by Dave Bara
I shrugged. “Usually so, I guess. The upper levels are most likely to be maintenance, like you said. Anything interesting should be on the third level. But we’ll check two just in case.” I pressed the button for two and the doors resealed, the lifter moving so smoothly it was hardly noticeable. The doors opened again on two, which looked remarkably like one. We randomly reconnoitered a few rooms, which were completely uninteresting, then returned to the lifter. I resealed the lifter door and then we made our way down to three. Both Marker and I noted a difference this time.
“We’re going a long way down,” he said. I nodded.
“Hopefully not so deep we can’t get back,” I said, my anxiety growing.
Finally the doors opened onto three and we stepped out into total darkness.
“Hold!” I ordered. I held up my arm and ran my light down the length of the hallway. Any part of the wall not directly illuminated seemed to fade away against pure black.
“What is it?” asked Marker.
“Unknown,” I said, then made my way slowly out into the hallway.
“Sir, perhaps I should take the lead—”
“Just hold your position, Corporal,” I said. I extended my arm out into the black. I felt a slight resistance just a few feet in front of me, my arm vanishing into a black event horizon. Then I seemed to punch through. The area around my arm itched with the buzz of a static current. “Some sort of energy field, like a membrane,” I said. My hand and arm on the other side of the event horizon seemed fine, I could bring it back out of the black or flex it at my leisure on the other side. I made a decision.
“Wait five seconds, then follow me in,” I said to Marker. He started to protest, but before he could finish I slid my arm back into the black and then passed through the event horizon, static energy buzzing around me as I went through.
Marker must have been surprised when he came through behind me. I hadn’t moved, too awed by what I saw.
I was standing on a vast glassed-in deck, looking down on a carved-out cavern that had to be miles across. A giant cylinder, wider at the back end farthest away from me to my left, lay horizontally across the center of the cavern. It pulsated with a vibrant blue glow, as if simply waiting for instructions to act again as it had many times before. The floor beneath us seemed to hum from the power of it. The end of the cylinder closest to us was capped by a copper-colored nose cone, illuminated at the end by a glowing orange light. For all the world it looked like a cannon just waiting to be fired. Above the cylinder on the ceiling of the cavern was an enormous, flat, circular membrane, like the one we had just passed through, black as could be in the center but rimmed with pulsating white lights and rippling with energy. I didn’t even notice Marker come up beside me as I stared at the marvel of it all.
“Looks like somebody left the lights on,” he said. He was right, the entire cavern was lit up and the focus seemed to be on this one object.
“This entire base must have been built to support this device,” I said, regaining my bearings.
“But we’ve been getting no power readouts at all,” Marker said, pulling out a handheld scanner and checking it. “How do they mask it?” Then he started rattling off statistics while I watched the awesome device glow in front of me. I felt like a child encountering a mountain or a skyscraper for the first time, overwhelmed by the enormity of it.
“Nearly a hundred terawatts of power being generated, though I don’t know how or from where,” Marker said. “Temperature inside is twenty-one Celsius. Oxygen levels near standard. Bio filters read normal. Definitely designed to support human life in a comfortable setting. It’s almost inviting.”
“Almost,” I said, “But not recommended.”
“You’re nervous about this?” said Marker. I nodded.
“Aren’t you? This whole base is just sitting here, abandoned but operational, like it’s just waiting to be found. And the lack of security is also a concern. If you had something this big wouldn’t you keep it a bit more tightly wrapped?”
“I would, sir. But I’m not from the First Empire. Who’s to know what their motivation was?” I nodded at that. In front of us was a display board, the first one we’d seen with functioning controls. It was lit up in a myriad of colored lights.
“Let’s have a look at that board, shall we?” I said. We studied the controls together in silence for a few moments. Again, the characters were not Imperial Standard, far from it. In my mind they looked not just foreign, but like they were in code.
“It would make sense,” I said, thinking out loud.
“What?” asked Marker. I motioned to the board.
“These characters seem like some sort of code to me. If they’re encoded they’re also likely to be booby-trapped, to prevent unwanted tampering with the system. I highly recommend we don’t mess with this.”
“Agreed,” said Marker.
I looked at my watch. Forty-seven minutes of oxygen left. I had a decision to make.
“We’re getting short on time if we’re going to make our assigned rendezvous. Let’s take digital records of everything in here—panels, input ports, output ports—and see if we can make sense of it back on the yacht. I don’t want to keep the captain waiting on my first EVA mission,” I said.
We proceeded to record everything of note in the control room and all we could photograph of the cavern, the cannon, and the membrane shield. With that we began our egress to the yacht, ending up outside in the twilight of L-4b, and beat a quick retreat to our ship.
An hour later, we were standing next to Serosian and the captain as they scanned through our recordings.
“Can you identify those characters?” Captain Kierkopf asked the Historian. He shook his head.
“Not with enough certainty to attempt to operate the machine, if that’s what you’re asking.”
