Gibraltar Stars E-Book

Michael McCollum

• Herausgeber: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

The great debate is over. The human race has rejected the idea of retreating to Earth and that the Broa will continue to overlook them—at least for a few more generations. Instead, the World Parliament, by a 60-40 vote, has decided to throw the dice and go for a win. Brave words echo in Parliament Hall as members declare a victory inevitable. While plans for war mount on Earth, Mark and Lisa Rykand face grave danger as spies in enemy territory. The Broa have begun to scrutinize these strange two-legged interlopers and question their intentions. It's only a matter of time before their identities are revealed. But the Rykands' mission is key to securing a victory. With the number of forces favoring the enemy by roughly a million to one, Earth will need all the help they can get…

Leseprobe

GIBRALTAR STARS

Copyright © 2009, 2019 by Michael McCollum

All rights reserved.

Published as an eBook in 2019 by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

ISBN 978-1-625674-67-8

Cover design by John Fisk

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

49 W. 45th Street, 12th Floor

New York, NY 10036

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[email protected]

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

The Rock of Gibraltar

Prologue

The Duodecimal System

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Part Two

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Part Three

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

About the Author

Also by Michael McCollum

THE ROCK OF GIBRALTAR

Prologue

“No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.”

—Field Marshall Helmuth Carl Bernard von Moltke,Prussian General Staff

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the ancient wisdom of our profession. Despite this axiom, few military officers are truly prepared when they come face to face with the enemy in battle. We make our plans, array our forces, build vast logistics trains, and worry about the smallest details of the most unlikely scenarios. Yet, when the moment of truth arrives, we find it nothing like we imagined. A prime example of this is our recent campaign against the implacable alien foe.

As others have pointed out, we were incredibly lucky during our first encounter with the Broa. Had things gone just a little differently that day, this planet would now be enslaved, or barren. Having been present at the initiation of the current conflict, I can tell you that we felt many things that day, but “lucky” was not one of them.

I was in my cabin when we felt that first gravity wave pass through Magellan. A few minutes later, sensors reported a battle in progress between two alien ships that had appeared out of nowhere. What we didn’t realize was that we would soon become combatants ourselves.

It all happened so quickly that there was no time to plan, no plotting of move and countermove. That first battle was fought with instinct and wild improvisation. It is only by the Grace of God that we survived to bring home the news that humanity was no longer alone in the universe.

Later, when the First Expedition confirmed that there was indeed a race of hostile alien overlords in the next galactic arm, the human race found itself in a quandary. We knew about them, but they were, as yet, ignorant of our existence.

You all remember the Great Debate. Many well-meaning people thought discretion the better part of valor. They counseled a policy of retreat from the stars and a reduction in our electromagnetic emissions at home, all the better to hide from our new enemies. Many were attracted to this point of view. It was only after events proved such ‘safety’ to be an illusion that we decided to face the danger squarely and begin preparations for war.

For six long years, we spied out the enemy’s weaknesses. We invented new weapons and technologies, built vast flotillas and manned them with the best of our young warriors. We established secret bases in the heart of the enemy domain, moved vast mountains of supplies, and did all we could to get ready for the inevitable day when we would finally confront the Broa.

Yet, when that day came, our preparations were incomplete. Some of our plans had not worked out as expected. Many of our most important fleet units were still under construction. Like every other fleet/army in history, we went into battle when circumstances forced the battle, not when we were prepared for it.

Yet, to date we have been successful. This is not primarily due to our planning and staff work, although these are essential precursors to victory. No, we carry the fight to the enemy because of the diligence, competence, and sheer guts of those who ride our ships into battle.

These, ladies and gentlemen, are your predecessors. I know that when the time comes for you to take your place beside them, you will carry on in their tradition and that of the Terrestrial Space Navy!

—From a Commencement Address to the

Naval Academy Graduating Class of 2358,

by Admiral Daniel Landon.

The Duodecimal System

The duodecimal system is widely used by species that possess six digits on one grasping member and which are laterally bisymmetric. Chief among these are our adversaries, the Broa.

PART ONE

PREPARATIONS FOR WAR

Chapter One

One piece of space looks like any other, Lisa Rykand, thought morosely as she gazed at the shrunken star more than a billion kilometers below.

Lisa was a petite blonde with green eyes and a nose that turned up at the end. She wore her hair cropped close in a microgravity style. Her mouth was a bit too wide for her face, and her cheeks had a tendency to dimple when she smiled. She wasn’t smiling at the moment.

For more than a year each successive mission had taken them farther out along the Perseus Arm of the Milky Way and deeper into enemy space. Sol was too small and dim to be seen from her current vantage point. Had it been visible, the photons detected would be brother to those that once illuminated a small village destined one day to become Babylon. The constellations were another reminder of how far they had voyaged. None were remotely the same as those named by the ancient Arab astronomers.

This mission had seen them scout six enemy star systems. Save for the color of the starlight streaming through the viewports, each had presented the same ebon panorama sprinkled with diamond-like sparks of light.

The first star had been a red giant, whose rays tinged everything ruby. The second was a small blowtorch of a sun. In that system, camera filters had been dialed to maximum and the viewports tightly sealed to protect delicate retinas. The third…

“What are you doing, Hon?”

Startled, Lisa squirmed against her acceleration straps to look over her shoulder. Floating in the open hatchway, with one steadying hand wrapped around a nearby stanchion, was her husband, Lt. Commander Mark Rykand.

“About to tear my hair out from boredom,” she replied. “Thank you for coming to save me just in time!”

Lowering himself to her level, he leaned down and planted an upside down kiss on her lips. Lisa welcomed the distraction and concentrated on making it the best kiss he had received all day.

When their lips finally separated, her husband twisted his body around to align with hers and wedged himself between her flank and the arm of the couch. He stabilized himself in the microgravity by anchoring his hand to a spot that wasn’t exactly Space Navy regulation, but one that caused a small electric shock to race up Lisa’s spine.

