Nova Igniter Read online

  Nova Igniter

  Joseph R. Lallo

  2020 © Joseph R. Lallo

  Cover by Nick Deligaris

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  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

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Epilogue

  From the Author

  Prologue

  The sun is a harsh mistress. Nowhere was that truer than on the surface of Operlo. The whole of the planet was a blazing, dubiously inhabitable desert. When it had been discovered, it was little more than a spinning hunk of UV-blasted rock, rich in mineral resources and utterly devoid of life. Centuries of terraforming had transformed it. It was still a spinning hunk of UV-blasted rock, but now it was slightly less rich in mineral resources and had a construction consortium, a resort, and most recently, a hoversled racing league.

  Pedants would point out that the rays of Operlo’s star didn’t truly count as sunlight, as “the sun” technically referred to Earth’s star. It was solar radiation. Other pedants would argue that Earth’s star was called Sol, and thus light from other stars was not Solar radiation but stellar radiation. Fortunately, this apartment didn’t belong to a pedant. It belonged to a man named Trevor Alexander. Most everyone called him Lex these days.

  He muttered a half-coherent complaint as the sun drifted far enough across his bed to reach his eyes. It had been a long night, as he’d just clinched his spot in the top three for Operlo Racing Intersystem Circuit’s first full season. He could finish dead last and still be in at least third place when the time came to hand out trophies. Not that he intended to ever finish dead last.

  A familiar, utterly gleeful yip rang out in the otherwise silent apartment. His eyes shot open.

  “No, no, no!” he yelped.

  Further complaint was reduced to sputtering as his mouth filled with the belly fluff of his pet funk Squee. At some point in the last few weeks she’d gotten it into her head that the moment he woke up, that was her signal to jump on his face to demand cuddles and/or food.

  “Squee, honestly,” he groaned, pulling her off his face. “You’re smart enough to disengage the security code on my slidepad. You’re smart enough to order your own toys. But you can’t figure out how to get your own beans and rice while Daddy sleeps off a hangover?”

  She replied as she usually did, by assaulting his face with licks and scampering onto his shoulders. He winced as her almost toxic levels of cuteness and affection reached his neck, where the licking produced a faint jolt of pain.

  “Easy, easy, easy,” he groaned, pulling her from his shoulders and tucking her under one arm.

  He awkwardly slid from bed and lumbered over to a mirror to check himself out. The bags under his eyes were no surprise. It was only ten a.m. local time, and the last clear memory he had was of checking the clock in an autonomous limo at six a.m. But the long swath of medical gel that failed to blend into his sunbaked skin reminded him that the victory he’d been celebrating had been a little more exciting than it should have been.

  “I might have to start taking corners a little shallower.” He ran his finger along the injury. “Either that or turn up the inertial inhibitor a little higher. It’s probably a bad sign when the safety harness tries to saw its way through your jugular.”

  “Good morning, Lex,” intoned a pristine synthetic voice. “Would you like to begin your morning routine?”

  “I usually try to save my morning routines for the afternoon when I’m recovering from a proper bender.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that reply. Would you like to begin your morning routine?”

  “Ma would have understood me,” Lex taunted, tugging at his eyelid to check out his eye in the reflection.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that reply. Would you like to begin your morning routine?”

  “Fine! Yes!” He raked his fingers through his hair. “She’s spoiled me for other AI.”

  “Excellent. Please enjoy your day.”

  The lights slowly illuminated. A much-anticipated bitter scent wafted from the kitchenette as the coffee machine kicked on. Glowing white text expanded into three dimensions from the front of the mirror, summarizing messages, news, weather, and his agenda. The weather report had gotten a lot more valuable in recent months, as the repaired Indra Station had finally started to exert some degree of control over the climate. Thus the temperature didn’t get nearly as close to boiling these days. The news was the usual sensationalized nonsense peppered with evergreen topics like “Political Strife Causes Tension” and “VectorCorp Denies Any Wrongdoing.”

  “‘Malware Causes Network Slowdowns,’” Lex murmured, reading the one headline that stood out from the rest. “Must be either really bad malware or a really slow news day.”

  Lex dropped Squee to the ground and followed her to the kitchen to prepare a breakfast burrito for each of them.

  “Read me my schedule for the day,” he instructed his digital assistant.

  “You have three appointments. 11:45 a.m. to 12:45 p.m.: Lunch with Preethy at The Usual Place. 1:15 p.m. to 2:45 p.m.: press junket for The Thing. 7 p.m.: Supper with Preethy at The Nice Place.”

  “It might be time to start being more specific when I make these entries,” he said.

  “Urgent Messages: Your spam box is full.”

  He cocked his head. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that message before.”

