Gibraltar Earth

by Michael McCollum

  Mark’s anger had been unfocussed at first. He had raged at an uncaring universe that had robbed him of his entire family in the short span of three years. Yet, shaking one’s fist at the stars is not very satisfying. Society taught that when a person dies, someone is to blame. The culprit might be a criminal, the drunken flyer of an aircar, or even the victim himself (if he dies of a heart attack after a life of dissolution).

  Until he knew the details of Jani’s death, it would be impossible to assess blame. The more he thought about the duty officer’s refusal to tell him how his sister had died, the angrier he became. How dare they keep such vital information from her only relative?

  After a long night spent in mental turmoil, Mark decided to do something. It was easy to ignore a face on the screen, considerably less so when that face is close enough to feel hot breath issuing from an angry mouth. The sun had not risen over the Sierras when he had booked passage on the first suborbital flight to Europe. Even then, nature conspired against him. The eight-hour time difference meant that the first direct flight did not leave until early evening. He had spent the day in anxious anticipation and useless recrimination before boarding a suborbital hyperjet for Zurich.

  In less than a minute, the car was out of the tunnel and in sunshine again, climbing the low hills that surrounded the ancient fortress at Meersburg. The bullet car pivoted about its long axis, compensating for the sideways surge of a long sweeping curve to the right. The accelerator ring pylons ran parallel to the shoreline, directly for the gleaming pyramid that towered above the trees. A minute later, the car decelerated swiftly as it entered the pyramid and slid to a halt in the subsurface transport station. Most of the passengers climbed to their feet and waited patiently for the automatic doors to open. When it came Mark’s turn, he moved like a man in a trance.

  “Mr. Rykand?” a young woman asked as he exited the car.

  “Yes?”

  “My name is Amalthea Palan. I am special assistant to the director here. We received your message that you were coming late last night. Director Bartok apologizes for not meeting you personally, but he had an appointment in Toronto today. He asked that I convey his sympathy for your loss. Your sister was a valued member of our family and will be sorely missed.”

  “Look, I don’t want to cause any trouble, but I won’t be quiet either. I came here to find out how my sister died. I think you owe me that.”

  “I understand your concern, Mr. Rykand. Why don’t we go up to my office and discuss it? I’ll be happy to share everything we know, little as it is.”

  They rode an escalator up to the main level of the building. The public foyer of Survey Headquarters was one of the eight architectural wonders of the world. It was the largest enclosed space on the planet, exceeding even the ancient Vehicle Assembly Building at the Cape Canaveral Museum. Finished in polished marble, the great expanse reminded Mark of a mausoleum – a thought that he ruthlessly put down as soon as it occurred to him. Around the perimeter were views of worlds the survey had discovered. It being early on Monday morning, the usual small groups of school children were absent and the anti-echo field had yet to be turned on. Mark listened as his and Amalthea Palan’s footsteps echoed back from far overhead.

  They took another escalator to a mezzanine level and then an express lift to the 27th level. The director’s assistant ushered him into a plush office with a sloping window that looked out over the lake.

  “Refreshments, Mr. Rykand? Coffee, tea, perhaps something stronger?” she asked as she motioned him to a leather settee and then sat opposite him.

  “No thank you.”

  Amalthea gazed at her visitor.

  She saw a well-muscled young man of slightly more than average height with a shock of sandy hair and piercing blue eyes. He would almost be handsome except for the dark bags under each eye and the turned down corners of his mouth. In addition, it looked as though he had not depilated today. “I hope you don’t think me too forward, Mr. Rykand, “but you look as though you haven’t slept in a long time.”

  “Could you sleep if it had been your sister?”

  “No, I suppose not. If you like, I will have our staff doctor prescribe something when we are through here. We can even provide you with quarters in this building. We keep them for visiting VIPs.”

  “Please, I just want to know what happened to my sister.”

  She paused, seemed to come to a decision, and then said, “Very well. Are you aware of your sister’s job out in the deep black?”

  “She was a scout pilot.”

  “Quite correct. As I understand it, the system Magellan was exploring this trip is quite dirty compared to most. It had a lot of meteorites and space dust in it. The astrophysicists tell us that this is normal for a new system. Personally, I majored in economics, so I do not really understand these technical things. Do you?”

  Mark nodded. One of the courses he had taken in pursuit of his minor had gone extensively into the evolution of star systems.

  “Anyway, your sister’s scout craft was transporting several of the ship’s planetologists to a moon when it ran into a piece of orbital debris. The ship was vaporized instantly. That is why we can’t return Miss Rykand’s body to you.”

  “There were others killed?”

  “A total of eight, according to the report by Magellan’s captain. I am afraid that is all we know about the incident until the ship docks and sends down its full logs.”

  “Perhaps I can talk with the captain to get more information,” Mark said.

  Amalthea Palan sighed and cocked her head in an odd gesture. “I am afraid that is impossible. The ship is still out beyond the orbit of Mars and two-way communications are not yet practical. Speed-of-light delay, you know.”

  “When will it arrive?”

  “Within a week.”

