I was free! Free is a relative term, I was stuck aboard a Thuranin dropship with five other people, holds jammed with fuel and supplies, and we still had no way to get away from the star system. Skippy’s battle with the worm was still counting down to Zero Hour. And searching an ancient junkyard full of broken alien ships may be a tremendous waste of time. What I cared about was that it felt like I was doing something useful. Or something that might be useful, despite the odds against us. Desai, Reed and the three other pilots mostly cared they had one last opportunity to fly a spacecraft, before we all became subsistence farmers like the humans on Paradise.
So, our Condor had plenty of fuel, bland but sufficient food, and one shiny beer can. I was hoping this would be the most epic road trip ever!
“This sucks,” I mumbled less than a month later.
“I warned you-”
“Don’t remind me,” I snapped back at Skippy.
“Hey, I wasn’t the one who thought coming out here would be a super-fun family adventure. You’re like the Dad who gets the family in a car, drives six hours to the Museum of Dusty Relics, and is surprised everyone didn’t enjoy the trip.”
“I said don’t remind me.”
“Someone has to.”
“Crap.”
I was hanging in space, tethered to the Condor, just returned from yet another fruitless trip to inspect alien junk. This time, it was part of a Thuranin ship that Skippy estimated was twenty thousand years old. From the spinning hulk that massed over eight thousand tons, we were able to recover three jump coils. Three! Skippy didn’t even know if those three were usable, all we could see was those three were the only ones with microfractures in their matrices. Three measly coils was not going to get the Flying Dutchman anywhere.
We also found a surprising amount of fuel in the hulk’s tanks, although the reactors had sheared away so there was no place to use the fuel. And we recovered part of a jump drive controller, Skippy didn’t know if he could use it, but it wasn’t large or heavy so we took it with us anyway. The fuel we found in the tanks wasn’t compatible with a Condor’s engines, damn it. If we found or could build a reactor we could always come back for the fuel; that hulk wasn’t going anywhere.
Thus far, our epic journey to the stars was, as Hans Chotek predicted, an epic waste of time. After the first couple days, my boss only bothered to contact me once a week, and that was in response to the rather thin progress reports I had sent. The people on Gingerbread had made actual progress; they had located a site to build a settlement and were already transferring people and supplies there. The site sounded nice, it was next to a river, and just upstream from a large lake. Winters there were mild and perhaps the best feature of that site was another geothermal power source was there; one of the synthesizers was being relocated and should be producing dropship fuel soon. Major Simms had a team clearing land and planting test crops. I could not picture the SpecOps teams settling down to live like Little House on the Prairie but I certainly could not criticize them. They were dealing with reality as best they could while I was only delaying the inevitable by flying around looking at ancient space junk.
We had plenty of fuel, we had plenty of food, we had plenty of floating scrap to investigate in the orbital junkyard. What the six of us were running out of was patience and enthusiasm. Right from the beginning, our flight was a desperation move, a Hail Mary. I had pushed to explore the junkyard in part because we just might find something useful out there, but I knew the reality was my main motivation in flying offworld was to delay facing the fact that Skippy was going to die soon, and the Merry Band of Pirates would be trapped on Gingerbread, probably forever. I justified my refusal to accept reality because reality totally sucked, so it’s reality’s fault.
“Desai, I’m coming in,” I announced after indulging myself for a long minute of staring at the stars. “Let’s wrap this up, there’s nothing useful here we don’t already have aboard.”
“Yes, Colonel,” she replied from the cockpit. Desai had been the first pilot to volunteer for our useless goose chase, and of course I approved her coming with me. If this were the last time we ever flew, I wanted her with me. “Set course for the next target?”
“Sure,” I responded without enthusiasm. Then, remembering that I had to set the tone for all six of us, I added, “I promise no negative thoughts this time. The next target is going to be a jackpot of gear we can use to fix up the old Dutchman, guaranteed.”
