“Sorry.”
“After you kill the worm, you can see if it sent out a signal?”
“No, the worm would cover its tracks."
"So, there's no way for us to know if the worm has been calling for help?
"Well, there is one way to tell if the worm ratted us out. After I fix myself and kill the worm, we can go back to Earth. If your home planet is a smoking ruin, we can assume the worm told somebody about your secret.”
“Shit.”
“I’m just sayin’.”
“Yeah, thanks a freakin’ lot.”
“Ah, there is good news, Joe. The worm is Elder technology. It was designed and created at a time when only the Elders inhabited the galaxy. The Elders would not have programmed it to call for assistance from other species, because there were no other species back then.”
“That is pretty thin to hang my hopes on, Skippy.”
“It’s all I’ve got, Joe. Come on, get moving. We need an active conduit to fix me, or we don’t have any options.”
“Ayuh,” I agreed as I picked him up carefully. “I’ll bring you down to the docking bay so you can check it yourself.”
“Crap!” Skippy shouted in disgust after we got the stolen conduit hooked up to a proper power source. “This damn thing is totally busted! Oooh, I hate those stinkin’ octopussies.”
“Busted? The Wurgalan did something to it?”
“The Wurgalan, or the Bosphuraq before them. Or, hell, the Kristang during the brief time they owned the place.”
“It is something we can fix?”
“No. Before you ask me a bunch of stupid time-wasting questions, the problem is not with the device itself. This thing is no longer a conduit, because its connection to higher spacetimes has been severed. Hmmm, that makes me think the rotten Bosphuraq must have been the ones to break it; the Wurgalan would not have any idea how to do that. Even the Bosphuraq likely did it by accident without knowing what they were doing. Crap. This sucks.”
I looked up at Hans Chotek, overall mission commander and breakfast cereal spokesmodel. His usual expression of mild displeasure when dealing with me had turned into annoyed, exasperated and strong displeasure. "Colonel Bishop, this entire operation was a waste of time and resources?"
"We had no way of knowing that, Sir."
Skippy came to my rescue. "Mister Chotek," he began, and everyone including Chotek stared at Skippy's beer can in surprise. Skippy rarely used Chotek's real name, and had never referred to our commander as 'Mister'. "There is no way Joe could have known this damned thing would be busted, because I didn't know the conduit here would be inoperable. That was always a risk. I am sorry that personnel were placed at risk, but there is nothing we can do about that now. We have to chalk this up to karma and move on to Plan B."
"That should be our motto," Chotek said sourly. "Something to the effect of 'Plan B is our Plan A'."
"Yes, Sir," I agreed, and I really did mean that. As a motto, it was not inspirational, but what it lacked in motivational ability, it made up for it in accuracy.
"You do have a Plan B, Colonel?" Chotek asked with a skeptically raised eyebrow.
"Yes, Sir."
"First, please explain why we didn't consider this alternative before raiding the Wurgalan."
"Because," I tried to keep my expression neutral so fear did not show on my face. "Plan B involves us raiding the Thuranin."
After I gave the bad news to Chotek and he went back to his chocolaty Count castle to hem and haw and wring his hands and agonize and make my life hell before making the obvious and only decision he could make, I went to the galley for a glass of ice-cold lemonade because being on the bridge during the operation had made me tremendously thirsty. The galley was full of soldiers and pilots excitedly chatting about their experience; I assured them that although we had failed to find a working conduit, I considered the operation to be a complete success.
Taking a second glass of lemonade back to my office, I downloaded tactical data of the air battle, hoping to learn what worked and what didn’t. The pilots involved, and Desai, would later conduct a full debriefing that I would attend eagerly; this was my opportunity to view the raw data and imagine I was there. Later, I could experience the air battle in a flight simulator, when it would truly feel as if I were there. “What the hell?” I mumbled.
“What is it, Joe?”
“Lt. Reed is certifiably insane, Skippy. She hovered her dropship inside a tornado.”
