To Touch the Stars (Founding of the Federation Book 2) Read online

  To Touch the Stars

  Founding of the Federation Book 2

  Chris Hechtl

  Copyright © 2014 by Chris Hechtl

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

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional. Any resemblance to other people is in parody or is purely coincidental. ;)

  Cover art by Chris Hechtl

  Proofread by: Jory Gray, Thomas Burrows, Brandon Bynum, Ulrich Schlegel, Mike Kotcher and Tim Brown

  Professionally edited by: Rea Myers

  Formatted by goodlifeguide.com

  Dedication

  Special thanks goes to those fans who took the time to read First Steps with an open mind. Doctor Zubrin and others for keeping up the fight to go to Mars and beyond, thanks for that. Also, thanks to Ulrich, Poon, Mike, Thomas, Tim, and the other Betas for their hard work. And Rea, for busting her butt to get this done quickly for me. :)

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  ACT I

  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

  ACT II

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  ACT III

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Author's Afterword

  Cast

  Sneak Peek

  Prologue:

  June 2140

  Little three-and-a-half-year-old Hannah Anne Castill looked up to the night stars with her father as she sat in his lap. Her tiny hand pointed up; she asked what big light was. Her hazel eyes studied the light with an intensity that amused her father.

  He wrapped his arms around the kid. She was a wonder, just like his son, a genius. She had an edict memory and a brain with an astronomical IQ. That still didn't stop him from treating her like a little girl and teasing her whenever he could though. “What do you think it is, a flying teddy bear? A unicorn?” he joked.

  “No fair,” she mock pouted, jutting out her bottom lip in a cute face that tore at his heart.

  “Well,” he drawled, “I told you, honey, I work for Lagroose Industries,” he explained, nodding his chin over his shoulder to the faded sign painted on the side of one of the out buildings. She nodded dutifully. It was all there for her to access. In fact, she had accessed some of it, but she didn't understand it all.

  “Some of those are satellites,” he said. “Some are stations and junk. Not a lot of junk, companies have been cleaning up the orbitals for the past couple of decades now,” he said.

  Bret explained the history of the initial space program, how the Irons had worked with the government to kick-start colonization of Mars and then gone private when the funding had dried up. He used his tablet to point out various projects in space including Mars. “Mars is a planet; I know you know that,” he said as she made a face at him. “But right from the beginning they were set on it being terraformed. Luigi Irons hit it with an asteroid right after the first group got there I think. I'm not sure about the timing,” he said.

  “I'll look it up,” Hannah said, not wanting her dad to get distracted by a tangent. He nodded.

  “You can look up the whole Mars program. It's neat, and it's visual. Real visuals, even 3D stuff,” he said. She wrinkled her pert nose at him but then nodded. He looked up once again. “To be there when they were doing that. It must have really been something,” he whispered.

  There were 19 billion people on Earth, another five and a half million people in space, on the moon, and on Mars. With the beanstalk and dozens of space ports around the globe, that number was growing exponentially. It did nothing to impact the overall planetary population however. That still increased by at least one billion people every twenty years.

  The Earth's climate change had accelerated despite last minute desperate efforts to halt it. Too late those that had refused to listen saw the melting ice from the poles as a threat. Despite that, billions of dollars had been spent on trying to protect the cities on the coasts. Not much could be done; some areas like India, Florida and parts of Africa were under water.

  Some of the populations had abandoned the efforts and moved further inland, swarming inland cities which caused a refugee crisis for decades. They did start up new cities on higher ground. But the real estate wasn't ideal; they had to fight over the dwindling natural resources as well as the land.

  The Earth plainly sucked he thought. His blue thoughts were yanked back to the present by a tug on his arm to get his attention.

  “I thought Lagroose just did communications?” Hannah asked, waving to the antenna farm on the hills beyond their trailer. “Cyber stuff? Software?”

  Bret looked over his shoulder to the communication equipment and smiled ruefully. “Not quite kiddo,” he said. “I'm a communication's engineer. I service this stuff, it's all tracking, telemetry feeds, that sort of thing. We're out here in the boonies because I want to be.”

  “Oh,” Hannah said, blinking at him.

  “Trust me, dear; you don't want to be in a big city. Here you can breathe and see,” he said, waving a hand to indicate the Yukon. It was one of the few last bastions of untamed wilderness left in North America. Man had encroached just about everywhere else; even the parks they'd set aside were being pressured to fold.

  She nodded dutifully as she nestled into the blanket she had wrapped around her small frame. It was cold out in the Canadian outback, but beautiful. She loved seeing the trees; she'd heard they were rare in parts of America. “So what else do they do?”

  “Oh, a lot, kiddo,” her father laughed. He pulled out his tablet and then pulled up the company website. He scrolled through it, narrating softly as he pointed out the various projects the company had going on.

