McCollum - GIBRALTAR STARS Page 9

  “Are you suggesting that our initial suspicions were correct? Has one of the clans discovered a new world and failed to register it?”

  “No, Councilor, I do not think so. There should have been an initial record of the discovery, even if the discoverers later decided to keep it to themselves.”

  Zel-Sen made the gesture of confusion. “Then we have exhausted the possibilities.”

  “Not all of them, Councilor. There is one more we must consider, fantastic though it might seem.”

  “Yes?”

  The scientist fidgeted in his frame, obviously uncomfortable. Zel-Sen gave him a reasonable time before chiding, “I have a great deal to do today, Philosopher.”

  “I believe, Prime Councilor, that we may have a wild species loose in Civilization, using the stargates.”

  #

  Chapter Eleven

  Lisa Rykand stirred in her sleep, stretched, slowly opened her eyes, and then smiled. After a long, troubled time, everything was again right with the universe.

  She was floating in mid-air, and she wasn’t alone. Mark was floating with her. They were intertwined, wrapped in the lover’s embrace that is the natural position when two people sleep together in zero gee.

  When a spacer sleeps, the biceps exert more tension at the elbow joint than do the triceps. This causes a sleeper’s arms to bend upward to float in front of them, not unlike the position used by some religions while in prayer. If two people wrap their arms around one another before drifting off to sleep, the natural motion of their arms causes them to remain locked together throughout the night.

  At least, that was the way physiologists described the phenomenon. Lisa preferred to believe that God had exercised His Divine Foresight to design the connubial embrace into the human genome long before the species ever experienced the absence of gravity.

  Of course, God benefitted from some technological assistance, as well. While preparing to make love, both she and Mark donned coital leg straps — elastic bands loosely wrapped around their calves just below the knees. The first time they intertwined, the straps engaged, loosely tethering hairy right leg to smooth left, and vice versa. The straps tied them together during coitus, preventing their exertions from setting them adrift. The arrangement eliminated the need for conscious effort to cling to one another, freeing them for the serious business of giving one another pleasure.

  Both she and Mark preferred the leg straps to any of the elastic belts of ingenious design that had long served the same purpose. And, despite elaborate and loving descriptions of the act of microgravity coitus in romance novels, the simple act of penetration did nothing to anchor a floating couple. Male ego notwithstanding, the forces involved vastly exceed the holding capacity of even the strongest penis.

  Lisa lay comfortably in Mark’s unconscious embrace, her nose tucked into the fold of his armpit. Each breath brought with it the strangely erotic aroma of his perspiration. She listened to the rhythm of his slow breathing and felt the slow rise and fall of his chest as it massaged her flattened breasts. Everywhere save where her skin was pressed against his, she felt the cool air wafting against clammy skin. Wherever they touched, she felt the burning contact of a kindred soul.

  She pulled Mark closer, purposely rubbing her pubic mound against his now-flaccid member. He moaned in his sleep and she felt a delicious chill of wickedness flash down her spine. Momentarily, she considered waking him in one of several ways a wife has to bring her husband back to consciousness. Then her lips curled into a broader smile as she decided against it. Considering the number of times they had made love since her arrival aboard Amethyst, she decided that he needed his sleep.

  Yet, sleep for her seemed to have fled, to be replaced by a gentle languor. Lifting her head, she glanced at the chronometer on the bulkhead. The numbers were hazy, as though viewed through a thick fog, but sufficiently distinct for her to make them out. The hour was halfway through mid-watch, and still a couple to go before they were due to get up.

  Turning her head, she made out the indistinct outline of the wash basin with its cluster of glowing automatic controls, barely visible in the dim bluish light of a starship pretending that night has fallen. That outline, too, was indistinct, this time appearing as through a spider’s web; as indeed, it was.

  In addition to the elastic leg straps, their bed was equipped with a loose fitting cocoon — a descendent of the ancient mosquito net. It was large enough for two people to move within without being overly constrained, yet sufficiently confining that they could use it to brace themselves if their lovemaking required one or both parties to be anchored.

