Invardii Series Boxset

by Warwick Gibson

Bosun dragged the heavy industrial lead from the multibox through the doors and toward the shining white wall that soared out of the ground and curved away above them.

  “Now what?” he said, turning toward Finch, who shrugged, an expression largely lost in the rubbery binding of his spraysuit.

  A square of darker material formed in the white wall. Bosun dragged the linkage to it. There was a moment’s hesitation, and then a negative impression matching the end of the lead formed in the darker square.

  Bosun steeled himself, then he pushed the fitting into place and locked it home. He walked back to the rover to read the energy levels off the packs. Before he was halfway there the heavy shielding on the lead began to bubble. He ran clumsily in the low gravity to shut off the powerpaks.

  “Look at this,” he said to Finch a moment later, pointing to the energy levels on the multibox. The powerpaks were all empty. It was no wonder the power surge to the alien ship had bubbled the covering on the heavy-duty lead.

  “I thought it might take a lot to boost their systems,” said Finch. “I’m hoping we’re starting secondary circuits that will be enough to get their own power source back on line.”

  “What now?” said George, from the control room.

  “Now we re-start our reactor, and use the mining lasers to send power to the portable dish, and from there to the dome.”

  “You do think outside the square!” said Bosun in admiration. “That might just work.”

  When Bosun placed the portable dish next to the dome, Finch saw a nearby area of the wall darken, then slump inward and take the shape of a large parabolic dish. He tapped Bosun’s shoulder, and pointed.

  Bosun whistled in surprise.

  “Those boys are way ahead of us. Look at that, a receiver dish. I wouldn’t have believed it.”

  Finch took a locator cone they used for heavy blasting in the mine, and taped it to the centre of the dish. The reactor picked up the cone’s signal straight away. Once the reactor started to feed power into the dish, the cone would be a fog of ionised gas, but by then the beam would be locked on.

  George slowly increased the power, until eventually a blue beam connected the reactor directly to the dome, at the highest rate Finch thought was safe. The dome soaked it up. Finch didn’t know how much power the dome would need, but he was prepared to keep feeding the reactor’s output indefinitely.

  He felt good about the fact he and his crew had been able to help someone in distress. It was an old law carried over from seafaring days. When you were this far from home, you did everything you could to help others – it might be your turn next time!

  Finch had no idea, as he surveyed his team’s handiwork, that his act of kindness might save his species. A war was coming, one that Humanity had little hope of winning, and they would need every bit of help they could get.

  CHAPTER 3

  ________________

  The link from the reactor to the dome had been running for twenty minutes by the time Finch was cleaned up and back in the control centre. Bosun and Matsu were still down in the micropulse room, having their spraysuits removed.

  Finch was looking at the central screen, where a light blue beam blazed across the huge opencast mine to land on the dome in one corner. The vidlink had darkened the feed to reduce the glare from the beam, and the reflections from the rocky surrounds.

  “The dome is an energy screen,” said George, without preamble.

  “The whole thing is an illusion, though perhaps it could be used as a shield if enough energy was pumped into it. Mind you it would be almost impossible to hit the vital parts inside the dome. See here.”

  He tapped back a couple of screens to an energy schematic of the floor of the mine. The outline of something half the size of the rover, that looked like it had been made up from a haphazard collection of boxes and barrels, lay on the floor of the mine.

  “I think they ‘turned off’ the sphere as an evasive manoeuvre when they were hit by that orange fire,” he continued. “The cabin part is covered in something that won’t reflect emf signals, some sort of cloaking technology, and they just coasted in to land with all systems off.”

  “There’s something else,” he said, pointing to a string of results on the screen to his right.

  “I’m pretty sure there’s nothing living in the cabin. There are no life signs coming out of it. Any sort of life would need to modify its environment, and it would need a space inside the cabin to modify. There are neither of those in the cabin. There’s nothing but hardware and systems, packed solid, right into every corner.”

  “I thought you said it absorbed emf,” said Finch. “So how did you find this out?”

  “It does,” said George. “I got sneaky and used gravity wave analysis from the mining satellites. The cabin is full of something with a density up in the super-heavy metal range.”

  He turned and looked at his boss.

  “There is no room for living quarters,” he said, “no room for an atmosphere, and definitely no room for a flesh and blood body of any sort.”

  “Very interesting,” mused Finch. “I was thinking it was time for another chat with our guests. It looks like you’re right, it is only a machine we’re talking to.”

  He took a seat in front of the central screen, and pulled out the diagnostics pad he had previously changed to alphabet use.

  “How much power do you need?” he typed in, and looked up at the central screen.

  There was no reply. Finch wondered how he might ask the question in different ways.

  “How long will you require the reactor feed?” he queried, then added, “Time left reactor feed. Question.” Maybe the K’Sarth trader slang was easier for the machine to understand.

  “PERHAPS TWENTY MINUTES. PERHAPS NOT,” filled the screen in giant letters. As this faded another message overwrote the first. “PRIMARY SOURCE UNSUCCESSFUL.”

  Yes, thought Finch, they’re trying to repair their secondary systems sufficiently to kick start their main power source. He had expected that.

