Claws That Catch votsb-4

by John Ringo

  The nice thing about this shot, admittedly, was that the Blade had finally found an apparently uninhabited planet that looked remarkably like Earth must have prior to the advent of civilization. The closest possible magnification even showed trees that looked like… well, trees. Broad-leafed, coniferous… If there was ever an Earth Two, it was the planet they were currently surveying.

  “I know what you mean, man,” Lieutenant Morris said. “I wish just one of…”

  “One of what?” Eric asked, pulling up the next shot. This one, he had to admit, was interesting. It looked sort of like…

  “Eric,” Morris said in a strangled voice.

  “I think I’ve got…”

  “I don’t think,” Lieutenant Morris said. “I know.”

  “Calling that thing a ruin is a bit of an understatement,” Captain Prael said, whistling faintly. “That’s a… A…”

  “That would be a city, sir,” Weaver said, looking at the zoomed back shot of the area. “A big one. A big one. And it’s not the first one we’ve spotted, just the largest to date.”

  It was hard to tell that the collection of odd-shaped mounds was a city unless you looked at the penetrating radar. When those shots had been pieced together, it was apparent that buried under about forty feet of silt and loess was a massive urban region approximately thirty miles across. The larger mounds were piles of rubble from immense buildings over a kilometer across at the base. Foundations for lesser buildings could be seen stretching out from those megastructures.

  The ocean was now well away from the structures but the city might have once rested at a seaside. One side certainly had that terminal look. That meant that the planet had, probably, been warmer given that in twenty million years a sun tended to cool, slightly. The planet currently had extensive icecaps which might have been liquid in that earlier time.

  “Do you think it’s their home planet?” the CO asked.

  “Sir, I wouldn’t begin to venture a clue,” Bill replied. “We don’t know what these guys looked like, how they lived, what they ate or what happened to them. But the point is, we’re looking at a ruined planet. One that has more territory than we can effectively survey just in this one shot. And one, by the way, that’s perfect for humans as far as I can tell. Gravity’s slightly lower, oxygen’s a tad higher. It’s actually paradisical.”

  “You just said a big word, XO.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “Gravity’s lower?” the CO said. “The Blade’s gravity is…”

  “Even lower than that, sir,” Bill replied. “If we assume that they would design a drive that gave the same gravity as their home planet, sir, it actually mitigates against this being it.”

  “I wonder what their home planet looks like, then,” the CO said.

  “If we ever find it, it will be interesting.”

  “The majority of the ruins are under forty feet of soil,” Captain Zanella said. “Which means we are not going to be digging; that’s way too much to move. What we are going to do is look for any surface remnants we might find. Platoons will cover their designated search boxes and we’ll keep it up until we find something or Captain Prael calls off the search.”

  “Remember that scene in Star Wars where they’re chasing each other on those bike things?” Dupras said, weaving his board around a massive broad-leafed tree.

  The area where the city had once been was covered in trees. They looked somewhat like hemlocks but rose nearly ninety feet off the loam-covered forest-floor. Over the external sensors could be heard the sound of birdlike creatures fighting for territory, calling for mates. A deep, rumbling croak like from a frog the size of a mastadon occasionally echoed through the woods. Nobody had spotted the source, but there were various bets on what it was going to look like.

  “Yeah,” Staff Sergeant Carr said as they came to a large stream and started to parallel it. “And I remember them crashing a lot. So be careful.”

  “I’m being careful, Staff Sergeant,” Dupras said, sliding around another tree. “I’m being so careful I’m the model of carefulness. But I gotta say, I wish this was as far as we were going. This place is great. Gotta get rid of some of the trees, though.”

  “Yeah, I don’t get all the trees,” Lance Corporal Rucker interjected. “Where are the fields? It’s just, like, trees for miles and miles and miles. I was looking at the shots and I didn’t see one open area in this whole part of the continent.”