“Yes, Sir,” she said with a chuckle that sounded forced. “It’s only a four day trip from here; we’ll know if you’re right soon enough.”
“Joe, we gots a problem,” Skippy’s voice broke me out of a daydream, and I scrambled to pull myself back to the present. There was no problem with our Condor, I knew that because the display in front of me was not showing any alerts. And the pilots up in the cockpit would have notified me. That left some very bad possibilities, like Skippy losing control of the Guardians and them tearing our dropship apart, or the worm attacking Skippy again.
“What is it?” In the passenger compartment, I had been loosely strapped into a seat, standard procedure while the Condor was coasting toward our next target. Desai had fired the engines for about half an hour and then cut thrust; we wouldn’t use the main jets again until we needed to decelerate to match course and speed with the pile of spinning ancient junk that was our next target to explore. Until then, the six of us floated around in zero gravity and exercised awkwardly to prevent our muscles from wasting away.
“Sorry to startle you, there is no immediate danger,” he assured me. “The orbits of the planets in this system are not natural. Not possible. There’s an entire planet missing.”
Hearing that gave me a chill. “Oh, crap. Is this like Newark, where Newark got pushed out of its original orbit, that disrupted the orbits of the other planets, and the innermost planet fell into the star?”
“No. Well, yes. There was an inner planet here, one that originally wasn’t there at all, I speculate that-”
“Hold on. Go back a minute. What do you mean, the inner planet wasn’t originally there?”
Skippy sighed. “Ugh. Now I have to explain orbital mechanics to you?” His voice was incredulous. “Can I hit the highlights and skip the math?”
“Probably a good idea,” I admitted.
“Ok, here goes nothing. Joe, running the math backwards shows me the Roach Motel used to have a Saturn-sized gas giant planet orbiting close to the star. Close, like, the star’s gravity well was siphoning off the planet’s atmosphere.”
“I thought gas giant planets didn’t form so close to a star.”
“Very good, Joey, get yourself a juicebox. Gas giants normally do not form so close to a star, and this planet didn’t form there. This planet originally orbited far from the star, out deep in the Oort cloud. The Elders must have towed it near the star.”
“Towed? Holy shit. They could- of course they could do that. Wow, moving a big planet like that through the system must have caused havoc with the other planets.”
“It would have required the Elders to stabilize the other planets during and after the transition. Most likely, the Elders jumped the planet through a temporary wormhole, to avoid it passing through the orbits of other planets.”
I simply shook my head. The works of the Elders blew my mind. They jumped a planet through a wormhole. Skippy once told me they had jumped a supergiant blue-white star through a wormhole, jumped it outside the galaxy. Beings like that, I could not comprehend. No wonder Skippy was so awesome, he had been built by beings to whom awesomeness was commonplace. “Let’s skip the part where I ask you how the hell anyone can jump a planet through a wormhole, and get to my next question; why? Why would they want to reposition a planet close to a star?”
“A gas giant planet, Joe. That’s the key. I am speculating, but my guess is the Elders used the planet to slowly replenish the star’s hydrogen. Pushing the planet into the star would have been too disruptive, so they placed th
e planet where its atmosphere would be gradually siphoned off. That technique can stretch out the life of a star’s main phase. If the Elders were tapping the star for power, as I suspect they were and still are, they are shortening the star’s useful life. The further back I run the math, the more fuzzy it is, but I think the Elders used at least two gas giant planets to replenish the star over the eons.”
“Wow. Wow. So, when you said a planet is missing, you meant that over time, the star sucked up that entire gas giant planet?”
“No. Damn, talking with you is frustrating, you ask too many questions. What I meant is, that innermost gas giant planet fell into the star, much earlier than it was supposed to. Gas giants have rocky cores; when all the gas had been siphoned off, the Elders likely planned to crash the useless core remnant into the star. What I think happened is, the gas giant fell into the star while it was still a giant.”
“The Elders pushed it into the star, the same way someone pushed Newark out past its original orbit?”
“No. Joe, technically, there are three planets missing from this star system.”
