by Ian Douglas
Had they accidentally let slip that tidbit about the old galaxy? Koenig tried the direct approach. “So tell me . . . where are the Sh’daar from?”
Gru’mulkisch twisted her eyestalks in what Koenig had been told was an expression indicating humor—the equivalent of a human smile. “We can’t tell you that, Admiral,” she said. “That data would be extremely valuable, yes-no?”
“There must be an exchange,” Dra’ethde told him. “We have been asked about this before by your intelligence people. . . .”
“And what would you accept in exchange for that information?” Koenig asked.
“We are not aware of anything you possess worth such an exchange, Admiral,” Gru’mulkisch said. “We regret this . . . but what you ask is mish’a’ghru. Of first importance, you might say, yes-no?”
“In fact,” Dra’ethde added, “I regret having mentioned gu reheh’mek chaash at all, and perhaps I was irresponsible in doing so. But since the words will not help you, no harm has been done, yes-no?”
The phrase translated as “yes-no,” Koenig knew, was what the xenolinguists referred to as an agreement manipulator, a way to get others to agree with you, to be on your side in a conversation, and to disarm any potential hostility. Individually, the Agletsch were more agreeable to talk with than many humans Koenig knew.
But talking with them tended to lead in unsatisfying circles. Even if the Agletsch translator units perfectly shifted between the English and Agletsch languages, there was a hell of a lot missing on both sides simply because of differences in culture, attitude, and worldview.
Koenig wondered how much of their professional reticence was due to business considerations, and how much to the fact that both of them carried Sh’daar Seeds that, no doubt, were listening in on this conversation and recording it.
“We are about to emerge from Alcubierre Drive,” he told them. “I can’t allow you on the bridge or in the CIC, but I’ve given orders to dress the crew’s lounge for external view, and you can watch from there.”
“Thank you, Admiral.”
“My senior aide, Lieutenant Commander Nahan Cleary, will be with you. If I have questions of you two, I’ll pass them to him. Okay?”
“Quite acceptable, Admiral.”
“And if either of you have insights about what’s happening, I’d appreciate it if you could share them with him. Such information will be considered to be under the terms of your contract.”
“Of course, Admiral.”
The two Agletsch had volunteered to accompany America and her battlegroup on this mission as guides—which meant that they were expected to share data with Koenig and his officers without the need to haggle over the informational price of each item. His understanding was that the Agletsch mission on Earth had been “paid” for their services with several exabytes of information drawn from the New Library of Congress in Columbus, and from the British Library in High London. He wondered what, specifically, the Agletsch had learned in exchange for the services of these two.
No matter. He expected them to deliver.
“You’re certain,” Koenig said, “that you have nothing to add to your report about this system we’re about to enter?”
“Quite certain, Admiral,” Gru’mulkisch said. “We know that the system is of importance within the Sh’daar network, but we’ve not been here before. We do not believe it to be inhabited, but cannot tell you if it is defended, or if there is a military base or outpost.”
“In fact, we hope to acquire profit here ourselves,” Dra’ethde added. “Yes-no?”
By profit, Koenig assumed the Agletsch was referring to new information, something even the Agletsch did not know.
“What happened to the Chelk,” Koenig told them, “might well happen to my species. If you two learn anything new, I’ll expect you to share it with us. I will invoke the contract if I must.”
“We understand this, Admiral.” Gru’mulkisch sounded almost contrite . . . or possibly cautious, as though she were picking her sixteen-legged way across thin ice.
“And we appreciate you including us in the investigation,” Dra’ethde said.
“We will be emerging from metaspace in another hour,” Koenig said. “I suggest you get down to the crew’s lounge and make yourselves ready. Mr. Cleary will join you there.”
“Thank you, Admiral,” Gru’mulkisch said. “We expect that this will be of great profit to both our peoples, yes-no? A place neither human nor Agletsch has yet ventured.”
But Koenig still wondered if the many-legged beings could be trusted.