“Technically, it was a dust devil, Joe, not a tornado. However, I do agree that a strong love for doing crazy shit seems to be a prerequisite for being part of this crew. Hey, you got a minute?”
“Sure. What’s up?”
“Barsoom. Now that the battle is over, I had time to examine sensor data about that planet. It is a puzzle. Barsoom should have a much thicker atmosphere; the planet has a strong magnetic field capable of repelling solar wind particles that would strip away an atmosphere. Given the surface gravity, the atmosphere should be as thick as Earth’s. Perhaps even more thick, considering the level of carbon dioxide.”
“Ok,” I replied distractedly, watching the air battle scroll across my laptop screen. “That’s a puzzle for sure.”
My laptop screen blacked out. “Joe, are you listening to me?” He asked peevishly. “I’m trying to tell you something important. Something that scares the shit out of me.”
“No, Skippy, I was not really listening. Sorry about that. You have my full attention now,” I assured him, as I didn’t have any choice after he killed my laptop. “Barsoom should have a nice thick atmosphere. Geology, or, uh, planet, science, stuff,” I struggled with the proper terms, “is not my thing. Shouldn’t you be talking with the science team about this?”
“Frankly, Joe, it would be difficult for me to care less about atmospheric conditions on Barsoom, except that I suspect the thin atmosphere there is not natural.”
That did get my full attention, making me sit up straight in my chair. “Not natural? You mean someone, like, stole the air?”
“Not exactly. The lack of atmospheric pressure is not the only odd thing about Barsoom. Based on geological survey data from the Wurgalan, Kristang and Maxolhx, that planet once had a relatively pleasant climate, with abundant native life. Oceans covered half the surface, but that water has mostly boiled away.”
“Oh, shit. Did Barsoom get pushed out of its original orbit like Newark?”
“No. Good guess, though, that’s what I thought at first. The thin atmosphere isn’t the only puzzle. One hemisphere has a cluster of deep and extensive craters that appear to be caused by meteor impacts, but after examining the data closely, I realized only some of the craters were made by impacts. The three largest craters are not craters at all; they are where large sections of the surface were scooped away.”
“Scooped away like transported into another dimension? We’ve seen that same thing on several moons that contained Elder facilities.”
“Exactly. I am now certain Barsoom once contained one or more large Elder facilities, perhaps even a settlement or city. My analysis is based on the fact that the Maxolhx did find shattered remains of Elder facilities and equipment outside the three main craters. I say ‘shattered’ because whatever escaped being scooped away was subjected to extensive and powerful orbital bombardment. Joe, someone used Elder technology to erase almost all traces of whatever the Elders had at that location.”
“Orbital bombardment? You’re sure those secondary impacts aren’t just meteors?”
“They were not caused by meteors, and I won’t bother explaining how I know, because the science would be lost on you. The secondary craters were caused by relativistic impactors.”
That I did understand. “You mean like a super powerful railgun?”
“A super-duper powerful railgun.”
“Wow.” I tried to imagine even a tiny object traveling at half the speed of light hitting a planet. Such an event would make a nuke look like a sneeze. “Crap.
Next you’re going to tell me all this bad stuff happened to Barsoom around the same time that Newark was pushed out of orbit, and somebody blew up moons that had Elder facilities?”
“No. That would be interesting, but merely another data point. What scares me is that Barsoom lost its atmosphere, and the surface was bombarded, long before disaster struck Newark. I wish now that we had more time at Barsoom, so I would not have to rely on the amateurish data collected by the idiot Maxolhx. My best estimate is the event occurred between ninety and one hundred thirty million years ago.”
“Wheeeeew,” I whistled. “Newark got pushed out of orbit about two point seven million years ago? So, the bad guys, whoever they are, they were around way back then?”
“No,” his avatar shook its head sadly. “My internal subroutines are still preventing me from recalling accurate timelines, however I am certain this disaster struck Barsoom while the Elders still inhabited this galaxy. In fact, the Elders did not depart their physical existence for many millions of years after the event on Barsoom.”
