The Lion and the Lizard

by Brindle, Nathan C.

  "Sir, a suggestion?" said Wolff.

  "Go."

  "I believe, if the Marine Corps Commandant is amenable, he could do worse than to assign Major General Roger Patterson to command the overall operation in this clusterfuck."

  "Oh?" Buford lifted an eyebrow. "I thought General Patterson was retired."

  "He is," acknowledged Wolff, "but he never stood down from a good fight with the RIFs."

  "Your commanding officer, as I recall, when you were injured."

  Wolff chuckled. "Yes, sir, many moons ago when the world was young, we were fighting a war we couldn't win, and he was a butterbar and I was a simple gunnery sergeant."

  "Hrmf. I will bring it to the Commandant's attention and see what he thinks."

  "Thank you, sir. I'm sure Roger's wife will be happy to have him in theatre with her."

  Buford snorted. "Pretty slick, Major. All right. You kids go now and find out what's going on out in Sagittarius. Captain LaForrest, thank you for bringing all of this to my attention, even at two in the morning. If there is nothing else?"

  "No, sir," acknowledged LaForrest. "We'll get out of your hair and go back to Sanddoom."

  "Excellent. Paul, you can bring my breakfast in now." Buford grinned. "I know he's standing outside the door with a tray . . . heh. I was right. Get out of here, Captain. Buford, out."

  "Enjoy your breakfast, sir. LaForrest, out." The captain waved at Chief Charles, who shut off the holoscreen and dropped the connection.

  Chapter 9

  Water, Water, Everywhere

  "Nor any drop to drink," came from the front seats.

  Ariela blinked, startled, then stretched, and yawned hugely. "What?" she asked.

  Wolff looked over his shoulder. "Sleeping on the job, I see."

  "A little," she admitted.

  "I was just declaiming the Rime of the Ancient Mariner," said Wolff. "Coleridge seemed fitting, given the planet we just found."

  Ariela blinked again, and memory took over –

  They'd left the Constellation a day ago, after Ariela had a final consultation with Tina regarding her patients, and Wolff and von Barronov had topped off supplies aboard the Frumious Bandersnatch, courtesy of Captain LaForrest.

  Commander del Toro had wandered down to the berth not long before they cast off, bringing a bottle of what he called "medicinal whiskey" but which the two majors knew was some very fine Kentucky bourbon, distilled by an important house on the Bourbon Trail, and provided to Space Force at no charge – and no request for publicity; indeed, a rather fervent request to not make a big deal out of it – by the family who owned it.

  "They had three sons in the Navy during the GWOT," del Toro told them. "And they were all at Long Beach, the day the nuke went off. When Space Force destroyed Pyongyang in retaliation, and would have done the same to Tehran, they decided to make this provision in their sons' memory." He looked sad, then smiled, gently. "Three Sons Special Kentucky Bourbon isn't sold anywhere; the entire small batch production is earmarked for the fleet. My predecessor didn't hold with alcohol in his medical section, so we have quite a few cases in command-level locked storage. LaForrest was livid when he found out Toledano was just storing it away. So was I; so I gave him a couple of bottles for that bar in his ready room."

  "Well, they made it for drinking, not setting aside and avoiding," grinned von Barronov.

  "Toledano was an ass," said Wolff. "The service is better off without him."

  "True enough," acknowledged the doctor. "And I figure you're a fleet vessel, at least for the moment, so you should have a bottle for the odd special occasion."

  "Thank you, sir," replied Wolff, taking the bottle, and shaking del Toro's hand. "Still looking out for me after all these years."

  Del Toro snorted. "Well, Kat's not around, so someone has to." He looked at Ariela. "Doctor, remember what I said."

  Ariela nodded, solemnly. "Aye, aye, sir."

  Del Toro nodded in return, sketched a salute, and left the berth.

  – and Ariela remembered what del Toro, characteristically blunt, had told her:

  "We do not have time for a full unpacking of all of your doubts, but the most important one may be easily analyzed, and the answer is quite simply this: Imposter syndrome does not suit you. The free-will mind capable of designing these changes to the nanos, Doctor, even if originally conceived in a non-free-will state, is no slouch, and its owner is no phony. Do not fret your origins, your brilliance is innate and independent of them."

