Mark carried the drinks to the Admiral’s desk, set them down on the polished metal surface, then sat down in the second visitor’s chair. Lisa had already settled into the first. Cautiously, to avoid spillage, they each took a sip of steaming liquid. Somehow, the moment made all of the months of fear and boredom worth it.
The admiral resumed his seat and watched them, smiling like a beneficent father.
“Damn it’s good to see the two of you again. What has it been? Three months?”
“Nearly four, sir,” Lisa replied.
“Hard mission?”
“No, Admiral. Just long. There’s a certain amount of excitement with each jump through the gates. You don’t know what you are going to run into in the next system and that gets the adrenaline flowing. It dissipates pretty quickly when the new system turns out to look just like the old, save for the color of the star. The first few hours after a jump are busy, while we locate the ecliptic and the system’s planets, get the eavesdropping equipment up and running, check the database to see if we can identify the locals. After that, it’s just boring routine until you reach the next stargate and it’s time to do it all over again.”
“How many missions does this make for you, Lisa?”
“This was our third.”
“How is the survey going? Does it measure up to your expectations when you proposed this approach?”
Lisa grimaced. She often wished everyone would forget just whose brilliant idea this sneaking around in Q-ships had been.
“In one respect, our explorations have far exceeded my expectations. I assumed we could spy out two or three systems before slipping away again. The survey just completed took us to eight star systems…”
“And the other respect?” Landon asked.
“Stargate network diagrams aren’t as useful as I thought they would be before we obtained the Pastol database.”
“How so?”
“They are topological maps rather than astronomical ones. A stargate diagram shows the sequence of jumps required to travel from Point A to Point B, but not where Points A and B actually are with respect to one another. In this respect, gate diagrams were like subway maps. In the middle of town, the scale increases to better show the numerous train stations and routes, while it contracts in the suburbs and countryside because the stations are correspondingly far apart.
“Our problem is that we need to know where the Sovereignty’s stars are located in space before we can launch operations against the Broa. Figuring out where we were after each jump was the responsibility of my loving husband here.”
“Any difficulties, Mark?” the Admiral asked.
“Not usually,” he responded. “We automatically do a circumambient scan after emerging in a new system and then it’s a matter of looking for the common signpost stars, and of course, the Crab Nebula. Usually, we are approximately where we expect to be. As we learned at Gamma last year, stargates are directional and have to be pointed in the direction of the jump. Still, there are always a few surprises when we get our position plotted.”
“While Mark and his people map the system,” Lisa continued, “I and my section record all of the local chatter. Mostly we can’t understand a word, but we try to accumulate enough data to give the linguistic computers a statistically valid sample to chew on.”
“How often do you get translations?”
Lisa shrugged. “About one-quarter of the time. The problem is that we don’t spend enough time in any one system.”
“What about the Broa?”
“Three of the star systems were definitely occupied by the overlords. One might have been a sector capital, albeit a small one. We got some good recordings in the Broan language from that one.”
“What about the slave species you observed? Any candidates for our subversion program once it’s launched?”
“We found five of the eight in the Pastol planetary database,” Lisa said. “All are bipeds of one sort or another. There’s one batch that look like little bears with long, fluffy tails. Specialists are studying their database entries to see if any of them fit in with our plans.”
Dan Landon considered what he had been told for a moment, and then nodded. “Sounds like a productive trip. Are you ready for something different?”
“Different, sir?” Lisa asked, distress obvious in her voice. “We thought we would have some time to relax before we had to go out again.”
“You misunderstand,” Landon replied. “I’m not asking you to go out again.”
“Then what are you asking, Admiral?”
“Your idea for a Q-ship Survey was a good one. But Staff has been concerned about the pace since the outset. You hit eight systems in a little over three months. When you consider how many Broan stars there are, at this pace it will take longer than any of us will live. Either we get more resources or we find some way to speed up the survey.”
He fixed his gaze on Lisa. “That is where you come in. How would you like a new job?”
#
“New job, sir?” Lisa asked, her internal sensors at full gain and suddenly suspicious. “What new job?”
