McCollum - GIBRALTAR STARS (7 page)

There was another reason why stargates had to be strong. Pointed at another gate light-years distant, each gate must minimize jitter, lest it lose focus and break the link to its twin.

 “Come on. I want to see the databanks,” she said, striding down the slope to where a ladder and scaffold arrangement allowed access to an open port atop the ring.

Tom Blanchard followed, noting the suddenly careless way in which she bounced down the sloping path. He opened his mouth to give warning, but she reached the access ladder before he could get the words out. He didn’t need to hear the quickened pace of her breathing in his earphones to recognize that she was suddenly excited.

#

The interior of the ring reminded Lisa of nothing so much as an ancient submarine she had once toured. And Blanchard was right. The volume was filled with a complex series of braces and webs that made the ring as rigid as the Broan engineers could make it.  Alien equipment filled most of the rest of the volume. The interior was literally stuffed with it.

Some of the mechanisms she recognized. Others were strange to her. They barely left room to move through the access tube the builders had left for maintenance workers. Often it was necessary that she turn and insert herself sideways between two large gray hulking shapes in order to follow Blanchard down the dimly lit tunnel. The Chief Vacuum Specialist made it look easy, which caused her some chagrin, considering how much bigger he was.

Concentrating as she was on not banging her suit against things that might break off an antenna or damage a heat exchanger, she found it difficult to form an impression of the ring interior. In addition to her rather confined field of view, her surroundings were a kaleidoscope of strange sights. Several times they stepped over cables the size of a man’s biceps. Twice they had to duck down — another difficult maneuver — to pass under smaller, glittery cables.

 “The databanks are this way, Lieutenant,” Blanchard said after they had been inside the ring ten minutes. He paused before a very human-design door; in fact, one that undoubtedly would have borne the inscription “Product of Sutton” somewhere on its surface if the local constructors bothered with such nonsense. Blanchard pressed a code into the oversize keypad designed for gloved fingers, and the door retracted to reveal a glittering gallery of sparkling cubes beyond. Running down the center of the compartment was a suspended catwalk surrounded by space netting.

She gazed at the scene for a second, and her guide answered the unspoken question.

“To keep someone from putting a boot through the record cubes. We went to too much trouble to get this baby to let someone damage it.”

“You did all of this in the forty-eight hours since they landed the gate?” she asked over the radio. Her words echoed as the radio signal bounced back to her after circumnavigating the ring.

“Mostly we did it in orbit. The gates were designed to be maintained in the absence of gravity.”

 Lisa pulled herself into the tunnel of nets and drifted along horizontally through the surrounding cubes. The gate was still drawing power, she saw, even a hundred years after it had been abandoned. She wondered if that was because the Broa were in a habit of periodically visiting the system they had killed — perhaps to mine or salvage the corpse — or if the gates were self repairing. If the latter, that was a trick humanity needed to learn.

 “Keep moving, Lieutenant. The data banks cover about one-eighth of the circumference. There’s a duplicate set of cubes diametrically opposite. We think they are intended for redundancy.”

 “What do you suppose they have stored in all of these?” Lisa asked in an awe-tinged voice. “They’ve got enough data storage to house several Library of Parliament Databases in here.”

“Dr. Svenson says they have detailed maps of the gravitational anomalies throughout the Vrathalatar system. Not star maps, but gravimetric charts and space density curves for most of a light-year surrounding the gate.” After a few seconds’ wait, there was a chuckle in her earphones. “I’m quoting, of course. Personally, I have no idea what any of that means.”

“Me either,” Lisa said.

In truth, Lisa understood more than she admitted. Both starships and stargates used multi-dimensional translation theory to conquer Einstein’s Barrier. Her specialty was languages, and one of the tongues her job required her to master was the one she had long ago dubbed “Ph.D.ish”. In some ways, it was more difficult than the Broan trade patois Sar-Say had taught her.

