Vorpal Blade (ARC)

by John Ringo

  * * *

  "And we're . . . done," Lyle said. "Step out and let's key it to you."

  "Hell of a job, man," Berg said, climbing out of the armor. "Like a grapping glove."

  "You're welcome," the armorer said, then hit the hatch close button. "Okay, palm on the pad."

  Under the right armpit was a hand-print pad. If the user wasn't in the armor, it could only be opened by the user, the unit armorer, the first sergeant or the CO.

  "State your last name, first name and rank," Lyle said.

  "Bergstresser, Eric, PFC."

  "Team name?"

  "Two-Gun," Berg said with a wince.

  "And you're keyed," Lyle said, starting to put away his tools. "But if you've got a few minutes, come on by the armory."

  "Okay," Berg said. "Can I give you a hand with that?"

  "No offense, but nobody touches my tools," Lyle replied, looking up at him and grinning. "You know, except good looking ladies of inappropriate age."

  "Gotcha, man," Berg said.

  * * *

  "What in the grapp is that?" Berg asked, as Lyle set the gun on the counter.

  "It's a really grapped up pistol," Lyle replied. "I started with some parts from a Barrett M-63. See, the Wyverns don't have a pistol system . . ."

  The pistol was massive. Berg could pick it up with one hand, but only by cradling it. There was no way to get a hand around the grip. Forward of the grip was the magazine.

  "What's it fire?" Berg said, then paused. "Wait, the Sixty-Three is a damned .50 caliber system!"

  "I don't know if it can actually be used," Lyle pointed out. "The Wyvern's only got two fingers and a thumb. It might rotate out of your hand."

  "You don't want me to try this thing, do you?" Berg protested.

  "Hey, you're the one called Two-Gun, not me," the armorer whispered. "I don't even have a Wyvern."

  Berg paused at that. He wasn't sure what the specialty of the armorer had been before his accident, but he was probably infantry. Now he just got to fix the toys, not play with them.

  "If I strap this on, I will get unending maulk," Berg pointed out. "And Top will blow a gasket."

  "If we get the chance, though, will you at least try it out?" Josh asked. "I'll square it with Top."

  "If I get a chance."

  "Shiny. 'Cause I made two."

  "All hands! All hands! Stand by for Chill! We Be Chillin'!"

  "Maulk," Berg said. "Again?"

  "Still getting over the pink stuff?"

  "I'm never going to get over it at this rate . . ."

  * * *

  "I'm dying in data!" Dr. Dean half screamed. "And now they want a planetary survey!"

  "Sir, if I could recommend," Runner said, looking up from his computer screen. "Doing a planetary survey is grunt work. I can run the scope. You keep working on the data from Saturn."

  "Good idea, Runner," the doctor said, picking up two two-liter bottles of generic cola and looking at them balefully. One was full, one nearly empty. He carefully opened the full one, poured part of it into the empty until both were slightly over half full, sealed both and shook them vigorously. Then he opened the cap on one, let the air hiss out, shook it again and took a swig. "For a soldier, you're not entirely stupid."

  "Thanks for the compliment," the master sergeant muttered, unlatching his chair and rolling it over to the telescope controls.

  The main scope for the Blade was mounted where a periscope would normally be on a sub. Runner first extended the scope, then swiveled it into working position. Then he entered the survey command.

  Now that they were in a stable orbit around the sun, the boat was probably moving at a notably different velocity than the planets. By taking fifteen-minute-long duration shots of the sky in quadrants looking "outward" from the sun, he got six "plates" of the sky. They were actually detailed Flexible Image Transport System, or FITS, graphic files but the term plate went back to when astronomers would use actual photographic plates for the same purpose.

  Mostly older astronomers used plates; the newer ones talked about files or digital images. Dr. Dean had started out with a thirty-five millimeter camera as a kid before video cameras and frame grabbers were available. He was in the generation that was between the older astronomers and the new kids on the block like Runner. But Dean didn't think of Runner as an astronomer. He was a stupid soldier, not a scientist. Which was why Runner called the files FITS at every opportunity.

