“It would help if we had an actual gate to study. I understand that Brinks Base is working on obtaining a sample.”
“They are if they are following their mission orders,” Nadine Halstrom replied, wistfully. With a two-year delay in communications, the personnel at Brinks Base must, of necessity, operate autonomously. The last dispatch she had received, now some 18 months stale, included detailed planning for such a mission.
#
Chapter Two
The star was unremarkable, a yellow-white dwarf some twenty percent more luminous than Sol, and a full spectral point hotter. Even so, its wan glow was homelike as the human ships dropped sublight beyond the system’s twelfth planet.
The “breakout complete” announcement was still echoing as Captain William Lonegan gave the order for a full circumambient sensor sweep.
“We just picked up
Sundowner
’s beacon,” Lieutenant Vivian Myers reported. “She’s about three hundred thousand klicks off our stern. Nothing yet on the other four.”
“Let me know when you have them.”
Like the rest of her class, Battle Cruiser
TSNS Lancer
was a young ship. She had left the construction cradle a mere month before setting off on the year-long journey from Sol to Hideout and had spent the last sixteen months scouting enemy star systems.
“
Barnstable
just checked in, Captain,” his communications officer reported. “They are a quarter-million klicks off our dorsal antenna, sir.”
“
Burlingame
, as well, sir,” Lieutenant Myers reported. “No communications yet, but I have her beacon in sight.”
“Have all ships converge on us,” Lonegan ordered. “Tell
Archernar
and
Powhatan
when they check in.”
While he waited for word of his two stragglers, Lonegan adjusted his screen for a view of the local star. Even at maximum magnification, it was merely the brightest point of light in an ebon sky.
#
Catalog System 385492, tentatively tagged
Vrathalatar
, was one of a million or so stars tied together by Broan stargates. The Broan symbology showed the system as a small bent hourglass figure dangling at the end of a dimly glowing red line, a cul-de-sac star with but a single stargate.
Normally such a system would not have been of interest to humanity. In the Broan Sovereignty, a system’s importance could best be judged by the number of stargates it possessed. Some of the larger hubs had six or more, indicating a center of commerce and power.
Vrathalatar was different.
Lancer
and her consorts had come to the yellow-white star because, a century earlier, the small Koala-bear-like inhabitants had decided they’d had enough of Broan arrogance. The source of their discontent was not known, but the grisly results were recorded in Broan records as a warning to others.
Vrathalatar was a dead system, all life on its one inhabited world having been wiped out by an avenging Broan war fleet. There had been no mercy for the world and its hundreds of millions of inhabitants. Nor had the galactic overlords stopped when they destroyed the planet. They systematically swept among the locals’ extensive off-world installations and destroyed them as well. When they left the system, not a single Vrath (as human researchers had taken to calling the indigenous species) was left alive.
Yet, more than a century after the destruction of its children, the star still showed as a cul-de-sac symbol in star maps of the vast Broan transport web. It was Vrathalatar’s orphan stargate that had drawn
Lancer
and her consorts to this dead system.
It was their mission to steal it.
#
Bill Lonegan lounged in his command couch while he sipped on a bulb of hot coffee, feigning disinterest in the maddeningly slow progress of
Lancer
’s latest deep space sensor sweep. It had been five days since he and his small fleet dropped sublight at the edge of the system. So far, they had not found the stargate that was the focus of their mission.
Their lack of success had once again brought home the fact of just how large a place an entire star system really is. The main viewscreen was focused on the diamond-studded blackness before them, the section of airless void where they sought their prey.
Behind them, the star Vrathalatar was a small, brilliantly glowing billiard ball, its surface pockmarked by an unusually large number of sunspots, which in turn caused the star to radiate static all across the communications bands. While normally not a problem, radio static had the effect of limiting the effectiveness of some of their more sensitive search instruments, rendering them blind in one particularly useful frequency range.
“Anything, Mr. Cardin?” he asked, striving for that tone of bored disinterest with which starship captains are supposed to meet even the most harrowing of emergencies.
