McCollum - GIBRALTAR STARS Page 5

  “I’m not a linguist, Admiral. I doubt I’d be much use helping my wife read a Broan blueprint.”

  “No one is asking you to be, Mark. Once Lisa and her compatriots get the data translated, the project will pass into a new phase. I want to get what we learn to Earth as fast as possible. And for that, we are going to need the stargate.”

  “Sir?”

  “Since it is functional, I want to use the gate to send a ship back to Earth in a one-way jump. The ship I have chosen has an open billet for an Executive Officer. The responsibility is commensurate with that shiny new half-stripe on your uniform. Do you want it?”

  #

  Chapter Six

  The airlock door opened and Lisa Rykand stepped awkwardly out onto Sutton’s airless, dusty surface. She could feel the packed talcum-powder-fine dust crunching beneath her boots, but of course, no accompanying sound. The only sounds she heard were those of her own breathing and the whirr of the ventilation fan that was blowing air onto the nape of her neck. The air was cold, but smelled of dirty socks… as did the air inside every vacuum suit.

  As she exited the airlock, she stepped into the full glare of Hideout, which was shining directly into her face. Her faceplate automatically darkened, but not before she felt a brief stabbing pain in her retinas from the sudden radiance.

  “Bright, ain’t it?” Chief Vacuum Construction Specialist Tom Blanchard commented as he exited the airlock. Blanchard was the grizzled spacer who had been assigned to guide her. His vacsuit was canary yellow; hers, lime green.

  “It’s been so long since I was outside, I forgot to squint.”

  His chuckle echoed in her earphones. “Everyone I bring out here says the same thing. Surprising what human beings can get used to, isn’t it? We were cooped up in steel cages for the full year we spent getting here, then we burrowed our way into this moon and exchanged our cages for caves. Living in vacuum, we forget what it feels like to have the wind and rain blow on our face, to smell air that hasn’t been through the scrubbers a thousand times, or the joy of just lying in the sun.”

  “This is definitely the wrong profession for a nature person,” Lisa agreed, “or a claustrophobe.”

  “How’s your vision?”

  “A few purple spots, but I can see again.”

  “Then just follow that path to your left, the one marked by the little triangular red flags. We ran out of yellow bricks.”

  The two of them started walking in the awkward way one does when encompassed in a pressurized balloon with a diving bell strapped to their shoulders.

  It had been a week since the meeting in Admiral Landon’s office. Instead of the three weeks decompression between missions that regulations recommended, she and Mark had taken three days. At least, she had taken three days before reporting to her new assignment. The ship to which the Admiral had assigned Mark was off somewhere on a spying mission and wasn’t scheduled back for anywhere from ten days to a month. Where sniffing out the enemy was concerned, schedules were highly flexible.

  If there was anything Mark had learned in four years of marriage, it was not to be out having fun while his wife was working. Women resent that, he’d learned, no matter how well deserved the fun might be. So, on the fourth morning after their return from Broan Space, he reported along with Lisa to the warren of offices occupied by the stargate research team and offered to assist until his ship showed up. They had both been given a half hour briefing on the effort to develop human stargates, with an emphasis on the extreme need to cut transit times between Hideout and Earth — as though anyone who had made the trip three times needed any such explanation!

  After Dr. Niels Svenson, the project director, finished his hurried briefing, he handed them a record cube filled with technical data and dry scientific reports and sent them to an empty cubicle to review the project details. The Rykands shared a workscreen for two days, scanning until their eyes felt like boiled onions. Late on the second day, a burly man stopped by and introduced himself as Tom Blanchard. He announced that he would be taking them one at a time on a tour of the stargate. Lisa’s tour was scheduled for the following morning, Mark’s for the day after.

  The path Lisa and Blanchard followed led up a rise, past a flat spot where vacuum tractors were parked. The small, powerful machines had been bright yellow when loaded aboard the freighters in Sol System. Now each machine was coated with Sutton’s dust, and was gray-brown in color, with only an occasional hint of the original bright hue. Even the windows, supposedly kept clean by electrostatic repulsers, looked as if they had recently been in a Sahara sandstorm.

