by JCH Rigby
The adjutant’s avatar lowered his voice conspiratorially. Richter tried not to laugh out loud. He was half way up a mountain for god’s sake who was going to overhear them. “The NipponDeutsch company is extremely important to the European Federation. They’re in the process of developing a device of unmatched significance, and there’s a need to provide them with high-quality security. Other interested parties may wish to remove the device. That’s your lot, Trooper. You’ll receive the rest later.”
The avatar turned and stood on the edge of the void. “I presume you can get down from here without breaking your neck, yes?” Richter spared him his best ‘you think’ face. “Good. Now, get moving, and don’t try this at home.”
The adjutant’s avatar stepped off the edge, walking straight out into thin air, fading as it went.
May
RICHTER STILL FELT LIKE an outsider in the security detail. The other members of the detail were from Air Space Troop. He’d been drafted in to replace Hans Becker, a guy he hardly knew, in Sergeant Krause’s squad. From what Richter had heard this was the squads third mission, though nobody had been willing to share with Richter what the actual ‘mission’ was. Well, whatever it was Becker flatly refused to take part in another one.
They were in the mess hall, in the crappy little barracks on Charon, Richter’s new home, when Becker dug his heels in. “Not a chance,” he told Krause loud enough to turn heads at nearby tables. “There’s no way I’m going through that again. Jail me, bust me, send me back to Basic Dumb Infantry; I don’t care. If you can keep your brains in during that, then good luck. Not me—I reckon you’ll all be in an asylum after one more go.”
The raised voices caught Richter’s attention, looking up from the miserable meal interested to see what Krause would do about Becker’s outburst. The sergeant’s mild response surprised him—jokes about Krause’s short temper were part of the unit’s shared vocabulary.
“Okay, Hansi, if your minds made up.”
“Yeah, while I’ve still got one.” Becker snorted.
Krause stood, pulling Becker gently to his feet, and as Richter watched on the two men left the compartment together, talking much more quietly, Krause’s arm resting lightly on Becker’s shoulder. Richter thought Becker seemed close to tears, not something you saw every day in Special Forces units. Half an hour later, Hauptmann Walter called Richter to his tiny unit office tucked in behind a standby generator.
“You probably heard Becker’s not prepared to take on another mission.” In person, Walter was much less irritating than his avatar. How accurate was that personality mapping? “Now Ledermann feels the same way, so Sergeant Krause has only got Pedersen left. I know you’re happier with Mountain Troop guys, but God knows we’re spread thin. Will you join Krause and Pedersen to provide security for this next mission?”
The novelty of being asked surprised Richter, as he later realized Walter must have planned. He agreed, of course. Another split-second in mid-air.
If Richter felt like an outsider with Air Space Troop, he was already an intruder simply by being any kind of squaddie among all these NipponDeutsch techs and scientists. They’d not been exactly welcoming. “Why the hell do we have to take these knuckleheads with us?” was about the kindest comment he’d overheard. Terms like grunzenfracht, grunt-freight, and selbstladend gepäck were tossed about freely.
After a few more wisecracks in the same vein, it appeared the Air Space troopers had had enough. Two of the engineering team ended up spot-glued together by their wrists and suspended from a rope secured over a beam ten meters from the hangar floor. In Charon’s fractional gravity it was more undignified than painful, and the two men weren’t interested in naming names. Walter ripped into the troopers, but it hadn’t been needed. The name-calling stopped however, everyone knew it was a hostile truce at best.
And, to be fair, Richter hadn’t been too sure himself what purpose special forces troopers might serve. Not knowing the nature of the mission his mind had been making its own guesses. Securing the base, maybe. But what was going to turn noisy out in the deep wide black?
Wednesday, June 8th
RICHTER TOOK A VERY small, very cautious breath in, then hurriedly pulled the puke bag over his mouth and nose, careful to hold it sealed in place until the stomach heaves stopped. After a few distinctly unpleasant moments things settled down once more, equally carefully he removed the bag from his face.
