Gibraltar Sun Page 7

  That was another problem with Civilization. It was too damned big! Even automated recorders and a mania for record keeping couldn’t adequately catalog events.

  Take these Vulcans, for instance. How could they possibly have misplaced an entire race of subservients? There had to be a record of them somewhere.

  After a long pause, Ssor-Fel muttered, “I don’t like to float unsolved problems to the Home World, but in this case, I think it prudent. Bundle up everything we know and send it on the next ship. Include all of the biometrics we have concerning these Vulcans and emphasize that we have been unable to identify them.

  “Point out that this Sar-Say seems to be in their company, although he was not seen at Klys’kra’t. Perhaps he is hiding from his attackers. Also, send a copy of this report to Sar-Ganth. It may be that he will have a personal interest in seeing this mystery solved.”

  “It will be as you say, Hunt Master.”

  “Now, please leave me. I have this matter of Master Val-Vos to consider.”

  #

  Captain Dan Landon sat on the bridge of the Ruptured Whale and contemplated the news that some idiot had transferred Sar-Say to Earth. Someone, it seemed, was prepared to flirt with disaster. Having lived with the pseudo-simian ever since his crew had rescued him from this very ship, Landon wasn’t particularly concerned about alien diseases. If Sar-Say and humans could support the same sort of bugs, they would have discovered that fact long before now.

  However, as any imbecile should have known, disease was not the only worry where Sar-Say was concerned. Being the only representative of his species currently in human hands, Sar-Say was uniquely valuable as a study subject. What if someone assassinated the silly looking little monster?

  Nor was assassination out of the question. According to news reports, emotions were running high on Earth, with every politician talking about the advisability of confronting the Broa. (Landon was amused in a cynical way about the politico’s avoidance of strong, clear verbs such as “attack,” “do battle with,” “conquer.”) Most seemed to be unsure of where to come down on the issue, with not a few of them coming down strongly for both sides.

  Then there was the problem of Sar-Say himself. Despite being a prisoner, he had proven himself a skilled manipulator. Somehow he had managed to get them to send thirteen starships to the Crab Nebula and back — a roundtrip of 14,000 light-years! Once in the Klys’kra’t system, he had nearly convinced Landon to allow him to join the contact party. The captain still shuddered that he had even contemplated bending mission rules to accede to the alien’s request.

  The intercom chose that moment to beep for attention.

  “What is it?” Landon asked.

  “Incoming message for you, Captain,”

  “Read it, Mister.”

  “It’s from Admiral Carnes, sir. He is asking you to join him in his quarters at 14:00 hours.”

  “Does he say why?”

  “No, sir. Just the request that you join him and the time.”

  Landon chuckled. “When an admiral ‘requests,’ it’s an order. Acknowledge the receipt and tell them that I will be there. Then have the Exec break out the landing boat.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  #

  High Station was the headquarters of the Stellar Survey, where starships prepped for their missions and to which they returned from the deep black. It had been unnaturally quiet around the station for the past three years. Now the fleet was back from the Crab.

  There was Magellan, Landon’s previous command, its great globe floating serenely against the limb of the Earth, half in light, half in dark. Beyond it was City of Tulsa, one of the great colony ships. And beyond that was Ponce de Leon, Magellan’s sister ship. The fleet had returned home, leaving only two starships to guard humanity’s first outpost in the Sovereignty.

  Just before the fleet’s departure from Brinks, there had been a great shuffling of crews. Those who would stay behind were culled from the full fleet. They were largely unmarried, male and female, with few ties to Earth. Manning the rear guard meant that they would not likely see home again for five years or more.

  High Station lay ahead as his landing boat moved across traffic lanes filled with vacsuited bodies and small intra-orbit craft. There were the local workboats, along with the ungainly ferries that never entered atmosphere. There were even two sleek winged craft whose journeys took them from ground to orbit. These were a rarity since most passengers for High Station passed through Equatorial Station en route, shifting to the extra-atmospheric shuttles. The winged landing craft were docked at the station, their dorsal airlocks hooked to the non-rotating docking sphere like two lampreys on a shark.

