Major Lisbeth Zhang, USWMC, nodded and forced herself not to grin. Her smile made the Navy officer nervous. He sounded positive and confident, but he couldn’t conceal his doubts and fears from her.
“The previous owners called it the Redoubt, more or less,” she said. “One of their earlier conquests, and their last refuge when the wheels came off.”
In her mind, she pictured the view from the cockpit of a Corpse-Ship as it emerged from the Starless Path, an incomprehensibly long time in the past. The ship was heading towards the sixth planet from the star, a heavily-populated world, surrounded by half a dozen massive orbital installations, each artificial moon sheathed in gleaming black armor and emitting tachyon wave transmissions intense enough to kill the weak-minded. She blinked and tried to match the past and present. One big difference was readily apparent: an asteroid belt had replaced the fortified planet from her vision.
“That’s a big ‘oopsie’ right there,” she mumbled to herself.
“I beg your pardon?” Captain Spears said.
“Sorry. Thinking out loud. My apologies, Captain.”
The bridge crewmen were giving her sidelong glances. Without meaning to, she caught bits and pieces of their thoughts: Bitch be crazy was the most popular phrase going through their minds. This cruise is going to suck ass was in second place. The poor bastards weren’t just right about her and their mission, they didn’t know just how crazy she was, or how bad things were going to get. That thought almost made her giggle, but she stopped herself.
People got downright terrified when she started giggling.
The urge was hard to resist, because the cartoonish image of Atu the Pooh kept showing up without warning. Her invisible friend appeared behind Captain Spears and started making obscene gestures behind him. The hallucinations or visitations or whatever were a big reason they’d kept her locked up in Venus until she convinced her handlers that there was some method in her madness.
“We’re not picking up any emissions,” the Tactical Officer reported. They’d been hiding in the shadows and using passive sensors for a few hours, long enough to ensure a hostile fleet wasn’t waiting for them.
“Initiate active scans.”
The American ship started bombarding the system with a steady stream of graviton waves that would provide a detailed analysis of everything they encountered – and would announce the ship’s presence far and wide. The Humboldt was made for this sort of mission, however; nimble, stealthy, and armed heavily enough to give any enemies a bloody nose before leaving them in the dust.
Once upon a time, Lisbeth Zhang had been an up-and-coming Navy officer. She might have ended up commanding something as impressive as this starship if her career hadn’t been ended by a handful of Lamprey space mines. Her career, and the lives of everyone under her command.
“Vampires!”
Lisbeth turned to the Wildcat’s Tactical Officer and began to shout orders – “Warp shields!” – but the mines had already fired the grav-thrusters that turned them into missiles. One hit was all it took: the world dissolved in flames just as she realized how badly she had failed...
She shook her head to banish the relived memories and concentrate on living in the moment like a normal human being. The Humboldt crewmembers ignored the gesture; they’d learned to pretend not to notice her occasional ticks.
“The Kraxans lived on three planets,” she said. “After they terraformed them to suit their biology. Their biochemistry was Class Two, fairly compatible with our own.”
“They don’t seem to be around anymore,” Captain Spears said. “And only one planet shows signs of life.”
The readings confirmed his words. The innermost planets were superheated airless rocks, slightly smaller than Sol’s Mercury and even less hospitable. Redoubt-Four was the right size and distance from the sun to harbor life, but it had a thick, hot and inhospitable atmosphere, worse than Venus, which was saying something. A flash from another time and place showed her the same planet, green and rich in life; now it was a hellhole where no Class Two organism could survive.
The destruction of Redoubt-Six might explain what had happened to Four: debris from the shattered planet might have struck it in a cataclysmic meteor shower. Enough large impactors could have triggered all kinds of climate changes, undoing centuries of terraforming in a few hours. The thermal readings showed a surface temperature somewhere in the hundreds of degrees. There might be some microscopic life in deep crevasses somewhere, but that was about it.
