To The Stars (The Harry Irons Trilogy) (20 page)

"It believes in a sky god," Kretin told his brother. "See how it looks upward?"

"Maybe it looks for the flying thing," Arai suggested.

"Maybe. Maybe it looks for help from those who murdered father."

Arai shrugged. "I do not think so. It looks more like us than them. Nothing looks like them."

"That is true, but we must remember they all came from the sky. I do not believe they belong here. Perhaps Grandfather will decide to sacrifice this creature." He motioned toward Kathleen.

Without understanding a thing, Kathleen listened to the curious clicks and assorted sounds the Bedorans made.

"The creature saved my life, Kretin."

"Perhaps it was just saving its own life."

"To be sure, that it was. But in so doing, mine was saved. I will remember that."

Kretin snorted. "I will remember as well. I will also watch it closely until we decide what to do with it. Does it not speak? Does it not hunger and thirst? Hey you!" Kretin poked Kathleen with the blunt end of his spear.

She looked at him.

"Do you not speak?"

Kathleen didn't understand. "What?" she said.

"Did you hear that, Arai? What an odd sound it makes." He jabbed her again.

"What do you want?" The aborigines were trying to communicate. She wondered how Harry would handle the situation. She saw she had the attention of the larger one.

He was around five and a half feet tall. The younger one, or so

Kathleen surmised, was nearly two feet shorter. Both were wiry, with a fine, short, clean fur covering their entire bodies. They wore skins around their waists, walked upright, and used their long tails as one might use an extra hand.

Kathleen held her bound hands aloft. "Untie me." She looked directly at the larger one, without averting her eyes from his.

"It has no manners, it looks into the soul without permission." Kretin said to Arai.

Again, Kathleen raised her hands. "Untie me."

"I think it wants me to unbind it."

"It might run away."

Kretin flipped his tail with a negative gesture. Kathleen didn't recognize the gesture for what it was. "Untie me!" She repeated more forcefully.

Suddenly, Kretin's tail whipped around his head and slapped Kathleen across the cheek. It stung her. She responded by turning away and following the smaller one.

"Hah!" shouted Kretin. "I made it understand."

That was the worst thing that happened. Kathleen realized she was in a tenuous situation. She didn't allow herself to think about the possibility that she might be stuck on the planet without a way to get back to the Magellan. Instead, she told herself she had to think positively. If she was to have any kind of chance, first she had to survive. That thought was scary enough.

Survival was something actors did in videos. Kathleen had always lived her life as she had pleased. Rich and pampered, she was able to try whatever interested her and avoid all she found too difficult to live with. As a result, she was beautiful and spoiled. At least she knew it. She had to be tough and smart. What would Harry do?

He would watch and listen and be quiet. Rubbing the side of her face with the back of her hand, she decided that was the best course to take.

*

"What is it?" asked Harry as he floated onto the bridge. All except Blane were there, crowded around the monitors. Fagen glanced up.

"Take a look, Harry." He motioned to a monitor. The display showed several windows, one of which held columns of hexadecimal code.

"The hex code is a data message. We don't quite know what to do with it. I thought you might take a look."

"Where'd it come from? Was there an accompanying voice

message?"

"No, no voice, just data. The source wasn't far away. Just over the horizon, actually. In geosynchronous orbit."

"That close?"

"And now," Fagen peered at another monitor, "it's about 10,000 meters in front of us."

"Got it on visual," said Nadine. A new window opened on Fagen's monitor showing a dark portion of space.

"Can you blow that up some, Nadine?"

"Got it."

The display zoomed forward to reveal a darkened outline among the backdrop of stars. Harry stared at the picture over Fagen's shoulder. It could be a meteor, he thought, or a tiny moon except there were stars shining through it. No, that wasn't it. There were lights shining from it.

"Can you come in closer?"

"No problem." The picture again jumped forward. Now Harry could see details, outlines and shapes. He drew in a breath. It was a ship. A high-tech artifact.

Bonner clapped Parker on the back and shouted like a cowboy. Nadine turned to Doris, grinning.

Parker said, "This is a momentous occasion."

"Not yet," said Fagen. "Let's get some spectrographic readings and try to determine what it's made of. Harry, I want you on the bridge for awhile. See if you can make something out of the message."

"Recorders on, Nadine?"

"Uh, I forgot." She typed a command into her terminal. They're going now."

Fagen gave her a stern look. Nadine shrugged and stared at her monitor. Parker shook his head and stood up.

"It's crowded in here. I think I'll watch from the terminal in the lab." He left the bridge while Harry took a place at a vacant terminal. Between glances at what they all hoped was an alien spacecraft, he began to work on the data.

Converting the hex code into symbols was simple enough. The Corporation supplied the most sophisticated conversion programs on Earth. It took less than a minute to see what the code contained.

Harry was undaunted by the confusing symbols that appeared. Immediately he recognized the rudiments of a natural language. He took a deep breath and methodically began trying to break the symbols into patterns. In short order, he divided the message into what he hoped were sentences; then, with a little help from his linguistic analysis programs, the sentences were further divided into words. This was where the task became difficult.

As Harry worked, the Magellan closed on the object. From the telescoping cameras, they recognized ports at the rear, most likely a drive of some sort. The lights appeared to be navigational beacons located port and starboard, fore and aft, with another light above an empty space. When they got close enough, Harry took a long look.

"It looks like an empty hanger bay."

