Five

A shuttle approaching the OWME Passenger Liner Star of Carolina, orbiting Forest

“Geez, Dad, that thing is huge.”

“It’s not as big as the old Mayflower, but it’ll do,” Mike Crider agreed with his son, staring at the huge, slate-blue mass of the passenger liner from his window seat in the orbital shuttle.  “It’s going to take us a while to get to Tarbos, wherever that is, so we may as well be comfortable.”  He dropped back into the bucket seat with a sigh.  “At least the Company is picking up the tab for this trip.  I don’t want to think about what a trip on a liner like that would cost.  It cost me everything I had to get me to Forest twenty years ago,” he exaggerated.

Mike Junior craned his neck to keep the liner in sight as the shuttle adjusted course.  “Why’d you pick Forest anyway, Dad?  Don’t they use hunter-pioneers on other planets?”

“Yeah, I’m sure they do.  It’s a long story, Junior, but basically, I saw a recruiting poster in the market one day, and an old friend sort of talked me into it.  Next thing I knew, I was on the way.”  He tilted his big gray Stetson back on his head.  “Not that I’d change anything, if I was to do it all over again.  If I hadn’t come to Forest, I wouldn’t ever have met your mother, for one thing.”

“And Mom would have been killed by a roc, along with our grandparents.”

“That’s right.  Anyway, from what I hear, Earth’s more crowded than ever.  Idaho is a great place, son, and I hope one day you’ll get to see it, but there’s sure a lot of people.  Forest is nice and quiet.”

“Too quiet, sometimes.”  The younger man lapsed into a pensive silence for a few minutes before speaking up again.  “Dad, by the way, do you think you could not call me ‘Junior,’ while we’re on the ship and on Tarbos?”

Mike turned to stare at his son.  “What?  We’ve called you Junior since you were born.”

“Come on, Dad, I’m a grown man now.  ‘Junior’ just doesn’t get it, you know?  Can’t you just call me Mike?”

“Not ‘Little Mike?’  We used to call you that, you know.  How about ‘Mikey?’” his father teased.

“Dad!”

“I think I’m following you, son,” Mike Senior teased.  “There sure aren’t very many girls on Forest, but there’s bound to be a bunch of them on that liner,” he pointed out the viewport, “And more on Tarbos.  Especially with this big convention going on.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dad,” Mike Junior chuckled.

“Uh huh.”  It would be another hour before the cranky old shuttle made it to the Star of Carolina’s docking bay.  Mike smiled and, tipping his big hat down over his eyes, leaned back for a short nap.

The Star of Carolina’s docking bay

Eighteen-year-old Maria Gutierrez found the trip from Earth of differing levels of interest, in stages.

The trip up the Quito Skyhook and the shuttle ride to the ship was exciting.  Settling into one of the giant liner’s VIP suites was exciting.  Watching on the terminal viewer as the ship accelerated and leaped into subspace was exciting.

The weeks-long stretch after that was boring.

Now things were getting exciting again, as Maria stood with her father at a port, watching the shuttle approach.  She didn’t find the vast green and blue expanse of the wilderness below interesting; there were no cities, no air traffic was visible, and the liner’s planetary information system told her that there wasn’t much there for a big-city girl (as Maria invariably thought of herself, having grown up in Denver) to find interesting.  There wasn’t even a Skyhook; the boarding passengers had to batter their way up the gravity well in an old orbital shuttle.

But the rather banged-up old shuttle that was approaching the ship now carried a living, breathing historical figure about whom Maria had read in her recent history classes.  The Hero of Forest, Mike Crider, was on that ship, and she was going to get to meet him!

“Maria, honey, back away from the port, let your brother have a look.”  Sandra and Hector Gutierrez stood behind their children, awaiting the arrival of the representative from Forest.  Maria stepped back to let her fifteen-year-old brother Manuel peer through the heavy polymer port.

“Hey, that’s some busted-up old junk,” he commented. 

“Forest isn’t a real profitable venture for OWME,” his father informed him.  “There’s no mineral wealth, not much for petrochemicals, no precious metals.  Mostly farming.  It’s going to be the breadbasket of the Galaxy one day, but right now, it’s still mostly wilderness.”

“That’s still some busted-up old junk,” Manuel repeated.