“I believe you saw it on the way in.”
She frowned, puzzled. Then recognition dawned.
“The stargate!”
He nodded. “The stargate. Bill Lonegon and the
Lancer
group snagged it away from the Broa as slick as any bank heist in history. Better yet, they don’t know it’s gone and may not for decades. The system we purloined it from has been dead for a century.”
“What shape is the gate in?”
“Surprisingly good. It appears fully functional. It passes all of the diagnostics we’ve figured out how to run. Now all we need do is learn everything we can about its operation and get that information back to Earth.”
“Can we do that, Admiral?”
“There are practical problems, of course. However, I am hopeful. The gate has a full set of technical specifications stored in an onboard database. Hardly surprising. We do the same with our starships. No sense having all of the repair manuals back at base if you break down a thousand light-years from home, is there? More importantly, this is the sort of stuff you don’t find in planetary databases; at least, not in the databases of slave species.”
“So why are you talking to us?” Lisa asked.
“Because we’ve run into a problem. The data isn’t written in the trade language Sar-Say taught you. It is written in what you might call ‘technical Broan.’ We’re having difficulty translating it. The computers just aren’t picking up the nuances.”
Lisa frowned. “I’m not technical, Admiral. I minored in Romance Languages in school.”
“You are still the best linguist we have. When we brought Sar-Say back from New Eden, I thought he was mute. Yet, he began to speak to you from practically the first moment you laid eyes on him. Everything we know about the enemy lingua franca is based on your initial work. It isn’t a matter of knowing the science. It’s a matter of being able to grasp the meaning of words from context and interpolation.
“What about Mark? I don’t want to leave him.”
“I would never think of breaking up either your team or your marriage. It’s lonely enough out here without making it more so. In fact, I believe ours is the first navy in history that has made it a priority to accommodate married couples.
“And in that vein, I have a new assignment for Mark, as well — if he wants it.”
“I’m not a linguist, Admiral. I doubt I’d be much use helping my wife read a Broan blueprint.”
“No one is asking you to be, Mark. Once Lisa and her compatriots get the data translated, the project will pass into a new phase. I want to get what we learn to Earth as fast as possible. And for that, we are going to need the stargate.”
“Sir?”
“Since it is functional, I want to use the gate to send a ship back to Earth in a one-way jump. The ship I have chosen has an open billet for an Executive Officer. The responsibility is commensurate with that shiny new half-stripe on your uniform. Do you want it?”
#
Chapter Six
The airlock door opened and Lisa Rykand stepped awkwardly out onto Sutton’s airless, dusty surface. She could feel the packed talcum-powder-fine dust crunching beneath her boots, but of course, no accompanying sound. The only sounds she heard were those of her own breathing and the whirr of the ventilation fan that was blowing air onto the nape of her neck. The air was cold, but smelled of dirty socks… as did the air inside every vacuum suit.
As she exited the airlock, she stepped into the full glare of Hideout, which was shining directly into her face. Her faceplate automatically darkened, but not before she felt a brief stabbing pain in her retinas from the sudden radiance.
“Bright, ain’t it?” Chief Vacuum Construction Specialist Tom Blanchard commented as he exited the airlock. Blanchard was the grizzled spacer who had been assigned to guide her. His vacsuit was canary yellow; hers, lime green.
“It’s been so long since I was outside, I forgot to squint.”
His chuckle echoed in her earphones. “Everyone I bring out here says the same thing. Surprising what human beings can get used to, isn’t it? We were cooped up in steel cages for the full year we spent getting here, then we burrowed our way into this moon and exchanged our cages for caves. Living in vacuum, we forget what it feels like to have the wind and rain blow on our face, to smell air that hasn’t been through the scrubbers a thousand times, or the joy of just lying in the sun.”
“This is definitely the wrong profession for a nature person,” Lisa agreed, “or a claustrophobe.”
“How’s your vision?”
“A few purple spots, but I can see again.”
“Then just follow that path to your left, the one marked by the little triangular red flags. We ran out of yellow bricks.”
