McCollum - GIBRALTAR STARS Read online

  “Yes, the Admiral told me that this whole shooting match is pretty much your idea.”

  “I made the initial suggestion, Captain. It is far from my idea.”

  “Modest, eh?” Borsman asked, regarding him with a stern visage and a gimlet eye. “I’m not sure I like that in an officer, either.”

  “Not modest, sir. Just being realistic. I came up with an approach and several thousand other people fleshed it out.”

  “So you didn’t attend the Academy?”

  “No, sir. I received my commission before we launched the second expedition. I earned it en route.”

  One of the things about a year spent in transit, it left plenty of time for study. Both he and Lisa worked hard to absorb all of the online studies required to justify their wearing the uniform of the Space Navy.

  “So why have they saddled me with you?”

  The question surprised Mark. “This ship has been assigned to the stargate project, sir. Haven’t you received your orders?”

  “I have. But why you, Mister?”

  “My wife, sir. She will be coming aboard with the scientists. She’s ‘Essential Personnel.’ Official policy is not to break up couples except for ‘extreme need.’”

  Borsman nodded. “And if the experiment works, you’ll probably be ordered off my ship so that you can accompany your wife on her next assignment.”

  “Probably, Captain, when we reach Earth.”

  “If we reach Earth,” Helperin responded.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Does the notion bother you, Commander?”

  “What, sir?”

  “Your secondary status in all of this.”

  “No, sir. Lisa is the best Broan translator we have. She is worth a hundred naval officers, possibly more.”

  The sound Helperin made was noncommittal. The Captain continued:

  “I hope the transient nature of this assignment doesn’t affect the diligence with which you perform your duties.”

  “I will do my job the best I know how,” Mark replied, his tone suddenly formal, with a hint of frost in it. “You will have to judge how well I do.”

  To his surprise, the captain laughed. “You can be sure of that, Commander. I would have preferred an academy man, but the admiral made it clear that you’ve earned your place.”

  He reached across the desk and extended his hand, which Mark grasped. “Welcome aboard. I have a good crew here. I expect you to make them better.”

  #

  Lisa was lonely. It had been a week since Mark reported aboard his ship and she was tired of sleeping alone. She was also busy. In fact, she couldn’t remember being busier in her whole life, not even the heady period when she had studied Sar-Say round-the-clock.

  Technically, her job was to translate the information in the stargate computers. The problem was that there was a significant difference between the trade speech Sar-Say had taught her and technical Broan.

  She would be reading along, comprehending what was being said well enough, and then encounter a word, phrase, or entire thought that seemed gibberish. Stymied, she would hunt for other usages of the word/phrase to divine meaning from multiple contexts. Having done so, often imperfectly, she would add that word to the project database and begin all over again.

  It was tedious work, and no less boring for the fact that it was a necessary precursor to enabling the physicists to do their jobs. She imagined her current situation analogous to the original work on the Rosetta stone, the stone tablet inscribed in both Greek letters and Egyptian hieroglyphics that provided the key to deciphering the writing of the pharaohs.

  Nor were her troubles simply of the Broan-to-Standard variety. Earlier in the week, she spent hours tracking down a particularly vexing Broan term. Even after listing a dozen sentences that used the concept, the meaning was still unclear. Frustrated, she sent a note to the technical team asking if anyone could assist. The note came back in less than a minute. Dr. Phonouvong responded, “The word translates as hysteresis.”

  Intrigued, she called up the definition of “hysteresis,” and two days later, she still had no idea what the word meant. Whatever it was, apparently it was a big problem when forming the wormhole that connected stargates to one another.

  At that moment, her office door opened, emitting the high-pitched squeak that seemed all too common for Sutton-produced hinges.

  “Got a moment?”

  She looked up to see a gaunt, white-haired figure enter.

  “Certainly, Dr. Svenson.”

  “Donaldson thinks he’s found the mother-lode and we’d like your opinion.”

  “Mother-lode?”

  “The stored specifications for the gate’s aiming system. If he’s got those, we can begin translating the operating system and get on with writing our own interface. Would you check to see if he’s truly found it this time?”

  “Glenn Powers would be better at that, Doctor.”

  “Powers is busy with Rod Cranston.”

  “What is Dr. Cranston complaining about this time?”

  “His model of how stargates work isn’t tracking again. He says that all of the detected gravity wave distortions can be accounted for except those from that star due east of us. No matter what he does, he can’t match the waveform to the known stellar cartography. He has Powers helping him search for an explanation.”

  Lisa nodded. From discussions during team meetings, she vaguely understood that gravity waves were affected by the gravitational pull of the stars they encountered as they swept through the universe. By measuring the distortion of the wave front, one could map the gravity fields back to a wave’s point of origin. It was an essential ability if one expected to drive a wormhole across the galaxy and have it exit anywhere near the aim point.

  Dr. Cranston’s team was trying to validate the stargate theoretical model by comparing the distortion in the waves detected by Brinks’ array of gravtennas to the local star charts. For nearly a week, Cranston had complained the waves from one particular Broan system didn’t match his predictions. He kept muttering something about a missing star.

