McCollum - GIBRALTAR STARS Page 14

  “What about ship markings?”

  “Broan standard practice since these beings are supposed to come from inside the Sovereignty. The detail parts each have their own part number marked in both Broan and Brahminian script. We copied the scheme used on the Type Seven Freighter that Sar-Say was rescued from, right down to the shipyard registration. That, of course, is fake. Still, if the Broa, or whatever beings intercept a ship, look in the onboard computer, they will find full construction records stored there.”

  “Which is, after all, the whole purpose of the exercise,” Mark agreed. “It wouldn’t do for us to tantalize the Sovereignty’s slaves without giving them the information they need to duplicate the ships, would it?”

  “No, it wouldn’t.”

  “You go to so much trouble to make everything sterile, how do you get the ships out of this factory without contaminating them?”

  “Plastic wrap, just like you use in your freezer,” she said. “The ships are triple sealed in impervious film before going through the airlock into transport cases filled with helium gas. From here they go to White Sands, are loaded aboard a heavy lifter and taken to orbit. We have about fifty of them completed. They’re being stored 300 kilometers aft-orbit of High Station, waiting for the stargate network to go operational.”

  “Clever,” he said.

  So far, the project scientists had anticipated his every concern. That gave him a problem. An inspection that didn’t find even one thing to complain about would be a poor inspection indeed. He would have to come up with something before he could declare his mission accomplished. He pondered the problem while he decided that he’d seen enough of Assembly.

  “We can move on, if you like,” he announced.

  “Very well,” Susan replied. “We’ll look over the ‘brains’ of the project next.”

  “Brains?”

  “We’re divided here between brains and brawn. What you see below is brawn. As realistic as we make the ship’s structure, it’s the software that will either convince them they have captured a starship, or else betray the whole charade for what it is. ‘Brains’ is my department… mine and about three hundred other people.”

  They traversed the length of the transparent tube, passed through an open emergency airlock, and entered a lab filled with computers.

  “This is where I work,” Susan said. “It would be a little too obvious if the only thing in the shipboard database were full details of how to build the ship. So, in addition to the standard history of the Sovereignty we pulled from the Pastol planetary data, we are constructing a history of Brahmin in the native language of the dominant species. Frankly, I doubt anyone will go to the trouble of translating it, but if they do, we want our story to stand up to scrutiny…”

  #

  It was cold in Vancouver, colder than Lisa could remember being in… well, forever. The winters around London were generally tempered by the Gulf Stream and nowhere near as frigid as the winters in British Columbia.

  People often speak of the coldness of space. In fact, space habitats don’t generally have a problem keeping their inhabitants warm. Just the opposite.

  Human beings and machinery sealed inside a perfectly insulated sardine produce more heat than they can comfortably use. To keep the inhabitants from being broiled in their own juices, space habitats and starships must radiate excess heat to the surrounding vacuum. When it comes to cold, Lisa had recently learned, nothing in space compares with a twenty-knot wind blowing straight out of the heart of Siberia!

  Her arrival at Stargate Project H.Q. followed a pattern she was getting used to. Upon disembarking from the suborbital scramjet, she was met by a man who introduced himself as a member of the project security detachment. He escorted her to the University of British Columbia, where the project was headquartered. After a thorough induction process, she found herself billeted in student living quarters, just as she had been in Colorado Springs. The difference this time, of course, was that she didn’t have Mark to keep her warm.

  As he’d promised, her husband called each evening. They usually talked for half an hour. Mostly they spoke of how much they missed each other. She would have liked to discuss her work, but project rules prohibited any mention over public comm links. Trojan Horse was even more secretive.

  The public was aware of humanity’s effort to discover the secret of the stargate. Of the plan to teach the Sovereignty’s subservient species to build starships of their own, there had been no hint. High command was worried about the public reaction should the news leak.

  When she wasn’t talking on the phone with Mark, Lisa spent her days as she had at Brinks Base: translating esoteric concepts from Broan into scientific lingo that was nearly a foreign language itself.

  She was surprised to learn that the stargate project predated the current war preparations. It had started as a small theoretical study shortly after Magellan returned from New Eden. The impetus had been the irritation felt by physicists upon learning of the existence of stargates. Several took umbrage at the fact that humanity had somehow missed an entire branch of physics. About the time the First Expedition departed Neptune, a hastily convened secret conference set out to figure out where the heirs of Galileo, Newton, and Einstein had gone astray.

  In a universe of eleven dimensions, only four of which are readily apparent, there are only so many ways to get around Einstein’s Limit. Since star drives do so, and since stargates do likewise, the physicists reasoned the two technologies must be related.

  The universe came into existence as a point of infinite density, the result of an energy fluctuation in the perfect vacuum of whatever it was that preceded it. Shortly thereafter, the strong nuclear force decoupled from the electroweak force, producing a vast explosion — an explosion not of energy, but of space. The energy fluctuation expanded from a dimensionless point to something the size of a baseball in an instant.

  This inflationary era was the most important moment in the whole history of the universe. During the expansion, the familiar four dimensions of space-time coalesced out of the primordial energy soup; leaving the remaining seven dimensions compacted beyond the range of human senses. It was this arrangement of dimensions that held the key to travel between stars.

