Earth Song: Etude to War (65 page)

The soldier was curious who was in the suit. It must have been quite obvious that whoever occupied it wasn’t Tanam, as scrunched up as Aaron was forced to make the abdomen so he could get his legs and arms through and head high enough to look out the faceplate (the Tanam necks were annoyingly long). He held up his arms in a helpless gesture.

“I don’t know the controls?” he said, though he knew the other wouldn’t hear it across vacuum.

The attempt to communicate failed and the armored figure pressed a beamcaster pistol against Aaron’s head. He yelped and yanked an arm out of its sleeve, retrieved his translator, and managed to wedge it into the helmet against the tiny HUD.

“I hope this works.” Sure enough, it began reciting controls. An entire sweat soaked minute later, “Depolarize Helmet” was listed and he jabbed it with his chin.

The other pulled the gun away and seemed to be having some kind of spasms. Coughing? Sneezing? No, the damn thing was laughing! Aaron let the pendant go and lifted his middle finger. “Up yours, shorty.”

The other cocked its head and touched helmets. Squeaking chatter echoed through and was instantly rendered by his translator. “You are welcome, human.”

Aaron was wondering where he’d heard that language before when the warrior depolarized its own helmet and there was a furry face, quivering whiskers, and dark black eyes. Buck teeth were visible in an unmistakable smile.

“You are now our prisoner,” the Squeen told him.

Chapter 79

September 19th, 534 AE

Office of the First, Fort Jovich, Peninsula Tribe Territory, Bellatrix

Five days remained before the prisoner exchange with the Tanam on Coorson and Minu was pretty sure everything was ready. The last off-world transfer was late the previous night. The council put up no fuss over the one thousand beamcasters. The price was considered light.

There was some grumbling from the planetary government over the hundred thousand tons of wheat, but despite the unpredictable weather because of the sun, harvests were excellent. It wouldn’t even effect a decimal place in humanity’s profits this quarter. Besides, if the bigger plan worked out the food income would no longer be necessary.

She oversaw last night the official transfer of all business interests of the Rasa to their own people. It made zero sense to control their offworld sales, and even less to take half the profits.

They took all the chances developing the algae protein harvesting operations on Remus, and what little material costs there had been must have been repaid a thousand fold by now. They would continue to pay the Peninsula tribe for the lease of their land for Lizardville though, Var’at had insisted on that.

They hadn’t worked out how to begin raising sheep and vineyards on Remus… yet. The first of their young were bonding and Rasa schools were operating. Their species was returning from the brink, and that made Minu feel better since humanity bore some of the responsibility for where they had found themselves.

The sun was just coming up over the equatorial sea. The sea was tinged a light red hinting at yet another storm soon, but for now it was calm and a flotilla of fishing boats were racing out into the waters.
Work while you can
, Minu smiled and turned back to her computer just as her communicator squeaked.

“First Groves,” she said and Ted Hurt’s face appeared. It was fuzzy with distorted interference.

“ –class at least –  -out of nowhere!”

“Ted, enhance your signal, I didn’t get that.”

He turned sideways and his image went blurrier for an instant then cleared. “How is this?”

“Much better, what’s going on?”

“X class flare from Bellatrix, just happened about five minutes ago. The corona is at least a hundred thousand miles wide, you should see it!”

“Oh no, aimed?”

“Right at the planet, Minu. I’m up on Romulus with some Chosen scientists and Rasa techs working on the power scheme. This facility’s sensors are more powerful than our orbiting satellites.” Minu did some quick calculations. This was bad.

“Keep your heads down, I need to warn the planetary governments!”

Ted nodded and his face disappeared. She brought up her main computer account and triggered the planetary emergency action control. All the Chosen forts were instantly put on alert and her communications went straight into each tribe’s government offices, emergency management agencies, and news media. All over the planet TV broadcasts were being pre-empted and her face was appearing. She hoped she didn’t have egg in her teeth.

“This is an emergency action message from the Chosen. An X-class solar flare has just erupted from our sun and is aimed directly at Bellatrix. Seek shelter immediately if you are on the dayside of the planet. All power distribution hubs will shut down in ten minutes, I repeat, all power distribution hubs will shut down in ten minutes!”

