Star Force 10: Outcast
Page 41
Deciding not to press our luck, I let the Raptors be.
That day we held funerals for our dead. Three marines and one crewman had died in the battle. I felt every damned one of their deaths. They were my responsibility. If I’d thought to challenge Kleed earlier, maybe there wouldn’t have been a boarding action. Then again, it was probably only his supreme overconfidence and his trapping himself aboard Valiant that had forced him to accept the duel.
The next day I declared a holiday for everyone, letting Valiant run everything. As we were in deep space with nothing nearby, I felt like the risk was negligible. Getting up early, I packed all of Sir William’s things up and put them into the cargo hold. I finally moved into the captain’s quarters. For the first time since joining Valiant, I felt like I’d earned the position. From their responses, I knew the crew was ready to accept the change.
I’d spent the night after the battle with Adrienne, but I’d been too banged up for sex. She’d pouted a bit until I reminded her of what she’d said about making the first time special. Due to the miracle of nanites and Microbes—plus a little help from the autodoc—I invited her to breakfast in the morning.
The food was nothing special, but the company was excellent. Suffice it to say that we spent our holiday athletically making love. For once there was no looming crisis and no emotional baggage to push us apart. For the first time, I let go of my regrets that Olivia and I had never slept together. It was better we hadn’t for now I would never compare the two.
Despite my itching, healing body, it was a day and a night I would always remember—and the next couple were pretty damn good, too.
* * *
We found Greyhound on Orn Six, at the location we’d suspected was a square-shaped Raptor installation. In fact, it wasn’t of Raptor origin at all.
When we cruised into orbit, four Raptor monitors pinged us. They were missile-heavy mini-fortresses held aloft by repellers above the ring. They painted us with their radar, but held their fire.
Valiant edged closer. My gunners were locked on with our heaviest weapons—but nothing happened. Apparently Star Force and the Raptors were now at peace, or at least in a state of truce.
I felt better when we’d half-orbited the planet and landed next to Greyhound near the Square. That’s what we ended up calling it: the Square. Resembling a city nearly half a mile across, it was composed of an infinite variety of dark gold-colored cubic shapes each placed upon or even within one another. Perfectly square openings dotted the cubes in seemingly random places—not only on the sides, but often on top of, or beneath overhangs. The doorways varied in size from too small to accept a fingertip to ten yards across or more. While always lined up with the associated cube’s edges, the portals might be placed anywhere on any surface.
Our sensors had spotted Marvin’s ship resting nearby. We’d been attempting to contact him intermittently, but he hadn’t answered. Greyhound seemed to be undamaged, and I suspected he was still inside the hull.
I also suspected he was just too busy to bother answering us. Whatever this Square was, I was certain it fascinated him and probably for the same reasons it fascinated me.
That didn’t mean I hadn’t learned a few things since falling through the first ring back on Yale. This time I disembarked Valiant in a battlesuit with Kwon and a squad of marines at my back. Hoon joined us as well, representing our science team. I had more faith in his ability to survive a crisis than three clumsy civilians, nanotized or not.
Adrienne wanted to come along, but she hadn’t been trained to use a battlesuit, and I wasn’t going to let her out in a thin crew suit this time. There probably weren’t any Lithos here as Greyhound hadn’t been molested, but other dangers might lurk.
I decided not to fly close to the Square on suit repellers. I had no idea what we were dealing with here. It seemed a lot safer to walk, and only fly if we needed to jump out of there fast. The Square itself showed unusual, hard-to-pinpoint power emanations. It made me jumpy.
As we moved warily among the cubes, the doorways beckoned to us. Black as a void, they seemed to be made of liquid darkness with no depth. I’d seen something like it, but I wasn’t certain where.
Choosing a large opening near ground level I walked up to it and stared at it for a time. I couldn’t see inside the perfect, obsidian darkness.
Picking up a stone from the rocky surface—the ground was not paved or altered in any way—I was just about to cast it at the portal when I heard Marvin’s voice over the close-range com-link.
