Gibraltar Earth

by Michael McCollum

  “The Stellar Survey is launching an expedition into the heart of the Broan Sovereignty? You can’t be serious!”

  “Very serious, Mr. Vasloff.”

  There followed a sputtering noise that segued into a stream of invective in Russian. After awhile, the invective stopped and there was nothing but silence from the lower bunk.

  Mark considered explaining what the expedition planned, but decided not to. There would be plenty of time for that later. Instead, he turned his attention to the bulkhead-mounted viewscreen that displayed the view from a topside camera. Above them, the banks of lamps began going out one by one. Then, when the dock was in twilight, eight bright lines appeared to be radiating from the zenith. They grew wider, and suddenly, the Ruptured Whale was bathed in naked sunlight.

  An unidentified voice issued from the annunciator. “Dome retracted. Ready for takeoff.”

  “Very well,” the voice of the Whale’s captain answered. “Generators to power. Stand by for liftoff.”

  Long seconds passed in which nothing seemed to happen. Then, the periphery of the landing dock disappeared at the edges of the screen. There was no sensation of motion as the Ruptured Whale rose slowly into the black sky.

  Mark was jolted by Vasloff’s strained tones from beneath him. “Listen to me, Mark. The Broa killed your sister. They are evil beings and it is criminal for the Coordinator to take this risk. We have common cause here. You have to help me convince them to call off this expedition.”

  “Don’t you want to know the truth?”

  “But think of the risk, man!”

  “The risk is minimal. They have it all planned. We will scout from afar, never getting within a light-year of any target system until we are ready. We rebuilt this ship in order to slip in and out without arousing suspicion.”

  “Damn it, Mark, this is not the sort of decision that can be made by a few bureaucrats and scientists. This involves the whole of the human race. At the least, we should take the time to put it to a vote.”

  “Sorry, Mikhail, but the fleet will be long gone when they make the announcement. They can vote when we get back.”

  It had been a full minute since the ship had first risen from its landing cradle. Now the viewscreen changed to show the view below. They could see the open Lomonnosow Space Dock a kilometer beneath them, its interior partially bathed in sunlight. The rest was inky shadow. As Mark watched, a gentle hand pushed him into the bunk and the crater-strewn lunar landscape receded more swiftly. Soon the Moon was round again, and shrinking by the minute. Ahead lay the dim point of light that was Neptune.

  #

  Mark Rykand had been wrong. It did matter who was in the upper bunk. More than a week after leaving Luna, that gentle hand on his chest was still there. In its infancy, space travel had been a matter of extremes. One spent a few minutes blasting off on a thundering pillar of fire, and then weeks or months in freefall as the ship coasted towards is destination.

  The advent of the reactionless drive had brought about a revolution in space travel for ships large enough to mount one. No longer did a ship need to throw expensive reaction mass overboard in order to maneuver. The space drive generator warped space asymmetrically around itself and slid down the artificial hill thus created. In the days of rockets, when fuel was at a premium, it would have taken a ship thirty-one years to reach Neptune in a minimum energy orbit. The Ruptured Whale would make the same voyage in two hundred hours, reaching a velocity of 1100 km/sec at turnover.

  For most of that time, sharing a compartment with Mikhail Vasloff was like having a cabin all to himself. Despite Mark’s attempts to engage the Russian in conversation, Vasloff remained withdrawn and uncommunicative. Whether he was sulking or planning something nefarious was difficult to tell.

  Mark spent most of the voyage with Lisa in the ship’s communications center. She had been working feverishly to complete the software program that would train the fleet in the Broan lingua franca. She, too, was having roommate problems, but of a different sort. Far from being morose at the prospect of the voyage, Sar-Say’s joy seemed boundless.

  “One would have thought that a race of traders would have learned to hide their emotions better,” Lisa remarked one morning at breakfast.

  “You can’t blame him. He is just excited about going home.”

  “I wish he would calm down enough to sleep at night.”

