A chart appeared on the display. Most materials were made up of a variety of basic elements, each of which would appear as a line of data showing each element and the amount of that element as a percentage of the whole. But in this case, there were only two lines. The first indicated Fe, or iron, with a composition of 0.05183%. The remainder of the material was lumped under the ominous heading of Unknown.
“That doesn’t make sense,” Burke told him as she passed the disk to Sidorov. After turning it over gingerly in his hands, he passed it to Steph, who stared at it, fascinated.
“I know, ma’am,” he replied. “But I assure you, it’s accurate. I ran it a dozen times, using different equipment, calibrating everything carefully. I also performed as many other tests as I could think of that were non-destructive, all with the same results.” He shook his head. “I know someone here will conduct many more tests, but I will be surprised if the results differ. This,” he retrieved the disk from Steph, who parted with it only reluctantly after becoming transfixed by the shimmering cyan surface, “is a completely new material to our science.”
Steph noticed that he automatically put the disk back in the pocket of his uniform tunic. He’s going to have a tough time parting with that little souvenir, she thought.
“But it’s nothing compared to this.” An insulated box that was big enough to hold a basketball had been on the table the entire time. He removed the lid, setting it aside on the table. Then he reached in with both hands and pulled out the globe of the planet Keran.
His audience gasped.
“This is what is most important now,” he told them, holding it up so they could look at it closely. “I believe this represents the planet Keran, and is some sort of countdown timer to an invasion there.” He handed it to Burke.
“Goddamn suits,” she grumbled, having difficulty holding it. “I can’t seem to get a grip on it.”
“It’s not the suit, captain,” Sato told her. “It’s what the globe is made of. Or, perhaps, what it is not.”
“What do you mean?” Steph asked, fascinated by the incredibly sharp detail of everything shown on the globe, from the lights of the larger cities showing on the planet’s dark side, to the deltas of the major rivers emptying into the seas.
“I don’t believe that it is a physical object,” he explained. “It is more like an...energy capsule of some sort. That is why it’s so difficult to hold. It seems to have mass, but I haven’t been able to measure it accurately. And you can’t actually touch it: it’s almost like trying to handle some sort of self-contained repeller field.” He shook his head. “I’ve tried everything from pressing against it with my hand to a low-intensity laser to try and get an accurate measurement of its size. But the results are all inconsistent. The harder you press against it, the harder it presses back. I don’t have the necessary physics knowledge to explain, but I believe that what we’re seeing here is Keran, perhaps reflected in some sort of space-time bubble, and we are seeing it in real-time.”
“Impossible,” Sidorov breathed, gingerly taking the object.
“What do you mean, ‘we’re seeing it in real-time’?” Steph asked.
“I believe that the cloud formations and other phenomena you see here on this object, at least the parts that aren’t reflections of what the aliens want us to see of the invasion, are actually happening, now, on Keran,” he replied, taking the globe back from her. He set it on a ring on the table that acted as a stand. “I have actually studied the cloud patterns, and in the months it has taken me to return home they haven’t repeated. I don’t think this is some sort of replica that the aliens produced from the ship’s navigational records. It is real.”
“How can you be sure?” Burke asked.
“It should be simple,” Sato told her. “I have made three-dimensional recordings of the object, and the files have been dated. If we can get meteorological data from Keran for those times, comparing them should be a trivial matter.” He tapped a few buttons on the console, bringing up the information on the files.
The thought sent a chill snaking down Burke’s spine. “If what you’re saying is true, the bastards must have a ship in the Keran system, spying on us and relaying this somehow.”
Reluctantly, Sato shook his head. “That is a possibility, captain, but...”
“Spit it out, midshipman,” she told him. “Now isn’t the time to hold back any ideas.”
“As I said, ma’am, I think this is more than some sort of transmitted image from a ship or sensor platform in the system. I think what we are seeing here really is Keran, as if it was contained in a separate bit of space-time.”
“You’re not making me feel any better, Ichiro,” she said in a softer voice, the implications suddenly striking home. If the aliens had technology that was that advanced, she thought, what chance would we have against them?
“I want confirmation of this right now,” Burke ordered Sidorov. “Get Sato’s data to Hecate and have her jump for Keran immediately.” Direct communications between the far-flung star systems occupied by humanity was, as yet, impossible. Instead, a fleet of courier ships spent their operational lives jumping between systems, gathering up data from special communications buoys that buffered outgoing information. In turn, the incoming couriers dumped their communications files into the buoys for distribution into the local system, or to be held for couriers heading to systems further on. It was a cumbersome and slow way to communicate, but until some of the highly experimental, and incredibly expensive, direct communications systems long in development had been perfected, it was all humanity had.
In the unusual case of Aurora’s return, the Navy had anticipated the need for priority interstellar communications and had pulled several Navy courier ships off of their regular runs and put them at Burke’s disposal. They were small and unarmed, but with their massive engines, they were the fastest ships in human space.
Sidorov spoke for a few moments on a private channel, his voice muted in his helmet. “Done,” he told Burke. “We won’t have anything back for nearly two weeks, though.”
