by Tom Shepherd
But this wasn’t simply the vacuum of space. Dynamic, mysterious forces operated inside the hyperspace conduit, where the laws of the ordinary universe did not apply.
At the dawn of the Terran Space Age, Tanella Jennings had theorized how to enter and exit this place and cover light years in a few hours. Three centuries later, Aurelio Lupetti had proven her theory and took humanity to the stars at last. But even today in the thirty-second century, Terrans still did not entirely understand the alternative physics at work. Like so many before them, most members of Julieta’s generation were users not theoretical physicists.
“Tyler, I’m ready,” Julieta said.
At the bridge, Tyler opened the ship-wide hot mike mode. Everyone could hear and respond as if together in one location. He checked with Lovey first.
“Lieutenant Frost, ready to expel boarders?”
“I’m ready to jettison a pile of scrap metal, sanitation tanks, and broken instruments. Remind me to ask Phibby why the Frogs never cleaned their lagoon. It’s a pigsty down here.”
“No females aboard. The guy-Frogs probably went college dorm mode for a couple dozen cruises. Standby.” Tyler touched the console and caught Mr. Blue’s latest sensor readings of Kaito’s approaching ship. They would be in weapons range in less than a minute.
“We should raise shields soon as the probe breaks free,” Flávio suggested.
“Keep your finger on the button.” Tyler took a deep breath. “Ready everyone? Lovey, on my mark, dump the junk. Julieta, blast the homing device out of the bulkhead soon as we’ve ejected the trash. Paco and Kilub Riff, slap a patch over the breach and pray to the Virgin the goddamn thing holds.”
All players acknowledged the sequence. Tyler waited until the Sakura House frigate closed within weapons range, so Kaito couldn’t maneuver around the crap in his flightpath.
“Okay, Lovey—go, go!”
Time slows down in a moment of crisis, even though events unfold like sheet lightning. Kaito’s ship fired its blasters, but the time distortion in the Cumberland Tunnel transmuted the light-speed, hard energy into streams of golden light, not exactly frozen, but creeping toward the Howling Tadpole like molasses poured outside on a wintry day.
Lovey Frost did not freeze. She slapped the eject knob and four metric tons of accumulated rubbish rushed into hyperspace across the path of the Sakura House frigate. When the trash tsunami met the morbidly slow sticks of blaster fire, the impacted fragments burned like firebombs for a heartbeat, then the two attacking forces—emptied garbage and energetic gunnery—passed each other like rival cavalry charges and continued toward opposite targets.
Kaito’s helmsman attempted to dodge the wave of wastes, but a significant portion of the dump slammed into the light cruiser. Shards of broken hull metal scattered from the wounds and joined the mad rush down the Cumberland Tunnel, sucked along by the cruiser’s hyperspace wake. The Sakura House ship dropped from FTL and disappeared.
Aboard the Tadpole, Julieta heard Tyler screaming for her to fire, but the discharge of so much mass by trash jettison had unsteadied the deck beneath her feet like a ship tossing on heavy seas. She leaned harder against the floor strap and wrapped both hands around the blaster. Still too hard to steady her aim. She had only one choice and dreaded the consequences.
Julieta unbuckled and moved close enough to the invasive probe to touch it. She wrapped the restraining belt around an overhead handhold and clicked fast, then jumped onto the wall like she was rappelling down a cliff face. Two feet spread around the probe, she called to Chief Léon and Arrupt Kilub Riff.
“Catch me if you can!” The JPT dispatcher took point blank aim and fired four thermal blasts around the protruding missile tip. Bulkhead metal exploded outward, taking the probe along but also pulling Julieta against the gash in the ship’s skin. With no atmosphere to vent, the only reason she was drawn to the jagged hole had to be those bizarre currents in hyperspace, passing just a few centimeters from her body, which now plugged the hole.
Julieta leaned back against the strap, but her knees began to tremble as if the kneecaps would explode. Inside the EVA suit, she gasped for oxygen and realized the sharp metal edge had sliced through the protective gear and laid her arm open to the bone. She felt wetness and throbbing and knew she had an arterial bleeder. The suit did not counter-inflate like Terran EVA do, because it was designed for cold blooded Dengathi and did not recognize the danger in warm liquid gushing into the sleeve case.
