Claws That Catch votsb-4

by John Ringo

  “Apparently an open one, too,” Miriam said. “The caves are now explained. Besides being sort of stellar sky-boxes, they’re rooms for bands getting ready to play to warm up. And they have automatic visual feedback if you’re not up to par. No offense, Captain.”

  “None taken,” Bill said dryly. “I think the main venue must have filtered out the vocal component.”

  “It is even more remarkable from space,” Colonel Che-chee said. “But we nearly lost a dragonfly. Cha-shah came close to one of the beams and reported that if it had not been for his shield he would now be dead. And he was not even in the beam itself, more than a hundred meters away.”

  The video shots from the dragonflies showed that the tree opened up into a hemisphere, stretching somehow to engulf the upper tenth of the star then entirely wrapping it in some sort of absorption field. The incredibly hot, bright, star faded to insignificance, becoming almost black, keeping the light from the star from overwelming the show and feeding the masses of raw power into the beams that created it.

  If anything, the most spectacular sight was the Tum-Tum Tree, which must have been using a good quarter of the star’s energy itself. It blazed along with the music, visible only from space. But from the right place it would be magnificent.

  “Time to full warm up was right at nine minutes,” Figueredo said. “At that point, stellar output was less than three percent of normal and the power of the beams was blasting the Jovians so hard they’ve probably lost a good ten percent of their mass.”

  “Yeah, but it’s gas,” Weaver pointed out. “Most of it remained in the orbits. They’ll collect it back over time. When this thing was in full use, though, I wonder how they kept them supplied?”

  “With these guys, sir, who knows, sir?” Figueredo said. “They could have teleported it through gates from other Jovians. Especially if they could expand the size of the gates.”

  “Planet-sized gates?” Bill mused. “Heck, just set up a gate to move a smaller Jovian. Put one gate in the way of the incoming Jovian and the other by the one you’re refueling.”

  “That is scary,” Miriam said. “That’s… too big.”

  “These guys used the full output of a blue-white star, twenty thousand times the power of Sol, as a laser-light show,” Bill pointed out. “Throwing around Jovians would be comparatively trivial.”

  “The males did report something that troubles me,” Colonel Che-chee said, her nose twitching. “They say that they could hear the music. Not over the radio, mind you. They could hear it as if they were present. They, in fact, complained about how loud it was.”

  “Impossible, Colonel,” Captain Zanella said. “Noise does not propagate through vacuum, no matter how loud it is.”

  “I told them this,” the colonel said. “They still insist that they heard the music.”

  “Was it in time with the pulsing of the planets?” Bill asked.

  “I believe they said it was,” the colonel replied.

  “There’s a way that you could do it,” Weaver said musingly. “If you knew the make-up of the receiving ship, or suit in this case, you could tune a gravitational beam to cause harmonics in the receiving ship. But, my God, the computational requirements! You’d have to figure for light-speed lag, the materials you were encountering, location of the target referential to the Jovians and the Tree…” He shook his head in wonder. “And all this for an entertainment device?!”

  “You know, in about eight years this star’s going to start blinking from the standpoint of the nearest G class star,” Bill said, watching as Red moved out of place and Gants stepped up. The Tree would hold in “playing” position for up to fifteen minutes, apparently to let bands change places. And it reacted to any music, even badly sung or played. It was best with better quality and reacted the most effectively to pure sonic mass, the more decibels the more the planets fluoresced. But it would even cause some reaction from a badly sung nursery tune, as Captain Zanella had demonstrated to everyone’s dismay.

  “Since there are ruins there, you have to figure that the race that built this thing had this star blinking on and off all the time,” Bill continued. “You can just see it: Those damned kids are at it again!” He looked less excited than he sounded.

  “I’m glad we found this,” Miriam replied softly. “It’s nice to find that at least one race could pour this much effort into something of beauty, that has no other use than to bring joy.” She looked at him for a moment and then snorted. “Penny and some dehydrated fruit for your thoughts?” she added, holding out a bag of dehydrated apples.

