McCollum - GIBRALTAR STARS (42 page)

Admiral N’Gomo said, “Give us a break, Dan. You have had a month to think this through. Spell it out for us.”

“Yes, sir. It all comes down to the source of Broan power.”

“The stargate?”

“Precisely. They rule through their network of stargates. With it, they can conquer any system they choose.”

 “Your point, Admiral?” Nadine Halstrom asked.

“Simply this, Madam Coordinator. The Sabator mission, as flawed as it was, demonstrated that we have leapfrogged the Broa. The stardrive trumps the stargate. We have them helpless.”

“Helpless, Admiral?”

 “We operated with impunity in one of their most populated and powerful systems. First we sent a ship well inside the critical limit. They failed to detect it. They were alerted only when our ship suffered a catastrophic accident. Even then, they were powerless to prevent the rescue of the crew, the destruction of the damaged cruiser, and the escape of our rescue ship.

“They never detected the cruiser we had monitoring the operation, which led to the ultimate success of the mission. We went to Sabator to learn the location of the Broan home sun. That is precisely what we have done.

 “Our ships cross the interstellar gulf at the time and place of our choosing. Unlike the stargates, there is no betraying gravity wave when we drop sublight. That allows us to move to the outskirts of any system we choose and hide among the orbiting icebergs in the Oort cloud.

“Because stardrives and stargates are related technologies, both only operate beyond the critical limit. That means we can approach their stars, drop sublight, launch SMs at their stargates, and be gone before the light of the explosions reaches their inner system.

“Madam Coordinator, Admiral, gentlemen…! Don’t you see? Our stardrive is to the Broa what their stargate is to everyone else. Like the atom bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it gives us battlefield supremacy. But like those bombs, our period of dominance is limited.”

Landon paused and regarded his listeners. He could see from their expressions that his argument had made an impression. It should have. He and Lisa had practiced it enough on the trip from Brinks Base.

“Why limited, Admiral?” Barnett asked.

“Because, Mr. Barnett, after Sabator, it won’t be long before the Broa have their own faster-than-light ships.”

“Come now,
Sasquatch
was destroyed. They can’t whip up a stardrive generator merely by watching a ship disappear into superlight!”

“They don’t have to. One of the objectives of Trojan Horse is to seed the Sovereignty with enough starships that a few of them will fall into Broan hands. How else could we sow suspicion and mistrust among the enemy?

“However, whether they have our small ships or not, the Broa know multi-dimensional physics. They must be familiar with the gamma to aleph coordinate rotation.”

“Then why haven’t they used it?” Barnett asked.

“Because freedom of navigation is the last thing they want. Their rule is secure only so long as everyone else must ask their permission to travel between stars. We have given some of their slaves the secret of the stardrive. That is why I recommend an immediate strike on their home star and every other star in the gate network we can reach. We need to disrupt their transportation system and keep it disrupted long enough for the seeds of sedition to bear fruit.”

#

Chapter Forty-Two

Mikhail Vasloff sat in his office on the upper floor of a canal house overlooking the
Prinsengracht
in Amsterdam and thought about how his fortunes had changed since his return from Klys’kra’t.

Ten years ago he had been the head of
Terra Nostra
, the leading anti-interstellar organization on Earth. A chance meeting with a grieving Mark Rykand put him on the trail of a mysterious project. The Stellar Survey had gathered a large number of scientists at PoleStar. One of the experts, he learned, was a linguist. This startling fact led him to conclude the Survey had made contact with aliens.

He’d confronted them with his evidence and threatened to go public unless he was allowed in on the secret. To his surprise, his demand was granted. They’d allowed him to go aboard the satellite. Then, to make sure he couldn’t communicate what he knew, they shanghaied him on the expedition to the Crab Nebula.

Vasloff had not objected. By his lights, if the Expansionists were going to barge about a galactic empire, he wanted to be there. Dan Landon surprised him and asked him to join the contact team at Klys’kra’t to provide a pair of skeptical eyes.

