McCollum - GIBRALTAR STARS Read online

  GIBRALTAR STARS

  (A Novel)

  By

  Michael McCollum

  SCI FI - ARIZONA

  A Virtual Science Fiction Bookstore and Writer’s Workshop on the INTERNET

  www.scifi-az.com

  ISBN 1-934805-29-7 / 978-1-934805-29-9

  390 pages

  Copyright 2009 by Michael McCollum

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America by Sci Fi - Arizona, a virtual science fiction bookstore, and writer’s workshop located on the INTERNET at www.scifi-az.com.

  Michael McCollum

  Proprietor

  Sci Fi - Arizona

  PO Box 14026

  Tempe, AZ 85284-0068

  [email protected]

  01312010

  The Rock of Gibraltar

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Prologue vi

  The Duodecimal System vii

  PART ONE: 1

  PREPARATIONS FOR WAR 1

  Chapter One 2

  Chapter Two 7

  Chapter Three 13

  Chapter Four 16

  Chapter Five 19

  Chapter Six 23

  Chapter Seven 27

  Chapter Eight 31

  Chapter Nine 35

  Chapter Ten 40

  Chapter Eleven 43

  Chapter Twelve 48

  Chapter Thirteen 52

  Chapter Fourteen 56

  Chapter Fifteen 60

  Chapter Sixteen 64

  Chapter Seventeen 68

  Chapter Eighteen 72

  Chapter Nineteen 76

  Chapter Twenty 80

  PART TWO: 84

  UNTO THE BREACH… 84

  Chapter Twenty-One 85

  Chapter Twenty-Two 89

  Chapter Twenty-Three 93

  Chapter Twenty-Four 97

  Chapter Twenty-Five 101

  Chapter Twenty-Six 106

  Chapter Twenty-Seven 110

  Chapter Twenty-Eight 114

  Chapter Twenty-Nine 118

  Chapter Thirty 121

  Chapter Thirty-One 125

  Chapter Thirty-Two 130

  Chapter Thirty-Three 134

  Chapter Thirty-Four 138

  Chapter Thirty-Five 142

  Chapter Thirty-Six 147

  Chapter Thirty-Seven 152

  Chapter Thirty-Eight 157

  Chapter Thirty-Nine 163

  Chapter Forty 166

  PART Three: 172

  LET SLIP THE DOGS OF WAR 172

  Chapter Forty-One 173

  Chapter Forty-Two 177

  Chapter Forty-Three 180

  Chapter Forty-Four 185

  Chapter Forty-Five 189

  Chapter Forty-Six 193

  Chapter Forty-Seven 196

  Chapter Forty-Eight 199

  Chapter Forty-Nine 205

  Author’s Biography 208

  Sci Fi - Arizona 209

  WWW.SCIFI-AZ.COM 209

  NOVELS 210

  Non-Fiction Books 213

  Prologue

  “No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.”

  —Field Marshall Helmuth Carl Bernard von Moltke, Prussian General Staff

  That, ladies and gentlemen, is the ancient wisdom of our profession. Despite this axiom, few military officers are truly prepared when they come face to face with the enemy in battle. We make our plans, array our forces, build vast logistics trains, and worry about the smallest details of the most unlikely scenarios. Yet, when the moment of truth arrives, we find it nothing like we imagined. A prime example of this is our recent campaign against the implacable alien foe.

  As others have pointed out, we were incredibly lucky during our first encounter with the Broa. Had things gone just a little differently that day, this planet would now be enslaved, or barren. Having been present at the initiation of the current conflict, I can tell you that we felt many things that day, but “lucky” was not one of them.

  I was in my cabin when we felt that first gravity wave pass through Magellan. A few minutes later, sensors reported a battle in progress between two alien ships that had appeared out of nowhere. What we didn’t realize was that we would soon become combatants ourselves.

  It all happened so quickly that there was no time to plan, no plotting of move and countermove. That first battle was fought with instinct and wild improvisation. It is only by the Grace of God that we survived to bring home the news that humanity was no longer alone in the universe.

  Later, when the First Expedition confirmed that there was indeed a race of hostile alien overlords in the next galactic arm, the human race found itself in a quandary. We knew about them, but they were, as yet, ignorant of our existence.

  You all remember the Great Debate. Many well-meaning people thought discretion the better part of valor. They counseled a policy of retreat from the stars and a reduction in our electromagnetic emissions at home, all the better to hide from our new enemies. Many were attracted to this point of view. It was only after events proved such ‘safety’ to be an illusion that we decided to face the danger squarely and begin preparations for war.

  For six long years, we spied out the enemy’s weaknesses. We invented new weapons and technologies, built vast flotillas and manned them with the best of our young warriors. We established secret bases in the heart of the enemy domain, moved vast mountains of supplies, and did all we could to get ready for the inevitable day when we would finally confront the Broa.

  Yet, when that day came, our preparations were incomplete. Some of our plans had not worked out as expected. Many of our most important fleet units were still under construction. Like every other fleet/army in history, we went into battle when circumstances forced the battle, not when we were prepared for it.