“Holy shit.”
“Yeah. Now you see why this scares me. A violent act was committed against the Elders, while the Elders were still here.”
“This changes things, Skippy.”
“Uh huh.” He was so frightened that he didn’t bother to make a snarky remark. “The story gets worse, if possible. The technology required to strip away Barsoom’s atmosphere, in the manner data indicates the event happened, is technology currently available only to a Sentinel. Someone, something, tore a hole in a star and created a massive, focused solar flare. I say ‘focused’ because only Barsoom was affected, not the third planet in the system. A powerful solar flare traveled outward, scorching Barsoom and blowing away most of its atmosphere. At the same time, Elder facilities on the surface were scooped away into another spacetime. Then whatever facilities remained were pounded to dust from orbit.”
My head was spinning. “We raided that Elder site under the dome the Wurgalan built. Why wasn’t that destroyed also?”
“I now think that site was placed on Barsoom later, as a monitoring station.”
“Monitoring? Whoa. Someone used Elder tech to wipe out Elder facilities on Barsoom, then installed Elder tech to monitor the place? Why? More important, who?”
“For ‘why’ it is likely that whoever attacked Barsoom monitored activity on that planet to make certain nothing survived. The obvious choice for ‘who’ is the Elders themselves, although that makes zero, absolutely zero, sense. We know Newark was pushed out of orbit long after the Elders departed, so that event must have been caused by an unknown third party. But the idea of a third party coexisting with the Elders, and surviving long after the Elders left the galaxy, is simply not possible. Not possible. Unless everything I know about the Elders is wrong, completely wrong. And even that doesn’t make sense. If there was a third party inhabiting this galaxy for over a hundred million years, where are they now? Why haven’t we found relics of their civilization? The Elders left extensive relics scattered across the galaxy. There is no, no evidence of a star-faring species in this galaxy before the Rindhalu, other than the Elders themselves.”
“I can’t picture the Elders sitting back and allowing anyone to blow away one of their planets. Crap, Skippy, we had enough of a mystery about Newark. Now we have a totally different, maybe unconnected mystery about Barsoom?”
“There is one connection between the events at Newark and Barsoom; not just the level of technology involved. The connection is the type of technology involved as well. Joe, now that I know about Barsoom, I think something similar may have happened to other planets in this galaxy, around the same time as Barsoom. Knowing about Barsoom allows me to make sense of data collected mostly by the Rindhalu. They were puzzled by catastrophes which struck multiple sites across the galaxy roughly one hundred million years ago. One of their theories was that the Milky Way galaxy collided with and absorbed a dwarf galaxy at that time. The new mass passing through the Milky Way disrupted orbits and caused havoc like comets swinging in from distant orbits to collide with inner planets, planets being ejected from their star systems, even stars being pulled into orbit by larger stars. The Rindhalu discarded the dwarf galaxy theory because it didn’t explain large areas scooped out of planets and moons and other phenomena they couldn’t understand.”
That remark puzzled me. “Did the Rindhalu know about Newark, and Barsoom?”
“I don’t know,” Skippy admitted. “Unfortunately, my only source of data about the Rindhalu comes from other species; I have had no direct contact with the spiders. The Rindhalu traditionally are reluctant to share data and technology. Joe, that is a very good point.”
“Uh, it is?” I didn’t know what point I had made.
“Yes. We should somehow get access to a Rindhalu data archive. Crap! I should have thought about doing that a long time ago. We have serious questions, the spiders may have answers.”
I did not like the sound of that. “Hey, how about we concentrate on one problem at a time?”
“Ok, sure,” he sighed. “The current problem is our need to get a conduit so I can fix myself, before we can do anything else.”
“No, the current problem is persuading Count Chocula to approve us raiding a Thuranin star system.”
“Oof,” he grunted. “Crap, now you’re asking the impossible.”