“Crap, Skippy.”
“Crap indeed, Joe. There’s the gas giant that fell into the star, plus a Neptune-sized planet that got ejected from the system. Technically, that planet is still orbiting the star, but it is so far away, it takes eight thousand years for a single orbit. Because the math tells me roughly where that outer planet must be, I found it using the Dutchman’s sensors. It’s faint, but it’s there.”
“That’s two. What about the third planet?”
“That is what puzzles me, Joe. The third planet that is missing originally orbited just beyond where Gingerbread is, kind of like how Mars orbits beyond Earth. This missing planet was more massive than Mars, the math tells me it had about the mass of Venus.”
“Ok, and? Where did it go?”
“It didn’t go anywhere, Joe. It just simply went ‘poof’ and disappeared.”
“It’s missing? Is its picture on a milk carton or something?”
“What?”
“Forget I said that. How is it possible for a whole planet to go missing?”
“It’s not. Not even for the Elders. I thought possibly they jumped it somewhere, but doing that leaves a distinctive vibration pattern inside the star, that would be detectable even after all this time. There is no such vibration.”
I scratched my head. “This is all great info, and it’s a mystery to puzzle through another time, right? It’s not actionable?”
“Actionable? You need to stop picking up buzzwords from PowerPoint slides. It is actionable, Joe, because I want us to fly over to where this planet should be, so I can examine it better with this ship’s crappy instruments.”
“Hoooo boy, that’s going to be a tough sell to Chotek. How about we check out our next target, and think about flying over to this phantom planet later?”
“Deal. If the phantom planet exists, it will take us a month to get there anyway; plenty of derelict ships in the junkyard between here and there. Hey!” He exclaimed with delight. “You don’t even need to tell Chotek at all. There are two large derelicts in the general area where I expect the phantom planet to be, if it exists. Those derelicts are close enough for me to scan the area and determine whether we should go in for a closer look.”
“A closer look? At a planet that, you think, might not exist?”
“Well, it just sounds stupid when you say it like that, Joe.”
“Major Smythe?” Captain Giraud approached the SpecOps team leader as the SAS man came out of a dreary meeting with Chotek and Simms, reviewing details of the site Chotek had selected for a permanent human settlement on Gingerbread. “We have a decision?”
Smythe nodded. “Yes, Chotek has selected a site. It’s good enough, I suppose. Major Simms agrees the area is suitable for agriculture.”
“He is serious about expending effort to build permanent structures, while Skippy is still with us?”
“Captain, our civilian leader is planning a golf course,” Smythe noted with a raised eyebrow.
“Golf-” Giraud thought for a moment the remark had been missed in translation, then thought Smyth had been joking. The expression on Smythe’s face made it clear his statement had not been a joke. Giraud lowered his voice. “It is one thing to scout for a site, but it seems premature to dedicate our air power to transportation of supplies to build a settlement, while Colonel Bishop is still working to get us away from this star system-”
“I agree, Captain. Orders are orders. I intend to confirm my instructions with Colonel Bishop. Chotek does not intend to begin a serious effort to move base camp for another month,” he looked up at the trees, which still had healthy green leaves. The climate model created by Skippy predicted nights at base camp would begin becoming cool in another six weeks, with winter approaching in four months. It was Smythe’s turn to lower his voice, he glanced around to assure no one overheard the conversation. “There is another matter I need to discuss with Colonel Bishop, if we truly are to be stranded on this planet. We need to do something about those Thuranin. They may not be a threat to us now because we have a technological advantage, but in ten, twenty, fifty years? Our dropships will cease to be flightworthy, and even for ground combat, we have a limited supply of ammunition. I do not want our future generations to face the Thuranin, with our side armed only with bows and arrows.”
Giraud nodded in grim agreement. “We must hit them while we still have air power. You think Bishop will agree?”
“I won’t ask him while he still hopes to fix Skippy’s problem. But, our commanding officer is a common-sense soldier,” Smythe concluded. “He will understand what we have to do.”
