Six Bits

by Laurence Dahners

  Rayland resumed cracking his jaw.

  WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM

  1045 EST

  A loud “foomp” in the corridor signaled the arrival of the president. The light flash reflected into the room and the air blown through the transfer-ring pushed the door shut. When the president pulled the door open a second later, still cracking his ears, he found himself staring into the barrels of several weapons.

  “Jeez sir, what happened to you?”

  “I’ll explain in a minute, but, we - are - now - at - war. I want you to begin assembling the cabinet and the Joint Chiefs, NOW!”

  The president heard in his earbud a tiny voice with Lt. Snellen’s computer translation tonality. “Mr. President, you may speak to us on the ship at any time. I’m decompressing now so in another 20 minutes, if you feel it would be helpful to have a representative from Exceltor, I’ll be available to transfer down to act as liaison. I’ll have to wear an oxygen mask though.”

  BRIDGE—KRANE FLAGSHIP—LIGHT CARRIER XAJION—BOW FRAGMENT—EARTH ORBIT

  1050 EST

  Commander Kinjie stood at the center of a turbulent boil of activity. He had suppressed outward signs of glee when Quell proved to be completely unarousable. He’d expressionlessly ordered the diplomat moved to his cabin. He’d pondered for a moment the fact that a similarly injured human would have had someone trying to repair him. Thank the Mother the kranes don’t do anything like that, he thought.

  Kinjie’s heads darted back and forth as he barked orders to his remaining functional crew members. For a while he’d hoped that this fragment of Light Carrier Xajion might still fight. It had the bridge and the main ship shift-rings, as well as one set of accumulators and a single gunnery room with its weapon-rings. All the flickership bays had been lost with the stern of the ship, but he’d hoped this fragment might still carry on the war. Then had come the report that the accumulators had been holed by a star-port before the transfer wormhole collapsed. The Mother must have been with them since the accumulators hadn’t blown, but they wouldn’t hold a significant charge either. This fragment of the carrier wasn’t going to shift or even open a significant weapon-ring until it got new accumulators. For now he was trying to get the wobble taken off the bow fragment with the few operational thrusters they had left. He had his navigation team trying to get a fix on their position. He’d also ordered navigation to figure out whether their orbit was stable, and started silently cursing Jenkoit and Quinjot for not yet establishing a rescue shift-ring and getting him the hell out of here.

  GUNROOM—KRANE DESTROYER ZOADEN—EARTH ORBIT

  1055 EST

  Quac ventilated rapidly, but his nostril continued to show his agitation by producing fetid exhalations. After his foul-up on their last mission he was amazed that the captain had chosen him for the difficult and important task of establishing the rescue port to Xajion. Alternately his cilia drooped with his dismay regarding the likelihood of his success and stood on end with his relief over being chosen to find the bow fragment, surely a sign he’d regained respect somehow. The fragment was somewhere over the sunward side of the planet, but its altitude and orbit were only approximately known from the intended jump target that Xajion had communicated prior to jumping.

  After the transected jump, Xajion had been unable to get a navigational fix on its own location with the stars rolling wildly about the tumbling ship fragment. Xajion’s comm officer had extruded a radio antenna through a port in high P3 orbit so he could communicate with Zoaden, but it wouldn’t do any good until Xajion figured out its own location.

  Besides, the humaniforms would soon track down Xajion’s ported antenna and destroy it.

  And, of course the Xajion fragment remained stealthy in order to keep the humaniforms from finding it, but that stealthed it against Quac’s efforts too. What was that glint? Could it be off the cut surface of Xajion? Quac drove his port towards it. No, it was just another one of those damn humaniforms’ innumerable satellites.

  BRIDGE—HUMANIFORM CRUISER EXCELTOR—COMETARY EARTH ORBIT

  1055 EST

  General Price leaned over to the ensign. “Mallor, are we under way yet?”

  Mallor gave him a confused look, “Under way to where, sir?”

  “To find these krane and try to fight them!”

