McCollum - GIBRALTAR STARS Read online

  Even as the incandescent plume rose silently into the black sky, residual heat softened the surrounding strata and turned the rock to magma. Glowing rivers flowed into the 140-kilometer-wide crater, turning it into an incandescent lake.

  As the cauldron cooled, a pumice-like skim formed on the surface, trapping heat and gas deep in the slowly solidifying rock. As the crater cooled over a thousand years, the gas formed voids in the frozen lava. Even up to modern times, these pockets of gas occasionally found a path to the surface, producing vapors in the vacuum of the crater. The sight of these wispy fogs had delighted early astronomers unused to viewing changes in the Moon’s surface.

  Slowly, over eons, the Earth-Moon tug-of-war pulled the orbiting debris from the sky. Most blazed across the terrestrial heavens to burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere, although the larger chunks gouged gaping holes in the young continents.

  Most of the voids trapped below the crater’s surface were small. One particular void, however, was epic in scope. A massive gas bubble was caught in the slowly thickening magma, which, when it cooled, resulted in an ovoid cavern some 200 meters across.

  Also buried beneath Grimaldi Crater were the remnants of the spent nickel-iron asteroid. The asteroidal material was first identified when scientists analyzed the orbits of the earliest lunar satellites. They dubbed the subterranean iron mass a “mascon.”

  The first colonists were drawn to the crater by the commercial possibility of mining that iron. However, when a consortium performed seismic studies, they discovered the treasure was buried too deeply for economic extraction. Their studies did, however, reveal the massive void that underlay the crater.

  Disappointed, the Mayor of Grimaldi City raised sufficient capital to bore a shaft down into the bubble. Crews sealed the walls and the city used the void as a reservoir for their air supply.

  There matters remained until Magellan brought home news of the Broa. After the second expedition, a frightened Parliament voted to erect a Solar System Defense Network. The Grimaldi bubble was judged the perfect location for the network’s impregnable nerve center.

  Technician First Class Heather Gramm, a Lunarian born-and- bred, knew almost nothing of the geological history of the Grimaldi Defense Center. But she knew that it was the biggest empty space she had ever seen. Illuminated by floodlights overhead, with humidity added by the exhalations of two thousand people, the center was large enough to have its own weather… another phenomenon alien to a native Lunarian. When she was off duty, Heather often lay on her back in an empty cubicle; head cradled in the palms of her hands, and watched the transparent wisps of nascent clouds carried aloft by ventilator streams.

  Indeed, after nearly two years spent monitoring the instruments that would detect a Broan attack and coordinate Sol’s defense, she still felt a thrill every time she happened to glance upward. The center psychologist diagnosed it as a mild touch of agoraphobia and nothing to worry about. It was a malady common to tunnel-dwelling Lunarians exposed to the big subterranean bubble.

  GDC had been established on the Moon because it would take an explosion almost as large as the one that created Grimaldi to destroy the Solar System’s premier command-and-control node. If anyone were to attack Sol, Grimaldi had hundreds of ships and thousands of superlight missiles at its disposal. Depending on how serious the attempt, there was a good chance the first wave would be stopped out beyond the orbit of Saturn. After that, depending on how serious the Broa were, Earth’s commanders were far less confident.

  “How was your date with Dreamboat?” Technician Specialist Prudence Hopewell asked from the control station to Heather’s right.

  “Pretty good. You have to watch his hands, is all. They have minds of their own.”

  “Or at least are controlled by the ‘small head,’” Prudence replied with a laugh.

  “You could say that about all of them, couldn’t you?” Heather responded.

  There was a beeping noise from her console. Simultaneously, a red dot appeared on a black star field. Suddenly, her romantic encounter of the previous evening was forgotten as she scanned her status screens. Nodding subconsciously, she keyed for her supervisor, whose station was two rows back and one level up from her own.

  “What is it, Gramm?”

  “I have a signal, sir. Comm laser. Standard fleet model. Coming from Sagittarius.”

  “Odd,” Specialist Ferguson replied. “Navy ships don’t usually approach from that quadrant. Any message yet?”

  “No, sir. Just the carrier. Triangulation puts them out beyond Jupe.”

  “How are the gravity wave detectors?”

  “Quiet, sir. It appears to have dropped out of superlight.”

  “All right. Let me know as soon as they begin transmitting. Once you have them identified and have verified their security code, send the usual ‘Welcome Home’ message and ask their intentions. What’s the communications lag?”

  “Fifty minutes.”

  “If you haven’t received a reply within two hours, go to Alert Level Four.”

  “Yes, sir. Verify identity, send welcome, and receive reply. If nothing in two hours, Alert Level Four.”

  “Keep me apprised of any changes. Ferguson out.”

  “Gramm Out.”

  #

  For once, Nadine Halstrom was not at her desk. She and her husband were standing on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. It was her first vacation in two years and she was determined to enjoy it. More specifically, she was determined to not think about the war until she was back at her desk in Toronto some four days hence.

