Gibraltar Sun (26 page)

The collection of snowballs was the perfect place in which to hide a ship.
New Hope
had insinuated itself into the heart of the complex formation, being careful not to let the drive field touch any of the surrounding snowballs.
As far out as they were, it was nearly inconceivable that anyone would spot them even if they took no such precautions. However, “nearly inconceivable” is not the same as “inconceivable.”

The one way the inhabitants might spot
New Hope
was by her infrared radiation signature. So far as the surrounding universe was concerned,
New Hope
’s skin was a blistering 300 degrees Kelvin. To a sufficiently sensitive infrared telescope, the ship would stand out against the black background like a small star.

By positioning themselves among the floating snowballs of the Oort Cloud, their ship’s radiation was largely masked by the cold masses around it, whose temperature hovered just above absolute zero. With
New Hope
hidden by one particularly large proto-comet, they had spent a busy two days arraying their spy gear where it could see the whole of the inner Gamma system.

The first thing they unshipped was the astronomical telescope, a compact 3-meter diameter instrument with enough light-gathering power to spot a candle from across a solar system. They had anchored it on the far side of the biggest snowball and then run a cable to the back side, where a short range antenna beamed the telescope’s images back to the ship. The second group of observation instruments to emerge were two different dish antennas to scan the electromagnetic spectrum for communications. Finally, they had unloaded two small gravity telescopes. These last were hauled by landing boat several thousand kilometers to each side of
New Hope
’s lair. Otherwise, the mass of the snowballs would mask or distort gravity waves from the local stargates.

“Big ears online!” the voice of a vacsuited spacer reported when the last of the big radio telescopes had been planted on the surface of one of the nearby ice mountains, its feet insulated against the absolute cold.

Lisa Rykand scanned her instruments and noted that they were already picking up radio hash from Gamma. She hurriedly activated the software program that would filter that, along with other naturally occurring radio noises. The hiss emanating from the speaker died away, to be replaced with the slightly musical rasping of artificially generated signals.

“Lock onto that,” she told the communicator assisting her. As part of the Alien Assessment group aboard ship, she had no particular technical expertise concerning the instruments they were using. On the other hand, the comm techs had no expertise in interpreting what they were hearing. It was, she had long since decided, a case of the deaf leading the blind.

“I wonder why every technologically advanced species uses radio waves,” she mused.

“Beg your pardon, Ma’am,” Comm Specialist Leonard Wolfling, the tech on duty, said. “Did you say something to me?”

“No, just musing.”

“About what, Ma’am?”

“About what we are doing here. We are watching them in the visible and invisible light spectra, we are listening to them on all of the electromagnetic frequencies, and we are waiting to detect the gravity waves their gates produce. But what if a species develops something other than radio to communicate with? They could be ordering their fleet to attack us at this very moment and we would be deaf as a post.”

“Not possible, Ma’am. Everyone uses radio.”

“I don’t think you give them enough credit, Specialist.”

“I don’t mean they aren’t smart enough to invent something else, Ma’am. I mean it’s physically impossible.”

“Why is that?”

“Because there are only four kinds of energy in the universe. At least, that is what they teach us in comm school. There are gravity, electromagnetic radiation, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force. That’s all there is, nothing more. So, if you want to communicate over long distances, which one do you choose? I suppose if you could generate gravity waves at will, they might make a pretty good comm device, but we can detect those, too. Since generating a gravity wave takes either a small black hole or a stargate, everyone chooses electromagnetic radiation for their comm gear. It’s really the only thing they can do.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Lisa replied. “Makes sense.”

“Anything else I can help you with?” Wolfling asked as his eyes constantly scanned his control screen.

“No. I was just curious.”

Then had begun the long vigil. That there were plenty of radio waves on which to eavesdrop had been apparent in the first seconds after locking in on the small radio star that was the system’s single inhabited planet. Making sense of those signals was the work of many days.

