McCollum - GIBRALTAR STARS (22 page)

“How do we do that?”

“If I knew that, you would be paying me a hell of a lot more than my simple civil servant’s wage.”

Nadine nodded. As a student of history, which all good politicians are, she was aware of the innate nature of the tide flowing against her. The problem was that people just do not like war. Twenty percent of the population opposes it on general principles; something to do with their genetic makeup.

A second, larger group, objects to war’s deprivations – the diverted resources, the restrictions, the draft, and the taxes. They start out enthusiastic, but slowly sour as the war begins to impinge on their personal lives.

In every war since the invention of public opinion polls, the effort has been accompanied by downward sloping lines of public approval. No matter how high the support at the beginning, by the end of the third year, a majority just wants the war to end.

The Broan War was especially problematic because it wasn’t really a war… yet. It was merely hard, dirty, and expensive preparation. Which brought her to her third guest, a figure in black. He listened to the political talk, but did not partake of it. “Do you hear this, Admiral N’Gomo?”

“Yes, Madam Coordinator.”

“Then you see my problem?”

He nodded. “Public support for our forces is declining faster than preparations to start our campaign against the enemy.”

“And the solution?”

“I’m not sure there is one, Madam Coordinator. Our fighting forces are preparing as quickly as they can and are suffering casualties in the process. Three ships have gone missing during the Long Jump and we are suffering the usual deaths through accident, disease, and suicide that any project of this scale entails. As of this morning, we have lost just over a thousand men and women.”

“You needn’t tell us about the casualties,” Carnahan said. “Vasloff speaks of nothing else!”

“So what is the Navy doing about it?” Nadine asked.

“We are working to bring about the necessary preconditions for an attack.”

“You have the new stargates. Surely you can get enough forces in position in the relatively near future, Admiral.”

“It isn’t just a matter of manpower. We also need a target.”

“You have a million targets, Admiral!” Carnahan exclaimed.

“Precisely, sir. That is the problem. We have too many targets. To be successful, we must strike at the enemy’s heart. To date, we have yet to identify their home world, and without knowing where it is, we cannot begin an offensive.”

“I presume, Admiral, that this lament has a point,” Nadine said.

“It does, Madam Coordinator. We have a team working on the problem. They believe they have come up with a strategy to force the Broa to reveal their secret. However, we must develop a new technical capability. Preliminary results are encouraging, but not yet ready for the field.”

Nadine sighed.  Leaning back, she said, “I hope they hurry, Admiral. Otherwise, when you come into this office to seek clearance to begin your assault, you will be talking to Mikhail Vasloff.”

#

Chapter Twenty-Two

Standing on the ice promontory above the snow covered valley, Mark Rykand watched the bulk freighter slowly descend toward its landing cradle. Around him, the world was as dark as the blackest night on Earth, with the red circle of the cradle perimeter lights the only illumination. Overhead, the stars were diamond pinpoints set in dark velvet, with the broad band of the Milky Way bisecting the ebon firmament. The dim splotch low on the horizon was the Crab Nebula, some 200 light-years distant. Even at that range, the nebula was one of the largest objects in the sky.

Directly overhead, the hazy cloud of stars was abruptly interrupted by a sharp circular-edged shadow, as though someone had taken a bite out of the galaxy. In fact, the dark orb was Erasmus, the oversize Jupiter-class planet that served as the system primary. It was the largest of ten worlds bound together by mutual gravitational attraction. Nemesis, Mark’s home for the past six months, was next to the smallest of the rogue cluster, and orbited Erasmus every sixteen days.

Although the world around him was in perpetual black, the Milky Way was bright enough that his suit’s light amplification circuits revealed his surroundings as well as if it had been high noon at home. Nemesis was a beautiful planet, with breathtaking panoramas and jagged, impossibly high mountains adorned in whiteness that had an ivory-pearl glow in his suit visor. It reminded Mark of that glorious week he and Lisa had spent at Yosemite before one of them, he couldn’t remember who, had the brilliant idea to hurry back to the war.

