He was trying to goad her into another argument, and she would not have it. “Professor Ricter, I’ll give you access to the probes but not a shuttle.”
He smiled smugly, “Thank you, Captain Cook. It’s been a pleasure working with you.” He turned the screen off.
~*~
“You must be wrong,” Ricter yelled at Thomas, who sat at a computer console. “Am I going to have to run the scan myself?”
Fran stepped in front of the charging professor, stopping him in his tracks. “He’s run it five times, and the results are the same.”
Professor Ricter walked around her as if she weren’t there. “Get out of the chair.”
Like a frightened animal, Thomas skittered away from his chair to let Professor Ricter take a seat.
He looked over the results himself. Not satisfied with what he was seeing, he had the satellite orbiting the comet run them one more time. The results were exactly the same as what Thomas found. The comet was hollow. It had no solid core, nothing under its rocky surface. He frowned, not because of the results, but because he was forced to admit he shouldn’t have yelled at a subordinate. “Thomas, you were right. What do you two make of these readings?”
“I’m not sure, sir,” Thomas replied meekly. “Almost every comet I’ve studied has had a metal core. This is a very large comet, almost as large as Pluto’s moon. There should more than enough mass to compress the core into something solid and it should be almost as dense as a small moon.”
“It’s about eighty percent less dense that we thought it was, which suggests what, Doctor Mercury?” He found that calling Fran by that name got her to do what he wanted quickly and seemed to soften the bad attitude she always exhibited while they worked. If not for the fact she was smart, he wouldn’t want to have anything to do with her.
“It suggests that it’s hollow.”
“A hollow comet?” Thomas asked. “I don’t think we’ve ever found one of those.”
“We never have. What would cause that?”
“Volcanic activity?” Fran asked. “No, that wouldn’t make sense.”
“I agree,” Ricter replied. “You’d need to have enough heat and pressure to melt the rock, and a comet’s core wouldn’t even come close to those kinds of pressures.”
“What if it’s not a real comet?” Thomas suggested. “What if it came from a system where a planet was destroyed, and this is just a remnant of, say, its north pole or an ocean?”
“Good thought, Thomas,” Professor Ricter said. “Test your theory on the computer?”
“Do you want me to help him?” Fran asked.
“No, I need you to run some more scans. I want to know all there is to know about it before we arrive. What’s the surface made of? What’s the comet’s tail made of? I also want a few internal scans. If the comet is hollow, then it might have cave systems that we can use to map out the best place to plant the explosives. Can you handle it?”
She smiled. “You know I can, Professor. I’ll get right on it.”
~*~
Over the course of her lifetime, Marjorie has seen some odd looking aliens. She recalled falling ill from a group of Illthoians who emitted a noxious chemical when they said hello. She remembered the stunning beauty of meeting her first Crystal men, whose bodies looked like finely cut diamonds and spoke in a signing language that was more complicated than any symphony ever composed. In front of her now was a Regal ambassador, Blueic Deimen. He was hairless, tall and slender. Eye slits mostly hid two charcoal colored orbs. His head reminded Marjorie of an upside down egg with the smaller end connected to a slender neck which seemed to have no right to be holding up such a large skull.
On another screen was Ling Mia, the linguistic expert. The best way Marjorie could describe Ling, now that she had a chance to get a good look at her, was young. She looked as if she were from Korea or Japan. She hadn’t lost all the baby fat from her face. Her black hair was pinned up into a ponytail which rested on her left shoulder.
Ling had told her that Blueic knew Common well enough to have a conversation but felt it would be a good idea to be there in case he needed to express a more complex thought.
“Ambassador Deimen, Ambassador Mia.”
“Ma’am, I’m not—”
“It’s sir, not ma’am. I may be a woman, but it’s always sir.”
Ling blushed, “I’m sorry, sir. What I was going to say, and what I tried to say to you earlier, was I’m not really an ambassador. I’m only here until they can get a replacement.”
Marjorie had no time for semantics. “Are you the representative of Regal at the moment?”
“Yes sir, I am.”
“Then that’s all I care about. I don’t mean to be short, but we don’t have much time now that I need to supervise the repairing of the Arwen.”
Blueic spoke up. “How badly was the ship damaged, Captain?”
He had a strange accent but wasn’t hard to understand. “We’ll survive. No one was killed.” She was going to tell him about the intruder but didn’t fully trust the secure communication line they had established. It had been her experience there was no such thing as a secure line, so the less said, the better.
“That is good to hear,” Blueic replied. “We are sorry that we didn’t inform you of the attack. We were focused on the Jerrasic.”
“They’re the other major race on your planet, correct?”
“Yes,” Blueic said. “They are a very aggressive race and do not feel we need your help.”
“Took me almost three months to convince them to call you,” Ling said. “They thought they could destroy the comet. Then the Plick interfered and all hell broke loose.”
“Yes, I read the reports on that,” Marjorie said. “Can you give me any more information? Has anything changed since we went into wormhole space?”
Blueic said, “The Jerrasic are sending out one of their battle cruisers to . . .” He looked over and Ling and said something in his own language.
