Across the Great Rift

by Washburn, Scott;

  “Somebody is already here!”

  Chapter Seven

  Tadsen Farsvar set aside the small block of plastic he had been engraving, stared at the control panel, and then yawned. Another boring night watch on the free prospector, Carlenzer. He glanced over the instruments automatically, but there was no change since the last time he had looked, five minutes earlier. He had not expected there to be, but he knew his duty and he would not neglect it. It had not been so long since he had been confirmed as a full adult in the Hasnari sept of the Seyotah clan that he had forgotten his duty! He could still remember the fear he felt before the Trial of Worlds and the pride he felt afterward. The words of his oath were still fresh in his soul. No, he would not neglect his duty—no matter how boring it might be.

  And who knew what might happen? Perhaps he would be at the controls when the great find was made. Perhaps one of these times he would glance at the sensor scope and see a faint return which could not have been made by the ubiquitous iceballs that made up the inner cloud of Refuge. No, it wouldn’t be ice, it would be something else. He would adjust the controls and send out a focused pulse, and the readings he would get back would make his heart race. But he would control himself and confirm the readings and then calmly—oh so calmly—inform the Execti. They would close on the object and it would be a treasure such as they had not seen before. A chunk of iron and nickel twice the size of their ship, with veins of gold, silver, and uranium thrown in for good measure. Well, the uranium probably wouldn’t be there with all the rest, but if he was going to fantasize, why not go all the way? Inferno, why not have pockets of diamonds, too? Yes, it would be a find like the Hasnari had not seen since they were driven from their ancestral space in the Belt so many years ago. And at the next Conclave, Tad Farsvar would be the hero. All the men would congratulate him and the girls would cluster in, trying to catch his attention and be promised a dance. Tad closed his eyes and savored his fantasy.

  Unfortunately, when he opened his eyes and checked the scope a few minutes later, the object of his fantasy still wasn’t out there. Nor was it likely to be, he was forced to admit. The inner cloud was almost entirely ice. There would be the rare, rocky asteroid tossed into an eccentric orbit by the gravity of the system’s gas giant, and the even rarer metallic ones, but the vast majority of the cloud objects were just ice. Not that the ice was worthless, of course. When Carlenzer returned to Panmunaptra, it would be towing a full load of ice, assuming Tad’s fantasy did not materialize after all and allow them to be towing something far more valuable.

  A load of ice would allow the family to survive, but just barely. Carlenzer was very nearly self-sufficient, at least in the short term. They grew their own food, recycled their own air and water, and made most of the things they needed with their own hands. The pittance they could sell the ice for would allow them to buy those things they could not make themselves. The family had done it this way for generations, but rarely had they been in so precarious a situation. A string of bad luck had plagued Carlenzer for several years. Vital equipment had broken down and had to be replaced and twice—twice!—they had been caught by Clorindan raiders who had taken a heavy tithe from them. The family’s assets were dangerously low and just one more mishap might leave them unable to survive on their own. A few good years would allow them to rebuild their fortunes a bit, but if they were not given those years, they might be in serious trouble.

  Tad clenched his fist at the thought of what might happen then. If they were lucky, they would be allowed to indenture themselves to one of the richer families in the sept and work off the debt. But if fortune did not smile on them… Carlenzer would be sold and the family would have to take whatever work they could find on the ships and stations in the system. They would be scattered and it would be the end of the Farsvars.

  “We can’t let that happen, damn it,” hissed Tad to himself. He had seen the worry in his grandfather’s eyes and felt the tension in all the other older adults. He looked back at the sensor display. If he could just find something…

  “What the…?”

  Tad stared in amazement. A few minutes ago the display had shown nothing. Now there was a massive return! A gigantic return, as large as an asteroid, and it screamed of metal! Where had it come from? Why hadn’t he spotted it earlier? He eagerly began studying the other read-outs.