  The language course they prepared was a typical multimedia education program. It had been culled from hundreds of hours of surveillance recordings of Sar-Say, as well as lessons Lisa had recorded back at PoleStar. Users listened first to Sar-Say, and then Lisa, as they enunciated a word in Broan. The students were then asked to repeat the word and a voice analysis was displayed to compare the results.

  Mark had learned quite a lot of what Sar-Say called “trade talk” already. He was surprised that the language was so logical and easy to learn.

  “Of course it is easy to learn,” Lisa replied in response to his observation. “It has to be simple for a million sentient species to make themselves understood in it.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because those million species have a million different ways of communicating with their own kind. Their brains all work differently. Actually, it is quite an accomplishment for the Broa to design such a simple language. In fact, I think most people have the wrong idea about the Broa.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What is it about the Broa that make them capable of ruling a million other species?”

  “That’s easy. They control access to the stargates.”

  Lisa nodded. “That is right. So long as no one can travel from system to system without their tacit agreement, they do not have a need for a large presence on any individual planet. Sar-Say says that there are systems the Broa don’t visit for years at a time.”

  “So they are not the evil imperialists we have been led to believe?” Mark asked.

  “Actually, they are probably worse than we imagine. No, their domain is not ruled like a human empire because it can’t be.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “Think about it. Would you try to control a race of civilized dolphins using the same techniques you would use with human beings? How could you? Human and dolphin brains and cultures are too different.”

  “For one thing, dolphins don’t care anything about money.”

  Lisa laughed. “And the females are in charge, a much more sensible system than the one we use. Think of the problems inherent in controlling a million-star interstellar empire, where every species is a different sort of ‘dolphin.’ What sort of government do you set up that works with humanoids, quadrupeds, octopoids, and God only knows what other forms there are to be found among the stars?”

  “I guess you don’t,” Mark replied. “You have to find something that they all agree on.”

  Lisa beamed as though gazing at a star pupil. “What the exo-biologists call an Objective Reality. In the case of the Broa, the objective reality is that if you do not do what you are told, a million starships suddenly materialize in your sky and proceed to kill every male, female, and pup of your race. That is the sort of thing anyone can understand, regardless of the shape and size of their brain case. Conversely, however, that is about the only level of control the Broa have over their subjects.”

  “Interesting, but it isn’t getting this program debugged.”

  “Sorry,” Lisa said. “I’ll leave you alone to work.”

  Somehow, she did not sound sorry.

  As the days passed, the need to finish the training course became ever more pressing. The software program would be distributed to the fleet before it departed Neptune and the human spacers would spend the next year learning the alien language. Those aboard the Ruptured Whale would have the added advantage of Lisa’s personal instruction and daily practice with Sar-Say.

  Specialists aboard each starship would be fluent in the common language of the Sovereignty by the time they arrive
d. However, every member of each crew was to learn as much of the Broan language as his or her duties would allow. At the very least, the mission planners hoped any ship that stumbled into contact with aliens would be fluent enough to lie their way out of trouble.

  Eventually, the blue star they had been tracking for a week grew into a visible disk. Then, over a period of hours, it filled the viewscreen. The Ruptured Whale had slowed to a few dozen kilometers per second when they caught the first laser beacons of the ships that had gathered at Neptune.

  An hour later, they were among the gathered starships of the human race as they prepared to go out into the great unknown.

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Neptune is an oversize marble thirty times more distant from Sol than Earth, a cold gas giant so far from the sun that it radiates twice as much heat to space as it receives. The internal heat is the engine that drives the planet’s 2000-kph winds, the fastest in the Solar System. The winds give the planet the characteristic banded appearance of a gas giant. In the case of Neptune, however, the bands are blue, the result of the red wavelengths being absorbed by methane in the upper atmosphere.

