by B. V. Larson
“Yes—and I’m willing to bet he’s done the same thing to you. What did he promise you to get you to fly out here, Verr? Tell me the truth.”
Captain Verr hesitated. “I’m in a quandary,” he admitted at last. “There have been… visitations. I’d assumed I’d been uniquely chosen to experience them. The fact that this entity has apparently revealed itself to you as well forces me to question what it has said.”
“How did Godwin appear to you?” I asked him. “Was he a sultry female of your species? Or a long-lost friend?”
“Godwin… it never provided me with a name. Instead, it appeared as a living plant from our homeworld. A plant that is sacred, something none of us would dare uproot and take into space.”
“A talking plant?” I asked.
“There are legends… The truth is embarrassing now. Perhaps it is as the younger members of my crew say. Perhaps I’m too old to be commanding a starship. My mind is easily misled.”
Privately, I agreed with his junior officers, but that wouldn’t do me any good now. “That’s nonsense!” I stated flatly. “You should reduce them in rank and give them the worst assignments. They’re nothing but jealous rank-climbers.”
“A pleasant thought… In any case, what should we do about this duplicitous being you call Godwin?”
“We’re going to play along with his game for now,” I said.
“Play along?”
“Yes. Let’s fly out there to the anomaly point. Let’s see what awaits. But, we’re not going to fight. We’ll be secretly cooperative.”
His dark eyes flashed. “Ah, I understand now. You hate this being as I do. Your vid file indicated you were barely interested—but I see the truth now. You’re angry. He must have fooled you in the past just as he fooled me. I understand, and I share your blood-rage.”
“Damn straight. Is it a deal?”
There was a hesitation, but it was brief.
“Yes,” he said at last. “It is a deal, Blake.”
The connection closed. Smiling, I walked onto my bridge and relieved Hagen early. It was good to have a plan—even a vague plan.
My ship would face her next challenge with an ally at her side.
=30=
As we drew closer to the point where an anomaly in the space-time continuum was registered by our deep scanners, the tension aboard ship heightened. We had no idea what we would discover, and when we thought about that it put everyone on edge.
When we were about six hours from our destination, and we were already braking, we were close enough to see an idle ship in space.
“Anything?” I asked for the hundredth time.
“Still nothing on our scopes, Captain,” Chang answered. “At least, there’s nothing out here the size of a cruiser.”
“They could be phase-ships,” Dalton suggested. “Running quiet way out here—just as we’d do with our own stealth vessels.”
I glanced at him, but I didn’t say anything. He was right. Besides Earth, the only known fleet of phase-ships belonged to the Empire.
Could that be the answer? Were they lying in wait out here, after having baited their trap with anomalous readings?
“At least we know it’s not Fex,” Samson said.
“How so?” I asked him.
“If it was Fex out here, he’d be grandstanding. He’d let us know it was him, just to flash his own giant ego.”
“Hmm…” I said. “You have a point.”
“That’s the way, Samson!” Dalton said. “A few more ideas like that, and nobody is going to mistake you for a dolt.”
“Belay that shit, Dalton,” I said as I saw Samson begin to get irritated. I couldn’t allow Dalton’s fun to interrupt the smooth operation of the ship.
Dalton glanced my way like he was detecting a bad smell, but he shut the hell up all the same. That was good enough for me.
“I want to shoot something,” Mia complained. “It’s been weeks.”
“Less than a week—but you might get your chance.”
“Not if you visit their ship and talk to them sweetly—again.”
She was somewhat bitter about the ending of our last encounter with the Terrapinians. Diplomacy, deal-making and alliances were all considered sinister by the predator races. They’d evolved fighting for territory and dominance on their home worlds. For most of the Rebel Kher, there was no room for nobility out here among the stars. Enemies were to be killed—or they killed you. That was that.
Ignoring my crew for the next hour, I studied what little data we were getting from the region as we got closer. More and more sensory equipment managed to get a reading on background radiation, drifting particles of mass and other vital info.
Unfortunately, it all painted a vague picture. Something had opened a rift here, that much we could be sure of. Had a ship glided into the star system then glided back out? It was perfectly possible.
It was also possible they were still here, cruising silently. At great distances, ships detected one another by their exhaust plumes and radioactive trails. But if a ship came in coasting and didn’t turn on her engines—well, there was no way to detect a small dark object at this distance. Earth didn’t yet have a comprehensive set of sensor buoys out this far. We had no idea what had happened, only that a rift had opened and closed.
Conversely, if any ship was lurking out here, they had almost certainly spotted us by now. We were flying under power. That meant we had a plume of exhaust and plasma trailing us like a torch. We would look like comets to them, and we were just as hard to miss.
On impulse, I used my sym to contact Captain Verr.
“Captain,” I said, “are you seeing anything we aren’t?”
“We’ve detected residual ripples in this region of space. There has been a rift formed here recently.”
“Yeah… anything else?”
“No. Not yet. Perhaps they hide like your evil ships.”
“That would make them Imperials. Do you think the Imperials would come here?”
