Once the Broa accepted what their instruments were telling them, they would have no option other than to recognize that somewhere among the stars there existed a race of aliens who they did not control.
“Thirty seconds,” Mark announced.
Around him, the duty crew sat motionless, watching the main viewscreen. No one spoke and most did not breath. “Twenty seconds… Ten seconds…
“Five, Four, Three, Two, One!”
For the span of two heartbeats, nothing happened. The bright star at the center of the viewscreen remained unaffected. Then, suddenly, a third of the screen to the right of the star, another star appeared. This one popped into existence and brightened until it was as bright as Etnarii. It remained at maximum for a dozen seconds, then slowly dimmed, never quite dropping back to invisibility.
“Focus on that and magnify!” Captain Harris ordered.
The screen shifted and expanded. At maximum magnification, the new star showed as a tiny flower blossoming against the blackness of space. At first it was violet-white in color. Slowly, it shaded down to blue-white, then to green, and yellow.
“My God, I would call that a hit!” the Captain exclaimed. “Congratulations, Mr. Rodriguez, on your aim.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Any sign of the Avenger?” someone asked.
“Too small to see at this distance,” Vivian Domedan answered.
“Then what is that speck?”
Within the gradually fading nebula that had once been the local stargate was a bright white point. It looked solid.
“That must be the bulk hauler,” Simon Rodriguez said from his weapons station. “It was close enough to have been caught in the blast.”
“Do we have recordings of all of this?”
“We do, Captain,” Vivian Domedan replied.
“Then there is nothing more to see here. Astrogator, set your course for Brinks Base. Transition to superlight on my command.”
“Yes, sir!”
Mark keyed for the program that would put them on a path for the system that would be home for the next several years. Nor were they the only ones. Having seen the gate explode, Chicago and her consorts would already be en route to Brinks Base.
“Ready for superlight, Captain.”
“Execute.”
The star-studded blackness of the viewscreen turned suddenly to the absolute black of superlight as the stardrive generator thrummed in the bulkheads around them. Within seconds, they left the Etnarii System behind and were on their way home. In the captain’s safe was the original record cube containing the Pastol planetary database. In the hold were several hundred liters of vasa juice.
All in all, it had been a successful mission.
#
Chapter Thirty Nine
If there is anywhere in the universe that can truthfully be called the Armpit of Creation, that place would have to be Sutton. Brinks’ moon was an airless, lifeless ball of rock and stone, bereft of weather save the cosmic wind, covered with a fine coating of brown dust the consistency of talcum powder. The dust coated the suits of those foolhardy enough to venture out onto the surface, and drifted into Brinks Base despite the entire facility being hermetically sealed and below ground.
The moon’s stark surface was alternately baked and frozen as it circled its primary every twenty days. During half the orbit, Hideout cooked it in its harsh rays; while at night, the surface temperature dropped to sub-arctic conditions while in stygian darkness, or else lit softly by reflected light from the blue-white world that was its parent.
Sutton was a slagheap, a junkyard, a collecting place for the detritus of a dead system. Debris rained down onto the barren moon in the form of ionized particles, fine dust, and an occasional rock large enough to blast a crater out of the already pummeled surface. To this sky junk was added the clutter of the human occupation. It was a world only a mother could love.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Lisa asked as New Hope’s landing boat dropped toward the surface. In the distance, through the windscreen, could be seen the red beacon that marked the location of Brinks Base.
“Home never looked so good,” Mark agreed.
The two of them were strapped into their customary places on the boat’s front acceleration bench. Spacer Jorgenson shared their perch, causing Lisa to be squeezed between the broad shoulders of two large men. It was not an altogether unpleasant experience. A dozen other members of New Hope’s crew were packed like sardines behind them, until the atmosphere smelled of stale sweat and halitosis.
The truth was that the beat-up old moon did look good. To spacers who had just spent a month in enemy vacuum, the gray-brown panorama below might have seemed a Christmas painting. To nerves rubbed raw by the long chase and near battle with the Broan Avenger, this ball of hardscrabble dirt was the most welcome sight in the whole universe.
“Stand by for landing,” the pilot said over his shoulder as he lined up the red flashing beacon on his instrument display. Their weight changed subtly as reaction jets hissed. In response, a fine layer of dust engulfed the boat and brought a dusty curtain down on the universe around them.
There was sudden brightening as they dropped into a floodlit underground hanger. A few seconds later, a bump told them that they had touched down. Gravity stabilized at Sutton’s anemic pull as both lift and drive engines were shut down. Jorgenson loosened their common safety belt as the turbines whined down into inaudibility. Lisa turned and hugged Mark.
“Oh, darling. It’s good to be home again!”
#
Dan Landon met them at the airlock leading out of the hanger and into the base. “Welcome home, Adventurers. I take it from your preliminary report that all went well.”
“Yes, sir,” Mark replied.
“Did you bring it?”
“I did,” he said, fishing into a pocket of his jumpsuit and retrieving the record cube containing the original copy of the Pastol planetary database.
The Admiral took it with reverence. There were probably a hundred copies onboard New Hope, many of which had already been hand-carried down by others. Still, this was the original, the quarry they had been sent after, the jewel of great value after which they had sought for five long years.