When one considered the complexities involved in keeping the gate focused on another a dozen light-years distant, it was obvious why the gate needed a precise model of the gravimetrics of surrounding space. Distortions caused by the gravitational pull of intervening stars were the equivalent of the atmospheric turbulence that plagues ground-based telescopes. Telescopes used adaptive optics to defeat the problem. Stargates undoubtedly used something equivalent.

As they came to a second human-designed door that marked the end of the computational section of the stargate, she glanced around and attempted to estimate the amount of information stored in this glittery tunnel. It was huge! And when one multiplied the data storage capacity of this single gate by the millions of others that knit the Sovereignty together, it made one feel very small indeed.

 “Heads up,” Blanchard said as he squeezed past Lisa to punch his code into the keypad. “Beyond this door is the power compartment. Touch the wrong thing in there and you could vaporize both of us.”

#

“So how was the tour, darling?”

“Intimidating,” Lisa told Mark as the two of them sat in the commissary eating dinner. “Apparently, forming a wormhole and focusing it on a spot halfway across the universe is a more daunting task than I realized.”

She went on to describe the data storage and power and space rotation generators.

“I actually got the shivers inside the ring,” Lisa concluded.

“Why?” Mark asked as he rolled up a string of spaghetti on his fork. It was ‘Italian Night’ in the commissary, with pasta and tomato sauce, but no meat balls. He inserted the fork in his mouth and then slurped up a wayward spaghetti strand.

“Stop that!” she said, absentmindedly, momentarily distracted by the noise. “I guess seeing all of that machinery inside finally made the gate real for me. We’ve been using them to scout the Broa for more than a year, yet I guess I never thought of them as anything more than a pretty ring floating against the blackness of space.”

“Stargates are no different than starships. You know how much we stuff inside one of our hulls and all the energy that has to be pumped into a stardrive generator before a ship can rotate out of normal space. Why should the gates be any different?”

“I don’t know. I guess I just got to thinking of them as magic circles. As long as the alien contraptions work by sorcery, they aren’t very frightening.”

“Speak for yourself, woman. Personally, if I thought we are up against a coven of wizards, I would poop my pants.”

“Not wizards, exactly,” Lisa said. “But powerful. I think we may have bitten off more than we can chew.” She punctuated her words by crunching down on a piece of lettuce from her salad.

“Nonsense,” he replied, trying to steer the conversation out of the melancholy mood into which it was threatening to veer. When one was 7000 light-years from home, melancholia could be the deadliest of emotions. “The Broa are powerful, but they aren’t godlike. They’re one-trick ponies, nothing more.”

“It’s a pretty good trick,” Lisa said, sipping red wine. The vintage was quite good — the previous April. “If the Broa hadn’t invented the gate, they would just be a world of monkeys among a million other worlds. They would probably still be swinging from vines.”

“Just a case of transient technological superiority. The same thing has happened time and time again on Earth. Someone discovers something new, usually a more efficient way to kill their enemies, and they lord it over their neighbors until the neighbors catch up. The Assyrians did it with their chariots; the Spartans by organizing their whole society like an army; the Germans with their new mobile tactics called
blitz-something-or-other
. They ran rampant for a time, and then were eventually defeated when someone else learned a newer trick.”

“The gate is different from just having a faster airplane, you know.”

“In degree, perhaps,” Mark agreed. “The Broa lord it over other species because they control who can reach the stars, and who can’t. The secret won’t last forever.”

“But it
has
lasted forever; at least, forever in terms we humans can understand.”

“But it hasn’t. We know the secret, don’t we? Pretty soon, a lot of other species are going to know it, too.”

Chapter Seven

Sar-say paused and regarded the plant with the red blossoms and the dagger-like spikes on its stem. The humans called it a “rose” and one of their ancient playwrights had said something about it “smelling as sweet.” He had struggled to understand the allegory.

 Checking the chronometer he’d been given, he discovered that the most enjoyable time of his week was nearly half over. There was another human saying about “time flying when one is having fun.” That one he understood all too well. The hour each week they allowed him to roam this arboretum was his favorite recreation. The fact that his communion with alien plants had become such an important part of his life said more about the evil turn his fortunes had taken than anything else he could imagine.