  He judged Hannah was pretty close to understanding Lagroose and some of the current events. Jamey had picked it up around five. The kid had changed almost overnight when he'd started to look at current events, turning into a chipper child into a somber boy with the weight of the world on his shoulders. It had given Bret a few sleepless nights. And when Jamey had announced he was going to follow in his father's footsteps, sign up with Lagroose and change the world, he'd had to wrestle with his own conscience over the idea.

  Lagroose Industries was a megacorp, one of the better ones in his opinion. They had went to space to mine and to settle the solar system in the early days of the Mars settlement program. They'd been one of a dozen start-ups that had thrived on the new frontier, in no small part from the alliances Mister Jack Lagroose had forged w
ith the Iron family of Mars fame.

  Jack Lagroose was another child prodigy like Hannah and Jamey. He was now in his midforties, but he'd done some astonishing things in the past three and a half decades. He'd overshadowed the Irons family and just about every inventor humanity had ever produced.

  “Come on, Daddy, we don't have all night,” Hannah grumbled. “I've got to hit the sack soon, you know, bedtime?” she asked.

  Bret coughed, hiding a chuckle. He'd let Hannah stay up a few times, and she'd been cranky the next morning. That had taught her it was important to get her sleep. When she'd looked into sleep and realized it was important for her development, she'd gotten into insisting on getting her eight hours in. To Bret the reversal was comical sometimes.

  He cleared his throat and then went on to explain how the company made space ships to carry people, goods and food across the star system and eventually beyond. Your brother's going up there. He's at the Lagroose Academy now.”

  “I know,” Hannah nodded dutifully. “I remember. He's not the only one with an edict memory. I'm as smart as he is,” she said with a petulant airy sniff.

  “You may be, kiddo,” Bret said, ruffling her hair.

  As a father he had some misgivings about sending his fourteen-year-old son, however gifted, off on his own. But Jamey had proven himself. He'd graduated high school at age 11, gotten his bachelor's degree the following year, and there was no holding the lad back. He refused to stand in the boy's way out of some misplaced tradition or conventional wisdom like his grandparents said. He'd been piloting the family plane since he could walk, and he'd made it clear he was going up. Bret envied the lad for his courage and intelligence. Unlike his parents he refused to stand in his son's way.

  Down here, groundside was just filthy air and constant fighting. The world was weary of the scandals and fighting, but like a punch drunk fighter, they didn't know how to stop. There was also a fear of stopping and not being able to start again.

  He closed his eyes briefly. He wanted better for his kids. There were millions who were expecting some sort of world war, a revolution or something to wipe the slate clean so they could start over. That expectation had been around for over a century now. Each year though … they teetered ever closer to the brink. Of course, none expected them or their friends to be hurt by such matters. He wanted his kids safely away from that when it all came crashing down.

  Already the Luddites were screaming that the spacers were a major drain on the economy. The fact that the space program was self-sustaining and paid for a lot of stuff groundside didn't matter. They just saw something to sap to feed the undying appetite of the machine.

  “I'm old, but when you are old enough and on your own, I'm going up if they'll have me,” he said. “I've been training for years,” he said.

  She blinked at him. He nodded solemnly. He didn't tell her that he'd put his own dreams on hold to support his family. He didn't want to hurt her. He'd never get her advantages or Jamey's, but he could get them off the rock with the right push. “Jamey's going to go up to orbit for the first time in a month,” he said.

  “Really?” She practically squealed in envy. “That's so not fair! He always gets to be first!” She jutted her bottom lip out in a too cute pout.

  “He's got the touch, kiddo,” he said, ruffling her hair. “He's earned his shot.” He remembered his unenviable first and second runs on the vomit comet. Jamey'd handled it just fine. Of course the lad had loved roller coasters and thrill rides once he was tall enough to ride them. “He wants to see the stars up close. They are a lot prettier up there with no atmo and light pollution in the way,” he said. “Maybe he'll even name a world after one of us.”

  “He … ,” His daughter stared at him in surprise.

  “He could do it,” her father said with an earnest smile. “That's the great thing about being first. Now we've got a real chance to do it. People have been dreaming about it for hundreds of years, but it's finally getting to where we can actually do it.”

  The little girl's eyes lit with a fire. “I want to do that,” she said slowly as if coming to a weighty decision. “To see new worlds. To touch the stars too, Daddy.”

  He looked at her and then hugged her close. “Eat all your peas and get good grades and keep your chin up and you just might.”

  She grinned, then went on to ask about other stars in the night sky.