  Beyond the tractors, a series of towers marked the ridgeline of the low hill they were climbing. Each tower was topped with a directional antenna that pointed skyward. There appeared to be no pattern to the arrangement, although they all seemed to be altering their direction in synchronization with the moon’s rotation.

  When she reached the top of the hill, there was bowl-shaped depression beyond. She paused, a little out of breath despite the low gravity.

  “There she is, Lieutenant,” Blanchard said, pointing. “What do you think of her?”

  “Big,” Lisa responded.

  Spread out before her, its surface partially eclipsed by scaffolding, was a ring of silver metal with intricate patterns etched into its surface. Unlike the tractors they had just passed and the rest of the moon’s surface equipment, the stargate seemed completely clean, as though the electrically charged moon dust did not stick to it. She commented on how clean it looked.

  “Some kind of a field emanating from the surface,” Blanchard explained. “It repels dust. The physicists think it’s a residual effect from the wormhole generators.”

  In space, a stargate looks like a wedding band that has fallen off some giant’s finger. Against the scale of a star system, the ring is a tiny thing, almost too small to imagine any ship slipping through it to a different part of the universe. Lying here on the ground, it was enormous. At thirty meters in diameter, with a circular cross-section some five meters thick, it was no longer a lone artifact in the endless void. Here it was a structure, not unlike the ring buildings that had been popular on Earth in the 23rd century. Its apparent size was brought into scale by the several small vacsuited figures working around it. One in particular seemed to be attempting a circumnavigation of the ring’s upper surface.

  “Isn’t he afraid he’s going to damage it?” Lisa asked.

  “Not a problem, Lieutenant,” Blanchard answered. “Wait until you see inside. The thing is hell-for-stout, built like an old-style tank inside.”

  Lisa nodded, forgetting that the gesture cannot be seen in a vacuum suit.

  He was right, of course. Even 7000 light-years from home, Newton’s third law remained in effect. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. And in the case of stargates, that involved large masses materializing and dematerializing in the focus of the gate. Mass curves space-time, and when that mass instantaneously disappears, space-time snaps back into shape just as instantly. Like the cannon of old, stargates must absorb the recoil.

  There was another reason why stargates had to be strong. Pointed at another gate light-years distant, each gate must minimize jitter, lest it lose focus and break the link to its twin.

  “Come on. I want to see the databanks,” she said, striding down the slope to where a ladder and scaffold arrangement allowed access to an open port atop the ring.

  Tom Blanchard followed, noting the suddenly careless way in which she bounced down the sloping path. He opened his mouth to give warning, but she reached the access ladder before he could get the words out. He didn’t need to hear the quickened pace of her breathing in his earphones to recognize that she was suddenly excited.

  #

  The interior of the ring reminded Lisa of nothing so much as an ancient submarine she had once toured. And Blanchard was right. The volume was filled with a complex series of braces and webs that made the ring as rigid as the Broan engineers could
make it. Alien equipment filled most of the rest of the volume. The interior was literally stuffed with it.

  Some of the mechanisms she recognized. Others were strange to her. They barely left room to move through the access tube the builders had left for maintenance workers. Often it was necessary that she turn and insert herself sideways between two large gray hulking shapes in order to follow Blanchard down the dimly lit tunnel. The Chief Vacuum Specialist made it look easy, which caused her some chagrin, considering how much bigger he was.

  Concentrating as she was on not banging her suit against things that might break off an antenna or damage a heat exchanger, she found it difficult to form an impression of the ring interior. In addition to her rather confined field of view, her surroundings were a kaleidoscope of strange sights. Several times they stepped over cables the size of a man’s biceps. Twice they had to duck down — another difficult maneuver — to pass under smaller, glittery cables.

