Gibraltar Sun (10 page)

“What say you, Captain Landon?” the admiral asked formally.

Landon grinned, stood, and in complete disregard for space station protocol, snapped off a salute. “I guess I will be building Q-ships for you, sir.”

Chapter Ten

Jennifer Mullins sat at her console in a room hacked from solid rock. The overhead lights were naked glow tubes bolted to the rock ceiling, which still showed the circular marks of the digging machines. A long strand of black electrical cable ran across the ceiling, held there by globs of clear adhesive every meter or so. In between the globs, the cables drooped like the threads of some oversize spider web.

Jennifer was bored. The problem was that it had been two years since they had established Brinks Base, misnamed because it was actually located on Brinks’ oversize moon, Sutton. Brinks was twice the diameter of Earth and had been a terrestrial-class world until 8000 years ago, when the star 50 light years distant that would one day become the Crab Nebula went supernova. The resulting radiation storm had sterilized the planet save for some rudimentary sea creatures.

The main dining hall of Brinks Base had a viewport in its overhead – a large periscope device that projected the outside view down into the underground base through at least four sets of transparent safety barriers. Usually, the wide angle surface scope was focused on the Crab Nebula, which was the most impressive sight in Sutton’s black sky.

The ball of gas and charged particles looked nothing like the Crab as viewed from Earth. For one thing, they were seeing it from a different angle, and for another, the cloud had been expanding for seven millennia longer than the nebula in Earth’s sky.

But even as spectacular a sight as the Crab quickly became routine when there was nothing else to look at. The lack of day-to-day variety was what had triggered Jennifer’s boredom.

In the early months on the moon, there had been too much work to be bored. There had been tunnels and chambers to be dug and sealed, power systems to install, environmental control, emergency airlocks in case of blowout, whole instrument clusters to be transferred down from the ships and installed in the base.

Then there had been the hustle and bustle of having the whole fleet in orbit about Brinks. Then the population of the Hideout System had been 3000 souls, housed in 13 starships. There had been great excitement when the rotating array of the gravity wave observatory had detected the first gravity wave from the Orpheus System, home of the Voldar’ik.

Jennifer remembered how thrilled she had been when
Magellan
and
Columbus
reconnoitered the target system. She had been one of the astrogation officers aboard
Magellan
, and for that entire voyage, her department had worked watch-and-watch — four hours on / four hours off.

Then had come the voyage back to Brinks Base to report their findings, and their subsequent return in the company of the
Ruptured Whale
.
Magellan
and
Columbus
had once again hidden themselves in the comet swarm at the edge of the system, while the
Ruptured Whale
made contact with the Voldar’ik.

Jennifer remembered the feeling of panic when word came that Sar-Say was a Broa and that the
Ruptured Whale
had fled Klys’kra’t. The two starships on guard broke orbit for Brinks Base as soon as their charge made good its escape through the Voldar’ik stargate.

As soon as the
Ruptured Whale
returned to Brinks, the expedition commanders convened a series of high level conferences. The decision had been for the bulk of the fleet to return home. Two smaller starships,
Ranger
and
Vaterland
, would stay behind to guard the base. Their orders were to delay departure for four years. If they had not received other orders in that time, they were to destroy the base and return home.

Like everyone else in the fleet, Jennifer had looked forward to going home. Between the Spartan living conditions and the disappointment of discovering that Sar-Say had been telling them the literal truth about the Sovereignty, she often wondered aloud what had attracted her to a life in space. Then had come word that Captain Heinrich wanted to see her. She made sure that her uniform was clean and pressed before reporting to her commanding officer.

“Ah, Lieutenant Mullins, come in,” Heinrich had called out in that too hearty manner that often signaled that he had a dirty job to assign. “Strap yourself in.”

Jennifer had done as directed,
Magellan
then being in microgravity.

“Lieutenant, we are looking for volunteers to stay behind, guard the base, and operate the gravtenna. As an astrogator, you are qualified. Interested?”

“No, sir!” she had replied, emphatically.

“Are you sure? The extra pay involved is considerable.”

“Why me, Captain?”

“It’s not just you,” he said. “We are canvassing the fleet.”

“What about Commander Arlington, or Ensign Boggs?”

“Both married, while you are still…”

“Playing the field?” she asked.

“I was going to say ‘single.’”

Somehow, she had come out of that meeting with orders assigning her as chief astrogator aboard
Ranger
, if and when it ever spaced for home. Until that happy day, she was a senior gravitational astronomy specialist, which meant that she sat in a rock room and watched the gravtenna array a thousand kilometers overhead as it performed its never-ending tumbling act.

Brinks Base had seemed crowded when home to the 3000 members of the expedition. With the departure of eleven starships, the population had dropped to barely 200, and half of those were aboard
Ranger
and
Vaterland
at any given time. One thing they did not lack at the moment was living cubic. In fact, Jennifer often felt like she was alone on base as she passed through deserted corridors to and from her duty station. It was depressing.

She had been surprised at how quickly their small group learned one another’s quirks. Seeing the same faces day after day contributed to her boredom and despite there being no shortage of male companionship – men outnumbered women four to one – the dreariness of it all had begun to seep in. Most of her Saturday dates ended up in the mess hall, staring up at the nebula through the view periscope.

Twice the dull routine of life had been interrupted when the gravtenna detected a stargate-induced gravity wave. Once the wave had come from the Orpheus System, which reduced the observation to no consequence. The second observation had tentatively added another star to their very small map of the Sovereignty.

Yawning, she stretched her arms wide over her head to relieve the kinks in her muscles, and glanced at the chronometer display on her workscreen. Only three hours to go before Witherspoon showed up to relieve her.

