B009NFP2OW EBOK

by Douglas, Ian

  “Maybe the Sh’daar have been busy inventing stuff for the last twenty years.”

  “Maybe . . . but not likely. Remember, the Sh’daar are extremely conservative, not given to tinkering with established designs or technologies. Intelligence thinks these . . . these mirror ships are something new. A new species . . . a new civilization we haven’t encountered before.”

  “All the more reason to find out who they are, what they want . . . and why the hell they destroyed three of our ships without warning.”

  “I agree with you.”

  “Okay . . . so what would you advise, Mr. President?”

  “Are you asking because I am president of the USNA?”

  “No, sir. I’m asking because you were once CO CBG-18. And before that, you were Captain of the America. You made command decisions that were not exactly approved by Geneva.”

  Koenig seemed thoughtful for a moment. Was he thinking? Or remembering? “I am not going to undercut the authority of Admiral Steiger, son.”

  “I would not expect you to, sir.”

  “All I will say . . . all I can say, is that you will need to use your best judgment. You’re going out where Geneva can’t keep a tight leash on Admiral Steiger or you . . . and neither can Columbus. You’ll have to use your discretion, do what you think is right. That’s what I did.”

  Twenty years before, Koenig had been declared a rogue by the Confederation government when he’d violated operational orders and taken the carrier battlegroup off to face the Sh’daar on his own. They’d sent a pan-European squadron out to bring him home. Had his gamble not worked, he would likely still be in a Confederation correctional institution on Mars or Triton.

  Assuming, of course, that Earth and the human species still survived.

  “Admiral Steiger is a good man,” Koenig added after a moment. “He knows what he’s doing. Follow his lead, support his decisions, and watch his back. That’s what a good flag captain does.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Beyond that, all I will tell you is that when you get out there, your duty is to your conscience . . . and to the human species. Not to Geneva, not to Columbus, and not to me . . . because you’re going to be well beyond the reach of any human government.”

  “Yes, sir.” Gray hesitated. “It occurred to me, though . . .”

  “What?”

  “These new orders put over a quarter of the USNA fleet under the direct command of the Confederation, and most of the rest of our ships are scattered the hell and gone across seven star systems. If Geneva was going to try some sort of a power grab, the time to do it would be when CBG-40 is nineteen light years away. At 36 Ophiuchi.”

  “Believe me, Captain, that’s occurred to us as well.” He didn’t add but that is my responsibility. He didn’t need to.

  The unspoken words hung within the virtual meeting room as President Koenig’s image began to fade out.

  “Good luck, Sandy,” Koenig said.

  The use of his nickname startled him. “Thank you, sir.”

  And then he was back on the bridge of the star carrier America.

  Chapter Seven

  11 November 2424

  TC/USNA CVS America

  USNA Naval Base

  Quito Synchorbital

  0715 hours, TFT

  America was leaving port.

  Grav tugs with magnetic grapples extended gently eased the huge ship clear of the docking gantries, working her well clear of the delicate traceries of the synchorbital port facilities. Her own maneuvering drives were powerful enough that a careless drift left or right, high or low, could collapse beams or support structures and cause as much damage as a kinetic-kill warhead.

  Gray, immersed in the navigational virtual feed, noted four of the largest Confederation ships standing off a few thousand kilometers in the distance—an unspoken threat, perhaps. If America made some untoward or unexpected move, she might well find herself under the guns and missiles of her nominal allies.

  “Tugs releasing,” helm officer Alicia Byrnes reported. “We are drifting free at twenty-eight meters per second and clear of the gantry.”

  “Very well,” Gray replied. “Bring us about to the proper heading.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  As America pivoted slowly in space, swinging about to face just to one side of Earth’s sun, Gray opened another feed, downloading the available data on their destination.