That left the fifth planet. Its biosphere hadn’t been destroyed – its orbit must have kept it far enough away from the other two to avoid their fate – but the initial sensor pass only revealed a few ruins buried beneath massive forests and jungles.
One out of three, and it looks like they either packed up and left or died out.
Lisbeth consulted with the records she had absorbed from a Corpse-Ship back in Xanadu. According to them, the main Marauder Armada had been stationed on Redoubt-Six. If any Corpse-Ships had survived, she would have expected them to be there. Except there was no ‘there’ anymore.
She knew how long a shot all of this had been, but striking out a few hours after their arrival made her want to scream and break things.
“Don’t give up just yet, Christopher Robin,” her invisible friend said. The hallucination was floating right over Captain Spears’s head. It winked at her. “Try listening for a change. You might hear something useful.”
Lisbeth nodded, and luckily the gesture was aimed at the Humboldt’s skipper, so for once she didn’t look quite so crazy.
“We’ll take it nice and slow,” the Navy officer said, unaware of the alien spirit’s presence. “Do a detailed scan of both worlds and the asteroid belt. We’ll figure out our next step after we have more information.”
As he spoke, Lisbeth tried listening. There might not be graviton or electronic emissions coming from Redoubt-Five, but there was something else out there. It was the stuff they were calling tachyons or t-waves, because it sounded a little more scientific than juju or bad mojo, and never mind that most physicists wanted to tear their hair out when they heard the name of their beloved theoretical particle taken in vain. By whatever name, people like Lisbeth could sense t-waves, and Redoubt System was positively lousy with them.
“I told you,” Atu said, and tried to thumb its nose at her. Which was funnier than it should have been, since it didn’t have a nose, or any sort of breathing organs on its face for that matter.
She thought about telling everyone, but figured she was getting too much of a reputation as a weirdo. Instead, she drafted a text message and sent it privately to the skipper. Captain Spears would listen to her. The officer wasn’t a fan of the ‘weird Navy’ – a term that covered everything from the eccentric Warp Navigation departments on which FTL travel depended to the more recent fighter pilots – but he was a pragmatist. If relying on hunches and black magic worked, then he’d make use of them.
“It appears the Kraxans didn’t rely on graviton waves for communications,” the skipper announced after reading Lisbeth’s discreet message. “They used something like our Quantum Entanglement telegrams, but a much more advanced version, sort of like the difference between pre-Contact telegraphs versus full television. Some of those sources appear to be active.”
A moment later, Lisbeth wasn’t on the bridge of the survey ship anymore. A black tower, thousands of feet tall, reached towards the greenish heavens above her. She was on a busy street filled with bizarre creatures: Kraxans had once been humanoid, but most of the Marauders she saw had all kinds of bizarre deformities, everything from cancerous-looking growths to cybernetic limbs and even what appeared to be body parts from other species grafted directly onto their flesh. She watched one of them use a limb-mounted device and create a warp aperture; the unprotected being walked right into it.
“Major?”
She shook her head. “Sorry, sir. Some of those tachyon waves can trigger hallucinations.”
“I see. We’ll do a short warp jump to within a light-minute of the inner planets and then continue the trip in normal space; that will give us enough time to make a thorough examination of the system. I’ll meet with you, select department heads and the civilian advisors tomorrow at 1800 hours.”
Lisbeth wasn’t looking forward to that meeting. She’d never been a people person even before her close encounter with assorted alien minds had sent her flying over the edge: that shortcoming could have held back her promising career in the Navy, and she had been working on it until the Lampreys sank her ship and career at the same time. Telling a bunch of officers and gentlemen what to do was not going to be any fun at all.
She’d all but promised anyone who would listen that she could recover a small fleet of Corpse-Ships in mint condition. If one cobbled-together museum piece had been capable of that much, a hundred – or even a dozen – fully-operational models would be more than enough to win the war. Maybe a squadron or two had been stashed away on Redoubt-Five and escaped the destruction of the other two Kraxan worlds.