Doctor Solorio fought the pulling power outside the ship, but she was getting weaker and her right arm was useless. When she neared blackout, Mr. Arrupt somehow flattened himself, as if he’d melted inside the spacesuit, and slid between Julieta and the hole in the wall. He croaked something incomprehensible, and inflated like an air cushion, pushing her back from the crack.
Paco grabbed the doctor, wrapped a restraining strap around her forearm as an emergency tourniquet and seal against air loss, and returned to the wall where Arrupt was losing the fight against the eddies of hyperspace.
“Take my hand!” Chief Léon said.
“Paco-Paco, get patch. When I go, you save ship.”
“No!”
“Do it for crew.”
Paco grabbed the self-sealing patch and flashed to his side. “You’ll die out there.”
“You Catholic?” He cackled. “Tell Matt Junior, it okay. Not fry like cantina food. Arrupt Kilub Riff is Star Lawyer.”
The airless, trans-dimensional Cumberland Tunnel ripped his suit and sucked him away. The top half of his body went first, then the lower torso and legs. Paco fell against the bulkhead, slammed the patch over the hole, and beat his fists against it, sobbing.
* * * *
Kaito’s ship was gone, so the Tadpole continued on course for the second Traveler Gate unvexed by pursuers. Tyler assigned João Tavares watch duty at the bridge, then called the crew to attend an all-hands memorial service for Mr. Arrupt. They gathered in the section near the antimatter-dark matter containment pods, where the amphibian had given his life for the ship.
It was a moving experience.
Holographic attorney André Mercier surprised everyone by confessing that his beta personality was an Orthodox Jewish Rabbi named Uriel Berheim, also a Frenchman. Lacking any other ordained clergy aboard, Tyler asked Rabbi Berheim to officiate at Kilub Riff’s Funeral Mass. The result was an ecumenical menagerie that despite its strangeness, or perhaps because of it, brought the odd life they were celebrating into focus.
Julieta wore her arm in a sling due to lack of adequate medical equipment aboard the Tadpole, but despite the handicap she managed a stirring account of Kilub Riff’s last moments.
Chief Léon spoke through tears. Dorla embraced him when he finished. Rabbi Berheim offered prayer in Terran, Latin and Hebrew. Julieta then recited a few words in Regalik, the Dengathi language Mr. Arrupt spoke. Félix Koshka produced a bottle of naturally distilled vodka, with which the ship’s company toasted the non-drinking Arrupt Kilub Riff and wished him bon voyage into the mysterious realm after life. Tyler was ready to deliver the closing eulogy when João called from the bridge.
“Captain, I think you want to get up here.”
Tyler groaned. “Kaito again?”
“No, sir,” João said. “I am looking at a long-range image of Traveling Gate number two. Request permission to drop from FTL.”
“Do it. We’re on our way.”
Twenty-Seven
“Captain, you’ll find the derelict starbase inside that system ahead,” João said.
When the Howling Tadpole emerged from Traveling Gate Two, she lay 1.9 light years off a blue dwarf star. In the optical viewports a few nearby stars framed a constellation which resembled the Little Dipper of Terra, minus the star at the top left corner of the cup.
Astrometric readings put them roughly halfway between the Rim and Core of the Milky Way. Tyler asked for multiple confirmations of their coordinates, but the location came back the same every way they chec
ked.
“How the fuck did we jump from the NCG 2808 Globular Cluster outside the galaxy to the middle of the Norma Arm?” Tyler said. “That’s got to be sixty thousand light years.”
The Milky Way had two major arms, spinning off opposite ends of a central, bar-shaped bulge which orbited a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. Astrometric scientists had subdivided the great spiral structure into segments and awarded these the honorary title of arms, but the system was far simple and much more elegant when viewed from above the galactic plane.
This blue dwarf inhabited a thick band of star systems. Billions of stars, trillions of worlds. A systematic search of the region would take even the most advanced civilization millions of years. Suzie’s model—many beaches, one grain of sand.
