Gibraltar Sun (28 page)

The primary offensive weapon of the fleet was the Superlight Missile:
SM
, for short. Superlight missiles were modifications of the
ftl
message probes, one of which Dan Landon had used to destroy the Broan Avenger at New Eden.

SMs were militarized and miniaturized versions, designed to accelerate to superlight, then overload on command. They returned to normal space just short of their target, spraying a billion pieces of shrapnel into the enemy vessel’s path.

Interspersed among the many sensor arrays were shallow hemispherical depressions carved into the rocky ground of Sutton. Each depression cradled its own SM, ready to fly.

There was one other means of defense with which every ship had been equipped, one that no one talked about much. Bolted to each vessel’s thrust frame was a nuclear charge. Should a captain find his vessel in danger of imminent capture, he had orders to self destruct.

Starship captain was the most sought after job in the new Space Navy, and the one with the most rigorous psychological screening. Command skill was important, but having the courage to use the self destruct as a last resort was essential.

It was just one of the reasons most captains had gray hair.

#

“Wow, things have grown around here since we left, haven’t they?” Lisa asked Mark as the ship’s boat arrowed toward the circular pattern of sensor arrays and missile batteries that had sprouted from the black and brown plain above Brinks Base.

The two of them were strapped into a single bench seat at the front of
New Hope
’s landing boat, with Mark’s knees almost in the pilot’s kidneys. The pilot’s head filled their field of view, but it was possible to see their destination by looking past his ears and through the forward viewport. The dozen other passengers were packed side-by-side into the long fuselage, with only fist-size viewports of their own through which to catch occasional glimpses of the airless moon.

“They’ve had enough people working,” Mark said. “I’m surprised we didn’t come back to find a bubble city, complete with hanging gardens.”

“That would be nice,” his wife said wistfully. Military construction had three priorities: function, function, and function. They wouldn’t so much as paint a flower on a bulkhead unless that flower aided them in target acquisition.

The pilot pitched the boat up at an angle that robbed them of their view, and cut in the underjets. They grounded in a cloud of dust that was slow to dissipate in the low gravity. Heretofore, a landing on Sutton required one to seal up his or her vacsuit, and then walk-bounce to the nearest surface airlock. Not this time.

As soon as they grounded, an oversize arm reached out and hooked onto their boat just behind the cockpit. Silently, it hoisted them like a mother cat picking up her kitten, swung it over an open rectangular pit lit by flood lamps, and then lowered it inside.

The pit was barely larger than the boat. There was a gentle shock when they were deposited on the floor. The arm detached and withdrew. The sky then disappeared as a heavy roof section moved into place, sealing off the pit.

The boat was buffeted by an external rush of air and quickly enveloped in expansion fog. After a few seconds study of his instruments, the pilot announced, “All ashore who are going ashore! Last one out, close the airlock.”

Lisa and Mark undid their single lap belt and waited for the others to clear the narrow aisle before gathering their own kit bags and following. As instructed, Mark palmed the control that would close the airlock. As he did so, an amplified voice told them to hurry, as the pumps were about to once again suck the air out of the chamber.

Both of them hurried to a small airlock inset into the rock wall. There was just enough room for both of them to squeeze inside. The outer door closed, leaving them sealed inside a steel box little bigger than a coffin.

“Cozy,” Mark said, enjoying the feel of warm softness pressed against him as he wrapped Lisa in his embrace.

His wife wriggled suggestively in response. Just as she did so, the inner door made a series of clicking noises and withdrew into its recess to reveal a grinning crew of vacuum jacks lining the rock hewn tunnel within. There were several whistles as the couple disentangled themselves.

“Home, sweet home!” Mark said as he let Lisa exit the lock first. He followed, carrying both kit bags.

Lisa crinkled up her nose and turned toward him. “What’s that smell?”

He breathed in the base air. “Drying paint and body odor, I would guess,” he replied. One thing was certain. Of all the improvements that had been made to Brinks Base, the atmosphere scrubbers had not been one of them.