  “You are machine. Question. You are people. Question,” he keyed in.

  “I AM PEOPLE. WE ARE PEOPLE,” came the answer.

  Finch wasn’t sure how to proceed for a moment. Communication was difficult enough without trying to point out the logical inconsistencies of being both ‘I’ and ‘we’.

  “No people in ship,” he tapped. “No room, no life, no people.”

  This time there was a long pause. Matsu came in, tidy in a fresh change of clothes after being stripped of his spraysuit, and George put him to work rigging an emergency signal that might reach another mining station, or a passing ship. Bosun would be a while dissembling and putting away powerpaks, and trying to repair the damaged lead.

  “PEOPLE LONG WAY FAR,” filled the screen. Then, “SHIP A MACHINE,” pulsed and faded over the first message.

  “Hey, George, you getting this?” queried Finch. “It looks like the dome’s a remote.”

  “It can’t be,” responded George, who was trying to find out how the dome was communicating with them through the screens.

  “Time lag,” he explained. “Signals can only travel at the speed of light, so unless whatever built the dome is nearby, it can’t be having this conversation with you. The time lag from Earth is over twenty minutes at this distance.”

  “So you think it might be a computer talking, a kind of advanced AI?”

  “Not necessarily,” broke in Matsu excitedly. “When I was in my last year at the academy, we talked about this problem in the Diminishing Effect hypothesis.

  “It was a kind of string theory. Each quantum particle is connected to every other particle by ‘strings’ determining how they react to each other. But the number of strings increases by the cube as distance increases from the original particle, and the effect of ‘determination’ decreases.

  “Anyway,” said Matsu hurriedly, as George tilted his head and gave him a ‘make this relevant’ look, “an emf signal moves from particle
to particle and is limited by the speed of light, but a ‘string’ signal acts outside particles embedded in a gravity-curved space, and may be much faster than light, or even instantaneous.”

  “Sub-space radio,” said George. Finch raised his eyebrows.

  “The way all the spaceships communicated in the big surround theatres when I was growing up,” said George. “Instantaneous communication.” He grinned.

  “Yeah, maybe,” said Finch. Matsu could be right. He had been brilliant as a student but not very stable emotionally, and that was why he hadn’t lasted long as a junior officer in the UfEta star drive fleet. A quiet mining life and time to read the latest engineering research had suited his emotional make up much better.

  “Reactor laser has cut off,” snapped George, riveted to the small screen in front of him. His head lifted abruptly, “look at the main screen, the dome’s lifting off!”

  The bottom half of the dome lifted out of the bedrock. The floor of the mine remained undisturbed, exactly as they remembered it. The perfect white sphere gained more height, and peeped out of the opencast mine like a vast bubble escaping an underground mud pool.

  The cameras outside the control room picked it up, and it hung on the horizon like an impossibly large full moon on Earth.

  “They’ve got their main power source up and running I guess,” murmured Finch. “Star drive must be coming on line as well.”

  How long before their strange visitors left? His fingers stabbed at the mining diagnostics pad.

  “Who are you? Where do you come from?” he typed.

  “WE ARE DRUANII,” came the answer, and “FAR SPACE NO STARS,” followed. Then nothing.

  He was about to tap in another question when the screen blazed again, “SYSTEM DELETE.”

  “Talk more. Friendship,” keyed in Finch.

  “NO TIME,” came the reply, and “ENEMY HARM,” followed that.

  “INVARDII DRONES PROXIMITY HARM,” came through as the ship lifted smoothly away from the control centre, dwindling rapidly as it fell toward Neptune. Messages continued to blaze and then fade on the main screen.

  “REPEAT NOT.”

  “ASSIST REMEMBER HELP.”

  “SYSTEM DELETE NOT FEAR.”

  “SYSTEM DELETE INVARDII READ.”

  “MANY SUNS HARM.”

  All they could see now was a tiny white dot at the extreme magnification of the vidlink cameras.

  “REPEAT NOT.”

  “ONE SOURCE.”

  Then, suddenly, the white dot was gone.

  “FREEDOM,” came the last message, and then every system in the control centre went down, and the lights went out.

  “For love of the unnatural!” bellowed George in frustration. Then pale, blue light came up in the corners of the room as the emergency systems kicked in. The life support panels came back up as a soft yellow glow.

  “Systems starting from AVS,” called George, watching a group of red graphics in one corner of his control panel indicate machine language start-up.

  “Something’s not right, though,” he relayed, watching as the red graphics reached out to areas they would not normally touch. He was able to run tests as more systems came online.

  “I think there’s a rider program in the system,” he said at last, “something that’s making changes and then deleting itself.”

  “Something from Big Billy?” questioned Finch.

  “Unknown. Unlikely to be anything else,” said George.

  “Can you do anything about it?” said Finch.

  “Wait a minute,” said George. “Ah, main systems are now fully operational, and there’s no trace of a rider program remaining.”

  “So, what did it do to our systems?” said Finch, running some diagnostics himself and getting normal readings.

  “Nothing showing different in the mining systems,” said George. “Nothing in the dish array routines, or the satellites.”

