McCollum - GIBRALTAR STARS (24 page)

He avoided an urge to look away and forced himself to lock eyes with her. “I wish I could,” he croaked. Clearing his throat, he said, “God, I wish I could.”

“This isn’t romance, you know. This is biology. I’ve been celibate for more than a month. It has been six months for you. I liked you in New Mexico, Mark. Your wife’s not here. I know you want me. All of the physiological reactions are there, including the obvious one. Who will it hurt?”

“It will hurt Lisa.”

“Even if she never finds out?”

“She’ll find out. She’ll know about ten seconds after I see her again. One of the downsides to living in close quarters with another person.”

“You’ll regret it if we don’t.”

“I already regret it.  But I’ll regret it more if we do.”

There was a long pause, followed by two loud sighs, one from each side of the table.

“I guess it isn’t to be then,” Susan said softly, then louder: “How about that dessert?”

To his surprise, there seemed no rancor in her. He had just offered the worst insult a woman can receive, and she had either brushed it off or was a good enough actress to make her living on the stage.

“Look, I don’t want this to ruin our evening.”

She shrugged, drawing his attention once again to her breasts. “I offered. You turned me down for what are probably sound reasons. Let’s finish our strawberry short cake and you can show me that night life you talked about. If I can’t relieve the tension with sex… well, dancing is a poor substitute, but it’s better than nothing.”

“If I take you to our local bar in that gown, you are liable to get pawed on the dance floor by a hundred different men.”

“So long as they are polite about it, I’m in the mood for a good pawing.”

#

Chapter Twenty-Four

Lisa Rykand sat in the Brink’s Base mess hall and downed her third bulb of coffee that morning. She worked late last night, as she did most nights, and found that she had trouble waking up this morning. Life for her had become a dreary procession of indistinguishable periods of waking, interspersed with too little sleep.

She had thought the stargate project draining. She now looked back on that ordeal with something approaching nostalgia. On the stargate team, she was responsible only for herself. Late at night, when she struggled with some esoteric concept in Broan, she knew she was competing only with the
ideal
that was Lisa Rykand, the all-knowing slayer of the Broan tongue.

No matter how difficult it seemed at the time, like most tasks successfully accomplished, it appeared simple in retrospect. Interminable it may have been, but eventually she mastered everything that needed mastering. The proof of that came with
Amethyst
’s jump from New Eden to Grand Central Terminus.

Seven months later, the evidence of how well the stargate project had succeeded was all around her. There were now three times as many ships in orbit about Sutton as before, and an even larger fleet at Nemesis.

As it always did, the thought of the distant, dark world sent a stab of longing through her. In her opinion, Nemesis was well named. It had swallowed Mark whole!

The two of them exchanged letters weekly, or as close to it as the ship schedule allowed. Luckily, there was almost as much traffic between Hideout and the rogue cluster as there were starships leaving Sol.

She had gotten a letter from Mark just yesterday. In it, his cheery expression had done nothing to hide the lines that creased his features. He looked five years older than when they’d parted. His letter was full of the mundane details of his life, and had ended as usual: “I miss you. Can’t wait until we are together again. I love you!”

It wouldn’t have been so bad if they could have arranged an occasional visit. The problem was finding the time. Lisa had spent the last three months attempting just that. All she needed was a few weeks off. She could hop a ship, be in the cluster in 7 to 10 days, spend a glorious week in bed with her husband and be back at her desk before the month was out. However, no matter how she planned, it never seemed to fit her schedule.

She was no longer just a single translator. She was now responsible for the whole translation department, with fifty people reporting to her. She now bore a significant responsibility for the outcome of the whole goddamned war!

So far, the
Gibraltar Earth
plan had gone off about as efficiently as anyone had a right to expect. They’d established two bases in the heart of Broan space and developed the means to get there in less than a year. They had acquired a planetary database. Their intelligence gathering efforts had penetrated the enemy’s strongest systems and their ships spied on him relentlessly. Yet, all would be for naught if they couldn’t locate the Broan home world!

