Sounded like a good idea, so after she took reports from each of her human team, she and Trel headed to the shuttle hangar, and within half an hour, they had left the mother ship and slipped into the darkness of space.
He started by giving her special glasses that would translate the writing from Mralan to something she could read. Then, he went over the controls and indicators on the dash board—he called it the front panel—demonstrating how to do things and providing her with the name of the maneuver or change in the system. After each demonstration, he had her try it. Some things she picked up quickly, others took two or more attempts before she got them right.
“And you can do all this in the mother ship, too?”
“Yup.” His grin was broader now, his eyes sparkling.
“Why don’t we head out a little way, just for the experience?” she said.
“Hm. I don’t know. We’re right on the edge of your solar system—a place your people call the ‘Oort Cloud.’”
“Never heard of it,” she said. Her education had been in biology, not astronomy.
“Well, it’s trillions of comets, just waiting for something to prompt them to head toward the sun.”
She snapped backwards, as though something was trying to grab her. “Then if we go in there…”
“No. A ship this small won’t really affect any of the big ones. If it’s small enough for us to knock it out of orbit, it’s no threat to your planet.”
“It would burn up in the atmosphere?”
“Yup.”
“Then let’s go.”
“Best we head that way.”
Mehta thought about it for a moment, then said, “How about if you drive, while I give commands? Let me practice all of that.”
“Great idea!” Trel said, switching the control of the shuttle back to his side.
“Set a course for the Oort Cloud,” she said, grinning as she watched him input speed and direction into the controls.
“Here we go.”
They moved away from Fmedg’s ship, but nothing else notable happened. This would be a good time to ask about other things.
“So, why did your people start the Protectorate?” Mehta said.
“Doesn’t it seem like the right thing to do?”
“It seems like a very costly endeavor, and I haven’t seen any evidence that you benefit from it.”
“It started a couple of thousand of your years ago,” Trel said. “Our planet was only marginally developed. Rudimentary electronics, machine manufacturing, that kind of thing. And then the Rajeen arrived.”
“Rajeen?” she said.
“They’re one of the aliens we protect others from.”
“Dangerous?”
“Right now, they don’t seem to be doing much. But back then, there was no one to protect us. They came and set up a colony, and they forced us to work for them. Most of our manufacturing output was taken back to their planet. The same with our food production. We were left with about a tenth of whatever our farmers produced. People were starving, and if you argued with the Rajeen, they would torture you to death.”
“Damn.”
A warning light flashed. Trel pressed the stop button and looked at her. “I think we just found our first comet.”
She looked into the darkness. “I don’t see anything.”
“You see spots where there are no stars?”
“Oh, shit, yes.”
He led her through a few steps in the controls, and a heads-up display appeared on the front window, showing a grid-like representation of all the objects ahead of them.
It wasn’t particularly crowded, she noted, but the comets were large, irregularly shaped, and difficult to see.
“Okay,” she said, “let’s continue, moving between the comets.”
“Accelerating.”
The nearest comet grew on the front screen, while the remainder stayed about the same size. That meant they were dealing with large distances between the objects. This wasn’t going to be as dangerous as she’d thought.
“So how did you get out from under Rajeen rule?”
“At that point, the Spirits had only been in contact with a few people who would go into the mountains to meditate. They were considered the odd balls of society. But then they met with the shadow government, and said the Spirits had a plan.”
“I bet they jumped at the offer.” The craft was almost even with the nearest comet, and she noted its irregular shape, that it was even deeper than it was wide.
“But it came with a requirement that we would form the Protectorate, so that people on other planets wouldn’t have to suffer the way we did.”
“I always thought your people felt like it was your duty or something.”
“It was their price for saving us.”
They moved around the large comet, then she saw another in the distance, slowly spinning. “Hey, look at that,” she said with a grin. It reminded her of asteroids in the movies.
Trel frowned, then did some calculations. “That’s not right.”
“What’s wrong? A comet’s not allowed to spin?”
“They do have angular momentum,” he said. “But this one is way off the chart.”
“So it’s an outlier,” she said with a shrug. “That’s not impossible, is it?”
“No, probably not.”
“Set a course to move around the rotating ice ball.”
“Right.” His fingers moved deftly over the controls, and the shuttle changed course just enough to head for the new target.
“Were there a lot of species threatening other planets?”
“Only the Rajeen. But ours wasn’t the only planet they conquered. They also hit the Dakh Hhargashian home world. The Dakh Hhargash, being as violent as they are, quickly overthrew the Rajeen and stole their technology. So, you can see why our government doesn’t want to give technology to other planets.”
“How did the Spirits save your people?”
“They gave us a plan to steal a Rajeen ship. Then, at the direction of the Spirits, we flew to another planet around a dead star—the type you call a ‘white dwarf’.”