  Both the star drive and the stargate operate by rotating hidden dimensions to alter an object’s three spatial coordinates, thereby changing its position in normal space. Star drives do so by rotating the gamma dimension around the aleph axis. The effective pseudo-velocity is dependent on the generator, but is always substantially in excess of the speed of light.

  Stargates, the physicists realized, function using a dual coordinate rotation. They rotate the aleph dimension around the gamma axis, and the zeta dimension around the beta axis. A double rotation produces a binomial solution to the coordinate transformation equation, causing the result to be discontinuous. Any ship undergoing such a rotation is thrown out of normal space in one coordinate and reappears “somewhere else” in the same instant. Stargates were the practical version of the ancient concept of a wormhole in space.

  While a single stargate can perform the trick through the application of prodigious quantities of energy, two stargates acting in concert can form a wormhole at a substantially lower cost in energy.

  With the return of the First Expedition, the Stargate Project took on a new urgency. By the time Lisa joined, Earth’s scientists had completed three prototype gates, with two more under construction.

  The original plan had been to haul a gate to a far-off system to see if it would form a wormhole for a single-ended jump. With Amethyst’s arrival, the plan changed.

  Rather than a single-ended test jump, they would transfer a human gate to New Eden and attempt to link up with the purloined Broan gate near the Crab.

  And so it was that Lisa spent her time translating the data needed to synchronize the human gate with the one they’d left behind. If the coming test worked, they would have solved the biggest hurdle on the path to ultimate vic
tory.

  #

  Chapter Eighteen

  The morning sun glistened off the snowpack at the edge of the tabletop summit of El Capitan as Mark and Lisa Rykand enjoyed a leisurely breakfast. The temperature outside was well below freezing, but they were warm within the glass-enclosed patio of the hotel where they were staying in Yosemite Park. It was the 27th day of their leave and they were enjoying a late breakfast amid tall pines, with an icy babbling brook bisecting the snowpack beneath the trees just below their frosted window. This was the seventh and last stop on their tour of Earth and as different from the warm surf of Waikiki, their previous venue, as it was possible to get.

  Mark scanned his communicator messages while Lisa drank a second cup of tea.

  “Director Hardesty confirms the board is adopting all of my suggestions,” he said to his wife. “I wonder if they are just trying to avoid trouble with Admiral N’Gomo.”

  “They were strokes of genius, darling. I’m surprised no one thought of them before.”

  He laughed. “Stroking your man’s ego, dear?”

  She looked coy. “I would never do that.”

  “Really?” he asked, attempting to arch a single eyebrow and failing in a way that caused her to burst out giggling.

  Their month-long leave had been pleasant indeed.

  It had taken him three weeks to review Trojan Horse to the depth he considered necessary to give the Admiral his money’s worth. Nor had he been diligent merely for form’s sake. He got interested in the problem of introducing starships into the Sovereignty without pointing a finger at the creatures who visited Klys’kr’at and Pastol. For the first week and a half, he did little more than study reports, attend meetings, and interview project participants.

  On the tenth day in New Mexico, he woke with a familiar feeling. Something was not right, something he couldn’t identify. It took a week for the lurking thought to mature sufficiently to reveal itself. When it did, he had one of those slap-your-forehead insights: Trojan Horse didn’t feel “real” to him because it was too damned antiseptic!

  He had seen the ships in their vacuum assembly area. He’d taken a tour of the bio-cleansing line, where every part was scrubbed, baked, and then irradiated. He’d watched as finished craft were carefully injected with alien microorganisms and other bio material prior to being wrapped in their triple layer of impervious film. He had witnessed the loading of a finished starship into its helium-filled shipping container before being loaded onto a transport.

  As they left the factory, the starships looked like Fabergé eggs wrapped in holiday paper. The resemblance had caused the workers to dub the finished products “Easter Eggs.” Each could well have been a new model ground car on its way to an auto show. They probably even smelled new inside!

  The stimulus that finally triggered his subconscious was an offhand comment he remembered making to Susan Ahrendt: “Too bad we can’t provide some short, six-armed corpses to man the derelict.”

  They were going to release the small ships into systems where the wizards of Alien Intentions judged the locals to be less than fully loyal to their overlords. The little ships would be set into orbits where they were bound to be noticed and investigated. It was hoped the discoverers would be curious enough about the engines to realize they were star drives. What was missing was a plausible explanation as to how the little ships came to be abandoned in the first place.

  “We need to mess up the ships,” Mark said at a meeting later that day in Director Hardesty’s office. Lee Pembroke was also in attendance.

  “Beg your pardon.”

  “Your ships are supposed to be derelicts. How did they get that way?”

  The question stumped them. The situation reminded Mark of a book he’d once read about the project to build the first atomic bomb.

  The scientists at Los Alamos got together late one afternoon in 1944 to solve a serious problem. They were using a sawed-off anti-aircraft gun to trigger the uranium bomb. One scientist had come across a report that warned that the quantity of explosive they intended to use would seriously erode the barrel. For an hour, the finest minds of the generation brainstormed methods to minimize barrel erosion until a junior member of the team made a critical observation: “Hey, aren’t we only going to fire this cannon once?”