  Since planets were probably going to be moving at a notably different velocity than the boat, any planet facing the sun, and therefore bright in the sky, would turn up as a streak. What used to be a laborious human process was now all managed by computers. Stars turned up as dots. Planets turned up as streaks. A rather simple program found the streaks and highlighted them. An only slightly more complex program could determine orbits, debris, velocities, and distances.

  Each of the shots required fifteen minutes of exposure, but they could be used for purposes other than just the planetary survey. Ever since man had looked up at the stars he'd been wondering "just how far away are those damned things?" He'd eventually gotten past thinking they were glued to the top of the sky, but scientists were still scratching their heads about most of them. The easiest way to compute a distance is called triangulation. Look at something from two different angles, do a bit of simple math and you know exactly how far away something is.

  The problem with that with stars was, well, the only place they'd been observed from was Earth. Even the "parallax" of the Earth's orbit around the sun wasn't enough to help much with extremely distant stars. Astronomers, historically, would take plates of the night sky in the winter and then compare them to plates taken in the summer. This allowed for parallax with a separation between measurements of nearly two hundred million miles. But when talking about the universe, that was not near far enough for really good triangulation.

  So, clever astronomers figured out others ways to get fairly accurate measurements of star distances by using things called Cepheid Variables. Cepheid Variables are a type of star that blinks in brightness with a clocklike periodicity. The period of the blinking is directly tied to how bright the star should be due to the physics of the star's inner makeup. So if a certain Cepheid was blinking at a given rate, then astronomers knew exactly how bright it should be. By measuring how bright it looked in the sky they could determine just how far away it was, since stars appear dimmer with distance as a one over the distance squared type law.

  The Cepheid Variable measurement method was the best way to make deep sky measurements, but the process is much less accurate than good old triangulation. Now being able to use triangulation with many light-years distance on the parallax leg would allow for an amazingly detailed survey of the galaxy. But that would take time.

  Runner took as many shots as he could to store away in the database. Astronomers could use the data and analyze it for many years to come. If he ever had the time, Lieutenant Commander Weaver probably wouldn't mind taking a gander at the data in more detail himself, but Runner doubted the commander would ever have another free moment as long as he lived.

  For the first time man was looking at stars from a completely different direction. Before the mission was done it was intended that the entire sphere be swept so that every star in the catalogue could be viewed from another angle.

  And soon they would get images from really far away from the sun and . . .

  While the computer was chuckling over the planetary data, Runner extended a second scope, less powerful than the main but still good enough, and started hunting around by eye. Epsilon Eridani had two planets already detected, both gas giants. But one of the gas giants was at only two astronomical units away from the star. That was right at the edge of the potential life zone of E Eridani.

  The life zone of a star was the zone in which the star's luminosity provided enough heat to keep water from freezing but not boiling it. Between 0 and 100 degrees Celsius. For Sol, the home star of Earth, t
hat range was from .95 astronomical units out to 1.5, technically. There was a straightforward calculation to calculate the zone based on a star's luminosity.

  Life zone was an important factor in the potential development of life. Every form of life humans had found by going through the Looking Glasses was based on water to one degree or another. So having liquid water was a given.

  Brighter stars, the really hot ones like Vega, would have very broad life zones, if they even had planets rather than just an accretion disks of debris, while cooler ones, such as E Eridani, had very narrow life zones. Based purely on that, life was more likely to be found around hot stars. However, another necessity was sufficient time for life to develop. And hot stars had very short lives. It took about three billion years for the first life to develop on earth after it cooled. A sun like Vega might only last a couple of billion years, leaving behind cold, dead planets.

  On the other hand, smaller cooler stars such as E Eridani, while they lasted a long time, had very narrow life zones. And the life zone changed over time, generally getting closer to the sun and narrower as the star cooled. For that matter, planets close in had a tendency to become tidally locked as the moon was with earth, one side always facing the star. While life could develop in those conditions, it was unlikely.