  Planetary Data Download

  Arianrhod

  PLANET: 36 Ophiuchi AIII

  NAME: Arianrhod, Silverwheel

  COORDINATES: RA 17h 15m 21.7s, Dec -26° 34’ 16.32”, distance 19.5 ly

  TYPE: Terrestrial/rocky superEarth; reducing atmosphere

  MEAN ORBITAL RADIUS: 0.766 AU; Orbital period: 265d 9h 40m

  INCLINATION: 15.1° 23’ 12.2”; ROTATIONAL PERIOD: 12h 28m 08s

  MASS: 5.084 Earth; EQUATORIAL DIAMETER: 21448.4 km = 1.7 Earth

  MEAN PLANETARY DENSITY: 5.62 g/cc = 1.02 Earth

  SURFACE GRAVITY: 1.8 G; ESCAPE VELOCITY: 19.4 km/sec

  HYDROSPHERE PERCENTAGE: 95.7%; CLOUD COVER: 50%; ALBEDO: 0.35

  SURFACE TEMPERATURE RANGE: ~-15°C – 45°C.

  SURFACE ATMOSPHERIC PRESSURE: ~5095 millibars = 5.028 atmospheres

  PERCENTAGE COMPOSITION: CO2 48.1; O2 14.1; SO2 9.6; NH4 8.63; H2S 7.1; N2 5.95; SO3 4.15; CH3 2.1; Ar 0.2; others <700 ppm

  AGE: 0.9 billion years

  BIOLOGY: C, N, H, S8, O, Se, H2O, CS2; Free-floating and motile photoautotrophs, chemoautotrophs, and chemoorganoheterotrophs in liquid water. Anomalous biology may be due either to periodic flares from parent star drastically accelerating the local biosphere’s evolution, or to biological contamination by unknown alien visitation within the past few million years. . . .

  COLONIAL HISTORY: Silverwheel research colony established in 2278 under auspices of the Confederation Xenoplanetological Directorate to study local biology and causes of anomalously rapid evolution . . .

  The reasoning behind changing the mission objective to Arianrhod was, frankly, bewildering as far as Gray was concerned. The colony of Osiris—70 Ophiuchi—was closer to Earth and, therefore, more of a threat. Presumably, the invaders at 36 Oph wouldn’t have had time to fortify their conquest—they’d had twenty years to do so at Osiris—but in terms of the system’s usefulness it didn’t make sense. Osiris was a far more habitable world than Arianrhod and, twenty years ago, had had a much larger population. Arianrhod’s surface gravity of 1.8 Gs was no joke unless you were a genaltered transhuman, and even then the problems of creating an enhanced subspecies able to endure that environment for more than a very short time were daunting enough that there had to be a significant reason to make the effort . . . something more than research that could have been conducted from orbit.

  And there was still the matter of the arrival of unknowns at the Black Rosette.

  But all of that, Gray knew, was now decidedly SEP—someone else’s problem. The USNA military had a long, long tradition, one going all the way back to the original United States, of encouraging independent thought up and down within the hierarchy of the command structure. Both enlisted personnel and junior officers were actually encouraged to ask questions . . . and to question orders. Why must we take that hill? Why are we retreating? Why are we fighting this war? Why?

  That kind of democratization of the battle force could cause a hell of a lot of headaches for the high command and the nation’s political leadership, but it made for a stronger, healthier, and more self-reliant war-fighting force. It was also an approach almost unknown in the military traditions of other Confederation member-states—the European Unions, the Brazilian Empire, the various squabbling republics of los Estados de las Americas del Sur, the North India Federation. And with the Confeds preempting the USNA battle group and strong-arming it into their operation,
questions by mere ship commanders would no longer be tolerated. Gray had been taking a rather large risk by going to Koenig, but if Confederation Security had been tracking his link communications, there’d been no sign. He was still the captain of the America.

  “Captain,” Steiger’s voice said in his command link, “Admiral Delattre has given the command. We are clear to accelerate.”

  “Very well, Admiral. Helm initiate Acceleration Program One.”

  “Initiating Program One, aye, aye, Captain.”

  America began to move forward, falling toward the stuttering, on-again, off-again knot of intense gravitational warping projected ahead of her titanic mass. Bootstrapping, the technique was called, a seeming violation of the common-sense of basic physics, but the ship’s velocity continued to increase as an intense singularity was repeatedly projected and switched off just beyond the vast, round shield of her forward cap at a rate of some hundreds of times per second. The fabric of spacetime around the ship began to reshape itself as America slid forward, leaving a fast dwindling Earth astern.