Long ago, dynamic forces of stellar drift wrapped the system in a vast, thin cloak of dust that glowed blue-white from the star’s radiance.
“That’s one hot momma for a medium-sized star,” Lovey noted. “Way hotter than the Terran sun.”
“Blue dwarfs are uncommon in the inner systems,” Suzie said. “And life seldom evolves on the planets. No wonder they picked this location.”
“How many planets?” Tyler said.
“I show thirty-seven, friend Tyler,” Mr. Blue reported. “Many more if you count large planetoids, like your Fido.”
“Pluto.”
“Didn’t I say that?”
“Well, Lieutenant Frost,” Tyler said, “you complained about the ignominy of tasking out the trash. That little blue bugger is God’s garbage man, sweeping the neighborhood, cleaning away space junk.”
“João, where is the derelict?” Suzie said.
“Orbiting a Jovian-class planet, 0.6 AU from the star.”
“Hot Jupiter.” Tyler whistled. “Scorching neighborhood. Will this pollywog’s shields withstand that much heat?”
“I’ll let you know.” Suzie ran a finger down the double-helix tattoo on her forearm and disappeared into the Howling Tadpole’s computer net. She reported her findings in less than a minute. “I ran hundreds of scenarios. We’ve got heat-resistant qualities more than adequate to take us within half an AU of the blue dwarf.”
“Good work. Listen, I think you should stay in there for now. Recharge yourself,” Tyler suggested. “You’ve been external most of two days.”
“Bloody wonderful. You send me into the net on an empty stomach. I could murder a hamburger.” Even in her energetic form, Tyler heard Suzie gasp. “Oh, I am so sorry. That was insensitive of me, so soon after—"
“Dorla will have one grilled and ready when you exit,” Tyler said. “Don’t worry about it. We’re all trying to move on.”
“I wish J.B. or Esteban were aboard,” she said. “They could have said something nice and Catholicky for Kilub Riff.”
Tyler smiled, but memories of a lost crewman smothered any outbreak of gaiety. He wished Mr. Arrupt were here to contribute one of his dismissive, Dengathi comments about warm-blood relationships. Frog do it better, Matt Junior, ‘cause Frog no do it.
“Mr. Tavares, take us to the gates of hell.” Tyler was in the mood for someplace like that.
João slipped the Tadpole into FTL, and when the ship emerged near their objective twenty minutes later, bridge viewscreens showed hundreds of moons and jagged rocks orbiting the hot Jupiter. The planet’s powerful gravity well had nabbed every stray chunk of planetoid, asteroid, comet, and meteor to wander sunward, and gathered the tribe of mini-worlds around it like a fiefdom within the blue dwarf’s domain.
“Hull temperature four thousand C,” Lovey reported.
“That’s too high,” Capitão Tavares said. “Your screens are half-strength.”
“Damn! Shields to max.” Wake up, Jackass! That was a newbie mistake. Don’t let your grief kill anyone else. “Thank you, Flávio.”
“Temperature dropping,” Lovey said. “Hull returning to normal range. Screens holding, but the power drain is oppressive.”
“Captain, can you see it?” João said. “In the shadow of the big moon, lower left quadrant.”
“What am I looking for, Mr. Tavares?”
“Our destination. Hakieth n’diuo Kalieth. The House of the Silent Moons.” João slipped a pointer noose around the target and enlarged it to full screen.
“Any idea why they called it that?” Tyler said.
“The station was the only transmitting-receiving satellite circling the gas giant below,” João said. “All the other ‘moons’ are silent. Which was what the Imperials wanted. A quiet neighborhood. Power down, send no message traffic, keep a low EM signature, and you’re just another chunk of space rock. Flotsam moving with the tides of orbital gravity.
The prized quarry looked like a dumbbell, two saucer sections joined by a thick shank. Complex modules and tinted hull panels covered the surface of each circular base. Along the edges of the upper and lower sections, a mixed assembly of instrument ports faced outward and slots opened inward to what might be docking bays.
The starbase looked old and haggard but fully intact. Here and there, a gash in the hull had been patched, probably by autobots, and some of these efforts looked like wounds scars while others were smoothly filled in and difficult to detect. No guns or missiles were apparent, but that hardly meant the place was defenseless.
