Gibraltar Stars Page 19

  The thought of orangutans reminded Lisa of a private joke she and Mark shared. She’d read once that orangutans’ penises were only about two-centimeters long. One night after lovemaking, she had casually mentioned that fact to her husband. As expected, he reacted with the typical self-satisfied male smirk. It was then that she’d sprung her trap.

  Smiling sweetly, she snuggled up close to him and whispered, “Before you get to feeling too superior, dear; you should know that the orangutan’s favorite position for making love is hanging by one arm from the limb of a tree!”

  Since then, often when they were at a party, one of them would sidle up to the other and whisper, “Know where I can find a strong tree around here?” That was the signal to make excuses to their host.

  Lisa sat staring blankly into space for several minutes, entranced by her memories, before she noticed a figure moving in her direction. It was Bernie Weiskopf, her assistant.

  “Yes, Mr. Weiskopf?”

  “Did you forget this morning’s briefing, Commander Rykand?”

  Lisa drew a blank. As she sorted through her memories, displacing the pleasant ones with the more mundane, suddenly it all came back to her.

  “Damn, we have that meeting with the Trojan Horse people this morning, don’t we?”

  “They arrived ten minutes ago.”

  “And here I sit gathering wool. I need a vacation!”

  “Don’t we all?” he agreed affably.

  Lisa climbed to her feet, making sure not to be too energetic about it.

  #

  “Hello, I’m Lisa Rykand, Chief Translator. Sorry to keep you waiting.”

  “No problem, Commander. We have been getting acquainted with your staff,” a small, balding man with a squeaky voice said as he limply shook hands with her. In addition to Bernie Weiskopf, there were two others from Lisa’s section and half-a-dozen exo-biologists and alien psychologists present. They were all members of team searching for what they had christened “Planet X.” The reference had come from some prehistoric movie.

  The visitors numbered four. The leader was Dr. Gordon Smithers, sociologist from the University of Toronto. With him was Samson Oge, a swarthy, squat man who introduced himself as a jack-of-all trades. Felicia Godwin, a grandmotherly type with silver hair, turned out to be a stardrive engineer. The final member of the team was an attractive brunette, Susan Ahrendt, a sculptor. Lisa shook Susan’s hand and said, “I believe you know my husband, Lieutenant.”

  Susan nodded. “I was his guide when he first arrived at Trojan Horse in New Mexico. You were in B.C. at the time, if I remember correctly.”

  “Yes. Duty called and we found ourselves two thousand kilometers apart. That was one reason we decided to come back to the war, so that we could be together. Now look at us. The gulf has grown to two hundred light-years.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  Lisa thought for a moment and remembered something else. “Your ship put in at Nemesis before coming here, did it not?”

  “Yes,” the brunette replied.

  “Did you happen to see Mark while you were there?”

  “I encountered him in a corridor aboard Gideon. I don’t think I have ever been so surprised to see anyone in my entire life. We got to talking and he invited me to dinner.”

  “Oh?” Lisa asked. “I’d like to talk to you later about how he seemed. He looks tired in his recordings.”

  “And you are concerned.” Susan’s response was a statement, not a question.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Then let’s talk.”

  “We’ll go somewhere quiet and let our hair down. I’ll buy the drinks.”

  “I’d like that.”

  She turned to Doctor Smithers. “Now then, what can we do for our colleagues from Trojan Horse?”

  “You can tell us where the best place is to lay our eggs,” Smithers replied.

  “Toward that end, we’ll begin the meeting. If you will all take your seats…”

  #

  The strategy for locating Planet X was basically the one Admiral Landon had outlined to Mark and Lisa in his office. Create a map that plotted the location of Broan power centers and hope to divine something of their government from the patterns revealed.

  The pseudo-simians were humanlike in one respect; they seemed wedded to the authoritarian pyramid as a paradigm for governance. Any intelligent being has only so much time and attention available, so a hierarchy was a natural way to keep work-loads tolerable at any level of governance.

