Battlespace (The Stars Aflame Book 1)

by Richard Tongue

  “If we do our job right, then they won’t have to know anything happened until it’s all over.”

  “Level with me, Mike. Do you honestly think that we have a chance of pulling this off?”

  “There’s always a chance. And if any ship and any crew can win this little war, this one can. They all know what’s at stake, and they all made the same decision you did.” He placed his glass on the desk, rose to his feet, and said, “We’ll be leaving soon enough, but I’ve got time to give you a brief tour. At least enough to let you get the feel of the ship.”

  “That’d be fine, Captain. It’d be a pleasure.”

  “Don’t speak too quickly. You haven’t seen it yet.”

  “I’m an Ambassador. Stretching the truth is right there in my job description.”

  Chapter 6

  “Watch it,” Patel said, leaning over the sensor panel. “We don’t want to push too hard, not unless we want any surprise guests.” Reaching over Novak’s shoulder, he adjusted a control, and added, “If we push our bandwidth any higher…”

  “If we don’t,” Belinsky protested, “then we’re just wasting our time. What we’re looking for has to be right down in the core of the asteroid, far deeper than anything we’d normally be able to find.” Tapping the screen, he added, “There. Right there. Focus on that point.”

  Nodding, Novak replied, “I see it.” She reached for a control, magnifying the display. The monitor showed a chaotic collection of catacombs below, tangled and twisted through the rocks, but curving towards a single focus point, more than a mile underground. “That’s a regular shape. It can’t be natural. Look at those shapes.”

  “A dodecahedron,” Belinsky said, a smile on his face. “I think we found what we were looking for. Can you transfer the best path to our suits?”

  “Just a minute, Professor,” Patel replied. “Not to throw cold water on this, but we haven’t got the resolution to determine whether those tunnels can be accessed, and even if they are, that’s a hell of a long way down. I’m not sure the equipment we have is up to the job.” He looked out of the viewport at the collection of clutter scattered around the camp, and added, “In fact, I’m damned sure it isn’t.”

  “We’ll find a way,” the scientist said. “Look, do you have any better suggestions? We’ve got to head down there, we’ve got to find out the secret of this race. If for no other reason than academic curiosity, but if they were destroyed by the same aliens that are attacking us now…”

  “That’s a good point, Professor,” Patel pressed. “If they were destroyed, then all we know is that they have been attacking other sentient lifeforms for a million years. What lessons can they possibly have to teach us that will be of any value? To say nothing about the infinitely small possibility that we would be able to decode anything they left behind in a reasonable time.”

  “They’ll have thought of that,” Belinsky said. “Chief, look upon this as more than just the site of a last stand. It cannot be that, or it would certainly have been destroyed, and this rock is far too small to serve as the refugium of a long-dead civilization. This was a repository, a place where the last wisdom of this race could be stored, for the benefit of anyone who faced the same existential threat to their civilization.” He gestured at the sensor display, and added, “We’ve got nothing, Chief. Don’t tell me that anything in the Commonwealth Navy is even remotely equipped to deal with that sort of ship, because I won’t believe you.”

  Nodding, Novak replied, “I’m forced to agree with him, Chief.” Before he could protest, she continued, “I’m going with the Professor, and the two of us are going alone. In our absence, you will strip the shuttle, and prepare it for immediate launch. Or as close as you can possibly get without attracting attention. Do everything you can possibly do to improve the performance of this vehicle. If help arrives, contact them if you can, and either warn them off or arrange for a pickup.”

  “What about you?” Patel asked.

  “Don’t wait for us,” she replied. “If you’ve got a chance to get out of here in one piece, I’m ordering you to take it. Ensign Cunningham is a damn good pilot. If anyone can get you to the wormhole, he can.” Clapping him on the shoulder, she said, “I’ve got to do this, Chief, but I’ll be damned if I risk any more lives than I must on this mission. The Professor and I know what we’re doing, and we know what we’re risking.”

