The Reticuli Deception (Adventures of Hannibal Carson Book 2)

by Alastair Mayer

“It’s a pity that Hannibal isn’t here,” Marten said. Jackie wasn’t sure whether it was because he was concerned for Carson’s welfare or because Carson was missing out on something he’d been seeking for years. Possibly both.

  “Hannibal?” The Kesh’s feathers became more erect, like an animal pricking up its ears.

  “Hannibal Carson, the third member of our party,” Marten said. “The Velkaryans grabbed him.” Jackie wondered if telling the Kesh that was wise.

  “Velkaryans?”

  Oh, so they didn’t know who the Velkaryans were? Then perhaps they hadn’t been observing humans that closely after all. Or was this a trick question? “A radical human political and religious group. They’ve given us trouble before, including on Chara III,” she said.

  “And they’re in this system?”

  “Yes, that is . . .” Jackie turned to Marten. “You’re sure that was a human ship you saw?”

  “No question, and I saw two humans physically grab Carson after he fell.”

  “Then yes, they’re in system, unless they’ve already left. Didn’t you detect them?”

  “It’s entirely possible. Excuse me a moment.” Ketz touched a panel on the table and spoke in a sibilant language which Jackie didn’t recognize. A different voice speaking the same language came back from a speaker embedded in the panel. “Yes, the ship was spotted. It hasn’t landed for long enough to worry about, not yet.”

  “We have to get Carson back!”

  “What would you suggest? Even if we were to choose to intervene in what is apparently a strictly human affair, what can we do beyond ask?”

  “Is this ship armed?”

  “That is irrelevant. If it were, and again, if we chose to intervene, how could we attack the Velkaryan ship without injuring Carson?”

  “I don’t suppose you could teleport him?”

  Ketzshanass’s brow feathers waggled. It must be a sign of amusement, Jackie decided. “As in ‘beam me up Scotty?’” he said. “We’re not magic. There’s no such thing at the macro level. Nor do we have stun rays. Not that we wish to get involved anyway.”

  The cultural reference surprised her. It confirmed that they’d been watching humans for a while. “The Velkaryans are dangerous,” she said. “Carson would be a helpful ally.”

  “Dangerous to whom, and why would we need an ally?”

  “There’s something out here you’re scared of, isn’t there?”

  “The automated defenses—”

  “Are pretty useless if two human ships could make it all the way in-system and land on this planet without being fired upon.”

  Ketz’s brow crest feathers were not waggling now, in fact they were flattened back against his head, and his eyes had narrowed. Jackie had the impression of a cobra sizing up prey, or an opponent.

  The feathers relaxed, just a little. “You were saying, about the Velkaryans.”

  “They’re xenophobes. Part of their philosophy is that the terraformed planets were created for humans. They pursued us to Chara III looking for weapons technology. If they knew you existed, they’d fight you.” The words were out of her lips when Jackie realized that might have been the wrong thing to say.

  “All the more reason for us to avoid them, is it not?”

  Jackie thought fast. “They probably already know you’re here. This pyramid isn’t exactly stealthy.” At least, it hadn’t been when they’d seen it . . . but that didn’t really prove anything, did it? “Carson has been studying them, and your ancestors, for a long time. If you wanted to contact us, even unofficially—especially unofficially—he’s the man you want. He can give you insights and options.” She hoped she wasn’t overselling him. But if they got him back they could worry about that later.

  Ketz shook his head. Did that mean the same to the Kesh, or was it just for her benefit? “I don’t think—”

  “Did I mention that my ship had two kilograms of antimatter aboard?”

  The feathers flattened back down. Marten darted an alarmed look at her. Both of them said “What?”

  Jackie wasn’t sure without doing the math, but she estimated that it was about the equivalent of a twenty megaton nuclear bomb. And the Kesh had brought it aboard their ship. She had their attention.

  “It’s an emergency range extender. Quite safe . . .” she made an elaborate show of checking the time her omni “. . . for a while longer anyway, if I can’t check the containment system.”