Mark was of average height with a shock of sandy hair that was tinged with gray, something that hadn’t been there when she first met him. His blue eyes were his most striking feature. He was currently grinning in that crooked smile way he had.

“Seriously, what are you doing?”

“The same thing we’ve been doing since we entered this godforsaken system. I’m listening to the locals jabber at each other in their native tongue, while attempting to record everything we can of their visual communications. At the rate we have been capturing speech and images, the linguistic computers should be able to crack the code in another week or so. Of course, we will reach the stargate and jump in three more days.”

“I could ask the captain to hang around to give you more time to collect linguistic source data.”

“Sure, drive right up to the gate and then hover for another 120 hours or so, looking inconspicuous. I’m sure the local overlords wouldn’t suspect a thing,” Lisa replied, laughing.

“And if they did,” Mark replied, “we would just tell them that we are doing the local once-a-twelve-year space monkey census.”

“The only space monkeys around here are us. The locals look more like ambulatory fish.”

“When do you get off duty?”

“I have another hour to go,” Lisa replied, snuggling close to feel her husband’s muscled ribs press into her right breast. “Why, sir, do you have something interesting planned for this evening?”

“Not a bad idea,” he said. “We’ve both been working too hard this trip.”

“You’re telling me. It’s been so long, I forget which of us gets tied up!” She emphasized her point by letting her own hand do some exploring. His torso still had its same hard tone, she noted, despite so many months in microgravity.

“Stop that!” he said, applying his own pressure in return. There ensued a quick tussle that ended with both of them laughing and not a few articles of clothing in disarray. Acknowledging that it might not be good for two officers of the service to be found in such a position, Mark released his wife, pushed back, and halted his flight just out of reach.

“Besides,” he said, gesturing toward the Gordian knot of light paths in the nearby holoscreen, “It’s your own damned fault.”

* * *

For Mark Rykand, it had begun at Sandia Spaceport, New Mexico, when he’d seen his sister off to join the Survey Starship Magellan. Maggie had been assigned the plum of exploring the newly discovered New Eden system, containing the most earthlike extra-solar planet yet discovered. Jani had been quite excited at the prospect.

Laughing, her red locks whipping in the breeze, she waved at him from the shuttle airlock before disappearing into the streamlined dart. Minutes later, the dart had lifted from the runway and disappeared into the azure sky. That was the last time Mark had seen his sister. Three months later, he received word that she had been killed in space.

That worst day of his life triggered a series of events culminating in his discovery that humanity was no longer alone in the galaxy. While exploring New Eden, Magellan detected two nearby alien ships as they suddenly materialized from out of vacuum. The pair was impossible to miss. Their arrival triggered a massive gravity wave that rattled storage compartments all over the ship.

At the moment of breakout, the two alien ships had been slugging it out in a space battle. Or rather, one of the ships was attacking the other. The second ship tried to flee its tormentor.

Finding itself near Magellan, the alien under attack made directly for the human starship. In the process, its orbit took it close to Jani Rykand’s scout boat. The scout was unarmed and defenseless, offering no threat to anyone. Despite this, the alien attacker lashed out with an energy beam. Jani, her ship, and seven other human souls were instantly transformed into an incandescent cloud silhouetted against the black of space.

The attack on the scout boat alerted Magellan’s captain to the coming threat as the two aliens made a beeline for his ship. He used the only weapon available. In desperation, he aimed one of the ship’s faster-than-light message probes at the attacking alien.

Launching a probe so deep in a planetary gravity well would normally have been a prescription for disaster. Not that day. The probe’s overloaded drive generator exploded in the first millisecond after jumping to hypervelocity. With its superlight generators gone, the remains of the probe returned to normal space with an intrinsic velocity of 60% light speed. The expanding cone of debris sliced through the alien attacker, vaporizing it as thoroughly as it had vaporized Scout Three.

With one alien ship gone and the other drifting helplessly in space, there had been nothing for Magellan’s crew but to hunt for survivors.

That was how the human race first met Sar-Say.

* * *

Nadine Halstrom, World Coordinator, sat in front of her phone in which her own visage hovered in the depths of the idle holo-display. What she saw shocked her. She hardly recognized the drawn face framed by gray hair, the sunken eyes and the permanent worry lines. That she had aged two decades in the past seven years was undeniable. At least, she reminded herself, the sacrifice was in a worthy cause.

She remembered vividly the day Magellan returned home carrying a single live and several dead aliens. She remembered the feeling of wonder that had suffused her at the prospect of meeting another intelligent species.

Even now she grimaced at how naïve she had been.

Luckily, her first impulse – to call a press conference – was short lived. Instead, she ordered Magellan to the PoleStar habitat. There she assembled a secret research program to learn all that was possible about the aliens. The dead ones were quickly dissected, while the living alien was studied in less destructive ways.

The first task was to communicate with the survivor. For this, they put out the call for a linguist, a call answered, somewhat reluctantly, by Lisa Arden of the Multiversity of London.

Upon her introduction to the alien, Lisa had started the standard “You, Tarzan; me Jane” routine so lampooned in the popular media. To everyone’s surprise, when she asked his name, the alien replied, “Sar-Say.” It was the first intelligible sound anyone had heard him make.

As the days went on, Lisa taught Sar-Say Standard and he taught her his language. When he gained sufficient fluency, his interrogators asked him about his origin. Sar-Say answered.

Sometimes, Nadine Halstrom wished that he had not.

Sar-Say claimed to be a trader from a realm ruled over by monstrous lizard things called the “Broa,” a race of insatiable conquerors. He’d spun tales of planets plundered and species enslaved – those that had not been destroyed outright.

