by Mark Wandrey
Minu nodded. “Response time to a disaster?”
Jasmine tapped her lips with a finger. “Maybe ten minutes to spin up the field generators, another five to balance the field. It will chew a massive amount of power.”
“The EPC banks here save more than enough,” Bjorn assured them from Romulus.
“Downside?” Minu asked.
“Definitely price,” Jasmine said to a series of nods. “You don’t find those kind of shield generators in junkpiles. We believe they were once used to protect cities and military installations from orbital bombardment. They are all but impossible to come by.”
Minu knew why; because the higher-order species all kept them to protect themselves from each other. If she got any, she wanted some for her cities as well. The game was afoot.
Ted spoke up. “We have a line on four, the bare minimum we’d need to establish a stable field.”
“How much?” Minu asked. He told her and she whistled. “That’s a stack of cash.” He nodded soberly. “Other alternatives?”
“Ask the Tog for help?”
Minu shook her head no, that one was off the table.
“Deep space shield array between Bellatrix and the sun,” another scientist suggested. A variation of protecting the entire planet. It would act like a bow wake to move the charged particles around the planet.
“Almost as expensive and will have to be a starship to maintain position,” Bjorn said.
Minu nodded and filed that away. Could the Kaatan act as their shield in a desperate situation? She’d ask Lilith later.
Other suggestions went from the desperate, start building domes for the cities and agriculture, to the sublime, research altering the star’s condition. The last was interesting, but Minu didn’t think even the Lost took their stellar engineering that far.
She’d thought they’d ran the gambit when Bjorn spoke up again. “There is one more possibility,” he said.
Minu looked at him expectantly.
“Do the same thing the Lost used to do.”
“Move the planet?” Minu said with a laugh in her voice.
“Yes,” he said. Ted was scratching his chin with that far off look in his eye that meant he was doing ‘big math.’ Others were glancing at each other. They believed it was possible.
“You all think this is a possibility?”
“It has to be,” Bjorn told her, “it’s why Romulus is here. This rock doesn’t come with Bellatrix, it was moved here under its own power. This thing formed in the system Kuiper belt and had one hell of a long trip getting here. It didn’t do it all on its own.” More nods. “It’s really only a matter of math.”
“And there’s the rub,” Ted interjected. Bjorn shrugged.
“Fill me in,” Minu told them. Ted took it on.
“Managing a gravitic field of this intensity is an extremely complicated endeavor. The controls here are all designed to interface with computers that feed them the calculations. And I mean a mother bucking assload of calculations. At least a hundred trillions a second. And there isn’t a single damned computer up there capable of doing one millionth of that, so the Lost all did it through their data network.”
Which we don’t have access to, Minu finished for him. Lilith could access it, but not control it. Half the time when she made inquiries she got no reply. She likened it to a room the size of a planet full of file drawers which you opened randomly looking what was inside. What were the odds of finding a computer center where she could do those calculations? The same odds as finding the ‘well of souls’ as she called it, where all the fighting ships’ AIs were stored. With that, she could…
“We can just build our own network,” Bjorn brought her back to the present.
Ted laughed and shook his head. “In our dreams.”
Bjorn held up a hand. “We can’t duplicate the full capacity, but we’re not trying to move the damned planet to another star system, just another hundred thousand kilometers farther out from the star!” He had a tablet out and was working furiously. “We’re talking about forty thousand teraflops or so.”
“And about a thousand secure data connections,” Ted reminded him.
Bjorn shrugged as it they were talking about popcorn.
“Budget?” Minu asked.
Ted sighed. “A lot less than the shield option. And the goods are reusable. If we screwed up the shields, we could burn them up and that would be that. The computers would be a reusable asset.”
“Get me a proposed budget,” Minu said.
Bjorn looked like it was his birthday. “Really?!”
“Yes, Bjorn. Get underway. I’m going to talk to the planetary government tonight and a news conference later. They’re expecting miracles, so I guess I need to deliver.”
Minu was about to leave Steven’s Pass to head for Tranquility where she’d have her high level meetings when a young Chosen scientist caught her.
“First Groves? Ted wanted you in his lab for a moment before you left.”
The young boy looked at her like she had the power to kill him with her eyes. Minu smiled and patted the five silver starred kid on the shoulder.
“Thanks,” she said and changed direction, leaving him smiling ear to ear. Why were people so scared of her anyway?
Minu trotted into Ted’s primary lab at the center of the science wing to find him deep in a heated argument with logistics. “Ten thousand computer tablets, are you completely insane?”
“Yes, he is,” Minu said over his shoulder.
Ted glanced back and grinned at her then flashed his pearly whites at the bemused three green star logistics branch Chosen. “Get on it, Chosen.”
“Yes First. I’ll get an estimate in an hour.” He signed off, only just in time to cover the string of expletives that began to come out.
“Thanks,” Ted said and gave her a little hug. They’d been friends for a very long time. Minu was glad of one thing. Since she’d become First, Ted had finally given up trying to get into her pants. At least he seemed to have given up. Her marriage hadn’t dissuaded him.