  At the bottom of the pyramid, worlds like Klys’kra’t and Pastol suffered under the Broan yoke, yet received only occasional visits from their alien rulers. The researchers dubbed these ‘Plantation Planets.’ Each cluster of a dozen or so plantation worlds was directed from a nearby system in which the Broa maintained a permanent presence. Generally, these local capitals consisted of a governor, a naval base, and a few administrators, along with their retinue of slave helpers.

  Next came the Sector Capitals, worlds with significant Broan presence. These controlled the local capitals and engaged in central planning on a grand scale. The sector capitals reported to Quadrant Capitals (as human scientists had named them). Quadrant capitals were worlds colonized by the Broa centuries or millennia earlier, although they had large populations of other species in service to their masters.

  There was one faction among the stellar cartographers who thought Planet X was one of the quadrant capitals. However, the theory was not yet well supported by evidence. Another faction thought they would find the home world one level up, at the pinnacle of the pyramid.

  All of this was conjecture, of course. However, it was educated conjecture. The operative assumption was that if they could trace the sinews of Broan power, they would eventually find the one world that controlled all.

  Trojan Horse was not interested in these mega-worlds; exactly the opposite. They were looking for systems where the overlords’ control was tenuous at best, and where the locals might prove rebellious.

  In the million worlds comprising the Sovereignty, there must be thousands of planets that would gladly throw off the Broan yoke if given the opportunity.

  Much of the work to find Trojan Horse candidate systems had been done on Earth. However, Earth’s data was from the Pastol database and contained none of the haul of intelligence from the Q-ships. And though Lisa’s translators and the scientists of the Project X were not looking for rebellious plantation planets, they had the data to flesh out the Earth team’s target list.

  This morning’s conference was to lay out the parameters of a search routine that would give the Trojan Horse people their best shot at planting their eggs in fertile soil.

  The conference dragged on through lunch and well into the afternoon. Despite her fatigue, Lisa found the subject intriguing. It was also professionally challenging. There were a large number of interlocking characteristics that might identify a race of slaves inclined toward rebellion; and extracting that information required creativity by both translators and computer programmers.

  Finally, at 15:00, she called a halt. “Let us process what we have learned today and turn it into a proposal. We can get back together in… what do you think, Bernie? Three days?... Yes, we’ll set up a status meeting for three days from now.”

  Everyone stood and began speaking with their neighbors. Lisa left her place at the head of the table and skated to the other end where Susan Ahrendt was putting away her notes. She had been quiet for most of the day. Mostly Smithers had done the talking.

  “Susan,” Lisa said, touching the brunette’s arm to gain her attention.

  “Hello, Lisa.”

  “I’d really like to have that talk now.”

  “Sure. You mentioned drinks, correct?”

  “I did.”

  “I’ll talk as long as you buy. Nemesis is dry, you know.”

  Lisa laughed. She had meant it to sound lighthearted, but it didn’t come out that way. “No wonder Mark is developing fr
own lines!”

  #

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  With the influx of supplies from Earth through the stargates, Admiral Landon found sufficient surplus to turn one of the base’s store rooms into a bistro. The furniture was all wrought iron of local manufacture, as were the hanging Tiffany lamps, but the beer and wine were imported; albeit, they were dispensed from vacuum cylinders rather than traditional wood barrels and glass bottles.

  The two women found a quiet spot in a corner. They made small talk while the waitress, a middle-aged woman whose day job involved operating a power excavator, took their order. For her second job, she had shed her dust-encrusted surface suit for a genuine Bavarian dirndl dress. She returned to the bar, retrieved two objects from a jury-rigged ship’s cryo cooler, and quickly returned with two frost-covered bulbs filled with amber-gold liquid.

  “Two beers, as requested,” the waitress said.

  She removed a couple of small coasters from her tray, put them in front of the women, and then set a drinking bulb on each. A traditional bowl of pretzels completed the order.

  “Anything else, dearies?”

  “We’re fine, thank you.”

