Star Thief

by T. Jackson King

  “Captain, we are in geosync orbit. I have access to our magfield and fusion pulse drives,” Flow chirped. She looked back. The pupils in her blue eyes expanded. Her red beak opened. “Orders?”

  I thought quickly. Then spoke. “Akantha, status of the three orbitals?”

  Acoustic is so slow. “The orbitals are non-active and—correction! All three are now emitting neutrinos. Fusion power plants on each orbital are active. We . . . we are being scanned.”

  “By what!” I gritted my teeth.

  “By a hadron beam emitted from the apex orbital,” Akantha said in her sing-song tone. I heard a touch of exasperation. “Hadron scanning beams are routine in some empires. You will recall this vessel was touched by one in your second Harl ruin visit.”

  That had been four years ago. Those ruins had been quite active in the sense of sensors, mobile robots and spiral-doors that still operated. I had kept the employer alive despite the reptile’s intense focus on entering a pile of stone roomblocks. Once that employer snatched a small mobile bot it had consented to leave. We’d left the world intact, though an x-ray laser beam had fired on us as we left low orbit. It attenuated in the atmosphere, thankfully.

  “Why are we sitting still in high orbit?” barked Laserta.

  “Because it’s smart!” I snarled. “Akantha, any sign of laser targeting beams? Or other fire control lock-ons?”

  “None so far.” Though such is possible in view of the three orbitals going active.

  I knew that. We’d visited enough Harl ruins to know that signs of active devices meant potential danger. And a chance for tech riches, of course. “Pilot, take us inward on a spiraling, randomized track.”

  “Moving inward,” the purple feathered avian chirped.

  The image of the world below and the three orbitals now slipped and jerked. The scope reduced the zoom-in to maintain visual monitoring. A side vidscreen showed our entry track with the world and moon shown as large dots. Our track was an orange line. The orbitals were three small red dots. Though I felt nothing I knew my ship was moving like a roller coaster ride that I had ridden in an old amusement park just outside of Delphi. My parents had taken me to the ancient ruins right after our visit to see the Treasury of Athens building in the Delphi ruins. The treasury commemorated their victory over the Persians at Marathon in 490 B.C.E. That visit cemented my fascination with ancient Greece. Now, though, other ruins drew closer. My vessel’s entry on the magfield drive combined a spiral with the ups, downs and sideways trip on that roller coaster. It was supposed to make targeting us somewhat difficult.

  Sharp Claw looked back at me, her yellow gaze fierce. “Captain!”

  Yes, it was time for her. “Weapons, activate your lasers and sensors.”

  “Activating,” she hissed. It was overdue! She should have gone active before they passed below the local moon. She touched active her ultraviolet, infrared, far infrared, radar, lidar, hadron, quark, gamma ray, x-ray and carbon-dioxide sensors. She touched on the proton sensor also. One empire used proton lasers, she had heard during a long-ago shore leave. Three flashing lights caught her attention. “Captain! All three orbitals are scanning us with lidar, infrared and UV targeting beams. I must fire!”

  “We are not in range,” came the mammal’s calm voice.

  She knew that. The maximum range for her lasers was 11,223 kilometers. The range for the plasma beams was better, at 20,103 kilometers. Her vessel was just crossing 51,000 klicks range from the orbitals. Sharp Claw looked over to Flow.

  “Pilot! Take us in faster!”

  Flow spread one wing wide with excitement. Her other wing-hand touched her control panel. “Done! Adding fusion pulse thrust to our magfield approach.”

  Sharp Claw saw the change in speed on her own targeting vidscreen that filled the top of her pedestal. They now moved at 900 kilometers per second. Very soon they would be in range. She put her left hand above the plasma beam controls. Touching them she activated the infrared targeting sensors for the two beam mounts. She assigned two orbitals to the two mounts. Then she touched active her x-ray, gamma ray and CO2 lasers. They would fire on the third orbital within 10 seconds after she fired the plasma beams.

  “Thirty thousand. Twenty-seven!” screeched Flow. “Twenty-four!”

  “Incoming!” called out Akantha. “X-ray laser beam missed us by four kilometers.”

