The Belt Loop _Book One

by Robert B. Jones

  “Is that one of the reasons you’ve never asked for a ship, Davi? The command responsibility? The thought of sending men to their deaths?” Uri Haad asked his XO.

  Yorn was silent. Eventually, all conversations with his superiors came down to this one thing. He had his reasons to be sure, but lack of command resolve was not one of them. “Think what you want, Uri. You know that’s not the case. I know you remember the Mobile Bay just as well as I do. I see you fingering those scars every day. You know why I will not command a starship and you should be aware why I don’t even want to discuss it.” Yorn pushed back his chair and stood up.

  “Take it easy, old friend. I know you have your reasons. I can’t deny that they are valid. But, sooner or later, you have to face up to your fears, Davi. Put the Mobile Bay behind you. You did what you had to do and walked away alive. Instead of thinking about all of the men you lost, think of all the lives on Elber Prime you saved.”

  Yorn was agitated. He’d had this discussion a million times and probably at least a dozen times with the captain. He paced around the table again and on his second lap he stopped right beside Haad’s chair. The captain turned to look at him. Yorn clasped his hands behind his back and uttered, “By your leave, sir.” Then he turned and walked out of the compartment.

  Uri Haad sat perfectly still except for his left hand. That hand was stroking the three long scars on the left side of his face.

  * * *

  After looking at the graphic display for the third time Milli Gertz looked at her specimen then looked back at the wall screen again. It was similar, but not the same. There was no way to classify this damned bird. For one thing, this bird had far fewer bones than anything else she had seen in the database. A lot of the bones in the vestigial wings had been fused or ossified, indicating these animals were probably flightless. The ventral keel or sternum was long and flat and most of the other supporting bones were solid, not hollow as one would associate them with most flying species of terrestrial vertebrates. Add to that the strange arrangement of the mouth and the pseudo-beak, it was evident to Gertz that these creatures did not hatch from any eggs. The point of the beak had no milk tooth to break its way out of the yolk sac and ultimately the eggshell.

  She studied the scans again, looking for anything that would put her on the right track, anything that would give her the clue she needed to understand the bird’s physiology. Even though she saw many things she was familiar with — cervical vertebrae, sternum, ulna and radius bones, scapulae, humerus, carpus and metacarpus structures — there was still much that defied description. her examination had only progressed to the dense structures and she had not even contemplated the soft masses yet.

  Gertz voice-activated a comm link in her helmet and asked one of her technicians to hurry up with the DNA analysis. She got only grunts for a reply. She had sent her lab a specimen scraping from the roof of the thing’s mouth. Damn. Waiting frustrated her. These new Navy ships could have used some better research equipment she lamented. At least updated or sophisticated sensors, scanners and test equipment that were all too common on Earth but just a pipe dream out in the boonies. At a cost of two million per kilo, hauling materiel out of Earth’s gravity well was too expensive for the fledgling Colonial Navy. They had to buy patent rights and build the stuff out here. Some of her equipment was first-rate, some was first-to-fail.

  But the Belt Loop and the Fringes presented her with the only environment to ply her trade. Those primitive life forms collected near Barnard’s star and Canno were billions of years away from star drive intelligence. Until now, only the Varson Empire had anything that could compete with Man. And as advanced as the Varsonians were, they proved no match to the Second Navy Fleet of Elber. That war had given Gertz a lot of material to study and she wound up publishing a few volumes of technical manuals on Varson physiology. She was staring down at the table and just letting her mind drift whichever way it wanted to go —

  It was time to stop fooling around. Gertz picked up her laser knife and thumbed it on. It was time to go in. The instant she touched the cutting tool to the front of the carcass, the thing sat up.

  Chapter 21

  Commander Davi Yorn made his way forward to the moving ladder that would take him to the passageway leading to the bridge. He was not so much miffed about his conversation with the captain as he was annoyed that the skipper would even bring it up. Uri Haad was one of the only persons left alive that really knew what he did when he was a Weapons Control Lieutenant on the CNS Mobile Bay during the war with the Varson Empire.

