Ark of the Stars

by Frank Borsch

  "Yes, I'm sure," Driscol said, louder than necessary. There was only one thing that stung him out of his usual reserve: when someone questioned his ability as a hyperdetection expert.

  "Fine, Omer," Sharita quickly reassured him. "That settles that. Maybe the Akonians aren't behind this after all. Increase the hyperdetection radius to five light-years!"

  The hyperdetection officer went back to work. Alemaheyu called up Omer's data on his console, aligned it at the edge of his field of vision and looked around the control center. Sharita continued to stare at some point beyond the Palenque's walls, and Pearl was making every effort to look busy.

  The other members of the bridge crew bent over their work stations.

  And Rhodan ... Rhodan sat in his seat and looked unhappily at the only information Sharita had authorized him to receive: some very general data along with a selection of screen savers. It was clear to Alemaheyu he felt as chafed by this inactivity as did Sharita—except that Rhodan was effectively blocked even from looking on.

  Alemaheyu felt sorry for Rhodan. The comm officer knew how it felt to be the object of Sharita Coho's displeasure.

  A thought came to him. Why not?

  Alemaheyu entered several commands at his console, then looked back in the direction of the inner bridge.

  Rhodan was a pro. When the hyperdetection data suddenly flashed across his holo, he merely raised his eyebrows.

  A moment later, he let his glance sweep with studied casualness across the control center. When he made eye contact with the comm officer, Alemaheyu winked. Rhodan winked back.

  All right, then. Alemaheyu wondered why Sharita was so hard on Rhodan. You just had to treat him like a normal person. The rest would take care of itself.

  "Hyperdetection!" Omer called out.

  "Put it on the bridge holo!" the commander ordered.

  "Impossible." The hyperdetection officer shook his head. "The impulses are too weak and indistinct to get a visual."

  "Then tell us what you are getting."

  "A large object. The syntron might be misinterpreting the data, but it says the object is several kilometers long."

  "Several kilometers?"

  "Just what I said. But that's only a guess. I can't really get a solid reading on the thing. Don't ask me why—the hyperstorm has long since faded. Maybe it has some kind of anti-detection field."

  "Anything else?"

  "Yes. The object is moving at nearly light-speed. Distance just about four light-years. Its trajectory deviates only by a few degrees from the piece of debris that we picked up."

  Sharita released the air in her lungs with a loud snort. "Well done, Omer. We're on the right track now." She turned to the first officer. "Pearl, take us in!"

  Alemaheyu didn't expect any further orders and bent over the console in order to inform the crawlers. Before he got that far, Sharita's voice echoed through the control center once more. In it was a hard note that Alemaheyu had never heard before.

  "Harriett," she said, turning to the engineer who handled the Palenque's offensive and defensive systems. "Keep your guns ready! I don't know who's out there, and they probably only have a few firecrackers to shoot off ... but they've shown they're willing to use them!"

  * * *

  The Palenque went into ultra-light flight, towing its swarm of crawlers.

  Alemaheyu was surprised to discover that he was so anxious he was panting. And he wasn't the only one affected by the tension. Everywhere in the control center he saw nervous gestures, clumsy movements, flushed cheeks. Even Rhodan seemed to be clutching the armrest of his seat more tightly than necessary.

  Harriett Hewes was calmness personified. With economical movements showing no signs of haste, she checked the Palenque's defense fields and weapon systems. If Alemaheyu hadn't known better, he would have assumed Harriett was working on one of the three-dimensional puzzles with which she passed her time, and which she used to make it almost impossible to enter her cabin unauthorized. Every so often Harriett approached Sharita about using one of the storage rooms for what she called her installations, but her attempts failed with equal regularity.

  "This is a prospecting ship," Sharita would explain. "We need the storage rooms for rock and ore samples, not for ju ... well, you know."

  Of course Harriett knew. Alemaheyu was fairly certain that she outshone everyone else aboard in terms of intelligence, Perry Rhodan included, but that didn't keep her from being stubborn, with an endless patience that was often painful to see.

