Gibraltar Sun (38 page)

Their superlight voyage was a short one. A mere 2.7 nanoseconds after breaking free of Einstein’s barrier, they dropped back into normal space at the limit of missile range. The computer launched a superlight missile at the stargate and again crashed power to the stardrive. The next leg of the voyage was longer than the first, but still too quick for human senses to perceive.

All the human beings onboard detected was an indefinable sensation, as though someone had taken hold of their insides and twisted. The ship seemed to shudder for an instant. The shaking was accompanied by a sudden drop in illumination that lasted for about as long as it takes to blink. The overhead lights brightened momentarily, then failed completely.

The computer displays were the next to go as their protective circuits took them offline rather than subject them to the power spike. The bridge was plunged into murk. The only source of illumination was the multicolored glow emanating from various emergency status lights.

“Someone get power back!” the captain’s voice ordered from out of the gloom.

Seconds later, the overhead lights illuminated. It took thirty seconds for the displays to return to life.

“Where are we, Astrogator?”

Mark commanded a hull camera to search for Etnarii. When it ceased slewing, a bright star sat at the center of the main viewscreen. At the stargate, Etnarii was shrunken, but still displayed a disk. No longer. The sun was now merely to the brightest of several stars in the field of view.

The computer immediately began searching for Pastol and the other planets. Within a few seconds, it had found three of them, enough to do a reverse parallax calculation.

“We seem to be one light-hour due galactic north of Etnarii, Captain. Right where we want to be.”

“Thank God for that! Weapons, status!”

“I didn’t see it go, sir,” Rodriguez replied, “but we seem to be short one SM from our magazine.”

“Congratulations, Mr. Rykand. Your plan seems to have worked, at least up to the point where we fired a missile at the stargate. Any indication that we hit it?”

“No, sir. Not at this distance.”

“How long before the light from the flash reaches us here?”

“I make if fifty four minutes, Captain.”

“All right. All sensors focus on the gate. In fifty-four minutes, we see if we hit what we were aiming for.”

#

“What was that?” Pas-Tek demanded as every sensor on the side of the ship closest to the gate ceased transmitting.

“The freighter, Master. It exploded!”

“Suicide?” Pas-Tek demanded. Suddenly, all of his visions of future advancement faded, to be replaced by the thought that he would be carrying messages to the hinterlands for the rest of his life. He would forever be known as the ship commander who let his quarry take the easy way out.

“Malfunction, I would think. They were leaking something just before they blew.”

“Sensors!”

“Yes, Master.”

“Get me a view of the gate.”

“I cannot, Master. All of the aft cameras are burned out and we can’t rotate the ship while we are decelerating.”

“Stand by,” Saton answered. “We will be through with engines in a few heartbeats.”

Almost before the sailing master’s sentence was complete, the weight lifted from Pas-Tek’s chest and he rebounded into the restraining straps. He wasted no time feeling relieved.

“Sensors. Rotate the ship. Get me a working camera!”

“Acknowledged, Master.”

There followed several disquieting sensations as the ship spun about its axis until the bow once again faced forward. The main viewscreen lit. Of the freighter and the stargate, there was no sign.

An expanding fireball occupied space where the gate had been. The incandescent cloud was already large enough to overflow the edges of the viewscreen. At Pas-Tek’s command, the sensor operator reduced the magnification until they could see the whole cloud. It roiled with turbulence, a beautiful white, translucent flower against the blackness of space. The size of the flower could be judged by the size of the small, off-center black dot

“Focus on the cargo vessel!” Pas-Tek ordered.

The view expanded once more until the large sphere was centered in the viewscreen. Even from this distance, the cargo vessel appeared misshapen, almost molten.

As he gazed at the horrific sight on screen, the implications slowly seeped into his consciousness. Not only was the Type Seven freighter destroyed, but so was the gate. At the edge of the cloud, one small sector of the ring could be seen spinning lazily away from the origin of the explosion. The rest of the ring seemed to be missing altogether.