He’d always suffered a bit with motion sickness, not ideal, considering what he did for a living. His time with Mobility Troop had been horrible—always puking up in some vehicle or other. Don’t even think about Boat Troop or Air Space Troop his friends had said. Imagine—same thing in three dimensions, or hurtling out of the sky into somewhere hostile with his guts falling up through his throat. The other guys loved watching him let rip. Trooper Kotzen-Kopf, they called him. Trooper Puke-Head.
No, Mountain Troop was where he belonged, and that’s what made him useful to the European Army’s Special Forces, although the venerable and ancient Gebirgs Jaeger Division had been the starting point. Dangling from a karabiner halfway across a difficult traverse, fast-roping out of one of those bloody aircraft, abseiling down the face of some mega-story building, hanging by one hand 300-meters up a cliff in the Tyrol, free-climbing fast up a rock face hell-bent on mayhem when the bad guys at the top were all fat, dumb, and happy—that’s when Leon Richter got his jollies. He didn’t think of it as showing off, it was what he did. To most other people, it looked like antigravity.
But he reckoned any one of them would have been heaving right now. Zero- gravity was bad enough, but Faster-Than-Light was something else entirely. The first few crews to travel FTL said stuff like “the universe is turned inside out,” or “your spatial awareness can’t reconcile the extra dimensions.” None of that came close. You didn’t become as good a free-climber as Leon Richter without having perfect knowledge of your surroundings, and FTL travel took that away and hid it. Meaning he was still flinging his guts about, long after most of the others stopped.
After they’d, what did you call it? Re-emerged into normal space? Returned to Newtonian physics? Left hyperspace? Plain bloody slowed down? Whatever, and the flight crew stopped throwing up and started rushing around shouting numbers at each other, while greasy techs finished looking to see if the engines had turned up with them or were still in another star system entirely. —After all that, when this bloody experimental-prototype-Mark-One-lash-up-interstellar-hyperspace-Buck-Rogers device still seemed to be working despite the outrage caused to the laws of physics, and accompanied by the background whirring of Einstein’s scattered ashes. After all that, someone looked through the various telescopes and scanners and radars and sensors and stuff to see where they were.
And realized they had hit the jackpot with one pull of the lever.
THERE WAS NO WAY anyone wanted an untried piece of technology like supra-light-speed space travel loose in an inhabited solar system. In retrospect, it was amazing the thing had ever been built. After decades of research and trillions of dollars, the sudden FTL breakthrough had taken everyone in the NipponDeutsch company completely by surprise. Everyone who knew about it inside its company-most-secret, multi-covered, deeply-black shadowy existence, that is.
Richter had never expected to become involved in such a high-tech operation, but once he’d been roped into it he’d taken the trouble to find out a little more. He wished he had never bothered he couldn’t make head or tail of it.
The outer layer of NipponDeutsch’s cover story was the embarrassing old chestnut of cold fusion. If you thought that that was a plausible explanation for the company’s secrecy, you’d dig no further. If you weren’t convinced however, next came a stratum of convincing waffle about broadcast power transmission. A further layer was a wonderfully deceptive load of guff relating to teleportation. Each of these stories was actually a pretty good cover, because no one would ever admit to working on one of these thorou
ghly discredited chimeras, and so secrecy was sort of expected. Besides, there was a small element of genuinely interesting stuff in each project. While only a tiny number of people knew what they were really working on. None of those few thought it could be turned into a working prototype anyway.
Still, the FTL engine got built, and that’s when the problems really started. The theory was scary enough, and the effects looked ludicrous in simulation. What the finished device might do to the space around it remained the subject of intense debate. Some equations implied the bizarre and exotic energies released by the process would destabilize the surrounding volume of space out to 0.75 AU. In other words: fire it up, and you were going to wave goodbye to everything somewhere between Earth and the Sun. A further trouble was the “0.75 AU” figure had a potential error of 50 percent. Get lucky, and you might not actually lose Mercury and Venus. Or be unlucky, and you could lose Earth into the bargain.