  “Lieutenant…”

  “I’ve made my decision, and it is final.” Turning to Belinsky, she asked, “Any reason why we can’t head out right away?”

  “Not that I can think of,” he replied, walking over to the suit locker.

  “I just don’t like the idea of you wandering around down there,” Patel said. “Maybe I should go with you, or perhaps Vidmar…”

  “The fewer who go, the fewer you might have to leave behind,” she replied. “Unless I can find something out down there that we can use, there isn’t that much need for all of us to go.” She paused, then said, “I told you to strip the ship. That includes all the emergency supplies. If the worst happens, the Professor and I can probably survive for a while. Maybe long enough for you to come back and pick us up.”

  “We both know that isn’t going to happen, ma’am.”

  “Perhaps not, but it might help you sleep a little easier at night.”

  Nodding, he followed her to the suit locker, Belinsky already almost prepared for the surface, and said, “Good luck, Lieutenant.”

  “And to you,” she replied, tugging on the bulky spacesuit, sliding her arms into the components. Patel helped strap her into the suit, then carefully lowered a helmet onto her head, clipping and locking it neatly into position as air hissed from the lifesystem, the on-board computers suiting up. Belinsky handed her the largest hand sensor she’d ever seen, a wand almost a foot long festooned with pickups and detectors, then stepped into the airlock, already beginning to cycle the system before she’d even managed to step inside.

  The two of them walked out on to the surface, side by side, Powers snapping a salute as they departed, making their way towards the shaft on the close horizon, a short walk from the landing site. The pit was frozen in permanent shadow, impossible to see from above, and Belinsky led the way inside in a series of long bounds, anxiously eating up the terrain in his haste to begin the exploration of the underworld. Novak looked back at the shuttle, shaking her head, then followed him below, reaching up to turn her helmet light on.

  “The scanner is tightly focused,” he said. “Wave it at anything that looks even remotely interesting. I’ve rigged all the suit records to maximum-definition storage. They’ll only be able to hold a couple of hours of footage, but that should be more than enough for us to reach the vault.” With a smile, he said, “We’re walking in the footsteps of Schliemann, of Howard Carter, Hiram Bingham.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, Professor, but given the time constraints, I’d rather sprint.” She paused, then looked at a wall, waving her scanner at a series of indentations, asking, “What’s that?”

  “You’ve just found a nice sample of writing, Lieutenant,” he replied. “One that I’d missed, actually.” With a sigh, he said, “We could spend ten years here, and still barely scratch the surface. This site needs a full-scale research team, the best scientists in the Commonwealth, not two people with a couple of hours to investigate.”

  “Cheer up, Professor. If this goes wrong, we might both be here for a very long time. Long enough to become a permanent part of this find.”

  “The thought had occurred to me.” Gesturing to the right, he said, “This way. I think.”

  They passed along a narrow corridor, twisting and turning all the way, but it was increasingly apparent that someone else had been there before them, long ago. The floor was smooth, markings that could only have come from machinery, and the strange shapes returned to the walls, pictograms that spoke of intelligence without revealing the secrets that lay behind it. She looked at a long string of writing, puzzling
it out, as though almost able to understand it, the meaning feeling almost at the tip of her tongue.

  “It’ll likely take decades to work out what they’re saying. Assuming we can at all. I’m hoping that they realized that, arranged some method to help us interpret the words.”

  “We’re both hoping that, Professor. If we can’t understand whatever message they left behind, this is going to be a wasted trip.” As they continued along the shaft, increasingly curving down, towards the core of the asteroid, she asked, “What did they look like?”

  Belinsky froze, aiming his sensor forward, and said, “Something like that.” She looked in the indicated direction, and her eyes widened as she saw a white outline in the distance, a skeleton leaning against the wall. There were four arms, seeming to end in claws, and a strange, elongated skull, savage teeth at the end of it, and what could only be three eyes, the empty holes staring endlessly into eternity. The legs were long and tapered, three of them.

