As Harold stepped into the lab, however, he had to duck as a chunk of permafrost smashed into the wall next to him and shattered into a hundred pieces.
Ramona Wolastoq stood next to a series of machines that Harold didn’t recognize, clearly glaring at the results of whatever scan she’d run on the piece of frozen dirt she’d just destroyed. Four of her students were gathered around the equipment as well, apparently unbothered by their leader nearly taking out a starship Captain.
“We’re done for now,” Wolastoq snapped. “Go get some rest; we’ll have a new round of samples in a few hours.”
“Yes, Doctor,” the students chorused before trooping out. They’d all slipped out the door before Wolastoq even realized that Harold was there.
“What do you want, Captain?” she snapped. “I’m busy.”
“Yelling at your students and breaking samples, yes, I noticed,” Harold agreed, surprised at how much he enjoyed the flash of not-quite-anger that ran through her eyes in response. “I wanted to check in, Doctor, and see how you were doing.”
“I don’t need a nursemaid, Captain. I know how this works.”
“Agreed,” Harold said calmly, smiling as Wolastoq’s eyes widened in surprise before she controlled herself again. “And I don’t, so I was hoping you could give me an update.”
“Fine,” she snapped. “Come with me.”
The Amerindian xenoarchaeologist led him past the equipment to an array of storage drawers, each neatly labeled.
“We have space to store twelve hundred soil or artifact samples,” she told him. “We’re full on soil samples; I’m starting to discard the oldest as new samples come in.” She glanced at the mess by the door.
“Usually, admittedly, with more care than that.” She sighed.
“No luck, I take it?”
“Well, I can tell you a lot about this plateau, but not much of use.”
“Give me the rundown, Doctor?” Harold asked.
“Ice cores tell me that this rock is more habitable right now than it has been in the last million or so years,” Wolastoq replied. “This is a permafrost zone now, but it has life. That’s a development of the last fifty thousand years or so.
“Plateau or not, this place was under two meters of ice a hundred thousand years ago, and that’s been its constant state for most of its history,” she continued. “If anyone settled here, they had a far higher tolerance for cold than we do.”
“Some of the races we’ve encountered do,” he argued.
“But every race we’ve encountered requires liquid water,” she snapped back. “Same for Imperial records. Average annual temperature in this place is somewhere around minus fifteen Celsius right now, and it’s warm compared to the historical average.”
“So, any settlement would be technological, but anything that wasn’t wouldn’t have attracted the attention it did,” Harold replied. “Any signs?”
“That’s what all of this is,” Wolastoq said flatly, gesturing at the rows of sample drawers. “Every one of these is a chunk of soil where something triggered as abnormal. We’re finding a lot of little oddities, but nothing that will let us trace a source.”
She shook her head.
“I can tell you, Captain, that there is something here.” She gestured for him to follow her and led him to a map on the wall with a mass of glowing green, yellow, and orange dots.
“I don’t know what,” she admitted. “There’s no pattern to any of this. Green dots flagged as abnormal but nothing unusual when we scanned them here. Yellow dots are samples where we confirmed artificial radiation of various ages.
“Orange dots are just weird.” Wolastoq shook her head. “They all share a specific makeup, but it’s like fragments of something ended up in them—but those fragments are like nothing I’ve ever seen or heard of.”
She slid a hand into the haptic control field over the map and blanked the green dots.
“There’s no pattern to what’s left,” she told him. “No center point I can identify yet—we thought we had one, but…” Wolastoq gestured to the soil sample she’d thrown at the wall. “That sample was from what I thought was the center point, and it shows no signs of any abnormality at all.”
Harold studied the map. There was something there, something that the back of his mind insisted was a pattern, but he couldn’t see it. He shook his head.
“I’m guessing you have the solution?” he asked brightly.
Wolastoq chuckled bitterly.
“The key is time, Captain. In two senses: first, that it’s going to take time to analyze enough of the samples to break down enough of the pattern to find whatever we’re missing; and second, that whatever we’re looking is from a specific time, and there’s enough movement in the permafrost here that things move quite quickly on a geological time scale.”
She shrugged.
“So, we estimate the movement and backtrack in time,” she concluded. “That gives us an idea, but…so far, I’m not getting anything useful.”
Harold continued looking at the map.
“Can you run that backtrack for me?” he asked. “Something in here is ringing a bell, but I’m not sure what.”
“Sure, certainly I’m feeling blind right now,” Wolastoq told him.
The dots moved, following clear currents of the underlying soil and ice—currents that flowed on timescales of centuries, not minutes. The yellow dots…there was no pattern there. Something had flooded seemingly random chunks of the plateau with hard rads.
“Wait, stop,” he told her as the orange dots, the strange debris, formed a pattern he did know. “I think I know your problem,” he continued as he studied the frozen source of samples. “I know that pattern, and it won’t have a single point source.”
“What do you mean?” the xenoarchaeologist demanded grouchily, her glare returning.
He pulled out his communicator unit, an updated version of the scroll-like device the UESF had used, and rolled it open. He didn’t have access to Hope’s network from there, but the communicator was still linked in to Liberty, and the heavy cruiser had the files he was looking for.