If Landon expected the experience to turn him into an Expansionist, the encounter with the tripeds had the opposite effect. Vasloff still shuddered when he thought of how close they’d come to letting Sar-Say loose among his subjects before discovering his true identity.

Later, when the expedition returned to Earth, the team split along natural fault lines. Landon, Mark Rykand, and Lisa Arden were all in favor of an activist approach. Vasloff joined the Isolationists. He advocated pulling back from the stars, abandoning Earth’s young colonies, radically suppressing electromagnetic emissions to space, and scrapping all starships.

Unfortunately, the treachery of a few greedy individuals sabotaged the anti-war position. The ensuing paranoia led to the current full-scale militarization.

The Expansionists romanticized the war as a case of David versus Goliath. Vasloff had a different mental image.

Back in primary school in Russia, he’d seen a holo about African monkeys. One young primate showed a morbid fascination with a boa constrictor that shared the limb on which the monkey sat. Every few seconds, the monkey reached out and grabbed at the snake’s head. For its part, the snake did nothing but flick out its tongue. With each touch and passive response, the monkey grew bolder.

Quite unexpectedly, the snake opened its mouth, clamped down on the monkey’s arm, and slowly and horribly, wrapped its coils around its victim’s torso. As the young Mikhail and his classmates watched, the snake crushed the life out of its victim and slowly swallowed it.

In Vasloff’s view, the Expansionists were like that little monkey. They insisted on poking the giant snake. Soon, the snake would strike, entrap Earth in its coils, and crush the life out of the human race.

Vasloff lost no time after the collapse of the anti-war effort to build anew. His
Terra Nostra
organization proved the perfect instrument. They gained support and power steadily until, two years ago, he himself had been elected to parliament, representing the Lowlands District of Europe.

“Mikhail, are you busy?” the box on his desk squawked. The voice was that of Claris Beaufort, his long time assistant.

“No, not busy. What is it?”

“I just received a report from one of our people in Toronto. It concerns old friends of yours. Guess who met with the World Coordinator this afternoon?

“Who?

“Admiral Daniel Landon, and Commanders Mark and Lisa Rykand.”

“What?” he asked. “They’re all supposed to be Beyond the Crab.”

“Apparently they arrived on the courier ship this morning and were whisked by chartered suborbital to Toronto.”

“Where are they now?”

“According to our source, they left for European Headquarters with Admiral N’Gomo. They should be in Meersburg this evening.”

“Find out where they are staying and get me on a flight to Zurich.”

#

Mark, Lisa and Dan Landon strolled into the Meersburg Yacht Club on the north shore of Lake Constance, which is called “the Bodensee” on the north shore. They were in civilian clothes, having walked the kilometer along the promenade from the small country inn where they were staying.

“I think you will like the food here,” Mark said as he ushered the other two into the bar to wait for a table, “although the waitress’ attitudes leave something to be desired.”

“Have you been here before?” his wife asked.

He nodded. “I ate dinner here, once.”

“With Moira Sims?”

“No, it was a business meeting,” he responded without elaborating.

A waitress in a low-cut dress took their order for drinks and disappeared. Lisa noticed both men’s eyes following her. She had gotten used to that reflex in her husband, but the Admiral surprised her. Then she wondered why. After all, he was a man…

He interrupted her train of thought by saying, “When we go to headquarters in the morning, I will get you settled with the people in Strategic Plans, and then I will be leaving you for a few days,” Landon said.

“Sir?” Mark asked.

“This is the first time I’ve been home since we decamped for Brinks in force. I want to see my daughter.”

Both of them blinked. Landon never talked about his family. They knew he was divorced, a not uncommon condition for the Space Navy, and had a son and daughter. The son was serving on a starship somewhere, but the daughter was a mystery.

“How old is she, sir?”

“Twenty-four. She’s about to make me a grandfather. She and her husband live in Spain, so I thought I would pop down there for three or four days.”

“How wonderful,” Lisa replied.

“Think you can hold down the fort?”

“We’ll do our best, sir.”

“I’m just Dan in civvies, Mark. We’ve been through enough together to be on a first-name basis.”