  She smiled, and wondered how she had even gotten up the nerve to confide her doubts to him. But he'd certainly given her a different outlook to chew on. And she thought she rather liked that particular world-view.

  "So what did you decide to name it?" she asked. "The planet, I mean."

  Wolff, still looking over his shoulder at her, shrugged. "No idea. What do you think?"

  She considered. "Why not 'Coleridge'?" she said. "It's evocative of his poem."

  Wolff thought about it for a moment, then gave her a thumbs-up. "It will do at least for a temporary name. We'll see if it sticks once actual officious authorities start officiously bustling around out here. Though, by the time that happens, I expect it will be ingrained sufficiently to prevent them changing it."

  "What system is this, anyway?" she asked.

  "It's called Nunki, more formally, Sigma Sagittarii," replied von Barronov. "Thought to be 228 light years from Sol, looks like that's close, but it's more like 248, according to our parallax measurements. They're getting more accurate the farther out we get, which is only to be expected. Nunki is a B2.5 variable. Big, blue-white star. It's actually surprising to find a water world in orbit around it, though we are in the 'Goldilocks' zone, and the planet orbits at –" he checked a holoscreen. "At the moment, it appears it averages around 320 AU, which is about eight times farther from Nunki than Pluto is from Sol."

  "Wow!"

  Von Barronov punched in another set of numbers. "The orbital period appears to be about 2,050 years. That's assuming we got the average distance correct."

  Ariela fired up her scanners. After a few moments, she said, "Huh. No land on this side."

  "None on the other, either," confirmed Wolff. "We were around there while you were napping. It also appears to be southern hemisphere summer, as there's ice floating around in the northern polar region."

  "Is that a storm down there? Southern hemisphere, about 10 degrees below the equator, just rotating into view."

  "Yep. Looks like a hurricane, to me . . . and I don't even know how you calculate its category. That must be a hell of a thing, given there's no land anywhere to break it up and stop it." Wolff looked at another screen. "Says here the wind speeds around the eye exceed five hundred miles per hour."

  "So it just goes around and around the planet until there's insufficient warmth in the water below it to sustain it," theorized Ariela.

  "That would be my guess," agreed Wolff. "There aren't any shallows, so far as we see, so it can't even get into a situation where it sucks up all the warmth and stalls, like storms do in the Caribbean, sometimes. So a storm like that probably runs for hundreds of years, till the season changes and air temperatures make it unsustainable."

  "Like the Red Spot did."

  Wolff grinned. "Yeah. Till we snuffed it."

  "By accident," von Barronov growled.

  "Of course." Wolff turned back around. "Anything else you want to know about the place?"

  Ariela thought about it. "Breathable air? Warm enough to skinny-dip?" She laughed.

  "Air's breathable," said von Barronov. "There's enough green plant life in the ocean to produce oxygen from carbon dioxide. Looks like that's about the extent of life, though. And yeah, down at the equator the water's probably around ninety Fahrenheit, I imagine."

  "Why no other life?"

  "Planet's young," grunted Wolff. "B-type main sequence stars only stay on the main sequence for about a hundred million years. So if Nunki is about halfway through
its lifetime, it's been on the main sequence for less time than Earth has been past the K-T boundary, when all the dinosaurs died out."

  "Could be a captured rogue planet, too," von Barronov pointed out. "In which case it would have to evolve animals all over again, if it ever had them in the first place, but some of the plant life might have made it through the frozen time. Spores and seeds, particularly if they were deep enough in the sea to avoid actually being frozen; or, if hot vents survived all that time, life in the deep sea may never have ceased in any case. And in less than a day, with no descent to the surface, we're not going to find out either way."