  “Perhaps I can visit the captain then, both to hear what happened to Jani and to pick up her personal effects.”

  “We’ll deliver her effects to you. You certainly won’t have to go to the expense of going all the way to orbit to retrieve them.”

  “I am rich. I don’t mind the expense.”

  “I understand your pain, but there is really nothing constructive you can do in orbit. Captain Landon will not be able to meet with you, anyway. First, there is the mandatory quarantine period and he will be very busy preparing the ship to go out again. I will tell you what. We will forward a copy of the captain’s log entry as soon as we receive it. Will that be acceptable?”

  Mark gazed at the pretty blonde opposite him. Her expression reminded him of the professional lamentation of a mortician. Perhaps it was his lack of sleep or the fact that his senses had been stretched taut. Something about her manner told him that she was not telling him the truth, at least not the whole truth. He frowned, and then nodded. “I suppose it will have to do.”

  They talked for another ten minutes, after which Mark found himself deftly herded back to the transport station. He climbed into a bullet car headed south and watched Amalthea Palan as she stood on the platform until his car had left the building.

  Mark mulled over his next move. If the survey thought that he would go back to California and give up, they were in for a surprise. Someone was to blame for his sister’s death and he was not going to rest until he found out whom that someone was!

  #

  Chapter Three

  Nadine Halstrom, World Coordinator, and arguably, the most powerful single human being alive, sat in the dark and watched the images shimmer in the depths of the holocube. Beside her sat Anton Bartok, director of the Stellar Survey. Beyond the darkened office, a late afternoon storm sent booming thunder across the Toronto cityscape while rain pelted the side of the hundred-story office building that housed the bureaucracy serving the World Parliament.

  The record of Magellan’s fight with the alien starship and its aftermath ended in a flicker of static as the lights came on in the coordinator’s office. Nadine blinked rapidly in the sudden brilliance.
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  “My God, Anton. So it’s true!”

  “Yes, Madame Coordinator. Captain Landon squirted that recording and his report to me via secure comm link as soon as Magellan dropped sublight.”

  “Where is Magellan now?”

  “Just crossing the orbit of Mars, inbound. She should be here in about a week.”

  “I have to admit to some skepticism when I received your initial message, Mr. Director. After seeing this, I must say that you understated your case. Have you considered the implications?”

  Bartok nodded. “I’ve thought of nothing else for the last day and a half, Madame Coordinator.”

  Nadine sighed. She, too, had thought of little else. “I think we have a major problem here.”

  “I agree.”

  “Have we any idea at all where these aliens come from or their military potential?”

  Bartok’s expression was doleful as he shook his head. “None.”

  “Then we’d best keep this under wraps until we’ve learned more.”

  “Is that wise? The newsers will cut us to pieces when they learn we’ve been holding out on them.”

  “That can’t be helped. Do you have any conception of what it will do to the body politic if they start going to bed every night afraid they’ll wake up dead in the morning?”

  “I think you are exaggerating, Madam Coordinator.”

  “I wish I were, Anton. You should read more. The surest way to bring about psychosis in the human animal is to give him something to fear that he does not understand. I can cite you chapter and verse from history if you like.”

  Nadine Halstrom had begun her career as a professor of history and had only gotten into politics through a fortuitous series of accidents. Her field of specialization had been the ultra-violent twentieth century. In many ways, that century had been an aberration, a detour into mindless destructiveness. It had been an era when the question of national survival had turned logic on its ear. How else to explain the fifty-year stalemate that had dominated much of the last half of history’s bloodiest century? Eastern and western power blocs had both threatened to annihilate their foes if attacked, all the while professing their devotion to the cause of peace. For more than two generations, people had lived in fear of death raining down from the skies and it had warped them. To think that the same thing could happen in her century sent a shiver up her spine that had nothing to do with the temperature.

  “Very well,” Bartok replied, “we’ll keep the alien a secret.”

  “How do you propose to do that, Anton?”

  Despite the lightness of her tone, it was obvious to the survey director that his job might well hinge on his answer. He considered the problem for a few seconds while alternately puffing out his cheeks and sucking them back in. It was a mannerism of which he was totally unaware.

  “Standard procedure calls for holding the alien in quarantine aboard High Station until the biologists can clear him. Obviously, we cannot do that. High Station is too public for a secret of this magnitude to last very long.”

  “You aren’t suggesting that we break quarantine!”

  “No, of course not. What we need is someplace out of the way where we can perform the necessary tests, somewhere we are able to control access.”

  “Any suggestions?”

  “What about PoleStar? The weather directorate owns it outright and there is virtually no traffic to and from the habitat.”

  Nadine looked pensive, and then flashed a smile familiar to billions of holovision viewers. “Hmmm, not bad ... not bad, at all! It is remote and in a conveniently difficult orbit for everything in the equatorial plane. I will see to it that the weather directorate cooperates. What problems are there in turning it into a base of operations?”

  “We’ll need to duplicate High Station’s laboratory facilities, of course, and man them with specialists. If we start moving people and equipment from High Station, someone will talk.”

