“That’s the good
news, ma’am,” said Lt. J’rrantar, standing in the holo in his singular battle
armor. The huge Phlistaran’s faceplate was raised, and his toothy snout was
set in a grimace.
“And the bad?”
“The aborigines
stole all of the ready weapons in the shuttle,” said the Marine Officer.
“Thirty-three particle beam rifles, a pair of heavy crew served lasers, and a
good dozen shoulder fired anti-aircraft missile launchers. Those are what I
worry about the most, ma’am. They could use them to knock down a couple of
shuttles if they employ them carefully.”
“Will they know
how to use them?” asked the Captain, her brow furrowing in worry. “They have
to be a thousand years or more advanced on their tech level.”
“They have
shoulder fired missiles,” said the Marine, shaking his large head. “They’ll
figure them out. And, even worse, some of the units have holographic manuals
built in.”
“Any chance of
finding them?”
“We’ll may pick
up something when they’re activated,” said the Lieutenant. “But remember, we
built them to be hard to track in combat. Not impossible. They will have an
electronic signature that will be traceable for several hundred meters. We
just have to be within those couple of hundred meters.”
“And their
range?”
“They can hit a
target they are in line of sight of at five hundred kilometers,” said
J’rrantar. “Maybe further with some luck.”
Bad luck for
us
, thought the Captain, imagining her shuttles being knocked from the sky
by one of the fanatical aliens that were opposing her people’s efforts to save
them.
“I want every
weapon we have to have a tracer placed in it,” she finally said after a
moment’s thought. “I know that defeats the purpose of all the electronic
stealth we have built into them, but I’m more concerned about them being stolen
than their giving us away in combat with these people.”
“Yes, ma’am,”
said the Marine, nodding. “Any other precautions you want us to take?”
She thought
again about one of the shuttles, hit with a hyper velocity missile that blew
through the hull, or ripped off a wing and its grabber units. “From now on,
all personnel are to be in full battle armor, at least medium suits, at all
times to and from the planet, and whenever there is a possibility of contact
with the aliens. That includes helmets on at all times. Understood?”
“Yes, ma’am,”
said the Marine crisply, snapping to attention.
“I will not have
my people be easy targets for the fanatics among these people,” she said with
finality, then cut the transmission.
And I will be damned glad when some
support comes
, she thought.
She was limited
in the number of personnel she had. Each light cruiser had just under seven
hundred and fifty crewmembers, Spacers and Marines. Almost all of the Marines
from the
Clark
were on the planet, with the remainder, a couple of
squads, on-board as a ready reserve. She also had over a hundred Spacers,
officers and enlisted, on the planet, more than she would normally deploy for
the initial surveys this kind of ship was intended to conduct.
Lewis
had
also put a similar number of crew on the planet, just before she headed off on
her own mission to the blue supergiant. Both ships could still operate very
well with such reductions in on-board personnel. Unfortunately, as shown by
this incident, the Imperials needed more boots on the ground.
“Message coming
in from Zzarr, ma’am,” came the call from her Com Officer over the link. “Do
you want to take it?”
“Not really,”
said Albright, grimacing at the thought of talking with the leader of the
Honish. While the Tsarzor had been giving her problems, they were nothing as
compared to the fanaticism of their enemies.
And I bet when we get those
people we captured to talk, they’ll have a connection to the bastard’s country.
“Put him on, anyway.”
The glaring face
of the Premier, really the dictator, of the Nation of Honish, looked out at her
from the holo. They had given the native leaders com sets that allowed them to
send and receive holos. The units were black boxes that couldn’t be tampered
with without causing a meltdown of all the molycircs on board.
“How dare you
kill the people of my nation, Captain Albright,” growled the alien, primary and
secondary eyes all locked onto hers. “What gives you the right to do so?”
“Your, people,
kidnapped and decapitated an officer under my command,” said Albright,
returning the glare. “Under interstellar law, that gives me the legal
authority to kill or capture the perpetrators. And I have a question for you,
Premier. Did these people act on your orders?”
“That’s a
preposterous allegation,” said the alien, his glare growing even more intense,
if that was possible. “I resent what you imply, Captain.”
And of course
your people will not know from whence the orders originated
, she thought.
You’re
too smart for that.
“I order all of
your people off of my territory, Captain Albright,” continued the Dictator.
“You have one day to remove them, or my military and police forces will remove
them.”
“I would not
advise that, Premiere,” said the Captain in a low voice. “You know we have the
firepower to keep you from doing that.”
“And how will
you use this, firepower?” asked the Dictator. “I do not believe you will hit
us with kinetics or nuclear weapons. That is not your way. Your way is that
of a soft people.”