  “The whole eastern seaboard used to be covered in trees,” Sergeant Bae, the Bravo Team leader, answered. “It’s been clear cut at least five times since you Westerners arrived. Ecologically destructive bastards.”

  “And the Chinese aren’t?” Carr replied, grinning.

  “Oh, hell, so was China until we clear cut it,” the sergeant replied. “But that was thousands of years ago, not hundreds, so it’s all shiny.”

  “Staff Sergeant?” Dupras said, suddenly. “I’m sorry to interrupt your wrangling like an old married couple, but I think you need to see this.”

  “It’s some sort of support member for one of the buildings,” Eric said, looking at the shots from the portable ground penetrator. The meter-square box didn’t have the power of the radar on the Blade so it only revealed structures down twenty feet or so. The member faded into the depths well below that.

  The part that extended above ground, jutting out of the stream like a transluscent rock, looked like a log made of glass. It was apparently untouched by the elements, about a foot across and the portion that could be sounded for was at least forty feet long. It was a jutting enigma, a relic of a race gone for so long that their most massive works were buried under the dirt and silt of millennia, with only this glassine remnant whispering: We were here.

  “My name is Ozymandias,” Gunny Judas said.

  “Sorry, Gunny?” Eric replied. “What was that?”

  “I barely recall, sir,” the Gunny said. “Something I learned in school. A poem about a ruin in Egypt. The only part I can remember is the part that goes something like: My name is Ozymandias. Look upon me ye mighty and despair. But the statue it’s about was ruined and faded by time.”

  “Habitable planet and all those ruins right in the line of Dreen advance,” Captain Prael pointed out sourly. “But we found nada of any use so we’re done here. We’ll leave it to generations of archaeologists if the Dreen don’t trash it. Next?”

  “HD 242647,” Lieutenant Fey said. “G2 class star, just short of nine light-years away.”

  “XO?”

  Bill looked at the star map pensively, then shrugged.

  “Technically, Astro is right,” Bill said, frowning.

  “But… ?” the CO asked.

  “But I’m wondering if we should bet on the ponies, sir,” Bill said. “The Blade’s engine was found on the rocky planet of an F type star and so are two other facilities that are believed to be from the same race. Another, though, is on the sole rocky planet of a B, a blue star. Okay, so this city is around a G class. But all the stuff we’ve found that’s useful has been around other classes.”

  “And… ?”

  “HD 34547 is a blue seventeen light-years from here,” Bill said. “If I’m wrong, I’m wrong and we blew a survey. But my point is that it’s not a G class star.”

  “Whoa,” the sensor tech said as the ship exited the heliopause. “TACO!”

  “We’re getting major readings, sir,” the TACO said, pointing at the display.

  “Hmmm…” Captain Prael said. “Dreen?”

  “They don’t match the Dreen readings we have, sir,” the TACO said, shaking his head. “And they’re way off the scale. If that’s a Dreen ship, sir, it’s the size of a moon.”

  “Got this triangulated, yet?” the CO asked cautiously.

  “Right in by the star, sir,” the sensor tech answered. “Less than one AU. Inside the warp-denial bubble.”

  Sufficient gravity caused the ship’s warp drive to refuse to work. For Sol the warp-denial point was between the
orbits of Mercury and Venus. For this more massive star, it was at nearly one astronomical unit, the distance from Earth to Sol. However, the surface temperature of a planet at that distance would be closer to Mercury’s. Whatever was generating the energy was relatively close to the blue-white star.

  “Actually, sir,” the tactical officer continued, looking at the readings. “It appears to be in a non-Keplerian orbit. Not even that, it looks like it’s just sitting over the star, directly out of the plane of elliptic.”

  “Well, we’re here to find stuff from that race,” the CO said. “Makes sense that it would be something that was big and put out a lot of particles. So we check it out. We have a visual, yet?”

  “There’s a flicker there,” the TACO said, zooming in the scope. “There’s something there, but what is the question. We’ll just need to get closer.”