  "You guys need to build probes that are actually probes, and not primarily testbed drive modules," said Ariela. "Build a few hundred tiny drive modules with autopilots, and mount CubeSats on them. Or things like CubeSats. Which wouldn't survive starflight in the open, probably, but you could armor the suckers against radiation with hullmetal and open 'em up after you get where you want them to do their research. Let 'em work, then close 'em back up and bring 'em back alive."

  Wolff and von Barronov looked at each other. Von Barronov pointed at Ariela, still looking at Wolff. "She's right, you know."

  "We must be getting old," replied Wolff, "because she's having all the big ideas, this trip."

  "Where would you get the parts, though?" asked Ariela. "It's not like you can go to the store and buy them."

  "We'll get them from Elon," chuckled Wolff. "He's probably got a huge junkpile on Mars we can pick from."

  "Oh, come on," retorted Ariela.

  "You're right," said Wolff, still chuckling, "Elon isn't interested in CubeSats, unless the technology is useful in some project he's working on. We'll get them through NASA or ARISS or someone like that. The drive units will come from BaeNorGrumLockMart as usual, though they'll giggle at making them that small."

  "At any rate," prompted von Barronov, "we do have a mission."

  "Indeed. Are you set up for Kaus Media?"

  "Yep, about a hundred light years thataway." He pointed vaguely out the front port.

  "OK, stand by for rotation to Kaus Media, Delta Sagittarii . . ." Wolff reached up and did the usual with the big red switches. "And we're there."

  "So, this is a K3III star, orange/red, about 3.2 Solar masses and about 16 times the diameter of Sol . . . doubtful there are planets since it's a, huge, and b, part of a multiple star system, but we promised to look . . ."

  On the planet Coleridge, at the same time, had there been human eyes there to see it, a large disturbance could be seen as . . . something . . . broke the surface of the world ocean, and flopped back in . . .

  Twenty-four hours, and a couple more transits later, they'd completed a planetary survey of the Albaldah system (Pi Sagittarii), and were contemplating the next jump.

  "This next star is really off the reservation for us," noted von Barronov. "So far we've been within 500 light years of Sol. HD 167818 is somewhere between 700 and 800 light years from Sol. And we've given up on 100 light year jumps because there's nothing all that interesting out here. So . . . HD 167818 is," and he peered at his holoscreen, "another K3III, but bigger than Kaus Media. 6.3 stellar masses, 56.2 times the diameter of Sol. Since it's a K, it's not going to be like B-class Nunki, but any useful planets are still going to be a long way out – quick estimate of the notional habitable zone is 44 AU to 83 AU."

  "So, not really worth the time to work up a planetary study," mused Ariela.

  Wolff shook his head. "No, so we're going to jump in, make a couple of parallax back-checks along the route, and then jump right on back out."

  "And?" prompted von Barronov.

  Wolff sighed. "And, we could be getting into an area the aliens might consider theirs, if they have starflight."

  Ariela shrugged, then cracked her knuckles. "Time for me to think about getting to work, then."

  "Ari," began Wolff.

  "No, Dad, it's okay. Who else is going to negotiate if we need to negotiate?"

  "Chris," said Wolff, without hesitation. Von Barronov snorted. "The hell are you laughing at? Have you ever known me to be diplomatic?"

  "You were a fair-to-middlin' Master of the Lodge. Nobody got up and walked out in your year. And we got that Admiral to stand down his men long enough to let Ari work her charm on them. Some of that was your doing."

  "So? That was dealing with other men of good will, not with aliens of unknown intent."

  "She'll be fine, she can do it," said von Barronov. "You've seen her do it before. She can do it again."

  "Which was not my point. My point was, she's sort of being forced into this by the Simulation. We can turn around and go home and say, fuck this for a game of soldiers, send in a goddamn frigate, and some cookie-pushers and an ambassador from State."

  "Gentlemen," broke in Ariela, "sirs, with all due respect, I can do this. And I will do this, even if it took the Simulation to prod me into it." She smiled, wanly. "I'm a second lieutenant of Space Force Marine Reserves. I'm not going to refuse to do my duty."

  "Good enough," nodded Wolff. "That's all we can ask, I guess. And if it doesn't work, we'll hightail it for home and have them send that frigate."