“That may be inadvisable, Captain Riggs.”
Marvin slunk out from behind a large cube. The core of his body was a lumpy cylinder ten yards long. His many tentacles and camera stalks sprouted from his central mass in a random profusion. He looked like a fifty-armed octopus sliding toward me.
“My, how you’ve grown,” I laughed.
“I determined that an increased body mass could more efficiently explore this facility.”
“And what is this facility?”
Marvin’s appendages moved slightly faster in agitation. “I’m not certain.”
“Got a guess?”
“I have a theory, but the evidence is very thin.”
“Share it with me,” I said.
“This place was built by a very advanced agency.”
“Can we get to the point, Marvin?”
He didn’t even bother to get huffy about not using his self-appointed title this time. Maybe he’d grown bored with the joys of playing captain.
“I suspect it’s a station—possibly even a laboratory. More importantly, I’m fairly certain it was built by the Ancients.”
I turned in a slow circle, eyes wide. “Now you have my full attention. What makes you think the Ancients built this?”
“All the technology we’ve ever encountered up to this point in our exploration has been comprehensible right down to the fundamental level. By studying it, I was able to determine core principles and work toward replicating and altering it. Every type structure I’ve encountered has been technologically straightforward—except for one.”
I nodded thoughtfully. “You’re talking about the rings.”
Marvin moved closer, picking his way carefully across the rocky ground. “Exactly. While we’ve made some haphazard progress toward controlling them, like a primitive playing with a motor vehicle, actually understanding and replicating the technology is far beyond us. This facility is of a similar, perhaps even more advanced, nature.”
“So what would happen if I threw this rock at the doorway?” I hefted a chunk of what looked like broken masonry.
“The results are highly unpredictable since I’ve not tested this particular portal. Let me show you what occurs when another is interacted with.”
Marvin led us through winding non-streets. The cubes seemed to be set down randomly so there were no straight boulevards, only narrower and wider spaces between them. I could see tentacle tracks in the dust as if the robot had been here before, and they increased in number until we came to a large plaza. Here, the haphazard placement of the cubes had created an open space a hundred yards across.
I saw instruments all over the place. Devices were pointed at walls and doorways. I recognized small lasers, other beam projectors, and what I thought was a scanning electron microscope. There was a portable materials analyzer and a dozen other things less comprehensible. Smart metal wires snaked to several generators, and everything was connected together in a console at the center.
“You’ve been busy, I see,” I said. “No wonder you didn’t answer.”
“This place is far more fascinating and important than mere interspecies politics,” Marvin replied.
Hoon had followed me since landing but maintained his distance poking and prodding things. When he saw the equipment, he quickly moved to inspect it. Without permission, he began making adjustments.
“Professor,” Marvin said, “please do not touch that equipment.”
“I am merel
y recalibrating some of your sensors which are showing some evidence of maladjustment.”
“Maladjustment? They’re calibrated to twenty decimal places.”
Hoon snorted—that’s what the translated nonverbal sounded like, anyway. “A mere twenty decimal places? No wonder you’ve made no progress. I can improve your precision to at least thirty-five decimal places.” The lobster continued to play with the consoles.
“You’ve got to love Hoon, Marvin,” I chuckled. “He’s at least as nosy as you are.”
“I don’t have a nose.”
“It’s an idiom, Marvin. Look it up.”
Marvin’s body language gave me the impression of patient longsuffering as he ignored Hoon.
“To answer your initial question, Captain Riggs…” He led me over to stand below a small portal. It was like a window a foot across and set about twenty feet up on the side of one wall. “Stay here,” he said to me.
Then he grabbed Hoon and hauled him protesting over to a spot under a high overhang. Watching this reversal definitely gave me a sense of irony.
“Wait here,” he said to Hoon, who sputtered and complained bitterly. Marvin returned to me. Extending a tentacle with a tiny laser, Marvin inscribed “CR” on the rock I held, my initials I guessed, and then pointed. “Toss the rock through that portal.”
