The long wait was over. The time for action was at hand.
#
Old City had been constructed entirely out of red granite blocks, giving it a rosy glow when Faalta set behind the distant peaks of the Vedans Mountains. The pinkish color softened the lines of what had once been a fortress city on the banks of a river that had long since been diverted to other uses.
As the aircar put down on a landing stage atop what once had been a battlement, Sar-Ganth gazed at the squat council building with its castellated roofline and its soaring guard towers. The windows were of stained glass, showing scenes of famous battles.
When the car touched granite, Sar-Ganth stepped out and began knuckle-walking toward the stone ramp that led down into the main square. No powered vehicles were allowed inside Old City, and the guards flanking the council building entrance were decked out in archaic battle armor. However, their blast weapons were both up-to-date and obviously well maintained.
They brought their arms up in salute as he proceeded through the high doors into the interior. While the exterior of the old building was as it had been for centuries, the interior was filled with modern conveniences. Sar-Ganth moved to a sliding ramp and was whisked to the third floor.
The third floor of the council building was reserved for Ssasfal’s reigning aristocracy, the city-dwelling clans that had originally joined an alliance to conquer the barbarian hordes that surrounded them. The Sar-Dva Clan had been part of those barbarian hordes. Sar-Ganth had no problem with the fact that his ancestors had been brought into Civilization by force. As bad as it had been for those who lost the Great Conquest, civilization had proved an unalloyed good for all subsequent generations. What he objected to was that this ancient historical fact relegated him and his to second rank status in perpetuity.
As he entered the Realm of the Founders, he felt the familiar irritation rising within. No matter how successful he and his fellows were, no matter how much value and status they accumulated, they could never aspire to this hallowed place. He stifled the emotion with difficulty by concentrating on the issue at hand. After a momentary halt to regain his equilibrium, he proceeded to the over-decorated section of the building that housed the spacious offices of the Zel-Sun-Do.
Sar-Dva arrived at precisely the moment of his appointment and used the small metal spear held upright by an iron bracket beside the door to announce himself. He did so by lifting the spear and using it to pound the heavy wood of the door. He carefully avoided the antique iron inlays in the wood, lest he damage the butt of the antique door knocker.
The requisite time elapsed and the door opened. An obsequious subservient made the posture of obedience and inquired as to his business. He gave it and was admitted.
The whole performance was unnecessary, since Sar-Ganth’s appointment had been confirmed electronically. However, as in everything having to do with the Council of Rulers, ancient ritual was rigorously adhered to, lest the majesty of these precincts be diminished.
The three senior councilors awaited him in a plush inner chamber that Sar-Ganth noted was equipped with anti-eavesdropping equipment. Zel-Sen gestured for him to take his place on the visitor’s resting frame while Cal-Tar and Dar-Tel watched him with impassive eyes and said nothing.
“You asked for this audience, Clan Master. How can we serve you and the Sar-Dva?” Zel-Sen asked, bypassing the usual ceremonials. His abruptness signaled that his time was short, and in any event, more precious than that of the leader of a “younger” clan.
Sar-Ganth once again swallowed his irritation, and said, “I thank the Senior Clan Masters for seeing me. What I have come to say is highly confidential.”
“You made that clear in your communication,” Dar-Tel replied. “We have all agreed to keep your secrets.”
“Not my secret, Dar-Tel. The secret of the Council and of The Race.”
“Get on with it,” Cal-Tar ordered. Advanced age had turned the fur around his muzzle white and caused his spine to curve. The latter made it difficult to walk. It also did not improve his temper.
“Very well,” Sar-Dva replied. “I have reason to believe that some clan or faction has discovered a new world and has not shared that fact with the rest of us.”
The flat statement took the others aback. Sar-Dva watched impassively as they processed his words in silence.
Finally, Zel-Sen spoke. “That is a serious charge, Clan Master. Can you substantiate it?”
