He breathed in the base air. “Drying paint and body odor, I would guess,” he replied. One thing was certain. Of all the improvements that had been made to Brinks Base, the atmosphere scrubbers had not been one of them.
#
“I think you’re right,” Alfred Bastion, senior scientist said while reading the summary of New Hope’s mission to Gamma.
“About what, sir?” Mark asked.
“The damned gravity waves are focused along the axis of the gate. No wonder we’ve been seeing fewer of them than we predicted.”
“But the wave they detected in the New Eden system was uniform. They’ve since checked that by dropping sublight just beyond the expanding wavefront and mapping it in a dozen places.”
“The wave at New Eden was very powerful, and from a single-ended jump. No stargate at the destination to focus the wave. I fear we have extrapolated our strategy from a single data point. These observations you brought back are going to force us to reevaluate.”
“Reevaluate what?”
“Everything,” the physicist replied. “Most of all, you’ve just proven that we can’t be sure how far Earth is from the edge of the Sovereignty.”
“I don’t follow.”
Bastion looked as though he had bitten into a spoiled lemon. “When we first discovered stargates and gravity waves, we did a calculation. We concluded that since gravity waves move at the speed of light, the Sovereignty can be no closer to Sol than the number of years since the Broa developed their gate technology, which puts them quite a distance off.
“This new data tells us that there may be Broa-occupied star system almost next door to Sol, but with its gate oriented in the wrong direction for us to see them.”
“That’s a cheery thought,” Mark mused.
“Indeed,” Bastion replied absentmindedly. He was already considering what other bad things might flow from the fact that stargates focused gravity waves.
#
“Congratulations on your work at Gamma.” Dan Landon said. Lisa was perched on the spindly arrangement of wires that the engineers laughingly referred to as a ‘visitor’s chair.’ Even her dainty weight would have crushed it had they been in Earth’s greater gravity field.
“Thank you, sir. I’m just sorry we didn’t find you a candidate system for our next contact.”
The admiral shrugged. “Negative data is data, too. At least, we know what system to avoid.”
“Yes, sir. Harlasanthenar appears to be a major Broan hub, possibly even a regional capital. We’ll want to steer well clear of it.”
“And we will. Luckily, the other expeditions had better luck. I think we have two worlds that ought to be safe to contact. How would you and Mark like to tackle one of them?”
“Sir?”
“You have the experience from our visit to Klys’kra’t. More importantly, you are probably our most knowledgeable expert on the Broa and their language. We need that planetary data base badly. Would you like to try again?”
“Yes, sir. We would love to try again.”
“It might be dangerous.”
“Dropping out of superlight into an Oort Cloud is dangerous, Admiral. Compared to that, this should be easy. We pop in, haggle awhile for show, give them whatever they want for the database. Then we pop out again.”
“You’ll be getting orders in about a week. Along with New Hope, we’ll send one of the blast ships and a couple of Q-ships to guard you. If you get in trouble, they will try to get you out again.”
“At the risk of blowing our cover, Admiral?”
He nodded. “Better that than to risk your capture and dissection.”
Lisa shivered at the word ‘dissection.’ Unfortunately, if the Broa ever began wondering about their origin, that was probably the least she could expect. For that reason, in addition to a self destruct for the ship, every member of a ground party would be carrying suicide pills on their person at all times. In fiction, the spy always has a false tooth filled with cyanide. Not only was such a thing susceptible to accidental breakage, it would show up on bio scanners and start the host race to wondering at its purpose.
If Landon noticed the reaction, he didn’t acknowledge it. “Anything else we need to talk about, Lieutenant?”
“Yes, sir. I had an idea while I was away that might greatly aid our explorations.”
“Let’s hear it.”
She explained her idea that a ship might sneak into a Broan system and then jump through the local stargate. After that first jump, they would just be another ship in transit for somewhere else. They could jump from gate to gate until they plotted the positions of dozens of stars. They could also use their transit time through normal space between gates to spy on the locals.
Landon leaned back in his chair, a twin to the one in which she perched. “Sounds interesting. Write it up and get it to Strategy and Intentions. Have them look it over. If they pass on it, then we’ll give it a try.”
“Yes, sir.”
#
Chapter Twenty Nine
New Hope was again in the absolute blackness of superlight velocity, en route to an alien star system in the hands of the enemy. The star was called Etnarii in the language of the dominant people. The planet was Pastol, and the people were the Ranta. Rough translations of the three terms were: “sun,” “world,” and “the people.”
The Etnarii System was home to a single inhabited world, which appeared to be predominately agricultural. The world’s energy signature was one-tenth that of Harlasanthenar and its lack of importance in the Broan scheme of things was emphasized by the fact that the system possessed a single stargate.
Throughout the Broan realm, important planets had half a dozen or more stargates (or so Sar-Say and the Strategies and Intentions Group maintained). These were the hub worlds of the Sovereignty, the crossroads. As in the Gamma System, which itself was a minor regional hub, ships arrived via stargate and then made a beeline for some other gate that sent them to the next star in the chain, never halting or interacting with the species whose system they had just traversed.