  In other words: she was the best weapons control officer that Alemaheyu could imagine. Harriett thought first, then pressed the button. Maybe. And when she pressed the button, she used exactly the necessary firepower. Not a watt too much or too little.

  "All systems ready," she reported.

  "Good. We're about to need them." Sharita didn't take her eyes off her holo. As commander, she was the only one on board with real-time access to all data, with the exception of Alemaheyu, who had hacked his own, as-yet-undiscovered access: as comm officer, he considered it his duty to be completely informed. And Rhodan, whom Alemaheyu had patched in.

  The comm officer called up a new holo next to his console. To his relief, all systems on board the Palenque showed green. Harriett was stockpiling energy in order to be able to raise the Paratron shield at maximum power immediately after entry into normal space; she was even drawing energy from the weapon systems.

  Alemaheyu grinned. What did Harriett always say? "There are only dead heroes."

  On a second holo, the comm officer checked to see what data Rhodan was viewing. To his surprise, the Immortal wasn't following the preparations for reemergence from hyperspace, but was working through the video material that had been taken inside the wreck. What was bothering Rhodan? Was he afraid that an unpleasant surprise might be waiting for them at their destination?

  Alemaheyu switched to hyperdetection. No major change, still an oscillating gray-toned image that collapsed into a constantly shifting swirl. Now and again, he thought he could see a long, extended cylinder with projections like an insect's antennae at both ends. Omer might be able to make something meaningful out of the image—Alemaheyu could just as easily read the future in the swirls of a newly stirred cup of tea.

  The lower edge of the holo showed the estimated length and mass. The numbers wavered between three hundred meters and thirty kilometers. First, the syntron gave the mass as five million tons, then five hundred million. What was going on?

  "Ten seconds to reentry into normal space."

  Alemaheyu clicked off the hyperdetection holo. It was more confusing than helpful. There was something out there. It was probably fairly gigantic, moving at nearly light-speed and, when it felt like it, cutting innocent little shuttles in two. He didn't need to know any more. The rest would come to light on its own.

  "Five more seconds!"

  Belts shot from the sides of his seat, automatically united over his stomach and pressed him firmly against the cushion. It was the last resort in case everything else failed: the Palenque's shields, its hull of highly compressed laminated steel, and even the force-field generator built into the contour seat. The safety belt was a strange feature, Alemaheyu had always thought. By the time a space traveler found himself in the embarrassing situation of having to depend on the safety belt, a chaplain or the appropriate holy object of his faith would have been just as much help.

  "Three seconds!"

  Still, the belt gave him a feeling of security, as though a protective hand rested on him. Man was a strange being.

  "Reentry!"

  The Palenque shuddered as Harriett pulled the Paratron up to one hundred-sixty percent of its normal value. The defense-shield projectors could withstand that level for only a few seconds, but the maneuver was absolutely necessary. Perhaps someone was expecting them, hoping to destroy them as they reentered normal space.

  There was no attack.

  The shuddering faded to a barely noticeable vibration that s
paceship builders never had managed to completely eliminate, despite millennia of experience. The Paratron leveled off at ninety-nine percent capacity.

  The crawlers checked in with Alemaheyu as one after the other fell out of hyperspace and crowded closely around the Palenque, as though they hoped to be able to use the Paratron to shield themselves.

  "Hyperdetection!" Sharita barked. "Is there anything out there that could be a danger to us?"

  "I ... don't think so."

  "Do you call that a report? Is there something there or not?"

  Confused, Omer shook his head almost angrily. Alemaheyu remembered there was one more thing the hyperdetection officer couldn't stand: not knowing.

  "There is something. I'll switch it to the bridge holo."

  Alemaheyu turned in his chair—the belt yielded but didn't retract—and looked into what resembled a window into space. Stars. And a long shadow that blocked some of them.

  "Very enlightening," Sharita said sarcastically. "Can you make that any better?"