His human interrogators attributed the stories to a castaway’s need to impress his captors. Still, his tale could not be ignored if it had even a modicum of truth to it, especially because of the answer he’d given when asked the size of the Broan realm. According to Sar-Say, the overlords ruled more than a million suns!

That claim, preposterous as it was, forced Nadine Halstrom to authorize a reconnaissance of Broan space.

The expedition had been gone three years. When it returned, it brought evidence that Sar-Say’s tales were more fact than fiction. Indeed, he seemed to have lied about only one vital detail. The Broa were not the ravenous dragons he had described. Rather, they were small beings and rather comical. They looked like monkeys.

In fact, they looked exactly like Sar-Say, himself.

* * *

The World Coordinator’s reverie was interrupted when the screen on her phone flashed, causing her own visage to be replaced by that of her assistant.

“Yes?” she asked,

“Dr. Heindorff is here to see you, Coordinator.”

“Show him in,” she replied, sighing.

Nicholas Heindorff was a round man with a round red face framed in wild white hair. He had been holder of the Isaac Newton Chair for Theoretical Physics at the University of Stuttgart before she tapped him for the war effort. Despite his Prussian ancestors, it was hard to think of him as a warrior… even one confined to the laboratory.

“Nicholas, come in.”

“Hello, Nadine. It is good to see you again.”

“Please, be seated,” she said, directing him to the settee she kept for important visitors. “Schnapps?”

“Don’t mind if I do.”

“Carl, two glasses of Goldschlager peach, please,” she said to the empty air.

“Right away, Madam Coordinator,” her assistant responded.

Within five minutes, Nadine and Heindorff were seated comfortably and had sampled the fruit brandy. She regarded the scientist for long seconds, and then said, “How are things going on the project?”

Her question elicited an expansive shrug. “Good in some ways, not so good in others.”

She frowned and let her momentary irritation dissipate. Nicholas was one of those people who avoided answering any question directly. She let a few seconds pass before she said, “Perhaps you could be a bit more specific.”

“Ja, Nadine. I suppose I can. The theoretical work goes well. My team has a much better understanding of the principles on which the stargates operate, especially since receiving a copy of the alien database last year.”

She nodded. It took more than a year for ships to travel between Sol and the advance human base near the Crab Nebula … a distance of some 7000 light-years. One year there and one year back, plus whatever time was required at the other end. Thirty months after they sent practically every working starship in the Solar System to relieve Brinks Base, two ships returned carrying the first fruits of their campaign against the Broa.

Having spotted a number of Broan stars via the gravity wave emanations of their stargates, a few brave souls made contact with an isolated Broan world and talked the inhabitants into trading for a copy of their planetary database. It was an act equivalent to aliens landing on the White House lawn in earlier centuries and leaving with a copy of every book in the Library of Congress.

If the first rule of combat is to know one’s enemy, the database proved the first step on the long road to victory. In that database they discovered voluminous entries regarding Broan physics; which, not surprisingly, were closely related to human physics. How could it be otherwise, since both species occupy the same universe?

“Are you sure you have the theory down solid?”

“Certainly, Nadine. The stargates operate on a principle not unlike our own stardrives. Both utilize the fact that the universe is composed of eleven distinct dimensions to perform a tertiary dimensional substitution that effectively warps space. Where our stardrives rotate the gamma dimension around the aleph, the stargates rotate the aleph and zeta dimensions…”

“Spare me, Professor. I took history in college.”

“Suffice to say, then, that we know the principles involved. We just haven’t figured out how to mechanize them.”

“That is the reason I asked you here, Nicholas. We need to pick up the pace. We can’t fight a war with year-long lines of communication. We need a gate network of our own to reduce transit times from years to weeks.”

“I know that, Nadine. What would you have me do? Pull a stargate out of my ass?”

“If that will speed the process,” she replied, nonplussed at the sudden profanity.

“It would help if we could experiment. The restrictions you have placed on such efforts have hamstrung us.”

“You know the rules, Nicholas, and the penalties for breaking them.”

Unlike starships, which left no detectable trace on the universe, stargate jumps involved abrupt mass discontinuities, which in turn produced gravity waves. Gravity waves spread outward from their point of origin at a pace of one light-year per year… forever. A successful test of such a device inside the solar system would mark Sol as an inhabited star to anyone in position to detect the resulting wave.

“Then this subject is likely to remain a theoretical one for quite some time, Madam Coordinator,” Heindorff responded coldly. “We are preparing experiments to be performed in some distant godforsaken system, but the preparations and transit times are slowing our progress.”

“Come now, Nicholas,” Nadine cajoled. “You know we can’t take any chances, not with the Broa as strong as they are. Surely we are learning something without going directly to experiment.”

“Ja, Nadine. We have learned quite a lot. For one thing, we do not see that there is any limit to the physical size a stargate may be.”

“Then why do the Broa only seem to build one size?”

Her question brought forth a Germanic shrug. “Perhaps they have a power limitation.”

“How can we speed things up without betraying ourselves?”

“It would help if we had an actual gate to study. I understand that Brinks Base is working on obtaining a sample.”

“They are if they are following their mission orders,” Nadine Halstrom replied, wistfully. With a two-year delay in communications, the personnel at Brinks Base must, of necessity, operate autonomously. The last dispatch she had received, now some 18 months stale, included detailed planning for such a mission.

Chapter Two

The star was unremarkable, a yellow-white dwarf some twenty percent more luminous than Sol, and a full spectral point hotter. Even so, its wan glow was homelike as the human ships dropped sublight beyond the system’s twelfth planet.

The “breakout complete” announcement was still echoing as Captain William Lonegan gave the order for a full circumambient sensor sweep.

“We just picked up Sundowner’s beacon,” Lieutenant Vivian Myers reported. “She’s about three hundred thousand klicks off our stern. Nothing yet on the other four.”

“Let me know when you have them.”