The shuttle coasted into the cavernous docking bay of the Star of Carolina, stopping with a puff of maneuvering thrusters.  A docking tube extended outwards, connecting finally to the hatch on the side of the craft.

“Let’s head over to the gate.  I want to meet Mr. Crider as soon as he debarks.”

“Yes, I suppose we should.  Kids, come on.”  Sandra Gutierrez tapped both teenagers on the shoulder.  “Let’s go.”

Only a handful of people debarked from the shuttle.  Hector Gutierrez lined his family up at the port and waited patiently as the passengers filed off. 

“There he is,” he said suddenly.  The figure that emerged from the port was easily recognizable from old pictures Gutierrez had seen; all of the settled worlds had seen photos of the Hero of Forest, and anyone would recognize the tall, lean, taciturn frontiersman with the trademark blue cotton work shirt, blue jeans, laced boots and big gray Stetson hat.  Behind him stepped a second man, younger, but otherwise a near duplicate of the veteran of the Grugell Occupation.

The Vice President stepped forward, hand extended.  “Mr. Crider?”

Mike smiled, a little intimidated at being so far out of his element.  “Yeah, that’s me.  This is my son, Mike Junior.”

Gutierrez shook Mike’s hand in a rock-hard grip.  “Hector Gutierrez, Mike.  I’ve looked forward to meeting you.”  He turned to introduce his family.  “This is my wife Sandra, my daughter Maria, and my son Manuel.” 

Mike Junior felt his heart take a sudden lurch.  Maria Gutierrez looked at him with a dazzling smile.  Her dark eyes sparkled, her raven-black hair shone, her teeth were even and white, her skin smooth and silken.  She extended her hand towards him, smiling sweetly. 

“Hi.  This is all pretty exciting, isn’t it?”

“Uh, yeah,” Mike Junior stuttered, shaking her hand lightly, suddenly conscious of her soft, warm fingers clasped in his own thick, callused hand.  “Yeah, I suppose it is.”

“Have you ever been off Forest before?”

“No, this is my first time,” he replied, finding his voice again.  “Heck, I’ve only been as far as Settlement a few times.  Dad doesn’t have much use for towns.”

“Oh, well, I guess we’ll be seeing quite a city on Tarbos.”

Mike Junior suddenly realized he was still holding her hand.  He let go as though her slim fingers had suddenly turned red-hot.  Wow, he thought. 

Mike Senior and Hector Gutierrez hadn’t missed the exchange.  They looked at each other with raised eyebrows. 

“I think this is going to be an interesting trip,” Gutierrez observed.

“I think you’re right, Mr. Vice President,” Mike grinned.

“Call me Hector, Mr. Crider, please.  Oh, hell, call me Heck.  That’s what all my friends call me.”

“Only if you drop the ‘Mr. Crider’ business and call me Mike,” the Hero of Forest answered. 

“Agreed.  I only hope the rest of the issues at this conference can be settled that easily!”

Mike frowned, remembering the stack of notes he had in his luggage, products of a week’s reading in the Settlement Library.  “I’m not betting a penny on that.”

Earth, high orbit

OWME’s high orbit spacedock contained, among other things, the best zero-gee physics lab that had yet been devised.  Hans Richter, as one of Earth’s foremost working physicists, was OWME’s first choice to head up the staff at that lab.  Hired away from The Planck Institute three years earlier, he had immediately gone to work cataloging interstellar dark matter ratios, hopefully to improve the efficiency of the Gellar Star Drives mounted by OWME ships.  To that end, he had sent scanners out on OWME ships traveling all the standard trade routes, and kept his staff working late into the nights analyzing the data each time a ship returned.

What his scanners had found, on three occasions, were strange clear areas in his spatial matter density scans – “blank spaces” in space, baffling to Doctor Richter, intriguing to the American government’s Air Force Chief of Staff who had visited the labs.  Three weeks after Air Force General Janine LeBlanc had visited the lab, she’d returned with a question.

“A cloaked ship?  You mean a Grugell ship?”  Doctor Richter hadn’t even considered that possibility.

General LeBlanc answered tersely.  “Yes, exactly that.  We want to know if a cloaked Grugell ship could be responsible for those blank spaces.”