  Act 1

  Chapter 1

  March 2143

  The red planet still revolved, Mario Irons thought, staring off into space. He, Betsy, Wanda, and Luigi had done well. Their descendants on Mars had become involved in just about every engineering project worth doing on the planet over the past century. Power plants, city construction, you name it he thought in approval. And those that still had the wanderlust genes had moved on, back into space to be engineers on the sublight ships that plied the space lanes around the solar system. They'd pushed the frontier ever onward and outward.

  He smiled a slight smile as he stared at a mural. They'd done well he judged; he was proud of them. Well, most of them, he thought. He still had a few issues, a few bad apples that needed straightening out. None had gotten into crime, but he still wished they'd sort themselves out. He sighed a heartfelt sigh.

  “Thinking deep thoughts?” Sydney Reshenkov Irons teased. He snorted. Sydney was so much like her grandmother Tess, Mario reflected, with her eyes and smile. She'd followed along in her grandmother's footsteps too, unlike her father and sisters. They ran the family's growing aquafarm business.

  “Another day, another new thing. But sometimes, I wish the news wasn't so … Earthy,” he said, indicating the tablet in his lap with his gnarled hands.

  She looked over his shoulder at what he'd been reading and then patted him on the shoulder. “You and me both, Gramps,” she said. “You and me both.” The planet's government was getting increasingly mired in the politics of the system and problems with minor sabotage of the planet's terraforming and space program. The headline alone, “Mars Gov Passes Felony Law on Sabotage” may have seemed okay; after all, it was excruciatingly frustrating to see work that had gone on for decades be destroyed. But the article was all about how unfair it was to prosecute people for using their constitutional right to protest by any means. “I read that this morning before breakfast and wished I hadn't. “Don't they know if they insist on breaking the law then they should be willing to pay the consequences for it?” She asked.

  He snorted. “Heh, don't try telling them that. People have been pulling this kind of shit for decades,” he grumbled. He turned with wise eyes to see the other adults gathering. He nodded to Jeremy, Opal, Ellen, and a few others. Adam he glanced over and then gave him a nod. He was surprised but pleased that some of the kids had come in too. “Another chat?”

  Sydney looked over her shoulder, hands resting on the finial on his chair. “It looks that way. The future I think. Or what we're going to do. Or what the kids will get a chance to do.”

  “You even label the topics of the conversation?” Mario asked, shaking his head.

  “No, well, sort of. It's nice if we all come prepared and on the same page,” Sydney replied. He shook his head.

  The family had moved to a compound in a canyon southeast of the ancient first settlement. It was all one level which made it easier to get about in for Mario and the other elderly family members.

  Mario had resisted moving from the ancient habs and his underground base for years; it was home to him where a lot of great memories were. It was lonely however; only a handful of the family could be with him. Most had come for visits but they could only stay overnight when they were on vacation. The industry in the area had moved away when Capital City, also known as Mars City, had been constructed.

  Mario had busied himself with taking care of his old place. But as he aged the maintenance became increasingly harder and harder for him to do. Just getting in and out of a suit was an exhausting chore. He had only been convinced of the wisdom of the move wh
en he had fallen down a ladder and broken his hip. Fortunately, the health implant he had immediately alerted medics to his situation. His lengthy recovery and rehab had allowed the family to quietly turn over the base to the Mars historical society and move the family into the new compound.

  Mario had pitched three shades of a snit, but the deal had been done. He'd even threatened to drive himself back and become a squatter. The kids had told him to go ahead; they'd love to stuff and mount him for the museum. He'd backed off when he'd seen the portraits of his wife and family one of his grand kids had painted on the wall. They'd also recreated the portraits his wife had done, a bit smaller but still full of love and life. They had brought tears to his eyes when he'd seen them.

  He'd finally been mollified when Sydney his eldest granddaughter-in-law had made up a white lie about how his late wife Wanda had asked them to do it before she'd died, but it had taken a long time to get it just right. Now they had room to grow as well as support the far flung clan members who returned during family reunions.

  Now things were changing on Mars, as it seemed the planet always did. Mars was constantly in flux, and not just because of the ongoing terraforming or growing population. Politics were getting ugly on Earth, and some of the rancor was spilling over into space and had reached Mars.

  Infighting over the various terraforming projects and the planet's own space program was expected. People were passionate about the projects after all, and everyone was entitled to their opinion … and exercised the right to express it, sometimes loudly. Sometimes too loudly, Mario thought sourly. He wished a few of the pissing and moaning crowd would move on or find another topic to bitch about.

  Seven-year-old Isley Irons, Reno Irons, and their four-year-old cousin Amelia Irons sat proudly at the feet of their parents. Isley looked around, but the other cousins were either playing or off doing homework, chores, or out and about. All her cousins were young. They were of course all under age, but they were also on their best behavior for the family meeting. They'd been warned if they wished to be treated like adults they had to act and listen like adults do. Isley had refrained from pointing out that they should apply that to Uncle Adam then too.