Read Starshine: Aurora Rising Book One for Free Online

it—in her case typically ship architectures and schematics—with micro-scale accuracy and detail. It also happened to act as a rather beautiful complement to the bright, elegant décor of the office.
    This project wasn’t so far along as to require the desk’s particular capabilities, however. Not yet. The presentation contained in the hovering screens focused on the big picture. Its purpose was to weave a story the less technically minded (she was being charitable) directors might understand and, more importantly, believe in enough to invest significant funds in the project.
    She smiled to herself and gazed out the window. Large, feathery snowflakes danced in the air yet again. Maybe she should go skiing this weekend….
    Erisen was the closest habitable world to Earth and had been one of the first extra-solar settlements. In a nasty storm she occasionally questioned the ‘habitable’ part, but colonists had put the chilly environs to good use. Due to little orbital tilt there weren’t seasons to speak of and while it did snow often, the low humidity resulted in a dry, champagne powder snow. Those features meant, in addition to creating a skier’s paradise, quantum-scale and other manufacturing that required supercooled conditions could be made cheaply here without the need for orbital facilities.
    The colony had wasted no time in crafting the advantages into an economic boon, building a manufacturing sector which was all too happy to supply materials for the rapid galactic expansion of the late 22 nd century. More than a hundred fifty years later, Erisen was among the most prosperous Alliance worlds and a hub for electronics, orbitals and starship design and construction.
    Which was why she was here, despite the reality that the social and cultural offerings still paled in comparison to those of home. But Earth was a mere three hours away, and it was easy enough to hop a transport when something interesting caught her fancy.
    With an almost wistful sigh she turned away from the snowflakes and back to the presentation. A palm came up to rest beneath her chin.
    As onboard CUs grew increasingly powerful and attained greater range, long-distance hacking of ship systems constituted a growing crime. The chart hovering to her left indicated the rate of increase in such attacks threatened to become exponential.
    A heavily cyberized merc ship was able to hide in the shadow of a moon and remotely take control of a corporate, personal or possibly even military ship halfway across a stellar system. Mercs were then free to disable it for boarding and raiding, turn its weapons on its friends or send it crashing into the nearest planet.
    The problem hadn’t yet hit the radar of the general public, but it would do so soon enough. If she had her way, IS Design would be waiting in the wings to offer the finest in EM reverse-shielding to counter the threat—for the right price, obviously.
    She had already drawn up rough schematics for how the shielding would integrate into standard ship infrastructure, determined the estimated power and material requirements and developed a lattice formulation to best improve its performance. Really, all she needed to do now was add some flowery words and a couple of charts projecting outrageous profit percentages, and she’d be ready to present to the board of directors.
    She reached over and flipped the trend statistics and market analysis scr—
    —a flashing light in her eVi signaled an incoming holocomm request. She stashed the screens and allowed the holo to take their place.
    “Kennedy Rossi speaking. I’m seeing the back of a head and a knot of dark red…Alex?”
    “It says so right there on your screen, Ken.”
    “Oh, I never check that. I prefer to be surprised.”
    Alex chuckled and finally looked up. She sat cross-legged in the middle of the engineering well of the Siyane, an open panel exposing the engineering core beside her. She blew a wisp of hair out of her face. “Sorry,