“No problem, you needed to see me?” She glanced at her chronometer. Time was getting short, she hated to push her personal aerocar too hard. It was getting old.
“Yeah,” he said and went to a secure cabinet. From inside he drew out a clear crystal rod. Minu snapped her fingers.
“Right, the ones we found on the frontier my father left for me.”
“This,” Ted said, handling the device like it was a newborn baby, “this is amazing.”
Minu grabbed it out and touched the base, bringing it alive. Ted’s eyes got wide and he reached to take it from her, she smacked the hand away. “Don’t be silly, I’ve been handling PCRs for almost twenty years.”
“Yes, but that is not a PCR?”
Minu looked at the holographic script chasing itself around the rod and gave him a skeptical look. “Then it’s doing a real good job of pretending.”
“Could you please deactivate it while I explain so you don’t accidentally make a very expensive mistake?”
She rolled her eyes but shut it down nonetheless. Ted took it back and sat it on the work bench under a scanner. “I spent quite a while looking for the network entries on these. I had two problem.
“One, I went with the assumption if was a PCR, which proved erroneous.”
“Right, are you going to explain that?”
“In time girl. Second, it wasn’t on the Tog data network at all. I found it in the pilfered data you and Pip stole all those years ago.”
Minu nodded. She’d long since given Ted and Bjorn copies of all that data. She’d found some fantastic things in there. Most of it beyond them, but some quite useful. Apparently this was one of them.
She gave a ‘well?’ gesture and he continued. A display came alive and there was an alien species she’d never seen before. It reminded her of a bipedal dog, but there were no canine species in the Concordia with huge fangs like that and horns growing behind their ears.<
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The being had one of the clear crystal PCR on a planet. He activated it and did something she couldn’t see before sitting it down and taking a step back.
“What the,” she started to say, and then the rod morphed into a full size portal. “What?”
“What you have here, young lady, is a portal initiator. Fifteen of them, to be precise.”
“I didn’t know they existed.”
“No-one did. At least, no-one here on Bellatrix. I suspected they might exist. I did a few careful inquiries in the second hand black market out there where we’ve gotten ‘controlled goods’ before. The only response that I got which could even be considered an acknowledgement of their existence was a ‘you willing to trade your world?’ from a certain character on the frontier. They are likely unbelievably expensive.”
“Maybe we can use a couple to fund our defensive plans?” Minu wondered aloud. Making the contacts would prove difficult at best. Ted was waging his finger from side to side and she put her hands on her hips.
“More.”
“More?”
“Yes, lots more.”
“Can you give me some kind of idea?” she asked, her frustration growing.
“He asked if we were willing to trade our world, Minu. He thought we wanted to buy an initiator and the price was an entire planet!”
Minu’s jaw dropped open and he reached out a finger to push it closed. A leasehold? No, they meant a deed. You own the world, free and clear. Leaseholds cost taxes to the Concordia. Depending on the condition of the world, a shitload of taxes. A world like Herdhome with its stable biosphere and good growing season was ten times more valuable than Bellatrix.
“We could buy a couple colonies,” she said excitedly. Her dad had indeed left her the keys to the store.
“We don’t dare?”
“What? Why?”
“Minu, without starships you have to invade a world through its portals. They’re naturally defensible bottlenecks. We’ve buried all of ours under forts and the planet is all but secure from invasion now.”
He held up the initiator and put it under a delicate scanner. The device registered nothing. “Slip this into your pocket, go for a diplomatic visit, get a moment by yourself, and poof. Let the invasion proceed.”
Minu’s eyes got big as she fully grasped the implications. Of course, this was the big gun. Even landing from orbit had risks, especially with higher order species. Troop transports were vulnerable, you had to protect them, and an invasion was impossible to hide. Drop one of these in a quiet corner of a world and you could move a hundred thousand troops onto their world before they even knew you were there.
“They must be rare, even to the higher orders,” Minu surmised.
“Lost technology, I’m sure. If these Weavers you discussed are involved in all the portals,” he held up the one he’d been scanning, “then this is Weaver under glass. I wonder how hard it was to make these?”
“Not very easy,” she said with a certainty. Negotiating with a Weaver was like arguing with a cat.
“Lock these away,” she ordered him.
“They’re secure here.”
“No, I want them in the deep command bunker.” He cocked an eyebrow but nodded. “Who else knows about these?”
“You, me, Bjorn, that’s it.”
She debated telling Dram then put off that decision for later. First she would get Aaron back, and deal with this later. “Good job. See to the transfer to the command bunker down below yourself. These do not leave your hands.”
He nodded then she thought and took one. He raised a hand and she shook her head.
“I want one of these where I can get at it if I need be,” she said and slipped it into her pocket. It felt almost warm against her leg. “You never know when you might need something special.”
He looked skeptical but shrugged before locking the box. “And email me the links to all the references you found on the initiators?”
He said he would. She needed to study up on them. It wouldn’t do any good to need to use one and not know how.
