“That's the spirit, Frank.” She looked down at the images again, and said, “I can say a lot of things about my ex-husband, but he's not a murderer. He wouldn't do something like this.”
“The evidence seems pretty conclusive.”
“Yes, it does, doesn't it. All wrapped up with a nice pretty bow on top, a neat package of horror served at our table. And that's another problem. If I was planning something like this, the last thing I would do is leave all this evidence behind. The station could be destroyed, in such a way to make it look like an accident. No trace left, nothing for an investigative committee to work on.”
“Maybe it is a little convenient, ma'am, but I don't see what we can do about it. Orders are orders.”
“True,” she said. “Don't worry, Lieutenant. I'm not going to involve you in anything that might jeopardize that transfer.”
He paused, then said, “I'm still the Operations Officer of Abydos Base, ma'am, at least for the next couple of weeks, and you are my commander. Whatever you need me to do, I'll do it.” He looked at the door, and said, “Blake isn't an officer. I don't know what he is, but I know he doesn't belong in that uniform.”
“You're walking a dangerous line.”
With a smile, he said, “Perhaps, ma'am. You are, of course, free to charge me with insubordination.”
“Like hell,” she replied. “There's more going on here than we've been told. These orders might be genuine, but for all we know, they're based on faulty evidence.”
“The images of the attack on the station?” He shook his head, and said, “If they're going to be watching the systems, I can't run an analysis on the data without them knowing about it, and the next step would be a loyalty interview.”
Nodding, she said, “I'm going to take a risk that might end my career, Frank.” Looking around the room, she added, “At this stage, I don't think that matters to me, but...”
“I said I would do anything you think is necessary, ma'am. I'll stand by that.”
Taking a deep breath, she replied, “I intend to act on the assumption that these images are forged, and that my verminous ex-husband isn't flying the Jolly Roger.”
“I agree, ma'am. It all does seem unlikely.” Shaking his head, he added, “We don't even know for sure whether the station was attacked at all. What do you want me to do?”
Before she could reply, the door burst open, and Blake walked into the room, followed by Hansen. He shook his head, reaching down to retrieve a small, hidden device from the floor, then gestured for the guards to move to either side of the door, blocking them in.
“I'd expected better from you, Kat. I really did. You've got that good job waiting for you on Mars, and all you had to do was grit your teeth and get through this unpleasantness.” Looking at Corwin, he added, “And your career was just about to kick into high gear with an assignment to a capital ship. Why did you choose to throw it all away?”
Glaring at him, she said, “I haven't done anything that violates the Admiral's orders, Blake, and you know it. If you want to try and put me up on charges, you go right ahead.”
“I don't have to,” he replied. “Both of you can consider yourselves restricted to quarters in the interests of security.” Turning to Hansen, he said, “You are now in command of this station, Lieutenant, and given that I will be taking these two with me, I think you can consider that a permanent assignment, complete with a promotion to Acting Senior Lieutenant.”
“Thank you, sir. I won't let you down.”
Shaking her head, Mallory said, “I knew you were ambitious, Holly, but I didn't realize you wanted my job that badly.”
“Lock them in their quarters,” Blake said, turning to the guards. “I'll make an announcement to the base personnel in the morning, as soon as your men are in position. Hopefully they'll learn from the example of their new commanding officer and cooperate.”
“I can assure you of that, sir,” Hansen said.
“You're making a mistake, Lieutenant,” Mallory replied. “You're making a big mistake, and I just hope you live long enough to see it.”
“Take them,” Blake said, moving to sit behind her desk. As the troopers pulled out their pistols, she glanced at Corwin, and the two of them walked down the corridor. Even if they managed to get away, there was nowhere to run, just a single dome alone on a vast plain of ice. Reaching the door to her quarters, she stepped inside, and heard the locks engage on the far side.
She sat down at her chair, and sighed. “Damn it, Jack, haven't you screwed my life up enough? What the hell have you dragged me into now?” Turning on her terminal, she called up a floor-plan of the base, then took out a datapad, disconnecting from the network with the tap of a control. One way or another, she was going to take back her command, even if she had to do it by force.
Chapter 11
Morgan looked over the datapad again, scrolling through the artifact inventory, trying not to think about what would happen when Churchill emerged from hendecaspace. She looked up at the starfield image, tapping a control to throw a holographic projection into the air, using her hands to guide it around, zooming in on the constellations. It could just be decoration, could have some sort of significance she didn't recognize, or it could be something else.
Her eyes were drawn to a spot on the top corner, well away from the rest of the image, and she frowned. Reaching over to a wall computer, she called up the astrographic database, and added the remainder of the constellation to the display, running the courses of the stars back through time, back ten thousand years to when some unknown alien hand carved this piece.
The door opened, and Angel stepped in, a bag in her hand emanating spicy odors. She dumped it on the desk, then sat next to her on the bed, looking up at the rotating image, squinting to try and bring it into focus.
“You haven't eaten all day,” she said. “We're coming out of hendecaspace tomorrow, and you're going to have to be at your best for it.” Pointing to the bag, she said, “I brought dinner.”