VFA-44
Approaching Texaghu Resch System
112 light years from Earth
1058 hours, TFT
Lieutenant Gray tried to relax within the close embrace of his fighter. Always it was the waiting that was hardest. He checked his in-head time. Five minutes.
The Dragonfires were doing a drop-launch this time, free-falling with the centrifugal force of America’s rotating hab modules. When it was time to launch, Gray’s fighter would pivot ninety degrees, pointing out and down relative to the turning bay, the magnetic clamps would release, and the hab module’s rotation would fling him into space with a half-G of acceleration—about five meters per second. Once clear of America’s immense forward shield cap, the squadron would orient on the local system’s sun and then boost; fifty thousand gravities would bring them close to the speed of light in just a whisker under ten minutes.
“Hey, Skipper?” It was Miguel Zapeta, on the squadron channel. “Any word yet on who we’re gonna be fighting? Or if we’re going to be fighting?”
“Nothing yet, Zap,” Gray replied. “We’ll be the first to know, right?”
“Yeah. Except the scuttlebutt I heard was that the bugs know, and they’re leading us into a trap.”
“So, you’re believing scuttlebutt, now? Who told you that shit?”
“Uh . . . a gal I know in S-2.”
S-2 was the designation for America’s intelligence department. “Ah, well if Naval Intelligence said it, it must be true, right?”
He heard several chuckles over the squadron channel. Good. Loosen them up a bit. You don’t want them thinking too hard before a drop.
“We’ll be emerging far enough out-system that we’ll have plenty of time for a look around, okay? The entire Sh’daar galactic fleet could be in there, and they’d never even see us if we dropped in, took a look, and then jumped back into Alcubierre Space.” He hesitated, then grinned as he added, “Yes-no?”
That raised laughter from the waiting Dragonfires. The odd patterns of Agletsch speech and their constant use of the phrase “yes-no” was well known to everyone on board America by now.
“Sounds like we have an Agletsch loose in the squadron,” Rostenkowski said, laughing. “Since when did they start driving Dragonfires?”
“Dragonfires, PriFly,” Wizewski’s voice broke in. “Is there a problem?”
“Negative, CAG,” Gray replied. “No problem.”
“Can the chatter in there and focus on your finals. Emergence in three minutes. Drop in sixty seconds after that.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
No sense of humor, that one.
He was glad the newbies in the squadron could laugh, though. They’d been training hard in sim, but the real deal was never like electronic simulations, no matter how bad-assed realistic the downloads.
If they could enjoy a joke now, they ought to be okay.
He hoped. . . .
CIC
TC/USNA CVS America
Outer System, Texaghu Resch System
112 light years from Earth
1103 hours, TFT
Emergence.
The star carrier America dropped into normal space as her Alcubierre bubble collapsed. Since she’d been motionless relative to the volume of space wrapped up inside the Alcubierre field, she emerged traveling at a velocity of only a few kilometers per second—the difference in relative velocities between this patch of space,
and the space within the Kuiper Belt of HD 157950. The transition released a great deal of potential energy as light and hard radiation, a flaring burst spreading into and through the new star system at the speed of light.
Koenig studied the new system, both represented by icons within the tactical tank, and as revealed by optical sensors across the bulkhead viewalls of the Combat Information Center. They’d emerged ten astronomical units from the local star—a little farther than Saturn was from Sol. There were planets—five visible immediately, and there likely would be others as the ship’s navigational AIs scanned local space.
“Admiral?” a familiar voice asked. “This is CAG. So you still want to launch fighters?”
“Wait one,” Koenig told him. “We need to see what we’re launching to.”
Data continued to cascade in from the AIs scanning the system. Two inner rocky planets, small enough and close enough to their primary that they likely were too hot for Earth-type life. Planet III, 1.5 AUs from the star, was a small gas giant, about the size of Neptune. Beyond that, at 3 and 5 AUs, were two more rocky planets, both dazzlingly bright and probably encased pole to pole in planet-wide sheets of ice.