  Gray decided that what he most objected to was Delattre’s high-handed commandeering of the America as his flagship. Yes, America was a Confederation warship first, a USNA vessel second but that had always been little more than a technicality of intraconfederation law. Twenty years ago, Admiral Koenig had had Confed political officers looking over his shoulder on the flag bridge but when he’d sent one packing nothing had been done about it, nothing overt, at any rate.

  Geneva might have decided that Steiger wouldn’t dare do the same to a Confederation naval service admiral. . . .

  But the system was clumsy and inefficient, adding another layer to the battlegroup’s chain of command. It was also humiliating, as if Geneva’s military hierarchy just didn’t trust the Americans.

  Gray was forced to admit, though, that they might have just cause on that point. Anti-Confederation sentiment was at a fever’s pitch back home; he remembered the crowds celebrating Koenig’s re-election.

  But in Gray’s book Jason Steiger was not Alexander Koenig. He was a good officer, a good CO, but Gray couldn’t see him kicking against the command structure. He would follow orders, so long as they were legal.

  Following the software instructions of Program One, America’s acceleration gradually but steadily increased. Earth all but vanished astern, a tiny blue star, now, with the moon a minute attendant. The sun appeared at first to lie almost directly ahead, but as minute followed minute it began drifting off to the right, swelled huge for an instant, and then flashed past on America’s starboard beam.

  At this time of the year, Sol appeared to be in the constellation Scorpio, right next door to the constellation Ophiuchus; in another two weeks it would actually track through Ophiuchus—the so-called thirteenth constellation of the Zodiac—much to the embarrassment of traditional astrologers, and in the first week of December would pass quite close to 36 Ophiuchi, at least as viewed from Earth.

  The Earth was now drowned out by the sun’s glare astern, and the familiar stars of Scorpius, Ophiuchus, and the teapot of Sagittarius now hung directly ahead. Giant Antares hung a little to starboard, its ruby hue now beginning to blue-shift toward orange as America’s velocity began creeping up on c. The navigational tank showed the rest of the battlegroup—the entire Confederation battlegroup of sixty-nine other warships spread out in a rough cone formation around, behind, and ahead of the America.

  Hours later, they reached the orbit of Neptune and the so-called “flat metric,” where the gravitational effects of the sun were slight enough that the fleet could switch over to Alcubierre Drive. The gravitational drive projectors extended their effect, curving local space around each individual ship until it existed within a tiny, walled-off bubble of space apart from normal spacetime. Within metaspace, as the bubbles’ interiors were called, each ship remained at legal, sublight velocities relative to the space within which they were embedded . . . but there were no such restrictions on bubbles of space. Indeed, during the first instants of the big bang, space itself had expanded at what amounted to many, many trillions of times the speed of light, carrying matter and energy along with it.

  America and the other ships of the battlegroup couldn’t manage velocities like that, not with the vacuum energy available to them. Drive technology had improved considerably in the past twenty years, however, and they could now manage the equivalent of about four hundred light years per day. At that rate, they would have been able to reach 36 Ophiuchi in about an hour and ten minutes.

  The energy requirements for that fast of a metaspace transition, however, were literally astronomical. Battlegroup America would make the passage in twenty-five hours, a pseudovelocity of “only” about 18.7 light years per day.

  It wouldn’t be long enough. Gray had been going over the Confederation plan for entering the 36 Ophiuchi system, and he didn’t like what he saw one bit.

  Slan Protector Vigilant

  Low Orbit, 36 Ophiuchi AIII

  1535 hours, TFT

  Its name was a high-pitched chatter of clicks and chirps, but an Agletsch translation of the sound-symbol would have been something close to “Clear Chiming Bell.” The Slan—that name, too, was the product of Agletsch translation, a shortened version of the phrase “Dwellers in Night”—could see visible light after a fashion, but poorly, in infrared frequencies only, and without depth or detail. They relied instead on high-frequency sound to image their surroundings clearly. Clear Chiming Bell was listening to the view of the alien planet below.

