McCollum - GIBRALTAR STARS (20 page)

Landon shrugged. “Actually, it is going as well as can be expected. It will go a lot better when we get our own stargate link. The survey is on schedule, although we still haven’t found the Broan home world. We are kicking off a new effort to map the Sovereignty. Lisa, I want to talk to you about that. But first, we may have a problem…”

#

Captain Vance Harcourt, of the Q-Ship
Xavier
, sat in his command chair and observed the quiet beehive of activity that consumed his bridge crew. They were 60 days out of Brinks Base and on the seventh and penultimate leg of their current spy mission. So far, everything had gone precisely as planned, which was one reason for the tension around him. The Space Navy believed in the ancient axiom,
If everything is going all right, you have obviously overlooked something!

Outwardly,
Xavier
was a Type 12 bulk carrier, basically a series of spherical tanks for the transport of high value liquids and gasses. Inside, of course, his ship was a sham. Most tanks were mere empty shells and not even vacuum tight. Others contained the surveillance gear that constituted the ship’s eyes and ears in enemy space. Had the designers left it at that,
Xavier
would have possessed a thrust-to-weight ratio that would have been the envy of any ship in the fleet.

Of course, it would also have made her useless as a spy craft.

While stargates avoid the problem of Einstein’s Universal Speed Limit, they are not immune to the Law of Conservation of Energy. One vital parameter in making a jump is the mass of the ship.

It was important for
Xavier
to at least simulate the mass of a loaded bulk tanker, and not merely its outward appearance. The Q-Ship’s designers solved the problem by ballasting the ship with lead blocks. Thus, the nickname:
Lead Sled.

“We are cleared to approach the stargate, Captain,” his astrogator announced.

“Do so, Mr. Phovanavong.”

“Powering up now.”

On the forward viewscreen, the tiny ring began to grow perceptibly larger. When
Xavier
arrived in the vicinity of the gate, they’d found a convoy of ships queued up to make the jump to the next system before them. Ships in convoy usually meant Broan business of some sort. While waiting three hours for his turn, Harcourt resolved to watch them on the other side to see where they were headed. The information might prove useful sometime in the future.

As the stargate grew larger, he listened to the intercom as various departments prepared for jump. Phovanavong’s excited voice broke into the chatter.

“Captain, something’s wrong here.”

“What?”

“The gate, sir. It’s talking to me.”

“Say again!”

“The gate just sent me an order in Broan.”

“What order?”

“It wants to establish visual contact.”

“It’s manned?” Harcourt asked. The Broa weren’t supposed to have enough manpower to rule all of the worlds they’d sucked up, let alone put someone at every stargate.

 “No, sir. It’s some sort of automated message being transmitted by the gate computer. It is directing us to send it a live picture of the bridge before it will clear us for jump.”

Harcourt swore under his breath and thought fast. It was too late to make a break for the deep black.

“What should I tell it, sir?”

“That we will comply, Astrogator. Set up a visual link and send it to my workscreen.”

 “Aye aye.”

A few seconds later, what appeared to be an actual Broa stared out of the screen at him. For a moment, he thought his astrogator wrong about the gate being manned. Then he realized that it was a recording.

“This is Bulk Freighter,
Cansawan Sky,
out of Posledinal with a cargo of serums, en route to Voskedol. Commander Sasstandival. How may I help you?”

“What species, Commander?” a very realistic voice asked in Broan.

“Batan,” he said, reeling off a long registry number in the Broan base-12 numbering system. The species in question were bipeds, with a slight physical resemblance to humanity… although you wouldn’t want to meet one alone in an alley on a dark night.

There was a short pause, after which the figure spoke again. “You may proceed with your jump, Commander.”

“Acknowledged.”

The transmission cut off abruptly. Harcourt sat and stared at the suddenly blank screen. What was it that had just happened? It seemed innocuous enough, except that it was a change in procedure, one that must be reported back to H.Q.

Something wasn’t right!

#

“
Xavier
reported back three weeks ago,” Landon said. “They were the first. We’ve heard from two other craft since then. Both were challenged and forced to leave a visual record before the gate computer would authorize the jump.”