“Astrogation,” Koenig called. “Give that gas giant a close look. Maybe it has Earthlike moons.”
He was thinking of Alchameth, circling the star Arcturus, and its moon Jasper.
“We’ve been looking, Admiral. We’ve spotted several small moons—rocks, really—but nothing like a real planet.”
“Carry on, then.”
He felt a small bite of disappointment. Because of this system’s listing in the Turusch Directory, he’d assumed there would be an inhabited planet here—if not one with an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere and temperate climes comfortable for humans, than one with the reducing atmosphere and hot, sulfur-laden conditions enjoyed by the Turusch.
The truth of the matter, though, was that habitable worlds of either type were painfully few and far between within that sliver of the galaxy explored so far by Humankind. The chances that a world of near-Earth mass would just happen to lie within the band of liquid-water temperatures around a star were slim; the fact that the Confederation had discovered as many as twenty where humans could walk unprotected—Chiron and Circe and Osiris and the others—spoke more to how many stars were out here, not to how common other Earths might be.
Texaghu Resch was a G2-type star almost identical to Sol . . . but it simply hadn’t won the planetological crapshoot that would have led to its possessing a planet humans could call home.
Something was flashing red in the tactical tank. Koenig looked . . . then blinked. There was something there. America’s instrumentation was picking up a gravitational anomaly. In essence, the ship was feeling about twice the force of gravity it should be feeling at this distance from a G-class star. It was exactly as though there were two stars in there—a close binary—each of about one solar mass . . . but one of the stars was invisible.
Either that, or the single visible star was twice as massive as it should be, and that simply wasn’t possible, not within the rules governing stellar classification as humans now understood them.
“Admiral?” another voice said. “This is Lieutenant Del Rey, in Astrogation.”
“Go ahead.”
“Have you seen the GA alert, sir?”
“Yes, I have. What do you make of it?”
“We didn’t know what the hell it was at first. We still don’t. But . . . take a look at this, sir.”
A visual feed came through, opening as a new window within Koenig’s in-head display. It appeared to be a highly magnified image of a portion of the star itself, with the light drastically stepped down by the AI controlling it. Koenig could see the curving limb of the star, the mottling of the surface granulation, the sweep and arch of stellar prominences. At first, he saw nothing out of the ordinary.
And then . . .
“Good God!” he said, expanding the image for a closer look. “What the hell is that?”
“We have no idea, sir,” Del Rey replied. “But we thought it might be important.”
And that, Koenig thought, was a hell of an understatement.
Chapter Six
29 June 2405
VFA-44
Outer System, Texaghu Resch System
112 light years from Earth
1106 hours, TFT
“PriFly, this is Dragon One,” Gray called. “What’s the hang-up?” They were supposed to have dropped two minutes before, but Primary Flight Control had called for a hold.
“Wait one, Dragon One,” a voice replied—one of the traffic control personnel in PriFly. “There’s been a hitch. The Space Boss is talking to the admiral now.”
The “Space Boss” was Commander Avery, America’s primary flight controller.
Gray scowled. His cockpit was projecting a view of surrounding space, overlaid with icons representing the ships of CBG-18 as they continued to emerge from metaspace. A dozen Confederation vessels were out there, now, with more popping in every moment as the light from their Emergence reached the America’s sensors.
There were no icons representing enemy or unknown vessels. It appeared that this system might be clean.
Possibly the drop was going to be scrubbed.
Well, that was the battle cry of the Navy: hurry up and wait.
“Dragonfire Squadron, this is PriFly,” Commander Avery said. “The drop is scrubbed. Repeat, the drop is scrubbed. VFA-51 will remain on Ready Five. All others will stand down.”
VFA-51, the Black Lightnings, was one of the Dragonfires’ sister Starhawk squadrons on board the America. Commander Alton Crane was their new skipper, and like the Dragonfires, they’d taken heavy losses at Alphekka, and a good half of the pilots were newbies.