And those were the optimists! A small though very vociferous group maintained this technique of FTL was inherently and spectacularly uncontrollable, and the universe itself—never mind the galaxy—couldn’t cope with the indignity switching it on would cause. A certain brilliant physicist currently resided in a comfortable and private NipponDeutsch company sanatorium in the Alps, waiting in a personal internal hell for the end of the world and everything else.
So, you weren’t going to fire up FTL anywhere near Earth, that much was obvious. But you couldn’t afford to point it at any of the inhabited systems, either. Where did that leave things? Answer. Point it somewhere no one had been yet.
Even then, there’d been a lot of agonizing before the drive was fitted into a ship christened Amaterasu, named after the Japanese goddess of the sun, and dragged out way beyond the orbit of Pluto. Apparently, the thing had been ready to go for a year before they worked out who was going to crew it.
Eventually, a crew was found who were mad enough to try the FTL drive out. Amaterasu was pointed somewhere safe, and the launch team lit the fuse and retired to a safe distance. Three AU.
In due course Amaterasu had gone somewhere, and come back again. Happily, nothing significant seemed to have gone missing from the solar system, and they had to try it again to make sure it hadn’t been dumb luck. This new tech was on the verge of giving NipponDeutsch and its notional parent states the biggest commercial advantage in human history, so no wonder the powers that be kept each launch very quiet indeed, and each launch went somewhere new and different.
So here they were, Richter and his companions approaching a perfectly nice little G-Type star, one with a distant fainter secondary. It had been sitting in the database for ages, apparently, but there had never been the money or the interest to point a probe at something this far from home.
Until now. NipponDeutsch selected this star as the perfect place to go and do this weird FTL thing. To the grateful thanks of all aboard Richter and the Amaterasu had gotten here without disappearing this solar system either. No one predicted the extra surprise they would find when they did get here.
PLANETS. The surprise wasn’t that the system had planets—they’d known that—it was the number and type. Eight of them spread in a temptingly familiar pattern from 0.5 AU all the way out to twenty AU. Two planets were gas giants; one with rings. Another planet sat at 0.93 AU, which was close to the Earth-Sun distance, while another planet looked rocky and watery. The ship had emerged within a few days travel of the banded gas giant, at normal Newtonian speeds. The system had an asteroid belt, a hint of comets, an external rock and ice belt resembling another Kuiper and shed loads of moons.
So that was a good start. Not only had they survived the ninth-ever FTL mission they’d also discovered a spare solar system, which was a near-perfect clone of home. However, there was something much more significant to come.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Like Homesick Angels
Wednesday, June 8th
"Von Waldschmidt was right, you know, Greta. The process does cause some disruption in the fabric of the universe. It’s more localized and far more trivial than his calculations showed. He thought the galaxy would unravel in a bloody great chain reaction.” Piet Roorback knew she thought him a geek, and he didn’t care. Without brilliant scientists like him, FTL would never have happened. Geeks were going to conquer the universe and his FTL engine would be the key.
“This is the smearing effect you’re talked about?” Greta asked, though her tone of voice indicated her lack of interest in any answer. “I’ve got to say I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to that bit. I’m too interested in what actually happens to us, not what it looks like behind us.” Greta Wiedemann, commander of the Amaterasu, had always been a typical rocket jock, Piet reckoned; full speed ahead and damn the rule book. Push the limits! Why the hell didn’t you pay attention? he wanted to shout at her. This is important!
“Fair enough. But, yes, that’s it.” Piet pushed himself away from the bulkhead door and floated forward into the cramped flight deck. “What happens is the departure vector out of contiguous space leaves a vortex behind it, a vortex which widens and weakens as the distance from the launch point increases.”
Greta’s blank expression met his explanation. Keep it simple. “Optically, space looks smeared, as if you were looking through a lens that’s a bit greasy. The theory guys in Launch Planning thought if you followed that vector far enough, it would point straight at your destination. That bit doesn’t quite work, though. It’s a bit off, for some reason.” Greta’s forehead creased slightly and Piet rushed to reassure her.