  Yet, to date we have been successful. This is not primarily due to our planning and staff work, although these are essential precursors to victory. No, we carry the fight to the enemy because of the diligence, competence, and sheer guts of those who ride our ships into battle.

  These, ladies and gentlemen, are your predecessors. I know that when the time comes for you to take your place beside them, you will carry on in their tradition and that of the Terrestrial Space Navy!

  —From a Commencement Address to the Naval Academy Graduating Class of 2358, by Admiral Daniel Landon.

  The Duodecimal System

  The duodecimal system is widely used by species that possess six digits on one grasping member and which are laterally bisymmetric. Chief among these are our adversaries, the Broa.

  Decimal

  1 = One

  2 = Two

  3 = Three

  4 = Four

  5 = Five

  6 = Six

  7 = Seven

  8 = Eight

  9 = Nine

  10 = Ten

  11 = Eleven

  12 = Twelve = Dozen

  10x10 = 100 = Hundred

  10x10x10 = 1000 = Thousand

  Duodecimal

  1 = One

  2 = Two

  3 = Three

  4 = Four

  5 = Five

  6 = Six

  7 = Seven

  8 = Eight

  9 = Nine

  A = Ten

  B = Eleven

  10 = Twelve = Dozen

  10x10 = 100 = Gross (144 decimal)

  10x10x10 = 1000 = Great-Gross (1728 decimal)

  PART ONE:

  PREPARATIONS FOR WAR

  Chapter One

  One piece of space looks like any other, Lisa Rykand, thought morosely as she gazed at the shrunken star more than a billion kilometers below.

  Li
sa was a petite blonde with green eyes and a nose that turned up at the end. She wore her hair cropped close in a microgravity style. Her mouth was a bit too wide for her face, and her cheeks had a tendency to dimple when she smiled. She wasn’t smiling at the moment.

  For more than a year each successive mission had taken them farther out along the Perseus Arm of the Milky Way and deeper into enemy space. Sol was too small and dim to be seen from her current vantage point. Had it been visible, the photons detected would be brother to those that once illuminated a small village destined one day to become Babylon. The constellations were another reminder of how far they had voyaged. None were remotely the same as those named by the ancient Arab astronomers.

  This mission had seen them scout six enemy star systems. Save for the color of the starlight streaming through the viewports, each had presented the same ebon panorama sprinkled with diamond-like sparks of light.

  The first star had been a red giant, whose rays tinged everything ruby. The second was a small blowtorch of a sun. In that system, camera filters had been dialed to maximum and the viewports tightly sealed to protect delicate retinas. The third…

  “What are you doing, Hon?”

  Startled, Lisa squirmed against her acceleration straps to look over her shoulder. Floating in the open hatchway, with one steadying hand wrapped around a nearby stanchion, was her husband, Lt. Commander Mark Rykand.

  “About to tear my hair out from boredom,” she replied. “Thank you for coming to save me just in time!”

  Lowering himself to her level, he leaned down and planted an upside down kiss on her lips. Lisa welcomed the distraction and concentrated on making it the best kiss he had received all day.

  When their lips finally separated, her husband twisted his body around to align with hers and wedged himself between her flank and the arm of the couch. He stabilized himself in the microgravity by anchoring his hand to a spot that wasn’t exactly Space Navy regulation, but one that caused a small electric shock to race up Lisa’s spine.

  Mark was of average height with a shock of sandy hair that was tinged with gray, something that hadn’t been there when she first met him. His blue eyes were his most striking feature. He was currently grinning in that crooked smile way he had.

  “Seriously, what are you doing?”

  “The same thing we’ve been doing since we entered this godforsaken system. I’m listening to the locals jabber at each other in their native tongue, while attempting to record everything we can of their visual communications. At the rate we have been capturing speech and images, the linguistic computers should be able to crack the code in another week or so. Of course, we will reach the stargate and jump in three more days.”

  “I could ask the captain to hang around to give you more time to collect linguistic source data.”

  “Sure, drive right up to the gate and then hover for another 120 hours or so, looking inconspicuous. I’m sure the local overlords wouldn’t suspect a thing,” Lisa replied, laughing.

  “And if they did,” Mark replied, “we would just tell them that we are doing the local once-a-twelve-year space monkey census.”

  “The only space monkeys around here are us. The locals look more like ambulatory fish.”

  “When do you get off duty?”

  “I have another hour to go,” Lisa replied, snuggling close to feel her husband’s muscled ribs press into her right breast. “Why, sir, do you have something interesting planned for this evening?”

  “Not a bad idea,” he said. “We’ve both been working too hard this trip.”

  “You’re telling me. It’s been so long, I forget which of us gets tied up!” She emphasized her point by letting her own hand do some exploring. His torso still had its same hard tone, she noted, despite so many months in microgravity.

  “Stop that!” he said, applying his own pressure in return. There ensued a quick tussle that ended with both of them laughing and not a few articles of clothing in disarray. Acknowledging that it might not be good for two officers of the service to be found in such a position, Mark released his wife, pushed back, and halted his flight just out of reach.

  “Besides,” he said, gesturing toward the Gordian knot of light paths in the nearby holoscreen, “It’s your own damned fault.”