She said her goodbyes and headed for the parking lot. She was gone before Ted locked the box. She didn’t notice him take one of the remaining fourteen and place it in a secure place under his desk. A short time later, he carried the box down to the bunker transport tube.
Chapter 80
September 24th, 534 AE
Planet Coorson, Traaga Leasehold
The portal building was new since Minu had last been on Coorson. That wasn’t to say it was a new structure, she didn’t think there were any new structures on the planet. It was, however, newly commissioned as the planet’s outworld portal. The old building had been all but destroyed in the abduction of her husband.
Minu waited with her nearly omnipresent squad of Rangers several buildings down from the portal building. It was raining, as was pretty much the normal for the Traaga’s dismal world. The streets were empty of the locals, which was very much not normal for the only city on the planet. She could hear the sound of their chattering only blocks away, but this place was quiet. She would have been confused, if she didn’t already understand.
Right on cue, a pair of armored Tanam emerged from the portal building. They cradled massive beamcaster rifles tailored to their four arms with casual deadly familiarity. High tech combat helmets fed the warriors data on their surroundings, causing them to instantly turn towards Minu and her twelve Ranger escorts. Alien eyes regarded the twelve modestly armed human warriors. A moment later, a highborn Tanam stepped out.
“You agreed on minimal escort,” the highborn called down the muddy street. She, unlike her warriors, appeared unarmed.
Minu glanced around her at the steely eyed Rangers who were eying the Tanam. “This is my personal guard as First among our Chosen, much like your own.”
“You are nervous, human.”
“You’ve given me reason to be,” she replied and moved down the street. Her guards fanned out and let he move ahead, though not far ahead. Veka did the same, her two guards staying a few meters back.
“Have you brought the agreed upon goods?”
Minu gestured to one of her men who used his tablet. A second later a squad of crabbots appeared all carrying large crates on their backs.
“And my sister?”
Two of the Rangers gestured and another crab-bot came into the street, this one with a neutral gravity field generator and a forcefield. Inside the field floated a very unhappy looking Seela.
“Are you well, sister?” Veka asked.
“Well enough,” the other highborn replied.
“Enough of the reunion,” Minu said. “Where’s our person?” she asked as the bots came to a stop abreast her position.
Veka looked around as if she could spot Aaron standing around waiting for her. Of course, he was nowhere in sight. “You see human, things have not worked as we planned.”
“Explain,” Minu said, crossing her arms.
“Your soldier’s ship was ambushed in deep space.” Minu’s eyes narrowed. “It was destroyed.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“The human did not survive.”
Minu took a half a step back, reeling as if she’d been struck a hammer blow to the head. The mask of her calm slipped, then slipped again. Aaron was dead?
“If this is some sort of a trick,” she mumbled. Some part of her was aware that Seela was roaring something inside the floating zero gravity ball. The shielding allowed no sound to leave.
“No trick, human. The traitorous beings who attacked us have been a nuisance to our ships before. Lately, they’ve become worse. You will likely find out as well.”
“Your father is dead,” she said through the link with Lilith untold light-years away.
“I heard,” came the reply. Her voice was strained. It was almost the most emotion she’d ever heard from her daughter.
Seela continued to scream for attention, unheard and unnoticed. Though she couldn’t be
heard outside the field, she’d heard it all inside, and she knew who this soldier was that Veka casually mentioned was dead. She also remembered all too well what they faced.
Minu felt the pain solidify and settle around her like a cloak against the world, and transform. She looked down at her hands and turned them into fists, one with five fingers one with four. “You need to leave.”
“Give us my sister and we will complete the deal.”
“The deal died with… the deal is dead. We will meet you on Nexus to discuss the matter with the war council.”
Veka looked at her sister only a few meters away and snarled, cocking her head slightly at the look on the other highborn’s face. What was she screaming about?
“Is this the way you wish it to go, human?”
“This is the way you forced it to go.”
“As you wish. NOW!”
From all along the street a dozen beamcasters flashed, each a carefully aimed shot at the heads of the human Rangers. Each shot was dead on target, and each one splashed against the humans’ shields, the energy cleanly absorbed.
“Sergent,” Minu barked, “plan beta.”
“Yes commander!” Seela replied.
Minu nodded her head, reached behind her back and drew her combat knife, and charged.
Veka hadn’t expected the humans to all be wearing rare and expensive miniature shields only deployed by specialized elite soldiers of higher-order species. She was caught completely flat footed when the ambush failed and didn’t react for crucial seconds. They were seconds that Minu used to her effect.
Ten of the dozen Rangers broke for cover, seeming to scatter in every direction as Seela and another Ranger took flanking positions behind Minu, their shockrifles rotating forward on their slings and raising them to shoulders.
Veka roared in rage as Minu and her two men raced towards her, then hissed as she realized her position. Shock rifle fire snapped and cracked, striking the soldier to her right multiple times, clean through her shield. The Tanam fell with a surprised roar as the other guard drew both her beamcaster pistols and fired bolt after bolt.