Ling nodded and translated. “Sorry, Captain, he wasn’t sure the word he was going to say was correct. They are going out there to observe you.”
“Then I should talk to a representative from their side.”
“You will be,” Blueic said. “They do not like diplomats or politics, instead they like the, um—” He spoke to Ling again.
“I believe the best translation is, iron fist. They don’t like to talk their problems out; they like to fight it out.”
“But, you don’t think they’ll interfere?”
“Not at this stage, no,” Blueic replied. “But, they are a very unpredictable race so we cannot say for sure. We do know they are sending out their most powerful ships, the Sylavic, which Ling told me translate to ‘the war hammer,’ and should be there shortly.”
“I don’t want to fight, but I will defend my ship if I need to.”
“I understand, Captain,” Blueic said. “I would be alert and watchful of them. They are not to be trusted. We know that from personal experience.”
“I, too, would advice caution,” Ling said. “I’ve dealt with them before, and they are not a pleasant race.”
Can’t be any worse than dealing with the professor. “I’ll be mindful of that, thank you. Is there anything else I need to know?”
“I don’t think so, Captain,” Ling said. “We’re still trying to find out where the Plick got the fighters, but so far we’ve hit nothing but dead ends.”
Dead ends or cover-ups? Marjorie thought. “I hope you find out soon. Is it possible those were the only ships they could get their hands on?”
“Maybe,” Blueic said. “We are trying to determine that. Do not worry, Captain. My nation has nothing to hide. We want you to be our superiors. We recognize that we cannot win a war with you and can only become stronger with an alliance.”
The talk of dominance and being stronger made her feel uncomfortable. She knew it was true, but it was hard to hear it in such a matter-of-fact way. “Thank you, Blueic.” A small icon flashed on
the upper corner of the screen. “I’m being called to the bridge, so I’m going to have to cut this short.”
“It’s been a pleasure, Captain,” Blueic said, turning both his and Ling’s monitors off.
It wasn’t an urgent message, so she could only assume that Kel hadn’t found the intruder. Walking down the hall, knowing that some stranger was in her house, made her feel uneasy. She tried to listen carefully to the sounds around her. Was that a normal click from the air-conditioning ducts? Were those people behind her sneaking up on her? She heard stories of captains who had been assassinated on their own ships by pirates who boarded in secret and then hid, waiting for the right moment to attack.
As she opened the door, she was met by Kel, who stood up from his chair. “Captain, the chair is yours.”
“Thank you, Kel. Any word on the intruder?”
Kel was a proud man, and Marjorie knew that not finding this person was eating him up inside. He took every aspect of the ship personally and, just like her, he viewed this as an insult to himself. “Nothing yet. I have teams looking.”
“Do you have all important sections sealed up?”
“Yes, sealed up and guarded.”
“Good. Now, why did you call me up here?”
Kel pointed to a screen on her computer, “We have some company. The computer did not mark it as a threat, but I wanted to let you know. Sensors are still down, so we can’t really tell what kind of ship it is. But I did a visual inspection and cross-referenced it with the report we got from Ling Mia. It’s a Jerrasic battle cruiser, shields down. Weapons don’t look like they are powered up, so I don’t think it’s a threat.”
“Not right now.” Marjorie took her seat. “Ling told me that they are here to observe. I’m sure once they get close they’ll contact us. Looks like they are going to meet us at the comet.”
“Should I send them a welcome message?”
Marjorie thought for a moment. They regarded dominance higher than anything else, and if she contacted them first it could be a sign of weakness. “No, we’ll wait for them to contact us first.”
“Sir, with your permission I’d like to join security in helping to find the intruder.”
She nodded. There was no way she could keep him here even if she wanted too. “Go ahead and don’t get yourself killed, okay?”
***
The air duct was the last place Kel wanted to be. It was a place where dust and other contaminants had gathered over the thirty-year history of the Arwen. No matter how clean a ship was, and the Arwen was a very clean ship, there would be no way to keep every corner spotless. But this was the only place Kel could think of where the alien might be hiding.
Kel squirmed in the tight quarters, reached up to his forehead, and pushed his goggles down over his eyes. In an instant the darkened vent looked as clear as a sunny day. He saw nothing of significance. After fifteen minutes of searching, he cursed in Martian. Once again he came up empty. He moved his way back out where he met a few of his other soldiers. “Okay, this area is clear, let’s move onto the next.”
The sounds of a battle echoed down the hallway. A yell escalated rapidly, then abruptly stopped. Before Kel could react, the distinct blast of two gunshots rang out, closely followed by a second scream. Another gunshot. Silence.
Kel and his security unit ran full speed toward the sounds of battle which seemed to be coming from the particle generator. He had placed two guards at the room and now wished he had placed more. His only comfort was the fact that he had locked the accelerator room down tight. There would be no way for whomever this was to get in.
Kel turned the corner just in time to see the door to the particle accelerator room close. Two of his guards lay on the floor: one had his throat cut, the other’s chest exposed from a shot by a very powerful energy beam.
A volley of energy beams blasted the door to the particle accelerator room as it closed. Kel ran over to the now red hot door. He turned and ordered, “We need explosives now!”