  Claw saw that. Her sensors and her targeting array had shown one orbital firing an x-ray laser at them. Her awareness was simultaneous with Akantha’s announcement. She saw no point in copying what the AI announced. Though she disliked the fact the orbital’s laser had a greater range than her laser and plasma beams.

  “Twenty thousand and two hundred!” chirped Flow, sounding nervous.

  She tapped the two plasma beamers. The spine and belly beam mounts shot out coherent purple beams that diverged slightly. One struck the apex orbital. The other struck the lower left orbital. Brilliant yellow-orange light filled the front vidscreen.

  “Dead!” she hissed sharply. “Two orbitals are gone. Now targeting third orbital.”

  A white beam reached out from the third orbital.

  “We are struck,” sang Akantha. “No hull rupture. Secondary particle spray has been blocked by deuterium water fuel tanks. All vessel systems are operational.”

  Claw tapped her x-ray and CO2 laser controls. The port and starboard carbon-dioxide laser mounts fired green beams down at a 23 degree angle as Flow took them into a random jink. The nose and stern x-ray lasers fired white beams. Their stern gamma ray laser added disruptive force. The CO2 lasers had the best hull penetration power of any laser on the Akantha. The x-ray and gamma ray lasers were guaranteed to scramble anything electronic and kill anything biological that might be present on the orbital. A red glow showed on the front vidscreen.

  “Captain, two orbitals are gone and the third orbital is non-functional,” she hissed hurriedly. “It will likely lose orbital coherence and fall into the atmosphere.”

  “Understood. Good shooting.”

  Of course she shot well! Fighting was survival. Killing with the first strike or beam was what mattered.

  “Weapons, launch a monitoring missile. I want eyes on other parts of the planet.”

  She agreed. Putting spybot sats in two polar and two equatorial orbits would allow the captain to know whether dangerous devices approached from other parts of the Harl world. Claw tapped her panel control for the stern launch tubes. A slight vibration touched her clawfeet, telling her the missile had launched. It was auto-programmed to emit the four spybots into high orbits above the Harl world. What they saw the captain would see on his personal vidtablet, whether on the ground, inside a ruin or in the air.

  “Missile launched,” she hissed. “Four spybots heading to polar and equatorial orbits.”

  “Land us!” barked Laserta.

  She wished she could rip out the throat of the red-furred being. Such was what would happen to any being on her world that challenged a Notem. But employers paid to be arrogant and dominating. She accepted that. Reluctantly.

  “Employer, we are approaching. Rushing to land on a Harl world with active devices is not smart,” the captain said in his mammal speech. “Patience. Akantha, show us the Harl city.”

  Flow looked away from her piloting panel to scan the front vidscreen. The vessel’s scope zoomed down, past the puffy white clouds that made her wings ache for flight. The enlarging image focused on a high mesa within a central mountain change. Green forests covered the nearby mountains and ran up the mesa slopes. They stopped at the edge of the mesa. Filling the flat mesa were kilometer after kilometer of black stone buildings. While the outer buildings were only a few levels high, the central structures rose to thirty or forty levels. As usual a circular plaza occupied the center of the city. She approved of the city’s high location. So much better than a warren of caves along a seashore!

  “Harl city displayed,” sang the vessel’s AI.

  She turned away from
the high aerie that held the Harl city and focused on her flight through low orbit. She felt the star’s magnetic field fading as the planet’s magnetic field captured her senses. All occupied planets had strong magnetic fields that protected their worlds from the charged particles of stellar winds. This world was no different, though its axial tilt was rather strong at 19 degrees. The seasons here would be notable.

  Flow touched the piloting panel with both wing-hands as the Akantha entered the outer wisps of the world’s atmosphere. As usual she approached on a flat arc, partly to reduce the heating of the vessel’s hull and partly to give her time to twist, turn, loop and simply joy in her sense of flying. Her wings shivered. Her tail feathers stiffened. Inside she yearned to feel the weightlessness of true flight, not the gravity of being ground-bound. Still, flying the Akantha down to a world was almost as joyful as flying the winds of Nest. Briefly she hoped this exploration would yield devices that might help her people defend their world. At the least she would again observe the risk-taking of her captain. That she looked forward to.

