The Mothership (44 page)

The seeker was driven onto its “knees” by
the impact. Now blind, with its data link to its companion severed, it lashed
out wildly with one of its shield arms, striking Liyakindirr in the chest,
hurling him into the bushes, stunned and breathless. Laura now fired from
behind her tree, striking the seeker’s torso several times before her ammo ran
out. The crippled seeker wobbled on its knees, disoriented, firing blind
uncontrolled bursts as the second seeker circled at high speed to avoid being
hit itself.

Hooper holstered his pistol. “Grenade!” he
yelled as he pulled the pin with his burnt right hand and rolled the explosive
underarm. It bounced along the ground, under the seeker’s shield, landing
between its knees.

Laura ducked back behind her tree while
Hooper went to ground. The grenade exploded, tearing the seeker’s legs off and
throwing it into the air. It landed on its back, shooting continuously into the
sky as Hooper fired his pistol into the gaps in the crippled machine’s armor,
triggering an internal explosion that silenced its weapons. He forced himself
to a sitting position and scanned the trees for the other machine as he
reloaded. It was circling at high speed deep in the forest, preparing for
another attack. Nearby, Liyakindirr crawled out of the bushes, coughing blood.

 “Hurry,” Liyakindirr wheezed as he helped
Hooper to his feet.

The aboriginal hunter reached for the radio
pack, but Hooper restrained him. The side flap of a pocket was open and two
black rectangular devices had fallen half out of the pocket. One was Timer’s
radio detonator, the other had a short black aerial and a display that pulsed
the same signal repeatedly. He holstered his pistol and picked up the
rectangular burst transceiver, turning it over curiously. In a flash of
understanding, he realized it was broadcasting a radio signal into the ether.

“That’s how they’re tracking us!” he
declared.

Laura’s mind spun as she realized Markus
had planted the burst transceiver in the radio pack and set it so the seekers
could find them. Kill them. Kill her! And she’d helped him! “It belongs to
Markus,” she blurted. “I’ve seen him with it.”

Hooper looked confused. “Markus? Why would
he …?”

“He wants the ship,” Laura stammered. “If
you call in an air strike, it’s gone.”

Hooper’s expression grew dark. “That
filthy, god damned son of a–” He promised himself, if he got out of this alive,
he’d ring Markus’ neck. He was about to hurl the transceiver into the woods,
then caught himself. His eyes leapt from Markus’ small black communicator to
the silver streak circling out in the forest, then he carefully returned
Markus’ transceiver to the backpack’s pocket.

“What are you doing?” Laura asked
incredulously.

Hooper threw Timer’s radio receiver to her
with a grim look. “Buying you time. Don’t waste it.” He nodded to the
detonator. “Left button to arm, right button to detonate.”

Laura dropped Xeno’s empty pistol and
picked up the radio detonator, knowing she now held her husband’s life in her
hands. She slid the device into her pocket, trying not to think about the
consequences of using the detonator.

Hooper picked up the fatboy special, and
handed it to Liyakindirr. “Point it that way, touch that mark to shoot. Got
it?”

Liyakindirr shouldered the backpack and
nodded, holding the weapon, feeling its weight. “I shoot good.”

Hooper gave Laura a final nod, “Good luck.”
He drew his pistol and pointed into the trees, away from the path. “That way.”
Liyakindirr started off on the new direction, with Hooper close behind.

When they had almost passed from sight, the
seeker sped through the trees near Laura, after Hooper and Liyakindirr. She saw
it fire several bursts of brilliant white energy through the trees before it
vanished from sight. A moment later, she heard the distinctive bang of Hooper’s
big .50 caliber pistol.

For several minutes, Laura hid beneath the
thick green tropical ferns that carpeted the forest floor, listening for the
distinctive whine of the seeker’s cannons, and the periodic thunder of Hooper’s
heavy hand gun. When she was certain she was alone, she ran crouched through
green ferns towards the east, hearing the sound of the running battle moving
further away to the south. After several minutes, an explosion rumbled through
the forest from Hooper’s last grenade. A short time later, the seeker’s cannons
sounded, telling her the grenade had missed its target. She knew the crippled
soldier could not hold out long, and when the seeker finally finished him and
Liyakindirr off, it would came after her.