This made for a busy sky, with ships constantly moving from gate to gate. In the Gamma System, the span between ship arrivals was shorter than the time it took to transit between the Babylon, Nineveh, and Tyre gates. Thus, there were usually multiple starships in the system at any given time, each on its own business.
In the Etnarii System, there was only the one entrance and exit. Etnarii was a cul-de-sac. In the whole time the Delta Expedition had watched the place, they detected no arrivals or departures. In fact, for more than a month they had wondered if the system had stargates at all, despite the evidence that a gravity wave had been detected emanating from it. Eventually, a careful infrared scan of the sky located the gate hovering at about the orbital distance of Jupiter on the far side of Etnarii.
The Ranta were a humanoid species and bore a closer resemblance to humanity than most. They were either descended from avians or else the pseudo-mammals of their world had evolved a fluffy form of feathers. Estimates of their heights (never reliable when all one had to go on was a video picture) placed them at three meters tall. Their bodies were spindly by human standards, with long, stork-like legs and elongated torsos from which hung two long, triply articulated arms.
Their heads were encased in a skullcap of feathers, as were the visible portions of their arms. (They wore poncho-like garments that concealed much of their torsos.) Their faces, showed no sign of birdlike features. They had two eyes placed high on a round head, spread wide for good stereoptic vision. Their nostrils were two vertical slits that widened and narrowed in time with their breathing. Their mouths were also oriented vertically and placed between the slits, giving their faces a long look. Their ears were scalloped at the edges, as though modeled on a spike-leaved plant, but the convolutions within seemed to mimic the shape of the human ear.
The covering feathers came in several colors, confirming that the Ranta had color vision. Some of the color variations
were sufficiently extreme that the alien sociologists were arguing that they were a mating display… much as in terrestrial peacocks.
A Ranta’s voice issued forth from its food intake aperture, just as did human voices. Whatever means they used to generate sound appeared no more versatile than a human voice box, which meant that communicating with them should not be a problem. Their language was not complex, but with only two months’ study by the previous expedition, the specialists and computers had been unable to translate more than a few words.
The Delta expedition’s most exciting discovery was the complete lack of communications in the system in the Broan tongue. They took the lack to mean that there was no Broan master in residence. There might be other explanations, of course: perhaps the master had been on a long vacation, or communicated only by hand-delivered proclamations on parchment, or just wasn’t very loquacious.
However, such speculations were meaningless until they actually made contact. For the moment, they took the lack of Broan speech to mean a lack of Broa in the system.
All in all, the system seemed perfect for a low key visit by a group of “traders” from a distant world on the other side of the Sovereignty.
At Klys’kra’t, they had been Vulcans – orange skinned, blue haired bipeds from the planet Shangri-la. At Pastol, they would be Trojans from the trading world of Troje.
Once again they would go in disguise. Whether such elementary precautions were really necessary had been the subject of spirited debate after the crew discovered what Trojans were supposed to look like.
“Hairless?” Lisa demanded when Mark told her. “They want me to shave off the beautiful head of hair that I have spent all my life getting just the way I want it?”
“Not just the hair on your head. They want us to depilate our eyebrows, the hair on our arms and legs, even our ‘you-know-what’ hair.”
“I suppose they want us to dye ourselves blue this time!”
“Tiger stripes,” he replied. “We’ll each carry an individualized pattern of black and yellow stripes over a base of tan. Our lips will be dyed black and our earflaps red. It isn’t much, but it just may confuse them enough to keep them from identifying us as the visitors to Klys’kra’t.”
She was silent for a long time, then smiled impishly. “I suppose we can make tiger stripes chic, and checking to make sure we’ve gotten rid of all of our body hair might be fun.”
He leered at her, “I may just have to check you over several times.”
“Ditto,” she replied.
#
The bridge of New Hope was once again a tense place as they prepared for breakout on the edge of the Etnarii System. It had been six hours since the expedition’s four ships rendezvoused well beyond the target system. In addition to New Hope, there were the Q-ships Revenger and Allison, one a Type Seven Freighter, the other a Bulk Transport, and the blastship Chicago. The three other vessels would remain hidden in the Oort Cloud unless needed. Then, depending on circumstances, either one of the Q-ships would mysteriously appear in the system and voyage to Pastol to aid their brethren, or else Chicago would break from hiding and rush to the rescue.
Of course, ‘rescue’ might involve bombarding the planet from space to ensure that any captured human agents were not left alive to be questioned about their origins.
The entire bridge crew was decked out in their disguises, each with a distinctive black and yellow stripe pattern that covered their bald pates, faces, necks, and hands, the only parts of their bodies that stuck out of their skin-tight, yellow shipsuits. Had one cared to investigate further, they would find the stripes traversed every part of their skin save for the palms of their hands and the soles of their feet. In fact, a couple of the crewmen – one male and one female – had become masters at body painting before preparations for the masquerade were complete.
