The comp speakers rattled off a series of liquid whistles and hums, interspersed with harsh cackles.
“What is it?” Baedecker asked.
“Not what,” Corbin said, “but who. We’ve got company out here, only . . . “
“Only what?”
“It’s not anybody we know.”
* * *
The vent was easy for Dan to negotiate. There was only one tight turn anywhere in it, and it had been simple to wiggle around that. There were no side vents big enough to get into, so you couldn’t take the wrong one. Once you were inside the thin metal walls you had only two choices: up or down. Up was Level One, down took you to Five. Simple.
He wasn’t afraid of enclosed places, not many people on the station were, and anyway he had his light, so it was no big deal. It was a little hard to keep enough tension on the tube’s walls with your feet and arms to keep from slipping, but Tooey had told him about that, so Dan had his thick-soled running slippers on and bands cut from the old scooter tire around his elbows for padding and added friction.
It took around ten minutes to make it to where the vent came into the ceiling of Level Five. There was a glasfiber filter and bird grate over the end to keep the swallows out, but it was on a hinge just like the one on the top had been. The vent opened right over one of the big tanks, like Tooey had said, and it was only half a meter below, an easy slide.
The tank rang hollowly when he stepped down onto it, and Dan grinned as he shut the lamp off. Oh, this was mean, mean, mean!
Climbing down from the tank was a bit tricky, but there was a pipe you could use that ran almost all the way to the top. In a minute, Dan was on the floor between two of the three-meter-high holding units—in a new world that was his to explore.
* * *
“Shut down the ion engines!” Corbin commanded. Baedecker looked at him as if he’d suddenly sprouted wings. “What?”
“Kill the drive, now! Hurry!” Corbin was busy with his own controls, stopping their automatic radio transmissions back to the vicinity of Sol.
“You’ve lost your mind—” Baedecker began.
“We don’t have time to argue. Tyne, get that drive off! And everything but life-support while you’re all it. Hurry!”
Tyne hesitated a second, then moved to obey.
“Stop!” Baedecker roared. “Touch those controls and I’ll have you brought up on charges!”
Tyne laughed, a short, sharp bark. He lifted the cover and flipped the old-style mechanical switch that kicked off all but emergency life-support.
The battery lights kicked on, dimmer than the regular lighting, and the vibrations of things mechanical inside the Argo I rumbled to a stop. The silence that followed was profound.
Baedecker came up from his chair and started to hurl himself at Tyne, who was closest.
“Hold it, hold it!” Corbin yelled.
The Commander hesitated.
“Look, let me explain. Thirty seconds, and if you still want to tear somebody apart, don’t pick on Leon, you can have me.”
“You can’t abort ship’s functions like that!” Baedecker said. Breaking regulations was to him what breaking a spiritual law was to a religious fanatic.
“We’ll die if we don’t,” Corbin said.
Baedecker glared at him, but the words sank in. “What are you talking about?”
“Look, Tony, what do you think cooked Square Land?”
“I don’t have any idea. Neither do you.”
“Yes I do. Hear me out, okay?”
“Go on.”
“I think,” Corbin said, “that there are alien ships on the other side of PC-Prime. I think they just got through using Square Land for target practice.”
Both Baedecker and Tyne stared at him.
“Look, we don’t know of anything natural that can do what we see down there, right?”
“It’s a new planet, Corbin—”
“Physics is physics, Commander. Think about it for a minute. One day down there and the continent is peaceful and cool; the next and it’s barbecue city. If there was anything alive down there, it’s cooked crisp.”
“Granted. So?”
“So all of a sudden I’m getting coherent signals all over my com bands in a language like nothing we’ve ever heard. The computer doesn’t recognize it and field strength says it’s in the neighborhood. Something on the other side of Prime did that”—he pointed at the unseen planet through the wall of the ship—”and nobody lives there who’s got radio or weaponry capable. That means ships. More than one signal, and talking to each other in those glottal stop whistles. Where’d they come from? They aren’t native; nothing else in this system could possibly field life as we know it. We’ve got aliens over there!”
Baedecker shook his head, disbelieving. “All right. Suppose you’re right. Why turn our ship off?”
Tyne cut in. “Yeah, I see. He’s right, Commander.
If they are there they’re probably in orbit, and maybe they’ll swing around to this side. If we’re spewing ions and radio, they’ll see it.”
“Exactly,” Corbin said. “I don’t know what kind of sensor gear they might have, but they do have radio so they might hear us; our beam has some spill.”
Corbin took a deep breath and let it out, trying to calm his voice. “Tony, if they can fry a continent from off-planet, what do you think they can do to our unarmed ship?”
* * *
Baedecker wasn’t convinced that there was anybody on the other side of Prime, but he was willing to wait a few hours to see. They were still heading toward planet fall at a good clip, even without the engines, and if there was anything at all to Corbin’s theory it might be a good idea not to attract attention.