  “Then we don’t do it. You can use Magellan’s specialists for most things. Those extra scientists we need, we will recruit here on Earth. Same with the equipment. That way no one will have enough view of the full picture to realize what is going on. To further obscure things, have Magellan’s flight plan pulled from the Sky Watch computer. We may not be able to obscure the fact that the ship is home, but by God, we can make it difficult for anyone trying to find it.”

  Bartok scribbled a note on the face of his pocket computer before continuing. “Then there is the problem of the people who were killed. We’ve notified their next of kin.”

  “Any problems?”

  “The families are in shock at the moment. I think we can handle them well enough if they start to ask too many questions. The scout pilot was independently wealthy. So is her brother. He is at headquarters right now making inquiries into how his sister died.”

  “I suppose you have arranged a plausible cover story.”

  Bartok nodded. “My assistant is explaining to him that his sister ran into an errant piece of space junk. That should satisfy him. We will also send someone to help with the funeral arrangements. I figure if we are helpful enough, he will soon give up rooting around for details.”

  “It sounds like you have things well under control, Anton. Now, then, what do you make of the fact that these aliens attacked our scout and starship without warning?”

  “Obviously, they’re warlike.”

  “I thought species who have achieved interstellar travel were supposed to be long past the war stage. In fact, I once wrote a thesis to that effect.”

  “Apparently, your thesis is in need of revision.”

  “They must be very confident,” she mused. “The speed with which they attacked the scout indicates that they didn’t consider Magellan a threat.”

  “How could they know whether it was or wasn’t?” Bartok asked. “They’d never seen a human ship before.”

  “Paranoid?”

  “Possibly. Still, the fact that they attacked us without provocation is less disturbing than what our people found onboard that derelict. You saw the bodies. Did they look like the same species to you?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “The survivor represents a third species, and those who destroyed our scout, a possible fourth.”

  “Where does that leave us?”

  “In a very precarious position, Madame Coordinator. The evidence suggests that somewhere not far from here, there are two interstellar civilizations at war with one another. One of these civilizations contains at least three stars, probably more. Possibly, a lot more! Maybe they both do.”

  “Does that necessarily follow?” Nadine asked as she stared at the director over steepled fingers. “After all, if someone boarded one of our starships, they’d find humans, dogs, cats, parakeets, cockroaches, and a dozen other species.”

  “You haven’t had time to read Captain Landon’s report,” the director said as he held aloft a report marked Stellar Survey Confidential. “Magellan’s biologists autopsied several of the corpses. The six-legged aliens developed under a star cooler than our own, a K5 stellar type to judge from the construction of their oculars. The second species of dead aliens came from a hotter star, probably one in the F-class. The survivor comes from a star very like our own. In addition, the scientists say the survivor and the six-limbed species have blood chemistry based on iron, same as human. The insectoid had a magnesium-based circulatory fluid. The three could not possibly have come from a single biosphere. Human beings and oak trees are more closely related.”

  “So we face a minimum of three star systems and two contending interstellar associations —”

  “Or a single association infested with space pirates.”

  “That doesn’t cheer me up any.”

  “No, Ma’am. Still, there is one bit of good news. They don’t know where we live.”

  “Are you sure? One explanation for their quickness to attack a human starship is that they recognized it for what it is.”

  “T
he fact that Magellan destroyed the attacker would argue against that,” Bartok insisted. “And if our ship was their target, why were they fighting the other vessel? No, I think we stumbled into someone else’s fight.”

  “How do we confirm or refute that?”

  “Two ways,” Bartok said, holding up a similar number of fingers for emphasis. “If we can learn to talk to the alien, he can tell us what is going on. For that, we will need a good linguist and knowledge of his psychology. We need to establish a baseline sufficient to tell when he is lying to us. Luckily, semantic analysis has developed into quite a science since the two of us were in school. Given time, we will be able to tell when he lies to us merely from analyzing the internal contradictions that creep into his story. Luckily, no knowledge of alien physiological reactions will be required.”

  “Not that we won’t use bio-monitoring as well, once we learn how he reacts.”

  “Agreed, Madame Coordinator.”

  “What are your immediate personnel requirements?”

  “We’ll need a linguist and a psychologist to study the alien. Also, an astrophysicist. We can get him from Magellan’s crew.”

  “Why an astrophysicist?”

  “Because,” the director replied, “once he tells us where his star is located, we’ll need someone who can translate his coordinates into our own.”

  “And if he won’t tell us?”

  “Semantic analysis ought to help there, too. If we can get him talking about the sort of things he sees in the night sky of whatever planet he lives on, we may be able to triangulate the location of his home world.”

  Nadine nodded. “All right, the alien is the first approach. What is the second?”

  “That one is a little more objective. Captain Landon wants to return to New Eden to salvage the alien hulk. We can learn a great deal about these people by studying their technology. Who knows, we might even come away with their star maps.”

  “I don’t like that approach, Anton. As of now, they do not know where we live. However they got there, New Eden has been visited by two alien starships. What is to stop it from being visited again while we are trying to salvage that ship? They could follow Magellan home this time.”