“Here.” He passed her the unit. “That’s the debris pattern for when the wreckage of Geneva went down over the Australian Outback.”
He tried not to wince at the orbital photos. Like the video he kept on his desk in his office aboard Liberty, it was a reminder of loss. His lover had died farther out, the wreckage of Queen of England retrieved from deep space and scrapped to help build Manticore and Griffon, but Geneva had gone down in the same battle.
The pattern was clear and, while it didn’t quite match the one on the Corellian Plateau, the similarity was there.
“Geneva was already dead when she came down,” he half-whispered. “She was coming apart as she burnt up; very little hit the ground intact in the end. But irradiated soil and hull fragments were found all along a fifteen-kilometer track before that final impact.”
“That…makes sense,” Wolastoq told him, her voice and eyes gentler than they had been before. “A ship, damaged but not destroyed—so, less particulate but more radiation than Geneva. The track might help us find the crash site, but…”
She shook her head.
“What?” he asked.
“It’s the timeline, Captain,” she admitted. “The crash pattern lines up with the radiation dating, and that’s part of why I was thinking the rad date was from something else.
“That pattern is fifty-six thousand years old, and no one we know of, not even the Mesharom, had space travel that long ago.”
Harold whistled softly. Everything he’d heard put the rough “start of galactic civilization” with the first Mesharom hyperspace flights, forty-something thousand years earlier. If the Mesharom weren’t inherently a slow-paced, slow-breeding, somewhat lazy race, they’d have ruled the entire galaxy.
A starship from before the start of known civilization was something very, very new.
Before he could say more, however, th
e com unit in Wolastoq’s hands started flashing and she quickly passed it back to him.
“Rolfson here,” he answered it.
“Sir, this is Lyon,” his tactical officer greeted him. “We have a major hyper portal in the outer system. I recommend you get back aboard immediately.”
Harold nodded instantly.
“I need to get to the shuttles,” he told Lyon swiftly. “I’ll be aboard in five minutes; get the ship ready to deploy.”
He turned back to Wolastoq.
“Have fun, Doctor,” he told her with a grin. “I need to go earn my paycheck.”
Her responding smile was the first one he’d actually seen out of the woman.
#
Vice Admiral Pat Kurzman stood calmly on the flag deck of the super-battleship Emperor of China, second of its name after the first had died at the Second Battle of Sol. Emperor brought up the rear of his little formation, with President Washington leading the way through the massive hyper portal the first capital ship had opened.
Between the two immense warships was their collection of escorts and escortees. Four Thunderstorm-class heavy cruisers and eight Capital-class destroyers plus half a dozen freighters and colliers. Half of the Duchy of Terra Militia’s cruisers and a third of their destroyers and super-battleships had been sent on this mission.
With the regular patrol deployments, like the one Liberty was on, that left Tornado and the three Laian attack cruisers under Commodore Tidikat as the only cruisers in Sol. Villeneuve had kept the lion’s share of the Duchy’s capital ships in Sol, but most of the Militia’s lighter units were now scattered through the Kovius Zone, that forty-light-year sphere around Terra that was part of the Imperium—but belonged to humanity.
The Kovius Treaty guaranteed those systems to humanity, and the Imperium honored that by granting the Duchy ownership rights of those worlds. The Duchy only ruled Sol itself, but it would maintain an economic interest in every world in the Kovius Zone—and at least the first wave of colonists would be human.
For now, Hope was the only established human colony, and Pat was there—a small but still unfortunate number of light-years away from his husband—to make sure it was safe. No matter what.
Technically, that was the Imperial Navy’s responsibility, but the nearest Fleet Base was almost two weeks’ travel away. Sol was right next door and no one was going to argue the Militia had no interest in defending Hope.
“President Washington has handed over portal maintenance,” his chief of staff, Commander Heng Chan, informed him. The tall and painfully gaunt Chinese man was part of the massive number of Chinese Party members who’d been trained in secret to counter the UESF if it became a problem—crews and personnel who’d eventually been used to man the Militia’s capital ships against the Kanzi.
Many had died in Sol’s defense, and many more had gone home once it was over, but there’d been enough of them, combined with the original large Chinese contingent in the UESF, that the Chinese were the single largest ethnic group in the Duchy Militia.
“Captain Fang reports that Emperor’s emitters are holding the portal without problems; we will be passing through in sixty seconds,” Chan continued. “There are no problems with portal stability or any of the ships.”
“Thank you, Heng,” Pat replied. It had taken a few more days to get the task group in motion than he’d liked, but the Duchy of Terra Militia wasn’t actually set up for rapid deployment. It was a primarily defensive force, after all.
“The colliers?” he asked.
“Transiting now,” Chan confirmed. The true center of the Militia formation was the six colliers, loaded with missiles, spare parts, food and fuel. Hydrogen for the fusion cores could be acquired from any gas giant or ice asteroid, but the antimatter that fuelled the primary cores was harder to come by.
“We are thirty seconds from emergence, doing a final safety scan,” Lieutenant Commander Tran reported. The bleached-pale Vietnamese officer studied his screens. “Wait, what is that?”