“Thanks,” she said, looking up at the image. “I'll get to it.”
Shaking her head, Angel replied, “Not good enough.” Gesturing at the image, she said, “The missing artifact?”
“We've got a complete scan of it, thanks to McGuire. Enough to get us a good start on analysis.” With a sigh, she added, “I'm missing something, and I can't think what it is. Only that it must be important. Someone killed fifty people for it, and if we're right, are going to double that number at Abydos.”
“That's what's bothering you. You've been in combat before, surely.”
Nodding, she said, “Street brawls and bar fights, mostly. That's not the problem, though.” She paused, looked at Angel, and continued, “I can't help but think that all of this is my fault.”
“You mean you're the one who launched that attack, decided to kill the entire crew of a space station?”
“No, but I'm the one bringing you all out here.” Her voice turned cold, and she said, “I want that bastard in my gun-sights, Angel, and I want to bring him down for what he did to my friends, but that doesn't mean I need to drag the rest of you out there with me.” Looking around the room, she added, “Any way you look at it, a civilian freighter is going up against a pair of warships.”
“Civilian?” she asked. “You might want to tell that to the rocket jocks down in the fighter bay. Jack's just finishing up the twenty-fourth simulation run. I haven't ever seen him so focused on anything before.” She paused, then added, “This isn't just about you. There are a lot of demons on this ship, and everyone's looking for a chance to get rid of them.”
“Jack's ex-wife?”
“Of course,” she nodded. “So Major Conway gets to ride into town on his white horse and save the day, shooting up the bad guys with Mark Twenty-One Missiles. Just like the OK Corral.” Looking at her, she continued, “You've got your own score to settle, an
d you aren't going to rest until Blake's dead.”
“Probably not. Why are you here?”
“Where else would I be? You know my story.”
Shaking her head, she replied, “No, that isn't it. You could have got a job at Belzoni for the asking. Fontaine would have hired you, so would Vlad. Or half a dozen other tramp freighters out here.”
“Maybe I don't want to miss a good fight.” She smiled, then added, “You think you're the only one attracted by the idea of a desperate battle against impossible odds? I read about all of this stuff when I was a kid, watched all the old movies where the sheriff rode into town and wiped out the bad guys.” Her eyes distant, looking at something far away, she added, “I spent a long time looking for the good guys. Don't think I ever really found them. The world doesn't work like that.” After a pause, she continued, “Found a lot of bad guys, though. Lots of them running around. I wouldn't mind there being a few less. Which is my way of saying that I'm coming with you when you take down that bastard. You'll need someone to watch your back.”
“Thanks,” she replied.
“What are you going to do next?” Angel asked. “Assuming, of course, that we live through this crazy stunt.”
“I don't know. Jack offered me a job, and I guess I might take him up on it. I don't see how I can go home, not after this.”
She frowned, then said, “I'd guess we'll get enough evidence to clear your name.”
Looking at her tattered uniform, hanging from a rail on the far side of the room, she asked, “How can I ever wear that again? Even if my name is cleared, that won't matter. Back there, I'll always be 'that officer'. I can see where that goes. I'll just end up sitting on some rock, looking up at the stars and...” She paused, then looked at the starfield again.
“It won't be so bad,” Angel replied. “There might be some trouble at first, but they won't dare...” She looked at Morgan, and said, “Are you listening?”
“We never checked,” she said.
“Never checked what?”
A triumphant smile on her face, she continued, “We never checked whether that constellation could be seen from the planet. I didn't even think of it.”
“Does it matter?”
Ignoring her friend, Morgan jumped from the bed and ran over to her desk console, her fingers flying across the controls as she called up the ship's records from their visit to Karnak, bringing up a full view of the sky as seen from the surface. She ran a series of projections, running the starfields back and forth, until after a few minutes, the focus locked onto a fuzzy image in the sky, highlighting the stars that were the best match for the few on display.
Peering over her shoulder, Angel said, “You've found something.”
“That isn't an exact match.”
“It's carved in stone, Nicky. Come on.”
Turning to her, she said, “To very precise specifications, and machine-carved, not hand-carved. There's no reason to assume that they didn't produce exactly the image they wanted.” Looking at the rotating image again, she continued, “Normally we can get a temporal fix down to a decade. We couldn't even be sure of the millennium.”
“I thought that was because you didn't have a complete image.”
Shaking her head, she replied, “Partly, but also because it doesn't perfectly match the image as seen in the night sky, not even ten thousand years ago.” Waving her finger at the screen, she added, “There's a significant variance. Damn Hubbard for a fool. He must have spotted the discrepancy when I passed it up to the astrogation team, but he was so busy counting the credits he was going to make that he never followed up on it.” She paused, shook her head, and said, “I should have checked it myself.”
“So what have we got here?”
“Someone left us a map. There's something out there the sculptor wanted us to find. Even if it's just their homeworld, it would be the archaeological breakthrough of the decade, maybe the century. An alien homeworld, empty and waiting for our research teams.” Shaking her head, she said, “I just wish the others were here to share this.”