  #

  For Mark Rykand, it had begun at Sandia Spaceport, New Mexico, when he’d seen his sister off to join the Survey Starship Magellan. Maggie had been assigned the plum of exploring the newly discovered New Eden system, containing the most earthlike extra-solar planet yet discovered. Jani had been quite excited at the prospect.

  Laughing, her red locks whipping in the breeze, she waved at him from the shuttle airlock before disappearing into the streamlined dart. Minutes later, the dart had lifted from the runway and disappeared into the azure sky. That was the last time Mark had seen his sister. Three months later, he received word that she had been killed in space.

  That worst day of his life triggered a series of events culminating in his discovery that humanity was no longer alone in the galaxy. While exploring New Eden, Magellan detected two nearby alien ships as they suddenly materialized from out of vacuum. The pair was impossible to miss. Their arrival triggered a massive gravity wave that rattled storage compartments all over the ship.

  At the moment of breakout, the two alien ships had been slugging it out in a space battle. Or rather, one of the ships was attacking the other. The second ship tried to flee its tormentor.

  Finding itself near Magellan, the alien under attack made directly for the human starship. In the process, its orbit took it close to Jani Rykand’s scoutboat. The scout was unarmed and defenseless, offering no threat to anyone. Despite this, the alien attacker lashed out with an energy beam. Jani, her ship, and seven other human souls were instantly transformed into an incandescent cloud silhouetted against the black of space.

  The attack on the scout boat alerted Magellan’s captain to the coming threat as the two aliens made a beeline for his ship. He used the only weapon available. In desperation, he aimed one of the ship’s faster-than-light message probes at the attacking alien.

  Launching a probe so deep in a planetary gravity well would normally have been a prescription for disaster. Not that day. The probe’s overloaded drive generator exploded in the first millisecond after jumping to hypervelocity. With its superlight generators gone, the remains of the probe returned to normal space with an intrinsic velocity of 60% light speed. The expanding cone of debris sliced through the alien attacker, vaporizing it as thoroughly as it had vaporized Scout Three.

  With one alien ship gone and the other drifting helplessly in space, there had been nothing for Magellan’s crew but to hunt for survivors.

  That was how the human race first met Sar-Say.

  #

  Nadine Halstrom, World Coordinator, sat in front of her phone in which her own visage hovered in the depths of the idle holo-display. What she saw shocked her. She hardly recognized the drawn face framed by gray hair, the sunken eyes and the permanent worry lines. That she had aged two decades in the past seven years was undeniable. At least, she reminded herself, the sacrifice was in a worthy cause.

  She remembered vividly the day Magellan returned home carrying a single live and several dead aliens. She remembered the feeling of wonder that had suffused her at the prospect of meeting another intelligent species.

  Even now she grimaced at how naïve she had been.

  Luckily, her first impulse – to call a press conference – was short lived. Instead, she ordered Magellan to the PoleStar habitat. There she assembled a secret research program to learn all that was possible about the aliens. The dead ones were quickly dissected, while the living alien was studied in less destructive ways.

  The first task was to communicate with the survivor. For this, they put out the call for a linguist, a call answered, somewhat reluctantly, by Lisa Arden of the Multiversity of London.

  Upon her introduction to the alien, Lisa had started the sta
ndard “You, Tarzan; me Jane” routine so lampooned in the popular media. To everyone’s surprise, when she asked his name, the alien replied, “Sar-Say.” It was the first intelligible sound anyone had heard him make.

  As the days went on, Lisa taught Sar-Say Standard and he taught her his language. When he gained sufficient fluency, his interrogators asked him about his origin. Sar-Say answered.

  Sometimes, Nadine Halstrom wished that he had not.

  Sar-Say claimed to be a trader from a realm ruled over by monstrous lizard things called the “Broa,” a race of insatiable conquerors. He’d spun tales of planets plundered and species enslaved – those that had not been destroyed outright.

  His human interrogators attributed the stories to a castaway’s need to impress his captors. Still, his tale could not be ignored if it had even a modicum of truth to it, especially because of the answer he’d given when asked the size of the Broan realm. According to Sar-Say, the overlords ruled more than a million suns!

  That claim, preposterous as it was, forced Nadine Halstrom to authorize a reconnaissance of Broan space.

  The expedition had been gone three years. When it returned, it brought evidence that Sar-Say’s tales were more fact than fiction. Indeed, he seemed to have lied about only one vital detail. The Broa were not the ravenous dragons he had described. Rather, they were small beings and rather comical. They looked like monkeys.

  In fact, they looked exactly like Sar-Say, himself.

  #

  The World Coordinator’s reverie was interrupted when the screen on her phone flashed, causing her own visage to be replaced by that of her assistant.

  “Yes?” she asked,

  “Dr. Heindorff is here to see you, Coordinator.”

  “Show him in,” she replied, sighing.

  Nicholas Heindorff was a round man with a round red face framed in wild white hair. He had been holder of the Isaac Newton Chair for Theoretical Physics at the University of Stuttgart before she tapped him for the war effort. Despite his Prussian ancestors, it was hard to think of him as a warrior… even one confined to the laboratory.