  “Why would you mention this now?” Ketz asked. Marten looked as though he wanted to ask the same thing.

  “Just so you know that we’re on the clock here. You can let us go and give me my ship, and we’ll take our own chances with the Velkaryans. Of course if they get the better of us, then they’ll have two kilograms of antimatter. It’s not something I’d really want them to have. Or it might go off. I’m sure that would attract the attention of your defense drones, although I’d probably be past caring.”

  “You are threatening us?”

  “Not at all. I’m in no position to make threats because I don’t know what you’re capable of. I’m just laying out some of the natural consequences of things as they stand.” That and bluffing like crazy. “If you have other information that may alter my understanding, now would be the time to share it.”

  Ketz’s response was to mash a fore-digit down on the comm panel and carry on an extended hissing conversation with whoever was on the other end. It almost sounded like a cat fight.

  When it was over, he continued in English. “We’ll escort you to your ship and release you and it. We’re currently in high orbit over the planet.”

  When did that happen? wondered Jackie. She hadn’t felt any movement, and they still had gravity.

  “Do not try to engage the Velkaryan ship. Wait for us on the far side of the moon. We will attempt to retrieve Carson.”

  “What? How?”

  “Never mind. Now please, take your ship and its antimatter away from here.”

  Wow, thought Jackie, that worked better than I’d expected. Although they still didn’t have Carson back, or any proof that the Kesh would do anything about it.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  “What was that about Jackie?” demanded Marten when they were safely away. “Do you really have antimatter aboard, and do you really expect them to rescue Carson? What were you going to do, detonate it?”

  “Yes, I don’t know, and no. The antimatter really is a range extender. There’s a modified power plant below deck. I can’t easily detonate it because it’s divided up for storage—although I suppose once it got started it might well chain-react as the containments failed in the blast. As for Carson . . . if they don’t then we’re no worse off than before they picked us up, and at least we have the Sophie back. Maybe we can work something out.”

  “So we go to the moon and wait?”

  “That and talk. There’s more here going on than meets the eye. I want your take on what Ketzshanass said.”

  “He did seem to be hiding something. Some of his answers were evasive or ambiguous.”

  She angled the ship toward the edge of the moon, which showed as a crescent almost directly opposite the planet, and said “Hold on.”

  “What?” Marten settled into his seat and grabbed the arms.

  Roberts touched a control and the ship warped for a few milliseconds, placing it beyond the moon. “I wanted to get here quickly,” she said as she rotated the Sophie and applied thrust to enter orbit.

  “You’re not worried about our warp pulse triggering the defenses?”

  “Only a bit. We’re not going to be where we came out, and I don’t think there’s any way to track us in warp anyway.” She looked over at Marten, who showed evident stress, clenching and unclenching his fists and breathing deeply. That was probably just the zero-gee. “I’m going to land us on the far side. It’ll be a few minutes.”

  The relief in Marten’s face was obvious. “Thank you.”

  Z1R III was nearing the moon’s horizon behind the
m when Jackie noticed certain monitor readings begin to climb. “That’s odd,” she said, and keyed another panel to bring up more data.

  “What is?”

  “I’m getting some strange . . .” her voice trailed off as she looked at the numbers. That could almost be— “Hang on! Emergency thrust!” She slammed a control forwards and dived the ship towards the moon’s surface, feeling herself pushed back into the control chair. Behind them, the planet dipped below the horizon.

  As Roberts watched, her attention split between the monitor numbers and her flying, the numbers dropped back to normal. She eased up on the controls.

  “What was that all about?” a shaken Marten asked.

  “Some kind of energy surge was building up. Outside the ship.”

  “Another ship?”

  “It didn’t look like that kind of signature. It looked more like somebody warming up an accelerator, or a particle beam. Remember Ketzshanass’s warning about defense systems?”

  “Remind me never to complain about your flying again.”

  Roberts grinned. “You never have in the past, just the weightless parts.”