Gray felt a jolt as his Starhawk began rising within its magnetic cradle. A moment later, it passed through the drop-tube vacuum seal, allotropic composites within a nanomatrix that made solid metal flow like a thick, viscous liquid, allowing the fighter to be drawn into the carrier’s flight deck while maintaining the compartment’s atmospheric pressure. His cockpit melted open and swung away as a rating outside triggered steps that grew out of the deck.
“Short flight, huh?” the guy said, grinning.
“The best kind,” Gray replied with considerable feeling. “Uneventful.”
An hour later, Gray entered the crew’s lounge, located at the third-G level of America’s number-two hab-module stack. The compartment was large and furnished more like a civilian social center Earthside, with numerous entertainment pits, food bars, and low couches grown from the deck and turned soft. The overhead was an enormous dome, and at the moment, it was displaying the view outside. The local star, yellow, bright, and showing a tiny disk, gleamed halfway up the gently curving bulkhead.
Shay Ryan spotted him and walked over. “Hey, Skipper,” she called. “Looks like they don’t want us here, either.”
Like Gray, Ryan was a Prim, formerly of the Periphery areas that once had been Washington, D.C., until rising sea levels had reclaimed the lowland areas as a ruin-littered salt marsh. Like Gray, she’d joined the service because she’d had few decent options. Like him, she mistrusted both government authority and technology, but she’d tested well on her inborn spatial and coordination skills, and they’d made her a fighter pilot.
“Hello, Shay,” he said. He walked over to a food bar and placed his palm on the contact. He ordered a cola, which rose from within the black surface a moment later in a sealed cup with a built-in straw. “Looks like we lucked out, huh?”
“Shit. I don’t like going through all of that, getting ready to drop into hard-V, and then suddenly get pulled back. They’re just jerking us around, y’know?”
“Any day they pull us back,” Gray replied, “is a day we don’t get into a knife fight with toads.” Toads was pilot slang for the blunt, heavy, hard-to-kill fighters used by the Turusch. “And that suits me just fine.”
“I guess. Hey . . . did you see
? A couple of our old friends are on deck.”
Gray turned and glanced in the direction she was pointing, his eyes widening a bit. “So! They’re allowing the spiders out to play?”
“Maybe the brass trusts them now.”
Gray glanced at the Marine staff sergeant standing behind the two Agletsch. “More likely they figure they can’t do any harm here. Let’s go say hi.”
Gray and Ryan both had met the two Agletsch three months earlier, just before the battlegroup had departed from Earth’s SupraQuito synchorbital complex. They’d been at a restaurant called the Overlook, and an officious headwaiter had been trying to expel the two many-legged aliens for no other reason than, as far as Gray could tell, that they didn’t happen to be human. Gray, Ryan, and several other service personnel had lodged a protest by leaving en masse, taking the Agletsch with them to another restaurant, one without so narrow a definition of acceptable patrons.
And they’d gotten to know the two pretty well, Gray thought, as well as it was possible to know beings with both physiologies and psychologies utterly different from anything from Earth.
A small crowd had gathered around the two Agletsch, who were standing with a lieutenant commander in a full dress uniform. Gray thought he recognized the guy—someone on Admiral Koenig’s staff. When he pinged the man’s id, he got back a name and rank: LCDR N. Cleary.
He wasn’t sure which alien was which, but he had their names stored in his implant memory. “Hey, Dra’ethde,” he said. “What brings you down here?”
The Agletsch on the right twisted two of its eye stalks around for a look, identifying itself for Gray as the one he’d named. “Ah! You are the fighter pilot Trevor Gray, yes-no?”
“Yes. We met at SupraQuito, remember?”
“We do. We are delighted to see you again. And Shay Ryan as well! We remember you, too.”
“Stay clear of this, Lieutenant,” Cleary said. “We’re on duty.”
“Doing what?” Ryan asked. “Watching vids?”