She was in mid-stretch when an alarm sounded and a flashing message replaced the chronometer display:

GRAVITY WAVE DETECTED!

Blinking, she began issuing commands. The screen filled with data displays. One showed a schematic of the rotating observatory and the results of the continuous diagnostic program that monitored its health. Everything was green, which meant the data was likely real and not one of the ghosts that plagued her existence. The waveform displayed in another window showed a strong negative gravity wave. And, best yet, the observation’s vector did not point toward either Orpheus or the other system they had discovered

This was a new contact!

Before she could punch her intercom, Brad Wilson, the Duty Officer, was standing behind her.

“What have you got?” he barked.

Normally such abruptness would have irritated her. In her excitement, she didn’t even notice.

“Gravity wave, sir.”

“The real thing this time?”

“Looks like it. I’ll know for sure in a couple of minutes when the computer finishes crunching the data.”

“Where does it originate?”

“The vector is still pretty rough, but it looks like it is back toward the Galactic Center.”

“Are you sure?”

“Getting there,” she replied tersely, wishing he would go away and let her finish her work. Then she realized the reason for his question.

From the vicinity of the Crab Nebula, where she was, G.C. was in the Constellation of Sagittarius. That was a purely arbitrary designation, of course, since the constellations from the Hideout System looked nothing like the constellations back home. However, Sagittarius held more than the center of the galaxy.

It was also the direction where the Solar System was to be found.

The implications were clear. Brinks Base was somewhere inside Broan space. With but three data points and two of those in the same direction, it was impossible to determine just where in the Sovereignty they were.

For all they knew, they might be in its very heart!

#

The wind was cold and blustery, laden with the smell of impending snow. The campus footpaths were all heated and clear, but the lawns of summer had been replaced by cold blankets of white. Winter had come to Colorado Springs and over the past several weeks had decorated the surrounding mountains in deep drifts of glistening white.

Mark Rykand hurried toward the Institute’s Headquarters Building, huddled deeply in his electrically heated overcoat. Reaching his destination, he climbed the steps and pushed through the first of two sets of doors. At the second door, a blast of hot air greeted him.

The main auditorium of Institute Headquarters was a large hall that could have been rented out to show commercial holomovies. The floor sloped down from the back, with seats in curved rows. Fewer than a quarter of the seats were filled as Mark hung up his coat before striding down the aisle to the third row. He took a seat as quietly as he could and turned his attention to the stage.

Dr. Hamlin, the institute director, sat at a long table at the right side of the stage. He was flanked by three other senior administrators. A tall Christmas tree that was still in the process of being decorated dominated the left side of the stage. In front of the tree, Dr. Thompson stood behind a lectern and gestured at the holocube suspended above the middle of the stage. A black starfield filled the cube. Dr. Thompson was reporting the results of his Working Group’s search for candidate systems in which human advance bases might safely be established when the time came.

The occasion was the Winter Assessment. Although this was the first, similar reviews were scheduled to be held each quarter to judge progress. And, in truth, they had accomplished quite a lot.

There were nineteen working groups in all. Dr. Thompson headed the astronomy group. It was up to them to sketch out the terrain for the coming battle, and eventually, to pinpoint the location of the Broan home star or stars.

There were also groups devoted to strategy, tactics, logistics, force size and structure, weaponry, Broan information technology, enemy physiology and psychology, Solar System defense, politics, personnel requirements, training, and Mark’s personal favorite, worst case scenario! That latter group had been nicknamed
The Doomsday Club
. It was their responsibility to consider the possibility that Earth would someday be located by the Broa, and what could be done about it. In the event things went wrong, some portion of the human race must be given a chance to survive in freedom.

One-third of the way around the planet, the institute in Paris was organized quite similarly, or as much so as fit their mandate of fleshing out the Vasloff alternative. Surprisingly, Mikhail Vasloff had no official relationship with the group. To do so would have put a crimp in his rabble rousing.

The unofficial name of the institute in Colorado Springs was
The Gibraltar Institute
, an appellation that was fast becoming official. After initial confusion, the working groups had settled down to their tasks, fleshing out the details of the master plan for taking their undeclared war to the Broa. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the outlines of the Gibraltar Earth plan were beginning to emerge.

Surprisingly, considering the number of scientists involved, there was universal agreement on Task One. They needed information! Without it, humankind was blind, deaf, dumb, lame, and just possibly, stupid. A consensus had formed around the need for another scouting party into Broan space. The incursion would take place as far from Klys’kra’t as possible.

Once the scouts made contact with a new species, they would negotiate for that species’ planetary database. Nor would the “Vulcans” of “Shangri-La” do the negotiating. To confuse the enemy, they would masquerade as a different race from a distant fictional star system.

Once they had a database, they would no longer be dependent on listening for gravity waves. Ships stuffed to their hulls with monitoring equipment would sneak into the cometary halos of numerous systems and eavesdrop on the locals.

Such a scouting expedition would not be underway anytime soon, however. The one ship they could use to pull off a second masquerade was being disassembled for study.

The
Ruptured Whale
currently sat in the same Lunar space dock where it had been repaired after being salvaged from New Eden. This time the yard techs were taking it apart as carefully as a surgeon works on a prenatal infant in the womb. The hope was that once the scientists and engineers examined the Broan equipment, they could reverse engineer it for use in human-built ships.

That was the hope.

Like a six-year-old disassembling an antique mechanical clock, the danger was that they might not be able to reassemble it again.

Following the need for information came the need for a faster way to reach Broan space, the Stargate Option. The team assigned to develop the technology independently was not making much progress. Hopefully, the alien database would give them clues, and possibly detailed information, on how the stargates operated. If not, they would have to obtain the technology the old fashioned way – they would have to steal it.

Beyond that, the plan to defeat the Broa became fuzzy.