The possibility that using those monstrous little vessels might cost humanity its very soul and turn the known galaxy into a devastated wasteland had been mostly glossed over by everyone concerned. The War and Navy Departments didn’t deal in such intangibles as souls: they thought in terms of firepower and enemy tonnage ‘sunk,’ an archaic term that had survived the US Navy’s transition from sailing on Earth’s oceans to fighting in outer space.
If the only choices facing humanity were extinction or damnation, which was the right one?
Lisbeth thought there might be a third option, one she was keeping to herself, mostly because it might be construed as high treason and grounds for summary execution.
“Mama said there would be days like this, Christopher Robin,” her alien ghost companion said in its cheerful cartoon voice.
“Bitch be crazy,” she said, careful not to say the words out loud. If people knew she was hearing voices in her head, let alone replying to them, the jig would be up.
“Bitch be crazy indeed,” the alien said solemnly.
She wanted to giggle very badly, but refrained.
* * *
They should have called this expedition Operation Haunted Planet, Heather McClintock thought as the meeting came to order.
A holographic image of Redoubt-Five hung over the conference table. At that scale, there was nothing unusual about the green-blue-white sphere: it had less oceans than Earth, and a much more active biosphere, to the point that every land mass outside the polar caps was choked by thick forests and jungles, their teeming chlorophyll canopies adding a verdant tinge to the planet. Still, it wasn’t terribly unusual at first glance. There were dozens of similar worlds in American space alone.
The tiny purple spots popping in and out everywhere on the world’s surface were something else, however. Warp signatures, blinking like thousands of little eyes. Nobody opened doors into warp space like that, not even humans. Even if there’d been a good reason for doing so, it took a great deal of energy to punch a hole through spacetime even for a brief moment. A Marine assault catapult required about one gigawatt per launch at minimum range, the cost going up exponentially over longer distances. The display below her would take the energy budget of a large Starfarer city, and they hadn’t detected the telltale emissions of the power plants required to produce it. Gluon reactors – and their poor-man substitutes, antimatter, fusion and fission power plants – were hard to hide from passive sensors, let alone the full graviton scan the Humboldt had conducted a few hours before the meeting. The only sign of civilization they’d found were those mysterious apertures. That, and the maddening t-wave whispers only she and Lisbeth could hear.
Captain Darius J. Spears and the heads of the ship’s Operations, Supply and Science departments were all there. Most Navy ships didn’t have a Science department – only survey and research vessels like the Humboldt had those. Spears himself had spent most of his career on survey ships, exploring warp routes to find new worlds to colonize or new trade routes to exploit. It was a hard, often boring and potentially very dangerous job. His experience in handling unusual situations – his tenure aboard the USS Livingstone had been legendary – made him the right man for this job.
The Humboldt had started life as a New England-class battlecruiser, the USS Castle Rock. After the ship class was decommissioned, a handful of them were converted for survey duties. The redesign retained their armor, shields and guns (but not their missile batteries), added extra life support and cargo space for extended trips, and mounted additional sensors and an advanced stealth system. The mission of the rechristened vessel was to make multiple warp transits and extended real space maneuvers, study newly-discovered planets and, if potential enemies were encountered, remain hidden and perform a stealthy reconnaissance before leaving.
Peter was there as well, in his capacity of commander of the attached Marine company. Survey ships normally didn’t have Marines, and making room for over two hundred trigger-pullers, their vehicles and a set of platoon-level warp catapults had required a lot of work and aggravation. Given the chance of extended planetside operations to search for Lisbeth’s Corpse-Ships, having a ground force at hand seemed like a good idea.
She and Peter exchanged a brief glance; once again, they were going on a cruise together, and once again it was going to be all work and no play. It might be an improvement over being hundreds of light years apart, but not by much.