  “Call me if you need refills.” With that, she moved with a practiced skating motion toward a table of vacuum monkeys who seemed to have been here quite a while.

  “Ever drink beer from a bulb before?” Lisa asked

  “Can’t say I have,” Susan responded.

  “There’s a trick to it. She held up her bulb. The frost was quickly dissipating as moisture from the air condensed on the surface. “Note the lack of the usual foam or bubbles. That is the clue that the bulb is pressurized. Pick it up, put your thumb on the lever, stick the nozzle in your mouth, like so,” she demonstrated. “Now, as gently as you can, press the lever…”

  A quiet hissing noise and the odor familiar to bar patrons across the galaxy suddenly suffused the air. As quickly as Lisa started the flow, she halted it. “Now you try.”

  Susan followed her example. Thumb on the control, she inserted the nozzle between her lips and squeezed. There was a harsh noise and an immediate spate of coughing as liquid sprayed from her nostrils. The coughing came to a ragged halt while Lisa used a cloth to clean up the minor mess.

  “Too much thumb on that one,” Lisa said, laughing.

  Susan tried again, this time with better results. After a few minutes of idle chat interspersed with sips of refreshment, she had her technique down to a science. That was when Lisa decided the time was right to broach what was on her mind.

  “Tell me about Mark. How did he seem to you?”

  Susan shrugged. “Tired, I suppose. I told him he looked haggard.”

  “How did he respond to that?”

  “He acknowledged it.”

  “He did? He must be really tired.”

  Susan nodded. “He explained that Nemesis is a difficult environment. There are so many things that can go wrong that it is hard to relax. Eleven were killed in setting up the base, I understand.”

  “He told me about them in his letters. Tragic. Still, compared to wars in history, we have suffered amazingly low casualties so far. Of course, I couldn’t maintain my Olympian attitude if Mark were one of them.”

  “What I don’t understand,” Susan answered, “is why they didn’t find a warmer planet to set up shop.”

  “Didn’t Mark explain that?”

  “Something about the cluster being undetectable.”

  “Right. Without a star to act as a marker, the Broa will never figure out where our main base is. Unlike a starship, you just can’t go traipsing around the universe via stargate. You have to have a definite destination in mind.”

  “Oh.”

  “The problem with rogue planets is that they are orphans — no star to warm them. That’s why they are called ‘rogues.’ Actually, Nemesis is a lot warmer than it ought to be. It’s the flexing caused by the other planets. At least, that is what Mark says in his letters.”

  “It’s colder than a witch’s teat,” Susan agreed.

  “A what?”

  “Just an expression I once heard. We were there for three days offloading cargo, and everywhere I went, I had to wear an electrically heated bunny suit. You can see your breath in the pedestrian tunnels.”

  “How did you two run into one another?” Lisa asked, hoping her delivery did not betray her intense interest in the question.

  “By accident,” Susan lied. “I was on my way to lunch when I saw him. He was traversing a cross-passage, visible for maybe a second. It startled me. It took me a moment to react.

  “Anyway, when I got over my shock, I ran after him, yelling his name like an idiot. From the expression on his face, he must have thought so when he turned around and saw me.”

  “So, Mark invited you to dinner?”

  “Not right away. We adjourned to Gideon’s mess. That was where I told him that he looked haggard. We had coffee together while I brought him up to speed on the gossip from New Mexico. Our conversation was cut short by a call from his boss. A tractor had buried itself in a snow bank or something. That is when he invited me to dinner.”

  “Did he seem depressed?”

  “Not particularly,” Susan responded. “Just tired. Sort of like you seem to me now.”

  “I’m tired, all right,” Lisa agreed. “Bone tired. How was dinner?”

  “Delicious. Apparently, your husband has some pull with the chef. He had dinner waiting in a thermal box, with a red rose on the table.”

  Lisa grew silent for a dozen seconds. Her expression, which had been open and friendly, became indefinable. When she spoke again, there had been a change in her voice.