* * *

The storm of charged particles slammed into the planet of Bellatrix like the edge of a tsunami, bending and quickly breaking its miniscule magnetic field. Unlike Earth, the planet’s core was nearly cool and the planet had little defense. Electricity built up on all metallic surfaces and arced wildly between metal buildings and cars.

In Plateau a pair of businessmen trying to secure their load of refrigerated produce were electrocuted as a ten thousand volt bolt of electricity jumped from the trailer, through one man, then the other, and then to ground. Their bodies were not found for hours after the danger had passed.

Two Chosen transports were caught in the air trying to outrace the storm to the night side of the planet. One made it with only minor electrical damage, the other found its gravitic impellers shorted out completely and plummeted into the ground at two hundred kilometers per hour, killing all four aboard.

Generally luck was with the humans of Bellatrix. Aside from a few hundred burns from static discharge and untold fried power lines and farm implements (the flare hit the farming center of the Rusk territory dead center), those were the only deaths. Remus was on the far side of the planet, shielded by its primary, and those on Romulus were deep underground and shielded quite adequately.

Six hours later in the mid-afternoon, everyone emerged to survey the damage. Some delicate plants were harmed, and a few pets killed as well, but that was the extent of it. Media all over the planet heralded Minu and her Chosen once again as heroes.

Late that evening, Minu met with the science department to discuss the event.

“Could it have been worse?” she asked them.

“Not really,” Bjorn assured her. Ted’s image floated over the table along with a Rasa researcher who specialized in stellar physics. “At least until the sun flares.”

They’d long lived under the threat of their blue-white star killing them all. The overeating behemoth would continue to gradually get hotter for eons until it either collapsed in on itself or shed a spectral class and settled down.

The Lost had used Romulus to move their planet intermittently to make sure it stayed out of range of such stellar phenomenon. Scientists went as far as suggesting the planet had probably started life far outside the so called ‘goldilocks zone’ (not too hot, not too cold) and was moved to its habitable zone to be terraformed.

“Solutions?” she asked them.

“Use the generators on Romulus to create a planetary shield,” Jasmine suggested. As head of the science department, she had access to more scientific knowledge than just about any human on the planet. “We can set up a couple field boosters in orbit using the Phoenix shuttles and bring the whole thing on line when threatened.

Minu nodded. “Response time to a disaster?”

Jasmine tapped her lips with a finger. “Maybe ten minutes to spin up the field generators, another five to balance the field. It will chew a massive amount of power.”

“The EPC banks here save more than enough,” Bjorn assured them from Romulus.

“Downside?” Minu asked.

“Definitely price,” Jasmine said to a series of nods. “You don’t find those kind of shield generators in junkpiles. We believe they were once used to protect cities and military installations from orbital bombardment. They are all but impossible to come by.”

Minu knew why; because the higher-order species all kept them to protect themselves from each other. If she got any, she wanted some for her cities as well. The game was afoot.

Ted spoke up. “We have a line on four, the bare minimum we’d need to establish a stable field.”

“How much?” Minu asked. He told her and she whistled. “That’s a stack of cash.” He nodded soberly. “Other alternatives?”

“Ask the Tog for help?”

Minu shook her head no, that one was off the table.

“Deep space shield array between Bellatrix and the sun,” another scientist suggested. A variation of protecting the entire planet. It would act like a bow wake to move the charged particles around the planet.

“Almost as expensive and will have to be a starship to maintain position,” Bjorn said.

Minu nodded and filed that away. Could the Kaatan act as their shield in a desperate situation? She’d ask Lilith later.

Other suggestions went from the desperate, start building domes for the cities and agriculture, to the sublime, research altering the star’s condition. The last was interesting, but Minu didn’t think even the Lost took their stellar engineering that far.

She’d thought they’d ran the gambit when Bjorn spoke up again. “There is one more possibility,” he said.

Minu looked at him expectantly.

“Do the same thing the Lost used to do.”

“Move the planet?” Minu said with a laugh in her voice.