  The station itself was a long cylinder spinning slowly about its central axis. The cylinder’s length was four times its diameter, with a long pole sticking out the end pointed toward Earth. At the other end of the station was the docking sphere. Cylinder and sphere were coupled together by a large bearing and a complex rotational joint, allowing the habitat to rotate while the docking sphere remained stationary.

  “We’ve been cleared straight in to Docking Bay Alpha-Nine, sir,” Melissa Trank, the landing boat’s pilot reported to Landon, who sat strapped into the copilot’s couch.”

  “Very well, Pilot. Take us in.”

  The docking procedure was uneventful, with the Ruptured Whale’s landing boat floating from sunlight to floodlight as it passed through the oversize rectangular landing port. A few jolts from attitude control jets sent their nose into a waiting docking arm, which took over and positioned their dorsal airlock against one of the numerous station locks. A series of clanking sounds echoed through the boat, followed by the hiss of compressed air.

  “How long will you be aboard, sir?” the pilot asked in a tone that carried another question altogether.

  Dan Landon smiled. “Want to hit the shops on Level Seven?”

  The young spacer smiled back, “You read my mind, sir.”

  “Go ahead. Keep your comm on and I’ll call you if the admiral finishes early.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  #

  The admiral’s cabin cum office was aft six decks and on the outer station hull, which meant that he could look out. As Dan Landon waited in the one-half gravity of the station’s outermost deck, he stood at attention and absently watched the view in the deck while wondering what the old man wanted with him. He had a ship to repair. Two years of voyaging had taken its toll on the Whale, a consequence not helped by the fact that the ship was an alien design that had been shot to pieces when they salvaged it.

  Admiral Carnes entered the compartment from his living quarters at precisely 14:00 hours.

  “Dan, good to see you again,” he said, striding across the floor viewport to shake Landon’s hand.

  “Good to see you, too, sir. It’s been a long time.”

  “It was a long voyage. Come, sit down. Refreshment?”

  “Yes, sir. I’ve been thinking about how good an orange juice would taste for two years.”

  “Orange juice it is!”

  The admiral retrieved a real groundside glass filled with orange liquid and had something brown and alcohol smelling for himself. He handed the glass to Landon, moving with the exaggerated care required to keep liquid in a glass in reduced gravity.

  “That was a damn fine job you did out there, Dan. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a star in it for you somewhere in your future.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Landon replied. He wasn’t sure he deserved his own flag, not after what had almost happened at Klys’kra’t. He had been in the service long enough, however, to keep his opinion to himself.

  They both sipped from their glasses. The admiral watched him over the rim of his drink, then set it down on a table. “I imagine you are wondering why I summoned you today.”

  “Yes, sir. My curiosity has been getting the better of me.”

  “Tell me your impressions of the masquerade you people pulled off. How successful
was it?”

  “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  “Did these Voldar’ik buy it? Were they even a little suspicious of you?”

  “No, sir. They had no reason to believe that we weren’t precisely who we said we were, a species called the Vulcans from a planet named Shangri-La. Nor did they have any curiosity about it. There are so many species in the Sovereignty that no one can meet all of them. Having a ship of strangers show up on one’s doorstep is fairly common. Besides, the Voldar’ik can best be described as tripods. I imagine every species with two arms, two legs, and a head appears the same to them.”

  “Do you think we will receive a similar reception elsewhere in the Sovereignty?”

  “I don’t see why not, so long as we present them with what it is that they expect to see.”

  “What about your Q-ship?”

  “Q-ship, sir?”

  “Sorry. Ancient reference. In the days of the First World War, the British built armed merchantmen with hidden gun mounts. Their job was to lure a German U-boat into range and then unmask and sink it before it had a chance to submerge.