With the stargate destroyed, he and his ship were stranded. There was no way for him to send a message to Those Who Rule to tell them what had happened. Nor were there any other gates in the Etnarii System. Stargate technology was the sole province of the Race. No other species could be trusted with the knowledge.

That meant that the replacement gate would have to be procured from one of his species’ home worlds. It would be delivered to Etnarii via single-ended star jump. After that would come the careful maneuvering into position, followed by a delicate calibration process that could take a demi-cycle or more to complete. Only when the new gate was linked to the one in the Gasak System would his ship be free of this backwater system.

None of these time consuming positioning and calibration steps could take place until someone in Gasak noticed that the link between that system and Etnarii was down. Considering the amount of ship traffic that normally plied the route, he had no idea how long it would be before Those Who Rule realized his dilemma.

Until they did, he was trapped.

#

“You may begin your countdown, Mr. Rykand.”

“One minute to go, sir.… Fifty seconds.…”

The bridge crew of
New Hope
had just spent the longest hour of their lives hovering at the edge of the system, waiting to see whether or not they had fooled their enemy.

The Avenger had nearly caught them. At the time of their departure, the Broan ship had been close enough to record the whole event in excruciating detail. Broan scientists would study that recording in future months and how they viewed it was important.

The impression that everyone hoped the recording would leave was that
New Hope
had exploded while attempting to jump. That perception would present the Broa with a minor mystery, but one that was reassuringly mundane.

However, that whole scenario depended on them hitting the gate with a superlight missile. They had just taken the fastest snap shot in history, in the midst of wild transients in
New Hope
’s entire electrical system. If the missile malfunctioned, or just plain missed, the Avenger would have full recordings of a ship that disappeared through a stargate without producing a gravity wave.

Once the Broa accepted what their instruments were telling them, they would have no option other than to recognize that somewhere among the stars there existed a race of aliens who they did not control.

“Thirty seconds,” Mark announced.

Around him, the duty crew sat motionless, watching the main viewscreen. No one spoke and most did not breath. “Twenty seconds… Ten seconds…

“Five, Four, Three, Two, One!”

For the span of two heartbeats, nothing happened. The bright star at the center of the viewscreen remained unaffected. Then, suddenly, a third of the screen to the right of the star, another star appeared. This one popped into existence and brightened until it was as bright as Etnarii. It remained at maximum for a dozen seconds, then slowly dimmed, never quite dropping back to invisibility.

“Focus on that and magnify!” Captain Harris ordered.

The screen shifted and expanded. At maximum magnification, the new star showed as a tiny flower blossoming against the blackness of space. At first it was violet-white in color. Slowly, it shaded down to blue-white, then to green, and yellow.

“My God, I would call that a hit!” the Captain exclaimed. “Congratulations, Mr. Rodriguez, on your aim.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Any sign of the Avenger?” someone asked.

“Too small to see at this distance,” Vivian Domedan answered.

“Then what is that speck?”

Within the gradually fading nebula that had once been the local stargate was a bright white point. It looked solid.

“That must be the bulk hauler,” Simon Rodriguez said from his weapons station. “It was close enough to have been caught in the blast.”

“Do we have recordings of all of this?”

“We do, Captain,” Vivian Domedan replied.

“Then there is nothing more to see here. Astrogator, set your course for Brinks Base. Transition to superlight on my command.”

“Yes, sir!”

Mark keyed for the program that would put them on a path for the system that would be home for the next several years. Nor were they the only ones. Having seen the gate explode,
Chicago
and her consorts would already be en route to Brinks Base.

“Ready for superlight, Captain.”

“Execute.”

The star-studded blackness of the viewscreen turned suddenly to the absolute black of superlight as the stardrive generator thrummed in the bulkheads around them. Within seconds, they left the Etnarii System behind and were on their way home. In the captain’s safe was the original record cube containing the Pastol planetary database. In the hold were several hundred liters of
vasa
juice.