“What have you got?” Pat demanded.
“Fifteen seconds to emergence,” Chan reported. “We can’t break off now unless it’s critical.”
“No, just another portal opening. I’ve got—”
Emperor of China flashed through the portal into the Alpha Centauri system, normal space settling in as the portal collapsed automatically behind them.
“I’ve got nothing,” Tran repeated after a moment. “Somebody opened a hyper portal as we were entering, trying to use ours as a shield from the colony’s sensors, I think.
“They didn’t get the timing quite right, but I didn’t get anything on the ship, either. Too far away.”
“Pull sensor data from the task group and inform Captain Rolfson and Commander Teykay that we’ll need all of their sensor data as well,” Pat ordered. “If someone was lurking in Centauri, I want to know who.”
If he was being watched, he needed to know who was watching. There were friends in the area, after all…but there were also enemies and people who could easily become either.
And the last people who’d been in Centauri with stealth fields had killed an Imperial flag officer.
#
It took nearly ten minutes after Harold arrived on his bridge to confirm that the battle division that had just arrived in Centauri was friendly. The Militia ships had emerged at “only” three light minutes, but that still meant a six-minute two-way communication lag.
“Vice Admiral Kurzman, welcome to Alpha Centauri,” he greeted his superior officer. “I gladly yield command authority of the Alpha Centauri System to you. Things have been quiet since the attack, but I’m glad to see backup—and just as glad to see your munitions colliers and couriers!”
Plus, the two super-battleships had starcom receivers, which meant Sol, at least, could communicate with Centauri instantly now. Hope’s starcom receiver was on order, supposed to arrive in a few months. A full starcom installation was a massive two-year construction project; Sol’s was relatively new and it would easily be five to ten years before the minor colony at Hope could justify it.
He sent the message and glanced around his bridge.
“Any oddities on the sensors?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Saab told him. “It’s been dead as a doornail around here, like nothing ever happened.” The XO shivered delicately. “It’s creepy. Would almost have preferred a second wave.”
“If there’s a second wave, I’m glad they held off,” Harold replied. “I’d rather run them into super-battleships than try and fight them with no missiles.”
“Aye,” his XO agreed. “The lance was more effective than hoped, but I wouldn’t want to fight a battle with it as our only weapon.”
Harold settled into his command chair, studying his repeaters as he refreshed himself with the status of his command. They still had no missiles but were over eighty percent on their antimatter and hydrogen stocks.
With the warships headed his way at forty-five percent of lightspeed, the transmission delay was dropping rapidly, and it appeared that Kurzman had replied immediately.
“Captain Rolfson, it’s good to see you,” Harold’s old Captain told him. “I assume command of the Alpha Centauri System.
“I’m glad to hear things have been quiet, but I’m now concerned that may have been a false impression,” the Admiral continued. “We picked up someone entering hyperspace as we were exiting, trying to use our portal as a shield for theirs.
“We didn’t get much information on them, but Captain Fang’s staff have narrowed down the real-space locus of the portal. His people will be sending over the data momentarily, and I’ll want you and the Imperial ships to review everything you have on that chunk of space.
“If nothing else,” Kurzman noted grimly, “we know we can find a stealth field if we take enough time.”
That was not good. The strange Kanzi had used stealth fields, but their version had required atmosphere to function. It had been useful for a landing assaul
t but hadn’t enabled them to hide in space.
The only people with proper stealth fields were the Core Powers.
“Do we have the data?” he asked Lyon.
“It’s coming in now.”
“Relay it to Teykay,” he ordered. “And then have CIC take it apart with a fine-toothed comb. If someone was hiding in this system…” He shook his head.
“With that close of a locus, we’ll be able to tell if there was a ship with a stealth field present,” Lyon promised. “We’ll find them, sir.”
#
Chapter 12
Harold reported aboard Emperor of China shortly after the super-battleship made orbit, leaving Liberty once more in the charge of his XO. Commander Teykay landed shortly after him, and he waited for the Rekiki officer before heading to the conference room.
“It seems everything was less quiet than we thought,” the big centaur-like lizard rumbled to Harold. “Too many mysteries in this system; you humans seem to attract trouble.”
“I wish we’d stop,” Harold told Teykay. “Three years of quiet was not enough—and that’s if you even count the long-cycle after the battle as quiet!”
Teykay chuckled. For six months—an Imperial long-cycle—after the Kanzi had attacked Sol, the massed battle squadrons of the Imperium and the Theocracy had glared each other from border fortifications all along the line. In the end, there’d been peace, but it had been an uneasy few months.
Especially for the Terrans, who had had no ability to influence the outcome of events but whose vulnerability had been clearly demonstrated.
“Commander, Captain, come in, come in,” Kurzman ordered as they reached the conference room. Captain Hu Fang stood at one end of the long dark-gray table while the Admiral occupied the other. The junior captains of the task group were scattered along it, though chairs had been left next to the Admiral for Harold and Teykay.
Well, a bench in Teykay’s case. The Rekiki couldn’t sit comfortably on human chairs.
Terra and Imperium (Duchy of Terra Book 3) Page 10
