Gibraltar Sun Read online

  “I’m sure I don’t know.”

  The reason Vasloff had been stuck in orbit had been obvious to everyone; including him. He was a born agitator and had molded his organization, Terra Nostra, into one of the best lobbying groups in the world. The mere hint of what was waiting out among the stars had caused worldwide rioting three years earlier. When news of the Broan Sovereignty leaked, there would be hell to pay. Terra Nostra’s membership was about to balloon, possibly into the billions.

  Everyone expected Vasloff and his organization to lead the opposition to Mark Rykand’s plan. For one thing, Vasloff had had a year to think up ways to thwart what he called “those idiot expansionists.”

  Slowly, the anteroom began to fill. Dan Landon walked in a minute behind Mark and Lisa. He nodded to both of them and to Vasloff, but did not speak.

  Drs. Thompson and Morino arrived, as did half a dozen others. Several conversations buzzed just below the level where the brain can pick out individual phonemes. From time to time, there were surreptitious glances in the direction of Vasloff. If the Russian noticed, he made no sign; but rather, continued to go over his notes.

  At precisely 10:00 hours, a musical tone sounded and the doors to the committee room opened. They filed through the portal to find two long tables with chairs facing a dais on which there was a fancier table with larger and more comfortable chairs. Each witness’ place was marked with a nameplate. They spent a minute sorting themselves out. Save for a few staffers busily laying out briefing books, pitchers of ice water, and spare styluses, there was no one else in the room.

  When they had been seated for five minutes, a door at the front of the hall opened, and in filed six Members of Parliament. Their leader was Anthony John Hulsey, Member from New South Wales, Australasia. Also present were Thackery Savimbi, Capetown, Federation of Africa; and Jorge Santa Cruz, of Estados Unidos de Sud America; along with three others that Lisa did not recognize.

  As the MPs entered, the witnesses rose and stood respectfully. As the doors closed, a low buzzing sound just below the level of hearing began as the anti-eavesdropping field came alive. The committee members took their seats and gestured for the witnesses to do likewise.

  Chairman Hulsey pressed a plate inset into the table surface. As he did so, the amplified sound of a gavel banging wood sounded from hidden speakers. A uniformed functionary intoned ceremoniously, “Hear ye; Hear ye! The Special Committee of Parliament on the Discoveries Made by the Crab Nebula Expedition is now in session. Citizen Anthony Hulsey, Chairman, presiding. Attend all who have business here!”

  “Sergeant-at-Arms. Are all we have summoned here present?”

  “They are, Mr. Chairman.”

  “This may prove a long session. I suggest we get started. The committee calls Mark Richard Rykand. I understand you have a statement to read?” When Mark nodded, he continued: “Very well, Mr. Rykand, the floor is yours.”

  #

  Mark made essentially the same presentation that he had in the office of the Stellar Survey Director, with the exception that this time he had visuals. He briefly recounted their discovery of one of the home stars of the Sovereignty and of the expedition they mounted there. He told of his surprise and horror when the big blue Taff trader described Sar-Say as a Broa. He spoke of the hurried retreat that had followed.

  It had been in a black mood that he, Lisa, and some others sat in the Ruptured Whale’s wardroom, commiserating with one another. They had been talking about the overwhelming power of the Sovereignty when Lisa made an offhand comment:

  “It's too bad we can't defend the solar system against stargates. What we need is a fortress that blocks access to our system, like Gibraltar once guarded the entrance to the Mediterranean.”

  “Then it hit me,” Mark told the committee. “I realized that the Broa aren’t three-meters-tall and covered with fur.” He smiled sheepishly. “Well, they are covered with fur, but you know what I mean.”

  “We know,” Elizabeth Fletcher, one of the junior MPs on the panel responded. “However, perhaps you should amplify the point.”

  “The Broa control a million star systems. How can one planet with a dozen interstellar colonies hope to survive a conflict against such a behemoth? The answer, of course, is that we can’t. If the Broa knew about Earth, we wouldn’t stand a chance in hell. They would overwhelm us before we could get organized.

  “But they don’t know about us… yet. They have no idea that we exist, let alone where in the sky to look for us. So long as that is the case, we have freedom to act against them without fear of reprisal.

  “Nor are the Broa all-powerful. They have problems of their own. There is internecine strife among them, as evidenced by the attack on Sar-Say. They have an abnormally low birthrate. The Voldar’ik’s master hadn’t visited their world in quite some time. The Broa are stretched thin. Much of their domain runs on autopilot most of the time.

  “Despite that, of course, is the problem of their inherent power. The Sovereignty has a gigantic population, with a million planetary economies from which to draw resources. If we were to go up against the whole of the Broan domain, we would have no chance at all.

  “However, there is no need for us to fight all of them. To secure safety for ourselves and our children, we need not conquer a million worlds. We need to find the Broan home worlds, and defeat only them.”

  “How do we do that?” the chairman asked.

  Mark quickly explained his overall plan, which those aboard the Ruptured Whale had come to call “The Gibraltar Earth Strategy.”

  #

  One: Humanity would finish the job they had begun on Klys’kra’t and obtain a planetary database with its astronomical data and maps of the stargate network.

