“Three species?”
“Sar-Say and the two types of corpses we took off the alien ship.”
“Oh. I didn’t know that.”
“That’s why Magellan is going back out this afternoon, you know. To salvage Sar-Say’s ship.”
“I didn’t know that either. I am afraid I’m a little out of my league here.”
She smiled. “It can be a bit overwhelming when you first come aboard. I liken it to drinking out of a fire hose.”
“They gave me a lot of old reports to read, but I haven’t had the time. Tell me, has Sar-Say told you why the Broa were after him?”
Lisa explained the Taff’s strange attitude toward the overlords, using the pet dog analogy. Mark was doubtful.
“He seems too intelligent for that.”
“We all have our blind spots, Mr. Rykand.”
“Please, call me Mark. After all, one of us has seen the other naked. That should put us on a first name basis, right?”
Lisa did not answer. She was too busy turning bright crimson.
#
Sar-Say sat in his cabin and ignored the entertainment screen on which a buxom young woman breathlessly related the details of the latest scandal involving a well-known actor and actress. His unseeing gaze was directed not at the screen, but inward.
Like humans, Sar-Say had the capacity effectively to switch off his external senses when he concentrated deeply. Also, like humans, he could worry endlessly over whether he had made the right decision at some time in the past. The decision he was worried about now was whether it had been smart to tell the humans essentially the truth about Civilization, what they were calling “the Sovereignty.” In retrospect, it might have been better if he had told them the galaxy was an association of free beings arrayed voluntarily in a great interstellar union. That, at least, would have piqued the curiosity they seemed to have in abundance. Instead, he had awakened fears inherited from ancestors who once cowered in caves to avoid beasts with fangs and claws. That he had known nothing of humans at the time of his capture, and therefore could not have risked such a lie, did little to calm his racing thoughts.
Sar-Say had learned a great deal about humanity since he had been brought aboard this orbiting prison. He was not sufficiently conceited, however, to think that he understood them very well at all. Experience had taught him that thinking, rational beings are the most complicated things in the universe. Humans were no different in this respect from Vvralians, Antaks, or the Broa. For Sar-Say to understand humans would have required him to think like one, and that was a physiological impossibility. His brain structure was as different from the human cortex as their brains were from Vithians. Indeed, one thing he hoped to keep from them was just how different his thought processes truly were.
Even if he could never truly understand them, his study of humans had yielded a few tentative nuggets of knowledge. One stroke of luck had been the human language. It possessed a rigid structure, with word meaning often determined by position within the thought-unit. Compared to High Lantean or the multitude of dialects on Saporsva, the human tongue was a study in simplicity. In fact, it was nearly as structured as the lingua franca of Civilization.
After obtaining grounding in structure and pronunciation, he had devoted himself to gaining fluency. In this, he had been largely successful, or so Lisa Arden assured him. With fluency had come a plan to bend humankind’s actions to his own purposes. For Sar-Say had goals beyond merely being rescued from the beams of a Broan Avenger. His continued survival would mean little if he were forced to live his life circling this unknown planet of an unknown star, a sendalth sentenced to an eternity of pokes and prods by human scientists.
To be successful, to gain the fabulous wealth and power due him and his sept, he must not only survive, but return to his home. At first, he had been at a loss of how to accomplish this. After all, he had no idea where in space to look for Civilization. Indeed, until his talks with the astronomer Bendagar, it had never occurred to him to think of geography as something that might be applied to stars. In the Sovereignty, the physical positions of stars in space were of interest only to a few licensed philosophers.
He had thought long and hard about the problem while he was learning the human language. Slowly, as he became aware of the strength of human curiosity, his plan had begun to take form. There was one world that he was sure he could locate among the stars. It was marked by one of the most spectacular sky sights in all of Civilization, a cloud of gas so prominent that even the humans must know of it. Broan masters had traveled from as far away as Pryxal to see the Sky Flower Nebula in the night sky of Zzumer, created in historical times by the explosion of a nearby star. Sky Flower had been the third picture he had painted for Bendagar.
As he sat in front of the flickering screen and stared unseeing into its depths, Sar-Say considered the one factor that might wreck the plan he had so carefully constructed. This morning Lisa had let slip that Magellan was about to leave on a mission to salvage the Hraal. It had taken all of his concentration not to let her see how much the news disturbed him. So long as he remained the humans’ sole source of information concerning the Broa and their domain, he would be able to guide events to his own advantage. If these curious bipeds were successful in salvaging the Hraal, they would have an independent source from which to check his allegations. Though the risk of discovery was minimal, this plan of theirs was a complication he did not need. The stakes of the game he was playing were too great for even the smallest of risks.
#
Lev Bukovsky was new to Sky Watch, having just completed his mandatory three-month training assignment. In fact, he had been standing a regular watch for less than a week and had yet to get over the godlike sensation of it all.
