This mission had seen them scout six enemy star systems. Save for the color of the starlight streaming through the viewports, each had presented the same ebon panorama sprinkled with diamond-like sparks of light.
The first star had been a red giant, whose rays tinged everything ruby. The second was a small blowtorch of a sun. In that system, camera filters had been dialed to maximum and the viewports tightly sealed to protect delicate retinas. The third…
“What are you doing, Hon?”
Startled, Lisa squirmed against her acceleration straps to look over her shoulder. Floating in the open hatchway, with one steadying hand wrapped around a nearby stanchion, was her husband, Lt. Commander Mark Rykand.
“About to tear my hair out from boredom,” she replied. “Thank you for coming to save me just in time!”
Lowering himself to her level, he leaned down and planted an upside down kiss on her lips. Lisa welcomed the distraction and concentrated on making it the best kiss he had received all day.
When their lips finally separated, her husband twisted his body around to align with hers and wedged himself between her flank and the arm of the couch. He stabilized himself in the microgravity by anchoring his hand to a spot that wasn’t exactly Space Navy regulation, but one that caused a small electric shock to race up Lisa’s spine.
Mark was of average height with a shock of sandy hair that was tinged with gray, something that hadn’t been there when she first met him. His blue eyes were his most striking feature. He was currently grinning in that crooked smile way he had.
“Seriously, what are you doing?”
“The same thing we’ve been doing since we entered this godforsaken system. I’m listening to the locals jabber at each other in their native tongue, while attempting to record everything we can of their visual communications. At the rate we have been capturing speech and images, the linguistic computers should be able to crack the code in another week or so. Of course, we will reach the stargate and jump in three more days.”
“I could ask the captain to hang around to give you more time to collect linguistic source data.”
“Sure, drive right up to the gate and then hover for another 120 hours or so, looking inconspicuous. I’m sure the local overlords wouldn’t suspect a thing,” Lisa replied, laughing.
“And if they did,” Mark replied, “we would just tell them that we are doing the local once-a-twelve-year space monkey census.”
“The only space monkeys around here are us. The locals look more like ambulatory fish.”
“When do you get off duty?”
“I have another hour to go,” Lisa replied, snuggling close to feel her husband’s muscled ribs press into her right breast. “Why, sir, do you have something
interesting
planned for this evening?”
“Not a bad idea,” he said. “We’ve both been working too hard this trip.”
“You’re telling me. It’s been so long, I forget which of us gets tied up!” She emphasized her point by letting her own hand do some exploring. His torso still had its same hard tone, she noted, despite so many months in microgravity.
“Stop that!” he said, applying his own pressure in return. There ensued a quick tussle that ended with both of them laughing and not a few articles of clothing in disarray. Acknowledging that it might not be good for two officers of the service to be found in such a position, Mark released his wife, pushed back, and halted his flight just out of reach.
“Besides,” he said, gesturing toward the Gordian knot of light paths in the nearby holoscreen, “It’s your own damned fault.”
#
For Mark Rykand, it had begun at Sandia Spaceport, New Mexico, when he’d seen his sister off to join the Survey Starship
Magellan. Maggie
had been assigned the plum of exploring the newly discovered New Eden system, containing the most earthlike extra-solar planet yet discovered. Jani had been quite excited at the prospect.
Laughing, her red locks whipping in the breeze, she waved at him from the shuttle airlock before disappearing into the streamlined dart. Minutes later, the dart had lifted from the runway and disappeared into the azure sky. That was the last time Mark had seen his sister. Three months later, he received word that she had been killed in space.
That worst day of his life triggered a series of events culminating in his discovery that humanity was no longer alone in the galaxy. While exploring New Eden,
Magellan
detected two nearby alien ships as they suddenly materialized from out of vacuum. The pair was impossible to miss. Their arrival triggered a massive gravity wave that rattled storage compartments all over the ship.
At the moment of breakout, the two alien ships had been slugging it out in a space battle. Or rather, one of the ships was attacking the other. The second ship tried to flee its tormentor.