  Yorn grabbed the hand-hold and stepped onto the moving ladder and looked up. The thoughts of the war seemed to descend all around him even though he was moving in the opposite direction.

  He shook his head but the images aboard the doomed Mobile Bay would not go away even though it had been ten years in his past. Yorn regretted that he had to set the ship to self-destruct with all hands aboard. It wasn’t his fault that the Varsonian captain had out-maneuvered his own bridge officers and had commandeered the ship. It was not his fault that they had taken him prisoner but had not found the little remote control device he had hidden in his boot. The Varson plan had been simple: steal a Navy ship, take a few prisoners — hostages to be exact — then send the captured ship, guns blazing, right into the assembled Second Navy Fleet of Elber. If their plan had succeeded, it would have destroyed over fifty ships at a cost of 25,000 lives. Yorn detonated the Navy vessel before it was close enough to the Fleet to do any real damage. Three-hundred-and-fifty souls sacrificed for the good of the Navy. Souls that would follow him around for all eternity.

  He could still see the blossoming yellow and red rose of the Mobile Bay as the Varson shuttle boat made the jump to the fold. He had turned his head instinctively and thought he felt the first concussive waves touch the trailing edge of the little Varsonian skimmer. They were three weeks out of Galena-221 and only the miracle of Uriel Haad had saved him from what surely was going to be deadly interrogation and torture.

  Haad had followed the Varson ship through the folded space and once he saw the little ship make its involute spiral toward the central star and determined their exact destination he called in the troops. Before Yorn had suffered too much at the hands of his captors on a small rocky moonlet orbiting the second planet around Galena-221, Lieutenant Commander Uriel Haad and a whole shitload of armed men had successfully raided the Varsonian prison camp and freed the captives. It was in that battle that Haad had received his scars. A sentry, thought to have been killed in the raid, got up and shot Haad in the back, and as he fell the stuttering pulsed discharge beam the sentry had in his hand got off a last volley before he was cut in half by the rescuers. Haad had taken four months to recover from his wounds and as soon as he was able, he went back to war in the Fringes. Davi Yorn sat at a desk for a month before he was cleared of all wrong-doing in the destruction of the Mobile Bay. Its demise was deemed in the best interest of the war effort and some at Fleet had even proposed citations for bravery for Yorn. Ultimately that rush to decorate was quickly forgotten and no mention of the incident was ever inserted into his fitness reports.

  But by the time Haad returned to duty the war was pretty much over. The Varsons were unceremoniously routed and surrendered after the Navy nuked three of their seven worlds. Then the politicians took over, banishing the aggressors to their home planet and a few of their remaining outposts way beyond the Fringes. The Colonial Navy had a flotilla of picket ships patrolling the edge of Varsonian space with standing orders to shoot to kill should any ship from the Varson Empire venture into the Fringes. So far, the truce had held and there was even some talk of sending a trade envoy to Galena-221 and the Varson home world.

  Davi Yorn cleared his head and stepped off the ladder and turned right. In forty-five seconds the XO was piped onto the bridge and familiar surroundings.

  The image of the Mobile Bay blossoming silently and violently into the void was slow to fade from his thoughts.
r />   * * *

  It took the better part of two hours to figure out the alien electronics. After carefully swapping out component boards, it was discovered that the power source to the bridge was indeed filtered direct current flowing at roughly twenty-four volts and being stepped-down to half that for some of the lesser boards. Max Hansen and her two techs discovered the boards for the lighting, ship systems control, life support, and the communications system. The voice and data links were digital and showed a degree of sophistication that was unusual for a ship that must have been launched thousands of years ago. Olson rigged up a few patch cords and Johns continued his probe of the electronics with his testing meters and voltage detectors. He had found two huge cables snaking below the bridge but as of yet he still had not found the power source for the deck.