  “Conn, CIC…”

  “Whoa,” Bill said, looking at the swelling image on the screen. “That looks like…”

  “The world’s biggest Christmas tree,” Prael finished.

  The ten-kilometer object was tapered like a fir, either made of glass or some similarly translucent material and colored in wild shades of red, purple and green. Different “branches” were different colors and either were pulsing or picking up refractions from the blue star. The base of the “trunk,” and there did appear to be an extension, was pointed towards the star with the tapered “top” pointed into deep space. And it was, in fact, just sitting at the absolute north pole of the star.

  “Distance to object?” the CO asked.

  “Three AU,” the TACO said.

  “Sir, recommend…” Weaver started to say.

  “Conn, CIC,” the CO said. “Hold it right here. Way ahead of you, Captain Weaver. We don’t know what that thing is or what it does and I’m not getting any closer until we do.”

  “It’s pretty, I’ll give it that,” Prael said.

  The Blade had moved around the system getting images of the giant “tree.” There was, indeed, a section of “trunk” on the inner side. Temperatures in that region should be nearly four hundred degrees Celsius on the surface. However…

  “And weird,” Bill said. “I don’t believe these readings. Nowhere on the surface, including on the side pointed to the star, does the surface temperature get above a hundred degrees celsius.”

  “Conn, Astro.”

  “Go,” the CO said.

  “We’ve got another anomaly and you’re not going to believe this one…”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Oh, now that’s just too rich,” Bill said, shaking his head at the planetology monitor.

  The ship had not lifted with a full science complement, but it had brought some specialty personnel. Astroman Darryl Figueredo was an astronomy-mate, once one of the most obscure members of the Navy’s wide-flung bureaucracy. Since man had gone to sea the stars had guided him and even with the advent of GPS the Navy had continued the tradition of teaching stellar navigation. Stars changed position ever so slightly on a constant basis which was why the Naval Observatory put out constantly updated tables detailing how to use their current position to find a ship’s current position. Somebody had to do the viewing, the calculating and fill out the paperwork. Since that was what enlisted men were for, the Navy had an insignificant number of enlisted people with just that specialty.

  With the abrupt shift to a space Navy, the specialty had become far more important. However, there were still only a handful of astronomy-mates in the Navy. The school was being ramped up, but in the meantime…

  Darryl pushed his glasses back up his nose and shrugged.

  “Sir, I just find the stuff,” the astronomy-mate said. With gray-green eyes and chocolate brown skin, Darryl was a second-generation Dominican and still retained a trace of his family’s islands accent. But since he had also been the captain of his school’s astronomy club, getting this job was a dream-come-true. Admittedly, if he had his druthers he’d have been doing it from a nice safe observatory on Earth, but you went where the Navy sent you. “It’s up to somebody else to figure it out.”

  So far the astronomy-mate had found only four planets in the system, a rather paltry number even for a blue-white star. But that was only the most minor part of the strangeness.

  All four planets were super-massive Jovian gas-giants, planets that were right on the edge of being stars themselves.

  All four were in exactly the same Keplerian orbit, circling the blue-white at a distance of 2 Astronomical Units, just a little greater distance than Mars is from Sol.

  And they were, as far as the instruments could determine, perfectly spaced.

  “I’m starting to wonder what this race couldn’t do,” Bill said, swearing faintly under his breath. There was no way that the orbits could be natural.

  “And if you think that’s weird, sir,” Darryl added, “take a look at the spectral readings from the planetary atmospheres.”

