McCollum - GIBRALTAR STARS Read online

  “Nicholas, come in.”

  “Hello, Nadine. It is good to see you again.”

  “Please, be seated,” she said, directing him to the settee she kept for important visitors. “Schnapps?”

  “Don’t mind if I do.”

  “Carl, two glasses of Goldschlager peach, please,” she said to the empty air.

  “Right away, Madam Coordinator,” her assistant responded.

  Within five minutes, Nadine and Heindorff were seated comfortably and had sampled the fruit brandy. She regarded the scientist for long seconds, and then said, “How are things going on the project?”

  Her question elicited an expansive shrug. “Good in some ways, not so good in others.”

  She frowned and let her momentary irritation dissipate. Nicholas was one of those people who avoided answering any question directly. She let a few seconds pass before she said, “Perhaps you could be a bit more specific.”

  “Ja, Nadine. I suppose I can. The theoretical work goes well. My team has a much better understanding of the principles on which the stargates operate, especially since receiving a copy of the alien database last year.”

  She nodded. It took more than a year for ships to travel between Sol and the advance human base near the Crab Nebula … a distance of some 7000 light-years. One year there and one year back, plus whatever time was required at the other end. Thirty months after they sent practically every working starship in the Solar System to relieve Brinks Base, two ships returned carrying the first fruits of their campaign against the Broa.

  Having spotted a number of Broan stars via the gravity wave emanations of their stargates, a few brave souls made contact with an isolated Broan world and talked the inhabitants into trading for a copy of their planetary database. It was an act equivalent to aliens landing on the White House lawn in earlier centuries and leaving with a copy of every book in the Library of Congress.

  If the first rule of combat is to know one’s enemy, the database proved the first step on the long road to victory. In that database they discovered voluminous entries regarding Broan physics; which, not surprisingly, were closely related to human physics. How could it be otherwise, since both species occupy the same universe?

  “Are you sure you have the theory down solid?”

  “Certainly, Nadine. The stargates operate on a principle not unlike our own stardrives. Both utilize the fact that the universe is composed of eleven distinct dimensions to perform a tertiary dimensional substitution that effectively warps space. Where our stardrives rotate the gamma dimension around the aleph, the stargates rotate the aleph and zeta dimensions...”

  “Spare me, Professor. I took history in college.”

  “Suffice to say, then, that we know the principles involved. We just haven’t figured out how to mechanize them.”

  “That is the reason I asked you here, Nicholas. We need to pick up the pace. We can’t fight a war with year-long lines of communication. We need a gate network of our own to reduce transit times from years to weeks.”

  “I know that, Nadine. What would you have me do? Pull a stargate out of my ass?”

  “If that will speed the process,” she replied, nonplussed at the sudden profanity.

  “It would help if we could experiment. The restrictions you have placed on such efforts have hamstrung us.”

  “You know the rules, Nicholas, and the penalties for breaking them.”

  Unlike starships, which left no detectable trace on the universe, stargate jumps involved abrupt mass discontinuities, which in turn produced gravity waves. Gravity waves spread outward from their point of origin at a pace of one light-year per year… forever. A successful test of such a device inside the solar system would mark Sol as an inhabited star to anyone in position to detect the resulting wave.

  “Then this subject is likely to remain a theoretical one for quite some time, Madam Coordinator,” Heindorff responded coldly. “We are preparing experiments to be performed in some distant godforsaken system, but the preparations and transit times are slowing our progress.”

  “Come now, Nicholas,” Nadine cajoled. “You know we can’t take any chances, not with the Broa as strong as they are. Surely we are learning something without going directly to experiment.”

  “Ja, Nadine. We have learned quite a lot. For one thing, we do not see that there is any limit to the physical size a stargate may be.”

  “Then why do the Broa only seem to build one size?”

  Her question brought forth a Germanic shrug. “Perhaps they have a power limitation.”

  “How can we speed things up without betraying ourselves?”

