But several things had planted the seeds of doubt in Vel Noric’s mind about his Hedfer-Vel. He was different from the others. J’quol was not quick to anger, but neither was he quick to cower. He could be very methodical, thinking things through from many directions. He always stood by his ideas, even if he phrased objections in a properly subservient manner. And he could be manipulative, exploiting weaknesses or disagreements among the crew to further the Vel’s orders.
Noric realized J’quol’s eyes were still looking at him, while new eyes had turned to investigate.
“What was that you said, Hedfer-Vel? I was … contemplating something.”
“I apologize for intruding on your thoughts, Vel. I asked would it please you to judge an observation?”
“Proceed.”
“Only moments before sensor interpreter Kotal detected the … emissions from the human vessel, it had made a series of small course alterations.”
“Yes.” Noric exuded boredom. “Probably dodging pebbles too big for their excuses for energy weapons to destroy.”
“That was my initial conclusion as well, Vel. However, by chance, I had been looking at our navigational sensor readings at the same time. There was no such debris for them to avoid.”
This was obviously a fiction, as the two different data sets were not displayed simultaneously. He couldn’t have been viewing them both “by chance.” He would have needed to call them up separately and deliberately. J’quol was taking care to present his argument in a way that wouldn’t make the Vel look stupid in front of the rest of the command crew.
Normally, this would be a very good quality in a subordinate. In this case, however, Noric wasn’t so sure. He couldn’t shake the feeling that J’quol was putting on a performance. There was something entirely too calm about J’quol. Almost … Lividite.
Noric grew impatient. “Come to the tip of the tooth, Hedfer-Vel.”
“With haste, Vel. I believe the human commander suspected our presence, perhaps a faint sensor reading, but had reason to doubt his conclusion. So he altered course to see if we followed in unison. Any delay in our course adjustment would prove that we were not a trick of his sensors.”
“Continue,” Noric said, interested.
“Almost immediately after the course alteration, their commander sent out the signal we detected. I believe the human vessel has detected us faintly and is attempting to initiate communication.”
Vel Noric rolled back on his heels and leaned on a handrail. His synthetic irises shrank to pinpoints as he mulled over the theory. They’d been shadowing the human thieves since intercepting the buoy’s requisition for repair. As best as his crew could deduce, the humans had stumbled onto the buoy purely by luck. In accordance to their foul nature, the first thing they did was hope no one was looking, tuck the buoy under their coats, and run for home.
Normally, that would’ve been justification enough for Vel Noric to capture or destroy the vessel on charges of piracy. Unfortunately, after reporting the matter, the Assembly of Sentient Species, in its unassailable wisdom, had ordered Noric and his ship to remain hidden and report on the Earth vessel’s actions. Apparently, hijacking wasn’t a sufficient crime to perturb the centuries-old noninterference policy regarding humanity and similar lower species.
The Vel wondered precisely what it would take for the Assembly to take the threat of Earth’s rapid advancement seriously. Would the humans need to invade a member world? Collapse a star perhaps?
He reached a decision. “Your observation is sound, Hedfer-Vel. That … complicates things.” He found his chair and sat down. “For reasons beyond my understanding, the noninterference dictum remains in place. We were to remain hidden and observe. Somehow, they have seen through our sheath. By itself, that has compromised our assignment. Now I must decide how to salvage the situation.”
“You have ideas on that facing, Vel?” asked J’quol.
“Yes, what we should have done from the beginning: destroy the vessel. If they do not get back to Earth, they cannot alert them of their discovery or deliver the technology in that buoy to their scientists. The last thing we need is their engineers digging around inside of it and leaping forward a century.”
“Would that not violate noninterference?”
“That was already violated when they detected us. It’s just a matter of degree.”
“True. Would it please you to judge another—”
“Just throw it out, Hedfer-Vel,” Noric said testily.
“Yes, Vel. Analysis of the buoy will confirm for them that it was not built by other humans. So detecting our vessel would not be their first evidence of another sentient species. The humans have a saying—‘That dog is already out of the sack.’” J’quol folded his arms. “Besides, destroying the vessel may be seen as an overreaction. You know how … squeamish the Assembly can be about such things.”
That was certainly true. Noric could hear the objections coming from the review members now. “They were unarmed and defenseless,” they would say, completely missing the point that that’s when you want to attack the enemy. The clawless cowards certainly didn’t voice such qualms millennia ago when the Turemok military was the only thing preventing the Lividite war machine from overwhelming the entire sector.
The Assembly’s idea of long-term military strategy seemed to be to allow every planet full of savages to frolic about space giddily until they were technologically advanced enough to pose a real threat. It made as much sense as hand-rearing Gomeltic hatchlings until they were big enough to eat you.
But that was someone else’s problem. If Noric ordered the human ship destroyed and the Assembly disapproved, that would be his problem.
“Your observation is persuasive, Hedfer-Vel. Tiller, open a portal and move us to one-third Dar-Penyog from the human vessel. That should put us well outside their sensors. Once in position, continue observation until we receive updated orders. And find out what went wrong with our sheath to cause this mess in the first place!”