“Yes,” he said. Ted was scratching his chin with that far off look in his eye that meant he was doing ‘big math.’ Others were glancing at each other. They believed it was possible.

“You all think this is a possibility?”

“It has to be,” Bjorn told her, “it’s why Romulus is here. This rock doesn’t come with Bellatrix, it was moved here under its own power. This thing formed in the system Kuiper belt and had one hell of a long trip getting here. It didn’t do it all on its own.” More nods. “It’s really only a matter of math.”

“And there’s the rub,” Ted interjected. Bjorn shrugged.

“Fill me in,” Minu told them. Ted took it on.

“Managing a gravitic field of this intensity is an extremely complicated endeavor. The controls here are all designed to interface with computers that feed them the calculations. And I mean a mother bucking assload of calculations. At least a hundred trillions a second. And there isn’t a single damned computer up there capable of doing one millionth of that, so the Lost all did it through their data network.”

Which we don’t have access to
, Minu finished for him. Lilith could access it, but not control it. Half the time when she made inquiries she got no reply. She likened it to a room the size of a planet full of file drawers which you opened randomly looking what was inside. What were the odds of finding a computer center where she could do those calculations? The same odds as finding the ‘well of souls’ as she called it, where all the fighting ships’ AIs were stored. With that, she could…

“We can just build our own network,” Bjorn brought her back to the present.

Ted laughed and shook his head. “In our dreams.”

Bjorn held up a hand. “We can’t duplicate the full capacity, but we’re not trying to move the damned planet to another star system, just another hundred thousand kilometers farther out from the star!” He had a tablet out and was working furiously. “We’re talking about forty thousand teraflops or so.”

“And about a thousand secure data connections,” Ted reminded him.

Bjorn shrugged as it they were talking about popcorn.

“Budget?” Minu asked.

Ted sighed. “A lot less than the shield option. And the goods are reusable. If we screwed up the shields, we could burn them up and that would be that. The computers would be a reusable asset.”

“Get me a proposed budget,” Minu said.

Bjorn looked like it was his birthday. “Really?!”

“Yes, Bjorn. Get underway. I’m going to talk to the planetary government tonight and a news conference later. They’re expecting miracles, so I guess I need to deliver.”

Minu was about to leave Steven’s Pass to head for Tranquility where she’d have her high level meetings when a young Chosen scientist caught her.

“First Groves? Ted wanted you in his lab for a moment before you left.”

The young boy looked at her like she had the power to kill him with her eyes. Minu smiled and patted the five silver starred kid on the shoulder.

“Thanks,” she said and changed direction, leaving him smiling ear to ear. Why were people so scared of her anyway?

Minu trotted into Ted’s primary lab at the center of the science wing to find him deep in a heated argument with logistics. “Ten thousand computer tablets, are you completely insane?”

“Yes, he is,” Minu said over his shoulder.

Ted glanced back and grinned at her then flashed his pearly whites at the bemused three green star logistics branch Chosen. “Get on it, Chosen.”

“Yes First. I’ll get an estimate in an hour.” He signed off, only just in time to cover the string of expletives that began to come out.

“Thanks,” Ted said and gave her a little hug. They’d been friends for a very long time. Minu was glad of one thing. Since she’d become First, Ted had finally given up trying to get into her pants. At least he seemed to have given up. Her
marriage
hadn’t dissuaded him.

“No problem, you needed to see me?” She glanced at her chronometer. Time was getting short, she hated to push her personal aerocar too hard. It was getting old.

“Yeah,” he said and went to a secure cabinet. From inside he drew out a clear crystal rod. Minu snapped her fingers.

“Right, the ones we found on the frontier my father left for me.”

“This,” Ted said, handling the device like it was a newborn baby, “this is amazing.”

Minu grabbed it out and touched the base, bringing it alive. Ted’s eyes got wide and he reached to take it from her, she smacked the hand away. “Don’t be silly, I’ve been handling PCRs for almost twenty years.”

“Yes, but that is not a PCR?”

Minu looked at the holographic script chasing itself around the rod and gave him a skeptical look. “Then it’s doing a real good job of pretending.”