  The cocoon served two basic functions. Primarily, it was to restrict lovers to the vicinity of their bed, lest they smash their heads into a bulkhead (or worse, a delicate piece of machinery) during the throes of passion.

  It had another function, one that was understood, but not often spoken of. Its weave was sufficiently loose to allow the passage of cooling air, but tight enough to trap errant globules of fluid that might escape the act of love. Several embarrassing incidents in the early days of spaceflight had been caused by glandular discharges shorting out critical electrical equipment.

  Lisa had arrived aboard Amethyst eight hours earlier as part of the first contingent of Stargate Project people. Her early arrival was no accident. Dr. Phonouvong knew her husband was Executive Officer of the Amy and arranged for her to be one of the first to transfer from Sutton to the ship. He’d explained with a smile that it was her reward for working so hard at translating the stargate’s operating instructions.

  Normal social rules required Lisa to look demurely downward in that “Aw, shucks!” way and offer that it was nothing anyone else wouldn’t have done. She ignored the rules. Rather, she confined herself to a quiet, “Thank you,” and a large grin.

  In fact, it was a reward she richly deserved. For the better part of three standard months, she had worked fifteen hours each day to decipher the gate’s operating principles. At the beginning, she and Mark agreed they would get together once a month to renew their marriage. Their plans had been for naught. There never seemed a good time for her to take the orbital shuttle to his ship, and his new duties prevented him from taking a 24-hour leave on the moon’s surface. Their time apart had been the longest ninety days of her life.

  Long, but educational… in the way that getting caught on a raft in the open sea during a hurricane can be said to be “educational.”

  It was a time as intense as those first few months with Sar-Say aboard PoleStar. By the time the Broan had become fluent in Standard, she thought she had learned to speak the enemy tongue passably well. Visits to two Broan-controlled worlds increased her confidence in her mastery of the language.

  She now knew better.

  As the one-eyed man rules in the kingdom of the blind; her status as the most accomplished human translator of the Broan language disguised the extent of her ignorance. The technical Broan in the stargate database forced her to face her limitations.

  She learned so much, so quickly, that she came to think of her previous facility with the speech as being akin to the argot of an East-End whore, and her newly expanded vocabulary as the dulcet tone of an Oxford Don. It was a mental comparison she wasn’t sure flattered either party.

  Conservatively, she estimated that she had increased her knowledge by a factor of three, although with words unlikely to ever come up in daily conversation. There was also a rhythm to the true Broan tongue that was missing from the pidgin trade talk. The difference was like that between a natural language such as Standard and an artificial construct like Esperanto.

  As her mother often told her, eventually hard work pays off. With the help of computers that grew smarter by the day, she and the rest of the team managed to translate the working documents of the stargate. What they discovered was that human physics and Broan physics were two different versions of the same subject. Of course, as the physicists pointed out incessantly, it could hardly have been othe
rwise. After all, both species inhabited the same universe.

  The theory of the stargate network was well laid out in the gate records, since the information was intended for maintenance technicians. Week by grueling week, the physicists exhibited ever-growing confidence that they understood the technology. The science of the gates was a subset of standard 11-dimensional universe theory. Although the Broa used a different coordinate transformation than did humans, the technique was no mystery to those who studied such things.

  Lisa shifted her position back to the crook of Mark’s arm. As she did so, her husband stirred. She waited for his breathing to return to the slow, measured beat of deep sleep. It did not. She felt his grip on her back tighten and his hot breath in her hair as he asked, “What time is it?”

  She told him.

  Sighing, he said, “Go back to sleep. We’ve got a couple of hours yet.”

  “I can’t,” she replied, plaintively. “I’m wide awake. Keyed up, I guess.”

  He stirred. His arms moved until his hands gripped her rib cage just below her breasts. He pushed her away. She could see the black hollows of his eyes shadowed in the dim blue light that filtered through the gossamer cocoon and sensed his intent gaze.