Tyne said, “Look, if there are aliens over there, there’s no reason we have to assume they’re hostile, is there?”
“You saw Square Land, didn’t you?”
“Come on, we don’t know if there’s any life down there except trees and bugs, if that.”
“We don’t know that there isn’t, either. Besides, anybody who would destroy an entire continent where life might evolve probably wouldn’t think twice about taking us out.”
“Your logic is flawed,” Baedecker said.
“We’re a long way from home, Commander. Do you want to take the risk? Follow my flawed logic for a little while more. If they aren’t locals, then where did they come from? More important, how did they get here?”
“You said that yourself—they have ships.”
“Right. They must have FTL ships. They have the Jump, and likely their version is in a hell of a lot better working order.”
“I fail to see—”
“My god,” Tyne said slowly. “If these are unfriendlies, they’re within spitting distance of Sol!”
Corbin nodded. “Exactly. And if we can hear voices from home, so can they.”
Baedecker got it, finally. “We’ve got to warn the System!”
Tyne said, “If those jokers are staging here to hit the Solar System, they’ll be there a long time before our radio signal gets home. We’re fucked, and so is Earth.”
Corbin became the devil’s advocate for a moment. “Look, I know I said all this, but there’s an off chance that maybe these guys aren’t hostile. There could be another reason why they melted Square Land, something we don’t understand.”
“So what are we supposed to do?” Tyne asked.
Corbin looked at him, and saw that Baedecker also was waiting to hear the answer. The book had failed the Commander, there was nothing in it to cover this situation. Nobody had planned on the first Jump ship running into aliens who could destroy a continent from space. “There’s nothing we can do but wait and watch.” Corbin said. “We need to know more before we make any decisions.”
* * *
Dan wandered around the tanks, watching the tiny, box-like robots—the drones—as they scurried back and forth on their little plastic tires, scanning pipes and containers with their UV lasers, looking for problems. The drones ranged in size form about that of a shoe package all the way to the repair models with patching tools that stood near Dan’s own height.
He walked for what seemed a long time before he ever looked at his chronograph. The timer on his wrist warned him that it was nearly time for him to be home for the evening meal. Better start back.
After a few minutes, he was a little worried. After half an hour, he was scared.
After an hour of searching for the vent and not finding it, Dan was in a full-blown panic. He remembered what Tooey had said about the boy who disappeared into Level Five, never to be seen again. He remembered about the ghost. But he couldn’t remember where the vent was. He darted about, the fear covering him like his nervous sweat, his mouth too dry to do more than croak for help. He was lost!
He couldn’t find the vent.
He couldn’t remember the way to get home!
* * *
“Son of a bitch,” Corbin said softly. He was watching the high-res doppler scan on his screen.
“What?” Tyne said.
“There they are. Coming over the pole.” Baedecker and Tyne got busy at their own boards.
They were too far away for direct visual, except maybe as tiny pinpricks of light, but the ship’s sensors had eyes that could see a long way.
“Oh Lord, there are dozens of them. Hundreds!” Tyne said.
Even Baedecker forgot the book. “Look at the sizes! The smallest is ten times as big as we are! The big ones . . . “
Corbin nodded, not speaking. The largest ships were huge. As big as a tube-world.
Though they couldn’t see them, the computer was able to construct pictures. The smallest ships were winged and looked capable of dipping into an atmosphere and flying; the larger vehicles were rod-shaped, long and cylindrical, obviously meant for deep space.
“Their lowest ships are in orbit at nine thousand, six hundred klicks,” Baedecker said, back in control. “Unless they’ve changed it, their weapons are effective at least that far.”
Corbin nodded grimly.
“Can they see us?” Tyne asked.
“I hope not,” Corbin answered. “Not much we can do about it if they can.”
He began tapping controls on his com board.
“What are you doing?” Baedecker asked.
“They’re using a fairly wide VHF band to communicate between the ships, more than they need for voice radio. “
“What does that mean?”
Corbin shrugged. “Could be sending computer data. Or maybe visual. I’ve got a signal at around a hundred megahertz, I’ll see what our computer can do with it.”
The alien ships continued their north-to-south orbital segment.
“I make it a hundred and fifty ships exactly,” Tyne said. “Looks like they are broken up into three big squads.”
The computer began to decode the alien radio beam. It took a minute. Corbin touched more controls and spoke to the VA pickup to hurry the bioelectronic brain along.
Then, suddenly, he knew what they had here. “Television!”
“What?” That from Tyne and Baedecker together.
“Punch up com three,” Corbin commanded. The computer lined in his own flat screen as he spoke.
“Oh, man!”
What the computer gave them was a picture of one of the aliens.
* * *
“What is it, a reptile? A mammal?”
Corbin looked at Baedecker, then back at the image on the screen. “I don’t know. I’m not a zoologist.”