She pushed a curl out of her face, hands on hips. “If what you’re asking is do I plan on making an attempt to rescue my shipmates aboard Impulse, Mr. Serosian, the answer is yes. Whether or not you recommend such an action is not my concern. So I only have two questions. Is this the device that activated that gate and allowed Tralfane to take Impulse through it, and can you operate that device if I request it?”
Serosian turned away from the displays and faced the captain again. I could see that theirs would never be a trusting relationship, at least not like the kind that Serosian and I had. I signaled to Marker and he stepped away from the conversation, going to the rear stations to make busy with Layton.
“The answers to your question, Captain, are most likely yes to the first and no to the second,” he said. “This script is some sort of code. Some of the characters I recognize as being of Sri origin. Others, I am unsure of. One thing is certain though: attempting to operate this device without knowledge of that code would most likely be suicidal. The Sri were not ones to give up their secrets easily.”
“So you say,” she replied. “Yet Tralfane operated this device just a few short hours ago and made off with a Lightship, the most sophisticated weapon in our arsenal. How did he do it?”
Serosian pondered this a moment before replying. “I think most likely, Captain, he had knowledge of the code and he came down here in his yacht, like we did, and activated it, probably setting a remote timer of some kind. Then when he knew we would be close enough to observe him, he activated it and took Impulse through.”
“Through what? To where?” demanded the captain. “If you have answers, Mr. Serosian, or even educated guesses, I want to hear them.”
“Most likely it’s an artificial jump gate generator,” I heard myself saying, then regretted it. Now the captain’s attention was squarely on me.
“Explain,” she said plainly. I hesitated a second before answering.
“There is a theory,” I said. “During the Imperial Civil War, Corant was effectively sealed off from the rest of the empire. The natural jump point
s simply weren’t there.” I looked to Serosian. He and I had had this conversation many times.
I continued. “Jump points are essentially wormholes that balance out the dark matter of a system with the light of a primary sun. They’re a part of the natural topography of space. If you were trying to defend an embattled capital planet in a time of war, you would most likely do it by collapsing the natural jump points, especially if you had a way of generating one of your own.”
“The ultimate defense,” said the captain, apparently engaged with my theory. “But the power curve would be off the charts. Something like that would have to be the size of a small planet.”
I shrugged. “Or a large moon.”
“Or a large moon,” Kierkopf agreed. “With enough power to generate an artificial jump point—”
“By using a massive Hoagland Wave,” I finished. I looked at her for a few moments, gathering my thoughts. She seemed skeptical.
“It would take the power of a full sun gone nova. How could a small station like this generate that much energy?” she demanded of Serosian.
“By pulling it in from higher dimensions,” he said. “Torsion energy—the spin rotation of objects in normal space—combined with the energy of counterbalanced objects in higher dimensions would provide more than enough power.” He pointed out one of the pictures we had taken of the cannon. “What this device likely does is open a singularity to that dimension or dimensions, then channel the power through the cylinder and up to the membrane on the cavern ceiling—likely some kind of conduit—then onto the gate itself, opening an artificial singularity on this side and likely connecting to a similar device, or possibly a natural jump point, on the other side, allowing a ship to pass through unimpeded.”
“But just where is the other side?” asked Kierkopf. “And where is Impulse?”
He shook his head. “Unknown. Possibly Corant, or perhaps some other world.”
“It would make sense for there to be a series of gateways, to act as a buffer between the Imperial home world and any potential enemies,” I said, and instantly regretted it again. The captain was now fully focused on me once more.
“So we don’t know where Impulse went, but we think we know how she got there. So tell me, Mr. Cochrane,” the captain said, “What would you do next?”
“Well,” I said hesitantly, “If I couldn’t activate that device from this location, I suppose I would go to the gate itself and see if I could activate it from there.”
The captain nodded. “Precisely,” she said. “Mr. Serosian, is your yacht sufficiently rested for a trip to the gate?”
He nodded. “Sufficiently,” he replied.
“Then let’s set a course for the gate. No time to waste,” she said.
“Captain, there could be a problem with that strategy,” Serosian said. “If we approach the gate, we could make ourselves a target of this technology, and its origin is still unknown.” She pondered this a moment, but just for a moment.
“Then I suggest you redouble your efforts to decode that control panel, Mr. Serosian. You are the expert, after all.” She turned to me. “Take us up as soon as she’s ready, Mr. Cochrane.” Then she marched off to Marker and Layton’s stations to give them instructions.
I turned to my mentor. “Can you decipher the code?” I asked.
“I hope so, Peter. Before your captain here gets us all killed.” And then he was back off to his private chambers.
We approached the gate structure with extreme caution. It was basically a ring of connected satellites nearly a kilometer in circumference, big enough to move a ship, or a fleet for that matter, in a single maneuver. That would give the users of this device a distinct advantage over the Union Navy, which could scarcely move a single ship in and out of a natural jump point at one time. Fleet maneuvers were slow when gathering large groups of ships, which was why the new Lightships were so important. They were designed to be as autonomous, and as powerful, as a strategic battleship or a trio of cruisers with half the displacement. The key was hyperdimensional power, provided by the Historians of Earth, driven by the minute singularities stored inside HD crystals. Without that nearly unlimited power source, the Lightships would be about as powerful as small destroyers and just as vulnerable.