The two of them started walking in the awkward way one does when encompassed in a pressurized balloon with a diving bell strapped to their shoulders.
It had been a week since the meeting in Admiral Landon’s office. Instead of the three weeks decompression between missions that regulations recommended, she and Mark had taken three days. At least, she had taken three days before reporting to her new assignment. The ship to which the Admiral had assigned Mark was off somewhere on a spying mission and wasn’t scheduled back for anywhere from ten days to a month. Where sniffing out the enemy was concerned, schedules were highly flexible.
If there was anything Mark had learned in four years of marriage, it was not to be out having fun while his wife was working. Women resent that, he’d learned, no matter how well deserved the fun might be. So, on the fourth morning after their return from Broan Space, he reported along with Lisa to the warren of offices occupied by the stargate research team and offered to assist until his ship showed up. They had both been given a half hour briefing on the effort to develop human stargates, with an emphasis on the extreme need to cut transit times between Hideout and Earth — as though anyone who had made the trip three times needed any such explanation!
After Dr. Niels Svenson, the project director, finished his hurried briefing, he handed them a record cube filled with technical data and dry scientific reports and sent them to an empty cubicle to review the project details. The Rykands shared a workscreen for two days, scanning until their eyes felt like boiled onions. Late on the second day, a burly man stopped by and introduced himself as Tom Blanchard. He announced that he would be taking them one at a time on a tour of the stargate. Lisa’s tour was scheduled for the following morning, Mark’s for the day after.
The path Lisa and Blanchard followed led up a rise, past a flat spot where vacuum tractors were parked. The small, powerful machines had been bright yellow when loaded aboard the freighters in Sol System. Now each machine was coated with Sutton’s dust, and was gray-brown in color, with only an occasional hint of the original bright hue. Even the windows, supposedly kept clean by electrostatic repulsers, looked as if they had recently been in a Sahara sandstorm.
Beyond the tractors, a series of towers marked the ridgeline of the low hill they were climbing. Each tower was topped with a directional antenna that pointed skyward. There appeared to be no pattern to the arrangement, although they all seemed to be altering their direction in synchronization with the moon’s rotation.
When she reached the top of the hill, there was bowl-shaped depression beyond. She paused, a little out of breath despite the low gravity.
“There she is, Lieutenant,” Blanchard said, pointing. “What do you think of her?”
“Big,” Lisa responded.
Spread out before her, its surface partially eclipsed by scaffolding, was a ring of silver metal with intricate patterns etched into its surface. Unlike the tractors they had just passed and the rest of the moon’s surface equipment, the stargate seemed completely clean, as though the electrically charged moon dust did not stick to it. She commented on how clean it looked.
“Some kind of a field emanating from the surface,” Blanchard explained. “It repels dust. The physicists
think
it’s a residual effect from the wormhole generators.”
In space, a stargate looks like a wedding band that has fallen off some giant’s finger. Against the scale of a star system, the ring is a tiny thing, almost too small to imagine any ship slipping through it to a different part of the universe. Lying here on the ground, it was enormous. At thirty meters in diameter, with a circular cross-section some five meters thick, it was no longer a lone artifact in the endless void. Here it was a structure, not unlike the ring buildings that had been popular on Earth in the 23
rd
century. Its apparent size was brought into scale by the several small vacsuited figures working around it. One in particular seemed to be attempting a circumnavigation of the ring’s upper surface.
“Isn’t he afraid he’s going to damage it?” Lisa asked.
“Not a problem, Lieutenant,” Blanchard answered. “Wait until you see inside. The thing is hell-for-stout, built like an old-style tank inside.”
Lisa nodded, forgetting that the gesture cannot be seen in a vacuum suit.
He was right, of course. Even 7000 light-years from home, Newton’s third law remained in effect. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. And in the case of stargates, that involved large masses materializing and dematerializing in the focus of the gate. Mass curves space-time, and when that mass instantaneously disappears, space-time snaps back into shape just as instantly. Like the cannon of old, stargates must absorb the recoil.