  “You and Mark had dinner in private?”

  “We did.”

  The pause from Lisa was longer this time. Finally, choosing each word carefully, she said, “There is a question I would like to ask you, but I’m not sure how to phrase it.”

  “You want to know if I slept with your husband,” Susan responded.

  “Well… yes!”

  “The answer is no. I did not.”

  Another long pause ensued.

  “Would you tell me if you had?”

  “Under normal circumstances? No. I would lie. However, in this case, virtue is the easy call. Nothing happened.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  Susan shrugged. “If you must know… I offered. Mark turned me down.”

  “He told you he didn’t want to have sex with you?” Lisa’s question was dripping with incredulity. “That doesn’t sound like a man.”

  Incongruously, Susan chose that moment to laugh. “You know, that was my exact thought at the time! You think you have them figured out, and they throw you a curve. It took me a few moments to comprehend what was going on.”

  “What?”

  “It seems that Mark loves you very much. Don’t misunderstand me. He was tempted! I have enough experience to read the signs. Yet, when the time came, he refused to play. The moment passed, we had dessert and coffee, and then he took me to their version of this place.

  “I think I met just about the entire male population of the planet. There was standing room only around the walls that night. I don’t know how they selected who it was that would come over and ask me to dance or in what order. I think they were holding a silent auction back in the corner. All I know is that I danced with about thirty different men.”

  “How lucky for you.”

  “It was therapeutic. My ego was bruised right about then and that dance did more to cheer me up than I would have thought possible. I also confirmed a suspicion that I have always had about the male of the species.”

  “What’s that?” Lisa asked, still subdued as she tried to process what she was hearing.

  “You never see them, but they just have to possess six hands!” she said, giggling. “That is the only thing that explains it.”

  Despite herself, Lisa laughed too. “Isn’t that the truth?”

  Her l
aughter was so unexpected, she paused a moment to reflect on it. Here she sat, drinking with a woman who admitted propositioning her husband. She should have been angry. How could she sit here laughing with the hussy? she wondered, reaching back into her memory for an antique concept of her own.

  Apparently, she decided after nearly a minute of introspection, deep down, she must believe Susan’s story. She wanted to believe it, both for the sake of her own sanity and for her marriage.

  The manic mood passed as quickly as it arrived. What replaced it was an indefinable sadness. Her husband had faced temptation and passed the test. Yet, what good did that do her when he was 200 light-years away in the deep black?

  “Susan,” she asked, plaintively, incipient tears in her voice, “what can I do?”

  The answer came without hesitation. “You must go to him. He needs you. He had the willpower this time. He may not be as strong the next time opportunity presents itself.”

  Lisa nodded. It was the sort of advice only a woman can give another woman. Men just didn’t have it in their genes to see beyond the surface of the words.

  Susan watched Lisa’s features change. She saw doubt replaced by confusion, then calculation, and finally, resolve.

  “Excuse me.” Lisa reached for her communicator. A couple of numbers punched and she had it up to her ear. A tinny voice answered on the other end.

  “Yeoman Beal? This is Lisa Rykand. Is the admiral still on duty?” (Short pause.) “May I schedule an appointment? (Short pause, tinny voice.) No, this afternoon. It won’t take long.”

  There was a much longer pause, followed by the tinny voice again.

  “I’ll be right there.”

  Lisa slid off the stool and turned to her guest. “Thanks for the advice. Order another drink. Tell the waitress to put it on my bill.”

  With that, she turned and hurried out of the bistro, moving as fast as Sutton gravity would allow.

  #

  Mark Rykand was again in his vacuum suit, watching two cranes lower a large rectangular frame into place. The building going up was the largest in Port Grayson, or would be once they had the insulation on its sides. Unlike the igloo-shaped residential domes, this was a massive storeroom that would house a portion of the billions of spare parts a fleet needed to maintain its operational readiness. It was the first of hundreds that would soon dot the ice plain that was Nemesis’ most prominent feature.