“It’s possible.  We don’t have any idea, really, how the Grugell cloak works.  We assume it either renders the ship transparent to the electromagnetic spectrum, or that it somehow bends light waves around the ship’s mass.  A strong gravimetric field could conceivably do that, but we’ve no idea how they would generate or control such a field, and the stresses on the ship’s structure would be far, far beyond the capabilities of any material we know of.”

“So, it’s more likely the former, then.”

“Jah.  And while the ship is shielded from observation, it still ‘sweeps’ an area of space in passage, either displacing or removing the normal traces of interstellar matter.  They may well use them as we do, to power their drive systems.”

“Could you adapt your scanner to track the passage of a cloaked ship?”

“Easily, given some added computer support.”

General LeBlanc stood up.  “I’ll have a funding voucher faxed to you from the Pentagon within the hour.  I’ve already cleared it with your bosses at the Company HQ in Denver.  This will be your top priority now – get your plans together, build a prototype if you have to, and get us documents on how to build a tracker.”

“Yes, I’ll start right away,” Richter answered softly, his scientist’s mind already turning over with procedures and plans.

That had been five months ago.  Today, Doctor Richter had learned that the plans for his adapted scanner had been hyperphoned to Tarbos.   For what reason, General LeBlanc had declined to say.

Half a light-year outside the Tarbos system

Not even a shimmering in the star field betrayed the passage of the cloaked ship; the Grugell frigate slid through space like a wraith, invisible, undetectable.  Alone and unsupported, the diminutive warship coasted towards the Tarbos system, decelerating slowly at a rate that would bring it out of subspace a little over a hundred thousand kilometers (the Grugell, of course, used their own units of measure) outside the orbit of the sole inhabited planet.

The K-101 was built on the standard frigate pattern, a sleek, shining silver fuselage between two arms supporting the drive pods.  The main cabin was somewhat cramped for the crew of six officers and twenty crew, but Grugell society was Spartan in nature, and none of the crewmembers thought that things might ever be any different.  There was one recent innovation that made life easier aboard ship; this newest frigate had special deck plates that produced a gravity field, approximating the sea-level gravity of Grugell itself.

And deep in the bowels of the ship, shielded by three different energy fields and wired to a self-destruct charge, was the unfathomable black sphere of the cloaking unit.  It hummed now in its darkened compartment, exerting its unknowable influence to warp all forms of electromagnetic energy around the body of the K-101.

Two decks above the crew quarters and tiny dining area and one deck above the officer’s staterooms, the bridge was small and claustrophobic as was the rest of the ship.  The Commander had the only really comfortable seat on the ship, a large chair in the center of the Bridge that swiveled to face the various stations on the circular compartment:  Navigation, Helm, Weapons, Signals, Scanning.  A large viewscreen dominated one wall, at present displaying only the weird, shifting patterns of subspace.

“All stations, report status,” Commander Kadastrattik XII barked from his bridge chair.

“Helm, Commander.  We are on course, scheduled to leave subspace as planned, we will assume station one hundred thousand kilos from the planet as you have commanded.”

“Navigation, Commander.  Confirm we are on course.”

“Scanning, Commander.  All scanners are nominal.  No other detectable ships are in the area.”  He didn’t bother to explain that detecting another ship in subspace was all but impossible without actually running into it.  “We are prepared to begin detailed scans of the planet and surrounding space upon reaching station.”

“Weapons, Commander.  Torpedoes are stowed, all units tested and operational.  Anti-proton projectors are fully charged and functional.  Cloaking device is functioning normally.”

“Signals, Commander.  No incoming messages.”

“Excellent.”  Kadastrattik was a careful Commander, a cautious and prudent Grugell, and a veteran of the debacle of the failed Occupation under Clomonastik III.  His orders were simple, if somewhat cryptic, and the manner in which he was to accomplish his final goal had been left to his discretion.

Communications intercepts indicated a meeting of some sort was to take place on this planet.  The humans were, Fleet Intelligence predicted, attempting to form an interplanetary alliance.  His orders were to prevent that from happening.

All he needed was a brief window of opportunity.

And, to his good fortune, he had an idea of how to achieve that as well. He leaned back in his chair now, smiling slightly, visions of Group Commander rank floating deliciously through his head.

To see more of Animal’s writing, visit his page at Crimson Dragon Publishing or Amazon.