Without delay, the (nearly) invisible ship came about, flexed its muscles as if to pounce, and then leaped headlong into a hole in space.
* * *
“They’ve disappeared, ma’am!” Wheeler shouted from his nav station, bewildered.
“They left?” asked Allison.
“No, well, yes. Sort of. They didn’t leave, exactly. There was a strange energy spike. Now they aren’t appearing on our scopes.”
Allison queried the last ten seconds of sensor data and watched the playback. It was exactly as Wheeler described. A bizarre blip, then the fuzzy anomaly simply vanished.
“What the hell was that all about?” she asked no one in particular.
“I don’t know,” replied Prescott, “but I’ll feel a bit better with one less mystery hanging over our heads.”
“Amen to that.” Allison sank into her chair. Whatever it had been, Allison was relieved it had decided to bug out instead of start shooting.
“Helm, resume course for Earth.”
“Aye, ma’am.”
CHAPTER 15
As the months piled on, Eugene found the accumulated pressure of work took progressively longer to leak back out again. His “retirement” from teaching had proven more strenuous than even the worst parts of his old life. There were times he found himself wishing to return to the days of grading an entire lecture hall’s worth of doctoral theses, just for the rest it would represent compared to the last year.
Wrestling with politicians added greatly to his frustration. Eugene had taught political science for two decades before moving on to AESA. He thought he had a pretty good handle on the political environment and the dangerous species that inhabited it, but detached study was far different from direct interaction. Like the difference between watching lions prowl in the zoo and listening to them prowling outside your tent in the dead of night.
In spite of this, Eugene was not immune to the infectious enthusiasm permeating his group of brilliant shut-ins. He found
he possessed more energy than he’d had in years. He came home exhausted, but slept deeply and awoke rejuvenated, often with enough exuberance to give his wife a proper rise-and-shine before going back to work.
Most important, progress was being made. Felix’s reverse-engineering team had yielded tangible results. They’d already developed an advanced gravity projector both smaller and more efficient than traditional designs. Simulations estimated a vessel fitted with them could reach 0.55 c, a 10 percent increase, which would cut months or even years off round-trip journeys to the colony worlds, and time equaled money.
The ARTists had set up a shell corporation to hang the new patents in. Venture capital flowed into the company accounts, supplementing the project’s AESA black budget and swelling their ranks further still. There was a real risk to such maneuverings. Anyone nosy enough to take interest could see the shell for its true nature, and they still hadn’t identified Harris’s secret admirer from nearly a year ago.
But neither had there been any repeats of that performance. Harris must’ve scared whoever it was off the trail. Still, curiosity tended to trump fear over the long run, and there were always others to take up the torch.
Eugene glanced at his watch. It was an antique mechanical piece, a gift from the university upon the end of his tenure, and quite valuable to the right collector. Feeling a little ancient himself, he wore the anachronism proudly, even though it had taken over a year to get used to reading the hands. He still couldn’t do it at a glance, which forced him to look a second time: 7:48 P.M.
That was enough for one day. The rest of what people continued to call paperwork, despite not containing any paper, would still be there in the morning. In fact, if past experience was any guide, it would find a way to fornicate and multiply.
Eugene locked down his computer terminal and placed his tablet in his coded briefcase, genetically tagged to him. It acted as a sort of reverse fire safe. Should anyone else attempt to open it, the contents would be thoroughly incinerated, without damage to anything outside the case. The flammable mixture contained its own oxidizers, allowing it to work underwater and even in a vacuum. Eugene felt this was overkill, as, if he found himself floating in space, document destruction wouldn’t be his most pressing issue.
Eugene was about to extricate himself from his disarmingly comfortable chair when he saw shadows lurking through the frosted glass of his office door. He tensed for a moment, until he recognized the squirrelly tenor of Mr. Fletcher. Did that kid ever leave the lab?
Eugene pressed the stud to open the door. “Come on in, boys. No sense waiting around to ambush me in the hall.”
Felix and Jeffery rushed in like a river through a burst levee.
“Professor, I’ve just heard that—”
“I’ve figured it out! It’s not a—”
“They’ve finished transl—”
“It must be a—”
“Slow down, guys,” said Eugene.
“Quit interrupting.”
“Can I finish?”
“I was here first!”
“Yeah, but—”
“Stop!” Eugene gave them both a simmering look. The two men went silent and had the good sense to look penitent. “Thank you. Now, then, one lunatic at a time is all that I can handle at my age. So, in no order of importance, Felix, please proceed. Jeffery, you may go second.”
“Sorry, sir. What I was in a hurry to tell you was I think I’ve killed two birds with one stone.”
“I hope you had the proper hunting permits,” quipped Eugene. Felix looked a trifle confused. “Never mind, please go on.”
“Right. You know how the buoy’s insanely inefficient radio transmitter has been bugging the crap out of me?”
“Yes.”
“And how none of us could figure out how the mystery ship had known where to look for the Magellan, since the crew was blocking the buoy’s radio broadcast?”
“Again, yes.”
“Well, I think I’ve figured out the answer to both.” Felix took a breath. “It isn’t a radio transmitter. At least that’s not what it’s supposed to be.”