  Two: They would use this data to discover the location of the Broan home world and other capitals.

  Three: They would build a fleet of starships capable of attacking the Broa in their power centers. The objective would be to destroy the home world stargates and isolate the bulk of the Broa from their possessions.

  Four: While the enemy power structure was cut off, humanity would work to foment revolts on as many subject worlds as possible.

  Five: They would continue the strategy until the Sovereignty collapsed under the strain. With thousands of former slave species on the rampage throughout their domain, the pseudo-simians would be far too busy to threaten the far-off human race.

  #

  “Bold, I’ll give you that,” Thackery Savimbi responded when Mark finished. “But a bit foolhardy, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Not as foolhardy as waiting for them to discover us,” Mark replied. Two places down the table, he noted Mikhail Vasloff stiffen out of the corner of his eye.

  “Proceed, Mr. Rykand,” the chairman said, glancing at his sleeve chronometer.

  Mark laid out the operational details that they had fleshed out over the past year. With interruptions for questions, it was well past lunch time when he finished.

  The chairman gazed at the other witnesses. “I know the agenda calls for several of you to present your technical evaluations now. I propose that we hold that for later this afternoon. We will break for lunch, 45 minutes. Committee members and witnesses are requested to be back here at 13:30 hours when we will hear the opposing viewpoint.”

  The recorded sound of a gavel striking wood punctuated the chairman’s remarks.

  #

  Mikhail Vasloff sat at the witness table with every hair in place and a hint of a smile on his face. He sat with folded hands, waiting for the committee to resume their places after lunch. To look at him, one would have thought that he was here in support of a highway bill or agricultural aid appropriation. None of the mental anguish he had felt in the past few hours showed.

  That he could keep his expression passive while seething inside was a testament to his long experience in politics. It had been torture to sit and listen to the stream of heresies spew forth from Mark Rykand.

  It wasn’t that he dislike
d Mark personally. He found him a personable young man and an entertaining traveling companion. On the voyage home, the two of them had whiled away the boredom with a chess duel. It had been during those games that Vasloff had tried to win Mark over to his point of view.

  He might as well have been talking to Sar-Say.

  Vasloff attributed Mark’s attitude to the insanity that infects human beings. Having been the lords of creation for so long, the built-in response to any challenge was to attack! In most human beings, the “fight or flight” reflex was permanently stuck on “fight,” and while emotionally satisfying, it was a reaction that could well end all life on Earth.

  The fact was that the human race lacked the power to challenge the Broa. The overlords had a million worlds; humanity, no more than a dozen, and eleven of those were net drains on resources. Compared to the Broa, humanity was a gnat headed toward a speeding truck.

  Mark Rykand was correct about one thing. Humanity’s only defense lay in its anonymity. Mikhail Vasloff intended that they do everything in their power to remain anonymous.

  When the committee returned, Chairman Hulsey gaveled them to order and introduced Vasloff before turning over the meeting to him.

  “Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committee,” he said in his carefully cultivated speaking voice. “I appreciate the opportunity you have given me this afternoon. I would also like to thank you for springing me from PoleStar, where I was being held in durance vile to keep me from talking.

  “Before I begin, I would like it understood that there is nothing personal in my dispute with Mr. Rykand. Our differences are due to the differing ways we view the world. Mr. Rykand is still young. He has the optimism of the young. To him, conquering the rulers of the galaxy is merely a task to be undertaken like any other. I am older and more experienced in, shall we say, the unpleasant realities of life. There is a reason why the old are more pessimistic than the young. We have been disappointed more often.

  “When Mr. Rykand presents his grand scheme for defeating the Broa, I say, ‘Bravo!’ If such a plan has any possibility of success, I will support it enthusiastically. Unfortunately, the odds are too great against us. His plan has no chance of success. Somewhere, something will go wrong and the Broa will discover the location of Earth. They will send a war fleet to conquer us, we will resist valiantly, and in the end, we will be destroyed.

  “The unpleasant facts are facts nonetheless. The Broa are the masters of the galaxy. They receive tribute from hundreds of thousands of species. No matter how brave and skilled our warriors, the day will come when the Broa occupy this world, or destroy it. This point is crystal clear in the Klys’kra’t data. Mr. Rykand obtained a number of scenes that show the fate of rebel worlds. They are now cinders orbiting their respective stars.”

  He waited a few seconds for the mental image to sink in, then continued.

  “It is not glamorous, I grant you. But the only safety the human race will ever know lies in making ourselves as invisible as possible. Earth has coexisted with the Broa for thousands of years. We just didn’t know it. If we keep to our part of space and they keep to theirs, I submit that we can keep coexisting with them indefinitely.

  “To this end, I say that we must do everything in our power to keep from coming to their attention. To do this requires some unpleasant actions on our part.

  “We must return to Earth and the Solar System. We must reduce the radio noise we broadcast skyward. The earliest TV and radio signals are far away and getting farther, yet they are relatively weak compared to our modern broadcast power. We can do nothing about past sins, but we should not continue them. By shielding our power sources and reducing electromagnetic emissions, we can prevent Earth from becoming a radio beacon in the Broan sky.”