“This time, Skippy, I understand why he is reluctant to approve this operation.” There were several reasons why raiding Barsoom had been Plan A, and our next target was Plan B. The op at Barsoom involved us tangling with a small Wurgalan outpost, a relatively soft target of a lower-technology species. Plan B required us to jump into a Thuranin star system. The system was centered on an orange dwarf star and had no habitable planets; the inner worlds were small, lifeless rocks, with one large and two smaller gas giants forming the outer band of the system.
Unlike Barsoom, where millions of Wurgalan lived on one planet of that system, our second target had no permanent Thuranin presence. That is, no permanent presence that Skippy knew about. There is an unmanned refueling station in low orbit around the big gas giant, but the station supposedly was used infrequently because the star system was only one wormhole away from major ship servicing and fueling facilities. Our actual target, identified by Skippy, was on a moon orbiting the outermost gas giant; it was an Elder installation very similar to the one on Barsoom.
Yeah, like the one on Barsoom. Where we had taken a risk to steal a device that didn’t work. Why did Skippy think we should take the even greater risk of going to our second target, which I decided to call ‘Bravo’ for lack of a better name? Because, Skippy had assured us, the conduit at Bravo was functional. Or it had been at one time. The Advanced Research Directorate of the Thuranin had done extensive, though completely unproductive, testing on the Elder installation, and Skippy had access to their testing data. Although the Thuranin had not learned anything useful because they had no idea how Elder technology worked, their tests told Skippy the conduit was still active. Or it had been active, the last time the Thuranin ran tests, which was fifty three thousand years ago. Since that time, the Elder site had rested undisturbed, almost forgotten. Security at the site was limited to one surveillance and defense satellite; Skippy knew that because four thousand years ago the Thuranin had an internal dispute over who should pay the cost of maintaining and upgrading that satellite. In the end, ARD had ponied up the resources, grumbling about it for years afterward.
So, on the surface, Bravo looked like a soft target. It was in an uninhabited star system. Skippy knew exactly where the lone defense satellite was, in geosynchronous orbit directly above the Elder site. We could jump in practically on top of the satellite, jamming its signals while we sliced it apart with our maser cannons. We would time our jump so the satellite was above the side of the planet facing away from the star, concealing the gamma ray burst of our inbound jump from being detected by the fueling station orbiting the big gas giant. There, w
e had a bit of luck because our target and the big gas giant were almost 170 degrees apart in their orbits of the star; any stray photons from our gamma rays would not reach the fueling station for two and a half hours. That should be plenty of time for us to fly down to the Elder installation, remove the item we want, fly back up to the Dutchman and jump away. Simple and easy, right?
It should be simple and easy, but nothing the Merry Band of Pirates did was ever simple or easy. We were bound to encounter surprises that would bite us in the ass, and a surprise provided by the Thuranin would be an order of magnitude worse than any surprise the Wurgalan could have thrown at us.
Still, our raid at Barsoom, although fruitless, had been nearly a textbook operation, considering the ‘textbook’ was being written as we conducted each action. Maybe, I privately dared hope, our luck was changing for the better.
Man, was I ever wrong about that.
The Wurgalan named Oostlet Nabanu willed himself not to tremble in front of the two Thuranin who now occupied the repaired dome. The Thuranin did not have a physically imposing presence, being only three quarters the height of an average adult Wurgalan. Thuranin supposedly were proud of the efficiency and superiority of their compact body mass, but Wurgalan had learned over the eons the superior species were sensitive about their diminutive stature when face to face with other species, so Oostlet had followed protocol and scrunched up his tentacles to pull himself down, making the two Thuranin slightly above Oostlet’s eye level. Lowering the trunk of their central bodies was practiced by all Wurgalan expected to encounter Thuranin in close proximity; one advantage of the Thuranin being clones was they were almost exactly the same height. There was no difference between the height of males and females in the patron species, and as far as Oostlet had been able to tell under the shapeless coveralls worn by the aliens, there was little other difference between the two genders of Thuranin.
Zero Hour (Expeditionary Force Book 5) Page 9