Like the rest of her class, Battle Cruiser TSNS Lancer was a young ship. She had left the construction cradle a mere month before setting off on the year-long journey from Sol to Hideout and had spent the last sixteen months scouting enemy star systems.

“Barnstable just checked in, Captain,” his communications officer reported. “They are a quarter-million klicks off our dorsal antenna, sir.”

“Burlingame, as well, sir,” Lieutenant Myers reported. “No communications yet, but I have her beacon in sight.”

“Have all ships converge on us,” Lonegan ordered. “Tell Archernar and Powhatan when they check in.”

While he waited for word of his two stragglers, Lonegan adjusted his screen for a view of the local star. Even at maximum magnification, it was merely the brightest point of light in an ebon sky.

* * *

Catalog System 385492, tentatively tagged Vrathalatar, was one of a million or so stars tied together by Broan stargates. The Broan symbology showed the system as a small bent hourglass figure dangling at the end of a dimly glowing red line, a cul-de-sac star with but a single stargate.

Normally such a system would not have been of interest to humanity. In the Broan Sovereignty, a system’s importance could best be judged by the number of stargates it possessed. Some of the larger hubs had six or more, indicating a center of commerce and power.

Vrathalatar was different. Lancer and her consorts had come to the yellow-white star because, a century earlier, the small Koala-bear-like inhabitants had decided they’d had enough of Broan arrogance. The source of their discontent was not known, but the grisly results were recorded in Broan records as a warning to others.

Vrathalatar was a dead system, all life on its one inhabited world having been wiped out by an avenging Broan war fleet. There had been no mercy for the world and its hundreds of millions of inhabitants. Nor had the galactic overlords stopped when they destroyed the planet. They systematically swept among the locals’ extensive off-world installations and destroyed them as well. When they left the system, not a single Vrath (as human researchers had taken to calling the indigenous species) was left alive.

Yet, more than a century after the destruction of its children, the star still showed as a cul-de-sac symbol in star maps of the vast Broan transport web. It was Vrathalatar’s orphan stargate that had drawn Lancer and her consorts to this dead system.

It was their mission to steal it.

* * *

Bill Lonegan lounged in his command couch while he sipped on a bulb of hot coffee, feigning disinterest in the maddeningly slow progress of Lancer’s latest deep space sensor sweep. It had been five days since he and his small fleet dropped sublight at the edge of the system. So far, they had not found the stargate that was the focus of their mission.

Their lack of success had once again brought home the fact of just how large a place an entire star system really is. The main viewscreen was focused on the diamond-studded blackness before them, the section of airless void where they sought their prey.

Behind them, the star Vrathalatar was a small, brilliantly glowing billiard ball, its surface pockmarked by an unusually large number of sunspots, which in turn caused the star to radiate static all across the communications bands. While normally not a problem, radio static had the effect of limiting the effectiveness of some of their more sensitive search instruments, rendering them blind in one particularly useful frequency range.

“Anything, Mr. Cardin?” he asked, striving for that tone of bored disinterest with which starship captains are supposed to meet even the most harrowing of emergencies.

“No, sir,” his chief of sensors replied. “No sign of the stargate, yet; although the range is still long for passive scanning in this radio soup.”

“What about the gate beacon?”

“It isn’t responding. We’ve sent the universal jump code a dozen times. So far, nothing.”

“Carry on.”

With the stargate not responding to hails, it wasn’t surprising that they were having difficulty locating it. However, the silence was worrisome. The possible reasons for its non-responsiveness ranged from mundane to sinister. The most likely scenario was that the gate had malfunctioned sometime during the century since the destruction of the Vrath, and that the Broa had not thought it worth fixing. Or it might be operative, but not answering to the standard codes. Perhaps the Broa wanted to keep commercial traffic out of this system and had reprogrammed the gate accordingly.

The most worrisome possibility was that the gate wasn’t responding because it did not exist. For all he knew, the last Broan warship to leave this system had left behind a time bomb to destroy the gate following its jump. If that were the case, he and his ships had been sent on a three hundred light-year snipe hunt.

Lonegan glanced at the chronometer displayed in one corner of his workscreen. Their database placed the gate high above Vrathalatar’s ecliptic. If true, they would close to passive detection range within sixty minutes. If not, they would spend an extra week searching before he declared the mission a bust.

Centered on Lancer, a globular formation of ships probed the void in front of them. Two of the five, Barnstable and Burlingame, were new destroyers, smaller versions of Lancer, armed with nearly the same weaponry. Their mission was to guard the operation for as long as was required to tow the stargate back to Brinks Base.

“Tow” was a misnomer, of course. To rotate a ship into a different universe requires substantial power. Thus, jump fields were designed to be no larger than absolutely necessary. Often the field extended only a few centimeters beyond the hull. However, jump fields can be stretched to enclose any external object so long as one does not insist on efficiency.

Transporting the purloined stargate would be the job of Sundowner, one of the largest starships ever constructed. As large as it was, the ship was too small to take the gate aboard for transport. Rather, Sundowner would wear the gate like the victory wreath of some Roman conqueror.

Of the other two ships in Captain Lonegon’s small fleet, Archernar was a converted liner carrying the scientists and technicians who would first study the gate and then prepare it for transport. Powhatan was their support ship, a combination tanker/freighter.

Lonegan’s workstation chimed. He reached out and keyed for acceptance.

“Yes?”

“Stargate detected,” Lieutenant Myers said from her station three consoles to Lonegan’s right.

“Where?”

“About three million kilometers directly in front of us, Captain. Right where it is supposed to be.”

“Has it responded to our signals, yet?”

“No, sir. It’s still quiet as a tomb.”

“Continue the approach. Alert Archernar. It looks like the scientists are going to have to cut short their card games. We will have work for them after all.”

“Yes, sir.”