“No—not yet.”
That made me pause and frown. I’d never gotten even a suggestion from the Terrapinians that they thought the Imperials were coming. It had all been about Fex and his supposed armada of ships.
“Uh… when do you expect the Imperials?” I asked off-handedly.
“When this matter is done, of course.”
“What ‘matter’ are we speaking of?”
The connection, which was audio-only and essentially connected one aural nerve to another, went quiet for a time. He was either thinking, or consulting with others. Either way, I didn’t like it. He might be hiding something.
“I misspoke,” he said when he came back online at last. “I have no knowledge of the Imperials.”
“Yeah… right,” I said, and I broke the connection.
My ally was screwing me already, or at least that was my impression.
The last few hours dragged. When we finally got there, we arrived pinging away with every piece of detection equipment we had.
“Captain?” Dr. Abrams said, buzzing in my ear.
“Yes, go ahead. What have you got, Abrams?”
“There are no phase-ships in the immediate area. I’d stake my reputation on that.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve studied them intensely, as you must realize. They tend to leave particles when they phase-in or phase-out. None of those particles are within a million kilometers of this location.”
“That’s good news, Doc. But what if they glided in, without power? What if they didn’t use so much as a chemical jet to alter their course? Could they be here—phase-ship or not?”
He hesitated. “You’re using the term ‘here’ too loosely for me to answer.”
“Let me be more clear then: if they were within ten million kilometers of us right now, could we detect a ship?”
“While it was running silently? No emissions?”
“Correct.”
Again, he hesitated. I got the fe
eling I was blowing up some of his presumptions.
“That seems highly unlikely, Captain.”
“And your answer seems evasive. It’s no more unlikely than the idea a starship popped in here then performed an immediate U-turn and went back out through the same rift.”
“I can think of a dozen scenarios where—”
“Don’t bother,” I said, cutting him off. “Keep analyzing the data incoming from the sensors. Blake out.”
He was in mid-squawk when I closed the connection.
I had to think. If the Terrapinians were playing us… we were in trouble. Could they possibly know more than they were letting on about this breach of the star system? Godwin had suggested as much.
“Godwin…” I muttered, thumping a fist lightly on some steel tubing. The next time I got ahold of that guy, he was going to give me some solid answers.
A few hours later we arrived at the point where the rift had opened. It was in the middle of nowhere, even by interplanetary standards. There were no significant bodies of mass within fifty million kilometers of us. Nothing bigger than a beach ball was drifting in all that volume of space.
At least, nothing was there that we could detect.
Sixteen long hours inched by. I went off-shift late, slept badly, and came back on-shift early. It was all for nothing. Local space was as empty as it could be.
Finally, I lost patience and contacted Captain Verr again.
“Captain,” I said, “please tell me what’s going on. I know you have information I don’t.”
“Naturally,” he said. “We aren’t even the same species. Our minds have a differing number of layers, sub-processors, and—”
My fist thumped down again. “Forget about that! What’s happening? You don’t even sound quite the same…”
“There is no true audio transferring between us,” he said. “You realize that, don’t you?”
“There it is again. A certain snottiness… Captain Verr was never like that.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Let’s talk about what you do know,” I said, pressing. “You told me Godwin appeared to you as a bush, or something. A sacred plant.”
“I did? Oh, yes…”
Frowning, I ran my hands over my control plates. Our ships were near to each other now, in relative terms. If I’d been standing on the outer hull, I might have been able to see Verr’s ship with binoculars—if there had been light reflecting off the skin of his vessel.
All his engines were stopped. He was drifting, not even running stabilizer jets.
“Why are we here?” I asked suddenly. “Why did you lead us out here?”
Another hesitation. “I did not ‘lead’ you. We came together of our own accord.”
“Initially I thought that was the case, but now, I’m not so sure.”
“You’re not making any sense, Captain Blake.”
“Let me talk to someone else. Your exec, perhaps.”
More quiet, then: “That would be impossible, I’m afraid.”
“Why?”
“I’m sorry, Captain. Please be patient. Everything will become clear soon.”
He cut off the connection. Cursing, I got up with a lurch that caused me to bounce into the air due to the low gravity. I had to push off the hull to drift back down again and land on my feet.
“What’s wrong, sir?” Samson asked—his hands poised over the controls.
I saw that Dalton had the engines warmed. Mia was wide-eyed and rolling her turrets around to pinpoint the nearby mass of Captain Verr’s ship.
Waving them all back down, I paced the deck with light steps. “I don’t know what it is,” I admitted, “but something’s wrong over there on that Terrapinian ship.”
=31=
We made a series of attempts to contact Verr’s ship over the next several hours. Each was blocked. They were unresponsive. As time passed, my entire crew was becoming increasingly worried.
“The Terrapinian ship is drifting, Captain,” Chang announced just as I was giving up for the night.
“What do you mean?”
“She’s off her position.”
“Wasn’t she stable before? What exerted force to propel her?”