#

“I think you’re right,” Alfred Bastion, senior scientist said while reading the summary of
New Hope
’s mission to Gamma.

“About what, sir?” Mark asked.

“The damned gravity waves are focused along the axis of the gate. No wonder we’ve been seeing fewer of them than we predicted.”

“But the wave they detected in the New Eden system was uniform. They’ve since checked that by dropping sublight just beyond the expanding wavefront and mapping it in a dozen places.”

“The wave at New Eden was very powerful, and from a single-ended jump. No stargate at the destination to focus the wave. I fear we have extrapolated our strategy from a single data point. These observations you brought back are going to force us to reevaluate.”

“Reevaluate what?”

“Everything,” the physicist replied. “Most of all, you’ve just proven that we can’t be sure how far Earth is from the edge of the Sovereignty.”

“I don’t follow.”

Bastion looked as though he had bitten into a spoiled lemon. “When we first discovered stargates and gravity waves, we did a calculation. We concluded that since gravity waves move at the speed of light, the Sovereignty can be no closer to Sol than the number of years since the Broa developed their gate technology, which puts them quite a distance off.

“This new data tells us that there may be Broa-occupied star system almost next door to Sol, but with its gate oriented in the wrong direction for us to see them.”

“That’s a cheery thought,” Mark mused.

“Indeed,” Bastion replied absentmindedly. He was already considering what other bad things might flow from the fact that stargates focused gravity waves.

#

“Congratulations on your work at Gamma.” Dan Landon said. Lisa was perched on the spindly arrangement of wires that the engineers laughingly referred to as a ‘visitor’s chair.’ Even her dainty weight would have crushed it had they been in Earth’s greater gravity field.

“Thank you, sir. I’m just sorry we didn’t find you a candidate system for our next contact.”

The admiral shrugged. “Negative data is data, too. At least, we know what system to avoid.”

“Yes, sir. Harlasanthenar appears to be a major Broan hub, possibly even a regional capital. We’ll want to steer well clear of it.”

“And we will. Luckily, the other expeditions had better luck. I think we have two worlds that ought to be safe to contact. How would you and Mark like to tackle one of them?”

“Sir?”

“You have the experience from our visit to Klys’kra’t. More importantly, you are probably our most knowledgeable expert on the Broa and their language. We need that planetary data base badly. Would you like to try again?”

“Yes, sir. We would
love
to try again.”

“It might be dangerous.”

“Dropping out of superlight into an Oort Cloud is dangerous, Admiral. Compared to that, this should be easy. We pop in, haggle awhile for show, give them whatever they want for the database. Then we pop out again.”

“You’ll be getting orders in about a week. Along with
New Hope
, we’ll send one of the blast ships and a couple of Q-ships to guard you. If you get in trouble, they will try to get you out again.”

“At the risk of blowing our cover, Admiral?”

He nodded. “Better that than to risk your capture and dissection.”

Lisa shivered at the word ‘dissection.’ Unfortunately, if the Broa ever began wondering about their origin, that was probably the least she could expect. For that reason, in addition to a self destruct for the ship, every member of a ground party would be carrying suicide pills on their person at all times. In fiction, the spy always has a false tooth filled with cyanide. Not only was such a thing susceptible to accidental breakage, it would show up on bio scanners and start the host race to wondering at its purpose.

If Landon noticed the reaction, he didn’t acknowledge it. “Anything else we need to talk about, Lieutenant?”

“Yes, sir. I had an idea while I was away that might greatly aid our explorations.”

“Let’s hear it.”

She explained her idea that a ship might sneak into a Broan system and then jump through the local stargate. After that first jump, they would just be another ship in transit for somewhere else. They could jump from gate to gate until they plotted the positions of dozens of stars. They could also use their transit time through normal space between gates to spy on the locals.

Landon leaned back in his chair, a twin to the one in which she perched. “Sounds interesting. Write it up and get it to Strategy and Intentions. Have them look it over. If they pass on it, then we’ll give it a try.”

“Yes, sir.”

