which meant that, like her grav-web, her inertial dampers were second-rate. We would not be smeared into jelly against the bulkhead when the drive kicked in, but we would be uncomfortably compressed.
 
I hurriedly got into my acceleration seat. Less hurriedly, Thibauld curled up inside the glorified pet bed that was his version of the same thing. I watched the display nervously. He watched it impassively, though the tip of his tail continued to flick.
 
The drive impulse, when it came, was brutal, slamming me down into the thick gel padding and pushing the breath out of my lungs for what seemed a lot longer than forty-nine seconds. Thibauld let out an uncharacteristic and clearly involuntary moaning yowl. When the pressure eased, I gulped air and blinked blurred eyes at the display. “Ernie, report status.”
 
“Impulse complete. Trajectory sufficiently altered to—”
 
The AI’s voice cut off in mid-sentence. I’d never heard that happen before. It didn’t seem to bode well.
 
I was right.
 
“Anomaly’s rate of expansion has increased,” Ernie said. “Drive impulse insufficient.”
 
“Insufficient?” My heart, already racing after the short burst of high-G acceleration, sped up still more. “Ernie, recalculate and burn again.”
 
“Deuterium reserves critical,” Ernie said dispassionately. “Any further attempt to avoid the anomaly will reduce our fuel to the point I will no longer be able to generate the Delta-v necessary to rendezvous with any known inhabited station, asteroid, moon, or planet in the system within the constraints of our supplies and life support.”
 
Which would mean sending out a Mayday and hoping someone heard it and came to “rescue” us . . . which, out here, was just as likely, if not more likely, to mean killing us and taking the Ernest Cox for salvage.
 
“It wouldn’t work anyway,” Thibauld said, startling me. He’d stuck his head out of his acceleration bed. “That thing is blowing up like a pig in a vacuum.”
 
“When have you ever seen . . . never mind. Ernie, how long until collision?”
 
“Seven minutes from . . . mark.”
 
Seven minutes. I glanced at Thibauld. He pulled his head back into his acceleration bed and started to wash himself.
 
“Cats,” I muttered.
 
Seven minutes was plenty of time to make my peace with God, which is what my Christian-orphanage upbringing urged me to do, but under the circumstances, I rather thought that if God wanted to make peace, He could start the negotiations by moving that mysterious, ever-growing black sphere out of our path before we discovered firsthand, and probably catastrophically, what it was made of.
 
There was literally nothing I could do to influence the course of events. I suppose I could have spent the time watching my life flash before my eyes, but there was nothing I could do to influence the course of events that had led me to this point, either.
 
Maybe I should wash, I thought, glancing at Thibauld, but I lacked both the desire and the flexibility to lick myself in the spot he was currently cleaning so industriously.
 
I looked at the screen again. The coordinates of the center of the anomaly were prominently displayed above its featureless image.
 
And then I blinked. I knew those coordinates, and it’s not like I make a habit of memorizing random strings of numbers pinpointing bits of vacuum. (Can you have a “bit” of vacuum? a part of me wondered. How do you quantify nothing? Since I was used to that part of myself asking stupid questions, I ignored it.) “Ernie,” I said, “display coordinates for MASTT Primus.”
 
“MASTT Primus no longer exists.”
 
I sighed. AIs were often annoyingly literal-minded, Thibauld being a notable exception. “I know that, Ernie. I misspoke. Please display the coordinates for where MASTT Primus would be if it had not been destroyed.”
 
They appeared. They didn’t precisely match the coordinates of the anomaly, but they would definitely fall somewhere inside it.
 
The thing was, as Ernie had unnecessarily reminded me, MASTT Primus didn’t exist. Not anymore. Not since they tried to open MASTT Secundus. (Yes, identifying things by way of Latin ordinal numbers is pretentious. Not my fault. I wasn’t born yet.)
 
Once upon a time, humans had an interstellar civilization, thanks to “Multiverse-Adjacent Spacetime Tunnels”—MASTTs. But that went away a long time ago.
 
MASTTs got around that pesky speed-of-light barrier by taking a shortcut through the both infinitesimal and infinite everywhere-adjacent extradimensional space between our universe and the next one over in the multiverse, and if you know what that means, then you’re smarter than I am. All I knew was that specially equipped ships could zip through these tunnels to other solar systems. Over a century or so, humans settled (to a greater or lesser degree) a plethora of systems, building all sorts of colonies, mining operations, research stations, pleasure palaces, and more.
 
But then, one hundred and twenty-seven years ago, it all came crashing down.
 
Earth’s government was just as paranoid back then as it is now (which is saying something), and it also had a stronger grip on the solar system than the current version. MASTT Primus was the only MASTT it allowed, and it led to only one place, the first settled planet, rather unimaginatively called New Earth (personally, I’m surprised they didn’t go with Terra Secundus).
 
In contrast, New Earth allowed multiple MASTTs to be opened, making it the hub of galactic expansion and also (from Old Earth’s point of view) a bit full of itself. Eventually, it broke free of Earth’s government, thumbed its nose at the homeworld, and went about becoming fabulously wealthy.
 
This peeved Old Earth (Terra Primus?) no end, but as much as it would have liked to teach New Earth a lesson, the homeworld simply couldn’t launch a military attack through a MASTT with any hope of success because ships have to travel through one at a time, which means all you have to do to defend the other end is wait and pick them off as they emerge.
 
Old Earth did have one ace up its sleeve, though. It managed, by hook and crook, skullduggery, and more than a few extrajudicial executions, to keep the knowledge of how to open a new MASTT all to itself. Only ships from Old Earth could open new MASTTs, a service performed only for an exorbitant fee—the only thing that kept Old Earth relevant. Old Earth’s government decided it would open a second MASTT within the solar system and use that as a beachhead for a second expansion of human civilization, only this time in a much more controlled, Old Earth-centric fashion.
 