“And then?” They had almost reached the spinning comet, and all the other objects on the screen seemed motionless.
“There, we were led to a translation device, and then, the Spirits showed us the instructions for manufacturing our own ships, ships with way better technology. We got the maintenance manuals, the operations manuals, everything we needed. Then we built one ship. One ship was all it took to get the Rajeen off our planet. That’s how much more advanced the technology was.”
Mehta creased her brow. “Wait a minute. Your people never developed this technology? You just copied it from someone else?”
“Yes.”
“Does anyone understand how it works?”
He stared at her for a moment, silent, his face still. “No,” he said finally.
“Then these protests about not explaining the technology are bullshit? They just don’t want to admit they don’t know how the hell it works?”
“Don’t get angry.”
“I’m not angry. I’m...” She let out a breath. “Okay, I’m a little riled. It’s like they’ve been lying to me.”
“Well, the fact that we won’t give you the technology isn’t a lie.”
“Yeah.” She sighed. “But it really doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
“What do you mean?”
“You said you have the maintenance manuals, but what do you do when the instructions there don’t fix the problem?”
He frowned. “We replace the next larger part.”
“Then you must have a huge graveyard of broken parts.”
“Whole ships, even.”
The shuttle moved around the spinning comet, its potato shape twisting in odd ways. “Why is it doing that?”
Trel queried the computer. “Looks like there are two components of the spin, and one is much faster than the other.” He sat back in his seat and frowned.
“These other comets have spin, but it’s slow. So, this one was probably like that, but then something came along and disturbed it.”
“Recent?”
“Impossible to tell.”
“Don’t these things leave little trails of dust and water?”
He nodded, his expression seeming to say that he was impressed with her thinking. “Yes. And I can pick it up on my sensors.” He keyed in some more instructions, then turned the shuttle away from the comet, his face down, staring into the sensor read-out. “Following the trail. I can see evidence of the spin… still more spin.” He gave the shuttle a burst of acceleration. “More spin.”
“Then it’s been a while?”
“No spin.” He lifted his head. “This happened only a few days ago.” He punched some more numbers into the computer. “It wasn’t a planet-sized object, otherwise, everything else in the area would be spinning.”
“But bigger than a shuttle.”
“It’s hard to say how big. Distance would have played a factor, too.”
“Could it have been another comet?”
“I don’t see any in range.” He looked up, into the comet field. “It’s probably a mystery we’ll never solve.”
“Right.” She sat back, trying to process the disappointment, and not even certain why she felt that way. Strange. Was her intuition telling her something? “Let’s head deeper into the—” She leaned forward, looking at the edge of the visible field. “There’s one moving in toward the sun.”
“That’s disturbing.”
She gave him a sharp look. “Why is everything so ominous? I thought you were an optimist.”
He smiled, a little chuckle bouncing his shoulders. “I am. But I also know the probabilities of certain things happening, and the likelihood of two cometary anomalies so close to each other is very low.”
“But still possible.”
“True.” He smiled, but not the dazzling smile he usually wore. “I’m just a little on edge.”
“Right. Shall we look for more disturbances?”
His eyes enlarged. “Why would we do that?”
“To either confirm or refute your suspicions.”
“Oh,” he said, then swallowed. “Okay.”
“Compute the trajectory between those two anomalies, and let’s head in the opposite direction.”
“Deeper into the comet cloud.” He nudged the shuttle forward, turning toward the densest part of the cloud.
Of course, she knew these space bodies were hundreds, if not thousands, of miles apart. But the grid on the screen showed hundreds of them, small and closely spaced, obviously very far away. Then, as the shuttle finished its turn, more movement caught her eye. “There’s another one,” she said, pointing to a slowly spinning object.
“Spirits,” he whispered.
“What do you think it means?”
“Something has disturbed a lane in this part of the cloud,” he said.
“Something,” she repeated. “That’s not very specific.”
“It could be a passing rogue planet, a small black hole, a large molecular cloud…”
She swallowed, looking at the hundreds of grids visible through the front window, pointing at the new discovery. “But that disturbance could have happened a long time ago, right?”
He chuckled. “Now who’s the optimist?”
“Okay. But answer the question.”
“For the comet we’re looking at now, yes, it could have been millennia ago. But for the comet exiting the cloud, it would be more recent.”
“How recent?”
He did a few calculations. “Based on the speed of the comet, and its current distance from the cloud, and assuming it was somewhere in the middle of the pack… a few days ago.”
“Just like the first comet.” She looked around, her stomach suddenly tight.
“There’s another one,” he said, pointing into the distance.
She saw the tiny grid floating away from the main group of comets. Then she looked at it more closely. “There are two comets there.”
“Not good.” He did some more tapping on his controls. “All the disturbances are roughly lined up.” A red line appeared on the heads-up display. “See?”