  “Try the temporary files for the vidlink system,” said Matsu. He had given up rigging an emergency signal, and now sat at one of the consoles beside George.

  “What do you mean?” said Finch.

  “This is the remote feed from the mine, right?” said Matsu, and the part of the mine where the dome had just lifted off came up on the central screen. The others nodded.

  “This is five minutes ago,” said Matsu, and the picture jumped momentarily but remained the same.

  “Ten minutes ago,” he added, and still the screen showed nothing but the floor of the mine. “Twenty minutes.” Flicker, no change. “Thirty minutes”. Flicker, no change.

  “Get it?” he said. “No evidence that the dome was ever here.”

  “Well, brush me with oil and serve me as a salad,” said Finch in disbelief.

  George looked up, startled at the phrase, and Finch wondered where he’d learned it. Maybe from his eccentric grandfather, who’d died when he was young. He shook his head, and forced himself to look at the screen again.

  “That’s what they meant by ‘system delete’,” said Matsu. “They were warning us they were going to remove all traces of their visit.”

  Finch nodded his thanks, and then turned to George. “What was the phrase they used most often?” he asked, looking thoughtful.

  “Apart from ‘system delete’?” said George. “Ah, ‘repeat not’ I think.”

  “So they were asking us to keep this incident confidential,” said Finch. “To not report it to mining control at the united mining council, or to the federation of trading blocks, or to anyone else.

  “That’s why all our attempts at getting out an emergency transmission wouldn’t work. They read our systems and figured out how to stop us.”

  “Why would they be so secretive?” said George, puzzled.

  “Anyway, they didn’t ask us,” he continued, “they forced the point. Who’s going to believe us without any evidence?”

  “I think they asked us,” said Finch. “At least, that’s what I would like to believe.”

  He turned in his chair toward the others.

  “We should write down what we remember, and compare our recollections,” said Finch. “Do you remember the words ‘system delete fear not’, and ‘system delete Invardii read’?”

  “Yeah, sure,” came two voices at once.

  “I think they were saying the Invardii, whatever they are, can read our records,” said Finch, “and it must have been the Invardii who attacked them, right?”

  “It fits, I guess,” said George.

  Finch got out of his chair and walked to the far wall, then headed back toward his seat. He couldn’t help pacing the floor when he was thinking hard.

  “I think the Druanii want to keep us out of their conflict with the Invardii,” he said, considering each word as he spoke, “and any evidence of the way we helped them would endanger us.”

  “Then these Invardii must be pretty low pricks to pick on us for helping someone in trouble!” said George. “Goddammit, that’s rule number one among star drive crews.”

  There was a moment’s silence. One of them had been pulled out of a desperate situation by the courage of others, and they all knew someone whose life had been saved.

  “All we saw of the Invardii was a few chunks of comet ice,” said Finch. “No ship, no energy signature, nothing to tell us they were there. Those guys are way ahead of us technologically. I figure they could be anywhere, and we wouldn’t know it.”

  He paused. “Maybe we aren’t a threat to the Invardii, not yet anyway, but if they think we’re allied with the Druanii they might act. They might think it worth destroying us before we became a threat.

  “That would certainly be the case if they thought we were getting Druanii technology. They would knock us out just in case – a first strike before we grew to be a problem.”

  George and Matsu had nothing to say.

  “I think the Druanii did us a favour,” said Finch finally.

  CHAPTER 4

  ________________

  The
world has changed, sighed Manoba Cordez, but some things never change.

  He was Regent of the South Am trading block, and one of the two most powerful people on Earth. He was, for a moment, mulling over the fact the endless urban sprawls and towering city centres of five centuries ago had gone.

  It must have seemed strange back then to be alone in the universe, to have an identity defined without reference to other civilisations. Those were the days before an alliance with the Sumerians, before trading with the K’Sarth, and before humankind knew about the legacy of the Rothii.

  The inclusion of Earth in the cultural milieu of the Spiral Arm had seen such a change in the Human psyche that all history was now divided into PM (Pre-Milieu) and the years that had followed. It was now the year 110, and Human and Sumerian were slowly beginning to work together – if one could call the huge cultural differences and frequent misunderstandings ‘working together’.

  And yet, despite enormous changes in the lives of the people of Earth, and their greatly expanded horizons, he was dealing with the same collection of power struggles, scientific advancements, and emotional entanglements as any ruler throughout history. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same!

  Manoba got up from his desk and walked to the window. He looked out over a profile typical of any city in the world today. Energy-conserving buildings, none higher than four stories, lay scattered through reserves and gardens, while the bulk of the city lay underground.

  Manoba preferred working on the ground floor of his three-storey UfEta office, where he could watch families walking through the grounds and children playing.

  He regretted that the site was monitored from hidden cameras and satellite feeds, and the glass he looked through was synthetic diamond polymer that could withstand any attack. These additions were things his security people had insisted upon, though very few people knew that this building was the centre of all South Am trading block activity on Earth.

  It was the middle of the afternoon, and people had gathered to rest on blankets under the larger trees, while more animated groups clustered around tables under sun shelters.