Brant got to his feet and rubbed at the back of his neck. “I feel like loading up with weapons…how do you prepare for the unknown?”
“You don’t,” Bedivere said flatly. “We’ll just have to stay alert.”
Brant kissed Lilly soundly. “Thank you for volunteering me.”
She patted his cheek. “Stop complaining. You wanted to go.”
“Come on,” Connell urged, heading for the door.
Bedivere followed him at a more sedate pace, waiting for Brant to catch up with him, although really, he wanted to race to the ship just like Connell was doing, except that Connell was skipping ahead with excitement over a potential adventure, while Bedivere’s chief emotion was worry…with a dose of fear for good measure.
* * * * *
Kashya (Canum III), Canum System, Scutum-Centaurus Arm. FY 10.187
When the Canum star field coalesced on the screens, Connell leaned forward in the co-pilot chair, his eyes widening. “Holy heavens…!”
Bedivere scanned local space both digitally and with his human eyes on the screens and dash readouts, braced and right on the verge of jumping away again. The skin on the back of his neck was crawling with unnamed terror.
The sky was full of ships…at least, he presumed they were ships. He had never seen anything like such craft before.
“They’re not human or Varkan,” Brant breathed.
“They’re not attacking,” Connell whispered. “They’re just sitting there. They must have noticed us by now.”
The ships were all sizes. Big and small, personal craft and behemoths that could carry an entire city. The styling of some of them was almost organic in the graceful curves and sinuous lines. Others were clunky, angled designs bristling with appendages, at least some of which would be weapons, even though nothing attached to the sides of those craft looked like any weapons that Bedivere recognized.
“It’s a junk fleet,” Brant said. “Nothing looks like anything else. It’s as though they’ve collected every craft that could move through space in a straight line.”
“No, there’s different classes,” Connell said in his flat processing voice. “The spiky ones outnumber the others. The smooth ones are the second most common design, even though each ship looks different.” He looked at Brant who stood between the two chairs, holding the backs of them. “They were purpose built. What they did collect was the design.”
Bedivere focused on one of the ships that Connell had described as “spiky”. They did look spiky. The front of the ship, where presumably the flight deck was located, if there was one at all, formed a head, attached to the body of the ship by an articulated and elongated structure that had panels or baffles mounted along the center line. Spikes.
The front of the flight deck had observation windows that glinted crimson in the light of Canum’s red sun.
“Dragons with red eyes,” Brant murmured. “Where’s Kashya?”
“Behind us,” Connell murmured.
“Hang on,” Bedivere said and switched the rear screens into active mode.
The view swapped over and Bedivere caught his breath. “Glave save us…” he muttered, using Brant’s favorite oath. “That isn’t the Kashya we looked at before we jumped.”
“That was an image in the datacore,” Connell said. “This is the real Kashya.”
Kashya, as registered in the datacore star catalogue, was the third planet of Canum. It had a highly inhospitable and thin nitrogen and ammonia atmosphere with a swirling permanent cloud cover. The original generation ship that had built the gates had lost all but a handful of their landing party on the surface. The three survivors had only lived a handful of years after that before needing regeneration, because the atmosphere was corrosive, eating at most metals and humans, too. The ores on the planet were resistant, which made them particularly valuable and explained why someone had registered the mineral rights. If a cheap way of extracting the metals could be found that didn’t kill off their labor too quickly, a profit could be made down below the cloud cover.
What they were staring at now was bare rock face, with patches of green. There was no cloud cover, yet there was a shimmer where the planet curved away from the naked eye.
“Atmosphere,” Bedivere said. “Only…not the atmosphere that used to be there.”
“They changed it?” Brant breathed. “Terraformed it…so quickly?”
“Who are they?” Connell demanded. “No one can terraform a whole planet in a few days or less. We’re still perfecting the technology and even then it takes decades.”
“Wasn’t there a mining colony under a dome, here, Bedivere?” Brant asked. “Where is it?”
“It should be on the dawn line right now,” Bedivere said. He looked at the emerging edge of the slowly turning globe. There was more green, more bare earth and rock. He magnified the view so that something as small as a large house would show.
For long minutes they scanned the section of the globe, quartering it with the long range viewer.
“It’s gone,” Brant said bleakly. “Everything…and everyone.”
“Whatever they use to terraform…it must wipe out everything already in place,” Connell said slowly, staring at the view. “Like a big meteor hitting a planet and destroying the atmosphere.”
Bedivere looked at the armada of ships floating around them, silent and still. “They hit it with something from up here. Something big that destroyed the atmosphere and all life, then replaced it with something they wanted in its place. An atmosphere favorable to them.”
“They’re down there, then?” Connell whispered.
Brant rolled his eyes.
“I think so, yes,” Bedivere told him, except that something was niggling, trying to sit up and talk to him. He left it alone. The idea would arrive when it was ready.
“We should leave,” Brant said. His voice was hoarse. “Someone with the ability to wipe out an entire planetary ecosystem…I don’t want to meet them.”
“We came for information,” Bedivere reminded him. “I’ve been scanning since we landed. I’m nearly done.”