“You may have lost me. We know it’s emitting a radio signal,” said Eugene.
“Yes, but that’s not its purpose, like an old-fashioned incandescent light bulb wasn’t supposed to be a heater.”
Someone flipped a switch in Eugene’s brain. “So you’re saying the radio waves are a by-product, like electrical resistance through a wire causing heat.”
“Exactly. It’s wasted energy. For months, I couldn’t figure out why the transmitter was sucking down so much energy for so little signal strength. Even worse, I couldn’t find where the majority of the energy was going. There wasn’t nearly enough waste heat or radiation to account for it all. It has to be going somewhere we can’t see.”
“All right. That gives us a place to start. But that’s only one mystery,” said Eugene.
“I was coming to the second. Since we can assume the majority of the signal is going out somewhere else, we can also assume that jamming the radio spectrum isn’t doing squat to stop the actual signal. That’s why the Magellan’s mystery guest knew where to find her.”
“Oh, wonderful,” said Eugene. “So our people are dragging around a giant torch attracting every moth in range. Ridgeway won’t be happy about that.”
“No, sir. But now that I know I’m not looking at the universe’s dumbest radio tower, I think we have a good chance of figuring out what it’s actually doing. And if my guess is right, whatever signal it’s pumping out is superluminal.”
“Like our QER?” asked Jeffery.
“I don’t think so. There’s no reason a quantum entanglement process should produce any radio waves, even as a by-product. I think whatever it is still takes time to travel, just faster than light can.”
“But that’s supposed to be impossible,” said Eugene.
“Sort of. There are a couple of possible ways around light speed beyond just entanglement. Besides, if the main signal had propagated out from the buoy at light speed, then the ship that came to keep tabs on Magellan would have been really close by to get there as quickly as it did.”
Eugene let his mind backtrack through the time line of events. Even if the mystery ship had been able to travel at just a fraction below light speed, the time between the emergency message being broadcast and the ship being detected by the Magellan was less than two weeks, meaning it had to have been less than a light-week away when it first heard the signal. There was nothing of interest in that area of space for many light-months. It did stretch credibility to think it was sitting there waiting for someone to stumble upon that one buoy.
“Make it your team’s top priority. Lives could depend on it,” Eugene said.
Felix nodded enthusiastically. Even as he said it, Eugene knew the instruction was unnecessary. Felix may have been quiet and shy, but he was a pit bull when it came to mysteries. He was going to sink his teeth into this new problem and thrash it around until it stopped moving.
“Moving on. Jeffery?”
“Yes, Professor. I just heard from the linguists, they’ve cracked the messages,” Jeffery said breathlessly.
Now that was interesting.
“That’s wonderful. What does the first one say?”
“Well, there’s some debate if the different languages represent different social entities like countries, or if they’re from six distinct species,” said Jeffery.
“Well, we may not be able to answer that conclusively until we find someone to ask, I’d wager. But what does the first signal say?”
“Really the turning point came a month ago when Magellan’s crew found the readout in the buoy that displayed the signals in written form,” Jeffery said.
“Yes, I figured. What does it say?”
“Well, the second signal was a request for maintenance like we figured.”
Eugene folded his hands in his lap and squared his eyes at his assistant. “Jeffery, do I need to waterboar
d the translation of the first signal out of you?”
Jeffery’s shoulders sagged. “You’re not going to like it.”
“I assure you, I like not knowing even less.”
“All right. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Jeffery called up something on his tablet and handed it to Eugene. The screen displayed a memo from the head linguist of the group, marked Signal 1 Translation. It read:
HUMAN WILDLIFE PRESERVE. KEEP OUT.
Eugene blinked. He read it again. It said the same thing. He tried a third time. The memo remained stubbornly resilient to change. After taking a few moments to order his thoughts, he was able to articulate again. “Are they sure about this?”
“There is some disagreement about the exact phrasing. Words don’t always line up precisely from one language to another, much less between seven of them, but they’re greater than 95 percent confident in the overall meaning.”
“Well, then,” said Eugene. “That’s going to ruffle some feathers.”
The next morning, it became apparent “That’s going to ruffle some feathers” would turn out to be one of history’s epic understatements, rivaled only by an unsuspecting Pompeii merchant who rose on a sunny day in 79 CE and greeted his neighbor with, “Looks like it’s going to be a hot one.”
The immediate effect among the circle of politicians aware of the ARTists program was disbelief and indignation. One of them spent the entire morning violently remodeling his office with the help of a putter and a fifth of tequila. None of this should have been surprising. There was only so much abuse the human ego can take. Learning that there were as many as six intelligent alien species sharing the galactic neighborhood with humanity would be enough to shift anyone’s sense of importance. Learning that said species were fencing off humans like elephants? That was another matter entirely.
For Eugene and his merry band of misfits, however, the news was positive. Their budget absolutely exploded, as their superiors were suddenly interested in wringing every bit of technology out of the buoy in as little time as possible. Allison Ridgeway and her A-squad were about to thaw out on the other end of the QER to start their next shift, and the various research groups were running smoothly.
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