  “The databanks are this way, Lieutenant,” Blanchard said after they had been inside the ring ten minutes. He paused before a very human-design door; in fact, one that undoubtedly would have borne the inscription “Product of Sutton” somewhere on its surface if the local constructors bothered with such nonsense. Blanchard pressed a code into the oversize keypad designed for gloved fingers, and the door retracted to reveal a glittering gallery of sparkling cubes beyond. Running down the center of the compartment was a suspended catwalk surrounded by space netting.

  She gazed at the scene for a second, and her guide answered the unspoken question.

  “To keep someone from putting a boot through the record cubes. We went to too much trouble to get this baby to let someone damage it.”

  “You did all of this in the forty-eight hours since they landed the gate?” she asked over the radio. Her words echoed as the radio signal bounced back to her after circumnavigating the ring.

  “Mostly we did it in orbit. The gates were designed to be maintained in the absence of gravity.”

  Lisa pulled herself into the tunnel of nets and drifted along horizontally through the surrounding cubes. The gate was still drawing power, she saw, even a hundred years after it had been abandoned. She wondered if that was because the Broa were in a habit of periodically visiting the system they had killed — perhaps to mine or salvage the corpse — or if the gates were self repairing. If the latter, that was a trick humanity needed to learn.

  “Keep moving, Lieutenant. The data banks cover about one-eighth of the circumference. There’s a duplicate set of cubes diametrically opposite. We think they are intended for redundancy.”

  “What do you suppose they have stored in all of these?” Lisa asked in an awe-tinged voice. “They’ve got enough data storage to house several Library of Parliament Databases in here.”

  “Dr. Svenson says they have detailed maps of the gravitational anomalies throughout the Vrathalatar system. Not star maps, but gravimetric charts and space density curves for most of a light-year surrounding the gate.” After a few seconds’ wait, there was a chuckle in her earphones. “I’m quoting, of course. Personally, I have no idea what any of that means.”

  “Me either,” Lisa said.

  In truth, Lisa understood more than she admitted. Both starships and stargates used multi-dimensional translation theory to conquer Einstein’s Barrier. Her specialty was languages, and one of the tongues her job required her to master was the one she had long ago dubbed “Ph.D.ish”. In some ways, it was more difficult than the Broan trade patois Sar-Say had taught her.

  When one considered the complexities involved in keeping the gate focused on another a dozen light-years distant, it was obvious why the gate needed a precise model of the gravimetrics of surrounding space. Distortions caused by the gravitational pull of intervening stars were the equivalent of the atmospheric turbulence that plagues ground-based telescopes. Telescopes used adaptive optics to defeat the problem. Stargates undoubtedly used something equivalent.

  As they came to a second human-designed door that marked the end of the computational section of the stargate, she glanced around and attempted to estimate the amount of information stored in this glittery tunnel. It was huge! And when one multiplied the data storage capacity of this single gate by the millions of others that knit the Sovereignty together, it made one feel very small indeed.

  “Heads up,” Blanchard said as he squeezed past Lisa to punch his code into the keypad. “Beyond this door is the power compartment. Touch the wrong thing in there and you could vaporize both of us.”

  #

  “So how was the tour, darling?”

  “Intimidating,” Lisa told Mark as the two of them sat in the commissary eating dinner. “Apparently, forming a wormhole and focusing it on a spot halfway across the universe is a more daunting task than I realized.”

  She went on to describe the data storage and power and space rotation generators.

  “I actually got the shivers inside the ring,” Lisa concluded.

  “Why?” Mark asked as he rolled up a string of spaghetti on his fork. It was ‘Italian Night’ in the commissary, with pasta and tomato sauce, but no meat balls. He inserted the fork in his mouth and then slurped up a wayward spaghetti strand.

  “Stop that!” she said, absentmindedly, momentarily distracted by the noise. “I guess seeing all of that machinery inside finally made the gate real for me. We’ve been using them to scout the Broa for more than a year, yet I guess I never thought of them as anything more than a pretty ring floating against the blackness of space.”