Several of his men ran back through the hallway and disappeared around a corner. Kel waited for them, wondering what kind of damage the intruder could do alone in the room. This wasn’t supposed to happen. He was in charge of finding this intruder, and now the intruder was at the heart of the ship. If it knew what it was doing, it could do unimaginable damage. As far as Kel knew, it had strapped itself to the accelerator and was about ready to blow itself up with it. His skin turned cold when he felt the ground vibrate and saw the lights dim. He had started the particle accelerator. It should not be able to know how to do that, Kel thought. “Where are those explosive charges?”
Three of his men turned the corner, carrying small explosive charges. They placed them on the door then backed off. The small contingent of soldiers hid behind a wall while Kel detonated the explosives with a remote detonator, causing the door to crumble into a smoldering heap. They ran in, guns ready, pointing in every direction.
The particle room, the largest room on the ship, curved around them. The great doughnut-shaped machine which created the strangelets took up almost the entire space. Coolant vents, large enough to hold a dozen men, connected to the powerful magnets that right now were humming. The sound was deafening. Kel and his men stood in the control room above the accelerator. The door which lead to the lower level was open. Kel ran over to it and looked around, scanning the grounds. It was too loud to shout an order, so he waved his men toward him and motioned to the ground. They ran forward, rifles on their shoulders, ready for any kind of attack.
The particle accelerator hummed contently as his crew carefully walked around it. The accelerator was suspended off the ground just enough for someone to be able to crawl under. Mostly that was reserved for maintenance, but unfortunately it could also be a perfect place for an alien to hide. Kel put his goggles on, bent down, and scanned under the machine. He saw nothing. It was clear.
The machine’s loud hum eventually quieted, and he could hear again. After several moments and shouts of ‘clear,’ it became evident that the intruder had once again slipped through the cracks.
Frustrated, Kel punched the accelerator and yelled, “Try to find out how he escaped. Go into the ducts if you have to. I want the intruder found!”
“Commander, you need to look at this,” the chief engineer yelled from the control booth. Kel jogged up the stairs and into the booth.
“What’s the problem?” He looked at the screen then cursed under his breath. His communicator chirped: it was Captain Cook paging him. He answered. “Captain, you need to come down here and see this.”
~*~
Marjorie felt the particle accelerator before she heard it. She had gotten used to the slight static charge it created when turned on, and the constant vibration of the floor no longer even registered. However, when she felt those things without giving the order to enter wormhole space, it caused her great concern.
“What’s going on?” she asked the navigator next to her.
“I’m not sure. The particle accelerator started suddenly.”
“Get me Commander Lipton.”
She waited a few moments before her communicator beeped. “Captain, you need to come down here and see this.”
“What is it?”
“We had the intruder cornered, or so we thought. He got away again. But he did something to the accelerator.”
Marjorie raced off the bridge. The accelerator was the most vulnerable part of the ship. The magnets inside were powerful enough to implode a ship. She heard stories of such events in battle and always feared it could happen to her ship. She shuddered at the thought of what a saboteur could do if it knew what it was doing.
She arrived to see her head engineer, Kel, and several other men hovering around a display monitor. “Kel, what’s going on?”
“Captain, Chief McFerren will explain it.”
Chief McFerren turned to face his captain with a very worried look. “Captain, whoever did this knew just what he was doing. The first thing he
did was create a strangelet, then he destroyed the mechanism to release it into space.”
“What does that mean exactly?”
“Do you understand the properties of a strangelet?” McFerren asked.
“I know they’re created when we smash heavy atoms together near the speed of light. I know it takes a few billion of those collisions in less than a second to create just one.”
“Right,” McFerren said. “And then that one touches all the other particles around it to create others. When you get enough of them in a tiny space, a wormhole is formed. In order to contain the strangelets, we need to surround them with a very powerful magnetic field. That’s what drains our batteries, keeping that field in place until we’re ready to throw the wormhole into space.”
Awareness seeped into her mind. “Are you telling me that we have strangelets contained in a magnetic field and we can’t eject them into space?”
He nodded. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. These machines were not built to hold strangelets for too long, and if the field fails it’ll escape and eat at the ship.”
“We lose the ship?” she asked. “What will happen after that?”
“A strangelet’s life outside the magnetic field isn’t very long, but it’s long enough to destroy us and anything close.”
After so many battles, so many wars, and so many missions, it didn’t seem right to lose her ship on this mission. “Is there any way to keep it contained until we can get someone out here to help?”
“We don’t have enough power to hold it for that long. Right now we’re running at a power deficit. We’re going to need to lower the power consumption as much as we can just so that we can keep the field up for another thirty hours or so.”
“All right, what do we need to shut down?”
“Bring the lights to nighttime level, lighten the gravity plates, and keep the shields down. That should buy us enough time to at least finish this mission.”
“That won’t be a problem,” Kel said. “We can still function at those levels.”
“And, we can’t run the engine.”
“No, I can’t do that,” Marjorie said. “We still have a mission, and we’ll need the engines at full power to keep up with the comet.”
The Arwen Book one: Defender Page 4