Finding itself near
Magellan
, the alien under attack made directly for the human starship. In the process, its orbit took it close to Jani Rykand’s scoutboat. The scout was unarmed and defenseless, offering no threat to anyone. Despite this, the alien attacker lashed out with an energy beam. Jani, her ship, and seven other human souls were instantly transformed into an incandescent cloud silhouetted against the black of space.
The attack on the scout boat alerted
Magellan
’s captain to the coming threat as the two aliens made a beeline for his ship. He used the only weapon available. In desperation, he aimed one of the ship’s faster-than-light message probes at the attacking alien.
Launching a probe so deep in a planetary gravity well would normally have been a prescription for disaster. Not that day. The probe’s overloaded drive generator exploded in the first millisecond after jumping to hypervelocity. With its superlight generators gone, the remains of the probe returned to normal space with an intrinsic velocity of 60% light speed. The expanding cone of debris sliced through the alien attacker, vaporizing it as thoroughly as it had vaporized Scout Three.
With one alien ship gone and the other drifting helplessly in space, there had been nothing for
Magellan
’s crew but to hunt for survivors.
That was how the human race first met Sar-Say.
#
Nadine Halstrom, World Coordinator, sat in front of her phone in which her own visage hovered in the depths of the idle holo-display. What she saw shocked her. She hardly recognized the drawn face framed by gray hair, the sunken eyes and the permanent worry lines. That she had aged two decades in the past seven years was undeniable. At least, she reminded herself, the sacrifice was in a worthy cause.
She remembered vividly the day
Magellan
returned home carrying a single live and several dead aliens. She remembered the feeling of wonder that had suffused her at the prospect of meeting another intelligent species.
Even now she grimaced at how naïve she had been.
Luckily, her first impulse – to call a press conference – was short lived. Instead, she ordered
Magellan
to the PoleStar habitat. There she assembled a secret research program to learn all that was possible about the aliens. The dead ones were quickly dissected, while the living alien was studied in less destructive ways.
The first task was to communicate with the survivor. For this, they put out the call for a linguist, a call answered, somewhat reluctantly, by Lisa Arden of the Multiversity of London.
Upon her introduction to the alien, Lisa had started the standard “You, Tarzan; me Jane” routine so lampooned in the popular media. To everyone’s surprise, when she asked his name, the alien replied, “Sar-Say.” It was the first intelligible sound anyone had heard him make.
As the days went on, Lisa taught Sar-Say Standard and he taught her his language. When he gained sufficient fluency, his interrogators asked him about his origin. Sar-Say answered.
Sometimes, Nadine Halstrom wished that he had not.
Sar-Say claimed to be a trader from a realm ruled over by monstrous lizard things called the “Broa,” a race of insatiable conquerors. He’d spun tales of planets plundered and species enslaved – those that had not been destroyed outright.
His human interrogators attributed the stories to a castaway’s need to impress his captors. Still, his tale could not be ignored if it had even a modicum of truth to it, especially because of the answer he’d given when asked the size of the Broan realm. According to Sar-Say, the overlords ruled more than a million suns!
That claim, preposterous as it was, forced Nadine Halstrom to authorize a reconnaissance of Broan space.
The expedition had been gone three years. When it returned, it brought evidence that Sar-Say’s tales were more fact than fiction. Indeed, he seemed to have lied about only one vital detail. The Broa were
not
the ravenous dragons he had described. Rather, they were small beings and rather comical. They looked like monkeys.
In fact, they looked exactly like Sar-Say, himself.
#
The World Coordinator’s reverie was interrupted when the screen on her phone flashed, causing her own visage to be replaced by that of her assistant.
“Yes?” she asked,
“Dr. Heindorff is here to see you, Coordinator.”
“Show him in,” she replied, sighing.