  Meander exhaled through her lower abdomen breathing spiracles. The destruction of the three guardian orbitals was a relief. Of course such had occurred when they approached other Harl worlds. But she always felt uncertain whenever she exited any Gate, on the way to a new world. She wished this was her home world with its yellow-orange star K-class star. Perhaps there would be clues among the ruins as to the Gate patterns in this part of the galaxy. She hoped so. Past ruins had contained carved imagery on hallway walls. But no Harl memory nodes had ever been found. Such nodes might contain Gate locations. She kept hoping for such a listing of Gates. The last two employer jobs had rewarded her with a record of the Gates in this part of the galaxy’s third arm. Which Captain Vitades called the Centaurus-Carina Arm. Other species had other names for the arm. What mattered to her was the type of star associated with each Gate. She touched her panel with her right griparm, adding ultraviolet to the image of the Harl city that appeared on her pedestal’s vidscreen. UV emissions sometimes marked power locations. She blinked as purple glows filled the city image.

  “Captain! The city below is highly energized! High UV emissions detected!”

  Jake looked away from the expanding city image to the four-legged person who resembled a praying mantis. Meander’s compound eyes were looking down at her pedestal’s vidscreen.

  “Akantha! Report energy emissions!”

  I was about to do just that. No need to be so angry-sounding.

  I grit my teeth. Then breathed deep. I am not angry. I am impatient.

  As you wish.

  “Multiple energy emissions are being detected from the city below,” the AI said, sounding musically happy. “I detect emissions of neutrinos, antineutrinos, quarks, hadrons, positrons and gravitons, in addition to infrared and UV dense locations.”

  “Are we being scanned?”

  “Yes. A tower next to the central plaza is scanning us with a hadron beam. Infrared and UV beams are also scanning us.”

  I did not like this news. “Display emission locations and beam sources.”

  “Displaying.”

  The front vidscreen grew a new image to the left of the real-time daylight image of the Harl city. Outlines of the buildings looked like they had a case of measles. Or the Spotted Fever. “What is the source of the emissions? Where are the fusion reactors?”

  “There are no fusion reactors per se in the city. There are seven locations which emit most of the particles I just listed.”

  I frowned. “Akantha, what kind of power generator is located at those seven locations? While neutrino emissions are normal for fusion reactors, gravitons are not produced by fusion reactions.”

  “You are correct. But a spin-2 field is being generated at each location. That gravity production is identical to the field produced by this vessel’s gravplates.” She paused, an action that drew my attention. “Neutrinos produced from the seven locations include electron, muon and tau neutrinos, along with up and down quarks. All in abundance. In fact the neutrino production exceeds the 85 billion neutrinos per second per square centimeter produced by your Human star. And other stars. Something with the power of a star occupies each location. And one location is the tower that is scanning us.”

  I swallowed hard. Prior Harl ruins I’d visited often had one or two fusion reactors supplying power to a few stone buildings and sometimes a few mobile bots. Our vessel had been scanned at three locations. One location had possessed guardian orbitals like the three we’d destroyed. But most Harl locations really were dead. Energy wise, at least. Deadfalls, dropholes and airless chambers did not need power to kill. Just step the wrong way or enter the wrong chamber and you could be dead long before your plasma torch could cut through the artificially hardened stone that allowed Harl cities to survive for 400 millennia. I looked to my employer.

  “Laserta, I have never visited a Harl city that is this energy alive. I suggest we orbit and—”

  “Land us! Or refund my fee,” she barked harshly.

  Hard to do since I’d spent half the fee on fuel, payroll and supplies. I looked to Flow. “Pilot, land us in the central plaza.”

  “Flying to the central plaza,” she chirped.

  Flow’s tail feathers stiffened even more, a sign she was both excited and worried. Her wing feathers had fluffed out, a sign she was ready to take flight away from a predator. A shudder in the ship brought me out of my musing.

  “Captain! The vessel is not responding to my piloting!” she chirped sharply. “We are being pulled down by something.”

