Ship's Log

by Lawrence P White

  A chime sounded, and she frowned, instantly fearful of possibilities. She turned large, blue eyes to the communications console in trepidation. Yes, the display flashed the code for an incoming message.

  The touch of a button or a spoken command could have brought the message to the forward screen, but she had been idle for too long. Legs untangled themselves as her lanky form, encased in a standard, one-piece coverall, unlimbered from the seat. A few quick steps brought her to the communications console. She brushed a hand through her brownish-blond hair and touched the appropriate key.

  A visual message sprang to the screen. “My screens are clear. Harbok all indoors. Hurry up.”

  She studied the display for a moment, then a twinkle found its way to her eyes as she thought of Jarl lazing about on his ship while he waited. Waiting would be difficult for him—he was well known for his high energy and lack of patience. Her eyes lifted to the ceiling in exasperation. Men! Did they all lack patience? Would they never change? Hurry up, indeed!

  She started to formulate a caustic reply, but she stopped. She could not take the risk, and Jarl knew it. She stretched to relieve tension, glanced again at the message, then studied it with curiosity. Did he know how uptight she had become during this long, tedious approach to Earth? Could he know the frustration and anxiety she felt? Was he telling her he understood? Jarl was a good commander. He probably knew exactly what she was feeling. Maybe he was acknowledging similar feelings.

  She closed her eyes and hugged herself, feeling some of the tension dissipate. “Thank you, Jarl,” she murmured as she returned to the command seat.

  Her expression hardened as she sat once again, willing the ship to hurry. To anyone below looking up into the night sky, her encroachment into Earth’s atmosphere looked like a shooting star, a brief streak of intensely white light. Soon, though, she was through the upper atmosphere and slowing. The fiery trail disappeared. Darkness hid her ship to the naked eye as well as to radar, and hopefully to the Harbok.

  She believed the energy reflections from her drive could be detected should they be extraordinarily alert, hence her arrival half a world away from the Harboks’ secret base in North America. She descended further and watched as the planet changed from a globe to a flat surface. Hidden by darkness, the dry outback of Australia welcomed her to Earth, but only briefly. Scant feet above the terrain, her ship raced along its programmed path. The lights of a small city glimmered in the darkness ahead and to her left, followed shortly thereafter by a line of phosphorescent waves shimmering in the light of a full moon. Moments later she crossed the boundary between land and the ocean the locals called Pacific. Her ship stretched its legs, picking up speed for the many miles yet to go.

  This detour was their standard arrival corridor to Earth, programmed into the ship’s computers and needing no assistance from her.

  Four hours later the shoreline of western Canada passed beneath her. She had raced against the sun and flown through a sunrise that had turned to midday. The ship reduced speed and maneuvered through a range of mountains before coming to a halt over a remote lake. She took control and grounded the ship in a clearing beside the lake. She spent a few brief moments putting the ship into its standby mode, then she was done. Well . . . done with this portion of her journey anyway. Now for the hard part.

  Still in her seat, Arlynn studied the meadow and forest before her. She was no stranger to this place. It had not changed, but this time she had. This time her purpose was not study. She and Jarl were here to steal. What they were about to do was wrong. They were the bad guys. The Harbok were unsuspecting, innocent, and unaware. Hopefully. The fact that her mission was necessary did not help her like it any better.

  The pristine surroundings outside offered no guidance, no forgiveness of her plight. Sighing, she uncurled her legs and stretched like a cat, then headed for the door. Snick! The door slid up, and the planet greeted her.

  Smells! Such wonderful forgotten delight. And the sun! Hot rays from a pale blue sky assailed her with physical impact. A light, steady breeze caressed. She breathed deeply, the heady, wholesome aroma of forest wilderness and grass filling her with hope. How many months had it been since she had breathed air that was alive? Ships had been her home for too long.