Burke shrugged, the gesture nearly lost in the bulk of the vacuum suit. “We’re stuck with what we’ve got,” she said stoically as she eyed the blue globe that sat on the table. “And this thing is going to start changing the closer we get to the time the aliens will arrive?”
Sato noted that Burke’s original skepticism, which he had certainly expected, had fled. She believed him. In one way, it was a huge relief that at least someone believed his tale. But it also frightened him: it confirmed that this was a nightmare from which he would never awaken. “Yes, captain.” He brought up a view of the globe that he had taken soon after Aurora had left alien space that showed it in pristine condition. “This is what it originally looked like. But if you look here,” he pointed toward the northern pole, which was a sooty gray, “you can see that it has already changed significantly. It will continue to alter its appearance from the northern to the southern pole as time runs out, sort of like an hour glass. In the four months it took me to return here, this much has run out.” He leveled his hand, much as the huge warrior had, at what was roughly fifty degrees northern latitude, which was the northern boundary of where the larger towns and cities began. While the more spectacular visions of war were not yet apparent, the clouds of smoke from burning cities were already swirling into the air of the northern pole. “Again, I have studied its progression, and it seems to be constant. If my projections are correct, we have roughly eighteen months to prepare.”
Burke and Sidorov exchanged a look. Eighteen months.
“Shit,” was all Burke could think of to say.
“But Ichiro,” Steph asked, “what of the aliens themselves? We have these two bits of their technology,” she nodded toward the globe and implied the disk in his pocket, as well, “but there’s nothing about them. No physical evidence-”
“But there is,” he said, bowing his head to her. He reached under the table and withdrew a long curved black
tube that was carefully sealed in plastic.
“Jesus,” Steph breathed. “That’s your grandfather’s sword, isn’t it? The one you stabbed the alien with?”
“The same,” he told her. “After I realized its value,” he made an apologetic nod toward Captain Burke, “I hermetically sealed it in plastic. The aliens may have erased all traces of what happened from the ship’s computers, but I assure you that there is physical evidence here.” He slowly slipped the blade from the scabbard to reveal some dried blood along the blade’s edge. “I ran some basic DNA testing on it as well as I was able with some of the bio-survey team equipment. Not surprisingly, it is not human.” He carefully slid the blade back in the scabbard and set down the sword.
“Midshipman Sato,” Burke began, then paused. “Lieutenant Sato, I can’t express to you the value of what you’ve done, not just in surviving, but in having the presence of mind to do all the work you did on the trip back to give us a jump start on this thing. You’re going to have a rough time for a while answering endless questions from the debriefing team, and you’ll also have to sit for a formal inquiry. I apologize for that, but I’ll be straight with you: a lot of people in high places aren’t going to want to believe any of this, and the inquiry might help with that. It’s going to be hell, but not nearly as bad as the hell you’ve already survived. And if there’s anything I can do for you, anything, just ask, and I’ll go straight to the bloody Chief of Naval Staff to get it if I have to.”
“Thank you ma’am,” Ichiro told her, bowing his head in respect. She had just spot promoted him up three grades. “I do have one request...”
“Name it,” she told him.
“When the defense plan for Keran, whatever it might be, is put into operation, I want to be there,” he told her, his eyes burning with a cold fury as he remembered Chief Harkness’s words. “I want to welcome those fucking alien bitches to human space.”
* * *
Steph was deep in thought as she watched Ichiro eat. Burke and Sidorov had left the ship. After going through the strict decontamination procedures in a temporary airlock set up outside the entrance to the space dock, they had been able to get out of their vacuum suits and get back to Africa Station. Burke had put Sidorov in overall command while she went planetside to confer with the brass. Steph already had most of her initial story put together, and had already run it by Sidorov. With a few minor changes, he had loved it.
But one thing was missing: their enemy didn’t have a name. Ichiro had tried to make sketches of what the aliens looked like, and no doubt one of the members of the growing debriefing team who waited impatiently in the space dock compartments set aside for the purpose would be a profile artist to help refine Sato’s rough vision. But no one had really come to grips with what to call them; they were simply “the aliens.”
That just wouldn’t do, and she wanted to be the one to set the standard, not some egghead on the debriefing team who’d come up with some idiotic appellation.
The problem was that she couldn’t just make up something. Well, she could, she reflected, but the Navy probably wouldn’t approve it if she didn’t have some basis for it. And it had to have a decent ring to it. She knew that she just needed a bit more time, and had pleaded with Sidorov to give her a while alone with Sato. He had finally agreed, knowing that Burke already had the most critical information, and all the debriefing team was really going to do was polish and further substantiate what Sato had already told them. But they still needed to get a story out, and fast.
Something tickled her mind, some small bit of information, but she couldn’t latch onto it. So she let her mind wander as she scrolled through the text and video files that Ichiro had put together.
The next file that came up was a video of Ichiro recounting those things he could recall from the aliens’ speech, from what little they had spoken.
