Perry Rhodan Lemuria 1: Ark of the Stars (14 page)

Which was a shame, Alemaheyu thought, since they missed hearing a lecture on the greatest job in the universe. On the wonderful feeling of being a spider in a web, the center of a community. All the
Palenque
's lines of communication ran through Alemaheyu, both internal and external. Nothing escaped him. He knew about the constantly changing love affairs and relationships on board, about the prospectors' prior lives—usually turbulent and not exactly crowned with success. Alemaheyu knew who was with whom, what for and why, or why not and with whom else. He only had to close his eyes and think of the individual crew members in order to rattle off an exact description of their strengths and weaknesses, their characteristics and moods.

Admittedly, the multiple redundant syntronic systems did relieve him of a large part of his work as comm officer. But any series of redundancies had its limitations, and in such cases human sensitivity was required that not even the most refined personality simulation could replace. And besides, the syntrons performed only the routine tasks—the requirements, so to speak—leaving Alemaheyu the electives: tending the network of relationships between the crew members, strengthening it to withstand the most powerful forces that could be arrayed against it.

Alemaheyu was convinced that he was a good net weaver. Why else would the crawler crews have nicknamed him "Mama?"

No, Alemaheyu never would have traded his job, even though he earned the smallest share of the
Palenque
's profits. Sharita Coho might earn a hundred times more than he did, but what did the commander get out of it? A podium in the center of the bridge from which she could bark her orders, and a whole lot of aggravation that followed her around like a contagious disease. No thanks. Alemaheyu could do without that. And what did he care that the commander nearly had saved enough capital to buy her own ship? For Sharita it would just mean a new podium that isolated her from her shipmates, and an ulcer when she had to watch some gang of bungling amateurs called a crew mistreat her hard-earned property.

Perhaps she already had the ulcer.

Sharita sat in her seat as stiffly as though she had swallowed one of the
Palenque
's landing struts, her head rigidly facing forward as she waited for reports from the hyperdetector.

The suicide of the shipwrecked stranger had affected her. Alemaheyu, who just by being the comm officer knew the commander better than anyone else on board—even better than Pearl Laneaux—knew there was a soft core beneath the hard shell. You had to look for it, but it was there.

Sharita was reproaching herself. Rhodan was breathing down her neck, yet she was condemned to inactivity until the hyperdetector came up with something.

"Hyperdetection!" she snapped in the direction of Omer Driscol. "When will I get some results?"

"Soon, Commander," the stocky black man replied with his trademark calmness. "You want me to be thorough, don't you?"

The commander declined to answer.

Alemaheyu kept in constant contact with the eleven remaining crawlers combing the sector in which Crawler Eleven had presumably collided with the shuttle fragment. The reports coming from the crawlers were unusually terse and businesslike, an expression of the pain that the crews felt at the loss of their comrades. Alemaheyu answered in the same tone.

Later he would try to come up with a good joke, but not now. A good mother knew the moods of her children.

"We have the analysis," Driscol announced. "No sign of your hypothetical attacker."

"Are you sure? Not even a cloud of particles coming from impulse drive engines?"

"Yes, I'm sure," Driscol said, louder than necessary. There was only one thing that stung him out of his usual reserve: when someone questioned his ability as a hyperdetection expert.

"Fine, Omer," Sharita quickly reassured him. "That settles that. Maybe the Akonians aren't behind this after all. Increase the hyperdetection radius to five light-years!"

The hyperdetection officer went back to work. Alemaheyu called up Omer's data on his console, aligned it at the edge of his field of vision and looked around the control center. Sharita continued to stare at some point beyond the
Palenque
's walls, and Pearl was making every effort to look busy.

The other members of the bridge crew bent over their work stations.

And Rhodan ... Rhodan sat in his seat and looked unhappily at the only information Sharita had authorized him to receive: some very general data along with a selection of screen savers. It was clear to Alemaheyu he felt as chafed by this inactivity as did Sharita—except that Rhodan was effectively blocked even from looking on.