  Omer bent over his console and punched at the virtual keyboard. Sharita had hit him in his professional honor; Alemaheyu had never seen the stocky black man move so fast.

  The shadow in the holo blurred, the blackness of space took on a reddish tint, then the shadow manifested itself. Alemaheyu saw a long, slender cylinder. At either end, metal fingers projected from the hull at regular intervals, reinforced by a ring that connected them about halfway along their length.

  Antennae was the first thought that popped into the comm officer's head. Those guys over there certainly have a big appetite for information.

  But then they should also have been broadcasting. Alemaheyu checked his console again: all systems were in working order. He would have picked up even the weakest comm signal. Only ... there was nothing. Was the ship itself a wreck? But then who fired at the shuttle?

  "That's better!" Sharita said, satisfied. "That thing out there is obviously a ship. Tell us more about it, Omer!"

  "I can't. None of the sensors or hyperdetectors are providing reliable data. What's on the holo is only a depiction based on the optical data, nothing else."

  "An improved snapshot, in other words."

  "Yes. As for the rest ... You know there is no planetary secret in the galaxy I cannot penetrate. But I can't get through to this thing. They've got a damned good hyperdetection shield."

  "I consider that unlikely," Rhodan said.

  The Immortal spoke just loudly enough to be heard above the excited murmur of the bridge crew. Everyone turned at once to look at him.

  The man had a sense of timing. And presence to spare. Even after observing the Immortal for the weeks he'd spent on board the Palenque, Alemaheyu still didn't know how Rhodan commanded attention so easily, with so little fuss—but he swore to himself that he would find out. And once he had succeeded, then ... then he would more often have the pleasure of people listening to him. He didn't want any more than that. After all, he already had the best job in the universe.

  Sharita's expression made it clear that she would like to ignore Rhodan's interjection, but that was impossible.

  "And why is that? Would you perhaps be ready to share your Immortal wisdom with us?"

  "There's not a great deal to share."

  How could he tolerate Sharita's aggressive tone so calmly? Alemaheyu always lost his cool at some point and snapped back.

  Rhodan pointed to the holo. "That ship is rotating along the long axis. There is only one explanation for that: the rotation is the source of centrifugal force, which provides gravity to the ship. It's a primitive but foolproof method. But anyone forced to produce artificial gravity by rotation most assuredly isn't capable of the higher-dimensional technology needed to baffle our hyperdetector."

  Pearl Laneaux chimed in. "According to my calculations and assuming that the optical data is correct, I estimate a gravitational strength of one and a half gs in the outer sections."

  "I guess that sounds reasonable. We'll accept that estimate as a working hypothesis. And how do you explain the failure of the hyperdetector, Perry?"

  "I don't have an explanation. At the moment."

  "You don't have a—"

  Rhodan held Sharita's cutting gaze. "But I can tell you who must be on board on that ship. I took the liberty of going through all the visual data that Pearl's investigation teams transmitted to the ship's syntron from the interior of the wreck."

  "How? You don't have any authorized access to the syntron whatsoever!"

  "What? I didn't know that." Rhodan's attitude was the ultimate in innocence.

  Way to go, buddy! Alemaheyu thought. Let her have it!

  "I would never attempt to procure unauthorized access to data. You must have made an error in the allocation of access rights."

  Sharita began to protest, but Rhodan spoke over the beginning of her diatribe. "But that doesn't matter. Mistakes happen, right? At the moment, the important thing is what I stumbled across. The teams found lettering on the walls in several places where they removed the ice layer, and there was enough to confirm my initial suspicion. The lettering is in Lemurian."

  "Lemurian!" Sharita needed a moment to absorb it. "But ... that would mean that thing out there has been under way for fifty thousand years. Or longer!"

  "Yes," Rhodan agreed. "We—"

  "Hyperdetection!" Omer interrupted him.

  "Hyperspace exit at ninety light-seconds distance!"

  "Put it on the screen!"