All in all, it had been a successful mission.

#

Chapter Thirty Nine

If there is anywhere in the universe that can truthfully be called the Armpit of Creation, that place would have to be Sutton. Brinks’ moon was an airless, lifeless ball of rock and stone, bereft of weather save the cosmic wind, covered with a fine coating of brown dust the consistency of talcum powder. The dust coated the suits of those foolhardy enough to venture out onto the surface, and drifted into Brinks Base despite the entire facility being hermetically sealed and below ground.

The moon’s stark surface was alternately baked and frozen as it circled its primary every twenty days. During half the orbit, Hideout cooked it in its harsh rays; while at night, the surface temperature dropped to sub-arctic conditions while in stygian darkness, or else lit softly by reflected light from the blue-white world that was its parent.

Sutton was a slagheap, a junkyard, a collecting place for the detritus of a dead system. Debris rained down onto the barren moon in the form of ionized particles, fine dust, and an occasional rock large enough to blast a crater out of the already pummeled surface. To this sky junk was added the clutter of the human occupation. It was a world only a mother could love.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Lisa asked as
New Hope
’s landing boat dropped toward the surface. In the distance, through the windscreen, could be seen the red beacon that marked the location of Brinks Base.

“Home never looked so good,” Mark agreed.

The two of them were strapped into their customary places on the boat’s front acceleration bench. Spacer Jorgenson shared their perch, causing Lisa to be squeezed between the broad shoulders of two large men. It was not an altogether unpleasant experience. A dozen other members of
New Hope
’s crew were packed like sardines behind them, until the atmosphere smelled of stale sweat and halitosis.

The truth was that the beat-up old moon
did
look good. To spacers who had just spent a month in enemy vacuum, the gray-brown panorama below might have seemed a Christmas painting. To nerves rubbed raw by the long chase and near battle with the Broan Avenger, this ball of hardscrabble dirt was the most welcome sight in the whole universe.

“Stand by for landing,” the pilot said over his shoulder as he lined up the red flashing beacon on his instrument display. Their weight changed subtly as reaction jets hissed. In response, a fine layer of dust engulfed the boat and brought a dusty curtain down on the universe around them.

There was sudden brightening as they dropped into a floodlit underground hanger. A few seconds later, a bump told them that they had touched down. Gravity stabilized at Sutton’s anemic pull as both lift and drive engines were shut down. Jorgenson loosened their common safety belt as the turbines whined down into inaudibility. Lisa turned and hugged Mark.

“Oh, darling. It’s good to be home again!”

#

Dan Landon met them at the airlock leading out of the hanger and into the base. “Welcome home, Adventurers. I take it from your preliminary report that all went well.”

“Yes, sir,” Mark replied.

“Did you bring it?”

“I did,” he said, fishing into a pocket of his jumpsuit and retrieving the record cube containing the original copy of the Pastol planetary database.

The Admiral took it with reverence. There were probably a hundred copies onboard
New Hope,
many of which had already been hand-carried down by others. Still, this was the original, the quarry they had been sent after, the jewel of great value after which they had sought for five long years.

“Any trouble?” Landon asked.

“You mean, other than the fact that we had to blow up a stargate to escape?” Lisa asked. “No, no trouble.”

“I read Captain Harris’s report of the action. That was quick thinking, Mark. Do you think we fooled them?”

“Hard to say. Our exit was spectacular enough. You really don’t understand how much energy a few grams of shrapnel moving at 0.9c packs until you see it hit something.”

“The gate was completely destroyed?”

“We spotted one small chunk spinning away from the epicenter of the cloud. Not much they could determine from that except that the gate came apart with considerable violence. That bulk hauler we nearly collided with was also caught in the blast. We were too far away for our recordings to show much except that it appeared damaged.”

“Well,” Landon said, “They may not know what happened, but they aren’t likely to ascribe it to either supernatural phenomena or an alien race they don’t control. That means we are probably out of the woods… this time.”