“You can however, track back to a launch point with it, if you know where to look. Or you can on the evidence so far. It’s a bit like the contrail behind an aircraft’s wingtip. Of course, we don’t know what it would feel like if that vortex passed over your planet, and we don’t want to find out, either. It might not be detectable by our senses, but it might be something else entirely.”
“So, Von Waldschmidt was wrong, then.” She sounds really pleased at that idea, a theoretician being wrong.
Piet put her straight. “No. Like I said, right in principle, wrong in degree. I guess he always was a bit overdramatic. That ‘von’ only turned up a few years ago, you know. Before he got to the Technische Hochschule, he was just plain ‘Waldschmidt.’ Do you know he only went there because that’s where Wittgenstein trained as an engineer? Anyhow, his main idea worked right.”
THE ALIEN SHIPS ORBITED the ringed planet at a range keeping them clear of the ornate bands, and well away from the several moons. There were eleven of the vessels, clustered in a defensive box formation like the twentieth-century American bomber aircraft which flew over Germany in her great-great-etcetera-grandfather’s time.
Greta Wiedemann had been shown the old warrior’s diaries in her grandmother’s house, read them, and then returned to them again and again. They were handwritten in black ink onto ancient crackly paper in a leather-bound book. Major Emil Hartmann had flown a supercharged Focke-Wulf Ta152H high-altitude fighter, running on nitrous oxide and methanol, while he ran on ersatz coffee and real amphetamines, going half-mad with nerves and sleeplessness, trying to knock the rumbling Yankee B17s out of the sky before they dumped their bombs onto the Fatherland.
They were called Flying Fortresses, and they were like a strongpoint in the air, with powered turrets full of multiple Browning fifty-calibers facing in every direction. But the Höhenjäger fighters carried three massive cannons—twenty millimeters and thirty millimeters—and they could climb like homesick angels able to hit 750 kilometers an hour in a dive. Irresistible force and immovable objects, all piloted by highly-stressed teenagers, freezing in rudimentary flight suits. Hartmann was one of the few how lived to write about it, and to have children.
Now here she was piloting another mad device, looking at another tactical box. Only, this box stretched some 7,000 kilometers in each direction. Wiedemann began to think she’d like some of those cannons her long dead rel
ative had called on. She didn’t have any children yet, and she’d like to live long enough to have the choice.
“They are alien, aren’t they? We’re sure about that?” Piet Roorback had all the personality of a paper clip, but she respected his judgment and his knowledge. Oh, okay; he was a brilliant practical engineer as well.
“Come on, Greta. You know I’m right. No one else has gotten close to us on this. ARTOK is still freezing crews to sleep, and trying to find wormholes. If anyone else had done what we did, then as soon as they’d launched all of Ops Control’s screens would have lit up like sunrise. You can’t hide the FTL process.
“I’ll give you this—if ARTOK knew how to look for the launch smearing, we wouldn’t be able to hide it either. So, it could be human, but only if someone had seen us do this and replicated what we did in under a year or so. No. No one else is anywhere close to NipponDeutsch technology.”
Greta held up one hand stopping him before he could say anymore. “Hold on a minute Piet. Think about what you’re saying. Are you so confident no one else has got FTL you think it’s more likely we’ve discovered an alien battle fleet instead of human ships?” Greta stared at the image of the alien ships shaking her head slowly. “I can’t believe I just said that.” Being here in this fantastic craft was amazing enough. Discovering they weren’t alone was bewildering; talking about aliens simply unreal.
“Look, they found lots of alien life on Sanctuary and Second Chance, Indi, and the rest. That’s not the surprise. It’s intelligent life that’s new. If we’re not the only life in the universe, why should we be the only intelligent life?” Piet called up screen displays to illustrate his points, pictures of exo-beasts from the various planets which humans now called home. Greta ignored the on-screen images watching Piet’s face instead. His eyes darted about, and his lips were thin and bloodless. The scientist was frightened and, Greta admitted, with good reason.
