by A. K. DuBoff
He took a sharp breath and tried to turn his head away, but Nia kept him looking straight ahead.
“Tell me!” Kira shouted in his mind.
He didn’t give in. Few could resist even her weakest commands, which meant he wasn’t alone in his mind.
“Are you here, too, Reya?” Kira asked.
“You think there are only two of us?” a new voice replied. “Oh, Kira, you have so much to learn.”
“Yeah, nope,” Kira said aloud. “I don’t have time for this shite right now.” She ripped Garett from Nia’s arms and shoved him down the hall. When she had a clean shot, she hit him with a sonic blast from her multi-handgun.
“Well, that’s one way to take care of that,” Ari said with a slight smile.
“We’re on a tight timeline.” Kira poked her head back into Edgar’s room. “Change of plan, Edgar. We’ll have someone take you to the government building in Dome 1 where no one will bother you. Grab your things.”
“I… don’t have anything,” he replied.
“That makes it easy, then. Come on.” She motioned him into the hall.
She nodded toward the unconscious man four meters away, and Ari grabbed Garett by the arms and dragged him into Edgar’s room.
“We’ll get the appropriate authorities to come retrieve him,” Kira said as she closed and locked the door. “I hope it’s not too late for him.”
Nia gave a grim nod. “I’ll be so happy when we don’t have to deal with these Trols anymore.”
Kira thought back to her conversation with Reya. “The Trols knew we were coming here to see Edgar. Could Garett have sabotaged the mining operation in some way?”
“We won’t be able to question him until he wakes up,” Nia said.
“Not necessarily.” Kira crouched over Garett and gently slapped his cheek. “Garett! What did you do?”
He groaned and shifted on the ground. Kira forced one eye open with her thumb and index finger.
“What did you do to the drill?” she repeated telepathically.
A subconscious thought flitted by in his mind: The regulator. Don’t tell her about the regulator.
Kira jumped to her feet. “Shite! How do we get in touch with Ellen?”
— — —
“Okay, bring it in,” Ellen instructed the team.
A portion of open office space had been transformed into a control center with workstations and a complement of frenzied staff. They’d been working for the past seventeen hours straight, first to get the equipment to the site, and now to maneuver it into position.
The final orders had just come through with the exact placement of the drilling location, which should land directly over the top of the underground cavern. Once the shaft was mined, they’d have an open pathway to pour down the chemical cocktail that should dissolve the valteron deposits hosting the alien beings.
“Drill is almost in position,” Trisha reported. “Not that I know anything about drills. But that’s what they tell me!”
“We’ve all been transformed into construction foremen today,” Ellen replied with a slight smile.
“And lab technicians!” Fiona chimed in.
Ellen chuckled. “Yes, I suppose that’s true.”
“Speaking of which, where did Garett go?” Fiona questioned. “He was all excited about this drill earlier.”
“Overseeing the chemical transfer,” Trisha replied.
Fiona nodded. “If it’s not one task, it’s another.”
Ellen settled into her chair, pleased to be working with such a capable team.
She watched the monitors displaying feeds from the remote sites as the workers moved the massive drilling laser into place. It, in theory, could cut through the entire planetary crust in a matter of hours. However, due to heat issues, and concerns about geological stability, they needed to go much slower.
If Ellen had her way, they’d just turn the drill on full blast to melt the alien nest, and be done with it. Apparently, though, the Guard wanted to stick with a more finessed version of exterminating the particular foe, and that involved the chemical mixture. All the same, laser incineration sounded much more satisfying.
On the monitor, the three-story drill finished maneuvering onto its hover platform. Giant spikes plunged into the ground to secure it in place, and the laser drill head pivoted downward.
“Ground team has given the all clear to go,” Trisha announced.
Ellen took a deep breath. “All right. Let’s—”
An incoming communication marked as ‘urgent’ and bearing Guard credentials lit up her monitor. “I should get this,” she said, coming to attention. “Proceed with the drilling.”
She rose from the workstation she’d co-opted in the central office and stepped into one of the conference call rooms along the adjacent hallway. Once situated, she answered the call.
Kira’s face appeared. “Have you started drilling?” she asked frantically.
“Just gave the order. Wh—”
“Stop them!” she exclaimed.
“Why—”
“Now!”
Ellen ran from the conference room back to the central office. “Stop!” she shouted over the din. “The drill, shut it down!”
Trisha repeated the order to the drill team, and the monitor showed the glow fading from the laser head. “Care to explain?” she asked Ellen.
Ellen’s face flushed. “Order came down from the Guard. Must be for a good reason. I’ll get the details.” She jogged back to where she’d accepted the call.
Kira was pacing back and forth on the screen.
“It’s off,” Ellen announced. “Now, what gives?”