* * *

Lieutenant Barbara Whalen sat strapped into the control station of her scout boat and watched the blue-white orb grow slowly in her forward bubble. Like all terrestrial worlds, it was a beautiful sight, especially after so long in the deep black. There was a large polar mass in the southern hemisphere. In the daylight hemisphere, a massive arrowhead-shaped continent of tans and browns and umber ploughed through an azure sea, its edges tinged aquamarine by extensive shoals on its southern flank. Over everything lay a bright white swirl of clouds blown west to east by stratospheric winds. Lower than the continent, nearly out of sight around the curve of the planet, mirror cyclones moved in tandem on each side of the invisible equator.

As Earthlike as Vrath seemed from a hundred thousand kilometers out in space, there was one obvious difference between it and the Mother of Men. From Barbara’s perspective, fully one-quarter of the globe lay in darkness. Yet, throughout the night hemisphere, there was no sign of civilization. No cityscapes outlined the shores of invisible land masses, nor sprawled across darkened plains, nor meandered along both banks of mighty rivers. The blackness was unrelieved, save for bands of lightning flashes marking thunderstorms.

“Pretty,” Amos Harding, Barbara’s second-in-command, said from the acceleration couch beside her.

“Very,” she agreed. “It makes me homesick.”

“I wouldn’t settle down there were I you,” he replied. “We’re getting diffuse gamma ray readings all across the face of the globe.”

“What sort of gamma rays?”

“Looks like Cobalt 60 mostly. Some other nasty stuff mixed in.”

“Ouch!”

“You can say that again. Whatever they did to piss off the Broa, it had to be major for the whole planet to be this hot a full century after the fact.”

“Radiation too hot for an upper atmospheric pass?”

“Not if we dip in fast, get our air sample, then get out fast.”

Barbara and Amos’s mission was to scout out the main planet of this system and record its condition. The scout boat’s cargo compartment was chock full of long range sensors that would record the surface destruction during their dip into atmosphere.

“We’ve got something coming up fast,” Ahmed Quereshi, their sensor operator, announced from the scout boat’s passenger compartment.

“What is it, Med?”

“Looks like a space station, Lieutenant. Big mother, too! I’ve got the telescope extended and have it in my cross-hairs. Ready to record.”

“Any chance of collision?” she asked, noting that the blip representing the station was very close to the red line marking their future course.

“No, ma’am. I’m painting it with the laser. Definite cross-plot velocity on the object. Looks to be three milli-arcseconds per second lateral drift to the right. We’ll close to about twenty kilometers at minimum distance.”

“All recorders to max ten seconds before min approach,” she ordered. “Let’s get a good look but save most of our storage capacity for the real deal.”

“Aye aye, ma’am,” the operator replied. His tone only hinted at what he thought about a mere taxi driver instructing him as to how to do his job.

Ten minutes later, a small black speck took a bite out of the fuzzy limb of the planet. The speck grew perceptibly as they watched. In a few minutes, it covered nearly the daylight hemisphere of the planet and was a speck no longer.

The basic shape of the space station was ovoid, a cosmic violet egg. The station had once had a smooth hull, with none of the jumble of pipes and antennae with which humans cluttered up the exteriors of their space stations. The hull was smooth no longer.

Several gaping holes had been punched into its surface and the contents spewed out. As they closed the range, the deep wells of destruction showed chaos extending several decks downward. Whatever had penetrated the station had burrowed deep, leaving behind bent girders, buckled decks, spaghetti-like strands of cabling, and other less identifiable detritus.

“Uh, Lieutenant,” Amos Harding said, “you don’t suppose those holes produced debris geysers when they were made, do you?”

“Looks like it to me,” she replied. The station was coming up fast. It would fully fill the forward bubble in another thirty seconds, although it was beginning to slide ever so slowly to the right as it did so. “Why?”

“Do you think it’s smart for us to make a high speed run this close to that pile of junk? No telling what pieces got ejected and may have found their way back in the last hundred years.”

“A fine time to think about that,” she muttered as she braced unconsciously for impact. The reaction was as useless as it was natural. If they hit even a walnut at the speed they were going, they would be vaporized before their optic nerves had time to send the news to their brains.

Suddenly it was on them and flashed by in a single blink. Once again, the planet filled the forward bubble, unobstructed by sky junk.

Barbara Whalen let out the breath she had been holding, as did Amos. They turned to one another and shared a look which said, “Let’s not do that again!”

Their silent dialogue was cut short by a whoop from the passenger compartment, one audible by both intercom and through the closed hatch.

“What’s the matter,” Barbara demanded.

“That got the old adrenaline pumping,” Ahmed said in her earphones. “Can we go again, Mommy?”

* * *

The Vrathalatar stargate hovered in the deep black, its sunward surface glowing dimly, giving it a ghostlike appearance silhouetted against the diamond-sprinkled ebon background of interstellar space.

Having discovered what they had come for, the six human ships surrounded the gate in accordance with their mission orders. The three warships took up station in an equilateral triangle that put them far enough from the gate that they were out of weapons range (they hoped) of any ship that chose this particular inopportune moment to visit Vrathalatar. Yet, they were close enough to be within tactical range of their own superlight missiles.

Sundowner and Archernar hovered close to the gate to give the technicians and scientists access for their preliminary studies. Powhatan had taken up position high above the gate. The supply ship was at twice the range as the warships and high above them. It would be Powhatan’s duty to run for Brinks Base should anything untoward happen to the rest of the expedition.

The gate itself was a copy of every other stargate the human scouts had encountered. It looked like a silver wedding band floating in space. The gate was thirty meters across and five meters in cross-section. Under high magnification, it showed a complex pattern of outer markings formed from small lines that flowed randomly around its surface. Lonegan was put in mind of a fingerprint. In front of the gate, there was the occasional spark of a vacsuit maneuvering jet. As he listened to the chatter over the vacsuit circuits, experienced vacuum monkeys searched the exterior for a way inside.

“Looks like we’ve got something at eight o’clock,” a gruff voice announced. “Stand by while I check it out.”