  Just as Oppenheimer and his team recognized that barrel erosion was only a concern for the second shot, Director Hardesty immediately grasped Mark’s meaning.

  “You’re saying we need a narrative, something obvious, to make the recipients think the ships are really abandoned!”

  “Exactly.”

  “How do we do that?” Lee Pembroke asked. “We can’t very well leave them a note.”

  “It would be nice if we had some corpses, but since Brahmin has no intelligent life, that won’t happen. And we can’t just substitute some species of wildlife. No one in the Sovereignty will fall for us passing a dumb animal off as ship’s crew. But what about pets? We could leave some dead animals in cages for verisimilitude.

  “And even if we can’t give them the bodies of the crew, what about traces of those bodies? Brahmin animals have blood, or something that serves the same purpose, right? We stain the control consoles with blood to suggest a crew member was wounded. You can’t tell an animal’s intelligence level by analyzing its blood, can you?”

  “I wouldn’t think so,” Director Hardesty said. “We’ll have to check with the biologists.”

  Mark continued: “Then there are the ships themselves. They’re too pretty. They should look lived in, even battered. We should scorch the hull plates, leave the airlocks open, build in signs of explosive decompression. Maybe we carve a hole big enough to suck the crew out during a breach. That would explain the lack of bodies. Better yet, we install empty vacsuit lockers, suggesting the crew abandoned ship.”

  There had followed a long discussion to flesh out Mark’s ideas. Pembroke shifted them to a conference room and called in several of the senior staff. The brainstorming session went on until early evening. For the first time since his arrival, Mark was late making his nightly call to his wife.

  He started his written report for the Admiral that very evening. A week later, he bid farewell to Hardesty and the other project members. Corporal Dennison drove him to Albuquerque where he boarded the first transport for Vancouver. One week after that, he and Lisa began their postponed leave.

  “What are we going to do today?” he asked his wife as she finished breakfast.

  “I thought we would get into our snuggies and hike the trail to Ribbon Falls. It’s supposed to be beautiful in winter. Then it’s back here for a sauna, a late lunch, and an afternoon air tour of the park.”

  “Do you have this schedule broken down minute-by-minute, or will we use our intuition to fill in the gaps?” he asked, laughing.

  She shrugged. “We can’t very well roll around in bed twenty-four hours a day, now can we?”

  “Speak for yourself, wench!”

  “Methinks you more ambitious than able, sir.”

  They bundled up in their electrically-heated snowsuits, and three hours later, were seated on a stone bench beneath an ice cascade frozen in mid-tumble down a spectacular rock face.

  They sat in a pool of cold sunshine, sides pressed together with arms intertwined. This time of year, the park was vacant save for the hardiest of tourists, giving them the solitude that made the moment just that much better. Lisa rested her head on Mark’s shoulder.

  Lisa stirred, lifted her head and turned to her husband. All Mark could see of her features were her eyes behind snow goggles. Her face warmer covered the rest.

  “I’ll be sad to see this end,” she said.

  “Me, too,” he replied, feeling his own warm breath spreading across his lips and cheeks beneath a muffler.

  “Have you considered what we will do when our leave is up?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “I’ve been giving it some thought,” she replied in a tone that made hi
m understand that she meant she’d been thinking about it a lot.

  “Spit it out.”

  “This has been pleasant, Mark, but I think it’s time we got back to the war. The stargate test is imminent. I thought we could volunteer to go with the ship that makes the first jump.”

  “Back to Brinks?”

  “It’s where we belong. This rear echelon stuff gets old after awhile.”

  “We’d need permission from the Stargate Director and the captain of whatever ship goes.”

  “We can get it.”

  “Oh?” he asked, sensing a setup. “What makes you think that?”

  He couldn’t see her mouth, but he could hear the grin in her voice when she answered: “It’s going to be Amethyst.”

  He gestured at the beauty around them. “Are you that desperate to give up all of this?”

  “Not for three more days,” she replied. “Still, it has to end some time.”

  He sighed, knowing that she was right. “Do you want to call, or shall I?”

  “I already have. Dr. Shepard is waiting for our official request.”

  “Then let’s get it over with.” He reached up to pat his shirt pocket through the snow suit. “Damn, I left my communicator in the room.”

  “Me, too. This afternoon will be soon enough.”

  He pulled her close. “In the meantime, let’s soak up the scenery while we can. It will be back to ship corridors and Brinks’ tunnels before we know it.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, wriggling in his embrace. “It will be good to go home.”

  #

  The New Eden sun could well have been a twin of Sol, which of course, was what had attracted the Stellar Survey to the system in the first place. Had the star been one of the big blue-white bruisers like Rigel, or a red giant such as Antares, or anything other than Sol-like; Magellan would not have been in position to witness Sar-Say’s arrival, in which case, humanity would never have learned of the Broa.

  And, of course, Mark thought, Jani would still be alive. He immediately pushed the thought back down into the dark recess where he kept it caged. He didn’t need to be distracted by morose thoughts of his dead sister at the moment.