  Using a switch on one of the panels, Hansen was able to get a frequency that seemed logical and using her suit mike to confirm the connection, she patched the alien board into the Christi.

  “Lieutenant Hansen here, you reading this Mister Corman?”

  Static.

  Hansen adjusted what she thought was a gain control and called again. Strange alien glyphs flashed on a little screen below her hand. She had been able to decipher the simple base-eight characters and readjusted the beat-frequency modulator. From all outward appearances, the worm broadcasted in single sideband.

  “Ensign Corman, Lieutenant Hansen here. You reading this?”

  A voice swam out of the static. “. . . Hansen, I’ve got a lock on your signal. One five eight point six. Do you read?”

  The twenty heads on the alien bridge snapped around and looked at the communications officer. “Okay, Sid. Got you five-by-five,” she said.

  They chatted for a few more minutes and satisfied that her link to the Christi was solid, Hansen moved on to other tasks. She still had to try to find some kind of ship’s log or video system. Maybe even a recording device that might shed some light on what had happened on this bridge, what series of events crippled the worm and drove some of its occupants to the killing frenzy in their hypersleep chamber.

  On the other side of the bridge, Haslip was directing her troops in assorted duties with their main thrust being to extricate the eleven surviving members of the alien crew from their sleep capsules. They had been able to isolate the power source on one of the bubbles and using a portable power supply from the Christi the techs had then been able to effect a transfer of the capsules from the worm’s voltage. It took an hour for her to get all of those chambers separated from their bases and readied for transport. While Max was looking for her recording device, Haslip directed the first of the capsules off the bridge on a floating cart.

  Six worms and five of those alien birds were still functioning.

  Perry Bone, now back on duty, filmed and recorded each and every centimeter of the alien bridge. The collected images would be enough to keep a fleet of exobiologists and anthropologists busy for the next century.

  “Commander Haslip, Chief Dawks here.”

  Chief Petty Officer Andi Dawks was part of the machinist’s mates contingent working toward the aft end of the worm. He had a team of mechanics, machinery repairmen, hull maintenance techs and electronic techs touring the back of the boat. They had found two hatches aft of the cargo hold and after disabling three more of those cutting beams they were progressing apace.

  “Go ahead, chief,” the commander said.

  “Ahh, ma’am, looks like we got an engine of some sort back here. Thing’s huge and, so far, we can’t make out what kind of propulsion system it is. Got it on a feed back to engineering and maybe they can come up with an idea.”

  “Is it active at all?”

  “Negative. I see a couple lights winking on and off but other than that, she’s dead in the water.”

  “Understood, chief. Keep me posted.”

  The chief signed off and Haslip returned to her routine: the second capsule was being lifted out.

  * * *

  Milli Gertz spun away from the bird and accidently knocked her little equipment table over, scattering a dozen hand tools across the metal deck. As she flung out one of her arms to steady herself her sleeve caught on the curved talons of the alien. She instinctively ripped her arm away and that movement tore her suit and gouged a three-inch runnel of flesh from her left forearm. She howled in pain.

  Gertz threw the laser scalpel down and grabbed her arm. In her mind’s eye she saw the desiccated thing swiveling its head towards her. She was applying pressure to the wound on her arm and refused to look up at the dissecting table. Had she done so, she would have seen nothing but a dead bird reacting to rigor mortis.

  “Hey! You okay in there?” one of her lab techs shouted into the comm stack.

  “Don’t come in, don’t come in! I’ve torn my suit!”

  “Get back, get back,” someone else said in an excited voice.

  Gertz finally took her eyes off her arm and looked at the examining table. What had happened finally dawned on her. She had touched her torch down on just the right spot to pierce one of the many air chambers in the dead aliens chest, releasing alien air and causing the animal to contract even further. Since she had its legs clamped down to the table, the tendons in the dead bird had caused it to rise.