The view on the screen expanded until only a section of the stargate filled the frame. A barely discernible figure emitted two bright sparks, which were accompanied by quiet puffing noises over the intercom. Then as the figure moved closer to the silver ring, two more sparks announced that the explorer had killed whatever forward motion he’d acquired.

“Yes, we have a hatch here.”

“Any way to open it, Murphy?” the youthful controller aboard Archernar asked, his voice cracking in his excitement.

“Just a sec, Ensign,” the bored voice of the spacer replied. After several seconds of silence, he continued. “Seems to be a Broan keypad with those funny dots-and-swirls they use. One of them says ‘ingress’ if I haven’t forgotten my training. Shall I push it?”

There was a longer pause as the scientists consulted. Finally, one said, “Go ahead, Murphy.”

“You don’t think it will blow up?” the spacer asked dubiously.

“If it does, the explosion won’t be large enough to damage the ship,” an unidentified voice responded with a chuckle.

“I love you, too,” Murphy replied. “Starting the opening sequence now!”

The audio link carried several seconds of breathing sounds before Murphy reported, “Hatch is open and the interior lights have come on. Data displays are starting to light up. I would say the gate has power and is operational.”

The announcement was greeted by a hurricane of breath being exhaled on three separate ships and scattered cheering.

“Secure your safety lines,” the anonymous teenage ensign ordered. “We’ll get a boatload of scientists and technicians to you within the hour.”

“Will do, Ensign. Damn this thing is big!”

* * *

Vrathalatar, the planet, filled the screens and no longer resembled a mottled, blue-white tennis ball in the forward bubble of Barbara Whalen’s scout boat. They were flying upside down. The dorsal airlock was open and the quartz heat shield extended to plug the opening. Centimeters beneath the transparent surface, the lenses of three separate telescopes peered at the tan surface below, seeking the black splotch of something that had once been a city sprawled across the width of a wide river valley.

Barbara watched on her screen as the destruction slowly made itself evident. As she watched, a transient glow flashed momentarily across her field of view, and then flickered in and out of the scene. Simultaneously, a tug at her body and an almost supersonic squeal at the edge of her hearing announced their arrival at Vrathalatar’s first tenuous wisps of atmosphere.

“Reentry!” Amos Harding announced.

“Noted,” Barbara responded, her eyes not leaving the screen.

Below them, the camera followed the course of a river as wide as the Kama on Earth. On each side were geometric shapes that suggested farms, except that nothing was growing on them. Even at this distance, the dust kicked up by the wind was evident.

Slowly, as the tug and whistle of atmosphere outside the hull built up, the tan wasteland gave way to a wasteland of a different sort. Structures began to slide into view. These came in a variety of shapes, although spheres dominated. They weren’t complete spheres, to judge by shadows, but rather spherical shapes with one-third or so buried in the ground.

If the Vrath had any need for the roads with which human beings festoon their cities, there was no evidence of it. Rather, their structures seemed haphazardly strewn about the landscape, or possibly arranged in a larger pattern that the camera was too focused to see.

As the partially buried spheres and other geometric shapes marched slowly from top of screen to bottom, a slow change came over the city. They began to see places where buildings had once stood, but which now showed as pits in the landscape, or piles of disorganized rubble. If there had been fire here, the intervening years had wiped away the traces. There were no blackened splotches where mighty buildings had once stood. Rather, everything was the same sand color as the denuded countryside.

“We’re picking up some damage,” Amos announced.

“Think so?” Barbara asked wryly.

On the screen, the edge of a large circular structure had appeared. On another world it might have been the remains of the city’s central lake. Not here. The cause for the increasing level of destruction as their view swept across the city center became clear.

Whatever city they were spying on had died by nuclear fire. Within a few seconds, their view swept across a giant crater. Here the Broa must have been aiming for something buried … possibly an underground command bunker. The warhead had dug deep into the surface before exploding, leaving a bowl-like depression with steep sides and a pool of water glistening at its bottom.

“Wow, they must really have been pissed!” Ahmed said over the intercom. In addition to the main view, he was monitoring the rest of the instruments that were recording the destruction.

“How’s the radiation?” Barbara asked.

“Not as bad as projected,” the technician replied over the intercom. “We can take this for hours without reaching maximum safe dose.”

“Well, we only have about three more minutes,” she replied, eyeing her chronometer.

Below them, the crater fell behind and the camera swept over new destruction. Where things had tended to topple over in the direction of the bottom of the screen earlier, now that they had passed over the epicenter of the blast, they were all pointed at the top of the screen.

They passed back into barren wasteland once more. Ahmed sent the telescope hunting for another target. This was a major metropolis on the coast that had received three warheads. Here the landscape was littered with small rectangular shapes that, upon close telescopic examination, appeared to be the remains of vehicles that had fallen from the sky when the power was interrupted.

They watched in silence, suddenly aware of the magnitude of what it means to kill an entire world. It was a chastened crew that found themselves once more back in space and climbing for the deep black.

“Get what we needed?” Barbara asked, her tone subdued by what she had seen.

“We’ve got full memory cubes,” Ahmed replied.

After a minute of silence, Amos said, “Damn the Broa. That was a living, breathing world back there.”

Beside him, Barbara Whelan sighed as she punched up the program that would return them to the fleet.

“Just pray that some alien explorer doesn’t make a similar camera run over Earth sometime next century.”

Chapter Three

Ship-Commander-Second-Grade Pas-Tek, of the Pas-Gorn Clan, lay strapped into the padded resting frame on one of the numerous transports that plied the route between orbit and the planet’s surface. At the moment, his arms and legs floated free in microgravity as the winged transport maneuvered for reentry. Around him, hundreds of other travelers lay swaddled within their own frames. Some slept, others talked quietly into comms, while still others busied themselves with telescreens, either catching up on tasks left undone or else partaking of entertainment.