#

Chapter Twenty Nine

New Hope
was again in the absolute blackness of superlight velocity, en route to an alien star system in the hands of the enemy. The star was called Etnarii in the language of the dominant people. The planet was Pastol, and the people were the Ranta. Rough translations of the three terms were: “sun,” “world,” and “the people.”

The Etnarii System was home to a single inhabited world, which appeared to be predominately agricultural. The world’s energy signature was one-tenth that of Harlasanthenar and its lack of importance in the Broan scheme of things was emphasized by the fact that the system possessed a single stargate.

Throughout the Broan realm, important planets had half a dozen or more stargates (or so Sar-Say and the Strategies and Intentions Group maintained). These were the hub worlds of the Sovereignty, the crossroads. As in the Gamma System, which itself was a minor regional hub, ships arrived via stargate and then made a beeline for some other gate that sent them to the next star in the chain, never halting or interacting with the species whose system they had just traversed.

This made for a busy sky, with ships constantly moving from gate to gate. In the Gamma System, the span between ship arrivals was shorter than the time it took to transit between the Babylon, Nineveh, and Tyre gates. Thus, there were usually multiple starships in the system at any given time, each on its own business.

In the Etnarii System, there was only the one entrance and exit. Etnarii was a cul-de-sac. In the whole time the Delta Expedition had watched the place, they detected no arrivals or departures. In fact, for more than a month they had wondered if the system had stargates at all, despite the evidence that a gravity wave had been detected emanating from it. Eventually, a careful infrared scan of the sky located the gate hovering at about the orbital distance of Jupiter on the far side of Etnarii.

The Ranta were a humanoid species and bore a closer resemblance to humanity than most. They were either descended from avians or else the pseudo-mammals of their world had evolved a fluffy form of feathers. Estimates of their heights (never reliable when all one had to go on was a video picture) placed them at three meters tall. Their bodies were spindly by human standards, with long, stork-like legs and elongated torsos from which hung two long, triply articulated arms.

Their heads were encased in a skullcap of feathers, as were the visible portions of their arms. (They wore poncho-like garments that concealed much of their torsos.) Their faces, showed no sign of birdlike features. They had two eyes placed high on a round head, spread wide for good stereoptic vision. Their nostrils were two vertical slits that widened and narrowed in time with their breathing. Their mouths were also oriented vertically and placed between the slits, giving their faces a long look. Their ears were scalloped at the edges, as though modeled on a spike-leaved plant, but the convolutions within seemed to mimic the shape of the human ear.

The covering feathers came in several colors, confirming that the Ranta had color vision. Some of the color variations were sufficiently extreme that the alien sociologists were arguing that they were a mating display… much as in terrestrial peacocks.

A Ranta’s voice issued forth from its food intake aperture, just as did human voices. Whatever means they used to generate sound appeared no more versatile than a human voice box, which meant that communicating with them should not be a problem. Their language was not complex, but with only two months’ study by the previous expedition, the specialists and computers had been unable to translate more than a few words.

The Delta expedition’s most exciting discovery was the complete lack of communications in the system in the Broan tongue. They took the lack to mean that there was no Broan master in residence. There might be other explanations, of course: perhaps the master had been on a long vacation, or communicated only by hand-delivered proclamations on parchment, or just wasn’t very loquacious.

However, such speculations were meaningless until they actually made contact. For the moment, they took the lack of Broan speech to mean a lack of Broa in the system.

All in all, the system seemed perfect for a low key visit by a group of “traders” from a distant world on the other side of the Sovereignty.

At Klys’kra’t, they had been Vulcans – orange skinned, blue haired bipeds from the planet Shangri-la. At Pastol, they would be Trojans from the trading world of Troje.

Once again they would go in disguise. Whether such elementary precautions were really necessary had been the subject of spirited debate after the crew discovered what Trojans were supposed to look like.

“Hairless?” Lisa demanded when Mark told her. “They want me to shave off the beautiful head of hair that I have spent all my life getting just the way I want it?”