  Like many of society’s ills, when people realized spam was a problem too difficult to solve, they devised an elaborate network of methods to ignore it. Spam filters and spam folders were present in any system capable of delivering information. Like vaccinations, they were so effective that people sometimes started to doubt they were necessary. Also like vaccinations, anyone who decided to forgo them soon found themselves regretting it. It was just a worthwhile precaution, an auto-emptying trashcan filled with attempted scams and unwanted sales. Losing the occasional friendly correspondence or business e-mail was an acceptable price. Those messages were sacrifices to the gods of the algorithm who kept us safe from the barely legal singles looking for a good time and your account information.

  Lex pulled his slidepad from his pocket and dug around until he turned up the well-hidden spam folder. The only reason he was able to find it at all was because it was in flashing red text.

  “I have eighteen billion… no, wait.” He counted his way up the sequence of commas. “Million, billion, trillion, quadrillion… I have eighteen quintillion spam messages? Wow. Surely these are once-in-a-lifetime deals I don’t want to miss out on. Delete all.”

  He slipped his slidepad into his pocket. Just as the microwave bleeped with the completion of his wholesome egg, bean, rice, and cheese wrap, his slidepad chirped again.


  Your spam box is full.

  Lex tapped the message and the folder popped open.

  “Okay. Great. Why do I get the feeling this is going to turn out to be something worse than another phishing scam?”

  Another 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 messages were waiting for him. Everything in the first page of messages was from the same second. The “from” addresses were all different, but the subjects were all the same.

  Lex has been located. Lex must be recruited. The mission must succeed.

  Chapter 1

  Lex marched across the sunny walkway between his apartment complex and his favorite restaurant. The incredibly dry heat of Operlo meant that as long as he was in the shade, it was actually quite tolerable even with Squee playing the role of fur stole around his neck. Rather than do the typical summertime two-step and try to hop between the shadows of buildings and the scattered shelters along the way, Lex had resorted to toting a parasol around with him. In the beginning, the silver umbrella had made him feel a little silly and old-fashioned. When the alternative was layering on gobs of sunblock or waiting for autonomous shade drones to show up, he quickly warmed to the practice.

  The restaurant wasn’t anything special. That was part of why he liked it so much. Operlo was in the middle of a massive community development project. As said project was under the guidance and financing of a large construction corporation, that meant loads of very fancy architecture and a very phony and manufactured ambiance. Colors were picked by committee to look spontaneous and carefree. Polymers were carefully pressed into shapes that looked like sun-bleached, warped wood. This sort of built-in, lived-in look always made Lex uncomfortable, like some alien culture was trying to assemble a habitat for him without really knowing what any of it meant.

  This place was different. It started as the snack wagon where the construction workers got their lunches while building the rest of the neighborhood. The food wasn’t artisanal. The menu was devoid of buzzwords. There wasn’t a menu at all. Just a holosign, typically riddled with typos, listing off the day’s specials that were defined by whatever the cook felt like making that day. Once construction was finished, they’d just converted the snack truck into an official diner, and Pihu, the cook, had stuck around.

  “What’s cookin’, Pihu?” Lex asked as the chime over the door jangled with his entry.

  The woman behind the counter looked up. “Hey, Lex. We’re doing aloo tikki and yesterday curry, plus—” she began.

  “Never mind, that’ll do just fine. Just set me up with a basket of one and a bowl of the other.” He took a seat on a stool permanently affixed to the ground in front of one of the tables. “Did Preethy show up yet?”

  Pihu glanced at the clock. “It’s 11:42,” she said simply.

  “Right, right. What was I thinking? She’s got three whole minutes.”

  “Water for Squee?”

  “If you please.”

  She grabbed a plastic to-go canister and filled it from a tap. Squee danced anxiously in place until she emerged with the water and set it down, then practically wrapped herself around the woman’s leg in pursuit of a head scratch.

  “Yes, yes. You’re very cute,” Pihu said. “And now I need to wash my hands again.” She pried Squee from her leg and dropped her in front of the water. “Congrats on the race yesterday,” she said. “I saw you on the sports feed.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Been a while since you came in first, huh?”

  “Why yes, Pihu, how nice of you to notice. I came in second twice.”

  “In a row though.”

  “Nice to know you’re keeping an eye on me.”

  “What’s with the blood spurting out of your neck when you crossed the finish line?”

  “It wasn’t spurting. It was trickling.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “According to the EMTs, about twelve stitches or a hundred grams of medical gel.”

  The door chime rang again at the precise moment Lex’s slidepad beeped with his appointment reminder. Before he could turn, he felt fingers glide across the treated wound on his neck.

  “Is it painful?” Preethy asked, circling around to her side of the table.

  “It’s fine. They said it’ll be healed up by tomorrow. It shouldn’t even leave a scar, but we’ll see about that.”

