by Bobby Adair
“Grav signatures,” he says. “At this distance, it’s difficult for us to get a clear picture, but my guess is cruisers coming out of bubble jump and pushing their plates to accelerate.”
“All to the same point?” I hope, as I make my guess.
Phil nods. “It’s hard to be sure from this distance, but they’re all moving in the same direction, generally. That’s all I can tell you for sure.”
“How many?” I ask, as the excitement at finally having the scent for our Trog supply depot fades under the realization that we’re going to have to face Trog cruisers.
“I counted seventeen pulses,” says Phil.
“Pulses?” asks Brice.
“When they come out of bubble jump,” says Phil. “Think of it like a splash on a pond, that’s the way the cruisers hit the local grav space, sending out waves and—”
Brice raises his palms to stop Phil. “I got it.”
“Seventeen?” I ask.
“Another just pulsed,” says Phil. “I don’t know when it’ll stop.”
“Keep counting.” I turn to Brice. “You have the logs of all the simulations we ran?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get Lenox, Silva, and Peterson to help. Sort the logs for anywhere we engaged at least twenty cruisers when we attacked. We need to know our options.”
Chapter 37
As much as we don’t want to, we have to bubble jump. That much became obvious to everyone on the bridge as soon as the hundred-million-kilometer number sank in.
Phil and Nicky, while keeping an eye on the grav anomaly, plan our jumps. We take them slow, hopping from position to position, trying to come out with any large mass between our bubble-out position, and the direction from which the Trog pulses are coming.
I hope the effort keeps our presence a secret.
It takes most of a day, and we finish our last jump and come out behind a spherical asteroid nearly the size of Ceres. We’re within a half-million miles of our target, a protoplanet larger than earth’s moon. At twice the distance from the earth to the moon, I have little doubt the Grays would spot us if we’d popped out into open space. As it is, Phil has brought us out perfectly.
Penny wastes no time in bringing the Rusty Turd in low over the asteroid’s surface, flying toward the horizon. If she does it right, not one Gray in any of those cruisers or in that supply base will think we’re anything but a piece of a comet.
Chapter 38
Penny brings the ship down on the sloped wall of a crater that stretches wide enough to hold a large city back on earth. The crater is old, and on its floor and along one edge, other smaller craters mark the impact of rocks that crashed into this one in the millennia after the big one that made the hole that’s keeping us hidden.
She shuts down most of the grav systems, leaving just enough running to magnify the asteroid’s natural grav to keep the Rusty Turd safely planted in the dust.
Silva swings our single assault door open and exits first, with Brice, Peterson, and Lenox right behind. They all have their railguns at the ready, eager to fulfill the duties of their role on this mission—to annihilate anything that even smells like it might be a live alien.
“Come,” Brice tells us as he scans the area for movement.
None of us expect it. In fact, we’d all be deathly surprised if Trogs and Grays started popping up to give us a peek. From everything we’re able to tell about this rock, it’s lifeless. Not one alien has chosen to use it for an outpost. We’ve seen no evidence that they’ve even explored it for the raw materials it might hold.
Nonetheless, as small as it is on the scale of worlds drifting in the great void, it’s still damned enormous on the human scale. It would take us months to survey the surface in detail, maybe years to assay all the kinds of elements and alloys hiding in its depths.
None of that today, though.
Today, we’re living on the edge. Taking our calculated risks to achieve our objective. We’re soldiers, set to the task all soldiers were born to, delivering the horrors of war to the enemy.
We’re all out, my four grunts, Phil and the Gray. The rest of the crew are staying on the ship, ready to blast off at the first hint of trouble, hopefully with enough time to spare to pick the rest of us up. However, we’re not the priority, those of us on the surface, or so I explained in detail before I left the ship. The Rusty Turd and its skeleton crew are our most important assets. If things turn to shit while the rest of us are out, Penny is to rocket the hell out of here and make a plan to attack the depot on her own.
Using only enough g to keep our feet on the surface we hike and hop. We dare not fly. Though the grav used to drive a suit should be imperceptible to a Gray cozied up in a warm Trog cruiser a half-million miles away, there’s no sense in tempting fate.
We have time. Not enough that we can screw around for months on end, but we have days or weeks if we need them.
The hours we’ll spend hiking up the slope to the crest of the crater rim are hours we can invest in victory.
Chapter 39
We peek over the ragged edge like we’re sneaking up on rabbits we’re hunting in a veggie patch back on Brice’s farm. Well, his parents’ farm, anyway.
Over the horizon, hanging in space in a sky full of dull white and gray spots, not nearly as bright as stars, and other asteroids caught in the vast gravitational well, we see a protoplanet roughly the size of Mercury. Well, we can’t tell that just by looking. Tarlow scanned and measured it. He told us. Being so large, it likely holds enough materials that the need to expand operations to other asteroids in the system might be a very long time coming.
Extrapolating the gravitational force of the protoplanet, Tarlow also guessed it was about a third of earth-g, light enough to make for comfortable living and easy mining, but not so light as to become troublesome as it was back on the Potato.
A flash of blue bursts like a speeding bubble up over our horizon, way out in space.