  “Is there something I can do to relax you?” he asked, his tone arch as his thumbs moved to press into sensitive flesh.

  She smiled, wrapped her arms about his neck, and squeezed.

  “I thought you would never ask.”

  #

  TSNS Amethyst dropped sublight deep in interstellar space. Around her was a small fleet of ships, including one that wore an oversize ring like a Roman hero with a wreath on his head.

  They had come to this particular well-chosen piece of vacuum to test how well the physicists understood what they had learned from the stargate maintenance data.

  There is an old saying among soldiers: “Amateurs study strategy, professionals study logistics.” The precursor to victory in all wars is the ability to keep the troops supplied once bullets begin to fly. Even the fastest starship spends a full year traversing the 7000 light-years between Brinks Base and Earth. It took another year to return home. With these long transit times, keeping a forward outpost like Brinks supplied was a struggle. Actually fighting a war was impossible. If nothing could be done to shorten transit times, long before sufficient force gathered for an attack, the need for cargo ships would outstrip Earth’s ability to build them. Luckily, the Broa had the answer. Stargates were the seven-league boots of star travel.

  Amethyst and her sisters rendezvoused deep in interstellar space. The nearest star was a dozen light-years distant, and it was fifty light-years back to Brinks. They had chosen this remote spot with care. For it was here they would take the first step toward building a network of human stargates.

  The problem was gravity waves.

  Travel via stargate involves discontinuities. One instant, the local mass of the universe contains a starship; the next instant, it does not. Since gravity is caused by the curvature of space-time, which in turn is dictated by the presence of mass, any step-change in mass produces a disturbance that moves outward at the speed of light.

  The easiest way for scientists to test their newfound knowledge would have been to haul the Vrathalatar stargate out to the edge of the Hideout System and send a ship through the gate’s focus. However, the jump would generate two expanding gravity waves, each racing outward from the gate in opposite directions.

  The nearest Broan-occupied system to Hideout was only ten light-years distant, and in the path of one of the gravity waves a jump toward Earth would produce. That meant that within a decade, the wave would sweep through a Broan-monitored gravtenna.

  To prevent that possibility, human astronomers surveyed local space, looking for some out-of-the-way spot where a starship jump would not be noticed. The point the astronomers eventually chose was a small bubble of space where star production had ceased. Better than its lack of stars was the fact that a gate oriented toward Earth would send gravity waves on a path that would not intersect a Broan-occupied system for nearly three centuries.

  They had come to what they were calling “The Void” to set up the gate for its first test. Nor would the jump be a local one. The first test would be a single-ended jump the full 7000 light-years to the New Eden system.

  “In for a penny, in for a pound!” was the way Lisa explained it to Mark after their memorable reunion that first night aboard ship.

  #

  Mark Rykand sat in his armored vacsuit in Amethyst’s Combat Control Center. As the ship’s Executive Officer, CCC was his normal jump station. Like the bridge, Combat Control was inside Amy’s armored central core, sandwiched between the engine spaces aft and the bridge forward. The hardened cylinder at the heart of the cruiser was trisected by two heavy bulkheads, and surmounted by an even stronger bow cap, making CCC the safest compartment aboard ship.

  Of course, in any space battle, ‘safe’ is a relative term.

  In front of Mark, a half dozen acceleration couches arrayed in a semicircle faced the compartment’s deck-to-overhead-high screens. They were occupied by his staff, specialists whose duties commenced only if they were attacked or damaged. At the moment, they were observers to the action taking place on the bridge, three compartments forward.

  The screen on the right was subdivided into several windows filled with multicolor displays. One window showed a view of the bridge itself, a compartment very like the one in which Mark sat. The picture was foreshortened by a wide-angle lens. It showed Captain Borsman strapped into the central control station, with the bridge crew around him. He was working his way through the pre-jump checklist.

  “Sensors, are all ships in position?”