  That was why the current survey had intended to concentrate on stars much like Sol. G class stars lasted a long time but had relatively broad life zones.

  The kicker to all that theory was the experience humans had developed through surveying the planets on the other side of the Looking Glass portals and planets in the Sol system. The first thing that was noted was that greenhouse gases played an important part in whether or not a planet was habitable. Venus, in the Sol system, was right on the inner edge of the life zone. But Venus' atmosphere was so choked with greenhouse gases that the surface temperature was nearly 400 degrees C. Mars, too, was right at the edge of the life zone, on the chillier side. But Mars had virtually no greenhouse gases in its limited atmosphere. If humans could somehow switch their atmospheres, the two planets would be marginally habitable.

  Planets on the other side of the Looking Glass had a tendency to be pretty poor. The portals had connected mostly to planets of some long gone race that had once used a similar system and had left behind inactive bosons. Most of the planets were in fading life zones, either those where the sun was starting to flare up in death or too cooled off to support life. Some of the planets appeared to have been terraformed, that is they had had extensive work done to them to make them habitable. That long gone race, perhaps the same race that made the warp engine for the Blade, had done the equivalent of switching Mars' and Venus' atmospheres.

  But they showed that, depending on a huge number of factors, the life zone of a planet could be about twice as large as first thought.

  Furthermore, it was apparent that while life could crop up under the oddest conditions, only a certain number of types turned up. So far in all the planets surveyed only four different biologies had been found. Two of those, human and Adar, were "green" biologies. That is, both used something that looked more or less like chlorophyll as a basic energy gathering system. One was "blue" and the last was "red."

  Given that over forty planets had been found with some sort of life, there should, by straight evolutionary principles, have been forty different biologies. Instead there were four. Chloro A, Chloro B, Blue and Red.

  Biologists and paleontologists were engaged in a hot debate about just why this was the case. The arguments fell into two broad categories: statistical genesis and panspermia.

  Statistical genesis argued that when life was developing there were a limited number of functional ways it could occur. An infinite number of monkeys might try to start life, but only four were likely to take. Panspermists called this the "by guess and by gosh" theory.

  Panspermists believed that either by the actions of some long gone race or due to microscopic survivors hitching a ride on rocks scattered into space, all life had originated in only four different conditions and then spread through the galaxy.

  What statistical genesists said about panspermists wasn't fit to print. "Creationism by another name . . ." and it went downhill from there.

  Runner had kept up with all the theoretical discussions even before he was volunteered to this mission. He just liked the debates and theories. So when he was hunting around he had a specific mission. The inner planet of E Eridani was well outside the theoretical life zone. But he kept in mind that word: "Theoretical." There were so many theories being crushed by this mission, he wasn't willing to settle for "theory."

  The planet itself was unlikely to have life. It was a gas giant, a super-massive planet of nothing but gas and metallic gas, gas crushed under so much pressure it turned solid. In fact, it was possible that the "planet," which was bigger than Jupiter, had been a brief-lived sun. But gas giants usually had rocky moons. And if the moon had enough CO2 . . .

  He finally found what he was looking for and let out an exclamation.

  "Have we found a planet?" Dr. Dean said, looking up from the Saturn data.

  "I believe Doctors Campbell, Walter and Yang actually found the planet," Runner said. "But we just found a very high albedo moon."

  "What?" Dean said, standing up and walking over, bottle of soda in hand. "Is that the thirty-centimeter aperture telescope or the one meter?"

  "Thirty," Runner said. "The one-meter scope is doing the survey."

  "Stop it and zoom in . . ." Dr. Dean said excitedly. "Do we have a spectroscopic analysis yet . . . ?"

  "Doc," Runner said, shaking his head. "Why don't we just have the captain drive us over there?"

  "Oh, yes," Dr. Dean said, blinking. "Perhaps that would be best."