  “We’re safe now?”

  “We’re not in line of sight of the planet, and the readings have dropped off. Is that good enough?”

  “It will have to do.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞.

  They touched down in a crater about two kilometers across, with an even floor. Jackie put the ship down in the shadow of the ring wall.

  “Okay. That won’t conceal us from anyone with instruments, but we won’t be obvious to the casual observer.”

  “Expecting many casual observers?” Marten wondered aloud.

  “Heh, no. But there are already far too many interested observers: the Velkaryans, the Kesh, and whoever left these ‘automated defenses’ Ketzshanass mentioned.” She looked at Marten, perhaps his alien point of view, or archeological background, could make some sense of this. It sure didn’t make much to her. “Any idea what’s going on?”

  “No, but we can approach it logically.” Jackie remembered that Marten was a college professor back on Taprobane. She hoped this wasn’t going to turn into a tutorial.

  “Okay, I’m listening.”

  “We’re reasonably sure that Carson was taken by Velkaryans. That was a human-built ship and humans who took him. I can’t imagine who else would be out here and would do that.”

  “Prospectors might be out here, but why grab him?”

  “Indeed. It could also be random tomb raiders, but this is probably too distant to be very profitable, and again, why take Carson?”

  “So let’s assume Velkaryans, and that they somehow followed us here from Verdigris. What about the Kesh?”

  “We do seem to keep running into them, or their ships. The explanation that they’re observing us makes sense, but why here?”

  “This is obviously a system of interest to them. They were in-system when we arrived, unless they knew we were coming here,” Roberts said.

  “The strange signals you picked up, and the alleged automated defenses. Could they have signaled the Kesh to come from elsewhere?”

  Jackie shook her head. “No. Even if they were at Zeta 2 Reticuli it would take thirty to thirty-five days for a radio signal to reach there.”

  “Faster than light signaling?”

  “We didn’t detect anything like a message torpedo warping out, but I suppose we could have missed it.”

  “What about faster than light radio?”

  “Doesn’t exist.”

  “Could it?”

  “N-no . . .” Jackie wasn’t so sure about that. Of course it wouldn’t be radio by definition; radio was an EM wave the same as light. Something else? Not in normal space, lightspeed was still a hard limit there, and she didn’t think there was any way to create a warp bubble without some kind of generator inside that bubble. Then she realized that if the alien disintegrator had worked the way they’d thought it had, that couldn’t be true; there had to be a way to do just that. But the data on how fast a gravitational wave propagated through the hidden dimensions, the ones which bled off gravitational energy from a warp field, was very sketchy. Could it be possible?

  “I don’t think so,” she continued. “We don’t even have a theory for it. Even if they did have FTL radio, they couldn’t have been any further away than Z2R. They must have been in-system.”

  “The size of that ship, it’s almost a space station. Garrison duty wouldn’t be too uncomfortable.”

  Marten was right. They could probably hang around for years in that thing without worrying about landing. But why?

  “What did you and Carson find in the ruins? Any clues?”

  “It looked as though there had been two separate waves of destruction, many decades or even a century or two apart. Impossible to tell exactly without some baseline data on local erosion rates, what materials the buildings were made of, and so on.”

  “Huh.” Jackie pondered this. Two wars? Two attacks? Two separate clusters of impact events? The latter might make sense with a large meteoroid stream on a multi-decade orbit, but why wouldn’t the inhabitants have rebuilt in the interim? Two unrelated events? No, that would be improbable. They needed more information. “Go on,” she told Marten.

  “We didn’t find much in the way of artifacts for personal or daily use, mostly just the buildings and some built-in furnishings. It had been cleared out, but we don’t know if that was before, between or after the waves of destruction. The structure stairway suggested they might have larger feet and shorter legs in proportion to humans or timoans.”

  Well, that was something. “Like the Kesh perhaps?” Ketzshanass had seemed taller than her sitting down, but about the same height standing up. More of his height must have in his torso rather than his legs.