  “Oh…”

  Energy reading. Strong energy readings from the object. A ship. His hopes, so high for a moment, fell back where they belonged. It was a ship. An enormous ship, it was true, but it clearly belonged to someone else. Tad’s treasure rock was still just a fantasy.

  But the ship had not been there a few minutes ago. It was only a hundred thousand klicks away and something that large would have been spotted at fifty times that distance, even by Carlenzer’s modest sensors. That left only one explanation.

  “A starship.” A ship had dropped out of hyperspace. Carlenger’s sensors had not missed it; it literally had not been there a few minutes ago. Some of Tad’s earlier excitement returned. Starships were not unknown here, indeed Refuge was one of the very few places in which a starship could be built, but the arrival of one was still a special event. And look at the size of it! No starship built here had ever been that large. It was kilometers across. Not even the legendary Long March, which first brought the clans here, was as large as what he was seeing now. What was it? Where had it come from? Who was aboard?

  He could not answer any of those questions, but his course of action was clear. He touched a button on the com panel. A few seconds went by with no answer. He pressed the button again.

  “Yeah? What’s up?” said a voice. It was his cousin, Eran.

  “Get your dad.”

  “He’s kind of busy right now.”

  “Get him anyway. It’s important.”

  “All right, hang on.”

  There was a considerable delay, during which Tad continued to monitor the intruder. It wasn’t doing anything that he could detect. Then he started checking out the other contacts on his screen. He was relieved to see that there weren’t any other ships closer than about twenty million klicks, and that one had a sizable vector away from the newcomer. Whoever these folks were, Carlenger was going to have first crack at them. Hopefully they would want to trade—not that the family had much to offer…

  “Tad? What’s the problem?” His Uncle Jari’s voice came over the com.

  “Sir, a very large ship has dropped out of hyper only a hundred thousand klicks away.” He was amazed at how calm his voice was. “I think you’ll want to see this.”

  “Are you sure about this?” asked his uncle, who was also the execti of the ship. “How large?”

  “Of course I’m sure!” said Tad, his calm evaporating like a drop of liquid hydrogen. “It’s practically sitting in our laps. And it’s enormous! Kilometers across!”

  “Tad, if this is some practical joke of yours…”

  Anger flared in him. “Sir, if you refuse to come to the bridge, I’m going to have to report this directly to the captain,” he said very formally. That seemed to get through to Jari. No one would try to play a joke on the captain!

  “All right, Tad, settle down. I’ll be right there.” The connection closed and Tad waited for his uncle to arrive, alternately fuming over the older man’s initial refusal to believe his report and growing progressively more excited by the contact on his scope. Who were they? Why hadn’t they broadcast any sort of greeting? Typically, on the rare occasions when a starship arrived, it would quickly start sending out messages assuring the locals of peaceful intentions and a desire to trade. This ship was completely silent. What did that mean?

  A few moments later his uncle drifted onto the bridge and propelled himself over to Tad’s station. Tad didn’t say a word, he simply pointed to the sensor scope and tried to keep a grin of satisfaction off his face. He nearly succeeded.

  “By the Lifegiver’s left gonad,” breathed Uncle Jari. “Sorry I doubted you, Tad. Have
they sent out any messages?”

  “Not a thing, Uncle. They are silent as a tomb.”

  “That’s odd.”

  “I’ve never seen or heard of a ship like this before, sir.”

  “No, it certainly wasn’t built here. Maybe they’re from Gantarani, I’ve heard that they build some pretty big ships—although nothing this big.”

  “So, what do we do?”

  “Well, we’re the closest ship around. I guess it falls to us to welcome the visitors.”

  “Should we inform the captain?”

  “Grandfather is sleeping right now. I don’t want to disturb him. He hasn’t been well lately, you know.”

  Tad nodded. The family’s patriarch was in poor health and Uncle Jari had been in virtual command of the ship for months. Still, this seemed important enough to wake the Old Man…

  “Fire up the communications panel,” said Jari. “Let’s say hello to these folks—whoever they are.”