  Like Saturn, Neptune possesses a full set of rings, although of much darker appearance than the orbiting ice shavings of its larger sibling. One of the rings has a twist in it, a phenomenon never adequately explained by astronomers. The largest of its moons, Triton, is in a retrograde orbit at about the same distance that Luna orbits Earth. The odd orbit, along with Triton’s physical similarity to Pluto, along with the fact that Pluto’s orbit actually cuts inside that of Neptune, had long fueled a dispute over whether Pluto was actually one of the blue giant’s lost moons.

  Lisa Arden lay strapped in her bunk and watched the big blue world on her cabin’s viewscreen. Like the rest of the crew, she had been briefed on what to expect during their approach. And, like the rest of the crew, she was not particularly interested.

  For even though Neptune was just about the farthest point in the Solar System and Sol’s outermost “real planet,” when one considered the length of the voyage on which they were about to embark, it was akin to walking down the hall to the bathroom in one’s own flat. Behind them lay 4.5 billion kilometers of empty space, and before them, a gulf so large that “billion kilometers” was too small a unit of measure.

  After a few minutes spent looking down into the blue complexity of Neptune’s upper atmosphere and gazing at the enormous cyclone that had been dubbed “The Great White Spot,” she shifted her gaze to the pulsing red beacon just above the gas giant’s limb. Over the next several minutes, the laser beacon resolved itself into a tiny sphere, and then into an ever-larger globe. Finally, they were close enough to recognize the globe as the Starship Magellan.

  “That is the ship that brought me to Earth, is it not?” Sar-Say asked from the upper bunk. Like her, the pseudo-simian would have preferred to have his face pressed against a viewport during the approach. However, the Stellar Survey’s regulations stated, “All passengers to be strapped down under conditions of variable acceleration,” and the captain had proved a stickler for regulations.

  “Right,” Lisa answered. “That is Magellan. She is back from fetching the starships we had out on survey.”

  Earth’s starships were clustered as close together as such ships ever get, yet the scale of space is such that only a few of the starships and giant freighters servicing them were within visual range.

  Since she did not expect to see any other ships, Lisa was surprised when a trio of ungainly mechanisms drifted into view, and then off the edge of the screen as the Ruptured Whale passed them. The things – she was sure they had not been ships – were gone too quickly to gain more than an impression of their shape. The fact that they had been visible at all meant that the Whale had come close to a mid-space collision.

  “What were they?” Lisa wondered aloud.

  “I was talking to Chief Engineer Dresser,” Sar-Say said. “She was telling me about the scientific instruments used to detect gravity waves. I believe that those were the same instruments.”

  Lisa nodded. Of course! What she had just seen were the gravtenna units they would be taking along. Usually the gravtenna constellation orbited between Earth and Mars. However, the Solar Systems’ only gravity wave observatory had been requisitioned for their expedition. Once at the Crab Nebula, they would begin “listening” for the characteristic gravity waves produced by stargates.

  The physicists had broached the subject of gravity waves with Sar-Say as soon as the alien’s vocabulary improved to the point where the answers were intelligible. Travel via stargate involved the disappearance of a ship from one point in the universe and its simultaneous reappearance at another. Because a ship literally falls into a wormhole, one terminus of which is anchored to the gate, the discontinuous mass function produces ripples in the fabric of space-time — gravity waves. Each jump results in two such waves being produced, one centered at the point of departure and the other at the point of arrival. These waves radiate outward in all directions at the speed of light and are detectable to distances of several thousand light-years.

  Most travel within the Sovereignty was between pairs of stargates and the gravity waves thus produced were of low-to-moderate intensity. It was not necessary to have a stargate at both ends of a jump, however. Given sufficient power, a stargate can drive a single-ended wormhole across the galaxy. That is what had happened to the Ruptured Whale’s former owners when the Broan Avenger fired on it during a jump. Wormholes anchored at only one end produced the equivalent of a gravity tidal wave wherever they emerged. It was just such a mega-wave that Magellan had felt following Sar-Say’s abrupt arrival in the New Eden system.