“Well, what comes next?”
Turning back to her display, she said, “I need to run the details through the computer. That's going to take a lot of capacity.” Shaking her head, she added, “This world can't be too far away. Say within ten, twelve light-years at most.”
“That's a lot of sky,” Angel said.
Tapping a control, Morgan said, “Nicky to Conway.”
The sounds of simulated battle raced through the room, and he replied, “I'm a little busy right now.”
“Stop playing computer games and get to the briefing room on the double. And tell Cruz that I'm going to be making heavy demands on the network for the next half-hour or so.”
“What...”
“I think I know what Blake is looking for.”
There was a brief pause, and he said, “You'll have all the processing power you need. I'll be up in five minutes.”
Tapping a series of controls, Morgan turned to Angel, and said, “The system's loading the data now. Let's go.”
Snatching the bag of food, Angel followed her through the door as she jogged out into the corridor, almost knocking into Doyle coming in the other direction. Unsurprisingly, they were the first to reach the briefing room, the wall monitors already flashing up starcharts as the computer struggled to process the data.
“I don't know much about astrogation, but how hard can this be?” Angel asked. “There can't be that many stars in this volume of space.”
“Thirty-one, but it isn't as simple as that,” Morgan said, as Conway walked into the room, followed by Sullivan and Bennett. “If it was a system we'd visited, odds are that we'd know about all of this already.”
Nodding, Conway said, “Meaning that it's another star that isn't on the charts.” He frowned, then added, “Or one that can't be reached by the hendecaspace drive. There are a few out there without any points of gravitational stability.” He paused, smiled, and said, “Which don't have planets, that rather rules my theory out.”
“Not quite,” Bennett said. “YZ Ceti. The first ship visited that system fifty years ago, but the planet is so far away from the hendecaspace point that no one's bothered to go there.”
“There must have been probes, though,” Sullivan said. “And you can bet that if someone spotted something interesting out there, they'd have taken a closer look. It might take a few months, but we could get to YZ Ceti I, if we really wanted to.”
“But that's a long-established system, and...”
“It's not on the map,” Morgan said, as the computer stuttered for a second, the scope of its task vastly increased. “All the stars have been checked, and even taking into account the time difference, there's no way that the constellation can be seen from any point.”
“So much for that theory, then,” Sullivan said.
“No,” Bennett said. “Belzoni's off the charts. There are still places out there no one's detected. Hell, a star was found within thirty light-years of Sol a couple of years ago, some dim brown dwarf.”
“A brown dwarf isn't going to birth a sentient species, though,” Sullivan said. “I don't think any life has ever been found on a world orbiting one.” He looked down at the desk, punching controls, and said, “Take that back. Microbial life on SGSS 93/26. Just bacteria.”
“Who said it has to be their homeworld?” Angel asked. “Nicky, what do you know about the aliens themselves? I mean aside from those ruins they left?”
“Not much. They were starfaring, but we haven't found any of their ships. The two worlds we know of are more than one jump apart, which suggests that they might have been roaming far and wide. Neither of the two worlds are habitable, and we could some evidence of pressure domes, or their equivalent. They were outposts, though I don't know what for.” She paused, then said, “And wiped out, probably ab
out the same time, probably violently. That's the only way to explain some of the damage we found on the surface. Decay in a vacuum takes a lot longer than that.”
“So a war, then,” Bennett said. “Thousands of years ago, this species was wiped off the map, leaving only a few isolated outposts behind.”
“Except I don't think these were military in nature,” Morgan replied. “Not that we really understand them, but we haven't found any weapons, and from a strategic point of view, neither of the sites is positioned defensively.” Shaking her head, she added, “We're guessing, and without that much data. Archaeologists have been working on the first alien relics found at Proxima for seventy years, and we're no nearer understanding them than when they were found by the First Interstellar Expedition.”
“There's a key difference, though,” Conway said. “This time, someone's worked it out. Blake, Knight, whoever is behind all of this. No one would wipe out the crew of a space station to find some long-forgotten planet, no matter how important it is.” He sat down, reaching into the bag for a piece of battered fish, and said, “And recently, as well. Since the stations were established. Otherwise they'd have prevented you coming out here in the first place.”
Morgan replied, “These aren't major expeditions. We were only meant to operate for six months, though I know Hubbard was trying to get that extended.” Shaking her head, she added, “Archaeology doesn't work that way. You can't force a timetable.”
“Something's changed, then,” Bennett said. “My guess is that Knight got these two expeditions moving on her own authority. She was named Director of Extra-Solar Starbase Operations last year, so she's got clearance to approve minor projects.”
“Subject to approval from the Combined Chiefs,” Sullivan replied with a frown.
“One item in a meeting that might have lasted for hours,” she said. “We're talking about four weeks of construction time, six months of operations, and three supply runs, right? Nothing that will push the budget. And no major names to attract attention on the science teams, either. No insult intended, Nicky.”
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