With Markus’ treachery burning in her mind,
Laura was determined not to waste a second. She sprinted through the trees,
putting distance between herself and the seeker. Soon she reached the lip of a
gulley, where she paused to catch her breath. A shallow stream trickled below
while on the far side was a steep climb, strewn with rocks and trees. A kilometer
further on was the summit, girded by rust colored sandstone cliffs. Breathing
heavily, she scrambled down into the gulley, her heart beating from fear and
exhaustion. When she reached the bottom, the boom of Hooper’s gun carried to
her from very far away.

She did not hear it again.

* * * *

A two meter wide
archway vanished, then Beckman stepped into the domed chamber, followed by
Bandaka and Markus. The three dimensional wireframe schematic Vamp had used to
guide them through the ship floated in front of Dr McInness, who sat in the
control chair holding his broken ankle off the floor.

“I thought we’d lost you,” Beckman said as
Timer and Vamp turned toward him with relief.

Timer grinned. “We thought you’d lost us
too.”

“We just made it into the tunnel,” Vamp
explained, “before the explosion.”

Beckman thumbed his mike. “Clear.” A moment
later, Nuke, Virus and Xeno entered, then Tucker took up position covering the
archway. When they were all inside, Beckman turned his attention to the
wireframe image. “What’s this?”

“This room has access to all of the ship’s
technical data, and its ship’s log,” Dr McInness said.  “Apparently it can
drill down to the molecular level, giving a very detailed map of the ship.”

Beckman glanced at the alien characters on the
screen, then cast a curious look at Virus. “Can you make sense of this?”

Virus stared at the characters, on the
brink of understanding. “Sort of. Some of the symbols represent zones inside
the ship. Territories. It’s linked to their command structure. It’s not
organized the way we do it. It’s like . . . clans, or families.” He winced,
straining to remember. “They have ranks, but family relationships and gender
are more important.”

“Gender?” Xeno said surprised.

“There aren’t many females,” Virus said, “But
they’re in charge.”

“I like the sound of that,” Vamp said with
a mischievous grin.

“This device records everything the ship
sees,” Dr McInness continued. “Everywhere it’s been, and it’s been to a lot of
places.”

Beckman’s eyes narrowed. “Does it say why
it’s here?”

“In spectacular 3D,” Dr McInness replied as
he inserted his hand into the sphere of light in front of him which he used to
control the system.

The room transformed about them into the
black velvet of space sprinkled with densely packed points of star light.
Behind them, a distant yellow-orange star shone brightly, the only star larger
than a point. Floating all around them was a fleet of dark rectangular
leviathans, barely discernible in the feeble light at the edge of the
yellow-orange star’s system. The fleet moved as one, nearly thirty great
vessels spread across thousands of kilometers of space.

Ahead of Dr McInness’ control position, two
columns of swirling characters continuously morphed into new shapes as
computations were rapidly updated.

“We’re the ship,” Dr McInness explained,
“We’re seeing everything recorded from the ship’s perspective.”

“We’re not going very fast,” Markus
observed.

“How can you tell?” Dr McInness asked.
“There’s no point of reference. Those other ships are travelling as fast, or as
slow, as we are. And the stars are far away, even the orange star.”

Virus pointed to the swirling characters in
the left side column. “That says the ship is slowing down.”

“These ships appear to travel no faster
than about ten percent the speed of light,” Dr McInness said. “Fast by our
standards, but not fast enough to go very far.”

Beckman motioned towards the majestic
sprawl of a barred spiral galaxy that dominated the far wall of the chamber.
“Is that what I think it is?”

“Yes. No human has ever seen it from the
outside before,” Dr McInness said, “But that is the Milky Way Galaxy.”

“So how did this ship get here, from out
there, if it’s so slow?”

