Mapped Space 1: The Antaran Codex (40 page)

I ordered the autonav to execute
another micro-bubble, then for several seconds, we crawled away from the star
at sublight velocity. When the bubble dropped and we could see again, we found Vintari
no longer lay ahead of us, but floated like a great seething wall of gas to
port.

“Any sign of the snakeheads?” I
asked.

“No,” Jase replied, studying his
sensors. “The star’s masking them.”

“You know,” Marie said, leaning
forward, “technically, they’re only distantly related to snakes.”

“Yeah, but snakehead says it all.”

I rolled the ship and began decelerating.
We might have got away with a couple of sublight blinks, but we couldn’t cruise
safely until Izin’s hull crawlers repaired some of the damage we’d taken
breaking away from the
Soberano
.
While Izin patched the hull, we’d kill our flat space velocity so there’d be no
surprises when we unbubbled next time.

I rubbed my throbbing head,
realizing I was tired and hungry. “So, what’s for lunch?”

* * * *

Two hours
later we were all in engineering watching one of Izin’s crawlers tip toeing
around the ragged hole in the hull where the port side airlock had once been.
Almost ten percent of the
Lining’s
pressurized interior volume was now exposed to vacuum, although the flight
critical sections were undamaged.

“Lucky those blinks didn’t tear us
apart!” Jase said.

“We didn’t bubble long enough, or
travel anywhere near fast enough, for the quantum forces to build up,” Izin
said. “A catastrophic failure would have required several seconds of superluminal
flight.”

“How long before we can get out
of here?” I asked.

“It will take several days to install
replacements for the two distorters we lost near the airlock and –” Izin suddenly
froze.

We watched him for a few seconds
before I stepped toward him and looked curiously into his unblinking eyes.
“Izin, are you OK?”

“The ship’s engines have stopped.”
He motioned meaningfully to the biosonar lobe bulging from his forehead. It
gave him a sensitivity to the ship’s vibration
Homo sapiens
could never fully comprehend.

I glanced at the energy and
propulsion displays. They indicated everything was functioning normally. If
there’d been a mechanical failure, a warning alarm would have sounded. “Looks OK
to me.”

“I assure you, Captain, we are no
longer decelerating.” Izin glanced at the other data displays. “In fact, we’re
in a stable orbit.”

I didn’t doubt his judgment, but
it should have been fifteen hours before we were slow enough to enter any kind
of orbit.

“Around what?” Marie asked.

Izin listened for a moment
longer, studying screens filled with engineering numbers. “Ambient spacetime
curvature indicates a planet, and that could only be possible if we were no
longer in control of the ship.”

“It’s the Matarons!” Marie exclaimed.
“They’ve come back.”

While Izin began wading through
engineering diagnostics, we ran to the flight deck. I expected to see the
Mataron cruiser floating alongside us, preparing to exact retribution for my
stunt with the drone, but when we entered the flight deck the view screen was
filled with the image of long, sleek silver dart. Its glistening hull reflected
starlight with mirror-like efficiency and a ghost-like shimmer enveloped it
from bow to stern.

“That’s not Mataron!” Jase said
as we climbed into our acceleration couches, “Is it?”

“No, it isn’t,” I said,
activating the intercom. “Izin, forget your diagnostics. You won’t find
anything.”

“I agree, Captain,” Izin replied.
“None of our monitoring systems are giving correct readings.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the
ship,” I said, gazing at the view screen. To my knowledge, the EIS had exactly
four images of such ships. All had been taken by the Earth Ambassador who’d
been transported halfway across the galaxy in one about four hundred and fifty
years ago to the Forum meeting that had ratified ending the Embargo.

“You know what it is?” Marie asked.

“It’s a Tau Ceti Arbiter.” Few
humans had ever seen such ships because when the Tau Cetins came to Earth, they
did so in small, deliberately unimposing diplomatic craft so as not to unsettle
us. “It’s the most powerful warship in this part of the galaxy.” One like it
had stopped the entire Mataron Fleet from destroying Earth two thousand years
ago – without firing a shot.

“They sure got here fast!” Jase
said.

Somehow, the Tau Cetins had
discovered one of Vintari II’s moons had been destroyed and sent an Arbiter to
investigate in just a few hours. The odds of such a ship being near the this system
were small, which meant it had come a long way, very fast.

Vintari II was visible below the
Arbiter. Its upper atmosphere glowed with orange light as vaporized rock from the
destroyed moon continued to burn up in its atmosphere. Dirty gray clouds were
forming close to the surface and beginning to spread across the planet.

“I’m getting nothing from the
Arbiter,” Jase said as he tried to detect energy readings from the Tau Ceti
ship, “but there’s a big reading behind us. Guess who!”

He reoriented the optical feed to
reveal the Mataron cruiser floating ten clicks away. Its hull was scored black
as if a giant plasma torch had blasted it. The edges of the ridges running along
its hull from bow to stern had melted and its weapon blisters now looked like burnt
out craters laced with melted metal.

“They don’t look so good,” I said
with some satisfaction. Clearly, their shield wasn’t quite as resistant to star
heat as it at first appeared.

“I wonder if they got the Codex
back?” Marie said.

The image of the Mataron ship
vanished as the Tau Cetins took control of our view screen. A pale skinned,
vaguely humanoid face appeared. The Tau
Cetin’s
eyes
were green, horizontal almonds set lower than a human’s on a face half again as
wide. A shallow central ridge of a nose divided the face above a small mouth
and a weak, slightly pointed chin. The TC had no hair of any kind, although his
skin was slightly dappled, a natural camouflage inherited from the shadowy
forests his species had evolved in hundreds of millions of years ago. He wore a
dark green jacket that lacked a collar and was decorated with vertical silver
insignia running down the center of his chest. Tau Cetins were bipedal and almost
as tall as humans, although they weren’t mammals. Earth
xenobiologists
classified them as
oviparous ratites
,
a fancy way of calling them large flightless, egg laying birds, but such
analogies scarcely made sense for such an advanced species.