  “If Galen is busy, I’d be pleased to help you, Doctor Svenson. What reference?”

  He gave it to her and she keyed in the data. What popped up on her screen was a display very unlike the simple, if dry, jargon-filled explanation she had been working on.

  After a moment’s study, she said, “Some sort of four-dimensional table, possibly star coordinates. This last column seems to be a time coordinate. We can check the rest of the numbers against the planetary database to see if they are known systems.”

  “Already being done,” Svenson replied. “What about the interspersed text?”

  She scrolled through the first few screens of data, all written in the base-12 numbering system the Broa used, interspersed with their dot-and-curl script.

  “Hard to say. The jargon level is high, which makes it technical writing. Broan engineers, it seems, have the same tendency as human engineers in that respect.”

  “How long before you can confirm Dr. Donaldson’s conclusion or invalidate it?”

  “Eight hours, if I don’t get interrupted.”

  “You won’t. I’ve put out the word that if anyone disturbs you, he loses his privileges on the Big Brain for a week.”

  She sighed. “Then I’d best get started.”

  #

  Chapter Ten

  Dos-Val of the Broan Ministry of Science, gazed at the report that scrolled up his workscreen and flapped his ears in irritation. It had been a quarter-cycle since he had been assigned by the Prime Councilor to look into the case of the wild bipeds and their mysteriously exploding stargate in the Etnarii agricultural system. The deeper he delved into the mystery, the more confused he became.

  The facts were not in dispute. A shipload of aliens in a Type Seven freighter had cheated a species of triped ocean-dwellers out of value for services rendered. Later, they reappeared on a distant agricultural world. When a Broan naval vessel e
ntered the system, the miscreants fled.

  The naval vessel gave chase, but the freighter managed to reach the local stargate ahead of its pursuer. However, as it prepared to jump, it exploded, leaving not one atom of its own substance to mix with those of the vaporized gate.

  There was a time in the Race’s history when the masses believed in disembodied intelligences. Those days were but a distant memory. Ancestor reverence was well and good, but belief in ghosts had died ages past. Still, how else to explain the disappearance of a shipload of garishly pigmented, hairless bipeds?

  Having wrung all of the information he could from Pas-Tek’s report and having assured himself the ship commander omitted nothing, Dos-Val approached the problem from a new direction.

  He turned to the data the Ruling Council retrieved from the two worlds the bipeds were known to have visited. Some were visual records of their interactions with the locals. More importantly, he reviewed data on the bipeds’ physiology obtained when they underwent examination prior to entry into the local biosphere.

  Civilization contained more than 125 races, with a population on the order of 1216 individuals. Each of those beings carried within them an indelible record of the planet on which their species evolved. The most useful indicator was a species’ optical receptors. By determining the wavelengths to which an individual’s eyes were most sensitive, the spectrum of his home star could be extrapolated.

  Likewise, musculature and limb arrangement revealed the gravitational pull of the home world, as well as offered a clue as to biotic conditions. Fins and hydrodynamic sculpting pointed to an aquatic origin; while quadrupeds and centaurs tended to be ground dwellers. Most bipeds were descended from arboreals.

  Further, bipeds could be divided into Brachiators and Striders. Brachiators, like Dos-Val himself, were descended from animals whose physical size made it difficult for them to scamper atop vines. They found it more efficient to swing beneath the stalks.

  Striders were arboreal quadrupeds whose ancestors were forced out of the vines early in their evolution. They were vertically oriented animals forced to live in the horizontal world of the dangerous ground. The fugitives were obviously Striders.

  From the structure of their eyes, he assumed they evolved under a star that emitted yellow-white light, with either a tint of green in its spectrum or a canopy of chlorophyll-laden leaves overhead. Their naked skin spoke of a mean planetary temperature well above the melting point of water. Their well-regulated body temperature put an upper limit on the temperature of their world. The fact that they cooled themselves by evaporation spoke of a planet with a low average humidity, at least in the areas where their kind originally developed. This, in turn, suggested large, continent-sized land masses.

  In other words, they came from a planet not unlike Ssasfal. This was not exactly ancestor-astonishing news. Most intelligent beings came from worlds that were at least passable imitations of the Home World.

  It was not possible to tell from their eyes whether their yellow star was a giant or a dwarf. However, knowing its approximate spectrum narrowed the search parameters. There were fewer yellow stars in Civilization than orange, and substantially fewer yellow than red; but still far too many to launch a physical search on the little information he possessed.

  The fugitives’ biochemistry was nothing special. They shared the basic life code of all carbon-based forms and were close enough to Broan that the two species could consume the same food, with only minor supplements to maintain health.

  It was that very fact that gave him an angle from which to approach the problem.

  Carbon biochemistry replicates itself so consistently from world to world that the phenomenon had long been a matter of debate among biologists. One faction maintained that the building blocks of carbon-based life are unique, and therefore, must be found wherever “life” has appeared. Other biologists held that space-borne precursors of life were responsible for spreading the code throughout the galaxy.