  “It would help if we had an actual gate to study. I understand that Brinks Base is working on obtaining a sample.”

  “They are if they are following their mission orders,” Nadine Halstrom replied, wistfully. With a two-year delay in communications, the personnel at Brinks Base must, of necessity, operate autonomously. The last dispatch she had received, now some 18 months stale, included detailed planning for such a mission.

  #

  Chapter Two

  The star was unremarkable, a yellow-white dwarf some twenty percent more luminous than Sol, and a full spectral point hotter. Even so, its wan glow was homelike as the human ships dropped sublight beyond the system’s twelfth planet.

  The “breakout complete” announcement was still echoing as Captain William Lonegan gave the order for a full circumambient sensor sweep.

  “We just picked up Sundowner’s beacon,” Lieutenant Vivian Myers reported. “She’s about three hundred thousand klicks off our stern. Nothing yet on the other four.”

  “Let me know when you have them.”

  Like the rest of her class, Battle Cruiser TSNS Lancer was a young ship. She had left the construction cradle a mere month before setting off on the year-long journey from Sol to Hideout and had spent the last sixteen months scouting enemy star systems.

  “Barnstable just checked in, Captain,” his communications officer reported. “They are a quarter-million klicks off our dorsal antenna, sir.”

  “Burlingame, as well, sir,” Lieutenant Myers reported. “No communications yet, but I have her beacon in sight.”

  “Have all ships converge on us,” Lonegan ordered. “Tell Archernar and Powhatan when they check in.”

  While he waited for word of his two stragglers, Lonegan adjusted his screen for a view of the local star. Even at maximum magnification, it was merely the brightest point of light in an ebon sky.

  #

  Catalog System 385492, tentatively tagged Vrathalatar, was one of a million or so stars tied together by Broan stargates. The Broan symbology showed the system as a small bent hourglass figure dangling at the end of a dimly glowing red line, a cul-de-sac star with but a single stargate.

  Normally such a system would not have been of interest to humanity. In the Broan Sovereignty, a system’s importance could best be judged by the number of stargates it possessed. Some of the larger hubs had six or more, indicating a center of commerce and power.

  Vrathalatar was different. Lancer and her consorts had come to the yellow-white star because, a century earlier, the small Koala-bear-like inhabitants had decided they’d had enough of Broan arrogance. The source of their discontent was not known, but the grisly results were recorded in Broan records as a warning to others.

  Vrathalatar was a dead system, all life on its one inhabited world having been wiped out by an avenging Broan war fleet. There had been no mercy for the world and its hundreds of millions of inhabitants. Nor had the galactic overlords stopped when they destroyed the planet. They systematically swept among the locals’ extensive off-world installations and destroyed them as well. When they left the system, not a single Vrath (as human researchers had taken to calling the indigenous species) was left alive.

  Yet, more than a century after the destruction of its children, the star still showed as a cul-de-sac symbol in star maps of the vast Broan transport web. It was Vrath
alatar’s orphan stargate that had drawn Lancer and her consorts to this dead system.

  It was their mission to steal it.

  #

  Bill Lonegan lounged in his command couch while he sipped on a bulb of hot coffee, feigning disinterest in the maddeningly slow progress of Lancer’s latest deep space sensor sweep. It had been five days since he and his small fleet dropped sublight at the edge of the system. So far, they had not found the stargate that was the focus of their mission.

  Their lack of success had once again brought home the fact of just how large a place an entire star system really is. The main viewscreen was focused on the diamond-studded blackness before them, the section of airless void where they sought their prey.

  Behind them, the star Vrathalatar was a small, brilliantly glowing billiard ball, its surface pockmarked by an unusually large number of sunspots, which in turn caused the star to radiate static all across the communications bands. While normally not a problem, radio static had the effect of limiting the effectiveness of some of their more sensitive search instruments, rendering them blind in one particularly useful frequency range.