“That’s one,” says Phil.
I feel it as well as see it.
He says, “That’s a cruiser coming out of bubble jump.”
It seems to drift for a handful of seconds before it powers up its drive array to push it lazily toward the supply depot. That last business, I sense with the bug in my head. My eyes can’t make out that kind of detail at this distance without the aid of a telescope.
“How many have you counted so far?” I ask, as I squint at the protoplanet’s dull surface. I see plenty of grav signatures, some strong, most weak. Mostly I see tiny, dull, blue blurs.
“You’ll have a better chance with your bug,” Phil tells me.
He doesn’t realize I’m already doing that. He forgets sometimes my bug isn’t as sensitive as his, and it’s nothing near what he and the Gray can do together.
“Over sixty,” Phil tells us.
“Sixty?” Brice doesn’t want to believe it. “Sixty cruisers?”
I see the ominous count sag the shoulders of my marines. “Not one of those cruisers has a load of railgun slugs,” I say. “They’re all low on H.” And that makes we wonder what the chances are of us simply swooping in and shooting them like a bunch of fat ducks sitting on the park pond with clipped wings, with instincts so dulled by a cush life they’ve forgotten what it’s like to flee a predator.
“Were any there already?” asks Brice. “Sentinels for the depot?”
We’d gamed out the scenario of sentinels, as many as six, a full pod in Gray terms. We didn’t expect the Trogs to leave more than a squadron to guard a base nobody but them knew was there, in a part of the galaxy where they probably expected they were the dominant species.
Assumptions, of course.
We only know the Grays and Trogs through our interactions.
No!
We know what Nicky told us. If Phil’s history of the Gray empire turns out to be true, then many assumptions can be made. And a squadron of sentinel ships, as a max number of armed protectors, is a valid assumption.
Sixty cruisers on deck for resupply with more trickling in, that scenario wasn’t one we’d ever seriously gamed out. Yet one we did work through was the presence of a resupplying fleet mixed in with the sentinels, sheep mixed in with the wolves.
Maybe a worst-case scenario for us regarding what we’re getting into.
“How many arrival pulses did you and the Gray witness?”
“Nearly forty,” Phil answers, guessing right away where I’m going with my question. “We don’t have any way of knowing if every one of those ships arrived today, or if twenty of them have been here for a month, resupplying and resting. We can’t even be sure we noticed right away when the pulses started. We didn’t see any when we were bubble jumping. We’re blind to long-range scanning aside from the masses that are down our path of translation.”
Brice glances at me and rolls his eyes. He’s never amused when Phil slips into the technical lingo. Brice thinks Phil uses it to make himself seem smart. I think it’s just the way Phil thinks, and he’s always taken aback when he realizes others don’t. One more way he’s different.
Another blue bubble bursts, much farther from the planetoid than the last one.
“I wonder how far they’re jumping from,” muses Lenox. “If it were close by, they’d be coming in much more accurately, I think.”
I nod.
Phil does, too.
“Any indication they know we’re here?” asks Brice.
“Not that we can tell,” answers Phil.
With a pretty big spoonful of snark, Brice asks, “Can your girlfriend eavesdrop?”
Phil ignores the inflection. “It doesn’t work that way.”
I turn to Phil. “Seriously, how does it work?”
Turns out, not very well, at least not for what Brice and I are both hoping to get.
Phil explains it on the way back down to the ship. Mostly, it comes down to Nicky not being old enough. Long-distance communication skills in Grays don’t fully develop until they’re a hundred or two hundred years old. Since people don’t live that long, Nicky might never get there. After spending so much of her life bonding with Phil, by the time he goes, she’ll likely die as a result.
Depressing stuff.
Chapter 40
As much as we want to zip our way across a half-million miles, release our bunker busting nukes, and get the hell out of 61 Cygni with victory in our teeth and only a long, lazy cruise between us and home, we don’t.
Fools rush in.
“We need to understand what’s going on here,” I say.
“More than resupplying?” asks Brice. “One thing to keep in mind before we decide on the cautious approach is how much time we have. They’re down there refueling their cruisers right now.” He glances at Phil for confirmation.
Phil nods. "We can make it out, but at this distance, it’s difficult. It looks like six cruisers are docked."
“There’s urgency,” I agree.
"It might take them a day to refuel each ship," says Brice. "It might take an hour. For all we know, half the fleet is already done, and they’re preparing to bubble on to earth."
“That could be true.” I keep my eyes on the protoplanet sitting out there across all that emptiness. “At the supply depots back home, it took them a week to resupply.”
“With everything,” says Brice. “Water, food, railgun slugs, and H. And that week was the turnaround time on the whole fleet. Nobody ever asked exactly how long it took to rearm one cruiser. Somebody said a week, and we all accepted that, never clarifying that difference—one week for a cruiser, or one week for the fleet.”
“They had to run them through resupply in parallel,” says Phil. “That base down there seems to be doing six at once.”
“We didn’t come all this way to make an amateur mistake.” I decide. “We need to gather more intel before we attack.”
“From here?” asks Brice.
I shake my head. “Tarlow can point the radar dishes at the base and give us a clear picture. We need to move the ship.”
