in0 (20 page)

“Think so?” the old astronomer asked. “How many G class stars are there within a couple hundred light-years of the Crab?”

“I don’t know.”

“I had the computer do a count. One hundred and twelve. Cut that down to the range of G0 to G5, and you get fifty two, fewer but still not easy to check out.”

“Damn, I thought we had it for sure.”

Bendagar laughed. “Cheer up. Finding one star out of a hundred is vastly easier than one out of 100

billion. Besides, if the Broa truly control a million suns, they may be a bit easier to find than we humans might like.”

#

Dieter Pavel was strapped behind his desk, going over the day’s reports before sending them via secure data link down to Friedrichshafen for Anton Bartok’s attention. These scientific reports were largely written in impenetrable jargon, yet he disciplined himself to scan each one. A hard lesson that he had learned early in his career was that scientists could write the most amazing things in their reports, things that caused the powers-that-be considerable embarrassment when they became known. When that happened, it was never the scientists who were blamed. Rather, it was the administrator in charge. He had resolved never to fall into that same trap.

Pavel had been working sixteen hours a day for the past several weeks. Even with the human body’s reduced need for sleep in microgravity, there never seemed to be enough hours in a day. Not only were the ground research teams becoming more insistent about answers to their never-ending stream of questions, there was the upcoming ground conference to organize.

The plan was to gather the principal investigators together to let them compare notes, and hopefully, to provide a definitive answer as to whether or not the Broa were a figment of Sar-Say’s imagination. Each day that passed without that answer placed the existing power structure at greater risk.

As one who dealt with ‘the public,’ Dieter Pavel was well aware that people are much less intelligent en masse than as individuals. Since the fertility riots of the previous century, mob psychology had been a standard course for those who wished to enter the public administration. His teacher in
empie
(as the students called it) had stressed that mob action is caused by mass fear. Dieter could think of nothing that would produce mass fear quite so quickly as a news story about the Broa and their supposed empire.

The annunciator on Pavel’s door buzzed and Lisa Arden floated across the threshold a moment later.

“Busy?”

“No more than normal.”

“I have something to show you.”

In her left hand was a sheet of plastic of the kind the printers used for output. The flash of color told him that this was a graphical plot of some kind. Lisa used her free arm to pull herself awkwardly to his desk and spread the printout in front of him.

The being pictured was a biped. There the resemblance to a human stopped. Blue-green in color, the alien was reptilian and covered with scales. It had a short tail, stood upright but leaned forward, and balanced on stumpy legs. Two beady black eyes were inset beneath prominent eye ridges. The snout completed the resemblance to a snake’s head. The mouth was open and filled with pointed teeth. The body was wrapped in narrow strips of material something like an Egyptian mummy. At its waist, the alien wore a belt from which hung several implements.

“Ugly,” Pavel noted. “What is it?”

“That, Mr. Administrator, is a Broa.”

He looked at the picture more closely. There was something about the being that raised the hairs on the back of his neck.

“Where did you get it?”

“It occurred to me that if Sar-Say can paint accurate astronomical scenes, he can paint other things.

That’s the output from his latest artistic effort.”

“Does this jibe with what he has told us about the Broa?”

“To date his descriptions have been a bit vague, which is why I had him draw this. I thought it might be good for us to know what our adversaries look like.”

“As I said the first time, ugly!”

As he gazed at the picture, he had visions of this image being flashed to every household in the solar system.
“Forget riots,”
he thought. “
Think revolution
!”

Melissa Trank pulled herself hand over hand through the darkened corridor and prayed that she would not come face to face with a goblin. That had happened on her first day aboard and she still shuddered to think about it.

She had been surveying Quadrant 3, Deck 5, checking out the overall condition of the
Ruptured Whale
(the name had mysteriously entered general use within their first few hours aboard). She and her partner, Emil Valdez, had separated to check two small tunnels that branched away from the main corridor leading down into the
Whale
’s capacious holds. After more than four hours of exploring the dead ship, her initial excitement had begun to wane. She remembered thinking how good a nice hot shower would feel at that moment as she inserted the upper body of her suit into the “maintenance tunnel.”