  “Oh, no sir. We can find them from here, sir. But if we move, they’ll know where we are from the light of our shift-flash.”

  “So how are you finding them?”

  “The gunnery room had ports open on the other sides of your planet and your moon when the krane jumped in. The gunners will be trying to chase the krane down with their location ports. Unfortunately, it can be pretty hard to catch a ship that jumps in with a high velocity at a significant distance from your ports. And, you can guarantee a warship jumping into a hostile situation is going to come in with a high velocity.”

  “Why? Don’t the ports accelerate well?”

  “They accelerate well, but when the krane jumped in we were using wide angle lenses to be sure to see the jump. Magnification is extremely low at a wide angle so telling what vector and velocity the incoming destroyers had is difficult. So we move ports to the area and start looking off on likely vectors at higher magnifications, but with their stealthing, ships can be pretty hard to see.”

  “So why don’t you light them up with radar?”

  “Takes a big port to extrude the kind of antenna that can emit and receive back useful data. Besides once the antenna starts to radiate, it’s easy to find and blow away.”

  “Reminds me of submarine warfare. They’re always sneaking around, hoping the other guy’ll make mistakes. Can you take me down to this ‘gunnery room’?”

  “I’ll ask sir. What are submarines?”

  GUNNERY ROOM—HUMANIFORM CRUISER EXCELTOR—COMETARY EARTH ORBIT

  1105 EST

  Mallor took General Price past the transport room with the rings on the floor where the general and the president had arrived. The gunnery room proved to be next to it. The gunnery room was another long narrow room filled with holocubes similar to the bridge, but these cubes displayed enhanced real images rather than the prevalent “computer simulation” type of images he had seen on the bridge. Several officers were gathered in front of a cube which was displaying a multicolored cylinder. Mallon said quietly, “That’s the stern fragment of the krane carrier. The dark red areas are hotter on infrared. The warm areas you see represent the accumulator banks where they store energy.” As they watched, the image zoomed in on one of the red spots and blanked for a second. A crackling boom came from a large cylinder at the back end of the room. The hair rose on the back of the general’s neck at a sense of tremendous energy release. The image then zoomed back to show the red spot flaring and spewing violet streaks.

  “What the hell are they doing Mallon?”

  “They transferred a small port on the surface of the stern fragment to the star-port in that cylinder at the back of the room and blew a hole in the accumulator bank.”

  “My god! On Earth we don’t keep shooting after we’ve blown a ship in half! We consider it gentlemanly to help the survivors after the battle is over.”

  Mallon shrugged, “We are being gentlemanly to our way of thinking. I’m afraid that stern fragment is still a threat. It contains their flickerships and gunnery rooms. We’re just blowing their energy accumulator banks with small star-ports. That way they can’t open large ports to run their weapons. We could fry the whole fragment you know.”

  “Star-ports?”

  “That’s what we call our main weapons. Essentially they consist of two ports that are joined surface to surface so that there’s only a small, heavily-armored, highly-reflective, supercooled area between them that’s exposed to our location here. We locate one port on the enemy ship and the other we open into the photosphere of the nearest star. The end of the port that’s in the star is almost immediately destroyed, but not before enough stellar material and radiation blows thro
ugh to do significant damage to the target.” The general heard a muffled “kerchunk” similar to a bolt being thrown home on a large gun. Mallon said, “That sound was a new star-port ring-pair being loaded into the cylinder over there. The cylinder itself is made of a superalloy armor to protect us in case of accidental ring blowout.”

  “How do you know that the krane don’t have a port just outside our hull getting ready to blow a hole in us?”

  “Unfortunately, we don’t. Of course we have observation ports on the hull watching for the approach of such locator ports, but a small locator port just doesn’t put out enough light to be easily seen. We just have to hope that we ‘stealth’ better than they do.”