The shipsuits were of standard human design, but the individual names embroidered in Broan script above the right pockets were aliases. Captain Harris was Hass Vith, Mark Rykand was Markel Sinth, and each of the rest were other nonsense syllables that could not be found in any Earth dictionary. This close to the target world, all of the displays in the ship had been switched over to the Broan dot-and-swirl script to get the crew used to using them. Nowhere in the public areas of the ship (those not given over to hidden weaponry and additional engines unknown to the Broa) was there any indication of the ship’s true origin. Even the astronomical data onboard had been converted to correspond to a Sol-like star system a thousand light-years from Etnarii, and in the opposite direction from their true home.
Back on Earth, some of the most creative minds had spent years thinking about the masquerades needed during the initial contact missions. Many of those minds were now headquartered at Brinks Base, where they continued their quest to ensure that no telltale detail betrayed the fact that Earth existed, or where it was to be found.
It wasn’t that they were trying to masquerade as another species. That would have been impossible. Even if they had used prosthetics to improve their disguises, the bio scanners that checked them for infectious diseases would clearly show the extra features to be fakes, leading to unwanted curiosity. Some body modifications could have been explained away as mere fashion, but questions would have formed in alien brains that they did not want asked.
So, other than the lack of body hair and the different coloring, they were still human beings. The disguise was intended to confuse the enemy, but not to the point where anyone would wonder why their visitors were obviously in disguise.
The other expedition that had been dispatched from Brinks Base would also be in disguise, but not the same one. Having Trojans show up in two different systems simultaneously might also generate interest at some future date. The plan was to slip in like ghosts, transact their business, and then slip out again.
Unfortunately, there was one risk they hadn’t figured out how to abate. Every vessel entering the Etnarii System via stargate generated a gravity wave. Their arrival via stardrive would not. In fact, the only way to actually generate an arrival wave would be to discover the system the Etnarii gate connected to, travel superlight to that system, and then jump through to Etnarii as though they were regular Broan traffic.
At Klys’kra’t, they had waited for a Broan ship to jump outbound through the gate before pretending to be a new arrival. The thought had been that anyone monitoring the gravity waves might not notice that one wave seemingly had spawned two ships.
If they discovered any starships in the Etnarii System, they would pull the same scam, assuming they could get themselves into position in time. If the system were empty, then they would have to go in and brazen it out.
#
“All Hands, Breakout Complete!” Mark announced over the ship’s annunciator. His words echoed back at him, making him sound as though he were at the bottom of a well.
“Where are we, Astrogator?” Captain Harris demanded.
“Midpoint of the Oort Cloud, sir. Right where we want to be.”
“Any debris close enough to be a danger?”
“Checking now, sir,” Emily Sopwell, the sensor operator answered. She was sweeping circumambient space with the comm laser, making sure that it did not point anywhere near the planet or star.
This time they had popped out of superlight moving tangential to Etnarii so that they could safely sweep the volume of space in front of them, secure in the knowledge that their presence would not be detected.
Half an hour after breakout, Ensign Sopwell announced, “I have a laser beacon, Captain. It’s Chicago.”
“How far?” the Captain asked.
“I make it six million kilometers, sir.”
“Not bad, considering how far we’ve come since rendezvous,” Harris announced to no one in particular. “Astrogator, plot us a course for rendezvous.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
In this case, they would be making all of the course corrections to join up with the big blastship. Fleet order
s were to home on Chicago immediately after breakout, and that was what they were doing.
Two days later, they pulled alongside of the oversize cylinder. It was festooned with gun mounts, laser mounts, and particle beam accelerators. Around the waist of the ship was a string of hemispherical shapes that were its superlight missiles, ready for launch.
A hundred thousand kilometers or so beyond Chicago were two other laser beacons. Revenger and Allison were also making their approaches to rendezvous.
“Captain Symes has sent a message to you, Captain,” the communicator on duty announced. Symes was Chicago’s commanding officer.
“Read it.”
“His compliments, sir. You and the ground party are to join him inboard the blastship for dinner and a pre-mission briefing.”
“Time?”
“19:00 Hours, sir.”
“Signal him that we will be there.”
#
Chapter Thirty
New Hope’s landing boat was partially filled as they made their way across the void to Chicago. This time Captain Harris and Commander Vanavong, Hope’s executive officer, were ensconced on the forward acceleration bench. Mark and Lisa were relegated to the second row, where the view was not nearly as good. Behind them were Bernard Sampson, Alien Linguist, and Seiichi Takamatsu, Alien Technologist, the other members of the expedition ground party. Takamatsu was a specialist in Broan computer technology, having spent the last five years studying the Ruptured Whale’s computers. It would be his job to validate the Pastol database when they obtained it.
Their approach to Chicago was uneventful, even dull, for those in the rear seats. They could see little beyond the backs of the captain and exec’s heads. What little of the view the two officers did not obscure was taken up by the pilot. As they made their approach to the blastship, they made out an occasional dull lump on a hull painted to match the blackness of space. Unlike the Q-ships, the human designs on the expedition incorporated full stealth capability, including a surface finish designed to make them difficult to see, even at close range.
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