I looked into the next tower, slightly taller than the last. Square cross-section, plastic-feeling building materials.
“Okay,” I shrugged again. “Would it not have broken up in time?”
That sure put me off my dinner.
“No shit.” I just had to say it. I would have regretted it by nighttime. “So your working hypothesis is what?”
“For a long time.” I added.
“So the buildings just built themselves?”
“So?”
“How would I know what an alien toilet looks like?”
And of course, Ship had hit the proverbial nail on the head. I found nothing remotely answering these things. Nothing. And that was the reason it had been boring. Those functionary things would have made it interesting, drawing comparisons between the alien’s daily life and mine.
I got back to the Ship at a comfortable jog. “Conclusions?” I slipped out of the suit, and plodded through the increased gravity to my Command chair.
Damn ship and her shifting conversations. “Conclusions about the planet’s occupants?”
There was that IQ difference again. “So why no robots here now then?”
“Okay.”
What? Ship was now asking for the most routine orders? “Yeah, do what you like, Ship. Take off, take me home, cook me a cheeseburger, whatever!”
“What?”
I heard the doors close and felt the engines fire. My straps engaged.
“Barnard’s Galaxy?” I looked to the screen as the city dropped away from us. “Show me.”
Nothing even remotely interesting, just a regular clump of stars.
Wow, that brought it all home. “Where are we in Bernard’s?”
“Galaxy radius?”
“It’s a small galaxy then?”
Damn. It had taken me five years to cross roughly 150,000 light years of our own galaxy, and that was using some of the known jump-holes, and a few new ones we’d found. I was now ten times as far away. I didn’t fancy my chances on a 50+ year journey home. Even if I could find the fuel for it.
Again Ship had stumbled into another conversation and I had to ask just to keep up. “What about carbon?”
I almost twiddled my thumbs waiting for her to explain, but I wasn’t going to ask. If it took a freaking year, I wouldn’t ask. Turns out I didn’t have to.
“And your conclusion?”
“Oxygen?” I asked.
“Chosen?”
“For what purpose, Ship?” I asked.
“So they’re terraforming?”
“You're missing one thing, Ship.”
she asked.
“Why would robots and/or androids need apartments?”
“But you just told me that living beings never inhabited that city.”
“Then what's the purpose of the city?”
“If you're right about that, what should we do?”
“What would that tell the aliens about us?”
Yeah, a likely story lately.
We had now climbed into the darker stratosphere, and the stars were becoming visible on the screen.
“What now?”
“Okay, seems like a plan to me.”
We’d hardly gotten out of orbit when Ship released another bombshell.
“Details?”
I couldn’t place the new terminology. It wasn’t like a computer to use words like ‘quite’, when referring to something exact.
“Its destination? Description?”
Wow, and yet in the midst of working, she threw in her old command protocol.
“That’s going to hold a lot of cargo.”
“Yes?”
“Okay, scan for occupants.”
“So following it would get us either back to our galaxy or closer to the route of the mystery?”
“Okay, Ship, don’t list them.” I said with heavy snarky undertones. “Can we intercept?”
A moment of silence.
Basically I didn�
��t have a choice, we could hang around in Barnard’s waiting to be discovered and captured/killed, or we could take a chance on getting our teeth into a mystery or getting home. I chose the latter in thirty seconds, I didn’t need an hour. “Follow the money.” I said. “In fact get so close that we fly into the worm-hole together. I don’t want it switching the destination again.” I refused to call it a singularity; I’ve got no idea how she came up with that one.
We hit the hole no more than two hundred meters apart, good flying on Ship’s part.
Good decision on my part.
Where do you go when you follow a freighter headed for a Terraforming site? Don't answer that, because what the aliens were doing wasn't Terraforming. At least not by definition. Words are slippery things. So call it Alien-forming? I don't care. I was beside the freighter and snugged up close. With any luck their sensors wouldn't find me. Or, maybe they already knew where I was and had no desire to blow me out of space. In any event, I was more than a little awed by a jump that terminated no more than a million kilometers from an earth-sized planet. As far as I was concerned, coming out of jump that close to anything solid was risky, if not downright insane.
The planet we were headed for was still in the rough stage. A lot of the surface was covered with water. That's a good thing. What wasn't covered by water was rocky and barren. Not such a good thing. Without dirt covering the rocks, a planet isn't much good as anything other than a gravity well.
“Absolutely. You seem to pick the most interesting shots for the forward screen.”
“I have no idea.” I needed to get out of the command couch and move around a bit. Of course, with the possibility of sudden changes in velocity and trajectory, moving around much was out of the question.
“There was nothing of interest there.”