“No, sir,” his chief of sensors replied. “No sign of the stargate, yet; although the range is still long for passive scanning in this radio soup.”
“What about the gate beacon?”
“It isn’t responding. We’ve sent the universal jump code a dozen times. So far, nothing.”
“Carry on.”
With the stargate not responding to hails, it wasn’t surprising that they were having difficulty locating it. However, the silence was worrisome. The possible reasons for its non-responsiveness ranged from mundane to sinister. The most likely scenario was that the gate had malfunctioned sometime during the century since the destruction of the Vrath, and that the Broa had not thought it worth fixing. Or it might be operative, but not answering to the standard codes. Perhaps the Broa wanted to keep commercial traffic out of this system and had reprogrammed the gate accordingly.
The most worrisome possibility was that the gate wasn’t responding because it did not exist. For all he knew, the last Broan warship to leave this system had left behind a time bomb to destroy the gate following its jump. If that were the case, he and his ships had been sent on a three hundred light-year snipe hunt.
Lonegan glanced at the chronometer displayed in one corner of his workscreen. Their database placed the gate high above Vrathalatar’s ecliptic. If true, they would close to passive detection range within sixty minutes. If not, they would spend an extra week searching before he declared the mission a bust.
Centered on
Lancer
, a globular formation of ships probed the void in front of them. Two of the five,
Barnstable
and
Burlingame
, were new destroyers, smaller versions of
Lancer,
armed with nearly the same weaponry
.
Their mission was to guard the operation for as long as was required to tow the stargate back to Brinks Base.
“Tow” was a misnomer, of course. To rotate a ship into a different universe requires substantial power. Thus, jump fields were designed to be no larger than absolutely necessary. Often the field extended only a few centimeters beyond the hull. However, jump fields can be stretched to enclose any external object so long as one does not insist on efficiency.
Transporting the purloined stargate would be the job of
Sundowner
, one of the largest starships ever constructed. As large as it was, the ship was too small to take the gate aboard for transport. Rather,
Sundowner
would wear the gate like the victory wreath of some Roman conqueror.
Of the other two ships in Captain Lonegon’s small fleet,
Archernar
was a converted liner carrying the scientists and technicians who would first study the gate and then prepare it for transport.
Powhatan
was their support ship, a combination tanker/freighter.
Lonegan’s workstation chimed. He reached out and keyed for acceptance.
“Yes?”
“Stargate detected,” Lieutenant Myers said from her station three consoles to Lonegan’s right.
“Where?”
“About three million kilometers directly in front of us, Captain. Right where it is supposed to be.”
“Has it responded to our signals, yet?”
“No, sir. It’s still quiet as a tomb.”
“Continue the approach. Alert
Archernar.
It looks like the scientists are going to have to cut short their card games. We will have work for them after all.”
“Yes, sir.”
#
Lieutenant Barbara Whalen sat strapped into the control station of her scout boat and watched the blue-white orb grow slowly in her forward bubble. Like all terrestrial worlds, it was a beautiful sight, especially after so long in the deep black. There was a large polar mass in the southern hemisphere. In the daylight hemisphere, a massive arrowhead-shaped continent of tans and browns and umber ploughed through an azure sea, its edges tinged aquamarine by extensive shoals on its southern flank. Over everything lay a bright white swirl of clouds blown west to east by stratospheric winds. Lower than the continent, nearly out of sight around the curve of the planet, mirror cyclones moved in tandem on each side of the invisible equator.
As Earthlike as Vrath seemed from a hundred thousand kilometers out in space, there was one obvious difference between it and the Mother of Men. From Barbara’s perspective, fully one-quarter of the globe lay in darkness. Yet, throughout the night hemisphere, there was no sign of civilization. No cityscapes outlined the shores of invisible land masses, nor sprawled across darkened plains, nor meandered along both banks of mighty rivers. The blackness was unrelieved, save for bands of lightning flashes marking thunderstorms.
“Pretty,” Amos Harding, Barbara’s second-in-command, said from the acceleration couch beside her.