Sar-Ganth launched into his story of Sar-Say and how he had been waylaid en route from Vith to Persilin. He spoke of the Vulcans’ visit to Klys’kra’t, and of the Voldar’iks’ subsequent complaint. He told them about the discovery of Sar-Say’s pheromone on one of the samples the Vulcans had offered their hosts.
“Upon learning this, Ssor-Fel of the Salefar Sector queried Central Records to see who these Vulcans were. He reported finding no record of them. I, too, searched Central Records. I also found nothing.”
“And you surmise that these failures to identify them are proof that someone is running their own private world?” Zel-Sen asked.
“Why else would Central Records have no knowledge of them? We have an excellent bio scan from their time with the Voldar’ik, yet those scans match nothing on record.”
“Bio scan records are notoriously unreliable,” Cal-Tor reminded him.
“For individuals, yes. But for a whole species? Up until Ssor-Fel made me aware of this incident, I believed that the genotypes of all the species within Civilization were kept in Central Records.”
“That has been my belief as well,” Dar-Tel said.
“Then we will adopt as our working hypothesis that Sar-Dva’s suspicions are well founded,” Zel-Sen responded. “Apparently, someone has violated ancient custom. The question is, who and why? The gravity of the offense would appear to outweigh any possible benefit. What would a clan gain from such a risky enterprise?”
“Value and position,” Sar-Dva replied. “They may be a landless clan attempting to claim a place on the Council.”
“Possible,” Zel-Sen agreed.
“Or,” Sar-Dva continued, “They may be an existing council member seeking to gain advantage over the rest of us. If someone has access to a world the rest of us do not, they could enrich themselves to our detriment.”
“If true, this must be stopped immediately,” Cal-Tar demanded.
“How do we stop it?” Zel-Sen asked.
“These Vulcans are traders,” Sar-Dva replied. “The ones at Klys’kra’t claimed that they were many jumps from their home world. If we can track the planets they visited while trading, perhaps we can get an idea of where their star is located.”
“That might work,” Zel-Sen agreed. “They must have left records on the worlds they visited. We will send a Priority Inquiry as soon as the council has adjourned this session. What else?”
Sar-Dva made the hand gesture that signified his dismay at having to point out the obvious to his betters. “An Inquiry is just a start. We must also send orders for all planets in Civilization to be on the watch for them. With their blue fur, they are distinctive. If we can but capture one of these elusive Vulcans, we can learn a great deal.”
“Very well. We will order all port masters and administrators to enter the Vulcan descriptions into their automatic surveillance devices. We will also distribute their bio scans to every part of Civilization, and order any being who matches those scans held until we can be notified. Will that be sufficient to ease your fears?”
“It will,” Sar-Ganth replied. “Surely they cannot evade a Civilization-wide search for long.”
#
“Well, that was a waste of time,” Lisa said, snuggling closer to Mark. The two of them were in the ship’s mess, having just finished the evening meal. Through the bulkheads they could hear the thrum of the star drive as they left Gamma behind, en route to Brinks Base.
“We got a lot of data,” he reminded her. “Anything that adds to our knowledge of the Broa isn’t a waste.”
“I know,” she replied. “Still, it’s disappointing to have to write off a potential target.”
“Hopefully, some of the other expeditions had better luck.”
They had spent two months observing the Dastanthanen of Harlasanthenar, and had discovered nothing but bad news. In addition to the Broan presence, the frequency of ship traffic in the system wrote it off as a potential place to visit in order to trade for a planetary database.
While they watched, more than a dozen ships had come and gone through the system stargates. Some emerged from one of the three gates (Babylon, Nineveh, or Tyre) and made orbit for Harlasanthenar. Most, however, ignored the planet and made directly for one of the other gates in the system. These latter vessels were obviously in transit, making the Gamma System a crossroads of sorts for traffic en route to other worlds. The presence of Broa on the planet and the amount of ship traffic through the system combined to make Gamma useless for their purposes.