“Any trouble?” Landon asked.
“You mean, other than the fact that we had to blow up a stargate to escape?” Lisa asked. “No, no trouble.”
“I read Captain Harris’s report of the action. That was quick thinking, Mark. Do you think we fooled them?”
“Hard to say. Our exit was spectacular enough. You really don’t understand how much energy a few grams of shrapnel moving at 0.9c packs until you see it hit something.”
“The gate was completely destroyed?”
“We spotted one small chunk spinning away from the epicenter of the cloud. Not much they could determine from that except that the gate came apart with considerable violence. That bulk hauler we nearly collided with was also caught in the blast. We were too far away for our recordings to show much except that it appeared damaged.”
“Well,” Landon said, “They may not know what happened, but they aren’t likely to ascribe it to either supernatural phenomena or an alien race they don’t control. That means we are probably out of the woods… this time.”
“How many more times are we going to be able to say that, Admiral?”
Landon shrugged. “They’ll discover what we are doing sooner or later. Let’s make it as later as we can, shall we?”
“Aye aye, sir,” Mark replied with a smile. If it were up to him, the Broa wouldn’t find out what was going on until they had human warships in their sky. “When are the scientists going to be ready to review the database?”
“They’re already hard at it. Chicago got back yesterday. They downloaded what you transmitted to them. We received a couple of copies of this,” he said, gesturing with the original record cube, “a few hours ago. The astronomers are already pulling out data on the stargate network. It is, I’m led
to believe, quite extensive.”
“I hope they find something we can use,” Lisa said.
Landon guffawed. “Don’t worry about that! We’re learning plenty. Haven’t found the Broa home world or worlds, yet, but we’ve discovered a lot of useful information. In fact, you got back just in time. We were about to send out a couple of survey missions.”
“Survey missions?” Mark asked, perplexed.
“Ask your wife. It was her brainchild.”
Mark turned to Lisa, who seemed nonplussed. She was even blushing.
“What have you done now, my love?”
“It was just an idea I had while on the Gamma expedition. Watching all of that traffic through the system, I wondered if we might send some ships to join them. They wouldn’t make contact with the locals, merely look around while en route from one gate to another before jumping to a new system. We could check out a dozen stars in one trip. It seemed good way to learn about the Broa quickly.”
“It seemed that way to us, as well,” Landon replied. “That’s why I have authorized a couple of ships to give your idea a try. One Type Seven and another cargo craft. They were going to sneak back to Gamma and jump through the Nineveh and Tyre gates a day apart. We’ll see what they discover. With the information you brought back, they won’t have to jump blind. We can give them an idea of what to expect at each of their target stars.”
“Can’t we learn what we need to know from the Pastol database?”
The Admiral shrugged. “Maybe yes, maybe no. One thing we need to know is the location of their stars. Not where they are in the stargate network, but where they are actually located. The first thing our ships will do when they pop out of a stargate is a sky survey. We need to answer a question that has come up recently.”
“What question?” Lisa asked.
“We need to figure out how close the Sovereignty comes to Sol.”
“I thought we had decided that there are thousands of light years between Broan space and our own.”
“We did. Now it’s undecided. Ask your husband.”
Now it was Lisa’s turn to look quizzically at Mark, who said simply, “Gravity waves.”
“What about them?”
“They aren’t omni-directional like we thought. Not waves focused through gates. That means we can’t rely on the fact that Earth has never seen one to estimate how far it is to the closest Broan world.”
“I hadn’t thought about that,” she said.
“Neither had anyone else until Dr. Brainard mentioned it in passing the other day,” the Admiral said with a grimace. “Scientists!”
“Sounds like you’ve been busy while we’ve been gone, sir.”
“You don’t know the half of it, Lieutenant. We’re working on our master plan to steal a stargate. Now that we know where they are, we can pick out the best one to purloin.
“But enough work for one day,” Landon continued smoothly. “You two need to get settled. Have you been assigned quarters yet?”
“No, sir.”
“Check with central housing. I think you will find they are more efficient than when you left. Get cleaned up, rest a bit, and then make sure that you are ready by 18:00 hours.”
“Ready, sir? For what?”
“For the party, man!”
“What party, Admiral?” Lisa asked.
“The ‘Welcome Home’ party in your honor. It’s going to be quite a shindig. I’ve even authorized the alcohol to be broken out, so long as no one has more than two drinks. Now go get settled. That’s an order!”
“Yes, sir!” they both exclaimed in unison, then snapped off exaggerated salutes.
Mark grabbed their bags and threw them over his shoulder before grabbing his wife’s hand. The two of them set off down the long passageway leading to the interior of the underground base. They were in a hurry to occupy their quarters.
There was something they needed to do before they dressed for the party.
#
“Was it worth it?” Lisa asked lazily. She and Mark were both sweating, out of breath, and entangled in the sheets. Beneath them lay a pad of what appeared to be packing material. The bright blue rectangle lay on bare rock in one corner of their one-room cave. This was what passed for a bed in Sutton’s low gravity. If somewhat rudimentary, they could testify to the fact that it served one of a bed’s primary functions.