I had just finished a four-hour shift as copilot of our Condor, when Skippy made a strange, strangled sort of beeping sound, then went silent. “Skippy? What was that?” He had been quiet for several hours, I thought he was being nice and letting me concentrate on flying, although our dropship was currently coasting toward a cluster of parts from a derelict Thuranin ship, so there was absolutely nothing for pilot or copilot to do. Major Desai had spent most of our four hours together putting me through simulations to improve my skills for flying the Condor. All I was trusted to do so far was routine maneuvers in space; any tricky flying, or flying in an atmosphere would have to wait for me to gain more experience. “Skippy?”
He didn’t respond at all.
In a panic, I launched myself through the door into the main cabin, where his beer can was strapped into a seat. No sooner had I reached the chair and reached out to shake him when he finally spoke and his avatar shimmered to life above the headrest of the seat. “Hi, Joe. I thought you were still flying.” Skippy’s voice sounded mildly disoriented. “Whew, I had a little shock for a moment.”
“Skippy,” I waggled a finger at his avatar. “If this is because I washed my own laundry this morning, that is not funny.”
“Nope. Although that was a shock. Also, you did it wrong.”
“What is the problem, then?”
“Um, Joe, we’re in potential danger.”
“Wow!” I clapped my hands. “That’s great news, Skippy, thank you.”
“Huh?”
“Hey, usually the Merry Band of Pirates are in actual, no-kidding, oh-my-God, pee-in-my-pants danger. To only be in potential danger is a huge improvement.”
“Oh. That is a good point.”
“We’ve already got these Guardians swarming around us, a ship broken in pieces, your firewall is losing power and we haven’t been able to find the conduit thingy to fix you. What is the problem now?”
“I don’t want to alarm you-”
“But you’re going to do it anyway.”
“Right. Those other problems you mentioned, this new danger is kind of an order of magnitude worse. Like, infinitely worse.”
“What the hell is it, Skippy?”
“Um, there’s a Sentinel here?”
“Oh, shit. A freakin’ Sentinel? Like-”<
br />
“Like, a giant unstoppable Elder killing machine that can stomp the Rindhalu like bugs. Hee, hee, that was a good one. Because the Rindhalu are sort of spiders, like bugs.”
“Oh, yeah, that was freakin’ hilarious, Skippy.”
“Really, I would have been surprised if there wasn’t a Sentinel or two around here somewhere.”
“Why the hell didn’t you mention that before?!” I demanded.
“Would you have brought the ship to the Roach Motel, if you knew there were Sentinels here?”
“Hell no! Crap, did I just answer my own question?”
“Ya think? Joey, if I had told you this system likely contained Sentinels, you would have gone all ‘ooooh, too dangerous’ on me,” his avatar waggled its fingers in the air as if frightened, “and we wouldn’t have come here.”
“Yeah, and then we would have a ship in one piece. Plus, we’ve accomplished so much since we got here. Like, nothing.”
“Yet. We haven’t accomplished anything yet, Joe. Have faith.”
“Have faith? So says the beer can, who failed to tell me about the unstoppable killing machine. And brought us to this dead-end star system.”
“Joe, in my defense, there are Sentinels scattered across the galaxy. Normally, they are dormant, and they are actually in another phase of spacetime. As far as I know, the last time any of them were active was when the Maxolhx used Elder devices to attack the Rindhalu. That woke up the Sentinels, and after they stomped the Maxolhx and Rindhalu back to the Stone Age, they went dormant again.”
“And we woke up this one?!”
“No. No, in fact, that is what shocked me. Joe, this Sentinel is not dormant, it’s dead. I think it’s been dead a long, long time. All I found was a broken piece of it.”
“Dead? How could that happen?”
“Hence the source of my shock. What in this universe could kill a Sentinel?” His avatar shuddered. “This scares the shit out of me, Joe.”
Zero Hour (Expeditionary Force Book 5) Page 41