  “Yes, sir,” Spacer Ramirez, two acceleration couches to the captain’s right, answered after a quick check of her instruments. “All ships are well within the safe zone.”

  The ‘safe zone’ was the toroid of space outboard of the ring. The single-ended jump they planned would produce a powerful gravity wave, a wave that would emanate from both sides of the ring and expand outward along its axis in an ever expanding cone. Any ship caught by the wave would be shaken perceptibly, possibly hard enough to knock instruments out of calibration and even cause minor structural damage.

  As on the bridge, the central viewscreen in CCC showed the stargate. It looked, as always, like some giant’s wedding ring. The engineers in the Hamilton had spent the previous week running diagnostics on the gate and orienting it precisely in space for the coming jump. The precision was made necessary by the fact that there was no companion gate at the other end.

  “Consumables, Mr. Rykand?” Captain Borsman asked over the intercom.

  “Stowed and ready, Captain,” Mark replied without hesitation. “We won’t be able to shower for awhile, but everything is properly tied down.”

  In preparation for her journey, Amethyst had taken on three times her normal load of consumables… liquid oxygen, water, and foodstuffs. It was the latter that had caused Mark the most problems. He ran out of space in the hold, and was using every available bit of spare cubic. Like on the submarines of old, they would have to eat the shower stalls clean before they could use them.

  The extra consumables were insurance in case something went wrong. The most likely malfunction was that the jump field would collapse from overload and they would be vaporized. There was little they could do about that. However, they were jumping blind across 7000 light-years of space, aiming to materialize in empty space just outside the New Eden system. If that happened, there would be no need for the extra supplies. But an error in alignment of only a few tenths of a degree could cause them to emerge hundreds of light-years from their destination.

  If they returned to normal space to find themselves wildly off target, they would have to cross whatever gulf of space lay between them and Sol. The increased consumables were insurance that they would have the endurance to do so.

  “All right, Mr. Rettinger, you may
move us into the gate.”

  “Aye aye, Captain,” the pilot responded.

  The gate expanded on Mark’s screen until the swirl-decorated sides touched the edges and then disappeared, to be replaced by a black vista sprinkled with diamond points of light. Several secondary screens switched to the side cameras to display the ring’s inner diameter. A faint glow could be seen building up on the surface, an indication that the jump field was being charged.

  “All departments, report readiness to jump,” the captain ordered.

  There followed a well-oiled chorus of voices. Mark listened to the parade of acknowledgements until only two departments remained. “Combat control, ready to jump,” he reported.

  Finally, Captain Helperin announced, “Bridge, ready to jump. Pilot, you may jump when ready.”

  “Aye aye, Captain.”

  There followed five seconds of silence, which were finally broken by the jump alarm—by tradition, the ancient klaxon of the submarine service—and Pilot Lieutenant Davis Rettinger’s Texas twang.

  “ALL HANDS. THE GATE SHOWS FULL POWER. WE JUMP IN THIRTY SECONDS… FIFTEEN…TEN…FIVE, FOUR, THREE, TWO, ONE, JUMP!”

  There was no sensation.

  One instant, the forward camera showed blackness with a speckling of white points; the next, it showed the same. The side cameras, which had been focused on the interior surface of the gate, went suddenly black. Not the black of no signal, but of deep space.

  After all the tension leading up to the jump, their quiet arrival somewhere else was an anticlimax.

  The captain’s voice came over the intercom.

  “Astrogator, figure out where we are.”

  “Aye aye, Captain.”

  There followed a long pause in which tension began to build anew.

  #

  Chapter Twelve

  Grimaldi Crater lies on the Moon’s western limb, where it is perpetually in profile to Earth-bound observers. The crater was formed when a large asteroid traveling at 30 kilometers per second smashed down onto Oceanus Procellarum, the Sea of Storms. The nickel-iron rock burrowed 20 kilometers deep before coming to a halt. Then, in less time than it takes to blink, the overlying strata exploded upward, ejecting an incandescent geyser of molten rock skyward at several times the Moon’s escape velocity.