  * * * * *

  “What’s going on?” demanded Greg VanVean. Crawford had seen him hovering near the bridge in hopes of looking over some shoulders since the drop-out was complete—despite the fact he was supposed to still be resting after his wound. The commotion had drawn him in immediately. He grabbed Crawford by the arm as he asked the question. The engineer stopped and shook his head.

  “Seems like the long-range scans were wrong: this system is already inhabited.”

  “What? By who?” Greg looked stunned.

  “That’s what we are trying to find out. There’s radio traffic from all over the place. It’s all on odd frequencies and strangely formatted, but it is definitely human. It doesn’t seem like we’re dealing with aliens, at least. And it doesn’t seem to be anyone from our side of the Rift, either, which is a relief. No Petrunans, Venanci, or Hebyrnans waiting for us in ambush.”

  “But if it’s not anyone from across the Rift, how can they be humans?” asked VanVean in bewilderment.

  “Well, I meant that they don’t seem to be anyone we’re acquainted with from our side of the Rift. None of the usual suspects, so to speak. Clearly they are originally from our side of the Rift if they are human—we just don’t know who.”

  “This is going to prove rather…inconvenient, ain’t it, boss?” asked Greg. “What if they object to us building a gate here?”

  “Yeah, that could be a problem. To say nothing of mining their asteroids or colonizing their planet. This could get real sticky.”

  “So what are we going to do?”

  “Good question. Every skipper in the fleet, plus Shiffeld, are all trying to talk at once over the com. So far, we haven’t done anything, although we are starting to get some radio messages from the locals directed at us.”

  “God, what a mess. I mean we have to build the gate here, there’s no other choice.”

  “Mr. Crawford.” It was Captain Frichette; Crawford turned to face him. “Governor Shiffeld is calling for all the department heads to meet aboard Starsong. Please go there at once.”

  “Right.” He nodded at VanVean and headed for the shuttle cars. During the short trip over to the headquarters ship, he tried to get a handle on what this new development was going to mean. At the shuttle lock he encountered Regina Nassau of the Terraforming Team. She was wearing another amazing costume that revealed even more of her figure than usual, but she was also looking uncharacteristically serious.

  “Hello, Charles, what do you think of this?”

  “Not sure what to think. What about you?”

  “As soon as we dropped out of hyper, my team started doing scans on the one planet in the habitable zone—at least that is where they told us it would be! The initial readings say it’s unlivable in its current state but well within our capability to terraform, but it’s occupied! Lots of radio signals from the surface and evidence of small cities. I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

  “Me neither.”

  “At least you can go ahead and build your gate, Charles!” she said in exasperation. “That’s going to be out in empty space. But how can I terraform a planet that’s already occupied? As far as I can see it, I’m out of a job.”

  “Hey, don’t get ahead of yourself. If there are humans down there and the place is as nasty as you say, then they must be living under domes or some such. They might welcome having you turn the place into something livable.”

  Regina looked thoughtful. “Maybe. Some of our methods do some pretty…violent things to the planet. Not sure I’d want to be living down there when we did them. Still, you are right, I’m jumping to conclusions. Guess we better find out the situation first, huh?”

  “A good idea, yes.” As he said that, they arrived back in the too-big conference room where a lively debate seemed to be underway. Half-a-dozen people were talking at once, along with a batch on various com monitors, and Shiffeld was trying to establish some order.

  “Please! Settle down, everyone!” he ordered, holding up his hand. “We can worry about who’s at fault for the misinformation from the scans later. Right now we have to decide what we are going to do about this new situation. Ah, Mistress Nassau, Mr. Crawford, thank you for coming so quickly. I think we’re all here now.”

  Crawford and Nassau found seats. Shiffeld looked extremely harried, not panicked, just very stressed. Crawford could barley imagine the sort of shock this had been to the governor. He glanced around and saw the other department heads and a few aides. He noted with interest that Shiffeld now had several liveried attendants and a number of nervous-looking staff people—two of whom had used to work for him.