  Having spent the night in the North Rim Lodge, a rustic building constructed in the late 21st century to replace an earlier lodge that had burned down, she and Harold hiked along the rim trail to Bright Angel Point, just down the hill from the lodge. The point was reached by clambering along a ferrocrete path that stretched along a narrow ridge leading to a promontory. In places, the trail was only two meters wide. Nadine discovered that she felt lightheaded in those spots and had to be warned by her husband not to look down.

  The dizziness was caused by having one’s left eye focused on the floor of Bright Angel Canyon, a full kilometer below, and the right eye focused in Roaring Springs Canyon, a slightly smaller tributary canyon. The struggle between watching the path on which one walked and the two distant landscapes on either side caused Nadine’s brain to begin screaming “TILT”.

  After that, she didn’t look down as she and her husband of thirty years made their way single file to the overlook at the end of the promontory. There, a wide spot was mercifully bordered by a centuries-old chain-link fence.

  They stood and gazed out across the canyon to the banded red-and-buff strata that climbed the walls of the South Rim, some twenty kilometers remote. A cold wind tugged at their clothes and caused Nadine’s hair to blow around her face as she peered intently into the late afternoon haze. The two of them were trying to catch a glimpse of the river in the center of the canyon, a kilometer-and-a-half below her vantage point and ten kilometers distant.

  “God, this puts things in perspective, doesn’t it, Harold?”

  “It does indeed,” her husband replied, pulling her closer to share his body heat with her. “It’s hard to remember today’s crises when compared to the eternity of this place.”

  “To forget the day’s cares even for a bit…” Her sigh was the wistful exhalation of someone with too many cares.

  The biggest problem with a war where there was no apparent action, she had discovered, was keeping the population focused on the job at hand. The past eight years highlighted the remarkable resilience of the human race. They had gone from a world where no one living remembered what war was like, to as militarized a society as had ever been seen in human history.

  Not that everyone strutted around in uniforms, goose-stepping down the street in rigid rectangular formation. It was nothing like the grainy black-and-white newsreels of the twentieth century, or even the primitive vid
eo of the twenty-first.

  On the surface, everyone went about their job as they always had. Bankers still worried about interest rates, doctors still attended ailments that baffled the autodocs, and crinjiliers still repaired samrons. But the sameness was only on the surface. All of humanity’s efforts now went into supporting the war. Much of industry that had once built ground cars, aircraft, and surface ships had been diverted to the construction of starships and all of the things that went into them.

  Factories that once built computers for every aspect of society still did so. But they also built superlight torpedoes, gravity wave detectors, and all manner of devices for living and working in microgravity.

  Long abandoned mines had reopened to supply the metals needed for re-arming the human race. They were even pumping oil again after a hiatus of some 90 years — this time for chemical feedstock rather than combustion.

  And yet, despite having made the transition to war production, it was hard to remember there was a war on. Grumbling could be heard regarding the level of taxation, and second guessing was rampant as to whether an activist approach to the Broa had been the correct decision. An active protest movement had been mobilized and was busy chipping away at public support for the war.

  There were even those who believed the Broa were a government plot, that they didn’t really exist; and this despite the fact that there was a living, breathing representative of the species on Luna!

  There were so many decisions to be made, allocations of scarce resources, personnel clashes to be ironed out, and budgetary balances to be maintained. Each seemed to require the personal attention of the World Coordinator.

  As a girl in school, Nadine had been struck by how much older American presidents seemed when they left office compared to when they entered…this in the time when the U.S. had been the world’s sole superpower. She now understood the process that wore them down. It was wearing her down and if she kept at it much longer, it was liable to kill her. Already her doctors warned her about her blood pressure.

  That was the reason for this vacation with Harold. The plan had been to forget her job for awhile, to offload the weight of the world onto her assistants’ shoulders, and to forget everything, especially the Broa.

  More easily said than done, unfortunately. She could shut off her hand computer and cut her communicator out of the net, but she couldn’t shut off her mind. No matter how magnificent the view of nature, it didn’t help her sleep any better at night when her mind insisted on reviewing some decision that she had no way of changing now.

  Still, it was good to get away for awhile.

  So she held onto her husband and watched the sun sink toward the horizon. As it did so, the canyon before her disappeared into blue and purple shadows. This was why she had come here. Sunset from the North Rim was one of the natural wonders of the world. If anything could take her mind off her troubles, this could…

  She sensed the presence behind her more than heard it. Long years in public service had given her that ability. The sun had just disappeared behind the wall of Bright Angel Canyon. Orange still tinged the western sky and the shadows had started to darken to a deeper purple. She drank in the view for a few seconds, then sighed and turned.

  “Yes, Major?”

  The head of her security detail stood apologetically behind her. He and his dozen or so cohorts did their best to look like the other tourists, and failed more because of the effort than in spite of it. She wasn’t sure what it was. Perhaps the ramrod-straightness of his backbone, or the subtle bulge where his sidearm hung beneath one armpit. Or perhaps it was the unobtrusive communications suite tucked into one ear.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. The assistant coordinator has forwarded a message marked ‘urgent.’”

  “Aren’t they all?” she asked, trying not to show her irritation. After all, her guardian was merely relaying the message, not originating it. “What is it?”