Pas-Tek did none of these. He rested in his cocoon while focusing his attention on the screen mounted on the forward bulkhead. At the moment the scene showed a mostly black orb limned by a blue-white crescent, with the yellow-white disk of Faalta rising into view from behind the planetary disk. Dawn was breaking for the second time since they had departed the space habitat where Blood Oath was docked.

The scene might have been that of a gross of worlds that Pas-Tek had visited in the Navy. It was made special only by the mixed emotions of awe and dread it inspired. This was no ordinary planet, merely one among four-times-twelve-to-the-fifth worlds that comprised Civilization. This was Ssasfal, the Home World, the orb from which his ancestors had gone forth to conquer.

Pas-Tek had been born on Vil, where he grew to adulthood. Since joining the Navy, he had traveled far, traversing some of the more backwater places in Civilization. Yet, he had never been closer than four jumps to this, the center of power.

The transport continued its fall until he felt the familiar tug of atmosphere, accompanied by a gentle settling into the resting rack. The return of partial gravity was accompanied by a general stirring around him.

This particular compartment was restricted to Masters. Most of his fellow travelers were accompanied by their coterie of subservients, all of whom had been relegated to less opulent, accommodations.

Physically, he and his fellows were not imposing. Smaller than average for sentient species, their breed possessed long arms and legs, the better to swing through vine forests. Pas-Tek himself was 1.5 meters tall when he chose to stand erect, which was seldom. He was covered with brown fur, with streaks of lighter tan. His expansive eyes were tinged yellow. His short snout bore four breathing holes on each side and a mouth with a double row of grinding teeth.

What he and his fellows lacked in physical stature, however, they more than made up for in real power. Through a fortuitous accident of history, the Race had been the first to invent a technology to jump from star to star without crossing the intervening gulf. For more than a great-gross of cycles, the small, tree-dwelling denizens of Ssasfal had used this technology to subjugate every other species they encountered.

So far as Pas-Tek was concerned, that was the natural order of things. It was in support of that order that Those Who Rule had summoned him.

* * *

“The Council Leaders will see you now, Shipmaster,” a grizzled old warrior said. At his words, Pas-Tek felt a surge of excitement that was like a physical blow.

In the imagination of the young Pas-Tek, Old City was an impregnable fortress set high on a barren mountaintop, and the Council building a tower so tall that clouds scuttled past its uppermost floors. In truth, Old City rested on a broad plain, nestled into a curving depression that showed where once a mighty river had flowed.

Furthermore, the ancient capital was smaller than he had imagined it, almost cramped. Only a broad greensward prevented it from being dwarfed by the modern towers that had grown up around it. The battlements of rosy granite had a museum quality to them, and a solidity that exuded strength beyond the hardness of mere stone. This was the very spot from which the Race had gone forth to conquer.

Pas-Tek entered Old City through the Obsidian Gate. Powered vehicles were not allowed within the walls. He knuckle-walked half the length of the Hero’s Path. When he reached Council Square, he stopped to gape. The chamber presented its own castellated profile, with guard towers that rose to the azure sky. Between the towers were windows of stained glass where ancient warriors battled eternally.

Pas-Tek ascended the stone ramp, passed beneath ancient battle banners, and arrived in the main hall. There he presented himself and was directed to a slide way leading to the Realm of the Founders on the third level. It was there that he encountered the grizzled guardian who had just given him permission to enter the sanctum.

“Pas-Tek, Ship Commander Second Grade,” he announced to the four worthies within.

A senior councilor greeted him. “Welcome. I am Zel-Sen, Prime Councilor. These others are Cal-Tar and Sar-Ganth, representatives of two of our ancient clans. Beside them is Dos-Val, from the Ministry of Science.”

“I am at your service,” Pas-Tek responded formally after making the gesture of obeisance.

“Do you know why you are here?” the elder with the raspy voice asked. Cal-tar’s fur had the unkempt look of the very old, yet his eyes remained clear.

“You wish to hear my report of the incident in the Etnarii system.”

“We do,” Zel-Sen responded. “Please tell us about your encounter with these aliens.”

Pas-Tek spoke of his mission to the agricultural world of Etnarii to deliver the Council’s directive concerning the wild bipeds known to be loose in Civilization. There he learned that the bipeds he sought had departed the planet even as his own ship arrived. He gave chase. Upon reaching the Etnarii stargate with Blood Oath in pursuit, the bipeds’ ship had entered the gate and then exploded.

“Did you determine the cause of the explosion?” Zel-Sen asked.

“We believe they strained their engines evading my ship.”

“Do you have any proof of this?”

“No, Worthy. It is, however, the most logical explanation.”

“Are you sure they were destroyed?” the philosopher from the Ministry of Science asked.

“I saw it with my own eyes and have recordings,” Pas-Tek replied.

“Yes, we have those.”

“Tell us, Ship-Commander, what happened next?” Zel-Sen asked, interrupting the philosopher.

“We searched for pieces of the stargate and of the alien ship. We discovered a few melted bits of the former, but none of the latter.”

“It was completely vaporized?” the philosopher asked.

“Yes, Worthy. The explosion was very violent.”

“And you were trapped in the system because of the destruction of the gate?”

“Yes, Prime Councilor. Etnarii has but one stargate, so there was no way to report what had happened. After collecting all of the data we could, we returned to the planet to await the freighter with the replacement gate. It took longer for someone to come looking than we expected.”

“Yes, Ship Commander. Those responsible will answer for their negligence. However, that is not why we asked you here. The situation is sufficiently unique that we wanted to hear your story for ourselves.”

“What situation?” Pas-Tek asked.

“Dos-Val.”

The representative of the Ministry of Science turned to Pas-Tek. “Ship Commander, the Ministry has analyzed the data you collected. You are to be complimented on your thoroughness. Your observations of the gas cloud were especially enlightening.