“Believe what
you want, Premiere. But be assured that we will not allow you to use force
against us without our complete and total resistance, with every means at our
disposal. And you also might see to it that the weapons that were taken from
my shuttle are returned.”
“I had nothing
to do with that,” said the Dictator, his tentacles waving in the way of his
people, like a human shoulder shrug. “You seem to labor under the
misconception that I have complete control over all the supplicants of the
religion I adhere to. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
“We will defend
ourselves against those weapons,” said Albright, pointing a finger at the
Dictator. “By any means possible. You might want to remember that, before
your people try to take out any of my assets.”
With a thought
over her link she killed the transmission, feeling a small surge of victory as
the last thing she saw was the Dictator opening his speaking orifice to fire
back at her.
What the hell is wrong with these people
? she thought.
We’re
here trying to save them, or at least as many as we can get out of here with
our limited resources. Can’t they see that?
Unfortunately,
the religion of the Honish, the worship of their God, Hrrotha, of which the
blue supergiant was the physical manifestation, called for them to accept the
fate their deity had proclaimed for them. They looked forward to the end of
their race, believing that they would all awaken in the heaven of their God.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, they also rejected the idea that anyone of their
race should survive, not just the relatively few nonbelievers of their own
land, but those of all other nations.
We could
probably just get away with taking the volunteers from Tsarzor and the other
nations. But I really want to get some of the Honish away as well, if they
would let me.
She thought
again about the relief she had sent for. The hyper VII courier would take at
least three weeks to get back to Exploration Command base. Depending on what
was available, relief could head out in two or three days after the arrival of
the courier. How soon they got here would depend on what they sent. Hyper VII
would arrive in three weeks or less. Ships with a VI hyperdrive would take
four times as long.
It had been planned
to replace all the current Exploration Command ships with hyper VII vessels,
due to the huge volume of space they operated in. The war with the Ca’cadasans
had sidelined those plans. They had some VII vessels, and were receiving a
trickle of new ones, but the need for ships to match that of their enemy, which
were all hyper VII, had sucked most of the new ships out of the Exploration
Command pipeline.
And if it
wasn’t for the damned war, we could do so much more here
, she thought,
looking at the holo that showed a large scale representation of this section of
the Perseus Arm. They could have rallied a true rescue mission, thousands of
ships lifting most of the population of this world and relocating them to safe
planets.
And that damned time bomb keeps ticking away. How long do we
have? I guess that
Lewis
will give us that answer.
Chapter Five
A supernova is probably the most
interesting thing in this Universe that can kill you.
Dr. Larry Southard.
JULY 15
TH
, 1000.
D-355.
“I really don’t
like getting so close to this thing, Captain,” said Commander Stephanie
Harrison, the Exec of the LC
Merriwether Lewis.
“You and me
both, Ms. Harrison,” agreed Captain Walther Huang, staring at the holo of the
bright blue ball that was centered within the viewer.
From a distance
it had looked so peaceful. From their current vantage of thirteen light
minutes, with the star on high magnification, it looked anything but. Huge
prominences rose from the star, arcing millions of kilometers out into space
to, mostly, fall back onto the surface of the stellar body in great splashes
that could swallow scores of Jovian worlds. Each flare would have totally
destroyed a terrestrial world that got in its way. But there were no worlds
that close in to the star. The few planets it had were further out, the
closest over a hundred million kilometers, and entirely covered in either
molten rock or superhot gas. None of those worlds would be given a chance to
cool, to become something of use to the intelligent species of the Galaxy.
“The star masses
approximately twenty eight Sols,” stated Lt. Commander Christi M’tumbo from her
sensor station, using the term for stellar mass based on that of the sun that
mankind had evolved near. “Running close in spectrograph now.”
The Captain
nodded as he looked at the tactical holo. Their own ship sat at over two
hundred and forty million kilometers from the surface of the inferno,
electromag shields on full, the supermetal radiator surfaces facing away from
the star radiating furiously, trying to relieve the ship of the heat being
sucked in from the superhot body. And in closer, at one hundred million
kilometers, arranged in an equidistant formation around the periphery of the
stars, blinked the icons of the probes
Lewis
had deployed.
“Data coming in
and correlating now,” stated the Sensor Officer. “The star is definitely into
the last stages of carbon burning. Program estimates neon burning will
commence in four months.”
“We need a
better name than ‘the star’ for this thing,” said the Captain, looking at the
numbers coming up on his side holo from the sensor station.
“How about
Big
Bastard
,” suggested the XO. “It fits,” she continued as the Captain sent
her a questioning glance. “It’s certainly big, and it’s going to be a bastard
when it blows.”
“OK,” said the
Captain with a smile. “Big Bastard it is.”