The problem, as Admiral Landon had said, was that they were suffering from an abundance of riches. The Q-Ship Program had been Lisa’s idea, but even she never imagined how much data it would harvest.

Much of what they collected was unreadable, of course. In every subservient system, the majority of electromagnetic communications took place in the language of the native species. As meticulous as the Broa were about keeping records, they seemed to have no interest at all in recording the languages of their slaves.

The lack of interest bespoke a species arrogance nursed by thousands of years of being master of all they surveyed. Another cause of Broan linguistic chauvinism was the low Broan birthrate. The pseudo-simians wasted no time studying the patois of their slaves because they lacked the manpower for such activities.

Like orangutans, the Broa traveled Tarzan-style beneath the branches of their home forests. This meant that females must carry their young on their back, and thus, could raise but one cub at a time. The long maturation period set an upper limit to Broan fertility rates.

The thought of orangutans reminded Lisa of a private joke she and Mark shared. She’d read once that orangutans’ penises were only about two-centimeters long. One night after lovemaking, she had casually mentioned that fact to her husband. As expected, he reacted with the typical self-satisfied male smirk. It was then that she’d sprung her trap.

Smiling sweetly, she snuggled up close to him and whispered, “Before you get to feeling too superior, dear; you should know that the orangutan’s favorite position for making love is hanging by one arm from the limb of a tree!”

Since then, often when they were at a party, one of them would sidle up to the other and whisper, “Know where I can find a strong tree around here?” That was the signal to make excuses to their host.

Lisa sat staring blankly into space for several minutes, entranced by her memories, before she noticed a figure moving in her direction. It was Bernie Weiskopf, her assistant.

“Yes, Mr. Weiskopf?”

“Did you forget this morning’s briefing, Commander Rykand?”

Lisa drew a blank. As she sorted through her memories, displacing the pleasant ones with the more mundane, suddenly it all came back to her.

“Damn, we have that meeting with the Trojan Horse people this morning, don’t we?”

“They arrived ten minutes ago.”

“And here I sit gathering wool. I need a vacation!”

“Don’t we all?” he agreed affably.

Lisa climbed to her feet, making sure not to be too energetic about it.

#

“Hello, I’m Lisa Rykand, Chief Translator. Sorry to keep you waiting.”

“No problem, Commander. We have been getting acquainted with your staff,” a small, balding man with a squeaky voice said as he limply shook hands with her. In addition to Bernie Weiskopf, there were two others from Lisa’s section and half-a-dozen exo-biologists and alien psychologists present. They were all members of team searching for what they had christened “Planet X.” The reference had come from some prehistoric movie.

The visitors numbered four. The leader was Dr. Gordon Smithers, sociologist from the University of Toronto. With him was Samson Oge, a swarthy, squat man who introduced himself as a jack-of-all trades. Felicia Godwin, a grandmotherly type with silver hair, turned out to be a stardrive engineer. The final member of the team was an attractive brunette, Susan Ahrendt, a sculptor. Lisa shook Susan’s hand and said, “I believe you know my husband, Lieutenant.”

Susan nodded. “I was his guide when he first arrived at Trojan Horse in New Mexico. You were in B.C. at the time, if I remember correctly.”

“Yes. Duty called and we found ourselves two thousand kilometers apart. That was one reason we decided to come back to the war, so that we could be together. Now look at us. The gulf has grown to two hundred light-years.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

Lisa thought for a moment and remembered something else. “Your ship put in at Nemesis before coming here, did it not?”

“Yes,” the brunette replied.

“Did you happen to see Mark while you were there?”

“I encountered him in a corridor aboard
Gideon
. I don’t think I have ever been so surprised to see anyone in my entire life. We got to talking and he invited me to dinner.”

“Oh?” Lisa asked. “I’d like to talk to you later about how he seemed. He looks tired in his recordings.”

“And you are concerned.” Susan’s response was a statement, not a question.

“Yes, I am.”

“Then let’s talk.”

“We’ll go somewhere quiet and let our hair down. I’ll buy the drinks.”