  He opened up the bottle of soda and took a swig, for once forgetting his ritual. Of course, when he tasted the slight carbonation, he blew half of it all over the console.

  * * *

  "Okay, this just isn't happening," Weaver said, looking at the forward viewscreen. "Tell me we didn't find the Forest Moon of Endor."

  "The what?" the XO asked.

  "Star Wars," the CO replied. "That place the Ewoks lived."

  "Oh," the XO replied. "Not much forest. Looks like mostly ice."

  The planet was mostly ice. A very solid glacial zone extended almost to the equator. And what there was of the rest looked like mostly ocean. A few small dots of islands had been detected, but that was about the only land. Unless you counted the glaciers.

  "Hoth, then," Weaver replied.

  "Actually," the CO said, looking at an internal e-mail, "Dr. Dean has stated that it should be named Dean's World."

  "Figures," Weaver said, grinning. "He can have it. It's way outside the standard habitable zone. The only reason it's not frozen solid is that it has a higher CO2 level than Adar. So the air isn't breathable to humans. And it's gonna be cold. Wyverns all the way."

  "Is that a recommendation that we do a ground survey, Astro?" the captain asked.

  "It's there, sir," Bill said, shrugging. "This is what we came for. To do a local survey, find habitable planets, look for signs of life. Figure out what the planets outside the portal planets are like. Yes, sir. I think we should do a ground survey. Just because it looks like a cold ball of ice . . ."

  "Agreed," the CO said. "But we're not just looking for habitable planets. I want a full system sweep before we commit to a landing. It would be nice to know if there are any Dreen in the system before we're sitting ducks on the ground."

  12

  There's One In Every Unit

  "I was told to report to Ops?" Berg said, looking through the open hatch of the operations office.

  "You Berg?" the staff sergeant behind the desk said with a frown. There was a nameplate on the desk with a faux brass plate that read "Staff Sergeant Mark Driscoll, Operations." "Enter."

  "Yes, Staff Sergeant," Berg said, stepping into the office and coming to parade rest.

  "You're up on the si
mulator," the staff sergeant said. "Which is totally grapping up my training schedule. So get it right the first time. You've been in the sim before?"

  "Yes, Staff Sergeant."

  "Then you know the deal," presumably Staff Sergeant Driscoll said. "Come on."

  Driscoll led Berg back to his Wyvern and hit the hatch button. When the hatch didn't open he hit the armor with his fist.

  "It's already keyed, Staff Sergeant," Berg said delicately.

  "Then open it," the staff sergeant snarled.

  "Bergstresser, Eric, PFC," Berg said, laying his hand on the palm-pad. The armor still refused to open so he closed his eyes and grimaced. "Two-Gun."

  Then the armor opened. He wasn't sure if the voice analysis was just off for his name or if Lyle had grapped with him, but it opened and that was the important part.

  "Get in," Driscoll snapped. When Berg was snapped into his position, the operations sergeant leaned in and replaced a module on the inside of the pilot's compartment. "Training module. See you in six hours. Have fun."

  "Maulk," Berg muttered as the hatch closed. Nobody spent six hours in sim training. The staff sergeant was clearly just glad to have him out of his hair.

  But it was too late to protest. The VR mod was already starting and Eric saw his orders scrolling up in front of his eyes. Move to the corner of the street and recon for enemy positions.

  "Shiny," he said. "Let's dance."

  * * *

  "Six hours?" Jaenisch snarled. "Is Driscoll grapping insane?"

  "I should have brought a puke bag," Berg admitted, grinding his teeth to keep down the nausea.

  Virtual Reality was a very effective training method but not perfect. The problem was that the Wyverns could not actually move. The module that was replaced prevented that, so that the entire training program could be run with the Wyvern still latched into the side of the ship.

  So various motions occurred that disturbed the inner ear. VR could also cause epileptic fits in people who were susceptible. While Berg could have "stepped out" at any time, rapid VR reversion was often worse than space sickness.