Annihilation (Star Force Series) (6 page)

“I’m not that hungry.”

She laughed, then pulled away a fraction. Her eyebrows knit together. “You gave a new ship to Jasmine, I heard.”

Damn
, I thought. Talk about a mood-deflator.

I tried to smile. “Yeah. She’s senior, and her talents were wasted on a destroyer.”

“What ship did you give her?”

I hesitated. I could tell she already knew the answer. How could she have heard the rumor without knowing what it was about? She just wanted to see a full confession.

“The new carrier,” I admitted.

“You know what she’s going to call it?”

“No, not yet.”

One of Star Force’s oldest traditions dictated that new ships were named by the Captain. It dated back to the early days, when Nano ships plucked their captains out of their beds. After passing the deadly tests and taking command, the new people had been given the honor of naming the ship that had tormented them.

“She’s going to call it
Gatre
,” Sandra said.

“You seem to know more about current events than I do.”

“That’s part of my job.”

I moved in for another kiss, but she dodged me.

“Don’t you want to know what
Gatre
means?”

“Um…no, not really.”

“It means something like ‘calloused’ or ‘stubborn’ in Hindi.”

I frowned. “Did she tell you that?”

“No. I looked it up.”

I nodded, but had no idea why we were having this conversation. I reached out a hand toward her shapely hip, but she pushed it away automatically. I could see the look on her face was one of concentration. She really was interested in this carrier.

Her eyes studied mine with sudden intensity. “Why did you give that ship to her, Kyle?” she asked.

My face went blank in surprise. When it comes to women, I’m a bumbling idiot, but I’ve learned to sense traps when they’re laid at my feet. I was on guard immediately. I knew I had to step very carefully.

“Uh…” I began, my mind churning, “because she deserved a serious command?”

“Yes, I know that,” she said, her eyes searching my face. “But I don’t think you made the right decision. People have feelings you know.”

I heaved a sigh. I didn’t like where this might be going. Was she going to have another jealous fit?

 “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“Me? I’m not talking about
me
.”

“Then what are you talking about?”

“Miklos, of course. He wanted that command. He built the ship, he has dreamt of it for months. He hardly talks about anything else, you know.”

“No, I didn’t realize that. But don’t worry. I’ll give him the second ship.”

“The second one?”

I filled her in on Miklos’ new orders. By the end, she was satisfied, and a few minutes later we were back to kissing. Soon I was as satisfied as she was.

By the time we made it down to get our platter of broiled air-swimmers, the kitchen had run out for the night. But after a disappointed look from me, they headed back to the freezers and thawed another batch. Rank does have its privileges.

-5-

The first day’s voyage into the Thor system was tense, but uneventful. We were expecting something to happen at any moment. Every hour we stared at the screens, made countless attempts to open channels and continuously scanned the moons ahead.

“What if we’re too late?” Sandra asked me.

I glanced at her, then went back to staring at the screens. The same thought had occurred to me. What if the Crustaceans had been too proud to ask their enemies for help? What if they’d waited until the last and what we’d heard had been the last gasp of a civilization? Now that we’d finally responded, there might not be anyone home to answer our call.

“Nonsense,” I said. “They’re just stuffy and prideful. They’re probably too embarrassed to tell us they have problems.”

“You think they regret calling on us? That they’re too proud to admit they need help?”

“Exactly,” I said. “But we won’t know the truth until they talk to us or we get more solid data.”

More long hours passed. During this time, the carrier
Gatre
was crewed and launched back in the Eden system. It came into the Thor system behind us, trailing its tiny flotilla of support ships. When a call finally did come into my command center, it was from Captain Sarin, rather than the Crustaceans.

“Where are their ships, Colonel?” Jasmine asked me when I opened the private line to her carrier.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “We haven’t seen them fly above their atmosphere on any of the three worlds since we entered the Thor system.”

“I don’t like it,” she said, “it looks like a trap.”

“That, or the aftermath of a tremendous catastrophe.”

Jasmine didn’t answer me for a while. When she finally did, her voice was hushed, almost as if the things we were discussing were too terrible to be spoken aloud. Perhaps we were.

“You think they’re
all
dead?” she asked. “That’s why they aren’t talking?”

“We’ll find out when we reach orbit.”

“But it might be too late by then. If there is something so powerful it could erase a species from three worlds that quickly—your fleet may not stand a chance.”

I chuckled. “If this entire fleet turns into vapor, your orders are to do a U-turn with that carrier and get back to Welter Station. Then close all the shutters and hide in the cellar.”

She didn’t seem amused. “Don’t you at least have a theory, Colonel?”

“Of course I do,” I said. “But I’ve got nothing to go on. Guesses aren’t helpful, so I’m going to wait until we have some hard evidence.”

Privately, I felt certain the prideful Crustaceans would never have called me for help unless they were desperate. Whatever was going on out here, it was serious.

The second day went on as had the first. We sailed through space, coming closer and closer to the gas giant in the habitable zone. More than a day’s flight behind us was Captain Sarin’s carrier group. I monitored the new ship’s vitals from the beginning. There were a few glitches, and she was slow. I calculated that it would take
Gatre
more than two days to reach the home planets of the Crustaceans—it would be closer to three days.

The moons, Yale, Harvard and Princeton, now were visible using our long-range optics. They were strange worlds, beautiful in their own way. I reflected that calling them moons was really only a technical description. They were planets, just like any other. They did happen to be locked in orbit around a larger planetary body, but isn’t every planet is locked around its star? They were nothing like the sterile rocks we called moons back in the Solar System.