Chapter 41
I’m back on the bridge, and the rest of the crew is onboard.
We’ve spent hours finding the right place, and Penny has the ship drifting, taking advantage of the planetoid’s weak gravity while pushing the bare minimum of power through our plates to keep the Turd under her control.
The hull hits rock on the port side with a grinding sound so gritty and harsh I can’t help but think we’re ripping the steel off our side.
“No need to worry,” Phil grins as the bottom side of the hull bumps. “Just scraping the rust off.”
“Slowing,” says Penny.
“Don’t forget the tank ring brackets,” I tell her. “We’ll need those intact to get back home.”
“No worries,” says Penny.
I turn to Tarlow. “What can you see?”
“I don’t want to angle my dishes until we stop moving.” More surly than usual today. “If we tear them off on these rocks…well, let’s just say there are no service centers out here.”
“Noted.” I turn to Penny. “Put it where you think best.”
“Just trying to find the right spot to settle us in.” She glances back at Tarlow and rolls her eyes. It’s how we all deal with his attitude.
With my grav sense, I see rocky cliffs rising on both sides of the ship. We’re on the rim of a crater that might be only a million years old. In the vacuum, its jagged edges have barely had time to show wear under the pelting from small impacts.
The crater falls away to its depths behind us. In front of us, hanging five hundred thousand miles away and glowing dully from Cygni A’s light, the Trog’s protoplanet is waiting for our peeping-Tom eyes to learn its secrets.
The Rusty Turd finally grinds to a slow halt.
“This is it,” Penny announces.
“Tarlow,” I remind.
He doesn’t answer. He taps at his keyboards and controls. His screen images flash to blurs of nothing. He senses me looking over his shoulder and says, “Radiation, like every form of electromagnetism, has to obey the speed limit. 186,000 miles per hour. It’s a million miles round trip there and back.”
The screens come to life with the image of the Trog depot with cruisers moving overhead.
He says, “This is all a few seconds old.”
"I can live with it," says Penny as she powers down the drive systems.
I spin in my chair to scrutinize Tarlow’s monitors. “Can you zoom in? Give us a closer look?”
Tarlow sighs loudly.
“Somebody doesn’t like being back in his suit?” Brice speculates, a smile in his voice.
“It doesn’t help with all of you watching me,” Tarlow bites.
“Get used to it,” I tell him. “You’re our eyes now. Are you recording all this?”
He turns and glares at me.
I take that as a yes.
“Give me—”
“I know what you want,” he snaps. “Let me configure everything. I’ll take requests when I’m done.”
The rest of us on the bridge share a look.
While waiting on Tarlow to simmer down, I give Jablonsky my attention.
He answers before I ask. “Broadcasting every hour, now. In case Jill shows up.”
I give him a satisfied nod.
Over a private comm, Penny asks, “You still think there’s a chance?”
I shrug. “We don’t know what happened.”
Chapter 42
On our perch, hiding in plain sight, we sit four days, watching and learning about our enemy before we cram onto the bridge for our planning meeting.
“Let’s start with the elephants,” I suggest.
A few laugh.
Tarlow isn’t in any better mood than he’s been in since we first came into the 61 Cygni system. And though I’ve tried to talk to him and get to the bottom of it, my efforts have gone nowhere. He’s content to torture everyone around him with his mood.
He responds to my s
uggestion first. “You mean those freighters?”
"The tanker ships," I confirm. We’re a small crew and don’t have any secrets, at least not concerning our situation. Still, I want to make sure we’re all reading from the same playbook. "Phil and Nicky have analyzed the grav signatures—"
“Recognized is a better word,” Phil interjects.
“Let’s talk about resupply times first,” says Brice. “Do we have a count on which ships are ready to go?”
“Three of the six docked when we arrived,” I say, “have disengaged and have been replaced by three others. In four days, we haven’t seen a complete resupply cycle. So, at least four days.”
Brice is satisfied.
“The elephant?” Tarlow reminds me.
Glancing around at my audience, I say, “They’re the same four tankers. They disappear for thirty hours or so, and then they return and dock at the base. They stay roughly five hours, and then they disappear again.”
“And we’re sure there are only the four?” asks Lenox.
I shake my head. “We’re only sure that we’ve seen four—the same four going and coming. If there are more, they haven’t made a stop by the depot while we’ve been here.”
“And these are hydrogen tankers?” she asks.
"As near as we can tell.” I pause, then go on to correct myself. "It’s a guess they’re tanking hydrogen, though they could be grabbing methane or ethane and stripping the hydrogen out the molecules in a refinery located underground at the depot. We can only speculate on that part of the process, but it’s irrelevant."
No one argues with me on that point.
“What we know,” I tell them, “is that after the tankers offload, they fly seven or eight thousand miles away from the protoplanet, always on the same heading, and they bubble jump.”
“Down what heading?” asks Peterson.
“A gas giant orbiting 16 Cygni B.” I point. With the ship’s grav systems down, I can see all the major masses in the Cygni system. “It’s a monster of a planet, with rings just like Saturn, and who knows how many moons. We can make out a few from here but—”