Nemesis’ snow was not water ice. It was nitrogen ice. In the valley to his right, a stream of liquid oxygen trickled out of crevices in the rock and down a slope. At the bottom the oxygen formed a small pond before freezing into an ice skater’s dream of light blue ice. The stream was liquid only because the planet’s interior was heated by tidal stresses. The frozen pond was the source of Port Grayson’s breathing gas. On the opposite side of the bustling little community, an H
2
O ice mine provided them with drinking water.

Mark watched the monster globe that was
Pride of Gideon Sanders
, one of the new freighters capable of landing on a planet, ground in a sudden puff of vapor as its drive field brushed against the snow-covered cradle and a light hydrogen-helium wind carried the resulting powder away. As he did so, he stood carefully balanced on the packed gravel road on which a mobile transporter was parked. He was ten centimeters taller in his vacuum suit, the result of the thick insulation in his over-boots.

The insulation was important. It kept the heat from being sucked out of his legs, turning them into lifeless frozen stumps. Beautiful though his surroundings were, they were deadly. Eleven people had already died by accident while scratching out this foothold in the interstellar void. Each death taught the expedition a costly lesson about what it means to live on a world only fifty degrees above absolute zero.

He sometimes wondered what he would look like to the local animal life, had Nemesis possessed any. To them, human beings would appear apparitions of white-hot flame, demons from Hell whose very breath scalded and vaporized.

In six months, Port Grayson had gone from a few survival domes to some fifty buildings clustered around the central power plant, a glowing sphere supported on stilts thirty meters above the ground, the better to limit its damage to the local environment. Each of the town’s building was constructed on scores to hundreds of two-meter-tall pilings. The stilts and pilings were actively cooled with liquid helium to keep heat from the buildings away from the nitrogen ice that anchored the supports. The building walls were one-meter thick and constructed of the same super-insulating material as the under floor supports.

Among the small city’s structures were warehouses, machine shops, and bulk storage tanks that would shortly supply a fleet more than ten times larger than the one stationed at Brinks Base. The stargate links between Grand Central Terminus and New Eden now numbered eight, and were constantly busy with a stream of logistics craft and warships.

The nearest Broan-occupied planet along the axis of the stargates was 238 light-years distant. It would take ten human generations before Broan gravitational astronomers detected the first gravity waves emanating from human stargates. Shortly thereafter, their gravtennas would reverberate with something very like the tympanic climax of
Ad Astra
.

As the big freighter sank into the grasp of the insulated landing dock, the area came alight with a hundred flood lamps. Mark’s visor took a moment to compensate. When he could see again, the big tracked transporter was lumbering forward with its debarkation tube.

Five minutes later, the starship was part of the interconnected complex and the transporter lumbered away to its next assignment. Mark walked to the ground airlock and cycled through. As usual, his suit frosted over as warm air flooded the chamber. He waited the regulation three minutes, and then opened the inner door. As he stepped through the open airlock, he was still steaming.

 It was time to go to work.

#

“Captain Hideki?” Mark asked a worthy with the four stripes on his uniform after he finished the usual de-suiting gymnastics and donned shipsuit and slippers.

“Yes.”

“Commander Rykand, assistant to the Port Captain. Welcome to Port Grayson.”

“Quite a setup you have here,” Hideki said. “I thought I was going to get hit by a planet on approach.”

Mark laughed politely. It was an observation one out of three ship captains made on their first visit to Nemesis. The rogue cluster, with Erasmus as its frigid star, had not formed like a normal system. Normal systems obey Bode’s Rule, which gives the distances between a central star and the worlds that orbit it, with ever-increasing distances between subsequent planets.

The Erasmus Cluster was the product of a collapsing gas cloud, but one with a bit of swirl to it. As a result, the small orbs had coalesced before a central star could consume the available mass. Erasmus should have been the star, but never gained sufficient mass to light off a hydrogen fusion reaction.

Most of the nine planets rode elongated elliptical orbits around Erasmus. Only Nemesis and Scion, the smallest world, were in anything approaching normal orbits. Both were much closer to the big planet than Mercury was to Sol.