Two of the worlds had so much water on them there was virtually no land to be found on the surface. The depths of these oceans were tremendous. As we drew closer, our readings indicated that the third moon—Yale—had the deepest oceans of the three, and that it was even more alien than we’d thought. Yale had no land at all.

Submarines can’t normally go deeper than a few thousand feet due to the tremendous pressure. The requirement for breathable gas inside creates such a difference in pressure that the hulls of most subs will collapse if they continue to sink.

On Earth, our oceans are about thirty thousand feet at their deepest. But the oceans of Yale were deeper still. Our instruments measured the rocky bottom, and detected it at some two hundred thousand feet down in places.

At that depth, there is so much pressure that water transforms into alternate states. Back on Earth I’d been accustomed to ice, steam and liquid water. But when you stack up water deeply enough, with enough crushing weight, it takes on new physical properties. It becomes solid, and hotter. A type of “hot ice” develops. Our Fleet eggheads told me about it with a strange light in their eyes.

The pleading transmissions had come from Yale, as well as the strange readings we were getting now. The oceans there were a full six degrees hotter than they’d been a week ago. And still, there was no discernible reason for any of these changes.

When we were only nine hours out from orbit, Marvin came to consult with me. He seemed to be in a state of agitation. He couldn’t stand still. His metal tentacles slapped at the deck like fish in the bottom of boat. It was very distracting, but I’d seen this behavior before. Marvin was excited about something.

“What is it, Marvin?” I asked him. “You look like you’re about to pee your pants.”

“Reference unclear. I do not urinate. In fact, I have few liquids in my structure, with the possible exception of lubrication reservoirs. Are you suggesting I’ve sprung a leak, Colonel? Or is this somehow an apt reference to my findings?”

I chuckled. “It’s an idiom. I’m suggesting you’re excited and agitated.”

Cameras studied me. “You can infer that from my behavior?”

“Yes. Now, tell me what you want. I’ve got a lot of data to go over.”

“That’s exactly it, sir. I think there’s something in the data we’ve missed.”

He finally had my full attention. “Tell me about it.”

“It all came from my previous geological studies concerning the smaller celestial bodies in this system. Remember when we flew into the system and scanned it? I’ve been comparing that data to the current scans we’ve been reading since our arrival in the Thor system.”

“What have you found?”

“It’s very interesting. There’s a discrepancy on my readings of the third moon, Yale. A variation in measurable mass.”

I frowned. “In
mass
?” I asked. Suddenly, I understood his earlier remark about me making an apt comment. He meant the world had really sprung a leak. “So…the planet is smaller than it was before?”

“Yes,” he said.

“What could be causing such a change?”

“A leak, of course.”

I stared at him for a moment, finally catching on. I turned to the screens and flipped through maps and models.

“You’re telling me their oceans are draining away,” I said. “How long has this been going on?”

A camera snaked over my left shoulder and gazed down at the table with me. I knew it was only Marvin’s way of seeing something from my perspective. He did this from time to time, peeking over people’s shoulders with one of his many eyes. It helped him to understand what we were talking about when discussing visual input, because he could study what we were seeing. Most found it disconcerting, but I understood why he did it and it didn’t bother me. Marvin’s visual input was different from the human norm. He had many more eyes—variable numbers of them, actually. And he could be looking at several things at once. Unlike humans, who were built to visually study one part of their environment at a time, Marvin could see many at once. His cameras weren’t as good as our eyes, but he made up for that by having a lot of them.

Due to this major variation in visual input and processing, his perspective on the visual environment around us was quite different. Rather than looking only at the item we were discussing, he liked to use his mobile visual sensory systems to try to see my point of view. He wasn’t very good at indirect empathy, but he excelled at direct mimicry of behavior.

Finally, I had the data he was referring to. It had been in an old file saved months ago. “According to this, the planetary mass of Yale is about one percent lower than it was when you made your original readings. That’s incredible. Have you got anything else, Marvin?”

He slid up beside me at the table. “Possibly,” he said.

I looked at him expectantly. He studied me with many cameras at once. I knew he wanted me to ask him more about it, and to praise him for his accomplishments. He was odd that way—he liked it when people begged him for facts. He also liked to keep secrets. Sometimes he used critical details of information as bargaining chips to gain privileges. Usually these privileges came in the form of an approval to perform some kind of nasty experiment.

I’d played his little game many times. Over the years, I’d worked up a counter to his manipulations. I decided to employ it now.

My first move was to nod and tap the screen, closing the file.

“Very good, Marvin,” I said. “I think I have enough for now. You’ve done an excellent job. Once again, you’ve proven to me that my decision to make you my Science Officer was the correct one.”

Marvin’s cameras flicked from the blank screen to my blank face and back again.

“Don’t you wish to study the matter further, Colonel Riggs?” he asked.

I shrugged and reached for a cup of algae-based coffee. “You’re the Science Officer. You’ve made the call. Your commander has been briefed, and you’ve decided he’s heard all there is of value to know. I trust your judgment on this one.”

“That’s very gratifying, Colonel Riggs.”

“Good. Now if you don’t mind, I have a number of issues to attend to before we reach orbit. We’re only a few hours from planetfall.”

“But I think there might be something else to discuss.”

“Oh yeah?” I asked, trying to look bored. I fooled with my coffee mug, adding cream and sugar. I hated cream and sugar.