The tunnel was just wide enough to pass the torso of her suit and its backpack, after which it was a matter of pulling herself forward like a mountain climber negotiating a rock chimney. She had not noticed the turning of the tunnel until she was nearly on it. Sighing, she braced her boots and scooted up until her head was above the turn.

The insectoid crewmember must have been doing maintenance in the shaft when the ship had depressurized. With his body obstructing the rushing air, he had been whisked along the tube like a ping-pong ball in the hose of a vacuum cleaner. His body had wedged just in front of the turn. The being’s mouth was open, frozen in its final scream, or possibly a last attempt to draw the rapidly thinning air into its lungs. There had been some cranial damage inflicted during the trip down the ductwork, causing one bulging eye to hang down from its socket.

The unexpected discovery had caused Melissa to emit a single, sharp scream that reverberated all around her via radio. Melissa remembered nothing after that until the shouts of her partner had managed to overcome the sound of her own heart in her ears. Emil had towed her out of the tunnel, and then focused his helmet light on her faceplate. With a catch in her voice, she had explained the reason for her scream, and then apologized to Emil for frightening him. By that time, her cheeks had been hot from embarrassment.

A week later, she again found herself following the narrow beam of her helmet lamp into the dark unknown. This time she was partnered with Hideki Furosawa, one of Laura Dresser’s specialists. Their task was to map the ship’s various utility systems. As a member of
Magellan
’s crew, it was her place to break trail in virgin territory. Her place or no, she would rather have been cowering in her bunk back aboard the starship.

“Wait a second, Miss Trank,” Furosawa said, his voice echoing hollowly in her earphones. “I think we want to turn right up ahead.”

“Are you sure, Mr. Furosawa?” she asked, playing her headlamp along the corridor overhead. “The main cable seems to be headed off to our left.”

“I need to check this branch,” the small Japanese replied after consulting the portable computer strapped to the chest unit of his suit. The dim glow of the map reflected in a series of colored lines from his faceplate.

“To the right, then,” Melissa agreed.

Cautiously she swept the branch corridor with her lamp. As usual, the beam was invisible; with only the moving spot showing were she had it pointed. A pair of doors very like the pressure doors in a human spacecraft was retracted into the walls of the corridor. Their condition was the same as every other pair they had discovered aboard this ghost ship.

Melissa’s spot reached the end of the corridor and disappeared. Rather than a doorway or some other boundary, there was just ... nothing. She stared into the stygian darkness for a long second before a star drifted into view.

“Damn, look at the size of that hole!”

“I see it, Miss Trank,” came the reply. The words held the faintest hint of reproof, as though Furosawa wanted to remind her that proper ladies did not swear.

They pulled themselves cautiously toward the end of the corridor. Close up it was obvious that they were staring out of a large hole in the bow of the cylindrical ship (bow being the end directly opposite the usual direction of thrust). Most of the damage inflicted by the Broan Avenger had been to the aft of the ship, which was only to be expected since the
Ruptured Whale
had been fleeing its attacker. A hole this far forward surprised them.

Melissa reached out with her safety line and snapped it around a handy stanchion. She made sure that Furosawa did the same before they investigated further. By floating to the end of their tethers, they found they could just reach the corridor end. Beyond lay a gaping hole easily three meters in diameter.

“This isn’t battle damage,” the engineer said after a moment of inspection.

“Agreed,” Melissa replied. “It is too damned circular. What do you suppose happened?”

“It looks like a loading hatch might have blown out,” Furosawa said. “Strange.”

“How so?”

“This ship is compartmentalized against loss of atmosphere just as our ships are. Despite the damage inflicted, they maintained pressure integrity in large sections for a long period, then at the end, they suddenly lost it.”