“The star, I
mean
Big Bastard
,” said M’tumbo with an embarrassed smile, “will start
burning oxygen in seven months. Silicon four months after. The core will
start accumulating iron in approximately three hundred and fifty days.”
“And then she
blows,” said the Exec in a hushed voice.
And then she
blows,
agreed the Captain in his thoughts.
And six months later the
radiation wave strikes a world with billions of sentient inhabitants and wipes
them out.
The Captain shook his head at the thought. If it had been a
time of peace, the Empire might have been able to rally an effort that would
have save most of that population. But, engaged as they were in a war of
survival, they just didn’t have the resources to spare.
We might get out a
couple of million, out of what? Six billion plus.
“Sir,” said
M’tumbo, excitement in her voice. “I have an anomaly here. Make that several
of them.”
The Captain
walked quickly over to her station to look down on the holo. There was an
object there, almost completely black against the background fury of the star.
And nothing to give it scale.
The Sensor
Officer adjusted to take, lowering the background brightness, firming up the
image. What appeared was a globe with numerous spiked projections on its
surface. He looked over at the tactical holo, finding a dozen of the objects
arranged around Big Bastard, sitting about sixty million kilometers from the
roiling surface.
“How big is that
thing?” asked the Captain as M’tumbo started sending radar and lidar beams
toward it.
“It will take
about eight point eight minutes for a return,” stated M’tumbo, looking up at
her Captain.
“It takes what
it takes,” agreed Huang, staring at the object, trying to will the information
to appear sooner than allowed by the laws of physics.
That never works
,
thought the Captain, a natural explorer who wanted to know, and know now.
“Getting the
feed from active sensors now,” said M’tumbo as the information started
scrolling across a screen at her station. She hit a panel, and the info
appeared on the main holo.
That big
,
thought the Captain in surprise.
Not the biggest thing in the known
Universe. That would have to be the
Donut
. But big enough.
Each of the
objects was over fifty kilometers in diameter. Except for the protrusions, the
surface was completely featureless. With one exception.
“Is that what I
think it is?”
“It does look
like an opening, sir,” agreed the Sensor Officer. “Most probably to some kind
of a hangar.”
“It looks big
enough for the
Lewis
to enter,” said the Exec from CIC.
“I want a team
to go to the nearest structure and check it out,” said the Captain, looking at
the object.
Which could contain tech we desperately need.
“Pick the
people, and let’s get a look at this thing.”
* * *
Lt. Commander
Chadrick Balasubramanian kept his eyes focused on the viewer as the shuttle was
on final approach to the artifact
.
Commander
Bala, as he was known to the engineering crew, was the obvious fit for
commanding his mission, with his specialty in engineering, and degrees in the
mechanical and electrical aspects of the discipline. Add to that an interest
in ancient civilizations, and he was perfect for this mission.
But I sure
don’t like getting this close to this furnace
, he thought, his eyes taking
in the bloated form of the blue giant that back dropped the structure. He knew
it wasn’t supposed to blow for about a year. Intellectually he knew that. But
deep down in his lower animal emotions he cringed with terror that the stellar
furnace might blow at any minute, converting all that he was to glowing atoms
tossed about on the supernova wind.
“It’s damned hot
already,” said Warrant Officer First Debra Conner, the pilot of the shuttle.
“Big Bastard is really putting out the ergs. I can’t wait till we’re in the
shadow of that thing.”
“Won’t make any
difference,” said Bala, shaking his head. “The whole object has to be hotter
than hell, if it’s sat out here for as long as we think it has.”
“Temperature
readings on the outer surface of the object put it at four degrees above
absolute zero,” said the Pilot with a smile.
“That’s
impossible,” said Bala, looking to his own screen to verify what she had said.
Unless it’s real.
He thought over what he knew about thermodynamics
.
The star had been pumping heat into that object for how long? Thousands of
years? Enough time to raise the temperature of the entire object to tens of
thousands of degrees. Even if the surface away from the stars was made of
supermetal radiators, the temperature coming off of it would still be in the
tens of thousands of degrees. But it was just above the ambient temperature of
the space between the stars.
“So we might
just freeze to death,” he said aloud, mostly talking to himself. “Wonderful.”
Actually, it was
not as bad as burning to death when the heat of the star overwhelmed the
cooling systems of the battle armor suits. A frozen body could actually be
reanimated with nanotech. A body reduced to ash could not. Still, his mission
parameters called for checking out anything unusual, on an object that was
unusual in its own right.
“Let’s see
what’s in there,” he told his Pilot. “Get us into the shadow of the object,
and we’ll send a probe in to check it out.”