  “Call Doc Isaacs,” she said in her suit mike. “Get a broad-spectrum antibiotic series up here. I think I’m going to need stitches, too.”

  Gertz heard the techs paging sick bay. She returned her gaze to her forearm and winced when she saw the dark red blood oozing out from between the gloved fingers of her right hand. She kept pressure on the wound and waited.

  * * *

  Inactivity was not one of Har’s best subjects and his thoughts were growing darker the longer he waited. If only that stupid rating would get up and go do something. Surely he must have had some kind of shit to perform or monitor. With all of the activity on the ship now, how could that guy just sit there?

  Young Hansen was looking out of an air vent on deck eight. He had been on the move for almost twenty-four hours by his dead reckoning. He had observed three shift changes so he knew his accounting was semi-accurate. Also that probably meant that his mom would be out of her skull right about now. Or whenever she paid her daily visit to the supply hold, his hidey-hole. He knew she was alright after that loud scream; he had heard some of her broadcasts to the bridge subsequent to that trauma.

  But he couldn’t worry about such sundry things right now. He had his eyes on the prize. A handgun. Electric. Big and Bad.

  All he had to do, if that stupid seaman ever got off his fat ass and left the room, was to lower his little ropes and snag the weapon with the hook on the end of his bungee cord. Ha! Easy as pie, he thought. Push the vent cover down, lower the cord, snag the piece by the trigger guard, and voilà, there it is!

  After waiting another six hours, actually only six minutes for grown-ups, the rating left the compartment. Har made his move. He pushed out the vent cover and watched a small cascade of dust settle below him. He got his cords ready. Suddenly the hatch to the compartment opened again. The rube was back!

  Har Hansen held his breath. All the guy had to do was look up and he would immediately notice the open vent cover. Or all he had to do was walk over to his desk and look at the thin layer of dust that had not been there only moments before, which in turn would cause him to look up and —

  The seaman walked over to a filing cabinet and rummaged around in one of the drawers. Har didn’t recall the exact number of seconds he could hold his breath, but he was getting close to setting a new record for himself. After what seemed like another hour of steady breath-holding, Har saw the man leave again. He let out a little scream as he gulped in the precious air.

  Not wanting to blow this chance, his restored lungs helped him return his mind to the task at hand. Just as he had imagined it, the rope part was easy. His bungee cord was lowered and as he ran out of length on the first one, he hooked the second cord to it and continued
to lower them both. Once the first hook bottomed out about ten centimeters from the gun, Har gave his end a slight wiggle and after three tries the hook slapped against the gun’s trigger housing. Har smiled.

  By twisting his end of the rope he was able to engage the hook on the other end. He pulled back slightly and the weapon moved accordingly. Then a dangerous thought struck him. Suppose the hook grabbed onto the trigger itself? What if the thing went off while he was lifting it and blew a hole in something? Was he taking an enormous chance? He didn’t know, but he didn’t stop. He knew that to be successful in his command duties, he certainly had to take some risks, hadn’t he? He pulled again and the gun was now directly below him. Blowing out a huge anticipatory breath, he lugged it up slowly, careful not to let it jiggle around too much. It rose muzzle first giving him a good look at the two contacts on the business end of the weapon. He had heard his mom say that these electronic blasters were state-of-the-art. All one had to do was aim and pull the trigger and a bright blue bolt of lightning would leap from the front and continue striking until the battery died or one released the trigger. That sounded simple enough, right?

  When the gun — formally known as the M2-A2 Urban Assault Weapon manufactured by an Earthside company known as General Electric — finally was within twenty centimeters of his perch he reached for it. Har’s small fingers wrapped around the butt of the gun and in his glee at having successfully getting the thing in his hands, he almost dropped it!

  He let out a little yelp and lunged for the twisting gun. Finally he had it under control.

  The next thirty minutes were spent with the reader and when he was satisfied that he knew enough about the gun — no, the M2-A2 UAW to use proper Navy approved nomenclature — Har Hansen pushed on.