Kira breathed a sigh of visible relief. “Garett. He was subverted. He did something with the regulator on the drill—I don’t know what.”
Ellen’s head swam. “He…?” She leaned against the back wall of the tiny room. “The drill could have overheated and exploded.”
“Can a regulator be fixed?” Kira asked.
“I’ll have to ask the mechanics, but I imagine so.”
“You have to get that drill going. Our timeline—”
“I know, Kira,” Ellen interrupted. “We’ll fix it in time.” Somehow…
The Guard officer nodded. “There’s one other thing. As soon as you get the drill sorted out, I need you to run some tests.”
— — —
Coordinating so many moving pieces had Kaen in his element.
Reports were rolling in from the fleet sent to retrieve the chemical cocktail from Mysar about their progress filling the transport tanks, while the few armored ships the Guard could spare at the moment had been deployed as their escort. Everything was coming together, but the timing would be tight with the alignment.
A new message illuminated on Kaen’s desktop. It was from the Raven, marked with Kira’s access code.
“Captain,” he greeted.
“Sir, we’re on our way to Gaelon.”
“I see the tankers are almost filled. MTech came through for us.”
Kira nodded. “Yes, sir. There was a near-miss with sabotage involving the drill, but Ellen assured me the hole would be completed in time.”
Now, that I hadn’t heard about. “Are you sure everything is okay?” he asked.
“It has to be so it will be. Right, sir?”
Kaen smiled. “The Mysarans have proven themselves resourceful. I’ll check in with them while you’re in transit to make sure our timeline doesn’t need to shift.”
“Thank you, sir. I accounted for the estimated repair time when we established the planned release time tomorrow.”
“Good.” Kaen looked her over. “Did you have something else you wanted to discuss?”
“Sir, I think I know how the Trols have been able to build all of these things.”
Kaen raised an eyebrow at the cryptic statement. “Explain.”
“I mean,” Kira continued, “we were wondering about their specialization as a species. They seem to have kno
wledge of nanotech, but not in the way we’d expect for beings that exist in that form. I think I figured it out, when I was interfacing with Edgar down on Mysar.” She paused. “I believe they manipulate matter.”
“Pardon?”
“Like, they don’t actually have nanotech. They just manipulate what’s there.”
Kaen let the words sink in. “What about the telepathic receptors and the rock formations?”
She nodded. “I was thinking about that, too. Those are just made out of valteron, a raw material. But when arranged in a particular pattern, it takes on a specific harmonic frequency that facilitates the properties we’ve observed.”
“And the bioamplifier?”
“Tweaks to a simple biological form to accomplish the desired ends. I suspect their abilities to manipulate biological and inanimate materials must be limited, though, or else they wouldn’t need genetic engineering to make ‘vessels’ out of Taran people.”
Kaen folded his hands on his desktop. “It fits, Captain, but what evidence do you have? It’s a bold claim about the capabilities of a race that already seems to be able to do things they shouldn’t.”
“Edgar’s memories. The details he picked up,” Kira explained. “It’s different watching events through someone else’s eyes. When I went to Gaelon, I was taking everything in as a Guard soldier. I’ve been to dozens of worlds and interacted with a number of races over the years. I’m used to accepting the unusual as normal. But Edgar—he spent his life on Mysar. For all the interaction he’d had with other species, he might put the cute, little cocoberas on Valta on the same foreign scariness level as a three-meter-tall tentacle monster. So when Edgar saw inside that facility, he picked up on things that I had glossed over because of my past experiences.”
“Such as?” Kaen prompted.
“Well, my first clue was the stairs. When we were on Gaelon, I’d thought it was all poured concrete. Through Edgar’s eyes, however, it was definitely stone—but there were no signs of the rock having been formed. It was just simply arranged in the final design.”
“The facilities could have been different.”
“That occurred to me, sir, so I looked up the footage from our mission record. The exact type of rock is different, but it’s not the concrete I’d originally thought it was. I verified that with the density readings. It’s one of those little details that I didn’t even think to look at.”
“None of us did, apparently.” Kaen’s eyebrows drew together. “Were there other observations you gleaned from Edgar?”
Kira nodded. “Yes, sir. Two things. The first was a frequency—a hum—in the air. We never paid much attention to it on Gaelon because we’re so used to background mechanical noise from ships and stations. The second thing was related to the walls around the pit. We didn’t see anything on Gaelon, but when Edgar approached the pit, these weird lights appeared in the rock. There was a pattern in the forms—the same pattern we saw in the computer system architecture, and in how the landscape was arranged on Gaelon.”
“We already knew that pattern had significance to them.”
“But we didn’t know why, sir. Seeing the minerals arranged in the pattern, I had Ellen get some MTech scientists to replicate the form with the valteron samples. Except the structures fell apart each time. That’s when they made the connection that the waveform of the frequency was strikingly similar to the patterns formed by the minerals. So, they played the frequency while building the structures, and it all suddenly worked. The valteron structure held together.”