  The holo of the mysterious cylinder ship collapsed. When it reformed, it showed a different ship: a spherical shape, flattened poles, extended weapon turrets.

  Sharita was the first to find her voice again. "Didn't I say it from the start? Akonians!"

  12

  When Denetree awoke the next morning, she was alone in the house. She went from one room to the next without finding Launt or even a note from him. Denetree tried not to worry—she hoped Launt was out trying to fulfill her request—and to her surprise, she actually succeeded.

  Her surroundings were too strange, too unreal. Four rooms! She spent several minutes just going from room to room to room, as if she had to convince herself that the house really existed. Never before had she met anyone who had sole possession of a whole room, to say nothing of an entire house. The houses of the metach'ton belonged to the community. Each room housed three, four, or even five people, and who slept with whom in which room was always changing, depending on personal feelings and the outcomes of the power struggles that constantly seethed under the surface of every Metach'ton.

  Now and then she stopped at one of the windows and looked out. A wall surrounded the house and protected its inhabitant from curious glances. Denetree saw her bicycle leaning against the house. She wanted to go outside and check to make sure it was in working order—not because she doubted that it was, but from a need to feel something familiar in her hands. But she resisted; there might be some way she wasn't aware of to see into the courtyard from outside.

  She ended her restless wandering in the most wonderful of the rooms: the kitchen. Launt had his own kitchen: he wasn't forced to eat in the Metach'ton's community kitchens! He could be by himself! She looked through the cabinets and found several doughcakes and some vegetables. She hesitated for a moment: this food wasn't for her! but in the end hunger overpowered her reluctance. She gulped down all six doughcakes and would have eaten more if she could.

  It felt good to be full, but an undercurrent of fear mixed quickly with the sense of being pleasantly stuffed: had the condemned prisoner just eaten her last meal?

  It was a miracle that Launt had saved her from the Tenoy. A miracle that could not last. Tenarch or no, even Launt's power was limited. Sooner or later, the Ship would track down Denetree, even if she stayed with the Tenarch. Denetree needed another miracle.

  She heard the door opening.

  "Denetree!" Launt called in a low voice. "Don't be afraid, it's me!"

  She ran into the front room. "Wher
e were you so long? Did you find it?"

  Launt hung his jacket on a wall hook and pulled a small box from his pocket. "Duties," he said. "And this took me some time. As a Tenarch, it's easy to do most things, but even for me it was hard to just show up at a Metach'ton and tap on the walls looking for hiding places."

  She took the box from him. "How did you manage it?"

  "The old Respect for Authority routine. The Naahk sent one of his advisers to make sure that the hard-working metach didn't want for anything. To guarantee impartiality, the Tenarch naturally insisted on not being disturbed during his inspection."

  "Naturally!" Denetree laughed and hugged the box tightly to her chest. A part of her observed her behavior suspiciously—there wasn't anything to laugh about!—and noticed that Launt's good mood seemed forced. The Tenarch was pale and appeared tired. After he gave her the box, he began to continually rub his hands together. They went into the kitchen. Denetree put the box down in front of her, picked up a knife and prepared to cut the twine wrapped around the box.

  "Denetree," Launt said, "you can't stay here."

  "I know." She couldn't stay anywhere on board. That was clear to her. But she wasn't worried. She had her gift from Venron, and her brother would not leave her in the lurch.

  "The Tenoy arrested a member of your group."

  "Who?" Her confidence had a hole torn in it.

  "Mika. She lost her nerve at a checkpoint."

  Mika? She had always seemed to Denetree as one of the strongest of the Star Seekers.

  "What happened to her?"

  "She ... " Launt swallowed. "She betrayed the rest of the group."

  "I don't believe it! Mika would never—"

  Launt shook his head. "She did. Believe me."

  Denetree didn't want to accept it. She grasped the knife more tightly in her hand, cut the twine and opened the box.

  Surprised, she froze in the middle of the movement.

  "What is it? What's in the box?"

  She reached in, picked up the tiny item and showed it to Launt.