  WHITE HOUSE—WASHINGTON DC

  1105 EST

  The group of his staff that surrounded President Rayland stared at him wide eyed. After a moment, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said, “Mr. President, let’s get this straight. You were abducted by skinny humans. They told you that there were green skinned monsters out there trying to kill everyone on this planet. Now you’re back and you want us to search near space with radar, looking for UFOs?”

  The president stared at the chairman, slowly becoming aware of just how implausible his story sounded. His mind sifted for known facts. Drawing himself up, he said with some irritation, “Not green skinned… Admiral lets go over the objective data: One. There was some kind of large, but very dim, radar shadow in Earth orbit. Two. It was first noted after emitting so much light it was observed by tens of thousands of casual observers at two o’clock this morning. Three. A little over an hour ago it again emitted a lot of light. Four. It is now much smaller and is quite hot in several places as if some sections may have been damaged or burned. Five. A little more than an hour and a half ago I and General Price were abducted from here in association with a bright flash of light. I alone was returned unharmed, in another flash of light, just minutes ago. Now, I’ve explained what I’ve been led to believe plausibly explains all these events. This ‘Humaniform Federation’ is proposing to help us, if they can, for the price of an asteroid that we have no use for, and that they could easily just steal from us, if they wanted. Providing us help appears to put them in grave danger as Exceltor is significantly outmatched by its opponents. I believe that I’ve been told the truth and that we have little to lose by using our radar installations to try to light up the krane warships. If you have an alternate explanation of these events and can recommend a more reasonable course of action, then I’m all ears.”

  The president’s words were delivered with the full force of his considerable personal charisma. As the room turned back to the Admiral, more than one of the individuals present were reflecting on the motto affixed to the front of the president’s desk, “Don’t bitch, don’t dither, get it done.”

  The Admiral stared at the president for a minute, surprisingly no one else tried to get a word into the pause. “I don’t know Fred. I just can’t get myself around the implausibility of the whole thing. I have a sinking feeling that we’re missing something.”

  “We might be, John, we might be. I, however, am unable to see how searching space for more of these ships will hurt us, other than wasting some time and money. I think it’s time to fish or cut bait.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “If we’re agreed then?” Nods around the room. “I’ll ask Exceltor to give us their coordinates so that we won’t accidentally irradiate them.”

  GUNNERY ROOM—HUMANIFORM CRUISER EXCELTOR—COMETARY EARTH ORBIT

  1230 EST

  Nedcam turned to address the crew in the gunnery room. “OK team, it looks like some of the people down on P3 are going to help us by sweeping the areas where we think the krane might be with the microwave radiation that they call radar. They are not supposed to sweep our area. If they do we’re in trouble because we reflect their radars’ wavelengths a lot better than the krane. Considering the quality of the krane stealthing in the microwave range, for this to do us much good, we’re going to need some antennas out there to pick up reflections. They’ll be radiating large areas, therefore they won’t light ‘em up the way they did the carrier when they focused in on it. We’d need some luck to pick up a weak, sweep reflection with our shipboard antenna. We’ve only got four microwave type antennas in stores, but we’re going to pop three of them out with a bunch of false port openings to try to keep the krane from recognizing and destroying the ones we care about.”

  General Price watched as the gun room crew wrestled a bulky antenna into an airlock. While they were bringing the antenna in, there were repeated thrumming booms coming from the airlock chamber which Mallon told him were “false port openings” designed to get the krane tired of trying to chase down every port they opened in near space. The actual loading of the antenna into the chamber to dump it through the port was a frenzied operation in order to send it through without a longer delay than the other port openings. Irregular timing would allow that port to be characterized as “special” by the krane. Once they’d sent the antenna through, they minimized the size of the port and brought the leads to the antenna out through the small port that remained. The leads and port were carried over and hooked into a holocube while another antenna was being prepared so it could be “popped out” as well. Shortly thereafter the holocube began to identify and display vectors to an amazing number of objects that were reflecting Earth’s radar emissions.