#

Sar-Say was a looker-after-value by profession, what humans called an ‘accountant.’ He had been on a tour of his clan’s holdings to judge their value and boarded a freighter on Vith, bound for Perselin. As a Master traveling on a ship crewed by subservients, he was given the most spacious accommodation onboard, the cabin of its commander, a Vithian named Muulbra.

Sar-Say’s duties often forced him to travel beneath his standards. While barely adequate, the quarters had one feature not usually found on even the most luxurious liners. The alien furnishings included backup instruments to those in the ship’s control center. With nothing else to do, Sar-Say amused himself by using the big screen to watch the mixed crew of Vithians and Frels. He also familiarized himself with the other controls.

The voyage was uneventful until the
Hraal
approached the stargate in the Nala System. There they encountered an Avenger-class warship. With a Master onboard, Muulbra had priority and moved his ship toward the gate. It had been then that the Avenger attacked.

Sar-Say was in his cabin when the attack began, so he had not witnessed the initial volley of energy beams. By the time he found the proper hull camera,
Hraal
had entered the Nala gate and was desperately attempting to jump. The Avenger closed and sent a new energy bolt into the fleeing freighter.

Up until that moment, the attack had not been real to Sar-Say. What subservient would dare attack a ship carrying a Master? Then he realized they were not after
Hraal
. The attack was aimed at Sar-Say himself!

Pressing an attack so close to a stargate was foolhardy. Sar-Say remembered the sickening lurch as the energy bolt struck home. For a moment, he thought the ship had been holed. His attention was drawn to the screen on which the gate had been prominently displayed.

It was displayed no longer. The screen showed an ebon expanse, with a small blue-white sphere half in light and dark in a lower corner. Wherever they were, it was no longer the Nala System. Nor was it Perselin.

Whatever had happened had caught the Avenger, too. The attacker wasted no time in renewing the attack. As soon as his accumulators recharged, he fired another energy bolt that struck
Hraal
somewhere amidships.

Muulbra did what he could. With no other hope for escape, he sent his ship racing for the nearby planet. It did not take long to note that the world was inhabited. Sensors reported a spherical ship in orbit, with an accompanying smaller vessel.

Muulbra flew his ship well, performing evasive maneuvers as best he could with chunks of the freighter shot away. Despite his efforts, the Avenger landed hit after hit on
Hraal
. Just as Sar-Say thought he was dead, the spirits of his ancestors intervened.

Taking its attention off the freighter for an instant, the pursuing Avenger reached out and destroyed the small alien craft as they passed it, then resumed its pounding of
Hraal.

Then it quietly exploded. One instant it had loomed large in the screen. The next it was an expanding cloud of glowing plasma.

#

Sar-Say lifted his torso and stretched tall on two legs in the fashion of a human. He reached up, grasped a stem of the rose bush between two of his six digits, making sure to avoid the spikes. He slowly pulled the red blossom close, buried his snout in the flower and inhaled deeply through his breathing slits. The aroma was alien, but not unpleasant. He inhaled twice more, and gently released the plant. The flower arced slowly skyward as the stem rebounded.

The rose bush was a giant of its kind. So, too, were the other plants in the arboretum. They owed their growth to the one-sixth gravity field in which they grew and to the continuous stream of nutrients fed to their roots through carefully positioned underground pipes. Framed against the black sky beyond the atmosphere dome, partially eclipsed by the branches of the rose bush, was another glowing apparition.

Like the disk on the screen aboard the
Hraal
that long ago day, this one too was blue-white, with swirls, and half in light and dark… but immeasurably larger and brighter.

The Earth hovered perpetually in the black sky above the atmosphere dome. From space it looked very like Sar-Say’s home planet. The sight of it made him long for a world that he might never see again.

#

It was not in Sar-Say’s nature to dwell on what might have been. However, if he regretted anything, it was that he had been too truthful with the humans during his first weeks in captivity. Had he known then what he knew now, he might have talked his way out of his dilemma.