  A disturbance out in the lake ended her respite. A black shape some 500 feet long emerged from the lake shedding water and headed directly toward her. She sighed as she knelt and tapped keys on a bracelet about her ankle. Her own ship lifted silently from its place beside her and glided to the center of the lake where it traded places with Jarl’s ship, disappearing as if it had never been. She waited impatiently for the new ship to settle down beside her. She wanted this miserable job to be over. It was so . . . not her.

  Snick! The door opened at Jarl’s command. He stepped into the clearing and greeted her with a brief hug. Kind but stern, tired eyes searched hers, looking for . . . what? Commitment? Agreement? Understanding?

  “You will not find what you’re looking for,” she said.

  He scowled and shook his head. “I know.”

  His lips thinned with determination when she squeezed his arm and stepped around him toward the ship. Inside, she stepped over to the engineering console and placed her bracelet over the scanner. She added this ship’s coding to that of several others, then she replaced the bracelet back around her right ankle where it would be least likely to get lost.

  Jarl stepped aboard and retrieved a package from a storage locker, then he turned and presented it to her without comment. She stared at it, closed her eyes briefly in despair, then removed the blaster from the package and strapped it about her waist. Accepting the weapon established tacit agreement that they were now committed. There would be no turning back until the deed was done.

  She did not bother checking the charge. She would never use the weapon, and he knew it. Nor would he. Others had made these demands of them.

  The blasters were for defense, whatever that meant. No one had explained to her how you could defend yourself without wounding or killing, and she would not kill, not under any circumstances. The very idea appalled, as it appalled all her people. They cherished life. To take the life of an intelligent being, even a Harbok, was beyond comprehension.

  Jarl seated himself in the command chair and turned to her with a questioning look. She nodded, and he touched the execute key for the trip he had already planned. The ship lifted, and they were on their way. This flight would take place at low altitude and modest speed over sparsely populated terrain. They would take no chances with the Harbok, nor would the local inhabitants be likely to discover them.

  “I take it you found a way in?” she asked.

  He nodded. “I did. Whatever else they are, they’re careless. Security is almost non-existent.”

  Her eyebrows rose. “It sounds too good to be true.”

  “I agree. To the best of my knowledge, I set off no alarms, and I should have.”

  “So, they could be waiting for us?”

  “I doubt it. They don’t know our plan. Had they suspected anything, they would have come at the first warning of anything amiss.”

  Their gazes locked, but there was nothing either of them could add. He briefed her on his discoveries of the past few days, days he had spent studying the area around the Harbok base located in northern Canada near Hudson Bay. They already knew the base was completely underground, but nothing had been known of its interior. He discovered a dozen air intake tubes, but standard force fields were the only security. He had penetrated part way to the main hangar, but unwilling to jeopardize their mission by exploring deeper, he had returned to await her arrival.

  Their mission was to discover the secret to the Harbok cloaking device. Harbok ships had the ability to remain invisible until just before attacking, a technological advantage with which Jarl’s fighters could not cope. Every skirmish to date had been completely one-sided, an intolerable situation. The mission plan called for them to bring back a functioning Har
bok ship. If that proved impossible, pieces of systems that even hinted at how the cloaking device worked might provide enough clues to the physics behind the device.

  If their scientists could develop an operational cloaking device, it might prove possible to force the Harbok to negotiate. At the very least, the Harbok would be forced to communicate, something they had so far refused to do.

  Jarl took the controls and brought the ship to treetop height for the last few miles, then he landed beside another lake. The ship again slipped out of sight beneath the water as they set off through the forest.

  They hiked for several hours before reaching one of the entrances Jarl had discovered. The base had been dug out of solid rock that was part of the Laurentian Shield plate that underlay much of North America. The sound of rushing air entering a massive outcropping of rock was the only indication that anything was amiss here.

  Jarl took the force field reducer from Arlynn’s backpack, checked its settings, and held it before him. A black, irregular shape materialized on the surface of the rock, its edges wavering in and out. The outlines of a tunnel beckoned faintly within.