Mark frowned. “Do you suppose it has something to do with us, sir?”

“Not known,” Landon replied. “Still, one explanation that fits the facts is that the Broa are gathering visual records because they have awakened to the fact that strangers are using their gates.”

“What are we going to do about it?” Mark asked.

“We’ve already done it.”

“Done what, sir?” Lisa asked.

“As soon as
Xavier
reported, I put together a team of specialists and they wrote a software program. The next time a gate computer challenges one of our ships, they will get a visual of whatever species we are pretending to be.”

 “A computer simulation? Will that fool them?”

“The development team says it will. That is one thing
Congress
will be doing when she reaches her area of operations next week. So far as the Broa are concerned, that ship will be crewed by lizards.”

“And if the Broa decide to board?” Mark asked.

“It could get a little exciting.”

#

Chapter Twenty

“Which brings me to you two,” Landon said. It’s damned good to see you back, and not only because of all we’ve been through together. I need competent people and you are two of the most competent people I know.”

Mark felt a chill go up his spine, and not one of quiet pride at having been complimented by the boss. The Navy wasn’t his career, or hadn’t been until the arrival of a certain silly-looking monster. Still, he’d worn the uniform long enough to recognize that when a superior began buttering you up, bad news was in the offing.

The Admiral continued. “The first task in any war is to establish a robust logistics chain capable of supporting future combat operations. The new stargates will do that. Now we need to work on the next couple of problems in our rather long list.”

“What is that, sir?” Lisa asked.

“It was Mark’s idea to use Earth’s anonymity as a shield against attack. Unfortunately, it would appear that the Broa thought up the idea long before we did.”

“Sir?”

“Despite the fact that we’ve sent spies through a couple of hundred Broan-controlled systems, we have, as yet, no clue as to where to find their home star. It isn’t in the Pastol database. It’s not on any stargate network diagram we’ve seen. There is no mention of it in any of our intercepts.”

Lisa frowned. “Something wrong with our approach, Admiral?”

“You tell me. It was originally your idea to send ships through the stargates and have them eavesdrop in transit. Is there something else we should be doing?”

“Nothing comes immediately to mind.”

“It hasn’t been that our Q-Ship efforts have been in vain,” Landon continued. “Perhaps they’ve been too productive. We sit here awash in comm intercepts, most of which are in languages we don’t understand. It’s the classic information overload problem.

“We’re reaching the point of diminishing returns. That is, we are learning more and more that we already know while our ships are ranging farther and farther afield. This new stargate protocol is worrisome. And even if it has nothing to do with us, each successive mission carries with it the risk that one of our ships will be captured.”

Mark nodded, “Or suicide to avoid capture…”

“Or suicide to avoid capture. Either way, the event will start alarm bells ringing all the way up the Broan chain of command. No matter how you look at it, the time is coming when we will have to curtail Q-ship operations.”

“What else can we do?” Lisa asked.

“Strategy and Intentions has a thought. They recommend that instead of continuing to flesh out our maps of stargate connectivity, we try to map the lines of Broan authority instead.”

Both Mark and Lisa gave him a blank look. Landon continued, warming to the subject.

“We’ve found a number of what we believe to be regional capitals, systems with multiple stargates and a large Broan presence.
Xavier
reported they encountered the new stargate protocol after being held up for hours waiting on a convoy: Seven ships all bound for the same destination. That level of activity ought to indicate a Broan stronghold somewhere along the convoy’s path.

Strategy and Intentions thinks we can use traffic analysis to get a better idea of where the Broa are. If we plot the density of pseudo-simians rather than star positions, we might be able to identify their hierarchy of control. Once we know the reporting relationships, we may pinpoint the single system everyone else reports to.”

“Logical,” Lisa said, nodding.

Landon laughed. “One of my professors at the Academy once defined logic as the means by which we arrive at the wrong conclusion with confidence. Still, it makes more sense than continuing to blunder about and risk losing a ship.”

“I hear a ‘but’ coming,” Mark warned.