  “Is it that obvious?” Bill asked.

  “Not to get too Star Trekkish,” Miriam said. “But I’m also an empath. To me, yeah.”

  “I’m wondering whether I’m doing the right thing,” he said, shrugging. “This is more my cup of tea than personnel records or wheedling clerks. Yes, I chose to be a Naval officer but I’m a scientist at heart. Astro was fun, exciting, challenging in a way that I found… useful and interesting. XO…”

  “Sucks,” Miriam said.

  “In a nutshell,” he replied. “And God only knows how long I’m gonna be stuck as one.”

  “And you don’t get along with Captain Prael,” Miriam said. “Not that I blame you.”

  “We’re getting along better,” he said. “But I’ll admit I’ve been comforting myself with the thought: ‘He’s not going to be here long.’ That said, what do I get next? Somebody more like Spectre? More like Prael? Worse?”

  “What are you going to do?” Miriam asked.

  “I’m not good at turning down a challenge,” Bill said. “And I’ve gotten better at the paperwork. It’s not the sort of paperwork I prefer, and I think it’s really limiting my scope, but I’m getting better at it. Being XO has taught me stuff. And if I’m ever going to command the Blade, it’s stuff I need to know.”

  “You want to command the Blade?” Miriam asked.

  “Oh, hell,” Bill said, snorting. “I want to own the Blade. I want to go off looking at what I want to look at. But the closest I’ll ever come is commanding it. So, yes. And to do that, I need to be XO. No matter how much it sucks.”

  “So you’re not going to bunk off to something else?” Miriam asked.

  “Nope. I’ll stick it as long as it takes for the Navy to trust me to command.”

  “Good,” Miriam said. “In that case, I’ll stick around too.”

  “I wonder what Gants is going to sing?”

  “No idea,” Miriam said. “But it couldn’t be worse than Captain Zanella’s rendition of ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb.’ ”

  Sub Dude stepped into the middle of the crystals and cleared his throat. Sticking his right hand into his blouse, he straightened from his habitual slouch, opened his mouth and proceeded to “sing”:

  “I am the very model of a modern Major-General,

  I’ve information vegetable, animal, and mineral,

  I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical

  From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical…”

  “Okay,” Miriam said, laughing so hard tears were coming out of her eyes, “I was wrong.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “What we need is a band,” Weaver said, rubbing his hands together.

  “Sir, with all due respect, I think you’re taking this too far,” Captain Zanella said, smiling.

  “I’m not sure he is.” Miriam looked at her notes. “There are different effects for the guitar and singing. A band would have that much more effect. Actually, a symphony would be about right or a full opera…”

  “Anybody else got any instruments?” Weaver asked. “Keyboard? Drums? A flute even?”

  “I’ve got a keyboard,” Miriam admitted.

  “Really?” Berg said. “I’ve never heard you play it.”

  “I use headphones,” Miriam said. “And I don’t play ’70s rock.”

  “God, not that Goth stuff,” Weaver moaned. “There’s hardly a guitar part in it.”


  “I play classical,” Miriam said.

  “Well, that’s not gonna work.”

  “I dunno,” Captain Zanella said. “Be interesting to see how it reacts to ‘Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.’ ”

  “Got any idea how hard that is to play on a guitar?”

  “My point, which I’m making badly, sir,” Captain Zanella said, “is that our mission was to investigate and explore this facility and determine if we could find its purpose and potentially activate it. Not to use it as a concert venue.”

  “Because we still don’t understand its full abilities,” Bill pointed out. “We’ve determined that it can distinguish between recorded music and live and reacts better to live…”

  “Good thing Ashley Simpson doesn’t have to use it, then,” Berg quipped.

  “That right there is something to investigate,” Weaver finished, ignoring the lieutenant. “I see no reason, given that we’ve determined its purpose, not to fully explore that purpose. I want a survey all of the sailors and Marines to determine if anyone has any instruments with them and their level of playing ability. I intend to fully explore the abilities of this facility.”