  “Amazing,” Belinsky said, walking reverently towards the body. “I’ve got to take a DNA sample. There’s a chance that we can crack the code, maybe find out a lot about its biology that way. Leave a marker. I want to be able to find this again if we get a chance to come back.” He reached down with a thin blade, scraping a potion of bone into a sample jar and tucking it carefully into a pocket, patting it sealed. “Astonishing.”

  “How long ago did it die?”

  “No way to tell without proper testing. It could easily be a million years. Just think, Lieutenant. While our ancestors were still nervously looking down from the trees, his were walking among the stars, just as we are today. And some other race, a million years from now, will doubtless find our remains and wonder how we lived, who we are. It’s all a continuum, you understand. A cycle of eternity.”

  “Strange,” she said, shaking her head. “So damned strange.” She looked back up the shaft, surprised at how far they had already come, and said, “We could try and take him back to the shuttle.”

  “No,” Belinsky replied. “When we moved the last one, it took us more than a day to make all the preparations. I don’t want to risk damage to the corpse. I’m afraid it’s just going to have to sit here a little while longer.” Rising to his feet, he said, “Come on. We’re almost there.” Leading the way, he continued down the passage, taking another turn, and added, “Notice something about the floor?”

  “Harder, firmer.”

  “It’s been treated somehow. This is definitely artificial, all of it. They built this place to last.”

  Nodding, she followed him down, the path growing steep enough that walking was becoming difficult, and said, “Have you ever seen anything like this before?”

  “Only in my wildest dreams,” he replied, a smile on his face. “The discovery of the century. Though there are still plenty of places we haven’t visited. We spread out so fast that we left a lot of gaps. Everyone was so interested in the major elements of each system that they ignored everything else. You realize that we’ve explored less than a tenth of a percent of the asteroids in our own Solar System? Sometimes I think…” He paused, then said, “My God, this is it.”

  She looked down, and her eyes widened as she saw the passage opening up, extending out to a wider chamber beyond. Some sort of alloy coated the rock, impossible for the hand sensor to register, the software struggling to match it to anything in its database. Struggling, and failing. This was new. The two of them walked forward as though in a trance, eyes locked on their goal, and finally emerged in the chamber beyond.

  The walls were covered in writing, dozens of panels making up the walls with thousands of pictograms on each panel. All of them were the same alloy that they’d found outside, designed to outlast eternity itself. At the heart of the chamber, sitting on the floor, another of the creatures lay, this one in the tattered remains of what had to be a spacesuit, some of the fabric still surviving, even after the endless centuries of waiting. Novak walked up to it, looking down at the creature.

  “This was the last of them,” she said. “Maybe even the last of his race. I can’t even begin to imagine that. Knowing that as soon as you pass, your entire species is lost. Lost and forgotten for the rest of time.”

  “Not forgotten,” Belinsky replied. “Not any more. There’s more writing here than they used to decode Minoan, centuries ago. They’ve left us everything we need. All I’ve got to do is find a way to crack the code, and we’ll be able to read it.” He looked down at the dead alien, and said, “Have a little more patience, old friend. Your people will live again, one way or another.”

  “The others didn’t have suits,” she said. “Just this one. Maybe they were intended to be preserved that way. A record of their lifeform, stored the only way they knew how.” Gesturing at the bones, she added, “They’re not the same as the others. Less pristine.”

  “Either that, or the others decided to take the fast way out,” Belinsky said, carefully waving his sensor around, being careful to record every panel, every scrap of text. “I suppose I couldn’t blame them for that. If my theory is correct, they watched their world being killed, all of their people wiped out. Suppose this had happened to the crew of Apollo 11 when they landed on the moon, some unimaginable holocaust that ended all life on Earth. What would they have done?”