I watched my display board, looking for visible light fluctuations or power curve signatures in infrared coming from the gate. None were forthcoming. The ring was as dead as it had been before being activated by Tralfane and powered by the HD energy cannon. We crept along the circumference of the ring, illuminating it with our running lights. The technology was exotic, to say the least, and counterintuitive in its design.
“It’s like we’re looking at solid blocks of metal,” said Marker from his station.
“Not metal,” I said. “More like a cast or molded material, like a ceramic. It shows no sign of metallic properties.”
“I’m not interested in what it is,” came the captain’s voice from behind us. “I want to know how to get it working again so that we can use it to rescue Impulse.”
“Understood, sir,” I said, then cleared my throat nervously before continuing. “The power curve is nil. Scans for energy signatures or residual radiation are nil. The material resists all my attempts to do an internal scan, sir. It may as well be made out of rock.”
“Is there a control complex of any kind?”
“Not that I can detect,” I said.
“That’s not good enough!” she said, her voice rising in frustration.
“Perhaps,” said Serosian, joining the conversation. “But it is all we have. We already know where the device is activated from. Our time would likely be far better spent exploring that option than putting ourselves out here in the line of fire.”
Though Dobrina was standing ramrod-straight to assert her position, she was barely five foot seven. Serosian towered over her.
“And are you any closer to deciphering that control code?” she asked the Historian.
“Yes,” he said, to my surprise, and the captain’s. “Enough to know that it is not a code. It’s a language. Complex, perhaps as much as sixteen hundred characters, but a language nonetheless.”
“Alien?” she asked. He shook his head.
“Human. Likely Sri, but human.”
“So we have some hope of cracking it?” she asked. He nodded.
“With time, if we don’t suffer any more setbacks,” he replied.
“Mr. Serosian,” she started. “I know you would like us to hunker down on that moon and play it safe, take our time and get things right, but nearly three hundred and sixty of my shipmates are out there somewhere, presumably in grave danger. Every moment we wait here trying to solve a riddle, we are getting further and further away from rescuing any of them safely. I can’t have that. We need to find a way to follow them.”
“And has it occurred to you, Captain Kierkopf, that that strategy is exactly what Tralfane wants?” snapped Serosian. I could see from his expression that he was truly angry now. “Did you notice how he purposely slowed his approach to this station, allowing us to catch him, allowing us to see what mechanism he used to take Impulse to unknown space? Has it occurred to you that perhaps he’s waiting for us on the other side, and it is part of his plan to capture not one Lightship, but two? Or at least this yacht and her HD drive, which would make him even more powerful? What better way to cripple the Lightship program than to take out two-thirds of the fleet with one blow? If he captures Starbound, or this yacht as well as Impulse, the Union Navy could be crippled.”
Dobrina was furious at him for showing her up in front of her men. “It has occurred to me, yes,” she said, measuring her response to control her anger. “But it doesn’t in any way dilute my desire to rescue Impulse and her crew, most of whom are not only my comrades but my friends. Maybe you Historians are trained to be loners, to keep your personal feelings in check, but tha
t isn’t the navy way. A captain must consider all possibilities, and sometimes use emotion and intuition, not just cold facts and technology, to make his or her decisions.”
“I care greatly about your crew, Captain, and want nothing more than to see them rescued,” he responded. “And I too have friends in the navy service.” He tilted his head slightly at me here, but I couldn’t tell if she noticed. “But I want them all to be safe. Impulse, this crew, and Starbound, in fact the entire Union Navy and the people of both your worlds. So you will pardon me if I also consider their well-being in my recommendations to you.”
This seemed to have a calming effect on her. “Understood,” she said. “But we do seem to be at an impasse about what to do next.”
As if on cue, we all heard a warning beep coming from the navigation board.
“Sir!” said Layton from his station, alarm in his voice. “I have a power flux coming from Levant Prime on my board!” Everyone turned their attention to their stations.
“Can you get a fix, Peter?” asked Serosian. I was at my longscope display in a second.
“Confirmed,” I said. “It looks to be three vehicles rising toward our position from the planet’s surface. By their mass I would estimate they are cruiser class ships. At the rate they’re moving, they will likely intercept us in . . . forty-one minutes.” I turned to look to the captain for orders.
“It appears the Levantines have solved the dilemma of what we do next for us,” said Serosian to Dobrina. She looked at my board, then to me.
“Take us away from the gate, Mr. Cochrane, but do it deliberately. Don’t let them believe we are trying to escape. Let them catch us,” she said.
“First Contact protocol?” asked Serosian. She nodded. I turned to my board to execute my orders.
“And let’s hope the natives are in a friendly mood,” she said, as I maneuvered us away from the jump gate, uncertain what the next move would be in this increasingly complex game.
“You are ordered to stand down and heave to,” said the voice on the com in heavily accented Imperial Standard. The message repeated in several other languages as well, none of which I, or apparently anyone else onboard, was familiar with.