It took some
minutes for a slow approach to the object. When they had entered its shadow
the shuttle began to lose heat at a prodigious rate through its own supermetal
radiators. One of the true wonders of modern tech, supermetals were a series
of elements high up on the periodic table, inhabiting an island of stability
among neighbors that only lasted in the microseconds before decaying to lesser
substances. But the supers, s-iron, s-gold and s-platinum, had half lives in
the hundreds of years, and had the wondrous properties of being super
superconductors of all forms of energy. They made possible the inertial
compensators that allowed fragile beings to travel in vessels accelerating at
multiple hundreds of gravities, converting inertia to heat, then radiating it
out into space at an almost unbelievable rate. And, since they had to be made
in industrial processes that used up entire moons and planets as heat sinks,
there was never enough of them for every need. But there were enough in this
shuttle to let it quickly download heat into an environment that was much
colder than the vessel.
“Launching
probe, now,” called out Conner, hitting a lit up panel on her board.
The probe, a
meter long robotic craft bristling with sensors, dropped from the open bay of
the shuttle and boosted at a gentle ten gravities toward the entrance of the
object. Halfway there it reversed its drive, until it floated to a stop just
outside the opening, its passive sensors questing for every bit of information
they could find.
“There’s no
appreciable energy being radiated by the object,” said Conner, watching the
take from the probe on multiple holos. “Heat just above absolute zero, five
Kelvin.”
“Go to actives,”
ordered Bala. “I want to see what’s in there before I let the probe poke its
nose into whatever’s waiting.”
Conner nodded
and sent the commands to the probe. Images started to form on the holos as the
takes from lidar and radar came back. But they were very distorted images,
without the clarity one would expect from active sensors. “Something seems to
be absorbing most of the active sensors’ energy,” said Conner, adjusting the
gain.
“Send it in,”
ordered the Commander. “We’ll see what its visual sensors can tell us.”
Conner nodded
again, then maneuvered the probe inward with a small joystick set on her
board. Its cameras could see in all spectrums, but it was also radiating
energy out on all those spectrums to give its sensors something to see by.
The opening was
about four hundred meters wide, and extended into the object at least two
kilometers uninterrupted. At the end it widened somewhat, forming a round
chamber two kilometers in circumference. A featureless round chamber, as far
as any of the returns from the probe could indicate.
“Move it around
the chamber,” ordered Bala.
Conner began moving
the probe around, getting with ten meters of the wall, then moving around,
active sensors on full.
“What are we
looking for?” asked the Pilot.
“An opening,”
replied Bala. “Of any kind.”
Conner grunted
and set the probe on a search pattern that would cover every surface of the
chamber, eventually. Bala sat and waited in his own seat, watching as the
probe covered square meter after square meter of the surface.
“I think we have
something here,” said Conner, as the probe stopped in front of a wall section
that looked no different than any other. “Look here,” said Conner, zooming in
the holo. “The consistency of this line here is slightly different. Like a
nanoseal.” The line went upward for a couple of meters, then took a right
turn.
Bala nodded. He was
familiar with nanoseals, which were widely used in Imperial tech. Where there
was a door, the added strength of nanites sealing the materials of the hatch
and surrounding hull made it almost one piece. The nanites could open the
bonds in an instant when wanted or needed, making the door seem to appear out
of nowhere while opening quickly. It was also used to make armored suits much
more internally sturdy, eliminating the weakness of seams. And it seemed that
the aliens used a similar process.
“Try different
forms of radiation into that area,” ordered the Assistant Engineer. “Send it
in varying patterns, and let’s see if we can get this thing to open up.”
They tried that
for almost twenty minutes before something happened.
“Something is
impacting on the probe, sir,” said Conner, punching some lighted panels on her
board.
“What kind of
something?”
“Energy all
across the spectrum, being beamed into the probe from several sources around
the surface of the chamber. A lot of radio waves.” The Pilot hit another
panel and the sound of the waves filled the cockpit.
“Can you
translate it?” asked Bala.
“I can’t even
figure out the algorithm they're using for their signal. Without that, they
could be sending a full tridee movie, and I wouldn’t know. But if I had to
guess, they’re trying to warn us away.”
“I want to see
inside this thing, so I’m going to ignore that warning,” said Bala, his
curiosity getting the better of him. “I want a full power laser along that
line. If we can’t burn through, at least we should be able to generate some
outgasing we can collect for sampling.”
“Are you sure,
sir?” asked the Pilot, giving the Engineer a nervous look.
“I’m sure. Now
do it.”
Conner nodded
and punched in the commands for the probe. They were close enough to the
object that there was no appreciable delay in the probe receiving the command,
or in their getting its take. “Probe laser is impacting the line,” said
Conner, even though there was really nothing to see. Which in and of itself
was notable, since any metal gas coming off the target would have made the beam
visible.