  By detecting the gravity waves produced by ships transiting stargates, and then plotting their points of origin, the expedition hoped to discover at least a few systems of the Broan Sovereignty.

  “I would think that if it were that easy, we would have discovered your people long before now,” Lisa had said to Sar-Say one night while they had been discussing gravity waves.

  Sar-Say explained to her about interstellar distances and the communications delay imposed by the speed of light. He concluded with, “The fact that you have not detected us indicates that none of the gravity waves we have produced have yet reached the Solar System. If this nebula that you people call ‘The Crab’ is truly Sky Flower, then you will not see a wave produced today for at least 7000 years.”

  As Lisa lay in her bunk and watched, the spherical ship swelled until it filled the viewscreen. Magellan was as she had first seen it at PoleStar, with the exception that the starship was the center of a beehive of activity. Everywhere she looked, there were small inter-orbit scooters and microgravity haulers floating around the big starship. One small vessel would undock from the starship, only to have another take its place a few moments later. Since Magellan had been out combing the cosmos for the other starships, she had been late in arriving and the crews were working overtime to prepare her for the coming voyage.

  The feeling of weight disappeared and Lisa floated into her restraining straps just as the ship on the viewscreen ceased its expansion. The cessation of acceleration announced that they had arrived. Lisa reached for the strap release just as an authoritative voice issued from the cabin annunciator to order her (and everyone else onboard) to stay as they were.

  The reason for the order became clear a few minutes later as a vacsuited figure rocketed away from one of Magellan’s docking ports, trailing a cable behind. The figure approached directly into the camera, and then disappeared from view. Only the lazily twisting cable was visible for long minutes. Then, the cable grew taut and they began to slide smoothly forward.

  Starships Magellan and Ruptured Whale were about to engage in an act of intercourse.

  #

  “Come along, Mr. Vasloff,” Lisa shouted as she followed Sar-Say’s diminutive figure around the circumferential corridor toward Ruptured Whale’s main cargo hold. The hold, which s
till contained much of its original manifest of alien gadgets, had a new addition. Inside was an Earth-standard docking portal. When the hatch doors were opened, the portal telescoped out from the ship and latched onto a mating device aboard Magellan. Once docked, the two ships could exchange personnel without the bother of suiting up first. Buried as it was inside the cargo hold, when the cargo doors were closed, the non-Broan technology was out of sight of any inquisitive alien eyes they might encounter. The docking port was merely one of the additions the work crews had made to the alien starship, and like all the other enhancements, great care had been taken to camouflage it.

  Lisa, Sar-Say, and Mikhail Vasloff were en route to Magellan, where the final pre-launch mission briefing was to take place. All over the fleet, ships’ captains and first officers embarked for the vessel that would serve as the expedition flagship.

  Mark Rykand was not with their small group as they made their way through the accordion-pleated tube that connected the two ships. He had gone ahead to help with the astronomical details of the briefing. He had also transported several hundred record cubes containing Lisa Arden’s course in Conversational Broan. The software was to be distributed to the fleet at the briefing.

  Their destination was Magellan’s hangar bay, the largest compartment aboard the ship. Even so, when the three of them arrived, they discovered the bay packed with auxiliary craft, twelve-sided crates, and a milling mob of humanity. Sar-Say’s arrival set off a muted wave of muttering and a general turning of heads. The pseudo-simian halted in the airlock and gazed upward at the surrounding faces. Beside him, Lisa halted as well. She wondered if the Taff had the equivalent of human horror holos. If so, a typical scene would probably look like this one — a single Taff surrounded by staring naked alien faces. The compartment was also thick with the odor of packed humanity. She wondered what Sar-Say thought of the smell.

  “Over there,” Lisa said, pointing to three empty microgravity perches near the anchored podium. She, Sar-Say, and Vasloff made their way to where Dan Landon floated behind an anchored podium. For her part, Lisa tried not to put her foot in anyone’s face.