  Marten looked thoughtful. “I’m afraid I wasn’t paying much attention to Ketzshanass’s feet. Silly of me. But from what I remember, I wouldn’t absolutely rule it out. On the other hand the stairs could be that way for some other reason. Carson thought so.”

  “But still, as a working assumption, this is either the Kesh home world, or it’s one they colonized.”

  “Subject to revision, yes. If it isn’t, then there’s yet another species of spacefaring alien to consider. Either way raises yet more questions. We really need more data.”

  “Okay. Is any of this going to help get Hannibal back?”

  Marten looked glum, or that’s how Jackie interpreted the expression. “I don’t see how. Do you think the Kesh will retrieve him? And how?”

  “Unless they’re lying about teleports or stun beams, I don’t know. If they are armed, attacking the Velkaryan ship is just as likely to get Hannibal killed.”

  “Do you suppose there’s anything to the Betty Hill abduction story?”

  “What? Why?” The question surprised her.

  “They might be able to use whatever technology on the Velkaryans that they used to abduct, and then wipe the memory of, the Hills. They managed to bring this ship aboard theirs, after all, perhaps they could do the same thing with the Velkaryans.”

  Roberts considered that. There were a lot of ifs in that scenario, starting with whether or not there was anything to the Hill story and whether the Kesh had been responsible for it. “They’re likely to be more wary about bringing ships aboard now that they know they might contain antimatter.”

  “You suppose the Velkaryans have antimatter?”

  “Probably not, that’s highly controlled. But the Kesh have no way of knowing, so they might choose to play it safe.”

  “So what are we going to do, just sit here?”

  “Hell no.” Roberts thought for a few moments. “The first thing to do is send a message torpedo back to Ducayne with a copy of my logs and flight recorder data . . . just in case we don’t make it back.”

  Marten nodded. “Agreed. And then?”

  “Then let’s go check out some of the fresh craters on this side of the moon. If we don’t he
ar from the Kesh in a little while, maybe we’ll go back to the planet. From the instruments, the Velk are still in-system, probably still in orbit over the planet.”

  “Is there something you’re looking to find in the craters?”

  “If they’re not meteor impact craters, perhaps some idea of what did cause them, and when. There’s clearly more to what went on in this system than Ketzshanass was willing to tell us.”

  “All right. But one thing—”

  “Yes?”

  “Can we cruise on thrusters rather than going orbital?” There was a pleading tone in Marten’s voice. “The gravity . . .”

  Roberts checked her fuel levels and made a rapid calculation. There was enough for a couple of days thrust at this moon’s meager gravity, if she wasn’t worried about cooling the exhaust. She just had to keep their horizontal speed down so they wouldn’t go ballistic by accident. “Sure,” she said, and made ready for flight.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Aboard Carcharodon

  “Just what do you Velkaryans want, anyway?” They’d brought Carson back to the briefing room slash galley area, and he stood facing Vaughan again. There was still gravity, and still the low rumble and vibration in the deck. Either they were still flying in atmosphere, or under constant acceleration in space. He hadn’t seen a window or viewscreen to tell him which, but to Carson it felt more like the latter.

  “Terran space for terrans. Humans, in particular. The goddamn UDT keeps closing off worlds. Kakuloa, Taprobane, —”

  “Kakuloa isn’t closed, just one continent.”

  “Sure, the one with all the squidberry plantations. Even inland, where the natives don’t wander—not that we should even care about the damn squids.”

  “Technically they’re octopus.”

  “Fine, arboreal cephalopods, then. Just like HG Wells’ damned Martians.”

  The mention surprised Carson. He’d never considered the resemblance; he hadn’t read Wells, although he was certainly aware of the stories. Could there be a connection? No, that was ridiculous. The treesquids barely had any technology, and Wells’ story was pure fabrication. But Vaughan was still talking.

  “. . .had to be due to pressure from Earths’ biopharm companies to cut competition with their synthetic squidberry compounds. And Taprobane. Why leave that to the fuzzies?”