  Preethy took a seat. She wore a wide-brimmed white hat and large sunglasses. Every stitch of her clothes was custom and impeccable, but she managed something that Lex had seldom seen before. Despite the surgical precision with which her outfit struck a balance between professionalism and fashion, it was her poise and bearing that spoke most loudly. She could have paced into the restaurant in a sweat suit and still demanded the respect of a CEO. It was just as well, as she was a CEO.

  “We keep a plastic surgeon on call at the clinic. Nothing should leave a scar.”

  “Nah, if it does it does,” Lex said. “It builds character.”

  She reached across the table to brush his arm, where a thin line of marginally less tanned skin marked another recent injury. “You’ve been accumulating character quite readily in the last few months.”

  “Gotta put butts in seats, right?” he said.

  “You are certainly doing that. Uncle is quite pleased,” she said. “Have you ordered yet?”

  “Yep. Oh! I forgot a drink.”

  “You’re getting an iced tea. It’s all we have right now,” Pihu called from the back.

  “That makes it easy,” Lex said.

  “Ms. Misra, you want chana masala? We’ve got that today,” she called.

  “That sounds lovely. Thank you.” Preethy pulled a sleek datapad from her purse. “As I was saying, Uncle is really quite pleased. We were rather concerned the near catastrophe caused by Indra Station would leave a stain on Operlo’s reputation. As it turns out, your bombastic performances on the racetrack coupled with the speed of the local news cycle have all but pushed the event from the minds of the sort of person who is likely to plan interstellar trips for the purposes of entertainment.”

  “Rich people.”

  “Broadly speaking, though a large percentage of our patrons are middle-class enthusiasts.”

  “If there’s one thing I can do, it’s be distracting. Particularly to middle-class enthusiasts. They’re my people.”

  “I could do with a bit of distraction myself,” Preethy said, eyeing the pad briefly before slipping it back into her bag. “We are dealing with a minor data infrastructure issue. I messaged Uncle about it. Normally we can tolerate the usual level of unexplained load, but the whole planetary network is lagging badly. I believe it’s been shut down entirely to lessen the load on our systems.”

  “Does that mean the press junket might get canceled? It wouldn’t break my heart if you and I got a full afternoon to do something nonwork related.”

  “It almost certainly will be. And to be quite frank, something nonwork related would be lovely. But with the championship race just a week away, it deserves my full focus.”

  Pihu set the food on the counter and rang the bell. “Order up!”

  Lex trotted up to bus the trays over to the table. “What sort of network infrastructure thing are we talking about, by the way?”

  “I’m told it is some sort of a distributed denial of service attack. We’ve had a few, but this one seems very peculiar.”

  “Is this where all the spam is coming from?”

  “Spam?”

  “Yeah, I’ve been getting zillions of them per hour. I must have dumped my box twenty times today. Finally I just left it full. Is that not happening to you too?”

  “Not nearly. You haven’t opened any of them, have you?”

  He gave her a flat look. “Yes, Preethy. I immediately opened each and every spam message, because I am a toddler who has never had a slidepad before.”

  “Point taken.”

  “I have seen all the subjects, though. Here, look
.” He hopped around to her side of the table and showed her the screen of his slidepad.

  “That is curious, Lex. Very curious.”

  “See, I went with the word ‘ominous.’”

  “We’ll submit a request for investigation,” she said.

  “I’m not so popular with telecom companies, you’ll recall.”

  “We have a sizable contract for global communications as well as entertainment broadcast rights. Not to mention the pending settlement over the Gemini Bypass fiasco. I am confident I can compel them to do their jobs.” Her eyes flicked to the window of the restaurant. “Hold still.”

  Preethy straightened his collar and adjusted the sleeves of his shirt. He raised an eyebrow.

  “Preethy, not that I mind, but why are you preening me?”

  “There are paparazzi across the street. I thought it proper that you look your best.”

  Lex turned and spotted the cameraman, who was shooting with a compound lens from the shelter of a bus stop across the way. After making a show of smoothing down his eyebrows, he settled into his seat and dug into his food. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the photographer decide he’d had enough for one day and take his leave.

  “Funny. My first encounter with random people taking my picture was when I had my first run of success racing back on Golana. Then for a while there was the whole ‘disgraced racer’ news cycle. Then there was when I was the hero who disarmed a truck that was going to explode back at Weston University. Now I’m not so sure if they’re even taking a picture of me or you.”

  “I suspect they are taking a picture of us,” she said, sampling her own meal.

  “Why?”

  She sipped her tea. “Have you not been following the stories about you?”

  “I figured out a while back that if I let my brain soak in too much of what people are saying about me, I can’t function.”

  “As it so happens I have a whole staff who reads and compiles relevant gossip and feedback.”

  “Jeez. That’s gotta be rough.”

  “The position has a rather high turnover. But through them I’ve learned that the love life of anyone with any degree of celebrity is its own sort of spectator sport. Your falling out with Michella was a point of fascination for a time. It has cast our frequent fraternizing into a new light.”