Alemaheyu felt sorry for Rhodan. The comm officer knew how it felt to be the object of Sharita Coho's displeasure.

A thought came to him. Why not?

Alemaheyu entered several commands at his console, then looked back in the direction of the inner bridge.

Rhodan was a pro. When the hyperdetection data suddenly flashed across his holo, he merely raised his eyebrows.

A moment later, he let his glance sweep with studied casualness across the control center. When he made eye contact with the comm officer, Alemaheyu winked. Rhodan winked back.

All right, then. Alemaheyu wondered why Sharita was so hard on Rhodan. You just had to treat him like a normal person. The rest would take care of itself.

"Hyperdetection!" Omer called out.

"Put it on the bridge holo!" the commander ordered.

"Impossible." The hyperdetection officer shook his head. "The impulses are too weak and indistinct to get a visual."

"Then tell us what you are getting."

"A large object. The syntron might be misinterpreting the data, but it says the object is several kilometers long."

"Several kilometers?"

"Just what I said. But that's only a guess. I can't really get a solid reading on the thing. Don't ask me why—the hyperstorm has long since faded. Maybe it has some kind of anti-detection field."

"Anything else?"

"Yes. The object is moving at nearly light-speed. Distance just about four light-years. Its trajectory deviates only by a few degrees from the piece of debris that we picked up."

Sharita released the air in her lungs with a loud snort. "Well done, Omer. We're on the right track now." She turned to the first officer. "Pearl, take us in!"

Alemaheyu didn't expect any further orders and bent over the console in order to inform the crawlers. Before he got that far, Sharita's voice echoed through the control center once more. In it was a hard note that Alemaheyu had never heard before.

"Harriett," she said, turning to the engineer who handled the
Palenque
's offensive and defensive systems. "Keep your guns ready! I don't know who's out there, and they probably only have a few firecrackers to shoot off ... but they've shown they're willing to use them!"

* * *

The
Palenque
went into ultra-light flight, towing its swarm of crawlers.

Alemaheyu was surprised to discover that he was so anxious he was panting. And he wasn't the only one affected by the tension. Everywhere in the control center he saw nervous gestures, clumsy movements, flushed cheeks. Even Rhodan seemed to be clutching the armrest of his seat more tightly than necessary.

Harriett Hewes was calmness personified. With economical movements showing no signs of haste, she checked the
Palenque
's defense fields and weapon systems. If Alemaheyu hadn't known better, he would have assumed Harriett was working on one of the three-dimensional puzzles with which she passed her time, and which she used to make it almost impossible to enter her cabin unauthorized. Every so often Harriett approached Sharita about using one of the storage rooms for what she called her installations, but her attempts failed with equal regularity.

"This is a prospecting ship," Sharita would explain. "We need the storage rooms for rock and ore samples, not for ju ... well, you know."

Of course Harriett knew. Alemaheyu was fairly certain that she outshone everyone else aboard in terms of intelligence, Perry Rhodan included, but that didn't keep her from being stubborn, with an endless patience that was often painful to see.

In other words: she was the best weapons control officer that Alemaheyu could imagine. Harriett thought first, then pressed the button. Maybe. And when she pressed the button, she used exactly the necessary firepower. Not a watt too much or too little.

"All systems ready," she reported.

"Good. We're about to need them." Sharita didn't take her eyes off her holo. As commander, she was the only one on board with real-time access to all data, with the exception of Alemaheyu, who had hacked his own, as-yet-undiscovered access: as comm officer, he considered it his duty to be completely informed. And Rhodan, whom Alemaheyu had patched in.

The comm officer called up a new holo next to his console. To his relief, all systems on board the
Palenque
showed green. Harriett was stockpiling energy in order to be able to raise the Paratron shield at maximum power immediately after entry into normal space; she was even drawing energy from the weapon systems.

Alemaheyu grinned. What did Harriett always say? "There are only dead heroes."