  “I trust you’ve all heard the news?” said Shiffeld, looking at Crawford and Nassau.

  “Yes, sir. Do we have any information on who we’re dealing with?”

  “Nothing definite. There is a lot of radio traffic and it’s evident that these people are present all through this system; on the planet, the asteroid belt, the moons of the gas giant, and in the Kuiper Belt. Some of the traffic is coded, but a lot is in the clear. The voices are human, but the language seems pretty odd.”

  “But who can they be?” demanded Tosh Briggs. “There wasn’t supposed to be anyone here!”

  “Tosh, the scans were made from over two thousand light years away. You can’t expect them to find every little detail,” said Jinsup Sowell.

  “This is more than a little detail!” snapped Briggs. “This could totally screw up everything!”

  “As if things weren’t totally screwed up already,” muttered Lu Karrigan.

  “I think that is the bottom line, Governor,” said Crawford. “Just how badly will this upset our plans? Although, as Lu points out, our plans are already pretty badly upset.”

  “Sir,” said Regina Nassau, “our initial sensor scans are showing a fair amount of activity in the region, but nothing like you’d expect from a heavily populated system in our own part of space. Energy output from fission reactors is modest, thermal readings from the planet and moons are low, and those ships which are close enough to get good readings on all seem small. Whoever these people are, they do not appear to have developed this system extensively.”

  “But that doesn’t give us any evidence about their military capabilities,” said Captain Jervis. “We’ve hardly done anything to get our warships operational, and if we have to fight them, we could be in trouble.”

  “Why should we even think we have to fight them?” asked Regina. “If we all keep our heads, there will be no need to fight.”

  “That is what we hope, Regina,” said Shiffeld. “But we’d be foolish not to at least keep the possibility in mind.” He looked at the others around the table. “How about it, people? If these folks do turn out to be hostile, how will that affect our operations?”

  Crawford shrugged. “I can hardly build the gate while being shot at. We’d have to at least secure the construction area.”

  “And you can almost forget about doing any mining,” added Lu Karrigan. “You know how that’s done: lots of littl
e ships scattered all over the place. No way we can protect them from attack.”

  “Manufacturing depends on the raw materials from Lu’s miners,” said Jinsup Sowell. “The actual factories would be easier to defend, but they’d still be vulnerable. And without raw materials…” he shook his head.

  Shiffeld looked at Tosh Briggs who looked back with an expression of apology. “Same situation here, Sir Rikard, I’m afraid. Trying to build the habitats around the planet in the face of hostiles would be nearly impossible.”

  “Mistress Nassua?” Shiffeld turned to the terraformer.

  “Our operations are actually less vulnerable to interference, I suppose,” she said slowly with a frown on her face. “But there are people on the planet and we can’t just start dropping our bombs with them down there.”

  “Unless there’s no other choice,” muttered Briggs. Nassau whipped her head around to glare at the other man.

  “There had better be another choice,” she said icily.

  “Hold on, everyone,” said Crawford, “I think we’re letting ourselves be panicked by this. Instead of being a threat, these folks could be the stroke of luck we’ve been needing.”

  “What do you mean?” demanded Shiffeld.

  “Our biggest problem is a lack of manpower. We simply don’t have enough people to do the mining and manufacturing and build the gate and try to man the warships in the time frame we’ve got. Well, it seems to me that if these folks are all through the asteroids then they are probably already doing a lot of mining. And if they have ships then they have manufacturing. I’d hate to put Lu and Jin out of work, but if we can get the stuff we need from the locals instead of having to make it ourselves, then we can divert a lot of our own people to manning the warships.”

  Shiffeld looked thoughtful, so did the others. “Yes, I suppose that could be a possibility. But what if the locals don’t want to cooperate?”

  “Well let’s find out!” said Nassau forcefully. “I understand there is a small ship close by which has been signally us almost from the moment we dropped out of hyper. Let’s talk to them!”