From inside the ship’s computer, Suzie said, “João-kosi, carliu katab nuilt enereyo-ngrem Miyosi?”
João smiled brightly. “Kata, Kata! Negloxi kentak Miyosi-kat.”
“Okay, enough with the Portuguese,” Tyler said.
“Miyosian,” João laughed. “I am amazed your fiancé knows the ancient language so well.”
“And how do you know it?”
João nodded at his father. “My childhood was spent on Rahjen studying banking and finances. Neo-Miyosian is the language of the common people, but I became fascinated with Imperial history and learned Classical Miyosian to read the surviving wisdom of the ancients.”
Tyler glanced at Flávio. The privateer had told him, “I have someone dear to me who has worked and studied on Rahjen.”
Tyler nodded. “So, this is why the Ovoins hired you as mediator with customers wanting to salvage ancient technologies. You speak and read the language of its builders.”
Flávio said with a touch of pride, “My son also mastered a few dozen common languages spoken by space faring people today. He is my scholar-merchant.”
João continued his background sketch. “Vestiges of the old galactic Empire, long past its days of glory, were in the middle of yet another great war against barbaric invaders. Miyosian defense forces loyal to the ancient civilization towed the last Imperial battle station here for safekeeping. They never returned.
“About thirty years ago, Ovoin explorers discovered this star system. They were looking for new mining sites, and they mistook the hot Jupiter’s moons for an asteroid field. They boarded the station, figured out what they had found, and decided to profit from the venture.
“Ovoins are a nonaggressive species, but flighty, like birds. They have no sense of commercial responsibility. Not a shred of guilt if their dealings harm others. The Ovoin business credo may as well be, ‘Let the public beware. We are not responsible for what customers do with our merchandise after the sale is complete.’”
“The Wernher von Braun defense,” Suzie said from the MLC.
“I’m glad you’re a trained economist, but let’s lay all the cards on the table,” Tyler said. “This isn’t an economic venture, it’s about saving billions of lives and preventing yet another galactic civil war. Are you aboard for the full cruise, or do you expect to cash out, carrying high-tech weaponry along with you? Because that ain’t happening.”
João said, “I’m not a bird. Or a pirate. Let’s stop a war.”
Tyler had to fight back emotion, because it sounded exactly like what J.B. would’ve said. “Take us in, Mr. Tavares. You pick the docking port.”
“Excuse me, sir, but wouldn’t
it be prudent to stand off the station for a day or two? Observe, take readings, determine if—”
“We’ve come a long way, João. Let’s get this pollywog inside before Kaito finds us again.”
“Boss-man, hold it a second,” Lovey said. “Mr. Tavares makes a good point. We don’t know what’s waiting inside that station, or who’s already docked.”
“I agree, friend Tyler,” Mr. Blue said.
Tyler turned to his new navigator. “Why the delay, João? You’ve been aboard. What’s the danger here?”
“We probably will not find anyone aboard. The station goes to sleep between visits, and the readings show complete power-down mode. But why take chances when there is no rush?”
“Ty, we’ve already lost one crew member,” Suzie said from within the computer.
“Anybody else—Capitão Tavares?” Tyler said.
“I trust my son’s judgment,” Flávio said. “Kaito’s ship took heavy damage, and the homing beacon is gone. Waiting will do no harm.”
“I have a history for recklessness.” Tyler drummed his fingers on the armrest. “But not today.”
“Orders, sir?” João said.
“Take us within ten thousand kilometers and drop anchor. We’ll observe, take readings for twenty-four hours.”
“I suggest longer,” João said. “Thirty-six?”
“No, one day is sufficient.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Suzie, coordinate the sensor scan internally. Far as you can see with those computer-enhanced baby blues.”
“Optics are nice,” she said, “but I’ve got infrared, X-ray, ultraviolet, and gamma rays, too.”
“With shields at maximum, friend Tyler, I suggest capitalizing on the radiant energy of the blue dwarf.”
Tyler hit the comm, “Paco, does this pollywog have good solar panels?” Most starships spent their lives in deep space where the power of sunlight was relatively useless.