  “Yes, sir,” Landon said. “I see the reference. The Whale is a standard Broan Type Seven freighter. That is what Sar-Say said. Outwardly, we looked just like any other ship of the class.

  “And inwardly?”

  “None of them came aboard, Admiral. We could have had an exhibition of naked dancing on the bridge and they would have been none the wiser.”

  “What if they had gotten onboard?”

  “Then they would have seen just what they expected to see. A standard Broan freighter outfitted for Vulcan physiques. Our displays are capable of showing the Broan script. In fact, the crew got so good at reading that crap that they sometimes didn’t switch back to default mode on the voyage home.”

  “So, having no reason to expect that you came from beyond the Sovereignty, it did not occur to the Voldar’ik to ask the question?”

  “No, sir. It did not.”

  “That is good, Captain. What if we build copies of the Ruptured Whale from scratch? Is the first E.T. who sees one of our homegrown models going to start screaming for his master?”

  “I don’t see why, Admiral. So long as our ships can communicate on the standard bands, look like the real thing, and jump through stargates, they have no reason at all to suspect that we come from outside the Sovereignty.”

  “Jumping through stargates is a problem. We’ve learned all we can studying the operation of your stargate jump generators. To make any more progress, the engineers tell me, they are going to have to disassemble them.”

  “They’re planning on taking the Whale apart, sir?”

  “I’m afraid we’re going to have to. It’s the only working model we have.”

  “Yes, sir,” Landon replied. Disassembling the Whale didn’t sit well with him. A captain becomes very attached to his ship.

  If the admiral saw the sudden flash of dismay in his features, he gave no sign. “What about variety, Captain? Won’t they get suspicious if we show up solely in Type Seven freighters?”

  Landon shook his head. “Sar-Say says the Whale’s type is common throughout the Sovereignty. Besides, we can build other types if we wish to. We were able to obtain some quite good holograms of the other ships in orbit at Klys’kra’t. We can duplicate their outer looks quite closely. The interiors might give us problems, although if we use the Whale as a basis for extrapolation, we ought to be able to pull it off.”

  The admiral sat back and considered for a moment, then asked, “Have you thought about what you will do with your ship being cut up, Captain?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Surely you have considered the next step, Dan,” the Admiral said. “If we decide to take on the Broa, we’ll need hundreds of ships, including Q-ships for reconnaissance into the Sovereignty. If nothing else, we are going to have to find another system where we can obtain that database you were negotiating for.”

  “Yes, sir. I had already figured that out.”

  “The Coordinator doesn’t want to wait. She believes that the time to get started on the fleet is now, and I agree with her. I would like you to lead the effort.”

  “Me, sir? I’m no engineer.”

  “You know what it is like to trust your life to a design that has to fool the enemy into thinking it is one of his own. Also, there is no one else with your experience. That makes you the logical man to build the fleet, and frankly, command it once it is completed.”

  “Command it, sir?”

  “Why do you think I invited you here today? Tomorrow, you will receive orders promoting you to Rear Admiral and directing you to take command of the New Mexico shipyards. Your team will immediately begin design on at least three different models of Q-ships. I want to be able to lay keels this time next year.”

  Landon thought about it for a moment. Flag rank and one of the most important assignments available in the coming fight against the Broa! The prospect was daunting. The learning curve would be ferocious.

  “What say you, Captain Landon?” the admiral asked formally.

  Landon grinned, stood, and in complete disregard for space station protocol, snapped off a salute. “I guess I will be building Q-ships for you, sir.”

  Chapter Ten

  Jennifer Mullins sat at her console in a room hacked from solid rock. The overhead lights were naked glow tubes bolted to the rock ceiling, which still showed the circular marks of the digging machines. A long strand of black electrical cable ran across the ceiling, held there by globs of clear adhesive every meter or so. In between the globs, the cables drooped like the threads of some oversize spider web.