  “A one and a two…”

  It turned out that there was more musical talent, for want of a better word, on the ship than had been realized. One of Colonel Che-chee’s dragonfly pilots had a Cheerick reed-flute with him. The device looked like a super-recorder, played more like a bassoon and had the sound quality of a Peruvian flute. The LPO of the mess section had brought an Adar drum-set, a full collection of drums that could be folded down to the size of an alarm clock. When extended it wasn’t much more than thin membranes and floor triggers but it had all the sound of a full drum-set.

  With Weaver’s guitar and Miriam’s keyboard there was a minimal band. Heck, with just Miriam’s keyboard there was a minimal band. Her keyboard was just as advanced as Weaver’s guitar set-up but with a much broader range of abilities, capable of mixing or replicating a full orchestra.

  After a brief wrangle, it was agreed that Miriam was lead singer. And since she was also unwilling to play the wide variety of suggestions from Weaver, from Lynyrd Skynyrd to .38 Special to the Allman Brothers, she had also picked the music.

  Weaver still, ostensibly, led the band.

  “How can you see into my eyes, like open doors…” Miriam sang as Weaver rolled his eyes. He didn’t get to come in with some serious guitar until a third of the way into the song. What kind of rock and roll did you call that?

  “Def Leppard even,” Weaver said.

  “Too ’80s,” Miriam replied, looking over the music that she had with her.

  “But it’s got big, big sound!” Weaver pointed out. “Big sound is good with this place. Blue Öyster Cult?”

  “Ugh!”

  “But it was the original Goth band,” Weaver explained. “What else do you call ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’?”

  “Discordant noise. And you just want to play ‘Smoke on the Water.’ ”

  “That was Deep Purple.”

  “Whatever!”

  “But it’s got a GREAT bass riff! I can set the guitar to bass…”

  “Oh, here, Crüxshadows! You’ll like them.”

  “Who? What the grapp is a Crew-shadows?”

  “You don’t look so good, sir,” Captain Zanella said as Weaver slumped into their shared tent.

  “The band is experiencing creative differences,” Weaver said loftily. “I managed to get Ke-cha on my side with Jethro Tull, since there’s actually a flute part, but Miriam’s insisting on a bunch of Goth and Industrial bands nobody’s heard of. One of them she wanted to replace the fiddle portion with flute and when Ke-cha tried to play it, well, let’s just say that he’s an okay flute player but he’s not up to that person’s fiddling. I pointed out that not only was I in command of this expedition, the speakers were mine and she suggested that I sounded like a vulture squabbling over carrion when I sang back-up and… Well, we’re having creative differences.”

  “Command is a lonely thing, sir,” Captain Zanella said, trying not to grin. “But to put it in nautical terms, sir, sometimes you just can’t fight the tide.”

  “Your input is duly noted, Captain.”

  “A choice profound is bittersweet,” Miriam sang. “No one hears Cassandra cry…”

  “That actually wasn’t all that bad,” Weaver said, plucking at the strings of his guitar and working over a riff he’d flubbed.

  “Planets seemed to like it,” PO Carpenter said. “But you could tell it was written for a drum machine.”

  “Well,” Miriam said, sighing. “I think that there’s a band that you and Captain Weaver would prefer. I suppose we could try Manowar.”

  “Mano… who?”

  “Their blood is upon my steel!” Weaver screamed, head bobbing as he slammed the guitar, “Their blood is upon my steel…”

  “That wasn’t entirely awful,” Miriam said, taking her earplugs out. “You should consider getting into death-metal. You’ve actually got the voice for it.”

  “Was that a compliment on my singing voice?” Weaver asked, amazed.

  “Not really,” Miriam said. “I was thinking of something like Rob Zombie. You just sort of growl the lyrics. I’ll point out that the lead singer of this band has a rendition of ‘Nessun Dorma’ on one of their albums that’s good enough for the Met. But you didn’t do too badly.”

  “Like the drum part,” PO Carpenter said, tapping the snare drum. “Really got the argon planet flashing in the middle there.”