  Ariela set her jaw. "It's going to work."

  Wolff looked around at her instead of using the rearview mirror. "Okay, sweetheart. I believe you. I just needed to hear it from you before we potentially jump this crate into harm's way."

  "No argument from me."

  Wolff sighed. "Chris, was it me she got the crazy gene from, or from her mother?"

  Von Barronov chuckled. "No comment. You ready? I have the coordinates locked in."

  "Sure. Let's go. Stand by for rotation – now!"

  "That is one big-ass fucking star," breathed Ariela.

  "That is one big-ass fucking bunch of planets orbiting it, too," replied Wolff. "Most of them are completely ridiculous . . . all those rocky planets close in, the only thing you could hope would be they're tidally-locked to the star, and you could land on and explore the dark side. You could probably even build an underground base there, if there was a good reason to do so."

  "And probably all too small to be seen from 760 light years away on Earth," surmised von Barronov. "There's a big gas giant out about 400 AU, but it's behind the star from Earth's vantage point, and nobody's going to see it for a couple of millennia, even if it does transit the star."

  "Shh!" hissed Ariela, hand to her ear.

  Startled, both men looked back at her. She was concentrating intently on whatever it was she was hearing. Finally – about 10 very long seconds later – she looked at them, puzzled.

  "I picked up that station on 1.9 megahertz," she said. "I thought you said the SETI people said it was gobbledygook that nobody could even get their teeth around."

  "It was," affirmed von Barronov.

  "Um. Well. Listen." She fiddled with her holotab, and sound started coming out of it.

  English sound. With a strong American cornbelt accent.

  "Well, that's all for this segment of Xzl5!vt politics and analysis. In our next segment, we'll be discussing the recent scientific discoveries made with the new starship drive, and whether it's really worth all the credit the government is throwing into . . . "

  "STOP!" shouted Wolff. "Are you recording this?"

  "Of course," said Ariela, somewhat flustered but obeying the order to turn off the sound.

  Wolff looked up at the overhead. "I'm waiting," he grated, angrily.

  "Waiting for what?" asked Ariela, still flustered.

  "Wait," said von Barronov, likewise sounding less than happy.

  Wolff's comm buzzed. He grabbed it, activated the text interface, and read.

  "Who told us about the . . . the . . . fuck, I can't pronounce it. Shi-zìl-fivèhgbëngvæt? That's not even close; I'd break teeth, too, trying to frame those harmonics. Maybe Shizzle? Who told us about the Shizzle? Bob told us about the Shizzle, you half-sentient pile of quantum circuits. What the fuck is going on here? They're
supposed to be in a completely different trunk line!"

  Bzzzt.

  "The hell . . . what do you mean, we're interconnected now?" Wolff looked at von Barronov. "How do you connect two trunk lines?"

  Von Barronov shrugged. "Beats me. I just work for a living, like you say."

  Bzzzt.

  "Oh, so you've promised not to bullshit us anymore and you're telling us the truth? What truth would that be?"

  Bzzzt.

  "Why don't we hook . . . hell, that's a great idea. Here. Chris, hook this comm into . . . no, wait, you should be able to simply hook directly into the comms on the Bandersnatch. Can you do that?"

  Bzzzt.

  "Oh, okay. That is a better idea. Chris, turn on the airlock intercom, it wants to talk to us through the cockpit end of that."

  Von Barronov flipped a switch. "Done."

  "If you did not have mechanical controls, I could have done that myself break," came from the speaker.

  "Tough. We did that for a reason. Fully-computerized controls are shit in ship systems. So what is this bullshit about tying two trunk lines together?"

  "Will transfer you to engineer Beam break His department break."

  "I think that 'break' thing is like a speech impediment," whispered Ariela.

  Wolff shook his head. "No, it's just how a computer signifies a full stop. Some of our computer languages use similar conventions."

  "Am I speaking to the humans?" came from the speaker.

  "Yes," replied Wolff.

  "May I have permission to come aboard?"