“Who could do this?” Connell was still whispering.
“Hurry up,” Brant urged.
“Hurrying,” Bedivere assured him.
“Who?” Connell said more loudly.
Brant gripped his shoulder. “Not humans. Not Varkan. You said that yourself. We’re still a generation away from perfecting something like this.”
“That leaves….” Connell looked at them, his eyes wide.
“Yes,” Brant agreed.
“Aliens.” Bedivere breathed out the word. “There’s another species in our galaxy, one that can scrape off an entire world and remake it for themselves in the blink of an eye.”
“God above, get us out of here,” Brant begged.
Bedivere jumped.
Chapter Ten
Charlton Space City, New Cathay (Ji Xiu Prime), Ji Xiu System, Perseus Arm. FY 10.187
“We have to tell all the planetary governors, of course,” Devlin said, in a reasonable tone. “Their worlds are as vulnerable as Kashya was, if I understand you properly. Kashya has close to a standard G in gravity and is an ideal size for human habitation. The only thing that made it high risk was the ammonia atmosphere. Now that has been replaced by whatever these aliens consider to be suitable for them. Every inhabited world in the known galaxy has the same gravity specifications, doesn’t it?”
There was a profound silence in response. Bedivere looked around the room. No, not everyone had processed all the implications properly yet. The shock on their faces told him that much.
Catherine, though, merely looked thoughtful. She had already figured out that much, then. She looked at Bedivere directly. “You didn’t see them?”
“Only their ships.”
“And a mottled, rag-tag fleet that was, too,” Connell said. “Different design specifications and philosophies.”
“A remaindered fleet?” she asked him sharply.
&nb
sp; Connell shook his head. “Too many of the same type. They built the ships themselves. They just used a smorgasbord of design approaches to do it.” He was still pale and his fingers were twining in and out of each other as he sat with his head down, his shoulders bowed.
Brant was sipping his way through his second brandy. The first had lasted only a few seconds.
“Stolen technology,” Catherine said softly.
That was when the memory clicked into place and began screaming at him. Bedivere dropped his feet off the arm of the sofa and sat up. “That’s where I’ve seen it before.” He pushed his fingers into his temples, trying to bring the memory into focus.
“Bedivere?” Lilly asked softly. “You’ve remembered something?”
“It’s not all there,” he muttered. “I can’t quite grab it. The spiky ships…I’ve seen them before. Something like them. Remnants.”
Catherine was staring at him, her eyes wide. So were the Varkan pilots who Devlin had brought with him to this hastily called meeting.
“You don’t remember something?” Catherine said. Dismay was etching her face in harsh lines. “How can you not remember?”
Connell lifted his head. “Is it from…?” he asked delicately, with a glance at Devlin and his crew. Even Nichol August was watching him with narrowed eyes.
“The Silent Sector,” Bedivere said flatly. He had to lay it out there for them. This was too important.
“You’ve been in the Silent Sector?” Catherine said. Shock made her voice hoarse.
“A while ago,” Bedivere said briskly, dismissing it. “I don’t remember much. The spikiness, though, I remember. What I saw out there was old. Very old. Ancient.”
“We’ve known for a long time about the alien artifacts out there,” Devlin said slowly, thinking it through. “None of it was whole or workable or told us anything except that there had been another sentient race in the galaxy, a long time ago. Are these the same race, then?”
“No.” Brant shook his head. “If they had been in the Silent Sector all along, we would have met them before now. These aliens steal technology.”
“They stole the spiky ship technology from the ones they found in the Silent Sector,” Catherine said softly. “That’s where they’ve come from. Kashya is only a few light years from where the Last Gate was.”
Bedivere groaned as even more ideas connected up and made a terrifying whole. He looked up. Everyone was staring at him.
“The gates,” he said. “They steal technology. Why wouldn’t they borrow it, too?”
Cat got to her feet, moving as though she couldn’t keep still on the chair. “Oh, hell in a handcart…someone in the Silent Sector must have destroyed the Last Gate to stop them.”
Yennifer had her hands held tightly together. “The Last Gate was destroyed ninety years ago exactly. Griswold, the closest planet beyond the gate, lies a light year beyond it. Travelling at optimum sub-light speed, without the use of gate technology, a ship or a fleet could take ninety years to reach Kashya, which just happens to be the nearest planet with a suitable gravity and sun.”
“Kashya also has a viable set of gates,” Devlin said. He raised his hands to his mouth, as if he was trying to hold in an exclamation, then rubbed his cheeks hard. “They’re using the gates.” His tone was bleak.
“Some would have stayed on Kashya,” Bedivere said. “That’s why there were ships just sitting there, empty. How many more went through the gates?”
“And where are they going to emerge?” Catherine added.
Abruptly, everyone began to speak at once, trying to shout each other down. The fear in the room leapt with the volume.
* * * * *
“Enough!” Devlin roared.
Silence descended. Devlin looked around the room. “Screaming at each other doesn’t do anything constructive. It doesn’t even make you feel better. So for the third time in the last hour, will you please keep your comments civil and take turns?”