Harry could feel the excitement on the bridge. They all knew what they were looking at and yet they still had to follow Corporation procedures.

Fagen instructed Nadine to send another hailing message. She did so. As before, there was no reply.

"Maybe nobody's home," suggested Bonner.

"Well, they left the garage door open."

"How close should we get?" Doris asked.

"Just close enough to have a good look. Maybe a thousand meters?"

"Closing on that now. Going to park routine." Doris punched a command into her terminal and the ship drifted to a halt. A thousand meters away, the alien ship hung in space. Other than the lights, there was no indication of life.

"What kind of power readings are we getting?"

Bonner stared at readouts and reported. "A little radiation, about the same as us. There's a fluctuating electromagnetic reading, though. I have no idea what that's about. Heat's coming off it too, but that's to be expected."

"Sure looks strange." Nadine commented.

Unlike the Magellan's highly-polished mirrored hull, the alien ship was dark, so dark it might have been painted black. No doubt part of the design included an effort to conceal all reflecting surfaces. It was sleek, basically in the form of a giant teardrop. Along one axis was a raised, rectangular surface that faced the rays from Miaplacidus. Two bulges on either side of the stern made it look as though there were two bulbous eyes. In all, it must have been ten times larger than the Magellan.

Harry was right about the hanger bay. It was open and revealed a space large enough to house a shuttlecraft.

Reluctantly, Harry returned to his work.

He first arranged the symbols into a header, a main body of text, and a closing. Beyond that, without more information, he quickly determined that it was anybody's guess. Some of the symbols were repeated, but there just wasn't enough repetition to assign meaning.

"How's it coming, Harry?" asked Doris.

"Well, it's a message all right."

"Yes?"

"But without more data there's no way I can decipher it."

Doris looked down her nose at the linguist. "Perhaps the computers can handle it, or maybe we can talk Blane into taking a look at it."

Harry shook his head. "I've run all the linguistic analysis stuff already. It says the same thing: lack of primary data. I doubt if Blane can do any more than I've already done."

"Yes, well, Blane's of no use anyway. Keep working on it." She turned away.

"All right," Fagen said, "let's circle this thing, and get a good shot at all sides." He fidgeted with the zoom control. "Okay, okay, I got some markings in the hanger bay. Take a look, Harry. What does that look like to you?"

The display showed the rear of the open hanger deck. Indentations in the bulkhead gave hints as to their purpose. Harry looked at the picture and frowned.

"I'd bet the larger, sunken area is an airlock. The markings are written signs, probably saying something like "airlock," or "danger." The other places are storage places, lockers like we've got in our hanger bay. There's no equipment I can see other than the rails set into the floor. Those have got to be guides for some kind of shuttle they have. Since it's missing, I would also assume at least a portion of the crew is on the planet's surface."

"It's what I don't see that's bothering me," said Bonner.

"What's that?"

"Hanger bay doors..."

"They must be hidden in the walls."

"Nope," replied Bonner, "They aren't in the walls because there aren't any doors. See the circles lined up along the outside edges of the bay opening? I wonder if those aren't field generators?"

"Force fields?"

"Could be," said Doris. "That kind of technology is still science fiction for us. What do you make of the drive system from the design of the nozzles?"

"It's not a fusion drive. It's not big enough for that. If they have force-field technology, I would guess it's propelled by accelerated photons."

"Light-drive?"

"It's a handful of light years to the next closest system. If they didn't come through the wormhole, then that's the only way they could've gotten here."

Nadine looked at Bonner. "If that's right, then this is big. I'm going to be famous! First thing I'm gonna do is get one of those big condos on New Detroit. Then I'm gonna..."

"Control yourself, Nadine," interrupted Doris, "there's a lot to do before you retire."

"What would you estimate the dimensions to be around the indention in the hanger bay?" Fagen asked.

"Let's see." Bonner checked his instrument readings and consulted the small computer he always carried. "Two and half meters."

"Pretty big," said Doris.

"Not necessarily," said Harry. "The main hatch in our hanger bay is considerably larger, around eight feet square. And then there are the auxiliary hatches -- they're considerably smaller."

"I wonder what they look like." Nadine mused.

"No telling."

Harry's monitor flickered once, then twice.

"Where's my display?" Fagen suddenly asked.

Harry looked and saw that Fagen's terminal showed a maelstrom of changing colors.

"What's going on here, Nadine?"

"I don't know, I've got the same problem."

"Interference of some kind?"

Nadine's fingers played over the keys of her terminal. Watching the rapidly changing readouts, she shook her head. "No, this is internal. Blane's hacked his way in."

Fagen turned to Doris. "Take Bonner and remove Blane from his hookup. Have Parker give him another dose." He turned back to Nadine. "Re-route through my password, MATRIX."

She tapped on the keys. "Done," she said, "he's off-line. I'll bet he's one pissed-off wirehead about now."

"Check data integrity."

"That'll take a little time."

"Okay, park it. Let's remember where we are, folks. We're going to be without sensors and navigation for how long?"

"Twenty minutes."

Fagen ran a hand over his face. "Twenty minutes," he repeated. To no one in particular, he added, "I've waited this long, what's another twenty minutes or so?" He turned to Harry. "Anything going with that message?"

Harry shook his head. "I've gone as far as I can without more data."

"That's what I figured." Fagen stared out a port.

"What'll we do when the systems come back up?"

"Gather data, Harry, that's the name of the game."