  “Stargates are no different than starships. You know how much we stuff inside one of our hulls and all the energy that has to be pumped into a stardrive generator before a ship can rotate out of normal space. Why should the gates be any different?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I just got to thinking of them as magic circles. As long as the alien contraptions work by sorcery, they aren’t very frightening.”

  “Speak for yourself, woman. Personally, if I thought we are up against a coven of wizards, I would poop my pants.”

  “Not wizards, exactly,” Lisa said. “But powerful. I think we may have bitten off more than we can chew.” She punctuated her words by crunching down on a piece of lettuce from her salad.

  “Nonsense,” he replied, trying to steer the conversation out of the melancholy mood into which it was threatening to veer. When one was 7000 light-years from home, melancholia could be the deadliest of emotions. “The Broa are powerful, but they aren’t godlike. They’re one-trick ponies, nothing more.”

  “It’s a pretty good trick,” Lisa said, sipping red wine. The vintage was quite good — the previous April. “If the Broa hadn’t invented the gate, they would just be a world of monkeys among a million other worlds. They would probably still be swinging from vines.”

  “Just a case of transient technological superiority. The same thing has happened time and time again on Earth. Someone discovers something new, usually a more efficient way to kill their enemies, and they lord it over their neighbors until the neighbors catch up. The Assyrians did it with their chariots; the Spartans by organizing their whole society like an army; the Germans with their new mobile tactics called blitz-something-or-other. They ran rampant for a time, and then were eventually defeated when someone else learned a newer trick.”

  “The gate is different from just having a faster airplane, you know.”

  “In degree, perhaps,” Mark agreed. “The Broa lord it over other species because they control who can reach the stars, and who can’t. The secret won’t last forever.”

  “But it has lasted forever; at least, forever in terms we humans can understand.”

  “But it hasn’t. We know the secret, don’t we? Pretty soon, a lot of other species are going to know it, too.”

  Chapter Seven

  Sar-say paused and regarded the plant with the red blossoms and the dagger-like spikes on its stem. The humans called it a “rose” and one of their ancient playwrights had said som
ething about it “smelling as sweet.” He had struggled to understand the allegory.

  Checking the chronometer he’d been given, he discovered that the most enjoyable time of his week was nearly half over. There was another human saying about “time flying when one is having fun.” That one he understood all too well. The hour each week they allowed him to roam this arboretum was his favorite recreation. The fact that his communion with alien plants had become such an important part of his life said more about the evil turn his fortunes had taken than anything else he could imagine.

  #

  Sar-Say was a looker-after-value by profession, what humans called an ‘accountant.’ He had been on a tour of his clan’s holdings to judge their value and boarded a freighter on Vith, bound for Perselin. As a Master traveling on a ship crewed by subservients, he was given the most spacious accommodation onboard, the cabin of its commander, a Vithian named Muulbra.

  Sar-Say’s duties often forced him to travel beneath his standards. While barely adequate, the quarters had one feature not usually found on even the most luxurious liners. The alien furnishings included backup instruments to those in the ship’s control center. With nothing else to do, Sar-Say amused himself by using the big screen to watch the mixed crew of Vithians and Frels. He also familiarized himself with the other controls.

  The voyage was uneventful until the Hraal approached the stargate in the Nala System. There they encountered an Avenger-class warship. With a Master onboard, Muulbra had priority and moved his ship toward the gate. It had been then that the Avenger attacked.

  Sar-Say was in his cabin when the attack began, so he had not witnessed the initial volley of energy beams. By the time he found the proper hull camera, Hraal had entered the Nala gate and was desperately attempting to jump. The Avenger closed and sent a new energy bolt into the fleeing freighter.

  Up until that moment, the attack had not been real to Sar-Say. What subservient would dare attack a ship carrying a Master? Then he realized they were not after Hraal. The attack was aimed at Sar-Say himself!