  He bowed with an arm extended toward the tunnel. Arlynn allowed a fleeting smile to brush her eyes and mouth, then she grimly bent and stepped through the threshold into the rushing airflow. Jarl stayed right on her heels as she led them deeper and deeper into the ground.

  The force field appeared to be the Harboks’ only security against entry. The natives did not have the technology to breach the field and had probably been shrugged off by the Harbok as a non-existent threat, but much to Arlynn’s chagrin, the Harbok apparently placed her own people in that same category. It did not make sense. Surely, the Harbok knew of her baseship’s presence within the system. Surely, they had observed at least some of her people’s visits to Earth. Was it possible they were incredibly lax and had not? Or worse, did they simply not care?

  As with everything about the Harbok, no one knew.

  The tunnel, unlit, angled steeply into the ground. Laser drills had left their marks, turning stone to glass. Walls and floors were slippery beyond belief and difficult to negotiate. Steps and handholds were in place, but in the wrong places. The Harbok had not had the foresight to place the handholds where Arlynn and Jarl needed them. They were both exhausted by the time they reached bottom. Theirs would be a long and difficult climb back if they failed to steal a ship.

  The tunnel opened onto a catwalk high above the floor of an enormous cavern hewn from rock. Here, the craftsmanship was not rough, but it was utilitarian, without frills. This was not the small exploratory base they had anticipated. Instead, the Harbok were well ensconced here on Earth. How long had they been here, they wondered?

  Four standard Harbok fighters, small, disc-shaped ships about 100 meters across, were positioned about the cavern. The hangar could accommodate at least one more, two if they squeezed, but Jarl had not observed any ships coming or going during his days of exploration. To the best of his knowledge, the Harbok had no other ships on Earth.

  Activity was minimal on the floor of the cavern. Two technicians dressed in coveralls worked on the closest ship, and several small groups of Harbok moved between corridors and offices around the periphery, all of them dressed in comfortable, functional clothing embossed with bright markings of rank on sleeves and shoulders. Guards and weapons were noticeably missing. There seemed to be a complete lack of security.

  The Harbok were truly giants, just as reports had described them. They acted human, and they resembled humans to a large degree: two arms, two legs, a torso, a head with eyes, nose, mouth, and hair in the appropriate places. But they were huge, and heavily built. Their skin looked like parched leather, wrinkled and hard. The few Harbok voices Arlynn heard were deep and appropriate to their body size.

  Jarl and Arlynn simply observed for a long time, their hearts in their throats but enthralled to be in the presence of Harbok. No one had yet observed the Harbok from such close range. At one point, a technician lying on the top of a ship with his head and upper torso out of sight inside an inspection panel, reached back to pick up a wrench, then he reached back inside and whacked a piece of machinery. A loud clang echoed across the cavern. A nearby supervisor castigated the technician, but the technician simply shrugged with indifference and slipped fully into the ship to continue his work. Both workers seemed weary, disinterested in what they were doing.

  Was this normal behavior for the Harbok? And the place was messy. Crates and supplies of every description lay scattered about the hangar, seemingly at random.

  Arlynn photographed everything, gathering data that scientists would study later. Prior to this, their only information had come from afar, from orbit about Harbok worlds. Her equipment included a directional microphone to record conversations among the workers, a real bonus for linguistic experts who were anxious to study the Harbok language.

  The cavern emptied of Harbok by evening. Arlynn and Jarl forced themselves to wait an extra hour just to be certain, then they cautiously worked their way down from the catwalk, fear of discovery evident in every step they took. On reaching the floor of the cavern, they worked their way through stacks of supplies to the nearest ship. No alarms had been set off yet. Their luck was holding.