What they were looking for was a backwater world visited by the Broa once every decade or so, a world where a Q-Ship could slip in quietly, trade for a planetary database, and then slip out while leaving as thin a trail as possible.
While watching the comings and goings, however, they noticed something odd. Each jump through Babylon and Nineveh caused the gravity wave telescopes to ring like a bell. However, jumps through the Tyre stargate barely registered. At first the physicists thought their equipment was malfunctioning. After running diagnostics, they had to admit that the gravity waves from Tyre were just a lot weaker than the other two.
Based on observations of the New Eden incursion, gravity waves had always been assumed to be omni-directional. Their observations of the Gamma gates seemed to prove that idea false. Rather, the expedition physicists maintained, each stargate emitted a funnel-shaped gravity disturbance aligned along its longitudinal axis.
The observation, if true, had all sorts of implications. It explained the relative paucity of gravity wave detection by Brinks Base. It also called into question whether there were indeed inhabited stars within the Sovereignty that lacked stargates. It was possible that some species had escaped conquest by the Broa. It was also possible that they were slaves whose gates were pointed in the wrong direction for detection by the Brinks gravitational observatory.
Lisa had observed the heavy space traffic and come up with an idea of how they might spy more effectively on the Broa. She broached the subject with Captain Harris at their next briefing, the last before they were scheduled to return to Brinks Base.
“Sir, I’ve been wondering if we aren’t going about this the wrong way.”
“I beg your pardon?” Harris’s distracted response came while he scanned a fuzzy photograph before him. They had been going over the data on a ship caught in transit between stargates. The contact was intriguing because the ship’s emissions indicated it was a large Broan warcraft. The glimpse of a potential adversary held the captain’s full attention.
“When we abandoned Klys’kra’t, we took the Ruptured Whale through the local stargate to escape without arousing suspicion.”
“Your point?” came the irritated reply.
“Well, sir, watching the local traffic, I wondered why we can’t just sneak in and jump through one of the stargates. After that, we would just be one more ship en route for somewhere else while we photograph and scan the hell out of everything in sight. We could catalog a dozen star systems in the time we took doing just this one.”
Harris looked up from the fuzzy picture of an oversize globe he had been studying. “Write it up and we’ll submit it for consideration when we get back to Brinks Base. I would have thought someone would have evaluated such an approach before now. Possibly they considered it and ruled it out as too dangerous.”
“I suspect we spent so much time trying to figure out how not to be noticed that we overlooked the obvious, sir.”
“Possibly so. Anyway, it won’t hurt to send it in for evaluation on our return,” he replied. “Now, let’s get back to the business at hand, shall we?”
“Yes, sir.”
#
Chapter Twenty Eight
Brinks Base had grown enormously in the months New Hope had been gone. When they left on their mission to Gamma, the base had been one big construction zone. Now, a mere ten weeks later, it was a veritable fortress deep in the heart of enemy space.
Most notable were the big sensor arrays surrounding the underground living quarters. There were infrared telescopes to sweep the sky for anything hotter than the cold of deep space, radio telescopes to pick up electromagnetic emanations — to be turned into high powered radar transmitters, as needed — and every kind of passive sensor invented by man. There were even neutrino detectors to detect ships by the emanations of their power plants. They had no difficulty picking up the myriad of human craft in a string-of-beads orbit around the moon.
Nor were the sensors there merely to provide warning. During its caretaker phase, the plan for defending Brinks Base had been to evacuate at the first sign of the enemy and blow the place up. To that end, a massive nuclear charge had been buried in the heart of the base, ready to erase all evidence of the species that had constructed it.
The strategy had changed. Should the Broa suddenly appear in the Hideout System, the first response would be an attempt to blow them out of the sky. One or more blastships were on station near the moon at all times for just that purpose. The other ships of the fleet were also available for defense. The cargo hold of every Q-ship was stuffed with offensive and defensive weaponry. Even the massive colony ships had been given the means to defend themselves.