“...one of the things that was repeated during the ceremony in the arena, and that the lead warrior said to me before I was put back aboard Aurora, was what sounded like uhr kreelan,” his image said, trying to carefully pronounce it. “I believe there were a couple of other variations, but what sounded like kreelan was a common ending of some of what was clearly ceremonial speech. It sounded similar to what you might hear in some religious services, with the congregation answering the clergyman...”
Kreelans, she thought, mulling over the term in her head. Humans might never know what they were really called, but at least this was something that had a basis in fact, and was certainly better than what some of the idiots waiting their turn at Ichiro were going to come up with.
“Ichiro,” she asked, leaning forward on her elbows in the increasingly uncomfortable vacuum suit, “we really need a name for these...creatures, other than the ‘sword-wielding, blue-skinned bitches from hell.’”
He almost choked on his dinner as he burst out laughing, the first time since before first contact. He had rarely exposed that much emotion to others, but there was something about this woman that made him want to open up to her. He knew that it was probably just the fact that she was a very attractive woman and he was a young man who hadn’t seen a human female for months. Hormones, he counseled himself. But it was more than that. From the moment he’d met her, he’d felt a strange kinship with her that he was at a loss to explain. “Well,” he told her after he’d managed to bring his laughter under control, “that would certainly get some headlines, wouldn’t it?”
She smiled at him, genuinely warmed by the fact that she’d been able to inject a little humor back into his life. Feelings like that didn’t come often to her as part of her work: she was usually a cause of angst to others in the course of her job, and this was a nice change. It didn’t hurt that he was attractive and extremely intelligent, if a little on the young side. She frowned inwardly. Definitely not her type, to judge by her previous history with boyfriends. But this wasn’t a social call. She had a story to write, and she set that train of thought aside.
“Okay, so that might make the tabloids happy, but for something serious, how about we call the aliens ‘Kreelans’? It’s not quite as sexy, I know, but it’s something the average Joe can pronounce and remember in between beers, and is something you remember them saying-”
“Yes,” he said, interrupting her. The light of humor had left his face, and his eyes were dark pools of thought. “We have no idea what that term means, of course. But yes, I think that would fit the bill.” He shrugged. “Not that I really have anything to say about it.”
Steph shook her head. “Listen to me, Ichiro,” she told him. “You’ve already made history, no matter how anybody looks at this whole thing, no matter what else happens. And you’re going to make more before it’s over. You’re the only expert we really have, and that counts for a lot.” She leaned back, making some more notes on her comp-pad. “Okay, so we’ll go with that. For all I know, it might mean ‘moron’ in their language...”
That elicited another uncontrolled guffaw from Ichiro.
“…but it’ll work. The next question, though, is what the hell are they? Their civilization, I mean.”
“The first thing that I thought of when we walked into the arena,” Ichiro said after a moment of thought, “was that it reminded me of Earth’s Roman Empire. We studied that a bit at the academy. I know it doesn’t necessarily fit, but that’s how it felt to me, like we’d been transported back in time to an alien version of Rome.” He shrugged. “We don’t know anything about their government, of course, unless some of the wizards on the debriefing team can puzzle something out. So the analogy is probably completely wrong. But that’s how I felt,” he finished quietly, trying to turn away from the memories of the slaughter that arose unbidden in his mind.
Steph saw him involuntarily shiver, and reached a hand across the table to take hold of his. He tried bravely to smile. “Well, we’re not really trying to get all the details straight at this point,” she told him. “We’re just trying to come up with something that we can use t
o help tell people the story.”
The Kreelan Empire, she thought. Perfect.
* * *
Four hours after Aurora flashed into existence above Earth, the senior civilian and military members of the Terran Planetary Government were gathered in the main briefing room of the Presidential Complex in New York. They had just seen the first report that Stephanie Guillaume had prepared and that the Navy had approved. The woman had effectively summarized not only the facts, such as they were at this point, of Aurora’s voyage, but had also turned it into an expertly crafted propaganda piece that gave “the enemy” a face and a name.
Admiral Tiernan, the Terran Navy Chief of Staff, nodded to an assistant to bring the lights back up. With fiery red hair long since faded to gray and piercing green eyes that missed nothing, Tiernan was a sailor’s sailor who had started his career as an enlisted man and worked his way up to the highest uniformed position in the Terran Navy over the course of his forty year career. While he could play the political game as well as anyone, his heart and mind were always focused on the ships of his fleet, and the men and women who served on them. “That’s what we plan to let TransCom News run through the newswire, Madam President.” Tiernan had been briefed personally by Captain Burke, and despite his misgivings - who would want to believe such a story? - she had been extremely convincing. He also knew her reputation as a hard-nosed no-nonsense officer, and if the young man who was the sole survivor on Aurora had convinced her, Tiernan felt compelled to believe the story. But he knew he wouldn’t be in the majority.
President Natalie McKenna was still staring at the now-blank screen. She was leaning forward in her chair, with her elbows on the table. Her hands covered the lower half of her face as if she were trying to hide her expression. Tiernan knew that wasn’t the case; it was simply one of her habits when she was concentrating hard.
In Her Name: The Last War Page 15