  The reflections mostly represented Earth’s satellites and satellite fragments that were getting pinged by the radar sweeps. Because the people on Exceltor had no way of knowing when and where a signal that bounced off the space junk had been initially radiated, they didn’t know its distance from the antenna, only its vector. After the second antenna had been deployed the two antennas triangulated, as well as noting the time difference it took a pulse to arrive at first one, then the other antenna. With this data, the holocube switched to displaying locations rather than vectors

  BRIDGE—KRANE DESTROYER ZOADEN—EARTH ORBIT

  1345 EST

  Quinjot’s cilia quivered as he pondered this new development. Exceltor had been opening two meter ports every 130 seconds all over near space. At 4 megawatts a pop, they were putting a fair amount of energy into this effort, but after looking down the vectors to a randomly chosen twenty and finding nothing, he was beginning to think that Exceltor must be doing it just to distract the kranes. Or perhaps they were temporary passive imaging portals? Open, get a snapshot, close and analyze.

  A new report grabbed his attention. A lot more planet based sources were beginning to sweep space with beams of microwave radiation. Presumably they were trying to find out what was producing all the flashing lights in near space. Incredible luck! The wavelengths they were using were in a range where the kranes’ stealthing was more effective than the humans’. Quinjot’s initial impulse had been to shift the hell out of there before he was caught like he suspected Xajion had been, however, he was now realizing that this represented an incredible stroke of good fortune. If one of those beams swept Exceltor it would light up like an onmibull, whereas Zoaden would be hard to see without big antennas.

  He decided to gut it out. “Rotan, deploy our own microwave antennas and see if we can pick up a ping off that humaniform ship. Then calculate the minimum size antenna ports we’d need to pick up a humaniform cruiser based on the strength of those microwave sweeps and open a couple on the other side of this damned planet.” Should I let Jenkoit know what’s going on? Quinjot wondered. No! he decided, Let the scum sucker figure something out for himself.

  BRIDGE—KRANE FLAGSHIP—LIGHT CARRIER XAJION—BOW FRAGMENT—EARTH ORBIT

  1400 EST

  Commander Kinjie was fuming. He knew that a destroyer, either Zoaden or Yaitan, had shifted into an orbit lower than Xajion’s because his navigation team had picked up the flash despite the severe damage to his fragment of a ship. The only port making equipment he had in this miserable fragment of a ship was the communications setup at the back
of the bridge. The ports they’d been using to communicate with Yaitan and Zoaden in their P2 and P4 orbits just after the Xajion had been stricken. Gueel had been unable to find whichever ship had shifted in below Xajion using the comm ports without having the precision data they’d used to locate Yaitan and Zoaden in their previous orbits. However, Xajion had sent the other two ships some information on Xajion’s current location in the message where Kinjie had transferred command to Jenkoit on Yaitan. Any cretin with a full complement of search ports should have been able to find Xajion with that data by now! Kinjie was getting a sinking feeling that giving command to the more competent, but more junior Jenkoit was the source of this problem. He doubted that a peeved Quinjot was refusing to search for Xajion, but the arrogant fool was just the type to assign one or two of his less qualified technicians to the task.

  Even worse, two meter ports had been opening all over creation and now planet-based units were sweeping the area with microwave frequencies. That damned Humaniform Federation must have had prior contact with this Mother-forsaken planet. Duot had finally gotten up the courage to tell Kinjie that they had been heavily irradiated by multiple planet-based sources of microwave just prior to their jump. No wonder Exceltor had found them so quickly. They must’ve just called their buddies on the planet, who’d seen Xajion’s in-shift flash, and asked them to radiate the whole area with those big, crude, planet-based antennas. Now they were having them sweep around to try to find Zoaden and Yaitan the same way. Exceltor had probably popped some 10 meter “blossom” antennas out through some of those 2 meter ports. Quinjot, that offspring of a DNA fertilized egg, probably hadn’t figured any of this out yet and, since he hadn’t established contact, couldn’t be told! Cilia wilting, Commander Kinjie spoke, “Fotayl, have you been able to rig the radio to broadcast on an antenna extruded through that damn comm port yet?”