The complex orbital mechanics caused more than one collision since the cluster’s formation. Rutherford, the third largest world, had nearly split in two sometime in the distant past; and its smaller brother, Solstice, bore the scars of several massive impact craters. Antipodal to one such crater was a cracked bulge five times taller than the Himalayas. Whatever had hit the planet had nearly punched its way clear through.

It was the near misses by the much larger worlds which caused the tidal stresses that provided what little heat Nemesis possessed.

“Yes, one of the more interesting planetary systems in existence,” Mark said in response to the Captain’s comment. “Who knew there was so much to see out here in the deep black?”

“Yes, if one sees by radar,” the captain agreed. “How may I help you, Commander?”

“I’ve been assigned to brief you on your stay here. After we’ve got you hooked up to the big cargo tube, you’ll be offloading your cargo into Warehouse Six. That is our main staging area where we sort incoming freight and then direct it to the proper shelters for long-term storage.

“Your people will have to wear their vacsuits while working in the tube. The insulation isn’t nearly as thick on the cargo tubes as on the personnel ones. They get damned cold. And though the tubes are pressurized, the low temperature does funny things to materials. We can’t guarantee it won’t suffer a blowout while occupied.

“Also, I’m here to pick up the classified pouch.”

“Very well. If you will accompany me to my cabin, I’ll open the safe and get it for you.”

#

Twenty minutes later, Mark made his way back toward the suiting antechamber bearing a small orange cube. The cube was filled with terabytes of minutiae which, though exceedingly boring, were never sent by comm laser. He had nearly reached it when he heard a female voice calling his name.

 “Mark! Mark Rykand, hold up!”

He turned to see Susan Ahrendt hurrying toward him. She had a broad smile on her face.

“Susan, hello!” he said as she caught up with him and gave him a non-regulation hug. She wore the uniform of a Space Navy Lieutenant, with her shoulder-length dark hair in disarray from her run down the corridor. “What brings you out here into the Deep Black?”

“Trojan Horse, what else? My team and I are en route to Brinks Base to begin our mission to sow Easter Eggs where they will do the most good. We’re shorthanded, so they’re drafting practically everyone for the contact teams.  I just happened to hear your name back in the mess and had to say hello. Do you have time for a bulb of coffee? I can catch you up on all of the gossip from New Mexico.”

“Sure,” he said after a moment’s hesitation. In truth, he was glad to see her after six months on Nemesis. The construction crew ran overwhelmingly to hairy faces and he was surprised at the electric thrill that ran through his body at the sight of a female face. Of course, it might also have been the feel of warm curves against his body after so long without.

He followed Susan back to the starship mess compartment. Nemesis’ gravity was 75% of standard, so the tables were moved from their microgravity positions to a planetside arrangement. As he followed her to an empty table, he noticed a number of crewmembers, male and female, give him appraising looks.

Even though the freighter was only a month out of Sol, he remembered the odd feeling one gets upon seeing an unfamiliar face for the first time after an interstellar voyage. On a ship in the deep black, it is easy for the human mind to subconsciously conclude that the ship’s crew comprises all of humanity. It requires some time to get back one’s perspective.

He sat down on a bench while Susan went to fetch coffee. He found his eyes following her, appreciating the way she moved.
Damn
, he thought,
I’ve been away from my wife too long!

Once they were settled in, Susan asked, “So what have you been doing since we saw each other last?”

He told her about his and Lisa’s tour of Earth, of sunning on the beach at Waikiki, and of their long snow hikes along the trails of Yosemite. He finished by saying, “If I had known I was coming here, I think I would have spent some time in the Sahara, soaking up the heat.”

“What’s it like living on a world without a sun?”

He shrugged, “You get used to it. The lack of sunlight is no problem, not with light amplifying visors, and the sky is sort of interesting, although when we’re suited up, we usually have too much going on to waste our time stargazing.”

Reaching over to cover his outstretched hand with one of her own, Susan said, “I hope you don’t mind my saying so, Mark, but you look haggard.”

His smile, he suspected, was less than full. He was too distracted by the sudden burning sensation on the back of his left hand. “It’s a challenging environment. You have to be on the lookout every minute. Falling into a snow bank can be fatal. Inside, there is the ever-present danger of a wall rupture. We have earthquakes, you know.”