  Even though the constituents of the bipeds’ life code were common to all living things, the arrangement of those building blocks was unique, as it is on every isolated world. Dos-Val was in possession of their chromosome map, which gave him the key to identifying their home planet.

  #

  The code of all living organisms was supposed to be filed in the central data banks of Ssasfal. Indeed, the collection of such data was something of a fetish among Those Who Rule. Thus, when the bipeds’ life code did not surface during a search of the databanks, its absence had caused alarm horns to sound at the highest levels of the Ruling Council.

  It was one thing for the sector data banks to be incomplete. Civilization was large and unwieldy. It could take as long as a generation for data to percolate from one side to the other. However, it was much less likely for the strangers’ life code not to be in the central databanks. The only logical explanation was that someone had deliberately expunged the data. Such an act was a violation so blatant as to suggest a nefarious intent.

  Still, difficult as it would have been to do, it was theoretically possible. A powerful faction or clan with access, opportunity, and resources might have erased a single species. But erasing a whole planet was infinitely more difficult. In fact, it was a task so complex that Dos-Val refused to believe it possible.

  Whoever these bipeds were, they were the end product of eons of evolution in the system of the yellow star. An isolated world is a closed evolutionary system. Dos-Val was biologically related to all of the animals of Ssasfal, and to a lesser extent, its plants and microorganisms. These fugitive bipeds were likewise related to the 129 species that evolved with them on their home planet. Of special interest were the microorganisms dutifully recorded during their two medical exams. If he could identify the microorganisms that cohabited within them, then he could find their home world.

  Dos-Val’s search had been extensive and costly. The algorithms involved consumed the power of several massive computers for so long that the Minister of Science expressed concern he was wasting resources. Still, the work had the imprimatur of the Prime Councilor, so no one could overrule him. Eventually, all the permutations were tested against every life code in the data banks. There were matches, to be sure. Considering the number of organisms on record, pure chance dictated some codes would be within his search parameters. However, further analysis showed these to be random hits.

  One lesson Dos-Val learned as a pup was that when an experiment fails, it is time to question one’s assumptions.

  He considered the question for several planetary rotations, becoming ever more frustrated. Eventually, as a mind often does when it is perplexed, a stray thought entered his brain.

  It was a tiny thing, little more than a passing whim. For most members of The Race, it would have disappeared as quickly as it formed. Only his long habit of scientific objectivity caused him to isolate the thought and consider its ramifications.

  He got no sleep that night and little over the next three. From its first wisp-like appearance, the idea grew into an obsession. The implications were fantastic, and horrifying.

  Finally, exhausted, Dos-Val fell onto his sleeping mat, pillowed by langol rushes, and slept from Faalta-zenith to its rise the following day. Yet, even rested, he could see no flaw in his logic. Unable to dispose of the horrid thought, he entered a confidential code into his communicator.

  His news would soon cause sleeplessness across the breadth of Civilization.

  #

  Zel-Sen, Prime of the Ruling Council, sprawled on his resting frame and watched the latest report scroll across his workscreen. His mood teetered between boredom and exasperation. Having achieved the pinnacle of power among Those Who Rule, it was his job to protect the gains made by the Ancestors. And, of course, to make gains of his own.

  Despite his exalted status, his job was surprisingly mundane. Mostly it consisted of what he was now doing… reading reports. This particular report involved a minor, but politically sensitive, matter. Some young sc
ion of one of the Greater Clans had made a mess of his stewardship over a second-tier subservient world, causing widespread disruptions in agricultural output. The Hunt Master of his sector relieved the pup and reassigned him where he would be less disruptive. Unfortunately, the head of the pup’s clan demanded discipline for the Hunt Master. That, in turn, brought it to Zel-Sen’s attention.

  Like most problems that survived to his level, there was no easy solution. The Hunt Master was correct in the matter. Too many of the young owed their positions to influence rather than ability. The problem was exacerbated by the perennial shortage of personnel to rule subject worlds.

  The correct thing to do would be to tell the Clan Master to concern himself with the quality of his offspring. Unfortunately, he dared not antagonize the pup’s forebear. So the problem was one of finding a way to assuage hurt feelings while upholding the Hunt Master’s authority. He was contemplating the dilemma when the call of a hunting torpor sounded in his ears.

  The signal announced his next appointment. He glanced at the screen. Dos-Val of the Ministry of Science had requested an emergency audience.

  He signaled his acceptance. The door opened and Dos-Val knuckle-walked to the resting frame across from the Prime Councilor. As he settled in, Zel-Sen noted that the scientist appeared agitated.

  “Thank you for seeing me,” Dos-Val began without preamble.

  “Is this about the missing accountant of the Sar-Dva Clan?”

  “Yes, Councilor.”

  “Have you discovered where the aliens who kidnapped him may be found?”

  “No, Councilor. I have found no clue as to the location of their world.” Dos-Val went on to briefly recount the parameters of the search he had launched. Zel-Sen, who understood the complexity of central data, was impressed — impressed and confused.

  Like the scientist, he found it impossible to believe someone had the power to make an entire planet disappear. That is, unless…