“I’d like that.”

She turned to Doctor Smithers. “Now then, what can we do for our colleagues from Trojan Horse?”

“You can tell us where the best place is to lay our eggs,” Smithers replied.

“Toward that end, we’ll begin the meeting. If you will all take your seats…”

#

The strategy for locating Planet X was basically the one Admiral Landon had outlined to Mark and Lisa in his office. Create a map that plotted the location of Broan power centers and hope to divine something of their government from the patterns revealed.

The pseudo-simians were humanlike in one respect; they seemed wedded to the authoritarian pyramid as a paradigm for governance. Any intelligent being has only so much time and attention available, so a hierarchy was a natural way to keep work-loads tolerable at any level of governance.

At the bottom of the pyramid, worlds like Klys’kra’t and Pastol suffered under the Broan yoke, yet received only occasional visits from their alien rulers. The researchers dubbed these ‘Plantation Planets.’ Each cluster of a dozen or so plantation worlds was directed from a nearby system in which the Broa maintained a permanent presence. Generally, these local capitals consisted of a governor, a naval base, and a few administrators, along with their retinue of slave helpers.

Next came the Sector Capitals, worlds with significant Broan presence. These controlled the local capitals and engaged in central planning on a grand scale. The sector capitals reported to Quadrant Capitals (as human scientists had named them). Quadrant capitals were worlds colonized by the Broa centuries or millennia earlier, although they had large populations of other species in service to their masters.

There was one faction among the stellar cartographers who thought Planet X was one of the quadrant capitals. However, the theory was not yet well supported by evidence. Another faction thought they would find the home world one level up, at the pinnacle of the pyramid.

All of this was conjecture, of course. However, it was educated conjecture. The operative assumption was that if they could trace the sinews of Broan power, they would eventually find the one world that controlled all.

Trojan Horse was not interested in these mega-worlds; exactly the opposite. They were looking for systems where the overlords’ control was tenuous at best, and where the locals might prove rebellious.

In the million worlds comprising the Sovereignty, there must be thousands of planets that would gladly throw off the Broan yoke if given the opportunity.

Much of the work to find Trojan Horse candidate systems had been done on Earth. However, Earth’s data was from the Pastol database and contained none of the haul of intelligence from the Q-ships. And though Lisa’s translators and the scientists of the Project X were not looking for rebellious plantation planets, they had the data to flesh out the Earth team’s target list.

This morning’s conference was to lay out the parameters of a search routine that would give the Trojan Horse people their best shot at planting their eggs in fertile soil.

The conference dragged on through lunch and well into the afternoon. Despite her fatigue, Lisa found the subject intriguing. It was also professionally challenging. There were a large number of interlocking characteristics that might identify a race of slaves inclined toward rebellion; and extracting that information required creativity by both translators and computer programmers.

Finally, at 15:00, she called a halt. “Let us process what we have learned today and turn it into a proposal. We can get back together in… what do you think, Bernie? Three days?... Yes, we’ll set up a status meeting for three days from now.”

Everyone stood and began speaking with their neighbors. Lisa left her place at the head of the table and skated to the other end where Susan Ahrendt was putting away her notes. She had been quiet for most of the day. Mostly Smithers had done the talking.

“Susan,” Lisa said, touching the brunette’s arm to gain her attention.

“Hello, Lisa.”

“I’d really like to have that talk now.”

“Sure. You mentioned drinks, correct?”

“I did.”

“I’ll talk as long as you buy. Nemesis is dry, you know.”

Lisa laughed. She had meant it to sound lighthearted, but it didn’t come out that way. “No wonder Mark is developing frown lines!”

#

Chapter Twenty-Five

With the influx of supplies from Earth through the stargates, Admiral Landon found sufficient surplus to turn one of the base’s store rooms into a bistro. The furniture was all wrought iron of local manufacture, as were the hanging Tiffany lamps, but the beer and wine were imported; albeit, they were dispensed from vacuum cylinders rather than traditional wood barrels and glass bottles.