  “A ship has dropped sublight at the edge of the Solar System. They claim to be the Cruiser Amethyst, a month out of Brinks Base.”

  For a moment, the import of his words did not register. There was a regular courier service between Sol and humanity’s forward base in the Sovereignty. They carried dispatches, supplies, and mail…

  “A month you say?” she asked, her curiosity piqued.

  “Yes, ma’am. It seems we have obtained an enemy stargate and used it to make the jump in zero time. Amethyst reports that they are carrying full data and experts on stargate technology.”

  “Thank you, Major.”

  As the security man retreated to his overwatch position, she turned back to her husband, intertwined an arm with his, and laid her head on his shoulder. The wind had picked up, but she barely noticed. She was determined to watch the rest of the sunset. And later, they would have a steak dinner in the lodge, and some wine, before catching a fast jumper back to Toronto. She had almost finished a whole week of vacation before work intruded, a new record!

  Somehow, she didn’t mind.

  For the second time, the expeditionary force had come through. First they purloined a planetary database from an alien world, a treasure trove they were still exploiting. And now they had the secret that would make it possible to take this war to the enemy.

  Humankind’s little problems might be transient compared to the age of the rocks beneath her feet; but they weren’t nothing. And sometimes, humanity won one!

  #

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Council Chamber of Civilization had been considered spacious three great-gross cycles earlier when Zel-Sen’s clan led a fractious alliance to victory in the last great campaign of political consolidation. For six generations, an amalgam of loosely affiliated family groups waged war for dominance of Ssasfal. Slowly they conquered their rivals, first in the forests of West Continent, and then the spacious vistas of the Eastern Islands.

  The last holdouts belonged to the Great Federation of the Iskar Mountains. After more than thirty cycles of war, the two sides came together in the Battle on the Shore. At battle’s end, the Leader of the Iskar was dead and Zel-Sen’s ancestors ascendant.

  There followed a great consolidation, heady times in which a worldwide culture was forged, one that had remained remarkably stable for a gross of generations. It was a culture originally forged in the forest tops of the home world and subsequently imposed across Civilization.

  The Race had lived in the vine tops since the earliest arboreals sharpened sticks for tools. It was safer than life on the ground, especially since droughts caused the early clans to move frequently to new feeding grounds. The thin stalks and runners of the upper forest were too weak to support the weight of the large strider predators that prowled the forest floor. So long as a person kept above where a mawmouth might jump or reach with its claws, the carnivorous beasts represented little threat to the early Broa.

  However, the Race paid dearly for this safety. Like most intelligent species, Broan young were slow to mature, and since a mother carrying a cub needed both hands free to swing from vine to vine, it made evolutionary sense to limit brood size to a single cub. Only when the cub developed sufficient reach to safely brachiate on its own did her fertility return, and then only in periods of plenty. Drought conditions delayed the onset of estrus further as a defense against famine. The conditions that produced fertility in the Broan female required a delicate balance that was not easily duplicated anywhere but the vine tops of Ssasfal. It was this historic ‘one offspring at a time’ adaptation that was modern society’s largest problem.

  There was also the competition from other forest dwellers for food. An early staple was the lossa fruit that grew in great clusters of succulent purple orbs suspended beneath the tangled mat of vegetation that made up the middle forest. Above this interlocking layer were the bright uplands; and below, the gloomy floor. With their nests high in the vines, gathering parties ventured down into the lower gloom to harvest the plump fruit.

  They were not alone.

/>   Colorful four-wingers buzzed around, darting forward to hover on wings moving too quickly to be seen as they pierced the orbs with spike-like proboscises. Slow moving vine-imitators also feasted on the lossa. They were a danger because their fleshy, legless bodies were camouflaged to resemble the vines themselves. An unwary traveler who reached for an anchor, only to find an imitator in his grasp could easily fall to his death.

  But the Race’s mortal enemies were the pelen, small six-legged, warm-blooded vermin that ate everything in their path. Pelen traveled in swarms and their approach was heralded by the loud crackling noise they made as they chewed through wood. Their progress was marked by a wide brown swath of dying vegetation.

  Upon the first hint of a swarm’s approach, watchmen blew alarm horns, sending a wailing call out to all members of the clan. The sounding of the horn was the signal to rush to the gathering grounds. Able-bodied males grabbed spears and positioned themselves between the mindless eaters and the clan’s fruit supply. A standard defense called for half the hunters to perch atop the midlevel mat while the other half waited below, suspended by one arm with the other holding a short, sharp spear.

  When the swarm reached the defense line, the hunters slashed and stabbed wildly to send dead and dying vermin crashing through the leaves to the darkness of the forest floor below.

  While males slowed the pests’ advance, females with cubs on their backs brachiated wildly, stripping fruit and placing it into harvest bags until they were nearly too full to lift.

  In the mad rush to defend or harvest, males and females sometimes lost their grip. Those who could not quickly reestablish an anchor went crashing into the darkness below. Such accidents invariably resulted in a short, sharp death scream and increased snarls from the great beasts attracted by the smell of blood as the slain pelen rained down upon them.