Melissa nodded. “Your point?”

“With all of the safety doors open, it is likely that the loss of this hatch was the primary cause of the explosive depressurization.”

“It is certainly big enough,” she said, sweeping her lamp around the edge of the hole. There was no sign that this was battle damage. There were none of the spherical globules that marked the sites where metal had melted. It was as though someone had punched a perfectly round hole in the bow of the alien starship. “Wonder what happened?”

“Perhaps a beam triggered a malfunction in the safety systems, opening all of the safety doors at the same time this hatch was jettisoned.”

“Funny, you wouldn’t think a spacefaring species would make a mistake like that.”

“Agreed,” Furosawa replied. “Whatever the reason this ship lost its air, it is not the sort of engineering a professional would be proud of.”

#

“Damn it, how much longer are you going to take on that generator, Laura?” Dan Landon demanded of his chief engineer. Both were in vacuum suits in one of the compartments where the salvage crew was stringing cables.

“The work is proceeding as quickly as it can, Captain,” came the surprisingly mild reply. One thing Landon had noted about Laura Dresser, her personality improved when she was working. If she could just master the technique in her private life, people might actually begin to like her.

“How long does it take to cut through six decks?”

“Not long at all once you have identified what other equipment you are slicing through as well. You wouldn’t want us to slice through anything vital, would you?”

“If it would get us out of this damned system even an hour earlier, I would consider it.”

“Not to worry, Captain. The crews have the star drive in position and anchored. All that’s needed is to hook up these power cables...” She gestured at the thick cables the crew had anchored to the bulkhead,

“... and cover the outer hull with meshwork.”

“We need to speed up.”

“I told you, we are working as quickly as we can.”

Dan thought about that and had to admit that he could not think of how to make them move any faster. “I am just tired of not being able to scratch where I itch.”

“Don’t remind me,” she said with a laugh. “I am okay as long as I don’t think about it. We should have the living spaces sealed and pressurized within another watch. Then we can all strip down to our long johns and have an orgy of scratching.”

“I am looking forward to it,” Landon replied with more feeling than he had intended. Vacuum lamps attached to bulkheads lighted the compartment where they were comparing notes. Around them was the alien machinery they were trying to understand. He had not had much time to study his new command as well as he would have liked. What he had seen of the alien machinery, however, had caused him to come to an odd conclusion.

“Does it strike you that these machines aren’t nearly as alien as they ought to be?”

“What do you mean?”

“Take that microwave conduit over there. If Sar-Say’s story is true, the Broa have ruled the galaxy since the pyramids were young. How is it that we can recognize a microwave conduit as a microwave conduit?

What is an advanced race like the Broa doing using microwaves at all?”

Laura’s answer was a laugh. “One of the early space age philosophers maintained that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. You are asking the same question.”

“Perhaps I am. The machinery aboard this ship does not appear to be sufficiently magical to me. Some of it is even a bit crude, like something from out of the 21st century.”

“Form follows function, you know.”

“Even so, you can refine the hell out of something in 5000 years.”

“Perhaps the Broa don’t worship at the altar of progress the way we humans do. Possibly they have learned to respect the dangers of unrestricted curiosity.”

“That is a strange thing for an engineer to say.”

Laura’s head bobbed in a way that told him she had just shrugged her shoulders. Inside a vacuum suit, it was difficult to tell. “Technology is the engine that drives human progress. That has been true since the days of when people lived in caves, and ‘progress’ has not always been pleasant. If a simple thing like the printing press caused The Reformation, is it any wonder that the Broa are wary of introducing new inventions?”

“Did it?”

“Did what?”

“The printing press caused The Reformation?”

“Sure. Martin Luther had a few criticisms of the way the church conducted business and nailed his
Ninety
Five Theses
up on the door of his church in Wittenburg. Not a great deal would have come of it if people hadn’t used the new printing presses to run off a few million copies.”