She nodded. “Follow that line. Let’s see what we find.”
His face turned white and he swallowed again. “I think we should go back to the ship.”
“And reset the alarm so it doesn’t buzz until we’re less than 20 kilometers from a comet.”
He tapped his controls. “This isn’t a good idea.”
“Now, ease up to one of the large comets, then skim around the outside.”
“Patrice, let’s go back.”
“We need to make sure there’s nothing out there.”
He swallowed, then moved toward the next large comet, several thousand kilometers away.
But his hands were shaking. Maybe she could do something to get his mind off his fears. “So,” she said, “since your people don’t really understand the technology, you never tried to improve it. You don’t know how.”
He shrugged. “It was the best around. We didn’t need to improve it.”
“Until Species X came along.”
“There’s another one heading toward the sun,” Trel said.
They had reached the next comet, and Trel weaved his way around it.
“Do we have running lights?”
“What?”
“Are there lights on the outside of the shuttle?”
“Yes.”
“Turn them off.”
He reached a hand up to the controls. “Why?”
“I saw a grid up there that didn’t look like a comet.”
The reflected blue light from the nearby comet disappeared. Now, the only way she could see it was the grid, and the absence of stars.
“What do you think it is?” Trel said.
She frowned. They still had a ways to go before she could determine that. It might not be anything. And Trel looked close to panic.
“Why did the Spirits leave?” she asked.
“The Spirits? Why are we talking about the Spirits?”
“I don’t like to waste my time,” she said. That was only partly true, but close enough that he wouldn’t sense deception.
“That’s not the reason,” he said.
“I want to know what happened,” she said.
He huffed and leaned back in his chair. “I’m too nervous to talk about history.”
“It’s a simple question. Give me a simple answer. Why did they leave?”
He sighed. “We disobeyed.”
“I’ve never seen anybody else taking obedience seriously,” she said.
“With the Spirits, it’s important. They’re not like us.”
The shuttle had come around the comet, and he stopped. “You want to keep going?”
She surveyed the other icy bodies before her, then selected a large one just to the right. Flying toward it would keep the shuttle out of the line of sight of whatever was out there. “That way.”
He nodded and turned the shuttle in the direction indicated.
“So, they’re not like us. What difference does that make?”
“They have the ability to sense people’s thoughts and plans. That lets them predict the results of any action. So, when they advise us, it’s from a position of knowing what will happen if we don’t follow their instructions.”
“I’m going to withhold my belief on that one.”
“Still, it’s true. And when we disobeyed... it was a disaster.”
“Yeah, they left. I’m sure they could have predicted that.”
They reached the next comet, and Trel began carefully moving around it. “No, I mean the choice we made, against the Spirits’ guidance, turned out badly.”
“What do you mean by ‘badly’?”
“Several people were killed, and a lot of equipment was lost or destroyed.”
“Okay, that’s bad.” Just one more comet, and th
en they would be in a position to verify whatever was out there. “Head to that one.”
“Can we please go back to the ship?”
“When did this disobedience happen?”
“Stop trying to distract me.”
She laughed. “If I was going for distraction, I would be asking about how Mralans have sex.”
“Not funny.”
They reached the last comet. “This one’s spinning faster than any of the others,” Trel said. “Moving around it is going to be trickier than I’m comfortable with.”
“I see that.” The comet wasn’t spinning on a single axis, like a planet, but was undulating unpredictably. “Back away from it, then give it a wide berth.”
He followed her instructions.
Only part way around the comet, she spotted what she was looking for. “Stop.” She looked down at her own sensors. “It’s a Dakh Hhargashian ship.”
Trel ran his hands over the sensor controls. “Confirmed. But it’s just sitting there.”
“They probably know Fmedg’s ship is in the area, and they don’t want to make their move until we’ve left.”
“We should really go back now.”
“What weapons do we have?”
“None.”
“Damn. Why didn’t you tell me that before?”
Trel gripped the control panel, knuckles white, but said nothing. He looked straight ahead, arms trembling.
“What about shields?”
“We have a little,” he said. “We could probably take a single hit.”
“Just one?”
“We need to call the ship.”
She slapped his hand away from the controls. “Don’t you dare.”
“What?”
“If we transmit, they’re more likely to know we’re here.”
“And they’ll come after us,” Trel finished the thought.
Mehta’s stomach dropped into her hips. “Do the sensors transmit?”
“Damn.”
“Turn them off,” she said, “and let’s get out of here.”
Trel spun the craft around. “I’m not comfortable navigating in a comet cloud without them,” Trel said.
“Just don’t get close.”
He nudged the craft forward, fingers shaking on the front panel. “The big ones I can spot. But I might miss a little one, and they can do serious damage.”
No Plan Survives Page 12