  “Anything, Mr. Cardin?” he asked, striving for that tone of bored disinterest with which starship captains are supposed to meet even the most harrowing of emergencies.

  “No, sir,” his chief of sensors replied. “No sign of the stargate, yet; although the range is still long for passive scanning in this radio soup.”

  “What about the gate beacon?”

  “It isn’t responding. We’ve sent the universal jump code a dozen times. So far, nothing.”

  “Carry on.”

  With the stargate not responding to hails, it wasn’t surprising that they were having difficulty locating it. However, the silence was worrisome. The possible reasons for its non-responsiveness ranged from mundane to sinister. The most likely scenario was that the gate had malfunctioned sometime during the century since the destruction of the Vrath, and that the Broa had not thought it worth fixing. Or it might be operative, but not answering to the standard codes. Perhaps the Broa wanted to keep commercial traffic out of this system and had reprogrammed the gate accordingly.

  The most worrisome possibility was that the gate wasn’t responding because it did not exist. For all he knew, the last Broan warship to leave this system had left behind a time bomb to destroy the gate following its jump. If that were the case, he and his ships had been sent on a three hundred light-year snipe hunt.

  Lonegan glanced at the chronometer displayed in one corner of his workscreen. Their database placed the gate high above Vrathalatar’s ecliptic. If true, they would close to passive detection range within sixty minutes. If not, they would spend an extra week searching before he declared the mission a bust.

  Centered on Lancer, a globular formation of ships probed the void in front of them. Two of the five, Barnstable and Burlingame, were new destroyers, smaller versions of Lancer, armed with nearly the same weaponry. Their mission was to guard the operation for as long as was required to tow the stargate back to Brinks Base.

  “Tow” was a misnomer, of course. To rotate a ship into a different universe requires substantial power. Thus, jump fields were designed to be no larger than absolutely necessary. Often the field extended only a few centimeters beyond the hull. However, jump fields can be stretched to enclose any external object so long as one does not insist on efficiency.

  Transporting the purloined stargate would be the job of Sundowner, one of the largest starships ever constructed. As large as it was, the ship was too small to take the gate aboard for transport. Rather, Sundowner would wear the gate like the victory wreath of some Roman conqueror.

  Of the other two ships in Captain Lonegon’s small fleet, Archernar was a converted liner carrying the scientists and technicians who would first study the gate and then prepare it for transport. Powhatan was their support ship, a combination tanker/freighter.

  Lonegan’s workstation chimed. He reached out and keyed for acceptance.

  “Yes?”

  “Stargate detected,” Lieutenant Myers said from her station three consoles to Lonegan’s right.

  “Where?”

  “About three million kilometers directly in front of us, Captain. Right where it is supposed to be.”

  “Has it responded to our signals, yet?”

  “No, sir. It’s still quiet as a tomb.”

  “Continue the approach. Alert Archernar. It looks like the scientists are going to have to cut short their card games. We will have work for them after all.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  #

  Lieutenant Barbara Whalen sat strapped into the control station of her scout boat and watched the blue-white orb grow slowly in her forward bubble. Like all terrestrial worlds, it was a beautiful sight, especially after so long in the deep black. There was a large polar mass in the southern hemisphere. In the daylight hemisphere, a massive arrowhead-shaped continent of tans and browns and umber ploughed through an azure sea, its edges tinged aquamarine by extensive shoals on its southern flank. Over everything lay a bright white swirl of clouds blown west to east by stratospheric winds. Lower than the continent, nearly out of sight around the curve of the planet, mirror cyclones moved in tandem on each side of the invisible equator.

  As Earthlike as Vrath seemed from a hundred thousand kilometers out in space, there was one obvious difference between it and the Mother of Men. From Barbara’s perspective, fully one-quarter of the globe lay in darkness. Yet, throughout the night hemisphere, there was no sign of civilization. No cityscapes outlined the shores of invisible land masses, nor sprawled across darkened plains, nor meandered along both banks of mighty rivers. The blackness was unrelieved, save for bands of lightning flashes marking thunderstorms.