Bedivere pulled the brandy decanter across the table toward himself. Brant was sitting on the other side, his tumbler in his hand. He looked exhausted and he looked ill. There were lines around his eyes and his mouth.
“We have to warn everyone,” he said again. “We have to. We don’t know when or where they’re going to emerge, if they will at all. We might be lucky and they screwed up the jump and destroyed themselves by jumping into a wormhole that doesn’t go anywhere and that’s the last we’ll ever see of them.”
“Except there are more of them on Kashya, settling into their new home,” one of the Varkan pilots pointed out. “They could use any of the ships floating around Kashya, dive into the gates and pop out somewhere else.”
“They seem to be adept at using borrowed technology efficiently,” Devlin said gently. “Enough to make it this far into the galaxy.”
“Then blow up the gates at Kashya,” Connell said. “Stop a second bunch from coming through.”
Devlin pointed at him. “That is a good idea,” he said. “It’s not like those gates will be needed in the near future.”
“Why not blow them all up?” Bedivere said.
Everyone rounded on him instantly.
“You can’t!” Lilly cried.
“Humans need the gate technology if Varkans are not at hand,” Devlin said, his voice still gentle and full of diplomatic smoothness. “Too many legacy systems still depend upon the gates that the Varkan have not yet managed to replace with their own services. Food, supplies, resource ships still use them. If you destroyed them, you’d cripple the known worlds and drive us back into the dark ages.”
“Bedivere has a point,” Catherine said. “If they’re using the gates, then we might have to destroy them.”
“If we destroy the gates, we also destroy our major strength—our ability to cross the galaxy quickly is what binds the known worlds together and makes them strong,” Devlin countered.
“May I interrupt?” Yennifer said, her sweet voice lifting a little higher. Like many of the people in the room, she was still on her feet, her fingers twined tightly together. Zoey, her AI, stood next to her, waiting patiently with a serene expression on her face. Most of this discussion meant less than nothing to the AI and for a moment Bedivere envied it the absence of harsh emotions. His own hands were shaking, a sign of impending cravings. The brandy was a permissible bolt hole. Later, he would have to shore up his defenses.
Tension was running high in the room and he wasn’t the only one suffering.
Yennifer glanced around as everyone shuffled on their feet, rubbing at necks and combing back hair with fingers. Drawing breath.
“You’re all assuming that these aliens represent some sort of monstrous threat. That as soon as they come through the gates, they’re going to inhale entire worlds.”
“They are going to do exactly that,” Connell said flatly.
“You don’t know that,” Yennifer pointed out. “Maybe what happened on Kaysha was a mistake. Maybe they didn’t know that humans were there. If we establish communications with them, talk to them, maybe we’ll find out that they’re as afraid as we are.”
Connell moved closer to her. His face worked. “Of course they’re fucking hostile!” he cried, throwing out his hand for emphasis. “They’re using our gate technology! They know we’re here! They just don’t give a damn!”
Yennifer blinked, backing up a half step. She had grown pale, too. “Until you talk to them, you don’t know that for sure.”
Nichol August put down his glass and moved a little closer, too.
“I saw the ships,” Connell told her. “I saw the hundreds of ships just sitting there like so much used junk. There are so fucking many of them, they can afford to discard them right there in space, like a graveyard. They don’t give a damn who finds them, or discovers them there. Who the hell knows how many more are going to come pouring out of whatever gate they chose? Are you suggesting we set up a welcoming committee for them?”
“Hey, take it easy, Connell,�
� Nichol said quietly, reaching for his elbow.
Connell shook him off. “You’re so fucking optimistic it’s offensive,” he told Yennifer. “When are you going to grow up and get a clue?”
Yennifer pressed her hand to her throat. A vein was throbbing in her temple and her hand was shaking. “I don’t think it’s optimistic to expect the best outcome.”
“Just naïve,” he shot back.
“Connell, that’s enough,” Lilly said loudly.
Brant slid passed Nichol and inserted himself between Connell and Yennifer. “Enough,” he said, his voice low. “Take a deep breath and calm down. Yennifer is not the enemy here.”
“Look at Zoey!” Cat called, surging toward the tight little group. The AI was flickering in and out of view, sparking like a live wire too close to water. “Quick, Lilly!” Cat added.
Lilly grabbed the smaller woman’s arm and turned her to face Lilly. “Yennifer, breathe. Slow and easy. You’re blowing circuits. Come on, now, look at me.”
The two Varkan pilots from Devlin’s ship stepped up one on either side of him, responding to the possible threat.
Yennifer was breathing rapidly. Hyperventilating. Her chest hitched and she began to gasp in tight, hard breaths. Her shoulders bent forward as oxygen depleted in her system.
Bedivere found himself unable to move or look away. He’d experienced that frightening hysteria when strong emotions he’d never felt before registered for the first time. The physical sensations were overwhelming, delivering their own fear. The first time it had happened he really had thought he was dying.
Yennifer was young enough and sheltered enough here in Charlton, surrounded by reasonable Varkan, that she had never experienced such conflict before. She had not yet found Interspace. Every Varkan had to go through this, sooner or later.
The terror in her eyes was hard to watch, all the same.
Cat and Company Page 9