  “I wonder how much mass we’ve blown off,” Weaver said, looking at the system. Even with the pause in the music, the tendrils of gas between the planets were still fluorescing from unexpended energy. They’d been playing, off and on, for long enough that there was now a solid band of gasses joining the Jovians.

  Ke-cha had returned to his duties as a dragonfly pilot. They’d tried to work in the flute playing, but it really didn’t work. The Cheerick was just as glad. After the first session he’d taken to wearing his flight-armor since it cut down on the decibels.

  “I wonder what would blow the most off,” Carpenter said.

  “Dragonforce,” Miriam admitted. “But we don’t have four guitar players who can also sing. Or one for that matter…”

  “So what do we have down so far?” Weaver asked, ignoring the jibe.

  “I don’t think we have any of it down,” Miriam pointed out. “Unless you consider a band playing at a high-school prom as having the music down. I suppose we could just play ‘Cocaine’ over and over again and it would be fine by you.”

  “Perfectionist.”

  “Neophyte…”

  “Creative differences again?”

  “We were just getting the sound right, you know… ?” Weaver felt more relaxed than he had in months.

  “Okay, no arguing this time,” Weaver said, holding his hand up and lifting his chin. “We have six songs we all agree upon, more or less. We’ll just practice those. That’s enough for one set. Then we’ll see what we can get this system to do. Miriam, just one question. Are there any of the ’80s stadium band songs you can stand? Because that’s big sound and we need big sound.”

  “ ‘Final Countdown,’ ” Miriam muttered under her breath.

  “What was that?” Weaver asked.

  “ ‘Final Countdown,’ ” Miriam muttered, somewhat louder.

  “Spectre’s Anthem?” Carpenter said, laughing. The former CO of the Blade, back when it was a submarine that snuck off planet by outrunning Akulas, would use the song, blasting at full power of the sonar system, to warn the Russian submarines he was coming through and they needed to get out of the way. Or whales for that matter.

  “I like it,” Miriam said angrily. “Okay? Is that enough? I admit it! I’ve got the sound effects programmed already. I’ve also got a Whitesnake’s Greatest Hits CD! Satisfied?”

  “Just when you think you know somebody,” Weaver said. “Okay, let’s try that…”<
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  “Whoa…” Weaver muttered, watching the Jovians rippling in after-effect. “It really likes ‘Fight For Freedom.’ ”

  “And it’s got a great guitar riff,” Miriam pointed out.

  “And piano,” Carpenter said.

  “Lots of drum.”

  “It’s a winner.”

  “No more creative differences?” Captain Zanella asked, looking over the patrol reports.

  “I’ve got to admit, some of this newer stuff isn’t bad,” Weaver said.

  “Manowar’s been around since the early ’80s,” the Marine said, not looking up. “I had one of their albums in high school.”

  “Really?” Weaver said. “Go figure. Thought there was a reason they were good…”

  “This is boring,” Cha-shah said, looking at the starscape.

  “Be glad you’re out here and not listening to what humans call music,” Ke-cha replied. “It is awful stuff, the worst caterwauling you’ve ever heard.”

  “I heard some of it. It is very bad,” the Cheerick acknowledged. “How can they listen to that horrible stuff.”

  “I don’t think they have ears like we do,” Ke-cha said. “In fact…”

  “Why is this light blinking so hard all of a sudden?” Cha-shah asked.

  “I do… not know,” Ke-cha said, slowly. “It is a red light. That is bad. You have one as well?”

  “Yes…” the Cheerick male said, puzzling out the words under the flashing light. “Dreen… emissions… indicator…”

  “Captain Weaver! We have Dreen emergence in-system!”

  “Damn,” Weaver muttered, leaning his guitar on a crystal pillar. “I thought we were getting that last riff together, too…”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Weaver looked at the combined sensor data from the dragonflies and tried not to flinch.

  The good news was that the unreality node the Dreen were using was well out from the star and the Tree. Given Dreen known accelerations, it was going to be at least eighteen hours before the main body of the unit arrived.