Lisa lay with her head resting on Mark’s shoulder, basking in the afterglow of their lovemaking. She was conscious of his hard body pressed against her soft one and of the pressure of his fingertips resting at the base of her spine.
“Well?” she asked when her question was greeted by silence.
“Sorry,” he said with a start. “I must have drifted off for a second. Well, what?”
“Was it worth it?”
“Always!” Mark replied with a leer, moving his hand to a protuberance and squeezing.
“Not, that, silly. Do you think the expedition to Pastol was worth it?”
“Sure. Don’t you?”
She shrugged half-heartedly, a gesture he felt more than saw as he nuzzled her hair.
“What’s the matter? Got the post-action blues?”
“No, I’ve never been happier. It’s just that I was thinking about the enormity of the task in front of us. Do you really think we can pull it off? Beat the Broa, that is?”
“What did your mother tell you about eating elephants?” he asked.
“…One bite at a time?” she laughed.
“Exactly. So what’s bothering you?”
“We traveled 7000 light years… almost 8000 if you count up all of the side trips… visited two enemy suns, risked our lives, and all we have to show for it is a little bit of sparkly crystal. It doesn’t seem enough.”
“I would remind you that sparkly crystal has all of our enemy’s secrets in it.”
“There is that,” she agreed. “Compared to what is in front of us, however, it seems such a small thing. How can one small planet hope to prevail against a million star empire?”
“By stealth, cunning, smarts, grit, bravery, and just a little bit of luck,” he replied. When he saw that she was not convinced, he rolled onto his side and propped himself up on one elbow. “Look, my dear. We didn’t ask for this. I could have lived my life drinking Gunter Perlman’s beer and racing his solar yacht with him. In fact, I thought I liked being a ne’er-do-well playboy. I was good at it.”
“Not to mention the perks.”
“Perks?”
“Moira Sims!”
“Oh, her. Yeah, she was nice, but not as nice as someone else I could name.”
“You’d better say that,” she growled, digging him in the ribs.
“Truthfully, with the settlement from my parents’ estate, I had everything… and nothing. Life didn’t mean anything to me. Now, here I am a gazillion kilometers from home, sleeping on the modern-day equivalent of a horse blanket, in a room carved out of bare rock with wires hanging from the ceiling, and I’m happy. Do you know why?”
“Because of what we just did?”
“That goes without saying,” he laughed. “I’m a man, after all. I love you more than anything, my nude love. However, what I was speaking of was the fact that Sar-Say gave meaning to my life.
“When he popped out of nothing in the New Eden System, he gave me the chance to make a difference, to be of service to my clan, nation, and race. Lotus eating is overrated. Give me something important to occupy my time.”
“Don’t forget the danger,” Lisa said quietly. She had attempted a bantering tone, but it hadn’t come out that way. She sounded like a little girl asking her father about the distant thunder.
“I can’t say that I enjoy that,” Mark said, enfolding her in his arms once more. “Hell, I almost wet my pants when that Avenger took out after us.
“Still, it looks like danger is going to be an unavoidable part of life from now on. We have no choice. We either win this fight or we die… all of us. It is something we
just have to do. We can neither shirk our duty nor hide from it. Humanity is counting on us, and I don’t plan to let them down.”
Lisa was about to respond when he silenced her with a kiss. When it was over, he delivered a light slap to where it would do the most good, eliciting the expected squeal.
“Now, Wench, roll out of bed. We have a party to attend, and later, some Galactic Overlords to slay. To quote a wise man, “Whatever else the future brings, it ain’t going to be dull!”
#
The End
Author’s Biography
Michael McCollum was born in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1946, and is a graduate of Arizona State University, where he majored in aerospace propulsion and minored in nuclear engineering. He is employed at Honeywell in Tempe, Arizona, where he is Chief Engineer in the valve product line. In his career, Mr. McCollum has worked on the precursor to the Space Shuttle Main Engine, a nuclear valve to replace the one that failed at Three Mile Island, several guided missiles, Space Station Freedom, and virtually every aircraft in production today. He was involved in an effort to create a joint venture company with a major Russian aerospace engine manufacturer and traveled extensively to Russia in the last decade.
In addition to his engineering, Mr. McCollum is a successful professional writer in the field of science fiction. He is the author of a dozen pieces of short fiction and has appeared in magazines such as Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, Amazing, and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. His novels (originally published by Ballantine-Del Rey) include A Greater Infinity, , Procyon’s Promise, Antares Dawn, Antares Passage, The Clouds of Saturn, and The Sails of Tau Ceti, His novel, Thunderstrike!, was optioned by a Hollywood production company for a possible movie. Several of these books have subsequently been translated into Japanese, German, Russian, and the Queen’s version of English.
Mr. McCollum is the proprietor of Sci Fi - Arizona, one of the first author-owned-and-operated virtual bookstores on the INTERNET, which first published Gibraltar Earth, Gibraltar Sun, and Antares Victory. He is currently working on the conclusion to the Gibraltar series, Gibraltar Stars. He also runs Third Millennium Publishing, an INTERNET site that provides web and publishing services to independent author/publishers.
Gibraltar Sun Page 30