Nicholas Heindorff was a round man with a round red face framed in wild white hair. He had been holder of the Isaac Newton Chair for Theoretical Physics at the University of Stuttgart before she tapped him for the war effort. Despite his Prussian ancestors, it was hard to think of him as a warrior… even one confined to the laboratory.
“Nicholas, come in.”
“Hello, Nadine. It is good to see you again.”
“Please, be seated,” she said, directing him to the settee she kept for important visitors. “Schnapps?”
“Don’t mind if I do.”
“Carl, two glasses of Goldschlager peach, please,” she said to the empty air.
“Right away, Madam Coordinator,” her assistant responded.
Within five minutes, Nadine and Heindorff were seated comfortably and had sampled the fruit brandy. She regarded the scientist for long seconds, and then said, “How are things going on the project?”
Her question elicited an expansive shrug. “Good in some ways, not so good in others.”
She frowned and let her momentary irritation dissipate. Nicholas was one of those people who avoided answering any question directly. She let a few seconds pass before she said, “Perhaps you could be a bit more specific.”
“Ja, Nadine. I suppose I can. The theoretical work goes well. My team has a much better understanding of the principles on which the stargates operate, especially since receiving a copy of the alien database last year.”
She nodded. It took more than a year for ships to travel between Sol and the advance human base near the Crab Nebula … a distance of some 7000 light-years. One year there and one year back, plus whatever time was required at the other end. Thirty months after they sent practically every working starship in the Solar System to relieve Brinks Base, two ships returned carrying the first fruits of their campaign against the Broa.
Having spotted a number of Broan stars via the gravity wave emanations of their stargates, a few brave souls made contact with an isolated Broan world and talked the inhabitants into trading for a copy of their planetary database. It was an act equivalent to aliens landing on the White House lawn in earlier centuries and leaving with a copy of every book in the Library of Congress.
If the first rule of combat is to know one’s enemy, the database proved the first step on the long road to victory. In that database they discovered voluminous entries regarding Broan physics; which, not surprisingly, were closely related to human physics. How could it be otherwise, since both species occupy the same universe?
“Are you sure you have the theory down solid?”
“Certainly, Nadine. The stargates operate on a principle not unlike our own stardrives. Both utilize the fact that the universe is composed of eleven distinct dimensions to perform a tertiary dimensional substitution that effectively warps space. Where our stardrives rotate the gamma dimension around the aleph, the stargates rotate the aleph and zeta dimensions...”
“Spare me, Professor. I took history in college.”
“Suffice to say, then, that we know the principles involved. We just haven’t figured out how to mechanize them.”
“That is the reason I asked you here, Nicholas. We need to pick up the pace. We can’t fight a war with year-long lines of communication. We need a gate network of our own to reduce transit times from years to weeks.”
“I know that, Nadine. What would you have me do? Pull a stargate out of my ass?”
“If that will speed the process,” she replied, nonplussed at the sudden profanity.
“It would help if we could experiment. The restrictions you have placed on such efforts have hamstrung us.”
“You know the rules, Nicholas, and the penalties for breaking them.”
Unlike starships, which left no detectable trace on the universe, stargate jumps involved abrupt mass discontinuities, which in turn produced gravity waves. Gravity waves spread outward from their point of origin at a pace of one light-year per year… forever. A successful test of such a device inside the solar system would mark Sol as an inhabited star to anyone in position to detect the resulting wave.
“Then this subject is likely to remain a theoretical one for quite some time, Madam Coordinator,” Heindorff responded coldly. “We are preparing experiments to be performed in some distant godforsaken system, but the preparations and transit times are slowing our progress.”
“Come now, Nicholas,” Nadine cajoled. “You know we can’t take any chances, not with the Broa as strong as they are. Surely we are learning something without going directly to experiment.”
“Ja, Nadine. We have learned quite a lot. For one thing, we do not see that there is any limit to the physical size a stargate may be.”
“Then why do the Broa only seem to build one size?”
Her question brought forth a Germanic shrug. “Perhaps they have a power limitation.”
“How can we speed things up without betraying ourselves?”