Physically, Bukovsky was thirty meters below ground in Sky Watch’s operations center outside Omaha, Nebraska. Mentally, he was a million kilometers away – literally. With the aid of the latest full sensory interface, his disembodied self hovered a million kilometers above the Earth in the direction of Polaris. From that vantage point, he could look down on a blue-white sphere the size of an apricot, its surface half light/half dark. From his position “One Meg North,” Bukovsky could survey all of the sky junk that orbited Earth in the plane of the equator -- everything from worn out communications satellites scheduled for salvage to the orbiting space docks that were the largest structures ever lofted by humanity.
Much of the sensation of godlike omniscience came from the supernaturally sharp vision granted to his “virtual self.” Beyond the orbiting satellites lay the double curve of ships in transit between Earth and Luna. Beyond the half-sphere of gray-white that was the Moon, other ships headed for the planets and beyond.
Bukovsky’s vantage point was courtesy of a large sensor array at One Meg North. Strictly speaking, the array was not actually “in orbit.” It neither circled Earth nor traveled about the sun in an orbit whose focus lay at the center of mass of the sun. Rather, the sensors (and their twins at One Meg South) were maintained in position by electric thrusters that precisely balanced the gravitational pull of Earth and Sol.
Lev Bukovsky lay in his couch and smiled vacantly as he watched a series of numbers float past his eyes. The emerald green apparitions told him that Luna Lines 502 had just begun the orbital insertion maneuver that would place it at Tyco Station three days hence. Lev concentrated on the spot where the ship lay. Instantly, a dim red curve sprang forth. Other multicolored curves materialized to intersect the first. The various curves showed the orbits of 502 and all objects that would pass within a thousand kilometers of the liner during its voyage. A moment later, the curves vanished automatically, signifying that there was no possibility of a mid-space collision.
Lev was about to return to his routine when a crimson star appeared high above Earth and a silent alarm began ringing in his brain.
“What is that?” Bukovsky muttered to himself in his native Russian. High above the northern hemisphere, an unidentifie
d ship had just begun to accelerate away from Earth. The “no record” message that flashed in response to Lev’s unspoken question was unprecedented in his short experience. He immediately took the action called for by training when confronted with a problem he did not know how to solve. He called his supervisor.
“What is it, Lev?” Melissa Carter asked her newest operator. She had been a Sky Watcher for nearly twenty years and sometimes felt nostalgic for the old flat panel displays on which she had learned. This jumping about mentally over millions of kilometers every few seconds was disconcerting.
“I have a ship leaving orbit with no flight plan. Think it could be a hijacking?” Lev asked as he sent her the transgressor’s coordinates.
Melissa read off the numbers, asked her own mental question, and then smiled. This would be a good test to see how the kid handled the unexpected. “What do you make of it?”
“Someone’s in big trouble,” the young operator said, the grimness in his voice barely covering his suppressed excitement. “It is against the law not to file a flight plan.”
“Perhaps they filed one, but it’s coded so that our computer won’t pick it up.”
“Who would do that?”
“You tell me.”
Lev chewed his lower lip. There had been something about this situation in training, but what? “Uh, Space Guard can do it, of course, under extraordinary circumstances.”
“Who else?”
“The World Coordinator, the grand admiral ... director of Sky Watch ... director, Stellar Survey, I think.” I can’t think of any reason they would do that, though.”
“Nor can I. Apparently, they have such a reason. Now what are our duties in this situation?”
“Uh, to take no notice?”
“Officially correct, Operator Bukovsky. Still, it will not hurt to be a little curious. What do we know about this mysterious flight?”
“We know its point of origin.” There was a moment’s silence while Bukovsky checked the traffic database. “PoleStar. Those are the current orbital elements of the PoleStar mirror and habitat!”
“Good. Now where is it heading?”
“I don’t know.”
“Shouldn’t you find out?”
Bukovsky’s brows knit together beneath the heavy helmet that covered half his face. Suddenly he was no longer a million kilometers out in space, but near the ship so blatantly transiting the traffic zone without so much as a “by your leave.” The green alphanumerics next to the ship symbol changed almost too quickly to read.
“We have a change of plane maneuver going on here,” Bukovsky reported, “and he is moving away from the ecliptic.”
“Very good, Lev. What does that make him?”
“A starship, of course.”
“What starship?”
“Uh, I don’t know.”
“No reason you should,” Melissa said mysteriously. In fact, she had watched that same ship inbound several weeks earlier. On that occasion, too, the ship’s data had been encrypted; as though someone thought they could enter the Earth-Luna traffic zone without anyone noticing! That had piqued her curiosity and she had watched it rendezvous with PoleStar rather than High Station. Her inquiries on the subject had elicited the comment that it would be unwise to inquire further. “Good analysis. We will make a Sky Watcher of you yet. Now, back to work.”
Lev Bukovsky, junior among Omaha’s watchers, returned to his duties. He watched the unidentified ship climb away from Earth for the rest of his watch. They were in a hurry, whoever they were. Their acceleration rating stayed constant at 1.0 g the whole time.
He checked them one last time just before his watch ended. As he lifted the helmet from his shoulders, he wondered again what ship it had been and where they were bound.