To say the scheme blew up in their faces is both sadly literal and a vast understatement.
 
I checked the time to impact. Less than four minutes.
 
There was a standard procedure for opening new MASTTs. To create the necessary puncture in the fabric of the universe, a fleet of a dozen specialized ships focused enormous energies of a mysterious nature on a specific point in space for a specific amount of time, calculated by the powerful AIs who had invented the technology in the first place. This would create a pathway to a specific star system, identified by Earth’s array of space telescopes as having a decent chance of hosting habitable—or at least exploitable—planets. Then, a previously built space station was moved into place to anchor the MASTT and keep it open.
 
Until the far end was likewise stabilized, only a special kind of vessel, a Pioneer-class starship, could travel through the MASTT. This ship would place a temporary stabilizing ring around the far end of the MASTT, the seed from which a matching space station would grow, send a small communications drone back through the MASTT with news of its successful arrival in the new system, and then scout, reporting periodically before finally returning, typically after two or three months.
 
Just such a ship was sent through MASTT Secundus, which had been opened without drama. It was all routine—or it should have been.
 
But the ship never reported back. Instead, almost the moment it disappeared into the MASTT, the Earth end of the new interstellar pathway collapsed.
 
Such a thing had never happened before. Details are sketchy because of what happened next.
 
The collapse of the MASTT released energy—a lot of it. It destroyed the MASTT Secundus terminus. It destroyed every ship involved in opening the MASTT and every ship that happened to be in the vicinity, observing. At the speed of light, it leaped from orbital station to orbital station, from communications satellite to communications satellite, from ship to ship. It blasted through Earth’s atmosphere, frying equipment and buildings and spaceports and several thousand human beings. In short, in the space of a few hours, it shattered much of the spaceborne part of Old Earth’s empire, ending with a final catastrophic encounter with the terminus at MASTT Primus, reducing it to tumbling debris spinning off in a thousand different directions. And then it leaped into the MASTT itself and, effectively, pulled it closed in its wake.
 
On that day, Earth ceased to be part of an interstellar civilization.
 
That old line of poetry, “things fall apart, the center cannot hold,” certainly applied to what came next. So many ships had been destroyed, so many stations and satellites and outposts, so many engineers and scientists and ordinary people’s lives lost or changed forever, that the next few decades were . . . not very nice.
 
Fortunately, I still hadn’t been born.
 
By the time I appeared on the scene on Luna, squalling my displeasure, things had settled into an uneasy new status quo. Earth’s government ruled from an orbiting Capitol that also housed the ruling elite, but its sway did not extend beyond Luna, and even on Luna, its writ was tenuous. In the rest of the system, on stations and moons, there were multiple governments of varying types, from shaky democracies to at least two theocracies I knew of (both inside hollowed-out asteroids: one Islamic, one a weird neo-Pagan cult) to (most common of all) nasty little one-man-or-woman dictatorships and/or criminal empires.
 
Skirmishes had been fought, leaders deposed, new leaders installed, atrocities committed in roughly equal measure to acts of selfless heroism—pretty ordinary history-type stuff. In general, though, large-scale hostilities were avoided as being bad for business and wasteful of both lives (low importance) and ships (very high importance). What really mattered was money: Earthbucks still ruled, even if Earth itself did not. Money bought larger quarters, more water, more entertainment, more comforts, and the aforementioned ships with high-end grav-webs and inertial dampers, which were important in various enterprises that allowed you to make more money to buy more of those things. Money made the worlds go round.
 
Money—or rather, a severe lack of it and Galioto’s threats hanging over my debt-ridden head—had brought me out here. It wasn’t exactly a coincidence I was close to the coordinates of MASTT Primus. Many of the pieces of the MASTT Primus Station continued to follow something approximating their original orbit.
 
The bigger they were, the more likely they were to be to still be found somewhere close to where the station would have been if it still existed—and the more likely they were to be of value, as scrap metal if nothing else. And that chunk I’d been chasing had been, relatively, huge: barely small enough to fit into the Ernest Cox’s cavernous hold.
 
Least of your worries now, I told myself.
 
Then I stiffened and leaned forward. Thibauld must have caught my reaction: he thrust his head out of his acceleration bed again. “It’s shrinking,” he said before I could. His eyes flicked across the display. “It’s going to be close.”
 
The sphere was indeed collapsing in on itself, faster and faster. Our projected trajectory still intersected it . . . but not by as much. And if it continued to shrink . . .
 
“Impact with anomaly projected in one minute,” Ernie said. He sounded disinterested. “Fifty-nine seconds. Fifty-eight. Fifty-seven.”
 
“Don’t count down, Ernie,” I said. “There’s a good chap.”
 
“Understood.”
 
Silencing Ernie did not, alas, stop the numerals on the screen from continuing to decrease. I flicked my eyes from that ticking clock to the main display. We were still projected to intersect with the surface of the sphere.
 
Thirty seconds.
 
Still on a collision course.
 
Fifteen seconds.
 
A glancing blow?
 
Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven.
 
I closed my eyes.
 
Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One . . .
 
Nothing happened. I was still there.
 
I opened my eyes. For just a moment, I found myself looking into the interior of the sphere.
 
I saw . . . flickers. Flashes. Images appearing, one after the other, too fast for my brain to register them.
 
Then, just like that, the sphere collapsed.
 
A millisecond later, the Ernest Cox tumbled out of control