They had conferred with Admiral N’Gomo on the suborbital transport from Toronto to the small airport on the Swiss side of the lake that served European H.Q. All agreed that the presentation went well and that the Coordinator was intrigued, as was N’Gomo.

Before the Navy would commit to authorizing an offensive, however, it would have to pass a rigorous screening and simulation process.

That is what they would start in the morning.

Planning would feed everything they learned at Sabator into the big computers in the basement of H.Q., where it would join years of Q-ship observations and a goodly portion of the data from the Pastol database. They would run simulations on various battle strategies to see what worked and what did not.

 “Your table is ready,
Meine Dame und Herren
,” the waitress said upon her return. She balanced three golden beers on a tray, which she did not put down. Rather, she led them into the restaurant and deposited the drinks on their table.

Mark and Lisa sat on one side, with Landon opposite. They had just opened their menus and were discussing a choice of wine when Mark looked up and groaned.

“What is it?” Lisa asked, following his gaze. She emitted an unladylike expression, causing Landon to swivel in his seat. If he had a response, he kept it to himself.

Threading his way among the crowded tables, aiming right for them, was a smiling Mikhail Vasloff.

#

“Good evening, former teammates!” he said as he arrived. “The lady at your villa said that you’d gone out. I thought you might have come here.”

“Why would you think that?” Lisa asked, perplexed.

“This is where Mark and I ate dinner the night we met,” Vasloff replied, causing Lisa to turn and stare at her husband.

He shrugged. “I told you it was a business dinner.”

“What business?”

“Finding out what happened to Jani. I paid this scoundrel and he never gave me anything useful in return.”

“You had found your own way into the project before I had a chance to report,” Vasloff replied. “May I sit down?”

Everyone turned to Landon, who seemed on the verge of refusing. “Sure, Mikhail. Good to see you again. Have a seat. I hear that you have come up in the world.”

“No more than you, Admiral. I understand you are in overall command Beyond the Crab!”

“More to the point,” Landon said, “how did you know where we were staying?”

Vasloff shrugged. “As you say, I have come up in the world. I now have people who can find out things I need to know relatively quickly. In this case, it was a simple matter of pulling up your hotel reservations.”

“But that is against the law…” Lisa exclaimed.

“Yes, it is. Luckily, the man who did it for me didn’t get caught. There is nothing against the law about using the information once it has been obtained, however. If the
Polizei
ask me about it, I can truthfully tell them I have no idea who the hacker is.

“I see you are looking at the wine list. The fish here is quite good. Might I suggest a Riesling Heiligenstein?”

Dan Landon nodded. “We will bow to your expertise. Where we’ve been, the vintages all come from vacuum sealed aluminum kegs.”

The waitress returned and the four of them ordered dinner: three fish courses and a steak. Mark had never cared for seafood and was not picky about his wines. After the waitress punched in the orders, she left them alone.

Vasloff said, “Now, let us get the business of the evening out of the way so that we may then relax and enjoy each other’s company. What are the three of you doing on Earth?”

“We’re on leave,” Landon said.

“Come now, Admiral. You were in the Coordinator’s office in Canada by 09:00. Later, Admiral N’Gomo gave you a lift here, you checked into your hotel, cleaned up, took a walk, and still made it in time for dinner. A frenetic leave, is it not?”

 “When you’ve been in the deep vacuum as long as we have, you don’t want to waste a minute. Besides, whatever reason we have for being here is none of your business.”

“I’m sorry, Daniel, but I am now an elected member of parliament. The war effort is my business and having the Commanding Admiral arrive unannounced says something important is afoot.”

His comment was met with silence.

“Well then, I tried. Now we can all relax and enjoy our meal. You won’t let me in on your secret; I, however, have no such reticence. Let me tell you how my life has been going since last we were together…”

#

Chapter Forty-Three

“How did it go?” Claris Beaumont asked Vasloff when he returned to his office in Amsterdam.

“I learned what I needed to,” he said. “Call for a conference this afternoon. We have actions to plan.”

 “They told you why they have come back to Earth?” his assistant asked incredulously.