  “Is that it?” the chairman asked.

  “Far from it, sir,” Vasloff responded. “Reducing emissions is only the first step. We must also abandon our interstellar colonies. They give us too large a footprint to remain inconspicuous. Even though space is vast, it is exponentially easier to find a civilization spread across a dozen star system than it is to pinpoint a single star.”

  “What if the colonists refuse to abandon their colonies?”

  “Then we must force them. We cannot let a few selfish individuals endanger the human race.”

  “Anything else?”

  Vasloff lifted his hands, palms upward, in a gesture of resignation. “The list is endless. Once the colonies are abandoned, we must erase all traces from those planets’ surfaces of our presence. Luckily, our toeholds are so tenuous on most colonies that this will not be difficult. And after the colonists return here and all traces are obliterated, we will have to give up our starships. Not mothball them, mind you; but destroy them completely.”

  “Why?”

  “To prevent what happened in the New Eden System from happening again. If we allow starships to roam this part of space, there is a much higher chance of our encountering a Broan ship than if we do not.”

  “What you are suggesting,” Chairman Hulsey said, “sounds like a totalitarian state of the sort we thought we had outgrown.”

  “It is no more totalitarian than the militarism that Mr. Rykand is advocating, but it is no less either. I don’t like it any better than you do, but the safety of humanity is more important than my personal opinions.”

  Vasloff continued speaking for another hour, then each of the scientists summoned got their say. Many supported Mark Rykand’s Gibraltar Earth plan, but not all. The sun had long since set and stomachs were beginning to growl when the talking finally ran down.

  Finally, The Honorable Tony Hulsey gaveled the hearing to a close. It was a confused group of legislators who filed out of the hearing room by one door, and a gloomy group of witnesses who left by another.

  Mark commented to Lisa as they strode out of the black tower and onto the street, “No one said this was going to be easy.”

  #

  Chapter Six

  Nadine Halstrom stood in front of the glass wall of her office on the 100 floor of the World Secretariat building and stared out across the Toronto skyline. The sun was setting as it often did when she stood here and pondered a problem. She seemed to be doing that more than ever since that damned Sar-Say had come into her life.

  “Well,” she asked her visitor. “What do you think?”

  Anthony Hulsey, Member from New South Wales, and Nadine Halstrom’s unofficial troubleshooter in parliament, stretched out in the powered chair and balanced a bourbon-and-branch-water on his oversize paunch. His position of ease belied the inner tension that the coordinator’s question had triggered. Finally, after a long minute of silence, he replied, “I don’t know what to think, Madame Coordinator.”

  “That’s a hell of an answer, Tony.”

  “It’s the truth, Nadine. The problem would seem to have no good solution.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, let’s just state the obvious. The more emotionally satisfying course is the one young Rykand is advocating. We fight as smart and hard as we can. Maybe we win in the end, although that seems farfetched, but maybe we lose. If we lose, the Broa will likely exterminate us.

  “Then there is Mikhail Vasloff’s plan. We dig a hole, climb in, and pull it in after us. Cowardice is never attractive, but in this case it may be the smart thing to do. After all, we haven’t been visited by the Broa in the thousands of years we were blissfully ignorant of their existence. Who is to say that we can’t live in peace for several more millennia. All we need do is stop advertising our presence to the universe at large.”

  “I don’t like Vasloff’s plan,” the coordinator replied. “I’ve never liked defeatism. We would be trading the last century of human progress for an uncertain safety. ”

  “I don’t care for defeatism either,” Hulsey replied. “However, that doesn’t mean it isn’t the smart play under these circumstances.”

  “Then how do we choose? Put it to a vote?”

  Hulse
y made a rude noise. “The people will vote for whichever side lulls them to sleep best. The last thing we need is to turn this into one of our recurring propaganda battles. Vasloff will do that well enough by himself.”

  “Can’t be helped, Tony. This is a secret too big to conceal.”

  “I had no intention of concealing it,” Hulsey said. “However, since we are going to be hammered no matter what we do, we might as well do our jobs.”

  “Which brings us back to the original question.”

  After a long pause, Hulsey responded, “I think, Madame Coordinator, that for the moment, we should straddle the divide as best we can.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “We adopt both sides for the time being. We begin planning and preparations for Mark Rykand’s Gibraltar Earth program, while at the same time, making preparations to abandon our interstellar colonies. We put whatever resources we need into becoming smarter while keeping both sides working toward their goals. Perhaps in the ongoing process, we will discover a middle way.”

  “Sounds expensive.”

  Hulsey shrugged. “You can’t take it with you and you can’t spend it if you are dead. The advantage of this plan is that we can postpone the crisis until we are much smarter about its dimensions. Take, for instance, the need to build new ships. We will need them whether we attack the Broa or defend the Solar System, so we get started building before we know what they are to be used for.

  “No, Madam Coordinator, I see no reason to lock ourselves to a course of action until we have to. Kicking the can down the road has its detractors, but I find it is often the smart play.”

  “Very well, that is what we will do. I will set up a full net address to announce the bad news.”