“Did I? Who was around to tell them anything about what I did or did not do?”
“Whatever, Ship. I think following this freighter was a better choice.”
It was a question out of the blue, because I wasn't something I'd taken the time to think about. “Of course not,” I blurted, without a shred of an idea of what I was going to do next.
“You think we haven't, already?”
“By the way, Ship. Where are we?”
Not in home galaxy if that's what you're asking>
“Where, then?”
“And?”
“So we're still in the same galaxy?”
All I had to do was think about it and it began to make sense. It wasn't so much about the planet as it was about the star. “Check the primary, Ship. What's the star’s age?”
“Is it stable?”
“Is that natural?”
Ship surprised me by pausing for a few seconds. Finally, it said,
“It took you a while to figure that out.”
“Right. So tell me what Terraforming—or whatever it's called when aliens do it—around an extremely stable star means.”
“Obviously. Could our civilization manage such feats of engineering?”
“Extrapolate. How long before they have complete control of this entire galaxy?”
“And after that, what happens?”
“Ours?”
A million years. I wouldn't be around. All the atoms of my body will have been scattered to the winds and most of them incorporated into other living things. And then the aliens would show up and start spreading through the Milky Way.
Did I really have a stake in it? A million years? Or more? How many things could happen between then and now to slow, or even stop, the alien expansion? But somehow, I felt it was my fight. I had to do something. I needed to tell the people who'd sent me on this mission what I'd found.
“We're getting close to a decision point. Stay in the shadow of the freighter, or run. We have to choose.”
Or maybe not All I really wanted to do was run. But did I have enough information for a decision? What if I took what I had back to headquarters and got laughed at? Or worse, what if what I brought was considered real, but classified? What if what I shared with my superiors was classified so Top-Secret that once I told them what I'd found, I wouldn't be cleared to handle it? What if what I told them got buried in bureaucratic manipulation, filed away, and forgotten?
Nothing was going to happen, that's what.
Not for at least a million years.
“Could you be wrong, Ship? Could the threat to humanity be realized in a lot less than a million years?”
I didn't know how correct Ship could be.
“As in a surprise attack.”
“I don't like that.”
“I am,” I said. “We run.”
“Far enough from the freighter to find a jump point. Then run toward the jump point at maximum practical acceleration.”
I watched as the huge bulk of the alien ship began to grow distant. I was just going to ask Ship if it had located a jump point when I noticed a ripple in my view of the freighter. Less than a second later, something hit my ship, and shoved it away from the freighter at least a hundred times as fast as we had been moving. Then we started tumbling, and as we did, alarms started going off all over the place. I’d been fortunate, I’d been strapped in my Command chair. If I’d been walking around, I’d have been in a bad way.
“What just happened?” I yelled over the buzzing and whooping of the alarms.
“I have no words for it,” I said. “But I think we've just been swatted.”
“Can you turn some of the alarms off?”
“Crap, tell me good news.”
“Come on, Ship!” I pleaded, but it got worse.
“Time the bursts,” I said, more for my own emphasis than Ship’s benefit. She knew precisely when to fire the thruster, albeit on the lowest power I’d ever used. I sat in the Control chair, feeling anything but in control. I had both suits on, and was taking oxygen from my pack. The environmental alarms were driving me batty, but even Ship couldn’t switch them off. In the end it took sixteen bursts to stabilize our tumble, getting our back to the star, ready to slow ourselves down.
“How many bursts do you think we have left?” I asked, conscious that we’d perhaps taken too much out of the already depleted energy.
Yeah, time to ponder our deaths. “Excellent.”
By the time the batteries read ‘dead’, we’d slowed to 61kilometers per second. Not a bad rate of suicide into a star; fast enough to die, but slow enough to enjoy the fry.
“What now?”
“In that case, turn off environmentals.”
“I’ll die anyway if we can’t slow our progress towards the star.” I gave little thought to our direction, we’d obviously been purposely swatted into the sun. Bastards. “In fact close down everything but the servo motors.”
We got five more boosts out of the servos before they shut down too.
That cut our speed to 23 km per second.
“How much time do we have?”
“How much air?”
“Okay,” I wasn’t ready to die yet. “Check the trajectory; I need planet information, asteroids, anything that will slow us down. Get to work.”
As Ship did her scanning, I went through every piece of equipment I could find, wired them directly to our main ship’s battery. I opened medi-packs, drills, tools I never even knew we had. I tied wire to terminals and wire to wire, working out the different voltages in my head; it wasn’t pretty but every time I checked the voltage back in Control, it got larger millivolt by stubborn millivolt.
Star-Eater Chronicles 1: A Galaxy Too Far... Page 6