“Very,” she agreed. “It makes me homesick.”
“I wouldn’t settle down there were I you,” he replied. “We’re getting diffuse gamma ray readings all across the face of the globe.”
“What sort of gamma rays?”
“Looks like Cobalt 60 mostly. Some other nasty stuff mixed in.”
“Ouch!”
“You can say that again. Whatever they did to piss off the Broa, it had to be major for the whole planet to be this hot a full century after the fact.”
“Radiation too hot for an upper atmospheric pass?”
“Not if we dip in fast, get our air sample, then get out fast.”
Barbara and Amos’s mission was to scout out the main planet of this system and record its condition. The scout boat’s cargo compartment was chock full of long range sensors that would record the surface destruction during their dip into atmosphere.
“We’ve got something coming up fast,” Ahmed Quereshi, their sensor operator, announced from the scout boat’s passenger compartment.
“What is it, Med?”
“Looks like a space station, Lieutenant. Big mother, too! I’ve got the telescope extended and have it in my cross-hairs. Ready to record.”
“Any chance of collision?” she asked, noting that the blip representing the station was very close to the red line marking their future course.
“No, ma’am. I’m painting it with the laser. Definite cross-plot velocity on the object. Looks to be three milli-arcseconds per second lateral drift to the right. We’ll close to about twenty kilometers at minimum distance.”
“All recorders to max ten seconds before min approach,” she ordered. “Let’s get a good look, but save most of our storage capacity for the real deal.”
“Aye aye, ma’am,” the operator replied. His tone only hinted at what he thought about a mere taxi driver instructing him as to how to do his job.
Ten minutes later, a small black speck took a bite out of the fuzzy limb of the planet. The speck grew perceptibly as they watched. In a few minutes, it covered nearly the daylight hemisphere of the planet and was a speck no longer.
The basic shape of the space station was ovoid, a cosmic violet egg. The station had once had a smooth hull, with none of the jumble of pipes and antennae with which humans cluttered up the exteriors of their space stations. The hull was smooth no longer.
Several gaping holes had been punched into its surface and the contents spewed out. As they closed the range, the deep wells of destruction showed chaos extending several decks downward. Whatever had penetrated the station had burrowed deep, leaving behind bent girders, buckled decks, spaghetti-like strands of cabling, and other less identifiable detritus.
“Uh, Lieutenant,” Amos Harding said, “you don’t suppose those holes produced debris geysers when they were made, do you?”
“Looks like it to me,” she replied. The station was coming up fast. It would fully fill the forward bubble in another thirty seconds, although it was beginning to slide ever so slowly to the right as it did so. “Why?”
“Do you think it’s smart for us to make a high speed run this close to that pile of junk? No telling what pieces got ejected and may have found their way back in the last hundred years.”
“A fine time to think about that,” she muttered as she braced unconsciously for impact. The reaction was as useless as it was natural. If they hit even a walnut at the speed they were going, they would be vaporized before their optic nerves had time to send the news to their brains.
Suddenly it was on them and flashed by in a single blink. Once again, the planet filled the forward bubble, unobstructed by sky junk.
Barbara Whalen let out the breath she had been holding, as did Amos. They turned to one another and shared a look which said, “Let’s not do that again!”
Their silent dialogue was cut short by a whoop from the passenger compartment, one audible by both intercom and through the closed hatch.
“What’s the matter,” Barbara demanded.
“That got the old adrenaline pumping,” Ahmed said in her earphones. “Can we go again, Mommy?”
#
The Vrathalatar stargate hovered in the deep black, its sunward surface glowing dimly, giving it a ghostlike appearance silhouetted against the diamond-sprinkled ebon background of interstellar space.
Having discovered what they had come for, the six human ships surrounded the gate in accordance with their mission orders. The three warships took up station in an equilateral triangle that put them far enough from the gate that they were out of weapons range (they hoped) of any ship that chose this particular inopportune moment to visit Vrathalatar. Yet, they were close enough to be within tactical range of their own superlight missiles.