“A big one,” the Admiral agreed. “We’re stretched to the limit and we’re going to have to shift resources to make this new plan work. The problem is that there isn’t a lot of flexibility regarding our most critical shortage.”

“Which is what?”

“Translators.”

Lisa’s spine stiffened for a second, and then softened as she silently acknowledged what she had suspected was coming.

If Dan Landon noticed the sudden spasm, he gave no clue. Instead, he looked directly into her eyes and said, “Lisa, I would like you to head the translation team on this new effort.”

Lisa didn’t answer right away. Things were moving too fast… first their homecoming, then this new offer. It wasn’t the way she had imagined it.

As Landon fixed her with a penetrating gaze, she stammered, “Uh… yes, sir. If you need me.”

“I truly do.”

“What about me, Admiral?” Mark asked. “Do I have a position in this new organization?”

“I have something else for you, Mark,” he said, transferring his attention to the male half of the team. “It involves that second pressing problem I mentioned.”

“What’s that?”

“Security. Specifically, the security of Brinks Base.”

#

The silence that followed stretched uncomfortably long as Mark and Lisa regarded their commander with puzzlement. When they had left, there had been no hint of a threat to the base. What had happened in the interim? Finally, Mark asked the obvious question:

“Brinks Base isn’t safe, Admiral?”

“It’s safe enough… for now. The Broa don’t know we are here and there are no gravity waves emanating from this system to give them a clue. That is why we chose the location of… uh, Grand Central Terminus. Over the next few years, that bit of vacuum is going to be the origin of literally thousands of waves, but it will take a couple of centuries for any of them to reach a Broan-occupied system.

 “Like every other invention in history,” Landon continued, “stargates are a two-edged sword. On the one hand, they make interstellar travel easy and cheap. On the other, they are discontinuous. They operate by transposition rather than translation. No Broan craft will stumble over one of our gravity waves en route from hither to yon because their ships are never ‘en route’ between stars.

“Yet, it is inevitable they will eventually become aware of us, if not through misadventure by one of our spy ships, then some scenario we haven’t thought about. When that happens, they will launch a full scale search for us. Not only will they search all the systems under their thumbs, but every uninhabited system as well. They have the capability, using single-ended jumps.

“Hideout is, so far as they know, an uninhabited star system. What happens when a Broan avenger materializes on the outskirts of this system and detects our energy signature?”

“We’ll put a superlight missile through it,” Mark replied.

“That we will,” Landon agreed, “which will be almost as big a red flag as having that ship report back that it found a lot of radio traffic in a supposedly uninhabited system on the edge of the Sky Flower Nebula. We will likely have a war fleet materializing in our sky a month after that ship fails to report back.”

 “Isn’t that true of any base we establish in Broan space?”

“As it turns out, Mark, it isn’t. The scientists, being scientists, seem to think that this whole gargantuan scheme has been put in motion merely to allow them to study their specialties. The gravity astronomers have been looking at the waves we’ve detected with our gravtennas. Everything checks out except the waves coming in from galactic east. Try as they might, they couldn’t make the distortion patterns match the stellar cartography. They have been burning up computer time to discover the reason and came up with a theory that matches the data. It was sufficiently startling for me to loan them a ship. To my amazement, they found what they were looking for.”

 “What was that, sir?”

 “A rogue planet. Actually, a cluster of them.”

#

Mark and Lisa sat in the Brinks commissary and ate a late breakfast. Instead of one of the long tables, they chose a corner booth this morning so that they could sit undisturbed, side-by-side, and snuggle. Across from them, looking like a third diner, Mark’s vacuum suit sat propped up, facing them. Beside it was his kit bag.

“Damn it, Mark! We came back to Brinks to avoid this!”

“Sorry, sweet,” he said as he sipped hot coffee from a drinking bulb. “We knew this could happen.”

“But not so soon. We’ve only been back a week.”

He shrugged. “Needs of the service and all that.” A questing hand gave her a reassuring squeeze. Despite his attempt at putting a brave face on their coming separation, he, too was unhappy with the thought of not seeing his wife for months.