  Jarl led the way up a ramp into the ship with his blaster out. All they had to go on was common sense which dictated that the control room would be in the center of the ship. But on which level? Jarl led through corridors and up lifts. Arlynn followed close behind, her camera never resting, expecting to confront a Harbok at every corner. Eerie silence and an aura of emptiness pervaded the ship, a feeling very unlike what they had grown accustomed to aboard their own ships. Lights were dim in corridors and rooms. There were no voices or sounds of occupation, no sounds of ship’s systems keeping vigil, no sense of aliveness within this Harbok fighter. When they found the bridge, they discovered the reason.

  The ship was not powered up.

  Unbelievable! In their worst-case scenario, they had never considered dealing with a dead ship. Why would anyone power down a ship, ever? Ships were designed for permanent operation. Ships, at least the ships with which they were familiar, stayed healthier when powered up all the time. They had based their whole plan on finding a ship with which they could interface.

  After a brief, tense discussion, Jarl led the way back out of the ship and to the next, then the next, then the last. All the ships were dead.

  They stood apart on the bridge of the last ship, unable to face each other. Their mission was a failure. There were no plans for this contingency. The clock continued ticking as they delayed, but neither moved.

  Arlynn was first to recover. Her camera began whirring again as she angrily sought close-up pictures of equipment on the bridge. Jarl turned and watched her for a time, then he set his backpack down and removed a handful of tools. If stealing a ship was out of the question, they would settle for less. Their objective remained the same: discover the physics behind the cloaking device. They fell back on an alternate plan: find pieces of the system, or if they failed to locate the system, return with pictures of control consoles. Perhaps they could salvage part of the mission.

  They abandoned the bridge temporarily to search for the engine room. Surprisingly, they stumbled upon it immediately. It was located just off the control room through the first door they tried. A catwalk surrounded a deep compartment with stairs leading down through multiple levels. Though laid out differently from their own, they felt right at home. After all, ship’s drives had to operate on similar principles. They studied the layout below them and quickly identified the power bottle and the field generator. Arlynn’s camera continued whirring away.

  The field generator provided their first obvious clue. It resembled the generators on their own ships, but this unit was surrounded by something new—many fist-sized coils placed about the field generator in a spherical pattern. Jarl paused with a questioning look in his eyes. When Arlynn nodded her agreement, he pulled
an industrial laser from his pack and removed one of the coils. The operation went quickly and cleanly, and the coil ended up in Arlynn’s bag. Jarl removed several other small items of curiosity while Arlynn photographed everything, then they explored the remainder of the ship.

  Critical minutes evaporated one after another, but they forced themselves to be thorough. They returned to the control room and spent an hour removing various panels and hunting through storage cabinets. The time was not wasted. Jarl discovered data discs and several printed manuals which he added to the other items in Arlynn’s bag. Arlynn discovered a computer that might be the main computer for the ship, but she was shocked by its antiquity. Walls of cabinets lined a compartment. The cabinets held antiquated circuit cards, thousands of them. Her hopes for locating the computer for the cloaking device evaporated – there was simply no way to know which cards held the heart of the system. A few random cards went into her bag, but she knew the gesture was probably useless.

  It was time to leave. Jarl quickly laced incendiary cords across each control station, placed several more cords behind panels, then they stepped out of the room and activated the cords. Loud hisses and blinding flashes of light issued from the control room as they headed for the exit.

  Back in the cavern, Arlynn started toward the catwalk, but Jarl grabbed her arm. A brief argument erupted, Arlynn checked her timepiece, then she nodded with a grim expression. They moved quickly to another ship, spent fifteen minutes there, and exited with the ship’s interior flashing.

  The next ship was the one the technician had been working on. Jarl ran out of incendiary cord with the job only half completed, so he activated the fuse, planning to return and finish the job with his laser. But this time, when the flashing and hissing began, a tremendous explosion shook the ship. Jarl and Arlynn turned to each other with looks of horror, then they raced for the ship’s exit. They hit the ramp at a dead run but pulled up short when they discovered smoke and dust filling the cavern. Debris littered the floor. What had happened?