“There are a variety of possibilities,” he said. “She might have been struck by a meteor, for example.”
I waved my arms for emphasis. “Do you see anything like that out here? We’re becalmed in space terms. There’s a bit of Solar Wind—”
“That’s been accounted for. It can’t be the source of the drift.”
Squinting, I eyed the hull of my ship as if I could penetrate them by sheer will. After a moment, it seemed to work. I used my computers, sensors and my sym to reach out and grab a visual of the drifting derelict ship nearby.
I could see the Terrapinian vessel clearly. It was distant, but distinct. There was no visible damage. No jets streaming from her sides—why was she drifting.
Returning my perception to the bridge, I glanced at Chang. “Get Abrams up here.”
A few minutes later, Dr. Abrams walked onto the deck. His nose was about a mile in the air. He had the miffed look of a girlfriend I’d once had in college.
“Abrams, I’ve got a mystery for you.”
His hands were clasped behind his back, but one of them lifted up high and his finger fluttered dismissively. “It’s already been solved.”
“You know what’s wrong with the Terrapinian ship?”
“Well, I know why it’s drifting. There’s a gravitational force being exerted. In time, it will affect us as well.”
I squinted at him. “You mean there is a mass out here? Something we can’t see?”
“No, not exactly. There’s a gravity-well—but not a large volume like a Moon. The object is small, but dense.”
“Ah...” I said, catching on. “Where is it?”
“I’m employing gravimeters. If you allow me to toss out a few probes equipped with similar devices, we can triangulate and pinpoint the collapsed matter.”
My crew was wide-eyed. Some were clueless about what we were discussing, but those who did understand it were even more alarmed.
“We aren’t talking about a black hole, are we?” Dalton asked, breaking the ice on their fears.
“No, no, no,” Dr. Abrams chuckled. “Don’t even dream of a true singularity. We’d all have been extruded into particles and energy long ago if that were the case—Earth included.”
“What then?” I asked.
“Collapsed matter. Neutronium, if I don’t miss my guess. Something perhaps a half-meter in diameter.”
We stared at him. “What is it? Why didn’t we detect it previously?”
“I should think that was obvious,” he said.
“Humor me.”
“We didn’t detect it previously because it wasn’t here. It’s been moving closer. That’s why the Terrapinian ship is now drifting, where before it was stable.”
“And… what is it?” I demanded.
“A ship, of course. A tiny ship of collapsed matter.”
That threw me. It shocked everyone. A tiny ship? No bigger than a beach ball?
“How’s it moving?” Chang demanded. “We can’t see any engine plumes, or radiation trails.”
“There are more methods of propulsion possible than throwing mass overboard to create a primitive, Newtonian reaction.”
As usual, I found Abrams both haughty and uninformative. In this case, however, he was making sense. If there was a tiny ship out here, one with mass sufficient to tug a starship off course, it couldn’t be using traditional engines. We would have spotted the emissions if it had been.
“Okay,” I said. “What do we do?”
“I believe I mentioned my requirement for two probes equipped with—”
“Yes, of course. Give him the probes, Samson—whatever he needs.”
No one argued. We all worked and soon the probes were launched on diametrically opposed trajectories.
/> “Do you think this thing is dangerous, Doc?” I asked.
“I would assume so—if it wants to be. The technology is beyond our own.”
“What’s it doing here?”
“I can only conjecture on that point. Since we’ve never seen a vessel like this before, and the technology is advanced, I would assume it was built by the Imperials.”
I exchanged glances with my crewmen. “Mia, keep those weapons hot.”
“Opening gun ports!” she said happily.
I hadn’t directed her to do so, but I didn’t argue. Perhaps it was a wise precaution.
Abrams was already consulting an incoming data stream. After a few moments, he displayed his findings on our holo projection system.
“There,” he said, pointing at a red dot and making it pulse. “It’s very small… Definitely under a meter. Spherical, moving through gravity manipulation…”
“Gravity manipulation?”
“Yes… but the findings are embarrassing,” he said.
“How so?”
“My earlier hypothesis might have been premature. I’d assumed it was dense—but I’m not certain it’s so extremely dense now. The propulsion system is what’s affecting the Terrapinian ship.”
I looked at him, then the approaching object.
“It’s a probe of some kind, then? Or a bomb?”
He sniffed. “I would call it a stealth missile. Or a mine. I’m heading to my lab to work on the analysis. Something that’s attracted to mass the way a magnetic mine is attracted the hull of a ship by—”
“Mia!” I shouted. “Blast that thing out of space!”
Dr. Abrams threw up his hands in exasperation then hurried below to his lab. He probably thought we were overreacting—but I didn’t care.
Mia made a happy, snuffling sound. “Helm, line me up!”
I realized she wanted to use the center-line main batteries. That wasn’t what I’d figured, but I didn’t want to countermand my gunner now. I nodded to Dalton, who swung us around.
Devilfish’s main batteries aligned with her hull, permanently aiming forward. They could swivel in about a thirty degree arc, but more than that would cause the released force to throw us into a spin.