What the three men saw was the head and—for want of a better term—shoulders of the alien. The head was squarish, with thick brows and deep-set eyes, and it had flat nostrils over a long gash of a mouth. The jaw was underslung, bulldog-like, and wired to knots of bunched muscle on the top rear of the skull. The neck was long, but thick in relation to the head, and there seemed to be four long ropes of muscle that inserted under the jaw, coming up from four bony protuberances at the top of the torso.
It had no arms.
Behind the thing were two elephant trunk-like appendages. Corbin couldn’t see where they were attached to the creature—the torso? Were they tails? Each of the trunks had three fingers on the end, one of which opposed the other two.
Corbin was aware of saying something softly, but he wasn’t sure what it was.
The signal broke up but the computer managed to drag in another one, a slightly different view of the alien. There was nothing in the background to give a size comparison. But this picture was smiling. Or at least showing its teeth.
“What?” Baedecker stared at the image. “Look at the teeth.”
The thing had long and pointed eyeteeth, and shorter but similarly shaped fangs on either side of the big incisors. The row of teeth inset into the bottom jaw were shorter, but tapered to tiny points. There were no molars in sight.
“So they have teeth, so what?”
“Those are not cud-chewers,” Corbin said. “That’s the dentition of a predator.”
“I still don’t see what—”
“It’s a killer,” Corbin said, cutting him off. “A killer in a ship that can throw a rock more than nine thousand kilometers to nail its prey.”
“Oh, man!” Tyne said again.
Exactly, Corbin thought grimly. Man was in deep trouble.
* * *
“We’ve got to do something,” Baedecker said. “We’ve got to get the Jump drive operational and get back to warn the system.”
Corbin stared at him. “How?”
Baedecker was really upset. He removed his helmet and wiped at his perspiring face. Strictly against regs.
“I’ll go down and examine the malfunction.”
“Won’t work,” Tyne said. “You’d be cooked before you could get a good look at it, much less repair it.”
“We have to do something!”
“I suggest that we get into a matching orbit and stay on opposite sides of the planet from those guys,” Corbin said.
“What good will that do?”
“It’ll keep us alive a little longer. Alive and working on it is better than dead and not.”
Nobody argued with that.
* * *
Going over the south pole they nearly hit a big chunk of spinning rock twice their own size.
“Jeez, look at that!” Tyne said.
The sky ahead was filled with debris, some of it as small as the house-sized boulder they’d just missed, most of it much larger.
“Where’d all this crap come from?” Corbin wondered aloud.
“Asteroids? Maybe Prime had a moon and the monsters from outer space blew it up,” Tyne said. “What do you think, Commander?”
Baedecker was adjusting the ship’s course so it wouldn’t plow into a city-sized rock rapidly approaching. “I’m busy.”
Halfway around the backside of Prime, the three got another surprise. The comp-aug enhanced picture showed them another piece of flying real estate, this one four or five klicks long by half that wide. Upon this moonlet was some kind of artificial structure. It was roughly dome-shaped and covered with a reflective material like silvered Mylar. As they got closer, the computer told them there were large mechanical devices in operation both within and outside the dome.
“Some kind of mining operation,” Tyne said. “Those are diggers and crushers. Bet there’s a smelter and gasworks inside.”
“Makes sense,” Baedecker said. “A fleet that big would have to have some way of generating supplemental supplies. Air to breathe, water, other essential gases.”
“Is it manned, you think? Or aliened?”
/> Baedecker shrugged. “Could be. Could be automatic. Tyne?”
“Probably automatic. That kind of stuff is easy to program, assuming their technology is only as good as ours. What difference does it make?”
Corbin bit at his lip. He had the glimmerings of an idea. It was iffy at best, but they were certainly at the stage where any idea was better than none. He looked at Tyne. “You suppose they have the equivalent of drones down there? Small ones?”
“Probably.”
Corbin grinned. “You think you could figure out how to take control of an alien robot and make it do what you want?”
Tyne cocked his head to one side and considered that. “Maybe, if their technology wasn’t too different.” He smiled as the thought took him.
The mining operation flashed by as the ship sped along in its orbit. Baedecker said, “What are you two talking about?”
“Commander, do you think you could rendezvous with that rock being mined?” Corbin asked.
“Yes, of course. What would be the point?”
“Getting home.”
Baedecker looked at Tyne and Corbin. “What the hell are you trying to say?”
Corbin and Tyne exchanged glances, and then Corbin told Baedecker.
* * *
“You’re crazy, both of you.”
“Better to die trying the unlikely, didn’t you say?” Baedecker rubbed at his mouth with one hand. “It will be tricky. We’re doing one orbit every ninety-seven minutes. I’ll have to start slowing well before we reach the mining operation. Even with the Em rockets, we’ll only have a few minutes at best before the fleet circles around and sees us.”
“You have a better idea?” Corbin said. Baedecker sighed. “No,” he admitted.
The Jupiter War Page 25