The indigenous race did not speak Broan among themselves. Thus, most of their communications were in their native language or languages. This made the intercepts so much gibberish to Lisa and her two other Broan translators. They recorded it anyway, especially the video feeds, for later analysis by the linguistics computer. Once the comm technicians figured out how they were encoding the pictures, or rather holograms, they watched video feeds.

The beings were humanoid to the extent that they possessed two arms, two legs, and a head. They were also armored, with each individual looking somewhat like a knight in non-shining armor. Their faces were immobile in that they seemed to be covered in overlapping scales or plates, but their features were arranged more or less in the human pattern. Two small black eyes were positioned above breathing slits… six vertical holes with a ridge projecting above to keep rain out. The mouth was in the familiar place, but when opened, revealed a double row of teeth and several cilia. These latter performed the same function as a tongue.

Most people thought they looked like they had a mouthful of worms and did not find the resulting mental image esthetically pleasing. Lisa disagreed. Whatever environment had produced these creatures, evolution had once again followed its ironclad law: “form follows function.” If they were well suited to their environment, then they were beautiful, by definition.

It wasn’t until the second week of monitoring that they picked up a broadcast in the Broan language. The accompanying visuals answered one of the most important of their mission objectives. Were there any Broa in the system?

On the screen, Sar-Say’s twin looked out at them. He seemed agitated, haranguing some poor unseen subordinate about a late report on local production of some product whose name was gibberish. The Broa was screaming that the report must be on a ship leaving for the sector capital the following day, and why hadn’t it been transmitted yet?

Sure enough, the following morning, their visual light telescope watched a vessel depart planetary orbit and accelerate toward one of three stargates located well out from Gamma. A few days later, that ship jumped through the stargate to somewhere else.
New Hope
’s gravity wave detectors reported the departure simultaneously with the ship’s infrared image merging with that of the stargate, and then disappearing.

#

“So, Lieutenant, what have we learned?”

“Not as much as I would like, Captain,” Lisa replied to Captain Harris a month after their arrival in the Gamma System. “Apparently, the star or planet are called “Harlasanthenar” in the native tongue, and the species refers to themselves as “Dastanthanen,” which is our transliteration of the true name. What they really call themselves has a couple of sounds in it the human voice box is not equipped to duplicate.

“The fact that 99% of all intercepted broadcasts are in the local patois has severely handicapped our ability to understand their communications. The linguistic computer has been crunching the pictures and soundtracks and has come up with the meaning of barely two hundred sound groups, and most of them are very tentative. It would take one of the big computers on Earth a year or more to make sense of everything we have recorded, and even then, we might not understand the language.”

“All right,” Captain Harris responded. “We aren’t likely to understand their language any time soon. What
do
we understand?”

“Our important finding is that this world is ruled directly by the Broa. There are at least a dozen in residence, possibly more. Their presence makes this a poor system for first contact and precludes our releasing a Trojan Horse here.” Trojan Horse was the colloquial name for the small starships that humanity would eventually set loose in selected systems to spread knowledge of the star drive.

Mission rules on Trojan Horses had not yet been finalized. However, none of the ‘wrecked’ ships would be introduced into systems with Broa known to be in residence. Otherwise, when the locals discover an unknown blip inbound at high speed, they would immediately report the sighting to the local master. The whole subterfuge would depend on keeping the Broa ignorant of the star drive sufficiently long for their servant species to recognize what it was they had found in the small derelict scouts.

“That’s why they sent us here, Lieutenant. We can’t very well begin our campaign to sow dissension throughout the Sovereignty until we know the lay of the land.”

“Yes, sir. It means quite a workload for us, I’m afraid.”

Harris shrugged. “We all knew it wouldn’t be easy. If you wanted a life of leisure, you wouldn’t have joined the Space Navy. What else do we know about the Dastanthanen?”

“We’ve got good recordings of their non-communications emissions, sir. That allows us to estimate their industrial output. Pretty much the same as we found at Klys’kra’t. I can tell you that their yearly output of goods is about the same as that of Earth, despite their population being one-fifth our own.”