  The majority of a Jovian’s troposhpere was hydrogen and helium and that was the case with these planets: Atmo was 86% hydrogen and 13% helium. And after studying literally hundreds of them since the Blade went out, it was well understood what the mix would be depending upon the type of star that was in the system and the distance the gas planet was from that star. For Sol-like stars, Jovians between about three to fifteen AUs were mostly like Jupiter or Saturn and consisted mainly of hydrogen and helium gases in the outer layers. Deeper into their interiors were liquid metal hydrogen and very few other materials. Gas giants that had orbits out past fifteen AUs typically had hydrogen and helium in their tropospheres but also had other compounds like methane and ethane there as well. Deeper in those large gas planets were water and ammonia ices and even rocky materials.

  In the case of these planets, however, the numbers were just… off. High levels of krypton, neon, and argon were present in planet one. High levels of sodium and neodymium in planet two.

  “Metals in one planet, nitrogen in that planet, noble gases xenon, krypton, and… argon?” Bill said, swearing again. “It’s 4% argon?”

  “The planetary chemistry has been tailored, sir,” the astronomy-mate said, pushing his glasses up his nose again. “I did the math while you were on your way down. That’s more argon in that planet’s atmosphere than the mass of the Earth. Be interesting to find out where they got it. Given that I’ve found no rocky planets or moons in the system, sir, they might just have converted it from those, assuming they could change huge masses of one element into another. Based on normal blue-white solar systems, the mass transfer is about right.”

  “I so didn’t want to hear that.”

  “This entire system has been tailored,” Bill said, shaking his head. “And that thing has to be why.”

  “The question is… what is it?” Prael asked.

  “A weapon,” Bill said. “Nobody expends that much energy on anything else. Their version of a supercarrier is my guess.”

  “Something that can destroy this part of the galaxy?” Lieutenant Fey interjected. “There’s enough power there.”

  “This is reality, Lieutenant,” Captain Weaver replied, “not an Xbox game. Think about propagation time. Even if it could destroy ‘this part of the galaxy’ it would be a while before the destruction got anywhere, don’t you think?”

  “There may be a data point for that,” the TACO said. “A weapon that is. We’ve detected what look like meteoric impacts away from the surface. I think it has some sort of shield.”

  “I’m surprised they left any asteroids in the system,” Bill muttered. “They sure seem to have cleaned up otherwise.”

  “So much for getting close, then,” the CO said, ignoring the muttering.

  “Not… necessarily, sir,” Bill replied, breaking out of his reverie. “There are various types of theoretical shields that will stop a meteor but not a vehicle that’s going slow enough. Not saying that’s the case, but it’s possible.”

  “How do we test it?” the CO asked.

&n
bsp; “Well, the dragonflies are just sitting there.”

  “It’s important to approach from the shade, Colonel,” Bill said. “It’s going to get really really hot if you don’t.”

  “So you have repeatedly told me, Captain Weaver,” Colonel Che-chee said. “I will make that approach.”

  The ship was in orbit around the star at three AU from the tree while Colonel Che-chee and her wingman accelerated towards it.

  “Approach slowly,” Bill reminded her.

  “I will endeavor to avoid being smashed, XO,” the colonel said.

  “Flight One, follow the ball,” the fighter control officer said, punching in deceleration orders. “More, more, stationary relative. Ready to advance, Colonel?”

  “Quite,” Che-chee said.

  “That’s about where we think the shield is, sir,” the FCO said to the hovering officers. “If it’s really a shield it’s a big one, extending nearly a kilometer from the tree.”

  “Given its size, that’s not all that far,” the CO said dryly.

  “But it’s far enough we can fit the ship inside it,” Bill said.

  “Point.”

  “Flight One, two hundred meters to shield,” the control specialist said. “One fifty. One hundred. Fifty…”

  “That is an odd sensation,” Colonel Che-chee said. “All my fur just lifted.”

  “Flight one is inside the theoretical shield zone,” the control specialist said.

  “Keep them inside it,” the CO replied. “Colonel, are you willing to go try to look over the edge at the sun? Be aware that if this shield doesn’t work the way it seems to, you’re going to get fried. You will not survive.”

  “Then I will let the male take the risk,” the colonel replied. “That is what males are for. Vector?”