Heather was there as a civilian, serving in the role of Kraxan ‘expert.’ She had spent a good month soaking up every last bit of data she’d found in Starbase Malta’s libraries. It wasn’t much, but it made her the foremost authority on the legendary aliens other than Lisbeth Zhang, who knew a lot more but had a few problems communicating with others. Heather’s special, still largely classified ‘telepathic’ implants also played a role, of course. All Kraxan communications relied on tachyon transmissions; the poorly-understood technology would likely come in handy here.
Her role as an advisor was somewhat muddled, but that wasn’t anything new for her. When she’d become a Central Intelligence Agency field agent, she’d learned to wear all kinds of figurative hats: anything from fighting as an infantry grunt to acting as a corporate executive to running an alien space habitat, all while doing her real job. Which was to advance US interests in any way possible.
And that was what this expedition was all about.
The intentions of the other civilian at the meeting were less clear. Sophocles Albertus Munson, Ph.D. (‘should always be addressed as Doctor,’ his personal profile indicated) looked like he’d slept in his old-fashioned tweed jacket and had never used a comb in his life; the white mane on top of his head sprawled in every direction. She supposed the Albert Einstein look was still popular in certain circles, but in combination with the man’s morbidly obese physique, the hair style made him look like a disturbingly grotesque child’s doll. Nowadays you had to work hard at being overweight, given all the metabolic enhancers available, but Doctor Munson had managed the feat quite handily.
Maybe his age had something to do with it. Munson earned his third doctorate a few years before First Contact. As an Ancient, the man was a true civilian, someone who had never spent a day in uniform, as opposed to almost every American born after First Contact, who had the choice between undergoing a minimum of four years performing the Obligatory Service term, or four years in prison as a deserter, forsaking most citizenship rights in the process.
The old scientist had advanced degrees in a dozen specialties, including galactic history, linguistics and information technology. He also had friends in high places, the National Science Advisor to the President among them. Those contacts explained why he was the person in the expedition besides Heather who was equipped with t-wave implants. The top secret program had been suspended after a number of subjects suffered undesirable side effects (including death), but Munson appeared to have suffe
red no ill effects.
After the initial pleasantries were exchanged, Captain Spears nodded to the Operations officer.
“We have done an extensive orbital scan of Redoubt-Five. At this point, we have learned everything we can from above. We have analyzed the data and I can give a preliminary report with some confidence.
“Basics first. Redoubt-Five is a ‘near-Goldie’ planet. Local gravity is ninety-eight percent of g. Average temperature is seventy degrees Fahrenheit, closer to eighty in the area we’ll be concentrating on, which is near its equator. The atmosphere is a typical mix of nitrogen and oxygen and the local biosphere is Class Two, largely compatible with our own. Since we aren’t taking the time to conduct a proper analysis of the planet’s biosphere, there’s no telling if any of the local microbes will take a liking to us, so ground personnel will be issued haz-con suits. Full decontamination and quarantine procedures will be followed throughout the expedition.”
That meant that anybody who set foot on the planet would spend the return trip isolated from the rest of the crew, making the already-cramped conditions aboard the ship more uncomfortable still. Everyone had expected that, so there was no grumbling. Starfarer medicine was extremely efficient, but there was no point in testing it via exposure to unknown bacteria or viruses.
“Our initial assessments indicate there is no advanced technological presence anywhere in the system. There are no energy signatures congruent with the presence of a power infrastructure. We have found the remains of buildings in a handful of sites, but they are all buried under accumulated soil and silt, and all appear to have been abandoned for many thousands of years. There are no native sophonts.”
The Science Officer took over at that point.
“As Commander Green noted, we haven’t had time to conduct an extensive survey of Redoubt-Five.” He sounded almost reproachful about that; as a career survey officer, he probably found the haste to be unwarranted and risky. “But even our preliminary observations show a very high ratio of predators versus prey animals, and surprising levels of mutations – even members of the same pack exhibit enough divergent traits to suggest they are from different species altogether. Plant life is similarly affected, and only slightly less aggressive. We will need to take extreme measures to safeguard our shore parties.”
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