The primary offensive weapon of the fleet was the Superlight Missile: SM, for short. Superlight missiles were modifications of the ftl message probes, one of which Dan Landon had used to destroy the Broan Avenger at New Eden.
SMs were militarized and miniaturized versions, designed to accelerate to superlight, then overload on command. They returned to normal space just short of their target, spraying a billion pieces of shrapnel into the enemy vessel’s path.
Interspersed among the many sensor arrays were shallow hemispherical depressions carved into the rocky ground of Sutton. Each depression cradled its own SM, ready to fly.
There was one other means of defense with which every ship had been equipped, one that no one talked about much. Bolted to each vessel’s thrust frame was a nuclear charge. Should a captain find his vessel in danger of imminent capture, he had orders to self destruct.
Starship captain was the most sought after job in the new Space Navy, and the one with the most rigorous psychological screening. Command skill was important, but having the courage to use the self destruct as a last resort was essential.
It was just one of the reasons most captains had gray hair.
#
“Wow, things have grown around here since we left, haven’t they?” Lisa asked Mark as the ship’s boat arrowed toward the circular pattern of sensor arrays and missile batteries that had sprouted from the black and brown plain above Brinks Base.
The two of them were strapped into a single bench seat at the front of New Hope’s landing boat, with Mark’s knees almost in the pilot’s kidneys. The pilot’s head filled their field of view, but it was possible to see their destination by looking past his ears and through the forward viewport. The dozen other passengers were packed side-by-side into the long fuselage, with only fist-size viewports of their own through which to catch occasional glimpses of the airless moon.
“They’ve had enough people working,” Mark said. “I’m surprised we didn’t come back to find a bubble city, complete with hanging gardens.”
“That would be nice,” his wife said wistfully. Military construction had three priorities: function, function, and function. They wouldn’t so much as paint a flower on a bulkhead unless that flower aided them in target acquisition.
The pilot pitched the boat up at an angle that robbed them of their view, and cut in the underjet
s. They grounded in a cloud of dust that was slow to dissipate in the low gravity. Heretofore, a landing on Sutton required one to seal up his or her vacsuit, and then walk-bounce to the nearest surface airlock. Not this time.
As soon as they grounded, an oversize arm reached out and hooked onto their boat just behind the cockpit. Silently, it hoisted them like a mother cat picking up her kitten, swung it over an open rectangular pit lit by flood lamps, and then lowered it inside.
The pit was barely larger than the boat. There was a gentle shock when they were deposited on the floor. The arm detached and withdrew. The sky then disappeared as a heavy roof section moved into place, sealing off the pit.
The boat was buffeted by an external rush of air and quickly enveloped in expansion fog. After a few seconds study of his instruments, the pilot announced, “All ashore who are going ashore! Last one out, close the airlock.”
Lisa and Mark undid their single lap belt and waited for the others to clear the narrow aisle before gathering their own kit bags and following. As instructed, Mark palmed the control that would close the airlock. As he did so, an amplified voice told them to hurry, as the pumps were about to once again suck the air out of the chamber.
Both of them hurried to a small airlock inset into the rock wall. There was just enough room for both of them to squeeze inside. The outer door closed, leaving them sealed inside a steel box little bigger than a coffin.
“Cozy,” Mark said, enjoying the feel of warm softness pressed against him as he wrapped Lisa in his embrace.
His wife wriggled suggestively in response. Just as she did so, the inner door made a series of clicking noises and withdrew into its recess to reveal a grinning crew of vacuum jacks lining the rock hewn tunnel within. There were several whistles as the couple disentangled themselves.
“Home, sweet home!” Mark said as he let Lisa exit the lock first. He followed, carrying both kit bags.
Lisa crinkled up her nose and turned toward him. “What’s that smell?”
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