Kaen leaned forward. “Are you sure?”
“It was small scale, but the lab results were verified,” Kira confirmed.
“So, that frequency may have something to do with how the Gaelon planet operates,” Kaen mused. “If we interrupt that sound…”
“It may break apart,” Kira completed for him. “If the chemicals alone don’t do the trick, we can disrupt the bonds holding the rest of it together by playing an opposing soundwave.”
“In theory.”
“Yes, sir. It’s only a theory. And there’s a major complication: soundwaves don’t travel in space, and we also don’t have a big enough speaker, even if it did.”
That’s it! Kaen perked up. “We don’t need actual sound.”
“Sir?”
“Other types of signals—specifically, telepathic signals—don’t require a physical medium for transfer. And that entire planet is designed to be one giant communication hub.”
Kira raised an eyebrow. “Are you suggesting that I… think that frequency? We need to break up a physical object with a soundwave. Telepathy isn’t the same thing.”
“Doesn’t valteron resonate with telepathic signals? To do that, it must convert the telepathic energy into actual physical vibrations.”
“I guess, but…” Kira trailed off.
“You brought it up, Captain. Did you have something else in mind?”
Her expression changed to one of determination. “No, sir. I can do this.”
CHAPTER 20
Shite, why did I ever agree to do this? Kira groaned inwardly as the Raven made its final approach into the Gaelon System.
Kira smiled.
The plan was absurd any way Kira looked at it, but the nature of the enemy demanded an unconventional approach. She took a deep breath and went to meet her team in the galley.
“Ready?” Sandren asked when she entered.
Already seated at the table, the three members of her team were standing by to lend moral support.
Kira nodded to the major. “Let’s do it.”
“We’re still a few minutes out from the strike time, but why don’t you feel them out?” Sandren suggested. “You need to make sure you can get a solid connection.”
“I’ll give it a shot.”
For lack of having someone’s eyes to gaze into, Kira focused on the Gaelon dwarf planet visible through the viewport. “Hello?” she asked into the void.
She could sense the planet and the strange, constant hum, but no sentient presence met her probe.
“I know you’re out there. I want to talk.”
Silence.
“No response,” she reported with a sigh.
“Hmm.” Sandren stroked his chin. “Hopefully, once they realize we—” He cut off when a jolt rocked the Raven.
“Uh, what was that?” Ari asked no one in particular.
Kira looked around outside, but none of the other ships were visible with her naked eye. She reached out to magnify the view, but another jolt rocked them, powerful enough to make her stumble against the wall.
“That’s not good.”
Sandren ran toward the ladder. “I need to get to the bridge.”
Kira followed him. “Is it something I did, I wonder?” she speculated while they climbed.
“I have no idea,” the major replied. “Obviously, they know we’re here now.”
Once at the top of the ladder, they ran toward the bridge and were knocked sideways in the middle of the corridor.
“That was stronger than the last,” Kira observed.
“I don’t like that trend one bit.”
Sandren was the first through the door. “What in the stars is going on?” he asked the captain and first officer.
“The ship is acting like we’re caught in some sort of gravity well,” Rodrick replied while he fought with the controls. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say we were at the event horizon of a black hole.”
Aleya shook her h
ead. “Nothing about this makes any sense. Other ships are reporting the same thing. We’re all being pulled toward the planet.”
“Oooooh shite,” Kira whispered.
Sandren turned to look at her, standing behind him. “What?”
“Remember how we said the gravity on the planet was too strong for something of its mass? What if they have some kind of massive gravity generator and they just cranked it up to the max?”
The others’ faces drained.
“That would explain it,” Rodrick said, “but I don’t like where it’s going.”
“Artificial-grav at that scale is really unstable.” Aleya shook her head. “I doubt they’d be able to keep this up for long without running into problems.”
“And what would happen then?” Sandren asked.
“Stars if I know, but it’d be bad,” the first officer replied.
“Pull back,” Sandren ordered.
“We’ve tried, but navigation is, uh… not behaving,” Rodrick said.
“Shite,” Kira whispered to herself. “Sir?” She jerked her head toward the hall and left the bridge.
Sandren followed. “What?”
“What if the Trols figured out a way to remotely hack our ship’s computers using the algorithms from the external processor we left behind?”
The major got that look in his eyes that he did whenever he was in crunch time. “We need to act before they get complete control.” He ran back into the bridge. “All right, get ready to send those torpedoes. And, Kira, you’re up. Time to get their attention and keep it.”
“Yes, sir,” she acknowledged.
she added privately to Jasmine while she followed Sandren back to the galley area.
Kira caught on.