  Vigilant had been orbiting the ocean world since their arrival nearly sixty ch’k’!tt’cht earlier. Clear Chiming Bell spread its heads farther apart to better appreciate the globe’s delicate, cloud-wreathed beauty.

  The Slan had been a long time in reaching space . . . sixties upon sixties upon sixties upon slow-marching sixties of !cht’k’k’k’!cht, their homeworld’s years. It had been sixties of thirty-six hundreds of their years more before they were even aware of the stars in their endless night skies, and sixties of sixties years beyond that before they learned what stars were. The single light-sensing organ each Slan possessed high on its torso between the rubbery stalks that held its !k’ch’t’t organs could sense differences in light intensity, could tell the difference between light and dark, but could make out only the very brightest of stars in their night skies.

  Fortunately, their home sun was located close to an open cluster, some hundreds of stars in a loose grouping the Slan had called The Mystery. Those vague and blurred blobs of light had drawn them on, leading them to develop technologies that could convert even weak electromagnetic wavelengths to clearly visible patterns of sound.

  The discovery of the galaxy, of the far vaster universe around them, had transformed the species forever.

  “Lord!” Clear Chiming Bell’s second-in-command, Sighing Wind, called over the bridge comm. “We have found a living alien and captured it!”

  “Indeed?” Clear Chiming Bell replied. This was excellent news. “On the planet’s surface?”

  “No, Lord. It appears to be a pilot of one of their fighters, damaged during the battle. One of our scouts discovered it on an outbound trajectory, and took it under tow. It is being brought on board now.”

  Numerous members of the alien species—designated as Nah-voh-grah-nu-greh Trafhyedrefschladreh by the Sh’daar—had been recovered, both in past engagements and on the poisonous surface of the world below, but always they’d been torn and lifeless. Clear Chiming Bell wanted a living specimen.

  Knowing one’s enemy always was the key to victory. There were puzzling aspects of these creatures. For one thing, they did not appear to have !k’ch’t’t organs for beaming sound at objects in their vicinity. This would represent a serious handicap for the creatures, not being able to form detailed sonic images of their surroundings.

  “Once you are certain it is not distressed b
y our environment, bring it to the command compartment. Protect it! We want it unharmed.”

  “Yes, Lord.”

  Trafhyedrefschladreh: the Agletsch sound patterns created as a common language among those Sh’daar client species that could use them meant roughly “carbon-oxygen-water,” the basis of the alien biology. Slan, too, were carbon-based, breathed oxygen, and used water as a biological solvent and transport mechanism. The aliens might not be so different from the Dwellers in Night after all. It was odd, however. The planet below possessed far too little oxygen and far too much carbon dioxide to support oxygen breathers. The sulfur dioxide was probably a poison to this type of life as well, as it was for the Slan. What were they doing here if they could not breathe the atmosphere?

  “Lord,” another subordinate said. “There is news. The enemy fleet is in motion. Its flight path suggests that it may be coming here.”

  The Sh’daar masters had identified the home system of the aliens, and Clear Chiming Bell had dispatched a cloud of sensor drones to its outskirts, each smaller than one of its projection heads. The drones were programmed to listen and wait, and to dispatch one of their number back to the fleet at high velocity if any significant movement of the enemy was detected.

  “As we hoped,” Clear Chiming Bell replied. “The trap is set?”

  “It is, Lord. Half a sixty of ships, in five positions, powered down and silent. They will appear to be background debris.”

  “Alert them all, then maintain communications silence. You expect the enemy when?”

  “Within less than a k’k’k’cht’t, Lord.”

  “Then we will be ready for their arrival.”

  TC/USNA CVS America

  In transit

  1725 hours, TFT

  America was ten hours out on her programmed flight, which put her just under nine light years from Earth. There was nothing to be seen by the ship’s sensors, however, no view of slow-passing stars, no impossible starbow of velocity-distorted light, as appeared ahead of ships pushing close to c. Wrapped tightly in its Alcubierre bubble of metaspace, America effectively was outside of the familiar universe of stars and matter and light. Even the other vessels of the fleet, the nearest technically only a few kilometers distant, were completely beyond the star carrier’s sensor arrays.