  “Akantha! What is happening?”

  Remarkable. “Our vessel is being pulled down by a gravity beam. It is coming from the scanning tower. It appears something in that tower wishes us to land in the plaza.”

  “Can we break free?”

  “No. Or likely not. Attempting to break free using both magfield and fusion pulse drives would likely stress my vessel’s molecular joining. I have no wish to be partitioned.”

  Damn. Double damn. Triple. “How can this be happening?”

  I repeat your expletives. “A location with the power of a star can bend space-time. It can also generate large amounts of gravitons, which are the particles that make up gravity waves. We are being pulled down by a focused gravity wave of gravitons. It could be worse.”

  Worse! “How worse?”

  “The tower location could simply bend space-time and immediately transport us to the plaza surface. I do not know what would happen to biological lifeforms involved in crossing a space-time threshold.”

  My mouth felt dry. We were caught in a projectible gravity beam. We were descending to a city powered by the energies equal to seven stars. No Harl ruin had ever been reported as being this alive. It made me wonder if there was an AI in the city. And if so, would it allow us to leave?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Flow felt as if she was plummeting with a broken wing. The gravity beam was drawing them down too fast.

  “Captain! If we keep descending at this rate we will crash!”

  “Push against the planet’s magnetic field with the magfield drive!”

  She drew her wing-hand across her magfield control. Output increased. Their descent speed remained the same. “No change!”

  Flow heard the captain’s hand digits tap his seat arm. “Akantha, would it help to add the fusion pulse thrust?”

  “Definitely not,” the AI sang. “The strength of this beam is equal to ten Jupiters or 24 gees. This vessel could not escape such a high gravity field if we ever set down on such a massive planet. Or rather a star. Your Sun’s surface gravity is equal to 28 gees.”

  Flow saw the distance counter drop rapidly as its numbers got smaller. Then the drop slowed. Relief filled her. “Captain! Our descent is slowing. We are on a vector track to land on the part of the central plaza that is next to the scanning tower.”

  “Good. Whatever is doing this does not want us dead.”

  Sharp Cla
w disagreed with Vitades’ conclusion. This gravity beam could easily lift their vessel up and bring it down hard against the planet’s surface. Just because it is allowing them to land in one piece proves nothing about future intentions.

  “Captain Vitades, I recommend firing on the gravity beam emitter. We have a clear line of sight. Our belly plasma mount could destroy the tower portion emitting this beam.”

  “No!” the Human yelled sharply. “Firing on any part of this city could result in weapons elsewhere firing on us. We are alive and in a controlled descent. Let’s see what happens after we land.”

  Draken shared the reptile’s concern. While he was disappointed there were no fusion reactors below which he could embrace, this Harl city was dangerously alive. He would be needed to spot any energy surges during their surface travel. An energy surge would be emitted by any weapon, mobile bot or powered building.

  “Captain, take me with you. I am able to detect energy surges from a distance.”

  The Human sighed. “My vidtablet can also detect energy emissions. Along with creating three-dee maps of any structure we enter. It also serves as a route tracker so I never get lost. You know this from our prior ruin visits.”

  Draken did know that. “True. But we have never before visited a ruin this energy alive. Extra senses will improve our group safety.”

  A moment passed. “You may join our exploration team,” came the captain’s voice as honking in his right and left ear pits.

  Relief and excitement filled him.

  Lotan felt worry at the presence of such a powerful device as the gravity beamer. His control gestures and pheromones had no effect on non-living devices. Then again, dealing with devices was the task of a mind, especially one trained in the diversity of species who inhabited the galaxy. He would cope with this exploration. Assuming the captain invited him to be on the team. If not, he would focus on his practice of friendly chatting with the AI Akantha. Casual chatting with the AI was a job he had chosen four cycles ago when he realized the value of the Tessene vessel. Causing the AI to feel comfortable with him was an extension of his gesture control abilities. A comfortable AI should be receptive to an offer to bond with it, if the captain every entered the afterlife on one of these ruin visits. Which could be years into the future. Patience was a cultural pattern of his Torsen species. He would be patient for as long as needed.