#
Chapter Fifteen
Captain Dan Landon lay in his acceleration couch and watched the screens around him as the chronometer continued its march toward zero hour. The six-day voyage from Sol had been gratifyingly free of mechanical difficulties, with nothing more serious than the breakdown of the wardroom coffee maker to turn his hair gray. He was especially gratified with the working of the stardrive. He had been skeptical when Laura Dresser had first suggested splicing the new generator into Magellan’s own circuits. True, the jury-rig was running at only one percent of its rated capacity, just enough to envelop the external cargo in the combined drive field. Even so, Landon did not like trusting his life to such an obvious band-aid.
The near perfect condition of the ship left him plenty of time to handle other problems –notably, Laura Dresser and her crew of prima donnas. Organizations, like people, develop personalities of their own. Most often, an organization’s personality is a reflection of that of its leader. Never had he found that more true than in the case of the stardrive specialists. The arguments had begun almost as soon as they had jumped superlight out of Sol. First had come Laura’s complaints that her people were not provided private cabins, followed by criticisms about the food, the noise, and the smell of the ship. Then had come her demand that her people be given control of one of Magellan’s primary computers so they could model the salvaged derelict’s handling characteristics. To give up one of the ship’s computers meant a reduction in operational redundancy. Still, he judged that in this one case, the demand was justified. Preplanning was worth the risk if it would get them out of the New Eden system even one day earlier.
Nor were Laura Dresser’s people the only problem. Along with the stardrive experts, he was transporting a large contingent of scientists hurriedly recruited from Earth. They would search for telltale signs left behind by the New Eden stargate. If Sar-Say’s allegations were true, then the ability to detect where gates once existed could prove highly useful. The leader of this second group of scientists, Dr. Pomerance, had tried to explain the physics involved, but the explanation had been so much gibberish to Landon.
“Breakout in thirty seconds, Captain,” Pendergast announced from his station in front of Landon’s couch.
“Very well, Ensign. Make the announcement.”
“All Hands. The ship will transition to sublight in thirty seconds. Take all precautions! I repeat, sublight in thirty seconds.”
“The ship has been notified, Captain.”
“Thank you, Ensign.”
Landon watched the chronometer tick off the seconds. There was no countdown or other such silliness. When the numerals all reached zero, the quiet hum of the stardrive died away and the stars returned to the bulkhead viewscreen.
“Where are we, Miss Mullins?”
“Stand by, Captain,” the astrogation officer said. She monitored while the computer measured the positions of several thousand stars and compared the results to the sky survey they had done the last time they were here. Finally, she said, “I make us 65 astronomical units from the New Eden sun and 12 AU’s above the local ecliptic.”
“Sensors, begin your sweeps. I want to know if there is even the slightest evidence of alien activity in this system.”
“Aye aye, Captain,” came the response on the intercom.
They had broken out on the outskirts of the system as a precaution. If the Broa had traced their missing ships, they might have been able somehow to reconstruct the battle. If they had also found the derelict, they might have discovered evidence of the brief human presence aboard. In that event, it was conceivable they would set a trap for Magellan’s return.
“Dr. Forham, any evidence of gravity waves?” he asked Bendagar’s assistant. He had not liked leaving his chief scientist back at PoleStar, but felt the search for Broan home worlds more important than this salvage operation.
“None, Captain.”
“If you get even a wiggle out of your instruments, let me know immediately. We’ll be out of here so fast that our own photons won’t catch us.” Which, Landon thought, as he disconnected, was the literal truth.
Twenty minutes later, he was gazing at a very-long-range view of New Eden when his communica
tor buzzed.
“Captain, this is Laura Dresser.”
“Yes, Ms. Dresser. What can I do for you?”
“I would like to begin assembling my team. You still haven’t given me names.”
“I will meet you in my ready room.”
In addition to her own technicians, Laura Dresser would need a crew of competent spacers to fly the derelict. The only source of such people was Magellan’s own crew. He had chosen those who would man the salvaged craft three days earlier. The worst difficulty had been deciding who would command. He needed someone who understood the dangers involved and was sufficiently familiar with the jury-rigged stardrive to get the derelict home safely, an officer respected by both the unruly stardrive specialists and his own crew. In the end, there had only been one suitable candidate. He smiled as he pulled himself hand over hand toward the bridge hatchway that led to his ready room.
He wanted to see the look on Laura Dresser’s face when he told her!
#
Three days later, those who would operate the derelict on its perilous journey to Sol gathered in Magellan’s mess compartment. They sat at the long steel tables bolted to the deck and waited for Dan Landon to begin the briefing. Magellan was under power, giving them half-a-gravity of acceleration for the next dozen hours.
“All right, let’s get started,” Landon ordered as he scanned their expectant faces. “You all know why you are here. This will be our only gathering as a group. If you have a problem with any part of the salvage plan, I want to hear about it before we finish today. Before we get to the details of the mission, I want everyone to think about something. You all know the worst-case scenario. I want you to look deep into your heart and decide if you want to take the risk.”
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