  “Pretty,” Amos Harding, Barbara’s second-in-command, said from the acceleration couch beside her.

  “Very,” she agreed. “It makes me homesick.”

  “I wouldn’t settle down there were I you,” he replied. “We’re getting diffuse gamma ray readings all across the face of the globe.”

  “What sort of gamma rays?”

  “Looks like Cobalt 60 mostly. Some other nasty stuff mixed in.”

  “Ouch!”

  “You can say that again. Whatever they did to piss off the Broa, it had to be major for the whole planet to be this hot a full century after the fact.”

  “Radiation too hot for an upper atmospheric pass?”

  “Not if we dip in fast, get our air sample, then get out fast.”

  Barbara and Amos’s mission was to scout out the main planet of this system and record its condition. The scout boat’s cargo compartment was chock full of long range sensors that would record the surface destruction during their dip into atmosphere.

  “We’ve got something coming up fast,” Ahmed Quereshi, their sensor operator, announced from the scout boat’s passenger compartment.

  “What is it, Med?”

  “Looks like a space station, Lieutenant. Big mother, too! I’ve got the telescope extended and have it in my cross-hairs. Ready to record.”

  “Any chance of collision?” she asked, noting that the blip representing the station was very close to the red line marking their future course.

  “No, ma’am. I’m painting it with the laser. Definite cross-plot velocity on the object. Looks to be three milli-arcseconds per second lateral drift to the right. We’ll close to about twenty kilometers at minimum distance.”

  “All recorders to max ten seconds before min approach,” she ordered. “Let’s get a good look, but save most of our storage capacity for the real deal.”

  “Aye aye, ma’am,” the operator replied. His tone only hinted at what he thought about a mere taxi driver instructing him as to how to do his job.

  Ten minutes later, a small black speck took a bite out of the fuzzy limb of the planet. The speck grew perceptibly as they watched. In a few minutes, it covered nearly the daylight hemisphere of the planet and was a speck no l
onger.

  The basic shape of the space station was ovoid, a cosmic violet egg. The station had once had a smooth hull, with none of the jumble of pipes and antennae with which humans cluttered up the exteriors of their space stations. The hull was smooth no longer.

  Several gaping holes had been punched into its surface and the contents spewed out. As they closed the range, the deep wells of destruction showed chaos extending several decks downward. Whatever had penetrated the station had burrowed deep, leaving behind bent girders, buckled decks, spaghetti-like strands of cabling, and other less identifiable detritus.

  “Uh, Lieutenant,” Amos Harding said, “you don’t suppose those holes produced debris geysers when they were made, do you?”

  “Looks like it to me,” she replied. The station was coming up fast. It would fully fill the forward bubble in another thirty seconds, although it was beginning to slide ever so slowly to the right as it did so. “Why?”

  “Do you think it’s smart for us to make a high speed run this close to that pile of junk? No telling what pieces got ejected and may have found their way back in the last hundred years.”

  “A fine time to think about that,” she muttered as she braced unconsciously for impact. The reaction was as useless as it was natural. If they hit even a walnut at the speed they were going, they would be vaporized before their optic nerves had time to send the news to their brains.

  Suddenly it was on them and flashed by in a single blink. Once again, the planet filled the forward bubble, unobstructed by sky junk.

  Barbara Whalen let out the breath she had been holding, as did Amos. They turned to one another and shared a look which said, “Let’s not do that again!”

  Their silent dialogue was cut short by a whoop from the passenger compartment, one audible by both intercom and through the closed hatch.

  “What’s the matter,” Barbara demanded.

  “That got the old adrenaline pumping,” Ahmed said in her earphones. “Can we go again, Mommy?”

  #

  The Vrathalatar stargate hovered in the deep black, its sunward surface glowing dimly, giving it a ghostlike appearance silhouetted against the diamond-sprinkled ebon background of interstellar space.