  Jennifer was bored. The problem was that it had been two years since they had established Brinks Base, misnamed because it was actually located on Brinks’ oversize moon, Sutton. Brinks was twice the diameter of Earth and had been a terrestrial-class world until 8000 years ago, when the star 50 light years distant that would one day become the Crab Nebula went supernova. The resulting radiation storm had sterilized the planet save for some rudimentary sea creatures.

  The main dining hall of Brinks Base had a viewport in its overhead – a large periscope device that projected the outside view down into the underground base through at least four sets of transparent safety barriers. Usually, the wide angle surface scope was focused on the Crab Nebula, which was the most impressive sight in Sutton’s black sky.

  The ball of gas and charged particles looked nothing like the Crab as viewed from Earth. For one thing, they were seeing it from a different angle, and for another, the cloud had been expanding for seven millennia longer than the nebula in Earth’s sky.

  But even as spectacular a sight as the Crab quickly became routine when there was nothing else to look at. The lack of day-to-day variety was what had triggered Jennifer’s boredom.

  In the early months on the moon, there had been too much work to be bored. There had been tunnels and chambers to be dug and sealed, power systems to install, environmental control, emergency airlocks in case of blowout, whole instrument clusters to be transferred down from the ships and installed in the base.

  Then there had been the hustle and bustle of having the whole fleet in orbit about Brinks. Then the population of the Hideout System had been 3000 souls, housed in 13 starships. There had been great excitement when the rotating array of the gravity wave observatory had detected the first gravity wave from the Orpheus System, home of the Voldar’ik.

  Jennifer remembered how thrilled she had been when Magellan and Columbus reconnoitered the target system. She had been one of the astrogation officers aboard Magellan, and for that entire voyage, her department had worked watch-and-watch — four hours on / four hours off.

  Then had come the voyage back to Brinks Base to report their findings, and their subsequent return in the company of the Ruptured Whale. Magellan and Columbus had once again hidden themselves in the comet swarm at the edge of the system, while the Ruptured Whale made contact with the Vo
ldar’ik.

  Jennifer remembered the feeling of panic when word came that Sar-Say was a Broa and that the Ruptured Whale had fled Klys’kra’t. The two starships on guard broke orbit for Brinks Base as soon as their charge made good its escape through the Voldar’ik stargate.

  As soon as the Ruptured Whale returned to Brinks, the expedition commanders convened a series of high level conferences. The decision had been for the bulk of the fleet to return home. Two smaller starships, Ranger and Vaterland, would stay behind to guard the base. Their orders were to delay departure for four years. If they had not received other orders in that time, they were to destroy the base and return home.

  Like everyone else in the fleet, Jennifer had looked forward to going home. Between the Spartan living conditions and the disappointment of discovering that Sar-Say had been telling them the literal truth about the Sovereignty, she often wondered aloud what had attracted her to a life in space. Then had come word that Captain Heinrich wanted to see her. She made sure that her uniform was clean and pressed before reporting to her commanding officer.

  “Ah, Lieutenant Mullins, come in,” Heinrich had called out in that too hearty manner that often signaled that he had a dirty job to assign. “Strap yourself in.”

  Jennifer had done as directed, Magellan then being in microgravity.

  “Lieutenant, we are looking for volunteers to stay behind, guard the base, and operate the gravtenna. As an astrogator, you are qualified. Interested?”

  “No, sir!” she had replied, emphatically.

  “Are you sure? The extra pay involved is considerable.”

  “Why me, Captain?”

  “It’s not just you,” he said. “We are canvassing the fleet.”

  “What about Commander Arlington, or Ensign Boggs?”

  “Both married, while you are still…”

  “Playing the field?” she asked.

  “I was going to say ‘single.’”

  Somehow, she had come out of that meeting with orders assigning her as chief astrogator aboard Ranger, if and when it ever spaced for home. Until that happy day, she was a senior gravitational astronomy specialist, which meant that she sat in a rock room and watched the gravtenna array a thousand kilometers overhead as it performed its never-ending tumbling act.