“We have extrapolated the density of the plasma to determine its mass, as well as its composition. We have come to a startling conclusion.

“All of the mass in the cloud appears to be from the stargate. We can find no trace of these bipeds’ ship in the debris!”

Chapter Four

Daedalus was a weary ship as it dropped sublight at the edge of the Hideout System. Hideout was the G-class star astronomers had chosen to host humanity’s secret base of operations in Broan space. It had been picked because it was only 10 light-years from the Crab Nebula, actually on the fringe of the expanding ball of gas and dust. Proximity to the pulsar gave it a high level of background radiation, making it the perfect hiding place.

The Crab was the remnant of a supernova that exploded around 6000 B.C. Though relatively close to Sol on the galactic scale of distance, the “guest star” did not appear in the skies of Earth until May of 1054 A.D. By July 4 of that year, the new star had grown in luminosity until it was brighter than everything save the full moon. It would have been hard to miss for anyone familiar with the night sky and was duly noted in the annals of both Arab and Chinese astronomers.

The Crab was important to Earth’s astronomers for a simple reason. Under interrogation about where the Broan Sovereignty lay in space, Sar-Say had sketched a series of sky scenes he had witnessed in his travels. One of these featured a large globular glowing cloud in a black sky which Sar-Say had dubbed “Sky Flower.” Computer analysis identified it as the Crab Nebula.

Hideout was a G-class giant of a star some ten times larger than Sol. The system possessed seven planets, none of which radiated any detectable artificial energy. Two of the worlds were gas giants in the outer reaches of the system, and a third orbited in the middle of the temperate zone.

Although classified as terrestrial, the world was twice the size of Earth and inconveniently large. However, its oversize moon, some three times the diameter of Luna, was made to order as a base of operations.

* * *

Of necessity, Daedalus had broken out on the outskirts of the Hideout System, beyond the critical limit. To penetrate too deeply into a star’s gravity well would have strained the stardrive generators. It took a full week to dive into the inner system. For much of that time, the main viewscreen was slaved to a telescope that showed their destination. The crew watched the planet/moon pair grow from a dimensionless point, to a misshapen blob, and finally, to two perceptible disks with faint mottling.

From the ship’s vantage point, both moon and planet were crescent-shaped, with the glowing yellow ball of Hideout hovering against a black backdrop. The planet was half-lit by Hideout’s rays, while Sutton, the moon, had both a bright and a dim hemisphere — the latter illuminated by the copious light reflected off Brinks’ clouds.

The only other thing visible against the backdrop of space was the Crab Nebula. The ghostly apparition covered half the sky, with the supernova remnant clearly visible at its center. Some claimed to be able to see the remnant actually pulsate… unlikely, since the neutron star at its center rotated 30 times each second.

“How can something so ugly be beautiful at the same time?” Lisa Rykand asked her husband as the two of them cuddled on their too-narrow bed and watched Sutton grow ever larger on their cabin screen.

“Cognitive dissonance,” he replied. “We were out too long this time.”

“Well, we made it home and we’ll have thirty days before we have to go out again.”

He groaned. “Don’t remind me! Let’s live in the present for a while. I wonder what new amusements they’ve set up since we’ve been gone?”

“I’m sure the recreation center has the usual array of well-thumbed playing cards and chess sets missing no more than a piece or two. Then, of course, there’s the booze.”

“There is that,” he agreed.

Space Navy regulations were very specific when it came to intoxication on duty… specific and draconian. When the art of distillation was as easy as hooking up a plastic tube to the nearest vacuum spigot, the powers-that-be controlled drunkenness in the same way the British Navy had once handled the problem. They became the sole authorized distributor of alcohol.

Daedalus had been out three full months this trip. Their routine was the same as on every other voyage. They would sneak into the traffic flow in some Broan system, and then jump from gate to gate to gate until they ran out of recording space in the computer.

And so, in addition to Broan traffic of all sorts, there were a dozen or so human craft traversing the stargate network at any given time. By pretending to be locals, they could survey star systems faster than more surreptitious methods allowed. Even so, they were not getting the job done quickly enough.

The problem was that the Broan domain was too damned large! The human fleet, operating at the end of a year-long supply line, could easily spend several lifetimes poking around on the fringes of enemy star systems. And the more they did so, the more likely that they would be detected, or worse, one of them would be captured.

It was a scenario that kept the Q-ship crews on edge the whole time they were in Broan space… and kept their Captains’ hands never far from the self-destruct switch wired to a small nuke welded to the ship’s keel.

Mark Rykand and his wife snuggled together and watched the approach to Sutton parking orbit. Since the moon was airless, ships could orbit close to the surface; so close, in fact, that it sometimes looked as though they would clip the tops of the moon’s Alpine-size mountains.

As Daedalus used a staccato burst of attitude control jets to slide into its assigned orbital slot, the view shifted. A large spherical shape lay at the center of the screen. It floated stationary while Sutton’s surface swept past in a blur of motion behind it. The big freighter wore a ring around its hull, giving it the look of a bald man with a hat perched at a jaunty angle.

“What the hell is that?” Mark asked.

Lisa was quiet for a few seconds, and then laughed.

“It’s a stargate!”

“So it is!” Mark exclaimed. “They actually snagged one while we were gone!”

* * *

One thing you had to say about the Space Navy, once a ship returned from a long, arduous patrol, they wasted no time in emptying it out. Save for a minimum watch on the bridge and in the engine spaces, the rest of the crew crowded into the three ground-to-orbit boats that arrived to take them down to Sutton.

Mark and Lisa managed to squirm into one of the bare acceleration shelves on the third transport along with two space bags.

“Happy, Darling?” she asked as she snuggled closer and gave him a brief kiss on the lips.

“Ecstatic,” he replied. “Somehow this canned air smells fresher than our canned air, don’t you think?”

“I do.”