Aiming carefully, I gently threw the stone at the hole. It disappeared as soon as it crossed the plane of darkness.
“I’ve been assaulted!” I heard Hoon shout. He came scuttling over to me with a rock in his claws. “This was fired into my carapace. I don’t appreciate humor of any kind, but personal assaults are too much, Riggs.”
I took the rock and examined it. On one side I could see the inscription: “CR.”
“It’s a ring. A portal.” I laughed aloud. “But it only goes from here to there?”
“That one does,” Marvin said. “Others lead to portals around the Square, but some lead nowhere that I can see—and some appear to go nowhere at all.”
“Huh?”
“Let me show you.” Eagerly, Marvin seized a long metal rod lying on the ground. He led us to a three-yard-wide portal near ground level, he extended the rod’s tip to enter the flat darkness, then drew it back. When he did, the piece he had shoved through did not return. Turning the end to me, I could see it was shiny, as if it had been sheared off—which I figured it had.
“Better not fall through that one,” I said, backing away a bit.
“There are many other wonders here, Cody Riggs,” Marvin said. “Areas of variable and twisted gravity, places where physical laws are bent—even some spots where time itself is altered. And can you guess what these cubes are made of?”
“Stardust, right?”
“Exactly,” Marvin said. He seemed disappointed I’d guessed, but since that was what the rings were made of, I’d figured it was only logical.
“Well Marvin, I’m very impressed. You have yourself a mad scientist’s playground here. I’d like a daily written report of your work, and I’ll expect a weekly briefing in person. Carry on.” I turned to go.
“But Captain Riggs, I have so much more to show you!”
“Marvin, I’m genuinely happy for you, I really am. You’ve finally found something to fully occupy your neural chains and networks. You might say, however, that I have too. So you and Hoon stay here and do your thing, and I’ll do mine for a while.” I waved an airy salute. “See you in a week.”
We left him there with his tentacles half-raised, like a forlorn wiz-kid whose science fair project had only won second place. But I knew I could’ve spent hours listening to him and only scratched the surface. I planned to turn loose Sakura and the civilian scientists to be my liaisons. Marvin and Hoon might destroy the star system if they were left in this playground alone.
For the most part, I wanted to get more familiar with my new quarters and the king-sized bunk inside. Adrienne would play a big part in that exploration.
I felt of pang of guilt even as I had that pleasant thought. Had I forgotten about Olivia so quickly? So much had happened… I no longer was haunted by Olivia’s memory, but I was still determined to find out how and why she’d died and who was responsible. When I returned to Earth—and I would—I’d seek justice on her behalf.
In the meantime, I had a large number of living people to worry about. We had a base to build, repairs and reconfigurations to perform, and information to acquire. For example, I didn’t know what was on the other side of the ring the Raptors were guarding. Before we could dive through, we had to investigate the far side. I’d learned my lesson on that score.
One thing was certain…we weren’t going through the ring until we were fully repaired and ready for action. Every star system we’d visited so far had been hostile to intruders. In fact, so far the entire universe seemed like a hostile place.
A private worry I didn’t share with any of the others involved the Ancients. They were out there somewhere. They had to be. Right now, I was standing in the middle of one of their castoff toys. Maybe they were all dead—or maybe they were waiting for us. If we were destined to run into them, I didn’t want to do it unprepared.
And most of all, I didn’t want to accidentally lead them back to Earth.
The End
From the Authors: Thanks Reader! I hope you enjoyed OUTCAST. The Second Saga of the Star Force Series begins with this volume. If you’d like to see more stories in this universe, please put up some stars and a review to support the series. Tell us what you’d like to see next!
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STAR FORCE SERIES:
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Swarm
Extinction
Rebellion
Conquest
Army of One (Novella published in Planetary Assault)
Battle Station
Empire
Annihilation
Storm Assault
The Dead Sun
Outcast
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The Eden Plague
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Cyborg Strike
Comes the Destroyer
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Steel World
Dust World
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