  “Hold onto that thought, Professor. There’s a ship hanging in far orbit that might make that come about yet,” she replied. “How long is it going to take?”

  “It’ll take as long as it takes,” he said. “I can’t rush this. I don’t know how much detail we’re going to need. It’s amazing how well preserved these symbols are. This material is tougher than diamond. Carving it must have taken a long, long time.”

  “There’s no equipment down here,” she replied.

  “Maybe it was left up on the surface,” he said. “It would have been covered in dust, eons ago. A proper survey of the asteroid might uncover it.” He paused, smiled, then said, “I think I found what we’re looking for. This isn’t going to take as long as I thought.”

  “How long did you think?” she asked.

  His face reddening, he replied, “Maybe a few years.” At her expression, he added, “I didn’t think I’d get a chance to come back here. This could easily have been the only chance we ever had to take a look at this civilization close up. I couldn’t pass it up.”

  Suppressing her scowl, she asked, “What exactly have you found?”

  “An omnilingual. A Rosetta Stone.”

  “They haven’t translated into an Earth language…,” she began.

  “No, no, of course not. I doubt we had a language when they died out.” Flashing his torch on a panel, he said, “Look at the symbols. That’s a periodic table, and they’ve been very, very careful with the pictograms in that part of the panel. It’s an alphabetic language. I’m sure of that. Aside from those circles, the pictograms repeat quite often. I’ve only made out a hundred or so. That means that once I know their word for, say, Hydrogen, I can start using that to decode the rest of the text. With access to a decent computer, I can probably put this together pretty damn quick.” Nodding, he added, “Score one for Professor Piper.”

  “Who?”

  “My old lecturer. He predicted something like this, fifty years and more ago.” He paused, then said, “It’ll go even faster if you help.”

  Before she could reply, her communicator squawked, and she said, “Novak here.”

  “Lieutenant, this is Patel. We’re picking up some interesting readings in orbit. Something’s on the move, heading into the system. And we’re not the only ones to detect it. If I’m not mistaken, the alien ship is powering up.”

  “Understood. Keep monitoring. Out.” She looked at Belinsky, and asked, “How long?”

  “Maybe half an hour.”

  “Work faster. We don’t have that much time.”

  Chapter 7

  Scott walked onto the bridge, nodding at Rochford as he vacated the command chair, smoothly moving acr
oss to his station. It had taken a phenomenal effort for him to remain in his office for as long as he had, not wanting to make the command crew more nervous than they already were. As he settled into his chair, he looked around the room, his eyes darting from station to station.

  They were either too old or too young. Either old enough that they had served before the drawdown, or cadets fresh from the Academy, rushed into service far too soon. That they were all maintaining the same cold exterior was a miracle, one that they almost didn’t deserve. At the rear of the bridge, standing at parade rest, was the uninvited Ivanov, a faint sneer on his face, as though holding the situation in mild contempt. Scott settled into his chair, then looked across at Rochford, who nodded in reply.

  “Four minutes, Captain,” he said.

  “Battle stations, old friend,” Scott replied. “God, I never thought I’d say that again.”

  “I never thought I’d hear it,” Rochford said, reaching for a microphone. “Now hear this. Now hear this. Alert Condition One throughout the ship. All stations to Alert Condition One. Department heads report status to the Executive Officer. That is all.” He looked up at his console, and his eyes widened. “Weapons Control’s already gone red. And Life Support.”

  “I think they were looking at the clock every bit as closely as we were,” Scott replied with a smile. “We’re going to set a fleet record. One less thing to worry about.” Leaning forward, he said to the helmsman, “Ensign, we’ll be emerging into an uncertain situation. Presumed hostile. Act on the assumption that we might come under enemy fire immediately upon our arrival in the system, and plan your egress accordingly.”

  “Aye, Captain,” he replied. “I’ve already programmed a random-walk evasive pattern into the computer, for implementation five seconds after emergence. Hopefully that will throw them off.”