The Tau
Cetin’s
tiny mouth made small, rapid movements, which came through into the flight deck
perfectly translated. “I am Siyarn. I speak for the Forum to preserve order.”

My diplomatic training was
limited, but I knew that was a formal introduction telling me he was an
Observer, responsible for maintaining the rule of law throughout the Galaxy.
That made him the Big Cheese in the Orion Arm.

“My name is Sirius Kade. I’m captain
of this ship.”

I could have claimed to be an
Earth Ambassador, knowing the EIS would confirm it later, but that would have
made my actions authorized acts, increasing any penalty against Earth. If
Siyarn’s judgment went against us, I’d already decided to declare myself a
renegade, hoping to reduce whatever punitive measures were to be imposed against
mankind.

“The Mataron Commander claims your
entry into this restricted system is a violation of the Access Treaty.”

“About that,” I said. “We can
explain-”

“As the authorized Observer for
this Protectorate, I am required to conduct an investigation. If I find you
have committed a treaty violation, because your species has only probationary
status, a Forum Inquisitorial will be conducted at which time your explanation
will be heard.”

“An inquisitorial? Where would
that be?”

“The next Forum Session will be
held at
Anrak
Orn
in ten
days.”

I was afraid of that. I’d never
heard of
Anrak
Orn
. “And where
is that?”

“Sixty one thousand light years
from here.”

“That’s kind of a problem for us.
It would take,” I did a quick calculation in my head, “forty five years for us
to get there.” That’s if I knew where it was!

“If an Inquisitorial is convened,
we will transport all those required to provide evidence to the Session.”

The image of the Tau Ceti
Observer was replaced by our own sensor feed of the damaged Mataron cruiser.

“Those lying freaks over there
are framing us.” Jase declared. “We should lodge a complaint. We can do that,
right?”

“Yeah.” I pointed to the screen.
“With him. He’s the guy.”

“Oh,” Jase said, deflated.

I reoriented the view screen so
the TC Arbiter and the Mataron armored cruiser were both visible above Vintari
II. The planet was now suffering the most extreme upper atmosphere event it had
experienced in several billion years, although fortunately there was no impact
on the surface.

“We are in a restricted system,” Marie
said ominously. “Technically, we broke the rules.”

A stream of tiny brilliant red points
of light emerged from the Arbiter and streaked out across the Vintari System.
Some dropped towards the planet, others found the trajectory the
Silver Lining
had followed, some moved
off into the more remote corners of the system while a few passed outside the
Vintari System altogether.

“I guess we’re going to find out
how advanced the TCs really are,” I said. I’d never seen their technology before,
but they were obviously piecing together what had happened. Several of the TC
snoopers skimmed the Mataron ship’s hull while a couple gave us the once over.

“If they decide we screwed up,” Jase
said, “Will they shut us down, like before?”

“That’s the Mataron plan,” I
said.

“But we saved the damned planet!”
Jase exploded.

“And destroyed its moon.” Marie added
soberly. “And probably scared two hundred and eighty million people half to
death!”

Presently, the red points of
light came streaming back to the Arbiter.

“Now what are they doing?” Jase
demanded.

I tapped my console impatiently. “Working
out who’s guilty.”

Marie leaned forward. “They’re
supposed to be fair.”

“They don’t do favors,” I said,
“and they don’t have much evidence to go on. The Matarons saw to that.”

Siyarn appeared on the left side
of our view screen and an image of the Mataron Commander appeared on the right.
The Mataron seemed identical to the two snake heads we’d encountered on the
Soberano
. He wore an ornate black
uniform with a chest scabbard containing a Q-blade and a thin black
circlet
around the top of his head marking him as a high
ranking member of the Black Sauria.

“I demand you execute the
Violation Provisions!” The Mataron Commander declared. “The law is clear!”

“Indeed it is,” Siyarn agreed,
“however there are discrepancies between our analysis and your explanation.”

My hopes began to rise.

“What discrepancies? A human ship
deliberately destroyed one of the moons of Vintari II, affecting the primitives
on the planet. It is a clear violation of the rights of the Vintari II
civilization. Under the First Principle, the humans must be held responsible.”

“They will be judged responsible
for their actions,” Siyarn agreed. “As will you.”

“Me?” The Mataron Commander
baulked. “There is nothing preventing us from being here.”

“That is true.”

“We are conducting long range,
non invasive cultural studies of the primitives on Vintari II, as is our right.”

“Does the Mataron Supremacy
typically conduct these cultural studies from within the photosphere of a
star?” Siyarn asked.

Jase burst out laughing, then I
silenced him with a look.

“We had engine trouble,” the
Mataron said.

“Is that why your ship remained
inactive while the two human ships approached the planet?”

“We didn’t know they were here.
Our sensors were affected by the star’s plasma wind.”

“Your level of technology is
resistant to such interference. Even if your sensors were disrupted, we have
detected the presence of a small Mataron craft interacting with the human
ships. Why did you send such a craft?”

“We ordered the humans to
withdraw. They ignored us!”

“How did you know to issue such
an instruction, when your malfunctioning sensors could not detect the human
ships?”

“We didn’t know what we were
detecting. It was only after our reconnaissance ship identified them that we
ordered them to withdraw.”