On a second holo, the comm officer checked to see what data Rhodan was viewing. To his surprise, the Immortal wasn't following the preparations for reemergence from hyperspace, but was working through the video material that had been taken inside the wreck. What was bothering Rhodan? Was he afraid that an unpleasant surprise might be waiting for them at their destination?

Alemaheyu switched to hyperdetection. No major change, still an oscillating gray-toned image that collapsed into a constantly shifting swirl. Now and again, he thought he could see a long, extended cylinder with projections like an insect's antennae at both ends. Omer might be able to make something meaningful out of the image—Alemaheyu could just as easily read the future in the swirls of a newly stirred cup of tea.

The lower edge of the holo showed the estimated length and mass. The numbers wavered between three hundred meters and thirty kilometers. First, the syntron gave the mass as five million tons, then five hundred million. What was going on?

"Ten seconds to reentry into normal space."

Alemaheyu clicked off the hyperdetection holo. It was more confusing than helpful. There was something out there. It was probably fairly gigantic, moving at nearly light-speed and, when it felt like it, cutting innocent little shuttles in two. He didn't need to know any more. The rest would come to light on its own.

"Five more seconds!"

Belts shot from the sides of his seat, automatically united over his stomach and pressed him firmly against the cushion. It was the last resort in case everything else failed: the
Palenque
's shields, its hull of highly compressed laminated steel, and even the force-field generator built into the contour seat. The safety belt was a strange feature, Alemaheyu had always thought. By the time a space traveler found himself in the embarrassing situation of having to depend on the safety belt, a chaplain or the appropriate holy object of his faith would have been just as much help.

"Three seconds!"

Still, the belt gave him a feeling of security, as though a protective hand rested on him. Man was a strange being.

"Reentry!"

The
Palenque
shuddered as Harriett pulled the Paratron up to one hundred-sixty percent of its normal value. The defense-shield projectors could withstand that level for only a few seconds, but the maneuver was absolutely necessary. Perhaps someone was expecting them, hoping to destroy them as they reentered normal space.

There was no attack.

The shuddering faded to a barely noticeable vibration that spaceship builders never had managed to completely eliminate, despite millennia of experience. The Paratron leveled off at ninety-nine percent capacity.

The crawlers checked in with Alemaheyu as one after the other fell out of hyperspace and crowded closely around the
Palenque,
as though they hoped to be able to use the Paratron to shield themselves.

"Hyperdetection!" Sharita barked. "Is there anything out there that could be a danger to us?"

"I ... don't think so."

"Do you call that a report? Is there something there or not?"

Confused, Omer shook his head almost angrily. Alemaheyu remembered there was one more thing the hyperdetection officer couldn't stand: not knowing.

"There is something. I'll switch it to the bridge holo."

Alemaheyu turned in his chair—the belt yielded but didn't retract—and looked into what resembled a window into space. Stars. And a long shadow that blocked some of them.

"Very enlightening," Sharita said sarcastically. "Can you make that any better?"

Omer bent over his console and punched at the virtual keyboard. Sharita had hit him in his professional honor; Alemaheyu had never seen the stocky black man move so fast.

The shadow in the holo blurred, the blackness of space took on a reddish tint, then the shadow manifested itself. Alemaheyu saw a long, slender cylinder. At either end, metal fingers projected from the hull at regular intervals, reinforced by a ring that connected them about halfway along their length.

Antennae
was the first thought that popped into the comm officer's head.
Those guys over there certainly have a big appetite for information.

But then they should also have been broadcasting. Alemaheyu checked his console again: all systems were in working order. He would have picked up even the weakest comm signal. Only ... there was nothing. Was the ship itself a wreck? But then who fired at the shuttle?

"That's better!" Sharita said, satisfied. "That thing out there is obviously a ship. Tell us more about it, Omer!"

"I can't. None of the sensors or hyperdetectors are providing reliable data. What's on the holo is only a depiction based on the optical data, nothing else."