“How can you know that?” Captain Harris asked.

“By the intensity and distribution of their energy emissions, Captain. We’re pretty far out, but we have some fuzzy scans of their planet’s surface at night. We can estimate their population by the number of lumens they emit from the various landmasses.”

“And there are a million of these worlds, most of which are equivalent to the one we are watching?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That is a pretty sobering thought.”

“We knew about the size of the Sovereignty before we came on this expedition.”

“Knowing something intellectually is one thing, Lieutenant. Seeing it with one’s own eyes is something else again.”

“Amen to that, sir.”

#

Chapter Twenty Seven

Sar-Ganth stood at the window in his office in the Sar-Dva Tower and gazed out over the greenbelt separating the inner city of Valar from the subservients’ quarters that surrounded it. Normally this view soothed him. Not today. For nearly two cycles, he had been attempting to bring the matter of the Vulcans of Shangri La to the attention of Those Who Rule, and for two cycles, other priorities had frustrated his efforts.

One of the problems, of course, was the need for secrecy. If another clan had indeed found their own private world, the last thing he wanted was for news of his concerns to reach their ears. If they realized that their perfidy had been discovered, there might well be one more dead world circling its star before they could be brought to justice.

Keeping the secret until evidence had been gathered meant that Sar-Ganth could not just walk into the meeting chamber of the Ruling Council and lay out his suspicions in open forum. No, he needed support from the highest level of the council without the knowledge of the rest of the council members.

After careful thought, he decided to approach Cal-Tar of the Cal-Zoree, Dar-Tel of the Dar-Lant, and Zel-Sen of the Zel-Sun-Do, the three most senior council members. In addition to their seniority, they each represented one of the Founding Clans; and therefore, would never contemplate violating custom to the extent of failing to notify Central Records of a new discovery.

Indeed, such a development threatened their power more than it threatened the Sar-Dva. Thus, the three ranking councilors would likely be even more anxious to discover the perpetrators of this monstrous hoax than was Sar-Ganth, and would keep his secret.

Since it took a triumvirate to issue the order he needed, his initial plan had been to approach the three privately at their estates, asking that they issue a Civilization-wide watch for these orange-skinned, blue-furred bipeds. Such an order would involve official dispatches to every sector or subsector master, ordering them to establish an active watch for these aliens. These masters would distribute the warning to their subservient worlds.

The Vulcans should not be difficult to spot. He knew of several species whose skins shaded toward orange: everything from a reddish light tan to the florid color of a
grava
fruit. However, he knew of no pigmentation that resulted in fur that was electric blue in color. That, therefore, would be the characteristic they would watch for.

The more scientific approach would be to identify them by their bio scans. Unfortunately, not every backwater planet took bio scans of visitors, and those that did often did not forward them to central records for several cycles. Bio scan matching would be used, but the blue fur would be the initial key characteristic used in identifying them… at least on worlds where the inhabitants possessed color vision.

Optimally, Sar-Ganth should have been able to gain the support he needed within a single twelve-day. Nothing lately had gone optimally. His plan had been thwarted when Zel-Sen left on an extended tour of inspection of his clan’s holdings. Since the Zel-Sun-Do were the oldest and most powerful of the Founding Clans, Sar-Ganth decided to wait for the clan master’s return before seeking support from the others.

Unfortunately, when Zel-Sen finally returned to his estate, Sar-Ganth had been off world, busy with his own clan’s business. When he again had time to think of the mystery of the Vulcans, Fal-Tar came down with
als
fever. He nearly died, and it took many rotations of the planet before he was well again.

By the time Sar-Ganth was again ready, it was nearly time for Those Who Rule to reconvene in their Old City council chambers for their thrice-each-cycle meeting. In one respect, this simplified Sar-Ganth’s problem. Since the council was soon to be in session, he could arrange an audience with all three senior councilors at the same time, citing Sar-Dva proprietary business as the excuse.