“Engines have stopped!” Virus called out,
pointing to a set of frozen symbols. “The ship is completely motionless.”

The black void of space blurred, then faded
as the pinpoints of star light merged into a soft, gray sphere surrounding
them. The rest of the fleet was now obscured from sight, as was the universe
beyond.

“Are we in hyperspace?” Timer asked.

“No,” Dr McInness said. “We’re very much in
normal space, what Einstein would call flat space. That grayness is a bubble
encasing the ship. Spacetime is sweeping around the bubble, pulling it forward
from the front, and pushing it from behind.”

“How can you tell?” Beckman asked.

“It’s a theory for us, a reality for them.”

“But didn’t we just stop?”

“Technically, yes,” Dr McInness replied. “The
ship isn’t moving, only spacetime outside the bubble. That’s how they got here.
You can’t see it, because nothing can get through the bubble, in or out.”

Beckman looked incredulous. “You mean it’s
flying blind?”

Dr McInness nodded. “Totally blind. It’s
completely dependent on the course it calculated before it started, and on the
quality of its navigational data.”

“Isn’t that kind of dangerous?”

“They don’t have a choice. Providing they
don’t fly into something big, like a star or a planet, they’re OK. It’s not as
risky as it sounds.”

“Heat is rising,” Virus translated. “I’m
not sure of the numbers, but it’s getting really freaking hot out there.”

“It’s Hawking radiation, from the quantum
effects around the bubble wall.” Dr McInness sped up the recording. “It stays
like this for several days. No way to know how fast the ship is going, but it appears
to have come from a globular cluster above the galaxy. That’s tens of thousands
of light years in a very short time.”

The bubble surrounding them collapsed, and
the walls of the chamber once again turned black, only now, a thick band of
stars snaked all the way around the chamber, marking the plane of the Milky
Way. The ship had followed its preplanned path blindly down into the galaxy,
skirting the dust clouds of the main spiral arms and avoiding the hidden
gravitational shoals of black holes and dark matter concentrations, halting
only when it entered a small spur of stars branching off from a major spiral arm.
Swirling characters identified a small yellow star glowing dimly off to the
left, while other characters marked the locations of planets, moons and
asteroids too small and dark for the naked eye to see.

“Welcome to the Solar System,” Dr McInness
announced.

“Our Solar System?” Markus asked surprised.
“From outside the galaxy? That was . . . fast!”

“Wasn’t it!”

Xeno looked at the stars enveloping the
room apprehensively. “It’s bad for us that it’s so easy for them to get here.”

“It ain’t good.” Tucker said as he tried unsuccessfully
to scratch the wall with his knife where several stars were clustered close
together.

“Hey man,” Nuke said, “Write your name in
space!”

Tucker scowled at Nuke and flicked him the
bird.

Bandaka put his hand to the wall covering a
white star and watched the light refract between his fingers. He quickly
discovered the image was not on the wall, but floated in front of it.

“What do you think, Bandy?” Nuke asked,
expecting the hunter to be overawed by the technology, “Is it magic?”

“No magic. TV.”

Nuke looked at the wall and nodded. “You’re
right man. I wonder if they can get cable on this thing?”

Dr McInness looked thoughtful. “Considering
they can’t see through the bubble, they’d need good navigational information to
make that kind of trip.” He gave Beckman a meaningful look. “You know what that
means?”

“Sure, they need good maps.”

“Yes, but no one civilization could possibly
map the entire galaxy by itself. They must share navigational information, to
make travel safe, to make trade possible, which means every interstellar
civilization in the entire galaxy knows where we are. All of them! They trade
maps, and those maps will have Earth’s location as a footnote saying ‘Warning!
Primitive anthropoids with nuclear weapons live here’. Some people think we
should hide, not send out signals or probes in case we let the wrong kind of
advanced civilization know we exist, but they’ve missed the point. There is no
hiding. Everyone, probably thousands of civilizations across the galaxy,
already know we’re here. They must!”